TheVat

Didn't you make this error before in another thread, and I and others pointed out that this is not affirmative action because it is an APPOINTED POSITION. No one applies for the position, no one is hired. The president selects and can do so with an intent to create a court panel that is representing a full range of life experiences and broader demographic that is more like that of the country. Or, as in the case of Trump, to curry favor with conservative Christians. If Congress finds the candidate to be not qualified, they can vote to reject. Senators may also try tearing down the candidate while striking political poses for their constituents and vote against confirmation based on partisan slander... yet this seems to provoke no outcry from the high-minded Mr Peterson. How odd.

Perhaps some more indication that sanctions are working: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-europe-economy-foreign-debt-572b9a32691739fb6322fba4c301d9f1 BOSTON (AP) — The credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has downgraded its assessment of Russia’s ability to repay foreign debt, signaling rising prospects that Moscow will soon default on external loans for the first time in more than a century. S&P Global Ratings issued the downgrade to “selective default” late Friday after Russia arranged to make foreign bond payments in rubles on Monday when they were due in dollars. It said it didn’t expect Russia to be able to convert the rubles into dollars within the 30-day grace period allowed. S&P said in a statement that its decision was based partly on its opinion that sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine “are likely to be further increased in the coming weeks, hampering Russia’s willingness and technical abilities to honor the terms and conditions of its obligations to foreign debtholders.”

Faulty premise, Mack, that passive acceptance of invasion means no lives lost. If Putin expands his empire, you really believe no one will die as a consequence? Hint: look at the nation Putin currently rules.

So now we're down to "hey just check the Internet." The burden of proof for extraordinary claims is on the OP poster. Synaptic connections begin to decay in a few minutes when there is a lack of oxygen. Cellular apoptosis and necrosis ensue soon after. There are Himalayan-scale mountains of evidence for this. When those neural connections (called the "connectome") degrade, all that makes up your self and consciousness go away. One can postulate metaphysical mechanisms by which consciousness continues somewhere else, but that is not science and lies rather in the domain of religion or spiritualism. So, show us a study from a peer-reviewed scientific journal that supports your claims, Keybay. Also, manifesting some basic understanding of cell biology and physiology would help you make your case, whatever that may be. For example, your incomprehension of how freezing leads to ice crystal formation which breaks up cytoskeleta and ruptures cell membranes and breaks up synapses, suggests some sort of further study is needed on your part. When you thaw animal tissue, you get dead meat, not something that thinks and asks for breakfast.

Not 100% certain. I have only my impressions of the company culture of Hallmark, which seems to be rooted in a fairly conservative and "sweet" approach to greeting cards. AFAIK, they do not have a line of naughty cards, but TBH I have not kept careful track of this.

I think the link I posted covers the content of the video, provided your web browser supplies the English translation button at the bottom of the page. Or some have the translation accessed by a dropdown option.

Inadvertent humor from the Hallmark greeting card company....

Shouldn't be that hard to provide a textual source on oligarchs and Putin corruption. I believe a suitable title for such a text would be Putin on the Ritz. https://palace.navalny.com/

Looks like someone watched "Flatliners" one time too many.

Yes. 😀

John Fewster, a country doctor, noticed farmers who had had cowpox seemed immune to smallpox. Though his accounts were largely ignored, Edward Jenner heard them from the physician brothers to whom he was apprenticed (and who had met with Fewster) and years later developed a vaccine with Fewster's observations in mind. Jenner then was credited with the now debunked lovely milkmaid story by a biographer eager to glorify Jenner as a singular genius struck by an epiphany. And there was Albert Hoffman, the chemist working on ergot derivatives and their efficacy for inducing uterine contraction, who found himself tripping one afternoon in his laboratory at Sandoz. The derivative in question was the 25th he had synthesized, hence called LSD-25.

Just want to alert you to someone hacking your account and posting analogies so awful a five year old could see through them. Hope you can fix this breach soon! Good luck!

After Bucha, I'm thinking it's time to stop confiscating oligarch superyachts and start moving them to deep water, drain all engine fluids, and then sink them. If any oligarchs then whine about international law, reply "look who's talking."

I had a recent initiation that was literally gruel-ing, when my wife initiated me into the dark underworld of chocolate malto-meal.

I've been reading The Ministry for the Future, KS Robinson's 2020 novel which draws heavily on the IPCC reports and is really straddling the border between speculative hard sci-fi and well-researched futurism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future There are enough novels being written on this theme that it now has its own genre label: cli-fi (climate fiction). Have gotten about halfway through the book. So rich with problem-solving ideas, hard facts, extrapolations, various anonymous first person narrators who step in to recount their experiences at various locations on the warming globe, etc. that it can be a fairly slow read. Robinson really knows his stuff, and is arguably the world's foremost writer of cli-fi. Just mentioning this as something that can dovetail with the UN summaries, and also counter the "doomism" referred to in the phys.org article in the OP.

Vicks Vapo-Rub is good vapors. So why, if that's the case, wouldn't they be fighting bad vapors? You and your Germ Theory ilk are all sadly blinkered by a stifling orthodoxy. (My autocorrect tried to make that last word orthodontist -- maybe I should have left it that way)

Yes, plus one. I have said elsewhere that Russia is a nation of chess players, and I think that's never more apparent than when their armed forces are afflicted with internal problems, desertions, demoralization, and flawed chains of command. When your army sucks, go for psychological manipulation and terror. So when your Kyiv forces have to withdraw north to regroup, resupply, and get their shit together, leave corpses in your wake, both to provoke allies and to sow terror in the populace for when you come back. Russia isn't committing war crimes, more like they are committed to war crimes as their MO. It all is, as many here have noted, so breathtakingly counterproductive -- how can they now not expect any nation nearby not to pound on NATO's door? Do they really think they can sell the whole "fake news" nonsense?

If proton decay is real, that would be the real endpoint. Before that, there is baryonic matter which can be manipulated and from which energy can be extracted. After decay, you just have a dispersed cloud of leptons and photons. And thermodynamic equilibrium, where no work can be done. I would search on "proton decay" to see what conjectures are for timelines of such decay.

I think Orban's tight control of media there answers the question of who wins. Would love to be surprised, though. Ukrainian refugees, percolating through Hungarian society, could help to pierce the bubble, too.

A largish meteorite striking the Oscars ceremony is not the worst thing I can imagine. I lost respect for the Academy around 1998, when Ed Norton's stellar performance in American History X was passed over and the bald statuette handed to Roberto Benigni for a rather silly bit of acting fluff.

I'm tagging @Doogles31731 because he wrote a book on vitamin K. My only hint: the difference between K1 and K2 is somewhat like the difference between plant based omega 3 PUFA and the DHA form of omega 3 found in fish and other animal sources. Research what happens when gut microbiota process the plant based K1.

I too have noticed that Thomas (like Scalia, his mentor) takes the Originalist view that constitutional amendments are unambiguous and cannot be seen as bending towards modern goals of social justice. IOW, he has a genuine philosophical position that laws cannot repair past inequalities or lingering aftereffects. For him, they only assert equality and then hope that its simplistic enforcement is enough. Everyone has to supply their own bootstraps, so far as their own starting point. I suspect Thomas is not a fan of Rawlsian ethics or any other system that suggests some may need a head start in order to compensate for the differentials in wombs born into. (take me away now, syntax police!) I can respect some nuances of his argument even if I disagree. But the failure to recuse, when it does seem a clear violation of the USC statute, makes me think our legal system needs upgrades beyond the 18 or 10 year SCOTUS terms (the round number appeals to me) -- perhaps a less blunt tool than impeachment in Congress when conflicts of interest happen. The sad part is that it's Congress that makes laws, and that body is so mired in partisanship that I cannot even imagine them crafting something enforceable. And if Congress did, would some demagogue leap up and cry foul that the legislative branch was encroaching on that lofty independent judiciary? Does a bear shit in the woods?

https://archive.ph/2022.04.01-072154/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/01/ukraine-belarus-fighters-russia/ (Screenshot, no paywall) These are some very optimistic Belarusians. It's worth asking if Putin would do something that we all regret if faced with any chance of losing Belarus.

Migration from Africa to the Middle East, and then migration from there to Europe. There are several haplogroups, both Y-DNA and mt-DNA lines which moved in this way through the ME. A good online text source, even Wikipedia, would be better than this video. Alexander Hamilton, Sting, and I share the I-M253 haplogroup, which is most prevalent among Swedish males. (Hamilton's haplogroup was inferred from descendant testing). My grandfather, Oskar, was one of those Swedes, who came from the county in which I-M253 is most prevalent.

While men are composed primarily of grunts, recent research has found that women are composed largely of hmm-ing sounds. The science on this seems very solid, and a huge population study across many demographics and and nations, conducted by the Trondheim Polytechnic Institute of Technology Institute, found that this is the most reliable indication of gender identity.