Part of the problem with criminalizing abortion is in how it creates large bureaucratic hurdles for doctors to prove they aren’t committing a crime under necessary circumstances.

Texas law specifically allows for abortions in cases like this, but the state’s AG has threatened to prosecute anyone who performs one, regardless.

Consequentially, no hospital will perform these “legal” abortions, for fear of a prosecuting convincing a jury it was illegal after all.

Electrolytes. They’re what plants crave.

Its not my job to teach you. I suggest you do your own research.

some men still don’t know how to wear a fucking condom

Excited to hear how condoms prevent congenital defects.

Year-over-year, 255 more infants, defined as babies under one year old, died in 2022 than in 2021.

So, 1961 infant deaths in 2021 and 2216 in 2022, amounting to a 13% increase in total infant deaths. The rising mortality rate appears to be driven by congenital defects in the newborns.

The majority of excess deaths over the previous year were caused by congenital anomalies, the study found, while deaths due to other reasons like complications during the pregnancy also increased year over year; the data showed that babies born with congenital anomalies increased in Texas by nearly 23 percent but decreased across the U.S. by 3 percent.

So, basically, Texas mothers are being told the fetus is nonviable and doomed to die. But then the state prohibits the mother from terminating the pregnancy. She’s got to carry the baby to term, give birth, and then watch the baby live a few tortured months in the NICU before expiring.

This is patently untrue, look to Syria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khashamor

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Battle of Khashamor in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

shrug

The US is able to project power globally in a way that Russia has tried to and simply cannot counter.

Who can forget their famously successful efforts to project power into Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.

Even Ukraine is projecting power in Sudan and Syria

In a report on Monday, the English-language Kyiv Post said it had obtained video from Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate (GUR) filmed in March

Listen, I know we’re all “Rah Rah Ukraine! Can’t wait till they’ve got boots on the ground in Moscow!” But you can’t seriously link to a fucking press briefing by the GUR as unbiased news.

The United States spends in a year, what the rest of the world spends in 1.2 years.

Yes, yes. This is why we can’t afford health care. Ye-haw.

But we spend all this money on an endless parade of Wall Street executive compensation packages. Nobody in Russia is getting paid a Boeing CEO’s salary to make aerospace equipment that strands folks on the IIS. And while Lockhead and Raytheon have made a mint selling the Pentagon loot boxes, the physical hardware we’ve produced still doesn’t seem capable of winning the fucking war.

There is no historical analogue to the power of the United States military.

There are numerous analogs. But none of them are particularly flattering.

The funny thing to me is that it’s still basically machine learning, the same tech that we’ve had since the mid 2000s, it’s just we have fancier hardware now.

So much of the modern Microsoft/ChatGPT project is effectively brute-forcing intelligence from accumulated raw data. That’s why they need phenomenal amounts of electricity, processing power, and physical space to make the project work.

There are other - arguably better, but definitely more sophisticated - approaches to developing genetic algorithms and machine learning techniques. If any of them prove out, they have the potential to render a great deal of Microsoft’s original investment worthless by doing what Microsoft is doing far faster and more efficiently than the Sam Altman “Give me all the electricity and money to hit the AI problem with a very big hammer” solution.

Should note that a lot of the Microsoft Recall project revolves around capturing human interactions on the computer in real time continuously, with the hope of training a GPT-5 model that can do basic office tasks automagically.

Will it work? To some degree, maybe. It’ll definitely spit out some convincing looking gibberish.

But the promise is to increasingly automate away office and professional labor.

Hell without Hitler doesn’t really sound so bad

You’re saying that god is so oblivious (even though he’s supposed to be omniscient) that he’ll be fooled by you claiming to believe just because you’re hedging your bets?

More that repetition reinforces an idea. By commiting to the bit and accepting a God at face value, you reduce your psychological defenses when the priest or prophet comes around with the next ask.

So you admit you believe in God? Then you won’t mind putting a few coins in the collection plate to prove it.

Oh, you’ve already donated? Surely you’d be comfortable making a confession.

My son, you’ve got so many sins! Surely you’d like to join our prayer group to get yourself right with the God we all agree exists.

Can’t have prayer without works! Time to do some penance.

More like a Chain Letter.

There was a trend when I was a little kid of people sending you mail that said something to the effect of “You have been cursed by reading this letter. If you don’t mail a copy to ten other people, you will die in thirty days.”

Roko’s Basilisk is a modern manifestation of human paranoia and superstition. It exists to exploit and extort the gullible.

Libraries provide a host of public services beyond “warehouse for books”. A big part of our digital archives come from library digitization programs. And knowing how to sort, store, and distribute this information is a vital piece of library science.

Losing libraries means losing the tools we use to organize information on a national scale.

The election is shaping up to cost $10B across all races. Really a drop in the bucket within our $5T national GDP. Would be nice if some of that money went to working class folks doing productive labor. But I’m betting the lion’s share of it goes to tech and media companies charging four figures an hour to make a photo of a pregnant woman with six fingers stutter out AI generated prompts on who to cheer for.

Doing the plot of “Far And Away” as domestic immigration policy.

I’m more worried about the homes where the dad insists on watching you piss in order to confirm your gender.

Shockingly difficult for certain kinds of people.

The US has too many bases to defend simultaneously to engage with Russia directly. It would be the 18th Anglo-French Wars all over again but with the possibility of a spicy nuclear conclusion at any given moment.

Keeping the conflict contained to the Ukrainian theater means western states get to “bleed” Russia in a protracted conflict without drawing the rest of their assets into a firefight. But we’re already seeing the US/Russia conflict leak into the central African states, the Korean border, and recently the coast of Florida.

Americans don’t actually want this to become a full blown World War. That drives up our defensive costs significantly and skews the “Stupid Russians Lose Again” headlines with a bunch of “Brave NATO Soldiers Fucked By Insidious Russian Treachery” articles.

I’m waiting for these wars to finally come full circle and for Israel to start selling Russia weapons it got from the United States on the cheap.

One often fuels the other

You can vote for whichever politician you like, so long as it’s AIPAC approved.