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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • That gas line goes right into Ukraine, they could have blown it up anytime they wanted safely in their own territory. So I’m not sure that makes much sense. They have not done this previously to avoid angering EU allies funding them, as some still rely on it.

    I think more likely explanations are it helps make it easier to strike and and shut down a very important rail route for Russian re supply, it brings the war to the Russian people in a way they can’t ignore, makes Putin look weak, draws Russian troops away from other fronts, and if the land is held gives Ukraine a bargaining chip in any future negotiations with Russia.



  • https://www.nbcnewyork.com/paris-2024-summer-olympics/olympics-boxing-imane-khalif-xy-chromosome-italian-boxer-quit/5662035/

    Look number one, whether or not she is xy has not been confirmed. It was reported by a Russian controlled organization only after she beat a Russian fighter, and they haven’t actually released their results or methods.

    Second, what the posted article is referring to, if she was indeed xy (which is just suspect Russian heresay at this point), is androgen insensitivity syndrome. Meaning she wouldn’t be able to derive benefit from testosterone anyways. This is also different from trans individuals on a number of levels. Though Russia of course sees it as beneficial both for smearing anyone that beats their own athletes, as well as stoking popular lgbt hatred in their own country.

    The only story here is Russia co opting international sports organizations for their own purposes once again, just like when they had state organized doping of their athletes that went all the way to the top involving the flipping FSB. Now they are also using it to try and spread fear and hate of trans individuals, even though it wouldn’t be trans in this case it would be intersex if what they said is true, and we have no actual confirmations that she is intersex anyway. I’ll believe it when an organization not controlled by Russia shows it (and even if they were correct it’s very likely she wouldn’t be deriving any advantages from it).

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/08/03/olympics-2024-khelif-russia-boxing/a7e9ff36-5191-11ef-9728-3037305a6b0f_story.html

    They’ve made similar unsubstantiated claims against another boxer. They still haven’t released any specifics of their testing, and they only made these claims after they claimed world championship titles in each case. What a coincidence.

    I doubt either of them is actually xy. This Russian boxing organization was banned by the international community for good reason.







  • Following the CNE’s announcement that Maduro won the election, the Venezuelan opposition has concentrated its efforts on digitizing and publishing on the internet the voting records showing that González won with nearly 70% of the votes, documents that the regime has so far been unable to produce.

    Literally what the opposition is trying to do right now as Maduro hunts them across the country, trying to imprison them all or worse. Over 1,000 people from the opposition the regime Maduro has imprisoned. Meanwhile Maduro hasn’t released any documentation that backs up his ridiculous results, results that conflict with numerous independent exit polls that show a landslide victory for the opposition. The election monitors Maduro himself invited, the Carter Center, have widely condemned the election. Leftist leaders in Colombia and Brazil are condemning him.

    https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-presidential-election-maduro-machado-edmundo-results-3ec88b273cabfee8e5696ff67d24186d

    The mission, led by the Carter Center, a pro-democracy organization, said late Tuesday that the election violated Venezuela’s own laws and the government’s failure to release a vote count was a “serious breach of electoral principles.”

    Maduro has all the results immediately available to him and all the many recourses of an entire country’s government but won’t release. Meanwhile he’s busy hunting and jailing opposition members who are trying to go individually from polling station to polling station across the country to try and get copies of receipts while the government does everything in their power to prevent their release.

    Boggles my mind anyone could try and defend Maduro.

    Oh and if you want to see what the opposition has been able to publish online so far look here:

    https://supervisiondev2.metabaseapp.com/public/dashboard/6b2f7b3b-16ec-4af6-84c7-69c39ee2139d?tab=16-english

    The only one trying to block transparency here is Maduro.




  • They try to get you to submit articles to them (usually for a fee too). But they’re kind of sham journals with no peer review or standards who no one actually reads. They’ll publish pretty much anything without even looking. They have bots that just mass email every corresponding author in every paper published just begging for submissions to their journal. Whenever an article is published in a reputable journal, one author has to have contact information publicly listed so they can answer any questions about the paper, and these predatory journals just scrape that info. It’s bad, so many emails every day.




  • Brain blackout is kind of a dramatic word. I’m pretty sure the article is trying to refer to cortical spreading depression.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/nrneurol.2013.192

    This is a wave of decreased activity going across the brain. It’s not the whole brain though, just a portion, and it tends to happen more often in the posterior brain than anterior. That’s why visual and other sensory auras (posterior brain) auras are more common than motor/weakness auras (anterior brain). The visual aura itself is the spreading wave of decreased activity going across the brain. It happens in primary visual cortex, primarily dealing with lines and colors. Visual space is represented radially on the brain, so it can often be circular. The “fortifications” or lines on the edges some people see come from the fact that it’s neurons that deal with line detection. Pain usually follows shortly after, but we aren’t exactly sure how that works, and this article was posing a possible mechanism to help link these. The main bulk of the visual aura where it’s grey, blurry, and indistinct is the decreased activity itself in the visual cortex. The area can get larger as the wave spreads.

    Deja vu or jamais vu have been reported with migraines, though that’s a very rare aura in comparison. It’s all depending on what parts of the brain are involved with the cortical spreading depression for that migraine aura for that person in terms of what symptom will happen. Deja vu would be more temporal lobe. Temporal lobe is the most common localization for focal epilepsies. So deja vu as a symptom of a neurologic disease would more commonly be seen with seizures (focal seizures are sometimes called auras too, which gets confusing but are inherently different from what is happening in a migraine). But don’t worry, most deja vu is nothing to worry about.




  • It’s mostly been conservatives that have a problem with this, not progressives for the most part. I mean sure some progressives are against but they’re by far the minority.

    I know progressives and democrats, and conservatives and Republicans, aren’t the same thing, but you get the picture. I think most on the left would prefer to stand up to authoritian genocidal governments, whereas many conservatives crazily see a lot they like in Russian government and want the US to embrace them.


  • The president already was protected from all civil lawsuits due to previous rulings. This ruling was only about criminal prosecutions.

    He has absolute immunity for any use, for any reason, of his core presidential powers include anything listed in article 2 (the military, pardons, firing or hiring officials within the executive department). There is no determining if those are an official act or not. Anything the president does with an article 2 power is an official act with absolute immunity now. Motives or reason for using that power or the outcome of that cannot be questioned. It is legal for the president to accept a bribe to pardon someone right now. The fact that it happened couldn’t even be mentioned in court.

    Only when the president is doing something not listed in the constitution can it be determined if it’s an official or unofficial act by the courts and should be immune. And again it’s the action, not the motive or the result or purpose of the action, that determines whether it is official. The only example they gave was talking to justice department officials is official. So if he is talking to justice department officials to arrange a bribe or plan a coup? Legal, immune, can’t even be used as evidence against him. It doesn’t matter why he was talking to the justice department, the fact that he was makes him immune from any laws he breaks in the process of doing so. They aren’t determining if a bribe or coup is an official act, they’re determining if talking to justice department officials in general is. It doesn’t matter what he’s actually doing it for, arranging a coup? That’s perfectly okay. Oh someone found out, pardon everyone else involved in the conspiracy who wasn’t already immune. Now it can’t even be brought up in court.

    In the example you gave of ordering an assassination, if it used the military to do the assassination that is a core power, cannot be questioned. The supreme court ruling placed no limits on what can be done with his article 2 powers. Only a nebulous official vs not official test for things not listed in article 2. There’s also a very worrying core power in article 2 about “ensuring laws are faithfully executed” that even Barrett thought was too much in her concurrence as it could apply to seemingly anything. Basically, as long as the president is using the levers of government to commit crimes, legal now.

    Impeachment is the only recourse now as you say, but even if impeached and removed from office by some miracle, they still wouldn’t be able to be held criminally liable afterwards for that.

    Everyone panicking in this thread is right to do so.