Democrats are stuck in their own echo chamber - "Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has become a purveyor of political wisdom these days, simply for speaking out for the sensible center. Earlier this month, he drove progressives crazy with another aphorism of common sense: “We can't go too far left. This is not a center-left or a left country. We are a center, if anything, center-right country." Denying that political reality is at the heart of the Democrats’ political problems these days. Party leaders seem genuinely to believe that they can win swing-state elections by mobilizing their base and tying every Republican to former President Trump. The strategy backfired badly in Virginia (and nearly in New Jersey) this month, yet Democrats appear disinclined to change course... There’s no mention of what Democrats will do to mitigate rising inflation. There’s not one reference to the soaring gas prices across the country. Even though the rising rate of violent crime has grown as a top voting concern, it doesn’t get any attention. And House Democratic leaders certainly aren’t embracing longtime Democratic strategist James Carville’s advice that the party needs to “go to a woke detox center” to win back voters in the middle. This is a stay-the-course document, even as polls show Biden’s approval ratings hitting all-time lows and the Democrats facing historic deficits on the generic ballot. The irony is that in the rush to claim the pro-democracy mantle, Democrats are recklessly ignoring voters’ own signals warning them to slow their progressive agenda down. The ideological disposition of the country has always been clear: Gallup’s annual survey shows that 36 percent of Americans identify as conservative, 35 percent identify as moderate, and just 25 percent identify as liberal. Among independent voters, a whopping 78 percent identify as either moderate or conservative in the latest 2021 data. Even Democrats are evenly divided between the moderate/conservative wing (49 percent) and the liberal wing (51 percent). That means that when Democrats play to the progressive base, they’re automatically energizing a sizable conservative faction, while alienating must-win moderate voters. When Republicans play to their base, they at least can plausibly cobble their way to a majority by hanging onto a critical mass of moderates. To hit a majority, Democrats need the lion’s share of moderates to be on their side... when your administration is pitching infrastructure to working-class Americans, don’t frame it as an equity issue... Manchin, a Democrat representing a state where Trump won 69 percent of the vote last year, is still one of his state’s most popular figures. A new poll from the GOP firm MBE Research found that Manchin holds an enviable 61 percent approval rating, while Biden’s approval is a dismal 33 percent. There’s a powerful lesson in those numbers: If even in this rough environment for Democrats, a moderate maverick can remain popular in a ruby-red state, there’s still plenty of time for the party to turn things around by moving to the middle"
From 2021
What happened to DNA computing? - "“There is a need for technology to beat silicon, because we are reaching tremendous limitations on it,” says Nicholas Malaya, a computational scientist at AMD in California. What could this successor technology be? There has been no shortage of alternative computing approaches proposed over the last 50 years. Here are five of the more memorable ones. All had plenty of hype, only to be trounced by silicon...
Spintronics
Memristors
Carbon nanotubes
DNA computing
Molecular electronics"
Taking Viagra cuts the risk of Alzheimer’s by up to 69 percent - "Meanwhile, British researchers are optimistic that Alzheimer’s could be reversed one day after finding a $19.88 vaccine could be used to restore memory. Scientists said they are “hugely excited” by the findings after seeing promising results in mice. Meanwhile, health officials in the US approved the first new drug for Alzheimer’s disease in nearly 20 years. Despite controversy over the trial results, the Food and Drug Administration said it granted approval to the drug developed by Biogen."
Most Dictators Self Destruct. Why? - "Daniel Treisman, a UCLA political scientist... analyzed 218 episodes of democratization between 1800 and 2015 and found they were, with some exceptions (such as Danish King Frederick VII's voluntary acceptance of a constitution in 1848), the result of authoritarian rulers' mistakes in seeking to hold on to power. The list of these errors is both a useful handbook for authoritarians and a useful reminder that even the most capable of them are fallible, with disastrous consequences for their regimes. According to Treisman, deliberate liberalization — whether to forestall a revolution, motivate people to fight a foreign invader, defeat competing elite groups or make a pact with them — only occurred in up to a third of the cases. In the rest, democratization was an accident: As they set off a chain of events, rulers didn't intend to relinquish power. Some of them — such as Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president — have admitted as much. Treisman's list of mistakes is worth citing in full. There are five basic ones:
Hubris
Needless risk
Slippery slope
Trusting a traitor
Counterproductive violence...
These are all very human errors of judgment. Dictators are people, too, and sometimes they'll act on imperfect information or erroneous gut feeling. But Treisman makes the point that they may be prone to such errors precisely because they are dictators. They'll be fooled by polls which people don't answer sincerely, taken in by their own propaganda (like Malawi ruler Hastings Banda, who called and lost a referendum in 1993 because he'd been impressed by the high turnout at rallies in his support even though people had been forced to attend them). And sometimes they'll rule for so long that their mental faculties will be less sharp than at the outset... in 85 percent of the episodes he studied, democratization was preceded by mass unrest. Sooner or later, people tend to get tired of regimes in which they have little say. Then, it only takes a misstep from the one person at the center of such a regime. Dictators often overestimate the external danger to their power, the plots of foreign or exiled enemies. In the final analysis, they are the biggest threat to themselves."
Determinants of eating at local and western fast-food venues in an urban Asian population: a mixed methods approach - "Participants reported a high eating-out frequency with 77.3% usually eating either breakfast, lunch or dinner at eateries. Main venues for eating-out included hawker centres (61.1% usually ate at least 1 of 3 daily meals at this venue) and school/workplace canteens (20.4%). A minority of participants (1.9%) reported usually eating at Western fast-food restaurants. Younger participants and those of Chinese and Malay ethnicity compared to Indians were more likely to eat at Western fast-food restaurants. Chinese and employed persons were more likely to eat at hawker centres. The ready availability of a large variety of affordable and appealing foods appeared to be a primary driver of eating out, particularly at hawker centres"
Singaporeans eat out a lot
Lifeless Market For Meatless Meat - "The dream of plant-based chicken, pork and beef appears to be withering... There are more than 100 plant-based chicken-nugget companies, many of them with products similar in taste and texture. To break out from the pack, Daring hired newlyweds Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker to take photos eating the faux nuggets while wearing lingerie. It was unclear whether the result — 1.2 million likes on Kardashian’s post; 5 million on a video Daring posted — was enough to goose sales. There’s simply too many brands struggling for space on supermarket shelves, and the rare chefs who adopt meatless products for their restaurants are reluctant to keep unpopular items on the menu. Consumers are ruthlessly weeding out the market while investors tread lightly now that money is more expensive than it’s been for a decade. “Capital was free almost for a long time and now it’s very, very expensive,” Mackay, Daring’s CEO, told Forbes. “We’re aware of the situation. We have to be as effective and efficient as possible.” Plant-based meats seem to fizzle before the trend ever really got going... “Plant-based dairy is much further ahead.”... It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Customers were supposed to embrace meatless meat products because of their taste and texture, but also because they were better for their bodies and for the environment than the real thing. Sales were supposed to catch fire. In the past decade, startups have raised a record amount of money for the food industry, and last year the category pulled in $4 billion, according to Pitchbook. There are an estimated 800 meatless meat startups globally. Investments in many of those startups are now being written off or revalued."
Big meat is gobbling up fake meat companies
Meat alternatives: life cycle assessment of most known meat substitutes - "Results showed the highest impacts for lab-grown meat and mycoprotein-based analogues (high demand for energy for medium cultivation), medium impacts for chicken (local feed), and dairy-based and gluten-based meat substitutes, and the lowest impact for insect-based and soy meal-based substitutes (by-products allocated). Alternative FU confirmed the worst performance of lab-grown and mycoprotein-based analogues. The best performing products were insect-based and soy meal-based substitutes and chicken. The other substitutes had medium level impacts. The results were very sensitive to the changes of FU. Midpoint impact category results were the same order of magnitude as a previously published work, although wide ranges of possible results and system boundaries made the comparison with literature data not reliable."
Fake meat might be worse for the environment than real meat. So much for that
Meat prices are up, but plant-based alternatives still cost more - "Fake meat has come a long way since July 2018, when A&W became the first national burger chain to add the Beyond Meat burger to its menu... Nearly four years later, plant-based analogues are booming with more options than ever in grocery store meat sections. Whatever the animal product — bacon, burgers, chicken nuggets, fish or sausages — there’s a meatless equivalent. The technology has advanced to the point where you may not even be able to tell them apart, at the grill, stove or table. Where you are likely to notice the difference, though, is on the price tag. Even accounting for rising meat prices, plant-based substitutes are on average 38 per cent more expensive than their animal counterparts... Turkey, likely due to its seasonality (the survey took place after Thanksgiving and Christmas), is the only category where the plant-based version was less expensive"
So much for promises of dropping prices. When no one wants this shit...
S’pore becomes first country to approve sale of lab-grown chicken - "approval to American food manufacturer Eat Just to start selling nuggets and snacks made of lab-grown, or cultured, chicken. Unlike more popular variants that use plant-based proteins to mimic the texture and taste of meat, such as the plant-based burger patties by American firm Impossible Foods, cultured chicken features meat grown from cell culture."
Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. - "Cultivated meat companies have repeatedly missed product launch deadlines... GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility... Gram for gram, animals are a wildly inefficient vehicle for producing edible protein (as advocates for cultured meat like to point out). Cattle consume roughly 25 calories of plant material for every calorie of edible protein they produce, according to some estimates. Even chickens, the most efficient form of livestock from a feed perspective, eat 9 to 10 calories of food for every calorie of edible protein produced... According to the Open Philanthropy report, a mature, scaled-up industry could eventually achieve a ratio of only three to four calories in for every calorie out, compared to the chicken’s 10 and the steer’s 25. That would still make cultured meat much more inefficient compared to just eating plants themselves; we’d dump two plates of pasta for every one we eat. And the cells themselves might still be fed on a diet of commodity grains, the cheapest and most environmentally destructive inputs available... But cultivated meat’s gains in feed efficiency give rise to new inefficiency—the need for intensive, sophisticated machinery, and lots of it... at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse... It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny... All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible... By GFI’s own admission, the challenges are serious—current costs are 100 to 10,000 times higher than commodity meat, according to the CE Delft analysts. Despite that forbidding premise, GFI’s TEA doggedly shows a path forward, dropping the cost of producing a kilogram of cultured meat from a current-day high estimate of over $22,000 to a goal of $5.66 by 2030. In one key way, though, the report’s authors appear to admit defeat: If the goal is to create a new generation of wildly profitable cultured meat companies, the economics of building full-scale facilities may never pan out. “The requirements for return on investment need to be set much lower than common practice in commercially motivated investments,” the authors write. In other words, the entities investing in this nascent industry’s growth should have very modest expectations about profit... If investor altruism proves to be in short supply, GFI makes clear that the remaining option is for “government bodies” and “non-profit funders” to shoulder the burden... “There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”... When cattle are processed at a slaughterhouse, workers will sometimes cut open a cow’s body and discover a fetus. Dairy cows are kept perpetually pregnant so that they can produce milk, and farms often overlook the animals’ status when they’re finally shipped out for slaughter. Once a living fetal calf is discovered inside a carcass, it’s too late for it to be born. Instead, a technician will be called in who can perform euthanasia and, from there, extract the fetus’s blood. The resulting substance, known as fetal bovine serum (FBS), amounts to a final gift for humanity. According to an article in the peer-reviewed online publication Bioprocessing Journal, FBS and other animal sera have led to the development of life-saving remedies like cell and gene therapies. It’s also used in some forms of animal cell culture, including the research and development of new vaccines. FBS would be a perfect ingredient to include in cultured meat growth media, because it contains key proteins and vitamins that cells need to maintain health and stability. In fact, it can be hard to make cells grow properly without FBS. “In many common culture media, the sole source of micronutrients is fetal bovine serum (FBS),” according to a 2013 article in the peer-reviewed journal BioMed Research International. For cultivated meat, though, FBS is anathema. Cultured animal protein can’t really be “meat without slaughter” if it’s dependent on an ingredient that’s intertwined with the current, grim realities of commodity beef production... companies are still struggling with an inherent, widely documented challenge: the cells’ tendency to limit their own growth. Like all living things, animal cells in culture excrete waste. These so-called catabolites, which include ammonia and lactate, are toxic and can slow cell growth even at low concentrations. As San Martin puts it, “they get inhibited by their own poo-poo.”... Renninger finds it “frustrating” to see so many resources going into cultured meat. “It is a zero-sum game, to a certain extent,” he said. Money we spend chasing cultured meat is money we can’t use on converting coal plants to biomass, or scaling solar and wind, or modernizing concrete and steel. There’s a reason that the U.S. government employs people like Humbird to do rigorous due diligence on attractive new ideas. When billions are spent on science that doesn’t come together, the biggest losers aren’t really the private companies and trade associations, or the class of professional investors who get rich on speculative tech. Instead, the public loses out—and we lose time we don’t have."
Keywords: meat grown in vats, vegan, vat grown meat, meat vats purity, vat meat contamination, vat meat
Major correlates of male height: A study of 105 countries - "The purpose of this study is to explore the main correlates of male height in 105 countries in Europe & overseas, Asia, North Africa and Oceania. Actual data on male height are compared with the average consumption of 28 protein sources (FAOSTAT, 1993–2009) and seven socioeconomic indicators (according to the World Bank, the CIA World Factbook and the United Nations). This comparison identified three fundamental types of diets based on rice, wheat and milk, respectively. The consumption of rice dominates in tropical Asia, where it is accompanied by very low total protein and energy intake, and one of the shortest statures in the world (∼162–168 cm). Wheat prevails in Muslim countries in North Africa and the Near East, which is where we also observe the highest plant protein consumption in the world and moderately tall statures that do not exceed 174 cm. In taller nations, the intake of protein and energy no longer fundamentally rises, but the consumption of plant proteins markedly decreases at the expense of animal proteins, especially those from dairy. Their highest consumption rates can be found in Northern and Central Europe, with the global peak of male height in the Netherlands (184 cm). In general, when only the complete data from 72 countries were considered, the consumption of protein from the five most correlated foods (r = 0.85) and the human development index (r = 0.84) are most strongly associated with tall statures. A notable finding is the low consumption of the most correlated proteins in Muslim oil superpowers and highly developed countries of East Asia, which could explain their lagging behind Europe in terms of physical stature."
This suggests that plant protein is inferior to animal protein for nutrition
Japanese man spends $15,700 on dog costume to fulfill lifelong dream of transforming into an animal - "To fulfill his lifelong dream of transforming into an animal, a Japanese man spent 2 million yen (approximately $15,709) on a realistic border collie costume"
Time to go to Pride. If the Furries are already there...
2022 | Pets or threats? Goldfish might be harmful for biodiversity - "Invasive species are one of the leading causes of global biodiversity loss, and the pet trade is responsible for a third of all aquatic invasive species. Pet owners releasing unwanted pets into the wild is a major problem. Whilst many believe this is a humane option, new research suggests that attempting to ‘save’ the life of a goldfish could in fact lead to catastrophic outcomes for native biodiversity.... “Our research suggests that goldfish pose a triple threat. Not only are they readily available, but they combine insatiable appetites with bold behaviour. While northern European climates are often a barrier to non-native species surviving in the wild, goldfish are known to be tolerant to such conditions, and could pose a real threat to native biodiversity in rivers and lakes, eating up the resources that other species depend on.""
Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported - "These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove... Los Angeles–based Second Sight provides a cautionary tale for bold entrepreneurs interested in brain tech. What happens when cutting-edge implants fail, or simply fade away like yesterday’s flip phones and Betamax? Even worse, what if the companies behind them go bust?"
Welcome to scam town - "BMWs, Porsches and mansions dot Chang Keng village in Anxi, where just a few years ago, farmers in one of China's poorest regions relied on tea leaves to eke a living. However, when tea prices crashed in 2011, they turned to a new business - phone scams, a fount of illicit wealth."
Cannabis replaces antibiotics as chicken farmers in Thailand's Lampang go organic - "A farming community in Lampang in northern Thailand has been feeding its chickens cannabis and claims this new feeding regime has improved the quality of meat and eggs. Ms Sirin Chaemthet, president of the Peth Lanna community enterprise, said on Saturday (June 11) that the experiment was conducted in cooperation with Chiang Mai University's Faculty of Agriculture... Upon consuming cannabis, the chickens developed higher immunity against disease and were able to withstand inclement weather... National Farmers Council president Prapat Panyachatrak warned that antibiotics in chicken meat and eggs harm consumers' health, such as declining immunity and allergies. He added that apart from ensuring consumers' safety, feeding chickens cannabis also helps boost the commercial value of chicken products."
How To Start A Periodic Table With Real Elements Collection - "Luciteria Science is pleased to offer our proprietary desk display of the Lucite acrylic periodic table with actual elements, designed to fit our specially manufactured, museum-quality pure element cubes and Lucite acrylic cube element samples. These make the elements less expensive and more accessible, safe, and exciting than ever before!"
The Illegal Ramen Vendors of Postwar Tokyo - "Foods rich in fat and strong flavors became known as “stamina food,” according to Professor George Solt, author of The Untold History of Ramen. Ramen was very different than the milder, seaweed-based noodle soups of traditional Japanese cuisine. Okumura Ayao, a Japanese food writer and professor of traditional Japanese food culture at Kobe Yamate University, once expressed his shock at trying ramen for the first time in 1953, imagining “himself growing bigger and stronger from eating this concoction.” The Americans also aggressively advertised the nutritional superiority of wheat and animal protein, endowing ramen with a nutritious reputation and a welcome change for a population weary of rationing. And in a failing economy, running a ramen yatai was one of the few opportunities where small business entrepreneurship was still possible. Gradually, ramen became associated with urban life, eaten by the working class huddled around a yatai in a bombed-out city."
Britain is in ruins thanks to the failed dogmas of our permanent Leftist elite - "Who governs Britain? It certainly isn’t Boris Johnson. You may support his Rwandan refugee policy, or you may loathe it. But the central promise of his Government was that such important decisions would be taken in the UK, with the ballot box the ultimate arbiter. The European Court of Human Rights’ decision to effectively block the Government from sending refugees to Rwanda thus symbolises the moral and practical implosion of his project. He was elected to take back control, to give a voice to the culturally conservative majority, to wrestle power from acronym-wielding experts, and yet is proving laughably ineffective at influencing, let alone directing, affairs of state. Even the Supreme Court agreed that there was no reason why the plane couldn’t take off – but then the judges in Strasbourg swept in, reminding Britain that it isn’t in charge. The Government knew this might happen, but took no measures to prepare, and I doubt it will really do anything meaningful about it now. That is why so many Tory voters have lost patience with Johnson: he is all talk, and no delivery. The Blob is naturally making the most of a weak Government that doesn’t seem keen to exercise power. Take education: ministers don’t believe in “decolonising” universities, so why is it happening? The Tories don’t think that girls should be banned from wearing skirts, so why are some schools imposing such absurd rules? How come the Education Secretary wasn’t even aware that his own bill contained provisions that would revoke the independence of free schools? Or take welfare: during Covid, the sanctions imposed on recipients who turn down jobs or miss meetings were suspended. The Government says that it wants to fully reintroduce conditionality, but so far this has not fully happened, which is one reason why the total number of people on out of work benefits is above 5 million at a time of extreme labour shortages. As to taxation, Treasury mandarins believe that it should go up, and that tax cuts today would be inflationary, and the Government simply acquiesces. Or inflation: the Bank of England isn’t being held accountable. Devolution, an ultimate Blairite project, doesn’t work as currently constituted, but keeps being extended by clueless Tories. Tony Blair was devastated by the referendum, but he is having the last laugh. We’ve ended up with a technical Brexit in which Britain is subservient to a permanent Left-wing, politico-managerial class. Many Tory MPs might as well be Labour MPs, and vice versa. Nothing has changed: Whitehall Blairites seized the power relinquished by Brussels’ social-democrats. More money is being spent on the NHS and the public sector than even Blair could have dreamt of; taxes have shot up far more quickly than under Labour. All of Gordon Brown’s extensions of the welfare state remain largely intact, and now social care is being nationalised, creating yet more dependents on state largesse. Command and control environmentalism pervades all policy, and price controls are back. The labour market is more regulated than ever. The Government’s debilitating inability to say anything intelligent on human rights sums up the predicament of Tory Britain. One of the big Left-wing untruths of the moment is that membership of the European Convention of Human Rights is necessary to enjoy human rights, and that without it we would turn into a totalitarian hell-hole. It is absurd – none of the non-European liberal democracies are members, and yet all protect human rights – but still the Left is winning. The ECHR was originally proposed by Churchill to enshrine rights and protect democracy across a Europe that had only just emerged from the horrors of fascism, genocide and the Second World War. It made sense, in the context of the time, for the likes of Germany, Italy and France to sign up, but Britain should have pursued its own path, just as America, Canada or Australia chose to rely on their own domestic rules and courts. Churchill didn’t realise how a well-intentioned document would be weaponised by a new generation of anti-democratic Left-wing activists. England had led the world on individual rights with the Magna Carta in 1215, Habeas Corpus in 1679 and the Bill of Rights in 1689, and the common law, the judiciary and the jury system were hugely effective at protecting the individual against the power of the executive. Relative to almost everybody else, we were a human rights success story... By the 1980s, the Left had become obsessed with the idea of granting the ECHR judges more power over an ever-broader conception of human rights. They wanted to build an international, technocratic class divorced from national accountability and from the common law tradition, and loved the activist nature of the Strasbourg court. By enshrining the ECHR into British law via the Human Rights Act of 1998, Blair helped cement his cultural putsch. Real rights violations by rogue states weren’t blocked – absurdly, Russia ratified the ECHR in 1998 and will only be properly kicked out in September – but the court dedicated itself to creating new rights out of thin air, deciding that prisoners should be allowed to vote. It extended its reach into overseas military occupied areas and war zones, and decreed that “whole life” sentences violate human rights unless they are “reducible”. The problem is that extricating ourselves from this madness would take great political skill and energy. The ECHR and the Council of Europe are separate from the EU, but the latter insisted on membership of the ECHR as part of the Withdrawal Agreement, and Blair baked ECHR membership into the Good Friday Agreement and the legislation that created Scottish devolution"
Undercover Journo Infiltrates British Far-Right, Gets Violently Attacked by Far-Left After Just 10 Minutes of Leafleting - "An undercover journalist with Channel 4 taking part in a documentary infiltrating the "far-right" in Britain ended up getting attacked by masked far-left extremists after just 10 minutes of leafleting while undercover in Rotherham. The scene was hilariously included in the show "The Enemy Within: The Far Right: Dispatches," which focuses on the Patriotic Alternative party in Britain... If you watched just the documentary's intro, you'd be led to believe it was Patriotic Alternative who carried out the attack. While they played footage from the attack, the narrator could be heard describing the show by saying that in this episode "we infiltrate a growing movement that's sparking clashes in the streets." The "clash" was sparked by left-wing extremists attacking them for leafleting. I must say I'm surprised Channel 4 included the embarrassing scene in their show. In another embarrassing scene, the documentary shows how one member of Patriotic Alternative had a photograph taken in the past with members of the banned far-right group National Action. One of the far-right figures can be seen sporting the logo of the Azov Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi group which the British government is currently arming to the teeth with billions of dollars in high-tech weaponry in order to fight Russia. Patriotic Alternative released a statement in response to the documentary on their website. They said they offered to do full recorded interviews to address all the claims in the documentary but their offer was rejected. "Hardcash Productions declined our offer for an interview stating that they do not want to interview the people they are making the documentary about""
Proof the "far right" is violent and a priority for the police to crush
Report: USPS improperly enabled workers who helped Clinton campaign - "A government investigation concluded that the United States Postal Service “improperly coordinated” with a postal workers union that supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The investigation, as documented in a report from the Office of Special Counsel, said the USPS granted employees union leave time off, at the request of the union, to do political activity – which OSC concluded was a “systematic violation” of a law regarding the political activity of federal employees. The report said the practice was longstanding, perhaps ranging as far back as the 1990s... the USPS’s actions during the 2016 campaign violated the Hatch Act, a 1939 law intended to keep federal employees from directly supporting candidates."
BTS' Billboard win to create economic effect worth W1,700,000,000,000: report - "An estimated 1.7 trillion won (US$1.43 billion) worth of economic effect is expected to be created by K-pop sensation BTS' conquest of the Billboard Hot 100 chart"
Fraudsters Cloned Company Director’s Voice In $35 Million Bank Heist, Police Find - "In early 2020, a bank manager in the Hong Kong received a call from a man whose voice he recognized—a director at a company with whom he’d spoken before. The director had good news: His company was about to make an acquisition, so he needed the bank to authorize some transfers to the tune of $35 million. A lawyer named Martin Zelner had been hired to coordinate the procedures and the bank manager could see in his inbox emails from the director and Zelner, confirming what money needed to move where. The bank manager, believing everything appeared legitimate, began making the transfers. What he didn’t know was that he’d been duped as part of an elaborate swindle, one in which fraudsters had used “deep voice” technology to clone the director’s speech... It’s only the second known case of fraudsters allegedly using voice-shaping tools to carry out a heist, but appears to have been far more successful than the first, in which fraudsters used the tech to impersonate a CEO of a U.K.-based energy firm in an attempt to steal $240,000 in 2019"
Woman pretended to be court secretary while her son posed as Chief Justice to cheat man of S$113,400 - "A woman posed as a court secretary while her son pretended to be the Chief Justice or a senior judge in order to cheat an elderly man of S$113,400. The 71-year-old man struggled to get the money, believing the duo's lies that he had to fork out the cash for legal expenses or face trouble with the courts. Devaki Gopal Muthu, 62, was sentenced to 20 months and two weeks' jail for her crime on Friday (Mar 4). She pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to cheat. Her son had previously been sentenced to 20 months' jail for his role in the scheme. The court heard that Devaki got to know the 71-year-old man, an insurance agent, through her then boyfriend. Her boyfriend was the man's customer and had bought an insurance plan from him. Devaki and her son, 38-year-old Rajeshvran Veerappan, conspired to cheat the insurance agent from 2016... On numerous occasions, Devaki's son also called the agent pretending to be prominent members of the judiciary, such as Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon and then-Principal District Judge Bala Reddy. He did so in order to induce the man to transfer money to him or his mother. Devaki would also call the man, pretending to be a court secretary named Sara Goh, asking for money transfers... The man, who has not been repaid, borrowed from friends and banks to make the transfers and struggled to make repayments. As a result, he became devastated and expressed suicidal thoughts, especially when it began affecting his relationships with his family members, the prosecutor said. His brother now refuses to speak to him and he can no longer visit his aging mother who lives with his brother. Court documents did not indicate how the offences came to light. The prosecutor on Friday asked for between 20 and 22 months' jail for Devaki, saying she had inordinately delayed court proceedings and wasted the court's time. A plead guilty hearing was set many times and the case even went to trial at one point, but Devaki claimed to have COVID-19 on the day of the trial... She stressed that Devaki has caused an inordinate delay by "vacillating" between which position to take regarding her plea... Defence lawyer Riyach Hussain said 20 months' jail was "sufficient". He said his client "fully appreciates what she has done", and this is her first brush with the law. She is "anxious and distressed" over the fact that she is facing a prison term, said the lawyer. He added that this "entire offence started as a result of her son's manipulation over her to assist him in procuring the monies through deception". He said the son was the mastermind while Devaki "merely followed instructions". In response, the prosecutor said the claim that Devaki's son was the mastermind was not borne out by the statement of facts. Even if this was so, Devaki went along with it and contributed to it. "Obviously she couldn't pretend to be Chief Justice Menon and District Judge Bala Reddy because she's a lady, but she pretended to be a court officer. Her culpability is not less than the co-accused""
Entomemeology | We can rebuild him | Facebook - "We can rebuild him *crab turned into cyborg*"
40-Year-Old Woman In India Slaps Teen After Being Called "Auntie", Police Break Them Up - "Crossing the ambiguous age threshold to be called “auntie” is often a hard pill to swallow for many women. But for the 40-year-old woman in Etah, India, it was so triggering that she had to start a fight... a 19-year-old girl was reportedly making her way through a crowded Babuganj Market in Etah, India when she casually said, Excuse me, auntie."
Making Blurry Faces Photorealistic Goes Only So Far - "One more trope of Hollywood spy movies has now taken at least a partial turn toward science-fact. You’ve seen it: To save the world, the secret agent occasionally needs a high-res picture of a human face recovered from a very blurry, grainy, or pixelated image. Now, artificial intelligence has delivered a partial (though probably ultimately unhelpful) basket of goods for that fictional spy. It’s only partial because Claude Shannon’s Theory of Information Entropy always gets the last laugh. As a new algorithm now demonstrates for anyone to see, an AI-generated photorealistic face “upsampled” from the low-res original probably looks very little like the person our hero is racing the clock to track down. There may even be no resemblance at all... “We kind of proved that you can’t do facial recognition from blurry images because there are so many possibilities. So zoom and enhance, beyond a certain threshold level, cannot possibly exist.”"
Data shows that half of 2019 donations to ActBlue came from untraceable 'unemployed' donors - "more than 4.7 million donations totaling more than $346 million passed through Act Blue to liberal causes and candidates this cycle from people claiming not to have a job (or potentially others using their names to donate)... The 47.4 percent of Act Blue donors claiming in 2019 not to have a job was shockingly higher than the 4% unemployment rate PLUS the percent of Americans who are retired, and begs the question how these unemployed people had $346 million to give to liberal causes."
Damn Republican dark money corrupting politics!
Meme - "Elon Musk's Neuralink chip will allow users stream music into their brain!"
"Hackers: *Rickrolling*"
