It’s really looking like a shitty week for the Trump administration.

How do you expect them to lash out? Invasion of another American city? Attack on Venezeula? Arrest of Pelosi?

It doesn’t have to be subtle to show why something is good or bad.

My favorite recent example was the TV adaptation of the Last of Us. The third episode makes it very clear that it’s a statement that a gay couple can have a beautiful life together. I was watching through the show with my parents, who were incredibly homophobic. They got very upset when they realized that it was going to be about a gay couple, but by the end they had tears in their eyes.

There was zero subtlety, because the story was so beautiful it didn’t need it.

Trump lost the last shutdown in one of the most humiliating political defeats of his Presidency. Did he think this one would be different?

Best we have is Civil Contempt. It’s different than criminal contempt, which can be pardoned by the President and must be enforced throught the executive or the Marshalls service. A judge can appoint anyone to enforce civil contempt rulings, including someone who doesn’t report to the federal executive.

Lots of people’s don’t understand the difference between civil and criminal, and a automatically assume criminal is always stronger. But civil is a lot more flexible because civil and criminal have different goals and remedies.

Criminal penalties are punishment for committing crimes. People think of murder and theft, but by far the most common criminal convictions are traffic violations. You get caught speeding and you have to pay a pre-defined penalty or take a driver’s ed class or whatever. For the most part, criminal convictions can result in fines, imprisonment, or execution.

Civil is different. Civil cases aren’t seeking punishment - they’re seeking relief. That is, in a Civil case, the Court can make you do something or stop doing that thing.

For an easy example that I run into pretty often in municipal government, I’ll highlight the difference between Civil and criminal cases for the same offense: building a fence past your property line into the public right-of-way.

When I take someone to court in that case, I can go criminal or civil (or both).

If I take them to criminal court, the judge can make them pay a fine. But the judge can’t make them remove the fence. We can issue separate citations every day and have 14 charges on the docket each week, but that’s it. There are some billionaires in some areas who actually build illegal fences and just pay the $500/day in fines because money isn’t an object to them.

But when I take them to civil court, the city isn’t seeking punishment for what they’ve done - it’s seeking relief. That is, instead of a fine, the judge can order that the fence be removed, and (and this is the big point) that if it ISN’T removed after the order the judge can appoint someone else to go on the property and forcefully remove it.

We actually have a case in my city where we’re have a court-appointed third-party private firm preparing to tear down a large part of house that cost 9 figures because the owner is refusing to carry out the judge’s order regarding their illegal construction. The judge didn’t want to put the city in charge because the impact on property tax revenue of tearing down such an expensive piece of property might convince the city to turn a blind eye.

When an order isn’t obeyed, a judge can appoint someone to carry out the ruling, and unlike in a federal criminal case which requires that the judge appoint the Marshall’s Office, a civil ruling specifically doesn’t have that restriction on the judge.

Throw in another leap day every 12 years and we’ve got a system.

I’m just saying that I’m heavily armed even for a Texan. Do with that information what you will.

The rub is which to go with. Some people want the extra hour of daylight after work in the winter. Others want it in the summer because it will maximize their after-hours sunlight in the season when being outside is more realistic.

The reasonable position I take is that, if you inflict a Spring Forward on me, I’m owed a goddamned Fall Back and I’ll go to war with any government who tries to keep that hour indefinitely.

It’ll be handy to have a tool that makes things up that they can use an an excuse to arrest you.

I feel like there’s an opportunity for a multi-layered Epstein-Barr joke in this whole situation, but I can’t quite put it together.

That’s why you have to light the fireworks before eating them. They undergo a chemical reaction when lit and are not longer gunpowder after a few seconds.

That’s the beauty of AI. It can look everywhere without requiring additional manpower.

What makes thela5 work so well is that the twist works because of the format.

It wasn’t mind control of the main character. It was mind control on the person holding the controller, and it WORKED.

My favoriteturret quote:

“Prometheus was punished by the gods for giving the gift of knowledge to man. He was cast into the bowels of the Earth and pecked by birds.”

Yeah. Those guys all work on Futurama.

He was such a terrible candidate. I think he may have been okay as President, but he had zero charisma. The right couldn’t even be bothered to hate him.

Howard Dean was a more exciting candidate, but him making a weird sound in a speech somehow disqualified him from office.

I wouldn’t sign that. I work in government, and with new generative AI tools some of the emails are getting very good.

We had one sent to an applicant pretending to be me thay appeared to have scraped data from staff reports and minutes for public meetings for vatiances and SUPs. It was very detailed.

It had also scraped our fee schedule, so it had convincing fee amounts with links to the relevant codes and everything. It’s just that the payment site was not actually us, but a site made to look just like us with a 1-letter change.

It’s the 2 weeks or so in which your insurance company allows you to adjust your coverage. To facilitate this, they give you brochures designed to be confusing to try and trick you into paying maximum premiums alwith minimal coverage.

I had an employer that bragged about bringing employee down costs with the new provider by 20% per payckeck as the reason for the drastic reduction in coverage and higher copays. They glossed over the fact that we were changing from bi-weekly to weekly paychecks, so the 20 percent reduction per paycheck was actually a 60 percent increase overall.

It’s more about letting someone know they’re breaking the law if they buy it. It’s also something that can be added onto charges if they commit a crime with the gun. Lying on the 4473 is a crime.

I did once have someone try to buy a gun using a medical Marijuana card as ID because their driver’s license was expired.

The 4473 specifically mentions that Marijuana use in states where it’s legalized prohibit the purchasing of a firearm.

Picked by slaves.