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Clear after defining
Wondered why 100% of “news” about politics is pointless arguing. A roasts B, C debates with D, E kicks F out of speakership. Within “dissident” circles it’s the same. Pointless arguing about who’s more ideologically pure or who’s taking more money from Deepstate. For powerless people, the only effective political action is Desistance, finding ways…
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Substock
I’ve decided that everyone who succeeds on Substack is a stock trader, manipulating the “two” “sides” of an issue to gain arbitrage. Questions that can’t be turned into a trade or a bet aren’t discussed much. With a few notable exceptions, the writers who don’t engage in stock crime don’t last. This is historically normal.…
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Layerbilt again
Redoing an item from last month with a better picture. Last year I was genuinely astonished to find that dry batteries are all fake. They aren’t sandwiches of zinc/carbon pairs as I had always imagined; instead they are wrapped packages of 1.5 volt dry cells hooked in series. This is so unutterably WEIRD that I…
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Essential difference
When GetReligion closed in Feb, I missed a favorite reading place on the web. I didn’t recognize, or maybe I didn’t remember, that Religion Unplugged is basically the successor. Warm weather opens my mental pores. Found it again today, and it’s still a good read, with most of the same writers and features. This article…
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Ask and ye shall
Last night, thinking about the satanic “government” of Spokane, which is unfortunately the default in most cities, an odd analogy popped up. When other jobs need to solve a problem and can’t think of the solution, we Google it. More specifically we go to subject area websites like Slack or StackExchange, where people within a…
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A new feature that works!
The warm weather has opened my perception up just a bit, so I’m noticing things that faded into the background before. I was looking at the features available on AOL Mail. I’ve always used inbox, spam, trash, and saved mail, and simply blindspotted the other choices. Today I noticed ‘subscriptions’. Huh? AOL isn’t like Substack.…
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Ice cream
Nice warm evening after a long tired (but blessedly NOT very snowy) winter. The ice cream man is driving around, playing his unidentified song that sounds like Lilly Marlene. His tune has been the same for several years, but apparently less than 10. Around 2013 the ice cream man was playing the required Entertainer Rag.…
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Other way around
Vivek knows how to play the clickbait game, and Ann Coulter does too. Ann claims to agree with Vivek on many points but says that she couldn’t vote for him because he’s Indian. Good clickbait. I’d have trouble voting for Vivek because he’s TOO AMERICAN. He makes a huge point of American exceptionalism, which is…
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This is how to do it.
Pew writes another long detailed article about how people get local news and what they think of it. Turns out my tastes are typical, not unique! Many people use a local Facebook group instead of radio or TV or newspapers, and most people think weather** is the only important and valid part of local coverage.…
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Shannon info!
ZeroHedge mentions that BlackVault had tried to get an FBI file on Bezos’s grandfather, but the file was supposedly deleted. That’s not important. Here’s the important fact. I didn’t know it until now. Jeff’s grandpa was Gise, the founder of DARPA and the grandpa of the HTML internet. The conventional story says that Jeff was…
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Third Shift Workers Day (habitual reprint)
Today is Third Shift Workers Day! From the linked items I couldn’t tell for sure which day is the Official Day. They range from May 7 to May 13. This is fitting, since graveyard shift blurs the boundaries of dates. I’ve always been happiest and steadiest on graveyard shift. I worked graveyard at motels in…
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I should be unpissed
In all the discussions of the stupid ban on Tiktok, I haven’t heard anyone mention the obvious prima facie failure of the “law”. At one time there was an old novel or play or something containing the words: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed. I don’t remember what this…
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Copyright trap or just error?
While looking through my old maps to find the right corner of Manhattan for previous item about city dumps and barrios, I noticed a really odd error on a USGS map. File creek? I remembered it as Pfeil Creek. Another USGS map got a little closer: Here’s the same Phiel, scanned from a more recent…
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Reprint on Libertarians
I wrote this in April 2020, after the lockdowns but before the waterboarding got started. Later on the point got even sharper, as the holocaust directly ruined public transit, another favorite target of the Randians. I’m proud of catching the correlation before it was blatantly obvious. Right now I’m tired of Repooflicans trying to blame…
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Not just “elections”
I’ve been hammering for years on the FACT that all “elections” are rigged, and the rig is NOT in the votes or counting. It doesn’t matter who votes or how the votes are counted. The rig happens before the ceremony of voting, when parties carefully remove all candidates and referenda that could change government behavior.…