I would 100% believe that a Republican lawmaker came out as pro-child murder. It's really not a stretch anymore.

Trump's wasn't a raid. It was a normal search. They didn't break down doors and run in with guns pointed

There was a guy down the hall from me my freshman year of college who would huff Axe to get high, in addition to smoking weed. I was in his room one time and saw a blackened little oblong thing in his weed pipe. He had tried to smoke a Tylenol.

I'm talking specifically about the ones that were turned in to media frenzies. The ones at Martha's Vineyard and Kamala Harris's house. Those people were not assisted by social workers, they were lied to by political staff, and they were not sent to where they wanted to go.

If a program provides voluntary assistance to where someone is actually trying to go, then it's legal and a good thing. Helping people make transportation arrangements is normal work in social services.

Voluntary assistance to a destination of their choice isn't trafficking.

If your flight gets canceled during a layover and someone pays for your ticket on another carrier, are you being trafficked?

The trafficking from TX involved lying to people about jobs and legal assistance in specific places, and then sending them to completely different locations.

Migrant: I'm heading to New York

Mayor of NYC: This is Colorado's fault

Colorado didn't "pay people to leave", they bought tickets for migrants who got stranded in the state en route to somewhere else.

Colorado did coerce people with false information about jobs and legal assistance, and then send them someplace completely difference.

Colorado helped people get to where they were already trying to go when their transportation got cancelled in the middle of winter.

The state of CO's statement has been posted multiple times already - it clearly says that it provided voluntary travel assistance to people's destination of choice.

Believe it or not, NYC and Chicago are major destinations for immigrants.

For those unfamiliar with Denver/CO's recent situation: This is a major travel hub, and most of the migrants who arrived here in December were on their way somewhere else. During the travel clusterfuck of December '22, the state provided financial assistance for people who were basically stranded mid-journey.

https://www.colorado.gov/governor/news/9356-colorado-takes-action-assist-migrants-completing-their-journeys

>About 70% of the migrants arriving in Denver don't have Colorado as a final destination and due to weather and workforce shortage, they have been experiencing transportation cancellations.
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>...
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>To help solve this challenge, the State is partnering with Denver and nonprofits to provide intake, processing, and transportation coordination to help migrants safely reach their desired final destination. Our priority is ensuring that this is done in a culturally competent manner, in the most humane possible way, and in coordination with the receiving community.
In order to facilitate the safe and voluntary transit of people, the state is working with culturally competent navigators to ensure that each individual is voluntarily making their decision.

Then they stay.

You're asking why migrants looking for work, housing, and legal assistance would want to go the New York, largest city and metro area on the continent?

I understand how this works, but you're missing the point here that is specific to crypto: that its value is too volatile (and in the wrong direction) to be effective as collateral. It's like trying to get a HELOC while your house is on fire.

Collateral IS the risk premium. It defeats the purpose of asking for collateral if the collateral is itself so risky it has to be offset with higher interest or can only reliably back a tiny percentage of its nominal value.

We literally just witnessed one of the most spectacular financial implosions since Lehman Bros because of this magical thinking that Crypto is stable enough to back real financial assets.

But IS it $3.5 billion? Was that the value today or when it was seized? Will that be its value tomorrow? Collateral is collateral because it has definable value. If the value is uncertain, then its value as collateral would be the likely minimum liquidated dollar value. When it comes to crypto, that minimum is getting closer to $0 by the day.

It just doesn't make sense to borrow against something that's losing value continuously, that's a recipe for a margin call.

But it's not collateral if nobody wants to conduct transactions in it.

Ironic to think that countries might not have cared to expand NATO had they known how pathetic Russia's army actually was.

Makes you wonder if it's possible that the complete shitshow of Russian politics right now is itself a deterrent against coups. Like, who would actually want to take this hot turd out of Putin's hands? It would be an act of either saintly altruism or megalomaniacal delusion.

That said, who knows if Putin is actually the trigger man in such an operation. If he really wants it happen, the order could be given well in advance and require no more input from him or anyone else in a sensitive position. For all we know, Putin's death could be the contingency that greenlights a nuclear attack. And I'm very doubtful that the entire chain of command will just stop caring about Ukraine. As much as we like to think Putin is pulling everyone's strings, wars just do not happen without enthusiastic obedience all the way down.

Based on what we've seen from the Russian army so far, I expect such a weapon will absolutely be packed in with other stuff that looks similar, discovered by some luckless soldier from a backwater without working toilets, then sold on the black market in Belarus for a carton of cigarettes and a poorly forged EU-nation passport.