#federal outsourcing

[federal21]

How do I move to Portugal with my family?

Moving to Portugal with your family is an exciting opportunity that involves careful planning and organization. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you through the process:

1. Choose the Right Visa: The first step is to determine the appropriate visa for your family. If you plan to work, the D7 Visa is a popular choice for non-EU citizens, particularly for those with passive income or freelancers. If you’ve secured a job in Portugal, you’ll need a Work Visa. Family members can apply for a Family Reunification Visa to join you.

2. Gather Essential Documents: Ensure you have important documents such as passports, marriage and birth certificates, financial proof, health insurance, and accommodation details ready for the visa application.

3. Find Accommodation: Research and secure suitable housing in cities like Lisbon, Porto, or the Algarve. Consider factors like schools, transportation, and community amenities.

4. Enrolling in Schools: If you have children, you’ll need to enroll them in a school. Portugal offers both public and international schools.

5. Accessing Healthcare: Portugal has an excellent healthcare system. Once you obtain residency, you can access public healthcare services.

By following these steps, your family’s relocation to Portugal can be smooth and enjoyable.

[rightnewshindi]

हिमाचल में कर्मचारियों का हल्ला बोल: शिमला से शुरू हुआ आंदोलन, सरकार को दी चेतावनी!

Himachal News: हिमाचल प्रदेश के सरकारी कर्मचारी अपनी मांगों को लेकर अब आर-पार की लड़ाई के मूड में हैं। सोमवार, 7 अप्रैल 2025 को शिमला के कालीबाड़ी हॉल में संयुक्त कर्मचारी महासंघ ने एक बड़ा अधिवेशन आयोजित किया, जिसमें कर्मचारियों ने सरकार के खिलाफ जमकर नाराजगी जाहिर की। यह सिर्फ शुरुआत है, क्योंकि महासंघ ने अगले तीन महीनों में हर जिले में ऐसे अधिवेशन करने का ऐलान किया है। कर्मचारियों का कहना है…

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In mid-1920, the Pennsylvania started to contract-out some of the repairs of locomotives to the giant Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia. In all, 200 locomotives were sent to Baldwin, yet an Interstate Commerce Commission investigation found out that the railroad had paid "$3,173,000 or over $16,000 per locomotive more than it would have cost to do the same work in its own shops." The investigation further found that the Pennsylvania, in fact, had the required shop capacity to do the work but reduced its work force by 10,000 men. For Frank Walsh, the attorney representing the shopcrafts, the explanation for the situation was simple; "the men in control of the bankers and railroads believed it was easier to make money through equipment companies than through the railroads." The Pennsylvania management was "hostile to organized labor and that part of the conspiracy was for the purpose of causing unemployment among the railroad shop crafts."

...

With the Pennsylvania setting the course during 1920, numerous other railroads clamored to contract their work out. The Erie Railroad was one of the first to take advantage of this loophole when in 1921 it leased its Hornell, New York, shops to the Hornell Repair and Construction Co., and its Marion, Ohio, shops to the Railway Service Company. The contracts stipulated that the Erie would retain ownership of tools, could take over the shops on demand, and retained the right "to decide who can be employed." Finding this arrangement successful, the Erie went one step further and signed a contract with the Wagner Construction Co. of Jersey City, New Jersey. What was strange about this contract was that the offices of this company were "operated by the Jersey City Horse Manure Co., with Charles Wagner as President." This arrangement with a "dummy contractor" led one union "operated by the Jersey City Horse Manure Co., with Charles Wagner as President." This arrangement with a "dummy contractor" led one union observer to note caustically:

I will leave it to the reader to figure out for observe the connection between the two lines of business, as I have been unable to come to any logical conclusion why a dealer in horse manure unable how to handle locomotive repairs.

At least forty-four Class 1 railroads engaged in contracting out.

Erie Railroad shopmen discovered that once they were under new ownership their wages were cut, consequently, they walked out on strike at the end of March 1922. The general chairman of System Federation no. 100 called the strike and argued that "the men were sick and tired of being fed up on the law." This chairman then went on to say that there had been innumerable strike votes taken but that "nothing had ever been done." The frustration of the Erie men with their cautious national leadership, and with the bureaucratic constraints of the RLB [Railroad Labour Board], was leading to a breakdown in control. When RED [Railway Employee’s Department of the American Federation of Labor] representative Frank Paquin tried to convince the men to go back to work, the strikers labeled him a dupe of the contractor:

The men were very much inflamed against my presence in the city and they exhibited no modesty in expressing their opinion of me in the worst terms of profanity.

The RED was thus faced with the angry Erie Railroad shopmen; contracting out was spreading; and an unfriendly railroad board was handing down a series of decisions undermining hard-won gains. The approaching Chicago convention of the RED promised to be a lively affair. Set for April 10, 1922, the convention promised to propel the shopcrafts into an aggressive stand against any further attacks, either from the railroads or the RLB.

In a convention hall decked out in exhibits showing the interlocking directorships of railroad owners and managers, with tables showing the degree of bank control of both railroads and equipment companies (contracting firms), Bert Jewell almost immediately found himself defending the actions of the RED. The major criticism voiced was that union leaders had ignored the members' strike vote. Jewell remarked that he couldn't understand this point, because the advantages of holding a strike ballot had been to go "back in [to the RLB hearing] and get a further concession. "

In any event, Jewell argued, the shopcrafts "could not... finance such a strike for any length of time we know how long it has taken by previous experience [Illinois Central and the Harriman strikes) for a shop craftsmen's strike to be effective." Peter Conlon of the IAM [International Association of Machinists] countered Jewell's argument by stating that localized strikes were disastrous, while a national strike would make it difficult for the railroads to find scabs:

I can't conceive where they are going to get enough scabs to fill every position in the shop crafts throughout the length and breadth of our land and I believe it will make the issue short and snappy.

The delegates agreed with Conlon's call for action. One explained he was tired of "getting trimmed at every turn of the road." Another angrily observed, "I feel that the roads are gradually eating into the vitals of our organizations. "

With the bulk of delegates in a fighting mood, a strike ballot was ordered regarding the issues of contracting out and piecework. The question that remained for the convention was how to finance the strike? The leadership pushed for the acceptance of a fixed assessment on the membership, but after a vigorous debate it was decided to call for a voluntary "donation" of 5% rather than an assessment. The more angry delegates had ignored their leaders' pleas for financial preparedness. The convention finished its business on April 22, and the decisions made there profoundly shaped the response of the shopcraft leadership to further attacks by the railroads and the RLB. The members had made clear their intention to strike if contracting out and piecework were not discontinued."

- Colin J. Davis, Power at Odds: The 1922 National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. p. 52, 57-59.

[saywhat-politics]

HealthWatch

FDA making plans to end its routine food safety inspections, sources say

By Alexander Tin

Edited By Nicole Brown Chau,

 Paula Cohen

April 17, 2025 / 4:56 PM EDT / CBS News

The Food and Drug Administration is drawing up plans that would end most of its routine food safety inspections work, multiple federal health officials tell CBS News, and effectively outsource this oversight to state and local authorities.

The plans have not been finalized and might need congressional action to fully fund, the officials said, who were not authorized to speak publicly. 

Some FDA employees have been working on a possible shift of the agency's routine food efforts to states for years, one current and one former official said, which could free up resources to focus on higher priority and foreign inspections. The FDA already outsources some routine food inspections through contracts with 43 states and Puerto Rico. 

"There's so much work to go around. And us duplicating their work just doesn't make sense," one former FDA official, who worked on the plans before leaving the agency and spoke on the condition of anonymity, told CBS News.

Multiple federal health officials said that the state work currently is often reserved for lower-risk inspections. A third of routine food safety inspections were done by states over recent years, a Government Accountability Office report said earlier this year. 

[twofeetonthedashboard]

WHO AM I VOTING FOR - AND WHY?????

That moment when someone says, "I can't believe you would vote for Trump.”

I simply reply, “I'm not voting for Trump.”

I'm voting for the First Amendment and freedom of speech.

I'm voting for the Second Amendment and my right to defend my life and my family.

I'm voting for the next Supreme Court Justice(s) to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I’m voting for the continued growth of my retirement and reducing inflation.

I’m voting for a return of our troops from foreign countries and the end to America’s involvement in foreign conflicts.

I'm voting for the Electoral College and for the Republic in which we live.

I'm voting for the Police to be respected once again and to ensure Law & Order. I am tired of all the criminals having a revolving door and being put back in the street.

I’m voting for the continued appointment of Federal Judges who respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I’m voting for keeping our jobs to remain in America and not be outsourced all over the world - to China, Mexico and other foreign countries. I want USA made.

I’m voting for secure borders and have legal immigration. I can’t believe we have actually have flown 380,000 illegal immigrants into our country.

I am voting for doing away with all of the freebies given to all of the illegals and not looking after the needs of the American citizens.

I'm voting for the Military & the Veterans who fought for this Country to give the American people their freedoms.

I'm voting for the unborn babies that have a right to live.

I’m voting for peace progress in the Middle East.

I’m voting to fight against human/child trafficking.

I'm voting for Freedom of Religion.

I'm voting for the right to speak my opinion and not be censored. I am voting for the return of teaching math, history, and science instead of indoctrination of our children and pronouns.

I'm not just voting for one person, I'm voting for the future of my Country.

I'm voting for my children and my grandchildren to ensure their freedoms and their future.

What are you voting for? Trump/Vance2024

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

They told her she was just spending the night in Miami.

No warning. No lawyer. No time to pack. Just steel cuffs wrapped around her wrists, cinched tight across her chest, chained to a waist belt so snug she couldn’t breathe. A bus with no food, no water, no bathroom—just a puddle of piss soaking the floor. The guards told her to go ahead and urinate where she sat. She did.

Then they pushed her into Krome.

Krome, the Miami processing center where men with criminal records are supposed to be held—not immigrant women with no charges, no convictions, no voice. Krome, where she and 26 others were stuffed “like sardines in a jar,” forced to sleep on concrete, offered one three-minute shower in four days, and told by guards to pretend to have a seizure if they wanted medicine. One woman actually had a seizure. They came for her. The rest they ignored.

Three people are now dead in ICE custody. Three. In just over a month. Genry Ruiz-Guillen, 29, from Honduras, died January 23. Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, 45, from Ethiopia, died January 29. Maksym Chernyak, 44, from Ukraine, died February 20.

No convictions. No due process. No protection. Just death under fluorescent lights.

And while the bodies pile up, the architects of this system are laughing.

THE ARCHITECTS OF SUFFERING

Tom Homan—now officially Trump’s Border Czar—is no longer just shouting from Fox News panels. He’s in charge. And he’s promising “deportations every day,” vowing to expel millions. He’s pushing to build new detention camps on military bases and at Guantanamo Bay, to outsource incarceration to local jails, and to lower federal detention standards across the board. He wants to hand over human lives to any sheriff with a cage and a budget. This isn’t law enforcement—it’s a national purge.

Kristi Noem is no longer the governor of South Dakota. She’s been promoted to Secretary of Homeland Security, overseeing ICE, CBP, and FEMA. She’s already begun reshaping disaster policy and immigration enforcement with the cold efficiency of someone who never cared about the human cost. She’s toured detention centers abroad and proposed funneling more power and funding into the machine that’s already killing people. This is the woman now in charge of protecting the homeland—and she’s treating it like a battlefield.

And Stephen Miller—the alabaster goblin behind Trump’s first wave of xenophobic terror—is back inside the West Wing as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. He is not hiding. He is not softening. He is laying the groundwork for mass deportations, family separations, and the total militarization of immigration enforcement. Miller’s strategy is simple: flood the system, break it, and make cruelty look like order.

This isn’t mismanagement. This isn’t politics. This is state-sanctioned human suffering.

ICE has 46,269 people in custody—far above its legal bed count of 41,500. Congress just rewarded them with another $430 million. Detention centers are overflowing. Guards are whispering, “It shouldn’t be like this.” But they keep turning the key. They keep locking the doors.

Because this system wasn’t designed to rehabilitate. It wasn’t designed to deter. It was designed to break people.

And it’s working.

CORPORATE PROFITEERS OF THE GULAG

Akima Infrastructure Protection—remember that name. That’s the private contractor running Krome under a $685 million federal contract. Your tax dollars. Your country. Your name on the invoice. And Akima didn’t just ignore the reports of overcrowding, abuse, and death—they didn’t even respond. Because they don’t have to. In America’s immigration gulag system, accountability is optional, profits are mandatory.

Akima isn’t alone. The privatized detention racket is a booming business. The worse the conditions, the higher the margins. More detainees equals more beds, more guards, more federal payouts. These aren’t just prison contractors—they’re war profiteers in a domestic war against the poor, the brown, the undocumented, and the disposable.

And while three human beings die in government cages in thirty goddamn days, ICE puts out a statement saying they can’t verify the abuse without the women’s names. That’s like watching a house burn down and saying you can’t help unless the flames file a formal request.

What ICE really means is this: unless you hand us their names, we can’t retaliate.

FEAR, SILENCE, AND THE NEW AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

These women are afraid to speak because they know what happens to people who tell the truth in a system built to erase them. Their fear isn’t paranoia. It’s wisdom. Because in Trump’s America, the immigration system is no longer civil. It’s punitive, predatory, and lethal.

And while this slow-motion horror show unfolds behind steel bars and security checkpoints, the rest of the country scrolls past it—too tired, too numb, too wrapped in talking points to see what’s right in front of them:

The United States is running concentration camps again.

Not in secret. Not in shadows. In Miami. In Arizona. In Texas. With full congressional funding. With bipartisan indifference. With the open approval of a political movement that cheers cruelty like it’s patriotism.

And unless we name it, scream it, and rage against it, it’s only going to get worse.

Because this administration has made it clear: they don’t want to fix the system. They want to break more people. Faster. Cheaper. Louder.

And if that means more body bags? So be it. To them, that’s not a failure.

It’s the plan working exactly as intended.

WHAT THE HELL DO WE DO?

We stop pretending this is normal. We stop calling it a “broken system” and start calling it what it is: a weapon.

We hold the names. We name the dead. We say Genry. Serawit. Maksym. Not as footnotes, but as proof that silence is complicity.

We pressure Congress to defund ICE, to end private detention contracts, to shut down Krome and every facility like it. We demand independent investigations, criminal accountability, and media that covers these stories like lives are on the line—because they are.

We support immigrant-led organizations. We raise hell at town halls. We show up with signs, with lawsuits, with cameras, with righteous fury. We flood their offices. We write until our fingers bleed. We organize, we protest, we resist.

And if you’re in a position of power—if you’re a staffer, an attorney, a journalist, a human being with a platform—you use it. This is not a drill. This is not a moment to stay neutral.

The machine is killing people. The people running it are proud of that. And history will not forgive anyone who stood by and watched.

Raise your voice. Wreck their silence. And don’t stop until the cages are empty.

[Bill Adkins]

[mariacallous]

In his first two weeks of office, President Trump signed several Executive Orders (EOs) to fulfill one of his many campaign promises—to reduce the size of the federal government. He has rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, asserting that the federal government will no longer consider race, ethnicity, or other federally protected characteristics in hiring and retention decisions. In recent days, he announced a financial buyout to federal employees who do not wish to comply with the new Return to Office (RTO) mandate, which requires employees to be in an office for five days per week, despite concerns about available office space. The details of the buyout were outlined in an email with the subject line, “Fork in the Road,” sent by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on January 28, 2025, to over 2 million federal workers. The OPM also offered deferred resignation where federal employees could resign immediately and still be paid for the next several months. Meanwhile, those who decide to stay are not promised future employment and the memo stated new conditions for employees, that they be “loyal, trustworthy, and to strive for excellence in their daily work”; principles that likely will become benchmarks for future performance reviews.

Under the Trump administration, federal workforce reductions will happen, along with a greater deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and outsourcing to private firms. These new services will cost millions of dollars to design, deploy, and train the federal workforce, creating new national and data security threats as well, given the level of protected information at stake. But the influence of Big Tech leaders, who are formally and informally advising President Trump and his administration, may be accelerating a smaller government workforce based on their own values about corporate governance. Big Tech companies were among those that led the RTO mandates for their own employees after the pandemic with similar terms and conditions, as well as promises made that were not kept. Many of these same companies are making AI more technically advanced without realizing that millions of people are still impacted in the U.S. by the lack of digital access. As Biden era policies were working to address the connectivity challenges faced throughout the U.S., these programs are now being challenged, which will almost guarantee that even the best of AI technologies embedded in government functions may be inaccessible to most people.

[centrally-unplanned]

could Congress in theory pass something similar to the Enabling Act of Nazi Germany or are the constitutional limits on delegation of powers too strict?

I think they could, yeah. It won't look the same, right? Like you can't get rid of the Bill of Rights that way. But there is a lot you can do in between the spaces there. The US Constitution doesn't create a lot of rules around election management, for example, beyond requiring they happen in some form. Congress could vest expansive authority in the executive to police elections against "foreign threats" and you could do a lot that way. You can use the powers of policing/antiterrorism/what-have-you to allow the executive to use the threats of property confiscation (civil asset forfeiture babyyy, no trial required!) or imprisonment to force compliance from the population. We used the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to break up labor strikes in the past, you can get there again and do a lot more!

The biggest limit is probably going to be state-federal; you can get a lot of power invested in the executive branch via creative framing (the product of an 18th century constitution being stretched to meet the needs of a modern nation state - what can't the commerce clause do??), but there are fundamental rights that states have that the executive cannot break. You can corrupt elections, but states have strong powers to determine their structure that the federal government can't override and definitely could not be outsourced to the President. And you will legitimately not be able to establish a state religion or some other key things.

In the soft version of the Enabling Act, of course. But you can just not be a fucking coward about it - Congress passes a law tripling the size of the Supreme Court which they can totally do, you appoint your cronies, and then file an Executive Order declaring martial law to revoke the entire constitutional order which they rubberstamp

Which really isn't an indictment of the US Constitution? If your ruling political party universally agrees to say Il Duce Vivre is the fashion of the times, you are fucked no matter what a piece of paper says. I don't think the Weimar Constitution was that badly designed! It is a bit of a myth. The Nazis had co-opted the conservatives, ran the state, and used the threat of violence to coerce compliance from dissenters. The wording of Article 48's "Emergency Powers Clause" wasn't gonna change that. This is the hard limit of legalism, it can never bind the hands of men who choose not to be bound by it. If the US truly faces a "fascist coup" moment it probably won't be because the Constitution has a loophole for the moment of the coup. It will be because of the one million failures of design that led to that being possible and desired by so many of the political elite and voting public.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

When it comes to benefits from economic imperialism, is puerto rico also included among those who receive these economic benefits? Genuinely curious, I don't know much about the economic situation in Puerto Rico compared to the rest of América Latina

Have in mind that not being from there and I'm not like EXTENSIVELY well-read about US-Puerto Rico relations, but from what I've read the short answer is no.

I do think Puerto Ricans have a small privilege over other Latin Americans by virtue of being granted US citizenship (considering that just being a US citizen confers a non-trivial amount of passport privilege); but in the economic sense Puerto Rico is subject to the same kind of exploitative economic relationship that other Latin American countries have with the US, where the conditions enable American businesses to extract a staggering amount of wealth from the territory by operating there (either through labor outsourcing or exploitation of natural resources) in a way that benefits American investors and not the local economy, except this relationship is exacerbated by Puerto Rico's all but explicitly colonial status as an unincorporated US territory which allows American interests to create and maintain these conditions, and the fact that Puerto Rico is subject to the decisions of the US federal government while being denied any say in US politics.

I think a very straightforward example is the issue of how laws such as the Jones Act benefit certain sections of the US working class while having extremely negative consequences for Puerto Rican people. Puerto Rico, being a small island nation, is heavily reliant on importing goods and resources that can't be produced locally. The Jones act, among other things, requires all ships transporting goods between US ports (including those in territories like Puerto Rico) to be american-owned, operated, and built. Due to protecting the US maritime transport industry from foreign competition (and also due to codifying seamen's rights to compensation in the case of injury working on a US-flagged ship) it enjoys the support of US maritime worker unions, but it also increases the cost of imported goods in Puerto Rico by an estimate of 30%, which massively increases the cost of living for Puerto Ricans. (Which you know. I support labor unions, and the law does benefit maritime workers in the US, but it's an example of the way the influence that the American government wields over Puerto Rico is used to create conditions that benefit certain sectors of the US economy at the cost of the quality of life of people in Puerto Rico)

Another example is how Puerto Rico has become a tax haven for American companies and wealthy individuals under the guise of attracting investment. On top of already low property taxes, currently under Act 60 certain export industries are allowed to operate in Puerto Rico at a 4% corporate tax rate, and entitled to a 75% exemption from property taxes, 100% from passive income taxes, and 50% from municipal taxes, while US citizens who become new Puerto Rico residents as "individual investors" can apply for a 100% exemption from most income taxes.

Also there is the whole deal of disaster capitalism and American companies benefitting from natural disasters in Puerto Rico, such as firms like Whitefish Energy securing extremely profitable contracts to rebuild Puerto Rico's electrical grid after Hurricane María, or private equity firms like Blackstone swooping in to buy the affected hostels, homes, and farmland at extremely cheap prices.

Ultimately, I think the simple fact that US economic projects have turned Puerto Rico into what is considered a "high-income economy" while the poverty rate in the territory is currently 43% (more than double the poverty rate of the poorest US state) should be a pretty good indicator that Puerto Rico, despite nominally being part of the US, is on the receiving end of US economic imperialism and wealth extraction.

[anonymous-dentist]

Honestly? I think everything goes back to the night Cellbit found out that he and Bagi are siblings, because several things happened that night:

Cellbit admitted that he killed Maximiliano the Worker and that he liked it

Cellbit found out he’s missing 11 or so years of his life and that he could’ve had a happy childhood with an actual family who loved him if the Federation hadn’t sent him away

Bagi told Cellbit that she’d be there for him even if he started killing again

Cellbit got confirmation that Bad kidnapped that missing worker

Cellbit also made a very important point: the Federation is spreading itself thin trying to find this missing worker

Cellbit told Bad that his proposed revolution would not exclude regular Federation workers unless they betrayed the Federation because, if they don’t, then they’re complicit in the Federation’s wrongdoings

And now we’re here with four dead Federation workers and a Federation clearly struggling to keep things under control, and I think that that’s the point. The Federation has spread itself too thin.

We saw this even in Cucurucho’s presentation during the Mini-Me event when it basically admitted that the Feds have no idea what happened to the president. And then we have the Mini-Mes themselves: they’re clearly meant to be protection of some kind for the workers because they can fight at certain levels, and they’re at least meant to be assistants. This was before the killings started, but it was after the Federation’s lower-rank workers started legit just not doing their jobs because they were too scared of getting kidnapped.

Cellbit has a history of taking people’s plans and adapting them to make them his own. His Regret Arc and subsequent Federation infiltration was directly inspired by hearing Quackity try and join the Feds and then Quackity telling him that to beat the Federation, you have to think like the Federation. And now we have Cellbit and Bad talking about how the Federation is creating openings in itself by expending so many resources trying to get the missing worker back, and we can already see the effects of the murders kinda making the Federation even weaker because, and no offense to Foolish, but they’ve legit had to outsource their murder investigation to him instead of using their own staff of A Rank investigators and Security Guards.

If this is Cellbit killing these people, he’s doing it to try and break the Federation to the point of the island’s rebels being able to actually hit the Feds where it hurts and try and take them down. He said himself that he already had an idea as to how to get an opening for his little revolution idea, and he told Bad that it would happen within a week of their conversation. The first body appeared four or five days later.

Cellbit is tired. We know this. He says that he wants to spend time with his family, but he’s also got one hell of a martyr complex going on where he thinks he’s better off dead than he is alive if it means helping people. We’ve seen this in him for months between him running for president to die for Forever, him legitimately banking on getting killed by the Federation during a hypothetical custody trial to get everyone to see how bad the Feds are, him blowing himself up to prove a point, him taking all the fall for the Mini-Me infiltration and accepting the punishment that’ll go with it, and maybe now we’re seeing it in him killing these workers and leaving clues pointing towards it being him.

Cellbit could be killing these workers to start a revolution that he’ll never see finished because he might be expecting to die before the end of it.

[federal21]

How to Sponsor Your Family While Working in Jordan

Eligibility Requirements

▸Must hold a valid work visa or residence permit in Jordan. ▸Proof of stable employment with a Jordan-based company. ▸Meet the minimum income threshold to support family members financially. ▸Provide proof of adequate housing/accommodation for family members.

Who Can Be Sponsored

▸Immediate family members, including spouse and children. ▸Some cases allow sponsorship of dependent parents.

Required Documents

▸Valid passports and residence permits of both sponsor and family members. ▸Employment contract or proof of sufficient income. ▸Marriage certificate (for spouse) and birth certificates (for children). ▸Proof of housing in Jordan (rental agreement or property ownership).

Application Process

▸Submit a family sponsorship application to Jordan’s Ministry of Interior. ▸Pay the required processing fees. ▸Provide translated documents (preferably in Arabic) as per official requirements. ▸Processing times vary; the application can take several weeks to months.

Important Tips

▸Ensure all documents are accurate and up to date. ▸Check for any changes in sponsorship regulations. ▸Follow up regularly on the application status with the authorities.

For more information:

[thespectrehauntingfodlan]

I feel like a lot of people, and this is really more for Usamericans than those from other countries who don't have any exposure to the internal affairs of this particular nightmare country, truly do not grasp the scale and significance of the problems and horrors here?

Literacy will be mentioned and downplayed, but a full 20% of people living here are illiterate to a degree where they cannot interact with even basic writing. That's one in five people, or almost the population of the entirety of the United Kingdom. And that's only the population that either cannot read any words at all or cannot parse sentences, an equally large amount of people can only read at a very basic level, and can't interpret and extrapolate information from text that's not direct. This is not some cry about media literacy, this is about basic functioning in society and how many are left behind from a society that increasingly isolates and diminishes them.

Manufacturing will be mentioned, and the thought most will have is that American production has been gutted and outsourced (usually leading to hostility to places like China or Vietnam), which has some truth but much of American industry has been transfered from "free" workers to prison slave labor, with some states not paying prisoners forced to work at all and the most ""generous"" states paying them a seventh of the already laughable federal minimum wage, and with the government actually subsidizing this by giving corporations a $2400 tax credit per prisoner they "employ"

Prison will be mentioned but the sheer inhumanity and brutality will never be grasped even when people recognize elements of it (usually for what passes as comedy) the totality of it will never register. One out of five of all people incarcerated on Earth are in prison in America, subjected to conditions which regularly and frequently kill them or break them, and there's not even a consistent reporting measure for people who die in prison or jail, to say nothing of the police killings which dwarf the amount of people executed by the state, which has even less of a standard for reporting. One county was simply burying the people they killed in unmarked graves nearby and never reporting it or recording it, only being discovered after years almost on accident.

Homelessness is rampant but the numbers and methods for assessing the size of the unhomed population are pitiful at best and laughable at worst, regularly undercounting and diminishing the severity because those who are homeless are barely considered people to not just the government but in the perception imposed by society.

And none of that is touching on the scale of the imperial war machine which ravages the rest of the world, how there's no way to even know how many bases the US even has, how many people it kills, how many wars it fights, who it even supports. None of us touching on the non-military methods of support and control the US provides to its proxies and cronies who prop up its hegemony.

The scale of it all is just mind breaking and I have seen excellent writing and interrogation of parts but I don't feel like the overall picture is ever even glimpsed.

[jangillman]

WHO AM I VOTING FOR - AND WHY?

That moment when someone says, "I can't believe you would vote for Trump.”

I simply reply, “I'm not voting for Trump.”

I'm voting for the First Amendment and freedom of speech.

I'm voting for the Second Amendment and my right to defend my life and my family.

I'm voting for the next Supreme Court Justice(s) to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I’m voting for the continued growth of my retirement and reducing inflation.

I’m voting for a return of our troops from foreign countries and the end to America’s involvement in foreign conflicts.

I'm voting for the Electoral College and for the Republic in which we live.

I'm voting for the Police to be respected once again and to ensure Law & Order. I am tired of all the criminals having a revolving door and being put back in the street.

I’m voting for the continued appointment of Federal Judges who respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I’m voting for keeping our jobs to remain in America and not be outsourced all over the world - to China, Mexico and other foreign countries. I want USA made.

I’m voting for secure borders and legal immigration. I can’t believe we actually flew in 380,000 illegal immigrants into our country.

I am voting for doing away with all of the freebies given to all of the illegals and not looking after the needs of the American citizens.

I'm voting for the Military & the Veterans who fought for this Country to give the American people their freedoms.

I'm voting for the unborn babies that have a right to live.

I’m voting for peace progress in the Middle East.

I’m voting to fight against human/child trafficking.

I'm voting for Freedom of Religion.

I'm voting for the right to speak my opinion and not be censored. I am voting for the return of teaching math, history, and science instead of indoctrination of our children and pronouns.

I'm not just voting for one person, I'm voting for the future of my Country.

I'm voting for my children and my grandchildren to ensure their freedoms and their future.

What are you voting for?

Trump/Vance2024. 🙏🇺🇸🙏🇺🇸🙏🇺🇸🙏🇺🇸

Copied from another post but it embodies my thoughts as well

. Feel free to copy and paste on your page or anywhere else. This is how we all feel.

[starseedpatriot]

That moment when someone says, "I can't believe you would vote for Trump," I simply reply:

"I'm not voting for Trump, I'm voting for the First Amendment and freedom of speech.

I'm voting for the Second Amendment and my right to defend my life and my family.

I'm voting for the next Supreme Court Justice(s) to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I’m voting for the continued growth of my retirement 401K and the stock market.

I’m voting for a return of our troops from foreign countries and the end to America’s involvement in foreign conflicts.

I'm voting for the Electoral College and for the Republic in which we live.

I'm voting for the Police to be respected once again and to ensure Law & Order.

I’m voting for the continued appointment of Federal Judges who respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I’m voting for our jobs to remain in America and not be outsourced all over again to China, Mexico and other foreign countries.

I’m voting for secure borders and legal immigration.

I'm voting for the Military & the Veterans who fought for this Country to give the American people their freedoms.

I'm voting for the unborn babies that have a right to live.

I’m voting for the continued peace progress in the Middle East.

I’m voting to fight against human/child trafficking.

I’m voting for Freedom of Religion.

I'm voting for the right to speak my opinion and not be censored.

I'm voting for my children and my grandchildren to ensure their freedoms and their future.

I'm not just voting for one person, I'm voting for the future of my Country.”

Are you?

[mariacallous]

“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” President Trump told reporters on March 22. In the span of a week, the president “forgot” that he invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport hundreds of people to a Salvadoran gulag.

“Other people handled it, but Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that,” he mumbled vaguely.

The media framed the debacle as a clever effort to “downplay his involvement” in the ugly episode, rather than evidence that the president is totally checked out and letting other people run the government.

And yet, just five days before his own memory lapse, Trump “declared” his predecessor’s pardons of the January 6 Committee “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” because Biden was too senile to understand them.

The post is part of an ongoing campaign to undo Biden’s presidency by claiming that he was too incompetent by the end to exercise actual power, and some unnamed, shadowy figure was running the White House instead. It’s shockingly inappropriate, of course. But the juxtaposition is even more jarring as we are daily confronted with a president who is disengaged from the details of his job, preferring to outsource most of his authority to an unelected billionaire.

President 4chan

Undoing pardons is not a thing. Not even if Biden used an autopen. As the Supreme Court made clear in Trump v. US, the president’s exercise of his “core” powers, specifically the pardon, is unreviewable. But Trump is captured by internet memes, and so he’s thrilled to amplify the “autopen” conspiracy currently flooding the rightwing media ecosystem.

“The person that operated the autopen, I think we ought to find out who that was because I guess that was the real president,” Trump said in the Oval Office on March 20.

As the New York Times points out, the “autopen” story was a conservative op from the get-go. Mike Howell, a Heritage Foundation operative who describes himself on Twitter as “Top Deportation Scientist. Official Pardon/Autopen Inspector,” spent the past four years trying to undermine the Biden administration through more or less questionable means. Looking to recycle that work in the Trump era, Howell is now trying to find ways to undo Biden’s work.

Heritage’s official position, at least since January 20, is that the president has un-challengeable authority over virtually every aspect of government. In 2024, even as the conservative think tank spearheaded litigation to challenge Biden’s supposedly tyrannical abuses, Heritage published Project 2025, a blueprint for imposing conservative rule. But consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and so, as Trump rushed to implement the Project 2025 agenda in the first weeks of his second stint, Howell and former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz were trawling through Biden’s signatures hoping to find a way to magic away his executive actions.

On March 5, Missouri Attorney General Andy Bailey unknowingly boosted Howell’s project.

“I am calling for a federal investigation into President Biden’s mental decline and legality of executive orders, pardons, and all other actions issued in his name,” he blustered on social media. “I am urging the Department of Justice to determine whether unelected White House staff exploited the president’s cognitive declined to issue executive orders without his knowing approval.”

The post was accompanied by a fake news release bearing the seal of Bailey’s office.

Bailey, who is no stranger to using his position for political stunts, cited zero evidence that President Biden lacked mental capacity. But for Howell, the signal boost was a godsend.

“Whoever controlled the autopen controlled the presidency,” he tweeted.

Howell’s post went viral, and soon rightwing media was running the story wall-to-wall.

Smear early, smear often

Perhaps reasoning that no one but liberals reads the “fake news” New York Times, Howell gleefully described the plan to reporters.

“We determined that the most legally vulnerable documents were the pardons,” he gushed, tacitly admitting that the goal was destruction for its own sake, not to further any policy goal or because the orders were themselves defective.

It’s an odd strategy. Even conservative stalwart Jonathan Turley is rolling his eyes at the idea of invalidating Biden’s pardons. And, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out in her partial dissent, the Court’s immunity decision would make it impossible to prosecute a president for selling a pardon, much less auto-signing one away, since questioning his advisors in court is now illegal.

Which is a lucky thing for Trump, who just pardoned Trevor Milton, a convicted fraudster who just so happened to have made a $1.8 million donation to the president’s campaign. Trump seemed not to know that Milton was found guilty by a jury of defrauding investors in his electric car company.

“He was exonerated. It was a big celebration,” he babbled, adding that “They say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president. He supported Trump. He liked Trump.”

Trump went on to call the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York “vicious people.”

“They’re violent,” he ranted, accusing the Justice Department of going after “thousands” of innocent people. He appeared blissfully unbothered that pardoning Milton will likely deprive his victims of hundreds of millions of dollars that would have gone to restitution.

Trump, who, at 78, is just three years younger than Biden, is clearly decompensating before our eyes. And yet, even as he free associates on live television, back-formulating justifications for orders he’s obviously never read, the right leans ever harder into the story of Biden’s supposed incompetence. Last week a federal judge on the Fifth Circuit took the occasion of an unrelated appeal to bring it up in a wholly unrelated case.

“Questions have arisen about the flurry of last-minute pardons issued by the Biden Administration,” Judge Andy Oldham wrote conspiratorially, without saying who was raising those questions.

“Some or all were allegedly effectuated via autopen,” he intoned, again omitting to mention who is doing the alleging.

“Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, stated that President Biden ‘genuinely did not know what he had signed’ in at least one instance toward the end of his presidency,” he went on, as if Johnson’s interview with conservative journalist Bari Weiss was cognizable evidence.

Judge Oldham went on to condemn Biden’s “pardon” of the defendant as “a stain on the noble prerogative of executive mercy.” In fact, it wasn’t a pardon at all, but a commutation of the death sentence for a murderer who will never leave prison. But Andy Oldham really wants to be a Supreme Court justice, so when he saw an opening to abuse the president’s former rival while expressing his support for the death penalty, he took it.

Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it to create confusion

“If Obama …” or “If Biden …” is a pointless exercise. And yet we are daily confronted with a president who is vigorously, confidently not doing his job.

Trump doesn’t know what he’s signed when it comes to pardons, executive orders, or anything else. He’s outsourced the job to an unelected billionaire who is currently slashing through the government, bragging on social media about feeding entire federal agencies “to the woodchipper.” Elon Musk leads cabinet meetings, dispatches his henchcoders to take over agency after agency, and purports to cancel federal contracts at will. He has no statutory authority, but claims only to be acting as an extension of the president.

In short, Musk is the autopen, illegitimately usurping executive power while claiming to be a mere extension of the president, mechanically recording his wishes and codifying his orders. And so, to compensate, Trump leans into the old, familiar foil.

It’s not the Trump kids who are trading on their father’s position to enrich themselves. It’s Hunter Biden. It’s not the Trump administration storing classified information on unsecured devices. It’s Hillary Clinton. And it’s not Donald Trump who signs whatever his aides put in front of him, no matter how corrupt. It’s Joe Biden.

[cyberstudious]

An Introduction to Cybersecurity

I created this post for the Studyblr Masterpost Jam, check out the tag for more cool masterposts from folks in the studyblr community!

What is cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity is all about securing technology and processes - making sure that the software, hardware, and networks that run the world do exactly what they need to do and can't be abused by bad actors.

The CIA triad is a concept used to explain the three goals of cybersecurity. The pieces are:

Confidentiality: ensuring that information is kept secret, so it can only be viewed by the people who are allowed to do so. This involves encrypting data, requiring authentication before viewing data, and more.

Integrity: ensuring that information is trustworthy and cannot be tampered with. For example, this involves making sure that no one changes the contents of the file you're trying to download or intercepts your text messages.

Availability: ensuring that the services you need are there when you need them. Blocking every single person from accessing a piece of valuable information would be secure, but completely unusable, so we have to think about availability. This can also mean blocking DDoS attacks or fixing flaws in software that cause crashes or service issues.

What are some specializations within cybersecurity? What do cybersecurity professionals do?

incident response

digital forensics (often combined with incident response in the acronym DFIR)

reverse engineering

cryptography

governance/compliance/risk management

penetration testing/ethical hacking

vulnerability research/bug bounty

threat intelligence

cloud security

industrial/IoT security, often called Operational Technology (OT)

security engineering/writing code for cybersecurity tools (this is what I do!)

and more!

Where do cybersecurity professionals work?

I view the industry in three big chunks: vendors, everyday companies (for lack of a better term), and government. It's more complicated than that, but it helps.

Vendors make and sell security tools or services to other companies. Some examples are Crowdstrike, Cisco, Microsoft, Palo Alto, EY, etc. Vendors can be giant multinational corporations or small startups. Security tools can include software and hardware, while services can include consulting, technical support, or incident response or digital forensics services. Some companies are Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), which means that they serve as the security team for many other (often small) businesses.

Everyday companies include everyone from giant companies like Coca-Cola to the mom and pop shop down the street. Every company is a tech company now, and someone has to be in charge of securing things. Some businesses will have their own internal security teams that respond to incidents. Many companies buy tools provided by vendors like the ones above, and someone has to manage them. Small companies with small tech departments might dump all cybersecurity responsibilities on the IT team (or outsource things to a MSSP), or larger ones may have a dedicated security staff.

Government cybersecurity work can involve a lot of things, from securing the local water supply to working for the big three letter agencies. In the U.S. at least, there are also a lot of government contractors, who are their own individual companies but the vast majority of what they do is for the government. MITRE is one example, and the federal research labs and some university-affiliated labs are an extension of this. Government work and military contractor work are where geopolitics and ethics come into play most clearly, so just… be mindful.

What do academics in cybersecurity research?

A wide variety of things! You can get a good idea by browsing the papers from the ACM's Computer and Communications Security Conference. Some of the big research areas that I'm aware of are:

cryptography & post-quantum cryptography

machine learning model security & alignment

formal proofs of a program & programming language security

security & privacy

security of network protocols

vulnerability research & developing new attack vectors

Cybersecurity seems niche at first, but it actually covers a huge range of topics all across technology and policy. It's vital to running the world today, and I'm obviously biased but I think it's a fascinating topic to learn about. I'll be posting a new cybersecurity masterpost each day this week as a part of the #StudyblrMasterpostJam, so keep an eye out for tomorrow's post! In the meantime, check out the tag and see what other folks are posting about :D