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A Reminder

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When Donald Trump came into office in 2017, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was in force, and working as expected/ hoped. It was a far better agreement than most of us wonks had expected or wished for. When its draft came out earlier, we were dancing in the streets. It was carefully done and extremely specific about limitations on Iran’s nuclear program.

And Iran was working to the plan. IAEA inspectors installed sensors that sent information on how enrichment was working to their computers. Numbers were being hit. Iran was working toward what the IAEA calls a “broader conclusion,” a certification that its nuclear program is peaceful. Collaborations were being forged between Iran and the nations that were involved in the negotiations. IIRC, China was working with Iran on reactor design to minimize plutonium production, for one example. There were other provisions to move toward more extensive agreements; the expectation was that interactions would continue.

But the JCPOA required regular certifications from the US president. And those regular signatures reminded Trump that it was Barack Obama who had negotiated this wildly successful agreement. That could not stand, and it didn’t. Trump withdrew. He had great faith in his negotiation skills combined with coercive measures that he loves.

The Biden administration tried to put things back together, but the loss of trust that Trump’s withdrawal produced was too much. And situations had changed, both in the US and in Iran.

Trump ordered his golfing buddy, Steve Witkoff, another great negotiator in his eyes, to put something like the JCPOA back in place. He didn’t use those words, of course, but that was what it amounted to. Reports from Witkoff’s negotiations seem to indicate they might have been converging on something a little less than the JCPOA.

The US JCPOA negotiating team consisted of something like 150 people, most of whom were experts in nuclear issues and sanctions. The national labs supplied experts. Witkoff showed up to meetings without even an interpreter, much less national lab experts.

This time around, Iran was more pressed to get an agreement, but even with that, the Great Negotiators failed. Throughout, Trump occasionally tweeted threats at Iran to encourage them to agree.

Bibi Netanyahu had other ideas, as we see. Like Putin, he sees Trump as a sucker. Like Putin, he has no interest in peace. As Trump sees his great triumph (and Nobel Prize) slipping away, he is panicking, as we see from his frequent postings over the last 24 hours. His earlier threats, along with his poor understanding of the situation and inability to think about anything but win-lose outcomes, put him in a bind Now he’s meeting with his crack foreign policy team.

The post A Reminder appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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HarlandCorbin
9 days ago
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I think there's a typo.

Now he’s meeting with his crack foreign policy team.

Should be:
Now he’s meeting with his on crack foreign policy team.
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The Disability Follies, Part the Thousandth

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In one of those brave acts of revelation long after the fact to sell books, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson tell us that President Joe Biden’s aides were told by his doctor that Biden might need a wheelchair if he tood a bad fall.

Biden has spinal arthritis and neuralgia in his feet. That makes his gait uncertain. It’s not uncommon in people his age. A friend of mine has the same sort of neuralgia in her feet. I have to let her hold onto my arm at times, but she continues to compose operas and just had one performed in Santa Fe.

Physical disabilities do not imply mental disabilities.

Let me repeat that.

PHYSICAL DISABILITIES DO NOT IMPLY MENTAL DISABILITIES.

Nonetheless, CNN includes a sentence in the article to imply exactly that.

I remind you that one of our most influential presidents used a wheelchair.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been ignorant and bigoted and has abused his body for most of his life. It’s not just a feature of his old age, so I guess that’s okay.

Could we concentrate on that clear and present danger?

The post The Disability Follies, Part the Thousandth appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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HarlandCorbin
44 days ago
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If the cheeto traitor took a bad fall, he'd likely need a hearse.
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Punched Out

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Everybody to the limit

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HarlandCorbin
56 days ago
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Bowling ball? Or Pintsize's old head?
JavaJim
56 days ago
that's got to be a head
gordol
56 days ago
My question too!
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US citizen detained by ICE questions his vote for Trump – NBC4 Washington

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A naturalized Hispanic man says he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who were looking for another person on a deportation order, and now the man is questioning his vote for President Donald Trump.

Jensy Machado said he is a U.S. citizen and provided News4 documentation of his legal status.

Machado said he was driving to work Wednesday with two other men when he was stopped by ICE agents on Lomond Drive in Manassas, a short distance from his home. He said he was confused by what was happening, why agents surrounded the pickup truck. 

“And they just got out of the car with the guns in their hands and say, turn off the car, give me the keys, open the window, you know,” Machado told Telemundo 44’s Rosbelis Quinoñez, who first reported his story. “Everything was really fast.”

He said the agents said the name of a man they were seeking for a deportation order, someone who had given Machado’s home address. Machado told them that wasn’t his name — he didn’t know anyone by that name — and offered to show them his real ID compliant Virginia driver’s license.

“They didn’t ask me for any ID,” Machado said. “I was telling the officer, if I can give him ID, but he said just keep my hands up, not moving. After that, he told me to get out of the car and put the handcuffs on me. And then he went to me and said how did I get into this country and if I was waiting for a court date or if I have any case. And I told him I was an American citizen, and he looked at his other partner like, you know, smiling, like saying, can you believe this guy? Because he asked the other guy, ‘Do you believe him?’”

Machado said he was uncuffed and immediately released after showing his driver’s license.

The two men with him were taken into custody. He does not know why.

Machado said the experience shook his faith in the immigration enforcement efforts of Trump, for whom he voted.

“Because, like I said, I was a Trump supporter,” he said. “I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be the things, you know, like, … just go against criminals, not every Hispanic looking, like, that they will assume that we are all illegals.”

“That’s what they’re doing, now,” Machado said. “They’re just following Hispanic people.”

Immigration lawyers advise residents and citizens to always keep ID with them.

News4 and Telemundo 44 have both contacted ICE for comment and are awaiting a response.

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HarlandCorbin
111 days ago
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"I can't believe they would eat my face" says man who voted for the leopards eating faces party.
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The odds of a city-killer asteroid impact in 2032 keep rising. Should we be worried?

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An asteroid discovered late last year is continuing to stir public interest as its odds of striking planet Earth less than eight years from now continue to increase.

Two weeks ago, when Ars first wrote about the asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. NASA's most recent estimate has the likelihood of a strike increasing to 3.2 percent. Now that's not particularly high, but it's also not zero.

Naturally the prospect of a large ball of rock tens of meters across striking the planet is a little worrisome. This is large enough to cause localized devastation near its impact site, likely on the order of the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia.

To understand why the odds from NASA are changing and whether we should be concerned about 2024 YR4, Ars connected with Robin George Andrews, author of the recently published book How to Kill an Asteroid. Good timing with the publication date, eh?

Ars: Why are the impact odds increasing?

Robin George Andrews: The asteroid’s orbit is not known to a great deal of precision right now, as we only have a limited number of telescopic observations of it. However, even as the rock zips farther away from Earth, certain telescopes are still managing to spy it and extend our knowledge of the asteroid’s orbital arc around the Sun. The odds have fluctuated in both directions over the last few weeks, but overall, they have risen; that’s because the amount of uncertainty astronomers have as to its true orbit has shrunk, but Earth has yet to completely fall out of that zone of uncertainty. As a proportion of the remaining uncertainty, Earth is taking up more space, so for now, its odds are rising.

Think of it like a beam of light coming out of the front of that asteroid. That beam of light shrinks as we get to know its orbit better, but if Earth is yet to fall out of that beam, it takes up proportionally more space. So, for a while, the asteroid’s impact odds rise. It’s very likely that, with sufficient observations, Earth will fall out of that shrinking beam of light eventually, and the impact odds will suddenly fall to zero. The alternative, of course, is that they'll rise close to 100 percent.

Ars: What are we learning about the asteroid's destructive potential?

Andrews: The damage it could cause would be localized to a roughly city-sized area, so if it hits the middle of the ocean or a vast desert, nothing would happen. But it could trash a city, or completely destroy much of one, with a direct hit.

The key factor here (if you had to pick one) is the asteroid’s mass. Each time the asteroid gets twice as long (presuming it’s roughly spherical), it brings with it 8 times more kinetic energy. So if the asteroid is on the smaller end of the estimated size range—40 meters—then it will be as if a small nuclear bomb exploded in the sky. At that size, unless it’s very iron-rich, it wouldn’t survive its atmospheric plunge, so it would explode in mid-air. There would be modest-to-severe structural damage right below the blast, and minor to moderate structural damage over tens of miles. A 90-meter asteroid would, whether it makes it to the ground or not, be more than 10x more energetic; a large nuclear weapon blast, then. A large city would be severely damaged, and the area below the blast would be annihilated.

Ars: Do we have any idea where the asteroid might strike on Earth?

Andrews: The "risk corridor" is currently spread over parts of the eastern Pacific Ocean, northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, parts of Africa, the Arabian Sea and South Asia. Additional observations will ultimately narrow this down, if an impact remains possible.

Ars: What key observations are we still waiting for that might clarify the threat?

Andrews: Most telescopes will lose sight of this "small" asteroid in the coming weeks. But the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to track it until May. For the first time, it’s been authorized for planetary defense purposes, largely because its infrared eye allows it to track the asteroid further out than optical light telescopes. JWST will not only improve our understanding of its orbit, but also constrain its size. First observations should appear by the end of March.

JWST may rule out an impact in 2032. But there's a chance we may be stuck with a few-percentage impact probability until 2028, when the asteroid makes its next Earth flyby. Bit awkward, if so.

Ars: NASA's DART mission successfully shifted an asteroid's orbit in 2022. Could this technology be used?

Andrews: Not necessarily. DART—a type of spacecraft called a kinetic impactor—was a great success. But it still only changed Dimorphos' orbit by a small amount. Ideally, you want many years of advance notice to deflect an asteroid with something like DART to ensure the asteroid has moved out of Earth’s way. I've often been told that at least 10 years prior to impact is best if you want to be sure to deflect a city killing-size asteroid. That’s not to say deflection is impossible; it just becomes trickier to pull off. You can’t just hit it with a colossal spacecraft, because you may fragment it into several still-dangerously sized pieces. Hit it too softly, and it will still hit Earth, but somewhere that wasn’t originally going to be hit. You have to be super careful here.

Some rather clever scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (which has a superb planetary defense contingent) worked out that, for a 90-meter asteroid, you need 10 years to confidently deflect it with a kinetic impactor to prevent an Earth impact. So, to deflect 2024 YR4, if it’s 90 meters long and we have just a few years of time, we’d probably need a bigger impactor spacecraft (but don’t break it!)—or we’d need several kinetic impactors to deflect it (but each has to work perfectly).

Eight years until impact is a little tight. It’s not impossible that the choice would be made to use a nuclear weapon to deflect it; this could be very awkward geopolitically, but a nuke would impart a bigger deflection than an equivalent DART-like spacecraft. Or, maybe, they’d opt to try and vaporize the asteroid with something like a 1 megaton nuke, which LLNL says would work with an asteroid this size.

Ars: So it's kind of late in the game to be planning an impact mission?

Andrews: This isn’t an ideal situation. And humanity has never tried to stop an asteroid impact for real. I imagine that if 2024 YR4 does become an agreed-upon emergency, the DART team (JHUAPL + NASA, mostly) would join forces with SpaceX (and other space agencies, particularly ESA but probably others) to quickly build the right mass kinetic impactor (or impactors) and get ready for a deflection attempt close to 2028, when the asteroid makes its next Earth flyby. But yeah, eight years is not too much time.

A deflection could work! But it won’t be as simple as just hitting the asteroid really hard in 2028.

Ars: How important is NASA to planetary defense?

Andrews: Planetary defense is an international security concern. But right now, NASA (and America, by extension) is the vanguard. Its planetary defenders are the watchers on the wall, the people most responsible for not just finding these potentially hazardous asteroids before they find us, but also those most capable of developing and deploying tech to prevent any impacts. America is the only nation with (for now!) a well-funded near-Earth object hunting program, and is the only nation to have tested out a planetary defense technique. It’s a movie cliché that America is the only nation capable of saving the world from cosmic threats. But, for the time being—even with amazing planetary defense mission contributions from ESA and JAXA—that cliché remains absolutely true.

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HarlandCorbin
127 days ago
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I'm cheering it on. Hoping it speeds up, praying it has a certain crappy "mansion" in florida in its sights.
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No, The People Didn’t Vote For This | Techdirt

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A stunning 54% of Americans now believe we’re in a Constitutional crisis, according to recent YouGov polling. They’re right. As a tech billionaire effectively dismantles federal agencies without Congressional authority — agencies that Congress explicitly created and funded — we’re watching in real-time as our system of checks and balances crumbles.

Yet supporters of the current administration keep insisting “this is exactly what the people voted for.” That’s clearly bullshit. While I’m sure that some cultists have no problem watching the US Constitution burn, and many will gleefully embrace all of this because it “makes the libs sad,” that’s wholly different from whether Trump has a mandate to destroy the constitutional order. The reality is far more complex, and far more concerning for anyone who cares about constitutional governance.

Yes, Donald Trump won the election, though he did so with a very small margin — just 1.2% of the popular vote — and less than 50% of the total vote. So there’s hardly a huge mandate here.

But, more to the point, he was elected based on promises that he wouldn’t actually do what he’s doing now. Trump swore up and down that he did not support Project 2025’s plan to gut the government. The entire premise of Project 2025 fundamentally misunderstands (or deliberately misrepresents) the constitutional framework of administrative agencies. These aren’t just bureaucratic inconveniences to be eliminated at will — they’re congressionally authorized entities carrying out specific statutory mandates.

Trump seemed to understand this political liability during the campaign, explicitly distancing himself from Project 2025’s plan to gut these agencies. And because the mainstream press has been beaten into submission by false claims of “anti-conservative bias,” they simply repeated these denials without examining either the reality of them or the implications if Trump was lying.

That’s why USA Today ran a fact check claiming Trump didn’t support Project 2025. Politico ran a report citing “anonymous sources” saying that Trump’s team had put together a blocklist of anyone associated with Project 2025, declaring that they would not be allowed in his administration.

Former President Donald Trump’s transition operation is compiling lists of names of people to keep out of a second Trump administration.

The lists of undesirable staffers include people linked to the Project 2025 policy blueprint

Of course, since gaining office they have ignored that entirely, basically enacting much of Project 2025 and including many Project 2025 authors in key positions, including one of its main architects, Russ Vought, to lead the Office of Management and Budget.

This appointment wasn’t just another broken promise — it was Trump explicitly installing the very architect of a plan he had repeatedly said he rejected, making his previous denials impossible to defend as anything but calculated deception.

It is hardly a “mandate” to do something if you spent most of the election denying you’d do that very thing.

Yes, the Musk/Trump cultists were gleeful after the election, saying that of course Project 2025 was the real plan all along. Political observers across the spectrum knew Trump’s distancing was a lie, but there’s a reason he felt compelled to make that lie: the actual agenda would have repelled the moderate and independent voters who provided his narrow margin of victory. Whatever “mandate” he claims was built on promises he never intended to keep.

For some supporters, this isn’t about policy at all — it’s a performative middle finger to “elites” they blame for stagnant wages and cultural shifts. Their support stems not from policy alignment but from tribal resentment, making them willing to burn constitutional guardrails if it “owns the libs.” But that’s a much smaller group than the cultists believe.

The polling data shows just how badly this bait-and-switch is playing with the public. Outside the narrow band of cultists whose only principle is “owning the libs,” Americans are increasingly alarmed by the Musk/Trump administration’s actions.

Democrats, obviously, aren’t thrilled, but the more meaningful data is that Republicans don’t like what Elon Musk is doing at all.

The share of Republicans who say they want tech billionaire Elon Musk to have significant influence in the Trump administration has fallen substantially in the months since President Trump was elected.

In The Economist/YouGov poll taken in the days after the November 2024 election, 47 percent of surveyed Republicans said they wanted Musk to have “a lot” of influence in the Trump administration, while 29 percent wanted “a little” and 12 percent wanted him to have “none at all.”

Today, however, the share of Republicans who say they want Musk to have “a lot” of influence has fallen substantially to 26 percent. Meanwhile, 43 percent of Republican respondents say they want Musk to have “a little” influence, and 17 percent say they want him to have “none at all,” according to the latest poll from The Economist/YouGov released Wednesday.

That’s likely to only get worse as the real economic impacts of Musk’s “streamlining” become clear. Voters who supported Trump based on economic promises are instead seeing federal support for their local hospitals vanish, government contracts that supported thousands of local jobs disappear, and consumer prices continue to rise. The very voters who wanted economic stability are getting the opposite: economic chaos driven by an unelected billionaire’s personal agenda.

That’s only among Republicans, who had been excited to have Musk involved in the government. But as his unilateral dismantling of federal agencies accelerates, even his former supporters are realizing this goes far beyond “running government like a business” — it’s about destroying the basic functions of government itself.

This growing awareness is reflected in a shocking YouGov poll that found 54% of Americans think we’re in a constitutional crisis, with only 27% confident we’re not. When more than half the country believes we’re in a constitutional crisis, and barely a quarter is sure we aren’t, we’ve moved well beyond normal political disagreements about the size and scope of government.

I know the cultists will argue that the public supports them, but they’re increasingly trapped in a shrinking snowglobe of propaganda, desperately denying the reality that more and more Americans are seeing this mess for what it is.

Those are fairly stunning numbers, given that when I called some of Musk’s actions a form of a Constitutional crisis just last week, some people mocked me as being hysterical. But it appears that a large part of the public is waking up to the fact that Musk isn’t driving towards “efficiency in government,” he’s looking to destroy the government.

The YouGov numbers reveal a stark reality: the American public is increasingly aware that something fundamental has gone wrong. While some extremists might celebrate this constitutional breakdown, the majority of voters — including many Trump supporters — are realizing this isn’t what they signed up for.

The campaign promised economic relief: cheaper eggs and lower gas prices. Instead, voters got an unelected tech billionaire systematically dismantling federal agencies, surrounded by a coterie of 4chan edgelord trolls LARPing as cabinet secretaries, all operating without congressional oversight or constitutional authority. They voted for economic stability and got the effective end of the American Constitutional Republic instead.

Filed Under: constitutional crisis, doge, donald trump, elon musk, mandate, popular support

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HarlandCorbin
135 days ago
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They were *TOO DUMB* to realize it, but YES THEY DID VOTE FOR THIS MESS.
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LeMadChef
135 days ago
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Actually they DID vote for this. Willingly and wholeheartedly. They thought it was for *those other people* (brown folks) and not them.
Denver, CO
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