Links July 2021

The News Tribune published an article in 2004 about the “Dove of Oneness”, a mentally ill woman who got thousands of people to believe her crazy ideas about NESARA [1]. In recent time the QANON conspiracy theory has drawn on the NESARA cult and encouraged it’s believers to borrow money and spend it in the belief that all debts will be forgiven (something which was not part of NESARA). The Wikipedia page about NESARA (proposed US legislation that was never considered by the US congress) notes that the second edition of the book about it was titled “Draining the Swamp: The NESARA Story – Monetary and Fiscal Policy Reform“. It seems like the Trump cult has been following that for a long time.

David Brin (best-selling SciFi Author and NASA consultant) wrote an insightful blog post about the “Tytler Calumny” [2], which is the false claim that democracy inevitably fails because poor people vote themselves money. When really the failure is of corrupt rich people subverting the government processes to enrich themselves at the expense of their country. It’s worth reading, and his entire blog is also worth reading.

The forum for the War Thunder game had a discussion on the accuracy of the Challenger 2 tank which ended up with a man who claims to be a UK tank commander posting part of a classified repair manual [5]. That’s pretty amusing, and also good advertising for War Thunder. After reading about this I discovered that it’s free on Steam and runs on Linux! Unfortunately it whinged about my video drivers and refused to run.

Corey Doctorow has an insightful and well researched article about the way the housing market works in the US [6]. For house prices to increase conditions for renters need to be worse, that may work for home owners in the short term but then in the long term their children and grandchildren will end up renting.

etbe – Russell Coker