— Read on the.ink/p/anat-shenker-osorios-actual-plan

I didn’t watch, I read the transcript. Lots of useful stuff in there, specifically:

– do, don’t make appeals for reps to do. Wear the shirt. Carry the sign. Show up at the council meeting and say something. The loyal opposition is dysfunctional.

– the message is “bullies taking over the government for the billionaires so they can steal our money.”, according to the article. Overly simplistic, direct and to the point, so everybody gets it.  I think it’s the wrong message.  I’d say “mafia don taking over the government and turning it into a patronage fiefdom with himself at the top, with the willing cooperation of billionaires who think this will be in their best interest”.

Last weekend I had an idea.  I saw video of Palestinians setting up ragged tents in their former homes in North Gaza, where they are going to live while they get on with rebuilding their homes.  I thought, I know a company, Pallet, in Everett that makes shelters way better than those tents.  They build flat pak villages of small units, some for sleeping, some for cooking and eating, some for showering and using the bathroom.  They ship them to a site, and set them up with nothing more than a screwdriver and a socket set.  They provide temperature controlled comfortable functional pods for families to live together while getting their lives sorted: meeting with counselors, getting off drugs, getting into social support programs.  These pods are way better than the crap tents I was looking at.

Of course, this company is not in a position to manufacture and ship units for 1M people on the other side of the world.  But, also in Everett, there’s a company that is: Boeing.  They’ve done it before.  With the right incentive, they could build a line, take the Pallet designs and crank them out, airfreight or ship them to the coast of Israel. They’d need money, and an army of people.

Money’s not the issue, there’s tons of money floating around.  Who knows how to ship, distribute, set up all these things, and has an army of people?  The UN.  And coincidentally one of the more senior UN people is someone from Auckland, New Zealand, who clearly knows who the right people would be to get an initiative like this happening.

Turns out the ex-CEO of Boeing lives right on Whidbey.  I know half a dozen ex Boeing employees.  I know people in New Zealand who could talk to Helen Clark.  This is totally doable.

I talked to everyone I know.  And they all pushed back.  Within a few days I understood that, while this is clearly a fixable problem from an engineering point of view, it wasn’t going to be fixed by someone like me, or by anyone I know.

Dave Winer’s editor.  If he’s right, it’s a way out of the Twitterverse, for those who need it.

drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/02/22/a-few-simple-points/index.html

I’m fast becoming bored with ironic protest signs that express our disdain and outrage for the administration. They make me chuckle or raise my blood pressure, but they’re not going to fix the problem. And it’s a small step from there to expressing rage at the voters who put them there, which again will not fix the problem and instead does real damage.

the broader point: the root of the problem is a dysfunctional Congress. A functional Congress has mechanisms to impose its will on the Administration. To that end, while everybody is looking the other way, it’s an opportunity to make whatever changes to Congress we need to make to enable it to function as a representative body.

That means identifying why it’s not working and then fixing those things. IMHO, it’s not working because: it’s captured by party politics, which is finely balanced between the parties and which is functioning like a parliamentary system where one party follows the PM’s lead and the other politely objects. “Captured”, in the sense that stepping away from the expressed will of the party leadership results in a primary challenge that means you lose your job, and captured in the sense that factional interests with lobbyists are overrepresented in their influence because of the power of money in elections. We have many instances of congresspeople making off-the-record statements saying they would have done something differently but for the threat against them by their own party.

You may not agree with these diagnoses. We, and our representatives, should take this time to analyze the root causes of this dysfunction and determine what’s broken and what can be fixed quickly. If, for example, we agree that these are the issues to be fixed, then we should be preparing the way with changes to our electoral system, things like proportional representation, banning of PACs, and other long-discussed and well-understood mechanisms, from the state level. We should make things like these the focus of our public demonstrations, our postcard writing, our calls to our representatives, pushing for radical change, not just against abuse they cannot, or choose not to do anything about. We should be focusing our representatives on reform from within their organization, to the exclusion of wasting time trying to create and pass legislation that will have no effect on the abuse imposed by the rest of government.

While all the action is with the administration and the judiciary, we have the opportunity to reshape the third branch, the one that actually represents us, to act powerfully in our interests.

https://interconnected.org/home/2025/02/19/reflections

Hope Dave Winer sees this …