rametarin

[rametarin]

choices made in anger is such a crazy image. if you know what i'm talking about

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Or institutions either working on behalf of the government or using the government to punish from a position of ivory tower authority.

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yeah full disclosure.

Disagreeing with demographic collectivism, and the propaganda that all white people are inherently complacent with white supremacism just by existing, does not make me a fascist.

Fascism is an inherently stupid concept and a slapdash system, if one can even call it that. Representative democracy is not fascism, no matter how many mental backflips you do trying to stan for committes or boarrds or groups over singular representative heads and declaring everything else to be "authoritarian and fascist." That's a you thing. Akin to a vegan trying to amount all eating meat to murder.

Unless someone is actually advocating for fascist government, don't just haphazardly throw that out just because, being a charged insult, it provokes a reaction. Some of you whine about McCarthyists seeing communists under every bed, and then mutter under your breath about how liberals are practically fascist- from further left than liberals are.

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Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

Continue Reading.

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[rametarin]

OP, I hope you realize you've become That Guy.

You're that guy that goes up to the gamer girl and says, "Pfftbt. Doubt you're a real gamer. Name ten Mario power-ups."

its fascinating how very very surface level 1920s-ish jazz age inspired aesthetics are very popular (see: hazbin hotel and electroswing and the endless wave of bowtie pinstripe character designs from the 2010s) but the vast vast majority of people who are into that seem fundamentally disinterested in actually engaging with actual jazz age art and culture because that would require engaging with black art

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I'm so happy we're passed the point where if you said this was true, they'd argue it wasn't.

In the past you used to have to be in second tier girl club fandom to be allowed to see the GIRLSMUT and GIRLPORN that the girls on the one hand would pretend doesn't exist, or only exists in a "true, wonderful, romantic" fashion, superior to the horrid soullless MAALE GAAZE objectifying smut that men write. And if you testified that yes, female authors exist and are horny as fuck, you'd be told to shut up that's not true.

The internet has made it so inescapably true and so easily verifiable that to deny it is simply impossible and I am here for it. No more ambiguities on "pure, chaste, no horny only loving and intimate" glorious crystal women.

skskskskskskksksks

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It's largely because of the usual suspects. First the present the European purge of the Indigenous Native Americans as a bloody slaughter universally.

Then you ask questions about the genocide, and you learn the vast majority of the deaths came from plague. Not violent war, or extermination.

Then they tell you bullshit about the smallpox infected blankets; reproducing infecting blankets with smallpox turns out to be inconclusive and the guy wholesale made that "fact" up with a conspiracy theory that the North American Army did the infecting and spreading. And they did it because they were literally a communist agitator spreading bullshit and trying to cajole a local tribe into his professorial nonsense. The vast majority of those deaths came from Spanish and Mexicans colonizing what would become US states and spreading diseases.

And you learn not only did they not have proper germ theory at that time, but the smallpox blanket thing WOULDN'T HAVE WORKED. So the vast majority of the deaths of Native Americans didn't come from bloody slaughter by European colonialists, they came from disease that the indigenous people just weren't familiar with and lifestyles that exacerbated and enabled massive casualties. To call it a genocide implies intention. When over 80% of the indigenous Americans were dead before the fucking Mayflower even arrived on US shores.

The people that are so hellbent on teaching the bad parts of US history, "that the status quo doesn't want you to know about," put such emphasis on just how white supremacist and prejudiced and hateful of the natives the whites were, how murderous and evil they uniformly were.

They let you make logical leaps to assume the unfortunate fading population was akin to Nazi Germany tossing the oppressed minority into ovens by the hundreds of thousands. They didn't tell us it was actually the SPANISH occupied states that spread the majority of the disease, and instead attribute it to non-Hispanic white supremacism. Somehow, the Spanish manage to both be behind the plague, and free of the blame for it in the ledgers of how this "gritty, real" alt-history is taught.

From the 60s up until the late 90s, they fetishized the image of the more wise and learned Native American that wasn't spoiled by capitalism and western European culture, with an almost mystical connection to the planet that whites just lacked because we're soulless I guess.

When talking about Europeans conquering the mainland US, they frame it in terms of this singular people (like if East Asians went to Europe and the Europeans all just idenfieid as Europeans, with no distinctions or discrimination or bigotry between one another) that were uniformly the victims of a massively organized efforts to cleanse them with extreme prejudice. They don't mention all the Native Americans that left their failing tribes in the faces of surviving plague and joined western society, adding to the gene pool, and instead attribute all of that to spoil brides of war and rape.

And then you learn they had EMPIRES and conquered their neighbor tribes and their own cultures maintained polygamy and gender discrimination towards women and that Native American tribes ALSO took black slaves.

But somehow European colonialism is noteworthy for its specifically terrible cruelty, because specifically white supremacism is a heinous and horrid blight on the earth, and capitalism. Somehow, blood&soil exists as an argument making ALL of North America the collective property of an indigenous bloodline or culture, in a way that it's invalid in Europe among Europeans, that they'll say no white American legitimately counts as REAL American. Not even if they're aboriginal/native mixed. To where miraculously, ethnosupremacism among any other group in history is somehow irrelevant.

They didn't fail to tell us the natives of North and South America had empires, they simply removed them from the conversation deliberately. Because to their morals, it only mattered that it was white people doing the colonizing, and that was somehow the most wrong thing on planet earth.

God I am sick and tired of people uwu-washing indigenous American history.

Did the Inca have exquisite building techniques, efficient messengers, and quality waterworks? Yes. They were also an expansionist empire built on violent conquest and the splitting up and relocating of conquered peoples.

Did the Aztecs have a gorgeous capital city built at the heart of a lake, with floating farms and towering temples honoring their fascinating pantheon? Yes. Guess what tho. They were also a violent expansionist empire who practiced ritual sacrifice of prisoners of war.

The Iroquois confederacy had one of the most unique representative political systems I’ve ever heard of, with women taking a forefront in most local government matters too. But their internal peace allowed them to redirect violence to their neighbors, as so often happens with tribal confederations, and they eventually violently conquered the Ohio valley and destroyed or displaced dozens of other indigenous groups.

Even my beloved Cahokia has the graves of sacrifice victims amidst its ruins.

A society should not need to be (and fundamentally cannot be) squeaky clean unproblematically stannable in order to be worth studying and remembering, and pretending that they were is no less disinformative than the European accounts painting them as godless savages.

[rametarin]

It's expensive, but worth it.

I watched a video criticizing vertical farming. It winds up being incredibly expensive, because the sun is cheap and land depending on where, is plentiful.

But that's just it. Vertical farming practices make the most of minerals, water and in the right environment, can be completely controlled for mold, fungus and bacteria. You just need more specialized knowledge and modern equipment to start it up.

Once you have it you can grow, rain or shine, omnienvironmentally. Including under the earth and Antarctica. You could have 15.6 million acres of farm land in the span of 250 acres across, 250 long and 250 acres straight up. 300 of those across the planet would mean we double all existing farmland that currently exists on earth. Without detrimentally affecting the eco-systems, clearcutting forests or destroying grasslands, or swamps.

It becomes impossible to starve or worry about food just because your country is desolate. All you need are geothermal plants and vertical farms underground, and even if your country lacks sun for a quarter to half the year, you could grow enough food for tens of millions of people.

I'd say, "Even socialist countries couldn't fuck that up," but it requires trust and professionals and integrity and proper management of resources, so I highly doubt North Korea would benefit from this technology, even if they had it.

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Worse than a conspiracy theory, it's an echo chamber theater performance piece. Not unlike when you have those absurd televangelist conferences where they all agree Satan is behind gay rights and they all need to believe and repeat that and insist it's the truth, starting from there.

This is a bad faith interpretation of history and may as well be on the same level of Russian state propaganda/agriprops, except it's not something actively working for republicans, so it won't be considered that by the left.

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Stellar Blade Censorship

Once again, something risque gets censored and people rush in to say "omg who cares" or "stop being horny".

I'm not big on the game. But the devs had a vision and it was censored. Sony is notorious for stupid censorship of games produced outside of the EU/America and this is another case of it.

Remember what they did with DMC5? Among other games.

We are at a point where corporations are trying to pressure out anything NSFW, like Gumroad evicting anything too risque at the behest of Mastercard and Stripe.

And this is the exact same sentiment. I do not care if it's only adding a bit of fabric to her outfits or the gore is toned down. It is still censorship and against the devs' artistic vision.

The fact that people are willing to let this slide because a personal bias or prudishness is absolutely shameful. If you don't like the art, that doesn't mean you should approve of the art getting censored for no damn reason.

It seems so easy to make people defend censorship. All you have to do it cover a bit of skin and they'll shrug, yet they'll be surprised when their NSFW artist friend gets nuked off of a site.

Stop defending censorship of art for the sake of corporate approval/sensibilities.

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I feel validated in that I've always called her, "Mee-yet."

Just checking.... We all pronounce Miette like My-TAY in our heads, right?

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It's the most fundamental of processes—the evaporation of water from the surfaces of oceans and lakes, the burning off of fog in the morning sun, and the drying of briny ponds that leaves solid salt behind. Evaporation is all around us, and humans have been observing it and making use of it for as long as we have existed. And yet, it turns out, we've been missing a major part of the picture all along. In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT has demonstrated that heat isn't alone in causing water to evaporate. Light, striking the water's surface where air and water meet, can break water molecules away and float them into the air, causing evaporation in the absence of any source of heat. The astonishing new discovery could have a wide range of significant implications. It could help explain mysterious measurements over the years of how sunlight affects clouds, and therefore affect calculations of the effects of climate change on cloud cover and precipitation. It could also lead to new ways of designing industrial processes such as solar-powered desalination or drying of materials.

Continue Reading.

[rametarin]

The question is what would he start over from scratch with.

It's not enough to throw out the existing punch with a poop in it. What will replace it? What will the principles be? Because we have an entire section of far-lefters that dedicate themselves to ingratiating themselves into a system to make sure ones they don't like can't function, and they do it specifically so they can argue for the replacement of it with something entirely new, that they control.

Journalists demonstrate that they are unbiased by suspending the editor who has said that they are biased