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Nobody here has stated that they supported the war in Iraq. Nobody here has stated they support the idea of war crimes when committed by the USA. Somebody else's potential war crimes, do NOT justify Russias current war crimes. The ACTUAL topic of discussion. You are tilting at windmills. It's just getting incredibly boring at this point. You've added little of value to this discussion and are just accusing us of believing or saying things that nobody has said. Did your mother never tell you that two wrongs do not make a right? Ukraine wasn't the one at war with Iraq. Ukrainian civilians certainly were never at war with Iraq. How is Iraq, the Cuban missile crisis or an imaginary war with Mexico in any way shape or form, relevant or related to this discussion?

Except that isn't what is happening, therefore the wild speculation is irrelevant. You literally just copied a few of the words used... do you actually believe this makes you sound intelligent? Agreed. +1 at this point I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out they work for Russian state media. Russia commits war crimes, then all of a sudden some random apologist appears in places where people are having informed discussions about it. State sponsored trolling doesn't seem too far-fetched to be a really possibility here imo.

Moreover, rituals predate humans. Other mammals, birds have rituals. My dogs love rituals and don't like when a ritual goes "wrong". Maybe religions predate humans as well?

In 1976 I visited a talk about lasers, for interested laypeople. One of the applications of lasers that were presented was nuclear fusion. I remember the presenter told that in fact the only problem that had to be resolved was to fire the lasers at exactly the right time, to avoid that the pellet would be thrown out of the mid-point of the lasers. That is 46 years ago... Just to add another anecdote to Moontanman's. I think when we had invested all the money in durable energy sources and develop technologies that use less energy, instead of nuclear fusion (including Tokamak and other methods), we would have solved our CO2 emission problems...

IMO, the answer here will be similar to the answer "where / what is the seat of consciousness?" While photons come in through the retina and stimulate receptor cells, and while those receptor cells send impulses back to the occipital lobe via the optic nerves, the actual concept of "sight" is extraordinarily complex once those signals arrive. There's a bit of a "Fourier analysis" happening unconsciously where the different signal strengths and locations are first sorted and that gives a baseline of data for interpretation, and it's this interpretation part after signals arrive where things get interesting. The parts of our brain associated with memory are sort of queried first... "Have I seen this before? Do I have an existing category bucket into which I can fit this?" The process of recognition saves energy from other brain areas. If we don't recognize it, we then engage the narration and creative parts of our brain... "I've seen something similar to this, but this is clearly different. Could it be X, could it by Y, or is this entirely different and may it's Z?" This all happens faster than the blink of an eye, until a signal is sent to our higher cortical areas and we become aware of it. This awareness is then "colored" by our mental state... are we tired? are we sad? are we angry? are we blissful? Those deeper underlying feelings all shade what we see in the conscious parts of our mind... and it's this conscious part of the mind that one might equate with a "mind's eye." It's just not a single place like a gas station on the corner of two streets. It's instead a town, or a neighborhood, a rhetorical symphony where no single instrument or note makes the music, but all together matter for the end experience being explored.

Just a couple of qualifications: I didn't mean to say panspermia isn't to play a role some day in long-term (mean-planet-life-wise \( \sim 10^{9} \) years) sense. It probably is, and a lot, IMO. For starters, it is an empirical fact that organic matter does make its way to neighbouring planets and moons, at least within the confines of Solar-System parameters. If you lower your standards for how "primitive" an "organism"* must be in order to be considered life --example: chemolithotrophs--, then it may well be that our concept of Goldilocks zone has to be recalculated to include much wider ranges within a solar system, as well as the different varieties of solar system that can harbour life this kind of "less-honourable" life. Panspermic events, in this view, would serve as bridges between communicating vessels of proto-life (planets and moons) to find their way to a more promising platform for multicellular/organelle-centred life. Trying to paint a vivid picture of what I think might be going on: Imagine that already gazillions of these proto-living forms are out there saying: We don't think of our arrangement as non-life; in fact, we're doing quite alright by our standards. We've lived here for 2 billion years within our Goldilocks zone, with our mind-bogglingly sluggish metabolism and reproductive cycle. If a higher-order Goldilocks zone opens up in any of the neighbours, higher-order, more sophisticatedly organised life will be seeded in those moons, don't worry. Enough of our spores are flowing around to guarantee that in, say, a couple billion years more, this higher form of life takes seed. I'm sure part of what I'm saying here, or similar, is being considered by people working on these subjects. * "Primitive" meaning things like: Doesn't have internal membranes/compartimentalisation equivalent to eukaryots Doesn't have to exploit any particularly profitable redox reaction => doesn't need to have a particularly fast metabolism/reproduction cycle Doesn't have more than order 103-104 pair bases in any of its nucleic acids (or the equivalent of DNA)

I don't know, maybe some folk that support Will might think so. It just "seemed" to me that's all. Will has obviously got personal issues and the out burst could well be (likely) part of his frustration. All I was saying is that the joke (in my opinion) did not justify Will's reaction. Where others may feel the slap was deserving, or at least understandable due to Chris's "insulting" remarks. But the matter is, Chris was just doing his job and Will was out of order. Lets face it, would people even be questioning the joke if Will hadn't reacted the way he did? I think not. +1, Will appeared to be laughing quite calmly at Chris's jokes including the one aimed at Jada until he saw her reaction. This then sparked his reaction, maybe this was an attempt by Will to prove something to Jada?

After all the crap that's come out after 'slap-gate', I have come to almost feel sorry for Will Smith. I recently saw a clip from a Red Table ( Jada P Smith's show ) episode, where she and Will calmly discuss her infidelity while Will does his best to keep smiling. On TV, mind ou. Is there no end to this woman's self-centered narcissism ? And his idiot son ( Jayden, named after his mother , how appropriate ) commenting on social media "And that's how we do it". Best course of action for Will, is to be like the 'stereotypical black American father' and abandon his family. ( just kidding; I'm with Chris Rock, and believe we should be able to laugh at our shortcomings and challenges ) And then I remember I don't really care about Hollywood types ...

All the same, I would not want the thread reopened and further trivialized. There is subject matter there that could be discussed to some purpose, but once it's become bawdlerized, there is little point in continuing. Perhaps the phrasing of the question was unfortunate.

Why don't you fuck off to Russia and enjoy the delights of their state media. Stop dragging this topic into irrelevance. If you've got an axe to grind, make your own thread. We don't need your bile making a difficult subject more difficult to navigate. You are making this thread stink of red herrings.

To be honest, I have more confidence in the people behind the links I provided, than your bluster. I was originally not sure if I remembered the original source correctly, but I'm now quite sure that I did. The 8.4 cells on average, needed to infect 1% of the young children, makes it clear that I recalled it correctly. I said that a single bacterium can lead to an infection, and it's perfectly clear from those links that it can. Obviously, not in 50% of the population, or 1%, but in some cases.

That's the stock argument, but it doesn't work both ways does it? When Cuba exercised it's autonomy, the USA threatened a nuclear world war three, and forced most of the world to impose sanctions on them for fifty years. I asked some time ago, what do you think the USA would do, if Mexico was arranging to join in a mutual anti-USA military pact with China and Russia, and nobody had an anwer. Because everybody knows that the USA military would be down Mexico way like a shot, and all autonomy would be forgotten in an instant.

Yeh, but it's one law for the rich, and another for the poor. 😄 Roman Abramovitch came to the UK, bought Chelsea Football Club, spent billions building it up into the top club in the whole world, and they jump on his assets without even trial. Meanwhile, people come from the gutter in Somalia, Eritrea and Lithuania, bring nothing with them, and they rape, rob and murder, and we shower them with lawyers, psychiatrists and benfits. It's always the poor what gets the gravy, and the rich what gets the blame !

No spin here then. So long as YOU think it's possible, that's good enough for me !