I apologize for not blogging that often this month, I will attempt to get back up to speed, but in the meantime this kid (oh GOD I'm old) Josh Johnson is blowing up YouTube with clips of his stand-up routines skewering the billionaire techbro bastards currently tearing down every aspect of human civilization.
And these illiterate elites are trying to shove their artificial intelligence as though that fakery can compensate for their stupidity. Argh.
I'll check back in soon.
So today there was an organized national protest opposing trump/Musk's attacks on our federal infrastructure and our legal migrants called Hands Off, and a local event in nearby Lakeland FL was on the calendar for 1:00 PM so I decided to contribute with my presence for an hour.
Parking downtown was intriguingly tight today, so by that metric turnout seemed pretty good. I've seen the videoclips of the marches in the major cities like New York City, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, and... is that Salt Lake City? Did someone get video from Anchorage by any chance?
It's nice to witness that there's still more Americans siding with you against the corruption and stupidity of the trump regime. It'd just be nicer if the f-cking mainstream media will recognize that these anti-trump protests are bigger and better organized than those staged tea party ragefests the billionaires set up during Obama's tenure. /sigh
Anywho, here's a few photos and videos I took at the Lakeland rally.
I should have made a sign that noted NO ONE VOTED 4 ELON but I didn't think to do so, alas.
I hope your protests went well today.
Keep fighting.
Update: Thanks as always to Batocchio for including my blog at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Remember to think positive, call your lawyers to sue Musk for stealing our personal data, and ignore any emails telling you there's a "fork in the road."
It's gotten ugly during the first two weeks of President trump Musk raiding and hijacking federal agencies (via David Ingram at NBC News):
The billionaire tech magnate has never been elected to office or been confirmed by the Senate for a high-level government job, but in the span of a few days, Musk has still gained access to sensitive federal data through his position as head of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency project, or DOGE, to push a far-reaching agenda and potentially spark a constitutional crisis.
Musk has embraced Silicon Valley’s most notorious instincts to “move fast and break things” in a lightning battle to muscle into the computer systems and power structures of federal agencies. As he did with his corporate takeover of Twitter in 2022, he has brought in a team to assess details such as office building leases, budget line items, vendor contracts and the performance of individual employees — with the stated intention of radically downsizing the organization...
There are deep concerns among many Democrats and some Republicans that Musk — and his staff members who are not government workers and are not bound by the same ethics and rules that apply to federal workers — are acting in secret, without accountability and potentially against the law in the Trump administration’s effort to shrink the federal government...
DOGE’s targets include the U.S. Agency for International Development, which closed its headquarters Monday in anticipation of shutting down entirely. Musk’s DOGE has staff members working at the Treasury Department, which pays the government’s bills, and he has said on X that he wants to slash or overhaul several other agencies, including the General Services Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Education Department...
Inside the offices of USAID, more than 1,000 staff members and contractors have been fired or furloughed because of a near-total freeze on foreign assistance, and the agency’s security leaders were put on administrative leave Saturday after they tried to prevent DOGE employees from accessing secure systems, NBC News has reported. At least some of the DOGE employees had insufficient security clearances, sources have said.
None of this is legal. Musk is operating at a level in trump's administration that deserved a vote of approval from the Senate, operating without any level of accountability, and operating against a slew of laws and constitutional authority.
As Ingram noted, Musk is bulldozing through our federal agencies on a mission to downsize our government like he took over Twitter... which he turned into a disaster through mass firings, questionable policy changes, and a willingness to let the worst of the worst take control under his guidance. Musk - like many other CEO oligarchs and high-income pundits - is obsessed with the idea that "government should be run like a business".
There are two problems with that mindset. First, a government is not focused on generating profits - which businesses do, and for the most part that's how capitalism works - government is focused on performing public service (as Grover Cleveland noted: "Public office is a public trust.") so it's not about saving money as it is about effective customer service to the millions of Americans. Second, Musk - and that epic business failure donald trump - are not the best people to fucking run government.
It's being documented - even as Musk and his techbro interns (gods, one of them barely graduated high school) try to hide from public scrutiny - how sloppy these office raids are being conducted in terms of cybersecurity. There's evidence Musk's teams are inserting bad code into existing networks that will make them more vulnerable to future attacks. They're violating every privacy requirement in the CFR and US Code books. Musk is literally mismanaging our nation's major institutions, and no one fucking voted for him to do that.
In the process, Musk is fulfilling the fantasy of every Far Right wingnut out there - from Grover Norquist on down - who dreamed of shrinking government small enough to drown in Grover's - and now Elon's - bathtub. They're convinced that there's too much waste in the federal system, and they believe it's all tied into to oversized staffing and bloated personnel budgets. This is why trump ordered a freeze for new hires and why Musk is pushing workers to retire early on questionable "deferred resignation" offers. They don't notice or care that a lot of agencies are understaffed - that's not where the bloat is, the wasteful spending is from corrupt vendor contracts - and by gutting many of these agencies of trained, qualified employees is going to make public service that much worse.
Treating the federal government like it's a new acquisition for a venture capital vulture capitalism firm is a bad idea. Mass firings - which you can see Musk is heading, because he's done it before - do not lead to improved services, only to overwhelmed staff that remained which now have to juggle more duties, and which worsens performance. Any attempt to refill those agencies will suffer from trump's need to staff people who are loyal to him, getting people not qualified for those duties.
The loss of jobs cascades across the employment spectrum: places that relied on a major employer - like a regional federal agency that staffed 200-500 people - will see less income coming in, gutting local businesses that will have to fire their own employees, which adds to the downward spiral. All of that job growth that happened under Biden is going to stop, unemployment is going to go up, and without any genuine investment from public spending - as Musk grabs every penny from a hijacked Treasury - our economy is going to tank.
All of this is happening because a Republican-controlled Congress refuses to fight trump - or Musk - on this issue, relinquishing any authority they have with "the power of the purse" to enforce the spending and staffing they already voted for. It's been up to the agencies' unions or outside advocacy groups filing lawsuits to try and stop Musk's rampage. And even that might not work as these lawsuits will end up before a conservative - and trump-friendly - Supreme Court that may well expand their definition of presidential powers to eliminate any checks or balances the Constitution demands.
This is going to get ugly, as fast as Musk can break everything.
Gods help us.
This is how chaotic things are going with President trump Elon Musk taking a sledgehammer to the federal government (via Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany at the Washington Post, so it may be paywalled):
The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department left the agency after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
David A. Lebryk, who served in nonpolitical roles at Treasury for several decades, announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post. President Donald Trump named Lebryk as acting secretary upon taking office last week. Lebryk had a dispute with Musk’s surrogates over access to the payment system the U.S. government uses to disburse trillions of dollars every year, the people said. The exact nature of the disagreement was not immediately clear, they said.
Officials affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been asking since after the election for access to the system, the people said — requests that were reiterated more recently, including after Trump’s inauguration...
Typically only a small number of career officials control Treasury’s payment systems. Run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the sensitive systems control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually to households, businesses and more nationwide. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people across the country rely on the systems, which are responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy as the Trump administration nears the conclusion of its second week. Musk has sought to exert sweeping control over the inner workings of the U.S. government, installing longtime surrogates at several agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management, which essentially handles federal human resources, and the General Services Administration, which manages real estate...
With the kind of control Musk is seeking, you have to question by what authority Musk can do any of this. He's not a Secretary of the Cabinet, he's the head of a non-approved advisory committee that Congress never budgeted or signed off on. Yet he's out here doing the things a Cabinet member would be doing, and without any accountability to anyone except trump. And even trump might not be in control of this train wreck.
This is what's scaring the experts and people in the know:
The executive order Trump signed creating DOGE also instructed all agencies to ensure it has “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems,” which would appear to include the Treasury payment systems.
It is unclear precisely why Musk’s team sought access to those systems. But both Musk and the Trump administration more broadly have sought to control spending in ways that far exceed efforts by their predecessors and have alarmed legal experts.
Musk is going after the money: Either to shut down spending in part or in whole - which is unconstitutional and would crash the economy - or to funnel moneys into his and others pockets - which would be the largest bank heist in history and also crash the economy.
All of this is happening on the whims of a person whom NO ONE ELECTED to any office. Musk does not have the approval of the voters, he does not have confirmation from the Senate, he does not have any established legal authority outside of trump's executive orders. What he's doing ought to be illegal as hell.
And yet, thanks to the President First Felon in the White House, all of the checks and balances from the legislature or the judiciary might not be able to hold Musk - or trump - to account here.
If any advocacy groups outside of the federal government have the power to fight these corrupt acts, for the love of GOD do so, please and thank you.
Otherwise, the nation drowns in Grover's Elon's bathtub.
If there's any positives in the wake of the disastrous 2024 election results, it's that a lot of people on social media are voting with their feet and fleeing Elon Musk's Twitter (stop calling everything X, you moron) in droves (via Luca Ittimani at the Guardian US):
Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 1 million new users since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.
The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach nearly 15 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.
Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offered an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and policing harmful behaviour.
“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.
What had happened since Musk's hostile buyout of Twitter is that Musk brought back a lot of the Far Right - even Nazi-fueled - vitriol under the excuse of "free speech". Not only did Musk gut the staffing needed to manage the social media environs, he also gutted many of the protections that the app had put in place to protect users from harassment and direct attacks. Indeed, one of the truly last straws that drove people away from Twitter is a rule change Musk enforced on blocking that effectively made the tool useless.
When Musk bought Twitter back in 2022, I questioned - and found my own answer - why a billionaire was so desperate to waste $44 billion like that:
Forget the line he's trying to sell to the public about his interest in Twitter. This is not about encouraging free speech, or bringing his "brand" of innovation to improve security or service to a cornerstone of global social media. No, what Elon Musk is doing is Buying speech, there is nothing FREE about what he's doing. From here it's looking like Musk wants control over one of the many social networks that have openly derided his - and other billionaires' - obsessions with space travel, his self-marketing overkill, his lack of genuine philanthropy, his business model of racism in his workplaces, and more.
Musk's call for a more open Twitter runs the serious risk of creating an environment of lax rules governing online behavior. Twitter already has problems with online harassers, raging haters, and sociopathic doxxers looking to bully and threaten people because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and/or political beliefs. Musk is poised to make things worse...
Well, now it's post-election 2024 and we have a clear answer: Musk spent all that money so he could campaign for donald trump, pushing lie after lie on his own account(s) to prop up trump's chances, and gaslighting a low-information electorate into voting for the goddamned rapist/felon. Musk alone didn't win the election for trump, but he clearly assisted in the damage done.
And so with that, whatever counts as a liberal/progressive audience within Twitter is bolting for the lifeboats to head over to Bluesky.
There are other social media apps similar to Twitter that people already set up accounts; such as Facebook Threads, Counter Social, and Spoutible. Bluesky quickly became the destination of choice because they set up an effective blocking system that can prevent the more hostile and deceptive Far Right trolls from gaining any audience there.
The Far Right "Free Speechers" are already complaining about the blocks - "Waah, you're denying me my right to be heard" - but for all that the First Amendment represents there should be an individual's right to NOT LISTEN TO YOUR BULLSHIT. We have the freedom to peaceably assemble with like-minded persons, and the haters do not have a right to bulldoze their way in and shout at everybody until we surrender to their hate.
We don't want to listen to your gaslighting fearmongering, Nazis, and you can't make us.
As for myself, I kept saying I was leaving Twitter after Musk bought it out, but I kept getting dragged back in because like a fool I wanted to stick around and document the atrocities. Well, no longer. I don't owe Musk or any of the haters that took over Twitter another second of my time. So I downloaded an archive for the last time, waiting until I got the ZIP file, and then parted ways with Twitter with a final salute to the goddamn billionaire who ruined it all:
 |
| Both barrels, motherfucker |
No regrets, America.
See you on Bluesky at @paulwartenberg.bsky.social
Well, after six months of insane mismanagement by Elon Musk, this past weekend of enforcing data limits on viewing is pretty much the death knell of Twitter. It's now a question how quickly this ship will sink into the Atlantic. Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice has a number of details - especially how Musk is failing to pay his bills - which would be better to read at her article before returning back here, please and thanks. Here's a GIF of Titanic failure to pass the time until you return.
Ever since Musk overpaid for Twitter - seriously, 44 BILLION?! - he has fired most of his workforce, tried to cheat employment safety guidelines, sought to make Twitter users PAY for something that had been free for them for more than a decade, allowed haters and racists back in order to spike reader interest, and eventually committed to this act of self-immolation as if to drive even addicted Tweeters - sighs and points to mirror - to flee for their lives.
I mean, I know I promised to walk away from Twitter, and I tried... for about a week, before I got pulled back by the fact most people I know were still using it, and because it was still a quick and powerful way to gain near-instant news. A lot of people pledged to get off the ship back then, and yet... We were too used (too addicted) to the app.
But we're looking at the likely abandonment of Twitter within this month as more people get frustrated with Musk's growing incompetence at managing things. It does not help Musk that more alternatives to his app are cropping up.
I had for example jumped onto CounterSocial last November. Only because a favorite for everyone else - Mastadon - was too frustrating for me to install and set up. It wasn't intuitive or helpful. Sadly not a lot of people I knew crossed onto CS, there was no audience to share, so I hadn't kept up with it.
Soon after, an alternative called Spoutible showed up, and I was able to register onto that relatively easy. It mimics a lot of features on Twitter and it should be the easiest app to shift to, except not everybody has, partly because of early controversy with Spoutible's owner being a jerk and mostly because (see below)...
Another app called BlueSky showed up a couple months ago, promising to be the best possible replacement, and it's using the Beta testing process to encourage users to invite their friends in order to make BlueSky more desirable (for those of us who never sat at the cool kids' table, this is high school all over again sigh) to join. As Twitter collapsed this weekend, BlueSky invites skyrocketed (pun intended).
And just this Monday, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I mean Meta announced the speedup of a new app tied into the Facebook/Instagram services called Threads, which dropped this morning late Wednesday night and already got 30 million users to where Musk is threatening to sue Zuck out of spite. While shifting over to an app most people already have - Facebook has 2.99 billion users globally and Instagram which ties into Threads has 2.35 billion - would be a no-brainer, there are security and privacy concerns about the transition that makes me wary.
As you see, while Twitter is sinking, we humans are overwhelmed with choices we didn't have when Twitter started back in 2006. The instant sharing of tweets - faster than newswires and RSS feeds, easier to send to millions of readers than emails or texts - was a novel and unique software app for its day. But now that Musk is punching holes into his own luxury liner to make it sink faster, the survivors queuing for the lifeboats can't make a clean decision on which arriving cruise ship to join.
I mean, we could even go join up on Discord and tie-in to our multiplayer gaming habits, but that just breaks down to such specific cliques that general sharing could never be a reality. And hell, I am digressing here.
So, if you're keeping up at home:
Twitter: still there at https://twitter.com/PaulWartenberg playing the trumpet with the band until the ship sinks for good.
CounterSocial: Can be found at https://counter.social/@pwartenberg but I'm not sure how often I will show up, but send me a tell when you get there.
Spoutible: I'm at https://spoutible.com/PaulWartenberg and I am trying to make it a habit of cross-posting my blog flogs to increase traffic from there.
BlueSky: (I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not... /cries)
Threads: Nope, not unless they PAY me to do it.
And I'm curious, are there OTHER social apps out there playing for Twitter's market share...?
(Keeps playing Herb Alpert's "Rise" until the waters reach the deck)
"Gentlemen, it has been a priv---" (suddenly gets invite to BlueSky) "Every sucker for himself! I'm out of here!" (flees)
Update 7/21/23: Holy sh-t I DID get an invite to BlueSky. You can find me there as @paulwartenberg.bsky.social
With all the talk the last two weeks of Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter as a corporate entity - his mass firings, driving the employees to flee under demands of "hardcore" doubling down on work, pushing for fee-based services that would drive users away, and allowing for extremist BS to spread that would drive advertisers away - most everybody hadn't actually quit Twitter because we were enjoying the drama too much, and some of us were masochistic enough to stay to watch the pending technological collapse of the media app in real-time.
It would have to take an act of sadism and cluelessness for Musk to drive people away from Twitter even as he was driving the app over the cliffs, and Musk reached that today with the announcement that he's letting donald trump - who lied, bullied, lied more, mocked people, lied a lot more, and made outrageous demands through his Twitter feed on an hourly basis until he crossed too many lines and got banned - back on twitter without restraint.
With that, I made my announcement and made my peace. Goodbye, Twitter.
I will not support a Twitter where Elon Musk brings back a lying, racist monster like trump without consequences to let him poison this forum any further. I am gone. Goodbye Twitter, and good luck. look for me on @pwartenberg@counter.social#RIPTwitter #ElonMuskIsATroll
— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) November 20, 2022
I am done with Twitter now, and if it falls apart under the strain of too few workers keeping it together with duct tape and spit, then I will just have to read about it on NPR's website when it happens.
I will miss you all. Except for the ones I know on Discord and Facebook, mostly the Lost Golden Horde Battalion of the TNC.
You can find me now on the alternative social media app Counter.Social under @pwartenberg and I wish you good luck in your journeys ahead.
More to say about this hectic month later. A little too busy with NaNo and with working a vendor table at Lake County Comic Con this Sunday.
I will part with this, my most famous tweet of all time:
that's how it starts, with the oohing and the ahhing. then comes the screaming and the running... pic.twitter.com/iZDXx7T4EQ
— Witty Librarian For Ukraine (@PaulWartenberg) April 9, 2017
Update: I'm also looking into this HIVE app, but it's mobile-only.
Even Further Update (12/5/22): Well, damn. HIVE turned out to be a bit unhelpful. Counter Social works okay but I'm having a hard time finding people and following them. In the meanwhile, Musk may have invited trump to rejoin Twitter but it turns out trump signed an exclusive rights deal with his own (failing) social media app, meaning trump legally can't get on Twitter even if he wanted to. It all turned into Much Ado About Nothing, I suppose. Anyway, Musk is turning out to be a real idiot running the company into the ground, and violating a ton of international labor laws in the process. I will see you back on the Titanic on the Twitter feed, peeps.
Even Further Revision to the Update (12/11/22): Going back to Twitter is not a good idea. Elon Musk is intentionally promoting every bad-faith right-wing meme on the site, in the process of defaming former Twitter officials in order to justify letting extremists promoting violence and misinformation to return to the site. Other people I know are going back to quitting the site, refusing to let their traffic contribute to Musk's stat numbers. Musk is intentionally starting fights to get views. It's disgusting.
