Swagnarok

It's no secret that of all Western countries, the US has retained the highest level of religiosity in modern times. Today I figured out why. It has surprisingly little to do with Americans being inherently more receptive to religious messages, and more to do with the manner in which America changes religion.

In Europe, before Martin Luther, there were Catholic Churches. And then there was the Protestant Reformation. Or should I say, the Magisterial Reformation, because in practice the big Protestant sects merely replaced Catholicism as the state religion. With that came a high degree of uniformity. Lutheran churches looked alike, worshiped alike, prayed alike, and sermonized alike. There was no "religious marketplace", because these conditions made for a monopoly.

Since religion, outside of compulsory attendance, is an optional good that one might choose not to engage with, one might compare it to eating out. If the only option you have for eating out is one mediocre hamburger joint, odds are you'll cook for yourself more and eat out less, if at all. But if you're surrounded by tasty restaurants? Well, that's a different story.

Since the 19th century, religion in the US has been less of a monopoly and more like a marketplace. Does your town have a single church whose pastor bores you to tears? Well, one day a traveling Methodist tent preacher shows up in your area. His style of religion is different. His message hits home different. You happen to find it more compelling. So you have a conversion experience.

With time, of course, the range of options expanded dramatically. At least if you live in the Bible Belt, one can "church shop" with unprecedented ease. This fosters a very competitive environment between churches. Anyone can call themselves a pastor, which means anyone can try to one-up the neighboring church by offering a product that draws in the most people. If you're dull and nobody likes your church, you'll go belly up and somebody else will take your place.

America, in short, is a laboratory that produces excellent churches, or at least if we measure it by mass appeal. And it's not "just" conventional churches either. There are parachurch organizations; for example, religious radio or publishing houses which put out religious literature with lucrative sales in mind. A pastor named Rick Warren, taking a page from the self-help industry, wrote a book titled The Purpose Driven Life, which to date has sold more than 50 million copies.

The most competitive churches skew Evangelical (loosely speaking, "non-denominational"). That's because, not being tied to a well-defined church model, they are comparably freestyle and you see a lot more variation between them as opposed to, say, a random two Methodist churches.

In 1990, a Pizza Hut opened in the Soviet Union, and this was a big frigging deal within the country. Everyone wanted to eat there when it first opened. Decades of competition in the fast food industry produced one of the greatest American restaurant chains. When it arrived on the shores of a country where everyone was eating government-issued cans of borscht, slices of pizza sold like hot cakes.

By now I think you can guess where I'm going with this. American churches aren't limited to America; instead, they routinely try to proselytize overseas and plant churches in their own image in foreign countries. Assuming that local regimes don't curtail their freedom to operate (e.g. in Russia), American churches fine-tuned to efficiently draw crowds will brush up against longstanding local monopolies that've never had to earn their keep, or so to say. And it's just like taking candy from a baby.

Whereas the old Protestant churches struggled to penetrate the Catholic landscape of Latin America, about 31 percent of all Brazilians were Evangelical in 2020. One source projects that the number of Evangelicals will be nearly on par with the number of Catholics in 2032, and after that they may become the largest religious group in the country. Brazil, of course, is not the only Latin American state undergoing this demographic shift.

In the Philippines, Evangelicals went from 2.8% of the population in 2000 to 14% in 2017. In Ethiopia, an Oriental Orthodox country (the most historically insular of all Christian branches), nearly 23% of the population is P'ent'ay (lit. "Pentecostal", but now a catch-all term for Evangelicals).

In Europe, it was reported c. 2022 that a new church is planted in France every 10 days. Assuming the average congregation has 200 members, that corresponds to about 7,200 new converts every year. This pace has been ongoing since at least 2017, and presumably continues today.

What I'm describing is a seismic shift in global Christianity. It is evangelical-izing, which is a cultural export of the United States. Forget Coca-Cola and Hollywood; America is enough of a soft superpower that in another 20 years the world's largest religion will have comprehensively and irreversibly changed. The new church is less traditional, less doctrinally focused, more experiential, aesthetically modern, more media-driven, and more organizationally fragmented, with each being an island unto itself.

Israel, in prosecuting its war in Gaza, has relied on an AI system named "Lavender".

Lavender uses data on known Hamas affiliates to direct strikes on them. At its peak, the system identified 37,000 men as being such, though it was so overly broad as to include police officers and people involved in civil defense. It was eventually scaled back to entail a narrower set which only includes Hamas fighters, leaders, etc.

Imagine you're a low-ranking Hamas fighter. Lavender tells the Israeli air force where your home is, and they decide to drop a bomb on it. You have family members living with you; the system determines that no more than 10-15 people would be killed in this strike to kill you, so it approves the operation. Of course, if you were high-ranking, a much higher death toll could be justified. Ironically the opposite often turns out to be true, since imprecise but cheap "dumb bombs" are used on low-priority targets, whereas more expensive "smart bombs" are used to fry bigger fish. Imprecise bombs run a higher risk of collateral damage.

Hamas-controlled organizations in Gaza estimate that over 33,000 Gazans have been killed thus far. Hypothetically, 30,000 civilians could've been killed in the process of neutralizing 3,000 average Joes who are fighting for the group.

It's true, then, that Israel is killing the families of terrorists as part of its official policies.

It is over. The "big lie"propagated by Dems since the 2020 election, which is that Trump committed or attempted insurrection, has been unanimously debunked by the most authoritative court in the United States. From this point onward, if social media does not label/censor as misinformation any further claims to the contrary, then it'll prove the glaring hypocrisy of the oligarchs who rule us.

Wikipedia defines The Singularity as "a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseen consequences for human civilization." Discourse on the topic often cites Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a probable cause of The Singularity. In this short-ish post, I aim to demonstrate why The Singularity won't happen anytime soon.

1. Energy Constraints

There is, ultimately, a hard entropic limit to the number of operations a computer can perform per second for a given amount of energy input. And that upper limit assumes conditions which cannot be realized by a normal, everyday computer, such as being stuffed into a black hole or existing in a constant low-Kelvin temperature state.

At this time, computer usage consumes 1 percent, or slightly over 1 percent, of the world's electricity consumption. A single ChatGPT-4 query will use between 1/1000th and 1/100th of a kilowatt hour of electricity, and at this time AI is still in an early phase of consumption, with systems like ChatGPT still being perceived largely as a novelty. But imagine, if you would, a world where such heavy data-crunching applications are used on a day-to-day basis by the average person around the world. Imagine, if you would, a 24/7 arms race between criminals and state hackers who use AI to crack cryptographic digital security layers and their would-be targets who add more and more layers to protect their property. To brute force AES-256 would take enough power to supply 50 million American households for billion of years; even assuming resourceful programmers managed to find shortcuts that trimmed this time down drastically, hacking would still be a quite expensive affair. In real life the most efficient operation to mine one Bitcoin will expend 155,000 kilowatt hours; at its peak Bitcoin mining took up more than 7% of Kazakhstan's electricity usage, despite being a fairly rich country of almost 20,000,000 people.

In short, imagine a world with exponential growth in demand for computing intensity, while electricity supply is growing at a far slower rate. After all, it takes years to commission one gas-fired power plant and even longer to bypass the hurdles to build a nuclear plant. Wind and solar entail buying up large properties in certain locations, and have their own issues, such as scaling up battery capacity. Something will eventually have to give.

The average voter, of course, won't tolerate 60% of local power consumption being siphoned away from their homes and toward such enterprises. So the human factor will further restrict the combined processing power of all computers, which makes the unlimited growth of The Singularity impossible.

2. Water Constraints

Related to the above, computers guzzle water. A lot of water. Cooling is used to raise computing efficiency and keep physical components from frying. Every 5-50 ChatGPT queries will use half a liter of water, and one Bitcoin transaction uses 16,000 liters of water. Water supply is arguably harder to amp up than electricity, as groundwater is finite and a desalination plant would take years to build. And again, the average person wouldn't tolerate half their municipal water supply being diverted from their homes to giant computing plants.

3. Other Constraints

Imagine a future where AI can churn out useful inventions by aggregating patented schematics. Beyond-human-control technological progress is a big part of the whole "Singularity" concept. Assuming that world governments didn't crack down on this in the name of intellectual property rights, there are still problems. An invention that's never built is useless, and to do so entails building physical supply chains and infrastructure. 3D printers are limited to working with certain materials and can only produce a certain range of results. Assuming human owners of these enterprises, it would remain within human control. Assuming that governments recognized the property rights of AI, it still wouldn't be outside human control unless all the work was automated as well.

The rate of advancement here would be slowed by physical constraints. It takes so much time to build a factory and build/install the prerequisite equipment. It takes so much money as a startup, and needs to turn a profit that might not materialize. A factory needs to bring in supplies through vehicles that cannot move faster than roadway speed limits. And so on.

Turkey has ratified Sweden's NATO accession, leaving Hungary as the last holdout.

Should Sweden join the alliance, its control of the strategically important Gotland Island will give NATO control of the Baltic Sea, reversing the balance of power when it comes to a war in the Baltic States. Russia currently has "area denial" capabilities that would block NATO from reinforcing Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia by sea, giving them the upper hand. But should NATO gain the ability to bring in maritime reinforcements then even the least defensible region under their vast security umbrella would suddenly become a lot easier to defend.

The EU has a liberal agenda while the Orban administration has a conservative agenda. This, combined with charges of authoritarianism in Hungary, have led to a growing rift between the two sides, with the EU attempting punitive measures to influence Hungarian national policies. As a countermove, Hungary has sought to leverage its position as an EU and NATO member to veto certain actions by these organizations, such as a $50 billion dollar aid package to Ukraine by the former and Sweden's accession to the latter.

Orban has paid lip service to not being opposed to Sweden's accession, and has pledged to ratify at some point, but in practice the ongoing dispute could prove an obstacle. There's a good chance the situation won't be resolved until Hungary is either cowed into submission or appeased with concessions.

This is an introduction to Programmatic Civicism, which is my highest political ideology. It doesn't come up in my daily posts here when I'm in "Those dagnab liberals suck for X or Y reason" mode, but it's the highest political ideal that I would like to see pursued. It is both an ideal and a feasible possibility, because Programmatic Civicism describes a tangible method of arriving at that ideal.

At the foundation of Programmatic Civicism is the following principle: that in order to build a better society, one should make better people who together comprise that society. Depending on the role you see for government in making a better society, you might disagree that this is the exclusive means of doing so. But I think everyone, left or right, can agree that it would be a huge step in the right direction if realized. Thus, Programmatic Civicism is not inherently a left or right wing ideology. It could either belong to whatever camp a given adherent happens to fall into, or it could lie outside the left-right spectrum altogether.

But there lies the problem which it aims to solve: how do you realize the ideal you have in your head? Isn't that ideal most likely to remain a product of one's imagination and never become anything more?

In short, how do you bridge the gaping divide between theory and practice?

To answer this question, Programmatic Civicism has the following prescriptions:

1. Setting aside lofty questions of free will and individual responsibility, it accomplishes nothing to tell a man who's lapsed into poor behavioral and decision-making patterns "Shame on you, you b*stard!" and not offer him the means of getting better. Rehab isn't exclusively the domain of drug addicts but of criminals, underachievers, the undereducated, overeaters, the sedentary, people who harm their relationships with family, those with other negative personality traits, etc.

2. In a subversion of conventional wisdom, the hypocrite is a myth rather than a true villain.

It is always easier to give advice than to follow it yourself, and it's easier to be motivated to take hard action by someone else's compulsion than it is to motivate yourself. Rather than obstinately braying "HYPOCRITE! HYPOCRITE!" when someone tries to help you accomplish something that they haven't, the smart person would see this as a psychology hack which can be exploited. Instead of the masses listening passively to the instruction of a guru who has to pretend he's perfect (until some investigative journalists prove he isn't and the entire thing crumbles like a house of cards), two unmotivated people can "teach" one another to rise to the level of competency that they themselves would like to attain. The accountability group structure is where the most potential for improvement lies, and everyone in society ought to be plugged into such.

3. The accountability group structure needs to be designed well to produce good results. Were this not the case, anyone who attended regular AA meetings would be a well-adjusted, highly productive member of society (and we know they often aren't), since Alcoholics Anonymous has a sort of accountability group structure. A design, which I call a "program", should have many rules and protocols tailored to yield results. Below, I will list some design principles of a program that's in line with Programmatic Civicism:

3.1. Hard rehab

Metaphorically speaking, when neurons in your brain fire according to a certain habit, you "tread that path with a wheelbarrow" and "wear a groove" in the road, making it hard to turn left or right the next time. Which is to say that behavior, when repeated, reinforces itself as a habit. It took a great deal of time and repetition to arrive at the lifestyle a person is living now, so it will take a great deal of time and repetition to replace it with something healthier.

In drug rehab, the "gold standard" is 90 days, because this loosely corresponds to the amount of time needed to make or break a habit. With that much time, one can arrive at the ability to live every day without that to which they were accustomed.

3.2. Mythopoeia

What hard rehab does is establish a new "baseline" for one's behavior. But it doesn't shield one from temptations to relapse upon returning to society. For this, they need a reason to avoid doing so.

Self-improvement movements are known to utilize mythopoeia, which is a fancy word for myth-making. There's an entire Wikipedia article on the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, which thrived around the 1980s and 1990s. If you've watched enough Vice documentaries on YouTube, you may be familiar with the type: men are in a wilderness retreat with pseudo-Indian vibes, somebody beats on a drum, misquotes Carl Jung, and says something like "You've completed your hero's journey. Peter Pan has grown up from a boy into a proper man. Congratulations."

Basically, these programs used the power of suggestion to convince attendees "My life has been changed by the 48 hours I spent here", in the hopes that that belief would help the personal benefits the program aimed to impart stick. It wasn't different in principle from the proverbial 30 year old alcoholic felon who found Christ, turned his entire life around, and broke into the middle class with a wife and kids by age 45.

Of course, the self-improvement industry is rife with charlatans and perverse incentives, such as making fortunes by selling the temporary feeling of transformation and personal growth in lieu of its actual substance. Additionally 48 hours of indoctrination isn't enough time to make someone truly believe that the idea being suggested is true. But the point here is that a "rehab program" combined with believable and inspiring "myths" can give a graduate reason to stick with it afterwards.

The third and final step is the day-to-day accountability group. When done intensively, and when underpinned by the aforementioned two steps, the result can be an upward spiral for most people enrolled in said program. This would, just to be clear, be a program one is part of for life, though certain steps like rehab would be one-time only. It would occupy a great deal of one's time and energy and would rise to the level of a religious cult, though without a charismatic leader who can abuse and exploit the flock.

To tie it altogether, here is a specific example of how such a program would be organized:

You are invited to a 90-day wilderness retreat where you eat right, sleep right, live according to a schedule, exercise your body, exercise your mind, and have nothing to entertain you besides a larger-than-life message that seems to have reached you from a supernatural place of origin. Then you go home and are part of the group for life. It is leaderless and its members are governed by a pre-established set of rules. Everyone has an accountability partner, with whom they discuss things over the phone and in person, set plausible weekly, monthly, and yearly goals for life improvement, and are disciplined by (to the level of severity that one consents to) if they fail to meet those goals. Ideally, one would live with his accountability partner so that the two of them are constantly in touch. There's no need for a big commune; a group of two or three living together in an apartment is enough.

For most people, the first priority would be career. They'd aim to break into more economically productive jobs and make more money. Next would be things like being healthy, and then one's relationships with friends and family, then broader philanthropy, and finally miscellaneous personal issues or goals. The group would constitute a web of interpersonal connections through which people can get to know each other and find likeminded business partners. Motivated by an outpouring of friendship and generosity between men, there would be a sharing of advanced technical knowledge needed to build a 21st century economy, keep the US competitive with foreign powers like China, and grow GDP large enough to keep the national debt from swallowing us whole.

In short, a well-designed program that takes off and reaches this country's 300,000,000 citizens could basically solve our problems and save us from pending national collapse.

As for what precisely this "well-designed program" would be, it depends on who's founding such a group. The best way forward is for many different groups to be founded with many different approaches, in the hope that one of them actually takes off and transforms America. These groups should be volunteer-run and not money-making enterprises. Members should pay no dues to an organization, much less to a singular person. Greed is a cancer which has infested, tainted, and destroyed the whole reputation of the self-help industry, and it is a pitfall the Programmatic Civicist would do best to avoid if he wishes to succeed where all others before him have failed.

Anyway, this is it.

I'm not delusional enough to think that my average post here on DART, or previously on DDO, has been of any real value to the world. But in this forum thread, I think, has been put forward a truly novel idea that's never been strung together by anyone else in exactly this form. All I can ask you to do is read this and judge for yourself whether or not Programmatic Civicism has serious merit to it.

As of September 2023, the reported median home price in the US was $412,000.00. In the state with the least expensive housing, that number was $229,000,00. This is according to Forbes.

But to be conservative, let's say you're a prospective homeowner in his/her early to mid 30s who buys a $200,000.00 house on a 30-year mortgage. If you were to sign a contract two days ago, on December 21, 2023, you would be paying roughly 6.67 percent interest. Had you been unlucky enough to sign the contract in September, October, or November of this year, that number would be in excess of 7 percent.

For context, when Biden first took office that was a meager 2.77 percent, and the absolute highest it ever got under Trump was 4.94 percent. But anyway, 6.67 percent. The cheapest it's been in the last 6 months, so you buy.

What does 6.67 percent interest mean? It means that, just to keep the debt from growing, you'll need to have $13,340 that you can afford to part with, per year. Once you've coughed this much up, as opposed to spending it on, I don't know, healthcare for your children and other things that are definitely not important, the bank will expect you to make an additional payment. You know, to actually repay the mortgage itself. Which would be around $6,660 a year.

In other words, unless you're in a financial situation where you can part with $20,000 every single year, it is impossible to afford what's generally considered an affordable home in this economy.

Now, you might say, "Well they wouldn't be paying rent so it's fine". Let's examine a few more statistics for some added context. As of October the median American's savings account balance was $1,200.

In August the average national rent price was $1,372, or $16,464 a year.

The Biden Administration and Congressional Dems are mulling a proposal to do the once unthinkable: tax gains from investments in securities (e.g. stocks) that haven't been cashed out yet. For example, if I purchased $50,000 in Bitcoin and then later the value my holdings has risen to $100,000, then that $50,000 "gain" would be liable to said tax even if, hypothetically, the value of said holdings were to crash the day after I paid taxes on it.

How do you think this would be implemented? Do you think it's a good idea in principle? In practice?

This is a proposal for how the electoral system in the US may be amended, allowing for a breakup of the two-party system.

It is centered around this premise: that there should be an additional step between the ballot and swearing in of elected officials. A step akin to that which the President must already go through: the electoral count.

Scenario A: Say, for example, that the fictional U.S. state of Transylvania is trying to elect a Senator. This is a true purple state, where Dems and Republicans are in a neck-to-neck race. Republicans are united. Dems, however, are very unsatisfied with their incumbent candidate, a man with a corruption scandal under his belt and a track record for not voting consistently for "the cause". If they stay home on election day, or vote third party, then the Republican guy wins. And so, they suck it up and vote for a candidate that only 26 percent of the state's voting population is enthusiastic about. Even if he wins, it's dubious to what extent the people he represents won.

Scenario B: Same state, same Senate race. But that 48 percent of Dems who don't like the incumbent candidate for their party has another recourse: form their own party with their own favored candidate and vote for it.

What will this accomplish? Well, obviously they won't be able to win the election hands-down. But their minority share of the vote, instead of being wasted, now designates them electors. As for winning, neither can the incumbent, with almost half of "his" votes now in the hands of another party and its candidate. So now they need to decide: which one of the two candidates gets awarded all those votes? If the third party holds its ground and refuses to budge, it has a chance of eventually compelling his electors to switch sides. After all, if it's the candidate you don't want for the party that you want VERSUS 6 years of the seat being held by the party you don't want, then it's a compromise most people would be willing to make.

Thoughts?

I posit that:

1. The human mind isn't a monolithic entity. People are doubled minded, and this is probably underselling it. Oftentimes, the statement "I want this and don't want that" is misleading. People often act in ways that conflict with what they say they want.

2. Because of this, polling can't be considered a reliable indicator of what the public wants. If people's private actions seem to be informed by value sets contrary to the values which informed how they responded to a poll, then their collective actions may be thought of as an ongoing poll in itself.

3. This has implications for such debates as the legal status of pornography or marijuana, tax ethics, social justice, and climate change policy.

Discuss.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has recently warned members of Congress that Azerbaijan is on the cusp of launching an invasion of the last enclave of the historically embattled Armenian people. For historical context, the Armenians are a truly ancient race who once called all of Eastern Anatolia their homeland and settled as far as the Levant and the shores of the Mediterranean. But the passage of time has been less than kind to them. Today, all they have left is a tiny piece of real estate smaller than the state of Maryland.

Azerbaijan recently succeeded in the ethnic cleansing of some 120,000 Armenians from their homes in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. You'd think that would be enough for them. But the Azeris, cut from the same cloth as their more numerous Turkic cousins to the west, would like nothing better than to see the total subjugation and possible annihilation of the Christian Armenians. Buoyed by a higher population and awash in oil money, along with the final deterioration of Russia's role as a peacekeeper in the post-Soviet space, Azerbaijan has all the tools it needs to successfully invade.

Armenia is landlocked and it would be extremely difficult for even the United States to reinforce them military in the event that Azerbaijan attacks. But I am of the opinion that the US can and should deter an Azeri invasion, by way of lending them several nuclear weapons. It would be the most cost-effective way to guarantee peace in the Caucasus.

Acausal trade is a concept that was first(?) explored on an online community known as LessWrong. In a nutshell, you have two actors who can't communicate directly but do so by predicting the other's actions. In a nutshell it revisits the classic "prisoner's dilemma" and asks the question: what if both prisoners could anticipate the other's move?

The "Roko's Basilisk" thought experiment is internet-famous, though it arguably wasn't meant to be a serious idea so much as a demonstration of the principle of acausal trade. The future AI god can't communicate with you now, in its past. It can only threaten you by way of you anticipating its threat and responding to it.  The idea is still impractical for a number of reasons: (1). The vast majority of humans are unqualified to make any contribution to its future existence; (2). Its threat cannot be truly predicted but only speculated about, meaning this isn't true acausal communication, meaning the ultimatum cannot be issued, and it's immoral to enforce a threat made in the absence of true communication; and (3). the AI has no reason to enforce the threat after it has come into existence. Again, since acausal communication isn't happening, its decision not to enforce the threat can't be truly predicted.

Another application is the "multiverse trade" idea. Suppose that a runaway AI has taken over everything and subordinated every particle in the universe to its will. There is a multiverse but it cannot directly communicate with other realities. What it can do, however, is use its near-infinite predictive power to reconstruct what other universal AIs in other realities are like. They "communicate" by perfect prediction of each other's attributes.

They predict correctly that if they themselves do X, another AI will respond with Y, that another AI has predicted their response to its actions, and finally that the other AI knows that they know. If an AI is programmed to have a value set, then it may see utility in seeing that value set expanded to a parallel reality that lacks such. Different values may be mutually proliferated through acausal trade.

Hi,

So this is a concept that I've kind of been thinking about on and off for a while. In a nutshell, it's the ideas that "rules are rules for some people but not others".

First, what do I mean by rules? For the most part I don't mean actual laws. Not in developed countries where the law is applied uniformly, anyways. I mainly mean social conventions and the expected cause-and-effect from acting in manner X vs. from acting in manner Y.

So let's look at an example. "Don't tell offensive jokes or it could harm your reputation." Pretty straightforward, right? Even comedians aren't immune to this. Plenty of comedians have suffered because they crossed a line too far.

But suppose that you're highly competent and likable, you know what you're doing, you've calculated your words and delivery with great care, and perhaps you get a little bit lucky. Your joke brings the house down with laughter; your audience likes you more, not less, because of the metaphorical limb you stepped out onto. You are audacious.

But suppose that another comedian, not so talented, not so careful, not so likable, and perhaps not so lucky, makes the same or a similar joke and it flops. He gets booed by the crowd. Word spreads of the offensive thing he said. Depending on its nature, it could be career-ending. This man was not audacious but instead he had audacity.

Other examples abound: the player who solicits random women on the street and gets into one's pants within under an hour, vs the guy who tries to solicit random women on the street and ends up being arrested. The guy who said something risky during a job interview and improved the boss's impression of him, versus the guy who tried the same thing but came across as an antisocial weirdo.

Often it's hard to tell why one guy is successful and the other ends up sabotaging himself. Sometimes it boils down to sheer competency or positive virtue, or even something so mundane as privilege and better access to certain resources But what we can agree on is that the latter person should've followed normal rules and norms whereas the former person benefited from not doing so.

America is a relatively egalitarian society where everyone is encouraged to take bold risks in life. This is how the country hopes to achieve new heights of creativity, productivity, and accomplishment, be it in one's career or personal life. But for one reason or another, some people are more cut out for successfully doing so than others. The less cut out find themselves not protected by rules that used to protect their ancestors, or if their behavior inadvertently results in victims, those victims are not. It's a double-edged sword.

It has been announced that from September 23 to September 27, the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts will hold "referendums" on the question of whether to join Russia. Medvedev, in all of his bluster, said that once Russian territory, these would fall under Russia's nuclear umbrella and that Russia would use all means at its disposal to enforce its territorial integrity.

In other words...

One week from today, Russia's territorial integrity will start to come under question. Donetsk and Luhansk will be no legally different from Moscow (from the Russian government's POV, anyhow). And yet, it'll come under constant shelling from another country, which asserts control over a large percentage of it, and which will continue offensive operations to take more of it until the eventuality comes when Russia controls none of what it claims in the area.

No reasonable person thinks that Ukraine will be in the least bit deterred by Russia's plans, or that a single Ukrainian offensive will be stalled for even a microsecond by this non-consideration. Nor is it likely that this'll bring a halt to Western aid.

Once Russia invites this precedent on its homeland, it'll be no different from if any other part of Russia was suddenly attacked and invaded. And the consequence of said attack and invasion, broadcast for the entire world to see, will be "no consequence whatsoever".

This is the beginning of the end of Russia's status as a sovereign nation. And history will hold Putin 100% responsible.

In a stunning reversal of fortunes, Ukraine has successfully defied predictions of a permanent stalemate and advanced on the northeastern front, recapturing large swaths of territory and forcing a chaotic Russian retreat from the area which shows no signs of having stopped yet.

Ukraine has liberated the strategic railway hub of Kupiansk and the stronghold of Izyum, with signs that they could soon retake Svatove and Lysychansk. It's worth noting that Lysychansk was the last major conquest of Russia's "second phase" offensive earlier this year, and Lysychansk is very close to Sieverodonetsk. If Ukraine retakes both, it'll be a signal that said offensive achieved nothing.

While at this point much of the above remains speculation, what we've seen is nonetheless a good sign that Western military aid to Ukraine is paying off. And it's a sign that we ought to give more so that they have a fighting chance of finishing the job.

On August 15, the series finale of Better Call Saul aired. Between Breaking Bad, the 2019 movie El Camino, and this, the Breaking Bad franchise has finally concluded after a legendary 14 year run.

Press F to pay respects.

This is a pretty crazy idea, but one that's been floating around in academia and pop culture since the 1970s:

That until c. the late Bronze Age, humans were generally incapable of complete self-awareness. Instead, one part of the brain ("independent" of a person's core consciousness) signaled information to the rest (constituting a person's core consciousness), and people didn't understand this "voice" as originating from themselves but rather believed it to be an external voice.

It was analogous to modern-day schizophrenia and people thought they were communicating with the divine. This was not due to anatomical differences from modern humans but instead it was a cultural phenomenon. Or, that is, when civilization attained a certain level of sophisticated thought via the development of language and so forth, it altered the way that people perceived their own consciousness.

Thoughts?

Ukrainian defenders have evacuated their last major positions in Lysychansk, ceding pretty much all of Luhansk Oblast to Russian aggressors.

Going into the war, Putin had the stated aim of securing the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk from Ukraine; with today's development, he is substantially closer to being able to announce that Russia has accomplished this. Whatever its tangible impact on the situation on the ground, it is nonetheless a huge symbolic victory for the Kremlin.

It's of some consolation that, from the start of its Donbass Offensive around mid-April, Russia took about 2 and a half months to get to this day. Their gains have been slow and it has always meant giving up men and resources in exchange. However, the Russian army has successfully defied countless predictions of imminent collapse. There's no telling what straw will be the one to break the camel's back, or if that day will indeed come before Kyiv is made to capitulate.

This is a question for English majors.

Take the following sentence:

"Our beings flared with passion, bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole."

Our beings flared with passion is the independent clause. In contrast, bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole is the dependent clause. There is no conjunction here so I believe that's irrelevant to the question.

The book that I'm using as reference hasn't offered much clarity as to when commas should be used. So I looked online, where I found that a comma should link the two if the dependent clause comes first but not if it comes afterward.

This would suggest that the comma in the aforementioned passage is inappropriate. However:

"Our beings flared with passion bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole."

My gut tells me that there should be a comma here.

While it's true that, for the purposes of most people 99% of the time, it doesn't matter if your writing abides to the rules so strictly or not, I would like a precise answer to this question if possible.

In its basest form, freedom of speech is the right to attempt to communicate irrespective of the content of that speech. In practice, this is a tricky concept for sure. One does not have the right to flash one's genitals at a bunch of children. Nor to dox somebody online or credibly threaten to murder them. But for the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that we generally agree on a few exceptions to free speech and move on.

In American law, there likewise seems to be a link between speech and property, with a higher level of expression allowed on one's own property and a lower level on somebody else's.

^This is where recent controversy has arisen. Twitter, Facebook, etc. are "private property". This itself is an iffy term, given that all of these are publicly traded companies, but whatever. Any use of these services is interpreted as being "on their property".

Generally speaking, users aligned with right or right-leaning politics stand a greater risk of being banned or otherwise censored for their political speech, and for speech unrelated to politics after something political has been uttered. The traditionally pro-corporation party has paradoxically taken to complain about this, while the traditionally anti-corporation party has gleefully denied any problem and stood with the social media giants, citing the fact that they are, again, "private property".

There are two separate ways to resolve this. Though I skew right, having been on the receiving end of this I would in good faith support and strive to protect the same rights I'm about to espouse for all Americans.

Take the small town of Greenville, Green State. The town has a rich history of public discourse in town squares, libraries, etc. However, as if a strange fairy cast a strange spell over the whole town, now people meet at the local Walmart to discuss matters of public importance.

Suppose that the town has two political factions: the Populares and the Optimates. Walmart has sided with the Optimates and banned any political activity by the Populares from their property.

Suppose that, as another condition of the fairy's spell, almost no one has interest in doing or receiving anything political outside of Walmart. The Populares used to distribute their magazine on city streets. Today, their sidewalk distributors are rendered magically invisible to all but a few elderly citizens who've always taken an interest in sidewalk magazines. They can try knocking on people's homes, but this method is, for a number of reasons, dramatically less effective than what used to happen.

The Optimates, on the other hand, are free to distribute their magazine at Walmart. People notice the magazines and many will take a copy home.

In real life, of course, there is no such thing as fairies. Rather, the existence of social media platforms has by nature made communication by traditional alternatives, namely magazines, newspapers, local gatherings, or even cable news, much less effective. By virtue of driving/drawing people away from these outlets, a manner of deprivation happens unless those who would communicate by these outlets have access to wherever the public has since been driven/drawn. Therefore, it is neither freedom of speech nor of property for these giants to deny access to some but not others on political grounds. Rather, it is the active suppression by them of another's speech, even if by admittedly elaborate means.

This raises another issue: not merely the ability to communicate but access to a reasonable platform for it where that speech can be heard. In the past, that was by way of mouth or by writing. But today more advanced platforms exist, and by the fact that speech today necessarily competes against other people's speech (in a variety of contexts, not merely political), unequal access to advanced platforms is a legitimate issue. Next, we'll discuss an ideal framework for speech and means of that speech being heard, AKA its "amplification".

What I'm arguing is this: that, generally speaking, speech ought to be separated from unnatural amplification or diminution.

And what is speech's "natural" merit? It is that which it would have stripped of resources that the average person lacks. For example, if the content which you provide to some segment of the public has proven appealing to them, you might naturally build an audience. Your speech is amplified by nothing but its merit. Or if, for example, you're a celebrity and people naturally want to hear what a celebrity has to say. Likewise, if you're a boor and very few people find you interesting, then your speech will by its own merit be ignored.

Speech can presently be amplified with money.  For example, suppose that the next $200 million Pixar production proves a smash hit. Its producer includes a certain message that in today's climate is considered political, and many young people take that message to heart because of the characters in the awesome movie who enunciated it.

Were that same producer merely to tweet about his political values, millions of children would not be influenced by it. Nor would they if, say, he made a movie on a budget of $70,000 dollars that was seen by only a few people because it wasn't blockbuster quality. Which is to say that money amplified his speech in plainly unnatural ways.

Speech can also be amplified unnaturally through the uneven use of algorithms. For example, a tweet that by its own merit wouldn't reach very many people does because the algorithm for that given website is tweaked.

Additionally, what I'm saying is inversely true as well. Or that is, speech can be unnaturally diminished. For example, a producer with different political values who only has the budget for a $70,000 dollar movie cannot convey his ideas remotely as effective as the other producer. Or take an online commenter who's shadowbanned and his content is not seen by anyone, even though some or many people would see it were the given digital infrastructure and its algorithms applied normally.

Now, this is an ideal. But it has obvious exceptions. For example, political candidates must campaign and spend money campaigning. Were they limited to spending no more money on the endeavor than the average Joe has in his pocket, our electoral system would quickly become unworkable. And from 2016, it's clear also that the presidential candidate who spends the most money won't necessarily win. For practical reasons, elected officials or those running for elected office would have to be some kind of exception. However, this could be a rule of thumb for civic discourse among ordinary people, and for speech that might be considered corporate or connected to big money that's not immediately associated with elections or a political party.

Thoughts? Critiques?

This is a total crackpot theory but hear me out guys.

I was born in 1996 and obviously cannot have had experiences predating my birth. What was normative behavior so recently as 1980 is beyond me except so far as depicted in records. Those records tend to be either fictional or do not recount the nitty-gritty mundane-isms of American cultural norms. Therefore, short of asking an older person who was there (which would be an awkward conversation to say the least), I have no way of confirming or debunking this.

But anyways:

In the past, male-on-male interactions often took on a flavor that today would be interpreted as homosexual, homoerotic, etc., though in fact the common people of these times generally didn't think much about the subject if at all.

In the 19th century, strange men might rent a room together for the night and sleep in the same bed. Written correspondences between close male friends might read today as if between lovers. As late as the mid-20th century at least, young men might share a space completely nude in certain sports-related contexts. There were no cultural taboos against such things, whereas the men of 2022 are reportedly careful to avoid giving off "gay interest" signals through their body language and eye contact.

Compared with today, the not-so-distant past was an Eden of intimate male bonding that carried none of the connotations it does today. This was parcel and package to a wider condition where social cohesion between men was greater, the near-ideal state of affairs whose passing was lamented by Robert Putnam. This "civic friendship" enabled broad interest in cooperation and sharing of skills and passions toward a diverse array of overwhelmingly positive ends.

This age did pass, and for many reasons. But it also coincided with the rise of the LGBTQ movement. Suppose that, by introducing a dynamic of homosexual possibility to interactions between American men, the coastal elites shattered group cohesion in areas where emotional/social intelligence was lower. Getting very close to somebody of the same sex without making them feel threatened and scaring them off, especially in the post-adolescent phases of life where making new friends was generally harder for men already, took a certain nuance that with a deficit of said intelligence might prove more challenging.

As history is decided by the best organized factions, this was one trick which helped the old bases of power keep their edge beyond what was otherwise natural. To be clear, I am by no means blaming everything on that one thing. That would be silly. But perhaps it was a factor.

In September of 2014, Putin boasted that if he wanted to, he could take Kyiv in 2 weeks.

As of tomorrow, thanks to February being the shortest month and 2022 not being a leap year, it'll have been 1 month since the Russian invasion began, with an early offensive against the capital (located close to the Belarusian border) having providentially stalled after a short time.

I'm no military strategist. However, ideas are arguably as powerful as bullets. Now, Zelensky could decide to capitulate tomorrow. But assuming this doesn't happen, and depending on how long the Ukrainian army can keep dragging this out, this is a timetable spelling out some of the implications of a long war:

March 31: The Ukrainian army and government will remain yet unsubdued at the end of the same length (35 days) that it took Nazi Germany to seize Poland, despite 80 years of technological and warfighting doctrine advancements.

Granted, the Nazis actually found Poland to be a difficult foe and they might not have won had the Soviets not invaded from the east at the same time, but popular culture imagines Poland to have been a pushover with outdated cavalry charges against German tanks. As such, expect negative comparisons between the Nazi and Russian war machines to flood the internet beginning around this time.

April 7: The Ukrainian government and army will remain yet unsubdued at the end of the same length of time (42 days) that it took the US to conquer Iraq in 2003.

On the eve of Russia's invasion, one of the biggest risks was that a 21st century "lightning war" against Europe's poorest and most dysfunctional country would serve to promote the Russian military as hyper-competent, and indeed, somehow superior to the "decadent" American forces that recently lost a 20-year counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

If Kyiv holds out until and ideally past April 7, that notion will be much easier to dispel. And with that, the risk that Russia might grow drunk in its newfound sense of invincibility and feel emboldened to soon attack another neighboring state will also be minimized. Whether Ukraine lasts another 2 weeks could help decide the future of Europe.

April 24: The observance of Easter, as the date is calculated in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

If the global orthodox community outside of Russia takes the opportunity to condemn the ongoing war and formally take a stand with Ukraine, it'll be a major challenge to Moscow's credentials as the head of Orthodoxy and serve to ecumenically isolate Patriarch Kirill, hopefully putting serious pressure on Kirill to rehabilitate his image by turning against the war.

Given that more than 3.5 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad, including in majority-Orthodox countries like Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and even Serbia, and given that this number will certainly rise or even double in the next month, the presence of these sympathetic refugees who've lost everything because of Russia could sway these countries' Orthodox churches to finally issue statements condemning Russian invasion.

At Easter, expect high profile statements against Moscow's war by dissenting priests inside the Russian Orthodox Church as well.

April 29: On March 12, it was reported that Russian military equipment losses amounted to more $5 billion dollars. Assuming that rate of loss can be sustained, then by April 29, or Day 64, that figure will have risen to $20 billion dollars. Of course, this doesn't count the combined daily operational costs of 64 days of war, which by this time will likely stand around $30 billion dollars.

In comparison, Russia's annual military budget is around $70 billion dollars.

May 9: The celebration of Victory Day in Russia and other post-Soviet countries.

Putin likely hopes to end the war before this date, so that on it he can celebrate the fresh "de-nazification" of Ukraine that's supposedly analogous to the de-Nazification of Eastern and Central Europe at the end of WWII 77 years ago. This opportunity will be missed.

Outside of Russia, Victory Day implicitly celebrates the role of Russian leadership in defeating German aggression. However, the ongoing 2 and a half month war of aggression against Ukraine by Russia will cause many to question why they're still celebrating this holiday.

If some countries remove the holiday's official status afterward, or do so before May 9 so that it's not observed in 2022, this'll mark a visible unraveling of the very ideal of a post-Soviet sphere.

And so, in summary, a war lasting "just" 2 and a half months longer could cost Russia:

-More than the equivalent of $50 billion dollars in military costs alone

-Its cultural influence as head of the historic bloc that saved Europe from Nazism

-Its religious influence as current head of Eastern Orthodoxy

-Its long-held reputation as a military power that credibly rivals the United States

If you type in "Iraq" on Google right now, you'll find reports of an assassination attempt against the country's Prime Minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. The attack was perpetrated by the Iran-backed militias using a bomb attached to a drone that targeted his home in the capital.

It's clear that the militias, at one time apparent national heroes who led the campaign to retake northern Iraq from ISIS a couple of years ago, have since emerged as the greatest threat to Iraqi national security. Having failed in the 2021 parliamentary elections, they've now resorted to violence in the name of installing a foreign country as master over Iraqis.

What do you think the short and long term consequences of this development will be? What action, if any, do you think the Biden Administration should take in response?

First thing to note: a vaccine for SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) is still (probably) quite a long way off from being ready for commercial use. This is the only true "silver bullet" in the fight against the coronavirus. But in the meantime, the world might've stumbled upon something:

It's hit the news cycle that South Korea and some other countries are using a drug known as chloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, to treat the coronavirus in infected patients, with encouraging reports.

While many in the medical community are still skeptical (and for good reason), it has been effective in primate studies as a treatment against the original SARS, which of course is a related virus.

On the US scene, President Trump was immediately enthusiastic about the drug's potential in combating a crisis which has effectively paralyzed the entire US economy. But at this current stage of the news cycle maybe half of sources are ridiculing him for this; whether this will change later on, or whether this touted treatment might eventually be discredited, remains to be seen.

It appears that the treatment may be particularly risky in patients with certain commonplace conditions, such as diabetes, and those with kidney disease. It might also not be the best possible option for treatment. It is yet unknown what constitutes a safe dosage that will still be effective against the virus. And finally, how the economics and logistics of mass-supplying this drug to tens of thousands of patients across the country fare I have no idea. Though Trump has invoked the Defense Production Act (authorizing large-scale manufacturing for a purpose that the government deems necessary), It seems the federal government is still dragging its feet on actually responding to the outbreak on American soil.

The first piece of good news is that chloroquine has been around since World War II, meaning it is not a patented drug. There should be no legal obstacles to mass producing and distributing it.

In the meanwhile, the Trump administration has fast tracked "compassionate use" of this drug for very ill coronavirus patients, and in coming weeks may evolve into a systematic remedy.

The second piece of good news is that because this coronavirus is novel, it should demonstrate a novel reaction to antiviral treatment.

For example, penicillin quickly rendered many deadly diseases curable, but eventually new strains developed that were resistant to it and to similarly common drugs. Because SARS CoV-2 has only existed in humans for maybe 4 to 5 months, we should have many years, or even decades, of potent use of a treatment that shows itself initially effective, meaning streamlined and routine chloroquine therapy for the coronavirus should not risk viral resistance in the foreseeable short term.

The bad news is that this, assuming it works, will only reduce the fatality rate in those infected, not halt the spread of the virus. Millions might still end up infected, in which there might just not be enough treatment to go around. There is a huge shortage of testing equipment for new cases and by the time it's readied and delivered, demand will likely have outpaced the fresh supply.

Okay. So...

Donald Trump has done something really, really stupid:

He has made, and then has doubled down on repeatedly, statements which have little in way of potential payoff to him and his 2020 campaign but which, on the other hand, could backfire tremendously.

He chose to downplay COVID-19, better known as the coronavirus.

The instinct behind this is obvious: Thus far, the left has tried to paint everything about his time in office as being doom and gloom, so it's no wonder he interpreted their coverage of the coronavirus outbreak from this same angle.

To be fair, there is another practical reason for this: to prevent a stock market panic. But depending on how bad it gets that's eventually gonna happen either way, no matter what he says. If anything, a measured response of "We acknowledge the problem but we'll deal with it strongly" would be far more reassuring (to ordinary people, and certainly also to day traders) than a leader who metaphorically buries his head in the sand.

Of course, the Dems are gonna hammer him on that, and rightfully so. I'm sure some of them already have. But here's the thing: the full consequences of this are not yet clear. We've now gotten the first confirmed coronavirus death in the US, but we're nowhere near the level of mass pandemic just yet. It's still a relatively marginal issue, so far as the 2020 election goes. Railing about "Trump corruption" and climate change is still far more potent a message to their base than focusing on the coronavirus.

But it could get worse. A lot worse. This presents a window of opportunity, between the time of posting and when this finally happens: an opportunity for one of the lagging Democratic candidates.

If said person, preferably somebody who enjoys rapport with the medical profession, turns their campaign around right now and makes the coronavirus their hot button issue, early, and therefore "corners the market" on this talking point while demand for such is still low, then it *could* pay off big time in coming weeks. Maybe not, but it could.

If, as one prediction have put it, 40-70% of all people on earth will catch the coronavirus within the next year, and if the death rate amounts to 1 out of 30 infected, somewhere in the area of 4 to 7 MILLION Americans could die from this thing, easily the biggest national catastrophe since 9/11.

If you'll recall George W. Bush was a dull, maybe not too bright Republican governor, who probably got the nomination because daddy was president, and who in 2000 still lost the popular vote in spite of the 8 year rule, a much more right-leaning America and press compared to today, and a demographic map that was not as skewed by illegal immigration as it is now.

Come a certain terrorist attack and then the year 2004, he won the popular vote by 3 million.

At this point the common assumption has become that this is Bernie's game to lose. He's emerged as the obvious front-runner, and by a large margin. The only person he has to worry about is Trump. You know what that means? The rest of those guys have nothing to lose. They can either drop out now, continue to putter along until they run out of money, or make a wager on death.

It's official. As of tonight the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is no longer a member state of the European Union. It took 3 1/2 years after the initial referendum to get here, but now Parliament can say they actually followed through. Some Brits are celebrating, others are mourning. What nobody can deny is that the island nation's future trajectory is more unclear now than it has been in a long time.

The economy of the 2020s is one that will continue and escalate the trends of the past.

While the average worker remains more or less an average guy, hiring prerequisites have grown exponentially. Gone are the days where anyone from virtually any background can simply be trained on-site and then start making a livable salary after a month or two. Requirements for prior work experience, certification, high educational attainment, and unrealistic anecdotes of "I have saved the company money by suggesting and implementing innovative solutions to problems" have outpaced the ability or willingness of many, if not most, people to meet these.

In the same vein, people who entered the workforce during a time when barriers to entry were far lower are now decades into their illustrious careers, often having ascended to affluent management positions, and who are not keen on retiring in sufficient numbers to give space to younger people (and here by "younger people" I mean the middle aged instead of the elderly; people under 30 would still have no chance in this event).

The ball is definitely in the park of the employers. They can collectively impose whatever conditions they want and it's up to the rest of us to suffer because of their unreasonableness. In addition, because of inflation and the drastic rise in home prices over time, actually managing to meet these progressively more insane hurdles will not put you "ahead" of your forebears socioeconomically. Rather, the best you can hope for is that your "higher salary" does, adjusted for inflation, match what they made. The price of this, in many cases, is tens of thousands of dollars in student debt that your forebears knew nothing of.

These are the lucky few; there are also millions of young people with a relatively passive attitude towards life who have no business being in college but their parents talked them into it because "hey why not if you have any degree it'll magically be a meal ticket for you". These people are perhaps the most screwed of all. Even if they graduate without student debt they pretty much wasted several years of their lives and are in no better shape when it's time to whip out the resume and apply for work somewhere.

The reasons for this are simple: capital and organizational efficiency can accumulate over time, but any new person being born will not inherit the knowledge of his/her forebears and so will start out life as a "blank slate" no wiser than the people who came before him/her, having zero managerial background or relevant technical expertise to begin with. As systems increase in complexity over time, humans are not well-adapted to adjust to this. In addition, there is little infrastructure in place to help them do so effectively.

This is why capitalism has failed in contemporary America: average people simply can't keep up with these institutions and as a result they are growing more and more disempowered over time.

This is where the conservative and the liberal diverge.

The liberal says remake the system. A conservative would say make better people who are more able to compete. I'd say both are needed to some degree or another. A country whose people are actually strong enough to keep up would certainly be blessed with prosperity and power as compared to the rest of the world. But this probably couldn't be sustained indefinitely.

This is the day Democrats everywhere have been waiting for since the conclusion of the 2016 Election. The House of Representatives is scheduled to hold a vote today on the two Articles of Impeachment that were authorized. This will be the first vote of its kind since the impeachment of President William "Bill" Clinton in December 1998. Had Democrats waited one more day, Trump's impeachment would've been held on the 21st anniversary of the famous/infamous GOP vote against the 42nd President, which would make their revenge just a tad more poetic.

House Republicans started the day off by holding a vote to stop impeachment proceedings. The measure was defeated 226-188, a sign that the President's impeachment is virtually guaranteed.

Before the vote is to be held, six hours of final debate have been scheduled, beginning at 9 AM local time. The big vote is expected for "later this evening" according to USAToday.

Attorney General William Bar did, on November 15, give an address at a convention of the Federalist Society, or, more particularly, to a gathering of conservative lawyers under the banner of this organization.

In his address, he argued that the independence of the executive branch has come under unprecedented attack from the other two branches during the Trump era, pointing to record-breaking use of injunctions by miscellaneous lower courts to block initiatives of the current administration on a nationwide level, along with other grievances.

The full speech can be read here:

CNN just published a certain article. While the article's content is nuanced enough, it has a provocative headline, and if the reader doesn't bother to click on the article (opting instead to only read the headline) it'll leave exactly the impression that the media is hoping for.

It describes a bipartisan bill, signed by Trump, which released some inmates from prison. Criminal justice reform, to be clear, is a policy fixation of Democrats. Republicans and Trump simply went along with it this time.

Anyways, one such guy released is now accused of murder. The article headline read something to the effect of "Prisoner released by Trump reform accused of murder".

The reason why they'd frame it this way is obvious: anything that pushes the long-running narrative of the Trump administration being riddled with incompetency and failure they will say gladly. Even if it's mainly the Democrats' fault. As is the case here.

(I put it here because I didn't want to disturb the people playing mafia.)

Who else is playing this right now?

In a tweet dated back to, strangely enough, December of last year, the Church of Sweden tweeted that:

 "Jesus of Nazareth has now appointed one of his successors, Greta Thunberg."

Based on their follow-up tweet in response to the controversy that ensued, in which they apologized for hurt feelings but also declared that "Our meaning has been to talk about Jesus Christ in our own way", it would appear that they weren't kidding.

This kid, who has championed a social cause unrelated to religion and who has made little in way of personal sacrifice pursuant to such, is evidently now regarded as a saint at least by the Church of Sweden and a new messiah superseding Jesus's ministry at most.

...Which is why European Christianity is a joke. "We're behind you and the good work you're doing" is one thing. This is just, ugh.

Okay, so:

Right outside where I work there's a dumpster. We throw out trash bins with food waste, and the lids are too large and heavy to "leave them closed and open them just when you're throwing something away". So they're pretty much open all day long.

To summarize: the dumpster is open and has food in it. So it's attractive to little furry mammals, if you know by now what I'm getting at.

Sometimes I go out there and spot the raccoons in the dumpster. A family of them, I think. Most of the time they're absent, especially when it starts to fill up. I'm not exactly sure where they go during this time but there's a small woods right next to the restaurant.

This evening I went out there to throw a bag out, and there it was.

Right. In. Front. Of. My. Face.

I turned around and ran away, but before I turned I think I saw it jump. So I'm not entirely sure what happened.

I am fully aware, of course, of the risk of contracting rabies, the only disease known to man that has a 100℅ fatality rate. So as fascinated as I am by the raccoons I always try to keep a safe distance.

But tonight I'm not 100℅ sure what happened. I probably wasn't bitten, as I think I would've felt it. Surely a raccoon's jaw strength is nothing to dismiss entirely. But in any case if I should keel over and die from rabies in the next few days, weeks or months that is why. It happened today, September 24, 2019.

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Attack on Titan Chapter 121 made a startling revelation: that Eren, using pathways combined with the power of the Attack Titan, altered the past and manipulated his father into murdering the royal family though originally Grisha refused to kill children.

So what would've happened in the original timeline? The one in which Grisha walked out of the Reiss chapel emptyhanded? Just for fun here's some speculation:

The following five or so years would proceed more or less the same way in both timelines. The "bubble city" of Shinganshina + the outermost wall would collapse. Eren, Mikasa, and Armin would escape to behind the middle wall. Grisha would still be alive. He would take in Eren and Mikasa, along with Armin after the death of his grandfather.

Because of his personality, Eren would refuse to see reason and join the military. In spite of Grisha's continued survival there's some chance his two young comrades would join him.

Near their graduation Reiner and pals, also cadets in training, would attack Trost.

Eren would get eaten early into the battle, and this time he would stay dead. Mikasa also nearly died in the timeline we know if not for titan Eren's intervention, so she'd probably end up dead too, though she resolved to keep on fighting and so might have made it out.

As they had no qualms about carrying out their mission thus far, Reiner Bertolt and Annie would've most likely proceeded to breach the middle wall.

At this point Paradis's fate would be sealed. Even if the innermost wall wasn't attacked, the survivors holed up behind there would be faced with such a dire food shortage that everyone would be dead in two or three years at best.

If I'm not mistaken, the royal family lived deep in the interior. If so, they'd be among the last killed. But if, say, they were among the first to die as Frieda most likely planned, then the people behind the remaining two walls might've survived as there'd be no pressing need for Marley to continue their attack. The "one surviving human" behind the outermost wall would be whatever titan ate Frieda. Even if that person were then eaten, another titan would become "it". If Marley found whoever was it, then they could bring that person back with them as a prisoner.

Assuming this person wasn't Dinah, Marley would have no way to use this person to kill the remaining Paradisians. However, a sizable chunk of the island would be cleared of possible military resistance, and drilling activities could commence.

However, this is where Zeke, possessing royal blood, would make his move. The end result would be the sterilization of all Eldians, an outcome more or less favorable to Marley since they'd have sufficient time to transition to a post-titan military apparatus before the last of their warrior candidates died of old age.

HOWEVER, what if Grisha had passed on his attack titan power to Eren as in the timeline we know?

In that case, the Warriors' assault on Trost would've failed as before, assuming the "it" person was never found by Marley. Everything would proceed the same until the end of Season 2 as per the anime, when Eren made physical contact with titan Dinah. At this point he, Mikasa, and probably Armin would've been eaten at long last, though Reiner and Bertholt would probably be unaware of this fact (initially, at least). Dinah would end up in Paradis's hands, and she'd be obliged either to continue the fight or pass on the attack titan to someone who was so willing (say, Erwin), assuming they all made it back alive from that expedition to begin with.

And that's all I got.

The difference between the normie Yahoo article about the guy and discussions about his background on the deep web is pretty hilarious. Having recently gone on a TCAP watching binge, the similarities between him and the kinds of guys who appeared on that show are kind of unnerving. He apparently wanted to insert tampons into preteen girls, evidenced by snapshots of text conversations he's had, including one rather inappropriate convo with a 14 year old girl. In fact, much of the armchair investigating into him has dated back to at least 2018, long before this present controversy. But there's no mention of any of that in the article. This guy is pretty much just painted as a warrior for social justice (though the article is more fair than I would've expected), whereas in fact even some prominent transgender YouTube personalities have openly and unreservedly disavowed him for his seedy past.

Discuss.

I distinctly remember the first part of the song from when I was a kid, so I managed to find this song online and the more I listen to it the more familiar it sounds. Without further ado:

Everyone in the comments mentioned how, erm, rape-y the lyrics might be construed as. What do you think? Good song or inappropriate?

To understand what I'm talking about, take the example of YouTube.

Let's say that you're a content creator. You want lots of people to view your content, and you want to be monetarily compensated for a large number of views in accordance with some kind of algorithm.

Any video streaming service can in theory provide you with the latter thing. HOWEVER, YouTube is where most people turn for user-generated videos to watch, because the vast majority of stuff is already on YouTube. So what do you do? You post it on YouTube, because that's the most rational decision for you. Maybe you could post it on some other website instead, so as to help them out, but that doesn't do you much good. There's little economic reason for you to post your content other than on YouTube, so you don't.

What was YouTube's advantage here? The size that it's already accumulated. It hit a critical mass long ago that virtually assured further growth. For that reason I predict that YouTube will continue to be a widely used service even into the 2030s decade, because it's basically a digital city.

But anyways, critical mass ensuring further growth. That's the principle I'd like to talk about here. Entrepreneurs and investors are "gravitationally attracted" to commercial hubs that've already achieved a certain size.

These hubs are called cities. The expansion of a city is a nearly unstoppable force, absent a massive disaster that strikes a city and disperses a significantly large sum of its accumulated capital elsewhere (and even then it might recover). Most of the economic growth happening in the United States today is happening in cities, whereas but a smaller portion trickles down to the countryside. As a natural consequence, inequality between urban and rural areas is naturally slated to increase over time. For whatever reason some of us assume that the latter ought to be able to mostly keep up, but that's just not the case too often.

The cities receive the talented people and the bold risk takers who have a business model in mind. These they receive from lesser developed areas, and of course from among the burghers themselves, since there are demographically more burghers than otherwise. But more importantly to this discussion is the process of brain drain.

The best and the brightest from rural areas rarely stay there, and instead move to the cities to seek opportunity, because opportunity is of course centered in urban areas, because those services which would help make their dreams a reality had already moved to the cities long ago.

The advantage of the city is twofold: first, geography. It is the natural midpoint between opposite areas. However, for services which can be facilitated over the internet or by telephone this is far less important in the emerging economy.

So what is the principle advantage of cities? It is their critical mass which they've already achieved. It serves as a magnet to the surrounding areas. While the burghers themselves (descendants of people who moved from the countryside) do produce, there is also something distinctly parasitic about cities.

It's also important to keep in mind that when we talk about "Trump Country" (and especially in the pejorative sense), we're talking about areas that have been victimized by the market forces of urbanization. Revolutionary start-up companies that might've been centered in their towns, and provided jobs to their towns, but which instead went to the cities. The people who stayed behind were indeed left behind.

In the modern world, there exists a potential to do things differently. A more geographically dispersed economy. And perhaps a more equitable one as well.

It would allow us to take better advantage of our large landmass, and so make land and home ownership more affordable for the average American. Most people would enjoy better air quality, less noise pollution, and even a natural landscape surrounding their homes.

Total ruralization is unreasonable, but a shift from urban to a somewhat more natural (and I don't mean a centrally planned grid whose only shrubbage was 1 centimeter tall plastic grass) suburban setting wouldn't be. It'd require a gradual relocation of American workplaces (mostly offices designed to provide long-distance services) to make this vision a reality.

It could happen naturally, but most likely it would require no small amount of government intervention. The city-rural divide could be bridged, and our politics might stand to become less polarized as a result.

When they have the opening for Season 3 Part 2 I'll be sure to update here.

(I mean Attack on Titan, If you still don't know.)

Omar al-Bashir, Sudan's long-running dictator (since 1989), a figure who is internationally wanted for perpetrating the Darfur Genocide, has been ousted in a coup d'etat by the Sudanese military, whose head is now the national leader of Sudan. A two-year transitional period has been announced, with intent to stage elections sometime soon. Reportedly he is still alive, but his fate is uncertain. Whether he'll be handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face justice remains to be seen.

The Islamic State's last territorial holding in Syria, the town of Baghouz, has been declared liberated. Unfortunately the likes of al-Baghdadi had long escaped, but this still marks a significant victory against the group, which once controlled a piece of real estate the size of Great Britain.

Behold, O America, thou who hath abandoned the old piety, thou who now wanders aimlessly in a thousand directions, chasing after a thousand ideological gods to find one whom might be worshipped, a new gospel is proclaimed in thy midst, uniting these feuding lands under a holy banner of righteousness and wokeness.

IN HOC SIGNO VINCES!

Liam Neeson, the famous "tough guy" actor, recently admitted in a public interview that there was once an incident in his life where, after a friend of his was raped by a black man, he waited outside a bar for a week hoping that he'd get heckled by a black man (any would do) so that he'd have an excuse to murder that person.

For the record, this goes far, far beyond anything that President Trump, Roseanne Barr, heck, even Richard Spencer, Strom Thurmond, or George Wallace had ever said. If this guy gets a relative pass (that is, if he faces consequences that are comparatively light and his career survives), then that's it. Anybody on the Right will be deserving of a pass for virtually anything they say from that point on.

So, uh, we'll see how this plays out.

The Texan government has discovered 95,000 persons registered to vote in that state who might not be citizens. Of these, roughly 58,000 have voted in at least one election from 1996 to 2018.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/texas-finds-95000-non-citizens-registered-vote-encourages-local-election-1306592

He just was an ordinary man, trying to make ends meet for himself and for his family, in a cruel world that'll chew you up and spit you out. His name was Gunther Black. And this is his story.

And on her first day she flirted with the notion of indicting a sitting President. Marvelous.

George Herbert Walker Bush, former President of the United States (1989-1993), has died at the age of 94. Jimmy Carter is now the oldest surviving former President, both men having been born in the same year (1924). A distinguished WWII veteran and the President who led America during the Gulf War and the dramatic fall of the Eastern Bloc, Bush will be missed.

Consumerism is:

-Owning a washing machine, instead of washing everything by hand in a tub with a crude homemade soap and then hanging it out to dry

-Having a house that is centrally heated, or cooled, instead of simply opening a window in the summer and having a fireplace in the winter (both of which are wholly inadequate to regulate the temperature of a large house)

-Taking a car from point A to point B, instead of walking (roughly 3 mph), taking a bike (10 mph), or taking a horse (15 mph)

-Owning a kitchen stove instead of gathering wood to make a fire, lit manually instead of with a match

-Being able to throw lukewarm food into a microwave to make it more palatable, and to reduce the risk of bacterial infection

-Being able to take a hot bath/shower every or almost every day

-Having indoor plumbing, and running water, enjoying the luxury of brushing your teeth twice a day with brand toothpaste and an industrial-grade toothbrush

-Having reliable metal tools (even if just pots, pans, and metal utensils), which probably could not be produced at home

-Buying your clothes at a store from a name brand instead of making it by hand or with a loom

-Owning ceramic plates and cups, washing these in a dishwasher instead of by hand with a homemade soap

-Wearing deodorant or antiperspirant

-Taking medicine when your stomach's upset

-Having a refrigerator/freezer so that you can wait several days/weeks/months to eat certain perishable foods, such as eggs, milk, or meat

-Being able to regularly apply a razor to your body, with shaving cream, and being able to apply a band-aid/antibiotics if you get a cut anywhere

Let's not kid ourselves: by world and historical standards we are obscenely wealthy, and the average guy here who talks crap about consumerism would not be willing to give half of these things up (and I didn't even mention entertainment like television, radio, internet, movies, or books). You might self-righteously believe that cutting back just a little bit will somehow make you not a rabid consumer, but in fact you still are, because that's just the nature of the society into which you were brought up and which you have always been a part of.

Sorry to break it to you.

As a history major who's (hopefully) about to graduate after three years, ask me anything about history. Alternately, ask me questions about myself or about religion/politics.

During President Obama's first term the CIA, the latest in a very long series of failures by an organization that is often lionized in pop culture, it has been revealed that the agency had scores of its agents compromised in places like Iran, China (where thirty agents were subsequently murdered by the regime), and North Korea. The breach started in Iran, which used fricking Google to track down covert CIA websites used for communications, and then they helped China do the same, and then began aggressively exposing agents in other countries as well.

You can read about it here: