DL Open Thread: Friday, December 15, 2023
Feckless Joe: Bibi, You Need To Dial It Back. Bibi: Kiss My Tucchus:
Almost half of the munitions Israel has used in Gaza since the war began have been unguided bombs, a U.S. intelligence assessment has found, a ratio that some arms experts say helps explain the conflict’s enormous civilian death toll. The revelation comes as U.S. and Israeli officials engage in intensifying conversations about the sequencing of military operations in the two-month conflict.
The Israel Defense Forces has fired more than 29,000 air-to-ground munitions into the Palestinian enclave since Oct. 7, and only 55 to 60 percent of them have been precision-guided, according to a new assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The rest were what are known as “dumb bombs,” said two people familiar with the assessment who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.
My back-of-the-envelope math suggests that at least 11,600 ‘dumb’ bombs have been dropped on Gaza. But, I digress:
The use of so many unguided bombs, first reported by CNN, is a concern among humanitarian groups and others amid growing calls inside and outside the United States for Washington to condition any further military aid to Israel on the immediate reduction of civilian deaths.
The Biden administration has thus far rejected such calls, fearing a backlash by Republicans and political attacks from powerful pro-Israel lobbying organizations. Instead, it has attempted to influence the Israeli government to sharpen the focus of its military campaign using high-level visits, including meetings in Tel Aviv on Thursday between national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Under international law, weapons are considered indiscriminate if they cannot be directed at military targets.
By his actions, Bibi is now a war criminal. Biden is his feckless lackey.
Supreme Court Upholds Assault Weapons Ban. Could the tide be turning on Second Amendment absolutism?:
With less than three weeks to go before the registration deadline for guns restricted under the Protect Illinois Communities Act, the U.S. Supreme Court has again declined to block enforcement of the law banning the sale and most unregistered possession of semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 and AK-47.
The nation’s highest court on Thursday issued an order denying an application from the National Association for Gun Rights and a Naperville gun dealer for a preliminary injunction to the statewide gun and magazine ban, as well as the suburb’s municipal ban.
There were no dissents noted in the order, marking the second time the justices have passed up an opportunity to intervene in the Illinois ban.
Ohio Takes Bold Stand Against Transgender Youth. Because they’re bullies:
The Ohio legislature gave its final approval Wednesday to House Bill 68, which would ban transgender youth from accessing gender-confirming surgery and non-surgical interventions, including hormone treatments and puberty blockers. (The latter is how medical providers typically treat transgender youth with the approval of the patient’s parents.)
The legislation would also prohibit transgender girls from participating on female sports teams, despite a lack of evidence that Ohio’s current policies allow any transgender athletes an unfair advantage.
Hey, it’s understandable. This will be model legislation under an authoritarian regime.
Convicted By A Hair. The Folly Of Follicles:
In courtrooms across America, “scientific evidence” used to imprison people for heinous crimes has been increasingly discredited. Blood-spatter patterns, arson analysis, bite-mark comparisons, even some fingerprint evidence have all turned out to be unreliable.
A quarter of the 3,439 exonerations tracked by the National Registry of Exonerations involved false or misleading forensic evidence.
But these exonerations are only the tip of the iceberg, some experts say. Many more people remain incarcerated despite questions about the forensic analysis of evidence used against them. Cases are not automatically reopened when a field of forensics is questioned or even discredited. That’s true of hair analysis, which has been under scrutiny for decades: Government studies have found that in hundreds of cases, hair analysts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation exaggerated their findings in reports and court testimony.
A new report by the exoneration registry found 128 cases in which people were falsely convicted at least partly because of flawed hair analysis and testimony. Fifteen of the defendants were sentenced to die. Exonerees lost almost 2,000 years of their lives in prison and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. And there may be many more people behind bars who were convicted because of bad hair evidence.
“I am willing to speculate that—because the process of exoneration is so difficult—those 128 exonerees could represent between two and 10 times as many wrongly convicted people,” said Simon Cole, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is the director of the registry and an author of the study. Many of them “aren’t ever going to be able to prove their innocence to the state’s satisfaction and become exonerated,” he said, noting that overturning a verdict requires very persuasive evidence, such as DNA, and a lot of time, money, and legal help.
I may never watch ‘Forensic Files’ again now that the bubble of forensic certitude has been burst.
Q: What is unusual about this photo?:
What do you want to talk about?
Jury awards $150 mill to two victims of Giuliani false claims.
Not sure if either will see a dollar of compensation, but anything that causes agita for Rudy is a good thing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/politics/rudy-giuliani-defamation-trial-damages.html
I’m glad the jury saw through his “Yes, I did it – and MORE!” defense.