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michaelepley.bsky.social

@michaelepley.bsky.social
396 followers 876 following 212 posts
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 15/10/2026
Sadly our immigration laws simply may not care. Many provisions are 'status' without any required mental state (eg knowingly) depending only on what facts the government can establish as civil infractions with a lower burden of proof, relaxed evidentiary standards, fewer civil rights protections.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 14/10/2026
Sotomayor is awesome. That is all.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
So now that he has a new helipad we are back to inaudible shouting of questions over the blaring noise of rotors.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Mostly I lament that we could have a kick butt space exploration program / commercial industry 10 years earlier but instead minted the world's first trillionaire on the backs of NASA engineers. Just to save a few bucks.
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Reposted by @michaelepley.bsky.social
Rex Huppke @rexhuppke.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I don't mean to make waves or anything, but as a journalist, I am definitely opposed to the president talking about arresting journalists.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
These cocktails will be a triumph of speculative mixology, wherein the astronomical capital expenditure is distilled into a potable tribute, eagerly quaffed by fawning courtiers who mistake the bitter dregs of deferred liability for the vintage of divine favor.
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Reposted by @michaelepley.bsky.social
Thor Benson @thorbenson.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Elon attacks the best human being on the planet
Elon Musk calling Jose Andres an "asshole" for telling him to chill out
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
On the subject of accountability. The Supreme Court has made it clear that the only mechanism to hold the President accountable is impeachment. Why is that also not a sufficient remedy for leaders of independent agencies and departments under the federal executive branch?
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Or could be about operating under international law in holding leaders accountable under that system. Individual countries can sometimes struggle under their own laws to hold leaders to account. We need a robust international law system with some real teeth.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
More evidence that China is the real winner in the Trump 2.0 era. Even as Trump props up the AI sector to the detriment of all else.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Harmonizing domestic virtues of a national birthday party with a thunderous, Machiavellian display of aerial hegemony requires a theatrical level of doublethink; the administration seems quite unable to distinguish between inspiring its own citizenry and rehearsing the annexation of the neighbors.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Sold!
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Or a corollary: the founders didn't intend to enshrine their particular cultural eccentricities but create high aspirational goals and serve a larger purpose. So why would we look to their social quirks of tradition to constrain those goals?
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
I wonder how much chained CPI changes -- that allowed for greater product substitutions -- affected our ability to accurately measure inflation for a given standard of living. Seems clear people are downgrading to stay afloat.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
A deal was cut wrt Gonzales. But both should have resigned immediately and of their own accord, period.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
There are also alternatives to hard term limits. Just make it harder for incumbents to win -- a bias to offset inherent incumbent advantages. Say increase the vote threshold by 5 or 10% every time an individual is elected. Want a third term? You need to win 70% of the vote share.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
Expect ICE to assert: broad search powers based on a claim that all TSA checkpoints are the functional equivalent of the border, even for domestic travelers; profiling under Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem, no search warrant is needed per 8 USC 1357; & administrative arrest warrants per recent DHS memos.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 22/03/2026
Our foreign policy was obsessed about the threat of a client state of the USSR off our coast. This keeps up and we'll have a client state of China off our coast.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
We had an opportunity to back a global minimum tax that would have brought in revenue without damaging trade and competitiveness. Would have meant believing in the liberal international order to implement and funding research and education to maintain competitiveness, so....
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
War is not ok, just because your enemy is weak.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
If the government wants to deny your right to vote -- depriving you of a fundamental right and freedom -- shouldn't due process apply and the government have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt you do not have that right? Not the other way around?
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Not actually fun.
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Reposted by @michaelepley.bsky.social
Evergreen Intel @vcdgf555.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
Thread. Iran/Israel indications. 8 USAF transports destined to or departing Fort Hood for missions eventually to Europe and beyond. The implication is these transports are picking up air defense equipment. Fort Hood is host to the 69th Air Defense Artillery Brigade. 1/
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
The applicability of case law to the release of files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act changed the instant the act itself passed. The statue set up a unique test for release and withholding.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
To expand a bit: Right now we have exceptions to the more general third party rule. The theory behind that is when sharing with a 3rd party to a transaction -- a bank that facilitates a money transfer, a Telco that connects a circuit, etc -- suddenly there is no expectation of privacy.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
About 90% of persons physically present in the US are citizens. Absent some other evidence, the odds any person is a citizen are very high. It would seem from a reasonable suspicion perspective, there is no basis to even ask a person about their citizenship status.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Not saying no does not mean yes. Of course, lots of people don't actually know how consent works
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Pretty sure separation of powers had something to say about declaring "null and void" the judicial branch by executive order.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
Introduce yourself with four spaceships
NASA concept for an O'Neil cylinder. It shows a large cylinder, kilometers long and a few kilometers in diameter. 3 sets of alternating ground and window sections running the length of the inside surface and wrapping around the cylinder and scene. A ground section at the bottom of the picture shows lush green pastoral landscapes dotted with trees, lakes and streams, farmland and pastures, and wispy clouds above. Through the windows the darkness of space dominates, with a planet and moon visible through the left window section and a close bright yellow star through the window at the top of the picture.  This star illuminates the ground section at the bottom.The generation ship from Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora, a fictional account of a failed attempt at colonizing a planet near Earth (~12 lt-yrs). The grey ship is shown in the lower right quarter of the scene as two thick wheels around a thick spine, each wheel connected to the spine with 4 darker spokes. A dark blue and black field, dotted with pinpoint stars and wisps of a cloud like nebula in the distance fills the rest of the picture.The Discovery One spaceship from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a fictional film about a mysterious monolith and it's relationship to mankind's evolution, discovery, conflict, and transcendence. The ship is a light grey sphere, its front dominated by a horizontal illuminated window and 3 round portals before. A structural truss like stalk extends behind and to the left, a small radar dish assembly mounted atop and facing backward. The strut extends to a rounded box-like engine module, though the engines themselves are not visible. Dark black space with thousands of points of white stars fills the background.A whitestar class ship from J Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5, a SciFy TV show about a large space station built by man as a diplomatic outpost to prevent another war after a disastrous first contact. The ship is a flowing grey and purple organic form with a main hull section in the center of the scene horizontal wing amidships and vertical teardrop fin-like structures aft and to the right in the scene. A dark black space fills the rest of the scene, with hundreds of fine points of stars and a blue, purple, and pink diffuse nebula to the upper left.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
A typical LLM is 100% hallucination. The training process has eliminated some possible model instances that guess poorly, and what you see is a model where it guesses right most of the time. You only (sometimes) notice the places when it guesses wrong.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
It is almost inevitable that there will be a ceasefire of the current conflict while the current administration is in power. And that a "peace deal" is always on the table at any given moment. Neither is connected or necessarily means we are any closer to Middle East peace.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
To argue 14A's "jurisdiction" excludes births to non-citizens is to say its meaning was lost for a century & SCOTUS in Wong Kim fooled. If meaning so plain, why require a modern reinterpretation to reveal an intent hidden in plain sight? Textualists: what should have appeared? Why use 'all persons'?
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
As we start seeing impacts from the defunding of PBS/CPB, starting to worry for the future of some of the incredible tools they have built to help education such as Crash Course. www.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/c...
pbslearningmedia.org
Crash Course | PBS LearningMedia
From balancing chemical reactions to analyzing famous literature, never before has one collection offered such an awe-inspiring range of content. Since 2011, brothers John and Hank Green have pioneere...
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
"arguing that the law does not apply to the holding cells because they are a “processing center,” not a detention facility." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/n... So the people in these facilities are free to go, since they aren't being detained?
nytimes.com
11 N.Y. Officials Arrested Trying to Access ICE Detention Cells
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Reposted by @michaelepley.bsky.social
Olivia Messer @oliviamesser.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
pretty wild that it so quickly became normalized that immigrants don’t have even basic free speech rights www.axios.com/2025/09/11/c...
axios.com
State Department warns immigrants not to mock Kirk's death
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted the warning on Thursday.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
SCOTUS has basically told us this doesn't mean what you think it means. US has plenary sovereign power to exclude aliens -- inherent power superceding the 9th/10th limits on enumeration. And Congress needs "No law" because aliens have no rights to abridge, even if speech seems like a natural right.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
Age verification? I watched Oliver North testify live.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
Kavanaugh is apparently unfamiliar with some of the jurisprudence on the question of "remedies [that] should be available in federal court" and the likelihood of success there.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
An excellent analysis of some of the core legal issues here.
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Reposted by @michaelepley.bsky.social
Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
'Trump and his granddaughter Kai Trump load the motorcade on the south lawn of the White House in Washington DC on August 30, 2025, as they head to Trump National golf course in Sterling, Virginia' (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)
'Trump and his granddaughter Kai Trump load the motorcade on the south lawn of the White House in Washington DC on August 30, 2025, as they head to Trump National golf course in Sterling, Virginia' (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
Looks like a beautiful day for golf at trump national. Just saying.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Militant atheists getting their exercise in this thread!
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
Currently waiting for Thomas' 'history and tradition test' to run into the ad coelum principle via the 5th and/or 10th amendments. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_e...
en.m.wikipedia.org
Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos - Wikipedia
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
A playbook already piloted and working. The most glaring and egregious example might be Ohio as documented by the Brennan Center www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res... and Common Cause www.commoncause.org/ohio/resourc....
commoncause.org
The Battle to End Gerrymandering in Ohio
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 16/08/2025
Having a hard time figuring out how this rises to criminal assault in the legal sense.... intentional act that creates reasonable apprehension of imminent harm. Those posts don't seem very imminent nor credible.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
The supreme court had the perfect opportunity to put this threat to democracy to bed in Common Cause, and took the cowardly way out.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
Sure seems like shooting the messenger.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
Space exploration has immense value all its own, far exceeding and outside having positive side technology.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
Moreover the constitution gives the president the power to grant pardons but does not even say he has to sign them. In comparison, it explicitly says he has to sign laws. It does not say what counts as a signature. Why would it need to -- so long as it is clear and permanent evidence of assent.
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michaelepley.bsky.social @michaelepley.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
I'm not sure how this works without racial profiling, since even a terry stop to inquire about status requires articulable reasonable suspicion of a crime. Pretty sure being in a park in the middle of the day does not qualify. Anyone stopped would have immediate grounds to challenge.
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