Author: polistra
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Animist jargon
From the Old Postcards Facebook page. The crate is familiar, but the official jargon for the crate is new to me. Pop shells!
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Lorgnette
An unusual 1936 hearing aid from RCA Sonotone, which later became a major brand in HAs. This unit wasn’t a freestanding amplifier. Practical HAs had to wait for submini tubes in 1947 and especially transistors in 1954. This was just an earphone or a BONE CONDUCTION transducer to connect to the earphone output of a…
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Thanks to DailyMail
I’m always bitching that modern media fail to warn about classic swindles. Here’s a good solid exception to the rule. DailyMail tells the stories of several people who fell for the classic romance swindle. It hasn’t changed in a hundred years, and the older shows like Racket Squad told the story in many forms. The…
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Restoration, not revolution
The Federalist folks are discussing the Trump indictments. They’re not exactly Trump fans, but they do treat this mess as an unfair prosecution, a use of “legal” techniques to accomplish a purpose that should be done politically. And there’s the real problem. WE CAN’T REMOVE A LEADER POLITICALLY. IT’S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Impeachment was a terrible…
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Nature came back
In previous item I linked a 2015 piece about sleep improving memory. At that time I was going through a ‘phase change’ without knowing it: = = = = = START QUOTE: Since the end of paid work project in early Feb, I’ve dropped into a bad broken sleep pattern, and can’t seem to pop…
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Pointless without guildforce
I hadn’t heard of this before. At one time in the world of big “alt” media like Gawker and Buzzfeed, a group of commercial bloggers tried to socially enforce a pair of weird symbols to denote different types of credit. One symbol would indicate that “the discovery of the information is being credited to somebody…
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Massive and instant
The academic side of social science has not produced any good knowledge in at least 100 years. It produces lots of evil (training CIA torturers, assisting NSA surveillers) but mostly churns out trivial and blatantly wrong nonsense. A fine example of the latter is circulating this week. Some “scientist” has declared that most people don’t…
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Barbenheimer is not new
Finally got ENOUGH sleep last night. With a non-fogged brain, listened to the Ankler folks discussing Barbenheimer as usual. Ping! This peculiar cocktail was mixed once before! I mentioned it last year in my feature on the Peilempfänger. = = = = = START QUOTE: Speaking of festive colors and obscure cryptographic machines, here’s the…
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Whoops, not so fast!
Beatrix offers a plateful of positive and uplifting subjects this morning, including some modern channelers. I made my usual Actually comment: The Archangel Metatron doesn’t seem so silly now. The tech world is channeling the Archangel ChatGPT, who is actually written by human slaves. At least Metatron wasn’t a slavemaster. Later thought: WHOOPS! Not so…
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Canadian radios
I’ve often discussed Canadian auto manufacturing and the standard myths. I hadn’t noticed the equivalent in radios before. The American Radio Library has added a few issues of a Canadian trade journal for radio and appliance dealers from the early ’50s. Canadian carmakers started out semi-independent and quickly converged to fully owned divisions of US…
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Sounds like FDR
RFK has started writing on Substack. It appears that he signed up back in April with an atrocious Earth Day piece, but didn’t write much after that. Now he’s finally settling into real problems and real solutions, in the same way that the actors union is talking about real life for real people. This piece…
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Good interview on the newspaper biz
This is an informative interview by the EnidBuzz crew. They’re talking with Cindy Allen, who just retired as editor and publisher of the Enid News & Eagle. She explains what’s happening in the newspaper business on a local level, in a way that avoids the usual partisan nonsense. Like most Enid businesses, the Eagle was…
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That’s not how we get there.
Weiss interviews Vivek. He’s obviously running to be Trump’s VP, no matter how strongly he asserts otherwise. This is standard political strategy. Nobody ever SAYS he’s running for VP. Vivek is pushing for “raw unfiltered meritocracy”. That’s exactly how we got into the current grotesque situation where a few monstrous psychopaths own the world and…
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Old strategy
Seen on Reddit. The ChatGPT ‘testers’ can’t stand it when Chat attempts to enforce a copyright. They’re full of the old Everything For Free spirit, which is another way of saying they’re professional criminals. The pro criminal type has an unquenchable desire to cheat. If there’s an easy honest way and a difficult sneaky way…
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Dumb multitasking
Multipurpose devices are a tricky idea. Some of them work out, most don’t. Radios with phonographs and radios with clocks were common. Radios in cars were a good idea, and in fact the radio took precedence over more prosaic devices like windshield wipers or heaters. The radio had the place of honor in the center…
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