Grab 'em by the Parliament

Lol it’s the GAS act.

Until the House impeaches and they convict, their words mean nothing. The Supreme Court was quite clear that the President is above the law, and impeachment is the only remedy. And if anything is impeachable, this is.

Incoming Truth Social post…

“This PROVES that Demonrat states are run by crooks, because only criminals use the Fifth Amendment!”

This is, at least, trying to solve an actual problem. It remains to be seen whether the solution is more cost effective (and durable) as bifocals. As a human of a certain age myself, I would welcome being able to see without having to tilt my head awkwardly.

But something tells me this tech is not self-contained, and requires an always-on connection to some cloud resource which is guzzling electricity and water. No thanks! Bifocals are cheaper.

Except that the Fed spokesperson said the expensive features were removed from the plan in 2021. Which, coincidentally, is when the Biden administration moved in. If these expensive features were never in the plan, they would have said so. This implies that they were in the plan at some point, during the first Trump admjnistration, and I wonder if they encouraged it as a trap. It sounds like the type of thing they would do.

Some Athiest should sue to get all religious texts banned in that district, using this ruling as direct precedent.

The Fed says those elements were removed from initial 2021 plans submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission.

Now I’m interested in knowing a bit more about what the plans were before 2021. You know, when Trump was in charge the first time. Since so much of this complaint concerns discrepancies between what was originally planned, what got approval, and what Congress was told, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the Trump administration was planting a way to trap the Fed all along.

Trump didn’t like Powell, even though Trump appointed him. It makes sense that after years of Powell ignoring him, Trump would want to manufacture a way to fire him. And while Powell’s term as Fed chair ends in a few months, he is still a Fed governor and that term lasts longer. Conventionally, when a Fed chair reaches the end of his term he also resigns from the board entirely, but there is nothing conventional about all this.

He sounds really angry. He should be careful, if he gets too upset he may end up getting a heart attack or a stroke due to stress. That would be a shame…

For a C64 emulator, sure, but we can do better now.

Yes, this would be awesome, but for the love of all that is holy can it please not be BASIC?

I don’t think Ordinals really help here, they just turn Bitcoin into 2.1 quadrillion individual NFTs. But, my knowledge may be dated.

I sold all of my Apple stock because they wanted to make a phone and I thought that would end poorly, so I should take my profits while I could.

Not really. Bitcoin blocks are limited in size, originally to 1MB, now the limit is a bit fuzzy but the largest theoretical block is 4 MB. Transaction fees are (again, fuzzily) paid by transaction size, so if someone wanted to fill a block with a large transaction that contained a file they would have to pay an equally large fee.

Furthermore, the protocol is designed to find new blocks every 10 minutes. The actual rate is up to chance. Sometimes several blocks can be mined in quick succession, other times blocks may need 30+ minutes. But over the long term, the protocol ensures blocks are found every 10 minutes. Once the transaction is accepted into a block and that block propagated, it will be made immutable and the time of block creation will be fixed y multiple distributed mining nodex (assuming the block continues to remain in the longest chain, which it likely will be).

But even then, what do you have? All you have is proof that a file existed at a particular time. It says nothing about its provenance. If you want to vouch for the authenticity of a file on social media, you are much better off just posting a hash of the file, preferably signed with a known GPG key. I mean, that is basically what the Blockchain is doing, just with transactions attached.

The face of evil

ICE agents don’t feel they need to operate under the law, because they think they are the law.

There’s no reason for optimism as long as Republicans are too spineless to overturn a veto, or to force Trump to spend the money if he doesn’t want to.

They still have to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict. That includes investigating the source of each video, taking statements from whoever made them that they are authentic, and some analysis to further corroborate that the videos are authentic.

And then, even beyond that, they may need to further investigate the agent, to try and establish that this act goes beyond whatever qualified immunity he gets as a Federal agent.

There is a huge burden to prove this in a court of law. Unfortunately, this agent gets the benefit of all that process if he is ever a criminal defendant. His victim didn’t get that benefit, he just decided she needed to go and she was gone. But it’s the way our system works.

We live in an interesting time, where nearly everyone has the ability to record anything, at any time. It’s probably one of the worst time periods for a Fascist movement to start. They rely on controlling the narrative in order to deny the truth, and right now a citizen with a cell phone can seize control with the truth instead.

When AI figures out how to manipulate cell phone video to fit a narrative in real time, though, we’re all screwed .

<theyrethesamepicture.jpg>