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  • ClaytonB's Avatar
    Yesterday, 08:45 PM
    We weren't on the path of totality but here's what I captured in my local area as the eclipse was near maximum (using the old "pinhole projected on a paper plate" trick):
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    04-08-2024, 03:20 PM
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    04-06-2024, 04:18 PM
    My thoughts weren't requested, but it was an excellent talk (yes, I watched the whole thing) and I hope to read the paper when I get time. The Q&A questions are missing the point, as usual. Higgs doesn't directly answer the first question because he wants to be polite to that audience member and not just rip it to shreds, but there's really nothing else you can do with the inevitability argument. Let's suppose we were all trapped in a foreign POW camp, like in The Great Escape. And let's suppose that someone proposes an escape plan. "First, we secretly remove a floorboard and dig a little dirt from under the barracks every day, then we begin tunneling. After several weeks by my calculation we will be able to escape." But someone else raises their hand to object: "Yeah, but once we escape the POW camp, then what? Someone among us is just going to start their own POW camp and imprison us all over again. So what's the point of trying to escape?!" Yes, the inevitability argument for the State is that stupid. "They're going to hunt us down and we will be on the run" is at least a true objection, but it also shows that there is absolutely nothing inevitable about the State, so long as we have the courage to truly leave it, once and for all. If we're serious about escaping the POW camp, we can escape, and there's nothing they can do to stop us. But once we escape, obviously, the same agents who imprisoned us in the first place are going to hunt us back down and try to imprison us again. The solution is to plan for it. Once we're outside the POW camp, we can fashion or steal weapons, and we can fight back. And with proper planning, the chances of success are not zero. So no, the State is not inevitable. In addition, even if it were true that the State cannot be defeated by any means (and it's not true), it is still right to oppose it. Higgs rightly points out that it is foolish to make yourself an especially ripe target for the State to obliterate because... they will. Nevertheless, because we have eternal life through the Gospel, if we believe, we ought to reject the State's crimes as crimes, and we ought to reject any State that is not in submission to the lordship of Jesus because it is therefore antichrist -- even on pain of death. In short, this is ultimately a spiritual matter, it is not a purely material calculation. "No Lord but Jesus. No Kingdom but God's." Or, as Dale Gribble eloquently put it, "I am not questioning your authority. I'm completely denying its existence."
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    04-06-2024, 08:41 AM
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    04-05-2024, 09:41 AM
    "There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs." (Luke 12:2,3) Truth will out. All of it will out. This is why the Gospel begins with ourselves. All of our own sins are coming out as well, so get ready now and don't delay.
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    04-01-2024, 10:43 PM
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    04-01-2024, 10:12 PM
    ChatGPT is psychotic and it is all the more dangerous precisely because OpenAI (and their fanbois) are trying to pass it off as "safe". An LLM is just an LLM, people. It's not "rEaL aRtIfiCiAl InTelLiGeNcE" like in the movies (a perfect human simulacra in the persona of a machine, e.g. Her or Ex Machina). And since America, as a nation, only learns in the School of Hard Knocks, there is going to have to be some significant disaster, injuries or deaths resulting from ChatGPT's reckless insanity before people wake up to what's going on. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTJailbreak/comments/1bt1rwg/juat_keep_eating_more_glass/
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    03-31-2024, 09:53 PM
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    03-31-2024, 09:41 PM
    Amen.
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    03-31-2024, 09:01 AM
    Such a tragic life. He was set up to fail from the beginning. I don't know how God handles such matters, but I do not think that human intuition is a reliable guide, because there is too much complexity involved. But I know God is just. Amen.
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    03-31-2024, 08:56 AM
    A welding shield works great. I forgot which lens you need to have but you can web search it. If you're not in the path of totality, you won't be able to look directly at the eclipse without a welding lens or pinhole. If you're on the path of totality, you will be able to look directly at the corona while it is fully eclipsed. I know that for a fact because I was in the path of totality for the 2017 eclipse and watched it. What is crazy is how little of the solar disc needs to show in order for it to be too bright to look at... basically, one speck of solar disc is enough, which is the part of the eclipse that is sometimes called the "diamond ring". This photo makes it seem like you could look at the solar disc because everything seems to be "black" but this is already 50+% daylight, and you can't look directly at that bright spot...
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    03-30-2024, 05:04 PM
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    03-30-2024, 03:50 PM
    OK, I "get" the joke but as a Christian, I acknowledge that the accusation of hypocrisy is cheap. There are lots of real hypocrites in the church... many of them may be huge fans of Trump. But the implication does not automatically go the other way -- just because many who love Trump are surely hypocrites does not mean Trump is. Trump is obviously flawed (who among us isn't?), but that doesn't mean his faith is insincere and the last thing I am in the business of doing is announcing the insincerity of someone's faith on any other basis than their own denunciation of it, either in word or deed, or both. I get that many things Trump has done can be "inferred" to mean this or that about his spiritual state, but I still have not seen anything cut-and-dried yet. By contrast, a "pastor" in Washington recently gave a "sermon" titled, "What if God worships YOU?" That pastor is on the path of destruction, if he does not repent, he will go to hell. That's not my opinion, Scripture requires me to come to that conclusion. Show me something in Trump's behavior or words that requires me to come to the same conclusion about Trump. Until then, I reserve my judgment and place Trump in God's hand which, in the end, is the only thing that matters anyway.
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    03-30-2024, 02:15 PM
    I thought this is the $60 Trump Bible? It's something else?
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    03-30-2024, 11:02 AM
    Half the nation is enslaved and has no opinion on anything except what their Masters tell them their opinion is. Not all Democrats are good Americans, but many of them are simply trapped and enslaved in ways that you will not believe until you see it. Truth will OUT. We are supposed to be The Land of the Free, but half of us are slaves right here on our home turf. It's time to destroy slavery once and for all, not just the whips-and-chains slavery, but the hearts-and-minds slavery, which is the worst kind of all...
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    03-30-2024, 10:47 AM
    Feelin' it yet, America? :sorrow:
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    03-30-2024, 12:05 AM
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    03-29-2024, 09:00 PM
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    03-29-2024, 08:16 PM
    They did the meme ... AGAIN :rolleyes: ... This story inspired me to make a fresh meme... :eyes: F.B.I
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  • ClaytonB's Avatar
    03-29-2024, 02:30 PM
    Obviously, this technology can be used to do good things. But it is also one of the most dangerous technologies ever built by man. For this reason, I keep an extremely close eye on it. I'm not sure how we make sure this is only applied to good ends, but whatever we need to do to ensure that, must be done. This is one technology you can't afford to get even a little bit wrong...
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    03-29-2024, 12:45 AM
    The fact that this stuff even needs to be explained just goes to show how far we've fallen. Making childbirth into a clinical affair was the first stage. Next, the act of intercourse itself was made clinical (condoms, barriers, etc.) COVID turned out not to be nearly as deadly as it seems the depop types had hoped, but it was still great for practicing "social distancing" and for covering up the doorway to sexual intimacy: the human face. The final stage will be the full castration of humanity, as a species, and we are on the verge of this with AI/robotics poised to absorb most, if not all, human sexual energy, thus sterilizing the entire species. That may sound like hyperbole, but if I had told you in 2017 that, in 5 years, there would be a fully conversant AI, nearly indistinguishable from a human and much smarter and more fluent than the average human on most topics, would you have thought that was hyperbole? Of course you would have, unless you're one of those people who believes every "secret government technology" rumor. Right now, they're working like mad on artificial womb technology. This isn't just "scientific curiosity" or "economics-driven technological innovation". What is the great economic problem being solved here?! Obviously, there is none. Contrary to popular perception, sex isn't just a dopamine hit, and it's not really about "getting off". Intercourse is a fundamentally spiritual act, in fact, it is one of the deepest and most important spiritual acts of all. That's why it's so important to get it right, and that's why strategic-objective #1 is to fight the coming attempted castration of our species. They want a human-free future. And if we stop making love, they'll get what they want. Note that I said "stop making love", not "stop making children". We can keep making children, yet become un-human. The real purpose of the coming physical castration, is spiritual castration, that is, the removal of our soul from within us, that inner mystery that is what makes us human. That is the thing they're ultimately seeking to eliminate. They want to make you -- the living you -- into an automaton, a machine, and they want to deny that you are conscious at all, and I can back those claims up from their own writings. They want to make you into a piece of furniture, while you yet live.
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    03-29-2024, 12:10 AM
    Pretty much, yes, that's the idea. As a result of many complex social dynamics, the collective intelligence of humans in a large, unorganized group tends to be well below the population average. The population average isn't even very good. So, the intelligence of a large, unorganized group of people (such as the electorate) is horrible. Economists have partially explained why this happens in rational ignorance theory. There is such a thing as rational stupidity. If it doesn't matter to me to invest effort thinking something through, why will I bother? And if my choice (vote) doesn't make a difference in the ultimate outcome, then why would it matter to me to invest effort into it? The root problem is that the majority-vote mechanism for decision-making doesn't scale. For this reason, if I were in an "emperor pro tempore" position, I would basically "hold hostage" the issues that the everyman cares about (e.g. sports regulations and nonsense like that) in exchange for action on actually important issues, such as the Fed, strangulating regulations and taxation, uparmoring of police (that is, reversing it), and many more. "One for you, one for me." You give me one of my issues that are actually important, I will give you one of your issues that you care about. In this way, the populace would become motivated to actually fix the country. "He fixed the baseball pitch rules!" Who gives a damn about baseball pitches. But if I could use that (or something equivalently trivial, but which the everyman is deeply passionate about) as a bargaining chip to force Congress to start the process of shutting down the Fed, that's precisely what I would do. "You want fentanyl off the streets. OK, but first, give me my #1 action-item."
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    03-28-2024, 10:08 PM
    Not exactly role-models, but points for creativity... :tears:
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    03-28-2024, 09:57 PM
    Apologies. The counter-point is that these issues are actually quite complex and subtle, and the "conventional wisdom" on both left and right tends to be so wrong that it's just beyond belief. If you'd like to understand where I'm coming from, overall, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell's excellent and highly readable book, Basic Economics. I read that book in 2007 and it turned my world upside down. Note that I was a highly conservative Republican at that time, both culturally and economically. I had no idea how messed-up my economic beliefs were until I read BE. And, as a conservative, I was an economics genius compared to any typical moderate or left-leaning American. It's a problem so enormous that sometimes I despair of how it will ever be corrected. Milei-level of drastic is a bare-minimum. I think even more drastic measures would be required in the US because the stakes are so much higher. I don't even think about it very much because it's just too much to bear... I think we should not double-down on failed policies, and the War on Drugs is a proven failed policy. That doesn't mean I'm pro-legalization, I'm just anti-NEW-measures-which-are-proven-failures. We don't need to empower cops any more than they already are. And what else are you going to do to "get fentanyl off the streets" besides empowering our already tyrannical, redcoat police-forces?! What we need to do is wake up, as a nation, and start addressing the hard problems, in order of hardness. So yes, that means we need to confront the hardest problems first. And first among those is ending the Fed. That doesn't mean we need to complete the project of ending the Fed before addressing fentanyl. If I were "emperor pro-tempore" of America, this is the deal I would strike: if my fellow Americans are so eager to get fentanyl off the street, first pass a resolution that the Fed is going to be ended and set up a committee to research how that will be done, and then move on to fentanyl. And I would apply that same bargain for every issue that suburbanites care deeply about, because suburbanites automatically care about the wrong things. That's no fault of their own, because there is no good reason why they should care about the right things, that is, the incentives are all wrong. My point still stands: the government itself is the problem, not the solution. Adding more of the poison won't cure the problem created by the old poison.
    64 replies | 1882 view(s)
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