Harvard says the administration’s move is unlawful.
And most likely, it is.
However, for a foreign student to enter the US currently to study (presumably for several years) does kind of feel like jumping onto a hovercraft crewed by eels.
Thanks for the reminder. I will be promptly disguising a number of legs exceeding 4 as tentacles and antennas. :)
Apparently, generative AI doesn’t know that only the front part of the cartridge is the bullet. :o At least god doesn’t have six fingers.
Good point. Biopsies can cause complications.
PSA is still recommended here (it’s cheap) but only its negative answer is considered reliable.
Since this is an opportunity to educate people about health, I will not discuss politics here. :)
If you’re a guy, your urinary tract is stupidly complicated from a medical viewpoint and there’s a prostate beneath the bladder which hydrogenates testosterone (T is produced by the brain) into dihydrotestosterone, produces fluid to mix the seminal fluid with, and generally supports fertility and gender specific phenotype.
With progressing age, the prostate enlarges, gets infected with HPV (nearly everyone gets it) and may get bacterial infections (typical ones are E. coli). It may also develop calcinations.
Risk is reduced if you live in Asia and eat a traditional menu containing much soy bean products which enables guys in those regions to enjoy several times less prostate cancer.
Risk is increased with nearly every urinary tract infection, especially if not conclusively diagnosed and treated.
After the age of 40, regularly have PSA (prostate specific antigen) measured from a blood test. It tells how much disintegration and immune reaction is occurring down there.
Regularly have ultrasound check-ups done. If there are UTI symptoms, treatment must not occur blindly, but must be followed by observation.
If you are young and your home country has medical insurance that covers HPV vaccination, get it while it’s free (because it costs 150 € a dose). If you’re rich enough, there may be a point in getting it later too, especially if you’ve not had unsafe sex (it doesn’t protect after infection). The majority of people get HPV during their lives and approximately 9 strains cause cervical cancer in women and raise the risk of prostate cancer in men. By getting vaccinated against HPV, you protect both yourself and your partners from drawing a ticket in a quite nasty lottery.
As long as prostate cancer is androgen dependent, it can be suppressed with an androgen blockade.
Who’s gonna stop them?
The first line (diplomacy):
Several factions in the Libyan government have warm relations with Turkey. Turkey has so far antagonized with Israel over the matter of Gaza. It’s not hard to predict that factions in the Libyan government, upon Trump’s likely blackmail (he can do little else) to accept the deportation of million ethnically cleansed Palestinians, would receive a phone call from their Turkish, Quatari, Algerian and Pakistani backers, telling them to “stop discussing that nonsense” and asking them to reject Trump. So, most likely the Libyan government will fail to reach a consensus.
The second line (politics):
The Libyan parliament will not support it. Parliament may remove the government if it’s doing something unpalatable
The third line (war):
Libyan people will not support it. Various factions may rebel again and restart the civil war if they see the government acting seriously against their wishes.
Since their sovereign wealth fund is emptying, they will implode anyway. War is an incredibly expensive thing.
The key requirements for Russia’s implosion:
Pharmaceutical companies will demand higher prices from countries with socialized healthcare. Those higher costs will be passed on to the citizens of those countries.
I’ve tried to analyze whether this can happen.
Maybe. Countries with socialized health care typically have disproportionately great bargaining power relative to their size. A pharamaceutical company may not be inclined to demand higher prices from a customer who buys great quantities.
Countries may also enter international alliances to obtain cheaper access to some product, like the EU did in case of COVID vaccines. Currently, companies have contracts they cannot back out from. Countries with single payer systems also have laws which regulate the purchase of pharamaceuticals, and those won’t be changing soon.
Basically, it seems that the only thing Trump can do to immediately alter prices, is to start a trade war. Which would raise prices for US consumers and lead to unreliable access to certain drugs, putting people’s lives in direct danger.
Finally, even if we suppose that one category of customers agree to pay higher prices (likely not for long, foreign competitors would quickly step in and offer alternatives) - there’s no guarantee that savings obtained in such a way will be passed down to another category of customers (who have lower bargaining power) without legislation to ensure that. But legislation comes from the Congress…
Diagnosis:
The US system for financing medicine has middlemen who increase prices. The consumer / patient has poor representation and low bargaining power. In European countries, there typically exists a central health insurance authority that’s not interested in making a profit, but is interested in everyone’s health and access to medicines (at low cost if possible).
Subsequently, a president arrives who doesn’t understand a thing. He’s been told that his ratings are dropping and he should “do something the people like”. He tries to solve drug prices with customs tariffs instead of implementing single payer health care in the US.
Prognosis:
The result will be a free market clusterf*ck and some people will die as a result.
Yes. These guys have a vested interest in their client selling F-35 parts, so they will try to paint white as black.
The interesting part will be whether the court accepts their reasoning.
In any self-respecting civil war, people use jets and warships against someone’s orders, and build as many drones as they can. Handguns are how it starts - a crew taking control of a ship will be fighting their ex-commander with handguns.
Note: I do not recommend a civil war to the US folks. Almost any other problem-solving method is guaranteed to give better outcomes.
Considering that he hurt the US economy considerably in the process of getting tootled by China, I don’t think he has credit to spare for repeating the same process with the EU.
If he continues ruling like that, he’s going to need more floor space. :)
If it were another house, I’d recommend a statue of a small crowd of Soviet citizens heroically overwhelming a man who missed Brezhnev with a pistol. The statue should be equipped with audio, so if a visitor approaches, the audio should play and multilingual translations should run on a screen, narrating the approximate dialogue:
<bang>
you missed him
<bang>
really poor shot
<bang>
hey, let me try
<bang>
give me the gun
<bang>
you're wasting ammo, give me the damn gun
<bang>
stop resisting, I will take the gun from you now
(sadly it’s based on an anecdote, no such historical event has occurred)
Wait until you happen to visit to Risti, Estonia, where a mast named Soorebane inhabits an intersection of some country roads. :)
Of course, it’s an artsy decorative exception for where a high voltage line must cross through a public place. In all other places, ordinary lattice grid masts.
Despite the suspicion-causing “Trump says” expression in the title, the news has been confirmed.
It’s a relief that they stopped. This could have turned really ugly.
Once upon a time, in a distant land, a person arrived near a police vehicle while a crowd surrounding the vehicle was argumentative and loud. They dropped a few caltrops and nudged them under the wheels with their toe.
Once upon a time, in a distant land, a guy with a cordless drill disabled some police vehicles in a speed-run. Sadly they had no RC car to mount it on (note: some cleanliness, testing and engineering skills required) or they could have called it a “rig” and proclaimed “drill, baby, drill”.
The doctrine of the EU so far, is to consider China a multi-faced player: a partner for cooperation, an economic competitor and a systemic rival (e.g. it’s possible to cooperate with China on climate, but not on human rights).
So far, China has also been a multi-faced player. Xi has patted Putin on the back and declared “unlimited partnership”, but no Chinese weapons have been seen in Ukraine. Chinese soldiers have been observed there, but they seem to be really few for a country of that size - either mercenaries or people obtaining first hand experience under mercenary cover. Too few to matter as soldiers.
China has warm trade relations with Russia and has helped Russia source technology and endure sanctions. However, they haven’t made a special and dedicated effort to insulate Russia from secondary sanctions, and several Chinese companies have applied sanctions on Russia as a result.
On other occasions, Chinese representatives have said nice words about Ukraine’s territorial integrity. But deeds haven’t followed.
In UN votes about Ukraine, China often abstains.
Officially, China doesn’t sell drones to Russia or Ukraine. In reality, both Ukrainian and Russian drones are full of Chinese parts. Ukrainian government is asking every bigger player to have a plan B that works without China, but few really have one. What Russian government asks of their drone makers, I don’t know.
I think the video refers to this event: back in 2022, a journalist was shot by Israeli troops while covering a raid in a refugee camp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Shireen_Abu_Akleh
The most recent news article about it is from Al Jazeera, 1 day ago:
As for Biden’s role, Al Jazeera describes it thusly:
The administration of former US President Joe Biden had “concluded early on that an Israeli soldier had intentionally targeted her, but that conclusion was overruled internally”, he said.
“We found some concerning evidence that both Israel and the Biden administration had covered up Shireen’s killing and allowed the soldier to get away without any accountability,” he added.
So, they were able to do the math, but subsequently “fell on their tongue” instead of speaking up. Later on, the issue was dragged out into public attention anyway, but Israel failed to investigate properly and prosecute the killing (they apologized, though). As of yesterday, the primary suspect’s name is also known. But that doesn’t guarantee much.
Myself, I actively avoid YouTube as a source of news, since YouTube has a recommendation algorithm that feeds people content that it thinks they want. To get news about the Middle East, I’ll recommend Al Jazeera almost without hesitation.
If he does that, the prices that rise most in the US will be medical products, medicines and motor vehicles.
The EU does have a trade surplus in goods with the US. The US has a nearly comparable surplus in trade of services.
If the EU were to respond by taxing US services harshly, we’d experience more expensive licenses and advertising costs. Year of the Linux desktop? Year of the dark red Google?