From Springfield.

Yes, but that is less fun for my dad-joke purposes.

So the one in the old fable was even more of a dick than we’d been led to believe. Got it.

She’s got to course-correct after having the unmitigated gall(!) to suggest women might want to consider having their finances and careers in order before getting married and having kids.

Perhaps the wings are articulated ribs?

The whole issue here is that the American constitution is high level framework written in the legal jargon of three different centuries. It’s only viable if either (1) no one really cares about how the Federal government handles itself (1789-ca1850ish), or (2) there is a a tacit agreement that legal precedent and custom are actually important to get on with the business of governing (1865-2025).

The 14th amendment is extremely clear, with the sole exception of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Unfortunately, that one’s only “very” clear, and requires some very basic understanding of the legislative history and customary usage in a legal context. It basically means literally everyone present in the country with the exception of those with diplomatic immunity, invading armies, and (at that time) members of Native American tribes. There was no real regulation of in-migration when it was signed, but the debates were very clear that even “undesireable” people who could not be trusted to assimilate would be citizens merely by being born here, and no one challenged the point.

If you don’t understand anything about the history, though, or if you want to willfully ignore it because you have an idiotic textualism approach that would make Antonin Scalia cringe, then you open that back up for litigation. Then there’s the issue of Trump declaring everything an emergency and pretending that some dudes who want to cook some french fries or a single mom hoping her kids won’t get shot by a cartel are somehow equivalent to an invading army. It’s facially absurd, but the constitution being what it is, if they challenge it, then the courts have to at least consider it.

With the ascendancy of originalism at the Supreme Court, and with the right wing deciding to push a “unitary executive” theory to its ad-absurdum conclusion, they might get what they want and largely dismantle the checks and balances in the system without an official “coup” at all. This would remove the predictability that allows a system to chug along and slowly but inexorably change with the times (hardly good enough for true justice, but it at least sets some sort of floor for awfulness), and it would also seriously weaken the guardrails to having free and fair elections at all.

Oooh, when do we get to deploy the E-Meters?

I have it on good authority that you’re not old.

Can we start a rumor that Musk wants to shut down Boeing? He won’t last a month.

The UAE in general is an interesting experience. I’ve only been once, but my wife has been several times for work.

The face they want to present has a kind of a Pan-European middlebrow banality (i.e. you want to impress many people who may or may not be all that thoughtful and who definitely speak many different languages and have different cultural touchstones… I am thinking of stuff like the old BASF “nothingburger” ads or the "anthems for Eurovision or Champions League football), combined with an American-like sense of recklessly cheerful enthusiasm for development and economic growth, but wrapped in a cloak of religiosity and always with a barely concealed underpinning of oligarchic authoritarianism.

To be perfectly honest, it felt a lot like what I expect the evil, but less mustache-twirlingly evil, hope America will be. Still open for business, and even superficially welcoming, but with true wealth only going to those selected by the entrenched power structure, with all others allowed to serve at their pleasure and under a bedrock expectation of not disturbing their preferred social order.

I’ve had chocolate made with camel milk. It was good, though being positioned as a premium thing it probably would have been just as good with cow milk.

56k modem noises

I particularly remember the heart-dropping feeling of the repeated changes in pitch as it negotiated a lower baud rate to account for the shitty wiring my dad DIY’d.

I mean, he did go to the notorious third-tier toilet known as… Yale.

Yup. The word “legitimate” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and he’s just hoping that no one asks the follow up, “How do we determine whether a use of power is legitimate?”

Transitional Organized Crime, Cartels, and Gangs.

Page 4. Either somebody lets the spell-check do auto-replace, or they are going hard on those dangerous hormone therapy peddlers.

Aww, who am I kidding? It’s both!

More or less, yes. When the circuits are in agreement, it’s still not binding on SCOTUS, but traditionally it’s been powerfully persuasive. If they can get a similar ruling out of the 5th or 11th, then even for this court it’s likely game over, eventually. The gross thing is the cruelty and uncertainty of the Trumpian attitude towards the rule of law, which is simply, “I know what it says. Fuck it. Make 'em sue me.” It’s in bad faith and erodes the simple, predictable functioning of government, to say nothing of, y’know, being directed towards evil ends.

SCOTUS is very conservative and increasingly activist about it, but Roberts in particular doesn’t like being dragged through the political mud and he can usually prevail upon Kavanaugh or Barrett to be less crazy for a day. Roe was a special case in that it extended the legal idea of the “penumbra,” which was by definition fuzzy, and I learned about attacks on the idea over twenty years ago, so the Democrats bear a certain amount of blame for not spending some political capital at some point to ensconce it in statute, if not in an Amendment (which admittedly may have been a bridge too far). It was always a bit fragile. RBG also did her legacy no favors by being short-sighted about how her successor would be selected.

Anyway, all the “But dis iz whut it sez!” reasoning from the Second Amendment cases mostly works against MAGA here. The idea that you’re not subject to America’s laws because you broke one of them when entering the country is pretty absurd, and that concept only works in a context of international law. It was meant for Diplomats and their families with immunity, and for Female troops or officially-employed camp followers of another nation’s invading army (operating on the assumption here that “traditional” war pregnancies will involve mothers who are subject to the jurisdiction of the US) - also Native Americans, but we “fixed” that in 1924 at least. There was no significant bar to immigration at the federal level when the 14th amendment was drafted, but super racist senators explicitly whined that Chinese immigrants’ kids would become citizens, and others said, “Yeah? And?” Add in various court decisions over the decades since that have clarified who is and isn’t subject to jurisdiction, and it should be a settled question. There’s a dissent here and there, and an occasional whinge from the right, but there is very little for an “Originalist” court to complain about here, at least legitimately.

If they got pissed off enough, I bet you were glad you had it.

Dude… ANY job.

Like a binary star system, the UK and the US will do an eternal dance to see who can troll the French the most with mangling the loanwords. The Brits win this one.