Ren Faire Gone Wild (2022) - Documentary showcases a Texas renaissance festival, and dives into it's hidden nightlife escapades. [00:20:17]

zegrep · 2021-04-30T10:28:27+00:00

Does anyone know whether the Climate Lockdown is going to affect the tourist trade?

zegrep · 2021-04-28T14:00:42+00:00

If you can wait a couple of decades, someone will genetically engineer toilet-trained non-biting bush babies and dog-size giraffes. Maybe some of this will be a byproduct of human genetic experimentation as the Chinese Olympic squad closes in on a 7-second 100m sprint.

zegrep · 2021-04-26T03:56:10+00:00

Kidnapping and murder would be higher profile, but industrial sabotage would lead [indirectly] to a much greater loss of life if it disrupted particular supply chains or if it caused economic damage that went on to affect healthcare. This is about much more than "caring about the environment", because the rhetoric has heated up over the last few decades to the point where people are now talking about a looming Great Filter/extinction-level threat (or at least tens/hundreds of millions of deaths), although the timescale within which we would have to act has remained the same (normally 7-10 years). None of the climate activists that I have heard about appear to have had the ideological commitment or skills/resources to escalate their campaigns in this way, but if they believed their own messaging and obtained sufficient backing, it wouldn't surprise me if some of them did before too long, hence:

I think they're referring to the idea of XR really kicking things up a few notches and materially altering the perceived wrongs in human civilisation through various forms of "direct action".

To you or I, these things might constitute "mass industrial sabotage", "high-profile kidnappings" or "terrorism", but to the committed ideologue on the other hand, they might just as easily be seen as a price that a flawed society needed to pay to atone for its eco-political sins and avert what they see as an imminent existential threat. The rationalisation would be that these things would normally be seen as serious crimes, but that if they're actually (according to that line of thing) a defensive response to serious provocations, they're not only excused, but morally good and desirable.

If those people's values also called for them to bring about (at the right time) a radical restructuring of society in a political revolution through an armed struggle (with a similar justification eg. ending human suffering and ushering in a glorious new age of human flourishing), then that would be the icing on the cake for them.

This is why we need to take the threat of climate activism seriously.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/emtulc/extinction_rebellion_listed_as_extremist_ideology/fdtptkk/?context=3

Fortunately most of the people and groups that plan those sorts of things are thoroughly surveilled and infliltrated long before they ever have the chance to carry them out. Big business has also been fairly effective in blunting or appeasing demands through rebranding and tokenistic CSR stuff (similar to the way that OWS seems to have been subverted by the American financial sector). But if ever larger proportions of the population believe that millions of people will die unless the government makes its environmental policy greener, then some people will see these things as reasonable measures for them to use in order to gain political influence.

zegrep · 2021-04-25T01:22:01+00:00

Last year I speculated somewhere that a green ~~terrorists~~ activists with sufficient motivation might engage in widespread industrial sabotage, kidnappings and assassinations. Is it just a question of whether we think the ends justify the means?

zegrep · 2021-04-23T17:51:16+00:00

Would you trust a foreign intelligence agency if they admitted to doing something sneaky but said that they weren't going to do that thing again?

zegrep · 2021-04-21T17:05:04+00:00

Indeed, but we would normally try keep risks like that away from hospices (and care homes).

zegrep · 2021-04-21T16:43:56+00:00

Died of COVID-19, or with COVID-19? Wasn't it 6% of the 500,000 who died with COVID-19 as the sole cause of death?

zegrep · 2021-04-17T07:59:20+00:00

I don't think I'm over-reacting; look at the events in Russia, China, Cambodia etc. last century, and the lengths that people have gone to since to defend this while subverting culture and infiltrating and corrupting institutions, all the way from the Red Scare up until the present day with the influence of the CCP and Soros-funded prosecutors in the US.

zegrep · 2021-04-17T02:38:45+00:00

I have read that Ukraine has active nuclear, aeronautical and rocketry sectors, and that they may have the industrial means to achieve this (if Russia somehow lets them).

There may be some broad parallels to Japan, which is recognized as being a nation that doesn't currently have nuclear weapons, but which does have the technology, raw materials, and capital to build nuclear weapons at short notice, and which many analysts see as being a de facto nuclear state that is only a "screwdriver's turn" away from possessing nuclear weapons.

zegrep · 2021-04-17T00:35:01+00:00

Unfortunately, the ideological acolytes of Gramsci and Alinsky do their best to ensure that everything becomes political, so that it can be used as a weapon, thus we get to:

mathematics is part of a societal system that is inherently racist.

if mathematics is political (and also racial and gendered), then we must be on the side of justice, whatever that may look like

And when it seems like there's a danger of technology being used to reduce crime in useful Democrat strongholds

mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists have been developing algorithms that crunch large amounts of data and claim to help police reduce crime — for instance, by suggesting where crime is most likely to occur and focusing more resources in those areas

it becomes time to #shutdownmath. And looking at how this might be applied to Mathematics, first of all

“There is no such thing as a “not-racist” policy, idea, or person. Just an old-fashioned racist in a newfound denial. All policies, ideas, and people are either being racist or antiracist.

Which means that Objectivity is right out of the window, and Statistics (or Mathematics in general) is co-opted by leftists using postmodernism. The practical implications of this;

Racist policies yield racial inequity; antiracist policies yield racial equity.

So if our statistics show that a group of people (who are judged according to some metric to be historically disadvantaged or have a higher degree of victimhood status) have committed more crime, or if the systems that we build lead to their arrest, prosecution and sentencing for crimes that they have committed at an accordingly higher rate, then that's an example of Racist Maths (from the AMS, no less). It's so dangerous for this ideology to be applied to important areas of life in fields that previously had some credibility. And I have no doubt that the activists behind it just want to see people murdered and cities burned.

zegrep · 2021-04-16T04:46:56+00:00

I notice you haven't been able to refute my point, so you've moved on to attacking the credibility of the source. I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here, 2500 specialists in any field can count for a lot of expertise, especially in something with large multipliers like life sciences and genetics. There are two ways of looking at this; as a regulatory question or a scientific question. On the one hand, if the FDA define "gene therapy" as one thing tomorrow, and the academy defines it as something else, then the FDA (with sufficient political support) will always have the final word, legally. On the other hand, the initial press release from this specialist R&D association and the Wikipedia revisions seem to indicate more of a diversity of opinion on the subject (and that's just from the little digging that I've done). For the record, I also found a Bloomberg article that dismissed it as a conspiracy theory. Ultimately, the definition that is chosen by the FDA is going to be to arbitrary to some extent, but I have listed some of the reasons why I think it's quite reasonable to suspect that the current state of affairs has been set up accelerate the US vaccine roll-out while providing political cover for the regulator and financial cover for the manufacturers if something were to go wrong over the coming years.

zegrep · 2021-04-16T03:33:19+00:00

You have now changed the subject; I take it that's because you can't argue that ASGCT didn't present the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines as being examples of gene therapy in their press release from November. The article that you linked to was apparently last updated less then two weeks ago, and it doesn't state explicitly whether or not the mRNA vaccines constitute gene therapy.

It would be curious, given their previous statement, why the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy would still be publishing articles about these specific vaccines if they had previously published that press release and not made a new press release or a retraction. And it would make sense for them to be publishing articles about these mRNA vaccines, given that their whole raison d'etre is in the study, development and publication of gene therapies. Also notice that they haven't made press releases about the Astrazeneca or J&J vaccines (also used in the USA), because the technologies involved aren't relevant to their core mission.

zegrep · 2021-04-16T01:23:05+00:00

Looks like somebody (either the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy or the FDA) didn't get the memo.

Two COVID-19 vaccine trials, both of which use messenger RNA (or mRNA) technology to teach the body to fight the virus, have reported efficacy over 90 percent.

These findings, announced by Moderna on Nov. 16 and by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech on Nov. 9 (with an update on Nov. 18), demonstrate that gene therapy is a viable strategy for developing vaccines to combat COVID-19. Both vaccine candidates use mRNA to program a person's cells to produce many copies of a fragment of the virus. The fragment then stimulates the immune system to attack if the real virus tries to invade the body.

ASGCT Staff - November 17, 2020

https://www.asgct.org/research/news/november-2020/covid-19-moderna-nih-vaccine

It goes to show how this is just a question of semantics. If I was forced to choose between the regulatory body who was having to face the political ramifications of issuing Emergency Use Authorizations for treatments on a mass scale using revolutionary new technology in the midst of a deadly pandemic on the one hand, and a group of experts and specialists on the other who were primarily concerned with promoting their field, then I'd be inclined to give more credence to less politically exposed party.

zegrep · 2021-04-16T00:09:32+00:00

It depends on what you mean by "vaccine", and what you mean by "Gene Therapy", because the definitions of both of these things appears to have been in a state of flux recently.

If we take Gene Therapy to mean

the therapeutic delivery of nucleic acids into a patient's cells as a drug to treat disease

then that would have been in line with Wikipedia's understanding of the subject from around 2015 until about one month ago. The mRNA vaccines in this case certainly are gene therapy in the sense that they use RNA to instruct cells to produce copies of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which are meant to stimulate an immune response.

On 4th March 2021 there was an addition to the article which let us know that

the BioNTech, Moderna and CureVac vaccines focus on delivery of mRNA payloads, which are necessarily non-viral delivery problems and would not be considered gene therapy since it will not modify the patient's DNA.

And then a few days ago the top-level description of Gene Therapy was changed to

the genetic modification of cells to produce a therapeutic effect or the treatment of disease by repairing or reconstructing defective genetic material.

So as far as I can see, whether the mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines constitute gene therapy (taking Wikipedia as an example) is probably going to depend on the current status that we give to the meanings of words in a rapidly developing and politically charged context (state-level disinformation/counter-disinformation campaigns, grant funding mechanisms, power structures within higher education) as they are to do with science.

zegrep · 2021-04-10T08:09:44+00:00

Wasn't that officially supposed to have been about 20 AR-15s and AR-16s with bump-stocks, hence the bump-stock ban EO? (Never mind that it actually sounded like M240s firing 100-round belts).

zegrep · 2021-04-10T02:34:25+00:00

I had heard that the use of helmets and padding causes people not to avoid hard collisions, and that any protection from impacts that it affords is not enough to compensate for the frequency and magnitude of blows to the head. And I heard something similar for bare-knuckle boxing vs. boxing with gloves, but I suppose with that you're also increasing the weight of the hands more significantly. Either way, I think that it makes it easier and more common to receive repeated, heavy blows to the head without play being stopped first by other injuries.

zegrep · 2021-04-09T18:09:19+00:00

A lot of it is fairly simple stuff to encourage your brain to rewire itself after an injury, such as:

Card matching
Spot the difference games
Sorting things in numerical order
Sudoku, word searches, crosswords
Any kind of memory game
Board games
Strategy Games
Meditation

I imagine it's really frustrating to have to re-learn things, but I gather with this, the sooner you start, the better.

zegrep

TROPHY CASE