What we are seeing is not a decrease of quality writing but a compression of the large span of poor writing into a much more narrow mediocre range.

This isn't as helpful a unit of measure as you imagined when you wrote that, fyi.

Since the revolutionaries declared themselves enemies of America, took hostage US embassy workers and tortured them for over a year.*

Agreed that this isn’t about Epstein though. According to the Biden DoJ, Iran attempted to assassinate Trump. He’s rather vindictive.

That depends on what Iran does in the meantime, does it not? If Iran effectively turned their missile program into a true deterrent then negotiated delay is worse, because it would remove the ability to stunt the development through military means. Which is very much the argument being made for the “why now” of this war.

There’s this weird attitude I see where people claim “realpolitik” to give other nations colonial rights to their neighbors while denying the same to America. If you buy into “spheres of influence” as a concept it’s time to accept that the US, as the world’s preeminent military and economic power, has a sphere of influence that spans the globe.

Less than 0.01% of travelers to the US have their electronics screened. A similarly small fraction of travelers get turned away at the border. It's remarkable how big of a story it is for how much of a non-story it is, especially when you consider the fact that similar laws exists in the UK, France, most of the Middle East, East Asia, and more. The only story here is that America is (regretfully) becoming more like the rest of the world.

Yes, I keep thinking about the bastion of free speech that gave birth to the Nazi movement. If only the Weimar Republic had anti-hate speech laws, perhaps the Shoah could have been avoided? Oops, turns out it did have those laws, and those very laws were subverted to suppress dissent.

In which countries is this service free? Alipay and Wechat are probably the biggest actors in this space both take a cut.

Why displacing? Greenland is 3x the size of Texas and only 60k people, mostly concentrated around a single village.