Margaret Atwood uses the term “speculative fiction”, I think partly to get at the difference you are describing. But also partly because she doesn’t think it needs to be “science-y”.

True, but we aren’t talking about whether jury nullification should exist. It already does exist and has for a 1000 years. The question is just when to use it. Like any right or privilege, it can be used unjustly. It is up to citizens to make sure it is used for good.

Jury nullification exists precisely because there is often a gap between legality and justice. It’s a way for the commoners to ensure justice when the nobility (CEOs and rich politicians, nowadays) make the laws in ways that exploit the commoners. It’s not so much about law vs. feelings as much as it is about offsetting the power of the powerful.

Recency bias. Also anti-semitism. I don’t mean that in the sense that any criticism of Israel is necessarily or logically anti-semitic. I mean it in the historical sense. Any time Western societies starts hating on Jews, we really, really need to reflect hard on why.

I know, we all think we are objective enough to separate the Jewish identity from the Israeli identity, but I’m not so sure. Jews are definitely not so sure. It would be interesting to see a study on the correlation between having general anti-semitic views and having negative opinions about Israel.

I enjoy listening to Katty Kay and the Mooch. However, I think we hit peak Mooch just before election day.

I am still favour of using the Mooch system for measuring the length of appointments, just for the sake of nostalgia. We need to standardize it, though. Is it 11 days or 10?

This is extremely reductive identity politics. The point of the 2024 election results is that Trump made gains with all racial groups. You can’t just boil it all down to identity. Beyond that practical lesson, identity politics is bad for any country because it is a zero-sum game. If we don’t look past identity politics to a common set of ideals, we will end up with people at each other’s throats.

Northern Canadian here. Your worst enemy in the cold is wetness. As others have said, layers are key. Silk and wool are top of the list, but synthetics are okay, too. Silk and wool are expensive, synthetics are cheaper. Do NOT wear cotton. Cotton gets wet and stays wet. It truly sucks in cold weather.

Sweating makes you wet. You have to match your layering to your activity. If you are going to be active, don’t overdress. You should feel chilly when you first start your activity. A common trick is to layer up, then take off your parka to do physical activity, then put it back on when you are done with the activity. Some jackets have pit zips that you can open to shed excess heat. If you are going to sweat, plan it so that you end up indoors somewhere you can dry out. Don’t sweat and then plan to stand around or sleep outside.

If you are going to be mostly standing around, you need big, bad-ass Baffin-style boots, which are heavy. If you’ll be moving around, you can use insulated hiking boots and wool socks. Bring extra underwear and socks because they get wet.

Mitts and a touque are mandatory. Bring two sets because they get wet. Gloves are much less warm than mittens. You can layer that, too. A very thin synthetic glove inside of a mitten works when you need to take off your mitts to work on stuff. It is also worthwhile to get a thin, synthetic balaclava to help prevent wind burn and frost bite. Fingers, toes, and cheeks are the most susceptible to frost bite.

Grow out your beard if you are a dude.

In terms of less intuitive tips, as someone else said, if you start getting cold, expelling urine and faeces really does help. Also, stay hydrated. You get cold when you get dehydrated. You may not even feel thirsty, but cold air is dry air and you will get dehydrated quicker than you think in the cold. Especially if you are shoveling snow.

Shoveling snow sucks, so people tend to rush. The key is to go slow, especially if you are older. You will build up heat rapidly if you are shoveling. Avoid sweating too much, unless you have somewhere warm to dry off. Even if you aren’t shoveling, manhandling a snowblower will make you sweat heavily, too.

OK, so what does this mutual aid look like? Are you talking about organizing armed resistance for when the Gestapo come for you? Or more like food-sharing for when the revolution comes and destroys the economy you don’t care about? I don’t have a sense of what you are getting at.

Couple of things:

1. Revolution sounds good until it actually happens, and then it sucks. It unleashes all the crazies and the outcome is uncertain. And it tanks the economy.
2. If you look at exit polls, people told you why they voted for Trump. Rightly or wrongly, they don’t believe he is a fascist, or at least that the US system won’t allow him to indulge his fascist tendencies. Again, I don’t know if they are correct, but that’s what most people believe.
3. The majority believe that the wokism and identity politics of the left is a greater threat to democracy than Trump.

So, the answer to your question is that you won’t find much support IRL because most people don’t actually think they are supporting fascism. Time will tell if Trump is an actual fascist or just a blowhard. I wish we didn’t have to wonder, but there you have it.

It’s because of the drive-thru. If I could get a locally-made channa masala on rice or a good salad at the drive-thru with a decent cup of coffee, that would be my daily lunch. And, yes, I know that’s lazy, but the drive-thrus are packed so I know I’m not the only one. Unfortunately, only the fast food chains have drive-thrus where I live. There is a business opportunity.

According to NOAA, the ocean was originally not very salty but became saltier over time as rivers eroded the land and delivered the dissolved minerals to the ocean. At the same time, salts crystallize out of the water and are deposited on the ocean floor. This input and output are now more or less balanced so the ocean is not getting saltier. Apparently, this salt cycle involves about 4 billion tons of new dissolved salts being added to the ocean each year and about the same amount being deposited from the water to the ocean bottom.

So, why aren’t rivers salty? Apparently, it is because rivers carry only a small amount of salt and are kept fresh by constant rainfall, whereas the ocean has been accumulating salt for the last 4 billion years.

Lakes that don’t drain to the ocean, like the Dead Sea, can get salty over time, just like the ocean.

I think it depends entirely on the integrity of the cremator. I have a good friend who does pet cremations. He cremated one of my pets and told me that he had a hell of a hard time getting the bag of ashes into the box I gave him. I laughed and asked him why he didn’t just pour some out so the bag would fit more easily. Who would know? Who would care if there were a few grams missing? Especially if the reason was that the client-provided box was too small. But he was genuinely shocked and said he would never do that.

This is the conclusion I’ve come to as well. I used to be frustrated at how stupid Trump supporters are. I would wonder how anyone could be so gullible, cynical, racist, or mysogynist as to vote for Trump. How does he get away with, even prosper, saying such crazy and harmful things? But I’ve come to the conclusion that Trump voters are just extremely unhappy. A vote for Trump is a big fuck-you to the establishment. Both parties were basically run by a modern day aristocracy. The Kennedys, the Clintons, and the Bushes are the most obvious dynasties, but they also have many, many surrogates. More importantly, they defined a kind of cursus honorum for becoming president, including all of the right schools, fraternities, clubs, contacts, donors, etc that you have to follow to move up through the various offices to get to the top. The Tea Party disrupted the Republican aristocracy, but then Trump came along and just obliterated it.

Now, on the one hand, we can probably all get behind the idea that breaking up the aristocratic hold on political parties is a good thing. However, history has also shown that supporting populist demagogues who specialize in chaos and hateful rhetoric often leads to a bad time for the country and the people.

These last five years are the first time in my life that I’m genuinely worried for the stability of the republic. It has been said many times by people who have lived through it that people never think civil war will actually happen until it does. And then they look back and the signs were obvious. Whoever actually wins, when half of the population is voting for a hateful chaos candidate, that’s a big red flag.

My guess is that assassination isn’t as easy as it is made out to be in the movies. The CIA, the best funded intelligence agency in the world, tried to take out Castro hundreds of times and failed. They couldn’t find Osama for a decade, either, and even then the US used Seals, not the CIA. Sure, killing some rando is probably easy, but not a government leader who is actively avoiding assassination, as I’m sure Hamas leaders are doing.

It isn’t such a simple question and I don’t remember all of Scaramucci’s points, which is why I gave the reference. Also, given how long OP’s post was, I figure they probably do want the longer explanation in the podcast. But since you ask (even though you claim its not important to you), here’s what I recall:

1. Many people, especially uneducated people, can’t tell the difference between entertainment and politics. To them, Trump is entertaining, so that’s who they like. When Trump says crazy shit, as detailed by OP, it isn’t a negative. They love it because it is entertaining.
2. Many voters don’t understand economics and the business cycle. They assume that the current state of the economy/inflation/affordability is the direct result of whatever the current president is doing. So, if affordability is bad right now, it is Biden/Harris’s fault. If affordability was better when Trump was president, they want him back. I think The Mooch called it “economic nostalgia”.
3. Racism and misogyny plays a role.
4. There is a large segment of the population, not just in the US but around the world, that believes in the “strong man” style of leadership. A big, loud and proud alpha male type who never surrenders is comforting to many people. This is lizard-brain stuff that goes way back to caveman days.
5. Straight white males have been either ignored or actively disparaged by many on the left. Things like DEI may be justifiable on a group level, but proponents sometimes forget that people are not just members of a group, they are individuals. As individuals, they may not feel the privilege that they supposedly have. So, as much as a straight white male may support the goals of DEI or “wokeness” or whatever you want to call it, they don’t want to be discriminated against as individuals, anymore than women or minorities do. This is why support for Trump is much higher among white men than women and minorities.

That’s all I can remember right now.

It’s not an advertisement, dumbass. I found the last two episodes of that podcast pretty much exactly answered the question that OP posed.

If you really want to know why Trump is still competitive, listen to Anthony Scaramucci, a.k.a. The Mooch. He worked for Trump for a couple of weeks before being fired by him. The Mooch is a long-time conservative investor-type who knows Trump well and can’t stand him, so he has been helping the Democrats. Thr Mooch really understands Trump and his followers. I’m pretty sure he helped with Harris’s debate prep, especially helping her understand how to get under Trump’s skin.

He hosts a great podcast along with Katty Kay called The Rest Is Politics US (as opposed to the parent program The Rest Is Politics UK). https://tripus.supportingcast.fm

In particular, check out the last two post-debate episodes:

#27 Trump vs. Harris: What You Didn’t See

#28 Why Kamala Harris Still Has a Problem

Yeah, but she was his cousin so…

You, sir, are a poet. And now we all know it.

As everyone else has said, this is a risky practice due to heat-tolerant bacterial toxins. Here is an article about it, if you want to do some more reading:

https://blog.foodsafety.ca/what-are-bacterial-toxins

The reason the meat smells better after you partially cook it is that you are killing the spoilage bacteria coating the outer surface and washing away or destroying their smelly byproducts. Oddly enough, those aren’t the really dangerous bacteria. The ones that cause serious food poisoning mostly do not stink.

Also, cutting the larger chunk of meat up into smaller pieces is a very bad idea. You are just spreading the surface contamination into the muscle. Also, using water as a medium actually limits the upper temperature you can achieve. If you really want to save a piece of meat while minimizing your risk, do this instead:

1. Leave the cut of meat intact.
2. Put a high-heat vegetable oil like canola or sunflower oil into a steel frying pan.
3. Heat it until the oil smokes just a little. The smoke point of sunflower oil is 248 Celsius, whereas water boils at 100 Celsius, so you can easily see why this method is more effective than boiling.
4. Pick up the piece of meat with two pairs of tongs and place it into the hot pan. Rotate it around until a brown crust forms on the outside. This is called searing.
5. Remove the meat from the pan and let it cool.
6. With a clean sharp knife, cut off the seared meat at the surface and discard.

Note that you should not attempt this with poultry, only whole, non-tenderized cuts of beef or pork. This, by the way, is how restaurants prepare beef for serving raw dishes like steak tartar. Or at least that’s how they are supposed to prepare it from a food safety perspective.

Note also that this doesn’t guarantee that the meat is safe, but raw, whole, non-tenderized cuts of meat are usually only contaminated on the outer surface. Obviously it is safer to avoid the risk altogether, but if you must try to save the meat, this method is far, far better than your current practice.