On Heightism

#50 For XYZ History Month(s), teachings of philosopher Martha Nussbaum guide us to examine every -ism, and develop tactical empathy** for the plight of relative shorty, Founders Fund's Peter Theil.

In Tracing #28 you met Davos Man. Standing before you in #50 is Valley Man. Peter Theil (left) and Marc Andreessen (right), are two of the species’ three alphas which either led or remained neutral on the retreat from SVBank during the bank run and subsequent collapse on Mar. 9.

Introduction: It’s becoming more clear with each month we got the “Roaring Twenties” all wrong.

And I’m thinking we should rename these months “XYZ History Month.” The 2020 George Floyd protests in my backyard on The Great Highway were dominated by signs that read “Asians for Black Lives.” White patriarchy over-wrote the John Dos Passos trilogy with works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Earnest Hemingway. This podcast interview of Matt Stoller, who wrote Goliath, conducted by Lewis Lapham mention Dos Passos’ take, and describe what a scary monopoly rollup and power-consolidating decade the 1920’s were. FDR’s New Deal didn’t come on a frictionless delivery platform. It was, as Stoller discovered while researching Goliath, “a gang fight.”

🎙️Nov 22, 2019 Podcast: Matt Stoller Author of ‘Goliath The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy’ (Lapham’s Quarterly) -

Tomorrow’s issue for free subscribers will appear on the website tracingcovid.substack.com. It will honor Women’s History Month more properly than this issue. I truly hope you can take a look, as it recommends donations and subscriptions.

Contents:

• Catch & Contain: Fresh Misinfo Wave

• Level #3 is the Number One “A.I.” Issue

• Vocabulary Building

• Timeline

• Peter

• Marc

• Venture Capital Tiers Weren’t Always Pump-and-Dump Cops. Rrriiight???

• It’s Important to be Playful and Frivolous

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Catch & Contain: Fresh Misinfo Wave 

Mar 03 [Misinformation: ] Long Covid is much less likely after omicron than after variant circulating at start of COVID-19 pandemic (EurekAlert! For AAAS) - This was a cleverly designed misinformation wave. Humans from Switzerland packaged a pre-preprint – a mere Google document yet to become a preprint – as findings being presented at a conference. The authors submitted the study the preprint the Google document to news outlets with a news "embargo" directive, which means they gave it to the press ahead of time. But this study’s, or rather this Google document’s findings are ho-hum: the authors tabulate some people who caught COVID after most people were vaccinated, and those Omicron people developed longCOVID at lower rates than people who caught COVID when nobody was vaccinated. But the authors spin the different longCOVID rates as having nothing to do with vaccination.

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