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bolverk

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by bolverk

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/us/politics/trump-education-department.html?smid=url-share
  2. "Jesus Loves the Little Children" is WOKE!
  3. @horn4life @Captainant This article from today is focused solely on Canadian visitors and New York, but it does indicate we should expect a slowdown in international tourism. Some key quotes and figures from the article: Canadians spent $600 million in NYC in 2024 and $1.7 billion across NY state in 2023 (the last year for which state data are available). About 16,000 more Canadians visited NYC in 2024 than in 2019, despite a weak Canadian dollar, showing a recovery from the pandemic. Last month (Feb. 2024), the number of Canadians flying into NYC fell 11 percent. Last month, vehicle traffic crossing around Buffalo had already fallen 14% compared to Feb 2023. To the east, traffic on the Thousand Islands Bridge dropped 19%. The travel agency Flight Centre Travel Group Canada reported a 40 percent decline in leisure travel bookings to the United States in February, compared with the same month last year, as well as an increase in cancellations on previously booked trips.
  4. The article ends with a great line: β€œThe more power they grasp,” Wynn-Williams writes of Facebook’s leadership, β€œthe less responsible they become.”
  5. Before responding to Denison, I'll await the expose, uncovering instances of Islamophobia and the targeting of Palestinians in and around college campuses across the country, such as the two cases in which Islamic students were physically assaulted in separate incidents, as well as a third one where meatheads who claimed to be IDF soldiers barged into and threatened attendees at a university-sanctioned meeting of a group of pro-Palestinian students (which occurred well before the protests), and finally where two TAs were fired by the university contrary to policy following that event: On Oct. 12, students with the Palestine Solidarity Committee held an event on UT-Austin’s campus to discuss the history and context of the war. Roughly an hour into the event three men, who appeared to be unaffiliated with the university, disrupted the meeting and began intimidating students, calling them β€œfucking terrorists.” The students, shaken by the event, called on the university to condemn the harassment. The university stayed silent, which students said felt particularly deafening after President Jay Hartzell sent a message to the UT-Austin community the next day announcing increased security for Jewish groups on campus. Shortly after, a student approached Daghighi and Kennedy, who were working as teaching assistants in a course titled β€œWomen and Madness,” asking if they could address the mental health needs of Palestinian and Arab students on campus. The two worked with course professor Lauren Gulbas on the letter and sent it to students on Nov. 16. β€œThe message fully aligned with the scope of the course and our responsibility as teaching assistants,” Kennedy said. The letter addressed the Oct. 12 harassment incident and concluded by declaring that β€œwe firmly support the rights and autonomy of Palestinians, Indigenous people, and displaced peoples across the globe.” One day later, Gulbas informed Daghighi and Kennedy that a student in the class had filed a grievance with School of Social Work Dean Allan Cole regarding the statement. The three met, but before they had an opportunity to address the class, Cole dismissed Daghighi and Kennedy from their positions with pay. Cole said they would not be reinstated as teaching assistants the following semester. Talk to me when you're equally committed to protecting all races, genders, religions, etc., from bigotry -- and not just individual cases but also (or especially) systematic and institutional ones.
  6. Corruption. Donald Trump Jr. Mixes Business and Politics in Serbia, as Protests There Rage President Trump’s oldest son visited Belgrade, the site of a Trump International Hotel project, and pushed back on calls for the country’s president to resign. The protests against President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia had been growing in intensity and size when an unusual guest showed up in its capital this month to meet with the embattled European leader: Donald Trump Jr., the oldest son of President Trump. The quick visit by Mr. Trump, which included a meeting with Mr. Vucic to talk about U.S. foreign aid to Serbia, came as the Trump family and Jared Kushner, the American president’s son-in-law, were moving ahead with plans to build a Trump International Hotel in Belgrade, the first such property in Europe. The hotel is slated to be built atop the site of the former Yugoslavian Ministry of Defense headquarters, which was bombed by NATO 26 years ago on land now owned by the Serbian government. Opposition leaders in Serbia have criticized the agreement and called for it to be terminated, raising the prospect that the deal could be scuttled in a change of power. Mr. Trump used the visit as an opportunity to express his support for Mr. Vucic β€” a trip that offered perhaps the most explicit mixing so far in President Trump’s second term of U.S. foreign policy and the Trump family’s financial interests. On Wednesday, the Serbian prime minister resigned, effectively bringing down the ruling party and forcing Mr. Vucic to form a new government or hold new parliamentary elections later this year, creating more uncertainty there. A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. dismissed any suggestion that his visit created a conflict of interest. The spokesman said the trip had been driven by a plan to interview Mr. Vucic for Mr. Trump’s podcast, not to step into foreign relations issues or the real-estate deal. cont'd
  7. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/us/trump-judges-threats.html President Trump’s angry call on Tuesday for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration on deportation flights has set off a string of near-instant social media taunts and threats, including images of judges being marched off in handcuffs. The call came against an ominous backdrop. Nine days earlier, police officers in Charleston, S.C., had been dispatched to the home of one of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s sisters because of a threat that there was a pipe bomb in her mailbox. β€œThe device’s detonation will be triggered as soon as the mailbox is next opened,” the emailed threat read. The pipe bomb proved to be a hoax, but the threats and intimidation faced by judges and their families in recent weeks are real, judges say. At a moment when the judiciary is weighing pivotal decisions on the legality of Trump administration policies, the potential for violence against judges seems to be rising. β€œI feel like people are playing Russian roulette with our lives,” said Judge Esther Salas of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son was shot and killed at her home in 2020 by a self-described β€œanti-feminist” lawyer. β€œThis is not hyperbole,” she added. β€œI am begging our leaders to realize that there are lives at stake.” The threats and intimidation may have not become actual violence, but they appear to be mounting, as Mr. Trump, his advisers and his supporters are questioning almost daily the legitimacy of the American legal system. There is no evidence that jurists’ judgment in the high-profile cases before them has been warped by their antagonists. But at the least, public perceptions of judicial decisions could be shaped by the volume of attacks on the courts. The attempts at intimidation have taken many forms: bomb threats, anonymous calls to dispatch police SWAT teams to home addresses, even the delivery of pizzas, a seemingly innocuous prank but one that carries a message. β€œThey know where you and your family members live,” said one judge who is overseeing litigation against the Trump administration and has received a pizza delivery. The judge requested anonymity, citing concerns for their own security and that of their family. cont'd
  8. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/health/kennedy-bird-flu.html Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, has an unorthodox idea for tackling the bird flu bedeviling U.S. poultry farms. Let the virus rip. Instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers β€œshould consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it,” Mr. Kennedy said recently on Fox News. He has repeated the idea in other interviews on the channel. Mr. Kennedy does not have jurisdiction over farms. But Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, also has voiced support for the notion. β€œThere are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Ms. Rollins told Fox News last month. Yet veterinary scientists said letting the virus sweep through poultry flocks unchecked would be inhumane and dangerous, and have enormous economic consequences. β€œThat’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” said Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas. Since January 2022, there have been more than 1,600 outbreaks reported on farms and backyard flocks, occurring in every state. More than 166 million birds have been affected. Every infection is another opportunity for the virus, called H5N1, to evolve into a more virulent form. Geneticists have been tracking its mutations closely; so far, the virus has not developed the ability to spread among people. But if H5N1 were to be allowed to run through a flock of five million birds, β€œthat’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Dr. Hansen said. Large numbers of infected birds are likely to transmit massive amounts of the virus, putting farm workers and other animals at great risk. β€œSo now you’re setting yourself up for bad things to happen,” Dr. Hansen said. β€œIt’s a recipe for disaster.” cont'd
  9. I'm not going to argue the merits of your case other than to say ethnic cleansing is not my "parlance." It's exactly what you call making a group leave an area, either through force or coercion. Anyone who argues Palestinians should leave their homeland land, where they've been living for thousands of years, is in favor of ethnic cleansing. Rex, statsman, Frank Drebin (fka Johnny Sack), and a number of other posters on this site have made their positions clear: they support kicking the Palestinians out of their homeland and are no better than the Germans who were silently satisfied during the Holocaust.
  10. Read the Guardian article (quick read) in the link below, and you'll see Bouie hits the nail on the head quite succinctly. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/19/chuck-schumer-trump-book
  11. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/19/us/jfk-assassination-files Here’s what to know. For years, the assumption β€” held by conspiracy theorists and many historians alike β€” was that the final tranche of documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy was being kept under wraps because it might reveal damning evidence showing that Kennedy was not assassinated by a lone gunman in Dallas. But with the release over the past 24 hours of what the Trump administration said was the last of the documents held by the National Archives, including many no longer weighed down by blotted out paragraphs and sentences, it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the decision to keep them from public view: protecting the sources and methods of U.S. intelligence gathering operations. The roughly 63,400 documents released in two phases on Tuesday night are still being reviewed, so it’s an open question if they contain undiscovered information. But judging by one standard β€” those items that are no longer redacted β€” the real concern seemed to be more pedestrian: masking the names of C.I.A. agents and informants, agency intelligence gathering operations directed at U.S. allies, and the location of various C.I.A. stations and even their budgets. The C.I.A. has always been very protective of the way it works. That is understandable given the nature of its mission β€” but also because of its history of at times unsavory practices. (Case in point: the Bay of Pigs) But this could help to explain the shambolic nature of the release of documents. Piles of uncategorized documents were dumped into the public arena in two tranches after President Trump abruptly announced on Monday that they would be released the next day. β€œThe holdup was not because of the smoking guns that would help us understand Lee Harvey Oswald’s role in the assassination,” said Timothy Naftali, an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a former director of the Nixon presidential library. β€œIt’s because ensnared in these documents were the sources and methods. We were intercepting message from Egypt during the Nasser era! That has nothing to do with who killed Kennedy.” The latest release of dry government documents, diplomatic cables, handwritten notes and blurry photocopies offered no major revelations, at least at first glance. But scholars held out hope that the documents might expose new details or at least shed light on persistent questions about an event that traumatized a nation and remains the subject of conspiracy theories six decades later. Here’s what else to know: Kennedy criticism: Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of President John F. Kennedy, criticized the release of the new trove of government files about the assassination and the news media’s coverage of it in a series of social media posts. He also said that the Trump administration did not give anyone in President Kennedy’s family a β€œhead’s up” before the documents were released. Read more β€Ί Difficult reading: The documents released Tuesday were not categorized or presented in any organized way and, in some cases, they were blurred and difficult to read. That no doubt reflects their age β€” many of them were typed or handwritten a half-century ago β€” but also that they appear to be the end result of repeated photocopying of originals. Persistent doubts: Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and nothing in the archives is going to dispel the swirling fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation. Read more β€Ί [spoilered below] Three killings: The latest records were released through an executive order signed by Mr. Trump in January. That order also directed the nation’s security agencies to disclose any remaining documents related to the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. So far, no new information is apparent. Read more β€Ί Good read:
  12. I see that statsman is still on the ethnic cleansing train, even more so than the typical Israeli. Israelis Take to Streets a Day After Gaza Strikes Israeli protests are converging over the war in Gaza and domestic politics amid concerns about a government push to reduce the power of state watchdogs. Thousands of Israelis gathered on Wednesday outside the Parliament building in Jerusalem to call for a renewed cease-fire deal in Gaza and to protest political moves by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including firing the head of the Shin Bet intelligence agency. The convergence of popular anger over both domestic and national security issues came a day after Israel carried out deadly aerial attacks across the Gaza Strip in what Mr. Netanyahu said was β€œonly the beginning.” The strikes ended a temporary truce with Hamas that began in January and added to the uncertainty over the fate of hostages still held there. The broad sense of national solidarity over the war in Gaza, which was set off on Oct. 7, 2023, by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, appears to be fraying. Critics accuse Mr. Netanyahu of placing his political survival and bolstering his right-wing government ahead of the country’s best interests. The Israeli leader appears to be emboldened by the broad backing of President Trump, who has shown little opposition to his approach in Gaza. Despite its strong support for Israel, the Biden administration periodically pushed Israel to do more to avoid civilian casualties in the territory and to alleviate the humanitarian crisis there. The Trump administration appeared to back Israel’s decision to resume wide-scale attacks, with the White House saying Israel had consulted with the United States before launching its assault. This month the Trump administration bypassed Congress to send Israel $4 billion in arms and floated a new cease-fire proposal that breaks significantly with the deal signed in January. Opinion polls indicate that a majority of Israelis favor a complete cessation of hostilities in Gaza to secure the release of up to 24 living hostages and the bodies of more than 30 others still in Gaza. But politically, Mr. Netanyahu depends on far-right members of his governing coalition who have been pressing for a resumption of fighting, with the goal of fully defeating Hamas. cont'd:
  13. Sounds like the title to a They Might Be Giants song.
  14. I'm half-convinced 52-80 *is* Ian Miles Cheong.
  15. I'm quickly learning to be wary of trauma counselors. "Shofner is a trained Christian life coach who seeks to empower women in recovery from traumatic experiences."
  16. Oh, yeah, the whole Obama executive order thing. I remember that particular rant being a big one amongst the crowd that used to dominate the old CR back in the day when I dipped my toes in these waters. Obviously, that once-popular topic went away immediately in January 2017 for some reason. For context, Trump made more executive orders annually during his first term than any president after Carter. And he issued 26 on his first day of this one.
  17. Rex cares most about his wallet, and the ONLY reason Rex doesn't like Trump is he's bad for business. Rex is perfectly fine with everything else.
  18. A day or two ago, NPR interviewed the mother of one of the Venezuelans, and she said her son agreed to sign a deportation form (I don't know exactly what that is, but you probably do), thinking they would send him back to Venezuela with the understanding that "surely, the United States would respect human rights." She claimed he had no criminal record and had never been a member of any gang. Sure, that could very well be a "he's a good kid" kind of thing, but the reporter indicated that the regime had admitted many of them did not have criminal records. All of the above might not be new news since I haven't followed this particular story closely other than what I've read here on Surly.
  19. Wordle 1,369 3/6 πŸŸ©β¬›πŸŸ©β¬›β¬› πŸŸ©β¬›πŸŸ©πŸŸ©β¬› 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Connections Puzzle #647 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 πŸŸͺπŸŸͺπŸŸͺπŸŸͺ πŸ™‚ Daily Quordle 1150 4️⃣7️⃣ 6️⃣5️⃣ m-w.com/games/quordle/ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜🟨🟨⬜🟨 ⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜🟨⬜🟩⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ 🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
  20. Come get all your new, red-hot reaction gifs.
  21. I'm not sure Kristol was ever on the Trump train. I remember when my dad would hush the kitchen table when the guy came on the teevee during the 1980s. Later, after 26 years of Fox News conditioning, he thought he was a RINO. Anyway, Kristol, as an actual conservative with conviction, has been critical of Trump for years. But, yeah, I don’t disagree.
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