Thread – Dump the Legacy Media; Turn to These News Sources

A. We all need sources less tainted by the Big Tech/globalist narratives that are echoed repeatedly throughout the legacy media. My brother sent me a list of alternatives from the Noq report.

More from Resist the Hologram - Stu Cvrk

Thread – Excerpt from a Ross Rant (Election-related)

1. These following are excerpts from a recent “Ross Rant.” Joel Ross publishes these periodic reports that provide commentary on the changing scene with an eye toward wise future investments.

2.

There never was going to be a new stimulus deal. Pelosi did not want to do anything that might help Trump, and she was hoping to trap McConnell, and make him look like he killed it so they could argue the Dems need to control the Senate.

3. My sense is that backfired. It is clear to most that she is the problem, and why, and that she does not give a damn about the people who are suffering. It is all about getting power. Unfortunately, Wall St kept being fooled thinking there would be a deal.

4. So the market was up and down depending on which false rumor they believed. Classic Wall St. Buy on rumor and hope. Sell when it does not happen, then buy again. Trader’s dream.

5. The EU is now in the midst of a major virus surge and that will kill any hope of a near term economic rebound as lockdowns get put back on. While in the US there are a few stories of hospitals in rural areas getting to capacity, reality is, most of the US has lots of capacity.

Stop the Steal - Stu C...
@STUinSD

Thread – Observations on the Past and Future

1. The following commentary received from a friend mirrors my own remembrances and thinking exactly. There are more of us than there are of them! Here is what he had to say.

Stop the Steal - Stu C...
@STUinSD

Thread – The Inexorable Marxist Push in America

1. Americans thought the war with Communism was “over” after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Well, at least some did.

2. Others, on the other hand, buried deep into Academia, Hollywood, and other US cultural institutions and worked to subvert America from within – some even overtly so, working in the various Marxist political parties to stir up protests and later violence in the streets.

3. Always, the Marxists/Socialists perpetuate the myth that socialism will work “the next time” when the “right people” are in charge. It is a continuing pipedream of theirs.

3A. It will never work because it is contrary to human nature. Ask any former resident of a socialist country about that!

4. Though we may not be around to see it, in the end the Marxists (evil) running free and unchecked in the BLM and Antifa movements will consume themselves, and after that from their ashes, good will find its way back.

Stop the Steal - Stu C...
@STUinSD

Thread – A New Year’s Eve Retrospective on 2020 America

1. A good pal of mine emailed me this commentary written by a third party who has allowed for it to be shared with the condition no attribution be given.

2. Recommend taking the time to carefully read this through (twice!) and then ponder the questions asked and the actions evinced in America over the past year. It is a fabulous commentary.

3.

"A year ago today, at the close of a retrospective on the ending decade, I wrote this: "We step into a decade that will likely be more terrible than we grasp. For the nation, for the world, many bills will come due & the survivors will be the quiet and the unseen.”

4. Finishing from a year ago: “My fear — which I expect to be vindicated, even as I hope it is not — is that the decade just ended will be remembered with one word: prewar.”

5. There is no reward in prophecy. Here is the opening passage of Stefan Zweig’s 1941 “The World of Yesterday”:

Cancel the Dementiacra...
@STUinSD

Thread – Victims of Wokeness

1. The Cancel Culture takes scalps. We’ve seen many examples this year. It’s the real why the likes of Vaseline, the NFL, MLB, the NBA, and other large corporations/business have taken the knee to the mob.

More from Tech

Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

There are only 3 real challenges to free speech at the tech level a) the need for CDNs at scale b) distortions of net neutrality c) nation-state firewalls.

All other claims are about social governance on private sites, where applying free speech doctrine is a stretch at best

Baseline free speech has expanded modestly since 1776 or whatever your reference point is.

About 20% beyond core case of government-critical speech in formally public spaces and media I'd say.

You can (for example) have more kinds of conversations in a bar without getting punched or kicked out by other patrons or management. You can teach more things in colleges than 100 years ago.

That's a genuine de facto increase in practical, informal free speech/expression.

But online free "speech" is, as @reneed has pointed out, not an expansion of free speech at all, but an expansion of reach. It is like the secondary freedom of the press to print as many copies as they can afford, not primary freedom to say what they want

If a newspaper wants to print more copies it has buy more printing equipment and front more upfront costs. Reach for a paper publication is not "free", but a function of desired circulation, which in turn is a function of demand prediction etc. But that logic is obscured online.

EverythingOppresses
@SoOppressed

The first area to focus on is diversity. This has become a dogma in the tech world, and despite the fact that tech is one of the most meritocratic industries in the world, there are constant efforts to promote diversity at the expense of fairness, merit and competency. Examples:

USC's Interactive Media & Games Division cancels all-star panel that included top-tier game developers who were invited to share their experiences with students. Why? Because there were no women on the

ElectronConf is a conf which chooses presenters based on blind auditions; the identity, gender, and race of the speaker is not known to the selection team. The results of that merit-based approach was an all-male panel. So they cancelled the conference.

Apple's head of diversity (a black woman) got in trouble for promoting a vision of diversity that is at odds with contemporary progressive dogma. (She left the company shortly after this

Also in the name of diversity, there is unabashed discrimination against men (especially white men) in tech, in both hiring policies and in other arenas. One such example is this, a developer workshop that specifically excluded men: https://t.co/N0SkH4hR35

Caleb Porzio
@calebporzio

🎉🎉 PHP 7.3 is here!

Here are the things I'm excited about.

🚂 Trailing commas in function/method calls!

This will certainly be a required styling choice for me. Same delightful benefits of trailing comma in multi-line PHP arrays, and JavaScript objects.

🧵 Less disgusting heredoc syntax!

Inlining heredoc strings in any way right now is grrrosssss. Now we get sensible capabilities. Everything that was wrong with it is now fixed!

(Ignore the bad syntax highlighting)

☠️ Finally, not-so-silent json_decode error detection!

This really sucked before, now it just sucks a bit less (who wants to pass a 4th param and pass 2 default params first? (helper function anybody?)

📜 Not horrible functions for getting the first and last item (or key) from an array!

Before you either strung a bunch of functions together or messed with internal array pointers. This is a much-needed improvement.

Brad Kaellner - Stock ...
@bkaellner

Incumbents almost always prevail with sustaining innovation

In disruptive circumstances, the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents

H/t Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution

Zeke Hausfather
@hausfath

There has been a lot of discussion about negative emissions technologies (NETs) lately. While we need to be skeptical of assumed planetary-scale engineering and wary of moral hazard, we also need much greater RD&D funding to keep our options open. A quick thread: 1/10

Energy system models love NETs, particularly for very rapid mitigation scenarios like 1.5C (where the alternative is zero global emissions by 2040)! More problematically, they also like tons of NETs in 2C scenarios where NETs are less essential. https://t.co/M3ACyD4cv7 2/10

There is a lot of confusion about carbon budgets and how quickly emissions need to fall to zero to meet various warming targets. To cut through some of this morass, we can use some very simple emission pathways to explore what various targets would entail. 1/11 pic.twitter.com/Kriedtf0Ec
— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) September 24, 2020

In model world the math is simple: very rapid mitigation is expensive today, particularly once you get outside the power sector, and technological advancement may make later NETs cheaper than near-term mitigation after a point. 3/10

This is, of course, problematic if the aim is to ensure that particular targets (such as well-below 2C) are met; betting that a "backstop" technology that does not exist today at any meaningful scale will save the day is a hell of a moral hazard. 4/10

Many models go completely overboard with CCS, seeing a future resurgence of coal and a large part of global primary energy occurring with carbon capture. For example, here is what the MESSAGE SSP2-1.9 scenario shows: 5/10

For three years I have wanted to write an article on moral panics. I have collected anecdotes and similarities between today\u2019s moral panic and those of the past - particularly the Satanic Panic of the 80s.

This is my finished product: https://t.co/otcM1uuUDk
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) September 29, 2018

The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.