@drvolts: "Now, I'd like you to think about what will happen if Trump takes over, Project 2025 is implemented, & the entire federal bureaucracy (including law enforcement branches) is staffed with ideological MAGA cronies."[1]

That will mean the end of anything like independence or expertise in the civil service. Crime statistics will be engineered to support Trump -- in his mind, and theirs, that's what the bureaucracy is *for*. The gov't is Trump's, devoted to Trump's glory... And you can broaden that out to economic statistics, trade statistics, GHG emissions, any & all information about the objective state of the country & the polity. It will all be pure propaganda under Trump, which will mean simply that *no one really knows* what's going on. People lament the "post-truth" era we're living in. Misinformation. Epistemic bubbles. Algorithmic distortions. Etc. But I need people to understand that we really haven't seen anything yet... Take a peek at Russia or Turkey for a preview. This is what keeps striking me over & over again as we wander backward into fascism, with scarcely any resistance: all the blessings we enjoy in America, the result of so much hard work that came before us, that we are taking for granted & casually frittering away.

@GregTSargent: "Under Project 2025, an army of Trump loyalists would deeply corrupt information gathering by the government and turn it into little more than pro-Trump propaganda."[2] (TNR)

MAGA personalities raged at CNN when it refused to allow a Donald Trump propagandist to smear journalists on air. They exploded again when CNN announced that the debate would be fact-checked. We think this provides an unexpected glimpse into what Project 2025's implementation might look like. This thought was driven home by a must-read thread from writer David Roberts about Project 2025's true aims. So we talked to Roberts about what MAGA's hostility to neutral journalism portends for a second Trump term—one that wrecks the professional, fact-based civil service and transforms government into a tool for manufacturing propaganda. Listen to this episode here.[3]

also btw...

• Supreme Court decision can't defrost chilling effect on disinformation research, experts warn - "Why it matters: Disinformation campaigns targeting the 2024 U.S. elections are expected to reach further and outnumber what's been seen in past elections, experts warn."
• The Destruction of Economic Facts - "During the second half of the 19th century... To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible... The result was the invention of the first massive 'public memory systems' to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available... for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results... Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The results are hardly surprising. In the U.S., trust has broken down..."[4]

Agnotology: Culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth. Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it's learned may be crucial to Western democracy - "The exercises include examining claims found in YouTube videos and social media posts, comparing media bias in an array of different 'clickbait' articles, probing how misinformation preys on readers' emotions, and even getting students to try their hand at writing fake news stories themselves."[5]

The course is part of an anti-fake news initiative launched by Finland's government in 2014 – two years before Russia meddled in the US elections – aimed at teaching residents, students, journalists and politicians how to counter false information designed to sow division. The initiative is just one layer of a multi-pronged, cross-sector approach the country is taking to prepare citizens of all ages for the complex digital landscape of today – and tomorrow. The Nordic country, which shares an 832-mile border with Russia, is acutely aware of what's at stake if it doesn't. Finland has faced down Kremlin-backed propaganda campaigns ever since it declared independence from Russia 101 years ago. But in 2014, after Moscow annexed Crimea and backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, it became obvious that the battlefield had shifted: information warfare was moving online.

Comparing Trump to 'political chemotherapy' - "Cuban said: '...a lot of [chemotherapy patients] die. A lot of the systems, they change.'"[6]

"My kids, when they're 60 years old and say, hopefully, say, look, we went through, the country went through the s*** when I was a kid, but we learned from it," he continued. "I think we're starting to learn from what happened. You're seeing them throw him under the bus."

"In the Democratic party, not everybody gets their way, but everybody gets a voice. In the Republican party, there's just one voice." --Christopher Gibbs, Farmer, Shelby County Ohio You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle - "Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media."[7]

United Ireland Should Be Political Objective, Former PM Says [ungated] - "'What I hope we'll see happen in the next government, no matter which parties are in it, is that that we'll see what is a long standing political aspiration toward unification become a political objective,' [former Prime Minister Leo] Varadkar said at an event in Belfast on Saturday."

• The inevitability of a united Ireland - "As demographics keep shifting, the direction of travel seems fixed despite ongoing conflict."
• The prospect of a united Ireland emerges as a republican leader takes office in Belfast - "Until now, Northern Ireland's first minister has always come from a British unionist party, but Sinn Fein, which advocates for Northern Ireland to rejoin the Republic, won the most seats in the assembly for the first time in 2022... The elevation of a nationalist to the top seat at Stormont has sparked the question of whether Irish unity is on the horizon." (Is a United Ireland on the Horizon?)
• Tall order for Sinn Fein to revive suddenly flagging Irish election hopes - "Failing to enter government for the first time would be a major setback to its ambition of seeking a referendum on unifying with Northern Ireland, the British region where it is already the lead party."
• A united Ireland is closer than ever. Let's make it a paradise for all of us, not just corporate tax-dodgers - "Arguing over anthems and flags is a distraction. This is our one chance to create an inclusive society across our whole island."

-United Ireland -A Republic for all -A Decade of Opportunity - Towards The New Republic --- *You remember the Irish Unification of 2024, right? - "Like a lot of Star Trek episodes, the 1990 episode 'The High Ground,' features a scene in which the characters discuss a real-world issue in the context of the show. In this case, Data the android (Brent Spiner) cites historical examples of the use of violence to successfully achieve political aims. He refers to the very real Mexican independence from Spain and, typically for Star Trek, a fictional example, the 'Kenzie Rebellion.' But it's his third example, the 'Irish Unification of 2024,' that's really captured the internet's imagination in that very year."

• Star Trek predicts United Ireland in 2024 - "This clip is taken from an episode called 'The High Ground'. The result of this short conversation, and the general theme of the program being centred around insurgency as a means to achieve freedom, led to the BBC (The British Broadcasting Corporation- Britain's national broadcaster) and Sky TV (a Satellite Broadcaster) putting a ban on showing the episode. When Sky did show the episode they cut the part about Irish reunification in 2024. In Ireland on RTE (Raidió Teilifís Éireann-Ireland's national broadcaster) the showing of the full episode came with a warning describing the content as 'Fictional and Aspirational.'"
• Did Star Trek predict an Irish reunification in 2024? - "As you can imagine, the episode was mired in controversy because of the mention of the Irish unification. As a result, the episode wasn't broadcast in the UK or Ireland unedited until 2006. In addition, the actual episode was also disliked by the series writer Ronald D Moore who said in an interview in 1995: 'We didn't have anything interesting to say about terrorism except that it's bad and Beverly gets kidnapped – ho hum. They take her down to the caves and we get to have nice, big preachy speeches about terrorism and freedom, fighting and security forces versus society. It's a very unsatisfying episode and the staff wasn't really happy with it.'"
• Could Star Trek's prediction that Ireland and Northern Ireland will reunify come true? - "The writer of that episode, Melinda Snodgrass, joins News Breakfast to discuss why she wrote that line in the 1990s."
• @MMSnodgrass: "It wasn't just filler. It was to reference the fact that Earth had united and nation states had ended in the Federation."[1]
• Star Trek's Biggest Prediction For 2024: Irish Unification Explained - "The episode aired in 1990 when the Troubles were ongoing and topical. The line implies that the Troubles/armed struggle lasted into the 2020s until the IRA got the U.K. to concede the territory to the Republic of Ireland. However, reality was not so violent. In the 1980s, the Sinn Féin party (meaning We Ourselves, then led by Irish Republican leader Gerry Adams) refocused on electoral politics. This culminated in the Good Friday Agreement between the British and Irish governments, signed in 1998. Under the agreement, Northern Ireland was still part of the U.K., but citizens could claim dual citizenship and the North would be self-governed (the new Northern Irish Assembly required power-sharing to maintain this balance). Moreover, if Northern Ireland chooses to leave the U.K. by referendum, they are allowed to do so."
• Sanctuary Districts And Irish Unification: Star Trek's Vision Of 2024 Comes Strikingly Close - "Despite living in a world of conflict, we have reason to be hopeful. We are growing as a people, but growth is painful. Star Trek gave us the confidence that war and social strife would push us to leave those injustices behind, but offscreen life offers no such reassurance. Science fiction predicted the future, but illustrated clearly that the path to get there would offer the same difficulties we'd always known. It's going to be up to us to make sure that the sacrifices we make now will be seen as worthwhile by future generations."

--- also btw... The Spark - Rhyme Island (BANGER OF THE YEAR)