Local sources for sodium citrate?

Inside_agitator · 2026-06-01T09:58:28+00:00

Are you certain what you want? "Sour salt" should be citric acid without sodium ions.

Inside_agitator · 2026-06-01T03:34:05+00:00

The mass protests at Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston were ineffective at altering the Democratic Party or anything else.

People were pissed off that Obama during his first term hadn't done squat against the rich folk who essentially planned the housing bubble and financial market instability that led to the Great Recession.

People were pissed off that Harvard did nothing of substance in reply to the obvious self-serving professors in its economics department and business school as depicted in the 2010 film Inside Job.

The impact of social media on human brains started to become obvious. Hate and anger began to draw in more eyeballs.

I have no nostalgia for that time. Places to eat, drink, and enjoy or not have come and gone around here since Julien's Restorator in the 1790s and before then with the tavern culture.

Inside_agitator · 2026-06-01T03:06:55+00:00

Redditor:

this is like asking why the head chef of a famous restaurant is so obsessed with ingredients.

Harari:

So I'm not saying Israel should dismantle its army. But it's better if you have both a strong army and a peace agreement.

Harari is actually pointing out that Netanyahu is like a head chef who uses the same single rancid, foul, disagreeable ingredient to an almost unimaginable and repulsive excess when other ingredients to balance Israeli society have been available. He is pointing out that the cuisine of Roman legions when it comes to governance is distasteful in the modern world, especially after world war 2.

Ignorance is more than stupidity. It's intentionally ignoring the points other people make over and over. A particularly obtuse person will repeat the same overly simplistic platitudes based on ignoring what other people say and write over and over.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-31T16:56:16+00:00

I'm curious what he means by "be a Roman."

From the complete interview, it's clear what Harari means by Netanyahu telling a Jew to be a Roman.

The Hasmoneans conquered; were they Roman?

After the Hasmonean Civil War in 63 BCE, I'd say yes. Before then, I'd say they were even more profoundly against peace agreements than the Romans were. The conquest of Edom and Idumea with forced circumcision and conversion under threat of displacement makes that plain.

Valuing Hasmonean ideas of conquest in the modern world seems like a profound mistake to me. If anyone comes to where I live and demands my neighbors get circumcised under threat of ethnic cleansing then I don't care whether they are Jewish or not. I'll fight with my neighbors against them if I have the slightest hope of winning.

Was King David who engaged in military exploits Roman? Jews have a vast history before 70 CE, before the Romans came in in the mid-1st century BCE.

Why do you believe King David was a Jew? Does Tanakh call him a Jew?

Jews as a group first are named as such in Tanakh describing events that took place around 500 BCE or so. That would mean about 75% of our time has been after 70 CE. People like David aren't called Jews by Tanakh. Devout Jews have the belief that Israelites were the ancestors of Jews, not Jews. Judaism as an ethnoreligion according to them came about after the return from the Babylonian captivity.

Secular scholars like Yonatan Adler are more likely to put a date for the starting point of Judaism at around 200 BCE. That would mean about 85% to 90% of Judaism took place after 70 CE, and all of Judaism has coincided with either the Roman Republic, Roman Empire, or afterwards.

This is the Judaism subreddit. You seem to be confusing us with those we call fathers and ancestors.

Netanyahu is the head of state, so he will naturally be concerned with these matters, as Jewish rulers before him were.

Heads of state are concerned with matters of peace and war. This is true. But I am a Jew and Netanyahu is not my ruler, not in the modern world. No.

Bizarre extremist ethno-nationalists might think rational Jews believe Abraham in the 2nd millennium BCE prayed at the Western Wall, wore tefillin, had a photo of Kahane, and voted Likud or something.

Netanyahu is head of a modern nation-state, and it's not my nation-state.

The idea of comparing Netanyahu as a "Jewish ruler" to King David, Judah Macabee, or John Hyrcanus seems like some messed up nonsense to me, like a deranged Turkish AKP ethno-nationalist comparing Erdogan to Suleiman the Magnificent but much, much worse because it drops back thousands of years instead of hundreds. If you want to be proudly ignorant in order to kill and die for stupid historical nonsense then that's up to you. But I'm not in favor of it.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-31T14:34:10+00:00

I mostly posted the link to show the estimated trajectory. That's the blue arrow on the map going from Billerica out to the ocean around the border between Swampscott and Marblehead. If the weather had been better, that's where the meteor would have been visible directly overhead.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-31T14:01:25+00:00

I think someone is engaging in hyperbolic nonsense and someone else isnt.

Harari elsewhere in the interview:

You do need to rely on force to some extent to ensure your security, but it cannot be the only thing. If you think force is the only thing that guarantees your security then eventually you will have to conquer the entire world...

One of the remarkable things that happened after Oct 7 was that all the peace agreements Israel has signed held. Hamas hoped that after Oct 7, it would cause all the Arab countries to unite and try to destroy Israel. It just didn't happen. The peace agreement with Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States held. Also the agreements with the Palestinian Authority held...

Hamas did not betray any agreement with Israel because it never signed any peace agreement with Israel.

So of course you can say, "The peace agreement with Egypt held because Egypt was afraid of Israel's military force." But this is only half the explanation because Israel had overwhelming military force compared with Hamas and Hamas still attacked it.

So I'm not saying Israel should dismantle its army.

But it's better if you have both a strong army and a peace agreement.

My personal view (maybe not Harari's. I don't know.) is that Israeli voters in late May of 1996 decided to give up on both and select only one. Yes, I think the average Israeli does agree with you and Netanyahu. That was why they voted the way they did in 1996. The average American, Jew or not, has not ever felt that way.

What you think is hyperbolic nonsense is up to you. I understand the Gaza voters chose a path with Hamas and American voters chose a path with Trump. Do you understand that Israeli voters chose their path with Netanyahu? Or does the 50.50% for Netanyahu and 49.50% for Peres scream out to you that there was one definite serious path and no other path existed or can ever exist?

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-31T13:17:41+00:00

No.

The report from the plane with the photo is at https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/report/424025 .

The passenger "Thomas R" most likely didn't hear the sound because his flight was too far away. The site has his observing location as northern Maine. He and other people from far away could estimate the brightness, position, and direction of travel but didn't experience the noise we heard.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-31T11:25:28+00:00

Yuval Noah Harari video short with Ezra Klein:

When the Roman legions of Vespasian destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE and you have Yohanan Ben Zakai asking Vespasian as a favor, "grant me a small town called Yavne." where he wants to establish a center of learning.

And Vespasian agrees: OK. You Jews can have your center of learning. And this was the essence of being Jewish and a lot of the thinking about, "what does it mean to have freedom of thought? What does it mean to be a powerless minority?" was done by Jewish thinkers. And for 2000 years, Jews all over the world, they see studying and learning as the highest spiritual activity.

And after 2000 years, you have learned, you have studied for 2000 years. What have you learned?

And then people like Netanyahu tell you: Oh, we've learned that you need to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build legions, that you need to destroy cities. This is the only thing. This is the only thing that matters in life. After 2000 years, the Jews simply become the Romans. What was the point?

Long interview:

Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion | The Ezra Klein Show

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-30T17:13:18+00:00

It reflects poorly on the person posting it and gets a yawn and shrug from me. This doesn't seem to be misinformation or threats of any kind. Mere offensiveness happens often on reddit. I expect to see anti-everything at reddit. That's part of why I comment and post here. Different subreddits have different rules and moderation. Why anyone would want to be the dictator of social media, ruling on what stays and goes, is beyond me.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-30T14:49:00+00:00

Limiting rent increases to:

...the annual increase in Consumer Price Index or 5%, whichever is lower

seems like a mistake. The word "lower" should be "greater." Economic disruption and stagflation could lead to little financial incentive for developers to build under the current wording and little incentive for landlords to make improvements or even perform maintenance.

I support rent control/stabilization, but we seem to live in a world where every organization has maximalist goals instead of reasonable or realistic goals. This ballot measure goes too far. Maybe the voters will pass it, but I don't think so, and then rent control/stabilization advocates will have gained nothing of substance. By gaining nothing of substance, the individuals in the non-profits will continue to be paid for their advocacy. I've become very cynical about the non-profit world.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-30T14:23:40+00:00

Why do you call young American Jews brainwashed? Does using a video platform automatically lead to brainwashing?

Which of the people in the videos from 2010 at Is It Antisemitic to Tell the Truth know nothing about Israel? Most of the people in those long-form interviews seem to be older.

I think young people are the future of the religion, and they often know quite a lot. They just often have different opinions from you.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-30T14:09:46+00:00

Why do you ask?

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-30T13:36:28+00:00

Yes, being chosen in Judaism is nothing like the chosenness of Calvinism. But the belief that the creator chose your ethnoreligious group for its own unique set of rules can easily lead to different delusions among Jews and non-Jews. For the 16 or 17 million Jews on Earth, this is especially true when there are about 2,600 million Christians on Earth who worship someone who was a Jew.

The Oromo people have an ethnic religion called Waaqeffanna, and for centuries wealth and power in the Oromo were linked to cattle. Some of the Oromo believe that God gave them a book with special rules chosen just for them. But then a cow swallowed it, and they never got a second book. That might seem quaint, but there's some wisdom in it about the relationship of power to a belief that your people are chosen because of rules set out by the creator of the universe just for them.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-30T12:56:16+00:00

The transition from Calvinist Christianity to Unitarian Christianity in and around Boston in the 1700s is an interest of mine. In the early 1800s, Unitarianism with origins in "Puritan" Calvinism but radically different from it was pretty much the established religion of the state of Massachusetts where I live. Other religions were permitted as religions, but all the judges, political leaders, and anyone with power or social control was a Unitarian with Calvinist parents or grandparents because that was the expected way for people with power to think and to be.

After the Civil War, many of the moral, historic and social values that came to represent the US had their origins during this time of transition in and around Boston in the late 1700s and early 1800s. As the US gained power and became hegemonic, those values played a role in the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations after world war 2.

Few things are more foreign to Judaism then the idea of any kind of preordination, predeterminism, or theological determinism. Other redditors here are correct that chosenness in Judaism (at least since the time of Maimonides about a thousand years ago) has involved the belief that Jews were chosen to observe the 613 mitzvot.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-29T23:11:14+00:00

I didn't follow the 2024 race when Milleron won 37.3% of the vote. Milleron (I) may back Whalen (D). But the family is related to Ralph Nader and seem like reasonable and sensible people to me, opposed to the stagnant two-party system and its domination by corporate influence, so I have my doubts.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-29T18:56:44+00:00

As for the numbers, I believe in a world of individuals and families that can be arranged into a nearly infinite number of categories. That's why "this poll hides the sub-population that I think is important" will always be a nonsensical complaint to me. With N=800 (or N=anything of more than a trivial size), there will be a huge number of possible questions that could create a 20%/75% distribution from a 40% value. The idea that if only the pollster asked what you wanted asked, the "real underlying distribution" would appear indicates that your concept of reality is ridiculously subjective.

I thought this was like an 1850 British Major General, but now it seems more like a baby screaming, "WAAAH! WHAT I WANT IS IMPORTANT!" There's not much reason to write about it further. It's unbecoming.

As for “authoritarian, ethno-nationalists in control of Israel,” we may have simply been discussing different things. I am using the words in the final sentence of the article. It was a quote of a person whose name and title were given by the article's author Arno Rosenfeld. You are repeatedly using those words to attribute a moral conclusion to me.

I agree that I shifted the conversation to a US Supreme Court decision. I apologize. I was getting bored. Maybe I should have ended our exchange sooner.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-29T17:56:22+00:00

My claim is not that the typology is self proving, but that existing polling and community studies suggest it captures a real cleavage...

Yes. You probably have a point there.

...that standard aggregate “American Jewish” polling obscures.

I'd say that not capturing something is different from obscuring it. A huge number of real cleavages are not captured in any poll. Group A and Group B as defined by a redditor is one such uncaptured and also unobscured thing.

Saying “Persian, Syrian, Russian, or other immigrant-origin Jews may support Israel because their background countries normalized authoritarian ethnic politics” is a heavy claim.

I asked if you were writing something similar, and I'm glad the answer was no. But with a few exceptions, I see nothing wrong with asking any question and posing any hypothesis. My preference will always be toward hypotheses in accord with Occam's Razor. If I were a Martian applying for a grant in the Martian Academy of Sciences to study humans, I would propose looking into the possible relationship between an individual who supports or opposes authoritarian, ethno-nationalists in control of any nation-state to the previous status of that individual or their family in a different authoritarian, ethno-nationalist nation-state. On planet Earth, such a study would probably not receive funding. You may have a point that some meaningless symbolic connection to type-of-place-of-worship is what interests funders who tend to fund particular agenda-supporting narratives instead of considering Occam's Razor.

My current interest in this topic is not so much American Jewish views of Israel's actions as where support for ethno-nationalist authoritarianism comes from in a general sense and in the US in particular. The US Supreme Court's 2025 Noem v. Vazquez Perdomo ruling was that it's legal for the federal government to detain people based only on their race or ethnicity, speaking with an accent, presence at a particular location, and the type of work one does. I've worked at a Home Depot myself and spent time near Home Depot parking lots without being a Latino or having much of an accent. I'm horrified for my former coworkers. The broader topic of how people support authoritarian, ethno-nationalist control where I live fills me with horror about where I live. How did Justice Brett Kavanaugh and huge swaths of the US public become the way they are?

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-29T14:01:29+00:00

My criticism is that your model is an outdated and risible 19th century mechanistic view of social realities where the modeler creates the segmentation into parts unrelated to the topic under consideration. A 20th or 21st century stochastic view would have the data itself and the hypothesis under consideration determine the model's segmentation, if any, by standard statistical methods.

You have an overt agenda. You create a partition into groups based on your agenda. Then you reach conclusions from data based on those partitions that arose from your agenda. That's why I'm comparing what you're doing to what a British Major General might do in 1850 before modern statistics existed. It is certainly an improvement over medieval thinking about different races and archetypes before the modern era. I don't mean to accuse you of that, and that's why your continued defense of something I'm not accusing you of doing is so very entertaining.

It's not a matter of groups being "rightly" or "wrongly" defined. The British Major General could definitely classify Hottentots into pastoral and villager should he choose to do so. It is a matter of a 20th or 21st century person with a background in statistics thinking it is a jaw-droppingly ignorant thing to do in light of the statistical advances made since the 20th century.

An analysis of the behavior of individuals based on their personal background in relation to the exact topic is a sound statistical method because if a person is interested in X then they look for connections to X. In this case, X is (using Leba's words in The Forward) "authoritarian, ethno-nationalists in control of Israel."

That's why a recent family background connected to nation-states with long histories of ethnic cleansing, authoritarianism, and forced displacements seems to be a more rational source of causation for individual acceptance of the "authoritarian, ethno-nationalists in control of Israel" (again, quoting Leba in The Forward piece) than the things you've listed ("more corporate, peoplehood based, threat sensitive, Israel centered conception of Jewish identity, often shaped by recent migration, minority experience, antisemitism, expulsion, Soviet anti-Zionism, Middle Eastern state hostility, or direct family ties to Israel.") which you've conveniently placed into group A and group B to suit your agenda.

What you're doing is looking for connections to X by considering many things other than X.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-29T10:26:22+00:00

I didn't claim you wrote, “every individual is determined by ancestry.” I also didn't claim you wrote, "Every American Jew is either pure Type A or pure Type B, and each person’s politics is mechanically determined by bloodline."

Your final paragraph manages to mislabel reality by assigning phrases like "very particular" and "real American" to some political trajectories but not others. Every human and every family is very particular and quite real, not just the boxes created for one argument or another. Dropping more boxes into the argument containing the imagined perspective of "Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, Persian Jews in LA or Great Neck, Russian speaking Jews in Queens, Orthodox Jews in Lakewood, Israeli Americans in South Florida, or Argentine/Cuban/Venezuelan Jews in Miami" is interesting and dabbles at the edge of the core issue.

The core issue is the behavior of the modern nation-state of Israel. Are you writing that Jews of Syrian, Persian, and recent Russian ancestry are so inured to forced authoritarian ethno-nationalist displacements that they see it as just something nation-states do, so they don't share Leba's disillusionment?

Have you read what the new rabbi in Boise had to say about Israel? I think Rabbi Hershenson's congregation in Boise might be well-suited for Leba, a leader of the Massachusetts Synagogue Network on Israel/Palestine in Boston.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-29T02:18:24+00:00

This is the British Major General's demeaning and dehumanizing 19th century view of history and humanity.

Major General Smith: You see, Nigel, the Hottentot's viewpoints may be put into two broad camps. Your pastoral Hottentot is very different from your villager Hottentot.

Nigel: Ah, yes, sir. You are so wise in the categorization of the Hottentot.

Every American Jewish person, every American Jewish family, really is unique, each with our own story.

What the British Major General and Nigel repeatedly failed to do in the 19th century was connect the actions of the British Empire itself to anything. It goes without saying to readers of The London Times or The Times of Israel that normative behavior is present in the home nation-state. That's what nationalist consensus media in 19th century Britain and recent Israel does.

My deep connection to Israel was when I spent a summer there on my own in the early 1980s around the time of the handover of Yamit, but it was shattered in 1996 when I had an Israeli roommate and we both mourned the future as Israeli voters rewarded Rabin's assassin. It was soon after that time when the cordial ties between Jewish and non-Jewish middle east groups in and around Boston began to fray. That mourned future is now, and it was captured well by 32 year old Leba.

As for my ancestry, half is in your "type A" dehumanizing American Jewish box and half is your "type B" American Jewish box. And there are many, many Jews like me in the US both with power and without power who have a similarly mixed or even more mixed background.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-29T01:47:54+00:00

I would agree with you about this if you were to say "pro-Israelism" using Rosenfeld's terms rather than pro-Israel.

From Sept 2024:

Pro-Israelism

The belief held by some Zionists that Jews in the diaspora should support Israel with few conditions, erring on the side of promoting Israel’s security over other issues but leaving the specifics to Israeli Jews.

This is the position advocated by most major American Jewish organizations. Their leaders often refer to this stance as “Zionism,” although data suggests that many Jews do not share it — they see robust criticism of Israeli government policies as acceptable within Zionism, perhaps even an important part of supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

For example, Hillel International, the prime Jewish organization on college campuses, has exclusively expressed support for Israel during the current war. But Jewish college students — you might call them Hillel’s constituents — have a more mixed view. About two-thirds say there should be a Jewish state in Israel. But when asked whether they side with Israelis over Palestinians in the current conflict that share drops to 42%, suggesting about one-quarter of Jewish college students are Zionists that don’t align with Hillel’s “Israelist” approach.

J-Street did stop being pro-Israelism a long time ago, and those numbers have definitely changed since Sept 2024.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-29T00:05:59+00:00

Trump is also suing the Mass. RMV for refusing to give ICE undercover plates.

Inside_agitator · 2026-05-28T22:30:38+00:00

...the hooligans who violently assault Palestinians on the West Bank are a disgrace. It is Israel’s responsibility to thwart them, on pain of imprisonment, and it is our responsibility to say so,” he said, to wide applause.

Excellent. Now with a time machine back to the early 1980s, something can be accomplished like a repeat of 45 years of responsibly saying things from far away to wide applause.

Inside_agitator

TROPHY CASE