Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The people who are now in charge of the Office of Personnel Management apparently don’t know how to scrub PDF metadata, and have exposed the original authors of the guidance they’re publishing. Two have links to the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025.

Noah Peters is the author of the OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell’s January 27 memo (archive) providing guidance on the “Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce” executive order, which is being described as the “Schedule F” order because it effectively reinstates that policy under a new name (“Schedule Policy/Career”). Peters also authored the January 20 memo (archive) from Ezell, which exploits loopholes to bypass limits on political appointments.1 Both of these memos are clear steps towards achieving a primary goal of Project 2025: to expand President Trump’s power, and to replace career civil servants with Trump loyalists.

As far back as 2023, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was recommending Peters for a position in Trump’s second administration.2 Peters had previously been appointed by Trump in 2019 as the Solicitor at the Federal Labor Relations Authority,3 where he “aided and defended Trump appointees’ anti-union FLRA policies that went against decades of the agency’s own precedents” according to Court Accountability Action and State Democracy Defenders Action.4 Peters returned to private practice in 2022, but recently quietly updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect a new title of “Senior Advisor” to the Office of Personnel Management. This appointment does not appear to have been announced anywhere else.

1/2

#USpolitics #USpol #Project2025 #HeritageFoundation

Please don't parrot the "Sputnik moment" BS regarding the alleged Chinese "AI" breakthrough.

Even if DeepSeek is the real thing, the wailing from the US tech bros looks mostly like a ploy to get taxpayers to spend 100s of billions of their dollars to further enrich US AI companies and their investors.

Socialism for the rich and the rest of us pay for it -- hell of a business model if you can pull it off. Don't let them get away with it.

Follow the money. Follow the money.

Speaking of fediverse projects needing support, I've mentioned before that @dansup is one of the most prolific developers in the 'verse. Leading the charge on Pixelfed, Loops, Sup, Pubkit FediDB, and fediverse.info. The recent drama around TakeTok in the US, and its possible purchase by ZuckerBorg, have highlighted why developing short video apps for the fediverse (like Loops) is so important.

@Dansup is running a crowdfunding campaign to fund their work. Please share;

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelfed/pixelfed-foundation-2024-real-ethical-social-networks

GTK and GLib developers will be in Brussels starting on Wednesday for a hackfest. The agenda is:

- Planning for the next version of GTK
- Accessibility, and the new accesskit backend
- Text handling
- Session saving
- Deprecating the X11 and Broadway backend
- Merging the Android backend
- App launching, portals, and cgroups
- Future of the type system

Make sure to follow the GTK development blog!

Artisans Cooperative has been selected as one of the Remember the Future Fellows!
Remember the Future is a pilot fellowship https://Art.coop is organizing to honor the power of group work in the arts and beyond. Remember the Future awards a community of arts and culture groups with $15,000 each plus technical assistance for the year. Listen to Artisans Co-op on the Remember the Future podcast on Jan. 30 at 2:30 EST https://rememberthefuture.buzzsprout.com/
#Cooperative #MemberOwned #Artisan

You wanna know what I would really like to know? When the rental moratoriums expired and a whole lot of people suddenly had to come up with months of back rent, as well as their current rent...what happened? Did everybody somehow magically find the money? For those that couldn't, where are they now? Any chance that maybe this has exacerbated our homelessness crisis? I haven't seen a single follow up story anywhere since the expiration of the moratoriums. The silence is deafening.

@dangillmor Our channel, ad-free, no accounts, no bs, is at https://live.retrostrange.com/

@dangillmor Meanwhile on RetroStrange TV we are showing the best of the public domain, for $0, and doing great

Brazilians being deported from the US were handcuffed, beaten, and mocked by ICE agents on the plane. Even scarier, the plane had technical problems that forced it to land in Panama and Manaus, and the deportees were only able to make it to Belo Horizonte (the capital of the state they were from) after the Brazilian government intervened and forced ICE to switch planes.

https://g1.globo.com/google/amp/mg/minas-gerais/noticia/2025/01/26/um-inferno-uma-tortura-desde-que-saimos-relata-brasileira-deportada-dos-estados-unidos.ghtml

Happy birthday to Marius Mason, who has faced relentless state repression for standing against environmental destruction, corporate greed, and systemic oppression. As a vocal advocate for transgender rights, even from behind bars, Marius continues to amplify the fight for ecological justice, trans liberation, and solidarity for all marginalized communities.

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all?

"Strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such, but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to...meet human needs...while ensuring universal access to key goods and services...At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production should be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization..."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493

In light of US tech oligarchy setting its sights on Wikimedia Foundation, a historical detail I did not know before: #Wikipedia became the non-profit it is today partly as the result of a labour strike of Spanish Wikipedia editors who disagreed with the proposed inclusion of advertisements. Initially, it was not clear what revenue model Wikipedia would get, and Wales moved towards a for-profit model already a year after launch. However, rather than working for free, so Jimmy Wales could profit from their labour via advertising, Spanish contributors forked Spanish Wikipedia as the Encyclopedia Libre Universal. Under the threat of losing the editorial community of such a large language, Wales conceded and set up the non-profit.

That is to say, however imperfect they are, all the digital commons we have are the result of ongoing struggle and hard work to keep them as commons.

Via Las Redes Son Nuestras (https://www.consonni.org/es/publicaciones/las-redes-son-nuestras) by @teclista

In a major win for creator communities, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has once again handed video streaming site Vimeo a solid win in its long-running legal battle with Capitol Records and a host of other record labels. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/second-circuit-rejects-record-labels-attempt-rewrite-dmca

GM will be banned from selling driver behavioral data and geolocation. Good, but all automakers need privacy regulation. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/ftcs-ban-gm-and-onstar-selling-driver-behavior-good-first-step

Subscribe to the GEO newsletter to receive a weekly blast of cooperative and solidarity economy news and information.
https://newsletter.geo.coop/subscription/form

My new opinion piece at Scientific American has just been published.

"Our refusal to aggressively cut greenhouse-gas emissions isn’t a problem for some distant uncertain future; it has become our present-day reality. It is time to disavow climate denial and accelerate building disaster resilience in our cities and homes.'

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/los-angeles-fires-force-us-to-confront-our-dystopian-present/

After his executive order on sex, is #Trump legally the first female president? - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/25/trump-executive-order-sex so let's call her "Mrs President" now...

This week's comic: Your New Order Has Arrived

#cartoon #comic #politics #media #authoritarianism

Now is the time to know our antifascist history. Get a FREE e-Book copy of It Did Happen Here: An Antifascist People’s History with code ANTIFA at checkout. Get your free e-Book and check out the @itdidhappenherepodcast at the link in our bio.