Giuliani can't hide the truth from the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg
đłïžâđ 18F software engineer "deleted" by DOGE đ https://skiles.blue/
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Giuliani can't hide the truth from the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg
Yup. Anyone who actually does anything other than create propaganda is a threat.
No amount of masculinity, bravery, skill or sacrifice will ever earn the respect of fascism. Firefighters, cops, and soldiers have all been thrown under the bus.
It's a legit hacker movie without computers
The resignation letter that the government does not want you to see
They cannot handle criticism
This, except that they will also be garbage on the front end
Here's my former coworker @ethanmarcotte.com on the feeble, embarrassing attempt of the "National Design Studio" to *actually build a website*. Ethan is a top tier, literally-famous-level designer who DOGE pushed out. He cannot be replaced by a teenager nicknamed Big Balls.
Occasionally DOGE takes credit for something, but in the actual code repository (a lot of gov websites are open source!) you'll see the change was actually made by someone who's been at the agency for a long time, not by DOGE. Also, the change will just be like, removing "nonbinary" from a form
Totally. It's a little odd because software people care about, for example, testing. We hire test engineers and invented test-driven development because we saw the problem. But bad documentation is a very similar problem to untested code, and we don't care.
As the article notes, DOGE actually fired the people working on this design work, including the best designers I've ever worked with in my career. Now I guess DOGE is going to pretend to work on government websites themselves. But the work will never actually occur.
This is another way of saying that the "National Design Studio" is fake DOGE does not actually write software. They only write press releases, steal data, cancel grants, and fire people. They will never do a "historic mission to redesign government websites."
I consider this the biggest problem in my field, software development. Documentation is spread over various platforms, mostly out of date, ownership is unclear. We never hire anyone to fix it.
When any other group of Americans get really into Russia propaganda we just admit they are on the right
Voting is one of the most morally relevant decisions that the majority of people make in their lives
Amen to this. I wrote about this problem in "Artificial Unintelligence" in 2018; it's only gotten worse in the AI era.
Yup. And keep that documentation someone you can still get to it even after you are suddenly fired!
Also, @mc2020.bsky.social, I totally agree that the best time to quit twitter was more than a year ago and the second-best time is now
CDC workers just went outside for a little while to wish farewell to their leadership who are being forced out. It's not "a walkout" like a work stoppage. They care too much about their work for that.
Yeah, that's right
There's no real CDC walkout. It's being mis-reported.
This isn't quite right. "Walkout" makes it sound like a mass quitting or mass work stoppage. Which isn't what actually happened.
The decision to quit vs stay to fight but also become complicit is a very painful decision. I feel lucky I just got fired rather than have to agonize over it. Synchronized quitting is a powerful choice and I'm sure the top people at the CDC didn't come to it lightly.
Yeah honestly, I think we are insulting nihilism here
"They would also play a function not altogether unlike what we would today think of as a congressional committee hearing, investigating some policy concern and recommending solutions." This still seems like a good idea. Randomly-chosen Congress seems better than elected Congress.
Seeing as the current government of Russia views transgender people with murderous hatred, I'm still not seeing how and why Trans Girls Online got to this place
You gotta go in person because the media will tell you that a rally with tens of thousands of people has "hundreds of people"
Do these people know that the Soviet Union is over? Why does there even exist a "very far left" person who takes their cues from the theocratic right-wing government of today's Russia? That makes so little sense
CDC scientists receive a heroes welcome after walking out today.
The Trump administration's racist and misogynist intent is strikingly literal. You can find it in DOGE's GitHub commit history. When we report on the admin systematically firing women and black people, this fact deserves to be mentioned. Even in a "just asking questions" type of way.
"Trump officials are literally searching through lists of contracts and research grants for taboo words like 'diversity,' 'female,' and 'ethnicity' to target them for cancellation."
Concessions that allow fascists to accumulate more power will never keep us safe
Oh yeah, good male partners are out there! But my impression is they are in relatively short supply. Lots of heterosexual women who are total catches can't find one.
Not all married blondes are fascist. I hope you can understand.
We are going to have to fight hard "A new reconstruction to fix the Trump era will likely involve a degree of use of state power akin to Trumpâs actions now"
Yes you do. And the law gives people the justification they need to stand their ground. When you are enforcing the rules you have so much more power than when you are acting on your own.
Yeah I think in the long run, the young men of DOGE will become the fall guys for a lot of these breaches of the law
DOGE may not follow the law, but they are to an extent constrained by the law. The better the laws are, the more civil servants and judges can focus and synchronize their power to protect Americans. DOGE is a paperwork coup; we need to send our best paperwork into the arena when we fight them.
These laws are basically voluntary, with no real enforcement mechanisms. Yet, they consumed (by my count) about 5 months of DOGE's time at SSA. Now imagine if these laws had enforcement: criminal penalties, jail time, a private right of action so that you could sue DOGE. More powerful laws. âȘ
To get that copy made, DOGE had to contend with FISMA, a federal law, and the civil servants who are loyal to it. They forced DOGE to document their misdeeds: to sign their names to their violations of Americans' privacy. The Privacy Act also helped, by creating data silos that are hard to breach.
Civil servants at SSA with the law on their side shut down DOGE's systems access a number of times. They even got a court order. They forced DOGE to work with a static copy of Social Security data. This is still bad, but it's not as bad as if DOGE had ongoing systems access. Copies go out of date.
Seeing stories like this, a lot of people say: "The laws don't matter. No one is enforcing them so they're not worth the paper they're written on." That's doomerism. The fact is, federal law hindered the bad guys a lot in this case. We should put more teeth into these laws. They matter. đ§”
Yeah, sorry, I don't mean to disagree with him either. Anyway, I think we can all agree that gun nut behavior is in essence a fandom and it contains the compulsive behaviors that fandoms often do.
Yes. In spite of what Fashion Guy says here, addiction isn't simple. It is wrapped up in self-definition, fantasy, identity.
I watched this change overtake my father's hobby. He was low-key addicted to buying old historical weapons at gun shows, and artisanal reloading of historical ammunition. Then the gun shows gradually changed into trade shows for people with home invasion fantasies. It stopped being fun.
Like how "fast fashion" has magnified shopping addictions focused on clothes, changes in manufacturing (of guns and of paranoia) have magnified the shopping addictions focused on guns
My heart goes out to these feds at the CDC. How are they supposed to continue to serve the public when their boss wants the public dead? When they aren't protected from physical violence in their workplace? Public health should be the solution to health misinformation, not the cause
![In his resignation letter, Daskalakis wrote, âI am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponizing of public health.â Houryâs resignation letter spoke about the continued spread of misinformation around vaccines. âRecently, the overstating of risks [of vaccines] and the rise of misinformation have cost lives, as demonstrated by the highest number of US measles cases in 30 years and the violent attack on our agency,â Houry wrote.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2mpndi3qhexg5azmyrjtvvou/bafkreie7ndnlatmx4d74d2yu7dfuhhcffe7evtzyvz75nher6str4jvize@jpeg "Click to view full size")
In a functional government, this would be a five alarm fire where Congress calls in Kennedy and asks him what the fuck is going on
I'll admit I have a bad feeling about it
It implies so much work policing genres: if Slaughterhouse Five is not scifi, then probably Frankenstein is not horror, Sense and Sensibility is not romance, etc. Soon the genres are all redefined as only including the non-classics of each genre. PS, I love The Midnight Bargain, thank you for it
Huh. Yeah I guess I have heard people say that and I just think it doesn't make sense. "This sandwich is so good it has transcended the category sandwich." what are you talking about, that's a sandwich
Yeah witches are not responsible
evergreen
www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...
Susan Monarez just got fired from the CDC, a few weeks after responding to an attack by a gunman with bravery and compassion for CDC workers. No one is saying why she was fired yet.
It has vampires, darkness, blood, jump scares. All the typical horror movies items. What esoteric definition of horror movie could possibly exclude it?
The DOGE team at SSA might have violated FISMA and other laws by not following security protocols as spelled out in NIST's SP 800-53, which are mandatory for all government agencies. 1/2 www.csoonline.com/article/4046...
I have ever thought to object to this but yeah, you seem totally correct
Yes of course they do. It's a widespread conversation via whisper network, but our main ways of having a visible conversation in public (policy, journalism) can't acknowledge it. I guess because men might hear.
Instead we mostly see reports of how rightwing gender fundamentalists frame this issue: to double down on the entitled approach to masculinity that is actually the cause of the problem, and to fantasize about returning women to an imagined past
I find it weird there's not more reporting on it. "There's no decent, responsible men for women to choose as partners" should be front-page news, right? Feels like the problem is very widespread.
I know a fair number of women who want to have kids but they can't find a decent single man to have them with. I think this is common. Although I find "raising the fertility rate" to be a bad, creepy goal, it's pretty clear to me that achieving that goal requires changing men, not changing women.
Hmm I see what you're saying but I was guessing "equipment pin acces" was the name of some access method in the PSNAP and SNAP MI systems mentioned in the prior paragraph. I'm not familiar with these systems; it's not clear to me if they are on AWS or not.
Ooooo, is using IAM implied the whistleblower complaint, in your view?
DOGE is currently creating the national identification system that Republicans have been terrified of for my entire life
Same experience that me and my colleagues at 18F had with Musk's people. Like the SSA staff, we warned DOGE that the things they were trying to do violated FISMA and the Privacy Act. They weren't "innovative ideas," they were crimes. DOGE went ahead and did the crimes.
Preventing the illegal exchange of data within government is part of the reason that the ATO process exists. If DOGE plans on doing something illegal with that data, this would explain why DOGE felt the need to circumvent this process. In other words, they know their plans are against the law.
Problem: this plan is illegal under the Privacy Act of 1974, a law which prohibits sharing data in bulk across government agencies, and very specifically prohibits sharing Social Security data of exactly this kind. The law was meant to prevent exactly the national id system DOGE is trying to create.
Musk's people have been clear that they intend to combine all government data about people together, specifically SSA data, "to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud" The SSA could easily be the keystone of a national identification system, which DOGE wants to build
Aside from the crimes committed here, the justification for DOGE's actions also sounds likely to point to something illegal. "The purported reason for the project was to improve the way that SSA exchanges data." Let's dig into that claim:
They treated the Provisional ATO like a blank check. DOGE is now "holding a copy of the American public's social security data in a potentially unsecured cloud environment." This is illegal under a federal law called FISMA. Everyone I know in government takes this law very seriously, except DOGE.
But DOGE people are also in the relevant security offices. So in July DOGE just wrote themselves a Provisional ATO with no real security rules. They promised to only use test data, not real Social Security data about real Americans. They lied.
By June 12th SSA security responded: no, you can't create any kind of new system without the property security process, an Authority to Operate (ATO). And you can't take real SSA data out of SSA and move it to a place the SSA's IT shop does not control.
Ignoring the court order, DOGE gave themselves access again (more access this time) within 24 hours. The SSA's security office shut them back down, again, on March 24. Evidently frustrated with this, DOGE decided on June 10th to instead copy SSA data to a new system under DOGE's control.
DOGE gave themselves access to Social Security databases on March 14. They tried to keep it a secret, bypassing the access approval process. SSA discovered the breach on March 17; by March 20 SSA got a court order and shut their accounts down.
Re-reading the report of the Social Security whistleblower, it is striking how many times good people within SSA tried to keep DOGE from committing crimes. Here's my understanding of the timeline đ§”
Screenshot from here: www.theatlantic.com/health/archi... Note: the real reason Musk is killing USAID is because he believes in a conspiracy theory that people who appear to disagree with him only do so because they are paid. So he cancels random payments, trying to stamp it out
Obviously this is small potatoes compared to the millions who will die because of the closure of USAID. But the money lost goes to show that this never was about efficiency!
You wonât find a single major paper discussing these yet every person who reads this knows what im talking about
Yup. On the Interstate I can see bumper stickers calling for my death coast to coast.
As it stands, we really don't have a mechanism to hold these people accountable in many cases even if sanity were to return today. The laws don't have clear enforcement mechanisms. We need to give ourselves a chance to enforce justice here.
Ultimately yes, but the teeth can inspire fear. If DOGE knew they were violating laws that carry major jail time, and that they might be prosecuted years or decades later after they were out of power, I think it would count for something.
"the people that are supposed to be enforcing the ethics rules are getting canned" This behavior is criminal, but the enforcement mechanisms are insufficient. When this all finally ends, we need to hold people like Shedd accountable. And we need to strengthen the laws, put real teeth into them.
Shedd and DOGE are stealing not just money, but data. Tesla is under investigation by OSHA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Could DOGE be stealing data that will help Tesla escape justice in those investigations? We don't know. The theft is happening out of sight.
Musk is so clearly dealing contracts to himself. American taxpayers are funding "MechaHitler" LLM chatbots and that money is going to the richest person in the world. Because he has Shedd and the DOGE guys doing stuff for him, Musk himself no longer needs to be inside of government.
Musk put his guy in charge of the system of government contracts. Obvious, huge conflict of interest as Musk basically lives off of government contracts.
Surprising no one, Musk's man within GSA still works for Tesla at the same time as he works for the government. @autost.bsky.social did you think no one would find out?
The Social Security Administration's chief data officer has publicly blown the whistle, alleging DOGE put hundreds of millions of Social Security records at risk of compromise by uploading a critical government database of citizen's data to Amazon's cloud.
"DOGE personnel appeared to have given themselves authorization to create a copy of SSA's entire set of data on the American public without any independent security or oversight mechanisms in place in violation of laws and creating enormous vulnerabilities." static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics...
Sadly white supremacy is the "order" that many people mean when they say law and order
"Website design is my passion." americabydesign.gov
The decent people left within GSA have been forcing DOGE projects within GSA to follow Section 508 via extreme determination. DOGE really does not want to do it.
Even a small amount of emotional support can allow kids to climb out of this trap. A single trustworthy adult, or even a kindly television figure like Mr. Rogers. That's why Dobson created a whole alternative media empire: to make his abuse an immersive experience.
Dobson was frightened of the social progress of the 20th century and he saw that the only way to halt it was by abusing children. Today the right wing bans books on social emotional learning and anti-bullying because they know: abused, stunted children are needed to replenish their movement
Dobson was right about something: The physical abuse and emotional repression of children is indeed a somewhat reliable system for creating the fearful, reactionary, superficially-obedient adults that Dobson wanted in the world.
These fascist goons are mobilizing the whole power of the US government to persecute this one man and ruin his life, because he embarrassed them.
They should sell product placement in the NATO phonetic alphabet. X could be Xbox. C is Cheerios now. What does it matter.
