When this country was founded, tariff revenue was enough to fund the entire federal government. Those days are long gone, and they’re not coming back.

Nowadays, there are basically two reasons to play the tariff game. 1. Extract tariff concessions from your trading partners, and 2. Encourage domestic production. The problem is, if you’re going for #1, you have to be willing to drop your tariffs at the drop off a hat to make a deal. If you’re playing #2, the people that build factories and whatnot want assurances that the tariff supports will be in place for years and years.

So you can see that there’s an inherent trade-off between #1 and #2. To some extent, you cannot serve both masters. But Trump has been playing both strategies at the same time without a care in the world. There are… consequences… to doing that, which I am sure we will all get to experience.

Edit: okay, okay. This Bolsonaro thing is a brand new strategy #3 which I’m calling… Oh geez… I gotta go buy some more beer.

Encrypted data channels can still be vulnerable to man in the middle attacks. Like when you connect to an unknown host with SSH, and the client pops up a big warning.

In this case, ICE or whomever sets up a “valid” cell tower that your phone connects to, and they (law enforcement) route your packets onto the rest of the Internet. They can decrypt the 5G data, and see all of the IP headers. They can’t necessarily read the TLS traffic, such as https. But most important of all, they can log all of the IMEIs that connect, which effectively gives them a database of all of the protestors.

The use of Stingray by US law enforcement has been challenged on grounds that the law enforcement agencies have no spectrum license. Those challenges seem not to have found success.

On the other hand, prisons in the US have been stopped from operating cell phone jammers on prison grounds, on the same complaint of no spectrum license.

Pork is famously ‘the other white meat’ according to an old advertising campaign.

Sadly most of the great maritime powers have signed onto the 1856 Declaration of Paris where they agreed to give up privateering as a weapon of war. The United States has not signed on, but has also not issued a letter of marque since that period. During the civil war, the confederates experimented briefly with privateering, but the Union declared that it would not.

In 2025, The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025 was introduced in Congress. This bill would authorize privateering against “cartels” (apparently any cartel, like OPEC or the American Medical Association).

I have a relative that was in Nam and wears that hat, but he claims he was POG. I have another relative who lied about his age to get into Nam, who definitely was in the shit, and he doesn’t wear the hat.

I’m pretty sure that the military understands in general that the bunker busters don’t really work all that well.

I think the more relevant factors in this calculation are (1) B2 is a technology from the 1980s, (2) B2 still looks fricken cool, (3) Tomahawk was also a big deal in the 1980s, (4) Israel already did all of the work suppressing air defenses, and finally (5) the big parade the week before kinda sucked.

If you want top speed, Fortran is faster than C.

This lawsuit is on a really narrow ground: the law says that when the president calls up a state guard into federal service, the orders must issue through the state governor.

In this case, the President wrote the words “Through: The Governor of California” at the top of the memos. But he never actually sent anything to Gavin Newsom, or gave California any formal notice at all.

This suit also doesn’t challenge the active duty marines, which are indisputably under Trump’s chain of command. But they can’t do domestic law enforcement unless the Insurrection Act is invoked (it hasn’t, formally).

The historical benchmark I use is this: Nixon was at 31% when he resigned. I think GWB also hit a similar number, but he never was facing articles of impeachment.

He was deported to Mexico (illegally), but he’s a citizen of Guatemala. After that, he travelled from Mexico to Guatemala on his own. So his return to US was facilitated from Guatemala.

For all we really know the agreement with El Salvador is a guaranteed one way deal that we pay them to handle and they’re refusing to play ball beyond that.

This seems to be the party line in the sealed ex parte filings that have been presented to judges. I’ve also seen allegations that the deal is a handshake deal only–nothing in writing.

Judge Boasberg at least is taking them at their word, with some strong warnings about perjury.

I didn’t know that the feds accredited universities. When I was in school, the one that mattered for engineering was ABET or somesuch.

You can ride the Paris Metro in Paris, TX:

You can* sue CBP and Secretary Noem in her official capacity for collecting illegal tariffs from you.

*Probably. I’m not a lawyer. Don’t take legal advice from the Internet.

That’s because he tried to open the door. Everyone knows that on Boeing planes, only the door plugs can be opened in flight.

DB also made sure to select a Boeing 727 aircraft that has a rear stairway exit. It’s much easier to deplane that way into the slipstream.

In normal flight, the pressure differential between the inside and outside is pushing the doors against the frame with thousands of pounds of force. So it’s not possible to open the door.

If you really want to go sky diving, then be sure to dump the cabin (button is on the flight deck) to equalize the pressures. It will also help to slow down below normal cruising speed. If you do dump the cabin, keep the altitude below 15,000 feet or make an emergency descent to that level. Hypoxia is a beast.

Reverse Hackintosh.

But then who says what the statutes that Congress passed mean…?

In this case, the court has determined that notices in English only, that give a 24 hour deadline, with no information about how to contact an attorney, are illegal. That amount of notice is not due process as guaranteed by the 5th amendment of the Constitution.

The constitution overrides all parts of federal law, including the Alien Enemies Act. There is no power to suspend the constitution here. Not even a war power. The constitution applies to the plaintiffs in this case, because they are in the territory of the United States. Full stop.

The government has argued to the court, without citing any specific clause of the constitution, that the President enjoys broad “war powers” that prevent the court from looking into any aspect of what the administration is doing here. The court has clearly rejected that argument* with respect to the 5th amendment concerns.

So that is what the law is, and that’s what the law is not. That’s a final decision.

*The court has not decided yet on whether the government can use this reasoning to block any interpretation of the meaning of the words “invasion” or “predatory incursion.” The lower courts that have ruled are something like 4 or 5 to 1, on the side that the judiciary can interpret those words.

EDIT: Actually, I think the one judge that ruled for the AEA proclamation did so by interpreting “invasion” by looking it up in a dictionary. She just used a modern dictionary, while the others have been using 1798 dictionaries.

Everything the Supreme Court orders is “legal”, by definition. That’s what Supreme means. They have taken up the duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. There is no further appeal.