And what the frack is that? Quite a number of people sail their boat up to Vancouver and back to Seattle, not always with the same number of people traveling each way. If I get on someone's boat in Vancouver and ride it to Bellevue should I be deported? And to where? (Please don't send me back to Michigan.)

My gr-gr-grandfather Bolle walked across the frozen Lake Superior one winter, and married a mine widow in Calumet . She had apparently sailed on a boat all the way up the Saint Lawrence Seaway, through 4 of the 5 Great Lakes to land in Calumet with a bunch of other mail order brides from Scandinavia. Should they have been deported? Actually four years later they all voted as legal citizens.

I'm sure that was part of the whole purpose of DOGE, to destroy government employment as a viable career choice for competent people.

Women who I have worked with call themselves "linemen", so I don't think that's a problem. The fact that almost all of them are Union members is probably more of an issue to this Sadministration.

Considering "the companies named in conjunction with the play" I think that failure is pretty much guaranteed. For that matter, I personally believe that's the plan.

"If you want voters to believe that government is broken you'll need to break it first." - Grover Norquist

What I find amusing is that even after spending hundreds of millions supposedly fighting opium growing over 20 years, every year but one (partial crop failure) set a new record for opium production. In comparison, in their first year the Taliban almost completely eliminated opium cultivation.

What I find interesting is the timing. Fentanyl production had just reached the levels where it could replace most of the heroin on the Western market when we pulled out of Afghanistan.

When did your ancestors come to the US? Did they have to go through "quantified and validated immigration control"? Almost certainly not. The whole conservative ethos of "I've got mine, now go fuck everyone else" is stupidly short sighted. Liberal immigration is what made the US the leader of the world, as our politics get more conservative and our immigration policies get more restrictive we fall further and further behind. That's pretty blatantly the goal of your leadership.

As neocon 'thought leader' Grover Norquist told an assembly of conservative congresscritters in the '90s, "If you want to convince voters that government is broken then you'll have to break it first." I don't think that even he imagined that in less than two decades the Democratic Party 'leadership' would be quietly acquiescing in the effort.

You act as though Western European culture is the only conceivable model, and you're wrong. The Chinese model has worked for China for 5,000 years, modern Western Liberalism is barely two centuries old. Over the last 500 centuries they have managed to learn that while their system works for them, it isn't automatically the perfect fit for everyone everywhere in every time. We as a young barbarian culture have yet to learn that.

I've been called 'conspiracy theorist' for noting that he got his shares of a bank, steel company and shipping line confiscated under the 'Trading With The Enemy Act'.

A realist would think...

FTFY

That's how the Bush clan got rich, pump-and-dump.

They don't protect IP (almost none of which is actually 'stolen') much at all, their entire economy is open sourced.

You should check their energy grid, electrical engineers say that it's at least two decades above anything that will likely be done in the West. They have completely robotic and completely electric (no diesel) open pit mines. Look at a photo of Shanghai from three decades ago and another from today. Their high speed rail lines are second to none, as are their new nuclear power plants. According to Nature magazine they have 8 of the top 10 tech universities in the world.

If you think China is still a Third World nation you haven't been paying attention.

Do you really think that a country with almost 1/4 of the world's population, with one of the best educational systems anywhere, which has six of the top ten research institutes in the world and 2/3 of the top technical universities (including 8 of the top 10 according to Nature magazine), is unable to innovate? Be real.