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One of the biggest mistakes people on both right and left make (or try to push their opponents into making) is turning any political discussion into an Either/Or choice: "Don't let them concentrate on bringing the Republicans to justice! They need to focus on social programs!" "These people need to be held accountable, or there won't BE any social programs!" etc. etc., etc.

There's a hundred Senators and several hundred Representatives. They can absolutely address MULTIPLE THINGS AT ONCE. That is, indeed, the PURPOSE of a government of a major country -- the country has to do many things at the same time.

So we absolutely CAN bring Trump, his family, his cronies to account for their crimes, AND we can start strengthening the social safety net, AND we can help Ukraine and let Putin go hang, AND we can admit we f'd up and stop the war in Iran, AND we can take away the psychotic tariffs, AND we can start dismantling the grotesquely overfunded ICE, AND we can restore environmental and worker protections, AND many more things that need to be done.

We can do this ALL AT THE SAME TIME, because there's actually a lot of people in the government and there's particular DIVISIONS of government set up to handle different tasks so that the government can in fact do all the things it has to do every day.

This is not an either/or situation. This is a "We have a lot to do, and we have to do it all" situation.

Posted this on Facebook, but figured I'd put it here too:

I see a lot of people basically saying "Hey, now that we won, let's not argue internally or fight the Party leadership."

That is the dead-wrong lesson to take from this. The Blue Tsunami had nothing to do with "we love all the Democrats", and everything to do with "Jesus, we're sick and tired of watching these guys screw our country over".

A lot of voters were still holding their noses as they pulled the lever for various Democrats. They pulled the lever, but that didn't mean they were voting for *that particular person*. They were voting *against* the most corrupt and evil administration this country has ever seen, at least in living memory.

This is EXACTLY the time to clean house -- to take out of power the Democrats who still keep thinking that you can "work with" the Republicans, that we need to "go slow" or "not be focused on revenge".

It's not revenge: it's just retribution that Trump and his cronies have been ducking all along, retribution for theft on an absolutely incredible scale, for treasonous work against Congress and the entire American people, for incompetence and grifting that boggles the mind.

Holding those people accountable isn't a *bargaining chip*. There's no bargains to be made here. And Democrats who lead the party cannot start thinking there are.

It's time to FIX the country, which means universal healthcare, which means restoring union and environmental and worker protections, which means rebuilding our destroyed goodwill...

AND which means directly trying and properly penalizing every single person involved in Trump's grifts, in Epstein's island of horrors, in all the criminal, immoral, and self-aggrandizing acts perpetrated by this administration and the Republican party at large, as aided and abetted by the Heritage Foundation and its associates.

It means restoring and enlarging the social safety net, removing the cap on earnings for Social Security conributions, finding a way for the productivity of the country to be returned in reasonable part to the general population instead of an increasingly small handful of wealthy corporations, and generally fighting the effective oligarchy that's been messing up the world for short-term paper profits. It means working WITH other countries to see what we can do to keep our planet livable and comfortable for humanity and for all the other species that we share this unique world with.

And it means bringing the hammer down on the people that were dismantling all of this in favor of themselves and their friends.

The time for polite disagreement is long past; we tried the "let's heal now" approach after the Civil War, and we're STILL paying for that; indeed, there's a lot of reason to trace much of our current trouble back to that. These guys STARTED another civil war and hoped that the fact it didn't involve armies shooting at each other (yet) that no one would notice. They need to face the consequences of all their actions.

I'm going to try to do an LJ-cut for this long-winded post, but there's some detailed formatting in this post and I've seen that this sometimes screws up the cut process. If it doesn't work, my apologies.

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Yet another talk about AI...

( And not the last, probably... )

This came from a discussion on FB, and deserved more writing than I could do there...

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So TL;DR is this: Yes, I'm foregoing all the potential pleasure of all the things I want to see and still spending a lot of money on living artists and editors, because this technology is neither morally constructed, nor controlled by people who intend it to enrich anyone other than themselves.

Posted this on FB, but figured it goes here as well.

( see the context! )

My employer made it clear that I was going to have to make use of AI, specifically ChatGPT 5.5, in the course of my duties. I did express my philosophical objections, but in this case sticking to my ideals, while far preferable, was not an affordable position for my family.

Having been forced into this position, therefore, I have chosen not to be an ass and drag my feet, but have focused on learning this new toolset and understanding what it does and does not do. The advantage of this is that now I can speak from a point of view of some experience, rather than merely theoretical understanding of these systems’ operations.

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I managed to stop doing this for quite a while, but car repairs and other issues around the house (today added to by my washer deciding not to work) have taken big bites out of the money supposed to keep us in this house. So once more, I'm doing a GoFundMe to help bail us out. I hate to do it, especially when so many other people are also coming up short every month, but I have to try.

At almost 64 with my peculiar background, getting new jobs that pay better is nigh-impossible, though I keep looking.

Anything anyone can give will be appreciated. Thanks.

... or as close to it as makes no difference.
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This of course links back to my detailed discussion of Project 2025, but the point of this post is to summarize the ENTIRE PROJECT in a few basic principles, which in turn show why it WORKED -- aside from the fact that the Heritage Foundation and others put decades of work into trying to prepare the ground.

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I'm not sure how to get out of this, but it's important to realize that the entire course of events was really built on approaches so simple and yet opposed to our system that the system had no way to properly respond.

Another problem...

( .... a more serious discussion than some... )

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I have to remember to put in cuts so I don't post walls of text.

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(while I've been writing this it's also become clear to me that there would be a major problem with current AIs whether or not they were actually sentient/sapient and I suppose I should write that one soon to make sure I don't forget, because it has a big bearing on all the reported "the AI lied/tried to escape/blackmailed" events and how that kind of thing is bloody inevitable because of the way the things are trained. But that's a different post)

Elon Musk made a statement recently that was very interesting, and even in concept true:
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One of the common tactics in debates-- on both right and left sides -- is to point out some inconsistency on someone's stance with respect to their actual behavior.

This is sometimes absolutely valid -- if someone claims to support one thing but then clearly is doing the opposite, this is certainly an indication that they aren't serious about their initial claim (or possibly they're flat-out lying).

However, in many cases, especially larger political or economic stances, the very facts of existence and the rules and requirements of society and one's business within it puts people in a position where it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to avoid participating in various activities that may in specific elements contradict your personal stances or preference.

I, for instance, am against exploiting and mistreating workers. This means I have a LOT of dislike for many large corporations, if not all of them, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and so on and so forth. Yet I'm sitting here typing on a machine that was undoubtedly to one degree or another made by underpaid, mistreated workers. My books are on Amazon, and if I want them to have any chance of selling halfway decently they had BETTER be there because that's the biggest single market for books anywhere, making up the vast majority of ebook sales and a huge chunk of physical book sales.

Similarly, someone can be a full-on Taxation is Theft libertarian, but if you have a family and the only support you can get to keep them going is Social Security, then you bloody well take it, because you have a much more direct and personal responsibility to keep your family safe and fed than you do being a purist.

Politicians are in some ways more subject to this than anyone else. You may sincerely, like Bernie and AOC, want to fight against the entrenched elitism in the society, to address global warming and other environmental concerns, and believe firmly in reining in spending on various areas while increasing spending in others that you believe will help the most people. But in order to do that job, you have to talk WITH the elites -- civilly -- and maybe even concede something in one area in order to get something you think is more important. You have to go to meetings with other politicians and such that may be widely separated but close in time -- and so, like everyone else in your business, you will be getting in a jet and flying there when you'd pollute much less if you went by car or train. You will even likely prefer to take a charter rather than a standard commercial jet because you can get a lot more work done, and done privately, on the way.

None of these mean that the beliefs are insincerely held. They mean that even if you want to fight the system, you're still IN the system, and unless you're already at the point where you can step outside of it -- so rich and powerful that you need not accommodate anyone else -- you will have to do what the system requires even while you're trying to change it.

You can use the system to support you while fighting it, and indeed, for almost everyone, you HAVE to.

This is true of, say, celebrities who are trying to promote social or political change. The fact is that their power to change anything is directly dependent on the wealth and exposure OF being a celebrity -- and so the common "gotcha" of "if you were serious you'd have given away all YOUR money" is directly ignoring the fact that in our society, that would mean giving up the strongest lever you have to try to affect change.

In that situation, we're all apparent hypocrites by necessity.

The important thing is to avoid DELIBERATE and OPTIONAL hypocrisy -- when one reasonably can. That's where you see whether people actually believe what they say.

... is HOLD EVERYONE ACCOUNTABLE for this absolute disaster that has been foisted on the world.

Every single perpetrator involved in the Epstein trafficking network needs to be arrested, tried, and if convicted put away for a long, long time. (I do not support the death penalty for a number of reasons, but if I did...) This is first in my list because it's absolutely GOBSMACKING to me that this hasn't already brought down dozens if not hundreds of people. It should, and it must.

Trump and his entire administration need to be impeached (if possible after the midterms) or arrested afterwards, tried, and if convicted also put away for life. These people haven't just screwed the USA, they've hurt most of the world -- even our supposed allies AND our supposed enemies -- in inexcusable ways.

Elon Musk and his DOGE boys need to be brought up on charges of data theft and espionage, at the least, for their vandalizing and thieving ways in their illegal "DOGE" activities. (Musk also probably needs a lot of treatment for bad drug use)

A large number of those in Congress need to be investigated for their activities that have supported the criminal President and his people.

The Supreme Court Justices who've been clearly working against the very CONCEPT of justice need to be impeached and kicked out of office and then put on trial for corruption.

It's hard to FATHOM the degree and extent to which the current administration and its people have corrupted and damaged our institutions, and ALL of that needs to be fixed.

We need to re-instate AND make more clear and powerful the regulations that prevent companies from casually damaging our environment.

We need to revoke any Trump-derived licenses to exploit our national forests and parks and monuments and re-establish the protections on those invaluable resources.

We must strip away all of the Evangelical-inspired changes to our health, education, and general welfare supporting agencies.

We need to do all this, and a lot more -- while, as I posted earlier, also GOING BEYOND -- PLUS ULTRA! to make the USA a GOOD place to live, and not a Bad Example for the rest of the world.

Behind the cut...

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We need to explicitly, in law, make it clear that ANY organization -- commercial, nonprofit, government -- has its FIRST responsibility to the people and region in which it exists. Its SECOND responsibility is to its CUSTOMERS -- the specific people or organizations that its products or services will be used by. Its THIRD responsibility is to its WORKERS -- the employees who do all the work. (I'm not sure if that shouldn't be the second, but I think this is the best setup). The FOURTH responsibility, then, is when we reach the investors, the stockholders.

There are currently data centers being planned which will take up a vast amount of the water and energy resources of the area they'll be built in -- enough to seriously impact the hundreds of thousands of people living in the area, making such resources more scarce, and more expensive, perhaps even seriously restricted in availability. THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN. This should be ILLEGAL. A company that wants to build something with so great an impact should FIRST have to demonstrate how they will INCREASE the carrying capacity of the region -- how they will generate more power, how they can bring in more water, etc. -- without damaging the environment OR putting the burden of their operations on the general populace. Expenses of a company should be ON the company.

There are many companies whose employees often require public assistance just to survive. This, ALSO, should NEVER happen. A company whose employees take X billion dollars in public assistance should have to pay that X billion dollars straight back to the government. Plus a penalty for making people jump through hoops just to live (see "Basic Human Value" below).

*Universal healthcare. Every other civilized country on Earth has this. Yes, you can find horror stories of waits or mistreatment or whatever for all of those countries, but -- no surprise here -- you can find worse ones in job lots HERE. I can tell you some of ours, and ours haven't been nearly as bad as many other people have experienced. In actuality, people in comparable countries with universal healthcare are paying less for better care and are healthier. The USA's life expectancy is LOWER than that of most of the first world, because most of us are afraid to go to the doctor unless we're deathly ill or in some kind of major accident. This will NOT result in "unpaid doctors" -- the bloated healthcare costs in the USA are almost entirely due to the parasitic insurance industry. The taxes I'd have to pay for additional universal healthcare would be TRIVIAL compared to what I currently have to pay just to insure me and my wife (fortunately, NYS has programs that have generally covered my kids). You could (and probably should) double nurses' and doctors' salaries and STILL drastically reduce the costs of healthcare here. While NOT reducing the quality -- likely improving it.

*Universal bodily autonomy. The sad thing is that this is an assumed fact in a LOT of law. It's just that there are specific areas that a relatively small, but very vocal, group of people keep insisting that bodily autonomy shouldn't apply to, and of course most of this gets put on women and other minority groups. The right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy is one of the most obvious, but this issue also applies to trans people, and also to the general ... well, shocking APATHY that seems to apply to the abuse of women and girls in general. The basic principle needs to be explicitly and universally written into law so that there's literally no BASIS for people to deny others control over their own body.

*Universal Human Value. We have this stated in various documents, in different ways, most obviously in the Declaration of Independence ("...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..."), but the LAW has been rather patchwork about this, and because of that an awful lot of people suffer who shouldn't.

Specifically, we need to directly, and forcibly in law, recognize that EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING has these rights that we declare above, and that these are not PASSIVE rights, but ACTIVE ones. Every human being has the right to live. Every human being as the right to liberty. Every human being has the right to be able to pursue their own happiness. AND THIS MEANS EVERY HUMAN BEING MUST HAVE THE RESOURCES TO MEET THESE RIGHTS.

There is no "right to life" if your ability to LIVE is at the mercy of someone else. If you have the right to life, you have the RIGHT to eat. You have the RIGHT to be sheltered from bad weather. You have the RIGHT to healthcare to keep you from dying or suffering.

There is no "right to liberty" if your existence is so constrained that you literally have no choice but to spend all of your time surviving. There is no liberty in a grinding bare existence. You have the RIGHT to a life that gives you choices beyond "suffer and live" and "suffer and die".

There is no "right to the pursuit of happiness" if you have neither time nor resources to apply to the pursuit. You have the right to a life that allows you leisure, that allows you pleasure, that allows you, in short, to LIVE FULLY as a human being. Happiness ITSELF cannot be guaranteed -- that's partly due to our own natures and choices -- but there's a big difference between existing hand-to-mouth and actually LIVING in a way that might give you a chance to be happy.

*Explicit separation of religions and government. We've had too much trouble from having to argue whether that provision is actually in the Constitution; it needs to be put in specifically. This includes not merely eliminating the use of religion as a justification or framework for how government should act, but also explicitly eliminating any assumptions that any one religion is superior inherently to any other and therefore able to be used as a tool to oppress others. The Heritage Foundation and their apocalyptic Evangelical associates have made it clear that this is a necessary change.

It is absolutely possible for us to ACHIEVE ALL OF THIS, and not in decades. And we need to be TRYING to achieve it, and a number of other goals, from this very moment onward, not talking about maybe, someday, after we've slowly dragged things back to the very unsatisfactory way they used to be ten or fifteen years ago.

We need to follow Mamdani's example, and work on changing things at the local and state, as well as the Federal, level. Local social support programs can be invaluable; my own Rensselaer County has a number of services that help a lot of people maintain their basic living dignity. This isn't something that HAS to be dumped entirely on the Federal government. It is something that can, and should, be supported from the local through county through state level up to the Federal level.

Yes, of course, there's a lot more to write on all of the above, and a lot more to write on other important subjects we need to address, but I think for now that's more than enough to chew on!

A cut for length...

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Realized I hadn't cut this and it's long, so I add a cut ...

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Because it’s even more relevant now than it was a year ago, I post the link to my detailed review/commentary on the blueprint the current administration is following in its quest to destroy the country.

http://grandcentralarena.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Ryk-Spoor-Project-2025-Commentary.pdf