BRUCE LERRO—Stage magic is an old practice in which skilled sleight-of-hand is involved in deceiving an audience into making errors in perception. The range goes from simple card tricks to escaping locked jails to the feats of Houdini. Stage magicians are so good they have convinced PhD physicists under laboratory conditions that paranormal effects are real. For instance, that they can bend spoons and read pictures sealed in envelopes. Cold readings are a judgment about a stranger based on a combination of reading body language, knowledge of rhetorical techniques, behind the scenes investigation into a person combined with knowledge of how to create atmospheric effects.
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BRUCE LERRO—Standards for getting information in the mass media are lower than for professional publications. Programs about the paranormal are notorious for editing out disconfirming evidence. Paranormal topics are a thriving business. Mass media has a stake in keeping its businesses alive. They would lose money if they revealed the truth of scientific research. In drug studies, research supported by pharmaceutical companies reports more positive results than research supported by public funds. Once a study is submitted for publication, a journal has an incentive to publish positive results. There is a publication bias for positivity.
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JOSUE MICHELS—n age of relative freedom took a major setback on August 25, the day the European Union’s draconian Digital Services Act (dsa) went into force. In the future, this measure could be used to ban articles such as this one. But much more than banning “disinformation” and “hate speech,” the law is set to ban any illegal content, services or activities. While the dsa is combating some filth and corruption American companies allow and promote, it is also setting the scene for a system of absolute state control over the Internet.
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GARY LEUPP—(After the failure of the pearl industry in Hawai’i—in part due to the construction around what became “Pearl Harbor,” and before sugar became the mono-crop curse of the islands, whaling and the provision of R&R for whaling ships was the kingdom’s leading economic activity. By 1824 about 100 foreign whaling vessels were using Hawai’i as a reprovisioning center.
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PATRICK LAWRENCE—“The story of the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling scheme, which netted tens of millions of dollars from Ukraine, China, Russia and beyond, is scandal enough,” Devine writes. “But the coverup — from Big Tech’s censorship of the Post’sreporting from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, and CIA lies that it was Russian disinformation, to the burying of this FD–1023 — is bigger than Watergate.”
