President said he didn't like that they were sent back in military planes and regular planes would have been alright. Basically they tried to act the big man.Originally Posted by Spikey M
President said he didn't like that they were sent back in military planes and regular planes would have been alright. Basically they tried to act the big man.
1 insurrectionist down, god bless US police violence.
Another one just got a 17 year sentence for killing someone drunk driving.
It's like Final Destination.
I saw something about one being arrested for being a nonce as well.
If you're prepared to storm a top level government building without fear of repercussion then you're obviously tapped. Not surprising to see all this come out at all.
In the latest episode of "stop being so alarmist bro he won't actually do anything", Trump is turning Guantanamo bay into a concentration camp.
Isn't that what it has always been?
Arguably I suppose, but the increase from a current occupancy of around 15 (and a total of 780 people across it's more than 20 years existence) to an intended 30,000 immigrants is somewhat noteworthy.
The kind of density we need if we are to solve the housing crisis.
A few more years and you might be getting "offered" a free trip there yourself.
Considering how cold it's been this January, I might sign myself up.
Cuba is underrated.
Even the mainstreamers are now starting to get the message
Ireland, the world's largest corporate tax haven, the home of Trotskyite politics.
Somebody fetch Mrs Doyle.
If we can get that lot quaking in their comfortable little boots then things are going in the right direction. That radio show today is most likely the first time a good portion of the country will have heard anything other than everything is wonderful. Every day that goes by shows how important it was for the world that Trump won that election.
Cringe.
Oh go and finger your nose ring you ultra sap.
It's quite sweet how you've learned this one insult you really like and then get super overexcited at every opportunity you get to use it.
Yea. I can't possibly contain myself.
Obviously I'd rather Guantanamo Bay didn't become a concentration camp, to add to its heinous list of crimes already, but short of that, have I missed a meeting?
From what I can see Trump's instructed his border Tsar to round up and deport illegal immigrants, but (some) people seem to be reacting to it as if he were deporting all immigrants. Are these people seriously suggesting borders don't matter and it's fine that all of these people are there, even the ones who've committed multiple crimes?
Yes, but only because it's Trump doing it. It was fine when Obama was deporting illegals.
All this stuff is basically just Phonics on Arsenal.
Fuck me, the spin you put on things to suit your agenda is wearing a little thin.
The tariffs are hitting. Go on Donald my son.
Hasn't he delayed them?
Nah, happening.
He talks a lot of nonsense, but I have to say I am aligned with the DEI stuff. Create a fair , merit based process and the system will work fine.
Market didn’t respond well when the tariffs landed so I scooped up a lot of the blue chips (apple, Microsoft, nvidia).
Have been trading nvidia all week. That thing has been absolutely wild this week.
New strategy is focus on the “winners” as a blend to punting on losers.
I recommend everyone buy several pairs of crocs.
Gotta tell it how it is, he’s had a cracking start to the 2nd run at the gig.
The reason dei became a big thing is specifically because "a fair , merit based process" wasn't happening.
And we ended with an even less fair, less merit based process. Best part is the demographic that was supposed to be helped the most is doing worse by pretty much any metric you choose. At some point you have to admit that your plan doesn't work and move on.
For example the recent data on reading/writing. On average, slightly worse, with the top performers doing slightly better and the worst performers doing a lot worse. This after at least two decades of schools having as an only priority to help said worst performers at all costs. Turns out that letting them miss school and not turn in homework if they don't want to makes them perform worse. Nobody could have seen that coming.
God, you are annoying. Just a statistic driven process wanker.
Yes. Whilst I don't really agree with the quite aggressive US approach to such things [outside opinion, I don't really know] the idea that life is a meritocracy and fair and balanced for all so leave it alone is misguided at best, and more likely pernicious.
This whole FAA thing sounds like most sort of reasonably well-intentioned government initiatives which end up being hijacked by militant interest groups and thereby made a bit of a disaster.
Not that it had anything to do with a helicopter flying into a plane. Those are unrelated events.
The reason why 'the plan' doesn't work is that it misses the point for the most part. Society largely discriminates against the poor. As more and more of society become poor, more and more people will be on the end of this. The solution isn't to try to promote a small percentage of the growing poor into a higher and largely unobtainable social strata.
Last edited by niko_cee; 31-01-2025 at 10:12 PM.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mus...ay-2025-01-31/
Learn more aboutRefinitiv
My News
Exclusive: Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency, sources say
By Tim Reid
January 31, 20259:21 PM GMT+1Updated 2 hours ago
Item 1 of 2 The U.S. Office of Personnel Management building in Washington June 5, 2015. REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File Photo
[1/2]The U.S. Office of Personnel Management building in Washington June 5, 2015. REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
Musk aides restrict access to federal employee data systems
Musk's team works around the clock, installs sofa beds at OPM
Concerns include cybersecurity and lack of oversight
WASHINGTON, Jan 31 (Reuters) - Aides to Elon Musk charged with running the U.S. government human resources agency have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees, according to two agency officials.
Since taking office 11 days ago, President Donald Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
As President Trump stated yesterday, he is still committed to placing tariffs on Canada starting as early as tomorrow, possibly.
Musk, the billionaire Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab CEO and X owner tasked by Trump to slash the size of the 2.2 million-strong civilian government workforce, has moved swiftly to install allies at the agency known as the Office of Personnel Management.
The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue
The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.
"We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."
Advertisement · Scroll to continue
Officials affected by the move can still log on and access functions such as email but can no longer see the massive datasets that cover every facet of the federal workforce.
Musk, OPM, representatives of the new team, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
OPM has sent out memos that eschew the normal dry wording of government missives as it encourages civil servants to consider buyout offers to quit and take a vacation to a "dream destination."
Advertisement · Scroll to continue
Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said the actions inside OPM raised concerns about congressional oversight at the agency and how Trump and Musk view the federal bureaucracy.
"This makes it much harder for anyone outside Musk's inner circle at OPM to know what's going on," Moynihan said.
MUSK INFLUENCE
A team including current and former employees of Musk assumed command of OPM on Jan. 20, the day Trump took office. They have moved sofa beds onto the fifth floor of the agency's headquarters, which contains the director's office and can only be accessed with a security badge or a security escort, one of the OPM employees said.
The sofa beds have been installed so the team can work around the clock, the employee said.
Musk, a major donor to a famously demanding boss, installed beds at X for employees to enable them to work longer when in 2022 he took over the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter.
"It feels like a hostile takeover," the employee said.
The new appointees in charge of OPM have moved the agency's chief management officer, Katie Malague, out of her office and to a new office on a different floor, the officials said.
Malague did not respond to a request for comment.
David Lebryk, the top-ranking career U.S. Treasury Department official, is set to leave his post following a clash with allies of Musk after they asked for access to payment systems, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
The new team at OPM includes software engineers and Brian Bjelde, who joined Musk's SpaceX venture in 2003 as an avionics engineer before rising to become the company's vice president of human resources. Bjelde's role at OPM is that of a senior adviser.
The acting head of OPM, Charles Ezell, has been sending memos to the entire government workforce since Trump took office, including Tuesday's offering federal employees the chance to quit with eight months pay.
"No-one here knew that the memos were coming out. We are finding out about these memos the same time as the rest of the world," one of the officials said.
Among the group that now runs OPM is Amanda Scales, a former Musk employee, who is now OPM's chief of staff. In some memos sent out on Jan. 20 and Jan. 21 by Ezell, including one directing agencies to identify federal workers on probationary periods, agency heads were asked to email Scales at her OPM email address.
Another senior adviser is Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla and most recently a director at The Boring Company, Musk's tunnel-building operation in Las Vegas.
I think - although wrong on principle - you can get away with a degree of affirmative action when 1) the minority group is a relatively tiny fraction; and 2) the minority group is relatively coherent. Once you have a load of competing minority groups making up an ever-increasing part of the population is becomes more overtly one specific group paying to have its own opportunities reduced, and that obviously isn't going to be popular.
I think it's also really hard to guard against personal biases, especially in the recruitment process. You're essentially picking one applicant over another and the difference might be entirely on vibes. DEI sounds like a poor way to counter-balance that. If it needs balancing out at all.
Except that the ATC program had a test and if you passed it (and met the other requirements) you had a job. That was it.
EDIT: A job with a median salary of $140k and that you retired from in your fifties.
Last edited by Pepe; 31-01-2025 at 11:03 PM.
I think that, more importantly, affirmative action (which is most definitely not the same as DEI) needed an obvious 'majority advantaged group' to measure against. Whites vs blacks in the 60s worked well. Once some of the minorities started doing better than the whites despite no 'privilege' it all kinda fell apart.
It's still about whites vs blacks even if they have to pretend otherwise. Everything in that space is about people grasping for the vanished righteous glory of MLK and the 60s civil rights pioneers.
If he can stop this trans/paedo thing now too then it'll be a monster success of a term.
This is absolutely fucking crazy.
Any news on whether Musk aides have locked government workers out of computer systems at a US agency?
As it happens Jim I have some news for you here.
You can't stop that. It's driven by the internet and autism. Even if you get doctors halting them getting surgery, they can deliver some bathtub hormones online.
It'll never stop, because it's a legitimate dysphoria that has happened since atleast the days of Rome. The Internet- Social Media, as usual - has made it fashionable though. And like all fashion, it will eventually move on.
It's a bit like all the hand wringing over emo kids cutting themselves when we were young. What the adults / media at the time didn't understand is that the cuts were part of the emo uniform and they weren't self harming in the way most people cutting themselves are.
You cannot stop it, but he has made it so that any clinic that performs gender changing procedures to minors cannot take government money. Good move, in my opinion. Private clinics can still do whatever they want, of course, and if adult women want to chop their breasts then so be it.
As for that thing Kiko posted. Can someone explain the severity of it to me? Some government officials have temporarily (?) lost access to a database if I understand correctly. What's the evil scheme?
An unelected foreign tech oligarch with ties to the CCP and Vladimir Putin who does not have security clearance has not only been given access to sensitive data pertaining to every citizen in the USA, he's also been given the ability to lock out actual government officials from accessing it.
Yeah, but he's put a couple of sofa beds in as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/u...al-valley.html
Every day is like a greatest hits of the most moronic shit he could possibly do.Trump administration officials began releasing significant amounts of water from two dams in California’s Central Valley on Friday in a move that seemed intended to make a political point as President Trump continued to falsely blame the Los Angeles wildfires on water policies in the Democratic-run state.
The releases, as ordered, have sent water toward low-lying land in the Central Valley, and none of it will reach Southern California, water experts said. Nonetheless, President Trump said on Friday that the same action would have prevented the Los Angeles wildfires on the other side of mountain ranges over which that water has no way of traveling.
“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California,” President Trump posted on Friday on social media in an apparent reference to the dam releases. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”
Experts expressed dismay on Friday that releasing so much water now served little use for farmers, who typically have higher irrigation needs in the spring and summer months when agricultural fields are abundant.
He is a member of the government. Every single bureaucrat is unelected, so them having access to the database is equally bad, no?
He is a US citizen.
Does said database require a security clearance to be accessed? I don't think that it was mentioned in the thing posted.
It also doesn't say that it pertains to every citizen in the US, but to every government worker in the US.
Again, I don't understand what is going on, it could be VERY BAD, so if someone can explain properly before I panic that'd be great.
Doesn't Space X do government work? He presumably has some level of security clearance.
Otherwise yes foreigners shouldn't be trusted.
As I understand it, by the usual standards, he's not actually. His "appointment" should have been subject to a congressional review which it hasn't been. But Trump just does what he wants and there's no functioning safeguards left to stop him.
Pretty sure if Trump's proposed position on immigrants was actually accurately applied to Musk, his citizenship would be revoked because he previously worked illegally in the US.
Fair point. You would hope so. But on the subject, Musk's own lawyers had to tell him not to apply for higher security clearance because he'd almost certainly be refused and probably get the clearance he currently has through SpaceX revoked. He's not currently allowed inside his own SpaceX facilities when certain documents are present because he doesn't have sufficient clearance, lol.
I've read elsewhere that he's also obtained access to a payment system which includes details of all citizens, but even if it's only government employees, it's still insane.
Reply With Quote
