This is how the US government used to describe slaves.
If I were in charge of marketing for the Democrats: 1. I'd restart the online channel that Kamala Harris had that was shut down on Election Day. 2. I'd get out the message over and over about how things are going too fast, we need to slow it down, so we can consider what's happening. Who? The people. I know this will resonate with almost everyone in the US, no matter who they voted for. Stop I want to know how these changes will help or hurt me, my family, community. For Trump voters, it was fun to make my statement, but I'm afraid this is going too far. I think we can all relate to that. We aren't being represented here.
I asked Google Gemini to visualize what it feels like to be watching what's happening in the US from inside the US. This came close to capturing it, but it could have expressed the fear of it more clearly. Slow down, please, let us figure out what you're doing.

Bus careening down mountain road.
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The Z Blog by thezman on Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:29:57 GMT
Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the clash between the formal and informal rules in Washington, a post on the new world order, a video from the new studio and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or …
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I am too dizzy and shocked from current affairs to discuss them in a blog essay, too tired from winter and other things to continue with a new essay about pharmacokinetics for novelists and aspiring poisoners, and I really need...
Yup, it’s that time. I’ve had really bad tinnitus since my mid twenties: I’ve been a shooter since I was a child and an idiot for about that long so that’s no surprise. So everything I hear, I need to …
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We're diving head first into a world run by AI bots, before we've even begun to understand how to use them.
BTW, no one thought much about the threading structure we use on Bluesky. As far as I can tell it was copied from Twitter. It's not a very good structure. It encourages spam and abuse. You gotta wonder if the threading structure had evolved, or if there were more competition, different approaches to see what would happen, we might have avoided our meltdown with a better design.
Great quote from a
favorite show. "He put the dick in contradiction." This is a show that doesn't often indulge in that kind of humor. I imagine they must've had a great time with it in the writer's room. Or was it ad-lib'd? And wtf does it mean?

The idea of a
coup in the US is one we all presumably have a hard time thinking about. I sure do. It has never happened before. But it has happened now, and the group that is governing is doing it illegally, and is dismantling the country as quickly as they can, assuming someone will at some point try to stop them? Is that correct? What comes next?
Winter returned to the Gulch… …just in time for my bedroom heater to pack it in, same as it did this time last year. First it gets undependable, then it stops working entirely. I figured out last year what was …
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According to The Hill, 75,000 of us feds accepted the deferred retirement offer (
here), and we can trust The Hill to be accurate and unbiased about that since it's probably been state-supported media all along.
The figure — 3.75 percent of the nation’s 2 million federal employees — falls short of the projected 5 percent to 10 percent of federal employees the White House expected to take the deal.
Add to that the normal annual attrition of federal employees, which IIRC is just under six percent, and you almost get to the ten percent reduction target by the end of the fiscal year.
Fans of statistics will object that we aren't correcting those numbers for what proportion of feds were not allowed to take the offer, etc., which if we did, might make that 3.75 number larger. But those guys have probably been laid off by now, so ignore that quibbling.
As for the other 96.25 percent of us, many were scrambling this past week to document the statutory authority which justifies their function. Frankly, though, crying you will respect muh authoritah! is a thin reed to cling to when the Reduction in Force winds begin to blow. Some of those functions just plain do not align with current administration policies. Some are directly opposed to those policies.
"Elections have consequences" as another POTUS famously said, and we will see those consequences played out in the next few months.
It may be some comfort to recall that this is
not the first time a POTUS has taken an ax to government staffing.
Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato il 17 dicembre 2024 con il titolo How Bad Will It Get? Some Possible Mitigating Factors. Tradotto in italiano da Enrico Sanna. Rieccoci al punto di otto anni fa. Tanti, compreso io, dopo l’incubo delle ultime elezioni hanno fatto previsioni catastrofiche per il dopo venti gennaio. Conosciamo tutti i programmi...
The way to get even is to win. A lot of people don't get that, and it's almost always their downfall.
I’m not giving money to Democrats. I will give to campaigns that run hard-hitting ads telling the full truth about what Musk is doing now. I want to see the actual ads before I chip in, and will do so enthusiastically, but they can’t be anemic.
Hypercard stacks were the equivalent of websites.
If it had been built around the Macintosh Toolkit, and had an API that fit in with Mac apps, there wouldn't be a web, we'd all be using Macs. Alas it was all on its own, didn't work with anything but itself.
A lot was lost because the Mac development model was far in advance of what existed on the web, and it was well-thought-out unlike the app model of the web, which is a hodgepodge of horribly designed modules that don't work well together.
I was a Mac developer at the time, so I know a lot about this moment of history.

Screen shot of a Hypercard stack home page.
The Dems don't do
positioning. The Repubs run circles around Dems. They are masters at positioning. It's not hard, you just have to decide to do it.
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The Z Blog by thezman on Fri, 14 Feb 2025 23:56:54 GMT
This Week’s Show Contents 02m53s Healthcare gets a new boss 03m49s Healthcare horror Down Under 05m33s Immigration enforcement gets real 09m55s Why are politicians so rich? 13m05s Healthcare:a history 26m43s Signoff with a medical melody Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast …
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Musk will defund Medicare.
More than death panels.
Say goodbye to everyone who needs health care
Because almost no one can afford it without coverage.
That's what they mean when they say they'll cut $2 trill.
That's your health care.
Podcast: Dems must campaign 365 days every year.

Anne Applebaum
writing in the Atlantic says that people in the US feel like we're living in an occupied country. I get it. That's what it feels like to be in a Silicon Valley company that has been acquired by another Silicon Valley company, a subject I
wrote about on Wednesday. I wish there was some way for us to communicate with each other about this, because I'm sure my description comes closer to the way Musk sees it, though they are very similar ideas. One of the defects of the social web is that we live in little bubbles and not much information is exchanged over bubble boundaries. So if anyone knows Applebaum, please send her a link to this post. Thanks.