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silveradeptBecause there was inauguration and other such changeover material happening, this entry contains a significantly higher concentration of United States politics than usual, most of it in the vein of "they said they would do this, and so they are trying to do it." Be aware, skip as needed.
Let us begin with the understanding that library workers are not superheroes, they are not the sacred clergy, they are people doing a job, and many of them are either allied with the villains or feel like they don't have enough support to stand up to the villains. So support your library, both in demanding they get more money that is probably currently feeding a militarized police force, but also in going before their governing authorities and demanding the library have progressive collections full of works by marginalized authors and staffing that resembles the community around the library. They need that kind of support much more than people saying how brave and heroic the library profession is, because not everyone in the profession is actually doing the work.
Filmmaker David Lynch, known for several movies and the Twin Peaks television series, has finished his career at 78 years of age.
In a posthumous documentary, Paul Reubens, best known for his role as Pee-Wee Herman, comes out as a gay man. Which makes sense that this would happen after his death, given that Pee-Wee spun off into a children's show, and at the time, there would have been much hue and cry about pederasty if a beloved children's show host was gay. (There will be now, too, but at that point in time, it would not have just been fringe pastors.)
A ceasefire agreement has been reached between Israel and Hamas, which may hopefully bring an end to the war in Gaza and return all hostages. For the agreement to do anything good, of course, it has to be honored, and that may or may not be something that happens.
(There's also been some thinking in some of my social and podcast circles about whether or not this is timed in the same way that other incoming Republican administrations timed cease fires, successful negotiations, and other such international diplomacy successes so as to make themselves look good and effective for getting things done that their Democratic predecessor couldn't. Almost always, if those timings were deliberate, those timings are then discovered to be deliberately engineered for that particular result, and it undercuts whatever message was supposed to be sent.)
On his way out of the office of the President, Joe Biden proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution had been properly ratified and was now the law of the land, which would have been nice to know at the beginning of his presidency, rather than the end, so that there could have been the proper fights over the matter and the possibility that the text itself could have been incorporated. The next administration will certainly wave that idea off, and their Supreme Court is likely to support that, regardless of how the legal arguments go, so this feels like a fight that's being teed up for whenever next a liberal executive, legislative, and judicial trifecta comes into existence.
Also on his last day, the President commuted the federal sentences of nearly 2500 people serving time for nonviolent drug offenses that he considers to have been too harsh and long compared to what they would have received in today's era. Which seems to be in keeping with the usual practice of clemency during the final days of an administration, so that there's basically no chance for pushback or for their opposition to make political hay out of those decisions.
Before the changeover, the Department of Justice sued several companies that manage housing for collusion using tools that ingested their proprietary data and then made very hard-to-ignore recommendations about what the "correct" (meaning maximally profitable) rent should be for the company and area that the company is managing. Given that the successive administrator has not done great in real estate or in fair dealing with real estate, I won't be surprised to see that case disappeared.
The incoming administrator is officially a convicted felon, although he received no punishment for what he was convicted of. This is mostly because the Supreme Court interfered and accepted a novel legal argument designed to allow him to evade accountability, which required re-working the case, and then the election that is positioned to put him in power meant that most of the potential penalties for him would either be eraseable or appealable.
Unsurprisingly, the incoming administration leaned heavily on country and country-related music artists to perform for ceremonies and balls related to the inauguration and similar events, although there was also the presence of the Village People there, who tried very hard to deny that there was any kind of political endorsement to their appearance and performance during the situation. I'm not surprised about the country artists being there, I am surprised that the Village People are, given how much of their songs and performances have been embraced by communitites that the incoming administration has been vehemently against and intends to cause harm to. I have been since told that there's only one member of the original Village People in the group, and he's the straight one, so perhaps it is less surprising than it would otherwise be.
Once they were situated in power, the new administration began to demonstrate the weaknesses of getting things done by executive order, in that the next person can rescind current orders. Of course, when people say "there has to be legislative solutions to this!" they are assuming a functional legislature and a court system that will not rule in favor of one political position or another, regardless of what the law and their precedent actually says. The United States is pretty far away, at this moment, from a functional national legislature, and the majority of the highest court in the land seems more than happy to be partisan and political in their rulings, and not bother trying to disguise it in any kind of way.
As it is, the new administration declared that all persons are the sex they were at conception, which would technically render every person non-binary, and spent time railing against "gender ideology." Regardless of the scientific reality of what the order is, how it will be interpreted, of course, is that there is no such thing as gender identity and trans people don't exist, and the federal government must conform to this limited understanding of the world in how it engages with policies and people. Of course, while this proclamation is entered into the record immediately, the actual details and rules that come from it will have to be crafted and go through the appropriate processes, and be subjected to legal challenges, before they can be effected. And even after all of that process, there will still be some places that will enthusiastically embrace all of this (assuming they haven't already done it statewide) and places that will insist that if the federal government wants to do these things, they'll have to do it in person and with no help from anyone in the state.
The chair responsible for equal opportunity in employment has declared she intends to see the ideology of erasure extended so that no trans person is allowed to use a bathroom of their gender. Which is the small form compared to the executive order declaring that being trans is incompatible with military service, because they consider being trans as dishonorably lying about who you are, and the order intended to re-classify all gender-affirming care for those under 19 years of age as "chemical and surgical mutilation" with the intent that prosecution occur for those providers and caregivers that provide gender-affirming care. (Since trans people don't exist to them, the only way that a minor could be trans is if they were being psychologically or physically harmed or otherwise acted upon by a malicious force, and a adult could be trans is if they were somehow mentally unwell or deliberately choosing to live a lie. These are statements and ideas that seem appropriately responded to with the sentiment of, if not the action itself of, "gargle my balls.")
In addition to ideology being required on all government websites, data and information previously present on government websites and data sets is being purged to fit ideology.
On other fronts, a different order demanded that all programs related to hiring, retaining, and providing funding for a more qualified and more representative workforce, and to ensure that workplaces and workers have what's required so that people can access resources and do work, must cease and all persons who are employed in implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs be fired immediately. The order decries what it calls "discrimination" in hiring and programs, and also directs those whose jobs are retained snitch on their coworkers if any proposal or practice appears to include DEI in "coded or imprecise language." The order posts the e-mail address to use, DEIAtruth@opm.gov, and there are at least a few calls out to ensure that the people who manage the snitch e-mail have plenty of things to work through and investigate all kinds of reports that turn out to be plausibly constructed but entirely untrue.
Proving they know nothing about how "the government" operates, nor that they actually care to learn, an order demanded a complete freeze on all federal spending, without anything close to an understanding of what was being stopped.
The new administration also attempted to subvert the Constitution without going through the proper process for amending the document, drawing a sharp rebuke and at least a temporary block from a federal judge for their transparent attempt to deny citizenship to those who were "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" as outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment.
At least one of the sycophants understands the proper procedure for amending the Constitution, by introducing an amendment specifically toward allowing the current administrator a third term while barring previous presidents from taking advantage of it. One could call it the Grover Cleveland exception, if feeling historical.
The Administration believes they can subvert the Constitution and exile persons accused of crimes to other countries for their punishment. With all of the nativist posturing about how the people from outside are somehow more dangerous and violent than the people who were born here.
Elon Musk and his lackeys began the process of taking over governmental systems and locking out those who have proper custody over them. The unelected, uncleared emperor that the current administrator seems perfectly happy turning over his power to also sought to gain control of the U.S. Treasury's payments system, which resulted in a career civil servant leaving his position while fighting with the unelected "Efficiency" entity.
Rather than dismiss it as a joke or logorrhea from the administrator, the State Department head said that acquiring Greenland, the country, was in the United States' best interest and they would be pursuing this idea seriously.
Elsewhere, presumably believing that it would mean that the other countries would have to pay the increased costs, instead of United States consumers, tariffs were announced of 25% for goods coming from Canada or Mexico, and 10% for goods coming from China. (Except energy, I suppose, which only gets the 10% rate when coming from Canada.) I'm sure that when the backlash reaches hi, he'll drop it or have the things reduced, but right now it's "fulfilling campaign promises theatre" time, damn the actual consequences.
Another one of those actions of the new administration was a blanket pardon or commutation issued to everyone arrested in connection with the 6 January 2021 riot that breached the Capitol building and threatened the safety and security of the lawmakers and the transfer of power. Two of those pardoned have indicated they will refuse the pardon on the basis that they accept responsibility for what they did wrong, but for the most part, those pardoned have been thrilled to avoid the consequences of their actions. At least at the federal level - the states may still have opportunity to prosecute them for their actions on January 6, 2021, should they choose to, and many of the people pardoned in this release have indicated they're likely to do things that may end up with them having different state charges leveled against them, so it might be that their freedom is curtailed swiftly by their own actions. We can already see that at work, sometimes with fatal consequences for the person who was pardoned.
Beyond this, the current administration has already fired all the persons who worked upon the cases prosecuting those now pardoned, and has indicated they intend to investigate those who did their jobs professionally and correctly, because the administration doesn't like that his personal mob was prosecuted for breaking the law and attempting the overthrow of the government. And in other parts of the government, several of the inspectors-general responsible for oversight of executive agencies were told they were fired in an attempted purge of their oversight responsibilities. (Or, more likely, so that they could be replaced by people who were politically loyal, rather than those who would be competent at their job.)
Several states and locailties have declared their refusal to participate with federal immigration authorities seeking to deport persons from the United states, in much the same way they refused to cooperate with similar policies in the first time around.
There are plenty of other executive orders and statements being passed around, to make sure that the Education Department no longer wants to pursue cases against book bans that infringe on student rights, or that the National Institutes of Health and other such public health and public science departments have to suspend all their grants, funding, and outside-facing communication to others until…presumably, until everyone's loyalty is tested appropriately to the satisfaction of the administration. There's an entire field of possible fights to pick and focus on.
It's clear, at least from some of the metadata in the documents, that the people who were responsible for detailing this plan in Project 2025 are also writing the memoranda that are involved in implementing Project 2025 in the government.
If this feels like a litany of "we said we would do this thing, and now we are doing them," it is. What we're never sure about is whether or not the people who elected the person who said they would do such things is thrilled at the keeping of promises or horrified at the keeping of promises.
If you haven't already written off Mark Zuckerberg as at best a windsock and at worst a collaborator, note that even with all of his attempts to suck up to the new administration, they still want him to do more to prove his loyalty to them. Furthermore, Zuck has taken to complaining that all of his ass-kissing and sucking up to this administration is being leaked everywhere and nobody is respecting his privacy. Considering that so far, the sucking-up has included ditching fact-checking, requiring content moderators to move from California to Texas, removing any thought that his companies support hiring anyone other than unqualified white men, and stating that he thinks there isn't enough "masculine energy" in the still highly male-dominated tech sector, you'd think he'd have gotten at least a little bit of pity from the people he's trying to impress, but no, they don't buy that he's changed his ways and now wants to be their guy.
If you've decided to ditch Zuck and all his matters, you can start with downloading your Facebook data and then deleting your account, and then repeat the process for all the other services that you have accounts on. One of the pieces of advice I heard that's excellent, though, is the "make a plan and tell other people how you can be found and what ways to get in contact with you once you leave that place."
The administration also wants ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok (which has been at least temporarily banned from the United States) to give up majority share in the company to Oracle and investors if it wants to be allowed back into the United States. According to the people working on banning TikTok, it's because there's too much China in it and they think it'll be leveraged by a hostile state actor. This is the moment where the montage happens of all of the ways that all of the U.S. telecoms and social media sites have been leveraged, often without any any kind of court order, in service of a hostile state actor called the United States government. Even at double- or triple-time, the montage will take a while.
Perhaps the one thing that the new administration really will care about enough to refute, rebut, or deny: the television ratings for the inaugural ceremony were dismal compared to the previous inaugurations, including the first time around for this administrator. Which is cold comfort, indeed, to know that he'll be unhappy about that, instead of so many other things.
For the rest of us, we are in a situation where we have to decide how much of the normalization we're willing to accept, and how much we're going to let go because we don't want to make waves or talk about "politics". And for people who desire to do things and build resilience and networks that will survive disruptions and "chaos," the CrimethInc folks published a document on this matter in November that's still relevant to now, a document that assumes the functions of government will be hostile to the desired outcomes, regardless of the political party affiliation of the politicians. In combination with this, a set of fifteen more pithy pieces of information about change, how change is effected, what to look for in victory, and who are the people who sometimes are best convinced.
Comparisons to the Vichy collaborators in France are already well underway for this set of Democratic leadership, and unless they start getting on their horses and trying much harder to protect the government against the administration, the comparisons will stop being opinions and start being reality.
Because of the flux, but also because the messaging has been pretty heavy about who the administration wants to blame for their own problems or for situations that are caused primarily by their friends wanting more zeroes on the end of their worth, it's worth keeping in mind what draws people toward being radicalized into hate groups, and also what kinds of things can be done to disrupt and respond to the casual bigotry of our lives, a bigotry that I expect to increase significantly as this administration continues to get airtime for their own bigotry.
A beginning post about being prepared for a disaster, which is one of those things that as disasters start showing up in places and strengths that they hadn't before, will probably become more important and regular than it was before. And also, the joys that come from mindfully making gifts for others in your world, and sometimes, being surprised that someone else has made a gift for you.
Students in Utah are now forbidden from bringing any material that is on the state's banned list, including banned books, into their schools, even if the student is bringing a copy obtained in some other method than at school. The books, recall, only require three districts to ban them before they are then banned throughout the entire state and all schools.
Captain Awkward gives solid advice to a letter-writer whose relationship scenario reminds me of my bad relationship all too well. It's probably a sign of progress in my life that I recognize the similar situation, and am glad that the advice being given is the same that I had to go through, to recognize that the fault is not with you (but being a person with neurodivergence means you get messaging from everyone else that says all faults are your fault) and that there is not something that you can do to fix the relationship from within it or without. It has to be the person doing the terrible things that changes, and some people won't, or even acknowledge they need to.
At least some of the societies of the Iron Age appear to have had men traveling to live with their wives, rather than women traveling to live with their husbands, a suggestion that will no doubt make some of the people who believe we need more "masculine energy" feel defensive and small. Understanding the societies of various African nations and peoples can make for more effective methods of getting health interventions by talking with actual power brokers rather than what a Western audience might assume are the people with power.
Flowery language in relation to women's anatomy and sexuality is very common, regardless of whether the goal of the communication was to encourage pleasure or to discourage it. A fair amount of the discourse in that space is about the fragility of the flower and what not to do so as to preserve it for the "right" time in marriage. That kind of language can make it difficult for someone to learn about themselves, but also to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies. An observational study in England and Wales suggests more women may be attempting to time their own fertility, with the assistance of apps, as their form of contraception, and that this use may also be related to a rise in seeking abortion services. Setting aside the privacy implications of an app that tracks your menstrual cycle, and who that data might be shared with, it's also an inexact science in relation to knowing when someone could get pregnant. When there are difficulties in finding effective contraception, unintended side effects, or there are messaging being pushed about how "natural is better" than what science can produce, there are plenty of opportunities for a woman to drop their hormonal contraception and try something different, including some of these apps.
Data from reporting sites in the United States indicates that there are still plenty of places with high concentrations of SARS-CoV-2, and since we're in the cold season, that means other airborne respiratory viruses are having their surge periods as well. Stay healthy, as best you can, and use what protective measures you have available to yourself.
There are still several mitigation and suppression measures that could be taken against SARS-CoV-2, none of which are "let it rip" nor waiting on a miracle. To do so, however, would require politicians to admit that the problem exists and put in significant effort and resources toward that suppression and mitigation.
Transitioning and using the infrastructure of natural gas providers to have them provide geothermal energy and heat pumps instead.
Creating inclusive community and welcoming bodies of all sizes into cycling, without assuming that fat people cycling are doing so because they want to lose weight or that their fatness is an impediment to everyone else's enjoyment of cycling.
A biography of Professor Sir Ludwig Guttmann, Father of the Paralympic Movement and advocate for the equal participation of the disabled in sport.
Humpback whales are being sighted taking different migration routes around England than they usually are.
In technology, the original chatbot, ELIZA, has been reconstructed and run in an emulator for the original code version, which is excellent, and it turns out there was a bug that crashes the original in their code. There's been a lot done with chatbots since, but having the code and the ability to run the code of the original will make it better for research and for the curious to see what it was like to have a pseud-o-responding entity in their computers.
The incoming U.S. administration dismissed and disbanded several cybersecurity advisory boards, including one that was investigating how foreign nationals found and exploited deliberately introduced insecurities in United States telecommunications networks so they could spy on and monitor the communications of government officials and other prominent figures. You know, the kind of stuff that a nationalist, nativist administrator would presumably be very interested in finding out and preventing from happening again. But, given the amount of work that's being done to prioritize ideology (his) over any other element, it's probably no surprise that there's going to be a lot of wrecking things and then belatedly, realizing that those were important and they need to be staffed with competent people instead of sycophants.
A Chinese LLM, the Deepseek R1, appeared as a cheaper and open-source entity, and all of the people who have been hyping and providing materials for the U.S. LLMs took significant sanity damage and watched their stock prices tumble as the market adjusted to the possibility of competition. Afterward, OpenAI complained that the DeepSeek model might have stolen the training data that they stole from people using the Internet for purposes other than training LLMs.
The people who are building and deploying tools that are intended to trap and poison scrapers for the LLMs that don't respect a go away message. Which may be more symbolic than effective, but for people who are looking for ways to at least nominally say a stronger no than their robots.txt file, then these tools may be very useful.
Facebook has apparently decided that Linux topics are against their community standards as cybersecurity threats. Which is certainly a decision that's gotten made, and I suspect there's an algorithm involved somewhere there that has made poor decisions. Or a person has tweaked the algorithm to make poorer decisions.
Slightly related to Linux, if only in that servers tend to be running it, you should have a website. In addition to your socials and your other hosted services, having your own website is a good thing. (Modulo that you want to do the work of hosting your own website and creating all the necessary pages, but straight up HTML and CSS is, compared to some of the other options, lower barriers to entry, and there are still WYSIWYG editors available to us.
geraineon offers a useful analogy for those of a certain level of experience on how to envision the Fediverse - as a collection of forums, rather than as e-mail servers or telephone networks, as well as some thoughts about how you can signal in your replies how they connect to the original post.
Last out, if you have ever been a fan of the Pebble smartwatch, before the company was first eaten by Fitbit, and then by Google, the original creator is looking to create new Pebble watches again, based on the now open-sourced PebbleOS software and a new hardware design. Looking for people to express their interest again, and we can hope that new Pebbles will be able to continue working with the Rebble community that has been keeping Pebble services alive.
And one last, very not safe for your work computer, link: the most popular search terms on the adult site PornHub, broken out by country and U.S. State, so that you can see what's getting popular or remained popular in your locality/country.
(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.)
Let us begin with the understanding that library workers are not superheroes, they are not the sacred clergy, they are people doing a job, and many of them are either allied with the villains or feel like they don't have enough support to stand up to the villains. So support your library, both in demanding they get more money that is probably currently feeding a militarized police force, but also in going before their governing authorities and demanding the library have progressive collections full of works by marginalized authors and staffing that resembles the community around the library. They need that kind of support much more than people saying how brave and heroic the library profession is, because not everyone in the profession is actually doing the work.
Filmmaker David Lynch, known for several movies and the Twin Peaks television series, has finished his career at 78 years of age.
In a posthumous documentary, Paul Reubens, best known for his role as Pee-Wee Herman, comes out as a gay man. Which makes sense that this would happen after his death, given that Pee-Wee spun off into a children's show, and at the time, there would have been much hue and cry about pederasty if a beloved children's show host was gay. (There will be now, too, but at that point in time, it would not have just been fringe pastors.)
A ceasefire agreement has been reached between Israel and Hamas, which may hopefully bring an end to the war in Gaza and return all hostages. For the agreement to do anything good, of course, it has to be honored, and that may or may not be something that happens.
(There's also been some thinking in some of my social and podcast circles about whether or not this is timed in the same way that other incoming Republican administrations timed cease fires, successful negotiations, and other such international diplomacy successes so as to make themselves look good and effective for getting things done that their Democratic predecessor couldn't. Almost always, if those timings were deliberate, those timings are then discovered to be deliberately engineered for that particular result, and it undercuts whatever message was supposed to be sent.)
On his way out of the office of the President, Joe Biden proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution had been properly ratified and was now the law of the land, which would have been nice to know at the beginning of his presidency, rather than the end, so that there could have been the proper fights over the matter and the possibility that the text itself could have been incorporated. The next administration will certainly wave that idea off, and their Supreme Court is likely to support that, regardless of how the legal arguments go, so this feels like a fight that's being teed up for whenever next a liberal executive, legislative, and judicial trifecta comes into existence.
Also on his last day, the President commuted the federal sentences of nearly 2500 people serving time for nonviolent drug offenses that he considers to have been too harsh and long compared to what they would have received in today's era. Which seems to be in keeping with the usual practice of clemency during the final days of an administration, so that there's basically no chance for pushback or for their opposition to make political hay out of those decisions.
Before the changeover, the Department of Justice sued several companies that manage housing for collusion using tools that ingested their proprietary data and then made very hard-to-ignore recommendations about what the "correct" (meaning maximally profitable) rent should be for the company and area that the company is managing. Given that the successive administrator has not done great in real estate or in fair dealing with real estate, I won't be surprised to see that case disappeared.
The incoming administrator is officially a convicted felon, although he received no punishment for what he was convicted of. This is mostly because the Supreme Court interfered and accepted a novel legal argument designed to allow him to evade accountability, which required re-working the case, and then the election that is positioned to put him in power meant that most of the potential penalties for him would either be eraseable or appealable.
Unsurprisingly, the incoming administration leaned heavily on country and country-related music artists to perform for ceremonies and balls related to the inauguration and similar events, although there was also the presence of the Village People there, who tried very hard to deny that there was any kind of political endorsement to their appearance and performance during the situation. I'm not surprised about the country artists being there, I am surprised that the Village People are, given how much of their songs and performances have been embraced by communitites that the incoming administration has been vehemently against and intends to cause harm to. I have been since told that there's only one member of the original Village People in the group, and he's the straight one, so perhaps it is less surprising than it would otherwise be.
Once they were situated in power, the new administration began to demonstrate the weaknesses of getting things done by executive order, in that the next person can rescind current orders. Of course, when people say "there has to be legislative solutions to this!" they are assuming a functional legislature and a court system that will not rule in favor of one political position or another, regardless of what the law and their precedent actually says. The United States is pretty far away, at this moment, from a functional national legislature, and the majority of the highest court in the land seems more than happy to be partisan and political in their rulings, and not bother trying to disguise it in any kind of way.
As it is, the new administration declared that all persons are the sex they were at conception, which would technically render every person non-binary, and spent time railing against "gender ideology." Regardless of the scientific reality of what the order is, how it will be interpreted, of course, is that there is no such thing as gender identity and trans people don't exist, and the federal government must conform to this limited understanding of the world in how it engages with policies and people. Of course, while this proclamation is entered into the record immediately, the actual details and rules that come from it will have to be crafted and go through the appropriate processes, and be subjected to legal challenges, before they can be effected. And even after all of that process, there will still be some places that will enthusiastically embrace all of this (assuming they haven't already done it statewide) and places that will insist that if the federal government wants to do these things, they'll have to do it in person and with no help from anyone in the state.
The chair responsible for equal opportunity in employment has declared she intends to see the ideology of erasure extended so that no trans person is allowed to use a bathroom of their gender. Which is the small form compared to the executive order declaring that being trans is incompatible with military service, because they consider being trans as dishonorably lying about who you are, and the order intended to re-classify all gender-affirming care for those under 19 years of age as "chemical and surgical mutilation" with the intent that prosecution occur for those providers and caregivers that provide gender-affirming care. (Since trans people don't exist to them, the only way that a minor could be trans is if they were being psychologically or physically harmed or otherwise acted upon by a malicious force, and a adult could be trans is if they were somehow mentally unwell or deliberately choosing to live a lie. These are statements and ideas that seem appropriately responded to with the sentiment of, if not the action itself of, "gargle my balls.")
In addition to ideology being required on all government websites, data and information previously present on government websites and data sets is being purged to fit ideology.
On other fronts, a different order demanded that all programs related to hiring, retaining, and providing funding for a more qualified and more representative workforce, and to ensure that workplaces and workers have what's required so that people can access resources and do work, must cease and all persons who are employed in implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs be fired immediately. The order decries what it calls "discrimination" in hiring and programs, and also directs those whose jobs are retained snitch on their coworkers if any proposal or practice appears to include DEI in "coded or imprecise language." The order posts the e-mail address to use, DEIAtruth@opm.gov, and there are at least a few calls out to ensure that the people who manage the snitch e-mail have plenty of things to work through and investigate all kinds of reports that turn out to be plausibly constructed but entirely untrue.
Proving they know nothing about how "the government" operates, nor that they actually care to learn, an order demanded a complete freeze on all federal spending, without anything close to an understanding of what was being stopped.
The new administration also attempted to subvert the Constitution without going through the proper process for amending the document, drawing a sharp rebuke and at least a temporary block from a federal judge for their transparent attempt to deny citizenship to those who were "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" as outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment.
At least one of the sycophants understands the proper procedure for amending the Constitution, by introducing an amendment specifically toward allowing the current administrator a third term while barring previous presidents from taking advantage of it. One could call it the Grover Cleveland exception, if feeling historical.
The Administration believes they can subvert the Constitution and exile persons accused of crimes to other countries for their punishment. With all of the nativist posturing about how the people from outside are somehow more dangerous and violent than the people who were born here.
Elon Musk and his lackeys began the process of taking over governmental systems and locking out those who have proper custody over them. The unelected, uncleared emperor that the current administrator seems perfectly happy turning over his power to also sought to gain control of the U.S. Treasury's payments system, which resulted in a career civil servant leaving his position while fighting with the unelected "Efficiency" entity.
Rather than dismiss it as a joke or logorrhea from the administrator, the State Department head said that acquiring Greenland, the country, was in the United States' best interest and they would be pursuing this idea seriously.
Elsewhere, presumably believing that it would mean that the other countries would have to pay the increased costs, instead of United States consumers, tariffs were announced of 25% for goods coming from Canada or Mexico, and 10% for goods coming from China. (Except energy, I suppose, which only gets the 10% rate when coming from Canada.) I'm sure that when the backlash reaches hi, he'll drop it or have the things reduced, but right now it's "fulfilling campaign promises theatre" time, damn the actual consequences.
Another one of those actions of the new administration was a blanket pardon or commutation issued to everyone arrested in connection with the 6 January 2021 riot that breached the Capitol building and threatened the safety and security of the lawmakers and the transfer of power. Two of those pardoned have indicated they will refuse the pardon on the basis that they accept responsibility for what they did wrong, but for the most part, those pardoned have been thrilled to avoid the consequences of their actions. At least at the federal level - the states may still have opportunity to prosecute them for their actions on January 6, 2021, should they choose to, and many of the people pardoned in this release have indicated they're likely to do things that may end up with them having different state charges leveled against them, so it might be that their freedom is curtailed swiftly by their own actions. We can already see that at work, sometimes with fatal consequences for the person who was pardoned.
Beyond this, the current administration has already fired all the persons who worked upon the cases prosecuting those now pardoned, and has indicated they intend to investigate those who did their jobs professionally and correctly, because the administration doesn't like that his personal mob was prosecuted for breaking the law and attempting the overthrow of the government. And in other parts of the government, several of the inspectors-general responsible for oversight of executive agencies were told they were fired in an attempted purge of their oversight responsibilities. (Or, more likely, so that they could be replaced by people who were politically loyal, rather than those who would be competent at their job.)
Several states and locailties have declared their refusal to participate with federal immigration authorities seeking to deport persons from the United states, in much the same way they refused to cooperate with similar policies in the first time around.
There are plenty of other executive orders and statements being passed around, to make sure that the Education Department no longer wants to pursue cases against book bans that infringe on student rights, or that the National Institutes of Health and other such public health and public science departments have to suspend all their grants, funding, and outside-facing communication to others until…presumably, until everyone's loyalty is tested appropriately to the satisfaction of the administration. There's an entire field of possible fights to pick and focus on.
It's clear, at least from some of the metadata in the documents, that the people who were responsible for detailing this plan in Project 2025 are also writing the memoranda that are involved in implementing Project 2025 in the government.
If this feels like a litany of "we said we would do this thing, and now we are doing them," it is. What we're never sure about is whether or not the people who elected the person who said they would do such things is thrilled at the keeping of promises or horrified at the keeping of promises.
If you haven't already written off Mark Zuckerberg as at best a windsock and at worst a collaborator, note that even with all of his attempts to suck up to the new administration, they still want him to do more to prove his loyalty to them. Furthermore, Zuck has taken to complaining that all of his ass-kissing and sucking up to this administration is being leaked everywhere and nobody is respecting his privacy. Considering that so far, the sucking-up has included ditching fact-checking, requiring content moderators to move from California to Texas, removing any thought that his companies support hiring anyone other than unqualified white men, and stating that he thinks there isn't enough "masculine energy" in the still highly male-dominated tech sector, you'd think he'd have gotten at least a little bit of pity from the people he's trying to impress, but no, they don't buy that he's changed his ways and now wants to be their guy.
If you've decided to ditch Zuck and all his matters, you can start with downloading your Facebook data and then deleting your account, and then repeat the process for all the other services that you have accounts on. One of the pieces of advice I heard that's excellent, though, is the "make a plan and tell other people how you can be found and what ways to get in contact with you once you leave that place."
The administration also wants ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok (which has been at least temporarily banned from the United States) to give up majority share in the company to Oracle and investors if it wants to be allowed back into the United States. According to the people working on banning TikTok, it's because there's too much China in it and they think it'll be leveraged by a hostile state actor. This is the moment where the montage happens of all of the ways that all of the U.S. telecoms and social media sites have been leveraged, often without any any kind of court order, in service of a hostile state actor called the United States government. Even at double- or triple-time, the montage will take a while.
Perhaps the one thing that the new administration really will care about enough to refute, rebut, or deny: the television ratings for the inaugural ceremony were dismal compared to the previous inaugurations, including the first time around for this administrator. Which is cold comfort, indeed, to know that he'll be unhappy about that, instead of so many other things.
For the rest of us, we are in a situation where we have to decide how much of the normalization we're willing to accept, and how much we're going to let go because we don't want to make waves or talk about "politics". And for people who desire to do things and build resilience and networks that will survive disruptions and "chaos," the CrimethInc folks published a document on this matter in November that's still relevant to now, a document that assumes the functions of government will be hostile to the desired outcomes, regardless of the political party affiliation of the politicians. In combination with this, a set of fifteen more pithy pieces of information about change, how change is effected, what to look for in victory, and who are the people who sometimes are best convinced.
Comparisons to the Vichy collaborators in France are already well underway for this set of Democratic leadership, and unless they start getting on their horses and trying much harder to protect the government against the administration, the comparisons will stop being opinions and start being reality.
Because of the flux, but also because the messaging has been pretty heavy about who the administration wants to blame for their own problems or for situations that are caused primarily by their friends wanting more zeroes on the end of their worth, it's worth keeping in mind what draws people toward being radicalized into hate groups, and also what kinds of things can be done to disrupt and respond to the casual bigotry of our lives, a bigotry that I expect to increase significantly as this administration continues to get airtime for their own bigotry.
A beginning post about being prepared for a disaster, which is one of those things that as disasters start showing up in places and strengths that they hadn't before, will probably become more important and regular than it was before. And also, the joys that come from mindfully making gifts for others in your world, and sometimes, being surprised that someone else has made a gift for you.
Students in Utah are now forbidden from bringing any material that is on the state's banned list, including banned books, into their schools, even if the student is bringing a copy obtained in some other method than at school. The books, recall, only require three districts to ban them before they are then banned throughout the entire state and all schools.
Captain Awkward gives solid advice to a letter-writer whose relationship scenario reminds me of my bad relationship all too well. It's probably a sign of progress in my life that I recognize the similar situation, and am glad that the advice being given is the same that I had to go through, to recognize that the fault is not with you (but being a person with neurodivergence means you get messaging from everyone else that says all faults are your fault) and that there is not something that you can do to fix the relationship from within it or without. It has to be the person doing the terrible things that changes, and some people won't, or even acknowledge they need to.
At least some of the societies of the Iron Age appear to have had men traveling to live with their wives, rather than women traveling to live with their husbands, a suggestion that will no doubt make some of the people who believe we need more "masculine energy" feel defensive and small. Understanding the societies of various African nations and peoples can make for more effective methods of getting health interventions by talking with actual power brokers rather than what a Western audience might assume are the people with power.
Flowery language in relation to women's anatomy and sexuality is very common, regardless of whether the goal of the communication was to encourage pleasure or to discourage it. A fair amount of the discourse in that space is about the fragility of the flower and what not to do so as to preserve it for the "right" time in marriage. That kind of language can make it difficult for someone to learn about themselves, but also to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies. An observational study in England and Wales suggests more women may be attempting to time their own fertility, with the assistance of apps, as their form of contraception, and that this use may also be related to a rise in seeking abortion services. Setting aside the privacy implications of an app that tracks your menstrual cycle, and who that data might be shared with, it's also an inexact science in relation to knowing when someone could get pregnant. When there are difficulties in finding effective contraception, unintended side effects, or there are messaging being pushed about how "natural is better" than what science can produce, there are plenty of opportunities for a woman to drop their hormonal contraception and try something different, including some of these apps.
Data from reporting sites in the United States indicates that there are still plenty of places with high concentrations of SARS-CoV-2, and since we're in the cold season, that means other airborne respiratory viruses are having their surge periods as well. Stay healthy, as best you can, and use what protective measures you have available to yourself.
There are still several mitigation and suppression measures that could be taken against SARS-CoV-2, none of which are "let it rip" nor waiting on a miracle. To do so, however, would require politicians to admit that the problem exists and put in significant effort and resources toward that suppression and mitigation.
Transitioning and using the infrastructure of natural gas providers to have them provide geothermal energy and heat pumps instead.
Creating inclusive community and welcoming bodies of all sizes into cycling, without assuming that fat people cycling are doing so because they want to lose weight or that their fatness is an impediment to everyone else's enjoyment of cycling.
A biography of Professor Sir Ludwig Guttmann, Father of the Paralympic Movement and advocate for the equal participation of the disabled in sport.
Humpback whales are being sighted taking different migration routes around England than they usually are.
In technology, the original chatbot, ELIZA, has been reconstructed and run in an emulator for the original code version, which is excellent, and it turns out there was a bug that crashes the original in their code. There's been a lot done with chatbots since, but having the code and the ability to run the code of the original will make it better for research and for the curious to see what it was like to have a pseud-o-responding entity in their computers.
The incoming U.S. administration dismissed and disbanded several cybersecurity advisory boards, including one that was investigating how foreign nationals found and exploited deliberately introduced insecurities in United States telecommunications networks so they could spy on and monitor the communications of government officials and other prominent figures. You know, the kind of stuff that a nationalist, nativist administrator would presumably be very interested in finding out and preventing from happening again. But, given the amount of work that's being done to prioritize ideology (his) over any other element, it's probably no surprise that there's going to be a lot of wrecking things and then belatedly, realizing that those were important and they need to be staffed with competent people instead of sycophants.
A Chinese LLM, the Deepseek R1, appeared as a cheaper and open-source entity, and all of the people who have been hyping and providing materials for the U.S. LLMs took significant sanity damage and watched their stock prices tumble as the market adjusted to the possibility of competition. Afterward, OpenAI complained that the DeepSeek model might have stolen the training data that they stole from people using the Internet for purposes other than training LLMs.
The people who are building and deploying tools that are intended to trap and poison scrapers for the LLMs that don't respect a go away message. Which may be more symbolic than effective, but for people who are looking for ways to at least nominally say a stronger no than their robots.txt file, then these tools may be very useful.
Facebook has apparently decided that Linux topics are against their community standards as cybersecurity threats. Which is certainly a decision that's gotten made, and I suspect there's an algorithm involved somewhere there that has made poor decisions. Or a person has tweaked the algorithm to make poorer decisions.
Slightly related to Linux, if only in that servers tend to be running it, you should have a website. In addition to your socials and your other hosted services, having your own website is a good thing. (Modulo that you want to do the work of hosting your own website and creating all the necessary pages, but straight up HTML and CSS is, compared to some of the other options, lower barriers to entry, and there are still WYSIWYG editors available to us.
geraineon offers a useful analogy for those of a certain level of experience on how to envision the Fediverse - as a collection of forums, rather than as e-mail servers or telephone networks, as well as some thoughts about how you can signal in your replies how they connect to the original post.Last out, if you have ever been a fan of the Pebble smartwatch, before the company was first eaten by Fitbit, and then by Google, the original creator is looking to create new Pebble watches again, based on the now open-sourced PebbleOS software and a new hardware design. Looking for people to express their interest again, and we can hope that new Pebbles will be able to continue working with the Rebble community that has been keeping Pebble services alive.
And one last, very not safe for your work computer, link: the most popular search terms on the adult site PornHub, broken out by country and U.S. State, so that you can see what's getting popular or remained popular in your locality/country.
(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.)
