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[Max™]

Bahahaha, someone said come to the US because of our weather! Yeah, it's great, it was 16 C last week, just dropped to 0 C this week, and we've only got 4 or 5 months before we can start wringing out the air so we can dry our towels off so we can try to sop off some of the sweat we're swimming in, and since people reflexively dislike spiders we've got more fun: MOSQUITO CLOUDS THICK ENOUGH TO STEAL YOUR TOWEL! FUCK!

Oh shit, then someone actually linked Dubya to Texas (the fuck is from Connecticut) and in between there was a bit of smartness from LW (I'm pretty solidly a liberal, I like a lot of progressive ideas, but forcing others to adopt your ideologies is bad no matter how close or far they may be from my own) and a bit of dumbness from LW (he can't help it, lack of Vitamin D can inhibit cognitive function, and our bodies usually produce it in response to sunlight, or as he knows it: that vaguely lighter spot of clouds that probably isn't a plane) plus flare-ups of jerkassery directed at each other, knock it off ya dinks!

[misko27]

...

Ok, so a few things.

1: What poor excuse for a state do you live in that the weather is so terrible?
2: George W. Bush was the Governor of Texas. That's enough of a connection for me.
3: Are you ok? Do you need to lie down, or perhaps get a glass of water, or...?

[smjjames]

...

Ok, so a few things.

1: What poor excuse for a state do you live in that the weather is so terrible?

He's from Texas I believe.

...

3: Are you ok? Do you need to lie down, or perhaps get a glass of water, or...?

Yeah, you okay Max? Not sure what you're lashing out at.

[Max™]

Grew up in Dallas, lived in Louisville, Kentucky for a while, in Memphis now, been across the country at various times. The parts which always have nice consistent weather are either the super boring flyover states, Hawaii, or I guess some of the coastal areas might not be too unpredictable, beyond the ground shaking, or ocean getting sucked up over your house, or mudslides, or fires, oh, Seattle is pretty nice if you like rain!

The only Texan in that family as far as I know is Barbara, Dubya appealed to the worst parts of us and likes to pass himself off as though he's a Texan, and yeah I'm part of the weird little nook of liberals around the Dallas area so I disagree with a lot of shit that actual Texans do and like... but fuck that guy in particular.

Thankfully it's winter so the mosquito clouds are all bundled up in warm clothes and unable to steal my drinks, though I wish my spiderfriends were back.

Yeah, I'm fine, I was lashing out ironically at people bitching at each other back where the new post button took me to.

[wierd]

A few states north of Texas, in barren flyoverland USA (aka, Kansas), the weather is always predictable in its unpredictability. (You can rely on it changing radically day by day.)  We get lots of tornadoes every year, but due to the low urban cross-section, most of them just tear over farmland and dont do a whole lot of damage, or threaten many lives.

Unlike in the south, where gulfstream air rains out bucketloads of water all the damn time, and leaves the air a smothering blanket that feels like a turkish bath, ours tends to be hot and dry in the summer. That is good for us, because dry kills mosquitoes.

In the south? Yes. Enough that they can actually be life threateningly thick.

We just get radically unpredictable weather with high winds.

[smjjames]

The weather in Southern California is generally nice. Cold and rainy during the 'rainy season', hot and mostly dry during the 'dry season'. But in general, yeah.

[Max™]

Well, yeah, the missus was talking to a friend of hers on hangouts last year and all of a sudden she comes in here and asks if I could check on an earthquake, apparently they were chatting along and then the camera starts shaking, something falls over behind her, and the line cuts out.

She's like "oh god is this bad?" so I checked and it was like a 5.4 I think?

Fuck, I wonder how many magnitude 5~ quakes you've been through smjjames?

I wonder what the threshold for ones you don't notice anymore is?

Also really impressed by that presentation you did a few pages back, LW, posting it again and asking where you got it from because it is so great for international politics where us murricans have no idea what the hell a lib-dem or labour really is, but in terms of the chart it has that broad explanatory framework to work with.

[Reelya]

<snip>

George Bush Senior moved the family to Texas when George Junior was only two years old, in 1948. Say what else you like about George Junior, but the "fake Texan" meme isn't really valid. Is there something special about having sex in Texas that makes the babies proper Texans? If not, he's as "Texan" as just about anyone.

http://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/is-the-us-in-the-middle-of-a-coup/news-story/ab0ece5c5b27b004b0b203fcce435a92
^ a good overview of the likely power vacuum that TrumpCo are creating in Washington, which basically would allow them to rule by decree without needing to worry about whether things are unconstitutional.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

They're just ignoring court challenges and ordering people to do it anyway, while gutting departments which would normally have some input / checks / balances. Trump was meant to assign 660 senior officials, which is normal, his team preselected 29 out of the 660. It's either incompetence or they literally want cripple departments which might question there orders, and replace them with an "inner circle" with autocratic powers. Basically it's like Augustus Caesar consolidating roles / powers in his position when he turned The Republic into The Empire.

The list goes on. Mr Trump issued an extraordinary 20 executive orders in his first 10 days. If you read through them, they are hilariously amateurish in their drafting.

I know this sounds like a joke, but one of the orders — honestly — declared the day of his inauguration The National Day of Patriotic Devotion. I’m not making it up. The Order itself reads like a decree from Kim Jong Un.

As you read through them, it becomes clear they have not gone through the conventional methods for drafting executive orders — which involves showing them to the relevant department for input. At times they are vague, at other times the wording is flowery. They are not the work of experts.

The White House has confirmed to multiple reporters that they have been drafted by Mr Trump’s inner circle, and released without any input from the Departments that are expected to carry them out.

Again, this might be incompetence — many of his inner circle have no previous experience in government. But it might also be they simply don’t care about what the Departments think about his orders. Or worse, they know exactly what they think, and are seeking ways to avoid that scrutiny.

Properly gauging how Mr Trump is exercising his power is important because many of those who oppose Mr Trump are still in a state of denial that he is really behaving in this way.

The insider analysis is still largely that the institutions of Congress, the Court System, and even the bureaucratic procedures of the Departments, will place roadblocks around Mr Trump.

But what no-one seems to realise is that these institutions are not set up to deal with being circumnavigated, especially not by someone as powerful as a President.

And where it starts getting into coup territory is when you realise that he’s even sidelined the US Military from the normal processes in recent weeks.

Take, for example, the most powerful body in the US Military hierarchy: the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These are the seven top leaders of all four arms of the military. On Monday, Mr Trump pulled the Joint Chiefs’ representative off the top committee of the National Security Council, and instead appointed his civilian adviser (and far-right nationalist) Steve Bannon to run the committee. Now the military has no permanent member on the committee which directs national security decisions.

This is unprecedented. Nobody ever thought that a President would go around the back of a Department or the Military, simply because, being President, the Department and the Military is formally already his to control.

But if Mr Trump is prepared to go around his departments and media, ignore diplomatic protocols and sideline the US Military, will he really obey the will of Congress and the Supreme Court when they start trying to put limits on his power?

What it means is that much of the conventional thinking about how Mr Trump’s presidency will play out needs to be completely rethought. It’s no use running off to a court to get the President’s order declared unconstitutional if the President plans on ignoring the court’s declaration. It’s no use hoping the military will place roadblocks on his latest National Security plan, because they’re no longer on the committee.

tl;dr: He cut the military out of the National Security Council and put Bannon in charge. They're gutting the State Department, they're removing feedback from the military: you monkeys take orders you don't talk back! Bow down to Darth Bannon. You know that whole "Impeach" thing they always bring up but never seems to happen. About now is the time you guys should be dusting the law books off and looking for triggers for that.

Also as far as that whole Berkeley thing goes, it smacks of agent provocateurs. The normal opponents of Milo are feminist groups, and feminist groups aren't exactly known for beating up female students with poles and pepper-spraying girls, while wearing masks and shouting "death to fascists". These masked men actually disrupted the actual protests, which had to be abandoned, while smashing up the campus. To be honest I really hope they catch them, because that's too on the nose. Who exactly are these SJWs who pepper spray women and beat them with sticks? The whole thing makes too little sense, given the stances of the typical SJW types at Berkeley. I think they were trouble-makers from outside the college basically, because student protesters don't normally destroy their own facilities and beat up girls very often.

[Erkki]

Not really Ameripol, but: Germany's SPD has announced that Martin Schulz will be their candidate for the 2017 election a week ago. This has apparently spawned /r/the_schulz, in the same spirit as /r/the_donald, complete with rare pepes and Gottkanzler memes.

The difference? We're building bridges, to get the good hombres in.

Go check it out - it's pretty funny even if you don't know German. And maybe it'll soothe your pain a bit. Maybe we'll beat the alt-right with its own weapons.

Is it the same Martin "Germany exists to secure existence of Israel or something" Schulz?

Looking at things from across the pond, Trump is turning out to be more awesome than I could have ever hoped for. I thought he was going to eat at least half of words the very moment he stepped into office. But what is going to revive hope and interest in democracy and politics more than someone who wins presidency against all odds and then proceeds, at least for now, to actually keep his campaign promises? Nevermind the leftist anarchoterrorists acting up and breaking stuff in California.

Today my morning newspaper informed me that it is racist to hate muslims and I too should judge Trump's "muslim ban" because more people are killed in non-muslim mass shootings than in muslim mass shootings, thats right, in the USA.

[Max™]

You're right Reelya, we're all Texans now, congratulations folks!

Except Trump, not even a rampant president can just declare that sort of thing, well, unless I become one, as a Texan I can do this, it's in the constitution, look it up!

[martinuzz]

Looks like Putin can forget sanctions getting lifted. Nikki Haley said, in her first speech before the UN Security Council, that the sanctions against Russia will only be lifted if Russia returns the Crimea to the Ukraine.

[MorleyDev]

An older BBC article but a fun one: A Point of View: Is the US president an elected monarch? Argues that the role of President in the USA has always been a pretty screwed up concept from a political power point of view.

To begin with, the denunciation - and the demonisation - of King George III in the Declaration of Independence was based on a seriously misleading exaggeration of his royal prerogatives. Those powers were increasingly being claimed by the politicians, and insofar as George III did re-affirm Britain's right to rule, to tax and to legislate for the American colonies, he believed he was asserting the sovereignty of the British parliament rather than that of the British crown.

But ironically, when the leaders of the American Revolution tried to work out what powers they should give to the newly created American presidency, the only models available were those of contemporary European monarchies, and especially the British. And so the founding fathers gave to the American presidency just those powers they erroneously believed King George III still possessed - to appoint and dismiss his cabinet, to make war and peace, and to veto bills sent up by the legislature. From the outset, then, the American presidency was vested with what might be termed monarchical authority, which meant that it really was a form of elective kingship. So when Henry Clay, the leader of the American Whig Party regretted that, under Andrew Jackson, the presidency was "rapidly tending towards an elective monarchy", he was in error because it had been an elective monarchy from the very beginning.

Indeed, better-informed Americans fully understood this. "We elect a king for four years", Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State once observed, "and give him absolute power within certain limits, which after all he can interpret for himself".

[Sergarr]

I think they were trouble-makers from outside the college basically, because student protesters don't normally destroy their own facilities and beat up girls very often.

Apparently, according to some of the people who live there, those are "rich kids who like the sound of breaking glass", and have been wrecking shit on every public occasion since 1990s, if not earlier. They evade arrest because, one, it's apparently really hard to prove that you were rioting, and two, they have rich parents who can buy the best lawyers, and the police knows that and thus doesn't even really try to interfere.
The workers will finally be made free from the oppressive grasp of the evil socialist unions!

[Reelya]

You're right Reelya, we're all Texans now, congratulations folks!

That's a ridiculous strawman. He grew up in Texas from the age of two. What's the line for proper Texans? Are you really saying that someone who grew up in Texas isn't a proper Texan if their parents weren't also from there? Isn't that a bit crazy and regressive. What about someone who grew up from age of two in Texas but their parents were from Georgia? Would that make them more proper Texan than someone from the north? What about immigrants?

I know it's Bush and all but it's still a pretty dumb thing to hold against him.

[MorleyDev]

Well, from an abstract point of view "left-wing types" being more violent in more situations makes a lot of sense. Whilst the "right wing type" thing "oh boo hoo, mah values are unda attak" and may be forced to be *slightly uncomfortable*, the not-white, not-straight, not-very-specific-denomination-of-christian have to live with a feeling of "oh no, my *fundamental rights to live my life, and possibly my very life* are under attack".

Not condoning violence from either side, it just feeds into the perpetuation and creation of yet another cycle of violence and hate, but I'm gonna more understanding of someone violent in one situation than another.