400 karma · joined March 5, 2015
How throwing grenades into missile bunkers full of frightened 16 year old girls near the Nova Festival or going into retirement homes in the kibutzes and shooting old helpless grandmothers dead or kidnapping them is "fighting back against the oppressor" is something I can't understand and am not willing to accept.
There are also 185k German Soldiers in Germany right now.
The reason the EU leaders placate the US President is that it worked getting past his first presidency and we are all part of the rollercoaster ride that is his second coming.
The US would never pull unilaterally from NATO, they just lost massive projection power into the middle east by losing the Iran war and Ramstein Air Base is strategically the most important asset the US has in Europe.
Even if it did happen NATO is still able to beat Russia, the biggest threat in the region without the US. UKs nuclear subs can kill 80% of the Russian population on their own as Russia has highly concentrated population centers and launching nukes right of their coast line, which is extremely long and impossible to fully protect wouldn't allow them to launch counter measures on time. Mutual destruction assured usually means both sides have no interest to pull each other into a all-in conflict.
Also stay feisty, refreshing.
And a Israeli life is not worth more, or less, than a Palestinian life.
Reading that you compare victim numbers to justify the Oct 7th atrocities as resistance effort in your personal believe system makes me genuinely sad.
It will never be justified to kill civilians, be it Palestinians or Israelis, Russians or Ukrainians or Iranians and US Americans.
May Allah open your eyes and your heart, so that you can see and accept the truth.
I will and did call out IDF war crimes before as well.
There is !!overwhelming!! eye witness account and confirmation by internationally recognized bodies of the monstrosities the Hamas cowards did to their victims.
I will not cite the dozens of Israeli reports because we both know even first responders from ZAKA lied. But there were multiple independent investigations coming to the same conclusion.
https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15621.doc.htm
https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploa...
https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n25/108/72/pdf/n25108...
I'm in Berlin for the weekend right now and enjoying my "NATO subsidized way of life".
Can you point me in the right direction where in Berlin i can find those American occupation troops? Seemed to have missed them so far. Would like to take some pictures with them.
They now know they can close the straight whenever they please and the mightiest military in the world is not able to open it back up.
The straight and the confidence in their ability to survive complete air dominance by two of the most sophisticated military forces in the world is Irans new A-Bomb.
Which is a complete disaster for Israel.
Israelis never need to forget two things before the next election, the Oct 7th atrocities were carried out by Hamas, and everyone who participated deserves to be hunted and killed with the same brutality they murdered and raped elderly and children with, but equally important, it was the Israeli PM who allowed this to happen by his inflated ego, creating an "impenetrable" high tech border with sensors and outposts that were beaten by a few caterpillars and hanggliders.
For Bibi not going to jail he has to keep his forever wars up so the people of Israel are distracted and not able to finally mourn the victims properly and asking the important question why did this happen in the first place and who needs to take full responsibility for it.
So Iran trapped the Israeli PM who thought he could control Trump and the narrative and they got completely outplayed by the Iranians.
Iran managed to get Bibi the Zelensky treatment and now the US President is publicly humiliating the Israeli PM into submission by letting trump ramble publicly about how weak, insane and isolated Bibi is.
So either Bibi becomes Trump's bitch and misses all of his war goals which will get him eaten alive by the Israelis asking themselves why they all suffered through this? Or he keeps whatever dignity is left in that old meat bag and can kiss his freedom and legacy goodbye.
Oh and lets not forget the US lost this war using AI. Which speaks a lot against using the technology in a military context. It produced a lot of noise / kills which did not translate into a better strategic outcome, more control or in the end winning the war.
Why is that ironic?
They use OpenAI’s resources and models, and therefore cost them money and tie up computing resources, which are also aligned way better with American users than the Chinese models.
Obviously, they are also smart enough to hide their activity from OpenAI long enough to produce what they consider usable assets at scale, and they are able to exfiltrate them reliably, as OpenAI is showing in their own report how propaganda generated with ChatGPT on their own platform makes it into the wild with all their security measures failing.
Ironic is the last sentence.
> Industry, governments, civil society, and the public should remain alert for similar attempts to scale these messages and foreign interference activities.
Oh, so I, as part of the civil society and public, need to be alert because your product is basically a national security risk as it allows hostile entities and foreign governments to reliably produce and exfiltrate propaganda assets that are then used against the, in this case, American public?
That is unacceptable.
How about we simply ban you from doing business until you put effective measures in place that prevent those entities from destroying our democracy and societies with ChatGPT-generated disinformation campaigns, so you wouldn’t have a reason to publish these public records of how OpenAI fails to deliver even the most basic protection from AI-generated influence campaigns to the public in the first place?
Why doesn’t AI have the same KYC regulations as banks?
You shouldn’t be able to open a bank account anonymously to finance terror, but foreign adversaries can open accounts with US AI companies, gaining access to frontier LLM models to drive influence campaigns built to damage the glue that holds our society together just like that?
No sense of responsibility on OpenAI’s part. Oh look how smart we are here is a lengthy report to an important problem we fixed.
Fix the damn cause, your platform and product security, instead of applying bandaids and wanking each other off on company time for damage assessment reports like this.
It broke like four times under warranty because the crease got gummed up with their glue strips in the summer or it got brittle when I travelled to Greenland because of the cold in the winter, it felt uncomfortable and often moved in the pocket you put it into in a way that would annoy you every time you sat down somewhere.
But once you pull it out, something magical happens. Foldables are still one of those items you will rarely see in the wild, and it peaks the curiosity of people in a way that will make them come over and ask questions.
You see them touch it really carefully and open it really, really slowly because they are afraid they might break it, and suddenly you have this magical, foldable screen right in front of you that turns this heavy slab into a form factor known by anyone who ever held a book in their life.
When it snaps open or shut with the satisfying noise and haptic feedback, it makes them genuinely happy and smile, and watching different people having the same experience over and over again is kind of satisfying and in a way justified the price for me alone.
I am sure the Apple foldable will have its downsides and is heavily overpriced, and if you buy it in the EU, you won’t be able to use half the features, but I am still going to get one because I will have a lot of joy watching people interact with new technology for the first time when I travel, and I love listening to how they think it could improve their life or how and for what they would get one themselves.
Also, theoretically, unlike with a smoking car wreck, you would have basically unlimited chances to find the right angle for the lens if you tried.
Who’s going to stop you? The campus security drone defence squad?
Most likely, some middle-aged dude will try to angrily yell at it and hit it with a mop, miss it a few times, then yell some more, and it goes viral on TikTok. But doing crime is bad, so don’t ever destroy an AI camera.
Why would anyone carry a palm-size non-traceable drone with a glass breaker on campus you might ask. Are they going to break the cameras? Of course not, that’s highly illegal.
Students care deeply about the wellbeing of fellow students and professors, just like the University seems to care so much that they installed AI cameras for 1.3 mil USD. Safety first.
What if one of your fellow students crashes their car on campus and needs to be rescued in style? Evaluate explosion risk, decide to break glass with the drone from a safe distance, then quickly move in to cut the seat belt and extract the crashed driver.
Drones are cool tech, students at SDSU should experiment with them way more and establish their presence on campus. Maybe even make a nationwide university sport out of it. National Drone Rescue Championships anyone?
And the scientists don’t seem to be aware of this, because later on in the conclusion they talk about what other governments can learn from this, policy-wise.
The severe flaw in this logic, unless with other governments they mean state-wise within the US, is that it only looks at US Americans, who have a very own subset of unique variables you hardly see in other parts of the world and populations that do influence the outcome.
America is a pill-popping nation.
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/americans-will-spend...
And the health education of the average American is rather poor, with over 60% of U.S. adults demonstrating inadequate health literacy in this study from 2025.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133552...
What surprises me here is the shortsighted conclusion.
How can you conclude this:
"Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realise the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate. Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work and for firms and governments setting remote-work policies."
Rather than, obviously, we have to deal with a highly health-uneducated overall population in the US, that is overall less resilient to mental distress, tends to look for quick fixes (pill popping) rather than eliminating the factors causing the need to take pills in the first place, and that is largely unable to develop strategies on their own to deal with temporarily forced isolation and has severe problems adapting to rapidly changing external factors and the mental load they put on the individual.
How can we teach the average American to be more resilient, have better health education so they can make better decisions and get them off so many pills?
I know. This study examined how remote work affects isolation and mental distress.
And therefore not the root cause of the underlying systemic problems.
But it is annoying to see smart people who should know and see the root of the problems, rather looking for grant money than for solutions.
That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.
To bribe a nation-state, you’re in the billions. https://www.jfeed.com/middleeast/qatar-iran-bribe-deal
To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-blocks-iraqs-dollar-shipmen...
If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.
According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.
What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?
https://unicri.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/UNICRI_Organi...
You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/AOTP/Hawal...
There is a good example in that report.
Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions and profits in ledgers.
The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.
My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.
This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”
But the real problem here is that there are a ton of adults who would love to have kids but are medically not able to for a bunch of reasons, from autoimmune disease to genetic differences to the simple fact that young people get cancer too and infertility because of treatment or the illness is a thing too.
Is it really wise for a society to treat them as if they willingly deny the society additional benefactors and valuable younger members?
It feels wrong for me that you get treated unequally by the law because of circumstances that are not choice-based and your decision to make in the first place.
I will tell you the same. Look at what Altman actually does to make the life of the "replaced because of AI workforce" a good life, not at his mouth.
Altman is a liar. It’s his profession. He hypes up the product in order to sell it to investors. Of course, he told everyone whose loyalty is to their shareholders and their own bonus payments that you will become exponentially more wealthy after replacing those pesky workers and their hard-fought rights with machines that never complain about working for too long or too hard and that he is selling such soulless Tinmen to the evil Fortune 500 witches at scale if they are interested.
You can’t trust the man on a single thing he says because his actions don’t line up with the words that leave his mouth. They never did.
Now he is lying again because he is unfortunately afraid of him and his family getting murdered, and AI can’t solve the problems he created by making the statement that AI will be able to do and replace most of the jobs employers pay humans for.
And now people actually see this, their friends and family members getting laid off by email, by AI or because of AI and suddenly their lives get exponentially worse instead of better.
Betting on AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people at currently zero overall value for humanity itself, because the base of this technology is flawed by design. Hallucinations are not a bug, they are a baked in feature. It’s like building on sand.
This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight, what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.
We will just add an "if it uses energy, we can shut it down" to the "if it bleeds, we can kill it".
It’s all about adoption and the bigger picture. The US is an untrustworthy, isolated island in the AI future if you vote another idiot into office in a few years. If you’ll still be able to vote at all, that is.
The largest part of the world is not the US. The cutting-edge US models are way too expensive for most parts of the world, and that also shows in adoption.
China is building an ecosystem of open-source models that are both cheap and good enough for most use cases. While most of the US AI sphere will collapse under the pressure of making profits, which means having their models and infrastructure adopted by as many enterprises and individuals across the world, China’s models will have become global standards and hard to displace.
If Beijing’s AI pitch centers on universal access and cost-effectiveness, then Chinese AI firms do not need the latest chips to win the global AI race. They also don’t need the expensive US-run infrastructure. If you watch Chinese AI adoption closely, they already want as many Chinese people as possible to be able to build and try with AI, whereas for most Americans, US models for productive use are already too expensive.
Kimi K2.6 sits within touching distance of Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 while costing about $4 per mil output tokens. That is six to eight times cheaper than cutting-edge US models. If you run hundreds of agents, that’s a significant opportunity to get the same work done for a lot less.
Even early adopters like Singapore, ditching US models, the government kicked Zuckerberg in the nuts and went for Qwen instead to build its sovereign AI models.
To understand why the US is at a severe disadvantage in this race, you need to understand China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI entails Chinese firms delivering fully financed infrastructure projects in a bid to lock third countries into China’s economic orbit. They use the same approach for their open source ai models, but this time the infrastructure is both invisible and free.
No need to build power plants or buy /build ports. AI dependency is invisible to both policymakers and the population, limiting pushback. No pesky activists in Germany nagging about China buying parts of ports. No African nutbags questioning why the humble Xi is building hospitals in areas Chinese mining companies take things out of the ground for pennies on the dollar.
China is going for a marathon here while the US tries to push their ai tech by sheer force into the throats of the world. As soon as Chinese ai models have become global standards, it’s game over for us ai companies. And China is way better at this game than the US. They have proven this over and over again in the past 50 years.
I recommend reading the China Standards 2035 strategy to get a better understanding of their approach and how smart this is.
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-standards-2035-str...
AI is not as revolutionary as you think in terms of our experiences with previous technological advances in terms of trade and economics.
Western economies are locked into U.S. models, while China runs on Chinese ones. It’s the age-old game. But the real war of the AI race will be fought in the global south.
I will give you three examples.
Can you really imagine, if you look at what AI needs to cost to make a profit, that even at the current prices, US models and infrastructure, which are heavily subsidised already, being used in cost-sensitive countries? I am not talking about coders, think really big here for a second.
Secondly, US ai models are trained on Western data. How do you expect them to grasp local contexts in the Southern Hemisphere? Chinese open-source models, on the other hand, can be downloaded and finetuned with country-specific data.
Want an example? Check out AfriqueQwen-14B, which is adapted to the top twenty African languages.
So I think this author is wrong. The ai race to be won is not hardware or cloud infrastructure, my money is on it will be a contest to decide which models and standards become the default infrastructure in countries that are up for grabs.
China neither needs the best models nor does it need the best cloud infrastructure, it just, like so often, only needs to be affordable and good enough to become the default choice in emerging markets.
The right choice would be for everyone to step off the gas pedal and think about whether we are willing to become China in order to beat China. Our ancestors worked really hard to get us here, our rights, our ways of life, culture, all the blood, sweat, and tears.
AI better be worth it in the long run for all of humanity if we go back to survival of the fittest. Because that is what it will take to beat China at their game.
I think what will happen after this war is that we will see the Gulf states taking away projection power from the US military, which will also significantly lower the chances of a more and more unhinged Israel projecting power into the other Gulf states.
Also, Iran did not even play its best cards yet.
That the leadership of Iran, who is still a murderuous regime, seems to be the more sane party in terms of answering aggression with "adequate measures" while mostly trying to prevent civilian loss of life is absolutely mind-blowing for me.
It’s like a rabid dog (US) hunting a fox (Iran) and now the dog got its head stuck in a hole and gets bitten in the nose once in a while until it learns its lesson.
What is way more important than oil and the Strait of Hormuz in this conflict is actually (drinking)water.
The Gulf region, with its desert climate, is among the most water-scarce in the world. The six states, which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, use desalination to provide water to a combined 62 million people.
For the GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia), most of their freshwater supply comes from a constellation of groundwater aquifers. Many of these, however, are severely over-exploited, depleted at rates far exceeding what nature can replenish. The total renewable surface and groundwater resources of the six GCC countries together amount to 7.21 billion cubic meters (m3) a year, less than the annual flow of the Potomac River for a population of 62 million.
Water managers generally consider that societies require 1700 m3 of renewable freshwater per person each year to meet their populations’ water needs, from drinking, cooking, and washing to the demands of agriculture and industry.
By this metric, the members of the GCC exhibit “absolute water scarcity.”
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Oman enjoys no more than 296 m3 per capita of annually available renewable freshwater resources, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia each possess only 75 m3 per capita per year, Qatar has 20 m3 per capita per year, while the UAE and Kuwait receive just 15 m3 and 4 m3, respectively.
From 1990 to 2022, annual desalinated water production soared by 314 percent across the GCC, rising from 1.4 to 5.9 billion m3. The six Gulf states now count some 3,401 operational desalination plants, comprising 19 percent of all desalination facilities worldwide.
Collectively, these plants can churn out 22.67 million m3 of desalinated water each day, enough to fill over 9,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, representing 33 percent of global daily production capacity.
For the GCC countries, extensive desalination systems constitute indispensable critical infrastructure.
Desalination fulfills 77.3 percent of total water demand in Qatar, 67.5 percent in Bahrain, 52.1 percent in the UAE, 42.2 percent in Kuwait, 31 percent in Oman, and 18.1 percent in Saudi Arabia. Desalination plants are especially important for meeting drinking water needs. Qatar derives 99 percent of its drinking water supplies from its network of desalination facilities, and Bahrain over 90 percent. For Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the figures are 90 percent, 86 percent, 70 percent, and 42 percent, respectively.
The GCC’s desalination plants are large, fixed, open-air industrial complexes. Mostly concentrated along the coast within 350 kilometers of the Islamic Republic. So well within Iran’s drone and precision ammunition’s striking range.
Desalination plants are also essentially linear facilities, meaning that the seawater-to-freshwater transformation takes place through an ordered sequence of stages. Damage to sensitive parts of the system, such as high-pressure pumps or membrane buildings, could disable production entirely.
So the real bargaining chip for Iran is not Oil. It’s water.
This scenario has unfolded before btw. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, Iraqi forces purposely destroyed most of Kuwait’s desalination capacity and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the northern Persian Gulf, jeopardizing water intakes for plants in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
After coalition forces retook the country, water shortages forced Kuwaiti authorities to cut household water services to four days a week while relying on contracted tanker ships and hundreds of tanker trucks to deliver bulk water for the population.
Article 54(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits attacking or destroying “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as drinking water installations and supplies.”
But if the US keeps threatening Iran openly with annihilation/genocide, I think it’s reasonable that from an Iranian position, a retaliation strike will go on the desalination of the Gulf countries, which means millions of people will die and all ties to the US will be cut off as they are essentially responsible for this outcome.
You’d think the president wouldn’t be stupid enough to go through with his threats, but nobody thought he would be stupid enough to turn a beheading strike into a months-long war, plunging the whole world into chaos, and even if the Iranians gave up the nuclear material, the damage caused by the US Administration with allies and to the global world trade will outweigh Iran not having a nuclear weapon.
We see North Korea having nuclear weapons as well as a supreme leader, but you’d need to search long and hard to find a single serious expert who says they would use them in a first strike even against their direct neighbour, South Korea. They also more or less take the sanctions put on them without threatening everyone with nuclear annihilation.
Instead, their supreme leader used the killing of Khamenei senior to update the North Korean constitution to retaliate with a nuclear strike if he ever got assassinated by a third party. Something that wasn’t necessary in a pre-trump era.
This whole conflict is FUBAR and at the whim of a person that is known for not being able to admit defeat, we still frequently hear about the "stolen election".
Might be Checkmate in Iran.
But if the person starting the war doesn’t understand the rules of chess to begin with, what is the expected outcome here?
Thank you for understanding me.
I mean, there are only 300 or so cases recorded in history of the Andes hantavirus human-to-human transmission.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2009040#ap1&uccL...
And Trump, the wise man he is, didn’t cut a single dollar on science, especially that of epidemiology and emerging priority pathogens.
You guys are lucky there were no passengers coming back to the US and that there is no global event like the soccer World Cup starting soon or the 250th anniversary of the United States.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/us/hantavirus-cruise-us-p...
I wouldn’t be worried too much, especially knowing how the president dealt with the coronavirus in his first term. They are just going to shine some light into your veins and/or inject disinfectants into you, and your suffering will be over in no time.
I wish my country had an administration that is this good at everything they do, but we wouldn’t know what to do with all those wins.
Best of luck, Americans.
Now that this will obviously change, why should I keep using Apple Maps? At least they should have kept it ad-free for people already paying a premium for their Apple One Premium subscription.
I have less and less incentives to stay in the Apple ecosystem, this is just another nail in the coffin.
They just want you to eat your lunch, not to ask stupid questions about whether it was ethically sourced or how much rat milk is in that sauce.
It is also kind of interesting that they couldn’t get a single journalist from the OG Politico staff to put one of their names under it. So this is basically pushing "Die Welt" content into the English-speaking / US hemisphere disguised under the Politico brand label.
The only person in relation to Politico is the illustrator who, at least for me, added her own little detail of artistic protest by colouring the nails of the man in the picture, who eerily looks like Doepfner while leaving his toenails out and absolutely half-assing the fires.
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...
Something the ultra-conservative chief doofus would rage about if he actually read the shit his staff writes and not just the metrics.
Lennart Pfahler and Philipp Woldin are reporters for WELT. Alexander Dinger is WELT’s investigations editor.
I didn’t see that disclaimer the first time I read the article, but it’s kind of a statement by itself, they are distancing this clearly from Politico staff-written content.
That’s also a lot of times a wrong assumption based on the trust we put in journalists to stick to the highest standards of reporting by trade. But these are no journalists, these are writers for hire that will sing any song as long as they get paid in cash and attention.
If someone wants to plant a thought in your head, like there is a huge problem with German far-left activists waging "war" against the infrastructure and people, while applying emotional pressure to you with the story of the poor man on ventilation who was slowly dying, which is a false representation, as this man never was at risk of life, they could have kept him on battery ventilation in his flat for days if necessary with mobile power stations and replaceable battery packs they have for exactly that reason and everyone who ever worked with rescue workers knows that.
The first thing you need to ask yourself is, what is their motivation to write an article like that and is there a bigger overall motive behind this kind of coverage?
With Axel Springer Publishing and their CEO, it’s easy to find out. As there are plenty of journalists who cover what and how they do it.
You could start with a piece from 2022:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/axel-springer-politico-...
and
https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/boost-for-the-...
and
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/apr/08/how-axel-sprin...
and then work yourself from there to find more English-speaking articles about the whole Axel Springer Publishing complex and the kind of journalism they do to make up your own mind if that is a source you can and should trust, or even share with others.
In my opinion this isn’t investigative journalism, it’s agenda journalism.
You can see this article break apart quite easily if you question some of the facts presented in the article and how the journalists purposefully don’t give you any proof for them and go to the “ trust us, bro” base.
Everyone speaks under anonymity, nobody wants to go on the record.
The letter announcing responsibility is never presented as being authentic. They couldn’t even find proof for that. There is a million euros on the heads of the suspected perpetrators, the same amount the US put on Bin Laden’s son, Hamza. But not a single arrest in connection with this attack.
There is no question that attacking the energy infrastructure, no matter by whom, is an attack on every citizen, and whoever did this needs to get the whole weight of the security services on their neck.
But to be fair, there is still no proof that this was in fact Antifa activists, all investigations, including a million euros bounty and kicking down doors, brought exactly 0 arrests.
So you’d be wise to ask yourself why the boys at Politico are crying wolf, and in whose interest they do it.
Nearly a third of the state’s residents are Black. However, the Republicans, who hold a majority in the Louisiana legislature and also hold the governorship, drew the congressional districts in such a way that Black voters had a majority in only one out of six districts.
Activists and organizations filed a lawsuit challenging this. The state subsequently revised the district boundaries so that two of the six districts had a majority of Black voters, reflecting their proportion of the population.
In response, a group of white citizens who felt they were being discriminated against filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court.
The court has now ruled in favor of these plaintiffs. In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative majority, argued, that the category of “race” should not play a role in government decisions.
This argument about a “color-blind” Constitution always surfaces in the U.S. context whenever there is an attempt to roll back social progress.
It ignores the fact that the Constitution was not written to be “color-blind,” but rather to discriminate deliberately. Enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, not as full citizens. That did not change until the 1860s, after the abolition of slavery had been decided through the most violent conflict in U.S. history.
Like other advocates of “colorblindness,” Alito now invokes, of all things, the constitutional amendment adopted at that time and the Equal Protection Clause it contains, which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law.
Yet this clause was specifically intended to safeguard the interests of minorities. And it took nearly another century and an additional law to force the Southern states to apply this part of the Constitution.
As early as 2013, the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.
Until then, states that had previously enacted racist laws to discriminate against voters needed permission from the federal government if they wanted to change their election laws. The Supreme Court struck down this requirement, reasoning that the conditions that had made this restriction necessary no longer existed.
As if the racism that runs through the history of the United States had suddenly vanished.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once remarked that this was like throwing away your umbrella in the pouring rain just because you didn’t get wet under it. She would be horrified to see how some of her former colleagues are now, some six years after her death, further eroding the hard-won civil rights. And this just a few months before the 250th anniversary of the United States.
But at its core, it simply follows a tradition that is as old as the nation itself. Every step forward that brings the United States closer to fulfilling the promise it made at its founding, yet denied to a large portion of its population, that all people are created equal and must therefore have equal rights, is followed by a step backward.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 significantly increased the proportion of Black voters. But efforts to weaken the law have been going on for just as long as the law itself. Now, with the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court that Donald Trump helped create, those efforts have succeeded.
The coming months and years will likely reveal what happened after the initial ruling in 2013. States used the Supreme Court’s decision as a pretext for implementing numerous measures that made it particularly difficult for Black voters to cast their ballots. Now the Court has set another precedent.
Therefore the title "Supreme Court limits the voting rights act" is correct. To be more specific it is missing a ",again".
As you might have noticed, for months now, a redistricting war, a veritable battle over the drawing of electoral districts, has been raging in various states.
Sadly, the Democrats have also gotten drawn into it, adopting the motto “fight fire with fire”, and now want to manipulate electoral districts to their own advantage in order to keep up with the Republicans.
The latter now see this as their chance to prevent defeat in the November congressional elections.
In Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina, all states in the Deep South of the U.S. where people were once enslaved and which later enacted racist discrimination laws, leading Republicans are already planning special legislative sessions to quickly approve redistricting plans.
Marsha Blackburn, a staunchly pro-Trump senator from Tennessee who is running for governor there, posted a map of her state on social media in which every single county is colored red as in the color of the Republican Party.
They no longer need to worry about anyone stopping her. The Supreme Court has made sure of that.
Shameful.
I recommend reading this instead, and then trying the concepts you learn from it out in topics that personally interest you by looking at something like Google Scholar or any other search engine for scientific papers or open access journals.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/09/ho...
That way you can also compare your own research to what this tool is outputting to see what it missed, or what you might have missed, always under the assumption that the AI hallucinates, while you hopefully don’t have that issue.
The CIA is toppling oppressive regimes this way for decades. You create friction, the oppressor pushes back, and the people gather behind the oppressed.
Ridicule and constantly calling out idiots for what they are does work. You create friction by it. Trump made sure the factory worker gets fired, people were pushing back by donating for him, and they will vote against him in the midterms.
Abuse of power directed at the citizens is something most people will not forget or forgive in a free society, no matter what political beliefs they have, unless they are facists.
The stuff Petti did, filming ICE agents, being in their face, openly calling them out, created friction. They killed him because of that friction. The whole state pushed back in return.
Creating friction is what makes Republicans losing seats in the Congress and allows the regain of power from Trump, who is mostly ruling by executive order.
As a citizen, it’s not your job to focus on the failures of his job and show them to the public. It’s what you voted representatives for and the job of journalists. You demand their inactivity to be explained by them over the phone, over mail, respectfully showing up at their office. All day, every day, the only time they should be at peace is when they eat, sleep or be on the toilet.
You create friction for them. It’s not the fault of the people that he got voted again, it’s that most of the Senate and Congress rather try to protect their own interests and power than openly confronting the President, creating friction, every day, all day, until the President pushes back. Which in return will have the people gather behind the suppressed, jailed, or murdered representatives.
You have a different method of creating friction in mind, but don’t do the job of the people you pay handsomely to represent you or that of the press. Your energy is better spent creating friction for them until they act. Then you support them when they take the heat they are supposed to take if they fight for your rights instead of just cashing in from their position of embarrassing passiveness.
There is not a single good reason to try to kill Trump.
Just ridicule him in public and call him out for what he is. That’s hurting the man more than any bullet could. Have you seen him rage and yell “fuck you” at a factory worker for calling him a pedophile protector? That’s the way to deal with Trump. Laugh about him, call him an idiot, or a PPP.
You vote him out of office, like people did before. You see his lawyer sweat black goo and laugh about it, and about Trump ranting on social media for a while, then go on with your life.
He is 79. I’d be surprised if he made it past 85. That’s like six more Christmases. We are almost done with his nonsense. Don’t throw your life away because of him.
In 200 years, the man will be erased from collective human conscience.
When was the last time you and your friends thought about John Quincy Adams, the US President 200 years ago? Young people barely have the attention span to make it through the news, if they are not dancing them on TikTok.
His buildings will be renamed, his policies rolled back, he will be no more than a stain in American history.
All emperors meet the same fate, since we started putting things on the record. Nobody cares about them, you, or me in about three generations’ worth of lifetimes.
That’s some of the beauty of being human. Everything will be forgotten in time, unless you did upload photos from that spring break at Lake Havasu in 2005 to Facebook, that shit stays forever, talking about you, Emily.