Chicago

Chicago Timelapse - 1870 to 2026
RealGoodVideo

Video actually starts in 1761.

Very cool. Via The Feral Irishman

Update August 2026 replaced missing video.

Building a Religion

Cake - Comfort Eagle (Late World with Zach)
SgtRlee

I imagine you have heard about people vandalizing Tesla cars and Tesla dealerships. 'Vandalizing' is putting it mildly. You may have also seen this meme:

Voltaire Quote

How many people will believe whatever you tell them? I suspect it's a fairly large share of the population. You can increase that share with relentless propaganda, which is what the Democratic Party has been doing since, I dunno, forever? The Republicans have their own propaganda, but until recently they have not been as organized or pervasive as the Democrat's stuff.

How many people think for themselves? Of course you need to allow for the fact that many people don't waste anytime thinking about politics. So, not many.

Then you look at Moslem suicide bombers. Is there anything atrocious than killing yourself in order to kill a bunch of infidels? Why do they do it? Because they believe, in something, I'm not sure what. The Ayatollah built a religion, taught a bunch of people to believe in absurdities and then sent them out to commit atrocities.

That basically sums up American politics in the 21st Century. See Brave New World for a more in depth analysis.

Brave New World

Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment

Excellent story about political propaganda in the USA in the 21st century.

It's a little long. It talks about the collapse of traditional media and the rise of social media.

How Barack Obama Built An Omnipotent Thought-Control Machine... And How It Was Destroyed by David Samuels

Excerpt: 

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves. . . .

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled. . . .

A key technique used in the Obama's 'digital switchboard':

permission structures - is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” provides:

• social proof (most people in your situation are now deciding to) 
• new information
• changed circumstances
• compromise

As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.” 

Later on we get this: 

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia, . . . 

Samual's essay names a bunch of people and books, some of whom I knew and some I didn't. I collected them all in a spreadsheet.

Note: The first time I opened the essay, all I got was a plain orange screen. There is supposed to be a giant image there, but for some reason it didn't load. Anyway, scroll down a bit and you will get to the text.

Paladin

BOSCH Season 7 - Official Trailer | Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video

We're watching season 7 of Bosch. Somewhere past the middle (episode 6 maybe?) they are talking about a hitman and Jimmy Robertson (played by Paul Calderon), the aging Latino detective, mentions Paladin, Have Gun Will Travel, and Richard Boone and draws blank looks from everyone else, including my wife. How could they not know about this fixture of American culture? Don't they teach nobody nuttin' in school no more? I guess not, and not too many people delve into history. It's really not surprising none of the characters recognized the phrase since all these whippersnappers were born after the show ended in 1963, but I bet all of the actors did.

TV Intro | Pilot | Have Gun – Will Travel
John Daniels

Wikipedia gives us a little background:

The Paladins (or Twelve Peers) are twelve fictional knights of legend, the foremost members of Charlemagne's court in the 8th century. 

Statue of Roland in the town hall square of Riga, Latvia.
Image courtesy Patrick Mayon

Roland was the leader of the pack.

Bosch, 8 episodes, 50 minutes each, on Amazon Prime

Have Gun - Will Travel, 225 episodes, 25 minutes each, at least some of which are on YouTube

Liquid Metal Battery

Don Sadoway | Innovation in Stationary Electricity Storage: The Liquid Metal Battery
This video is a little long (nearly an hour), but he covers a wide range of issues pertaining to batteries. The bit about Volta (32:20) was fascinating. The general idea, as I understand it, is to build large batteries that can be charged when consumer demand for electricity is low, but your solar and wind power systems are producing. Elon Musk / Tesla are doing this successfully with Lithium-Ion batteries in Australia.


This video is a couple of years old. Mr. Sadoway's company, Ambri, had a couple of problems but they are still going strong.

Wikipedia has an article about Molten Salt Batteries which includes a section on Liquid Metal Batteries.

Via Marc.