TheVat

A larger part of our primal nature is to rant on and on about matters we know very little about.

Even volcanoes, usually associated with global cooling events, can sometimes pump water vapor into the stratosphere and achieve a warming effect for several years. This seems to be the case wrt the Tongan blast a few months ago. (just what Earth needs right now, right?) https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stratosphere-water-warming

Seems like the same old Left Strawman emerging here, driven by the same RW talking points. Rather than take the trouble to define what he means by Left policies, he simply goes right to bashing caricatures that appeal to the darkest incidents of historical totalitarianism. I doubt we can actually steer this towards discussing realworld outcomes in various countries, with comparisons of living standards, happiness index, poverty rates, access to healthcare, maternity leave, elder care, etc. Because to go that direction would discover that center-left liberal democracies like Denmark or Japan get the highest marks on these quality of life metrics. When you can't pound the facts, you pound the table.

A, C, K, K2, D, copper, selenium, zinc, and a few other essential nutrients, and you would be short on methionine. This is a terrible diet and would result in multiple deficiencies and eventually severe illness. About the only thing positive I could say is you've got your fiber covered. And subbing potatoes for wheat, while it would mitigate scurvy, would further reduce some of your B complex vitamins and be less of a complementary protein with the chickpeas. Starchy tubers are generally not nutrient-dense.

The meaning of Left-wing, i.e. the specific ideologies, really depends on the location of the Overton Window at a given time and place. You really need to specify where that is and what specific policies you are opposing. Swedish liberal democracy and Stalin really aren't at all the same thing, and are greatly separated on any political spectrum. Here's a wiki definition of Left, to get started: Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.[1][2][3][4] Left-wing politics typically involve a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.[1] According to emeritus professor of economics Barry Clark, left-wing supporters "claim that human development flourishes when individuals engage in cooperative, mutually respectful relations that can thrive only when excessive differences in status, power, and wealth are eliminated.

This whole will she won't she story has been a snoozefest. Serg's difficulty with identifying Pelosi's gender was amusing, though.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/nichelle-nichols-dead-star-trek-lieutenant-uhura-1235189880/ An interesting obit. I didn't know about her recruiting stint with NASA. Or that MLK was a Trekkie. And talked her into staying on the series when she was planning to leave Knew that she and Shatner broke the interracial kiss barrier on American tv, which required malign telekinetic beings to achieve but hey it was a start. May her hailing frequencies always be open.

Masking tape on the cut line, and a finer toothed blade? Have had pretty good results with that.

Well, better I think. Recall the traditional Jeffersonian idea of democracy was that representation was not just a passive reflection of popular wishes but also an exercise of leadership and wisdom, offering people a broad vision and educating them on a range of issues so they can more clearly see what opposed corruption and fostered civic virtue. This was why Jefferson et al so distrusted aristocracies, which they saw as self serving and prone to corruption.

@exchemist Fantastic paper. Plus one. I like Pigliucci. The Hard Problem does seem like a category error, and it's one called to our attention nearly a century ago by Gilbert Ryle. This is a good response, also, to Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment Mary in the black and white room. Which causes some philosophers of mind to go off on a mystical tangent over qualia (aka "raw feels") and their seeming mystery. Perhaps we can say that qualia are simply how brains appear from the inside. Just as green is how my wife's eyes look from the outside when viewed by a terrestrial hominin with color vision where there is sufficient ambient light. Someone deprived of mirrors isn't going to lecture us on The Hard Problem of My Eye Color.

Kind of a sticking point with "instantaneous" awareness in this chat, given that there's zero evidence of quantum processing in brains (Hameroff claims notwithstanding) and much evidence that human responses take a little time, as do nerve impulses. Things that feel instant, when tested, prove not to be. Our minds paper over time lags and provide an illusion of "instant." Subjective impressions can be deceiving. Emergent phenomena like consciousness may feel holistic and irreducible, but that's not evidence that they are. But that feeling of unity provides a useful narrative for a biological organism that has to survive a challenging environment. As is often noted, the brain is "too hot, noisy, and wet" for quantum processing. Penrose's OR remains hypothetical at this point.

When you come to a four kin the road, take it.

And bacon grease is consistent with veganism, so long as you do it by means of liposuction on free-foraging pigs. The pig is more svelte, you get the great flavor, everyone wins.

The Catch-22 on ranked choice is a problem. Even Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912, couldn't break through in spite of garnering a large coalition behind his Progressive party. Which resulted in Taft, who would have likely won, losing to Woodrow Wilson. Taft had won easily his first term. ("Bull Moose party" was the nickname of TR's Progressive party) If it actually were Biden v Trump in 2024, as @J.C.MacSwell mentioned, it does seem possible there could be some unprecedented win of a third party. That would be two uniquely poor main choices. A third option like Yang, or maybe Amy Klobuchar, could start to look pretty good.

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/27/1114074697/james-lovelock-gaia-theory-dies LONDON — James Lovelock, the British environmental scientist whose influential Gaia theory sees the Earth as a living organism gravely imperiled by human activity, has died on his 103rd birthday. Lovelock's family said Wednesday that he died the previous evening at his home in southwest England "surrounded by his family." The family said his health had deteriorated after a bad fall but that until six months ago Lovelock "was still able to walk along the coast near his home in Dorset and take part in interviews." Born in 1919 and raised in London, Lovelock studied chemistry, medicine and biophysics in the U.K. and the U.S. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked at the National Institute for Medical Research in London. Some of his experiments looked at the effect of temperature on living organisms and involved freezing hamsters and then thawing them. The animals survived...

Would be hard to explain how those five retroreflectors got on the moon, for starters. Also, there are quite a few lunar rocks which have distinctively different mineralogical signatures from terrestrial rocks. (and they are also different from lunar origin meteorites)

There is. When I hike in rocky canyons around here, a broad brimmed hat that blocks direct solar rays is insufficient because UV bounces off some minerals in rock and so I get some UV from below. A similar case is walking by water - UV will bounce off the water and come in below the brim. This reflected UV is less than from direct sun, but it is still significant from a dermatological perspective if you are exposed for more than a few minutes. Sand and snow also reflect quite a bit of UV.

Yes, good point, emergent qualities are inherently unpredictable. And that recognition of sentience will require a formidable sort of Turing Test. Something that can tweeze out all the clever artifice that might manifest in a really high grade simulation (or somehow discern what David Chalmers calls a P-Zed).

The important barricades will be around state and county election officials and workers. The "ginger mints" affair was just the beginning. The people who process and certify votes are where the ramparts of democracy are most threatened.

This was pointed out also in Michigan when an angry COVID restrictions protest in Spring of 2020 , a crowd with many men carrying rifles, filed into the State Capitol there and entered legislative chambers. If you look at the crowd shots, it's pretty clear why they were not seen as a threat.

You bloody well deserved it. In the guise of championing relevance, you were incredibly rude to a new member who brings a lot to this forum. This thread helps connect some dots in the Trump strategies to Bannon, and is quite helpful. Like the OP mentioned pigeon, you seem to be crapping all over things, with petty complaints that you're not getting a precise roadmap for discussion. Complaints that turned to bullying. Completely unnecessary.

Excellent contribution, which added to my knowledge of Bannon connections and role in all this. Not being an international affairs scholar like some of our members, I found the context useful.

I've heard more like 30% (not sure about that 40% number, though I know an Axios poll about six months ago did put it around 40) will say Biden didn't win on a poll, but half of them know perfectly well that Biden won, with maybe more like 10-15 percent who are genuinely members of the cult and truly believe. I think the psychology is something like racists who fear black folks moving in and lowering their property values. They will say that black people are crime prone and do drugs and throw trash in the yard, but what they're doing is asserting a sort of group delusion that keeps them in the club and the wagons circled. Many know it's a lie, but admitting it as such threatens the group cohesion. Getting back to the Stop the Steal delusion -- if you ask for evidence, they just deflect or say "people are saying..." A telltale that they know it's not real.

I had a basal cell carcinoma removed recently, a procedure that is quite routine (over half of adults will get one, in the US) for older adults. They are nuisance more than true affliction. My annoyance was at the number of risk mitigating factors I had (not an outdoor worker, never a swimmer or beach bum or lifeguard, dark brown hair, long adherence to the 10/4 rule for yardwork or hiking, wearer of hats) and yet still with the face lumps. LOL the alien baby - Chelsea thing!