SatanicNotMessianic

Damn those democrats and their gotcha questions!

Hospitals in California have had this in place for a month or so now. All persons in the hospital must wear masks.

For me your comment history shows about a half dozen comments from 6 months ago with body=“null”

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away

The alignment between Catholics and Protestants in US politics is a relatively recent phenomenon. Up through the 70s, Protestant groups were generally anti-Catholic (something that was a factor when Kennedy ran). The KKK was anti-Catholic. Prejudice against Catholics, who were often suspected of having more loyalty to the Pope than the country, was pretty constant throughout US history.

That started to change in the 80s. The Southern Baptist Convention, which was controlled by moderates at the time, had originally supported the Roe decision. Catholics, on the other hand, were against abortion and birth control (and also largely against the death penalty). When the federal government started to demand that Baptist colleges start to admit black students, that all changed. Abortion became the wedge issue of choice. Conservative Catholics leaned into the shift, with growing political power fueled by donations to Catholic lobby organizations and by the creation of JPII as a charismatic media star.

As a former Catholic and a strong atheist, I have absolutely no love for the Catholic Church. I do, however, believe that Francis is sincere in his beliefs and attempts to reform things. I suspect that the next pope is going to make Ratzinger look like a hippie - they’re going to become ultra-conservative. But for now, as a member of Team Rainbow, I really do appreciate what he’s trying to do. And if it can break off even a portion of the Catholic vote, so much the better.

You know, I really wouldn’t have minded at all if the previous administrations had Carter on speed dial for policy advice.

Coming from someone with an academic background in biology, the treknobabble in biology and medicine is pretty terrible.

There’s a concept called the neural correlates of consciousness that basically states that every thought, memory, emotion, or other mental process has a direct correlation with the wiring and states of the cells in your brain. We can debate on whether or not to include other body states or gut bacteria, but the essence of the argument is that there is no “mind” as a phenomenon apart from the brain. This being a more serious sub, I’d argue that something like transporter technology implicitly assumes this, since you arrive with the same thoughts, memories, and emotional states as you had when you were decompiled.

So you’d be able to say that the Vulcan amygdala becomes hypertrophic during pon farr due to signaling by some other physical brain structure and activates the limbic system which itself becomes hypersensitive to stimulation and so on. So you can govern your pointy-eared patient some space Xanax, which increases the effectiveness of Vulcan GABA, which calms them down. Or using your advanced knowledge of physiology that no doubt extends down to the level of quantum effects, find another avenue of intervention.

Basically, I’m acknowledging your point - it’s a necessary complication that makes for interesting plot lines - but it really doesn’t line up with a justifiable in-universe answer.

I am using Voyager. It’s very far from a UX clone, unfortunately. When entering a link, for example, it simply creates the markdown for the link and leaves it to you to paste in the link on the text body, rather than popping up a text box and setting the body text itself. It frequently will lose the screen when scrolling down a list of posts, turning a solid black and requiring you to scroll back up to restore. When switching user accounts, rather than leaving you in the post you were reading, it drops you back into /all, which makes it difficult to impossible to juggle multiple accounts. I think k that’s also the one where the text you’re typing ends up underneath the visible part of the text box, making you have to scroll to see what you’re typing.

I’m also using Avelon, which has similar but not identical issues. I’m also using Memmy and Mlem, which get further away from a mature product, and I’ve tried Lemmios, Thunder, and that one whose icon was a rocket ship. Each one has bugs. No one has a great search function, no one lets you browse topics by instance (that I’ve been able to find), only a handful allow you to block instances and even blocking a topic takes three or four clicks in some clients. I also think there’s a performance falloff with the number of blocks in several of them.

And the reason I don’t just browse local or subscribed is that there’s simply not enough traffic.

I’m not slamming the devs here. Software is hard. I’ve been doing it for 30 years. UX can be very hard, especially if you’re letting the bar be set by AB and Apollo. One of them has a good text recovery tool that takes you back to the thread you were replying to, but others don’t even let you copy text from the post you’re replying to.

Honestly, I think Christian Selig should teach a master class on app development. Overcast is another one where a single developer writes a better app than most corporate teams (that’s still just the one person, right?). It can be done, and I’m sure it will be done. It’s just not quite there yet.

seven year itch

Wow - I had never put those two together before.

Anyway, Memory Alpja states that intensive meditation is also used to alleviate the problems associated with pon farr.

What doesn’t make in-universe sense to me is that the condition comes from a neurochemical cascade. Even in our time, we recognize many of these conditions and have targeted drugs and therapies for them. Surely a society that is medically and technologically more advanced than ours by orders of magnitude would be able to simply treat the condition.

As a plot point it makes sense, and Roddenberry both personally and as a person of his time saw things like brain processes as strange and mysterious. It allowed them to play with the still evolving character of Spock and with Vulcans in general. It allowed them to do that “put a human condition into an alien and turn it up to 11” kind of thing they loved so much. The same would go for Lon Suder, of course.

They just get really hand-wavey around medical questions.

For me, a queer atheist with a brown Jewish partner, there’s no question about me voting for Biden. It doesn’t matter mathematically because I live in a dark blue district in a dark blue state, but I’m going to cast that vote. I also recognize that the choice is between an elderly conservative with outdated ideas and the possible end of American democracy.

The reason why I think we are well and truly fucked is that our standard bearer is among the most milquetoast presidential office holders since Bush I. Neither the democrats nor the press has any idea how to deal with the existential crisis we are facing. Trump had his followers chanting “lock her up” against his political opponent. Biden is keeping the dignity of the office of the president.

I don’t know if there’s a better tactic, but people making millions of dollars as political consultants have had since 2015 to come up with a counter strategy, and this is the best they’ve given us. They do not know how to deal with a successful fascist populist.

"Included also are World Leaders, both good and bad, but none of which are as evil and 'sick' as the THUGS we have inside our Country who, with their Open Borders, INFLATION, Afghanistan Surrender, Green New Scam, High Taxes, No Energy Independence, Woke Military, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Iran, All Electric Car Lunacy, and so much more, are looking to destroy our once great USA." Trump posted. "MAY THEY ROT IN HELL."

Versus

Biden, who is running with little competition for the Democratic party presidential nomination in 2024, struck a different tone with his Christmas message. He posted a video of the White House's holiday decorations overlaid with an audio track of him and First Lady Jill Biden reading the poem "The Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clark Moore.

Sigh.

We are so fucked.

Sure. The first time your racist uncle drops an n-bomb or comes out with some LGBT-phobic statement and everyone just goes along with it, you can check your watch, say something about having another engagement, and walk out the door to go home.