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Cake day: March 13th, 2024

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  • This article conveniently omits Israel-Palestine relations prior to and during periods of minimal US meddling. Let’s take a look at the prelude to the current conflict to get our bearings.

    Obama made statements early on in his presidency about lasting peace in the Middle East. His first meeting with Netanyahu was a disaster, and so he dropped the issue for his entire term. 8 years of pretty much ignoring the Palestinians. Trump enters office and likewise makes public statements supporting lasting peace. His meetings with Netanyahu were a great success…for Israel specifically. The US changed policy to state that illegal Israeli settlements were legal, it recognized Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel with Israel as the sole owner of the city, and it began to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. All of this was a big kick in the pants to Palestine, who were never consulted for any of these policy changes.

    Biden entered office and continued to push for normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but let’s be honest, he had a similar do-nothing attitude as Obama had when it comes to lasting peace.

    Then Hamas attacks Israel. The US hadn’t engaged them for over a decade and Arab nations were starting to normalize relations with Israel with no regard for Palestine. It is hard to imagine what else Hamas could have done to get the attention of the US and Arab nations.

    And that brings us to the present, where Israel’s retaliation has once again captured the attention of the US and Arab nations and put the needs of the Palestinians in the minds of their leaders.

    In my opinion, if we had meddled more during peace time and engaged with Palestinians in the absence of conflict, then we could have avoided the current war altogether. The current conflict appears to be the result of the absence of US meddling, or at the very least an unwillingness to recognize the needs of Palestinians during times of relative peace.


  • Lots of stretching here. The paper uses simulations of microtubules to show quantum effects when tryptophan residues are excited by UV light. The paper only did simulations of microtubules, and those simulations did not include the bends and many many dynein molecules found on microtubules. The reason this is important is that researchers have been hitting every biomolecule with UV excitation for decades, including microtubules, and have never observed this effect.

    A key finding missing from this video is that microtubules are dynamic. They are constantly disassembling and reassembling and recycling components. This occurs at very short timescales. Also, they do not bridge cell membranes. If information is passing through networks of microtubules, it is constantly disrupted and not affecting other cells. Synapses do handle cell-cell information transfer (where the role of microtubules is already well studied and not quantum in nature). Why would quantum microtubule information be limited to a single cell? Maybe it could influence coordinated assembly and disassembly at the termini, but the authors offer no evidence that there is any chemical effect of this quantum phenomenon, which would be required to change anything about how those enzymes behave.

    We already know of a mechanism by which information is transported across microtubules: physical transport of signalling molecules. They are walked (quite literally, dynein is cool) along the microtubules to different sites in the cell. No quantum effects needed to explain this phenomenon.






  • We are not in a recession. The problems with wage stagnation are not some temporary hiccup in the economy. It is a systemic problem. Stop conflating the two, complaining that a macroeconomic term with a very specific meaning isn’t defined the way you want it to be. Stop expecting the problem to heal itself if the fed lowers rates or taxes get nudged up or down or whatever. We know how to fix wage stagnation because we have done it before. Regulation. Labor protections. Minimum wage increases. Wage stagnation occurs in the absence of these things, and they can only be done by Congress.


  • Even though the law can be circumvented, it nonetheless provides resistance. Traveling to another state, filling out paperwork, paying extra money, etc all provide additional obstacles to overcome. If someone was having an acute mental problem and felt compelled to eat a barrel, a simple few hours delay in acquiring a gun can make all the difference. For someone planning on using a gun for criminal activity, at some point they might just consider employment as an easier alternative if acquiring a gun is too much of a pain.

    We have already seen this effect in reverse with regard to immigration. Legal immigration is such a painful crapshoot that people are willing to surrender their fate to cartels as an alternative.




  • It is so strange to say that identity should take a back seat to humanism when every historical example of discrimination and dehumanization is based on identity. Identity in those instances is not imposed on oneself, but is used to define the outgroup that is being dehumanized. Identity politics is simply an honest accounting of groups that being descriminated against. When the discrimination ends, we see the group identity evaporate. We need only look at the early 20th century definitions of Caucasian, and the identity politics of Irish and Italian Americans subsequently evaporating when that definition evolved to include all Americans of European decent, to see that identity politics is a reaction to injustice and not the other way around.



  • Details like this are really just a distraction. Do you really think the average respondent understands these technical details, or have any good reason to memorize the specs of all rifles? The focus on the AR-15 is not because of any risk associated with that particular gun, but because most people understand that this is a semi-auto rifle. There is no other model of gun that will have that kind of widespread recognition.

    Drawing up these very silly technical arguments is a willful ignorance of the underlying issue: What is the limit of deadly force we should allow one person to lawfully own? We don’t let people own tactical nukes. We don’t need to argue over thermonuclear or hydrogen nukes. We don’t need to understand quantum mechanics to regulate these devices. The technical details do not matter. The potential body count is what matters. And so it is with guns, which happen to occupy that grey area where reasonable people disagree on an acceptable level of lethality. You do not need to know all the different models of gun to be killed by one, so we should not require such technical knowledge when engaging in discourse around their regulation.


  • Is no one going to acknowledge that a huge portion of the American electorate actually supports Israel’s genocide? Part of living in a democracy is accepting that official policy reflects some mixture of the views of the electorate. If the US electorate is still mixed in its view of Israel then the official US policy should be mixed as well (which it is).

    I will use my vote to push for an end to the genocide, the release of hostages, and a stable 2-state solution. But I will not abandon core democratic values just because I find myself in the minority.