Didn't know pragmatics was a word.

Must be nice, to be an "only one". That is to say, trusted with a firearm by the gun control crowd.

https://twitter.com/Suntimes/status/1100518383316017156

I was just thinking of John Adams and his representation of British soldiers in connection with Boston Massacre.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/322923/

Funnies not from twitter.

Bill Maher defends(?) the flyover states. With defenders like these....

[This] means that the most affluent and educated people are clustered in just a few cities. ... The blue parts of America are having a big prosperity party while that big sea of red feels like their invitation got lost in the mail. And they still use the mail. They turn on the TV and all the shows take place in a few hip cities. There's no Real Housewives of Toledo or CSI Lubbock. There are no red carpets in Wyoming and no one ever asks you "Who are you wearing"? Because the answer is always "Target."

There are two Americas, and it seems like one is where all the cool jobs are, where people drive Teslas and eat artisanal ice cream. We have orchestras and theater districts and world class shopping. We have Chef Wolfgang Puck. They have Chef Boyardee. Our roofs have solar panels. Theirs have last year's Christmas lights. We've got legal bud. They've got Bud. ... The flyover states have become the passed over states. That's why red state voters are so pissed off. They don't hate us. They want to be us. ... How do I know this? Because 238 cities and regions submitted proposals to Amazon for the company to locate in their area, all desperate for jobs that don't involve guarding prisons and murdering chickens. And Amazon picked two places that didn't need them at all [that would be Virginia and New York] — places where prosperity already was. Bezos: You're worth $130 billion. Take one for the team. Stop playing cities off against one another and help a dying one come back to life. ...

But if liberals are serious about winning elections, they have to start recolonizing the parts of the country they've abandoned. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. Amazon could buy the whole state and rename it Amazippi. If we keep leaving the red states behind, they're going to keep getting angrier and crazier. ... When Amazon moves to West Virginia, people get better jobs that don't give them black lung. The locals meet people of different races and backgrounds and sexual orientations — none of whom kill them. They find out gays don't ruin anyone's marriage, but they do improve the karaoke scene. A yoga studio opens up. Then an art gallery. A gym that admits women. Then one of those trendy bars. ... Asians come and open a Chinese restaurant. Then the Jews come because there is a Chinese restaurant, and before you know it, there is legal weed and decent health care and the schools are teaching science again.

That "drip, drip, drip" you're hearing is the condescension dripping off Bill's commentary.

Meanwhile, the middle class is abandoning the coastal areas for the "less prosperous" middle states with lower taxes, less crime, more jobs, and functional government services.

Good observation, Conan.

The Blue, urban centers are becoming islands of the "woke" well-off, surrounded by seas of increasingly poor, increasingly dependent people. The smug well-to-do apparently rely on the assumption that increasing economic desperation and increased dependence on welfare will keep the great unwashed on the Blue Plantation.

In the past, this has not worked out well. Pikes, meet heads.

This is NOT as good as sexual intercourse.

But it ain't nuthin'.

"Drive a Wrangler!" they said. "The dog will LOVE it!" they said.

You bastards!

Somewhat in relation to Conan's post above, I've been trying to dig in further to define / test my contention that contemporary America has had, for the past several decades, characteristics of a Fascist government. The first thing I decided to do was dig up a good list of the characteristics of Fascism. Surprisingly, I'm having trouble coming up with anything satisfactory. There are a bunch of Web sites that purport to do this, but most of their lists simply consist of items that are typical of any totalitarian form of government (one part state, censorship, lack of economic freedom, etc.) and not specific to Fascism. And some of them are based on aspects of how Fascism arose in Nazi Germany which are probably incidental. (E.g., much is made out of the fact that Germany turned to Fascism amid a great surge of nationalist feeling. However, the same is not true of Italy -- at the time it went Fascist, it had barely been a nation for two decades, and most inhabitants still identified with the region in which they lived rather than as Italians per se.)

So what I'm trying to do now is dig into the history and operations of Mussolini's Fascist government in Italy. This is a topic that I don't know a lot about. What drove its popularity? How did it gain power? Once it gained power, how did it operate and how did it remain in power? (If you've got any good references, I'm all ears.) Hitler was a Johnny-come-lately; it was Mussolini who created "practical" Fascism. Everyone assumes now that WWII killed Fascism dead. I've come to realize that it did no such thing. In a way, I'm starting to wonder if WWII settled anything at all.

"In the past, this has not worked out well. Pikes, meet heads."

I'm not sure it would actually take that. Remember, of the things that address the basic needs of modern life, the Blue enclaves manufacture nothing. All of their basic-needs supplies come from Red territories. Cut off their electricity, water and natural gas, and block the highways to stop fuel and food shipments, and see how long they last. (These are all things that are within the capabilities of the yellow vests in France, but they don't seem to have thought of it.)

More "only ones". I'd forgotten about this incident.

Nearly four years ago, over 170 people were arrested after a violent altercation outside a meeting of motorcycle club members at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, Texas, was swarmed by police, who had already surrounded the meeting before anything untoward occurred. Nine people were killed and 18 wounded in the melee. This week, the last of the initial set of charges was dropped after a special prosecutorial team didn't like what it saw.

https://reason.com/blog/2019/02/26/waco-biker-massacre-prosecutions-continu

Kashmir is heating up.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47383634

The antebellum South was a society made up of wealthy plantation owners, poorer white farmers, and slaves. What was missing? A strong middle class.

Since skilled slaves could provide most of the services that a growing middle class accumulated wealth by providing - blacksmithing, carpentry, bricklaying, etc. - there was little chance of a skilled laborer growing wealthy in the South; and few chances to apprentice to gain the skills.

Plantations were mostly self-sufficient and any services they lacked could be rented or borrowed from other plantations with slaves skilled in those services.

Wealth in the antebellum South was not liquid, and was tied up mostly in slaves and land - meaning banking services were mostly unnecessary or under-utilized.

The Southern domestic market consisted mostly of plantations with few-to-no middle class consumers. Northern economic growth was propelled by increasing demand while Southern economic growth was propelled by extracting more ever-more productivity from unskilled agrarian slave labor.

Without a middle class or a manufacturing base with which to develop one, Southern society stratified and ossified.

That ossified society, after years of hostility with the industrialized (and socio-economically diverse) North, thought it could go to war with that advanced industrial society and prevail.

If the coastal elite areas continue to bleed their middle class residents and become a society with a wealthy upper class and an impoverished lower class, with almost nothing in between, will the social-divisive conditions that led to the Civil War be recreated?

Are we recreating the worst era of our history?

You called me nuts when I made that same argument a few years ago Conan. To answer your question at the end, yes some people are recreating all the of the forces that caused the civil war. Do they realize that, probably not. But they are doing it all the same.

The thing to watch is the appearance of corruption. Actually measuring corruption can be difficult. And it also irrelevant to the question at hand. The appearance of corruption or belief in corruption is both more easily measured and more significant. If people think their vote doesn't matter, that the elections are rigged, then they have no reason to wait and try again later. The answer is known and nothing short of military force is going to change that answer. So armed conflict becomes a reasonable choice. That was one of the biggest issues with Hillary Clinton. She was obviously corrupt. It was clear in that election that the FBI, IRS, Justice Department, among others were partisan political organizations. Or at least that is the appearance they have given. And like I said the appearance is more significant than the reality in this case. James Comey and Loretta Lynch did great damage to the nation with how obvious they were about their corruption.

And if things come to armed conflict you and Cousin Dave are right about how that will turn out. There is a lot of old wealth in the deep blue areas. But that is largely paper wealth. If you had to liquidate it you would get a minor fraction of it's book value. As for military assets they are largely in red areas. Food supplies, gun and other weapon factories, the list goes on and on so it is clear than in any sort of sustained military conflict the blue areas lose.

But like the antebellum South, there is a small group with very insular tendencies driving all of this. Would they be dumb enough to set something like this off? Well, Macron in France sure did.

"Are we recreating the worst era of our history?"

Last weekend I saw a girl wearing bell bottoms. I say unto you the end times are upon us.

Speaking of small groups with insular tendencies:

Facebook Eliminated Over One Billion Page-Views to Conservative Websites in 2018 – Now, Thanks to James O’Keefe, We Have Proof This Was The Plan

Thoughts?

Four New DNA Letters Double Life’s Alphabet

Cousin Dave. Not an expert on Fascism or Italy for that matter, but my observation has been that What we now call Italy, is a collection of provinces with very diverse interests.
If there is some sort of national character or cohesive principle I don’t know where or what it is.

My beliefs are that governments tend to reflect the countries and the values of people within. The Soviet Union was little different from Russia two hundred years before. Just a different group of people in charge.

Oh, boy, here we go again:

Top-Ranked NCAA Women’s Runner Competed as Man Last Year

Well, duh!

Blue State Refugees Flock to Conservative Florida

Like many diseases bell bottoms may not be eliminateable. But containment is possible and has been successfully implemented. While new outbreaks of the fashion do occur they are largely limited in impact Gog. And that may be the best we can hope for.

Mpetrie98, not many significant thoughts. As noted in the link artificial bases were first implemented in the 80s. All they've done now is an incremental improvement on that. They are still a long way away from significance.

It isn't enough to generate a double helix. DNA transcribed to RNA also has the ability to form into psudo-proteins and other shapes. So adding four new bases means you need to add those to RNA and account for their folding properties. You also need epigenetic molecules to signal on the new base pairs. And probably a whole host of other things too.

A bigger question is why do you need any more base pairs? Our computers operate on one set of markers, 0 and 1. I can see the value in going up to 0, 1, 2, 3 when there is a fixed pairing mechanism. This provides redundancy and error correction. Going up to 0-7 doesn't add any more value. Instead you are adding costs. So while it is academically of mild interest to me I find the general concept misguided.

Other people may have different opinions this is just mine.

I can see your point, Ben. God did a damn fine job with just A, G, C and T (and U instead of T for RNA). Praise the Lord.

And back to the show: want some sauce with a little extra zest?

Tennessee man accused of dipping testicles in customer’s salsa

I did my master thesis on the economic viability of electronics based on various base numbering systems. If you assume that the information density is fixed (i.e. a 0-4 bit is the same size as two 0-1 bits) you find for arbitrarily sized problems the binary solution offers the best solution. If your problem aligns with a specific base then that base offers the best solution. But it is rare in life that all your problems line up with a fixed size. So binary wins for general problems.

Now this all falls apart if the physics underling the system doesn't have uniform information density. Which does happen in real life. So you can get specific cases where this falls apart. But DNA isn't one of them.

So from an efficiency and cost perspective eliminating two bases from DNA is the right solution. Going from a base 4 to a base 2 system would let you significantly shrink the size of your DNA strands saving size, cost in molecules, and cost in energy. So why hasn't mother nature caught on? Well, A, G, C, and T are cheap crummy parts. They are made from cheap easily sourced materials and they tend to screw up fairly often. So some cost has been sacrificed for data integrity checking. But going from base 4 to base 8 doesn't offer much more data integrity while increasing the general cost. It is an economically poor choice.

From an engineering stand point finding new bases that store data more reliably and reducing the number of base pairs to two seems like the better choice.

"God did a damn fine job with just A, G, C and T (and U instead of T for RNA). Praise the Lord."

As Ben partially points out, this is not optimized - it just works, which is something often deliberately disregarded by the religious: "divinely" sourced mechanisms do not seek "perfection", just utility. When development produces survival, development stops.

There is a HUGE amount of information about this.

The Soviet Union was little different from Russia two hundred years before. Just a different group of people in charge. ~ Isab at February 27, 2019 7:13 PM

Churchill was one of the few world leaders who understood that Stalin was a new czar, not really a committed ideological communist.

From Stalin onward, the USSR differed from the former Russian Empire only in name.

"From Stalin onward, the USSR differed from the former Russian Empire only in name."

Very true. A lot of Westerners don't understand that Soviet Communism was very much a Russian-nationalist movement, and that the other Warsaw Pact countries were basically conquered territories.