The Continuing and Spreading Corruption of Wikipedia

John Stossel offers disheartening observations on the fall of once-promising Wikipedia. The site is permeated with censorship. On any controversial topic, you can depend on Wikipedia to present you with a false consensus.

Stossel: "I once reported how great Wikipedia is. But now, it’s manipulated by leftists. That’s a big problem because its bad information corrupts AI and search results."  Click on the graphic below for Stossel's video report:

Prior DI article mentioning Glenn Greenwald's commentary on Wikipedia.

Neutral Point of View, by Ashley Rindsberg:

Readers of NPOV know that I’ve previously described Wikipedia as a “methane fire” — a flame that burns invisibly. WMF, in deploying its “most trusted source of information online” message, has blinded itself to reality: people are losing trust, and generally for good reason.

A recent article by Rindsberg reports: "WMF recently discovered that Wikipedia has seen an 8% decrease in traffic. Despite its 400-strong workforce of engineers and product specialists, WMF had no idea this was going on until it stumbled on the data during a bot purge."

New alternative to Wikipedia: https://grokipedia.com/

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EU Directly Attacks the First Amendment

The EU is trying to destroy the First Amendment. It is an attack on the United States. Greg Lukianoff of FIRE quotes this article by the Editors of The Free Press:

“The stated reasons for the fine are a lack of transparency, a violation of advertising rules, and misleading users with “deceptive” design. The real reasons have little to do with those allegations, and everything to do with the kind of speech the EU wants to suppress: perspectives that have not been filtered through bureaucrats, academics, or media professionals; views that go against the received wisdom of policymakers; and views that have not been vetted and found to be acceptable by governments. Any company that utters the wrong kind of speech should now know that the meter is running.”

Mike Benz has been explaining that the actions of the EU must be considered a direct assault on the lives of all Americans:

This is the day I’ve warned the Trump Admin every day for 7 years would come, since 2018’s EU Disinfo Code, to 2019 when the DSA was floated in concept, to 2020 when it became a formal draft EU law while I was at State, to its 2022 adoption, to its 2025 mandatory Disinfo Code.

I keep telling you exactly what to do and exactly what bad things will happen next if you think you can ignore this and not do anything, and each thing I keep saying will happen next literally keeps happening next and happening exactly as I told you it would if you didn’t act.

How could anyone in the admin be surprised the EU censorship law would fine/extort X ??? That’s WHY they made the law, whose enforcement teeth JUST kicked in this summer! This is like letting a flesh-eating cannibal sleep on your chest then being surprised it bit your heart

My lovely DC policymakers who are doing so much good, this €120M fine is N-O-T-H-I-N-G compared to what happens in 2026, 2027, 2028 if this — the first fine — isn’t smacked the fuck out of the air hard, mercilessly and with a message. Is @USAmbEU briefed enough to be armed?

BTW, what has Hillary Clinton been up to? Jonathan Turley explains:

Heritage Foundation exposes Hillary Clinton was directly behind getting the European Union to use their Digital Services Act to pressure Elon Musk and America back into censorship ‌

Hillary Clinton flew overseas for a meeting to facilitate this against America ‌

“They (The European Union) gathered in Berlin, and it was the most anti-free speech gathering I've ever been part of — Hillary Clinton was there, and she really fueled the anger. ‌

When Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, she called on the EU to use the infamous Digital Services Act, which is one of the most anti-free speech pieces of legislation in decades. And she called upon the EU to use the DSA (Digital Services Act) to force the censorship of American citizens, force people like Musk to censor.

It's an extraordinary act by someone who was once a presidential candidate” ‌

[More . . . ]

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How Much ATP Does a Human Body Produce Every Day?

Today I learned that the human body makes its weight in ATP (a key component of the Krebs cycle") every day. When I read this I wondered if it could possibly be true. Here's what Grok had to say:

My Query to Grok: Is it true that we make our body weight worth of ATP every day?

Yes, it's true. The human body turns over (produces and consumes) an amount of ATP roughly equivalent to its own body weight each day, though the exact figure varies by activity level and individual.

At any given moment, the body contains only about 250 grams of ATP (plus some ADP). However, ATP is rapidly recycled: it's hydrolyzed to ADP + phosphate to release energy, then resynthesized using energy from food. This cycle happens thousands of times per day per molecule.

Reliable sources estimate daily ATP turnover as:

    • 50–75 kg for an average adult (often cited as ~100–150 moles of ATP hydrolyzed and regenerated daily).

    • Around 50 kg in sources like Wikipedia.

    • ~60 kg in BioNumbers database.

    • Up to 100 kg or more during high activity in some physiology texts.

For a typical 70 kg person, this is approximately one body weight's worth per day at rest or moderate activity. During intense exercise, the rate can increase dramatically (e.g., up to 0.5–1 kg per minute). The key point is the enormous flux: even though net ATP storage is tiny—your cells are constantly churning through it to power everything from muscle contraction to brain function.

This fact is widely accepted in biochemistry and physiology textbooks and is often used to illustrate how dynamic cellular energy metabolism is.

Tutorial on the Krebs Cycle (Also from Grok):

The Krebs cycle, also known as the citric acid cycle or tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, is a central metabolic pathway in cellular respiration that occurs within the mitochondria of eukaryotic cells, efficiently converting nutrients from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins into usable energy. It begins when acetyl-CoA—derived primarily from the breakdown of glucose via glycolysis—combines with oxaloacetate to form citrate, initiating a series of eight enzymatic reactions that systematically oxidize the molecule, releasing carbon dioxide as a byproduct (which we exhale) and generating high-energy electron carriers like NADH and FADH2, along with a small amount of ATP directly through substrate-level phosphorylation. These electron carriers then feed into the electron transport chain to produce the bulk of the cell's ATP via oxidative phosphorylation, yielding up to 38 ATP molecules per glucose molecule overall. The cycle is highly efficient, regenerating oxaloacetate to allow continuous operation, and it's tightly regulated by factors like ATP levels and enzyme inhibitors to match the cell's energy demands, playing a crucial role not only in energy production but also in providing intermediates for biosynthesis of amino acids, nucleotides, and other essential compounds.
 

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Quotes for Today

In the past, I've posted some of the most interesting quotes I've encountered. I haven't done that for awhile, but today seems like a good day for another batch of quotes from my collection. Here they are:

“If I were rich, I would have a plaque made up, and sent to every judge in America, bearing a statement made by Adam Smith more than two and a half centuries ago: ‘Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.’” — Thomas Sowell

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." - H.L. Mencken

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” - Galileo

"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." -Balzac

"You are not a traveler on this path, you are the path itself, unfolding with every step." ~ Rumi

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain

“We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.” ― Quintilian

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." - Hannah Arendt

“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.” ― George Carlin

“Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

"I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive." Lord Chesterfield

“Do not interfere with an enemy that is in the process of destroying itself.” -Sun Tzu

“Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.” - George Orwell, 1984

“I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64 [or] removing lead paint that lowers a child’s IQ by five points.” - Steven Pinker

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