Quote: 
> Two Middle East mothers are sitting in a cafe chatting over a plate of
> tabouli and a pint of goat's milk. 
>
>   The older of the two pulls a bag out of her purse and starts flipping
> through photos. They start reminiscing.
>   
> 'This is my oldest son, Mujibar.  He would have been 24 years old now.'
>   
> 'Yes, I remember him as a baby,' says the other mother cheerfully.
>   
> 'He's a martyr now though,' the mother confides.
>  
> 'Oh, so sad dear,' says the other.
>
>       
> 'And this is my second son, Khalid. He would have been 21.'
>   
> 'Oh, I remember him,' says the other happily,  'he had such curly hair when
> he was born.'
>
> 'He's a martyr too,' says the mother quietly.
>   
> 'Oh, gracious me . . . , ' says the other.
>
>       
> 'And this is my third son.  My baby. My beautiful Ahmed.  He would have been
> 18,' she whispers. 
>   
> 'Yes,' says the friend enthusiastically, 'I remember when he first started
> school.' 
>   
> 'He's a martyr also,' says the mother, with tears in her eyes.
>    
> After a pause and a deep sigh, the second Muslim mother looks wistfully at
> the photographs and, searching for the right words, says . . .
>     
> 'They blow up so fast, don't they?¹

For everyone who like to cook and try something new

http://www.cajun-recipes.com/index.htm

Maybe it is the weakening magnetic field that is making world leaders nothing more than idiots ?

Quote:In this video Geoff dives into an article about the Sachverständigenrat für Umweltfragen (SRU - German Advisory Council on the Environment) have proposed a 10 GRAM PER DAY limit on meat, how they plan to MANIPULATE and PSYCHOLOGICALLY SHAME meat eaters and RE-EDUCATE CHILDREN AGAINST THEIR PARENTS in the drive to stamp out the consumption of Germany's favourite food. Is the Sausage Fest over? And what else is going on in Farming that we need to know about...?

I came across this video about Snowden and how some of this stuff went down. He did not want to end up in Russia but that was the only door left open for him to stay out of a USA jail.

War Began! US Navy Blow Up Chinese Warship as Cuts Across US Warship Path in South China Sea... I am hoping the title is click bait even though I have been waiting for something like this to happen . Anyone else heard anything about this incident ? The video was posted 14 hours ago..

Another Dr. Doolittle moment today. Driving down my dirt road about 4 pm. I see this tiny black thing on the side of the road. More in the road than on the side. I slow down and I see that it is a kitten.

I asked my Mother, did she see the kitten she said she didn't. I kept on driving slowly because there was a car behind me and I did not want to create and obstacle for them. They saw the kitten and slowed, but the kitten ran off into the woods.

Mother said, "Poor thing". "I wonder how many there are?" So I went back. I didn't see the kitten and was not sure where I had saw it before, so I got out of the car to see if I heard anything. Immediately after I got out I heard it "meow". I looked down and it was walking towards me like he was saying, "About time!"

I picked him up. He was so skinny and tiny. I put him on the back seat. He looked up at me as if he was saying, "Home Jane".

I took him home.

He is on the front porch and he is more docile and cuddly than Sylvester or Enoch. I have to get him checked out by the vet and treated before I can introduce him to the rest of the pack. But he seems to think the place is his.

I was going to name him Joseph because his coat is of many colors, but he would not respond to Joseph. So, I asked him if he thought he was a king. I said are you Nebuchadnezzar, and yep, he walked right over laid down on his back and demanded I rub his belly.

If I say Nebuchadnezzar he turns his head and he comes. If I call him Nebbie, he won't even look at me. If I call him Chad, he won't look at me. If I call him Nebuchadnezzar he turns his head looks at me, and comes if I tell him to come.

So, here we go again. So far Sylvester and Enoch will look at him from the window, but they have not made a sound towards him, and had not made any attempt to get his attention. I think he is so tiny, they are not so sure about him yet. The Huskies looked at him from the outside of the porch, but they haven't weighed in on him yet either. And tiny Nebuchadnezzar, so far, is ignoring them as well.

   

The Furries are cyber attacking state governments and stealing tons of data (beyond sabotaging their sites). Appears they are stealing legal docs from the state supreme courts and health records and who knows what else.

Damned Furries.....


https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/07/gay-...er-states/

Quote:In a series of cyberattacks directed at state governments hostile to transgender rights, members of a hacking group that call themselves “gay furries” have breached and “defaced” websites in Nebraska, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas.

In a communication announcing the breaches posted to the social media platform Telegram, the gay hacktivists, members of a group known as SiegedSec, say they infiltrated Nebraska’s Supreme Court intranet, the South Dakota Boards and Commissions website, the Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council, Pennsylvania’s Provider Self-Service website, and South Carolina’s Criminal Justice Information Services.

“We have proudly defaced the South Dakota Boards and Commissions website!” the group announced Wednesday. “We left little special messages across their site.”

“Unfortunately, they have now fixed the defacement,” the group added. “Since it seems South Dakota didn’t appreciate our gift, we will offer gifts to someone else. We’ve hacked and leaked documents from the Nebraska Supreme Court Intranet and South Carolina Criminal Justice Information Services.”

The group also claimed it caused disruptions to online systems in Pennsylvania and retrieved health-related data in Texas.


It was the second attack on the Lone Star state in a week. The group says they stole close to half a million files from a Ft. Worth-affiliated site last Friday.

“We have decided to make a message towards the U.S government,” the group wrote on Telegram following the Ft. Worth action. “Texas happens to be one of the largest states banning gender-affirming care and for that, we have made Texas our target. Fuck the government.”

Super slow motion of Elephant rifle fired at 2 blocks of ballistic gel with both standard and soft point.

The power of this thing is just awesome.

Start at 8 minutes for the good stuff.

I was ranting about how forums and social media sites are going downhill and how hard it was to find ones that have the information and subject matter I'm looking for. I mentioned that some kind of a news feed service is what I'm really looking for, so I searched around and I am trying out Feedly.

It's a website you have to join and then you choose the websites you want to get news articles from. I'm pretty sure it can be customized to the point where you can get specific about the content of the articles.

So far I have news feeds from websites like Newsmax, OANN, Al Jazeera, and some others to test it and I'm liking it. I have it on list setting and it has a forum feel to it. I have yet to do much with it, but it is delivering all kinds of articles that would make great threads here or on TOS.

I'm sure that this is the way to go rather than using forums and social media as a faux news feed.

If anyone has advice or websites for news feeds, please chime in.

I'm sure we all knew this has been coming...I doubt it's the 'first' but perhaps first publicly acknowledged.

Quote:The first fully A.I.-generated drug enters clinical trials in human patients

Key Points

• Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based biotech startup with more than $400 million in funding, created the drug as a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic lung disease.
  
  
• "It is the first fully generative AI drug to reach human clinical trials, and specifically Phase II trials with patients," Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, told CNBC.
  
  
• The discovery process for the new drug began in 2020.
  

Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based biotech startup with more than $400 million in funding, created the drug, INS018_055, as a treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic disease that causes scarring in the lungs. The condition, which has increased in prevalence in recent decades, currently affects about 100,000 people in the U.S. and can lead to death within two to five years if untreated, according to the National Institutes of Health.

"It is the first fully generative AI drug to reach human clinical trials, and specifically Phase II trials with patients," Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, told CNBC. "While there are other AI-designed drugs in trials, ours is the first drug with both a novel AI-discovered target and a novel AI-generated design." 

The discovery process for the new drug began in 2020, with hopes to create a "moonshot" medicine to overcome challenges with current treatments for the condition, which mostly focus on slowing progression and can cause uncomfortable side effects, Zhavoronkov said.

He added that Insilico has chosen to focus on IPF in part because of the condition's implications in aging, but the company has two other drugs partially generated by AI in the clinical stage. One is a Covid-19 drug in phase one clinical trials, and the other is a cancer drug, specifically a "USP1 inhibitor for the treatment of solid tumors," that recently received FDA approval to initiate clinical trials.

When this company was launched, we were focused on algorithms — developing the technology that could discover and design new molecules," Zhavoronkov said. "I never imagined in those early days that I would be taking my own AI drugs into clinical trials with patients. But we realized that in order to validate our AI platform, we needed to not only design a new drug for a new target, but bring it into clinical trials to prove that our technology worked." 

The IPF drug's current study is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial taking place over 12 weeks in China, and Insilico has plans to expand the testing population to 60 subjects at 40 sites in the U.S. and China. If the current phase two study is successful, it will go on to another study with a larger cohort, and then potentially reach phase three studies with hundreds of participants.

"We expect to have results from the current Phase II trial next year," Zhavoronkov said, adding that it's difficult to predict exact timing for future phases, especially since the disease is relatively rare and patients must fulfill specific criteria. He added, "We are optimistic that this drug will be ready for market, and reach patients who may benefit from it, in the next few years." 

Quote:“And in May, we announced that our first AI-designed cancer drug received IND approval from the FDA to proceed to clinical trials – a new treatment for solid tumors that shows promise to benefit cancer patients who are resistant to other treatments. “

Zhavoronkov also added: “We have a number of cancer drugs designed by AI in our pipeline, and presented four of them at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in Orlando, Florida held in April.”

About the role of the Abu Dhabi research lab in developing this test drug for IPF, Zhavoronkov, said: “Our AI and Quantum Computing R&D center in Abu Dhabi drives the technology advancements related to our generative AI platform, Pharma.AI, which combines generative chemistry and generative biology in order to produce new drugs like this IPF drug.”

“This platform was used in order to identify the novel target (known as “Target X”) which is implicated not only in IPF but other forms of fibrosis, and was also used to generate an entirely new molecule which has shown promise as a treatment for IPF and is now in Phase II trials with patients.
....
Zhavoronkov added: “We see great potential for continued use of the AlphaFold predicted protein database with our platform. We’ve also added chat functionality into our target discovery engine, called ChatPandaGPT, allowing users more seamless interaction with the knowledge graph that connects diseases and possible targets. And in another international collaboration, we also recently published a study combining quantum computing with generative chemistry to generate new molecules. It’s the first step in what we believe will be the future of drug discovery and was published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.”

Insilico takes AI-discovered designer drug into trials to treat pulmonary fibrosis

Quote:Dating AI is "a meditation on how to prepare for the unknown," a thought experiment designed to stimulate new ideas about issues that are important now as well as in the future. Fictional descriptions of human-android romances are interspersed with commentary about the varying differences between people and AI (Artificial Intelligence), and methods for breaching the chasm between machine and human experience. Chapters tie speculation into contemporary life, drawing parallels between current human interactions with machines.

Section 1, "Are you ready to fall in love with a machine?" explains what you'll need to know to engage romantically with AI (including similarities and differences). Section 2, "You are ready, now what?" helps interested humans prepare to date AI. Section 3, "Establishing a relationship" covers the complicated mix of human and AI needs in a relationship, including power dynamics and acceptable behavior. Section 4, "Getting over a breakup (or merger)" explains some of the legal and economic fallout that could result from the demise of an human-AI breakup.

Dating AI is an entertaining, humorous (even slightly satirical) exploration: not only of a possible future, but also of our rapidly changing present relationships with other people and technology. Discerning readers will be compelled to utilize their imaginations, again and again, in an attempt to depict the Psychology of the Future, which looks to be significantly different from anything Freud might have considered.

To quote the visionary writer J.G. Ballard, "Sex times technology equals the future." Just as almost nobody predicted the Internet until it suddenly seemed to have ensnared all within its grasp, so the technology of AI may, sooner than we think, come to be as natural as breathing, and inevitably, perhaps deeply, ensconced in our unconscious -- to be revealed in our dream life as we fall asleep at night.

Dreams reveal truths far beyond what the rational mind might consider "tolerable." It is only at the borders of acceptability where our future freedoms reveal themselves, adumbrating and perhaps incubating a society of the future, where science and art seamlessly integrate themselves, and where poetry and technology are no longer alien domains but a vast cultural continuum where play and discovery create new language and, ahem, acceptable behaviors! We shall see...

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