Showing posts with label Weinstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weinstein. Show all posts

Monday, February 27, 2023

Weinstein Got Drunk On Rogan And Said ALL THE QUIET PART About "The Jews" Out Loud

 

 

To hear Eric Weinstein's entire "shut it down, the goyim know" drunken rant, - in which he repudiates everything he's professed about the DISC as well as placing himself squarely in the Epstein psy-op camp - go to the 3 hour 30 minute mark on the spotify podcast with Rogan.

Wednesday, July 21, 2021

Bret Weinstein Trying His Hand At Apocalyptic Fiction...,

unherd |  Humans model danger based on their own experiences and those of their ancestors. Solar storms were nothing new, in 2024, but the jeopardy they posed to humanity had increased only very gradually since the last really big storm, in 1859 — the year Darwin had published The Origin of Species. That storm caught the eye of a British astronomer named Richard Christopher Carrington, who noticed unusual solar activity and linked it to the spectacular aurora that had appeared. What became known as the Carrington Event damaged telegraph systems and delivered shocks to a number of operators. Some found they could send messages even with the loss of power, because the storm had induced currents in the wires. Fascinating, but not the stuff of the nightmares, on a planet not heavily dependent on industry. And as our civilisation became overwhelmingly electrical, solar flares never produced enough harm to focus our collective attention — there was no real prelude to the event that precipitated our downfall.

In the initial weeks after the collapse, the military was tasked with a vital mission. Even dormant nuclear reactors — and their spent fuel pools — need to have cold water circulated through them constantly to prevent reactor meltdowns and devastating fuel-pool fires. Regulations required that each complex have a week’s worth of backup diesel generator fuel on hand. Many had four times that amount, but none had planned for a blackout that would last a year or more, and that is what they were facing in the best-case scenario. It fell to the Army to make sure these backup diesel generators and pumps never failed or ran dry. For six months, they accomplished that mission across all the affected reactors, with one exception.

The Army had quickly found that for most reactors, creating a defensible perimeter around the site and delivering fuel by helicopter was the most reliable approach. In the third week after the collapse, a helicopter clipped a light pole in the fog and crashed at the North Anna reactor in Virginia, spilling its fuel and sparking a devastating fire that engulfed the generators. Retardant dropped from above was sucked into the air intakes, and the combination killed the power, which remained out long enough for the reactor cores to meltdown and slump. The containment breached, forcing the site to be abandoned.

As the fuel pools boiled and ran dry, the heat from radioactive decay caused the cladding on the fuel rods to burst into flame; a plume of highly radioactive smoke rose above the site, contaminating the region and driving essential governmental functions out of Washington D.C., one of few Eastern seaboard cities that had been successfully stabilised. The danger of the radioactive fallout was kept officially quiet, but rumours spread, confirmed by those few citizens with access to battery-powered Geiger counters. This sparked a massive refugee crisis as the region’s population fled their homes, dodging precipitation, every squall now raining radioactive isotopes onto the earth below. Ultimately, the spreading collapse of civilisation would cause every nuclear reactor complex on Earth to be abandoned, guaranteeing that all of its radioactive material would escape into the environment and begin to circulate.

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Wolfram's Approach DOES Deserve Better Than The Reception It's Gotten


scientificamerican  |  Most scientists would readily tell you that their discipline is—and always has been—a collaborative, communal process. Nobody can revolutionize a scientific field without first getting the critical appraisal and eventual validation of their peers. Today this requirement is performed through peer review—a process Wolfram’s critics say he has circumvented with his announcement. “Certainly there’s no reason that Wolfram and his colleagues should be able to bypass formal peer review,” Mack says. “And they definitely have a much better chance of getting useful feedback from the physics community if they publish their results in a format we actually have the tools to deal with.”

Mack is not alone in her concerns. “It’s hard to expect physicists to comb through hundreds of pages of a new theory out of the blue, with no buildup in the form of papers, seminars and conference presentations,” says Sean Carroll, a physicist at Caltech. “Personally, I feel it would be more effective to write short papers addressing specific problems with this kind of approach rather than proclaiming a breakthrough without much vetting.”

So why did Wolfram announce his ideas this way? Why not go the traditional route? “I don't really believe in anonymous peer review,” he says. “I think it’s corrupt. It’s all a giant story of somewhat corrupt gaming, I would say. I think it’s sort of inevitable that happens with these very large systems. It’s a pity.”

So what are Wolfram’s goals? He says he wants the attention and feedback of the physics community. But his unconventional approach—soliciting public comments on an exceedingly long paper—almost ensures it shall remain obscure. Wolfram says he wants physicists’ respect. The ones consulted for this story said gaining it would require him to recognize and engage with the prior work of others in the scientific community.

And when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.”

Friday, August 14, 2020

Eric Weinstein Is Peter Thiel's Sugar Baby Public Intellectual...,


art-19 |  One of the pillars of the American Dream has been that of seeing your children go to college. And, for the many families that can't afford the cost of soaring university tuitions, a new controversial institution has arisen to address the problem. That institution is Sugar Baby University, a tuition assistance campaign that attempts to allow attractive young women, and a smaller number of handsome young men, find generous older men to date in the quest to complete a new version of the American Dream by graduating debt free in an era which has made it all but impossible to discharge student debt even in personal bankruptcy since 2005.

This year, Sugar Baby University is 'graduating' it's fifth class with thousands of alumni in its network that stretches from coast to coast and includes institutions of higher education from local community colleges to research universities and ivy league colleges. If you know many young graduates, the chances have been increasing that one of them has quietly matriculated in response to the crisis of crushing debt payments. Yet despite widespread awareness of the program on campuses by students and financial aid advisors via word of mouth, the world of Universities and mainstream media news outlets have tacitly given their approval to the campaign by remaining strangely silent as tuitions have continued to climb an unbelievable average of 8-9% per year.

In this episode we do not pass judgement on Sugar Baby University, it's parent company 'Seeking Arrangement' or it's spokesperson Kimberly De La Cruz, who is our guest. Rather, we celebrate their openness to discuss the situation, and question, instead, the universities, politicians, media, and the lending industry, who have quietly created the desperate need for this program which they do not openly discuss and prefer not to address at all. 


Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Louis Proyect Puts Hands On Matt Taibbi And The Weinstein Bros.


counterpunch |  In the opening moments of their conversation, Taibbi repented for not making a big stink over Weinstein’s ostracism and eventual resignation from Evergreen over student protests. Suing the school for $3.8 million in damage, Weinstein walked away with only a half-million.

One wonders if Taibbi looked into the case against Weinstein made by three Evergreen professors that year on Huffington Post titled “Another Side of The Evergreen State College Story”. One of them was Zoltan Grossman, who has written dozens of articles for CounterPunch over the years. The three make an essential point:
In order for a propaganda campaign to succeed, it needs a Big Lie. At Evergreen, the Big Lie is that Evergreen’s Day of Absence demonstrated “reverse racism” as whites “were forced to leave campus because of the color of their skin.” It is stunning to us how often this “alternative fact” has been repeated until it has become unchallenged truth. The truth is that the Day of Absence has long been an accepted — and voluntary — practice at Evergreen. On the Day of Absence, people of color who chose to do so generally attended an off-campus event, while whites who chose to participate stayed on campus to attend lectures, workshops and discussions about how race and racism shape social structures and everyday life.
Once they got past the Evergreen business, Weinstein and Taibbi settled into a litany of how bad things have gotten in the U.S. because of uppity anti-racist students dragging the country down. They struck me as two middle-aged men ready to write a book titled “The Decline of the U.S.” after the fashion of Oswald Spengler. They probably could make good money writing such a book since there is always a market for screeds against political correctness, identity politics, and that sort of thing. Usually written by conservatives like Allan Bloom (“The Closing of the American Mind”), they also have their liberal counterparts like Todd Gitlin, who wrote “The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars” in 1996.

Gitlin, who signed the Harper’s letter, described himself in the book as sympathetic to blacks but was distressed by their retreat into what he felt were self-absorbed, symbolic politics, according to a N.Y. Times review. He wrote that “few political campaigns are launched against the impoverishment of the cities” and that “The diversity rhetoric of identity politics short-circuits the necessary discussion of what ought to be done about all the dying out there.” He had come to the same conclusions as Adolph Reed Jr., who also got the red-carpet treatment from Taibbi and Halper.

Weinstein gushed over Taibbi’s long record of courageous journalism as if writing take-downs of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump risked a jail term. Yes, Taibbi is entertaining, but how far can you go stating the obvious, even if scabrously. I’d prefer a little less scabrousness and a lot more economic analysis. That’s one of the reasons I stopped reading Taibbi after the good old “vampire squid” days ended.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

What Would An Exploding Heads Day Be Without A Heaping Helping Of Weinstein?



dr.brian.keating |  In part one of our extensive conversation, we cover his Geometric Unity theory and the value of scientific theories in general.

As a mathematician and an economist, Eric is uniquely suited to understanding how ideas have contributed to human civilization — and what we’re losing out on when academia throttles them. His perspective that, “[Professors] need the freedom of a billionaire without the wealth of one,” is a spin on something Ralph Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, told him:

“The bargain was always that you weren’t going to get super rich as a professor, but you would have the freedom that came from your job. And that’s how we got great people. When we lost freedom, we stopped being able to compete effectively for the top people.”

Having Eric on the show challenged me to consider my approach to the interview. Though an expert in experimental physics, it is beneficial to be reminded about the contributions of theoretical study. His allegory that the tailor who sews on the last button of a coat shouldn’t get all the credit is powerful. Think of the creative spark, the person who sketches, then finds practical materials, the engineers who bring instruments into the equation, and all the other pieces of the puzzle.

In this interview, Eric says, “The scientific method is actually the radio edit of great science” and that is really striking. It is important to remember that the unedited version exists, even if it doesn’t make it through all the noise very often.

Saturday, April 11, 2020

The Covid-19 Economic and Political Restructuring Narrative In The Light Of Preference Falsification


Thanks to Eric Weinstein, this year's curriculum kicked-off with an introduction to the concept of "preference falsification".  The ongoing and encompassing tsunami of current events make it exceedingly germaine for you to revisit this little-known - but nevertheless determinative concept.

voxeu |  We characterise the motivations central to the workings of civil society by a series of other regarding or ethical values including reciprocity, fairness, and sustainability. Also included is the term identity, by which we refer to a bias in favour of those who one calls “us” over “them.” We draw attention to this aspect of the civil society dimension to stress that in insisting on the importance of community in fashioning a response to the pandemic, we recognise the capacity of these community-based solutions to sustain xenophobic, parochial, and other repugnant actions.

Figure 2 illustrates the location in “institution-space” of different responses to the epidemic. At the top left is the government as the insurer of last resort. Neither market nor household risk-sharing can handle an economy-wide contraction of activity required by containment policies; and neither can compel the near-universal participation that makes risk pooling possible.

Closer to the civil society pole are social distancing policies implemented through consent. The triangle opens up space for modern-day analogues of the so-called Dunkirk strategy – small, privately owned boats took up where the British navy lacked the resources to evacuate those trapped on the beaches in 1940.  An example is the public-spirited mobilisation by universities and small private labs of efforts to undertake production and processing of tests and to develop new machines to substitute for scarce ventilators.

These examples underline an important truth about institutional and policy design: the poles of the institution space – at least ideally – are complements not substitutes. Well-designed government policies enhance the workings of markets and enhance the salience of cooperative and other socially valuable preferences.  Well-designed markets both empower governments and make them more accountable without crowding out ethical and other pro-social preferences.

Much of the content that we think is essential to a successful post-COVID-19 economic vernacular is present in two recent advances in the field.

The first is the insight – dating back to Hayek – that information is scarce and local. Neither government officials nor private owners and managers of firms know enough to write incentive-based enforceable contracts or governmental fiats to implement optimal social distancing, surveillance, or deployment of resources to the health sector, including to vaccine development.

The second big change in economics gives us hope that non-governmental and non-market solutions may actually contribute to mitigating problems that are poorly addressed by contract or fiat.  The behavioural economics revolution makes it clear that people – far from the individualistic and amoral representation in conventional economics – are capable of extraordinary levels of cooperation based on ethical values and other regarding preferences.  

As was the case with the Great Depression and WWII, we will not be the same after COVID-19. And neither, we also hope, will be the way people talk about the economy.

But there is a critical difference between the post-Great Depression period and today. The pandemic of that era – massive unemployment and economic insecurity – was beaten new rules of the game that delivered immediate benefits. Unemployment insurance, a larger role for government expenditures and, in many countries, trade union engagement in wage-setting and the introduction of new technology reflected both the analytics and the ethics of the new economic vernacular. The result was the decades of performance referred to as the golden age of capitalism, making both the new rules and the new vernacular difficult to dislodge. 

It is possible, but far from certain, that the mounting costs of climate change and recurrent pandemic threats will provide an environment that supports a similar symbiosis between a new economic vernacular and new rules of the game yielding immediate concrete benefits. 

Saturday, April 04, 2020

Weinstein's Revenge: The New Geometric Quantum


edge |  The modern theory of the quantum has only recently come to be understood to be even more exquisitely geometric than Einstein's General Relativity. How this realization unfolded over the last 40 years is a fascinating story that has, to the best of my knowledge, never been fully told as it is not particularly popular with some of the very people responsible for this stunning achievement.
To set the stage, recall that fundamental physics can be divided into two sectors with separate but maddeningly incompatible advantages. The gravitational force has, since Einstein's theory of general relativity, been admired for its four dimensional geometric elegance. The quantum, on the other hand encompasses the remaining phenomena, and is lauded instead for its unparalleled precision, and infinite dimensional analytic depth.

The story of the geometric quantum begins at some point around 1973-1974, when our consensus picture of fundamental particle theory stopped advancing. This stasis, known as the 'Standard Model', seemed initially like little more than a temporary resting spot on the relentless path towards progress in fundamental physics, and theorists of the era wasted little time proposing new theories in the expectation that they would be quickly confirmed by experimentalists looking for novel phenomena. But that expected entry into the promised land of new physics turned into a 40-year period of half-mad tribal wandering in an arid desert, all but devoid of new phenomena.

Yet just as particle theory was failing to advance in the mid 1970s, something amazing was quietly happening over lunch at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. There, Nobel physics laureate CN Yang and geometer (and soon to billionaire) Jim Simons had started an informal seminar to understand what, if anything, modern geometry had to do with quantum field theory. The shocking discovery that emerged from these talks was that both geometers and quantum theorists had independently gotten hold of different collections of insights into a common structure that each group had independently discovered for themselves. A Rosetta stone of sorts called the Wu-Yang dictionary was quickly assembled by the physicists, and Isadore Singer of MIT took these results from Stony Brook to his collaborator Michael Atiyah in Oxford where their research with Nigel Hitchin began a geometric renaissance in physics inspired geometry that continues to this day.

While the Stony Brook history may be less discussed by some of today's younger mathematicians and physicists, it is not a point of contention between the various members of the community. The more controversial part of this story, however, is that a hoped for golden era of theoretical physics did not emerge in the aftermath to produce a new consensus theory of elementary particles. Instead the interaction highlighted the strange idea that, just possibly, Quantum theory was actually a natural and elegant self-assembling body of pure geometry that had fallen into an abysmal state of pedagogy putting it beyond mathematical recognition. By this reasoning, the mathematical basket case of quantum field theory was able to cling to life and survive numerous near death experiences in its confrontations with mathematical rigor only because it was being underpinned by a natural infinite dimensional geometry, which is to this day still only partially understood.

In short, most physicists were trying and failing to quantize Einstein's geometric theory of gravity because they were first meant to go in the opposite and less glamorous direction of geometrizing the quantum instead. Unfortunately for Physics, mathematicians had somewhat dropped the ball by not sufficiently developing the geometry of infinite dimensional systems (such as the Standard Model), which would have been analogous to the 4-dimensional Riemannian geometry appropriated from mathematics by Einstein.

This reversal could well be thought of as Einstein's revenge upon the excesses of quantum triumphalism, served ice cold decades after his death: the more researchers dreamed of becoming the Nobel winning physicists to quantize gravity, the more they were rewarded only as mathematicians for what some saw as the relatively remedial task of geometrizing the quantum. The more they claimed that the 'power and glory' of string theory (a failed piece of 1970s sub-atomic physics which has mysteriously lingered into the 21st century) was the 'only game in town', the more it suggested that it was the string theory-based unification claims that, in the absence of testable predictions, were themselves sinking with a glug to the bottom of the sea.

What we learned from this episode was profound. Increasingly, the structure of Quantum Field Theory appears to be a purely mathematical input-output machine where our physical world is but one of many natural inputs that the machine is able to unpack from initial data. In much the way that a simple one-celled human embryo self-assembles into a trillion celled infant of inconceivable elegance, the humble act of putting a function (called an 'action' by physicists) on a space of geometric waves appears to trigger a self-assembling mathematical Rube-Goldberg process which recovers the seemingly intricate features of the formidable quantum as it inexorably unfolds. It also appears that the more geometric the input given to the machine, the more the unpacking process conspires to steer clear of the pathologies which famously afflict less grounded quantum theories. It is even conceivable that sufficiently natural geometric input could ultimately reveal the recent emphasis on 'quantizing gravity' as an extravagant mathematical misadventure distracting from Einstein's dream of a unified physical field. Like genius itself, with the right natural physical input, the new geometric quantum now appears to many mathematicians and physicists to be the proverbial fire that lights itself.

Yet, if the physicists of this era failed to advance the standard model, it was only in their own terms that they went down to defeat. Just as in an earlier era in which physicists retooled to become the first generation of molecular biologists, their viewpoints came to dominate much of modern geometry in the last four decades, scoring numerous mathematical successes that will stand the tests of time.

Likewise their quest to quantize gravity may well have backfired, but only in the most romantic and elegant way possible by instead geometrizing the venerable quantum as a positive externality.
But the most important lesson is that, at a minimum, Einstein's minor dream of a world of pure geometry has largely been realized as the result of a large group effort. All known physical phenomena can now be recognized as fashioned from the pure, if still heterogeneous, marble of geometry through the efforts of a new pantheon of giants. Their achievements, while still incomplete, explain in advance of unification that the source code of the universe is overwhelmingly likely to determine a purely geometric operating system written in a uniform programming language. While that leaves Einstein's greater quest for the unifying physics unfinished, and the marble something of a disappointing patchwork of motley colors, it suggests that the leaders during the years of the Standard Model stasis have put this period to good use for the benefit of those who hope to follow.

Weinstein Discussion Resources

reddit | Discord Server for discussion of The Portal

I've created a Discord server for anyone who would like to discuss The Portal in real time.  And with Eric's recent discussions of community building, I thought this may also have the possibility of becoming a useful place.



Friday, March 27, 2020

Dr. Heather Heying and Bandit Bret Weinstein Hold Forth On The Coronavirus Situation


nakedcapitalism |   We can make a highly suggestive correlation between globalizers and COVID-19 if we look at two simple maps. First, as is well known, one of the main distinctions between the places that are “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward” (i.e., globalizers) and the dull provincials in flyover is the possession of passports. (A passport is a likely marker for the sort of person who asks “Why don’t they just leave?”; “front-row kids,” in Chris Arnade’s parlance, as distinguished from, say, grocery workers, who he calls “back-row” kids.) Here is a map of passport ownership by state: 

The correlation is rather neat, don’t you think? It makes sense that the first case was in a globalist, passport-owning city like Seattle on the West Coast; and it makes sense that the world capital of globalization, passport-owning New York City, now has a major outbreak.
Oh, and the ability to travel by air correlates to income (a proxy for class)

What Is France To Do With The Thousands Of Soldiers Expelled From Africa?

SCF  |    Russian President Vladimir Putin was spot-on this week in his observation about why France’s Emmanuel Macron is strutting around ...