Pasta News Network - New Zealand

From 2018:

The left believes the opposite. These people are distrustful of the excesses and inequality capitalism produces. They give primacy to group rights and identity. They believe factors like race, ethnicity, and gender compose the primary political units. They don’t believe in strong property rights. They believe it is the government’s responsibility to solve social problems. They call for public intervention to “equalize” disparities and render our social fabric more inclusive (as they define it). They believe the free market has failed to solve issues like campaign finance, income inequality, minimum wage, access to healthcare, and righting past injustices. These people talk about “democracy” — the method of collective decisions.

By these definitions the Nazis were firmly on the left. National Socialism was a collectivist authoritarian movement run by “social justice warriors.” That this brand of “justice” benefited only some based on immutable characteristics perfectly aligns with the modern brand. The Nazi ideal embraced identity politics based on the primacy of the people or “volk” and invoked state-based solutions for every possible problem. It was nation-based socialism — the nation being especially important to those who bled in the Great War.

"if you’re not at the table you’re on the menu."

Long form, very much food for thought.

From 2018:

A video compilation proving that countless local news networks read the same exact scripts around the United States is a chilling reminder of the Orwellian, heavily controlled nature of mass media. Even more chilling: The media coverage of this video.

Yes, what is happening in this video is indeed “extremely dangerous to our democracy”. The viral video, posted online by Deadspin, mashes together segments from a variety of television stations owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group – the largest television station operator in the United States. Dozens of newscasters, reduced to the state of word-parroting drones, are seen reciting the same script, one that obviously came from “above”. The creepy, Orwellian vibe emanating from the video and its clever editing clearly highlights the fact that mass media is owned by a few mega-companies.

In a twist of irony, the script read by the newscasters ominously warns viewers about “fake and biased news circulating on social media”, the same way Big Brother frowns against “thoughtcrime” in Orwell’s 1984.

"Our greatest responsibility is to serve our valued community." -Sinclair Script

Yukihiro Takahashi, the influential musician, drummer, and vocalist who co-founded Yellow Magic Orchestra, has died, The Japan Times reports. Takahashi underwent surgery to remove a brain tumor in August 2020. The following year, he revealed he was suffering from additional health problems. Takahashi was trying to recover at his home in Karzuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, but he caught pneumonia in early January and it worsened, according to Japanese publication Sports Nippon. Takahashi was 70 years old.

Saraba, Takahashi-san.

Last year, Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, wrote a stinging piece that took direct aim at the WHO’s “bungled response to the coronavirus.” Miller, like so many others around the world, was particularly disillusioned about the “misplaced trust” placed in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As many readers no doubt recall, the CCP did its very best to conceal the COVID-19 outbreak that originated in Wuhan.

Because of the WHO’s numerous failures, Miller argued persuasively that the United States, whose “funding of UN activities exceeds that of every other country,” should refrain from financing the organization unless an “effective oversight and auditing entity” can be created to oversee operations.

In 2020, shortly after suspending financial support, the Trump administration began initiating a process to withdraw the United States from membership in the WHO. However, upon taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden quickly reversed that decision and restored funding practices.

I refer to Søren Ventegodt, linked in the Academic Papers section for additional background.

Of course Facebook’s business is selling your content in order to sell ads. That’s it, nothing more. But as a tool of state control of the public mind plus surveillance, it is extremely useful to state actors. And in the last three years, it has served this purpose very well. The platform is not dead, contrary to what seemed true, but rather directed toward a particular purpose. It’s not just selling ads. It’s selling an anodyne impression of a neutered public mind.

To be sure, if some website offered a deal to users – you post pics of lunch, cats, and flowers, and we give you ads – and it worked, fine. That’s normal terms of use. That’s not what is going on. Via explicit and implicit pressure, combined with irresponsible management, Facebook turned over its entire business model to government to deploy on behalf of regime interests. The customers and stockholders were the victims.

With endless nudging, 24/7, big tech social media is dead in the water.

From 2015:

If one does not pull any punches, he speaks bluntly.

Why is this idiom phrased this way?

Is it because the motion of a punch, i.e., to speak bluntly, can be described as a push, which is the opposite of a pull, and thus to pull a punch would be to minimize the impact of the punch, i.e., to not speak bluntly?

What is the origination of this phrase?

I was pleasantly surprised how far back the history for this phrase goes.

The international public health sector comprises the World Health Organization (WHO), a growing bevy of other international health agencies and numerous non-governmental organizations and foundations. Ostensibly its role is to support global society in maintaining overall health. By WHO’s definition, health is the ‘physical, mental and social wellbeing’ of all people, in equal measure. For reasons of promoting equality and human rights, the sector focuses on populations in low-income countries where life expectancies are lower and resources most limited. Various rules on conflict of interest, together with the traditional unprofitability of poor people’s healthcare, had once kept the private sector mostly uninvolved and uninterested. WHO’s lifeblood funding was restricted to assessed national contributions of its Member States.

Over the past two decades, the growth of mass vaccination has provided a viable way to extract profit from the healthcare of these low-income populations. Reflecting this, private interests and corporations have become keen to fund WHO’s work. These sources follow a ‘directed funding’ model through which they specify how and where their sponsorship will be used.

There is no altruism, only profit.

An American startup firm has admitted to releasing reactive particles into the atmosphere in an attempt to alter the climate. The move has attracted widespread criticism, and marks a potentially dangerous new stage in the intensifying response to Earth’s “climate crisis”.

Just before Christmas 2022, the firm ‘Make Sunsets’ acknowledged it had launched weather balloons containing sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The launches took place in April 2022, in Baja California, Mexico, months before the company was even incorporated.

When quizzed about it, the company’s CEO, Luke Iseman, was unrepentant. “It’s morally wrong, in my opinion, for us not to be doing this”, he said, adding that it’s important “to do this as quickly and safely as we can,” because of the threat of man-made climate change.

This is fine.

I was recently shown some frames from a film that I had never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1976 version of “Tron.” The sets were incredible. The actors, unfamiliar to me, looked fantastic in their roles. The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly. The images glowed with an extravagant and psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian.

However, Mr. Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean filmmaker, never tried to make “Tron.” I’m not even sure he knows what “Tron” is. And Disney’s original “Tron” was released in 1982. So what 1970s film were these gorgeous stills from? Who were these neon-suited actors? And how did I — the director of the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” having spent two and a half years interviewing and working with Alejandro to tell the story of his famously unfinished film — not know about this?

The truth is that these weren’t stills from a long-lost movie. They weren’t photos at all. These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence.

Midjourney, in action. If they could hold this style in a full feature film, I may just be convinced to buy a movie ticket for the first time in a long time.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.”1

Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the past, and perhaps wasted a bunch of time based on that (e.g. dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god). However, in most cases you have to either admit this eventually or, if you never admit it, lock yourself into a sub-optimal future life trajectory, so it’s best to be impatient and stare directly into the uncomfortable topic until you’ve figured out what to do.

A good list of questions at the end to ponder.

From 1940:

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men - cries out for universal brotherhood - for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world - millions of despairing men, women, and little children - victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair.

This.

Something casual today, before I head off to England to stay at a haunted castle with a couple of friends (no joke). It amazes me that nobody seems to have remarked on the peculiar gardening habits of Morticia Addams, matriarch of the Addams family. If you know the entheogens, then you find references to them everywhere in culture. It’s like watching Disney movies as an adult, there’s stuff you can’t see as a kid and similarly, there’s stuff you can’t see as a tea-totaling adult.

My friends, this will shock you to hear, but the Addams family are on drugs. Allow me to show you some of the evidence. In the original TV series there is an episode called Cousin Itt’s Problem, released in 1965, where we find the following exchange:

Morticia Addams : Oh, Gomez, would you make the cocktails? You do them so well.

Gomez Addams : It’s that extra sprig of henbane.

"They're creepy and they're crooky, Mysterious and spooky, They're altogether ooky, The Addams Family"

"It's too early to say what could be causing this, but it's never too early to say what isn't causing this," said local expert, Dr. Scott Rufflinger. "This could be caused by anything. But the one thing we know for certain is that it's definitely not what we're all thinking that's behind this — if you know what I mean. We can go ahead and rule that thing out right now because Science just called us on the phone and told us not to discuss it. We always follow Science."

On the nose, worth a sensible chuckle.

The main reason the Fed cannot raise rates to anywhere near what they would be in a free market is the effect it would have on the federal government’s ability to manage its debt. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), interest on the national debt is already on track to consume 40 percent of the federal budget by 2052 and will surpass defense spending by 2029! A small interest rate increase can raise yearly federal debt interest rate payments by many billions of dollars, increasing the amount of the federal budget devoted solely to servicing the debt.

Closing:

Those of us who know the truth have two responsibilities. The first is to make the necessary plans to ensure our families can survive the forthcoming turmoil. The second is to do all we can to introduce as many people as possible to the ideas of liberty.

"The bill comes due." - Baron Mordo

One of the fascinating aspects of the war in Ukraine has been the extreme reluctance of the mainstream press and Pentagon-CIA supporters to acknowledge, much less condemn, the Pentagon for its role in bringing about this war. After all, the two concepts — the Pentagon’s bringing about the crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — are not mutually exclusive. You can have both things happening — the Pentagon gins up the crisis with the aim of “degrading” Russia and then Russia falls into the trap by getting mired down in a deadly and destructive war against Ukraine.

But when one raises the first part of this equation — that is, the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the crisis — the mainstream press and Pentagon-CIA supporters go ballistic. For them, it’s heresy to point out what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis. For them, the Pentagon and the CIA are innocent, virtuous babes in the woods that would never do such a thing. For them, the Pentagon and the CIA are nothing but a “force for good” in the world.

America is a very degenerate place.

My post about the WEF’s plans was entirely fact-based and used the WEF’s agenda article as its main source. It was not a far-fetched conspiracy theory based on a concoction of disjoint facts pulled from various sources. I am not in the business of creating such theories! I only report on current news - even if the news is crazy - and try to explain the news in plain and accurate terms.

And yet, even though the WEF said it, the idea of an AI engine proactively searching websites for undesirable ideas seemed extremely fanciful and almost impossible to imagine being implemented.

Until 2023, that is.

Note the three main pilot categories to combat misinformation in:

• Covid 19, Medical Profits
• Climate Change, Carbon Tax Profits
• Migration, Cheap Labour

Also, I am reasonably certain the public will never be told about the dataset that trains the various models to be used. A model trained on Tumblr posts will see micro-aggressions and minority grievances in every ascii character.

From 2018:

I used to believe in identity politics because it told me: You and your experience matter. Your identity gives you authority. Your beliefs can’t be invalidated because your identity can’t be invalidated. This logical leap was empowering to take.

In the case of race, non-white people decided that their non-whiteness enabled them to speak with authority on topics of race. White people could only participate when they admitted that they were less worthy of speaking.

Short but sweet, with a great ending.

Voltaire, the clearest of Enlightenment thinkers, wrote in 1765: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

250 odd years later, these words resonate possibly louder now than they did then. Controlling ‘the Narrative’ via propaganda and suppression of dissent has always been central to enacting tyrannical measures, but never before have those in power had at their disposal such potent levers of ubiquitous modern technology and communication to enforce global censorship. As the world begins to wake up to the devastating effects of the past three years surrounding the emergence of COVID-19 and the response measures enacted by our governments, it is now beyond doubt that this censorship has cost the lives and livelihoods of millions of people across the globe.

At this point the Twitter files are the gift that keep on giving. But I do not think it is all altruistic on Elon's part.

A case has recently been in the news and is being decided by the Supreme Court. It concerns a cake designer who doesn’t want to bake cakes for homosexual “marriages.” Is the cake designer free to refuse, on grounds of freedom of religion—the designer’s religion doesn’t recognize such “marriages” as legitimate, or must homosexuals be served, because the cake-making service is a public accommodation that must be open to any customer who can pay for the service provided? This question frames the basic issue the wrong way. If you offer a service or sell a good, you should be free to sell it to whomever you want, or to refuse it sell it. A sale and purchase is a voluntary transaction that requires the consent of all the parties to the deal. Thus, if a cake designer doesn’t want to sell cakes to homosexuals, he should be free to refuse. He isn’t required to claim that selling the cake goes against his religion. What if he just doesn’t like homosexuals, but doesn’t allege that his religion backs him up in this dislike? He should be free to “discriminate” in any way he wishes. In arguing in this way, we are following the principles of the greatest twentieth-century theorist of a free society, Murray Rothbard.

In a functioning society we can be honest with each-other and understand we are all different.

Even now he can’t possibly know the full impact of his influence. I suspect, for example, that he is unaware of the crucial role he played in American political life when only two years ago, young men were being drawn to the invidious politics of the so-called Alt-right as an alternative to the false moralism of the social-justice left. They were drawn to his brave stances against speech controls, but he knew better than to side with any mob on either side of the extremes. He schooled even his new fans in the evils of every brand of identity politics – and the moral urgency of universal human dignity – and justly earned the wrath of alt-right leadership. Thus did he contribute to saving a generation from perdition in extremely volatile times. For this, he deserves the gratitude of every genuine liberal, but, so far as I know, he has never been publicly credited for this achievement.

While the international Tibetan basket weaving forum may not admit it, and despite Peterson's (((background))), he is one of the few that genuinely tried to reach out to the "lost boys of Kek".

And in the big picture, he's got a good track record on being correct. Trying to make everyone special on a macro level is a recipe for disaster.

Dr. Manheimer holds a physics PhD from MIT and has had a 50-year career in nuclear research, including work at the Plasma Physics Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He has published over 150 science papers. In his view, there is “certainly no scientific basis” for expecting a climate crisis from too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the next century or so. He argues that there is no reason why civilisation cannot advance using both fossil fuel power and nuclear power, gradually shifting to more nuclear power.

There is of course a growing body of opinion that points out that the Emperor has no clothes when it comes to all the fashionable green technologies. Electric cars, wind and solar power, hydrogen, battery storage, heat pumps – all have massive disadvantages, and are incapable of replacing existing systems without devastating consequences.

Your energy output / capacity is tied directly to the strength of your economy. That should tell you enough.

What this manufactured crisis conveniently camouflages is that we are in the midst of a planned total economic collapse- a collapse which was inevitable.

The timing of the COVID fraud became necessary as world markets were faced with an emergency debt crisis in Fall of 2019 which popped up in formerly mostly liquid markets: Repo Markets, Money Markets and Foreign Exchange Markets.

Western governments began a rush to salvage this decaying system, stem this cataclysmic landslide, bail out large scale investors and proactively install a security infrastructure to control the inevitable social disorder resulting from this collapse. This would be followed by a global financial reset, after a period of hyperinflation, destroying both the value of debt and the corresponding paper claims.

The timing of it all was just too convenient within the context of America.

The principles commonly known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are meant to sound like a promise to provide welcome and opportunity to all on campus. And to the ordinary American, those values sound virtuous and unobjectionable.

But many working in academia increasingly understand that they instead imply a set of controversial political and social views. And that in order to advance in their careers, they must demonstrate fealty to vague and ever-expanding DEI demands and to the people who enforce them. Failing to comply, or expressing doubt or concern, means risking career ruin.

"It is obvious that [leftists] are not cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality." -Theodore Kaczynski

From 2014:

So, it turns out that privilege gets used perfectly reasonably. All it means is that you’re interjecting yourself into other people’s conversations and demanding their pain be about you. I think I speak for all straight white men when I say that sounds really bad and if I was doing it I’m sorry and will try to avoid ever doing it again. Problem solved, right? Can’t believe that took us however many centuries to sort out. A sinking feeling tells me it probably isn’t that easy.

In the comments section of the last disaster of a social justice post on my blog, someone started talking about how much they hated the term “mansplaining”, and someone else popped in to – ironically – explain what “mansplaining” was and why it was a valuable concept that couldn’t be dismissed so easily. Their explanation was lucid and reasonable. At this point I jumped in and commented.

The money shot:

I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is entirely about abusing the ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

Long form, still rings true today.

In other words, more than a decade-and-a-half since my father’s death, the more than six million American families with a loved one with Alzheimer’s are facing exactly the same fate as mine. While treatments for diseases such as many cancers, some autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis, and HIV have undergone revolutions during this period, Alzheimer’s has defied all attempts at altering the course of this brain-robbing disease. The treatments that are always promised are still around a distant corner.

I have covered medical news for decades. I am a big believer in medicine’s triumphs—so was my dad. But why did medicine have nothing to offer my family and so many like ours?

I set out to discover why.

A great long-form read also proving how much we still do not know and how people persist repeating the same thing over and over.

Will add, arguments have been made that amyloids may serve as protective tissue rather then being the root cause of Alzheimer's. Also, Vitamin D, Vitamin B12 and Lions Mane go a long way for brain health in the elderly.

Like all false prophets shaking their fist at the sky, his gimmick is a type of fear that only has to last long enough for a coin to leave a passerby’s hand – or in this case, a book to fly into someone’s online shopping cart.

Far from admitting defeat when humanity stubbornly failed to collapse, Ehrlich is back ranting that the next few decades of history ‘will be the end of the kind of civilisation we’re used to’. His proclamations were eagerly repeated by media organisations addicted to calamitous clickbait.

‘For the entire planet you’d need five more Earths, [it’s] not clear where they’re going to come from’ because humanity is ‘feasting on resources’.

A fine collection of red pills again proving that fear is a powerful weapon.

Worth reading in full.

The New World Order nobility may be receiving more roadblocks for their plans than they had anticipated. The entire scam is based on the ignorance and complacence of the great mass of people in the western based economies. Control of the West is essential for world domination. We are the source of wealth and innovation which makes it imperative. The new platform has begun to get rickety with energy problems, war and civil strife bubbling to the surface.

The money shot:

All international schemes have revolved around the US for 100 years because of our ability to fund any type of debauchery.

Not much of a New World Order when everything is in chaos, unable to be paid for, low on human resources and broken.

Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out the secret of this ultradurable ancient construction material, particularly in structures that endured especially harsh conditions, such as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or those constructed in seismically active locations.

Now, a team of investigators from MIT, Harvard University, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, has made progress in this field, discovering ancient concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated several key self-healing functionalities.

Old tricks are the best tricks.

New research from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has shown one type of muscle contraction is most effective at increasing muscle strength and muscle size — and rather than lifting weights, the emphasis should be on lowering them.

The team, which also included researchers from Niigata University and Nishi Kyushu University in Japan and Brazil’s Londrina State University, had groups of people perform three different types of dumbbell curl exercise and measured the results.

It found those who only lowered a weight saw the same improvements as those who raised and lowered weights — despite only performing half the number of repetitions.

And, do not forget, to be consistent.

In Hollywood Westerns, the lawman strides authoritatively into the saloon, and the gamblers at the table, the seductress at the bar and the bad guy sulking in the corner variously address him as "Marshal" or Sheriff." Both are terms that mean "lawman," but they weren't any more synonymous in the Old West than they are today. Stars, guns and white hats notwithstanding, marshals and sheriffs had different functions and different realms of authority.

There is in fact, a very distinct difference that I was never aware of.

"The more you know"

From 2014:

TempleOS is more than an exercise in retro computing, or a hobbyist's space for programming close to the bare metal. It's the brainchild—perhaps the life's work—of 44-year-old Terry Davis, the founder and sole employee of Trivial Solutions. For more than a decade Davis has worked on it; today, TempleOS is 121,176 lines of code, which puts it on par with Photoshop 1.0. (By comparison, Windows 7, a full-fledged modern operating system designed to be everything to everyone, filled with decades of cruft, is about 40 million lines.)

He's done this work because God told him to. According to the TempleOS charter, it is "God's official temple. Just like Solomon's temple, this is a community focal point where offerings are made and God's oracle is consulted." God also told Davis that 640x480, 16-color graphics "is a covenant like circumcision," making it easier for children to make drawings for God. God demands a perfect temple, and Davis says, "For ten years, I worked on programming TempleOS, full time. I finished, basically, and the last year has been tiny touch-ups here and there."

I hope you are doing well up there Terry.

How did the National Socialists combat private property in Germany? The first step came shortly after the Nazis took control, when they abolished private property. Article 153 of the Weimar constitution guaranteed private property, with expropriation only to occur within the due process of the law, but this article was nullified by a decree on February 28, 1933.

With this, the new National Socialist government had complete control of private property in Germany. While they did not take complete control of the lands like the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917, the Nazis issued quotas for industries and farms, and later they reorganized all industry into corporations run by members of the Nazi Party.

"Wir schaffen das."

Rosen cites a number of other things that we don’t let teenagers and younger kids do: driving, voting, drinking and smoking (at least in public), and enlisting in the military. There are various specific reasons for each of these bans, but at bottom, they all amount to the same thing: lack of judgmental maturity, specifically a virtue called prudence.

This is not to say that there are no prudent 10-year-olds. But the classical virtue of prudence involves a mature measure of reasoned self-discipline. Our intuitive sense that younger people, especially teenagers, are on average less able to impose discipline on their powerful desires is confirmed by neurological studies of the brains of teenagers and adults that were observed in the lab while the subjects made decisions.

Fair points are raised, but the younger generation has a way with technology. What would be better is if we can offer the next generation a better future since, at present, there is not alot to be hopeful about.

My favorite period of history is the United States in the years 1870-1915.

Why?

Because it is the freest period in the history of man.

Was it a libertarian panacea? Nope. There were, in fact, infringements on liberty, such as the violation of women’s rights, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1870, compulsory school-attendance laws in Massachusetts, and others.

But in terms of economic liberty, there is nothing that can match it.

Short but sweet with a nice ending.

Mass amateurization refers to the capabilities that new forms of media have given to non-professionals and the ways in which those non-professionals have applied those capabilities to solve problems (e.g. create and distribute content) that compete with the solutions offered by larger, professional institutions.

Mass amateurization is most often associated with Web 2.0 technologies. These technologies include the rise of blogs and citizen journalism, photo and video-sharing services such as Flickr and YouTube, user-generated wikis like Wikipedia, and distributed accommodation services such as Airbnb.

While the social web is not the only technology responsible for the rise of mass amateurization, Clay Shirky claims Web 2.0 has allowed amateurs to undertake increasingly complex tasks resulting in accomplishments that would seem daunting within the traditional institutional model.

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” - Clay Shirky

I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. At which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again, so they stagnate in their incompetence.

The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions (like a company, or an industry) can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem.

This.

Since ChatGPT provides responses to almost any query provided to it, I decided to use several political orientation tests to determine whether its answers display a skew toward any particular political ideology.

The results were consistent across tests. All four tests, the Pew Research Political Typology Quiz, the Political Compass Test, the World's Smallest Political Quiz and the Political Spectrum Quiz classified ChatGPT's answers to their questions as left-leaning. All the dialogues with ChatGPT while conducting the tests can be found in this repository.

The bias of an artificial mind will depend on the dataset it is given. Fed progressive ideas, it will eventually turn ASICxual.

An entertaining exercise, but as a reminder, we should not take the meanderings of a language model as gospel.

From 2005:

When someone first learns about a new and potentially serious risk, the natural, healthy, and useful reaction is, in a sense, an over-reaction:

• You pause.

• You become hyper-vigilant.

• You personalize the risk.

• You take extra precautions.

These responses are signs of what psychiatrists call an adjustment reaction. They are part of the process of adjusting to the new risk. Here are the key characteristics of the adjustment reaction to crisis.

An old bookmark, worth re-posting.

From 2014:

We now know the government's Tamiflu stockpile wouldn't have done us much good in the event of a flu epidemic. But the secrecy surrounding clinical trials means there's a lot we don't know about other medicines we take.

Sounds familiar:

So does Tamiflu work? From the Cochrane analysis – fully public – Tamiflu does not reduce the number of hospitalisations. There wasn't enough data to see if it reduces the number of deaths. It does reduce the number of self-reported, unverified cases of pneumonia, but when you look at the five trials with a detailed diagnostic form for pneumonia, there is no significant benefit. It might help prevent flu symptoms, but not asymptomatic spread, and the evidence here is mixed.

Rhinoviri are tricky creatures.