While I understand the resentment of saying an institution is a person, and I agree- they still have constitutional rights. To say that private institutions don’t have a right to free speech is the same as saying that the government is allowed to dictate what companies can and can’t say. Authoritarians would love for you to push that idea.

Under your same thinking (Harvard isn’t a person and has no right to a first amendment? OK): Then Harvard resisting against the trump administration is illegal and we find it treasonous to be funneling in possible spies from adversarial countries under the guise of education. We need to lock up anyine who works at any higher ed institution unless they can swear loyalty to America (trump) because they might be complicit in this spy ring. And don’t forget, the universities can be searched at any time for evidence and assumed guilty without trial because they aren’t a person and don’t have constitutional rights! Can we charge the university entity with state laws or federal laws? Both! They don’t have rights to protect against double jeopardy!

I find it funny that the tankies still think Russia can hold their own in a fight against NATO when they let can’t even beat up on their smaller neighbor with NATO hand-me-downs and previous generation surplus gear.

Am I the only one who read the paper? All the comments are like: it’s only mice.

They did it in 6 different breeds of knockout mice, rats, and beagles -as in the best dog model for cancer translation to humans. They are well passed the threshold needed to show strong potential in people.

Other comments: it’s new and experimental

They have been working with it for years now and have shown efficacy down to a single dose. That is what this paper is about. They had previous tests with the compound, then with decreasing doses, and now this paper will it down to a single dose.

Other comments: there is no way this is real

Of the 9 primary authors, 4 are on NIH grants. I’m taking a wild guess no one here has had to fill one of those out, but they take about a month of solid writing and submitting evidence as to why your thing should get funded due to the shortage of scientific funding, then it gets reviewed by several rounds of blinded experts in the field to evaluate if you have any merit to what you are talking about, then you have to submit regular updates to show that you aren’t just pissing away tax dollars. On top of that, this was done out of a lab at the university of Illinois urbana-champaign, meaning you also have university funds mixed in so you have them checking in on you. Then they also had a state cancer research grant, adding more oversight.

How real is it? If you read the paper you would have seen they were using human tumors grown in the mice. This is a very well established cancer testing method. The downfall in their model, as they pointed out, is using NSG and athymin mice. These are immunocompromised mice. They bring up how with the necrotic cell death in the tumor (from the drug working ironically so well and so fast) that they don’t know how human immune systems will respond to it and that is kind of their next direction of the research.

Read the full abstract, then at least read the discussion section near the end if you want to get a better understanding of what is going on. Then if you are still interested, go back up to the intro and read through from there till you can’t any more.

While any aircraft sent to ukrane is nice, I sure hope they aren’t paying much for them. That airframe is about 60 years old with the last major design overhaul in 1990 and its last electronics upgrade in 2000. They would be better off buying F15e’s or even the new f15ex. He’ll, even getting some last Gen f16’s or f18’s over there would be as good or better, but cost probably more. The f15 though is probably the best multiroll jet for the cost.

Now, if we are talking about sending some OG Mirage 2000 fighters over there, then that sounds like the ultimate white elephant gift France could give. The US could sent some F4 phantoms over while we are at it.

The big news I the training of 4500 pilots. That is huge. If they could do that, then the mirage 2000 could basically turn into their base fighter trainer and use it as the training wheels to get the new pilots experience and into bigger and better things.

One man’s terrorist group is another man’s freedom fighter. This is why many new organizations that are big on neutrality normally shy away from calling anyone terrorist groups. You could just as easily frame Israel as a terrorist group with the same justifications listed above.

I always know someone doesn’t know anything about Afghanistan and its people when they refer to them as Afghani’s.

An Afghan is a person. Afghani is a currency. Anyone who calls them Afghani doesn’t even know the right term to call the people. It is a giveaway to how little you know about them when you don’t even know what to call them.

Meanwhile all the Chineses and Viet Congs are turning in their graves right next to the Afgani.

It isn’t just about the pumping. You can pump crude all day and still be broke. Look at several of the middle east smaller countries or even most south America pumpers. The refining is where the industry and money is really at. Cars don’t burn crude oil, it has to get refined. Plastics don’t come out of the ground, they have to get refined. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest crude oil exporter and they still have to rely on others to refine.

In fact, here is a direct quote from OEC-

“In 2021, Saudi Arabia imported $7.43B in Refined Petroleum, becoming the 27th largest importer of Refined Petroleum in the world. At the same year, Refined Petroleum was the 2nd most imported product in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia imports Refined Petroleum primarily from: India ($2.17B), Greece ($1.09B), Russia ($892M), United Arab Emirates ($835M), and Egypt ($689M).”

This is a huge deal for India. They are the world’s second largest exporter of refined oil, and the largest in asia. This means a lot of buisness is about to shift to them. This is also after India has been negotiating cheap raw oil off Russia due to a combination of sanctions and the occasional case of exploding refineries leading to excess raw oil in Russia

Woosh

Ethiopia DID have a coast. It was what is now known as the country of Eritrea. They were forced to be part of the country after WW2 in 1950, and ignored the wishes of the people to remain independent. Then by 1961 a war for independence started and lasted for 30 years. It ended with the Eritrean forces taking the Ethiopian capital and winning the war capture the flag style, but with guns.

As far as Djibouti, they are probably the best example of American modern imperialism. The country enjoys a stable currency by using an American backed currency. In exchange the US has their Horn of Africa base there. Because the country is so small but the base has so many troops and the US pays to lease the land, the US military ends up making up a little bit over 10% of their entire GDP. This is the base that launches the anti-pirate operations for the region, not only providing security for Djibouti, but security for the entire HoA. Say what you want about the USA and their modern imperialism, but the only thing anyone in that region agrees with is that they love the US troops there and the mission they do.

If Ethiopia wanted to take Djibouti, not only would that piss off literally every other country in the region, they would also have to go through the USA to take it. Good luck with that.

For those who are not familiar with operation praying mantis, here is my favorite video the breaks it down in about 15 minutes.

https://youtu.be/d5v6hlRyeHE?si=qjuaWUv61xe0Y4Xe

In 2000 the Afghani was worth 75,000 to 1 USD. During ISAF occupation it was fixed at 50 to 1. It is now at 70 to 1 and dropping. Let’s stick to one argument at a time rather than playing the whataboutism game. You said the USA destroyed their economy, yet the evidence strongly says otherwise. Before 2001, Afghanistan was the second poorest country in the world. When ISAF pulled out it was ranked at about 40 (I say ‘about’ because it was still growing and changing faster and the rankings were uptated). In the short time of Taliban rule they have dropped back down to sub 33 with exact number still to be determined. (The sub 33 ranking is important because there are only 33 countries on the UN “least developed countries” list).

I would spend time debating topics like this with educated people and those that are open minded, but you do not seem like you fit either group. Do not expect a reply.

Over the course of 20 years, the US and its coalition allies in Afganistan killed approximately 50,000 civilians and there we calls for war crimes investigations. In the course of one month Israel has killed over 10,000 civilians.

I did two tours in Afghanistan and can tell you now, they are not bending over backwards to minimize it. They are using this as an excuse to indemnify themselves from war crimes prosecution.

Death toll as of yesterday was reported around 8,000. The US/coalition 20-year war in Afghanistan was (rounding UP) 50,000. That puts it at an average of 2,500 civilian deaths per year. Even THAT number was high enough for people to call for war crimes investigations. Now Israel has reached over 3x the yearly average in only 3 weeks. On track to pass 10,000 by the one month mark, too. I’m not saying that Isreal doesn’t have the right to defend its self, or even defense through offense, but there is a point that we need to agree is too far; and I think we are a bit past it.