Browse Category

Blog

Playing with numbers and minds

  • Jul 19, 2020
  • /
  • Blog

A huge collective hooray seems to sweep through the media landscape every day, when the lastest number of positive tests is reported.

Any reasonable person who hasn’t been entirely robbed of their ability to think clearly through the wall-to-wall propaganda machinery flooding the unsuspecting Australian public with their poisonous trash information would at least suspect that there are some fishy things going on with the statistics we are shown. These numbers are not only presented free from any kind of meaningful context or relationship, but the numbers are qualitatively also on a spectrum of anything from imprecise and unscientific to downright dishonest.

I had a closer look at the latest Case and contact management guidelines of the Australian state of Victoria. What is being done to deceive and skew the numbers is pretty brazen, hidden in plain sight, and adds to the suspicion that this entire COVID-19 thing is not about a virus, but about power and control and furthering other agendas.

Locking down the herd

Has herd immunity been reached? You bet. The public in most countries was well and truly immunised against any logical and rational thought soon after governments began their fear mongering propaganda campaigns.

Are the lockdown measures we are experiencing required? No. Of course not.

Switzerland is one of the hardest hit countries when it came to the spread of COVID-19, and it was also a country to introduce a lockdown quite early. This article by Swiss Prof. Dr. Pietro Vernazza suggests that lockdown measures have really nothing to do with flattening the curve which our politicians, aided and abetted by a clueless and complicit media, want us to believe.

Keep Reading

It’s not the virus, stupid!

Apologies for the rude title, but I’m getting tired of this. Once again, I smell a rat.

As country after country succumbs to the latest wave of collective madness, reason and commonsense is in even shorter supply than toilet paper.

There’s widespread panic at governmental level from the UN down, in the business community, of course in the financial markets that are irrational at the best of times, and in the general population. And the fear and panic is being dutifully fuelled by a thoroughly complicit mainstream media – nothing new there.

Still, I don’t buy into the hype, and I was suspicious from day one. I prefer to think for myself and trust my own judgement. I can’t be certain what exactly is going on here, but I’m quite certain that this is not about preventing the spread of a killer virus.

Keep Reading

Debunking the supposed climate crisis – historical records

There is an easy way to expose the supposedly man-made climate crisis or climate emergency as an elaborate indoctrination and propaganda scheme: look at unadulterable historical records such as old newspapers, for instance.

A post by a climate activist on Twitter lamented the recent death of 3,000 flying foxes in the Kangaroo Valley in Australia, no doubt attributing the insufferable heat which caused this calamity to man-made climate change. This tweet prompted me to do a search for similar events in history, and it took me about a minute to find some in the Trove newspaper archive.

On page 13 of the Sydney Morning Herald of 30 January 1932 (during this year the CO2 levels are thought to have been about 305ppm, before the big spike in man-made CO2 emissions) we find the following article:

Source: Trove
Keep Reading

Climate change – the one thing you really need to understand

The only relevant question regarding climate change is: are human-generated CO2 emissions driving climatic changes? This is purely a scientific question, and the entire global warming theory hinges on this one question.

We can either unquestioningly (as we are asked to) accept and believe the alleged consensus that answers this question resoundingly in the affirmative, or we examine the scientific arguments and understand the issue ourselves.

Having done that, my understanding is that CO2 has little or even no discernible influence on the Earth’s climate system as a whole, let alone the huge but still relatively small amount of human-made CO2 emissions. 

And if that is the case, the entire global warming theory collapses in a heap – there is no need to worry about whether climate models are accurate (they’re not!), whether there is a consensus amongst 97% of scientists (there isn’t!), etc…

But I am not a scientist, and whilst I think I now understand CO2 much better, others can explain that much better. So below some useful video sources that helped me understand the science behind CO2 and that convinced me that CO2 cannot possibly be the climate control knob alarmists claim it to be.

And in German:

On the climate “debate”

The earth’s climate is and has always been changing. Just about everybody agrees on that. But for the last decades and especially more recently there has been fervent disagreement when it comes to the question whether the climate changes of the last decades have been caused by humanity, more precisely, whether our massive CO2 emissions have caused a warming of the planet, and whether this could have consequences for the environment, which could also affect humans.

The mainstream view seems to be that humans have indeed caused the Earth’s climate to change, and that urgent action to prevent the potential effects is required. But there are also people who have a more or less opposite view.

So whom should we believe?

Keep Reading

Trip to the Blue Mountains

  • Jul 14, 2019
  • /
  • Blog

I recently walked the Dardanelles Pass loop in the Blue Mountains, enjoying the spectacular scenery on a chilly and windy day.

Importing your own scanned text into LingQ

I love using LingQ for my language learning, and to make the most of it, I wanted to import one of my favourite French books that I have only in hardcopy. Whilst the LingQ process for importing text is as easy as could be, preparing the text involved a bit of trial and error, so I thought I would share what I do.

The book is La délicatesse by David Foenkinos, which is full of vocabulary I’d like to internalise. By the way, I love the movie with Audrey Tautou too.

Step 1: Scanning

I found it best to create individual scans of each double page, or to scan to a multi-page PDF, but it’s important not to scan with OCR (optical character recognition) turned on, so that you just have a plain PDF without any text in the background of the image. On the scanner I used the option is called a “non-editable PDF” – a slight misnomer, but anyway. If you produce a scan with OCR you may later have trouble overriding the default underlying text output – unless of course you can change the scanner’s OCR language to French, but with my office equipment that wasn’t possible.

Step 2: OCR process

I use a program called Nitro, but Adobe Acrobat would probably be similar. After importing the PDF, I go to Review > OCR > Options > Advanced, and select French as the recognition language. Then click OK, and the text recognition process only takes a few seconds.

Step 3: Create text document

Still in Nitro, I go Convert > To Word > Convert. A Word doc with the text opens up. In my experience there are some anomalies in the placement of some blocks of text, so I continue…

Step 4: Cleaning the text

I copy and paste the text in the correct order into a Notepad document. The purpose of this is to strip out any weirdness that comes from the Word doc.

Step 5: Assembling the text

I then copy and paste the text from Notepad into a WordPad document, which is easier to work with than Notepad. In WordPad I get rid of any OCR errors, for example hyphens that have magically turned into bullet points, or unnecessary spaces, etc.

It could be easier to edit in Word though. If you want to get rid of double or even triple spaces between words, you can do an easy copy/replace.

Save the file as a LingQ-compatible DOCX file if you import the whole book in once go.

Step 6: Importing the text

You can then use the Import ebook function in LingQ to easily create a lesson with the text you scanned.

Or you can create a new course and then add each chapter as a lesson.

Resources for learning French

I’ve been learning French since I was in 4th grade. For a long time I had a complicated love-hate relationship with this beautiful language, thanks to many years of relentless drilling, but now I just enjoy experiencing some French and Quebecois culture by reading, listening and speaking (a love interest certainly helps).

In this post I’ve collected some resources I’ve found particularly useful. I recommend a combination of various sources. No one source alone will get you to fluency.

Any questions or suggestions? I would love to hear them and include them in this post!

Keep Reading