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silveradeptBeginning May 12 until the money's gone, household in the United States can apply for cost relief of residential broadband services, if one of a handful of criteria are met by someone in the household or the household itself. The credit is for up to $50 for non-Tribal households, so it won't buy a very high-speed tier, but it should be enough to get some people online. Assuming that your local monopoly participates (or, if you are in one of the places where you don't have a de facto monopoly on broadband services, if one of the competitors participates). It also provides a discount on a purchase of a device to take advantage of the new broadband services.
This is your regular reminder that running for the school board is probably going to produce more meaningful results in your lifetime than running for President, because the people who oppose changes to curricular standards and incentives that would tell a true(r) story of the history of the United States all learned a version of history that is specifically intended to perpetuate myths like happy slaves and that the Civil War wasn't primarily fought over abolition of slavery and other such things, when they're talking about those things at all instead of glossing over them completely. In addition, being on the board will give you the opportunity to directly deal with the parents concerned that there's some sort of "wokeness" substitution of curriculum and that "the classics" will summarily be cast down in favor of some newer, lesser material.
Brexit continues to produce difficulties for the UK, as they send warships out to try and protect what they think is a possible blockade.
A Glaswegian who noticed neighbors being taken away by immigration authorities mobilized a successful public protest that eventually resulted in the men being released and no immigration action taken at the time. The protest appeared swiftly enough thanks to a swift communications network in place formed after some earlier immigration decisions and a community that cared about its people. I wouldn't be surprised at this stance coming out of a Home Office that believes they need to do things about the "damn furrners" now that there's been a successful Brexit, and they think that brown people are the easiest and softest targets to enforce that on.
Not all of the large amounts of anti-trans bills introduced in conservative legislatures this year succeeded - the one in Louisiana, for example, garnered a significant amount of opposition and no support, and so was dropped.
Bangor, Wales, elected the first openly non-binary mayor, as best we can tell.
Languages with gendered pronouns continue to struggle over how to avoid privileging the generic masculine, with the obvious amounts of backlash happening about changing the language at all and denunciations that all of this language talk is fascism from the left-wing designed to destroy the perfect society that has already been built. Neopronouns are starting to come back into the Discourse, and as with many things, it can be hard to tell who's being serious, who's being ha ha only serious, and who's being trollish. And, well, usage acceptance is usually more of a personal matter than an institutional one, even if usage changes over time and audience. And there's the perenial problem of when using a loanword, do you pronounce it like the language it originated from (and if so, which one?), or the language it's been imported into? And do you need to care that much about it?
Crime fiction works on the premise that there is such a thing as a good cop, even if in that particular crime fiction, there isn't anyone allowed to be a good cop, and then adds in the fantasy that there is much more crime that both needs police to solve and that would be resolved well by police interaction and intervention. We can find all sorts of works with protagonists and heroes who are par of the justice system, but when we have authors who have heroes and protagonists in worlds where the justice esystem is hostile to them, suddenly there's a lot of pearl-clutching and insistence that those books are inappropriate or unappealing. Even though books that portray the justice system as hostile and uncaring are closer to the reality than ones where police and justice are on the side of good.
A daily life post about a day in the life of someone with Inattentive-type ADHD, including all about how much things would go smoother if there weren't so many damn distractions that get in the way of being a functional and ordered adult.
Using the character of Amos from The Expanse to examine how autism traits and complex post-traumatic stress disorders can combine to work merry hell and make it seem like a character is sociopathic when they're not, as well as all the fun around negative autism stereotypes that make it very easy for someone to assume that another person is sociopathic when they're responding to a life lived where they have autism and have been punished for it all their life.
The ways in which reactionaries can be completely wrong about things but still provide useful hooks for better discourse, this case in architecture. The people who want to return to the age of classical architecture without thinking are often promoting some form of white supremacy couched in the desire for the Distant Past That Never Was, which makes them wrong, but their obsession with classical architecture might be grounded in a desire to have buildings where form and function are closely matched, and there is fruitful ground for talking about buildings with a function and pastiches where the façade is related to one type of building and the interior is for a completely different function.
And also, the way in which a person who deserves to be snarked for dismissing Virginia Woolf and expecting us all to follow in his lead can be the beginning of a better conversation from people who know about what is good, bad, or appealing about authors without having to get too far into the insistences that there is a Right Way and an Official Canon.
Looted artifacts of the kingdom of Benin are being returned and vigorously advocated for return from foreign museums where they have been collected and displayed, the discovery of a bronze age settlement in the Lake Lucerne area of Sweden, right place, right time, big discovery of bronze age jewellery in Sweden, a farmer moving an inconvenient stone shifted the boundary between two nations, a different accidental annexation in relation to trying to keep a border closed over COVID issues, a raid on people trying to pass off Iranian saffron as a more expensive and protected variant from a specific region in Spain, and the correct idea that decolonizing museums (and other related institutions) is not about 'wokeness' but about dignity, respect, and putting things in their correct contexts, rather than viewing them with an imperialist lens.
Puppers at the polling places, a new set of ravens in the Tower of London, the mass digitization and collection projects underway at the UK Museum of Natural History, cetaceans getting in waterways and locks, and a 97 percent hatch rate with regard to rescuing turtle eggs that were laid late in season.
If you have a CVS near you, you can do walk-in appointments for a vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. Same for Wal-Mart and many other entities that have pharmacy services or pharmacies attached to them. The part of the conservative wing in the United States that hasn't decided to buy fully into conspiracy theories are much more likely to get vaccinated if they trust their doctor to provide them with unbiased information, and that their greatest amount of vaccine hesitancy is about the long-term possible effects and possible safety issues.
Residents of Cardston, Alberta, were able to get vaccinations, courtesy of additional surplus from the Blackfoot Confederacy in Montana. Members of the Confederacy on both sides of the border collaborated with their own and the other's Federal governments and made it possible for a drive-through vaccination event for the Canadians, because the Blackfeet on the United States side had 98% vaccination and spare doses to give.
Moderna is testing tweaked vaccinations and booster shots designed to attack more common variations of SARS-CoV-2, with the possibility of improving on the original's already excellent effectiveness, Pfizer's shot seems to be doing well, but they're also developing variations and boosters, Valneva hopes to have an effective vaccine that uses the entire virus (inactivated) to guide the development of an immune response, which might make it more robust against the variations, a vaccine has entered Phase III trials in India, where it hopes to be manufactured and used, should it prove effective, and it looks like most of the vaccines do an effective job of severely lowering the likelihood of transmission of the virus as well as protecting against severe symptoms, which means, with more vaccinations, there can be less transmission and more time granted to tweak and modify so that the vaccinations and their boosters can be really effectively targeted. So, we want more vaccine available everywhere, so there's no place for them to hide from the immune systems coming to get them, and, hopefully, we will also be able to continue with our desire for spite-based public health policy that continues to discriminate hard against coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2.
An unofficial survey uncovers the possibility that getting vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 might cause a temporary change to the menstrual cycle of the person receiving the vaccination. This feels like something that should already be known, but we also know that things that involve menstruation are usually considered dirty things or culturally inappropriate frank sex talk, so it's not surprising that this wasn't tracked or asked about.
That said, because these things weren't necessarily tracked and reported as part of the side effects, an enire conspiracy has spun up about how vaccinations are causing irregularity of menstruation and pregnancy, and that the vaccinated might be somehow transmitting the spike proteins that the vaccines target to build an immune response to. Which, weirdly enough, might finally be getting people who are fervently against good infection protection practice to start adopting good infection prevention practice, because they want to protect themselves from people who they think have taken a poison or some other compound that is not a vaccination and are now actively spreading that contagion to others.
To help get people vaccinated, a county health commissioner offered a free shot (of vaccine) and a free beer (to chase the shot), and collected some stories of why people hadn't gotten their shots yet. Convenience is definitely a factor in this, although we might find that novelty also helps. Bran Castle, a place that plays up its association with the literary Dracula as well as the real Vlad Tepes, is offering free vaccinations, as well as entry to the museum of medieval torture instruments on the property to go with the vaccination.
For those without internet access, calling 1-800-232-0233 in the United States will get the hotline for vaccination, which builds on a lot of other things that are being done to try and make vaccination easier and more convenient, like ride-hailing companies saying they'll provide free rides to and from vaccination sites.rydra_wong has the details along with significant community outreach efforts that are underway, now that it's probably likely that the people who really wanted the vaccine and were in a place that had adequate supply and logistics are mostly getting it or are on track to.
The General, Most-Purposes E-mail Response to Someone US-Based Sharing Misinformation about SARS-Cov-2 and COVID-19, with much thanks torachelmanija for putting together the whole thing into a succinct form.
In technology, The creators of Signal disclosed some significant vulnerabilities in a kit that claimed it could hack into any phone and defeat any encryption on it, both in software versions and in potential copyright liabilities, before making a completely unrelated and otherwise uninteresting comment about aesthetic file choices for their app going forward.
Likely because they became too high-profile after their successful attack on the Colonial Pipeline the DarkSide ransomware group made a public announcement that they are quitting the business, claiming they lost access to their servers and had all their funds seized. The linked article suggests that the decision comes at the hands of the group DarkSide was renting the ransomware capacity from, for as much as any of the statement can be verified or authenticated.
Last for tonight: the narrative that gymnasts must be young and relentlessly abusively trained to achieve world-class performance needs to be changed, and there are at least some athletes who are, by gymnastics standards, "old" who are showing that they might still be able to perform sufficiently difficult routines to return to the elite. Part of this comes from the uncovering and starting to take seriously the abuse that women gymnasts have suffered for decades, part of this comes from the fact that gymnastics for women is beginning to acknowledge that power is the favored attribute for building sufficient difficulty value to compete. (Thank you, Simone Biles.)
This is your regular reminder that running for the school board is probably going to produce more meaningful results in your lifetime than running for President, because the people who oppose changes to curricular standards and incentives that would tell a true(r) story of the history of the United States all learned a version of history that is specifically intended to perpetuate myths like happy slaves and that the Civil War wasn't primarily fought over abolition of slavery and other such things, when they're talking about those things at all instead of glossing over them completely. In addition, being on the board will give you the opportunity to directly deal with the parents concerned that there's some sort of "wokeness" substitution of curriculum and that "the classics" will summarily be cast down in favor of some newer, lesser material.
Brexit continues to produce difficulties for the UK, as they send warships out to try and protect what they think is a possible blockade.
A Glaswegian who noticed neighbors being taken away by immigration authorities mobilized a successful public protest that eventually resulted in the men being released and no immigration action taken at the time. The protest appeared swiftly enough thanks to a swift communications network in place formed after some earlier immigration decisions and a community that cared about its people. I wouldn't be surprised at this stance coming out of a Home Office that believes they need to do things about the "damn furrners" now that there's been a successful Brexit, and they think that brown people are the easiest and softest targets to enforce that on.
Not all of the large amounts of anti-trans bills introduced in conservative legislatures this year succeeded - the one in Louisiana, for example, garnered a significant amount of opposition and no support, and so was dropped.
Bangor, Wales, elected the first openly non-binary mayor, as best we can tell.
Languages with gendered pronouns continue to struggle over how to avoid privileging the generic masculine, with the obvious amounts of backlash happening about changing the language at all and denunciations that all of this language talk is fascism from the left-wing designed to destroy the perfect society that has already been built. Neopronouns are starting to come back into the Discourse, and as with many things, it can be hard to tell who's being serious, who's being ha ha only serious, and who's being trollish. And, well, usage acceptance is usually more of a personal matter than an institutional one, even if usage changes over time and audience. And there's the perenial problem of when using a loanword, do you pronounce it like the language it originated from (and if so, which one?), or the language it's been imported into? And do you need to care that much about it?
Crime fiction works on the premise that there is such a thing as a good cop, even if in that particular crime fiction, there isn't anyone allowed to be a good cop, and then adds in the fantasy that there is much more crime that both needs police to solve and that would be resolved well by police interaction and intervention. We can find all sorts of works with protagonists and heroes who are par of the justice system, but when we have authors who have heroes and protagonists in worlds where the justice esystem is hostile to them, suddenly there's a lot of pearl-clutching and insistence that those books are inappropriate or unappealing. Even though books that portray the justice system as hostile and uncaring are closer to the reality than ones where police and justice are on the side of good.
A daily life post about a day in the life of someone with Inattentive-type ADHD, including all about how much things would go smoother if there weren't so many damn distractions that get in the way of being a functional and ordered adult.
Using the character of Amos from The Expanse to examine how autism traits and complex post-traumatic stress disorders can combine to work merry hell and make it seem like a character is sociopathic when they're not, as well as all the fun around negative autism stereotypes that make it very easy for someone to assume that another person is sociopathic when they're responding to a life lived where they have autism and have been punished for it all their life.
The ways in which reactionaries can be completely wrong about things but still provide useful hooks for better discourse, this case in architecture. The people who want to return to the age of classical architecture without thinking are often promoting some form of white supremacy couched in the desire for the Distant Past That Never Was, which makes them wrong, but their obsession with classical architecture might be grounded in a desire to have buildings where form and function are closely matched, and there is fruitful ground for talking about buildings with a function and pastiches where the façade is related to one type of building and the interior is for a completely different function.
And also, the way in which a person who deserves to be snarked for dismissing Virginia Woolf and expecting us all to follow in his lead can be the beginning of a better conversation from people who know about what is good, bad, or appealing about authors without having to get too far into the insistences that there is a Right Way and an Official Canon.
Looted artifacts of the kingdom of Benin are being returned and vigorously advocated for return from foreign museums where they have been collected and displayed, the discovery of a bronze age settlement in the Lake Lucerne area of Sweden, right place, right time, big discovery of bronze age jewellery in Sweden, a farmer moving an inconvenient stone shifted the boundary between two nations, a different accidental annexation in relation to trying to keep a border closed over COVID issues, a raid on people trying to pass off Iranian saffron as a more expensive and protected variant from a specific region in Spain, and the correct idea that decolonizing museums (and other related institutions) is not about 'wokeness' but about dignity, respect, and putting things in their correct contexts, rather than viewing them with an imperialist lens.
Puppers at the polling places, a new set of ravens in the Tower of London, the mass digitization and collection projects underway at the UK Museum of Natural History, cetaceans getting in waterways and locks, and a 97 percent hatch rate with regard to rescuing turtle eggs that were laid late in season.
If you have a CVS near you, you can do walk-in appointments for a vaccination against SARS-CoV-2. Same for Wal-Mart and many other entities that have pharmacy services or pharmacies attached to them. The part of the conservative wing in the United States that hasn't decided to buy fully into conspiracy theories are much more likely to get vaccinated if they trust their doctor to provide them with unbiased information, and that their greatest amount of vaccine hesitancy is about the long-term possible effects and possible safety issues.
Residents of Cardston, Alberta, were able to get vaccinations, courtesy of additional surplus from the Blackfoot Confederacy in Montana. Members of the Confederacy on both sides of the border collaborated with their own and the other's Federal governments and made it possible for a drive-through vaccination event for the Canadians, because the Blackfeet on the United States side had 98% vaccination and spare doses to give.
Moderna is testing tweaked vaccinations and booster shots designed to attack more common variations of SARS-CoV-2, with the possibility of improving on the original's already excellent effectiveness, Pfizer's shot seems to be doing well, but they're also developing variations and boosters, Valneva hopes to have an effective vaccine that uses the entire virus (inactivated) to guide the development of an immune response, which might make it more robust against the variations, a vaccine has entered Phase III trials in India, where it hopes to be manufactured and used, should it prove effective, and it looks like most of the vaccines do an effective job of severely lowering the likelihood of transmission of the virus as well as protecting against severe symptoms, which means, with more vaccinations, there can be less transmission and more time granted to tweak and modify so that the vaccinations and their boosters can be really effectively targeted. So, we want more vaccine available everywhere, so there's no place for them to hide from the immune systems coming to get them, and, hopefully, we will also be able to continue with our desire for spite-based public health policy that continues to discriminate hard against coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2.
An unofficial survey uncovers the possibility that getting vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 might cause a temporary change to the menstrual cycle of the person receiving the vaccination. This feels like something that should already be known, but we also know that things that involve menstruation are usually considered dirty things or culturally inappropriate frank sex talk, so it's not surprising that this wasn't tracked or asked about.
That said, because these things weren't necessarily tracked and reported as part of the side effects, an enire conspiracy has spun up about how vaccinations are causing irregularity of menstruation and pregnancy, and that the vaccinated might be somehow transmitting the spike proteins that the vaccines target to build an immune response to. Which, weirdly enough, might finally be getting people who are fervently against good infection protection practice to start adopting good infection prevention practice, because they want to protect themselves from people who they think have taken a poison or some other compound that is not a vaccination and are now actively spreading that contagion to others.
To help get people vaccinated, a county health commissioner offered a free shot (of vaccine) and a free beer (to chase the shot), and collected some stories of why people hadn't gotten their shots yet. Convenience is definitely a factor in this, although we might find that novelty also helps. Bran Castle, a place that plays up its association with the literary Dracula as well as the real Vlad Tepes, is offering free vaccinations, as well as entry to the museum of medieval torture instruments on the property to go with the vaccination.
For those without internet access, calling 1-800-232-0233 in the United States will get the hotline for vaccination, which builds on a lot of other things that are being done to try and make vaccination easier and more convenient, like ride-hailing companies saying they'll provide free rides to and from vaccination sites.
rydra_wong has the details along with significant community outreach efforts that are underway, now that it's probably likely that the people who really wanted the vaccine and were in a place that had adequate supply and logistics are mostly getting it or are on track to.The General, Most-Purposes E-mail Response to Someone US-Based Sharing Misinformation about SARS-Cov-2 and COVID-19, with much thanks to
rachelmanija for putting together the whole thing into a succinct form.In technology, The creators of Signal disclosed some significant vulnerabilities in a kit that claimed it could hack into any phone and defeat any encryption on it, both in software versions and in potential copyright liabilities, before making a completely unrelated and otherwise uninteresting comment about aesthetic file choices for their app going forward.
Likely because they became too high-profile after their successful attack on the Colonial Pipeline the DarkSide ransomware group made a public announcement that they are quitting the business, claiming they lost access to their servers and had all their funds seized. The linked article suggests that the decision comes at the hands of the group DarkSide was renting the ransomware capacity from, for as much as any of the statement can be verified or authenticated.
Last for tonight: the narrative that gymnasts must be young and relentlessly abusively trained to achieve world-class performance needs to be changed, and there are at least some athletes who are, by gymnastics standards, "old" who are showing that they might still be able to perform sufficiently difficult routines to return to the elite. Part of this comes from the uncovering and starting to take seriously the abuse that women gymnasts have suffered for decades, part of this comes from the fact that gymnastics for women is beginning to acknowledge that power is the favored attribute for building sufficient difficulty value to compete. (Thank you, Simone Biles.)
no subject
Date: 2021-05-22 06:20 am (UTC)They've been at it since before Brexit, it's horrible. May's "hostile environment" was one marked worsening.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-22 06:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-22 11:23 am (UTC)Indeed it could be argued that Glasgow was only able to respond the way it did this time because it has bad a long time to organize and prepare for resistance.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-22 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-22 02:52 pm (UTC)(My own feelings is that I don't support any kind of nationalism, and that I'd rather get rid of it altogether and let people live where they want. Also I feel that here in the north of England we have a lot more in common with Scotland than we do with London/the Home Counties and I selfishly hope Scotland doesn't abandon us to perpetual Tory government but I wouldn't blame them for wanting to get out while they can.)