Inching closer to the Man in The High Castle timeline, I see.

Gnome is quite good with dash-to-dock and the system tray plugins, but it does kinda suck both of those need to be plugins.

Still waiting for gloomwood (spiritual successor to Thief) to come out of early access. Probably will be a few years yet, tho.

One of those spray-can extension poles would probably work pretty well.

According to wikipedia, Tinnitus is listed as an uncommon side effect of that drug, so that is indeed the most likely culprit, meaning it is very likely not permanent. :)

Constant background sound does not hurt your ears unless it is over a certain decibel level.

You can get temporary tinnitus from an active ear infection or a swollen/inflamed ear, it may not be permanent.

Were you exposed to any overly loud sounds recently, or chronically over the course of your life?

It’s a short video, and I found his speech pretty moving, I’d recommend watching it in its entirety.

Here’s an Irish Mayor recounting how Catholic priests raped and beat him repeatedly as a child, and how the catholic church of Rome sent out a priest during the investigation into the rapes just in an effort to discredit him and call him a liar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq-BB_aZUVI

AFAIK, the concept first appeared in the dystopian sci-fi novel The Shockwave Rider written by John Brunner back in the 70’s. It was called a Delphi Pool in that. Great book, btw. Though unfortunately another example of tech-bros old dystopian novels as a model to build a business.

The description of it from the book:

It works, approximately, like this.

First you corner a large - if possible, a very large - number of people who, while they’ve never formally studied the subject you’re going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epidemic which followed World War I…

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statical returns.

It’s rather as though this paradox has proved true: that while nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can’t it work for the future? Three hundred million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.

And here’s how the concept was used in the real world (before polymarket), according to this source:

Perhaps the most striking attempt to make use of this kind of idea was the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), a proposed futures exchange developed by our friends at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). PAM was intended to be a kind of “futures market” for the Middle East; investors could trade futures based on political outcomes in the region.

The idea is that the monetary value of a particular “future” (a stated outcome in Middle East politics) would tend to increase as the outcome became more likely. That is, the value of a futures issue would tend to reflect the relative likelihood of that future actually occurring.

Unfortunately, it turned out that PAM would allow trading in such events as coup d’etats and assassinations; the resulting uproar caused the cancellation of PAM.

The Delphi method was used in the late 1940’s at the RAND Corporation. In their implementation, a panel of experts was regularly polled by a facilitator to predict future outcomes of events related to the Cold War. Brunner probably derives his Delphi pool idea from this work.

The name “Delphi pool” is derived from the pythia, or priestesses, of Delphi in ancient Greece. The pythia would take questions and make predictions (which modern-day geologists attribute to hydrocarbon gasses like ethylene, which bubbled up from the faults in the region).

You get paid a small amount per day until the trial finishes if you’re chosen.

3 Days of The Condor.

It’s a 70’s paranoid thriller with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, just an awesome film.

EDIT: Ah, I found that he was indeed at least open to the idea to centralize the militias.

He then met with Cipriano Mera, who proposed that all the confederal militias in Madrid be unified under Durruti’s single command; this would prevent an army from being formed, while also relinquishing the democratic control the rank-and-file had over the command structure. Mera and Durruti then agreed to meet the following morning

At the meeting, Mera said “for people to carry out their mission and not budge from their assigned position—in a word, so that they obey—there is no choice but to use the tool that we’re afraid to even mention: discipline.”

Mera recorded Durruti’s response: “OK, Mera, we’re mostly in agreement about this. I agree with the core of what you’re saying, and also with your idea of joining our forces. Mine have to be relieved because they’ve suffered heavy blows in the last few days. We’ll see comrade Val at 4:00 and can discuss all this together.”

It looks like he still wanted to hash some things out, but as far as I can tell, that meeting with Val never occurred due to his death the next day.

End of edit.

Could you share your source which details that Durruti created specifically a top-down centralized militia? From the sources I’ve read, he created a bottom-up militia with the ability to recall poorly performing elected leaders. As an example, from Chapter 7 of Paz Abel’s ‘Durruti in The Spanish Revolution’:

The volunteers decided among themselves how to organize themselves, and all opposed anything that suggested a resuscitation of the militarist spirit or hierarchies of command. The structure and organization of the militias, which lasted until the general militarization in March 1937, emerged from the discussions among the future combatants. It was simple: ten men constituted a group, which nominated a representative; ten groups formed a centuria, which elected a representative of its own; and five centuries would form an agrupación. The leader of the agrupación and the centuria delegates made up the agrupación committee. [540]

Pérez Farràs, the Durruti Column’s first military advisor, objected to this organizational structure and cast doubts about its feasibility in combat. Durruti quickly realized that Pérez Farràs would not make a good advisor and replaced him with artillery Sergeant Manzana, who had a better grasp of the anarchists’ anti-authoritarian psychology. Durruti entrusted Manzana and Carreño (a school teacher) with equipping the Column with artillery, munitions, as well as doctors, nurses, and an emergency operating room. Manzana didn’t need many explanations. He immediately understood what Durruti wanted from him and did a wonderful job carrying out his mission. He knew several soldiers who had joined the column, as well as some officers, and planned to have the military men instruct the others. All these people integrated themselves into the Column, fraternally and without conflict.

One day Pérez Farràs stated his criticisms to Durruti directly: “You can’t fight like that,” he declared. In reply, Durruti said:

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: I’ve been an anarchist my whole life and the fact that I’m responsible for this human collectivity won’t change my convictions. It was as an anarchist that I agreed to carry out the task that the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias entrusted to me.

I don’t believe—and everything happening around us confirms this— that you can run a workers’ militia according to classical military rules. I believe that discipline, coordination, and planning are indispensable, but we shouldn’t define them in the terms of the world that we’re destroying. We have to build on new foundations. My comrades and I are convinced that solidarity is the best incentive for arousing individual responsibility and a willingness to accept discipline as an act of self-discipline.

War has been imposed upon us and this battle will be different than those we’ve fought in Barcelona, but our goal is revolutionary victory. This means defeating the enemy, but also a radical change in men. For that change to occur, man must learn to live and conduct himself as a free man, an apprenticeship that develops his personality and sense of responsibility, his capacity to be master of his own acts. The worker on the job not only transforms the material on which he works, but also transforms himself through that work. The combatant is nothing more than a worker whose tool is a rifle—and he should strive toward the same objective as the worker. One can’t behave like an obedient soldier, but as a conscious man who understands the importance of what he’s doing. I know that it’s not easy to achieve this, but I also know that what can’t be accomplished with reason will not be obtained by force. If we have to sustain our military apparatus with fear, then we won’t have changed anything except the color of the fear. It’s only by freeing itself from fear that society can build itself in freedom.[541]

Durruti had expressed himself with extreme clarity. His goal was to unite theory and practice. As an anarchist, he intended to remain faithful to libertarian ideals while leading a workers’ column that would soon fight important in Aragón, on the frontlines as well as among the peasants in the rearguard. [542]

And really horrific events like the holocaust must’ve had countless people praying to be spared, but since most of them died anyway, that must mean the Holocaust was God’s will, since that’s what religious people always say when prayers go unanswered.

Your family member survived cancer? “God saved them!” Your family member died of cancer despite praying? “Must’ve been God’s will, He works in mysterious ways!”

Original Sin is true, that is fact. Take a look around the world. It will let you know.

Personally I would put forward that starting with that assumption is more gut-feeling/vibe based than science based, since our negative behaviors are able to be explained without the need for a supernatural answer.

I guess I’ll conclude with an observation; I started with equating ML’s to religious indoctrination since they have a sunk cost and interest only believing sources that reinforce their worldview despite solid evidence that is contrary to their views. I personally believe all dogmatic religions encourage that same phenomena, with the abrahamic religions and their offshoots being particularly stifling (though others such as Confucianism can be similarly bad), due to their direct encouragement of seeing any outside information as the devil’s work.

As someone who believed those dogmas for a long time, I know that such teachings essentially give a perception of paranoia that any person who isn’t in the same club is a potential source of evil or temptation into the mind, which results in automatically assuming all counter-information being dismissed or not properly investigated out of the discomfort it can create. I personally look back on those days as a very bleak and sad time due to that worldview, I hope you avoid it.

As all of the information presented was exclusively from biased pro-catholic sources, I’m sorry to say I remain unconvinced, just as I remain unconvinced by ML’s for similar reasons. However, I want to say thank you for taking the time to explain how you came to these conclusions and views, I did find it enlightening.

I wish you the best.

There are some pretty solid criticisms on how it was tested.

Scientific debates surrounding Ricardo Castañón Gómez’s investigations into alleged Eucharistic miracles have centered on methodological concerns raised by forensic scientists, particularly regarding the Buenos Aires case of 1996. Critics argue that the testing protocols exhibited bias, with the selection of primarily pathologists and cardiologists predisposing results toward interpretations of human cardiac tissue without input from microbiologists or mycologists to explore alternative explanations. This approach, according to a 2024 analysis in the Journal of Forensic Science Research, reflects a lack of true blind testing, as the involvement of a camera crew may have signaled the sample’s significance to experts, potentially influencing their conclusions.

Questions about sample handling have been prominent, especially in the Buenos Aires investigation, where the host was stored in water for several years before analysis and handled by multiple individuals without personal protective equipment, heightening contamination risks. A forensic review highlights that no chain-of-custody documentation or spike controls were used to detect inhibitory substances, which could compromise DNA results showing only low concentrations of human genetic material. Furthermore, the absence of peer-reviewed publications for these findings has drawn scrutiny, as the studies have not undergone standard scientific validation processes, relying instead on reports from select experts without broader interdisciplinary review. Potential contamination from environmental factors, such as bacteria like Serratia marcescens or fungi producing reddish pigments, was not adequately ruled out, with control experiments demonstrating that unconsecrated wafers under similar conditions can yield comparable appearances due to microbial growth.

Speaking for myself, I would not personally take that test as adequate evidence of the supernatural.

From what I understand, and as someone who once had an interest in ancient bibles, even ordering a re-print of scans of an original tyndale bible in Olde English, I don’t believe it’s quite so cut and dried. Biblical texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls were originally in Hebrew, and from modern archeology it appears that even then, there were multiple versions, with some differing greatly.

https://www.bibleodyssey.org/articles/what-are-the-earliest-versions-and-translations-of-the-bible/

The Catholic Church was the first sect of Christianity to add in those 7 books later, in their own Latin translation of the Bible..

Personally I must observe it is rather convenient that the books they added just so happened to contain material which bolstered their political power, wealth, and importance in society by requiring the Church as a necessary intermediary (besides it being in a language only they could read).

Buddhism preaches works instead of faith, but we still have original sin.

I’m not quite sure how that applies. The concept of original sin only exists in the abrahamic religions. When you were assessing the other religions, were you doing so under the assumption that Christianity’s original sin was already a truism and determined the merit of the other religions based on how they applied to that concept? If so, how did you determine that Original Sin is by default, a scientific universal truth?

Ah… I’m sorry, but neither of those events would stand as proof in a scientific context.

In the first case, medical oddities occur quite frequently, and it’s not unlikely that patient had an unusual form of cancer that was particularly receptive to the more primitive treatment at the time. I would not classify an unusual experience as a miracle, personally. I have seen many similar stories and claims from the alternative cancer cure community, all of which I have found to be grifting, yet to those less skeptical, seem quite convincing.

The second case is extremely dubious, as it is purely hearsay that the flesh suddenly appeared, and it would be quite easy to simply place the supposed flesh photographed and claim it morphed there naturally. Church officials are not immune to lying, corruption, or deceit as history shows, so without an unrelated 3rd party having been present and verifying in real-time, to me it seems clear that it’s a stunt, as the evidence is about as convincing or trustworthy as the Loch Ness monster photograph.

I see. How how did you determine that the Protestant’s reasons for removing those books was illegitimate (as far as I can tell, they claim that the 6 additional books were not included in the original Hebrew canon, essentially saying that the catholic additions were not inspired works, and that they are closer to a more pure, unadulterated Bible), also how did Eastern Orthodoxy fare in the overall assessment?

Did it concern you at all that Catholicism once burned people at the stake for translating the Bible into English (which in practice would lessen the power the priesthood had in disseminating the Bible)?

Lastly, I’m quite curious how you then determined that an Abrahamic religion (Catholicism) was the only true religion, what set it apart from Taoism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc, as the only source of spiritual truth for you?

just looking at the inner values and beliefs of them I guess.

Do you have any specific examples of values and beliefs that you liked better than any of the other religions or christian denominations?

Catholicism stood out because God is all loving, and forgiving

My protestant church said that too, and emphasized Jesus’s forgiveness.

and actual scientific evidence of miracles and proof

Could you share those? I’ve never seen any scientific evidence of miracles despite looking for it.

What sort of research did you do? What made Catholicism stand out from every other religion?