Notices by Karl Auerbach (karlauerbach@sfba.social)

I've been railing about the need to restructure SCOTUS for rather a while now. (I've added a couple of URLs after the Guardian opinion link.)

Here is an opinion piece that says something similar.

It adds something that I missed - that SCOTUS and Congress are filled with people who think that if El Cheato goes away that his mess will also go away.

I don't think so. The maga-klan is too deeply embedded into our judiciary and administrative agencies. It's going to take everything from metaphorical dental picks to dynamite to get 'em out.

"It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/19/us-supreme-court-legitimacy

"Building A Firewall Around A Radical Supreme Court"

https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/limit-scotus/

"Reformation of the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS)"

https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/scotus-reform/

#SCOTUS

The move of the Oscars to Google's YouTube carries a message that nearly everyone is missing:

Broadcast TV is dying.

This is OK (except that our point-to-point model of media dissemination on the Internet is far from efficient as compared to broadcast radio/TV.)

Note that the right wing in the US has been busy trying to buy up broadcast assets - both radio (AM mostly, but some FM) and TV.

That's like making an investment now in wagon wheel and buggy whips.

The switch to ATSC 3.0 will slowly obsolete many of the TV's that are presently in service. And my guess is that those who watch broadcast TV (and radio) these days tend to be people who will be the last to switch to the new technology, if at all.

In other words, the move of the Oscars to Youtube suggests that the right-wing investment in broadcast media is only of short term value.

(Personally I'd like to see good broadcast tech - for efficiency - and return to home DVRs.)

@amszmidt It was not El Cheato who has so badly twisted the 2nd Amendment, it is SCOTUS that did that dirty dead.

There was so very much that was wrong with the Heller decision. Not only did that decision erase words from the US Constitution, it also created a fake history about how the US has an entire legal backstory based on pre-1776 UK practice, and utterly forgetting that the great majority of the US came from France, Spain, Mexico, Russia, and the Dole Pineapple company rather than from the UK.

(BTW, our SCOTUS started erasing words from the US Constitution when it declared war on the 14th Amendment shortly after the US civil war. For instance, check the mayhem they committed on the "privileges or immunities" clause of the 14th amendment.

I would support a repeal of the 2nd amendment,

Farmers get tariff kickbacks, but the rest of us get to pick up the cost... And Congress, which is supposed to control our national spending, sits silently as it is emasculated.

"Trump to unveil $12 billion aid package for farmers hit by trade war"

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-unveil-12-billion-aid-farmers-hit-by-trade-war-white-house-official-says-2025-12-08/

To my eyes, this is an act of war by the US upon the nation of Venezuela. (Not to mention the blurring of GPS and the sinking of boats by the US.)

If indeed a state of war now exists (to borrow a phrase from FDR's speech to Congress after Pearl Harbor) then Venezuela could be anticipated to wage war against the US - endangering US people (including tourists) everywhere in the world.

El Cheato and Whiskey Pete are getting the US in Vietnam Part II.

"Trump says airspace above and around Venezuela should be considered closed"

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-says-airspace-above-surrounding-venezuela-be-closed-its-entirety-2025-11-29/

Yikes, this is about as Nazi as Nazi can get... El Cheato is demanding to know who is "jewish" and who is not.

"Federal Suit Seeking Names of Some Jewish Employees at Penn Sparks Backlash"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/us/eeoc-university-pennsylvania-antisemitism-jewish.html

@elfin @ai6yr @GhostOnTheHalfShell The first time I ran into Oracle was way back around 1981. I was at Interactive Systems (the first Unix company - which was bought by Sun and thus is now part of Oracle, uggh.) At that time there were several competing database companies, Oracle among them.

The Oracle people came to us and very forcefully demanded that we turn our Unix-on-VAX/VMS product in a way to make Oracle outperform its competitors. We considered that cheating.

Through the years I've watched employees at Oracle be belittled (or worse) by their management, with no protection of the employees from the top.

And I personally had a company (that I founded) illegally driven into the ground via an Ellison acolyte. (It was fun a few years later when that acolyte went up against Ellison and ended up getting brutally squished by Ellison.)

I had a condo in Redwood Shores - now home to Oracle - glad I moved away from there.

@ai6yr @GhostOnTheHalfShell @elfin When I was at Wells Fargo I bought a lot of computers and communications gear - so I was at the receiving end of many a sales pitch.

There were some companies, and their sales team, who were the opposite of Oracle. These folks were honest, helpful, and mutually supportive of one another - and also of my issues and needs. My memory suggests that one of those better companies was Digital Equipment (DEC).

On the other hand I've come across companies that were cocaine riddled hell-holes. (I have in mind a particular company whose ethical/moral standards can be represented by a guy who always had white powder on his lip, hit on all the women [including my wife], and told his own wife he was leaving her within minutes after she gave birth to their child. As fate would have it, this guy came, years later, to beg my wife, then a company president, for a job - he did not get it.)

@whitequark Another area where broken regex can sneak into DNS is in NAPTR records. (Fortunately those are not used very often.)

The burden should those go wrong would tend to be more distributed among caching and resolving servers, so less noticed. But the risk of a regex munching through heavy processing loads of greedy and non greedy matches is still there.

@whitequark Back around year 2000 when I first came onto the ICANN board of directors I made a proposal that ICANN establish a worldwide mesh of DNS monitoring stations to check DNS availability, response times, and response accuracy. I even had buy in from a major, worldwide website monitoring company to host those DNS monitoring stations. ICANN didn't want to hear this then, nor does it seem to want to hear it now.

Our internet is extremely brittle and is becoming even more so. And that weakness is made worse by increasing tall and thick security barriers that make it ever harder to monitor for failures, diagnose and isolate what is happening, and to deploy repairs.

Little, if any, attention is being paid to this increasing risk. A few years back I wrote the following note about this problem:

https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/netsecurity/

So, it looks like the US+Israel are proposing to construct what Apartheid South Africa called "homelands", but which are actually very large concentration camps...

They euphemistically call it "Green Zone".

Which, in addition to being a concentration camp is one that is intended to be a no-mans land between to protect Israel.

Moreover, the remaining "Red Zone" is the area that the trumps+jarad-k+Saudis+Emirates want to bulldoze and use to build luxury beach resorts.

And the US wants EU to undertake to police these areas.

This seems like a plan to merge the worst of the historical British woes with Ireland/Northern-Ireland, and the US experience in VietNam.

"US military planning for divided Gaza with ‘green zone’ secured by international and Israeli troops"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/14/us-military-plan-divided-gaza-green-zone

So, No Kings day begins...

I am reminded of the time when I stood on the grave of King Charles I.

I never got to St. Denis near Paris to see the tomb of Louis XVI.

I am reminded of Diderot, who is often given credit for writing:

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest".

Songs for today...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYyI4vmds5o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnuJgq_UWiQ

El Cheeto is tearing down the East Wing of the White House.

He says, of course, that he isn't. But he is.

And he promises to preserve historical elements and artifacts.

But he won't - does anyone remember when he was trying to get New York to allow him to build the horrid "trump tower" on the site of the then existing Bonwitt Teller building (a building full of and covered by art deco works)?

Well back then El Cheat-o promised to preserve those Bonwit Teller architectural and artistic jewels.

But he broke those promises and simply destroyed those works of art.

He is doing it again with the East Wing of the white house to build his gaudy, gilded "ball room". But this time he is doing it to a building that you and I own, and in which Cheeto is merely a temporary occupant.

"The Travesty of Trump Tower and Bonwit Teller"

https://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2024/04/15/the-travesty-of-trump-tower-and-bonwit-teller/

I hope that people noticed that ol' J. Kushner was in the background of many of today's photos of JD Dunce in Israel and Gaza.

Kushner has not hidden that he wants Gaza bulldozed so he can replace the Palestinian people with tacky beach hotels.

Is there any reason - apart from the possibility of civil and criminal sanctions - for paying Federal income taxes?

Congress has abandoned "the power of the purse" thus leaving our Federal government treasury outside of the Congress based appropriation machinery created by our Constitution and restated in various laws (such as the "anti-deficiency" act.)

Remember that old phrase - something about "no taxation without representation"? It used to mean something.

Ol' Clarence T. says that prior SCOTUS decisions are not binding, that they are precedent that is not controlling.

OK.

That effectively means that no SCOTUS decision is actually final, that all SCOTUS decisions are merely provisional and may be silently reversed by simply refusing to acknowledge that that case has to be honored as binding precedent.

This, in turn, means that SCOTUS never really is finished with a case, even after it renders a decision.

That, in turn, means that SCOTUS has the power - and there is nothing in our Constitution that denies this power - to pick up an older case & overturn it by issuing a new decision to replace the initial decision.

Just as El Cheeto wiped out Biden's Executive Orders, a new panel on SCOTUS could quickly wipe out the egregious cases of the Roberts/Cheeto era.

Of course this means the end of law as a predictable framework. But have we not already reached a place where what is law and what it means has become the whim of the President?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/28/clarance-thomas-precedence-supreme-court-docket

@GreenFire Are the food trucks in Portland still as good as they used to be?

Long ago when I was in high school - and a thing that I am sure has not changed - is that it is a world of whirling hormones, fears, and anxieties.

At my high school there were "clubs" that pretty much assured that the members would be treated as outcasts - for instance joining the ROTC was a short road to social, and sexual, exclusion.

So here is Oklahoma trying to establish "Turning Point" clubs at all high schools. Membership would create an invisible balloon over each member that says "Horrible Person, Avoid!!"

If I were a teacher I would begin the year by doing class readings of the Aristophanes' play "Lysistrata".

"Oklahoma official says all high schools will have Turning Point chapters after Charlie Kirk killing"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/24/turning-point-oklahoma-high-schools

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

I too often need to mention that a large part of my extended family vanished during the late 1930s and first half of the 1940s in Poland and Germany.

I am afraid that in the future there will be people saying much the same, but slightly, and significantly differently:

"A large part of my extended family vanished in the US during reign of dictator Trump."