For whatever it's worth, Dailywire showed pretty conclusively that the 94% number by Bloomberg was garbage analysis, and not the actual number: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bombshell-report-that-only-6-of-new-corporate-hires-are-white

Like Innocent Smith in Manalive, confronting the nihilistic Warden to force him to realize that nihilism was wrong.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him--only to bring him to life.

For the same reason the Gillette and Target and Bud Light boycotts each targeted individual companies rather than entire industries. You can't bring your full force to bear on a hundred targets, so you bring your full force on one target at a time, and make the other ones afraid that they'll be next.

I haven't seen Pokemon, so I'm not familiar - is it just the bald eagle resemblance, or is there more to it?

It helps that All Might is more proudly American - despite being Japanese both in- and out-of-universe - than characters written in modern American stories.

Back two years ago, he issued a declaration trying to shut down the Latin Mass, on the grounds that it was too conservative and traditional. He knew he couldn't just ban it outright, so he said that priests had to have the explicit permission of their local bishops to say Mass in Latin. My local bishop, and various others in other places, responded by issuing explicit permission to every priest in their dioceses, whether previously interested in saying Mass in Latin or not, and as a result, the Pope has had to back off, and Latin Mass attendance has gone up. It's a good sign that a bunch of local bishops are fighting back on this nonsense.

The "Trial of a Time Lord" arc was the best thing they could have done with Colin Baker. Much as I like him, in his first season, he just wasn't good in the role. He was too used to stage productions, so every conversation was like a monologue to an audience and every gesture was meant to be seen by the people in the back rows. It was weird, and it didn't translate well to television. The scripts for his first season were rubbish too, which didn't help.

But the writers, for "Trial of a Time Lord", decided to embrace Colin Baker's odd acting. Colin Baker can't help but monologue? Give him an in-universe audience to monologue at. He wants to gesture wildly? Have him do it at an enemy fifty feet away. His character has over-the-top bluster? Make the bluster a conscious decision, and show him thinking about subtlety and politeness before deciding to project bravery and pomposity.

Doctor Who had a lot of problems during that era, and the arc wasn't enough to save the show, long term. But it was more than enough to save the character.

I'm Impossible2, and so's my wife!

It's been a weird marriage, let me tell you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

To sum up the origin history: this quote is something that Michael Haupt said in 2003, that William Guy Carr said in 1956, that Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Santiago said in 1925, that The Cause of World Unrest said in 1920, that Gabriel Jogand-Pagès aka Dr. Bataille aka Leo Taxil said in 1896, that Albert Pike said in a letter to Giuseppe Mazzini in 1871.

I can't blame OP for not wanting to write all that out.

For those interested, this is a hoax originally dating to 1896, and has a very interesting history as it's been handed down, added to, and translated from English to French to Spanish back to English again, over the last hundred and twenty-seven years.

In 1896, a publication appeared in Paris called Le Diable au XIXe Siècle (English: The Devil in the 19th Century), an attack on Freemasonry by an anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic writer named Leo Taxil a.k.a. Dr. Bataille. In it, among other things, was claimed to be the full transcription of a letter from August 15th, 1871, from General Albert Pike to Joseph Mazzini, both prominent (and real) Masons who lived at that time, outlining the plan for Masonic domination of the world via the destruction of the Catholic Church. Translated directly from French, it reads:

Therefore, when the autocratic Empire of Russia will become the citadel of papist adonaism, we shall unleash the revolutionary nihilists and atheists, and provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will demonstrate clearly to the nations, in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, mother of savagery and of the bloodiest disorder. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the mad minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate these destroyers of civilization; and the countless disillusioned adonaites, whose deist soul have up until that time remained without a compass, thirsting for an ideal, but not knowing which God is worthy of tribute, will receive the True Light, by the universal manifestation of the pure Luciferian doctrine, at last made public, an event that will arise from a reactionary movement following the destruction of atheism and adonaism, together at the same time vanquished and exterminated.

We know this to be a hoax, largely because Taxil himself admitted to it being a hoax some years later, along with dozens of other anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic pieces he'd written. But, what's noteworthy is that it has nothing about a "Third World War", or about Islam, or Zionism, all of which would have been astonishing predictions for 1871. The first three sentences of the quote OP provided are not present in the original, nor anything like it. To find out where the rest came from, we have to trace it down.

This letter was first translated into English in 1920, in the book The Cause of World Unrest, and the paragraph above was included verbatim. Cardinal Caro y Rodriguez of Santiago translated it into Spanish in his 1925 book The Mystery of Freemasonry Revealed; the book was later translated back into English in the 1950s. So far - aside from the fact that it was made up to begin with - so good. But then, William Guy Carr, in his 1956 book Pawns in the Game, paraphrased it by saying that the original letter was about the first, second, and third world wars, saying:

The first world war was to be fought so as to enable the Illuminati to overthrow the powers of the Tzars in Russia and turn that country into the stronghold of Atheistic-Communism. The differences stirred up by agentur of the Illuminati between the British and German Empires were to be used to foment this war. After the war ended, Communism was to be built up and used to destroy other governments and weaken religions.

World War Two, was to be fomented by using the differences between Fascists and Political Zionists. This war was to be fought so that Naziism would be destroyed and the power of Political Zionism increased so that the sovereign state of Israel could be established in Palestine. During world war two International Communism was to be built up until it equalled in strength that of united Christendom. At this point it was to be contained and kept in check until required for the final social cataclysm. Can any informed person deny Roosevelt and Churchill did not put this policy into effect?

World War Three is to be fomented by using the differences the agentur of the Illuminati stir up between Political Zionists and the leaders of the Moslem world. The war is to be directed in such a manner that Islam (the Arab World including Mohammedanism) and Political Zionism (including the State of Israel) will destroy themselves while at the same time the remaining nations, once more divided against each other on this issue, will be forced to fight themselves into a state of complete exhaustion physically, mentally, spiritually and economically. Can any unbiased and reasoning person deny that the intrigue now going on in the Near, Middle, and Far East isn’t designed to accomplish this devilish purpose?

The bit about World War Three was commentary about the letter by Carr - he included the rest of the quote a couple pages later - and was not at all accurate to what the letter actually said, given that the letter was all about how to destroy the Catholic Church through an elaborate plan involving kicking the Pope out of Vatican City (disregarding, of course, the fact that the 'letter' was made up to begin with). His source was the English translation of Cardinal Rodriguez's The Mystery of Freemasonry Revealed, which also didn't have anything about World War Three, so he just made those parts up.

And then it lay dormant for another fifty years, re-emerging on the website http://threeworldwars.com/ in 2003 by Michael Haput, shortly after the Iraq war started. And it was Michael Haput who joined Carr's 'paraphrasing' with the original letter to create the quote OP provided, to make it seem as though a Freemason in 1871 had accurately predicted the first two world wars perfectly. You can see Michael Haput's original article on Albert Pike here, including the 'predictions' for all three world wars. You'll also notice that the current version of that page does not have any of those quotes on it.

You other commenters might scoff at OP's flippant responses, but with a quote whose origin is this disingenous, can you blame him for not wanting to answer?

Added: it's not a literal turd, as OP's title suggests. Given the AIDS memorial that was seriously proposed a few months back, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch, but this specific one isn't.

Well, worst-case scenario, if you really don't enjoy them but feel obligated to read anyway, you can always wait until the Netflix adaptation. The books will undoubtedly seem like masterpieces after watching that.

I read the three books in the trilogy. My thoughts in brief:

• Three-Body Problem: Quite good. It starts with a chapter called "The Madness Years", showing how horrible the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard were (condemning both their anti-science and anti-religion worldviews); I was surprised that China allowed it to be published as-is. Has neat science and sci-fi concepts, and explores them fairly well.
• The Dark Forest: Fairly good...if you ignore a major plot point from the first book that could have settled the entire conflict from the second book if the bad guys had used it properly. Most of the story revolves around the question: "How do you beat an enemy that can surveil absolutely everything, except reading your thoughts?" Some sci-fi, but most of it is a paranoia, mind-game type story. Has a cameo by Osama Bin Laden, of all people.
• Death's End: Unfortunately, lousy. There's an endless war going on throughout the universe, altering the very laws of physics, and there's no hope of peace. Earth is destroyed (thanks in large part to the protagonist) and the universe itself isn't far behind. Just pointlessly bleak.

I'd recommend the first two books in the series, but not the third.

Seconded. The Bloomberg article this is based on is trash, with bad mathematics justifying a clickbait headline. The Substack article, while good, is based on a false premise.

u/Gizortnik approves this message.

I doubt it - Morgan Freeman's voice would fit the character too well. It'd be too good of a casting choice.

And the incident I'd heard of involved the Army and using AI to call the shots for a large simulated artillery battery.

Fascinating! If you do happen to stumble upon it again, do let me know. I'd love to read about it.

Huh. What incident are you thinking of, then? This is the only one I'd heard of in the military, but I could easily have missed another.

And I disagree that they haven't tested it - the purpose of the entire field of "AI alignment" is to convince people that AI is powerful enough in the first place that it could go rouge, if we don't give the AI alignment people money, power, and status to keep it under control. The colonel's speech wasn't meant to say "The Air Force can't competently program an AI; look how it went out of control". It was meant to say "The Air Force can program an AI that's so smart that it takes our top minds just to keep it contained and stop it from killing everybody". If he's out there making statements like that, then I doubt they have anything remotely similar.

For whatever it's worth, that didn't happen - the story originated with a speech by an Air Force colonel here (Ctrl-F for "AI – is Skynet here already?"), but he later admitted that it was a thought experiment which didn't actually happen (which you can see as a late edit on that same page). And, making journalists proud, he clarified that while he made it up, it was still true in spirit and is the reason he should get more funding:

UPDATE 2/6/23 - in communication with AEROSPACE - Col Hamilton admits he "mis-spoke" in his presentation at the Royal Aeronautical Society FCAS Summit and the 'rogue AI drone simulation' was a hypothetical "thought experiment" from outside the military, based on plausible scenarios and likely outcomes rather than an actual USAF real-world simulation saying: "We've never run that experiment, nor would we need to in order to realise that this is a plausible outcome". He clarifies that the USAF has not tested any weaponised AI in this way (real or simulated) and says "Despite this being a hypothetical example, this illustrates the real-world challenges posed by AI-powered capability and is why the Air Force is committed to the ethical development of AI".

Yeah, mask and lockdown success is going to vary wildly by ethnicity and political affiliation. Which is why this going to be so region-dependent, if they actually try it in earnest; Los Angeles County would have a harder time than e.g. Portland or San Fransisco, but a much easier time than pretty much any city or town with fewer than a hundred thousand inhabitants.

If they attempt it in the US again, results will vary wildly state-by-state and even county-by-county. There are a few places that probably would, but there are a LOT of places where even people who enthusiastically masked last time won't do it again. If they try this, I suspect we'll see significant pushback even in the unbelievably liberal Los Angeles County...or else a significant contingent which simply ignore the rules regardless.

Hillaire Belloc's 1922 book The Jews is a good look at this. Belloc wasn't a big fan of Jews, which is why he was the right man to write this - because he foresaw a genocide if things continued the way they were going, and decided that even if he didn't personally care for them, he didn't really want to see a genocide happen. It's a good look at the causes and degree of antisemitism in the early 20th century, throughout the Western world and not particular to just Germany.

There were enough individually good episodes that I'd say it's worth watching even with the cliffhanger ending...although, yes, the cliffhanger ending was frustrating. Gary was probably my favorite character of the group (Bill and Lee Rosen were quite good as well), with Brent Spiner being the best villain in the show and Anna and (iirc the name) Marcus a close second.

It's hard to describe, but while it had problems, it...came by the problems honestly, so to speak. You got the sense that the writers were by and large trying to write a good story, and occasionally fumbling the ball, rather than being deliberately trying to tear down things we love in the guise of storytelling.

Alphas had one of the best non-TNG roles Brent Spiner was in.