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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Fair enough, it’s something I’ve viewed with deep suspicion and RFK Jr endorsements didn’t help but this is way deeper knowledge than I have.
  2. We are in a five alarm fire. The White House is openly threatening to suspend Habeas Corpus. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5292820-white-house-miller-immigration-crackdown/ Habeas Corpus has been suspended four times. During the Civil War, during reconstruction and Ku Klux Klan insurrection, during an early 1900s Philippines rebellion, and in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor. This isn’t even the Constitution. Habeas Corpus predates Magna Carta. It is the great writ that separates freemen of England from despotism elsewhere. It’s encoded in our nation’s DNA. It is insane to even contemplate it, and it is the threat of a tyrant.
  3. It’s crazy, I really preferred Michelle’s stance of eating healthy and not having polio.
  4. To be clear, “functional medicine” is just quackery. She might as well have quit her residency to do reflexology or sell ground up animal potions.
  5. Absolute fucking lunacy. “Actually it’s better that the surgeon general isn’t really a doctor.” And regarding the last paragraph, this country had a week-long meltdown because Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden.
  6. The post from @Masshole Horn and constant whining from my ten year old inspired me. She loves Indian food and I hate how gotdamned expensive it is. This is more of a riff on butter chicken than a real attempt. Leaving the skin on isn’t traditional but I love grilled chicken skin and I cooked the sauce separately and poured over the grilled drumsticks that cooked all the way on the grill. They got slashed to the bone and marinated overnight in a yogurt/spice mix. Slammed and went hard.
  7. A bit of earnestness I’m sure I’ll regret. I am not a Catholic, I am a believer. I do not think that the pope is infallible, even when speaking ex cathedra. The Catholic Church, like every institution of the Christian faith, is not infallible and quite often has been significantly worse than that. In the late 1970s Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II. He was also not a perfect or infallible man, and at times he could be rather worse than even that. But this man proclaimed from the chair of St. Peter to millions of Central and Eastern Europeans that the inhuman and anti-moral system they lived under had lost all credibility and moreover, that they didn’t need to be afraid anymore. And while that may seem simple and trite, in the 1970s and 1980s fear was as much a part of that corner of God’s creation as castles and beer and dumplings and sour cream. Fear hung in the air, written in red, blown in from a leaden gray Moscow sky. Millions of people decided to believe him and acted thus. Catholics and non-Catholics and atheists and Jews and within ten years the fear was gone, the Soviet barracks emptied and the castles and beer and sour cream and dumplings remained. No one had to shoot at anyone, no superpower intervened. Maybe it was God or maybe John Paul II or maybe neither. Maybe it was just people who looked for a reason to stop being afraid. Today a friend with Slovak passport, Hungarian name, Jewish roots, and secular worldview— a sensitive and intelligent woman, a graduate of Columbia j-school, an award winning anti-corruption crusader— wrote that perhaps the selection of Leo XIV will serve as an “impulse to calm an agitated America or to return to basic values like care for your neighbor and empathy.” Maybe so. It’s possible. Deus vult.
  8. Today the State Department dropped a graphic using Avro Lancasters. This type of stuff drives me nuts. You can see the RAF roundels. In ordinary times I’d say this is a nod to allies but it’s not our brand now and it’s just dumbness.
  9. I love the Walk of Life Project. Dr. Strangelove is my favorite.
  10. Not as deep as you’d think. Once you get down 1-2 levels that starts becoming apparent. They are grabbing really junior people who have no idea what they are doing to serve at the assistant and undersecretary type levels. They aren’t known quantities either. A lot of this, outside the meme appointments, is evidence that no one serious wants to be a part of this.
  11. I spent the worst year of my life in Karachi. China has little reason to want actual escalation and many reasons not to; they are delighted to get some data on how well their systems work against a fighting opponent but zero reason to want an actual war. The United States also has zero interest in this spiraling. And while miscalculation and face-saving can lead to some bad outcomes, both India and Pakistan are calibrating here in rhetoric and action. I still thing a slow wind-down is most likely.
  12. A phrase keeps popping up. It prevents me from feeling sympathy. “Everything right.” “The right way.” ”We did everything right, we worked and tried to save money.” ”She did everything right and tried to immigrate by the rules.” ”I did everything right, I wasn’t a lazy government worker, I was doing an important job.” No acknowledgment that they got duped. Of course no reflection that they let emotions and frustration overcome human decency. No, the complaint is simply that the cruelty missed the target. They just want someone with better aim. Fuck them. Stay out there on the wrong end of the shooting range.
  13. Disabled, not able to work, voting for Trump.
  14. 956 Worldwide

    LBGTQ

    Good news everyone, the new surgeon general nom is all about “sound medical evidence basis” cause that’s what we are doing now.
  15. True and they also use spouse batterer psychology all the time. “At least he didn’t hit me today.”
  16. “Warfighter” has been around for a while but it took WhiskeyLeaks to turn Pentagon cringe into mainstream cringe. &nbsp
  17. 956 Worldwide

    LBGTQ

    Over the past few years a lot of cranky “Christian libertarians” have fallen under the sway of nut-job anti-American Russophiles. That’s not what we have here, although he’s been doing an impressive job posing as the former to seduce people into becoming the latter.
  18. Lithuania’s former foreign minister has similar thoughts. There will be a lot of lurching and spasmodic outbursts because that’s just the way this administration is. But there’s also a growing acceptance that the rest of the world can’t be cowed and browbeaten into submission when a primary isn’t at stake. The bad news, of course, is that cracking down at home to offset concessions you have to make abroad is the well-trodden autocrat path.
  19. Wait a second, cuts to early childhood education were not supposed to affect kids named “Tanner.” There must have been some error.
  20. In the European context the problem of LNG has long been a problem of terminals, which cannot be turned on overnight and for which there needs to be a demand. Germany only finally brought their first online in 2022 after the full-scale invasion. NS2 basically existed as a canard to prevent Europe (specify Germany) from building out alternate infrastructure and to keep themselves on cheaper Russian pipeline gas. It’s a longstanding foreign policy failure all around but an honest reading is that the Germans wanted to delude themselves and it’s unclear if any pressure could have brought them around absent the forcing event.
  21. Vance gave some unusually measured and in some places even conciliatory remarks in an interview for the Munich Security Conference leaders’. Really a contrast in tone to basically everything coming from his office. - Acknowledged that Russia is asking too much in negotiations and taking fewer swipes at Ukrainians - Almost statesman-esque in the comments on NATO spending, framing it as a goal we all agree to and that the real question is how to get there quickly - Even some soft-pedaling of his hostile and antagonistic February speech where he raged out over alleged censorship; instead talking about the need to balance security and values with rights. My sense is that someone told him that this administration is racking up Ls and they need to get positive movement from Europeans on trade and at the NATO summit since there’s basically no domestic appetite to have pointless food fights with Europe.
  22. Somehow, I don’t think that a “bi-gender” sign would be acceptable either.
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