iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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public health guy @publichealthguy1.bsky.social · 2h

a high ranking official (probably miller, blanche, or vance) is openly admitting this is a fishing expedition in national news. they just can't help themselves

The investigation is seeking information to see where it leads, the
source said. For example, if records, representations related to age
and immigration status contain false information, that would
provide material for investigators to scrutinize further. They could
also examine communications related to such matters.

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Civilization @greeniteration.bsky.social · 6h

the Billionaire Coup is protecting Billionaires

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 6h

DOGE had a lasting effect in stripping out principled agency leadership who refused to go along with illegal and unethical actions. IRS leadership *today* is still hollowed out. Lewis gives a view from the inside about what those decisions to exit felt like. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/blockers-a...

After the call, Julie, the IRS privacy lawyer, came straight to her office. Julie was usually ice-calm – someone who kept her wits about her. She hadn’t a trace of drama in her. But now Julie was not calm. Kathleen, after that call I’m not working on this thing, she said. I’m not coming in tomorrow. I might not come in Monday. I might not come in ever again.

“I don’t usually deal with life or death stuff,” said Kathleen. “But this was life or death stuff. At that moment I knew I had to quit. Either that or I’m going to get fired, because I can’t facilitate something that will break the law and is going to hurt people. We all have boundaries. That was my boundary.”

That weekend, Kathleen sent Melanie a note saying she’d be resigning. “I didn’t need to tell her why,” said Kathleen. “She knew why.” She’d be leaving just weeks before her 20th anniversary with the agency. If she’d waited until mid-May, she would have been able to retire and receive benefits for the rest of her life. But she didn’t want to retire. Federal law made it hard for a retired civil servant to return, and if the day ever came when the IRS was rebuilt, she wanted to be able to return.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 6h

The IRS is a great example of where DOGE undermined the core mission: in this case, collecting revenues. It cut 1 in 4 employees, and 1 in 3 of audit specialists. Thats creates revenue losses. It also made it harder for IRS to collect the $66 billion in annual revenues from undocumented immigrants.

If DOGE was interested in cutting the deficit, as it claimed, it would not have engaged in illegal data sharing of immigrants’ identities because doing so has the entirely predictable effect of discouraging immigrants from paying taxes. If DOGE was a white nationalist organization, it would not care about those lost revenues. It did not care about those lost revenues.

Now the Trump administration wants to add a citizenship question to tax returns (and to the Census) to drive those immigrants underground and say goodbye to billions.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 7h

DOGErs were told they were breaking the law but that did not stop them. Kliger pushed the illegal sharing of IRS data with ICE. After his time in DOGE, he was hired by the DOD as - wait for it - Chief Data Officer. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/blockers-a...

DOGErs were told about this law, but did not care. Kliger called a staff meeting to tell IRS veterans that “Every agency has a superpower. The IRS’s superpower is data.”

Everyone in the agency knew that its data was valuable. That was the reason for the strict laws that prevented it from being exploited for profit or political gain. “He said this in a way that he expected everyone to clap when he was done,” said Kathleen. “No one said a word.” The people around the table – a group that included a woman who had worked at the IRS for 54 years, or 53 years and 50 weeks longer than Gavin Kliger – looked down, or away. Kathleen felt embarrassed for Gavin Kliger. But now it was clear what the meeting was about. Gavin wanted, in his words, “to explore how we can share our data with other agencies”. Interestingly, he never once mentioned Ice or DHS. Instead, that week, he sought to share data with himself, by trying to access files detailing IRS contracts with outside consultants that also contained taxpayer information. Kathleen denied him access.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h

Lewis details some of what we already knew about DOGE, such as the fact that they told civil servants to fire employees by lying about their performance. Many refused to go along with the lie, knowing that it would cost them their job.

Again, this was not a one off. As I wrote last year:
HR officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration resigned after they became frustrated at being forced to tell employees, falsely, that they were being fired for performance reasons.
The absurdity of the situation was underlined when a Small Business Administration hire was
told they were fired for poor performance, despite not yet having worked a single day in the agency.
Other employees were fired despite receiving only excellent performance evaluations. It is one thing to lie to the public about what bureaucrats do— and Musk has been doing plenty of that-but there is something deeply amoral about lying directly to individual human beings about their performance.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h

One DOGEr, Gavin Kliger, enabled the handover of IRS data on immigrants to DOGE. Kliger had an anti-immigrant right wing edgelord profile online. For DOGE, he was also shutting down agencies, killing life-saving grants, and firing federal employees. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/blockers-a...

Gavin Kliger turned up at IRS on February 13 demanding agency credentials and access to data. Kliger was at the forefront of DOGE’s crippling of multiple agencies.

He wrote the email telling USAID employees to stop coming into work.

The 25 year old was told his private stock portfolios limited him from working at CFPB, the consumer watchdog, and he needed to divest. He refused but led an attempt to fire 90% of staff. One member of the CFPB Reduction in Force team swore that: “He kept the team up for 36 hours straight to ensure that the notices would go out yesterday…Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough…calling them incompetent.”

He oversaw the cutting of climate grants by USDA.

He was assigned to American General Media, the parent company of Voice of America, shortly before almost all employees on leave.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 17h

New from me: Michael Lewis provides a timely reminder that even the heroic federal employees who tried to block DOGE grifters could only do so much. If DOGE could not be stopped at the time, accountability must be on the agenda for the future. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/blockers-a...

donmoynihan.substack.com

Blockers and Grifters

What Michael Lewis Reveals About DOGE’s War on Civil Servants

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Jordan Howard @jordanahoward.bsky.social · 6h

Point 2 is so imp for me. SCOTUS has weaponized standing. Congress can absolutely sue the Executive for not enforcing its laws.

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(°○°) @rarecryptid.bsky.social · 19h

Minor potentate so charmed by a mechanical bird whose movement and song is so lifelike that they demand the bird or else have a tradesperson executed is a beautiful story thst echoes through time.

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Jamison Foser @jamisonfoser.bsky.social · 19h

just some impartial "observers" offering their genuine thoughts

But the revelation has also prompted criticism from some observers questioning why Talarico's campaign did not provide similarly verifiable evidence earlier before an unsubstantiated theory about his whereabouts mushroomed across social media and was amplified by prominent conservatives.

"In October of an election year, every day and every hour count as candidates do everything they can to meet with voters. So, if you are out of commission for any extent of time, it's easy for voters to wonder what's going on," GOP strategist Mark Bednar told Fox News Digital.

"That being said, if there's a simple explanation like an illness, it's even easier to just prove that outright to voters. If the flu was really the case with Talarico, it's mind-numbing malpractice that his campaign didn't quickly and easily demonstrate that."

Washington Free Beacon investigative reporter Chuck Ross pointed to the Times report Monday, writing on X that the footage "could have been released a week ago and quashed the rumors."

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Jamison Foser @jamisonfoser.bsky.social · 19h

"the real scandal here is that Talarico's campaign didn't move quickly enough to refute the lies our allies were spreading about him" is some weapons-grade bullshit

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 19h

Troy Jackson to Susan Collins: "In light of the article last week from ProPublica, I'm shocked that you're up here talking about fraud, because there's only one person up here that's been accused of that by the FBI."

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🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 @golikehellmachine.com · 20h

maybe his son-in-law should get a fucking job that isn’t shilling nazi supplements

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🎃GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE🎃 @golikehellmachine.com · 20h

collins is worth tens of millions of dollars, if his daughter and son-in-law feel like they’ve been forgotten, maybe collins should reconsider how he approaches his responsibilities as a father

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Like I would at least strongly consider that to be a possibility! Trump has ordered people to be killed before. He had motive to kill his former criminal associate Jeffrey Epstein. He had the means, as the guy at the head of the federal government which had direct jurisdiction over Epstein's jail.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

I don't have any proof that Trump ordered Jeffrey Epstein to be strangled to death in his cell but idk there sure is a lot of fucking fishy shit in the official story! Cameras turned off, missing minutes of footage, a strange shape seen on one of the cameras that was on, guards asleep etc

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Among the elite media, there is a consensus that Trump is committing illegal extrajudicial murders of random Latin American guys in boats all the time, but if you say he might have also committed an extrajudicial murder of Jeffrey Epstein, the idea is treated like saying he rode a unicorn.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

why does the media repeatedly demand Abdul El-Sayed answer for everything Hasan Piker says because of the time they did an event together, but not demand every Republican candidate answer for stuff Elon Musk, the largest GOP donor in '24 and '26, says?

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Timothy Burke @bubbaprog.xyz · 13/10/2026

1. There is no such thing as a "false rumor." The word for that is a HOAX. 2. The headline misses the entire point of the hoax, which is not that he was in Ohio, but that he was in a mental health facility! are there any adults left at the new york times

Republicans Promoted a False Rumor
That James Talarico Was in Ohio
The Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas spent nine days off the
trail with what he and his campaign said was a bad case of the flu. His
opponents fueled rumors, including one that spread widely before it
was debunked.
By Bayliss Wagner
Oct. 12, 2026
After James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas,
spent more than a week with no campaign appearances because of
what he and his aides described as a bad case of the flu, a false rumor
circulated by conservatives exploded online.
By Sunday, a post on X claiming that Mr. Talarico had been at a mental
health facility in Ohio a story promoted by Republican allies of Mr.
Talarico's opponent, Ken Paxton - had been viewed millions of times.
Then the Ohio facility took the remarkable step of publicly announcing
on Sunday night that Mr. Talarico had in fact never been treated there.
"I've never even been to Ohio," Mr. Talarico, who returned to the
campaign trail on Friday, wrote in a post sharing the center's
statement. He called the theory "the craziest thing I've ever heard" in
an interview with MS NOW.
The New York Times reviewed time-stamped images from a security
camera at Mr. Talarico's home, which were provided by his campaign on
the condition they not be published for security reasons. The images
showed Mr. Talarico around the exterior of the home and at its
entrances between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8.

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molly mary o'brien @missmollymary.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

after a long day, i asked chris if enough clothes were in the washer to justify starting a load of laundry; i was the kind of tired where u immediately forget the words u just spoke. 5 min later he said "are you aware you pointed at the washing machine and said, 'is it ok to get the party started'"?

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Tony Fischer @tonyfischer.bsky.social · 13/10/2026

Law as an academic program is definitely bs; legal history in a history department would be fine though.

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Tony Fischer @tonyfischer.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

When "My system gets overwhelmed and instantaneously short-circuits…” I start biting sandwiches.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

The Omar story today and the Talarcio story yesterday are the same story of rat-fucking your opponents before an election. Except now the government does it, out in the open.

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

This is simply not generating either the volume or tone of scandal coverage that effectively ended Joe Biden's presidency when he was unable to produce a surgically-clean implementation of Donald Trump's totally unplanned & poorly timed withdrawal from Afghanistan: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Not only should brooks and others shut up. But Ossoff is the best example in the country of a Democrat playing dominance politics and using it to control the whole terms of his race.

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Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 11/10/2026

The anti-anti-Trump movement has been as damaging to he country as the pro-Trump movement. The basic idea of the anti-anti-Trump faction is that they themselves criticize Trump sometimes, but any political or legal figure who tries to stop Trump is always going too far or not doing it the right way.

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Coach Finstock @coachfinstock.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

The President sent a mob to the Capitol to have people killed when he lost the election and then he let all those psychos out of prison. This is entirely the fault of MAGA and the media who didn't report on this shit honestly. The end

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☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

This is also of course a consumer and supply slide driven media belief. axios does not want for readers on their ratfucking stories

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☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

The basic mechanism that enabled Russian interference to be effective in the us is the same mechanism that made 2024 about Harris as unserious policy who, did she fuck her way to the top? Is she black? while trump ethnic cleansing promise gets 1% the coverage

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☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

worst thing about russian interference discourse is people talk about it the same way the dumbest leftist talks about cia ops. The discourse is either mind control or there is no interference instead of mostly tossing gasoline on a burning fire and hack & leaks.

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Sanho Tree @sanho.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

As of October 1, New Yorkers can file a complaint against businesses that make it hard to cancel your subscription.💪

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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 11/10/2026

Cancelling a subscription shouldn't be this hard. If you can sign up with a click, you must be able to cancel with one. Head to nyc.gov/click-to-cancel to file a complaint against any business that makes it hard to cancel a subscription.

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James Hell Brooks @kleinman.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

After the midterms a bunch of tech freaks are going to tell us that really they consider themselves moderates and guess what they want the next president to be Gavin Newsom

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James Hell Brooks @kleinman.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

The 2028 case for this guy is that he sucks on everything but brought kneepads to Davos

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Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Yep, no question. Let's recall that those arguing that 2024 heralded a multiracial working class realignment were expressly using that to argue that Dems had become too liberal on cultural issues and immigration. There will never be any reckoning for any of it.

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Tony Fischer @tonyfischer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

I wouldn’t characterize 2022 as a “throw the bastards out” cycle. The Dems would have kept the House if the New York and California state Democratic Parties ever acted as partisan or politically competent as the Texas or Florida state Republican Parties.

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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 10/10/2026

If I built an AI lab and it went rogue and deleted all student loan information, I'm betting they'd suddenly figure out how to prosecute me.

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bjkeefe @bjkeefe.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Cold hard numbers, well-presented in a short essay. Here's a piece:

As we approach the two-year mark since Donald Trump’s second election victory, it’s a good time to do a little economic scorekeeping. Before getting into where the economy is and where it’s going, it’s worth a little reminder of where it was before the election.

This is important because Trump and the Republicans continuously spew utter nonsense about an economic disaster that only exists in their imagination. By literally every standard measure, the economy was doing extremely well just before the election. The unemployment rate was hovering near 4.0%, and nominal wages were growing at roughly a 4.0% annual rate.

Inflation had slowed sharply, with the year-over-year rate at 2.6% in October of 2024. This translated into real wage growth of close to 1.5%. Inflation was expected to continue to slow, with most projections having inflation coming in very close to the Fed’s 2.0% target by the end of 2025.

There had been a massive surge in the number of people able to work from home as a result of the pandemic, with that figure still being close to 20% by the end of 2024. These people were saving hundreds of hours a year in commuting time and thousands of dollars annually in commuting-related costs. There also had been an unprecedented explosion in factory construction, with real spending in 2024 more than double the pre-pandemic level in 2019.

Growth for the year was 2.5%, and it was expected to be above 2.0% for the near future. This story was the basis for The Economist’s famous cover story about the U.S. economy: The Envy of the World.
Trump Takes Over: The Story Darkens

Virtually without exception, the data have gotten worse under Trump. Inflation has risen; nominal wage growth has slowed. Factory construction has plummeted. The

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Tony Fischer @tonyfischer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Any idea what percentage of that “savings glut” during COVID was used to pay down debt?

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

He used his IRA account to buy private paypal shares below their value at like $0.001 per share, staying under the $2000 annual contribution limit AND making his taxable income less than the $110k IRA restriction. You, a regular person, cannot do this

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Peter Thiel is about to turn 59 and a half this year, so he’ll be able to withdraw his more than $5 billion in capital gains tax free because he legally gamed the Roth IRA system. Superrich just have different rules. Propublica’s 2021 report: www.propublica.org/article/lord...

propublica.org

Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank

Roth IRAs were intended to help average working Americans save, but IRS records show Thiel and other ultrawealthy investors have used them to amass vast untaxed fortunes.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

the reason the media doesn't cover this for what it clearly is is because they like Trump and they want to help him rule us. Especially as we approach an election that could be a generational wipeout for Rs they will double down on attempting to help him

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Their scheme is to cheat and steal the election from us and then enslave us — take away our freedoms and make us work for them.

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Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Indeed, Trump himself has 34 felony convictions and was facing a further 92 felony charges... but nothing is going to happen to him, because SCOTUS threw a blanket of immunity over him. I think this is what he means.

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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

A lot of rich guys want you to think that the bar on the right is always going to be bigger than the bar on the left.

Vertical bar chart titled "Norwegian wealth tax revenue, change from 2021 to 2024," in billions of Norwegian kroner (BNOK), nominal. Subtitle: top rate 0.85% to 1.1% and stock valuation discount cut from 2022.

Two bars. "Growth with no emigration": 13.71 BNOK, a tall bar. "Lost to reform-driven emigration": 0.65 BNOK, a barely visible stub, about one-twenty-first the height.

Notes: Growth includes the rate and valuation changes and wealth growth. Net of tax that emigrants still paid, the reform-driven loss is 0.49 BNOK.

Source: Ring (2026), NBER Working Paper 35854, equation 2 and figure 5.

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