President Trump on why Sudan was removed from the travel ban pic.twitter.com/ipEAS2F5XP
— Yeganeh Torbati (@yjtorbati) September 27, 2017
Being as we live in his fiefdom now, the first thing I noticed was that Granpa Comment Section sounds like he’s sundowning again. But seriously — why is Sudan in, and Chad out? Apart from “gotta have some bunch of black Africans to kick around”, which is I assume Steven Miller’s advice?
I guarantee the answer is 'the Saudis need Sudan to keep sending troops to Yemen and they let me touch the Orb.' https://t.co/JfWCuwxMNG
— Liked By ZedCruz (@ZeddRebel) September 27, 2017
The BBC — which, globally trusted source — suggests a different angle:
… Observers wonder whether Chad’s troubles started when it attempted to slap a record $74bn fine on US oil giant Exxon Mobil.
At the time, the current US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson headed the company.
Exxon Mobil was accused of not making royalty payments but eventually avoided the fine, more than seven times Chad’s gross domestic product, as both parties reached a settlement.
There is however little to suggest it was the cause of this ban…
“We’re just saying, is all.” Because Rex Tillerson’s reputation. Also, too:
… Chad might feel hard done-by to suffer this punishment despite its counter-terrorism track record, while its eastern neighbour Sudan – labelled as a state sponsor of terrorism – is being removed from the US’ bad books.
Sudan will see its omission from the travel ban list as a sign that the Trump administration will also remove wider economic sanctions on the country on 12 October.
The sanctions were first put in place in 1997 when Sudan was named a state sponsor of terrorism, while further penalties were imposed for alleged abuses carried out in the troubled Darfur region.
The State Department concluded that Sudan was cooperating better on counter-terrorism, and in improving humanitarian access to conflict areas, like Darfur…
And when this doesn’t happen, because c’mon, Trump administration/GOP, then what?
mike in dc
I can only assume Trump just discovered the “Fuck Chad” meme on the internet.
Duane
When the Trump administration starts to make sense, please let me know. Or if flying pigs are seen.
MattF
Reporters have to pretend that Trump could find Sudan and Chad on a map. I mean, besides ‘Africa’.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@mike in dc: Not sure if that or the “we mixed up the two countries on a globe” explanation is any less awful than the retribution angle.
Speaking of, we should formally adopt the Arabic transliteration of the country (Tšād) to avoid any future association with the North American population of Chads.
Adam L Silverman
Here’s why Chad is out, as I covered in a previous thread:
NotMax
“Sir, we face a mounting crisis in Puerto Rico.”
“Really? Tell Mad Dog I said to set up air drops of lube and rubbers. And hide it under Miscellaneous Expenses.”
jl
@Adam L Silverman:
In the meantime, Deep state Muslim Brotherhood mole Dunford is nattering about problems that will be caused by withdrawing from the Iran nuke deal. What kind of central casting general is that?
U.S. Military Chief Warns Against Pulling Out Of Iran Nuclear Deal
https://www.rferl.org/a/dunford-warns-iran-nuclear-deal/28758792.html
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman:
It still looks like it was done on a whim. No nation that will shiv an ally on a whim is to be trusted. The Dotard administration is deserting America’s post in the world order.
Brachiator
@Amir Khalid:
Despite Trump’s blather about making America great again, his mindset prevents him from giving the US a role as world leader. He and his advisors have contempt for nonwhite people, and he has to be reminded that some of them are useful allies. And after he has had his nap, he probably forgets again.
More and more, Trump will drift into a more deeply incoherent foreign policy.
GregB
This cartoonish, money worshipping shitheelis going to clusterfuck us all the way into WWIII.
Meanwhile Zombie Eyes Ryan was giving Trump the full reach-around on the Han-Nazi show tonight.
All while the recovery effort in Puerto Rico is getting the Heckuva Job treatment.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: What do you think about the BBC deciding to highlight Tillerson’s C.R.E.A.M. interests, though?
jl
@GregB: From what I read in the news tonight, Trump is still obsessed with player protests in the NFL. Or more likely, obsessed with fact that nearly everyone, even rich people, in the league told him to go stuff it.
Amir Khalid
@jl:
To the moneybags who own NFL teams, the Dotard is still the obnoxious wannabe — both as a billionaire and as a team owner — whom they had to keep out of their clubhouse decades ago. He has never been “one of us” to them. So it was no hardship for them to tell him to stuff it.
Major Major Major Major
I’m starting to worry about work. We’ve sold off the project that’s made up the bulk (>75%) of my work time over the last year, as of next week. We’ve mostly frozen the feature set, so there definitely won’t be enough work for three full-time developers on this. And there’s only one or two other projects in the pipeline that I’m aware of, which I verified with one of my colleagues today.
I’ve been budgeted out for the whole fiscal year (ending in July), and we aren’t strapped for cash, so I probably won’t be laid off(??), but what are we going to be doing? Is this the sort of situation where you lay somebody off? We’re a think tank, we just don’t have that many webs to develop.
Punchy
Does this travel ban include koalas? Because I’m deep into scheming how to smuggle a few of these furballs back to the States with me. Maybe dress them up as Jeff Sessions….the size would be about accurate.
Anne Laurie
@Punchy:
They’re too cute to be Repubs. But the only time I saw live koalas (at the Alburquerque Zoo, on loan, in 2000), they were greeting their dinners with deep sonorous blaaaats. So maybe if you shaved them down and told the customs agents they were GOP legislators…
Amir Khalid
@Punchy:
Wouldn’t work. If it looks cute, there’s no way it resembles Jeff Sessions.
ETA: Dang you, Anne Laurie …
ByRookorbyCrook
Have you ever seen a koala with mange? It is the stuff of nightmares, but still cuter than the KKKeebler elf.
joel hanes
@Major Major Major Major:
I probably won’t be laid off(??), but what are we going to be doing?
Weary cynic’s answer : Rev 2 of the documentation; this time with all bits that were left out of Rev 1 due to time pressure, plus adequate explanations of _why_ the key design decisions were made, and under what circumstances it would make sense to reconsider them.
Better answer: write tools to automate the drudgery parts of constructing the most recent project, so that you can easily generate a parameterized range of variations to suit different customers and different markets.
Layoff looming answer: now might be time to pick up a new language, or add a new tool to your list of competencies.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Major Major Major Major: Maybe have more of the staff, including you, involved in business development and strategy to get some potential work into the pipeline?
Is it a small enough company you could have a sit down with the President and ask these questions? And ask to work on the answers?
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: I can see why you would be uneasy, which completely sucks.
I went through that for 9 years in my department at the University – where there were cuts 9 years in a row, so every year we all got to wonder for about 5 months whether this would be the year we would be cut. In year 9, I was one of the people whose positions got cut, and that was when I left the university and decided to go out on my own.
That’s a long way around to saying that uncertainty sucks.
NotMax
FYI, from up north.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: Weren’t you thinking of moving to NYC next year? Wondering whether you would have to find a new job at that point, anyway? I’m also thinking that if you might make that move but you don’t know when, that it might be best not to share your possible move to NYC with anyone at work.
Maybe your worries are for naught and there won’t be any cuts, but if there are, someone who is likely to be moving soon might be perceived as a less painful choice for position cuts.
Sister Golden Bear
@Major Major Major Major: FWIW, I’m quite happy with my company, although we’re down in Redwood City. If you get to the point of thinking about jumping ship, I’d be happy to talk you about it.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@WaterGirl:
I so do not miss academia… I faced the same thing in my area (developmental composition). The belief nationally over the past five years or so is that graduation rates and student retention are down because students who must go through dev ed lose interest. The CC where I taught — theoretically a two-year program — was graduating 34% of students after six years.
So they trimmed,cut, slashed the program, declaring that telling students they’d just have to enter transfer-level classes and tough ’em out and seek tutoring was the best for SLO’s (student learning outcomes).
Somehow I’m guessing that in a few years it will be decided on a national level that, oh, dear, some students really need developmental courses to succeed!
4M, best wishes with whatever you decide. Maybe web comic projects will take off… you ever check out The Oatmeal website? He makes a living doing that.
raven
@West of the Rockies (been a while): A new study from the Tennessee Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s two-year institutions, found that while scaling up this type of remediation resulted in some small decreases in pass rates from a similar pilot program, there was overall success in students completing the credit-bearing courses compared to those who took traditional prerequisite remedial courses four years ago.
Boatboy_srq
@Major Major Major Major: Sounds to me like time to explore a nice comfy consultancy. Remember the GOTea is only slightly less hostile to Silicon Valley than to Hollywood, and that’s mainly because Microsoft, Intel, Google and Facebook keep delivering tools they can use to grift the rubes, rewrite history and twist language.
Boatboy_srq
Not entirely OT: The Hill is reporting that evacuees from PR are being charged for the flights, and those who cannot pay are forced to hand over their UNITED STATES OFFICIAL passports as collateral for the “loan” (which of course probably means anyone without access to funds, which is newrly everyone in a PR sans functioning infrastructure).