John Abbe

Healing within each of us, among us, & with the rest of the natural world.

Take sides, without making anyone wrong.

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[John Abbe @johnabbe]

DEAR ADVERTISTERS:

If I see you advertising here on Twitter while it is under its current management, I will go out of my way to avoid purchasing your products.

[Clare Hinchcliffe (Rogers) @Subversivite]

This Friday, 12 June, 4 young activists who broke into an Israeli weapons factory in Bristol - and were convicted of criminal damage - face sentencing AS TERRORISTS.

This is unprecedented in British legal history. We have to act now!

4 things you can do... 🧵

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

Hard to think of a greater honor than to be considered The Economist‘s intellectual enemy #1.

My work is “intellectual ballast” for the largest number of Americans since 1975 wanting government to “improve the standard of living” of the poor, cut their costs, raise their incomes and stop AI from wrecking society, they say. Dream of an endorsement. Thank you @TheEconomist!

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Florida paid a portable toilet company called Doodie Calls more than $92 million over six months to haul wastewater out of the Everglades. The state projected it would pay Doodie Calls $480 million over two years. For comparison, building a sewage treatment plant for a city of 10,000 people costs about $5 million.

That is one vendor. At one facility. Built in eight days on an Everglades airstrip using hurricane disaster funds because Ron DeSantis declared immigration a state of emergency in 2023 to access a $5 billion fund set aside for floods and hurricanes.

The facility costs between $1.2 million and $3 million per day to operate. A conservative estimate puts the annual per-capita cost at $500,000 per detainee. Florida spends $30,000 a year to house a convicted criminal in a state prison. The math on Alligator Alcatraz is not tougher than a prison. It is more than sixteen times more expensive.

Three quarters of the men held there have never been convicted of a crime. They are awaiting civil immigration proceedings. They are being held in kennels - cages with steel mesh sides, 16 bunks, three toilets, brightly lit 24 hours a day. Amnesty International documented what it called deliberate neglect designed to dehumanize, including credible allegations of men held in stress positions in direct sunlight without food or water for hours at a time.

Governor Braun opened the Speedway Slammer at an Indiana prison. The Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska. The Louisiana Lockup at Angola. The naming contest is ongoing. The cruelty is the point. The cost is someone else's problem. Florida's emergency fund has dwindled to $200 million. The facility cannot run to the end of the year.

The men in the cages are still there.

[Ollie Vargas @Ollie_Vargas_]

Bolivia's general strike against neoliberalism:

Workers in the Santa Cruz region have forced police & paramilitary forces to retreat after more than 4 hours of resistance on the highway in San Julián. The barricade blocking the road remains in place for now.

[Northwest Treaty Tribes @nwtreatytribes]

We’re thrilled to introduce the new and improved Rooted Futures platform, designed to illuminate pathways to careers working with natural resources. It won a Bridge-Builder Award for Equity at UW.

Check it out: https://t.co/Dbk2NTTAbf

[John Abbe @johnabbe]

I understand many are here because someone they care about or want to follow still has blogs only here.

But it's become inhumane.

Elon Musk saw the propaganda opportunity. And is so insecure, he was willing to lose billions of $$ just to inflate his tweets' numbers. 1/2

[John Abbe @johnabbe]

@margaridaeid1 @Lev_Lavan @TimesofIsrael Such accounts are only allowed here because this is now an open propaganda platform. There is no serious effort to make it a humane, or human place.

Elon Musk saw the propaganda opportunity. And is so insecure, he threw away billions of $$ just to inflate his tweets' numbers.

[Kal - Don't Trust. Confirm. @TruthJustis4USA]

@MikeLevin @AntiToxicPeople The Trump family is openly doing everything that Republicans spent four years falsely accusing the Biden’s of and on a scale that no one ever conceived or thought possible.

The silence from Republicans is deafing as the Trump’s use the presidency as a pin-less ATM.

[John Abbe @johnabbe]

@TruthJustis4USA @MikeLevin @AntiToxicPeople There was some there there with Hunter, but on a scale that doesn't even register in the context of the Trumps & surrounding grifters.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it.

More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil.

Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.

The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.

Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.

We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.

https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl

[Dark Road Games @dark_road_games]

Sometimes I forget how "normies" see the world. There are people out there that believe "consumers just decided to switch to streaming and give up physical media".
Youtube lost money for a decade before it made a profit.
Spotify lost money for 17 years.
None of this is accidental or organic. People didn't "choose" these systems. They outright rejected them for literally decades while these systems operated at a loss that made competition with them impossible, funded by people who wanted to change the world into what we have now. A system where you own nothing, consume whatever is offered on-demand and nothing else, and you have no privacy or anonymity.

Netflix killed Blockbuster with by-mail PHYSICAL MEDIA at a loss. The entire time they were eating Blockbuster's business they were losing money. After Blockbuster died, Netflix phased out physical media and I remember the severe backlash, but the choice was streaming or nothing. Still many (maybe most) people just cobbled together private collections from bargain bins and garage sales. Netflix continued to lose money....10 BILLION dollars of loses in the 2010s even after Blockbuster went out of business.

Understand the truth, that a cabal of global institutional investors funded companies that nobody wanted for literally decades at a cost of untold billions of dollars....until there was NOTHING ELSE LEFT for you to use.

[Andy Kim @AndyKimNJ]

Because of your voice on Delaney Hall, the Trump admin just released 18 yr old high school senior whose story I told. They released the pregnant women held inside. These releases show ICE isn’t targeting the violent criminals. ICE is feeling the pressure. Keep raising your voice.

[John Abbe @johnabbe]

@freedaaron @brian_callaci They're already hiring back, after ruining many people's lives unnecessarily. https://t.co/jjbhcchWP5

Universities who go big on this stuff will follow the same pattern. Except maybe the ones with unions strong enough to stand up to it.

[Labor Notes @labornotes]

“At the end of negotiations, these guys come up and say, ‘I’ve got a new respect for the union. I didn’t know this stuff was going on behind the scenes. I can see who’s trying to hold me down now—it’s not the union, it’s the company,’” Mikesell said. 2/2

[John Abbe @johnabbe]

@gladd1968 @ScottNover @literaryeric Okay, so Bilton was "cool" under pressure. Wasn't defensive about someone calling him & his boss out, okay? Didn't have a substantive response to that, but he has been in the presence of powerful people like Pelley before, okay? Not at all feeling intimidated.

Okay.

[John Abbe @johnabbe]

@JShellinsky @ShortSeller65 @ScottNover Right? And a moment's research would have made obvious what an ignorant comment that was. https://t.co/rzYfDcscwE

[Scott Nover @ScottNover]

One of many eye-popping exchanges between Scott Pelley and Nick Bilton in this morning’s meeting:

[The Institute for Ethics in AI @EthicsInAI]

🗣️ Senior Fellow of the Accelerator Fellowship Programme of the Institute for Ethics in AI, Ambassador Audrey Tang (@audreyt) will deliver an upcoming lecture on Friday, May 22, from 4.30pm to 5.30pm, hosted by the Oxford Global Society (@global_oxford) for Education and Research, exploring the relationship between software freedom, democracy and civic responsibility across generations.

The lecture, Good Enough Ancestor: Software Freedom as Civic Care Across Generations, will examine how open technologies and participatory digital infrastructures can help build more resilient, inclusive and democratic societies.

🔗 Learn more about the event: https://t.co/muvXE1lEfq

[平将明（たいらまさあき/Taira Masaaki） @TAIRAMASAAKI]

We have gained many insights from Taiwan's policies. On behalf of the Liberal Democratic Party, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for Audrey Tang's kind cooperation.

[John Abbe @johnabbe]

@MartinTruther @UnabomberMcduck (In other words, correlation doesn't cause research was only a headline.)

I've ignored Epoch Times since seeing one too many clickbait/trash stories. So, their money-laundering wasn't surprising. Part of the MAGA corruption. Not a source that has weight w me.

[John Abbe @johnabbe]

@MartinTruther @UnabomberMcduck I did a bunch of research, there were reasonable questions, I didn't see answers from the authors, I'm not going to recapitulate all of it with you in tiny chunks.

It's unconvincing. Moreso because there is no growing mass of citations of this paper, with confirming evidence.