Issues You May Know, 18 April 2025.
A list of things you might want to know about - or write your reps about.
📍Note: Dissent is patriotic, and protests are as American as apple pie. ICYMI, a directory of pro-democracy in-person and remote events: https://www.mobilize.us/
Discussion on AI hype & crypto data center boondoggles on TheLetterHack livestream.
I didn't see the chat at the time but there was some interesting discussion going on. And thank you for the kind compliments Sami, Alex, and my #1 reader Obvious Books. Happy birthday Environmental Coffeehouse! – who mentioned in the chat about using some AI assist clip tool. Automated tools can be useful. But the people pushing this tech as "the big future" and this great revolution that needs all this power, are making promises that are off the charts bonkers. Like the "AI toaster" mentioned in the comments! I have a Hello Kitty toaster and it burns a Hello Kitty face into the bread, far superior in my opinion.
Pitchforks Dragon said: I can hear trump in my head "they're burning beautiful clean tires and the radical left is against it can you believe it? Beautiful clean tires."
A few people in the chat had mentioned living through having data center debacles in their region, or in their neighborhood, even while actual infrastructure is in need of repair and housing ought to be built out. It's not surprising, because these things really are, as my representative in congress said, "popping up" all around. (Of course it's just a big coincidence that he's also bought a bunch of stocks in companies that have pivoted to AI or do cloud computing.)
Someone mentioned how Elon Musk wants to put chips in people's heads to hook everyone up to AI, and sadly he and other tech tycoons do have some really out there plans, and Elon Musk himself is definitely steeped in a weird sci-fi origin story.
MiSs_anOnymOus_617: It's like Musk saw the villainous Borg in Star trek & said "Yes, I need to make that real!"
Some asked why I said “printing cryptocurrency” in the chat… here’s the answer:
Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez voting for the SAVE ACT to subjugate women is not surprising.
I read that Marie Gluesenkamp Perez attends a far right wing prayer group in congress and was even trying to recruit others into it.
Gluesenkamp Perez Is Recruiting Members of Congress for Far-Right Bible Study The Washington Democrat urged members of Congress to join an anti-LGBTQ+ ministry Jonathan Larsen Jan 29, 2025 Gluesenkamp Perez and a dozen other members invited colleagues to join them in a weekly Bible study meeting led by Ralph Drollinger, a supporter of Pres. Donald Trump who opposes LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights and leads a global effort to get elected officials right with Jesus. Drollinger’s ministry, the letter says, “has had major impact” on the lives of Gluesenkamp Perez and her co-signers. Her connection to Drollinger has not previously been reported and her name does not appear on his online lists of congressional sponsors. I obtained the letter, which was undated but distributed earlier this month, from a source on Capitol Hill. Gluesenkamp Perez did not immediately respond to emailed questions. The letter says that Christian beliefs should supersede the obligations of office and that belief in Jesus makes one a better member of Congress. Of the 13 signers, Gluesenkamp Perez is the only Democrat and the only woman.
I’ve been hearing that Republican reps are saying “there’s a lot of misinformation" about the requirements in the SAVE ACT, is definitely a party line talking point for Republicans, because I heard that from Rep. Rob Bresnahan. Rob Bresnahan also claimed that there were no medicaid cuts in the bill he voted for, even though I’d sent him a letter a couple weeks before that explicitly explaining how math works. In other words, Republican talking points can’t be trusted to be accurate.
Gluesenkamp Perez didn’t use those Republican talking points, but she did use similar excuses and moved the goalposts in excuses I’ve heard about a few times when pushed by her constituents. (I heard multiple examples on this Oregon resident’s youtube channel.) But considering she’s engaged with a far right Christian nationalism aligned prayer group in congress, perhaps she hasn’t stated the actual reason. I think somebody in her district ought to be birddogging her to find out and get her on record whether or not she’s into “head of household voting” and repealing women’s independent suffrage, because that’s a thing!
Over a year ago Moms for Liberty was creating content with the privatized prison contractor of the offshored gulag in Central America.
A leader in the group formed in the pandemic to oppose public health measures, and then moved onto every culture war topic under the sun, was sharing visions for education with Nayib Buekele over a year ago.
Curmudgucation - Moms For Liberty and the Salvador Gulag - Peter Greene Apr 15, 2025 In March pf 2024, she was at CPAC. So was Nayib Bukele, who at the time was mostly known for A) the kind of conservative dictatorship that has become popular on the right and B) his attempt to convert El Salvador's currency base to bitcoin, a bold idea that has turned into a demonstration of why that's a bad idea. (I'll let someone else see if there are dots to be connected between the failure of a grand cryptocurrency grift and the launch of a gulag-for-profit grift.) While Bukele was at CPAC, Catalina Stubbe connected with him for some interview time.The results were reported by FSSPX News (that's the Society of Saint Pius X, a canonically irregular traditionalist Catholic outfit):...
Bukele said he wants to see morality introduced back into schools, along with suggestions that would violate the separation of church and state in the US.
Martial Law and the Insurrection Act is the garbage politics propaganda of losers.
People repeating this is, I believe, an attempt to use the mere exposure effect (aka reiteration effect), to just get people used to hearing this and that it could happen. Advertising works. And lots of times familiar things can seem ok just because they're familiar, even if they're bad. It's not that bad things won't happen. We're definitely working under an authoritarian regime. But the issue is that a lot of it is hype and also misunderstandings of both the law and the logistics and the problem with helping them spread this propaganda.
Here is a lawyer youtuber explaining the logistics and legal issues in a video to share with people who mention being worried about the insurrection act or martial law, but who won't be willing to read articles and whatnot.
The DOGE hacker people implicated in… something. surprise surprise.
This:
DOGE employee’s past cyber breach and hacker gang activity. February 2025
was pretty much bound to lead to this:
Elon Musk Whistleblower GETS SCARY THREAT AT HOME Before Going Public!!! Brittany Page Apr 16, 2025
"We are not monsters, we are only following orders."
Amy Goodman mentioned on Democracy Now that one of the lawyers of Rümeysa Öztürk reported that among the hooded figures who did the abduction, who said they were police and turned out to be ICE agents, one of them said to Öztürk at the time, "We are not monsters, we are only following orders."
Guess the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File can no longer be trusted.
The Trump administration has rendered the Social Security Death Master File useless by contaminating it with people who are NOT dead at all, in an effort to weaponize the death declaration power of this database against lawful legal immigrants that did things "the right way" and that's how they wound up in this bureaucracy. It will render it useless because obviously now in includes now numerous people who are not dead. If they recklessly added over 6,000 people to it – that we know of – how do we know they haven't added more people before or after this?
The New Republic - Edith Olmsted/ April 11, 2025 Trump Has Despicable New Way to Carry Out His Deportations Donald Trump’s latest plan to kick immigrants out of the country is unbelievably cruel. Donald Trump speaks to reporters while in the Oval Office of the White House. Earlier this week, the White House added the names and Social Security numbers of thousands of living, breathing people to the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, which is used to track when a person has died and should stop receiving government benefits. But it can have far-ranging effects, as people will no longer be able to access their bank accounts or use their credit cards. The SSA’s website said that the effects of being wrongly included in the DMF can be “devastating to the individual, spouse, and dependent children.” The outrageous move targeted individuals whose legal status had just been revoked, people who the government claimed were convicted criminals or “suspected terrorists,” according to documents reviewed by the Times. However, the list managed to include eight minors, including one 13-year-old.
My letter to reps:
The Social Security Death Master File list should not be utilized as a weapon to add people to it who are not dead because they're considered political enemies of the current presidential administration. Contaminating the list like this renders it useless by raising questions about other misuses by members of the administration to add people who aren't dead to an official list. Nobody can trust this database now. This needs to be investigated and people need to be held accountable for this corruption of a government database.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Evergreen plea for people to stop saying “everyone needs to be willing to do X” before we can do anything.
Don’t wait for everybody before speaking up. We don’t need to convince everyone before moving forward, and we may already have more on board than it appears anyway. We won’t know until we try. Chloe Humbert Aug 08, 2023
The covid dot gov website url leads to some kind of lab leak truther propaganda.
Hopefully once and for all people will understand that lab leak trutherism is far right-wing covid contrarianism, and stop letting red-pilled horseshoe lefties push that propaganda in disabled and public health advocacy spaces. We’ve always known this because the same people pushing these conspiracy theories are the same people pushing climate contrarianism, often using the same tactics.
On a lighter note, on the official government webpage, the American president strangely looks like a pooting toddler in the photo. Right-wing graphic design choices are so odd.
The robots are coming for the mercenary agent provocateur jobs.
It's an old story used as a labor discipline threat based on lies, Dean Baker has pointed this out for at least a decade. And it's obviously also an attempt by AI peddlers to leverage the wish-casting fantasy of the capital class of getting rid of pesky human workers with human needs, and diminishing the bargaining power of labor. Meanwhile these many influence operations are hired to subvert and undermine labor. And now the robots are coming for their jobs too.
404 Media - This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops Emanuel Maiberg , Jason Koebler · Apr 17, 2025 at 6:00 AM American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications 404 Media obtained via public records requests. Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media.
From botnets to agent provocateurs, there's an entire business economy around espionage, influence operations, propaganda, and privatized outsourced law enforcement with poor oversight. And the taxpayer will get taken for a ride as usual since this is being sold to law enforcement and they're probably more likely to fall for shoddy tech tools than will fossil fuel paid industry operative consultancies.
The Greenland fixation is about the Network State. It sounds bonkers because it is.
I prefer kayaking in tranquility, but some people see things differently.
The next time you are tempted to assume others will make the same decisions or calculations you would, think about Aniol Serrasolses…