We now have our most brilliant minds shackled to an ideology every bit as blinding as the old religious view of Catholicism. "It's all chance" is the "God works in mysterious ways" of our time. It is a fiction perpetrated by an institution invested in a certain way of seeing the world.

It's hard to explain how weird the word "Homeland" sounds in the ear of a pre-911 American. I can only say that it's not an American word. It's an Old World word.... It's a word used by a besieged, defensive and frightened people; not a word used by a confident, optimistic, powerful people. It's a word for serfs.

From 2017, in simple language, What Is Fascism? A Detailed Guide to a Dangerous Philosophy:

Under the pressures of real economic hardship, the fascist believes the problem can be solved by getting rid of of some undesirable group.... Violence from the bottom up is never to be tolerated. Violence from the top down is seen as equivalent to justice.

From 2019, Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? It's funny, the people who believe in the Antichrist are almost all under Trump's spell. But a few aren't, and this guy has written an impressive comparison of Bible passages and stuff Trump has done.

I don't believe in the Antichrist, but I believe in meaningful coincidences, in the intelligence of chance, and in the Trickster archetype, of whom Trump is an obvious and powerful incarnation. Related, a thread from the Spirituality subreddit, Could Trump actually be the catalyst that awakened masses?

He is an incredibly accurate and complete representation of America's collective shadow. Of course Americans are recoiling in horror, that's what people do when faced with their own shadow.... You don't put your shadow in charge. You accept it, because the suppression and denigration of those traits is specifically what creates the shadow in the first place.

My understanding is that the control system for deciding when to send the water to urine and the control system for whether the parts of your body needs water were put together by different contractors who didn't talk to each other. As a consequence your kidneys can be busily shoving out water to your bladder while your organs are crying out for water.

Since then I've been self-experimenting. My habit for decades has been to wait until I'm obviously thirsty and then drink about ten swallows. So I started limiting it to three swallows, and overall I did not feel more thirsty. Then I tried one swallow every three minutes, for thirty minutes, and it was much more thirst quenching than ten swallows all at once.

You can do your own experiments. More generally, part of getting older and not dying is to give increasing attention to your body. Supposedly young people are physical and old people are mental, but for me it's been the opposite, because when I was young I could afford to ignore everything but my thoughts, and now I can't.

What awesome images are suggested by the existence of such secret cities within cities! Beholding this ingulph'd and search-defying fragment of yesterday, the active imagination conjures up endless weird possibilities - ancient and unremember'd towns still living in decay, swallow'd up by the stern business blocks that weary the superficial eye, and sometimes sending forth at twilight strains of ghostly music for whose source the modern city-dwellers seek in vain. Having seen this thing, one cannot look at an ordinary crowded street without wondering what surviving marvels may lurk unsuspected behind the prim and monotonous blocks.

Dogon cosmology envisages a kind of entropic system in which the maintenance of the village depends upon a continual inflow of vital force from the bush, which is worn down and used up in the process. If the village is a place of stability, where things stay put and proper distinctions are maintained, it is also a place of stagnation. In an almost exact inversion of the modern Western notion of food production as the manifestation of human knowledge and power over nature, here it is nature -- in the form of the bush -- that holds ultimate power over human life, while the cutivated fields and gardens are sites of consumption rather than production, where vital force is used up.

The AMOC transports a staggering amount of energy. Like a million nuclear power plants. It is such a core element of the Earth system that its collapse would radically alter regional weather patterns, the water cycle, the ability of every country to provide food for its inhabitants.

New subject, sort of. This long Hacker News thread has lots of debates about how well AI is going to work. The popular fear is that it's going to work too well, but I lean toward the opposite position, explained in this comment:

At the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics.

Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain.

LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water.

When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible.