India has a population of 1.4 billion people. There being 3 horrific stories within a day does not say much. You seeing 3 such stories says more about your media than India.

Didn’t have anyone representing Hamas or Israel.

I guess Biden has started to be a bit more careful about how he phrases things now, after the “Israeli” deal he announced a while back, that was immediately rejected by Netenyahu.

Mostly potassium salt, although with some other recipe changes to account for the different flavor.

The good news is that potassium is well understood nutritionally. Most Americans do not get enough of it. To a first approximation, it is anti-sodium health wise, so it is a double win in that it both reduces sodium intake, and counters the effect of a still high sodium intake.

Plant based meats are bassically the definition of highly processed food.

Unironically, yes. A common substitute for table salt (sodium chloride NaCl) is potassium salt (potassium chloride KCl).

The good news is that the health problems with table salt is the sodium, not the chloride. Potassium actually has the opposite effect on the body, so a higher potassium intake would actually help treat a high sodium intake.

The us also has a $14,600 standard deduction that effectively adds a 0% bracket and increases the lower thresholds by that amount (people in the higher thresholds would probably itemize, decreasing their effective tax even further).

The IRS does index the tax brackets for inflation.

Also, that table does not include state taxes.

This isn’t progress. It is actively incentiving having compensation be tips in the tax code.

No, we don’t know that. First, not even the military claims that all of the detainies orchestrated 9/11 (which is a much stronger claim then merely being involved).

Second, do we really trust the portion of military that violated domestic law, violated international human rights law, lied to congress about it, and fought for decades against bringing cases to trial?

Is it more likely than not that a given inmate there is a terrorist? Probably. But that is not the standard for indefinite imprisonment.

Egypt has been an ally for decades, even if public opinion in Egypt has forced the government to keep the relationship out of the spotlight. Anyone who claims that Israel has no friends in the region is woefully out of date. The region is bipolar, and Israel is firmly in one of the two camps.

The crazy thing is that most of the 9/11 comparisons have been coming from Israel and proponents of the way Israel has been handling this.

I seriously do not understand how someone can look at the history of the US’s response to 9/11 and come away thinking it supports Israel’s actions. Although, in fairness to Israel, at least they got the (quasi)country correct.

And what happens after you kill the Houthi leadership? Do all of the Houthi forces turn over their weapons and go home? Get taken over by a more radical leadership? Split up into a bunch of cells with no centralized leadership?

The Houthis are not a force for good on the region. However, compared with other terrorist groups, they are relatively rational and constrained. If even half of their forces want to go more extreme, they will have a proximate reason to do so, and no leadership to stop them.

The likely result is the Gaza war expands into having a full war on the Yemen front (which is, admittadly, on track to happen anyway), against an enemy that no longer has the capacity to negotiate or surrender.

As a fun side note, a bunch of those cells are also going to be freshly angry at the US, which is very much not in her interest.

We’ve tried killing terrorist leadership before. It tends to not end well.

The Israeli Minister of Diaspora endoresed the anti-semetic National Rally candidate in the recent French election.

Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu has been aligning with the anti-semetic Trump in the US elections.

There has always been a significant amount of anti-semetism in the Zionist coalition. Hitler’s “final solution” was his solution to the “Jewish question”, which had been explicitly talked about in Europe since at least the mid 1700s, but was popularized in 1843 with the publication of Bruno Bauer’s book “The Jewish Question”.

Before Nazi Germany came up with it’s final solution, they considered a more modest proposal of resettling their Jewish population outside of Germany, including some support for Zionist movement. Their only major opposition to Zionism was a concern that it would destabilize the region. Otherwise, it would get Jews out of Germany, thus solving their Jewish Question. Ultimately, Nazi Germany settled on a much less well structured approach of “voluntary emigration” by making life intolerable for their Jewish population, before finally settling on their final solution.

Once Israel was established, her anti-semetic neighbors seized on the opportunity to resolve their Jewish question by finally forcing out their Jewish population (who now had somewhere to go).

Of course they did. Isreal has spent the past 10 months aggressively radicalizing the organization. And killing the rest of Hamas’s leadership. Now, they are left with an enemy being run entirely by its most militant wing.

I don’t understand how Israelis keep voting him in either.

They aren’t exactly voting him in. Israel operates under a parliamentary system, not a presidential one.

Between 2018 and 2022, Israel had 5 elections because they were unable to form a government. No political party held an outright majority of parliament, so to form a government, they needed to form a coalition between multiple parties. Historically, this had gone fine, but during this period the more liberal parties adopted an “anyone but Bibi” stance, and refused to join in a coalition led by Netanyahu. Similarly, Netenyahu’s party, Likud, representing about 25% of parliament, dug in and refused to remove Netenyahu from being party leader, and the other conservative parties joined in and refused to join a non Netenyahu coalition. With the Arab parties forming a third wing, neither side was able to get to 50% to form a government.

Ultimately, Likud and the conservative parties ended up winning this fight, but only by joining with far right parties that were previously to extreme for Israeli politics.

The main complaint isn’t so much that Israel is killing enemy leaders; but that it is doing it in a strategically self destructive way.

Bin Laden was a risky move, but the strike was conducted in Pakistan, who was friendly to us; and there are allegations that the Pakistani government gave more of a green light to the operation than they were willing to admit.

Al Zawahiri was in Afghanistan about a year after we left. The Taliban at the time was still occupied in condolidating their power domestically; and their big victory was getting the US to withdraw. They lacked the will and means to start a major war with the US.

Al Bagdhadi was done as part of the Syrian civil war, in direct coordination with the SDF. At the time the operation was planned, the US military was directly involved on the ground in Syria, although our sudden withdrawal prior complicated that.

Israel is dealing with a country that is antagonistic to Isreal, and which has spent decades building up its military capabilities in anticipation of an eventual hot war with Israel. Iran has demonstrated that it has serious political will in avoiding a hot war, however it is just 1 miscalculation away from stumbling into one anyway; and every direct attack Israel makes causes Iran to roll the dice again. Or, at some point Iranian leadership might decide that all Israel’s direct attacks mean they are in a hot war already, an that Iran should respond with full force.

In the case of this particular assassination, I struggle to see what tactical or strategic upside Israel gets to justify the risk. Israel is nominally trying to negotiate with Hamas; but they just killed a senior Hamas member who was involved in those negotiations. Worse, they killed a member who was, within the context of Hamas, a pro peace moderate. Him leaving for completely benign reasons would have been bad for Israel, because his replacement woukd likely be more antagonistic then him. This is 100x worse when he leaves due to a direct and deliberate attack by Israel.

The only way Israel’s actions make sense is if the leadership that has been spending years trying to start a war with Iran is trying to start a war with Iran; and if the leadership that has been spending months sabatoging any potential deal in Gaza wants to sabatoge the potential for a deal in Gaza.

Bail them out how? The US has 20 years of experience in loosing wars on terror. If they drag us fully into this mess, why do they think it would result in anything other than them loosing harder.

The insidious thing is that refusing to serve does not grow dissent within the ranks. It takes those who are dissenting out of the ranks, which causes the army as a whole to be more extreme. And, given long standing compulsory service laws, such dissenters can be jailed, allowing the government to disrupt any potential domestic anti war movement.

14 year olds have a job. It is called “student”. There is a massive societal interest in them doing that job well.

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The bill: https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/s3696/BILLS-118s3696es.xml

As always, I read the bill expecting to be deeply disappointed; but was pleasantly surprised with this one. It’s not going to solve the issue, but I don’t really know of anything they can do to solve it. My guess is this will mostly be effective at going after large scale abuses (such as websites dedicated to deepfake porn, or general purpose deepfake sites with no safeguards in place).

My first impressions on specific parts of the bill:

1. The bill is written as an amendment to the 2022 appropriations act. This isn’t that strange, but I haven’t actually cross-references that, so might be misunderstanding some subtlety.

2. The definition of digital forgery is broad in terms of the means. Basically anything done on a computer counts, not just AI. In contrast, it is narrow in the result, requiring that:

when viewed as a whole by a reasonable person, is indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction of the individual.

There is a lot of objectionable material that is not covered by this. Personally, I would like to see a broader test, but can’t think of any that I would be comfortable with

3. The depiction also needs to be relevant to interstate or foreign commerce. There hands are tied by the constitution on this one. Unless Wickard v Fillburn us overturned though, me producing a deepfake for personal use reduces my interstate porn consumption, so it qualifies. By explicitly incorporating the constitutional test, the law will survive any change made to what qualifies as interstate commerce.

4. The mens rea required is “person who knows or recklessly disregards that the identifiable individual has not consented to such disclosure” No complaints on this standard.

5. This is grounds for civil suits only; nothing criminal. Makes sense, as criminal would normally be a state issue and, as mentioned earlier, this seems mostly targeted at large scale operations, which can be prevented with enough civil litigation.

6. Max damage is:

   • $150k
   • Unless it can be linked to an actual or attempted sexual assult, stalking or harassment, in which case it increases to $250k
   • Or you can sue for actual damages (including any profits made as a result of the deepfake)

7. Plaintifs can use a pseudonym, and all personally identifiable information is to be redacted or filed under seal. Intimate images turned over in discovery remains in the custody of the court

8. 10 year statute of limitations. Starting at when the plaintif could reasonably have learned about the images, or turns 18.

9. States remain free to create their own laws that are “at least as protective of the rights of a victim”.

My guess is the “at least as protective” portion is there because a state suite would prevent a federal suit under this law, as there is an explicit bar on duplicative recovery, but I have not dug into the referenced law to see what that covers.