By the way, @CowperKettle I dreamed that you had bought watercolour pencils but didn't realise it, so I explained to you that you could use a wet brush to make the colours flow.
I'm translating a validation protocol report concerning the AstraZeneca vaccine. Probably the process is slowly ongoing to prepare it for registration in Russia.
> Inscrutable His ways are, and immune To catechism by a mind too strewn With petty cares to slightly understand What awful brain compels the smoker's hand.
@Cerberus There is a late Soviet movie in which a man discovered that he can invoke any dream he wishes in other people. He starts earning money by making on-demand dreams according to the customers' wishes.
If their religion means anything to them, you should see its fruits in their deeds not their words. If they proclaim it or argue about it, they are just so many pharisees crowing on the street corners.
@Cerberus Because religious people strive to something moral and look for some higher purpose. Even though their religion may be cluttered with absurdities, the mere fact of thinking in this general direction might be good
It helps cultivate humanistic principles that strengthen the community, principles like kindness and compassion and charity and forbearance and forgiveness and mercy and altruism and selflessness. A society without those will not long survive. These can be spread by other means than by organized religion, and there can be religious organizations that fail to spread these attributes so critical to civil society.
Those are the fair fruits of religion. As Cowper mentioned, few organizations think beyond the current mortal span, or recognize a higher calling beyond self-interest.
Europe has been harrowed by the foul fruits of religion. Religion should play no part in government. But these principles must.
The masses will always prefer simple pablum over complex thought.
@CowperKettle That is a good point. To state that another way, what if our existence is parted out like frames on a film strip? One frame has only an apparent continuity with the next because of how it is viewed.
I'm kidding though. About the coal offsets for guilt
That would be cheating
In the game of personal goal setting
@tchrist I was thinking here maybe apricots?
Dried of course
Undried I cannot do
They taste like someone was told about how peaches are supposed to taste and they tried to replicate it but have no taste buds or sense of smell so there was no way to test.
Also they were bad at fruit taste reproduction
Wait
I mixed up apricots and nectarines
Nectarines are like tasteless and half dried peaches
Apricots are
Mostly the same? But done by another incompetent fruit constructor
Nectarines can be great, juicy and sweet and sour like peaches, but without the slightly annoying skin.
Apricots are far too bland to eat raw; however, halve them and heat them in the oven until they brown slightly, and you have the best food ever. Best combined with something like custard or cake or cookies.
When one fries or bakes various fruits, like apples, plums, and apricots, they acquire a (patched) brown to black layer where they have touched the pan or the hot air. It tastes deliciously tart and bitter. Is that only caramellisation, or is it more than that? Bonus question: is it the same proc...
@Cerberus Depends on where you shop. Out here there are plenty of produce stands and markets. Enough so that the supermarkets have to at least try to compete.
You need to buy fruit in season, though.
A perfect honeydew melon is my favorite fruit. But a bad one is an abomination.
I believe they are planning to tax kerosine and bunk oil at last. If the tax is high enough, that will reduce the needless shipping of food around the world.
@Cerberus ?? Then why did you mention Haitenk? We were discussing what to put in obituaries for someone who has done something egregious, like a scandal. Why Haitenk?
@Cerberus as someone who hails from a pretty uneducated society, especially in social issues and such, compared to the average westerner, I think religion was the perfect opium here, and it fading away has caused some crisis in the people. I'm with TChrist; in an impoverished society like mine, nobody would listen to you if you wanted to explain why compassion and empathy would go a longer way than "every man for himself".
And I think that a huge part of why we're exposed to more 'bad religious' is precisely because it's fading away. The sort of people that constantly want to demonstrate how they think homosexuals or women ruined the society probably don't donate or help their communities much. I mean, that's not to say religious people of the old couldn't be horribly racist or whatever, they just didn't believe their whole religion revolves around who to exclude and who to hate.
It just wasn't a huge part of their day to fantasize how people far away are pulling invisible strings to make their lives miserable. It was at worst chalked up to supernatural evil.