TheVat

What's especially worrisome is that as pop increases, other trends mean arable land is decreasing and habitable land also decreasing. And, to make a trifecta of awful, fisheries are being depleted, and with more seafood becoming too contaminated to eat. Some of the crowded southern border of the US is related to eco-degradation in Central America, with regions that are no longer sustaining those populations. This onslaught of desperate refugees from the tropics is being repeated all around the world. I would not mind if Pope Francis, an unusually progressive pontiff, were to speak up on the matter. Rhythm method is not going to cut it.

Not sure if null hypothesis applies to a metaphysical conjecture. There is no statistical test that would affirm or reject. We can't compare data sets for a universe that has a god and another universe that lacks a god. In any case, I see no epistemological position that can not be agnostic and be valid. There is simply no means by which a human mind can obtain and crunch sufficient data to certify the existence or nonexistence of a deity. The only mind that could make a valid claim that there is a god would be the mind of that god, since it would have the prerequisite features to discern traits like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Personally I do not believe, so I would be atheist in the broad and nonprejudicial sense, IOW no burning bushes have spoken to me or filled me with some divine inspiration. I make no conjecture, though I am sometimes intrigued by panpsychism as an alternative to theism.

Let me dispel those fears for you. You're not.

Aline has been a member for five years.

My bladder exploded. As I had always feared it would.

This sounds not quite correct. Space has no temperature, it's a vacuum, only objects in space have temps. And any shade would be (as a practical matter) an object that is thin and radiates IR from its backside, so it is not clear that only a tiny bit of heat penetrates. Also, objects cool more slowly in space, because there is no conduction or convection, only radiation. So that shade will be slowly radiating heat a lot of the time. I don't know enough about IR reflecting surfaces - are there materials that would affordably create your near-perfect shade? Otherwise you may need some fancy system circulating coolant theough the shade.

Walter Sobchak: Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos. /the dude abides

So what's yours? You were moved to post, so I assume you have one. That, and paperwork. Had one relative whose stuff I had to deal with. It was mostly junk you couldn't even put in a garage sale, so it was simpler to donate it or dump it. (and I suspect some of the donating was really dumping in disguise) Thrift stores refused some of it because upholstery was saturated with cigarette odor. Recyclers wouldn't take it, either, because furniture has to be disassembled into its various components. With all due respect to the departed, I wish smokers would smoke next to an open window, range hood, or find some way to vent. Crazy Chester, in the song The Weight , was a real guy in the town my wife grew up in. My in-laws knew him. Bandmate Levon Helm was from that area.

I remember Vallee. Seems like one problem was his hypothesis wasn't much of a hypothesis. The alleged beings appeared to be three-dimensional and possess craft that would require time to construct and have bodies that would require time to evolve, so it's hard to see them coming from "beyond space-time." Not clear what is meant by multidimensional visitation. I just got up and went to the bathroom. The bathroom was multidimensional and I visited it. Not terribly anomalous. Conditions like us imagining things? If something is like a fairy or angel, then it's also like a unicorn.

Jenna Ellis looks disturbingly happy for a mugshot. Kind of a Manson Girl vibe. Trevian Kutti looks like she is auditioning for a horror movie scene where she picks up an axe or chainsaw. Trump looks like someone frightened who is trying to look tough.

Odd how the power of the Cult seems to overcome what would normally be an aversion to cowardice. Especially among the blue collar portion of TFG's base. Trumpers I encounter would not usually be the sort to be okay with someone backing away from the debate arena (and instead retreating to the safe space of a Tucker Carlson interview during the Milwaukee debate). I can remember a time when prairie republicans out here would have found that repugnant. But now they lap up his weak sauce of debates don't matter, big waste of time, and I'm so far ahead.

Ken, as usual, steps in and posts much of what I wanted to say, except better. I will just add how annoying it is that American business has such dislike for worker profit sharing (with a few exceptions), the sort of Marx Lite that gives workers a stake in their company and correlates with improved quality and productivity and worker loyalty. The whole Red Menace thing is tiresome.

Seems like it. Putin grew up in street gangs in the postwar ruins of Leningrad, so that way of thinking about power is natural to him. I think we're both experiencing citation fatigue, neither wants to dive deep for previously posted poll data, so for now I'm just saying we see the trend differently. Slainte.

Somewhat new to this concept. Wouldn't such a view, universally practiced (I'm applying Kant's categorical imperative here), lead to species extinction? Having babies: it's a nasty dirty job but somebody's got to do it. I suppose we could scale back a bit, get population down to some sort of ecological ideal with psychologically optimal amounts of wilderness and personal lebensraum and grizzly bears snatching salmon, but at some point it would still be necessary to get the fertility rate back to 2.3 (commonly seen as replacement rate). Antinatalism sounds kind of antihuman, taken in the long term. On the individual level, it makes more sense. If Mary wants to be a monk and a lepidopterist, and not be bothered with the whole mommy track thing, that should be perfectly okay, and no one should be pushing the breeder lifestyle at her. If Joe wants to raise weimaraners and go into town once a week to be spanked, that's his business. Sounds lonely to me, but maybe I just don't get weimaraners. Sorry, am losing the serious focus this issue deserves.

You seem to have a two-tiered system for evaluation of polling results. Ohe tier is acceptance of polls that are pro-Russian hegemony, the other tier is dismissing polls that are pro-Ukrainian sovereignty and NATO membership, usually implying they were conducted at gunpoint (metaphorically, anyway). And the poll you mainly reference was only Crimeans IIRC, and done while it was already under Russian control. Your system seems not too objective. Russians report the pilot seemed very depressed and said things to copilot like, "Going to find me a couple of SAMs and dive into them if you don't stop popping your gum."

More recent opinion surveys suggest support for Ukrainian independence has only grown. https://www.rferl.org/a/ukrainian-unity-identity-poll-russian-invasion/32001348.html#:~:text=As many as 96 percent,declare a “good” one. As many as 96 percent of Ukrainians support their country joining the European Union, and 91 percent now favor joining NATO. Some 92 percent profess a “bad” attitude toward Russia, while only 2 percent declare a “good” one. Hrushetskiy believes these changes will prove enduring because unity around them has been developing gradually since Ukraine gained independence from Soviet rule in 1991. A significant increase in support for the pro-European and transatlantic geopolitical orientation of the country -- and a corresponding decline of positive sentiment toward Russia – were notable features of the 2004-05 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, he noted.

I was tempted to just type DYHACFT? again, but I will try to address this further. (yes, some trustworthy polling would be helpful on this matter) You might get fewer DVs if you could better explain what you mean by a preference to be linked to Russia - do people having such preference really want to be part of Russia or part of a puppet state? Zelenski's landslide win suggests the majority do not. And there may be some who would like both better ties to EU and cordial links with Russia. Again, I don't feel you have any reliable source on public opinions in Ukraine. As always, the first casualty in war is...

Thanks, I wondered. So if I run my VPN through Switzerland or Sweden and those countries sign some MoU on IP filtering, then I'm blocked. Unless I move to Gibraltar or Panama or some other haven. Or I'm Ed Norton in Glass Onion and I do all my business through a fax machine. 😀

Wouldn't bad actors just use VPN to step around Geo IP filtering?

Much as I respect the genie/bottle argument I still believe that, since nuclear war could end our species and bring a kingdom of cockroaches, the global goal should remain nuclear disarmament. When nations came to an accord that nerve gas and biological agents should not be used, treaties were made. There are powerful economic incentives for major powers to not engage in massive wars with each other. I believe we can eventually get everyone to the table to agree that a nuclear sword of Damocles over the head of every person on the planet is not a viable instrument of foreign policy and that mutual economic destruction (and don't forget cyber war) is adequate to the task of deterring a conventional WW3. There is also the massive expense of maintaining nuclear arsenals, and thus massive economic benefit of elimination of them. Adding MORE nukes, and more nations to the nuclear club, strikes me as a terrible idea. I would think mass shootings have taught us, on a smaller scale, what happens when a crazy person gets their hands on a mass killing device. We are still here because we've been extremely lucky. And luck has a way of running out. My generation grew up with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads. I think some of us would like to see future generations face at least one less catastrophic scenario.

But aren't they the Latin words that were adopted as the formal medical terminology back when Latin and Greek were the languages of scholars? I think of slang as more "street." It has a different meaning from jargon or terminology, forms which tend to be established in a more formal way. Without being snobby, I just think slang has a particular meaning and way it differs from more formal terms. In the US, we might say she's got a bun in the oven and that's slang. She has a fetus in her uterus is NOT slang, is it? Nor is she's pregnant. She wouldn't visit her OB-Gyn and be told "one change you will notice is bigger boobs, and they may be all tingly..." Likely a nurse, PA, or doctor would say "you may notice some breast enlargement and sensitivity..." (not to say there aren't doctors who develop a rapport with a patient by sometimes using humorous slang - that would depend on the patient I expect)

We should have a butcher's, then. (which brings up an interesting feature: removing the original rhyming portion of the slang, rendering it more obscure. So "look" was butcher's hook, then the hook was dropped.) Similarly "berk" was originally Berkeley Hunt, a rhyme for cunt. Berk is not as offensive as cunt, partly due to its full rhyming form being forgotten.

Interesting how pudendal slang carries different weights in different English speaking countries. In the UK, I noticed that c--t was in wide usage and for a vast range of tones and often very casual. Contrast with the U.S. where it is still considered more foul than a lot of the usual suspects. I remember seeing a film where F-bombs and similar dropped frequently, zero audience reaction, but then one character turned to another and called her a "magnificent c--t," and I heard audible gasps from several quarters. It may have been the character who spoke it, partly, who was a mayor at some elegant occasion, so the word is also a sudden reveal about him. If Ray Winstone had said it, perhaps no one would have batted an eye.

Chinese cats tend to say "mao" instead of "meow," for example.

How on Gaia's green Earth is photon emission a form of reproduction? If you want people to not make jokes or get rowdy, then you need to know your subject and supply a set of testable hypotheses that bear some relation to current knowledge. Atoms and subatomic particles are not life; life is composed of complex dynamic structures that are built of atoms bonded in molecules. Theories that particles and atoms are in themselves alive have tended to be in the tradition of a 19th century fad called Vitalism (Bergson called it elan vital, postulating some sort of ethereal life force) - such theories have been discredited for lack of evidence and coherence.