Trump swore a presidential oath to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, but the text of the 14th Amendment says it applies to those who have sworn oaths to “support” the Constitution, Blue pointed out the sematic difference in an Oct. 6 filing in the case.

Both oaths “put a weighty burden on the oath-taker,” but those who wrote the amendment were aware of the difference, Blue argued.

“The framers of the 14th Amendment never intended for it to apply to the President,” he wrote.

Absolutely despicable.

That's a lawyer arguing that a president is free to engage in insurrection because of a semantic difference between the 14th Amendment and the wording of the Oath of Office sworn by the president.

All of these people are fine with America descending into a totalitarian dictatorship, presumably thinking they're the clever ones who would be doing the dictatoring.

"Atomstrom wird so billig sein, dass es sich nicht lohnen wird, Stromzähler einzubauen."

Atomstrom ist halt überall auf der Welt subventioniert. Ob jetzt in den Sicherheitsgarantien, die der Staat trägt, oder in der Kostenübernahme für Rückbau und Endlagerung, oder in direkten Subventionen wie in Frankreich.

Das Irre an der Sache ist, wie viele Leute auf den Strompreis in Frankreich gezeigt haben mit der Behauptung, so günstig wäre doch Atomstrom, ohne auch nur eine Ahnung davon zum haben, wie sehr das in Frankreich subventioniert wurde.

It's absolute insanity that something like government emergency alerts get broadcast via an unregulated, privately owned, privately run for-profit service that answers to absolutely nobody.

One would hope that this episode would bring about some rethinking, but realistically, the reaction now is probably going to be "whew, crisis averted, let's change nothing and continue exactly as before."

John Yoo, a Berkeley Law professor and former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration

It's insane that a guy like this who tried to get government torture legalized in the United States has now had a long, well-paying, distinguished career and is being referred to as "a Berkeley Law professor and former Justice Department official" instead of "torture guy."

I guess having zero morals and ethics really does pay off.

Chutkan has other options besides a gag order with a threat of jail if Trump doesn’t comply. She could summon Trump to court and admonish him directly, subject him to escalating fines with each confirmed violation, or threaten to move up his trial.

Alright, let's see some of those consequences.

It's completely preposterous that Trump can keep breaking rules, laws, regulations and court orders with impunity because the entire nation is too fucking scared about what might possibly happen if we held Trump to the same fucking standard as everybody else.

So Elon is now going for the severed horse head under the bedsheets approach to persuade advertisers?

That's a bold move.

That entire song is just a thinly veiled threat saying "we're going to murder you if you're trying something we disapprove of here in this place, where we have all the power."

There's not one single person in the world who should own a thousand million dollars, never mind hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars.

The pure existence of billionaires is unethical and immoral - doesn't matter whether they're being stupid and fascist in public, or quietly pulling strings and bending society to their will in the background.

The likely Republican candidate for president is a convicted fraudster and known rapist who tried to install himself as dictator and is currently facing 91 criminal charges - and the GOP is celebrating him as their savior.

That's the answer.

The entire party is rotten to the core.

Russia must have some very serious kompromat

I hate this narrative, because it implies that the person in question - whether it's Musk or Trump or the Republican representatives who travelled to Russia on 4th of July or whoever it's about - are acting in a way favorable to Putin and Russia against their will and only because they're being coerced.

The reality is that a lot of wannabe authoritarians who look up to Russia and to Putin simply admire Russia, admire the totalitarian system, admire the silencing of any opposition voices, admire how the press is being reduced to pro-Kremlin propaganda, admire how regular people lose their rights, admire how anyone can be tossed into prison on a whim, admire the hate campaigns against LGBT+ people, admire the white supremacist, nationalist kind of conservative state religion, admire how Putin is wielding military power to annex territory, etc. etc. etc.

Regular counselor? Sure, doesn't need to be on the bridge.

Mind-reading empath, though? Massive strategic advantage in any encounter, friend or foe! Put her on the bridge!

How long are we, as a society, going to allow shit like this in the name of free speech?

It feels that those nations that experienced the Nazi terror of the Third Reich have a much better idea of what constitutes dangerous speech.

Allowing this kind of stochastic terrorism out of some misguided notion of "free speech" is just not a good idea.

Strong "you can't let good food go to waste" in the post-war generation, including in my own family. It's so ingrained even in the next generations that many of us will just "finish their plate" even though there's no necessity there. Some of us are quite well off now, but attitudes around food haven't changed. You have to finish your plate. You can't let good food go to waste. People elsewhere are starving. People worked hard so you could have this food. You don't know when you'll be able to have a nice meal like this again.

Like you, I realized the difference when I met people from different, well off, culturally food-secure backgrounds. They'd just stop eating, and throw the uneaten leftovers in the trash. Doesn't matter how good the food was. Doesn't matter how expensive the food was. Doesn't matter that you could eat the leftovers later.

I had a really hard time landing on some reasonable middle ground (you can save leftovers, but you're allowed to stop eating when you're full, etc.). Made me realize that it's so much more cultural than personal. Also raises questions about what we're going to pass down to the next generations, intentionally or not.

Contemporary observers were talking about how much of a shithead he was. It's pretty safe to say he was a shithead.

The fact that people with an agenda managed to retroactively make him into a glorified hero centuries later says more about our current culture than it says about Columbus's contemporaries 500 years ago.

Well, let's see what Trump has said about that:

"We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we'll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years."

or how about

“I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”

or

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

or how about when he admired Xi Jinping:

"He's now president for life. President for life. And he's great. I think it's great. Maybe we'll give that a shot someday."

At this point, one of the things keeping Twitter alive is that 99 percent of journalists and media outlets have refused to leave, despite all the evidence that there's nothing to be gained for them on that platform.

It's just their own FOMO that keeps them there.

I'd wish they'd follow the lead of those organizations who simply left, or, better yet, started up their own Mastodon instances.

Are WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and such blocked in the US?

Of course they're not blocked.

People just default to the app that comes pre-installed with their phone and sits right there on the first screen, because it's marginally easier than picking a third party app in the App Store, installing it, and creating an account.

It's the exact same argument that Microsoft made when they bundled Internet Explorer with their OS.

I think his base has shifted, though. Used to be people who were interested in technology, in space exploration, in green and sustainable technology, etc.

Now a significant part of his fan base are people that decided he's their hero after he purchased Twitter and then unblocked white supremacists, Nazis, racists, white nationalists, fascists, conspiracy theorists, xenophobes, etc. and decided to harass, block, and mock middle-of-the-road journalists, national public media, and use all the far right dog whistles and megaphones.

So yeah, he still has a lot of support - but it's not the same support he had 10 years ago.

These are basically small concrete boxes sunk into the ground. They're only meant to stick out a bushfire for a few hours.

You could probably just keep a few bottles of oxygen or a carbon dioxide scrubber stashed in there, just in case. If you can spend $10,000 on one of these bunkers, spending a few hundred more isn't going to make a difference.

Anything longer than a few hours would get dicey anyway without room to move around, without room to stash water or food, without a toilet or beds.

And only 23 percent of Israelis voting in the last elections voted for Netanyahu.

That's only half as much as Trump got in the popular vote in 2016.