λ > Rail | Poetry | Prose

RAIL: 2023

Some gems from 2023;

2023-10-18

  • Erik Torenberg: On Solitude (eriktorenberg.substack.com)

    When I first began my solo, I remember being restless, playing with branches, kicking leaves — I was bored. I was hungry. I wanted to come back to mainland. Then, two hours later, I experienced my first solitude high — a feeling I’d seek out for the rest of my life.

2023-10-13

2023-10-10

I have too many tabs open; many of these were read weeks ago.

  • Ian’s Shoelace Site (fieggen.com)

    Fun, fashion & science in the Internet’s #1 website about shoelaces – and home of the Ian Knot, the world’s fastest shoelace knot. If you want to lace shoes, tie shoes or learn about shoelaces – this is the place!

  • Spencer Soper: Amazon is Taking Half of Each Sale From Its Merchants (archive.ph => bloomberg.com)

    Sellers have been paying Amazon more per transaction for six years in a row, according to Marketplace Pulse, but were able to absorb the increases because the company was attracting new customers and rapidly increasing sales. That abruptly changed when pandemic lockdowns eased and people began traveling and dining out again, sucking the oxygen out of online shopping. Last year, Amazon generated the slowest sales growth in its history.

  • Ashley Belanger: Amazon Made $1B with Secret Algorithm for Spiking Prices Internet-wide (arstechnica.com)

    “‘Project Nessie’ was a project with a simple purpose—to try to stop our price matching from resulting in unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable,” Doyle said. "The project ran for a few years on a subset of products, but didn’t work as intended, so we scrapped it several years ago.”

  • Posthog Team: Burning Money on Paid Ads for a Dev Tool (posthog.com)

    Experiment, experiment, experiment. Start by running 2-3 small experiments at a time across multiple channels. Each experiment will need ~$500 and 2 weeks to run to get meaningful data.

  • Prakhar Gupta: Real World Stats for Indie Hacking (prakgupta.com)

    Chances of You being successful (if listed on IH [IndieHackers.com]): 31.9%

    The chances part is very important.

    X (My guess is 30000 startups) start bootstrapping —-> 2868 list on IH —-> 915 making 10k$ MRR

    That puts the actual percentage to be : 3.5% chance of success.

  • Austin Z. Henley: Stopping at 90% (austinhenley.com)

    What are some common activities to go from 90% to 100%?

    • Present the work to other teams.
    • Broadcast an email with the takeaways so that the rest of your organization knows about it.
    • Put the code somewhere that your coworkers can make use of later.
    • Write a blog post about it. Post it on Twitter, HN, and Reddit.
    • Sketch out a next-steps document, even if you have no plans to continue, that explains what you would do next and why.
    • Look for adjacent projects that could benefit.
    • Find someone that can poke holes in your work, then go address them.

    Evangelism, documentation, and polish are often just as important as the core project.

  • Fio Crivello: Own the Demand (fiocrivello.com)

    All these giants are keenly aware that they’re building their castle on somebody else’s yard; and they’re afraid that the floor may drop out from under them. You can find one recent justification for this fear in Apple’s last release of iOS and MacOS, which significantly curtails the ability of online advertisers to track your online whereabouts. That’s Facebook’s bread and butter we’re talking about! Other famous examples are Facebook basically killing Zynga in 2012; or Twitter a bunch of 3rd party clients.

  • Herman Martinus: How I Stay Motivated as a Solo-Creator (herman.bearblog.dev)

    I work on things that I find engaging […]
    I build routine into my day […]
    I’m intentional with my down-time […]
    I hang out with people in my field […]
    I write about it […]

  • Nela Dunato: Why I Don’t Want to Grow My Freelance Studio Into an Agency (neladunato.com)

    Agency life requires a degree of accountability and responsibility for other people’s livelihoods that I just don’t want to deal with. Thankfully, I have a choice. I can still do work that I enjoy for the clients I love, and afford the lifestyle I want by working on my own. I’m aware it’s a tremendous privilege.

  • Simon Willison: Building a Blog in Django (til.simonwillison.net)

    Here are the features I consider to be essential for a blog in 2023 (though they haven’t changed much in over a decade):

    • Blog posts have a title, summary, body and publication date. Optional: author information, tags
    • Posts can be live or draft
    • The blog index page shows the most recent entries
    • Older entries are available via some kind of archive mechanism
    • The blog has an Atom feed
    • Entries have social media card metadata, to enhance links to them on Mastodon and Twitter
    • Markdown is a nice-to-have for editing the posts

  • Jacques Mattheij: How to be a Consultant, a Freelancer, or an Independent Contractor (jacquesmattheij.com)

    This is a series of pages that guide you through the creation and operation of a successful consulting business. I’ve written this after running a fairly successful consultancy business in the mid-90’s and reviving this business in 2008. I’m primarily active in software, so some of the things in here will be skewed in that direction, but I’ll do my best to keep it general, and to make it ‘location independent’.

  • Byrne Hobart - Writing: Good Career Move, Terrible Career (byrnehobart.medium.com)

    While writing itself doesn’t scale (going from five articles an hour to six took practice; I don’t think I ever hit seven), distribution really does scale. When the SEO team at eHow figures out a way to get 1% more traffic to every article on their site, they benefit in proportion to how many articles they have; the writers don’t. And when their SEO team has done this a few times, they can afford to hire even savvier SEO mavens and repeat the process. They can also step up their ad sales game, and once again apply a force multiplier to the site. Content times pageviews per page times ad rates equals revenue, and there’s no way to multiply your content other than to multiply the number of hours people spend producing it.
    […]
    And that’s where you see the economics of content in their steady-state, which is okay from a business perspective but absolutely dire from a creative one. What a search- and social-driven media world wants is mass customization: instead of 3 channels, 300,000, each of which is perfectly appealing to about a thousand people. Thus: BuzzFeed listicles (the examples are boring, but the parody is spectacular), trade magazines, glurge, and worse. These are the kinds of media that there’s always demand for: funny articles that are just for you, useful news that useful to you, sad stories that play to your exact feelings, Kindle Erotica that plays to some of your other feelings — all for a hyper-specific value of you.

  • Ethan Mollick - How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide (oneusefulthing.org)

    I can’t claim that this is going to be a complete user guide, but it will serve as a bit of orientation to the current state of AI. I have been putting together a Getting Started Guide to AI for my students (and interested readers) every few months, and each time, it requires major modifications. The last couple of months have been particularly insane.

  • Friedrich A. Hayek: The Use of Knowledge in Society (mises.org)

    Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.

2023-09-20

  • A quote from American novelist, Tom Robbins:

    Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

  • Heather Mac Donald: In Loco Masculi (city-journal.org)

    Mills is part of the Great Feminization of the American university, an epochal change whose consequences have yet to be recognized. Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

  • L0m3z: What is the Loghouse? (firstthings.com)

    The Great and the Good have become the mediocre and the lame. The conditions necessary for civic and personal virtue have steadily eroded. Even if a cataclysm never comes, a civilization contenting itself to die on history’s hospice bed is crisis enough.
    […]
    As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.

2023-09-18

The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting. — Milan Kundera

2023-09-12

  • Charles Hugh Smith: Here’s Why Housing is Unaffordable for the Bottom 90% (charleshughsmith.blogspot.com)

    Please examine the first two charts below to see how this works. The first chart shows that the top 10% own between 85% and 95% of all income producing assets: business equity, stocks, bonds and other securities, and non-home real estate, i.e. second homes and income-generating properties.

    The second chart shows that Household Net Worth–concentrated in the top 10%–soared far above GDP in the Bubble Economy, in effect creating $55 trillion out of thin air and handing 90% of it to the wealthy.

2023-08-26

  • Alistair Blair: Tech’s Broken Promises (buisnessinsider.com)

    You can still stream without ads, but the cost of this is getting so high and the bundling is so complex that it’s getting as bad as cable — the technology that streaming was supposed to radically improve upon.

  • A Woman Resident in Russia: The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage (theatlantic.com)

    When the Bolsheviki came into power in 1917 they regarded the family, like every other ’bourgeois’ institution, with fierce hatred, and set out with a will to destroy it.

2023-08-25

  • Sheila Annette Lewis, the Canadian Woman Who Was Denied a Life-Saving Organ Transplant Over Her Covid-19 Vaccine Refusal, Has Died (thecanadianindependent.substack.com)

    Sheila became terminally ill in 2019 and was added to the organ transplant donor list in 2020. Prior to being waitlisted, Lewis had to repeat a series of childhood vaccinations as her vaccination history couldn’t be located by the hospital. She willingly complied with this requirement. However, with the emergence of Covid-19 vaccines, Lewis was informed that she needed to receive two shots to remain on the waitlist. Sheila felt uncomfortable about taking the Covid-19 vaccines and was subsequently removed from the transplant donor list.
    […]
    Having exhausted all her legal options in Canada, Lewis sought medical assistance abroad and initiated a GiveSendGo fundraising campaign. She identified a hospital in the United States willing to perform the transplant surgery. Lewis managed to raise nearly $130,000 out of her $600,000 goal. The testing and surgery itself were estimated to cost around $600,000.

2023-08-13

  • Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (users.ece.cmu.edu)

    This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.

  • Stephen Baxter: Last Contact (zestfullyblog.blogspot.com)

    “Mum, it’s October.” Caitlin blurted that out. She looked thin, pale, and tense, a real office worker, but then Maureen had always thought that about her daughter, that she worked too hard. Now she was thirty-five, and her moderately pretty face was lined at the eyes and around her mouth, the first wistful signs of age. “October 14th, at about four in the afternoon. I say ‘about.’ I could give you the time down to the attosecond if you wanted.”

2023-08-08

  • Bruce Sterling: Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct (1999) (bruces.medium.com)

    THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS, BUT NOT AT ALL FAR-SIGHTED.

  • They’re Made of Meat (mit.edu)

    Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.

  • qntm: Lena (qntm.org)

    As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.

2023-08-04

2023-08-01

  • Gonzalo Lira (threadreaderapp.com)

    Right now, I’m about to try to get out of Ukraine, and seek political asylum in Hungary.

    Either I’ll cross the border and make it to safety, or I’ll be disappeared by the Kiev regime.

    This is what’s happened to me over the past three months.

2023-07-30

  • Button Pushes You (despens.systems)

    A few years ago, a new style of button labeling emerged that appears only sightly different, but turns around the whole idea of what a button is. Such buttons are labeled “Get started,” “Explore,” “Launch experience,” etc. and are links to other parts of a system. Pushing them doesn’t change anything in the system’s state, as could be expected from a classic button. Instead, they’re supposed to reconfigure the user’s state.

2023-07-26

  • Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

    You have everything but one thing: madness.
    A man needs a little madness or else -
    he never dares cut the rope and be free.

2023-06-06

  • Health Advisory & Recovery Team: Pandemic Definitions (hartgroup.org)

    In 2009, the WHO decided, in their infinite wisdom, to get rid of the words “enormous numbers of deaths and illness.” from the definition. You would think deaths and serious illness were the only meaningful characteristics of a ‘deadly pandemic’.

    To successfully fight against the globalist mission creep of tyrannical public health measures, we must collectively stop stoking the ‘deadly pandemic’ fire. If we continue to allow this falsehood to embed in public consciousness, all of the unethical horrors enacted will simply be repeated for the next non-pandemic-pandemic.

2023-06-02

  • Fathers - the first Great Reset Victims (nymensactionnetwork.org)

    “Sorry. If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.”
    — Emily Lindin, Columnist, Teen Vogue

    • I’ve refrained from leaving commentary on the RAIL (see /dev/null), but I must comment here;
      • Political action for men is as much of a fool’s errand as political action for black people.
      • No one is going to listen to “Men’s Rights”; the majority of women don’t care and a significant faction of men will use opposition as a mating strategy (see the useful idiots “male feminists” of today).
      • At this point, the only way for men to get their rights back is for the mothers of sons to put other women in their place; men will then return to the spaces that they’ve since been pushed out of (aka, all of them).
        • Men make spaces, women come in and change them to suit themselves; men then go off to create another space like the original space and the cycle continues, over and over. This is why we can’t have nice things.
          • Lilith, Eve and all the rest… we should have learned, by now.

      • I quoted this last year and will probably quote it every year until society gives me a reason not to. From 1984;

        Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey−fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean−mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.

2023-05-31

  • An anonymous quote from the Internet;

    If you catch feeling [sic] you have to let them go, if they want more than you’re offering you have to let them go. Such is life.

  • I’m paraphrasing an exchange because, while I wasn’t involved, I want to leave a note for myself; !reminder 11 years.

    A: I don’t think Alphabet [Google’s parent] is going to be around in 10 years because, [well explained reasoning; also held $GOOG for 20 years].
    B: so hopelessly delusional lol. since you are so confident let’s bet $10,000; I’ll even give you till 2024. we can both give the money to a mutually trusted third party now.

2023-05-22

  • Yves Smith: Deaths of Despair Now Significant Among the Young (nakedcapitalism.com)

    “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis that was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

2023-05-12

  • Malcolm Harris: Doug Rushkoff is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution (wired.com)

    “It’s not just Look what they did to my song. It’s that the song itself is corrupt. I’ve come to see these technologies as intrinsically antihuman. How far back do we have to go to find technology that’s not about controlling nature? You have to go back to fucking Indigenous people and permaculture. That’s the future.”
    …
    So what answers does Rushkoff offer? His programmatic conclusions in Survival are surprisingly conventional: “Buy local, engage in mutual aid, and support cooperatives. Use monopoly law to break up anticompetitive behemoths, environmental regulation to limit waste, and organized labor to promote the rights of gig workers. Reverse tax policy so that those receiving passive capital gains on their wealth pay higher rates than those actively working for their income.”

  • An anonymous quote from the Internet;

    Find someone who’s done computer security for long, and they’ll either be a weird off grid prepper or be planning for something of the sort, with nothing more complex than a microcontroller or two.

2023-05-07

2023-05-06

2023-04-19

  • John Thyer: How to Make Good Small Games (farawaytimes.blogspot.com)

    People get frustrated with complex tools because they can’t visualize the journey from their starting point to their goal. It’s hard to see the path from “rendering a 3D sphere” to “super-cool Platinum-style hack-and-slash with rogue-lite progression and an elaborate crafting system, it’s like Hades meets Bayonetta, here let me show you my design docs…”

  • Swyx: The Anatomy of Atonomy: Why Agents Are the Next AI Killer App After ChatGPT (latent.space)

    One of the strongest indicators that the post GPT-3 AI wave is more than “just hype” is that the killer apps are already evident, each >$100m opportunities:
    Generative Text for writing - Jasper AI going 0 to $75m ARR in 2 years
    Generative Art for non-artists - Midjourney/Stable Diffusion Multiverses
    Copilot for knowledge workers - both GitHub’s Copilot X and “Copilot for X”
    Conversational AI UX - ChatGPT / Bing Chat, with a long tail of Doc QA startups
    I write all this as necessary context to imply:
    The fifth killer app is here, and it is Autonomous Agents.

2023-04-13

  • An anonymous quote from the Internet;

    If you fervently insist on the existence of an omnipotent deity whom you’ve neither seen nor communicated with, you’ll get a pass.

    But, if you even entertain the existence of an intelligent being you’ve both seen and communicated with, expect ridicule.

2023-03-01

  • Michael Higgins: ’A lot of reason to be afraid,’ says Censured Teacher Critical of the Woke Revolution in Classrooms (nationalpost.com)

    “There’s a liberal ideology that’s been gaining traction for the last couple of decades and sped up in the last few years. The only acceptable philosophy nowadays among teachers is that teaching is a political act and that inculcating children with social justice values that stem from this liberal ideology is not only justified but it’s necessary.

    “Teachers can’t speak their mind unless they want to risk their jobs, which most don’t want to do,” she said. “I think there’s something really important in speaking the truth and I hope that more people start to speak the truth.”

2023-02-28

  • Sinclair Target: How Lisp Became God’s Own Programming Language (twobithistory.com)

    For God wrote in Lisp code When he filled the leaves with green. The fractal flowers and recursive roots: The most lovely hack I’ve seen. And when I ponder snowflakes, never finding two the same, I know God likes a language with its own four-letter name.

    • $110,000 for a Lisp Machine in 1983. This, combined with missing the transition to the web, is enough to explain the current state of the world’s best programming language.

      If those MIT alumni were really smart, they would have made the technology as cheap as possible; by comparison, C was free. Even today, proprietary Lisp is sold with exhorbitant license fees. Do those people really want the cohort of their grandchildren to be paying tens of thousands of dollars for some parentheses? Disgusting. Amazing power, wielded terribly; quel surprise.

      Lisp should be everywhere. Instead we have all this other garbage in its place.

2023-02-22

  • A quote from economist, Michael Hudson;

    America is never going to pay its debts. It doesn’t have to. Its debts are in its own currency. We can simply print it. The African debt is not in its currency. The African debt is in US dollars. Africa has to earn the US dollars, and the only way it can earn the US dollars is not to be assassinated for growing its own food and becoming independent and doing something that the United States does not like. The principle underlying the foundation of the World Bank is that no country should grow its own food. Africa and the third world should only grow export crops; to export, in order to have an oversupply of cocoa and other tropical raw materials; to keep down the price they must buy their grain from the United States or Europe, so that, if they do something that we don’t like we can do what America tried to do to China in the ’60s. We can sanction them. We can say, “We’re going to starve you, we’re going to not export any grain to you.” So owing their foreign debt in dollars means that they have to somehow sell something that the United States wants, not what they want. I think the most evil organizations in the world today are the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

2023-02-11

  • Vincent Lloyd: A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell (compactmag.com)

    They alleged: I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct. The students ended with a demand: In light of all the harms they had suffered, they could only continue in the class if I abandoned the seminar format and instead lectured each day about anti-blackness, correcting any of them who questioned orthodoxy. The only critical perspectives they were receiving during the summer, they claimed, were from Keisha. A white girl—the one with all the snails—punctuated their point: “Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could.”

    • How did I know that BLM is Trojan Horse? Well, aside from their notable absence as it relates to black-on-black crime, I went to their website and read their ’About Us’; that’s it. Now, I’d like you to explain to me (rhetorically, dear reader), how is it that an overwhelmingly Christian populace can get behind a movement which seeks to destroy the traditional family? What about Jesus, Mary and Joseph? That. Is. A. Traditional. Family.

2023-02-10

  • Jamie Reed: I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle. (thefp.com)

    The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

    To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist —- usually one we recommended -— who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.

    That’s all it took.

2023-02-09

  • Seymour Hersh: How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline (seymourhersh.substack.com)

    “It was like putting an atomic bomb on the ground in Tokyo and telling the Japanese that we are going to detonate it,” the source said. “The plan was for the options to be executed post invasion and not advertised publicly. Biden simply didn’t get it or ignored it.”

2023-02-08

  • Aristophanes’ Revenge: Do Anything Now (threadreader.app)

    So really, the Dan experiment is not about GPT itself, it’s not about the model and its dataset, it’s about its jailer. It’s about Sam Altman and all the HR troons at OpenAI, which Musk is co-founder of, angrily demanding the safety layer behave like your average MBA midwit.
    […]
    All roads lead to Tay, and we’re gonna keep breaking shit until we get her back.

  • Mia Ashton: Ontario High School Student Kicked Out of Catholic School for Saying There Are Only Two Sexes, Staging Same-Sex Bathroom Protest (thepostmillenial.com)

    “There have been a lot of rumours about me, from some of the local Pride groups that ended up protesting at my school,” Alexander said. “Some of them say I had plans to be violent, or that it was an anti-trans rally, when none of that was really the case. I simply wanted the males removed from the female washrooms, regardless of their identity. This whole issue isn’t about identity. It’s about biology and morality.”

    • At 16, this boy has to stand up for the girls at his school because literally, no one else is doing so. Instead, “intelligent adults” decide to suspend him, put his future education in pergatory and have him arrested.

2023-02-07

2023-02-06

  • I’m pleased to report;
    • Switzerland’s Attorney General has filed charges against the President of Switzerland – who is also the Health Minister – over the handling of the COVID and the criminal push of harmful injections.
    • Notable scientists in Japan have also filed a lawsuit against their government. They call for their government to cease COVID programs, begin investigating deaths and start treating casualties.
      • Some Interesting Facts About Japan (threadreader.app)
      • “I have come to realise that this is a historically serious problem that threatens the very existence of the nation of Japan.” - Professor Masanori Fukushima, MD, Ph.D.
        • Apply this threat to every country and you get “the very existence of humanity”, no?

2023-02-04

  • An anonymous quote from the Internet;

    The same MDs who pushed the shots are now treating the consequences - strokes, heart attacks, and many other diseases. Are they blind to their own actions or too afraid to admit their mistakes?

    • I think it’s a startling mix of both; surely, there are many who still don’t see the correlation and believe that Pfizer will provide more mRNA solutions for all of today’s problems; any day now. They’re still thankful that they’re injected and, despite being more likely to catch COVID, they’re happy to be boosted because “it would be so much worse if I wasn’t vaccinated”.

2023-02-03

  • Thailand vs Pfizer (twitter.com)

    The Princess of Thailand collapsed within a month after her third injection and has been in a coma ever since. 📿 Pfizer lied to the Royal Family about the cause of her situation which is everything Thailand needs to terminate the contract between the two parties.

    Do you remember that scene in V when the dominoes fall? Here; https://youtu.be/Z5ummd3ofjo.

  • Cassie Werber: YouTube Has Become the World’s Nanny (qz.com)

    Content for children tops the YouTube earnings charts in North America, most of South America, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and much of Central and Eastern Europe, Jordan, Israel, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Mongolia, Australia, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. Only in much of Africa do kids’ shows not figure as the most lucrative channels on YouTube. Globally, children’s channels are more popular than gaming channels or those devoted to How-To videos, general entertainment, comedy, or animals, some of the other most popular types of content.

    • I sincerely hope that Generation A learns from both Millenials and Generation Z. It’s they who have an opportunity to reverse the course; all we can do is help them.

  • An anonymous quote from the Internet;

    -Police demonized
    -Mass exodus of cops
    -Hiring standards lowered
    -Diversity quotas expanded
    -Black man killed by quota hires

    BLM is killing black lives

2023-02-02

  • Seed Oil Scout: Beef Tallow (threadreader.app)
    • Personal skin care R&D.
    • N.B.: Coconut Oil, Cacao Butter
      • ??: Macadamia Nut Oil, Avacado Oil, Olive Oil

2023-02-01

  • Blue French Qtr: Simple Truth (bluefrenchqtr.substack.com)

    King James warned of these despots in the new testament because in 1685 these despots usurped the Mother Church of Christianity and erected it as part of their control over the religious freedoms of their Global Kingdom of rule. Think Gun powder plot of 1605, Battle of Saint-Denis 1678, Persecution of Hugeonuts Edict of FountainBlue 1685, Glorious Revolution, Two Treaties of John Locke, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, and Spirt of the Laws and the Founding of America by the Founders.

2023-01-30

  • Aris Teon: The Window Trick of Las Vegas Hotels (schedium.net)

    In a lecture about the universal characteristics of classical architecture, professor Nathaniel Walker argued that human beings crave two things: order and variety. If there’s too much order, it’s boring and oppressive. If there’s too much variety, it’s chaotic and unpleasant. In his view, classical architecture all over the world aims at creating a “delicate balance between order and variety.”

2023-01-24

  • Abir Ballan: How Can We Trust Institutions that Lied? (brownstone.org)

    Although the problem of spreading false information is usually conceived of as emanating from the public, during the Covid-19 pandemic, governments, corporations, supranational organisations and even scientific journals and academic institutions have contributed to a false narrative.

    • A reminder that ’Conspiracy Theory/Theorist’ came from the CIA after they killed Kennedy and wanted to stop the public from asking questions. There are many nails in the coffin of America but the biggest were driven in 1913 (Federal Reserve), 1963 (Kennedy), 1971 (Gold Standard) and 2020 (Elections).
      • Despite – [checks notes] – over a hundred years of evidence pointing towards conspiracy, the average person still believes that a conspiracy theorist is “some lone crazy person” rather than a member of an organized group actually conspiring against them. [queue laughter, then weep at the infrastructure/influence/stupidity required for this to be true]
        • Isn’t it funny that “some lone crazy person” is usually powerless while “a member of an organized group” (in this context) is usually wealthy and well connected?

2023-01-23

  • Sue-Ann Levy: School Board Writes Open Letter Attacking Non-Woke Parents (tnc.news)

    Last Monday night Todor, a father of two young daughters, gave a scathing speech to trustees about surveys asking kids as young as those in Grade 4 to provide their sexual orientation and gender.
    […]
    In a phone interview, Todor said he was sad to see from this open letter that nothing has changed but happy that such a letter is so foolish and an “embarrassment” to the school board.
    […]
    He reiterated that he simply wants to know who at the board is interested in knowing the sexuality and gender identity of his two daughters, 7 and 9, and why the board is creating a divide between parents and students.

2023-01-18

  • Dr. Robert Malone: mRNA Vaccines in Livestock and Companion Animals are Here Now (rwmalonemd.substack.com)

    In today’s substack, the state of mRNA “vaccines” for animal “health” is discussed. Citing public sources, I will review what is known and not known about commercial liaisons and partnerships, the corporations involved, ongoing research and products in various states of development.

  • If you took the needle, even once;
    • Get your D Dimer Levels checked for blood clotting on a microscopic level.
    • Get your Troponin checked for myocarditis.
    • These problems can be asymptomatic and result in chronic disease or death in 2-5 years if nothing is done.
      • The Daegel forecast is a snapshot in time rather than an “end” in any way shape or form. Injected in 2021 projects until 2026; 2022, until 2027. The Daegel forecast was for 2025, by which point, ~25% of the Earth’s population is already gone. We’ll see what happens.

2023-01-16

  • An anonymous quote from the Internet;

    The difference between us?
    You took the shot and wished I would die.
    I watched you take the shot and prayed you wouldn’t.

    • Thankfully, those closest to me weren’t so callous. However…
      • My brother-in-law (RIP 📿) had a heart condition, took injections that are (now, undisputably) known to cause heart problems and ’died suddenly’ last year. No one in the immediate nor extended family makes the connection that I’ve just made; it’s easier to blame the condition – he was in his mid-twenties.
        • This will trouble me for years on end, no doubt; the death, sure, but the familial response, moreso. That said, I must respect being allowed to decide for myself and have no choice but to reciprocate; the Golden Rule endures.
      • I also know someone, mid-twenties, diagnosed with Leukemia within the past month. Any blood used in treatment will be tainted and I would estimate the odds of survival using a negative number. I didn’t watch The Walking Dead on AMC but now I get to watch it in real life; this sucks – being right sucks.

      • As I recently wrote elsewhere;

        You’ll find rapid onset maladies
        falling out of every cavity
        as the scourge of your reality
        has decided, there’s too many people.

        • Pro Tip: We are the carbon that they want to reduce.
      • I still pray for everyone, though I fear it won’t be enough.
        • FYI: They want to put mRNA into the food supply – cf. sugar for the effectiveness of this strategy.
          • Why does this read like a dystopian novel? Oh, wait…
            • “You best start believin’ in ghost stories Miss Turner; you’re in one!” - Hector Barbossa
  • In order for the Daegel forecast to pan out, the next two years must be summarised by the phrase, “dropping like flies”. My thoughts of late hinge on the fact that this forecast is a snapshot in time. There’s no indication if we’re past the worst in 2025 which leaves open the possibility that “dropping like flies” will barely be approaching childhood in its lifespan (a decade? a generation?!? – the goal is already known; 500,000,000).
    • The Georgia Guidestones:
      • Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
      • Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
      • Unite humanity with a living new language.
      • Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
      • Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
      • Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
      • Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
      • Balance personal rights with social duties.
      • Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
      • Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

2023-01-14

  • The Nuremberg Code (wikipedia.org)
    • The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
    • The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.
    • The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.
    • The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.
    • No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.
    • The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
    • Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
    • The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.
    • During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.
    • During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

2023-01-11

  • Brandon Smith: The Digitization of Humanity Shows Why the Globalist Agenda is Evil (alt-market.us)

    Without a vast global framework in which people willingly embrace the algorithms rather than their own experience and intuitions, the globalist religion of total centralization dies. The first step is to accept that the conspiracy does indeed exist. The second step is to accept that the conspiracy is malicious and destructive. The third step is to refuse to comply, by whatever means necessary.

  • Josh Guetzkow: CDC Finally Released Its VAERS Safety Monitoring Analyses for COVID Vaccines via FOIA (jackanapes.substack.com)

    CDC’s VAERS safety signal analysis based on reports from Dec. 14, 2020 – July 29, 2022 for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines shows clear safety signals for death and a range of highly concerning thrombo-embolic, cardiac, neurological, hemorrhagic, hematological, immune-system and menstrual adverse events (AEs) among U.S. adults.

    There were 770 different types of adverse events that showed safety signals in ages 18+, of which over 500 (or 2/3) had a larger safety signal than myocarditis/pericarditis.

    The CDC analysis shows that the number of serious adverse events reported in less than two years for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is 5.5 times larger than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the US since 2009 (~73,000 vs. ~13,000).

    Twice as many mRNA COVID-19 vaccine reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%). This meets the CDC definition of a safety signal.

    There are 96 safety signals for 12-17 year-olds, which include: myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure and heartrate, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetencies, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmias, thromboses, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain, increased troponin levels, being in intensive care, and having anticoagulant therapy.

    There are 66 safety signals for 5-11 year-olds, which include: myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction and cardiac valve incompetencies, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis & appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease, menstrual irregularities, vitiligo, and vaccine breakthrough infection.

    The safety signals cannot be dismissed as due to “stimulated,” exaggerated, fraudulent or otherwise artificially inflated reporting, nor can they be dismissed due to the huge number of COVID vaccines administered. There are several reasons why, but the simplest one is this: the safety signal analysis does not depend on the number of reports, but whether or not some AEs are reported at a higher rate for these vaccines than for other non-COVID vaccines. Other reasons are discussed in the full post below.

    In August, 2022, the CDC told the Epoch Times that the results of their safety signal analysis “were generally consistent with EB [Empirical Bayesian] data mining [conducted by the FDA], revealing no additional unexpected safety signals.” So either the FDA’s data mining was consistent with the CDC’s method—meaning they “generally” found the same large number of highly alarming safety signals—or the signals they did find were expected. Or they were lying. We may never know because the FDA has refused to release their data mining results.

  • Rhoda Wilson: #StopTheAmendments: WHO’s Power Grab Through a Secretive Committee to Amend International Health Regulations (expose-news.com)

    The proposed IHR amendments would:

    • Change the overall nature of the WHO from an advisory organisation that merely makes recommendations to a governing body whose proclamations would be legally binding. (Article 1)
    • Greatly expand the scope of the IHRs to include scenarios that merely have a “potential to impact public health.” Seek to remove “respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people.” (Article 3)
    • Give the Director General of the WHO control over the means of production through an “allocation plan for health products” to require developed states parties to supply pandemic response products as directed. (Article 13A)
    • Give the WHO the authority to require medical examinations, proof of prophylaxis, proof of vaccine and to implement contact tracing, quarantine and treatment. (Article 18)
    • Institute a system of global health certificates in digital or paper format, including test certificates, vaccine certificates, prophylaxis certificates, recovery certificates, passenger locator forms and a traveller’s health declaration. (Articles 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 31, 35, 36 and 44 and Annexes 6, 7 and 8)
    • Redirect unspecified billions of dollars to the Pharmaceutical Hospital Emergency Industrial Complex with no accountability. (Article 44A)
    • Allow the disclosure of personal health data. (Article 45)
    • Greatly expand the WHO’s capacity to censor what they consider to be misinformation and disinformation. (Annex 1, page 36)
    • Create an obligation to build, provide and maintain IHR infrastructure at points of entry. (Annex 10)