I have ZERO positive to say about scientology; it's a scam setup by the world's worst SciFi author.

That said, however, the people who did this are scum.

You have NO RIGHT to enter somebody else's facility (no matter how much you disagree with them or hate them) and mock them, wreak havok, sew discord, make a scene, etc. That's NOT a party, or a gag, or a joke, or a protest. These jerks would call the cops if a pack of scientologists did this to THEM in their homes or some place THEY care about, or some place THEY go to for a bit of peace.

In the United States, we have a Constitutional Right to free speech, and a right to protest, but this was stretched to crazy extremes by the Supreme Court in the sixties during all the uproar over the Vietnam War. If you actually READ what the founders WROTE, ignoring temporary court interpretations, people's individual imaginations and preferences, etc then you see that the founders made NO guarantee of any right to "protest" at, on, or within, the private property and/or buildings of ANY private people or any commercial or religious institutions. The relevant text is the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." In so far as an assembly of a group of people goes, they have a guarantee of a right to PEACEABLY assemble (that assembly is contingent on it being peaceful) to PETITION (not to annoy/anger/insult but to actually provide an application, for example to state the problem and propose a solution) the GOVERNMENT (there's NO protection for protests against individuals, companies, organizations, just GOVERNMENT). The text also clearly prohibits the government from banning people from SPEAKING their minds. All that stuff about "sit-ins" and burning flags, etc is all just the ruminations and preferences of judges and can be undone as easily as it was done - it was NEVER in the Constitution any more than the idea of escaped slaves being returned to their owners, or facilities being segregated along racial lines (other things judges once said were Constitutional, but which were NEVER in the Constitution).

The jerks who did this were not "edgy" or "speaking truth to power" or any of that other mindless drivel...They were doing something actually rather popular: making a point of disliking and disrespecting Scientology. This was on-par with comedians who pretend to be edgy and rebellious - while doing the exact same thing as 99% of their peers: joking about Trump. It's the easy, lazy, and popular thing among their peer group. For all the propaganda they spew, not a single one of those comedians has ever been sent off to a Gulag, jailed, tortured, killed, etc by the guy they insist is some dictator. They know full-well they're at no personal risk at all in attacking him and the worst that might happen is half of the country will get annoyed and pressure their employers (Trump himself will do no more to them than they do to him - rant). Hate to drag the Bad Orange Man into this, it's just that he and his critics are an excellent example of this.

These jerks are complete cowards; they'd do this to Scientologists, probably Mormons, possibly Jews or Christians, but NEVER to Muslims. Nope. They'll say Scientologists are super strange and take disagreeable positions on things, but you'll NEVER see them do it to Islam. They'll ONLY go after people they are certain will not hurt them. There's nothing gutsy about them. They're just getting their kicks out of being hurtful to other people.

People love to shift the blame for bad results away from themselves and their actions; it's very human (unfortunately).

Members of congress do it by passing laws that create some executive agency and then grant that agency the power to write "rules" that will be enforced as though they were laws. This makes it so when the FAA or the FCC or the EPA etc clamps down on somebody, and it gets the attention of the public and the public seems not to like it, the congress members can point at nameless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats and encourage the public to be mad at those guys (who wrote the stupid rule or enforced it ham-handedly) as though the congress had NOTHING to do with it...

Same thing here.

Some executive over-staffed, failed to get rid of the unproductive, blew a big sales contract, blew the roll-out of a new product, mis-managed the development of a product, spent too much and needs to find some cost-cutting, etc and ANY news that's in the headlines and has the public attention becomes the go-to excuse. In 2020 and 2021 it was COVID-19. Plenty of corporations that were in big trouble BEFORE the pandemic finally admitted it and collapsed during the pandemic and blamed the pandemic. Think about it. If you're the doofus who ran a company into the ground, and you hope to get a CEO job elsewhere, it's GREAT to blame some big global thing or some huge cultural trend for the failure. The board of the next company you hope to helm is much more likely to give you the chance if the failure you presided over previously wasn't your fault...

I've seen many of these excuses over the decades... and there will be many more in the future. Investors need to learn to see through these excuses.

with the current generation of young programmers. They clearly do not know the difference between an operating system and applications. Nobody should be trying to add AI to Windows, or to Linux, or to any other OS. The OS is supposed to add a layer of abstraction to the platform, so applications can be written and then run on multiple systems with hardware differences. The OS is supposed to allocate resources to applications. The modern OS is supposed to allow multiple applications to run at the same time or appear to run at the same time using some combination of cores and time-slicing. If any operating system is having problems doing these things (the basics) then programmers should be improving whichever element is not up to par.

So-called AI, as currently being hyped, is a mutant derivative of large language models and could well be a computing fad. Fads do not belong in an OS; they BARELY belong in an app. We know things like memory management, bulk storage management, and process management belong in an OS and we have decades of experience confirming that, but AI a decade from now could be nothing like AI today.

There's plenty of need for coders in Linux land to get the basics of the OS right. For example: as long as I cannot get proper support in linux for half of my printers (in other words: the hardware abstraction is still incomplete), there's ZERO excuse for any linux programmers spending time adding AI fluffery. Similarly, the OS is still using a web interface and CUPS for printers, in part because the OS lacked its own standardized API and abstraction for printers. I'm not even fully convinced that the whole Xorg vs Wayland thing, and the init vs systemd thing, are fully settled.

To be a little more charitable: it's possible this is not entirely about younger coders wanting to play with the current new shiny object and being bored by completing/fixing/maintaining the basics - the investor types are currently pushing AI as an investment and thus anybody wanting money is sprinkling AI about and talking it up to attract attention, but even there, it's the job of serious programmers to stand up to people doing that and say "NO, that's NOT appropriate for inclusion into an operating system."

they were NOT rented props nor were they props from the studio warehouse. They were a product placement. Oh, and they were NEW and fully functional.

I was on set when they arrived, and played with them myself. I thought they were really cool (remember, this was the mid-80s and they were advanced machines for the time) and would have loved to get one. I've long wondered what happened to them after production wrapped, given that such items placed in such deals often do not go back to the suppliers. I do know that Sly got one or more of the PC clones for personal use, and know one of the guys from that company who went to his residence to set it up or answer questions about it.

More Cobra trivia: the police station set was built on about the 4th floor of an old dis-used downtown LA skyscraper (bank?) which was then called "the security building" on South spring Street. The set was on the south (south-east?) corner region of that floor, and other movie companies had put other sets in other parts of that building and then abandoned them. When parts of that building were used for filming, the sets were powered by generators setup in the parking lot which used to be across the alley where a parking garage now stands. In recent years this building has been converted to a nice looking apartment building called "The Lofts". The people living there probably have no idea of the things that happened there in the past.

California has about the most progressive income tax in the nation. The higher your income, the steeper the rate you pay. What this means is: The costs for the very generous social programs are CURRENTLY largely borne by the highest earners. When those millions of illegal immigrants get free phones, free Obamacare, free lawyers, free education, housing assistance, food assistance, etc and when the homeless get benefits, and there's assistance for trans surgeries, and every other big Democrat happy promise to some constituent group, the state makes the rich pay disproportionately for it, so average voters don't feel the pain. This has been the secret sauce in the Democrat recipe for Democrat dominance in the state politics for decades. As long as companies like Apple and Google and Tesla and Oracle, and Intel and the other big chip companies were headquartered here and their executives lived here and payed taxes here, there was a virtual printing press for cash for Democrat party spending dreams. With super-control of the state by one party, however, arrogance has set in, and the Gavin Newsom generation of leadership has forgotten how the magic worked; they've finally squeezed too hard and the people paying the bills are bailing out.

TANSTAAFL - Nothing that requires energy, material, or human labor can possibly be "free". SOMEBODY has to pay for it.

The current political leadership of the state has been driving the rich, and the big corporations away from the state at a rate never before seen in the history of California, and now with a push like this, in which a public largely not attentive to the details will be encouraged to further "soak the rich" the departures of the very people carrying the disproportionate share of the burden for all the give-aways is likely to accelerate. What certainly will NOT happen is a reduction in the hand-outs being used to buy the votes of the poor. As a result, the SOMEBODY who must make up the difference and who will be subjected to a very sharp increase in taxes will have to be the middle class. There's no way to avoid this. The laws of economics are every bit as inviolable as the laws of physics.

There's a reason California is now actually LOSING population for the first time in its history, and it cannot be made up with poor immigrants (who won't be able to fill the budgetary holes with taxes on their low incomes). Smart middle class folks can see the writing on the wall, and they know that (absent a political revolution) they're gonna have to get out while they can still get a good price for their California homes, before the taxes skyrocket and any new homebuyers are priced out by the taxes. Any new residents who cannot afford the taxes, are not going to be able to afford the homes, and that'll destroy home values (which are the primary assets of the middle class).

In the Sylvester Stallone movie "Cobra", there are two types of computers seen. In his apartment, there's a PC clone. In the police station, there are more PC clones but also a bunch of these AT&T Unix PC machines.

The only ones operating are the PC clones, whose vendor provided people. The provider of the AT&T machines provided nobody, and no information on how to run them. They looked super-cool for their day. During down-time, people switched them on, thought they were interesting, and then ignored them. Nobody has time on a movie set to figure stuff out just for some set dressing - every minute is money being burned. This was a very sad product placement marketing failure.

The Apollo program had no need for a moon-orbiting space station. The Saturn V launch vehicle, and the CSM and LM were properly designed and sized for the planned missions, and those planned missions were scoped to be what was possible with the tech of the day. Three people were going, so the CSM was sized for three. Two people were landing, so the LM was sized for two. The tech of the day could not withstand an approx 340 hour lunar night, so all landings would be etirely during lunar day. Fuel requirements were too high (thus would have driven a need for larger launcher) for big orbital plane changes, so all landings were in the lunar equatorial regions. The list of requirements and constraints was insane, but the systems were properly aligned with them.

The post-shuttle space program had NONE of that. It was primarily driven by the Bush[43] admin running back to space capsules under parachutes (forgetting that NASA did shuttles in-part as a running-away-from-parachutes play after Apollo13 and Apollio15) out of political fear post-Columbia while being unwilling to spend the money for a 2nd generation re-usable space plane. The Orion capsule was set to both support deep space ops AND replace shuttle for servicing ISS crew rotations, so it's sized for four on extended missions, but SEVEN people for short low Earth orbit ops. People forget that one of its jobs was to replace the seven-person shuttles - this latter option will never happen because we now use commercial Dragons (also initially sized for 7, but only used for 4) for that purpose. This made Orion big and HEAVY. Orion's weight was a huge driver in the Ares I debacle, which contributed to the downfall of the Bush era "Constellation" program. When the Obama admin tried to kill the Bush program and shift NASA manned spaceflight money to "education", a bi-partisan revolt in congress wrote the SLS into LAW in 2010 (which is why the giant orange rocket is nick-named the "Senate Launch System"). The rocket design spec was specified in that law! The congress basically mandated a jobs program for people in certain districts who'd worked on the shuttle program. Note: at this point, neither the SLS launcher nor the Orion capsule was scaled for any particular use. As part of the Constellation-to-SLS transition, the very-capable upper-stage powered by two new derivatives of the Apollo J-2 engines was cancelled (thereby crippling the launcher) with the function slightly replaced by a modified Delta-IV upper-stage (sized to boost unmanned satellites) called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage. Then the US-built service module for Orion was cancelled, and a deal was worked with Europe to have them provide a service module (partly as compensation for their discontinuation of cargo service to the ISS and partly as buy-in for their participation in future exploration missions). The Euro service module is derived from their old ISS cargo hauler (the ATV) and uses one Space Shuttle OMS engine from the US as its big engine; this is NOT a huge, capable, SM like the one of the Apollo era with their big fuel tanks and giant SPS engines. The result is that the SLS-SM-Orion combo is not capable of an Apollo-style mission. There's simply no ability to put Orion into LLO (low-lunar-orbit) and then get it home from there. The solution was a hack... send Orion to a very elliptical NRHO (Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit) where a lander is pre-positioned, and have the lander return there. This requires a far better lander than Apollo had, but happily it's been decades and we have much better tech now. The Gateway is the glue in that scheme, becoming a hub where landers can be stationed and maintained (solar power works in lunar orbits, but not on the surface where there are those long lunar nights). The whole scheme would be a joke as a band-aid for an improperly-scaled rocket and spacecraft, but it was able to provide one significant benefit that was a good sales point: unlike Apollo, a super-capable lander and a NRHO rendezvous made lunar orbit plane changes reasonable, and thus access to the full lunar surface (particularly polar regions) possible.

As long as nobody came along and upset the political and public relations applecart, the Gateway seemed in the minds of many to be a critical enabling tech for that new lunar polar activity, making a permanent lunar base plausible with current tech (Spots on crater rims at the lunar south pole never see sunset). Then came the new NASA admin, who's VERY unusual - a young computers and aviation entrepreneur, NOT a career politician/bureaucrat, who paid Musk to send him into space, TWICE (trusts "newspace" without the traditional "only government way work" attitude). He's apparently asked some basic questions as part of an effort to re-ignite the old NASA attitude of risk-taking and exploration, and one of those was this: If the moon return depends on Earth-orbit re-fuelling of either a lander or an Earth departure stage (which the current plans DO) then we're already dependent upon that working no matter what... so if THAT's the case, why not dock Orion to the Starship lander (for example) in Earth orbit rather than lunar orbit, then have all the energy required (Starship being HUGE and sized for Mars missions) to get Orion into any low lunar orbit at any lunar lattitude, with Orion's mini SM reserved solely for the return home from LLO? Oh, and the crew gets the benefit of all that space in the lander on the out-bound trip too. POOF! There goes the "need" for Gateway.

Gateway was simply a stop-gap enabler/relic of a poorly designed and scaled POLITICAL launch vehicle and capsule. It was the "self-licking ice cream cone" of what would eventually become the Artemis program out of the ashes of Constellation+Obama. With the introduction of TWO new commercial super-heavy launch systems (SpaceX's SuperHeavy+Starship and Blue Origin's New-Glenn, particularly with the newly-announced size-up) and the future options for supplementation from all the other new rockets coming along, the need for things like Gateway is simply likely to evaporate.

Happily, the power and propulsion module is apparently being re-purposed to be both a useful mission and a demonstration of a nuclear-electric spacecraft concept - The module WAS designed to provide super-efficient thrust from an electric Zenon thruster powered by solar panels, but will go to Mars with an enhancement: a nuclear generator for the electricity after departing Earth orbit. It'll be a great tech demonstrator mission, while carrying newer helicopters to Mars.

People like this who are "experts" whose words will get hyped all over the place and be given extra credibility by the mass media have a terrible impact on decent human beings, and thus upon society itself; they do more long-term damage than any good they do.

How so?

Simple: When you tell a generation of young people that the world will be ending on their watch, do you know what they do? Some of the best of them, who are bright, healthy, well-meaning, etc (the sort who would contribute to society and make things better and raise kids like themselves (NO, I'm NOT talking skin color, just intellect, health, behavior, drive, inclination, etc)) get depressed and decide NOT to have kids, and possibly choose NOT to major in the tough stuff they might have and choose other, more comfortable careers, rather than ones that would be better over the long term (which they've become convinced will never have the chance to arrive). Meanwhile, the jerks, morons, and idiots of their generation go right on having kids and screwing things up.

It's practically the recipe for Idiocracy to become reality even sooner.

Where's the upside?

Over the decades of my life I've seen many of these self-appointed blowhard prognosticators predict all sorts of premature-world-endings with ZERO net positive results. The world is still here, civilization is still here, people still exist. I have also, however, seen a bunch of couples device to have few or no kids because they'd been told "the end is near" during their reproductive years... end then end-up regretful and without kids after it became too late to have them.

This "Nobel Prize winner" is a class-A jerk who is going to cause a bunch of people a lot of unhappiness, in exchange for probably getting some name recognition and a bit of cash for book signings, speaking events, or some other personal benefit.

that yer heads are pumped so full of crap and propaganda that you're living in a fake world. Stuff does not make sense to you PRECISELY because you're not seeing the real world, you're seeing an incoherent propaganda world.

Examples:

"Europe knew that Russia was running roughshod over the United States voters and working hard successfully to put Trump back in the White House." - GARBAGE. The Trump-Russia collusion crap was cooked-up by a former British spy and his Russian spy pals on the payroll of the Hillary Clinton campaign in the form of the "Steele Dossier". Democrats ran with it both as an excuse for how Hillary massively outspent Trump in 2016 and lost (backers/investors expect answers when over a billion dollars are squandered), AND as input to the FBI and congress in attempts to get rid of Trump and undo the election.

"the United States still has the largest military on the planet." - NOPE. China has a bigger army, and bigger navy. The US does have a bigger Air Force, and of course a big edge in quality. As has been noted in the past however, "quantity has a quality all its own"

"You would think electing a convicted felon, pedophile, rapist and six-time bankrupt businessman to be the most powerful person on our planet would have been a clue but nope. People still think Americans have the slightest shred of sanity." - WOW, you went right into the bat-guano-crazy-zone with Rosie O Donnell on that hot mess! [1] Technically, you're not a convicted felon in the US until sentence is passed, which will never happen on the bogus political charges over Trump paying his lawyer (charges never meant to actually stick, just to last long enough to hurt him in the election) [2] You're liar, Trump has never been convicted of pedophilia, not is there any evidence he is a pedo. You're dishonestly trying to smear Trump by associating him with Epstein, but of course you have no interest in destroying any of the Democrats who eagerly associated with Epstein long after Trump kicked him aside. Like lots of people he knew Epstein long ago, but unlike the rest, Trump kicked the guy out of his places and banned him after finding out what he was up to [3] Rapist? Trump's never been convicted of that, nor has anybody come forward with any evidence of him raping anybody (the CIVIL judgement, NOT criminal conviction, in the E Jean Carol case is for DEFAMATION and will likely be overturned), [4] Nearly every businessman who starts a bunch of businesses ends up shutting some down, and often it's done deliberately via bankruptcy. I may not like it, and you may not like it, but you'd apparently be shocked at how many Democrats have done this and more... in fact Trump WAS a Democrat during all of those bankruptcies.

"About 40% of us believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old and about 35% of us believe Noah's flood is real." - This is a combination of ignorance, sloppy stats, presumption, and insults. I'm not going to respond with in detail, which nobody would read any way, suffice it to say that the percent of Jews, Christians of various denominations, and Muslims cannot be easily extrapolated into how many people believe a particular age of the Earth, believe in a global flood, or any other simplistic thing you want to rant about. Plenty of people who are in these mono-theistic faiths believe in a "young Earth" (with lots of variation in the specifics) but plenty believe in an "old Earth" with many variations of the theme. Plenty of these people believe in various versions of an ancient flood (some thinking it was global, some thinking it was regional, some thinking it was symbolic, etc AND people in nearly every civilization on Earth regardless of religion have ancient stories of a great flood (every hear of the "Epic of Gilgamesh?) Your rant was clearly a "we have too many crazy religious people, and I'm a superior sane atheist" ploy which relies on the assumption that in a situation where NOBODY can prove how when and why everything began, there's some super-validity to claiming to believe everything made itself from nothing for no reason. Far greater minds than you have wrestled with that problem and been less sure of themselves than you appear to be.

The way you jumbled all that together and tossed it out as an insult, and then followed it with "We absolutely would launch nuclear weapons safe in the knowledge that God would protect us from a counter-attack. We are that fucking insane." places you firmly in the column of "delusional and in need of updated meds". Calm Down. In the immortal words of Londo Molari, "it can't be THAT bad..."

The simple fact is: for all our faults, the United States has been the most-stable and least-kleptocratic large powerful nation for about a century. Our Presidents, good and bad, have all been (in the grand scheme of things) reasonable (yes, INCLUDING Trump). We're the nation all the other nations look to as a provider of stability, safety, and some semblance of justice - PROVABLY SO: none of the rest have been willing to step-up and do the job. Name another nation other than Russia, China, or India that has the resources and willpower to be a superpower. One would have to be the singularly most stupid AND foolish person on Earth to want any of THOSE 3 to be the global cop.
As detestable as I found Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama to be, THEY were all better than what other nations would have offered at the time, and they were each MY president.
As detestable as YOU no doubt think Trump to be, he is still better than anybody the rest of the world would offer, and he's YOUR president.

Those women on The View are free to be insane; they're cheap entertainment. Those lefty vloggers and bloggers and news outlets you almost certainly get your insane factoids from are MAKING MONEY off the clicks they get when they keep you agitated and in OUTRAGE mode. None of them has one ounce of accountability or responsibility for what happens in the world. Our presidents (ALL of them, and of ANY party) have immense responsibilities, and a ton of murky problems to solve with conflicting issues that make very few decisions clean, without risk, and without collateral damage. YOU clearly could not handle that situation, since you clearly get all would-up over simple disagreements over things that don't really matter... making YOU less stable than Trump.

Grow up

Life's better here in mature adult land.

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." - I Corinthians 13:11 (from a letter by the Apostle Paul to the Church at Corinth)

Do you people have no memory at all, or is it just sheer hypocrisy?

Joe Biden had gas prices $1 to $2 dollars per gallon HIGHER and a lot of you were clapping like seals with the presumption that this was some good plot to replace gasoline with electricity and "save the planet", when it was actually just a doddering old fool driving inflation up to 9%. The current price spike is at least tied to an attempt to stop major western cities from melting under mushroom clouds within the next decade or so. That's a bargain, [admittedly] IF it succeeds [which is, like all military and international endeavors, NOT guaranteed].

I'm in California, so the one-two punch of Gavin Newsom AND Trump's Iran actions hit ME and the people around me harder than most people in the country, yet I think this is currently worth it. NOT because of Trump anything, but because of 47 years of "Death to America" Ayatollahs scrambling for missile tech, nukes, and backing nearly every bad terrorist outfit on the planet - a VERY BAD combo.

Maybe you have to be old enough to have an attention span longer than that of the average squirrel to get it.

Cheap insults and expletives are no substitute for a rational argument, and they don't make you look wise or tough; it just sounds like the frustrated rant of a teenager.

This is Slashdot where, many years ago, many of us [being the geeky technical sorts] actually put together cogent arguments. It's sad to see the degradation of quality in the comments, but I suppose it tracks with the general stupification of younger people raised by public school teachers with political agendas. You could have at least gotten creative and attempted to reinvigorate some old terms like "carbuncle" or "lickspittle"...

Hey, you kids, Git offa my lawn!

Not even the dumbest fencepost in the field would be a big enough idiot to bring back the Obamination "deal" in which we give billions of dollars to the mad Ayatollah and agree to watch him take ten years to build a nuclear bomb.... followed by an assembly line of nukes over the following years...followed by nukes being handed out like roadside bombs, suicide belts, and explosively formed penetrators, to any Iran-aligned terrorists who want them.

The Obama "deal" was nothing more than yet another president trying to find a way to avoid doing anything about Iran during his term of office and hope the bad results hit on somebody else's watch. The most-important thing there is for any career politician is avoiding responsibility/accountability, and the Iran mess was thought likely to blow-up in the face of anybody who touched it. President after President listened to the permanent Washington bureaucrats as they wrung their hands and sweated a lot over the supposedly unsolvable problem Jimmy Carter left behind. These "experts" all advised against doing anything to Iran, as the biggest baddest military in the region (partly MADE that way by these same unelected "experts" who supported arming that county (including making Iran the only country on planet Earth to ever get a shipment of F-14 Tomcats) while their hand-selected puppet, the Shah, was in power). Every single President, in BOTH parties, tolerated the bad behavior as it got worse and worse because all were warned the risks were too high and there were elections in the USA to consider...

No. If you're gonna assert that "by all accounts" (in other words: "EVERYBODY says") Trump is trying to bring back the dumbest deal any human being ever made (the Obama-Iran nukes deal) then you need to provide some proof. That deal was even worse than the deal Ukraine made to give up its nukes because 3 foreign leaders (Clinton, Blair, and Putin) guaranteed their territorial integrity if they did it.

Hate Orban all you want for being a pain to the EU, not wanting to amp-up a war in Europe, not wanting his country flooded with migrants etc, but he's NOT "an authoritarian leader". He was ELECTED into power, RE-ELECTED into power, and eventually having lost an ELECTION is leaving office. He had better relations with Putin (in PUBLIC) than other European leaders, but not to the level of a stooge - he opposed Russia's attack on Georgia (the country, not the US state) but it's actually a bit hard to say he's been more of a Putin puppet than the other leaders of Europe have been (in PRIVATE - they all posture as Putin opponents publicly). Let's face it: for all the bluster, Europe's leaders are mostly PRIVATELY subservient to Putin, as they refuse to properly maintain the military power to even slightly oppose Putin (they just want the US to do it at expense to the US taxpayer). They yell and scream about Ukraine and how evil Putin is (yeah, he actually IS, but that's a bit beside my point and not what really matters here...) but at the same time they made themselves dependent upon Russia for energy. Back in Trump's first term when he pointed this out publicly at the UN, the German representatives laughed about it. Remember that blown-up gas pipeline that had everybody so worked-up a few years ago? Yeah... natural gas line from Russia to Europe. The Europeans were demanding America spend BILLIONS of dollars a year protecting them from Putin at the very same time they were making themselves dependent upon him AND funding his war machine with purchases of his natural gas.

Hate JD Vance all you want, but he was NOT in Iran... the negotiations were hosted by Pakistan and took place in Islamabad. [eyeroll]

Hate Trump and Rubio all you want, BUT them being at some stupid pugilist event was at worst a huge nothing-burger and at best an excellent international signal. Nobody with a brain expected the lunatic theocratic shia Muslim leaders of Iran to be serious in those negotiations... they've been dishonest terrorist-supporting scumbags since the 1979 revolution and it's even a little hard for people outside that regime to even know who in it is in a position to negotiate anything (that may, indeed, have been the primary intent of this meeting, from a US perspective). It's not a bad thing to show the world that the American President is not all tied-down by these shenanigans (it was a TERRIBLE look in 1979 when Jimmy Carter did the opposite). If anything important was going to happen, everybody knows the negotiating team could easily contact the President. This is true for ANY American President of either party. Were you this worked-up when Kamela was Border Czar and Biden could not be reached?

On what planet did Biden "work with congress"? The man was so out of it he routinely shook hands with people who were not there, tried to talk to a member of congress who'd been dead for months, and did not hold unscripted press conferences because his staff knew he was not up to answering any challenging questions. Democrats did not so much push their own incumbent from the ticket as he fell off of it by melting-down in a Presidential debate in front of America's voters, thereby exposing all the media and his political allies as LIARS who'd been endlessly lying about his condition on every TV channel, radio station, and website they had access to. When people hounded Trump (in his first term) to take a cognitive test for the supposed insanity of opposing Democrat plans and policies, he DID. When Joe was falling down, starting his days late and "calling a lid on it" at 10AM or noon, often going days without seeing people outside his inner circle, and needing the White House Easter Bunny to protect him from journalists with questions and HE was hit with demands for a cognitive test, he REFUSED and his party (the one demanding such tests of over political and style differences for Trump) sided with him with many running to microphones and cameras to proclaim his amazing soundness...Remember THIS little gem???

The only thing you were right about is this: "No more "both sides" here, there is a big difference." Only you misunderstood which side was the problem. If the left did not have double-standards, they'd have no standards at all.

in the United States is "equal treatment under law". People who are rich or powerful are not supposed to get away with stuff when average people do not.

I might dislike this jerk and think his company was up to no good, but I have to say I approve of this pardon PRECISELY because I want "Law and Order".

Attorney General Merrick Garland threw the book at Changpeng Zhao for violating the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (basically, enabling financial transactions with unsavory people and countries specifically including Iran and failing to warn American regulators properly). I could be wrong, but as I understand it Zhao was not accused of the actual transactions that violated the laws himself, but rather running a company that knowingly allowed others to break that law via his platform. This was the Biden admin AG prosecuting a man for enabling somebody else to transfer money to Iran (a federal crime) at the very same time that President Biden himself was transferring BILLIONS of dollars to both Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mr Garland also was looking the other way as his boss, Mr Biden was holding the US border wide open, enabling unprecedented flows of drugs and trafficked humans AND doing nothing about remittance payments flowing out of the country, some of which would have been cash flowing to the drug cartels in mayment for the humans and drugs smuggled. Mr Garland also did NOTHING about then-previous president Obama having violated the same federal law in HIS transfer of BILLIONS of dollars to Iran (which historically would be normal, given that by tradition we do not prosecute former presidents for their official acts.... BUT this very same AG Garland threw that tradition out the window and was going after former president Trump (so much for precedent and tradition)).

"Rules for thee, but not for me" is the most basic violation of the very concept of law in the Western world since the signing of the Magna Carta (Look it up if you were under-educated by the public schools within the past 3 or 4 decades).

I would normally have opposed a pardon for such a man, but not pardoning him for these offenses while not prosecuting Obama and Biden was a travesty. People are forgetting that one of the scandals of the Clinton administration was that a businessman named Marc Rich had been, while outside the US, transferring money to Iran (that same federal crime) and could not return to the United States without being arrested and prosecuted. The man missed the funeral of one of his kids because of this exile. His wife Denise Rich donated something like a million dollars to the DNC and the Clintons, and in the final hours [literally] of Bill's time as President, Marc Rich got a Presidential pardon. This seemed very partisan at the time and many conservatives/Republicans went bananas over it as a PARTISAN thing, however in hindsight after it became clear that Dick Cheney's good friend Scooter Libby was involved in the pardon effort, it turns out it was more of an elites vs everybody else thing again... it's that same old abuse of the idea of a "Rule of Law" and it somehow stinks more when it's the top-ranks of the political folks vs everybody else, rather than a partisan fight between people of different parties but essentially the same power and resources...

This: "Republicans have had them blocked from being able to take any effective labor action since Reagan" is dishonest/misleading. Unlike you, I will back up this post with facts.

First: Federal workers (ALL of them) were originally not permitted to unionize. From 1776 to 1962 there were no federal workers unions. For a very simple reason, which everybody understood: Govt workers unionize -> unions fund campaigns of politicians -> politicians sit across table from union that won them election at contract negotiation time -> Voters/taxpayers who fund the whole mess and in whose name it's being done are cut right out and not represented. In such a scheme, the taxpayers get slammed when the union goes on strike - which WILL happen because a strike (or threat thereof) is the primary weapon of a union, or they get slammed as the politicians cave to all the union demands to avoid strikes and to get campaign dollars from those unions. It's a lose-lose for the citizenry.

President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988 on 17 Jan 1962 (see page 3 of that document which contains several executive orders). Note that strikes by unionized federal workers are specifically prohibited and illegal under that order.

In August of 1981, PATCO (the union representing the air traffic controllers) called a strike. President Reagan, only months into his presidency and working hard to halt the economic nightmare he inherited from Jimmy Carter (double-digit unemployment, double-digit inflation, and double-digit interest rates, a previously unheard of condition in the US) reminded PATCO that the strike was in violation of federal law. A strike at that time that grounded all air traffic would have dealt a massive blow to the economy, so the union figured it would rapidly get what it wanted. Even though this strike was a federal offense, Reagan did not arrest the strikers; he gave them 2 days to stop the strike. The president had previously run the actors' union, so he was quite familiar with unions and knew that if one of these federal worker strikes was allowed, there'd never be an end to what would essentially be blackmailing of the taxpayers. They were convinced they could defeat this newly-elected Republican (like most unions, they'd supported Carter in the election) so they refused to end the strike ("he's just a former B-actor" was their attitude). He fired them. He did NOT arrest and jail them (like Biden did to thousands of Trump supporters decades later). Reagan simply fired them, and they were prohibited from returning to those jobs (they'd definitively proven themselves to be criminals who did not belong in control towers with the lives of millions of innocent civilians in their hands). No other president has faced a nation-wide illegal strike by federal workers in safety-related jobs, and NONE would be able to tolerate it. All presidents since Reagan (in BOTH parties) have had the benefit that Reagan made the point that such strikes which everybody involved KNOW are illegal, will not be tolerated and thus do not happen.

Just what the hell do you think would happen if we let another group of federal workers (the military) unionize? Just how would a war go? Some general tells the Marines to take a particular island, and the Marines say "sorry sir, we're on strike!"???? The country would have no national security at all. Even left wing super hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) knew it would be idiotic to allow federal workers to unionize. He was HUGE on unions... in the PRIVATE SECTOR.

As to the pay and working conditions "nightmare" rant: NOBODY is drafted into the FAA and forced to work there. People make a CHOICE to train for a job and then apply and qualify for it, and then take it, and they KNOW the schedules and pay and benefits when they take those jobs. I have never in my life taken a job without knowing the pay and benefits and expected schedules. Nobody with a brain takes such a job. Agreeing to take a job at a particular pay and with particular bennies and then changing your mind and deciding you won't do what you agreed to and that the job is so awful you won't do it BUT so good you will block anybody else from taking the job and doing it, is a rather bizarre thing... but that's the union line on striking. Strikes in the private sector are reasonable and just IF the employer has done something to break the deal made when the employees signed-on. Strikes in the public sector, or strikes where the employer has kept-up his end of the deal but the union simply wants more are another thing altogether.