Daniel @daniel@campduffel.social

Holy moly!! Lightning caught mid-strike as it hits a tree. ⚡ 🌳 😲

I hope the photographer was using an extremely long-range telephoto lens, as lightning will travel along root systems, which can extend some distance away depending upon the type of tree.

Vertical photograph; click to see the full strike and whole tree (or what's left of it).

Photographer — Debbie Parker of West Virginia.

#Photography #Tree #LightningStrike #AmazingNature

#NoAgendaBannedCamp

When government crafts an Internet regulation bill, more often than not, the bill shows how ignorant most politicians are about how the internet works.
This is not the case with Senate Bill 686.
If you read it, you will see that this bill is unlike anything weve seen before.
In the past, National Security included the preservation of Constitutional rights. That is going away. These people have one goal. Control. Your rights and freedoms are in the way.
This thing had to have been written by tech experts. Evil fascist tech experts. It is designed to obliterate all freedom on the internet. Specifically, and intentionally. That freedom is viewed as a "National Security threat".
These people are increasingly seeing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as a "threat to National Security". And we need to understand that when they say "National Security", they mean "ability to control EVERYTHING"
This bill places everything, and I do mean everything, under the jurisdiction of unelected, "boards" , "panels of experts", and intel agencies.
Defeating this bill is not enough. The people who created it need to be routed out.

I have not been seeing nearly enough discussion about what is poised to be one of the most dangerous bills to move through congress this decade.

For those not in the know, Senate Bill 686 The RESTRICT Act in its current form grants sweeping authority for the U.S. government to prosecute, fine, and imprison any person whom--among *many* other things--uses a VPN to access any "app" operated by a "foreign adversary" of the U.S.

The wording of the bill is so broad and vague that it can criminalize a wide range of technologies, and potentially even ensnaring U.S. citizens for conspiracy simply on the basis that they use a VPN that the US gov. can't snoop on and see what they're doing with it.

Let that sink in--you could face a minimum of 20 years in prison and from $250,000 up to $1,000,000 in fines, just for protecting your online privacy with a VPN, and your only recourse is to appeal in the D.C. circuit court.

The bill's sponsors pinky promise it won't be used for that, and it's only meant to catch foreign actors engaged in subterfuge etc, but the language to back that claim just isn't there. The anti-circumvention penalties and restrictions essentially put at risk anyone whom engages in any activity using these technologies due to the fact that if the technology is working, then the government can't see what you're using it for, and therefore simply using it could be used as the basis for charges of conspiracy to circumvent.

It is abundantly clear that if this passes, it can and will eventually be used to target anyone engaging in activities the government or its corporate sponsors don't like.

This isn't a slippery slope. It's a lubed up vertical waterslide straight to weaponizing the acting regime's list of potential "threats" against citizens engaging in protected speech.

Don't just write your representatives. Call them. Demand that they oppose this bill, and vow to actively campaign for their opponents if they won't.

If this passes, then ultimately no speech is protected in the U.S. It is 100% unconstitutional, but do you really trust our current courts stacked with political operatives to shoot it down?

Read the bill and see related info here:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686

Go here to find your representatives and how to contact them about it:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/s686/comment

Here's more reading on the bill and how it affects us:

https://reason.com/2023/03/29/could-the-restrict-act-criminalize-the-use-of-vpns/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3ddb/restrict-act-insanely-broad-ban-tiktok-vpns

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/restrict-act-tiktok-jail-time-vpn/

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1497307-the-restrict-act-supposedly-to-ban-tik-tok-will-probably-not-put-you-in-jail-for-using-a-vpn-it-mentions-even-very-futuristic-technologies/

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