Progressive Politics

We are not so different from that pre-revolutionary France: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/19448/the-three-estates-of-pre-revolutionary-france/.

The current POTUS is a megalomaniac imperialist who thinks himself a depot rather than an elected official. A significant majority of the clergy, particularly evangelicals, support his efforts because it amplifies their power. The nobility class (oligarchs, billionaires) hold an imbalance of the country's wealth. We are vastly becoming servants to their feudal "estates", except now we call them C-corps. The rest of us, the common-folk, the 98%, are in disarray. In a world of abundance, our paychecks continue to grant us less and less purchasing power. As feudalism progresses, we are forced to rent instead of own. We know the system is rotting, but we are not coalescing around the reasons why.

One of the first areas that the POTUS has attacked is USAID. There is a reason for this. Of all of the departments, USAID employ(s/ed) the largest subset of highly educated employees within the government: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/. If you, dear reader, continue to frame the discussion as government efficiency, then you are towing the their line. This is blatant hollowing out of the educated class from government. They'll guise this as "market efficiency" but they know exactly what they are doing by hollowing out the educated state. As USAID falls, as the Department of Justice falls and as the Department of Education is soon to fall, it terrorizes the remaining federal employees to flee or get in line.

This is state capture.

Now onto enforcement.

Little is being discussed of the purging of the FBI for retribution of what they did during the first term. Sure, there is certainly an argument to be had that a federal police force can be problematic. But consider that, when you purge half a workforce that is investigating significant crimes against the US, that purge is going to directly correlate to less enforcement and a weakening of the rule of law. You should expect a resurgence of the mafia and the mob, only these dealings will be obscured from view because the scapegoat will be the focus on gang violence, which again, serves their narrative.

Instead of the FBI, who I expect to begrudgingly follow the 1st and 2nd estates agenda, we'll instead see a mass increase to the Department of Homeland Security. This is a group that aligns more with the depots vision. They are to be the Blackshirts of Italy or the SS of Germany. It will start as the enforcers for border security, but once the catalyst happens, this group is to be our morality police.

They also have purged the main group who is in charge of Federal Election fraud. Wake up and get angry - The people who were screaming about free and fair elections just destroyed the entity that ensured free and fair elections. There are so many foxes in the henhouse that it's now a foxhouse.

History serves as a guide: it's easier to cull the resistance if you can outflank it from its inception. Once it is gone, it can take years, even generations to regroup, if ever. And the tools our adversaries are equipping themselves with are stronger than ever.

The Resistance: The power they HAVE is the POWER we CEDE.

I do not want to live in current state Iran. I do not want to live under oligarchic Russia. Nor do I want to live under the Khmer Rouge. I want to live in the America that I know, that I grew up in. I want to be free to share my thoughts, have the freedom to express myself in the full spectrum, and be true to myself. And in that right, I share the same for you. We should all strive to be John Winthrop's "Shining city upon a hill." We are not a utopia, but damned if we don't strive to be.

We need to be prepared, because they our going full Blitzkrieg. First the state, then onto the states.

For one, DOGE. We are enabling what constitutes as a LARPing LAN party to play government bureaucrat. The folks are special advisors to the president. Special advisors only get 130 days to do what they do. Surely they are queuing up the next round of special advisors to roll in after.

• Contact your federal representatives - they need to know just how pissed we are that a group of 6 people are compromising our federal data. Calls do matter. Letters do too. Hell, if you're too lazy, just copy and paste one of the existing letters out there, or have your AI du jour write it for you.
• The LAN party has access to the Treasury databases and will past April 20th. They will study your tax data if they can get it. Late filing exists: https://www.irs.gov/filing/get-an-extension-to-file-your-tax-return

Immigrants

Immigrants, they get the job done! We are a nation of immigrants. I heard just yesterday say "I don't care if they come back, I just want them to come back legally" (eye roll). Firstly, these folks need to understand just how hard it is to get into this country legally nowadays and moreover how hard it is to become a naturalized citizen. Secondly, with birthright citizenship possibly going away, these folks need to understand that they may not be citizens anymore either. What better way to create a feudal state than to strip away people's citizenship and voting rights.

• Donate to causes that offer sanctuary - money, time, whatever you can do. You don't have to be front-lines. These people need writers and advocates too, and right now they are being flooded.

Free-Press

• Get off the oligarch's social media platforms. Already on Lemmy and Mastodon, good for you! You're already on your way. Now stay off those other sites, don't let them take ownership of your IP.

• Donate to free press organizations. PBS, NPR, The Guardian. Much like Russia today, we are going to need outlets outside of the US to keep us informed of the atrocities the controlled media won't share with us.

• Contribute to and use your local library. Learn how you can peacefully resist from within. Assess how you can do so within your own life Stay informed.

Prepare

Things are going to get much worse before they (may) get better. Stash away some dry powder from when you need it. Don't trust the banks with all of your money. They now make the rules and own them.

• If you can, get a safe and save for at least 3 months worth of funds. If you can't do that, save what you can.
• Save a month's worth of food. Water, dry goods, preserved snacks.
• Get some way to charge your phone off grid.
• Most important - get connected with organizations. Find groups that are working to fight the BS. You will need to be plugged in when the time comes. At minimum, they can get you connected if the time comes to flee and regroup.
• Get a firearm and learn to shoot it. You are going to need protection. Controversial, I know. Yet, When the time comes, the first and second estate and their sycophants are counting on us to fold. The judicial branch is looking weaker by the day. Learn from Türkiye - The pen is mightier than the sword up until someone takes all of the pens.
• Learn a skill - take a nursing course; take a system networking course; store food, water, medicine or books. Store bottles of alcohol, a tank of gasoline or kerosine. Not everyone needs to be a fighter. If you're absolutely opposed to firearms, be someone who can provide auxiliary support.

The Blitzkrieg is coming. History will judge us at this pivotal moment. Who are you? One that rolls into the tides or will you join us in crashing against it?

The power they HAVE is the POWER we CEDE.

In three weeks, Donald Trump has imploded whatever positive image the United States might have had internationally.

Blackburn with Darwen borough currently has seven rough sleepers on its streets the council’s leader has revealed.

Three weeks ago, I was living in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Terre Haute has a population of less than 60,000. Blackburn and Darwen has a population of over 150,000.

Terre Haute has an estimated 500 homeless people.

It will get down to 1°F/-17 °C there on Wednesday night.

Sources name conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt and far-right journalist John Solomon as potential replacements.

Contaminated water, raw sewage, ruined soils, toxic rubble, and a land denuded.

As the Trump administration and its cadre of Silicon Valley machine-learning evangelists attempt to restructure the administrative state, the IRS is preparing to purchase advanced artificial intelligence hardware, according to procurement materials reviewed by The Intercept.

With Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency installing itself at the IRS amid a broader push to replace federal bureaucracy with machine-learning software, the tax agency’s computing center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, will soon be home to a state-of-the-art Nvidia SuperPod AI computing cluster. According to the previously unreported February 5 acquisition document, the setup will combine 31 separate Nvidia servers, each containing eight of the company’s flagship Blackwell processors designed to train and operate artificial intelligence models that power tools like ChatGPT.

One month out from a deadline to avert a government shutdown, Republicans in Congress are struggling to find the votes to extend federal funding, and Democrats are issuing a stark warning: Don’t look at us this time.

Elon Musk has welcomed 13 children with four different women, including three with singer Grimes

How will Reddit generate content for paid-for subreddits?

Scores of firings have begun at federal agencies, with terminations of probationary employees underway at the Department of Education and the Small Business Administration, federal employees and union sources told CNN on Wednesday.

This article describes how Supporters can find and sign up for current volunteer opportunities and what happens after they sign up

Seventy-one-year-old woman dies after being sent home from USAID funded hospital. Others die after hospitals close in refugee camps

Here we see Elon not only contradicting his message to the people about how he's planning to "save Democracy" through DOGE, but also ends up telling on himself while explaining how an "unelected" bureaucracy is controlling the government.

If you listen carefully, you can hear his pitch change when he realizes.

"This victory is just the latest sign that Americans are fed up with overpaid CEOs—and want to use tax policies to crack down on the problem," one advocate said.

When we see a parallel government taking shape, we should not refrain from calling fascism what it is.

*A look into how the tech leaders may be using the new administration to achieve their own agenda. Looking specifically at Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andressen, Ben Horotwitz, Brian Armstrong, and David Sacks as well as their relationship with figures like JD Vance, Balaji Srinivasan, and Curtis Yarvin. There is a focused discussion on how a shaping of the government might take place based on convergences between the ideas of Yarvin, who influences the tech libertarian right, and Project 2025, who have authored a playbook exclusively for President Trump to help with his transition to power. *

Note that it looks like the copy writers changed the headline to "Trump Dares The Courts To Stop Him" for brevity, but this opinion appears on the front page with the headline I put in the title: https://kbin.melroy.org/media/fc/27/fc27e0c7624e758a8ba71e9891453b7539167b9139dd753602dd8016f5a5bfce.png You can also see the long headline at https://archive.today/2025.02.13-135321/https://www.nytimes.com/ .

Gattsu

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Kevin De Liban, attorney and founder of TechTonic Justice, about how AI comes between Americans and their government.

...

KEVIN DE LIBAN: I had several disabled and elderly clients who were part of a Medicaid program that would provide in-home caregiving assistance that folks needed to live independently and stay out of nursing facilities. And these were folks with severe conditions - quadriplegia, advanced multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, things that don't get better. And suddenly, the state decided to cut their care drastically - by 50% in some cases - dropping people from, say, eight hours a day of care to four or five. And this meant incredible suffering. People were lying in their own waste. They were getting bed sores from not being turned. They were being shut in. And what we found out is that the state had implemented an algorithmic decision-making system to decide how much care people actually needed, and that choice was what was propelling the cuts.

...

INSKEEP: So what do you think about when you bring this past experience to the news of recent weeks, as the Department of Government Efficiency - or DOGE - has been rummaging around in federal computer databases?

DE LIBAN: Well, I understand that most of the time when AI is being used for governmental purposes, it means that the public is likely to be harmed. I just haven't seen any instance where AI was implemented for governmental functions where that wasn't the case.

INSKEEP: What do you mean?

DE LIBAN: So every time government uses AI, whether it's for public benefits administration, people get cut. Whether it's to reduce staff or increase efficiency, what ends up happening is services are harder to access, longer wait times, more frustration getting accurate information. So AI use in government generally hasn't worked well, particularly when there are no regulations or safeguards to ensure that this stuff isn't used for harmful ends. And in the case of DOGE, it's actively being weaponized to target President Trump's enemies, you know, diversity efforts, science, journalism, people who are transgender, civil rights.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250213194923/https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/nx-s1-5288984/techtonic-justices-kevin-de-liban-discusses-how-ai-can-cause-problems-in-government

People who love and defend a government are creating parental figures out of the state instead of growing up and taking their stand as mature individuals.

In his attempts to reshape the federal workforce, Donald Trump is drawing on the American tradition of treating workers’ employment as completely subject to their bosses’ whims.

Macklemore

• The pause will be implemented to avoid putting U.S. businesses at an economic disadvantage to foreign competitors.