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Fill the reader or fulfill the writer?
Both sides are sticking to the peculiar Shared Lie that newspapers are supposed to “hold power accountable” or “speak truth to power”. The two sides have different party-based definitions of which truth and which power, but they’re both essentially wrong. Newspapers were ALWAYS working for one party or for the owner’s business interests. Newspapers are…
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Data web returns to data web
The “rights” fans are getting all excited over the non-revealing “revelation” that FBI controls media. Time for a reprint from April of this year. = = = = = START REPRINT: Secrecy and censorship are the defaults. We don’t have the choice of escaping censorship. Given this CONSTANT, there are two interesting VARIABLES, a political…
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Nice exception
One of the neighbors always puts up a complex light and sound Xmas display. As I walked past it yesterday it was chiming Rudolph. I’m always bitching about the cruel jokes of Cinderella and Ugly Duckling. Attractive people bamboozle unpopular people into wasting their lives in futile pursuit of unachievable goals. Rudolph is an admirable…
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Metashannon
Still Shannon-watching, following the latest from Bari Weiss and crew. Still not seeing anything genuinely new or unguessable in the material they’ve dug up so far. Reviewing from previous item: In pre-web terms, Twitter is a magazine like the New Yorker. It’s not a newspaper or a broadcaster. Facebook is more like radio or TV,…
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Clicking for anger isn’t new
We believe that the use of disgust and anger to create ‘engagement’ is new. It’s not. These polls from a 1946 book about radio and advertising surprised me. First an unsurprising poll on general attitudes: Radio was slightly more favorable than newspapers, and local government was lowest on the approval scale. Another unsurprise: The Fairness…
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You can do better
UncommonDescent’s take on the Lawrence Livermore fusion advance: Could fusion energy be God’s design for supplying humanity’s energy needs in a future era? Come on, you can do better than that. The fusion-powered SUN is God’s design for supplying energy to life. We still haven’t turned fusion into a practical and controllable energy source, and…
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Science and sausage
As usual I was reading some article by some “independent” who naively assumes that science actually proceeds by questioning. First thought: As usual I was thinking about the peculiar disconnect between the public myth of science and the reality of science. Anyone who has worked in research for a while realizes that self-censorship is automatic…
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EVs returning to sanity?
EV hype began well before the free money era of QE. It came along with the coal movement (usually called the “environmental” movement for some reason.) Coalists have been pushing EVs since the ’70s. The EV hype didn’t really take off until Elon masculinized the EV, first with outright Lambo-type sports cars, then with fast…
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WOW!
This is a HUGE development. Currently, electrical activity is mainly associated with ‘excited’ brain neurons or heart cells, however, this may not be an isolated event. As the novel research suggests, this communication may enable cells within the same tumor to coordinate cell growth and promote tumor survival. In essence, cancerous cells start behaving more…
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Where are the goddamn philosophers?
A young congresscritter named Himes was discussing Sam’s arrest and yesterday’s “hearing”. He said that Sam had spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill in the last two years, “educating” Congress about how bitcoin works. Himes thinks he “knows” how it works thanks to Sam, so he will help to craft the regulations that…
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Kirn back in action
Here’s an evocative question from Kirn: We didn’t need AI to make quasi-counterfeit art that many find indistinguishable from original works by human artists. It’s an old game, long mastered. The question is why are we prepared now to grant these machine forgeries, though they may be more complex, special esteem? Damn good question. The…
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We weren’t allowed
Vintage.es has a set of pix from Moscow in December 1959. The first thing I noticed is the lack of snow. Obviously cold, but all dry. (Not meaningful, just personally salient because I’ve been shoveling and raking 10 inches this week.) The second thing is a group of workers putting up a statue of Sputnik,…
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Spoiled brat
Supposedly Sam’s lawyers tried to prevent his arrest and jailing by pleading vegan and ADHD. He won’t be able to get his chosen diet in jail, and he shouldn’t be jailed because he needs his Adderall or whatever. Fortunately the Bahamas authorities didn’t listen. A couple weeks in a REAL jail might do him a…
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YES!
Brad Sherman told the truth about the entire blockchain enterprise in the “investigation” this morning. “Sam is not a snake in the Garden of Eden. The whole area is a garden of snakes.” Just now in an interview with Yahoo: “I would urge them to take those animal spirits and invest in real companies that…
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Two cheers for nuclear!
Yahoo Financial interviewed the head of Constellation Energy, which owns several existing nuclear power plants. He is optimistic about the future of nukes, since the omnibus “Inflation” “Reduction” “Act” includes a new tax credit to level the economic playing field for nukes vs fake “renewable” sources. He also (finally) sees some real action in the…
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