…ok…so…obviously there are better things to be thinking about than the man-who-should-be-in-sing-sing…but the news is chock-full of mr 34-counts-&-counting…so to get that part out of the way…the part I for one had been a tad more curious about than the individual charges…which mostly come in batches of three…one for the check & a pair of falsified records for each…for eleven payments…relating to two sets of hush money…& a bonus extra for a doorman who didn’t have the goods he claimed to…but I wasn’t clear about what jacked them up into felony territory…& it turns out that part is on account of the parts that are referenced in the “statement of facts“…because if business records are falsified in the furtherance of a different crime the felony bonus is like a door prize…& thanks to some lawyers who previously entered guilty pleas to this stuff…they get to stipulate that part…they even get to refer to it as a scheme
From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects. In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York. The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.
…that last part has to do with how, in order to wind up reimbursed in full…after tax…on money reported as income…part of the art of the deal was that on his part he paid out a multiple of the cash they gave stormy…which I don’t think I’d ever really appreciated
The TO CFO and Lawyer A agreed to a total repayment amount of $420,000. They reached that figure by adding the $130,000 payment to a $50,000 payment for another expense for which Lawyer A also claimed reimbursement, for a total of $180,000. The TO CFO then doubled that amount to $360,000 so that Lawyer A could characterize the payment as income on his tax returns, instead of a reimbursement, and Lawyer A would be left with $180,000 after paying approximately 50% in income taxes. Finally, the TO CFO added an additional $60,000 as a supplemental year-end bonus. Together, these amounts totaled $420,000. The TO CFO memorialized these calculations in handwritten notes on the copy of the bank statement that Lawyer A had provided.
…I also hadn’t appreciated that while the particular scheme being furthered (as the arrangement was referred to in the findings of a previous court) constitute campaign finance violations…& that aspect of the part that brings things up to felony-level is somewhat of a first…converting charges about falsifying business records to felonies on the basis of their relation to what would be federal charges is nothing of the sort…so…I don’t want to jinx anything…but…it doesn’t sound as novel a legal theory as I’ve seen it described in a lot of places…& a good deal of it would appear to be beyond what I’d think of as “reasonable doubt”
In a conversation captured in an audio recording in approximately September 2016 concerning Woman 1’s account, the Defendant and Lawyer A discussed how to obtain the rights to Woman 1’s account from AMI and how to reimburse AMI for its payment. Lawyer A told the Defendant he would open up a company for the transfer of Woman 1’s account and other information, and stated that he had spoken to the Chief Financial Officer for the Trump Organization (the “TO CFO”) about “how to set the whole thing up.” The Defendant asked, “So what do we got to pay for this? One fifty?” and suggested paying by cash. When Lawyer A disagreed, the Defendant then mentioned payment by check. After the conversation, Lawyer A created a shell company called Resolution Consultants, LLC on or about September 30, 2016.
[…]
The Defendant directed Lawyer A to delay making a payment to Woman 2 as long as possible. He instructed Lawyer A that if they could delay the payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public. As reflected in emails and text messages between and among Lawyer A, Lawyer B, and the AMI Editor-in-Chief, Lawyer A attempted to delay making payment as long as possible.Ultimately, with pressure mounting and the election approaching, the Defendant agreed to the payoff and directed Lawyer A to proceed. Lawyer A discussed the deal with the Defendant and the TO CFO. The Defendant did not want to make the $130,000 payment himself, and asked Lawyer A and the TO CFO to find a way to make the payment. After discussing various payment options with the TO CFO, Lawyer A agreed he would make the payment. Before making the payment, Lawyer A confirmed with the Defendant that Defendant would pay him back.
…personally…I’d be up for some superseding indictments somewhere along the no doubt long & winding road between here & a verdict…but…even in their absence it seems like some pretty deft lawyering to me
What may seem like a head-scratching move to keep the actual indictment silent about the hooks to “bump up” misdemeanors to felonies wasn’t surprising to some lawyers familiar with the DA’s office — perhaps it was even intentional, says Daniel Horwitz, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan.
“It was ingenious on their part,” Horwitz said, because this way prosecutors haven’t actually committed to a precise theory of liability, leaving their options open until the case reaches the jury.
…either way…there’s bound to be a lot of hurry-up-&-wait to sit through for the foreseeable
Duncan Levin, another former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, said that Trump’s attorneys will likely make a demand for what’s known as “a bill of particulars” — arguing that prosecutors haven’t spelled out the charges in sufficient detail for Trump to properly defend himself.(The defense team can ask for that anytime now that the indictment has been unsealed, and if prosecutors resist, Trump’s lawyers could take the issue up with the judge.)
Analysis: What could kill the ‘zombie’ case against Trump again? [NBC]
…& while the “c’mon, guys – this is me we’re talking about, here” defense might play with some judges…not least on appeal…if I were of the gambling persuasion…I know which verdict I’d have my money on in the first instance
The books and records counts laid out in the charging papers against Mr. Trump are the bread and butter of the D.A.’s office. Mr. Trump, who pleaded not guilty to all charges on Tuesday, is the 30th defendant to be indicted on false records charges by Mr. Bragg since he took office just over a year ago, with the D.A. bringing 151 counts under the statute so far. Indeed, the Trump Organization conviction and the Weisselberg plea included business falsification felonies.
[…]
While the particulars of Mr. Trump’s case are unique, his behavior is not. Candidates and others have often attempted to skirt the disclosure and dollar limit requirements of campaign finance regulations and falsified records to hide it. Contrary to the protestations of Mr. Trump and his allies, New York prosecutors regularly charge felony violations of the books and records statute — and win convictions — when the crimes covered up were campaign finance violations, resulting in false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity.
[…]
What these cases demonstrate is that Mr. Bragg is not navigating uncharted waters. They also support a corollary point in favor of this prosecution. Some legal analysts have pointed to an intent to defraud issue with the charges. The statute says that a person is guilty of falsifying business records when, “with intent to defraud,” the individual commits certain acts.These analysts say that requires proving that the scheme resulted in cheating or depriving another person of property or a thing of value or a right and that there is no such evidence here. That may be the case in other jurisdictions, but in New York, there is no such requirement.
New York appellate courts have held in a long series of cases that intent to defraud includes circumstances in which a defendant acts “for the purpose of frustrating the state’s power” to “faithfully carry out its own law.” To the extent Mr. Trump was covering up campaign contributions that violated New York law, that seems to be exactly what he did.
It’s also worth noting that Mr. Trump was a federal candidate, whereas the other New York cases involved state ones. But court after court across the country has recognized that state authorities can enforce state law in cases relating to federal candidates. Those courts have allowed state cases concerning federal campaign contributions under widely varied circumstances, including for fraudulently diverting funds from political action committees founded to support federal presidential campaigns, violating state law limits on corporate contributions to federal campaigns and transgressing state laws concerning donations to PACs that funded federal campaigns. Some of the examples involve criminal enforcement by state authorities, some civil, but the point is the same: They can act.
So Mr. Bragg’s bringing a state case concerning a federal campaign is hardly novel. In an abundance of caution, he not only alleges violations of state campaign finance law but also alleges federal violations. We believe that is permitted, given that the fraudulent books and records and other relevant statutes refer simply to covering up “another crime” or using “unlawful means” and do not specify whether they need be federal or state.
This approach is wise because to throw out the case, a judge would have to rule that Mr. Trump is covered by neither state nor federal campaign finance law. We think it is unlikely that the courts will embrace that Catch-22.
We Finally Know the Case Against Trump, and It Is Strong [NYT]
…so…that’s nice…but…this might be nicer?
…anyway…I don’t want to get carried away…but in terms of tempting speculation…smarter people than me seem to think there could be some there, there
But I can’t help but wonder whether, in his attempt to stave off a Trump indictment last month, Robert Costello provided new information to Bragg.
I say that because one of the only new details in the statement of facts is that, after writing Cohen on April 20, 2018 to reassure him that he had “friends in high places” (which made the Mueller Report and was also included in the SOF), Costello emailed Cohen again on June 14, 2018, urging him not to plead again. This email is not included in the Mueller Report.
On or about June 14, 2018, Lawyer C emailed Lawyer A a news clip discussing the possibility of Lawyer A cooperating, and continued to urge him not to cooperate with law enforcement, writing, “The whole objective of this exercise by the [federal prosecutors] is to drain you, emotionally and financially, until you reach a point that you see them as your only means to salvation.” In the same email , Lawyer C, wrote, “You are making a very big mistake if you believe the stories these ‘journalists’ are writing about you. They want you to cave. They want you to fail. They do not want you to persevere and succeed.”
In hubristic interviews after his testimony to the grand jury — which he claimed to be sure would stave off an indictment — Costello described that prosecutors were narrowly focused on six emails he provided them, rather than a whole binder of emails that, Costello claimed, would totally discredit Cohen as a witness (but not Kellyanne, Hope Hicks, or David Pecker, which is a testament to the limits of his understanding of the case).
[…]
If Costello’s attempt to stave off the indictment actually hastened it, it wouldn’t be the first time. Costello had two exchanges with federal prosecutors (and FBI agents) in a November 2021 attempt to stave off Steve Bannon’s indictment for contempt. Prosecutors treated him as a witness. Among the other damning things he told them is that he advised Bannon to BEWARE because he could be referred for prosecution if he totally blew off the subpoena from the January 6 Committee. He also made it clear that Bannon did not have an explicit executive privilege invocation.It would be especially remarkable if Costello provided Bragg with emails that he previously didn’t have, because that might mean that Cohen didn’t have everything accessible himself. It might mean DOJ didn’t consider all the evidence about Costello’s attempt to influence Cohen’s testimony.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/04/05/did-robert-costello-inadvertently-provide-new-evidence-against-defendant-1/
…meanwhile
Democracy isn’t working very well these days, and artificial intelligence is scaring the daylights out of people. Some creative people are looking at those two problems and envisioning a solution: Democracy fixes A.I., and A.I. fixes democracy.
…it’s an interesting idea…& not as laughable as it might be tempting to assume it to be…so various bits that piece links to are arguably worth a read
Siddarth, who worked for Microsoft’s chief technology officer until January, told me that while elites’ views on A.I. are highly polarized — from “let ’er rip” to “bomb rogue data centers” — the general public is still uncertain. Since most people aren’t dug in, there’s still an opportunity for consensus building, she said.
I told Siddarth that her project reminded me of the efforts of Daniel Yankelovich, a pollster who died in 2017. In 2010 he and his co-editor, Will Friedman, published “Toward Wiser Public Judgment,” which called for building consensus on key public issues, starting with focus groups at the grass roots.
[…]
Tang, a self-described hacker who addressed the summit by video (her remarks start at 3:56:00), is worth listening to on A.I. and democracy because Taiwan is a world leader in incorporating public opinion into decision making through a consultative process called vTaiwan. One of its signal successes was forming a consensus around how UberX, Uber’s standard private ride service, was allowed in. (UberX, recall, uses a form of artificial intelligence, albeit not a general purpose one.)
[…]
“I’m very interested in depolarization of these conversations” around A.I., Tang told me. She said that “it’s very difficult to hit the rewind button” on A.I., so the focus should be on mitigating the risks of A.I. systems that have already been released.Tang and the Collective Intelligence Project use software called Polis to solicit and digest public opinion. The widely used software, which is in the public domain, was built by the Computational Democracy Project, a nonprofit based in Seattle. “We are providing a map of the opinion space,” Megill told me. “You can comment, and you comment on other people’s comments. That’s the matrix.” He said it’s somewhere between Twitter, which is a completely unstructured way of gathering opinion, and a conventional survey. An early generation of artificial intelligence is used to digest inputs, including by discovering clusters of people who are more or less like-minded.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/05/opinion/artificial-intelligence-democracy-chatgpt.html
…but…something, something…run before you can walk…something
One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.
The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.
A regular commentator in the media, Turley had sometimes asked for corrections in news stories. But this time, there was no journalist or editor to call — and no way to correct the record.
“It was quite chilling,” he said in an interview with The Post. “An allegation of this kind is incredibly harmful.”
Turley’s experience is a case study in the pitfalls of the latest wave of language bots, which have captured mainstream attention with their ability to write computer code, craft poems and hold eerily humanlike conversations. But this creativity can also be an engine for erroneous claims; the models can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even fabricating primary sources to back up their claims.
As largely unregulated artificial intelligence software such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Bard begins to be incorporated across the web, its propensity to generate potentially damaging falsehoods raises concerns about the spread of misinformation — and novel questions about who’s responsible when chatbots mislead.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chatgpt-lies/
…but…much like the felonious dunk & everything else to do with the alleged administration…my fascination with the rise of the machines is very possibly well past the point where your eyes have glazed over…so I’ll give it a rest…after this bit, anyway
The urge to stand athwart AI, yelling “stop!”, might be understandable. AI applications that may have seemed implausible or even unfathomable a few years ago are rapidly infiltrating social media, schools, workplaces, and even politics. Some people look at the dizzying trajectory of change and see a line that leads to robot overlords and the downfall of humanity.
The good news is that both the hype and fears of all-powerful AI are likely overblown. Impressive as they may be, Google Bard and Microsoft Bing are a long way from Skynet.
[…]
For a road map to the impact of AI in the foreseeable future, put aside the prophecies of doom and look instead to a pair of reports issued last week — one by Goldman Sachs on the technology’s economic and labor effects and another by Europol on its potential for criminal misuse.
[…]
The research analysis by Goldman Sachs estimated that generative AI will alter some 300 million jobs worldwide and put tens of millions of people out of work — but also drive significant economic growth. Take the top-line figures with a shake of skepticism; Goldman Sachs predicted in 2016 that virtual reality headsets might become as ubiquitous as smartphones.But what’s interesting in Goldman’s current AI analysis is its sector-by-sector breakdown of which work might be augmented by language models, and which might be entirely replaced.
[…]
The report strikes an optimistic tone, calculating that this generation of AI could eventually boost global GDP by 7 percent as corporations get more out of workers who master it. But it also anticipates around 7 percent of Americans will find their careers obsolete in the process, and many more will have to adapt to the technology to remain employable. In other words, even if generative AI goes right rather than wrong, the outcomes could include the dispossession of swaths of workers and the gradual replacement of human faces in the office and daily life with bots.Meanwhile, we already have examples of companies so eager to cut corners that they’re automating tasks the AI can’t handle — like the tech site CNET autogenerating error-ridden financial articles. And when AI goes awry, the effects are likely to be felt disproportionately by the already marginalized. For all the excitement around ChatGPT and its ilk, the makers of today’s large language models haven’t solved the problem of biased data sets that have already embedded racist assumptions into AI applications such as face recognition and criminal risk-assessment algorithms. Last week brought another example of a Black man being wrongly jailed because of a faulty facial recognition match.
Then there are the cases in which generative AI will be harnessed for intentional harm. The Europol report details how generative AI could be used — and in some cases, is already being used — to help people commit crimes, from fraud and scams to hacks and cyberattacks.
[…]
Notably, what makes the language models vulnerable to these sorts of abuse is not just their wide-ranging smarts, but also their fundamental intellectual shortcomings. The leading chatbots are trained to clam up when they detect attempts to use them for nefarious purposes. But as Europol notes, “the safeguards preventing ChatGPT from providing potentially malicious code only work if the model understands what it is doing.” As numerous documented tricks and exploits demonstrate, self-awareness remains one of the technology’s weak points.
[…]
But OpenAI is now leading a headlong race, tech giants are axing their ethicists and, in any case, the horse may have already left the barn. As academic AI experts Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan point out in their newsletter, AI Snake Oil, the main driver of innovation in language models now is not the push toward ever-larger models, but the sprint to integrate the ones we have into all manner of apps and tools. Rather than try to contain AI, like nuclear weapons, they argue regulators should view AI tools through the lens of product safety and consumer protection.Maybe most important in the short term is for technologists, business leaders and regulators alike to move past the panic and hype, toward a more textured understanding of what generative AI is good and bad at — and thus more circumspection in adopting it. The effects of AI, if it continues to pan out, will be disruptive no matter what. But overestimating its capabilities will make it more harmful, not less.
The AI backlash is here. It’s focused on the wrong things. [WaPo]
…the inexorable march of progress, ladies & gents…ain’t it something?
At the end of the last ice age, parts of an enormous ice sheet covering Eurasia retreated up to a startling 2,000 feet per day — more than the length of the Empire State Building, according to a study released Wednesday. The rate is easilythe fastest measured to date, upending what scientists previously thought were the upper speed limits for ice sheet retreat — a finding that may shed light on how quickly ice in Greenland and Antarctica could melt and raise global sea levels in today’s warming world.
Scientists monitor ice sheet retreat rates to better estimate contributions to global sea level rise. Antarctica and Greenland have lost more than 6.4 trillion tons of ice since the 1990s, boosting global sea levels by at least 0.7 inches (17.8 millimeters). Together, the two ice sheets are responsible for more than one-third of total sea level rise.
The rapid retreat found on the Eurasian Ice Sheet far outpaces the fastest-moving glaciers studied in Antarctica, which have been measured to retreat as quickly as 160 feet per day. Once the ice retreats toward the land, it lifts from its grounding on the seafloor and begins to float, allowing it to flow faster and increase the contribution to sea level rise.
If air and ocean temperatures around Antarctica were to increase as projected and match those at the end of the last ice age, researchers say ice marching backward hundreds of feet in a day could trigger a collapse of modern-day glaciers sooner than previously thought. That could be devastating for global sea levels.
[…]
The team found the retreat rates ranged from 180 to 2,000 feet per day. The extreme rates only lasted on a scale of days to months and probably couldn’t be sustained for much longer. If an ice sheet retreated around 600 meters per day for a year, Batchelor said, you probably wouldn’t have any ice left.“This is not a model. This is real observation. And it is frankly scary. Even to me,” Eric Rignot, a glaciologist who was not involved in the study, said in an email.
In the past, one of the fastest retreat rates detected for a glacier was at Pope Glacier in West Antarctica, a smaller glacier that’s very close to the enormous Thwaites Glacier, nicknamed the “doomsday glacier” because of its relatively large melting contribution to sea level rise. During a period in 2017, based on satellite calculations, Pope Glacier retreated at a speed of about 105 feet (32 meters) per day. That’s quite fast — but still nothing like the rates of as much as 2,000 feet per day, the study found for the Eurasian ice sheet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/04/05/antarctica-ice-melt/
[…]
The rate of retreat at Pope has now slowed down, and similarly, for the Eurasian ice sheet, the pulse of extremely rapid retreat would have been temporary. Still, it’s worrying, said Rignot, one of the scientists who published a 2022 paper that documented Pope Glacier’s retreat.
…one way or another…there look to be more troubled waters in our future than I’m comfortable contemplating
The deep-water flows which drive ocean currents could decline by 40% by 2050, a team of Australian scientists says.
[…]
The study, published in the journal Nature, also warns the slowdown could reduce ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.The report outlines how the Earth’s network of ocean currents are part driven by the downwards movement of cold, dense saltwater towards the sea bed near Antarctica.
But as fresh water from the ice cap melts, sea water becomes less salty and dense, and the downwards movement slows.
These deep ocean currents, or “overturnings”, in the northern and southern hemispheres have been relatively stable for thousands of years, scientists say, but they are now being disrupted by the warming climate.
…the difference in scale makes it sound sort of ridiculous…but that shit is basically your planetary heat-pump kind of deal…& our shit is liable to go entirely haywire if we trip the off switch
“Our modelling shows that if global carbon emissions continue at the current rate, then the Antarctic overturning will slow by more than 40 per cent in the next 30 years – and on a trajectory that looks headed towards collapse,” study lead Professor Matthew England said.
The 2018 Atlas Study found the Atlantic Ocean circulation system was weaker than it had been for more than 1,000 years, and had changed significantly in the past 150.
…not to mention the part where mother nature could wind up with a collapsed lung
“If the oceans had lungs, this would be one of them,” Prof England, an oceanographer at Sydney’s University of New South Wales, told a news briefing.
…it’s certainly pretty breath-taking when you put it that way
Scientists spent 35 million computing hours over two years to produce their models, which assumed that emissions of greenhouse gases continue their current path. If they fall, this could lessen the amount of ice melting, and slow the decline in the ocean current.
However, results suggest deep water circulation in the Antarctic could slow at twice the rate of decline in the North Atlantic.
“[It’s] stunning to see that happen so quickly,” said climatologist Alan Mix from Oregon State University, a co-author of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment.
“It appears to be kicking into gear right now. That’s headline news,” he told Reuters.
The effect of Antarctic meltwater on ocean currents has not yet been factored in to IPCC models on climate change, but it is going to be “considerable”, Prof England said.
Antarctic ocean currents heading for collapse – report [BBC]
…if you feel up to it…I’m pretty sure this is the paper the BBC didn’t offer a link to
Abyssal ocean overturning slowdown and warming driven by Antarctic meltwater [Nature]
…though…well…I can see how you might not feel like heading in that direction…so maybe we’d all be better off considering whether a pirate’s life might be not such a bad thing?
…quite honestly…it doesn’t sound that bad…& although the quarters can be a tad cramped there’s something about the cunning design features that let you squirrel away an entirely implausible amount of stuff in a-place-for-everything-&-everything-in-its-place kinda style…I’ve always sort of thought I might not object to living on a boat…anyway…speaking of things that seem fitting
Democrats in Florida are attempting to use a state law that censors books in public schools against the governor who signed it, Ron DeSantis, by asking schools to review or ban the Republican governor’s own book, The Courage to Be Free.
“The very trap he set for others is the one that he set for himself,” Fentrice Driskell, the Democratic minority leader in the Florida statehouse, told the Daily Beast.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/05/democrats-ron-desantis-censorship-law-book-ban
…the humor is undeniably dark
Japan’s crackdown on errant diners in the wake of “sushi terrorism” has intensified after two men were arrested for using their chopsticks to remove a condiment from a communal container at a restaurant in Osaka.
[…]
The men, whose clip of the prank was widely shared on social media, are also accused of destroying property by contaminating the container and ginger with their utensils. Diners are supposed to use separate chopsticks to add toppings to their dish.
…but it’s a serious business
News that miscreant diners have targeted gyūdon will horrify many Japanese. The dish, comprising seasoned beef and onions on rice – often accompanied by bright red strips of pickled ginger – is an enduring comfort food whose price is an unofficial bellwether for the health of the world’s third-biggest economy.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/diners-in-japan-arrested-for-dipping-own-chopsticks-in-communal-bowl-of-ginger
[…]
The arrests come a week after a man was indicted for licking the top of a communal soy sauce bottle at a revolving sushi restaurant in February. Two other people have been arrested in connection with the incident.
[…]
The sushi chain described the pranks as a “public nuisance,” adding that it hoped the arrests would deter other would-be pranksters. It has since installed security cameras equipped with artificial intelligence to monitor customers, while other hi-tech kaitenzushi chains have halted their conveyor belts.
…caveat emptor is all well & good…but when you’re shopping for laughs…it’s worth noting that sometimes the punchline doesn’t just back fire…it could fire back
Tanner Cook – who regularly makes videos of himself pranking strangers for nearly 40,000 subscribers of the channel Classified Goons – was reportedly playing a practical joke on a man at a mall in the Washington suburb of Dulles, Virginia, at about midday on Sunday. A friend was recording him when things took an almost deadly turn, according to authorities as well as an interview Cook gave to the local TV station WUSA.
The man, identified as 31-year-old Alan Colie, pulled a gun out and shot Cook in the stomach, investigators allege. Cook, 21, survived the wound and had to undergo surgery after first responders brought him to a hospital in critical condition.
…still…we live & learn…or at least some people do
Tanner Cook told the station he is not angry at Colie. He also said that he does not intend to let the shooting deter him from making more videos, because that is his life’s passion.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/05/youtube-prankster-tanner-cook-classified-goons
…either way…it’s about time some jokers were brought up short
An international coalition of law enforcement agencies has taken down one of the most user-friendly digital marketplaces for hacked data — responsible for accessing some 80 million user credentials in the past five years — the Justice Department said this week.
On Tuesday, U.S. law enforcement, in collaboration with agencies from more than a dozen countries, seized 11 domain names belonging to the marketplace. Would-be users of at least one of the sites were greeted by a notice that said the seizure had been ordered by a federal court in the Eastern District of Wisconsin. It provided a link to a website that helps consumers determine whether their data had been trafficked on the site.
[…]
“Our seizure of Genesis Market should serve as a warning to cybercriminals who operate or use these criminal marketplaces: the Justice Department and our international partners will shut down your illegal activities, find you, and bring you to justice,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news release Wednesday.Officials suspect that Genesis operated out of Russia, the Treasury Department said in its own statement, noting that it had a presence on the dark web, a corner of the internet where users can operate anonymously. As of February, Genesis listed about 460,000 packages of stolen information, including passwords to email accounts, video streaming and social media accounts, according to the agency.
The marketplace offered programs that continued to update users’ personal information as it changed on their devices, amounting to a “de facto subscription to the victim’s information,” the cybersecurity firm Sophos wrote in an August analysis.
The Sophos report characterized Genesis’s interface as “slick” and its services as “polished,” with a platform that offered multilingual tech support, easily searchable data and a user dashboard that provided updates on which compromised systems had been changed since their last visit.
Since it launched in March 2018, Genesis Market has offered access to data stolen from more than 1.5 million computers worldwide and containing over 80 million account access credentials, according to the Justice Department.
During a news briefing Wednesday, senior FBI and Justice Department officials said there were 119 arrests around the world, following the investigation that drew in law enforcement agencies from at least 15 countries.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the agencies, said some arrests were made in the United States, but they declined to offer specific numbers. The officials said $8.7 million in cryptocurrency had been made from selling users’ online credentials, and they estimated tens of millions of dollars in overall financial losses.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/05/genesis-market-cybercrime-fbi/
…&…while scammers might be an obvious target for the follow-the-money maxim
[…that guy should probably count himself lucky he didn’t wind up under our blacksmith’s hammer]
…the guardian have a whole collection of bits & pieces that apply it to what some would style a most august institution
…so…I have questions that outnumber the answers I seem to be able to lay hands on…not least among which being…the joke’s on who?
…either way…I’m off to face the music…& see about bringing some back to go between here & the comments…so…best of luck to us all?
We can remember this moment as when the worm turns. Dr Salaam’s ad/tweet is quite telling where he is at this stage considering what people (in large part Donald Trump) did to him in the name of getting justice… uh, let’s call it what it really was, a media lynching.
“When They See Us Now” about the Central Park Five is one painful piece of drama (and one of Netflix better offerings). I remember discussing it here when it showed up.
I remember the case and being fed the NY Post narrative (and to a certain extent believing it at the time when it happened-I didn’t know any better…the shame is what made watching the TV series of the Central Park Five emotionally painful for me watching what they suffered) of alleged wilding raping “thugs” who were just kids close to my age at the time.
When I learned later the rage was fueled by Donald Trump who ironically was the reason I began to have doubts because if that motherfucker was going all out then maybe something was wrong (I thought back then he was what was wrong with society.)
…from your lips, as the saying goes…& as it goes…you look to be far from alone on that train of thought
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/05/trump-had-always-been-above-the-law-until-it-turned-on-him
…so…here’s hoping that for the doubly-impeached, serially-indicted & entirely un-presidented one…the light at the end of the tunnel is very much an oncoming train he’s tied himself to the tracks in front of…& not a fate he can squirm his way out from under?
I didn’t think I would be able to scramble out of the clutches of the Cokehead Narcissist mostly because she got into my head by gaslighting me, filling me with doubts about myself, what I could do and what options I had. In the end I escaped because I sacked up and challenged her, forcing her to reveal her hand (she was bluffing all the damn time.)
That is why I think the attorneys have been so reluctant to prosecute Trump. Why Merrick Garland seems to be so damned reluctant and/or so damned methodical.
Once you cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, it gets easier. The walls will start falling down.
…it’s entirely speculation on my part…but I’ve long thought that part of what his dad was much better at than him was finding a line to walk between being useful to the right people & not important enough to the ones wielding the law to be worth the time & trouble it would take to bring that hammer down on him
…when he was younger shut-up-donnie-you’re-out-of-your-element did a serviceable impression of toeing that same line…but over time…& absent consequences…he seemed to forget the part of his cover that relied on not being worth it…& from the first moment he embraced the idea that compared to his usual book-cooking ways campaign finance was a gold rush he couldn’t get enough of…his thorough lack of understanding of what he was getting into or how it changed that aspect of the game he fancies himself a master of…has always seemed like a glaring (& hopefully costly) miscalculation on his part…so…I could be wrong & he could be right…which would suck for more than just me…but if it turns out he was never too big of a deal to get into trouble…& actually always managed to skate on account of being small potatoes in the grand scheme of things…well…aside from the catharsis that bit of poetic justice might afford…I’d find the irony pretty much delicious?
There has always been shit in Trump.
Well, I composed an email and sent it to the first link in the chain about the credit stealing jagoff (that I mentioned last week.) I didn’t mention him by name, but I added my evidence including an email chain about the authorization of said project as well as the initial email that started off the project including my suggestion.
I made sure that I composed it while I wasn’t foaming at the mouth, didn’t call people credit stealing jagoffs or weak kneed chicken shit motherfuckers (a few years back I once bellowed that about a supervisor because of his poor decisions/favortism especially regarding who worked OT (and yes, some of his favorites got OT at my expense) and he heard it, glared at me and I glared back… all part of my… lack of charm, lower tolerance for shit leaders, my own emotional stupidity and bluntness. BTW he didn’t last long and also should not be a shock why I rarely got promoted.) This time I kept it professional.
I included all the people who actually worked on the project too not just myself.
If I don’t get a reaction then I am going higher up the chain.
…best of luck with that…may just desserts be the order of the day
When I was younger, my family went to a dive restaurant in Texas, and we saw a kid take the ketchup bottle and lick all the ketchup off the top. Needless to say, we did not use our ketchup.
Gross.
Also, what the fuck is wrong with people?
…I see we’re getting into the eternal questions early, today
It’s early in the morn for me, not enough sleep and I’m kinda grouchy right now.
When I am in that kind of state, I usually skip the frivolities and get to the heart of the matter.
…some days…there’s not enough coffee in the world…& most of us don’t have the patience of a saint…so…like the man said
How much time do you have?
Third base!
Didn’t Republicans lose their fucking minds when Pelosi went to Taiwan? I guess it’s different when Taiwan comes here?
…they do seem to get confused about things “foreign & domestic”…& generally be somewhat hard of thinking
…but that’s how I remember that, too…so it’d be up there with the questions I lack satisfying answers to
…along with protecting children from perverts by *checks notes* imposing genital inspections as a requirement for school sports
…or getting elected to a state legislature as a democrat before transferring your allegiances to team GOP thereby awarding them a supermajority
…or deeming interstate travel a criminal offense where it involves helping someone travel for the purposes of an abortion they’ve banned in their bailiwick
…or…hell…pretty much where the hell these people get off claiming they ought to be able to dictate any of their wildly hypocritical terms to just about anything or anyone?
Pelosi could go to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — white nationalist haven of America — and they’d scoff at her “going somewhere French.”
It’s different when Republicans do anything that Democrats have done/will do.
Now they want to do anything they can to piss of China so they can start a war and blame Biden. These assholes have only one goal.
The case against Trump is fascinating because I think all three of these things are varying degrees of true: he flouts the law and openly admits it; he’s a wildly famous celebrity and former president but also widely reviled; and this particular case against him is mediocre but also small potatoes compared with his other criminal acts as a campaigner and president.
I suspect as others have said, that the dam will break and this will merely be the first and he’ll drown under the weight of everything hitting him, but I do think it’s worth noting that none of this is really about the law itself. He has clearly broken it! Is that actually enough to see him punished? I’m less convinced that this is the one that’ll do it.
…I expect you’re right that this might be the first crack in the dam…but likely not the thing that put him underwater
…with all the legal gambits & appeals & everything some of what I’ve read suggests that it’s unlikely to be the first of his legal difficulties to reach a final verdict, though…whilst the higher stakes of some of the others headed his way seem to augur for potentially swifter resolutions?
I guess more broadly what I’m saying is that the law doesn’t usually apply to someone like him (rich, powerful, popular) but in this case might (serial criminal, broadly reviled, many powerful enemies). It’s rare that I’m not sure which side the coin will land on in cases like this, but this time, I legit have no clue how it’s going to play out. Makes it interesting!
It’s worth noting it’s not even the first case — his corporation was convicted in December.
In his case, the Trump corporation was a true case of the earliest legal meaning of corporate — body — that was separate from the person for legal purposes but not in reality.
A typical multishare corporation like IBM or GM ought to be thought of as a truly separate entity, and generally not fully affiliated with a single person. The sins of the corporation aren’t necessarily the sins of any one person. That is most definitely not the model with Trump.
In this case, the Trump Corporation and Trump the man are one and the same. His corporate crime and his personal crime should be treated as the same. Not out of some abstract principle, but due to the facts of how the Trump corporation operates.
Watch carefully for coverage which ignores or dismiss this, and attempts write off his civil suits too. It’s not that all of them are identical, any more than a state criminal case will ever be identical to a federal one. But good coverage will bring everything together, while bad coverage will try to reframe the Bragg case as an isolated instance lacking precedent.
…I don’t disagree…particularly with this part
…but that has a lot to do with me…& as you point out…when the eyes of the law are the determining beholder…that’s a distinction with a difference…so the felony-falsification number does still retain the distinction of being the first charges levelled against him personally to have reached indictment status
…would love to see the DoJ (& indeed the IRS, FEC, SEC & the entire alphabet soup of agencies & institutions) get all up in his business(es), though
Like I said, there is a difference, but the question then hinges on whether and how the differences are treated.
If the story is a narrow one, focused only on the particulars of the Bragg charges in a context that makes it clear that’s all the story is doing, it’s potentially reasonable to treat things that way.
This is the kind of coverage that would make sense in a publication aimed at attorneys.
If, on the other hand, it’s some vibe-based “analysis” by a news-side reporter that tries to make sweeping claims about precedent, it’s completely bad practice.
It leans much harder in the direction of substituting wildly subjective opinions about what counts as context for reasonably objective coverage of an issue.
It would be akin to looking at a new massive oil spill from a BP oil platform which was charged under civil liability and deciding not to even mention the Deepwater Horizon disaster because technically Deepwater was operated under a Marshallese flag of convenience by a BP contractor and the Deepwater case involved criminal liability.
Technically it would be true that there were distinctions involved between a corporation and contractor and civil and criminal liability, and these things could be viable issues for discussion.
But any kind of overall coverage which relies on these distinctions and then refuses to look at the previous disaster at all isn’t good coverage.
…fair enough…though I guess for my part I’d see there being a wider audience for the legal niceties type of coverage than just the lawyers
…he of the flimsiest of flim-flam routines may be as morally bankrupt as many of his business enterprises wind up being financially…& from that angle BP or a.n. other fossil fuel goliath is guilty as sin, too
…but there are expectations to be managed and a need to pace ourselves for the long haul, too…so being clear that doesn’t map directly onto provably guilty legal determinations that can survive an appeal is similarly important to my mind
…it’s too easy to get discouraged when the giant beanstalk it’s easy to imagine turns out not to amount to so much as a hill of beans when the courts get through with it otherwise
…I don’t mean the sort of apologia being hawked by all manner of knowingly duplicitous assholes…but one of the unpleasant realities we need to acknowledge even if we probably ought not to make our peace with it anytime soon is that when it comes to throwing the book at him & his ilk…until & unless we can provide an updated edition we’re stuck with the stuff that’s currently on the books?
But that’s literally why corporations exist, to separate the personal from the business. That he doesn’t is never going to be considered a crime because there’s way too many other people guilty of it. (And I’m aware that’s against the law, but to paraphrase the greatest TV attorney of all time, Lionel Hutz, there’s the law and then there’s THE LAW.)
…it just sucks that they get to be all about limiting their liability while the rest of us are stuck being liable to have to stomach the consequences of their actions
I think the larger point is that Donald Trump is not going to give anyone but Donald Trump any input into decisions that get made for Trump Corp., and therefore he is the corporation.
…even when it was supposedly at arm’s length from the man behind the desk in the oval office & he was furiously flouting the emoluments clause to drive as many bucks that way as he could wrangle
…which feels very much like something he ought to be held personally liable for…to me at least?
As always, it’s the “proving it” part. Of course he is the Trump Org. Nobody would dispute that (not even him, provided he wasn’t under oath). But the legal definition of self-dealing and fraud and so on vs. what is provable in a court of law has always had a gap big enough to drive a beer truck through. That his org is even less of a thin veil than those usual corporate standards is readily apparent … but so was the flouting of all the other stuff he did while president and to date nobody’s done anything about that either so…
Adding a big pile of info to the record that Clarence Thomas is totally corrupt:
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow
He’s taken free vacations each worth six figures from right wing billionaire Harlan Crow most years for the past two decades. In violation of rules for judges. Which John Roberts has openly refused to consider applying to the Supreme Court.
Earlier reporting going back to 2011 has picked up on other entanglements, such as Crow giving $500,000 to Ginni Thomas’s Tea Party group that also paid her $120,000 in salary.
Great quote from the liar:
STFU!!!
https://deanobeidallah.substack.com/p/ny-judge-should-impose-a-gag-order
The undisputed champion of shitholes!
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/5/2162217/-Mississippi-s-GOP-governor-signs-Confederate-Heritage-Month-proclamation-and-dates-it-April-31
This is going to be the new normal. They cannot win on policy so just lie, get elected, then switch party.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tricia-cotham-nc-switches-party_n_642d8eabe4b02a8d51921afc
The judge already has warned Trump, which is the first step toward a gag order if warranted.
And while I’ve complained about the misuse of precedent in broader terms for this case, in this particular instance I would say that it would be following bad precedent to issue a gag order at this stage.
He really should be given the opportunity to follow the judge’s warning and given a gag order if prosecutors can make the case that it’s needed. That may come up based on his kookiness, but it’s still early.
In the case of the Project Veritas defamation suit against the NY Times, the judge issued a ridiculous gag order on the Times which later ended when an appeals court threw out the gag order last year. The bar really needs to be clear and based on the case at hand, even when Trump has a bad history in the past. He’ll have plenty of chances to cross the line, at which point he should be dealt with seriously.
…I’m on the fence about the gag order thing in the bragg case…I think part of treating him like he isn’t special does have to include giving him the benefit of the same rights & privileges anyone else ought to be able to avail themselves of…up to & including mounting the most vigorous possible defense & being considered innocent until proven guilty
…but…not unlike roger stone posting pictures of judges with superimposed crosshairs…that side-by-side of bragg with an image of trump holding a baseball bat like some tinpot dimestore capone wannabe…that’s some bearding the lion in his den shit…so I’m not so sure a gag order would be an over-reach?
…plus he’d almost certainly breach it…& I’m absolutely cool with him racking up more charges in a way I’m entirely not with the potentially stochastic collateral of his shit-talking
I think the problem in a lot of these cases is judges just stick to warning after warning and then never enforce anything.
He should get a chance to follow what the judge said, but the leash needs to be short and the dog crate should be waiting.
…she was the turncoat I had in mind in another comment…but much like the fucked up anti-trans thing or the what-can-we-get-away-with-criminalising approach to all things post-roe…I have a nagging feeling that she’s not the only one trying to make that play stick?
I’m curious about what her price was. We’ll find out eventually!
Does Trump wind up in as much trouble if he just pays the hush money out of his own pocket? Does that fact that he didn’t demonstrate that he either doesn’t have any of his own money, or that he is cheap and not very bright?
…I’m about as far from being a lawyer as we feel like being from the part where the consequences of his actions get brought to bear…but I believe the majority of the checks that match up with falsified invoices/ledger entries are in fact payments that came out of his personal account
…which (I think) makes it true he gets in as much trouble that way as when he throws other people’s money at his problems in ways that aren’t strictly legal
…but then I tend to hew to the theory that just because it came out of his personal account doesn’t actually mean it was his money in the sense of being something he’s genuinely entitled to lay claim to…& between all the bills he hasn’t paid…the extensive family history of defrauding both individuals & the state to provide the basis of “his wealth”…& the vast debts he needs PAC money to stanch lest even that his-on-paper wealth hemorrhage itself away…I don’t see that as an obstacle to also agreeing that it demonstrates he’s both cheap & not bright?
A lot of it is that he’s never been good about “his” money vs. “not his” money. But also that he’s about as cash-poor a billionaire as has ever existed.