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I thought I was Level 3. I have a savings account that does get a little interest. Not much but it's a start.

Section 31 was only done well in Deep Space Nine because the writers of Deep Space Nine understood that SECTION 31 ARE THE BAD GUYS.

They were used as a foil for the grey morality of the show as a warning of "This is where you will go if you continue on this path". Section 31 was the logical endpoint of the show's themes of sacrificing your ethics, morality, and principles in a pragmatic "the ends justify the means" mentality in order to defend those ethics, morals, and principles.

Because you CAN'T.

If you compromise your ethics, morals, and principles in an attempt to defend those very same things, what exactly are you defending? Things you yourself tossed aside when they became inconvenient.

All three (yes, there were only three) episodes of DS9 centering on Section 31 featured Bashir resolving the conflict of that episode WITHOUT compromising his integrity as a citizen of the Federation and a Starfleet officer.

Up to and including preventing Section 31 from committing genocide. Yeah, remember that? When Section 31 infected Odo with a degenerative virus so that he would spread it to the Great Link and kill all of the Changelings? Then specifically stonewalled Bashir when he attempted to find a cure?

Section 31 is not just a tool for telling happy funtime spy stories in Star Trek. That organization is called Starfleet Intelligence and was already around long before DS9. Section 31 is an unauthorized unelected black ops group that functions outside any chain of command or authority that can place any checks on their use and abuse of power. You know, just like EVERY OTHER evil Starfleet officer in every other episode where some Admiral goes off the deep end and starts doing shady shit the Enterprise then has to stop.

No. The Section 31 Changeling Virus did NOT win the war.

What lost the Dominion the war was the following:

The mining of the wormhole and later the Prophets closing access to it for the Dominion meant they could no longer get reinforcements from the Gamma Quadrant.

Their brutal occupation of Cardassia as their primary forward base in the war and seat of power in the Gamma Quadrant led to an uprising against them.

The Founders were not used to outright warfare because they ruled through threat in the Gamma Quadrant, so their method of dealing with the various threats was either subterfuge and manipulation from the inside or through shows of overwhelming force to dominate their opponents into subjugation. That is a tactic that decidedly does NOT work on the cultures of most alien species in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants. Instead of just saying "Resistance is futile", they showed you by carpet bombing a planet. In the Gamma Quadrant, this show of force was enough to force compliance but in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants they act as rallying points to fight back harder.

The increased paranoia and vindictiveness of the Female Changeling in charge of the Dominion led to her making decisions that went against all tactical and strategic sense for her own self-preservation and need to punish those around her. This led to more and more conservative military strategies and over-reliance on technological advantages like the alliance with the Breen and their shield-bypassing weapons that were later subverted. Rather than fighting an offensive war, the Dominion began laying strategies specifically knowing they were losing solely to make the act of winning as painful as possible on their opponents.

That last point means Section 31's virus made a peaceful end to the war impossible.

The reason the Female Changeling was so paranoid and turtling up was because she and her people were under a genocidal biological attack from the enemies she was fighting. There was no chance whatsoever for negotiations or trust because her people were dying directly because of the Federation. Meaning there was no way whatsoever she would believe that the Federation or any of their allies were negotiating in good faith.

By the end, the war was over. The Dominion was stuck on Cardassia Prime. They'd amassed all their defenses there, and taking Cardassia would've been a blood and destructive battle. Or the Federation, Romulans, and Klingons could have set up a blockade and allowed the siege to eventually win the battle. However, this would have also cost lives as the Dominion attempted to break the siege and it would have caused countless deaths (not only of soldiers but of civilians as well) through starvation and disease. Either way, The Dominion's power base in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants was broken, but it would be a long, slow, bloody process to eventually get peace.

Providing the cure to the Changeling virus is what allowed peace to happen while avoiding that senseless loss of life.

The cure that Section 31 worked very, very hard to prevent that as an option, even cajoling/blackmailing Starfleet Medical itself into becoming complicit in the genocidal attack. Bashir had to literally hack into Sloan's mind to retrieve the cure using super-experimental technobabble for that to be an opinion, and even then Sloan was prepared to fight to the bitter end to make sure the cure never made it out.

Odo - not a member of the Federation - negotiated the peace by providing the Female Changeling with the cure without precondition and then negotiated terms of surrender.

Section 31's actions made the war longer and bloodier.

Now there's one point I want to really address here.

"acting ethically requires greater sacrifice than acting pragmatically"

YES AND THAT IS THE POINT!!

The point is that it is worth the sacrifice to act ethically. To win the "right way" rather than the easy way. That is the whole point of Star Trek! Think back to almost every single episode of TOS and TNG and think about a pragmatic solution if you didn't care about morality or ethics. Those episodes would be 10 minutes long because the Enterprise could just open fire on the enemy ship or lay waste to their cities with orbital bombardment or beam in security officers with phaser rifles. The entire run of every Star Trek series is filled with moments where the crew could take the easy, pragmatic solution but choose to do things the hard way because it is also the ethical and moral way to handle the situation.

Holy hell, Deep Space Nine itself addressed this! The episodes "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost" were specifically about compromising morals and ethics for pragmatic solutions and how that is bad.

As he nears his 83rd birthday next month, local man Robert Lech told reporters that attending dozens of funerals over the past several years has given him “tons of great ideas” for his own memorial service, and has really opened his eyes to what a funeral can be.

According to Lech, he first began picking up tips for everything from casket placement to quick-and-easy Bible passages back in 2000, when Karl Manoch, his best friend and business partner of 25 years, passed away following a sudden brain aneurysm.

I want to see this legal battle

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

@lymeandcoconut

#lmaooooo #my fave is that episode of white collar where neil is doing a theft #and the music they play over it is leporello's 'here's the list of all the hundreds of women my boss has fucked' aria from don giovanni #it's supposed to just sound grand and sophisticated but the guy is singing about how DG fucks tall women short women #fat women skinny women princesses and peasants he fucks them all! #and here's the numbers broken down by nationality! #he's fucked over 1000 women in spain you know!

Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead – a worthy woman... ...I would say "how lucky am I"

Father in heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water... ...Who would then transform me from a man to woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness...

What shall I say? why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity then I do not wish to remove it. the sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found. So, I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground. Since I have learned from our tradition that we bless both, the good and the bitter I will bless in a voice hushed and weak: blessed are you [HaShem] who has not made me a woman.

bonus/proof: