This is the latest part of a series of videos uploaded recently by the Ayn Rand Institute, some of which are repackaged audio files (of which some are not always dated precisely).
A careful listener may hear the hint of approval she would have for a President Trump, who is said to have dined with her in 1977 ... just after her secret affair with Pierre Elliott Trudeau came to a sad end.
Qui eu percipit accusata. Nam ex perpetua forensibus reprimique, mei sale mucius te. Ei postea sanc
My homespun header sung to the tune of something from Paint Your Wagons, I think. The headline at Phys.org is "Modern humans inherited viral defenses from Neanderthals." Click and go, but someone go first for Peter and give him an all-clear, thanks.
We sometimes talk about viral things and sometime talk about Neanderthal and sometimes we talk about Neaderthal and Rand. This is my half-assed attempt to knit together a proper blog post. Since I can't socialize the means of content-prod
A splendid experiment shows its fruit. This is like Sokal Hoax squared. The headline is from Aeon, the story written by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian; it's a forty-seven minute read, so I will leave that for OLers to consume at their own pace. A highlight:
Well worth a listen are two recently-uploaded visual-radio pieces from ARI's Youtube channel. I wish a few of our founding-people regulars were still around to masticate this lecture. My first impression was that Binswanger is both precise and sloppy: the lack of 'show notes' or references makes it cloudy where exactly he is relying upon someone else's work. He implicitly invokes both Plutchik and Ekman, but does not say their names, rubbishing one, but basing his next ten minutes on the other
Peter Taylor left a crumb trail to an entertaining video from FoxNews' ratings juggernaut Tucker Carlson's show. Featuring the Objectivist lawyer and scholar Amy Peikoff. Veddy interesting ...
"I must say, you seem like a logical atheist ..." sez the man with the Beatles haircut.
[ ...]
[... see below for the video missing above: Atheist and Haircut]
From the "Friendly Atheist" ...
There is a reading festival in Chilliwack, including a lottery-style draw for fabulous prizes, accorded to a pool of readers. You fill out a little reading report and you may be rewarded with ... weekly-distributed prizes, all around fifty bucks value, from Arts Centre/Playhouse events to Plants.
Anyway, there was another little promotion going on when we visited the main library: local, small-press "Chilliwack"-keyed books aka "Local Indie Authors." I picked up .. Dark Oasis, A Self-Made
President Trump, in his inimitable fashion, has pushed back against one of the central themes of Michael Wolff's breathless work of gossip, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. The theme -- fanciful, false, 'fake' or not -- is that Trump's White House was staffed with more than a few folks who view the man in the Oval Office as unfit for the job, lacking the qualities of mind that one should expect.
This is not a new theme.
Here is an article in Statnews last year that tried (a
Tarl Warwick (such a nice Lovecraftian name) aka Styxhexenhammer666 is someone I pay attention to, so that I can at the very least understand various arguments made. He is quite assured before the camera**, which still impresses me), and can run on for at least ten minutes, even if not colouring within the lines of his topic. Here he hews fairly strictly to the concept of Moral Panic and raises some questions that readers/watchers/listeners here can either analyze, scoff at, or nap through.
A depressing report from the folks at Reporters without Borders. It contains all the data undergirding the index, which lets you dig into the specifics. We are probably (Canadians and Americans) thinking we have nothing to envy in other nations, in terms of press freedom, but the methodology suggests no -- we don't even crack the top ten.
The way I look at it is ... an open society cannot function without press/media freedom -- including full freedom to report without the need to 'obey g
My blog item on the Best Days of the Presidency attracted some slightly off-topic wonderfulness. I have removed that ish-ness from that thread to populate this topic thread.
This is a headline that needed an entry -- it is embedded within a story about, er, "cyber warfare" -- or whatever laden term best describes the augmented reality of propaganda, misinformation, and its effects. It's in a Bloomberg special report called A Global Guide to State-Sponsored Trolling. I can't wait till I get to the Canadian section.
________ ____ ____ ___ __ ________ __________ _____
/ ____/ / / __ \/ __ )/ | / / / ____/ / / / _/
I have learned a few serenity lessons along the way, having been a typically shy-but-exuberant child and a normally anguished-at-times-by-love teenager. Emoting can be fun when it involves a bodily thrill short of nausea or panic or grief. Outrage is then physical, in anger, disgust, just as with alarm, fear, and ever more physical as emotions heighten or become infused with more potent bodily energy -- to Rage, Revulsion, Terror. How to keep your head when all around you are losing theirs.
I will put the whole list of unremarkables and red-zoned claims/statements, perhaps regrouping them, and adding links where appropriate. I have been hungering for some kind of discussion with OLers on climatology's raging discourse. This may be the opening, a list of contentious contentions, and notes on same. Sharpen the dialogue, deepen the inquiry, get over the hurdles of shared knowledge. To the curb with unwarranted assumptions, as we dig. I do believe reasoned and reasonable inquiry can gi
Live, from Miami Beach, it's the Jackie Gleason Show!
Actually, I wish. Today my Twitter feed was a go go with Peter Strzok answering questions from a combined committee of the House, ostensibly part of "Clinton Email Investigation.
I give but the link, since I don't have the knowledge or right to embed.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?447953-12/fbi-deputy-assistant-director-peter-strzok-testifies-2016-investigations
[Added: yesterday's hearing has been made embeddable:]
Over in the active Incel thread, there are a few misunderstandings ... here, for example, Michael notes the superiority of his position with regard to assessing the probability that Adam Schiff is a "Ruling Class Pedophile."
Investigating the claims is like pulling teeth.
I thought Caroljane and Michael had some interesting brainstorm results, laid out below. I also had some storms of creativity ... which I will add once I finish furiously scribbling notes on a break by the river. We have secretly kept everything green behind our fencing, despite the water-restrictions. I hate when Israel steals our clouds all summer.
My basic notion is weather weapons, weapons of war, that is what the protagonists come to be up against, discovering and destroying the milit
A Twitter List by wsscherk is my compilation of accounts our dear Leader follows. This post originally was a summer test of embedding such a thing on a page, which I did later do with both the Salon and anti-Salon lists elsewhere.
Sorry if Michael felt his privacy invaded -- this post was put on a "Publish later" schedule and forgotten about until it popped up.
In any case, Twitter Lists are a means to narrowly focus and sample tweets from interest groups, subject areas, kooks and cr
Bloomberg has a short Trump-whisperer item on the President's supposed impatience with negotiations to "update" the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Trump’s Impatience Emerging as Biggest Threat to Nafta Agreement
Some of you may have read the earlier report in which he instructs General Kelly that he "wants tariffs" ... while his weepy loser staff won't bring him tariffs.
That report could be 100% shit, and since said tariffs were to be imposed on China, not perhaps pertinent
Chat instructions via video!
So, my new "livecasting" set-up is coming along. Today I botched a brief video header for this topic. I insert it just for fun. The other voice you hear is young Jordan Sather; since I wasn't wearing the headphones, I didn't know he was talking. He is talking about the Toronto attack, obliquely, via Qanon.
I will replace this with a better version where the sounds make sense and I wear the headphones as I mix. I wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to add
The article "Cognitive Ability and Vulnerability to Fake News" appeared at the Scientific American website on February 6th. Its subheadline is "Researchers identify a major risk factor for pernicious effects of misinformation."
The article makes for interesting reading, whether you consider 'fake news' a classifier for broad swaths of the information landscape, or whether you consider 'fake news' to be particular items that are inaccurate, infused with partisan bias, subject to grotesque e
The Hill reports the 'breaking' news that the White House has approved the public release of the MEMO. The MEMO was crafted by staff of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).
From an earlier report ...
When Two Tribes Go To War ...
Taking this topic out from the conspiracy thread here at Friends and Foes. I want to look at how we discern tribalisms, membership, shibboleths and associated markers.
Define: William's tribe.
Define: Michael's tribe.
List: core beliefs of Michael's tribe (sacred cows)
List: core beliefs of William's tribe (sacred cows)
Once a core belief of Michael's / William's tribal affiliates is identified, plug the details in
I was alerted to this review by one of the folks I follow on Twitter, Robert Tracinski:
A small excerpt from the offending review with a bit of Rand news that I missed highlighted:
-- I am half-convinced that we already noted the Amsterdam theatre group's adaptation in an earlier OL post, but my attempts to find that note are foiled by the search facility, which has gremlins at the moment.
[Edit: gremlins vanquished:; the link goes to Michael's note of the earlier sighting
From Rick Ross's Cult Education Institute -- Getting Started:
See also the fascinating Objectivist Living topic, "Secret Objectivist Cult," a funny and intriguing thread started by Dear Leader seven years ago:
I am a big fan of Tony Ortega's blog The Underground Bunker. Tony is former editor of the Village Voice, where he began his decade-long examination of Scientology. Some readers here may have seen him on various episodes of the Leah Remini cable series "Scientology and the Aft
