July 2018

3 stock picks: 1) AMD, with Zen 2 coming in April 2019, Zen 3 in 2020, and even 5nm manufacturing on the horizon, is about to supplant Intel as the dominant desktop chip maker.

2) MSFT has scaled down its megalomania under the new CEO Satya Nadella, but under the calmer exterior, it is still a ruthlessly ambitious company. They’re into everything:

– cloud with Azure,
– IoT,
– AI,
– business analytics (Power BI),
– quantum computing (they even have a language Q# to be used for quantum research),
– desktop with Windows 10 being regularly updated and still the premier gaming platform (e.g., DirectX 12 has just been updated with Raytracing technology),
– servers with SQL Server being in my opinion their best software overall,
– developer tools like Visual Studio soon to be updated to VS 2019 (one crucial reason MS has been so successful is its commitment to developers and thorough documentation of all its tools),
– porting their stuff to Linux,
– Office 2019 is coming, and so on.

They’re also working on a mysterious “modular” version of Windows called Windows Core OS + CShell which may enable them to return to the smartphones market.

3) NVidia (NVDA): still the undisputed leader in GPUs for servers and machine learning, crypto mining, and gaming, with AMD way behind and Intel seriously wounded, it may announce a new GPU architecture very soon.

The core of Western astrology, as I understand it, is the ancient / medieval geocentric cosmology of “celestial spheres,” the highest of which is the “empyrean” heaven where the blessed congregate.

This is coupled with the idea of preexistence of the soul. When a soul travels down from the empyrean heaven to incarnate in a body, it passes through all the lower spheres containing the less noble celestial bodies — stars, planets, and so on, and is influenced, as regards personality or destiny, by their positions at that precise time.

Then the interaction between the heavenly bodies (1) at the date and time of birth / ensoulment and (2) at the present or future time can be used to construct a unique horoscope for each person.

Astrology falls apart as a science as soon as the premise, and so its causal mechanism, is denied.

The devil’s envy is satisfied when he gets us to destroy each other.

Envy is a species of hatred, wherein the demons resent the divine graces and favor given to us and the possibility of glory for us if we defeat these evil angels. Not only that, but they’d take away even our natural happiness by causing us to sin and so to corrupt our nature, thus earning us hellfire.

They will not rest until we are pure evil.

And the devil’s pride is tickled when we worship him instead of God.

Recall that the source of the conflict is that certain angels refused the grace of charity for humans and the state of servitude that came with it.

Instead of charity, they now feel hatred for us; and instead of serving us, would rather see us bow down to them.

The remedy is for us (1) to see God for who He is: existing necessarily and being lovable essentially; (2) obey the moral law; and (3) welcome and nurture the divine grace in us through holy deeds.

“Jesus is not God” is not an article of faith of Islam.

It is merely an opinion, which happens to be false, of many individual Muslims.

Similarly, “Muhammad is not the final prophet of God” is not a Christian doctrine. That Muhammad is basically irrelevant in the scheme of things is just a (true) opinion of most Christians.

(See St. Thomas on science, faith, and opinion.)

Progress in medical technology can be a serious snare to us, if it is used to prolong not our living but our dying.

It seems that to be a biologist in good standing within the “scientific community,” one needs to affirm some confession of faith like:

“I don’t believe in God; I believe in evolution.”

Crazy!

I hope the president stays missing.

Permanently.

At this point it should be clear that no government involvement is needed in creating technological standards.

Cooperation within the market to the benefit of all occurs as smoothly as competition. The term “industry” as “a distinct group of productive or profit-making enterprises” therefore has a technical aspect: all the ways in which the various machines produced by the firms in the industry interoperate.

That includes coining money. The “gold standard” is a universal custom generated privately by the market, that is, by human action (i.e., of individuals acting in their own pecuniary interest as buyers and sellers of goods and services) not human design (i.e., by an armchair economist-philosopher of social institutions or government).

This gold standard precedes any national currency or fiduciary media.

Other meanings, such as a state of affairs in which government paper money is redeemable in gold, are strictly derivative and must be used with care.

Never before Trump did I find myself praying for a politician, most of whom are hopeless degenerate undead.

But I’ve been beseeching God to watch over Trump a number of times now.

May he crush the snake that is the US evil empire.

How we need the capitalist revolution over all the world!

The entire whatever-industrial complex needs to disappear 100% along with the federal government that it serves.