Japan is still a fairly insular nation, especially in regards to the topic of history. During the Meiji restoration they basically rewrote their own history, which also kinda requires you to ignore or reshape everyone else’s history to suit your perspective. As a result, I doubt world history is very well covered in their public education.

I think that’s somewhat of a pedantic place to draw a line in the sand. I could just as correctly claim that if you aren’t committed to civil disobedience and are still paying taxes, then you are part of the problem. You are vegan, but you’re still supporting a government that spends hundreds of millions of dollars perpetuating animal cruelty on a daily basis?

Just because you aren’t vegan doesn’t mean you can’t believe that animals should be treated in a more ethical manner. Veganism is a imperfect human construct filled with internal contradictions based on western interpretation of ethics and cultural mores.

This is unfortunately not super uncommon. Older patients, especially women in palliative care are sometimes so close to death that the transition can be hard to detect. Things like heart rate and breathing can be so faint and slow that it can be extremely difficult to detect without equipment usually not found in most nursing homes. And when the patient is in this state, they can physically appear to be deceased.

That, and end of life care is horrible in America. It’s so profit driven that the facilities only hire the legally mandated amount of licenced professional to operate.

I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, and a large part of my last job was providing specialty care at nursing homes. I’ve had the unfortunate experience showing up to a nursing home and finding my patient deceased when the employees just thought they were sleeping.

I think I may have found the answer? After researching a little bit it looks like Abu al Abyad, the island above the elongated rectangles is actually an international military testing facility. This article , and a couple similar to it alluded that the area is for testing naval equipment and amphibious landings.

There are similar man made pools of salt water in desert condition that the US utilizes for radar testing at the China Lake research facility in California.

I don’t really have any study off the top of my head, most of my information is coming from departmental meetings we had during the COVID shut down. Though I’m sure it’s not too hard to find, it’s a well known problem, to the point where most states have legislation limiting the construction of new hospitals.

I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation in my state’s only trauma 1 ward, and during COVID our department was shut down for a couple weeks, as a lot of my clinics treatment is elective based.

Because elective services tend to be the profitable aspect of healthcare, we ended up in a situation of diminishing resources and an increase in demand for emergent care for COVID treatment.

Emergent care is basically any condition we can’t legally/ethically turn away from the emergency room, no matter if the patient has insurance or not. During COVID lots of people without insurance spent a lot of time in emergency services, and because our profitable clinics were prevented from operating, our hospital went into a lot of debt.

A lot of people are going to connect this to trump, but it’s really just a byproduct of the capitalization of medicine as a whole. This is more of an issue in conservative states who rejected the Medicaid expansion, but it’s also happening in states that vote heavily blue.

Emergent care is a huge money sink, and the roll of money making departments like orthopedics or cardiovascular care’s main job is to make enough profits to keep the lights on in the ER. When physician owned or private “hospitals” that don’t feature a ER open, they are taking revenue out of the emergent care network.

Many of these whistle-blowers are older experienced engineers who will be biased towards a higher death rate.

This, plus being highly involved in any court case is extremely stressful, which can take a toll on your mental and physical health.

Which is why I’m still kinda leaning towards an actual suicide with the first case. Being stressed, tired, having your life dictated around court schedules while you sleep in hotel rooms… I could see that wearing someone down after a while.

I just don’t think it makes real sense for a company to hire an actual hitman to operate in the US. Corporate murders happen, but usually overseas, and usually not when they’ve already testified.

Not saying it isn’t a possibility, I just think it’d be cheaper to pay the guy off and have him sign an NDA.

if you’re a responsible parent that keeps an eye on what their child is doing.

Unfortunately you can’t run a society based on how people should behave. That’s the entire reason we have a legal system and the means to implement safeguards for our population.

It’s probably not that bad, but I wouldn’t be surprised just based on anecdotal experience.

I’m a provider at a children’s hospital and phones have always been an issue during appointments. Before, it was mostly an issue with getting parents to pay attention or answer questions during the evaluation.

However since COVID, we’ve noticed a large increase of parents using tablets and phones as a constant babysitter. These children are so emotionally attached to their screens that they will tantrum until they have access to their screen again.

No worries, there’s a lot of narratives about assange being pushed around lately.

As I said originally, I don’t think he deserves to be put in a black box or anything. But I do believe he’s a self important ass, who is probably extremely unpleasant to be around.

Most of my opinions on him were formed around how he treated his original team at wikileaks. He did release information that needed to released, but the way the dude released the information was against the wishes of his very capable (at the time) team, who were highly (rightly) concerned about endangering their sources.

Hell, his original security architect stole their servers and destroyed them afterwards because Assange was constantly going rogue and ignoring security protocols.

Any “journalist” willing to endanger their sources or their opsec for headlines and personal glory isn’t a journalist imo.

The Embassy suddenly alleged to the media that it had all these problems with him after Ecuador had a change of government to a right wing that would be more sympathetic to US objectives.

“Julian Assange has launched a case against the Ecuadorian government for alleged “violation of fundamental rights”, the latest episode in an escalating row between the Australian founder of anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks and his host government.”

This spat between Ecuador and Assange began months before Correa left office. Below is the reasoning why the leftist president began putting more rules in place over the embassy.

"We did notice that he was interfering in the elections and we do not allow that because we have principles, very clear values, as we would not like anyone to interfere in our elections,” he said. “We are not going to allow that to happen with a foreign country and friend like the US.” Correa granted asylum in 2012 to Assange, who took refuge in the country’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations, which he denies. Correa fueled his rise to power on anti-US vitriol and aligned with Assange after WikiLeaks published highly classified Pentagon materials. Correa’s comments came one day after CNN published an exclusive report about surveillance reports that describe how Assange transformed the Ecuadorian embassy into a command center and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States. The report cited hundreds of surveillance documents detailing Assange’s time inside the embassy. The documents describe how Assange met with Russians and world-class hackers at critical moments and acquired powerful new computing and network hardware to facilitate data transfers just weeks before WikiLeaks received hacked materials from Russian operatives. “WikiLeaks’ justification was that they were providing truthful information,” Correa told CNN. “Sure, but (it) was just about Hillary Clinton. Not about (Donald) Trump. So, they were not saying all the truth. And not saying all the truth is called manipulation. And we are not going to allow that.”

I was talking about the incident that happened prior to the events you posted.

In 2014, the company hired to monitor Assange warned Ecuador’s government that he was “intercepting and gathering information from the embassy and the people who worked there” and that he had compromised the embassy’s communications system, which WikiLeaks called “an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange”. According to El País, a November 2014 UC Global report said that a briefcase with a listening device was found in a room occupied by Assange. The UC Global report said that proved “the suspicion that he is listening in on diplomatic personnel, in this case against the ambassador and the people around him, in an effort to obtain privileged information that could be used to maintain his status in the embassy.” Ambassador Falconí said Assange was evasive when asked about the briefcase.[291][292]

It was one of the first events that started to raise the hairs of people in the embassy.

As far as the imf loan, it seems pretty circumstantial. Tbh I just don’t think that the new leadership wanted to continue to pay millions of dollars a year just to watch the guy stir up trouble.

Did you not read the part that I didn’t think he belonged in prison? We can both acknowledge that the guy is an ass, and that he doesn’t deserve to be locked in a hole forever.

Forcing people into an opinion of false dichotomy between devil/angel just aids his prosecutors. He surely isn’t an angel, so what does that leave us to assume?

after they coerced Ecuador into revoking his asylum in April 2019

If you actually read into his time at the Ecuadorian embassy, it’s pretty easy to tell that the US didn’t have to coerce them to kick him out. They went out on a limb for him and he repaid their kindness by being a brat. He literally couldn’t be a decent human being if his life depended on it. He essentially got kicked out for installing spyware and listening devices into the embassy’s private network.

I don’t think he deserves to rot in prison forever, but he hasn’t made defending his prior actions any easier with recent behavior. And we’re getting to the point where his past actions as a journalist are being overshadowed by his recent political and private agitations.

Again, I don’t think he deserves jail time, but I don’t think he’s a decent person, nor a decent journalist.

That study’s been going around for years in the media, but mainly because it’s sensational. If you actually read the article, I’d hardly say it’s very convincing, or very accurate. Also, this.

Existing estimates of mortality from cat predation are speculative and not based on scientific data13,14,15,16 or, at best, are based on extrapolation of results from a single study18. In addition, no large-scale mortality estimates exist for mammals, which form a substantial component of cat diets.

But that was in the 60s. They are not exactly new at it. I think they also invaded Vietnam but my memory is fuzzy on why.

Their last major engagement was the sino Vietnamese war, where they attempted to invade Vietnam to support the Khmer rouge in Cambodia. It was a complete shit show.

I imagine if a full invasion ever happened it would be a complete shit show. Large combined arms maneuvers are problematic for countries with actual experience. I can’t imagine choosing Taiwan for your first time.

But let’s be real for a second. the CCP(should) have little interest in invading Taiwan. Sanctions from the West would cripple the country. Also their birthrates are at an all time low. A war would devastate that even more. China is already feeling some discontent since the CCP has broken the golden contract.

One would hope, but it wouldn’t exactly surprise me if they utilized it as a rallying cry if the rise in discontent on the mainland continues.

Tbh, this seems more like training facilities for special operations. In the 60’s North Korea built a to scale mock up of the Blue House in Seoul for the same reason, then they carried out a raid in an attempt to kill the president.

I wonder if the construction of the mock up in China aligns with your recent election cycle? From what I’ve read about Ching-te, he seems pretty adamant about the sovereignty of your country.

I wouldn’t want to be in the airborne unit being dropped. Your choices are basically to be dropped into urban combat, or on a freaking mountain. But I think I’d probably choose that over an amphibious landing on an island that’s been fortifying for this specific engagement for decades.

Either way, I definitely wouldn’t choose Taiwan as my first combined arms offensive in 40 years.

It’s hard to do with slate tiled roofs. The slates have to overlap to keep water out and the tiles aren’t flexible. So when you get to a corner you basically start the layering process over again.

They sell corner pieces for slate, but they’re pricey. So you typically see them do metal flashing in the corners, or some fancy tiling like in the post.

I’m guessing they just did the corners in this post, the rest of the roof looks older. Probably just replacing some bad flashing with something more permanent.

Eh… I know there’s about a million Afghan refugees in Iran that are considered internally displaced people. I think acquiring citizenship would be pretty hard for this population, especially considering they require a fair bit of documentation.