The 90's called and it would like it's sneering depictions of "pathetic right wing rubes" back. I know it makes a certain segment of the educated classes (of which I'm a member) feel good about themselves to read paragraphs like this, but it's lazy political analysis.

I can’t bring myself to watch Republican Senators like Cruz, Lee, and Sasse wax rhapsodic about the Constitution while the President they support is spreading disinformation about the election and accusing Biden, Obama, and Clinton of treason. Sorry, just can’t do it.

Anyone who’s read the writings of the founders knows full well they their beloved Trump is the Platonic form of the type of President the founders most feared, and that they epitomize the sort of short sighted and craven public officials they also desperately feared.

These GOP Senators are smart and well-read enough to understand how outlandish their President is, and how embarrassingly cowardly their behavior has been these past four years.

The chutzpah of these people to pass themselves off as great patriotic lovers of the founders’ Constitution. Feh.

If they loved the Constitution, they would be telling people not to vote for Trump until he agrees to accept the results of the election. Otherwise they are aiding and abetting an attempt to shred the Constitution. Shame on them,

Thinking about all of those Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who drilled for months (if not years) in preparation for January 6 while visions of “Antifa super soldiers” danced in their heads.

Anyway, watch this video and share it with everyone you know.

Today is Jayanti of Udham Singh, the man who assasinated General O Dwyer, responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the atrocities that followed, a true hero.

His real name was Sher Singh, born on Dec 26, 1899, to a poor peasant family in Punjab’s Sangrur district. His father, Tehl Singh, worked as a railway gate keeper at a level crossing in the Uppali village of Punjab.

Having lost both his parents when he was small, he along with his brother Mukta Singh, grew up in the Central Khalsa Orphanage in Amritsar. Following the Sikh initiation rites, he got the name of Udham Singh.

In 1919, he left the orphanage after passing the matriculation exam. In that year Punjab was in turmoil, with massive protests breaking out against the British rule.

Around 1500 Indian civilians, in Amritsar, protesting against the deportation of nationalist leaders, Dr.Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal Dang, were brutally massacred at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. While Gen Dyer led the carnage, he was backed by the Lt. Governor O’Dwyer.

As America celebrates its defeat of an authoritarian in the middle of consolidating power, it is critical to stay vigilant.

In my @BylineTimes interview with historian @ruthbenghiat she cautions these so-called “strongmen” often remain in the party’s

1/ Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s latest book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, details the precise moment in time when fascism was born.

2/ “World War One was this cataclysmic change,” she told Byline Times. “Multiple empires fell, including the Russian Empire, Hapsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire. It created death on a scale no one had seen before. It created wounds no one had seen before because of new weapons.”

3/ In addition, the Great War led to a profound crisis in maleness.

4/ “It created this entire class of men who were damaged, many were killed, and it created this huge crisis of masculinity,” she said. “So fascist rulers came up during this crisis period of unrest and instability in their individual countries and Italy was first.”

“Thread: History of Valentines Day”

Ancient historical sources have claimed the existence of several saints by the name of St.Valentines who died on Feb 14. Among them, two were executed during the reign of Roman Emperor Claudius Gothicus in 269-270 A.D.
#valentinesday2021

[1]

It was the time when the Christian persecution was common. Another legendary account states that under the rule of Claudius II, Rome was involved in the bloody campaigns, therefore, to maintain a strong army, Claudius II banned all marriages and engagements in Rome.

[2]

The reason of forbidding marriages was forced by the reluctance of people to join military because of their strong attachment to their wives. But St. Valentine defied the orders of the Emperor Claudius II Gothicus and married couples secretly to spare the husbands from war.

[3]

A few claims have reported that St.Valentine endorsed illegal relationships which could end up into a marriage. When it was discovered by the emperor, St. Valentine was arrested and condemned to have his head cut off.

[4]

An order of Belgian monks spent almost three centuries to explore the lives of saints by the name of St.Valentines from archives around the world. Bollandists suggested, that there weren’t actually two decapitated Valentines, but the two different versions of one saint’s...

[5]

In this thread, I will argue that the conventional wisdom that Shannon's information theory is all about syntax and not about semantics stems from superficial reading. On the contrary, even his 1948 BSTJ paper is already concerned with syntax, semantics, *and* pragmatics. 1/14

Of course, it does not help matters that Shannon himself states that "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem" of communication on the first page of his paper. But you have to read the entire paper, not just the first page. 2/14

Let's first pin down the notions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in the sense of Charles Morris: syntax is about relation of symbols to other symbols, semantics is about their relation to objects, and pragmatics is about their relation to subjects. 3/14

Let's start with pragmatics. The full formulation of Shannon's theory is concerned with the problem of reliable communication of some state of the world over a noisy medium, subject to a fidelity criterion. This is an operationalist, pragmatist concern. 4/14

We may envision the problem where we take an action U contingent on the state of the world X and incur the cost c(X,U). We cannot access the state of the world directly, but must mediate the act of selecting the action through transmission of symbols over a noisy channel. 5/14

In 1928, the American holdings of IG Farben, the American branches of Bayer Company, General Aniline Works, Agfa Ansco and Winthrop Chemical Company, were organized into a Swiss holding company, the Internationale Gesellschaft für Chemische Unternehmungen AG or IG Chemie in short