収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

“DOGE”‘s Shitler Youth committee includes white nationalists, misogynists, and – naturally – probable criminals. Here’s some in-depth storytelling about “Path Network,” the “startup” where Edward Coristine was previously working. This is only one of many gems in the post:

My first interaction with the founder, Marshal Webb, was in 2016 when the company was called “BackConnect’. … a lot of his knowledge came from the fact that he was personally hosting the threat actors’ infrastructure, therefore had direct insight into the botnet. […]

At some point shortly after, a DDoS-for-hire service got hacked and its entire customer database along with all DDoS attack logs was leaked online. One of the records traced back to an employee of his DDoS mitigation firm, and from a combination of attack logs and corroboration with customers, it was determined that they had been launching DDoS attacks against businesses, then cold calling them to sell DDoS protection services.

Honestly there’s no way these fash bastards aren’t looting Federal records exploitation purposes. Even aside from the fascism, they’ve got their hands on the biggest information drop the world has ever seen and they’re absolutely going to use it. There’s simply no way they don’t.

And I want to be clear about something: I speak as someone who was once what one might call part of the problem. To be clear, never for money! Only for lulz and actual curiosity. But did I hoover up all the spare info I could get even if I never intended to use even a little of it? Hells yeah I fucken did, which is how I had bullshit like IBM mainframe FORTRAN libraries. Did anyone want that? No. Did I have a use for it? No. Did I ever think I would? No! Did that stop me? Oh hells no.

It wouldn’t stop these guys, either. And the difference is these guys hang full-time with actual criminals, and this data is actually crazy valuable, so you know it’s for the money.

Lock your goddamn credit down, folks. At a minimum. And do everything else you can think of to protect yourself, too, because there is going to be some incoming goddamn fire.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Hey team.

Been a bad month. But I’m still here, and I’ve been thinking about something and I think I should get it out there.

I think we should hold our fire on the economy with any Trumpy family or acquaintances we might have.

About bad economic news, anyway. Talk about how the economy had been improving all you want. That’s fine, ’cause the fundamentals are solid, unemployment has fallen through the floor, we’re finally seeing wage growth, Biden-Harris actually delivered the damn near mythical soft landing after the COVID economic nightmare and now that Their Guy is about to be back in office, magically the MAGAts think the economy’s a lot better too.

(Seriously: an over 16-point swing amongst Republicans on the state of the economy. Christ, it’s pathetic.)

But when it comes to talking about tariff-driven inflation and mass deportation crashing the farming and construction industries?

Hold your fire. For now.

Keep that powder dry, and wait.

I know. I know. You want to talk about it. I do too. And amongst people who aren’t MAGA chucklefucks, I will.

But to MAGAts? No. Until it actually starts to hit, every day is Shut the Fuck Up Friday. Do not catastrophise, do not predict.

Wait for it.

Sure, massive tariffs and workforce devastation will send food prices and housing prices and gasoline – the one they really care about – and everything else through the roof, but the key word there is will, not has, so I want to… but I will not say it to them yet.

(Prices are already spiking in some sectors, by the way. Just the possibility of another trade war is doing damage, just not in places they see it yet. I bought ahead a bunch of high-durability SATA SSDs because I’m fully expecting Trump to actually do all this shit, and they’re over 40% more expensive than last time for the exact same in-production models, and hon, that ain’t Bidenomics at work, it was the election. It’s adventure times for at least some number of data centres right now.)

So. Why am I not going off about this yet? Two reasons.

1: While I’m pretty dang confident he won’t, he could back down, point at the inflation he caused in specialised areas already and blame it on Biden, then when the tariffs aren’t as high as he was threatening or don’t happen at all he can take credit for not breaking shit and say the mere threat of his tariffs fixed everything.

That’s absolutely the kind of game Team Fuckface McSharttington likes to play.

He can also just not do the mass expulsions and say he did. He did that with “the wall,” so why not this too? I don’t think that’s going to play out that way either, since what he and MAGAttry truly want is an ethnic purge, and we all know it. But it’s still possible.

So that’s one reason, with two examples.

But I think – from a strategy standpoint – the second reason is way more important. To wit:

2: Unless and until it’s happening in ways even they can’t miss, all you’re doing by going off about it beforehand is giving them time to get their defences up and their denials ready. You’re giving them the forewarning to find someone else to blame other than Dear Leader, which they absolutely will do unless it hits them in the face before they’re ready.

So don’t give them that time. Keep your mouth shut about this. Go at ’em for everything else, absolutely. Make sure they know damned well what they did and that you do not forgive them – or however you’re playing it. Take all of that to town.

But on kneecapping the economy in both knees at once? Farm and construction labour and imports?

Wait.

Wait until it’s hitting them in the face.

Then, and only then, tell them:

This is what you voted for, you stupid-ass motherfucker.

Or however you choose to put it. However you’d personally phrase that. Me, I’m out of tolerance and niceties and if anybody complains my response would be something along the lines of “Oh, are you not playing ‘Fuck Your Feelings’ anymore? Did you get tired of that? Too bad I finally warmed up to it. Fuck your feelings.”

You could explain further, if you like:

We told you what they would do, they told you what they would do, telling you outright that little NPC shits like you would have to “embrace the pain.” But you absolutely refused to listen – even to them! – and now here we fucking are.

Reap the goddamn whirlwind. This is exactly what you voted for.

You jackass.

Or, you know. Something like that, only in your own, probably nicer words.

I may be clean out of nice words – not giving a fuck anymore can be kind of liberating, really – but maybe you aren’t. It’s your call. Make it however you see fit.

But either way…

…I’d keep this particular powder dry.

Dry, but ready.

Until it hits them in the face.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Many people, including myself, have been talking about how Truth Social’s stock is a bribery system, existing to launder bribes given to Donald Trump.

($DJT stock hit the a level so low on Wednesday, by the way, that literally no one who has ever bought it in open trading is above water. This doesn’t actually matter for this purpose, and might even make it a little easier for lower-tier multi-billionaires and smaller sovereign wealth funds.)

There are multiple ways to go use $DJT for bribery; we’re going to talk about one that can be fairly public while maintaining a superficial outer layer of legitimacy. It also maintains the illusion of a wall between Trump and those who want to bribe him.

It’s a simple game for three players: Trump (as a larger entity, meaning Trump and his inner circle), a trusted intermediary, and the persons and/or organisation who want something in exchange for a bribe, who we will refer to as Some Fucker.

Some Fucker calls in an intermediary – there are plenty of options, it doesn’t matter specifically who – whose job is to ‘lobby’ Trump for an opportunity to exercise or acquire ‘influence,’ on a superficially-legal level. They may even register as a lobbyist, it doesn’t matter; the intermediary and Mr. Trump’s inner circle negotiate, obliquely, with Mr. Trump himself involved as little as can be managed, but with direct influence on the numbers.

If Trump and Some Fucker’s terms can be reconciled and a deal can be made, Mr. Trump issues a sell order of $DJT stock at a price $X. This price will be clearly outside whatever the current trading range of the stock might be.

For those who don’t know, this is a perfectly normal trading action, something done routinely by anyone who actively trades stocks. It lets you cash out a position when you’ve reached at particular profit, without having to micromanage anything. It raises no red flags.

Once Some Fucker sees the conditional sell order, they then start driving up the stock price through a combination of purchases – some direct, some options – and churn. They maintain that price long enough for Mr. Trump’s sell order to go through, plus a little after that to make it look like a natural rally.

At that point, Mr. Trump has his money, and the bribe has been – indirectly – tendered.

This kind of bribery is useful for both sides, as Some Fucker will end up with some overpriced stock, but overpriced stock which still has value as long as the scam continues, and which may even be worthwhile to hold onto until the next group does the same thing. Depending upon how it goes, Some Fucker may well be able to cash out at minimal overall expense – if not a small profit.

This bribery system creates a sustaining price for $DJT stock independent of its theoretical value (Truth Social), based on its true value (bribery). In turn, this allows Mr. Trump – and those who bribed him already by investing in his farce of a social media network originally – to cash out over time without crashing the trading price. Once he and his first-round-funder bribes are out completely – once he’s sold all his stock – he doesn’t have to care anymore, its only value will be Truth Social, and it can go to zero.

This – like most things Trump does – is a scam. Like many scams, it is explicitly illegal. It is not a stock market hack; it is illegal market manipulation. This is why Mr. Trump has to be president and to have had his way with Project 2025’s personalisation of the bureaucracy. That way, no one will be allowed to investigate it, or even question it.

Preventing this is, obviously, critical – particularly with that broad presidential immunity ruling, which his stacked court will expand as much as is necessary to cover him. If you want that ruling narrowed, you want Harris in office immediately, because wow will they start hacking it back if she’s in charge.

But if he’s in office, the dictatorial sky will be the limit.

Explain this to your family and friends. Truth Social should be at zero; it has absolutely no worth as a social media site, no users to speak of, and not even its own code base. (It runs a somewhat modified and old version of the Mastodon server, under the hood.) It’s without value.

But as a bribery conduit? It can work wonders, and have all kinds of value.

And that’s why it exists.

Let’s drive this thing to zero, folks.

60 days remain.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

The Biden Administration Pledges to Phase Out Coal Power Plants

I mean, West Virginia is going to elect a MAGAt senator to replace retiring Senator Manchin anyway, so politically, why not do the urgently necessary thing here? As massive changeovers go – and this is a massive technology changeover – 12 years is pretty reasonable, and the technology is absolutely there, so let’s goooooooooooo

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Let’s start with this, to begin with: the MAGAts want to crash the economy.

There’s no doubt whatever about it. The budget the Republicans passed and then largely disowned would do it, default would do it even better, and Trump signed onto to the idea himself, cheerleading from the side of chaos. He said years ago that riots and collapse are how you get real change, and he’s pushed for that before and is still pushing for it now.

The MAGAts want to crash the economy, and the Freedom Caucus has now said “pass our crash budget, or we’ll crash the economy even harder.”

Why?

For the 2024 elections, of course. When in power, loot; when out of power, sabotage. They know low-information voters blame the president for everything and anything, and they will run hard against whatever they themselves do, blaming him for it. It’s how they’ve worked for decades. I wish everyone knew this, but they don’t, but that’s not the point of this post anyway.

No, the point is what’s going to happen when they stick to their guns.

People have talked about the traditional Democratic legislative method of bypassing Republican economic hostage-taking with the debt ceiling, and they are working that right now. I doubt it’ll happen, and others do as well, which is why you’ve got all this 14th Amendment talk.

But I don’t think it matters, because the MAGAts think they can stop it, regardless, and get themselves at least a short-term default. I think they also think they can get themselves a long-term default, and I kind of hope that’s what they’re thinking, because they’re wrong.

The way they can absolutely get a short-term default is by calling for a no-confidence vote. They only need one (1) member of the caucus to call for the “motion to vacate the chair,” and they’ll only need four to keep that motion from being referred to committee. Then the motion is a privileged vote, which must happen immediately. If we get there, then those same four vote against him and he’s out.

At that point you have to pick a new Speaker, and we’re back to the hilarity of January this year, with recurring rounds of votes until someone new is selected Speaker. Until that happens no other business can be conducted.

Believe it or not, this is where things get complicated.

These guys may not understand that they only have this power until they use it. Once they actually use it, they’re done.

All it would take is four Democrats crossing over for this one vote to put Speaker McCarthy back in place. That’s all. And they could extract an extraordinary price for those votes – or a merely reasonable one, like the clean debt ceiling rise Republicans hand their own presidents without fail, and which Democrats hand Republican presidents again without fail.

Get the right rules changes in place, and McCarthy – who is, above all, hungry for the power of the Speakership – could get more Democratic votes than Freedom Caucus, and that would free McCarthy from the MAGAts entirely.

And that would be an awfully, awfully tasty piece of bait. Might even be worth working with a few Democrats to get it done, wouldn’t it?

(There’s a simpler solution that would take all of four Republicans crossing over the other direction, and suddenly oh look, it’s Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Democratic Speaker of the House. As hilarious as that would be, by the time we’re looking at that, we’re looking at serious global economic damage. I’m pretty confident we’re not going to get there.)

But what if they know all that? They’re evil and stupid, but not politically stupid. They have McCarthy where they want him already, so why would they burn that?

If they’re smart enough to know they get to remove a speaker once, but dumb enough to mean it when they say they’re sticking to their guns, then what they could do is launch a series of no-confidence votes with four people making sure it doesn’t get referred to committee, who them vote to keep him as speaker anyway before the next MAGAt in line calls for another no-confidence vote. They could cycle through their entire caucus doing that. If you get three votes a day with all unique members calling to vacate the chair once each, that’s 14 business days of delay, and all – I mean, all – eyes upon them.

And by that time, one hopes that even the lowest-of-information voters will go, “Wait. Who are these clowns again?” and go back to paying attention, just for the spectacle. And then they lose big in 2024.

Most or all of this is probably too much to ask. Maybe they’re just puffing up as big as they can for the weekend. But these people are seriously crazy and actually do want to crash the economy for the next Federal election, and that just might be too big, too shiny – and too blinding – a piece of candy for them to ignore.

Can they ignore it? Can they constrain themselves? I honestly don’t know.

But I do know that either way, it looks like we’re about to find out.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.