WATCH: Schmitt suggested Jack Smith perjured himself about a basketball game, but mixed up 2 teams

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., questioned former special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday about whether he had attended an NBA game in Atlanta in Feb. 2024, but seemingly confused two different basketball teams.

Schmitt said during a Senate Judiciary hearing he had text message evidence that Smith had been in Georgia at a game of the Atlanta Hawks, which took place the day before Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis admitted an affair with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor who was leading the case against President Donald Trump for his role in a 2020 election interference scheme in Georgia.

Smith said he couldn't recall being in Atlanta at that time, and that he definitely did not go to an Atlanta Hawks game. Schmitt briefly presented a poster board showing screenshots of text messages.

“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” Schmitt. “I will give you a second to process so you don’t perjure yourself.” The lawmaker added, "I think you've already perjured yourself."

Smith said in the hearing he recalled going to a University of Maryland women's basketball game during that timeframe, where Caitlin Clark was playing. At the time, Clark was a star player for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, a fact that Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar shared during the hearing.

"I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong," Klobuchar said in a verbal tussle with Schmitt.

I’m not sure there’s a good Community to discuss meta elements of Lemmy? So I’m posting here, this isn’t necessarily a support question (and might be apt in a Lemmy developers community or asked on matrix) but I also think it’d be valuable to get input from a larger pool of Lemmy users.

Last night I stumbled on a dead instance that have links somehow through the fediverse still being able to read the body text but with dead images link and whatnot due to being served from a now defunct instance. And that inspired me to make this post, curious what admins are supposed to do to try and make Lemmy more sustainable to host/incentivize instances to stay up (even if their admin is kind of a jerk or whatever).The admin of this instance said a couple years ago he was shutting down the domain and was really angry to be hosting a Lemmy instance with like 250k visitors or whatever his metric was. He had a donate button but was not making enough to recoup the hosting costs and basically made inflamed comments about the users giving him a pittance of $60/month.

I’ve tried to host my own Lemmy instance and did for about a year but I had specific goals in mind to make a local community to get local businesses off the other US social platforms. I didn’t find much time or effort making this a reality, just me and few friends had accounts on the instance so I pulled the plug.

But it made me curious if Lemmy devs or community have some sense of what would be a good way to help admins fund their hosting costs? I’d be against ads/trackers, promoted content as they erode privacy and the spirit of the fediverse imo. But what would the community’s thoughts on having some sort of payment system baked in where it’s kind of gimmicky but translates to $ for server costs?

I personally don’t pay for “free” things, which is coincidentally how most people operate; But smaller, humanity defining initiatives like the fediverse subverting US tech oligarchy might be a decent cause to toss a few dollars at every month via some sort of subscription with some value add. Like Reddit has awards you can give other users, maybe something like that? I’d love to hear what others think!

Unexplained fires are a matter of the courts!

Taken from Reddit comment thread in July:

Were you upset when people Googled instead of getting in their horse and buggy to journey to the library to consult the scrolls on topics instead, too?

Things should be arbitrarily difficult. We shouldn't use technology.

As a matter of fact, look at how little effort you're using to communicate. You should be writing hand-written letters to my house with your responses, and summoning a runner to deliver them to me. How fucking lazy, what absolute slop.

It is enraging to see people with such a lack of self-awareness, a lack of education, a lack of understanding the context of history and how this relates to past events. It really just comes down to people not liking change, it scares their small little brains, scares their worldview. So they make snarky, passive-agressive comments where they can, or if they're more outwardly brave, they make the daring sacrifice to put NIMBY signs about datacenters in their backyard.

Change is coming. Technology is coming. It's ironic, because you didn't mind it up to a certain point -- just not any further, because you draw an arbitrary line. That's not being intellectually consistent or honest, that's being emotional and deceptive.

I guess calculators are slop machines too. I guess math is only valuable if we do long division by hand, huh?

• Written from my own brain, with my own fingers, on a keyboard slop machine; sorry for not using a quill and parchment, hopefully it's not too "slop" for you, and took enough "effort" to arbitrarily be valuable.