Author: polistra
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So what’s my guess?
Branching from previous item on command/fact pairs…. For a brief period last year, Deepstate was preferring the believer side of the UFO question. (Deepstate always runs organizations on both sides, but this was a switch of preference.) NASA presented some sightings in an attempt to gin up yet another fake “threat” requiring “protection”. It fell…
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Reprint on the uses of expertise
I’ve reprinted this list many times in various contexts with various additions. Feels like a good time to reprint it again, connecting it to my recent language-based comparison of facts vs commands, and this week’s UFO obsession. This version of the list is from 2017, with a good discussion of factual experts vs commanding experts.…
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Probably not an April Fool
Apparently this isn’t an April Fool. It should be. “Scientists” are trying yet again to communicate with Autistic Messiah Aliens, using really stupid NFT-style images. The new spacebound note, named the Beacon in the Galaxy (BITG), is the latest in a series of attempts to contact other lifeforms in the universe that date back to…
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Best of the bunch
Two of the best interviews from the Connors UFO audio are from the mid-60s after most of the hoopla had died down. Despite the lack of hoopla, a lot of ‘undismissable’ incidents were happening in ’65 across large parts of the world. = = = = = (1) Ray Fowler of the Boston-area NICAP was…
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Truly new invention
The peculiar extreme suckerdom of NFTs is hard to comprehend. The suckers proudly exhibit horrible art as their avatars in social media, and proudly exhibit the hexagon-shaped Twitter profile. These fools are proudly walking around wearing a badge that says I AM A PERFECT SUCKER. CHEAT ME NOW! Older generations of scammers bought and sold…
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Language doesn’t create culture, as usual.
On a random impulse I got curious about the grammar of Polynesian languages like Hawaiian. Their phonology is extremely simple. Is their grammar equally simple, or bizarrely complex? I expected the latter, but the answer is in between. Hawaiian grammar is in the median range of complexity. It has NGDA for nouns, singular/dual/plural for pronouns,…
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Somehow regenerate
Kirn’s latest pithy point: All the great histories agree: the world is very used to being ruined. That’s what it does best, in fact. Endlessly absorb ruination & then somehow regenerate the orderly conditions necessary for the next ruination. True before 2020. Life creates order and beauty. Psychopaths create chaos and horrible ugliness and ruination…
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Putting UFOs onto the timeline
Two very different men with the same initials. = = = = = Alphia Hart mentioned the UFO craze often, and not only because it was a kindred unorthodox spirit. Hart’s specific mission was debunking the Hubbard cult, which is based on a wild story about alien contacts. Now that I know some of the…
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It’s all about caste
Headline at MindMatters: Unexplained — Maybe Unexplainable — Numbers Control the Universe In Carl Sagan’s Contact, the extraterrestrials embedded a message in the irrational number pi (the circumference of a circle divided by its radius). But some other numbers are critical to the structure of our universe too — and why they are critical does…
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Deceptive standard wisdom
Our thinking about economics and technology and history is full of standard “wisdom” that isn’t remotely true when you stop to think about it. Ran into a couple of those standard wisdoms in automotive articles this week. Collectible Auto mag has a feature on the ’28 to ’30 Cadillac. The author commits two standard wisdoms…
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Outlaw intellectuals
Kirn’s latest pithy point: My studied belief is that America’s greatest wealth is its oddballs, weirdos, seers, compulsives & autodidacts. They’ve transformed science, business, religion & the arts. Making more space, not less, for nonconformity & improvisation is the way of prosperous peaceful flourishing. This wasn’t true of the whole country, and it’s no longer…
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No, it’s not falling behind
The latest stupid lawsuit claims that the plaintiff bought a ‘rare NFT’ but it wasn’t rare enough or something. So he’s suing to get back the 500k he spent for the ‘rare NFT’. An attorney on the other side says: “We are in a world where copyright is many years behind the art world and…
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Google’s ancestor
Returning to Say the black and do the red. Media and “science” were formerly indicative, now imperative. Media and “science” were formerly passive description, now absolute gunpoint commands. Here’s a previous example of media as absolute command, from Wireless World, July 1939. Broadcasting occupies a special position in Germany. It is the official mouthpiece of…
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Interesting thought, uninteresting research
An interesting thought contained in a mostly uninteresting research paper. The abstract: Many economic decisions, such as whether to invest in developing new skills, change professions, or purchase a new technology, benefit from accurate estimation of skill acquisition. We examine the accuracy of such predictions by having experimental participants predict the speed at which they…
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From Liberty Sausage to Liberty Lounge
Back in 2016 as usual, I noted an odd exception to our standard idiocy. = = = = = START REPRINT: Russia is our enemy because Russia shows that Life Outside The Empire can succeed. We cannot allow such an example to persist. Modern Russia’s success includes a strong connection between national government and national…
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