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Still strikes me as pretty weird that the US government using public resources funded ridiculously ill-justified virus-breeding research that created a pandemic killing millions and counting, and no one’s in trouble for it and no one cares, but maybe that’s just me.
sonch retweeted
I have seen it all. 🤣95 yr old WILLIAM SHATNER ‘sings’Metallica yesterday. The guy astounds me. He gives me hope for growing older. I mean.. he is 33 yrs older than me…
I really love this dude. Always have👊🏻
sonch retweeted
If no one had tried to mandate or coerce the covid vaccines, we would not, to this day, have such heated debates around efficacy, adverse effects, and the impact on transmission. Coercion is the hidden point of contention in these debates.
Probably one of my crankiest and least-‘Smart People’ beliefs is that things like this - mandating folic acid supplementation into the food supply because of (hand wave reasons and bla bla ‘public health’) - will ultimately come to be seen as an embarrassing and antiquated 19th/20th century thing where ‘science’ went off the rails. Kinda like lobotomies or prescribing nonstop opioids to women with ‘women’s problems’
A typical folic acid supplement for a woman trying for a baby is 400 micrograms, as recommended by the NHS.
Thanks to the government making folic acid in non-wholemeal flour mandatory, someone who eats:
🥣a bowl of Cheerios with milk and two slices of white toast for breakfast (55ug)
🥪sandwiches made with 4 slices of white bread for lunch (240ug)
🎂a slice of sponge cake for a mid-afternoon snack, (50ug)
and
🍕half of a pizza and a slice of apple pie with custard for dinner (250 + 50 ug)
will consume more than 600 micrograms of synthetic folic acid. And if they have a typical multivitamin that's another 400ug.
It's not a great diet but the reality is plenty of people eat like this, and the government is not (yet) in charge of everyone's diet so cannot control or measure their folic acid intake.
Let's imagine that person has cancer or a heart stent. What has happened here? The government has mandated the addition of a medicine acknowledged by its own NHS to be potentially harmful to that person, into food that they cannot easily avoid (white flour is everywhere, even many wholemeal breads), without telling them, without controlling the dose, without requiring food manufacturers to say that the food may be harmful.
What is the difference between this and "unlawfully and maliciously administering to, or causing to be taken by, another person any poison or other destructive or noxious thing" under the poison / noxious-substance offences in the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 ?
Can the government be challenged in the courts about this?
sonch retweeted
We got out of covid because people got tired of being afraid (or, cynically, pretending to care if other people die). In many European countries, 2022 was the worst year in terms of excess deaths. But people went back to normal anyway. Pandemics are also a social phenomenon.
sonch retweeted
Almost no one who rails against citizens united know what it actually did. Even fewer have used their platform to push an actual amendment to address it.
sonch retweeted
The United States has been leaping from one moral panic to the next: Black Lives Matter, MeToo, George Floyd, and now data centers plus the specter of AI-driven human extinction. In every case a genuine problem exists, but the threat is inflated out of all proportion and the costs of overreaction are overlooked. The resulting hysteria blocks clear thinking and closes off rational discussion. Consequently, individuals never notice that self-appointed experts are distorting the facts for their own gain.
Companies with billions in AI stakes are perfectly capable of staging “rogue LLM” incidents to stampede politicians into regulation that keeps out competitors or simply reduces their own liability.
Previous panics have already damaged trust in institutions and among ourselves. They have also intensified the political polarization that now endangers American democracy. We should resist the current panic rather than feed it. The costs of getting this one wrong dwarf those of the last several.
jury duty is now a grift. if you don’t grift off it ur just leaving money on the table
Lindsay Clancy holdout juror shares pictures of himself with newborn daughter - as his fundraiser tops $350,000 trib.al/7Qs2Ngh
sonch retweeted
The printing press led pretty directly to tens of millions of deaths within a generation of its diffusion across Europe. Germany's population dropped 50% by the end of the 30 Years War.
maybe he should've focused on doing at least good worthwhile stuff instead of a bunch of mostly dumbass stuff, idk. hindsight's 20/20
NEW: President Trump is privately lashing out to allies that some elements of his second term aren’t going his way:
- Trump recently told advisers he wanted to be thanked for what he views is him helping the Kennedy Center
- He’s vented that there should be more surrogates on TV backing him
- Polls show a growing dissatisfaction with the state of the U.S. economy
- And amid these outbursts, Trump has banned CNN, MS NOW, Politico and likely soon other media outlets from the White House
Story on an ever growing frustrated Trump w/ @meridithmcgraw and @alexbward
wsj.com/politics/elections/w…
so that’s where they filmed it
Sweden just changed the way they salt winter roads, and it's saving thousands of birds every single year. When engineers discovered that traditional rock salt was poisoning wildlife during the harshest months, they did something incredible.
ifeg.info/.../sweden-changed…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Sweden has not switched to beet extract, edible, or any new "bird-saving" road salt. It uses standard sodium chloride only when necessary and has denied viral claims of such a change.
reuters.com/fact-check/swe…
trafikverket.se/resa-och-trafi…
We complain there’s a fragmented culture and old mainstream media is destroy but somehow every week like clockwork someone’s stupid ‘Sunday opinion column’ printed somewhere drives a bunch of Discourse on here. Y’all still like a bunch of Boomers that way
‘did you see what so and so wrote in the Sunday piece’
no, i didn’t, UNC
guys I just need to know what time the game’s at
Ugh, like clockwork yet again the other parents in [kid activity] ‘want to switch over to WhatsApp’
Seriously what’s this fascination with WhatsApp chat-groups instead of [centralized activity-announcements]! People just wanna be chatting all day??
(Thereby making the actual announcements harder to spot/parse)
idgi!!
sonch retweeted
Never fails
“A lot of women tell me this is new,” writes Monica Corcoran Harel. “Their spouses weren’t always so withdrawn. They married fun men who had fun friends. Their husbands used to hang out, even text, with those dudes. They had lives outside their romantic relationship. Somewhere along the way, though, they quit making the effort.”
If you look closely, you’ll see these women everywhere. The “wing wife,” who talks her husband up at social events because he doesn’t say much or engage; the “take-flight wife,” who literally pushes her spouse toward a group of men, as a bird urges her fledgling out of the nest; the “not-now wife,” who refuses to play the game and simply resents her introverted husband.
Here, Harel explores how — and why — so many married women say they have unwillingly become the managers of their husbands’ social lives: the-cut.visitlink.me/zW3i9F
And here I thought Terence Tao was supposed to be some kind of super-smart mathematician?
When it turns out all the insights & proofs he comes up with or ever can/will come up with are actually just interpolatable from the span of previously-established truths in a sufficiently large latent-space, in a sense things one could read off a well-arrangedlookup table given enough time/patience?
(I think this is what he’s saying/concerned about)
Total Macklemore victory
Funniest part is this whole thing has only raised Macklemore’s profile. Nobody’d mentioned him for years, I kinda thought his career was stagnant. Is the Foxy Shazam guy still part of his touring band? I don’t even know
Ed Sheeran weeps on stage, says Israel's actions in Gaza 'unjustifiable' in emotional first speech since Macklemore fiasco trib.al/pMjniaN
