That’s what impeachment is for.

Should he not have attacked Al Qaida? Or is it just the drones you object to?

And how many drone strikes did Trump order, and what was the noncombatant death toll of those?

She’s a member of the corrupt kleptocracy that Chavez kicked out. The fact that Maduro was a shit leader doesn’t mean that the faction that had been driven out of power was any better.

I cant help but feel like the Nobel committee really chose the wrong person.

They really should shut that shitshow down. It’s doing more harm than good.

It’s not an illegal action.

What law was broken? The Trump Doesn’t Like It law?

It’s not a clear 15% risk. The actual risk to an individual child is in the 4-5% range, compared to 2.55% for the population as a whole.

Good thing that it’s possible for a couple to take a test that gives a good measure of their degree of consanguinity.

This is a particular risk not only in countries with first-cousin marriage, but in those with small founder populations. For example, Iceland, where the government provides this measure to any couple who asks, so that they can make an informed decision about the risk before reproducing.

And ethno-nationalists can choke on this fact: the best strategy to reduce the risk of genetic defects is out-marriage. The less closely genetically similar two partners are, the lower the odds of autosomal recessive disorders afflicting their offspring. So I did the rational thing, and married someone whose ancestors came from a different part of the world than mine.

It looks as though the goal was to encourage midwives not to stigmatise people for marrying their first cousins. That seems a good policy when they’re delivering healthcare services. But the way the numbers were presented made things appear worse than they are.

I indulge in some risky behaviors (martial arts, skiing, cycling). I don’t want lectures about the risks of those, either. If I break a bone, I want it treated, and if the NHS takes a view on the activity that caused it, I’ll want to hear it later from my GP, and definitely not at the time I’m seeking treatment.

The stats I saw show a 2.55% risk across all UK births. So a bit under 3%.

You need to parse the sentence a bit. “85 to 90% of cousin couples do not have affected children” does not mean that the odds of one child being born with a hereditary genetic defect is 15%. It means that, for the average family size of a first-cousin couple, the odds are 10-15% that at least one of the kids is affected.

So, let’s conservatively say the average family size among those who marry first cousins is 3. The odds of at least one in those three kids having a genetic defect are stated to be 15%. So that means the odds of any individual kid whose parents are first cousins having a genetic defect are a bit under 5% (the odds of a given event happening at least once in three independent trials).

The odds will be substantially lower if that 15% figure were based on a larger family size than 3.

As a baseline, tn the UK, the odds in the overall UK population of a genetic defect occurring are around 2.55%.

So the risk is roughly double the baseline for any individual child. But the way the numbers are presented makes it seem misleadingly high and has led to predictable screeching from the usual quarters. There is also no measure of severity. For example, despite my parents being unrelated, I have a genetic defect that causes high cholesterol levels in my blood. However, it’s cheaply treatable (woo hoo, statins!) so its impact on pubilc health is next to nil.

I’d favour banning marriages where the partners have first-cousin and closer degrees of consanguinity, but I also see the point of not catastrophising the actual impact.

In this day and age, I think most babies are born out of wedlock.

Around 40% in the US.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/out-of-wedlock-births-by-country

Influencers are cancer.

He campaigned on peace

And he’s a habitual, compulsive liar. Anyone stupid enough to believe his talk about peace is a fool.

Hard to imagine FIFA being capable of embarrassment.

Refusal to comply is violence. “Stop hitting yourself!”

Every award is going to be more grandiose and ridiculous.

Always projection. As long as it’s their guy doing it, yay team.

It’s WWE politics.

where the change is just so insurmountable, at least some jobs might exist for a very long time

The problem that kept COBOL around for so long was financial institutions refusing to invest in new IT. They saw it as a cost center and not as a potential source of revenue.

Settle down, Hector.

Gladly.

The discussion about whether a DDOS account has anything to do with Russia solely because the IP addresses used are Russian fails to take into account the fact that Russian state actors and affiliated parties have previously done it that way. That includes attacks against sites that I work on. Not only DDOS attacks, but lots of vulnerability-probing attacks have come from Russian IPs as well (though not all, of course: China’s a close second on that leaderboard), and in one investigation of those, our security team was able to find a forum where the attacks were being coordinated. The discussion was in Russian. That doesn’t mean they were state actors in that case, but Russia’s not the kind of place where freelancers are allowed to operate against state interests for long. So maybe volunteers for the motherland, maybe mercenaries, maybe someone with a more formal relationship with the state. In that particular case, we stopped investigating at that point, since our goal was to harden our system further, rather than worry about attribution.

So yeah, you’d think that in the interest of good comsec, they’d go to the effort to obfuscate the origin of their attacks, but they don’t always. Maybe they’re sloppy, or they don’t see the need, or don’t want to incur the minimal additional complexity and/or cost.

I’d like to disclose more, but I’m in a position where there are some hard limits on what I can disclose about my personal and professional life.

Also, the Daily Beast is no paragon of journalistic integrity, but they’re more a mixed bag than a never-credible source. Case in point: Michael Wolff’s podcasts for them, which occasionally contain worthwhile insights mixed in with the tabloid gossip. I rank them a little below Times Radio, which also has a mix of clickbaity crap and occasional sound analysis. They’re certainly nowhere near the gutter that the NY Post or the Daily Mail inhabit. Well, maybe one foot, but not both.

Anyway… mea culpa for having downvoted rather than joining in. I was in a hurry, about to head out the door, and should have instead waited until I had the time to comment.