A few days ago, Biden commuted the death sentences of almost every federal death row inmate.
Every single person whose sentence Biden commuted was verifiably evil and clearly earned the death penalty.
Let's go through all 37🧵
Shannon Agofsky drowned a bank manager alive, received life in prison, and in prison, kept talking about how he was itching to beat up other prisoners.
Then he killed a fellow prisoner by stomping his neck in and causing him to drown in his own blood.
On camera. Guilty.
Billie Allen killed a bank guard during a bank robbery, using a semi-automatic weapon.
Allen and his accomplice also stole two vans to use as getaway vehicles the night before.
He was inspired by the movies "Set It Off" and "Heat" and he was caught red-handed. Guilty.
Aquila Marcvicci Barnette got dumped by his girlfriend and tried to firebomb her house to kill her
He was charged with murder and arson, but fled. In his attempt to escape the law, he carjacked a man, whom he killed, and proceeded to try to kill his ex-girlfriend again.
Guilty.
Brandon Basham and Chadrick Fulks kidnapped and murdered Alice Donovan after they escaped from prison.
The remains weren't discovered for seven years. They also admitted they killed another woman, Samantha Burns.
They are guilty.
Anthony Battle raped and killed his (marine) wife and received life in prison. He then killed a prison guard and was sentenced to death.
He told the jurors that the guard "died like a dog".
Guilty.
Meier Brown went to a post office, picked up his mail, and decided to come back to rob it.
He claims he tripped on his victim, Sally Gaglia, and accidentally cut her, so he decided to stab her to death because he knew her.
Admitted to his crimes. Guilty.
Carlos Caro was a drug smuggler serving out his sentence in prison.
One day, he decided to murder his cellmate, and for that, he turned his 30 years into the death penalty.
They were alone in a cell and the evidence was all over him. No one else did the crime.
Guilty.
Wesley Coonce and Charles Hall were serving sentences for, respectively, a carjacking that ended in sexual assault, and threatening a judge.
One day, they witnessed some other inmates attacking a guard. Victor Rodriguez ran to help the guard, so these men killed him.
Guilty.
Brandon Council walked into a bank to rob it.
Right after walking in the door, he shot Donna Major three times. He then proceeded to shoot Kathryn Skeen as well. They were just bank employees.
Caught on camera. Very guilty, and Donna Major's family is appalled at Biden.
Christopher Cramer, Ricky Fackrell, and Leo Johns were all prisoners and members of the gang Soldiers Of The Aryan Culture.
For some reason, Leo Johns fell out of favor with the gang, and Cramer and Fackrell murdered him.
It was obvious who did it. Guilty.
Len Davis was a rotten cop. He dealt crack, he arrested innocents, he stole cars, and the Feds were onto him, so he had a wiretap going.
One day, he killed a witness to him assaulting someone, and the feds caught him on tape, gleeful about it.
Terribly guilty of so many crimes.
Joseph Ebron was serving a life sentence for a back-to-back series of murders when he decided to help another inmate kill a different inmate.
The pair stabbed the man 106 times and were caught red-handed.
Guilty.
Edward Fields is a delusional schizophrenic former prison guard who stalked a couple in a national park before ultimately electing to kill them.
He fessed up to all of his crimes.
Guilty.
Marvin Gabrion is another delusional schizophrenic, and his rap sheet is really something. You should just go and read about it.
Short story, he's a serial killer, rapist, arsonist, and he beat up his own lawyer in the court room to top it all off.
So stunningly guilty.
Edgar Garcia and Mark Snarr were being escorted to their cells by a pair of correctional officers.
Then they slipped out of their restraints, pulled out some shivs they made, and stabbed the officers before grabbing their keys and running off to kill another inmate.
Guilty.
Thomas Hager is a former drug dealer who killed several people in the course of his other crimes.
His death sentence was earned for one of those murders in which he killed a single mother in her apartment with two other men, leaving her 13-month-old baby alone there.
Guilty.
Norris Holder was another one on this list who was caught doing a bank robbery in which he killed a guard.
This is such an easy crime to get caught dead-to-rights doing, and yet, his sentence is being commuted.
Guilty.
Richard Jackson kidnapped a woman, raped her, tied her to a tree, and then shot her in the head.
He confessed to all of this, but on appeal, he claimed the court didn't justify the claim that he did a "crime of violence".
Good luck on that, because he's very, very guilty.
Jurijus Kadamovas and Iouri Mikhel were Soviet-born mobsters who kidnapped and killed five people, and demanded ransom, were caught with four other people, and were, simply, stupidly and obviously caught.
Guilty.
Daryl Lawrence... bank robber, killed guard, etc.
This crime leads to people getting caught rapidly, with lots of video evidence, and usually with fresh evidence they shot someone.
Guilty.
Ronald Mikos was a doctor who had defrauded Medicare, and he went out and got egregiously caught killing one of the women set to testify against him as a witness before a grand jury.
Guilty.
James Roane was a drug trafficker who got caught killing his rivals, in addition to his many, many other crimes.
He did this with a gang and they were more than willing to rat on each other, but given all the evidence, that wasn't even needed.
Guilty.
Julius Robinson was a drug dealer who murdered three people, and did drive-bys of cars that were similar to the ones his rivals owned.
Caught red-handed. Very guilty.
David Runyon was a hitman hired by a Navy veteran's wife to kill the vet in a scheme to obtain a life insurance payout.
Caught thanks to being stupid and working with stupid people.
Guilty.
Ricardo Sanchez and Daniel Troya are gangsters who stopped a family of four on the highway in West Palm Beach, killing the mother, father, and their two kids for a drug debt.
Caught very easily.
Guilty.
Thomas Sanders abducted and murdered a twelve-year-old days after he killed the girl's mother.
He showed no remorse, so we shouldn't show any for him.
Guilty.
Kaboni Savage.
This man's story is terrible and his surname fits who he is. He was a drug 'kingpin' of sorts, and he killed a lot of people and was caught very red-handed.
Guilty as sin.
Rejon Taylor: Carjacking, kidnapping, and murdering a restaurant owner.
Guilty.
Richard Tipton is another drug kingpin of sorts, who killed a lot of people in the course of doing his 'job'.
He got caught with James Roane, mentioned above.
Guilty.
Jorge Torrez is a serial killer who killed a female Naval officer... in her barracks.
Stupid. Evil. And Guilty.
Alejandro Umana is a member of MS-13 and he killed two brothers in a public restaurant.
Guilty.
All of these people are horrendously guilty and not one guilty judgment is uncertain. There is no defending commuting their sentences.
These people are a risk to other prisoners, to guards, and an unaddressed evil we could have ended.
But Biden is protecting them.
Biden's stance is not based on a wholesale rejection of the death penalty. He's keeping it in place people who committed hate crimes and were involved in terrorism.
The means he's kept on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dylann Roof, and Robert Bowers.
This is what's so malicious about Biden's actions.
If you reserve the death penalty for a few who did politically sensitive crimes, but not horrible serial killers, you're sending a signal about which victims matter.
To Biden, so many victims and their families don't matter.
On that, we can be certain: Biden is guilty. He is guilty of failing to act in the interests of his constituents and failing to ensure justice is done.
He's letting evil people live.
There's no doubt in my mind that this should be a black mark on his already-contentious legacy.
And for opponents of the death penalty, there's a general lesson here:
If you want to oppose the death penalty, you cannot usually argue against it on the grounds that defendants might be innocent. The typical case is a deeply evil person who leaves no doubt as to their evil.
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World War I devastated Britain and likely slowed down its technological progress🧵
The reason being, the youth are the engine of innovation.
Areas that saw more deaths saw larger declines in patenting in the years following the war.
To figure out the innovation effects of losing a large portion of a generation's young men who were just coming into the primes of their lives, the authors needed four pieces of data.
The first were the numbers and pre-war locations of soldiers who died.
The next components were the numbers and locations of patent filings.
If you look at both graphs, you see obvious total population effects. So, areas must be normalized.
You know how most books on Amazon are AI slop now? If you didn't, look at the publication numbers.
Compare those to the proportion Pangram flags as AI-generated. It's fully aligned with the implied numbers based on the rise over 2022 publication levels!
Similarly, the rise of pro se litigants has come with a rise in case filings detected as being AI-generated, and with virtually zero false-positives before AI was around.
Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play argued that France's early fertility decline was driven by its inheritance reforms, where estates had to be split up equally to all of the kids, including the girls.
There's likely something to this!🧵
For reference, the French Revolution ushered in a number of egalitarian laws.
A major example of these had to do with inheritance, and in particular with partibility.
In some areas of France, there was partible inheritance, and in others, it was impartible.
Partible inheritance refers to inheritance spread among all of a person's heirs, sometimes including girls, sometimes not.
Impartible inheritance on the other hands refers to the situation where the head of an estate can nominate a particular heir to get all or a select portion.
In terms of their employment, religion, and sex, people who joined the Nazi party started off incredibly distinct from the people in their communities.
It's only near the end of WWII when they started resembling everyday Germans.
Early on, a lot of this dissimilarity is due to hysteresis.
Even as the party was growing, people were selectively recruited because they were often recruited by their out-of-place friends, and they were themselves out-of-place.
It took huge growth to break that.
And you can see the decline of fervor based on the decline of Nazi imagery in people's portraits.
And while this is observed by-and-large, it's not observed among the SS, who had a consistently higher rate of symbolic fanaticism.
I simulated 100,000 people to show how often people are "thrice-exceptional": Smart, stable, and exceptionally hard-working.
I've highlighted these people in red in this chart:
If you reorient the chart to a bird's eye view, it looks like this:
In short, there are not many people who are thrice-exceptional, in the sense of being at least +2 standard deviations in conscientiousness, emotional stability (i.e., inverse neuroticism), and intelligence.
To replicate this, use 42 as the seed and assume linearity and normality
The decline of trust is something worth caring about, and reversing it is something worth doing.
We should not have to live constantly wondering if we're being lied to or scammed. Trust should be possible again.
I don't know how we go about regaining trust and promoting trustworthiness in society.
It feels like there's an immense level of toleration of untrustworthy behavior from everyone: scams are openly funded; academics congratulate their fraudster peers; all content is now slop.
What China's doing—corruption crackdowns and arresting fraudsters—seems laudable, and I think the U.S. and other Western nations should follow suit.
Fraud leads to so many lives being lost and so much progress being halted or delayed.