sonch

BREAKING: UAE discloses it’s building an additional second pipeline bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. The new pipeline will be finished in 2027 and will double the country’s export capacity in Fujairah (the current pipeline has a capacity of 1.5-1.8m b/d)

I have mixed feelings about the execution of this scene but overall the designs were still creative. Didn't matter if the story didn't land, "would you play a reskin of Age of Empires with these civs?" was a hard "yes". Stuff like this kept the universe alive.

Any theory of what's happening to human beings re: marriage and fertility has to explain why young Chinese people and young Americans both became deep marriage-and-family pessimists across the 2010s:

to add to this: the vast majority of babies ever born were allowed to sleep on their chests (often on top of their mother), a position in which they *explicitly sleep better* in 1992, some arrogant doctors decided that this deep sleep was the reason some infants were dying (likely a correlation/causation disaster), and recommended that every parent of every child put them to sleep on their back, explicitly because they don't sleep as well and are closer to an awake state in that position so from 1992 forward, parents of new babies have been scared into putting their perfectly healthy babies to sleep in a position that makes their sleep less restful and shorter, thus making life for parents with a newborn significantly more challenging

A peer-reviewed paper published last year in the journal Bioethics by two professors at Western Michigan University School of Medicine argues that it is "morally obligatory" to genetically engineer ticks to spread alpha-gal syndrome, a permanent condition that makes you violently allergic to red meat. The paper is called "Beneficial Bloodsucking." Their argument: if eating meat is morally wrong, then preventing the spread of a disease that forces people to stop eating meat is also morally wrong. Scientists should gene-edit lone star ticks to enhance their ability to carry alpha-gal syndrome and expand their range into urban environments to infect more people. They call this a "moral bioenhancer." They frame releasing genetically modified disease-carrying ticks as a "vaccination" that only "infringes" on your bodily autonomy rather than "violating" it. The distinction, apparently, is that a tick bit you instead of a government official holding you down. Alpha-gal syndrome is not mild. The CDC estimates up to 450,000 Americans are already affected. Cases have surged 100-fold in the last decade. Symptoms include anaphylaxis. There is no cure. Alpha-gal cases are exploding across the United States. The lone star tick's range is expanding far beyond its historical territory. And two academics at a medical school published a paper arguing this is a good thing that should be accelerated. At what point do we stop treating papers like this as fringe academic exercises and start asking whether anyone is already acting on them?

CIA whistleblower’s written testimony just dropped. It’s worth reading in full but here is the short version: By March 2021, before Biden’s 90-day COVID-origin review, FBI and DOE were already leaning towards lab origin. CIA analysts were leaning the same way, but CIA management didn’t like where the evidence was pointing and were actively obstructing their own people. Then, once the 90-day review kicked off in May 2021, Fauci personally fed the interagency team a curated list of experts. The same ones who wrote “Proximal Origin,” along with others, all part of the same ecosystem shaped by the same overlapping incentives. Basically, the same people involved in funding, defending, or advising on risky virological research were now tasked with assessing and informing official analyses on whether that research caused the pandemic. And then towards the end of the 90-day review period, someone at the CIA management flipped the agency’s assessment from lab-origin to non-consensus. Between 2022-2023, the bureaucratic ecosystem at CIA was stil working overtime to block its own analysts and technical experts. Internal emails even admitted analysts would have called a lab origin if management had let them. Not just that, the analysts who pushed back saw their careers wrecked. And those who buried it got promoted. All this comes from a career intelligence officer on Gabbard's DIG task force, the group literally tasked with declassifying COVID origins. His position gave him direct access to the documents and communications they were trying to hide. So why was the lab-leak conclusion resisted, delayed, and obscured for years? Groupthink. Political pressure. Fear of anything geopolitically inconvenient about China. Reluctance to implicate a research infrastructure funded for decades with American taxpayer money. Motives would be hard to prove, but the result was a textbook cover-up, intentional or otherwise. The real question now is whether Congress, DOJ and the powers that be will follow this wherever it leads.

He has a point. James Franco’s father is of Portuguese descent. Castro’s father was of *Spanish* descent. They should have cast an actor who traces their lineage to Galicia, such as Charlie Sheen or Emilio Estevez. That would have satisfied Leguizamo’s (European Basque) complaint

Dr. Kelly Victory: “COVID mandates were a **GROSS VIOLATION** of the Nuremberg Code.” “The CODE says you MAY NOT mandate, coerce, or use fear of reprisal to force anyone into a medical experiment.” Job loss. School bans. That’s coercion. That’s illegal. They knew. They did it anyway. Never forget. Never forgive.

people who still insist on referring to A New Hope as just "Star Wars"

Amazon has officially begun auditions to cast the next James Bond. Who do you want to be the next James Bond?

🇺🇦🇺🇸 Secretary of the Army Driscoll: "Ukraine's Delta common operating system, their modular open system architecture, C2 system is absolutely incredible. It fully integrates every single drone, sensor, and shooting platform into just one single network. Ours does not." Wow, if only Ukraine was offering the United States some sort of deal that would facilitate the sharing of this technology.