TheVat

BALMORAL, Scotland, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Queen Elizabeth, Britain's longest-reigning monarch, the nation's figurehead and a towering presence on the world stage for seven decades, died peacefully at her home in Scotland on Thursday aged 96. "The death of my beloved Mother, Her Majesty The Queen, is a moment of the greatest sadness for me and all members of my family," the new king, her eldest son Charles, said. "We mourn profoundly the passing of a cherished Sovereign and a much-loved mother. I know her loss will be deeply felt throughout the country, the Realms and the Commonwealth, and by countless people around the world," the 73-year-old said in a statement. Very best of luck to Charles III. Was the longest serving Prince of Wales.

https://archive.ph/N5MCX (screenshot, paywall-free version of NY Times article) (you have to scroll past the "interactive" pictorial at the top, which doesn't transfer the pics to the screenshot, so there's just a bunch of isolated sentences on a field of green) (...) But today, as demand surges amid a Russian energy crunch, whole trees are being harvested for power. And evidence is mounting that Europe’s bet on wood to address climate change has not paid off. Forests in Finland and Estonia, for example, once seen as key assets for reducing carbon from the air, are now the source of so much logging that government scientists consider them carbon emitters. In Hungary, the government waived conservation rules last month to allow increased logging in old-growth forests. And while European nations can count wood power toward their clean-energy targets, the E.U. scientific research agency said last year that burning wood released more carbon dioxide than would have been emitted had that energy come from fossil fuels. “People buy wood pellets thinking they’re the sustainable choice, but in reality, they’re driving the destruction of Europe’s last wild forests,” said David Gehl of the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington-based advocacy group that has studied wood use in Central Europe.

I found this rant by Jonathan Pie. Gave a disturbing take on the backdrop behind all the mess over there. (Disclaimer: Not a Brit, not in any way conversant with the myriad of issues attending the labour situation over there, just concerned about what neoliberal conservatives are wreaking around the globe.)

Ribbit!

My bullshit detector has smoke pouring out of it. DeSantis is a Trump clone, playing to the Trump base. The rest of this post is somewhat redundant given what Phi just posted. I'll add it, anyway. CRT was an area of study at some colleges, it's not taught in primary schools. DeSantis concocted a bogeyman, in order to suppress intellectual freedom and muzzle teachers, and discourage covering darker aspects of our history. Learning real history, IOW. CRT does not teach anyone that a child is a loser or evil - do you have one shred of evidence such a thing happened in any public school? BLM demonstrations were mostly peaceful, included people of all ethnicities, and were legitimate First Amendment protests of police brutality, racial profiling and murder of unarmed suspects. Incidents of violence were often found to be false flag operations by outside provocateurs. The Don't Say Gay law was theater for homophobes and nervous RW evangelicals, purporting to fix another nonexistent problem. Are we quite sure, if an admin checks your IP address, it will be in Europe or overseas? I'll show you mine, if you show yours.

The 538 report I posted had detailed analysis of the polling leading up to the 2014 referendum. So your statement that you don't "know where you fish up such rubbish from, or why" would suggest you didn't even look at that report. Feel free to actually read the report which I posted. Nowhere did I say that it is not possible a majority of Crimeans prefer annexation by Russia. (only doubting that it was 97%) Again you haven't responded to the key points of that first posting on the matter, battening on to a side comment on an issue that is less interesting to me, and which dodges the larger picture which is Vlad the Invader attacking a sovereign nation, including its capital at the outset, which has no interest in being part of Russia. How bizarre that you think when a nation is constantly threatened by Russia for several years, and wants to join a military alliance to protect itself from Russia, that this is some kind of unconscionable aggression on the nation's part. Why aren't you firing up your outrage machine over Finland and Sweden now moving to join NATO? Is it possible that you have bought in to Putin's Empire philosophy, viz. that places like Ukraine aren't really separate sovereign nations that have any right to exist outside the Russian Empire? I am so ignorant of customs overseas. On what anatomical part do you sit in the UK?

In one former job, bleach was seen as the best broad spectrum germicide/fungicide, but that was clinic surfaces where we were just after bacteria. If there is a lot of organic material - fish poo, or whatever - on equipment surfaces, bleach can be somewhat reduced in power, so it is sometimes better to opt for alcohol (ethyl is better than isopropyl) in that case. If your equipment includes rubber, I would especially prefer ethanol, since bleach is a strong oxidizing agent that can hurt the rubber. In terms of speed, I am not sure which is better. Ethanol operates on cells by dehydrating them, so that might take a little time, too. If your research says bleach is slower, and you want something quick, then maybe you should go with that. If you don't mind really slow, vinegar is good, and will also eliminate any hard water deposits that may develop in equipment. You may want to research concentration, for that. When I kept fish, many years ago, I used vinegar, because it was considered safer than bleach and it was cheap. (bleach, you must leave zero residue when the fish go back in, which is probably obvious)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/10/ukraine-invasion-civilian-volunteers-survival/671241/ Horizontal relations. Self-organization. Ukrainians are very good at these.

Sodium hypochlorite. AKA bleach.

LoL. He is reposting his OP from another website forum.

My main point was in the first two paragraphs which it seems you were reluctant to respond to. I can see why. When Putin's actions and own words don't fit your narrative it's best to ignore. As for Crimea, not sure when 98% has ever anywhere been a credible vote count. Really? It could well be a majority wanted to join Russia, but returns that go into the upper 90s suggest manipulation and intimidation. 538, at the time, had cited polls that found 41% of Crimeans wanting annexation. Hmm. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-signs-pointed-to-crimea-independence-vote-but-polls-didnt/

But it's doubtful they really address the big questions of eggs-istence. Abstraction requires a sophisticated scaffolding of language, especially a rich trove of nouns which do not refer only to physical objects. It is remarkable when cuckoos know they're on the clock.

I know Vlad's words and actions, which couldn't be clearer. He has openly stated he wants to be like Peter the Great and rebuild an empire. No Vulcan mind-meld needed. In Georgia, Putin invaded on the basis of false accusations of genocide and then sponsored ethnic cleansing of Georgians by South Ossetians and then engaged in what international observers described as grave human rights abuses. (Gosh that sounds familiar!) Crimea has been a hot mess that empires fight over since it was taken over by Kievan Rus in the mid 10th century. I can find no trustworthy polling on what current Crimeans want, but Russian state media has (surprise!) found overwhelming support for it being part of Russia.

Not to mention that Z. turning down NATO was not going to prevent invasion, given Putin's oft stated intentions re Donetsk and Luhansk, and multiple indications that he wants to restore the old Soviet empire. And NATO certainly didn't need the invasion to "justify" its existence - there was little chance of a "friendly" Russia that was osmotically absorbing niceness and democracy from Europe. We should never let Mack's sympathy for the devil cloud a clear view of Putin as a vicious thug who will bully his way from Kiev to the Brandenburg gate if he can.

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/03/and-consequences-after-an-amazing-series-of-unforced-errors-indictment-is-coming/ A useful summary of Trump's successes at digging himself deeper into his hole.

I was tempted to reply to Mack, but then wondered if he was doing a little leg pulling. Surely climate disaster is, by numerous indications, already underway. We're at mitigation, not prevention.

Nice to talk with someone who shares my own level of knowledge. I had heard a bit about the problems with schemes to glean tritium from a lithium blanket, but your linked article goes much farther in explaining how paltry the yield might be. Would be quite anticlimactic to discover there is no practical large-scale fusion (except for the incredibly productive reactor located 93 million miles from here, which is still billions of years away from decommissioning). If we end up needing the higher temp containments to do other types of fusion, that could be, again, decades away if ever.

Kamala Harris spoke to a child in Kaliningrad on Sept. 1? Wow, I really missed that news! We do have an unusually dynamic vice president, when it comes to foreign relations.

When they say 43 empty classified folders, does that mean to imply that all those documents are missing, and that the 27 documents listed did not match any of those folders? OTOH If you knew that 27 documents could be matched to specific folders then is the term "empty folder" simply a description of the materials as found, i.e. were they just temporarily removed from folders to be perused and then sloppily never returned to those folders? How are folders labeled, beyond their classification banner? As for the possible 16 folders that are orphaned, do we know that their contents were not returned earlier this year - i.e. could they have been returned in a sloppy form, just one big stack minus folderage? Or were they part of the other huge mass of material (some 1500 documents) that was removed from his office Sorry, I haven't followed all this in the fine-grained detail that would give me a clearer sense of whether we are looking at destruction or spectacular sloppiness or both.

Show me a sudden burst of UFO sightings or ghostly apparitions or strange hominins, centered on a town in economic distress, and I will show you a cabal of local businessmen coming up with creative ways to boost tourism. Not yeti, but soon!

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (bleak as hell, powerful) Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (wit, humor, deep perception of human nature, utter command of the science.... Atwood is a genius) Cell, by Stephen King (just bizarre, but well told story) I am Legend, by Richard Matheson (true classic, a master storyteller) Blindness, by Jose Saramago (one of the books that earned him a Nobel Prize) Lucifer's Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle (are there any Larry Niven novels, or co-written novels, that aren't pageturners and huge fun? I'm unaware of them, if so.) The Windup Girl, which @Ken Fabian mentioned, struck me as amazingly ambitious yet I found myself not connecting and dropping it after a few chapters. Not sure why, but it is sad when brilliant books go unread so I might check it out again. The Fifth Season, by NK Jemisin. Utterly original!

Haha! I knew the moment I typed that last sentence that I was setting up that quip. The hope I expressed was that DOJ openness will narrow the conspiracy crowd to the serious cult worshippers. All the FBI needed was a record of the proximity of the items to the classified docs. And no doubt they reckoned that keeping passports was something the RW spin machine would seize upon as more Gazpacho tactics. As the law prof in your link said, the personal items allow one to reasonably infer that the person had "dominion and control" over the documents. If it was anyone but Trump, I would feel confident that the document possessor was headed for the slammer.

I meant "defuse" in the sense that Garland himself stated, that his DOJ would be more transparent on details of the investigation partly because of the welter of wild conjectures and claims of the DOJ conducting a political hit on TFG. DOJ would not normally have released the affidavit or made an open filing on the GJ subpoena, hiding of documents, etc. These are all extraordinary moves to help nip conspiracy theories in the bud, AFAICT. I hope they work.

My sympathy to the FBI, having to release (through filings) details of an ongoing investigation. They have no choice if they want to defuse some of the Far Right conspiracy theories and violence promotion that's oozing through social media. But criminal investigations tend to suffer when so much has to be shared at this stage. IIRC, one of the redacted witness names on the affidavit released last week has already been deduced, because of a little too much transparency. That's dangerous for a witness, and hurts the investigation if other future witnesses are then scared off or less forthcoming.

How would an AI determine what is humane?? There is a reason we hand such questions (or try to) to ethicists, social workers, judges, psychologists, anthropologists....and not machines that have zero clue what it is to be a human uprooted by catastrophe.