HWFO Housekeeping and Reading List November 2023
And some Osama Bin Laden talk
In case you missed it, The Guardian recently took down Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America, in which he outlined his multipoint rationale for blowing up the World Trade center. This letter first hit the Guardian pages on Thanksgiving Day of 2002 and survived online for 21 years, throughout multiple culture battles and geopolitical conflicts, to eventually fall to the heavy hand of TikTok girls. Here’s a link to an archived version of that webpage:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130826184301/https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
The Guardian link now says this:
In simpler terms, after Hamas jumped the wall and murdered a thousand Israeli Jews they very likely said something along the lines of “civilians are legitimate targets in the fight against oppression because Israel is a democracy and therefore the actions of its government are a reflection of the will of its people.” Which is also something that Osama Bin Laden said in his letter. In fact that’s the main fulcrum around which the entire letter pivots.
And that same phrase fits quite well with the sorts of protests that were going on here in 2020. In fact, the most of the opinions expressed by Osama Bin Laden in his letter fit surprisingly well into either Red or Blue opinions in the modern American culture war, as we described on HWFO in detail on July of 2021:
I did not project, at the time I wrote that, that we’d be seeing people doing Osama Bin Laden TikTok Dances a few years later but I probably should have.
I did however vociferously predict the hard turn against Jewish folks that the neo-progressives took this year, way back in February of 2019. They are forced to do it to preserve the pillars of their belief system:
Sometimes reading HWFO pays off.
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Reading/Watching/Listening List
This is a not-at-all-comprehensive list of things we’ve been discussing on the Slack server in the last month.
This is amazing. It’s hard to describe. I can’t stop watching it. Just do it. I promise it’s worth your time.
Lots of discussion about Microplastics:
Including apparently some new emergent research into microplastics from sex toys:
https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43591-023-00054-6#Sec21
The link between autism and gut bacteria has been known for a decade at least, and was discovered originally by granola hippie moms whom the scientific community refused to believe until they checked it out. Seems as if that link is spreading to other mental conditions.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/links-between-alzheimers-and-gut-microbiota
Not only that, when you dig down, the scientists were able to transfer Alzheimers gut bacteria into the stomachs of healthy rats, which then started exhibiting cognitive degredation. So it seems causal.
Lifestyles of the fat rich Asian nerd who struck it big on Silk Road:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/17/crypto911.html
This article by Astral Codex Ten ranks among his best, in my opinion, about how far a dedicated Effective Altruist is willing to go to make the world a better place:
Among many gems:
I make fun of Vox journalists a lot, but I want to give them credit where credit is due: they contain valuable organs, which can be harvested and given to others.
and
the last Guardian opinion columnist who must be defeated is the Guardian opinion columnist inside your own heart.
This one was also really funny:
Haidt continues to leak information from his likely upcoming book on how cel-phones and social media are destroying the youth.
I really like Data David on Twitter. He has a schtick similar to mine, except with a left leaning bent, and he’s engaging if you talk numbers with him. Does a lot of “freakoutery debunking” across multiple domains:
https://twitter.com/Data_David1/status/1719003199376613872
I only learned this past month that the origins of solitary confinement as a prison punishment were a kind of a forced-Quaker-meeting thing.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/silent-treatment/
This month in California Central Planning Gone Wrong:
Gun violence continues to plunge, and Jeff Asher’s substack is the best way to track it in multiple ways:
Americans are finally starting to realize that higher education is stupid. Surprisingly, this realization is also spilling into liberal circles.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/508352/americans-confidence-higher-education-down-sharply.aspx
I’m trying to avoid loading the monthly newsletter with too much culture war bait unless it’s relevant and contextual, but this was a pretty moving piece that received almost no traffic, written by a friend of a regular HWFO reader:
The Deepfake Apocalypse hits corporate America:
I’m increasingly interested in falling birth rates, which are some part reduction in male fertility, and some part increase in feminism. This is a part of the male fertility puzzle:
Related, this is an old Pew report from 2017 about trends in Muslim population growth, some images of which went re-viral recently on Twitter. It’s worth reading, to see their methodology. In short, Europe is going to become dramatically more Muslim over the next 30 years not only because of immigration by Muslims, but also because white women don’t want to make babies. As it’s from half a decade ago, it would be interesting to compare to modern population counts to see which “immigration projection track” Europe is currently experiencing according to their prior model.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/
This is a wild video of an “influencer factory” in Indonesia, where they have booth after booth of cute women pretending to be in their bedrooms reviewing products or convincing other women to do whatever it is that influencers do.
https://twitter.com/PicturesFoIder/status/1717597215462760607?t=vH0D1M-XRtTu5FHcsuwoPw&s=19
The flip side of the Jewish / Woke issue is... there are an awful lot of Jews that have been pushing the Woke Mind Virus in leftist academia.
Obviously, as an individualist myself, that doesn't create any sort of group culpability, but I am led to understand (and my statistical sources may be incorrect) that a significant plurality of Jews identify with "liberal" and leftist positions. For being as smart as they often are, you'd think they'd have seen this coming... ;)
Still, it's gotta suck to see this thing you thought was doing good in the world (and I will presume that *they* thought they were doing good for people, in terms of trying to achieve equality / equity / some other term meaning "good outcome") turn on you and try to eat you raw with salt.