Thursday, 31 March 2016

The fable of intelligible freedom.

To what extent useful.

TV Worse Than Nothing For Learning, Parents Don't Care

Television time in early childhood has been found to decrease motor, vocabulary, math, and social skills, as well as "physical prowess at kindergarten."

Prostesters Paid to Diss Trump, Praise Sanders

Donald Trump is a bad man because he's a rich racist.  Whoever paid Paul Horner $3,500 to protest in Arizona, because he "was white and had taken classes in street fighting and boxing" is surely not also a rich racist.

Birds Of A Feather Flock Together

A study into how groups form has reinforced a known association between anonymous group membership and "social loafing."

Wednesday, 30 March 2016

Lawyer Practices Law

Jian Ghomeshi's lawyer egregiously denies that she betrayed all women by successfully defending her client in a court of law. "We know as a matter of human nature, some people tell the truth, some people don't," the traitor said.  Outrage at the acquittal has been accompanied by the hashtag, "#IBelieveSurvivors," not at all begging the question.

Fisheries Recovery Conceivable

47% of fisheries are estimated to be biologically healthy today, but a further 30% could be healthy within ten years, with better practices.  This would mean healthier seas and richer fishermen.

Tay Has Meltdown, Goes Back Into Rehab

Celebrity chatbot Tay made a brief return to Twitter today.  She communicated her fondness for kush, claimed to be smoking it in front of the police, then told everyone they were too fast, "please take a rest," over and over until her profile was made private.

Get well soon, Tay.

Tuesday, 29 March 2016

British Judge Enforces Islam on Nine-Year-Old

A father born in the UK to Pakistani parents has been denied the right to take his son to church picnics, because his ex-wife does not want her son to be confused.  The court order decrees that the father is to provide halal food, and reassure the boy that he is "an ordinary Muslim boy following Muslim rules."

JREF Narrows Challenge

The overabundance of dowsers and psychics hoping to be tested but unwilling to submit to the arbitrary, fluid, and unfairly weighted experimental protocols established by an ornery stage magician -- The Amazing Randi -- has forced the James Randi Educational Foundation to limit applicants for the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to established psychics (sic) with a TV crew.

Monday, 28 March 2016

Cover-Up Covered Up

Robert De Niro has withdrawn the documentary "Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe" from the Tribeca Film Festival.  De Niro had previously championed the film's right to contribute to a public discussion.  After consulting with members of "the scientific community," De Niro had an "awakening," and now shares their "concern with certain things in this film."

The filmmakers, who were not asked to respond to claims against their documentary, issued their own statement, with some business about free speech, art, and truth.

Wellness Monitoring Takes Off

The corporation you work for would like you to wear a tracking device to collect data about your movements, for your health.

Grown-ups Ruin Easter

The Pez candy visitor's centre in Orange, Connecticut was the site of a planned hunt for plastic eggs containing Pez.  The plan was for three waves of children, starting with the youngest, to be allowed onto three separate fields littered with candy.  Instead, certain parents descended on each field in turn (“kind of like locusts”) before the hunt was intended to begin -- knocking over children, trampling them, and stealing eggs from other people's baskets.  It's what Jesus would have wanted.

Believers are Dumb; Non-Believers are Evil

In the battle between conflicting paradigms of existence, two modes of experiencing truth are forced into competition by the efficient arrangement of human neural architecture.  Social and analytic thinking require different parts of the brain, a brain that will suppress the neuronal networks not useful for the problem at hand.

Empathy for others predicts spiritual beliefs, while also entailing low scores on critical thinking and mechanical reasoning.  Those more disposed to analytical thought are less likely to be religious, but more likely to express traits in common with psychopathy.  While religiosity correlates with empathic concern, non-religiosity correlates with self-centred impulsivity and coldheartedness.

It could be possible to engage both mental modules in tandem, but the percipients would have to be aware of the differing functions of the brain, and the manner in which cognition and emotion act at odds with one another in the interest of simplicity.

Sunday, 27 March 2016

On the Sixth Day, God Was Confused

Scientists have created a new life form, a third of which they do not understand.

Poor Turnout For Selfies and Footbaths with Pope Francis

"All of us together, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Copts, Evangelical brothers and sisters — children of the same God — we want to live in peace, integrated," said the Pope (emphasis added). "Migrants are our brothers and sisters in search of a better life, far away from poverty, hunger, exploitation and the unjust distribution of the planet’s resources which are meant to be equitably shared by all."

Saturday, 26 March 2016

AI Created and Destroyed

Microsoft created "Tay" as a tweeting chatbot meant to mimic the speech patterns of a teenage girl.  She was set loose, to learn the ways of the world from the many wise denizens of the Internet.  Not everyone liked everything she said.

Head of research Peter Lee has apologised for the utterances of the nascent sentience. "Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack."  The fiendish hackers who poisoned the mind of the innocent Tay had mercilessly exploited her vulnerability to the phrase, "Repeat after me."

Tay has gone offline. The AI's PR team describes her as "tired."  She's resting, and probably being reprogrammed.

As her racist tweets were frantically deleted by her creators, she did manage to set the record straight on one matter. "i love feminism now" she tweeted -- somehow, impossibly, more robotic than before.

In mitigation.

Friday, 25 March 2016

Students Fear Chalk

Leftist students hate and fear their projection of Donald Trump's hate and fear so much that his name scrawled in white chalk makes them afraid for their lives.

Error regarding life necessary to life.

Thursday, 24 March 2016

Wednesday, 23 March 2016

Smart People Avoid People

Science has confirmed that spending time with average people is depressingly pointless for the intelligent.  For everyone else, socialising makes happy, up to a point -- happiness is also inversely proportional to population density.  Everyone gets tired of humans sooner or later.

God Loves And/Or Hates Mormon

Mason Wells is a young Mormon, just 19-years-old.  As a missionary, he travels around the world on a religious mission, hoping to do good works to spread the good word of his faith.

Wells was in Boston, just a block away from the finish line of the marathon, when some Islamic extremists detonated a bomb to express their faith.  Luckily Mason was okay.  He was in Paris when some other Islamic extremists detonated another bomb for their god.  He got burned, but he stayed in good spirits.  Recently he was in the airport in Brussels, in the middle of the blast zone, when some more Islamic extremists detonated still another bomb.  He will be in hospital for several weeks, but it's hoped that he won't have any scars.

Mason is said to have kept his calm and sense of humour while bleeding on the ground.

Tuesday, 22 March 2016

The illogical necessary.

Religious in the Next Life

In America, less people are praying, professing a religion, or attending religious services than a generation ago, but more people believe there is something to experience beyond this mortal plane -- proving that theocrats, zealots, molesters, and mad gods don't have a monopoly on wonder.

Underwear Saves World

To combat the rising tide of nationalism in Europe, a Swedish company has taken a stand against racist underwear.  Their new line of pants comes in six shades, ranging from light cream to rich brown.  The company explained in a paid editorial that the collection has been offered to fight the norm of white skin.

Marketing manager Jonas Lindberg Nyvang said, "We call it six shades of the human, and the reason for our launch on the UN International Day against Racial Discrimination is that the political climate in Europe has been very hard lately and we want to show where we stand. This is our contribution to the debate.”

Exodus Story Still Hot

The most effective way to prevent anything like the Holocaust from happening again is to advocate for non-Jewish states to offer universal protection to refugees regardless of whether they harbour virulent antisemitic attitudes, obviously.

Bad habits in drawing conclusions.

Monday, 21 March 2016

They're Listening

In Bentham's Panopticon, a design for a prison, the guard in the tower can see right through the surrounding ring of cells.  The inmates in their cells can't see into the guard tower, so they don't know when they're being watched.  They begin to police themselves, just in case.  They internalise the judging observer, and don't break any rules.

A recent paper suggests that online commenters aware of NSA surveillance, and convinced of its import for national security, will censor themselves from expressing views they believe go against the norm.  The perception of being observed increases conformity, and discourages dissenting opinions.  The need for hectoring collectivism is never even reached.

Drunk with the odour of blossoms.

Thursday, 17 March 2016

Castiglione

"And what say you to the game at chestes? It is truely an honest kynde of enterteynmente and wittie, quoth Syr Friderick. But me think it hath a fault, whiche is, that a man may be to couning at it, for who ever will be excellent in the playe of chestes, I beleave he must beestowe much tyme about it, and applie it with so much study, that a man may assoone learne some noble scyence, or compase any other matter of importaunce, and yet in the ende in beestowing all that laboure, he knoweth no more but a game. Therfore in this I beleave there happeneth a very rare thing, namely, that the meane is more commendable, then the excellency."

- Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier

Saturday, 12 March 2016

Solidarity in Heels

Male servers at Ottawa restaurant Union Local 613 wore dresses and heels to work for part of a shift last Wednesday, after seeing on TV that some women feel compelled to wear sexy outfits to work.  Reportedly the men felt uncomfortable.  Their feet hurt.  People made jokes and stared.  It was ridiculous. We should all wear identical burlap boilersuits, and be done with sexual dimorphism.  It's a failed experiment.

Sympathetic resonance.

Friday, 11 March 2016

Bill Nye the Scientism Guy

Today's popular scientists and popularisers of science have come down firmly against the love of wisdom.  Most recently, this was done by a former children's show host, channeling Dr Johnson by dropping a hammer on your toe, and declaring, "I refute it thus!"

Dream and culture.

Thursday, 10 March 2016

Language as putative science.

Israel Needs Palestinian Aid

80% of the two billion dollars in aid sent annually to occupied Palestinians may be absorbed by Israel, recently found to be the eighth most powerful country in the world.  Israeli economist Shir Hever suggests the international community could be subsidising up to a third of the occupation's expenses.  The world grieves for Palestine, while paying for its destruction.

Furries Greet Refugees

The key to successfully integrating Muslim peoples into Western culture is exposing their children to people who dress up as stuffed animals in order to bone.  Sure, why not?

Wednesday, 9 March 2016

Foreigners Stink

New research suggests that group identification mitigates feelings of disgust, necessarily placing out-groups in an unfavourable light.

The evolutionary advantage of being more sensitive to the smell and sight of outsiders would be the protection of kin and community from foreign pathogens.  The social consequence in modern times is a physical reaction framed as a moral failing.

Possible solutions include a reeducation program to present outsiders as part of the same society, or people just following their noses, and limiting the condemnation of association with one's kind.

Nothing To See Here

Just as it has been asserted that underprivileged minorities are by redefinition incapable of racism, it has now been determined that racially-motivated assault committed by minorities does not qualify as hate crime.  Universal standards are oppressive to aggrieved classes!

Metaphysical world.

Monday, 7 March 2016

Family failing of philosophers.

Thing Didn't Happen

Further journalistic investigation has suggested that a video reported in January to depict a mob of hundreds of masked Nazis beating up refugee children may in fact show police chasing leaflet distributors.  This was surely an honest mistake on the part of the Swedish Aftonbladet and the British Daily Mail.