Assad has been deposed and may be dead.

His troops were overrun originally by various "rebel" factions, many of them being radical Islamists (not exactly "nice guys") and there were many reports through the day that his forces knew it was inevitable they'd lose and rather than die they abandoned both their uniforms and positions.

Then, in a rather dramatic (but so-far as I know unconfirmed) report from public flight radar data an airplane that appeared might have had Assad and his family on board left, was ascending and then looks like it may have been shot at, hit and entered an extremely rapid descent and appears to have crashed.  However, later it was reported that Assad and his family had reached Moscow and were given asylum -- so either that wasn't his aircraft or had a very good pilot (and more than a bit of luck, I suspect.)

Syria is a tough nut.  Assad was clearly not a nice guy, but he lived in a world full of very not-nice people.  There are opinions all over the board as to whether he was the keeper of peace (albeit via rather extreme means on more than one occasion) or a brutal dictator who had no compunction about gassing his own to remain in power.  One of the problems of war is that the truth is usually the first casualty, and Assad had been in power for decades, faced many attempts to depose him and they weren't doing so with harsh language.  Thus the challenge in any attempt to figure out what's what.

Don't take lightly the geography.  Syria is in a very interesting place; Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan south and Lebanon west sort of along with a little piece of Israel.  The geopolitical aspects of this are obvious which is why Syria has been a flashpoint for a good long time, never mind the nation's direct sea access.

Netanyahu has made a public address taking credit for Assad's fall, stating that his nation's attacks on both Iran and Hezbollah were proximate causes.  Perhaps true but there's a caution here in that Syria was a fairly-significant balancing force against extraordinarily violent people and Assad wasn't voted out of office, he was basically shot out of office.

Will those who did so consider the issue resolved and lay down arms, leading to an outbreak of peace?  I'll take the under on that wager given the general nature of that part of the world over the last 100 years or so, never mind historical context going back way further than that.

This could quite-easily be the start of something much worse than what we've seen over the last 20 or so years in the Middle East. Both nature and politics abhor a vacuum and here we have one with pretty-much everyone in the vicinity being more than willing to pick up a rifle, RPG or worse at the drop of a hat.

This much I can say with certainty: We have no good reason to get involved in this in any way, and the further away from it we stay the better from an American point of view.  Let these folks figure out on their own whether they're tired of war or not.

Uh, what jobs?

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 227,000 in November, and the unemployment rate changed little at 4.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment trended up in health care, leisure and hospitality, government, and social assistance. Retail trade lost jobs.

Uh huh.

Health "care" continues its march of +54,000, but how many are doctors and nurses?  Ah, you already know that.  All draw a check however, so that's "good."

Leisure and hospitality hired, which is interesting too given some of the internals.  We'll get to that in a minute.

Retail trade, on the other hand, was down.

Oh, and in a new change, the last two months were revised up.

But....

On the unadjusted household numbers employment was negative 482,000.  579,000 more people decided to couch surf or otherwise not be engaged in the labor force.  The employment/population ratio (again, unadjusted) was down two ticks (which implies about a 1.2 million job net loss) which squares about right with the employment-population ratio and unadjusted jobs number and on a 12 month rolling basis, adjusted for working-age population, employment is down 2.384 million.

That latter number, ex the pandemic, is a continuation and acceleration of a negative series we've seen for the last two years, implying deep structural problems within the labor force.  Further, this comes in a month when it shouldn't -- for there to be a negative number of substance in January would not be unusual because of course temporary help for the holiday is let go then, but for it to come in November is -- since the exact opposite should be happening.  It clearly isn't.

Why does the market like this (and it does, apparently, if futures are to be believed)?  Well, it would seem that bad news being good news for the market continues, but I will warn that the internals show deterioration both in degreed professionals and also in IT, neither of which is something to cheer about.

.... or just travel a lot.

Starlink has their "mini" dish on sale.  You can buy one here and if you use this link you'll get a free month of service (I will too.)

Here's the short form:

• Latency is very low -- which is really nice.  ~30ms is my usual, which is equal or better than what I get on a landline.
  
  
• Advertised performance is not what might be claimed, but its still in the category of "good"; with a full and clear view of the sky, and aligned per the app's "correct" setting, I'm seeing ~70mbps down and ~30-40 up.  Of note this is ~3x typical cable modem speeds on the upbound side, which is excellent, but not the 100mbps often claimed on the "mini" dish.
  
  
• Jitter is quite good.  Better than I expected, and definitely good enough for remote work and video streaming.  No issues there.

On the physical side the mini dish is roughly the size of a business laptop.  That's the good news; it easily fits in a modest backpack. The included power supply is allegedly USB-C/PD but has a triple-sealed barrel connector so if you want to use something other than 120V power (which you apparently can; I haven't yet for lack of connector which I will take care of) provided it has 20V output, it should work.  Starlink says it must be 20V/5A (or 100W PD output) however it appears that operating power requirements are actually around 25W provided you shut the "snow melt" function off, which (since its a heater) would wildly increase power use if the panel had to use it.  I already have a passel of 65W 12V PD adapters which all have 20V output since they have to in order to work do charge my laptop (and they do.)

Note that POE is not supported; only the "++" version would be expected to have enough power and only with the snow melt function disabled, so I understand why Starlink didn't attempt to do so.  Thus yes, its always two cables if you need a wired connection -- data and power separately.

If you intend to use it truly "off grid" power consumption has to be figured out because while the hardware fits in the backpack with power consumption of about 25W in use that's 2A of 12V power plus conversion inefficiency on the PD adapter, so figure probably in the 3A range off your 12V supply.  That's not trivial -- but it IS much nicer than the amp-sucking power requirement for the "standard-sized" dish.  Power budget matters if you're off-grid and batteries are both heavy and large.  In an RV that matters much less than it does if you intend to actually use it "detached."

There are plenty of claims that if you want to use the wired ethernet you need to use the app to put the panel in "bypass" mode and then connect your own router.  This is not the case if you only need one device; plugging directly into the unit works perfectly well.  But again Elon has gamed it to a degree in that the Ethernet port on the antenna is non-standard sort of.  Its sealed, which makes sense as the actual antenna is likely to be outdoors when in use, but its rather offensive that there's no interface cable included that terminates on a standard connector.  Starlink sells one but again its very long and, for a cable, obscenely expensive.  The aftermarket has come up with a number of answers to this and the best one I've seen so far appears to be one that has the sealed connector on one end and a double-barrel compression gland on the other -- inside of which is a standard RJ45 jack.  A standard Ethernet cable will connect in the on-panel jack but will not lock due to the seal and jack arrangement in the unit, but for "I need to use it right now" type of situations over a wired link yes, you can -- just maneuver the plug in the hole after you remove the seal and be aware if you tug on it the plug will come out.

I have the "Roam 50" plan turned on which gives you 50Gb of data per month for $50 and can be turned on and off without penalty as needed.  That's perfect for either emergency use or if you travel sometimes but not always; 50Gb is pretty good as a data allocation (well beyond what you can buy for similar money on a cellular link from most carriers) and of course it works literally anywhere you can see the sky.  Also, and quite-importantly for people who are intermittently roaming like me you can put the antenna inside a vehicle behind a windshield without a performance hit.  I wouldn't do that in the summer sun in a sitting vehicle, but if you're comfortable (e.g. in an RV when not moving) other than "must face the RV the right direction so you can align it" that's quite a reasonable thing to do given the small size of the panel itself.  With the Gen3 standard -- not so much.

The panel also comes with built in 2.4 and 5Ghz WiFi hotspots (by default they are on one SSID but you can split them) and both work -- the signal on both is quite strong.  During testing with the unit on my back deck I was able to get both downstairs which has exterior between the unit and my phone on 5Ghz and would be expected to completely block the signal -- it didn't, although the quality was fairly crappy.

I would not call this a replacement for terrestrial service, especially if you have fiber available.  Its quite expensive where there are terrestrial alternatives -- but obviously if you travel or live where there aren't any good ones that's an entirely different story.

Provided you pay attention to your use case I like it.  At the original ask for the mini hardware I found it simply too expensive to be worth the spend, but with it currently being $150 off for the hardware I decided to pick one up, check it out and see if I wanted to keep it, and then have it in reserve here at the house if there are outrages along with using it when traveling in my RV.

I'm keeping it.

Its very unlikely to be the last one.

Presidents rather commonly issue pardons that raise eyebrows on the way out of office.  Clinton did, Obama did, Trump did.  Obama holds the record for volume on the last day, granting a stunning 330 clemencies and pardons combined on January 19th as he was about to leave office.  Many of them were commuted sentences handed out for drugs in the height of the drug war.

The only limitation on Presidential pardons in the Constitution is that they cannot block or reverse an impeachment.  With that single exception the power is absolute.

But the breadth of this pardon, stretching back to 2014 and forward to the present day, is unprecedented.  It covers not just the gun and tax charges which Hunter pled guilty to in September but also any and all conduct that was not subject to current indictment or prosecution dating all the way back to 2014, which incidentally is when we were interfering in Ukraine politics and the Burisma and biolab events linked to him began (at least as far as we know.)

Considering that with few exceptions the Statute of Limitations on federal crimes has run out after six years on virtually anything back to 2014 this raises a serious question: Exactly what is envisioned that might have actually been open and subject to potential prosecution?

Joe Biden and the Democrat Party have often tried to maintain that nobody is above the law.  Apparently that does not apply to Joe Biden's family, and the implication of the pardon in the way it was drawn is that there is much more, including likely conduct not subject to the Statute of Limitations, that he is now immune from the consequences of.

Many have said this "further damages" the faith Americans have in the US Justice system.

Frankly, for me anyway that faith was flushed a long time ago, but if you still had some sort of silly belief that we actually have a justice system that serves all without fear or favor you need only read 8 USC 1324 and contemplate the people who ought to be doing 10 years or even life in prison under that Statute, which dates to the 1950s, to be disabused of that.

Thus from my point of view I am neither surprised nor do I expect any of this to change -- and if the same standards are applied by the other side, well, that's called "what's fair for one is fair for the other."  If that's how Americans choose to see things and allow it to continue then so be it.  I will govern myself accordingly and you should consider doing so as well.