(Anyone here know anything about the technology?)

“Vanadium Could Be the Backbone of Our Next Energy Breakthrough”—
https://pjmedia.com/david-manney/2025/06/25/vanadium-could-be-the-backbone-of-our-next-energy-breakthrough-n4941182

+ Bonus (Daniel J. Mahoney):
“A Summer Reading List for the Anti-Woke”—
https://tomklingenstein.com/a-summer-reading-list-for-the-anti-woke/
H/T Powerline blog.

With wishes for a most enjoyable summer….

I disagree. It’s not common. That’s why others will pay to see it.

This is why so many of them are related to other entertainers or somebody important, and why there’s a “casting couch”. Talent is simply too common, some other filter ends up getting used…

Talent is rare, yet there is still so much more supply than demand. It’s so difficult for even talented entertainers to have a life long career in entertainment.

My goodness that young woman is a good actress! Hopefully she was featured in some non-animated roles. She has tremendous talent.

Here’s one of them.
https://x.com/ericldaugh/status/1937888023309427185

Hope they find the leaker, and waterboard them. (Actually I kind of like Edward I)

I read it, and IMHO there is nothing substantial in it. The sources also look political, including Sima.

There are things we can’t be certain about, but politics isn’t one of them 🙂 Of course they will try to raise doubts. CNN got there first with the “low confidence” intelligence leak. The Iranians may well have hidden some stuff away, that’s easy to say, but I don’t think the article makes a good case.

…suppose Infowars claimed that police shootings in the US cannot be racially motivated, because police shoot slightly more white people each year than black people (this is true). This is missing important context: there are ~5x as many white people in the US as black people, so police shooting only slightly more white people suggests that police are shooting black people at ~5x higher rates. But I claim it’s also a failure of contextualization when NYT claims police shootings must be racially motivated because they happen to black people at a 5x higher rate, without adding the context that police are called to black neighborhoods at about a 5x higher rate and so have no more likelihood per encounter of shooting a black person than a white person. Perhaps the failure to add context is an honest mistake, perhaps a devious plot to manipulate the populace – but the two cases stand or fall together with each other, and with other failures of contextualization like Infowars’ vaccine adverse response data.

But lots of people seem to think that Infowars deserves to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse vaccine data claim, but NYT doesn’t deserve to be censored for asserting lots of things like their context-sparse police shooting claim. I don’t see a huge difference in the level of deceptiveness here. Maybe you disagree and do think that one is worse than the other. But I would argue this is honest disagreement – exactly the sort of disagreement that needs to be resolved by the marketplace of ideas, rather than by there being some easy objective definition of “enough context” which a censor can interpret mechanically in some fair, value-neutral way.

Nobody will ever be able to provide 100% of relevant context for any story. It’s an editorial decision which caveats to include and how many possible objections to address. But that means there isn’t a bright-line distinction between “misinformation” (stories that don’t include enough context) and “good information” (stories that do include enough context). Censorship – even the “safe” kind of censorship that just blocks “fake news” – will always involve a judgment call by a person in power enforcing their values.

He got some pushback on these, with examples, and every example he looked at was the same kind of thing: the “misinformation” was not things invented by the source, but sourced information selectively chosen to support a narrative.

…my goal here isn’t to defend the media, or to deny it can be extremely deceptive and misleading at times, or to say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars, or anything like that. My goal is to make the very specific point that a wide variety of media sources, from NYT to Infowars, follow a similar pattern of very rarely lying explicitly or making things up, regardless of whether or not their articles are deceptive.

I originally said this mattered because it means “ban misinformation” isn’t a primitive action. Censorship proponents imagine a world where “good sources” are doing something fundamentally different from “bad sources”; the good sources are going out in the world and reporting true facts, the bad sources are just making things up. In this world, you can censor mechanically, without needing to consult your own opinions. But this is a false hope. You will always need to make judgment calls about which sources’ true facts are important vs. irrelevant, which sources’ studies are valid versus flawed, and which sources’ points that you don’t have good responses to are too annoying or conspiratorial to take seriously anyway. These judgment calls will be as subjective as any other attempt to have an opinion on the news. I reject the idea that Obama’s birth certificate is fake not because Infowars made up the claim that weird artifacts showed up on Adobe Illustrator, nor because I personally know and trust the Adobe Illustrator expert who said that was fine and normal, but because my priors are that the birth certificate probably wasn’t fake, and that Adobe Illustrator experts probably aren’t part of a conspiracy. Censorship – like all other decisions – has to bottom out in these kinds of judgments, which are much dicier and more corruptible than “lol, just ban false things”.

But aside from censorship, I find it really interesting that so many commenters were so resistant to the idea that the worst and dumbest conspiracy theories of our time don’t involve outright lies. I think all of us – not just censors – want to maintain the comforting illusion that the bad people are doing something fundamentally different than the good people, something that marks them as Obviously Bad in bright neon paint. If conspiracy theories only happen when someone literally makes up a total lie, then we – who avoid doing this, and always double-check our sources – know we are of the Elect, who never have to worry about this. But if wrong people (even the most wrong people) are just trying to reason under uncertainty and evaluate the relative strength of different sources of evidence – well, that’s the same thing we’re doing! Seems bad!

One thing that struck me about most of the “pushback” comments is how few people can distinguish between a fact and an inference from facts.