Notices by John (johnzajac@dice.camp)

Exactly right.

Make Trump march you out.

Fuck fascists.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/29/usda-inspector-general-phyllis-fong

This, like a great deal of material differences between this era and the last time we saw this kind of rise of fascism, is why I don't think we can game out how this is going to go.

You can't *do anything* with a broken search engine that looks for information on an internet that is 90% hallucinated "AI" content. A social media network is nothing if it doesn't have any actual *users* to pay it or attract advertisers.

Everything that big tech does at scale so they can dominate markets can be done in much smaller scales for not that much more money. Look at Mastodon! Each instance is mostly run by normal people who occasionally raise some money for server fees. You don't need Xitter or FB-level infrastructure to have vibrant online communities and social networking.

No matter how you slice it, web tech is not steel or food or clothing or medicine. It's just fucking ad-supported entertainment without overhead

BTW, it actually does make a different to tell the American people that all of these things Trump is trying to do are basically illegal and unconstitutional and don't fall within the powers of the Executive branch.

Trump can't "do away" with agencies that are basically incorporated by Acts of Congress. That's not *a thing*.

And yes, SCOTUS is illegitimate and corrupt so he'll probably be able to get away with it, but *IT MATTERS* that people *KNOW* it's fucking *NUTBALLS* and *CRIMINAL*.

You can't do any of these things he is trying to do without shredding the entire set of laws and the constitution.

That our media is running through the streets breathlessly screaming "the agencies are being shut down!" and not "Trump can't do any of this legally!" shouldn't be surprising, considering they can't look at a sieg heil and see a sieg heil anymore, for some reason.

Oh, and if you still pay any of them any of your money: what in the actual living fuck of God are you doing?

@cwebber

We've been told artists don't matter for 50 years. I remember watching C-SPAN in the early 00s as Congress universally agreed that art adds nothing to the economy, and therefor should be de-emphasized in NCLB. This is after 20 years of underhanded defunding of public school arts education by neoliberals in both parties.

STEM continued the idea that the arts are vestigial and useless to our new super-economy.

And yet, people keep making it. "AI" won't change that, or even dent it.

The wild thing about the tech oligarchs is that if they stopped offering their services tomorrow, most of us would be at a loss for maybe a week, then replace them with the dozens of other, smaller alternatives that they keep beating down below the fold.

They're nothing like the robber barons, who could *materially fuck you up* just by like, losing a shipment on their railroad or forgetting to ship you steel or cutting you off from oil.

These people bottle and sell the air like it's gold.

With the recent frouferaw around CDC changing wastewater measurement metrics to normalize them - which was apparently not as bad as the OP thought - it's important to do two things:

1) remember that verification is important

and

2) that hypervigilance is real and sometimes drives people to make mistakes in favor of protecting themselves from proven bad actors

I do my best to do #1, but #2 does get in the way after being imprisoned in my house for 4 years by Joe Biden and the CDC.

Basically, you could tell me that the CDC was killing kittens and mailing them to DCI people to terrorize them into getting COVID and I'd be like

[chuckle] "No...-but maybe?"

I don't have a way to explain how depraved the CDC and Biden administration have been to people who don't know about it. They murdered a million people in cold blood. They violated every oath and mission they have. They normalized mass death and sickness, and the total isolation and abandonment of the vulnerable.

So...

I *told* you that framing Harris' loss as a reflection of her being a Black woman would just convince Democrats they need to be a far right white man party with less "clown rapist traitor" energy.

The reason Democrats lost is because Harris crawled inside of Liz Cheney's asshole and set it up like a nice little bedroom, and because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris supported a genocide and eugenics and made several *very bad* decisions.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/democratic-national-committee-leadership-election

I don't know how many times Democrats will have to lose badly before they accept that the *right wing has no place in their party*, but I'm here for getting them those losses. I'm done lending my voice to a party whose greatest hits include the Some of the worst policy in US history.

We've learned from this cycle that the only thing Democrats will understand is flexing of power. I knew it for 20 years, but hopefully enough people know it now that we can get started re-educating them.

By the way, for a party and polity seemingly *obsessed* with legislating and policy, they sure do seem convinced that they lose *in spite* of policy rather than *because* of their policies.

Sure, kids. You lose not because of *literally everything you do in office and your attitude*, but because "voters are racist, sexist idiots". That must be it.

(Voters *are* very racist and sexist, but that's NOT why you lost in 2024 against a felon and a traitor and a rapist; you lost because Joe Biden is one of the worst, most immoral Presidents in US history, the gaslighting *didn't work*, and the party decided the way to win against Trump was to fuck over people who wanted them to STOP FUNDING GENOCIDE and instead pick up the votes of all those "normal, non-fascist Republicans" lol lmao)

The media reporting that there's widespread looting while the police report "arresting 20 people"

WHILE A MAJOR CITY BURNS TO THE GROUND

is so "21st century copaganda" that if you can't see it I don't know how to help you.

I am interested in studying any human animal capable of holding so much cynicism in their body that they can turn one of the worst natural disasters in US history into a pro-police crime story without exploding into a thunderstorm of sewage and toxic waste.

You know, if Gavin Newsom really is grateful to the firefighters who are saving Los Angeles, he should commute their sentences.

🧐

I still think it's wild that my brother's entire family had pertussis last Spring despite being up-to-date on their TDAPs, and their doctors were like "seems normal" and "take these antibiotics you'll be fine!"

Has everyone just...stroked out or something? I feel like I'm swimming through madness.

Didn't "your vaccines have stopped working" used to be a red flag for "you're immunocompromised"?

EDIT: this is a post about COVID-caused immune dysfunction, not anti-vax

You know, if you take a second to look past your anger and just sit with how Biden has treated public health during his ill-begotten term of office it's really remarkable.

Remarkable how irresponsible and unserious and cynical it was. Remarkable how absolutely false all of his exhortations about ending the pandemic responsibly were during the 2020 campaign. Remarkable how Democrats could foist such an unqualified narcissist on us at a key moment in history.

May he live in infamy.

And now, his legacy will be defined by Bird flu, this year or the next (it hardly matters).

We should call it the Biden Plague, because much of the dismantling he did to hide his failures on COVID, and his ideological commitments to prioritizing wealth and corporate interests, are what led directly to its progressive mutations.

It's almost like we learned nothing from "living with" SARS2.

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/bidens-usda-never-tried-to-control

What I cannot understand is how politicians think they can just "order" people back to work.

Bro, nobody *has* to go back to work, no matter how stern you act. Sure, you can fire *all of them*, but then you have the same problem you had before: nobody to make you your money for you.

The only response a union should make when "ordered" back to work is "fuck off and die" followed by "make me".

When you create laws based solely on loosely-held "definitions", you invite corruption and abuse, especially by people who control our media, e.g. the ultra-wealthy.

The rush to define anyone who uses "Deny, Defend, Depose" in any way as a "domestic terrorist" is a perfect example of this. If Mangione is a terrorist, it's Gitmo and oblivion for him. But if he's a folk hero? Well, we all know what jury nullification is, and so do our ruling class.