>What changed? Is it demographics - like are there larger numbers of young people who aren’t for a theocracy?
Some internal factor opaque to western media. Their economy's in the shitter, perhaps. Or the so-called water shortage. Though what it could be exactly, that western intelligence wouldn't be willing to trumpet from the mountaintops, I could not say.
> Though what it could be exactly, that western intelligence wouldn't be willing to trumpet from the mountaintops
Germany used to have great Middle Eastern intel, but they either lost it or got better about leaks. American HUMINT in the Middle East is notoriously awful, so I'd err on the side of us being as confused as everyone else.
I think intelligence like historiography is extremely bad at detecting processes as they are happening, as it cannot understand behaviors of humans that are not part of large bureaucracies it usually researches. Therefore, intelligence in general usually fails in anticipating revolutions
Why would you want to, unless you live in a domain of indoctrination ("echo chamber") that pacifism is good and anything else is bad?
I always find it useful to ask "why", whenever someone tells me their beliefs. Children do it and adults sometimes tend to find it annoying because they realize they cannot justify their beliefs but being children, they are easy to dismiss. Harder to dismiss an honest question from an adult.
>The thing is, that declining birth rates in the west are more about economic and social factors
If that were the case, this declining fertility rate would cluster around certain socioeconomic cohorts in ways we just don't see. The pattern I see is a more alarming one, where it follows more closely teenage suicide patterns in a contagion-oriented model. Even in those places in Africa where fertility remains high, it drops most sharply among those who are in contact the most with people from the west, and in proportion to the amount of contact.
When self-surveyed people say "it's the economy", they're being put on the spot to answer a question they've thought little about and don't even really know why. They grope for whatever answer makes them sound the least stupid.
>People dont want to have 2.2 children so we can even maintain replacement levels.
Likely, people want far more children than that, and do not know it. This is why the women who "do not want children" are the ones that have had 3 abortions these past 10 years despite the ease with which one might remain sexually active and yet not pregnant. They think they want one thing, and far more primitive parts of their brains/psychologies want something else. Why people hop from "relationship" to "relationship", because that's the impulse when mating was barren long ago... and they chalk it up to some personality incompatibility out of a magazine article.
Every single one of my ancestors who were in the war--except one--fought for the Confederacy in the War Between the States. (Or the War of Lincoln's Aggression, according to some. Yankees call it the "Civil War.")
Going further back, my Cherokee forefathers (the Chickamauga) were equally unimpressed by what they saw and experienced of this entity (they viewed it as a malignant tumor) that calls itself the "United" States of America.
I believe my ancestors are envious that I get to see the day when the truth of the Empire of Lies is finally exposed in front of all the world.
What was it about? By the time the Democrats were crowing that he was a felon, no one eve remembered. Did Trump see or sign this paperwork? Didn't much matter to anyone. If he saw it or signed it, would he have known what it was? Did he read it first? Probably not.
With a tiny little wall of text, you might even manage to tell me why you think the paperwork was so horrible that he should be in prison for it, I suppose. But no one would read your wall of text, because if it takes you a wall of text to explain it, they figure it's all bullshit anyway. And this is why he won in 2024, and why his successor will win in 2028, and likely in 2032. It's why this November is going to shock you even though there's virtually no room left for surprises. Just remember, it's like 96% certain Hillary's going to beat him if you need to fantasize about a better time...
To answer the question you avoided. The "paperwork" was classified materials that make the Hillary's emails outrage of magats look like nothing at all in comparison.
The real problem with prosecutors is that they don't want to prosecute. When I was on the grand jury in my city a couple of years ago, there was a slow morning and the assistant DA said that there were about 4000 cases per year and that they brought 30 of those to trial. He didn't think anything of it, for him it was a story about how they loved trials because "they were so much fun". But if they were so much fun, why are less than 1% of cases going to trial?
Plea deals.
Plea deals subvert justice for both those innocent who are bullied into pleading out, and for those who are wickedly guilty and get a big discount on the penalty exacted. Plea deals give the system extra capacity for prosecution, encouraging the justice system to fill the excess capacity, while simultaneously giving an underfunded system that doesn't have enough capacity the appearance of being able to handle the load. Bad all around.
The CCDs in cameras can be damaged with low-power lasers, or so I thought. No need for anything crazy. And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward. Pointing them across the street, or anywhere not visible from the air isn't going to sic federal agencies on you.
> And the FAA won't become involved unless you're pointing them skyward.
The point here is that 'skyward' is where the laser's beam goes when you're trying to aim it at a camera up on a pole. It's practically impossible to point a non-fixed position laser at something a non-trivial distance higher than you without spilling a large amount of laser beam into whatever happens to be behind your intended target; which is very often the sky.
I wasn't going to send my driver's license to some overseas contractor... I eventually hunted down a form for submitting a notarized statement proving who I was. It's more than a bit ridiculous.
I've stumbled across 3 or 4 magazines that printed the wrong ISSN in more than one issue. One from the 80s did so in every single issue of it's 20some issue run. It must be true that some books have done so as well, but I don't even check that those are correct.
I dunno. Is the United States required to bake them a cake if it offends our religious principles?
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