To be clear, the target of the shooting was an unidentified individual, and a scoped rifle was found in the vicinity.

Maybe something else happened, but it looks like the secret service doing their job and stoppingva shooter before he was ready to take the shot.

That inherent right does not extend to using any means to achieve it; just like a state’s right to self defence does not grant it the right to use any means to achieve it.

I actually read the 7 page opinion, because normally there is at least some shred of reasonableness in these crazy opinions. But this one … those 7 pages have nothing.

I’ll just leave this little nugget from the end:

The points we have made above provide some clarity about the legal standards and framework for this sensitive area of Texas law. The courts cannot go further by entering into the medical-judgment arena.

The really telling part of all of this is that there was no reason for this to be a thing. The state attorney general chose to fight this specific case. Then chose to send a letter to every hospital saying the injunction did not actually protect them, and chose to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court.

None of that had to happen. He could have let the extreme cases go through while fighting to remove women’s rights on the more “controversial” cases, but instead chose to make a test case out the most extreme interpretation of his extremist ideology.

Despite this, the court seems willfully blind to the fact that the reason for needing an injunction is that the state is acting in demonstorable bad faith.

Side note. Remember when the US SC ruled that this law could not be challenged because the state was not going to be the one enforcing it?

This is a civil case, not a criminal one. His 5th amendment protections are much weaker. If he says that his testimony may support criminal charges, then he is allowed to take the 5th. However, in a civil trial, the fact finder is allowed to draw a negative inference from that.

Having said that, none if this is relevent. He already testified during the State’s case, which is the only time he would need to invoke privilege. Since this is the defense case, they get to simply not call him.

Unless one of his co-defendants subpoenaed him, which is also not the case.

The allagation is that Panera did not adequately communicate the contents of the lemonade.

Neutral and Israel alligned countries have been calling for a humanatarian pause on purely humanitarian grounds. Even if you don’t care about the hostages, that Hamas was willing to offer them means that they had an interest in such a pause as well; making Israel the only obstacle to it happening. That is to say, the severity of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is squarly on Israel’s shoulders. The most charitable reading of the situation is that they have determined that the tactical advantage of blocking a humanitarian pause outways the civilian lives they put at risk by doing so.

US Jews aren’t that closely alligned to Israel; particularly if you are talking about the current Israeli leadership (which a significant portion of Israelis also aren’t alligned with). Further, the preferences of US Jews is pretty corralated to their political party; where Jewish Republicans are far more pro Israel than Jewish democrats.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/05/21/u-s-jews-have-widely-differing-views-on-israel/

The above survey is old, but I don’t think the story has fundamentally changed.

Across all US Jews (as of the time the survey was conducted)

40% rate Netenyahus leadership as good or excellent (25% of Democratic Jews, 80% of Republican Jews)

34% Strongly oppose the BDS (anti Israel Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement. (28% Democratic Jews, 54% Republican Jews)

33% Thought that Israel was making a sincere effort to peace. (20% Democratic Jews, 66% Republican Jews)

32% Thought that God gave Israel to the Jews. (22% Democratic Jews, 60% Republican Jews).

When people talk about the “Jewish” position for Israel in thr context of US politics, they are really talking about the Republican position.

They are a loud rounding error that gets amplified by the current media landscape.

Admit that the project of establishing a democratic Jewish state has failed, and try to salvage a democratic state out of the rubble.

Not sex related, but I learned it in sex ed. Most males do not have a big depression in their chest. Turns out that the males in my family happened to have a condition known as Pectus Excavatum.

In the US, the covid vaccine has a sticker price of about $120; which is already a meaningless and overinglated number, but puts an upper bound on the cost of the treatment.

Suppose you are a healthy young adult, working a job earning $15/hour. You do not get vaccinated and end up catching covid. Nothing major, you just call in sick for a day and sleep it off. 8 hours of lost labor at $15/hour gives a lower bound of $120 in economic damages. Of course, your work produces more value then your wage: there is profit, per-employee overhead, non-wage benefits, cost of unplanned disruptions.

Maybe you need 2 days to recover. Now the damages are large enough to have covered at least 2 vaccinations. Maybe you infected someone else, who proceeded to infect someone else. Maybe you value not getting sick at a rate above $0. And this is all just the cost associated with 1 sick day. Some young healthy adults will get even sicker, and there is no way to know ahead of time who they will be.

Notably, the US is not responding with overwhelming force. There was a relatively small attack on US bases, and the US responded with a few targeted attacks on the militia bases. Proportionate responce. Deterence is maintained.

Propoganda + Time = history.

The statue doesn’t say much about the civil war. But it does say alot about the Jim Crow era in which it was built. Personally I think this is even more important because the Jim Crow era is far less well understood by most Americans, and far more relevant to the race issues we see today.

Tricky question, but I think I have a solution:

:!readlink /proc/$PPID/fd/* | grep “$(dirname %)/.$(basename %).sw” | xargs -I{} rm “{}” ; kill -9 $PPID

Vaccinations are one of the most cost effective public health interventions.

No. The CDC Bridge Access Program is set to run through December 2024. As long as you go to a participating pharmacy, the Covid vaccine is free regardless of insurance status.

You can search on vaccines.gov for participating pharmacies.

Regarding insurance, the CDC has a program to provide free vacinations to those who are not covered by insurance. All you need to do is go to a participating pharmacy. They will bill the CDC program if they cannot bill insurance.

To find a participating pharmacy, go to https://www.vaccines.gov/ and select the Bridge Access Program filter after making the search.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/bridge/index.html

The UK is not supporting Hamas, so their is no point in protesting their support for Hamas. If you want to fly to Iran and protest their support of Hamas, that would make sense.

In theory, concurrent sentences are an acknowledgement that it is not fair to give multiple punishments for the same crime. However, it is often desirable to charge someone with multiple offences fir the same crime, as they might be found innocent of the more serious offense (or have some of the convuctions overturned on appeal).

For example, in the case of a homicide, you often see the defendent charged with both murder and manslaughter for the same act. In such a case the defendent would likely get a concurrent sentence because they were only convicted of a single act.

In many cases, the line between multiple convictions being a single “act” is blurry, the judge can exersise discretion.

Beyond just ‘not ok’, Israel’s response is playing out exactly how the terrorist’s playbook says the terrorized country should respond: terrorist launches a terrorist attack, terrorized country responds with forced, civilians hit in the crossfire blame the terrorized country and move towards the terrorists.

In the past few days, we have been hering Israeli officials refer to this as their 9/11. What they do not seem to appreciate with their comparison is that the emotion ladden responce the US engaged in after 9/11 proved to be one of the greatest military blunders in the countries history.

If they want to learn a lesson from 9/11, they should address the immediate military threat, fix the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to be so successful (such as diverting soldiers away from the Gaza border; and (allegedly) ignoring warnings that Hamas was planning an attack). Once the immediate concerns are addressed, they should back off and allow time for cooler heads to think through what a strategically effective response would look like and implement that.

Unfortunately, such a response is politically difficult in the best of circumstances. Given that the current ruling coalition is almost the definition of hotter heads, built itself up on the promise of “security”, and was already on shaky ground domestically, I don’t think they have many options other than a rash response.

Hopefully they constrain themselves to just responding in Gaza. If they decide to respond by going after Hamas’s supporters in, say Iran, we are looking at a major regional war.