Good Things Friday (312) and Link Love
February 14, 2025
1. I have read too many T. Kingfisher books NOT to be creeped out by Egyptian walking onions but also I want to grow them. That’s what I want for my birthday: walking onion bulbets or seeds to grow.
Challenges this week:
Former Costco Executive Hits Back at DEI Criticism: ‘Who We Are’
I was worried that extraordinary was bad but in this case, this is what’s needed, badly: Her job is to remove homeless people from SF’s parks. Her methods are extraordinary
This affects so many people: The SAVE Act Could Stop Millions of Women From Voting. Here’s What You Need to Know
The Families Torn Apart When Adult Children Go ‘No Contact’. I obviously have my own reasons for going no contact but this one feels ENTIRELY FAIR: But Coleman’s hunch is that it’s on the rise, fuelled by polarising politics – one couple consulted him after their son announced, “If you vote for Trump in the next election, we are done” – and a growing emphasis on individual happiness over collective bonds or old-fashioned filial duty. I think the article only lightly touches on the ongoing grief of having cut ties – I feel that grief in ebbs and flows. It’s also really sad to start to understand how far back my dad’s inability to love me in any way that slightly inconvenienced him went. I am suddenly understanding what his statement about 8 years back, “I didn’t help your mom with you kids at all” must have meant for me as a child. At the time, I resented him for it for my mom’s sake – what an awful husband to coparent with. Now it’s hitting me that it means the affection he bestowed on my baby cousins likely was not at all the baby and toddler experience that I had with him, and that’s a cornerstone of my perpetual distrust of others.
This only works if someone ACTUALLY ENFORCES it but: U.S. Rep. Stansbury (D-N.M.) introduces ‘Nobody Elected Elon Musk Act’
The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified. Four IT professionals lay out just how destructive Elon Musk’s incursion into the U.S. government could be:
Even if the president of the United States, the head of the executive branch, supports (and, importantly, understands) these efforts by DOGE, these experts told us, they would still consider Musk’s campaign to be a reckless and dangerous breach of the complex systems that keep America running. Federal IT systems facilitate operations as varied as sending payments from the Treasury Department and making sure that airplanes stay in the air, the sources told us.
Based on what has been reported, DOGE representatives have obtained or requested access to certain systems at the U.S. Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with eyes toward others, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “This is the largest data breach and the largest IT security breach in our country’s history—at least that’s publicly known,” one contractor who has worked on classified information-security systems at numerous government agencies told us this week. “You can’t un-ring this bell. Once these DOGE guys have access to these data systems, they can ostensibly do with it what they want.”
It’s feeling pretty rough these days isn’t it. Ugh.
Walking onions?! That needs to be a comic strip. Can you imagine what Calvin or his dad would have done with that?
I have walking onions! They’re fun.