2024-04-15
Worthy
-
Against the nerds | Locklin on science
Groves, to put it in American terms, was more of a Captain of the Football team than he was a nerd. The same can be said of other technical work done in Radar. Nerds had little to do with American victory in a “calling the shots” sense. They helped: but only because they were told what to do and kept under strict control by the Captain of the Football team. Subsequently, nerds and their bureaucracies flourished in the US, essentially cargo-culting what happened in WW-2, leaving out the all-important urgency and accountability to the Captain of the Football team who mercilessly bullycided them into producing results on a timeline, as is correct and proper.
Being intelligent isn’t the same as being a nerd. Though nerdism is touted as being a sort of definition of intelligence: it isn’t. Being a nerd is being a disembodied brain; a king of abstraction. Being a nerd is a lifestyle open to obvious stupidians. Even when they’re bright, nerds lack thumos; they have a hard time operating outside the nerd herd. If something is declared “stupid” the nerd won’t give it a second thought. If other nerds like a thing, or are declared “expert,” even the 200 IQ nerd will go along with it, because being a nerd is his identity. This is why the football star is superior to the nerd: his life isn’t made of abstractions -it’s made of winning, which is something that happens when you’re right, not when you do the proper nerd-correct thing to sit at the nerd table in high school. Right now there are probably a hundreds thousand nerds trying to predict the stock market with ChatGPT (aka autocomplete). That’s what a nerd does: acts on propaganda as if it is real information.
Horseshit
-
Addiction Activists Say They're 'Reducing Harm' Locals Say They're Causing It
-
People with more money 'struggle with generosity,' expert says
-
Few stations and $200 to fill up: Life on California's 'Hydrogen Highway'
-
Hudson Yards 'Vessel' Sculpture Will Reopen with Netting After Suicides
-
Most people ‘want to have sex with robots,’ new Robosexuality study reveals
-
The Elk Mountain Ranch manager, Steven Grende, kept a closer eye on the hunters this time. He was in charge of patrolling for trespassers. According to harassment complaints later filed by the hunters, and made public during court proceedings, Grende confronted them multiple times. He and colleagues drove pick-up trucks on public squares, scaring off the game, a misdemeanour in Wyoming. A bag of the hunters’ meat went missing. At one point, occupants of four different vehicles watched them, and the hunters had to hide just to use the bathroom. Grende raced his truck towards the hunters, yelling an obscenity. He also entered the hunters’ tent. “You were the boys in here from last year,” he said. “We were, in a sense, being hunted,” Yeomans, a diesel mechanic by trade, told me. (Grende did not respond to requests for comment.)
Electric / Self Driving cars
celebrity gossip
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
-
John Gartner, founder of Duty To Warn, a group of mental health professionals who have been raising the alarm about Trump’s increasingly sociopathic behavior since 2017. Now in 2024, Gartner has an even more dire warning about Trump: that there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia.
This wasn’t a new issue for me. I had written a series of op-eds about Trump’s signs of dementia in 2018 and 2019, and I was part of a group that publicly pressured Ronny Jackson to give Trump the dementia screening test that he can’t stop bragging about “acing.” I’d known for years Trump was showing medically unmistakable signs of dementia, but the press was hyper-focused on Biden falling off his bike, forgetting names, and being “too old.” One day, in silence, in my garden, I felt the Universe, God, the Force, whatever you want to call it, communicate with me. It was a simple message: If someone was going to take up this struggle, it would have to be me and I said yes. I reactivated my long-dormant Twitter account, to fight the information war, one last time.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
-
The Great COVID Cover-up: Shocking truth about Wuhan and 15 federal agencies | Fox News
How vast was the Great COVID Cover-up? Well, my investigation has recently discovered government officials from 15 federal agencies knew in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was trying to create a coronavirus like COVID-19. These officials knew that the Chinese lab was proposing to create a COVID 19-like virus and not one of these officials revealed this scheme to the public. In fact, 15 agencies with knowledge of this project have continuously refused to release any information concerning this alarming and dangerous research. Government officials representing at least 15 federal agencies were briefed on a project proposed by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
TechSuck / Geek Bait
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Crypto con games
Economicon / Business / Finance
-
Tech's Cash Crunch Sees Creditors Turn 'Violent' with One Another
-
About that NYT Piece – Nina Quinn Eichacker
Something that didn’t make it into the piece that I think is really important is that while I think it is excellent that policy makers are quick to use these tools during crises, I wish that policy makers in the government and at the Fed were more sanguine about deploying these tools for the social benefits that would follow outside of crises. Jamie Galbraith is right that we shouldn’t dismiss perceptions that the economy is not perfect for everyone, even if many metrics, like wages for the lowest income brackets, have shown huge improvement since 2020. I’d like the Fed to make dollar swap lines available to way more economies’ central banks. The end of the Child Taxcare Credit was a huge policy failure. I want more targeted credit facilities, and I’d really like the Federal Reserve to do something about liquidity risks likely to flow from climate change. I think that subsidies for housing, education, and more should be constant phenomena. I also think that a uniform and federally administered unemployment insurance system would be a gargantuan improvement over the US’s state-level hodgepodge of systems that range from the overtaxed and slow to the frankly awful, before we can move on to expanding unemployment payments more generously as a baseline. I also think that we should raise corporate taxes and minimum wages, pass more union friendly legislation, increase all manner of social benefits and on and on.
-
A Day in the Life of a Walmart Manager Who Makes $240k a Year
-
U.S. Steel Shareholders Approve Sale to Japan's Nippon Steel
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
-
The Space Force is planning what could be the first military exercise in orbit
-
Sizing up the New Axis - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
we should ask whether the New Axis is a real thing. “New Axis” is just a term I made up to refer to the combination of China and Russia (and whatever other allies and fellow-travelers they can muster). The idea that these two powers are de facto allies against the U.S. is based on the joint statement they released before the Ukraine war. When I use the tern “New Axis”, though, people occasionally scoff, arguing that China and Russia have too few common interests and too much mutual suspicion to form any kind of close alliance. And maybe this is true.
But it’s worth remembering that the original Axis wasn’t that close of an alliance either. Germany and Japan signed some agreements and both fought against the U.S., but they didn’t work together much at all during the war. They also didn’t team up against the USSR — Japan signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviets (which the Soviets themselves broke only in the very last days of the war), and notably failed to come to Germany’s aid in Operation Barbarossa.
World
Israel
-
Biden told Netanyahu U.S. won't support an Israeli counterattack on Iran
-
Israel missile defense chief: Our 'Star Wars' defense program was worth it
-
Iran informed Turkey in advance of its operation against Israel - The Jerusalem Post
The Turkish source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had spoken to both his US and Iranian counterparts in the past week to discuss the planned Iranian operation, adding Ankara had been made aware of possible developments. "Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with Blinken, and they (the US) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits," the source said. "In response, Iran said the reaction would be a response to Israel's attack on its embassy in Damascus and that it would not go beyond this."
-
Israeli Hetz 3 or US Navy SM-3 caught Iranian exoatmospheric threat
a particular video circulating on social media caught our attention. A solitary “colored balloon” sparks momentarily in the dark sky before fading. Shortly after that, another appears in a different form. Witnesses contend that this was the exoatmospheric interception of an Iranian ballistic missile.
It could possibly be, should the exoatmospheric interception be substantiated, that we are looking at the first exoatmospheric interception carried out in real conflict on April 14th. This event is rather notable as most interceptions are primarily theoretical, restricted to simulations or drills.
Take, for instance, a moment back in November 2023. Israel officially announced that their Arrow 3 had successfully intercepted a ballistic missile over the Red Sea. However, this particular occurrence did not take place in the exoatmosphere. According to reports from Israeli sources at that time, the missile in question was launched from Yemen by the Houthis. This gesture was apparently an effort by the group to show solidarity with the terrorist organization, Hamas, and to divert Israel’s attention from its military operations in Gaza.
-
there was a report from Yeshiva World News' Moshe Schwartz indicating:
"An immediate response with strikes within Iran was approved by a clear majority of the Israeli war cabinet but was called off at the last minute following Biden/Netanyahu phone call. The war cabinet still supports the planned response - but not necessarily immediately."
-
Iran's attack seemed planned to minimize casualties while maximizing spectacle
-
US tells Israel it won't join any retaliatory strikes on Iran
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, a senior administration official said that Mr Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "think very carefully and strategically" about how his forces replied to the unprecedented action, the first direct attack by Iran on the country. The official added that the Biden administration believes Israel "got the best of it" in the exchange, which began when senior Iranian military commanders were killed at an Iranian consular building in Syria.
A conversation took place between Mr Biden and Mr Netanyahu at a time "of heightened emotion" just after the attack, which included about 100 ballistic missiles simultaneously flying towards Israel. During the call, the two leaders had a discussion "about how to slow things down and think through things", with Mr Biden emphasising that Israel has "gotten the best of it". The official declined to say, however, whether the White House warned against a significant response, saying only that "it is a calculation the Israelis have to make".
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
-
Recreational use of erectile dysfunction drugs is rising — for doctors, it’s a hard no
Social media users are being bombarded with advertisements for easy access to erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra and Cialis, along with affordable generics — and men hoping to improve their sexual performance are taking their chances. That’s a hard no, Cleveland Clinic urologist Raevti Bole, MD warns. Just because these medications are easier than ever to access doesn’t mean you should fall for the hype.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
-
Swapping red meat for herring, sardines and anchovies could save 750k lives
-
The Vacuity of Climate Science
The theory of anthropogenic human warming ultimately rests on an unproven hypothesis that carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cause the Earth’s surface to warm up due to something called the “greenhouse effect”, an effect alleged to be so powerful that without it our planet would be an uninhabitable frozen ball. This makes it all the more peculiar that nobody has been able to experimentally demonstrate and therefore verify the greenhouse effect. The evidence that is provided consists mainly of models which already presume the greenhouse effect, and therefore assume a theory in which the conclusion is part of the premise. This is further corroborated by observational data which can never empirically distinguish the cause and the effect of greenhouse gases. Worst of all, the alleged recent warming trend that is said to confirm earlier model predictions is based on data that appears to be adjusted to match the very models it is meant to be independently corroborating.
-
Taking CO2 out of the air would be an expensive way to fight climate change
-
The inadvertent geoengineering experiment that the world is now shutting off
the world’s power plants, factories, and ships are pumping much less sulfur dioxide into the air, thanks to an increasingly strict set of global pollution regulations. Sulfur dioxide creates aerosol particles in the atmosphere that can directly reflect sunlight back into space or act as the “condensation nuclei” around which cloud droplets form. More or thicker clouds, in turn, also cast away more sunlight. So when we clean up pollution, we also ease this cooling effect. Before we go any further, let me stress: cutting air pollution is smart public policy that has unequivocally saved lives and prevented terrible suffering.
-
Top Europe court chides Switzerland in landmark climate ruling