The Limits of the Understanding by Paul Klee

The story doesn't directly say it but it's pretty clear that this report was written by an LLM that made up many of the studies it cites. RFK Jr and his team of lazy frauds. notus.org/health-science…

Jason Blakely Searle and Dreyfus settled this debate decades ago. The rest is sheer force of faith in a certain metaphysical picture of reality. To say a computer is conscious is to say a book or an abacus are conscious. It's drivel, they just refuse to acknowledge their philosophical error.

“Dying for Israel” is the dissident right’s Handmaid’s Tale

"Those who struggle to fulfil their role have an interest in discrediting it."—Pierre Bourdieu

Tucker Carlson when someone says the sky is blue: “What does blue mean? Which sky? What if I’m blind? Is it true at night? I like the sky; am I blue?” Tucker Carlson when someone says Churchill was to blame for WWII or Russia is a free country: “That’s really interesting.”

Peter Thiel on why 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist: “When one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time… and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”

In 2023 there were 227 billion pieces of mail globally. USPS handled 111 billion of them.

New essay: Recent grads face a hiring crisis. AI is making it worse. Folks are worried what AI will do to entry-level work in 5 years. We should pay closer attention to how AI has *already* transformed the entire college-to-workforce pipeline—and not all for good.

“—more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today…the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect…” -Sontag

Photography by Juan Rulfo, author of Pedro Páramo. Very interesting to me how his writing and photography show his creative vision from two different but related angles

Bitcoin was $0.01. Now it's $100,000. Ethereum was $0.31 Now it's $2,500. If you're reading this, there's a good chance that a coin you like is as good or better than they are, so why shouldn't it be wildly valuable too? The software is better than it's ever been, just needs eyes

Fascinating insight here from Stefanie Stantcheva: "People with more formal education are less likely to see the world as zero-sum but the pattern flips among the highly educated: those with PhDs often show the strongest zero-sum beliefs"

This fixation obscures the truth that child sexual abuse is horrifically common and tragically mundane, writes Freddie deBoer. thefp.com/p/the-epstein-…

Excellent thread on the Nazi Johann Von Leers who was persuaded by Grand Mufti Amin Al-Husseini after WWII to go to Egypt and help run the Arab world’s anti-Israel/antisemitic propaganda with the same Nazi flair he used in Germany. Here also is a short clip on Von Leers:

The thing with writing is you really ought to be in a disinterested, childlike state of mind. If you have a workplace mentality, any of the various tensions of social striving, or any kind of instrumental fixation at all really, you may be productive and produce fine work, but

So crypto, what are you gonna do when the mass marketing starts ripping faces off? People are going to hear about PulseChain, PulseX and HEX and pump dot tires directly before they hear about anything else. They're going to hold something in their hands that works great and is

“No political system can survive even a generation with only naked techniques of holding power. To the political belongs the idea, because there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of belief.” - Carl Schmitt If you find yourself trying to be more

Adrian Vermeule Behind "the marketplace of ideas" is the belief that eliminating authority creates freedom. All it really does is expose everyone to the predations of the powerful. The winning ideas in such a market are the opinions of the powerful. *paging Thrasymachus...*

1/ A thread about the class dynamics of air-conditioning in Europe. I believe attitudes toward air-conditioning are class markers in many European countries. Air-conditioning is seen as prototypically American, and that's important.