Tim Oren

Idaho-based Silicon Valley retiree. Gardener, firearms instructor, number cruncher, wiseass.

[Angela Morabito @AngelaLMorabito]

These are classes in a Master's in Education program

We are so cooked

[TheLastRefuge @TheLastRefuge2]

1. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Prior to January 2018, open discussion of the FISA Court was technically not allowed. Legally forbidden because everything around this issue was considered "classified" and a "national security interest."

[Marky Mark @MarkyMa11373784]

@pmarca I saved this for a rainy day. Today is that day

[MaggieWise ⭐️⭐️⭐️ @maggiewise111]

⚠️ THE MOST SINISTER ACT OF OUR ERA:
-On December 29, 2012 President Barack Obama Obama signed HR 4310 ,the 2013 national defense authorization act.
-Section 1078 of the bill authorizes the use of PROPAGANDA inside the US, which had previously been banned since 1948 when the Smith-Mundt Act was passed

[America First Legal @America1stLegal]

DEI DEFEATED🚨

AFL challenged a Biden-era DEI framework embedded in a federal kidney transplant program. 

The Trump Administration just dismantled it.

No American should ever be denied a transplant because of their race.

[Bill Gaffney @YogiGaffney]

We screwed this up in Idaho. Our legislative leadership let the house pass the 287g bill and then buried it in the senate. Idaho is not a conservative state.

[Rod D. Martin @RodDMartin]

🧵New Orleans just proved failing schools can be fixed at scale.

It became America’s first all-charter school district.

The results are staggering:

• 99th percentile nationally in reading growth
• 98th percentile in math growth
• The only state in America beating pre-pandemic levels in both subjects

This is what real reform looks like. THREAD 🧵

[Tim Oren @TimOren54]

@Jules33355 @BaronDestructo One of my favorite light / humorous SF books.

[AnechoicMedia @AnechoicMedia_]

There's a kind of soft professional conspiracy in America to hide from view the underclass that consumes most of the time and resources of public systems with their senseless, self-inflicted problems, particularly in healthcare.

In the social media era, you'd think it would be easy for gossip to spread about lowlifes, medical conditions, and social problems that healthcare workers encounter every day. This has been effectively suppressed by extreme interpretation of patient privacy laws against worker's speech.

Healthcare workers are frequently seen on social media complaining about the policy of silence that is drilled into them, and its implication for keeping certain topics out of public discussion. A recurring type of video is a worker saying "there are things we see, kinds of people we deal with, that would be so shocking or unknown to the general public, and everyone else with this job knows what I'm talking about, and everyone also knows the extreme degree we're told not to talk about it, or we get fired".

These workers are often grateful for fictional shows like The Pitt, which have managed to sneak through a liberal moral filter a frank depiction of the sorts of generally unsympathetic underclass whose self-destructive behavior consumes extreme quantities of hospital labor, who are told not to speak of it.

Concern for patient privacy has been elevated to a solemn vow of secrecy to not permit outsiders to know any aspect of the job that involves a patient. No law literally permits describing encounters in nonspecific terms ("I had a patient who ____"), but there is a general prohibition against identifying patients, even accidentally with descriptions of rare diseases. Since the scope of things that could hypothetically be used as clues to de-anonymize someone is ambiguous, organizations are advised to defensively adopt broad prohibitions on mentioning any aspect of any patient care, even if it's to describe common, decidedly not individual issues.

Even when speech is not illegal, healthcare workers are usually at-will employees and swiftly terminated when social media brings negative attention. HIPAA training material makes effectively no distinction between illegal social media posts and those that merely damage employers' reputation. As the purpose of compliance is to represent the employer's interests, a legal threat gets imbued into a broadly construed social media policy prohibiting any negative speech about the job. Preventing staff from "venting" is a frequently mentioned target of enforcement.

Zealous activists police social media to rat out dissenters who express negative sentiment about patient encounters. A doctor on TikTok recently got some attention for being fired, after he had described how there are some procedures in his job he finds disgusting and hard to do (going through stool samples). A single person takes offense -> looks up employer -> "we've received a complaint" -> instant termination, vague allusion to policy violation.

The language of "making people feel unsafe/unwelcome" has been employed by activists who leverage organizations' hyper-sensitivity to civil rights concerns, which elevate personal discomfort or shame into something that feels official and litigious. They treat it as presumptively illegal for a doctor to be anything other than fully supportive of the patient's decisions, or to criticize any behaviors publicly.

In contrast, you see this censorship less in education, because teachers have more labor protections around being fired for personal speech, and they don't have this threat of criminal prosecution drilled into them in trainings. So teachers are on social media reading redacted/reworded emails from stupid parents, or sharing stories about misbehaving kids, which fuels an ongoing conversation about how bad the kids are these days, or how negligent the parents are.

[Peter Bernegger @PeterBernegger]

Most people have no idea what President Trump’s new election-mail Executive Order USPS rule actually does.

1. Plain English: it creates a chain-of-custody system for mail ballot envelopes in federal elections.

2. Not the vote, the envelope.

3. Under the proposed USPS rule, states using mail-in or absentee ballots for federal elections would have to use standardized ballot envelopes:

-Official Election Mail logo
-Automation-compatible design
-Unique Intelligent Mail barcode
-USPS review of envelope/barcode placement

4. That means the ballot envelope becomes trackable.

5. States or election mailers would also submit key data through a USPS portal:

-Voter name
-Voter address
-Outbound envelope barcode
-Return envelope barcode
-Originating election office state

6. So officials can know: this ballot envelope was sent out, and this return envelope came back.

7. USPS would review outbound ballot mail before accepting it.

-Is it in the right envelope?
-Does it have the proper barcode?
-Is it going to someone enrolled on that state’s mail-
ballot participation list?

8. If not, the mailing goes back to the election mailer to fix.

9. The broader Executive Order also directs DHS + SSA to help create State Citizenship Lists using federal citizenship, naturalization, SSA, SAVE, and related data.

10. Those lists go to state election officials before federal elections.

11. Important: states still run voter registration. The federal list does not register anyone by itself.

12. Bottom line: this is not “tracking your vote.”

13. It tracks the envelope, creates a sent-vs-returned audit trail, helps flag discrepancies, preserves ballot-envelope records, and leaves states responsible for their voter rolls.

14. Chain of custody is not suppression. It is basic election accountability.

15. I used “proposed rule” because USPS has not finalized the rule yet.

16. The proposal says it applies to general, special, and runoff federal elections, not primaries or UOCAVA military/overseas ballots, and it requires unique barcodes on outbound and return envelopes.

17. The rule would require voter name/address plus outbound and return envelope barcode data through a USPS portal, with updates allowed until the last day ballots may be mailed under state law.

18. It also says USPS does not alter voter eligibility or manage state voter rolls.

19. The EO separately directs DHS/SSA to create State Citizenship Lists and directs DOJ enforcement and five-year preservation of participation records, excluding cast ballots.

20. There is one more thing it does, all I'll say is, watch out ballot mills. 😎

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

This is real engineering

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

The reason the 2nd Amendment has done virtually nothing to halt the endless march of Progressivism is the same reason Libertarianism hasn’t.

Political enemies don’t show up one day and publicly announce themselves as criminals who are hell-bent on acting outside the rules. They show up and quietly capture institutions and rewrite the rules so that their takeover appears to simply be the logical consequence of the system playing itself out fairly.

And all the while, they moralize their way to monopolizing power and operate as a single political collectivity while simultaneously demanding that their enemies treat them as “just individuals” operating freely inside the rules they’re busy manipulating.

What this eventually produces is total defeat for the gun-wielding libertarians, because their own ideology refusing to recognize that politics always operates on a group level, not an individual one.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

The level of betrayal that has played out here is insane.

Normally, labor scarcity is how an economy heals itself. When workers become harder to find, employers have to raise wages to deal with it, and out of this market slowdown the seeds of a new boom would be sowed as young people have greater purchasing power to buy a home, get married, and have kids of their own.

But instead of allowing that correction to happen, America chose a different model. We’ve mass imported millions of replacements to suppress wages, blowing out asset prices in the process and leaving native Americans economically (and increasingly culturally and politically) dispossessed in their own country.

[Tim Oren @TimOren54]

Number of registered voters per district - each gets one Senator and two Reps: 1 33440 2 39672 3 37752 4 29123 5 32614 6 31762 7 30885 8 27896 9 15575 10 39161 11 20310 12 25759 13 24933 14 39169 15 28400 16 27639 17 26991 18 28155 19 38081 20 31927 21 30075 22 34209 23 42350 24 26612 25 22200 26 17270 27 21770 28 28850 29 23904 30 25083 31 39836 32 26875 33 23509 34 21160 35 31873

[Tim Oren @TimOren54]

My final post of the 2026 primary season is up @gemstatechron : I discuss a little known reality of Idaho politics - the power of your vote differs depending on your legislative district. A short 🧵follows.
https://t.co/CyRGiWuBZ6

[Gem State Chronicle @gemstatechron]

Analyst Tim Oren is back with his final look at the 2026 legislative primary, with a look at Idaho's "dirty little electoral secret":

@TimOren54

https://t.co/2TWX1F51Hx

[Tim Oren @TimOren54]

@gemstatechron What kind of equal representation is this? Illegals are both burdening our citizens and being used to increase the power of districts dominated by BigAg. Idaho needs to revisit its reapportionment policies before 2030!

[Tim Oren @TimOren54]

@gemstatechron So now we have District 2 with 39672 registered voters, and District 9 with only 15575, according to Secretary of State figures from the primary. That amounts to 2.5 times the influence on Idaho policy for the district 9 voter.

[Tim Oren @TimOren54]

@gemstatechron The 2020 legislative reapportionment was based on equal population count by the U.S. Census. But that count was padded with non-citizens, and Idaho has had massive in-migration since.

[Theo Wold @RealTheoWold]

Americans didn't get due process when the Biden admin flooded our country with illegal aliens, but leftists now want a million layers of due process to remove illegal aliens from our nation.