CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS on Trump world's calls to impeach James Boasberg, who ruled against the president on the Alien Enemy Act:

"For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.

"The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.". //

Musicman
2 hours ago
Roberts is the reason we are having this controversy. For years now, under Trump's first and now second term, District judges have been issuing orders that extend beyond their districts. Roberts has had numerous opportunities to reign in those judges and has failed to do so. Yes, there is an appellate process, but SCOTUS should make it clear that only the SUPREME COURT is a co-equal branch of government. Congress is a co-equal branch, but Congressmen are not. If a district court judge rules against a Presidential action, it should be stopped from enforcing that ruling until SCOTUS confirms that ruling (which it can do by refusing to hear the case) or overturns it. But Roberts cannot simply stand by and allow District Court after District Court to run the Executive Branch.

laker 7w7o7r7d7s
2 hours ago
Article 3 created ONLY the supreme court. everything else was put into place by Congress & the President.

A hydroelectric generating station is a plant that produces electric power by using water to propel the turbines, which, in turn, drive the alternators.

These power stations generate about a quarter of all the electricity used in the world. With access to vast water reserves, Hydro-Québec uses water to generate almost all of its energy output. In this way, the company helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For those on the right who think this will invalidate much of the prior administration, this is magical thinking along the lines of a silver bullet designed to stop everything.

I actually do know the law here fairly well.

The basic rule of thumb is that signing a document is a ministerial act. The intention matters. If Joe Biden intended for someone to sign his name on a document, that is what matters. This is a rule in common law going back to the English Kings in the 1600’s who often had others affix the King’s seal to matters. Those matters were binding because the King’s intended his seal to be affixed even if he did not pour the wax and set down his seal.

I’ve had people throw wild hypotheticals at me since I brought this up yesterday. “What if they summoned Joe Biden’s doctor to court and he testified Joe Biden was out of his mind and incapable of doing so?” Sure. Good luck with that.

What is more likely is that Joe Biden’s wife and Chief of Staff would testify that Joe Biden was in sound mind at the time, lucid, etc. etc. etc. and that he did intend for his signature to be affixed by an auto pen.

All day yesterday, people who do not know the law in this area kept spinning wilder and wilder and more argumentative hypotheticals. I get the desire for a silver bullet, but it is a fairy tale.

What is real is this.

The Supreme Court has never heard the matter of pardons before. But the White House Office of Legal Counsel, during the Bush years, affirmed the long held view that signing a document is ministerial. What matters is the intention of the President — if the President tells you to sign his name, that is as good as the President signing it. The Office of Legal Counsel matter was legislation, not a pardon, but the same basic principle applies. There are numerous court cases of executives authorizing others to sign legally binding documents on their behalf and all those cases conclude the signing is just a ministerial act so long as the executive had not surrendered his power to make the decision.

Only the President can sign a bill into law. Only the President can make certain appointments, promotions, and commissions. Only the President can grant pardons. To argue he can use an auto pen on the first three and not the last is a weak argument. Even more so, a clear reading of the Constitution affirmatively requires the President to “sign” legislation, which can be done by directing another to sign his signature. The Constitution does not actually require the President “sign” a pardon to be effective.

You may not like this, but good luck challenging it in court. Likewise, a few weeks before the pardons, Biden expressed that he was leaning towards granting those pardons.

Thu 14 Jan 2016 // 07:02 UTC
The Register has learned, thanks to a post to a semi-private mailing list, of a server that has just been decommissioned after running without replacement parts since 1997.

The post, made by a chap named Ross, says he “Just switched off our longest running server.”

Ross says the box was “Built and brought into service in early 1997” and has “been running 24/7 for 18 years and 10 months.”

“In its day, it was a reasonable machine - 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive,” Ross writes. “And up until recently, it was doing its job fine.” Of late, however the “hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!” The drive's a Seagate, for those of you looking to avoid drives that can't deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations.

The FreeBSD 2.2.1 box “collected user session (connection) data summaries, held copies of invoices, generated warning messages about data and call usage (rates and actual data against limits), let them do realtime account enquiries etc.”

The server lived so long because it was fit for purpose. //

Ross reckons the server lived so long due to “a combination of good quality hardware to start with, conservatively used (not flogging itself to death), a nice environment (temperature around 18C and very stable), nicely conditioned power, no vibration, hardly ever had anyone in the server room.”

"At the time of construction, we included large, 24V case style fans with proper bearings, but running on the 12V rail. These ran slowly and quietly, yet moved plenty of air. The clean conditions probably helped them survive. All the fans were still running at the time it was switched off".

A fan dedicated to keeping the disk drive cool helped things along, as did regular checks of its filters.

Anna and her four young daughters were on a trip to England on the SS Ville du Havre. It was a French steamship. All iron. Built like a tank. Except, of course, tanks weren’t around yet. This was 1873.

The girls were excited to be on a ship. They were running on deck, playing TAG in the companionways, seeing what happened when they spit overboard at high altitude.

The ship was loaded deep with mostly first-class passengers. It was November, the weather was cold. Everyone was wearing coats and mittens.

They were bound for Havre de Grâce, Seine-Inférieure, France. Anna and her daughters were Americans, on their way to England to help with church revivals.

In a few days, the Havre was midway across the icy Atlantic when the ship collided with a Scottish clipper vessel. The collision was so loud, it sounded like an explosion. People were thrown from their beds. Some were injured.

The press and left call the right “culture warriors,” but we were not the ones who put pornographic material in elementary schools. We were not the ones who demanded kids in colleges attend seminars to learn about their inner racism. We were not the ones who demanded boys get into girls sports.

The left and press call us “culture warriors” solely because we said no and fought back against them.

And this is what it looks like for them to lose.

The press, infested by the left, sees horror and destruction all around it. What I see, as a conservative, is an effort to raze the purportedly neutral institutions irredeemably infected with progressivism. Government bureaucracies, academic institutions, and non-governmental entities were all formed as neutral institutions, but the left chose institutional capture. The left chose to advance its agenda from within these otherwise neutral institutions, infecting them, and now the only cure is tearing them down.

Academia became reliably progressive and deeply hostile to alternative viewpoints. USAID started funding trans-kids in Uganda. The press rushed to call pregnant women first “pregnant person,” then “birthing person.” The homeless became “unhoused.” And non-profits threw money at media outlets to subsidize left-wing activists as reporters to scare everyone about climate change. Progressives demanded diversity so long as the skin colors, genders, and sexual identities were different and the thinking was all homogeneously, uniformly progressive.

The left spent so long calling those of us on the right culture warriors, we finally decided to declare war. This is us fighting back, tearing down the ideologically captured institutions, and making it hard for them to rebuild or restore their trust.

You people on the left pivoted to censorship and press coverage of misinformation and disinformation — all while getting stuff wrong. We have used the internet to weaponize your lies against you and destroy your credibility with your own reporting. Trust in the media is now lower than even freaking Congress.

And you brought it on yourselves. You chose to embrace the left, be infiltrated by the left, be co-opted by the left, and finally taken over by the left. Along the way, you became arrogant and sclerotic. //

But you will not find me criticizing the razing of these institutions or the hard-charging approach to burning them all down.

It is time. The hubris of those involved from the left shows that reform is not possible, only destruction.

This is what it looks like when the right has had enough and starts fighting back. And right now, you progressives are, very deservedly, losing.

We would have accepted neutral institutions. But you foisted DEI on us all. The New York Times declared the country is systemically racist and rewrote the founding history of the nation, which some of you then pushed into public schools for re-education. You used your cultural, institutional, and media clout to chase advertisers and revenue away from right-leaning institutions and voices. You attacked productive industries with media outlets subsidized by progressive environmental groups. You captured the government-funded national radio network and turned it into soft-spoken progressive hacks. You took over academic institutions and started discriminating against Asian kids. You took over public schools and decided learning the colors of the Pride Flag was more important than learning math. When COVID happened, you people shut down schools, kept those schools shut down, and when the inevitable collapse of learning occurred, you lied about keeping schools shut down and tried, with willing accomplices in the left-controlled press, to shift the blame. In Illinois, progressive educators dragged girls into bathrooms and forced them to change in front of boys. You even got the Voice of America to explain white privilege while refusing to call Hamas “terrorists.”

So now you’ll watch the rest of us wipe out those institutions. You could have had neutrality. Instead, you called us culture warriors all while waging war to capture and use neutral institutions against everyone else. You could have chosen to embrace diversity of thought. Now, you can embrace the rubble.

This is what it looks like when the right fights back. When Trump is done, you’ll eventually take power again. There is no permanence in American politics. But you will find rubble and learn it is faster to destroy than to build. You brought this on yourselves. I have plenty of words of caution to the right and Trump supporters about overplayed hands, going too far, etc. But I can save those thoughts for later.

Kids have figured out that America’s failing liberal institutions have left them surrounded by a harmful cultural and political order that can’t justify itself. //

But in the clip from the debate that was most widely shared, a young Hispanic guy asks Seder about his objections to supposed religious fundamentalists and then, as the kids say, he proceeds to absolutely own Seder. Essentially, the question put before Seder is this: If he objects to traditional religious values as a foundation for guiding America’s collective political and legal decisions, what does he think should be the basis for morality? //

Presumably, Seder knew this debate would be hostile, but he seems genuinely shocked a kid would cut right to matters of first principles and question the assumptions of moral authority underpinning bog standard boomer liberalism. But this shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. When it comes to political punditry, there’s a pretty basic test for whether or not you take someone seriously: How does that person justify the use of political power to implement the policies they favor?

What Seder was asked was far from a trick question; rather, it’s basic American civics. This is exactly the question that the Declaration of Independence addresses, as the founders knew that any attempt to legitimize the rejection of their present government would start with establishing why the government they were proposing was more just and morally superior. In that sense, it wasn’t just a declaration — it’s an explanation of the basis of morality, and how England’s governance was illegitimate for not respecting it. So our founding document is a fairly succinct and compelling natural law argument for a government that recognizes all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that cannot be abrogated, let alone by a king who claims the “divine right” to tax people on a whim.

Of course, the actual structure of American governance is more complicated than that because we have to define and apply those rights, and the most just way to do that involves consent of the governed. So our system hinges on allowing an element of democracy, while putting enough checks in the system to ensure the tyranny of the majority doesn’t overwhelm the God-given rights of individuals. We don’t always get the balance right, but that’s the basic idea. And there’s no getting around the fact that having objective notions of morality, traditionally represented by a belief in God, is foundational to our whole system. You may not like the structure of American governance, but you’d think a guy who’s been doing liberal talk radio and podcasts for over twenty years would recognize why the question he was asked was so important and have a coherent way to answer it.

As Chris Rufo observes, “The remarkable thing here is that the Left’s ‘debate champ’ doesn’t see the entire setup, which means he’s ignorant of basic Christian theology, the natural rights theory of the American founders, and the criticism from Nietzsche to Weber to Foucault. Just doesn’t know any of it.” There’s also an element of blatant hypocrisy here as well. “Seder objects to religion because it ‘imposes’ values on everyone,” notes professor and First Things editor Mark Bauerlein. “It is, however, a dream to think that imposition of values is NOT a precondition of every social order. (Foucault’s prime critique of liberalism is that it presumes such.)” //

In other words, it’s safe to assume Seder is defending the dominant liberal order imposing its values on everyone because it’s what he knows and what he prefers, not because he can articulate why it’s justifiably “moral.” Nor is our current liberal order necessarily a matter of consent or democracy. This is pretty evident in the left’s approach to social issues. Gay marriage flailed in nearly every referendum it faced, and only became legal after the Supreme Court made it legal by decree, using a decision that has all the defensible legal and moral rubric one would expect to find on the back of a cereal box. And when a more conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the left screamed in unison they actually preferred it when nine unelected judges conjured up a new right to murder children in the womb that half the country found morally abhorrent, rather than letting such a controversial issue be decided by be democratic means.

And when liberals couldn’t exercise raw power to get their way in courtrooms and legislative chambers, they leveraged the economic might of corporate America to enforce their agenda. Despite the fact BLM was a scam literally run by communists who explicitly stated the nuclear family was an obstacle to “social justice,” corporations were alternately bullied and praised into giving BLM and related causes $83 billion even as the movement burned cities to the ground.

The problem is that you can only arbitrarily impose values on people from the top down for so long before there’s political and cultural backlash.

The U.S. marriage rate is near its lowest point in history, but it’s even worse among black Americans.

The black marriage rate has collapsed by half, from a 1960 high of 61 percent to today’s low of 31 percent, the lowest for any demographic group in America.

Almost 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers. These fatherless black children are three to four times more likely to be poor than their counterparts raised by married black parents. The outlook is particularly bleak for young black men who are far more likely to become incarcerated and suspended from school. Over the last several decades, the problem has become generational: Fewer black men with good jobs leads to fewer marriageable men and, in turn, fewer black marriages.

But add a married biological father to the home and what happens? As Conn Carroll writes in his new book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy, “There is nothing wrong with black boys in America today that can’t be solved by more married black fathers.” //

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, for the first time in our nation’s history, blacks had the legal right to marry and stabilize their families. And they did in droves. From the late 1800s until about 1960, young black men and women were more likely to be married than young white couples.

But government programs came along that “effectively eviscerated the black family and made fatherhood absence the norm,” Jamil says. In turn, black mothers became dependent on a government check to sustain their “impoverished lifestyle.”. //

Earlier on, she’d been juggling two small children, a part-time job, and college classes. Even with her husband’s full-time job, the couple barely made ends meet. When she sought financial assistance, a college administrator told her help was only available if she ditched her husband. “My peers were on assistance and seemed to be making more money,” she says. So why be married?

Why indeed? But that was America’s prevailing cultural message to black mothers and fathers. These welfare “man in the house” exclusions supposedly ended with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Smith; however, the ruling only held that the state had too broadly defined father to include cohabitating men, whether or not they were the child’s father.

The deceitful propaganda that voter ID laws suppress the vote and disenfranchise voters was spread only to demonize efforts to make elections more secure. //

The report noted that while “it is likely too large of a leap to say voter ID has increased turnout due to the correlational nature of our analysis, it seems that there is no negative relationship.” Further the report found there is “no evidence of a negative effect” on minority voters “from the implementation of voter ID.”

President Donald Trump declared any pardons signed by former president Joe Biden via autopen are officially "void," directing his ire very specifically at the House Select Committee behind the investigation of the January 6th protest at the Capitol.

Trump's comments were posted on his Truth Social media platform in the early hours of Monday morning.

"The 'Pardons' that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen," the President wrote.

"In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden.". //

Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
This crap is why for millenia Kings, nobles, generals, Popes, and others who wield power employed heavy wax seals, signet rings, witness signitures, and other seals applied to documents to verify authenticity. The Sumerians used them for goodness sake!

At the bare minimum, physical access to the autopen machine must be as tightly controlled as the nuclear launch codes. Nobody should ever be authorized to use it solo. At least 1 other individual should be required for the machine to even work.

Indylawyer Laocoön of Troy
an hour ago
Note that those rings did allow the ruler to choose one aide to have the authority to use the ring and make decrees in his name, but the identity of that aide was therefore well known so that he could be held accountable for abusing the authority. See, for example, the fate of Haman in the Biblical book of Esther 3:10, 7:5-10, 8:2.

Hank Reardon
an hour ago
And let’s not forget that Biden DOJ senior executive and pardon attorney Liz Oyer was suddenly relieved of her job and escorted from the building two weeks ago. Because, stuff’s going on . . .

Shipwreckedcrew reported in Red State last week that Oyer was suddenly fired, had her government phone(s) confiscated, and was immediately escorted out the door before she could access any government computers. The long play here seems to be the full investigation of precisely how all of Dementia Joe’s pardons were vetted. And whether he even knew.

That gets into the issue over who was controlling the auto pen. I hope this stays front and center.

https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2025/03/10/pardon-attorneys-n2186488

El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele has won a landslide victory in the country's presidential election, earning him a historic second term and underscoring his status as one of the world's most popular political leaders.

Posting on the X platform, Bukele announced that he had won the election with over 85 percent of the vote.

"According to our numbers, we have won the presidential election with more than 85% of the votes and a minimum of 58 of 60 deputies in the Assembly," he wrote. "This is a record in the entire history of the democratic world... God bless El Salvador.". //

Libs of TikTok
@libsoftiktok
·
Follow
Nayib Bukele is expected to win re-election tonight in a sweeping landslide victory.

Why is he so popular? He did what he was elected to do. He cracked down on crime, jailed criminals & gang members, and murder rates dramatically decreased by 70% last year.

In 2023, El Salvador became safer than the US. Destruction is a choice."
Last edited
6:38 PM · Feb 4, 2024

On Sunday Trump posted a savagely funny reaction to the scandal on Truth Social. //

Now, that's just epic, he has a wicked sense of humor. He posted his "45" and "47" official photos. Then in the middle was the autopen. But that's right on target.

On Friday, Trump commented on what a problem the autopen under Biden created, terming it a "big deal." He said it was disrespectful to the office and raised questions about the validity of the actions that were signed. //

The Trump team released a statement saying they don't do what Biden did.

"We do not use the autopen for documents that exercise the powers of the Presidency. So, for example, we do not use the autopen for executive orders, presidential memoranda, decision memoranda, nominations, appointment orders or commissions, or bills to be signed,” he wrote.

That's the way it should be done. It should only be used for things that don't involve such powers, maybe general correspondence or copies of things.

Erick Erickson @EWErickson
·
To the left: u chose to engage in ideological capture of institutions. The right has no choice other than razing those institutions. We would have taken neutrality. You chose to use the neutral institutions to advance progressivism. This is you losing now.
politico.eu
Trump’s move to silence pro-democracy media sparks outrage
11:23 AM · Mar 16, 2025

This sequence of events tees up a court fight that challenges the ability of the Trump administration to use the Alien Enemies Act to rid the US of known members of terrorist groups.

The deportation of TdA members is one of at least three sets of court cases that, in my opinion, put the US on the cusp of a constitutional crisis due to activist and anti-Trump judges using an imagined ability to impose nationwide orders stopping the administration from acting. So far, a judge has ordered probationary employees rehired, another has ordered the government to spend money according to his rather than the administration's timetable, and now this judge has decided that illegal aliens who are members of a terrorist group can stay in the US; //

Spartan Conservative
an hour ago
I believe this is the key sentence to this post:

While the J6 defendants had to beg for help or rely on public defenders who may not have had much sympathy for them, somehow, the airborne terrorists, like Hamas provocateur Mahmoud Khalil, were able to come up with high-powered and very expensive legal help on very short notice to keep them from being speedily deported.

Like Orwell said, "some of us are more equal than others." Follow the money path going into those lawyers' pockets.

the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua which has been terrorizing cities across the country—and then the administration sent at least one planeload of members of the “Foreign Terrorist Organization” back to their country of origin.

It didn’t take long for Obama appointed Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to kneecap the effort. Not only did he issue a temporary restraining order preventing the deportation of any Venezuelans, but he also ordered that the plane (or planes; it’s unclear) return the gangsters to the U.S.

The actions against the president began even before he signed the order. Mind-boggling:

Hours before the proclamation was signed, a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Democracy Forward and the ACLU of the District of Columbia, claiming it could be used to deport any Venezuelan in the country, regardless of whether they are a member of TdA.

At a hearing Saturday afternoon, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of the D.C. Circuit granted a temporary restraining order preventing the deportation of the five Venezuelans, who had already been in federal custody for two weeks.

Two planes that may have been en route to deport illegal immigrants were ordered returned by the judge. However, it is unclear as of Saturday night if they have done so. //

Bukele is a tough character whose uncompromising stance on law and order has transformed El Salvador from the most dangerous to the safest country in Central America; see El Salvadorian Hardman, President Nayib Bukele Wins Blowout Re-Election Victory – RedState. I'd much rather have Venezeuelan terrorists held in El Salvador than detained in America, and if it costs less in the process, that's a bonus. //

I remain of the view that this is a test case the Trump Admin has purposely triggered in order to RE-establish POTUS authority to use the AEA [note: Alien Enemies Act] to address the consequences of the Biden Admin "Open Border" policy. That policy allowed millions of unvetted migrants to enter the country illegally. The ability of the Administration to deport a substantial number of those illegal aliens is limited by the physical facilities necessary to arrest, detain, and hold them while deportation proceedings take place. Having the ability to execute mass deportations of the worst criminal offenders without going through the processes set forth in other federal statutes would increase significantly the pace by which large numbers of such individuals could be removed without burdening the facilities we do have.

...

What makes me think this is a test case is that the complaint was filed before President Trump issued an Executive Order stating that he would be using the AEA to remove these five individuals. The exercise of authority under the AEA begins with a Presidential “Proclamation” that certain factual circumstances have arisen, and extraordinary Presidential authority granted by Congress is being invoked to respond to those circumstances.

At the time the complaint was filed, no such proclamation had been issued by President Trump, but the Complaint was specific to an extent that would be highly unlikely if the Plaintiffs’ attorneys had not been given a preview of what it was likely to say.

the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against the vicious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua which has been terrorizing cities across the country—and then the administration sent at least one planeload of members of the “Foreign Terrorist Organization” back to their country of origin.

It didn’t take long for Obama appointed Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to kneecap the effort. Not only did he issue a temporary restraining order preventing the deportation of any Venezuelans, but he also ordered that the plane (or planes; it’s unclear) return the gangsters to the U.S.

The actions against the president began even before he signed the order. Mind-boggling:

Hours before the proclamation was signed, a lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Democracy Forward and the ACLU of the District of Columbia, claiming it could be used to deport any Venezuelan in the country, regardless of whether they are a member of TdA.

At a hearing Saturday afternoon, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of the D.C. Circuit granted a temporary restraining order preventing the deportation of the five Venezuelans, who had already been in federal custody for two weeks.

Two planes that may have been en route to deport illegal immigrants were ordered returned by the judge. However, it is unclear as of Saturday night if they have done so.

When the media all comes out at the same time, pushing the same talking points—that’s collusion.”

He criticized the media’s portrayal of ActBlue’s fundraising success, suggesting that the notion of millions of small-dollar donations from everyday Democrats is an illusion designed to mask financial misconduct.

Johnson shared the previously reported story of an 80-year-old woman from Richmond, Virginia, who allegedly made over 22,000 donations, totaling nearly $800,000, despite living in a rent-controlled apartment and relying on income from Social Security. //

Comer further suggested that ActBlue’s system was deliberately designed to facilitate fraud, referencing Sen. Marco Rubio’s past concerns about the platform not requiring credit card verification (CCV) codes (the 3-digit security code on the back of every credit card]. He implied that this loophole made it easier for foreign entities, possibly from China or Iran, to funnel money into U.S. elections through ActBlue.

According to Comer, “If they [ActBlue] were innocent, they’d be going on TV, trashing me. They’d be calling me a conspiracy theorist. … But they’re not saying anything. … Their lawyers are leaving. And when the lawyers leave, that’s a pretty good sign that something bad is going on.” //

“And if ActBlue goes down—if people go to prison—if there are frog marches for ActBlue executives—the Democrat Party is finished.”

“They’ll have to rebuild from the ashes. If ActBlue collapses, the Democrats have no party left,” Johnson said.

To which Comer replied, “Exactly. ActBlue is their financial lifeline. Without it, it’s over.”. //

DC_Draino
@DC_Draino
·
Replying to @elonmusk
All I know is that when the very unpopular Kamala overthrew Biden and raised more ActBlue donations in a single day than Trump did after he got indicted and shot, I knew they were money laundering
10:22 AM · Mar 8, 2025

But if you’ve seen this thorium ball for the 653d time, you may start wondering what exactly the ball summarizes. And what size it should be – apparently, there are different opinions here.

Does it supply all the energy needed to sustain the life you live? Does it include your yearly trip to the Bahama’s? Your kilometers made for commuting? Or just the electricity to last you a lifetime? It looks so small.

Fortunately, we have David MacKays great calculations of what we actually use. A handy number is the consumption of 195 kWh’s per person per day: the amount of energy used by the average affluent person, including household electricity, heating, transportation, food, energy contained in the ‘stuff’ we buy: everything that fits our western lifestyle.

From here, it’s easy to calculate how much energy we need for a lifetime. Let’s say we live 80 years. Of course, we live a bit longer, but I assume we use a bit less energy at infancy and at old age. That means we need 80 x 365 x 195 kWh’s = 5.694.000 kWh’s. This equals 0,00065 GWyr. And in our previous Numbers page, we saw that 1 tonne of thorium or uranium equals 1GWe-yr. This means the energy of a lifetime can be produced with 650 grams of metal.

In the case of Thorium, which has a density of 11,7 kg’s/ltr, 650 grams, equals 55,5 ml. In that case, the ball would be 4,74 cm diameter.

If the ball would be made of Uranium, which has a density of 18,95 kg’s/ltr, the same 650 grams would eaqual 4,04 cm diameter.

On my screen, Sorensen’s hand measures 7,5 cm, and the ball 2,3 cm. If I compare this to my own hand (11 cm wide), the ball should be slightly bigger, about one third in the case of Thorium (the slightly less dense and bigger ball of the two).

But although slightly bigger, it’s still perfectly possible to hold the energy for a lifetime in the palm of your hand, if this energy is produced in a molten salt reactor. //

I went over my calculations again – and realized I had made a mistake. In my calculation, I had used the grams to kWh ratio for electric power, where MacKay provides his number (195kWh per person per day) for thermal power.

This means my thorium balls are … too BIG! The weights should be divided by about 2,5…

But the most ridiculous thing she says there is that Democrats "do not, in fact, use [the filibuster] when we need it." She then goes on to say, "It's only used to block Dem policies. Never to block harmful GOP ones." Not only is that not true, it's the complete opposite of the truth. In fact, Democrats, during the first Trump administration, pioneered the extensive use of the filibuster as a legislative tool, using it 327 times in one year alone to halt Republican policies. Does that sound like Democrats "never" use the filibuster "to block harmful GOP ones?" //

Kyrsten Sinema
@kyrstensinema
·
Follow
Literally zero Senate Democrats support the filibuster.

38 voted to filibuster the continuing resolution yesterday.

8 who previously voted to eliminate the filibuster (1/19/22) did not filibuster.

1 who previously campaigned against the filibuster did not filibuster.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

@AOC
Still no.

In fact, the same Dems who argue to keep the filibuster “for when we need it” do not, in fact, use it when we need it.

It’s only used to block Dem policies. Never to block harmful GOP ones.

Could have proved us wrong. Instead they proved the point.
12:50 PM · Mar 15, 2025 //

What Sinema is pointing out is what should have been obvious from the beginning of this entire discussion. Democrats have no boundaries. They do not actually believe anything they say at any given moment. Everything they do is in pursuit of raw power. The ends always justify the means. Sinema stood up to that notion, and Democrats took her out. Now, those same Democrats get to roll around in the disgusting sludge of their own hypocrisy as they cling to the filibuster as a tool against Donald Trump.

With a penetrating gaze reaching deep inside his own soul, Hill touches a universal nerve of all humanity: a desperate need for God. //

When Dorothea von Ertmann, a friend and student of Beethoven’s, lost her only young child, Beethoven learned of her inconsolable grief. Instead of offering words of consolation, he sat at the piano and played for her, improvising for an hour before he squeezed her hand and left. It was Beethoven’s highest offering: using his greatest gift to express ideas and emotions of comfort and solace.

Dr. Jason Hill performs a similar service for readers in his moving new book, Letters To God From A Former Atheist. Hill, a philosophy professor at DePaul University, reasoned that if he were to find his way back to God, it also would come through his most developed faculty and his greatest gift, that of writing.

Hill shares this powerful journey of faith through his real-life story written as invocations to God: an autobiography told through the fearless and humble language of unfiltered and impassioned prayers.

“I seek to find You in these letters,” he prays.

These consecrated letters are filled with pathos, intimacy, joy, and a depth that is difficult to attain through other literary forms, helping to account for their unparalleled sublimity. //

Dorothea von Ertmann later recalled that Beethoven’s impromptu recital “said everything to me” and “finally gave me consolation.” I am confident this book will give similar consolation to its readers as only unvarnished prayer can.

Hill prayed to become the person he most wanted to be with a heart for humanity and a hunger for God’s presence in life’s every aspect. To his delight, he was not disappointed, and neither will the reader be.