TheVat

Hope that clarified what I was responding to.

A bit embarrassed to say I didn't know Bowie had that oddity until he played Nikola Tesla in The Prestige. I'm a mix of Isles, Baltic, Russian, so there's range of eye shades in the family - mine have brown in the center with green surround. Called this green for decades until a driver's license examiner pointed out, "that's actually hazel, honey." One of those nice Midwest ladies who call everyone honey. Later, the spouse and I were at a carnival where they had a fortuneteller, she specialized in eyes, said mine were dramatic and perceptive. So then my wife goes in, returns and says that her eyes had also been deemed dramatic and perceptive. Guess we were a good eye match. Rather like Pict, another fairly heterogenous group with a label slapped on by outsiders.

Palestinians have distinct subgroups, so Gazans are not just homogeneous with Israeli Arabs. That Israeli Arabs enjoy the rights of citizenship does not negate the repression of Gazans. Gazans, and West Bankers, lack freedom and justice and free passage. Is anyone here seriously going to try and give legitimacy to Likud Israel's actions because Israeli Arabs are doing fine? Please.

If we accepted this premise, then pretty much any theory could involve transformed ghosts. That would be so handy! It would also explain why cookies disappear so quickly. And dark matter. Someone notify the Academy in Stockholm.

This clip does not represent all of my reply fairly. I was suggesting that the side backed by economic wealth and billions of US dollars and SOTA munitions become the functional adult in the room and move to the table to discuss a two state solution and restoration of West Bank lands and homes they stole by force. Please do not caricature a different opinion as approving violence - can we not by this point in the chat stipulate that all here agree both Israel and Hamas have committed vile and Geneva Articles violating acts against civilian populations? By "stop the cycle" I mean that the powerful party shows some willingness to address its own actions and deal justly with a couple million people it has dispossessed and starved and stolen from. The power disparity between Israel and Gaza (or the 32% of Lebanon that is Shiite/Hezbollah) is great - it is generally held that with power comes some responsibility and accountability. Jesus Fucking Christ how hard is it for Israel to just admit, We violated your rights, stole your land, massacred civilians, denied your national sovereignty, and are currently starving a million of you or more in hideous festering camps, geez, maybe that wasn't quite right. Surely everyone here, all people of conscience, understand that there is no peace when people are denied justice. The US, after a long and painful process, got there with its tribal peoples; I see no reason Israel can't get there to. Step One: dump Netanyahu and his merry band of would be fascists.

Weird. Ever since the forced dispossession of 700,000+ Palestinians in 1947-8, aka the Naqba, the native peoples of that region have offered a real simple suggestion. Stop stealing people's land and kicking them out of their homes and razing their olive and fruit groves and systematically brutalizing them while forcing them into small enclaves of poverty. Stop the endless cycles of reprisal and repression. Allow a two state solution. Stop calling people who want their homes back terrorists and vermin. Stop carpet bombing and killing innocent civilians in vengeful and vicious ratios up to 40:1 to your own losses and then shrugging it off as collateral damage while you blame the victims. Really not a big secret. I am delighted to hear that you support the Palestinians in their ongoing struggle to gain those rights!

Sounds like the same old schist to me.

There are multiple ethical issues that swirl around veganism v carnivory. The ethics of how we treat animals - which gets into how animals suffer, factory farming conditions, and whether animals are lesser beings which we may legitimately use for our sustenance. The ethics of the resource-intensive high carbon footprint production of meat. An issue of eco stewardship and sustainability for eight billion plus people. The ethics of public health policies and recommendations against meat consumption - i.e. impact on human health and any obligation to make the costs of meat consumption known to the general public. For me, there are some things that change when you go from a hunter gatherer population of 10-200 million people to modern societies supporting eight billion. I am vegan, five days per week, with sustainable catch fish and free-range eggs two days per week. Pure veganism results in fatigue and minor health issues for me, an experience that seems to be pretty common. Generally, I am happy to (as GB Shaw put it) mostly leave the animals alone. Factory farming (which I've experienced up close) is a nightmare.

Cruel and cowardly as much of warfare now is. Not everyone who buys a pager is going to be an enemy combatant. Makes me think of that alien device in the original Star Trek series which allows Bad Universe Kirk to remotely vaporize people he doesn't like with the push of a button. Humans shouldn't be entrusted with anything beyond pointed sticks. /venting

Well putt.

Hypothetical, and unsupported. And irrelevant, since you acknowledge that mass violence would be reduced. Guns make mass killing easy. And that feeling of ease with a gun IS germane to the psychological aspects of the problem. Plenty of evidence to suggest an alienated angry teenager would more likely kill classmates with the feeling of power a gun, especially an assault style rifle, confers. Mass knifings are quite rare, even in places where no civilian legally possesses a gun. So it is not "politicizing" to inquire how to render mass murder more daunting to someone emotionally unstable. Even if it were, psychology and politics often intersect. Get used to it.

Reading news this morning, I reflected for a moment on the disturbing decline in marksmanship skills in this country.

I sorta assumed that, given the threat title. The notion that there aren't issues that pertain particularly to a gender would depend on an utter blindness to everything that goes on in the world. When I have heard people take this tack, it is usually a prelude to "dear Lord, us poor white guys and all the terrible inconvenience we have to deal with because all those other people are laying about pretending to be victims!"

OK as treats though I'd add that dogs don't digest milk well, and it can also lead to kidney stones. Bread and butter is good with a bit of roughage, like green peas or the vegs @Peterkin mentioned. I've noticed dogs, like humans, can have a sweet tooth so carrots and peas are appealing due to their slight sweetness.

Even democracy is prone to what de Tocqueville described as "the tyranny of the majority." Perhaps there could be forms of direct government (as opposed to representative government) like anarcho syndicalism which could be developed into systems where divergent minority groups could (within reason - i.e. not abusing basic human rights in their cohort or poisoning the river) pursue their own lifestyle without interference from an outside majority. DK, you might need some Plato type philosophical advisors in key positions where they could help maintain guardrails. I don't think there's any escaping the need for some set of democratic norms, e.g. to prevent unscrupulous philosopher-advisors from acquiring power and corrupting such a system.

That was my first reaction, to ask you why. So, being stymied in that regard, I will just congratulate you and your brothers on your apparent prescience. I remember liking the series, though some of the humor (from such scriptwriting eminences as Robert Towne and Harlan Ellison) went over my young head. Later had a GF who was mildly obsessed with Ilya Kuryakin, whose buttock shiftings seemed to also affect respiration albeit among his female admirers. Don't entirely follow this, but some instinct tells me to request no further explanation.

Yes, the article does make clear that these researches have value. The awards – which have no affiliation to the Nobel Prizes – aim to “celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology” by making “people laugh, then think.” As for enteral ventilation, I think politicians could find this useful: if you talk through your ass, it would help to be able breathe through your ass.

Not necessarily. Dogs, unlike cats, or their ancestors wolves, are not obligate carnivores and are more omnivorous. Their GI tract will benefit more from roughage and some plant nutrients, so protein levels are just one part of the equation. One example is that dogs have the genes that produce amylase. Wolves do not produce amylase, which breaks down starch in the diet; modern dogs do, suggesting an adaptation to process plant-based foods as would be found in a scavenger diet. While a wolf or a cat can get all it needs from animal muscle meat and organ meats, plants provide dogs with beneficial fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, enzymes and phytonutrients not found in meat. They help it maintain a gut biome that it needs for optimal nutrition. So rather than rely on protein content, you should look at the overall balance and type of plant materials in the dog food. When I was researching this for my dog (RIP), for example, I found that oats, millet and brown rice were better for him, while wheat and corn were best avoided. Of course, cheap dog foods tend to have a lot of corn and wheat (we used to call it "corn stink").

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/13/science/ig-nobel-prize-ceremony-2024-intl-scli/index.html CNN — The world still holds many unanswered questions. But thanks to the efforts of the research teams awarded the IG Nobel Prize on Thursday, some of these questions – which you might not even have thought existed – now have answers. We now know that many mammals can breathe through their anuses, that there isn’t an equal probability that a coin will land on head or tails, that some real plants somehow imitate the shapes of neighboring fake plastic plants, that fake medicine which causes painful side-effects can be more effective than fake medicine without side-effects, and that many of the people famous for reaching lofty old ages lived in places that had bad record-keeping...

Let me be your first data point on this (not that it would have personally made one bit of difference if we had had all boys). I recall some years ago giving off discouraging signals to a suitor who was rather proto-Trumpian. He soon disappeared, probably more owing to my daughter's powers of discernment than to my hints about the pick and shovel I kept in my car trunk. (there's a scene in the film Clueless that may illustrate this sort of threat) Anyway, I would guess such a poll might find a correlation there. To father girls does involve giving some thought to how men should respect women and what sort of role models men should and shouldn't have in that regard.

The flaw with this statement is that anything that can interact with a physical system, i.e. be somehow observable/measurable, would have to itselft be physical. That is pretty much the defining feature of physical entities. This is the core problem with dualism, that it seeks to make a false division between phenomena.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whelp If you intended that, it was quite clever.

For a woman any age. I'm not going to mince words on this: she's a hottie.

Harris had great reaction shots when TFG was making his various unhinged assertions, blending shock and amusement. And her ability, as a former trial lawyer, to bait people was on masterful display. She got him pretty riled up, to the point that he fell back on attacking a man he is no longer running against. While any undecideds (could there still be any?) may not be out factchecking stuff like "all of America and Congress wanted to get rid of Roe v Wade" they may be wondering about his fitness for any public office. Pass me a dog leg, wouldya?

It is concerning the way household pets are being eaten in our cities. Springfield was essentially destroyed by immigrants eating kittens. Also raises the spectre of pets who may be legally obtaining post birth abortions. They just leave the kittens in the basket while they decide what to do with them. Clearly Harris is okay with aborting the kittens after they're born and then eating them. When has she spoken out against this? NEVER. What did she do in 3 1/2 years? NOTHING. Puppies, kittens, hamsters, gerbils, aquarium fish...in one Ohio city they're all gone. All eaten by the immigrants, basically people released from insane asylums and prisons, the prisoners either there for political crimes or drugs or....eating pets, presumably. When you come to our big beautiful country, you know that our pets are bigger and healthier and mostly plump, just easy pickings for these human vermin.