johnzo

There's a long road ahead. Giant investigation with dozens of players, many of whom are foreign nationals. It's gonna take time. Of course, anything could happen. Trump could get spooked and resign, the pee tape could emerge, a genuine national emergency makes people rally round the president, etc. But I think we're in for a long haul with fewer juicy leaks, as potential leakers find an audience with the FBI instead of the media. Like Winston Churchill once said: (Yeah, Atomic, in addition to being a communist stooge and an fascist sympathizer, I'll also quote a British Tory hero when I need to make a point. Complicated!)

Ah, Ryan -- the cold-eyed granny starver, the guy who's been dreaming of cutting Medicaid since he was a kegstanding fratboy. To see him snared up in this would be a pleasure worthy of Xanadu.

Deleted .. double posted, not sure what happened.

Andromeda is a Mass Effect madlib. It's kinda like The Force Awakens, they're recycling story points like crazy. (see spoilers below) I played it for about thirty hours then got busy with other hobbies and just kinda drifted away from it. For previous Mass Effects, I've put my life on hold for weeks, locking myself in my office and living off lucky charms and pizza rolls. This one, not so much. If you're a casual fan of the series, I'd say wait until it's on discount to buy it. Everyone I've talked to says that Horizon Zero Dawn is really super good. sigh. guess I've gotta get a PS4...

So you're a Coast Guard Academy graduate. This is a massive achievement. (Seriously, USCGS people are badasses.) You've worked your ass off and now is time for you to celebrate your legit massive accomplishment with your family and classmates and instructors... and your commander-in-chief shows up and bellyaches about how rough his life is. I guess it's not just the millennials who are easily-triggered snowflakes! also wrt "no politician has been treated worse or more unfairly" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Benito_Mussolini

oh yeah, if gifs are your thing this is worth a look:

lol. The worm isn't just turning these days, it's spinning like a driveshaft.

Comey is gonna testify publicly to the Senate. Don't know what his play is, why exactly he'd insist on a public hearing, since there will be classified stuff he can't talk about .... but I will have my popcorn ready.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/11/15624544/fbi-trump-comey-war

It's been this way since I've been here -- presidents will fly into town on Air Force One, requiring all kinds of local security and traffic disruptions, so that they can attend big-dollar party fundraisers. Those fundraisers sell tickets that are priced based on the proximity to the big guy. How this isn't selling access to the president, I don't know. Also, your top priority as a Congressperson is to raise $18K a day: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-are-members-of-congress-becoming-telemarketers/ This is what happens when your supreme court decides that corporations are people and money is speech, and this is what turned me off economic libertarianism forever. Don't let this happen to you, Canada.

Anyone watching Mystery Science Theater?

A Democratic Congress wouldn't just hobble Trump, it would be a machine gun that fires subpoenas. We'd definitely get a sniff at those tax returns...

Ah, John McCain. He talks a good game, but not a lot of follow-through there.

Nicholls has had some gruesome injuries -- the dude has definitely seen his share of punishment.

Meant to get back to this but spaced on it... I can't really talk about the rural parts of the PNW. When I get out of Seattle, I usually go to Portland or Vancouver or some other big city. Which is part of the problem facing the USA -- me and a hypothetical rural Trump voter are kinda like aliens to each other. That article is from 2015, before Oregon legalized recreational dope, which is going to change things some. I have heard that legal dope reduces rates of illicit drug abuse, diverts people away from the harder stuff, but don't quote me on that. Seattle itself has massive inequality -- we're more expensive than Vancouver now. We have lots of highly visible homeless people, on embankments, underpasses, in tent cities, begging at stoplights. Lots of them you'd consider non-traditionally homeless. It's easy to get pushed out of your rental, our tenant protection laws are pretty weak. The interesting thing is that there's a socialist backlash brewing, we have an explicitly socialist city council member (Kshama Sawant, who makes certain people very anxious .. her opponents are always very well funded by donations from across the country). I was just doorbelled by the president of the Tenant's Union, who is also running for council on an explicitly socialist platform. Last time I was in Winnipeg was summer 2014, during the Fringe festival. Didn't see as many homeless people as I was used to, but the weather was gorgeous and the Exchange District was full of young theater freaks so maybe they were there and I just didn't see them.

Yeah, and the Lions are gonna roll out Chris Williams this year on top of Manny and Burnham. That is a scary set of receivers ... Jennings could pass for forty TDs next year. He can just score his way out of all the picks he'll throw. It'll be fun to watch if they're not playing the Bombers. (As of April, Williams' knee was on track to be ready for the regular season.)

Yeah, there's something to this .... but the bill also represents a huge real actual victory. Obamacare -- both the medicaid expansion and the individual policy subsidies -- is largely financed by extra taxes on investment income. This bill rolls back a lot (if not all) of those taxes. Despite the name, its goal is not to increase access to health care, create better health outcomes, create a more efficient health care system, anything like that. It's just a tax cut.

GET THE **** OUT OF MY CAB

Great thread. I was a skinny kid, spent all my university years continuously playing hockey and football and biking to work. When I graduated and suddenly had a desk job and money and a live-in GF and moved away from all my sports friends, I got big. Currently 46yo, 6', 230ish lbs. I've had stretches where running got me down to 215 or so, but my knees are aging out of that. Swimming and lifting are both really boring to me, so I gotta find something. Maybe get into cycling hard again, tho Seattle is really bike hostile ... I've been doored and threatened a few times. Only thing I do now is yoga. I agree that yoga is great, if I skip it more than a couple seasons I feel myself seizing up like an old lawnmower engine. You can definitely find low-woo yoga if you look. I'd recommend going to a class--preferably a small one--so you've got someone minding your form. Iso posted a really great fitness story awhile ago, he turned around his health pretty dramatically.

Vick is human garbage. Don't want him in the CFL unless he's cleaning up the stadium after the game. Would love to see the league pull a pre-emptive Justin Cox and just say "no, he's not welcome here, full stop, we won't register his contract, don't even bother thinking about it."

I hate to tempt fate, but I gotta point out that Loffler has a bit of an injury history. Those smooth-striding legs have been rebuilt a few times.

The anti-democratic right is a real thing in the USA. You've got your old school Christian Sharia dominionists ... national-level politicos like Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Mike Pence pussyfoot with those guys. Then you've got your new school neo-reactionaries like Moldbug, Peter Thiel and others. Bannon runs in Moldbug's circles too. Thiel lays it out pretty clearly in "Education of a Libertarian," you can google that if you want to know how a douchebag technocrat billionaire thinks society ought to run. The left-wing antidemocrats I've met are the familiar kind of jokey anarcho-socialists. The right wing ones have power and money and are way scarier.

I'm trying to imagine how such a coup would work. The United States is a huge patchwork of political systems and local authorities. Any disruption at the federal level would result in local chaos and immediate state secession movements. Hundreds and thousands of people in authority would denounce such a move and any one of them could become the inspirational leader for a counter-coup movement. A lot of those people will be Republican senators and congressfolk who are suddenly sidelined by the executive. There is no possible way that Trump could decapitate his opposition quickly and decisively enough to smoothly take ultimate control. Speed really matters in a coup, it has to be concluded quickly or it fizzles (like we saw in Turkey last year) or becomes a civil war. The US military is vast and amazing, but is strictly forbidden by law to operate on US soil. Of course, a coup would be extralegal, but posse comitatus is baked pretty hard into the military. You could definitely not expect 100% cooperation from regular troops, many of whom are already deployed overseas, and all of whom take oaths to the Constitution, not to the president. Each state also has a national guard, so state governors have guns and troops too -- less sophisticated, but they are trained formations. Oftentimes these guys are under federal control, lots of them were deployed to Iraq. In a real bad civil war type situation, not sure how these guys line up. From a law enforcement standpoint ... as big as the US federal government is, to do any LE on a regional level, they need local cooperation -- this is why the sanctuary city thing is such a big deal, it's denying the federal government a lot of resources. So the localities most strongly opposed to Trump, where he would need boots on the ground, are already standing in opposition to him. Certainly lots of local cops are sympathetic to Trump -- he is popular with law enforcement largely because Sessions has indicated he's really not interested in prosecuting federal civil rights cases -- but their command-and-control are not sympathetic to him and any pro-Trump LE troops would need to self-organize. The Border Patrol is probably the best stormtrooper unit that Trump has to work with; they answer directly to the executive, they are largely unaccountable within the US border zone (100 miles from any border, including sea coasts) and they are skilled at mass incarceration. They're very sympathetic to Trump and operate everywhere that he is likely to face open resistance. There's just 20,000 of them, though, so they're not super huge compared to the size of the country. There'd be spontaneous militia units popping up all over, yahoos with trucks and guns. Dunno if they could evolve a command-and-control structure that would make them useful for anything other than random terrorization. I think the more feasible scenario is a Hitler / Mussolini / Palpatine deal: the federal legislators vote themselves out of a job and hand ultimate power to the administration, and the supreme court signs off on it. This doesn't feel feasible at all. The Trump personality cult is pretty shallow, the guy can't even staff his own White House with loyal people, and DC is full of powerful and venal shits who will start kicking unless their nest is well-feathered. So I'm not super worried about this, there's lots of damage Trump can do without dismantling constitutional government wholesale. The worst thing he can do here, I think, is de-legitimize the rule of law enough so that more people start pining for a real baller dictator, one with the charisma to motivate a really broad base of support across the military, political, media, and religious worlds. Trump doesn't seem up to that.

There's also the case where North Korea is trafficking its nuclear warheads to terrorists. I don't worry about missiles*, I worry about a freighter sailing into Seattle or Vancouver with a nuke in one of its cargo containers. However, there's tons of forensics that scientists can do on nuclear blasts. The origin of a bomb exploding on North American soil would be known very quickly. If it was a DPRK bomb, North Korea would be annihilated shortly afterwards. Hell, even if it wasn't a DPRK bomb, we might pave North Korea anyway. Americans are opportunistic warmakers. So young Kim and his government are very strongly incented to keep their bombs at home. All that changes if the Kim regime faces an existential threat. If the DPRK government is against the wall and has nothing to lose, they might as well give their bomb tech away. This is yet another reason why a preemptive attack on the DPRK is a bad idea: it incents them to do the most dangerous thing they can do to us. But ... if intelligence reveals that the Kims are indeed passing bombs, bomb components, or bomb tech to ISIL ... that, to me, would justify a full-scale regime change war. Trouble is, there's absolutely no way I trust that the US government will get that appraisal right, not after seeing how it **** the bed in 2003. -- * Why I don't worry about missiles: foreign missiles are super hard to reverse engineer, and no country that owns ICBMs will sell the DPRK one anyway. They're trying to develop their own indigenous designs, but long-range missiles require a lot of tests to shake down. Those tests are extremely expensive and impossible to keep secret, so we know that the DPRK doesn't test their missiles with nearly the frequency necessary to make them reliable and accurate, especially at intercontinental ranges, especially because re-entry is a tricky problem to solve. Most of their current designs are liquid-fueled and truck mounted and need hours-long fueling cycles to fly; their flagship Taepodong-2 missile needs both a long fueling cycle and a static launchpad to fly. The USA has all kinds of reconnaissance assets watching those sites and are deploying missile defense systems to the Pacific. So you've got missiles that are slow to fire, badly tested, inaccurate, with lots of countermeasures in the theater, and then somehow if everything goes right the DPRK wins a battle and kills a city ... but loses the very very short war to follow. The DPRK navy has a new class of indigenous submarine under construction, one that may have SLBM capabilities, but I'm not worried about that either. Missiles are hard, submarines are hard, missiles + submarines are super hard. SLBM launch tests will be impossible to keep secret. We'll be well aware of the progress they make there.

Yeah, why not take a few months to get in Rory Kohlert's ear about how he liked playing for a 3-15 team that gonged everyone but Marcel Bellefeuille at the end of the season? Doesn't seem like a bad move, if you're forced to make a pick anyway.