Phi for All

First, not "every single report in the past 200+ years" mentions "throwing things at people", so you don't get to conflate the two. Second, your argument begs the question that it was a Bigfoot (really?) throwing things at people, so you don't get to assume that. It's just the kind of behavior that has mundane, mainstream explanations for it, which shows you don't understand Occam's Razor. Third, skeptics don't sit on the fence. If they don't find evidence quickly, they assume the mainstream explanation is adequate, and get off the fence until there's something new to question. What you're engaging in here is conspiracy. There's no firm evidence, but you assume it's true and try to reverse engineer the whole process. You're convinced of something extraordinary when ordinary will suffice.

We sympathize with your wife. You've set up a convention in your argument process where you only have to know 60% of what you're talking about, but get to claim others are deficient because they can't fill in the gaps in your ignorance. Heads you win, tails they lose.

It appears the expired passports the FBI seized along with the contents of a desk drawer directly tie TFG to the illegally stored classified documents also found there: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trumps-seized-passports-problem-legal-experts-say-rcna45726 Makes it difficult to claim that others mishandled the docs when they're mixed in with obvious personal items. Not sure why they returned them if they're evidence, but the article claims the FBI got what they needed from them.

! Moderator Note Moved to Speculations, since this sounds like non-mainstream ideas. Please do your best to support your assertions, using mainstream science, to bring them above the level of hand-waving. Be specific, and if you have "a remarkable solution", do everyone a favor and START WITH THAT. We're looking to see if your idea has merit, and we'd love to discuss it if it does, but we want some evidence that your concept reflects what we observe in nature.

I think you do, because it's been explained fairly well, and you're smart. Paintings rarely need other paintings to give them context and meaning, so no. In our case, individual pieces (posts, messages) are combined into a topic discussion (thread). Ideally, this creates something more than it's parts, so we can view a meaningful conversation as an emergent property of online forum discussion. It's not about the individual contributions, but without them there's no chance of discovering new meaning by talking with reasonable people. We need the discussion to be intact if we're to learn from it. Does that make sense? Fair? I think you're looking at this as if someone put something they owned down somewhere, and when they changed their mind and went to pick it up again, someone else tells them they aren't allowed to pick it up again and have to just leave it there. But that's not what's happening here. Putting down your thoughts is expected of everyone here, it's a science discussion forum.

Yes, it's exactly like that. Except Google employees are paid, unlike our staff. And nobody has had any personal information or photos exposed, also no video was involved. Oh, and most of the information in the posts was self-published and is available elsewhere for free, so removing it from our threads doesn't do anything. But yeah, other than those things, it's like what you said Google says.

Your hot water is hopefully set for at least 120 F (bacteria issues), which you're probably mixing with a little cold water to bring the bath to around 100 F. You spend some time adjusting to that so when you get out, 85 F feels quite cool. Also, before you dry off, water droplets are evaporating, drawing energy as they change from liquid to gas, which causes the cooling on the surface of your skin.

You're right, it was Barkley, not Shaq. Didn't Barkley also have a weird take on science, like he didn't think analyzing the metrics in basketball was necessary? My new Thesaurus is terrible. Plus, it's also terrible.

I stopped watching basketball because of Shaq and his stance that he didn't want to be a role model to children. I'm grateful for the extra time this gave me to study science, and I'd be equally grateful to know that children no longer look up to him. And I'd tell him that to the top of his chest, being 6' 3". But it makes sense that Shaq is a flat-Earther. Most of those folks are droolers, so a dribbler will fit right in.

Do you? Or are your police reporting the most violent crimes differently now? Your own BBC says that for every 6 knifings, 6 people are attacked by broken bottles or clubs, and 79 people are assaulted without a weapon. The knifings can certainly be more lethal, but it's also an opportunity to connect an ethnic group to the attacks. If you're like the US, it's reported that young black males are the ones being caught with weapons, but you never hear that they're also the largest victims of assault by weapons.

We've been losing wages in the US since the time of Nixon, and have had a huge percentage of our population incarcerated as a slave workforce, but the beginning of the end for us over here was turning our informative, regulated news shows into unregulated entertainment. Watch out for your BBC, it's been getting less and less reliable for me, and I can see the bias more every day. You've also had a LOT of attacks on your wonderful national healthcare system, so I would imagine there are people paying to see stories like that. We never got a national program, and ours is quite simply pathetic. So many private hands out for what should be public monies! I paid into our Medicare system all my life, and they've now purposely made it so complicated you have to hire someone to help you decide which plans and supplements to buy (yes, still making monthly payments for health insurance at 65).

I associate this with Christian religious affiliations mostly, but it's not quite like the Amish, where they didn't want their children exposed to modern thinking. This seems more like parents protecting their children from outlooks that might make their lives difficult, or lifestyles that might expose them to harsh criticism. It's better to fit in than to be happy for these people, and I can't help but notice how well that serves the wealth extremists. It seems like half the Republicans and Democrats in the US just want status quo, and are willing to keep pretending slavery doesn't exist. The other half of each party have always wanted better representation for the taxes they pay, but that other half of the Republicans want to change the whole makeup of our government. Some want a theocracy, some want a fascistic order, and others just want to see this democracy die.

It's highly unlikely this can happen when we put those with massive amounts of money in charge of our ignorance. Above all, they don't want us smart enough to realize the power we have as people in a democracy rather than individuals. If we figure that out, ALL BETS ARE OFF.

I think we all appreciate that. I'm not so much interested in changing people's minds as I am in making sure my own perspectives are as reasoned and complete as I can make them. I realize that massive amounts of money have gone into skewing our perceptions to suit the needs of those with massive amounts of money, and it's going to take extraordinary critical thinking skills to rise above that and see what the world's socio-political landscape really looks like. TFG purposely painted whole countries and peoples as shitholes full of rapists and thieves. These are textbook colonial tactics, and it's just unreal that they're still successful today. Call them "poor, third world countries" to make yourself seem sympathetic so you can offer "help" that allows you to pillage them, and also hide the fact that it was your country who pillaged theirs for centuries. TFG was able to get Americans to turn against the families of American soldiers who'd lost their lives, just because they weren't white. That's the part I have a hard time interpreting. Do so many white Americans hate brown people so much that TFG looks like a good idea?

That would remove all meaning from the word, but I'm sure that's why you said it. More whataboutism. It's boring.

"He tried to reach out and talk to North Korea". Notice how carefully neutral even YOU had put this. His "reaching out", done with no diplomatic training and a fawning gratuitousness that made him look like a child next to the smaller Kim, gave Kim exactly what he needed, which is confirmation that the US fears war more than he does. More than that, TFG legitimized Kim's cruel regime by personally visiting and praising him. TFG did NOTHING to reduce their ability to produce nuclear arms, and eventually backed down from his strongest stances. A few years later we now find ourselves worse off wrt Kim and his unscrupulous plans. In what perspective do you see TFG's visit to North Korea as anything but a colossal mishandling of leadership?

Well, we learned well from our colonial masters, the British.

Good for you, that's what it's all about! I used to be addicted to soap, but I'm clean now. Just be careful around trees, some of them are pretty shady. And stairs always seem like they're up to something. And can someone tell me why the person who invented the knock-knock joke didn't get the No-Bell Prize for Comedy?

I heard two versions of this joke recently, and didn't really care for either, so I took the best from both to punch it up. I agree about Dangerfield. He was another master of misdirection. "The doctor said I had cancer, and when I told him I'd like a second opinion, he said, 'You're ugly, too!'"

Misdirection is probably my favorite joke formula. Selling it well is an art form, imo. Bo Burnham is a master at it. I love his bit about believing in the Zodiac, and how morbidly ironic it is that his grandmother was a Cancer, and she was actually killed by a giant crab. I hate people who think it's clever to take drugs. Like customs officers.... I had a few too many at a bar the other day, so I decided to take a cab home. That's the first time I've ever driven a cab, to be honest with you.

Since it's already been established that the whole Ukraine/Nazi connection is a complete gaslight, I assume everything said after this point is equally untrue and aimed at perverting the truth. Red herrings for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

When I make someone breakfast in bed, is it too much to expect a little appreciation, or even just a "thank you"? Lately all I get is a bunch of questions, like "Who are you?" and "What are you doing in my house?"

! Moderator Note You have a thread for this already. One per topic, please. And since you haven't persuaded anyone that any of it is valid, it definitely doesn't belong in Science News.

American politics in general is a cult of personality, imo. The Republicans want to bomb more brown people than the Democrats do, and Liz Cheney and her dad were the old epitome of that tradition. The new Republicans are mostly split between the Reaganites like Liz who don't care for TFG, the Christian Nationalists who back him, and the Anti-Democracy Extremists who adore him, and none of them want to listen to anything progressive or liberal from anybody, or any kind of compromise even if it's the best thing for everybody. I don't see how she has a chance to bring the party back together, but she could be effective as a spoiler for TFG's chances (if he's eligible to run again). I'm hoping this is what keeps TFG from running again. You always know he's lying when he uses his trademarked brand of kettle logic. "There are no classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Documents are automatically declassified by my order. I don't need permission to declassify documents I want to keep." Remember Omarosa and the N-word? "I never called her the N-word. I've been told there's no tape of me calling her the N-word. You can't trust what she says because she's wacky and deranged. The media shouldn't listen to her because they didn't listen when she praised me." It really burns me that so many people are duped by this.

Drain the Boil! Make America Non-infectious Again! Lance him up! Give him four more years and he'll take the 5th again!