Thanks for that reference and excerpt regarding Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby character and “telescopic philanthropy” that you made on a prior post.
I had never heard reference to that and it’s a brilliant encapsulation of a trait we humans seem susceptible to.
Someone leaked Trump Administration plans to try to rein in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to far-left NPR. The plans are good news since previous Democrat administrations have populated the agency with anti-nuclear advocates. The details on the new structure for the bureaucracy are not clear, but any effort that speeds up the approval of nuclear power plants is welcome.
@Rufus: Dicken’s giant talent was for creating memorable characters with just a few paragraphs or even sentences, who frequently remind us of someone we know.
The book is Bleak House, and worth reading if you have the energy for a Victorian doorstopper.
The issue with zebras being not good candidates for domestication presumes the first candidates for what we know as “horses” today were considerably more mellow. It’s a planted axiom, comparing today’s horses to wild zebras rather than pre-domesticated (not domesticated breeds who got loose).
The reason that even in domesticated animals–cattle and horses–the majority of males are gelded is that whole males are still potentially dangerous even after umpteen thousand generations.
We “fix” dogs to keep the population down. We “fix” the big herbivores to keep from getting run over or otherwise attacked. Bull, anybody? And that’s the domestic brand.
To domesticate an animal, you usually need to confine it. And you can’t fence in enough prairie land to support a bunch fo cattle. You have to grow food elsewhere and feed them, while confining them to a convenient area. Which is to say you need the Neolithics to have some agricultural surplus. Only then do you have the capacity to domesticate large herbivores.
So, as to zebras…case not proven.
Re: Michelle Obama
Great dish from Megyn Kelly and Maureen Callahan. Fun and insightful.
At one point Kelly and Callahan are so horrified by how poorly MO speaks of her husband that they hope Obama is having an affair, as rumored, with Jennifer Aniston.
I don’t think Michelle O. has any idea how negatively her podcast comes across to most people. She seems to be a small, miserable person.
For those of you who speak Spanish, an excellent, but scary, discussion by a conservative Spanish economist Daniel Lacalle, about the threats to free speech and liberty in Western Europe.
Great dish from Megyn Kelly and Maureen Callahan. Fun and insightful.
==
I’m sure I must have been acquainted with women who were catty to this degree, but I cannot think of a name.
==
No insight into MO. I might think her dissatisfaction is derived from the realization that almost nothing she and her husband have is due to any actual skill either one of them possesses (above and beyond knowing how to work a room at a fundraiser). Which suggests that she sees herself as she is and sees him as he is. Mmmkay….
AD never likes anything except his own recommendations.
should one be so catty, well for someone who was granted many privileges, a prestigious education, poorly employed, made the first lady of the United States, and still can’t get the chip off her shoulder, all the acclamation from every outfit short of cat fancy, yes she did little to merit it, but complain effusively, maybe a little risque ridicule in some parts, but not more than most,
“So, as to zebras…case not proven.” – Richard Aubrey
Maybe not. However, Zebra meat is the least tasty of the grazing animals in Africa. Horse meat, on the other hand, is just below beef for taste. So, maybe there is something quite different about the DNA of Zebras versus the horses.
I enjoyed this romp through the history of domestication of wild animals. They have played a big part in the evolution of human society from hunter gatherers to the modern society we have today.
It’s interesting to me that Julius Caesar and George Washington, with about 1800 years between their times, would have understood one another quite well. Horses and sailing ships were still the main methods of transport. On the other hand, look at where we are today. George Washington would be astounded at the progress made in the last 250 years.
About Michelle Obama. It’s amazing that she can be so bitter about all the success that she and Barak have enjoyed. She may well feel/know that much of it was luck/affirmative action. However, you’d think she would be somewhat grateful for all her good fortune.
She complains that it was expensive to live in the White House. That may be true, but I’ve never heard a whisper about that from any other residents of that august residence.
She and Barak have become multi-millionaires post Presidency. Quit complaining and get on with your life. No one car es about her issues except she and her shrink.
There seems to be a coordinated move by Democrats toward strong profanity and physical violence. I’m not sure what their plan is. Maybe to whip up their base and force strong reactions from Trump and MAGA people, and then to complain about authoritarianism, racism, right wing violent extremism etc.
We know from January 6 that they are unscrupulous enough to use false flags.
J. J. Still, comparing domesticated horses to zebra for taste. Nobody’s tasted the pre-domesticated version in maybe five thousand years, not for choice, anyway. Free range, organic, mountain trained….versus in the paddock, corral, barn, eating grain provided and not starving in a bad season or running itself half to death to escape predators.
Or the wild aurochs as opposed to a beef cow.
You could maybe put a dent in the feral hog situation of somebody had a recipe. No luck so far.
But you don’t have to eat it, just make it work for you. Different issue.
Really interesting book, “Elephant Company”. It’s about the mahogany industry in Burma up into WW II. The elephants would work all day, be turned loose to go forage, come back in the morning to work. Got weirder. Wonder if “domesticated” fits anywhere near. But it’s something.
Dax, I don’t think there’s a front-runner to challenge Tillis in the R primary in NC as yet. There’s lots of speculation from Dems on whether former governor Roy Cooper will run for the seat. A former Dem congressman, Wiley Nickel, is already in the race. I’m just hoping Mark Robinson won’t try again, having lost so badly last year.
Michelle Obama has always struck me as being irrationally full of herself. Shortly after going to the White House she got nasty about a short (white) woman who approached her in a Target store to ask her to reach something from a high shelf. MIchelle said this little woman was racist and treated her like a slave, since it was incomprehensible to her that the woman had no idea who she was. Short women ask me for help in grocery stores routinely because I can reach what they can’t. Michelle’s constant whining about “racist” mistreatment shows she is an entitled spoiled brat.
Carnivore meat is supposed to be less palatable for humans (greasy, high in uric acid). Also, the prions can cause diseases (like mad cow), so even carnivores tend not to eat other carnivores. If you are ever forced to eat a bear, make sure you killed it in berry season and not in salmon season.
Might this be the most elaborate, sustained and gobsmacking hit job yet on a Trump appointee?
On the other hand, at this stage of the game, who in their right mind would believe ANYTHING in “Science” Magazine (or its ilk)??
@Abraxas:If you are ever forced to eat a bear, make sure you killed it in berry season and not in salmon season.
But salmon are themselves carnivores, and we eat them…
Bob Wilson on May 10, 2025 at 11:48 am said:
“Someone leaked Trump Administration plans to try to rein in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to far-left NPR. The plans are good news since previous Democrat administrations have populated the agency with anti-nuclear advocates.”
I hope they find out who that person is and charge him with something serious. I doubt the NPR would like to have their draft positions aired prematurely, too. But in today’s world, it could still have been leaked on purpose to gage reaction, etc.
A quote from your linked article:
“Who has the technical knowledge to actually do a substantive review?” asks Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit that has been critical of the nuclear industry. “To have political appointees meddling in these technical decisions is just a recipe for confusion and chaos.”
Given the reputation of the UCS, we can expect such things from those folks, but it seems to be lost on him that even nontechnical people can assemble technically aware advocates for two or more sides of an issue and eventually get enough information and knowledge explained to them to make political and financial decisions. Where does he think the current NRC budget comes from? Of course, if you don’t make that effort in good faith, you end up with an extended and extensive body of flawed “info”, viz. climate change, vaccines, etc.
Later in the article: “According to [one draft executive] order, the NRC would look at repealing the Linear No Threshold standard for radiation safety.” From reading Jack Devanney at The Gordian Knot News Substack [ https://jackdevanney.substack.com ], I have learned about the competing and preferred model of radiation exposure risk called Sigmoid No Threshold (SNT). This view indirectly allows for considering the fact that we have an evolved biological capability to repair DNA damaged by normal background radiation [or we would not be here today], and only at some higher radiation level does this repair process fail to keep up. Thus the risks from possible power plant radiation leaks depends critically on both the magnitude and rate of exposure [i.e., the whole exposure envelope.] Such plant release exposures may well be small and long term, in which case the risks are reduced via this repair mechanism. The LNT model acts like all exposure is cumulative and not correctible and thus introduces an excessively imbalanced view of radiation risks.
Several of his Substack essays may help understand this, but perhaps this one is a good place to start: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-ans-position-statement-on-radiation
Good points about the difference in feed for horses versus zebras, Richard.
A friend of our daughter adopted a zebra a couple of years ago. She gave up on it after a year. It was too nasty to keep on her small farm. A biter, kicker, and spitter. Not at all acclimated to human contact.
And this from Copilot: “Zebras have never been truly domesticated. Although it is possible to tame individual zebras to some extent, their unpredictable nature, strong survival instinct, and natural behavior make them unsuitable for domestication. Unlike horses and donkeys, zebras have not been successfully bred and raised on farms.” 🙂
@ Niketas – I will echo the thanks from Rufus for the Dickens’ “Mrs. Jellyby character and “telescopic philanthropy” that you made on a prior post” as I hadn’t noticed it back at that comment thread until just now.
Also the Lewis quote.
I thought of that segment immediately and tried to find the source, as I didn’t remember which book it came from. No surprise to find it in The Screwtape Letters.
Most fish are carnivores. Fish, though, doesn’t have the stringiness of carnivore meat. The flavor isn’t as strong. It’s usually milder or blander. Fish don’t have the glands that can give carnivore meat a bad taste. Parasites aren’t as common in fish as in predatory mammals. Plus, we evolved eating fish and developed sauces and flavorings for it.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 — Opening Words
00:01:34 — What Am I Talking About?
00:03:45 — History and Outlook
00:13:32 — Objectives and Doctrine
00:17:46 — Pakistan Army
00:21:22 — Pakistan Air Force
00:26:51 — Pakistan Navy
00:30:16 — Evaluating the Conventional Balance
00:31:01 — the Nuclear Deterrent & Doctrine
00:47:24 — Pakistan’s Problems
00:50:02 — Problem 2: Economics
00:57:23 — Problem 3: Reliance & Arms Imports
00:59:18 — Risks and a Way Forward
01:01:46 — Channel Update
Still…..don’t compare wild zebras to domesticated horses. Compare them to the wild ancestors of domestic horses, which you can only do theoretically.
However, there was a Russian experiment on breeding silver foxes for tameness. Over “several generations” (number not further specified) significant changes were built in.
“Selective breeding” might mean taking the most promising ninety percent, and culling ten percent. Or the most promising ten percent, a pretty savage culling.
But whatever it was, it was in only a few years, so it was likely pretty selective.
If you were to do the same to a population of zebras, there would be an inevitable result. And you can tell the bad actors before maturity. They turn into food. Breed who’s left.
So, either the wild horses were more mellow than the wild zebras, and why would that be? Or there has been selective breeding for utility and that means tameness.
That a wild zebra is a pain in the butt, no matter how gently raised in captivity, proves nothing without doing the same with a wild ancestor. And not the wild horses run away from the domesticated herds.
The wild horses, ancestors, had the same issues; food, mate competition, and the late Pleistocene–prior to megafauna die off–predators made current and recent Africa look pretty tame.
R2L, thanks for that note about the SNT model material. I wish that linked article had seen fit to subscript the “2” in “O2” and “CO2” – unless one is typing on a UNIX box or something, there’s really no need to write chemical formulae that way any more. But, you know, details….
Meanwhile, I wish to note that I hate the disgusting truncation of “Congratulations” to “Congrats”. Hate. Disgusting. I see it in office communications disturbingly often. (At least my area has things about which to congrat others, so that’s a bright spot, admittedly.)
R2L thanks for the link to the article. The Antinuclear power left loves the linear, no threshold model so they can claim that any release of radiation leads to deaths. It is outrageous that the NRC uses this model in their regulations. Articles in medical radiation physics journals say that alternate models which show that low levels of radiation actually decrease health effects are better. See this article
Bob Wilson, interesting article in regard to validity of radiation hormesis. I had been thinking along the lines of normal or natural levels of background radiation, but the idea of using controlled but higher levels of radiation to “flood the zone” of many cells and “energize” the single strand and double strand DNA repair mechanisms is also intriguing. I presume the idea is this would “sweep up” or “sweep away” initiating cancers in cells before they reach greater cell population impacts. [Vs. what I gather is the current process of focusing extensive radiation on known tumors.]
I fear his call for a national debate will not happen, except via the longer term piling up of articles and evidence, along with the dying off of those who are wedded to the prior paradigm. [But somehow Marx and Engels and Hitler and Gramsci and others have died and their ideas live on without serious decline.]
The concept of having a private sector “debate supporting business” might actually bear fruit if someone was willing to set up those conditions for debates on many different topics, as a business – with sports or entertainment business models as a guide?
My vision about this would also require the debaters to put up their own money to be the debaters, and also anyone who wants to provide corrective commentary [maybe $2K to $10 to debate; and $1K to $5K to respond?] The intent is to keep the debates as flame free as possible. Keeping in mind Sowell’s comments about “there are no solutions, only tradeoffs”. The end result also depends on “who decides” what or how a winner is established.
It might also better educate the public about the role of falsifying hypotheses in scientific advancements to move those hypotheses into the role of theories.
The NRC leaking to NPR with assistance from the UCS to strangle any revival of nuclear power in the US is shocking and inconceivable! (sarc)
NPR can’t be kicked away from their federal rice bowl soon enough. As for the NRC, they have been a useless impediment and force of delay and obstruction for many decades.
Unfortunately for those three letter assclowns, there are many significant economic interests that need the type of power that renewables or unicorn farts can’t provide, but nuclear power can provide.
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Some people can’t be either
US mediation brings an India-Pakistan ceasefire.
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2025/05/10/trump-announces-full-and-immediate-ceasefire-between-india-and-pakistan/
Niketas,
Thanks for that reference and excerpt regarding Dickens’ Mrs. Jellyby character and “telescopic philanthropy” that you made on a prior post.
I had never heard reference to that and it’s a brilliant encapsulation of a trait we humans seem susceptible to.
Someone leaked Trump Administration plans to try to rein in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to far-left NPR. The plans are good news since previous Democrat administrations have populated the agency with anti-nuclear advocates. The details on the new structure for the bureaucracy are not clear, but any effort that speeds up the approval of nuclear power plants is welcome.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/09/nx-s1-5392382/trump-nuclear-regulatory-commission-watchdog-safety-radiation
@Rufus: Dicken’s giant talent was for creating memorable characters with just a few paragraphs or even sentences, who frequently remind us of someone we know.
The book is Bleak House, and worth reading if you have the energy for a Victorian doorstopper.
The issue with zebras being not good candidates for domestication presumes the first candidates for what we know as “horses” today were considerably more mellow. It’s a planted axiom, comparing today’s horses to wild zebras rather than pre-domesticated (not domesticated breeds who got loose).
The reason that even in domesticated animals–cattle and horses–the majority of males are gelded is that whole males are still potentially dangerous even after umpteen thousand generations.
We “fix” dogs to keep the population down. We “fix” the big herbivores to keep from getting run over or otherwise attacked. Bull, anybody? And that’s the domestic brand.
To domesticate an animal, you usually need to confine it. And you can’t fence in enough prairie land to support a bunch fo cattle. You have to grow food elsewhere and feed them, while confining them to a convenient area. Which is to say you need the Neolithics to have some agricultural surplus. Only then do you have the capacity to domesticate large herbivores.
So, as to zebras…case not proven.
Re: Michelle Obama
Great dish from Megyn Kelly and Maureen Callahan. Fun and insightful.
–Maureen Callahan, “Breaking Down Michelle Obama’s Ongoing Midlife Meltdown and Disdain For Barack, with Megyn Kelly”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pDfcEjD-I4
At one point Kelly and Callahan are so horrified by how poorly MO speaks of her husband that they hope Obama is having an affair, as rumored, with Jennifer Aniston.
I don’t think Michelle O. has any idea how negatively her podcast comes across to most people. She seems to be a small, miserable person.
For those of you who speak Spanish, an excellent, but scary, discussion by a conservative Spanish economist Daniel Lacalle, about the threats to free speech and liberty in Western Europe.
https://youtu.be/ezbn0fQj35k?feature=shared
This link works better
https://youtu.be/ezbn0fQj35k
Great dish from Megyn Kelly and Maureen Callahan. Fun and insightful.
==
I’m sure I must have been acquainted with women who were catty to this degree, but I cannot think of a name.
==
No insight into MO. I might think her dissatisfaction is derived from the realization that almost nothing she and her husband have is due to any actual skill either one of them possesses (above and beyond knowing how to work a room at a fundraiser). Which suggests that she sees herself as she is and sees him as he is. Mmmkay….
AD never likes anything except his own recommendations.
should one be so catty, well for someone who was granted many privileges, a prestigious education, poorly employed, made the first lady of the United States, and still can’t get the chip off her shoulder, all the acclamation from every outfit short of cat fancy, yes she did little to merit it, but complain effusively, maybe a little risque ridicule in some parts, but not more than most,
Kate, any thoughts on Don Brown, who is challenging Thom Tillis for the NC GOP senate nomination? Thanks.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/05/meet-former-navy-jag-officer-taking-rino-thom/
I’m going to get this one in early. (for most of y’all anyway)
Happy Mother’s Day!
to Neo and the rest of you for whom it is appropriate.
https://twitchy.com/justmindy/2025/05/10/hakeem-jeffries-wants-law-enforcement-outed-and-arrested-n2412624
“So, as to zebras…case not proven.” – Richard Aubrey
Maybe not. However, Zebra meat is the least tasty of the grazing animals in Africa. Horse meat, on the other hand, is just below beef for taste. So, maybe there is something quite different about the DNA of Zebras versus the horses.
I enjoyed this romp through the history of domestication of wild animals. They have played a big part in the evolution of human society from hunter gatherers to the modern society we have today.
It’s interesting to me that Julius Caesar and George Washington, with about 1800 years between their times, would have understood one another quite well. Horses and sailing ships were still the main methods of transport. On the other hand, look at where we are today. George Washington would be astounded at the progress made in the last 250 years.
About Michelle Obama. It’s amazing that she can be so bitter about all the success that she and Barak have enjoyed. She may well feel/know that much of it was luck/affirmative action. However, you’d think she would be somewhat grateful for all her good fortune.
She complains that it was expensive to live in the White House. That may be true, but I’ve never heard a whisper about that from any other residents of that august residence.
She and Barak have become multi-millionaires post Presidency. Quit complaining and get on with your life. No one car es about her issues except she and her shrink.
There seems to be a coordinated move by Democrats toward strong profanity and physical violence. I’m not sure what their plan is. Maybe to whip up their base and force strong reactions from Trump and MAGA people, and then to complain about authoritarianism, racism, right wing violent extremism etc.
We know from January 6 that they are unscrupulous enough to use false flags.
J. J. Still, comparing domesticated horses to zebra for taste. Nobody’s tasted the pre-domesticated version in maybe five thousand years, not for choice, anyway. Free range, organic, mountain trained….versus in the paddock, corral, barn, eating grain provided and not starving in a bad season or running itself half to death to escape predators.
Or the wild aurochs as opposed to a beef cow.
You could maybe put a dent in the feral hog situation of somebody had a recipe. No luck so far.
But you don’t have to eat it, just make it work for you. Different issue.
Really interesting book, “Elephant Company”. It’s about the mahogany industry in Burma up into WW II. The elephants would work all day, be turned loose to go forage, come back in the morning to work. Got weirder. Wonder if “domesticated” fits anywhere near. But it’s something.
Dax, I don’t think there’s a front-runner to challenge Tillis in the R primary in NC as yet. There’s lots of speculation from Dems on whether former governor Roy Cooper will run for the seat. A former Dem congressman, Wiley Nickel, is already in the race. I’m just hoping Mark Robinson won’t try again, having lost so badly last year.
Michelle Obama has always struck me as being irrationally full of herself. Shortly after going to the White House she got nasty about a short (white) woman who approached her in a Target store to ask her to reach something from a high shelf. MIchelle said this little woman was racist and treated her like a slave, since it was incomprehensible to her that the woman had no idea who she was. Short women ask me for help in grocery stores routinely because I can reach what they can’t. Michelle’s constant whining about “racist” mistreatment shows she is an entitled spoiled brat.
Carnivore meat is supposed to be less palatable for humans (greasy, high in uric acid). Also, the prions can cause diseases (like mad cow), so even carnivores tend not to eat other carnivores. If you are ever forced to eat a bear, make sure you killed it in berry season and not in salmon season.
Might this be the most elaborate, sustained and gobsmacking hit job yet on a Trump appointee?
“Leaked: Science Mag’s Batsh*t Insane Interview With NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/leaked-science-mags-batsht-insane-interview-nih-director-jay-bhattacharya
On the other hand, at this stage of the game, who in their right mind would believe ANYTHING in “Science” Magazine (or its ilk)??
@Abraxas:If you are ever forced to eat a bear, make sure you killed it in berry season and not in salmon season.
But salmon are themselves carnivores, and we eat them…
Bob Wilson on May 10, 2025 at 11:48 am said:
“Someone leaked Trump Administration plans to try to rein in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to far-left NPR. The plans are good news since previous Democrat administrations have populated the agency with anti-nuclear advocates.”
I hope they find out who that person is and charge him with something serious. I doubt the NPR would like to have their draft positions aired prematurely, too. But in today’s world, it could still have been leaked on purpose to gage reaction, etc.
A quote from your linked article:
“Who has the technical knowledge to actually do a substantive review?” asks Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit that has been critical of the nuclear industry. “To have political appointees meddling in these technical decisions is just a recipe for confusion and chaos.”
Given the reputation of the UCS, we can expect such things from those folks, but it seems to be lost on him that even nontechnical people can assemble technically aware advocates for two or more sides of an issue and eventually get enough information and knowledge explained to them to make political and financial decisions. Where does he think the current NRC budget comes from? Of course, if you don’t make that effort in good faith, you end up with an extended and extensive body of flawed “info”, viz. climate change, vaccines, etc.
Later in the article: “According to [one draft executive] order, the NRC would look at repealing the Linear No Threshold standard for radiation safety.” From reading Jack Devanney at The Gordian Knot News Substack [ https://jackdevanney.substack.com ], I have learned about the competing and preferred model of radiation exposure risk called Sigmoid No Threshold (SNT). This view indirectly allows for considering the fact that we have an evolved biological capability to repair DNA damaged by normal background radiation [or we would not be here today], and only at some higher radiation level does this repair process fail to keep up. Thus the risks from possible power plant radiation leaks depends critically on both the magnitude and rate of exposure [i.e., the whole exposure envelope.] Such plant release exposures may well be small and long term, in which case the risks are reduced via this repair mechanism. The LNT model acts like all exposure is cumulative and not correctible and thus introduces an excessively imbalanced view of radiation risks.
Several of his Substack essays may help understand this, but perhaps this one is a good place to start: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/the-ans-position-statement-on-radiation
Good points about the difference in feed for horses versus zebras, Richard.
A friend of our daughter adopted a zebra a couple of years ago. She gave up on it after a year. It was too nasty to keep on her small farm. A biter, kicker, and spitter. Not at all acclimated to human contact.
And this from Copilot: “Zebras have never been truly domesticated. Although it is possible to tame individual zebras to some extent, their unpredictable nature, strong survival instinct, and natural behavior make them unsuitable for domestication. Unlike horses and donkeys, zebras have not been successfully bred and raised on farms.” 🙂
@ Niketas – I will echo the thanks from Rufus for the Dickens’ “Mrs. Jellyby character and “telescopic philanthropy” that you made on a prior post” as I hadn’t noticed it back at that comment thread until just now.
Also the Lewis quote.
I thought of that segment immediately and tried to find the source, as I didn’t remember which book it came from. No surprise to find it in The Screwtape Letters.
For anyone else who missed it
https://thenewneo.com/2025/05/08/papal-surprise/#comment-2801368
Dershowitz on anti-Trump judge-fare…
https://justthenews.com/podcasts/john-solomon-reports/alan-dershowitz-analyzes-impact-recent-legal-memos-and-ongoing-legal
@ Niketas Choniates
Most fish are carnivores. Fish, though, doesn’t have the stringiness of carnivore meat. The flavor isn’t as strong. It’s usually milder or blander. Fish don’t have the glands that can give carnivore meat a bad taste. Parasites aren’t as common in fish as in predatory mammals. Plus, we evolved eating fish and developed sauces and flavorings for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLTJ95kj9ng#ddg-play
Open Thread Sunday – Pakistan military and such Perun.
Pakistan’s Military Strategy & Assets – Risks, Challenges, Forces & Equipment _ Perun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1K1bY9pJPw
Still…..don’t compare wild zebras to domesticated horses. Compare them to the wild ancestors of domestic horses, which you can only do theoretically.
However, there was a Russian experiment on breeding silver foxes for tameness. Over “several generations” (number not further specified) significant changes were built in.
“Selective breeding” might mean taking the most promising ninety percent, and culling ten percent. Or the most promising ten percent, a pretty savage culling.
But whatever it was, it was in only a few years, so it was likely pretty selective.
If you were to do the same to a population of zebras, there would be an inevitable result. And you can tell the bad actors before maturity. They turn into food. Breed who’s left.
So, either the wild horses were more mellow than the wild zebras, and why would that be? Or there has been selective breeding for utility and that means tameness.
That a wild zebra is a pain in the butt, no matter how gently raised in captivity, proves nothing without doing the same with a wild ancestor. And not the wild horses run away from the domesticated herds.
The wild horses, ancestors, had the same issues; food, mate competition, and the late Pleistocene–prior to megafauna die off–predators made current and recent Africa look pretty tame.
R2L, thanks for that note about the SNT model material. I wish that linked article had seen fit to subscript the “2” in “O2” and “CO2” – unless one is typing on a UNIX box or something, there’s really no need to write chemical formulae that way any more. But, you know, details….
Meanwhile, I wish to note that I hate the disgusting truncation of “Congratulations” to “Congrats”. Hate. Disgusting. I see it in office communications disturbingly often. (At least my area has things about which to congrat others, so that’s a bright spot, admittedly.)
R2L thanks for the link to the article. The Antinuclear power left loves the linear, no threshold model so they can claim that any release of radiation leads to deaths. It is outrageous that the NRC uses this model in their regulations. Articles in medical radiation physics journals say that alternate models which show that low levels of radiation actually decrease health effects are better. See this article
https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/early/2024/06/21/jnumed.124.267868
Bob Wilson, interesting article in regard to validity of radiation hormesis. I had been thinking along the lines of normal or natural levels of background radiation, but the idea of using controlled but higher levels of radiation to “flood the zone” of many cells and “energize” the single strand and double strand DNA repair mechanisms is also intriguing. I presume the idea is this would “sweep up” or “sweep away” initiating cancers in cells before they reach greater cell population impacts. [Vs. what I gather is the current process of focusing extensive radiation on known tumors.]
I fear his call for a national debate will not happen, except via the longer term piling up of articles and evidence, along with the dying off of those who are wedded to the prior paradigm. [But somehow Marx and Engels and Hitler and Gramsci and others have died and their ideas live on without serious decline.]
The concept of having a private sector “debate supporting business” might actually bear fruit if someone was willing to set up those conditions for debates on many different topics, as a business – with sports or entertainment business models as a guide?
My vision about this would also require the debaters to put up their own money to be the debaters, and also anyone who wants to provide corrective commentary [maybe $2K to $10 to debate; and $1K to $5K to respond?] The intent is to keep the debates as flame free as possible. Keeping in mind Sowell’s comments about “there are no solutions, only tradeoffs”. The end result also depends on “who decides” what or how a winner is established.
It might also better educate the public about the role of falsifying hypotheses in scientific advancements to move those hypotheses into the role of theories.
The NRC leaking to NPR with assistance from the UCS to strangle any revival of nuclear power in the US is shocking and inconceivable! (sarc)
NPR can’t be kicked away from their federal rice bowl soon enough. As for the NRC, they have been a useless impediment and force of delay and obstruction for many decades.
Unfortunately for those three letter assclowns, there are many significant economic interests that need the type of power that renewables or unicorn farts can’t provide, but nuclear power can provide.