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Showing posts from January, 2023

Firearms and Leadership

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 Here's a comment that I did for a Youtube video about the Alec Baldwin firearm death: Thank you KB32 for showing us how to check a revolver just like the one Alec Baldwin is alleged to have misused. Hollywood has lots to answer for. The Wallechinsky family documented decades ago how the place runs on money, power and exploitative sex. And you are right that Hollywood is the home of gun porn (which bears the same relationship to real life firearm use that commercial porn does to real life sex). Hollywood uses firearms and weapons so much that people who work in props - just the guys in the shop - have to take a firearms course. Props people here in Vancouver have a rule: never hand an actor anything - anything - that they can mis-handle. Because they always do. If you hand them a sword, someone has to make that sword duller than a toddler's dinner knife. If you hand them a fire extinguisher, a prop person has to take the extinguisher and discharge it first. If you hand them so

Have We Picked the Low Hanging Fruit in Science?

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  To: Bob MacDonald and Producers, Quirks and Quarks, CBC Topic: Russell Funk and the low-hanging fruit Your show always has some good factual stuff that counterbalances the excesses and distortions of the news entertainment industry. But Russell J. Funk caught my attention. I automatically thought of the science and tech scammer Elizabeth Holmes, venture capitalism in a lab coat. When Funk started, I expected a classic discussion about Kuhnian paradigms and progress. (Like this one: ) https://stmuscholars.org/misunderstood-or-mistake-paradigms-shifts-and-the-growth-of-science/ The first clue that some different game was afoot was the straight-faced use of the term "disruptor", a word that is usually a joking term, as in the recent dark satirical comedy "Glass Onion" . "Disruption" is a trendy compression of the concepts nicely laid out by Andy Kessler in his "Running Money". https://www.amazon.ca/Running-Money-Honchos-Mons