Former federal civil servant. Current instructor of Computer and Information Systems. Multiple affiliations but I do not speak on behalf of any of them through this account. Contact via Signal: alpacaherder.27
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For Labor Day, I wanted to talk about the success of Paizo's unionization. We formed United Paizo Workers in October 2021, won voluntary recognition, and ratified our first contract in 2023. This happened because of solidarity, good union training from CWA, and empowerment of the workers.
It feels like we are living through a live version of 'Weekend at Bernie's'.
f24.my/BP05
No idea what this Oval Office announcement is. Could be resigning Could be apologizing because Stephen Miller molted all over the Residence and someone caught staff dumping the exuviae out of the window Could be clarifying that tariff revenue is really eleventy three trillion
Possibly. Dan Scavinoās hand could be up the social media puppet again like it was on J6 posting things Trump didnāt quite know about. Civil service retiree sense says something is rather awry and that whatever the 2 PM announcement is about could likely get very weird in unanticipated ways.
i swear to god if he launches another memecoin
President Brezhnev is alive and well. by Katherine Leavitt
NEW: Mercenary spyware is coming to the US. ICE just quietly unsuspended their contract with spyware maker #Paragon. Remember them? Caught earlier this year being used to hack Italian journalists. This is bad, let's talk about how we got here 1/ jackpoulson.substack.com/p/exclusive-...
āIn 2017, OāHanlon was captured at Trumpās first inauguration festivities in DC decked out in his full Eagle Scouts uniform. The photographer who took the photo wrote on his personal website of āthe Boy Scout kid that looked like a Brownshirt.āā
I get this comment quite a bit and I'd really like to talk about my Autistic masking experience in today's video.
Apparently we learned nothing from the Philippines?
"what if instead of trying to make Iraq a democracy, we turned Venezuela into an American colony?"
The capo is giving one of his lieutenants a reward before he passes on?
I miss being a librarian. At least I am tangentially connected to the library world as an instructor in information systems at a community college in northwest Pennsylvania.
Hey, kids, this is how we used to Google.
![Pin-fed paper with perforation for removal with dot-matrix printing on it, black ink slightly faded. Text reads Type N for next record. Type H for help.Type I for index. Type G for guide. Type Type R to revise search, H for help. E to start over. TYPE COMMAND AND PRESS RETURN== > ORBIS SEARCH REQUEST: T=SIGNATURE BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD -- NO. 1 OF 15 ENTRIES FOUND Signature: a quadrimestrail of typography and graphic arts. 1935-Dec. 1940; new ser. [no.] 1-18; July 1946-1954. London. v. ill., plates (part col.) 25 cm. SML : wanting* indes for Rollins Coll. Publication suspended, 1941-June 1946. Indexes: new ser. 1-15. 1946-1952, in v. 15. SUBJECT HEADINGS (Library of Congress; use s= ): Printing--Periodicals. Illustration of books--Periodicals. Printing--Specimens. [no.] 1-15; Novā¢ CONTINUED ON NEXT SCREEN: press RETURN Type N for next record. Type H for help-Type I for index. Type R to revise search, H for help. E to start over. TYPE COMMAND AND PRESS RETURN==> ORBIS SEARCH REQUEST: T= SIGNATURE BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD -- NO. 1 OF 15 ENTRIES FOUND (CONTINUED) Signature ... (CONTINUED) LOCATION: SML, Stacks, Yale Classification CALL NUMBER: X126 S45 (copy 1) LIBRARY HAS: ** Holdings are NOT yet available in ORBIS. ** Please consult appropriate periodical ** card catalog, or a reference librarian. LOCATION: SML, Arts of the Book (non-circulating) CALL NUMBER: X126 Si26 2 copies c. 2 in Rollins](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:aorbdsa5m6q5pw6japzuatds/bafkreicu6oit6hh4ssvgu7hokniw65r6o246dit2selzbi2pdbhifdifj4@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Well, I guess I need to start looking at buying a boat to live on then that can traverse the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Crap like this will probably see me losing my house. At least in a boat I can set sail for safe harbors.
"there is always an ideal solution that convieniently asks nothing of me and I will get angry if you suggest otherwise" has really been a driving ideological force in our politics since 2020.
What school closure discourse is a reminder of is that there are a lot of ppl in this country, cutting across the political spectrum, who reject the very concept of tradeoffs or that there could ever be a situation where all solutions have downsides & you just gotta pick the least bad one.
What is going bump in the night
Tulsi Gabbard is *very obviously* a foreign intelligence asset and I hope we all live long enough to see her tried and convicted for it.
Things like this are why I think weāre past the point we can save things or unwind the damage. A new constitutional settlement at a minimum is going to be needed. We have to perhaps radically restructure to prevent this ever happening again.
This is the provision Ensign cited as the basis for the government's authority to summarily remove unaccompanied migrant children. Iād love to hear from immigration lawyers, but having briefly looked at itā¦ itās so frivolous itād be laughable if it werenāt so cruel. (Am I wrong??)
It's difficult to imagine the complex meeting to coordinate the abduction of so many kids and then spiriting them away immediately to a foreign country at night on a holiday weekend without...well, hearing maniacal supervillain laughter.
Reminder: the apparent plan was to spirit these children away in the middle of the night without them ever seeing the inside of a courtroom to challenge their deportation. Children.
Between Trump being 1/2 dead all weekend, Giulianiās car crash, Clinton traveling with a defibrillator, this, Iām reminded that weāre NOT actually collectively psychologically (& logistically) prepared for the RATE at which the earliest round of boomers are going to start dropping.
Beats finding a bear in the woods
None of us relish this.
I initially had a typo that said "condiment sentiment". I definitely think we need an economic number that measures this. Ketchup is up +10% from a year ago, but mustard is down -5%, while relish remains unchanged.
University of Michiganās consumer sentiment index was 74.0 in December, now 58.2 in August. Conference Boardās consumer confidence index was 104.7, now 97.4. Government officials shouldnāt go on TV and blatantly lie like this.
Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian parties
Remember the Goolsbee Rule, also called the āpathological irony of crisisā: If you lose credibility, your statements begin to mean the opposite of what you say.
h/t @klhkhistorian.bsky.social
This is depraved
This is an interesting question. If the president ever needed serious hospitalization beyond what the facility at the WH can offer, they would have to be taken offsite. That requires a motorcade or chopper. Typically, the pool would note that.
Donāt act suspicious, donāt act suspiciousā¦.
This is worth sharing far and wide. Federal Employees and contractors oral history project. Im not involved in this. Just got the link, idea seems to be to create a record of the assault on the American Repuvlic after Jan 2025. www.fecohp.org
How are they going to justify sending the National Guard into New York City when they've told us that New York City has already been reduced to rubble by marauding gangs of gay murderers?
NEW: A week or so ago, one federal agent kept popping up in videos from Trump's violent DC crackdownāso @jsweetli.bsky.social and I investigated. Turns out he's a 26-year-old US Parks Police officer, a lesser known law enforcement unit currently championed by Interior Sec. Doug Burnum. Our report:
the summer may be coming to an end but the sewers will go on.
š¬ āHe wants to restore the old Soviet Union. And that includes part of my country,ā says German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
How much protein should you consume? erictopol.substack.com/p/our-preocc...
Definitely something the industry has been warning for months would happen
The headline calls this unexpected consequences, but I would call this extremely expected consequences.
On average, people attending church in person had a higher heart rate during the service and experienced more transcendence, according to a recent study. religionnews.com/2025/08/20/s...
From Stranger Things to strange new Disney Plus shows.
Not Joan of Arc but rather Horst Wessel instead en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_W...
She was a traitor then, is a traitor now and she will always be in the future.
He was sentenced to 63 months in prison. One of the longer sentences. www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/t...
This is the type of person Trump pardoned. He proudly asserts that they should have injured a US Capitol Police Officer worse than they did on January 6th (@sergeantaqgo.bsky.social) had to medically retire). But MAGA supports law enforcement? Seriously? Then show me by condemning this guy.
What a POS
it would be nice if, in this limited respect, power-political necessity and republican virtues align. Because the rules are shredded, the norms are gone, and our institutions are subverted. We are in a power-political struggle between fascist authoritarianism and pluralist democracy. Period. /end
I don't know what the correct balance is. But I do know that we need to expand the pro-democracy coalition, and I suspect that this *will* require approaches that abandon stigmatization of allies and potential allies in favor of empathy and persuasion.
We haven't lost yet. But we are losing. And no one ā and I mean *no one* ā has figured this out. So we've got politicians who think the only way to expand the coalition is to triangulate; we've got ones who think what matters more is having the courage of your convictions.
I don't think that people should abandon fighting for their rights or the rights of others. We all want to defeat reactionary authoritarianism and replace it with a new, better, pluralist democracy. Pluralist democracy is hard. It was too hard for MAGA and the post-liberals.
They *want* people hived off into antagonistic groups; they *want* people to believe that they can't form cross-cutting social ties; and they *want* people to see all institutions everywhere as eternally compromised.
And that gets at a larger point. Competitive authoritarian regimes benefit from reduced social trust ā which is why they actively try to destroy it.
There are virtues to working with people you otherwise disagree with. It's much harder, for example, for people to "other" religious, sexual, ethnic, & racial minorities when they spend time working with them as allies. It's no accident that the authoritarian right now wages a war against empathy.
But remember, none of this requires that we abandon the causes we believe in. None of this requires backing candidates we don't trust* in nomination contests. *I do mean "trust." We don't need politicians to say the all the right things. We need them to "do" the right things more often than not.
We should expect the regime ā with help from Russia and other foreign actors ā to engage in active measures to stoke tensions within the opposition. They will accuse us of being foreign agents. They will attempt to infiltrate the opposition with the aim of radicalizing and discrediting it.
If we are going to prevail against them, we need as large an opposition tent as we can get. We need disciplined counter-mobilization. That means protests where SJP doesn't get on stage and tell people that if they don't support the destruction of the state of Israel, then they need to go home.
They've been replaced with sycophants and true believers. The security services are being purged. Thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, the regime now has its NKVD. Each day more true believers joint its ranks.
It gets worse. Even if the Ds win the midterms, we should not expect a peaceful transfer of legislative power. The kind of people who stopped Trump from declaring martial law, seizing voting machines, arresting opposition leaders.... they're all gone.
But it's the truth: the choice is between a small-d democratic coalition ā one in which a majority either supports or is sympathetic to the causes we're talking about ā and a fascist authoritarian regime that will use every tool at its disposal ā including violence ā to suppress vulnerable "others."
Pro-democracy politicians will *fail* if they don't have space to form alliances with people who don't share our beliefs and room to blunt successful wedge issues. That sucks.
There's no point in punishing the nominees of the opposition for stances that we consider beyond the pale ā let alone ones that are problematic. The logic of "teaching them a lesson" presupposes that we still have a system in which the opposition can win elections.
Wedge strategies are also a time-honored feature of routine democratic politics. Everyone uses them. My point is simply that *stakes* are different. We are *not* in routine democratic politics.
We also have some limited ability to influence how unified the pro-democracy coalition is. Remember, competitive authoritarian regimes rely on divide-and-rule tactics. The sooner the opposition unifies, the better the odds of dislodging autocratic rulers.
There are things we can influence, of course. Most of what we can do right now is prepare, especially for participation in collective mobilization against the regime ā and here I mean everything from becoming involved in local politics and civil society to learning the tactics of mass protest.
Right now we're talking about the best case scenario. It requires a lot of things to fall into place. A lot of those things are outside of the control of Democratic officials and politicians. Even more are outside of our control.
Taking one or both chamber may be enough to slow down, let alone stop, the consolidation of authoritarianism. But if GOP holds... then, all else equal, democracy is fucked. It'll also really matters that Ds do well at the state level. The fewer states that are laboratories of autocracy, the better.
Put differently, if a) what we're looking at is an unfair playing field but +/- free elections and b) the regime faces a unified opposition, Ds have a decent chance of taking the House. I am also cautiously optimistic about the Senate, but I wouldn't bet money (see @jonathanbernstein.bsky.social) ā¼ā¼
3) GOP states will also ratchet up voter suppression, with help from the Department of Justice and the Supreme Court. Expect some *very* aggressive efforts. We won't be able to stop them. But there is a non-zero chance that they miscalculate and drive angry voters to the polls.
2) GOP states will continue to aggressively gerrymander. When all is said and done, Ds will be able to offset some of this but not all of it. The GOP will still likely lose the House, but keep in mind that the we're in a long-term existential struggle. Bigger majorities > smaller than ones.
1) We will still have an on-balance independent media. The MSM will be subject to state coercion, some of it successful, but it will also continue to break stories that are damaging to the regime.
Okay. So there's a lot of uncertainty about how "free and fair" the 2026 midterms are going to be. If you forced me to speculate, my *low confidence* prediction is that they'll be less free and much less fair than in 2024.
The worse news: the bulk of successful cases had a "white knight" ā and international power who facilitated the regime transition through some combination of pressure, brokering deals, and carrots. Guess who that white knight usually was?
But it was too late. To understand what happened, you *must* read @kimlanelaw.bsky.social's @jodemocracy.bsky.social article ā¼ā¼ In fact, just drop what you're doing and read it now.
I have bad news and worse news. The bad news: the more consolidated the authoritarian regime becomes, the harder it is to dislodge it. The opposition in Hungary finally got its act together in 2022, and formed a coalition that included far-right and far-left parties.
One of the many ways the regime fights back is to try to use its considerable resources to wedge apart those coalitions. And it often succeeds, because it is *very* hard to hold together politically diverse coalitions *even* when elections are free and fair.
We have a decades of scholarship on how pro-democracy forces win in competitive authoritarian systems: they form a united opposition that brings together people with otherwise profound political disagreements.
1) it will be difficult ā but not impossible ā for the opposition to win elections; and 2) if the government overtly steals an election, it can be toppled via widespread popular mobilization *if* the security services split or abandon the regime.
Let's start with the "best" scenario right now: that the US. remains a "competitive authoritarian" system. We have elections that are unfree and unfair, but not total and complete shams. This means that:
This consensus is correct. But I don't think enough people have actually internalized the implications. That is, they're perfectly happy to point out that too many Dem officials don't understand this, but they haven't updated their own understanding of what this means for taking the country back.
š§µ Authoritarianism, Democratization, and Coalition Politics. The consensus around here is, more or less, that the United States is currently a consolidating authoritarian regime controlled by a mix of reactionary populists and fascists.
Just because you feel like your day to day life may have not changed that much much doesn't mean that America hasn't changed dramatically under Trump. Authoritarianism is here, right now. We all need to be as clear eyed about it as @vermontgmg.bsky.social: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Itās really hard to do insightful satire of right-wing weirdos because almost any ridiculous stance you can come up with, theyāll just express freely without a shred of irony.
This āexplicitā is a weird editorial choice. The constitution gives the president no power over this at all. Itās not ambiguous.
I was in DC on Wednesday and Thursday. To my eyes it looks like too many people have gotten used to the madness. 249 years was a good run but we might not be able to save the patient. Starting over from scratch is increasingly looking like a good idea at this point to me.
Hello, I am furious www.liberalcurrents.com/let-it-burn-...
The best stuff on this recently comes from @donmoyn.bsky.social and @jvl.bsky.social Hereās Don on how America has already slipped into competitive authoritarianism and is hurtling toward outright authoritarianism donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...
On the question of our national character and whether we can recover from all this, I also wrote a bit more on the question of civic virtue for @liberalcurrents.com back in April www.liberalcurrents.com/inherent-vic...
āThe times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.ā - US Constitution, Art. 4.1
Donāt. Print. Lies. In. The. Newspapers.
german universities were once at the forefront of science before the nazis destroyed them to eliminate the "jew science" that would lead to the atomic bomb; the nazis eugenic beliefs were based in several ways on weird, occult, medieval beliefs fascism rhymes and adapts. america's is not unique
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What in the ever loving fuck is going on here
Chatbots killing their users suggests that big tech has transitioned from simple parasite to parasitoid, indicating that keeping the host alive is no longer essential for their evolutionary strategy
The non vaccinated maga campaign people sent me their āterms and conditionsā. (I didnāt ask for it). This is a campaign they launch with paid posts, promoted content with ten influencers launching at a time to support RFK Jrās nonsense. So expect a wave of bs.
