Trump today confirmed my view that the US will move on Venezuelan energy assets.
He really needs to stop saying the quiet part out aloud.

Explain that, Bern. Is this some about the frozen assets?

On the other hand it’s 2 am, you’ve been up since 7 am, had s couple of drinks, maybe you’re just dog tired.
An outlandish theory, right?

FMD Essendon v Carlton is very, very poor.

Your initial comment was that Higgins claimed Lehrmann removed her dress.
I pointed out that Higgins made no such claim, and since then you’ve doubled down on stupid.
Several times.

Another inference.

Dr Joanna Howe is a Professor of Law at the University of Adelaide and a consultant with Harmers Workplace Lawyers.

She’s also a strong opponent of late term and live birth abortions and the laws which prevent any assistance to the poor little buggars who survive the abortion and are then left to die. The bastards responsible for this in victoristan, nsw and qld should have hot pipes stuck up their arses. The good Dr was on Stoker tonight and became visibly disturbed as she articulated this disgusting state of filth.

A fine edit:

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou directed by Wes Anderson
Music: David Bowie – Life on Mars? (“The Life Aquatic” Official Soundtrack)

David Bowie – Life On Mars?

I’ve learnt from Ed tonight that Higgins was on a Tinder date, and that she was shouting the work group. Why haven’t I heard either of these revelations before now?

Because Ed is talking out of his arse.

I’m confused at your comment Mark, 20 minutes for what?
I’m wondering why people are speculating that she took ‘something’ at 2 am.
I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to add in something that has never been in the mix.
Most of the time young women make claims about having been slipped something because that is preferable to admitting they have gotten themselves so incredibly drunk.

Ms Higgins could be seen on her phone, and the court was told she had organised a Bumble date for the evening.

She moved away from the main group at 8.20pm to meet her date outside the bar before bringing him inside to introduce him to everyone at the table.

He sat with the group of mainly parliamentary staff, but seemed to disappear before 8.52pm, when Ms Higgins joined another table with Mr Lehrmann and two others.

The Beauty Of:

The cinematography of David Lean’s work

All DoP : Ernest Day, Freddie Young, Jack Hildyard, Guy Green, Robert Krasker & Ronald Neame

Song : Royal Pendant – Power Hauss

The Beauty Of David Lean

Off the pace again.
The court heard Ms Higgins then threw up in the former minister’s bathroom, before she made her way into a small room near Ms Reynolds’ former office, which had no windows, found a box of Roses chocolates and ate it while crying.

‘I pulled myself together – I was quite dishevelled. I borrowed one of the minister’s jackets to cover my cocktail dress,’ she said in the police interview.

No wonder you weren’t called at trial Groogs. Your invoice still outstanding?

Still a great video Rabz. The ball from Henderson to Salah is sublime

calli says:
June 11, 2023 at 3:01 pm

If you come out as an INFJ, you’ll probably not be gaming it. All the questions/answers that lead to it are the least appealing and most anti-social. No wonder there are only 0.03% of us.

Yep.
Very exhausting sometimes.

Posting again for those that missed it. Powerful clip.

A snapshot hard to ignore.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN – STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA – Subtítulos en Español – volandoconalas

Average drink spike & doseage: Vodka Cruiser x 12

Certain parents were the worst offenders – THEIR little girl must have had her drink spiked…..she would never have got that drunk….

It was that “deeply privately Christian” premier Gladys who birthed the late term abortion law for NSW.

Yep, our glad, ugly on the outside, uglier inside. She was acting to gain the support of the poofta now tangling with Latham. In fact greenwich gave the live birth abortion bill to glad and it is this as much as anything else which started the feud between the poofta and Latham since Latham is old school anti abortion.

Cronkers

Are still using Grindr for those “cute owl” dates ?

The official RBA definition is about the same for Australia. In the US, the official definition of a recession is not two negative GDP quarters as people generally believe. It’s this:

The *NBER defines a recession as a period between a peak and a trough in the business cycle where there is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy that can last from a few months to more than a year.

We’re in one now as the decline has been pretty significant.

*National Bureau of Economic Research | NBER

Those advocating this idiocy have obviously never been called out in the middle of the night to find, muster, sometimes supress, and deliver these creatures to their homes or colleges.

Those advocating this idiocy have never had a security job that involve “hens” nights. Some of the goings on would have made the Emperor Caligula blush…

PML very impressed with the Mar-a-Lago indictment; this is serious and nothing like Trump has had to face before he intones. I’m beginning to think he’s a fu.king idiot. And he looks like death warmed up. Is he sick?

These blokes are bonkers and brilliant.

Milwaukee Senior TT – Highlights | 2023 Isle of Man TT Races

Here’s Manhattan Contrarian on the Trump indictment. He was a senior partner at a large NYC law firm until he retired.

Thoughts On The Federal Trump Indictment: It’s Shockingly Weak

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-6-10-thoughts-on-the-federal-trump-indictment-its-shockingly-weak

The money shot.

Now, you might think that, in evaluating whether a case against Trump might have those elements, it would be rather critical to consider the importance of the Presidential Records Act of 1978. That is the statute that made presidential records the property of the government (previously they were understood to be the personal property of the President or former President). But in making presidential records the property of the government, the act contained this rather important carve-out (22 U.S.C. Section 2205(3)):

Notwithstanding any restrictions on access imposed pursuant to sections 2204 and 2208 of this title . . . (3) the Presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representative.

Somehow the indictment that has been issued does not anywhere mention this section.

Whatever you say Ed.
The Vagina Monologues

Excellent work to win the interwebs today Farmer Gez.
Your effort is plus several hundred thousands more than Carlton tonight.

Paul Murray on Sky claims before he reports on him he has to reveal that he is on the Trump train, his usual expression. Yeah sure Paul, it doesn’t look good when you condescend on to your audience.

West Aussie copper, who was knocked over by a stolen car, and dragged underneath it, four days ago, had the life support turned off today…

This weekend, the Economist ran an interesting piece dealing directly with consciousness.

The hard problem

“I THINK, therefore I am.” René Descartes’ aphorism has become a cliché. But it cuts to the core of perhaps the greatest question posed to science: what is consciousness? The other phenomena described in this series of briefs—time and space, matter and energy, even life itself—look tractable. They can be measured and objectified, and thus theorised about. Consciousness, by contrast, is subjective. As Descartes’ observation suggests, a conscious being knows he is conscious. But he cannot know that any other being is. Other apparently conscious individuals might be zombies programmed to behave as if they were conscious, without actually being so.

In reality, it is unlikely that even those who advance this proposition truly believe it, as far as their fellow humans are concerned. Cross the species barrier, however, and matters become muddier. Are chimpanzees conscious? Dogs? Codfish? Bees? It is hard to know how to ask them the question in a meaningful way.

Moreover, consciousness is not merely a property of having a complex, active brain, for it can vanish temporarily, even while the brain is healthy and functional. Most people spend a third of their lives in the state described as “sleep”. Unless awoken while dreaming, they have no sense of being conscious during these periods. Recordings of the brain’s electrical activity show, though, that a sleeping brain is often as busy as one that is awake. Subjective though it is, consciousness therefore looks like a specific phenomenon, not a mere side-effect. That suggests it has evolved, and has a biological purpose. These things—specificity and purpose—give researchers something to hang on to.

A lot of brain science relies on looking at brains that are broken. Studying consciousness is no exception. One of the most intriguing examples has emerged from work, started in the early 1970s by Lawrence Weiskrantz of Oxford University, on a phenomenon called blindsight.

Blindsight is occasionally found in those whose blindness is caused by damage to the visual cortex of the brain, perhaps by a stroke or tumour, rather than by damage to the eyes or optic nerves. Those who have blindsight have no conscious awareness of being able to see. They are nevertheless able to point to, and even grasp, objects in their visual fields.

Blindsight is an example of how brain damage can abolish the conscious experience of a phenomenon (in this case vision) without abolishing the phenomenon itself. Conversely, apparently full consciousness can be retained in the absence of quite important parts of the brain. One example of this is the case of a Chinese woman born without a cerebellum. This is a structure at the back of the brain which co-ordinates movement. The woman in question thus finds it awkward to move around. But she is completely conscious and is able to describe her experiences. Unlike the visual cortex, then, the cerebellum has no apparent role in generating consciousness.

Observations like this have led to a search for the neural correlates of consciousness—the bits of the brain responsible for generating conscious experience. One of particular interest is the claustrum. This is a candidate because of its extensive connections with other parts of the brain. A crucial property of consciousness is that it integrates many sorts of experience, both sensory and internally generated. Discovering how this integration happens is known as the binding problem. In 2005 a paper published by Francis Crick (posthumously, for he had died the previous year) and Christof Koch (who now works at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle) looked at the binding problem. The two researchers lit upon the claustrum as something that might help illuminate it.

The claustra (there are two, one in each cerebral hemisphere—see diagram) are thin sheets of nerve cells tucked below the cerebral cortex that have connections both to and from almost every area of the cortex. They are the only structures that link the various parts of the cortex in this way. Crick and Dr Koch suggested they act like orchestral conductors, co-ordinating the activities of the cortical components and thus solving the binding problem.

Doing experiments to test this idea is hard, for the procedures needed (such as the implantation of electrodes) would be intrusive, risky and thus unethical for the mere satisfaction of curiosity. But one such experiment has happened by accident.

In 2014 Mohamad Koubeissi, an American neurologist, was trying to hunt down the origin of the epilepsy suffered by one of his patients. To do so he implanted electrodes into her brain—permissible in view of her condition’s seriousness. When he placed one near one of her claustra and switched the current on, she lost consciousness. When he switched the current off, she regained it. When he repeated the procedure several times, he got the same result on each occasion.

Another phenomenon correlated with consciousness, which some think may help solve the binding problem, is a pattern of electrical impulses, known as gamma waves, which beat at an average frequency of 40Hz, in synchrony in different parts of a person’s brain. They are strongest during conscious concentration on tasks, are always present when someone is conscious, and largely disappear when he is asleep, unless he is dreaming. Many neuroscientists suspect gamma waves’ synchrony means they are acting like the clock in a computer processor, co-ordinating the activities of disparate parts of the brain—in other words, binding them together.

Yet another neural correlate of consciousness is the temporoparietal junction. Damage to this part of the brain, or use of a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deactivate it temporarily, creates intriguing effects. In particular, it can cause out-of-body experiences in which a person’s conscious perception of himself appears (from his point of view) to detach itself from his body.

TMS of the temporoparietal junction also reduces someone’s ability to empathise with the mental states of others. That suggests this part of the brain helps generate “theory of mind”—the ability to recognise that other creatures, too, have minds. Some see this link as more than coincidence. Seeking an evolutionary explanation for consciousness, they suggest that an animal which can model another’s behaviour can gain an advantage by anticipating it. They further suggest that, since the only model available to a mind that wishes to understand another’s is itself, a theory of mind necessarily requires self-awareness. In other words, consciousness.

This bears on the question of how it might be possible to find out if non-human animals are conscious. If being conscious requires the self-awareness that having a theory of mind implies, then those with it might be expected to be able to recognise themselves in a mirror.

Human babies are able to do so from the age of 18 months. That was well-known in 1970, when Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York, Albany, tried the experiment on three other primate species. Previous research had suggested that most animals, when they see themselves in a mirror, respond as to a stranger—often aggressively—and seem unable to learn, no matter how long the mirror is there, to do otherwise. Dr Gallup found that this was indeed true for two species of macaque monkey. But chimpanzees soon learned that the image in the mirror was a reflection of themselves, and even used it as a person might, to assist grooming.
To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature

Subsequent mirror studies have looked at bonobos, gorillas, orang-utans, gibbons, many other monkeys, elephants, dogs, dolphins and various birds. Bonobos, orang-utans, elephants, dolphins and magpies react in ways that might be interpreted as self-recognition. Gorillas, gibbons, monkeys, dogs and pigeons do not.

Although some psychologists question the value of the mirror test (dogs, for example, rely heavily on smell rather than vision for individual identification, so may simply be uninterested in images of themselves), it does suggest the capacity for self-recognition has emerged independently in animals with differently organised brains. If the phenomenon’s neural correlates could be identified in those brains—admittedly a hard task—then comparative studies might be possible. That would be valuable, as it is difficult to do good science when only one example is available.

And yet. Finding the neural correlates of consciousness, or even understanding what it is for and how it evolved, does not truly address the question of what it actually is—of what it is people are experiencing while they are conscious. This question has come to be known as the “hard problem” of consciousness.

It was so dubbed in 1995, by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, and the name encapsulates both the fact that it is hard to resolve and that its resolution is the heart of the matter. Merely calling it hard does not really help the investigator to think about it, but the work of another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, perhaps does. In 1974 Dr Nagel, an American, posed the problem in a novel way, in a paper called, “What is it like to be a bat?”

For the sake of this thought experiment Dr Nagel assumed bats have conscious experience of the world. If they do, though, he suggested that it will be built largely on the basis of a sense—echolocation—which human beings do not possess. A human might, Dr Nagel posits, plausibly imagine some parts of a bat’s experience, such as hanging upside down for long periods, or even flying. But seeing the world through sonar is ineffable to humanity.

The nub of the hard problem, then, is to make this ineffability effable. Other fields of scientific endeavour circumvent ineffability with mathematics. No one can truly conceive of a light-year or a nanosecond, let alone extra dimensions or wave-particle duality, but maths makes these ideas tractable. No such short-cut invented so far can take a human inside the mind of a bat. Indeed, for all the sophistication of theory-of-mind it is difficult, as everyday experience shows, to take a human being inside the mind of another human being. The hard problem may thus turn out to be the impossible problem, the one that science can never solve. The Oracle at Delphi said, “know thyself.” Difficult. But a piece of cake compared with knowing others.

For Gawd’s sake head prefect I’ve advised you about long posts, even if they’re copy and pastes. Your mental stamina is just not up to it.

In a previous clip he signed out saying to all “blue haired lefties” and retards preaching socialism to visit Cuba for a month.

This goes for over an hour.

—–

Kurt Caz:

Journey Across Forgotten Cuba

In a just world this Mar-a-Lago indictment would be shoved down jack smith’s throat.

Trump Appointee Will Remain Judge in Documents Case, Clerk Says

The surprise assignment of Judge Aileen Cannon could be a setback for prosecutors as they unveiled a sweeping classified files indictment.

NYTimes is really pissed off.

JC earlier.

Some super smart make evil mistakes.

Ted’s gone to hell.

Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the convicted domestic terrorist also known as the “Unabomber,” died Saturday in federal prison at the age of 81, the Bureau of Prisons confirmed.

Ted was quite smart at his chosen discipline.
His problem was that he wasn’t as half a smart a criminal as he thought he was.
Given he lived such an isolated life and committed his crimes before DNA testing and CCTV surveillance and he was able to transact everything in cash, they actually caught him after relatively few incidents.
And his stupid manifesto may as well have been signed with a bloody fingerprint.
A couple of people instantly recognised it as Ted’s work.

Don’t worry about whether the argument presented is a decent analysis based on facts, that’s not how we do.
And, after all he isn’t Mr Infallible from Blackrock.

rosiesays:
June 11, 2023 at 10:44 pm
Don’t worry about whether the argument presented is a decent analysis based on facts, that’s not how we do.
And, after all he isn’t Mr Infallible from Blackrock.

That’ll come back to haunt you.

After nearly three decades in Parliament — including eight years as WA’s 29th Premier — the Liberal stalwart now splits his time between the family farm in Wagin and lecturing first year students in economics.

Something of a fall for the Emperor. I would skip his lectures on succession planning.

Re: Ted Kaczynski

I never new about this letter- his final letter to his brother:

https://imgur.com/a/7MdHA1s

chrislsays:

June 11, 2023 at 8:44 pm

Richmond player Pickett in custody in Perth on burgulary charges

Aggravated burglary is wot I heard.
More than one.
With his form, I reckon he has played his last game of footy.

Definitely his brother, don’t know about his sister. IIRC his brother gave him up to the police. He wasn’t just “quite smart”. IQ 167.

My point was that he was very, very good at his chosen discipline of maths.
But as a criminal mastermind? …. D Minus.

Cash!

——

woof bark growl:

Cash 2.0 Great Dane at the Westfield outdoor mall 12