About cutting money he’s cutting, that will depend on the actual words in appropriations bills or CRs. If the law says we appropriate $1 billion dollars to add an extra lane on I10 from Phoenix to LA, that money will go out. But my guess is, most laws don’t say that.
Most laws do _require_ the spending, mostly because we ran into that issue in 1804 when Thomas Jefferson declined to buy some gunboats that Congress had authorized spending money on, but had not required it. I love how you apparently think this country sprang into existence a year ago and Trump is figuring out all the clever loopholes.
On top of that...are you aware there's literally a law requiring the president to spend money allocated by Congress, called the Impoundment Control Act of 1974? This was created when Nixon tried literally the same trick Trump is, refusing to spend funds for programs he did not approve of, under the justification of the laws (which did require him to do the thing) did not explicitly say what he had to do with it.
"Yes, I agree I am supposed to be spending this money by law, but I don't see how I can do that."
Hell, maybe you should have paid attention during Trump's first impeachment, where the impoundment of fund to the Ukraine was literally the crime listed. (Along with lying about it.)
Here, just read the primer. Here's a key section: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/a-primer-on-the-impoundment-control-act
Though earlier versions of the statute allowed a broader range of deferrals, the ICA today allows deferrals only “to provide for contingencies,” “to achieve savings made possible by or through changes in requirements or greater efficiency of operations,” or “as specifically provided by law.” The upshot is that, absent specific statutory authority, executive officials are not supposed to delay spending based on disagreement with the policy underlying it; they can instead make deferrals only to address practical obstacles or to employ funds more efficiently. As explained below, however, the scope of any authority to delay spending for “programmatic” rather than “policy” reasons has emerged as a recurrent point of controversy.
Now, a _clever_ man could claim there are delays, but that they are only delays, and that they are merely to make things more efficiency, not stop what is being done.
But Trump is not a clever man. Neither is Elon. And shuttering an entire agency cannot possibly count as a deferral, it counts as a rescission. Which Trump cannot do. He can pause spending for 45 days, but at that point, it has been considered long enough for Congress to have looked at it, so he must restart if they have not changed appropriations.
One of the things speculated is that Politico missed payroll the other day because the funding from USAID was abruptly cut off.
But it's _not_ true, in fact, the huge amount that was claimed to go from USAID is form the _entire_ government, because it turns out that a huge amount of people in the government subscribe to Politico. USAID itself paid a grand total of $44k to Politico.
Like, literally all this is a lie, and it's an obvious lie from the people that started it.
And you fell for it. Haha.
But to answer what I think you might be asking… one of the things that bubbled up about USAID was that, apparently, 97% of the USAID recipients who donated to US politicians apparently donated to Democrats… which creates a self-licking ice cream cone.
How many lies about USAID are you going to fall for there, Jaybird?
97% of USAID _employees_ that donated to US politicans donated to Democrats. Not recipients, almost none of who would be eligible to donate to any politician. (Indeed, a lot of them are not even human beings.)
I wonder why this is? Perhaps, and bear with me now: Republicans wanted to, and in fact did, shut down their place of work. So it seems a bad plan to give them money.
Hey Jaybird? What percentage of US government employees do you think donate to Democrats vs. Republicans? 75% to Democrats.
In fact, the only agency that has more donations to the Republicans and Democrats is the Air Force, and barely there. Even the Navy and the Army and Defense Department donate more to the Democrats.
0% of the Department of Education donate to Republicans. Weird. It's almost as if Republicans have been actively promising to shut that down _also_.
It's almost as if people inside the government can see a little more clearer how each party operates and how much they value the government.
But your 'The organizations must be incredibly biased in their hiring' works too. Perhaps there could be some sort of initiative to diversify the viewpoint...oh, hell, I've just been arrested.
Yeah, JD. Vance, carefully trying to calculate exactly what order the government is Coming For people.
"Alright, so, we're still coming for the trans, and the next is the Mexicans, we weren't _supposed_ to come for the Indians yet...I know some people here want to but Elon has assured me that he's going to stall that as long as possible because he needs his workers...can we maybe go after the gays in there after the Mexicans, delay things a bit..."
His wife: "What are you doing, dear?"
"Oh, just calculating when I'll need to throw you and the kids to the fascists."
I think he realized he was in over his head a little bit back, and used the social media stuff as an excuse to exit.
But my point was not his actual exact motives, which are pretty unknowable, my point was that that the reason there was not a 'fight over whether the kid should be able to stay', because the kid did not, in fact, want to stay. Before anyone could leap to his defense, he noped out.
The next time something extremely racists comes out, like if it comes out that someone near all this twice secretly did a Na.zi salute at the inauguration in front of millions of people, there will almost certainly be a fight.
He didn't get fired, he resigned. It doesn't seem like he was asked to resign.
I think he just finally figured what _exactly_ he had gotten himself into.
Man, if only the government had some sort of confirmation process for employees. Well, probably not that level, but some sort of confirmation process for higher up. This guy's boss appears to be *checks notes* someone named Elon Musk (Fake sounding name) who is in charge of some sort of efficiency office, and seems to have some sort of scandal about *check notes* Well, that can't be right, no one would let someone who just did that into the government.
Maybe we should set up a process where people like this 'Musk' have to get confirmed by someone else, maybe some part of Congress, and then some sort of political neutral system for hiring people to do things like IT and whatnot, which could be based on education and skill and things?
Also the Treasury Department should probably have _their own_ IT instead of some efficiency office coming in to do it...honestly, it feels like the people trying to 'cut fat' should be working over on the budget, which decides this in advance, instead of where _payments_ go out.
And it is true that the early Zionists, certainly down to 1937, sought Jewish sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel, from the River to the Sea. But in the summer of that year the mainstream of Zionism, led by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, accepted, in principle, the recommendation of the British Royal (Peel) Commission that the country be partitioned into two states, one for the Jews (on less than 20 per cent of the land) and most of the rest for the Arabs.
*Sigh*
"The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them." -David Ben-Gurion, literally said in 1937 about the partition.
That's Ben-Gurion not only claiming that the 'whole land of Israel' should be Jewish, but that _Jordan_ also should be.
"Why weren't the Arabs dumb enough to believe the Jews who were openly saying to their own people that they would eventually take all the land and the partition was just a step along the way?'
Chaim Weizmann, of course, did _not_ believe this, and was much more tempered. He actually had proposed a Jewish homeland elsewhere previously, as he seemed to understand how just...taking a country could be problematic, and said plenty of things about how Israel should be a joint nation of Jews and Arabs and the world will judge the Jews by how they treat Arabs. He had also was one of those people that everyone claimed to respect but completely ignored what he actually asked them to do, and he was elected to the entirely symbolic position of President of Israel, then died in 1952 so no one had to pretend to care what he thought anymore.
American Jews got the message and voted for Harris
I mean, yes, if you phrase it like that.
More Jewish voters (79%) did vote for Harris than Muslim voters (20%) did.
Of course, roughly the same amount of Jewish voters (20%) voted for Trump as Muslim voters (21%) did. If you're wondering where rest of the Muslim vote went, it went third party, almost entirely to Jill Stein, who had a Muslim running mate. Or to no one.
One might ask what is going on there with the Jewish vote, and also one might point out that 20% of Jewish voters is roughly five times as much voters as 21% of Muslim voters, and in fact is even more total votes than 21% Muslim voters + 59% half-voters for neither.
But anyway, you can blame Muslims for choosing to vote third party when that might have, hypothetically, altered the outcome in Michigan, but the simply fact it is did not. If every Jill Stein voter had voted for Harris, she would not have won a single additional state.
Oh, and the really funny joke is that, if we actually started using crypto as currency...at some point someone is going to come up with functioning quantum computers. Could happen in a decade, could happen in three. And from what I understand, those can just...literally instantly manufacture a ton of crypto, causing massive devaluation and inflation. (Or, if they're smart, do it slower and less obvious.)
Crypto is designed to be slow to make more of, with it getting slower and slower and more and more work as it's made, but a big enough quantum computer will just...do it. Instantly. Even a smaller quantum computer can do it a hell of a lot faster. On normal decryption, the the math is that every single qubit that the computer has halves the computational time (Because that's one less bit you have to check in combination with every other bit. I.e., 8 bits have 256 possibilities, 7 bits have 128, 6 bits have 64, etc. Standard encryption obviously uses a lot more bits.), I have no idea if that's the same for making cyptocurrency, but it's something like that.
Crypto, or more specifically blockchain as a concept, is a vaguely useful concept to make sure that records are not changed. It is a programming tool...not a particularly _useful_ programming tool because there are plenty of ways to do it, but blockchain does fill in some unique edge cases where you need to be distributed.
And people decided to use it for money, which it _sorta_ works as. In fact, it works a lot of actual currency instead of electronic money. Actually, arguably more like gold, because there's a finite amount of it, and while it does technically have 'serial numbers', those numbers are easy enough to 'melt off' and print new ones.
And let's ignore the fact that this (along with gold) is just fiat money, because all currency is fiat money, it's something we've randomly assigned value to, to trade in units of, and the question is just if we use the government's fiat or invent their own.
Unfortunately, there are reasons we don't carry around bars of gold everywhere we go and don't keep our savings in gold in giant saves in our house. Does anyone know this?
One, it's wildly deflationary because the amount of gold, and bitcoin, cannot possibly keep up with the amount of money that needs to exist. Ergo, the value keeps going up, which sounds great for an investment, but is incredibly stupid for a currency, because not only does it make things hard to value, but people tend to save it. (Which means, when they buy things, they use some other currency.)
Two, it means the government cannot track it at all, which sounds good until you remember 'The government tracking currency' is how you, uh, stop it from being stolen and recover it afterwards. And stop it from being used to pay off kidnappers. And drug cartels.
We do not actually want our currency to be 'indistinguishable ounces of gold poured into a pot'. Especially not a pot guarded by computer security that not only is easy to hack access to, but easy enough to social engineer access to. It doesn't matter if all the math in the world says you cannot copy and replicate the gold, we believe the math there, but people can just _take it_. They can physically, or electronically, walk off with it, and now they have it, and you can't get it back. (And humans are _completely crap_ at computer security compared to physical security. Actually, we're complete crap at unattended physical security too, which is why we put _humans_ in it to physically stop people from spending hours cutting through walls.)
This is all on top of the issue we skipped past, that this is basically just people printing a lot of something, and then trying to get others to use it as fiat currency. It's like if I have a bunch of stale breadcrusts and start hyping up how breadcrusts are going to be the best currency ever and everyone will take them, and even set up a fake economy where I trade breadcrusts for other things to show how well it works. I'm not even sure that qualifies as a pyramid scheme. It's just a conman trying to sell you crap by lying about what you can do with it.
Um, so I'm a little confused here. Is Trump planning on giving Gaza to Israel, or _keeping_ it?
It sounds like he's going to keep it.
Is that...is that an acceptable plan to Israel? Has anyone asked how they would feel about that?
The people in Israeli politics who want to wipe Gaza off the map are _very_ clear that they think all of the Southern Levant west of the Jordan River belongs to Israel.
Really? That's the part of the comment you decided to respond to?
I don't know if you expect trans people to be outraged by that, but no one fishing cares about sports except as part of a slippery slope. Transphobes got what they wanted, the incredibly minuscule amount of trans girls and women will leave sports, and all it will cost is in the future is dealing with accusations of being male being hurtled at girls and women that do not appear feminine enough and people doing genitalia inspections of them, including the children. *thumbs up*
Meanwhile, you don't bother to respond to the Blanchard part?
Pregnancy is impossible for anyone who isn’t a woman and even if she may not like being a woman, absent some crazy scientific breakthrough, it’s what she is and always will be.
...wait wait wait, you're asserting there _is_ a way to change sex, but science has not managed it yet?
Tell me, what is the thing you think science needs to be able to do to make a woman into a man?
Is it 'manufacturing different-sized gametes'? Is that literally your definition?
Or is it pregnancy, something you seem to have conflated with that?
Congress did not authorize the existence of the Supreme Court.
They did authorize the existence of the Treasury Department. It was founded September 11, 1789, by an Act of Congress:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That there shall be a Department of Treasury, in which shall be the following officers, namely: a Secretary of the Treasury, to be deemed head of the department; a Comptroller, an Auditor, a Treasurer, a Register, and an Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, which assistant shall be appointed by the said Secretary. [snip]
Every part of its structure is under Congressional control, everything it does is by the authorization of Congress, even if large chunks of their authority was delegated by Congress to the president. Congress has a right to do any sort of oversight it wishes as to how the Department is functioning, including personal inspection.
The equivalent of your question would be if Congress could get inside the _White House's_ deliberations, and the answer, as already answered by the court, is no.
(This is on top of the obvious fact that court deliberations are generally secret as part of the concept of due process, itself a part of the constitution. Whereas the behavior of the _Treasury_ is not impacted in that way.)
There actually is an armed force that answers to Congress instead of the executive. It's called the Capitol Police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_Police
While it answers to Congress, and has a specific assignment of certain areas, not only is Treasure Building _within_ that area, but it actually can do arrests anywhere in the US if it spots a crime. Like, oh, trespassing. (Like they tried to do Jan 6ths, in fact.)
Of course, how could Democrats send them anywhere, if they answer to Congress?
Well, according to Roll Call magazine, at least the top nine members of the House and Senate have a Capitol Police escort at all times, just like the executive and the secret service. I don't know the entire list, but I assume that is at least the minority leaderships, probably also the minority whips. (And with the majority, would be eight people. Who is the last person? Whatever, doesn't matter.)
Which means...when they walk somewhere, they have a police office with them...who do not take orders from the Executive. Not even indirectly, like DC police. And they can arrest people who are blatantly committed crimes, even crimes unrelated to their security job.
Now, if we had leadership that wanted to _do_ something, Democratic leadership could walk into, say, the Treasure, be denied entry by some Musk hack, have one of the _actual people who work there_ say 'I don't know who this person is and they appear to be trespassing', and, the police could, you know...arrest the Musk hack.
Would that arrest stick? No. The AG would not prosecute.
But it would remove the people long enough for Congress to, you know, get in there.
What are you talking about? The people under discussion are not refugees, as far as I know. I guess they _could_ be, there are not a huge amount of refugees from Colombia but there is some. But that is pretty much completely irrelevant to how Colombian feels about them.
And, yes, they are Colombian citizens, that's the reason they are being deported to Colombian. You generally deport people back to their own country.
Colombia does not have a problem with its citizens being deported back to it because those citizens entered another country illegal. Pretty much no country does, not even the US. If you get into Canada illegally, and get caught there, and they bring you back over the border, that's fine. Indeed, that's the _ideal_ punishment, sending you back, because the punishment can be much worse. You sneak into Singapore illegal, you probably get locked in prison for ten years and beaten with sticks every Monday. Having the foreign government merely _hand their citizens back_ is quite a relief. Colombia had no problem with that.
Colombia, again, had a problem with those citizens _being chained to seats in military planes_ instead of how countries normally deport people to non-connected countries, which is purchase flights on commercial flights or charter planes to send a group.
Hey, Trump signed an executive order about trans people in sports today.
Contact me when he does something about the designated hitter rule.
Blanchard’s taxonomies really got in the way because the defenders of transfolx usually pretend that we’re not talking about autogynephilic or autoandrophilic people and it’s whatever variety of “phobic” to bring them up (and don’t even THINK about bringing up the detrans people!)
That sentence makes it sounds like you think trans people think the classifications are real and it should be understood they're implicitly not talking about certain people.
Um, no. Trans people generally think Blanchard is a moron and, at some level, a bigot, even if not overtly. And his classifications are roundly rejected by almost all medicine.
For those who do not know, his theory postulated that all 'real' trans, the ones that are not autogynephilic, are attracted to men and are feminine and dress 'as women' and do womanly things.The category literally called 'homosexual transsexuals'. That is, again, the _normal_ trans woman, who are a form of gay men who are like, super gay, so gay they've wander over into being women, not the autogynephilic, who are just straight men who are aroused by their own bodies.
This is really obviously stupid, it's so stupid even non-queer people can realize it's stupid, and really homophobic honestly (It was, after all, 1989), which is why he's had to constantly rewrite it to be less stupid.
And as pointed out in the link below, this group is almost certainly a product of 'That is how you have to act in front of the doctors for them to let you transition'. It turns out that when you gatekeep medicine from a group of people based on their behavior, and at the same time _study_ that group's behavior, they, um, lie to you in the study and present exactly what you want to see.
As has been pointed out, it's time to retract the entire paper: https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/ray-blanchard-retraction-proposed
while the “what the hell are you talking about?” snickerdoodles are thinking primarily of the autogynephiles and the obvious gamers of the system.
If only sports had some sort of _rules_ or something and didn't need laws dictating how they operated.
Incidentally, the 1960s is sorta wrong. People really, really do not understand the history of legal gender changes on documents. Whether or not that was possible in any jurisdiction was pretty much completely random until the 1970s.
Plenty of trans people found literally all they had to do was go to a judge with a doctor's note saying the person was now the other sex, and the judge would issue a new birth certificate.
Other people found themselves in states where judges could only reissue birth certificates due to 'mistakes' on the original, so couldn't change it, and sued, and usually lost in the 70s...and it's around that point that laws started being passed to allow such a thing, or make it easier in places where it technically was already allowed.
This wasn't ever really something that was barred by law on purpose, and when it was barred, it rested on the 'situations under which new birth certificates could be issued by judges' rules, a completely obscure area of law that no one had cared about before and certainly wasn't designed to stop trans people. The judges themselves seems perfectly fine with issuing them if the law allowed and a doctor said 'This person is now the other sex'. In fact, they mostly seemed to think that was how things should work, that doctors determined someone's sex, and that was how you knew what sex someone was.
Ie.., anyone who think that trans people demanding to be recognized as their gender by the law is a new thing and 'everyone has always known what man and woman are and it is based on gametes' is not very knowledgeable about history or how the law _and_ medicine functioned for the longest time.
If she has had surgeries and/or hormonal treatments she may have harmed her reproductive system to the point pregnancy is not possible, and while I think an adult has the right to do that stuff if they want, she’s still a woman. Again, not really hard.
And if he has legally changed the sex on his driver's license, and becomes pregnant, do you think the things the CDC says about pregnancy apply to him?
Because you may _think_ such a person is a woman, but he has a driver's license that says otherwise and the Federal government has laws recognizing him as such. Should material that the CDC prints _recognize_ that, or should it operate in some other universe where those legal facts are ignored?
But we've already got an answer there. Your problem is not with the CDC. You're just an person who thinks trans people don't exist and should not be recognize by the government at all.
Hey, Jaybird, you still paying attention here? This is what I meant when I said 'Harris did not do anything, and the people complaining about 'pregnant people' literally are just arguing that Democrats should stop recognizing trans people at all'.
The problem is not that the Democrats are 'pushing' anything, the problem is that Democrats don't want to rewind trans rights back to *checks notes* ...well, they probably think it's 2015, but it's actually more like the 1960s.
I think that the disaffected young people who have run over to the right could not possibly give so much as a tinker’s cuss about gun control and the lack of progress there.
I think you misunderstood. I am not saying they are pro-gun control.
I am saying they are not anti-gun control. That there are basically no anti-gun control absolutists under...well, not immediately after Columbine, so let's say under 30 years of age. You grow up in a school where you can be murdered at any moment, you watch that happen over and over and no one can stop it, you're not 'cold dead hands'. You actually think that's a little insane.
Indeed, if these disaffected youth have a preference, it is for _some_ gun control, even if it's not a huge issue for them and won't decide how they vote. The Democrats talking about it will not fire them up to oppose it.
I honestly think a lot of this discussion is completely ignoring how soft power works. Do you know what the $100 billion over 20 years spent on PEPFAR bought the US? An incredibly amount of goodwill.
And almost all that money goes _back_ to the US. We pay Americans to do it, we buy drugs from American countries to distribute, and, yes, we also use all that to spy on everyone. For $5 billion a year.
And this is on top of the actual good it does. Because diseases running rampant elsewhere in the world is actually bad for Americans. Cause, um, diseases do not understand borders. But even pretending the good doesn't exist, $5 billion a year (Which, again, goes back to us) just for this level of good will and access is not actually bad.
Arguing 'There are some places it should cut back in' is reasonable...and is a thing it already does. This is why we have an _agency_ to manage this crap. It doesn't just keep funding things in places that don't need it.
And isn't actually what's being argued anyway. Maybe we should stop iron-manning the arguments that Trump's government _could_ be making against _small parts_ of PEPFAR, (we guess, we don't know and have no facts, we just sorta _feel_ parts of it must be ineffiecence), but he didn't make those arguments! He is trying to dismantle literally the entire USAID.
We aren't living in a hypothetical universe where someone is making reasoned and logical cuts to services. We're living in a universe where a bunch of techbros just cut outgoing payments to people and try to dismantle everything. We don't need to talk about what cuts we sorta guess that it might be possible to be made without causing much damage.
Can we also introduce as evidence the other way, of the books and articles written by the people around Trump during his first presidency of things they stopped him from doing?
Asserting that 'Trump is going to do X', and then Trump not doing X is not exactly a false claim when it turns out that Trump _tried_ to do X and was stopped by his staff doing border-line illegal things to distract him and make it difficult and sometimes even just not actually carrying out his orders.
That's perfectly understanding _Trump_. It's just underestimating the morality of the people around him.
I’m a man. I am not a woman. Can I get pregnant or not?
I don't know, are you a trans man or a cis man? Based on the ignorance you've always had about the topic of trans people, I have assumed you were cis, so no, you cannot.
If I'm wrong, and you're a trans man, then you _might_ be able to get pregnant. I don't really know your medical details.
But we are not talking about you, specifically. We are talking about what categories of people can get pregnant. Trans men can get pregnant.
Do you _literally_ not know what trans men are and that they can get pregnant? I want you to answer that question, yes or no.
You can then talk about how you want to reclassify trans men, but I do need to demonstrate you _literally understand the basics of the topic under discussion_. Because I don't think you do.
For those who don't know, the very very quick history: Congress passed sanctions for Apartheid South Africa in 1986 over President Reagan's veto.
Now, the thing is: Almost all foreign policy aperture is the administration's policy, right? The State Department is doing the president's bidding in a general sense. And the Reagan Administration had no problem with Apartheid.
So the Black South Africans and the anti-Apartheid forces did not trust American diplomatic outreach in general, considering it was coming from a very suspect source. (And they were probably right to not trust it, some of that was CIA.)
However, USAID isn't really a diplomatic mission. It is an executive agency, but it's one that exists entirely to implement foreign aid as laid out in law.
At least, that's the theory. The CIA probably also uses it, who knows. But whatever the actual fact is, the anti-Apartheid forces in South Africa trusted it in ways they didn't trust other parts of the US government, and it...helped them. A lot. It helped pay to educate the population after decades of oppression, it helped build civil structures that they were lacking (Which took legal exceptions to get around the sanctions laws), it put pressure on the Apartheid regime, and it was right there as Nelson Mandela took power.
If you are against Apartheid, what USAID did in South Africa is 100% a success story of the US government foreign policy, using soft power, not force, to pressure a mostly peaceful transition out of a oppressive and racist government.
I will make absolutely no comment if Elon Musk, a man whose grandparents moved with his mother to Apartheid South Africa the second it existed because Canada was becoming uncomfortable for overt Na.zis, and whose family with him left the second it _stopped_ being Apartheid, considers that a success story or not.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Keynesian Beauty Contests, Schelling Points, and the Omnicause”
Most laws do _require_ the spending, mostly because we ran into that issue in 1804 when Thomas Jefferson declined to buy some gunboats that Congress had authorized spending money on, but had not required it. I love how you apparently think this country sprang into existence a year ago and Trump is figuring out all the clever loopholes.
On top of that...are you aware there's literally a law requiring the president to spend money allocated by Congress, called the Impoundment Control Act of 1974? This was created when Nixon tried literally the same trick Trump is, refusing to spend funds for programs he did not approve of, under the justification of the laws (which did require him to do the thing) did not explicitly say what he had to do with it.
"Yes, I agree I am supposed to be spending this money by law, but I don't see how I can do that."
Hell, maybe you should have paid attention during Trump's first impeachment, where the impoundment of fund to the Ukraine was literally the crime listed. (Along with lying about it.)
Here, just read the primer. Here's a key section: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/a-primer-on-the-impoundment-control-act
Now, a _clever_ man could claim there are delays, but that they are only delays, and that they are merely to make things more efficiency, not stop what is being done.
But Trump is not a clever man. Neither is Elon. And shuttering an entire agency cannot possibly count as a deferral, it counts as a rescission. Which Trump cannot do. He can pause spending for 45 days, but at that point, it has been considered long enough for Congress to have looked at it, so he must restart if they have not changed appropriations.
"
But it's _not_ true, in fact, the huge amount that was claimed to go from USAID is form the _entire_ government, because it turns out that a huge amount of people in the government subscribe to Politico. USAID itself paid a grand total of $44k to Politico.
Like, literally all this is a lie, and it's an obvious lie from the people that started it.
And you fell for it. Haha.
How many lies about USAID are you going to fall for there, Jaybird?
97% of USAID _employees_ that donated to US politicans donated to Democrats. Not recipients, almost none of who would be eligible to donate to any politician. (Indeed, a lot of them are not even human beings.)
I wonder why this is? Perhaps, and bear with me now: Republicans wanted to, and in fact did, shut down their place of work. So it seems a bad plan to give them money.
Hey Jaybird? What percentage of US government employees do you think donate to Democrats vs. Republicans? 75% to Democrats.
In fact, the only agency that has more donations to the Republicans and Democrats is the Air Force, and barely there. Even the Navy and the Army and Defense Department donate more to the Democrats.
0% of the Department of Education donate to Republicans. Weird. It's almost as if Republicans have been actively promising to shut that down _also_.
It's almost as if people inside the government can see a little more clearer how each party operates and how much they value the government.
But your 'The organizations must be incredibly biased in their hiring' works too. Perhaps there could be some sort of initiative to diversify the viewpoint...oh, hell, I've just been arrested.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
Yeah, JD. Vance, carefully trying to calculate exactly what order the government is Coming For people.
"Alright, so, we're still coming for the trans, and the next is the Mexicans, we weren't _supposed_ to come for the Indians yet...I know some people here want to but Elon has assured me that he's going to stall that as long as possible because he needs his workers...can we maybe go after the gays in there after the Mexicans, delay things a bit..."
His wife: "What are you doing, dear?"
"Oh, just calculating when I'll need to throw you and the kids to the fascists."
"
I think he realized he was in over his head a little bit back, and used the social media stuff as an excuse to exit.
But my point was not his actual exact motives, which are pretty unknowable, my point was that that the reason there was not a 'fight over whether the kid should be able to stay', because the kid did not, in fact, want to stay. Before anyone could leap to his defense, he noped out.
The next time something extremely racists comes out, like if it comes out that someone near all this twice secretly did a Na.zi salute at the inauguration in front of millions of people, there will almost certainly be a fight.
"
He didn't get fired, he resigned. It doesn't seem like he was asked to resign.
I think he just finally figured what _exactly_ he had gotten himself into.
Man, if only the government had some sort of confirmation process for employees. Well, probably not that level, but some sort of confirmation process for higher up. This guy's boss appears to be *checks notes* someone named Elon Musk (Fake sounding name) who is in charge of some sort of efficiency office, and seems to have some sort of scandal about *check notes* Well, that can't be right, no one would let someone who just did that into the government.
Maybe we should set up a process where people like this 'Musk' have to get confirmed by someone else, maybe some part of Congress, and then some sort of political neutral system for hiring people to do things like IT and whatnot, which could be based on education and skill and things?
Also the Treasury Department should probably have _their own_ IT instead of some efficiency office coming in to do it...honestly, it feels like the people trying to 'cut fat' should be working over on the budget, which decides this in advance, instead of where _payments_ go out.
Has anyone looked into any of this?
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Yeah, this is so fun to read:
*Sigh*
"The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan: one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them." -David Ben-Gurion, literally said in 1937 about the partition.
That's Ben-Gurion not only claiming that the 'whole land of Israel' should be Jewish, but that _Jordan_ also should be.
"Why weren't the Arabs dumb enough to believe the Jews who were openly saying to their own people that they would eventually take all the land and the partition was just a step along the way?'
Chaim Weizmann, of course, did _not_ believe this, and was much more tempered. He actually had proposed a Jewish homeland elsewhere previously, as he seemed to understand how just...taking a country could be problematic, and said plenty of things about how Israel should be a joint nation of Jews and Arabs and the world will judge the Jews by how they treat Arabs. He had also was one of those people that everyone claimed to respect but completely ignored what he actually asked them to do, and he was elected to the entirely symbolic position of President of Israel, then died in 1952 so no one had to pretend to care what he thought anymore.
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I mean, yes, if you phrase it like that.
More Jewish voters (79%) did vote for Harris than Muslim voters (20%) did.
Of course, roughly the same amount of Jewish voters (20%) voted for Trump as Muslim voters (21%) did. If you're wondering where rest of the Muslim vote went, it went third party, almost entirely to Jill Stein, who had a Muslim running mate. Or to no one.
One might ask what is going on there with the Jewish vote, and also one might point out that 20% of Jewish voters is roughly five times as much voters as 21% of Muslim voters, and in fact is even more total votes than 21% Muslim voters + 59% half-voters for neither.
But anyway, you can blame Muslims for choosing to vote third party when that might have, hypothetically, altered the outcome in Michigan, but the simply fact it is did not. If every Jill Stein voter had voted for Harris, she would not have won a single additional state.
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Oh, and the really funny joke is that, if we actually started using crypto as currency...at some point someone is going to come up with functioning quantum computers. Could happen in a decade, could happen in three. And from what I understand, those can just...literally instantly manufacture a ton of crypto, causing massive devaluation and inflation. (Or, if they're smart, do it slower and less obvious.)
Crypto is designed to be slow to make more of, with it getting slower and slower and more and more work as it's made, but a big enough quantum computer will just...do it. Instantly. Even a smaller quantum computer can do it a hell of a lot faster. On normal decryption, the the math is that every single qubit that the computer has halves the computational time (Because that's one less bit you have to check in combination with every other bit. I.e., 8 bits have 256 possibilities, 7 bits have 128, 6 bits have 64, etc. Standard encryption obviously uses a lot more bits.), I have no idea if that's the same for making cyptocurrency, but it's something like that.
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Crypto, or more specifically blockchain as a concept, is a vaguely useful concept to make sure that records are not changed. It is a programming tool...not a particularly _useful_ programming tool because there are plenty of ways to do it, but blockchain does fill in some unique edge cases where you need to be distributed.
And people decided to use it for money, which it _sorta_ works as. In fact, it works a lot of actual currency instead of electronic money. Actually, arguably more like gold, because there's a finite amount of it, and while it does technically have 'serial numbers', those numbers are easy enough to 'melt off' and print new ones.
And let's ignore the fact that this (along with gold) is just fiat money, because all currency is fiat money, it's something we've randomly assigned value to, to trade in units of, and the question is just if we use the government's fiat or invent their own.
Unfortunately, there are reasons we don't carry around bars of gold everywhere we go and don't keep our savings in gold in giant saves in our house. Does anyone know this?
One, it's wildly deflationary because the amount of gold, and bitcoin, cannot possibly keep up with the amount of money that needs to exist. Ergo, the value keeps going up, which sounds great for an investment, but is incredibly stupid for a currency, because not only does it make things hard to value, but people tend to save it. (Which means, when they buy things, they use some other currency.)
Two, it means the government cannot track it at all, which sounds good until you remember 'The government tracking currency' is how you, uh, stop it from being stolen and recover it afterwards. And stop it from being used to pay off kidnappers. And drug cartels.
We do not actually want our currency to be 'indistinguishable ounces of gold poured into a pot'. Especially not a pot guarded by computer security that not only is easy to hack access to, but easy enough to social engineer access to. It doesn't matter if all the math in the world says you cannot copy and replicate the gold, we believe the math there, but people can just _take it_. They can physically, or electronically, walk off with it, and now they have it, and you can't get it back. (And humans are _completely crap_ at computer security compared to physical security. Actually, we're complete crap at unattended physical security too, which is why we put _humans_ in it to physically stop people from spending hours cutting through walls.)
This is all on top of the issue we skipped past, that this is basically just people printing a lot of something, and then trying to get others to use it as fiat currency. It's like if I have a bunch of stale breadcrusts and start hyping up how breadcrusts are going to be the best currency ever and everyone will take them, and even set up a fake economy where I trade breadcrusts for other things to show how well it works. I'm not even sure that qualifies as a pyramid scheme. It's just a conman trying to sell you crap by lying about what you can do with it.
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Um, so I'm a little confused here. Is Trump planning on giving Gaza to Israel, or _keeping_ it?
It sounds like he's going to keep it.
Is that...is that an acceptable plan to Israel? Has anyone asked how they would feel about that?
The people in Israeli politics who want to wipe Gaza off the map are _very_ clear that they think all of the Southern Levant west of the Jordan River belongs to Israel.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025”
Really? That's the part of the comment you decided to respond to?
I don't know if you expect trans people to be outraged by that, but no one fishing cares about sports except as part of a slippery slope. Transphobes got what they wanted, the incredibly minuscule amount of trans girls and women will leave sports, and all it will cost is in the future is dealing with accusations of being male being hurtled at girls and women that do not appear feminine enough and people doing genitalia inspections of them, including the children. *thumbs up*
Meanwhile, you don't bother to respond to the Blanchard part?
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...wait wait wait, you're asserting there _is_ a way to change sex, but science has not managed it yet?
Tell me, what is the thing you think science needs to be able to do to make a woman into a man?
Is it 'manufacturing different-sized gametes'? Is that literally your definition?
Or is it pregnancy, something you seem to have conflated with that?
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
Sorry, it was founded September 2nd 1789. September 11th was the date the first Secretary of the Treasury was appointed.
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Congress did not authorize the existence of the Supreme Court.
They did authorize the existence of the Treasury Department. It was founded September 11, 1789, by an Act of Congress:
Every part of its structure is under Congressional control, everything it does is by the authorization of Congress, even if large chunks of their authority was delegated by Congress to the president. Congress has a right to do any sort of oversight it wishes as to how the Department is functioning, including personal inspection.
The equivalent of your question would be if Congress could get inside the _White House's_ deliberations, and the answer, as already answered by the court, is no.
(This is on top of the obvious fact that court deliberations are generally secret as part of the concept of due process, itself a part of the constitution. Whereas the behavior of the _Treasury_ is not impacted in that way.)
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There actually is an armed force that answers to Congress instead of the executive. It's called the Capitol Police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol_Police
While it answers to Congress, and has a specific assignment of certain areas, not only is Treasure Building _within_ that area, but it actually can do arrests anywhere in the US if it spots a crime. Like, oh, trespassing. (Like they tried to do Jan 6ths, in fact.)
Of course, how could Democrats send them anywhere, if they answer to Congress?
Well, according to Roll Call magazine, at least the top nine members of the House and Senate have a Capitol Police escort at all times, just like the executive and the secret service. I don't know the entire list, but I assume that is at least the minority leaderships, probably also the minority whips. (And with the majority, would be eight people. Who is the last person? Whatever, doesn't matter.)
Which means...when they walk somewhere, they have a police office with them...who do not take orders from the Executive. Not even indirectly, like DC police. And they can arrest people who are blatantly committed crimes, even crimes unrelated to their security job.
Now, if we had leadership that wanted to _do_ something, Democratic leadership could walk into, say, the Treasure, be denied entry by some Musk hack, have one of the _actual people who work there_ say 'I don't know who this person is and they appear to be trespassing', and, the police could, you know...arrest the Musk hack.
Would that arrest stick? No. The AG would not prosecute.
But it would remove the people long enough for Congress to, you know, get in there.
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What are you talking about? The people under discussion are not refugees, as far as I know. I guess they _could_ be, there are not a huge amount of refugees from Colombia but there is some. But that is pretty much completely irrelevant to how Colombian feels about them.
And, yes, they are Colombian citizens, that's the reason they are being deported to Colombian. You generally deport people back to their own country.
Colombia does not have a problem with its citizens being deported back to it because those citizens entered another country illegal. Pretty much no country does, not even the US. If you get into Canada illegally, and get caught there, and they bring you back over the border, that's fine. Indeed, that's the _ideal_ punishment, sending you back, because the punishment can be much worse. You sneak into Singapore illegal, you probably get locked in prison for ten years and beaten with sticks every Monday. Having the foreign government merely _hand their citizens back_ is quite a relief. Colombia had no problem with that.
Colombia, again, had a problem with those citizens _being chained to seats in military planes_ instead of how countries normally deport people to non-connected countries, which is purchase flights on commercial flights or charter planes to send a group.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025”
Contact me when he does something about the designated hitter rule.
That sentence makes it sounds like you think trans people think the classifications are real and it should be understood they're implicitly not talking about certain people.
Um, no. Trans people generally think Blanchard is a moron and, at some level, a bigot, even if not overtly. And his classifications are roundly rejected by almost all medicine.
For those who do not know, his theory postulated that all 'real' trans, the ones that are not autogynephilic, are attracted to men and are feminine and dress 'as women' and do womanly things.The category literally called 'homosexual transsexuals'. That is, again, the _normal_ trans woman, who are a form of gay men who are like, super gay, so gay they've wander over into being women, not the autogynephilic, who are just straight men who are aroused by their own bodies.
This is really obviously stupid, it's so stupid even non-queer people can realize it's stupid, and really homophobic honestly (It was, after all, 1989), which is why he's had to constantly rewrite it to be less stupid.
And as pointed out in the link below, this group is almost certainly a product of 'That is how you have to act in front of the doctors for them to let you transition'. It turns out that when you gatekeep medicine from a group of people based on their behavior, and at the same time _study_ that group's behavior, they, um, lie to you in the study and present exactly what you want to see.
As has been pointed out, it's time to retract the entire paper: https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/ray-blanchard-retraction-proposed
If only sports had some sort of _rules_ or something and didn't need laws dictating how they operated.
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Incidentally, the 1960s is sorta wrong. People really, really do not understand the history of legal gender changes on documents. Whether or not that was possible in any jurisdiction was pretty much completely random until the 1970s.
Plenty of trans people found literally all they had to do was go to a judge with a doctor's note saying the person was now the other sex, and the judge would issue a new birth certificate.
Other people found themselves in states where judges could only reissue birth certificates due to 'mistakes' on the original, so couldn't change it, and sued, and usually lost in the 70s...and it's around that point that laws started being passed to allow such a thing, or make it easier in places where it technically was already allowed.
This wasn't ever really something that was barred by law on purpose, and when it was barred, it rested on the 'situations under which new birth certificates could be issued by judges' rules, a completely obscure area of law that no one had cared about before and certainly wasn't designed to stop trans people. The judges themselves seems perfectly fine with issuing them if the law allowed and a doctor said 'This person is now the other sex'. In fact, they mostly seemed to think that was how things should work, that doctors determined someone's sex, and that was how you knew what sex someone was.
Ie.., anyone who think that trans people demanding to be recognized as their gender by the law is a new thing and 'everyone has always known what man and woman are and it is based on gametes' is not very knowledgeable about history or how the law _and_ medicine functioned for the longest time.
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And if he has legally changed the sex on his driver's license, and becomes pregnant, do you think the things the CDC says about pregnancy apply to him?
Because you may _think_ such a person is a woman, but he has a driver's license that says otherwise and the Federal government has laws recognizing him as such. Should material that the CDC prints _recognize_ that, or should it operate in some other universe where those legal facts are ignored?
But we've already got an answer there. Your problem is not with the CDC. You're just an person who thinks trans people don't exist and should not be recognize by the government at all.
Hey, Jaybird, you still paying attention here? This is what I meant when I said 'Harris did not do anything, and the people complaining about 'pregnant people' literally are just arguing that Democrats should stop recognizing trans people at all'.
The problem is not that the Democrats are 'pushing' anything, the problem is that Democrats don't want to rewind trans rights back to *checks notes* ...well, they probably think it's 2015, but it's actually more like the 1960s.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
I think you misunderstood. I am not saying they are pro-gun control.
I am saying they are not anti-gun control. That there are basically no anti-gun control absolutists under...well, not immediately after Columbine, so let's say under 30 years of age. You grow up in a school where you can be murdered at any moment, you watch that happen over and over and no one can stop it, you're not 'cold dead hands'. You actually think that's a little insane.
Indeed, if these disaffected youth have a preference, it is for _some_ gun control, even if it's not a huge issue for them and won't decide how they vote. The Democrats talking about it will not fire them up to oppose it.
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I don't actually understand what you mean by that.
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I honestly think a lot of this discussion is completely ignoring how soft power works. Do you know what the $100 billion over 20 years spent on PEPFAR bought the US? An incredibly amount of goodwill.
And almost all that money goes _back_ to the US. We pay Americans to do it, we buy drugs from American countries to distribute, and, yes, we also use all that to spy on everyone. For $5 billion a year.
And this is on top of the actual good it does. Because diseases running rampant elsewhere in the world is actually bad for Americans. Cause, um, diseases do not understand borders. But even pretending the good doesn't exist, $5 billion a year (Which, again, goes back to us) just for this level of good will and access is not actually bad.
Arguing 'There are some places it should cut back in' is reasonable...and is a thing it already does. This is why we have an _agency_ to manage this crap. It doesn't just keep funding things in places that don't need it.
And isn't actually what's being argued anyway. Maybe we should stop iron-manning the arguments that Trump's government _could_ be making against _small parts_ of PEPFAR, (we guess, we don't know and have no facts, we just sorta _feel_ parts of it must be ineffiecence), but he didn't make those arguments! He is trying to dismantle literally the entire USAID.
We aren't living in a hypothetical universe where someone is making reasoned and logical cuts to services. We're living in a universe where a bunch of techbros just cut outgoing payments to people and try to dismantle everything. We don't need to talk about what cuts we sorta guess that it might be possible to be made without causing much damage.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025”
Can we also introduce as evidence the other way, of the books and articles written by the people around Trump during his first presidency of things they stopped him from doing?
Asserting that 'Trump is going to do X', and then Trump not doing X is not exactly a false claim when it turns out that Trump _tried_ to do X and was stopped by his staff doing border-line illegal things to distract him and make it difficult and sometimes even just not actually carrying out his orders.
That's perfectly understanding _Trump_. It's just underestimating the morality of the people around him.
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I don't know, are you a trans man or a cis man? Based on the ignorance you've always had about the topic of trans people, I have assumed you were cis, so no, you cannot.
If I'm wrong, and you're a trans man, then you _might_ be able to get pregnant. I don't really know your medical details.
But we are not talking about you, specifically. We are talking about what categories of people can get pregnant. Trans men can get pregnant.
Do you _literally_ not know what trans men are and that they can get pregnant? I want you to answer that question, yes or no.
You can then talk about how you want to reclassify trans men, but I do need to demonstrate you _literally understand the basics of the topic under discussion_. Because I don't think you do.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/3/2025”
For those who don't know, the very very quick history: Congress passed sanctions for Apartheid South Africa in 1986 over President Reagan's veto.
Now, the thing is: Almost all foreign policy aperture is the administration's policy, right? The State Department is doing the president's bidding in a general sense. And the Reagan Administration had no problem with Apartheid.
So the Black South Africans and the anti-Apartheid forces did not trust American diplomatic outreach in general, considering it was coming from a very suspect source. (And they were probably right to not trust it, some of that was CIA.)
However, USAID isn't really a diplomatic mission. It is an executive agency, but it's one that exists entirely to implement foreign aid as laid out in law.
At least, that's the theory. The CIA probably also uses it, who knows. But whatever the actual fact is, the anti-Apartheid forces in South Africa trusted it in ways they didn't trust other parts of the US government, and it...helped them. A lot. It helped pay to educate the population after decades of oppression, it helped build civil structures that they were lacking (Which took legal exceptions to get around the sanctions laws), it put pressure on the Apartheid regime, and it was right there as Nelson Mandela took power.
If you are against Apartheid, what USAID did in South Africa is 100% a success story of the US government foreign policy, using soft power, not force, to pressure a mostly peaceful transition out of a oppressive and racist government.
I will make absolutely no comment if Elon Musk, a man whose grandparents moved with his mother to Apartheid South Africa the second it existed because Canada was becoming uncomfortable for overt Na.zis, and whose family with him left the second it _stopped_ being Apartheid, considers that a success story or not.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.