I started a TMBG fan club called Church of the Possible Giants around the time this album was released. One of the requirements for membership is that your given first name is John. If you want to join, drop me a line, convince me your name is John, and I will send you a CotPG pencil.
In a Senate hearing today, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said, under oath:
“One of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers. One of the things that I was briefed on very early, senator, was by the CIA records management folks about the use of Signal as a permissible work use. It is. That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”
I watched the full debate. The proposition was "Don't Trust the Mainstream Media". On the pro side were Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murray; the con side was made up of Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg.
It wasn't great. There were lots of personal attacks on both sides. Biting remarks can add spice to a debate, but this got a little ugly for my tastes. Gladwell went especially foul by intimating Taibbi's fondness for Walter Cronkite and other trusted journalists of his era was due not to these iconic newsmen's integrity, but because they were white men, a suggestion Gladwell made three or four times.
The Pro side brought up several of the big stories of the past few years on which the mainstream media went rather hard, but turned out to be widely accepted as wrong, like Trump-Putin collusion and Hunter Biden's laptop, but the Con team essentially dismissed these as nothingburgers.
Before the start of the debate, the audience is polled on their opinion about the proposition. It was 48% Pro (don't trust the media) and 52% Con. Another poll was taken at the end, and it was determined the Pro side (don't trust the mainstream media) won, with 67% now agreeing with them.
The most impressive person on the stage was the moderator Rudyard Griffiths. He struck me as an educated, composed, and immanently fair man.
I believe the young economist mentioned in the article is simply wrong in his analysis. The most efficient 4-denomination set is {1,5,18,25} (tied with {1,5,18,29}) at 3.89 coins per transaction, better than the economist's {1,3,11,38} at 4.10. This result is from a 2003 paper by Jeffrey Shallit called "What's This Country Needs is an 18¢ Piece". Just before posting, I verified Shallit's result with a Python program.
Worth noting that 2016 election denial (Russia hacked the election!) was never banned. Here's an entertaining compilation of some of it, but there's plenty more where that came from.
Literally the subhed of the article: "Director has criticised the practice of re-editing older films while expressing remorse over removing guns in a later edition of ET"
The verdict came in around 7pm. Anyone else find it ironic that the author submitted, and the NY Times published, a 1750-word opinion piece the very next morning, complaining that the jury was too rash in reaching a verdict?
Can you share a few examples out of the 30,000 entries that you consider actual lies? (not mere puffery, not trivial errors, not simple difference of opinion)
Something substantive and fairly verifiable as false, along the lines of Biden's claim that he earned three degrees, or that he got arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela, or that he marched in the civil rights movement, or that his son died in Iraq, or that he finished the top half of his law school class.
Most of the entries in the database are things like "we have the greatest economy in history" and other such vague puffery. And if Trump repeats it 100 times, it counts as 100 lies.
Spot check the Post's database of 30,573 lies. It's a joke.
*This very sentence, if uttered by Trump, would be entered in their database: a joke is an amusing action or story with a punchline; our database is an objective list of lies.
The author uses the Clinton email scandal as an example of how the media over-covered certain stories.
"That Clinton was somehow a criminal for doing what her predecessor Colin Powell had also done—conduct government business using a private server—was a staple of the Trump campaign"
How does an educated person, journalist or not, not know the difference between using a private email account, which is what Colin Powell confessed to, and having a private email server set up in your home? (rumored to be quite insecure in the first few months)
There are several such "mistakes" in this article. It indeed read like a parody.
I'm pretty sure this first appeared in Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in the March 1962 issue of Scientific American. Gardner later collected some of his columns and published them in books, which is what you see in this HN submission.