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.

It’s true, electronic medical records range from garbage to totally broken in terms of usability for healthcare workers. Then you realize the actual customer is the hospital system, and all the design decisions start to make sense. Because the real purpose of the software is efficient billing, not patient care.

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 this one small part of the massive nationwide conspiracy of sedition is already much worse than Watergate.

As much as I hate meta/Facebook, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these laws are right either. I don’t think you should have to pay to simply provide a link to another website. This runs antithetical to the whole idea and structure of the internet. If they’re taking the article or photos and republishing it on their own website that’s different and they obviously should have to pay for that. The linking to news sites is actually good for news sites though and increases profit for publishers by driving traffic to their sites, it doesn’t take profit away. The news publishers are free to have a paywall or put advertisements on the page being linked too and get revenue from that. This feels like publishers wanting to eat their cake and keep it too, they want big search engines and social media to link to their articles so the news sites get traffic and revenue from advertisements/subscriptions, and then they also want the search engines who created that traffic in the first place to pay for linking too? I think publishers are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run lobbying for these laws all for a pittance of cash.

This idea could also affect things like lemmy too eventually and make them impossible, if you need to pay to simply provide a link to a news story or other website.

IANAL, but can read, and I think many people here are totally missing what this ruling actually says and doesn’t say. It says the standard that Colorado used in this man’s trial was too loose and would theoretically allow for conviction of protected speech. They did not say the speech in this case was definitely protected. They did not say it wasn’t threatening. It’s quite possible that if Colorado now chooses to retry the case that a jury would still decide he was guilty under the stricter standard too, but they have to retry him with a trial and jury working under that stricter standard, so that the overly loose law can’t be used to theoretically restrict protected speech under the first ammendment in the future. The supreme court just corrected the standard Colorado was using and kicked it back to them, they did not exonerate the guy unless Colorado chooses not to try him again. The headlines are all being written to be extra inflammatory and misleading.

Just to take it to an extreme and make it extra simple, let’s say we pass a law that says, you are guilty of murder if you are anywhere vaguely near where someone was killed. A guy is caught on video clearly murdering someone. They take him to court and tell the jury in their official jury instructions, if this man was vaguely near where the murder occurred he is guilty. They of course find him guilty. Supreme court steps in and says, wait, sure he’s probably guilty, but the standard you had the jury judging him by was ridiculous, that can’t be the standard for a murder conviction, and would probably result on infringement of multiple constitutional rights if you keep using that standard. Do a new trial with a better standard.

Thanks for posting that! The grant was interesting. Specific aims page is down on page 107 to save others who want to read it some time.

One of their main hypotheses they wanted to test was that covid viruses they found in animals in the Wuhan market would have greater fitness than those found in wild animals due to spillover between multiple species and other differences in the environment, which in light of current events seems a reasonable hypothesis.

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/05/the-wuhan-lab-and-the-gain-of-function-disagreement/

Above is a good summary. Here’s my personal take if interested:

Short story is an nih grant was awarded to a US based non profit research coalition, and the grant involved collaboration among multiple institutes. NIH funds are generally given to US based researchers primarily, but it’s also common if you have a good reason for the project to have international collaboraters on the grant as well. In this case they were collaborating with the Wuhan virology institute, who are obviously going to be very helpful in any collaboration to study corona viruses, since multiple novel corona viruses have been found or made the jump to humans in China before. So yes, a small portion of a much larger grant was sent to Wuhan, who helped provided corona virus samples for US researchers to study.

As an aside it’s also mentioned there was another corona virus 96% similar in genome to covid was previously isolated by that lab from bats. But saying that’s proof they artifically made covid from that virus is pretty ridiculous, altering genomes to that extent and still having a functioning virus is basically science fiction, would take an absurd amount of technology and resources that just do not exist currently. For comparison, humans and chimpanzees have 98.8% similar genomes, so 96% is really not that close. To get from 96% similar to covid even in the much smaller viral genome would still involve at least 1200 changes to different nucleotides across every gene and structural non coding regions and still have all the proteins it encodes not only somehow still work and be expressed correctly but do this even better than before. We’re struggling along with just slight changes to one gene at a time in genetic engineering currently.

Another point that keeps coming up, is research that was done in North Carolina (not China) that some people argue as gain of function research but by other definitions is not (if nih considered it gain of function research it would not have been funded due to a funding pause with that). This keeps being conflated with US funding gain of function research in China, which is not the case.

All in all, the NIH was absolutely interested in funding research into corona viruses because of the fear that something like this would happen after multiple novel corona viruses that started pandemics. I’m still very skeptical of the lab leak theory personally, when we already have multiple instances of novel corona viruses causing epidemics lately, like obviously it could happen again and still can. I suppose it’s possible this virus was found somewhere else, then brought to the lab, then leaked from the lab, but then it would have already been circulating and could have caused a pandemic anyways even without a lab leak. I think people just want to have an easy answer or someone to clearly blame, when the whole world is actually to blame for some extent with out terrible responses to potential pandemics and actually chronic underfunding to this problem that should be a high priority for the whole world. And probably will be happening with only greater frequency as we encroach further on habitats and become more and more densely populated and interconnected. Saying oh we just need to lock down viral labs even more (which hey I’m not even saying is a bad idea, keep that stuff locked up tight), is a much simpler problem to tackle so people would rather go after that than the true larger issues we’re facing with our poor abilities to surveil for and respond to potential pandemics.

Hope some found that interesting at least, sorry for the novel.