Gromnir

miller's family didn't exactly come over on the mayflower... arrived in 1903 after fleeing russian pogroms. am having mentioned how US refugee laws didn't come into being until post ww2. given his family background, you would think miller would have some kinda empathy for immigrants and refugees. counter to star trek visions o' the future, am suspecting prejudice and bigotry is fundamental to the human condition. when afraid, social predators seem to have an instinct to attack perceived weakness from within the group, though admitted, cultural, racial and religious differences equating weakness is a distinct human perversion. in any event, nativism, as a distinct flavour o' bigotry, has reared its ugly head a number o' times in US history. extreme income inequality and fundamental changes in the labor force is common characteristics o' rising nativism. https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3432# in the late 1890s, +40% o' the US population lived and worked on farms. by 1920, the agriculture accounted for ~1/4 o' the US workforce. at the same time, while the economy were s'posed booming, from a practical pov, most people were getting poorer. rise in political populism blame o' immigrants for all woes nostalgia for "traditional" values etc. just as the US never brought back all those family farms, the lost manufacturing jobs ain't coming back to the states, and ai is gonna disappear many entry-level white collar jobs young people has counted on for decades. an eat the rich moment is coming for the tech oligarchs if the income inequality issue ain't addressed, and no amount o' social media manipulation is gonna convince people that everything is wonderful when they cannot afford minimal health insurance and rent. given how similar is the economic and social reality o' 2020s US when compared to the 1920s, spawning objectively hypocritical and ridiculous proto fascists such as miller is perhaps a feature as opposed to an aberration o' the times we find ourselves. HA! Good Fun!

yeah, just imagine what frank sinatra might say to stephen miller. late 1800s and early 1900s US nativism has been forgotten by too many. let's hope it don't take another world war to once again snap us out o' our collective stoopid. HA! Good Fun!

gonna suggest J. Kavanaugh's efforts to retcon earlier stoopid is significant not only 'cause he is attempting to fix an error (not that a Justice is gonna readily admit a mistake,) but such inelegant gaslighting represents the possibility o' a shift in the Forces of Evil on the Court. judicial deference to legislative and executive prerogatives is a Court virtue and has been the explicit and assumed (given all the shadow docket nonsense, we are left guessing at reasons far too often) rationale for scotus' time and time again refusal to intervene in cases o' executive branch excess. however, when exercised w/o wisdom and common sense, the Court's faith in the motives and behaviors o' individuals such as trump, kristi noem and stephen miller is revealed to be not only imprudent, but also complicit. if one or two additional members o' the Court come to the realization that they need not be deaf, dumb and blind, then perhaps there is hope for more enlightened scotus rulings in the near future. please note am leaning extreme hard on equivocation. am not seeing one footnote as evidence o' a sea change, but if you are looking for hope... HA! Good Fun!

cthulhu and ghatanothoa got nothing on the south park guys for instilling outrage and horror amongst the faithful. warning: am personal able to see the humor, but am also able to understand the outrage the song inspires in "good" christians. you have been warned. nevertheless, in spite o' our descent into sacrilege, am genuine wishing a merry christmas and happy holidays to all. HA! Good Fun!

the leaked email which were the impetus for the current 60 minutes bruhaha specifically references your déjà vu. "CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones." ... just as an aside, 'cause the point keeps being ignored/overlooked, but the people sent to cecot by the US were not deported. w/o due process we transported residents o' the US to a dystopian hell hole where they were to serve sentences for an indeterminate duration. we paid a central american dictator millions o' dollars to incarcerate and torture people-- not deportations. trump correct recognized that americans wouldn't care if he made theatre outta cruelty as long as those suffering were part o' a disreputable them. a few hundred venezuelans? so what? they were possibly gang members and they weren't american citizens regardless. virtual nobody were gonna rush to the defense of them. additional aside bob dole literal fought nazis in europe. this generation is increasingly nazi curious? HA! Good Fun!

WATCH: The 60 Minutes CECOT Segment - by Allison Gill

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!