Your analogy makes no sense. This woman came here in 1978 and the Shah was booted in 1979. It is entirely believable that she would have faced reprisals in Iran during the massacres of 1981.
I don't know why this woman was denied asylum but her request was well justified by events.
Ahh folk metal, that can be a fun genre of music! The one you linked isn't too bad but if you like it a bit...eastern...you may want to check out "The HU".
As an American I fully agree. I've completely had it with our politics infesting everything, everywhere, all the time. For everyone's sanity it needs to stop. More communities need to have and enforce a "No US Politics" rule. No Trump, no Elon, no AOC, no Bernie, no State Senator from bumblefuck Alabama or Los Angeles, California. None of it. Just.Fucking.Stop.Already.
I'm not really a metal head and I'd never heard of Possessed / Seven Churches so I found it and gave it a listen.
My honest opinion is...meh. Musically it's an interesting track, arguably better than some Iron Maiden songs, but the vocals are the same muddy mess that ruins so many other metal bands.
If you listen to Seven Churches and then immediately play "Aces High" or "Run to the Hills" you will hear exactly what I'm talking about. It boils down to this; Jeff Becerra seems to love being buried in the music so he can growl out undecipherable lyrics while Bruce Dickinson is conveying at least as much vocal power while standing out from the music and being clear enough that you can hear the message.
It's just my opinion of course and honestly this is the same problem I've had with nearly every American Death Metal band. I don't know why most of them even bother having a vocalist as they are functionally useless.
Rock out to whatever moves ya' but I definitely wouldn't rank Possessed ahead of Iron Maiden.
This is a couple days delayed response, apologies for that I've been pretty busy.
With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don't expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it's almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.
It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don't lend themselves well to this, yet, but it's blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.
We've already reached the end of "Console Exclusive" games and I think what comes next is "Streaming Platform Exclusive" games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.
This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there's no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.
Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.
Zohran Mamdani seems a model for a kind of modernized Islam that I'd really like to see more of. I don't know anything about him other than what's available on Wikipedia and Social Media but I wish him well dealing with the problems of NYC and the churls on the other side of the aisle.
Why? The kinds of UHPC being discussed in the article weren't available even in the United States until the year 2000 but most of Iran's nuclear facilities were built between 1974 and 2005. Even their primary enrichment facility in Fordow, which was struck with MOPs, was started no earlier than the mid-2000s as it was still unfinished in 2009.
Basically the majority of Iran's facilities, even their major ones, are too old to have the kind of concrete being discussed in the article.
The EV1 was a wildly impractical vehicle with < 100 miles of range that cost $100,000 in 1996 money (over $200,000 today). It was never ever going to be any kind of mass produced consumer vehicle. Without GM subsidizing the ever loving shit out of them the only people who could have afforded them were the ultra wealthy.
Regardless, the only thing political was California's insanely premature ZEV mandate set to take effect in 1998. That was political but not the EV1 itself.
BTW GM never really gave up on ZEV / PZEV even though most people think they did. I had a most excellent Hybrid Tahoe in the late 2000s but at 55k-ish new in 2009 ($82,000 today) it was simply too damn expensive to be a mass market vehicle. Just like the EV1.
I don't remember anything about all their designs being open source but they DID open source(*) the Roadster.
They also open sourced(*) their charging connector which has now become an increasingly used standard called NACS.
I'm putting that asterisks by open source because that's only sorta-kinda what they did. More precisely they made the Roadster and TCC royalty free to use and released all of the engineering documents necessary to use & recreate them.
What you're probably remembering is their Patent Pledge from 2014. At this point Tesla holds nearly 1,200 patents worldwide so that Patent Pledge isn't a small thing. They're surely not going to make all of their vehicle designs open source but they do seem to be holding to their Patent Pledge and its underlying "Open Innovation Framework".
This doesn't mean Musk or his companies are good, it's just a review of the facts.
I’ll never understand how the EV thing became a political issue.
I think at first it was viewed as a threat by both the Domestic Auto Industry including the UAW. Tesla was selling an increasing number of vehicles, which is what the Big 3 cared about, and they weren't a Union Shop, which is what the UAW cared about. So they fought the rise of EVs out of self-protection.
It's really the oil industry fighting it now because it's an existential threat. The United States generates almost zero electricity from oil, to them it's all about fuel. Coal has been in steep decline for two decades and as an industry its nearly done. They were replaced by the Natural Gas folks for electricity generation and you won't find many NG folks who are actually against EVs. When you do it's because their parent company is an Oil Company.
Toss in the rise of China as the current best source for EV batteries and the threat that Chinese companies like BYD present to the Big 3 and its easy to see why things are still all knotted up.
The current Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, was appointed by Harry Reid in 2012. The previous Parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, retired after having held the position twice (once appointed by Democrats and the second time by Republicans).
The last Parliamentarian who was "fired" was Robert Dove and like Alan Frumin he held the position twice. He was fired by Democrats in 1987, then brought back by Republicans in 95 then fired by Republicans in 2001.
Senate Parliamentarians don't get "fired" very often, both parties seem to do it at about the same rate, and even when they are "fired" (demoted really) they tend to boomerang back into the position after a few years. There's only been 6 of them since the role was established in 1935.
China imports 1.3 to 1.8 million barrels of oil per day from Iran, roughly 16% of its total. It's not just oil either, China is a heavy importer of other Iranian petrochemicals.
China's EVs give them very little leverage at this point.
Reading these comments seriously makes me wonder how many of y'all read the article. The US doesn't need Iranian oil but China DOES.
A dwindling supply of oil through the Strait and rising oil prices damages China and buoys the United States. If China doesn't want to put any effort into keeping the Strait open it's going to hurt them far more than it will hurt anyone else.
Even the TCP sliding windows aren't safe!