Susan Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, worked for a lobbying firm that represented Qatar. Attorney General Pam Bondi lobbied for the Qataris. Mike Huckabee, now US Ambassador to Israel, was paid $50,000 to visit Qatar in 2018. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, also has pocketed money from Qatar. In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought the Park Lane Hotel from Witkoff’s company in a $623 million deal. The Trump Organization itself recently struck a deal to develop a luxury golf resort in Qatar. And now Qatar is considering handing as a gift to Trump a jumbo airliner worth about $400 million for Trump to use as Air Force One.

If I didn’t know the Republicans were such fine, upstanding, morally sound people, I’d start to suspect fuckery.

Teen Vogue. It was publishing good, hard-hitting investigative journalism for a while.

A spokesperson for Cohen later released a statement, “We are expected to be good Americans and look the other way as Israel prevents food, water, and medicine from reaching the remaining people of Gaza. Israel is literally starving them to death… We will not look away. We will not be silenced. We will do everything we can to get our government to stop being complicit in starving little kids to death.”

Well said. And good on him for standing up.

Sounds a bit like actual work. Rich people don’t like to do actual work.

It’s like everything with them: they talk about principles but what they really mean is everything must be bent to their advantage. When following their claimed principles would help someone else, they abandon the principles or move the goalposts.

No other nation with self-respect…

As a British person, I’m unclear how your comment relates to the UK.

Finally, a SpaceX mission we can all get behind.

The hand on his heart really does make you think twice about the meaning though, just like it did with that other guy.

she was accused of trying to help an undocumented immigrant evade arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Dugan is charged with concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings. She could face up to six years in prison and a maximum fine of $350,000 if convicted.

Seems to me she was trying to ensure that this person got their due process and their day in court, not just an extrajudicial kidnapping and trafficking to a foreign concentration camp. She made a small gesture to help justice as it’s supposed to be enacted in the USA, and the regime is determined to make an example of her for it.

Turns out, states’ rights, free speech, right to bear arms, small government, constitutional originalism, deregulation, border security, religious liberty, education reform, law and order, personal freedom… the whole Republican platform has all along been code for oppressing minorities.

The USA is such a fucked up place.

That’s odd. I’ve been running OpensSUSE Tumbleweed with a Ryzen 9 5950X and RTX 3080 with no issues. I don’t know what would be making yours, with similar hardware, function differently unless it’s the laptop stuff for dynamically switching between onboard graphics and the GPU.

I just have the regular subscription. I wouldn’t pay for the lifetime one. I want to support them but I am not confident enough that they’ll be around for the long term since video hosting is a hard business to make money from.

What kind of graphics hardware does your laptop have?

I have stopped buying lifetime subscriptions to cloud services unless they pay off within a year or two since you can’t guarantee that they’ll be honoured. Any longer and you stand to lose too much money.

Quite right. But I can’t help but notice how The Guardian gives the last word in this article (for three paragraphs) to the transphobes.

Debian and Mandrake in the late 1990s. And I was already almost three times as old as you were when you started. These days I’m happy with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for daily use. I tried NixOS but it threatened to break my old brain.

It’s part of their whole Nazi theme.

One of the key things about this administration is that they don’t believe everyone should live, or have a good life. They’re not trying to do the right thing for most people, because they believe only the elite few (themselves) deserve to live, and live well. They see everyone else as a lesser kind of being, and a disposable resource for their own use. Quite a lot of people they would prefer to kill or let die. This is fundamental to how fascists think. So when they enact policies that will make life worse for people or cause people to die, they just don’t care. The only ones worth taking care of are themselves, because they’re just better.

Conservatives in the UK have been using “common sense” as a slogan for some time now. I believe it was a thing during the Thatcher and/or Major years, and it still goes on:

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/11/conservatisms-cult-of-common-sense

There’s even a far-right group within the UK’s Conservative Party who call themselves the “Common Sense Group”:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_Group