TheVat

There is an irony that so many are going with their gut in an age when technology can serve up such an abundance of facts. When facts were scarcer and harder to find, people valued them more. Information gatekeepers could be seen as having special expertise, when they had a roomful of teletypes and you just had a telephone. They were the ones seen as having some expertise in extracting what was significant from the world's data flows and shaping it into some curated and understandable set of facts. That Jeffersonian view of the press is waning now. The information firehose in your pocket, with so many data streams competing to grab you with stimulation and appeals to emotion and desire, drowns out professional journalism and disciplined learning. I don't know if rescue can happen at the university level - if it happens, it might have to start in primary school grades. I wonder if the politics to really pay attention to might be who is running for school board, city council, and other local/state offices that strongly impact public schools.

If Steve Jobs can run for office, then I would support the New Hope for the Dead ticket! Then again, being dead for 13 years, Jobs might not be as emotionally invested in the needs of the living. (i.e. typical Republican)

Ever wonder what our lives would be like if we’d never abducted earthlings?”

The Constitution will hold up about as well as our cheap toilet paper when we no longer have those robust Canadian boreal forest tree fibers to weave into it. A possible control rod in this madness might be state legislatures, which have state constitutions that somewhat mirror the federal one. Unfortunately this path of asserting state powers (Amendment X, in the fed constitution) can lead to secessions. There would be a lot of ketchup on the wall at 1600 Penn Ave.

Pretty much my experience. Maybe one answer to Logo is that few are attacking passive racism (that poison that is dripped in our ears when we are young) but rather crypto-racist policy. I.e. legislation that pretends to foster equality, fairness and other civic virtues, but is in fact a discriminatory wolf in sheep's clothing. People will embrace such policies because of the usual information problems (media bias, critical thinking deficits, propa, etc) not because of latent racism that's been activated. (though it can lubricate the swallowing process, for some)

Come on, this is MAGAmerica, so facts don't matter, only appeals to emotion do. Oh, and answering any criticisms of the Trump administration or the potus's character by telling people they have a "syndrome." The character of the president and the effects of his policy agenda don't matter; only triggering the oppo and laughing at their TDS. Some of us wasted our time in the first Trump admin trying to engage with the faithful, no sense in doing that another four years. As Paul Simon put it: a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

The dishonesty is yours, darling. I post with the precise same name on the SF dot com site. I gave you honest feedback, directly addressing the fact that it would have been in 1962 the USSR attacking us FROM Cuban launch stands, and that our retaliation would have been, for obvious reasons easily grasped by those with critical thinking skills, against Russian targets and not Cuba. (others gave detailed analyses, pointing towards this scenario) I have noticed that an early sign of dementia is that people will start to accuse others of lacking cognitive skills that they themselves are starting to lose - a form of defensive projection driven by their anxiety over these losses. I hope this is not your situation and that you stay well.

And she was one of Trump lawyers in his 2019 impeachment trial. A less corrupt lawyer would disqualify themself on that basis alone, given that DOJ is supposed to be independent of the WH. As it stands, the DOJ administration is filling up with former Trump legal team members. I think Hannibal Lecter would be a fine choice for EPA director, given his track record on closed loop recycling.

Several members have answered your leading question, including me somewhere back there, and you seem to have ignored their replies and the reasoning behind them. You aren't really having a conversation, AFAICT, so I'm moving on.

So I wondered, if a standard quintessence field alone is not expected to be anisotropic because it is modeled as a homogeneous scalar field across the universe, then are there other theoretical frameworks where a quintessence field could exhibit anisotropic behavior? I had seen something a while ago where researchers are investigating scenarios where a quintessence field within a compact star (like a neutron star) could contribute to anisotropic pressure due to the star's internal structure, leading to an anisotropic manifestation of the quintessence field within that specific region. Beyond my understanding of physics, but could there be some anisotropic stress component in the energy-momentum tensor? Modifying GR? Hahaha!

BTW, if the main facility that is generating quintessence theories is called DESI, then they should have a facility that generates rival vacuum energy theories called LUCY.

This paper considers a field variable over time (not space). https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9505060

Stirring performance, lovely performer, and I loved the top comment which concerns coughing during a performance. (clicking on comments should show it first) I can play Asturias on piano, but on acoustic guitar it sounds so. much. better.

Could energy density vary from one region of space to another?

Be seeing you. I loved that Lotus 7.

Nope, still not seeing the relevance, if this is a politics forum. Seems suitable for speculations on alternate historical timelines, I guess. In Alt 1962, Cuba kept the missiles and Russia launched a nuclear strike again the USA. I'm thinking, again, the standard Herman Kahn scenario would have kicked in and the US would have nuked Russia. Sure, one could nuke Cuba, but seems like those missiles in Laurie's scenario were already launched and so Russian sites would be priority targets rather than the recently emptied silos or launch stands in Cuba.

Well, the question asked (with its original shout uppercase) was... ...ridiculous. Cuba doesn't have Russian missiles. If it did, Cuba would obviously not be our retaliatory target, Russia would. So is the OP asking how we would participate in a 1962 World War Three? Or is OP, based on today's headlines, making an analogy to our supplying Ukraine with ATACMs and greenlighting their use? Legitimate question and call for clarification, imo.

Twas really only mentioning one aspect, as a bit of synecdoche. Resisiting oligarchs and fascists wouid be a vast mosaic of possible choices that citizens make. The problem is people knowing they have choices, i.e. seeing above the ocean of propaganda and marketing they swim in. E.g. a lot of people don't know that over vast stretches of the US, it is cheaper to heat a home with a heat pump than a gas furnace. Or that Biden admin set up generous rebates for it (which may soon go away). When those rebates vanish, people will be pissed, and we will have that Leopards Eating Faces Party thing again. (the meme, for those who missed it, is something like: I never thought leopards would eat MY face, sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating Peoples Faces Party.) Sincerely, Shirley Thevat

Would OP kindly clarify what the OP is asking? Tired of guessing.

I like the Keillorian optimism, but would also suggest anyone who can could buy electric mowers, bikes, cars, and heat pumps. IOW make market forces that run counter to MAGAs drillbabydrill agenda. One power late stage capitalism gives we the peeps is to use our money to say no to Trump's "what global warming?" shtick.

Need to make small correction. Secret Agent Man was not played as the opening theme of Danger Man in the UK, only with the US release of the series alternately titled Secret Agent. In the UK, a different theme opened the show.* I'm a Fleck fan. Hidden Land I listened to quite a bit back in the 00s. *later, the secret agent was gassed, abducted to a village, and squeezed by a malevolent weather balloon. That sequel series was my favorite show in my early teens.

Why is this, which I take to be a sixties metaphor, applicable to current events? The US hasn't given Ukraine nukes, but rather longer range conventional missiles.

The Japanese say you cannot know life if you don't know death.

Kid definitely went down to the crossroads. Gave a lesson. Well, virtuoso guitar on a bit less pyrotechnic level, but still very fine picking, is Junior Brown. (check out the change at around 5:00, should be very familiar to UK members)

I think Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Mother Jones, and Martin Luther King had some good ideas on how to resist while letting the violence all be from the other side. Thus exposing the truth of Asimov's famous axiom: Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. It does take some guts to march or strike or lie down in a road, though, so it's always a question of numbers. Having the internet could help with gathering large flashmobs and organizing mass strikes.