Tom Cross 🇨🇦🇺🇸

@decius.bsky.social

810 Followers 2020 Following

Republics are systems that require people to compromise with each-other.

The letter is too long for alt-text. It seems clear that this country's future will be darker than it's recent past. What is the point of writing you? I'm honestly not sure. Maybe I'll get a carefully written form letter back representing a collective position of the Senator's office, and it may or may not relate to what I've written here. As a citizen I am, in part, personally responsible for these sentences - they were issued by a system that structurally represents me. I want my dissent to be noted. Perhaps it is like yelling into a tsunami. If we were better people we would have a better country.
Suppose that you had approached an economist in 1840, when most Americans were farmers, and textiles dominated the still small manufacturing sector, and informed him that 150 years later some two percent of the labor force would grow all the food and less than one percent produce all the cloth. And suppose you had demanded that he explain what everyone else would do for a living. He could not have given a very good answer, but he could with justice have argued on general principles that the economy would find a something useful for them to do. (Global glut advocates tend to focus in particular on the loss of jobs in manufacturing and find it hard to imagine that the service sector could make up for that loss. Yet we have already seen how it can be done, since the U.S. economy is already overwhelmingly a service, rather than goods, economy. As a Russian émigré‚ neighbor put it, “I don’t understand this country—it seems very prosperous, but I don’t ever see anybody making anything.”)
The search for truth is an essential element of democracy, which is itself a means of contributing to the common good. When questions about what is true lose their appeal, and a pragmatism takes hold that is content with what appears useful or effective, then democratic life is weakened. After all, democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole. Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism.
A screenshot of a post on X which says: Islamic Cyber Resistance Axis @Mhwear98 Translated from Arabic The Islamic Cyber Resistance #313_Team executed a massive attack targeting the Bluesky platform's API application programming interface—Bluesky is a social networking site—where the attack led to the disruption of post visibility and other malfunctions, including the shutdown of the app's registration panel. This means that the social networking site is now completely collapsed and unresponsive.
My weekend was brightened by this tree, standing in a vacant lot in downtown Atlanta - a life carved within a temporary space, under constant threat, but lived beautifully. A source of joy. One day, some developer with build on this lot, and the tree will be gone. I am thankful for this moment.
It is customary to look on Dunkirk as a series of days. Actually, it should be regarded as a series of crises. Each crisis was solved, only to be replaced by another, with the pattern repeated again and again. It was the collective refusal of men to be discouraged by this relentless sequence that is important.
According to CREW, such an order is necessary because—despite Mr. Musk’s insistence that all USDS’s actions are “maximally transparent” and that he doesn’t “know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization,” Elon Musk Appears With Trump And Tries to Claim ‘Doge’ Team Is Transparent, Guardian (Feb. 11, 2025), https://www. Case 1:25-cv-00511-CRC Document 18 Filed 03/10/25 Page 35 of 37 36 the guardian. com/us-news/2025/feb/11/elon-musk-trump-doge—USDS personnel “are not operating transparently and may well be ignoring their preservation obligations under the FRA.” Mot. for PI at 39. CREW points first to USDS’s use of non-governmental systems to conduct official business. For instance, USDS employees acknowledged using Signal, an encrypted messaging app with an auto-delete function, during the presidential transition period and into the new administration, as recently as February 27. Schleifer & Ngo, supra; Patterson, supra. Musk has also used the social media platform X to solicit job applications for USDS and to poll the public about courses of action that USDS is considering. Kate Conger, Elon Musk’s X Becomes Weapon in Government Cost Cutting, N.Y. Times (Feb. 4, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com /2025/02/04/technology/elon-musk-x-doge.html. CREW also notes reports that USDS employees have refused to identify themselves when requested to do so by career officials, further suggesting that the agency is operating with unusual secrecy. Sarah Cahalan et al., The People Carrying Out Musk’s Plans at DOGE, N.Y. Times (Mar. 6, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/27/us/politics/doge-stafflist.html. Indeed, Musk tweeted that a poster who published the names of USDS employees “committed a crime.” Peter Suciu, supra. USDS also allegedly installed an “illegally connected server” at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s headquarters to store personally identifiable information about executive branch employees.
JD Vance retweeting Adrian Vermeule, who argues that courts cannot interfere with acts of state.
We got three Republicans to vote with us, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell. We needed a fourth, and we were unable to get it because the Trump MAGA machine is powerful. They are aggressive. They are nasty. They issue death threats. They threaten people. They threaten them with retaliation. They have really gotten under the skin of a lot of Republicans who are unfortunately now unwilling to stand up to Trump, which is highly problematic.
Elon Musk: There will be consequences for those who pushed foreign interference hoaxes. The Hammer of Justice is coming.