Notices by solarbird (solarbird@solarbird.net)

Before things get a lot worse, which it looks like they’re about to do given Trump’s “full force” order and his “anti-fascism is terrorism” executive memo, I need to reiterate:

It’s lies. This shit about Portland? It’s all lies.

The lies about Seattle were lies too. Particularly reviving the old lie that “they” “took over a significant percentage of the city” back in 2020. Remember when I posted a map showing the three blocks and a park that were the entire protest zone? And how it was 0.0something percent of the city? How it was basically the equivalent of a guy and a yappy dog on the corner of a Walmart parking lot, and how on a full map of the city the red rectangle was literally too small to see?

Remember that?

It’s lies about Portland now. I know people in Portland. I know people who are in Portland RIGHT NOW, for the weekend.

It. Is. All. Lies.

If you don’t believe me, believe Tess Vigeland, a Wall Street Journal senior producer who lives in Portland. The Wall Street Journal is not exactly a “left” publication and doesn’t exactly employ “radical leftists.” I quote her here in entirety:

“He is lying. They are lying. They are literally making this shit up. I live four blocks from the ICE facility they say is a “war zone.” I pass it every single day on my way home. There are, on average, maybe 30 protesters who’ve camped out (they have a small grill) and set up tents. Sometimes more show up on the weekend. They use bullhorns to shout invective at the building and it’s been awful for the residents who live across the street and noise laws should be enforced. But the notion that this city of 600,000 people is a war zone is completely laughable. CNN has a photo from September 1st on its story about this that makes it seem like the city is, indeed, under siege (and that’s part of the problem, images that don’t tell a complete story). But the idea that they needed that kind of show of force is insane. Would I like the protesters to go away? As a neighbor, yup. Do they have the right to set up a tent city outside the facility? Probably — but again, it’s annoying. Does Portland have myriad problems that a maddeningly ineffective local government seems unable to solve no matter how much tax money we throw at it? Yup. But does any of it call for federal troops fanning out across the city? Absolutely not. It’s stupid. This is all for show by an authoritarian administration that knows its base will applaud because oooooh lookie a liberal city getting its due. (I have relatives who will applaud this, by the way.) But they’re lying. They’re all LYING.”

Tess Vigeland, The Wall Street Journal

If you don’t believe her? There are plenty of webcams. Here’s Pioneer Square in downtown Portland as I write this right now:

I won’t even point you to more webcams. Use DuckDuckGo or something. Find them on your own. It’s easy.

Find any cam you want. Look at them for yourself. Tell any Trumpy relatives you have to do the same thing. Look. See.

They. Are. All. Lying.

#cascadia #CasPol #CasPolitics #fascism #oregon #portland #uspol #uspolitics

I hate linking to The Hill, but here we go:

RFK Jr. says agency will reveal causes of autism in September

No, he fucking won’t. He literally shut down actual studies working on such things, because as with all fundamentalist-approach cardboard science, anything he does is driven by producing the answer he wants, not any answer that’s actually real.

So given all that, here’re a few key lies about “causes” I think we can expect:

• “Overvaccination,” which isn’t a thing; it’s just a wedge to start rolling back vaccination in favour of “wellness” horseshit and pseudoscience that doesn’t fucking work;
• High-fructose corn syrup, which in its most common formulation – for those who don’t remember – is chemically identical to honey. There’s literally not a way to tell filtered honey apart from 55/45 HFCS. This is also why filtered honey is fucking awful; once you filter out the water and the pollen remnants you don’t have any flavour other than sweetness.

  (This may be substituted out for artificial colours and/or flavours, he’s got bugaboos about those too.)

  And finally:

• Hormone-based contraception.

Yeah. I think there’s a pretty good chance they’ll go there. I can’t be sure – this is all speculation, I assure you – but it’s been floated around in christofascism on and off for a while. Not as strongly as other lies about “the pill” (christ they’re so old) causing breast cancer (again: a lie), and being an abortifacient (again: a lie). So why not here? Why not go for it?

It has the added bonus of blaming the woman, which is another thing they always want to do.

Maybe I’ll be wrong. Maybe they won’t. But he used one word in particular that makes me think I’m right. That word is “interventions,” as in “interventions” that cause autism. That’s a word I’ve heard plenty of times before when fundamentalists talk about birth control, and also by the new age crowd that merged in with them, calling hormonal birth control an “unnatural intervention.” In other words, both upstream forks of his anti-vax “wellness” following have a history of using that word to describe hormonal birth control.

And here it is again. That word. “Intervention.”

Really could be a coincidence; really, genuinely could. That word is used by a lot of actual medical people for good and real medical treatments; it’s not one of their own made-up words.

But … they really do have a history of using it that way. And the orange fuckfash muttered on about “a drug or something” as the intervention at work, so… yeah.

I’m smelling an attack on birth control.

They’ve really been wanting to go at it, and given the increased… severity in tone… that we’re seeing out of the fascists, it feels like they’re slamming the metaphorical pedal to the metaphorical metal, and they might just go ahead and go for it.

Stock up on your meds, folks. Clock’s ticking.

#fascism #medicine #politics #science #uspol #uspolitics

Okay, so remember when I told everybody to hold April 19th? Here’s where you can search for a 50501 event near you, and there are definitely going to be other events on the same day by other groups.

It will NOT be as big as April 5th. But a good turnout is important – and basically will continue to be important for months and months.

The next really massive turnout day looks like it’s going to be May 1st, though. Reserve the day. Indivisible is cooking something up, 50501 will be in on it, so will a lot of other people, or so I hear. Put it on your calendar now, so you’re ready.

Here are some other April 19 events in the Seattle area, compiled by Indivisible. I’m sure you can find something to do.

See you out there, and as always – good hunting.

#fascism #politics #protest #protests #uspol #uspolitics

Hello and welcome to another Monday planning day. At time of writing, I don’t actually know how this past weekend’s Tesla protests went – I’m writing this well in advance, and scheduling it to go up no matter what happens. But hopefully you were there and hopefully it went well.

This weekend is bigger. It’s called Hands Off! and it’s not specifically Tesla focused, it’s against the entire Musk/Trump administration agenda.

Like with the Tesla protests, there are hundreds scheduled. Like the Tesla protests, not all are at the same time of day – I have two in reasonable range of me that don’t even overlap so I may be able to show up at both.

You have options is what I am saying.

Go find a good one for you, make the time, and get out there.

And good hunting.

#fascism #politics #uspol #uspolitics

One addendum to the last post:

We need to do our own reporting. We need to talk about these protests. To everyone. You need to post about them, at least to say you did them, that you were there.

The media’s not reporting it, so WE HAVE TO REPORT IT INSTEAD.

Which is one reason why I’m writing all this up. WE have to spread the news, because THEY will NOT.

Seriously, the fash podcasting littleman I talked about last post? He was literally the ONLY media to show up. No other media was there.

So once again, we have to be that media. For real.

#politics #uspol #uspolitics #wapol

This Saturday, March 29th, is Tesla Takedown Day, a day of peaceful protest at every US Tesla dealership and as many other dealerships and facilities outside the US as possible.

Here’s a map of planned protests you can join – places, times of day, and so on. They aren’t all at the same time, which might be useful for you. Find one close to you that’s at a time you can make and be there, preferably with a sign. If you don’t want to design your own sign, feel free to print and use one of these, or adapt them to your own ideas. They’re high resolution at 11×17 and plenty good enough at two times that.

Tesla Takedown is also helping people find protests on other days as well. Here’s the home website for the movement, with all the details you need.

Get out there. And good hunting.

#fascism #politics #uspol #uspolitics

Holy shit, team. That thing I told you to do? Last week? The anti-trans bill, and the attempt to cut off debate, and how we had to stop it here or we wouldn’t, because then it could pass with only Republican votes so we needed to stop it here and now?

It fucken

WORKED

The vote got called this afternoon. Move to cloture FAILED 51-45, and not one single Democrat crossed the line.

Note how if this were a straight-up 50%+1 vote, it would’ve passed. That’s why we needed to win it here, where they needed 60 votes.

They might try again later but right now this is a big win. Drop ’em a note of thanks, team. Shouldn’t be required, but give it a moment anyway. This one can just be email, if that’s easier for you.

Not one crossed over.

Not one.

Good job.

#LGBT #LGBTQIA #politics #uspol #uspolitics

HHS employees, DO NOT OPEN YOUR EMAIL.

Not without reading this first.

They’re going to cut off your network access as soon as you read your email, so you need to download a bunch of things first. Details at the link.

DO NOT OPEN YOUR EMAIL WITHOUT READING THIS FIRST.

See also the firings in the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

#datascience #fascism #medicine #politics #science #uspol #uspolitics

Yes! As always, it’s not the most fucked up thing you will ever see, it’s the most fucked up think you’ve ever seen so far.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield want to stop covering anesthesiology drugs beyond a fixed amount of time

during

surgeries?

So if a surgery goes longer than their time allotment, coverage stops on

anaesthesia?!

I mean

I mean

I mean

there’s also the whole “nothing says quality medicine like rushing a surgery team” but

HOLY SHIT YOU MONSTERS

#HomeEc #lolscience #medicine #science

The Google app for iOS now adds THEIR links to YOUR posts from YOUR website unless you opt-out.

Their links lead people away from your site and back to Google. Because that’s definitely what you want, right? That’s why you have a blog or portal or web site or whatever. You want people to leave your site and go back to Google.

Oh, it’s not?

If you don’t like it, you can “Opt out.” Opting out is a pain in the ass. Here’s where you go to do it. You have to enter every variation of each of your domains or it won’t work. It will take up to 30 days, during which time Google will continue to pollute your work and your writing and your website with their modifications and their added links to take people away from your site and back to themselves.

For example, here’s the list of what I need to opt-out just for this one blog:

Yes, you explicitly have to file no prefix, http:, and https: variants separately. They say so.

Making it difficult like this is 100% intentional and entirely designed to make it as annoying as possible, and also, to make sure you slip up if at all possible and forget one or more combinations.

(Tho’ I am just going to depreciate web. as a prefix right now, to bring down the load a little. Still gonna list ’em, though, because spite is why.)

Right now it’s only in the Google app for iOS and it’s probably a test to see whether they can get away with it without complaint, and how much revenue it generates. Let’s make that a combination of no and as close to zero as possible. Because otherwise they’ll roll it out everywhere, and probably derank you if you don’t go along.

Fucking hell, Google. Fuck you. Just… fuck you.

#art #t0000000000bs_ #writing

The New Republic have called for an exit from Twitter saying that if you’re on X you’re complicit with Elon Musk

HEEEEEEY LOOK THE FUCKWIT MEDIA IS FINALLY NOTICING THAT TWITTER’S A FASCIST PROPAGANDA AND DISINFORMATION MACHINE AND ONLY TWO YEARS LATE! WOOOOOW!

Jesus fucking wept.

#fascism #politics #uspolitics

Say “You know that rape taunt going around? If you do this in front of me, I WILL IMMEDIATELY PUNCH YOU IN THE DICK.”

Or whatever you’re willing to say, but say it as strongly as you’re willing to say it. They’re looking for social permission from men. You must pre-emptively deny that in the strongest terms you’re willing.

This is about force now. Not reason.

I think I’ve squared a circle. Doesn’t mean it’s real; just that I’ve found a way to square it.

Walk with me.

Let’s say you’re Trump and you’ve promised mass deportations and huge tariffs on China and other countries.

Let’s say that mass deportation is incredibly expensive – maybe you’re aware that Hitler’s camps and extermination programme were eating 13% of Nazi Germany’s GDP in the middle of their wars of conquest.

Let’s say you’re also aware that this will take years and years and years, because there’s literally no way to do this quickly. Physically, I mean. 15 million people can’t be thrown out overnight, or even over months. It’ll be years.

Let’s also say you want to keep inflation down, particularly to keep prices from skyrocketing due to your tariff policies. Tariffs are, I remind you, a tax an imports that get paid by the importer, and which are passed on to the customer. They are inflationary, by design. At least, until and unless they torpedo the economy entirely, at which point, well, you’ve set off a second Great Depression, just like Smoot and Hawley.

Now, let’s say that it’s very important to you to keep wages down as well, because nobody wants to pay workers if they can avoid it. If you want to bring back a lot of manufacturing in an already-tight labour market, that’s going to raise labour costs. It just is.

So you assign an amoral monster like Tom Homan – author of Trump’s Family Separation policy – as the “czar” of immigration. He’s promising the largest deportation force in history and recently said his answer to preventing “family separation” is to expel the entire family – citizenship be damned.

(He’s also a contributor to Project 2025 and a visiting fellow at Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 absolutely is the agenda. All of it.)

Then you start talking to people you’re already very friendly with, the operators of private prisons. They are utterly ready and looking forward to the new policies. They see it as an opportunity to double – or better – the size of their evil industry in all its forms.

Your inner circle have already acknowledged you’ll have to build camps – lots of them, big ones. You’ll call them “prisons” or “detention facilities” or “military camps,” not “concentration camps,” you certainly won’t call them that. Let’s say “facilities.”

Prison “facilities” are already well known for requiring prison labour, and for their pennies-per-hour payment to inmates. Private prisons have pushed the envelope on this in many ways; prison labour is a profit centre. One I was working against, before the fascist era.

So.

Imagine, if you would, the very easy jump.

You’ve got to do something with these hundreds of thousands of imprisoned people, don’t you.

Imagine expulsions taking months, then years. Years at a time. Perhaps they stop working so hard on speeding up the process. Perhaps they slow-walk it, timed to, say, suit the availability of “facility” beds.

Of course you’ll put them to work. A rotating cast of “facility” workers – “prison workers” – worked slowly through the system so there’s no one there quite long enough to start organising.

Paid, technically. At pennies for the hour, as a token, a pretence that it’s not slavery. But, of course, it is. You recoup the pennies you have to pay by charging them for everything. Maybe even their bed.

And just like that you have highly profitable… North Korean-style labour camps, with entire families of workers imprisoned, for who knows how long while they are put to work as factory labour for the private prison companies which become the new internal outsourcers of zero-cost labour.

Slavery, though not by name.

Maybe you’ll tie camp expansions to increases in tariffs. Raise them in parallel, timed so that the internal outsourcing absorbs the cost of the new tariffs. And then look – no price inflation, no wage inflation.

And whole new class of people to look down upon forever, if you like.

It’s quite the plan. Very neat. Very clean. Given that Trump voters actively want “military camps” used against immigrants, it’ll be a very easy sell.

And very, very profitable. Slave camps always have been, really.

And all you have to be is an abomination upon the earth.

And all your supporters have to do is let you be one.

Is that the plan? I don’t know.

All I know is that all the pieces seem to fit.

#fascism #politics #uspolitics

I am not seeing nearly enough cishet men react proactively to this national wave of rape threats.

Most men listen only to men, particularly on topics like these. These men specifically only listen to men. Not listening to the opinions of women is the point, because as far as they’re concerned, we don’t get to have any.

Right now, these men are testing what they can get away with. They see but don’t care about how women react; if anything, they like the revulsion and anger, and look forward to more of it when they actually start “grabbing women by the pussy.”

But they do want to see how other men will react. They want to know what other men will say or do.

Passivity now, in the face of this, is permission. And your men friends are watching. If you don’t object, they probably won’t either. So if you’re against this – and you fucking well need to be – you need to get ahead of it.

And the next time, and the time after that? Every other time the fash test something? Because they will be testing everything they can?

It’s the same reality.

You have to get in front of it. Independently. Not just a thumbs up to a woman’s post. Preferably in your own words.

And you have to start right now.

#fascism #politics #uspolitics

How the fuck do you get a 33-point swing in favour of the guy campaigning on an ethnic purge against you?

This exit polling graph tells me everything and helps me understand absolutely nothing:

Trump won Latino men 53-45 after campaigning for months on the basis of an ethnic purge against Latino people, promising to expel millions of people, and if you think that’s only going to be undocumented people, you’re out of your goddamn fucking mind and you have to know that.

Trump won Latino men 53-45 after a hate rally in New York City against Puerto Ricans, who are Latino, and who got the word out.

White women still voted for Trump, but swung towards Harris. It’s stupid and it’s evil.

But how the fuck do you win the people you’re campaigning on purging?

Without this swing, I think I was mostly right. My higher hopes hinged on white women shifting more than they did, and they didn’t, which is fucking self-destructive. But this… I just… did not see this coming. It wasn’t in any of my calculations. It’s suicidal past a level I don’t know how to handle.

How do you get votes from people you’re promising to purge?

And now I don’t know what to think at all.

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics

Election Liveblog

I’ve never done an intentional “liveblog” before, but since I’ll be glued to it all anyway, I’ve decided hey, why not. This is the liveblog root, and updates will be in the replies below, which are also Federated so you can follow along on Mastodon and other Federated social media.

I’m also going to experiment with reply threads grouped by topic.

How active will it be? That’s a dang good question, and we’ll find out. I’ve got a few items queued up already to start reply threads. Let’s gooooooooooooooooooo~~~

[link] #politics #USPol #fascism #politics #t0000000000bs_ #uspolitics

Results and Exit Polling thread root

Holy shit the Latino – meaning in this case mostly Puerto Rican – exit polling in Philadelphia. Massive turnout, 90% Harris.

This insanity right here is why I kept hammering on how Elon Musk thinks Trump’s plans will crash the economy, but he thinks that’s good and wants it to happen, and why I kept begging everyone else to talk about it too.

But the media ignored it, so a majority of voters still trust Trump with the economy over Harris. Batshit insane.

A pitch I did not expect to have to make on this final day

For years now, I have been railing against the Republican Party as a literal – literal – Party of Plague. In these closing days of the campaign, they have quadrupled back down on this in ways that will kill millions of Americans.

Not “might.” Will.

Appointing RFK, Jr. as czar of public health and letting him “go wild” will kill millions. Not might: will. Not immediately, no, but over time. Trump himself is utterly refusing to promise he and his party won’t ban vaccines and said on Sunday that RFK Jr.’s pledge to eliminate fluoridation of water on day one “sounds OK to me.”

If they do this and make it stick, millions will die. And an outsized number of them will be children.

Courtesy McNadoMD on Mastodon, here are a few of the diseases mass vaccination eliminated from American life, and which banning vaccination will bring back, along with some of their symptoms and progression paths.

Lockjaw and rabies:

Diphtheria:

Whooping cough:

Polio:

You get the idea, right?

These aren’t the only ones. These are just a few of those less often mentioned in these modern times, because people have forgot they exist.

When I say the Republican Party is a Party of Plague, when I say it is a goddamn death cult, I mean every single one of those words in every way you might think.

They are promising economic ruin and they are promising ethnic purges and now they are promising mass death of children.

All while killing pregnant people for their vile sense of domination, of course. Let us never forget that, since their families certainly won’t.

One of the things their apologists keep saying is that “Trump doesn’t mean it” and “Trump won’t do it,” and “That’s just Trump being Trump,” and they talk about “Trump derangement syndrome,” and say that we’re stupid for believing what their candidate fucking says he’ll do, and meanwhile, they get enraged about shit they completely make up about us and the candidates who are with us.

We react to things their candidates promise. They react to shit they make up wholesale about us. We are not the fucking same.

If only the political press would catch on to that fact.

The very last day of a campaign is a pretty lousy time to bring up another topic, even if it’s not really new. But this is, again, so murderously psychotic that I can’t not bring it back up.

Maybe you can bring it up, too, on this final day of this hellish and evil campaign, this Monday, November 4th, 2024.

Zero days remain.

It is Lastday.

[link] #medicine #politics #science #USPol #fascism #politics #uspolitics