TNG5

Were the positive results for the sock and gate blood also false positives? That is difficult to say given what I currently know.

So even under incredibly unrealistically generous assumptions, you still don't get anywhere near 1 PPM. If Rieders is accurate that the testing equipment could not even in theory detect EDTA levels below the PPM range, then: 1) "OJ had detectable levels of EDTA in his blood because he had eaten a burger containing EDTA an hour before" seems very implausible. 2) If the blood drops on the back gate were not planted, then those drops still showing detectable levels of EDTA after 3 weeks of sunlight exposure seems even more implausible. 3) Both of those samples and also Martz's just donated blood *all* simultaneously genuinely having PPM levels of EDTA seems *extremely* implausible. Therefore, the EDTA level result for Martz's blood was almost certainly a false positive. Which we know for sure that the testing process was capable of doing, given 1/4 of the gate "negative control" swatches getting a positive result for EDTA.

At one point in the July 24, 1995 OJ Simpson trial video, there's a discussion about a lawyer for the defense submitting a paper in which he calculated how much EDTA *should* be in normal human blood based on dietary guidelines. There are words exchanged with Judge Ito about whether he submitted it properly, whether he should have submitted it earlier to give the prosecution time to read it, and so on. I don't know if that report is publicly accessible, but fortunately for us it is pretty easy to do a similar analysis ourselves.

@DerekPederson3 @ahron_maline It seems like this should all create tremendous uncertainty over whether or not Iraq will turn out better than it would have been under Saddam Hussein in the long term.

@TNG512 @ahron_maline Also al-Sharaa might try to take the Sunni Arab territories.

@TNG512 @ahron_maline Not true. The majority of the population of Iraq is Shia Arab. A return of Sunni minority rule is very unlikely. If anything Iran has weakened the country by propping up sectarians like Maliki.

@DerekPederson3 @ahron_maline But even so, only like 6 months passed in the current Yemeni Civil War before Saudi Arabia invaded, as in a direct boots on the ground invasion, so that's an even worse example for what "non-intervention" looks like.

@DerekPederson3 @ahron_maline Yemen has a totally different level of historic instability than Syria and Iraq.

I have never heard anyone make a convincing argument for why the US regime change being morally responsible for the actions of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq wouldn't also make the Union's decision to topple the Confederacy morally responsible for the formation of the Ku Klux Klan insurgency in the South. But I think there's four reasons here: A) Time distance, and particular sensitivity to racial issues in the American South today. Many people probably actually would have made this argument in the past. B) The soft bigotry of low expectations. In the eyes of many people, American Southerner Whites can be held morally responsible for their own actions but Arabs can not be held to this standard. C) It's not the real reason they oppose the Iraq War, they just think it was a costly and unnecessary war that harmed the United States, but in order to maintain their self-image as a good person they claim that it is because of their dubious "humanitarian concern" for Iraqis who supposedly benefitted from the barbaric Sunni minority-led Hussein regime. D) Perhaps even more important, they're not really than engaged in the Iraq War on any level, but they are depely engaged in the meta-conversation surrounding it in which it is seen as a good "gotcha" against certain politicians that they dislike for other reasons and they don't want to give that up.

@DerekPederson3 @ahron_maline Also, to the extent that you like the current political situation in Iraq that should give you more reason to oppose the war in Iran, because the current status quo in Iraq is, for better or for worse, held up to a massive degree by Iranian influence.

@ahron_maline Yes but the government of Iraq is also an improvement over the Hussein regime, and certainly the civil war was better than a counterfactual Arab Spring-like cataclysmic civil war like the one we saw in Syria. Kinda hard to imagine how Iraqis could have turned out better.

@DerekPederson3 @ahron_maline You keep repeating this argument that the Syrian Civil War is what "US non-intervention" looks like, but that is utterly ridiculous. Utterly completely ridiculous.

Even before the CIA started directly giving weapons to "moderate rebels," the decision of other countries to provide weapons was shaped in enormous part by their false impression that the US could be induced to launch a Libya-style direct intervention in Syria. Which we have been over before so many times. I have lost count. This is getting incredibly tiresome.

@loremipsumwiz @DerekPederson3 @ahron_maline en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sy…

@loremipsumwiz @DerekPederson3 @ahron_maline Especially because the Syrian Civil War happened the way it did because of US intervention.

I am embarassed to be saying this: It's because the alternative to fighting the Civil War was losing half the country whereas no one seriously thinks that not toppling Saddam would have resulted in consequences anywhere near that bad. Like, the average 12 year old could probably figure that out. Yiu are ridiculous.

The plan is all working out so incredibly well, huh?

I've seen the objection of "why would Fuhrman tamper with evidence so early when he couldn't have known at the time if OJ had an airtight alibi or not?" Never bought that argument, if that turned out to be the case Fuhrman could have just said, "oh, whoever killed Ron and Nicole must have planted the glove on OJ's property in an attempt to distract us." Would be extremely difficult to disprove that. Leaving aside the moistness issue that would be exactly as much or as little of a problem if OJ did not have a good alibi as if he did.

Second: excerpts from F Lee Bailey's book, describing an experiment that he ran to test under what conditions the Rockingham glove would have been either dry or moist, which he was not allowed to present to the jury. They took two gloves of the same brand as the murder gloves, smeared them both with blood, and left one out in the open and the other in a plastic bag from 11:00 PM (approximate time OJ left for the airport) to 5:30 AM (approximate time Mark Fuhrman claimed to have found the glove) on a night with, Bailey claims, very similar weather conditions to the night of the murders. The result was that the glove left exposed was completely dry at the end, while the glove in the plastic bag was still wet at the end. Which would seem to pretty strongly support the latter 2 hypotheses that Bailey mentions: either Mark Fuhrman moved the glove to Rockingham in an airtight container such as a plastic bag, or someone else did. Because clearly OJ physically could not have removed a glove from a plastic bag at Rockingham around 5:30 AM, when he was on a plane landing in Chicago more than 1700 miles away.

Here's my read of the EDTA debate as far as I currently understand it. First, it is unclear at this point if any blood samples besides the blood on the sock and the blood on the back gate were ever subject to the EDTA test. Disappointing, because that would have been a pretty quick way to determine if there was likely anything there (if it only raised red flags on the pieces of evidence that have all of those other independent red flags, then that would pretty clearly suggest that the test was detecting *something* real). Second, the prosecution's argument is that they tested the blood and then compared it to blood that had just come out of a test tube, and the test tube blood had much higher levels, therefore the blood on the back gate and sock did not come out of a test tube. The defense's response was that exposure to the open air and environment for weeks or months may well have decreased the EDTA levels, therefore we should not compare it to blood that had just come out of a test tube but to the level that blood from a human body *should* have. And they furthermore argue that since the test was only sensitive enough to detect EDTA in the parts per million, the fact that it got a positive result at all indicates that the blood in question did have additional EDTA mixed in, because for various reasons (health effects, experiments with radioactive EDTA molecules) EDTA in blood that is in a human body should only be in the parts per billion. Third, the prosecution's response to that is that the FBI person doing the testing, Roger Martz, tested his own blood and also got a low parts per million result in the EDTA test, comparable to the blood on the sock and back gate. Fourth, I'm still trying to get a read on the defense's response to that, but apparently Fredric Reiders, their EDTA expert witness, says that the control blood result should be impossible, but he does not know how it happened. Barry Sheck in his closing argument says the following, "He come up with this thing where he says he tests his own blood and he finds some level of EDTA in it but he threw away the documents about what he did. He put it in a test-tube for two weeks that has silicon in it, that has a red stopper in it that could be a source of EDTA."

@NeverTr74704466 @dilanesper Could Biden have gotten a ceasefire that lasted at least as long as the current one has?

@TNG512 @dilanesper Yes. This is not a permanent situation. It's step one of a cease fire agreement. An agreement Hamas has no intention of following through on, so the war resuming is just a matter of time.

A lot of lefties love to claim that Israel is just a US puppet and that POTUSes can pick up the phone and stop Israel from doing anything in a moment's notice, but the reporting on the Iran War is basically falsifying those claims-- Israel's done several things we didn't want.

@NeverTr74704466 @dilanesper bbc.com/news/articles/…

@NeverTr74704466 @dilanesper Headline of a BBC article published one month ago: "Hamas is reasserting control in Gaza despite its heavy losses fighting Israel"