Category Archives: Short piece

California to Finish Vote Counting Before Any Other State

Wackos of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your minds. California’s Secretary of Election Returns, Sus Domesticus, declared today that the state would finish counting its votes before any of the other 49 states. Speaking to an audience of preschool students he went on to say “I effing guarantee it.” Not only…


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Anger

The intensity of a person’s anger is usually inversely proportional to his knowledge of his hostility’s source. You’ve likely noticed the superfluity of people angry over complex issues they’re sure they understand, but whose emotional overload overwhelms whatever capacity for reason they may possess. Hyperbolic anger seems to be at an all time high. This…


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Follow the Leader

It (progressivism) is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. GK Chesterton…


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California Bans Breathing After 2035

The California state legislature just passed The Respiration Control Act banning breathing effective 2035. Introduced by San Francisco representative Twinkle Raspberry the state’s first trans-species legislator – they identifies as a hedgehog – the act will ban breathing effective 2035. Rep Raspberry explained that the gas exhaled by humans and other mammals is 4% to…


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Wisdom

Wisdom in an individual is hard to define. One almost has to resort to the Potter Stewart approach: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. Here’s a dictionary definition: “The soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” Neither Stewart or…


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Mencken on Intelligence – A Century On

HL Mencken (1880-1956), often called the Sage of Baltimore, though Curmudgeon would have worked as well had he not been mostly right about the debased condition of his countryman as well those residing in the rest of the world. A century ago when he was in his prime there was no lack of deranged thinking…


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I Don’t Want A Bone, I Want The Bone

Anyone who’s had two dogs understands the title. If you give each of them a bone, they’ll each want the one the other has. They also don’t want to relinquish the one they already have. The resultant conflict, the closest a dog can come to envy, will send them into a muddle of canine angst….


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Artificial Intelligence is Better Than No Intelligence at All

The press has covered the release by a Google engineer that the company has an AI that is sentient with a mix of fear, fascination, and foreboding. For the purposes of this article I will assume that everything Blake Lemoine (the Google engineer) has said about LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is true. If…


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Three Little Words

“I don’t know’” There they are. The truest and most applicable sentence in the English language. The more certain you are as to the proper solution to most of life’s problems, the more likely you’re wrong. A persistent problem by its nature is difficult. Were an irritant easy to resolve it would be gone. People…


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Madness is a Feature, Not a Bug

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” The sentence opens Rafael Sabatini’s novel Scaramouche. It’s also engraved on his tombstone. And it’s also true. Humans as the price for their exalted state of consciousness have been condemned by providence to eternal madness. The two are unalterably…


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