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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 So I unpublished again.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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Non-orthogonal suckers
Putting together a pattern. I should know better, but I always fall for ‘right populist’ fakers. Other independents who also should know better always fall for a faker named Kennedy. The pattern isn’t orthogonal. The leaders are not right populist faker vs left populist faker. The leaders are generic right populist vs a KENNEDY. What’s…
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Saw saw.
Speaking of my father’s woodworking talent…. This morning while waiting for a bus I noticed a nice clean old-fashioned handsaw laying on a lawn. No other tools or junk, and no obvious reason for it to be there. No construction in the area. Did it fall off a truck? Unlikely. Contractors use only high-speed power…
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Controlled experiment in stupidity
I’ve learned over the years that I’m incurably stupid about politics. Fake populists will fool me every damn time, no matter how often I temporarily “catch on” to their fakery. I’m much harder to fool in economic and scientific areas of life. Just noticed a neat Constants And Variables. When Bukele took over El Salvador,…
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Oh, dear, so sorry
From an article about the horrible prison-like conditions of Facebook employees: = = = = = START QUOTE: The company is also cutting back on some of its lavish perks, once considered necessary to attract top talent. Last year, Meta ended its free laundry service for employees and pushed dinner service later into the evening…
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Ford of the day
These quotes from Henry Ford have dates because they appeared in the company’s newsletter. As it happens, most of them are exactly 100 years ago. Today’s quote from 4/15/1923: Experience is the harvest of life, and every harvest is the result of a sowing. The experience which young people must crave is that of success…
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That’s more like it!
Might as well continue this topic. DailyMail is showing off another set of fancy souvenirs for the upcoming crowning. This time the royals are doing it properly: The items going on sale today include a £75 cup and saucer, £50 tankard, £50 dessert plate, £40 pillbox and a £30 coffee mug. The production involves 50…
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Was this a GM-style trick?
Budweiser is trying to turn things around with a patriotic appeal, invoking “patriotism” as seen stereotypically by New Yorkers who hate America. It didn’t work on Americans. Budweiser is learning the hard lesson of real business. After you kick your best customers in the balls, they aren’t likely to come back for more. This rule…
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