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silveradeptLet us begin with the practice of snowshoe baseball, in August, in Wisconsin. Apparently, the fans are there for both seeing people try to play the game in sawdust and snowshoes, exactly as ridiculous and prone to falling over as one might think, and pie. Large amounts of large pies. Which makes me think if Bitty and the Samwell boys want some additional training in the off-season, and wanted to make the pilgrimage, they could learn a lot from playing in the league.
R. Danya Ruttenberg wrestles with the story of the conquest of the Holy Land as described in Bamidbar/Numbers, first by pointing out the story of the conquest is almost certainly an after-the-fact justification of some other act, rather than a historical narrative, noting the wars and deaths that have been prosecuted in the name of that retroactively-inserted item, and pointedly explaining that because the Israelites and Canaanites were basically the same people, just one of them went on a different religious and political tack, the Israelites and the Palestinians of our timees are similarly much more related to each other than they are separate peoples with nothing in common that would justify the current wars and deaths being prosecuted. If the most prominent bit of "God told us to do this" is a retroactive justification rather than a contemporaneous account, then there are a lot of people saying "God told us to do this" and relying on that retroactive justification for their war and death now who need to have those justifications knocked out from underneath them, both historical and contemporary.
Rooster Teeth is being shut down by Warner Brothers Discovery. This could mean the end of their flagship series such as Red vs. Blue and RWBY, although there's the possibility those IP itself might be sold or licensed to someone else. Rooster Teeth is the latest casualty of Warner Brothers eating up as much as they could and then believing they are magically going to turn a profit because they're Warner Brothers properties at the moment. (Volume 9 of RWBY is not a bad place to have to end the entire series, if it happens, but one more volume, even if it had to be the last one, would be better.)
Children find their reading choices questioned and dismissed by the grownups in their lives, and therefore are not reading for pleasure, same as it was, same as it will be for however many times we have entities that want to quantify reading into a neat little package and people who believe that some materials are less worthy and less real than others. Those who love to read and do reading are those who were given an adequate supply of materials and told "find what you like," without judgment and without worries. Because, in so many cases, when a child finds the thing they like, they read voraciously. And then often finds something else and reads voraiously there, as well. With the assistance of people who can get them materials to keep that fire fed, things usually turn out fine. It's when grownups start imposing their opinions on what their children should be reading that things get derailed.
The Lousiana legislature has proposed bills for their upcoming session that would remove any exemptions libraries, whether public or school, have from being prosecuted under the state's obscenity law. The state law does incorporate the language the Supreme Court determined as a test in Miller v. California, which should presumably keep libraries from actually being convicted under such statue, but obtaining convictions is rarely the point of removing such a protection. The point is to signal that anyone who wishes to take issue with content in a library may now ask for prosecution of the librarians and tie them up with court issues and have them (and their bosses) censor their collections to avoid the possibility of prosecution.
Speaking of, if I haven't mentioned it before, Texas's unconstitutional requirement for booksellers to label all the works they sell as to whether they were "sexually explicit," "sexually relevant" or not was thrown out by a federal appeals court because it was unconstitutional, affirming the judgment of the district court that it violated the First Amendment rights of the booksellers by compelling speech from them, among other things.
Washington State, on the other hand, having seen what kinds of mechanisms get abused by those looking to enforce their specific morality on others, has been busily crafting and passing legislation to prevent such things from happening in their state. In the legislation that will have to be concurred and then eventually signed, books about queer people and black people cannot be challenged for being queer or black, challenge decisions have to stand for three years before they can be re-instigated, and only parents or direct guardians of students in a school may make challenges. That will certainly curb many of the pathways for abuses. The party for book banning first decried that this was interfering with "local control" of schools and their boards, then attempted to remove the three year waiting period and expand those who could challenge to grandparents of students through amendments, which were rejected. And one attempted amendment intended to ban books in schools because they had sexual content in them, hidden behind an accusation that books in schools were "pornographic" and had "printed, visual material of dirty sexual talk." and that was inappropriate for students. And, of course, it wasn't a ban, the would-be banner said, because the books would still be able to exist, just not be in schools. My unimpressed, very judgey face, let me show you it.
Widespread availability of electronic books and their consequent reading devices makes it more difficult for book bans to succeed, but widespread availability of electronic books is hampered by publishers who believe most firmly in the need for their bottom line to go up by extorting libraries on the license fees for those electronic books. Which will continue until someone can overturn the precedent and the laws that say those who license materials are allowed to put whatever ridiculous terms and charge whatever fees they desire in the contracts they offer to libraries, knowing full well that libraries are unlikely to have any real competitors to turn to in protest from such ridiculous treatment.
The librarians of the Autauga-Pratville Public Library in Alabama closed their library and locked the doors in protest after the director of the library and other staff were fired for refusing to implement new censorious policies enacted by the board without consultation of the director or the staff. The American Library Association would do well to send support to those librarians who are standing up for the principles and ideals of the library, and for those librarians that are advocating for the full ability of minors to access library information and entertainment. It is unlikely they're going to do much about that overtly. They may be providing less flashy and press release-worthy material, but this is another place where ALA could firmly plant themselves on the side of library workers and users against the well-moneyed and well-connected opponents who would prefer that nobody receive anything that hasn't been approved by the official censors. (Especially when even casual reporting and investigation produced a plethora of contradictory reasons from a board member who seemed very desperately to be fishing for a reason that the reporter would accept unquestioningly and report, rather than the obvious and most likely reason — the director asked for clarification about why he was supposed to ban a list of books that didn't meet even the most recently passed criteria for banning.)
In places that allow parents to monitor the classroom or to communicate directly with the teacher or student during the school day, learning and building the necessary resilience for independence is severely compromised. In the context this was first presented, the helicopter parents were seen as one of the most extreme symptoms of cell phone use in the classroom by those who have the devices, to the point where companies are advertising their faraday bags to have students put their phones in and prevent signals from entering or leaving. With the signals blocked, the belief is that the students will be more focused on their studies, instead of responding to the newest notification on the phone. There are likely several underlying problems that will not be solved by blocking the signals from student phones, but if the problem primarily is that the signals are distracting to the student, then the bags are certainly a workable idea. (Likely, the biggest underlying problem is that education has been trying for a long time to create lessons that are engaging to all the students, and when there are successes in those areas, there's pushback from politicians who want lessons to be easily quanitifed or who think that making lessons engaging will mean making them "woke" and having to then acknowledge that perhaps the "Rah! Rah! Ooosa! Ooosa!" curriculum has elied a significant amount of the actual facts and history.
The compensation for the top executives of several top U.S. companies far exceeds their net tax payments to the United States government. Which is not a new problem, as such, but certainly suggests that those companies and those executives could stand to pay a more appropriate tax rate and net tax amount for their successes. That won't happen unless there's sufficient filibuster-proof majorities in the Congress, and those people are people who believe in the need for fair tax rates, so you not only have to elect the party, you have to elect people from the party who are not secretly trying to make sure their corporate overlords pay less tax or who will object to them paying more toward a proper tax rate.
A white nationalist who had been twice freed by a specific judge who believed that the law the white nationalist was being prosecuted under was unconstitutional, and then who believed that there was "selective prosecution" of white nationalists over "antifa" and "far-left" persons who were doing worse than him was once again arrested on emergency warrant from the federal government. The judge seems very interested in making sure this particular person goes free based on his own beliefs about who is being prosecuted and what laws are constitutional. This seems to be a regular feature of this judge's rulings since he was appointed.
Tennessee's legislature and governor have decided they can flaunt Obergefell v. Hodges, Loving v. Virginia, and several other precedents by giving civil and religious officials blanket permission to refuse to solemnize any marriage for any reason. For the most part, the religious persons refusing is something that's been settled as someone's ability to practice their religion, but the civil officials being given blanket permission to refuse is presumably impermissible and opens the door to discrimination, even if, supposedly, persons denied by one civil official may be able to have their marriage solemnized by another.
The Supreme Court dismissed Colorado (and any other state)'s ability to exclude a candidate from a federal ballot using the United States Constitution's own provisions, and five of the conservative justices tried to ensure that no person could be excluded from a ballot at all by insisting that the Congress has to specifically pass legislation defining what qualifies as a disqualification. This is unlikely to be legal handiwork that holds up over time, but for the moment, it means that at least five of the justices of the Supreme Court have declared they are for the previous administrator politically and will do whatever they can to ensure that he is re-elected, or at least that his prosecutions cannot come to fruition before the election happens. This seems like the kind of thing that, were it possible to do so, might warrant the removal of justices from the bench for gross misconduct. As it is, we will have to wait until persons with sensible jurisprudence encounter a case that wishes to use this precedent and laugh at the attempt before sending that precedent to the ash can. Or, if they uphold the decision that a state may not use the Constitution on its own, they will eviscerate the overreach and make that part of the opinions bad law.
The American Psychological Association released a policy statement "affirm[ing] APA’s support for unobstructed access to health care and evidence-based clinical care for transgender, gender-diverse, and nonbinary children, adolescents, and adults." So the credible large organization says to follow the science, rather than misinformation or narratives that are inaccurate about gender identity and expression in children, adolescents, and adults, and to oppose bans and other restrictions on care that base their arguments in that misinformation. Which comes in contrast to the National Health Service in England confirming they will not be making new prescriptions of puberty blockers except in specific cases and research trials, even though the number that are currently on them is remarkably small. There is at least a gloss of someone's allegedly scientific review of the use of such things, but given the small number of persons on them right now, it seems much more likely NHS England's decision was made by a political entity rather than a medical one.
Paul M. Sutter on the need for science to regain trust by having better communication, by acknowledging their politics, and by not choosing to chase metrics that encourage scientists to overstate their conclusions and try to publish in as big-name of journals as they can. And that, perhaps, if we can get off the publish or perish grind, the peer review process might be able to be worth something again, because then the reviewers can take time to actually do the thing, rather than give it a once-over and make sure there's nothing obviously wrong. Because when science becomes less trustworthy and communication becomes less effective, you end up with people clamoring for "natural" solutions, even in situations where the natural way of doing things is perhaps one of the more dangerous ones.
It only took a significant number of medical professionals to be infected with a disease with long-haul potential, and to exhibit the long-haul symptoms, for research to start trying to make significant inroads into how to identify and successfully treat long-haul diseases like Lyme and SARS-CoV-2. The article is about one of the projects, MAESTRO, that is trying to do this, but buried in there is the telling realization that it took a mass-disabling event for those who were disabled already to be taken seriously instead of dismissed as people who were imagining the symptoms in their brains. Because it turns out that many of the long-haul diseases are very good at mimicing things that fool the body into not nuking them from orbit and there aren't developed tests to pinpoint the presence of the long-haul.
One of the symptoms of the long-haul from SARS-CoV-2 might be related to a weakening or leaking of the blood-brain barrier, which would certainly have possible cognitive effects if things that would normally be screened out are getting through and mixing in with brain chemicals.
There are still some pockets of people who are trying to make their spaces and activities safe for people who are cautious about getting infected or who know they cannot afford to infect themselves and others with a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2. The idea of wearing a mask equating to being seen as a radical lefty still has enough weight to be mentioned in this piece, and the implication behind it that being seen as a radical lefty might mean someone wants to do violence, is probably familiar to people who have been trying to advocate for accessibility and inclusion so that the disabled can participate. There's very much a prealent attitude, at least in several pockets of the States, that reminding people that planning should happen for more than just the abled is a political statement, because apparently nobody would genuinely want to include others in their events.
A 1983 book about the continuity of feminism and the need for continuity in showing that feminism is continuous. As is noted, there's always been a women's movement this century as well as the last one. Musician Olivia Rodrigo has been making sure that emergency contraception, condoms, and other sexual health materials are available for free to those who attend her concerts, because she's touring in plaves that have outlawed or severely restricted the ability of a woman to choose when she has children, if she wants to have them. That would certaily be a useful thing for some of the even more prominent musicians to do, to the point where I can see some of those state troopers trying to stop the free flow of information and materials at a concert. Or trying to arrest the musician on stage for facilitation of such things.
Dudes on the Internet, if you are going to claim the clitoris is an invention of modern feminism, you have many scholars of earlier times who will tell you that you are wrong, as those who bothered to observe women in past times come to conclusions that suggest the existence of the clitoris and what to do with it.
Finding and defeating several different rings of forgers who produced works they claimed were by Norval Morriseau, an Ashinaabe artist who had survived the residential schools and developed a style based on the legends and characters of the Ashinaabe. The catalyst was a member of the Barenaked Ladies who had bought a forgery at auction and then persisted in trying to get the forgeries off the market.
A person involved in long-running litigation against Boeing over improper parts and whistleblowing activities is dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Which raises a lot of eyebrows about the timing of such things, and especially given the other issues that Boeing has had about improper parts, assembly, and safety concerns, including criminal investigations opened into the Alaska Airlines door plug blowout, which is liekly to showcase just how shoddy record-keeping and actual maintenance has been on certain craft. The company has already admitted that required records cannot be found.
Winning wildlife photography.
In technology, A ransomware gang thought strongly harmed by a raid in 2023 returned with revenge, attacking a company that routes pharmacy insurance claims to to the insurers and makes sure everyone gets paid. Attacking health infrastructure, or providing services that does that, is not a particularly smart idea, but the people who are providing these services, or using them, are not particularly smart people. (It would also be nice if the infrastructure in place were harder to hack, but the most difficult part of securing any organization is the people who work for it.)
Several ex-Twitter executives are suing the new boss, claiming that they were fired without cause and the new boss tried to find every way he could to get a cause so he wouldn't have to pay their severances. They join several ex-Twitter employees suing the new boss to get the severance they are also owed. These sounds like a familiar playbook of denial, delay, and forcing someone to litigate to get another person to uphold their contracts and pay their penalties. It will probably turn out just as well for this billionaire as it did for the other prominent billionaire on the hook for significant amounts of money.
Accessibility is being built into many of our devices and computers, but without someone who knows where the features are, how to use them, and can convince a person they want to use those features, they will continue not to be widespread in adoption.
European safety regulators have decided that at least some critical vehicle features must be controllable through physical switches and buttons, rather than by touchscreen, so receive a top safety rating from them. We can hope that such requirements will be adopted in the States as well, an possibly improved upon. Touchscreens are distracting to find features on, and many of them lock when the vehicle is in motion, so they should never have critical features used solely by them.
German water regulators have demanded a Tesla plant close their wastewater line or actually fix the pollutants they're discharging from the plant that are multiple times-over the acceptable limits of pollution.
We knew our cars were spying on us and reporting to the manufacturers, but they're apparently also reporting to companies like LexisNexis, who use the data collection to compile dossiers about our driving habits and sell them to insurance companies to determine whether they can get away with rate hikes based on "dangerous" driving. And, of course, we can't opt-out of that data collection or that data selling, because that would mean that privacy was a real right, rather than a fig leaf wielded when convenient. I certainly hope there will be a device easily available that redirects all that sensor gathering to somewhere under the control of the driver, rather than being spewed everywhere for invasive and malicious uses.
Glassdoor, a service that made a name for itself by allowing employees of various companies to post anonymous reviews about the corporations they work for, or have interviewed with, have started attaching real names to accounts and will populate those names onto previously-anonymous reviews. Therefore, if you have an account with Glassdoor or have used it for such a purpose, it is best to delete your account as soon as possible so that there will not be an opportunity for Glassdoor to identify you and proclaim that it was you who exposed the poor conditions of your workplace. Apparently, they're doing this so they can make sure that you have an account with their socmed-style service as well, that will also have your name attached to it. Because data is valuable, and this process (the one with the Cory Doctorow-coined name attached to it) is depressingly familiar all around.
Last for tonight, the possibility that one of the most resilient craft ever built might finally have succumbed to something cannot be salvaged or fixed, simply because Voyager is old and very, very far away from all of us, and the information needed to potentially diagnose and fix the problem is not here with us back on Terra. Except that may not be true, as apparently Voyager managed to spit out a readout of its memory and therefore, it may be possible to find the offending issue and then transmit patches and software updates to get it to work properly again. Even as we all recognize that at some point, things will eventually give out and there will be no recovery for them. But it would be nice if that happened only when the power source itself finally gave out.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
R. Danya Ruttenberg wrestles with the story of the conquest of the Holy Land as described in Bamidbar/Numbers, first by pointing out the story of the conquest is almost certainly an after-the-fact justification of some other act, rather than a historical narrative, noting the wars and deaths that have been prosecuted in the name of that retroactively-inserted item, and pointedly explaining that because the Israelites and Canaanites were basically the same people, just one of them went on a different religious and political tack, the Israelites and the Palestinians of our timees are similarly much more related to each other than they are separate peoples with nothing in common that would justify the current wars and deaths being prosecuted. If the most prominent bit of "God told us to do this" is a retroactive justification rather than a contemporaneous account, then there are a lot of people saying "God told us to do this" and relying on that retroactive justification for their war and death now who need to have those justifications knocked out from underneath them, both historical and contemporary.
Rooster Teeth is being shut down by Warner Brothers Discovery. This could mean the end of their flagship series such as Red vs. Blue and RWBY, although there's the possibility those IP itself might be sold or licensed to someone else. Rooster Teeth is the latest casualty of Warner Brothers eating up as much as they could and then believing they are magically going to turn a profit because they're Warner Brothers properties at the moment. (Volume 9 of RWBY is not a bad place to have to end the entire series, if it happens, but one more volume, even if it had to be the last one, would be better.)
Children find their reading choices questioned and dismissed by the grownups in their lives, and therefore are not reading for pleasure, same as it was, same as it will be for however many times we have entities that want to quantify reading into a neat little package and people who believe that some materials are less worthy and less real than others. Those who love to read and do reading are those who were given an adequate supply of materials and told "find what you like," without judgment and without worries. Because, in so many cases, when a child finds the thing they like, they read voraciously. And then often finds something else and reads voraiously there, as well. With the assistance of people who can get them materials to keep that fire fed, things usually turn out fine. It's when grownups start imposing their opinions on what their children should be reading that things get derailed.
The Lousiana legislature has proposed bills for their upcoming session that would remove any exemptions libraries, whether public or school, have from being prosecuted under the state's obscenity law. The state law does incorporate the language the Supreme Court determined as a test in Miller v. California, which should presumably keep libraries from actually being convicted under such statue, but obtaining convictions is rarely the point of removing such a protection. The point is to signal that anyone who wishes to take issue with content in a library may now ask for prosecution of the librarians and tie them up with court issues and have them (and their bosses) censor their collections to avoid the possibility of prosecution.
Speaking of, if I haven't mentioned it before, Texas's unconstitutional requirement for booksellers to label all the works they sell as to whether they were "sexually explicit," "sexually relevant" or not was thrown out by a federal appeals court because it was unconstitutional, affirming the judgment of the district court that it violated the First Amendment rights of the booksellers by compelling speech from them, among other things.
Washington State, on the other hand, having seen what kinds of mechanisms get abused by those looking to enforce their specific morality on others, has been busily crafting and passing legislation to prevent such things from happening in their state. In the legislation that will have to be concurred and then eventually signed, books about queer people and black people cannot be challenged for being queer or black, challenge decisions have to stand for three years before they can be re-instigated, and only parents or direct guardians of students in a school may make challenges. That will certainly curb many of the pathways for abuses. The party for book banning first decried that this was interfering with "local control" of schools and their boards, then attempted to remove the three year waiting period and expand those who could challenge to grandparents of students through amendments, which were rejected. And one attempted amendment intended to ban books in schools because they had sexual content in them, hidden behind an accusation that books in schools were "pornographic" and had "printed, visual material of dirty sexual talk." and that was inappropriate for students. And, of course, it wasn't a ban, the would-be banner said, because the books would still be able to exist, just not be in schools. My unimpressed, very judgey face, let me show you it.
Widespread availability of electronic books and their consequent reading devices makes it more difficult for book bans to succeed, but widespread availability of electronic books is hampered by publishers who believe most firmly in the need for their bottom line to go up by extorting libraries on the license fees for those electronic books. Which will continue until someone can overturn the precedent and the laws that say those who license materials are allowed to put whatever ridiculous terms and charge whatever fees they desire in the contracts they offer to libraries, knowing full well that libraries are unlikely to have any real competitors to turn to in protest from such ridiculous treatment.
The librarians of the Autauga-Pratville Public Library in Alabama closed their library and locked the doors in protest after the director of the library and other staff were fired for refusing to implement new censorious policies enacted by the board without consultation of the director or the staff. The American Library Association would do well to send support to those librarians who are standing up for the principles and ideals of the library, and for those librarians that are advocating for the full ability of minors to access library information and entertainment. It is unlikely they're going to do much about that overtly. They may be providing less flashy and press release-worthy material, but this is another place where ALA could firmly plant themselves on the side of library workers and users against the well-moneyed and well-connected opponents who would prefer that nobody receive anything that hasn't been approved by the official censors. (Especially when even casual reporting and investigation produced a plethora of contradictory reasons from a board member who seemed very desperately to be fishing for a reason that the reporter would accept unquestioningly and report, rather than the obvious and most likely reason — the director asked for clarification about why he was supposed to ban a list of books that didn't meet even the most recently passed criteria for banning.)
In places that allow parents to monitor the classroom or to communicate directly with the teacher or student during the school day, learning and building the necessary resilience for independence is severely compromised. In the context this was first presented, the helicopter parents were seen as one of the most extreme symptoms of cell phone use in the classroom by those who have the devices, to the point where companies are advertising their faraday bags to have students put their phones in and prevent signals from entering or leaving. With the signals blocked, the belief is that the students will be more focused on their studies, instead of responding to the newest notification on the phone. There are likely several underlying problems that will not be solved by blocking the signals from student phones, but if the problem primarily is that the signals are distracting to the student, then the bags are certainly a workable idea. (Likely, the biggest underlying problem is that education has been trying for a long time to create lessons that are engaging to all the students, and when there are successes in those areas, there's pushback from politicians who want lessons to be easily quanitifed or who think that making lessons engaging will mean making them "woke" and having to then acknowledge that perhaps the "Rah! Rah! Ooosa! Ooosa!" curriculum has elied a significant amount of the actual facts and history.
The compensation for the top executives of several top U.S. companies far exceeds their net tax payments to the United States government. Which is not a new problem, as such, but certainly suggests that those companies and those executives could stand to pay a more appropriate tax rate and net tax amount for their successes. That won't happen unless there's sufficient filibuster-proof majorities in the Congress, and those people are people who believe in the need for fair tax rates, so you not only have to elect the party, you have to elect people from the party who are not secretly trying to make sure their corporate overlords pay less tax or who will object to them paying more toward a proper tax rate.
A white nationalist who had been twice freed by a specific judge who believed that the law the white nationalist was being prosecuted under was unconstitutional, and then who believed that there was "selective prosecution" of white nationalists over "antifa" and "far-left" persons who were doing worse than him was once again arrested on emergency warrant from the federal government. The judge seems very interested in making sure this particular person goes free based on his own beliefs about who is being prosecuted and what laws are constitutional. This seems to be a regular feature of this judge's rulings since he was appointed.
Tennessee's legislature and governor have decided they can flaunt Obergefell v. Hodges, Loving v. Virginia, and several other precedents by giving civil and religious officials blanket permission to refuse to solemnize any marriage for any reason. For the most part, the religious persons refusing is something that's been settled as someone's ability to practice their religion, but the civil officials being given blanket permission to refuse is presumably impermissible and opens the door to discrimination, even if, supposedly, persons denied by one civil official may be able to have their marriage solemnized by another.
The Supreme Court dismissed Colorado (and any other state)'s ability to exclude a candidate from a federal ballot using the United States Constitution's own provisions, and five of the conservative justices tried to ensure that no person could be excluded from a ballot at all by insisting that the Congress has to specifically pass legislation defining what qualifies as a disqualification. This is unlikely to be legal handiwork that holds up over time, but for the moment, it means that at least five of the justices of the Supreme Court have declared they are for the previous administrator politically and will do whatever they can to ensure that he is re-elected, or at least that his prosecutions cannot come to fruition before the election happens. This seems like the kind of thing that, were it possible to do so, might warrant the removal of justices from the bench for gross misconduct. As it is, we will have to wait until persons with sensible jurisprudence encounter a case that wishes to use this precedent and laugh at the attempt before sending that precedent to the ash can. Or, if they uphold the decision that a state may not use the Constitution on its own, they will eviscerate the overreach and make that part of the opinions bad law.
The American Psychological Association released a policy statement "affirm[ing] APA’s support for unobstructed access to health care and evidence-based clinical care for transgender, gender-diverse, and nonbinary children, adolescents, and adults." So the credible large organization says to follow the science, rather than misinformation or narratives that are inaccurate about gender identity and expression in children, adolescents, and adults, and to oppose bans and other restrictions on care that base their arguments in that misinformation. Which comes in contrast to the National Health Service in England confirming they will not be making new prescriptions of puberty blockers except in specific cases and research trials, even though the number that are currently on them is remarkably small. There is at least a gloss of someone's allegedly scientific review of the use of such things, but given the small number of persons on them right now, it seems much more likely NHS England's decision was made by a political entity rather than a medical one.
Paul M. Sutter on the need for science to regain trust by having better communication, by acknowledging their politics, and by not choosing to chase metrics that encourage scientists to overstate their conclusions and try to publish in as big-name of journals as they can. And that, perhaps, if we can get off the publish or perish grind, the peer review process might be able to be worth something again, because then the reviewers can take time to actually do the thing, rather than give it a once-over and make sure there's nothing obviously wrong. Because when science becomes less trustworthy and communication becomes less effective, you end up with people clamoring for "natural" solutions, even in situations where the natural way of doing things is perhaps one of the more dangerous ones.
It only took a significant number of medical professionals to be infected with a disease with long-haul potential, and to exhibit the long-haul symptoms, for research to start trying to make significant inroads into how to identify and successfully treat long-haul diseases like Lyme and SARS-CoV-2. The article is about one of the projects, MAESTRO, that is trying to do this, but buried in there is the telling realization that it took a mass-disabling event for those who were disabled already to be taken seriously instead of dismissed as people who were imagining the symptoms in their brains. Because it turns out that many of the long-haul diseases are very good at mimicing things that fool the body into not nuking them from orbit and there aren't developed tests to pinpoint the presence of the long-haul.
One of the symptoms of the long-haul from SARS-CoV-2 might be related to a weakening or leaking of the blood-brain barrier, which would certainly have possible cognitive effects if things that would normally be screened out are getting through and mixing in with brain chemicals.
There are still some pockets of people who are trying to make their spaces and activities safe for people who are cautious about getting infected or who know they cannot afford to infect themselves and others with a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2. The idea of wearing a mask equating to being seen as a radical lefty still has enough weight to be mentioned in this piece, and the implication behind it that being seen as a radical lefty might mean someone wants to do violence, is probably familiar to people who have been trying to advocate for accessibility and inclusion so that the disabled can participate. There's very much a prealent attitude, at least in several pockets of the States, that reminding people that planning should happen for more than just the abled is a political statement, because apparently nobody would genuinely want to include others in their events.
A 1983 book about the continuity of feminism and the need for continuity in showing that feminism is continuous. As is noted, there's always been a women's movement this century as well as the last one. Musician Olivia Rodrigo has been making sure that emergency contraception, condoms, and other sexual health materials are available for free to those who attend her concerts, because she's touring in plaves that have outlawed or severely restricted the ability of a woman to choose when she has children, if she wants to have them. That would certaily be a useful thing for some of the even more prominent musicians to do, to the point where I can see some of those state troopers trying to stop the free flow of information and materials at a concert. Or trying to arrest the musician on stage for facilitation of such things.
Dudes on the Internet, if you are going to claim the clitoris is an invention of modern feminism, you have many scholars of earlier times who will tell you that you are wrong, as those who bothered to observe women in past times come to conclusions that suggest the existence of the clitoris and what to do with it.
Finding and defeating several different rings of forgers who produced works they claimed were by Norval Morriseau, an Ashinaabe artist who had survived the residential schools and developed a style based on the legends and characters of the Ashinaabe. The catalyst was a member of the Barenaked Ladies who had bought a forgery at auction and then persisted in trying to get the forgeries off the market.
A person involved in long-running litigation against Boeing over improper parts and whistleblowing activities is dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Which raises a lot of eyebrows about the timing of such things, and especially given the other issues that Boeing has had about improper parts, assembly, and safety concerns, including criminal investigations opened into the Alaska Airlines door plug blowout, which is liekly to showcase just how shoddy record-keeping and actual maintenance has been on certain craft. The company has already admitted that required records cannot be found.
Winning wildlife photography.
In technology, A ransomware gang thought strongly harmed by a raid in 2023 returned with revenge, attacking a company that routes pharmacy insurance claims to to the insurers and makes sure everyone gets paid. Attacking health infrastructure, or providing services that does that, is not a particularly smart idea, but the people who are providing these services, or using them, are not particularly smart people. (It would also be nice if the infrastructure in place were harder to hack, but the most difficult part of securing any organization is the people who work for it.)
Several ex-Twitter executives are suing the new boss, claiming that they were fired without cause and the new boss tried to find every way he could to get a cause so he wouldn't have to pay their severances. They join several ex-Twitter employees suing the new boss to get the severance they are also owed. These sounds like a familiar playbook of denial, delay, and forcing someone to litigate to get another person to uphold their contracts and pay their penalties. It will probably turn out just as well for this billionaire as it did for the other prominent billionaire on the hook for significant amounts of money.
Accessibility is being built into many of our devices and computers, but without someone who knows where the features are, how to use them, and can convince a person they want to use those features, they will continue not to be widespread in adoption.
European safety regulators have decided that at least some critical vehicle features must be controllable through physical switches and buttons, rather than by touchscreen, so receive a top safety rating from them. We can hope that such requirements will be adopted in the States as well, an possibly improved upon. Touchscreens are distracting to find features on, and many of them lock when the vehicle is in motion, so they should never have critical features used solely by them.
German water regulators have demanded a Tesla plant close their wastewater line or actually fix the pollutants they're discharging from the plant that are multiple times-over the acceptable limits of pollution.
We knew our cars were spying on us and reporting to the manufacturers, but they're apparently also reporting to companies like LexisNexis, who use the data collection to compile dossiers about our driving habits and sell them to insurance companies to determine whether they can get away with rate hikes based on "dangerous" driving. And, of course, we can't opt-out of that data collection or that data selling, because that would mean that privacy was a real right, rather than a fig leaf wielded when convenient. I certainly hope there will be a device easily available that redirects all that sensor gathering to somewhere under the control of the driver, rather than being spewed everywhere for invasive and malicious uses.
Glassdoor, a service that made a name for itself by allowing employees of various companies to post anonymous reviews about the corporations they work for, or have interviewed with, have started attaching real names to accounts and will populate those names onto previously-anonymous reviews. Therefore, if you have an account with Glassdoor or have used it for such a purpose, it is best to delete your account as soon as possible so that there will not be an opportunity for Glassdoor to identify you and proclaim that it was you who exposed the poor conditions of your workplace. Apparently, they're doing this so they can make sure that you have an account with their socmed-style service as well, that will also have your name attached to it. Because data is valuable, and this process (the one with the Cory Doctorow-coined name attached to it) is depressingly familiar all around.
Last for tonight, the possibility that one of the most resilient craft ever built might finally have succumbed to something cannot be salvaged or fixed, simply because Voyager is old and very, very far away from all of us, and the information needed to potentially diagnose and fix the problem is not here with us back on Terra. Except that may not be true, as apparently Voyager managed to spit out a readout of its memory and therefore, it may be possible to find the offending issue and then transmit patches and software updates to get it to work properly again. Even as we all recognize that at some point, things will eventually give out and there will be no recovery for them. But it would be nice if that happened only when the power source itself finally gave out.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
