booly

Because it's #3 in the nation in per capita impact of opioid use disorder, after West Virginia and Ohio?

Fact is, these places that MAGA wants to label as hellholes are the cultural and economic engines of our country. Even places like Texas are driven entirely by their urban blue counties.

I think it's better understood as many different factions with their own desires:

• Those who want raw power for the sake of power. Trump is almost certainly personally in this category. This is probably the primary motivation behind the Project 2025 stuff, tearing down the guardrails that limit their power.
• Those who are trying to enrich themselves: Trump's family is probably here, and Trump himself and his inner circle do seem to be motivated by financial gain to some degree.
• Those who want to use the Trump administration to make the U.S. whiter by expelling non-white people and restricting immigration of brown people (while increasing white refugees admitted).
• Those who want to assert dominance of certain types of Christianity (with some internal tension on whether that extends to Catholics/Protestant/Mormon/other beliefs)
• Those who want the government to pursue business friendly policies like lower taxes and lower business regulations.
• Those who want to leverage the government's power to win a culture war (bullying schools, libraries, Hollywood, the media, etc., into supporting right-wing cultural principles).

There is tension between all of these things, and there's tension within the Trump coalition. The business interests and the immigration hardliners jockey for position with Trump and his inner circle. The religious groups and the war hawks and the cryptocurrency scammers are all trying to advance their own agenda, too.

Not everything is going to make coherent sense. Not every idea is going to win, either. And if anything, the business side of things is less powerful than in the typical administration with several areas that are actively hostile to traditional Republican business interests (immigration, tariffs, pardoning securities fraudsters, shaking down corporations for donations or tribute).

It's important to recognize the tensions because those are also weak spots in their coalition. Defeating fascism will involve fomenting some internal tensions and peeling off different factions.

I mean today ICE even tear gassed a bunch of Chicago cops who were trying to clear a path out for them. The ICE thugs are cowards and will turn on local police in a heartbeat. (See also capitol police beaten on Jan 6.)

He was circling on the bike taunting them, saying stuff like "I'm not an American citizen," and the ICE dudes just tolerated it until the bike rider dropped his phone, and detected weakness and pounced, before the guy snatched up his phone and managed to ride away.

Tragicomedy is the best description.

People like to use the example of Crassus' fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.

Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They're in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It's a problem for them, too.

Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they're in the same boat.

why were highly skilled Korean engineers working "illegally" in USA to begin with?

Most of them say they had valid visas or work authorization.

The U.S. has a visa waiver program where people can come into the U.S. without a visa, and have certain rights similar to visa holders. Many of the South Korean workers have taken the position that the visas they had that allowed them to work for 6 months, or the visa waivers they had entitled them to do temporary work for less than 90 days, and that they were within those time windows.

The lawsuits being filed also allege that immigration officials acknowledged that many of the workers did have legal rights to work, but that they were deported anyway.

So no, I don't think it's been shown that the workers did anything illegal. It really sounds like ICE fucked up by following a random tip a little too credulously.

The listeria outbreak also exposed Boar's Head as a deeply mismanaged company. When the CFO, who had been at the company for over 20 years, was deposed under oath, he couldn't answer the question of who the CEO was, or who his boss was. It came up in a lawsuit between family members of the family that owns and controls the company, and has their own competing factions in charge of different parts of the company.

From a pure corporate governance perspective, that type of dysfunction is a recipe for disaster.

Probably fair to assume that the shooter was aiming for center of mass. A stationary person at 180m is pretty easy to hit in the chest, and someone with enough skill/confidence might have opted to aim for the head, but nobody is aiming specifically for the neck. A hit on the neck almost definitely means the shooter was aiming for something else and missed high (or low) by inches in a way that still hit the guy.

It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960's. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn't even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.

You're talking about a guy who congratulated Putin on his sham election victory while staring at a card that said "DO NOT CONGRATULATE." And he's aged 7 years since then.

Why are you forgiving student loans?

That's the federal government's administration of a federal government program, so no, that's not the same at all.

Why do you tip servers in America?

That's the basic deal. If a restaurant implements a no tipping policy, they're allowed to do that. I don't see how that's the same or different from a restaurant implementing a "discount for veterans" or "no discounts for veterans" policy. It sounds like we're in favor of a system where the restaurant chooses what they want to be about, whether it's a tip-based system or not, or a discounts for vets place or not.

So in a sense, it sounds like you agree with me that we should let the restaurants choose. Neither choice is a "punishment" of anyone.

But really you’re just punishing veterans with PTSD

Failing to give special treatment to someone is not punishing them. Especially when we're talking about special treatment for an entire category of people, most of whom don't have PTSD (estimates range from 6-27% of those deployed to a war zone, and not all veterans served in a war zone), many of whom are financially well off.

Maybe the VA and the federal government should do more for vets. Maybe the military itself should take care of the troops a bit better. But asking private businesses to prop up veterans at their own expense seems like a misguided approach.