Notices by Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)

Q: Is FFOTUS an agent of Bin Laden or an agent of Putin?

Both of those people desire(d) an emasculated, crippled United States and FFOTUS is delivering, and wow is he delivering!

Wow, El Stupido (aka FFOTUS) has just dropped a trade bomb that probably amounts to the greatest tax increase (in the form of tariffs) on American citizens in the history of the USA.

This tax increase is highly regressive - the rich won't feel it because the tax/tariff is essentially a Federal sales tax. However, the middle class and people on even lower incomes here in the US will be clobbered. These people will react in a rational way by cutting back on their purchases - which is a road to recession or worse. It may also be inflationary because US vendors will increase their prices because of reduced foreign competition.

@HistoPol FFOTUS is "Fat Felon of the United States"

Last night I watched the 1941 Powell and Pressburger film "49th Parallel". I had not seen it before. (It came around on TCM within the last few days.)

(I rather like Powell and Pressburger films [especially "A Matter of Life and Death".)

Anyway 49th Parallel was most definitely a propaganda film. But it conveyed Canada in a light that ought to be remembered in view of FFOTUS' threats against Canada.

(My grandfather was stationed in WW-II in the general vicinity of some of the locations near Labrador in the movie. And I recognized some of the locations in Banff from my own travels.)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033627/

@heidilifeldman I am reading Caro's book "The Power Broker" about Robert Moses.

It is interesting how the methods that Moses used to run-over the NY city and state governments is very similar to what the Musk-Dog-ies and Project 2025 gang are doing.

Moses went through the motions of asking oversight bodies for permission, but he also went ahead to get construction of his projects (even without permission) to begin and progress to the point where by the time the oversight body acted it was too late to put things back the way they were.

It is pretty clear that the Musk-o-vites are working to destroy agencies before courts (or our feckless Congress) can try to stop things.

In our national case, we are in a humpty-dumpty situation where FFOTUS is breaking our governmental eggs so quickly and furiously that there will be no way to restore the status quo ante.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

@Lana Yes, we got a lot of gifts and benefits back then (and since).

But please don't forget that when we were buying homes the interest rates often ranged into the 15%/year (and above) range plus "points" and with a rather large down payment. As a consequence, for many of us housing was unaffordable.

So, how much has your net worth declined since January 20, 2025?

I am starting to encounter an increasing number of people who seem to be giving up on fighting FFOTUS/Musk because "The D's won't do anything and they have no power anyway, and the courts are packed in FFOTUS favor and besides the decisions of courts will be ignored by FFOTUS."

These are the kinds of seeds that grow into extra legal activities ranging from civil disobedience to IRA, Irgun, or Chechyn style terrorism.

This is pretty good...

"What can I do to fight this coup?"

https://choosedemocracy.us/what-can-i-do/

I went to law school way back in the mid-late 1970's. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FPCA) was new then.

Our courses were extremely practical - once I had to set up a manufacturing business in Ghana and I ended up in DC negotiating the terms with the Ambassador.

Our course about FPCA was even more practical - the profs (who had a lot of experience overseas) wanted us to experience the kind of pressures we would be put under. So this class actually involved hotel rooms with (fake) drugs, a fair amount of real cash, and nearly naked women. We were subject to blackmail (again, not real, but it was scary).

So here is FFOTUS saying to Americans - go forth and bribe, go forth and accept drugs, money, and sex, go forth and be blackmailed.

The US was better when we had a solid FCPA to give us backbone to resist.

Now our whore-monger in chief is telling us to engage in the worst of practices, to abandon ethics, and to make us no better than Nigerian Princes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/10/trump-doj-foreign-corrupt-practices-act-pause.html

Read this, then read the complaint (which is a .pdf linked-to from the article.)

I will probably be launching a donation in the direction of Public Citizen later today.

https://www.citizen.org/litigation/alliance-for-retired-americans-afge-and-seiu-v-bessent/

So FFOTUS wants to transfer all of the people in Gaza to somewhere else.

I've got an idea - there's another strip of seaside land, semi-tropical, that could be made available.

It's called Palm Beach, Florida.

The reason I went to law school and became an attorney was because one evening I was with my friend, who is Greek.

We were pulled over, violently pulled from the car (including my girlfriend), we were thrown up against the car and wall, intrusively searched (including my girlfriend's purse and the car trunk).

The only reason that the cops gave was that my friend "looked Mexican".

ICE is the American Stasi, the American Gestapo. Any officer who participates is not an American, he should be ashamed.

I see that Express Scripts - one of the large Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager companies - is doing online ads saying "we are not a middleman".

Well, they are a middleman, one that dictates to patients, doctors, and insurance companies what drugs, what dosages, what quantities, and what prices.

Well today I got a drug denial - as usual umpteen pages in umpteen languages, sent first class USPS. In other words it cost them several dollars to send.

And it was to tell me that my doctor prescribed an off-formulary anti-bacterial ointment that costs about $2.

Not very efficient, and very middle-man.

@hakan_geijer By-the-way, when taking actions please consider not only how good that makes you feel but also how it is perceived by those who could be convinced to move to the good side. We really want to push those people towards us, not away from us.

I just read the Larkin-Riley (LR) bills. Our congress essentially passes diff-patches rather to existing text. This makes the Bills difficult to read.

The use of quotation marks in these patches would make any computer programming tool barf - Congressional bills sometimes use semicolons to end a sequence started with a quotation mark.

This sloppy form of patching existing laws is an invitation to ambiguity and mistake.

Good drafting would simply replace entire textual blocks rather.

Even better if Congress were to use a tool like git and propose amendments as pull requests. Then we would have a much clearer view of text before and after the proposed amendment and we would always have a way to see the latest amended version.

By-the-way, the proposed Larkin-Riley Bill (Senate Bill 5) pretty much shoots the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of our Constitution in the head and abandons due process even more than when we sent Japanese (including US citizens) to concentration camps in WW-II.

#LarkinRiely

We need to resist the oncoming repressive white-nationalist-christian regime that is rapidly invading our United States.

May I suggest that we use the anti-fascist partisian song Bella Ciao as our anthem.

https://youtu.be/Zr6CeTm3aSE?t=103

@_elena @emmecola I've found that the real test of self hosting (whether of web servers, DNS servers, etc) is usually less in the establishment/set-up phase and more in the recovery from failure (e.g. lost disk) phase.

Las Vegas is going to be very sorry that Musk has made such a mess of underground transport in the city. And that mess is permanent - those tesla-tunnels will remain to bedevil future, more sane, infrastructure projects.

Unregulated construction of an underground grid of tunnels, using human driven Tesla's as vehicles, is about as stupid a design as is possible. But then again we are talking about the "brain" that brewed up the even worse "hyperloop".

Las Vegas could use an underground system (although it has a decent above ground bus system). But that system should use much more efficient, proven methods, such as the driverless shuttle-trains so often used at airports, such as at Atlanta or Denver.

Musk is a great pooper - he dumps on everything and leaves the rest of us to clean up his mess.

https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-las-vegas-loop-oversight

Sigh, Peter Yarrow died. I've been a very long time fan of Peter, Paul, and Mary - I saw pretty much every show they did in the LA area during the late 1960s and 1970s. I have heard that my father was friends with Yarrow. Now all we have is Paul.

BTW, I also saw the Weavers perform.