“According to the report, Tuesday was supposed to mark the start of a productive legislative week, with House members returning from the weekend to pass a slate of bipartisan bills. Instead, the chamber sat nearly empty after Republican leaders postponed the scheduled votes. Johnson’s fractured caucus has repeatedly sabotaged his legislative agenda. Senior House Republicans and aides now openly acknowledge it’s preferable to cancel votes entirely than risk the political fallout from public defeats on the House floor.”
—
GOP lawmakers refusing to return for votes until Mike Johnson cleans up his mess: report
Republicans can’t govern. They are incompetent and useless for anything that isn’t protecting pedophiles and other abusers.
How do police and federal agents identify and target those who participate in demonstrations? What countermeasures can we take to hinder this kind of repression? In this anonymously submitted text, one affinity group explores how they address these questions.
Once upon a time, only those who intended to engage in high-risk confrontational protest activity had to concern themselves with surveillance and security. Today, surveillance and policing are becoming much more invasive and arbitrary. Even if you never violate any law, the state may nonetheless seek to make an example of you. Everyone who might participate in a demonstration at some point should familiarize themselves with the security protocols that radicals have developed over the years.
the weird thing about being a leftist is the government calling you a radical extremist and your family believing that youre a radical extremist and the whole times your main political beliefs are shit like "we live in a world where we could very easily end world hunger, homelessness, most disease, poverty, ect. and the people in power are choosing not to, and thats evil and should change" and that bigotry is bad
"This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking."
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise t
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Comrade Trump continues his unbroken streak of destroying the American empire's grip on the world, hastening the renewables transition, de-dollarizing global trade, and killing the world's suicidal habit of entrusting its digital life to America's defective, enshittified tech exports:
But Comrade Trump's ambitious praxis knows no bounds. Now, he's helping to remake the Democratic Party as a muscular opposition with a serious commitment to workers' interests over billionaires. It's not merely that Trump has empowered the primary campaigns of leftist Democrats facing down corporate, AIPAC-backed sellouts:
He's also stiffening normie sellout Democrats' spines, forcing them to confront the stark choice between socialism and barbarism! And Dem leaders don't come more normie sellout than Cory "Big Pharma" Booker, a disgrace to Corys everywhere:
Nevertheless, that very same (lesser) Cory has introduced legislation to unwind every illegal, corrupt merger that the Trump administration has waved through:
Under the Correcting Lapsed Enforcement in Antitrust Norms for Mergers (CLEAN Mergers) Act, any company that was acquired in a deal worth $10b or more will have to break up with its merger partner if it turns out that these mergers were "politically influenced." "Politically influenced" sums up every major merger under the Trump II regime:
You could be forgiven for assuming that this is just about reining in Wall Street greed, but that it isn't an especially political maneuver. That's not true: antitrust is the most consequentially political regulation (with the possible exception of regulations on elections). Every fascist power defeated in WWII relied on the backing of their national monopolists to take, hold and wield power. That's why the Marshall Plan technocrats who rewrote the laws of Europe, South Korea and Japan made sure to copy over US antitrust law onto those statute-books (that's also why the tech antitrust cases brought in Europe could be re-run in South Korea and Japan – their laws are all substantively similar, because they were harmonized with US antitrust in the 1950s):
Fascism and monopolies go hand in hand, and smashing monopolies is key to the program of fighting fascism. After defeating fascism in the mid-20th century, the Allies oversaw a program of "denazification," starting with the Nuremberg trials:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials
Inspired by those trials, I've proposed that Congressional Dems could form a "Nuremberg Caucus" that would publicly promise sweeping plans to denazify America after Trump and his allies have been swept from power:
The centerpiece of the Nuremberg Caucus playbook is a set of ready-to-file, public indictments against Trump officials who have violated the law, the Constitution, and the rights of the people of the USA. Dems should create and maintain a docket with exhibits and witness lists that gets updated every time one of these crooks runs their big, stupid mouths on Fox News or OANN or Twitter. The Nuremberg Caucus could even set dates for the trials of officials, with judicial calendars for each federal courtroom, starting on January 21, 2029.
The idea here is to both demoralize Trump's collaborators and to stiffen the spines of the Democratic base who will have to be convinced that turning out for the coming elections, and defending them, will mean something, delivering the change and hope they've been promised since the Obama campaign, but which has never materialized.
While trials and punishment for Trump's fascist goons are at the center of the Nuremberg Caucus plan, that's not all of it. The plan also calls for publicly announcing the intention to unwind every corrupt merger that was consummated under Trump. This serves two purposes: first, it promises the electorate that the monopolists who steal from them will face consequences for their crimes; but second, it also puts investors on notice that any gains from corrupt mergers will turn into massive losses once the next administration orders these companies to unscramble the inedible omelets they're cooking up, no matter what the cost.
That's exactly what Booker's CLEAN Mergers Act – cosponsored by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) – does. I don't think that Booker is listening to me, but I do think that Dems who are willing to introduce this kind of legislation can be cajoled, coerced and sweet-talked into more ambitious Nuremberg Caucus actions.
For example, there could not be a better time to announce plans to unrig the Supreme Court, which has just gutted the Voting Rights Act:
The Supreme Court's legitimacy has been burned to the ground, and Trump's chud justices are pissing on the ashes. Packing the court is a very good idea:
Which is why I included it in the Nuremberg Caucus plan. But packing the court is just table stakes. In his latest video, Jamelle Bouie lays out a detailed plan for denazifying the Supreme Court:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzS61buXkQ
As Bouie points out, "as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable…We can have democracy and self-government in this country or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both."
But packing the court – while a good place to start – isn't enough. Per Bouie, the problem isn't just the court's corruption – it's how powerful the court is. Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution permits Congress to "jurisdiction strip" the Supremes: Congress can pass a law taking voting rights and racial discrimination away from the Supreme Court's jurisdiction. Congress can impose ethics reforms on the court, banning justices from taking bribes (I can't believe I have to type these words).
Congress can turn the Supreme Court's current building into a museum and move the Supreme Court back into its original home in Congress's basement. Congress can take away the Supremes' ability to select their clerks or which cases they hear. All the Constitution says is that there must be a Supreme Court, and it must adjudicate "disputes between states, disputes involving ambassadors, impeachments, that kind of thing." Everything else is up to Congress to grant or withhold from SCOTUS.
This is very good Nuremberg Caucus stuff. It would be an amazing campaign promise for anyone primarying a shitty normie Dem in the midterms: "Vote for me, and I will be part of the legislative movement to make the Supreme Court weaker and thus more accountable."
Now, as much as I like this, I'm really holding out for a Dem to go with my big ICE-melting idea: promising million-dollar bounties for ICE officers who rat out their buddies for violating the law:
ICE agents are signing up with the promise of $50k hiring bonuses and $60k in student debt cancellation. That's peanuts. The Nuremberg Caucus could announce a Crimestoppers-style program with $1m bounties for any ICE officer who a) is themselves innocent of any human rights violations, and; b) provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. That would certainly improve morale for (some) ICE officers.
As I wrote in February:
Critics of this plan will say that this will force Trump officials to try to steal the next election in order to avoid consequences for their actions. This is certainly true: confidence in a "peaceful transfer of power" is the bedrock of any kind of fair election.
But this bunch have already repeatedly signaled that they intend to steal the midterms and the next general election:
ICE agents are straight up telling people that ICE is on the streets to arrest people in Democratic-leaning states ("The more people that you lose in Minnesota, you then lose a voting right to stay blue"):
The only path to fair elections – and saving America – lies through mobilizing and energizing hundreds of millions of Americans. They are ready. They are begging for leadership. They want an electoral choice, something better than a return to the pre-Trump status quo. If you want giant crowds at every polling place, rising up against ICE and DHS voter-suppression, then you have to promise people that their vote will mean something.
The Epstein files are not just about pedophilia. Trafficking children for sexual abuse is deeply heinous, so it makes sense that it's captured our attention. But pedophilia is not the point.
The point is that we live with a global network of elites who have enough power to treat politics, laws, public opinion, international treaties, and all other people as personal assets.
The point is that nobody is truly safe or sovereign when a handful of rich assholes have access to this kind of power.
The point is that Epstein being dead and Maxwell being in jail does nothing at all to alter the power structure.
germansingergirl
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
dededos
areudirty
vaporwave
