yunyun333
4d ago
Who should have authority to order executions? It makes sense to push that up to the higher ups. Maybe the burden of evidence could be lower if they simply wanted to arrest him, although tons of people got thrown into military prisons for no good reason in afghanistan.
yunyun333
4d ago
There's no evidence that they were fired at, although one vehicle did take damage from ricochet fragments of an M203 grenade fired by the convoy. They panicked and fired indiscriminately.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/24/opinions/blackwater-defendants-pardon-trump-opinion-oconnor
yunyun333
4d ago
The us wouldn't have been driven out of Afghanistan if they decided to ethnically cleanse the whole place and start putting up housing like the Israelis do.
Why would Americans want to live there?
yunyun333
5d ago
The beard issue is silly ;what's more concerning is Hegseth saying that rules of engagement are for pussies. He advocated for trump to pardon men like eddie gallagher and the blackwater operators at nisour square. At least for now the military is limited to blowing up narco boats and standing around federal buildings.
yunyun333
6d ago
Saudis have dumped a ton of money into sports ventures like LIV golf and saudi league ft. ronaldo. They've also spent (a lot less) on esports/gaming such as the esports world cup where they crowned their own sponsored org as the victor two years in a row. The end goal, presumably, is to gain positive cultural influence in the west as opposed to simply oil, repressive islam, and terrorism. Maybe for pride as much as anything else.
yunyun333
14d ago
There are plenty of studies on the relationship between vaccines and atopic diseases like asthma. Some find an effect but nothing like a 4x factor. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36180331/
The study used in the hearing wasn't published. We can debate why that is, Siri argued that it was because they were afraid of losing their jobs. But plenty of scientists have published studies showing a correlation between vaccines and increased prevalence of various ailments.
yunyun333
18d ago
We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,
That's it? He didn't even, like, celebrate his death.
Seems like Nexstar is trying to butter up Trump for some deal that needs governmental approval in the future.
Tyler Robinson, Kirk shooter, has been caught after a family friend turned him in
The markings on the bullets described by authorities indicate that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was steeped in online culture and included references to the Antifa , or the anti-fascist, movement. A fired shell casing was inscribed with “notices bulges OwO what’s this?” - a reference to a “copypasta” - a piece of text that is repeated over and over again, often to troll people online.
Authorities say one unfired casing had the words “Hey fascist, catch!” and three down arrows - a common symbol used to represent the anti-fascist movement. A second casing had the lyrics to a song “Bella Ciao” inscribed on it. The song honours WWII-era partisans of the Italian resistance who fought Nazi Germany.
The third unfired casing was inscribed with the words “If you read this, you are gay lmao” - again an apparent reference to online trolling humour.
Parents, keep your kids away from Discord. Will be interesting to see if this guy is a true believer or just ragebaiting.
yunyun333
24d ago
The Qataris that funded Hamas with explicit Israeli approval.
For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.
During his meetings in September with the Qatari officials, according to several people familiar with the secret discussions, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, was asked a question that had not been on the agenda: Did Israel want the payments to continue?
Mr. Netanyahu’s government had recently decided to continue the policy, so Mr. Barnea said yes. The Israeli government still welcomed the money from Doha.
When is violence against a person justified? Usually the legal boundary is immediate threat. So if a politician is advocating for you to be put into camps, then that seems like a reasonable starting point. But then you have to consider 'reasonable fear of immediate threat' and things get much murkier. Is it reasonable to fear that pro-mass migration politicians intend to destroy your community with foreigners?
In America it's still only the crazies/extremely disaffected that are actually willing to go out and kill for politics, usually. People will cheer on the killer but almost none of these people would actually be willing to do something similar.
The British successfully invaded Afghanistan multiple times, but never held it for prolonged periods. Which is probably what the US should have done.
There's this book, No Good Men Among the Living, which argues that the US successfully destroyed the Taliban in the invasion, but then stupid governance and our taking sides in the vast web of tribal politics brought it back.
So in every district Jan Muhammad appointed a Popalzai governor and police chief, or figures from closely related tribes. The trouble was, many of these communities had already chosen their own leaders during the waning days of the Taliban. In Khas Uruzgan, elders had elected as district governor an anti-Taliban personage from the mujahedeen era, a former school janitor named Tawildar Yunis (“Groundskeeper Yunis”). He was working out of the governor’s house, along with a locally elected police chief and other officials, collecting weapons from surrendering Talibs. But they were not Popalzais and, even worse, maintained political links to one of Jan Muhammad’s rivals from the civil war years. So Muhammad appointed a local Popalzai elder and friend of the Karzais, Abdul Qudus, as his governor. But Yunis refused to budge, the imprimatur of Khas Uruzgan elders lending his claims an undeniable air of legitimacy. Unswayed, Abdul Qudus then requisitioned the local school for himself and his coterie of followers, declaring that it was now the rightful governor’s residence and that it was his job to collect Taliban weapons. In response, Yunis appealed to everyone from Gul Agha Sherzai to President Karzai himself, but none were willing to wade into the growing mess. Tensions rose by the day. Jan Muhammad’s side began openly questioning Yunis’s anti-Taliban bona fides, throwing him into fits of rage. He returned the favor by declaring Jan Muhammad’s men soft on the Taliban.
The actual Taliban were perplexed. During the standoff, a trio of senior Taliban officials made their way to Khas Uruzgan to surrender to the new government: Tayeb Agha, an erudite, well-spoken twentysomething who had served as Mullah Omar’s personal secretary and adviser; former finance minister Agha Jan Mutassim, who had publicly rejected calls from Pakistani clerics to wage jihad against the Americans; and Health Minister Mullah Abbas, the official who had been responsible for recruiting Heela and other women to study as nurses and midwives. All three had been members of the Taliban since the movement’s inception. Their surrender should have been a political coup for the young Karzai government. But surrender to whom? Who was actually in charge?
And then the Americans, acting on bad information, stormed both 'government' offices in a nighttime raid, killing Abdul Qudus and his fellow officials (Yunis managed to escape and was never seen again). The three former Taliban guys decided that surrendering didn't seem like such a good idea and went back to Pakistan where they helped lead the new Taliban insurgency.
yunyun333
1mo ago
Terence Tao: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.
In just six months, the United States has seen a wholesale assault on the scientific infrastructure that helped make it a world leader in innovation. Grants have been cancelled mid-project, fellowships for the next generation of researchers gutted, and federally funded institutes stripped of the resources they need to operate. These decisions are not the result of scientific review or Congressional debate, but of abrupt political directives that bypass long-standing norms, disrupt multi-year projects, and erode the independence of our research ecosystem.
In that time, I have seen first-hand how sustained federal investment—channeled through agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF)—powers the collaborations that link universities, government laboratories, and industry. At UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where I now serve as Director of Special Projects, those collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10. This is the America I chose as my adoptive home: a place where science is valued as a public good, and where researchers from around the world come to contribute their ideas and energy.
It is therefore stunning and devastating to discover that the new administration, in just its first six months, has deliberately attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem. Executive actions have cancelled or suspended federal grants with unprecedented scale and speed, with billions of dollars worth of ongoing research projects and experiments disrupted. This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications. Critical funding has been pulled for as insignificant a reason as the presence of a key word in the original proposal that is retroactively deemed unacceptable.
Federal support is, of course, a privilege, not a right; and Congress has the constitutional authority to set the budgets and rules for any expenditure of public funds and resources. But many of these executive actions have not waited for either explicit or implicit Congressional approval, and in some cases have even directly ignored past Congressional mandates for appropriations. Relative to the sheer size of the federal government as a whole, the amount allocated for supporting science is not massive. The NSF mathematics and physical sciences (MPS) directorate, for instance, is the largest of the subdivisions of the NSF, and has an annual budget of approximately $1.7 billion. This looks significant until one realizes that it amounts to about five dollars per US citizen per year, and less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget as a whole.
He seems to be referring to how the admin took an axe to science funding by ctrl+F-ing for 'woke' dictionary terms: underrepresented, minority, diverse, etc. The problem is that the effects seem to be about indiscriminate regardless of whether you were a true believer or merely box checking. Will we see upgraded diversity science pledges in the next democrat admin? Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.
yunyun333
2mo ago
Israel fought the Suez Crisis on US & UK's behalf.
UK and France. The US told them quite firmly to stop, which they did. The US was not particularly pro Israel until Lyndon Johnson, who let himself get bossed around by his very pro-Israel foreign policy guys.
Israel didn't directly instigate Iraq 2 of course, but many of the higher ups in the executive branch who were pushing for an invasion of Iraq were ardent Zionists (see the Office of Special Plans, which also involved an espionage scandal involving an analyst passing information to Israel through AIPAC).
yunyun333
2mo ago
Trump digs himself in deeper with every new quote. Epstein "stole" young girls from him? Now why would he say something like that?
yunyun333
2mo ago
There's been widespread malnutrition and hunger of course, but few actual deaths directly from starvation until recently.
yunyun333
2mo ago
Okay, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but Westerners don't have a problem with guerrilla tactics if it's their side doing it.
yunyun333
2mo ago
The first article quotes IDF officials praising the UN system as effective in distributing aid and having found no proof that Hamas was systematically stealing aid from the UN, although they did steal from smaller organizations that didn't always have boots on the ground. It's been widely reported that various armed gangs have formed in the power vacuum to steal and resell aid at extortionate prices.
yunyun333
2mo ago
Gaza pre war had an obesity problem. I don't think anyone was accusing them of being underfed.
yunyun333
2mo ago
it is impossible to prevent civilians from starving because Hamas takes all the food.
Pretty much no one was starving to death before Israel implemented more stringent aid restrictions this March.
yunyun333
2mo ago
Guerrilla warfare certainly isn't uniquely Western but is positively viewed and admired. Most Americans seem to have broadly positive views of the Viet Cong, whose calling card was using innocent villagers as cover.
yunyun333
2mo ago
Despise is a strong word. Sure the Babylonians annihilated Jerusalem, but the Israelites did foolishly try to rebel, and moving around conquered populations was a common tactic. Cyrus the Great famously let the exiles return and rebuild their temple. They did get into conflict with the Greeks and Romans over their unique heno/monotheistic thing.
yunyun333
2mo ago
Epstein DID kill himself. Also there's no client list. Stop asking questions
The US Department of Justice and FBI have concluded that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not have a so-called client list that could implicate high-profile associates, and that he did take his own life - contradicting long-held conspiracy theories about the infamous case.
According to a two-page Department of Justice (DoJ) and FBI memo, investigators found no "incriminating list" of clients and "no credible evidence" that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals. Investigators also released footage they say supports the medical examiner's conclusion that Epstein died by suicide while being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. The memo adds that investigators "did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties".
Some have claimed the conclusions reached in the memo contradict statements from Attorney General Pam Bondi in a Fox News interview that aired in February. "The DoJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients, will that really happen?", Bondi was asked on Fox, to which she replied: "It's sitting on my desk right now to review". White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Monday the attorney general was referring to all the files that are related to Epstein's crimes, rather than a specific list.
Well, there you go. It's been almost 6 years since Epstein did/didn't kill himself, and now we can close the book on the whole sordid mess (his primary accuser also happened to die by suicide (?) a few months ago). Epstein just wasn't a diligent record keeper. In unrelated news, Netanyahu nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
yunyun333
3mo ago
The bigger problem was that everyone was asleep. My phone does go off with a weather alert when anything worse than a thunderstorm pops up, but it probably wouldn't wake me up. If you live near a danger zone then you ought to install a dedicated warning app that's really loud.
yunyun333
3mo ago
"What's so bad about murder? Everything happens according to God's plan, therefore if someone commits murder that must be God's plan."
Don't Christians say this all the time? When good or bad things happen, it's "all part of God's plan". Either God exerts agency in this world or he does not.
The US didn't lose vietnam because of rules of engagement. Americans and their allies killed a shit ton of civilians, most of which was never brought to trial internally or revealed to the public.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/my-lai-month/
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