Why? It’s definitely a harbinger of bad times on the horizon, but it’s always been in the interest of “enemy” factions/nations to maintain a basic, failsafe line of communication.

Meh, the balloon stuff was pretty low-grade, silly stuff, with a lot of posturing on both sides, I’m not too worried about China not picking up on that stuff.

They did pick up Milley’s calls when trump was engaging in some serious sabre rattling, so still consider that red line to be up and running if/when actually necessary. Not clear if this will hold up long term, but all the incentives favour maintaining this kind of fail safe line of communication.

Korea had been making some inroads on that front, and there has been some level of recognition and acceptance of blame by Japan for the despicable treatment of “comfort women”.

Not enough to satisfy/assuage most Koreans (which is totally understandable), but the two countries just had a big “let bygones be bygones” meeting a few weeks ago that also helps turn a few more pages.

Very. (Also: Nanjing is just shorthand for a couple of decades of brutality that preceded it and centuries of decidedly tense relations before then).

Still a whooooole lot of (justifiably) hard feelings, especially when you consider that China was just kind of off its own universe until ‘76, so had some catch up to do in processing stuff like Japanese diplomatic relations.

Either way, good that this is now in place - nobody is expecting sunshine and lollipops between the two nations, but good to have a non-nuclear escape hatch in place.

Literally just James Cook fucking around with his buddies while leading the survey team, Newfoundland’s got loads of great town and landscape feature names (+ the best people you could ever hope to meet).

And that’s lazy mudslinging too, bc the IMF’s predatory shit is completely different than China’s lending model.

The IMF will bake everything into a contract up front, and force the signatories to attend in person meetings to walk through every single potentially brutal clause vs China, which starts out by building roads and hospitals for loan recipients, then strip mines a bunch of mineral deposits and dumps the effluent in critical waterways.

Ehh, disagree, the species will be fine, and the tendency towards civilization building seems to something we’re inherently built towards, so I’m not especially worried about that either, especially given the recovery that was seen post Bronze Age collapse.

As to the survival of current civilizations (or even preservation of the skills and standards achieved through those civilizations)? Oof, thing aren’t looking super great on that front, likely to be a pretty turbulent century or two, but I’m confident that they’ll be something recognizable on the other side.

Anyone have a link to any to Indiana’s licensing board complaints (if that’s even public?).

Bc if the allegation is in regards to the dr’s alleged violation of patient confidentiality, then this seems like baseless and vindictive nonsense.

Anonymizing such that age and home state are the only personal details are conveyed is less detail than you’d find in a published case report.

Fascinating, thanks for laying that all out!

Also, definitely hadn’t heard of yohimbine before, so that’s something new learned today.

On what analysis are you basing that 95% figure? Does it include print and tv? US markets only or other set of markets?

Because my personal impression - based on print only (mainly weeklies), US FRA and CA sources - was a solid mix of positive, neutral/bemused, and negative.

The US media environment is still a clusterfuck in the aggregate, but making random declarations like “didn’t cover X” or “only said Y” is no better than the garbage, fact free op eds pushed out in the daily papers.

Paxton, Texas. Too many investigations to name, DOJ has played a role in several of them.

Historical examples don’t work all that well as proxies, just bc of the amount of confounding factors and unique tensions inherent to a particular time/place…but feel like the British parliamentary system starting from the Carolean era is a pretty solid example.

Crazy concentrations of power and wealth, all kinds of evil fuckery (many having to do with colonial endeavours), but also a fairly stable country that has mostly rolled with the punches, all things considered.

Of course the UK is also currently shitting the bed, so that’s not exactly encouraging…but yeah: “worst option except all the other ones”.

Still think that democracy is remarkably durable, but also agree that we’re experiencing pretty extreme stresses/conditions, and that structurally flawed systems are going to collapse.

That’s not true - there have definitely been investigations of Republicans too.

That said: I strongly suspect that the DOJ gets flooded with plausible reports/tips of improper activities by Dems - petty bullshit like this being a prime example.

They can’t just NOT investigate reliable reports because that would be politically biased, and then the GOP PR machine gets to leak the story.

It’s a cheap political attack, and fucks w the DOJ’s ability to focus on other, serious investigations, but doesn’t necessarily point to thinks being screwed up within the DOJ itself.

But none of that indicates that Horowitz is a joke, or that he’s politically motivated - I commented more extensively above, but he seems like a pretty by the book/down the line civil servant.

What IS likely political is that someone was clearly keeping a very close eye on Rollins’s comings and goings, and reporting any hint of impropriety to his office. He doesn’t have much option but to follow up on that stuff - it’s clearly petty bullshit, but ignoring it would be a political call.

Meh: no idea what this guy’s deal is, but he’s clearly got the education and professional experience you’d want for someone in that role, and has served under 3 presidents.

None of the statements about Clinton, Comey, or Strzok are inaccurate, nor are they even especially strong (like yeah: don’t gossip about the current president via text on your FBI phone, it’s a bad look).

One section below in that that Wikipedia link there are details about how he found no political motivation behind Crossfire Hurricane investigation. >The report found that the FBI had a legal "authorized investigative purpose and with sufficient factual predication" to ask for court approval to begin surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser

Not trying to hype the guy up or anything, but looking at a rough snapshot of his highest profile actions, I see no obvious basis for criticism.

Oh, a super mish mash of classical and modern political theory, probably with some unconscious influence of sub-game economics thrown in… but definitely NOT some kind of Adam Smith “it’ll all work out in the end” blue sky thinking.

But yeah: plenty of supporting evidence - even given the natural tendency for wealth and power to accrue/compound - that democracies can and do hold up pretty well, so long as you have: 1) some level of variation and competition within the 0.01% and 2) a somewhat functional rules-based system that doesn’t have obvious forum shopping workarounds.

There’s also probably a 3) in the mix that involves the relationship between political/financial and military power, but that’s outside my wheelhouse and has its own particular dynamics and forces.

But even then, the incentives in a functional democracy are actually aligned to avoid collapse, if only because you have enough varying interests within the “concentrated power” crowd that refuse to concede their chance to have a turn at the helm.

Of course if you let enough nihilists who genuinely don’t give a shit either way accumulate enough money, and erode the foundational structures that keep the democratic process on track…yeah, things go downhill pretty fast.

So: the backslide is real, but would just caution about the risk of distraction/confirmation bias when it comes to news items like this one.

Bc voter intimidation is DEFINITELY happening in all kinds of shitty new ways (weird door knocking “audits”, ballot box “surveillance”, etc)…but # of reports of intimidation to a hotline is a shitty way of trying to calibrate the extent of this.

Bc election security is obviously a much more prominent issue than in the past, and that alone will make people more likely to make a report. Also: there are a handful of folks in every community who will file a report about anything (along with some who never, ever will).

All that to say: it’s important to use good metrics to get a sense of just how much aggression/intimidation is taking place and in what form, and stuff like # of reported incidents isn’t one of them.

Yeah, I honestly don’t have a single Chinese news source that I would trust at even the most superficial level.

The Economist publishes good, well sourced pieces from time to time, and have a few academics I follow who have perspectives that pass fact + gut checks…but for day to day news I got nothin.

Jesus fuck do they ever have long tentacles - the YouTube stuff, Epoch times, NDT (which is basically that quasi-official “broadcaster” of all Turning Point stuff)… and that was before Guo started pouring tons of money in all the various media platforms.

Such bad news bears.

That may be somewhat true of most Sunni orgs/states (if overly broad and simplified)…but Iran and other Shia dominated countries are a whole different ballgame.

I always think of salafism as the “biblical literalist/creationist” stream of the “Protestant” Sunnis vs the “Catholic/orthodox” Shias - and god knows that the catholics and protties have been fucking with each others’ places of worship for centuries.

(Alternately - the haredi faction of orthodox vs reform judaism, which didn’t work out great for Rabin…either way it’s a gross oversimplification, but helps me keep the factional tensions in Islam more or less straight).

Oh, no doubt.

Some of that is just down to people having limited bandwidth - I follow intl news relatively closely, from a wide range of sources, and know that I’m still only getting a tiny fraction of the most important news events of a given day/week.

The other bit is that there are a bunch of regions in the world where outsiders barely have a fighting chance at understanding the nuances and undercurrents at play, especially if we don’t speak the native language (and is a super bummer for Iran, bc Farsi is just so pretty) - Iran is definitely one of those places. You can know the about the shia/Sunni divide, the centuries of colonial fuckery in the region (driven by all kinds of shifting geopolitical reasons), the contributing factors behind the rise of IS/AQ/Daesh/whatever…and still barely scrape the surface in terms of being able to understand some of the motivations behind current events.

That said: yeah, most media sucks and a good chunk of people are so stunningly uncurious that they wouldn’t even be able to find Iran on a map.

Yup - I’m not anywhere near knowledgeable enough to understand the factional nuances at play here, but chaos invites more chaos.

The women opened up a crack in the Supreme Leader + mullah’s control, and now you have loads of groups jockeying to hasten the regime’s demise and grab power. Super unclear if any of this will “work”, or how it’ll play out…dangerous times indeed.