TheVat

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.

Perhaps they can give Will Smith an asterisk, a la Roger Maris. Won the vote, but the trophy is withdrawn because he shat on the ceremony with acting out his personal marital issues. Better than performing a full Russell Crowe on him. (i.e. the Academy just shuns him and the Oscar goes to someone else)

I found this interpretation of Putin's real objectives to be disturbingly plausible: https://archive.ph/2022.03.30-020554/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/opinion/ukraine-war-putin.html The possibility is suggested in a powerful reminiscence from The Times’s Carlotta Gall of her experience covering Russia’s siege of Grozny, during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. In the early phases of the war, motivated Chechen fighters wiped out a Russian armored brigade, stunning Moscow. The Russians regrouped and wiped out Grozny from afar, using artillery and air power. Russia’s operating from the same playbook today. When Western military analysts argue that Putin can’t win militarily in Ukraine, what they really mean is that he can’t win clean. Since when has Putin ever played clean? “There is a whole next stage to the Putin playbook, which is well known to the Chechens,” Gall writes. “As Russian troops gained control on the ground in Chechnya, they crushed any further dissent with arrests and filtration camps and by turning and empowering local protégés and collaborators.” Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s). Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance. “Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors....

The joke, taste level aside, compared JPS to a sexy and glamorous movie star in a popular movie in which she surmounts all obstacles. It could be a weak joke, it could be a little transgressive, and a lot of humor is built on mild transgression. As Stephen Colbert said, the way to really hit back at a comedian whose joke you don't like is to not laugh. A blow that Will Smith failed to administer, and which would have been more effective, given that cameras were trained on him and JPS for a reaction shot. JPS, herself, wisely wrote this about her condition a while back: I really had to put it in a spiritual perspective of, like, the higher power takes so much from people. People are out here who have cancer, people who have sick children. I watch the higher power take things every day and, by golly, if the higher power wants to take your hair, that’s hair? When I looked at it from that perspective, it really did settle me.

Western countries also expressed doubts about Russia’s intentions. “We judge the Russian military machine by its actions, not just its words,” British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab told Sky News on Wednesday. “There’s obviously some skepticism that it will regroup to attack again rather than seriously engaging in diplomacy.” He added that “of course the door to diplomacy will always be left ajar, but I don’t think you can trust what is coming out of the mouth of Putin’s war machine.” An assessment from Britain’s Ministry of Defense said that Russia’s focus on the Donbas region “is likely a tacit admission that it is struggling to sustain more than one significant axis of advance.” “Russian units suffering heavy losses have been forced to return to Belarus and Russia to reorganize and resupply,” the ministry said in a statement Wednesday. “Such activity is placing further pressure on Russia’s already strained logistics and demonstrates the difficulties Russia is having reorganizing its units in forward areas within Ukraine.” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. has detected small numbers of Russian ground forces moving away from the Kyiv area, but it appeared to be a repositioning of forces, “not a real withdrawal.” https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-roman-abramovich-kyiv-europe-ef9c28c44f94b34262fe6b7c296d58a6

Second that. His routine about bullet control remains one of my favorite commentaries on the issue of gun control.

Guess it's just as well that Ricky Gervais didn't host this year.

You can shorten URLs, without removing the identifying stuff, if they are larded with junk after the "?" symbol. I do that occasionally when there's a mass of tracking stuff and formatting specs that aren't needed. I agree the tinyurl site, and others, should be avoided.

I had trouble making out the nanobodies in your pic, @zapatos, but they are cute. Though I can see the Radar resemblance, I think the others look more like Colonel Potter and Charles Emerson Winchester.

Would it be possible to have a real chat, in our own words, rather than skyscraper-tall citation dumps?

"With the help of advanced laboratory techniques, we were able to identify a panel of nanobodies that very effectively neutralized several variants of SARS-CoV-2," says Gerald McInerney, professor at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology (MTC), Karolinska Institutet, and joint senior author of both studies. Despite the roll-out of vaccines and antivirals, the need for effective therapeutics against severe COVID-19 infection remains high. Nanobodies -- which are fragments of antibodies that occur naturally in camelids and can be adapted for humans -- are promising therapeutic candidates as they offer several advantages over conventional antibodies. For example, they have favourable biochemical properties and are easy to produce cost-effectively at scale. In the now published studies, the labs of Gerald McInerney and Ben Murrell, also at MTC, identify several potent nanobodies derived from an alpaca immunised with SARS-CoV-2 antigens. Nontechnical version: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220325185907.htm Technical version: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm0220

I was surprised to learn that Bertrand Russell was Welsh. That sent me a-factchecking. It seems that Monmouthshire was somewhat disputed as to its Welshness until 1972? I wonder if Lord Russell self-identified as Welsh. Or if he much cared. I hope Dimmy is not trying to subvert our minds with pro-Welsh propaganda.

Also there's the fact that he won that election, which makes the case for harm to his campaign a little weak. That, to me, is the comical part of all this. Re: Thomas - I posted in another thread a while ago that many in the Court (and federal judiciary generally) are reportedly privately uncomfortable that Thomas doesn't recuse himself on cases where there's a possible COI with his wife's political activities. The Court, unfortunately, has a deep tradition of never critiquing its own, so it would be up to some other body (Congress? (snicker)) to do something.

I agree with MSC that any system of normative ethics (i.e. having moral rules that govern a society) must flow from human feelings. We are not robotic beings without emotion that can be handled with a simple algorithm that optimizes some goal (say, making lots of paper clips). The Benthamites openly acknowledge the emotional basis of morality by setting pleasure and happiness (for the greatest number, in an impartial fashion) as the greatest good. JS Mill had similar views. Hume saw right actions as coming from moral sentiments. And so on. We have qualia, and feelings matter. The focus here, seems to me, has been on consequentialism - right actions are ones that we understand by their resulting in certain consequences. We are somewhat less concerned with being virtuous beings than with having results that are deemed the best for everyone. So some of the thought experiments here have been directed towards a utilitarian view. This value system seems implicit in some posts here. Better to hook jumper cables to one demonstrably horrible person than have great harm come to many other innocent persons. As I hinted earlier with my truth serum suggestion, a commitment to pragmatism might lead us to assert that mental violation is better than physical torture, and would lead to a better outcome for both interrogator, and criminal, and others involved. I have no crystal ball on this matter. But consequentialist approaches depend on good guesses as to outcomes. I can guess, say, that young boys in other countries are less likely to become terrorists if Americans are known for scopolamine cocktails rather than waterboarding or drilling holes in fingers. This might be the sort of guessing where a crack team of social scientists and intelligence operatives would be very handy! 😀

I wonder if there are gray areas of torture, like truth serum, that the thread didn't explore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum You are inducing a involuntary state, which may be emotionally painful for the "perp," but you aren't inducing physical agony. Leaving aside the highly complex question of relative efficacy, is this a violation of that person that would weigh less heavily (re @MSC feeling of shame, and empathic awareness of perp as a human being) than outright physical assaults? I don't have a quick answer to this myself, but if we were talking suitcase nuke in Grand Central Station and a certain perp who knows the location, or the heavily massively monstrously overused pedo example, I wonder if the drug cocktail might be worth trying.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex-currencies/092316/how-us-dollar-became-worlds-reserve-currency.asp Надеюсь, это поможет.

Apparently, Reagan had his moments of clarity.... https://archive.ph/2022.03.23-132736/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/climate/europe-russia-gas-reagan.html How this whole dependence on Russian gas/oil got started. And how US president Reagan tried to stop it. (I love the archive ph website, handy if you only read a paper intermittently and don't want to subscribe)

Max Boot waxes optimistic.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/21/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia-offensive-putin/ Accessible URL for the paywall blocked.... https://archive.ph/2022.03.21-131404/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/21/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia-offensive-putin/ Suggesting this is a win for Ukraine might be an overstatement. No one wins here, but I agree there could be a stalemate if Putin doesn't decide his humiliation is too much to bear and drop a tac nuke. Or two. I think there's less chance of that, given the pariah status already attained with conventional weapons directed at civilians.

Weird that I like Matt Dillon, and atmospheric movies in exotic locales, and yet haven't seen this film. Thanks for a nudge. Currently listening to ragtime selections on youtube. (once in a while, someone gets the tempo right, doesnt rush it)

As power was cut to the Chernobyl plant this month, nuclear engineers explained the importance of the electricity grid — even for plants that have been out of operation for decades. Chernobyl’s molten radioactive lava self-heats inside the belly of the blown reactor. Without ventilation, which requires electricity, hot air forms condensation that rains down inside the building, corroding and damaging equipment. With no electricity, the operators, who are working at gunpoint, have no idea of radiation levels inside the shelter. All anyone knows is that monitoring devices across the Chernobyl zone showed a spike in radioactivity a few days after the invasion. Then the monitors were hacked and went radio silent. Chernobyl’s spent fuel is another danger. Left to its own devices, it can heat up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. At high temperatures, the zirconium sleeves covering the fuel can ignite. After the Chernobyl accident in 1986, Soviet liquidators hastily built huge basins to store highly radioactive spent fuel rods. Water pumped into the basins cools the fuel and blocks radioactive gamma rays that emanate from the irradiated uranium. Now 20,000 fuel rods are stored in Chernobyl basins designed for 17,000. Officials at the IAEA stated March 9 that there is little risk the fuel will catch fire, since the rods are no longer very hot. Yet a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission study from 2000 found that “the possibility of a zirconium fire cannot be dismissed even many years after a final reactor shutdown.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/18/chernobyl-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-ukraine/ Some of the problems with cutting power to either long dormant reactors or to recently shut down ones.

While there is much truth there regarding TFGs competence, I fear you may underestimate the power of an angry monkey with a big box of wrenches that it can hurl into a large delicate piece of machinery. Appointment of incompetent and/or corrupt cabinet members, larding science-based agencies with partisan kooks and science deniers, tilting the balance of federal courts and (as @swansontnoted) the SCOTUS, ripping up carefully wrought treaties and other overseas relationships, abandoning Green programs and initiatives that need multi term momentum to succeed, etc. (a very short sampling of governance mayhem) While I agree more competent sabotage could be worse (as @iNow suggested), and RWers like DeSantis or Rick Scott (google his mean-spirited Rescue American Plan) are fearsome to contemplate in the Oval, TFGs flailing around could be pretty disastrous. And next time around, there might not be a Mark Milley or a James Mattis to step in at key moments and deflect those tossed wrenches.

Greene is the reigning queen of BSC, imo, based on her psychotic stalking of fellow Congresswoman Alexandria Octavio-Cortez. The mail slot incident was a notable low point. I don't think Trump will run again. His pro Putin ravings have whittled off enough of his base and distanced enough moderate Independents to render him nonviable in 2024. The primary winner will be whoever is best at kissing Trump's ring while edging away from his more toxic views at the same time.