I would think our competitors are the most likely people to give him something under the table to buy him off. What does he care to do it anyways?

Why are Russians eating whale food anyways?

Surely the government will be raiding ski towns to take cocaine from the hands of the rich folk any day now

I heard even talking about Prop 65 is known to the state of California to cause cancer

I see a two fold rationale:

The US is effectively a petro-state, just like Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, but is rarely seen as one, more like Norway. The US produces more oil products than anyone else in the world, and this administration wants to lean on that as a large part of our economic future. The only other major player in the region exporting oil is Venezuela, so fucking them up makes our oil more valuable. I doubt taking over Venezuela to steal their oil exports is even a goal, as they produce far less than the US does.

The second reason this benefits the current government is that it provides a great excuse to further their domestic agenda by claiming they are going after Venezuelan gangs on US soil. Creating a shadow enemy that doesnt even really exist as they have already been doing to excuse intensive ICE raids and national guard deployments. By starting a war they will even be able to “justify”locking up or deporting citizens with Venezuelan or other Latin American heritage, using the same rationale that was used to intern Japanese Americans in WWII. “They’re sympathetic to the enemy” is a refrain that will play to their base just fine, since most of them are racist assholes anyways.

Shit could, and probably will, get ugly very quickly considering the military is not refusing to participate in this baseless war. They claim its about fentanyl even though fentanyl pretty much exclusively comes to the US from China by way of Mexico. None of their arguments for doing this shit makes any sense. But the two fold rationale of psycho white supremacist government turned petro terrorist state makes perfect sense

I was taking issue with the statement “the UN was not intended to override the sovereignty of member nations” considering that in many respects UN convention certainly overrides national sovereignty. At least for smaller states that can be coerced as such

But even then, the idea that the UN was not intended to prevent wars is also false. That was basically the entire point of creating an international body before human rights and other focuses were ever in the conversation.

The League of Nations was invented as a result of WWI and the treaty of Versailles in the interest of preventing another world war. The precursor to that was the 1899 International Peace Conference “held in The Hague to elaborate instruments for settling crises peacefully, preventing wars and codifying rules of warfare”

The whole, at least original, point of international governance is specifically to prevent conflict.

The goals for the UN as outlined at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference make that pretty clear, as peace are literally the first two aims of the organization:

The stated purposes of the proposed international organization were:

1. To maintain international peace and security; and to that end to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace and the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means adjustment or settlement of international disputes which may lead to a breach of the peace;
2. To develop friendly relations among nations and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;
3. To achieve international co-operation in the solution of international economic, social and other humanitarian problems; and
4. To afford a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the achievement of these common ends.

That isnt really true, as most examples of what the UN does show. Conventions on all kinds of issues that are ratified are things that member states are technically obligated to adhere to, there just are few effective mechanisms to enforce them into it.

The international criminal court is probably the foremost example. A member state is not free to commit war crimes just because they want to, and all states are obligated to abide by the Geneva convention or face consequences for it. Although that is a convention that determines interactions between sovereign states, not interior issues.

But human rights conventions are also a similar obligation that member states are supposed to adhere to, and the UN is certainly capable of attempting to force member states to abide by them. Its just rarely effective. For example, the US refused to ratify conventions on labor organization rights over 70 years ago, and is obligated every year to answer to the UN why US citizens dont have those rights. In practice this means that every year the US tells the UN “because we dont want to give people those rights, our rights are good enough even if below standard” and then the UN can basically do fuck all about it simply because no one is going to go force the US government to comply. And since 99.9% of US citizens dont know or care that they lack labor rights that are considered human rights by the rest of the world there is no internal pressure. So the UN just has to let it go.

But that doesnt mean that on a technical basis that the UN doesnt have the authority to say the US is out of compliance when it is. And it doesnt mean that US sovereignty overrides international convention. It just means that in practice the US can flaunt international regulations on human rights. As do many other countries like Russia and China. The obligation exists, its just ignored

400lbs is a lot of weight to have poorly distributed directly over the very tail end of a car. Sure, a car can easily handle 2 200lb people sitting in the rear of it with little issue, but their weight is in an expected place and well dispersed. Having half of a 400lb fridge sticking out of a trunk where it is entirely unsupported means that a great deal more stress than just 400lbs is ultimately coming down on that part of the suspension

The average payload of a small sedan like that is about 850lbs, which would include the driver. So while were probably talking 600lbs-700lbs of payload between the driver, the added equipment weight for police modifications, and the fridge, that number also assumes normal distribution of weight within the vehicle. Im no engineer, but I would bet that having the weight of the fridge (which is the bulk of it) sticking out of the car halfway is probably pushing the sedan beyond tolerance for weight in some ways. But I could be wrong

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Some harm was probably done to that rear suspension lol

Places that experience over-tourism generally need tax revenue to fix issues like lack of affordable housing, or raising pay for municipal workers that provide services that arent important to tourists and only matter to locals

If they wanted to simply deter tourism then they could just close hotels, ban air bnbs, etc. The point is to still have tourism but check its growth against the strangulation effect it has on local life

If this cat is old enough to be named after Chocolat with Johnny Depp, hes certainly ready to retire

The article doesnt talk about fossil fuels because it has nothing to do with fossil fuels. Everyone knows fossil fuels are bad, that doesnt give a pass to labor violations and the environmental issues with nickel mining in Indonesia.

Arguing otherwise is like saying that someone writing an article on the health issues of vaping and environmental issues with their battery waste isnt spending enough time talking about how bad smoking cigarettes is, or how bad cigarette butts are for the environment. Its like… the article is talking about completely different shit. Advocating for reforms in the nickel production industry doesnt necessitate opining on how fossil fuels are worse.

People have no media literacy anymore, for fucks sake. Fossil fuels propaganda would spend a ton of time saying “look how bad nickel mining is in comparison to fossil fuel production” which this article doesnt do whatsoever. The only secondary aspect of this article is about the collapse of steel industry in rural northern china has supplied most of the workforce to the nickel plants in Indonesia, and how those areas are contracting due to their workers being exported

The amount of people downvoting this very insightful and well written article is particularly inordinate. People just want to pretend that things have no consequences? Rarely, if ever, do market forces create happy-go-lucky stories about global production chains

The whole story of him turning water into wine was literally because they had partied at that wedding for three days straight and ran out of booze. Mfs knew how to party harder than anybody

The term “rare-earth” is a misnomer, because they are not actually scarce, but because they are only found in compounds, not as pure metals, and are difficult to isolate and purify. They are relatively plentiful in the entire Earth’s crust, but in practice they are spread thinly as trace impurities, so to obtain rare earths at usable purity requires processing enormous amounts of raw ore at great expense.

Basically the whole thing has always been a misnomer. They arent rare, nor are they found as metal naturally. But I suppose rare earth elements or metals sounds better than “abundant but hard to find rock thingies”

Its hard not to see this as at least mildly trolling Trump by giving it to a Venezuelan, considering he seems pretty dead set on starting a war with Venezuela while also never shutting up about how he thinks he deserves the peace prize

That is a parole board as in the board of a prison that grants or denies parole to people currently in prison.

This parole commission sounds like it isnt a parole board whatsoever, theyre just using the term improperly. This is a body that supervises parolees after they have been granted parole by a parole board

An expert in starting shit and then peacing out

Its absolutely insane that healthy and wealthy societies are actively undermining their future thanks to disinformation.

In the 80s, the “decade of water” that featured international attempts to ensure access to clean water around the world, many tap wells were installed in rural communities in places where they previously were consuming unclean surface water. These wells were a blessing at first, but also turned into a curse in some places because the wells were not dug deep enough.

Without digging deep enough to avoid high fluoride concentrations, they ended up having severe fluoride poisoning in their communities. Children that couldnt walk because their bones grew deformed, older people that lost decades off their lives because of it. It was a real nightmare. Even still, people kept using the water as it was better than even more poisonous options.

The fact that people in societies that have had the benefit of clean and properly fluoridated water for generations are now freaking out about fluoride is absolutely the dumbest shit imaginable. These people dont remotely understand the actual potential harms of fluoride, and where those threats actually come from. They dont come from drinking water that has fluoride additives. The risk comes from drinking water with extremely high naturally occurring levels of fluoride, which is magnitudes beyond the amount of fluoride that is intentionally added to municipal water systems