Another Possessor of a Fighting Spirit

It has a monopoly on providing transfer services at the Rafah crossing, the only Gaza exit not bordered with Israel and the single route out of the coastal enclave for Palestinians.

In the past three months alone, the company is estimated to have made a minimum of $118m, or 5.6 billion Egyptian pounds, from desperate Palestinians trying to leave war-torn Gaza.

Prior to the war, Hala charged everyone exiting Gaza via the Rafah crossing $350 per person, but the price has increased 14-fold for Palestinians.

(Full article)

I went to and graduated from a PWI (I'm talking like, 89% white) and it was a moderatly sized university in a rural-ish midwest town.

While there, I took a handful of courses about race or where race would come up as a common topic. And even in like a 300 level journalism class, I would encounter people that would be like "Well I came from a small town, I never saw POCs of Color growing up!" and I was like. Okay. Sure. But You're an Adult, you grew up with the internet, you've been at university for at least a few years. I'm sorry but I do not accept the excuse of "I've Never Been Around Brown or Black People". At some point you have to fucking take the initiative and seek shit out. You can't spend your life blaming growing up in a small white town or the school system not talking about racism.

Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.

Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't directly be observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.

Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of mayn years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.

The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.

When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!

Wow. Talk about attention to detail.