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Imagine a bill to study energy infrastructure in your state:

On March 2, a seemingly innocuous bill in the Tennessee General Assembly proposed a study on energy infrastructure,  but an amendment to remove local government’s ability to regulate fossil fuel infrastructure threw up red flags with legislators, local government officials and environmental groups.

(Dulce Torres Guzman via Tennessee Lookout)

Based on my limited understanding:

A libertarian would say the state should not supersede the will of the locality, and the locality not supersede the will of the local people and deny the pipeline;

A liberal would say the good of the many outweighs the good of the few (or the one), but part of the calculus should be the environmental impact and deny the pipeline;

A conservative would say the good for business is the good for all as pipelines and their ilk will create jobs, short term and long term and approve the pipeline;

A modern Republican would be for state’s rights, religious legislation, and where the others don’t intersect, a hands-off approach to business – in this case, probably pro pipeline and approve the pipeline;

A MAGA would demonize those against pipelines (pro conservative) and demonize those for local control (anti libertarian) and variously pro- and anti-Republican depending on short-term goals and approve the pipeline;

A modern Democrat will do something either in concert with other Democrats or not;

An independent informed thinker, not an Independent voter, will look at the proposal – pros and cons, history, who benefits – and will be disappointed that the State government is moving so fast on this item.

… the United States’ domestic war crimes law, the War Crimes Act of 1996 (as amended), has never been fully aligned with the nation’s obligations pursuant to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 to enact domestic legislation establishing jurisdiction over any individual suspected of committing a grave breach of these universally adopted humanitarian law treaties.

(Via Lawfare)

Also, hostis humani generis means an enemy of all mankind.

Anyway, read the whole article for the interesting and detailed details, such as

Congress deprived federal prosecutors of the authority to prosecute suspected war criminals discovered in the United States so long as they and their victims were aliens when their crimes were committed.

That, Dear Friends, is a loophole through which one could drive a oligarch’s yatch.

On 18 August 2021 a significant breach of T-Mobile was made known.

T-Mobile is warning that a data breach has exposed the names, date of birth, Social Security number and driver’s license/ID information of more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company. The acknowledgment came less than 48 hours after millions of the stolen T-Mobile customer records went up for sale in the cybercrime underground.

(Via Krebs on Security)

Cut to March 2022, and the State of Tennessee has advice about this almost 6 month old breach:

State Attorney General Herbert Slattery is warning Tennesseans to take precautions from a massive data breach at T-Mobile from last summer.

A large amount of private data has just been put up for sale on the dark web.

That’s where criminals trade in stolen personal information.

It includes names, dates of birth, Social Security Numbers, and driver’s license information.

Slatery says more than 3/4 of a million Tennesseans were hit by the data breech.

He says victims have recently gotten alerts through various identity theft protection services about their info.

(Via WDEF.com)

Tennessee’s Attorney General waited until 750,000 Tennesseans’ personal data was available for sale — stolen six months ago and widely known to have been stolen — to warn the citizens that they should take precautions to protect themselves.

This is a non-partisan issue. I do not understand why the AG sat on this.

No Tuition hike at Chattanooga State/Cleveland State:

TENNESSEE (WDEF) – In a year of rampant inflation, it is not hitting Tennessee’s tech and two year colleges.

The Tennessee Board of Regents voted on Friday to hold the line on tuition next year at Chattanooga State, Cleveland State and local TCAT schools.

The also suspended online course fees for the second year in a row.

(by Collins Parker)

A Superwholock for every news cycle:

But it’s not that Gamergate never ended, it’s that no news cycle, if viral enough, ever actually ends now. The merge that has happened over the last decade between virality, news content, social platforms, and fandoms has created cultural pockets online that never fully die. Social platforms are full of zombie communities that were forced into existence thanks to the short-sighted incentives of corporate engagement quotas and now they light up when anything remote aligned with their initial reason for being comes across their feeds. It’s happened with the Gamergaters who became anti-Last Jedi activists who became Snyder Cut truthers who became Depp v. Heard watchers. And it’s happening with the pandemic expert LARPers who became lab leak conspiracy theorists who are now obsessed with monkeypox.

(Via Ryan Broderick)

It’s my sense that the Emacs “ecosystem” is growing and innovating at a very healthy clip. The richness of ELPA, the frequency of new releases from the core developers, and the adoption of Emacs/Org in places like academia — all these are examples.

This appears to be happening in the world of professional coding too, despite very capable competitors like VS Code. Here’s a recent quote from Jon Sander’s blog, irreal.org: “The fact — as evidenced by Org-mode and Magit — is that Emacs is at the forefront of editor/IDE development.” 

Ponder that: “at the forefront.” 

I have no data on the actual number of Emacs users, or on the rate of production of new packages or counts of new lines of code, but it’s my anecdotal sense that Emacs is modernizing and thriving. Not least, its reach is extending beyond the English-speaking world. 

Is this the golden age of Emacs? Was it ever better than now?

(Via u/tdavey on Reddit)

I’m using Emacs more than ever. I’m at that stage where I resist making more than modest changes to my config as it is a daily driver for me – and I am not in a technical role any more.