Steve Kerins

In regional news, this is the first night this season where the overnight temperature will drop to 68 F / 20 C.

Lovely out there 🌴😌

..Syrian citizens have claimed asylum this year.

This is a very large population, and integration success has varied considerably. Apparently there are about 6,000 Syrian doctors now in Germany.

Most asylum seekers cited the Assad regime as the reason they had fled.

Trump droht Putin nach Regierungs-Angriff / Syrer bleiben in Deutschland Podcast Episode · RONZHEIMER. · 09/08/2025 · 32m

Interesting re: the 900,000+ Syrians who remain in Germany after the fall of Assad.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 have accepted voluntary return with federal assistance, and about 10,000 naturalize as German each year. Meanwhile, more than 17,000 additional...

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Watch the weather, friends in Arizona and Southern California...

Put on a British police show.

When is Adelita Grijalva going to be sworn in?

Russian planes are out again, flying to launch missiles at Ukraine. The drone attack has been ongoing for hours.

This is how our weekend is going here in Ukraine. Again.

Keep us in your thoughts tonight, please.

This is misinfo, but also pretty funny in spite of itself.

First of all, no way this account is American.

Second, the US population reached 100 million at some point between 1915 and 1920, not at whatever time this Gillette commercial was made.

Georgia needs a bit of everyone's attention tonight.

🇬🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺

🤞

Work on leaving the EU and NATO, no one wants you.

Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told

No fake wars.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Today is German Unity Day, probably the closest thing to a "national day" that Germany has.

It commemorates the official reunification of East and West Germany on 3 October 1990.

Trump Is Building the Blue Scare Podcast Episode · The Ezra Klein Show · 09/24/2025 · 1h 27m

Interesting historical comparison.

Regime continuously uses pretextual events to trigger further repression, incl. employment sanctions.

Private institutions: weak.

Silicon Valley oligarchs were aggrieved due to perceived loss of control/ influence.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Kharkiv is again under attack.

Watched this, "Bullet Train Explosion", a remake of a 1975 film.

It was cheesy and pretty bad.

On the other hand, there's action, there are the landscapes of Japan, and there are trains, so, a few of my favorite elements.

...control information, to punish and harass enemies, to create a masked paramilitary force roaming the streets and carrying out Trump's commands..."

...his pockets, and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled...

The 2026 midterms are 14 months away. The machinery of the state is being organized to entrench Republican power through redistricting, to...

If Democrats Have a Better Plan, I’d Like to Hear It Podcast Episode · The Ezra Klein Show · 09/07/2025 · Subscribers Only · 22m

Excellent monologue.

"We are no longer in the muzzle velocity stage of this presidency...; we are in the authoritarian consolidation stage of this presidency...

Donald Trump is corrupting the government. He is using it to hound his enemies, to line...

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Is anyone addressing the potential nuclear incident that Russia is now risking by cutting off the power to Zaporizhzhia NPP?

That seems like it ought to be a priority.

Two things are simultaneously true:

1. Maduro is a dictator and illegitimate, and Venezuela, the region, and the world would be better off with him out; and

2. *We* should not be invading Venezuela, attacking it, or wasting scarce military resources on that country.

The Supreme Court Is Backing Trump's Power Grab Podcast Episode · The Ezra Klein Show · 09/02/2025 · Subscribers Only · 57m

It's subscribers-only now, but this was a great conversation with Kate Shaw on the Roberts Court, Trump, executive power, and the courts.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Another factor here, I assume, is that a US Attorney's Office like the Eastern District of Virginia will have a number of line prosecutors who are capable of handling a criminal case – but when a case is, by all appearances, merely political...

...Criminal law involves a very different set of procedures and considerations than most fields of civil law, and in general, if one is appointing a prosecutor, one ought to want that person to have criminal law experience.

That seems not to have been the case, here.

We have seen, and will continue to see, a lot of snobby takes from certain sectors of the legal profession on this.

I don't know much about Ms. Halligan, but the fact is, it is generally true that *any* civil lawyer who hasn't practiced criminal law, will not know how to do so...

Capitalization has to be postponed. It's too controversial.

Did you learn your lesson?

TIL that Fabians and Fenians are different things.

And so the farmers of northern Vermont got the border under control, but they also got a roving force going after the longer-term unauthorized Latin American farm workers who work on the dairy farms in that region.

I was particularly struck by the statistic that, in FY 2024, this sector of the border saw more apprehensions than the previous 17 years combined.

And if it was chaotic there, one can imagine what it was like at the southern border.