Like that time Enterprise-D had to stop in for a “baryon sweep.”

I’d like to conclude with a quote from Woody Guthrie:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. Sign was painted, said, “Private Property” But on the back side, it didn’t say nothing. This land was made for you and me.

And just to be clear, Polaris is not actually the “North Star” all the time. North Stardom rotates around on a 26,000 year period, as the earth precesses. That’s crazy lightning fast spinning on the time scales we’re taking about.

One of the last people born into (legal) Slavery in the USA died after being hit by a car in the 1970s.

The last ship to (illegally) bring Africans as slaves to the United States landed in Mobile Bay in 1860. There are photographs of it.

110 human cargo on an 86 foot boat.

The last known survivor from that trip died in 1940.

Earlier in his Army career, Custer attended the Confederate surrender at Appomattox (as a Union officer). He decided to keep the white dish towel that Lee used as a flag of truce (aka the true last and final Confederate flag), as a souvenir. Custer’s wife bequeathed that dish towel to the Smithsonian quite a bit later.

Back then, the point of the coins was to represent that they contained a certain weight of metal, without forcing people to weigh them out all the time.

In this vein,

In July 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech at Gettysburg to mark the 75th anniversary of the battle. 25 veterans from the original battle attended. They were filmed, on movie film, walking in the parade.

(This vignette opens the Ken Burns documentary)

The gov is doing this thing with the signs because “trespassing” into the 100 ft.-wide “military base” is a much more serious crime than just crossing the border not at a port of entry.

The civilian chucklefucks they hired to put the signs up apparently failed to notice where they crossed the mouth of the river.

Finally, these two letters, thorn and eth, dropped out of English a long time ago, but they’re still in Modern Icelandic today.

The law is this: Border patrol is allowed to operate anywhere in the United States. They have elevated powers to pull over automobiles in the 100-mile border zone. Where “international waters” counts as a border.

I don’t know what the distance is from Charlotte to the Atlantic Ocean is.

More than 1/3 of the US population lives in that damn border zone.

Each one of those bullet points is potentially a way for Comey to get his whole case thrown out. In addition to that, Comey has 4 other motions to dismiss pending right now, and they’re pretty good arguments. At this point, Comey has so many different ways to win, that it is really hard to imagine that he won’t win on one of them. (In which case he still has an entire trial to defend himself on).

The issue where there’s no case law is a pretty narrow one, I think: The grand jury voted to approve the words of the charges (except that the charge numbers were different), but not the specific piece of paper that the words ended up typed out on. Is that important for the formal charging process or not? Either way this gets decided, it won’t effect very many people, because any competent prosecutor will just re-run the new piece of paper past the jury to make sure. And it may not get decided at all if Comey’s case is dismissed on any of the other reasons.

EDIT: If it’s not true. If it turns out that the grand jury no-billed all three counts, then we’d be looking at a forged indictment. And that would be a serious crime.

I encourage everyone to read the opinion, at least the fact findings. Because it is absolutely unhinged and insane. There are 11 separate findings of fact as to why Comey needs to see the grand jury materials. Here are some summaries:

• Nearly all of the presented evidence relies on search warrants from the Arctic Haze investigation (2019-2020). In the USA, search warrants specify the specific types of evidence to be seized, and the crimes they are searching for. These warrants were for some personal hard drives and email accounts of James Comey’s personal friend and attorney, Dan Richman.
• The warrants themselves said that the government was to go through the full forensic extractions and pick out data that was relevant to the investigation into classified data mishandling. The rest of the search data was to be thrown out. This was not done.
• The warrants said that attorney-client privilege data was to be separated out and thrown out. The first part was done, but not for the Comey-Richman privileged material, and in any case, the full extractions were retained, illegally.
• The warrants were to look for evidence of classified data mishandling, not evidence of lying to Congress. You can’t just take the data from one warrant and use it on another case. You need to get a new warrant for the new case, which wasn’t done. What happened here turns the warrants into “general warrants,” which King George III was infamous for using.
• The FBI agent (Agent 2) for this case was directed to review raw Cellebrite cell phone extractions, which were not supposed to be retained. While reading this stuff, he noticed that some emails between Comey and Richman appeared to be attorney client privilege material.
• Agent 2 passed some information from the Cellebrite to Agent 3 in a memo. Despite being tainted, Agent 3 went ahead and testified to the grand jury anyway.
• Halligan told the grand jury that Comey would be required to testify at trial to clarify things. This is absolutely wrong. Comey has the right to “take the fifth” and not testify at trial, and no adverse inference can be drawn if he chooses not to testify.
• Halligan suggested to the jury that her burden of proof at trial would something less than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This is also a wrong instruction on the law.
• Halligan told the jury that she would have better evidence to present by trial time, and they could consider that promise when deciding whether to indict. This is wrong. The grand jury must make its decision based only on the evidence presented to it.
• And finally, the big kicker. There is a reasonable basis to think that the 2-count indictment that this prosecution is based on…the actual charging document…was never actually presented to the grand jury for an up-or-down vote. Instead, we think that the grand jury voted on the 3-count bill, rejecting count 1, and finding probable cause on counts 2 and 3. Then Halligan wrote a new indictment, renumbering 2 and 3 as counts 1 and 2, and got the foreperson to sign that, without holding another vote. This is, in the words of Judge Fitzpatrick, “unknown legal territory.” There’s no case law on this exact kind of screw-up.

The auto pen stuff too.

I remember I went to a Mardi Gras parade that year, and every single float was a joke about Bill Clinton’s penis. Very family friendly that was.

The feds have some facilities that are oriented around pretrial detention. MDC in Manhattan is one of them.

The discharge petition is just discharging a resolution that amends the Epstein stuff as a rider onto a regular bill.

So even if everything passes the House, the Epstein provision still has to complete the rest of the Schoolhouse Rock process:

• Pass in the Senate
• Survive conference committee
• Re-pass both chambers
• Trump veto
• Veto override on 2/3 votes in both chambers

They pick out the small chickens to go to the rotisserie. The chickens for sale raw are substantially heavier on average.

This is a federal lawsuit because the poultry farms are all over the border in Arkansas, but the poultry waste drains into the Illinois river into Oklahoma.

Stitt’s position is stupid. He doesn’t even get the “economic benefit” of the poultry industry in his state.

This form of exercise is called aerobics. It is not yoga.

Recently, there was a guy in DC who decided to follow a couple of national guard around on the streets. Following about twenty feet behind them on the sidewalk. Playing “Imperial March” by John Williams out of a small boom box. On loop.

He got arrested, but he’s an inspiration to me.