You’re saying that what the UK did in 1973 in was wrong? So China should copy that wrong and withhold a right to trial by jury from their citizens to persecute political prisoners as well? Weird take but alright, if that’s your viewpoint. Enjoy authoritarianism.

Fisa courts are a process to obtain search warrants. They don’t try suspects. If a warrant resulted in information that led to charges, they would be indicted by a grand jury and that would then lead to a public jury trial. You’re also changing the subject because you’re clearly wrong here and don’t want to admit it, or more likely just arguing in bad faith. You said it was the “world standard” to strip someone of a right to trial by jury if it involved national security information. And that’s obviously untrue. Hong Kong (until China changed it) and the USA are two such places where it is not the standard. Some quick internet searching would show you many countries in the world protect a right to trial by jury, even in cases involving national security information. Which I really doubt is the case here, more likely some pretext by the Chinese government so they can continue to persecute any political opposition to their one party authoritarian rule. Just because China decided to not grant their citizens a trial by jury right does not mean it is the standard in the whole world. Don’t conflate the two.

It’s absolutely not. There used to be right to trial by jury in all cases in Hong Kong before China took it away, which is what this article is about. So already it’s clearly not the “world standard.” Another example, United States routinely holds jury trials with classified national defense information and goes to great lengths to create a system to do this, since there is a constitutional guarantee to a trial by Jury. Process explained in this article: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/14/trump-trial-classified-documents-public-00102023 in regards to the trump case, which is a great example involving highly sensitive national security information. And that involves a jury too. I’d say you could just search online yourself and find out how wrong you are, but i doubt you’re arguing in good faith. So as you can see, the standard in China is not the same thing as the standard “the world over.” This was a right forcibly removed from the people of Hong Kong by China.

Take your authoritarian apologist made up nonsense elsewhere.

Taking these medicines in the forms they are found in nature is a horrible idea. Most of the plants they come from are poisonous because the therapeutic index of most of the drugs here are low, meaning the line between medicine and poison is very fine. Purifying the ingredient and allowing tight control of the dosage is the reason any of these are able to be used safely. Please don’t go around eating bits of foxglove or belladonna.

As you’ve seen, modern medicine is not shy about taking ingredients found in nature when they actually have a useful purpose in medicine, and enabling them to be actually used safely instead of taking some random unknown dosage of a potentially deadly drug and hoping for the best.

Except for fixing vitamin and mineral deficiencies, supplements are ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. They’re in desperate need of better regulation in the United States. They scam tons of people and get away with ridiculous claims like fighting dementia based on no evidence that would be totally illegal for any actual pharmaceutical company to claim, all while selling bottles of stuff with “proprietary formulas” or claiming to have plants that aren’t even in there when independent researchers look at them. All totally legal by the way, no requirement for ingredients listed on a supplement to reflect reality. Stay away if you value your health or your money. Not saying pharmaceutical companies are always shining beacons of beneficence here, obviously I have many problems with them as well, but they at least have some sort of regulated evidence base for the most part.

The former president? No wait he wanted to inject bleach. Or sunlight or something I dunno.

It shouldn’t be a big deal, but prior to the Biden administration, Betsy Devos under Trump was doing everything possible to block even already available student loan forgiveness and throwing up as much roadblocks as possible. The department education had to be sued in court to get loan forgiveness granted for things they should have been helping with not blocking. And even after all that they repeatedly failed to follow their own settlements and court orders for years, just refusing to grant forgiveness. So even though a lot of forgiveness was technically already on the books, having a administration actually helping this process instead of actively trying to prevent it is a huge breath of fresh air. They also previously changed many terms in public service loan forgiveness to help it apply to more people and made lots of other positive changes that luckily the supreme court did not block. At least not yet.

Just to be clear, it’s not like a protective order for their person (though Jack Smith and others already have to travel with large security details because of the stochastic terrorism of Trump and most other Republicans), but a protective order of the evidence in the case given through discovery. So before the trial the prosecution has to show the defense all the evidence it has, which is called discovery. The prosecutors here are concerned that Trump is going to leak that info in some way, like witnesses lists, so that his supporters can harass and intimidate witnesses on his behalf. Or maybe even bribe them or something. What the prosecution is seeking is a protective order to prevent trump from releasing publicly any evidence that they obtain through discovery. Normally there wouldn’t be anything preventing a defendent from releasing that info, though most sane people wouldn’t generally want their incriminating evidence released publicly. If the order is granted and Trump violates it, he could theoretically be held in contempt and go to prison where he no longer can violate the order.

Exactly, Putin is constantly describing Europe as a vassal state of the US and tries to drive wedges between European and US cooperation, especially when our interests clearly align like in Ukraine. In fact the biggest per capita contributions to the Ukrainian defense effort come from European countries. It’s not like the US dragged Europe kicking and screaming to defend Ukraine, it’s pretty obviously even more important for Europe than for the US. This is why so many European countries like Germany have made major ramp ups in military spending and defense. All these calls about Europe being a vassal state are basically telling Europe to shoot itself in the foot to show how independent it is. If they want a more unified foreign policy, the answer isn’t stopping cooperation with the US and the defense of Ukraine. The answer is they have to work on more cooperation with their own member states so they can speak with a unified voice. Something Russia in reality actively works to prevent, using influence in countries like Hungary to drive a wedge in the EU and preventing unified foreign policy in the EU and from them becoming a more independent player.

They don’t need amendments to the constitution to adjust the supreme court, only laws, as long as those laws don’t conflict with what is written in the constitution. For instance, the reason we have nine justices and not eight or ten, is because of a law passed by congress. So congress can change that anytime it feels like. The number of justices is not set in the constitution. There’s actually very few details about the supreme court in the constitution, so congress has a lot of latitude to regulate and make changes to the supreme court.

One thing that’s popular that would likely require a constitutional amendment though is term limits for justices, because the lifetime appointment is a detail specified in the constitution. So basically, congress regulates and sets up the court system through passed laws, most changes to the court system including to the supreme court don’t need constitutional ammendments. Alito is talking out of his ass when he says congress can’t do this.

Unfortunately Congress’s only real recourse if the supreme court declares themself above the law and ignores congress like Alito wants them to, would be for congress to get off its butt and impeach some justices, which seems very unlikely. I would hope Roberts and at least one other would want to avoid a constitutional crisis though that would risk a total collapse of supreme court authority, but I’m not sure. The corruption seems to run deep with a number of them.

From the article

Yeah the article is a little rosy and overstating things by using words like carbon free which obviously isn’t the case, but fta:

“Retrofitting a propeller plane with fuel cells and liquid-hydrogen tanks would result in a nearly 90 percent reduction in life-cycle emissions, compared to the original aircraft, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit think tank. That’s assuming the hydrogen is made using only renewable electricity —not with fossil fuels, the way the vast majority of hydrogen is produced today.”

Battery powered commercial airplanes are a pipe dream right now, batteries are just too heavy for anything practical with flight. Solid state batteries might reduce it some but probably not enough. We’ll still need some kind of mass long distance travel in the future. Once they’re able to scale up renewable energy sources even more, hydrogen made with those sources could become an important storage medium for getting that energy to power planes or other things where batteries are impractical. So it makes sense to at least be exploring these technologies.

Even for right now natural gas has a higher energy to co2 ratio than other types of fuels, so it’s possible there may even be a current efficiency boost, though I don’t know that off the top of my head.

If every new technology was attacked saying, well it’s not perfect right now so don’t even bother trying, we wouldn’t have electric cars or all sorts of other innovations. I agree with you on the article though, I hate when they say stuff like “look we have carbon free airplanes now” when obviously we don’t.