“But I don’t know. I can make all kinds of horrible theories up in my head, conspiracy theories and everything else, but it just seemed a little convenient that there was no water and that the wind conditions were right and that there are people ready and willing and able to start fires.
“And are they commissioned to do so or just acting on their own volition?” – Mel “Horse Paste Cures Cancer” Gibson, last night on Laura Ingraham’s show.
Lucky the above guy who destroyed expensive public property did not get caught buying weed or being a doctor saving a woman’s life by giving them a needed abortion. Hugs
New: Meta has deleted trans and nonbinary Messenger themes, as well as the blog posts announcing them. Happens the same week that it has changed its rules to allow users to say LGBTQ+ people are "mentally ill"www.404media.co/meta-deletes…
Another large company has fallen to right wing pressure and the fear of being on tRump’s bad side. This right wing media pressure campaign we had better find a way to stop and combat. Hugs.
A commitment to helping Black people live “free from fear,” and all occurrences of the term “transgender” disappeared from a page listing the online retailer’s policies late last month.
An Amazon logo hangs on a wall at Amazon’s HQ2 in Crystal City, Virginia in 2023. (Eric Lee for the Washington Post)
As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House, Amazon has cut commitments to protecting the rights of Black and LGBTQ+ people from a public listing of its corporate policies.
Statements that said Amazonsupported the rights of transgender people and would protect the safety of Black employees and customers disappeared from a webpage stating the company’s positions late in December, archived versions show.
Sections titled “Equity for Black people” and “LGBTQ+ rights” were removed from the page, along with all mentions of the term transgender.The “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” section wasupdated to say that “inequitable treatment of anyone — including Black people, LGBTQ+ people, Asians, women, and others — is unacceptable.”
The changes come as other corporations have also adjusted their policies in ways apparently calculated to fit the change of political weather in Washington.
McDonald’s this month scaled back its diversity goals and Meta confirmed Friday that it would dismantle its employee diversity and equity, or DEI, programs. A growing number of Fortune 500 companies have abandoned or reduced DEI initiatives in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn affirmative action in college admissions in 2023.
Some Amazonemployees who noticed the changes to its policy page this weekwere dismayedby the apparent changes in the company’s positions, screenshots of internalconversations seen by The Washington Post showed. The Information earlier reported the changes.
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in an email statement, “We update this page from time to time to ensure that it reflects updates we’ve made to various programs and positions.” The company also pointed toan internal memo from December in which vice president Candi Castleberry said it was rolling back some DEI initiatives. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
Before late December, Amazon’s webpage listing its policy positions said the company stood “in solidarity” with Black employees and customers, and supported “legislation to combat misconduct and racial bias in policing, efforts to protect and expand voting rights, and initiatives that provide better health and educational outcomes for Black people.”
Amazon also previously saidon that page it was “working at the U.S. federal and state level on legislation” on protections for transgender people. It saidthat the company provided “gender transition benefits based on the Standards of Care published by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).” The section with those claimshas also been deleted.
Well well well. Now that he got his party / his guy elected, he admits it was all just a game that was not possible. He is trying to shove some of the years of slime off himself and crawl to the side of good. Too late Newt. You choose your path, stay in your pen or your own fellows will turn on you and destroy you themselves. Hugs
Newt Gingrich during the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 17 July 2024. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
Newt Gingrich, the former US House speaker and presidential hopeful, said a section of his own Republican party was “rabid” over immigration and predicted Donald Trump’s suggestion that he could deport documented people as well as millions of undocumented people will not come to pass.
“I’d be very surprised if you see any significant effort to change the game for people who are here legally,” Gingrich said, weeks before Trump’s return to the White House. “I just think there’s a very small faction of the party that’s rabid about this.”
He also warned that public support for mass deportations would “collapse” if stories began to come out “about mothers or babies or children being deported”.
The president-elect may not welcome Gingrich’s intervention. After all, Trump won last year’s election promising mass deportations involving the armed forces and detention camps. He has chosen ultra-hardliners including Tom Homan and Stephen Miller and has suggested his administration will attempt to remove children and documented people, telling NBC: “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.”
Also at issue is the fate of millions of so-called Dreamers, undocumented people who were children when they were brought to the US, and Trump’s vow to remove birthright citizenship, a right protected by the 14th amendment but which Trump says he will strike down by executive order.
Amid widespread predictions of chaos and protest, Gingrich said he was “passionately in favor of trying to help find a path to create legality for the Dreamers”, a position that may put him less at odds with Trump, given Trump’s suggestion he might accept a deal on the matter.
Gingrich continued: “It’s nonsense to say somebody who came here when they were two, only speaks English, graduated as a high school valedictorian and is currently a nurse or a doctor should be deported. We’re going to deport them and they don’t speak the language of whatever country their parents came from, and they’ve earned the right to be Americans?
“ … I think [the Trump administration has to] to realize that there are gradations here that we’re dealing with, and try to think through, how do you both meet the long-term identity and national security interests of the country and meet the human concerns. And I think it’s a real challenge.”
Now 81, Gingrich was a Georgia representative from 1979 to 1999, the last four years as House speaker. In 2012, he ran for the Republican presidential nomination. A prolific author, he remains close to Trump, to whom he offered advice during the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Gingrich spoke to the Guardian to mark the release of Journey to America with Newt and Callista Gingrich, a PBS documentary made with his wife about immigrants who have made major contributions to US public life.
“We are a nation of law despite some of the things that have been said [by Trump and his allies],” he said. “And I think that if you have legal standing in the American system, it’s very difficult to deport you. On the other hand, if you have no legal standing, it’s pretty easy to deport you, right? And I’m for doing the easy first. That’s why we should give [Dreamers] legal status, as a practical matter.”
Along those lines, Gingrich has put out a seven-step immigration plan, perhaps for Trump to consider.
Gingrich offered another warning: “Lincoln once said that with popular sentiment, anything is possible; without popular sentiment, nothing is possible. Well, you get very many human stories about mothers or babies or children being deported, then support for the deportation program will collapse.”
January 13, 1874 The depression of 1873-1877 left 3 million people unemployed. The depression began when railroad owner Jay Cooke was found to have issued millions of dollars of worthless stock. Investors panicked and banks closed. The unbalanced, overextended new economy collapsed. In the winter of 1873, 900 people starved to death, and 3,000 deserted their infants on doorsteps. A public meeting was called in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park to lobby for public works projects to provide jobs; the city’s unemployment rate was approaching 25% at the time. The Tompkins Park Massacre The night before, the City secretly voided the permit for the gathering. The next morning, mounted police charged into the crowd of 10,000, indiscriminately clubbing adults and children, leaving hundreds of casualties. Police commissioner Abram Duryee commented, “It was the most glorious sight I have ever seen . . . .” The Tompkins Square event was part of a wave of parades of the unemployed and bread riots across the nation. In Chicago, 20,000 people marched. Even under police attack, workers in New York, Omaha, and Cincinnati refused to disperse.
January 13, 1958 Linus Pauling presented the “Scientists’s Test Ban Petition” to the United Nations, signed by over 11,000 scientists (including 36 Nobel laureates) from 49 countries. It called for an end to nuclear weapons testing for its detrimental health, especially genetic, and ecological effects, among other reasons. In reaction to his efforts, Pauling was forced to resign as Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) after having served in that role for 22 years. The petition Background – Linus Pauling & The Bomb
January 13, 1962 One hundred fifty members of the Scottish Committee of 100 (an anti-nuclear group) began a sit-down protest at the U.S. consulate in Glasgow, Scotland.
January 13, 1993 A vigil was held opposing the arrival of a ship bringing nearly two metric tons of plutonium for a pilot fuel reprocessing plant in Tokai, Japan. The specially constructed ship, the Akatsuki Maru, had carried it 25,000 km (15,500 miles) from Cherbourg, France. Akatsuki Maru The Voyage Of The Akatsuki Maru by Mario Uribe Many objected to the maritime transport of the highly radioactive material due to the risk of sinking, hijacking and the resultant risk of further nuclear proliferation. The original plan called for air transport over the United States. The Hottest Import To Hit Japan
This is more than the general republican wish to hurt poor people to help the wealthy. This is about the tRump tax cut give aways to the very wealthy in the US costing the add of 8 trillion to the national debt. The republicans wrote the bill so the minor cuts to the lower income’s taxes sunset with in a couple years, but the wealthy people got to keep theirs for ten years. Now they are due to sunset and the government will receive a huge influx of revenue again to pay the bills of running a country, paying for the world’s largest bloated military, and to help the poorest people in the country survive with some dignity. But tRump and the republicans are determined to make those cuts permanent and never ending while constantly pushing for more cuts to their taxes. Their goal is to push the entire cost of running the government on to those least able to pay for it, the lower incomes while the upper incomes pay little to nothing. Then using the complaints of the people that their taxes are too high they will cut social services and the social safety nets for the poorest among us including the elderly and disabled. Plus they will stop funding road repairs and other infrastructure projects and when people complain will privatize the roads, selling sections to companies who will be able to charge tolls of any amount they wish to make profit off the public needing to get somewhere. How we stop them I don’t know. Idiots worried about the price of eggs bought every lie tRump made about how he was going to magically bring all the prices down to 2020 levels … when the stores were empty and we had no toilet paper. Now he admits that he can not and will not be lowering prices, and the cult is not getting upset about being lied to by the leader of their cult. Hugs
lawmakers estimating Trump’s domestic policy agenda — including tax cuts and border security proposals — costing as much as $10 trillion over the coming decade.
House Republicans are passing around a “menu” of more than $5 trillion in cuts they could use to bankroll President-elect Donald Trump’s top priorities this year, including tax cuts and border security.
The early list of potential spending offsets obtained by POLITICO includes changes to Medicare and ending Biden administration climate programs, along with slashing welfare and “reimagining” the Affordable Care Act.
Five people familiar with the document said those provisions are options to finance Republicans’ massive party-line reconciliation bill or other spending reform efforts, including those being spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The people, granted anonymity to discuss closed-door negotiations, said that the list originated from the House Budget Committee, chaired by Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas). Republicans involved in the reconciliation plans have been generally targeting the listed programs for several months, but internal GOP fights over trillions of dollars in potential cuts are just beginning.
The overall savings add up to as much as $5.7 trillion over 10 years, though the list is highly ambitious and unlikely to all become law given narrow margins for Republicans in the House and Senate.
Cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act and the country’s largest anti-hunger program would spark massive opposition from Democrats and would also face some GOP resistance. House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t afford any Republican defections if he wants to pass a package on party lines.
Even proposed cuts to green energy tax credits, worth as much as $500 billion, could be tricky — as the document notes, they depend “on political viability.” Already 18 House Republicans — 14 of whom won reelection in November — warned Johnson against prematurely repealing some of the IRA’s energy tax credits, which are funding multiple manufacturing projects in GOP districts.
A House GOP source said that the “document is not intended to serve as a proposal, but instead as a menu of potential spending reductions for members to consider.”
Johnson and GOP leaders are hunting for trillions of dollars in cuts, with lawmakers estimating Trump’s domestic policy agenda — including tax cuts and border security proposals — costing as much as $10 trillion over the coming decade.
Johnson, with scores of House Republicans this week to chart the way forward, and groups of GOP members are set to meet with Trump in Florida this weekend.
In addition to Medicaid and ACA cuts, the document floats clawing back bipartisan infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Act funding.
One senior GOP lawmaker, asked if there were any particularly controversial spending offsets dividing Republicans, replied: “They all feel pretty controversial.”
Johnson agreed to make $2.5 trillion in spending cuts through the budget reconciliation process as part of last year’s government funding negotiations. Asked in a brief interview Wednesday evening if he was targeting $5 trillion in spending offsets, he replied, “Not sure yet.”
The policy menu suggests Republicans could capture major savings from Medicaid — up to an estimated $2.3 trillion. The list includes so-called per-capita caps on Medicaid for states, meaning the program would be paid for based on population instead of being an open-ended entitlement, and would institute work requirements in the program.
The list also includes a policy to equalize payments in Medicaid for able-bodied adults with those of traditional Medicaid enrollment — those with disabilities or low-income children, which would save up to $690 billion.
It would “recapture” $46 billion in savings from Affordable Care Act health insurance plan subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year, setting up a major policy battle. It would also limit eligibility for plans based on citizenship status.
Also on the chopping block are President Joe Biden’s climate policies, which are estimated to yield as much as $468 billion. That includes Trump’s repeated promise to repeal Biden’s “EV mandate,” as well as discontinuing “Green New Deal” provisions from the bipartisan infrastructure law and green energy grants from the IRA.
The green energy cuts could be particularly tricky from a political perspective. GOP lawmakers have long backed some technologies supported under the climate law, including supporting hydrogen, biofuels and carbon capture.
‘Concerns About A Stronger-Than-Expected Economy’ Is A Real CNN Thing We Just Read by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Oh no everybody’s got jobs. This is terrible news for stonks! Read on Substack
Now that Yr Wonkette is doing thinky pieces instead of trying to keep up with every last bit of news, we won’t feel obligated to bring you every monthly jobs report, but golly, this story from CNN sure is a ride. Looka this headline: “Stocks tumble following blowout jobs report.”
Hey, Bobby.
We are informed that US stocks “plunged” Friday in response to a much better-than-expected jobs report for December, showing that the economy added 256,000 jobs, way more than the 153,000 jobs that Wall Street economists predicted. Investors were reportedly worried that meant that the Federal Reserve will be too nervous about possible inflation to make more interest rate cuts anytime soon:
The Dow dropped by 697 points, closing at 41,938, while the S&P 500 fell by 1.5% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq index was lower by 1.6%.
The three indices all finished the week in the red as Friday’s selloff erased the week’s previous gains.
That’s one way to report the strong job growth, which was accompanied by a drop in the unemployment rate to 4.1 percent.
Or the numbers could also be reported with headlines like these, from ABC News and NBC News, respectively:
You know, just in case you needed a reminder that the stock market is not the economy, the stock market is not the economy, and did we also mention that the stock market is not the economy?
Traders now expect just a 2.7% chance the Fed will cut rates at its policy meeting later this month, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.
The Russell 2000 index, which tracks smaller companies, fell 2.2%, highlighting concerns about the impact of “higher for longer” interest rates.
And yes, it’s quite true that higher interest rates can be a drag on the economy, which is how the Fed deploys them, sometimes too aggressively, to keep inflation in check.
The story also noted that returns on 10-year Treasury notes,
spiked to 4.76% and the yield on the 30-year US treasury rose to 4.95%.
Rising yields signal concern about a stronger-than-expected economy, resurgent inflation and potentially fewer rate cuts in 2025 than anticipated.
Let’s just repeat that: “concern about a stronger-than-expected economy.” In other words, the strong economy that Joe Biden is handing off to Donald Trump as he leaves office is primarily a concern for big investors, not necessarily the rest of us proles out there.
The contrast in perceptions was evident even in the video attached to the CNN stocks story, which focuses more on the jobs numbers than on stocks. Reporter Matt Eagan was almost giddy, saying, “This is really good news for Main Street, right? It shows that workers are still very much in demand.” Eventually he did get to the response on Wall Street, but before that, Egan pointed out that yet again, workers’ buying power increased because wage growth outpaced inflation, yay.
Unemployment rate at 4.1%, widely considered to be “full employment.” Wages have risen 3.9% over the past 12 months, outpacing the inflation rate 2.8% during this period.
Rosenberg also helpfully reminds us that net job creation under Biden — 16.6 million jobs — is far greater than under the last three Republican presidents (Trump and both Bushes) combined, a piddling 1.9 million. Yes, yes, that includes the pandemic shock for Trump and the recovery of those jobs under both Trump and Biden — some nine million of ‘em lost and regained all told; roughly half of the bounceback occurred under Trump in the second half of 2020. But the pandemic job losses were all restored by June 2022, far earlier than most economists predicted, meaning that Biden’s economy has added around 6.8 million jobs since regaining the pandemic losses.
On the whole, the economy in 2024 added 2.2 million jobs, returning to something like the pre-pandemic job growth rate, and — we’re gonna say it again — reaching a “soft landing” from the high inflation that hit every industrialized country in the world following the pandemic and its disruption of supply chains. Joe Biden also pulled off something rarely seen in US history: Job gains in every single month of his presidency.
So congratulations, Mr. Trump. After cleaning up the mess made by the 2008 economic crash, Barack Obama handed you an economy that kept growing until the pandemic hit. Now Joe Biden, after getting things on track in the wake of the pandemic, will leave behind what just might be the best economy any incoming president has inherited.
We live in a world where right-wing nationalism is on the rise and many governments, including the incoming Trump administration, are promising mass deportations. Trump in particular has discussed building camps as part of mass deportations. This question used to feel more hypothetical than it does today.
Faced with this reality, it’s worth asking: who would stand by you if this kind of authoritarianism took hold in your life?
You can break allyship down into several key areas of life:
Who in your personal life is an ally? (Your friends, acquaintances, and extended family.)
Who in your professional life is an ally? (People you work with, people in partner organizations, and your industry.)
Who in civic life is an ally? (Your representatives, government workers, individual members of law enforcement, healthcare workers, and so on.)
Which service providers are allies? (The people you depend on for goods and services — including stores, delivery services, and internet services.)
And in turn, can be broken down further:
Who will actively help you evade an authoritarian regime?
Who will refuse to collaborate with a regime’s demands?
These two things are different. There’s also a third option — non-collaboration but non-refusal — which I would argue does not constitute allyship at all. This might look like passively complying with authoritarian demands when legally compelled, without taking steps to resist or protect the vulnerable. While this might not seem overtly harmful, it leaves those at risk exposed. As Naomi Shulman points out, the most dangerous complicity often comes from those who quietly comply. Nice people made the best Nazis.
For the remainder of this post, I will focus on the roles of internet service vendors and protocol authors in shaping allyship and resisting authoritarianism.
For these groups, refusing to collaborate means that you’re not capitulating to active demands by an authoritarian regime, but you might not be actively considering how to help people who are vulnerable. The people who are actively helping, on the other hand, are actively considering how to prevent someone from being tracked, identified, and rounded up by a regime, and are putting preventative measures in place. (These might include implementing encryption at rest, minimizing data collection, and ensuring anonymity in user interactions.)
If we consider an employer, refusing to collaborate means that you won’t actively hand over someone’s details on request. Actively helping might mean aiding someone in hiding or escaping to another jurisdiction.
These questions of allyship apply not just to individuals and organizations, but also to the systems we design and the technologies we champion. Those of us who are involved in movements to liberate social software from centralized corporations need to consider our roles. Is decentralization enough? Should we be allies? What kind of allies?
This responsibility extends beyond individual actions to the frameworks we build and the partnerships we form within open ecosystems. While building an open protocol that makes all content public and allows indefinite tracking of user activity without consent may not amount to collusion, it is also far from allyship. Partnering with companies that collaborate with an authoritarian regime, for example by removing support for specific vulnerable communities and enabling the spread of hate speech, may also not constitute allyship. Even if it furthers your immediate stated technical and business goals to have that partner on board, it may undermine your stated social goals. Short-term compromises for technical or business gains may seem pragmatic but risk undermining the ethics that underpin open and decentralized systems.
Obviously, the point of an open protocol is that anyone can use it. But we should avoid enabling entities that collude with authoritarian regimes to become significant contributors to or influencers of open protocols and platforms. While open protocols can be used by anyone, we must distinguish between passive use and active collaboration. Enabling authoritarian-aligned entities to shape the direction or governance of these protocols undermines their potential for liberation.
In light of Mark Zuckerberg’s clear acquiescence to the incoming Trump administration (for example by rolling back DEI, allowing hate speech, and making a series of bizarre statements designed to placate Trump himself), I now believe Threads should not be allowed to be an active collaborator to open protocols unless it can attest that it will not collude, and that it will protect vulnerable groups using its platforms from harm. I also think Bluesky’s AT Protocol decision to make content and user blocks completely open and discoverable should be revisited. I also believe there should be an ethical bill of rights for users on open social media protocols that authors should sign, which includes the right to privacy, freedom from surveillance, safeguards against hate speech, and strong protections for vulnerable communities.
As builders, users, and advocates of open systems, we must demand transparency, accountability, and ethical commitments from all contributors to open protocols. Without these safeguards, we risk creating tools that enable oppression rather than resisting it. Allyship demands more than neutrality — it demands action.
Again Ethel is a woman I have been following since she was a teenager. She has gone through all the stages of transitioning, from doubt, trying to make it something else to finally admitting to herself and the world she is a woman and now living her life as one. The grand thing is she still fights so very hard for trans people despite the costs to her for taking on one of the growing popular atheist anti-trans people and others. She lost 2/3rd her income but never backed down, always telling the truth. She makes every video well researched and documents it, also she provides a transcript for those who would rather read than listen. I admit I admire her and her strength in her life struggles. But if you wish to learn more about those attacking trans stuff or the false idea that trans women are destroying female sports, I would watch her videos. Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 