yunyun333
4d ago
"Hard" and "weak" are simply so vague as to make the theory virtually unfalsifiable. And there are so many other factors going into military prowess and conflict that make the connection extremely weak at best. Did the hard times of Vietnam and the 70s make the US better at kicking Saddam's ass, or were the two wars too different for any comparison? Something like the Schlesinger liberal-conservative cycle lays out somewhat clearer parameters.
yunyun333
15d ago
Russia is waging a territory-centric war to secure the Donbas, probably so they can declare victory and wind down operations as much as possible. Ukraine is more attrition-aligned but territory is still necessary because it's good PR when Pokrovsk/Kupyansk/??? Holds. Syrsky is known as General 200 and loves his 'meat' counterattacks, but the Russians are performing similarly brutal operations. The Europeans have tried to pick up the slack from Trump but Belgium refused to liquidate frozen Russian assets. So, who really knows what's happening?
yunyun333
17d ago
In 2024 several protestors in Bristol broke into an Elbit Systems defense factory with sledgehammers attempting to smash up the place. Police arrived and in the fracas one officer was hit in the back and seriously injured. They were acquitted on charges of aggravated burglary and partial or no verdicts were reached on criminal damage, violent disorder, and grievous bodily harm with intent.
Charlotte Head, 29, Samuel Corner, 23, Leona Kamio, 30, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, 21, Zoe Rogers, 22, and Jordan Devlin, 31, were all acquitted of aggravated burglary by the jury after more than 36 hours of deliberation. Rajwani, Rogers and Devlin were found not guilty of violent disorder, while the jury could not reach verdicts on the same charge against Head, Corner and Kamio. The jury could also not reach verdicts on an additional charge of criminal damage. Corner had also denied causing grievous bodily harm with intent for hitting a female police sergeant with a sledgehammer. The jury was unable to agree a verdict on that count.
The defense argued that the action did not rise to the level of GBH with intent, which is defined as
“Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously by any means whatsoever wound or cause any grievous bodily harm to any person with intent to do some grievous bodily harm to any person, or with intent to resist or prevent the lawful apprehension or detainer of any person.”
For a Section 18 GBH charge to be proven, it must be shown that the offender physically caused the serious injuries and, at the same time as the assault took place, that this is what they intended to cause. It is the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing that constitutes part of a crime. For a case to be considered under Section 18, identifying reckless behaviour in the actions of the offender will not be sufficient enough to find an accused individual guilty. The act must be malicious in nature and deliberate, indicating malice aforethought often with a degree of premeditation.
Instead, Mr. Corner, an autistic man, was pepper sprayed, confused, and attempting to defend his comrade being restrained and arrested, so malicious intent was not present.
It should also be noted that protestors put up jury nullification signs around the trial.
yunyun333
18d ago
There are economists who argue that employer health insurance tax exclusion pushes up overall costs. The ACA's cadillac tax was repealed before it came into effect, so we'll never know.
New epstein files stash released - search here: https://www.justice.gov/epstein
Trump is mentioned lots of times though some of the more lurid accusations (I was gangbanged by Trump and a bunch of other rich dudes) seem to be non credible. Epstein emailed himself about how he was annoyed that Bill Gates needed medicine from banging underage russian girls - probably fake blackmail. He also got banned from Xbox Live, shared coomer FNAF 4chan threads, talked with Chomsky about racial intelligence differences, getting advice on silencing a girl trying to expose his friends. For our global-intelligence-conspiracy friends, there are some connections to intelligence agencies.
Mods, remove this if it's a crappy post. It's hard to come up with a through line for this, other than "WOW he knew a lot of people".
yunyun333
27d ago
But the ICE agents didn't shoot him as he was approaching them with gun in holster. They got him down on the ground, one agent took his gun, and the other agent shot him from behind as he was getting up (?).
yunyun333
27d ago
Wouldn't you expect him to react more demonstratively? He looks back over his shoulder, not at the gun in his hand. All the other ICE agents wrestling with Pretti flinch back as though the shot was from the agent who pulls out his own gun (in video 1).
Who fired the first shot (at 21 seconds in the first video)? Logically it should have been the agent in center who pulls out his gun at 15 seconds and points it at Pretti. He obviously fires the second shot at 26 seconds - you can see the slide move and the casing eject. None of the other agents appears to have a gun in hand (other than the guy who pulls Pretti's gun from the holster and immediately turns and walks away).
Listening carefully, the first and second-fourth shots sound different. Does that have any significance?
yunyun333
28d ago
Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’
A group of fringe researchers thwarted safeguards at the National Institutes of Health and gained access to data from thousands of children. The researchers have used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart.
Mainstream geneticists have rejected their work as biased and unscientific. Yet by relying on genetic and other personal data from the prominent project, known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the researchers gave their theories an air of analytical rigor. Members of the research group were ineligible to obtain data from the ABCD project. But one of them gained access through an American professor who was already being investigated by the N.I.H. over his handling of another child brain study. Their papers have provided fodder for racist posts on social media and white nationalist message boards that have been viewed millions of times. Some of the papers are cited by A.I. bots like ChatGPT and Grok in response to queries about race and intelligence. On the social media platform X, Grok has referred users to the research more than two dozen times this month alone.
The misuse of the children’s data has validated longstanding concerns that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ genetic information held by the N.I.H. could fall into the wrong hands. The agency grants widespread access to stimulate new medical discoveries. But critics say the N.I.H. has failed to address the risks that the data, even with personally identifiable details removed, could be misused in unethical research, for commercial purposes or by foreign adversaries. The Times learned that in 2024, the same data was improperly obtained by an unidentified researcher in China. The data is not allowed to be shared with people in adversarial countries that could use it for blackmail, spy recruitment or military purposes. But the researcher evaded that prohibition by faking an affiliation with an American university, according to a former N.I.H. official and Dr. Jernigan, who said the agency informed her of the incident.
This debate is extremely opaque currently. For the interested outsider you have to go deep into the weeds of advanced statistics to follow along. Scott has some recent posts on the 'heritability gap' but it still makes my eyes glaze over. Optimistically, GWAS analyses will get more powerful, and environmental racial gaps will close, and the answer will be clearer in a few decades. The 'misuse' of anonymized data (what horrible crimes can the CCP and Ruzzia do with this?) is hardly that big a deal, but it will be kept under stronger lock and key in future.
Georgia expanded Medicaid with work requirements (which are coming to every state soon) in 2023. So far they've paid Deloitte about $90m to enroll about 10k people, with 2/3 of that cost being administrative. Surprisingly, that's not that terrible compared to Georgia's average of $5k medicaid spending per enrollee, but still quite a bit of waste to cover what should be a healthier population.
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