TheVat

Brava. I like musicians who get to that sort of communion with the piece and invite you in (vs showoffy "look at me play, Ma!" stuff). If you like "ecstasy throughout," also may be seen in many BB King solos.

Groan!

No one is tasked with persuading you of anything. Of course BNW is dystopian. So much so that it is often used as an exemplar of the genre. If you want to keep trolling, perhaps you take on other obvious facts and insist they are wrong. Julius Caesar isn't a tragedy, it's a wacky and farcical comic romp through Rome! Mies van der Rohe wasn't a Minimalist, bur rather a gaudy and ornate retro Victorian! Jackson Pollock was a realist in the baroque tradition of Dutch Masters! Rembrandt was an abstract expressionist! Moby Dick is a sex farce with bathtub toys!

Sorry to say your system sounds totalitarian and one in which only a small elite can vote - and only this elite determines specific metrics for vaguely defined qualities like intelligence or compassion. Also, are you aware that a lot of innovation comes from people who earn more than 2 million dollars and then can invest their earnings in new startups and R&D? Many of the tech devices we are using to have this chat come from entrepreneurs who could reinvest their profits. BTW, if you start a thread you need to read and reply to all the feedback you are getting.

This sort of arms race between user and advertizer does seem to be whats going on. If, as @iNow says, Blike doesn't own SFN and is at the mercy of the web hosting service, then as the opening of Waiting for Godot has it, nothing to be done. Can't help wonder, as @studiot does, how any company can conceive that the full page block format would actually help sell their crap. People loathe ads, Pope discovered to be Catholic, indeed.

Like many users at work or a library, when I am on a shared/public or institutional device, I lack the option of changing browsers or adding blocker apps. I think my previous post made clear why this situation could be off-putting for some users, especially when it BOOTS USERS OUT OF A POSTING BOX MIDWAY THROUGH WRITING TEXT IF THEY CLICK ON ANOTHER TAB EVEN FOR A MOMENT. This latter development is crossing a line from rude ads to hostile ads. It actually punishes users for doing what SFN encourages: going and obtaining citations and/or researching further before posting.

New wrinkle in the full page ad blitzkrieg (still on a browser sometimes where I cannot activate an ad blocker): I am composing a post, switch to another open tab to verify something or grab a citation or whatever, when I return to this tab my editing window is gone, there's a fullpage ad blocking the thread, and I have to scroll down, reopen the editing window, and hope my content is still there. This is not a good vibe for anyone thinking about regularly visiting SFN and participating in chats. Not everyone has admin control over the device they are using (especially at work or a library) that would allow ad blocks, so I think this trend needs to be addressed by the owner/admin.

This thread, perhaps? Nice to see you over here at the dot net. Please don't mention this place to MR? 😃

That is interesting, and could be anomalous, or it could indicate a selection bias - i.e. the intense focus of the campaign on those swing states and motivating frequent nonvoters in those states - "if you don't usually vote, you can just check the box for me and skip the rest. In this state, your vote will matter!"

I'm not the first to make that Mussolini connection. Somewhere on the web there is a video, IIRC, with side by side footage of Trump (a few years back) and Il Duce speechifying - the congruence of tone and body language is eerie.

Misinformation was what tipped it to El Douche. Who needs complex bullet ballot schemes when there's social media and a GOP that has mastered the propagandistic arts? One possible reason there were more bullet ballots is that El Douche energized working class voters who rarely vote and lack time to parse all the downballot races - so they leave those blank. They just wanted the price of eggs to come down and El Douche will fix everything. (don't see gerrymandering being a factor, since 48 states use the WTA system in assigning electoral votes)

I wonder if this would be an analogy...a home-made attempt: Two astronauts joined by a tether can't see other (as they are very far apart). The tether is tensioned such that the heads of any two astronauts so joined will point 180 degrees apart. So when we measure Astronaut 1, we find his head pointed towards galactic north. We instantly now know Astr 2 has her head pointed towards galactic south. Even if measurement breaks the tether, this relation persists. No communication needed.

Gabbard will stick around, if confirmed. Trump likes having Russian assets around. He has applauded her sympathetic takes on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Putin. Her complete lack of qualifications on national intelligence will make Trump feel more secure - easier to mold to his own shape, especially on Deep State loathing.

Apparently PT Barnum was gifted with monumental powers of understatement. https://apnews.com/article/hong-kong-banana-art-justin-sun-eat-cryptocurrency-ea246755028e74b87a2ecd8a27af16bf

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.