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Three categories
Substack has degraded and simplified into three categories. 1. Branch office of MSNBC 2. CS Lewis quotes 3. “If you don’t read a thousand heavy books per year, you’re an illiterate subhuman retard.” Category 1 is intended to win. The management is pouring their subsidies and rewards into the MSNBC branch office. After purification, they…
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Newspapers were snacks
Via Nieman: A media company in Belgium is trying a weird radical sci-fi method to attract PAID readers under age 65. The media company clearly finds this weird approach distasteful but feels it’s needed if they want to survive. = = = = = START QUOTE: Mediahuis carried out qualitative research to find out what…
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Never stopped to think…
I’ve been reciting the alphabet since I was 3, but never looked at the pattern of the official syllables. There’s a fairly consistent logic. All stops come before a vowel, most liquids and some fricatives come after a vowel. H is an odd exception. If it’s considered a fricative, it should be He. If a…
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Another first/second thought
Since I’m doing first thought/second thought today… Somebody posted that the internet makes fraud easier. First thought: On average it’s not easier. A proper swindle starts with cultivation and ends with disappearance. The net makes disappearing super easy, but makes cultivating a lot harder. Persuasion, for an honest or dishonest purpose, works best face to…
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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…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 