Happy Memorial Day!
On this day in 1994, Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley got married.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Interesting post on The Intelligence Curse.
The basic idea is that, like, you know the Resource Curse?
Here’s from wikipedia: “The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty or the poverty paradox, is the hypothesis that countries with an abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuels and certain minerals) have lower economic growth, lower rates of democracy, or poorer development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources.”
Essentially, the Intelligence Curse posits that this will create a MASSIVE resource where Management will suddenly discover that people aren’t needed anywhere near as much as they used to be. They’re a pure cost, now. Rather than, like, an investment.
The theory is that this won’t be post-Capitalist, it’ll be neo-Feudal.
The whole AI poisoning of the current college crop is interesting and gives a lot of the game away.
I saw someone on the twitters make this analogy: if you went to a vocal teacher and gave them $10,000 to teach you to sing and you never practiced and used autotune every time you went to have your progress measured, you wouldn’t actually be doing anything. You’d be throwing money away.
But college students are doing this. They’re using autotune to demonstrate mastery of vocal ability. And leaving with a degree that says “I can sing!”
Every other time in history when people’s productivity has increased, it has generated a lot of this doom and gloom that we see predicted now but has ended up being a massively good thing.
RE: College Degrees
Yes, some college degrees don’t add value.
I would say that college educations add value.
College degrees are indicators that you received a college education.
If a college degree no longer reliably indicates that you received a college education, then the college degree is worth less.
The degree doesn’t add value at all. Never did.
And not just college! Here’s one of the proposals for San Francisco:
Grading for Equity coming to San Francisco high schools this fall
A high school education adds value.
But when high school diplomas no longer reliably indicate that you received a high school education, that’s double-plus ungood.
traditional grading practices disproportionately benefit students with resources because of the inequitable inclusion of extra credit and other resource-dependent grading criteria
If that were true they could just ban extra credit. The real “resource” that’s the problem is caring functional parents. High levels of functionality also correlates with income.
Grading for Equity may reduce A and D/F grades and… enable a school district to cut costs for remedial classes…student academic outcomes… significant continued disparities…
So they’ve found a way to not do their jobs by pretending children don’t need help. IMHO everyone involved in this trainwreck should be fired.
Dude, why would “passing the final test” not be an indicator that you’d received an education?
“I summon the vast power of certification!”
They used to claim 61 was a D. They want to lower that to 21%.
On a multiple choice exam my cat would get a “D” under those rules.
My cat “passing the final test” doesn’t indicate that he received an education.
The other option is to massively increase welfare payments and reduce work requirements. Would you accept that? (I would!)
Good news, I guess. The plan is on hold.
SFUSD pauses ‘grading for equity’ plan amid backlash
Maybe they can slide it through in August or something.
According to Tipranks, microloan app Klarna has posted a net loss of $99 million for the first quarter of 2025.
Which is, like, worse than expected. It’s resulted in the IPO stalling out.
This isn’t *ENTIRELY* due to the whole “people who need a loan to get Five Guys won’t be good at paying it back” issue (though that’s part)… but, like, there’s a host of people who would have benefitted from a human being who went outside once in a while being in the room and screaming at them.
The age of tariff fraud is unsurprisingly here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/business/economy/trump-tariffs-trade-crime.html
Isn’t tariff fraud traditionally either smuggling to evade the tariffs or bribing officials to avoid paying the tariffs.
Or finding the small gaps in the tariff specs that can be exploited. I suppose that’s technically not fraud, but the bureaucracy will move promptly to close the gaps.
The law is impossible to obey because it’s changing every day.
They’ve gotten a hold of Elias Rodriguez’s chat logs (that’s the guy who allegedly shot the people in front of the embassy). And by “they”, I mean “Ken Klipperstein“.
You can read about his friends, see some of his chatlogs, and realize that he was a poaster at SomethingAwful and think “Lowtax strikes again” to yourself.
Man, he really hates PSL.
Eh, it’s not like he shot them.
Fair. He doesn’t hate them as much as he hates Israelis.
Some men just want to bbe a moderator 🙁
Welp. The Project Veritas guys sat down and talked with David Hogg.
His 15 minutes have been extended to a half hour.
He’s still one of the DNC Vice-Chairs, last I checked, and the debate is whether he’ll remain one or whether he’ll take over a PAC.
Emma Gonzales clocked out at fifteen minutes (talk about fumbling a bag!).
Davey there is well over an hour at this point.
Hard to know how much a 25yo activist, albeit one who was networked to the hilt in the Democratic Party during the Biden administration, knows about what went on in the White House, but this one be one of the few actual scoops PV has ever gotten if it turns out to be true.
Also, how, in 2025, does anyone get fooled by Project Veritas?
Well, part of it is how much credence you give to Original Sin.
For my part, I don’t believe the whole “nobody knew except for an inner circle that was exceptionally disciplined” narrative. I believe that it was much closer to an “open secret” where everybody who was in the know knew and gossiped about it at the bar after work but nobody AND I MEAN NOBODY was willing to go on the record about it and if Fox News or one of the other National Socialist Sympathizers out there talked about the open secret out in the open, everybody knew to come down on those people like the fist of an angry god.
And then, in the bar after work, everybody compliments each other on how well they did denying the open secret on camera between anecdotes about how much worse it’s gotten since last time.
As for how you get fooled by Project Veritas, hey. Look around in the video. They’re in a hipster eatery and I’m sure that they were delighted to pick up the tab.
When I was 25, I would have told half of the secrets I knew to a complete stranger in exchange for a beer and a plate of Italian Nachos at the Old Chicago’s. Given that he’s just giving more details about the open secret that has now been spilled by Tapper, hey. He’s not even saying anything particularly damaging. This is stuff that everybody in the know already knows, after all.
I haven’t read Original Sin, to be clear, so I can’t speak on it, but I figure it was pretty obvious a while ago that Biden wasn’t the one running the place. I’m pretty far from the halls of power myself, and I remember hearing rumors as early as like ’21. I’m just not sure how much to trust a second or third hand account about specifically who was running the White house, and the country. Does Original Sin give Jill Biden’s chief of staff as one of the people running the White House?
Oh, I haven’t read it either. But from what I’ve picked up from people arguing about it, the focus of the book isn’t on “What Happened” but “Why Journalismists Weren’t Able To Tell What Was Happening”.
If only the circle protecting Biden wasn’t so disciplined!
(Jill Biden is specifically mentioned as one of the puppet masters, though. As is Hunter, believe it or not.)
I assume something similar happens with Trump, and who is influencing/running things. I don’t mean this as a BSDI sort of thing, but as a recognition that we live in a world where the wagons are circled, and leaks from inside the circle are punished harshly. Add to that two very old presidents, and you have a recipe for serious legitimacy crises.
That said, it would be great if someone in either administration was like, “You know what, this isn’t right,” and spoke out, but I assume that if you’re in one of these administrations, doing what’s right takes a back seat to maintaining power and connections.
Maybe we can look forward to 2029 where we can discuss the new Trump book that talked about the guys who were *REALLY* running the show behind the scenes (Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio) while Trump fiddled.
Without reading it, of course.
Wasn’t there a book sort of like that in ’21? I only vaguely remember it, because in online years, 2021 was like 40 years ago.
I had to google to remember Woodward’s book “Rage” and Michael Wolff (remember him?) had a Trump trilogy of Fire and Fury, Siege: Trump under Fire, and Landslide but… yeah. I didn’t remember any of those.
The new Pentagon Press Secretary is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist and Leo Frank truther.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-official-who-promoted-antisemitic-conspiracies-appointed-pentagon-press-secretary/
I don’t like this world anymore. The right and the left are using Jews as props and arguing why we need to support them because of our history but also ignore vast amounts of anti-Semitism from their side and focus only on the anti-Semitism from the other side. The right wants us to ignore anti-Semites like the new press secretary and the left wants us to ignore stuff like the DC murderer or events like this from February 2023:
https://www.wiesenthal.com/about/news/cairo-book-fair.html
It’s just anger about Israel/Palestine and frustration at their own regime the left will say. Once the I/P situation gets better than it will all go away the left says. No, it won’t and nobody has any idea about what to do about it.
Lee, the Leo Frank “truthers” are the guys saying that there was a conspiracy to find him guilty despite there being no evidence of his guilt and they even found the black guy who really did it but covered the black guy’s crimes up.
The people who believe the official story are not “truthers”.
They’re, at best, “credulists”.
Your kneejerk contrarianism is not cute. It is pathetic. You are a grown-ass man over 50, you are not a 7th grade miscreant.
Saul, this is one area where I am an expert:
The people who argue against the established narrative are the people who are “contrarian”.
1. Do you think Leo Frank is guilty? Yes or no?
2. What is your point in responding to someone who is Jewish pointing out that the Trump admin is filled with people who believe in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories? Are you supportive of LeeEsq’s assertion or not? Why or why not? Are you wishing to cause him to be emotionally upset? Yes or no? If yes, why?
1. I am neither arguing for or against his guilt. I am, however, pointing out that the people who argue that there was a conspiracy to find him guilty are the “Truthers”, not the ones who say that the system worked.
2. My disagreement with Lee is that a member of the government who believes that the government wasn’t involved in a massive conspiracy to find a Jewish guy guilty is not particularly surprising. You’re quite likely to find a lot of people who work in the government who think that the government didn’t screw up for any given incident, even many of the controversial ones. If you’re going to argue that a given member of the Trump government is an antisemite, you’d best find a better example than one where he thinks that the system worked against the conspiracy theorists who believe that there was a massive conspiracy at play.
Seriously. I’m a big conspiracy guy. I am 100% on board with any argument that the government was involved in a big conspiracy.
But the guy who says “there was no massive conspiracy” is not the “Truther” in the dynamic.
Trust me on this.
“I’m a big conspiracy guy.”
Yes, we know.
Today in Leopard’s eating faces, Missouri farming community is shocked that Leopards come for their faces when one of the good ones is arrested and set for deportation. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/us/missouri-immigrant-trump.html
Trump orders critically ill 4-year old to self-deport. There is no reason for this except wanton cruelty: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/4-year-old-girl-with-fatal-illness-told-to-deport_n_6837240ce4b0327c975c77f6
United States Court of International Trade issues order of summary judgement that Trump does not have the authority to impose his tariffs:
https://www.newsweek.com/federal-court-blocks-trump-global-tariffs-trade-2078267
This is from 2024 but I’ve been thinking about this issue for a long time now. For several years, one element of the propaganda arm of the Palestinian movement in the West was to present the British Mandate period as actually being when an independent Palestinian state exists. This propaganda usually consists of taking something from the British mandate period and depicting it as evidence that there used to be a country called Palestine that was cruelly destroyed after WWII with a Jewish population forced upon the Palestinians by the world. The problem is that the things depicted as “Palestinian” are often Jewish/Zionist things from the Mandate period. Famously, the all Jewish mandate football(soccer) team was depicted as “Palestinian” by propagandists in 2018. I’ve also seen early Tel Aviv depicted as a “Palestinian beach city”. Here is a New Zealand article about products from Palestine but every one of these products were from Jewish owned and founded companies. At least one of these companies, Shemen, still exists today in Israel proper in Haifa. Another product has the very Ashkenazi Jewish name of Shoffmann on it.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/05-09-2024/made-in-palestine-found-in-1970s-hastings?fbclid=IwY2xjawKkoJtleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFhd2dMc1c4bHB5dGE3TnJXAR6LKuG6Y92rjE3usDInujLn4ROZuEptvcNxK1ZU7XVsc122vIXYtFMU5hwB6Q_aem_NiIZr5uGBi8VcK2NJoio2Q
The thing that always puzzles me is if the propagandists realize that this is propaganda that they are opening to get past people because of laziness, they know that very few people are going to do google searchs for Shemen Oil or Taya Cosmetic and find a 1955 film about Taya Cosmetics in Israel:
https://jfc.org.il/en/news_journal/61234-2/96790-2/
Or do they really believe in this alternative timeline because I’m getting vibes that they do. If they really believe in this alternative timeline than that’s bad. The Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian side could agree on a rough chronology in my lifetime even if they didn’t agree on the interpretation. Neither side would say that an independent Palestine ever existed as a country. If the Pro-Palestinian side is now believing that there was a Palestinian state cruelly snuffed out suddenly and all the Jews magically appeared in 1948 than that isn’t really going to be great at solving the conflict.
Their definition of “solving the conflict” is “No Israel, No Jews”. Their propaganda helps in that effort.
My question was whether they really believe in the propaganda or not. From what I can tell, the actually do seem to be living in their own alternative reality while they used to not.
Katy Miller appears to have left Stephen Miller for Elon Musk: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/28fdcd6d20392508f2fec7a24340054e2e94564105bef81f1dc1e1bf05dc5bc6.jpg
There’s no accounting for lack of taste.
Trump wants you to get Avian Flu: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-cancels-more-700-million-funding-moderna-bird-flu-vaccine-2025-05-28/
Republicans attempt to rename DC Metro Trump Train in today’s totally not a cult:
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/29/donald-trump-bill-dc-wmata-metro-republican?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawKl3tVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETF0YXNMejhGbUNPOHlEUG5DAR4sV4Nxp6Ovp433en6JdK8PauzzmTUaR-hipbT65-4TbRD4VDqixNXzIJqGhw_aem_rOBkYbTsGNdk9KV-wg1RtA
DC Metro? Trump should be actively fighting *AGAINST* that.
“Double homicide at Trump Station.”
“Donald Trump Train sees rash of purse snatching.”
“Trump Station shooting results in 2 dead, 11 injured.”
Cults are not necessarily savvy and we know that Trump likes putting his name over everything.
The man has no objection to bad publicity surrounding his name. He practically invites it daily.
I’m sure he would prefer good publicity, but for a New York real estate guy there is no such thing as “bad” publicity. To be ignored is to die.
Jodi Ernst is apparently a believe in the Five Rememberances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upajjhatthana_Sutta#Five_remembrances
Most of those seem fairly straightforward.
Well, except for the one about “I own my actions”. Hey. I was pushed into this position. I had no other choice.
According to the AF Post:
“A man hurled Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel hostage protest in Boulder, Colorado, setting multiple people on fire in what the FBI is calling a targeted terror attack.”
You want more Luigis standing up for what’s right even in the face of getting arrested for it?
Then more Luigis standing up for what’s right even in the face of getting arrested for it will you have.
A guy up in Denver who, as far as I can tell from his tweets, is just a regular guy who happens to be a Jewish basketball fan who lives up in Denver, has some eyewitness takes:
This guy is reporting that the alleged perp was here undocumented visitorly.
Reichstag Fire.
Oh, the attack was a false flag? That makes a lot of sense.
Whenever you see something like this, you should always ask “who benefits?”
They even did some background work a mere month ago:
This is just from one month ago: Colorado House passes immigrant protections as Trump administration sues over ‘sanctuary’ laws
What better way to give Trump a win than to have a leopard eat a face?
ICE raids office of Democratic Representative Jerry Nadler and arrests a female staffer:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/chaos-erupts-as-ice-raids-office-of-top-democrat-and-detains-staff/ar-AA1FSXTk?ocid=sapphireappshare&fbclid=IwY2xjawKp0DpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFrenNoMG1RZW1kbFpEbUZ4AR6vune-8LMK2F2ccQLPV_3mNkZYrEeEE7KKF9dVCADRyQGK_KXvup4o30YFPg_aem_49kDBEZs6zjqitkKOxgUiQ