Replacing it with nothing in an orderly fashion? Probably a good move.

Replacing them with ICE as a political gesture? Not so much

The TSA is responsible for more than just airports. As someone with family who works (worked) on port security in the maritime division, I would argue that Chesterton's Fence [0] applies here just as much as anywhere else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

There's an argument for that, though I think replacing it with Trump's basically-unregulated private military is pretty concerning.

This isn’t that.

It shouldn't be defunded, because as stupid as it and the 2001 politics that spawned it were, anything MAGA will replace it with in 2026 would be way worse.

Depends on what defunded means... if it means pay/control shifting from a Federal agency to local, then yes.

Maning, airports / municipalities should be funding this. If airports were in control the the user experience, I bet you would see a lot better outcomes.

This is a historical pattern: Bringing border forces to bear against your own population, because those border forces are trained to deal with people who don't have the rights of the state.

They dont have all the skills to do anything super complex in a sustainable way. Already proved in the first term. What their existence demonstrates is winning election is not super complex if you can find enough groups to precisely target and pander/capture attention. Social media has been a force multiplier for such behavior and the people that have emerged dont have any other skill other than attention capture. But thats short term win like full focus on marketing while product and operations have no hope of catching up. Every "large plan" will fail. Large plans in complex ever changing environments always need massive cooperation of very different skills. Never happens sustainably with just one skill dominating all.

It has. (Unless you're being sarcastic, in which case I'm not surprised it went over my head. Lol.)

Remember to use a pirate stream.

I can't tell what's supposed to be disgusting about this unless you stopped reading past the inflammatory headline.

It would really be amazing if the end result of all of this is the post-9/11 DHS finally gets reverted back to what we had before.

Excuse me, it's an "excursion", not a war.

It's a special operation

We already won. Are you tired of winning yet?

It identifies as a special operation and people should just respect that.

Yes, they are flooding the zone with many alternative explanations so that they're both all deniable, and all accessible to anyone who finds just one of them convincing. This is a strategy.

And all of them different from the last and/or contradicting each other at times.

It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Hopefully that is reassuring. Worryingly I would like some sense of confirmation but in any case I expect a declaration it's not a valid real result because that's what happened before, counts not withstanding.

You are more confident about this than I am. Let's revisit this comment in December.

I truly hope you are proved right by history, but I'm concerned.

All the people who decided to stay in the Middle East even when the second carrier group was en route, and then thought they were news worth enough to get on camera and comment about there being no commercial flights out of there.

Showing that government doesn't work by making sure government doesn't work.

Project 2025 and the Trump administration is the most success ant-growth movements have ever had.

Very few other people have Trump's ability to channel frustration in a nonspecific-but-charismatic way that connects the various extreme factions of the American right.

None of those factions will be gone, but their battles will weaken their cause more than they have since 2016.

Some of this can be seen by how even his own popularity falls any time he actually has power, since there are no effective ideas there, only misplaced blame, and that doesn't sustain support for four years. Without him there at all in an out-of-power period, the "blame the Jews"/"blame the brown people"/"blame the women"/"blame the baby-killers"/"blame the anti-Semites"/"blame the sexual deviants" factions will likely fail to find another person they all rally around.

Did someone say they would?

Having somebody less incompetent, senile, and corrupt at the helm may not make things "magically go back to normal," but it's a step in the right direction. Necessary but not sufficient.

Perhaps you'll be explicit though, what is the "sickness" you perceive?

It will be a lot harder to convince voters when he's gone... if the US still has elections

Could you enlighten the class as to what you believe the underlying sickness is?

America has neglected working class people for decades. The economy has shifted from supporting earning income to make a decent living, to protecting assets (bail outs etc.) Trump tapped into this and tricked these people into electing him, bringing along right wing or whatever they are.. and they got hold of power. Don't think numbers are there for this culture war crowd to stay in power unless they hitch a ride with someone. (edited: typo)

> A totalitarian theocratic regime with long range ballistic missiles and nukes.

Man, imagine that, how scary. I bet in theocratic regimes there's a bunch of stupid stuff going on, like a ~Secretary~ Minister of ~War~ Defense that justifies an attack on a foreign nation by calling it a holy war and prays every time he gives a speech to the troops.

Those theocrats probably do things like de-funding every science project they can when they get power. Or worse, maybe they think vaccines are against god's will and get a bunch of kids sick by opposing vaccines for preventable diseases. Hell they probably don't even teach their kids about evolution or gay people.

Can you imagine if a nation like that had nuclear weapons and long range missiles? Why, they might start a war for no reason.

47 years? What a convenient sounding number. Wonder where you got it from.

I honestly thought you were talking about the US in your first paragraph.

was this copy/pasted from a post from 30 years ago or was it typed up from scratch?

You certainly built a large strawman out of one sentence.

Hey, you forgot “they hate us for our freedoms” in your propaganda spiel.

Yeah it's a good thing we dismantled that regime and totally didn't empower the most extreme and radical portion of it while removing the politicians who'd tempered that and turned the population against the US and Israel.

But hey, at least we've lifted sanctions and we are now sending them even more money because the oil market was completely destroyed so that's great right?

Obviously this is the best strategy because we can see how the Taliban was completely dismantled in Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation right?

Unless you are proposing genocide of Iran or an eternal occupation, what we've done is kicked a hornets nest.

I agree THAT ethno nationalist country in the middle east, with long-range ballistic missiles, secret nukes and a secret nuclear doctrine that hasn't signed any Non-Proliferation treaty should make everybody worried. But that country isn't Iran.

It's the only country in the world with nuclear weapons that at this moment gets bombarded by missiles right now, if that doesn't make you worried you aren't paying attention.

They're not; they're speaking colloquially: this is the word "It's" omitted from the beginning.

---

*EDIT*: Corrected word. Lol.

One of President Donald Trump’s lines during the 2016 presidential campaign was his promise that, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’”

https://www.c-span.org/clip/campaign-2016/user-clip-too-much...

Trump says US is 'winning so much' in longest ever State of the Union - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhQUGjRtq-M - February 25th, 2026

Hence the joke, "I am tired of winning." as the situation continues to rapidly degrade through policy choices. So much winning, it's too much.

I find avoiding legible and most "graphic" clothing, period, works great.

Plus it usually looks better.

Not sure why you need any flag on you.

>Like any good American though, a Canadian flag works.

Please don't do this.

didn’t even know I was wearing it (honestly never even noticed anything other that “volleyball dad”) but rest assured I wore it every day for the rest of the trip

people*

yes, this is exactly the kind of story one would be dreaming up to share, I think if one was to make up a non-existent story one would come up with a lot more "interesting" one that this one :)

In what part of the world does the populace not suffer for the incompetence of their leaders? St. Petersburg? Ramallah? Port Au Prince?

I'm American, I didn't vote for Trump, so I don't feel like it's me dealing with adverse effects of my decisions.

I did vote for Eric Adams in NYC, and while Eric Adams didn't advertise blatant corruption as part of his campaign, insofar that I can be blamed for his idiocy and bribes I will accept responsibility. I didn't vote for him the second time around and I feel foolish for voting for him the first time.

Indeed, particularly given that ICE agents are going to be deployed to airports. Their penchant for killing civilians and otherwise violating civil rights only to lie about their actions hardly seems like a good fit for airport security duties they haven’t been trained to perform.

NATO says they can't confirm this Israeli claim: https://aje.news/ohi6b8?update=4425189

And Iran denies it as well: https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2035477318055985648

Makes you wonder who really did launch those missiles?