Issues You May Know, 17 January 2025.
A list of things you might want to know about - or write your reps about.
📍 Your voice does matter.
Though it may seem that things will keep going, and Trump nominees will pass into the administration, it’s still important to register their unpopularity with your elected officials so that this is at the forefront of their understanding — that there is widespread opposition.
Trump HUD nominee mega-pastor Scott Turner thinks housing assistance can be compared to slavery.
Trump's Pick for HUD Secretary BACKED INTO CORNER by Elizabeth Warren!!! Brittany Page Jan 16, 2025
✏️ My letter to reps:
I don’t think mega-pastor Scott Turner is the right person to manage the housing crisis we’re undergoing, since he has vocalized the most bizarre and clueless claim that housing assistance to the disabled and those experiencing misfortunes is akin to lifetime slavery of humans where husbands and wives and mothers and their children were ripped away from each other to be sold at literal auctions. This is obviously not someone who even thinks things through before they speak in public, or maybe ever.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
ProPublica - Trump’s Pick to Lead Federal Housing Agency Has Opposed Efforts to Aid the Poor - As HUD secretary, Scott Turner would oversee billions in housing aid, but as a Texas state legislator he voted against protections for poor tenants and has called government assistance “one of the most destructive things for the family.” by Jesse Coburn and Andy Kroll Dec. 23, 2024, 6 a.m. EST Behind those votes lay a deep-seated skepticism about the value of government efforts to alleviate poverty, a skepticism that Turner has voiced again and again. He has called welfare “dangerous, harmful” and “one of the most destructive things for the family.” When one interviewer said receiving government assistance was keeping recipients in “bondage” of “a worse form to find oneself in than slavery,” Turner agreed. Such views would seemingly place Turner at odds with the core work of HUD, a sprawling federal agency that serves as a backstop against homelessness for millions of the nation’s poor, elderly and disabled.
Tax prep company lobbying to get Donald Trump to kill IRS Direct File.
Republican lawmakers ask Trump to kill IRS Direct File By Natalie Alms December 11, 2024 02:21 PM ET - NEXTGOV Nearly 30 House Republicans are asking President-elect Donald Trump to stop the IRS free tax filing service, Direct File, on day one of his new administration. {...} Intuit has long lobbied against a government-run system, as ProPublica has documented. It set a new record for itself in lobbying dollars in 2023, according to Open Secrets. Other tax prep companies and trade associations also increased lobbying spend that year. Supporters of Direct File say that it saves Americans time and money in tax filing. People spend 13 hours and $270 on filing taxes annually on average, although that varies for individuals, the IRS estimated last year. That burden means that some people don’t file their taxes and miss out on benefits that are delivered through the tax code, like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Over 9 million people didn’t file returns to get benefits in the 2022 cycle, according to the IRS.
Letter to reps:
Keep and expand the IRS free tax filing “Direct File” service. We need this as a permanent option. It just makes sense.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Deregulation is another way of saying buyer beware.
When there’s “deregulation” of industry, that means less experts will be inspecting or requiring standards from goods and services sold to everybody, and less oversight and little prevention of false claims. It leaves it up to individuals to figure out if products, including foods and medicines, including prescription drugs, or things like cars, are in fact safe or effective, or possibly harmful or deadly. And that could mean finding out the hard way.
I’ve also heard it said a few times that it should just be called “re-regulation” because in fact what so-called deregulation does is just switch the regulation from protecting consumers to protecting bad actors.
LIVE: Investigative Journalist gives URGENT WARNING on Trump Transition | The Weekend Show MeidasTouch Streamed live on Dec 29, 2024 David Cay Johnston” “I want to get you to not use that word deregulation there is no such thing as deregulation there is only re-regulation and the history of America going back to Jimmy Carter is the re-regulation takes away from consumers takes away from customers and from investors and from workers and imbues power and authority and the freedom to be abusive to those people who own the companies those people who run run the institutions so everything is regulated one of the things I I've always taught my students is you know everything is regulated say this university like every other university in America regulates dating and it takes them a while even the third-year law students it takes them a while and they go oh sexual harassment that's oh that is kind of regulating dating isn't it we regulate baseball regulate how many stitches are on the ball the color of the yarn and the material that the yarn is made with everything is regulated in some way so when people say deregulation they're trying to get you to not see what's happening which is reducing your rights and privileges and expanding those of the people who have more power and political influence than you do”
None of this really makes sense in the context of a civilization. The benefits of organizing a community with various people and institutions specializing in different things is that everyone doesn’t have to be an expert in everything – because that’s impossible. Civilizations free people up to be efficient and thrive. Humans have been doing this better and better over thousands of years, why would we go backwards? So there’s really no rational argument against regulations unless someone is saying they actually want an extremely inefficient failing society. That simply doesn’t make sense.
✏️ My letter to reps:
I can’t be an expert in everything. I shouldn’t be threatened by dubious products or dangerous services. I want the government to regulate things so I don’t have to spend so much time trying to figure out what’s safe, effective, or even for real.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
AI search is not a search engine, it’s just dysfunctional.
The Washington Post burns its own archive Indignity Vol. 4, No. 216 Tom Scocca 09 Dec 2024 LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA VIRGINIA DEP'T. Artificial Intelligence Means You Can't Read the Newspaper Anymore No one who cared about the purpose of the Washington Post or the purpose of the Washington Post archive would have ever allowed the Ask The Post AI to be deployed. But the world has allowed the management of knowledge to be taken over by ignoramuses, and now the ignoramuses have built ignoramus machines in their own image, manufacturing non-knowledge on a scale previously unimaginable.
✏️ My letter to reps:
AI has been polluting ways to search for things. It makes getting things done harder, and with huge amounts of energy expenditure, and all for nothing or to give people misinformation, sometimes dangerous misinformation. We should not be forced to use this stuff in order to access information on the internet.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
AP - Cats on the moon? Google’s AI tool is producing misleading responses that have experts worried - By MATT O’BRIEN and ALI SWENSON Updated 6:10 PM EST, May 24, 2024 “The more you are stressed or hurried or in a rush, the more likely you are to just take that first answer that comes out,” said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor and director of the University of Washington’s Computational Linguistics Laboratory. “And in some cases, those can be life-critical situations.” That’s not Bender’s only concern — and she has warned Google about them for several years. When Google researchers in 2021 published a paper called “Rethinking search” that proposed using AI language models as “domain experts” that could answer questions authoritatively — much like they are doing now — Bender and colleague Chirag Shah responded with a paper laying out why that was a bad idea.
Listen, I tried the chatbot stuff out, and what I found disturbed me. And what the hell is it with cats in space anyhow?
Cats in Wonderland - the Uncanny Valley of lying AIs
·The first thing I did with chatGPT is see if it could generate MORE INTERNET CATS. Because of course I did.
Dark money has been trying to dismantle the EPA for years.
Who will make the decisions for our future?
Important Context As California Burns, Here’s What You Need to Know About Trump EPA Pick Former NY congressman Lee Zeldin has a mixed record but is loyal to Trump. Amanda Magnani Jan 10, 2025 Unlike Trump’s first EPA pick, Scott Pruitt, who had a long history of suing the EPA during his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Zeldin is not known for his experience in climate and environmental policy. But he does have one attribute Trump looks for in his picks: loyalty. Zeldin was one of the first Republicans to endorse Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016, and he hasn’t left his side ever since. He served as part of the former president’s defense team during his first impeachment trial. He voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election and even texted the president’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, with suggestions as to how to discredit them the day before the race was called for Joe Biden. On January 6, 2021, the day a mob of angry Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, he gave a speech stressing already debunked claims that poll watchers were denied access to vote-counting. Zeldin stuck with Trump despite his 88 indictments.
The EPA is not supposed to consider business, only the effects to public health.
Climate Scientist Peter Kalmus Fled L.A. Fearing Wildfires. His Old Neighborhood Is Now a Hellscape Democracy Now! Jan 10, 2025 Peter Kalmus: “I think everyone needs to understand and I wish the New York Times would have let me make this point that this is going to get worse. I can see that today just as clearly as I could see how a hotter and drier and more fiery Los Angeles was getting I think in the future if we don't change course for it quickly and maybe it's even too late to avoid some of these much more catastrophic impacts but II'm fully expecting heat waves to start appearing that where 100,000 people die and then maybe a million people die and then maybe more after that as things get hotter and hotter because there's no there's no upper limit right, like we keep burning these fossil fuels, fossil fuel industry keeps lying, the planet just keeps getting hotter, these impacts just keep getting worse it's not a new normal – a lot of climate messaging centers are on this idea that it's a new normal – it's a it's a staircase to a hotter more hellish Earth and you know a lot of climate impact predictions have erred on the side of least drama it's hard for even scientists to wrap our heads around how everything is changing right now on planet Earth.”
I recommend reading the book (or listening to the audiobook), Dark Money by Jane Mayer.
Jane Mayer, Dark Money. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, January 2016 Fink was fascinated by the nuts and bolts of power. After studying the Kochs' political problems for 6 months he drew up a practical blueprint ostensibly inspired by Hayek's model of production, but impressed Charles by going beyond where his own 1976 paper on the subject had left off, called The Structure of Social Change. It approached the manufacture of political change like any other product. As Fink later described it in a talk, it laid out a three-phase takeover of American politics. The first phase required an investment in intellectuals, whose ideas would serve as the raw products. The second required an investment in think tanks, that would turn the ideas into marketable policies. And the third phase required the subsidization of citizens' groups that would, along with special interests, pressure elected officials to implement the policies. It was, in essence, a Libertarian production line, waiting only to be bought, assembled, and switched on. Fink's plan was tailor-made for Charles Koch who deeply admired Hayek, and approached both business and politics with the systematic mindset of an engineer. While some might find it disturbing to regard the democratic process as a factory, Charles soon adopted the approach as his own. As he told Brian Doherty, the libertarian writer, to bring about social change requires a strategy that is vertically and horizontally integrated. It must span, he said, from idea creation, to policy development, to education, to grassroots organizations, to lobbying, to political action. Before long libertarian wags had dubbed the Kochs' publicity-shy multi-armed assembly line, the Kochtopus, a name that stuck.
Vaccines: the benefits outweigh the risks, and that’s how all medical decisions are made.
Letter to reps:
The government needs to fund vaccine research and vaccine promotion and deployment.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose the contents of my letter for your own letters to reps.
Pro-Trump Pastor: “We drank the kool-aid and it’s orange.”
Youtuber preacher clergyman claims “They” (whoever that is), forced him into the Trump cult. Jesse Dollemore says in the past Shane Vaughn admitted to worshipping Donald Trump. So bizarre. He literally said, “We drank the kool-aid and it’s orange.”
Pro-Trump Pastor Blames Me That HE'S IN A TRUMP CULT! Jesse Dollemore Jan 12, 2025
Taking Trump flags way too far.
I thought this was over the top. The interesting thing is that this same house has at other times, with the same ownership and along with Trump signs, had political signs for state and local Democratic Party politicians like PA State Rep Marty Flynn, Lackawanna County Commissioner Matt McGloin, and in the case of Lackawanna County Treasurer Angela Rempe Jones, Democrat, the sign was the really huge kind. A divided household” perhaps? Though the AOC + Trump voters really didn’t surprise me. I also know of people who wouldn’t dream of voting for local Democrats, but also can’t stand Trump. People are complicated, and politics is more than left & right — there are other axis.
David Lynch deserved better public health, just as we all do.