#Elon musk now controls all the country’s money

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

☠️☠️☠️

He can now turn the money flow for all government payouts on or off at will. All the money disbursements from all Federal Departments and agencies run through him. He can make any payment in any amount to whoever he chooses for any reason. He can block any payment to anyone at anytime, whether it be a social security payment to a citizen or money owed to a federal contractor. He can shut off payments to any department or branch of the government he chooses. He can put individuals, departments, or contractors on permanent np pay lists.

He can shut off money to your local school department or shut off all monies earmarked for your entire state. If he doesn’t like what an agency is doing he can immediately shut it down. If an individual citizen or individual government employee runs afoul of him he can cut off their checks. Conversely he can reward any agency or any private or public figure he chooses.

I don’t think anyone grasps how serious this is. He literally has control over the entire government and everyone and everything dependent on it. A madman hopped up on Ketamine now can dictate everything to every individual, agency, municipality, state, or elected official in the country.

Donald Trump has made Elon Musk the Dictator of America and we are all at his mercy. This is highly illegal and even the courts told Trump he could not stop federal payments or re-allocate money already designated by Congress there is nobody to stop him. He literally seized the spigot that controls the flow of money. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the world. Two deranged drug addicted billionaires can destroy anyone and anyone through the power of the government purse. This is unprecedented and we are no longer a true democracy but a fascist oligarchy.

The media needs to make clear to the public just what the implications of this are but so far few are even mentioning it.

[bromantically]

Transcript:

"Thanks very much for joining me. We are living in a dangerous and unprecedented moment in American history, and I'm getting a lot of calls from people who are not only upset about what's happening, but are wondering how we best go forward. Well let me tell you, we've got to be smart. We've got to be organized and we've got to fight back. This is not a time for wallowing in despair and hiding under the covers. The stakes are just too high. We are not just fighting for ourselves. We're fighting for our kids, for future generations. We're fighting for the future of this planet. In the first two weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump defied the Constitution by ending birthright citizenship, fired government watchdogs, allowed drilling along our coastlines, pen violent insurrectionist, suspended all foreign aid, and tried to cut off virtually all federal funding. So how do we go forward? First to be effective, we've got to understand what in fact is happening around us right now. Second, we need a short-term strategy. What do we do tomorrow and the next day and the day after that? Third we need a long-term strategy. How do we build a movement that gains political power?

Here is, in my view, a brief overview as to what is happening under Trump. Most importantly, the move toward oligarchy in our country, government run by the rich and the powerful is proceeding rapidly. And it's not being done secretly. A little over a week ago, Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, standing right behind them with the three richest men in the world, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Men who have become over 200 billion dollars richer since Trump was elected, and who now are worth almost a trillion dollars more money than the bottom half of American society, 170 million people.

But it's not just oligarchy that we should worry about. This country under Trump is moving rapidly toward authoritarianism. Just a few examples: In violation of the Constitution and federal law, Trump attempted the other day to suspend all federal grants and loans. That means he blocked funding for Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, homeless veterans, etc., etc.. Tens of millions of Americans, some of the most vulnerable people in our country, were impacted by that decision. Fortunately, Americans all across the country stood up in outrage and said, no, no. And with the help of the courts, much, but not all of that freeze and funding was rescinded. You may have noticed that Trump is intimidating the media with lawsuits against ABC, CBS, Meta, and the Des Moines Register. If Trump does not like what media reports, he is threatening them with lawsuits, undermining the First Amendment. That is a direct movement toward authoritarianism.

Now, that's a very broad overview of where we are today. In terms of short-term strategy, we've got to mobilize as strongly as we can against Trump's dangerous proposals. And let me just say this, importantly, yes, the Republicans control the House and the Senate. But do not forget, their majorities are small. In the House, a body of 435 members, they have a four vote majority. That is a razor thin margin. And their legislation can be defeated. There are a number of Republicans out there who won in Democratic districts by small margins. So let me tell you, these guys do respond to phone calls and emails. So if there's a piece of legislation you disagree with, get on the phone and call the capital switchboard at 202-224-2131. And what is some of that legislation that we should be concerned about? Republicans right now are working on what's called a budget reconciliation bill. The most important element, which would be a massive tax break for the wealthy to be paid for by large cuts in Medicaid and other programs that working families and low income people desperately need. At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, when so many of our people are struggling to put food on the table, we must not savage programs for working families to provide huge tax breaks for billionaires. We must vigorously oppose Trump's efforts at mass deportation. Yes, we must strengthen our borders. Yes, we should deport people who have been convicted of serious crimes. But no, no, we cannot destroy families who have lived and worked in this country peacefully for decades.

Not only is Trump's Mass deportation program immoral, it will have a severely negative impact on our economy. As all of you know, we are seeing extreme weather disturbances and devastation in our country and all over the world related to climate change. Think about LA. Think about North Carolina. We must vigorously oppose this absurd drill baby drill doctrine, which will only make an incredibly dangerous climate situation even worse. And those are just a few of the issues that are coming down the pipe. But we cannot just play defense. We have got to be on the offense. Please never forget that the agenda that we are fighting for is widely supported, widely supported by working families all across this country, and we must continue to fight for that agenda. The American people do not want cuts to Medicaid and the privatization of Medicare. They understand that healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. We must continue the struggle for Medicare for All so that every American has the health care that he or she needs. That's not a radical idea. That's what Americans want. Federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage. We must raise that minimum wage to a living wage. At least $17 an hour. If you work 40 hours a week in America, you should not be living in poverty.

All over this country, we have a major housing crisis. And it's not just 800,000 who are homeless. It is millions of working families who are spending 40, 50, 60% of their limited incomes on housing. Instead of spending almost a trillion dollars a year on a wasteful and bloated Pentagon budget, we have got to build millions of units of low income and affordable housing. And when we do that, we put large numbers of people to work at good paying union jobs. I could go on and on, but let me conclude by saying this: The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. If we stand together and oppose right-wing efforts to divide us up by our race, by our religion, our sexual orientation, or where we were born, if we stand together, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish. Bottom line, let us go forward and fight for a government and an economy that works for all, not just a few. We simply do not have the luxury of moaning and groaning. We have got to stand up and fight back. We can do it. Let's go forward together. Thank you very much."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pinkslump linkdump

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

We're less than a month into 2025 and I'm already overwhelmed by my backlog of links! Herewith, then, is my 25th linkdump post, a grab-bag of artful transitions between miscellaneous subjects. Here's the previous 24:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Last week's big tech event was the Supreme Court giving the go-ahead for Congress to ban Tiktok, because somehow the First Amendment allows the US government to shut down a speech forum if they don't like the content of its messages. From now on, only Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk and Tim Cook and the faceless mere centimillionaires running companies like Match.com will be able to directly harvest Americans' most private, sensitive kompromat. The People's Liberation Army will have to build their dossiers on Americans' lives the old fashioned way: by paying unregulated data-brokers who will sell any fact about you to anyone and who know everything about everyone.

After all, the reason the American market matters so much to Tiktok is that America is the only rich, populous country in the world without a federal privacy law. That's why an American is the most valuable user an ad-tech company can acquire. Keep your wealthy Norwegians: sure, they're saturated in oil money and thus fat prizes for ad-targeting, but they're also protected by the GDPR.

If you're an American (or anyone else, for that matter) who wants to use Tiktok without being spied on, Privacysafe has you covered: their Sticktock tool is a private, alternative, web-based front-end for Tiktok, with optional Tor VPN tunnelling:

https://sticktock.com/

As Privacysafe's Sean O'Brien explains, Sticktock is an free/open utility that's dead easy to use. Just change the URL of any Tiktok video from tiktok.com/whatever to sticktock.com/whatever, and you're have a private viewing experience that easily penetrates the Great Firewall of America:

https://bitsontape.com/p/sticktock-share-tiktok-videos

O'Brien – founder of the Yale Privacy Lab – writes that Privacysafe built this because they wanted to help Americans continue to access the great volume of speech on Tiktok, and because they knew that Americans would be using ad-supported, spyware-riddled VPNs to evade the Great Firewall.

Sticktock is a great hack, but it only defends your privacy while you're using Tiktok. For other social media, you'll need to try something else. For example, Mark Zuckerberg is the last person you want to entrust with your data, and always has been. Never forget that as soon as Zuckerberg's Harvard-based nonconsensual fuckability-rating service TheFacebook was up and running, he started offering copies of all his users' data as a flex to his buds:

Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Just ask I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

What? How'd you manage that one?

People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me" Dumb fucks

Don't be a dumb fuck! Lots of people can't manage to leave Meta platforms because they love the people there more than they hate Mark Zuckerberg, and Zuck knows it, which is why he keeps turning the screws on his users. That doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. Over the years, various law enforcement and regulatory agencies have forced Meta to add privacy controls to its services, and though the company has implemented these as a baroque maze of twisty little malicious compliance passages, all alike, it is possible to lock down your data if you try hard enough. My EFF colleague Lena Cohen has a walkthrough of Meta's privacy settings, AKA the world's worst dungeon crawler, which will see you through safely:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/mad-meta-dont-let-them-collect-and-monetize-your-personal-data

If this kind of thing interests you, you can spend a whole weekend learning about it, chilling and partying with some of the most fun-loving, fascinating weirdos in hackerdom this summer. 2600 magazine's semi-annual Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) con – now in its 31st year! – has gone annual, and they're pre-selling tickets at a freakishly low earlybird rate:

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope_16

I keynoted HOPE last year and it was every bit as much fun as I remembered. Sure, DEF CON is amazing, but you can't really call a 40,000-person gathering in the Las Vegas Convention Center "intimate." HOPE is a homebrew, homely, cheap, cheerful and delightfully anarchic hacker con with deep history and great people.

Speaking of weird ancient history, my pal Ada Palmer – sf writer, librettist, singer, and Renaissance historian – blew my mind this week with her article on the tower-cities of medieval proto-Italy during the Guelph-Ghibelline wars (1125-1392):

https://www.exurbe.com/the-lost-towers-of-the-guelph-ghibelline-wars/

Once upon a time, Italian city-states were forested with tall towers, like miniature Manhattans. Rich families built these stone towers as a show of wealth and a source of power, since the stone towers were taller than nearby homes and far less flammable, so the plutes of the day could drop flaming garbage on their neighbors, burn them out, and emerge triumphant. This ended with cities like Florence banning towers above a certain height, forcing their warring oligarchs to decapitate their fortresses down to compliance levels.

The images need to be seen to be believed. Ada's got a new book about this, Inventing the Renaissance, "which shows how the supposed difference between a bad 'Dark Ages' and a Renaissance 'golden age' is 100% propaganda, but fascinating propaganda with a deep history":

https://www.adapalmer.com/publication/inventing-the-renaissance/

Palmer is one of the most fascinating writers, thinkers, performers, and speakers I know. This is the book for every history nerd in your life, and also a magic artifact with the power to transform normies into history nerds.

Speaking of scholars finding nontraditional ways to do technical communication to the general public: this week, 404 Media's Emmanuel Maiberg reported on Zara Dar, an OnlyFans model who's racked up millions of Pornhub views for videos that consist of detailed, accessible, fully clothed explanations of machine learning:

https://www.404media.co/why-this-onlyfans-model-posts-machine-learning-explainers-to-pornhub/

Dar's videos cover a variety of poorly understood, highly salient mathematical subjects, like this introduction to probability theory:

https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=65cfae54411b9

Dar's got a pretty straightforward reason for posting her explainers to Pornhub – it pays about 300% more than Youtube does for the same amount of viewership ($1,000 per million views vs. Youtube's $340 per million). But it comes at a cost. Other platforms like Linkedin have banned her for discussing the economics of posting videos to Pornhub, without explanation or appeal.

The reason Dar's in the news now is that the Supremes didn't merely ban Tiktok this week, they also heard arguments about the red state "age verification" laws, in which Alito asked if looking at Pornhub was analogous to reading Playboy, which was famous for interleaving softcore pornography with hefty, serious reporting and editorials. Can you really look at Pornhub "just for the articles?" Seems like the answer is a resounding yes.

These "age verification" laws are jaw-droppingly reckless. Red state lawmakers – and ALEC, the dark money org that wrote the model legislation they're pushing – envision a system where each person who looks at porn is affirmatively identified as a named adult, and where that identity information is indefinitely retained. The most common way of gating services to adults is to demand a credit-card, which means that these weirdos want to create highly leakable databases of every one of their constituents' sexual kinks, which can be sorted by net worth by would-be blackmailers. Remember, any data you collect will probably leak, and any data you retain will almost certainly leak. Good times ahead.

Of course, it wasn't all gruesome policy malpratice this week. In the final days of the Biden admin, antitrust enforcers from multiple agencies launched a flurry of investigations, cases, judgments, fines and sanctions against companies that prey on the American public. The FTC went after John Deere for its repair monopoly:

https://www.404media.co/ftc-sues-john-deere-over-its-repair-monopoly/

And the FTC sued to end a system of secret noncompetes, where employers illegally collude not to hire each others' workers, something the workers are never told:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-01-17-building-service-workers-ftc-stops-secret-no-hire-agreements/

That's just for starters. Matt Stoller rounds up the "full Tony Montana" of last-week enforcement actions undertaken by Biden's best appointees, an all-out assault on pharmacy benefit managers (most notably Unitedhealth), junk-fee-charging corporate landlords, Capitol One, Cash App, rent-rigging landlords, Southwest Airlines, anesthesia monopolists, Experian and Equifax, private equity plunderers, lootbox-peddling video game companies, AI companies, Honda finance, politically motivatedd debanking, Google, Elon Musk, Microsoft, Hino Motors, and more:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/out-with-a-bang-enforcers-go-after

This is all amazing, but also frustrating, as it exemplifies what David Dayen rightly calls the "essential incoherence" of Bidenism, a political philosophy that sought "balance" between different Democratic Party factions by delegating enormous power to people with opposing goals, then unleashing them to work at cross-purposes:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-17-essential-incoherence-end-of-biden-presidency/

What to make of a president whose final address warned the American public of an out-of-control oligarchy, but whose final executive order was a giant giveaway to the biggest AI companies – and their oligarch owners?

And what to make of a president who oversaw a genocide in Gaza, fronting for an Israeli regime that made a fool of him at every turn, laughed at his "red lines," and demanded (and received) fresh shipments of arms even as they campaigned for Trump?

This had nothing to do with sound electoral politics. The vast majority of Americans supported a cease-fire in Gaza, and have done virtually since the beginning of the bombings. Harris – who reportedly agreed not to criticize Biden's record as a condition of Biden stepping aside – made it clear that she would ignore voters' horror at the mass killing. Voters responded by staying home in droves: 19 million 2020 Biden voters simply refused to cast a ballot in 2024:

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/kamala-harris-gaza-israel-biden-election-poll

A Yougov poll showed that 29% of the "non-voters" who turned out for Biden in 2020 refused to vote at all in 2024 because of Biden's support for genocide in Gaza. Polling during the campaign made it clear that Harris would improve her electoral chances by promising a cease-fire, but that was a bridge too far, even during an election "where democracy was on the ballot."

America is famously a country where legislators and leaders ignore the policy preferences of voters and give elites everything they want. In that world, not voting – even when "democracy is on the ballot" – makes a lot of sense:

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-theories-of-american-politics-explained

But Biden did do some popular things that elites hated – fighting corporate power, price-fixing, rent-gouging, and other forms of predatory business conduct. The "compromise" the Biden administration made with its elite backers was to call as little attention as possible to all this stuff. The Biden admin did more on antitrust in four years than all the preceding administrations of the previous forty years, combined. Just last week, the Biden admin did more on antitrust than any presidential administration did in a four-year term. And yet, they barely whispered about it.

This is a great example of what Anat Shenker-Osorio calls "Pizzaburger politics." Imagine half your family wants pizza for dinner and the other half wants burgers, so you make a disgusting pizzaburger that makes them all equally miserable and claim that everyone being mad at you is proof that you've been "fair":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

Handing billionaires a bunch of voter-enraging gimmes and sucking up to ghouls like Liz Cheney didn't buy the loyalty of America's tower-owning, neighbor-incinerating princelings. They gave millions to Trump, whom they knew would hand them billions in tax breaks and a license to loot the country. Worse, this pizzaburger strategy caused voters to stay home by the millions, convinced that they couldn't trust Biden or Harris.

We're heading into another four years of planet-incinerating, human-rights-destroying, immigrant-pogroming, mass-imprisoning misery. The incoming dictator has promised to throw all kinds of people in prison, so maybe we should learn a little about how America's prolific, crowded, nightmare penitentiaries actually function.

David Skarbek is a political scientist who studies prison gangs. In a fascinating interview with Asterisk, he describes the forces that led to the rise of race-segregated prison gangs, from virtually nonexistent for 100 years to ubiquitous:

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/why-we-have-prison-gangs

It boils down to this: in small prisons, it's possible to enforce a social code among prisoners that maintains order. Each prisoner can keep track of the trustworthiness of others and of the safety risks they pose. But once we started building larger prisons, this system broke down, requiring hierarchical, authoritarian structures – gangs – to keep people in line. Gangs are brutal, but they also keep the peace, regulating financial disputes, contraband trade, and the use of violence.

Skarbek thinks that building more, smaller prisons would eliminate gangs – as would increasing the number of guards, which would give the institution the capacity to step in and fill the regulatory void filled by gangs. He's not saying prison gangs are good, but he's explaining why they emerged and why they have remained.

There is no pleasure quite like reading the work of top-flight scholars explaining their areas of research. That's why I subscribe to the RSS feed for Matthew Green's blog about cryptography. Green is a great explainer who works in fascinating areas.

In his latest post, Green talks about the way that AI interacts with end-to-end encryption. After decades of rising catastrophes, mobile device makers and cloud providers finally standardized on end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, meaning that your data in the cloud is so scrambled that the cloud provider can't even guess about what it is (which means that if the cloud gets breached, none of that data can be read by hackers or sold on the darknet):

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2025/01/17/lets-talk-about-ai-and-end-to-end-encryption/

This works great for cloud storage, but it poses a serious impediment to cloud computing. You can't offload computationally intensive tasks onto someone else's giant data-center if you scramble your data so thoroughly that it can't be read or understood by the computers there. This is especially salient when we're talking about "AI," which involves a lot of data-processing that exceeds the capacity of your phone or laptop.

This presents a serious privacy risk, because it implies that AI companies are going to abandon the idea of end-to-end cloud encryption. They'll need the capacity to decrypt (and possibly retain) all the data you ask their "AI" services to munge in some way. Green uses this conundrum to discuss Apple's solution to this: a "trusted computing" server environment.

I've been fascinated (and horrified) by Trusted Computing ever since a group of Microsoft engineers came by EFF in 2002 to explain their plans for something called "Next Generation Secure Computing Base" (AKA "Palladium") to us:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The idea was to put a second, secure computer into every device. This "trusted platform module" (or, sometimes, "technical protection measure") would be tamper-evident and tamper-resistant, contain some factory-installed, non-modifiable cryptographic signing keys, and run an extremely limited set of programs. It would observe and record the code your computer ran, from the bootloader to the OS and on up.

Other computers elsewhere in the world could "challenge" your computer to prove that it was running an OS and programs that would behave in certain way (for example, that it would block screenshots of confidential messages). This challenge would include a long random number. Your computer's TPM would combine that number with hashes of all the other elements of your computer's operating environment – it's bootloader, OS, etc – and cryptographically sign that using its signing keys. This is then sent back to the other computer as a "remote attestation" about how your computer is configured.

Notably, it's an attestation that is outside of your own control – you can't override it or falsify it. That TPM in your computer isn't loyal to you, it doesn't take orders from you. It's a snitch that tells other people truthful things about your computer, including things you'd rather it not disclose.

Over the years, variations on this idea and its applications have popped up. TPMs aren't necessarily a second chip anymore – these days, they're more likely to be a "secure enclave" – a rectangle of logic gates on your computer's CPU that is designated as "secure" and subject to more strict testing and scrutiny than the rest of the chip. These secure enclaves are used to prevent you from installing a third-party app store on your games console or phone, and to prevent your car from being serviced by an independent mechanic.

But despite all these anti-user applications, Trusted Computing remains a fascinating subject. For example, you could use Trusted Computing to ask a remote technician to assess whether your phone had been infected with spyware, and the spyware (theoretically) couldn't hide from that helper.

This is how Apple proposes to solve the privacy/AI conundrum. Its remote AI servers are outfitted with their own TPMs, and before your phone sends them your data to be AIed, it can challenge the server to send it an attestation that proves that it is running software that will not leak or retain that data, or use it in any way other than for the task you're asking it to perform.

Apple calls this "Private Cloud Compute" and if it comes into widespread use, it'll be the first time in a quarter century that there is a major pro-user application for Trusted Computing, something the industry has touted as on the horizon since the first days of the second Gulf War.

That said, Green writes that he's "not thrilled" with Apple's privacy solution:

it still centralizes a huge amount of valuable data, and its security relies on Apple getting a bunch of complicated software and hardware security features right, rather than the mathematics of an encryption algorithm.

Nevertheless, this is way better than the approach of Apple's competitors, like Openai/Microsoft, who are just YOLOing it. Green points out that even if this works, it's only one of the many privacy issues raised by AI, notably the use of private information in AI training, which this does nothing for. He also worries that techniques like this will cause lawmakers to insist that "client-side scanning" (where your device runs a program that scans it constantly for illegal content and uploads anything suspicious to the police) can be done in a "privacy-preserving" way. It's not true, but it's easy to see how bad-faith would-be spies could spin, "There is a way to do some AI stuff in a more-private way" to "there are no privacy risks with this other AI stuff."

It's a gnarly issue, and like I say, it's one you can easily spend decades chewing on (or at least, one that I have spent decades chewing on). It's interesting how many of the fundamental tech policy questions have been with us since the start of the internet age. This week, I happened on a viral 1994 post explaining the difference between "the internet" and the promised "information superhighway":

https://www.wired.com/1994/11/q-what-is-the-information-superhighway/

It's not entirely prophetic, but it sure lands some blows that still sting, 30 years later:

It's just like the Internet, except:

* It's a lot more expensive. * You can't post, and there's no killfile. * There's no alt.sex or alt.drugs. * The new rec.humor.funny has a laugh track. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes. * Everything is formatted to 40 columns for TVs. * The free software costs you US$2 per Mbyte to ftp, more for long distance. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes.

It's just like cable TV, except:

* It's a lot more expensive. * The picture isn't as good. * There are 500 channels of pay-per-view and home shopping. * You can watch any episode of Gilligan's Island or any Al Gore speech for only $2. * There are no public-access channels. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes.

It's just like renting videos, except:

* It's a lot more expensive. * There's only 1 percent of the selection. * There's no porn. * There's no pause, fast-forward, or rewind, and it costs you another $3.95 if you want to watch something twice. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes.

It's just like the telephone, except:

* It's a lot more expensive. * There's no one to talk to. * Every number is a toll call. * There's a commercial break every 10 minutes.

(Image: Jen, CC BY 2.0, cropped)

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/18/ragbag/#reading-pornhub-for-the-articles

[kayas-kosmos]

Because of what's happening on Twitter...

I've made a little diagram to demonstrate why billionaires and the ultra-wealthy are bad for society.

(Text in Image)

"If we view society as a body, every sector is like a different organ within the body that serves a function and works in harmony with other organs to maintain balance. Every part of the body is important for the whole thing to function."

"The ultra-wealthy want you to believe they are the beating heart and thinking mind of the society – they are the innovators who create our jobs and their brilliance drives society forward. They deserve to be at the top of society because they have earned that. Without them, the body won’t function because they are the most important part."

"In reality, they are more like a malignant tumour, sucking all of the blood (resources) away from everything else (people and the planet) to fuel its own infinite growth, depriving the rest of the body and slowly killing it. Workers create all of the innovation and keep things running, the ultra-wealthy take all the credit."

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a public domain image so feel free to pinch it for whatever.

Elon Musk has put the careers of thousands of small business owners who depend on Twitter (myself included) in jeopardy by completely running it into the ground. Before this, Mark Zuckerberg had already been doing the same when he started pursuing Metaverse, making Instagram and Facebook much more unusable for artists. Do I really need to go into other examples of CEOs and very normalised practise of wage theft?

Meanwhile, the UK currently has the richest Prime Minister in its history. What is this man doing with this wealth? Continuing the Tory legacy of austerity in order to line his pockets and the pockets of his crony friends. This has resulted in a devastating cost of living crisis that continues to ravage the country as people's energy bills skyrocket out of control.

My diagram is pretty basic and lacks nuance, there's definitely more I could elaborate on with this comparison but I really don't have time. I just want people to get the basic point of how billionaires view themselves vs what function they actually serve. I'm also not here to debate whether some organs are more important than others since I'm not a doctor, that's not really the point here. And no, I don't care if people think I'm being harsh by comparing billionaires to a tumour. If they don't want to be compared to one they should stop acting like one. Jeff Bezos could end world hunger right now and chooses not to.

Also, I know a lot of people are going to come at me with the argument that billionaires give away massive amounts of money. First off, people like Jeff Bezos only give large sums of money to charity a.) for the sake of improving their public image and b.) because giving to charity allows them to write it off in their taxes. Also, charities in of themselves have a lot of problems, but that's a blog post for another day. Mutual Aid is a better way to help people directly. Really, the ultra wealthy need to be taxed, of course they do everything within their power to avoid taxes.

Also:

"Earning a lot of money" and "holding onto a lot of money" are two different things. You cannot be a multi-millionaire unless you hold onto that money. If you give away massive chunks of it to enrich society, you cease to be a billionaire.

Oh and this is worth a watch, too.

Furthermore:

Also before the inevitable great man comments:

Being a billionaire is a moral failing. Nobody needs that much money.

[Slight edit here - I made the assertion that a billionaire could not spend all of their money in their lifetime, but as someone in the comments pointed out it's very easy for them to completely waste billions in no time. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have shown that].

Anyway, if you would like to see more anti-Capitalist art from me, I am currently working on a webcomic called "Flowerpunk" - a story about a group of anarchists who are trying to save the city of Wyrdon from a supernatural plague known as "the rot." The comic heavily discusses disaster Capitalism and how the rich will use mass death and destruction as an opportunity to further line their pockets.

I also like to do little anti-Capitalist doodles relating to this project, which I plan to make into posters at some point.

Please consider donating a Ko-Fi also if you would like to help support this project. I am really struggling at the moment because I've basically lost a massive chunk of my client base due to this Twitter implosion and also because of the AI BS that has made it impossible for me to get any reach nowadays. The last year or so has been an absolute nightmare for my career because of all of this.

Thank you all for your continued support! Hopefully I can re-establish my audience here on Tumblr and wherever else I decide to go.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Gabe Fleisher at Wake Up To Politics:

A few weeks ago, after CNN published its bombshell report about North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, I was texting with a friend. Rumors had been flying around the political world all day about what the report would bring. Now that it had arrived, my friend told me he was unimpressed; it wasn’t as earth-shattering as he’d been expecting. “One day, when your grandchildren ask you what American politics was like in 2024,” I responded, “you can tell them that we learned a gubernatorial candidate called himself a Nazi on a porn website, and your initial response was to shrug.” [...]

The U.S. is currently grappling with two major hurricanes at once — trying to prepare for one while still recovering from the damage of the other. The latter, Hurricane Helene, was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005. More than 200 people have been killed, mostly in North Carolina, but also in Georgia and South Carolina as well. Entire towns in western North Carolina were leveled; some residents have now gone more than a week without running water.

The former, Hurricane Milton, is expected to make landfall in Florida tonight. Forecasters suggest that it could hit Tampa Bay, which was also impacted by the devastation of Helene but has not been in the direct path of a hurricane since 1921. The city is considered uniquely vulnerable to natural disaster; analysts are already predicting damage upwards of $50 billion. Local, state, and federal officials have been pleading with anyone in Milton’s path to evacuate immediately. “I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said on CNN earlier this week.

“Several years ago I asked [the National Hurricane Center] to show me what the worst case storm hitting Florida would look like,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) posted on X. “What they showed me back then is almost identical to the #Milton forecast now.” With both storms hitting the U.S. only weeks before a heated presidential election, it is not shocking that they has quickly been sucked into the political discourse. America has a long history of election-year disasters becoming talking points on the campaign trail, from Hurricane Andrew hurting George H.W. Bush in 1992 to Hurricane Sandy boosting Barack Obama in 2012. But the responses to Helene and Milton have been marked by something new: an unprecedented flood of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Don’t take it from me. Take it from FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, who told reporters on a Tuesday conference call that the misinformation surrounding these two hurricanes has been “absolutely the worst I have ever seen.”

Many of the false claims have come directly from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has claimed that: the Biden administration is “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas” (GOP governors have said otherwise); that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants” (FEMA’s congressionally-appropriated program to help local governments house migrants is completely separate from FEMA’s disaster relief funds); and that “we give foreign countries hundreds of billions of dollars and we’re handing North Carolina $750” (that is merely the amount of aid made available to hurricane victims immediately; over the long run, victims can receive up to tens of thousands of dollars in support). A slew of Trump allies, including X owner Elon Musk, have amplified several other conspiracy theories online. But the prize for Biggest Whopper goes to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who posted — on her official congressional account — this week: “Yes they can control the weather.” The supposed “they” was not immediately identified, although Greene previously suggested in 2018 that California wildfires that year were caused by space lasers linked to the Rothschilds, a prominent Jewish family that has long been the subject of antisemitic conspiracy theories. (Greene posted again about “lasers controlling the weather” this week.) In recent weeks, Hurricanes Helene and Milton have sparked a flurry of antisemitic attacks against Jewish officials involved in the response, including claims that they created the disasters.

In her initial post, Greene attached a video of former CIA Director John Brennan discussing geoengineering, an umbrella term for scientific research into manipulating climate systems in order to mitigate the effects of climate change. Geoengineering remains largely theoretical; it is not possible to geoengineer a hurricane, and the technology has no connection to anything that happened with either Helene or Milton. “Climate change is the new Covid,” Greene asserted in another message. “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled. Did you ever give permission to them to do it? Are you paying for it? Of course you are.”

Other right-wing influencers advanced the argument. “The weather can and is being manipulated,” Georgia Republican Party official Kandiss Taylor posted to her nearly 60,000 X followers, adding: “[Georgia] voting has been compromised and don’t know if we will be able to get all our early voting days in. Now, a hurricane is coming straight for Florida. These two states are necessary for a Trump victory! No coincidence.” Taylor’s message has received more than 3 million views on X. The theories became popular enough in right-wing circles that Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), who represents Asheville and most of western North Carolina (the area hit hardest by Helene), issued a press release on Tuesday to reassure his constituents of the falsity of various claims. Near the top of the list? “Nobody can control the weather,” he wrote. The statement, in its entirety, is a fascinating historical document — showing the types of claims that a Republican congressman felt he needed to fact-check in 2024, partially due to misinformation spread by his own colleagues and his party’s presidential candidate.

This piece in Wake Up To Politics by Gabe Fleisher is a must-read on the misinformation/disinformation crisis regarding Hurricanes Helene and Milton, thanks to Donald Trump and MAGA-aligned figures (especially in the right-wing media apparatus).

See Also:

MMFA: On The Victory Channel's FlashPoint, pro-Trump prophets suggest Hurricanes Helene and Milton are “spiritual” and that “God did say in the prophecies that these storms would be sent to interrupt the flow of our election process”

[shypotatoes013-blog]

I'm not sure what the proper CW/TW for this would be, kindly inform me and I will add it! Not proofread.

I don't want to be political on the TL, but I think this has to be said because for Americans, we are about to be entering even darker times.

Alongside the ban of TikTok yesterday, apps like Capcut and Lemon8 have also been banned. Gaming apps and companies are being banned as well, but I do not have a list as of yet.

This is not the beginning of censorship, but it is worsening now more than before.

About Tiktok:

This ban is not about TikTok but our freedom of speech. Even if you do not use TikTok or like it, this affects you too! They label the app as a national security threat and instill the idea that millions of American's data is being collected and used by the chinese government.

This is a fear based propaganda tactic that they weaponize against Americans for essentially anything they do not like. The false claims, surrounding China and communism that they conditioned American citizens believe, makes it easy for them to do this.

Do not fall for these tactics, henceforth, and become informed on your own. Using your own discernment, instead of basing your opinions from what you hear, is important in these times.

We will likely be seeing more of these things happening from this point forward and, especially, when Trump is inaugurated on January 20th (Tomorrow)

Why they are doing this:

There are many reasons our Congress and government officials are applying these unjust policies.

1: Unification with other nations.

They do not want us to be individual thinkers and to be able to think critically. TikTok has been a way, for many around the world, to connect and share their experiences. This is worrying to our government because people are awakening to how corrupt our power system is.

The rest of the world is not like this. We are given the illusion of choice and freedom, but we do not have a say in anything at the end of the day. And the saddest part is that the rest of the world already knows this.

We realize that we do not have universal healthcare, we have poor food and water quality, lack of education outside of our own country, the highest disease/crime/obesity rates, and overall poor standard of living. We are trillions in debt as a nation and 2% of the nations wealth is shared between the middle and lower class.

Americans have to work multiple jobs to pay for rent, taxes and groceries. We have no paid maternity leave, childcare and staggering homelessness rates. Gun violence is prevalent in schools where elementary aged children are risking their lives to get a subpar education that teaches no real life skills and our government is heavily militarized making it virtually impossible to protest these things without fear of being killed.

2: Money. America is a corporation. Not a country.

We live in an Oligarchy. Which means the people are controlled by the 1% who own most of the nations wealth. People like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Black Rock, Vanguard, JP Morgan.... Etc.

This also means that these people are capable of swaying political decisions and people in power with money. Often lobbying their interests to push bills against the will of the people and without the consent of.

All of our Congress have stocks in Meta. Meta is owned by Mark Zuckerberg and the apps that he controls are Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Which, by the way, if you read the privacy policy they are doing the same thing that they are claiming China is doing. TikTok is banned in China and has been! This is another tactic to shift blame.TikTok is owned by Mr. Shou Chew, a Singaporean man.

Stocks in Meta are not valuable if people are not using the apps. This makes TikTok a competitor app. Since it is not American owned, they cannot control the narrative or the revenue and these stocks are becoming worthless. Mr. Chew would not sell the app to American corporations.

As a side note, on TikTok, the day before the ban, I was getting ads for Facebook and Instagram and there is now a link to Tiktok on facebook. I fear that Mr. Chew has caved as he said in his last video that he has been negotiating with Trump to have the app reinstated. This is NOT a victory. This means our government won and it should be avoided at all costs along with all Meta apps. Please delete them and leave 1 star reviews. Tank their ratings and crash their stocks.

3: Project 2025

I am sure some of you have heard of this by now. I've been trying to inform people about this since last year when the heritage foundation was making their agenda to pass far, right wing religious laws to suit their narrative. They are a Christian nationalist group against the rights of all humans who do not follow their ideology.

If you haven't heard of Project 2025, you can read online what the project entails. That means banning of media such as games, pornography, women's right to healthcare and safe abortion and strict laws imposed within the lgbtqia+ community. Dousing religious freedom and mandating Bibles in schools. This is just a quick snippet from my memory, but you should look into it when you can.

A silver lining:

If you have not heard of Rednote or Little Red Book, it is a completely Chinese owned app that is similar to Pinterest, Tumblr, and TikTok all in one format.

This app has been wonderful and the Chinese are overjoyed to have us there. Their government even warmly invited us to take refuge. I've personally observed instead of interacting so far.

BUT

There are many who share their thoughts on their social media platform being overrun by foreigners and diluting their carefully curated experience on the app.

Do take note that IF you decide to go there, it is NOT your home. You must abide by their laws and be kind.

1. Be courteous and use translations in both English and Traditional Chinese if you pose. DEEPL is the most accurate for translation.

2. They do NOT have to accommodate to you and your needs. Do not go in acting entitled and causing drama.

3. There will be major cultural differences and trying to understand them rather than being offended is best. We all live by different standards and they are generally curious about you and your life! So be nice.

4. TikTok slang and Brainrot is not acceptable. They think we're funny, but people are already commenting inappropriate things under videos of attractive people (and there are many attractive people there.) Brainrot will actually get you banned.

5. Observe for a little to see what kind of content they post. You can even make friends. Most of them want to learn English and are willing to teach you Mandarin.

Anyway, that's all I have to say for now.

[beardedmrbean]

US President Donald Trump has said he will cut all future funding to South Africa over allegations that it was confiscating land and "treating certain classes of people very badly".

Last month, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a bill that allows land seizures without compensation in certain circumstances.

Land ownership has long been a contentious issue in South Africa with most private farmland owned by white people, 30 years after the end of the racist system of apartheid.

There have been continuous calls for the government to address land reform and deal with the past injustices of racial segregation.

South Africa's president responded to Trump with a post on X: "South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality. The South African government has not confiscated any land."

He added that the only funding South Africa received from the US was through the health initiative Pepfar, which represented "17% of South Africa's HIV/Aids programme".

The US allocated about $440m (£358m) in assistance to South Africa in 2023, according to US government data.

Elon Musk, who was born and grew up in South Africa and is now a Trump adviser, has also joined in the debate, saying the new law discriminated against white people.

"Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?" Mr Musk said to Ramaphosa in a post on X.

South Africans' anger over land set to explode

On Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social: "I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!"

He later said, in a briefing with journalists, that South Africa's "leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things".

"So that's under investigation right now. We'll make a determination, and until such time as we find out what South Africa is doing — they're taking away land and confiscating land, and actually they're doing things that are perhaps far worse than that."

South Africa's new law allows for expropriation without compensation only in circumstances where it is "just and equitable and in the public interest" to do so.

This includes if the property is not being used and there is no intention to either develop or make money from it, or when it poses a risk to people.

Land ownership has long been a contentious issue in South Africa for more than a century. In 1913, the British colonial authorities passed legislation that restricted the property rights of the country's black majority.

The Natives Land Act left the vast majority of the land under the control of the white minority and set the foundation for the forced removal of black people to poor homelands and townships in the intervening decades until the end of apartheid three decades ago.

Anger over these forced removals intensified the fight against white-minority rule.

In 1994, leader of the African National Congress (ANC) Nelson Mandela became the country's first democratically elected president after all South Africans were given the right to vote.

But until the recently passed law, the government was only able to buy land from its current owners under the principle of "willing seller, willing buyer", which some feel has delayed the process of land reform.

In 2017, a government report said that of the farmland that was in the hands of private individuals, 72% was white-owned. According to the 2022 census white people make up 7.3% of the population.

However, some critics have expressed fears that the new land law may have disastrous consequences like in Zimbabwe, where seizures wrecked the economy and scared away investors.

South African Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe responded to Trump's comments by telling a mining conference that the country should withhold its minerals if "they [US] don't give us money".

South Africa exports a variety of minerals to the US, including platinum, iron and manganese.

AfriForum, a group focused on protecting the rights and interests of South Africa's white Afrikaner population, wants the government to change the new law to "ensure the protection of property rights".

However, it said it did not agree with Trump's threat to cut funding, suggesting that any punitive measures should be directed at "senior ANC leaders" and not South Africans.

The ANC, led by Ramaphosa, currently governs South Africa as part of a coalition government with nine smaller parties.

Trump also hit out at South Africa during his first term as US president, asking the-then US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study the country's "farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers".

At that time, South Africa accused Trump of seeking to sow division, with a spokesperson saying he was "misinformed".

[pumpkinsy0]

What's Going On in Haiti Rn

tldr: barbeque (leader of revolutionary gang, isnt a cannibal btw) says hes trying to liberate Haiti to free the oppressed groups in Haiti from not only the rich ppl who live in Haiti but also from imperialism so Haiti can get better, but moving along from that, theres canals being built in Haiti so Haitians can actually make their own food and won’t rely in others

alright, I’m making this post, not only because I dont see many people talking about it, but also because they just aren't really telling the exact full story and theyre only using what the western media is saying and not really using any haitian sources or anything like that, for this post Im NOT picking sides or anything of the sort, I just want people to be more aware of what's actually going on in haiti

so where all of this gang stuff is going down is in the CAPITAL of Haiti, this isn't going on all across the country, everything really violent is happening in PORT AU PRINCE. As you know, there's this man called Barbecue who is essentially running Port Au Prince with his gang or group or whatever you want to call it, no Barbecue didn't get his name because he's a cannibal or anything like that, he got it because his mom would sell bbq chicken for people in his neighborhood. The cannibal claims that were going all around on social media was spread by alt right twitter users like elon musk and some other famous alt right twitter users.

NOW when it comes to the gangs in Haiti, what Barbecue is trying to do is "liberate this country, once and for all"(in his own words not mines), and he's done that by trying to bring together all the past gangs of Haiti and they've formed this one big group called "Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies" or I'll just call them G9, and now they control 80% of Port Au Prince and many civilians themselves who live in poverty and terrible conditions are with them because they just want a life with rights to healthcare, education, and housing, things that are hard to get because of politicians and rich people oppressing them and taking away their resources and forcing them to live with the scraps. Another group of people who's followed him is this group of men he's broke out of jail. In this jail as far as I know, these people were never actually given trials or anything and they as well were forced into terrible living conditions with, lack of food, space, that kinda thing. When it comes to G9 getting the prime minister, Ariel Henry, to step down, the reason why they wanted him to step down (as far as i remember) was because he just pushing the election for a new president back and back each time, and people were/are under the impression that he just wanted to get more power. On top of that Ariel Henry was NEVER SWORN INTO HIS POSITION. Plus, after the Haitian president's assassination in 2021, INSTEAD of working with Haitian civil society groups that were open to give solutions to fix the situation, the US, Canada, France, and other places, put their trust into Ariel Henry, and saw him as the connection to the Haitian public. Henry is not well liked by the public of Haiti and he is now not in Haiti and is in Puerto Rico, essentially exiled from Haiti. Now dont take this as me putting Barbecue in this shining light, he did use to be a police officer, and he has closed off Port Au Prince from the rest of the country and people are finding it hard to get food, water, go to school, and much much more, Im just laying out what's happening and his goal as he says it. If you want more info, watch some interviews Barbeque has done.

When it come to the US intervening or ANY country for that matter intervening is because in the past, forcing interventions in haiti has only led to worse. There was terrible treatment to the citizens and they stole money, their only way of intervening was literally through weapons against innocent civilians. Many haitians do NOT want any country, especially the US coming near them AT ALL because theyre are scared for what theyre going to do to them and their livelihoods, and you can't blame them one bit, the US is quite literally a genocidal empire who only looks out for itself.

ON SOME MORE BRIGHTER NEWS, idk if you heard, but theres this canal thats close to being finished, that will allow Haitian farmers to grow and make their own foods so Haiti wont have to rely on other places of getting stuff like rice!! The canal gets water from the massacre river however, Dominican politicians dont like that and are claiming that the canal will weaken the water supply of the river, despite the DR having like 11 canals using the river and Haiti has 1 (the one being built rn). To slow down the water flow going into the canal, Dominican officals have these pumps that are constantly flowing to take away water from the canal, however the canal is still able to flow a good amount of water into Haiti, to Haitian farmers :)

on top of that, Haitian farmers in another part of Haiti has gotten inspired to take action to make their OWN canal (that has NOTHING to do with the massacre river before yall start) and are currently making their own canal so they can have water so WOOOO🇭🇹🇭🇹🇭🇹🇭🇹

anyways pls share and make sure to listen to Haitian voices and media to understand whats going on, dont use media from the same niggas that assisted a Dominican dictator that committed a Haitian genocide :P

to learn more about whats going on theres this Haitian news source called Haiti Liberte that discusses whats going on in Haiti and they have a documentary on youtube that goes more in depth with Barbeque and his ideas/wants and some Haitian citizens

as for the canals, on tik tok theres this woman whos been at the forefront of it all, discussing whats going on with the canals, giving updates, and shes actually in Haiti, and you can see the canals for yourself, her @ is @bertrhude

[persbaderse]

i desperately, desperately need history books to make it clear that there was no reason for elon musk to be there today

not as in "there was nooo precedent for a billionaire to march into any given situation and act like they own the place" not as in "money has neeeeever controled american politics" not as in "noooo one saw fascism rising wow we're all so surprised" because that's not true

as in. no one voted for him. no matter how bad all of his ass-licking fanatics want him to control the world, no one voted for him to be involved in us politics at all. he never campaigned. he was never on any ticket. i dont know if he even could be because he wasnt fucking born here and his actual citizenship is questionable.

as much as my country is a joke and a trash fire, it is still so so so bonkers to see a convicted rapist and inciter of a fascist uprising the president, on his swearing-in ceremony, let essentially some random dude, with no long connection to himself other than being a millionaire nazi, march onto the stage and do not one but TWO nazi salutes in front of hte entire world

i am so tired and i will only be more tired if even five minutes from now someone tries to look me in the eye and justify any of this fucking shit

[thebluester2020]

I just wanted to leave this here as someone from the US,

Keep your eyes and ears open as we go through another four years of a Trump presidency. Trump "saving" TikTok was a political PR stunt to get GenZ and younger generations to like him, he doesn't give a damn about you. All he cares about is serving himself and his rich friends, he's a convicted felon of 34 counts and a rapist. Elon Musk is a man-child who believes he's Tony Stark when in reality, he's nothing but another imbecile born into money.

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was originally a "Hot or Not" site to rate women. He's just as creepy as Trump and Elon. Because of greed, a lack of education, and this country's unaddressed history of racism, it's facing a narrow path of becoming similar to 1930s Germany before eventually burning to the ground. I urge everyone, American or Non-American to please remain educated and build communities. America is in an oligarchy right now, the rich at the top control everything while those at the bottom suffer and they're willing to do anything to keep the status quo while ensuring they continue to line their pockets even more.

If you're a Pro-Trumper, block me. If you're apart of the communities facing the ICE raids this coming Tuesday, please stay safe and remember that you don't have to answer any of their questions.

That's all y'all, stay safe and hopefully someone finds a Death Note and Trump's name is the first one on the list.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 5, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 06, 2024

The U.S. government continues to tighten the screws against Russian malign activity. This morning the Department of Justice announced an indictment charging Dimitri Simes for violating U.S. sanctions against Russia. Simes allegedly worked for a sanctioned Russian television station and laundered the money from his work. Simes advised Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. 

A second indictment charged Simes’s wife, Anastasia, with sanctions violations and money laundering through the purchase of fine art. 

The Justice Department also issued a grand jury’s superseding indictment against six Russian computer hackers. Five were officers in Russia's military intelligence agency; one is a civilian. The six are charged with hacking into and leaking information from, as well as destroying, Ukrainian computer systems. The hackers also attacked systems in European countries that support Ukraine and in the U.S.

The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information on the defendants’ locations or their malicious cyberactivity.

The fallout from yesterday’s revelation that six powerful right-wing media figures were on the Russian payroll continues. One of the right-wing commenters referred to in yesterday’s indictment, Tim Pool, has pushed the idea that the U.S. is in a civil war, interviewed Trump on his podcast in May, and has been fervently against American aid to Ukraine. Today, he posted: “Upon reflection I now understand that Ukraine is our Greatest ally[.] As the breadbasket of Europe and a peace loving people we cannot allow the Fascist Russians to continue their crimes against humanity[.] We must redouble our efforts and provide and additional $200b at once[.]”

By this evening, though, he was making a joke of the news that his paycheck had come from Russia.

Notably, Trump posted on his social media site a rant that tied his own 2016 campaign to yesterday’s indictments, although the indictment itself did not do so. He accused “Comrade Kamala Harris and her Department of Justice” of “resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and trying to say that Russia is trying to help me, which is absolutely FALSE.”

Vice President Harris is not in charge of the Department of Justice.

By tying yesterday’s indictments to his campaign’s involvement with Russian operatives in 2016, Trump might have been trying to suggest the story was old news, but it does highlight the parallels between Russia and right-wing operatives trying to get him reelected. Along with his colleague Donie O’Sullivan, Jake Tapper put it like this on CNN: “Today, the U.S. government is trying to peel back more layers of what officials say are massive and complex efforts underway to influence your vote in the upcoming election. One part of these alleged plots: replacing your average 2016 Russian social media bots with actual conservative Americans, right-wing influencers with a combined millions of followers, influencers promoted by Elon Musk, some visited by Republican politicians such as former president Trump.” 

Then Trump fell back on the old trope that his opponents are communists, posting on his social media platform: “We are fighting true COMMUNISM in this Country. We have to save our Elections, our System of Justice, our Constitution, and our FREEDOM, but that can only be done after we win BIG on November 5th, and proceed to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” 

Economists for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. say that a Trump win in November would hurt the U.S. economy, while a Harris win—if she also gets Democratic control of the House and the Senate—would make it grow. 

Trump’s 2024 campaign is not at all about reality; it’s about a worldview. When asked at an event at the New York Economic Club “what specific piece of legislation will you advance” to make child care affordable, the 78-year-old Trump answered:

“Well I would do that. And we’re sitting down. You know I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that because—look, child care is child care. It’s—couldn’t, you know, it’s something you have to have it—in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have—I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it.” 

There is no specific legislation here, or even a grasp of the specific nature of the problem of paying for child care. What there is, apparently, is an argument that high tariffs will solve all of the nation’s problems. In the New York event, Trump called again for slashing taxes on the wealthy and insisted that new, high tariffs of 20% on all imports, and as much as 60% on Chinese imports, will end federal deficits and bring trillions of dollars into the country, although he is wrong about how tariffs work. 

Trump insists that tariffs are taxes on foreign countries, but they are not. They are essentially taxes on imported products, and they are paid by consumers. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, recently tried to claim that economists disagree about whether consumers bear the cost of tariffs, but as Michael Hiltzik explained in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, economists agree on this.

When he was in office, Trump launched a trade war in 2018 by putting tariffs of up to 25% on $50 billion worth of Chinese products. The next year he added another set of 10% tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, and the next year he did it again, this time on an additional $112 worth of Chinese products. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation calculates that this amounted to an $80 billion tax a year on American consumers, costing the average household about $300 a year and costing the U.S. about 142,000 jobs.

There are reasons to use tariffs. They can be used to protect a new industry from cheaper foreign products until the new industry can compete, or to stop foreign countries from flooding a country with cheap products that destroy a domestic industry. When he took office, Biden kept those of Trump’s tariffs that protected certain industries.

Trump’s insistence that tariffs will solve everything is not about economics, it’s about pushing a worldview from the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, one embodied by the 1890 McKinley Tariff. “If you look at McKinley,” Trump told right-wing media host Mark Levin on Sunday, “he was a great president. He made the country rich.” In fact, McKinley (R-OH) pushed through the tariff named for him while he was in the House of Representatives from his position as a spokesperson for wealthy industrialists. They insisted that high tariffs were imperative to the survival of the country, that such tariffs were good for workers because they protected wages, and that anyone who disagreed was a socialist. But in an era without business regulation, industrialists actually kept wages low and used the tariffs to protect high prices that they passed on to consumers. 

In the late 1880s, the American people demanded a lower tariff, but when Republicans in Congress went to “revise” it, they made it higher. In May 1890, in a chaotic congressional session with members shouting amendments, yelling objections, and talking over each other, Republicans passed the McKinley Tariff without any Democratic votes. They cheered and clapped at their victory. “You may rejoice now,” a Democrat yelled across the aisle, “but next November you’ll mourn.” 

Democrats were right. In the November 1890 midterm elections, angry voters repudiated the Republican Party. They gave the Democrats a two-to-one majority in the House—McKinley himself lost his seat. Republicans managed to keep the Senate by four seats, but three of those seats were held by senators who had voted against the McKinley Tariff, and the fourth turned out to have been stolen.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[houseofbrat]

Trump admin showing their ass right now

Before it was that they could fire us no problem but now he wants to offer us severance if we quit? Geeeee I wonder why

Not only that, but how is he going to guarentee 8 months severance in about a week when he has no control over the budget?

It's because they don't plan on paying you and they are trying to shake you out.

Well fuck that

BECAUSE I AM NOT FUCKING LEAVING!

This smells like Elon Musk

The "fork in the road" subject line is a close match for a similar message he sent out to Twitter employees after taking over there.

Where’s the buyout part????? It just looks like you’re agreeing to resign by 9/30 to not have to RTO. Where’s the benefit of resigning???

This is where I’m so confused. All these article say resigning by Feb 6 with a payout through Sept 30… this email says NOTHING of a payout or severance. ONLY that you do not need to follow RTO order through Sep 30, and you’re committed to resigning.

Hmm. That’s less than the 2 years Elon promised on the campaign trail. 

The art of the deal says we hold out for a better offer. Lol that gave me a chuckle. I laughed at 7 months, but 2 years I might actually think about it.

What they're saying: "The government-wide email being sent today is to make sure that all federal workers are on board with the new administration's plan to have federal employees in office and adhering to higher standards. We're five years past COVID and just 6 percent of federal employees work full-time in office. That is unacceptable," a senior administration official tells Axios.

This is what happens when leaders lie without consequence, new rules based on fabricated "facts".

Only 6%?? Like come on. That's 120,000. We've got that many people onsite at one of our buildings on campus. And we're a branch under a branch. Let's be fckin for real.

All the DC offices are empty except for one guy in the Hoover building who comes in to use the treadmill Source: my brothers cousins landlords former accountant

Complete lie. Over 50% work in the office as everyone knows that if you work in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) then you have to work on site. That includes the Pentagon, many outlying security facilities in the DMV and across the country. I'm at a Navy conference this week in San Diego and everyone is talking about the staggering incompetence and unpredictability of what these clowns are doing.

They can't just make up a buy out plan. You have to fund it....you have to follow existing law. Is it FULL retirement with full benefits or partial? This is a distraction AND concession that they realize they can't fire everyone the way they'd like so they are hoping to bribe some to take it. If you are a fed...I'd be very certain you have a really good federal employment attorney look at any agreement long before you ever sign it. DM if you need one in DC that specializes in such things.

That senior official would be Sen. Joni Ernst, according to the CNBC article that has the same quote and attributes it to her. She is such a POS.

An OMB report notes that as of May 2024, 54% of Feds worked in person full time. Only 10% were fully remote.

Edit: source of statistic.

My favorite:

The White House expects 5% to 10% of federal employees to accept the offer, which would potentially mean hundreds of thousands of people.

The administration projects the buyouts could ultimately save taxpayers up to $100 billion a year.

Roughly 5% of the federal workforce retired last year, so... they are projecting business as usual. Much wow.

They are actually going to cost the taxpayer MORE money because those that would have retired within the next 4-5 months will gladly take the additional months to September as the verbiage says retention of pay and benefits "regardless of your daily workload".

The incentivization of telework and non-RTO to resigning employees shows how ridiculous their argument for RTO is.

They are going to frontload the stats for resignations (retirements) to boast and gloat about the job they've done people will praise them for a job well done. Very similar to Elon's playing with vehicle delivery and manufacturing at Tesla centered around earnings dates. The story will disappear until September when they gloat and boast about it again.

If they think they are taking my pension, vet pref, work life balance and COMMITMENT to service for 18k after taxes, they are insane. I will be posted up in my office fueled by nothing but duty and spite until I am 90 years old. Telework doesn't move me enough to let them steal what I have worked hard to earn. F*ck them. Great news for those who need it though, seriously.

"All things are possible through spite, it strengthens me."

I have an unreasonable amount of stubbornness and the military taught me how to stew in it. Embrace the suck

I love that energy. I worry they won't even get buyouts though. I think Trump is hoping people quit and then when they don't get their money, there's nothing legally they can do. They can only pay 25k max, and whoever resigns won't have any legal paperwork saying they're owed a buyout. Just the empty promises of a con man.

Edit: Someone posted the letter in another thread. It's not even a buyout. Just an offer to be exempt from RTO on the condition that you resign on or before Sept 30.

Another edit: other people have read it much more closely and clearly than me. Read all the comments below. 

Edit again bc some of you can't be bothered to read: there was no email when I initially commented this. Now there's an email. Go read that.

Original comment:This is very likely a bait and switch. Feb 6th is way too soon for OPM and your agency to formulate a plan of which jobs/series qualify and then gather the money to offer it.

Remember, we're still under a CR until March 14th.. We don't even have the money to go to April!!

Also, I know they're breaking laws left and right, but the statutory max payout is $25k. They legally can't pay you more than that even if they had it. I doubt they're gonna break the law in your favor.

Bottom line this is a complete BS scam designed to fool people into resigning by next week only for them to rug pull you after you're gone.

Edit to add: ok guys I get it, there's a email and a memo out there. Just remember, I wrote this comment when the details were a few paragraphs in an AP article. Like seriously, who would've thought he'd just put people on admin leave for the rest of the year?!? Normal buyouts have rules, he's ignoring them. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. They're literally creating no-show jobs

But caution is still warranted... we don't have a full year's budget, if there's cuts in the rest of your agency's budget then they're fucked. All those no-show jobs are gonna be like an anchor until Oct 1

Not a Fed, but helping some out. They've overplayed their hand, they have to offer buyouts because they cannot fire folks as easily as they thought.

Exactly the reason that we stay

Don't forget there is not NEAR enough physical space to RTO the entire force. They will need to spend a FORTUNE to acquire the additional space needed after 15 years of downsizing, in accordance with the Telework Act of 2010. Doing a blanket RTO was so stupid, wasteful, unnecessary, and a massive burden on taxpayers.

Just like the deportation flights using military transports for optics at a much higher cost than civilian transports. Government efficiency was never the goal. Edit: clarity

Per an employment law friend: for folks close to retirement…..Don’t throw away your pension for a cash buy out.

Per a former employment lawyer (me), this is used car salesman tactics. You’d probably get just as much in unemployment if Trump shitcans you in a few months. Stay the course Edit: I just read the actual email sent to us. It's not a buyout. It's "continue to work from home and we accept your resignation on 9/30 or earlier"

“The government wide email being sent”. Makes me wonder if this was the reason for the email test from OPM.

It’s like the Nubian prince scam. They’ll pay you IF you provide your bank account and SS#. 

It definitely is. NBC references it in their article https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-administration-offer-federal-workers-buyouts-resign-rcna189661 And it references another article about the server https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-administration-tests-power-email-every-federal-employee-rcna189126 There are so many illegal things there, but it looks like the press is trying to smooth it over as normal things our government does.

He would still need to get an appropriation through before feb 6. Technically offering the buy out before money is appropriated violates the anti deficiency act.

Dont think he particularly cares about any such laws He’s not actually going to pay anyone. So I guess he can say whatever he wants.

You guys, if you can, please try to hold on. There's a reason they're trying to get rid of federal workers. Mass attrition of Federal workers would heavily impact the services they provide to the American public, which would create a customer service void that would need to be quickly filled. They are going to try to fill that void by contracting out government work. They can grant and deny contracts based on party loyalty. Contractors can be easily induced to do unethical things with far fewer repercussions than Federal workers. The privatization of the Government will advance their financial interests and increase their power.

If Federal workers just quit, it makes it easier for them to do that. That is why it's so important for us to keep working if we can, because doing so keeps government in the hands of the people, and accountable to the people. They are making working conditions hostile specifically so people quit. This creates a void that they can fill to suit themselves. I'm going to hold the line. I wouldn't be able to face my children if I let go of what little resistance I have within my power.

Musk offered Twitter people severance and then never paid them. This is all part of his playbook. If there is no authority for this (and I don’t know there is?) they will just stiff you. Be very wary.

Exactly what I was thinking. I wouldn’t trust him to pay out.

This sounds like that they know the RTO Executive Order is on shaky ground, and is most likely violating the Telework Act of 2010 law. And they're trying to get ahead of any lawsuits.

My question is, what is so significant about the February 6th date?

I'm not sure it's about RTO, but that they're realizing behind the scenes that it's gonna be harder for them to downsize via "Schedule F-and-fire" than they thought, and after that they're running out of ways to get feds out of employment without them voluntarily quitting for these reasons.

This is it, exactly. This email is a last ditch effort to scare people after folks didn't quit in waves last week, lol

Friend they don't though. Most people are believing the narrative that we're all "overpaid rats" that aren't doing our jobs. I wish people knew what we do, and how little we're paid compared to our private sector counterparts. Most of us genuinely do it because we give a shit about the mission. No one is talking about what this is doing to us - we're not being counted as people. There is not public outcry about how this is going to negatively impact people, because people still refuse to believe that anyting bad is going to happen.

Please let people know this is what's happening. So many think yeah, get rid of those lazy government workers and shrink government. They don't realize what he's really doing, trying to get rid of laws or regulations so he can do what he wants. He wants to get rid of federal workers because we stand in his way. If feds are really doing nothing how does all government business get done everyday, by magic elves? He wants to be able to hire his family and friends and contractors so his rich friends can make even more money and he can fire them easily if they don't agree with him or agree to do something illegal. This isn't just about federal workers. All of America should be seriously concerned right now but they just don't get it.

[theworldasiknowitnow]

The World as I Know it Now; Blog post two.

I missed a day, whoops. However today I'm back with something I learned about yesterday. Like yesterday I will be covering two days (Today and the day I missed yesterday.) I'm thinking about making this a weekly blog instead of a daily one. It would be easier to manage but the posts would be longer. Anyways. Today is January 23rd, 2025. Trigger warning: opinions. If you don't like them, please scroll.

Elon Musk at the T. inauguration did the Nazi salute. There is no way to put this politely. He stood up there, on that stage, in front of millions, and did a gesture that is banned throughout many countries. He stood up there and did that just for his supporters to say it was the “Roman Salute” or him “giving his heart to the crowd.” Who gives their heart to the crowd with a tucked thumb and a down facing hand? The most common way I’ve seen someone give their heart to the crowd is with two hands, palm up while they are being spread to the sides. Not palm down, up and to the right. “Oh, but he’s autistic!” Oh, and you’re making excuses for a Nazi. Forgive me for not jumping for joy that we have a Nazi helping to run this country. Day by day we are seeing our rights disappear and we are seeing the government embrace fascism. They are banning books, banning history, banning religious texts. All these T. supporters wanted to be all “he’s just the Christian choice!” What Christian choice? All I see is a man who wants to ban freedom and take control. He’s already started doing it, and one of his first steps was putting Elon, one of, if not, THE RICHEST man on the planet, in power. Made up a fake roll for him to take and everything, just because Elon is willing to eat the little orange Cheeto puff that nobody wants.

T. is going after Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada. He is going to throw us headfirst back into a world war, and we won't even have enough soldiers because he banned trans militants. We don’t need more land; we don’t need a president getting cocky and taking unnessecary risks. Every empire falls, and with the way this Cheeto prick is acting it might be within these four years. It might even be sooner than that. Why are we taking so many risks? Canada controls our power grids. If we piss them off, they could shut down our power. They could plunge us into darkness just as fast as our president is prepared to plunge us into a war. In an interview he was asked if he could promise to use nonviolent tactics to take Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal, and his response was chilling. He said he couldn’t promise that, and that he would use any means necessary to take these places, and yet he hasn’t explained why he wanted them yet. This oligarchy, if left unchecked, could be the downfall of the American empire. The average empire lasts a mere two-hundred and fifty years. America is two-hundred and forty-eight years old. We are two years away from that potentially crucial point and we have an orange who doesn’t know what he’s doing as president. He is trying to play Monopoly and Battleship when he doesn’t have a Clue. He is appointing random inexperienced people for positions they aren’t suited for. Elon is Administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency. Elon. The Nazi. Is in charge of basically controlling how modern our technology is. This man shouldn’t even be in a government position, the only qualification he has is money! You know what that sounds like? Say it with me now, oligarchy. Olee-gark-ee. We don't need an oligarchy if we already have a democracy. Actually, we just don't need one in general.

T. pulled us out of the WHO (world health organization) and he got rid of the thing that says that companies need a diversity hire. He framed it as making America a “colorblind nation.” The likelihood is though, without that, people who aren’t straight white men won't get hired as much anymore. Speaking of straight men, legally they don’t exist anymore. T. redefined what a male and female were, the only problem is, he defined a woman as someone who’s embryo was female when they were conceived. Which isn't the whole problem, it’s actually great news for the trans girlies. Congrats, you guys are all now cis women!!!! The problem with that is, that means that men are defined as anyone who was conceived with a male embryo. Now this is the funny part, all embryos at conception are female. All of them. We are all legally females in America. I’m so glad that MADAM president was brave enough to come out. I bet she is so happy that she made herself cis!! Now, it gets funnier, not only was she the first female president, she's also the first LESBIAN president! Maybe now that she is out, she’ll stop taking our rights! No? She’s still gonna be taking those? Well damn, worth a shot I suppose. But yes, basically they didn't consult anyone in the scientific field, and not only are we all considered legally female, but the entire intersex population has also ceased to exist.

[jentlemahae]

another controversial opinion and maybe a delicate one so I’d like this to be approached with seriousness.

*

my fears about lisa’s career being controlled by the arnaults rings true little by little cuz what do you mean lisa is going to release a book about her life under the french publisher JC Lattès who happens to be part of LVMH publishing house… i am sorry but, what? why would she do that in france when she could’ve gone for any worldwide publisher?? and why French writers at that? why are all of her gigs limited to France now? at this point, if blinks don’t think the arnaults (mostly frederic) are controlling a lot of her career choices — i think we are being delusional. every single solo content we have gotten from lisa since the end of bp’s tour and the contracts were getting negotiating have been in French/around Frederic.

i don’t think it’s smart for her to get so dependent of him to get certain deals because at this point we need to be real and accept that a lot of those french gigs she’s getting is because of him. he is there at every single event. LVMH is sponsoring almost (if not all) of those events. and all of the ceos from all the LVMH divisions suddenly posting her on their instagram feels like is more about her involvement with frederic than anything else. there’s not separation between romantic and professional relationship there because he is technically her boss and the heir to all of the brands that she endorses. the power imbalance there is crazy. this isn’t some random dude. and this dependency is really dangerous.

I get that she’s probably in the blind state of the relationship but someone needs to advice her.

it’s so bizarre seeing all this. looking at jennie successfully opening her label and starting this whole new journey with her own freedom and ideas to seeing lisa limit her career to her boyfriend’s domain is very wild.

and you would say “good she’s using his influence for her career” but like, are we not seeing that it feels like he is taking advantage of her popularity to uplift the branch he was recently appointed as a CEO? The fact the French presidency is looking for likeness since it has dropped in popularity with the young people and French is having strikes and protests every other day? the lady macron playing buddy buddy with lisa now. Or that Bernand Arnault is about to overtake Elon Musk as the richest man? Hello?

And people would say is not our business and it isn’t but i don’t see people really questioning this as much and trying to romanticize the fact that man is a “chaebol” is just really crazy considering what his family stands for and how not billionaire is ethical or humane.

mmmmmmh! unfortunately the more things happen the more i agree with this……cause alone these are all innocent and innocuous things and coincidences but together ? idk ……..

though if we were to give him/them the benefit of the doubt, we could say that maybe she’s having all these gigs in france and with french people simply bcs it’s convenient since she’s already there! and maybe she actually supports him/them in using her image and fame for the brand’s gain bcs she loves him and wants to see him succeed, and the family is not controlling her bcs they’re working together (i mean at least that’s how adult relationships are supposed to work) 🤷🏻‍♀️ that being said, and even if we think these things are true, i kind of share your concerns as well bcs atm her image and career are VERY closely tied to lvmh, which isn’t great in general but especially since it’s so early in her career and she should first find her own way as an artist before getting into the corporate and political scene of a foreign country. also, i don’t like that family and i don’t like how they get money, so her involvement (especially to this extent) doesn’t make me enthusiastic……..like you said, there seems to be a power imbalance between them that is pretty worrying, not knowing their relationship personally

however, the thing still is that even though we can voice our concerns and opinions and dislike the situation, we cannot really change it cause she’s not gonna listen to fans to decide what to do with her relationship! if he / his family are actually taking advantage of her, she’s the only one who can choose to leave him and france, there’s nothing we can do 😕😐 though i do think it’s fair and valid for fans to voice concerns like this, especially cause i see so many fans praising him and saying he’s a catch just cause he has money (and nothing else tbh cause we don’t know anything about his personality and he has a face only a mother could love) which i think is so weird and uncomfortable to me ? lisa is a very successful woman, she doesn’t need his money, and it’s weird for fans to say a woman should look for a man to have money……..

[the-oc-king]

Gonna be honest, you had me nodding along until "because of Tiktok, Trump won". Like, are we gonna ignore Elon Musk here? And the fact that Trump almost certainly interfered with the election??

At a certain point it seems like you devolved from an actual thoughtful analysis on history to tired old "kids are all stupid idiots and Tiktok is inherently bad" type rhetoric. I'm mostly confused about how you took the time to explain how we Americans were intentionally led into reduced literacy levels by this point, but then don't offer any sort of compassion or empathy to that point?? It's just, oh Americans are all stupid and illiterate, especially the kids, which definitely has nothing to do with long COVID. It's all our fault this happened.

Our youth have been purposefully and systematically failed, and I won't ever fall into the trap of making generalizations about them because of this.

The bottom line is, we haven’t all just been falling for the propaganda that’s been forcibly shoved down our throats our whole lives! Trump never would have won this election without what was likely illegal interference, and the evil cowards who ensured he could be sworn in despite being impeached twice and being a convicted felon.

I can promise you all as a young American myself, we didn’t want this. Most of us didn’t want this. The bigoted, illiterate white folk is simply the loudest and most dangerous group here, and unfortunately they also control our government, so they get the most attention. But please, keep the rest of us in your hearts. I know we could have done more, tried harder to prevent this, and I’m so sorry. But a great deal of us aren’t just “fucking STUPID” or whatever; we’re horribly tired, and scared, and many of us are disabled and struggling just to stay alive.

Not to mention, those of us who want to stay informed and literate are constantly fighting against waves of propaganda and rhetoric, telling us that everything is fine, it’s okay to not think critically about things, go ahead and use AI (especially so our shareholders can get their money back). It’s not an easy feat.

Things around the world are going to be much much worse for a minimum of four years now that Trump is in office again, and those of us who care will do our best to stop what’s happening. But please, all I ask is that you remember that Americans aren’t a monolith any more than people in any other country are, and that a great deal of us are the victims of a cruel system. Under the current state of things the average citizen has basically no power; to the rich elite we’re nothing more than fodder that can be used and crushed and thrown away at their whims, and they’ve made sure that the current system allows them this power without challenge.

Things are rarely as simple as the easiest answer makes them appear to be. Those of us who haven’t fallen into complacency will keep trying to fight for a better world, but most of us are terrified and exhausted and don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I’m sorry.

To my Asian, European, African, and Canadian friends...do y'all wanna know how the United States found itself under a fascist, Hitler-loving dictator named Donald Trump?

In another post, I started my timeline in 1980. The year I was born. But, it was also a turning point in US politics.

First, let me share my credentials.

- Bachelors of Arts - History

- Juris Doctor - Public Interest Law (Critical Race Theory)

- Masters of Philosophy (research degree) - Sociology (Race, Ethnicity, Conflict)

Just recently, we buried President Jimmy Carter, who was the president, when I was born. Jimmy was from Georgia, like my grandmother, and he came from a Southern Baptist background. Southern Baptists are known for being very conservative Christians who did not support abortion.

Jimmy, despite that background, actually supported LGBTQ rights by lifting a federal ban. He supported Roe v. Wade which protected access to abortion. And, he established the federal Department of Education.

However, Jimmy had an antagonistic relationship with Congress, and that alienated several Democrats, including Ted Kennedy, who was the brother of John F. Kennedy, a president who was assassinated.

The Kennedy family has an established name brand due to JFK and Robert F Kennedy (another brother and JFK's attorney general who was also assassinated). Ted was the younger, drunken brother who caused the accidental death of a college friend.

In 1980, Ted challenged Jimmy for the presidency even though they were both Democrats. Jimmy has the incumbent shouldn't have faced a challenge from his own party, but he had just been that bad.

So, this internal strife weakened the Democratic Party entering the 1980 election. In that same year, Jimmy boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Russia due to Russia's invasion of Afghanistan. Furthermore, there was a recession.

The Republican Party nominee was a former Hollywood actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan. Ronald was the governor of California and was trailing Jimmy in the polls until a presidential debate in which Ronald used his acting skills to make Jimmy seem incompetent.

Ronald believed in "trickle down economics." He believed that if the wealthiest people were taxed less, then they would spend more, thus boosting the economy and allowing prosperity to "trickle down" to the working & Middle class.

He also believed in increased military spending as this was the height of the Cold War with Russia. My own parents voted for Reagan because my dad was in the military.

Instead of trickling down, the wealthy just grew wealthier. Republicans continued to lower taxes for these individuals and businesses, so the money never trickled down. Social services were underfunded & unemployment increased. Reagan's response was to blame Black "welfare mothers" for abusing the system.

Republicans latch onto this. They implement work requirements for government assistance and make it harder for folks to pull out of poverty. As a result, a wealth gap separated white folk from the rest. White folk felt their hard earned money was supporting lazy white & Black folk, so they continued to constrict welfare programs.

[Section added] During Reagan's term, an unknown illness is killing young, gay Black & Latino men. It's AIDs. Reagan deemed it a gay disease that only affects gay people, so no funding is allocated to study this disease. It's viewed as retribution for their homosexua lifestyle. However, overtime, they learn about HIV once non-gay men were infected. Children die from the disease because blood is not tested for it, so some are born from it through their mothers while others were given transfusions.

Under Reagan, the Fairness Doctrine ends. Under this doctrine, news agencies had to report both sides of an issue. Because of this, television stations can now present one side. Fox News opens as a conservative network.

Ronald is well-loved by white folk. He gets elected to two terms. By the end of his term, the economy has recovered, and white folk are prospering. Then, his VP, George H.W. Bush, is elected.

Under George I, the Cold War ends, but we have the Gulf War in Kuwait. He signs trade agreements that result in several American companies, namely the auto industry, to shutter their doors and build factories overseas. This is due to a change in tariffs!

Millions of Americans lose their jobs as factories close. Detroit, as the leading auto manufacturer city, is devastated. Back in the 90s, Detroit was the 4th largest US city after Chicago. These factory closures hit the Midwest, especially hard.

This makes Bush unpopular. He is challenged by a young, charismatic Democrat named Bill Clinton.

Bill was a southerner like Jimmy, but Bill was a very well-known ladies' man. Bill appeals to Black Americans, though, and that allows him to defeat George.

Bill continues expanding trade agreements. He's a fiscal conservative despite being a Democrat, and under Bill, military spending is reduced.

[Section added] The rise of AIDs leads to further hate directed at the LGBTQ. During the 90s, several queer people are murdered. One such kid was Matthew Shepard. A college kid in Wyoming, he is beaten by a gang of white men. His family was terrorized so much, that they couldn't bury him because of fears his grave would be desecrated.

[A white woman Bishop in DC invites Shepard's parents to bury him in their graveyard. That Bishop is Marian Edgar Budde, the same Bishop who gave Trump his inaugural sermon this past week. She pleaded for Trump to have mercy on the queer community because she was the Bishop who buried Shepard!]

Bill is a popular president. The economy is booming, but he's still a lady's man, and he gets in trouble with a college intern.

This scandal adversely impacts the last few years in office so much so that his VP, Al Gore, loses the presidency to George W. Bush.

George Bush won the Electoral College while Al Gore won the popular vote. There was such a tiny margin that there were numerous recounts because of faulty ballots (hanging chads). Eventually, the Supreme Court intervenes and tells them to stop the count and certify George as president.

George II is the son of George I.

George II is a popular Texan with swagger. He wants to build up the military once again.

Clinton left a surplus of money, so what did George II do? He implemented tax cuts for the wealthy. That damned "trickle down economics" again. The wealthy get wealthier, increasing the wealth gap between white folks and everybody else.

They cut taxes while cutting social services. One of his biggest "achievements" was a restructuring of our educational system called "No Child Left Behind."

NCLB emphasizes test scores. School administrations are penalized if they don't meet these standards. They lost funding, so electives such as home economics, art, Music, etc are trimmed to make room for these test standards. By this time, my dad has retired from the military and is a school principal, and I remember the stress of trying to meet these standards.

These standards emphasize STEM at the expense of liberal arts. This is happening just as the internet becomes available to all.

Amazon opens as an online used book store. Facebook is started as a college message board. There's a tech boom, so everyone is being pushed into tech fields. Liberal arts education was devalued.

During his term, 9-11 happens. We declare war on Afghanistan. Islamophobia spikes. Fox News helps drive this narrative. Christianity is now being pushed into schools, whereas schools were previously secular.

[Section added] In 2004, the assault rifle ban was lifted. Now we are seeing a dramatic spike in school shootings. The Far Right embraces the expansion of the 2nd Amendment.

Then, we go to war in Iraq.

We aren't quite sure why we're at war with Iraq. We overthrow Suddam Hussein (from the Gulf War). George declares victory, then terminates the Iraqi Army.

This triggers an insurrection. Massive casualties are coming out of Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is overshadowed.

George serves two terms, but his VP is so unpopular that he doesn't run for president. Instead, the Republican nominee is John McCain.

Two Democrats fight for the nomination. Hillary Clinton, the wife of Bill, and Barack Obama.

Barack was a young, biracial Senator from Illinois. I attended law school in Illinois, and one of my classmates had been his legislative aide. I met Barack twice while a student. The first time, he had come to campus to propose a college-savings account. After his press conference, I latched onto his arm and refused to let go until he heard me, and I explained that his proposal was unrealistic because it assumed that a single mother would have the resources to save for an education when it was more likely her money would go towards groceries & rent or other immediate needs. (Fast forward two-three years, and the dude is repeating my line during the State of the Union! I had changed his mind!)

Barack beats Hillary for the nomination. He defeats McCain and is sworn in as the 1st black (not Black) president.

Obama is popular and well-loved by most Americans. Under his tenure, gay marriage is legalized.

Fox News triples down on their hatred.

Their network booms. They push Islamophobia 24/7. Highlight the fact that Obama's father was Muslim and that his middle name was Hussein.

Older Americans are watching program after program of this negativity. A movement starts called the Tea Party movement, which positions itself as a fiscally conservative movement. A bankrupt slumlord with a reality TV show gains popularity with these folks.

I wrote my master's dissertation on the Tea Party movement. It's called "Jesus and the White Man."

Donald Trump

Donald latches onto the Islamaphobia. He calls Barack by his middle name and questions his birth certificate. Donald grows popular with older Americans.

At the end of Obama's term, the son of VP Biden dies. This devastated Biden. He had lost his infant daughter & first wife in a car accident. He decides not to run for president.

Obama supports Hillary.

It is now Hillary v. Trump.

Trump pushes misogyny and Islamaphobia. Hillary is Bill's wife and a woman. She is the most qualified presidential candidate to ever run (at that time).

During Obama's last year in office, Justice Antonin Scalia* dies. Obama has the privilege to nominate that next Justice, but Mitch McConnell stalls through the election.

But older white Americans were barely okay with a black president. They were not about to let a woman serve as President. At the same time, an organization called Cambridge Analytica began to fine-tune an ultra conservative agenda.

With the help of Russian intelligence, they use Facebook ads to try to persuade voters to support Trump. They succeeded with white folk, but they did not succeed with the Black vote.

Russians used African bot farms in order to try to persuade Black Americans to support Trump. We rejected him at 90%.

Donald wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote.

Donald is a corrupt and ineffectual president. He tried to bribe foreign leaders and shared US intelligence with Russia.

However, as a populist, he latches onto the Christian Right. He nominates 3 Supreme Court Justices who lie during their confirmation hearings. These Justices will ultimately vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The Christian Right love this. But then COVID hits and the incompetence of Donald leads to millions of deaths. These Christian folk refuse to get vaccinated or wear masks.

Donald is an unpopular president and ranks as the worst president of all time.

Biden challenges him and wins.

Donald refuses to accept that he lost, so he organized an attempted coup. January 6th.

He's impeached. Twice.

McConnell refuses to take the step to have him permanently barred from office.

Biden takes office when COVID is still rampant. The Christian Right continue to push their agenda, seeking to remove protections for the LGBTQI.

Right wing media generates a lot of money. Podcasters jump on the bandwagon. Red pill content spills into the mainstream.

Kids who were isolated during COVID are now at home watching Joe Rogan & Theo Von. They spend hours upon hours on TikTok.

But unbeknownst to these kids is the history of Russian interference.

Schools emphasize STEM. They don't emphasize liberal arts or social sciences such as history or literature. The literacy rate plummeted to an all-time low. The average white American's reading level is at the 4th grade. They aren't able to engage in critical thinking.

They don't know the history of the Spanish Influenza. They don't know the history of a trade war that triggered the Great Depression. They don't know that our government has imprisoned citizens in internment camps. They don't know Hitler's rise to power.

In fact, Fox News frequently features individuals who deny the Holocaust.

Russia move their troll farms from Facebook to TikTok, where the algorithm serves as an echo chamber. Uneducated, illiterate folks gobble up 30-second videos but can't be arsed to watch anything over 5 minutes so complex issues are stripped down to sound bites.

The algorithm pushed right-wing fascist talking points. They rehabbed Donald while shifting Gen Z to the far right. They do not know how to verify information for themselves, so they gobble up misinformation and disinformation.

If a TikTok creator has millions of followers with thousands of views and likes, these kids assume that that info is factual. They do not vet shit for themselves.

Russia pushed anti-American propaganda that posed as pro-American talking points. Pushed isolationism. Pushed anti-democratic rhetoric. In fact, one of their greatest accomplishments is convincing Gen Z and uneducated, white Millennials into thinking we aren't a democracy.

We are a fucking Democratic Republic. Our constitution begins with: "We the people".

So, because of TikTok, Trump won.

That's why Biden was pushing for it to be banned before the election. The algorithm was being corrupted. But folks couldn't part from their addiction.

Folks who had been anti-Trump just 5 years ago are suddenly Trump supporters. They were brainwashed.

So, how did we get here?

We got here because most Americans are fucking STUPID.

[loverofpaperwork]

Doge, a failure from the start

I was silent for awhile because I mainly write this blog to avoid ranting to my friends. I truly am dissapointed with Trump and did not vote for him. I gave him the benefit of extreme doubt for a week and man he disappoints. But enough about the man who can't wear makeup right and more about the rat on his shoulder ratatoulling him into being the worst president ever.

Now, after nearly a month, we get to see what the newly formed Government of Departmental Efficiency is all about. Lead by the incompetent Elon Musk, owner of the failed business SolarCity, and the nearly bankrupt twitter rebrand X.com(which several countries blocked on the principle of sounding like a porn website). Elon Musk who was ousted from Zip2 because he tried to also name it X.com (along with being impossible to work with). The same Musk who said that the roof tiles behind him were solar powered, they were not, the guy who put in giant computers to impress investors, they were not turned on, the same guy who promises robotaxis every year like clockwork. The same musk who promised the US government two moon missions in 2024 and nearly got a rocket into orbit. All in all a very efficient guy.

So spoilers aside I am not a fan of Musk, mostly because of his constant fabrications of what his companies can do. I personally think Tesla is a fine car in spite of him instead of because of him. I don’t like the push for more computer automation in our lives since it often leads to pointless suffering and glitches. I could care less about his personality, but many dislike him solely on that reason. I fully expect when looking into the Department of Government Efficiency I will not be impressed, but rather discovery a huge amount of fraud. The reasoning is this, the Office of Inspector Generals oversees the federal government, why replace their oversight with a nongovernmental agency? Especially one that apparently has the power to overrule congress and the president on budgetary matters.

Musk’s tailormade agency feels like a thinktank, a government adjacent organization that attempts to set policy. Thinktanks lack the power to set policy, but instead control vast amounts of money, money that flows into the political campaigns like a tide of sin. A candidate who at one time may have been pro gun control, anti abortion suddenly will become anti gun control and pro abortion with no apparent reason for change.

Politics in the United States revolves around the Federal Budget. Politicians effectiveness is usually a byproduct of how much they funnel back into their districts. Usually raking in cash at the same time. It is nothing new, but the amounts are much grander than back in the day. Corruption cases rarely see the light of day because the advancements in financial tech have made the old laws obsolete. Personally seeing more corruption removed would be great, but Musk’s methods are not the right way to go about this.

My expectation from the campaign about Musk and Vivek’s organization is threefold. First, they will defund anything the republican party disagrees with without any congressional authority to do so, second, they will pocket a bunch of cash from organizations that don’t want to be shut down, thirdly, they will cut projects randomly based on who they like or don’t like. Given that Vivek was pushed out, or left of his own accord, I assume that Musk’s paranoia is going to control the agency. He regularly lashes out at critics and fans alike, you can’t like him enough to please him. Since he is the leader I wouldn’t expect the department to cut things like subsidies for his cars, space missions, solar companies, generative companies, cryptocurrency scams. Instead, I fully expect him to cut things that hampered his frauds and schemes from being successful, stuff like the NTSB, Nasa, the federal reserve. I honestly don’t think President Trump cares about what Musk does since Musk’s antics will conceal Trump’s own corrupt actions.

How the Department of Government Efficiency operates. No one knows really, they aren’t transparent. They are just a twitter feed and a website that has no information, just an official marker. It isn’t a good look. Some people might think dogegov.com is official, but the real website is doge.gov (I mean people’s internet literacy has gone down.) I choose not to link to them to prevent traffic to their site, as well as not showing images. If you care too, look it up. What dogegov is a community wiki that tracks the twitter account that randomly posts cuts and hot takes/memes. What the idiots in charge of that site unwittingly show is how manipulated the gov debt graphs are. Expanding the timescale to years instead of months makes the large slope flatten out and also shows that the largest gains in government debt has occurred in Republican administrations (Not that democrats are innocent of increasing the debt, but their slopes on average are much flatter). For example Biden increased the debt roughly 4.3 or 4.4 trillion, while trump increased it 8.4 or 8.5 trillion (later I will point out they inaccurately report his increase). Not that this is in particularly a bad thing, just the hypocrisy of the dogegov group is apparent because they try to claim Biden is the worse thing for the Debt. Personally I think they were happier when it was apparent that Trump was going to to lose the election, but someone had to win the election, and their asshole won. Now they have to defend his real policies instead of campaign promises.

A side note is that they are so butthurt that Biden lost that they label his admin as republican, this is probably an error. Altough changing the time scale really breaks their poorly coded website that just exists to sell cyrpto and electronic gov badges. In fact they have like 7 crypto tokens they sell that are constantly scrolling on the bottom of the page. On second thought they problaly did it to ratfuck the election, see image below ( I know, but this illustrates what doge is about). I added the red to show why they really really under-report Trump. Every single thing Dogegov says and by extension Musk and Trump needs to be seen like this. I am going to note that this is an inaccuracy on my part, I kind of eyeballed it, but assume 2020 spending is somewhere between 6.6 trillion and 7.7 trillion, getting accurate numbers on this stuff is hard, since a lot of orgs are trying to hide their expenses (see the Pentagon for example.)

Lets looke at what they call the US Spend tracker. A graph that trivially and pointless divides the federal budget from this fiscal year so far into 10 categories. These are outlays, on budget, benefits, cms, Health and human services, social security, off-budget, Treasury, Treasury interest, Interest of public debt. Their is no reason I can think of to seperate benefits from social security. To me this implies that this group wants to remove all of these orgs and just have the most bare-bones gov possible. Like why have outlay’s seperately when outlays are anything SPENT. Again they are trying their best to make it sound scary, but these people have no background in Finance services. They are just random edgelords on the internet finding things to cut and Elon randomly picks them. So expect Social security, child medical services, and health and human services to be removed because of trolls.

This is why he put hard drives in the social security computers, why he convinced Trump to foolishly shut down USAID and donations to religious orgs working to help refugees. These are programs that Edgelords hate because they are very very racist. Not wanting to be too specific here but they claim that the us government only spent 4 trillion in 2020, when in reality the us government spent 7.7 trillion. You see the reason for this discrepancy is what I call fancy accounting. They think any program that they like shouldn’t be counted, and that Biden has to be worse than Trump, so they halve Trump’s spending because it was correct while accurately reporting Biden’s spending because no one bothers to look up this stuff anyway. The big big reason to underreport Trump is that it makes Biden look much worse, instead of a level graph slowly increasing they are able to show a near doubling of the debt with this simple and dishonest trick. And if these are the people in charge of funneling info to Musk we are all screwed.

Doge ( I hate it) has no power to enact these cuts, but Musk gets Trump to do it. This should be enough for Congress to impeach Trump for overstepping his power in the budget and management. But don’t expect that to matter. The next president will have to fix this mess and hopefully put Musk in prison for what he does now.

If Musk wants to do this legally, be transparent, use the courts. Don't just whisper in Trumps ear behind closed doors. I would love a balanced budget and a clean government but this is not the way.