Michael Bastos

I've been coining a term lately: session maxxing. Instead of spending a significant amount of money on tokens unnecessarily, session maxxing means lining up a lot of work that needs to get done and maximizing your entire Claude/Codex/Grok sessions for the day, week, or month. This approach ensures that you always reach the rate limit at the end of each day or week, allowing you to maximize what you're already paying for and leaving nothing on the table in terms of unused tokens.

I've been coining a term lately: session maxxing. Instead of spending a significant amount of money on tokens unnecessarily, session maxxing means lining up a lot of work that needs to get done and maximizing your entire Claude/Codex/Grok sessions for the day, week, or month. This approach ensures that you always reach the rate limit at the end of each day or week, allowing you to maximize what you're already paying for and leaving nothing on the table in terms of unused tokens.

I've been coining a term lately: session maxxing. Instead of spending a significant amount of money on tokens unnecessarily, session maxxing means lining up a lot of work that needs to get done and maximizing your entire Claude/Codex/Grok sessions for the day, week, or month. This approach ensures that you always reach the rate limit at the end of each day or week, allowing you to maximize what you're already paying for and leaving nothing on the table in terms of unused tokens.

They brought an elephant to the #TexasGOP convention in Houston Texas

To switch your active model in Claude Code to Fable 5, use the /model command directly in the chat window. You can do this by typing: /model claude-fable-5 If you prefer to browse the available models or access the 1M-context and extended thinking level variants, you can also open the configuration settings within your interface: Type /model and select Fable 5 from the model picker. To use the 1 million token context window, use /model claude-fable-5[1m]. Usage appears to be Free until June 22nd. Important note, it won’t let you do security audits of your code yet, says its safety reasons.

Face Act was a compromise between Republicans and Democrats that if Republicans would protect the front and inside of Abortion clinics, that Democrats would protect the front and inside of churches and religious worship. What this really tells me is that both sides got to protect their most sacred places of worship, Republicans get to worship God, Democrats get to worship the slaughter of innocent children and everyone seems happy with that compromise?

I have to admit this is one of the most well thought out and brilliant speeches I’ve heard in a very long time. youtu.be/yOjBJ89aeXA?si=OGbb…

Save the Party from the PAC This election is about something bigger than personalities. It is about structure, transparency, and whether our county Republican Party operates in the open or in the shadows. Political Action Committees have a legitimate role. They fundraise. They advocate. They mobilize. That is their purpose. But a PAC is not the same thing as the official county party. When practical control and momentum sit primarily inside a privately funded PAC instead of the elected county organization, several things are lost: • Open, properly noticed meetings where all Republicans can participate • Decisions made under rules of order instead of private conversations • Published minutes, bylaws, and clear accountability • Equal representation through the elected structure • A county party that belongs to all Republicans, not just a subset When party business happens informally, even with good intentions, trust erodes. Questions feel unwelcome. Transparency disappears. Momentum slows. An official party should be: • Active and rule-based • Transparent and accountable • Independent from any privately funded group • A public forum for ideas, debate, and grassroots engagement The goal is not conflict. The goal is clarity. A strong Republican Party in Milam County must operate in the open, under the rules required by the Texas GOP, and independent from any single PAC or private organization. That is what “Save the Party from the PAC” means, that’s myself and my wife Christina BAstos are asking for your vote. It means restoring process over personalities and principles over proximity.

You should never worry about criticism from someone that you would never ask advice from.

Milam County Republicans: Please Watch Both Speeches and Decide for Yourself Last night, I gave my speech about why I’m running for Milam County Republican Chair. My opponent, Rebecca Lucky, gave hers. I’m posting both videos here so every Republican in Milam County can hear us directly and make their own decisions. Before reading the rest of this post, please go down to the bottom and watch both my speech and Rebecca's for context. After hearing Rebecca’s speech, I want to respond directly using her own words. 1) On fundraising and control structure Rebecca said: “the Republican women are the Political Action Committee, that is the PAC… So the PAC is the fundraiser for our county. Our GOP is represented, but we cannot fundraise because we are not a PAC… So all the power that we have is flooded in through the Republican women.” Those are her words, and they explain exactly why I’m running. Different legal structures between a PAC and a county party do exist, but that does not justify the elected county party functioning as second fiddle. The official party should be active, organized, and able to build and fund its own operations. 2) On meetings and open process Rebecca said: “we may not have prescribed meetings.” She also said: “there’s not too many things that go on that I don’t know about.” That is at the core of the issue. A party should not depend on informal awareness by one person. It should function through regular, open meetings where voters can scrutinize decisions, ask questions, debate respectfully, and vote under rules of order. That is how trust is built. 3) On call-based politics vs open forum Rebecca said: “Congressman Sessions is here. He takes my calls; I take his calls… Representative Stan Gerdes… Senator Schwertner… There is not a political person that I don’t take a call from.” Again, those are her words. To me, that highlights a top-down, call-driven approach to running the party. My position is different: party business should happen in the open, not primarily through private channels and backroom communication. 4) On what me and my wife experienced so far Rebecca said: “when someone has a concern… they’re on speed dial.” For two years, my wife and I repeatedly asked when official meetings would be held and how members could engage the elected party more. We did not experience that same responsiveness when the questions became difficult to answer. That disconnect is one of the reasons we decided to run. 5) On representation and fairness Rebecca said: “all the power… is flooded in through the Republican women.” If practical party control sits in an organization where men cannot hold office, then many Republican voters are effectively observers instead of decision-makers in county-level party direction. That is not a healthy long-term model. It was wrong when women were kept out of politics, and it is wrong for any structure today to sideline representation through the elected party. 6) Respect and reform can coexist I respect the work of the Milam County Republican Women. Rebecca also made clear they have carried major responsibilities for years. I acknowledged that. But the long-term solution is not to keep the elected county party weak. It is to restore a proper balance: - Quarterly evening meetings everyone can attend - Published bylaws, minutes, and public calendar - Open forums for all Republicans connected or not - Independent county party fundraising and operations - Clear separation of roles, with real partnership This race is not about attacking the establishment. It is about rebuilding structure. Please watch both speeches and decide for yourself what future you want for the Milam County Republican Party. Also case you missed it because of the audio, the quote I gave at the beginning of my speech was “Unity without verity (meaning principles) is no better than conspiracy” - John Trapp Michael Cabral Poubel Bastos & CHristina BAstos Cell: 858-335-0190

As a #Christian when people start attacking your character you don’t let it get to you because know it’s way worse than their accusations, you thank the Lord. #faith

We are doing a LinkedIn series we are calling “A Week of Redesigning VA.gov” over 7 days to talk about all of our ideas of how we think could improve the platform with the first post going out this morning. If you’re a Veteran would love your feedback on the screenshots and links we posted here and feel free to comment on the original post below. linkedin.com/feed/update/urn…

The "Chaos Tax" is Draining Our Society Ever feel like you’re paying a price for a problem you didn’t create? There is a name for this: The Chaos Tax. It’s the extra time, money, and sanity we all lose because the some of the leaders of our institutions, from schools to some local governments, refuse to address bad behavior directly. Instead of correcting the individual, they impose a "chaos tax" on the rest of us to accommodate the chaos. We see examples of this nonsense every single day: • The Education Chaos Tax: When one student has a violent outburst in a classroom, the entire rest of the class is often forced into the hallway for 30 minutes while specialized staff are called in. Our kids lose their valuable education time because the system refuses to remove the disruption and instead penalizes the students who are there to learn. • The Infrastructure Chaos Tax: Ever wonder why public spaces like libraries or transit hubs have uncomfortable, slanted, or "anti-homeless" furniture? It’s not a design trend; it’s a deterrent. Because a few people decided to use public resources as bedrooms, now nobody gets a comfortable place to sit and work. • The Community Chaos Tax: Even simple gestures of kindness are being taxed out of existence. Many workplaces and employees are now prohibited from accepting homemade treats or gifts because of the actions of one or two bad actors in the past due to malice or even a joke. We trade community connection for "pre-packaged" isolation. • The Environment Chaos Tax: Why do some public bathrooms now have weird, blue "Gothic" lighting? It’s an anti-vagrant measure designed so people can't find their veins. We have traded normal, well-lit, clean environments for "blue rooms" just to manage a crisis that some leadership refuses to solve at the source. Here is the truth: Society feels "crazy" right now because we have allowed organizations to shift the burden of bad behavior onto the shoulders of the responsible. We are literally paying for a lack of accountability. If enough people within organizations finally stood up and refused to let the majority suffer for the actions of the few, our world would look a lot different. We need to stop "taxing" the good people to subsidize the chaos. Have you or your friends experienced this kind of nonsense lately? Let me know what Chaos Taxes you’re tired of paying in the comments below.

I was a Marine in Iraq from 2004 to 2007. One of the things you learn fast over there is the difference between “anger in the street” and a system that can sense, decide, and act faster than the force trying to maintain order. That’s why the reporting out of Minneapolis has been bothering me in a very specific way. There appears to be a large, distributed “ICE watcher” network operating across neighborhoods, built around encrypted group messaging and rapid alerts. The details matter, because the shape of this thing looks familiar: people aren’t just filming, they’re organizing. They’re breaking the city into coverage areas, pushing real-time sightings, and moving information through a coordinated pipeline instead of everyone freelancing. In Iraq, early-stage insurgency infrastructure didn’t start with firefights. It started with observation and routing. A guy on a roof with a cheap radio. A kid on a bike. Someone who “just happens” to notice which vehicles are where. Someone else who logs it. Someone else who relays it. Someone else who shows up to interfere, slow you down, or force you to break formation. What’s described in Minneapolis follows that same logic, just with modern tools: Cam Higby discovered a large chat networks to broadcast suspected federal activity in near real time, then leveraging shared documents and informal databases to track patterns. Some accounts describe systematic collection of vehicle identifiers with the ability to look up license plates which mean local police is involved, coordinated “spotter” updates, and rapid “response” mobilization when agents are detected. The goal isn’t necessarily to win a direct fight. The goal is to make every federal movement costly, noisy, and contested. That’s the part people keep missing when they argue semantics about “protest.” Protest is people showing up. Insurgency behavior is a feedback loop: observe, report, converge, obstruct, disperse. Do it again tomorrow. Keep it distributed. Keep it deniable. Keep it under the threshold most days. And when an incident happens, make sure the narrative is already moving faster than the official statement. You can see how combustible this becomes when tensions are already high and federal operations are producing lethal outcomes and competing narratives in public. That’s not abstract. Reuters has reported on fatal shootings involving federal immigration agents in Minneapolis and the dispute around the facts of those incidents. So why would federal leadership hesitate to say “the horse is out of the barn”? Because in government, that phrase is radioactive. Naming something an insurgency is not just a description, it’s a trigger. It implies you’ve lost control of the environment, it invites blame, it changes legal and political postures, and it forces decisions that are expensive and irreversible. It also creates a civil-liberties minefield: the moment you publicly label domestic networks as insurgent infrastructure, every action taken next gets litigated in court and in the press, and every mistake becomes gasoline. I watched the same movie overseas. In 2004–2005, plenty of people knew what it was, but the official language lagged. Not because nobody could see the pattern, but because admitting it out loud forces a pivot, and pivots have owners. Owners have careers. The uncomfortable truth is that you don’t have to agree with the politics of any side to recognize the structure. When you see disciplined collection, rapid dissemination, role specialization, and repeated cycles of coordinated convergence against federal activity, you’re no longer looking at spontaneous civic energy. You’re looking at a domestic network that’s behaving like something we used to hunt. teapaw.org/camhigby/status/201509…

I spent the weekend rethinking and redesigning va.gov for the RFI that went out and I wanted to get all your honest take on the demo we built? It's got a mocked authentication with clickable pages so let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions or comments on the design/look and feel? vagov.zcoregroup.com/

Here’s my unorthodox take, do you punish your people enough?

There’s a concept in game theory I think about a lot, especially when people ask why “accountability” matters so much: If you can’t be punished, you can’t be trusted. That sounds harsh until you play it out. In any repeated game, trust only holds when there’s a real cost to breaking it. If one person gets all the upside of defecting and none of the downside, the whole system starts to rot. People stop relying on each other. They start hedging. They start protecting themselves instead of the mission. In the Marines, we lived this in a very blunt way: group-level punishment. And no, it wasn’t because everyone “deserved” it. Most of the time, they didn’t. The point wasn’t moral purity, it was system design. Group consequences create a high-trust environment because they do a few things at once: - They make standards everybody’s problem, not “leadership’s problem.” - They make small misses expensive before they become big misses. - They force people to correct issues early, because ignoring them hurts you too. - They remove the loophole where someone can coast and let everyone else carry the weight. Is it “fair” in the moment? Sometimes no. Is it effective at building a culture where people can rely on each other under stress? Absolutely. This is something I do with my kids all the time but now translate that to teams in the civilian world. When a company has “untouchables”, people who miss commitments, break process, ship sloppy work, throw teammates under the bus, and somehow never pay a price, trust doesn’t just drop with that one person. It drops across the whole org. The good people start asking, “Why am I the only one playing by the rules?” On the flip side, when consequences are real and consistent, it doesn’t make teams toxic. It makes them calm. Because everyone knows the game is fair, even if it’s strict. So the question I keep coming back to for leaders is simple: Do people on your team believe that commitments matter equally for everyone, or do they believe some people are beyond punishment? Because the moment someone is above consequences, you’ve basically told the rest of the team not to trust the system.