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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Real politik.

    Saudi Arabia is a useful ally to have in the region, a fellow enemy of Russian ally Iran, a good customer for the defense industry, and an alliance makes the US less reliant on Israel. That’s a win-win.

    Elements in the Saudi government may have helped orchestrate 9/11, but after 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia they drastically and often violently curtailed the influence of the Wahhabi establishment. The aristocracy clamped down on the power of the clergy. They also offered significant and valuable intelligence cooperation with the US

    So if elements in the Saudi government did help orchestrate 9/11, it’s easier to sweap it under the rug. There are more important issues to worry about.

    Twenty years ago? Other decisions should have been made and not made.

    Now? The world and the regime in Saudi Arabia has changed.



  • It was already spreading from mammal to mammal. IRC there was that Mink farm last year and I think seals too. There were also cases of H5N1 jumping from birds to humans.

    Given H5N1 can make the jump from birds to mammals(including humans), and from mammals to mammals, it’s not a huge shock that it’s made the jump to humans from other mammals.

    H1N1 killed 50-100 million people, so the danger has always been there, and scientists have been warning about it for decades. For example, here’s a journal article from almost twenty years ago discussing this scenario:

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1096898















  • You don’t need to poll everyone to get relatively accurate polling results.

    I have a related degree, it is possible with the necessary caveats, margins of error and confidence intervals. Statistics is a wonderful thing.

    This being said, I actually read the full 77 page document they linked to, and if I’m not mistaken the 55% comes from a 2021 telephone poll. Obviously phone only polls are likely to be biased, even if you correct for demographic factors like age.

    Then again, inflation is a problem.