Goof Ball Genius

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[goodcallgenius]

He described the defendant as an “A” student with a 3.7 GPA, holding down two jobs, who was on the varsity track team at the time of the incident. When Anthony arrived at the track meet, his attorney said, it began to rain; Anthony’s school was the only one at the event without a tent that day. Howard said that Anthony initially went to the other school’s tent to have a conversation with someone he recognized, when he was suddenly asked to leave by strangers who were much larger than he was. The jury was shown several angles of surveillance video that captured the stabbing, showing the entire incident, spanning from Metcalf’s arrival at the stadium to when Anthony was taken into custody, which lasted only about 15 minutes.

Karmelo Anthony taunted Austin Metcalf before stabbing: Prosecutors | Court TV

What a strange case. Maybe he was embarrassed by not having a tent but that doesn’t explain why he took a knife to a track meet. This and Nowak case are strange because the killer in both cases was carrying a knife and set off by perceived slights. 

[goodcallgenius]

The DailyFX site is gone so Oanda it is. Surprised at WTI sentiment.

[goodcallgenius]

Just like Costco and Sam’s Club have a membership fee to keep out undesirables (though they never admit this), the little inconveniences, whether it’s the cart return, bringing your own bagging, or the lack of quick foods, was all by design to keep the clientele as a certain type even if they say it’s to keep costs down. You might think these minor requirements wouldn’t be an impediment to those who want food cheaper than even Walmart, but it does the trick.

People of Aldi - by Alan Schmidt - Social Matter

[goodcallgenius]

From approximately 1980 through 2015, Trump did, by conservative estimate, several thousand long-form interviews. Howard Stern alone, over more than two decades, accounts for somewhere north of forty hours of unstructured conversation, much of it the kind of free-associative, mildly hostile, sexually frank, joke-tolerant exchange that Stern specialized in and that no other politician of Trump’s generation has any equivalent practice in. Add the local New York radio circuit (Imus, the morning shows, the sports-talk hosts). Add the print profile circuit (every major magazine did multiple long sit-downs with him over the decades, from Spy to Vanity Fair to Playboy to GQ). Add the tabloid culture he was both subject of and active participant in (he made calls to gossip columnists under his own name and under the pseudonym “John Barron,” which is the practice of a man comfortable manufacturing media on the fly). Add the fourteen seasons of The Apprentice, which is unscripted reality television, meaning he spent fourteen years on camera, in extended scenes, generating extemporaneous dialogue under the supervision of producers whose job was to elicit interesting moments from him. By the time he descended the escalator in 2015, he had probably ten thousand hours of camera time in unstructured formats.

The Apprenticeship - by Mark Atwood - Words about Thoughts

[goodcallgenius]

Predation (large exploiting small) and parasitism (small exploiting large). Wilson connects to Judaism. Wilson's daughter now mayor of Seattle and crazy leftist. I think his father was EO Wilson Sloan Wilson, author of Man in Gray Flannel Suit. Go to 43:04 for juicy part.

[goodcallgenius]

Oswald Spengler talks at length about Rembrandt’s signature brown paint. What is the significance of that color, and what role did Rembrandt play in the evolution of mankind? Spengler points out that Rembrandt brown is the one color that cannot be found in the rainbow or prism and is therefore a metaphysical color that signifies infinite space. Rembrandt’s self-portraits are the most complex and revealing of all time, and he is unfolding the Faustian myth of the human individual as a unique species unto himself. That’s our fundamental myth, and Rembrandt’s art is particularly important for detailing it.

Interview with John David Ebert – Gallowglass Books

The whole interview is great. In a just society JDE would be a widely celebrated intellectual. He really needs his own PBS special like Joseph Campbell. He would be huge on Rogan or Netflix if he ever got the right opportunity. 

[goodcallgenius]

“The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true ‘racist’ conviction of their own superiority.”

— Slavoj Žižek on the Charlie Hebdo massacre: Are the worst really full of passionate intensity?

[goodcallgenius]

This is true of all immigrants. Hasidic Jews are less damaging than normal Jews, the same is true of Muslims.

[goodcallgenius]

The rise of Jessica, Jacob, Noah, and Emma mirrors the Jewish ascendancy. Is Liam connected to Oasis? 

[goodcallgenius]

Big Thief - Not (Official Audio)

(via Big Thief - Not (Official Audio) - YouTube)

[goodcallgenius]

Lenker was born in Indianapolis and was raised in a Christian cult until the age of four, but primarily grew up in Minnesota. When Lenker was 5 years old, she was hospitalized after a railroad spike fell from the roof of a makeshift treehouse in the yard of her family's rented home in Nisswa, lodging itself into her skull and nearly killing her. She recounts the incident in the song "Mythological Beauty" from Big Thief's second album Capacity. After leaving the cult, the family began living out of a large blue van. They moved frequently, renting homes throughout the Midwest. They lived with a Russian couple and their five children in a two-bedroom apartment in Coon Rapids. They also lived with two women who were living an Amish lifestyle. They lived in a total of 14 different houses by the time she was 8 years old. Around this time, her father became disillusioned with the religion and they bought a house in the Minneapolis suburbs.

Adrianne Lenker - Wikipedia

These are my people. 

[goodcallgenius]

Nithya Raman was born into a Tamil family in Kerala, India, and moved to Louisiana at 6 years old. She earned a bachelor's degree in political theory from Harvard University then a master's degree in urban planning from MIT. After living in the United States for many years, Raman returned to her home country of India and founded the research firm Transparent Chennai. The firm's goal was to improve sanitation in the city of Chennai. In 2013, Raman moved to Los Angeles and worked for the city administrative officer of Los Angeles. In 2017, Raman founded and headed SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, a homelessness outreach nonprofit in Los Angeles.

Nithya Raman - Wikipedia

Her NGO issue in India was sanitation and in LA it was homelessness. Sanitation is a real problem and homelessness is a disease of affluence. Raman could solve real problems in India, in the US all she can do is pretend to solve pretend problems. A lady from Kerala is going to solve homelessness in LA when there are a billion people in India poorer than the average LA homeless person. I can understand an American going to India to solve sanitation problems, the idea that the US needs an Indian lady to solve homelessness is rich. Going to a foreign country to solve that country’s problem is surely an act of great arrogance. What does it say about Nithya Raman that she thinks we need her help? It says that she thinks she is our superior. It really is galling. 

Her husband Vali Chandrasekaran was a writer on 30 Rock but nothing that he’s done since makes you think he’s actually funny; his latest book has 7 ratings on Goodreads (ratings, not reviews). He is also a big Bob Dylan fan. When the Indians are all deported at the top of the list will be the Dylan Patels. 

[goodcallgenius]

Working in the archives at the Regenstein library, I would take short breaks to explore the sprawling university campus and its gothic architecture. As a bibliophile, the clear highlight of the campus for me was the Seminary Co-op bookstore, one of the best academic bookstores in the United States. On one visit, I met up with a faculty friend for coffee. He told me the bookstore used to be located in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary—hence its name. He added that some people weren’t too happy when it relocated; its original location at the seminary had been a fixture at the University of Chicago—a place of intellectual exploration, discovery, and community. He then asked me if I had visited the new economics-department building at the university. I hadn’t and wasn’t sure why I should have. With a grin, he explained that the university had purchased the old seminary building and given it to the Department of Economics. This had happened a while ago, but it was news to me, and the irony was unavoidable. One of the country’s most progressive Protestant seminaries had become the home of an economic department famous for ushering in the neoliberal revolution. The following day, I made sure to visit the Department of Economics. What I found there seemed like something akin to a replacement religion. The first thing that immediately was apparent is that this is no ordinary economics-department building but almost a campus unto itself—a kind of Vatican City. I first made my way into an octagonal room that bills itself as showcasing the “Chicago Economics Experience.” It served as a kind of iconostasis of the great saints of the Chicago School of Economics—notably, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and George Stigler—while also offering a pious potted history of neoliberalism. I then noticed that the chapel, where students had once worshiped something greater than themselves, had been turned into a kind of study hall for the entrepreneurial self. The collegiate-Gothic classrooms, beautified with stained-glass windows, had once been the place where divinity students were taught Christian ethics, whose first rule is to love thy neighbor as thyself. Now they are little neoliberal laboratories for research premised on an assumption that competition is basic to all human relations. In short, the Department of Economics at Chicago is now a kind of secular cathedral.

A Treasure Hidden in Plain Sight | Commonweal Magazine

[goodcallgenius]

In the sixties, he and his peers rejected local pop music; instead, “we listened to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Rolling Stones.” Though given to theatrical outbursts of anti-Americanism, this rebellious cohort “was probably the most Americanized segment of Berlin’s population at the time.” When he began to meet East Germans, he noted with surprise and envy their lack of the “hatred of Germany and of all things German that was de rigueur in West Berlin’s intellectual circles.” In “Ossi” eyes, “the enemy wasn’t our parents’ generation and their Nazi past but the party of bigwigs that had established a second German dictatorship after the war.”

The Lives (and Deaths) of Berlin

[goodcallgenius]

Euclid's Perfects and Mersenne's Primes (visually)

(via Euclid's Perfects and Mersenne's Primes (visually) - YouTube)

The amazing thing is that the Greeks did not find the 5th perfect number even though they knew everything they needed to get the number. They knew 

1) the formula 2^(p-1) times (2^p - 1) generates perfect numbers if 2^p -1 is prime

2) that 2 to 2, 3, 5, 7 minus 1 were prime and that 11 and 13 were good candidates for generating perfect numbers 

So all that they needed to do was calculate 2^11 - 1 and see if prime (factors 23 and 89, not prime) and then check 2^13 -1 (yes, prime) and from there it was a quick calculation (4096*8191) to discover 5th perfect number, 33,550,336. This number was not discovered until 1456 by an anon. Literally just 2 more numbers. 

Let’s say they had discovered it. Would it have changed trajectory of Greek math? Maybe. It would have opened their minds to larger universe, possibly. 

[goodcallgenius]

[Patel] did what any normal college sophomore might do and cold-emailed Bryan Caplan, a member of George Mason University’s famously libertarian economics department. In the email, he described how three Caplan books had shifted his perspective on immigration, education and how many children to have. Mr. Caplan responded encouragingly, and after a further friendly exchange, Mr. Patel asked if he could interview him for a podcast.

Dwarkesh Patel’s Podcast Lets You Eavesdrop on the A.I. Elite - The New York Times

Has Patel had an interview with a single Indian AI researcher? I couldn’t find one on his guest list going all the way back to Cowen. He interviews “Dylan Patel’ at “Semi Analysis” twice and Nadella once. I fear that Jews and indians and have too much in common not to join forces against whites. 

[goodcallgenius]

I was on Twitter for well over ten years, but have used it much less in the Musk years and not at all since Election Day. I’ve resisted signing up for any of the Twitter replacement apps. I find I’m less interested in the concept, the stream of thoughts put out for reactions. I’ve seen all the joke formats. It wasn’t giving me much pleasure anymore, hence, removing it from my life has been a pleasure by double negative, an act of anti-anti-pleasure.

[goodcallgenius]

She won a Guggenheim. Good for her, she was always friendly to me on the socials and her blog.

[goodcallgenius]

The mysteries of Linkedin

A former classmate and foreign service brat shows up on Linkedin without her maiden name (a little bit of a surprise) but as far as I can tell she started college at 27 and graduated at 28. She went to work for the NRA (?!?!?!) right out of college at 28 before working for State Dept. It would not surprise me at all if she was in CIA out of her first college at 22 (but which college?) and that explains the missing 5 years from 22-27 and why she went into classified work for State Dept at 29 (otherwise how did she get a clearance?) She must have learned HAM radio in CIA because she is, very improbably, a HAM radio operator. The other alternative is that she went conservative which would be very unexpected for a Jew and foreign service dependent but it's happened before.