Wednesday Night Links

• Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a man tells me that he has "seen the engravings which are upon the plates," and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either. [Mark Twain]
• Central planning requires central money, and gold stands apart by its very decentralized nature. It is indifferent to human conceptions, and can be discovered and summoned from the earth only with tremendous risk and effort. It cannot easily be manipulated or destroyed, and its value cannot be decreed (though they try mightily). It is unchanging, unyielding, and stubbornly at odds with the political visions of Fed bugs. And so they hate it. [Deist]
• There was ruling last month by one of the heavyweights of the Delaware Court of Chancery (Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster) that is a resounding victory for shareholders who are "outside the tent" of control at companies. It was in a case between a privately held investment fund (Sahara Enterprises, Inc.) and a woman who owned shares through a trust (Avery L. Woods Trust). You can download the whole opinion from the Delaware court website, but a key highlight is the decision that shareholders in Delaware have an absolute right to know about management compensation and related party transactions. [Oddball Stocks]
• I get this sinking feeling because finding things on Amazon, when you don’t know exactly what you want, is hard. I struggle to get a sense of which are good, which are overpriced, and which are drop-shipped from AliExpress to fund someone’s Tim Ferris-esque four-day workweek. Everything is either exploitatively expensive or suspiciously cheap. It doesn’t help that monitor model numbers look like automatically generated passwords. They are a jumble of random numbers and letters. Should I buy 328P6VUBREB? Customers also liked EW3270U. Each of these requires a separate piece of research off Amazon. When eventually I settle upon a monitor, I return to Amazon, enter the random characters that represent it, only to find it currently unavailable. Amazon suggests an equally opaque set of random characters and so the cycle begins again. [Simon Pitt]
• Schneider is one of many cardiovascular experts concerned about the nascent, growing body of evidence about how covid-19 affects the heart. The studies have not focused on athletes, but their findings have implications for the sports world. Research raises the possibility that athletes who recover from covid-19 may face dire or lasting heart complications, and medical experts have urged cardiac screening for athletes returning to play after contracting the virus. Two high-level athletes — including the projected Opening Day starter for the Boston Red Sox — have reported heart issues in the wake of recovery from covid-19. [WaPo]
• These words are usually the most common in any English language text, so they don’t tell us much that is distinctive about Bowsey’s trial. In general, we are more interested in finding the words that will help us differentiate this text from texts that are about different subjects. So we’re going to filter out the common function words. Words that are ignored like this are known as stop words. We’re going to use the following list, adapted from one posted online by computer scientists at Glasgow. Copy it and put it at the beginning of the obo.py library that you are building. [link]
• Anti-Whitism is more routine and prevelent in the world than anti-Semitism or any other anti-isms. The anti-White slur “racism” only applies to White people, per the people who made it up. You will forever only get a response of “only White people can be racist” when using “anti-White racism” to make an argument. Anti-Whitism is much more effective because it is outside their creation and narrative. [Counter Currents]
• My grandson is White, able-bodied and likes girls. That makes him an undesirable for the admission officials of the top US universities, mostly themselves "diverse". Now they have dropped SAT objective testing scores to deny him a chance to outscore. No foreign enemy is worse. [Edward N Luttwak]
• Medical bureaucracy is Kafkaesque. You don’t actually see the doctor. You might see the physician assistant or nurse but first you go through someone lower in the ranks who is basically a medical secretary. Talking to these people is like talking to an automated message system, the way they ask you rote questions about your health, with zero humanity, like a machine, everything reduced to quantitative data. Despite working in the medical field many know pitifully little about biology and medicine. Or, if they do, it doesn’t matter because they are prohibited from giving information to patients. They are information collectors and will soon be replaced by AI I’m sure. But even if you could see the doctor, would you want to? Can the doctor help you? Does the doctor have your best interests in mind? Many doctors know almost nothing about nutrition or exercise, despite these being the foundations of health and often the most effective treatments for a wide variety of problems as well as preventatives of illness. Many doctors are nothing more than pimps for Big Pharma. Pharma funds the medical schools, and all they learn is how to prescribe expensive drugs and/or perform expensive, invasive procedures. I have lost family & friends to cancer & heart disease. Not once did their doctors give them any dietary or exercise recommendations. They only prescribed more drugs, then more surgeries, until the patient was dead and their insurance had been milked for all they could get. The “health care” system is a misnomer; it is a disease management system which relies on the proliferation of disease for profitability. It exists to sell drugs and surgeries. It is inhuman; it may as well be run by machines, and it soon will be. The “health care” system cannot and will not take care of you. It cannot fix you. It cannot heal you. If you don’t take responsibility for your own health, with nutrition and exercise and lifestyle, you will become just more medical cannon fodder for this inhuman machine. [Semmelweis]
• Porsche claims a curb weight of 3636 pounds for the 911 Turbo S, which is a staggering 1485 pounds less than the Taycan Turbo S. As in every electric vehicle, that mass is down low where it should be, but it’s simply too much weight. By any standard, the ride, handling, steering, and easy speed of the Taycan is spectacular. But up against its more lightweight brother, it is smothered under all that tonnage. It doesn’t have the same instant reflexes. And with current battery technology, it’s hard to imagine that changing. [RaT]