Peterkin

Can you not get this? Nobody has a reason to give a flying fig. A little more substance instead of self-pity and dust in the wind might get you farther.

Neither of them excluded on the basis of race. They just haven't been federal judges long enough. Once the third one - a Biden nominee, incidentally - is confirmed, the two older women will have a shot at the next opening. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erinspencer1/2021/05/13/just-two-native-american-federal-judges-serve-king-may-be-the-third/?sh=37b0d8ee5815

Numbers. Not a lot to choose from. Something to do with the US education system and tuition fees, I would guess.

There is some reason to think so. In the middle ages in Europe, apparently, red hair was associated with witchcraft http://www.themythsandhistoryofredhair.co.uk/heresy.html Both men and women were equally suspect, but more women were prosecuted - for several reasons having to do with the times. I think the reason is rather about ethnicity and religion: the Celts were pagan longer and more stubbornly than other subject peoples; they kept their language and religion, in spite of the power of Holy Roman Empire. OTOH, in modern aesthetic tastes, the situation is entirely different. The phenotype usually includes pale, sensitive skin, very fine facial hair, freckles and susceptibility to sunburn. Women can use makeup and parasols to improve their facial definition and protect their complexion; for men, it would be considered effeminate, so they fade out in winter, burn and flake in summer, have spots and inconsiderable eyebrows and lashes. Also, many women who have red hair were not born with it: brunettes, even olive-skinned ones, can have flaming hair colour without the genetic price. Wow! I did not know that!

Like the kitten thing? It means something to you, but people who have never met you before and have no reason to care are not going to start off by asking for your long, complicated back-stories, are they? They will respond to what you post. If they like that, they'll put up with a dumb name (I should know!) and eventually, if they have reason to believe you, they might even care about your tale of woes. We? The mods are not so easily angered. They've dealt with much bigger problems with perfect equanimity.

it may just have been a poor choice of coloured font; after all, there are just too many to choose from. I'm okay with plain ol' charcoal on white.

The difference between excluding men and excluding women? Yes. The difference between excluding blacks and excluding whites? Also yes. The difference is who complains about it.

If it's not working, you might want to re-examine your working assumptions. It's not going to be assuaged if you keep pissing people off. (Come to think of it - How did that desolation and loneliness come about?) The choice of handle - however hilarious you may find the back-story - is a little off-putting to begin with. Maybe hold back on the humour until you get the feel of the place. Walk down the main street of Jerusalem gesticulating with a bacon and cheeseburger, you're bound to raise a few hackles.

There does seem to be a misconception at the heart of that nearly unreadable post.

You must be aware that there is only one (1) vacancy. This guarantees that whoever is chosen, everyone else, of every ethnicity, creed, gender, age, proclivity or taste in bowties is excluded.

As to qualifications, there are qualified judges to fit all possible criteria of gender, race and political leaning, but the people making the selection are in no position to assess the relative legal merits of a candidate; all they have is a record of academic attainments, career path and bench rulings. It's nothing to do with representation or diversity or even the Constitution (which is what it's nominally meant to serve). The people making the appointment are not jurists; they're politicians. It's a political appointment through a political process. Whether the appointments are affirmative in one term and retrogressive in another, it's always because of their respective political agendas. Meanwhile, of course, the judges themselves may not identify with their own gender or skin colour and it's quite possible to be a competent judge without the mirror influencing one's every legal decision.

What kind of appointee they prefer is always decided by every administration that has an opportunity to make a Supreme Court appointment. The general criteria (ie. militant transgender feminist; young progressive Hispanic male; mature fiscal conservative female; old white misogynist fathead) determine the short-listed candidates; which one is most politically viable for confirmation determines the nominee chosen. If that's a problem, it's endemic and unavoidable.

Experiment while flat-lining? Improbable. Perceive while flat-lining? Improbable. Cases described as near death experience are of people have almost died, but didn't. Nobody has described the approaching death experience of people who actually did die. Therefore, the data collected in studies of near death experience are from people who have a memory of surviving.

We have defined it until we are all the colour of Picts on the warpath. Death occurs when brain activity ceases. That frickin simple. Even if the heart is still pumping, with or without mechanical aid, if the brain has stopped, life has stopped. Even if the lungs are still bellowing, with or without mechanical aid, if the brain has stopped, life has stopped. There is no "process" of death. There are processes of life, the most essential and irreplaceable of which is the firing of neurons. When neurons stop, life stops. That's it. Now, ffs, leave them alone. Stop digging them them up to check for freshness. The "conversation" consists entirely of pointless remarks.

No, I don't define it as death unless it is death. But some people, including, apparently, yourself, seem to have trouble accepting the presence of death even after it occurs, or, indeed, the inevitability of death. I merely offered an alternative to forcing badly damaged brains to keep inhabiting bodies they can no longer operate or enjoy. Even more than that: undamaged brains shouldn't be forced to inhabit bodies they cannot operate or enjoy.

If by 'that', you mean telling the family it's time to turn off the life support, it's a problem because of psychology. People don't want their loved ones to be dead. They want to cling to hope, so they deny the evidence put before them. This is facilitated by the equipment which artificially mimics the obvious signs of life - heartbeat and breathing - even when the less obvious, but most important functions of life - brain activity - has ceased. These relatives often behave like a a mother dog who refuses to believe her pup is dead, and will keep digging it up and trying to lick it back to life (an instinctive behaviour, which is actually useful in cases where a newborn fails to start breathing right away) People, like other animals, have a hard time accepting the fact of death. Does any of this sound familiar? Yes, it is. In fact, I'll push this boat a little farther out. In some cases, even before all brain activity ceases, it is better to let the patient go than to pull him back into an untenable travesty of life.

While cessation of neural activity is easy to detect with state-of-the-art equipment, such equipment may be unavailable or incompetently used. Since human error cannot be ruled out entirely, vigilance is advised, and usually applied. That is why incorrect pronunciation of death is very rare, as we both said. After a period of monitoring borderline patients, a determination can be made on the basis of multiple readings. The problem is not telling when the patient's brain stopped working, but telling the family to pull the plug. The confusion of advanced medical technology is that it's reversed the termination determination. A century ago, if you failed the wrist and mirror test, you were off to the morgue, even if your brain was still working. Now, you can be dead for months, yet your heart keeps beating and you keep breathing.

True. OTOH, neither can you force me to leave. Are you at all aware that two posts you say are contradictory actually say the same thing?

I answered the specific items I quoted, and nothing else. The point was, in each case, self-evident. I'm not convinced this completely sincere. I mentioned a couple of factors that retard decomposition. To be more comprehensive: mummification, extreme cold, dehydration, saline or acidic environment, exclusion of oxygen and microorganisms. Not a great big mystery - and not relevant to whether the meat thus kept fresh was dead or alive when it went into the container. If someone were buried while still alive, they would not stay alive very long - 3-6 hours, depending on the size of the person and the coffin and how much they struggled. The state of tissue preservation is a function of the environment, not the animation of the corpse. I have* a pickled hog's head in a vacuum pack in my larder. It's been there for six months, before which it was shipped over from Poland. It's fresh and ready to eat whenever a Narn dignitary comes to dinner. But I'm confident that that pig was stone dead, even before the head was severed from the body. (* Of course i don't! That would be as gross as exhuming people. ) I don't agree that my responses have earned those quotation marks. I don't follow. My rational explanations were of the phenomena I explicitly addressed. If you need anything else explained, ask a specific, comprehensible question. If you want a thesis discussed, present it in clear, concise terms. If you just want to be annoyed and annoying, keep doing what you're doing.

There is your first problem. and that's our second. What, by you, is a 'proper' answer? Had we been interested enough to do all the original research, we would now be experts in undeadness, or whatever this subject is. Obviously, we were only interested enough to respond to you. Until you became tiresome. I never got so far as to figure out what you're wrong about, exactly. Please to show where I said this. I'm not mad keen on being grossly misrepresented.

Sop can I, should I become interested enough. So can you. Does that mean we're done here?

That's not why those procedures were carried out. They were meant to preserve the body for its passage to the 'next world'. They didn't set much store by the brain and didn't want that useless much rotting in the perfect skull. But they prized the heart and liver and preserved those, for the owner his post-life used thereof. Except in the case of zombies and vampires, of course, but that's superstitious practice in service of superstitious belief, while the Egyptian mummification is scientific practice in service of superstitious belief. The degree or absence of obvious decomposition has no effect whatever on the presence or absence of life. You can have putrefying postules all over your body and still be alive, or be a perfectly preserved prehistoric man https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/europe-bog-bodies-reveal-secrets-180962770/ and be dead as a doornail. You might vacuum-pack a body for safekeeping, or keep it in the deep freeze, the same way you keep any met fresh. Fresh and alive are not synonymous.

No, they're not. Decomposition starts as soon as tissue no longer receives nourishment. You just don't overtly notice it until the microorganisms get to work. There seem to be some gaps in your understanding of the subject, just as shown in your responses here. My refusal to read the thesis stands, on the grounds of personal taste. I prefer paragraphs, rational punctuation and comprehensible vocabulary. I dislike anything stated in all capitals, even when correctly spelled.

Yes, it is known to happen that someone, even a certified medical doctor, makes an incorrect determination of death. Human error is far less common than it was in the 19th and early 20th century, when cardio-pulmonary were the only criteria. We have more sophisticated instruments an can measure more subtle activity. Also, because these phenomena (semblance of death for various reasons) are now known and medical practitioners are alert to the possibility. (Unlike the movies, where any passer-by can say, "Too late; he's gone" and the victim is buried next morning, we're quite vigilant nowadays.) But it can still happen. And very rarely, even modern instruments fail to detect very faint signs of life in a patient who is comatose, hypothermic or extensively damaged, as in an explosion or fall from a great height. Such a patient would usually be monitored and checked again for life-signs over a period of time. I don't see your problem summarized in an accessible form.

Good! Then the subject has been well and truly covered and can be put to rest. In a mausoleum, if you want to keep visiting and taking its pulse.