CanuckKW64

Free thinker. Learning, human potential! Identity withheld ONLY due to repercussns for speaking agnst policies. My profession is muzzled. Photo: Tommy Douglas.

[CanuckKW64 @bw_jacobs]

I am recommending a May 2021 book by Canadian investigative journalist Sam Cooper (CCP is Chinese Communist Party). Answers a lot of questions.
Wilful Blindness: How a network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents infiltrated the West.
https://t.co/77vssCF2QS

[ADAM @AdameMedia]

James Cameron: "In Star Wars the good guys are the rebels, they're using asymmetric warfare against a highly organized empire, I think we call those guys terrorists today."

George Lucas: "When I did it they were Vietcong. That was the whole point."

[Voice of Yemen 🇾🇪🇵🇸 @Voice_of_yemen]

Until Palestine is free, none of us are truly free. 🇵🇸

[Michael de Adder @deAdder]

December 21st, 2025

[Peter Roman @TsarKastik]

@CrazyVibes_1 Gospel of Matthew Ch. 25:

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Officer Miller responded to a call at a local grocery store. The manager had caught a shoplifter.

When Officer Miller arrived, he expected to see a teenager stealing candy or a professional thief. Instead, he saw an elderly man, about 80 years old, sitting on a bench in the security office, looking at the floor.

"He tried to walk out with a loaf of bread, a carton of eggs, and a small bag of dog food," the manager said. "We have a zero-tolerance policy. I want to press charges."

Officer Miller looked at the items. The total value was maybe $12.

He sat down next to the old man. "Sir, why did you do this?"

The old man’s hands were shaking. "My social security check was late," he whispered. "I haven't eaten in two days. And my dog... my dog is hungry. I can handle the hunger, but I couldn't watch him look at me like that anymore."

Officer Miller looked at the old man’s worn-out shoes and his thin jacket. He thought about his own grandfather.

Officer Miller stood up and turned to the manager. "I'll take it from here."

He walked the old man to the checkout counter. The manager thought he was escorting him out.

But Officer Miller stopped. He took the bread, the eggs, and the dog food. Then he added a rotisserie chicken, milk, vegetables, and a large bag of high-quality dog food.

He pulled out his own credit card and paid for everything.

"Sir, you are not going to jail today," Officer Miller told the old man. "You are going home to feed your dog."

The old man started to weep right in the middle of the store. "Why?" he sobbed. "I broke the law."

"Sometimes the law is black and white," Officer Miller said. "But humanity is grey. We take care of our elders in this town."

Officer Miller drove the man home and helped him put the groceries away. He gave the man his personal cell number. "Next time you’re hungry, don't steal," Miller said. "Call me."

The police department posted the photo of the receipt. It went viral, reminding everyone that policing isn't just about making arrests; it's about making a difference.

Let’s spread kindness like Officer Miller. Share this story and inspire others to make a difference today!

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

Major preprint just out!

We compare how humans and LLMs form judgments across seven epistemological stages.

We highlight seven fault lines, points at which humans and LLMs fundamentally diverge:

The Grounding fault: Humans anchor judgment in perceptual, embodied, and social experience, whereas LLMs begin from text alone, reconstructing meaning indirectly from symbols.

The Parsing fault: Humans parse situations through integrated perceptual and conceptual processes; LLMs perform mechanical tokenization that yields a structurally convenient but semantically thin representation.

The Experience fault: Humans rely on episodic memory, intuitive physics and psychology, and learned concepts; LLMs rely solely on statistical associations encoded in embeddings.

The Motivation fault: Human judgment is guided by emotions, goals, values, and evolutionarily shaped motivations; LLMs have no intrinsic preferences, aims, or affective significance.

The Causality fault: Humans reason using causal models, counterfactuals, and principled evaluation; LLMs integrate textual context without constructing causal explanations, depending instead on surface correlations.

The Metacognitive fault: Humans monitor uncertainty, detect errors, and can suspend judgment; LLMs lack metacognition and must always produce an output, making hallucinations structurally unavoidable.

The Value fault: Human judgments reflect identity, morality, and real-world stakes; LLM "judgments" are probabilistic next-token predictions without intrinsic valuation or accountability.

Despite these fault lines, humans systematically over-believe LLM outputs, because fluent and confident language produce a credibility bias.

We argue that this creates a structural condition, Epistemia:
linguistic plausibility substitutes for epistemic evaluation, producing the feeling of knowing without actually knowing.

To address Epistemia, we propose three complementary strategies: epistemic evaluation, epistemic governance, and epistemic literacy.

Full paper in the first reply.

Joint with @Walter4C & @matjazperc

[Mike Hudema @MikeHudema]

Newly discovered docs dating back to the 1970's reveal that Shell has known about the harm caused by oil & gas for decades.These files aid the massive climate lawsuits targeting Shell: https://t.co/FzoAJw2N3f

Hold the companies causing this crisis responsible. #ActOnClimate

[Jim the hermit @SleepyJim0]

Living with COVID-19 means everyone getting sicker and sicker and sicker until civilisational collapse.
No seriously - look at what the graphs are showing (Finland). Extrapolate. Think what this means. Nobody will be capable of working if we don’t suppress COVID.
#COVIDReality

[Tehran Tadhg @TadhgHickey]

You only think you hate her. But it's not her you hate, it's her authenticity, compassion, fearlessness - qualities you might have once had or at least wanted to have but life drained them from you. You're looking for the angle but there is none. She simply cares. And you can fight to reclaim that empathy. It's the easier, softer way than emptying, fruitless hatred.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In a world where artificial intelligence can replicate a person’s voice or face in seconds, Denmark is stepping forward with a groundbreaking proposal: a copyright law that grants every citizen ownership of their own likeness.

If passed, this law would mean no one — not even AI companies — could legally use your face, voice, or body data without consent. The move comes amid growing global concerns about deepfakes, where digital replicas of real people are used in scams, misinformation, and even political manipulation.

[Ounka @OunkaOnX]

Dr. Gabor Maté, a Holocaust survivor - debunks the long-circulating Israeli disinformation and calmly responds to a provocative Zionist, revealing who is truly acting in an inhuman way

[David Lingenfelter, PhD @dlingenfelter]

Scientists are shifting from the “immunity debt” idea to evidence of lasting immune disruption from SARS-CoV-2.

Signs include T-cell exhaustion, viral reactivation, and increased infections—even in mild cases—raising population-level concerns.
https://t.co/Zm292V6qA4

[Prisoners For Palestine @Prisoners4Pal]

BREAKING: Greta Thunberg arrested under the Terrorism Act for holding a sign which says "I support Palestine Action prisoners. I oppose genocide"

She was detained at the Prisoners for Palestine action at Aspen Insurance in London, insurers for Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

yes, asian and african rivers produce 95% of ocean plastic but nobody asks where the plastic comes from.

plastic recycling is a scam. always has been.
the industry knew since 1974 it “cant be justified economically”

they funded the recycling campaigns anyway because the alternative was banning plastic.

only 5-6% of US plastic actually gets recycled and europe isnt better.
the EU exports 1.1 million tonnes of plastic waste per year, 3 million kg leaving every single day.
31% goes to turkey, 16% to malaysia, 13% to indonesia, all labeled “recyclable”

most plastics cant even be recycled to begin with (thousands of types, different chemical properties). and for the few that can, the output is lower quality and more toxic than virgin plastic.
you literally degrade the material each cycle until its worthless.

so what happens to the other 95%?
western countries ship it to southeast asia and africa under the label “recycling exports” with the receiving countries promising to recycle it in their stead for a price, but those countries dont have facilities either. so they burn it or dump it in rivers.

every 20 minutes, a 10-tonne truckload of plastic enters the ocean in indonesia alone.
it may look like indonesians pollute more but that’s because we ship them our garbage and they have no infrastructure to handle it.

china used to absorb it all. when they banned imports in 2018, the west just redirected to countries with weaker regulations. malaysia, vietnam, philippines. the map below shows the result.

you sort your trash so you feel like youre helping, the plastic goes on a boat, gets burned in a village without emissions controls, poisons their air and water, flows into their rivers, enters the ocean, and in your food and water.
you feel good about the plastic you recycled and never think about it again but you end up eating it anyway.

then we ban straws and plastic bags and call it environmentalism

[Saganism @Saganismm]

"In a life short and uncertain, it seems heartless to do anything that might deprive people of the consolation of faith when science cannot remedy their anguish. Those who cannot bear the burden of science are free to ignore its precepts. But we cannot have science in bits and pieces, applying it where we feel safe and ignoring it where we feel threatened."

― Carl Sagan

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

“My name's Morris. I'm 73. I collect shopping carts in the Walmart parking lot. Worst job in the store. Heat, rain, snow, doesn't matter. I'm out there pushing carts uphill all day while my back screams.

Thirty years I gave to this company. Manager once. Then they "restructured." Now I push carts with the teenagers who don't show up half the time.

Bitter? Yeah, I'm bitter.

But about six months ago, something stupid happened. I was bringing in carts, and this old man was struggling to get one from the corral. Shaky hands, oxygen tank. He couldn't pull the carts apart.

I walked over. "Let me get that for you, sir."

He looked at me, really looked. "You're too old to be doing this work."

Hit me wrong. "Yeah, well, life don't care about fair."

But I got him a cart. Walked it to his car. He thanked me three times.

Next week, same old man, same struggle. I got him a cart again. Week after that, same thing. Started just watching for him. Thursday afternoons. Blue Buick. I'd have a cart waiting by his car before he even parked.

One Thursday, his daughter was with him. She stopped me. "You've been helping my dad."

"Just doing my job, ma'am."

"No," she said. "Your job is carts. Not kindness. Dad has Parkinson's. Shopping is his only outing. He talks about you all week. Says you make him feel like he still matters."

Something broke in me. "He does matter."

She handed me a card. "Thank you for seeing him."

After they left, I sat in my truck and cried. First time in years.

Started noticing others. Woman with a toddler and infant, struggling with cart and kids. Started helping her to her car, watching the kids while she loaded groceries. Veteran with one arm, couldn't manage cart and bags. Started being there.

Teenagers at work noticed. "Morris, you're doing too much."

"I'm doing what's right."

Manager called me in last month. Thought I was finally done.

"Morris, customer satisfaction surveys mention you by name. Seventeen times this quarter. Corporate's asking questions."

I shrugged. "I just help people."

He pushed a paper across the desk. "They're creating a new position. 'Customer Assistance Associate.' Mostly helping elderly and disabled customers. Inside work. Air conditioning. Same pay. They want you."

I stared at him. "Why?"

"Because you already do it. Might as well make it official."

I took the job. Now I'm inside, helping people who need it. But here's what gets me, that old man with Parkinson's, his name is Robert. He died two months ago. His daughter came to tell me.

"Dad's last words were about you," she said, crying. "He said, 'Tell Morris he gave me my dignity back. Tell him old men matter because of him.'"

I couldn't speak.

She handed me something. An envelope. Inside, a letter Robert wrote,

"Dear Morris, I see you. You're angry about where life left you. I was too. But you chose kindness anyway. That's not weakness. That's strength. You matter more than you know. Thank you for mattering to me. -Robert"

I'm 73. I spent thirty years climbing, then watched it all collapse. Spent the last year pushing carts in parking lots feeling worthless.

But I learned something, your circumstances don't define your impact. I had no power, no title, no respect. But I had hands that still worked. And a choice.

So wherever you are, whatever knocked you down, whatever bitterness you're carrying, hear this: you can still matter. Right now. Right where you are.

Help someone to their car. Hold a door. See the person everyone else ignores.

Because the world doesn't need your former glory. It needs your present kindness.

That's enough. That's everything.”
.
AI image is for demonstration purpose only.
.
Credit: Juliana Hauck

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The beauty of Ruyi Bridge in Taizhou, Zhejiang China.

It's made up of three bridges across the Shenxianju Valley and it features a glass-bottomed walkway.

[Dr. Allison Wiltz @queenie4rmnola]

This

[Bruce Swanton @bruceaswanton]

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[CanuckKW64 @bw_jacobs]

@bruceaswanton @MikeHudema Thanks for posting this, BS. Simple and to the point.