TheVat

I was surprised to learn that Bertrand Russell was Welsh. That sent me a-factchecking. It seems that Monmouthshire was somewhat disputed as to its Welshness until 1972? I wonder if Lord Russell self-identified as Welsh. Or if he much cared. I hope Dimmy is not trying to subvert our minds with pro-Welsh propaganda.

Also there's the fact that he won that election, which makes the case for harm to his campaign a little weak. That, to me, is the comical part of all this. Re: Thomas - I posted in another thread a while ago that many in the Court (and federal judiciary generally) are reportedly privately uncomfortable that Thomas doesn't recuse himself on cases where there's a possible COI with his wife's political activities. The Court, unfortunately, has a deep tradition of never critiquing its own, so it would be up to some other body (Congress? (snicker)) to do something.

I agree with MSC that any system of normative ethics (i.e. having moral rules that govern a society) must flow from human feelings. We are not robotic beings without emotion that can be handled with a simple algorithm that optimizes some goal (say, making lots of paper clips). The Benthamites openly acknowledge the emotional basis of morality by setting pleasure and happiness (for the greatest number, in an impartial fashion) as the greatest good. JS Mill had similar views. Hume saw right actions as coming from moral sentiments. And so on. We have qualia, and feelings matter. The focus here, seems to me, has been on consequentialism - right actions are ones that we understand by their resulting in certain consequences. We are somewhat less concerned with being virtuous beings than with having results that are deemed the best for everyone. So some of the thought experiments here have been directed towards a utilitarian view. This value system seems implicit in some posts here. Better to hook jumper cables to one demonstrably horrible person than have great harm come to many other innocent persons. As I hinted earlier with my truth serum suggestion, a commitment to pragmatism might lead us to assert that mental violation is better than physical torture, and would lead to a better outcome for both interrogator, and criminal, and others involved. I have no crystal ball on this matter. But consequentialist approaches depend on good guesses as to outcomes. I can guess, say, that young boys in other countries are less likely to become terrorists if Americans are known for scopolamine cocktails rather than waterboarding or drilling holes in fingers. This might be the sort of guessing where a crack team of social scientists and intelligence operatives would be very handy! 😀

I wonder if there are gray areas of torture, like truth serum, that the thread didn't explore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum You are inducing a involuntary state, which may be emotionally painful for the "perp," but you aren't inducing physical agony. Leaving aside the highly complex question of relative efficacy, is this a violation of that person that would weigh less heavily (re @MSC feeling of shame, and empathic awareness of perp as a human being) than outright physical assaults? I don't have a quick answer to this myself, but if we were talking suitcase nuke in Grand Central Station and a certain perp who knows the location, or the heavily massively monstrously overused pedo example, I wonder if the drug cocktail might be worth trying.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex-currencies/092316/how-us-dollar-became-worlds-reserve-currency.asp Надеюсь, это поможет.

Apparently, Reagan had his moments of clarity.... https://archive.ph/2022.03.23-132736/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/climate/europe-russia-gas-reagan.html How this whole dependence on Russian gas/oil got started. And how US president Reagan tried to stop it. (I love the archive ph website, handy if you only read a paper intermittently and don't want to subscribe)

Max Boot waxes optimistic.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/21/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia-offensive-putin/ Accessible URL for the paywall blocked.... https://archive.ph/2022.03.21-131404/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/21/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia-offensive-putin/ Suggesting this is a win for Ukraine might be an overstatement. No one wins here, but I agree there could be a stalemate if Putin doesn't decide his humiliation is too much to bear and drop a tac nuke. Or two. I think there's less chance of that, given the pariah status already attained with conventional weapons directed at civilians.

Weird that I like Matt Dillon, and atmospheric movies in exotic locales, and yet haven't seen this film. Thanks for a nudge. Currently listening to ragtime selections on youtube. (once in a while, someone gets the tempo right, doesnt rush it)

As power was cut to the Chernobyl plant this month, nuclear engineers explained the importance of the electricity grid — even for plants that have been out of operation for decades. Chernobyl’s molten radioactive lava self-heats inside the belly of the blown reactor. Without ventilation, which requires electricity, hot air forms condensation that rains down inside the building, corroding and damaging equipment. With no electricity, the operators, who are working at gunpoint, have no idea of radiation levels inside the shelter. All anyone knows is that monitoring devices across the Chernobyl zone showed a spike in radioactivity a few days after the invasion. Then the monitors were hacked and went radio silent. Chernobyl’s spent fuel is another danger. Left to its own devices, it can heat up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. At high temperatures, the zirconium sleeves covering the fuel can ignite. After the Chernobyl accident in 1986, Soviet liquidators hastily built huge basins to store highly radioactive spent fuel rods. Water pumped into the basins cools the fuel and blocks radioactive gamma rays that emanate from the irradiated uranium. Now 20,000 fuel rods are stored in Chernobyl basins designed for 17,000. Officials at the IAEA stated March 9 that there is little risk the fuel will catch fire, since the rods are no longer very hot. Yet a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission study from 2000 found that “the possibility of a zirconium fire cannot be dismissed even many years after a final reactor shutdown.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/18/chernobyl-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-ukraine/ Some of the problems with cutting power to either long dormant reactors or to recently shut down ones.

While there is much truth there regarding TFGs competence, I fear you may underestimate the power of an angry monkey with a big box of wrenches that it can hurl into a large delicate piece of machinery. Appointment of incompetent and/or corrupt cabinet members, larding science-based agencies with partisan kooks and science deniers, tilting the balance of federal courts and (as @swansontnoted) the SCOTUS, ripping up carefully wrought treaties and other overseas relationships, abandoning Green programs and initiatives that need multi term momentum to succeed, etc. (a very short sampling of governance mayhem) While I agree more competent sabotage could be worse (as @iNow suggested), and RWers like DeSantis or Rick Scott (google his mean-spirited Rescue American Plan) are fearsome to contemplate in the Oval, TFGs flailing around could be pretty disastrous. And next time around, there might not be a Mark Milley or a James Mattis to step in at key moments and deflect those tossed wrenches.

Greene is the reigning queen of BSC, imo, based on her psychotic stalking of fellow Congresswoman Alexandria Octavio-Cortez. The mail slot incident was a notable low point. I don't think Trump will run again. His pro Putin ravings have whittled off enough of his base and distanced enough moderate Independents to render him nonviable in 2024. The primary winner will be whoever is best at kissing Trump's ring while edging away from his more toxic views at the same time.

Vlad may not be pleased with this koolaid antidote: Arnold speaks of the harsh realities to the people of Russia, and weaves in some personal history with his father's WW2 sufferings.

https://www.theonion.com/oil-companies-lament-rising-price-of-joe-manchin-1848656304

The word "performative" never seemed more applicable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/a-uniquely-perilous-moment/627040/ David French offers a clearer picture on why calling Putin's bluff could be a dangerous move.

May I suggest you don't require the participant to fill out the apportionment section twice? The first go-through is already annoying enough in requiring one to do the math by keeping up with one's total and then weight each answer in currency amount. I wouldn't have changed my original answers (I am a biologist, and follow endangered species coverage) so it was a nuisance that there was no "same as above" option. Also, too many choices of donation size makes the process really slow. Perhaps better to have the choice be binary - donate or not donate. It would still be clear that, say, most people care more about tigers than snakes. And you wouldn't force people to endlessly scroll back and forth to remember what their amounts were in the first apportionment. JMO.

This topic is a compelling case for just making an omelette.

If you have any other 6" possessions you feel like bragging about, I humbly request that you restrain yourself. Consensus building is what he ran on in 2020, and was his MO in the Senate years. So one can hope.

They don't call them "echo chambers" for nothing. The power they have to gaslight people (especially those who don't stray from one platform, and don't regularly clear cache and cookies) is creepy. The other distortion that bothers me is from platforms that favor brevity, like Twit(ter). Many issues are complex, and reducing one's thoughts to 288 characters may lead to shallowness and sloganeering. (For zen wisdom, it might be okay, and I do sometimes see very pithy stuff that is valuable)

Electrics have disappointed me somewhat, since you have to drive them 15-25,000 miles to break even on carbon. (the car you already have doesn't require any mining, smelting, fabrication, etc) If, like me, you walk and bike a lot and put only a couple thousand miles on a car per year, then it's quite a few years before you net lower carbon footprint. And, to worsen the carbon picture, selling your old IC car means someone on a tight budget can now afford one and starts driving yours and quite possibly putting higher miles on it. The upside of that gloomy picture, however is that electrics look to be fairly long lasting, so when I die someone will be able to buy an affordable used EV.

Class and ethnicity get quite muddled in the USA. Personnel people can form biased opinions of candidates whose speech patterns suggest to them a lower class upbringing. If they reject, it is correlated with ethnic groups that have higher poverty rates. So a Black person may come into an interview knowing they are fighting the "bigotry of lowered expectations." An interview subject who looks like Gwyneth Paltrow could have a verbal stumble and the interviewer may interpret that as nervousness. A Black prospect has the same verbal stumble and the interviewer might see that as poor communication skills. IOW, though the bias here, on the surface, appears to be racial, it is also about class: Gwyneth is presumed to belong to a "higher" class than LaShondra. Racism, in the US, attaches class. IOW bias and bigotry are about perceived clusters of traits (fairly obvious statement). If a Black prospect walks through the door and speaks in a posh British accent (RP, "Received Pronunciation"), that's going to alter the perception of a biased American personnel director who has been using skin color as a marker for a certain class origin. It's not what gets asked in an interview, it's more what colors (NPI) the perceptions at the outset of the interview. Even without ethnic differences, speech patterns are very hard to ignore. Imagine two ethnically European prospects are late and one rushes in, saying "There seemed to be some sort of street festivities and Third Avenue was utterly impassable," and the other says, "Man, they got some big do goin on down there," it's likely the hearer may settle into some class assumptions.

A bunch of names are redacted in that post, which I am guessing is some sort of "meta" joke. I think the prior restraint issue will torpedo this legislation in federal court. What do YOU think , @Orion ? In your own words?

Have to admit, there is something kinda nihilistic about it. Makes me think of that (possibly apocryphal) American major in Vietnam who was quoted as saying "We had to destroy the village to save it." Great teeshirt, btw.

Seems to me a central problem here would be defining poverty and its causal powers. While economic disadvantage can lead to learning disadvantage (home has fewer books and other cultural amenities, parents have less disposable income for music lessons, travel, etc), it is by no means certain. Mom could be a poet who reads to the kids every night and pushes creative writing and books and so on. Dad could be a champion of work ethic and showing kids all sorts of skills around the house. The examples are endless. And a wealthy family could have a child who is lazy, entitled, and opts to goof off. You really need to look at the individual and try to get a sense of how they respond to challenges. Bias arises from the ignorant application of broad categories to individual human beings. So it's never justified.

It gets worse... https://thehill.com/policy/international/597482-ukraine-says-russian-forces-disconnected-chernobyl-plant-from-power-grid I still can't tell if this is all a deliberate attempt to intimidate (as in Herman Kahn's "play crazy" which @iNow mentioned last week) or if it's a lot of raw recruits in the invasion force with poor supervision, firing artillery and rockets wildly. Maybe some of both?