Technically, yes. In any practical way, no. Quite aside from the problems of aiming and getting any reasonable concentration back where you want it, your targets will be either wearing lots of armor, helmets, facemasks, goggles, and other protective clothing or actually be inside what's basically a sort of urban tank. Then there's also the fact that, if you do, like many things authorities may throw randomly at crowds of people, if anyone throws them back they're treated as if they just attempted murder.

Which is why the companies that produce these also produce "inert" and low velocity/softer versions for training purposes. You hear these people going on about how people should just man up and they went through it themselves in training, but they're really talking about having saline solution sprayed in their eyes, etc.

I think you have to work a "high-T" and "anti-woke" in there somewhere. Possibly some form of stylized grunt as well.

Years back, they also did development on a device that uses microwaves (like this device) but instead of heating the skin, the goal was to vibrate the skull so that sound could be heard in the ears. The general idea (supposedly) was a sort of wide range public address system that could be heard even in noisy environments and at long ranges. The reason I bring this up is that over the years many crazy people have claimed that the government is putting voices in their heads using micro/radio waves. Most of them are paranoid schizophrenics who are having auditory hallucinations, of course. Then there are the ones who really were hearing voices in their heads because their dental fillings were actually picking up AM radio signals (and some of those actually may have also been paranoid schizophrenics as well). The thing is, it doesn't help much that the government actually did do development on a device that could put voices in people's heads with microwaves.

Overall this is a problem with our modern world. Fifty years ago, if someone went to their psychiatrist and complained that dark forces were listening to them through their toaster, the psychiatrist would have immediately recognized paranoia. These days, though, the patient's IOT toaster really could be spying on them, just like their TV, phone, fridge, washing machine, etc. Basically human civilization seems to have a drive to make every dystopian prediction and paranoid fantasy true as quickly as possible.

Was someone handing him a fast food bag stuffed with cash in that interview?

Aside from the fact that "immigration judges" aren't part of the judicial branch and are therefore just pretend judges, the simple fact of the matter is that US immigration law is very broken, and a lot of the reason is intentional sabotage of the laws for legal immigration over the years. That has left a massive number of people in a legal limbo that judges have handled all this time often by simultaneously issuing a "final order of removal" and a stay on that order at the same time (for example because of fixed time limits that are too short for the incredibly huge backlogs to catch up to). There are huge number of people who technically have orders of removal, but who actually aren't here illegally. Now ICE/DHS is taking advantage of that, and of the average person's ignorance of what a mess the system actually is. It lets them make disingenuous statements like the one you're echoing here.

The thing that keeps getting me is how much deflection goes on here. "Instead of tickling immigrants with a sunburn to make them..." What makes you think this is to be used on immigrants? It's made for using on crowds. There is basically no practical benefit to using this on, for example, people who have crossed the US border and are now on US soil in the group sizes that they would actually cross the border. If you did, what's your fantasy here, that the "irresistable urge to flee" will then make them run back across to the other side? It makes no sense whatsoever from a tactical or strategic perspective. Most people have to get by obstacles to cross the border, people under an "irresistable urge to flee" can't cross obstacles. In any case, most are not intercepted right at the actual border line, making it impractical to run back to the border anyway. Just how does anyone think this can actually be practically used for border enforcement?
Quite obviously, it can't. The obvious intent here is for a brutal form of crowd control. One that will almost certainly actually be lethal in some cases, both from some people in the crowd getting too much exposure time, from people being trampled to death, and from some members of crowds desperately fighting with others to use each other as human shields. This won't really see much use (justified use, anyway, I can see plenty of border patrol/ICE types using it for pointless torture to amuse themselves) at the border itself. This will be turned on protestors and the vast majority will be US citizens.

Someone has already pointed this out, but it bears repeating. For that to actually be true, they would need to cost more from the budget than they add to it through both direct taxation, and the tax revenue generated through the effects of their labor and other economic activity on the GDP. Virtually all studies show that they're actually a net benefit there.

This is a bit of a game of semantics, but you started it. That statement can only be true if you are selectively defining "illegal aliens" to mean people who committed actual crimes, as in in misdemeanors and felonies with regards to immigration laws. If so, then that statement is a meaningless tautology anyway. If you are taking "illegal immigrant" to mean everyone in the country who may not have a legal right to be here, then that's simply either extreme ignorance, or just a lie. Traditionally, basically all immigration offenses were administrative/civil, like a parking ticket or a fine for not cleaning snow off the sidewalk in front of your house or something. Not crimes. Although they could get you detained and deported, it was explicitly legally defined as non-punitive. While US conservatives/nationalists have spent a generation or two pushing through laws to make more and more immigration offenses crimes rather than just administrative/civil as well as doing their best to sabotage the immigration system so that everything is a broken gray area, it's still the case that most immigration issues are not actually crimes and government actions regarding them are legally required to be non-punitive (sadly of course, DHS actually uses this as a loophole to get around the requirement that they not employ "cruel and unusual punishment" rather than actually following the law) which certainly means that their "asses [being] dragged out and whooped in the street." is not legal. Not that it's meant to be legal for things that actually are crimes either, of course.

I'm pretty sure you must have a serious literacy problem. It's quite clear that blasting people with microwaves that cause intense pain (sorry a tingling sensation that causes an irresistible urge to flee) while they are at ranges where they can't possibly pose a threat is what they considered "cruel and unusual".

OK Mr. Random Troll.

You're really not getting this. Assume for the moment that humans lack the ability to see forward into the future. This is not for women to take "for a brief time before pregnancy". The whole point of the recommendation is that all women, post-menarche (and in fact even pre-menarche if there's a possibility of getting pregnant) and pre-menopause should be taking supplements regularly unless it's certain they're not going to get pregnant. That's not an edge case. Quite frankly, even your original interpretation still would not have been an edge case. 80%+ of women in the US get pregnant at some point. 40% of the population is not an edge case.

Sigh. I was quite explicit that you could also directly consume methylfolate, although I did also point out that the methylfolate available in most food sources is not actually the straight methylfolate that you get after internally converting other forms of folate or taking synthetic methylfolate supplements. Specifically, the methylfolate you get from most food sources is in the form of polyglutamates that have to be broken down into the monoglutamate form your body directly uses. The synthetic methylfolate supplements and the final form in your body don't require that. So, when you consume natural methylfolate from food sources, the enzymatic process that breaks it down is not all that efficient with significant amounts passing through without conversion or being destroyed. Basically, natural food methylfolate is about half as usable as synthetic methylfolate.

The other issue is that you seem to be applying a false dichotomy to methylfolate and folic acid. There are actually many different versions of folate available both naturally and as supplements (mostly synthetic, but there are some natural ones too). Virtually all of them, including most of the natural methylfolate, require some sort of conversion into the monoglutamate methylfolate form. Broadly speaking, the synthetics are all more bio-available.

It seems pretty clear you wrote your responses before fully reading through. I am quite clear on the fact that there are multiple food sources. I mentioned sauerkraut and liver specifically, but nothing I said limited it to just those. As for cooking, it depends on the actual method, obviously. Light steam vs. boiling for example will preserve different amounts of it. Boiling can eliminate in the range of 80% of it through both heat and it soaking into the water. The point is that women especially often don't get the amount they would need even from salads, so cooked versions are even less likely to provide enough.

Well, yes, that's pretty much the point of the recommendation for supplements. Hence why your rule that someone would have to be a moron to get micronutrients from supplements rather than quality food is problematic and I suggested you needed to qualify it. I will also note that I presented folate as only one example, but there are plenty more. More on that later.

While the problem in the headline may make things worse, there's still plenty of medical need for vitamin and mineral supplements without that problem.

See, the problem here is devolving things into false dichotomies again. Yes, there is a very scummy supplements industry, and also lots of problems in the pharma industry. But there's also plenty of legitimate public health research. For example the folic acid study I mentioned was actually sponsored by the UK Medical Research Council. Basically, you appear to have turned cynicism about this into a simple heuristic to be applied without actually thinking through the individual merits on a case by case basis.

Now, let's consider some other cases where someone would clearly not be a "moron" for getting nutrients from supplements instead of quality food. Let's start with one of the classics. Iodine. Your body needs it, but natural food often doesn't have enough in a lot of localities. There of course, you are spared from specifically taking pills, your food just gets artificially fortified with it. I mean, it's still a supplement, just usually in the form of a powder that's sprinkled on or cooked in. There's vitamin D, because a lot of people don't get enough sun, so they take supplements and it's also added to milk. Then, for those whose bodies can't use vitamin D because of problems like kidney failure, there's alternate forms like calcitriol. There's also vitamin B12 for vegans and the like, although frankly "supplements" like that should probably just be considered farmed food because the supplements are not synthetic, they're from grown microorganisms, just like all B12. Of course, aside from vegans, there's people (like a significant fraction of elderly people) whose digestive systems can't efficiently separate B12 from the animal proteins that most people get their B12 from, so they have to take supplements, where the B12 is more available. There are Iron supplements (once again, especially for women in pregnancy) because it becomes almost impossible to keep up through diet. There's B6 for people with liver problems who can't convert the food forms. Then there are all kinds of conditions (for example kidney failure again) where normally nutritious things like potassium or phosphorous become unhealthy - think weakened bone and "crunchy" blood vessels, or just outright paralysis followed by death from heart failure. Conditions like that often involve special diets with catch-22 requirements where the patient has to avoid nutrients that will kill them, while requiring heavy amounts of other nutrients with there being pretty much no natural foods that satisfy both sets of requirements. So, supplements can become literally required to live with special diets for specific organ failures, diabetes, and other kinds of medical conditions with dietary restrictions.

So, at the end, I would like to know, since you didn't actually point out anything I was supposedly incorrect or half-correct on, what those items were?

To be clear, the recommendation I was speaking about was for absolutely any woman (about half the population) who might become pregnant. That's a pretty huge edge case.

Actually I don't have it backwards. Methylfolate is, indeed, a natural form of folate, but it's the natural form of it that's active in our bodies. In other words, it's an intermediate form that our bodies convert it into when we eat other folate. Now, it can be found in specific green leafy vegetables if you eat them basically raw, but even someone who has a salad every day still has trouble getting enough that way (the same goes for some of the other possible sources like animal liver and sauerkraut) One of the main reasons is that even the methylfolate in food is not as simple and easy to digest as synthetic methylfolate, so even there you are far better off with the synthetic. In any case the vast majority of women don't eat a very large fresh salad every day, or a beef liver, etc. so they don't get enough. So, supplements are recommended and of course aside from folic acid there are synthetic methylfolate supplements. The big problem is having enough folate during a narrow window of early embryonic development while the neural tube forms and that window is inside the time period before most women know they are pregnant. So, a synthetic supplement is recommended to avoid the 1 in 1000 chance of such a defect (notably, that's rarer than it used to be before public health mandates increased the use of supplements and fortification of foods.

On another note, another reason for the strong recommendation for synthetic folic acid specifically is because the foundational studies on preventing neural tube defects used it, so the clinical evidence is not as strong for other forms, even though they could be as effective. That's why synthetic folic acid specifically is often mentioned for these recommendations, but it's not the only synthetic folate supplement available. As I pointed out, there's also methylfolate, but there are other forms as well.

I mean, I guess I was just trying to save a little of his dignity for not being able to figure out how to do it himself. Of course, it may depend on who his employer is. It's quite possible that some employers might absolutely insist on this. Of course, given the poster in question, such an employer would be a really, really bad fit.

You might want to qualify that a bit. Synthetic folate is much more effective than natural. It is absolutely recommended by doctors that any woman who might become pregnant should be taking synthetic folate supplements to avoid neural tube defects in offspring.

You do know that no animal actually produces cobalamin itself right? It's only made by a relatively small number of micro-organisms and it's inherently vegan. Growing those (in a matrix containing some cobalt) to eat isn't synthesizing in a lab, it's just farming. You tend to get it from animal products because either the animals in question eat and accumulate it from the environment, or one of the micro-organisms that produces it lives in their intestinal tract and produces it and it gets into the rest of the animal's body. For that matter, humans actually host microorganisms that produce it as well, but typically too far down our intestinal tracts for enough to be absorbed into our bodies.

As for creatine, we synthesize that in our own bodies from amino acids. Vegans don't have quite the levels found in people who eat a lot of meat, but since the amount created internally increases to compensate for a lack of any from diet, Vegans aren't deficient in it. For the most part, having high levels of creatine is only really useful for certain types of athletics and the simple fact is that pretty close to 100% of those athletes are not getting it from meat anyway, they're getting it from supplements.

The AC appears to be a nutbar, or, at the very least conflating this college with some other one. I can't find any record of any mass casualty event at Elgin college.