What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know. | Quanta Magazine

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I learned entropy as the observation that if you drop an unbound deck of playing cards from shoulder height to the ground, the likelihood that it will come to rest as an intact deck is as near-zero as to be equivalent to zero. The number of influences on any entity in the universe makes it impossible that it will behave in a perfectly organized way. Another way of saying this is that organization requires the input of energy. Without additional energy put into a system, the component parts will behave in a chaotic way.

This concept has always been central to my view of the WTC collapses on 9-11. The fact that buildings 1 and 2 fell upon airline impact, okay. I can do that. But the fact that all three buildings (including 7) fell in such a precisely organized manner - into their own footprint - is impossible. To believe that story is to believe that entropy was violated that day.

This is what controlled demolition is. It's the precise management of charge to overcome the chaotic natural collapse of a building. Energy is added to the system to control the chaos that would ensue if gravity were the only driver.

Those buildings can not have fallen in the way that they did without planning.

Entropy was not violated that day. It was managed. Ergo, the buildings fell as they did because they were controlled. The official story would violate entropy, therefore the official story is physically impossible, and is thus the most profound of lies. It is a lie that has been successful only because too few people are simultaneously capable and willing to see the simple truth in front of us. When something cannot happen, it didn't happen, no matter who says otherwise.

I've said this before: "The Specter of The Gun" is a great Star Trek episode talking about precisely this subject. Recognizing the impossibility of physical laws being broken is far harder than we would expect it to be. Human psychology, the psychology of what we expect to happen - regardless of whether that is physically possible - is set against reality to a far greater extent than we like to believe.

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Or, stated better than I can state it (from Robert Malone's weekly cartoons on substack):

"The actual consensus view of mainstream liberals is that democracy cannot function if people they don't like are allowed to participate in it." -@martyrmade

[I presume this is an X post, but not sure.]

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This has been going on for more than a decade. The "political class" has given themselves the right to decide who is acceptable for any given country to elect. My eyes opened to this in 2012 when Ron Paul was declared "unelectable". The belief among this class is that the population can only be represented by a member of a pre-selected set, which falls within the window of views that are broadly considered (by the political class itself, of course) "acceptable". It's the same question we've been repeating ad nauseum for decades: Who decides that criteria? They don't believe any longer that the election itself can be trusted to be the deciding factor. Actual un-fuckeried-with elections yield ideologies unacceptable to the political class, so those elections must be fucked with. They don't want the population represented; they want the population ruled by their rules. It's clear as day and growing clearer with each rise of the sun.

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Within this badly beaten dead horse lies a nugget of valuable but ignored information.

He says that in the Milgram experiment, 65% of participants delivered the maximum voltage. The mirror image of that tells us that 35% of participants did not.

Now I'm not intimately familiar with the statistics of that experiment. I've only heard of it over the years in the casual way many of us have. But just using this 65 / 35 split, the conclusion that anyone can be turned into a monster is by definition not true. 65% of people can be turned into monsters.

This creates a situation where you can definitely get monster societies. 65% is enough to destroy civilized functioning as a population. But having a monster society does not mean there are not good people remaining.

This is the reality of humanity and always has been. There has always existed a minority of people who are genuinely and consistently good. It's why we have among our oldest stories those of Noah and of Lot. It has never been easy to be good. It requires - wait for it - character. True character is not a majority trait.

The good news, however, is that bad behavior is self-correcting. It's ugly as shit in the meantime, but societies that do this will burn out in the end. They destroy themselves, and then the pattern starts over again.

Each of us living in this plane of existence is here to experience this. Where we stand as an individual on this moral spectrum is unique to each of us. And for each of us, it looks to me like the best we can do is to cling as tightly as possible to our own individual decency. Yes, the world is a dark, twisted, and cruel place, statistically. I am working my ass off to hold down that minority position, because the only part I can be confident I'm being truly decent within is my own. This is not easy, but it's the best use of a lifetime that I can imagine.

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A Buddhist here.

The answer to your question is that when an asteroid destroys all life on earth, an asteroid destroys all life on earth.

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Politics used to be a subtle art. They would state a truth but slant it. Comparing the slanted truths of the two sides, one would arrive somewhere in the middle.

Those days are gone post-2001. Flagrant 100% lies. It would make things easier except it's shocking how many seemingly normal people cannot see what's staring them directly the face.

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Public Education is now in the books as an oxymoron, alongside the classic Military Intelligence.

They are literally and actively destroying students' intelligence. What a world.

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A scary thought experiment:

Do we remember within the past year when Ukraine fired two missiles into Poland and promptly claimed (backed by the usual neocon / MSM lapdogs) that "Russia attacked Poland! NATO article 5!" Remember that?

The reason that fizzled quickly is that Poland came out pretty fast and said, "Uh, actually guys, those came from Ukraine..."

Would Tusk have made the same decision?

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We have reached the end-point of "negative campaigning".

When I was younger, campaigning was a mix of positive and negative. Alongside the attack ads, candidates would also advertise the positive aspects of their own platform, showing the optimism of what they would achieve. Over the decades, as they discovered the attack ads on their opponents were more "effective" to getting themselves elected, campaigns went increasingly negative. Today we're basically 100% attack ads with no advertising the benefits of their own policies.

But as I say, we've reached the end-point. The theory of an attack ad is that your protection is the path to avoid the horror you demonstrate is the other guy. In the current moment, this strategy has gone radically into reverse. Running attack ads is now hurting national-level democrats. Why? Their attacks have been demonstrated to be manufactured. An attack has to be based on what the other guy actually did. The classic example is the "very fine people" attack. More and more people have gotten off their ass and actually watched Trump's comments that day many years ago. Everyone who realizes that this attack is an egregious lie is now motivated to vote for the person attacked by those attacking him.

The Democrats are having greater and greater trouble with this. The only strategy either party knows is negative campaigning at this point. They have forgotten the skills for positive campaigns. But with the amount of demonstrable lies the Democrats have used with which to attack Trump, their attacks are now increasing Trump's popularity by the day.

The dynamic has become, Democrats attack Trump -> Trump's poll numbers go up. Democrats own energy is helping Trump. The best they can do is to shut up. But given the collapse of society around us, that isn't an option either, because they are the party in power.

For the moment this works only with regards to Trump, but the more the Democrat localities continue to dissolve, this dynamic will enter the more local races as well.

If the Republicans were a true opposition party, they'd have a field day. But Republicans are equally blind to their own failure: namely they fight like hell to gain and use power over the state apparatus which their marketing claims they are against empowering. The Republican base genuinely wants to CUT government. Republican base aren't so interested in having Republican government vs Democratic government. The base wants parts of government eliminated entirely. No government there to be run by anyone. The hypocrisy of the Republicans working to take power over precisely the government their base wants to eliminate neuters their attempts at resistance to Democratic dominance of government. As evil as the Democrats are, at least their lies align with each other. They say they want more government, and they continue to campaign for more government.

Our society is burning down around us.

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Russia is in Syria at the invitation of the UN-recognized government of Syria. The Russians and the Syrians have been official allies for decades. The US? By your logic, the US can place troops in any country in the world they can get away with. All they need to do is identify "an enemy" and "a victim", and they're in. The particular irony with ISIS, of course, is that ISIS was the direct result of the US's prior intervention in Iraq and Libya, creating chaos in both locations that has yet to be resolved to this day. How many times does the US need to enter an area and create in it smoking ruins (Afghanistan, anyone?) before you begin to wonder whether US intervention may be, just maybe, a shitty idea? Is this thought ever going to occur to you?

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What I find fascinating is that they are filling a toilet bowl that is emptying faster than they can fill it. By that I mean that pharma has lost people's trust. No matter how desperately they prime the pump with advertising [= repetition mind programming], people are daily more aware of the evil that Big Pharma has embraced. The old model assumes a neutral / positive attitude toward a product. When the attitude is as negative as the popular view of Big Pharma / Big Hostpital is in our context, these advertising blitzes just increasingly piss people off. If each ad is annoying like a mosquito, sending a swarm of mosquitos is not going to make people more positively disposed toward your product. It's going to every day increase people's consciousness and awareness of the social cancer that your products represent and make them more and more resolved to find a way to rid themselves of that cancer. The rulers of the universe don't see this dynamic, but on the ground it becomes clearer to me with each passing day. Something's gotta give.

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I find tornados to be the scariest of all natural manifestations. You can see them coming, and there is nothing you can do as you wait to find out if your number is up. That kind of power forces us into the proper attitude of fear, respect and awe which is due a force beyond human comprehension, much less control.

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You're ignoring that Russia ≠ the Soviet Union. The end of the USSR created today's geopolitical landscape, which bears no resemblance to that of post-war until 1989. The resources of Russia are not remotely comparable to the resources of the Soviet Union plus the eastern bloc countries.

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First, 2020s Russia and 1930s Germany represent a false parallel. The contexts are radically different.

Second, if you want to talk about recognizing borders, the US needs to have a little conversation about its troops in Syria, which nobody ever authorized, either within the US system or outside it. The soldiers simply appeared there, fait accompli. Given the past 20 years of history, the west has zero moral high ground to talk about invading other countries for its own interests.

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However, if Russia conquers Ukraine, Russia will be more powerful and threaten the West.

This oversimplification of this conflict is the root of the problem. "Russia conquers Ukraine" is not remotely what's going on. "Ukraine" is yet another of the innumerable examples throughout history of political borders which do not accurately reflect the tribal reality that exists on the ground. The people in the west of Ukraine HATE the people in the east of Ukraine and vice versa. These are two mutually antagonistic tribes. The group from western Ukraine took power in 2014 from a leader who had been aligned with the eastern Ukrainian faction. The eastern Ukrainians are majority ethnic Russians (overwhelming ethnic Russian in the case of Crimea), and those ethnic Russians never accepted that transfer of power. The links between this population of Russians in Ukraine and Russians within Russia's pre-2022 borders are family links, ultra-tight. There is no Russian government that could ever ignore persecution of Russians in Ukraine or the potential that Ukraine become a sworn enemy of Russia (the baseline meaning of "joining NATO"). This is so far beyond "Vladimir Putin" as to be laughable. Russian governments going back to Gorbachev (the "western hero") have been absolutely clear on this point for decades. Ukraine CANNOT be aligned against Russia. This is existential for Russians and always has been. Zip, zilch, zero to do with Putin. No leader could claim to be Russian and take the opposing point of view.

Russia does not want to "conquer" Ukraine. Russia wants two things: first, they have made formal what has been de-facto true for longer than anyone living today remembers - i.e. the eastern provinces, being ethnic Russian and being unwilling to be ruled by a separate ethnic group based in western Ukraine, are indeed Russians. That's what the annexation of the Donbass represents. Second, western Ukraine - which is not Russian and cannot be Russian - cannot be used as a forward military base for NATO to stage hostilities against Russia. Russia has been invaded from Europe multiple times in its history (anyone remember Napoleon? WWII anyone?). Again, this is way beyond the whims of Vladimir Putin; it is deep inside the Russian national character. Ukraine not being in NATO is something the Russians are willing to fight a war over.

Russia does not want to "conquer" Ukraine. They are fighting this war because they will not offer anyone again the opportunity to invade them from the west, as long as they can help it.

The takeover of the Ukrainian state by the western faction in 2014 was a tripwire. The resulting response from Russia was ironically surprising only in that it took longer than many of us would have expected for Russia to respond emphatically. The restraint shown by Putin from 2014 to 2022 was a measure of his desperate hope that Russia would be able to form a normal trading relationship with Europe and avoid having to take the bait offered by NATO of direct conflict.

Putin is not a saint. He's the leader of a state in Russia, and Russian politics has always been highly centralized and very corrupt. He's no different. But that is actually utterly irrelevant to the dynamics I have just described. The leadership in western Ukraine is absolutely the match (and then even a little more) for corruption, venality and ignorance as anything the Russians can put forth. Of course they are. So both regimes are thoroughly corrupt. But this war is way beyond that, and the profound misunderstanding on the part of the west of the motivations of Russia here (not just Putin, RUSSIA) is central to the understanding of why more than half a million men are now dead on both sides of the line in Ukraine.

It's a tragedy of human ignorance - on both sides, and to say "It's Russia's fault!" is the perfect embodiment of that ignorance.

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Uh...

Is this a trick question?

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It just seems insanely pointless. Do they (whoever "they" are) and she believe we have reached the point that a candidate who flatly denies their own words from just weeks prior during the same campaign will become popular and get elected? People are dumbed down, but we're not that dumbed down yet. By behavior like this, she perfectly exemplifies every point Ramaswamy made regarding her known history of flagrant lies. Do the people supporting her financially really think they're going to ride this kind of behavior to the White House? Seriously?

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Given that, as the article notes, he had prior battery incidents before this most famous one, this is almost the textbook definition of a "danger to society". Rehabilitation seems impossible. What to do in cases like this? Whatever it takes to keep him as far from society as possible for as long as possible.

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Those who believe Thunberg is working anything but FOR the establishment believe all the other mainstream narratives as well. Some people will believe everything they are told as long as it comes from "the authorities". There's no reaching people like this.

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Black people mostly commit crime against other black people and shit on their own communities.

This is the simple, obvious, elephant-in-the-room reason why BLM is total and complete bullshit. The physical insecurity blacks face comes overwhelmingly at the hands of other blacks. Until they acknowledge, address, and correct that truth, blaming whites for their problems is meaningless.

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My guess is she's acting on principle. She doesn't want to tacitly legitimize the "male and female are just a social construct" bullshit. This is her way of saying, "No." Good for her.

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