Pat @Pat@qoto.org

Whoever voted yes, please let me know where you heard that. Thank you.

@Pjcoyle

MARAD = an ancient Near Eastern city that was situated on the west bank of the then western branch of the Upper Euphrates River west of Nippur in modern-day Iraq.

IFR = Instrument Flight Rules

OT = Overtime

The closed captioning is small and hard to see, it says...

Right. So, what happens when we die?

We drop into limbo. Are you serious?

Limbo?! Unconstructed dream space.

(The last CC sentence was not spoken in this clip, it's for the next spoken line in the scene, which was cut off in this clip).

@freemo @EubieDrew @ufoi

That Roy Bean quote was a joke by the way, in case anybody didn't understand.

>"Deserved or not, he is polarizing."

I have not found freemo to be polarizing at all.

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #film #movie #drugs #addiction #race #racism #limbo #subversion #IHaveADream #dream #gravity #regrets

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Inception (2010)

What if M. C. Escher, Timothy Leary and David Duke got together and made a Hollywood tent pole?

This one has amazing computer graphics along with great acting performances, especially by Elliot Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard. Unfortunately, there was extreme racial bias in the composition of the cast with no black characters in this large cast besides bit parts.

In this film everyone had a dream except black people.

There were just two bit parts with black characters. One was a man interfering with the main protagonist and yelling at him in a foreign language, the other one was a stuntman who fought against a protagonist and was killed in an unusual manner, followed by another protagonist who laughed and said, “Did you see that?” (And the producers chose to have an actor of Indian ethnicity, Dileep Rao, deliver that offensive line.) Other than background, those were the only black people I saw in this two and half hour long movie.

Another huge issue I have with the film is the promotion and glorification of drug use. The film was produced right after Obama took office, when there was a massive, subversive campaign to encourage drug use in the US, along with a huge increase in racism, among many other efforts to undermine society during his administration.

Because of the racism in this 21st-century film, I don’t recommend watching it.

(short, fair use clip from the film, no spoiler)

@freemo

"First we'll give him a fair trial, followed by a hanging." - Judge Roy Bean

@ufoi

@freemo

>"...please report it with any evidence and the new head will remove us from the UFoI..."

Don't you mean, "...please report it and there will be due process..."

@ufoi

@ceoln

I like short, esoteric words. I made a jot.

Did anyone get all four them?

#people #silos #culture #PeoplePoll

Can you describe who these people are and what they are famous for?

(click each one that you know)

@Juan_Kinda_Guy

>"not sure what happened other than using a cheap telephoto."

That's all it takes.

@ThinkingSapien @LouisIngenthron

By the way, I think that's a terrible thing to tell children and that type of attitude is what brings down civilizations.

@ThinkingSapien @LouisIngenthron

Here's another way of presenting the same message...

"Do whatever you want. Don't bother following the laws, because they are made by an unfair system. Others don't follow the rules so you're a sap if you do. Don't worry about harming anybody, because they don't care about you. If you ever feel empathy for others, just wipe that feeling out because you won't be able to survive in the world if you have feelings for others -- just fake the sincerity. But whatever you do, just make sure you don't get caught."

@Theraviranjankr

This video provides the answer...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UvmWxm3nR6E

@deNew_John

>"Lost track of what's happening with soaring power prices? "

I get fucking reminder every month!

@jillianne

>"How buzzed do you think Dean Martin was when he recorded his Christmas album?"

Was he ever sober? 😆

@trinsec

>”Right now there are protests going.”

That’s a good thing. That’s part of democracy.

>“If your idea of 'succesful' includes locking up people (including welding doors shut) so they can't spread the virus, then sure, they were extremely succesful.”

My idea of success is very few people dead and very few long-term chronically ill. In the US we have more people who are dead or so sick that they can hardly breathe, than China has quarantined. Would you rather be confined to your house for a week or two, or be dead? We also have a large portion of our population who can’t go out and travel around now because they are old or immunocompromised and are stuck at home – many more than those who had spent a couple of weeks in quarantine in China. If we had a zero-Covid policy in the US everyone would be able to move freely without fear, and our services and hospitality sectors would not have taken such a huge hit.

I actually think that China went overboard on lock-downs. If they would have had everyone wear N95 or N100 respirators (not that KN95 shit they have now), then they would not be running into problems with the more transmissible variants, as they are now.

>”Now the virus is returning with bigger force, protests are increasing, and their leaders are starting to notice what it feels like to be between a rock and a hard place. It'll be very interesting to see how those protests unfold.“

Their strategy was correct because now the world has had a couple of years of experience with COVID-19 disease and we’ve developed better therapeutics and vaccines and are better prepared to keep people healthy. China has, by keeping their people safe early in the pandemic, saved many more lives even if they now start to have more cases. Now we know how to treat the disease better and more people will have better outcomes.

>”Virus-free country? Don't count on it. They just hide it. Or haven't you seen those regular city-wide lockdowns lately? (And with city-wide I mean cities of more than 1 million people).”

As I said elsewhere, in China they locked up a million people in quarantine for a couple of weeks; here in the US we locked up a million people in coffins and buried them 6 feet underground.

>”Prior there were total lockdowns if there was only one infection case found. And people were sent to quarantine hotels, even though they were very unhygienic and totally full. Now the people are allowed to quarantine at home if they have mild symptoms or if they tested positive but don't display symptoms. This is apparently considered a huge move over there.
>“The local governments also aren't allowed anymore to put whole regions in lockdown. They have to decide per building or even per floor what the risk factor is. It is as of yet unknown if this means the end of a zero-covid strategy.”

China’s historical MO on protests is to aggressively suppress them, and then after some time has passed, they make adjustments to address those grievances, but in a way so as to not make it look like they had caved in to the protesters. If they are now making immediate changes in response to the protests, that would be a big a change.

One possibility is that, prior to all of this, Western IC picked up intel that China was about to make some changes to their Covid strategy and then Western operatives in China launched the protests to make it look like the protests led to the changes that officials were going to make any way. (In order to make China’s leadership look weak or reactive.) But this is pure conjecture on my part, and would be really provocative on our part, which doesn’t make sense for us to do at this time. Perhaps the whole thing was purely organic.

>”Also, I've seen lots of pics from China, including those protests. They all wear simple cloth masks. Not respirators.”

They mostly wear surgical masks, procedure masks, or KN95s. That’s not enough to control the more transmissible variants. They should be wearing N100 elastomeric respirators now with these new and future variants. They have the manufacturing capacity to supply each of their citizens with high-quality elastomeric respirators and they should do that.

@mc @freemo @admitsWrongIfProven

@mc

I haven't heard anything to indicate that they are any less reliable than US numbers. US media is so anti-China right now, I'm sure if there was an issue with the numbers that they'd be all over them about it.

I use number of deaths rather than number of infections whenever I can because it's harder to hide dead bodies. About 10 months ago some US states changed their attribution criteria for COVID-19 deaths to try to lower the numbers, but you still have excess deaths that can be seen, even if they try to mis-attribute deaths to some other cause.

@freemo

And you have a valid point about demographics having a significant impact on death rate. For example, in many African countries, they had a huge AIDS epidemic recently that took out a lot of people and therefore have a much younger demographic, and therefore did much better with COVID-19.

@admitsWrongIfProven

@freemo

You're right, I'm not a statistician. What set me off on all this is an interview that Dr. Jha did on ABC's This Week (he's the guy currently heading the US response to the pandemic). So, in this interview, the guy running the group that is responsible for more than a million dead Americans, says that China (who's death rate <1% of the US rate) is doing it wrong. These people are evil, absolute evil.