Friendly reminder that China has one of the lowest positive WADA doping test rates in the world. The US tests positive at more than 5x that rate. India tests positive at more than 15x that rate. Russia tests positive at a similar rate as the US.

The US just can't accept that WADA, which receives more funding from the US than from any other country in the world, isn't biased towards Americans. We know that 6.5 to 9.2% of US athletes are doping, anyway: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11102888/

But sure, those 6.5% to 9.2% of US athletes are all acting on their own and there's no system in place to encourage doping (as if the fact that almost 1 in 10 US athletes get away with doping isn't a system to encourage it).

Default incoming?

Ok but they're so cute it's amazing

Increased use of Mandarin, however, obviously infringes of Chinese minority rights.

Edit: just to be clear, many Chinese dialects have a lower lexical similarity than European languages. The standardization of Mandarin in education has had impacts on these dialects as well.

China eats more poultry and fish. This was bound to happen. Poultry and fish are very calorie-efficient sources of protein.

This is a huge paradigm shift. The Republican party went from being an evangelical Christian, tax-cut whackoparty into...

well, without the platform, nobody knows.

The new platform softened language on abortion, excised old language referring obliquely to gay conversion therapy and culled a section about reducing a national debt that Mr. Trump had increased by nearly $8 trillion during his term in office.

Mr. Trump made clear to his team that he wanted the 2024 platform to be his and his alone. He wanted it to be much shorter and simpler — and, in some cases, vaguer. He was especially focused on the language about abortion, which he recognized was a potentially potent issue against him in a general election. He wanted nothing in the platform that would give Democrats an opening to attack him, and he made clear to aides that he was perfectly fine with bucking social conservatives, for whom he had delivered a tremendous victory by reshaping the Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority.

Mr. Trump also stressed that he did not want to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Instead, the document contains a vague statement open to interpretation: “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage.”

One person involved in the process recalled Mr. Trump saying privately: “Sanctity of marriage. Don’t define it.”

"Heavily subsidized supply chains"

Let's just call it what it is: economies of scale. China makes up 80% of the polysilicon market. The US? Barely 5%. Scale is the strongest subsidy of them all.

Does it sound like a suppressed .22 to anyone else?

Run Harris. Run Newsom. Run Obama. Run Kennedy. Hell, run Gore.

There's so many options here. This is the DNC's election to lose.

Only 10 US states have banned child marriage.

ITS HER TURN

I love justifying racism too don't worry

Archive: https://archive.is/S3n7T

People really underestimate the impact of sonar on marine life. Hell, people really underestimate the impact of sonar, period. Active sonar operates at 300dB. For reference, 85dB can damage human hearing, and 300dB is 21 orders of magnitude greater than that.

Calling all Black people monkeys isn't ok, but calling all Chinese person slaves is?

Republicans accept a post-truth society where everything is someone's propaganda, that the federal government is out to get them and that the union would be better served as a union of state-level republics. Democrats still believe in the existence of a ground truth and want a union with centralized control (i.e., they are Federalists). Like the Federalists, the Democrats are backed by wealthy financial states (New York, California) as opposed to more rural/working-class states (Alabama, Ohio) and support heavy industrial subsidies (Biden's IRA, CHIPS) as well as weak state governments.

This is a fundamental difference that explains a lot, actually. The role of government has always been to convince populations to pursue the policy goals of the elite. The foundations of representative democracy involve choosing which elites' policy goals to follow. The Republicans want to follow state elites (to borrow a Chinese proverb, the mountains are high and the President is far away). The Democrats want to follow federal elites.

Here's the real problem. The US gets to choose between a career politician and a career businessman (swindler, by definition). Who represents the working class? Who represents the people who actually built America's economy?

entirely peaceful, not projecting power or antagonizing regional powers

I wonder who's meddling in South American affairs again...

Germany x Fascism 2: Electric Boogaloo