Category: Uncategorized
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Upon whom shall Newton’s apple drop?
For many years schools taught prescriptive grammar, while real linguists and dictionaries had long since switched to descriptive grammar. The dispute finally went away in the 70s. Only conservatives and neocons are still pushing the prescriptive crap. None of the prescriptive crap made the slightest sense. The prescribers weren’t real authors, just various scholars who…
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Leaps
Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the ’50s brought China up to where we were in 1930. Xi’s Great Leap Forward in the ’80s brought China up to where we WOULD HAVE BEEN IN 2025. China has been moving forward normally in the last 50 years and we’ve been moving backward. Nothing is better than 1975,…
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Pope goes hardass on robber barons.
This is damned impressive! Prevost calls out the use of blockades and sanctions as a weapon of war, speaking specifically of Israel. He’s also talking to US, which has been routinely blockading dozens of countries since 1960. = = = = = START QUOTE: “We are now witnessing, with deep sorrow, the inhumane use of…
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Why the divide?
Writing this for my own purposes, trying to figure out WHY historians suddenly started looking at medieval times. WHEN is clear, around 1995. Googlebooks has abundant books after 2000, almost zero before. Sherri Olson’s first book was published in 1996. She does historiography along with history, discussing the timeline of people studying medieval times. She…
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Slight bit of action
Fairness Doctrine time. I’ve been thoroughly bashing the “city” of Spokane for ENCOURAGING crime instead of STOPPING crime. The people passed a referendum with a 73% majority two years ago, attempting to force action. The state’s alleged so-called “court” pulled the usual Manweller trick, invalidating the FIRMLY expressed will of the people. Until now the…
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Might be a good idea
Seems like a good idea at the moment: Last month I wrote about an eye-opening History Today article on the 1700 Industrial Revolution. The author showed with numbers that England didn’t become MORE industrial during those centuries. What expanded was the financial sector. England offshored its food and concentrated more on banking. The FORM of…
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Fun to watch
It’s fun to watch the long breakup of Lady Donald and Lady Elon. Somebody memorably described them as two aging divas. Fits perfectly. Liberace and Oscar Levant. From my viewpoint, they’re two iconic psychopaths. Each needs to create chaos and harm, each is convinced that he will always win every contest. Most of their experience…
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Absurd.
It’s fashionable now to boycott works of art and music when they were SUPPOSEDLY created by people who disagree with current fashions. We don’t do the same with ANY other product. In fact we don’t even THINK about the people who grow food or stock the groceries or build the appliances in China or build…
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Didn’t really need proof.
Canadians are unquestionably less noisy and less violent than Americans. Lit firework thrown in Waterloo is a HEADLINE. If one day went by WITHOUT some asshole tossing a lit firework and starting a brush fire, it would be a banner headline here. Unrelated: The streetcar tracks in the video caught my attention. Does Waterloo have…
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Odd behavior
Facebook and Substack have both started doing an odd thing lately. Both occasionally send emails with an old item from the archive. Facebook says I should enjoy reviewing some random comment I wrote back in March. Not the same as reprinting an old article because it’s relevant to today’s events. That’s a rational way to…
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Facta
One discussion of Prevost’s background mentioned a school whose motto is Facta non verba. Google doesn’t find the reference now, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t AI-hallucinate it. The Endarkenment inverted the meaning of factum. In Latin a factum was simply a completed task, a got-r-done**. Now we think facts are authorized descriptions of the…
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WPA 2.0 in Carver territory
Here’s a fine example of the WPA spirit. Business has abandoned a normal and necessary function, so government picks it up. Even more WPAish, it’s a county government, not the feds. WPA gave priority to local control and local tradition, with federal support when needed. A 150-year-old weekly in Tuskegee was failing like most papers.…
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QA done.
Finished doing the testing and QA on the latest version of courseware, two months before the deadline. The previous edition in 2018 was hasty with too many shortcuts. This year I’ve made a vow to balance out the universal Engagement and Enshitification with careful work. For the newer chapters I’ve added more value with texts…
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Here’s the real misinfo
Social platforms are constantly censoring “misinformation” and “disinformation”, two fancy names for heresy. They DON’T censor genuine fakery, some clearly illegal, in their ADS. Been seeing this one on various sites. Anyone with sense will know this isn’t the Social Security Administration. Unfortunately many old folks are either naive or mentally fading, and won’t know…
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Naive?
Polls missed again and they’re pretending to reform again. They didn’t see that Zohran could win. In the big picture polls don’t really matter much. The “election” matters to some extent, at least until Deepstate finds a way to overturn it or blackmail the rebel into submission. Or until the rebel turns out to be…
Polistra's Mill 