Computer scientists at University of California, Davis, Maynooth University in Ireland and the California Institute of Technology have created DNA molecules that can self-assemble into patterns essentially by running their own program. The work is published March 21 in the journal Nature.
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A few months have passed since President Trump last threatened to close the southern border, but with another caravan of 2,500 Central American and Cuban migrants making its way through southern Mexico – where the group has reportedly received a cooler welcome than previous groups – the president has apparently decided that it’s time to revive those threats.
Since when is it the government’s job (i.e. the taxpayers’ job) to fund programs to make handicapped people feel good about themselves? How much do ‘participation trophies’ cost, anyway?
In fact, Peoples had been arrested for her daughter’s spotty school attendance record under a truancy law that then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris had personally championed in the state legislature. The law, enacted in January 2011, made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents to allow kids in kindergarten through eighth grade to miss more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. Peoples’ 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days so far that school year.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that ‘truancy’ was still a thing.
Civil forfeiture is the law enforcement tool which allows property or currency to be seized and permanently forfeited, even in situations where the owner is neither charged with, nor convicted of, a crime.
Prior to the 1980s, civil forfeiture was a niche law enforcement tool relegated chiefly to admiralty and customs law. But Congress, followed later by nearly every state, ramped up the practice to target the assets and ill-gotten gains of drug kingpins, criminal organizations, and money launderers.
And to encourage law enforcement agencies to use this powerful new tool, Congress empowered federal agencies to retain the proceeds of successful forfeitures, and authorized them to share the funds with state and local agencies that participate in forfeiture cases through what is known as the “equitable sharing” program.
In other words, lawmakers empowered agencies to seize their way to bigger budgets. It should come as no surprise that forfeiture exploded in the United States.
‘Civil asset forfeiture’ is the biggest end-run around the Constitution in the country today. This legislation is badly needed.
I should like to point out that this problem is the direct result of the bogus government-mandated monopoly on certain information under the guise of ‘intellectual property’. Once you decide that people providing you with information can dictate what you can do with it, they’re going to make sure they charge you out the wazoo to do ANYTHING with it.
This started with the oh-no-you-don’t-own-that-software-you-just-bought-you-just-have-a-license-to-use-it trick in the early days of consumer computation and, when that worked, they pushed the envelope for all that it was worth, to the point that people can now patent human genes merely because they happened to be the first to figure out how they work.
The Chinese realized early on that this was a scam and they’ve been ignoring it (to their profit) ever since. Smuggling (the fashionable tar-term is ‘piracy’, the historical tar-term is ‘black market’) exists profitably when I can provide you with something illegally for less than the government will allow you to purchase it legally. The end-game here is Prohibition and the ‘war on drugs’. This is why Columbian narcos had warehouses of dollar bills being eaten by rats because they didn’t have anywhere else to put them.
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Phones come with Twitter and Facebook apps baked into the platform. In most cases, you can’t remove them even if you don’t use them. If you can operate a phone, you can be on these platforms, interacting with your fellow morons in minutes. What’s unique about this age is that the people who were encouraged to remain silent for most of human history have now been fitted with the tools to stand in the public square, bellowing like lunatics.
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So much for that “healthy conversation.” Twitter’s rules on abusive behavior and hate speech apparently exclude any form of anti-Semitism. Arsen Ostrovsky, executive director of the Israeli-Jewish Congress, reported a tweet directed at him which should have fallen under abusive behavior. But Twitter determined otherwise. In an email, Twitter Support informed Ostrovsky that the tweet, which called for the “stoning of the Jews,” “is not in violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior.”
Now imagine what their reaction would have been to a tweet calling for ‘stoning the Muslims’.
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The Israeli military said it continued strikes on Hamas targets throughout the early morning hours of Wednesday after a rocket launch from the strip targeted southern Israel, triggering rocket sirens and seek shelter warnings in the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Israel never strikes unless it is attacked, yet everybody always complains about Israel.
The Wall Street Journal story keeps bouncing around Twitter, about how the Baby Boomers who built big custom luxury houses don’t want them anymore, because the Baby Boomers are getting too old to handle such big houses, and they can’t sell them, because everyone else either is not interested in a big custom luxury house, in which case they won’t buy one, or is interested in a big custom luxury house, in which why would they buy someone else’s old one? This seems like funny comeuppance, and it is funny comeuppance, but it’s also just the clown-shoed version of the problem that everyone has in one way or another, which is that homeownership is not a solution but a way of freezing a particular set of problems in place.
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People guess who they are and what their lives are about, and they guess wrong.
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Physicists have studied quantum heat engines for many years—they work in ways similar to classical heat engines, but their “working fluid,” which behaves in ways reminiscent of steam in a steam engine, can be in a coherent superposition. This has led many in the field to wonder if quantum engines could actually perform better than the classical engines we see around us every day. Just four years ago, a team at Hebrew University of Jerusalem claimed to have found the answer, reporting a theory that suggested that quantum engines could, indeed, be more efficient than classical engines. In this new effort, the researchers have conducted experiments showing that the theory was correct.
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Scott Johnson relates his travails attempting to get another proglodyte ‘fact checker’ to tell the truth.
Wikipedia is just as bad. Scott Adams has been trying for the longest time to correct their coverage of the Trump’s statement about the Covington marchers.
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The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office issued the following statement: “After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollet’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition & appropriate resolution.”
Apparently they did this without checking with the Chicago PD. Smooth move.
For a time, it looked as if the “yellow vests” revolt was going to shakeup French politics by legitimizing populist issues. The protests were mainly focused on economic issues, but those issues are the sorts of things that highlight the divide between the cosmopolitan ruling class and the general public. That is the heart of the great political divide in the current age. The ruling class and its supporters are living a fantasy life paid for in a million small ways by the unorganized and ignored masses making up the general public.
That’s really what the yellow vest protesters were about initially. As is always the case with revolts, what got them in the streets were the little things, but those little things were symbolic of the bigger problem. The yellow vest originated from the nutty law that requires all French drivers to keep a yellow safety vest in their car. Whether or not having such a thing is a good idea is not really the point. It is the symbol of elite attitudes that result in the proliferation of thousands of such laws.
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The Ten Commandments are not LAWS (i.e. do this and you’ll be cool) but USE CASES (illustrations of ways to handle certain situations). They really ought to have a Preamble that says DON’T DO STUPID SHIT INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING:
I’m the guy who brought you out of Egypt. If it weren’t for me, you’d still be stacking bricks and eating cardboard. A little gratitude would seem in order.
Other gods didn’t do shit for you. You going to go with the losers or go with a winner? That’s a no-brainer.
Don’t be using me to bad-mouth other people. I’m more powerful than you and smarter than you. I have a short fuse and a loooooong memory. Pissing me off is a very poor career move.
I established the Sabbath for a reason — you need a break every so often. Remember, I’m smarter than you. Take the hint.
Maybe your parents are a pain in the ass, but they were here first and without them you wouldn’t be here at all. Again, a little gratitude would seem in order. Give them a break. Peace in the family is worth a little eye-rolling.
If people can’t go through their day without worrying about being killed, there won’t be a society. They have to be comfortable that they aren’t going to be whacked without a very good reason. This also is no-brainer.
Fooling around with other people’s spouses rarely ends well. ‘Feel good now and worry about tomorrow tomorrow’ is what children do. If others are having problems, it’s not your job to make ’em worse; if they’re not having problems, it’s not your job to start something. That’s what assholes do. Think it through and Just Don’t.
People also have to have a certain confidence that they don’t have to watch their stuff all the time. If you want to know why some countries are full of prosperous people and some countries are full of poor people, look at who spends their time stealing stuff. Again, this is a no-brainer. Think it through and Just Don’t.
When we are resolving disputes, we need to know what happened. When you lie about that, it screws up the system. If we can’t resolve disputes well, things go to Hell very quickly. Again, this is a no-brainer. Think it through and Just Don’t.
If you spend all of your time being grumpy about what other people have, you’ll never be happy, and it will be your Own Damned Fault. If you don’t like what you have, work and get more. It’s not that hard if you FOCUS. If you lust after what other people have all of the time, you wind up in number 7 and number 8 and that rarely ends well. Save us all some trouble and Just Don’t.
TL;DR. If you wouldn’t want other people to do something to you, don’t do it to other people. Doing shit to other people that pisses them off causes hate and discontent and makes everybody unhappy and it’s NOT NECESSARY. Nobody NEEDS to go through life pissing other people off. Give us all a break and don’t be a jerk. If you forget everything else, remember that.
Remember that the SPLC became a $400-milllion left-wing hate machine by “exposing” alleged Thought Crimes by others, and is now the target of at least three different lawsuits — one by Baltimore lawyer Glen Keith Allen, another by the D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and a third by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. The mounting problems at the “Poverty Palace” in Montgomery were compounded when a former SPLC official wrote about the “hate” scam in the New Yorker….
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Victor Davis Hanson points out that Trump really isn’t that much of an outlier as President.
eggy Noonan, apparently like many, believes that Trump’s occasional callousness and crassness are unprecedented. And they have so befouled the political landscape that he has spawned rude and crude leftwing imitators. The result allegedly is the vile language of the “mean girls” such as the anti-Semitism and foul speech of Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib…
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With all due respect, I don’t think we “all” know that this started with Trump, however crass he can be. Rather, we know all too well the political landscape a decade before Trump.
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To get an Apple Card, users will be able to sign up on their iPhone in the Apple Wallet app and get a digital card that they can use anywhere Apple Pay is accepted “within minutes.” Customers will also be able to track purchases, check balances, and see when their bill is due right from the app. There will be a physical titanium card, too, but there’s no credit card number, CVV, expiration date, or signature. All of that authorization information is stored directly in the Apple Wallet app.
I suppose it was inevitable. I doubt they can match the sweet deal I get from Costco.
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Scot Adams, in order to have a collective term for Congressman Jerry Nadler and his coterie, has decided to give them the name, like that of a rock band. I kinda like it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Nads and the Dingleberries
Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.
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The nonprofit organization building a coalition of states that favor choosing the president by popular vote promotes itself as nonpartisan, but is financed by millions of dollars from left-leaning groups.
Some of the leaders of the movement are prominent Republicans, and most of the funding for the nonprofit, National Popular Vote Inc., has come from a wealthy Democrat and a billionaire Independent.
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