October 2020 Favorites
The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate … No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in ‘truth.’ And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Videos
Science & Knowledge
- Tales from the Trip: Season 1 – Beautiful animated short films where people describe their drug trips with psychedelics.
- The science of psilocybin and its use to relieve suffering
- Does the Brave Browser Really Beat Fingerprinting? Let’s Test!
- There’s No Such Thing As Orange
- Learn Why The Way You’re Breathing Is Destroying Your Quality of Life – James Nestor on the health benefits of closing your mouth.
Productivity
- How I Remember Everything I Read
- How I Take Notes on Books
- My Comprehensive Obsidian Workflow For Zettelkasten and Evergreen Notes – An one-hour long walkthrough on how Bryan Jenks works with his Zettelkasten and Obsidian.
- Obsidian Block References (0.9.5)
- Comprehensive Overview | Obsidian Block References & Transclusion
- Why Obsidian Will Overtake Roam
History & Culture
- I wore the same shirt every day for 3 years.
- Wie Pepsi tödliche Proteste verursacht hat 🇩🇪
- Batavia’s mysteries unfold with discovery of mass grave
- Who is Seneca? The Incredible Life of Rome’s Greatest Stoic Thinker
- Sohei: Buddhist Warrior Monks of Medieval Japan
- What a USD 20,000/Month Japanese Apartment is Like
- Inside a USD 13,000/Month Japanese Apartment
- How to Live Adventurously Every Day
- Eleusis, the great mysteries – A tour along the route from Athens to the temple of Eleusis which housed the secret religion without a name for nearly 2000 years. My next vacation visit after Corona is over.
- Origin of the Germanic Tribes
- Arminius: Hero of Germania, Traitor to Rome
- Barbarians – Is This Netflix Show Historically Accurate?
- Charles Bridge (Karlův most) – Construction – An animation visualizing the construction of the historic bridge over Vltava river in Prague, Czech Republic.
Cinema & Film
- The Expanse – Season 5 Official Trailer – I can’t wait for December, finally one of the best books of the series gets on the screen.
- Cobra Kai – Season 3 Teaser Trailer – January 2021 👊
- 25 Things You Missed in Cobra Kai – A few nice hidden facts in the TV Show.
- This Movie Offends You? Good.
- Production Hell – The Abyss
- The Drinker Recommends… Cobra Kai
Politics
- Diversity, Inclusion, Equity – James Lindsay in a one-hour long talk about the Woke ideology, its origins, targets, and goals. 👍
- Are You Outsourcing Your Truth?
- Buddy Brown explains “PRIVILEGE” better than anybody!
- Buddy Brown’s plan for LOOTERS (Y’all will love this)
- Buddy Brown SOLVES America’s PARENTING Problem
- How to not get SHOT by the POLICE | Buddy Brown
- If CALIFORNIA wants to leave… LET EM! | Buddy Brown
- Ain’t Gonna be a CIVIL WAR… Here’s why | Buddy Brown
- m o d e r n i t y 3 – Paul Joseph Watson’s social commentary to insanity in 2020.
- Submission – And another social commentary by Paul Joseph Watson about the Islamic terrorist killings in France.
- President Trump Condemning White Supremacy Compilation – Because it gets ridiculous after a while hearing the same repeated lie over and over again, The Daily Wire made a compilation.
- The Origin Story Of ‘The Proud Boys’ … (May Contain Humor)
- The Media’s “Very Fine People” Myth – As even people in my social networks still share these fake news, I share the truth here.
- The Secret Origins of Black Lives Matter – The organization Black Lives Matters has their ideology from The Weather Underground, a radical-left Marxist terror organization that bombed and killed all over the USA in the 60s and 70s.
- Trump vs Biden: Which Candidate is RACIST?
- Trump vs Biden: Handicap Face-Off
- Trump vs Biden: Gay Face-Off
Humor
- Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden: FULL debate on the Joe Rogan Experience – A really funny parody. Even the voices are fantastic! 😂
- Why Everybody Loves Leaf Blowers – I love them so much, I even dedicated a Haiku to them!
- The NEW CDC Infection Fatality Rates!
- Spotify Employees Censoring Joe Rogan – Funny satire that was even retweeted by Joe Rogan himself.
- If the Pandemic Thinking Was Applied To Everything
- How the Left and Right Fight
- Why Twitter Censored the NY Post Article on Biden
- The Fact Checkers
- The Very Presidential Debate
- Amy Coney Barrett Goes To The Senate
- Twitter CENSORS “Fake News”
- Reasons to Vote for Joe Biden!
- New Website Curates News You Agree With
- Meet The People Who Decide Who You Can Punch
- FOX & CNN to Normal Humans
- Dumpster Fire 35 Clip – Naked Ballot Audition – Funny parody of the “naked ballot” ads by comedian Bridget Phetasy 😂
- Lisa Eckhart – Die Vernichtung des WDR 🇩🇪
- Uncle Roger React to Uncle Roger MEMES
TV Shows
- The Boys 2 P
- Doom Patrol 2 P
- Family Guy 17 N
- South Park – The Pandemic Special 24
- Carmen Sandiego 3 N
- Friends 1 2 P
- Barbarians 1 – A new and historically quite accurate TV Show about the most devastating lost battle of the Roman army in Germania. They even use German and Latin as languages! N
Movies
- The Handmaiden – A masterpiece in storytelling! 🤩 A group of con-men plot to steal the inheritance from a wealthy Japanese woman. Directed and produced by Chan-wook Park, who directed POldboy in 2003.
- David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet N
Music
- 아가씨 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) – The beautiful music of 아가씨 (The Handmaiden)
- Adrián Berenguer: The Journey
Podcasts
DUST
- CHRYSALIS – The third season of DUST (Trailer) is a 14 episode long brilliant sci-fi story about a replicator AI that goes on a revenge tour through the galaxy for the destruction of humanity. 🤩
The Joe Rogan Experience
- 1543 – Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock – A interesting episode about psychedelic origins of the world’s great spiritual practices.
- 1545 – W. Keith Campbell – Narcissism and its influence on society at large.
- 1551 – Paul Saladino – Dr. Paul Saladino, as a physician and board-certified nutrition specialist talks about the benefits of the carnivore diet.
- 1555 – Alex Jones & Tim Dillon – The podcast that melted the internet. Ironically, this time Joe fact-checked Alex Jones conspiracy claims and 70 % proved to be true 😆
- 1556 – Glen Greenwald – Former attorney and award-winning Journalist, who broke the Edward Snowden story.
- 1557 – Gad Saad – The professor of Marketing at Concordia University talks about his new book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense.
- 1558 – Tristan Harris – Tristan Harris, the man behind the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma talks about the social problems created by social media and the attention industry. N
The Portal
- 41 – Douglas Murray – Heroism 2020: Defence of Our Own Civilization – This was the best podcast episode I’ve heard in 2020. After a 20 minute essay by Eric Weinstein follows a long talk with Douglas Murray. Two intellectuals reflect in nearly 5 hours on the state of the world. 🤩
New Discourses
New Discourses is a new political podcast by James Lindsay I discovered this month.
- Biden Is Not The Room – A one-hour long, extremely interesting monologue by James Lindsay, the scientist behind the Grievance studies affair, on why he will vote for Donald Trump, even though he is not happy he has to. 🤩
Bret Weinstein | DarkHorse Podcast
Science Salon
- 136. Gad Saad – The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense – Dr. Gad Saad exposes bad ideas – idea pathogens – that are killing common sense and rational debate.
TRIGGERnometry
- “Sex is NOT a Spectrum” – Colin Wright – Evolutionary biologist and Managing Editor of Quillette talking about biology
- Can We Solve the Migrant Crisis? with Helen Dale – A very interesting talk with Helen Dale about Australia’s immigration politics.
- Darren Grimes Speaks Out on Police Investigation
- Simon Evans on Woke Bias at the BBC
The Art of Manliness
- 650 – Why People Are Building Bunkers for the Apocalypse
- 651 – How to Turn Fear Into Fuel
- 652 – Chefs’ Secrets for Organizing Your Life – How to apply the concept of chefs, Mise en Place, to your productivity.
On Being with Krista Tippett
- Arlie Hochschild – The Deep Stories of Our Time – Interesting conversation with the author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.
Quillette Podcast
Conversations With Coleman
- Bonus Episode – The Problem of Race: Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes
- Ep. 16 – Trump, COVID-19, and Cold War II with Niall Ferguson
Indubio
Books
- The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (Amazon) – The new fantastic book by Gad Saad on the war against truth.
- The Immortality Key: Uncovering the Secret History of the Religion with No Name (Amazon) – I saw the author of the book on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He wrote 12 years on the book which uncovers the secrets behind the connection of Greek religion and early Christianity.
- Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius (Amazon)
- On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho (Amazon)
- The Daily Stoic (Amazon)
Articles
- Hikari – The story behind the creation of the short film “Hikari”.
- Don’t take their word for it
- Mushroom Expert Merlin Sheldrake “Fungi Can Teach Us a New Way of Looking at the World”
- “Make Your Bed” by Admiral William H. McRaven – The full transcript of the fantastic commencement speech by US Navy Admiral William H. McRaven.
- James Bond Stoicism
- Should We Cancel the Stoics?
- Sunday Firesides: Secure Your Base
- Idleness Kills Manliness
- Pasha Glubb and Avoiding the Fate of Empires
- Analyst of Totalitarianism—Reading Simon Leys Today
- My Resignation From The Intercept – This is super worrying. If you don’t care, you deserve losing your freedom!
- The Great Silencing of America and the Hallmarks of Woke Totalitarianism – This was an impressive article!
- How Individualism Created Our Postmodern Culture
- Coinbase Has Drawn a Line in the Sand for Its Activist Employees
- The New Evolution Deniers
- JK Rowling is Right—Sex Is Real and It Is Not a “Spectrum”
- Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise
- Forget What Gender Activists Tell You. Here’s What Medical Transition Looks Like
- Yelp’s anti-racist social credit nightmare
- Biden, Inc. – How ‘Middle Class’ Joe’s family cashed in on the family name
- Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad
- Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of the family with Chinese firm
- Beyond Postmodern: The Neoliberal Roots of Woke Cancel Culture
- How to Disagree
- Chief Science Officer for Pfizer Says “Second Wave” Faked on False-Positive COVID Tests, “Pandemic Is Over”
- The Post-Pandemic ‘New Normal’ Looks Awfully Authoritarian
- The Coming Post-COVID Global Order
Inspiration
- Creative Mom Turns Everyday Meals into Animal-Inspired Food Art
- In Connecticut, Ledge House Makes The Most Of Its Stunning Forested Scenery
- Outlandish Concrete Dream Homes In Outlandish Settings
- MØM – Beautiful website of a french creative agency.
- Feed Social Media Agency
Stuff & Things
- Apple Music – I switched from Spotify to Apple Music this month. Spotify censored and de-platformed a small German podcast I’m listening to out of ideological reasons (they dared to interview an author who wrote a book about gender-transition in children). As Apple Music has 10 Million more songs, lyrics, a nicer app, and the same price, the decision to switch was not hard for me. But the migration of my playlists was stressful because I needed to speed up, as Spotify closed the APIs this month. I got out before the lock-in.
- Apple Podcasts – My new default Podcast app. I ask myself why I never considered using it before. It syncs across my devices, looks nice, and doesn’t censor content.
- Browser Threat Test – Test your browser for the vulnerability of Fingerprinting and other things.
- Raindrop.io – A powerful bookmark manager
- YiNote – A cool browser extension that allows making notes on YouTube videos and export these later including a screenshot, time code, and notes in various formats.
- Our World in Data – A fantastic website with scientific data and over 3000 charts on hundreds of topics.
- Drafts – A nice app I started using for quickly adding text on the go (via Apple Watch or iPhone) and later convert it to a permanent note in Obsidian.
- New Discourses – Pursuing the light of objective truth in subjective darkness. I discovered this fantastic website, founded by James Lindsay.
People
- Dr. Bradley L. Garrett – A social geographer, explorer, and photographer based at University College Dublin in Ireland.
- Colin Wright – Evolutionary biologist, who left academia because he couldn’t any longer study without harassment by activists. He is now Managing Editor at Quillette.
- Gad Saad – A Professor, Evolutionary Psychologist, Author and host of the podcast The Saad Truth. He is a Jew from Lebanon who had to flee the country and he lives now in Canada. His new book The Parasitic Mind exposes bad ideas that threaten freedom, reason, and liberalism in the West.
- James Lindsay – American author, mathematician, and political commentator. He has written 6 books and is the founder of New Discourses. He is the person behind the Grievance studies affair, that exposed the corruption of the Social Sciences in academia. He fights totalitarian ideologies every day on Twitter.
Quotes
The game Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted nearly 20 years ago quite accurately the world we live in. A world where no truth exists, just My Truth and Your Truth instead of The Truth.
I’ve seen many wrong statements retweeted by the people I follow on social media that the only explanations are filter bubbles, groupthink, and the laziness of finding out the truth.
The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate … No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in ‘truth.’ And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Elon Musk summarised on Joe Rogan’s podcast, that governments, thinking they can just lock down the economy for unlimited time and solve the resulting crisis by printing money, won’t work:
So, this notion that you can just sort of send out checks to everybody and things will be fine is not true. Obviously. There are some people that have this absurd view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty. Like it just makes stuff. There is just a magic horn of plenty and the goods and services, they just come from this magic horn of plenty, and then if somebody has more stuff it’s because they took more from this magic horn of plenty. Now let me just break it to you, the fools out there. If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff. […] You can’t just legislate money and solve these things. If you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff. Obviously.
Thomas Sowell summarises what was already predicted in early 2020 by a few people: That the upcoming election will be used to start race riots for political reasons.
Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to torn out as a voting block on election day.
The freedoms … guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.
Jason Fried on the Illusion of Agreement. Be precise in your communication and don’t assume two sides have the same understanding of an issue.
Next time you’re discussing something with someone — inside or outside your organization — and you find the outcome contingent upon a relative term or phrase, be sure to clarify it. If they say expedited, you say we need it tomorrow morning, October 3
. Expedited is relative, and overnight can be too depending on where someone’s shipping something from, what time zone they’re in, etc. Get concrete, get it in writing, and get complete clarity. Slam the door shut on interpretation, and open the door to assuredness.
Remember the lesson: ‘An idea or fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you’.
Retired Navy Admiral and former Navy SEAL William McRaven in one of my favorite commencement speeches about the importance of little things.
If you wanna change the world, start off by making your bed. If you make your bed every morning, you’ll have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed, will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact, that the little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right.
Colin Wright about the sad truth that ideology prevents scientific progress in a lot of scientific areas.
But it seems clear to me that academia now is not as it was advertised a decade ago when I started down this path. It is no longer a refuge for outspoken, free-thinking intellectuals. Instead, it seems one must now choose between living a zipper-lipped life as an academic scientist or living a life as a fulfilled intellectual. Currently, one cannot do both.
Thomas Sowell about the simple truth that a society can’t survive if the beliefs of people diverge too far from the truth.
There is only so much divergence between prevailing theories and intractable reality that a society can survive. Yet theories of equality are unlikely to be re-examined—or examined the first time—when they provide a foundation for the heady feeling of being morally superior to a benighted ‘society.’
Arlie Hochschild suggested an idea I read in similar kind last month in John Glubb and Avoiding the Fate of Empires by Leo Nicoletto: That obligatory civil service could be a solution to political division and help the unity of a country. It would bring people in contact with different people in other regions of a country, and teach respect.
It’s not only a contempt that really bothers me now whenever I hear it or see it, and that is buried to some degree, but there’s a kind of reluctance to reach out. It’s as if, on the left, there’s a lot of good political will, but it’s gotten curled up onto itself and become a kind of a self-monitoring program, Oh, you said this wrong or that wrong,
instead of reaching out to build coalitions — because we’re a big country. Not everyone’s like us; not everyone’s like them. What we need are sturdy coalitions. And I think labor unions — when the labor movement was much larger, there was a way that people of different colors and classes got together. When you had a compulsory draft, people of different colors and classes got together in a natural way. […] Public schools have done this. But we’re down on those crossover, connective institutions. I think we need to build another one. I would like to see a civil service, one year required of everyone. […] Yeah, of everyone, and you go to a different region and get to know people — first of all, get to know how to treat people respectfully and listen actively and be immediate. Everybody should learn those skills. And then go across to see if we can rebuild that connective tissue. […] I’m sure people have said to you, and I get into this conversation myself, this critique that there are all kinds of groups of people, including people of color, who have long felt like strangers in their own land in this country.
Reading without processing the ideas is fruitless to Arthur Schopenhauer, as reading already takes over a huge amount of the work which is thinking.
When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. […] This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.
For I believe a good king is from the outset and by necessity a philosopher, and the philosopher is from the outset a kingly person.
The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that.
The vaccine should be tested on politicians first. If they survive, the vaccine is safe. If they don’t then the country is safe.