my adoptive city can be saved from the sea with a wall literally two kilometers long.
I mean, the rest of the country needs
Where's your sense of adventure, Heebie?
When will Mars be ready for colonization? Can we speed up the timeline on that? Because we really need a Plan B.
London cunningly thought of the flood thing:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-thames-barrier
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/322061/LIT7540_43858f.pdf
Our city has also thought of a barrier. However we can't even make our goddamn subways work when it goes below freezing so I'm not optimistic they'll be able to hold back the entire ocean.
Don't bother with spelling either.
"Cnut" is probably how he would have spelled it if he was literate. It was his actual name.
It was, but I'm a dead polar bear.
It's not clear what the impact of Trump's actions on climate change is going to actually be. Most of the biggest factors are outside his control. His actions won't help, of course.
I'm guessing the sole legislative change to Obamacare will be to require uncontrolled tire fires in state parks before Medicaid expansion funds are released.
Because the Freedom Caucus needs to be able to run ads saying that Obamacare causes cancer.
And the GOP can only unite around their core issues: screwing over poor people and the environment.
The tires would have to be stolen from a Prius.
On environmental policy, I simultaneously truly believe (1) the Trump administration is pure disaster, virtually certain to have irreversible catastrophic long-term consequences, and (2) the Trump administration will not be meaningfully worse than the administration of any of Trump's major Republican primary competitors would have been. (2) does not really mitigate (1) in any way, of course. It just feels weird, because this administration's environmental policy is one of the things I'm personally most upset about, but it's also one of the things where I don't think I feel *more* upset about Trump's policies than I would about any other Republican's. Unlike so many other Trump administration policies, which are beyond the pale.
20: Right, on this issue the Trump Administration is just regular-evil rather than exploring new frontiers of evil. One of the Trump appointees at EPA recently left in a huff because Pruitt wasn't smashing things in a sufficiently Trumpy way or whatever. He'll still smash things, of course, but in a more subtle and legally defensible way that's more typical of Republican appointees.
I think Trump is actually worse on the environment than your average Republican would be, because he's also destroying the country's global reputation and diplomatic capacity. Not having allies who trust us or a functioning State Department is going to put a serious crimp in the next Democratic President's ability to engage in climate negotiations.
Not having allies who trust us or a functioning State Department is going to put a serious crimp in the next Democratic President's ability to engage in climate negotiations.
Yeah, I thought this through the other day. Some of the worst-case scenarios for this administration are going off the boards: they will not be very effective at anything*, people won't blindly fall for whatever BS they spout, ACA is saved, etc. I read enough Kendzior not to be sanguine, but I feel like I can set aside some fears, or at least put them on the back burner.
BUT. They really are a fucking disaster on the international front, and I don't see how we recover. Because, unless the guy is impeached and his people (if not him) jailed, then the lesson will be, for everyone who's alive right now, that America can go completely off the rails on a scale never imagined before. Pick your worst foreign policy admin in history (presumably Nixon, but early Reagan made a go of it): they still knew what they were doing, honored American commitments, didn't threaten allies with made-up invoices for services rendered**, etc.
Sure, whoever succeeds Trump will get an enormous wave of int'l goodwill, kind of like Obama's Nobel, but every Foreign Ministry on earth will always have people saying, OK, sure, we can trust this person, but what about the next guy?
Incalculable damage. Thanks, Comey.
*not to minimize the evil they'll do, but it seems that, even with the petty shit, they'll always step on their own dicks. This is the very opposite of evil masterminds. Evil incompetents.
**a story whose outlines, if not gruesome details, have now been NYT-confirmed
a story whose outlines, if not gruesome details, have now been NYT-confirmed
Link?
presumably Nixon, but early Reagan made a go of it
Not W?
I mean, Nixon shares a lot of Vietnam responsibility with Johnson, and he had real accomplishments regarding China and Soviet arms control.
That makes it sound like he brought it up verbally but didn't actually present a written invoice.
It was written a on picture of his dick, and an obvious photoshop enlargement of his dick at that.
It doesn't say he didn't either, though. Both stories would be consistent with him, say, bringing a one-page tabulation of Germany's spending versus the 2% guideline over the years and then waving it around and calling the document an invoice.
True, but that seems like the sort of detail Cohen would have mentioned if his source had.
I'm just skeptical because it seems like the kind of thing the White House would be waving around in public if it were real.
22- I think that is right. You might be a little optimistic thinking Trump won't end the world, but if he doesn't the damage will still be lasting.
Not having allies who trust us or a functioning State Department is going to put a serious crimp in the next Democratic President's ability to engage in climate negotiations.
I dunno. Because the international community was quite able to realise, back in 2009, that the US had been run by a fool but was no longer being run by one, and changed its response accordingly. And after 2024, when a reasonably sane and intelligent president (let's call him Martinez) is in office, I can't see them being stubborn enough to keep reacting to him as though he was another Trump.
The lack of trust is not going to be "oh hey we can't trust you because US presidents are all like Trump". It's going to be "we can trust you, President Martinez, but we do now know that your electorate is in the habit of electing festering bawbags from time to time, so we're taking that into account in our predictions of your future actions, including whether your country is likely to keep complying with this treaty we are negotiating right now".
Article 50 holy hell. Can't believe she went and did it.
I can't believe the Daily Mail didn't run photos of Tim Barrow and Donald Tusk's legs.
Yesterday afternoon there was a three-footed deer in my backyard about three feet from the window. It was a doe and it was eating the shrub that I hate.
Is that in Nostradamus or something?
As long as there isn't a total solar eclipse this year, we should be fine.
I endorse "festering bawbag" as an epithet.
35.2 was actually what I was getting at. The only deals Pres. Martinez will be able to make will be short term and transactional, or else pretty insignificant.
I mean, I guess (hope) we'll see. One thing that occurs to me is that there's long been this debate about the value of signaling in int'l relations, with one side arguing that e.g. displays of "will" are meaningless, because only actions matter. But ISTM that the post-Trump world will be one in which actions will be suspect because signaling is broken. That is, the US spent a century or more sending a relatively consistent set of signals (or signals within a consistent band, let's say), and our actions were then judged within the framework of those signals. Indeed, part of why the backlash against the Iraq war wasn't worse was that everyone basically believed that we wouldn't, in the end, act like a literal imperial power (and we didn't). But I fear that Trump will permanently--or for decades, at any rate--damage that presumption of good will, which will in turn mean that our concrete actions get treated differently than they would have under previous signaling regimes.
The Trump and W administrations have made it clear for all with eyes to see that the United States federal government is, at all times, less than four years away from potentially being run by deplorable idiots.
I think this story is bullshit. Comey is trying to exonerate himself. http://www.newsweek.com/fbi-director-james-comey-russian-tampering-election-576417
43 I think if there is anything to it then the truth of it was that Comey deliberately set it up so the idea would get knocked down. I mean sure "hey, why don't I write an op-ed?" in a meeting with the Sec State, NSA, Attorney General, Secretary of DHS, et al, how the hell did he think that would be received?
44: agreed. I am not an expert on how the US intelligence apparatus works but that sounds like the sort of suggestion that would get you at best funny looks and at worst a committal.