They’re not breaking their clients out of jail, they‘re just collecting and presenting any evidence that conflicts with the prosecution’s narrative. Juries and judges depend on someone performing that role so they can make an informed decision.

True—but it’s not “intervention” when it’s doing what they want.

(American) libertarians believe all the ills of modern capitalism ultimately stem from state intervention, while anarchists believe they stem from hierarchical relationships between people.

Celebrities tend to have very unpredictable cash flows, but most things the wealthy spend money on (including local investments, etc.) come with loans that need to be paid regularly.

I’d never use an iPhone if my phone were my main device—but I just want a phone/camera that I don’t have to think about beyond those specific functions, and for that my iPhone 12 mini works fine.

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Curing the side effects of the anti-cancer pill.

The lion-and-sun flag is the flag of the old Safavid Empire.

If you want to use a historical flag, a more appropriate one might be the pre-Islamic Sassanid Standard of Kaveh—the flag of the legendary blacksmith who overthrew the tyrant Zahhak. (But that flag has also been used by Iranians protesting the current regime, which may not be the overtone you’re intending.)

I will avoid saying why I’m planning on doing it now only because it will color people’s interpretation of why I’m doing it.

Flags are symbolic—they exist to communicate, and the only criterion to judge their appropriateness is whether they communicate the intended message to the intended audience.

Without knowing your intended message, it’s impossible to say whether or not you should use one in a given context.

How hard have you tried?

Institutions aren’t the sum of their parts—their behavior is dependent on human participation, but is largely independent of the values or goals of the participating humans.

Unless you’ve identified a specific weakness and have a plan to exploit it before going in, your participation will probably benefit it more than any opportunistic harms you can do to it while participating.

Grace keeps pushing Smoke to take the vampires head on, before they go to her store and kill her daughter. When the others refuse, she forces it by shouting “come on in, motherfuckers!”

Explain why the US hasn’t gone back in so long, and why with modern technology it seems so difficult?

The Apollo program took 4.5% of the US budget. NASA’s entire budget now—including space telescopes, earth satellites, and interplanetary probes—is less than half of one percent.

Nationalism—the idea that there ought to be (or ever was) a 1:1 correspondence between countries, cultures, and ancestry—is a 19th-century invention unsupported by history, anthropology, or genetics. Ancestry tests that categorize results by country are obfuscating real data to meet a demand for pop pseudoscience.

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MediaWiki’s probably overkill for basic wiki functionality, but I use it for the sake of Semantic MediaWiki and associated extensions. But SMW has more of a learning curve, so it might not be worth it for a casual-use wiki.

One of the many debated claims about Pirahã is that female speakers can’t use the phoneme /h/, always substituting /s/ instead.

Why would OP’s mother bring up the ultrasound in the first place if she were deliberately trying to conceal anything?

I could see the twin being stillborn and the doctors thinking it was easier to tell the mother it had “vanished”, though.

I live on the edge of my city’s Chinatown (Oakland, California) and it’s an important part of the local culture. I’ve lived, worked, and studied with Chinese/Taiwanese nationals, and if they weren’t there I’d feel like something was missing.

Penguin publishes reference “dictionaries” of various subjects, that are more like mini-encyclopedias. I’ve got ones covering mathematics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literary theory.