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mudil

8,652 karma · joined December 7, 2009

"The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology" — E. O. Wilson

"Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme-collectivism." -Ayn Rand

"The dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood." -Vladimir Bukovsky

"It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle." -P.J. O'Rourke

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -James Madison

"Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing." -George Orwell in 1984

"Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, social justice." - Thomas Sowell

"This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite." - Marco Rubio

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” – John F. Kennedy

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free." - President Ronald Reagan

“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.” - Elon Musk

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." - H.L. Mencken

“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.“ -Barry Goldwater

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.” - Christopher Browning in “Ordinary Men“

"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole." - Thomas Sowell

“It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will thereby cease to be a moron.” - H.L. Mencken

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world". - President Calvin Coolidge

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan

"Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed." -Robert A. Heinlein

"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." -George Orwell

"There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining “punishment” and “being supposed to punish” hurts it, arouses fear in it. “Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish? Punishing itself is terrible.” With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence." -Friedrich Nietzsche

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." -Thomas Sowell

"If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning." -Aristotle Onassis

"For quality of life, it is better to err on the side of being an optimist and wrong, rather than a pessimist and right." -Elon Musk

"Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity." -Charlie Munger

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy." - George Orwell in 1984

“I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.” ― George Orwell

"Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare’s Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume." - Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial." -Friedrich Nietzsche

"The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." -Paul Krugman (1998)

"But we’re very clear of our principles and our purpose, which is to be aligned with our Allies, understanding that — I mean, listen, guys, we’re talking about the potential for war in Europe." - US Vice President Kamala Harris, Munich, Germany February 20, 2022

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mudil··on Anti-Communism Week, 2025
"The dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood." -Vladimir Bukovsky
mudil··on Starship's eleventh flight test
What did their boss do that makes you feel so so sad?
mudil·
·on Wildfires are erasing California's climate gains, research shows (2022)
From the WSJ:

"Start with its environmental obsessions. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire- and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species.

The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species.

Since the milkvetch requires wildfires to propagate, the only way to boost its numbers is to let the land burn. A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans from what they view as the plant’s rightful habitat."

mudil··on California Fire Facts
More from the WSJ:

"Consider the state’s response to crime and homelessness, which may have contributed to the fires. Last year’s Park Fire—the fourth largest in state history—was allegedly ignited by a man with two prior felony convictions who was on parole for a DUI. The Los Angeles Times reported in early 2021 that 24 fires on average were breaking out each day in the city’s homeless encampments. A fire in an encampment shut down an L.A. freeway last November, the second time that had happened in a little over a year.

Good Samaritans on Thursday detained a homeless man who they said used a flamethrower to incinerate Christmas trees and garbage cans, around the same time as a major fire erupted. Police arrested the vagrant on a felony probation violation—meaning he had been on parole for another felony—because they said they lacked probable cause to charge him with arson. The suspect reportedly claimed he was using a blowtorch to smoke marijuana."

mudil··on California Fire Facts
Not so funny from the WSJ:

"Start with its environmental obsessions. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in 2019 sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire- and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species.

The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species.

Since the milkvetch requires wildfires to propagate, the only way to boost its numbers is to let the land burn."

mudil··on AI Guesses Your Accent
Same here.
mudil··on AI Guesses Your Accent
I am from Ukraine but it labeled me Russian. I guess, we'll have to fight for recognition some more.
mudil··on The medical contrarians picked to lead health agencies
Dr Oz is an American boarded cardiovascular surgeon, who performed many complicated surgeries, including cardiac transplants. He received his undergraduate degree in biology magna cum laude at Harvard University. He obtained MD and MBA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Penn's Wharton School. He completed his residency and fellowship at Columbia University.

Maybe you are so concerned because you get your information from MSM that is full of shit?

mudil··on Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science
Opinion pieces in scientific magazine should be based on the facts, and not just on opinions.
mudil··on Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way
Speaking as an MD, as someone who founded a medical technology blog in 2004, and closed it this year.

Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed.

When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.

It's a tragedy for whole society.

mudil··on U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan
mudil··on U.S. Sues Apple, Alleges Tech Giant Exploits Illegal Monopoly
"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan
mudil··on Drone Swarms Are About to Change the Balance of Military Power
https://archive.is/QWm3f
mudil··on Sweden Is a NATO Member
FYI "The head of the Russian General Staff Academy announced the threat of a “large-scale war in Europe”

The state agency RIA Novosti on Thursday reported on an article by Vladimir Zarudnitsky, head of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The article was written in the departmental magazine “Military Thought” and was “at the disposal” of the agency.

The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine into a large-scale war in Europe cannot be ruled out; the likelihood of Russia being drawn into new military conflicts is increasing, the main idea of the RIA Novosti article is retold.

“The possibility of an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine cannot be ruled out - from the expansion of participants in the ‘proxy forces’ used for military confrontation with Russia to a large-scale war in Europe,” wrote General Zarudnitsky.

“The main source of military threats to our state is the anti-Russian policy of the United States and its allies, waging a new type of hybrid war in order to completely weaken Russia, limit its sovereignty and destroy territorial integrity,” the general was quoted by Reuters, which also noted that a high-ranking A Russian military officer warned of the threat of the conflict in Ukraine escalating into a full-scale war in Europe.

Zarudnitsky's comments come as the West struggles to help Ukraine with more weapons and money after a failed counteroffensive, Reuters noted."

mudil··on Aeroflot deactivates brakes on nine aircraft, relies solely on reverse thrust
Good luck with this logic.
mudil··on YouTube, the jewel of the internet
It says something about the power of YouTube that Russian government still did not ban it, but it banned Facebook and Instagram. I suspect that banning YouTube might be dangerous to the putin regime.
mudil··on Generative AI: A Creative New World
'Prepare for impending market collapse and massive market failure...'

If you are so good at seeing the future, you should be the richest person on earth. Surely there's a way to short the market.

mudil··on How food powers the body's metabolism
This whole discussion missed the central role of oxygen molecule as the ultimate energy source.

Why we need oxygen:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsomega.9b03352

https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.5b00333

mudil··on Ask HN: Are we building a tech dystopia?
“The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
mudil··on The ACLU Has Lost Its Way
The ACLU lost its legitimacy when it stopped defending the civil liberties of people they don't agree with.
mudil··on Statement from Roman Abramovich
Navalny 35 (aka Navalny's List https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navalny_35) is a group of Russian "human rights abusers, kleptocrats, and corruptioners". The list been created by the Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation.

Abramovich is on the top of the list.

This list is a primary starting focus of Western govs to sanction Putin cronies. I hope Abramovich et al loose everything, not only for this war, but for robbing Russia and its people of their natural resources wealth.

mudil··on An open letter on E.O. Wilson's legacy
I came from the Soviet Union and these kinds of debates smell like 1937, like Lysenkoism, like Soviet doctors trials, etc etc. On one hand we have scientists that are probing the nature of reality and on the other we have politically opportune believers slash do-gooders, ready to paint the science on a political canvas, hurting the science, the scientists, and the progress itself.
mudil··on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
Why, when describimg conservatives, always a disclaimer? There's nothing wrong with Thomas Sowell or his ideas. He is an intellectual powerhouse.
mudil··on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
Ubik and Three Stigmata are amazing!
mudil··on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
I like Three Stigmata too. Both books are amazing.
mudil··on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
I read it whole and also found it to be not enjoyable.
mudil··on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
"The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War" by Ben Macintyre is an amazing story, very well written.
mudil··on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
Two thumbs up for every book by Nassim Taleb!
mudil··on Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021?
"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote. It's a masterpiece.
mudil··on Rijksmuseum to Stage the Largest Vermeer Exhibition in 2023
Tim's Vermeer is an excellent documentary that looks at the possibility that Vermeer used optical technology to produce his paintings. Pretty convincing documentary, imo.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/

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