Altherion

He will almost certainly be convicted again, but with a more legitimate trial. Here's potentially a new way of making false accusations: This accuser was relatively inept (among other things, he used computers at the place where he was employed to research how to do this), but he still managed to get a lot of traction: the principal has been suspended since January and his family needed police protection due to harassment at their home. AI tools are only going to get better from this point on and not everyone will be this sloppy so audio accusations of this sort (and, eventually, also video) will become more common.

Russia has to be extremely displeased with Iran right now. Prior to that drone and missile barrage, it was a pretty safe bet that the US House of Representatives would hold up the aid to Ukraine until at least the election, but it appears that with a sufficiently blunt reminder that the world is burning, they decided to make a deal instead.

It rather depends on why Canada would want a nuclear weapon in the first place. As the article points out, there are significant downsides to suddenly developing one so one would imagine that the reason to do it would be quite substantial. In that case, it's likely that the red tape and resource limitations that account for the overwhelming majority of that 10 years would not be present and it would take considerably less time. Remember, the original development took less than half of that.

I don't think this is within the bounds of expected behavior. Embassies and consulates are supposed to be left in peace, but, as has been pointed out multiple times within this thread, in practice, this is not actually the case and one can find multiple instances of attacks on both diplomatic personnel and diplomatic facilities. Typically, the response to this ranges from a complaint to the host country to attempts to track down the perpetrators to a strike on something associated with the perpetrators similar in scale to the original attack. Nobody -- and I mean literally nobody -- has ever replied to such an attack with a barrage of hundreds of missiles and drones aimed at both civilian and military targets.

That is sad. I had hoped she might recover.

Where did you see this? I saw a report that she underwent surgery and was in the ICU, but not that she died.

First, I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from. The largest number I can find is on Wikipedia which cites some Syrian Observatory for Human Rights for the following: Every news source I've found gives numbers smaller than 16 so it's not clear where you get ~50. Furthermore, it's not really a question of victims. In response to the bombing of a single building, Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones at a variety of sites all over Israel. The fact that Israel and its allies managed to mostly neutralize the attack does not make the attack any less of an escalation.

On the one hand, the interceptors appear to have worked exactly as advertised and the damage is relatively modest. On the other, this is a massive escalation relative to the attack on the consulate and the figures I've seen for the cost to Israel are on the order of one billion dollars (the interceptors are much more expensive than the ballistic missiles and drones that they're intercepting). It's also worth noting that the shielding has never been tested on this scale and Iran could not have possibly known that it would work so well -- had this not been the case, they could easily have killed hundreds of people with this attack. The upshot of all this is that the US has work to do. In the very short term, we need to give Israel money and weapons to replenish the interceptor stockpiles and thereby convince them not to escalate further. In the longer term, we need to accelerate work on cheaper anti-drone and anti-missile defenses -- the current approach works, but it is unsustainable and does not scale. We're already working on this a variety of approaches to this, but something complete needs to be here sooner because these hordes of drones are already here.

It's an old problem and one well known enough to warrant an explicit statement in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 11 of the latter states: The presumption of innocence also exists in most national codes... but of course it's not possible to make private institutions to wait years for the decision of a court. Unless they happen to be led by extremely principled individuals or people who are personally invested in the welfare of the accused, most of today's institutions care about money and their public image. In that regard, it is completely irrelevant whether somebody accused is innocent or guilty; the question is whether they are worth protecting or it's cheaper to abandon them. The answer is usually the latter... but there are exceptions.

Either there are enough Trump fanatics to drive the price up or there are some wealthy people who have reached an arrangement with Trump with respect to what he will do should he win in November and overvaluing the company is part of that arrangement.

The issue is actually not unique to Boeing, it's just that Boeing makes a product that makes it obvious. Almost everything constructed today is deliberately made in a way that reduces costs at the expense of quality. That is, the item usually still functions as intended, but some fraction will be flawed from the start and the rest are more likely to break down sooner than expected or function incorrectly in corner cases. There are products (e.g. water heaters) where the manufacturer is actually happy about this because they don't want the thing to last too far past the warranty (the technical name for this is planned obsolescence). There are other products (e.g. most software) where this is not desirable, but people will tolerate it. Boeing's problem is that planes are a rare product where this is not just undesirable, but completely intolerable. They're some of the largest and most complicated machines we design, they operate in an unforgiving environment and can carry hundreds of people. It's not enough for most planes to work properly most of the time and we've reached the point where the latter is pretty much the case. Our problem as a society is that corporate culture is not something that stays confined to a single corporation. It's not really possible to have most corporations run by despicable parasites who mainly care about their own compensation and thus the stock price, but then single out a few critical spaces where these parasites are not welcome -- there simply isn't a pool of leaders to draw anything else from or of investors who would deal with the alternative leadership.

It's not clear what exactly it is. It doesn't look like a straight up false flag, but it's entirely possible that the security services knew of it and did not intervene. If so, it could be intended to scale up the mobilization somewhat (this would be consistent with the Russian press secretary finally referring to the conflict as a war rather than a special operation). However, it could also be a random terrorist act or an attack by Ukrainian-aligned groups. It's very difficult to say what exactly this will be spun as -- we'll have to see.

I don't think that's what the decision says. The text of Section 5 of the 14th Amendment is: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. The Court does not specify that Congress has to vote on every single instance of determining what is an insurrection. All it is saying is that based on this enforcement clause, Congress (and nobody else!) must come up with the rules for this with respect to federal elections and these rules will apply for every state rather than each state deciding who is disqualified.

I don't think there is a lack of scientists or engineers in the US. The problem is that addressing climate change or building a better future is not something that makes a great deal of money so the number of jobs in these fields is relatively small and the few that exist are not very spread out (i.e. one would have to move to get them). Thus, many scientists and some engineers go into finance or tech where their training is not particularly relevant, but the jobs are more plentiful. In other words, the issue is not with the 2000s, it's with today. The people with money are much more interested in AI and novel financial trickery than they are in climate change.

I don't think that was the goal -- and this is a good thing because if it was the goal, then it would have been effectively using executive control of the prosecutors to influence a future election which is one of the hallmarks of states that claim to be democracies, but are actually autocratic.

I don't like to speak ill of the dead, but your statement is an extremely charitable interpretation of his actions. There is some confusion here because that method of suicide is indeed sometimes an effective way of sending a message. However, it is usually effective because it draws attention to something that is either not known by the general population or is not discussed in polite society. In this specific case, neither of these is true: the situation in Gaza is by far the single most publicized conflict in recent years with every minor incident reported and every medium-sized development on the front page of multiple news sources around the world. The problems with that conflict do not include a lack of attention; it's mainly intractable because the principals really hate each other, but each is limited in their ability to destroy the other and because there is a large number of interested parties pulling in opposite directions. Nothing about that is changed by that kind of stunt; it's not a sacrifice for the sake of others, it's just a sad way to make a scene.

That is why I said "mostly". They have not fully driven them back, but the areas that the Russians still hold are much less than they held in the beginning of the war. Also, the Russians have some momentum, but in absolute terms, the land they have recently captured is likewise much, much less than in the initial advance. Well yes -- long term planning is a forgotten art in many (most?) Western governments. It certainly no longer exists in the US (which is by far the single biggest arms manufacturer supporting Ukraine). There is some long term planning for after the war (a while ago, JP Morgan Chase signed some agreements with Ukraine regarding the rebuilding once the war is finished), but it's sporadic. There's no leader or group of leaders who are capable of creating and executing a grand plan that is more than 1-2 years in scope. That said, that doesn't mean that there is no plan at all. As I said, the idea is to let the Russians expend their arsenal against Ukraine and that seems to be working quite well. The distant (i.e. past the next election) future is not really something today's politicians plan for.

There is a strategy, it's just not a very pleasant one. Ukraine has been given just enough weapons to mostly drive the Russian forces back, but no more than that. The West gets to sit back and watch the destruction of Russian ships, tanks and planes (mostly mediocre ones, but also some that are pretty advanced) with no risk to Western lives or even the need to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of our own advanced weapons (the stuff we give to Ukraine is from the previous generation at best).

Rather predictably, the US campaign to deter the Houthis from attacking ships in international waters solely by targeting their weapon stockpiles is going rather poorly:

Every leader must deal with the consequences of prior leadership. The issue is that Biden has been either unwilling or unable to... chase the chickens off, so to speak. He has arguably not created any major new problems directly, but his responses to unfolding events have not been notably effective. There's war in Europe, there's war in the Middle East, there's inflation at home, many cities are overwhelmed by the influx of migrants... and there's simply not much Biden appears to be willing or able to do curtail any of this (well, maybe except for the immigration -- there are rumors he's considering executive action). Biden is very, very lucky that his opponent this fall will almost certainly be Trump.

They had plenty of martyrs before and it did not appear to do them any good so I doubt this case will be any different. Navalny was covered much more extensively in Western media, but there were plenty of politicians, journalists and activists who were simply killed throughout the past two decades. Here's an early example from 2006 and here's a later one from 2015; these are relatively famous ones, but you can find others for any year. Russia has never valued human life even to the limited extent that Britain, France and Germany did and the contemporary version is even more divergent in this regard. With the exception of the people at the very top, the Russian government has no compunction regarding killing people and opposition figures are naturally not part of this exception.

Few people foresaw the exact timing correctly (and those who did were probably just luck with their guesses), but it was only a matter of time. Their catastrophic defeat in WWII and the subsequent American redesign of their society convinced the Japanese to try a new, non-militaristic path... but it is now abundantly clear that the world is not well suited to such an approach (it was clear even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but after that, it's simply unmistakable). Thus, the Japanese will rearm and given the nature of that society, they will probably do it well.

To be fair, the US media is covering the escalation in considerable detail (I linked to it a few pages back) and people I've spoken to in real life are aware of this. It's only this thread on this board that for some reason appears to be obsessed with the various trials of Trump and other Trump related material to the point where few other things get discussed for more than a few posts.

It doesn't matter. He didn't just leak the tax info of Trump, he also leaked it for a bunch of other rich people. As a general rule, anything that harms rich people in the US will be punished severely regardless of the party affiliation of those assigning the punishment. I am actually somewhat surprised that they only managed to charge him with enough to get five years.

Biden is in a difficult position due to the drone attack that killed 3 American soldiers and wounded more than 30. The US strategy so far has been to rely mostly on defensive measures: However, there is no such thing as a perfect shield and even if 1 in 150 attacks gets through, people still get hurt or, as in this case, even die. The US either has to accept the losses (which is, among other things, politically terrible for the current administration) or retaliate in a way that gives the attackers pause... but this of course risks a wider conflict. Biden has said that the US will retaliate, but it's not clear how limited such retaliation will be.