Newt Gingrich's moment of brilliance was when he realized that he didn't have to get rid of government regulators, just separate their enforcement division into a separate line item and squeeze. And squeeze they have, the IRS, EPA, FAA, FCC, CPD, etc. enforcement divisions are all skeletons of their former selves. As neo-con 'thought leader' Grover Norquist told a group of conservative lawmakers in the '90s, "You'll never convince voters that government is broken if you don't break it first."

Russia is giving the territories affected the opportunity to vote whether to join the Russian Federation or stay with the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe. Oddly enough so far they've all voted to join the RF.

And wars that they didn't start? Seriously? I'll just refer to my post:
https://slashdot.org/comments....

There has never been a "prospect for peace" in our entire lifetimes, even 1948 was too late.

OK, so how do you propose to implement that foolishness when the more powerful "partner" adamantly rejects the very concept? Right now Israel has annexed East Jerusalem, is preparing to annex the whole of the West Bank, has destroyed Gaza and crammed the survivors into a few tiny concentration camps, and openly says that Israeli "settlers" will be allowed to occupy the majority of it. Where are you going to establish the second state? Since the Sadministration's plan is to remove the Palestinians before creating it's phantasmagorical "Middle East Riviera" maybe in Ann Arbor or Minneapolis?

Why? Israel has very clearly and definitively declared many, many times that they will never allow Palestinians to have their own state with any sort of independence. That's official state policy. So as is normal for the hasbara spouters, you demand that the Palestinians lay down and accept anything they're told to do, while putting no restraints on Israel.

Sorry, that bird don't fly no more.

Wow, so three quarters of a century of massacres, theft, abuse, rape, starvation, destruction, imprisonment and frelling biological warfare is just fine, and you feel the Palestinians should lay back and take it. I have no words.

Of course the vast majority of the country is populated by European Ashkenazi Jews, very few of whom share any measurable amount of genetics with the Mizrahi Jews who have consistently lived in the region for the last two millennia, so "and their descendants" isn't really applicable. I can convert to Judaism tomorrow and almost immediately qualify to move to Israel, but that hasn't changed my genetics or heritage.

In the early '80s Volkswagen established it's "Million Mile Club", for drivers who had exceeded a million miles on their vehicles.

They stick out of the back, but sure. The only things that I've been worried about carrying were the 16' 2x12s, so I put a landscaping block on the front end (I needed a couple anyway) and they were fine.

I have a 2002 Tacoma with the smallest 4-banger they sold and a manual 5-speed, and it's every bit as much truck as I need and in reality at least 75% of other truck owners need. I can, and do, carry a yard of manure or 1300 pounds of landscaping blocks and it's perfectly adequate. It drives a hundred times better than an F-150 and has better handling in the snow than any American car or truck that I've ever driven.

My uncle worked at the Chrysler Proving Grounds where he got to do the fun things like drive cars into brick walls and T-bone them with steel rails. In the late '70s they sent most of his team out to wreaking yards around the country. There they looked for vehicles with more than 70,000 miles and tore them apart, their task was to look for parts that were not wearing as fast as others. For example if the swing arms were still in good shape the company would lean on the manufacturer to lower the quality so that they would also fail before 100,000 miles, that way high-mileage vehicles would rapidly become too expensive to maintain and owners would be forced to buy a new vehicle. He said that he met testers from the other big car companies in some of the junkyards doing the same thing.

I suspect management had been "inspired" by the poem "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay".

https://www.gutenberg.org/file...

It had better be for short-term speculation, you're buying stock in a company which even though they were headquartered in Michigan still took 80 years to figure out how to build a car that didn't rust out in three winters. They still can't build a truck that doesn't get stuck in 6 inches of snow unless it has 4-wheel drive and some serious weight in the back.

You're about three decades out of date.

Another gave a partial list to Israel, which sold it to the Soviets in exchange for releasing some Jewish criminals and allowing to emigrate.

Signal? Really? **sigh** We used to be the world's leader in technology.