Author: polistra
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It’s an old truth
Buzzfeed is shutting down the “news” part of their service and continuing the part with quizzes and listicles and such. They’re realizing a very old truth, which pre-TV newspapers and radio understood well. Facts are not commercially valuable. Normal people don’t want to pay for facts because normal people have eyes and ears and neighbors.…
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Anecdata vs Anecfood
It’s odd… In recent years we’ve returned to correct science on overprocessed food. Our digestive system needs to work for its living, and it needs to chew up individual fibers to get the most out of nutrition. If we digest food before we insert it in the mouth, the system atrophies. This was understood in…
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IRS Borodin
The IRS is also suffering postwar withdrawal, falling back to old recessive penny-pinching purposes after the trillion-throwing tantrum of 2020. Today they sent me a letter: I suppose the bill for the rest of this year’s underpay will come soon, but it’s odd that they’re just now noticing a $9.29 overpay in 2020. Couple days…
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Borodin, Parkinson, Mendel
Now that the fight seems to be finished, but without any visible or audible All Clear or VE Day, the anti-Deepstate fighters have divided into two camps. One camp is running wild, taking the vax fight into ever more distant extremes, finding new enemies that may or may not exist, and following RFK directly into…
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Where’s the management?
Elon took a break from crashing Twitter and crashed a rocket today. Where’s the adult supervision? Most of his companies operate in close connection with the government, either consuming EPA subsidies or implementing Deepstate surveillance. Our Deepstate has lost its management abilities. Earlier spy agencies, including KGB and the first decade of CIA, were careful.…
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Odd exception
Noticed a news item about Julie Su, current Sec of Commerce. Got me thinking… Chinese immigrants were slow to get into politics, but they’re definitely in the game now. Skimming through the list of cabinet secretaries in the 20th century, I see two or three Chinese or Korean names and a couple of Vietnamese names.…
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Another nice flip
Amazingly the 9th Circuit is ENFORCING WRITTEN LAW and knocking down Gaian lunacy! Via Robert Bryce on Substack: Yesterday, in a unanimous opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the nation’s first ban on natural gas, put in place by the City of Berkeley in 2019, violates federal law. The…
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Mysterious closing
UncommonDescent has suddenly closed down. The URL leads to an archive, with one farewell message from its original founder Dembski. He doesn’t say why it halted. At this point I won’t miss it. About a year ago Denyse pulled out, briefly replaced by Eric Hedin, then he was gone. Since then it’s been solely occupied…
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Frames
GetReligion discusses the FBI’s current focus on traditional Catholics as alt-radicals. Broaden the picture. In a society where everyone is expected to be weightless bubbles, bouncing around with zero inertia under the influence of fast-changing media and government psychopaths, a grounded person is inevitably radical. (Radix = root). To the fast-moving moderns, a fixed moral…
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Agent, not spirit
EvolutionNews notes that a new NASA director chose to be sworn in on a copy of Carl Sagan’s book instead of the Bible or Torah or Koran. In the good old days when I was young, people viewed oaths as particularly dangerous. If you violated an oath, you didn’t just come under the wrath of…
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Why don’t we act on this knowledge?
Listening to some coverage of the congressional noisefest about bitcoin. They’re arguing about details of ‘stablecoins’. All of this regulation is misplaced. Bitcoin is not a form of currency or banking, it’s a form of ENTERTAINMENT. It’s like casinos or fraternities or city social clubs for aristocrats. It’s not nearly as entertaining as movies or…
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Trust the gut
Last night I found the four ‘banned’ Blogspot posts that led me to switch over to WordPress. I republished them here, then immediately had bad migraine/vestibule trouble. So I unpublished again. Old prison advice: Don’t look back. At any rate, running through the four items verified that they didn’t contain any unique opinions or information.…
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Easier solution
Elon is proposing ‘TruthGPT’, an AI trained to understand how the universe works. This would be ideal, but I don’t think you can get there with a language-predictive model. Understanding how the universe works is a muscle-sense problem, derived from long experience stored in genes and epigenes and cultures and cerebellums. The quick and dirty…
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Dream about political polling !?
A dream this morning reminded me that I had skipped one of the populist candidates. In the dream I was watching a street corner near two political meetings. The Andrew Yang meeting was hard to reach, requiring a tricky acute-angle turn into the parking lot. After watching (more or less polling?) I talked to Yang.…
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More fake surprise
Bad grammar is a major component of sneaky propaganda. I don’t mean ain’t or irregardless. I mean distortion of verb aspect. The latest fake surprise is a 75-year-old constant process posing as a freshly discovered sudden unexpected unprecedented brand-new crisis. The feds have arrested two Chinese spies who were running a blackmail factory in NYC,…
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