Dems had a supermajority. They enjoyed widespread public support. Sarah palin made the loony right look pathetic. Obama was never afraid to overuse executive orders either - dems had a lot of levers to pull and a lot of leverage to pull them.

If they’d investigated the rampant illegality, that would’ve been very hard for a post-loss republican party engaged in in-fighting to defend against. A new generation of republican hopefuls would’ve been tempted to get air time by twisting the knife in the old losers.

Remember the hype around the special master under biden? Imagine that, aided by obama’s charisma, with a super majority and before republicans completely corrupted the supreme court. They had a mandate and a lot of power.

Obama didn’t deal with Bush

I think this is SO important, and people never talk about it. The last chance we had to prevent trump was if obama prosecuted the open theft, corruption, torture and war crimes of the bush era. By biden it was too late, the rich already knew they could get away with it.

As soon as obama gave his “I’m looking forward, not backward” explanation for refusing to enforce the rule of law, he proved that he was yet another useless politician with no will to fix the problems facing the US.

Bush and obama paved the way for the current regime, and people never give obama his fair share of the blame.

So unauthorized transport of iranian oil? Either the ship was sanctioned by the US in error or a ship that was shady enough to do sanctions-busting for Iran is also shady enough to double cross iran, work for another paymaster, or some such?

part of Iran’s shadow fleet, the network used to move crude outside official channels.

Iran’s explanation didn’t add much clarity. Officials said the tanker was carrying Iranian oil but had tried to exploit regional conditions. No details on what that actually means.

Pretty shady looking site. If this can be believed, it seems like story is that some kind of deniable sub-contractor in the wider shadow fleet network was doing something that caused it to be flagged as suspicious and seized by iranian officials.

The article was mostly talking about how manufacturing has changed, becoming less blue collar and more white collar. Far far fewer people are employed at higher salaries due to automation (robots). So manufacturing can’t support entire towns like it used to. Plus what we manufacture has changed - it’s much more high end, high value products.

Objectively untrue. He lacks the cognition to realize anything of the sort. “Mythos is so scary!!1!1” is a PR line.

🤨🤔😐You win this round, smartarse!

There was fun article years back pointing out that regardless of the “we don’t make anything anymore” narrative, the US has never been lower than the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world.

GPL1 is not the only way to get there

Except that for the overwhelming majority, functionally everyone, they are.

I’m not a propent of the drug. I’m slightly wary, I don’t want it and i don’t bring it up to others. But I don’t judge people who do.

It sounds like you’re part of the incredibly small minority who have been able to lose weight. Congratulations! It sounds like you worked long and hard to find a regimen that works for you.

Literally 99% of obese people will never find what you found. For them, these drugs are the ONLY realistic option to perminantly lose weight. Nothing else has been shown to work in more than 1% of cases.

😊 Right? It really stuck with me. One of those articles that ties together so many obvious and not so obvious pieces into a really clear picture. And in HuffPo no less!

Yep!

The altered hormone balance is what allows weight loss and if that reverts than so does weight loss.

I know this “you have to keep taking them” argument is big in anti-glp1 circles, but I don’t think it’s very good - the same is true of vitamin supplements. You have to keep taking them or the deficiency comes back. They still help.

I don’t care for glp1s myself but i’ve heard how happy they make some, so i don’t judge others’ choices.

If you know several people who met the medical definition of obese and have perminantly left that category then you know several outliers, which is entirely possible.

But that is just not representative. Over 99% of obese people do not lose weight. Those few outliers are heavily visible and celebrated so it feels like there must be more.

No this predates glp1s, the article i linked is from 2018.

No, social factors like the price of processed vs healthy food, the amount of sugar and salt companies are allowed put in food specifically to addict consumers, the food our culture uses to celebrate, the stressors and social pressures that we know drive people towards dopamine sources like high caloric foods, cities designed to discourage walking, etc.

Edit: no one’s claiming what you’re saying. Individual behaviour is a factor in most disease. Focusing on the individual behaviour piece has proved to be completely ineffective at producing weightloss. That’s just a fact. And yet we keep doing it like it’s suddenly going to work. It won’t. You could tell people not to go to work in winter so they don’t catch a cold, but they won’t do that.

This attitude is the problem, yep.

There’s no other medical condition which only 0.8% of people ever recover from where we tell people to just keep trying treatments that we know don’t work.

An individual’s behaviour is a contributing factor in most diseases. But the hormones, social factors, etc. which determine that behaviour are beyond the control of willpower. GLP1s work because they treat the hormonal imbalances which cause the behaviour that causes weight loss.

We don’t tell people they’re pathetic for catching a cold, though our social organization put them in a place where their biological weakness to that disease was triggered.

people have been losing weight by a variety of methods

Surprisingly, they have not.

Before GLP1s, weightloss was a myth. 99. something % of people (edit 99.2% of women) who meet the medical definition of obese will always be obese despite a lifetime of effort.

We know for certain from decades of research that weightloss from willpower alone, even with diet plans or excersize plans is functionally impossible. The best they do is yoyo effects - no diet has ever produced perminant weight loss on a real scale.

Very rarely a statistically insignificant sample size enjoy permenant weight loss and these individuals are held up to show it’s possible and you can do it too! But that’s just not true, and we know it’s not true because decades of stats show again and again that perminant weight loss just does not happen.

“The mindset right now is that the GLP-1 hormone itself is the secret sauce to weight loss,” DiMarchi said. "What we’ve found in rodents and monkeys is that the combination of glucagon and GIP activity alone are sufficient to achieve comparable weight loss, without the lengthy dosage adjustment and adverse GI side effects

This article is saying that slightly different products can also produce weight loss.

don’t cry when the next rights they take are ones you were enjoying.

You’re overreacting - kids not using phones during class is not a fundemental human rights issue.

Moreover, the study only says that there is little impact on test scores so far. That’s a very limited conclusion. There’s a lot more to education than test scores. Even one of the authors warns against reading this study as evidence against phone bans.

one of the report’s authors, said it would be wrong for policymakers to see the results as a reason to shy away from restrictions.

“One of the concerns I have about this study is that it might encourage people to walk away from phone bans as a compelling reform. And I think that would be a major mistake

The study very specifically says "average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero.”

Little effect on test scores is VERY different to no positive effect and at least one author of the study is still strongly in favour of phone bans.

Most AI music will just end up with the badge, right?