Programmer, Composer, Oboist, coder of Java audio (AudioCue), student of PsychoAcoustics. UC Berkeley, BA. Music Here for politics, insights, discussions.

Joined September 2016
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
This irresponsible & dangerous settlement that Donald Trump’s DOJ agreed to will cost American lives because it effectively legalizes machine guns. As a result, every community is less safe. I am not backing down from this fight, not from gun lobbyists, not from MAGA extremists. #StopGunViolence
Exclusive: The Trump Administration has decided to permit the sale of devices that enable regular firearms to fire like machine guns, a move that one person familiar with the matter said was “by far the most dangerous thing this administration has done” on gun policy. Two people familiar with the matter told NBC News the Justice Department has signed a settlement in a lawsuit brought by the National Association for Gun Rights. The lawsuit challenged an ATF rule banning “forced reset triggers” –- devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapid burst of bullets. The settlement has not previously been reported. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. The move comes after a majority on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to side with the gun rights group during oral arguments on the case in December, citing a Supreme Court decision last year that another rapid-fire device, called a bump stock, did not convert firearms into illegal machine guns. There have been several lawsuits over the forced reset triggers ban, and lower court judges had issued rulings that came down on both sides of the question. Assuming the Fifth Circuit ruled against the ban, the issue likely would have ended up in front of the Supreme Court. But now the Trump administration is abandoning the effort to restrict the devices. “We were going to win this,” said a former senior ATF official. “These things are not like bump stocks.” The Justice Department declined to comment. President Trump’s White House counsel. David Warrington, is a co-founder of the National Association for Gun Rights and was counsel of record the lawsuit until he left to join the Trump Administration. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his role, if any, in the settlement discussions. The Trump Administration has celebrated its protection of gun rights. Under the settlement, the Justice Department “will bind itself, in perpetuity, not to enforce the machinegun ban against any device that functions like forced reset triggers,” one person familiar with the settlement told NBC News. “ATF must also return thousands of seized forced reset triggers to their previous owners. In other words, machine guns will soon become legal to possess and purchase, and the federal government will flood the market with these devices.” Some of the most popular versions of these devices are made by a company called Rare Breed Triggers, which was sued by the ATF in a separate case. That case will have to be dropped as part of the settlement, one of the people familiar with it said. Proponents of the devices dispute that they turn regular guns into machine guns. But the ATF determined that the devices allow a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle to fire as fast as a military M-16 in automatic mode, according to court records. Since the forced reset trigger devices will not be considered firearms, they can be purchased anonymously, without a background or age check. Machine guns have been mostly illegal in the United States since 1934, a notion that even gun rights groups have come to accept. The effort to ban forced reset triggers originated in the first Trump Administration, at the same time the ATF also banned bump stocks, another device that enabled rapid trigger pulls that mimic the firing rate of a machine gun. The gunman in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting killed 58 people while firing from his hotel room window using bump stocks. The Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 margin last year that the bump stock ban was unlawful after the majority concluded the devices did not meet the definition of a machine gun because they didn’t allow for automatic fire with the single pull of a trigger.
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
They received presidential pardons for this ‘message’ and it wasn’t seashells on a beach.
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
26 Apr 2025
Interesting. German Intelligence have just arrested two suspected Russia spies, they had US Sec Defence Hegseth's private phone number in their mobiles. (Der Speigel)
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My mother (when I was a teen) bought a house on a teacher's salary in the early 1970's. If only we still owned it! It's now worth a couple million: a 3-story Victorian in SF. Real estate appreciates. EM is showing his true colors.
Did social media rot Elon’s brain? Or does he know exactly what he is doing with posts like this?
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
"Pelosi says she spoke to Biden and Soros within the last hour" is a sentence that would have started an impeachment inquiry.
Johnson says he spoke to trump and musk within the last hour.
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
it would, so would be building up a media not controlled by billionaires thenation.com/article/societ… The other side has figured out there is not much difference between media and political campaigns. One day our side might figure it out.
Public funding of elections would do that
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
Sometimes some people need a creme pie in the face.
🚨NEW: Vivek Ramaswamay, an incoming member of the Trump Administration, has announced plans to cut $120 billion in Veterans health care. RETWEET to let the American people know what they voted for!
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I hope Europe is able to help Ukraine. It seems we (USA) are likely to fail as allies.
11 Nov 2024
In 2019, Trump tried to blackmail Ukraine's Zelenskyy to produce dirt on the Biden family. Zelenskyy courageously refused. Trump was rightly impeached for this abuse of office. Trump's actions now are motivated by revenge for past defiance. There's no grand "strategy."
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
I hate to put a lot of highly paid pundits out of business, but look at this f**king graph

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Good thread. There has been a lack of focus on the difference between the solutions offered to problems pointed out by Trump. Trump vs Harris was allowed to become "yes vs no inflated prices are a problem" rather than comparing Trump's awful tariff solution to DEM solutions.
I keep seeing the argument that Democrats abandoned the white working class, but from a policy perspective most of Biden’s legislative accomplishments benefited the working class. The sad reality for Dems is that “doing things” simply doesn’t translate into electoral benefits
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
I keep seeing the argument that Democrats abandoned the white working class, but from a policy perspective most of Biden’s legislative accomplishments benefited the working class. The sad reality for Dems is that “doing things” simply doesn’t translate into electoral benefits
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
But that would ruin the fun. As it stands, Trump can give special exemptions in exchange for political favors and payoffs.
If we're going to talk about tariffs as a potential major source of federal revenue, then let's explicitly limit the president's unilateral authority to raise them and give that power solely to Congress.
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
Mike Pence: “The American people deserve to know that President Trump and his advisers didn't just ask me to pause, they asked me to reject votes, to return votes, essentially to overturn the election.” (2023) x.com/michael81758766/status…

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Phil Freihofner retweeted
28 Oct 2024
"The best argument for Vice President Harris is that she's not Trump." @davidfrum answers the question: what's the best case for supporting Kamala Harris for president? podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcas…
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
Dr. Phil's great-grandfather, Matthew Strickland, was from Pickens County, Alabama, where his relatives were significant slaveowners. In 1860, the Alabama Stricklands owned 96 human beings to do their hard work.
27 Oct 2024
Dr. Phil: This country was built on hard work.. Not on DEI
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Pushing lies to promote fear, stoke racism is despicable. We've come a long way towards learning to get along, by helping one another. Obstructing this by creating bogus, race-based fear where there was little or none is a calculated act that hurts everyone, is doubly immoral.
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
Especially when that one dude held up the cross and started yelling that Kamala is the Antichrist and Satan. That was pretty spooky.
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"Ah the Norwegian Blue, beautiful plumage." "The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead." "No it's not, it's resting." The link is like watching a Monty Python sketch. Incredible. Vance/Trump have a good chance to run the country? How did they rise so far?
TAPPER: "He wants to use the military to go after the enemy within." VANCE: "There's the game that you're playing." TAPPER: "I’m not playing a game."
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
TAPPER: "He wants to use the military to go after the enemy within." VANCE: "There's the game that you're playing." TAPPER: "I’m not playing a game."
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Phil Freihofner retweeted
Former @washingtonpost executive editor @PostBaron said the paper's failure to endorse in the presidential is "cowardice" and democracy is its "casualty." I agree. Rather than hurt the Post journalists, I cancelled my @amazonprimenow membership. Done. newsweek.com/election-endors…
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