memfree

Let this be a reminder to all called to jury duty (grand or otherwise) that you do not have to convict.

Reid was arrested in July for allegedly resisting attempts to restrain her after she refused to back away from ICE officers who were conducting arrests outside the D.C. Jail. In the process, they said, an FBI agent received scrapes to the back of her hand.

and:

Reid’s attorneys, assistant federal public defenders Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, say she was arrested by officers who didn’t want to be filmed. Video evidence presented during a preliminary hearing captured an ICE officer telling Reid during her arrest, “You should have just stayed home and minded your business.”

Lady is trying to film. Legal. An agent gets scrapes while trying to stop her. Lady is charged with “an enhanced felony version of an assault charge that requires inflicting bodily injury on a federal officer and carries up to eight years in prison.”

Say NO.

Ah, the Fundamental attribution error

We didn’t learn bases until 4th or 5th grade, and then we did all kinds of calculations with them until we moved on to the next topic. Base 2 took too long. Base 8 reminded me of Tom Leher. Base 16 was cool cuz: computers! We didn’t have enough symbols for base 60, but I think we played with a few base 20+.

…get drafted to Viet Nam in 1968.

Toys are cooler, parenting competence and training has broadly improved, minecraft exists, and there is some really good childrens TV.

You’ve got a lot of good points, but I want to quibble about this one. I’m not an expert, but everything I’ve read about childhood development tells me toys like blocks, string, dirt/sand/water, and paper/pencils are the best toys. They are open-ended and drive critical thinking, exploration, and creativity. TV is the worst as it encourages passivity. Even when educational, TV encourages kids to sit and accept input rather than doing anything with that information. Yes, minecraft is akin to online blocks, and it does have some logic training, but it teaches in-game physics instead of letting toddlers discover real-world physics.

Mix of sad and angry. I see these broodmares popping out kids and I think of the movie Idiocracy because all of the more thoughtful people I know limited how many kids they had while the people having litters of kids all seem to be short-sighted selfish assholes. The thoughtful folks worry about saving college funds for the kids. The selfish ones don’t. They don’t have any plans, they are too busy making babies – and those kids are going to be predisposed to be the same way which will make matters worse for the handful of kids raised by thoughtful parents.

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood and maybe Gary Cooper in Beau Geste, but really I was smitten by that whole story there rather than one character. Both stories are about gallant men and nasty villains.

In high school, I switched to idolizing Kurt Vonnegut and thought maybe I should be a writer, but I don’t have much talent for it. I never lost the general sense I got from all three: one must stand up for the poor and helpless in a world where the powerful will treat them with cruelty.

As an adult, I understand that the movies are both flawed on that message in that Robin Hood turns out to be the very sort of noble doing the oppressing (but he’s one of the good ones, right? Right?) and all of Beau Geste is about excusing an upper class Lady’s crime and fighting natives who don’t ‘appreciate’ colonization. I still love Vonnegut as an author, but have some criticisms of him, too.

In addition to the articles on censorship, remember that the can media preemptively bias their content by only hiring those who demonstrate a shared point of view. This is done before any need for actively censoring jouirnalists – just hire the faithful rather than objective investigators.

Worry that being invisible did not make me invincible. Getting hit by a car or bullets or such would still kill me. I’d still make noise stepping on twigs and have a wake trying to swim a stream, so I’d have to keep being stealthy. Presumably, I’d still smell like a tiger and send prey fleeing. If I did catch prey, their blood would be visible on my claw and teeth, wouldn’t it? Would the chunks of flesh I eat stay visible as I gulp them down or would my invisibility mask them once they were inside me? If someone shot me as I mangled their their livestock, would my bleeding wound leave a blood spoor for hunters to follow?

All and all, I would try my best to be a silent hunter in unpopulated areas. Trying to move through city sidewalks would surely lead to my capture.

The split isn’t left/right (what the rest of the world would see as middle/extreme right), but money/workers, and I no longer see a fix. When Citizen’s United decreed that “money is speech” (it isn’t: money is power, and codifying ‘free speech’ was meant as a protection against power), the fix was to overturn that and go further to get money out of politics – but that didn’t happen.

We are in the process of losing everything that made the U.S. worthwhile. Other countries used to try to emulate the U.S. models for things like: public education, research and development, public works (roads, dams, etc.), economic model (and laws restricting it after it crashed), and lack of corruption, including laws to prevent and/or punish the latter. Now we are removing and de-funding all the stuff that made the U.S. attractive and successful. We’re working on becoming the next North Korea rather than the next, say, Sweden.

We seem to have lost all culture except for a love of money and spectacle. There’s no respect for education, Truth, Justice or the like. If an official does something questionable, they get to keep their job and the most their underlings can do about it is resign – and that doesn’t make things better. There ought to be an option where the official has to resign and the underlings who are doing honest work need not fear retribution. Instead, we reward those who can ‘spin’ the narrative or outright lie. The populace ought to be offended by those lies, but instead there is a large number of people who would rather be a good team member than demand honesty.

That’s where money comes in. You pay agents to start or reinforce several ideas, do data tracking to figure out which ones get high “engagement” scores, then campaign on that garbage rather than on anything of substance. Once you win the election, you don’t have to follow through on anything. Just give tax breaks to your backers.

Does it have a hint of lemon? NY cheesecake should have lemon or lemon zest (and cream or sour cream). Sample recipes: one, two, three, crazy four. Philadelphia cheesecake has neither – it is a very simple recipe promoted by Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

This pumpkin cheesecake recipe uses gingersnaps instead of graham crackers… it might change your mind about acceptable crusts, but it isn’t in the ‘plain cheesecake’ category because: pumpkin!

It is hard to be overly picky about bagels unless you live in Manhattan. Crossing over to Jersey City immediately drops the quality. Venturing futher is just asking for trouble. I will happily eat the things that pass for bagels in the rest of the U.S., but one trip to the big city set the mark so high that I don’t try to for perfection elsewhere. The lowest mark I’ve sampled was set in Montreal where I thought a onion bagel bought straight from the bakery would be be lovely… but instead was a crumbly, bready disaster. Obviously the Québécois have different expectations of bagels than do New Yorkers.

What type of cheesecake? NY (dense), Philadelphia (lighter), Japanese (hyper fluffy), or one of the Ricotta variations (possibly more authentic?)? There’s a bunch of others that are less common outside their native countries, but these styles are at several places within an hour’s drive, so I’m counting this list as the most common.

Yup. Buy dry beans and dry rice – none of that precooked stuff. Buy fresh potatoes tho. If you can afford it, I’d also get a bag of onions, maybe carrots, and some spices that do NOT contain salt. You can also buy salt, but it is way cheaper per-gram to get salt and other spices on their own. Note that brown rice has more vitamin content than white rice (thiamine deficiency), but most white rice is enriched to compensate.

The science folks document attacks that succeed and those where the prey escapes (possibly wounded, but still not a meal). Here’s a PDF on some hawk rates – it is just a few pages from a larger work. Excerpt:

Relatively high successrates of 89 and 82% have been documented for the fish-eating Osprey (Pundion haliuetus)in Europe (Brown and Amadon

1968. and North America (Ueoka and Koplin 1973). Success rates of 33- 65% have been reported for the insectivorous and rodent-eating American Kestrel (F. spurverius),depending upon season, prey type, and geography (Jenkins 1970, Sparrowe 1972, Rudolph 1982, Collopy and Koplin 1983). Various success rates have been reported for raptors that feed mostly upon mammals, but supplement their diets with birds and reptiles. Mader (1975) documented a rate of 16% for Harris’ Hawks (Purubuteo unicinc- tus). Wakeley (1978) reported that Ferruginous Hawks (Buteo regulis) were successful 17% of the time in Idaho. Orde and Harrell(l977) reported a successrate of 79% for Red-tailed Hawks (Buteojumuicensis) in South Dakota. Nesting Golden Eagles (Aquilu chrysuetos)in Idaho were suc- cessful on 20% of their capture attempts (Collopy 1983). Clark (1975) calculated a success rate of about 20% for the rodent-specializing Short- eared Owl (Asioflammeus).

Maybe souls reincarnate anywhere into anything.

Or maybe a soul only reincarnates into related beings. In the story of the The Goat Who Saved the Priest, the goat itself had been a priest in a past life. There was a relationship to its actions in past lives and the form it took. I’ve heard versions of that story that suggest the goat had been the very priest it ‘saves’ (because souls can reincarnate in the past or future?).

Perhaps if we had intergalactic flight and our actions impacted creatures on other planets, we’d reincarnate into those creatures. Then again, perhaps we already do.