Trump was a very specific kind of disaster: a chaos agent, who lacked the wit, patience and executive function to recruit the powerful institutions of the US military-industrial complex to fight his corner.

1/

It's been eight years since @aaronsw took his own life. Aaron had been charged with 13 felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (#CFAA) for violating the terms of service on the @JSTOR database of scholarly articles.

1/

Prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz didn't dispute that Aaron was allowed to access the articles he retrieved. Rather, they said that the WAY he accessed them (using a script instead of clicking on links) was a terms-of-service violation and hence a crime.

2/

In other words: any business could conjure a felony out of thin air by making you click through an unreadable garbage-novella of legalese proscribing the use of a service they granted you access to. Violate any of those terms and you face a prison sentence.

3/

This isn't law as we know it, it's Felony Contempt of Business Model, and the most alarming thing was that this interpretation of the CFAA wasn't completely ridiculous, given how badly drafted that law is.

4/

Ronald Reagan signed CFAA into law. Fed prosecutors had been seeking broad authority to punish "hacking" and had drawn up an absurdly broad definition of cybercrime that would give them latitude to go after anyone they didn't like.

5/

There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/

First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

2/

All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

3/

A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

4/

The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

5/

The Democrats are at least two parties. The progressive wing of the party (which is by no means unified) and the finance wing of the party, which is also the party leadership.

1/

During the leadership race, the progressive wing was represented by @SenSanders and @SenWarren; the former wants to minimize the role of markets in our lives, the latter wants to redeem markets by regulating them. It's a distinction with a difference, but I donated to both.

2/

Both wings of the party have prominent representatives in Congress; Sandersism are most visibly associated with @AOC (whom I donated to) and Warrenism is embodied by @RepKatiePorter (likewise), who was also one of Warren's law school proteges.

3/

Porter is a force of nature. She is infamous - and celebrated - for her brutal, no-holds-barred questioning of both corporate and administration witnesses, using a white-board to pin them down and eviscerating any attempts at bullshittery.

4/

This isn't just about getting facts into the record (though, she is SO GOOD at getting facts into the record!), it's also about effecting change, like when she single-handedly cornered the CDC's chief into guaranteeing universal, free covid

One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

1/

Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

2/

Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

4/

For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

5/

Will Trump play the #PenceCard December 23 (today)?
Thread: Absolutely not. The assertion that he will hurts our credibility and the cause because people who trust some accounts pushing it will be demoralized when it doesn’t happen. Let me explain:

2/ For this thread again, we will assume the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is Constitutional and binding. It very well may not be, but it doesn’t appear we have any court that will ever say so.

3/ The ECA is found in 3 USC 1-21. In secs 12 & 13, it requires that on the 4th Wed of Dec (that’s today) the President of the Senate (that’s Pence) to notify the states if he/she (or the Archivist) has not received a “certificate of vote and list” mentioned in sections 9 & 11.

4/ Sections 9 & 10 are merely administrative. Sec9 says that electors from the state make & sign six certificates of the votes w/ a lists for Pres & VP & attach a list of electors. Sec10 requires the electors to seal up the certificates & certify that the list of votes are inside

5/ The Pence Card is the idea that today, the VP can review & decide that the dem electors sent by AZ/NV/GA/PA/MI/WI don't meet the reqs of the ECA and/or the Const so, in effect, the VP hasn't received proper electors from the states & has a duty to notify them of that fact.

THREAD. I am failing to see any better path for Trump apart from resignation. (Yes, I know you will say, "He'll never do that" but also did you ever think three days ago that he'd be impeached twice?) Here's me as HIS (competent) lawyer:

2. You will be impeached. Your goal now is to avoid criminal liability, and, if possible, jail time. If you resign now, you avoid several unpleasant possibilities. For one, you make the potential for an invocation of the 25th amendment, on the basis that you are CRAZY, moot

3. If you resign, and Mike Pence becomes President, he will likely give you a limited, but nevertheless broad, pardon. If he emulates Ford's pardon for Nixon, you will be pardoned for (at the very least) obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation

4. He MAY be able to give you a pardon for crimes committed BEFORE you took office, such as your campaign finance violation, or whatever sketchy financial crimes you committed, but that is touch and go. There is *some* ambiguity over whether such a "blanket" pardon is valid BUT

5. You could also mitigate this by being frank with him and allowing him to be as specific as possible on your prior criminal liability in the pardoning language (like financial crimes re taxes, etc.). He is, however, unlikely to pardon you for inciting insurrection BECAUSE...

The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.

And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.

It's our moral duty not to.

Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.

Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.

We've seen our nation's face.

And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.

They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.

Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.

We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.

They don't care about truth, and never did.

We should care about truth, and speak it plain.

This is us.

We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.

Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.

One thing you see a lot on here is people pointing out the contradictions in the putative views of Trump’s GOP. COVID is a Chinese plot but also a hoax. The insurrection was antifa but also a tour of patriots.

What people need to understand is that these contradictions aren’t a SYMPTOM of Trumpism.

They point to its very core - its emotional, psychological appeal to millions of America. The ability to sustain these contradictions is why Trump was elected, how his movement exists.

Ultimately what Trump offers - what fascism offers - is a philosophy of total emotional and psychological indulgence. Believe whatever makes you feel best. Live your politics examined.

Don’t want to take credit for the insurrection, but want to claim its dead as your martyrs? Go ahead! Say it! The Capitol was attacked by antifa but Ashlii Babbit was a hero patriot.

Hate China, but annoyed by the scolding liberals and their masks? Call the coronavirus a Democratic hoax - and at the same time, a deadly foreign bioweapon.