2022-04-16

Worthy

• The End of Progressive Intellectual Life - Tablet Magazine

  in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.

  Who decides what is and is not permissible for American progressives to think or discuss or support? The answer is the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and other donor foundations, an increasing number of which are funded by fortunes rooted in Silicon Valley. It is this donor elite, bound together by a set of common class prejudices and economic interests, on which most progressive media, think tanks, and advocacy groups depend for funding.

  Having watched from up close over the past four decades as cliques of foundation program officers, individual billionaires, and their nonprofit retainers lobotomized first the American right and then the American left, I hope that I may live to see the American center left free itself from top-down orthodoxy and welcome dissension, discussion, and debate once again. But I doubt I will live that long.

etc

• "27 years ago I accidentally ran the hardest, strangest Easter egg hunt my hometown had probably ever seen."

• New York Public Library makes banned books available for free

  • 4 "banned" books offered via app.

• Chinese astronauts land on Earth after China's longest crewed space mission

• Seed banks: the last line of defense against a threatening global food crisis

• Naval Gazing Main/Nuclear weapons are not as destructive as you think

• FDA Probes Lucky Charms’ Possible Link to Illnesses Archive link

Horseshit

• Tech companies grapple with workers smoking weed on the job

• Police play Disney music to stop person recording for copyright infringement

  • Police blare copyrighted music to prevent videos being posted to YouTube

celebrity gossip

• ‘What a brutal business’: pop stars on life after the spotlight moves on

Musk / Twitter

• Musk is no longer the largest Twitter shareholder

• Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company | Hacker News

• The Law That Shaped the Internet Presents a Question for Elon Musk

• My take on Elon's offer for Twitter | Hacker News

• Musk Speaking To Co-Investors As Twitter Board Adopts "Poison Pill" To Thwart Hostile Takeover | ZeroHedge

• Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation

• Why Twitter shareholders should sell out to Elon Musk

• Epic: MSNBC Blast From The Past: It's Our Job To Control How People Think... Not Elon Musk's

  None other than MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' Mika Brzezinski said the following words in her out-loud voice...

  "The dangerous edges here are that he is trying to undermine the media, trying to make up his own facts, and it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsen, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think..." And then the nail in the 'oops, I just told the truth coffin': "...and that is our job."

  • Video clip on twitter

• Elon Musk wants Twitter’s algorithm to be public. It’s not that simple.

• Gatekeepers Very Afraid That Elon Musk Will Remove the Gates From Twitter.

• Why Elon Musk has rattled them - spiked

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Western Dissent from US/NATO Policy on Ukraine is Small, Yet the Censorship Campaign is Extrem

  Their crime, like the crime of so many other banished accounts, was not disinformation but skepticism about the US/NATO propaganda campaign. Put another way, it is not “disinformation" but rather viewpoint-error that is targeted for silencing. One can spread as many lies and as much disinformation as one wants provided that it is designed to advance the NATO agenda in Ukraine (just as one is free to spread disinformation provided that its purpose is to strengthen the Democratic Party, which wields its majoritarian power in Washington to demand greater censorship and commands the support of most of Silicon Valley). But what one cannot do is question the NATO/Ukrainian propaganda framework without running a very substantial risk of banishment.

• More Escalations In Online Censorship

• Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists

COVID / VaxCult

• The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown

• Feces with mild Covid can harbor viral genetic material months after infection

• India Is Stalling the WHO’s Efforts to Make Global Covid Death Toll Public

• Why So Many Covid Predictions Were Wrong

• A Case Study of the Information Chaos During Covid in India

• Even mild Covid-19 can cause your brain to shrink

• Long Covid: the invisible public health crisis fueling labor shortages

• Commentary: Who died from COVID-19 in Minnesota? - Alpha News

  Only 291, or 2.67% of the 10,903 certificates we examined, were "COVID only" with no comorbidity listed.

• The Covid-19 pandemic – what have urologists learned?

• China's Covid controls risk sparking crisis for the country – and Xi Jinping

• China’s lockdowns are greater threat to inflation today than in 2020: Bernstein

Culture War / Tribal / Re segregation

• The Media Bury the Race of Murderers–If They’re Not White

• Facebook’s race-blind hate speech practices came at expense of Black users

• Dozens of universities host segregated graduation ceremonies based on ‘identities.’

• Libs of TikTok has been suspended from Twitter AGAIN. Here's the notice and a message from LOTT. | Not the Bee

TechSuck

• Intel deprecates SGX on Core series processors | Hacker News

• CLIPasso: Semantically-Aware Object Sketching

Crypto con games

• Axie owner says recovering stolen crypto could take two years

Economicon / Business / Finance

• California Considers the Four-Day Workweek

• Black Swan Event? Top US Fertilizer Producer Hit With Rail Delays To Midwest | ZeroHedge

  The world's largest fertilizer company said Union Pacific had hit it with railroad-mandated shipping reductions that would impact nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate shipments to Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, and California. Union Pacific told CF Industries without advance notice to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad immediately. This means CF Industries had to decrease shipments by a whopping 20% to stay compliant.

• Vanishing LME shadow stocks add to metals market turmoil

• If You’re Getting a W-2, You’re a Sucker

• White House says it expects inflation to be 'extraordinarily elevated' report

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Texas repeals immigration order that caused border gridlock

• Major Insurers Are Scamming Billions from Medicare, Whistle-Blowers Say

• Biden Plans to Open More Public Land to Drilling

  • White House restarting federal oil, gas lease sales next week

• When CNN Says It's 'Really, Really, Really Bad' for Joe, You Know It's Catastrophic – RedState

• Biden shakes hands with thin air after North Carolina speech

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Conti ransomware leak shows group operates like normal tech company

• The Other Fednapping Plot: The same FBI operation that ginned up the phony kidnapping plot in Michigan also tried to coax a Virginia man to participate in a similar scheme against Governor Ralph Northam.

• Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people’s cell phones

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• Tim Cook of Apple and financier Ray Dalio should register as agents for China

• The End of Strategic Cacophony? The Russo-Ukrainian War and the Future of NATO

• US–China rivalry intensifies in the Pacific

World

• China Infrastructure Projects: The Myth of ‘Debt Trap’ Diplomacy in Africa

• Could Marine Le Pen Win?

  • A tantrum by infantilized French populists could elect Marine Le Pen

• Germany Inc. Played Russian Roulette – and Lost

• The Taliban Were Afghanistan’s Real Modernizers

Health / Medicine

• Acute hepatitis of unknown aetiology – UK

• Spontaneous pneumomediastinum and subcutaneous emphysema after masturbation

• We Must Develop Drugs Much Faster in the Next Pandemic

• The brain expands and shrinks over time

• (2020) Necessity is the mother of invention: William Stewart Halsted’s addiction and its influence on the development of residency training in North America - PMC

  William Stewart Halsted developed a novel residency training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital that, with some modifications, became the model for surgical and medical residency training in North America. While performing anesthesia research early in his career, Halsted became addicted to cocaine and morphine. This paper dissects how his innovative multi-tier residency program helped him hide his addiction while simultaneously providing outstanding patient care and academic training.

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Can We Cool the Planet?

• Wind Power Surpasses Coal, Nuclear as Power Generation Source in US

• For the Climate, Make the Switch to Electric Leaf Blowers

• Back from the dead? Elusive ivory-billed woodpecker not extinct, researchers say

Ukraine War

• Ukraine Invasion Update 23

  • The Kremlin is reframing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a Western war against Russia in a likely effort to maintain Russian domestic acceptance of the war.
  • Finland and Sweden are increasingly reconsidering their non-aligned status and may move to join NATO in the coming months.

  • "non-aligned status"

• Ukrainian Anti-Ship Missiles Struck The Russian Cruiser Moskva: U.S. Officials

  • Ukraine Sinks Russian Baltic Sea Flagship, Moskva

• NATO soldiers captured during special operation in Ukraine – Klimov

etc

• Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Pinpoints Russian Cruiser Moskva as She Burned

• Russia warns US of repercussions if it sends more arms to Ukraine

• Chief ICC prosecutor Karim Khan says Ukraine ‘crime scene’ after visit to Bucha

• 'World War III has begun', says Kremlin state media after sinking of Moskva

• Ask HN: Why can't Germany just go cold turkey and turn off Russian Gas?

• Russian artist faces jail over peace protest using supermarket price labels

• Romania Should Give the MiG-21 Lancers It Just Grounded to Ukraine

• The Russian Way of War: Part Two

• Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky’s historic mandate for peace

• Cold calling to chip away at Russia's digital iron curtain

• Putin’s Ruble Standoff with Europe Risks De Facto Gas Embargo

• Russia Renews Long-Range Strikes On Kiev Following Disastrous Loss Of Warship

• Times New Roman, Arial Fonts Blocked in Russia

• Mysterious American robotic ships headed to Ukraine

  “It’s an unmanned surface vessel (USV) that can be used for a variety of purposes in coastal defense. I think I’ll just leave it at that,” Kirby told reporters.

• Telegram: Where Russians Turn for Uncensored Ukraine News