You almost have to admire China’s commitment to long term strategic initiatives. Obviously the Chinese government is terrible for a million reasons but they’re basically guaranteed to dominate the globe within a few decades.
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We are on the cusp of a new colonial era with China as the dominant global force. They will certainly learn lessons from the experience of Western countries colonizing the world and probably China will do it “better”.
One interesting dynamic will be that when Europe colonized the world there were numerous European countries in direct competition with each other over New World and African resources. When China takes over the world this century they will basically do so unchecked by competition. The best case scenario for the US is that it successfully navigates internal turmoil so as to fashion a soft landing as they fall from super power status. The US won’t really be able to contest Chinese expansion.
Gogogogogo!
Or we will commit (even more) absurd amounts of money to our military, refuse to acknowledge reality and go out in a blaze of glory, taking the rest of humanity out with us.
Yep that’s on the table. The counterpoint is that there is no military with no economic power. The US is accustomed to having a dominant position as the world’s economic power. If (big if) the rest of the world withdraws that privilege then things fall apart pretty fast for the US. There are signals that this may be the case. For example, Canada now routinely kowtows to Chinese interests in trade policy. Could be a blip, or it could be the vanguard of a century of change where Chinese economic concerns supercede those if the US.
Cliffs are that the prosecution declines to prosecute in 2005, which led to compelled testimony in a civil lawsuit somehow, which was then used in his later criminal conviction.
Well that should help restore the public’s faith in the legal profession.
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What in the actual fuck!
Rich famous black men can now pay their way out of jail too. Progress!
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Brag:
https://twitter.com/pbump/status/1410280720996749313
Beat:
https://twitter.com/pbump/status/1410280111161720832
Variance:
https://twitter.com/pbump/status/1410280611214987273
The gist of it is that the court found that Cosby’s Fifth Amendment rights were violated.
The prosecutor (Bruce Castor, who later worked on Trump’s second impeachment) made a secret deal to not prosecute Cosby, which he did not put in writing, but claimed was binding on future prosecutors. This was allegedly so that Cosby would be compelled to testify in a civil case; since he was not in danger of prosecution, he could not invoke the Fifth Amendment. However, a decision by Kevin Steele, who won an election for Montgomery County district attorney against Castor using failure to prosecute Cosby as a campaign issue, was made to try him anyways.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/02/01/bruce-castor-bill-cosby/
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That army is possible because the female workers of the rival subspecies — the South African Cape honeybee ( Apis mellifera capensis ) — can create perfect copies of themselves, with one individual found to have done so millions of times in the past three decades. With this perpetual-cloning ability, the Cape honeybees sneak into the hives of their lowland honeybee rivals and churn out copy after copy (no need for a queen). Even worse, these clones are freeloaders, refusing to do any work.
The Cape bee workers that take part in this parasitic behavior are the genetically identical descendants of a single worker that lived in 1990, according to Oldroyd. This single lineage of clones is responsible for the collapse of 10% of African lowland honeybee colonies every year.
Nature up to some more crazy shit.
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My reaction to Cosby getting out is WTF. But my reaction to the facts of the reversal is that it seems totally reasonable, and that if it were in a different context people should kind of be outraged at the sequence of events leading to the conviction.
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Yeah I guess. Tough pill to swallow when it means the right outcome of Cosby rotting in jail doesn’t happen.
Cosby just pledged to devote the rest of his days searching for the real sexual assaulters
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I guess we all owe Bill Cosby a big apology for calling him a rapist.