| From: Thomas M. | 10/22/2024 12:44:43 PM | | | | | | “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”
- Woodrow Wilson
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| From: Thomas M. | 10/25/2024 12:15:28 PM | | | | | | What is "the Machine"? It is a giant, shapeless blob. A Byzantine network of agencies, organizations, and companies.
The stated goal is to diffuse power, but the actual result is to diffuse accountability. Accountability is eliminated, while power continues.
The NRC’s response repeatedly leans on the recommendations of other regulatory bodies and NGOs to deflect any responsibility for using an unsubstantiated model. The NRC asserts that it should use LNT because the International Council on Radiation Protection (ICRP) uses and recommends it.
ICRP also has the fortune of passing the buck. Their website informs us that their recommendations stem from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation (BEAR) publications.
UNSCEAR, being part of the U.N., is composed of representatives from dozens of countries. The U.S. delegate is an employee of the NRC. The pattern is similar for other countries.
Hence, UNSCEAR is largely composed of representatives from bodies it advises, or the advisees of those bodies in turn. Tracking the chain of recommendations back to the source reveals that its links form a circle.
palladiummag.com
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| From: Thomas M. | 10/31/2024 8:10:48 AM | | | | | | - Jeb Bush (representative of the GOP establishment)
- Rupert Murdoch (the GOP's media)
- Valerie Jarrett (Barack Obama's closest advisor)
All smiles. One big happy family.
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| From: Thomas M. | 11/8/2024 9:59:52 PM | | | | | | The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
by Marc Andreessen
The Enemy
We have enemies.
Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now – that have refused to die.
Our enemy is stagnation.
Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness.
Our enemy is statism, authoritarianism, collectivism, central planning, socialism.
Our enemy is bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy, blind deference to tradition.
Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels.
Our enemy is institutions that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing – blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.
Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.
Our enemy is speech control and thought control – the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual.
Our enemy is Thomas Sowell’s Unconstrained Vision, Alexander Kojeve’s Universal and Homogeneous State, Thomas More’s Utopia.
Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society in my lifetime. The Precautionary Principle continues to inflict enormous unnecessary suffering on our world today. It is deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with extreme prejudice.
Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation – the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death.
[continued ...]
a16z.com
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| From: Thomas M. | 11/16/2024 2:03:12 PM | | | | | | “What the hell do you think spies are? They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives."
- John le Carre
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