Large waist, buthisface, and a big bank. Qualifications: Vanderbilt J.D. Official Capacity: Just Some Guy Admissions: only when in a contemplative mood.
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Yeah, it's a significant step up from Bezos buying the Washington Post as a toy. It's similar to Musk with Twitter in that these vanity media purchases are stepping up from "hobby" level to sufficiently large that they actually are a significant liquidity burn if mismanaged.
One of the biggest problems the Dems have today is that they almost completely ceded Spanish language social media and local media in the late 2010s - early 2020s.
Much more of a Zuckerberg - Facebook situation than a Bezos - WaPo.
(In a way that obeys the rules and he and his staff are genuinely brilliant at it, but still heavily based on sign stealing. One of the easiest ways to mess with a Venables' defense is to adopt a true huddle.)
Jumping the quick dumpoff pass to the slot by faking that he's keyed in on the X. It's guaranteed to either get an interception or at least seriously mess with a QB's reads if the play is called correctly. Which bleeds into the issue that Venable's D is heavily based on sign stealing.
IMO the Barbary Wars actually comps really well to Yemen.
Buddy, if you look at the demographics "trans lawyers" are voting blue at Assad levels.
People slobber over the lower-middle/middle class tradesman despite him being the GOP's shocktrooper ever since the construction unions launching assaults on anti-war protests under Nixon.
Not to mention that the funniest thing in all of this is that the trans lawyer is almost 100% likely to vote for the redistribution party and the construction worker voted for the OBB party.
The parties finally internally aligning on ideodoogy post-Gingrich and the end of pork reducing the incentive to do inter-branch fights is what killed it.
"People will default to jealously protecting their own power" really isn't that dumb of an assumption given that it generally held until really the 1990s to early 2000s.
Provel does a specific task very well: providing a base for a mountain of pizza toppings. The problem is when people try to use it for something else.
Casino Royale is the only time we've really gotten a proper adaptation of Fleming's Bond. I loved it, but it's a pretty hard swerve given that Book!Bond is an existentially depressed government hitman killing for a meager pension he likely won't live to collect.
Fundamentally it's Bosnia 2.0 - use the pressures of continual warfare to render an area unlivable in the hopes of forcing the population to leave.
A model that is uncommon for crimdef.
The problem with general criminal defense is that it takes a lot hours to defend a case, meaning that you have to keep rates low to make the service affordable. And salary is basically perfectly pegged to rates unless you are the partner with a large associate base.
There's a lot of truth to this, though "white collar" here isn't really what you'd think (defending a fraudster) but more biglaw corporate work generally aimed more at defending companies and dealing with internal investigations.
Not just an engineering college, but the *only* real engineering college in the US at the time and probably the most prestigious educational institution in the country.
Plus one of the key pillars of the Bond films from the start in Doctor No is specifically that he's an agent propping up a declining Britain.
Inside of every human being is a peasant, and the triumph of a prosperous and open modern world has been eternally dependent on our ability to suppress that peasant.
Christopher Lee as Scaramanga, though.
The fact that this is due to the Soviet aerospace engine industry being concentrated in Ukraine is also why the Poland-Turkey-South Korea defense triad is probably going to have a competitive fighter offering by the 2040s.
This is also why images of men, as long as they have no facial hair, are generally more "timeless" due to the smaller delta in hairstyles from the mid-19th onward.
Basically boils down to her wearing her hair long and down with no visible makeup. A lot of the "antiquated" look really boils down to the fact that the historical trend in the kind of female hairstyles that would be depicted in art until very recently was very involved.
RFK Jr and Lorenz would at least have some respectability for being an age appropriate pairing.
Maybe we'd be less lifeless if we had hired DeEnglishman instead of DeBoer.
At least Mike Shula had a 10 win season.
At least our golden era involved multiple titles and not just one fluky team that immediately got upstaged the next year.
I guess this is just who we are now.
The best part about all of this is that I know @ingloriousj.swifties.social is back and just waiting in the shadows to drop posts she's spent all summer drafting.
Insane home atmosphere + QB playing lights out + Malzahn bullshit. This is the type of combo that screwed us up even when we had Saint Nick (PBUH) guiding us.
Pro: Milroe can't hurt me anymore. Con: EVERYONE HURTS ME NOW.
...Gus Malzahn with a very athletic QB giving us fits because we are constantly taking penalties because of poor discipline on the road. When I wished to go back before Trump this isn't what I meant.
17 plays. 75 yards. 8:50 minutes. Nature is healing. Joyless murderball is back.
Win or lose, the most important thing is that Milroe can't hurt us anymore.
Though there is an outside shot that AI companies revive the dynamism of old school cyberpunk, depending on the degree to which the gigaslop machine is allowed to infect society.
It's one reason why a lot of tech billionaires have gone insane. At a more general level, the rapid aging of the human population is also a dagger aimed at the idea of human dynamism. Basically: how do you imagine a world in 2100 that is meaningfully different than the world of today?
The primary problem facing sci-fi as a genre is that the future is rapidly shrinking. Sci-fi as a genre vs. mainstream lit with sci fi characteristics is firmly about imagined futures. But it's really set in in the past 20 years that humanity likely is never going to leave the solar system.
Extremely so.
Lee is in an inverse Grant situation. Lee *needs* to destroy the AOP. By contrast, Grant in 1864 primarily just needs to prevent Lee from detaching forces to Atlanta, and instead proceeds to feed the AOP into the teeth of Confederate entrenchments.
Which wasn't the worst of ideas, *on Day 2* - Wilcox's brigade comes very close to opening the way for the shattering of the AOP's center late on Day 2 and is mostly stopped due to the heroic stand of the 1st Minnesota in a 15 minute long firefight.
Lee goes into Day 3 of the battle having severely bloodied the AOP on Days 1 and 2 (getting the better of the fighting on both days). He also knows that the chance for a Confederate victory is rapidly falling into complete nothingness. So he gambles it all on a Napoleonic style breakthrough.
If you factor in died of wounds, it's likely that more Americans died in combat on a single day at Antietam than during the entirety of the Revolutionary War.
People constantly talk up the Union's manpower and industrial advantage, but by far the biggest bottleneck during the war was semi-competent officers. The ANV lucked out immensely at the start by somehow ending up with three officers semi-capable of leading large forces.
Frankly, I think people just don't get that the ACW was a complete amateur hour affair from start to finish, lead by people who never expected to lead anything larger than what would be considered a small to medium sized corps.
A lot of this is a recent phenomenon, IMO, due to educational polarization. Attachment to liberal values is heavily tied to class and educational attainment, and high-mid/low-high income + high education used to be split to flat out GOP lean until the early 2010s.
The usual idiotic Halleck-Lincoln political games.
They were paranoid about the ANV moving north (despite also heavily manning the Washington defenses) so they wanted to force the AOP to maintain a presence north of the Chickahominy to theoretically prevent any refusal by Mac to move north to follow Lee.
The only reason the seven days battle is even possible in the first place is because Mac is forced to split his army across the swollen Chickahominy river, something that isn't necessary if he is routing his logistics up the James.
This is where I'm going to get super spicy, but the War Department had far more to do with the failure of the Peninsular campaign than Mac. Richmond falls in 1862 if Mac gets to route his logistics up the James river, instead of the War Department forcing him to route them up the York river.
One of the sadder aspects of this is that Meade is basically in a state of borderline mental breakdown by June-July of 1864 caused in part due to the stress of the colossal losses among the men and leadership of the AOP caused by Grant.
The only goal of the AOP during the spring-summer of 1864 was to prevent Lee from detaching significant forces to be sent south for Chickamauga II. Something it could have done just fine by shadowing the force.
Oh yeah, the space between the Potomac and the Chickahominy is just brutal. Especially the natural frontline along the Rappahannock. One of the many reasons why Lincoln's obsession with the ANV in particular was highly counterproductive.
IMO Sherman is up there with Rosecrans in terms of leaders who would have absolutely *excelled* as staff officers in a German style military. Brilliant campaign planners and fairly mediocre tactical commanders.
People constantly cite the Pickett-Trimble-Pettigrew assault on July 3rd, but Grant's initial tenure with the AOP was basically just "oops, all Fredericksburgs" for a month straight.
Lee discourse in general falls victim to the issue that the modern values system correlates competency with morality. Lee is a horrifically brutal slave owning traitor who should have been hung along with much of the ANV's leadership. He was also one of the finest commanders the US has produced.
It took Grant barely a month to functionally wreck the Army of the Potomac as an institution. It never really recovered from the Overland Campaign and performed very poorly during the Siege of Petersburg. The defeat of the ANV was mostly a product of the winter 1864-65 desertion caused by Sherman.
...Not to get into a huge brawl here but this is an accurate post but not due to the assumed original answer. Grant was a fairly good general, but Lee significantly outperformed him relative to resources available.
Certain enforcement is easy to challenge and evade. Random, fuzzy, enforcement combined with as brutal of fines as possible creates fear and dissuasion out of uncertainty.
In practice this seems to be a lot like apellate mediation, which I'm surprised isn't more of a thing.
Being in the RGA would hardly be considered "safe" by civilian standards, but it's certainly the difference between "particularly hazardous workplace" danger and "solid chance of your entire battalion being wiped from the OOB for months."
One of the things that struck me the most when I really started doing cross-conflict KIA studies with my databases is just how radically different the experience of the infantry is to all other branches.
At this point, the only really viable path to increased gun control is to make the ATF as brutal, random, and arbitrary as possible to dissuade gun ownership. Random, potentially life ruining, fines.
I'm pretty blackpilled on the issue of any reform ever being possible, given how gun control massively underperformed at the ballot box even when it was significantly more popular back in the 2000s and 2010s.
If anything the ATF should be even more unpleasant and arbitrary to deal with because, given that gun control is basically permanently dead as an issue, guncel inconvenience is the least price they can pay in return for getting to bathe this country in corpses.
One side doesn't understand that AR stands for Armalite and the other side doesn't understand that it's more important for people not to have the tools to rapidly slaughter children then it is for you to be able to make the fun stick go bang in rapid succession out at the range.
Also understanding minute details of firearms doesn't matter when the primary problem is that guncels are fine with seeing children get massacred so long as no one touches their hobby.
For most of the 20th century clip and magazine were considered perfectly interchangeable words.
Clip discourse is very fun because it's a lot like Italian cuisine in that clip vs. magazine distinction is both obsessively enforced and also purely a product of the 1970s.
Good thing about Bluesky: it's a lot like pre-Musk twitter. Bad thing about Bluesky: it's a lot like pre-Musk twitter.
It also certainly doesn't help that the Navajo have very low educational attainment and there's a lot of internal cultural pressure on people not to stray too far for the rez, which really hamstrings any chances for people to grow.
What cements this is that everyone knows that the Navajo are by a massive margin the biggest rez (though the Washington tribes are no joke here if considered together) and also the most politically coherent, due to the lack of assimilation. So there's a lot of incentive to keep them frozen out.
The isolation means that the Navajo weren't assimilated into major US political and cultural networks as they were being set up, unlike the Oklahoma tribes who already had a vice president in the 1920s. Given that BIA is a patronage knife fight, this meant that they were frozen out latecomers.
The rez was only fully electrified in the 1990s and it was extremely common for clients of the legal service group who were 50 or 60+ (this is in 2016) to need a translator to speak with staff who didn't speak Navajo.
You could probably write multiple PhD theses on that. IMO it boils down to the fact that the Navajo are really the only true rez in the sense of a very large community geographically isolated from almost the entirety of the rest of the US who are extremely distinct.
In the mid-2000s Navajo elites chased a promising reformer off the rez by spreading rumors that she practiced witchcraft. And this doesn't even get into how Navajo politics is a knife fight to be the one who is first in line to redirect federal funding into your own pockets or patronage networks.
Though they are often also bad in the same way as a lot of rural areas. I love the Navajo rez, but it's also brutally corrupt and violent in basically the same way as rural Alabama is (something I'm also familiar with).
Dark Winds, the tv adaptation is fairly good, but is also a key example of how the Navajo are completely boxed out of a lot of elite Native American circles and institutions.
It was always fun to take drives on the Rez, pass random towns, and think of the (fictional) murders that happened there.
My dad, as the son of a good Frenchwoman, was obsessed with detective novels so I grew up with the Leaphorn series. It was one of the ways in which I bonded with the attorneys I worked under when I spent a summer on the Rez.
And are now tightly tied to Peter Thiel, who firmly believes that neither should be able to vote.
If Kerry wins Ohio (which only requires a very small boost in the two party vote there) we have two presidents in a row, one from each party, who take office while having lost the popular vote.
The best option would just be to peg the elector count to a fixed number (1 per 30,000) and to keep the house as it is. Though, at that point, you might as well just go full popular vote. Something we almost certainly would have gotten had Kerry won in 2004.
IMO this is a very bad idea because the key problem with the House is already that too few legislators have anything meaningful to do. Massively expanding the size of the house would just further weaken it vis a vis the presidency and the senate.
There's also the *very* bleak reality that the sepoys of pre-1857 India were overwhelmingly high class individuals, especially Brahmins, and a major part of the revolt was the British attempts to enact land reform and other measures to improve social equality.
It's just the old "white ethnics" (Poles, Italians) all the way down.
Latino communities by the third gen are politically indistinguishable from the white populations they are in.
Driver's licenses in a lot of states, TIN mortgages, being paid at or well above significantly increased state minimum wages + OT a lot of time, ect.
To really get into bad 90's scifi territory: "an associate of the cult of Satanic Nazis was later installed by the richest man on the planet as an all-powerful government official who played a key role in wiping out all US famine relief efforts in Africa and also stole everyone's data."
The era of Purdue calling ICE on its workers every 4-6 months to get out of payroll for a pay period is looong gone.
Something I saw firsthand working wage and hour cases is that being undocumented was functionally legalized in the late 2010s-2020s, particularly as the blue collar labor market heated up post-COVID. Which caused a ton of resentment from the people who/whose parents were undocumented during Bush I.
Which then became even dumber when the endgame villain is a stupidly overpowered all conquering omnicompetent military force lead by the (tragic and reasonable) dictator which is named after Sparta.
Sci-fi statism with welfare: weak corrupt Democrats being weak and corrupt. Sci-fi statism but military: hard men making hard decisions while hard.
In sci-fi statism isn't incompatible with libertaromneyism so long as the statism is military coded.
It's telling that the most prominent Earth hero, Avasarala, is basically a deep state bureaucrat whose the real power behind the scenes because Earth is weak corrupt Democrats.
One factor at play is that early Expanse is about weak corrupt Democrats on welfare (Earth) vs. manly self-reliant libertaromney types (Mars), a narrative that was downplayed in the show and steadily written out as the GOP went increasingly shitbird.
Probably my bleakest take is that the African century will eternally be on the horizon. An expansion of Lagos' ports is far more likely to be necessary to deal with a massive famine than an economic boom.
They are running out of momentum and trying to maximize consolidation.
It is very funny in a lot of ways to consider that you could, at one time, distinctly separate the city of Washington from the District of Columbia.
MO is substantially likelier to start trending back towards the Dems than TN.