When the political principal comes up with a great idea people are happy to do it and develop some initiative. But if it’s a bad idea or even a merely good idea that they can’t kill, they grouse about how the politicians never listen to the professionals, as though they had made any suggestions.
People who try to suggest too many ideas are disparaged. I’ve even heard phrases like “rogue element” and “dangerous.” Having a vision for how the agency can more ambitiously serve the public is seen as not only unrealistic, but unprofessional. Professionals know that better things aren’t possible.
What is happening with Zohran is however very familiar to American bureaucrats: when the political principal wants something, then they move heaven and earth to do it. But they don’t move on their own initiative, and generally block, slow, or water down anything that does not come from the top.
A very useful expression I had never heard. In my experience, not only is the term foreign to American bureaucracy but the concept itself is alien.
It's somehow very telling that the English language doesn't have an expression that fully translate the French expression "politique volontariste (de l'État)".
It reflects how much policy-making in the anglosphere, especially in urban planning matters, is reactive rather than proactive.
Transfem in all pink saying I want to read Dune on my own time
I want to support you and love you in this way
Pan down to her women as she continues, like let me experience Dune
Through my own eyes so I can understand your soul better
Here’s a modern analysis. Rural areas are extremely vulnerable to capture by local notables. Landowners, the church, company town industrialists, modern petty capitalists, whatever it is. Rural economic activity is not sophisticated enough to provide a material base for pluralistic social life.
I know this phrase is usually used as a meme, but literally unironically read theory www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
The idiocy of rural life.
17th century weapon that combines a pistol with an axe
See also: the 17th century when you could class for melee or ranged, both were viable, and you could even multiclass
The little domino on Denmark deploying troops to Greenland to protect it from American invasion
I love these moments in history where rival militaries were different enough to be like different factions in Warhammer
Peep those
R H U M B
L I N E S
can we just fire the entire ME Democratic Party into the sun
He’s not Napoleon, he’s Louis Bonaparte
Oh unrelated to the case but JSYK this judge makes a point of being a transphobe nowadays. Sorry.
Too much time has passed to really know for sure - cases go gold in 48 hours, let alone 48+ years - but I find this much more plausible than the JFK stuff, which has a lot of evidence for a lot of coverups for a lot of crazy CIA stuff… that does not include assassinating JFK.
This is the appeal of Trump. We’ve known since before he was ever president that he was, by his own admission, a sexual predator. There is a brotherhood of rapists among us, and Trump is their king because he has raped so many women and girls so openly. It proves that they can do it.
For the elite in New York and Florida it was the extravagant version of lots of women and even underage girls being trafficked to their parties. For these ordinary men it is one woman, usually their wife, but they seek out the brotherhood of men who drug and rape their wives.
Something that strikes me about this compared to the Epstein case is how, despite the obvious similarity of rape and the many other differences, there is one crucial commonality: sexual violence is a way that some men bond with each other. It’s a rite of passage for them.
This comes with a huge content warning of course. It’s horrific and goes to show just how widespread sexual violence is. Patriarchy may not be as overwhelmingly powerful as it once was, but it is very much still with us.
In any case, short version: The CIA probably didn’t kill Kennedy, but the FBI probably did kill King.
Brown also speculates that Jowers might have been approached to take part in a “conspiracy” whose real purpose was to set him up as a potential scapegoat, which they also did with Ray - and then they ended up using Ray. This would also explain his apparent connections to the event.
Two nondescript men showing up with a metal case and taking it into the fire house or the boarding house the day of or the night before the assassination, if they were noticed at all, would probably have been left alone by men like Jowers even if they’d guessed what they were up to.
Remember that this was Jim Crow Memphis at the moment that King was turning towards opposing the war in Vietnam and was in town for a strike. Most white people hated him and thought he was a troublemaker at best and maybe a Communist agent. There would have been all sorts of talk.
Unfortunately, people are much more aware of the theory, advanced by the King family and found by a civil jury in their wrongful death case, that Lloyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, was part of a conspiracy. Jowers seems to have relished the infamy. But he’s just some asshole.
In any case, according to Brown (again: the judge hearing the defendant’s appeal, not just some guy) the Army sent the FBI five of these rifles in 1968, and soon after asked for them back, but the FBI only sent four. That was the likely murder weapon.
Under this hypothesis, the shooters would have concealed the rifle in a toolbox like those normally used for carrying firefighting equipment. Brown doesn’t think the shot came from the boarding house, but it might still have even if Ray’s rifle left there was not the murder weapon.
So, you are more likely to hear the echo and misidentify the origin of the shot. Especially if there is a big flat surface for the sound wave to bounce off of, like the wall of an old building on the other side of a parking lot.
The reason is that it is easier to tell where a supersonic bullet comes from because the sonic boom is in a continuous line, so when you hear it echo off trees in a jungle, your brain can estimate the path of the bullet. But the gunshot of a subsonic bullet (like a handgun) is a single explosion.