Vermonters made their voice heard...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU7aTDxMYkA

As a part of this socially-asocial #Fediverse network I would like to talk to you on the other side of the ocean.

I rarely write posts in #English and I only have very few followers that are not #Czech or #Slovakian, so I'm not sure if this ever reaches my target audience of this post - the #USA citizens.

I am seriously concerned about what is happening lately with your country, who was supposed to be (or was acting like) a #democracy beacon. Yet, somehow you managed to reach the point, where #president, who most of you (!) elected is felon, who pardons criminals and does pretty rude political statements to country, who is losing lives of it's citizens only because they have chosen the path of being a #free nation.

As a person from central #EU I must admit this is seriously hard to watch as I expected your society to be #freedom and #liberty friendly and yet I see your president fueling #propaganda from #Russia and bullying president of #Ukraine.

I do not think this is a great way to #StopWar - this is a way to lose it. I'm hell-of-a-sure that befriending pretty much dictator of #Russia while his propagandists talks about nuking Washington is not a good idea, but somehow your president believes it is.

Please reconsider and act, this is not funny and people are dying. Your voices need to be heard or somehow you might find out you live in country you never imagined...

Before I was fired tonight, I was in charge of information security for VA.gov, which has millions of users per month and stores and processes huge amounts of veterans' personal information. I've been told by people I've worked with that I'm the best at what I do of anyone they've ever worked with. Now there will be _no one_ in charge of information security for VA.gov.
Does this seem like improving government efficiency?
#politics #USPol #DOGE #USDS #VA #infosec
2/2

BREAKING: A bunch of U.S. Digital Service employees (including me) were fired tonight. It's still unclear exactly how many. There is no visibility whatsoever into what determined who was let go. Legacy USDS (i.e., pre-DOGE) leadership was not involved in the decision about whom to let go and was not notified in advance that people were going to be fired.
#politics #USPol #DOGE #coup #USDS
1/2

it's not defamation when IT'S THE TRUTH

is it time to double down?

Ehh... crap.

Axios: Multiple sources told Axios on condition of anonymity that DOGE representatives were at NOAA's facilities in Silver Spring, Md., on Tuesday.

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/04/trump-nominates-noaa-head-neil-jacobs

* "When the Patriot Act was passed, libraries got requests for patrons' borrowing history. We were prohibited from disclosing those requests.

* We deleted and shredded those records and stopped tracking reading history for that reason."

#Libraries #Librarians #Rwsist #Politics #Anarchist
1/6

I wasn't paying attention to this earlier, but apparently 101 at Alameda blocked earlier today (2 hours or so ago?) by protesters trying to stop deportation of migrants. (I hate LA traffic, but show of force of people has its places. I think the "we just want to get to work" complaints go out the door when you have Nazi saluting billionaires trying to take over the country)

#Neoliberalism in a nutshell

A few excerpts here from an excellent op-ed piece by climate scientist Peter Gleick (@petergleick)...
____________________________________

It's not as though we weren’t warned. Scientists have been sounding the alarm about growing climate risks for decades. Despite repeated warnings, we have failed to adequately mitigate or adapt to climate change.

Incredibly, leading policymakers and pundits continue to deny scientific reality. In 2020, after an earlier series of devastating wildfires, then-president Donald Trump dismissed concerns over climate change, telling one California official “I don't think science knows” about global warming. “It'll start getting cooler, you just watch.”

Five increasingly hot years later, Trump is continuing to ignore the science during the Los Angeles disaster, preferring instead to point fingers at California water policy, diversity and inclusion efforts, endangered fish, and his political opponents.

These fires were unambiguously influenced by human-caused climate change. Global temperatures are accelerating upward — 2024 was the hottest year in recorded history, and all 10 of the hottest years have been in the last decade, continuing a century-long trend of warming.

Extreme hydrologic events, including floods and droughts, are accelerating, and Southern California is intensely dry. Los Angeles has received essentially no rainfall in over 10 months, with the driest start to a rainy season on record, parching soils and vegetation and setting the stage for extreme winds to intensify and spread the fires.

We know what’s coming, but we also know what to do. In addition to aggressively accelerating the energy transition away from fossil fuels, changing individual behavior, and reducing carbon emissions from other sources, we have to expand efforts to build resilience to unavoidable impacts.
_________________________

Yes, we do know what to do. But the question is — WILL it ever be done?

FULL OP-ED ➡️ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/los-angeles-fires-force-us-to-confront-our-dystopian-present/

Fixed it! Billboard on the way into Newcastle from Advance Australia. #truth #lies #politics #rightwing #AtlasNetwork #fossilfuels #money

"Meta and X are going rogue:" European Digital Rights group (EDRi) urges EU to invest in infrastructure "like Mastodon, Peertube and other key pieces of the Fediverse" to secure Europe's independence

https://edri.org/our-work/meta-and-x-are-going-rogue-here-is-what-europe-should-do-now

💵 💵 Business As Usual 💵 💵

When the bottom line means more than the poverty line, when stock and bond futures are more important than our futures, when the investment climate counts for more than the actual climate, this is what you get…

➡️ https://www.dw.com/en/billionaire-wealth-growing-faster-than-ever-says-oxfam-report/a-71345320

JPost: Did Elon Musk appear to Sieg Heil at Trump inauguration?

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-838444

In these troubled times, it’s nice to finally have a feel good, happy story 



Very aptly put, David Frum.
👍
https://bsky.app/profile/davidfrum.bsky.social/post/3ldtps2hxps2m

Congress Pushes #Apple to Remove #Deepfake Apps After 404 Media Investigation

https://www.404media.co/congress-pushes-apple-to-remove-deepfake-apps-after-404-media-investigation/

Yesterday: Among the neo-nazi X accounts revealed by Texas Observer are a 35-year-old vice president at JP Morgan Chase and a worker at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Maryland. https://www.texasobserver.org/revealed-operators-neo-nazi-x-accounts/

"If you are okay with having #Muslim, #Jewish & #Hindu students sit through a #Christian prayer at school, but not okay with having Christian students sit through a Muslim, Jewish or Hindu prayer, then it's NOT religious freedom -- it's #religious #oppression."

There was a singular moment in 2015-16 where Bernie Sanders could have been the Democrat Elect instead of Clinton. He was sabotaged, and along that, so was democracy in the US, as it opened the gates for Trump and all that ensued afterwards.

The future (and present) in the US is oligarchy, not a democratic republic. It's just that now it's going to be completely in the open, and legally elected for it. The dream is dead.