Here you go - https://archive.is/tjywS

I believe that it offers a degree of protection against malaria. Or, enough protection that you live long enough to reproduce before dying a terrible, agonizing death.

“Gender critical” is a dogwhistle for anti-trans. Dawkins falls squarely into that camp, of questioning everything that trans people, and experts on the subject have to say. The problem with being anti-trans–or, one of the problems–is that by its nature it assumes that there’s some kind of sex role in society. E.g., women are A, B, C, and men are X, Y, Z, and you can’t move between them. That kind of gender-essentialism is fundamentally socially regressive. Dawkins is also quite significantly culturally Christian, and Islamophobic, e.g., he is entirely critical of Islam both as a religion and as what he perceives to be a culture, but doesn’t direct the same types of criticism towards the Anglican church that he grew up surrounded by.

how you identify/feel is a different matter in many people’s eyes.

The way I see it, it’s just not my business. The only time that someone else’s gender identity is going to matter to me is if I’m potentially interested in dating them. They’re not harming people, they’re not ‘taking’ anything away from cis-women (or cis-men, for that matter), so why should it be my business what they feel they need to do with their body in order to feel comfortable in their own skin? I came across this a few weeks back, and it really drove that home to me.

But does that alone make him Right Wing now?

It’s a spectrum, like all things. You can be pro-science, but also still have a very socially conservative view on the ‘right’ place for people in society, or still maintain false beliefs about the ‘rightness’ of capitalism, imperialism, and so on. And scientists are still human, and prone to the same cognitive biases as everyone else.

Being right wing doesn’t necessarily mean being religious. Being left wing doesn’t necessarily mean being atheist. Yes, that’s more often true than not, but I think part of that is that the right in general uses an appeal to tradition–which includes religious practices–as part of their package. But, on the other hand, Jesus, as depicted in the 4 gospels and the early Christian church, would have been very comfortable to socialists, as would the teachings on tolerance.

In re: podcasts, the only explicitly atheist one that I still listen to is The Friendly Atheist. I find Jess to be annoyingly hyperbolic most of the time, and she frequently makes wildly overbroad statements, but Hemant Mehta is pretty measured overall. Mostly I listen to politics (FiveThirtyEight), 2A podcasts (A Better Way 2A, the irregular Tiger Bloc Podcast, Guns Guide To Liberals, Practical Shooting After Dark), a couple of ex-Mormon podcasts (Mormon Stories is great if you love really, really long form interviews), You Are Not So Smart, sometimes BtB, Cool People Who Did Cool Things, a couple others.

I agree with all of this. At the same time, I think that, in most cases, people should allow their body to adapt to heat, if they are healthy enough to do so. Most people can learn to be comfortable in higher heat than they believe, although some people have medical conditions that will make them more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. If you can get by without it, you should. If you’re at risk by not using it, don’t feel guilty.

(FWIW, my office only has a/c because I have a very, very large printer in here, and it tends to have head strikes and scrap prints out if there’s no climate control. But since I’m not printing at the moment, the current temp in here is 82F.)

Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

A historical Jesus might have had a small cult following, enough that the Romans couldn’t ignore him. He would have been talking about Jewish liberation from the Roman rulers, and how he was called by god. And then boom, he gets executed. His followers probably believed that he was actually the son of god, sent to liberate them. But now he’s dead. How do they reconcile the belief with the reality? So they retcon everything; he was a spiritual messiah, and he’ll eventually return and free the Jews, once the people are spiritually prepared.

You can see traces of this in the way that the four gospels don’t agree with each other, but they all include bits of prophecies from earlier scripture about the messiah. They were written with the intent of making Jesus appear to fit in to older prophecies about who the messiah would be, since he ended up not being the liberator that they had been expecting.

You can see similar behaviors in cults now. It’s clearly visible with Q; Trump was supposed to be their messiah, but he hasn’t managed to make any of their prophetic beliefs come true. So they’ve invented reasons why Trump’s holy will has been thwarted, and changed their history, rather than accepting that he was a false messiah.

This is a perfect segment to be overtaken by electric. Electric bikes can do what minibikes and pit bikes can do easily, and with no tailpipe emissions.

[…]with intent to obtain money, property, or other tangible benefit[…] [emphasis added]

There’s your problem. You’d have to demonstrate that he claimed the badge in order to receive some benefit. He’s a congressional member of Texas, and Republican; by winning the primary–which likely did not hinge on the medal–he was almost certain to win the general election.

This would be a very, very hard case to make as a prosecutor.

Interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of my text messages to my partner fail to send as well, and I also swear frequently and voluminously. I should test this and see if this is what is going on with my carrier.

Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings

I wanted to add to this because it might catch someone else.

I live in a cedar cabin in the mountains. The wood is untreated on the inside. Cedar is not usually attractive to insects that eat wood, but, well… Every year since we moved there, we’d get small amounts of frass (chewed-up bits of wood) from insects eating the exposed roof beams (!!!) of our house. I would spray the beams with permethrin, a bunch of dead ant-looking things would be on the floor the next few days, and that would be it for the year.

This year I called an exterminator, since it keeps happening. He said that it wasn’t termites (yay!), but thought that it was some kind of beetle. (Powder post beetles are a huge problem in our area.) He said we had two options: we could either fumigate the entire house (cost: about $10k, since the whole house would need to be tented), or we could paint all the woodwork in the hose with a 1:1 solution of Bora-Care and water. Bora-Care is a disodium octaborate tetrahydrate and glycerin solution, and should poison the wood for pests, without being toxic to people or animals once it’s dried. (I may also have to drill the beams in inject a similar product in order to get deep enough penetration.)

This should be a one-and-done process; I should not need to repeat it.

As far as I know, we simply don’t have directly contemporary, first-hand evidence of him. Even the most ‘contemporary’ accounts of him that still exist were written at least 50 years after he would have died, and those are quite cursory. Perhaps primary sources were lost–or intentionally destroyed when they didn’t align with beliefs–or perhaps they never existed. There’s not even much evidence for Pontius Pilate (I think one source mentioning that he was recalled to Rome and executed for incompetence?), and there should be, given that he was a Roman official.

People that study the history of the bible–as in, the historical bible, not the bible as a religious text–tend to believe that a historical Jesus existed, even if they don’t believe that he was divine.

IMO, the most likely explanation is that Jesus was yet another in a long-line of false messiahs, and was summarily executed by Rome for trying to start yet another rebellion. Since cult members tend to be unable to reconcile reality with their beliefs, they could have reframed their beliefs to say that he was a spiritual messiah, rather than a physical messiah.

You are confusing actual results with people being on the right side of a conflict.

No, I’m not. The NRA is not on the right side; they’re on the side of authoritarians. They’re on the side of the boot that is kicking you in the face. They’re on the side of the cops that will be the ones disarming people, and on the side of the christian nationalists that want to take guns from everyone but white evangelical christians. The NRA does not believe that the second amendment exists for ALL people, regardless of race, religion, age, disability, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, and they’ve never even tried to really conceal that. That’s why they are silent when someone like Filandro Castile is murdered by a cop.

When the NRA fixes it’s own shit so that, as an organization, they truly believe that 2A rights exist for everyone, and are willing to treat the disarming of any group as a crime, then we can talk. But that’s not who they are now, and it’s not likely that this is who they will be at any time in the future, since they’ve made it nearly impossible for grassroots change to happen within the org.

…Have you been paying attention to Dawkins in the last decade? The dude is decidedly anti-trans, anti-woke. Harris has been on the side of Republican foreign policy for decades, even if he’s more socially permissive. Shermer is the same kind of anti-LGBTQ anti-woke as Dawkins.

On top of that, as we experience higher temperatures, many people also crank up their air conditioners—which emit more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This is not correct. Air conditioning units do not ‘emit more […] greenhouse gases’. Air conditioners use a refrigerant–usually R134a–which does have a high global warming potential (GWP) compared to methane or CO2, but that refrigerant is in a closed loop; it’s not going anywhere unless the system is damaged. Most a/c failures aren’t from refrigerant leaking out of the system, and the system no longer being able to effectively transfer heat, but from the compressor motor failing. When the compressor fails, in most cases you can evacuate the refrigerant, replace the broken part, and then recharge the system. (The fact that they can be repaired doesn’t mean that they usually are repaired. Which is shitty.)

What is true is that a/c units emit heat themselves. An air conditioner moves heat from inside a space to outside of that space; in the process of doing so, the a/c unit itself is creating an additional small amount of heat from the function of the compressor motor, electronics, etc.

Beyond that, most electricity that’s used to run a/c systems–and every other electrical device–is produced from burning fossil fuels. So if there’s more demand for electricity–such as from a heat dome that has everyone running their a/c full-time–then yes, more CO2 is going to get pumped out into the atmosphere. But if your electricity is coming from sources that are largely emissions-free, like solar, wind, or hydro, then air conditioning is a negligible source of heat.

tl;dr - don’t feel bad about using your a/c when heat rises to dangerous levels; agitate at a local, state, and national level for renewable, carbon-neutral ways of generating electricity, and for more efficient use of electricity.

So, here’s the thing.

He shouldn’t have gone there. Being there, being armed, there to protect property, was taken to be provocative by the people that were protesting cops shooting an unarmed man.

But the narrative that we got in the news wasn’t how things actually went down. The first person confronted him and tried to grab his rifle when he wasn’t threatening anyone. The second person that was shot had just chased Rittenhouse down and struck him with a skateboard. The third person was pointing a pistol at Rittenhouse when he was shot in the arm. Source.

Given that he was not directly threatening anyone there, it was a clear-cut case of self-defense. Yeah, I don’t like it that a shitty person walks away, but he walked because he wasn’t guilty of a crime in defending himself. Is he still a right-wing shitstain that’s supposedly too dumb to get into the military? Yeah. But self-defense is a right for everyone.

That’s $62,000 annually. The median personal income in the US as of 2022 was $40,480, which means that’s about 50% above the median.

Not sure what you’re on that you don’t think that’s a pretty decent individual income.

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer.

All prominent atheists, all decidedly right-wing. If you want to include dead atheists, then I’d also say Christopher Hitchens was decidedly right wing on a lot of issues.

The NRA hasn’t done jack shit in decades. As I said, the NRA did their level best to kill Heller v. D.C. before it even got off the ground, and that was the single most important 2A win in the last 50 years.

Don’t give me that bullshit about them being the line between the US and tyranny, when they won’t even speak up against tyranny when cops murder legally armed citizens.

The “Energy Hypothesis” of bitcoin, he thinks that bitcoin will allow society to capture excess energy generation and make it profitable through mining bitcoin

That’s… Not really what’s happening. At all. Bitcoin mining isn’t using excess energy, it’s forcing energy producers to generate more energy, and forcing rates higher. If everyone was using solar or wind generation, and there was truly excess power being generated that had no additional costs associated with it–because it was a cloudless day with stiff breezes–then sure; the excess power couldn’t be stored past a certain point, so the solar cells and turbines would just be taken off line. But that’s not the way most generation works; when there’s low demand, power plants burn less coal/natural gas/oil to turn the generator turbines, and they ramp that up when there’s high demand.

I have a brand (yeah, the kind done with red-hot metal); my impression was that burning skin and subcutaneous fat smelled like a delicious pork roast.

I hope that the FPC gets ahold of this case; the prohibition on making your own firearms in any capacity, and being told that he couldn’t use an affirmative 2A defense in court might be enough to kick this up to SCOTUS.