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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"Without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable."
This quote describes Pirenne's thesis that Antiquity—the period when economic activity concentrated in the Mediterranean—ended because the rise of Islam destroyed the flow of trade across it.
The decline in trade that resulted from differences in faith had profound consequences for the economic geography of Europe.
Byzantine economic activity depended on trade, and it collapsed, whereas the Frankish economy, which was never trade-dependent, transformed.
The Byzantines' minting stalled and the Arabs' and Franks' increased (perhaps partly because they were cut off from one another!), providing each of their states with divergent trends in seignorage revenues and a widening gulf in the ability to fund the government.
Robustness tests are supposed to show a study's results hold up no matter how you reasonably change the specification
But we live in a world with p-hacking, and people p-hack robustness tests
Compared to unshown robustness tests (blue), what we get is suspiciously significant!
This is the distribution of z-values for different tests in economics papers, coupled with the robustness tests their authors presented, and other, plausible robustness tests they didn't.
Clearly people p-hack, and they p-hack tests that are supposed to make us think they didn't
It's sad this is the case. Were it not, it might be useful to get a surprising, marginally-significant result, and then show that it holds up across different permutations of the results
But because the robustness tests shown are selective, their potential utility is unrealized
Let's talk about the glass delusion, the Middle Ages' bout with a mass psychogenic illness marked by people believing they were made of glass.
Glass was a valuable commodity in Europe. It was primarily owned by the noble and well-to-do, and it had a notable purpose in alchemy.
Its perception as the technology of the time was as one that's both fragile and valuable, like the nobility.
Glass was the relatively novel technology people knew, and they knew things could be transmuted into glass. Delusional people also thought transmutation could affect them.
The massive increase in homicides in the last week of May of 2020 started in the days after George Floyd's death.
The Floyd Effect principally refers to the impact of George Floyd's death on homicide numbers in the U.S. through diverse mechanisms, such as reduced cooperation with police, reduced police activity, presence, and willingness to confront potential criminals, and maybe more.
The effect primarily occurred due to an increase in firearm violence that was largely isolated to African Americans. The effect is timed to the
College students make or are forced to make suboptimal choices about the times their classes take place🧵
For students who register for 8AM classes, about a third wake up after class starts, and almost 40% wake up too late to get to class on time.
People's internal rhythms aren't things they just choose, they're somewhat out of their control because they're synced up with day-night cycles.
Consider this, showing the amount of time 8AM class-takers sleep on school days vs weekends (gray), measured through logins at school.
If you compare those 8AM class-takers to 9AM students, you see that the ones who registered for 9AM classes sleep longer, but both sleep similar lengths on weekends.