https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a limited hangout is “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further”.

They don’t get access to DC hospitals and doctors, or a Congressional staff that can substitute as home health care workers.

Bupa, the international healthcare company headquartered in the United Kingdom. He was previously CEO of Sanitas, the Spanish health insurance company

Two countries with some of the better public health care system in the world.

He’s in charge of companies dedicated to selling you what you already have. So you know he’s an absolute POS.

Trump doesn’t have the power to just unilaterally create a new visa category.

He gets to order ICE around and they get to decide who actually gets the rough treatment.

That said, I wouldn’t count on this visa being worth much once Trump is gone. So I can understand why nobody is enthusiastic about paying his bribe.

I’ve heard speculation that Congresscritters keep running entirely for the health care benefits.

Like, once you get that old, you just want the kind of care only the government can provide

We’re going to get term limits in 1994, when Gingrich’s majority makes good on their Contract With America. Susan Collins will lead the charge.

Democrats also love fossil fuel money.

Would be very funny if we manage to eliminate Linux OS distributions on the internet before we eliminate CSAM on the internet.

I’m not holding my breath on either.

He still can. Wouldn’t be any worse than RFK Jr.

How to do this but not get caught…

If you get into the article, it reads more like an advert for Gemini plagiarism tools than a Get Rich Quick scheme with a serious chance of working. I suspect he didn’t escape getting caught, he was brought in to do it notoriously so he could write an article about how amazing AI is at making money.

If you consider the US relationship to Uganda, its very possible he’d pay them to function as mercenaries for the repression of Ugandan locals and the extraction of their domestic resources via compulsed and trafficked labor.

Ukraine and Russia is not a civil war by any measure

The entire conflict in the Donbas was driven by the hyped up divided between “ethnic” Ukrainians and Russians. Hell, the Maidan Revolution was explicitly a civil conflict between Russian allied Ukrainians and Ukrainian Nationalists.

The real Russian core is Moscow - St.Petersburg and the surrounding areas.

Moscow and St. Petersburg are farther apart than Estonia and Poland. These have always been distinct power centers within Russia.

So much of the discussion of this war is totally America-Brained, where you cannot see subpopulations and cultural carve-outs that aren’t made explicit by national borders. Nevermind these borders are themselves constantly in flux and contingent on the political alignments of the local ruling class.

But Ukrainians had wanted independence and even (wrongly) welcomed Nazi invaders

The Banderite nationalists, Makhnovshchina, Ukrainian Leninists, Lypyns’kyi-ists… these are all distinct historical factions often in armed conflict with one another. None of them are representative of the current EU-friendly corporate conglomeration governing the country.

Zelensky isn’t a nationalist in any meaningful sense. Neither was Poroshenko. They’ve both been happy enough to auction off Ukrainian sovereignty for foreign investment and aid.

The point is that Ukrainians see themselves as cousins of Russians but not as Russian.

There is a strain of Ukrainian nationalism that sees itself as distinct from Russians and a strain of pan-Slavic Ukrainianism that sees these groups as overlapping. And then there are non-Slavic Ukrainians that don’t fit either demographic (Jewish Ukrainians, most famously, eat a lot of shit, but so do Roma and Turks and Arabs, etc, etc).

All of these fractures are ripe for political wedging and other fuckery. And that’s exactly what international business has exploited since the collapse of the USSR. Everyone’s alienated from one another. Mass media is screaming that you’re being robbed by your “foreign” neighbors. And weapons have flooded the country to make the induced paranoia of a material threat.

My head canon is always converting magic into sci fi.

Arthur C. Clarke will be by to collect royalties.

Doesn’t really explain the Snitch though, other than “they’re more about tradition than logic”.

Lots of sports spring out of a bunch of silly children’s games that get increasingly bureaucratic to sell tickets.

Why not end the game with a timer or at a certain score count? Why introduce a fairy trapped in a golden ball who has some kind of personality, rather than just being a buzzing semi-invisible toy? Why not yadda yadda?

Rowling definitely left a lot on the table.

Blaming the war in Ukraine on Russophobia is about as reasonable as blaming the war in Iran on their chants of ‘death to America’.

It’s a bad comparison, as Ukraine/Russia is functionally a civil war over a border that didn’t matter until the USSR dissolved. Iran/US is a proxy war over Israel’s expansion into Lebanon.

Much like with the breakup of Yugoslavia and subsequent genocidal border wars, the fight between Ukraine and Russia has been manufactured by Western political interests seeking to run both countries down. That’s why the US is sending money and weapons to both countries.

By contrast, we’re not standing up Iran’s military.

The GOP isn’t even real. It’s a trick to distract us from the evil foreigners, I tell ya.

We need good strong Republicans like Bush and Cheney back in power to protect us from the mean, bad Russians

Power dynamics . Learn them.

Never! I will only engage with discrimination at a superficial and naive level, falling for every concern troll post like I was born yesterday

Just hang a pride flag. Those terfy people will stay away

If only.

More often you get a line of “Debate Me” Bros trying to churn influence standing outside the front door hoping to bait a conflict

Replace the restriction with “whites only”

This is why the Congressional Black Caucus is discriminatory and should be disbanded

Like most team sports have you work as a team to score points. Everyone participates and are more or less responsible for the outcome of the game.

A better writing of the game would have had other players working as a team to spot the Snitch. Or alternative strategies for leveraging the extra player in the early game, when finding the Snitch was unlikely. Or even just a history of the sport, or variations of amateur and professional rules, or a pro-league that got more than a casual mention for the first chapter of the fourth book and then never again.

you have that and then you have one team member that is just more special than everyone else

You could argue the pitcher in baseball or the QB in football fill a similar role.

But yes, the need to make Harry a Mary Sue at every opportunity definitely dragged on the series. The better parts of the series were when he wasn’t the center of attention and was more just an observer of a magical world.

Banning socialists

Not just socialists, “Islamists”. This guy is running for AG in a state with Muslims making up around 2% of the population. Many of them are highly educated professionals looking to form full blow communities of like-minded people.