Depends on your definitions, I suppose. You could argue that engaging in blatant market manipulation and insider trading from the Oval Office for 16 months and only netting $750M in profits represents a failure. Someone more competent could have made a lot more.

When are when are we going to see American ships in the Caspian Sea?

Americans forces stationed in Afghanistan couldn't stop things getting across the border in to Afghanistan, so how successful do you think they're going to be when they're not even in the country?

As long as the US blockades the Straits of Hormuz, so will Iran. Iran has more tolerance to pain than American voters do. Today's news: Trump chickened out again and didn't attack Iran.

I stayed in school for a couple of years to get my MSEE after getting my bachelor's. It was like being in Montessori school again and I loved it. It was the first time I had really manage my time over the long stretch - not just to get through this week's test, but to make my overall project successful. My advisor was more or less hands off, but available if I got stuck. Otherwise, it was up to me. That was 25 years ago. About 5 years ago I made the transition to leadership roles to be that advisor to the new guard, but I still value an MS if it was done with the right intent. A lot of colleges today will throw you an MS if you just take a few extra classes, but when I see a well-planned thesis that the candidate can demonstrate true understanding in an interview, it tells me (along with many other things) that they can manage goals, timelines, requirements, and do the validation work to tie it all up. It's nice when I don't have to spend their first 2 years at the company developing those skills in them.

To me the whole point of the MS is to give you something to figure out on your own and make you learn how to manage it. Taking a bunch of classes only makes you better at getting through this week and temporarily memorizing enough formulas to get through a final. There's little true understanding in that.

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

I'm all for criticising Israel; what they've done in Gaza is disproportionate and probably amounts to war crimes. This doesn't change the fact that there is widespread left wing antisemitism. See for example the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report on Labour antisemitism, published in October 2020, that found the Labour Party had committed unlawful acts of discrimination and harassment against Jewish members, highlighting serious failings in its handling of antisemitism complaints and political interference in the process. The former leader of the Labour Party who wanted to be prime minister continues to downplay it and deny there was a problem. AmiMojo has defended the man on this site and posted on multiple occasions that demonstrate his position. Many people in the UK are using Jewish people as a proxy for Israel and there's been a rise of violent antisemitic hate crimes against them. They don't deserve to live in fear, but the leaders of left wing parties in the UK will not speak out, just like AmiMoJo won't either.

It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

Yes! This is the way. Unfortunately, our system is so dysfunctional we can't even pass normal laws now, much less enact and ratify constitutional amendments.

Surely not that. That would be dumb. And awful. And utterly corrupt.

Sigh.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

Will it catch the president, who has been on a rampant insider trading and market manipulation spree for his whole second term?

What about congress?

What will the SEC do when it flags top politicians? I think all of us know the answer to that question.

Demonstrably wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You and your leftwing antisemitic claptrap. Are you ready to admit yet that Israel is also in an existential struggle against organisations on all sides hellbent on the genocide of Israel, funding by a state whose official policy is the genocide of Israel (that's Iran, if you're wondering)? When are you going to call them out for their actions?

Don't get me wrong, while I support Israel's right to defend itself, the way it's gone about it in Gaza is wrong. But unlike you, that doesn't mean I'm going to ignore the realities of both sides of this complicated and horrific conflict.

It's people like you who are fuelling the rise of antisemitism. That's also wrong.

s/blockage/blockade/g

Fucking autocorrect.

The US has tried to blockage a little island off the coast of Florida for over 60 years without success. North Korea has sticking the finger up for even longer. I can't imagine the US will succeed against a country of 1.6 million km^2 and 92 million people the other side of the world where the US has limited resources simply by trying to blockage them. The US couldn't keep the neighbouring Afghanistan under control with boots on the ground FFS.