2021-08-30

Cool

• John Yates and Pinball Paradise: How pinball is reviving a small Illinois town - Polygon

Worthy

• White House Pool | Forth

  • We’re Automatically Publishing the White House Press Pool

• What If People Don’t Want 'A Career?' - by Charlie Warzel - Galaxy Brain

• (Dec 2020) Applying IQ to IQ - by Razib Khan - Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

etc

• Hurricane Ida forces reverse flow on the Mississippi

• Confederate Slave Payrolls – Pieces of History

• FCC Temporary Waiver Permits Higher Symbol Rate Data for Hurricane Ida Traffic

• The unsolved mystery of the D-day puzzles | Sky HISTORY TV Channel

• How the Airline Industry Got Wise to Seat Belts | History | Air & Space Magazine

Horseshit

• China limits under 18s to 3 hours of gaming per week

  + [Video game addiction: China imposes gaming curfew for
  minors](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50315960)
  

  • China bans online gaming for minors except from 8 pm-9 pm Friday to Sunday

• Walking increases spontaneous fluctuations in the brain

celebrity gossip

• Stephen Miller loses his cool during Fox News interview about Afghan refugees

• 'The smartest person in any room, anywhere': In defence of Elon Musk

• Chase Bank Cancels General Mike Flynn's Credit Cards | ZeroHedge

• Rand Paul Claims 'Hatred For Trump' Hinders Ivermectin Research

Culture War / Re segregation / Identdoctrination

• Hostile Takeover of L.A.’s Public Schools

• ‘Woke Generation Is Rewriting Rules On What Can Be Said’: Legendary Monty Python Actor To Release Series On Cancel Culture | The Daily Wire

• Racial/Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Health Workers

• Judge strips unvaccinated mother her of visitation rights

• ‘On the Fringe’ explores the thin line between science and pseudoscience | Science News

  Most valuable of all is his first chapter, in which he demolishes the notion that philosopher Karl Popper’s “falsifiability” criterion allows a clear demarcation between science and non- (or pseudo-) science. Falsifiable, Gordin points out, is undefinable. If nothing else, every working scientist (and science journalist) should read this chapter to learn that the refrain “if it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science” is philosophically unsound gibberish, a sign of a weak argument.

• Campus Reform | Oregon State University’s College of Education hosts seminar on 'Confronting Systemic Whiteness'

• Anti-vaxx police officer who had been taking horse worm medicine dies from Covid

• Campus Reform | AU offers separate classroom, saying it's a ‘safe space for Black Students’

• Bearing Witness to Racism in America Today

Media / Many Ministries of Truths / Censorship

• The Battleground of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation on Facebook

• We Can’t Trust the Market with Scientific Knowledge

• Why is the Communist Party clamping down on China's biggest stars and fan clubs?

• No one is immune to misinformation: An investigation of misinformation sharing by subscribers to a fact-checking newsletter

  Like general samples, our participants were typically motivated to share possible misinformation due to interest in the information, or to seek a second opinion about claim veracity. However, even if information is shared in good faith and not for the purpose of deceiving or misleading others, the spread of misinformation is nevertheless highly problematic. Exposure to misinformation engenders faulty beliefs in others and undermines efforts to curtail the spread of COVID-19 by reducing adherence to social distancing measures and increasing vaccine hesitancy.

TechSuck

• UMG Seems to Think it Copyrighted the Moon | PetaPixel

  Update on 8/27/21: Philip Bloom says that after the publication of this story, UMB has released the claims on his video along with several others.

  Two hours ago UMG release my video of the moon they had copyright blocked alongside an unknown number of other moon videos. Some from over 3 years ago! Did you suddenly get a notification that your moon video has been released? I wonder how many have been freed?

• French Appeal Court affirms decision that copyright claims on GPL are invalid; must be enforced via contractual dispute – The HFT Guy

• SCO vs. IBM settlement deal is done, but zombie case shuffles on elsewhere

• Chicago sues DoorDash, Grubhub for allegedly deceiving customers

• TikTok owner ByteDance has acquired the third largest VR headset maker, Pico

• Apple acquires classical music streaming service Primephonic

• Another Tesla reportedly using Autopilot hits a parked police car

  • "Elon Musk's Anti-Police Program"

Economicon

• The Social-Media Stars Who Move Markets

• Stock Futures Pause After S&P 500, Nasdaq Hit Records

• Shares of Globalstar soar 40% on rumor iPhone 13 will use satellites directly

• PayPal is exploring a stock-trading platform for its U.S. customers

Poilitcks

• Biden Administration Launches U.S. Digital Corps

• If Biden’s Team Will Lie About His Dog Biting, What Won’t They Lie About?

• One housing project epic battle in SF, where the real enemy is city red tape

• Right on Cue, the President's Mistakes Are Our Fault Again | National Review

• Report: Wisconsin Lost Track of 82,000 Ballots in State Biden Won by 20,000 | Conservative Brief

Crime / Police

• Cops are the only ones being lawful on the dark web, AFP declares

• FBI suffers another black eye, admits it hid payments to informant in white supremacist case | Just The News

  FBI had failed to disclose in a search warrant application that a publisher of extremist literature had been paid about $144,000 over 16 years to be an informant, including $82,000 for work in the case against Cole. The confidential informant (CI) also had an earlier felony conviction that wasn't disclosed, court records show.

• NYC major crime complaints fell when cops took a break from ‘proactive policing’

Afghanistan

• America's 20-Year War In Afghanistan Ends After Last Troops Depart Kabul (Updated)

  123,000 were flown out as part of the evacuation in total. Many still remain, including Americans, which will now be dealt with diplomatically, at least overtly. Even with 10 more days, General McKenzie says they would not have gotten everyone out they wanted to. He also acknowledged there are still Americans there that want out. General Chris Donohue, commander of the 82nd Airborne and the on-scene commander, and Acting Ambassador Ross Wilson, were the last U.S. officials or troops to step foot on Afghan soil and flew out of the last aircraft.

• Biden breaks promise to 'stay' in Afghanistan until every American evacuated | Fox News

• Last U.S. Troops Leave Afghanistan After Nearly 20 Years

• Last plane carrying Americans from Afghanistan departs as longest war concludes

• (Aug 26 2021) Removing Afghan air support was ‘critical error’ say analysts

• White House says 'small number' of Americans remain in Afghanistan

• Exclusive: Biden Officials at Kabul Airport Warned American Rescue Plane To Turn Back or Be Shot Down › American Greatness

• Trapped In Afghanistan, A Military-style Rescue Operation, Conducted by Private Citizens

• Family of Kids Killed in U.S. Attack in Kabul Cry Out

• Senator Seeks Investigation Into Americans Reportedly Denied Entry to Kabul Airport

  Johnson is investigating reports by military veteran Chad Robichaux that rescue efforts coordinated with outside nonprofit groups are being met with resistance by American military officials on the ground. Robichaux said he organized a busload of 400 evacuees on Thursday and got them to the airport, only to be met by a commander of the 82nd Airborne Division who "told them to get back on their buses and turn around because ‘the rescue was over,’" Johnson wrote. "It is not clear what happened to the Americans and the other individuals after they left the airport."

• Explosions From Biden Drone Strike Likely Killed Nine Members of a Single Family, Including Six Children – PJ Media

• The Taliban's new three-pronged PR strategy is a temporary ruse

  The Taliban can create a functioning government and society and have popular support, or they can create another Islamist hellhole similar to what existed at the turn of the century. Sadly, most signs so far indicate that they are saying the former but choosing the latter.

• Multiple Rockets Fired At Kabul Airport, Operations "Uninterrupted" After US Intercept | ZeroHedge

World

• China eyes ‘ultra-large spacecraft’ spanning miles in $2.3m crewed mission push

• Protest Against Mandatory Vaxxing Turns Violent In Greece, 47 Detained

• Paris speed limit falls to 30km/h (19mph)

• Belarusian hackers are turning the country's surveillance state against it

• E.U. Set to Propose Travel Restrictions on U.S. Visitors

  • European Union recommends halting non-essential travel from the U.S.

• North Korea Restarted Plutonium-Producing Reactor, U.N. Agency Warns

Health / Medicine / COVID

• Respiratory infections other than Covid-19 are filling up pediatric wards

• The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic and Policy Responses on Excess Mortality

  We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented shelter-in-place policies earlier, and in which shelter-in-place policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries-and U.S. states that were slower to implement shelter-in-place policies. We also failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of [shelter-in-place] policies based on pre-shelter-in-place COVID-19 death rates.

• Covid: Delta variant patients twice as likely to need hospital care

• Let's Stop Pretending About the Covid-19 Vaccines | RealClearScience

• Pfizer director says Covid vaccine for kids 5 to 11 could come by winter

• First Death Linked to Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine

  New Zealand has reported what it believes to be its first death linked to the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.

• Veteran dies of treatable illness as Covid fills hospital beds

• Moderna vaccinations halted in Okinawa after ‘black substances’ found in vial

• 109 Czech deaths apparently caused by the Covid vaccination

  Note that the vaccine deaths are smaller than the Covid deaths by almost 2 orders of magnitude. But if you restrict both deaths to the young people or even kids, you will see that the vaccination kills more people than Covid. If you restrict the Covid deaths to the epoch when the vaccination was intense, the vaccine deaths "win" even among some older groups.

• New Zealand reports first death linked to Pfizer vaccine

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• We’re Hitting the Limits of Hurricane Preparedness

• Climate change linked to risk of viruses jumping species in the Arctic

• Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana and then didn’t weaken. Why?

  More than two hours after landfall, at 2 pm CT, Ida's winds were estimated to have fallen just 5 mph, to 145 mph. At 4 pm the storm's maximum winds were still a staggering 130 mph. At 10 pm, more than 10 hours after landfall, Ida still packed the punch of a Category 2 hurricane, with estimated winds of 105 mph.

• Street lighting has detrimental impacts on local insect populations

• The ‘Hedonistic Altruism’ of Plant-Based Meat

• A combination of failures: why 3.6m lb of nuclear waste is buried on a CA beach

• The era of leaded petrol is over, eliminating a major threat to health