Gromnir

no doubt karoline were dreaming o' her annie leibowitz portrait, and instead... ... is as if hoon had never seen a vanity fair photo shoot. glamour with more than a hint o' satire is de rigueur. am suspecting this group thought they were too clever to fall for anything subversive, but they nevertheless wanted to be immortalized... these jokers is never gonna be on rushmore and maybe having a public elementary school in florida or ohio named in their honor after they is dead is not gonna be a meaningful ego stroke. an eventual sight gag for something like futurama? no thanks. a vanity fair photo op were gonna be a way for this group o' clowns and ghouls to be cool. HA! Good Fun!

there is somebody, multiple somebodies, at vanity fair who dislike karoline leavitt warning: you will not be able to unsee. make sure this is not the last thing you view before going to bed. gonna admit, we only read the nyt article which shared details o' the vanity fair piece, so am not sure how good or bad it were. looks as if susie got caught in a few lies and even more unfortunate truth reveals, but regardless, that karoline pic is... unfortunate. HA! Good Fun!

have tried braeburn and is not quite firm enough for a julienne, but your suggestions makes us think am being too narrow-minded. granny smith is perhaps the right firmness but not exact the taste profile am looking to achieve. even so, there is no reason we can't use multiple apple types, yes? we use parsnips and carrots together in the same dish, so why not multiple kinda apples? am gonna try a box grater for our "juicy" apple and then lazy-man julienne a granny smith, but the y-peeler option will likely be part o' our next attempt when our initial efforts near inevitable fail. thanks for the suggestion. aside, six years past we received a stocking stuffer. am only ever having used the green one. carbon steel means we need clean and dry immediate after use, but am shocked at how well these work in spite o' the fact they likely cost about 10¢ apiece to manufacture. HA! Good Fun!

and pretty much every major hospital in the US, as well as thousands o' oncologists and cancer patients... although am understanding that fentanyl patches has become less ubiquitous as a "treatment" for late-stage cancer pain management in the last few years. am guessing there is some specific grant o' executive power related to wmds, similar to the way in which 2001 Congressional authorization to use force against al-quaeda and anyone with a "nexus" to the 9/11 attacks were used by bush, obama, biden and trump do acts o' war against any and all accused "terrorists" without the need for Congress to declare war. don't know the specific lever and fulcrum trump is trying to exploit, but am assuming there is such a thing... although am admitted not certain how vaporizing accused drug smugglers transporting cocaine from venezuela to other nearby nations constitutes an act o' war, even based on some o' the sketchy logic embraced by obama to assassinate anwar al-awlaki. ... am admitting the trump administration efforts around deportations and boat strikes makes otherwise fantastical slippery slope arguments look far less ridiculous 'cause there is no too extreme or too far for these clowns. if the dangers o' fentanyl is the raison d'être for labeling individuals as narco terrorists, and anybody even tangential related to the narco terrorists is subject to extra judicial murders, then what is the point o' the new wmd identifier? what sinister new article 2 sooper power has stephen miller and the project 2025 folks imagined into being? not sure, but given the current state o' affairs, that authority will be deemed valid until scotus says otherwise, and there is all kinda reason to be suspicious o' the Court's wisdom these days. HA! Good Fun!

misunderstanding. as part of article 1, sec8 (clause 18?) powers, Congress has implied power and duty o' oversight and investigation... of the other branches o' government. take care clause of article 2, based on understanding of language in 1787, creates a duty/obligation on the part o' the President to see that laws passed by Congress is implemented and enforced. ... and 'cause the current Court's embrace o' the unitary theory o' the executive authority is complete and extreme, it follows that the President is indeed the chief law enforcement officer o' the United States. Congress gets oversight and may investigate the executive in its law enforcement capacity, but other than impeachment and conviction, the ability o' Congress to interfere with considerable the discretion o' the President in matters o' law enforcement is largely limited to funding decisions. HA! Good Fun! ps keep in mind that originally there were no US Law Enforcement. we had fed judges created by Congress (1789) but initially the job o' attorney general were a part-time gig-- one guy advising Congress and the President. took 'bout one hundred years and the civil war to change things. fbi didn't get its start until early 1900. before the fbi we had US marshals and postal inspectors... not even customs and border protection until 1940s as each state handled its own customs inspection efforts and there were no real immigration policy. that the President were the chief law enforcement officer o' the US was largely meaningless for most o' US history.

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just a reminder, the trump boat attacks is one o' the only current issues on which trump is not substantial underwater... excuse the pun. a recent cbs poll had approval at 53%. yougov were more even spilt but still positive with 43% approval v. 42% disapproval. one excuse for the double-tap, 'corrding to Congressman tom cotton, were that the two survivors clinging to the capsized and still burning boat could conceivably have flipped it over, at which point they mighta' been able to get a radio working. with a working radio, the survivors possibly coulda' called for aid from their fellow narco-terrorists, narco-terrorists who woulda no doubt saved the waterlogged cocaine and delivered it to the US where it necessarily woulda' resulted in the deaths o' untold thousands in the US. as such, killing the survivors were not only justified but necessary to save americans from further drug deaths. republican response: prove it wouldn't have happened that way. edit: ... these people are freaking nuts. but again, most americans, either 'cause they is ignorant or callous, approve o' the boat strikes, so the current revelations about the double-tap events or where the drugs were actual headed changes nothing. maybe trump sacrifices hegseth or bradley, but am not seeing why the still-very-much-illegal-and-pointless boat strikes would end. welcome to the usa in 2025. HA! Good Fun!

it's legal(ish) and has been sop for years. is US fed law as well as UNCLOS and specific international agreements which give (enough) legal justification for drug inspections o' vessels on the high seas such that complaints o' lack o' jurisdiction has failed as a defense o' drug traffickers in both US and international courts time and again. also, ... The administration's lethal approach marks a huge shift from the traditional maritime interdictions the U.S. has long done. Those operations involve the U.S. Coast Guard intercepting a drug boat at sea, boarding the vessel, seizing the narcotics, arresting the crew and bringing them back to the U.S. to face prosecution. The U.S. Coast Guard works off information gathered from U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community sources. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has a hand in detection, monitoring and coordination. "We used to call it a self-licking ice cream cone," said one former FBI official who worked transnational crime and maritime interdictions. "You stop a boat, you get the bad guys, you use the leverage of prosecuting them to turn them into cooperators." Investigators would use those cooperators to intercept more drug boats, arrest more low-level traffickers, leverage some of them into cooperators to get more intelligence. This way, over time, the former FBI official said, investigators have been able to work their way up to cartel leadership. Even when the people detained on a boat didn't have information that helped in a prosecution, they often had tidbits that helped illuminate the cartel network, which American officials then use for intelligence purposes. "Forgetting the philosophy of whether killing people is right or wrong, when you kill them you can't talk to them. When you grab them, you can," one former senior DOJ official said. The information that leads to an interdiction comes from human sources as well as what's known as signals intelligence, or electronic surveillance. Current and former officials said in interviews that that information is generally accurate and reliable. It allows the Coast Guard, for example, to put a cutter at a precise location of a drug boat in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, which is roughly the size of the continental United States. The current and former officials said the intelligence isn't always 100% accurate. Sometimes the vessel the Coast Guard intercepts is a resupply boat carrying food and fuel for the traffickers, not the actual drugs. Still, the intelligence that allows the Coast Guard to be in the right place is often built upon a piece of information provided by a human source, which then allows the U.S. government to put its vast electronic spying powers to good use. These officials said blowing up boats instead of interdicting them will have a compound effect over time on the quality of intelligence. With the lethal strikes, the U.S. is no longer gathering phones and other electronics off of crew arrested on the high seas, nor is the U.S. questioning the low-level drug runners about who and what they know about the broader trafficking network. "You need something to tell you where to look," the former DOJ official said. "If you're killing all these people, you just dried up the human intelligence." ... again, the coast guard has been stopping, searching and questioning those on the suspected drug boats for many years, typical with the cooperation o' south american, caribbean and european nations, 'cause particular in the case o' venezuelan drugs (cocaine) the drugs is more likely bound to end up in caribbean and euro nations than the US. often the drug boats is destroyed by the coast guard, but only after the people and drugs is removed from the vessels. in spite o' the fact the boats is being stopped often many thousands o' miles remote from the US, the drug interdictions has ordinary been the task o' the coast guard, although the overall efficacy o' the operations has been... suspect. ... As the intelligence dwindles, the U.S. government's understanding of the cartels, their money laundering networks, supply chains and business strategies will start to go dark. In the past, the OCDETF-led interdiction model intercepted around 4% to 6% of known maritime cocaine shipments annually on non-commercial vessels. In fiscal year 2023, for example, the rate was 3.71%, according to a Department of Homeland Security watchdog report from February. This fall, the Trump administration shuttered OCDETF, and transferred its cases to new Homeland Security Task Forces jointly run by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations. For those who spent years working on combating drug cartels, there's deep skepticism that the Trump administration's new policy of military strikes will be prevent more drugs from reaching America. "All this strategy is doing is killing people and the same amount of drugs is getting into the U.S.," the former senior DOJ official said. "You didn't save anybody or increase the number of people you're saving in the U.S. It's extraordinarily shortsighted and I don't think it gets you the goal you want." ... the recent shift in policy and practice appears on its face to be performative. at least if there were some kinda compelling argument or evidence that blowing up drug boats headed for trinidad and tobago is saving american lives, you could see a rationale for engaging in lethal interdictions, but that ain't the case. recall, the US sent people to cecot w/o due process. explanation for cecot efforts were that tren de aragua is not just a terrorist organization, but is an active para-military group active involved in the downfall o' the US. if trump had been successful, he coulda' sent anybody he disliked to cecot or someplace similar, 'cause sans due process, explanations and justifications is replaced with faith in the administration. the boat strikes is an effort to do something similar to cecot and is arguable worse 'cause as bad as cecot is, summary executions means there is no way to correct mistakes. trump doesn't provide proof before the maritime murders take place and the justification for the killings is that narco terrorists is involved in what amounts to military actions directed at the US. the double-tap clap trap is a kinda red herring 'cause it ignores the complete lack o' legitimacy o' the boat strikes. am bothered by the focus on the double-tap accusations because doing so means you are already pretending as if the people being murdered on suspected drug boats is analogous to enemy sailors who is fighting a war with the US, a claim which is transparent false and... stoopid. if rando fisherman working for drug cartels in venezuela may be subject to summary executions 'cause drugs are bad and americans die because of drugs, then try and imagine who else and where else trump could do murder w/o needing proof o' any kinda crime. the only thing slowing down the administration's authoritarian efforts is their utter incompetence... a fact which is not near as reassuring as we would hope. 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Trump’s attack on DEI may hurt college men, particularly White men Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data shows. Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal antidiscrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses. But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. HA! Good Fun!

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am sudden realizing am having been imagining rl shady all wrong HA! Good Fun!

tom stoppard

gonna suggest it were likely less insecurity than incompetence. no survivors meant that there were nobody alive to contradict the dangerous narco-terrorist narrative concocted by the trump administration. is no 4-d chess being played by trump and his lackeys. general incompetence is the main thing holding this administration back from far more terrible outcomes, not that the current reality is benign. even so, we don't even wanna imagine how bad the situation might be if william barr were still running doj and if a competent secdef were in place at the pentagon. am guessing steven miller and trump wanted images o' dead venezuelan narco terrorists, and hegseth made it happen sans any genuine consideration o' legalities or consequences. a legal memo rationalizing the attacks weren't created until after the first murders happened. hegseth, being the wünderb00b that he is, decided on the following plan: caedite eos. novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius... 'cause he likely saw on a t-shirt or has it tattooed somewhere on his body. the reasons and explanations for the boat attacks were cobbled together after the fact by people smarter than hegseth. however, once a half dozen boats were hit, and a couple dozen people were murdered, the trump administration realized that there weren't a need to coverup evidence 'cause americans didn't f'ing care. multiple media outlets reported that there were no chance fantanyl were being smuggled on the boats being sunk and that as often as not, the people on the boats were ordinary local fishermen who were transporting cocaine to supplement their meager incomes. but nobody cared. as such, people with actual firing neurons realized that as long as the US didn't arrest and put survivors o' boat attacks on trial, the survivors could be sent home to venezuela and the trump narrative could be perpetuated on fox news w/o any counter-factual to muddy their propaganda efforts. is no need to murder survivors. incompetence v. insecurity... recognizing that they ain't mutual exclusive. HA! Good Fun!

up to aurora, we use argenta as a sniper. the rest o' the game am going flamer(s). argenta and heinrix, played as their kinda defaults, become cheat characters by mid game and although a flamer argenta isn't that much weaker than bolter, she feels a tiny bit less cheaty and so am able to add her to our party with our conscience unblemished. keep in mind, am not pretending as if our feels make sense, but given owlcat's writing efforts coupled with the intentional ludicrousness o' the setting, playing rogue trader complete reasonable and rational would be a comical self-own. HA! Good Fun! ps a respec after each major patch is kinda de rigueur at this point, although am not sure if the aoe psyker staff powers being treated as dodgeable melee attacks is intended or not. regardless, am recalling how a few people in this thread went nuts when obsidian considered adding respec to pillars. how bob's use o' respec could ruin doug's game confused us even at the time, but regardless, am amused there were nary a peep about owlcat's wrath or rogue trader respec from the purists.

hmmm why do you suggest the shooter is "unstable"? am sure not going so far as to suggest that the cia were the responsible party for claimed instability. am not certain o' the shooter's background and motivations such that am comfortable making such an observation. the shooter's actions were vile and unforgivable, but is too easy to dismiss him as unstable and somehow blame the cia appears knee-jerk at best. sans info, could just as easily imagine that the taliban, or the shooter's parents were responsible for shaping rahmanullah lakanwal. also, is too easy to dismiss bad actions as the result o' instability. @Guard Dog claimed he would shoot cops if they came onto his property to take his rusty chainsaw. unstable? maybe, but gd had convinced himself that shooting otherwise innocent people doing their duty were worth the human cost 'cause there were a greater principle involved. crackpot? wingnut? maybe, but we don't see gd as particular monstrous or unhinged even if a few o' his beliefs is fodder for the lunatic fringe. nevertheless, if gd had shot a cop in defense o' his chainsaw, it would be convenient and popular to dismiss his actions as monstrous and insane. too easy. label as unstable and monstrous means it is safe for average americans to dismiss an act or actor as unique and exceptional. am always warning people to wait after these situations where what we do not know far outweighs what we do know. almost nobody looks foolish by waiting a week. waiting means that a few yahoos get the chance to set the narrative, which is maybe important if you are a politician, but for anybody else is there an excuse? how many times has we seen on this board where Gromnir has been able to i told you so the folks who got out in front of facts and came to bad conclusions based on paucity o' information? am not certain o' the shooter's motivations and what in his mind justified a husband and father o' five children to travel thousands of miles so that he could shoot national guardsman in dc. most murders is impulsive. in spite o' lack o' certainty, am willing to concede this shooting does not appear impulsive, so the shooter likely had reasons. better or worse than gd's rusty chainsaw defense? dunno. tps for afghanistani refugees were ended earlier this year. our government transformed many thousands o' documented immigrants into undocumented immigrants... 'cause. the reality is that ending tps o' people who had aided US efforts in afghanistan means that the US government is knowing murdering many people by sending them back to the tender mercies o' the taliban. is not a "well, maybe... " kinda situation. send many back to afghanistan is a f'ing death sentence. D.C. police to begin patrolling with National Guard after fatal attack contrary to trump claims o' no dc murders post deployment, there has been more than 60 homicides in dc since the national guard were deployed-- troops didn't eliminate violent crime. now, post shooting, dc cops is gonna be tasked with protecting the national guard troops. what? am suspecting the point o' the deployments in la, chicago and dc were to provoke a violent response, and that hasn't happened... unless you are bruce and you have been watching only fox and right-wing sources o' news. the wh has been waiting for violence, but instead o' summer 2020 protests, which were never as widespread or bad as they were depicted on fox, we got months o' images o' protesters wearing inflatable frog costumes, pastors being shot in the head with pepper balls and hundreds o' living banksy memes. given the reality, the wh has become desperate for a violent response they could seize on to amplify one o' their narratives o' fear, which is no doubt why they tried to prosecute sandwich guy and other stoopid. yeah, a fully vetted afghani refugee who had worked with the cia is not an ideal target for anti-immigrant ire, but that don't matter 'cause facts has never been particular important to the maga base. what is most terrible is that the wh narrative might work in part 'cause o' how @Hurlshotportrays the situation. if you are selling fear, then root causes become far less important than is is practical safety concerns. example: those cigarette boats hegseth ordered destroyed weren't anywhere near the US when they were attacked by US forces, and if they were carrying drugs it were likely cocaine 'cause venezuela don't send fentanyl to the US. the mere possibility o' cocaine shipments, as likely to be heading to europe as the US, became the justification for US murder on the high seas? believe it or not, one o' the few things trump is doing that americans approve of is the murder o' "narco-terrorists." an "unstable" and violent immigrant killing national guardsman on the streets o' dc is gonna make steven miller and trump efforts to end non european immigration and to possible expel non-white immigrants more or less likely? the only thing which surprises us is that it has taken this long for somebody to provide the excuse the wh has been looking for since they first sent troops to la in june. 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