It was explicitly an attempt to influence Pence or congress to not certify the election results, attempting to allow Trump to use his fake electors to change the results in his favor.
It was a naked attempt to change the outcome of the election. What are you not understanding about this?
In 2016 there was an organized, and partially successful, effort to get 37 electoral voters to change their electoral vote to somebody other than whom they were pledged to vote - Trump. It was intended to change the result of the election by forcing a "contingent election", in which the House of Representatives would determine the President, owing to the esoteric nuances of US electoral law.
Would you consider this an insurrection? In your terms it was "a naked attempt to change the outcome of the election."
Calling it partially successful when Clinton lost more electoral votes to faithless electors than Trump did and it had zero impact on the outcome of the election is interesting.
But no, because electors deciding how they cast their votes is a matter of state legislation, not federal, and it is a wildly different thing than the candidate himself trying to install fake electors.
The faithless electors were chosen as part of the political process, and the founders expressly stated that the electors having the freedom to cast their vote was part of the safeguard against mob rule by an uninformed electorate. Hamilton, for example, wrote extensively of this in the federalist papers. This is explicitly one of the reasons why we have the electoral college at all, instead of a popular vote. If anything, I wish they had had the foresight to codify it in the Constitution or Bill of Rights so that states could not prevent it from happening. They wrote extensively of what they wanted the EC to be but did not do enough to make reality match their expectations in a durable manner.
Meanwhile Trump explicitly worked to install a group of illegally selected electors while riling up a mob to attempt to put a halt to the certification.
Trying to compare electors casting their vote based on how the founding fathers envisioned the electoral college as working to a sitting president being involved in a coordinated effort to create and install fake electors, cause the certification of the election to fail by inciting a mob to storm the capitol, and oh, telling Georgia to "find me the votes" is absurd.
It doesn't matter the margin by which Clinton lost. The point of trying to turn the electors is that the US constitution requires a candidate receive a majority of electoral votes. If nobody does, then the House of Representatives gets to determine who becomes President. And they came far closer to overturning the election than some guys rioting around the Capitol did, since there was a viable path towards the goal.
Your perception of the electoral college is somewhat biased. The college itself serves a practical purpose - elections in the US are extremely decentralized by design. States can do pretty much whatever they want, only later constrained by various constitutional amendments. So when a state A gives you a number, that number does not necessarily mean the same thing as when state B does the same. The electoral college normalizes election results by requiring each state to convert their numbers into a common format. And instead of relying on the Federal government trying to deal with millions of votes, it's only 538.
Similarly, the scheme in support of Trump was not only not illegal, but even anticipated by the electoral count act which made it such that if the House/Senate disagreed with votes included or excluded by the Vice President, then they were free to overrule it by a simple majority vote. The VP's role was then later changed to a purely ceremonial one in a new law passed in 2022, largely to prevent this angle in the future.
And you're still trying to compare mechanisms that exist within the system and are codified with someone attempting to operate entirely outside of it. And no, they weren't far closer at achieving their goal - they didn't get anywhere near the number of required faithless electors and were never going to get anywhere near the required number of faithless electors. Meanwhile, attempting to delay or totally obstruct the certification allowed for several pathways that Trump and his team viewed as potentially viable. Hell, just convincing Raffensperger to do what Trump wanted him to do would have also gotten him most of the way there.
And yes, obviously part of the point of the EC is dealing with a smaller number of votes instead of every vote. None of that is a counterargument to what I said. Again, the founding fathers literally wrote about how faithless electors were a feature and not a bug in their eyes. There's a reason they had the 'Hamilton Electors' moniker.
So if someone emailed Pence and said they would stab him if he certified the election would that be an insurrection? They are attempting to influence him to change the result of the election.
Surely the level of organization and possibility of success need to be taken into consideration? Otherwise every moron with a social media account or a sign could be guilty of insurrection.
If we want to include additional details, perhaps add the ones that explain why she was shot (Violently breaking into an area being secured by capitol police that directly lead to the congresscritters) and not irrelevant ones like her status as a veteran.
I included it because I think it's a counter-balance to how framing and selective information disclosure has been used to shape perception; in many accountings, you either see "five deaths within 36 hours", or just "one death", but neither mentioning the only death that day was a civilian veteran that was among the rioters.
I assume that's because, in this context, a rioter dying is less shocking than a police officer, politician, or other civilian, and "veteran" is more likely to humanize or engender empathy. I'd guess that's also why you objected so strongly to its inclusion, and sought to reframe the perceptive field.
It is a transparent attempt to specifically engender empathy while also leaving out the relevant details about what she did to get shot.
If you were including the full details, I would say nothing. When you leave out the single most important pieces of context and instead talk of her veteran status, it is obvious what your intent is.
In one case, we have a person in their home town, caught up in a situation that was not of her own making.
Babbitt directly put herself in the situation of traveling to the capital, breaking in to it, ignoring direct and lawful orders from police officers, moving towards people that the police had every reason to believe were likely targets of violence, after once again physically breaking in to an area.
They're not really comparable situations, IMO. But I don't like people dying when it is avoidable.
One was killed on the street, as she was leaving a protest, the other was killed while trying to break into a secure area of the capital during an attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power after an election.
I think your admission says a lot more about you than it does about either of the two women.
Have you read or watched/listened to his entire speech?
I genuinely do not believe any reasonable human being can look at just the speech in context - much less his statements surrounding it in the months leading up - and argue that he didn't get exactly what he wanted in good faith.
Mark draws some parallels between Amazon and some other tech companies that he believes have suffered from the same phenomenon - Apple with Jobs and Cook among them, along with Gates and Balmer, Disney, etc.
But Chinese model releases are treated unfairly all the time when they release new model, as if Tianmen response indicates that we can use the model for coding tasks.
We should understand their situation and don't judge for obvious political issue. Its easy to judge people working hard over there, because they are confirming to the political situation and don't want to kill their company.
These studies have conflict of interest, funding, etc. disclosures.
If it was Lilly and Novo pushing these, they'd either show up in those disclosures or you're suggesting a massive conspiracy to undermine the medical regulatory system to sell more drugs that they already have struggled to meet demand for for extended periods of time.
Why would they kill a golden goose that shows no signs of stopping it's egg laying?
It's not so much a massive conspiracy as it is the known reality of how these companies operate. There is very little risk as oversight and real accountability are basically non-existent
> Cross-sectional studies across a heterogeneous set of conditions suggest that between 29 and 69 % of published clinical trial reports include disclosures of conflicts of interest. Studies measuring undisclosed conflicts of interest suggest that between 43 and 69 % of study reports and other articles fail to include disclosures of conflicts of interest (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4854425/)
Thanks. I'll admit I'm pretty surprised - my understanding is this sort of thing usually is a much bigger deal when it comes to fucking with things that impact FDA decisions, etc., so them publicly flouting it is pretty crazy to me.
I only provided examples in case there was any doubt that failure to disclose ties to the pharmaceutical industry was a known and large scale problem after the suggestion that it was some kind of conspiracy theory. Skepticism in the case of these drug companies is warranted.
As for the variety of the things I've commented on, I can only blame procrastination and the contents of the front page. I got a lot more work done monday afternoon, I promise.
There's no case to be made for calling these drugs snake oil. They're well-proven to have a host of benefits beyond their specified use. Their promotion by the makers of the drug doesn't change that.
I'll note that calling it the gray market really is people uncomfortable with the idea of buying drugs from a drug dealer trying to find a way to make this more palatable.
That's not a judgment thing on my part - I've got a freezer full of Chinese peptides, among other things.
But the raw API on all of this stuff is coming from China in a way that is effectively unregulated and with no recourse if anything goes wrong. Underground Chinese labs get raided and shut down (usually because they're also involved in producing AAS or opioid precursors) often leaving millions of dollars in unfulfilled product. People get peptides with 0 active ingredient. People get peptides contaminated with disinfectant and have adverse reactions. People get mislabeled peptides. People get radically underdosed or overdoses peptides. And when a controversy hits, these labs close up shop one day and come back a week later under a new name. If you get a vial full of something truly harmful to you and you die, your loved ones have zero recourse.
Your local weed dealer has infinitely more accountability than these labs.
Testing isn't a panacea - people do endotoxin, heavy metal, HPLC, etc., but GCMS and similar basically never happens - and without knowing what the potential substances are the automatching to peaks even for GCMS is often inaccurate to the point of uselessness."Purity" reports on HPLC don't measure everything in the vial - just how pure the targeted peak is. It'll catch protein depredations, but it wouldn't tell you if there was a bunch of anthrax in the vial.
For me, the calculus still makes sense. I've got access to things that have worked incredibly well for me that are not yet available in the US, or in some cases, not likely to ever be. But the "gray" market is buying from overseas drug dealers that don't particularly give a fuck about you. They don't want to hurt you - you spend less money if they do - but they also aren't going out of their way to look after you. Most of them only started HPLC tests because the bodybuilding community demanded it, and these guys were selling AAS and HGH to them before they got into the GLP-1s, and then it became the standard.
These aren't parallel import goods getting sold in areas where they aren't supposed to or unauthorized retailers. These are drug dealers that get shut down by the Chinese government on a regular basis. Go look up QSC, SSA, SRY - and those are just some of the biggest names from the past year or so.
I like to call it the "gray" market because the substances themselves are gray, not because of their source. My weed dealer doesn't sell GLPs (yet, but I can see that coming). I haven't seen anyone arrested for having GLPs yet either-- although I have seen plenty of US based vendors have to close up shop due to legal pressure.
I do that believe that risk can be (mostly) mitigated, mainly by sticking with longstanding vendors and by trying to minimize risk with the actual substances (researching proper dosing protocol, batch testing, not assuming dosing, starting out on lower dosing with new kits etc). There is definitely risk associated, that said I'm often dabbling in non-FDA approved substances, so regardless I have zero recourse if something happens.
Are there any testing/safety protocols that you follow?
> I haven't seen anyone arrested for having GLPs yet either-- although I have seen plenty of US based vendors have to close up shop due to legal pressure.
> I do that believe that risk can be (mostly) mitigated, mainly by sticking with longstanding vendors and by trying to minimize risk with the actual substances (researching proper dosing protocol, batch testing, not assuming dosing, starting out on lower dosing with new kits etc)
Bunch of longstanding vendors have had issues. SRY was one of the biggest names for direct-from-China, shipped peptides contaminated by disinfectant, caused severe reactions for some people. Nexaph is one of the biggest names now in the US, has tons of testing, etc., but got a batch a while back from whoever their manu is in China that had some unknown excipient that got played off as a "test formulation," etc.
Batch testing helps, but it requires the original lab to have actually adhered to the batches in a way that others can track, which isn't always the case. Sometimes top colors span multiple batches, tests on the vendor spreadsheet don't necessarily correspond to the batch being sold if you're trusting their testing, etc.
> Are there any testing/safety protocols that you follow?
Not much. I use a 22um PES filter into a cartridge and inject from it for a few weeks and call it a day. I don't even bother with my own testing at jano unless I have reason to believe something is off and need to confirm.
But I never got my LSD or DMT or anything tested before either so my risk tolerance is basically "eh, send it." I just can't in good conscience recommend people follow that same risk tolerance (though I won't begrudge adults the right to make informed decisions to inject basically anything they want into themselves, either.)
You can't mention CICO in this forum, where people have a unique genetic disorder that makes them "extract more calories from the food" or "burn way less" than other people, barring them of any personal responsibility about what they put in their mouth.
It was a naked attempt to change the outcome of the election. What are you not understanding about this?
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