No chemist would make the mistake of confusing the question of what gold is (an element with a certain atomic number) with the question of how you know you have it (a positive response to certain physico-chemical tests). Presumably it is the fact that truth is less concrete than gold which has caused some philosophers to make a similar mistake.
- Graham Priest, In contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent
Jonny Fabian's conscience had been brought up to know its place. Like an eighteenth-century child it spoke when it was spoken to, but not otherwise.
Patricia Wentworth, The Fingerprint.
Above all, we see from these formulations how difficult it is when we try to push new ideas into an old system of concepts belonging to an earlier philosophy -- or, to use an old metaphor -- when we attempt to put new wine into old bottles. Such attempts are always distressing, because they mislead us into continually occupying ourselves with the inevitable cracks in the old bottles, instead of rejoicing over the new wine.
- Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy.
The 2026 Iran conflict will not be remembered primarily for the military campaign that achieved air superiority in 48 hours, nor for the assassination of a Supreme Leader whose nuclear fatwa died with him, nor even for the oil price spike that breached $100 a barrel for the first time in four years. It will be remembered as the moment the world discovered that the global energy system’s most critical chokepoint is governed not by navies but by actuaries.
He's gone mad with power! Like that Albert Schweitzer guy!
- The Simpsons [S06E12], writers Richard Appel and Jennifer Crittenden
Sex is the only thing on Earth that gets sadder when you go pro. Nothing else is like that. Maybe bowling.
- Mark Normand
This is a reply to Stephen Samela's question this afternoon on a Facebook post.
* He required recipients of government grants to agree with him on gay rights and abortion, refusing grants to organizations that expressed dissenting views, or that showed insufficient allegiance to his views. He used government aid as a carrot as well as a stick; a despicable example was exempting Planned Parenthood from HHS quality control measures that protect patient health. They're on the side of the angels: why should they have to document their infection-control training?
* He spent a huge amount of money trying to force a church to hire a teacher who disagreed with the church's doctrine. After a lot of money on lawyers, the Supreme Court unanimously slapped the administration down, but the damage was done. The whole purpose of the exercise was to chill speech after all, and it surely did.
To understand the scale of lawlessness during these years, Obama only won 45% of his cases before the Court! I think only Andrew Johnson had a worse win-loss rate.
I should note that federal taxpayer money was also used in Connecticut to support religious organizations with the "correct" view of homosexuality, but I believe that this was HHS incompetence rather than malice.
* He used the IRS to investigate and harass his enemies, in particular hundreds of nonprofits, including dozens of book clubs and at least one small publisher. The Biden administration wasted no time reinstating similar audits as soon as they took power.
* He weaponized Title IX of the Higher Education Act to require colleges to censor speech. A key part of this was a Dear Colleague letter that made it legally and financially hazardous to provide accused students with due process. When the students had the resources to bring lawsuits, the courts almost universally found colleges or their staff liable here, but the long-term damage to free speech was huge: https://buckleyinstitute.com/buckley-program-releases-eighth-annual-college-student-survey
Again, the Biden administration enthusiastically embraced the Obama's administrations civil-rights abuses as soon as they could.
* He freed the NSA to collect the text messages and emails of virtually every American (and a good part of the rest of the world.) He also collected most of the cell phone call records of most calls in the United States. In terms of metadata and call contents, he conducted more surveillance on his fellow citizens then all the presidents before and since.
His administration used some of this information against his political enemies, for example in the Russian collusion hoax. Furthermore, this data set was instrumental in the "success" of Biden's Disinformation Governance Board, which weaponized government censorship in a way that we've never seen before, even in wartime.
A case to compare with the Kimmel firing: At the 2013 Missouri State Fair, a rodeo clown lampooned President Obama and made over-the-top statements, one of which may be construed as inviting violence against him. The (Democratic) Governor complained, as did politicians on both parties.
And the rodeo clown got fired! Some might disagree, but most reasonable people would that's a good thing. But isn't a poor rodeo clown, just like a wealthy comedian, protected by the First Amendment? After all, his behavior wasn't nearly as vile as Kimmel's was.
This rodeo clown didn't use his position to spread a hoax, for example, or to mock people who are mourning a man whose corpse was barely cold. Furthermore, Kimmel, unlike the rodeo clown, spouted his hate on a broadcast TV station, whose FCC license specifically prohibits spreading hoaxes.
Why don't I see any of the people who claim to be outraged about Kimmel's firing also calling for justice for the rodeo clown? Okay, I do see why, and it's not pretty.
There’s a reason God gave us two ears and only one mouth. Listening is twice as important as talking. But he gave us ten fingers… he must really want us to poke things!
And how long are we lost in this confusion, unable to exert our reason, to possess our souls, or to rule our affections?
What a troublesome employment is love!
Abelard's first letter to Heloise in the convent of Argenteuil.
The Primate of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.
The four chapters devoted to this story unfortunately are also the ones covering the time of his great work on twistor theory, which gets somewhat buried amidst the not very dramatic unrequited love drama.
For the years 1971-76, this book provides all the detail you could ever want about why Roger Penrose wanted to sleep with Judith Daniels and why she wasn’t interested. For the details of the story of one of the great breakthroughs in understanding the geometry of the physical world, we’re going to have wait for another book.
- Peter Woit, reviewing the recent biography of Roger Penrose.
She called me a pathological neurotic! You know how the imprecise use of medical terminology drives me crazy!
- Northern Exposure S1E5
This is the perfect 21-century research topic! We don't know how to build a warp drive, but we do know how to criticize any aliens who do.
Clough, Katy, Tim Dietrich, and Sebastian Khan. 2024. “What No One Has Seen before: Gravitational Waveforms from Warp Drive Collapse.” The Open Journal of Astrophysics 7 (July).
I am skeptical of the notion that, from the age of 15 to today, Gordon Gano even once had trouble getting a fuck, kiss or screw.
From Wikipedia's "Sovetsky" article:
Modern Sovetsk has sought to take advantage of Tilsit's tradition of cheese production (Tilsit cheese), but the new name ("Sovetsky cheese") has not inherited its predecessor's reputation.
U.K. university (a member of the University of London) fires a professor without warning for politically inconvenient research, and confiscates her data while they're at it.
https://archive.ph/DeWSK#selection-2759.5-2797.54
A silver medal struck by the Kaiser's Lauer mint in Nuremberg, to celebrate the "liberation" of East Prussia. It features a naked, potbellied and anatomically correct Hindenburg, about to give a coup-de-grace to the Russian bear.
Russia's attitude seems to be that it's not in Russia's interest to sabotage their own pipeline, because they could have just as easily turned off the gas pressure. That's true, but it certainly wasn't in their best interests to invade Ukraine, or to send thousands of untrained soldiers into a war zone, or to mobilize their reserves for a fight in which reserve soldiers without trained officers are less than useless.
Furthermore, if Russia intends to use nuclear or chemical weapons in the Ukraine in the coming days, it wouldn't expect to get any hard-currency revenue from the pipeline for many years; thus destroying NordStream would send a pointed message about the seriousness of their intentions, at no expected cost to the regime.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/damage-nord-stream-pipelines-unprecedented-may-have-been-sabotaged
- Yoshio Agaoka, Degree of Triangle Centers and a Generalization of the Euler LineThe number −2 appears in several places in elementary geometry ...
