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How Gambling Explains Our Modern, Complex World

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If you were to watch “Moneyball” today, you might find it quaint. You may recall the premise: In a world before “data-driven decisions” was a cliché, a likable nerd played by Jonah Hill helps craft a baseball roster from a spreadsheet, beating out better-funded teams who still rely on traditional scouts. These old-school baseball types are stuck in the past – more concerned with a player’s jawline and how the ball “explodes off his bat” rather than on-base percentage and hard statistics.

Fifteen years later, algorithms have taken over everything from baseball to politics to research, and the shortcomings of “software eating the world” are becoming more obvious. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is built on vibes and being “brat,” instead of well-articulated policies. Despite our access to information and powerful modeling software, there is an ongoing replication crisis for scientific studies. Our social media feeds are targeted and addictive, but ultimately immiserating.

Enter Nate Silver, the statistician, political forecaster, and poker player. His new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is much more nuanced than “Moneyball,” eschewing the worship of data geeks and their denigration of human cognition. Instead, he uses poker to illustrate how to live in a modern, complex world. Statistical models have raised the game, but the best players combine these probabilities with their own human intuition to make the optimal play.

The River and The Village

To most people, Nate Silver builds election models. He came to prominence for predicting all 50 states

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Kirby’s Reply-All Rebuff Of Veterans Confirms The Biden Administration’s Disdain For Our Military

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In the Biden Administration’s latest “suckers and losers” scandal, White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby waved off a group of veterans critical of the Democrat regime’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal as being “all of one stripe.”

The rebuff came on Wednesday after Fox News Digital asked Kirby to weigh in on quotes from four veterans, including Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., who were unsatisfied with the White House official’s reaction to a new House GOP report highlighting “the chaos and instability” that took 13 U.S. service members’ lives in 2021.

During a White House press briefing on Monday, Kirby claimed that the 350-page report was “one-sided,” “partisan,” and wrongfully accused the Biden administration of “deception, lying, or lack of transparency.”

In an email chain intended for White House staffers on the National Security Council, Kirby remarked that there was “Obviously no use in responding” to the comment request because it came from “A ‘handful’ of vets indeed and all of one stripe.” Kirby did not notice at the time that his reply copied Fox News Digital.

“Clearly, I didn’t realize you were on the chain,” Kirby later clarified.

In an official statement, Kirby admitted to the accidental reply-all but claimed to “stand by my comments in the briefing room.”

Democrats like Kirby often accuse former President Donald Trump of insulting the U.S. military. Since 2020 they and corporate media have specifically capitalized on a fake news report that falsely accused Trump of insulting the deceased World War I soldiers in

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If Zuckerberg Truly Regrets His 2020 Censorship, Facebook Should Stop Smothering Free Speech

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Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg now admits in writing that he was manipulated by the Biden administration into suppressing free speech on Meta platforms. His actions obstructed vital information on effective Covid protocols and bolstered the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. This did enormous damage to our health and polity.

But Facebook’s censorship brought harm to innocent children too. I’m a longtime teacher, and for decades I’ve personally witnessed dangerous corruption in America’s schools. I dared to warn families, so I was silenced by Zuckerberg’s “shadow-banning,” thanks to algorithms imposed by censors (“fact-checkers”) at Meta.

Meta’s banning (as well as Twitter’s) began the very same night of my 2020 speech at the Republican National Convention. My pages changed from active with hundreds of likes and shares to zero likes and shares. And I went from rapid, daily follower increases to a complete halt in growth. Hundreds of my followers have reached out to me since the banning began to tell me that they no longer see my posts in their newsfeeds. Instagram’s (Meta’s) analytics show that an average of only 25 percent of my followers are seeing my content. That’s how shadow-banning works. I’m allowed to post, but my message is squelched.

Though I’m a volunteer in this battle for the kids, I had to hire social media experts to help me get my message to the public. They’ve reignited my social media presence — predominantly on Meta’s Instagram — with a reel-heavy strategy. Our ratios are the highest they’ve ever been — with the exception

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Latest Covid Shots Released Without Safety Data Under 4.5-Year-Old ‘Emergency’

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The Food and Drug Administration last month announced the availability of new Covid-19 vaccines directed to the latest variants in circulation but failed to disclose that the vaccines have not been established as safe and effective. Given the ongoing controversies about prior Covid mRNA vaccines during the pandemic, the FDA should do the work to assure the American people that the well-established standards for vaccine approval are applied to these novel mRNA technologies.

The FDA could release the latest Covid shots without proving safety and efficacy because they remain under the “emergency use authorization” (EUA) category. According to the FDA, “The ‘may be effective’ standard for EUAs provides for a lower level of evidence than the ‘effectiveness’ standard that FDA uses for product approvals.” The FDA has this authority only because the secretary of health and human services determined on Feb. 4, 2020, that there was a public health emergency that involved the virus that causes Covid-19, and this determination has remained in place over four years later.

In 2020, the U.S. was in a Covid public health emergency, but are we still in September 2024? 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that as of Aug. 31, only 2.3 percent of emergency room visits were for Covid. The rate of hospitalization for Covid is only 0.005 percent and is dropping. From a peak death rate in 2021 of 26,028 Americans per week, there are only 663 “deaths involving COVID-19” in the latest weekly CDC data. 

The reduced death rate

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