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You are not understanding me, a lot of people don't have the time to devote to a video as a means of assessing evidence. A transcript of a video may well get takers.

If you want people to see your support for what you are saying, don't post videos, use readable sources, it can be browsed and read many times quicker. How many people have got nearly two hours free to watch a video that might be a waste of time. This is not to say yours is. Text wins everytime. I might watch it later though, as the subject interests me. Phi put this up on the same subject earlier: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/understanding-russian-oligarchs

Missed this...Nice post by the way. Came across an interesting article....... https://www.quantamagazine.org/arik-kershenbaum-on-why-alien-life-may-be-like-life-on-earth-20210318/ Why Extraterrestrial Life May Not Seem Entirely Alien The zoologist Arik Kershenbaum argues that because some evolutionary challenges are truly universal, life throughout the cosmos may share certain features. Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist and animal communications researcher at the University of Cambridge, thinks that the evolutionary forces that shape life on Earth will produce many similar features in extraterrestrial life. On the website for the department of zoology of the University of Cambridge, the page for Arik Kershenbaum lists his three main areas of research, one of which stands out from the others. Kershenbaum studies “Wolves & other canids,” “Dolphins & cetaceans” — and “Aliens.” Granted, science hasn’t yet found any aliens to study, but Kershenbaum says that there are certain things we can still say about them with reasonable certainty. Topping the list: They evolved. “The bottom line — why animals do the things that they do, why they are the things that they are — is because of evolution,” said Kershenbaum, a lecturer and director of studies in the natural sciences at the university’s Girton College. He argues that evolution is a universal law of nature, like gravity — and that studies of plants and animals here can therefore tell us something useful about potential inhabitants of worlds far beyond Earth. He finds evidence for this in the process of evolutionary convergence, in which unrelated lineages of organisms evolve similar features as adaptations to similar environmental challenges. It’s an argument he presents in detail in his new book, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves, which draws on comparisons of animals’ physical adaptations as well as his own research (and that of others) into animal communications. more at link................................ :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: I sort of anyway see plenty of logic in that article. Particularly if we are inferring comparable intelligent advanced life forms that may reach space-faring capabilites. I made a comment supporting that stance a while back here, somewhere. Isn't basically the human form, two arms, fingers, opposing thumb, etc necessary for constructing cities, engineering projects etc, along of course with the necessary intelligence?

All you have been doing is using a broad brush. Even ignoring the atrocious and evocative characterization of certain folks, the superficial look at incarceration statistics is an example of using a too broad brush. Generally speaking crime is a relatively rare event which is not randomly distributed in a population. Some of the key factors, especially for violent crimes, where incarceration is more likely, include socioeconomic status and gender. So for these types of comparisons, at least representative cohorts are needed. Other ways to look at it would be to se whether areas or times with high immigration correlate with change in crime trajectories relative to areas which have no or reduced immigration and so on. Most in-depth studies were conducted in the US have clearly shown that the association between immigration and crime is a myth. Longitudinal analyses conclude that first generation immigrants are less likely to enter a crime trajectory, while 2nd generation kind of catch up to their native peers (https://doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2012.659200), undocumented immigrants were less likely to be involved in crime than their legal or native peers (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2014704117), a consistent negative association has been found between crime and immigration (https://doi.org/10.1080/15377938.2016.1261057), a pattern also seen in Canada (https://doi.org/10.3138/cjccj.2019-0015; https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.0.0229) and the UK https://doi.org/10.1163/15718174-02503002. In other words, once one puts the big brush aside, a finer resolved view emerges that counters the persistent but false narrative of immigrant crimes. What it does tell us that among immigrants the factors that are associated with crime (e.g. low income, gender bias) are likely overrepresented plus potential bias in policing. Also your selection of countries for criminal immigrants is quite interesting considering that the top foreign nationalities are Albanian, Polish, Romanian and Irish. Not saying that mentioning those would be any better, but perhaps there is some discrepancy between perception and reality?

Weird. Misleading title then: Is it rational (for an athiest) to believe in religion?

Got it! See this: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-3040.2012.02565.x To summarise: when potatoes are stored cold there is an imbalance between the rate of starch breakdown and the rate of sugar utilisation by the cells, presumably because their metabolic rate is decreased by more than the rate of starch breakdown. This leads to a build-up of free sugars. These, on frying the potato, undergo the Maillard reaction with amino acids, leading to dark brown compounds. (Apparently if the amino acid is asparagine, acrylamide can be formed, which is a suspected carcinogen. Yikes!) But in spite of this, potatoes are commercially kept in a cold store, to stop them sprouting or going off. So the solution seems to be to use the freshest potatoes you can get. Possibly better from a market stall than a supermarket, though not necessarily: all depends on time between field and sale. Possibly best to fry potatoes in the summer and autumn, when they have not been kept so long, as well. Anyway, a few things to try.

Maybe, I don't claim to be correct, its just my opinion I shared on this forum. I have my own views on the joke, again I'm sure many would disagree with. Personally my opinion is, the joke was lame, but quite tame. Will's reaction was understandable but his actions wrong and unjust.

Yes, of course you will die. Everybody dies. Your logic is atrocious, which contributes to why you are in the moderation queue.

Not to mention that keeping potatoes in the fridge is frowned upon as it makes the potatoes taste sweet and leads to increases in acrylamide, a cancer causing chemical, when cooked.

The purchase of the Sibneft oil and gas company through the rigged Russian government auction in 1995 is a great example of rape and robbery of assets that were once owned by socialist soviets. Or do you contend that someone who can snatch a company like that for $250M and sell it 10 years later BACK to the state for $13B is just a good businessman? Are you proud of the accomplishments of the Russian oligarchs who preyed on their own? Does that make them enviable wolves taking their just share from the sheep?

IMO, the answer here will be similar to the answer "where / what is the seat of consciousness?" While photons come in through the retina and stimulate receptor cells, and while those receptor cells send impulses back to the occipital lobe via the optic nerves, the actual concept of "sight" is extraordinarily complex once those signals arrive. There's a bit of a "Fourier analysis" happening unconsciously where the different signal strengths and locations are first sorted and that gives a baseline of data for interpretation, and it's this interpretation part after signals arrive where things get interesting. The parts of our brain associated with memory are sort of queried first... "Have I seen this before? Do I have an existing category bucket into which I can fit this?" The process of recognition saves energy from other brain areas. If we don't recognize it, we then engage the narration and creative parts of our brain... "I've seen something similar to this, but this is clearly different. Could it be X, could it by Y, or is this entirely different and may it's Z?" This all happens faster than the blink of an eye, until a signal is sent to our higher cortical areas and we become aware of it. This awareness is then "colored" by our mental state... are we tired? are we sad? are we angry? are we blissful? Those deeper underlying feelings all shade what we see in the conscious parts of our mind... and it's this conscious part of the mind that one might equate with a "mind's eye." It's just not a single place like a gas station on the corner of two streets. It's instead a town, or a neighborhood, a rhetorical symphony where no single instrument or note makes the music, but all together matter for the end experience being explored.

Just a couple of qualifications: I didn't mean to say panspermia isn't to play a role some day in long-term (mean-planet-life-wise \( \sim 10^{9} \) years) sense. It probably is, and a lot, IMO. For starters, it is an empirical fact that organic matter does make its way to neighbouring planets and moons, at least within the confines of Solar-System parameters. If you lower your standards for how "primitive" an "organism"* must be in order to be considered life --example: chemolithotrophs--, then it may well be that our concept of Goldilocks zone has to be recalculated to include much wider ranges within a solar system, as well as the different varieties of solar system that can harbour life this kind of "less-honourable" life. Panspermic events, in this view, would serve as bridges between communicating vessels of proto-life (planets and moons) to find their way to a more promising platform for multicellular/organelle-centred life. Trying to paint a vivid picture of what I think might be going on: Imagine that already gazillions of these proto-living forms are out there saying: We don't think of our arrangement as non-life; in fact, we're doing quite alright by our standards. We've lived here for 2 billion years within our Goldilocks zone, with our mind-bogglingly sluggish metabolism and reproductive cycle. If a higher-order Goldilocks zone opens up in any of the neighbours, higher-order, more sophisticatedly organised life will be seeded in those moons, don't worry. Enough of our spores are flowing around to guarantee that in, say, a couple billion years more, this higher form of life takes seed. I'm sure part of what I'm saying here, or similar, is being considered by people working on these subjects. * "Primitive" meaning things like: Doesn't have internal membranes/compartimentalisation equivalent to eukaryots Doesn't have to exploit any particularly profitable redox reaction => doesn't need to have a particularly fast metabolism/reproduction cycle Doesn't have more than order 103-104 pair bases in any of its nucleic acids (or the equivalent of DNA)

How well have they managed to supply their much closer troops from those locations? Maybe this will help: I realize I'm being an ass, but also consider how much easier it would be to supply the Ukrainians directly to where their war supplies are most needed from Poland if the Russians don't win control of that border (while risking Nato intervention with any "mistakes")

As I understand the technological requirements, there is a trade off between temperature, time and fuel quantity/density. The lower the temperature the longer you have to wait for fusion to start / and the larger the require sized of your fuel quantity. The longer you have to wait means the longer you have to 'contain' the nascent reactants, whilst maintaining their (high) temperature. And the temperatures achieved by these lasers are lower than some other methods. But lasers are getting better and better so perhaps they will be able to laze a target for long enough to activate the fusion at lower temperatures. This is not the first time it has been tried, but certainly the best I have heard of so far.

I didn't, because my original post was not about numbers or percentages. Or casting aspersions on immigrants in general. That came from you. I posted about the contrasting TREATMENT of immigrants. Comparing the best, like Roman Abramavitch ( an immigrant ) with the worst, the minority who rob, rape, and murder etc. You then spoke to that post, as if it was casting a slur on all immigrants, which it never did. So you twisted and spun my post to supposedly be a bigoted comment about ALL immigrants. When it was just about how our legal system treats them, best vs worst. If you responded to what I wrote, and not your own false spin on it, there wouldn't need to be a split thread.