yunyun333
11m ago
-A comment from a presumably intelligent healthcare professor on a recent healthcare podcast
yunyun333
1hr ago
Redistricting is retarded. Look at Louisiana. First the legislature draws up a map with 5 non-black majorities and 1 black majority. This is challenged in court and found to violate the VRA so they go back and draw up a new map with 2 black majority districts (Louisiana is 1/3 black). Another group of 'non-African-American voters' challenges the new map for being racially gerrymandered and a federal panel agrees, so now they might have to change the map again pending SCOTUS decision.
Redistricting changes that would significantly shift the results (based on the most recent election) should just not be allowed. Why can every other country make this work?
yunyun333
16hr ago
Yes, and people conflating this with historical antisemitism are pretty clearly off the mark. You can't explain it with reference to, idk, shylock or the dreyfus affair (do 5% of Americans know who alfred dreyfus was?)
To the antiracist left/liberal, Jews are white colonialists and Arabs are brown natives. There is very little that the oppressed can do against their oppressors that deserves full-throated condemnation.
yunyun333
4d ago
Vance apparently asked for a 20 year halt on enrichment (and handing over the remaining uranium). Now they're thinking about releasing $20b of frozen assets in exchange. It's hard to see how this isn't just the JCPOA but worse in most aspects.
yunyun333
4d ago
Per NYT, Israel told the US that they had intel about a meeting between Khameini and other IRGC leaders in a few days time and pitched it as the best time to strike. If the US had declined to get involved, Israel probably would not have gone ahead.
yunyun333
4d ago
The funny thing is that the economy was generally doing well pre-war. Dow was over 50k as someone pointed out, employment was good. Tariffs were paid for by Americans but weren't as big a drag as expected either, although core goods inflation would have been negative without them? He really could have done nothing, toned down ICE's retardation, and coasted.
yunyun333
4d ago
yunyun333
7d ago
South Korea is perfectly capable of annihilating Pyongyang even without nukes. The threat simply isn't credible. America could not have threatened the Soviets and Chinese with nukes to get them out of Vietnam, and Nixon's madman theory made him look pathetic instead.
yunyun333
7d ago
It was also sitting under the rubble of Isfahan since last June; no indication that they were even trying to dig it out. Because it was a bargaining chip (until now).
Nuclear blackmail also doesn't work the way the author thinks it does. Why doesn't North Korea say "Give us $100b and lift all sanctions or we nuke South Korea and Japan"?
yunyun333
8d ago
For better or for worse, human happiness seems to be tied only lightly to absolute material standards and heavily tied to relative status, position, and feelings of fairness, and the internet and social media are super-stimuli for the human sense of status calibrated towards the Dunbar number.
Relative deprivation/hedonic treadmill.
yunyun333
8d ago
Agreed, this is just impotent rage finding a lightning rod. You can't change society, but you can (attempt to) murder a CEO.
yunyun333
8d ago
They agreed to 3.67% enrichment and then the US ripped it up; thus, ask for more next time. If you look at a graph of SWUs (ie effort/time input) versus enrichment percentage, it's not that huge a leap; the first few percentage points of enrichment are the hardest.
yunyun333
8d ago
Wasn't that the point of the JCPOA? You can point out it was not indefinite, but given millennarian Shia expectations, it could plausibly be renewed without too much ideological handwringing.
yunyun333
8d ago
Which shows that they value having proxies over having nuclear weapons. Ultimately, trying to get nukes has been more trouble than it's worth for the Iranians; Israel can't invade them, the US pre-Trump wasn't interested, and it just led to a whole bunch of crippling sanctions. Khameini issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons which, presumably, meant something in a very fundamentalist society.
yunyun333
8d ago
If you believe the Omani negotiator, Iran was willing to give up their stockpile and enrichment in exchange for sanction relief; that was likely the point of building the stockpile in the first place. Once the US tried to regime change them, the calculations shifted.
yunyun333
8d ago
They had old moldy stockpiles of chemical weapons that were in disuse. None were actually used in the 2003 invasion and the only effect was that some US soldiers ended up poisoning themselves when disposing of them because they weren't properly labeled. The old canard was that Rumsfeld knew about Iraq's WMDs because he still had his receipts from Iran-Iraq.
All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.
In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.
Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong. “They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Mr. Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.”
Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.
yunyun333
9d ago
What does this mean? They still have thousands of missiles with launchers, they still have drones, they still have SHORAD, they still have hundreds of fast attack boats. If they had no military, the ceasefire would be unnecessary.
yunyun333
10d ago
Maybe pedophilia or ephebophilia or whatever just wasn't seen as that serious back then. (My only reference for this is a House episode where the doctors all make comments on how hot the 15 year old patient is)
yunyun333
10d ago
Who did you think the welfare state was for? Yes, you have to pay into the system, but you have freedom not afforded to the young and physical and mental ability not afforded to the old. That's the social contract. The theoretical benefit of immigration is that you bring in people who haven't spent 18 years consuming resources and are putting money into the system immediately; of course it doesn't always work out that way.
And people here absolutely complain about the spiraling healthcare spending growth (though in the past few decades the US has grown more slowly than comparable countries). It's pretty clear that medicare/SSI are going to fuck the budget soon, and it's politically impossible to seriously cut them.
The pillar gave basically the same description, except without the 'avignon papacy' comment, which was kind of ridiculous.
One senior official in Rome described the conversation as being “tense” at times and suggested that U.S. officials had been “aggressive” and “bullying” at points, but insisted that the conversation had been mutually forthright, with Cardinal Pierre “making himself heard, too.” “There was no question of anybody threatening anyone,” the Vatican official said. No one at the Vatican Secretariat of State contacted by The Pillar could recall or confirm any reference to the Avignon papacy during the conversation.
Another source told NBC that the meeting was "most unpleasant and confrontational."
The catholic herald appears to just have the 'no comment' from the vatican.
Let's split the three possibilities from maximalist to minimalist.
A) Trump is a serial predator who raped kids with his buddy (as documented in some of the more ridiculously lurid accusations)
B) Trump fooled around with some of Epstein's models who may have happened to be slightly under 18
C) Trump liked hanging out with Epstein because he knew people and was wealthy
The third seems to be the most likely. Trump wasn't happy about Epstein stealing his girls (Mar-a-Lago workers like Virginia). When the Palm Beach police chief arrested Epstein, Trump called thanking him because everyone knew Epstein liked em young. Trump is an adulterer and harasser of women (reminder that he has been successfully sued, in civil court, of sexual assault) but not an out and out pedo.
That said, his links with Epstein go beyond the mere appearance of impropriety, as do those of several of his advisors. And when the files get slow-walked and redacted, it increases suspicion. And when his wife who was barely mentioned in the files and barely discussed suddenly makes a big public announcement begging everyone to STOP TALKING about her and Epstein, well.
yunyun333
11d ago
We interrupt your regularly scheduled Iran posts with more Epstein posts.
Melania Trump says rumors linking her to Epstein need to stop
I never been friends with Epstein. Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach. To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice Maxwell. My email reply to Maxwell cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence. My polite reply to her email doesn't amount to anything more than a trial [?] note. I am not Epstein's victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump. I met my husband by chance at a New York City party in 1998. This initial encounter with my husband is documented in a detail in my book Melania. The first time I crossed paths with Epstein was in the year 2000 at an event Donald and I attended together.
For reference: This document, a proffer by one of Epstein's assistants, claims that Epstein introduced Melania to Donald; the assistant also worked for Paolo Zampolli, the man who hosted the party at which Trump and Melania met. Another piece of correspondence by a redacted author to Epstein claims that "I remember flying back with Donald on his plane the first weekend I went to visit you in Florida was the weekend he met Melania and he kept on coming out of the bedroom saying 'wow what a hot piece of ass'". So at the least, her claim that "My name has never appeared in court documents, depositions, victim statements, or FBI interviews surrounding the Epstein matter" is incorrect.
Michael Wolff, who become a sort of Epstein confidant while researching Trump, said Epstein claimed that the first time Trump and Melania banged was on the infamous Lolita Express.
This appears to be the referenced correspondence with Maxwell. Seems a little bit friendlier than "casual".
yunyun333
12d ago
On June 12, 2020, the second anniversary of the Singapore summit, the North Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs released a press statement that the Trump administration efforts in the past two years were for political achievements without returns for North Korea and "Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise."[198][199] North Korea subsequently cut communications with South Korea, demolished the four-story joint-liaison office building it shared with South Korea on June 17, and ceased efforts for diplomatic relations with the United States.[200]
What?
Oh, I was just adding on to your point about the study. The healthcare system would implode if we tried to impose Medicare or Medicaid prices on providers.
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