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I have Covid-19. I tested positive on the 3rd. The tell tale sign for me was not tasting my food. Yes, I've been feeling like shit, but no issues breathing, not even coughing and I never had a temperature, not even when they tested me. Now that I've said that, let me say this. Having this virus hasn't changed my opinion one bit. I still and will always favor liberty over lockdowns and freedom over fear. Throughout history, every single impingement on our freedoms and rights came under the mendacious guise of doing some sort of greater good for society and it's always we the people who vote these impingements into law. "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -Ben Franklin   We don't have the government to blame, we have ourselves to blame for voting in the very people who have no problem destroying our livelihoods while they go about living THEIR lives as if nothing has changed....

The playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that if you laid all the world’s economists end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. President Truman allegedly once asked for a one-handed economist, who would be unable to say “on the other hand…” Economists richly deserve such jokes. But there are still issues where economists overwhelmingly agree, regardless of politics, ideology, or methodology. One of those issues is the minimum wage. Economists are far more likely to be against it than the general public. Read the article with my highlights .

A deep dive into the science behind implicit bias. "Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse in recent years as 'implicit bias.' Embraced by a president, a would-be president, and the nation’s top law-enforcement official, the implicit-bias conceit has launched a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law and spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry. The statistical basis on which it rests is now crumbling, but don’t expect its influence to wane anytime soon. Read the source article with my highlights .

  " Gun sales surged 65% in the month of October as this year's figures show a continued "record firearm sales pace" amid  unrest and uncertainty , according to statistics released Monday. An estimated 1.9 million firearms were sold in October this year, a 65% spike from the same month in 2019, according to data provided by Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting (SAAF), a research group that examines the raw data obtained from the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS." Source

"When lifelong Democrat Mayra Gomez told her 21-year-old son five months ago that she was voting for Donald Trump in Tuesday’s presidential election, he cut her out of his life." Source article  

 Major win against big tech censorship! Suck it, Twitter.  How tweet it is: Twitter backs down, unlocks Post’s account

" New York (CNN Business) Bond billionaire Bill Gross is involved in a legal battle with his tech entrepreneur neighbor over a $1 million sculpture and allegations that Gross blasted the "Gilligan's Island" theme song on a loop from his house" Source .

A piece of music improvised by a composer suffering from dementia has been recorded by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and is being released as a single. BBC Breakfast was there for the moment 80-year-old Paul Harvey heard the full version of his piece for the first time. Original source article.

The Scientific American just published an opinion piece claiming that "fact checkers aim to get closer to the truth, but their biases can shroud the very truth they seek." The article points out the main problem with the way fact checking is performed on social media platforms. Laboratory studies reveal that, when shown a video of a group of protesters, people see either a peaceful protest or an unruly mob blocking pedestrian access, depending on their sociopolitical beliefs. The world outside the lab shows similar biased perception: For example, 68 percent of Republicans consider the videotaped demonstrations in Portland, Ore., Kenosha, Wisc., and New York City to be riots, versus only 30 percent of Democrats, according to a Fox News poll released in September. Journalists and fact-checkers are human beings subject to the same psychological biases as everyone else—and their analyses of what constitute “facts” is affected by their own political and ideological values, res...

This post reports on data analysis of NOAA hurricane data from 1851 (when we started tracking hurricanes) to 2017, all the data I could get from NOAA for my analysis. There are some key findings that show how specific indicators for hurricanes like ACE data ("ACE" - Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which is an index that combines the numbers of systems, how long they existed and how intense they became. It is calculated by squaring the maximum sustained surface wind in the system every six hours that the storm is a "named storm" and summing it up for the season. It is expressed in 10 to the 4th kt**2.) and Rapid Intensification (The National Hurricane Center (NHC) defines rapid intensification as, “an increase in the maximum sustained winds of a storm of at least 30 knots (35 mph) in a 24-hour period). Let's start with the ACE DATA Link to originl graph and data: https://chart-studio.plotly.com/~sonnyjitsu/22#plot There is a very slight uptick in A...

Okay if anyone else has a Samsung Galaxy Book Flex ⍺ running Fedora 32/33 and runs into the issue of getting no sound in your headphones, I have a solution/workaround that is satisfying enough for me. First let's get the headphones working on boot. Create a service like so: [root@localhost ~]# cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/headphones.service [Unit] Description=Start headphones After=multi-user.target [Service] Type=oneshot ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/headphones [Install] WantedBy=basic.target As you can see it makes a call to /usr/local/bin/headphones, this file looks like so: [root@localhost ~]# cat /usr/local/bin/headphones #!/usr/bin/bash /usr/bin/hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x1a SET_PIN_WIDGET_CONTROL 0x5 Make sure to make the file executable: chmod +x /usr/local/bin/headphones We still need to install acpid: `sudo dnf install acpid` Now create the corresponding scripts to detect when headphones have been plugged/unplugged...