Reader J sent this pic from the Minneapolis anti-Tesla protest, complete with IncelCamino.
Protesters at the Tesla service center just outside of Minneapolis. Signs reading “Unplug Mad King Musk”, “This car runs on facsism”, “Who buys cars from a nazi?”, “Say no to doge”, “Don’t buy swasticars, BAD DOGE!”.
Keep the pics coming to [email protected].
I posted this on BlueSky yesterday but in case you didn’t see it, it’s a perspective that I hadn’t seen before:
“It seems to me, with Canadian farms, we are well protected against the worst effects of avian influenza,” he said. He says U.S. “agribusiness” has “no resemblance” to Canada’s egg farms, which have an average of 25,000 laying hens per farm.
In the U.S., farms run by mega-producers like Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms can have several million laying hens.
If a wild bird infected with avian flu lands on a farm and infects a hen, the whole flock has to be euthanized because the disease spreads so quickly. Avian flu has a 90 to 100 per cent mortality rate in chickens, and they usually die within 48 hours, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s an incredibly communicable disease. So it has become a really, really significant and problematic issue,” Muirhead said.
On a farm with six million birds, he says, killing them would eliminate about four million eggs per day from the market.
Needless to say “small family farms” don’t have millions of laying hens on them.
Here is the ad the Washington Post refused to run about Elon Musk this weekend.
And here is the ad the Post was happy to run by a rightwing group funded by Musk that smeared me in October.
I started Democracy Docket to be fiercely independent and prodemocracy. Check it out. www.democracydocket.com
— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) February 17, 2025 at 7:49 AM
Legacy media, and most social media with an “algorithm” (all but BlueSky) are all-in on Trump 2.0. The woman who posted that great TikTok (franchesca_leigh) that I embedded on Saturday got that video demonetized for some pretext, and Hope Walz got a strike for gentle pushback against a right wing commenter. No links because it’s a pain to do with TikTok.
In a bit of a rush this morning, open thread and hope you’ll get time to attend a protest today, and if you’re in the Phoenix area check out WaterGirl’s post below.
Kay
https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-doge-staffers-additional-names
Propublica did some actual work and turned up the names of the Musk bros who now have all your tax and personal information, to use as they see fit.
Oh, and they’re firing more FAA air traffic controllers so expect some more plane crashes. Don’t fly in US airspace if you can possibly avoid it. The billionaire regime has ruined the whole safety system.
Kay
If you’re subscribing to the NYTimes or tge WaPo you are bankrolling the far Right plutocrat take over of this country.
They capitulated. Immediately. They didn’t hold up for a damn MONTH.
Shitty, low quality industry with no core values.
BlueGuitarist
Hope it isn’t obnoxious for me to repost this comment from. the action roundup thread yesterday in reply to Bill Arnold mentioning Erica Chenoweth’s Why Civil Resistance Works:
re Chenoweth et al’s project
the Crowd Counting Consortium data:
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/RI9JFU
They have 2025 data including events scheduled thru 2/28.
Includes protests against Musk in DC and 42 events coded as organized by 50501 Movement.
For the latter they don’t have much detail (yet?)
source listed is generic instagram.
E.g., They’ve got Denver but not how many people, etc.
anyone who has been at a protest can improve the information available about protest actions, which can be a meaningful resource for other protests:
Link to submit a record for the Crowd Counting Consortium
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc3W_tb71fiEJhi379y0T6gttQ0f9nbb23bj8iicceLP_j8rQ/viewform
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Last Friday I drove up to starfish’s house to not fix a couple of leaky faucets (could not get the set screws loose w/o stripping them and yes, I know all kinds of tricks to do that, none of them worked so instead if was a tutorial in replacing fixtures).
On the way, I’m always picking out EVs and there was a Wankpanzer on I-25. I’m always curious as to who the driver is to see if it goes beyond the simplistic stereotypes many on the left make when talking about this. It’s akin to seeing an expensive, convertible and the driver is invariably some 50+ year old white guy. I’m sure everybody’s seen this particular stereotype many, many times over the years.
In this case, it was a white guy and a woman (don’t wanna assume spousal status) in their 60s. It’s probably the first time I’ve seen a woman in a Wankpanzer after many dozens of sightings.
I contrasted that with the other EVs because I’m a geek (did see a Blazer EV which is somewhat rare here) and occupants I spied enroute to Casa Starfish and back, at least the ones that don’t have heavily tinted windows. Yeah, still predominantly white because of where we are and the symbolic gentrification nature of EVs (their cost). But a younger demographic, definitely an appropriate representation of women occupants, etc.
Thus, the Wankpanzer, at least in the early days, has become simply the EV equivalent of the 2-door BMW convertible in terms of the driver. :)
TBone
It’s a RED LETTER DAY! Noah has FINALLY decided to start eating Fancy Feast all by himself!!!!
My sign is finished and I’m getting ready to tube supplement his caloric intake AND I might even have time to wear mascara and curl my hair today!
Protest photos from Lewisburg, PA on their way to you M.M. after we come in from the COLD (1:30pm). How do I raise my fist in a mitten hahahaha?!
ETA wind gusts up to 55mph
cmorenc
WTF is it with firing air traffic controllers, especially in the immediate wake of the collision at Washington National, caused in part by faulty air traffic control?
And how in fuck to Musk’s minions get to circumvent privacy restrictions on individual taxpayers’ tax returns? In pre-Jan 20/2025 world, only the IRS and possibly Justice Dept attorneys prosecuting tax fraud cases would have legitimate access, and the latter only after adequate probable cause was shown by IRS employees?
Ron
Mastodon and others like Pixelfed have no algorithm, won’t have ads, and can’t be purchased by a nazi billionaire. But Bluesky can have all those things tomorrow. Using bluesky is just setting up to repeat the Twitter mistake.
cmorenc
@Ron: Who/what is the current ownership of BlueSky? The vulnerability to be turned by a RW billionaire purchaser into another Twitter => X is dependent on the vulnerability of the current owners or controllers of BlueSky being either volutnarily bought out by an irresistibly tempting $$$ offer, or else forced out involuntarily by someone who has obtained irresistible leverage over it.
Betty Cracker
@Ron: My understanding is Bluesky is open source, so if an evil billionaire did buy it, people could decamp to Mastodon or whatever with their followers. That’s a major difference from Xitter. Also, Bsky has algorithms, but you can choose which ones to apply, including limiting what you see to people you follow. There’s not a clown owner who puts himself at the center of the app like Xitter. If someone like that did buy it, the cost of exit would be much lower, which also makes it less likely that a Musk-type clown will buy it.
FWIW, I tried Mastodon after Musk bought Twitter. My UX wasn’t great, so it didn’t stick. I know lots of people love it, and I’m glad it makes a good alternative for them, but it isn’t a great fit for everyone.
New Deal democrat
It occurred to me over the weekend that the mass firings by Musk and his J.V. broligarch trainees is simply what he did upon acquiring Twitter x1000: “move fast and break things.”
More specifically, “I can run this place on duct tape and baling wire with only 10% of the workforce.” And when something really does break, make an offer to hire some of the workers back.
This is the story of Chesterton’s fence on a massive scale. Sometimes assets are put in place to make sure nothing bad happens. A 20th century example for tree-lovers: in the 1940s, municipalities put aggressive sanitation programs in place to trim or cut down American Elms that were infected with Dutch Elm Disease. The result was that very few new trees were lost. But from the viewpoint of municipal budgeters, there was nothing visible to show from the programs. So they were cut. And Dutch Elm Disease ravaged the remaining elms. “Oh, oops, that’s why we did that.” But it was too late.
The American public (those capable of learning, anyway) are about to learn why all those federal employees were there.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@New Deal democrat:
It’s classic Edolph. Last year, he fired Tesla’s entire Supercharger team, every person. No reasons given even when they hired some of them back.
It was seen as sending a message to them as the head had been pushing back on something Edolph had been asking for, can’t remember what.
Steve LaBonne
@New Deal democrat: For some air travelers it will be the last thing they learn, in the final moments of their lives.
pat
I’m surprised no one has come up with these:
DOGE, Department of Gutting Everything
DOGE, Destruction of Government Efficiently
RedDirtGirl
I’m going to a rally at Union Square in Manhattan today. I’ll take photos.
Elizabelle
@pat: Those are good, especially the first.
Fuck Musk.
ArchTeryx
It’s at the point where the paper’s doing open message curating of their ads, at a time where newspapers are desperate for any ad revenue they can get, that they lose all plausible deniability for being in the tank for the nazis. At this point, WaPo and FTFNYT may as well be 1930s Der Spiegel and Der Stürmer, or Soviet-era Правда.
jonas
I’m old enough to remember when releasing one particular individual’s tax returns became a federal privacy case of historic proportions. Guess that’s all behind us now!
WTFGhost
Random thought:
Political Press Reporter (PPR): I am reporting the facts, and that must exclude that this is a huge, unprecedented power grab by the Trump administration.
InterestedObserver (IO): Wait – it sounds like you’re excluding the most important part – the part that makes it *important news*.
PPR: Well, because Republicans refuse to condemn Trump in large enough numbers, it’s a POLITICAL question. We shouldn’t be making the Democrats case for them – they should be making it for themselve.
IO: Sooo…. in its founding, a fierce, independent Democratic Party was supposed to protect us from tyranny? Not a fierce, independent press-or-equivalent?
PPR: Well, but when does it go from “reporting the truth” to “helping one side over the other”?
IO: *HOPEFULLY*, only when one side is clearly right, or so close you’re willing to bet your any journalist who reads you will agree, you might have been slanted, but for the right reasons, even if in the wrong direction, that time.
(
WTFGhost
@ArchTeryx: I agree. (Also, if I got lecture-y, in a past comment, apologies as needed and appropriate.)
Belafon
@Ron: Dear Ron,
Weak arguments. You can set up a bsky server if you want today. There’s also nothing preventing a major company from using a lot of resources to set up a Mastodon server that saves a lot of people time and headaches associated with the distributed nature of Mastodon. See Threads.
BlueGuitarist
@pat:
Dishonest
Odious
Grifter
Elon
Belafon
@WTFGhost:
IO: You’re supposed to pick democracy. If one party is in favor, then that’s not on you. If neither are in favor, you’re still supposed to pick democracy.
BlueGuitarist
@RedDirtGirl:
yay you!
If you can, send photos and/or info to crowd counting consortium at link in #
And of course to MM at the Gmail in OP
Kay
https://actionnetwork.org/events/we-are-the-union-reading-group-launch-with-e-blanc-k-kelly-m-mills?clear_id=true
I’m doing a reading group of We Are the Union thru the DSA, if anyone else is interested. The book isn’t released yet but you can pre-order.
Its about the Amazon and Starbucks organizing efforts.
Bupalos
@Kay: I definitely think putting media dollars to better effect wrt investigative journalism is a good idea. At the same time, we probably shouldn’t confuse nearly meaningless editorial content and framing that angers or pleases us with investigative journalism. I think WAPO and NYT still on balance land on the “more helpful than harmful” side because as far as they’ve fallen in editorial heft, they still are among the few entities in the United States doing investigative journalism.
But definitely we can do better than these findlandized/captured outlets. .
Hungry Joe
I hope this is my being overly cautious rather than out-and-out paranoid, but I’m going to leave as few hints as possible about who these actual individuals might be:
A close acquaintance works in communications for a nonprofit that coordinates closely with a certain Federal entity. For the last couple of weeks this acquaintance has been going through all of the nonprofit’s past press releases, pamphlets, articles, etc., and scrubbing them (online) of all references to DEI, race, gender, inclusion, etc., fearing that Musk’s crew will come across something and use it as an excuse to harass or fire the nonprofit’s Federal colleagues/friends.
ArchTeryx
@WTFGhost: Right now I’m saving ALL my grudges for the assholes wrecking the country and the people that voted for them. We all make mistakes on occasion. I’ve made some absolute whoppers. We cool. 🙂
Kelly
@New Deal democrat: I suspect “move fast and break things” is a corruption of the more useful “make better mistakes” motto.
Kelly
@jonas: Would be hilarious if the inept Musk minions accidently leave the orange felon’s tax returns on an unsecured server.
Tenar Arha
@mistermix
Franchesca has a merch shop, with some great Leopards based items, & an album. It’s .here
Nina
Lone tweeted yesterday about Social Security, claiming that his script kiddies found that there were over 394 million enrollees in Social Security with the death field set to ‘false’, including millions over age 100.
Because they don’t know enough about the data to realize that enrollee does not equal beneficiary. A newborn baby is an enrollee once they get a social security number. Lord willing they won’t be a beneficiary for quite a few years to come. A lot of people in early years and still today never filed for Social Security.
There is no national death registry, it’s all run by the states. Some states are better than others about sharing their data. If someone dies in a foreign country and they’re not getting a Social Security check, there’s no reason for SSA to get that death notification.
But the nuts are out there screaming a simple lie and nobody is able to break through and correct them with the slightly more complicated truth.
sab
@TBone: Congratulations!
MomSense
Disposal of chickens is an absolute nightmare. They cannot be burned. They have to be buried in a giant lined “pool” of chemicals because the decaying corpses create so much heat they can start massive fires. It’s like spent nuclear fuel rods plus hazardous waste. It is incredibly expensive to dispose of diseased birds at these big farms.
brantl
@pat: DOZE the Department of Zero Efficiency, (anti-woke,too).
BlueGuitarist
Colorado peeps, fyi
Political scientists Seth Masket and Kaitlyn Sims on why “Colorado is uniquely vulnerable to federal spending cuts”
https://www.denverpost.com/2025/02/14/federal-spending-cuts-colorado-tabor/?share=cde2rnatpi2tatpceewn
Sure Lurkalot
Via Aaron Rupar on BlueSky:
This guy is either being bribed, blackmailed or delusional and this is what half the country listens to on Fox every damn minute of every damn day. I will go to my grave never ever understanding this mass delusion. I truly hope what is happening in the US is horrifying to the rest of the world.
Steve LaBonne
As many have predicted, stifling flu vaccine information just as flu cases are soaring. And I don’t even want to think about what will happen if the avian flu virus mutates to become transmissible between humans.
Steve LaBonne
@Sure Lurkalot: They’re busy trying to stave off similar catastrophes in their own countries.
Scout211
The new DNC chair has a plan.
. . .
I’m glad he is “getting out of Washington” but I’m confused about the last part.
Did anyone see his appearance on Morning Joe this morning? How did he do?
Baud
@Scout211:
The last part is “It’s not you, it’s me” because that’s the only way to reach normie voters who are trained to look down on us.
JetsamPool
Department of Government Extinction
I look forward to the air traffic controllers getting replaced by AI. Or that soutpiel could just award himself a contract to develop AI for air traffic control, he could probably get more money that way.
Belafon
@JetsamPool: “Every crash is a valuable lesson in making the system better.”
Thor Heyerdahl
I was going to take a flight next week via Newark, but after all the FAA bullshit, I don’t want to deal with any flying in congested US airspace – so I have a United credit instead.
Also exploring how to move various email platforms off of Google and onto something else outside the US – probably Protonmail (Swiss).
David Collier-Brown
@Steve LaBonne: It doesn’t speak to per-state details, but the year-over-year graphs for Canada are very similar to the US ones, and can be used as a guide. For example Figure 3, “Percentage of tests positive for influenza in Canada for season 2024-2025 compared to previous seasons” is a good guide.
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/respiratory-virus-surveillance/influenza.html
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat:
It reminds me a little of Earl “Madman” Muntz’s philosophy of electronics design: he’d go around his engineers’ offices with wire clippers, and every so often he’d start clipping pieces out of an engineer’s prototype until it broke, then say “put that last one back in”.
But there was a method to Muntz’s madness. He was specializing in low-cost TVs that he’d sell to city people living near the transmitter, so they didn’t have to be that good at picking up a signal. So rock-bottom manufacturing costs were everything. And I think he knew better than to apply the same process to his org chart.
Lily
8 sec video of Union Square protest. Posted by Grace Lindsay (NYU prof, Psychology & Data Science)
https://bsky.app/profile/neurograce.bsky.social/post/3lifdsuk3bs25
Martin
One of the contradictions within the new admin is RFKs crusade against industrial ag (something I support) with trumps support for everything corporate.
I think a number of the US food supply problems are products of over consolidation among distributors and retailers, and these are the forces that drive up prices and force larger and larger farms. Many farmers themselves are inclined to do this but running an industrial farm is not like running a family farm and many just don’t want that job.
France’s dairy farms average 75 cows per herd. The US averages 2500. Not only is that a big difference in disease risk, it’s a big difference in terms of local jobs and the health of small/rural communities.
Matt McIrvin
I wanted to go to the demonstration at the State House in Boston today, but the horrible snow/rain/slush storm we had yesterday solidified into a real ice rink today, with temperatures in the 20s and bitter howling winds–it took a while to even get the sand truck to come through, and I’m still chipping ice off the driveway. The roads didn’t even get walkable in time for me to catch the commuter rail downtown.
While there are a lot of reasons, I think people asking “where were the mass demonstrations this time?” should consider that this has been, by recent globally-warmed standards, an unusually brutally cold and snowy January and February in the Eastern US, and also one hit by a massive flu epidemic (this has been the least bad COVID season since COVID arrived, but the seasonal flu is really bad, just laying people out for weeks). It’s hard to get people to do corporeal politics under these conditions.
Shalimar
On a careful-what-you-wish-for note, DOGE has discovered a great way to make sure the vast majority of federal employees hate Republicans if they didn’t already. Now we see how many federal employees will be left when they’re done fucking around.
TBone
@sab: thanks! I felt comfortable to leave him alone long enough to go protesting today. He didn’t do so well being left alone for that one hour because he feels weak and vulnerable with the very conspicuous bright blue neck bandage and tube sticking out (he shakes his head furiously all the time to display his displeasure with it, and lost the cap for the tube in so doing a few times, sending us on frantic hunts for it with spotlight flashlight under beds and through the kitty litter till I got wise and taped it in place). He was crouched on the hardwood floor under hubby’s bed when we got home, eyes wide in fear. He usually sleeps in his kitty bed under there so when he wasn’t in it, I knew he was askeered. Poor bugger! But he’s all settled in now, nestled in the crook of hubby’s arm sleeping peacefully again.
Will not leave him alone in the house again until we can get the bandage & tube situated better – they wrapped the bandage a bit too tightly on Friday and I’ve been fiddling with getting it loosened a bit for him every day.
Protest was AWESOME we had a pretty large crowd and many amazing signs and people! 🇺🇸
Sure Lurkalot
Question for the community…while bearing up on a total liquid diet following a procedure, I did my taxes this weekend to keep my mind off of starving to death. I’m due a rare refund, having practiced for years to prefer a reasonable amount owing as opposed to have the government be a savings vehicle or withhold money I’d rather be spending.
Should I efiile? Should I request direct deposit (I do have a checking account I opened for a specific purpose I’d be happy to close)?
Interested in everyone’s two cents, thanks.
Melancholy Jaques
@Kay:
Please add the LA Times to the list. Another billionaire owner who ordered his staff to be more pro-Trump.
jackmac
The only thing uglier than Elmo’s PanzerWagen is a dirty PanzerWagen as evidenced by the photo up top from today’s demonstration and observations here in the frigid Midwest.
Man, those so-called trucks are magnets for dirt, grime and road salt.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Oh the reason given for firing the Tesla supercharge team was one of Musk’s VPs dared tell Musk the team was vital to the future of Tesla.
There is no deep plan with Musk, he is just stoned out of his mind because he is rich everyone thinks he is genius, and not just Butthead with a line of credit.
Belafon
@Sure Lurkalot: I efiled and did direct deposit – through TurboTax – during the Puppy Bowl and received my refund ten days later.
BlueGuitarist
@Scout211:
PA state house has a 1 seat D majority.
Ds should hold this seat, Harris +16 (-0.3 from 2020).
Ken Martin, new DNC chair, will door knock with
D candidate Dan Goughnour
Captain of Detectives of McKeesport Police, member of Teamsters Local 205 (which represents several other western PA police departments) and is also an elected school board member.
Fair Economist
I have noticed that even as the factory farmed eggs disappear from my supermarket the paature raised eggs I buy (for ethical reasons) aren’t much affected, either in quantity or price. They do stay a bit pricier than the factory ones but I think that’s mostly competition and demand.
Ruckus
@New Deal democrat:
Another reason why we have all those employees is this country has a not unreasonably large, diverse population with a lot of different needs and desires. We have a fairly large segment of first or second generation folks living here, with not all of them having the same needs or desires. And because this country has a large land mass for its population there will be a number of differing views of everything. Not many places are as vertically oriented as NYC, many more are wide spread, like Los Angeles county with its 10 million citizens. This changes how things look in many ways. And we have a country with wildly varying populations. We have cities with a population of ONE and cities with populations of millions. This is a diverse nation. And I’ve traveled to 49 of the states and can absolutely guarantee that it’s not just numbers it’s wildly varying local customs and population sizes. That’s one thing that’s made this nation what it is. Basically it’s the melting pot of nationalities. My family goes back only 2 generations for some of its home countries not being here. 3 for the rest. And that is not all that unusual. (I am an old, and youngest of my immediate family. I am talking well over a century ago.
Ruckus
@Sure Lurkalot:
Given the current toilet of, sorry head, of the government and his puppet master, I’d give them no more information than I HAVE to.
Dan B
@Kelly: The difference between Twitter and the US Govt is “remodeling” Twitter is like tearing out some interior walls in a house. The US Govt is like the foundation of a massive skyscraper. “Breaking” it threatens collapse. No one’s life is threatened by destroying Twitter.
Quinerly
@Scout211:
I listened to his appearance on MJ. I thought he did very well. I was impressed.
Had not been impressed with what I seen of him until listening to him this AM.