One of the crime scene cleanup photos shows a prominent pride flag in the window of the establishment, and the venue’s website says “Proudly Black-, Brown-, Queer-, and Women-owned.”

Could that have been the motivation for the attack?

the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation

Are all those qualifiers even needed?

Are there any state or local agencies larger than the federal government’s? Are there any other countries with larger agencies? (China or India, maybe?)

Or can we just call it “the largest law enforcement agency in (western) history”?

Art is built on metaphor, which is an underlying connection between multiple meanings.

In semantic space, meanings are points while metaphors are vectors.

Dont say Prometheus

Ok… it was Προμηθεύς.

The brain generates a characteristic signal (from a sub-region of Broca’s area) when it detects grammatical errors—but it generates an identical signal when you’re listening to a grammatical sentence and need to re-parse it partway through. I think this latter case is actually the real purpose of the signal: every time it triggers, your brain is warning you that you need to stop and check the sentence again even if the meaning seems unambiguous. So the “pretending they can’t understand you” reaction could just be a reflexive response to that signal (i.e., the brain is telling them it’s confused even if there’s no logical reason it should be).

It means he wants to see how people react to him saying it.

Who would even follow Elon Musk?

Candidates looking for funding.

I can’t see a significant percentage of Trump’s MAGA supporters abandoning him in favor of Musk. But I can see Musk being a divisive figure among the non-MAGA Republicans, with some refusing to work with him while others are happy to take his money.

The most likely outcome is nothing.

The second most likely outcome is a fracturing of Trump’s opposition, further weakening their ability to impede him.

If they weren’t such incompetent idiots I’d suspect it was a ploy to create a controlled opposition.

You could restrict it to cases where the victim and defendant belong to significantly different demographics, then.

You could expand that to a general principle for all criminal cases: select one judge that matches the demographics of the defendant as closely as possible, one that matches the victim, and one that differs to an equal degree from both.

He was originally jailed for life but at an appeal doctors told the court the rapes arose of sexual frustration arising out of his marriage to an “ambitious and demanding” wife. The sentence was reduced and he spent only about two years in jail.

Why are rapists seemingly the only category of offender judges always manage to find sympathy for?

They do say the rate of change was greater than the pre-COVID trend, but I don’t know if that means the level is now below where it would be if the pre-COVID trend had continued without interruption.

It’s interesting that the same stimulus (COVID) could cause crime to spike in the short term, then decline to below the original level.

I wonder if that could be a general pattern with societal trauma or social change in general—there’s an initial period of disruption, then a re-adaptation that creates an opportunity to resolve long-standing issues with the previous status quo.

It always seemed to me that the obvious conclusion to draw from the idea that some teens are under so much social pressure to align their mental and biological genders that they see suicide as the only alternative is that that aspect of society is in urgent need of fixing, not the bodies of the teens in question.

These days elders are printing screenshots of emails (and wondering why they’re cut off).

My kingdom for the lord of all horses!

Since 1995, I’ve always associated Ian McKellan with his iconic portrayal of Richard III.

Which colored my impression of Lord of the Rings a bit.

AI models aren’t willing to do anything—they’re just generating hypothetical behaviors based on the predictions they’ve learned to make about the behavior of others.

It’s like asking a child to describe the behavior of their imaginary friend.

Part of the ideology of the major AI companies is that AI is actually profoundly dangerous, and only the companies who recognize the danger should be allowed to develop it.