Letter to Schumer

 Senator,

It is very apparent that the DNC leadership has absolutely no idea how to react to the current political situation, including such areas as:

 - How to keep VA and SNAP vets like myself secure and stress-free

 - How to communicate with young voters

 - How to get re-elected with so many potential voters abstaining

 - How to continue being 50% of the reason there are only 2 political parties in the US, one more than North Korea.

 - How to have Bernie and AOC be "our" answer to President Musk

 - How old, centrist politicians need to step aside and make room for younger progressive representatives.

 - How to make confirming all of Pres Musk's cabinet look good

 - How to keep getting donations from corporations that Pres Musk hasn't bought yet.

 - How to placate residents of NY 21st that don't have a representative, but apparently still has an office in DC that we're paying for.

Instead of replying with some generic form letter, how about having you and your staff come up with something a bit more creative so I can bring it to my Twitch community online. The DNC is complacent in the creation of this dumpster fire, and the NY State Democratic Party should feel the wrath of Teddy Roosevelt. This entire corrupt neo-capitalist house of cards is about to come down on all of us,

Thank you very much for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Reaction to Jefferies

Referring to this Brian Tyler Cohen interview with House Minority Leader Jefferies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc4o58Yw238

I just got to the place where Leader Jeffries read off a list of places that don't exist in rural areas...in his state. I was an election inspector for the first time this past Nov. One of the themes of the night was neighbors meeting neighbors for the first time. The town has no retail (not even a place to get a coffee), no community or senior center, no library, and a town hall that's only open 4 days/week.

There is an active church, with a school that the town "donated" to it. I recently found out that it would make a great community center if it wasn't full of asbestos and didn't need a new heating system, new windows, and insulation. My conversation with the pastor included it being a long time before there will be any grant money available to do anything about it. One could see an opportunity to take advantage of potential future reduced regulations, but a Christian Church is involved. This is NY, not Trumplandia. People are distracted and disconnected from community, and there are no other options without a 40 minute drive. Most people are being distracted by corporate media of all sorts. Neo-liberalism is when corporations are in competition to attempt to provide benefits once provided by communities working together. Corporate media has us separated into groups that do similar things different and different things similar...or something. They may do one thing particularly good, but that's it. There are no venues to actually organize and share information safely and effectively without corporate distractions. There's no money in creating totally new platforms without having to to start with. There is no true public space, only those co-opted by corporate media of one sort or another. Trump's first administration showed so many cracks...none of which were fixed that I know of in the last 4 years, just bolstering the status quo. We've been kicking cans down some dark places that aren't roads or streets that are lit. There's a lot of work to be done if this experiment is going to continue in any democratic way, shape, or form, and we will need a way for everyone involved (We The People) to see what is going on and make suggestions on the way forward. Get out there, take a walk, and meet your neighbors. That's all some of us have without getting into a car. We're gonna need all the love, compassion, and cooperation we can get.

Effyew voting, take-two

One of the biggest problem I see is that Tim Walz and the rest of the Uniparty, the part that thinks they won by some "mandate", don't get that everyone else...the registered voters that didn't vote and the voters that under-voted and wrote-in. THAT is the majority; the one that is not allowed access to debates and funding due to regulations set by the Uniparty. We spoke bigtime, and we aren't organized enough (leftist online media infighting) to be heard by the obsolete corporate media...yet.  Organizing, building local communities, letter campaigns to representatives...we have access to so many tools that we've been too distracted to use. Let start building some class solidarity and weaponize our distraction 

That was the comment I made (you don't need to go here)  in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jyTrWroRlY
At about 10:20, Tim Walz does his "loosing is hard" speech. It's also where he "other-sided" Dems.

When Trump won the first time, I said there were a lot of "F-You voters", especially around Bernie.  This time, the "F-You voters"  "voted" a little harder. Now we wait to see who gets the sweatiest first.

My Letter to Rep Paul Tonko 6 Nov 2024

I sent this the day after the 2024 election, to my outgoing-via-gerrymander US Rep. I'd have to totally rewrite thing to my old/new/neither Rep Elise Stefanik, and then, I'll probably have to wait till after the special election. Send it with a cover letter to all of the potential candidate for the NY 21st? 

 Representative Tonko,

I'm a 58 year old USAF Vet on VA Healthcare and SNAP, living on about $500/mo in the Town of Day.  I am concerned about how my life is going to change under the upcoming Trump Administration and your role in your next term.

I am present to how obsolete the Democratic Party is in general, how the NY Democratic Party is an unbearable behemoth that is dragging the working class down, how Americans have been lied to by the Corporate Media, and my experiences being an Election Inspector last night.

Communities are being steam-rolled by both corporate political parties, and along with "The Distraction Industrial Complex", civic discourse in local communities is stifled. I would be interested in knowing what the plan is for the Democratic Party now, what your part in it will be, how those actions will affect me, and your role as a community leader in developing community civic discourse.

This is looking like a bad reality TV show. Polls over Prolls. Under-votes and write-ins should be a call-to-action, as well as the disastrous results in NYC, and I feel the political duopoly is going to destroy the Constitution that I took to protect, the same oath you swore to.  I'm an educated autistic human being in a country with practically no health care, let alone mental health care for which Donald Trump is a prime poster-child for. The status quo game the DNC has perpetualized needs to be canceled if the Working Class, not the fictional "middle class" of this country, is to prosper.

The impacts of this are deep. I would like to participate in some kind of community action that doesn't exist yet. We've been too distracted and too busy figuring out how to get by living from paycheck to paycheck, to create it. What would you suggest on how to proceed? A form-letter response is insufficient, and would like to see town hall meetings within the next 30 days. A little more about myself: I'm an amateur radio operator, active in RACES, ARES, building community communications infrastructures, and I fix computers for the locals as well as a couple organizations and small businesses. I'm a person of service living in an economy that encourages the capitalization of labor over community service. I've managed to mask my autism to be able to function as a contribution without feeling too much like "The Enemy Within", and it pains me to think that society values being able to buy cheap imported distractions more than it values human beings like me.

Corporate Politics is partially to blame, and it is time we are shown what's behind the curtain. ACTBlue has my info, and I've made political contributions, but I'm not willing to elevate my financial position to be able to contribute enough to anyone's never-ending re-election campaign to be heard. The next administration isn't going to free-up any more cash for me to make any contributions. This action is my only access to civic discourse, and it's tiring.

I suppose "Congratulations" are in order. I'll bet there may be some soul-searching. That may be projection on my part. This non-binary brain apparently works differently. There certainly is here. I'm not looking forward to uncomfortable family gatherings, made even more uncomfortable by people thinking their only action to change is violence, as that is what we see in the media. WWE is more interesting than TEDTalks.

What are we going to do now, Mr. Tonko? Have a great day, and remember to breathe.

Sincerely,

(signed)

P.S. I am an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church, and I chose a salutation based on that. I notice that there are no options for choosing to not have or use such titles, especially gendered ones. That annoys me. Sorry...autism, and being a non-binary human.   

A Thought Sent to the VP

I just did "share your thoughts with the vice president" at the whitehouse.gov/contact/vicepresident/ page and sent something like this:

"You're a little busy these days, so I'll keep this concise. Lina Khan is standing powerfully to protect everyday Americans from un-regulated, mis-regulated, and de-regulated corporations. This USAF veteran naively thought they were serving their country, yet the "corporate persons", responsible for their ability to gouge consumers and sell it off as "inflation", are under no obligation to do so. Please support Lina Khan's commitment to integrity and accountability by including her in your upcoming administration. Thank you for you time, and We're Not Going Back!"

Twitch, Discord, and Bark Eater Studios

This is mostly a launch announcement. I've been collaborating with some folks on Discord and Twitch to do what we love doing,:c help people, including ourselves, stream and get paid to do it. My effort is at https://www.twitch.tv/barkeaterj, where my bio is something like:

"A healthy dose of DIY (tech, gardening, music, braining, & more) with a bit of news, politics, spirituality, & general stream-of-consciousness, from an over-50 veteran, dichotomy destroyer & enby living in the Adirondack State Park in NY, bringing you the construction of a safe space for creators. "

I'll be streaming a lot of what I do, not just talk about stuff other people said. There'll be guests, too! Some may be over amateur radio! But the idea is to get things done while sharing and learning, and contributions are greatly appreciated.  Being able to hire another set of hands to actually build stuff would be great, even if it is only a few hours a week. The amount of sweat equity available is amazing!

Alas this is winter, certainly not the time to build much anything more complicated than a fire. So this is when we figure out how to play with Twitch, how to connect with other with it and discord, how to stream, and how to make it part of building what is happening here. 

If you are interested in any aspect of streaming on twitch or youtube, let me know and we'll go from there!

Aloha!

Community Wireless Networks

(from the Draft pile)

Senator Lieberman's proposed "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010, S.3480" http://is.gd/cUM8E is basically a government controlled internet "kill switch". Granted, it may not shut off the entire internet, but anything critical enough to be "at risk" shouldn't be accessible via the public internet as we know it. I would think that large internet-based corporations will have enough pull (and security savvy) to keep their business models running. With "Net Neutrality" also being an issue, its about time that us technically savvy geeks start roughing-out a decentralized substitute.

Decentralization seems to be the most resilient way to do most things, including commerce, energy, food, and governance. The internet seems to be the greatest distraction since TV, and it can really shine as an enabler of decentralization. Any useful internet-based decentralization effort needs to happen on a decentralized internet.

The ability to support HD video isn't nearly as important as the services I've outlined in my "Community in a Box" wiki at http://www.openideaproject.org/Projects/OIPeople/CommunityInaBox and such things as the Mesh Potato project at http://www.villagetelco.org/2008/06/the-origin-of-the-mesh-potato/.

There are probably enough older, flashable wifi routers around to start building-out basic community networks. Add some cantennas http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/cantennahowto.html recycled solar panels or home-made wind turbines, and gel cell batteries (or potatoes http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/06/20/22907/potato-battery/) Such units could be placed just about anywhere, small-ish UPSs could even be used if nodes are located at locations with access to AC power.

A collaborative, Commercial Free wifi mesh network could connect people, their objects, and their skills, with others that are interested in them.