You ever look up how RAM is manufactured?

I believe the regalia is state-owned, unless you have a source for your claim?

The crown jewels are state-owned and might as well be part of the UK’s gold reserves worth 30 billion. Given the historical, cultural, and symbolic value, I’d say they should dip into the gold reserves first to solve homelessness and fund the NHS.

You can certainly have a debate about where some of those rocks came from and their ongoing possession by the UK tho!

Pakistan has already taken the opportunity to step in as the key mediator

Yes, people forget Canada can still diplomatically oppose the war and push for internationally backed de-escalation without condoning the Iranian regime.

While I feel a lot of contempt and opposition to US imperialism, they’ve pulled the trigger and there’s no going back to how things were. Between expanding Iran-backed militias, international sanctions, and the conflicting goals on nuclear weapons, the status quo before the war was also becoming less tenable long term. And now there’s the question of how to stop this war without leaving a wounded and even more dangerous regime unchecked.

Tomorrow’s headline “The Trump administration removes the requirement to report US deaths due to war.”

Funnily enough, this is also the framework for those reality TV shows. It’s the move fast and break things approach that seems to be entertaining in a morbid way… So clearly the solution is to monetize your project (mis)management as entertainment!

Yes, the supreme leader of Iran stated he was opposed to developing nuclear weapons in 2003. The supreme leader then did not proceed to authorize two decades of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, a nuclear weapons program the West has not been negotiating about with Iran under his supreme leadership, a nuclear weapons program which was not bombed out last year, because of course it didn’t exist. /Sarcasm

The how does matter. You can appreciate the removal of a despot and still oppose unilateral regime change by force–especially one so explicitly motivated by resource exploitation. This is very different from the UN-sanctioned and NATO-led intervention that deposed Gaddafi.

Would you describe China attacking North Korea or Cambodia or another SE Asian dictatorship to depose their leadership as “accidentally doing something right”?

It’s a common mistake to assume that gun buybacks are being proposed as a solution. The solutions being proposed are a set of laws/policies to tighten gun controls, like who’s allowed to buy guns, what guns are allowed to be owned and how many, improving checks and mitigating newer loopholes.

Tighter gun controls are shown to reduce mass shootings. In Australia, the laws have loosened a lot since the big wave of gun laws in 1996. The buyback program is a consequence of bringing people in line with the new laws.

The realistic goal is not to make it absolutely impossible for a motivated extremist with lots of resources to plan and commit a mass shooting, it’s to make it much harder to prepare to do and to create more opportunities to notice their preparation.

Some people who face reasonable trade-offs in doing so have a choice. Others who face unreasonable trade-offs have less of a choice. It’s usually quite difficult to tell when it’s a stranger you’re overhearing without making assumptions.

I think it echoes that video of those two Apache crews blowing up civilians in Baghdad and then targetting people who came to help the injured. One of the most chilling parts of that video was probably how casually routine it all seemed. Can only imagine what footage existed that never got leaked.

I agree, I’m separating the justification of the engagement from how they label people. So the parallel I’m drawing only has to do with how they loosely label people as part of a group based on broad characteristics once they decide a group can be a valid military target, i.e. “insurgents” or “narco-terrorists”.

Declaring drug smugglers as valid military targets is certainly new, but ordering strikes on military targets on the thin rationale of “hey, they look like the group we said we can hit” is not new for the US military.

If it’s not obvious, I disagree with both of these issues.

I agree, but it’s also consistent with how the US operates. Through Afghanistan’s and Iraq, anyone appearing as a military-aged male in the vicinity of an operation (e.g. a village where insurgents were shooting from) was labeled an enemy combatant and treated as valid targets.

I don’t know, I think adopting sanitary practices tops it easily.

I suspect survivability bias plays into it, as I imagine an empathetic and self-reflective anti-war film in the is more likely than a straight “US are the villains” film to be funded and see financial, and therefore popular, success in the US. It makes sense why domestic industries will tend to tell domestic-facing stories. I’d say the size of the US film industry means you actually get more diversity in war films compared to ones you see in places like Japan or Germany.

Depends on what class you are, which I think a lot of comments in this thread understandably seem to assume from a middle class perspective, even assuming “wage” as the main source of wealth.

Real estate is one major source of capital gains, but for a lot of the 1% and investors, capital gains is primarily from financial instruments, i.e. stocks, bonds, etc.

I’m sorry, either I’m dense or your explanation is confusing. How is what you described different from the capital gains tax?

Yeah, both possibilities mentioned are plausible. Some actual investigation and evidence tying him to the account are warranted.