#sifri —

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2, and in BLOOMINGTON on Apr 4. More tour dates here.

It's hard to imagine today, but Barack Obama ran as a populist outsider, buoyed into office by a grassroots organizing campaign that used an incredibly innovative online organizing tool called MyBarackObama.com, which directly connected rank-and-file supporters so they could self-organize, creating an unstoppable force.

But as far as Obama was concerned, MyBarackObama.com was a campaigning tool, not a governing tool. The last thing Obama wanted was a clamorous electorate jostling his elbow while he made the grand bargains that defined his presidency: secret drone killings, immunity for telcos that profited from in illegal NSA spying, impunity for CIA torturers, bailing out bankers, complicity in the foreclosure epidemic, and, of course, unlimited free money for health insurance companies through the ACA.

Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, the GOP of his day was dominated by its own "grassroots" groups, the Tea Party movement that was funded and organized by the Kochs but who quickly slipped the leash and became an ungovernable force that conquered the party. It turns out that the kind of people who get really involved in party activism are, well, passionate (a less charitable term might be cranks – and I say this as a certified, grade-A crank). They really believe in the principles that bring them into party activism, and the only people they hate more than the other party are their own sellout leaders (oh, hi, Senator Fetterman!).

For a leader whose theory of governance involves a lot of back-room favor-trading and Extremely Grown Up compromising, an activated, organized base represents a powerful obstacle. Obama's seeming genius was his ability to awaken a grassroots campaigning force that he could then hit pause on once he attained office, then re-activate on demand (Obama "revived" MyBarackObama.com for his second presidential campaign):

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1532634/barack-obama-s-big-data-won-the-us-election-2.html

But ultimately, I think we have to conclude that Obama's strategy was a losing one. By putting his own organization into an induced coma between elections, Obama lost an important source of discipline and feedback that would have told him when his compromises overstepped the tolerance of the electorate – and the fact that Obama didn't have an organized base meant that his Democratic Party rivals and his Republican opponents could force him into bad compromises, as with the ACA.

Contrast Obama with another "populist outsider" in the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has never been afraid of his own base or their passion. Members of his staff disproportionately come from community and union organizing backgrounds. Think of the difference between Sanders' "Not me, US" and "Our revolution" slogans and Obama's dotcom URL, "MyBarackObama.com." Sanders' presidential campaigns were always organizing campaigns, and he's kept those going in non-election years.

Since Trump/Musk's shock therapy assault on American democracy, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been made headlines with a series of gigantic rallies across the country. The two Democratic Socialists have turned out vast crowds in Republican strongholds: 11,000 in Greely, CO; 15,000 in Tempe, AZ – and even bigger crowds in traditional Democratic turf: 34,000 in Denver.

Writing for The American Prospect, Micah Sifry describes the larger strategy behind these rallies. According to Faiz Shakur, the Sanders staffer who's organizing the events, the point of these events is to build a massive, grassroots organization that gets shit done:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-26-bernies-fighting-oligarchy-tour-organizing/

The campaign is hiring full-time organizers in "Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and several Western states," and they're already actively fighting in state-level battles, like a Colorado bill to make it easier to form a union:

https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/03/colorado-labor-peace-action-union-history/

These people-powered movements are mobilizing directly against Musk's dark money operation, like the Wisconsin Supreme Court election where Musk is paying people $100 each to vote against Susan Crawford, a progressive candidate:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-21-wisconsin-court-election-drawing-elon-musks-money/

The campaign is using online RSVPs to build out mailing lists. One interesting fact from Sifry's article: 65% of the signups are from people who are new to Sanders' mailing lists. 107,000 people have RSVPed so far. You can sign up here:

https://berniesanders.com/oligarchy/

Rationalization is easy to slip into and impossible to avoid. Politicians who make themselves beholden to organized supporters who really care about the issues are armoring themselves against the enormous pressure on elected representatives to make compromises. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have made compromises in their careers that I disagree with. I don't support them because I think they're perfect or immune to self-serving justifications. I support them because they are deliberately putting themselves in a position where it's much harder for them to make excuses and get away with it.

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/2025/03/26/not-me-us/#the-people-no

Image: Matt A.J. (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanders_rally_Council_Bluffs_IMG_4014_(49036624512).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[snowberry-pie]

smth i forgot i drew

[lazareneblessing]

hopping on an old trend? more likely than you think ! featuring @snowberry-pie's sifri and my malcolm. they might be from different universes but we make them hang out a lot

[giantbukonut]

jolts awake from a two week astarion induced stupor to think about sippybull for like fifteen seconds before slipping away yet again

[abysmalbeverage]

(Sifrie!)

[avoidcrowdraws]

Needed some support characters for mine and @every-captain's modern Dungeon Meshi AU, so here's the twins

They live and work in the wealthy part of town, Rysif owns a shoe store, and Sifry owns a bespoke clothing shop

Rysif is more social than her brother, and is generally a little better with people. Sifry can come off a little intense, and doesn't like small talk

[workersolidarity]

🇮🇱⚔️🇱🇧 🚀🚀🚀🏘️💥 🚨

ISRAELI OCCUPATION FORCES FIRE SEVERAL MISSILES IN LEBANON

📹 Scenes from the destruction wrought onto the villages of Berghoz and Kafr Kila on Sunday after the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) fired several missiles towards residential neighborhoods in the south of Lebanon, destroying several civilian homes.

According to reports in the Lebanese media, the Israeli military said Zionist warplanes had also bombed "Hezbollah" sites in the southeast of Lebanon in retaliation for the downing of Israeli drones.

According to Lebanese sources, the Israeli occupation army bombarded sites in eastern Lebanon's Baalbek region, targeting the village of Sifri in the Bekaa Valley plain, along with the village of Janta in the arid mountain region near the border with Syria, while the IOF claimed it struck a "military complex and three other terrorist infrastructure sites" belonging to Hezbollah's air defense network in the region. No casualties were reported in the strike.

The occupation army said the strikes were in retaliation for a drone that was shot down by Hezbollah surface-to-air missiles.

No less than 359 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon since the start of the hostilities with Hezbollah, which began with the Israeli occupation's assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks on Israeli military bases and settlements lining the Gaza Strip on October 7th, 2023, while at least 70 of "Israel's" victims in Lebanon have been civilians.

#source

#photosource

#videosource

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[hdadvocate]

Mara Sifry-Platt Shares Her Perspective on Multidisciplinary Team (MDT) For Huntington's Disease Families

Mara Sifry-Platt is a genetic counselor at HDSA UC Davis Center of Excellence and HDSA Center of Excellence Partner Kaiser Permanente, Northern California.  She is an integral part of the Multidisciplinary Care Team (MDT) at the two (2) Huntington’s Disease Society of America Centers of Excellence. Mara is a huge fan of a Multidisciplinary Care Team to care for Huntington’s disease (HD) patients…

[eretzyisrael]

Parashat - Ki Teitzei

by Meir Anolick

Written for Shabbat Parashat Ki Teitzei, יא באלול תשע”ד:

This week’s Parasha has one of the highest concentration of Mitzvot of any parsha in the Torah. Most of these Mitzvot are Bein Adam L’chaveiro, those Mitzvot which govern our interaction with our fellow man. There are plenty of important and oft-overlooked lessons of how to treat one another in this Parasha, from paying a hired worker (that includes babysitters!) on time to helping our fellow’s donkey (and all the more so a person) when they are stumbling under a load.

One Mitzvah is to put a protective fence around our roof, if it’s the kind of roof that people would walk around on, so that (22:8) “you will not place blood in your house if a fallen one falls from it”1, “ועשית מעקה לגגך ולא-תשים דמים בביתך כי-יפל הנפל ממנו”. The phrasing of this commandment seems strange at first; what does it meant that the “fallen one” will fall from it? Rashi explains for us that this is referring to one who was intended to fall, but it should not happen through you, since Hashem causes good things to happen through good people, and bad things to happen through bad people (Sifri, Shabbat 32:). The overriding lesson of this verse is that if one has been decreed to die, then it is going to happen, it’s just a matter of when, where, and how (unless the person does T’shuvah before then).

This verse was one my mind a few weeks ago, when we found ourselves under constant attack by our enemies. I had the website tzevaadom.com open on my computer constantly almost since the attacks started, and I was painfully aware of every time a siren went off anywhere in the country. When this was going on, many people started talking about how dangerous it was here. After all, with rockets fired at any and all hours of the day, and the frequency of sirens going on in certain areas of the country right by Gaza, one never knows if they would live through the day.

However, I counter that there is no place in the world that is safer than here in Israel. If Hashem has decreed that someone is to die, then it makes no difference if they are in Eretz Yisrael and get hit by a rocket or if they are in america (God forbid) and get hit by a car. On the contrary, when we are in a dangerous situation, then the more merits we amass for ourselves, the more likely Hashem is to have mercy on us and save us. As such, if we are in Eretz HaKodesh, the Land that Hashem has set aside for us, where we have certain extra Mitzvot we can perform that we can’t perform anywhere else in the world, and those Mitzvot that we do perform here gain us far greater merit than they would elsewhere, then where could we possibly be safer? Even those that don’t know Hashem gain merit just by living here, because every four Amot that one walks is another Mitzvah for dwelling in the Land. No where else can we hope to gain as much merit for ourselves as we can here in Eretz Yisrael. Yes, people do get killed sometimes, but they do every in the world. The only difference is, here in Eretz Yisrael our deaths are a Kiddush Hashem, whereas anywhere else, it appears to be mere accident.

Eretz Yisrael is described by the Torah as the Land that Hashem’s eyes are on it all year round. Though Hashem sees everything, his focus is on this One Land. When we are in a time of distress, where else could we possibly be safer than in His Land, working to fulfill His commandments, and striving to be as close to Him as we can be? Shabbat Shalom.

1 It is important to note that this Mitzvah applies to any many of dangerous object, both in the home and in the community, not just to fence-less roofs.

Source: amchachamvnavon.wordpress.com

[mvelazquez71]

Yo me enamore 😍

De ti perdidamente

De ti vivo

Impotente 😔

Sifri cuando

Te fuiste 😢

Lloré para

Olvidarte 😭

Pues no sabía

Vivir sin ti..😘

Porque Solo

Los tontos 🤓

Se enamoran

Igual que Yo 🥰

Con una mirada 👀

Con una sonrisa 😁

Y zas ya cayó..😎👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨

Gigoló Velázquez

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Occupy the Democratic National Committee

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.

Back in 2017, the Democratic National Committee's lawyers submitted a legal brief that didn't just say the quiet part out loud; they bellowed it: "[The DNC can] go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the [presidential] candidate that way":

https://observer.com/2017/05/dnc-lawsuit-presidential-primaries-bernie-sanders-supporters/

The brief was submitted in the lawsuit between Bernie Sanders and the DNC. Sanders sued over the DNC changing the rules midway through 2016 process in order to sideline him and give the nomination to Hillary Clinton. The DNC's response boiled down to, "Sure, we cheated. So what? We, the committee, are ultimately answerable only to ourselves, and we can choose anyone to lead the party into any election."

The DNC is a weak institution, in other words. There's a universe in which that would be OK. After all, there's a lot of overhead that comes with making strong institutions, all those checks and balances and oversight and transparency soak up resources that you could be using to do other stuff. In an ideal world, a badly run Democratic Party would be spurred to improve after it lost elections, which would result in the defenestration of bad party bosses and the ouster of bad candidates:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

But the US political system is not an ideal world. In the real world, it's possible for party bosses who pursue disastrous strategies that result in key electoral losses to remain in power. The Democratic Party still rakes in massive donations from people who hate Trump more than they hate the Democratic Party's incompetence. Candidates in gerrymandered safe seats can be wildly incompetent and still hold onto power for improbably long timescales, despite the manifest evidence of their total unfitness for office:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Lipinski

In the absence of real consequences for corruption, incompetence and utter moral turpitude, the Democratic National Committee needs some other form of discipline to get it into fighting form. We need to occupy the DNC, strengthen its institutional safeguards, and turn it into an election-winning, fascism-fighting, extinction-rebelling, worker-defending powerhouse.

Three weeks from now, the DNC will meet in National Harbor MD to elect its new president and officers. Who gets to vote on that? The 448 members of the party's national committee. Who are they? As Micah Sifry writes for The American Prospect, it's a secret, even to the committee members:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-10-opening-dncs-black-box/

No, really. While nominally, members can request a list of their fellow members, the DNC stalls and stonewalls and does everything it can to prevent the committee from communicating in any way they can't control. This is incredible, but it's true. Which is why Sifry has published a leaked list of all 448 members:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bQKIP3W1NWChRjSbsE0O5k5s7OdgXrJi5-CMfFECIBU/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Looking at the spreadsheet of members, we get a rare glimpse inside the Democratic sausage factory. There's te 73 "at large" members who were voted on as a single block after being handpicked by outgoing president Jaime Harrison. These members are a mix of great people and terrible people, and that's by design: it meant that Sanders and Warren voters could only get their people onto the committee if they voted for some of the most disgusting corporate shills you can imagine.

The fact that the national committee's membership is secret and their communications must pass through a DNC chokepoint means that they get up to all kinds of shenanigans, like at the 2023 summer meeting where they voted themselves the power to throw out any bylaw amendments passed at a national party convention. The vote was whipped by paid DNC staff, creating an atmosphere so poisonous that Jessica Chambers (a rep from Wyoming) called the DNC "the least democratic organization that I’m involved with."

Sifry's breakdown is really useful: he identifies the minority of members who are elected by the party rank-and-file, calling them "the people most responsive to what the base of the party cares about." He also calls out the corporate shills who "buckrake as lobbists," like Donna Brazile, "a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm.”

But even where state party organizations have elections for their committee members, some states keep the results of those elections a secret. Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have 69 members, but the identities of all but 14 of them are a secret.

This is a rotten institution, and that's by design. If you want to know why we can't have nice things – or, you know, a world that's not on fire and haunted by creeping fascism – this is why. The takeover of the DNC won't be easy, but it can't start until we know who the DNC is.

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/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#dinosaurs

[snowberry-pie]

style experiment

[soropositivoorg]

Estudo Revela Riscos Reais de contrair HIV em Lesões com Agulhas

Estudo do CDC destaca as diferenças no risco percebido e real Por James Myhre e Dennis Sifris, MD Atualizado em 03 de outubro de 2024  Avaliado clinicamente por Steffini Stalos, D.O. Lesões com agulhas – bem como qualquer lesão percutânea que possa expor uma pessoa a sangue ou fluidos corporais contaminados – há muito que são uma preocupação tanto para os profissionais de saúde como para o…

[abysmalbeverage]

(More doodles of Sifrie from In Ststars and Tim!)

[apamates]

coming out as a sifri hippie con un swing criminal and urging everyone to listen to danny ocean

[600shekels]

2 Chronicles 31: 1. "The Sages."

31 When all this had ended, the Israelites who were there went out to the towns of Judah, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. They destroyed the high places and the altars throughout Judah and Benjamin and in Ephraim and Manasseh. After they had destroyed all of them, the Israelites returned to their own towns and to their own property.

The double expression of destruction teaches that you must repeat the action until the purpose is accomplished. See Bava Metzia 31b.

In the words of the Sifri, "What is the source for the law that if you cut down a tree which was worshipped as an idol, and it regrew [after you have cut it down even] ten times, that you are still required to cut it down? The Torah therefore says, 'a'beid t'ab'dun'."6 Our Sages also said there, "The verse,7 '[You must tear down their altars, break their monuments, burn their idolatrous trees, and break their idolatrous statues,] and you shall obliterate their names from that place,' teaches that only in Eretz Yisrael are you command to chase after them, but you are not commanded to chase after them outside Eretz Yisrael."

= 13147, 13-14-7 =יגידז‎ Yagidz = Yag= a man, gid=great dz or tz= a sage.

The Torah states once we achieve Shabbat, we rehearse what gave us freedom from all duality and delusion so that when life challenges us we are prepared.

This leads to graduation from the practices of the Israelites which buffer us against the unjust forces that attempt to lure us into negative transactions with life to unity with the fires, Sefirot, which contain the basic wavelengths of a sentient personality, much more than just the outerwear of the aspects of a saint.