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Posted
1 hour ago, mchookem said:

i recently learned this one... anacyclosis. fun.

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Thanks, I've been referring to that pattern from old memory. Nice to see it laid out.

Our mistake was seeing it as evolutionary and arriving at last to the stable form of democracy.

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Posted
shutdown cbs !!!!
 
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I wanted to watch the 60 Minutes piece but also wanted an anxiety-free Sunday night so it’s saved for tomorrow. But now I’m even more excited.

It feels like we’re watching a crazy person come completely unhinged, and unfortunately, that crazy person is currently our president. He’s a bully picking fights with anyone and everyone and eventually he’s going to find himself on the losing end of things.
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Posted
10 hours ago, wild_turkey said:


I wanted to watch the 60 Minutes piece but also wanted an anxiety-free Sunday night so it’s saved for tomorrow. But now I’m even more excited.

It feels like we’re watching a crazy person come completely unhinged, and unfortunately, that crazy person is currently our president. He’s a bully picking fights with anyone and everyone and eventually he’s going to find himself on the losing end of things.

Eventually 

Posted
On 4/13/2025 at 12:43 AM, BurdineBandit said:

I watch a lot, and this week was absolutely over the top. He usually gets a few seconds of a recorded walk in, definitely gets shown on the ringside celeb cam a couple times, but this week giving him a fucking walk in with a couple minutes of uninterrupted screen time and fuckin Tulsi and Kash and Brain Worms and Elon getting screen time and fawned over? Straight knob-slobbing going on over at UFC these days. 

Last summer I went to a sports bar to watch a Longhorn baseball game with some buddies.  Unbeknownst to us, there was a big UFC fight that night that overlapped with the game.  I will never forget the reaction of that packed bar when they showed Trump on the broadcast.  One of my first "holy shit, he really might win" moments.

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Posted (edited)

Above the Law taking this opportunity to absolutely roast the law firms that chose to bend the knee to Trump:

Some choice bits (https://abovethelaw.com/2025/04/pray-i-dont-alter-it-any-further-what-darth-vader-should-teach-law-firms-about-settling-with-trump/:

Quote

With that, every Gen Xer and elder Millennial Star Wars fan learned that if you make a deal under duress with a retaliatory government official to save your business, you are a hopeless chump and will get systematically rolled. It was a raw demonstration of what happens when you negotiate with someone who doesn’t believe in the concept of negotiation.

Biglaw firms striking deals with the Trump administration to — theoretically — “protect” their firm or their clients from government interference, missed this lesson. These firms — Paul Weiss, Willkie, Skadden, Milbank (and potentially more to come) — now enter their Lando Era, watching the administration heap daily humiliation upon them while continually altering the deal to the firms’ detriment.

Who could’ve seen this coming except everyone?

Quote

But the important thing each of these firms want you to know is that this was a professional deal among very serious people conducted at a very serious boardroom table and not, in fact, the legal equivalent of getting choked out mid-sentence. And that it’s patently unfair that radical agitators — like, well, Above the Law — characterize these deals as “surrender” or “bending the knee.” No one seriously involved in these deals would say something like that! Let’s check in on the OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE TAKE:

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that “Big Law continues to bend the knee to President Trump because they know they were wrong, and he looks forward to putting their pro bono legal concessions toward implementing his America First agenda.”

The White House is the one saying “bend the knee!” Forget Star Wars, this is some Game of Thrones ass shit. 

 

Quote

Trump has proposed using the free legal services that the firms thought they’d committed to conservative-friendly — but that would nonetheless remain causes of the firms’ choosing — to handle coal leases for the administration’s proposed CoalPunk AI revolution and to negotiate tariff deals… before he realized tariffs were tanking the economy. It’s not just Trump speaking out of advanced dementia either, with Stephen Miller, who relishes his role as a Stormtrooper, echoing this sentiment describing the deals as part of an initiative to bank a billion in free legal services. Meanwhile, a Heritage Foundation group has approached the surrender firms asking for free legal work and citing their Trump pledges.

So far the law firms aren’t acknowledging these alterations to the deal. But the White House remains very clear:

“Assign.”

GREAT WORK, IDIOTS!

 

Edited by Gap03
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Posted
50 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Shapiro arsonist and Stephen Miller separated at birth?

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Ho-hum.  Just more stochastic terrorism.

But you know what the REAL problem is?

People writing op-eds saying "maybe don't genocide Palestinians" and people boycotting buying Teslas.  

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Posted

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/13/tufts-student-rumeysa-ozturk-rubio-trump/

https://archive.ph/Eswov

Spoiler
Days before masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk to deport her, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.
 
 
The finding, contained in a March memo that was described to The Washington Post, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for revoking Ozturk’s visa under an authority empowering the top U.S. diplomat to safeguard the foreign policy interests of the United States.
The memo, written by an office within the State Department, raises doubts about the public accusations made by the Trump administration as it has sought to justify Ozturk’s deportation. The Department of Homeland Security has said Ozturk engaged in activities “in support of Hamas,” a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, but neither that agency nor U.S. prosecutors have provided evidence for that claim.
 
 
The revocation of Ozturk’s visa is part of an expanding crackdown on international students and scholars by the Trump administration including hundreds of visa revocation cases. She was taken into custody March 25.
Ozturk, a 30-year-old doctoral student from Turkey, was targeted by the government for co-writing an op-ed last year in the Tufts student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to the Israel-Gaza war. A hearing in Ozturk’s case is scheduled for Monday in federal court in Vermont. Her lawyers say her possible deportation would violate the United States’ founding principles of freedom of speech.
When asked about the memo, the State Department said “we do not comment on ongoing or pending litigation.”
 
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
DHS originally recommended the revocation of Ozturk’s visa under an authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows for the deportation of a foreigner if the secretary of state has reasonable grounds to believe the person’s presence or activities has “adverse policy consequence for the United States,” according to a copy of a separate memo reviewed by The Post and sent by DHS to the State Department before her detention last month.
 
“OZTURK engaged in anti-Israel activism in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israelis on October 7, 2023,” says the memo, from senior DHS official Andre Watson to senior State Department official John Armstrong.
 
“Specifically,” Watson’s memo says, Ozturk “co-authored an Op-ed article” that “called for Tufts to ‘disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.’”
After receiving the recommendation from DHS, the State Department found that while Ozturk had protested Tufts’ relationship with Israel, neither DHS nor ICE nor Homeland Security investigations produced any evidence showing that Ozturk has engaged in antisemitic activity or made public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization, according to U.S. government employees briefed on the State Department’s memo.
 
The memo also said that a search of U.S. government databases on Ozturk did not produce any terrorism-related information about her.
As a result of the lack of evidence, the department said she could be deported using a different authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows for the revocation of a visa at the secretary of state’s discretion.
 
Legal analysts say a key difference between the two authorities at Rubio’s disposal is that the original one “requires a rationale and explanation and evidence,” said Soulmaz Taghavi, an immigration attorney. But the authority ultimately used for Ozturk’s deportation does not.
 
“There’s a chain of communication that gets passed along to the attorney general, but there isn’t any requirement to justify or rationalize what exactly the removal” is based on, Taghavi said.
 
In a separate document dated March 21 and reviewed by The Post, the State Department informed DHS that the revocation of Ozturk’s visa had been “approved” under the discretionary authority.
“Due to ongoing ICE operations security, this revocation will be silent; the Department of State will not notify the subject of the revocation,” the memo says.
Video of Ozturk being grabbed off the streets of suburban Boston by plain-clothed agents drew international attention to her case and sparked widespread debate about suppression of speech by the Trump administration. At Tufts, Ozturk’s arrest drew intense criticism, including from a pro-Israel group on campus and Tufts Republicans.
 
“We strongly oppose the content of the op-ed that Öztürk coauthored last year,” read an op-ed by Tufts Friends of Israel, “... but restricting freedom of speech is flat-out undemocratic and un-American. Freedom of speech in a democracy is sacred. It ensures that dissent is heard and that people can express themselves — it is the best tool we have to fight tyranny. Right now, our freedom of speech is under attack.”
 
When asked about revoking Ozturk’s visa, Rubio has repeatedly suggested that her infractions go far beyond co-writing an opinion column in a student newspaper.
“I would caution you against solely going off of what the media has been able to identify,” he told reporters on a flight back to the U.S. from his recent meetings in the Caribbean.
 
In another exchange with reporters, he said Ozturk’s removal is “not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.”
There are no indications that Ozturk was a leader in last year’s protests at Tufts.
 
Rubio has broadly justified his visa revocations by claiming that the students who have been targeted supported Hamas and promulgated antisemitism.
 
When asked about Rubio’s justification given the State Department memo indicating a lack of evidence that Ozturk engaged in antisemitism, the State Department referred to a recent Rubio op-ed published by Fox News.
 
“Visiting America is not an entitlement,” it says. “It is a privilege extended to those who respect our laws and values. And, as Secretary of State, I will never forget that.”
In a recent sworn declaration submitted in her case, Ozturk said she did not know that the State Department had revoked her visa when she was apprehended.
She was on the phone with her mother when several men surrounded her on the sidewalk. After one of the men grabbed at her, she screamed.
“I didn’t think that they were the police because I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this,” Ozturk wrote in the declaration. “I thought this was a strange situation and was sure they were going to kill me.”
Ozturk was handcuffed, then chained at the waist and put in ankle shackles, she wrote.

 

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Posted
16 minutes ago, Pancho said:

“6’3 and 224lbs”

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Uh Huh Yes GIF

pretty sure the first digit is simply a typo (yes, I know that's not it). 324 looks way more like it.

Posted
1 hour ago, Longhorn_Fan68 said:

pretty sure the first digit is simply a typo (yes, I know that's not it). 324 looks way more like it.

it's not his weight, its his blood glucose. 

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Posted
48 minutes ago, Firemans4Horn said:

Oh, item number 755 for reasons he should be impeached:

 

 

Trump Administration at work ... allegedly ...

 

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Pancho said:

“6’3 and 224lbs”

image.thumb.png.538faf50dfc7bdbc8b3db522a2f086cc.png

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uh Huh Yes GIF

 

6-3 235 ....

 

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Edited by tx 3 putt
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Posted
53 minutes ago, Firemans4Horn said:

Oh, item number 755 for reasons he should be impeached:

 

 

Have they announced a premiere date for the First Son, First Blood yet? 

Posted

english fleet street opinions

Spoiler

guardian

It is difficult to imagine a post-American world. But imagine it we must
Nesrine Malik

The truth is, we were always dangerously overexposed to decisions made in Washington – consider this chaotic moment an opportunity
Mon 14 Apr 2025 01.00 EDT
Last modified on Mon 14 Apr 2025 05.42 EDT

“People speak with forked tongues about America,” a veteran foreign correspondent once said to me. It was a long time ago – during a debate about whether the US should intervene in a foreign conflict – and I have never forgotten it. What they meant was that just as the US is condemned for foreign intervention in some instances, it is also called upon to do so in others and then judged for not upholding its moral standards. That dissonance persists, and is even more jarring as we approach the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second term. There is a duality to how the US is seen: as both a country that wantonly violates international law and as the only one capable of upholding that system of law and order. This duality, always tense, is no longer sustainable.

I have felt this ambivalence myself – the contradictory demand that the US stay out of it but also anger that it is not doing more. In Sudan, Washington frustratingly refuses to pressure its ally, the UAE, into stopping pumping arms and funding into the conflict. But what proof or history is there to support the delusional notion that the US cares about a conflict in which it has no direct interest? It is an expectation of moral policing from an amoral player that I remember even in childhood, after Iraq invaded Kuwait and the Arab world was rocked with fear of regional war. A fierce debate in our classroom in Sudan on the merits of US intervention was silenced by one indignant evacuee from Kuwait, who said that the most important thing was to defeat Saddam Hussein. Her words occasionally echo in my mind: “We must deal with the greater evil first.”

Even in Gaza, as Congress passed package after package of billions in military aid to Israel, there remained some residual hope – long extinguished now – that the phone call to Benjamin Netanyahu would finally come. And even as Trump emboldens Vladimir Putin, abandons Ukraine and slaps tariffs on allies, you can detect that belief in the fundamental viability of the US as an actor that can still default to rationality, and even morality.

But, for the first time that I can remember, the conversation is going in a new direction. The appeals to the difference between the presidency and other more solid US institutions are quieter now, as universities, law firms and even parts of the press kowtow to their erratic new king. The questions now being asked are about how Europe and the rest of the world can pivot away from the US, from its USAID programmes nestled within the health budgets of developing countries, and its global system of military assistance and deterrence. But they sound less like practical suggestions and more like attempts to get heads around a reality that is impossible to countenance.

The challenge is technical and psychological. It is difficult to imagine a post-American world because America crafted that world. When the US becomes a volatile actor, the very architecture of the global financial order starts to wobble. We saw this in the crisis of confidence in the dollar in the aftermath of Trump’s “liberation-day” tariffs. The robustness of the rule of law and separation of powers – cornerstones of confidence in an economy – are also now in doubt, as the administration goes to war with its own judiciary and the president himself boasts about how many people in the room with him made a killing out of his stock market crash. Is it insider trading if your source is the president?

Just as formidable is the mental task of divestment from the US. A friend who holds a green card but lives under an illiberal regime in Asia told me that, deep down, he always felt protected from the dangers of his country’s domestic politics by the knowledge that there was a safe haven to which he could retreat in case of persecution. No longer, as legal residents and visitors are hounded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) or turned away at the border. I know others who have cancelled work trips to the US for fear of deportation or blacklisting. With that insecurity comes an awareness that, for some in the global south who always knew that the US was not a benign presence, there was still the belief that there was something within its own borders that curbed its excesses. This was partly true, but also a reflection of US cultural power. The pursuit of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, “give me … your huddled masses”, the Obama hope iconography; all resonant and powerful touchstones. They are now reduced to dust. It is one thing to know that the US was never the sum of these parts, but another to accept it.

And there is a fear in accepting it. Because, for all its violations, the advent of a post-US world induces a feeling of vertigo. A world in which there is no final authority at all might be scarier than a world where there is a deeply flawed one. What is daunting is the prospect of anarchy, a new world where there is no organising principle in a post-ideological, everyone-for-themselves system. Not a cold war order divided into capitalist, communist and non-aligned. And not a post-cold war one divided into western liberal overlords, competing non-democracies and, below them, smaller clients of both.

But what the US’s breakdown should really trigger is not overwhelm and bewilderment, but a project to build a new global order in which we all have a stake. What the US chooses to do in terms of foreign and economic policy can affect your shopping basket and the very borders of the nation state in which you live. It remains the world’s largest economy, has the world’s largest military, and is the home of the world’s most powerful entertainment complex. This centrality combined with its collapse reveals the fact that the problem goes deeper than Trump. The world was always dangerously overexposed to whatever direction the US took.

Ironically, this all might be the beginning of a process that leads to genuine “liberation days” for other countries, but not the US itself. There is pain ahead, but also a sort of independence. Above all, there might finally be a recognition that the US’s definition of peace and prosperity was always its own, enforced by sheer force of power and propaganda.

Spoiler

Brown on tariffs

The ‘new world order’ of the past 35 years is being demolished before our eyes. This is how we must proceed
Gordon Brown

We have seen the conflict and tragedy that can follow when an old era collapses. Countries that believe in multilateralism must come together now

Last modified on Sat 12 Apr 2025 11.58 EDT

After a week that started with the worst financial volatility in recent history and ended with the most serious escalation so far of the China-US conflict, it is time to distinguish the tectonic shifts from the tremors. If nothing changes, the 2020s risks being remembered as this century’s devil’s decade – the term historians once used for the 1930s. It will be defined not just by seven million people who have died of Covid-19 and rising global poverty and inequality – but also by a dismembered Ukraine, a burnt-out Gaza and little-reported atrocities in Africa and Asia, each testimony to the violent displacement of a rules-based global order by a power-based one.

Indeed, before our eyes, every single pillar of the old order is under assault – not just free trade but the rule of law and the primacy we have long attached to human rights and democracy, the self-determination of peoples, and multilateral cooperation between nations, including the humanitarian and environmental responsibilities we once accepted as citizens of the world.

Power shifts are, of course, the stuff of history. Within the space of two centuries, four world orders have risen and fallen. The first two – the balance of power that emerged after the defeat of Napoleon in the early 19th century, and the post-1918 Treaty of Versailles system born after four dynastic empires collapsed – ultimately ended in the carnage of world wars. Then came the post-1945 architecture, led by the US and the United Nations; and, after 1990 with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, what US president George HW Bush called a “new world order”.

Now, as the economic balance of power shifts eastwards and a new mercantilism takes root, what was once called the Washington consensus is no longer supported anywhere – least of all in Washington. Globalisation is now rejected by millions as a “free for all” that has not been fair to all. It is not open trade but the opposite – restrictions on trade – now being popularised as a nation’s route to prosperity.

President Trump’s tactical ploy has been to exploit the profound shifts that were already reshaping the world’s geopolitics: first, the yawning gap between the benefits that globalisation promised and what it delivered in people’s everyday lives, and so he has become the world’s leading anti-globalist. He also saw how, turbo-charged by social media blitzes landing nonstop via people’s phones, he could resurrect the “great man” theory of history – Putin, Xi, Erdoğan and Kim Jong-un having shown him that populist but dictatorial leaders could set the agenda.

But Trump’s sheer unpredictability foreshadows even greater danger ahead. “Let chaos reign and don’t rein in the chaos” seems to be the mantra, and while there may be a lingering hope that something like normal governance might resume soon, this can no longer be a rational basis for anyone’s future planning. Instead, with both the US and China taking risks in accelerating their confrontation to new levels, the question is whether we are descending towards a “one world, two systems” future, or simply the chaotic disorder that has characterised the history of most previous centuries – and whether there is now any chance of building a world order that could ever be stable and sustainable.

What’s clear after recent events is that the fourth global order cannot be restored. We are not only in a more protectionist era but are moving from a unipolar world where the US was the sole hegemonic power to one that has many more centres of decision-making power. But because we are also a more interconnected world, we are more vulnerable to crises – from pandemics and climate emergencies to financial contagion. All the more so because countries can, as we saw this week, weaponise that interdependence and the choke points it creates for their own advantage. So if we are to have anything approaching a values-based order we will have at some point to agree an updated global charter for our common future, something that builds on the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the UN Charter of 1945, but is geared to a completely different century.

As William Beveridge said at that time: “A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching.” Over the past few days, calls for multilateral cooperation have come from the leaders of Spain, Brazil and South Africa, this year’s chairs of three global conferences: the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development, the 30th UN climate change conference and the G20. “As a collective we must now unite to enforce international law,” the Malaysian prime minister and Colombian and South African presidents have written. “The choice is stark: either we act together to enforce international law or we risk its collapse.”

All countries that believe in international cooperation should pledge that through a new multilateralism this generation will deliver global solutions to what are now inescapably global problems that cannot be resolved by nation states acting on their own or in bilateral deals alone. Second, as building blocks of that future, this collation of the willing should immediately engage in practical cooperation on urgent concerns for which no nation state-only answers are possible – global security, climate, health and humanitarian needs as well as the flow of trade. They should work to modernise the international institutions that deliver them.
Trump is pushing the world towards recession. By learning the lessons of 2008, we can still prevent it | Gordon Brown
Read more

And third, we should try to build a bridgehead to sceptics such as Trump by agreeing with him on the need for reciprocity and for fair burden-sharing between nations; and because this is a debt-laden world we should propose innovative and equitable ways to raise the resources needed to turn these commitments into action. By addressing the failures of the era of hyper-globalisation, we can all strive for a world that is not only open to trade but inclusive of all those who have been left behind.

Two hundred years ago, in similarly momentous times, a British leader called “a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old” , and the lesson of history is that any new order that endures has to be built on the solid rock of principle and not the shifting sands of expediency and the narrowest interpretation of national self-interests.

At the heart of the Atlantic Charter, the Roosevelt-inspired declaration of international cooperation, was a set of principles celebrating basic freedoms – against the use of force and protectionism, and for the self-determination of nations and national social contracts that would bridge the divide between rich and poor. Even if none of these goals are, as of now, championed by Trump, all is not lost: according to the US Global Leadership Coalition, 82% of Americans oppose isolationism, believing that the US is stronger when “engaged in the world”. And while the US can no longer lead a unipolar world by dictating to others, it can lead a multipolar world through persuasion.

Sadly, despite Keir Starmer’s valiant efforts, none of us can now guarantee that Ukraine – and its resources – will not be carved apart, emboldening autocrats everywhere. But we can set out the moral compass that will guide us and make us better prepared for the challenges ahead. We remain at risk of repeating the 1930s descent into global anarchy; but by nations acting together, we could create a 1940s moment as we start on the herculean task of constructing the fifth world order of modern times.

 

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Posted

That is really the only option. Surrendering doesn't get you left alone.

Besides if the new normal is Universities are constantly being made to do things or lose funding, you are better off just losing the funding if you can manage it. Otherwise your independence and academic freedom is gone.

Unfortunately, this is not an option available to Public Schools.

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Posted
On 2/18/2025 at 12:01 PM, DDD Dad said:

As a chicken owner I can verify that they indeed can fly. Not far, but they can get airborne. 

 

As the neighbor of a chicken owner, my dogs can confirm that chickens can in fact fly. At least until they land in my yard. 

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