Man, I am glad the US didn’t get out of the WHO, and there is a sane and responsible HHS Secretary with RFK Jr., whose brain totally did not get eaten by a parasite.
I mean, there are only 300 or so cases recorded in history of the Andes hantavirus human-to-human transmission.
And Trump, the wise man he is, didn’t cut a single dollar on science, especially that of epidemiology and emerging priority pathogens.
You guys are lucky there were no passengers coming back to the US and that there is no global event like the soccer World Cup starting soon or the 250th anniversary of the United States.
I wouldn’t be worried too much, especially knowing how the president dealt with the coronavirus in his first term. They are just going to shine some light into your veins and/or inject disinfectants into you, and your suffering will be over in no time.
I wish my country had an administration that is this good at everything they do, but we wouldn’t know what to do with all those wins.
What's up with all the sarcasm in your comment? It makes it hard to tell when you're speaking the truth versus speaking in opposites. Why not just speak plainly, so people can understand you -- comprehension should be the first goal. You're trying to communicate a serious matter.
Imagine reading a medical abstract, like the one you linked, if it were written in your style of heavy sarcasm.
> They are just going to shine some light into your veins and/or inject disinfectants into you, and your suffering will be over in no time.
Those were Trump's proposed solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Their post is quite clear: the US has an utterly incompetent administration which is actively opposed to the best known method for preventing the spread of deadly viruses: vaccines. Funding for monitoring the spread of diseases has also been cut. The World Cup is a large event which will bring people from all over the world into the US and into close contact for multiple days, right as a new dangerous virus with a long incubation period has been detected spreading from person to person.
The post is unnecessarily political, and is written quite unclearly. The administration certainly will fund a new vaccine if the situation merits it.
The Covid mRNA vaccine, while lifesaving, is not without safety issues. It increases carditis risk substantially[1] (5x the baseline risk in males), and I personally experienced this effect for a month. It is best not to neglect such safety issues, ideally so they might be addressed in future protocols.
The head of the Department of Health is solidly opposed to the development of vaccines. And the COVID mRNA vaccine increases carditis risk less than getting COVID without having had the vaccine does, and decreases the risk of severe carditis if you get COVID after the vaccine. So that's not a great argument against it.
No vaccine is without safety issues. That's why so much research has been done to evaluate the safety issues. The consensus conclusion is the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks in this age group, including because the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis is higher for those who get COVID. For examples more recent than 2022:
"Although our meta-analysis revealed a higher risk than previously reported of myocarditis/pericarditis attributable to mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (among adolescent and young adult men), this does not negate the recommendation of COVID-19 vaccination for this population. Our previous study showed that the benefit of receiving the BNT162b2 vaccine or the mRNA-1273 vaccine was much higher than the risk of the vaccination across all age group and sex.59 Though the AR of myocarditis was assumed to be 12.1 per 100 000 for the primary series of the mRNA-1273 vaccine in men aged 18-29 years for the original benefit-risk calculations, if we updated the AR to 22.26 (2.84 after first doses plus 20.0 after second doses) per 100 000 for the primary series for men aged 18-24 years, based on the results of this current systematic review with meta-analysis, the benefits of vaccination would still far outweigh the risks in this age group." - Epidemiologic Reviews, 2025, 47, (1), 1–11 https://doi.org/10.1093/epirev/mxae007 Advance access publication date: December 13, 2024
"Compared with unvaccinated groups or unvaccinated time periods, the highest attributable risk of myocarditis or pericarditis was observed after the second dose in boys aged 12-17 years (10.18 per 100 000 doses [95% CI, 0.50-19.87]) of the BNT162b2 vaccine and in young men aged 18-24 years (attributable risk, 20.02 per 100 000 doses [95% CI, 10.47-29.57]) for the mRNA-1273 vaccine ... Young people’s risk of developing myocarditis is higher and longer lasting after covid-19 infection than after vaccination against it, the largest study of its kind suggests ... Over a six month period the researchers estimated that covid-19 infection led to 2.24 extra cases of myocarditis or pericarditis per 100 000 children and young people. This compares with 0.85 extra cases of myocarditis or pericarditis per 100 000 children and young people in those who were vaccinated." - BMJ 2025; 391 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r2330 (Published 05 November 2025)
From my experience Google Maps is the superior product. The only reason I kept using Apple Maps was because I wasn’t molested with ads.
Now that this will obviously change, why should I keep using Apple Maps?
At least they should have kept it ad-free for people already paying a premium for their Apple One Premium subscription.
I have less and less incentives to stay in the Apple ecosystem, this is just another nail in the coffin.
Depends what you're looking for. If I'm looking for businesses or streetview or 3D I'll use Google Maps. If I want to explore I'll use openstreetmap. Sometimes I'll use public rights of way mapping or parking zone boundaries on local council websites, or hiking-specific mapping apps that overlay routes. Having one mapping app that does it all would be nice, but each serves their purpose
A lot of times when I get messages from people who read and share articles from "journalists" of the Axel Springer network, they get the impression that when police and prosecutors, politicians and "experts" talk with them, they must be doing some pretty good investigations and what they write is reliable and ethical journalism.
That’s also a lot of times a wrong assumption based on the trust we put in journalists to stick to the highest standards of reporting by trade. But these are no journalists, these are writers for hire that will sing any song as long as they get paid in cash and attention.
If someone wants to plant a thought in your head, like there is a huge problem with German far-left activists waging "war" against the infrastructure and people, while applying emotional pressure to you with the story of the poor man on ventilation who was slowly dying, which is a false representation, as this man never was at risk of life, they could have kept him on battery ventilation in his flat for days if necessary with mobile power stations and replaceable battery packs they have for exactly that reason and everyone who ever worked with rescue workers knows that.
The first thing you need to ask yourself is, what is their motivation to write an article like that and is there a bigger overall motive behind this kind of coverage?
With Axel Springer Publishing and their CEO, it’s easy to find out. As there are plenty of journalists who cover what and how they do it.
and then work yourself from there to find more English-speaking articles about the whole Axel Springer Publishing complex and the kind of journalism they do to make up your own mind if that is a source you can and should trust, or even share with others.
In my opinion this isn’t investigative journalism, it’s agenda journalism.
You can see this article break apart quite easily if you question some of the facts presented in the article and how the journalists purposefully don’t give you any proof for them and go to the “ trust us, bro” base.
Everyone speaks under anonymity, nobody wants to go on the record.
The letter announcing responsibility is never presented as being authentic. They couldn’t even find proof for that. There is a million euros on the heads of the suspected perpetrators, the same amount the US put on Bin Laden’s son, Hamza. But not a single arrest in connection with this attack.
There is no question that attacking the energy infrastructure, no matter by whom, is an attack on every citizen, and whoever did this needs to get the whole weight of the security services on their neck.
But to be fair, there is still no proof that this was in fact Antifa activists, all investigations, including a million euros bounty and kicking down doors, brought exactly 0 arrests.
So you’d be wise to ask yourself why the boys at Politico are crying wolf, and in whose interest they do it.
this was my gut reaction too. these people are being targeted for a reason and the people behind this outlet don’t like that reason so they’re gonna do their best to turn you against the perpetrators
They just want you to eat your lunch, not to ask stupid questions about whether it was ethically sourced or how much rat milk is in that sauce.
It is also kind of interesting that they couldn’t get a single journalist from the OG Politico staff to put one of their names under it. So this is basically pushing "Die Welt" content into the English-speaking / US hemisphere disguised under the Politico brand label.
The only person in relation to Politico is the illustrator who, at least for me, added her own little detail of artistic protest by colouring the nails of the man in the picture, who eerily looks like Doepfner while leaving his toenails out and absolutely half-assing the fires.
Something the ultra-conservative chief doofus would rage about if he actually read the shit his staff writes and not just the metrics.
Lennart Pfahler and Philipp Woldin are reporters for WELT. Alexander Dinger is WELT’s investigations editor.
I didn’t see that disclaimer the first time I read the article, but it’s kind of a statement by itself, they are distancing this clearly from Politico staff-written content.
I disagree. Let’s have a look at the bigger picture.
Nearly a third of the state’s residents are Black. However, the Republicans, who hold a majority in the Louisiana legislature and also hold the governorship, drew the congressional districts in such a way that Black voters had a majority in only one out of six districts.
Activists and organizations filed a lawsuit challenging this. The state subsequently revised the district boundaries so that two of the six districts had a majority of Black voters, reflecting their proportion of the population.
In response, a group of white citizens who felt they were being discriminated against filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court.
The court has now ruled in favor of these plaintiffs. In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative majority, argued, that the category of “race” should not play a role in government decisions.
This argument about a “color-blind” Constitution always surfaces in the U.S. context whenever there is an attempt to roll back social progress.
It ignores the fact that the Constitution was not written to be “color-blind,” but rather to discriminate deliberately. Enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, not as full citizens. That did not change until the 1860s, after the abolition of slavery had been decided through the most violent conflict in U.S. history.
Like other advocates of “colorblindness,” Alito now invokes, of all things, the constitutional amendment adopted at that time and the Equal Protection Clause it contains, which guarantees all citizens equal protection under the law.
Yet this clause was specifically intended to safeguard the interests of minorities. And it took nearly another century and an additional law to force the Southern states to apply this part of the Constitution.
As early as 2013, the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.
Until then, states that had previously enacted racist laws to discriminate against voters needed permission from the federal government if they wanted to change their election laws. The Supreme Court struck down this requirement, reasoning that the conditions that had made this restriction necessary no longer existed.
As if the racism that runs through the history of the United States had suddenly vanished.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once remarked that this was like throwing away your umbrella in the pouring rain just because you didn’t get wet under it. She would be horrified to see how some of her former colleagues are now, some six years after her death, further eroding the hard-won civil rights. And this just a few months before the 250th anniversary of the United States.
But at its core, it simply follows a tradition that is as old as the nation itself. Every step forward that brings the United States closer to fulfilling the promise it made at its founding, yet denied to a large portion of its population, that all people are created equal and must therefore have equal rights, is followed by a step backward.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 significantly increased the proportion of Black voters. But efforts to weaken the law have been going on for just as long as the law itself. Now, with the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court that Donald Trump helped create, those efforts have succeeded.
The coming months and years will likely reveal what happened after the initial ruling in 2013. States used the Supreme Court’s decision as a pretext for implementing numerous measures that made it particularly difficult for Black voters to cast their ballots. Now the Court has set another precedent.
Therefore the title "Supreme Court limits the voting rights act" is correct. To be more specific it is missing a ",again".
As you might have noticed, for months now, a redistricting war, a veritable battle over the drawing of electoral districts, has been raging in various states.
Sadly, the Democrats have also gotten drawn into it, adopting the motto “fight fire with fire”, and now want to manipulate electoral districts to their own advantage in order to keep up with the Republicans.
The latter now see this as their chance to prevent defeat in the November congressional elections.
In Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina, all states in the Deep South of the U.S. where people were once enslaved and which later enacted racist discrimination laws, leading Republicans are already planning special legislative sessions to quickly approve redistricting plans.
Marsha Blackburn, a staunchly pro-Trump senator from Tennessee who is running for governor there, posted a map of her state on social media in which every single county is colored red as in the color of the Republican Party.
They no longer need to worry about anyone stopping her.
The Supreme Court has made sure of that.
Nitpicking, but this has bugged me for a while and I'm taking this opportunity to vent:
"Enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person, not as full citizens."
They were not counted as three fifths of a person in a way that matters for what we talk about today. They got zero percent of the vote they deserved. They probably got, on average, quite substantially less than three fifths of the respect and dignity they deserved. They were counted as three fifths of a person for how much they magnified the power of the votes of their captors and how much taxes their State had to pay. Slavery would have been every bit as wrong if they were counted as whole persons (or half persons, non-persons, double persons) for apportionment and taxation.
> Nearly a third of the state’s residents are Black. However, the Republicans … drew the congressional districts in such a way that Black voters had a majority in only one out of six districts.
That’s the expected outcome in the absence of racial discrimination. If a group is 1/3 of the state population, and you divide it into districts, you’d expect the population to be 1/3 in each of those districts as well. If there is not an even population distribution you might expect one district to be majority minority. But two would require extreme gerrymandering unless the population distribution was highly uneven.
> In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative majority, argued, that the category of “race” should not play a role in government decisions.
Yes, absolutely. This is a core principle, and a necessary principle in a multi-racial democracy. Especially one like ours, which has no majority race any longer.
> This argument about a “color-blind” Constitution always surfaces in the U.S. context whenever there is an attempt to roll back social progress.
Creating race-based voting districts is the opposite of social progress. The idea of organizing politics along racial lines—and drawing that into our voting maps—is retrograde and racist.
> It ignores the fact that the Constitution was not written to be “color-blind,” but rather to discriminate deliberately.
It wasn’t, then we fought a big war, and we got the 14th amendment, which was designed to be color blind. It was designed to protect the interest of minorities in being treated identically without regard to race. So were the civil rights Laws.
You should watch the movie “RBG.” Justice Ginsberg built her career as a lawyer advocating to interpret the laws regarding sex discrimination in exactly the same way Justice Alito interprets the laws regarding race discrimination. She represented men challenging laws that purportedly discriminated in favor of women. Her argument was the laws say “equal,” and they mean what they say. They don’t permit discrimination in either direction.
> As if the racism that runs through the history of the United States had suddenly vanished
It doesn’t matter whether racism has “vanished.” Two wrongs don’t make a right. The government can’t discriminate based on race in one place to cancel out asserted race discrimination in another place. If you want to combat racism, you have to do it directly.
The appeals to history also ring hollow. It’s not 1965. Today, whites in Louisiana will overwhelmingly vote for a non-white who shares their politics over a white who doesn’t. In 2007, a brown guy became the first non-incumbent in a Louisiana history to win the governor’s race in the first round without a runoff.
I will take you at your word that you genuinely want a politics free of racial discrimination, but all of the points you’re trying to make here are being immediately disproven by the reality on the ground. Florida has already passed a redistricting that massively and transparently disenfranchises black voters as a direct result of this decision. Louisiana is currently trying to postpone their already-underway primaries to push through a redistricting which I expect will do the same.
I think learning how to read and understand scientific papers, and therefore actively training and flexing your critical thinking abilities, is such a valuable life skill that you shouldn’t outsource the thinking process to AI.
I recommend reading this instead, and then trying the concepts you learn from it out in topics that personally interest you by looking at something like Google Scholar or any other search engine for scientific papers or open access journals.
That way you can also compare your own research to what this tool is outputting to see what it missed, or what you might have missed, always under the assumption that the AI hallucinates, while you hopefully don’t have that issue.
Thanks for your point of view. Its great advice for someone already well on their academic journey.
ELI is built as an on-ramp for those that don't have the education al background to get over the learning curve required for this method to be practical.
Glad everyone is ok, including Trump.
Every assassination attempt on the man is such nonsense.
There is not a single good reason to try to kill Trump.
Just ridicule him in public and call him out for what he is. That’s hurting the man more than any bullet could. Have you seen him rage and yell “fuck you” at a factory worker for calling him a pedophile protector? That’s the way to deal with Trump. Laugh about him, call him an idiot, or a PPP.
You vote him out of office, like people did before. You see his lawyer sweat black goo and laugh about it, and about Trump ranting on social media for a while, then go on with your life.
He is 79. I’d be surprised if he made it past 85. That’s like six more Christmases. We are almost done with his nonsense. Don’t throw your life away because of him.
In 200 years, the man will be erased from collective human conscience.
When was the last time you and your friends thought about John Quincy Adams, the US President 200 years ago? Young people barely have the attention span to make it through the news, if they are not dancing them on TikTok.
His buildings will be renamed, his policies rolled back, he will be no more than a stain in American history.
All emperors meet the same fate, since we started putting things on the record. Nobody cares about them, you, or me in about three generations’ worth of lifetimes.
That’s some of the beauty of being human. Everything will be forgotten in time, unless you did upload photos from that spring break at Lake Havasu in 2005 to Facebook, that shit stays forever, talking about you, Emily.
Ridicule doesn't work. It hasn't worked at all. In fact it did the opposite. The constant attention on trump since the beginning was what lead to his rise. Certain elements in the masses saw themselves in the ridicule directed at trump, and identified with him as a result. That's why despite being a total failure policy wise he was voted in a second time. You need to focus on the failures of his policy. Take them seriously. Demand they be explained to you, as citizens of a republic. When they harm you, express outrage. That is what hurts trump.
The CIA is toppling oppressive regimes this way for decades. You create friction, the oppressor pushes back, and the people gather behind the oppressed.
Ridicule and constantly calling out idiots for what they are does work. You create friction by it. Trump made sure the factory worker gets fired, people were pushing back by donating for him, and they will vote against him in the midterms.
Abuse of power directed at the citizens is something most people will not forget or forgive in a free society, no matter what political beliefs they have, unless they are facists.
The stuff Petti did, filming ICE agents, being in their face, openly calling them out, created friction. They killed him because of that friction. The whole state pushed back in return.
Creating friction is what makes Republicans losing seats in the Congress and allows the regain of power from Trump, who is mostly ruling by executive order.
As a citizen, it’s not your job to focus on the failures of his job and show them to the public. It’s what you voted representatives for and the job of journalists. You demand their inactivity to be explained by them over the phone, over mail, respectfully showing up at their office. All day, every day, the only time they should be at peace is when they eat, sleep or be on the toilet.
You create friction for them. It’s not the fault of the people that he got voted again, it’s that most of the Senate and Congress rather try to protect their own interests and power than openly confronting the President, creating friction, every day, all day, until the President pushes back. Which in return will have the people gather behind the suppressed, jailed, or murdered representatives.
You have a different method of creating friction in mind, but don’t do the job of the people you pay handsomely to represent you or that of the press. Your energy is better spent creating friction for them until they act. Then you support them when they take the heat they are supposed to take if they fight for your rights instead of just cashing in from their position of embarrassing passiveness.
Space not being my domain, but how do you prevent space-based launch platforms from getting attacked by adversaries crashing cheap satellites into them, grilling them with ground-based direct-energy weapons China is clearly developing capabilities for:
I mean we know Musk has pretty pictures and PowerPoint slides but is overpromising and underdelivering on basically anything he touches. That’s acceptable for cars and flamethrowers, but for national security?
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