#Heritage management

[saints-who-never-existed]

Sign me up!

(And pay no attention to the fact that I'm triply-ineligible what with not being a Kiwi/Aussie, not specialising in a relevant field of conservation, and not having NZD$2000 laying around to pay as a 'contribution' toward the expedition. Just let me dream though, god damn it!)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Knefel at MMFA:

A new memo issued by the Trump administration directing the federal government to temporarily cease disbursing billions of dollars in funds appears to draw on arguments made by Russ Vought, the president’s selectee to run the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a primary architect of Project 2025, a sprawling effort organized by The Heritage Foundation to provide policy and staffing recommendations for President Donald Trump’s second term. In addition to that role, Vought is also the founder of the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has spent over a year arguing that the president can unilaterally refuse to spend funds allocated by Congress, an authority known as the impoundment power that was severely curtailed by Congress in 1974.

The new Trump administration memo was issued by Matthew Vaeth, acting director of OMB pending Vought’s confirmation vote. The document calls for federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”  “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the memo states. Although the two-page memo doesn’t use the term impoundment, law professor Steve Vladeck argued that the Trump administration is claiming “the unilateral power to at least temporarily ‘impound’ tens of billions of dollars of appropriated funds—in direct conflict with Congress’s constitutional power of the purse, and in even more flagrant violation of the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.” The existence of the document was first reported by journalist Marisa Kabas and later confirmed by The Washington Post and The New York Times. (OMB issued a follow-up memo claiming the freeze does “not apply across-the-board” and withheld funds are “not an impoundment under the Impoundment Control Act.”)

The direct effects of the memo are unknown given its scope and vagueness, but they could be detrimental even if the pause is short-lived.

“Experts said the memo as written was poised to bring a rapid halt to scores of federal functions, from assistance to homeless shelters to financial aid for college students,” the Post reported. “Health grants distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state aid for disaster reconstruction, might face delays.” The memo appears to exempt Social Security and Medicare recipients, and it says the halt “does not include assistance provided directly to individuals.” It isn’t clear whether Medicaid recipients will be affected, although some early reports indicated that payments had been disrupted.

Project 2025 architect Russ Vought had his handprints all over the federal funding freeze.

See Also:

HuffPost: The 50-Year-Old Law Trump Is Challenging To Create Chaos

The Guardian: Trump move to pause federal loans and grants rooted in Project 2025

Ahmed Baba: Trump’s Funding Freeze Power Grab Causes Chaos And Legal Firestorm

[stealingpotatoes]

Did Luke tell leia how they are the first free burn on there father side of the family

i want to say yes but at the same time, it's luke. he absolutely forgets to tell her until someone runs up to Leia near-praying calling her huttslayer and he ends up mentioning it in his huge explanation of why she's now the coolest person on tatooine

[originalleftist]

Democrats in the Senate stayed in secession overnight to oppose and stall to the confirmation of Russell Vought of the Heritage Foundation, a main author of Project 2025, as head of the Office of Management and Budget.

When the vote was finally held, they broke Senate rules against continuing debate by each stating the reasons for their No vote as they cast it.

They could not stop the approval of Vought, who was confirmed by the Republican majority in a straight party-line vote.

But not one Democrat broke ranks this time. Not. One.

You probably won't hear much about this unless you follow political news closely, and you certainly won't hear it from the "Do nothing Dems" crowd trying to get you to stay home or "protest vote".

So I'm sharing it here.

There is resistance. Those in power just want you to think that there isn't.

[monstersandmaw]

Funky trees from today’s coppicing work.

Anyone care to guess how old that ash stool is in the first image? (top left) the clue is in the width of the base, not the upright.

[guillemelgat]

I just started a new semester, and I'm finally getting the chance to take Malayalam, which I've been trying to do since my undergrad. This is obviously a very exciting development, and it's so delightful to be in a language class again for the first time in ages, but it's also been a very unique experience as far as language classes go. First of all, for me, who is generally used to having very odd personal connections to a language and being the overachieving linguist of the class. And second of all because it's just a very different experience to be in a class largely oriented towards heritage learners and people with some cultural familiarity.

There are five people in the class. Of those five, four have Malayalee family and have had some exposure to Malayalam throughout our lives; the last person is a native speaker of another non-Dravidian South Asian language. Of the four of us who are Malayalee, I'm basically the only one who didn't have a significant amount of Malayalam at home growing up. What this means is that we've spent very little time on the phonetics of the language, because everyone roughly knows how to pronounce it - something which wouldn't be true if there were non-South Asian in the class! (It was a bit comforting to hear all the other Malayalees struggling with aspirated consonants, which have constantly been the bane of my existence, and then to hear the instructor say that few people pronounce them right in spoken Malayalam anyways.) The instructor could ask us to say things on the first day, and the more fluent speakers could say them. There is already Malayalam being mixed in with the instruction. I'm sure by the end of the semester we'll be having extended conversations - especially since the two of us who don't speak have very concrete communicative desires for our outside lives.

It's also a very scary experience for me, personally. Or maybe scary isn't quite the right word, but I've always felt out of my depth in claiming Malayalee heritage - I've always felt that there were so many things which I didn't know which any normal Malayalee would. There is no evidence that this is true, at least insofar as that my cousins with two Malayalee parents have wildly varying experiences and I'm not actually that far outside the norm. In most American spaces, I will never be clocked as white, and most people usually immediately identify me as South Asian. Nonetheless, I know that when I visited Kerala this past December, I was decidedly foreign - to the two guys speaking in rapid-fire Malayalam on the flight from Qatar, to the person at the immigration counter in Trivandrum, even to my own relatives. Part of it is a mental block on my part, of feeling myself foreign and therefore never letting myself belong. Part of it is that I am, ultimately, American. But either way, in this class, I can feel that I'm the American in the room, even when I'm not, even when my pronunciation is just as good as the other Malayalees and there's nothing that's telling me I can't belong. I keep freezing up when asked to say real things, or when people speak to me, because there's some unreachable standard in my brain of Not A Real Malayalee, and everything feels fraught and fragile. So maybe this semester will be about overcoming that.

It's still strange being in a language class where the instructor, on the first day, can look at you all and say, "You know why you're here, you want to be here, we all have a shared experience." But it's also a beautiful thing in its own way, and I'm really looking forward to taking on a language in this way. I love the structure and the logic of language, the puzzle of putting it together, the beauty of making friends in it and watching shows in it and listening to songs in it - but as I get older I find myself really reflecting on what it means to learn and to know a language. And sometimes those barriers to learning and to knowing are only in our minds, not in our worlds. Language is communication and connection, and I hope that Malayalam serves me to these two ends, even as it sometimes feels like a trial by fire at each word.

[korshrimpski]

happy la kings filipino heritage night, but especially to jason robertson & matt dumba

[queencaramilflinda]

Listen I understand why some people disagree bc I love them as characters but personally I don’t particularly want another full season with the Bad Kids. I will watch it if they do one, but I feel like not only have the characters reached the natural conclusions of their arcs, the Intrepid Heroes have all grown so much as players from when Fantasy High came out like 5 years ago that I think it would feel a bit disingenuous. Like Ally had never played D&D before Fantasy High, and Kristen was played accordingly. Ally even said in Starstruck “no more bumbling Kristen shit”

All that being said I wouldn’t mind a short season (up to 10 eps) for junior/senior year or for the IH to do live shows of the characters. I would love a cross over season between Fantasy High and the Seven or even PirOL, I think that could be fun.

[sisterdivinium]

This Guardian article is from July 2020...

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Thomas Zimmer at The UnPopulist:

The speed with which the right has, in just a few short years, entirely abandoned its supposedly principled commitment to curbing the power of the state in general and presidential Caesarism in particular is remarkable. During the Obama years, Republicans insisted that they had a constitutional obligation to oppose the White House’s dictatorial overreach. The Tea Party craze saw Republicans casting themselves as defenders of the Founders’ vision of small, responsible, unobtrusive government. The animating conservative concern—rhetorically if not often substantively—was government restraint to guarantee individual liberty: keeping the Nanny State out of people’s lives and insisting on government non-interference in business. Now, the same movement that derided Obama as a lawless tyrant every time he considered exerting power via a presidential executive order is urging President-elect Donald Trump to upend the system with precisely that instrument. This trajectory—from at least rhetorically championing government restraint to aggressively mobilizing the coercive powers of the state to roll back pluralism—is a fairly recent one. And no single figure in the world of conservative policymaking better embodies this shift than Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget.

MAGA Mind

Vought, who presents as an ordinary political operative running a boring department, is the architect of one of the farthest-reaching policy initiatives we’ve ever seen: Project 2025’s “180-Day Playbook,” a suite of potentially hundreds of pre-prepared executive orders for Trump to issue once in office with a view to reshaping the executive into a ruthlessly efficient vehicle for unilaterally carrying out the MAGA agenda. He’s not exactly new to Republican politics: Across almost two decades, Vought went from low-level staffer to high-level éminence grise, being entrusted with various posts related to the design and implementation of Trumpism as a policy agenda.

Before the Trump era, Vought held various positions within conservative policymaking and advocacy. He was executive director of the Republican Study Committee, one of the power centers within the GOP. He was policy director of the House Republican Conference. He spent seven years as vice president of Heritage Action, a lobbying and advocacy arm of the influential Heritage Foundation. In 2016, Vought was part of Trump’s transition team. In the Trump White House, he was first brought in as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget; then, in early 2019, he took over as OMB director from Mick Mulvaney.

Vought made that position his own. He went all-in on getting the government to execute Trump’s every wish. Some of his “greatest hits” include holding up military aid to Ukraine because Trump wanted to pressure the Ukrainian government into delivering dirt on Joe Biden; redirecting billions of dollars from the Pentagon to Trump’s border wall when Congress blocked funding; aggressively advocating for Schedule F, the presidential executive order Trump announced in the very last weeks of his presidency that was intended to convert thousands of civil servants into political appointees in order to strip away job protections for agents of the “deep state”; and in 2020, if the Biden administration is to be believed, doing everything he could to sabotage the transition. Over the past four years, Vought has kept busy. Upon leaving the White House, he founded the explicitly Christian nationalist Center for Renewing America to serve as a kind of administration-in-waiting—and, as noted, he played a key role in designing Project 2025, authoring the chapter on the Executive Office of the President in the agenda document and taking charge of the “180-day Playbook,” the only part of Project 2025 that has not been made public. In a secretly recorded conversation that surfaced in the summer, Vought claimed he and his team had already drafted hundreds of executive orders and regulations; he specifically emphasized executive orders to implement the mass deportation of more than 20 million people as quickly as possible. Whatever tensions there were between the Trump campaign and Heritage, Vought’s standing was unaffected. He always remained close with the right’s undisputed leader. In May, the RNC named Vought policy director for the Republican 2024 platform committee—a move Trump enthusiastically approved, even while denying he knew anything about Project 2025.

Now, Vought is set to return to the OMB and focus all his energies on bending the entire machine to Trump’s will. Vought steadfastly believes that any check on the president’s power—on the power of Donald Trump, specifically—is illegitimate. MSNBC’s Hayes Brown called Vought the “unofficial prime minister” of the first Trump administration. It’s an apt description, though not in the sense of a modern parliamentary system in which the prime minister is the head of government: Imagine instead an absolute monarch’s prime minister, his executive officer who gets the machinery to do as the chosen leader commands.

[...]

Where Is The Line?

Vought pays lip service to religious liberty but at the same time explicitly suggests Christianity should have a privileged role in influencing American society. And, in his own words, “nationalism is not just a patriotic love for one's country, but a commitment to prioritize the needs and interests of one's own country over others.” This is why Vought’s Christian nationalism specifically underwrites his plans to implement the “largest deportation in history.” Immigrants, to Vought, are neither conducive to increasing Christianity’s influence on society nor are they a part of his nationalist conception of American identity. But how does a restoration of the Constitution fit with advancing a Christian nationalist agenda? If the “natural order” and “Christian civilization” are under threat, what must a movement pledged to their preservation do? Does constitutional “conservatism” imply inherent limits that must be respected—or does a commitment to conserve the divinely ordained order require radical measures when crisis hits? Modern conservatism has a long tradition of debating these questions. Where is the line? Who gets to define it? The American right today has become dominated by forces and factions that are convinced that the answer is that our moment requires not restraint and preservation but radicalism and counter-revolutionary force. As the major institutions of American life are supposedly in the grip of anti-American, leftist, “globalist,” “woke” forces that desire to tear the moral fabric of the nation apart, as the “natural order” is supposedly under siege, those who used to call themselves “conservatives” need to do whatever is necessary to defend a particular kind of “freedom”: the freedom to live in accordance with the “natural order,” which necessitates imposing it on the whole country. [...]

Conservatism Is No Longer Enough!

The idea here is that conservatism is no longer enough—this is a moment, Vought and his ilk believe, that requires radical, even revolutionary, politics. A massive upheaval of the system, not a “conserving” of institutions. In Oct. 2022, The Federalist, a formerly conservative publication that has now become a hotbed for MAGA foot soldiers, ran an instructive piece titled: “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives.” It pleaded with conservatives to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more appeals to “small government” political philosophy: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life—and in some cases, a blunt instrument. ... Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

Russ Vought, Trump’s pick to lead the OMB, will push a radical Christian Nationalist and anti-democratic agenda.

[buttercup-barf]

Under the cut are mostly self-insert doodles of decreasing quality. Again, not much directly tied to Team Fortress 2. Might as well toss these out while I have no access to my puter. Much yapping under the cut and in the tags incoming.

Another self-insert, this time less of a "here's me as a tenth class" and more of a "here's my game experiences translated into the class I would take the place of". The Cleaner. Although I guess they could still be wearing either suit. It doesn't matter that much.

That one Convict's Case taunt with Backup would be extremely funny, because the man would be on the verge of a breakdown (he does not want to go to jail so bad you have no idea). The second image- I owe no explanation. You know what I am. You see the pattern with my favourites.

The duality of the man. Resting face versus "just heard you express interest in religion/Russian folklore" face. He's not that hard to make friends with, when you pull him away from all the explosions.

Some doodles of trying to figure his face out. Unfortunately, the more I stare at him, the more I worry that he looks like A Certain Guy With The Last Name "Kazarin", and the fear of never being original in my life caught up to me.

Don't look at me, don't perceive me, I refuse to explain any of my actions to you.

[layton-heritage-posts]

I apologize in advance for what I did

Owl, first of all this looks unreasonably good.

But you had warrior kids phase as a kid didn’t you.

[seamusicpoetry]

The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary will become the sixth off the West Coast, protecting a vibrant marine ecosystem.

Details and more:https://www.npr.org/2024/10/13/nx-s1-5147914/the-u-s-gets-a-new-national-marine-sanctuary-the-first-led-by-a-tribe

[cant-get-no-worse]

Your writing is always great, I need you to write something to either making us optimistic about the future of the club or to make us realize how much in deep shit we actually are please 😭

Babe, just browse through my La Liga 2022/2023 tag and mourn with me. 💕

[raeloganthesonic06fangirl]

Quick question:

Even though I was born in America, would the fact that one of my grandmothers was Canadian mean that technically speaking, I'm a third generation immigrant?

Since my Grandma "N" was Canadian, that means my mother is Canadian-American, so I'm part Canadian... Right? A negligible amount because I'm still American, but still worth acknowledgement in heritage, right? 🤔

Just curious about the terminology there.

[saltcherry]

so you know the American Girl books (important cultural touchstones for little history nerd girls), well when I was a kid there were 7 that I had in a box set, then the 8th one was the Nez Perce girl they introduced, and then I aged out, WELL, there is now a Jewish American Girl and presumably doll, lovely, I checked out some of the books at the library today for my Children's Literature Reading Project (Self-Imposed) and, the Jewish American Girl (TM):

is named Rebecca (fine), lives in New York in 1914 (fair!), is involved in labor activism (also fairly representative), and dreams of becoming an ACTRESS (lmao. also the dream of many girls but we are really grabbing everything, huh?).