“there are two main reasons Americans tend to overestimate the extent to which crime happens: Media coverage of crime can often overstate trends and sometimes sensationalizes incidents that grab people’s attention. And law-and-order campaigns — the kind of campaigns that Trump ran, for example — are a mainstay of American politics and appear in virtually every election cycle in local, state, and national races.”
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“The United States is, after all, a relatively violent country and has a higher homicide rate than its peers. But while crime is a problem, lawmakers tend to react too quickly to crime trends, often by passing shortsighted tough-on-crime laws that bolster the perception of public safety by, say, putting more cops on the streets, but end up exacerbating the existing flaws of the criminal justice system, including sending poorer and more marginalized people to prison.”
“Lutnick is right that autism diagnoses have risen substantially. If not childhood vaccinations, what accounts for this increase? First, greater awareness means that many people with autism spectrum disorder who in the past would have been missed by clinicians are now being identified. However, a 2020 review article in Molecular Psychiatry reports that changes in diagnostic criteria “has been accompanied by a 20-fold increase in the reported prevalence of ASD over the last 30 years, reaching a current prevalence of more than 2% in the United States.” This contributes to the likelihood of over-diagnosis and a shift toward autism diagnoses in place of other mental health conditions.”
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“the liability system was unable to properly balance the public benefits of vaccines against their private harms. The result of this imbalance was killing off vaccine innovation and production. So Congress a year later chose to change the liability system with respect to vaccines in 1986 with the adoption of the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which provides compensation to people who are injured by certain vaccines.
And the benefits of vaccines are enormous. A 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention review finds that “among children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, resulting in direct savings of $540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.””
“The imprecision of the populist they/them enables its flexibility, making it malleable and applicable to an ever-changing array of targets. Researchers from Germany’s Friedrich Schiller University Jena closely examined pronoun usage in populist rhetoric. According to their study, populists favor impersonal pronouns, such as they, to avoid specificity, absolve responsibility, and reduce complexity.
Traditionally, this reductionist worldview rails against a wealthy and powerful “elite”—greedy corporations exploiting the poor on the left and a globalist cabal undermining cultural homogeneity and national sovereignty on the right.
However, populism also sets its sights on other groups—and few are better at hitting these moving targets than Donald Trump.”
“rather than merely pardoning his son for the gun crimes for which he was convicted and the tax crimes for which he pleaded guilty, the president’s pardon covers all “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024. That language mirrors the language in Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which did not merely cover the Watergate scandal but extended to “all offenses against the United States” that Nixon “has committed or may have committed” between Jan. 20, 1969, and Aug. 9, 1974 — the exact span of Nixon’s presidency.
The starting date of Jan. 1, 2014, in the Biden pardon was surely not chosen randomly: Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company, in April 2014, while his father was vice president. Republicans have accused the younger Biden of illegally profiting off his position on that board.
The pardon came the day after Trump announced he would nominate Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist, as FBI director. Last year, when it appeared that Hunter Biden was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve his legal troubles, Patel criticized the deal as unusually lenient. (The deal later collapsed.)”
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“its sweeping nature means the Trump Justice Department will not be able to reopen the long-running criminal probe of the president’s son, according to Samuel Morison, a lawyer focused on clemency who spent 13 years in the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney.”
“In 2015, when the Assad regime was about to collapse, the opposition force had the upper hand on their way to Damascus. And then, who came to help Assad? The Russians with an air force, against which the rebels didn’t have any air defense. And Hezbollah came to help Assad on the ground. Iranians delivered money, weapons and some Shia militia. What happened this time? All three players were absent. The Russians were in Ukraine. Hezbollah was destroyed by Israel. And the Iranians were deterred by Israel. So the Syrian army was left alone.”
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” I can see four scenarios. The first one I call the “Libyan scenario.” After the fall of Qaddafi, everybody fought with everybody to have dominance. In the end, Libya was stabilized by two main entities. But only after many, many years of internal war with the support from outside forces like Turkey, Russia and Egypt. The second scenario is some kind of “former Yugoslavia model.” Each one of the sects will have its own autonomy, and they will be smart enough not to fight each other. The third scenario is a jihadist state ranging from an extreme ISIS type to a Taliban in a moderate sense. The fourth scenario is a political Islam kind of country under the model of Turkey and Qatar. A political Islam, not jihadist Islam.”
“Wray’s decision undermined decades of hard work — by Congress, presidents, the Justice Department and the FBI itself — to move it out of a partisan, political framework. The FBI’s highest guiding principle is supposed to be the rule of law — and federal law is clear: The FBI director serves a 10-year-term, a length meant to isolate the role from political winds. Similarly, in federal law, there is a mechanism for removing an FBI director who errs — they can be fired, but only for cause. The role is not meant to be like the CIA director, attorney general or Defense secretary and turn over at noon on Jan. 20 for a new administration; it is, in fact, explicitly designed to NOT do so. Ronald Reagan spent almost all of his presidency with Jimmy Carter’s FBI director; George W. Bush inherited Bill Clinton’s FBI director; Barack Obama, in turn, inherited Bush’s, and Joe Biden will have spent his entire presidency with Wray, Trump’s choice to head the bureau.
Those safeguards and traditions exist because the FBI, in the wrong hands, is incredibly dangerous to American democracy.
The FBI is the most powerful, best resourced, and far-reaching law enforcement agency, not just in the United States, but anywhere in the world. Nothing compares to the sweeping breadth of its investigative powers; the intelligence and information it collects, wittingly and unwittingly, on all manner of Americans, powerful and not, guilty and innocent alike; and the resources and technologies it can bring to bear against anyone in its investigative sights. Even its routine investigations can paralyze and bankrupt businesses, upend lives, careers and families, and destroy reputations — and even do so when it doesn’t bring federal charges at the end. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s half-century reign, he deployed those resources to ruin the lives of civil rights activists and antiwar protesters, harass literary figures such as James Baldwin, blackmail gay people and persecute anyone he didn’t feel was sufficiently patriotic. We’ve spent a half-century as a nation trying to make sure that never happens again — and now Trump is explicitly saying he wants to restart that darkest chapter of the FBI’s history.”
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“let’s be clear about what’s happening here: The only reason Trump wants to change FBI directors is he doesn’t think he can boss, bend and break Wray to his will sufficiently, that Wray would not be personally loyal to him in the way that he has wanted his FBI directors to be — and which, institutionally, they’re explicitly not supposed to be. Every single part of that is a dire warning sign about what’s to come under Trump II and what he and Patel intend to do with the bureau.
Wray had an opportunity to make that a fight — to force Trump to bear the political cost of firing him on invented pretexts, to force the president to be the one who destroyed that guardrail rather than Wray himself. And, instead of upholding that oath to the Constitution, the rule of law and duty to protect the bureau from outside influence, Wray just … capitulated.”
“Zheng Wei is a fairly common Chinese name. A tennis player, a movie director, an archaeologist, and multiple Chinese-American academics all share that name. So do an inventor at the consumer drone company DJI and a professor at China’s National University of Defense Technology.
And the U.S. government mixed up the last two people, with serious consequences, according to a recent lawsuit by DJI. The drone manufacturer is suing the U.S. Department of Defense for designating DJI as an arm of the Chinese military”
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“Similarly, the Pentagon claimed that DJI software engineer Zhang Tao was listed on a patent for a temperature-sensing device designed by China’s Military Science Academy. Again, DJI provided a declaration from its own Zhang Tao stating that he is not the same person as the Military Science Academy’s Zhang Tao.”
“In September 2021, El Salvador became the world’s first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender alongside the U.S. dollar. The vision was ambitious: According to Bukele, bitcoin would “improve the lives and the future of millions,” making it easier to access financial services where traditional banking is often out of reach.
To incentivize adoption, the government launched the Chivo wallet app, offering $30 in bitcoin to anyone who signed up. Bitcoin ATMs popped up nationwide and plans were announced for Bitcoin City, a tax-free, bitcoin-powered metropolis fueled by geothermal energy from a volcano. El Salvador was on its way to become a global crypto hub.
Yet my trip to El Salvador revealed a gap between the promise and the reality. At restaurants, hotels, and shops, my attempts to pay with bitcoin were met with confusion or outright rejection. Despite a 2021 law requiring businesses to accept bitcoin, every establishment I visited turned it down. Instead, I received puzzled looks from waiters, clerks, and cashiers who seemed more perplexed than prepared.
A recent survey conducted by Francisco Gavidia University in San Salvador found that 92 percent of Salvadorans don’t use bitcoin. This marks an increase from the 88 percent found in a similar study conducted by the Central American University, San Salvador last year.
Some locals shared their reasons for opting out. At Lake Coatepeque, one waiter told me he skipped downloading the app entirely because he “didn’t want to give his personal information to the government.” In Santa Ana, another waiter said he wasn’t interested in bitcoin because he “didn’t understand how it worked” and had “no intention of learning.” Others admitted they were scared by the technical glitches in the Chivo wallet.”