2021-01-25

Cool

• SpaceX launches first Starlink satellites to Polar Orbit to provide In

  • Mentions a ground station in TN, over by Chatanooga, and another in SC.

etc

• Bad news for land-speed record fans as Bloodhound goes up for sale | Ars Technica

• Bronze objects suggest European farmers used standardized money 4,000 years ago - UPI.com

• (Nov 2020) Politics in Academia: A Case Study | Psychology Today

  the most difficult paper that my team (the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab) and I have ever tried to publish was a paper on the topic of political motivations that underlie academic values of academics.

• Husband stabbed repeatedly by his wife after she finds photo of him with young skinny girl, turns out it's an old picture of her. | Not the Bee

• ‘Covid “denier” is a disgusting, dog-whistle slur’ - spiked

• The River of Forgetfulness - American Greatness

• What If Deplorables Start “De-Platforming” Leftists From Receiving Skilled Trade Services?

• (Hawley) It's Time to Stand Up Against the Muzzling of America

• A contrast:

  • Control Societies with Sacrificial Characteristics - OUTSIDER THEORY

  In this way, the avoidance of harassment or cancelation becomes the basis of an expansive cybernetic system of self-regulation. The awareness that, at any point, one might fall victim to a spontaneous swarm of mimetic aggression, becomes part of how the control system operates. But the continued functioning of this system depends on the futility of such efforts. The shifting, arbitrary standards that determine what may trigger the mob ensure that the sacrificial spectacles will continue, which in turn, helps ensure the system’s ongoing hold on our attention.

  • The High Price of Mistrust

  One lesson we can take from Bowling Alone is that anything we can do to increase trust between people will have tremendous knock-on benefits. Trust allows us to relax, delay gratification, and generally be nicer to everyone. It makes for a nicer day-to-day existence. We don’t need to spend so much time and money checking up on others. Ultimately, it’s worth investing in trust whenever possible, as opposed to investing in more ways of monitoring and controlling people.

• A Complex Systems Theorist Explains Why the Poor Aren't to Blame for Poverty

• 1 killed, 5 hurt after car hits pedestrians in Portland; driver in custody

• Portland Mayor pepper-sprays man who accosted him outside pub

Horseshit

• In the early 1980s, white supremacist groups were early adopters (and masters) of the internet | by Laura Smith | Timeline

  • It was this era RBBS-PC - Wikipedia

    From first hand knowledge, these folks were at peak about 2 dozen people around the world. The Furries were a far larger group, then; and grew faster. The nazis weren't welcome on "the Internet" as it was then, even; few places would carry the two usenet groups.

  They, and others, had to bridge their BBS systems together using disparate protocols and I spent a couple years being one of the few people who wrote the software that did that. Under a different name, I enabled the network this artcile talks about. It was probably a half dozen boards and maybe a dozen more actual users.

  The "Alternative Sexuality" networks were by comparison hundreds of boards and thousands of users; the soveriegn citizens and alternative medicine folks were dozens, each, and so on. The nazis werent a big crowd, and were spectacularly stupid, and so no one paid them any attention except for folks like these who needed a threat to exaggerate.

  Today, this article pops up on HN. I'm afraid to say, on that board, that I helped enable these networks. I'm still proud of that work and firmly believe that letting those nazi fools speak to each other and the world and show their foolishness helped keep them irrelevant for a decade or more.

• Forgot to put "#BLM" on the pic, i guess. Lyles Man Arrested, Charged with Doctoring & Posting Harassing Photograph

  charged him with one count of Harassment and booked him into the Dickson County Jail where, because of this charge and other, unrelated legal issues, he was being held on a $76,000 bond.

• HN thread: San Francisco is one of CA’s most conservative cities – when it comes to housing | Hacker News

  • comment:

  This was actually one of the most disappointing parts of Silicon Valley for me and one of the reasons I left. The number of tech progressives I met that possessed a murderous hate of homeless people was unreal. I still can’t believe that such a wealthy area has such a fundamental problem meeting basic human needs. Not everyone can be a tech worker, but very few of the “Silicon Valley” types can imagine someone living outside of tech, and if someone wasn’t in tech they were considered subhuman.

• Oh. they still play? Buccaneers, Chiefs to Face Off in Super Bowl

• A MeToo scandal means an average 1.5% loss ($450m) in company value

• "Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns" In Fatal Shootings Of Unarmed Black People, Many Police Are Repeat Offenders : NPR

• Power Partner Program Lets the City Control Your Thermostat

• Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Developing Female Kurdish Militia Drama for TV

• 116th Congress set new records for lawmakers’ social media use | Pew Research Center

Climate

The whole "Climate change will kill us all" drumbeat has been silent, almost, for nearly two weeks. That propaganda teat is apparently coming unblocked today. I'll forgo the all the other words i could use here like "rancid" and "chunky", the metaphor is already nasty enough without adding mastitis to the milkshake.

• I like this one. "150 million years ago the Mesozoic atmosphere was 370 times thicker than what it is today." The Thick Atmosphere Theory

• After Climate Alarmism

• The team shaking up climate models

• Sea Level Rise Could Flood 260 Airports, New Study Says

• The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try

• Mozilla's Climate Commitments

TechSuck

• The Pendulum Of Internet Censorship Swings Leftward Again - Caitlin’s Newsletter

• Giant leak exposes data from almost all Brazilians

• Introducing Birdwatch, a community-based approach to misinformation

  Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context. We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable. Eventually we aim to make notes visible directly on Tweets for the global Twitter audience, when there is consensus from a broad and diverse set of contributors.

• Europe’s telcos want ‘open’ 5G networks

• How Is This a Good Idea: Car Dashboard Video Games - IEEE Spectrum

• Facebook Hiring a Employee Investigator

  As an Employment Investigator at Facebook, you will be responsible for any employee matter that may be a potential violation of law or company policy.

• New campaign targeting security researchers

Economicon

• Advertising: Budweiser joins Coke, Pepsi brands in sitting out Super Bowl

• American Airlines opens at-home wine delivery service - CNN

• The Nihilism Of R/Wallstreetbets – Jeromy Sonne

  See back in the day if you played the rules, worked the job, saved the money you could mostly live a pretty good life. The system was there and it had your back you just had to play by the rules. At some point that changed. Understanding that fundamentally you can do “everything right” and be totally fucked anyways, never able to achieve your dreams regardless of what you do or don’t do is a shitty feeling. Along comes WSB.

  I think there are really 2 things you need to understand about WSB (And really this piece of internet culture in general). It’s 50% depression and 50% a Molotov cocktail. You either win and get out or you lose AND you’re sticking it to the man at the same time. Even if I go super long, ratchet up the leverage, and take a big bet and lose guess what? Nothing.

  Seriously nothing. Most of these people are in hopeless debt with no clear path out anyway. They declare bankruptcy and move on. They took the bet, rode the adrenaline rush, and they lost. The silver lining? The elites that hate them are stuck paying the bill. It’s really a win-win situation. The memes, the culture, all of it really stems from this attitude.

  • Gamestop Goes Red After More Than Doubling Just Two Hours Earlier | ZeroHedge

  • GameStop Continues Melt Up

• BlackBerry stock rockets again, as company says it is 'not aware' of reason

• Reddit stock traders send GameStop, Blackberry on rocket ship ride

• The First Casualty Of The Big Short Squeeze: Melvin Capital Gets $2.75BN Bailout From Citadel, Point72 After Its Shorts Explode | ZeroHedge

BidenTime

• Janet Yellen Confirmed As US Treasury Secretary | ZeroHedge

• Here's the full list of Biden's executive actions so far

• Biden tells CNN Trump's impeachment trial 'has to happen' - CNNPolitics

• Politico Makes an Embarrassing Level of Biden Adoration the ‘Special of the Day’ by Brad Slager

• As Biden Lifts a Ban, Transgender People Get a Long-Sought Chance to Enlist

• Washington Post ‘Fact Checkers’ Won’t Count False Biden Claims; ‘Assume’ He’ll Be Like Obama | The Daily Wire

• Under Trump, WhiteHouse.gov was a disaster. Biden's team revamped it in 6 weeks

• Biden family dogs Champ and Major move into White House

• Biden brought the button Trump used to order Diet Cokes back to the Oval Office

Trumpoline

• US House delivers article of impeachment against Donald ...

• Justice Department watchdog investigating possible attempt to overturn ...

  The Justice Department's internal watchdog will investigate whether any department official sought to have the department overturn President Joe Biden's election win.

  • In other words: "We're investigating anyone who investigated election fraud."

• Can "election fraud" be brought into a court? Toronto's Dominion Voting Systems Sues Rudy Giuliani for $1.3B US

  + (2018, PDF) [Dominion_Voting_Systems_D-Suite_5.5_Test_Report_Rev_A.pdf](https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/voting_system/files/Dominion_Voting_Systems_D-Suite_5.5_Test_Report_Rev_A.pdf)
  

  • Surely Rudy Giuliani’s ‘Conclusive Proof’ of Machine-Based Election Fraud Will Save Him From Dominion’s $1.3 Billion Defamation Lawsuit – Reason.com

  • comments:

  I hope whatever happens with these lawsuits it chills the baseless accusations of voter fraud used to undermine voter confidence in our democracy

  • "there's no evidence"

  Rudy has a YouTube channel, you can hear him make his allegations and judge if it amounts to defamation. Most of them seem to be carefully phrased. https://www.youtube.com/c/RudyWGiuliani/videos Of all the claims that stuck out to me is the suitcase video, since it time corresponds with a one sided spike of votes.

  That's a lot of footage. Can you point to some more specific example of these "carefully phrased allegations" to check out, if I'm mildly curious, but not that interested to spend much time investigating?

• Facebook Gives FBI Private Messages Of Users Discussing Capitol Hill Riot

• Capitol rioter Garret Miller says he was following Trump's orders, apologizes to AOC for threat

• "he had already called the FBI weeks before the riot" Son Tipped Off F.B.I. About His Father, Who Is Charged in Capitol Riot - The New York Times

• Why the pro-Trump QAnon movement is finding followers in Japan

• Supreme Court dismisses two cases challenging Trump's business conflicts

• Democrats File Ethics Complaint Against Republican Sens. Cruz and Hawley

• GOP Sen. Josh Hawley wrote a column in defense of the Oklahoma City bomber when he was 15

• Trump Has No Plans to Start His Own Political Party - Report

• (seti.org Podcast) Skeptic Check: Shared Reality | Big Picture Science

  One of the many shocking aspects of the Capitol attack was that it revealed how thoroughly the nation had cleaved into alternate realities. How did we get to this point? How did misinformation come to create beliefs embraced by millions?

  • Great. "Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence" folks pile on about the "Capitol Attack" and make sure they pee in the propaganda pool too.

World

• Portugal’s President Wins Re-election, but Far Right Gains

  Portugal once stood out in Europe for having no real far-right presence in politics. Those days appear over.

• Portugal once stood out in Europe for having no real far-right presence in politics. Those days appear over.

• Fraud epidemic 'is now national security threat' - BBC News

• Hundreds arrested after riots in 10 cities in the Netherlands

• 19 burned bodies found near Mexico-Texas border town of Camargo

• Assume this is against "milk comes from mammals only" label laws. Petition to stop plant-based dairy censorship in the EU

COVID

• In California: State lifts stay-at-home orders for all regions

• The 'coronasomnia' phenomenon keeping you from getting sleep - BBC Worklife

  the ongoing coronavirus crisis has made getting a good night’s rest significantly harder. Some experts even have a term for it: ‘coronasomnia’ or ‘Covid-somnia’.

• Can Shocking Images Persuade Doubters of COVID's Dangers? - Scientific American

  Persuasion fatigue is setting in. How can we cut through the noise of debate? Is there a better way to show people that COVID-19 is indeed a serious threat? Such questions feel urgent in view of skyrocketing cases and overburdened hospitals. Our loved ones may be acting as if business is usual.

• Smart watches can detect symptoms of Covid-19 before wearer knows they know

  • So the tech overlords can tell us we're sick with a disease that most people never experience any symptoms of, so we can be quarantined and governed based on things totally outside our perception.

• Fauci backs 'double-masking' in coronavirus fight, says 'likely more effective'

• Merck pulls plug on two potential COVID vaccines

• California lifts regional stay-at-home orders

  California Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to lift regional stay-at-home orders in the state on Monday -- allowing for gyms and restaurants to engage in limited outdoor activity,

• No European deaths directly tied to Covid-19 vaccine, say scientists - The Local

• Anti-vaccine activists peddle theories that Covid-19 shots are deadly, undermining vaccination

• Amid COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout, a Quarter of Health Care Workers Say They Won’t Get a Shot

• Fast-spreading Covid variant can elude immune responses

• Moderna vaccine appears to work against variants

  • Moderna working on booster shots for South African strain

• Covid-19 warnings were on Twitter long before the outbreak of the pandemic

  • Early warnings of Covid-19 outbreaks across Europe from social media