Nostr notes by Chuck Darwin

Jeff Webb, a conservative political activist considered to be ...

2026-03-22T06:59:52Z

Jeff Webb,
a conservative political activist considered to be Charlie Kirk’s “mentor”
has died after he fell while playing pickleball

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/charlie-kirks-mentor-dies-after-36904048

Police officers raided the rapper Afroman's Ohio home, ... ...

2026-03-19T03:13:35Z

Police officers raided the
rapper Afroman's Ohio home,
... then sued him after he ridiculed them on social media
— but a jury just sided with the rapper.

In an unusual lawsuit members of an Ohio county sheriff’s department sued over songs and social media posts by Afroman
(Joseph Foreman)
that criticized the guns-drawn 2022 raid on his property, which yielded no charges.

The case claimed the videos were false and caused the officers "severe emotional distress".

But Afroman,
known for his 2000 hit “Because I Got High,”
testified at trial that he had a First Amendment right to mock the officers,
-- particularly after they smashed down his door for ultimately no reason:

“All of this is their fault, and they have the audacity to sue me"
https://www.billboard.com/pro/afroman-trial-verdict-rapper-wins-lawsuit-cops-music-videos/

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a ...

2026-03-03T05:10:26Z

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that
⚠️ the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was
💥“anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night,
👉more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department.

https://jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-were-told-iran-war-is-for

Sharing content to Mastodon is getting easier with the addition ...

2026-03-03T00:26:49Z

Sharing content to Mastodon is getting easier with the addition of a universal “Share to Mastodon” button for the decentralized social media platform.

Announced on Monday, the widget allows users to share content on any Mastodon server by connecting your Mastodon account and redirecting you to the server that account is on.

The blog post announcing the feature also explains that the tool “works entirely in your browser: there is no tracking data, and it does not store any information on the server.”

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/03/a-new-share-button/

Germany has issued a travel advisory to its citizens travelling ...

2026-01-29T03:48:21Z

Germany has issued a travel advisory to its citizens travelling to the United States,

citing risks linked to immigration enforcement and public-order situations

https://www.newsweek.com/germany-issues-formal-travel-advisory-for-us-11421830

Last October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit ...

2025-10-25T16:57:23Z

Last October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against adolescent medicine physician May Lau for prescribing testosterone to at least 21 patients.
Her license was cancelled by her request early this month, according to the Texas Medical Board.
In a statement to The Texas Tribune, Lau maintained her innocence.
“Dr. Lau decided to move her medical practice to Oregon and saw no reason to continue to maintain her Texas license,” according to a statement provided by her attorney Craig Smyser.
“Dr. Lau continues to deny the Texas Attorney General’s politically- and ideologically-driven allegations.”
The case was the first brought under Senate Bill 14, a 2023 law that prohibits physicians and health care providers from prescribing hormones to minors to transition their biological sex.
Lau surrendering her license was “a major victory for our state,” Paxton said in a Friday news release.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/10/24/paxton-transgender-lawsuit-doctor/

[Excerpt:] Tech billionaire Peter Thiel recently warned that ...

2025-10-10T20:03:55Z

[Excerpt:] Tech billionaire Peter Thiel recently warned that Swedish activist
Greta Thunberg & critics of tech or AI are
“legionnaires of the Antichrist”
in private lectures on Christianity that linked government oversight of Silicon Valley to an apocalyptic future.

https://bsky.app/profile/wpd3.bsky.social/post/3m2uaolxulk2f

House GOP committees have issued new subpoenas to ActBlue, ...

2025-10-09T22:30:02Z

House GOP committees have issued new subpoenas to ActBlue,
intensifying their probe of the Democratic fundraising platform.

The subpoenas are an attempt to force cooperation as ActBlue has pushed back on the congressional investigation,
questioning its intentions and constitutionality after the White House launched a similar probe.

Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.), Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who lead the committees investigating ActBlue, issued the subpoenas Wednesday
to compel a current and a former employee to testify about the platform’s fraud prevention policies.

The employees being subpoenaed had previously pushed back against voluntarily appearing before the committee,
citing the White House’s investigation,
and ActBlue sent the committee a defiant letter earlier this month criticizing the investigation as partisan.

ActBlue had slammed the congressional investigations in a letter this month as a
“partisan effort directed at harming political opponents rather than gathering facts to assist in lawmaking efforts.”

The platform and its Democratic defenders have argued that any probe into foreign donations and online fundraising should also include WinRed, the largest Republican fundraising platform.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/25/actblue-subpoena-house-gop-investigation-00424703

Kavanaugh began by accepting the government’s claim that one in ...

2025-09-10T13:27:35Z

Kavanaugh began by accepting the government’s claim that one in 10 residents of LA is an undocumented immigrant.

There is no citation for this figure, and there’s some evidence that it’s wildly inaccurate.

But it undergirds Kavanaugh’s entire legal theory, so he wasn’t about to factcheck it!

“Not surprisingly given those extraordinary numbers,
US immigration officers have prioritized immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area,”
he went on, noting
“the myriad ‘significant economic and social problems’ caused by illegal immigration.”

That internal quote about immigrants causing “significant economic and social problems”
is actually dicta from Brignoni-Ponce,
a decision which is five decades old.

Recent data proves that immigrants greatly strengthen the US economy
and commit crimes at significantly lower ratesthan native-born Americans
— which is why only blood and soil nationalists say that stuff today.

And while Kavanaugh was happy to cherrypick quotes from Brignoni-Ponce,
he wildly mischaracterized its holding.

There, the Court ruled that race plus location could NOT add up to reasonable suspicion because it would necessarily sweep up lots of people who were entirely innocent
— the exact opposite of Kavanaugh’s conclusion,
even with his demographic fudge to make it seem like every brown person ICE encounters in LA is likely to be an undocumented immigrant

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/kavanaugh-ice-racial-profiling

There’s a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that comes from ...

2025-08-13T01:58:16Z

There’s a specific kind of cognitive dissonance that comes from watching a woman of color who seemed to have been intellectually reared in progressive circles endear herself to this iteration of the Republican Party

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/jd-vance-wife-usha-vance-politics-amy-chua.html

We are eating the Earth. The result will be catastrophic. Excess ...

2025-07-01T15:39:14Z

We are eating the Earth.
The result will be catastrophic.

Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a long-term challenge resulting from an otherwise cheerful story,
in which more people live better lives with fuller bellies and bigger dreams.

The challenge will not be met with a single knockout punch; instead, we can offer partial solutions in countless places, and those will add up if we let them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/01/climate-agriculture-carbon-michael-grunwald/

Trump wants to be the American version of China's Xi. He ...

2025-06-29T23:42:21Z

Trump wants to be the American version of China's Xi.

He wants to be a dictator.

He's acting that way right now and daring us to stop him.

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lsqvvqxwaj2a

This terrible, terrible bill is going to do direct, material harm ...

2025-06-29T18:37:11Z

This terrible, terrible bill is going to do direct, material harm to the country
- our health care system is going to be weakened,
- close to 100m people will be paying more for health care or lose their insurance,
- tens of millions will struggle to eat,
- our existential transition to a clean energy future undermined,
- an unprecedented domestic political police force will be established,
- the fiscal integrity of the United States will be in jeopardy to the explosion in our deficit and debt,
- and of course the wealthy and privileged will get their tax cuts.

It is a Trumpian monstrosity,
an orgy of plutocratic “let them eat cake” greed,
another step forward in their fanatical, wrecking ball agenda of sabotage, plunder, and betrayal.

https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/signing-this-terrible-bill-will-be

The Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship ruling this ...

2025-06-28T15:48:42Z

The Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship ruling this morning
and it’s worse than just about everyone feared it could be.

The Court’s ruling is composed of two main parts.

The first is its declaration that it is possible that the president can contradict the plain-text reading of the Constitution by issuing an executive order doing away with birthright citizenship.

The second is that lower courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions against blatantly unconstitutional policies imposed by the executive.

Injunctions must now be created on a patchwork basis.

I want to impress upon you how dangerous this is.

SCOTUS has empowered the president to impose whatever he likes
—irrespective of its constitutionality
—and then prevented judicial overview except at the localized level.

Meaning that we will now have two sets of laws

One that operates in Red America and one that Operates in Blue America.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-supreme-court-just-made-america

Six people have died and two others were missing after a boat ...

2025-06-22T14:50:02Z

Six people have died and two others were missing
after a boat capsized Saturday on California’s Lake Tahoe.
A 27ft-long boat overturned in the afternoon after apparently being hit by a large swell near DL Bliss State Park, according to the Coast Guard.
Lake Tahoe and its surrounding wilderness region is a hugely popular spot with tourists.
Emergency services responded to the incident and reported six people dead, two more missing, and took two survivors to a local hospital,
the El Dorado county sheriff’s office (EDSO) said in a statement.

“EDSO search and rescue, along with the EDSO dive team, will return to the area in the morning to continue search operations,” the group said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/22/lake-tahoe-boat-capsizes-california?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Our Revolution here. It's crunch time in Congress - ...

2025-06-21T01:29:55Z

Our Revolution here.
It's crunch time in Congress
- Trump's budget, Iran, & oligarch money in politics.

Join the Virtual Lobby Training this Sun 6/22
at 7pm ET (4pm PT).

Our Revolution's DC team is facilitating virtual lobby visits with Capitol Hill offices
and we need your help.

Join and get trained up to speak directly with DC offices via Zoom.

RSVP now
👉 https://ourrev.io/hvYhyK

A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia sent ash and smoke miles ...

2025-06-19T00:47:34Z

A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia sent ash and smoke miles into the sky,
grounding flights, blanketing villages, and prompting evacuations as authorities remain on high alert.

Though no casualties have been reported, the volcano’s ongoing activity has disrupted travel and rattled residents in a region familiar with eruptions.

https://www.nbcnews.com/now/video/volcano-erupts-in-indonesia-grounding-flights-and-forcing-evacuations-241872965774

Carpenteria Indivisible Good Trouble July 17, 2025 ...

2025-06-19T00:39:34Z

Carpenteria Indivisible
Good Trouble
July 17, 2025

https://bsky.app/profile/carpindivisible.bsky.social/post/3lrw6fzsigs2f

Details from Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer’s study of ...

2025-06-18T01:58:04Z

Details from Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer’s study of Trump’s cellphone habits have a way of lingering in the mind.
The president’s personal number is “broadly circulated.”
He picks up calls from unknown numbers, and keeps a photograph of his own face on his lock screen.
The Cellphone in Chief is a “portal,” Parker and Scherer write,
but it’s also a mirror, a security blanket, and a vulnerability.
Their short psychological study suggests a man who is occasionally disembodied: more of his phone than of the world.
For more than a decade, the once and future president had been warned of the enormous risks he took
—as perhaps the top global target of foreign intelligence services
—by using a personal iPhone with a broadly circulated number to keep in touch with dozens of friends and colleagues.
His phone was a lifeline, though. He wasn’t going to give it up.
Days later, when he won the presidency for the second time,
his phone lit up, just as it had eight years earlier on Election Night 2016.
“You won’t believe it,” Trump marveled in early-morning phone calls after the race was decided last year, according to an adviser.
“I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”
A little more than four months into his second term, the president’s personal cellphone has become, in many ways,
the most pivotal technological device in the federal government,
directly linking Trump to the outside world.
Lawmakers, friends, family members, corporate titans, celebrities, world leaders, and journalists regularly call it,
knowing that, unminded by aides, Trump remains open to picking up the phone, even when he does not recognize the number.
https://longreads.com/2025/06/17/trump-private-cellphone-history/

On the orders of the Donald Trump administration, National Park ...

2025-06-17T04:13:14Z

On the orders of the Donald Trump administration, National Park Service employees hung two highly controversial signs this week at Manzanar National Historic Site, a museum examining the property’s former role as a prison where the U.S. government incarcerated more than 10,000 Japanese Americans during World War Two

Displayed on a site where American citizens were held against their will for more than three years,
the signs encourage visitors to report any depictions of U.S. history that
“inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” or fail to highlight the “beauty, abundance or grandeur” of the landscape,
according to a Manzanar official.

Identical signs are now posted at every national park site across the nation,
regardless of whether that site’s purpose is to educate the public about horrifying mistakes and grave injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government.

Although it’s unclear how and where the president’s directive will be enforced, park advocates and historians are bracing themselves for a drastic reframing of the darkest chapters of the nation’s history
https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/signs-negative-history-manzanar-historians-20376758.php

Randi Weingarten, the longtime leader of one of the nation’s ...

2025-06-16T02:28:40Z

Randi Weingarten, the longtime leader of one of the nation’s most influential labor unions and a major voice in Democratic politics,
has resigned from the Democratic National Committee.
She pointed to disagreements with the party’s new chairman, Ken Martin.
Ms. Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, had supported Mr. Martin’s rival in the chairmanship race early this year,
Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.
Mr. Martin subsequently removed Ms. Weingarten from the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee -- a powerful body that sets the calendar and process for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating process.
In her resignation letter, dated June 5 and obtained on Sunday evening,
Ms. Weingarten wrote that she would decline Mr. Martin’s offer to reappoint her to the broader national committee, on which she has served since 2002.
She had been on the Rules and Bylaws committee since 2009.
“While I am proud to be a Democrat,
I appear to be out of step with the leadership you are forging,
and I do not want to be the one who keeps 🔥questioning why we are not enlarging our tent and actively trying to engage more and more of our communities,”
🔥Ms. Weingarten wrote in her resignation letter to Mr. Martin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/15/us/politics/randi-weingarten-dnc-ken-martin.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Trump and his allies wasted little time in branding the people ...

2025-06-16T02:22:18Z

Trump and his allies wasted little time in branding the people protesting against immigration enforcement raids in Los Angeles as “insurrectionists”.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy
– particularly the vindictive kind
– spoke darkly of a “violent insurrection”.
JD Vance, the vice-president, inveighed against “insurrectionists carrying foreign flags” on the streets of the nation’s second-biggest city.

It didn’t escape notice that an insurrection was exactly what Trump was accused of instigating on 6 January 2021,
when the flag being paraded through the Capitol was that of the Confederate secessionists.

And that Trump hadn’t shown quite the same enthusiasm for sending in the troops then.
But simply accusing the leader of the Maga movement of hypocrisy feels like such a 2015 move -- It barely registers as news these days.

What’s really notable is that this is the latest example of Trump’s childish tactic of repurposing criticisms of himself to attack his enemies.
The world was first introduced to this manoeuvre on 19 October 2016 during a presidential debate in Las Vegas. -- When Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Vladimir Putin’s puppet, Trump shot back: “No puppet, no puppet … No, you’re the puppet.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/15/right-back-at-ya-trump-rhetoric?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

I need everyone on Normal People internet to know that American ...

2025-06-15T00:41:43Z

I need everyone on Normal People internet to know that American Girl Doll Instagram is doing doll protests today.

There are tiny t-shirts and signs.

AND THEN I realized it's a joint protest with the Barbie ppl, where there are EVEN TINIER SIGNS.

https://bsky.app/profile/tolcser.bsky.social/post/3lrlxeye5vk2g

It looks to Iranians that Trump is actually using the Israeli ...

2025-06-14T04:23:53Z

It looks to Iranians that Trump is actually using the Israeli attack as part of the negotiations.

And that makes it very difficult for them to go back to the table.

Trump wants Iran to surrender, not to sign a deal. And Iran right now is not ready to surrender

- Vali Nasar
https://www.pbs.org/@newshour/show/mideast-experts-discuss-whats-next-for-the-region-as-israel-iran-conflict-erupts

The US supreme court on Friday permitted DOGE, the so-called ...

2025-06-06T22:39:21Z

The US supreme court on Friday permitted DOGE, the so-called ‘department of government efficiency’, broad access to personal information on millions of Americans in Social Security Administration data systems while a legal challenge plays out.
At the request of the Justice Department, the justices put on hold US district judge Ellen Hollander’s order that had largely blocked Doge’s access to “personally identifiable information”
in data such as medical and financial records while litigation proceeds in a lower court.
Hollander found that allowing Doge unfettered access likely would violate a federal privacy law.
The court’s brief, unsigned order did not provide a rationale for siding with Doge.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from the order.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/jun/06/donald-trump-elon-musk-feud-steve-bannon-jeffery-epstein-us-politics-live-news-updates?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-684355f78f08d8006b373bdd#block-684355f78f08d8006b373bdd

History shows that once a vanguard of rogues and lawless ...

2025-06-05T15:41:06Z

History shows that once a vanguard of rogues and lawless individuals gets a hold on government, it is difficult to eject them.

Rather, the changes in government applied with force by this vanguard become normalized.

And that is what is happening here.

https://lucid.substack.com/p/the-whole-government-is-doge-now?r=4urvg&triedRedirect=true

In 2018, an #anonymous Trump administration official delivered a ...

2025-06-05T01:13:02Z

In 2018, an #anonymous Trump administration official delivered a stark warning about the threat he said the president posed with his erratic behavior.

The author was later revealed to be #Miles #Taylor.

When Trump returned to office, he claimed Taylor’s actions could be treasonous and ordered DHS and other agencies to launch an investigation.

Taylor joined Amna Nawaz to discuss his legal response.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/miles-taylor-fights-trumps-order-targeting-him-calling-it-an-attack-on-free-speech

Ukraine detonated a massive underwater blast t argeting the key ...

2025-06-03T15:40:59Z

Ukraine detonated a massive underwater blast t
argeting the key road and rail bridge connecting the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula to Russia,
damaging its underwater supports.

The operation, claimed by Kyiv’s SBU security service, is the second high-profile operation by Ukraine in days striking significant Russian assets after a sophisticated drone raid on Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet on Sunday

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/03/ukraine-hits-bridge-linking-crimea-to-russia-with-underwater-explosives?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Ahead of a meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s ...

2025-06-01T19:45:25Z

Ahead of a meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s Executive Committee in Little Rock on Friday,
DNC chair Ken Martin said the national party is committing the largest financial assistance to state Democratic parties ever.
“The DNC will push out over a million dollars every month to the state parties,” Martin said in an interview.
“There’s real opportunity for us, but that means we have to take advantage of it. Arkansas is really an important part of the calculus"
“Arkansas is one of the only states where we saw legislative gains (in 2024),” he said.
Democrats gained a single seat in the 100-member Arkansas House in the state’s only majority-Latino district last year.
https://arkansasadvocate.com/2025/05/30/state-national-democrats-meet-in-little-rock-to-sketch-out-partys-future/

A letter sent Wednesday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and ...

2025-05-30T02:41:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…vzry
_________________________

A letter sent Wednesday by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden and Jack Reed cited ProPublica reporting on
how one DOGE aide assigned to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helped oversee the mass layoffs of the agency’s staff while holding as much as $715,000 in stocks that bureau employees are prohibited from owning.

The DOGE aides’ cases “underscore what appears to be a pervasive problem with Elon Musk and DOGE employees trampling ethics rules and laws to benefit their own pockets at the expense of the American public,”
the lawmakers said in the letter.

Warren and Reed sit on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Wyden is the ranking member of the chamber’s Committee on Finance.

The letter asked Attorney General Pam Bondi,
the Office of Government Ethics and three inspectors general with jurisdiction over the CFPB, Treasury and IRS
to investigate the DOGE aides' finances, including whether they’d appropriately divested from any conflicted holdings, and their specific work at the agencies.

“The American people deserve answers regarding whether their own interests may have been undermined by Trump Administration officials that acted in violation of federal ethics laws,”
the letter said.

6 Billionaire Fortunes Bankrolling Project 2025 More than $120 ...

2025-05-10T21:54:30Z

6 Billionaire Fortunes Bankrolling Project 2025

More than $120 million from a few ultra-wealthy families has powered the Heritage Foundation and other groups that created the plan to remake American government.

Since 2020, donor networks linked to just six family fortunes have funneled more than $120 million into Project 2025 advisory groups
More than 100 nonprofits led by the Heritage Foundation, have signed up to sponsor the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document.
https://www.desmog.com/2024/08/14/project-2025-billionaire-donor-heritage-foundation-donald-trump-jd-vance-charles-koch-peter-coors/

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers faced a crowd of ...

2025-05-09T16:26:04Z

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers faced a crowd of opposition while attempting to arrest a mother clinging to her baby on the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, Thursday morning.
The brazen arrest, in which ICE agents were swarmed by close to 25 onlookers demanding a warrant and identification, was captured on video.
Agents attempted to control the crowd as they formed a “human ring” around the ICE vehicle holding the detained woman.
Local police were called to the scene amid the chaos.
“The crowd was unruly,” police said in a statement.
They claimed that some individuals “put their hands on federal agents and Worcester officers.”
The woman’s daughter, a 16-year-old, was left holding her baby sister and stood in front of the agents’ car at one point, trying to block it.
She allegedly kicked the car after handing the baby to someone else,
and now faces four criminal charges including reckless endangerment of a child, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.
Also arrested was a Worcester School Committee candidate, Ashley Spring,
who allegedly threw an unknown liquid substance on police officers and pushed them while they tried to arrest the 16-year-old.
Worcester City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj was among the residents who protested the arrest.
“As an elected official, it is my obligation to stand up for my constituents,”
Haxhiaj said in a statement.
“The way immigrants in Worcester and across the Commonwealth are being targeted and terrorized by this federal administration for deportation is absolutely unconstitutional.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/195061/ice-fight-arrest-mom-holding-baby

BREAKING: Judge Richard Myers ruled on Monday that the North ...

2025-05-06T02:24:39Z

BREAKING: Judge Richard Myers ruled on Monday that the North Carolina Supreme Court's handling of the state supreme court election there violated the U.S. Constitution.

Under today’s order from Myers, a Trump appointee, the win for Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, that was the result of the initial election count is to be certified.

More, and links: https://substack.com/@chrisgeidner/note/c-114784685 https://journa.host/@chrisgeidner/114457766083034777

How does anyone know that these guys in plainclothes 💥and ...

2025-04-23T04:30:27Z

How does anyone know that these guys in plainclothes 💥and wearing balaclavas are legitimate federal officers, and not kidnappers?

And what happens when a "good guy with a gun" kills a "bad guy with a gun" who turns out to be a Fed?

It will happen

https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/crime-courts/article_9ce921d6-5f61-4546-b0c9-ea2287d8bf16.html

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this woman: ...

2025-04-16T20:15:08Z

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this woman:

She’s one of the agents who arrested Tufts grad student Rumeysa Öztürk last month.

The raid was headed by ICE, but it’s unclear what agency this woman works for.

If you watch the video, this female agent comes in the second wave.

The first agent to make contact with Öztürk is a man who bumps her, as if by accident, and then grabs her phone out of her hands.

It’s clear that, initially, Öztürk thinks she’s being mugged.

But then another man comes in behind her.
She is quickly surrounded and they begin to pull off her backpack.

Eventually they handcuff her and lead her to an unmarked vehicle.

If this happened in Oaxaca, you’d assume it was a cartel kidnapping.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/inside-the-mind-of-an-ice-agent?r=1emko&triedRedirect=true

The Christian right has set the US on the road to Gilead. Without ...

2025-04-05T05:47:18Z

The Christian right has set the US on the road to Gilead. Without a fight, other nations may follow

With Donald Trump as president, there is now a heavy strain of Christian nationalism driving the US political agenda.

From draconian abortion policies to ending birthright citizenship, some of Trump’s first executive orders sound startlingly like something out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,
the dystopian novel turned TV show set in Gilead, a fundamentalist, fascist version of the US where women have no rights.

But it is urgent we understand that what is happening in the US could happen here.

This road to Atwood’s Gilead is charting a course straight through the UK and Europe, and we may well be sleepwalking on to it.

In November 2024 I debated with the American conservative lawyer Erin Hawley at the Oxford Union.

The motion was “This house regrets the overturning of Roe v Wade”, the US supreme court’s landmark decision that once protected the right to have an abortion at the federal level.

Hawley is vice-president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, founded by the US Christian right.

She is also a high profile lawyer and supported the state of Mississippi on the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe.

During the debate, Hawley argued that Roe was a “usurpation of democratic process” made by an all-male supreme court.
She mentioned the constitution a lot but, curiously, I didn’t hear her mention God. I was surprised because I had just spent the afternoon listening to the podcast This is Living,
which she hosts with her husband, the senator Josh Hawley, and on which she describes her decision to fight Roe as “a calling from God”,
putting her success down to “the prayers of believers”.
On one episode, the Hawleys suggest that where abortion is now illegal their listeners “adopt a mom who is unexpectedly expecting” to help her – and “most importantly, introduce her to Jesus”.

The overt religious agenda of Hawley’s podcast is completely at odds with the legalese she used in court and in the debating chamber.
But the ADF itself is more explicit. The CEO’s statement on its website reads:
“We will do – as we have done – the hard things to which God has called us with the expectation that He will accomplish His purposes.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/05/christian-right-us-gilead-roe-v-wade-europe-women-rights-abortion?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

I've never understood why more republicans aren’t actually ...

2025-04-03T14:22:18Z

I've never understood why more republicans aren’t actually bothered by Trump being so obviously owned by Russia.

And for all it’s been discussed, I feel like it’s still not talked about enough.

Like why isn’t the fact that we have a Russian puppet in the White House the frame for every news story?

https://bsky.app/profile/aselbst.bsky.social/post/3llw3jbasas2l

Tomorrow is Election Day: If we win, we can chop the GOP's ...

2025-04-01T00:52:27Z

Tomorrow is Election Day:
If we win, we can chop the GOP's House majority in half!

Our EOQ deadline is a few hours away + we're running out of time:

Rush $10 now to help us win elections where we can replace MAGA cronies with commonsense Democrats!

>> https://stand-up.us/l/7g1IoW

Thanks!
-Stand Up

A huge upset victory for Democrats: Democrat James Malone DEFEATS ...

2025-03-26T19:10:35Z

A huge upset victory for Democrats:

Democrat James Malone DEFEATS Republican County Commissioner Josh Parsons
in the special election for Pennsylvania SD-36
— FLIPPING a district Trump carried by 15.4% in the 2024 election.

Also, Pennsylvania Democrats retained their one seat majority in the Pennsylvania State House

⭐️The next big races will be to retain our Democratic majority on the Pennsylvania State #Supreme #Court.

Click here to get to know the candidates and to donate and get involved with the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.

https://www.padems.org/candidates/

As Trump wrapped up his first term in 2020, he signed legislation ...

2025-03-09T19:27:59Z

As Trump wrapped up his first term in 2020, he signed legislation to protect Americans from surprise medical bills. “This must end,” Trump said. “We’re going to hold insurance companies and hospitals totally accountable.”
But Trump’s wide-ranging push to slash government spending, led by billionaire Elon Musk, is weakening the federal office charged with implementing the No Surprises Act.
Some 15% of those working at the federal Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, or CCIIO, were fired two weeks ago, according to the agency’s former deputy director in charge of operations, Jeff Grant.
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/trump-surprise-medical-bills-agency-responsible-job-cuts-doge/

It’s Bernie. Back in 1991, I and a few other House members ...

2025-03-09T17:33:32Z

In reply to nevent1q…ws6m
_________________________

It’s Bernie.

Back in 1991, I and a few other House members started the Progressive Caucus.

Back then, many of the ideas we care about today were considered "fringe" or “too radical."

From Medicare for All, to expanding Social Security, to raising the minimum wage,
ideas that were once considered “too radical” are now supported by the majority of Americans.

And while we are making real progress, we need to do better.

These ideas are popular with the American people,
but there are simply not enough progressives in Congress to vote them into law.

A major part of our work moving forward must involve finding and recruiting more and more strong progressive candidates for office,
supporting them,
and giving them the tools and resources they need to run winning campaigns.

That is exactly the work of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC,
and why I’m reaching out to you today.

If you understand the importance of electing and re-electing as many progressives as we can,
then please use this link to make a $27 contribution to the Progressive Caucus PAC today:

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/cpc-p2p-ga-v-q12025-bernie?refcode=bs-txt-20250308-b1&amount=27

In solidarity,
Bernie

More than 10,000 people turned out for a rally with U.S. Sen. ...

2025-03-09T17:20:36Z

More than 10,000 people turned out for a rally with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt), in Warren as part of his national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

The audience filled the main event space – the gym at Lincoln High School – and two overflow rooms, and still left hundreds more outside.

Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed, who ran for governor in 2018 and is exploring a run for U.S. Senate in 2026, said the size of the crowd is a sign of progressives’ resilience.

“They want us to step back, and today, all of you have said that we are not stepping back, we are stepping forward,”
El-Sayed said.

“We are recognizing that in one another, we have all we need to build that government for the people and by the people.”

Sanders compared the current political moment to various movements throughout history, including the American Revolution and the abolition movement.
https://www.alternet.org/sanders-rally/

The reality of litigation challenging the Trump administration is ...

2025-03-09T16:40:28Z

The reality of litigation challenging the Trump administration is that it isn’t all going to win.
That’s OK.

Forcing the administration to defend its actions, on the record and in public, is important.

The mere fact of litigating can change implementation of policy to improve its application to those affected.

Even a loss can advance awareness about oppressive steps being taken by the administration.

And, multiple strategies might be taken to challenge certain actions, some of which will be more successful than others.

From a litigation perspective, in other words, not suing is sometimes “obeying in advance.”

Actions need to be challenged. If a key aspect of what President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and others are doing right now is seeing what they can get away with
— and what they can convince people that they can do
— then a key part of pushing back against that needs to be challenging everything that can be challenged.

In short: Force them to work for it.

https://www.lawdork.com/p/the-importance-of-being-litigious

To anyone who knows anything about the Social Security ...

2025-03-05T20:15:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…0xau
_________________________

To anyone who knows anything about the Social Security Administration, calling its workforce “bloated” sounds like a sick joke.

The truth is that the agency is hopelessly understaffed, and has been for years.

Trump, the GOP and DOGE have launched their attack on Social ...

2025-03-05T20:12:36Z

Trump, the GOP and DOGE have launched their attack on Social Security.

You should start worrying now

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-03-04/trump-the-gop-and-doge-have-launched-their-attack-on-your-social-security-start-worrying

Canada has border restrictions on felons entering the country. We ...

2025-03-03T01:34:52Z

Canada has border restrictions on felons entering the country.

We CAN offer a Ministerial Waiver, as we have done for some performers & others to allow entry.

We should VERY publicly offer Trump this waiver for the upcoming G7 meeting.

(Passive aggressive politeness is a Canadian thing.)

https://bsky.app/profile/canadaspmpet.bsky.social/post/3ljge5t4alk2r

Piff’s popular TED Talk is called “Does Money Make You ...

2025-02-28T06:22:15Z

Piff’s popular TED Talk is called “Does Money Make You Mean?”

His observations are consistent with a large body of social science finding that people of higher socioeconomic status are more prone to entitlement and narcissistic behavior.

Wealthier subjects tend to be more self-oriented and more willing to behave unethically in their own self-interest
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean

The Republican Party won the last election in no small part ...

2025-02-27T15:20:35Z

The Republican Party won the last election in no small part because of its new appeal with working-class voters, a shift that left many in Washington wondering if a sustained political realignment was afoot.

But the economic agenda Republicans are now putting together on Capitol Hill would by and large help rich Americans, all while teeing up cuts to programs that provide health care and food to the poor.

The disconnect has left some Republicans nervous about whether they are abandoning their newfound base of support. Democrats, eyeing that vulnerability, are hammering Republicans for planning to take from the poor to give to the rich, a line of attack that they believe helped lift them back into power during President Trump’s first term.

Who is helped and who is harmed by Republicans’ plans are shaping up to be central questions for G.O.P. lawmakers as they try to squeeze legislation through their narrow majorities in Congress. The House on Tuesday adopted a budget blueprint that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in spending reductions, alongside $300 billion in new funding for defense and border programs and an increase in the debt limit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/us/politics/house-republican-budget-bill.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Even the most disturbing RFK Jr. headline always manages to have ...

2025-02-26T23:39:43Z

Even the most disturbing RFK Jr. headline always manages to have a detail inside creepier than you could have imagined. I’m sorry, did you just say Black kids should have a chance to get “re-parented”???? Gift link
https://wapo.st/4hW2xGI

This monstrous plan, whether controlled by Erik Prince of ...

2025-02-25T21:13:21Z

This monstrous plan, whether controlled by Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy
or by Steven Miller himself,
would end the United States of America as we know it.

Neighbors turning in neighbors.
A private army reminiscent of the Gestapo.
Hidden cameras & mics everywhere

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/25/documents-military-contractors-mass-deportations-022648

California officials are pressing for further cuts to the ...

2025-02-24T23:03:01Z

California officials are pressing for further cuts to the electric bill credits people with rooftop solar panels can earn,
in a move that would align the state with its for-profit utilities
at the expense of consumers who invested thousands of dollars to power their homes with renewable energy.

Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric have long complained about the financial credits to households that generate more solar energy than they can use
— credits that can keep rising electricity costs in check for those with panels.

But the energy generated by rooftop solar also puts a dent in utility sales of electricity,
and the big utility companies successfully pressed the state Public Utilities Commission in 2022 to reduce the value of the billing credits for panels installed after April 15, 2023.

Now, the credits for consumers who installed panels before that date are becoming a target

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-24/big-utilities-war-against-rooftop-solar

"Dear Colleague,” the February 14 letter from the ...

2025-02-24T17:03:59Z

"Dear Colleague,” the February 14 letter from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights begins,

“Discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin is illegal and morally reprehensible.”

Who could disagree?

But the letter quickly pivots to the bold claim that today’s
“Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism,’”
the result of which is that schools are waging an enormous discriminatory campaign
“against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students.”

The letter’s argument is quite simple.

It draws the entirety of its firepower from the recent Supreme Court decision in
"Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard",
claiming that
“although SFFA addressed admissions decisions,
the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly.”

At its core, the test is simple:
If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race,
the educational institution violates the law.

Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.

Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race.

➡️ But like the SFFA decision, it goes further than just the explicit use of race.

“Although some programs may appear neutral on their face,” the letter goes on,
“a closer look reveals that they are, in fact, motivated by racial considerations.”

🆘 In a twisted inversion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s point that
“Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application,”
the OCR carves out a position that turns civil rights and anti-discrimination principles on their head.

It’s important to see the parallels in principle between what the Office for Civil Rights is saying
and what King was arguing when he wrote that line.

It’s true that neutral-sounding policies can, in practice, be applied selectively
or, worse, discriminate against specific groups.

The consequences of any given policy might disproportionately affect a particular group of people, even if the policy itself doesn’t explicitly name that group.

To take just one example, the seemingly neutral requirement to require a photo ID in order to register to vote sounds all well and good until you actually drill down on the effects of such a policy and see who, exactly, is most prevented from voting by this policy
(and, more to the point, who is often supporting such policies).
I’ll give you one guess.

So King was pointing out that seemingly “neutral” policies and laws often provide white racists with plausible deniability.

Now, the OCR argues that the same principle applies in reverse:
so-called neutral policies in schools serve as a cover for racist DEI advocates discriminating against white people,
giving more seats and consideration to minorities and historically disadvantaged groups.

In short, the real racists now are those who run or support DEI initiatives.

But the letter goes beyond banning explicit race-conscious policies, claiming that even indirect efforts to promote racial diversity
—so-called “proxies for race”
—must be eliminated.

Of course, this simply vindicates people who see the boogeyman of DEI everywhere they look, further encouraging an unparalleled level of suspicion directed at any group, professor, or program on campus.

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-governments-new-crackdown-on-race-in-education/

A few weeks ago, I warned that the second Trump administration ...

2025-02-21T15:24:05Z

A few weeks ago, I warned that the second Trump administration might be squandering the tolerance and good will that Washington had long received from the world’s major democracies.

Instead of seeing the United States as a mostly positive force in world affairs,
these states might now “have to worry that the United States is actively malevolent.”

That column was written before Vice President J.D. Vance gave his confrontational speech at the Munich Security Conference, before President Donald Trump blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia,
and before U.S. officials appeared to preemptively offer Russia almost everything it wants before negotiations on Ukraine were even underway.

The reaction of mainstream European observers was neatly summed up by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times:
“[T]he Trump administration’s political ambitions for Europe mean that, for now, America is also an adversary.”

Is this view correct?

A skeptic might recall that there have been serious rifts in the transatlantic partnership on many prior occasions: over Suez in 1956, over nuclear strategy and Vietnam in the 1960s, over the Euromissiles issue in the 1980s, and during the Kosovo war in 1999.

The Iraq war in 2003 was yet another low-water mark between Washington and much of Europe.

The United States did not hesitate to act unilaterally on numerous occasions, even when its allies’ interests were adversely affected,
as Richard Nixon did when he took the United States off the gold standard in 1971 or as Joe Biden did when he signed the protectionist Inflation Reduction Act and the United States forced European firms to stop some high-tech exports to China.

But few Europeans or Canadians believed the United States was deliberately trying to harm them;
they believed that Washington was genuinely committed to their security and understood that its own security and prosperity was tied to their own.

They were right, which made it much easier for the United States to win their support when necessary.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/21/yes-america-is-europes-enemy-now/

When Elon Musk’s DOGE first started out on its mission of going ...

2025-02-21T04:28:07Z

When Elon Musk’s DOGE first started out on its mission of going from department to department haphazardly cutting everything they didn’t understand and firing people at random, most Trumpists cheered.

They imagined themselves pointing and laughing as Federal employees who had been hired to do nothing but sit around being a Black transgender lesbian all day long while collecting millions of taxpayer dollars lost their jobs.

They imagined themselves becoming super rich from all of the money Elon was saving them.

They imagined Trump heroically ending the deficit and paying down our debt and this … affecting their day-to-day lives in some capacity?

They imagined getting to laugh in the faces of all of the smug liberals who just didn’t realize that government didn’t need money and workers to function properly,
or that all of our tax money was being sent to 250-year-old vampires.

So far, that hasn’t happened.

Some have been pretending that it’s been happening, but it hasn’t happened.

What has happened, to cite but a couple examples, is that they’ve accidentally fired people working on avian flu, as well as nuclear weapons specialists,
whom they now need to locate and rehire (despite not knowing how to reach them).

The point of the arbitrary firings was clearly meant to prove that federal workers are so pointless that you could just fire any of them without any regard to what they actually do and things would continue working just fine.

As it turns out, that’s not really true.

Another thing that has happened is that a lot of the people who have been fired have been Trump voters or relatives of Trump voters,
who — like so many Trump-voting relatives and spouses of undocumented immigrants
— thought they would get a pass.

As it turns out, this even includes a friend of Fox’s Jesse Watters

https://www.wonkette.com/p/when-republicans-said-they-wanted

Young Germans Interviewed in English about the Sunday #election ...

2025-02-20T20:00:25Z

Young Germans
Interviewed in English
about the Sunday #election
where the hate-based populist and largely fascist #AfD party is expected to take second place with 21% of the votes according to polls

https://todon.eu/@b9AcE/114037949135292381

In 1923 Adolph Hitler. incited an insurrection against the German ...

2025-02-17T16:14:05Z

In 1923 Adolph Hitler. incited an insurrection against the German Government.

He was tried, given a slap on the wrist, and became a convicted felon.

Despite being treated charitably by judges, Hitler claimed political persecution
and successfully portrayed himself as a victim of the "corrupt" Social Democrats.

National Archives Head Resigns as Trump Takes Control of Records ...

2025-02-15T01:32:46Z

National Archives Head Resigns as Trump Takes Control of Records

🆘 Sources name conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt
and far-right journalist John Solomon as potential replacements.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/national-archives-head-resigns-as-trump-takes-control-of-records/

SHOW UP ON MONDAY, FEB 17TH https://www.fiftyfifty.one

2025-02-14T03:46:43Z

SHOW UP ON MONDAY, FEB 17TH
https://www.fiftyfifty.one

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act could ...

2025-02-14T02:46:40Z

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act could
🔥prevent many married women from being able to register to vote🔥
The act, reintroduced by Texas Republican Representative Chip Roy, is intended to amend the "National Voter Registration Act"
to ensure that all people registering to vote are U.S. citizens.
It would require people to present in-person documentation as proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
Much of the documentation listed under the SAVE Act is based on having
💥 a birth certificate that matches the person registering to vote. 💥
However,
👉 as many as 69 million married women in the United States have changed their legal name since getting married,
meaning their name does not match their birth certificate, according to the Center for American Progress.
https://www.newsweek.com/married-women-stopped-voting-save-act-2029325

"For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should ...

2025-02-11T19:37:03Z

"For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace,"
FCC chairman Brendan Carr wrote.

He argued that any sign that taxpayer dollars are supporting a broadcaster running what are effectively commercials further undermines the case to send federal dollars to public broadcasters.

In a statement, FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, a Democratic appointee, said Carr's announcement was a source of "serious concern."

"Public television and radio stations play a significant role in our media ecosystem," Starks said.
"Any attempt to intimidate these local media outlets is a threat to the free flow of information and the marketplace of ideas."

Carr's letter fits into Trump's calls for the end of public funding for NPR and for PBS and into the president's broader rhetorical onslaught against media outlets.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5281162/fcc-npr-pbs-investigation

Do not comply ...

2025-02-09T18:22:54Z

Do not comply https://bsky.app/profile/peterflaire.bsky.social/post/3lhmlkzbkys24

Keir Starmer is considering plans to close a loophole that allows ...

2025-01-11T06:29:28Z

Keir Starmer is considering plans to close a loophole
that allows foreign billionaires like Elon Musk to bankroll British political parties.

Recent reports suggest the X-owner is considering donating up to $100m
– around £80m
– to Nigel Farage’s Reform,
after signalling his support for the party.

While there are restrictions on foreign citizens donating to British political parties,
these can currently be evaded under the law,
if the donation is made via a UK-based company.

While both Farage and Musk have denied suggestions of any imminent donation,
the Reform leader has also said he would accept money were it offered.
https://bylinetimes.com/2024/12/06/keir-starmer-considers-closing-elon-musk-donations-loophole-to-stop-foreign-interference-in-uk-elections/

@nprofile…89hz 🙏🏻Tkank You for your well deserved call ...

2024-12-21T19:32:14Z

In reply to nevent1q…wdhr
_________________________

Purp1eOne (nprofile…89hz) 🙏🏻Tkank You for your well deserved call for #Diversity and #Inclusion

They seem an unlikely, almost motley, crew of emissaries. For the ...

2024-12-21T18:21:36Z

They seem an unlikely, almost motley, crew of emissaries.

For the Bahamas, there is Herschel Walker, a former NFL star whose fledgling Senate campaign was undone by a string of personal embarrassments but who now is named to be the next US ambassador to the small island nation.

To the plum diplomatic posting of Paris goes Charles Kushner, father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and a man the president-elect once pardoned for a felony conviction that the former Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie, an ex-federal prosecutor, called “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he ever prosecuted.

And to Greece, once a preserve of seasoned career diplomats, goes Kimberly Guilfoyle, until recently the romantic partner of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and a woman known more for her rumbustious media profile than her diplomatic acumen.

The trio are among a flurry of ambassadorial nominees rolled out by Trump in recent weeks as he rushes to fill his administration at breakneck speed with envoys who will project his “America First” ideology abroad.

Their lack of credentials has prompted one experienced foreign policy analyst to label them a “diplomatic clown car” – and a deliberate affront to the countries hosting them.

Since last month’s election triumph, the president-elect has nominated ambassadors at a rate not recalled in recent memory – including five in a single day this week.

Some appear conspicuously unschooled in the diplomatic arts; others have business links which experts say risk conflicts of interest.

Unlike most countries, which fill ambassadors’ roles from the ranks of professional diplomats, it is customary for US presidents to reward allies and financial backers with ambassadorial jobs – with prize postings like London and Paris almost always going to friends of the man in the oval office.

But Trump has broken new ground with the sheer volume of ambassadorial nominations – and his lack of consideration of their professional suitability.

“It’s not unusual to see a lot of political appointee ambassadors named early in a presidency,” said Dennis Jett, an international relations professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of a book on the history of US ambassadors.

“But I don’t recall any president-elect announcing bunches of ambassadorships like this guy’s doing. They don’t usually dip down into the ambassadorial ranks until they actually are sitting in the White House.

“The other remarkable thing is how stunningly unqualified everyone is. I don’t see anyone there who I think, ‘Now there’s a highly qualified person.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/trump-team-cabinet?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Redis, creators of the popular in-memory database store, has been ...

2024-12-15T23:37:44Z

Redis, creators of the popular in-memory database store, has been transitioning away from its open source roots since 2018,
when it moved its “Redis Modules”
(e.g. RediSearch) from an open source AGPL license to Apache 2.0 with a “Commons Clause” addendum
(i.e. commercial restrictions).

The following year, Redis replaced the Commons Clause with its own Redis Source Available License (RSAL)
that promised to maintain some freedoms, but with notable restrictions related to competing database services
— such as those provided by companies such as AWS.

In many ways, this was a bellwether of what was to come,
as other companies would later cite the “Amazon problem” as their reason for switching their license up.

Earlier this year, Redis’ transition to the world of proprietary was complete,
when it announced that its core software would be shifting from a BSD 3-Clause license to a dual-license setup
— RSAL or server side public license (SSPL).
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/15/open-source-companies-that-go-proprietary-a-timeline/

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, ...

2024-11-24T19:30:52Z

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two British inventors, Arthur Pollen and Harold Isherwood, became fascinated by a major military question:
🎈how to aim the big guns of battleships.

These warships—of enormous geopolitical import before the advent of intercontinental missiles or drones—had to shoot in poor light and choppy seas at distant moving targets,
conditions that impeded accurate gunfire.

Seeing the need to account for a plethora of variables, Pollen and Isherwood built an integrated system for gathering data,
calculating predictions,
and transmitting the results to the gunners.

At the heart of their invention was the most advanced analog computer of the day,
a technological breakthrough that anticipated the famous Norden bombsight of World War II,
the inertial guidance systems of nuclear missiles,
and the networked “smart” systems that dominate combat today.

Recognizing the value of Pollen and Isherwood’s invention,
💥the British Royal Navy and the United States Navy pirated it,
one after the other.

When the inventors sued,
⚠️both the British and US governments invoked secrecy, citing national security concerns.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/analog-superpowers-how-twentieth-century-technology-theft-built-the-national-security-state-katherine-c-epstein/21055151?ean=9780226831220

"This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not ...

2024-11-24T18:40:56Z

"This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe."

Google's #Gemini #AI is an advanced large language model (LLM) available for public use, that essentially serves as a fancy chatbot
-- But things took a distressing turn for one user who prompted the AI with several school homework questions, was insulted by the AI before being told to die.
-- Around 20 questions in, the user asked about children being raised by their grandparents and challenges being faced by elderly adults.
This caused an extraordinary response from Gemini
-- and the most stark thing is how unrelated it seems to the previous exchanges
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/googles-gemini-ai-tells-user-trying-to-get-help-with-their-homework-theyre-a-stain-on-the-universe-and-please-die/

Experts are beginning to predict H5N1 could start spreading among ...

2024-11-24T07:18:22Z

Experts are beginning to predict H5N1 could start spreading among humans at scale this flu season.

One healthcare worker even said, “My medical billing app just added it -- novel avian influenza is now a billing option when I code acute hypoxemic respiratory failure.
-- It was never there before last week.”

You can always count on the healthcare industrial complex to be on their toes as agencies like the CDC and the FDA behave increasingly like PR agencies,
telling the public to wash their hands while they roll back infection protections in hospitals and stall progress on promising vaccines by companies like Novavax.
Last month, the CDC also announced that they’re partnering with Walgreens to develop a test for bird flu in humans.
As their release says, the program wants to prepare for “the symptoms and risk factors for infection with H5N1 bird flu among higher-risk populations,” -- including dairy and poultry workers.

Bird flu promises us a pandemic as the incoming president makes plans to infuse our top healthcare institutions with an army of conspiracy theorists
that includes Janette Nesheiwat as surgeon general, a woman who has written about “miracles” in medicine and sells her own brand of sketchy diet pills.
https://www.the-sentinel-intelligence.com/p/everything-that-friend-wants-you-8b4?triedRedirect=true

The common threads here are, unsurprisingly, transphobia and ...

2024-11-24T02:58:10Z

The common threads here are, unsurprisingly, transphobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, with a shot of "great replacement" conspiracy theorizing for good measure -- all in the name of Christian goodness

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2024/11/19/inside-beehive

Trump’s willingness to choose cabinet members with histories of ...

2024-11-24T02:42:31Z

Trump’s willingness to choose cabinet members with histories of alleged sexual misconduct threw his transition plans off course this week.

Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general, dropped out of consideration on Thursday amid mounting questions over allegations of having sex with an underage girl and illicit drug use. He has denied wrongdoing.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/11/23/world/politics/trump-nominees-sexual-misconduct-spotlight/

♦️The US expects thousands of North Korean troops massing in ...

2024-11-24T02:36:56Z

♦️The US expects thousands of North Korean troops massing in Russia will “soon” enter combat against Ukraine, the secretary of defence said on Saturday.

About 10,000 North Korean soldiers were believed to be based in the Russian border region of Kursk, Lloyd Austin said,
where they were being “integrated into the Russian formations”.

“Based upon what they’ve been trained on, the way they’ve been integrated into the Russian formations, I fully expect to see them engaged in combat soon,” the Pentagon chief said.

He had “not seen significant reporting” of North Korean troops being “actively engaged in combat” to date, he said.

♦️Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged world leaders to “respond firmly and decisively” after the Russian missile strike on Thursday.

The Ukrainian president said his country was working on developing new types of air defence to counter “new risks” following Russia’s deployment of a new ballistic missile. 
Ukraine’s parliament cancelled Friday’s session, legislators said, citing the risk of a Russian missile attack on the district of Kyiv where government buildings are located.

“The hour of questions to the government has been cancelled,” said Yevgenia Kravchuk, an MP from the ruling party.

“There are signals of an increased risk of attacks on the government district in the coming days.”
 
♦️Russia sent air defence missiles and other military technology to North Korea in return for the deployment of troops from the North to support its war in Ukraine, intelligence officials in South Korea said.

Experts believe North Korea’s dispatch of troops to fight against Ukraine and weapons from its vast stockpiles have been repaid with Russian oil and advanced military technology, Justin McCurry and Emma Graham-Harrison report.

 ♦️Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia would carry out more tests of its new Oreshnik missile in combat and had a stock ready for use, a day after firing the experimental, nuclear-capable ballistic missile on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

The Russian president described the missile’s first use as a successful test and said more would follow.

The Kremlin said the strike on a Ukrainian military facility was designed to warn the west that Moscow would respond to moves by the US and the UK to allow Kyiv strike Russia with their missiles. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/23/ukraine-war-briefing-us-expects-thousands-of-north-korean-troops-to-enter-ukraine-combat-soon

A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the ...

2024-11-23T23:42:45Z

A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that
the inner core of the Moon is,
In fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron.
This, researchers hope, will help settle a long debate about whether the Moon's inner heart is solid or molten,
and lead to a more accurate understanding of the Moon's history – and, by extension, that of the Solar System.

"Our results," wrote a team led by astronomer Arthur Briaud of the French National Centre for Scientific Research in France,
"question the evolution of the Moon magnetic field thanks to its demonstration of the existence of the inner core
and support a global mantle overturn scenario that brings substantial insights on the timeline of the lunar bombardment in the first billion years of the Solar System."

https://www.sciencealert.com/its-official-scientists-have-confirmed-whats-inside-the-moon

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been ...

2024-11-23T21:17:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…xxlv
_________________________

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans,”
Trump wrote when announcing his new Attorney General pick,
longtime ally Pam Bondi,
in a post on Truth Social.

“Not anymore. Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”
 It’s not clear how quickly or easily Trump could fire career staff,
including the prosecutors who worked for Smith on the classified-documents and election-obstruction cases.

Appeals on several fronts delayed the cases from going to trial before the November election, and Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting sitting presidents.

Smith is expected to submit court filings in both cases Dec. 2 explaining how he plans to wind them down.
 Before Trump left office in 2021, he passed an executive order known as the
“Schedule F” rule,
which would have reclassified huge swaths of career government employees and made it easier to fire them.

Biden reversed that order when he entered the White House,
and his administration finalized rules through the Office of Personnel Management bolstering protections for career staffers.  Trump has vowed to reinstate the Schedule F rule, however.

Even if he succeeds, legal experts said it could take years to implement the rule,
as the untested issue of firing masses of federal workers makes its way through the courts.
 “The protections that Biden put in will help, but it will be a fight,” said Rushab Sanghvi,
acting general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees,
which represents some Justice Department employees
— though not prosecutors.

If this is the richest administration in history, it is also ...

2024-11-23T20:14:31Z

If this is the richest administration in history,
it is also likely the one that will move in strictest concert with the needs and desires of people who keep their companies off the exchanges
specifically to maintain their secrets.

Even those in the Trump administration who are not wealthy likely owe their political success to the dons of the private company syndicate.
The Kochs’ nonprofit advocacy group "Americans for Prosperity" all but invented Mike Pence’s career as a leading light of the small-government right.
AFP has for years featured Pence as a speaker at its events and held up his record as Indiana governor as an example for others to follow.
Many in the Republican majority in Congress owe their seats to the help they received from Koch-linked groups,
including those partially funded by the former secretary of education, Betsy DeVos
Under questioning by senator Bernie Sanders during her confirmation hearing, DeVos said it was possible that her family had contributed $200 million to the Republican Party “over the years.”
And while the Kochs don’t much care for Trump,
and the Mercers occasionally butt heads with the Kochs,
I’m betting they’ll always find a way to work together.

It’s in all of their best interests, so long as the aim is the unfettered flow of the darkest of dark money to an increasingly small number of people.
The entry to the seemingly endless driveway at Owl’s Nest,
-- Robert Mercer’s estate in Head of the Harbor on Long Island,
-- is planted with sunny yellow daffodils marked by a white picket gate suspended between two stone pillars.
Atop each pillar sits a large bronze statue of an owl, wings extended, as if ready to swoop down on unwitting prey.
Consider yourself warned.
https://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/robert-mercers-house-2/view/google/

Others in the Trump inner circle who made their fortunes via ...

2024-11-23T19:47:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…9z2z
_________________________

Others in the Trump inner circle who made their fortunes via privately held ventures include treasury secretary
#Steven T. #Mnuchin, who got a great deal during the financial crisis on IndyMac, a mortgage lending bank,
thanks to our government’s penchant for the socialization of risk and privatization of profit when entities considered “too big to fail” go into a state of distress.
Mnuchin and his fellow investors, a group that included liberal donor and hedge-fund honcho George Soros, changed the company name to #OneWest and began to aggressively foreclose on homeowners.
The bank earned Mnuchin and his partners a profit of $1.6 billion in its first year of operation,
even as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was preparing to take a hit of nearly $11 billion “on bad loans that the Pasadena institution made before it was sold last March and renamed OneWest Bank,” according to E. Scott Reckard of the Los Angeles Times.

Then there’s commerce secretary #Wilbur #Ross, worth $2.5 billion according to Forbes, who started a second career in 2000 with the creation of his eponymous investment company,
which he later sold to Invesco for a reported $375 million.
#Reed #Cordish, special assistant to the president for intragovernmental and technology initiatives, is a scion of the family that owns privately held Cordish Companies,
involved in gaming and entertainment.
He’s said to be tight with Jared Kushner.
#Sonny #Perdue, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, founded the private company Perdue Inc., a trucking outfit,
with his wife, Mary, who was reported in 2005 to be the company’s sole shareholder.
(An official at Perdue Inc. declined to confirm to The Baffler whether this is still the case.)
And, while not a rich guy himself, CIA director #Mike #Pompeo founded a private company called #Thayer #Aerospace in the late 1990s with help from Koch Venture Capital, an arm of Koch Industries.
A Pompeo aide told the Washington Post that the Koch investment amounted to only 2 percent,
but there’s no way to really know, since the transaction took place between two privately held companies.
He later became president of #Sentry #International, another private company, before his 2010 run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he won, again with an assist from the Koch brothers.
He’s also a climate-change denier—an appealing trait in a public official if you’re a fossil fuels magnate looking to buy one

The wealth of #Betsy #DeVos, by contrast, comes from a simpler ...

2024-11-23T19:23:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…p98t
_________________________

The wealth of #Betsy #DeVos,
by contrast, comes from a simpler operation:
the marketing of what some have called a pyramid scheme that goes by the brand name #Amway.
Founded by her father-in-law in 1959, Amway distributes home products like dish soap and cosmetics through a network of home-based sellers
who are pressured to recruit more sellers in order to earn a bonus on the amount of product the distributor would then sell wholesale to the recruit.
That recruit would also be a distributor, looking for recruits of his or her own, in order to sell more products wholesale in order to get that bonus.
Note the emphasis on recruitment and bonuses rather than the direct-selling to retail customers,
who, in the end, were the ones for whom Amway products were ostensibly intended.
In the business press, Amway is often described as a “multilevel marketing company.”
In the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission described its business model as
an “inherent fraud,” as historian Rick Perlstein reported in The Nation,
and tried to shut the company down.
The FTC failed in that effort, but did issue orders in 1979 slapping Amway for price-fixing and misrepresenting the kind of money distributors could expect to make.
In fact, Amway was made to tell distributors that they could wind up losing money.
Three decades later, in 2010, a class action lawsuit by former sellers (um, “distributors”) alleging Amway’s engagement in an “illegal scheme” was settled out of court.
According to USA Today, Amway agreed to pay $55 million to former distributors,
closely oversee high-level distributors who run training businesses,
strengthen refund policies
and make other changes estimated to cost an additional $100 million.
In Forbes’ 2016 listing of “America’s Largest Private Companies,” Amway clocks in at number twenty-nine.

The education secretary, née Elisabeth Prince, did not come into the DeVos family empty-handed.
Her own family of origin, while not as wealthy as her husband’s, was quite well-to-do through her father’s enterprise, 💥Prince Corporation💥, itself a privately held company until Johnson Controls bought it for $1.3 billion in cash in 1996.
Founder #Edgar #Prince, seeking to change the political culture to more closely resemble his own heartless Calvinism,
donated, according to Zack Stanton of Politico, “millions in seed funding to launch the
💥Family Research Council,”
the right-wing organization that represents and organizes politically conservative evangelical Christians,
and was famously designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Prince’s son, #Erik, used his windfall to found #Blackwater, the military contractor that went on to infamy when, in 2007,
its mercenaries gunned down civilians in a Baghdad city square.
Four Blackwater contractors were convicted in 2014 of killing fourteen unarmed Iraqis “in what prosecutors called a wartime atrocity,” according to the New York Times.
Blackwater, since sold and renamed #Academi, was also privately held.
It enjoyed more than $1 billion in government contracts.
In 2010, according to the Washington Post,
Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates “amid mounting legal problems for his American business.”

Federal employment as a percent of total employment. Federal ...

2024-11-23T18:05:01Z

Federal employment as a percent of total employment.

Federal employment was around 4.3% of total employment in 1960 and is now down to 1.9%.

The spikes are the decennial Census!

Currently there are just over 600 thousand postal workers, and just under 2.4 million other federal employees.

The Federal government has outsourced some functions to the private sector

Just some numbers and graphs to keep in mind during the discussion of federal employment cuts.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8fJEBEybYLtAczFzLUgiSxmBaAmNNPVPXkemHLNeR_BhTS4vEfLH6POTw78ofXU9vG_UmKKtiKr_MQYkMNA281Ydl32uBLrcrf-IFiIk3b_cJRAZuPcFSToM_UsP2S5AFKieRkA2JeAsD3APJzYIPWAWrixHPi9RtSxuJ8hpFPSDtYWL4Bgjd/s927/FedGovPercentOct2024.PNG

On Oct. 24, President Biden released a National Security ...

2024-11-23T17:50:44Z

On Oct. 24, President Biden released a
National Security Memorandum
on artificial intelligence(NSM on AI),
in addition to an accompanying framework offering high-level recommendations.

The NSM fulfills a requirement outlined in Section 4.8 of Executive Order 14110, which requires large AI developers and providers to share safety tests with the government,
directs agencies to establish safety and testing standards,
and calls for action to address the technology’s impact.

The NSM applies to agencies within the intelligence community and those using National Security Systems (NSS);

the framework serves as guidance for agencies in managing their “respective components/sub-agencies.”

Both documents are intended to serve as the Department of Defense/intelligence community counterpart to the civilian-focused memorandum on AI (M-24-10) issued by the Office of Management and Budget
—representing a comprehensive government approach to AI.

Accordingly, the NSM is the “first-ever” such document,
with an overarching goal of responsibly, safely, and securely ensuring an “edge over rivals seeking to leverage AI to the detriment of [U.S.] national security.”

The administration outlined “three core principles”:
securing American leadership in AI,
harnessing AI for national security,
and accelerating responsible adoption via “clear rules of the road.”

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/memorandum-outlines-u.s.-government-s-role-in-ai-development

Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to ...

2024-11-23T17:16:43Z

Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/poor-people-often-dont-survive-to-become-seniors-who-vote.html

Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to ...

2024-11-23T17:15:16Z

Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/poor-people-often-dont-survive-to-become-seniors-who-vote.html

The moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party did not happen ...

2024-11-23T16:56:42Z

The moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party did not happen overnight. It happened gradually
— starting with Newt Gingrich’s attack on the government in the early 1990s.

It continued with the Tea Party movement, the birther conspiracy and the nomination of Donald Trump in 2016.

https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/the-choices-ive-made/

Musk has begun singling out individual government employees he ...

2024-11-23T16:46:22Z

Musk has begun singling out individual government employees he says are emblematic of the government’s bloat and posting about them to his hundreds of millions of followers on X.

Earlier this week, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, the X user “datahazard” shared a screenshot on X highlighting the role of Ashley Thomas,
the Director of Climate Diversification at the US International Development Finance Corporation, saying,
“I don’t think the US Taxpayer should pay for the employment” of that role.
Musk reposted it, adding the comment “so many fake jobs” in a post with more than 33 million views.
As the WSJ notes, Musk’s followers have responded in exactly the way you’d expect:
with a flood of memes and harassment targeting Thomas, whose LinkedIn and Facebook pages are now private.
Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told the WSJ that the posts
“are aimed at sowing terror and fear at federal employees.”

https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/22/24303594/elon-musk-harassing-federal-workers-x

Since Trump's election victory, his past vows to pardon ...

2024-11-23T04:46:48Z

Since Trump's election victory,
his past vows to pardon defendants from the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, has stoked a surge of people seeking to delay their cases
and prompted a Trump-appointed judge to call the possibility “beyond frustrating and disappointing.”

More than 1,500 people have been charged for the riot and more than 1,000 have been sentenced in the attack by Trump supporters
that injured 140 police officers and temporarily halted Congress from counting Electoral College votes certifying President Joe Biden's 2020 election victory.
A Justice Department list of sentences in the cases through Oct. 7 ran 120 pages.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/22/donald-trump-pardon-jan-6-defendants/76228037007/

Donald Trump nominated Dr. Marty Makary Friday to lead the Food ...

2024-11-23T04:32:05Z

Donald Trump nominated Dr. Marty Makary Friday to lead the Food and Drug Administration, selecting a surgeon and author who opposed vaccine mandates and some other public health measures during the coronavirus pandemic.
Makary, a Johns Hopkins University professor, is the latest in a string of Trump nominees who have declared the U.S. health system to be "broken" and in need of a shakeup.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-marty-makary-fda-administrator/

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar But some dollars are different, ...

2024-11-23T00:35:25Z

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar
But some dollars are different, because of how their owners obtain them and move them about.
These are the dark dollars of private companies, dollars slithery in their expert avoidance of taxes, their paths rendered invisible by the absence of footprints.

Critics of the Trump White House point to the obscene levels of wealth that you find among the inner circle of President Trump’s appointees and associates.
Just as striking, though, is the provenance of all this loose cash:
Trump’s trusted advisers have come into much of this wealth through private companies,
whose financial balance sheets and so much more are shielded from public view.
At least ten of Trump’s close political associates, including some of his cabinet picks, hail from the carefully shrouded world of private capital.
💥Private companies play by a different set of rules than those governing firms that trade their shares on stock exchanges.
Unlike their publicly traded counterparts, private companies don’t have to worry about facing irate shareholders.
That’s because a private company’s principals have chosen those shareholders, who are often drawn from a founder’s family.
No proxy fights or hostile takeovers to worry about; no bending to the will of big institutional investors.
This is not to say that there are no big donors to Democrats who don’t also get their dough from private companies.
For example, Democrats have long enjoyed the largesse of the Pritzker family, who took their Hyatt Corporation public only in 2009.
Until then, it was a closely held private company.
But no Democratic administration was ever dominated by the owners of privately held entities,
and no administration of either party has ever represented so much wealth derived from such secretive entities.
👉Little in the way of financial disclosure is required of privately held companies. When it comes to financial regulation, these companies reap the benefit of the government’s failure to call them to account.
The same is true of private companies as large as the Koch Industries conglomerate or as adorably tiny as a startup founded by a lone millennial in a stocking cap.
Sanctums of Privilege
This is not a screed against private companies. As a red-blooded American, I revel in tales of heroic entrepreneurship
—of hatched-in-the-garage ideas that yield their underdog executors an unlikely pot of gold.
This is, rather, a scream, the wail of a blues tune sung to my fellow red-blooded Americans:
🆘 Your government is in the hands of super-rich people who never had to show anything to anybody!
And you can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies:
using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown, answerable to virtually no one.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/what-we-do-is-secret-stan

This is not our first rodeo with authoritarianism ...

2024-11-22T19:58:16Z

This is not our first rodeo with authoritarianism
https://bsky.app/profile/timothysnyder.bsky.social/post/3lbk4omsmgc2t

@nprofile…mpj6 Matilija Poppy 💖 ...

2024-11-22T19:49:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…wun6
_________________________

nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqnd86x5za0ascfmvmsxqyrzk4xc7l48h6gfmlcf5d3e9munenydysffmpj6 (nprofile…mpj6)
Matilija Poppy 💖
https://www.gardenia.net/plant/romneya-coulteri-matilija-poppy

FIRST AID FOR FIGURES: A collection of links to useful resources ...

2024-11-22T19:34:40Z

FIRST AID FOR FIGURES:

A collection of links to useful resources for data visualization

https://helenajamborwrites.netlify.app/posts/24-10_linkcollection/

Meteorologist Syukuro Manabe shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in ...

2024-11-22T19:29:50Z

Meteorologist Syukuro Manabe shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work modeling gases’ movement through a column of atmospheric air—in the 1960s. His 60-year-old research had proved foundational for the computer models that scientists use today to interpret and predict our changing climate.

Manabe’s wait was particularly long, but there is often a substantial gap between the awarding of a Nobel Prize and the earliest work it honors—an average of 20 years across categories, Scientific American found. “It takes time to prove that something has impact beyond just curiosity,” says John Ioannidis, a Stanford University professor who has examined the Nobels’ distribution and influence. Although the awards are not a representative look at all of science, they reveal the trends and incentives shaping key scientific fields.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hidden-patterns-show-nobel-prize-science-trends/

#Bluesky and #enshittification I would like to use Bluesky. ...

2024-11-22T17:24:31Z

#Bluesky and #enshittification
I would like to use Bluesky.
They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire,
and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon.
I wrote about this in 2023:
I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will
- nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqhykucplphuhelaxutcw4jw3vuu7gcg42czhqmk7jhchs8vdga4fswlqz4x (nprofile…qz4x)
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

Many authors, artists, and "content creators" have signed ...

2024-11-22T16:42:36Z

Many authors, artists, and "content creators" have signed up with Amazon as “affiliates”.
Find one you’d like to support, and bookmark one of their Amazon links (doesn’t matter which one).
Any time you use that link to visit Amazon’s web site, they’ll get a small commission (usually 2 – 10%)
on anything you buy.
Notice I said “#anything”
– people often assume this works only if you buy the item that’s linked to, but it’s not so.
Once you’ve clicked the link, you can search for anything you want and, as long as you haven’t left Amazon’s site, the affiliate who took you there gets their cut.
So, it’s really easy:
pick someone you’d like to support,
bookmark one of their links,
and use it as your doorway to Amazon.
That’s it! It won’t make any difference to the price you pay
and you won’t be identified to the person you’ve chosen to support,
but a buck or two will move from #Jeff #Bezos’ pocket to theirs.

https://scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com/2024/05/07/how-to-give-jeff-bezos-less-money-and-support-an-author-artist-or-craftsperson/

The TSA also specified outcomes that the entities needed to ...

2024-11-22T01:01:18Z

The TSA also specified outcomes that the entities needed to achieve, letting the companies figure out how for themselves, Pekoske said.

Those included, for instance, separating operational and administrative networks, ensuring that only authorized personnel had access to critical systems and continuous monitoring of those systems. 
The revised requirements are an improvement, Denbow said in an interview.

It “made a world of difference” that they’re “performance based,” she said.

But the pipeline industry still has concerns that the TSA is dictating how a company should run aspects of its business, such as corporate governance and training, she said. 
As of October 2023, only 53 percent of the several dozen critical pipeline companies in the country were in compliance with the requirements, Pekoske said.
Today, he said, that figure is 100 percent. 
Likewise, as of October 2023, only 21 percent of critical rail companies were compliant with directives, which had been issued a year earlier. Today 68 percent are, he said
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/21/salt-typhoon-china-hack-telecom/

President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that his ...

2024-11-22T00:46:06Z

President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that his new pick for attorney general is #Pam #Bondi.
Bondi previously served as Florida’s attorney general.

The announcement came just hours after former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., withdrew from consideration.
"For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans — Not anymore,"
Trump said in a post to Truth Social.
I "Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again."
Trump also praised her work against “the trafficking of deadly drugs.”
Bondi previously worked on a Trump commission focusing on ending the opioid crisis and combatting drug addiction.
Bondi is currently a partner at the lobbying firm Ballard Partners, where she chairs the company's Corporate Regulatory Compliance practice, according to the firm's website.
The attorney general position would require confirmation by the Senate

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-announces-pam-bondi-attorney-general-pick-gaetz-withdraws-rcna181279

The ❌Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American ...

2024-11-21T23:33:35Z

The ❌Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act
was originally proposed last year,
👉ostensibly to prevent U.S. nonprofits from supporting groups like Hamas after widespread protests over Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
Nicknamed the 💥“nonprofit killer,” it gives the president unprecedented authority to go after political opponents.
🆘Advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union warned of the bill’s potential “to grant the executive branch extraordinary power… based on a unilateral accusation of wrongdoing.”
After an essentially identical bill failed to pass last week,
➡️the newly approved bill now goes to the Senate for a vote.

In the preceding weeks, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s report focused on the Inflation Reduction Act’s distribution of federal funding,
offering a preview of
⚠️how the new terrorism legislation could be wielded for political purposes.⚠️

It also highlighted the kinds of organizations that could be targeted,
including those that support clean-energy policies like committing investments to renewable energy, phasing out fossil fuel production and use, and expanding public land conservation.

Criticizing the Biden administration’s environmental justice grants for marginalized groups historically inundated by pollution,
🔥the report says, “Enriching nonprofit organizations to spread radical, left-leaning ideology is an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars.”

🔥🔥The plan singles out specific groups that the committee says have pushed a “radical rush-to-green agenda,”
🔸including Rewiring America,
(a nonprofit working on electrification),
🔸and New York City-based environmental justice group WE ACT.

🔥It castigated, for example, a blog post on WE ACT’s website“criticizing ‘Republican gas stove culture wars,’
and House GOP Members’ ‘preformative [sic], out-of-touch agenda.’”

https://www.levernews.com/gop-takes-first-steps-to-shut-down-climate-groups/

Brazil’s federal police indicted former President Jair ...

2024-11-21T20:43:04Z

Brazil’s federal police indicted former President Jair #Bolsonaro and 36 other people 💥for allegedly attempting a coup to keep him in office after his defeat in the 2022 elections.
Police said their findings were being delivered Thursday to Brazil’s Supreme Court,
which must decide whether to refer them to Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet, who will either formally charge Bolsonaro and put him on trial, or toss the investigation.

The former right-wing president has denied all claims he tried to stay in office after his narrow electoral defeat in 2022 to his rival, leftist President Luiz Inácio #Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro has faced a series of legal threats since then.

Police said in a brief statement that the Supreme Court had agreed to reveal the names of all 37 people who were indicted
“to avoid the dissemination of incorrect news.”
The 700-page police document likely will take several days for the court to review, Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes said.
Dozens of former and current Bolsonaro aides also were indicted, including Gen. Walter Braga Netto, who was his running mate in the 2022 campaign;
former Army commander Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira;
Valdemar Costa Neto, the chairman of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party;
and his veteran former adviser, Gen. Augusto Heleno.

https://apnews.com/article/brazil-jair-bolsonaro-indictment-0d62fe0a7399483aee48cf3c845560ea

OSIRIS Image Archive Max Planck Institute for Solar System ...

2024-11-21T20:03:52Z

OSIRIS Image Archive
Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

Image Gallery
https://rosetta-osiris.eu/gallery?gallery=custom&ipp=120&page=1&sort=targetDistance&seq=asc&target=67p,lutetia,steins,venus,earth,mars,jupiter,saturn,pluto,vesta,solar_system,stars&content=N,NC,NR,NS,NF,NL,NT,D,DM,DPT,DPC,DPA,DPF,DLS,DJ,DT,G,GC,GM,GVC,GCSC,GGC,GA,CB,CD,CF,CS1,CG,CL,CS2,CM,P,NA&camera=NAC&filterNAC=Blue,Orange,Near-IR&filterWAC=UV245,CS,UV295,OH,UV325,NH,UV375,CN,Green_WAC,NH2,Na,Vis610,Red_WAC,OI,Empty&maxImage=120&dateStart=2016-07-23&dateEnd=2016-07-23&startLikes=0&endLikes=3234&startViews=7&endViews=159352742&targetDistanceFrom=&targetDistanceTo=

Gov. Gavin Newsom will make the first of three post-election ...

2024-11-21T19:09:19Z

Gov. Gavin Newsom will make the first of three post-election visits to California counties that Donald J. Trump won in the presidential race,
reaching out to working-class voters in the Central Valley who remain frustrated by economic woes.

The appearance in Fresno, to unveil a new economic development system, comes as interviews and polls have shown that economic and class divisionswere key to Mr. Trump’s return to power.

With Democrats still mulling over their presidential and congressional losses, Mr. Newsom said in an interview on Wednesday that his party needed to learn from the recent election and to address the struggles of American workers.

“A lot of people feel like they’re losing their identity or losing their future,” Mr. Newsom said.
“Message received.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/us/newsom-california-counties-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Australian state of Victoria's government will spend ...

2024-11-21T04:09:49Z

The Australian state of Victoria's government will spend $370m to build a massive solar and battery farm
-- able to power more than 50,000 homes,
which it says will be the first state government-owned energy project since the electricity grid was privatised in the 1990s.
Jacinta Allan announced the new project in Horsham, in Victoria’s west, which is the second investment made by the government-owned State Electricity Commission.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/20/victoria-solar-farm-horsham-jacinta-allan

ChatGPT is a human conversation simulator, not an information ...

2024-11-15T17:53:09Z

ChatGPT is a human conversation simulator, not an information system or a knowledge base.

It has no understanding of anything: it only outputs plausible responses.

Do not ask an intermediary who has no capacity to understand information to explain it to you.

Instead, go to your university library and look it up yourself, with the help of your local librarians.
Actual information is contained in brains, documents and databases.

https://www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2024-11-14-student-guide-not-writing-with-chatgpt.html

NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study law professor Chase ...

2024-11-14T16:53:12Z

NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study law professor Chase Madar wrote:
"Very hard to see Gabbard disciplining the natsec apparatus (per paleo/Weird Right fantasy) in any way other than turning it into a personalist Trumpian political police.
She learned a lot growing up in her her dad’s authoritarian Hare Krishna spin-off sect and suddenly has a bigger stage to play on."

Willamette University US history professor Seth Cotlar added:
"That clipping sound you heard was all of our global allies cutting the cables that connect to the American intelligence network."

Georgia State University College of Law professor and political scientist Anthony Michael Kreis replied:
"Tulsi Gabbard as DNI? There’s not even a pretense of responsibility from Trump. We might as well just sign up to be a Russian client state."
https://www.alternet.org/tulsi-gabbard-trump/