Hope everyone is having an awesome week.
Honestly, you’re probably still sifting through yesterday’s DOT, so that means I can keep this one short and sweet.
Wouldn’t most people with a private plane be considered a flight risk?
Trump arraigned, pleads not guilty to 37 classified documents charges
https://wapo.st/46050Li [Gift]
Sprots
NBA Finals: A title run for the ages vindicates so much for these Nuggets … finally
https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-finals-a-title-run-for-the-ages-vindicates-so-much-for-these-nuggets–finally-090845390.html
Stonks!
Stocks rise after inflation report, S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit fresh 13-month highs: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/12/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
#RIP
Today in cuteness:
Have a good one!
When I see animals acting like that, or even cats or snakes or anything really, any animal chilling in nature, the fact we humans are extremely wrong as to what our goals are on this paradise is really obvious. People existence could be so much better than what it is, I just don’t get it. (I don’t have a way with words like many on here, hopefully the point makes it out some how.)
You’re exactly right. Some people, the dreariest among us, live to work; the rest of us work to live. When I had my corporate job we were granted a generous amount of vacation time and we were encouraged to take all of it. I used it to travel solo and à deux. And I’m so glad I did because I’m not going to be traveling much anymore.
When the pandemic struck we had plans to finally go to Greece, for like a month, it was going to be amazing, But now, more than three years later, I don’t think I’d survive the flight, not to mention the fact that Greece is not particularly friendly to people with mobility issues.
You know what one of the most accessible cities in the world is? I was just reading this. Dublin (Ireland; not one of the American ones.) I’ve never been to Ireland, either, and I picture Dublin being very Georgian or Victorian with no elevators and cobblestone streets and lots of slippery rain, but no, it’s like number one or two among cities worldwide. I wonder if it’s very good for the blind, maybe. Like you get to an intersection and a loudspeaker will go off saying, “Stand where you are. OK, the light has just changed. Cross now.”
Wait so the prosecutor said he wasn’t a flight risk?! WTF.
Nauta will go down for his boss and Trump will skate. Again.
Nauta very well may stay loyal, but they don’t need Nauta for this set of charges, which is why they charged them together. Nauta could be useful for expanding the documents case even further, but I think they feel they have Trump on enough at this point to get something through.
And I also think they feel confident about everything else he’s facing. I think this is a different situation from 2016, where the legal threat was vague and nobody knew if there were any witnesses who would talk or what documentation there was. There are a lot of twists and turns in terms of judges and appeals, and potentially even pardons, but I think he’s at the point where a bunch of people he needs to be on his sides from a legal perspective are nailed down by grand jury testimony and statements to prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions.
He could still skate, but his path is very narrow. I think his most likely escape route at this point is infirmity and some kind of home release.
…could be off base but I kinda feel like one of the things the current indictment was supposed to do was impress upon walt quite how deep in the shit his boss had dumped him & to make it clear to him that the defense that boss was bankrolling & directing was not in his interests & that he’d be wise to seek independent counsel & a deal
…a lot of mileage got made out of them not granting him immunity but that’s not a great deal for DoJ/jack smith whereas a bit of stick rather than carrot could make a difference
…if you fold in that it was clearly stipulated they should be no-contact at this point
…& that the first thing he did on leaving was to publicly flout that edict
…I don’t see this as being any kind of death knell…but he sure does keep digging & I don’t share butcher’s belief he gets out of the hole when its dimensions become clear?
Oh my God! The Versailles restaurant! It’s fabulous! Have you ever been? It’s in Little Havana and it’s like this huge Cuban catering hall.
I wonder what xenophobic Trump was doing there? Probably for maximum exposure, and the Miami Cubans are a strange lot, so I bet a lot of them are rooting for the Donald. They’re very funny. When we had our place down there half the building was gay, no one seemed to care, and we are a biracial couple, which again, so what, the Miami Cubans are many varieties of light and dark (although I’m sure they all self-identify as “white” on the census forms.) But you mention most Democrats and it’s like a switch is flipped and people start cursing and spitting on the ground.
The Miami Jews are the same way. If you were in New York and got talking to a Jewish local or someone born to a Spanish-speaking family, the chances that they would ever vote Republican would be, maybe, 1 in a 1,000? In Miami, the odds seem to be switched.
Well, that’s really the thing isn’t it? He will never see the inside of a cell, even if he does get convicted. Everyone will do WAY too much handwringing about the “precedent” it will set. Hey, assholes, you know what precedent will be set? The one that should have been set 50 years ago when Nixon got pardoned instead of facing the consequences of his actions. Nope, he’ll get home confinement, which he will promptly ignore. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he were able to make the case, post-conviction–that he needs to travel for “work”, and he’ll go to a bunch of rallies and pull his pant leg up and tell his sycophants “they’re coming for you next!”
Literally nothing will be different.
Even though I have endless belief in the system’s ability to let the powerful skate: I think legal limbo is bad for him both personally and politically. On the personal side, he has no self-awareness, which serves him well (and shamelessness is his superpower) but I do wonder if he’s feeling this at all today. I think it’s harder to ignore being arrested every few months than having your lawyers drone on about settlements in civil cases that he can throw campaign money at. It wouldn’t take a ton of stress to finish the job he’s started with his Filet-O-Fish/sudafed diet.
And politically, sure, the maga-chuds ain’t going anywhere, but the guy has already lost the popular vote twice and suffered several bad election cycles for his party. Even for Republicans (of whom I have a pretty low opinion, obviously) that’s not like, the best sell, and it’s not a big route to gaining a ton of new voters to come out and vote for the Big Crime Guy.
…yeah…I don’t much like the part where he most likely doesn’t wind up in pokey…but there are other consequences he’s used to being able to swerve & I think those are dogging him now & hopefully will to the bitter end
…I’d prefer for him to be just another incarcerated pensioner…but I think I’d settle for legally & financially flaying him alive as an example to others?
…in many ways I think he’d feel that stuff more keenly than most plausible forms of “jail time” I’ve seen theories about
…when I get carried away I imagine rolling on up the line until the GOP is eviscerated & there’s a come to Jesus moment on campaign finance reform & an un-fucking of the voting rights stuff off the back of a “this can never be allowed to happen again”…but…mostly I do better than that about managing my expectations?
I think the main thing that would keep him from prison will be health after all of the appeals are exhausted, assuming he doesn’t win in ’24, which is always possible. But as far as handwringing, if he loses I think the GOP will be begging to have him silenced in the end, not letting him go. And the pundit class will follow their lead.
…I’m not sure anyone really knows how it would wind up working in practice but the secret service angle comes up a lot when writing off the possibility of regular incarceration
…&…that might be the reality…although after the way he janked the about & charged them for the privilege of fulfilling that obligation…I don’t know that he has as many friends in that service as some people have suggested from time to time
…but if he does end up being the first ex-president to get convicted of stuff that usually runs to custodial sentences…you’d think a first time requiring setting a precedent or two wouldn’t be that surprising…so…does it have to boil down to less-meaningfully-incarcerated-than-manafort-was?
Regular incarceration would be an issue, but it would be absolutely trivial to find a place to put him and a security detail somewhere on federal property. The military has huge prison capacity designed for times of massive mobilization. The National Park Service, for that matter, has lockups for rowdy tourists.
They’ll have plenty of time to get ready, though, if it comes to that. He’ll get a lot of appeals.
I hate that he isn’t subject to the same rules as everyone else but I can kind of see it. Where’s he gonna go? He doesn’t want to live in the places that don’t have extradition treaties with the US. There’s no way he’s going to move to Russia or Saudi Arabia. He doesn’t want to be where he isn’t top dog and his value to them would be diminished without the possibility of political power here. He’d lose his fundraising grift and his precious secret service.
Still, I kinda want him to panic and attempt to flee to Russia or Saudi Arabia. Just to see what his GOPer enablers and moron MAGAs have to say or have a massive meltdown seeing the so called uber patriot flee.
He won’t make it very far.
They’d blame Biden, all Dems, and thug Jack Smith. The truest thing trump ever said was that he could shoot someone on 5th Ave and they’d still vote for him.
…arguably he’d be in less legal jeopardy for a singular homicide…but…yeah…that’s another of the facets of this stuff that bites the big one
LOL
That’s my thought. He simply can’t disappear. And there’s no way he’d flee to a country without his tacky trappings of “wealth” and all that crap. No, he’s gotta stick it out.
And honestly, he will never go to jail. Never. He’s legally entitled to Secret Service protection and they won’t allow him to be in any sort of prison. Barring constructing an entire prison solely for Trump, he’d be looking at some form of house arrest. Honestly, if they could get his stubby little baby fingers off of a phone, that would satisfy me. I don’t care where they keep him.
…saw someone somewhere say they could just kill two birds with one stone & have the trump presidential library & correctional facility…you could have a whole wing of evidentiary exhibits, even?
There are plenty of federal buildings where they could put some beds. There are bases all over, hospitals too. Logistics really aren’t an issue for a nonprison solution, and he’d probably wish for a minimum security prison to be honest for the social contact.
I read the rest of the unusual whales feed.
Wow. Quite a lot of garbage and that’s just Emol’s bullshit.
I’m telling you, the bears are up to something.
Another one: Bear spotted along John Young Parkway in Orlando
Tens of people showed up to protest in Miami. And most of those seemed to be mentally ill.
The pro-Trump protests at Trump’s Miami arraignment were minuscule
That’s a huge deal. His support is hollowing out, even in Florida. They’re more interested in sandwiches.
A lot of those tens who showed up were followers of the odd group spun off of Yahweh ben Yahweh’s sect and The Nation of Black Israelites.
It’s like the later run of The Apprentice franchise. A few hardcore fans, a somewhat bigger group tuning in from habit or because nothing else is on, and a network struggling to find a replacement but afraid to say anything about the awful ratings until they have a new show ready.
And a few hate watchers who tune in for kitsch value or because they need to reaffirm their sense of superiority over the nonironic viewers.
It really is. There’s this terror associated with upsetting Trump that’s a carryover from Jan. 6. I think the Georgia prosecutor was going to clear all the government buildings and only have armed investigators on site when Trump’s next indictment is announced.
But none of his “events” have actually materialized. For a variety of reasons, people just aren’t bothering to show up. And no matter how much the MAGAs, GQP politicians, and the media attempt to hype these things, nobody is coming.
Why do these asshats have press credentials?
…maybe they misunderstood double jeopardy & think they can’t get sued again?
…I know it’s the other thing…but they’ve done dumber shit
Very preliminary data suggests Tesla’s autopilot is worse than regular drivers, which is scary when you think about it.
https://prospect.org/justice/06-13-2023-elon-musk-tesla-self-driving-bloodbath/
I have a suspicion the data sets aren’t really comparable, but the underlying issue is that on its own, the Tesla autopilot numbers aren’t good.
And I think the number of miles driven by autopilot are high enough by now to establish that this isn’t due to a few simple factors which just need to be ironed out.
I suspect one of the issues is that the handoff from autopilot to human control is unsolvable — you just can’t get a tuned out driver back in control fast enough.
And I’m guessing on the autopilot side there is something going on with the level of complexity that isn’t solvable with regular programming approaches or increases in processing power.
It may be the case that there would be an out of the box solution such as every moving thing being wired into a vast network. But good luck getting to that point.
…I’ve heard people suggest that the solve probably requires infrastructure rather than onboard measures…so more like things that make lights/lanes/crossings announce themselves to the vehicle rather than it needing to identify them
…which potentially could be retro-engineered rather than needing to dig up every road & run cables everywhere
…either way, if you could crack it with just onboard measures it seems like someone would have figured it out by now…which mercedes maybe have…sort of…in that they got theirs certified as self-driving & road legal under some circumstances…which is several rungs up the ladder from anything they’ve signed off on for tesla?
Honestly? They’re going to need to run on tracks. Which makes them … trains?
More seriously, there’s going to need to be some sort of wireless network embedded in the road surfaces or nearby emplacements that interacts with an onboard computer. So the computer’s autonomy would be limited — it would do what the road network says it can do at this location, whether that’s stop, go, accelerate to 65 mph, whatever. The cars need to communicate with each other, so that one tells another, hey, I’m stopping, you stop too. The computer’s then free to scan with radar and react to say, bicycles or pedestrians.
Despite Elmo’s efforts, there are too many variables for the car to handle it all.
I can think of no faster way to kill autopilot than a simple requirement that it follows the speed limit. People would go like Dave to HAL in a second rather than go 55 while traffic around them is going 70.
Woops…
To be fair to Melania, none of Trump’s actual family showed up. Melania’s just a contractor, so why would she bother? The only other employees present were attorneys and Walt the Fall Guy. Ivanka lives there and didn’t bother to drive across town.
Apparently Ivanka is trying to rebuild her destroyed social standing, so she won’t come within miles of Daddy. At least that’s what’s getting reported.
we knownt it all along…
https://nltimes.nl/2023/06/13/dutch-intelligence-service-warned-cia-ukraine-plan-attack-nord-stream-pipelines-report
we also told the rest of europe it was probably the russians…or that it was anyones guess
presumably to stop ze germans from dropping ukraine like a hot potato at the time….
(told our own populace much the same….but no one believes anything the gubment says anyways….we’re more surprised they actually knew something than that they lied…..seems they might be somewhat more competent in some ways than we expected)
anyways…cant help but feel that ones gonna bite us in the ass eventually
ze germans hold grudges (not that i dont think they arent up to the same shit fuckery)