Wednesday: Hili dialogue

November 30, 2022 • 6:45 am

Greetings! It’s a Hump Day again (“Ngày bướu” in Vietnamese): Wednesday, November 30, 2022. Tomorrow it will be December. But today is National Mousse Day. Here’s a chocolate moose:

It’s also National Personal Space Day, Choose Women Wednesday (celebrating empowering women in business), National Mason Jar Day (celebrating the day John Landis Mason patented the jar in 1858), National Methamphetamine Awareness Day (a good day to start watching “Breaking Bad”), and, in Scotland, Saint Andrew’s Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the November 30 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The railway workers’ unions have been fruitlessly negotiating with railroad management for two years, and a strike had become imminent. Now, according to Nancy Pelosi, Congress is set to to pass a bill that will avert a potentially disastrous strike (think supply chain) but by giving the unions a lot of what they want. And yes, Congress can do this:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said that House lawmakers will take up legislation on Wednesday to stop a nationwide strike by railroad workers, saying Congress needs to intervene to prevent devastating job losses.

In a press conference, Mrs. Pelosi said that the House will aim to quickly pass legislation that accepts the original labor union agreement negotiated by Biden administration officials plus additional railway worker benefits added from subsequent negotiations.

“I don’t like going against the ability of unions to strike, but weighing the equities, we must avoid a strike. Jobs will be lost, even union jobs will be lost, water will not be safe, product will not be going to market,” she said Tuesday after meeting with President Biden and congressional leaders of both parties at the White House. “That must be avoided.”

. . .Under the Railway Labor Act, Congress can make both sides accept an agreement that their members have voted down. Lawmakers also can order negotiations to continue and delay the strike deadline for a certain period, or they can send the dispute to outside arbitrators.

Any House-approved legislation would also need passage in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said at Tuesday’s press conference that he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) have agreed to work together quickly for the legislation to pass the Senate.

The unions don’t like it (they wanted the issue to play out normally), and neither do some Republicans and Democrats in the House. But when push comes to shove, the Democrats will fall into line, and the bill will also pass the Senate given that both Chuck Schumer and Mitch “Tortuga” McConnell have said they’ll work together to ensure passage. Bipartisanship in the cause of union-busting!

*Here’s bipartisanship to protect LGBTQ rights. The Senate voted yesterday to legalize same-sex marriage, which is already legal countrywide, but needed a law to protect it from the dark intentions of Clarence Thomas, who alluded in the abortion-bill hearings to gay rights being in danger as well. And the vote was bipartisan: 61-36 to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act:

The 61-to-36 vote put the bill on track to become law in the final weeks before Republicans assume the majority in the House of Representatives at the start of the new Congress in January. It marked one of the final major legislative achievements for Democrats before Republicans shift the focus in the House to conducting investigations of President Biden’s administration and family members.

The bill must now win final approval by the House in a vote expected as soon as next week, which would clear it for Mr. Biden, who said he looked forward to signing it alongside the bipartisan coalition that helped shepherd it through the Senate.

In a statement, the president said the vote reaffirmed “a fundamental truth: Love is love, and Americans should have the right to marry the person they love.”

There was little question that the bill’s embrace in the Senate, where proponents had a breakthrough this month in drawing a dozen Republican supporters and overcoming a filibuster, gave it the momentum required to become law.

Amen!

One kicker, though:

The bill would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex couples. It prohibits states from denying the validity of an out-of-state marriage based on sex, race or ethnicity. But in a condition that Republican backers insisted upon, it would guarantee that religious organizations would not be required to provide any goods or services for the celebration of any marriage, and could not lose tax-exempt status or other benefits for refusing to recognize same-sex unions.

No more gay wedding cakes in the South. . . . .

*Here are the World Cup results from yesterday (see below for more0:

In the ideologically big match, the US beat Iran by just one goal (at the cost of a valuable player), but now the Iranians are out and must go home, and right into Evin Prison. Seriously, though, will they face punishment for their tiny show of resistance to the regime?

The job for the United States soccer team was simple, really: Win.

The stakes and the stage and the politics all made things harder going in to their game against Iran on Tuesday night at the World Cup. The own goal by their own federation’s social media team, the Iranians’ great umbrage at the perceived insult to their flag, the chatter and the threats and the intrigue all added to the spice of the matchup. But the task, at its heart, left no room for nuance at all: If United States wanted to keep playing in this tournament, it had to beat Iran on Tuesday night.

And so it did.

The price of victory may be a high one: Christian Pulisic, perhaps the Americans’ brightest star and the scorer of its only goal in a 1-0 victory, was forced from the game at halftime with an abdominal injury sustained when he crashed into Iran’s goalkeeper finishing his goal.

Highlights of that game: The sole U.S. goal, a nice one, is at 1:20. There’s another U.S. goal that was nullified by an offside call. Had this game tied, the U.S. would have been out of the Cup.

and

England won Group B after a 3-0 victory over Wales, which was eliminated. The U.S. needed a win and nothing less against Iran, and it got it, by a 1-0 score. The U.S. will face the Netherlands in the round of 16 on Saturday while England will meet Senegal on Sunday.

Here are the England/Wales highlights. England advances to the knockout round; Wales goes home after the rout:

Four years after missing the World Cup completely, the Netherlands beat Qatar 2-0 on Tuesday at Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, Qatar, to top Group A and advance to the knockout stage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Peep! Peep! Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! It’s all over at Al Bayt Stadium, where the Netherlands have won with the bare minimum of fuss. They advance to the last 16 of the tournament while Qatar become the first host nation in World Cup history to go out of their own tournament without winning a single point.

and:

The sight of a couple of Ecuador players slumped face-down on the turf sobbing uncontrollably tells you all you need to know. Senegal have held on to beat the South American side 2-1 and advance to the Round of 16, where they will face England if Gareth Southgate’s side finish top of Group B tonight.

Oy!

*Dog kills man: a report from the Torygraph via reader Christopher. This is a weird report out of Turkey. It’s not dog bites man, but dog KILLS man.

A man in Turkey has been reportedly shot and killed by his own dog on a hunting trip after the pet stepped on the trigger of his shotgun.

Ozgur Gevrekogulu, 32, died in Turkey’s Black Sea province of Samsun last weekend.

Local police originally took one of his hunting companions into custody, according to the Anadolu news agency.

Mr Gevrekoglu was loading equipment into the boot of his car after the trip to the Kizlan Plateau when his dog jumped on the back of a friend, stepping on the trigger of a shotgun, the Cumhuriyet newspaper reported on Sunday.

The 32-year-old hunter, who reportedly became a father just two weeks earlier, died from a bullet wound in his stomach before paramedics arrived at the scene.

This is the deceased with a dog, but probably not the killer dog. They should have taken the d*g into custody instead of one of Gevrekogulu’s hunting companions.  But it’s really sad: he had a newborn kid.

*John McWhorter’s NYT column this week (is he producing just one a week now?) is called “Harvard, Herschel Walker, and ‘Tokenism‘”, and he sees both Walker’s candidacy and affirmatvie action as “tokenism”: the advancement of a black person because of skin color rather than merit. A few quotes:

Our theoretically enlightened idea these days is that using skin color as a major, and often decisive, factor in job hiring and school admissions is to be on the side of the angels. We euphemize this as being about the value of diverseness and people’s life experiences. This happened when we — by which I mean specifically but not exclusively Black people — shifted from demanding that we be allowed to show our best to demanding that the standards be changed for us.

. . . When the Supreme Court outlaws affirmative action in higher education admissions, as it almost certainly will, it will eliminate a decades-long program of tokenism. I’ve written that I support socioeconomic preferences and that I understand why racial ones were necessary for a generation or so. But for those who have a hard time getting past the idea that it’s eternally unfair to subject nonwhite students to equal competition unless they are from Asia, I suggest a mental exercise: Whenever you think or talk about racial preferences, substitute “racial tokenism.”

As for Walker, McWhorter does not go gentle:

At the same time, Republicans, despite generally deriding affirmative action and tokenism as leftist sins, are reveling in tokenism in supporting Walker’s run for Senate and are actually pretending to take him seriously. But to revile lowering standards on the basis of race requires reviling Walker’s very candidacy; to have an instinctive revulsion against tokenism requires the same.

There’s no point in my listing Walker’s copious ethical lapses. Terrible people can occasionally be good leaders. With him, the principal issue is his utter lack of qualification for the office. Walker in the Senate would be like Buddy Hackett in the United Nations. It is true that Republicans have also offered some less than admirably qualified white people for high office. But George W. Bush was one thing, with his “working hard to put food on your family.” Walker’s smilingly sheepish third-grade nonsense in response to even basic questions about the issues of the day is another.

I’m with McWhorter on both socioeconomic rather than racial affirmative action, and of course anybody with more than a handful of neurons knows what an idiot Walker is. If he wins, I will be both upset and even angrier at Republicans, who put this mushbrain up for election.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s pissed off because she didn’t get the right noms Look at that face! I had to make it my profile picture on Twitter.

Hili: You bought the cheap cat food again.
A: They had only this one in the shop.
Hili: Order it on the Internet.
In Polish:
Hili: Znowu kupiłeś tanią karmę.
Ja; Innej w sklepie nie było.
Hili: Zamów przez Internet.

***************

A multiple groaner from David:

From Malcolm: a pas de deux with a border collie:

More Revenge from a Wronged Woman:

From Masih: Three videos in one:

From Barry, who says this is “uncalled for.” Indeed, octopuses are turning out to be nasty pieces of work, even throwing sand at each other:

From Simon. I have no idea why it ended the way it does:

A groaner from Malcolm:

A tweet from Ron, who notes,

“Here’s a new clue for the prevalence of religiosity. It turns out to be inversely correlated to the distance from the Pacific Ocean (I calculated Pearson’s r = -0.796). Who would have guessed that?”

From Luana; a paper that’s worth reading by Buss and von Hippel, which you can find here. It’s curious but not surprising that these people accept Darwinian evolution of the body, but not of the mind (aka evolutionary psychology).   It explains the widespread rejection of evolutionary psychology as a whole.

From the Auschwitz Memorial. I’m guessing that husband and wife were separated before they were gassed, so they didn’t even get to be together as they died.

Tweets from Matthew.  First, another “notice the errors” picture. The answer is in the thread (enlarge photo first). Find all 12!

The first biography of Darwin, published in 1882, very soon after his death, is now online:

39 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Again I say, it’s one thing—don’t get me wrong, an important thing—to get angry at the odious, hypocritical Republican politicians, but another, more important thing to get angry at those who vote for the likes of Walker. I don’t know how we address the willful ignorance and intentional cruelty of the denizens of MAGA World, but I think antitheism has to be in the remedy in some proportion.

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    1. One of the key elements that doesn’t seem to come across in the reporting is that the party leaders, and his supporters, know what Walker is, and is not. The intent is to continue mocking stable government, and, if possible, disrupt and dismantle it. He is not where he is because they don’t understand, but because they do.

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    2. Are you going to disenfranchise people for making bad voting choices, Stephen? I agree that there are altogether too many bad voters. Now it’s just a case of all agreeing which ones, and getting to work.

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      1. Disenfranchisement is not in my mind at all, Leslie. I’m thinking in the long term. There’s really nothing we can do to “deconvert” the current worshippers of the Orange God-King, but we can, by example and steadfast argument, continue to demonstrate the greater benefits of no belief and no religion, too.😉

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    3. Both candidates in this race seem fairly odious. I understand how one might be very critical of someone voting for some random pedophile when their opponent is Thomas Jefferson, but this is not that race.
      The reason this race matters outside of Georgia is because it affects the larger power struggle between the two main parties, but of course it it supposed to be Georgia voters voting for the candidate that best represents their interests, or against the one who seems worst.
      I would personally find it very hard to vote for someone who calls Israel an “apartheid state”. If a voter had strong reservations about voting for someone who has a history of at least the accusation of abusing women, they might need to sit this one out entirely. Additionally, both candidates have strong religious views that most of us here disagree with.

      But it is worrying to hear anyone want to direct real anger towards people who chose to vote differently than they would prefer, with the assumption that they would be doing it out of ignorance or intentional cruelty.

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  3. And the vote was bipartisan: 61-36 to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act …

    Meaning that even at this late date, seven and a half years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell, 72% of Senate Republicans (and a slightly higher percentage of House Republicans, in the vote on the House version of the Respect for Marriage Act last July) refused to endorse even this anodyne measure ensuring recognition for same-sex marriages.

    Chalk it up to the poisonous effect of religion.

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    2. It is the poisonous effect of religion in two respects. The first is that many of the Republicans are deeply religious themselves. The second is that in their districts the Party base is religious meaning that it would be bad for their political future to go against it.

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      1. But isn’t that how democracy is supposed to work? If you represent a district where people feel strongly about something, aren’t you supposed to vote that way, on pain of being defeated? At least your representatives can represent their constituents. Ours are told by their party leaders how to vote….and it is very bad for their political futures to go against orders. American voters might eventually forgive a principled but unpopular stand by their rep come election time. Canadian party leaders never do: instant expulsion from the party is the rule and the hapless renegade won’t be allowed to run with the party in the next election.

        Whether the voters feel the way they do because of religion is completely beside the point. It is none of your business why a voter wants his rep to vote against gay marriage.

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        1. Senators and congressmen take an oath to uphold the US constitution, not to vote the whims of their constituents. Moreover, given that 71% of the US public supports keeping same-sex marriage legal, and given that senators from several states voted on different sides of the issue, it seems likely that some congresscritters from both houses were either voting their own religious preferences or voting the preferences of activists, lobbyists, and big-dollar donors, rather than that of their rank-and-file constituents.

          That’s often how US democracy works in practice, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it the beau idéal of how US democracy is supposed to work.

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          1. Congresspeople must be in a double bind then. If they vote against a trendy progressive bill put together to do an end run around a revisit of Obergefell they, by the fact itself you imply, are abrogating the Constitution. If they vote for it, they risk being defeated (particularly in a primary) by voters who don’t see the Constitutional obligation quite the same way you do.

            Weekly churchgoers remain, unsurprisingly, the holdouts in accepting gay marriage. The 71% national figure is meaningless if your constituency includes a lot of weekly churchgoers and, yes, activists and donors, who oppose it and will mobilize the vote against the anti-Christ instead of just letting it slide. As I say, the calculus is much more difficult for American congresspeople than for Canadian members of Parliament. Our lot just has to toe the party line no matter what. Thinking about it only makes their heads hurt.

          2. … the calculus is much more difficult for American congresspeople than for Canadian members of Parliament. Our lot just has to toe the party line no matter what.

            Guess you never find any Profiles in Courage in the Canadian parliament, huh, Leslie?

          3. Quite right, no, you don’t, Ken. I will certainly concede that fact as what should be the last entry in this to-and-fro, unless you claim the last word. If a Canadian politician ever thought there was a time and a place for a stand on principle against whatever the leader’s policy is this week, s/he’s in the wrong line of work. Without Cabinet solidarity and caucus discipline among back-benchers, a government could fall and force an election, which, horror of horrors, might result in the Opposition winning enough seats to form the government. It’s not like a struggle for “control of the Senate” as a choker or enabler of legislation and judicial appointments etc. At stake is the power to govern as a time-limited (and Supreme Court-limited) dictatorship from the Prime Minister’s Office. An MP who didn’t play the game that way and voted against his Prime Minister (or threatened to unless a bill was amended) would be seen as too dense to figure out what he was there for. It would be like shooting the puck into your own net in the Stanley Cup Final just because the coach wasn’t giving you enough ice time.

            Everyone who goes into Canadian politics to do honest good must know that the only way to get anything done is to be the government, and that means doing everything you are asked to help the team win elections.

          4. > Senators and congressmen take an oath to uphold the US constitution,
            > not to vote the whims of their constituents.

            Presidents do, too. I wonder how long it’s been since any of them took the US Constitution seriously. I occasionally point out to constituents (of both parties) about how their preferred elected representatives violated the Constitution and I frequently hear people either ignore text that is plainly in the document, or they simply state that the Constitution doesn’t matter anymore. They cherry pick as much as bible-folk do.

            Ah, well. The last time the US Congress declared war (US Const. Art I Sec 8) was 1942; they’ve had a great 80 years of peace, I guess. And the Constitution never gave the federal government the power to regulate immigration; they only started doing that (unconstitutionally!) when they were worried about the ‘Yellow Peril’ in 1882.

        2. “But isn’t that how democracy is supposed to work? If you represent a district where people feel strongly about something, aren’t you supposed to vote that way, on pain of being defeated?…Whether the voters feel the way they do because of religion is completely beside the point. It is none of your business why a voter wants his rep to vote against gay marriage.”

          This seems to view democratic politics as a one way street, Leslie, with politicians simply reflecting the pre-existing views of their electorate and trying to give them what they want. In reality the views of the electorate are not cast in stone but shift one way and another over time and politicians are constantly trying to influence these shifts in the direction of their own ideology. Any individual voter is entitled to keep his or her vote and the reasons for it private but if Historian or anyone else wants to change how people vote it is surely very much their business to try and understand why large numbers of people vote the way they do.

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  4. I have never handled a gun, but surely everyone knows a shotgun is held broken open until you are ready to fire it, or not chamber a cartridge with a pump-action…

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    2. As someone who grew up around guns, I completely agree with you. One shouldn’t load ANY gun until one is literally prepared to shoot it–unless one is, for instance, a police officer or a soldier, when the need for the gun might be sudden. Even many gunfighters in the old West supposedly didn’t keep the chamber under the hammer loaded…they tended to load only 5 chambers of a six shooter (according to legend keeping a $20 bill in the other chamber). Even Wyatt Earp is supposed to have done this after nearly shooting himself when his pistol fell out of his holster. There are no excuses for inadequate safety precautions when dealing with something that can kill someone even by accident.

      It’s similar to buckling one’s seatbelt, as in the video of the guy in the ancient Camaro above, but is probably more likely to pose a risk to others than to oneself. It’s infuriating.

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      1. Yet, hunting accidents and gun accidents happen all the time. There have been cases in the US where dogs have stepped on rifles causing them to discharge. One thing every game warden, park ranger, etc. are taught is to watch where they stand if asking a hunter if their gun is loaded, as it is common to have someone say, “sure” and then demonstrate it by pulling the trigger. This is mostly done by someone with the rifle hanging in the rack along the back window of a pickup truck.

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        1. Yep. I consider it reprehensible. The right to keep and bear arms doesn’t in any way imply the right to do so irresponsibly in a way that endangers innocent people due to the owner’s reckless disregard for safety.

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          1. This is what frustrates me. We know that in any population that many individuals can be counted on to be incompetent, ignorant, lax, etc, that they will harm themselves or others at a significant rate, and that regulating things can significantly reduce those negative consequences. And all societies do regulate all sorts of things to various degrees for just those reasons.

            And yet here in the US, when it comes to one of the most dangerous things in our society, firearms, the typical gun enthusiast believes that regulation of firearms is immoral and intolerable. Or just won’t work, despite the evidence of many other societies, because the US is special.

    2. I think it was Mad Magazine that once showed a very wholesome (think: “square”) “Spot the Errors” scene, and the right answer was a beatnik-like response of, “Man, everything is wrong with this picture!”

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  8. [Tech issue first: I’m not seeing any of the images in today’s Dialogue. Is anyone else having the same problem? I’m wondering if it is my browser settings.]

    > No more gay wedding cakes in the South. . . . .

    Eh, free market. There’ll be some, just not in every shop. There’s still a market for them. The deeper question is the basis on which private individuals and corporations can continue to decide whom to serve – and how – and whether they can take religion / politics / race / age / etc., of potential customers into consideration. Many customers, of course, consider the demographics of the service provider (How often do we see signs like “Buy Local” or “Support [Demographic]-Owned Businesses!”?). Things are changing; whatever they turn into, I wonder how consistent the developments will be. There’s also the question of government-mandated discrimination, like who is allowed to buy alcohol and tobacco…

    Oh, and Masterpiece Cakeshop is based in Colorado.

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  9. If you want to shoot your mother-in-law, all you need is a gun, an armadillo, a fence, a mobile home with a back door, a recliner inside the mobile home, and a mother-in-law. You shoot the armadillo, have the bullet ricochet off the armadillo, hit the fence, go through the back door of the mobile home, through the recliner, and whack her in the back. The method was tested in Leesburg, Georgia (US state) and it worked rather well.

    If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, all you need is a 12-gauge shotgun and chocolate lab named Trigger. This was tested in Indiana.

    Donald John Trump (POTUS) and Herschel Junior Walker (VPOTUS) would be an excellent pairing for the White House.

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  10. In other news, Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last chief-of-staff and his righthand man in his efforts to overturn the legitimate result of the 2020 presidential election, has lost his bid to avoid testifying before a Fulton County, GA grand jury. Meadows’s home-state South Carolina Supreme Court found his arguments against appearing in response to the grand jury subpoena to be “manifestly without merit.”

    Meadows is represented by competent counsel, so I expect that, when he appears before the grand jury, he’ll make like the Brubeck Quartet and Take Five. I seriously doubt whether Meadows plans to fall on his sword to protect Trump. I look for the Fulton County prosecutor, Fanni T. Willis, and the federal special prosecutor, Jack Smith, to coordinate their efforts to get Meadows to cooperate against Trump. They will likely want Meadows to cop to some type of plea in exchange for his testimony and leniency. But if worse comes to worst, they can compel Meadows to testify by forcing a grant of testimonial immunity on him. If he then lies under oath to protect Trump, Meadows can be prosecuted for perjury or obstruction of justice.

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  11. A reader has emailed me and asked me to make this comment:

    Please advise your readers/comments that all guns have safeties. This is part of every gun. Therefore suggestions such as breaking the gun down or maintaining an empty chamber are not necessary for safe hunting. The suggestions are also not practical for some types of guns – semi-auto shotgun.

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    1. Your reader’s comment is incorrect. Not all firearms have safeties (for example, my Breda over/under shotgun does not have a safety. The Sig Sauer P226 pistol does not have a safety, just a decocking lever). Moreover, it is not enough to know that your firearm is safe, it needs to be obvious to everyone present, and the position of a safety is not easily seen by your companions. For a pump action, the position of the “pump” signals the state. Proximal is safe, distal is not. For the semi-auto shotgun, the safe way to carry it is with the bolt back, opening the chamber. This is easily visible to everyone if they can see that side of the firearm.

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      1. Right. Revolvers and many semi-automatic pistols do not have safeties. In addition to Sig Sauer pistols the very popular Glock pistols do not have safeties. I had a Browning .308 rifle that did not have a safety. Modern guns rarely will fire if dropped, however. What also does not necessarily have a safety is the person with the gun. Some people will put their finger on the trigger or inside the trigger guard, and then it is easy if something happens for them to unintentionally pull the trigger. Remember the two lawyers in Missouri who pointed their weapons at BLM protestors? The picture clearly shows the woman holding the pistol with her finger on the trigger.

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    2. As several readers have pointed out, it is not true that all guns have safeties. But the point here is that the men had finished hunting and were packing up to drive home. No matter the excuse of convenience that might be offered for carrying a loaded gun through the bush while hunting, the companion carrying the shotgun ought to have unloaded it and broken the breech (or similar action for other types of shotguns, as per Gord Hutchinson below) to show that it was unloaded long before they congregated at the cars and started horsing (er, dogging) around.

      The tragedy need not have happened but for the negligent handing by the companion. The dog of course is blameless.

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    3. Nope, not true, although I have not seen a shotgun without one, and I have several that are more than a century old.

      In the subject incident, he was at the car, packing up after hunting when it happened.
      My theories- He left the safety off, and leaned the gun against the vehicle or on a tailgate. The dog jumped on it, and pulled the trigger. Boom.
      If he performed the same actions, but with the safety on, it still could have happened. On many shotguns the safety slide is just forward of the trigger. It would not be impossible for a paw to hit the safety and the trigger in one swipe.

      My solution, when I carry a shotgun or drilling, Is to use a sling, so I never have to put it down.

      FYI- A Drilling is a gun that has three barrels. Normally two shotgun, and one large caliber big game cartridge. Very helpful if you are hunting small game in a place where one might be confronted by bears or other large animals. My good Drilling is an artifact of the 1938 German scientific expedition to Tibet. The cool thing is that if you want to select the rifle, there is a little lever to slide, a little silver ball pops up on top of the selected chamber, and rifle sights pop up from hiding places on the barrel. Fantastic engineering.

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  12. More news: dystopian tomorrows here today.

    San Francisco (CA, US) Board of Supervisors (i.e. city council) voted to permit police to use robots to use lethal force. I’m note sure how autonomous those robots are; on a technical level, there has to be at least a small degree of autonomy, meaning there is legal room for it to grow. Note: the URL below includes the term ‘remote control’, but neither the headline nor the article do.

    https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/30/us/san-francisco-police-remote-control-robots/index.html

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  13. What are the average genomic differences between, say, Dachshunds and Border Collies, and wherein do the herding and now dancing abilities stem from?

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