Michael Stuart Kelly

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Everything posted by Michael Stuart Kelly

  1. Ayn Rand Fan Club Ep 67: Ayn Rand and Star TrekView the full article
  2. Ayn Rand Fan Club Ep 67: Ayn Rand and Star TrekView the full article
  3. SCOTUS is hearing oral arguments about Social Media getting censorship instructions from the government. Then this beauty popped. You have to hear it to believe it. Kentaji Brown Jackson has no business being on the bench in the United States of America. In Communist China or Cuba, maybe. But not in the USA. I wonder what the procedure is to impeach her. Michael
  4. S, These are on my to-do list. After reading almost everything Rand wrote, there is a little voice in the back of my mind that keeps wondering if the effort to read a book explaining what Rand meant ethics-wise will be a productive use of my time. I mean, Rand was clear from what I understood. I even adopted it as a worldview Also, there is that academic thing I do not value--not at all--due to the tribalism and elitism and agenda-mongering in higher education. I'm not trying to be a snob. These things cause a subconscious resistance in me to reading her books. But I will get to them. Hell, if I could go through parts of two of Binswanger's books (The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, and How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation), her books should be a breeze. Incidentally, I am no fan of the Binswanger books. We can go into why later if you want. I do like the work he did on joining ITOE to the workshop, though. Also, I have added so much more to my base in Rand, stuff from evolutionary biology--especially brain development, neuroscience, modern psychology, behavioral science, and story, I find books that derive their arguments from Rand as their starting point and presenting themselves as universal are limited for where I am going intellectually. Once again, I'm not being a snob, you plebeian. Michael
  5. B, I remember Don Hauptman making a splash with that some time ago. If I'm not mistaken, he even did an update. I never got close to Don for some reason. Nothing in particular why. We just passed by each other on the open seas and kept on sailing. Maybe someday... Michael
  6. It's worse than I thought. Look at this. Politico says having a good time at a Trump rally is the sign of a dictator normalizing his autocratic ways. Note: This pearl of wisdom is written by Michael Kruse, a senior staff writer at Politico and Politico Magazine. In on the Joke: The Comedic Trick Trump Uses to Normalize His Behavior His supporters love it. Critics call it a sign of his autocratic tendencies. Sorry, for some reason this does not embed like the other articles. So you have to click on the headline to read it. But here is a bit of it: I love that phrase: "... the mirth masks the menace." Menace for whom? Hmmmm?... Do you smell panic? I do. Besides, the people on the left love to use humor to humiliate those they do not like. But they themselves can't stand it if they are being laughed at by a huge audience they cannot dismiss. And an audience of voters who are throwing their sorry asses out of power is an audience they cannot dismiss. Even if I didn't feel like laughing, I have to laugh. This dude Kruse forgot to say that laughter is a symbol of racism and white supremacy. But never fear, it's coming. It's all they've got, poor things... What dorks... LOL... Michael
  7. Ah, come on. This is funny. You starve woke leftists by giving them seeds to grow their own food. LOL... Michael
  8. Man, all those people from back then are 60 years older... I don't want to think about it. Michael
  9. I wish I could say I look down my nose at this, but I don't. And I have conducted Beethoven, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Mozart... What the hell is wrong with me? LOL... What a life... Michael
  10. The Deep State is a joke when they get panicked. All this lawfare against Trump is just that, panic and a joke. When the Deep State is incompetent, it has no equal. And Trump, himself, is having a good time with it. For those who don't know the backstory of the following clip. Fani Willis is the DA who has been prosecuting Trump in Georgia. She was moving right along until someone found out she hired her lover, embezzled funds and did some other do-nasties. So there was a hearing. They put her on the stand to explain herself and she was so arrogant, she turned off many on her own side. When they put her lover-boy-prosecutor on the stand, you get the clip below. They asked him if he had ever gone to a cabin with Fani. He literally took 15 seconds on the stand to answer. At any rate, with political maneuverings, Fani got to stay on the case, but lover-boy had to resign. Now, this case is all over except the yelling and tying up loose formality ends and everybody trying to cover their asses. Meanwhile, Trump shoved a big fat middle finger in their faces. He posted the following video meme on Truth Social. LOL... Michael
  11. Alex Jones just came out and said the prospect of WW3 has been dealt a blow. Germany ain't playing and that throws a bucket of cold water on Macron and other loonies who don't mind blowing up the planet. It's so odd seeing Alex say the world is OK. Dayaamm! Michael
  12. The more I study Bitcoin, the more I am 1,000% into it. And I see a huge opportunity. Explaining it in terms people can understand. The video below is cute, but it's based on truth. This is how the public in general responds to all the noise about Bitcoin. LOL... Michael
  13. On the other hand, Lara Trump is having the RNC hire Scott Pressler. You remember Scott? He's the guy who went around cleaning up trash-infected neighborhoods. Then he went out and personally registered more Republicans than the RNC did for years, just because he believed in what he was doing. Scott has super-long hair. He's gay. And he's not a big friend of sharia law (radical Muslims loathe him). Nobody on the MAGA side gives a crap about any of that. They love him for his belief in America and competence and willingness to act. In case you don't remember what Scott looks like, here ya' go. Scott was at the J6 rally, but did not go into the Capitol. I bet the Predator Class toadies at the DOJ are sick at heart they didn't arrest him. And I bet they will try now. If they do, that will generate even more votes for Trump and MAGA candidates. Michael
  14. Oh man... Pence said he will not endorse Trump. Damn... What's Trump gonna do? What's he gonna do? Michael
  15. S, There are videos of Tara Smith around on the Internet. I always found her a bit too rehearsed. Kind of like Toastmaster's trained and templated. Moments of forced enthusiasm that seemed like they had a timer on them and came with on-off switches. Her leading questions were very very leading if I remember correctly. I mean, it's OK to ask leading questions in a speech, then answer them, since this resets the audience's brain a bit with curiosity. But I remember some questions that were way too obvious for my taste at the time. I'm not going to say quote me on that, though, because to be fair, I need to look and find examples. So let me also say my memory might be off. I don't think it is, but this needs verification. In the stuff I saw, she was always super-prepared. And I appreciate that a lot. Robert Campbell, when he was posting on OL, had a strong criticism of her he liked to chew on. If you want to use the search function, I am sure you will find something. I don't recall what it was, though. I will probably check out Tara's new book when it comes out. Michael
  16. Arrested for being a patriot? #England #FreeSpeech #ShrinkGovernmentView the full article
  17. Can you love Ayn Rand and God?View the full article
  18. Here's an easy entry into James Lindsay's thought. A Joe Rogan interview. I've only seen the first hour so far. The damn thing is 3 hours long. But I will finish it. It's well worth it. And, so far, Joe is 100% right there with James on everything. Michael
  19. The bill passed in the House is a huge bait-and-switch. Styx lays out some of the problems. The TikTok Ban Bill is Basically a Digital Patriot Act WWW.BITCHUTE.COM https://twitter.com/Styx666Official/status/1768070720783806662 MERCH PARTNERS: https://pumpkinfirecrafts.us http://biltongusa.com https://wickedneedleembroidery.bigcartel.com https://www.heritageheirloomseedcompany.com https://www.websterswares.com… Under this bill, the President will be able to ban whatever social media he wants. At his sole discretion. And all court cases have to be adjudicated in Washington DC, where the bench is made of left-wing fruitcakes and Predator Class toadies. Man, what a dilemma. Either accept a CCP spy application to run free on American kids, or allow the Deep State to control social media in a formal dictatorial way. The real target is Elon Musk's X and sites the government does not like. I'm with Styx. I hope the Senate jams this one up. Also, November can't come soon enough. Michael
  20. Good God--The Transhumanism Bluff Ray Kurzweil is one of America's geniuses. I myself own lots of books written by him. So why is he a blithering idiot in the video below? Man, that video was painful to watch. From what I saw, Joe Allen's comment has a lot more truth to it than anything Kurzweil said. In case you are not familiar with Kurzweil, he's the guy who says we are going to live forever, merge with AI, get to the singularity, and so on. And he lives a regime of vitamins, exercise, etc., to guarantee that. I don't know if he takes blood transfusions with blood from young dudes, or maybe farts around with nanobots and all that crazy stuff the rich big tech hipsters like to do, but whatever he is doing, it sure looks like it ain't working. Instead, it looks like something is eating him alive right now. Let's call it reality, shall we? Seriously, Kurzweil comes off as being a pampered elitist who has been surrounded by "yes men" so long, he doesn't know how to carry on a conversation with a minimum of logic anymore. He appears to expect his pronouncements to be met with oohs and aahs. And when that doesn't come, but a reasonable question based on reality comes instead, he just repeats the pronouncement. Also, he appears to be bewildered that he is getting old and decrepit. As I watched that video, I began to wonder if Kurzweil already passed on and this was an AI humanoid robot version of him getting stuck in algorithm loops. That's a quip, but I would not be shocked if it later came out that this was the case. Transhumanism mixes real science with mumbo-jumbo, gobs and gobs of crony corporatist money, and a big-ass evasion of reality. That's one reason AI does not scare me, nor the predictions of sentient AI, destruction of humanity and all that other bullshit. Setting aside religious speculations, the human brain evolved on top of a biological species of individuals where there were two core standards for brain evolution inside of human bodies: (1) survival of the fittest individuals and, (2) reproduction of individuals to ensure the survival of the species. Lifespan and death of all individuals has been universal during this entire process and all known history. There is not one exception except for those individuals currently living as the individuals before them lived. That is true for all species where a brain is present in the individual members. Hell, that is true for life in general, brain or no brain. AI comes from non-organic materials and deductive structures and standards. One can do a lot with science alone, but this difference is foundational metaphysically. It is at the premise level epistemologically. It's worse than apples and oranges. It's like trying to make a boulder sing opera or yodel. Will AI become dangerous? No doubt. Nuclear fission sure is. That human discovery and related inventions can blow up the world. But they can also light up and power the world for advanced productive human life. I believe AI will be like that. Meanwhile all the AI gurus and transhumanists, especially those of the elitist persuasion, will turn into a variation of Ray Kurzweil at the end, unless they are squished or otherwise killed before they expire of natural causes. So I ain't worried. I am what I am and life is what it is. Not what these highly intelligent technocratic new-age bullshit artists say it is. A is A. (What a concept! ) Michael
  21. I don't have time to go deep into the following video, but I recommend it. Mini Essays: The Ultimate Learning Tool This gist. When you see something you find interesting and want to keep it in long term memory, write a mini-essay about it. The mini-essay should be between 100 to 300 words long. And you should write it as if you were going to teach the idea to someone who does not know it. (Basically, the Feynman technique.) I love the term mini-essay. This made the last confusing block of a notetaking method called Zettlekasten fall into place in my mind. In Zettlekasten, you have 3 kinds of notes: fleeting notes, literature notes, and permanent notes. You can also have reference notes for sources. Say what? What the hell is a fleeting note? Man are these names clunky, especially for someone like me. So here are the names and my understanding of them. A fleeting note is any kind of scrap piece of paper, or random reminder anywhere, of something that caught your eye and you want to file the idea away for potential use later. You don't want to forget the idea. A literature note is an explanation of the idea in your own words. This can come from one or more fleeting notes and you can add new thoughts to it. It's a kind of first draft of understanding an idea. You can have mistakes and unpolished language, or not. Once you have used a fleeting note in a literature note (or personal explanation in my own terminology), it's best to delete it. A literature note (personal explanation) can be long if you wish, but shorter works a lot better in this system. A permanent note is what is called a mini-essay above. This is the single idea cleaned up and in a form to teach another. This should only be between 100 to 300 words long and focus on one idea only per note. You have no idea of how much I have suffered with the concept of "permanent note" because of that goddam name. Dumb me, I guess. But the term, "mini-essay," wrapped it up and put a bow on it in my mind. I might talk about the open-source note-taking program called Obsidian later, but for now, I will just mention this. I find Obsidian to be the most useful program I have come across for using the mini-essay system. The reason? You can interconnect your notes, which are single text files in Obsidian. And that makes having lots of mini-essays useful. When you pull up a note, you can see the other notes that are connected to it through links right there at your fingertips. Since you wrote the notes yourself, you already know what they are the moment your eyes hit them. As you go along, you can build up quite a body of knowledge and interconnected ideas. What's more, Obsidian makes it super-easy to interconnect notes. As you write one, you type in [[, a double bracket. A list of note names appears from your Vault. (A Vault is a set of notes that is different from other Vaults. You can make as many Vaults in Obsidian as you like, but fewer are better.) Then you choose the note to interconnect and it will automatically finish the link on where you are typing. If there are a lot of notes (mini-essays in this case), you can type in a keyword and the list will start filtering down. It's super-easy once you learn it. I wish I had more time to talk about this right now, but watch the video at the start of this post. That guy does not talk about Zettlekasten per se. Instead, he does a great explanation of writing mini-essays every day. And he covers Obsidian a bit. I can attest to the benefits you gain from focused writing every day. In my Writing Journal, I do 500 words a day minimum. I have been doing this since May, 2022. I know I am getting close to one million words by now. Not bad for two years. I am not going to replace my Journal Entries with mini-essays, but I am going to see if I can add at least one mini-essay a day in a new Obsidian Vault devoted to this and this only. Or I might try to see if I can do this in my general notes Vault, where I gathered a good chunk of notes from over the goddam place at home, all over my computer's hard drives, and all over the Internet. That Vault is in a holy mess, so I'll have to see. But take a look at mini-essays for your own writing and note-taking. If you do the process right, and do it every day, it's easy and I am certain you will be in awe of your growing prowess before long. Michael
  22. Where did Chicago Teachers' Union boss learn her math? Maybe Chicago Public schools?View the full article
  23. Episode 81. Dr. Pierre Kory, treating vax injured patients. Can't keep this hidden forever. Michael