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2024-11-30

Zvi on giving, he et the banana, birthing fetish, rage bait often inaccurate, comfortable Thanksgiving lies, elevated etiquette, GPU loans, Sharpton's prices, "assisted dying" for the UK

etc

  • Survivors mark 20th anniversary of deadly 2004 tsunami

  • Stowaway found after boarding flight from New York to Paris

  • Zvi: The Big Nonprofits Post

    The process of applying for grants, raising money, and justifying your existence sucks. A lot. It especially sucks for many of the creatives and nerds that do a lot of the best work. If you have to periodically go through this process, and are forced to continuously worry about making your work legible and how others will judge it, that will substantially hurt your true productivity. At best it is a constant distraction. By default, it is a severe warping effect. A version of this phenomenon is doing huge damage to academic science.

    As I noted in my AI updates, the reason this blog exists is that I received generous, essentially unconditional, anonymous support to ‘be a public intellectual’ and otherwise pursue whatever I think is best. My benefactors offer their opinions when we talk because I value their opinions, but they never try to influence my decisions, and I feel zero pressure to make my work legible in order to secure future funding. As for funding my non-Balsa work further, I am totally fine for money, but I could definitely find ways to put a larger budget to work, and shows of support are excellent for morale.

    If you have money to give, and you know individuals who should clearly be left to do whatever they think is best without worrying about raising money, then giving them unconditional grants is a great use of funds, including giving them ‘don’t worry about reasonable expenses’ levels of funding. This is especially true when combined with ‘retrospective funding,’ based on what they have already done.

  • Ford Built America's Foundational Airliner and Then Quit Building Planes

  • Honda Debuts Funky New V3 Gas Engine Design with Electric 'Turbo'

Horseshit

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

  • Misinformation exploits outrage to spread online

    We tested a hypothesis that misinformation exploits outrage to spread online, examining generalizability across multiple platforms, time periods, and classifications of misinformation. Outrage is highly engaging and need not be accurate to achieve its communicative goals, making it an attractive signal to embed in misinformation. In eight studies that used US data from Facebook (1,063,298 links) and Twitter (44,529 tweets, 24,007 users) and two behavioral experiments (1475 participants), we show that (i) misinformation sources evoke more outrage than do trustworthy sources; (ii) outrage facilitates the sharing of misinformation at least as strongly as sharing of trustworthy news; and (iii) users are more willing to share outrage-evoking misinformation without reading it first. Consequently, outrage-evoking misinformation may be difficult to mitigate with interventions that assume users want to share accurate information.

Bluesky

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • Thanksgiving's troubled history

    The nation's annual Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday brings millions of families together, but the nation is growing more diverse and requiring new voices to tell the country's history. Debates over Thanksgiving's origins have been reduced to political-cultural battles amid a divided nation, yet a new generation of historians say we need to understand the holiday better to understand ourselves.

    Until the Civil Rights Movement, restaurants that held Thanksgiving gatherings excluded Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and (ironically) Native Americans — all of whom would develop their own Thanksgiving traditions. Conservatives, like the late Rush Limbaugh, attacked what they called revisionist histories of Thanksgiving and dismissed anything challenging the myth. Before he died in 2021, Limbaugh falsely claimed Native Americans had "little, if anything, to do with the prosperity" the Pilgrims experienced.

  • The Great Thanksgiving Hoax | Mises Institute

    Each year at this time, schoolchildren all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating. It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.

    The official story has the Pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America, and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620–21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them. The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America. The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hard-working or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

  • Emmanuel Macron shows off the gloriously restored Notre Dame

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Trump

Democrats / Biden Inc

  • Explosive Report Exposes Biden Admin's Targeting Of Christians | Off The Press

    A report showed that nearly 70% of enforcement actions executed by the Biden administration’s Education Department targeted faith-based and career schools. According to a press release published by the American Principles Project (APP), they drew on newly obtained data finding that nearly 70 percent of the Department of Education’s (ED) enforcement actions dealt with faith-based and career schools, even though those schools represent less than 10 percent of students in the US.

  • MSNBC Says It Was ‘Unaware’ of Harris Campaign Contributions to Al Sharpton Nonprofit—But Won’t Say Whether It’s Taking Action

    MSNBC was “unaware” that Kamala Harris’s campaign paid Al Sharpton’s nonprofit $500,000 shortly before Harris sat for a softball interview with the cable host, a network spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon. He wouldn’t say, though, whether the left-wing network is taking any action against Sharpton for a move that appears to violate network policy. Other network hosts like Joe Scarborough have been publicly reprimanded for their failure to disclose making, rather than receiving, political donations. The Harris campaign made a $250,000 contribution to Sharpton’s National Action Network on Sept. 5 and another on Oct. 1, just weeks before Sharpton conducted a favorable interview with the Democratic nominee, the Free Beacon reported.

Left Angst

  • The ‘Trump Killed the Bipartisan Border Bill’ Talking Point Just Got Wrecked.

  • How Cancel Culture Panics Ate the World | The New Republic

    The gambit of Stanford literature professor Adrian Daub’s clarifying new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global, is the contention that, in fact, we don’t really know what “cancel culture” is. Moreover, the very fact that we think we do sustains it. Like every moral panic, cancel culture skirmishes thrive on contradictory impulses: incuriosity regarding accuracy coupled with intense, even prurient interest in perceived violations of norms; presumptive familiarity cut with historical amnesia. Before we have even read the latest cancel culture narrative, we already know the roles, the sides, and where we stand. Yet still we find ourselves consuming each one as the baleful harbinger of something new, strange, and profoundly threatening to the integrity of the polity.

    Yet it is precisely those who suffer the costs of neoliberal discipline who are then cast in the role of a powerful illiberal force in cancel culture discourse’s “little morality plays.” This inversion rewrites problems of political economy as dramas of an embattled liberalism, while also furnishing an “all-encompassing” justification for dismissing out of hand critics of the status quo as “Twitter mobs” or “woke” college students. All the while, the ongoing production of ever more anecdotes means more opportunities for panicked moralizing and prepares the way for yet more disinvestment. This is the grand political mystification effected by cancel culture panic as Daub has described it. It persuades us to feel angry at or fearful of or smugly superior to the student, inevitably blue of hair, who wants to “cancel” the dining hall at her college for misrepresenting a sandwich. In our fervor, we forget to ask not only whether that is really what happened, or whether we should really care, but also why she had to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt just to be there in the first place.

  • Nursing Home Industry Wants Trump to Rescind Staffing Mandate - The New York Times

    Covid’s rampage through the country’s nursing homes killed more an 172,000 residents and spurred the biggest industry reform in decades: a mandate that homes employ a minimum number of nurses. ut with President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the industry is ramping up pressure to kill that requirement before it takes effect, leaving thousands of residents in homes too short-staffed to provide proper care. he nursing home industry has been marshaling opposition for months among congressional Republicans — and even some Democrats — to overrule the Biden administration’s mandate. Two industry groups, the American Health Care Association and LeadingAge, have sued to overturn the regulation, and 20 Republican state attorneys general have filed their own challenge.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Israel

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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