TheVat

So this was encouraging... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/19/no-kings-how-many-protesters-attended If this first large scale protest did indeed bring nearly 2 percent to the streets (including me, spouse, daughter and her BF), then that may encourage more to show up next time.

No apologies needed. It's useful to keep things in perspective as to where people are suffering. When I toss off ideas in a quick list, I expect there will be corrections. And I don't know about mortality statistics, given the wide variance in estimates. Some sources say deaths caused by the Gaza war is a multiple of the direct deaths number (~ 55K, IIRC), with much starvation happening right now. And Gaza has much higher ratio of civilian deaths, from all reports.

That's interesting, fitting this all into classical Marxist theory, but I think this thread concerns itself with a broader definition of fascism and is not seeking precise matches with historical instances. We're focused on examples like the OP, where you see people being dragged away by uniformed thugs because they are asking questions that are perfectly legal. This is understood to be a paver on the road to fascism.

March, write your Congress members, sign petitions, vote, donate to reputable relief agencies, get a degree in a health field and join DWB (MSF), Red Cross, etc, join Greta Thunberg in a food/medicine smuggling run, feign being a Right Wing ideologue on conservative websites while generating content that subtly undermines the RW positions on geopolitics and Likudist/ Zionist propaganda...

And now the senator from California is joined by the NYC comptroller. [ETA: posted before seeing Peterkin had also posted coverage) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/17/brad-lander-arrested-new-york-city-comptroller Masked federal agents just illegally arrested New York City’s elected Comptroller. Outrageous. The Trump Administration went after Brad Lander for asking this simple question: ‘Do you have a warrant?’

What?? Bumper sticker seen in Eugene, around that time: "Buck the Feavers!"

This could also inflame a lot of Shiites. Attack so near to Qom, which is considered holy among Shia Muslims, raises the specter of bringing religious outrage and vengeance seeking into the dynamic. Never a good thing in war.

Been mostly AFK, but IIRC this vast digression turned on whether or not comparisons to Nazi Germany were warranted. So it looks like that was thoroughly discussed and the OP question also answered - US Senators must follow an approved script in questioning the executive branch or else. Somehow I thought this thread would be a short one, concluding with "was anyone expecting anything else from the 47 regime?" What's really disturbing is that giving a senator the SA treatment is one of the LEAST awful things the Great Turnip administration has done. Which means that, again, theatrics are being used to distract people while they chip away at the rule of law and global alliances formed over the last century.

Interesting back and forth between you and Sohan, pessimism v optimism, a polarity where I find myself on a middle ground. Watching traditional hardball journalism falter in recent years, I can lean pessimistic especially when the worst people are getting AI tools of propaganda and flooding the social media zone. OTOH, Sohan's optimism can also be contagious in a good way and encourage people to get off the bench. I think Churchill's maxim, democracy is not a great system but it's better than all the others, holds. US democrats really need to come together and rebuild the focused progressive big umbrella that they used to sorta make work. Democracy is always fragile, especially in a nation which is (as you've observed) an uneasy union of several sub-nations. Some of them very far, in every sense, from DC.

Yeah, a lot of other factors, too, e g. there have been studies connecting sunlight levels with lowered rates of colorectal cancer. Vitamin D production seems to have a protective effect. This complicates the causation picture in places like Uganda, where you have copious sunlight, a very unprocessed high fiber diet, everyone walks a lot, and shorter average lifespan than developed countries. All those can cause lower cancer rates, but to what degree? With colorectal cancers one might be tempted to point to the diet as primary, but you'd need to look at a range of countries where those other factors are different.

<chuckle>

Oh the humanity! 💩 In the words of John Milton, "They also serve who only stand and wait.".

What seemed the most outrageous attempt at putting lipstick on this pig of an event was claiming that Padilla was perceived as some unknown potential marauder. Right, the senior US Senator from California, at an LA presser. The Sturmabteilung is back, dimwit thugs and their corrupt Cabinet skank with the charisma and oratorical skills of used cat litter.

So it looks like Alexandra Petri who wrote a political humor column for the Washington Post until five months ago (she took a maternity break) and who I assumed was coming back...is not coming back. In fact, she decided to go to work for The Atlantic, a non-Bezosian publication that will allow her to continue doing her vitally important job of making me laugh until I piss myself at things which would otherwise make my weep or gnaw off my extremities. Without further ado, here is a paywall free version of her first column: The AtlanticSo, What Did I Miss?“How much can possibly happen when I’m on parental leave?” I said five months ago.https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/06/trump-second-term-first-months/683169/?gift=43H6YzEv1tnFbOn4MRsWYhniaX1uDThh4_CnCxomanY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share (Sorry, the top link may not give the gift access, but this one will)

Unless Sara lives in one of those school districts where Right-wing fundamentalist Christians are hijacking the science curriculum, I would have some hope that a high school biology course would dispel some of this confusion. I would also recommend Philip Whitfield's "From So Simple a Beginning" as a fine intro. Most libraries will have this, unless the book burners have got there already.

The statistical explanation appeals to my inner Ockham. The galaxies rotating opposite to us appear brighter, so they're their overrepresented in telescopic surveys. The BH conjecture is mind boggling - inherited angular momentum from a parent BH our verse lies inside of.

The soul is a metaphysical postulate, therefore science takes no stand on the matter. What can't be physically observed or measured is not accessible to the methods of science. That doesn't mean it can't be accessed in other ways, like meditation or a revelatory experience or some other sort of intuitive flash. But it's not going to be something proved or disproved - at least it seems unlikely that, say, one day a neurological procedure will be able to remove a small object that resembles a chickpea and is in fact a soul. (Though that notion is the basis for a funny movie with Paul Giamatti, "Cold Souls")

This article is about an SSA employee of 35 years being pushed out and then discovering her retirement package has been reduced, by the "big beautiful bill": NPRShe served the American people for 35 years. Now her reti...As part of Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill," the House voted to end a retirement supplement aimed at helping federal employees who retire before they're 62.Santa Maria, who voted for Trump in the 2024 election, says she'd hoped that his Department of Government Efficiency would bring technical expertise and upgrades to the Social Security Administration. "But what they're doing now is just eliminating the people and leaving the rest with the outdated computer system," she says. And now, with part of her retirement on the chopping block, she's even more disappointed...

The food chemistry of adding oils (even bland oils) is powerful, as it helps to dissolve and distribute fat-soluble compounds in the spice or herb which are the main sources of flavor. Fats spread over the taste buds and stay in contact with them longer, enough to fully transmit the volatiles which carry flavor. Learned early when making oatmeal for breakfast - adding cinnamon, and then a spoonful of cooking oil, the oil seemed to triple the intensity of the spice. (Up vote, esp for concluding your experiment with the ingestion of liver)

At best one could say that semaglutide and related formulae, insofar as they affect areas of your brain that process hunger and satiety, have a neurological effect. Which is not the same as psychoactive. Acetaminophen affects areas of the brain and nervous system but we don't consider it psychoactive. While it might mean my shoulders ache less after pruning the hedges, it is not meeting the definition of directly causing changes in mood, awareness, thoughts, or feelings. Coffee OTOH is psychoactive. Pretty much everyone not a devout Mormon or extremely isolated hunter-gatherer tribe member can describe the mental changes from caffeine.

Looks like Charon and Phi stepped up to resolve some of the evolution confusions. I just want to note that some species can originate from a split off and isolated population of another species. This is a kind of genetic drift called a founder effect. The founder effect can lead to the origin of new species when a small group of individuals colonizes a new habitat, leading to reduced genetic diversity and rapid evolutionary divergence. This divergence can lead to speciation - the new population becomes reproductively isolated from the original population. So in this way, @Sarae.the.wannabe.chemist you could have a new species in that geographically isolated area while the original species remained in its usual habitat. In fact, our knowledge of this goes back to Darwin, who discovered such a founder effect on the Galapagos Islands, where new species of finches arose from a mainland species.

LLMs use transformers in their architecture which is a type of NN called a recurrent NN. It's good for temporal relations and sequences of textual data. Pattern recognition like image or video analysis use CNN, convolutional NNs. CNNs are more "biological." Here's a basic look. (I want to read these, too, and brush up) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_architecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network

Not really up on UK strategies, over here in the disunited states...do you think there is some notion that a move to heat pumps, EV, etc will bring use back up? Also, could some overbuilt sites try "water batteries"? Store the excess, then release during heat waves or other spikes? Seems like I read about a couple spots in UK where they were pumping water up to a high lake during excess wind, then it was handy later released through hydro turbines.

From my brief time hovering on the edges of this field, my takeaway was that genuine AI required internal goal setting and recursive self-improvement (RSI, which is an AGI system that enhances its own capabilities and intelligence without human intervention, leading to greater intelligence in a RW setting). To develop, I would think it needs a sandbox that's more like a world and not just acres and acres of text. LLMs lack internal goal setting or anything like RSI and their sandbox is nothing but "stuff people wrote," which is pretty far from what an AGI needs. Seems like you would have to attach something to an LLM which would be unlike present specialized applications and which could somehow broadly develop internal goals and very creative ways to revise it's own software. Some folks think you can get there with autonomous agents which are driven by simple rules. I have some doubts. I think artificial neural networks, modeled on biological cognition, offer some hope, though I don't quite understand digital simulation of neuronal activity (which is both digital and analog). Digital simulation is driven by algorithms and data, not feelings or survival needs or social imperatives, so it's a real philosophic thicket as to what you really have there. For now, seems like you need a system that can take raw experiences and contextualize them in a broader "worldview," which would IMO mean some sense of pleasure and pain, some capacity for reflection on experiences which go well or not so well, some way to improvise when faced with novelty. And it would store not just data packages but also slippery sensations of missing something or lacking a pleasing outcome.

OT side comment: I love mustard. And I like wine flavoring. So Dijon mustard is basically a harmonic convergence. A close second is mustard plus horseradish, traditionally known as Dusseldorf German Mustard. Both horseradish and mustard are members of the Brassicaceae family, though different genera. (actually, various mustards are different genera, as well) Rapeseed is also a mustard plant (genus Brassica), and I have no difficulty understanding why its extracted oil is marketed as canola, rather than rapeseed oil. (the Canadians, leading producers of rape (those poor farmers!), came up with the canola moniker, Canadian Oil, Low Acid, to describe a more flavorful (i.e. less bitter and acidic) variety)