Well, I don't know about all you suckers, but I just traded my Trump crypto coins for a reservation at the Trump Gaza Resort, (The Donald Suite).
Brief AP update on deportations here.
They are literally sending deportees to Guantanamo, that wasn't a fantasy? Jesus Christ.
I guess, the thing that the thing that is surprising me a bit is exactly how cowardly/on board the Republican congress has been. Did not expect much, but I thought there might have been some greater show of institutional pride.
And hearing reports on background that many 'are concerned." At this point it is to laugh; and I fear Ds were slow in part because they thought they were going to ,strike>kick that football peel off some Republicans on critical stuff.
To me this all feels a bit like the beginning of the pandemic: overwhelm, imperfect information, constantly shifting priorities, constantly shifting threats, fear of government malice, etc. I remain convinced that that experience permanently fucked a lot of people up, and now we've moved on to the next iteration. Genuinely unsure what lessons to apply.
4.last: they were going to kick that football peel off some Republicans on critical stuff.
5 is exactly right.
In fact, trying to figure out what to post here each day feels like that time period: what on earth would anyone else want to talk about besides this one big elephant? How do I distinguish one thread from the next? Is a photo of being on fire sufficient?
3: Gitmo is the Riviera of the Caribbean at this point.
On Guantanamo, my dad's theory is that they want the camp to be intentionally porous, so that they're more or less just releasing detainees into Cuba.
I think it's interesting, but ultimately false. First, that hypothesizes a level of planning beyond what they're doing. Second, then they lose an opportunity to be punitive. Finally, they lose a source of captive labor, although putting them in Guantanamo already makes this one a stretch. (I did think that was going to be the plan: make detainees work for corporations.)
I don't think Cuba is going to let any border with Guantanamo be porous.
9.last: My assumption is that it would end up with some guest worker/indentured servant arrangement. And probably similar. Doing Parchman Farm writ large seems like too much overhead.
I know Bouie was called out in the other thread, but this is it for me in the end:
"The sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country's political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse."
Not to false-equivalence, but you all remember you've had a concentration camp for refugees in Guantanamo for about 40 years?
8: Yes, exactly. El Salvador said they would take US citizens as prisoners too.
OK, I just have to get in one more NYT hit as they keep serving them up on a platter:
Today's Daily is with mega-hack Jonathan Swan, and here's the write-uo:
Elon Musk and his team have taken a hacksaw to the federal bureaucracy one agency at a time, and the question has become whether he's on a crusade that will leave the government paralyzed or deliver a shake-up it has needed for years.
[emphasis added]
This time, the camps won't be declared unconstitutional or, if they are, it won't be enforced. Also, this is bringing people from the United States to Guantanamo. Before, the point was to stop people from reaching the United States.
Also, back in the 90s, it resulted in a great line in "Clueless."
I am in person today, and only the person retiring has mentioned anything political. Well, i said something to my Latina coworker, but we are friendly outside of work.
I'm getting more anxious today. Mainly, because I feel like Schumer isn't doing enough and the Dems aren't putting forward a united front. Plus no Republican pushback - even from traditional Republicans.
Also Yikes
https://bsky.app/profile/nycsouthpaw.bsky.social/post/3lhgy3e22tk2c
Dem can't be bothered to vote to subpoena musk.
I truly don't really know what anyone expects the Democrats to be doing right now. Gumming up the works in Congress? What would a united front even be? Their only weapon right now is "words" and "lawsuits" and both of those have been totally neutered. There's no oxygen in the room for anything they're doing, even if they're doing it perfectly correctly (which of course they aren't).
Congressional Democrats have been rallying and making speeches in front of federal buildings that Musk's little squad of parasitic wasps are laying eggs in. It's not enough, but it's one thing that they should be doing and are doing.
I'd like the Senate to grind to a complete halt -- no business done except by the most laborious interpretation of the rules the minority can force -- but that doesn't seem to be happening yet.
23: Gumming up is a start. Going to agencies with crowds to try to gain entry. In the Senate, it means demanding a vote and refusing to advance any nominees.
Apparently Elon's minions are editing the federal payment system by using AI to translate COBOL to Python? We're doomed.
Just for reference is 2/3 of 100 (the number of Senators needed to convict) 66 or 67? Obviously, it wouldn't happen.
My dem senator could certainly stop voting to confirm his nominees.
My dem senator could certainly stop voting to confirm his nominees.
27: 67, because it needs to be more than 2/3.
Greater than or equal to 2/3, to be precise.
22: The most pathetic thing about that is now Khanna will probably get treated as if he voted yes by the opposition (Musk's team and the tech hate machine) without having actually voted yes.
I guess it's also possible that there's a bit of doing things for show because Khanna's district is tech. This way he gets to dodge the vote and look like it's not his fault.
https://www.404media.co/email/dc4f2fa1-e993-4f30-aea1-b985998bd90a/
I have also heard 26 and it's so plausible - this is exactly what the kids now do any time they hit a technical problem they don't understand.
||
"These dropouts are more vulnerable for such recruitment. The strong sense of anger and hatred among the communities are prompting to increase the manpower of their village volunteers. This is pushing the life, education and careers of many adoldescent boys and girls into darkness"|>
Agree with 4.1. My "good" Senator (not actually good, but arguably the best Republican senator relative to state partisan lean) is a big booster of science funding, but doesn't seem to be doing anything to resist the complete gutting of science funding.
Republican unity really does baffle me -- how can they all be psychopaths? But I suppose they do seem to be.
If the payment control isn't successfully pushed back, we may not be in a full dictatorship, but we will be much further into mixed-regime status.
I do think the Gaza thing is the most likely in "distraction" territory. Or at least, without divining intent, most likely to be a thread dropped.
Republican unity really does baffle me -- how can they all be psychopaths? But I suppose they do seem to be.
I think both that the current Republican party is deeply concerning, and that it's always easier to imagine that the opposing party is more unified than it is.
Look at the process of pushing Biden out of the presidential race, for example, there was a period of time when many Dems wanted him to step away, but nobody wanted to say it publicly. It was challenging to maintain pressure over time, when it was clear he was resisting.
Or, for another example, look at the most vocal Republican critics of Trump who have mostly been pushed out of the party -- you can understand why a Republican who objected to Trump might want safety in a numbers and not to be the first to speak out.
I am a bit surprised that Mitt Romney, after voting to convict, has not suffered any repercussions at all.
I mean, any Republican who would stand up to him has been filtered out.
A major factor is that any Republican who does speak out even mildly is going to get inundated with death threats
We are entering our years of lead
I am a bit surprised that Mitt Romney, after voting to convict, has not suffered any repercussions at all.
I'm not sure quite how much sarcasm is intended there (he didn't appear to suffer major consequences, but has left the Senate and . . . https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/video/2024/12/mitt-romneys-failed-attempt-to-save-the-republican-party )
I'm trying unsuccessfully to figure out the status of the deal in 8 -- specifically, whether sending non-citizens to El Salvador is definitely agreed, but sending citizens is under review, or if the whole thing is on hold until they can figure out the citizens part. The reporting says that "Rubio left El Salvador on Tuesday with an agreement," but it's not super clear about the next steps.
42 and 46: Mitt Romney is rich and was able to hire his own private security. I don't know whether he would have gotten re-elected if he had not chosen to retire. Cala, any thoughts?
47: It seems like more than ever before newspaper reports scratch no deeper than "this is what this source I deem reliable told me."
Re Romney, who knew about the White Horse Prophecy? Not that he's anywhere close to living up to it.
26, 36, 39. The "culture" at SpaceX:
That last story is almost too perfect a metaphor for how SpaceX reliably hires the best people on earth to do the job, and then almost as reliably grinds them into oblivion. The hours are insane. At one test facility, they rig up giant loudspeakers to blast Metallica's For Whom The Bell Tolls early every morning to get people out of bed (oh, did I forget to mention everybody was sleeping at the office?) so they can review the previous night's results, plan new experiments, work all day to get them set up, and inevitably work the first half of the night to accommodate some unforeseen complication, then collapse in their beds to be jolted awake by Metallica again, in an endless cycle, like some obscure area of Hell that Dante forgot to mention.6
The expectations are insane. If your work is short of perfection, you are expected to work nights and weekends until you have fixed all of the problems. You are reminded, constantly, and in no uncertain terms, that if you screw something up it may result in hardware exploding and people dying. And if you screw something up while Elon Musk happens to be looking in your general direction, there's a good chance that you will be instantly fired.7
How do they get away with treating people like this? Well for starters, they hire a lot of very young people, especially young men. Young people do better with sleep deprivation,8 and young people are less likely to have formed inconvenient perspectives about what is and is not reasonable for your job to demand from you. But these young people aren't exploited and treated as drones: SpaceX is one of the purest and most brutal meritocracies you'll ever see. "Field promotions" rain from the skies, as in a military force engaged in existential warfare. Men (and women, but mostly men) in their mid-20s wind up with "Vice President" titles, or in charge of entire departments. This in turn keeps the organization hungry and ambitious, because men in their mid-20s are hungry and ambitious. They take more risks, because they have less to lose and more testosterone in their bloodstreams. This sets the tone for the whole organization.
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger
I do wish Susan Collins had retired and Olympia Snowe was still the Maine Republican. She had such a hard life personally- both of her parents died within a year of each other, leaving her an orphan at age 9, and her 1st husband died in a car crash when she was 26 - that I don't think she would have been afraid to stand up for what she believed. She and Susan Collins did not get along.
I'm having good days (don't look at the news) and bad ones (I scroll bluesky and sink into despond at what seems to be government by 8chan.)
24 and 25 seem right to me. Show up with cameras at the buildings where Musk's people are doing crimes. Someone (bluesky? here?) commented that courts don't have armies. It really seems to be at the level where physical confrontation (with cameras! put all these assholes on the news!) is the best chance. Don't pin your hopes on the courts saving you. I love AOC and like Elizabeth Warren a lot, so go ahead and say the right thing on camera in front of a microphone, but get the assholes's photos out in the mainstream, too. Who exactly is stopping the senator or congressman getting into the government building and what do they have to say when confronted? Seems like that could break through.
Going back for another dip in the slough of despond, was it just a couple days ago that Schumer was tweeting about the price of superbowl snacks?
Well I guess I'm dropping everything to read the entire link in 50.
I'm not reading that whole article in 50, but it reminds me of stuff I've read about how the prior macho culture among airline pilots was determined to be a safety hazard (they wouldn't listen to copilots warning of danger, & copilots were afraid to), and they overhauled culture from the ground up to make it more cooperative.
My House Rep just skeeted about Billy Jean King and the threat to womens sports if Title 9 is undermined, because she went to an event.
I missed the town hall. They have constituent services casework clinics. Wonder if I should sign up gor one but I hate to bamboozle her. She has commented on more pressing stuff, but I feel like she could have cancelled sone of the routine stuff.
54: ooh, joke's on me, the substack is written by a conservative couple who approvingly review one of Chris Rufo's books. Fascinating through-the-looking-glass world.
At least Mitch McConnell didn't live to see this.
So far the power ministries are siding with Musk and Trump. Or maybe elected Dems like Warren and AOC haven't moved to the next step of escalation, which is "Sir you are attempting to enforce an illegal order. You need to get out of the way and let proper oversight authorities do their duty." And have along their own team of cops or cop-like officials to do just that.
Then I suppose we will find out where the power ministries stand, or how divided they are.
Mere gossip: apparently the implication is Kyrsten Sinema and Vrinidivan Bellord, sister of Tulsi Gabbard, have some kind of thing between them? Based on the amounts and ways Sinema sent her public money.
Mere gossip: apparently the implication is Kyrsten Sinema and Vrinidivan Bellord, sister of Tulsi Gabbard, have some kind of thing between them? Based on the amounts and ways Sinema sent her public money.
58
Or maybe elected Dems like Warren and AOC haven't moved to the next step of escalation, which is "Sir you are attempting to enforce an illegal order. You need to get out of the way and let proper oversight authorities do their duty." And have along their own team of cops or cop-like officials to do just that.
Who are the teams of cops or cop-like officials who could do so? I'm struggling to think of any Democrat in DC who has any actual authority other than Muriel Bowser, the mayor. If she ordered the DC police to enforce federal laws against Trump's appointees or cronies, it would be an impressive moral stand and massively out of character. (Also probably a Constitutional crisis, but who's counting those these days. Also, Congress could remove home rule from the district whenever they want to, which doesn't mean Bowser shouldn't get involved but it's sort of a sword of Damocles.) Who else could? The minority party in Congress has no authority over the Capitol Police, let alone anyone else. If they made a good Diplomacy check and persuaded some federal agency staff to resist illegal orders, that would last right up until someone identified the chain of command between them and the appointee/crony.
Sorry to be defeatist, but I'm not even sure what effective opposition would look like at the moment. Maybe someone should be chaining themselves to the doors of government offices to keep people out, but I'm not surprised I don't currently see Congresspeople doing it.
Who are the teams of cops or cop-like officials who could do so?
If I knew that, I'd be a Congressional staffer or a DC insider instead of just a citizen living overseas. The first step would be finding out who is blocking the doors at, say, USAID. Then who gave them the orders.
Make some more theater: come with keys and make them push you away. At a more unionized workplace, say, Department of Labor, bring a larger crowd of people and get them chanting "We want to work!" Camera teams, of course; like they said in Wag the Dog if it isn't happening on tv, it isn't real.
47: It seems like more than ever before newspaper reports scratch no deeper than "this is what this source I deem reliable told me."
As for tv/video, it's so depressing to watch news stories that are just one person talking to the camera/reporter with absolutely no evidence that anyone has tried to determine if what they're saying is true. Just saw a story about a mayor who wants to increase his local surveillance state to stop immigrants and enlist residents in reporting on their neighbors that went like this:
Mayor: It's terrible the state doesn't allow us to support federal immigration enforcement officers.
[picture of a boat on a beach]
Reporter: He says this is why there's an increase in immigrants showing up.
Mayor: We've seen 'a number' of cases where pongas* have shown up on beaches.
[a couple more pictures of boats on the beach]
Reporter: He says he's dealing with rising crime caused by illegal immigration.
and so on.
Were those boats carrying migrants? Could be true, no attempt to substantiate it in the story. Has crime increased? Could be true, no substantiation. How much crime, increased or not, in that city is connected to undocumented immigrants? I don't know why you'd ask.
*In this story, there are no boats. Only pongas, which I guess is a term for a type of fishing boat? But it sounds foreign and therefore bad.
That Musk / SpaceX piece is well written, but left me wondering why, if Elon is _so dedicated to getting to Mars_, why is he pissing about, wasting his time, trying to get rid of US foreign aid?
65: At this point do we need to go down little garden path "if we assume his intentions are X, why does he do Y" exercises? His intentions are right-wing domination. He tweets about it plenty.
So he's bored of the rocket thing now?
Its too bad Washington DC doesn't have a sheriff.
The only actors in a position right now to actually push back on what Musk et al. are doing are the career employees within the agencies they're trashing. Congress and the courts can and should pass laws and issue rulings declaring this all illegal, but the practical impact of that is to embolden the insiders to push back. The coup is entirely internal to the executive branch and that's where it must be stopped. Drawing attention to it by showing up to buildings, blocking nominations, etc., is good, but only because it brings more attention and public pressure. Nothing Congress does can directly affect what's going on in those buildings.
Have all those FBI people officially lost their jobs yet or no?
Trans sports ban is out. You'll be relieved to know that this non-problem is going to be solved worldwide: "The Secretary of State shall use all appropriate and available measures to see that the International Olympic Committee amends the standards governing Olympic sporting events to promote fairness, safety, and the best interests of female athletes by ensuring that eligibility for participation in women's sporting events is determined according to sex and not gender identity or testosterone reduction."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/05/musk-doge-takeover-usaid
Thinking of flying?
Sean Duffy (DOT dude): "Big News--talked to the DOGE team. they are going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.
What the hell power does the Secretary of State have over the IOC?
Who knows, but per NYT: [T] has opened the throttle on blowing through apparent legal limits, often with no clear public explanation for how their actions could be consistent with the rule of law.
Laws are less apparent than they appear.
First wholly positive thing they've done: White House says it will cancel $8 million in Politico subscriptions after a false right-wing conspiracy theory spreads
Given all the ways Olympic sports have been pushing out trans athletes in the past few years, it's not clear what more concessions they can get. Trump's term will include the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, so that will be fun.
Maybe we just need to get better at spreading rightwing conspiracies.
Did you hear about Trump's DEI nominees?
65: the rocket ship to Mars isn't ready yet, and Musk gets bored easily. Constantly, I assume. Also, messing with world governments could give him even more money and power to speed the Mars thing up, so why not?
Don't people find their true selves with ketamine? Maybe he looked deep inside and decided the real Mars is the white people you meet along the way.
Rumors are flying about ICE coming to town tomorrow.
We're supposed to get freezing rain, which is spelled the same.
Now that the federal purported buyouts have become regular news, I feel like we all missed a chance for a "night of infinite resignation" joke.
This is all going to come faster now that more crazed fuckholes are getting into their positions in the agencies.
77: Reading a few things, i am led to understand that this is something called Politico Pro which apparently does wonky detail policy stuff. So... I may have been overly smug and probably wrong to think it a good thing that they cancelled.
I thought the Politico thing was based on a coincidence with a Politico computer system happening to go down around the same time something happened with USAID, leading to some theorizing that USAID was paying for Politico. You mean it's real, like the Gaza condominuims?
That seems to have been part of the motivating conspiracy theory. But then I think they announced they were unsubscribing.
82: White Mars is the sequel no one needs or wants.
46 and 48: by major consequences I meant "no one has tried to murder him".
White Mars
Next two seasons of White Lotus: Gaza Riviera hotel, Martian resort.
89: It's actually not bad - rather better than the incredibly clunky Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy that Robinson perpetrated.
[T] has opened the throttle on blowing through apparent legal limits, often with no clear public explanation for how their actions could be consistent with the rule of law.
This is such a great way to say "he is openly committing crimes".
I was just at an hour long faculty development workshop dealing with grants at local, institutional, and federal levels and not one of the two presenters, one of whom has won NSF grants, breathed a word about the current situation, I had to bring this up in the Q&A https://bsky.app/profile/darbysaxbe.bsky.social/post/3lhcvn4hxwk2o
They listened and took it seriously though one person asked if it was just rumor. I heard the NSF grant winner mumbling half to himself wistfully that he didn't think about the current climate. Another faculty member, a professor of journalism, asked me to send it to her.
Also I sensed a palpable shock go through the room as I read some of them, including an incredulous "historically?!"
93 is basically "tell me why I shouldn't fire you without using the letter e."
93: Mind boggling to me. Mostly the same at my job. Which is so weird. Sometime they decided everything had to be apolitical. Which is very different from 2016 or the George Floyd era.
One of our hospitals gets for NIH funding than any other independent hospital, so I don't understand how they aren't talking about it.
Every statistics grant about to be rejected for using "bias."
Someone on Bluesky said that they were so grateful to have used the more pompous phrase word "impediments" in place of "barriers".
The statistic "bias-corrected Kappa" is now a job title in the new concentration camp.
There was a story that a presentation that made the point that using pronouns like "you" instead of generic terms like "beneficiaries" when talking to people who would be the beneficiaries is a more effective way to communicate with ordinary people got taken down because it used the word "pronouns".
I know it's wrong to get distracted from the evil by the stupid, but the pronouns thing really gets to me. They are genuinely objecting to a newish practice that exists! It's evil of them, but it's not absolutely incoherent! All they need to do is to give the practice a name, which could be arbitrary so long as they got it across as meaning "the practice of specifying what gendered pronoun you wish to have used for yourself and thereby implying that observation is insufficient to correctly determine gender." That's what they object to, not "pronouns". You can't speak English without pronouns (or at least not easily or naturally at all.)
It's harder in Spanish, because you have more things with genders.
And also because I can't remember if le/les or lo/los/la/las is for the direct or indirect object.
Apparently Elon's minions are editing the federal payment system by using AI to translate COBOL to Python? We're doomed.
I'll be the dummy here and ask how far-fetched this is. It seems like computers taught to play chess showed that learning models were particularly good at seeing solutions to problems that were beyond even brilliant people who spent their lives studying that same problem. "Rewrite this COBOL code in Python" seems to me, a naif, like exactly what "AI" is (eventually) supposed to be best at.
26 is honestly probably the least dumb thing they're doing. This is one of the things AI is at least decent at. You still need humans testing, and to hope that you're using an AI that China hasn't fully compromised, but using old COBOL systems is a rare case of a genuinely inefficient thing the government does because it's underfunded.
https://bsky.app/profile/barryfreed.bsky.social/post/3lhj3g2mfkk2q
105: I feel like it should be pretty straightforward that the failure modes to be worked out here - "making bad chess moves" - involve much less damage than "we can't process Social Security checks to anyone whose SSN ends in a zero and we don't know why."
And then stack that with AI generating a false sense of confidence, and being used by 22-year-old programmers steeped in its mythos and their own omnicapability.
@geekgalgroks.bsky.social commenting on COBOL (pasted because they limit visibility to those not signed in):
I know enough COBOL to never touch any of it.
COBOL is old business process logic. Infrastructure things. Deep, ancient, foundational things. It is the old dark magic of programming.
You don't mess with it unless you KNOW what you are doing.
And you definitely don't push direct to prod!
105: My expectation is that the result would be surprisingly good, probably good enough to get a fair sense of what the original code was intended to do, but likely to be completely wrong in some respects. Not something I would ever dream of putting straight into production.
The problem is that there's not a single COBOL program with clear inputs and outputs to be translated, there are many, originally written long ago and since modified. Look at fig 2.5.11-32 for a tiny slice.
https://www.irs.gov/irm/part2/irm_02-005-011. The translation framework, to work correctly, needs to be able to read and also internally represent all of this stuff, including the protocols for S/370 interprocess communication.
106 was me.
The stupid (rather than evil) part is that they're trying to do something big without anything like the number of people they need, and without anyone who understands anything. Partly they just want the headlines, but to some extent I think because they've never read any science grants they think that "DEI" uses of the banned terms are more common than "natural language uses," and they're just wrong and by orders of magnitude.
This dumb "search for terms" has always been the leading technique of idiot backbenchers, in Math the famous example is a Canadian MP who objected to Lie Theory (Sophus Lie, nothing to do with lying), but previously Republicans haven't put those idiot backbenchers in charge of things. My understanding is that particular list comes from some grandstanding Ted Cruz was doing. (And even then, I think if Ted Cruz were actually running things he'd find a way to grandstand without actually gumming up the normal works, because he's not actually dumb enough to believe his own bullshit.)
And then stack that with AI generating a false sense of confidence, and being used by 22-year-old programmers steeped in its mythos and their own omnicapability.
I work with 22-year-old programmers every day. They can be quite talented. But making a safe change to a legacy enterprise system embedded in a vast network of organizational dependencies is not something you learn alongside cranking out cool demo apps on your laptop in high school. It's something you might barely start to learn at a corporate summer internship.
Since this is something I do know a bit about... the COBOL/Python thing is perplexing on a couple of levels. It seems like it must be confabulated from a couple of things people said somewhere, because it doesn't make a lot of sense. The systems running COBOL can't have readily have Python dropped onto them, most likely, and "take the entire giant machinery and move it to something modern" is enough of a systems lift, independent of being a language lift, that it's already implausible.
If I was feeling even a little charitable, I might guess "we've got this giant COBOL-flavored data store and want to use current tools to run reports against it" - looking for USAID or "Job Title: Starlink Investigator" or something similarly crude.
I also suspect it's even less likely to work on its own terms, just because there's relatively little COBOL out there in public for LLMs to have trained on, and it's not as standardized as they might hope.
(And I don't even think JCL would tokenize sensibly in a lot of the current LLMs)
Since this is something I do know a bit about... the COBOL/Python thing is perplexing on a couple of levels. It seems like it must be confabulated from a couple of things people said somewhere, because it doesn't make a lot of sense. The systems running COBOL can't have readily have Python dropped onto them, most likely, and "take the entire giant machinery and move it to something modern" is enough of a systems lift, independent of being a language lift, that it's already implausible.
Maybe I'm missing something, IANAP, but I didn't think anyone was claiming anyone was actually moving the system to Python - just to be translating existing code into Python as a means of understanding what it was doing, then editing or rewriting the Python, then translating back into COBOL and pushing that.
The Kobold took my social security check!
The story of the COBOL tombstone.
I feel like it should be pretty straightforward that the failure modes to be worked out here - "making bad chess moves" - involve much less damage than "we can't process Social Security checks to anyone whose SSN ends in a zero and we don't know why."
I kind of doubt they're rewriting the whole system at this moment, but if the system in the past had an issue with SSNs that ended in zero (or whatever), it's plausible that it was fixed in some janky way that could break again if you don't catch that fix when rewriting. There are lots of less than ideal ways of fixing bugs that then look like extraneous code until you find out that, yes, that actually was being used somewhere and now something is broken.
109 and 114 match my assumptions about what they're trying to do, and existing code is guaranteed to contain a thousand bits of duct tape as described in 117. You probably end up with new code that runs and even works as intended up to a point, but goes south as soon as a scenario comes along that didn't occur to the 22-year-old in question.
DO NO CITE THE DEEP COBOL TO ME, INCEL; I WAS THERE WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN.
117: Yes, that's what I'm saying, they shouldn't be doing it, even if they think they're making minor tweaks. Heck, even if they had COBOL certificates!
So it turns out one of the programmers was too racist even for Trump.
https://bsky.app/profile/nathantankus.bsky.social/post/3lhjy3fq3as2y
This one has a gift link to the WSJ article
And this is one of the only two named (as a complete list) as still getting read-only Treasury access by the judge's order!
Given that the other named person is the CEO of Citrix, I have a hard time imagining that he'll make much of an individual contribution with that read-only access of his.
LLM code generation tools are useful but what they produce is 80% ok and 20% crap and you really do need to go through and pick out the crap.
The owner of the BlueSky account linked in 125 seems to think the racism isn't the real reason for the resignation - because when has that stopped Trump/Musk people recently? - but I'm having a hard time figuring out what he thinks are the real reasons because there are so many posts on his timeline. I kind of wonder if the ruling allowing him to keep access, but on a limited basis, set just enough limits that they decided it was pointless to continue meddling with the system.
Or they slurped up what they needed from Treasury and are going to try to make the court case moot by moving to other departments, I guess.
It takes us hours to upload a video to google drive. Seems fast to hoover up all government transactions.
COBOL is the fastest of all languages.
The thesaurus is the smartest of all dinosaurs.
Did something happen in the news that I missed while I was trying to avoid the news?
He's been shit since Midnight Cowboy.
139: THANK YOU. I basically have this thought every single time, in part because JV is also super right-wing.
You're welcome. I can't feel my lips because of my support of Canada, but apparently I can still type.
I want to watch Conrack again at some point. I remember being surprised that I thought it was a decent movie, but that was maybe 15-20 years ago.
Have you been drinking enough Crown Royal?
Because of public transit, I didn't even have to walk home. But the bus driver keep looking at me like he's leery of white people throwing up on his bus.
137 some rumors that Trump is fine with PRC revanchism
I got scrambled by the Voight-Kampff test and briefly believed that Jon Voight and Rutger Hauer were the same person.
Bishara Bahbah, chairman of the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, said during a phone interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday that the group would now be called Arab Americans for Peace.
https://apnews.com/article/arab-americans-trump-gaza-name-peace-479f6777cac7bac52fb098daa0821cb5
130: The story of the COBOL tombstone at 116 said introducing a language with words was encountering resistance from the engineers who liked to program in machine language. Now there's some deep magic for you.
I was very struck that the argument was "computers don't understand words. They only understand symbols"!
Some agreement out there that Elon's arsonist activities are directed, ultimately, at getting more funding for Mars. Maybe he can get a bit more that way, but how ultimately was this meant to pan out? Retired Americans are expected to pay for the construction of the new Mars City, through total loss of their pension income, and through deception (initially, for how could you hide it?) and without consent? And this wouldn't be objected to?
It's not like the Mars programme even needs very much money, compared to huge items like Medicaid or Social Security - or even USAID. USAID distributes $40 billion a year in aid, which is meaninglessly tiny, but is still almost twice as much as the entire budget of NASA. Switching USAID's budget to SpaceX to support the Mars programme would give it vastly more money than it is able to spend on Mars.
If that's the case, he might get away with it. Some people have suggested that the tunnelling stuff he does is preparation for Mars; sending tunnelling equipment there sounds _very_ expensive.
I think I'd prefer an absurdly ambitious plan to an ordinarily ambitious one, though. Something at pitchforks level.
138: Vought in at OMB.
It's Susan Collins nation, we just live in it.
They're not reading the grants. They're using AI scrapers to flag words. Our state pulled this nonsense last year which lead to our marketing and communication department changing all websites to avoid the naughty words, which predictably meant that faculty hit the roof when their research pages focusing on diverse populations got scrubbed for being DEI and I got called into a very strange meeting with the university president about the language of the general education outcomes that talked about diverse perspectives.
So yeah, don't talk about the diverse mega fauna of the paleolithic or mortgage equity or data inclusive of the endpoints.
To add a bit of evidence to the above. Musk said in interview (within the last year) that he thinks that about 1% of US GDP should do it. That's of the order of 40% of the US defence budget, or around six or seven USAIDs. He thinks that's modest.
1% of US GDP total, or 1% per year? If it's total, that's extremely modest. Apollo cost $25 billion total, at a time when US GDP was about $750 billion. If it's per-year it's less modest, but still not extraordinary; per-year spending on NASA (not just Apollo) peaked in the mid-sixties at just under $6 billion, or 0.8% of GDP.
Well, I think we're into contrarianism here, but no, it's not modest, either way. That sort of figure represents an extraordinary national effort, as Apollo was. Funding it requires defunding something large, or borrowing, which seems unlikely given the attendant ideological commitments. The Green New Deal (say $50-100bn over a decade) wouldn't cover it, for example.
Nor would it be in any way invisible. It would have to be argued for openly, and quite soon, if it really is the explanation that makes all this make sense.
Sorry, strike that Green New Deal figure; misread it and now distrust the source anyway. Let me check and get back.
Switching USAID's budget to SpaceX to support the Mars programme would give it vastly more money than it is able to spend on Mars.
On Mars, you have to shop at the company store, and it's staffed by Nazis.
OK, I should refer instead to the 'Inflation Reduction Act', which committed "783 billion" over a decade to "domestic energy security and climate change" (Wikipedia). That sounds as though it's getting to be the right sort of figure for Musk's 'one percent of national output', as long as he's happy to have that one percent handed to him over a decade.
Now can _that_ be done without putting veterans on the street or removing insulin from diabetic seniors? Possibly? I suppose it depends on what else happens alongside. The spending will be very visible, though; huge rockets taking off very regularly, some of them exploding, along with lots of breathless discourse about how amazing it all is.
Well, I think we're into contrarianism here, but no, it's not modest, either way.
It's modest in that it's not much more (as a proportion of GDP) than Apollo cost, to achieve considerably more. 1% of GDP right now is $274 billion, by the way. Over a decade that's $27.4 billion a year.
Now can _that_ be done without putting veterans on the street or removing insulin from diabetic seniors?
Considering that there already are veterans on the street, I don't think that's actually an issue. The real question is can we also afford to round up and fly immigrants to Guantanamo and El Salvador.
Now can _that_ be done without putting veterans on the street or removing insulin from diabetic seniors?
That sounds like a very inefficient way to get insulin. They're diabetic, dude, they don't make very much insulin, that's the whole point. Very low-grade insulin ore. You should be removing it from healthy seniors.
"To achieve considerably more": we need to be careful not to smoke whatever Musk smokes. It achieves considerably _less_. There's no technology breakthrough: large rockets and landers already exist. There's no science: we already know pretty well what's on Mars. It's not a cultural achievement: going to the Moon demonstrated what this sort of activity means, and what its limitations are as well. Like the Moon, Mars is an airless, frozen, high radiation desert. It'd be survival, not living. Tbh it'd be much better to _respect_ Mars as a desert rather than scatter bits of rocket and other junk all over it.
And yes I will hammer the point, because what is in prospect is deeply offensive to me. The JWST, Voyager: inspiring. Attempting to construct a patchwork of caves and greenhouses on Mars: stupid, regressive, an embarrassment to humanity.
Here's a helpful ESA backgrounder on radiation on Mars: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/The_radiation_showstopper_for_Mars_exploration
The upshot of '1 day of radiation in space equalling 1 year of radiation on earth' is that to 'live' on Mars, you have to live in a burrow, wtih several metres of soil coverage above you most of the time.
Ignoring the rest of the comment (sorry, not feeding that one), I think it's more of an achievement to go to another planet millions of miles away that takes six months to reach, rather than going to a satellite 250,000 miles away that takes three days to reach.
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"for just as a master puts a slave to work, the practitioner, like the master, realizes [the deities] and their factotums to be like slaves and servants."|>
167: Voyager was pointless, though. What did it accomplish? There was no technology breakthrough: large rockets and deep-space probes already existed. There's no science: we already knew pretty well what Saturn looked like. It's not a cultural achievement: Pioneer demonstrated what this sort of activity means, and what its limitations are as well. Tbh it would have been much better to _respect_ the outer solar system as a desert rather than scatter bits of rocket and other junk all over it.
Ajay, did you read the review in 50, just out of curiosity? Easily the most memorable piece of writing I've read this week, and if you've got more time for SpaceX than many here, you might find it entertaining. (Or, inevitably, riddled with errors.)
170: I even agree with the sentiment here. Why would anyone spam hundreds of Voyagers, SpaceX style? That would be gross too. (Istr they did produce new and different science, that said. And are still active, which contributes to what is impressive about them.)
I didn't read it - I will, though. I think what SpaceX has achieved is undeniably very impressive, both technologically and in a business sense (IIRC it now has a majority of the entire commercial satellite launch business; a startup in such a capital intensive business coming to dominate the market is impressive in any sector). How much credit Musk deserves for that is open to debate, obviously.
Tbh it'd be much better to _respect_ Mars as a desert rather than scatter bits of rocket and other junk all over it.
Seriously. My main take-away from _The Martian_ was "fuck, we've already trashed that planet too?". I deeply believe that we shouldn't go to any other planets until we prove we can steward the one we are currently on.
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Den of Thieves: Pantera is a solid and conventionally entertaining crime movie, but sadly isn't a patch on its predecessor. The first film followed Heat's footsteps and retained, even distilled, Mann's bleakness; this one follows Ronin, but doesn't come close to that film on any axis.
|>
But! Fucking great soundtrack. Maybe so good it's reason enough to see the movie.
I think he's right but I wonder if the Democrats have what it takes to go through with it https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/wheres-the-real-power-nexus-how-does-the-opposition-get-to-it
A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weidersmith asks in its subtitle "Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?" Again, time constraints have kept me from finishing the whole book [before the Hugo voting deadline], but I really want to get back to it and confirm that the answers are "Probably not, probably not, and definitely not." It's possible that by the end of a full reading, I will see that the answers are even simpler: no, no, no.
-- Hugo Awards 2024, Best Related Work
I also haven't finished the book, but I got far enough to be clear that the answer to "should we" is no, because there's no practical reason besides bragging rights. No economic advantage like minerals or manufacturing, no chance at making it a stable home for humanity if you're into that sort of thing as Musk says he is. (If every city in the world over 50,000 were nuked, the resulting Earth would be more hospitable to human life than Mars is now.)
I also took away (not sure they said this but) that if we improve in biotech enough to be able to reengineer humanity and other life to arbitrary design standards, maybe we could overcome the huge issues. But that's a task for centuries, and still iffy.
178: thanks for the tip, I will have a read. From scanning the sample, I see that a point of dry humour is made: one of our first and main exports to space would be our amazing ability to generate conflict, and as yet there's no system (i.e. developed space law) for managing it.
It's possible that by the end of a full reading, I will see that the answers are even simpler: no, no, no.
I definitely recommend the book and the overall perspective is, "we'd like to see space settlements as much as anyone, because they would be awesome, but we aren't close to having enough research to know the full scope of several significant problems. In the short term we should focus on additional research and then revisit the idea of space settlements when we know more."
A good discussion of the book here: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-sunday-zach-weinersmith-talks
I think the way I would say it is, humans are the problem, but in that they're humans. Because people tend to think like, "Oh, you'll go mad in space." Or whatever. And there's just no evidence of that extreme thing. It is just that they're going to be humans. So on Earth, when you're a human, you expect all sorts of basic services. Some humans, from time to time, have acute psychiatric problems or whatever, and they need to be taken care of. And this is just usually not imagined when people talk about sending a thousand people to Mars.
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They shun evil and pollution (dik-drip).|>
Because people tend to think like, "Oh, you'll go mad in space. Or whatever. And there's just no evidence of that extreme thing.
I don't know what they mean by going mad in that context, but in accounts of long sea voyages in the 18th and 19th centuries you have people feeling like they're going to go mad from the monotony of the open sea. I've always imagined long space voyages could generate similar experiences. The complete isolation part of even multi-year voyages weren't even that long, but I guess space voyages are going to have communication most of the time.
This place was one of the worst places to be stationed in the days of the British Empire and likely gave rise the the phrase "going around the bend"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraph_Island
From the linked interview, they are mostly using Antarctica as a point of comparison:
So there's a little bit of a nuance to this. Sometimes when people work in space psychiatry, space psychology, they'll say one of the things that's important is, "Did you know one time a guy got stabbed in Antarctica for spoiling novels?" And then there's another famous story where, as the story goes, there were two Russians at Vostok station having a chess match and one killed the other or attacked him with an axe or something. So they banned chess.
And so both of those stories, actually, they're not really true. They got passed around the internet all day and all night. I think the one about the chess thing is just not true. Or at least, we couldn't find evidence. We talked to a guy who had been at Vostok station for a long time, he's a Russian guy. And he was like, "I'd never heard of this or about the chess ban." And it also just utterly smacks of Russian stereotyping.
...
The story about the spoiling novels, the novel thing was just a weird detail it was fixated on. It was more like the guy was just hazing him and bullying him for a long time and finally went too far and the other guy stabbed him. And it's sort of a bit more of a conventional stabbing story.
Our perspective, and there's reasonably robust data on this, is actually that in Antarctica where it is dark and cramped and awful and somewhat space-like, you actually don't get a higher rate of psychiatric problems. Maybe even there's some evidence it's lower. That's probably to do with the fact that people are screened before they come and they're probably somewhat self-selected.
But that doesn't mean you get to just be like, "Don't worry about it." Right? Because it has been the case in Antarctica that we've had to handle murders. There have actually been murders. There's one that's well-documented where a guy accidentally shot another guy during an altercation having to do with raisin wine. Which, I hadn't by the way heard about raisin wine, but it's I guess a sort of low-quality homemade wine.
186 there's been some brutal murders on oil rigs in the gulf here
Women would like a word about Antarctica.
That is also a good (and concerning) point of comparison.
23: work with unions, immigrant rights groups, nonprofits, churches, etc to call for mas demonstrations, phone zaps, sit ins, freedom rides, whatever it takes. But the most of them wouldn't want to lower themselves to that level, nor put that much power in the hands of the people. Because liberals will always side with fascism if they think there's any chance of actual social change occurring.
I'm now getting ads for Crown Royal on Reddit.
NIH indirect costs now capped at 15%, this the mechanism by which research grants fund US universities, a huge cut that will mean less higher ed.
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-068.html
Separately, I've been playing a fair amount of go online, played a guy in Antarctica Wednesday.
192: They said it was for previously issued grants too). Harvard's indirect rate is like 69%.
I don't know how they cam enforce that , like technically how, on grants that sre already disbursed.
Moby- are there statistics jobs that aren't in the biomedical field you could do.
Yes, including the one I have now.
It is in fact illegal, in the last appropriations bill for the NIH it said that indirects may not be modified from previously existing agreements. But laws are for the little people. Section 224 of the 2024 appropriations act:
Indirect Cost (Section 224).
"In making Federal financial assistance, the provisions relating to indirect costs in part 75 of title 45, Code of Federal Regulations, including with respect to the approval of deviations from negotiated rates, shall continue to apply to the National Institutes of Health to the same extent and in the same manner as such provisions were applied in the third quarter of fiscal year 2017. None of the funds appropriated in this or prior Acts or otherwise made available to the Department of Health and Human Services or to any department or agency may be used to develop or implement a modified approach to such provisions, or to intentionally or substantially expand the fiscal effect of the approval of such deviations from negotiated rates beyond the proportional effect of such approvals in such quarter."
Ithe notice says for all funds dispersed after 2/10, but retro, though says they would have the authority to do so.
But not retro that was supposed to say.
But not retro that was supposed to say.
I'm not particularly worried about losing my job. We're budgeting as if I'll lose my job later this year. It still maths out with one income.
And one of the major Boston law firms already anticipated this based on the project 2025 agenda and noted what loopholes the Trump admin might try to use to claim it's legal (claiming certain institutional costs are unallowable- I bet D.E.I. makes and appearance here)
https://www.ropesgray.com/-/media/Files/Event-Media-Library/Webinar/2025/Feb/20250205_HC_Webinar_Slides.pdf
I'm looking forward to working in a cubicle where I monitor a chatbot that's writing various forms of "I love President Trump" all day while in the next cubicle someone is monitoring a chatbot praising Elon Musk. We're both on Mars and our jobs last a couple of hours at the most before we die of unspecified causes because by some SpaceX engineering miracle, Mars is so inhabitable that everyone who goes there loves it so much they never leave or write home. The cost of eggs, now defined as a thin gruel that has been hardened into an oval shape, is the lowest its been in years.
But! Fucking great soundtrack.
"Buttfucking great" has potential.
BTW, Fuck and boycott the More Racism Superb Owl. Dave Zirin with some of the details.
T will be there.
201: A former commenter used to work there.
190: liberals will always side with fascism
That strategy and attitude sure worked well for the KPD in the 1930s, didn't it?
Granted, they got 40 years of power in something like 15% of Weimar's territory when they rode in behind the bayonets of the Red Army. On the other hand, Stalin killed more German Communists than Hitler did, so I guess it was a bit of Russian roulette whether they lived to see those days of power.
Anyway, unless and until there's an American Lenin the only allies you are likely to find think of themselves as liberal.
John Ganz has really been hitting it out of the park lately
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/lets-get-real
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/what-happened-here-c9f
My iPhone updated and now Safari won't let me see Unfogged, I have to use chrome
207: DNFTT, Doug. He's only doing it because he knows it'll get a reaction.
202 is great. Yes, time to Make the Mechanicum Great Again!
208: Yep, these are interesting reads, and there's some evidence (the Andreessen thing about the engineers getting uppity) to support what he's saying.
HOWEVER. Any time someone just uses the word 'liberal' without explaining what or who is meant: that's a do-over (or maybe we just skip that part entirely?). There is an ocean of difference between a social justice liberal with Kantian commitments (i.e. Rawls) and a libertarian like von Mises. Maybe the elision is meant to get us to think there are no alternative stories (to the one the author is pushing)? Well, then it's dishonest writing as well.
207: so what's your explanation for what is going on right now? That liberals know what is going on, they know what the outcome will be, and yet they're choosing to do nothing because... they're lazy?
During the Spanish Civil War, the liberals refused to support the Republican cause, which meant the Stalinists had all the influence, since they were the only ones providing significant men and material to the war effort. Then, the Stalinists stabbed the Republicans in the back because they ALSO did not want to see an anti-authoritarian victory in Spain. The KPD, the SPD, the church AND the capitalists all did their part to pave the way for the various fascist takeovers in Europe in the first part of the 20th century. If you are aligned with any of the corresponding tendencies* in the first part of the 21st century, you're likely to effect a very similar result.
*Capitalists, liberals, post-Stalinist/post-Maoist authoritarians, fascists, the Catholic Church and evangelicals
Here's Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who made her bones as a prosecutor sending young Native men up the river on added federal charges for state convictions, gleefully shaking hands with the fascist and smiling as he signs his first executive orders, ending the democracy she claims to support.
https://youtu.be/iGseW9v0G6Q?si=YTlLvdendEIqAUPf
Schumer and Jeffries could pick up their phones RIGHT NOW and call up the leadership of the left-wing unions, the liberal churches, the major nonprofits, the academic and professional organizations, the student activist organizations, the civil rights groups, the artistic and humanities groups, the Democrats in state and municipal government, and others and start convening meetings and conferences and demonstrations focused on resisting Trump and Musk. But they won't, again, because they are scared that they would be unleashing a sleeping dragon that could lead to anti-capitalist, pro-humanity changes in this society and the world.
So instead, they will continue to have anemic press conferences, file lawsuits and introduce go-nowhere legislation to give the appearance of resistance but forego any substantial possibility of change.
Hey Natilo, do you hear from Frowner these days? I've been worried (more about succumbing-to-despair issues than physical safety, but that too).
Imagine this: in Minnesota, the governor and lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the US Senators, the Democratic US Representatives, the Democratic state legislators, mayors and city councilors all got together and declared the first Saturday in March a Day of Resistance Against the Musk Coup. They encouraged everyone who could to go to the capitol, the federal buildings, the city halls and demonstrate against the fascist takeover of the country. Cancel every event that could be cancelled, order the police not to interfere, encourage people to form local resistance leagues and affinity groups to plan further actions, encourage people to speak up in church the next day, tell people that they can take back the power and do whatever is necessary to restore democracy. Maybe it wouldn't work immediately, but it would go a long way towards making it impossible for the coup to succeed. And then do it all again in April. And May. And June.
Obviously, obviously, this will never happen. Not because it is impossible, but for the reasons I outlined above, the vast majority of the Democratic officials who could make it happen are scared of losing their power, their prestige and their profits.
217: Frowner should probably answer for their self, but it has been a very, very bad week and their job is about as insecure as anyone's right now.
Damn. I'm not surprised, but I'm sorry.
I don't even disagree that strongly with your other comments, but for "they're lazy" I think I do run with "they're cowards." It's consistent with being beholden to the power structure.
This is an absurd question, but is there a good book-length study of cowardice out there? I'm not sure who would be qualified to write one, while having done the necessary research and critical thinking, without their own courageous actions leaving them no time for writing monographs -- but the subject deserves some sustained attention imo.
Related, this is what liberal popular resistance to fascism actually looks like today, rather than vague impressions of what happened ninety years ago in Spain:
https://www.msb.se/sv/publikationer/om-krisen-eller-kriget-kommer-pa-engelska/
Focuses the mind rather, doesn't it?
I've been thinking more about physical sabotage of the civic infrastructure: the grid, sewage. There's only so much damage DOGE could do in the Treasury Building if it didn't have electricity or running water. Those systems probably aren't well defended yet.
Liberals were a part of the Spanish Republican government and resistance.
The Ganz links in 208 are really good. Especially the second one.
I've had Trump show up in my dreams twice since the inauguration. And last night I dreamt I was ordered to schedule an ICE raid at a restaurant by my employer. I was trying to work up the nerve to quit. So unpleasant.
In light of the unanswered question of why M. Gessen is still working for the New York Times, and when the breaking point will come, this is great. I assume the editors aren't actually reading these, or are just disinterestedly skimming.
||This site is now borderline unusable on *two* of my devices (first one of my office computers, and now my phone) as something is causing Safari to aggressively redirect to https.|>
225: Even when I subscribed, I didn't read the long articles very carefully.
226: Does it no longer work to edit the URL manually after it fails to load? That has been working for me: once it redirects to https and then errors out, manually delete the s and hit return, and it should load properly. It's annoying, however.
223: An effective part? Or one of the parts that worked to destroy the revolution and consequently destroyed the effective resistance to Franco?
225: Yeas, i was feeling about the same as the mood of that piece before I read it, and now even more so. Thanks, I guess.
A great sadness.
Anyone can feel free to join me in my current rabbit hole of the Tartessian language/Celtic from the West controversy. One of you has offspring with research interests in Celtic linguistics, right?
We got to chose the form of the Destructor and we came with the closest human analogue of the StayPuft Marshmallow Man.
Hmmm, Trump as America's collective intrusive thought? That's unsettling.
On Bluesky there is a small but vocal group that is advocating boycotting the Super Bowl which is barely visible on my feed (which means it is probably quite small). I actually fired up Xitter for the first time in months to see if there was any traction there. Almost nothing re: T and racism, but there was a somewhat more visible movement saying to boycott because the games are rigged.
218: Trump himself is the model here. He's able to unite his side and get them to do what he wants. He is able, for example, to enhance his reputation by spurring an invasion of the Capitol.
But yeah, elected liberals aren't up for that sort of thing because in the US, people don't elect liberals who are up for that sort of thing. If you want a leftist mass movement, it pretty much has to come from the masses. Strom Thurmond gets the votes; Abbie Hoffman does not. And Bill Ayers? Forget about it.
If the Democrats had the numbers, Trump would no longer be president. My understanding of the situation in South Korea is that the governing party sided with the opposition against Yoon Suk Yeol. If you want to cast blame in the US, it's not hard to find actual villains.
There's absolutely nothing in your plan that requires the participation of elected officials -- and it's not something elected officials are particularly qualified to make happen. Imagine if everybody in the country rose up and marched on the Capitol. Imagine if just the Democrats did. Once you're able to dictate what everybody does, it's easy to come up with solutions. But that's a leadership model that necessarily takes you to some dark places, and it take a special kind of leader -- as you say, not a liberal leader -- to make it work.
Having just finished a (medium-length) history on the SCW, I think politics was polarized enough through the 30's that non-socialist liberals were not a huge force once the right wing was withdrawn into rebellion. Regardless, the biggest liberal party, the IR, third-biggest overall, ended up part of both the Caballero and Negrín governments, as did the second-biggest, the UR.
All historical parallels aside, 190 is still a shitty thing to say to anyone you envision an alliance of necessity with.
226 and 229: I gave up,on trying to use Safari and downloaded Firefox to my iPhone and iPad. I still mostly use Safari for everything else, but I can't get unfogged to work on Safari either.
219: Yikes. Sorry to hear that. I don't have their contact info.
their self
Speaking of linguistic rabbit holes: we say "himself" and not "hisself," but "myself" and not "meself," an odd inconsistency I hadn't thought about in a while. Additionally, for singular "they," I think I switch between "themselves" and "themself" basically at random, maybe depending on whether I feel more casual or more fussy. I don't have strong intuitions about it at all.
"An effective part? Or one of the parts that worked to destroy the revolution and consequently destroyed the effective resistance to Franco?"
Since you're so interested in the Spanish Civil War... there is, right now, a small nation fighting for its survival against fascists. They have an International Legion. They accept volunteers. Even middle aged ones. Here's the URL.
https://ildu.com.ua/
Ever wondered what you would have done back in 1936, when liberty and fascism were in the balance? When all those great socialists were taking up arms to defend the Republic against Franco and the Condor Leg Legion? Ever wondered if you would have joined the International Brigade with all your heroes?
Well.... now you know.
Things keep on creeping along.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/153893/los-angeles-area-landslide-expands
241: Well, of course we can't edit comments here, had I been able to, when I re-read that, I would have put "their own self" rather than "them self" to connote the emphasis I intended.
242: While I am broadly sympathetic to anyone fighting imperialism anywhere, I hardly think the Ukraine War maps very well to the Spanish Revolution & Civil War. There is and was no anarchist revolution in the Ukraine in this century. (There was one in the previous century, which Stalin, Trotsky, Wrangel/the Whites and the western powers conspired to crush. That speaks to my distrust of any statist formation in working towards the victory of any actual liberation struggle.) In Spain, in the 1930s, the Church, the monarchists, the capitalists and the fascists were all basically united in their opposition to an internal anarchist-communist revolution. In Ukraine, nationalists of every political stripe have united in opposition to invasion by a foreign power. That is, in many senses, laudable, and I certainly don't want Putin and his ilk to win, but realistically, life in the Ukraine post-war is likely to be characterized by pro-western, pro-business interests coming to the fore. So the stakes there are just not the same.
Furthermore, I'm nearly 50, and have had three heart attacks, as well as suffering from severe gout, poor lower back health and several less serious maladies. I don't think any army, no matter how desperate, would take me on at this point. I'd be an instant liability, and aside from wasting medical resources, be of little impact on anyone's war effort. If it were 1936, and I'd been born in the mid-1880s, there's very little likelihood that I would still be alive at that point, given the state of medical science at the time.
Finally, if you wanted to shame me, the most meaningful thing to talk about would be why I didn't up stakes and join the war effort in Syria in 2012 when the YPG was getting going, since that would have been 5 years prior to my first heart attack. Even then, I'm not sure I would have been of any net benefit to a fighting force, since I did not speak any of the regional languages, had no military training, and did, even at that time, already suffer from gout and dangerously high blood pressure.
Oh, also, why didn't I head down to Chiapas in '94/'95? Again, no military training, no relevant languages, and the EZLN were emphatically NOT calling for well-meaning gringos to show up and start cosplaying filibuster.
What DID I do in the 1990s when I was young and relatively healthy? In my own community, where I was raised and had strong connections and a reasonable sense of the political questions in play, I organized against the first Gulf War, stood on the front lines of the struggle against Operation Rescue, and for reproductive freedom, worked with Anti-Racist Action to counter neo-Nazi organizing, helped manage a collectively run anarchist infoshop and free food & clothing distribution site, helped organize a couple of different anarchist federations and supported every other locally active liberation struggle that I couldn't be directly involved in. I even worked with principled communists, socialists, progressives and liberals when and where I felt our interests aligned and I wasn't going to be stepped on. The vast majority of people in the US don't do as much direct political organizing in their lifetime as I did over the 6 or so years I was regularly engaged in activist projects. And when they do, it's rarely in as good a cause as my contributions were.
Someone should have gone to Missouri and helped Kansas City.
215, 216 and thereabouts: If the response is "Do better! Really stand up for what you say you believe in!" then I think you're likely to find allies. If the response is "You're all a bunch of fascists anyway!" then I think you're likely to find irrelevance.
As you surely know, from what you recount in 247.
"The only recourse is to go out on the streets and march," Conway said. "That is the only recourse. The courts have no mechanism to enforce."
Me and George Conway and a bunch of other people can say this until we're blue in the face, but people getting out in the streets won't matter at this stage if the Democrats aren't willing to exert official pressure too
201: My hospital employer just announced a bunch of layoffs for non clinical staff. They claim that this was planned before the NIH announcement, but I'm guessing that this pushed them to move faster. I still have a job but I know that my area lost some people. I have no idea what they are going to do with the indirect costs cut. That's several hundred millions from our budget.
The Eric Adans stuff is both nuts and very predictable
Abd the fracking NYT is there again with the "raises Questions" phrasing*.
The dismissal of the charges would, for now, end the case against New York City's mayor, and raise questions about the administration of justice under President Trump.
*I last saw it from them when he launched the crypto several days before the inauguration, although maybe some more questions have been "raised" in the meantime and I missed it.
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252: The correct formulation is: "The dismissal of the charges would ... answer questions about the administration of justice under President Trump."
That is to say, it would answer questions if there were any remaining questions.
In their defense, there is a footnote that addresses it:
1Your Office correctly noted in a February 3, 2025 memorandum, "as Mr. Bove clearly stated to
defense counsel during our meeting [on January 31, 2025], the Government is not offering to
exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams's assistance on immigration enforcement."
So all good.
Adams skates
https://bsky.app/profile/whitehouse.senate.gov/post/3lhuojp47v22a
lol
https://bsky.app/profile/steveolson.bsky.social/post/3lhujqljusc2a
people getting out in the streets won't matter at this stage
I'm skeptical that people in the streets would matter at any stage. They've priced that in and know perfectly well how to ignore it.
Doesn't sound like it's worth reading the article referenced here, so I'm just going to quietly add Zel/izer to my list of academics whose formally academic work is the only work of theirs that has a chance of being worth reading.
I'm skeptical that people in the streets would matter at any stage. They've priced that in and know perfectly well how to ignore it.
Absolutely this. Authoritarians the world over keep sharing notes, and this is one of the things they consult a lot about - e.g., here in Israel, Netanyahu and his advisors spoke to both Erdogan and Orban specifically about how to deal with public opposition and demonstrations, and we've been in the streets, at least some of the time in very large numbers, for the past two years with not much to show for it (well, maybe minor victories, but definitely not toppling the government).
Honestly, I wonder whether it's time to bring back guillotines, or the hashishim. I don't think much else will deter them.
Medical hashishim are legal in the Netherlands.
I vaguely remember that "hashishim" is a false derivation used as an insulting term for Nizari Ismailis in order to imply they were all a bunch of heretical layabout potheads, and the correct derivation of "assassin" was from something like "asasyun" meaning "the pure ones".
This comment was made possible by a generous grant from the Aga Khan.
When I was at school a friend of mine coded an Infocom style text adventure game based on the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and I have to say that "Hashishin's Creed" would have been a 100% perfect title
Also if anyone is looking for sitcom concepts set in 11th century Syria, "Omar the Assassin" about amiable dropout Omar who is known to everyone in his Persian village as Omar the Weed Dude, travels to Syria and is involved in HILARIOUS MISUNDERSTANDINGS
254- The funny thing is Adams didn't even get a pardon or dismissal with prejudice. They said they won't pursue charges while he's running for election (same argument Trump used about why his prosecutions were a "witch hunt") but they'll reassess in 10 months. So all the ass kissing so far is just a temporary fix, he has to perform for Trump this year or they'll get his ass later. I'd feel sorry for the guy if he wasn't a corrupt piece of shit who doesn't care about anyone but himself.
My happy thought is remembering how many people who tried to work with Trump wind up worse off than people who tried to resist him even if you do as they (the Trump lickers) do and give no value to your own dignity.
Counting on American voters to fix anything generally leads to sorrow, but I am really hoping the people of NYC firmly reject both Adams and Cuomo if Cuomo does actually make a move. They are both tied for the absolute worst.
265: I am kind of hoping the Trump magic works to leave Elon Musk impoverished and imprisoned.
I have a lot of hopes, mostly driven by spite.
My bet that Tesla stock would drop after December 10th is paying off for me so far.
When does Tesla drop the car production arm and just go full financial-or-something company?
My friend works for Tesla on the solar cell/power wall side.
269 kudos, I really should have taken that bet myself