Tuesday, August 1st, 2023 - TrickJarrett.com: Semper Ad Meliora

Trinity Downwinders - People who were affected by the Trinity test for the nuclear bomb

A Reddit post (of screenshots from Twitter) discussed the people who were forced to move, with less than 24 hours notice, to avoid the test of the Trinity bomb. The linked site is the group waiting for some sort of compensation from the US government due to lost lands, and that many of them dealt with radiation fallout.

8/1/2023 5:44 pm |

| Tags: us history, nuclear weapons

"Trump charged in probe of Jan. 6, efforts to overturn 2020 election"

The article also linked to the 4-page PDF detailing the indictment. The four counts against Trump and unnamed coconspirators.

Not from the article, but pulled from elsewhere, this is the summary of the counts:

A conspiracy to defraud the United States "by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit to obstruct the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election," according to the special counsel's office. This count carries a 5-year maximum sentence.

A conspiracy to impede the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified. This count carries a 20-year maximum sentence.

A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have that vote counted. This count carries a 10-year maximum sentence.

Obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct and impede, the certification of the electoral vote. This count carries a 20-year maximum sentence.

Doing further reading, here is a piece on Politico: Key revelations, groundbreaking strategies and notable omissions in the new Trump indictment

The indictment does not identify any of the six alleged co-conspirators who prosecutors say unlawfully agreed to aid Trump's bid to subvert the election. But five of them were readily identifiable based on the widely known details in the indictment. They are:

Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer and the leader of an effort to pressure state legislators to reverse election results.

John Eastman, a constitutional lawyer who helped develop the strategy to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the election on Jan. 6.

Sidney Powell, a conservative lawyer who pushed fringe theories about manipulation of voting machines.

Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer who pressed DOJ leaders to sow doubt about the election results.

Ken Chesebro, an architect of key elements of Trump's fake elector strategy.

The identity of the sixth alleged co-conspirator, a political consultant, was not immediately verifiable, but the indictment says that person played a role in the effort to assemble false slates of pro-Trump presidential electors in states that Biden won.

The article also highlights the following revelations from the indictment:

Prosecutors say Trump offered — and Clark accepted — the job of acting attorney general on Jan. 3, 2021. The select committee found phone records listing Clark as "acting attorney general" before Trump rescinded the appointment under the threat of mass resignations from DOJ leaders, but the committee did not confirm that Trump had made the official appointment.

Prosecutors say that Pat Philbin, Trump's deputy White House counsel, warned Clark that if he and Trump pressed ahead with plans to stay in power past Biden's scheduled inauguration, there would be "riots in the streets" across the country. According to the indictment, Clark responded, "That's why we have an Insurrection Act."

The indictment reveals that Mike Pence kept contemporaneous notes, including of his conversations with Trump in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6. In one Dec. 29, 2020, conversation, Trump falsely told Pence that the Justice Department had identified "major infractions" in election integrity, prosecutors say.

And the last part, at the end of the article which I found notable. I had considered the second point, but not really the first or third, but seeing them called out here makes me wonder about them as well.

Many of the central details in the indictment tracked closely with the evidence amassed by the Jan. 6 select committee. But large swaths of the committee's probe went unmentioned. Among them:

The indictment makes no reference to the organization of Trump's Jan. 6 rally or the financing that went into it.

It omits evidence of Trump's serious consideration of a plan to use federal or military power to seize voting machines from several states in which Trump disputed the outcome.

It includes no allegations of any links between Trump and the extremist groups who attacked the Capitol or references to others featured by the Jan. 6 committee as key players, like Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones.

8/1/2023 8:34 pm |

| Tags: us justice, donald trump, january 6th, us politics

Back from Barcelona

Yesterday, I left Barcelona around noon local time (Central European Summer Time, UTC +7) and at 7:37 pm Pacific, I messaged Katie that I had touched down in Seattle. That is nearly fifteen hours, with a two hour layover in Chicago. And it brought to an end my first international trip since COVID.

I was in Spain for work, Wizards ran their first European MagicCon event. It was a fantastic event and a lot of fun. But man am I glad to be home and sleeping in my own bed.

I took today off work to re-acclimate to the timezone, and I'll be back at work tomorrow.

The photo above is a snap from my hotel. It's a fascinating building with a vertical garden for half of the building, which is also open air. They air condition the bedrooms and the elevator shafts aside from the lobby and the hotel restaurant.

With the summer heat, I had actually packed two desk fans in hopes of helping ensure I slept well, but thankfully they weren't needed. I'm thankful the AC worked very well in our rooms, but also I'm thankful because these are American fans and I hadn't considered the differences between American and European voltages. When I plugged one of the fans in, it immediately spun up faster than normal such that I immediately understood my mistake.

Oops.

All that said, I loved traveling overseas and look forward to my next trip overseas for work. This year though I've only got one more trip on the books: Las Vegas in September.

8/1/2023 8:48 pm |

| Tags: travel, barcelona