Randall Stephens

@ConnorMEwing Thanks for these. PPE guy myself and looking for antebellum political economy work, which seems pretty thin of late. But I appreciate the response(s)!

@ProfXRPIsIn And all grad students should know about David Brian Robertson's APD bibliography: umsl.edu/~robertsondb/s…

James Madison's weak little voice robbed us of so much good archival material.

@ConnorMEwing A grad student asked me for the best recent APD work on antebellum constitutional development.

@ConnorMEwing Hey, APD guy: do you know anyone who teaches a pre-Civil War APD course?

@HQNewsNow Oh, so *that* is what the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares is all about: distinguishing between the fake votes and the real ones.

Trump: If we had Jesus Christ come down and count the votes, I would've won California because I do great with Hispanics

Unpopular opinion: XRP is going to explode if/when the Clarity Act **fails** to earn passage; it would exacerbate XRP’s legal and institutional advantage over other cryptos. Couple that with its operational advantages over BTC and ETH (cheaper and quicker txs) and you have 🚀

@x_MrCrimbo_x @uptownsaul Follow @heythereRich on the degree to which XRP is already being treated as within a legal framework by gov’t institutions

@ProfXRPIsIn @uptownsaul So banks and institutions will just start using XRP without a legal framework? It’s not so much XRP I’m worried about as it is the entire use case surrounding it

Really anticipating a moment where XRP escapes its proverbial gravitational pull. It needs a booster for that. Not sure when tho.

@uptownsaul @x_MrCrimbo_x Exactly. Non-passage of the Clarity Act may trigger the extinction-level-event for 99% of crypto that Brad Garlinghouse alluded to several years ago. But a token with full legal clarity need not worry about such an event.

@x_MrCrimbo_x You think those items slow down XRP adoption?

@PAHoyeck @WeirdMedieval Stanley Lombardo translation never gets the positive attention it deserves.

@WeirdMedieval I love the Heaney translation, even though it's more of a retelling. So vivid and readable. Amusingly, it has that in common with Wilson.

Emily Wilson Odyssey translation discourse has got me thinking that people on here would have dismembered Seamus Heaney for starting his Beowulf with “So.”

@PAHoyeck Rolling Stones tickets.

Before sliced bread was invented, what did we even use as a standard of value?

@EkoLovesYou Nevermind, just saw that it’s been added to Amazon!

@EkoLovesYou Just got the paperback in the mail, thank you! (Will there be an audiobook version with the same AI reader as the first two? I am rather fond of the “man.”)

sending preview chapters of After Jesus this week, the final book in my kingdom within trilogy. reply for a peek.

@13thBen @ChadSteingraber Zero chance that the House passes it unamended. What, the banking lobby is suddenly going to eschew pressuring vulnerable MCs who need money for their re-election campaigns?

@ChadSteingraber That's HIGHLY optimistic. Even GENIUS Act took 4 weeks from committee to floor vote, and that was far less complex. Im betting at least that long for this one. Likely 6 to 9 weeks for reconciliation alone. I think there's a single digit chance at best this is done by July 4th.

June 18th is the perfect date. It's enough time to let the Senate work out final details and get it over to the House for a final vote. Then on July 4th. We would have the Law.✅🏁

@ConnorMEwing TL;DR (Hartz, not Ewing): Liberalism = constant, feudalism = absent, 1st-year PhD students = exasperated.

Perhaps the best example of this is Louis Hartz’s enormously influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955)—which didn’t bother to define liberalism.

@PaulRDeHart Agreed. Unfortunately, my first thought upon reading Mary Ann Glendon's *Rights Talk* was, "this is just warmed-over Sandel." Fine, but not original.

The first edition of Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent still provides the best account, analysis, and critique of liberalism. And Sandel persistently presents the American framers as republicans with grounding in classical political philosophy. Sandel's analysis in the first edition (much of which Harvard / Belknap excises from the second edition) is far superior as an account and critique of liberalism to anything produced in the last 10-15 years. Sandel better understands liberalism and its problems and therefore why the American founders were not liberals than any analysis and critique of liberalism and of the American order in the last decade plus. Also, the critique of the American regime as liberal hasn't gotten beyond Louis Hartz's 1955 The Liberal Tradition in America--the apotheosis of the liberal interpretation of the American founding but published just as the liberal interpretation of the regime was beginning to collapse among serious historians.

@daniel_dsj2110 Matthew Stewart’s *Nature’s God*

In your opinion, what is the best intellectual history book written since 2000.

@heythereRich Do you have any sense of the precise Japan 30Y rate that will ultimately break the carry trade?

Bonds are imploding. Japan 30Y — all-time high yield. US 30Y — 5%. The old system is cracking. Silently, 45 institutional firms filed 13F disclosures THIS WEEK holding XRP. This isn’t coincidence. This is positioning for what’s next. Renaissance. US Bancorp. National Bank of Canada. Captrust. EP Wealth. Sloy-Dahl $1.3M. Iron Bridge $5.5M. These aren’t degens. These are fiduciaries. DeFi Technologies already held XRP. This quarter they started lending it — $15.9M out on loan. That’s activation. CLARITY Act passed committee. RLUSD/XRP — $3M volume in 24hrs on the XRPL DEX. Ripple lending $250M to Gemini — RLUSD collateral required. Stablecoins ARE the settlement layer. When the old system needs new buyers for its debt — the infrastructure that moves that value becomes everything. 45 firms this week figured that out.

@PAHoyeck Entering an elevator before allowing others to exit.

Behaviours that should be punishable by law: • Playing media out loud in public • Talking at the movie theatre • Writing in library books • Standing on the left on the escalator What am I missing?

@vincent_vancode You are forgetting about this little thing called the House of Representatives.

Woohoo... Voting completed and markup passed. Up next: full senate vote, then sign into lay 4th July (current chance about 30%, but claiming). Oct 2026 looking like about 85% though. But I think clearing the banking committee is a HUGE milestone signally a change. I am very bullish. We will see a pullback, as people take profits from the current surge. And arbitrage bots flattering out peaky gains and liquidating longs, nothing new. But, the behind the scenes XRP, you might see more adoption, those anticipated XRPL LPs kicking in, as adoption grows with confident institutions. Let's homecwe have a moderate saw tooth upward trend from now until end of year.

@uptownsaul @Bird_XRPL People really are underestimating the gauntlet still to be run. If the House eventually gets it and makes any amendments, we’ll need a conference committee. I think the bill is DOA if we need one.

@Bird_XRPL It's just a committe vote, Birdman.

Good night from Asia! Today is Thursday and Today is Clarity Act day. HUGE.

@blockniahc @dom_kwok Um…why is everyone forgetting about the House?

@dom_kwok 2 votes away fr

THE CLARITY ACT IS ONE VOTE AWAY