![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet us begin with a ruling that the paramilitary group the Proud Boys have forfeited their name and logos to the church their leader attacked while he was in Washington, D.C. in December of 2020. Since the group refused to pay a judgment against them for several million dollars from the attack, a judge has ruled that the group has to forfeit something of value to make up for the money, and has thus awarded the church the rights to the name and associated logos of the group.
A history of braille systems, from the Perkins School for the Blind, which has some fascinating parts about how many different codes and forms for getting the blind to be able to read text before the dot systems, and that there were more than a few dot systems involved before a certain amount of standardization, and then compression, was adopted for use. I have seen braille dots and felt them, and I even have a bookmark somewhere from our State Library that offers services to the blind and those who have difficulty reading standard print that has the alphabet on it (so it would probably only be useful for Grade 1), but it would definitely take time and extra sensitivity in my fingers to get used to reading the dots, like any other thing.
After here, there's still yet more of the next few weeks of an administration that seems determined to destroy everything it touches, through malice, even if that malice turns out to be incompetence as well. There will be other things, I promise, by the end, but there's going to be a lot of politics in between.
States with the strictest abortion bans have negative net population changes, although the study involved does not put blame on those bans as the cause for the migration. Beyond that, though, places with strict abortion bans are not good at providing a proper social safety net for those who are being required to give birth, which burns through one of the common excuses provided for those bans. Not that the states with the strictest bans are in any kind of rush to figure out how many additional deaths their bans cause.
The wealthiest believe they will be able to outlast whatever disaster may befall the plebes in luxury bunkers with steep membership prices or construction costs. What I note is missing from this piece about opulence and decadence, is how the things are going to be staffed. Are the rich folks supposed to bring their own people with them when they feel their safety is threatened or will there be a suite of workers who are definitely not being paid enough to cater to the rich people and supposedly ensure their continued survival. (Because "AI powered medicine" and robots used as doctors makes me think the rich will die of gangrene from a cut somewhere, rather than live forever with their opulent IV treatments and the like.)
In the same vein as several other of their executive orders that would require Congress to pass a law to actually do, the current administration intends to defund and diminish the Department of Education, and thus, in their own minds, free the education of children and adults back to state and local control (where it will immediately be used to enhance the richest and deprive the poorest, blackest, and brownest, exactly as intended.)
The sweeps of supposed "immigrants" have been accusing citizens of Native nations of being undocumented immigrants, which is very much what happens when your criteria for "is this person possibly undocumented?" is "is their skin brown?" And in other places that are feeling the pressure of deportation, industries that have relied upon immigrants to staff their workplaces are finding their workers are bracing for deportation, regardless of their status, are trying their best to be invisible and unnoticed, and are shipping their belongings to the countries they originated from, so that they don't get destroyed should they be deported. The raids are being conducted on ordinary people who happen to be undocumented, as they were before, because they refuse to acknowledge that most of the people here aren't violent, gang members, or engaged in criminal enterprise. The people who should be rightly horrified at both the intrusion of the state into their houses of worship and having voted for someone who intends to go against their professed beliefs about welcoming and making community with everyone are not as outraged as those who profess those beliefs would be.
The new Department of Transportation chief wants you to know that climate change isn't real, and has directed the department to purge itself of even thinking about it, in the same way that it's no longer allowed to think about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
The Forest Service is being told to eliminate positions that the administration believes are connected to processes to hire the most qualified people for their open positions, and to make their work accessible for both employees and consumers.
The newly-appointed head of the Department of Justice has instructed her office to pursue legal action under discrimination statutes of any private companies that have processes to hire the most qualified people for their open positions, and to make their work accessible for both employees and consumers, rather than only hiring unqualified, cisgender, and temporarily able-bodied white men for their open positions. Regardless of what other court decisions have said about this on constitutional grounds. Several companies have removed language from their annual reports so that they don't get accused of having processes that hire the most qualified people for their open positions and make their work accessible for employees and consumers. Google axed several holidays from showing in its calendar that are related to the people who might get hired by processes that hire the most qualified people for their open positions and make their work accessible for employees and consumers, claiming their list wasn't sustainable and that they totally didn't do this because of a change in the political situation in the United States. Google blames a service they were using to populate their calendars with and it was just too much for them to keep up with the expanding list of holidays and observances.
A person cosplaying as a United States Attorney has sent several things out for consumption on social media, in relation to many of the things that are here in this post, but does not appear to have anything close to the goods on actual crimes, and if he did, we might be reminded of th3e time where he participated in things that either were or led to actual crimes.
Expect a lot more focus of federal enforcement on political opponents or groups who are trying to push back against autocracy and racism, instead of keeping focus on right-wing terrorism and how many recruits right-wing terrorists have or gain from people involved in enforcing the law.
The demands of the administration to try and erase people includes demands that specific words must be used, not only on forms, but in conversation or in communication with others. (The 404 media folks are on target about how all that railing about "politically correct" language was really about how they weren't allowed to use the language they wanted to and they couldn't control what language others were allowed to use.)
Other organizations have decided they want to accelerate terror and declare that some people are guilty of offenses that should get them fired from federal bureaucracies, because they are somehow connected to processes that hire the most qualified people for their open positions and make their work accessible for employees and consumers.
The current administrator demands that the rules regarding investigation and prosecution of sexual assault be tightened back to his previous demands, so as to make sure to inflict maximum trauma on those who survive and want to try and hold their attackers accountable.
The current House of Representatives seeks to strategically disenfranchise married women and non-white people by requiring in-person voter registration and updating, as well as providing documentation as proof of citizenship that many do not have or do not have the means to easily obtain.
The current administration has demanded that trans people be removed from the Stonewall National Monument, the place where two trans women started a riot against police trying to make them disappear. The community reacted strongly to this and other attempts at erasure from history and the National Parks Service.
The continued march to erase queer people from the government expands into data sets and demands for retractions or revisions to papers that contain terms that administration refuses to acknowledge, which presumably should be punished with "No, fuck you, we use science here," but may not be, because, as we see below…
An unelected, uncleared man is routinely being given or seizing access to sensitive systems that contain payment data, data that could be easily used to commit identity fraud, and federal worker and applicant data. Assisting him in this matter are several inexperienced engineers with similar political leanings and origins given immense power and access, several of which have the hubris and foolishness to push untested changes to production and who are probably writing backdoors in that will give them control and prevent transparency. We're talking people with juvenile screen names who routinely promote open white supremacists and misogynists, say that Germany should no longer feel "guilt" about having had a regime that murdered millions because of who they were, perform edgelord jokes about the Nazi salutes they gave on the inauguration day (the link contains a picture of such a salute as its primary image), state openly and unreservedly that the only people who could possibly competently run the world are cisgender white men,
That same unelected, uncleared man is demanding that certain agencies be shut down after they refused him access to their classified and sensitive materials, at which point the administrator demanded that those who were protecting the data from an enelected, uncleared man be placed on administrative leave for daring to refuse. As one might suspect, giving an unelected, uncleared man and his lackeys full access to sensitive systems is a massive security risk. Because messing with things like payment systems is all bad side and no good side, even if the people doing it think they can get something to use as a lever against their opponents. And the more the travesty stands, or worse, if it is endorsed by a high court, the more likely we are all going to be subject to the whims of the unelected, uncleared, unaccountable man and his fools who have basically no clue what kind of stuff they're messing with. (They're not even good at standing up their own websites and keeping them secured.)
The unelected man has taken aim at an organization that has kept consumers happy and gone after those that were cheating them out of their money or offering them worthless or worse contracts and loans. It's been a solid and effective piece of the governmental apparatus, but it's also been a thorn in the side of the billionaire class, and therefore they are hoping it gets destroyed by the unelected, uncleared man.
And, of course, they're also doing it to increase their own grift, as federal agencies are forced into providing updates only over the social media platform that the unelected, uncleared man owns. And giving over the correspondents' space in the Pentagon to propaganda-friendly entities like OANN, Brietbart, and the New York Post, instead of NBC News, NPR, and the New York Times. Even though some of the ones in the second column are also sometimes very propaganda-friendly with this administration. People in charge of private prisons ar salivating the the possibility that the government will arrest sufficient people accused of being undocumented that they can overcharge the public purse for the "privilege" of housing them.
They're also hoping that the federal civil service will simply resign en masse so they can be replaced by loyalists with no experience nor ability to make "the government" work.
The attempts at completely freezing out and dismantling the agency primarily responsible for U.S. foreign aid has already created significant problems for U.S. goodwill and for important programs happening all over the world. Even if most of their actions demanding that programs not be given what's been appropriated for them by Congress are illegal, these are folks whose respect for the law extends only as far as it allows them to do what they want.
These are also people who think it's a good idea to "clear out" the Gaza strip and either forcibly relocate or kill the current residents and believe they should be acquiring the Panama Canal Zone, Canada, and Greenland to themselves (and that the residents of those places will welcome them with open arms and want to be part of the Untied States), and are perfectly fine with abandoning Europe to whatever power would like to sweep in and conquer them.
This kind of takeover would certainly make you wonder whether it's the elected official or the unelected, uncleared, man who is the actual person in charge of the government of the United States.
The administrator took personal revenge against an entity that has routinely exposed him as a criminal and doggedly attempted to hold him accountable for his crimes by firing the Archivist of the United States.
Continuing in pettiness, the administrator is alleged to have given a former Coast Guard Commandant three hours notice to vacate her house, after dismissing her from the position because she practiced hiring the best available people for that branch of service, instead of hiring only unqualified white men.
The Associated Press has been banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One because they refuse to change the name of the body of water off the coasts of Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Mexico to a jingoistic designation in their reporting. Petty revenge after petty actions.
Threats to cut staff and personal animus against the head of the Federal Aviation Administration aren't necessarily responsible for the spate of airline incidents and crashes, but they certainly haven't helped keep the airways safer.
The entire tariff debacle shows how little everyone involved in moving it forward understands about what tariffs are or how they work.
The party and the administrator are also interested in making sure that nobody gets lead out of their water and that toxic substances aren't properly regulated.
The current Health and Human Services Secretary wants the government to start creating farms for people that would help them get "cured" of their "addictions" to substances like mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, and ADHD and autism assistance medications. The piece notes his claims are not rooted anywhere in science, but as one notes with so many other people being confirmed to cabinet and other positions by a complicit Republican party, they don't want people who follow science and have expertise in their field in these positions, they want people who will destroy the government in pursuit of their own pet, unscientific, beliefs.
As has been the case for many administrators from his party, the administrator put a theocrat in charge of a part of the government with a charge to ensure that Christian theocracy is an official government position and will have government resources devoted to it. Regardless of what the Constitution says about such things, because they are certain about what the Being Represented by the Tetragrammaton wants and they know better than the people who wrote the founding documents about what kind of state religion they wanted in their country.
A viral photograph claims to be a picture of the State Department of the United States with the flag flying upside down, what is usually considered a sign of extreme distress. That would certainly reflect the mood of the United States at this point in time. I find it interesting that Newsweek's sampling of people on Elon Musk's platform was mostly people going "Nah. We're happy that the leopards are coming!" with the implication that they believe the leopards would never eat their faces. Even though the leopards probably already are, or will be soon.
Many people are rediscovering the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual, and at least some will no doubt take it to heart as a useful tool to obstruct things that are not going in the direction they want them to.
Attempting to do anything structural in an authoritarian environment is very difficult, because there isn't enough solid anything to build a structure on much of the time. If you want an Orwell component, it's the constant shifting back and forth between Eurasia and Eastasia as the enemy and similar kinds of arbitrary movements that mean nobody actually believes there's a structure there nor even a foundation to build a structure on that won't get immediately collapsed or undermined.
The government has been purchasing data from commercial brokers that it would normally have to clear warrant requirements to obtain, and they argue that because the data is available for sale, they have no such need for warrant requirements, even as they use purchased data to easily re-identify people from what is supposedly anonymized data. The pocket computers and the advertising networks and all of that surveillance tech deployed commercially is producing data that is eventually funneled back to the government for their use. The article makes it sound like we should be shocked this is happening, but enough people who have been around surveillance or who understand what's been going on with ad tech already know that corporations and the government alike have already created detailed profiles of us so they can try to sell us things or track our movements to all kinds of places. Actual data privacy would require the government to regulate itself and corporations so that they cannot so easily spy on us, and the government dun wanna, and the corporations won't, because that might make them less profitable, somehow. And then some yutz with access they shouldn't have or access they stole will eventually figure out how to exfiltrate it, and then wide-scale identity theft gets to happen, especially once that data gets cross-referenced with things that can't be changed about a person. You know, the kind of thing that's probably pretty immanent, given how much the unelected, uncleared cowboys have been mucking about in systems they cannot possibly understand well enough to make constructive changes to.
The state of Texas, under the idea that people deserve some sort of choice about what kind of vaccinations they and their children receive, seems poised to have a significant number of the population unvaccinated against diseases that are already proven dangerous, communicable, and possibly deadly.
A piece that focuses on the activism of Ursula K. LeGuin and tries to make it fit into the Daoist concept of wei wu wei, using the prevalent water metaphor form Laozi. I don't think it succeeds as well as it wants to, because it focuses on the multiple different types of activism that Le Guin undertook, rather than looking at the ways in which the activism gave way when it hit hard opposition and found its way around that hard opponent all the same. But it is nice to see people having a look and seeing how much got done at the local level while also at least gesturing at the national. Something that might be a bit more on the spot, and also uses a water metaphor, is the Procedure for Having to Behold, which is a thing about what you can do to keep yourself going as you continue to witness more and more information about what's atrocious. If you're trying to figure out how you make differences when it seems like everything that's happening at levels above yours are all negative, one of the things that works best for you is figuring out what works best for you, the person that you are, with what resources and connections you have at your disposal.
Sometimes that means operating a surgical clinic out of a barn in western Washington State, long before official permissions and offices began to accept that trans care was a thing.
Often it means recognizing that you're in a space where they might let the opposition exist for show purposes without ever giving them the opportunity to unseat the authoritarians from power.
In technology, A drone operator pleaded guilty to unsafe operation when the drone he was flying over the Palisades fire struck and damaged a water bomber plane fighting the fire. The operator will pay back the repair costs for the plane, as well as other potential penalty for having flown the drone in airspace where it wasn't allowed.
Anna e só on systems thinking and how sometimes the correct question to answer is not "how do we make this experience the best?" but instead "why have we allowed this one thing to become so large it's causing problems?" The context is FOSDEM, but it's also generalizable to all kinds of things that have become far too large for their own health and safety.
Despite seeing the amount of damage that people with backdoor access can do, the government of the United Kingdom demanded to have backdoor access to Apple cloud users' data. Because the government apparently has no faith in the ability of their own investigators to find things correctly and through legal processes, I guess.
A situation where it is easier and cheaper by two orders of magnitude to buy a domain name and redirect than fix a typo and reprint all the wrong fliers.
Facebook engaged in widespread copyright violation by torrenting over 80 terabytes of books so they could train their LLM. Which is to say, they took some of our finest writing and used it to create something that produces sub-par writing. And thus you see the difference between something like Anna's Archive, getting the book thrown at them for hosting metadata and possible links to things, and Facebook, which is trying very hard to say that nobody was hurt by their piracy, because they used it for machine learning instead of trying to make works more available.
CAPTCHAs, or at least reCAPTCHA, is now much less a security measure (it can be defeated by bots easily) and more a method of making money for Google by generating tracking data for them.
The low-poly joke of a Tesla truck is also a high danger joke, as on average, the likelihood of dying in a fire-related fatality is 17 times more likely than even the infamous Ford Pinto.
Last out for tonight, a library of craft patterns and craft pattern publications in the public domain.
And Soemone finally pushing back against the idea that technology and screens are all causing our brains to rot and become mush. Convenient scapegoats are convenient, but there's at least some research out there that's not taking the idea as a given and trying to fit their data to it.
Which I pair with the suggestion made in the 1950s that philosophy as it is studied in most Western nations relies on the bachelorhood of many of its greats, and that reliance is a weakness woven into the structure of those philosophical traditions.
(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.)
A history of braille systems, from the Perkins School for the Blind, which has some fascinating parts about how many different codes and forms for getting the blind to be able to read text before the dot systems, and that there were more than a few dot systems involved before a certain amount of standardization, and then compression, was adopted for use. I have seen braille dots and felt them, and I even have a bookmark somewhere from our State Library that offers services to the blind and those who have difficulty reading standard print that has the alphabet on it (so it would probably only be useful for Grade 1), but it would definitely take time and extra sensitivity in my fingers to get used to reading the dots, like any other thing.
After here, there's still yet more of the next few weeks of an administration that seems determined to destroy everything it touches, through malice, even if that malice turns out to be incompetence as well. There will be other things, I promise, by the end, but there's going to be a lot of politics in between.
States with the strictest abortion bans have negative net population changes, although the study involved does not put blame on those bans as the cause for the migration. Beyond that, though, places with strict abortion bans are not good at providing a proper social safety net for those who are being required to give birth, which burns through one of the common excuses provided for those bans. Not that the states with the strictest bans are in any kind of rush to figure out how many additional deaths their bans cause.
The wealthiest believe they will be able to outlast whatever disaster may befall the plebes in luxury bunkers with steep membership prices or construction costs. What I note is missing from this piece about opulence and decadence, is how the things are going to be staffed. Are the rich folks supposed to bring their own people with them when they feel their safety is threatened or will there be a suite of workers who are definitely not being paid enough to cater to the rich people and supposedly ensure their continued survival. (Because "AI powered medicine" and robots used as doctors makes me think the rich will die of gangrene from a cut somewhere, rather than live forever with their opulent IV treatments and the like.)
In the same vein as several other of their executive orders that would require Congress to pass a law to actually do, the current administration intends to defund and diminish the Department of Education, and thus, in their own minds, free the education of children and adults back to state and local control (where it will immediately be used to enhance the richest and deprive the poorest, blackest, and brownest, exactly as intended.)
The sweeps of supposed "immigrants" have been accusing citizens of Native nations of being undocumented immigrants, which is very much what happens when your criteria for "is this person possibly undocumented?" is "is their skin brown?" And in other places that are feeling the pressure of deportation, industries that have relied upon immigrants to staff their workplaces are finding their workers are bracing for deportation, regardless of their status, are trying their best to be invisible and unnoticed, and are shipping their belongings to the countries they originated from, so that they don't get destroyed should they be deported. The raids are being conducted on ordinary people who happen to be undocumented, as they were before, because they refuse to acknowledge that most of the people here aren't violent, gang members, or engaged in criminal enterprise. The people who should be rightly horrified at both the intrusion of the state into their houses of worship and having voted for someone who intends to go against their professed beliefs about welcoming and making community with everyone are not as outraged as those who profess those beliefs would be.
The new Department of Transportation chief wants you to know that climate change isn't real, and has directed the department to purge itself of even thinking about it, in the same way that it's no longer allowed to think about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
The Forest Service is being told to eliminate positions that the administration believes are connected to processes to hire the most qualified people for their open positions, and to make their work accessible for both employees and consumers.
The newly-appointed head of the Department of Justice has instructed her office to pursue legal action under discrimination statutes of any private companies that have processes to hire the most qualified people for their open positions, and to make their work accessible for both employees and consumers, rather than only hiring unqualified, cisgender, and temporarily able-bodied white men for their open positions. Regardless of what other court decisions have said about this on constitutional grounds. Several companies have removed language from their annual reports so that they don't get accused of having processes that hire the most qualified people for their open positions and make their work accessible for employees and consumers. Google axed several holidays from showing in its calendar that are related to the people who might get hired by processes that hire the most qualified people for their open positions and make their work accessible for employees and consumers, claiming their list wasn't sustainable and that they totally didn't do this because of a change in the political situation in the United States. Google blames a service they were using to populate their calendars with and it was just too much for them to keep up with the expanding list of holidays and observances.
A person cosplaying as a United States Attorney has sent several things out for consumption on social media, in relation to many of the things that are here in this post, but does not appear to have anything close to the goods on actual crimes, and if he did, we might be reminded of th3e time where he participated in things that either were or led to actual crimes.
Expect a lot more focus of federal enforcement on political opponents or groups who are trying to push back against autocracy and racism, instead of keeping focus on right-wing terrorism and how many recruits right-wing terrorists have or gain from people involved in enforcing the law.
The demands of the administration to try and erase people includes demands that specific words must be used, not only on forms, but in conversation or in communication with others. (The 404 media folks are on target about how all that railing about "politically correct" language was really about how they weren't allowed to use the language they wanted to and they couldn't control what language others were allowed to use.)
Other organizations have decided they want to accelerate terror and declare that some people are guilty of offenses that should get them fired from federal bureaucracies, because they are somehow connected to processes that hire the most qualified people for their open positions and make their work accessible for employees and consumers.
The current administrator demands that the rules regarding investigation and prosecution of sexual assault be tightened back to his previous demands, so as to make sure to inflict maximum trauma on those who survive and want to try and hold their attackers accountable.
The current House of Representatives seeks to strategically disenfranchise married women and non-white people by requiring in-person voter registration and updating, as well as providing documentation as proof of citizenship that many do not have or do not have the means to easily obtain.
The current administration has demanded that trans people be removed from the Stonewall National Monument, the place where two trans women started a riot against police trying to make them disappear. The community reacted strongly to this and other attempts at erasure from history and the National Parks Service.
The continued march to erase queer people from the government expands into data sets and demands for retractions or revisions to papers that contain terms that administration refuses to acknowledge, which presumably should be punished with "No, fuck you, we use science here," but may not be, because, as we see below…
An unelected, uncleared man is routinely being given or seizing access to sensitive systems that contain payment data, data that could be easily used to commit identity fraud, and federal worker and applicant data. Assisting him in this matter are several inexperienced engineers with similar political leanings and origins given immense power and access, several of which have the hubris and foolishness to push untested changes to production and who are probably writing backdoors in that will give them control and prevent transparency. We're talking people with juvenile screen names who routinely promote open white supremacists and misogynists, say that Germany should no longer feel "guilt" about having had a regime that murdered millions because of who they were, perform edgelord jokes about the Nazi salutes they gave on the inauguration day (the link contains a picture of such a salute as its primary image), state openly and unreservedly that the only people who could possibly competently run the world are cisgender white men,
That same unelected, uncleared man is demanding that certain agencies be shut down after they refused him access to their classified and sensitive materials, at which point the administrator demanded that those who were protecting the data from an enelected, uncleared man be placed on administrative leave for daring to refuse. As one might suspect, giving an unelected, uncleared man and his lackeys full access to sensitive systems is a massive security risk. Because messing with things like payment systems is all bad side and no good side, even if the people doing it think they can get something to use as a lever against their opponents. And the more the travesty stands, or worse, if it is endorsed by a high court, the more likely we are all going to be subject to the whims of the unelected, uncleared, unaccountable man and his fools who have basically no clue what kind of stuff they're messing with. (They're not even good at standing up their own websites and keeping them secured.)
The unelected man has taken aim at an organization that has kept consumers happy and gone after those that were cheating them out of their money or offering them worthless or worse contracts and loans. It's been a solid and effective piece of the governmental apparatus, but it's also been a thorn in the side of the billionaire class, and therefore they are hoping it gets destroyed by the unelected, uncleared man.
And, of course, they're also doing it to increase their own grift, as federal agencies are forced into providing updates only over the social media platform that the unelected, uncleared man owns. And giving over the correspondents' space in the Pentagon to propaganda-friendly entities like OANN, Brietbart, and the New York Post, instead of NBC News, NPR, and the New York Times. Even though some of the ones in the second column are also sometimes very propaganda-friendly with this administration. People in charge of private prisons ar salivating the the possibility that the government will arrest sufficient people accused of being undocumented that they can overcharge the public purse for the "privilege" of housing them.
They're also hoping that the federal civil service will simply resign en masse so they can be replaced by loyalists with no experience nor ability to make "the government" work.
The attempts at completely freezing out and dismantling the agency primarily responsible for U.S. foreign aid has already created significant problems for U.S. goodwill and for important programs happening all over the world. Even if most of their actions demanding that programs not be given what's been appropriated for them by Congress are illegal, these are folks whose respect for the law extends only as far as it allows them to do what they want.
These are also people who think it's a good idea to "clear out" the Gaza strip and either forcibly relocate or kill the current residents and believe they should be acquiring the Panama Canal Zone, Canada, and Greenland to themselves (and that the residents of those places will welcome them with open arms and want to be part of the Untied States), and are perfectly fine with abandoning Europe to whatever power would like to sweep in and conquer them.
This kind of takeover would certainly make you wonder whether it's the elected official or the unelected, uncleared, man who is the actual person in charge of the government of the United States.
The administrator took personal revenge against an entity that has routinely exposed him as a criminal and doggedly attempted to hold him accountable for his crimes by firing the Archivist of the United States.
Continuing in pettiness, the administrator is alleged to have given a former Coast Guard Commandant three hours notice to vacate her house, after dismissing her from the position because she practiced hiring the best available people for that branch of service, instead of hiring only unqualified white men.
The Associated Press has been banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One because they refuse to change the name of the body of water off the coasts of Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Mexico to a jingoistic designation in their reporting. Petty revenge after petty actions.
Threats to cut staff and personal animus against the head of the Federal Aviation Administration aren't necessarily responsible for the spate of airline incidents and crashes, but they certainly haven't helped keep the airways safer.
The entire tariff debacle shows how little everyone involved in moving it forward understands about what tariffs are or how they work.
The party and the administrator are also interested in making sure that nobody gets lead out of their water and that toxic substances aren't properly regulated.
The current Health and Human Services Secretary wants the government to start creating farms for people that would help them get "cured" of their "addictions" to substances like mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, and ADHD and autism assistance medications. The piece notes his claims are not rooted anywhere in science, but as one notes with so many other people being confirmed to cabinet and other positions by a complicit Republican party, they don't want people who follow science and have expertise in their field in these positions, they want people who will destroy the government in pursuit of their own pet, unscientific, beliefs.
As has been the case for many administrators from his party, the administrator put a theocrat in charge of a part of the government with a charge to ensure that Christian theocracy is an official government position and will have government resources devoted to it. Regardless of what the Constitution says about such things, because they are certain about what the Being Represented by the Tetragrammaton wants and they know better than the people who wrote the founding documents about what kind of state religion they wanted in their country.
A viral photograph claims to be a picture of the State Department of the United States with the flag flying upside down, what is usually considered a sign of extreme distress. That would certainly reflect the mood of the United States at this point in time. I find it interesting that Newsweek's sampling of people on Elon Musk's platform was mostly people going "Nah. We're happy that the leopards are coming!" with the implication that they believe the leopards would never eat their faces. Even though the leopards probably already are, or will be soon.
Many people are rediscovering the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual, and at least some will no doubt take it to heart as a useful tool to obstruct things that are not going in the direction they want them to.
Attempting to do anything structural in an authoritarian environment is very difficult, because there isn't enough solid anything to build a structure on much of the time. If you want an Orwell component, it's the constant shifting back and forth between Eurasia and Eastasia as the enemy and similar kinds of arbitrary movements that mean nobody actually believes there's a structure there nor even a foundation to build a structure on that won't get immediately collapsed or undermined.
The government has been purchasing data from commercial brokers that it would normally have to clear warrant requirements to obtain, and they argue that because the data is available for sale, they have no such need for warrant requirements, even as they use purchased data to easily re-identify people from what is supposedly anonymized data. The pocket computers and the advertising networks and all of that surveillance tech deployed commercially is producing data that is eventually funneled back to the government for their use. The article makes it sound like we should be shocked this is happening, but enough people who have been around surveillance or who understand what's been going on with ad tech already know that corporations and the government alike have already created detailed profiles of us so they can try to sell us things or track our movements to all kinds of places. Actual data privacy would require the government to regulate itself and corporations so that they cannot so easily spy on us, and the government dun wanna, and the corporations won't, because that might make them less profitable, somehow. And then some yutz with access they shouldn't have or access they stole will eventually figure out how to exfiltrate it, and then wide-scale identity theft gets to happen, especially once that data gets cross-referenced with things that can't be changed about a person. You know, the kind of thing that's probably pretty immanent, given how much the unelected, uncleared cowboys have been mucking about in systems they cannot possibly understand well enough to make constructive changes to.
The state of Texas, under the idea that people deserve some sort of choice about what kind of vaccinations they and their children receive, seems poised to have a significant number of the population unvaccinated against diseases that are already proven dangerous, communicable, and possibly deadly.
A piece that focuses on the activism of Ursula K. LeGuin and tries to make it fit into the Daoist concept of wei wu wei, using the prevalent water metaphor form Laozi. I don't think it succeeds as well as it wants to, because it focuses on the multiple different types of activism that Le Guin undertook, rather than looking at the ways in which the activism gave way when it hit hard opposition and found its way around that hard opponent all the same. But it is nice to see people having a look and seeing how much got done at the local level while also at least gesturing at the national. Something that might be a bit more on the spot, and also uses a water metaphor, is the Procedure for Having to Behold, which is a thing about what you can do to keep yourself going as you continue to witness more and more information about what's atrocious. If you're trying to figure out how you make differences when it seems like everything that's happening at levels above yours are all negative, one of the things that works best for you is figuring out what works best for you, the person that you are, with what resources and connections you have at your disposal.
Sometimes that means operating a surgical clinic out of a barn in western Washington State, long before official permissions and offices began to accept that trans care was a thing.
Often it means recognizing that you're in a space where they might let the opposition exist for show purposes without ever giving them the opportunity to unseat the authoritarians from power.
In technology, A drone operator pleaded guilty to unsafe operation when the drone he was flying over the Palisades fire struck and damaged a water bomber plane fighting the fire. The operator will pay back the repair costs for the plane, as well as other potential penalty for having flown the drone in airspace where it wasn't allowed.
Anna e só on systems thinking and how sometimes the correct question to answer is not "how do we make this experience the best?" but instead "why have we allowed this one thing to become so large it's causing problems?" The context is FOSDEM, but it's also generalizable to all kinds of things that have become far too large for their own health and safety.
Despite seeing the amount of damage that people with backdoor access can do, the government of the United Kingdom demanded to have backdoor access to Apple cloud users' data. Because the government apparently has no faith in the ability of their own investigators to find things correctly and through legal processes, I guess.
A situation where it is easier and cheaper by two orders of magnitude to buy a domain name and redirect than fix a typo and reprint all the wrong fliers.
Facebook engaged in widespread copyright violation by torrenting over 80 terabytes of books so they could train their LLM. Which is to say, they took some of our finest writing and used it to create something that produces sub-par writing. And thus you see the difference between something like Anna's Archive, getting the book thrown at them for hosting metadata and possible links to things, and Facebook, which is trying very hard to say that nobody was hurt by their piracy, because they used it for machine learning instead of trying to make works more available.
CAPTCHAs, or at least reCAPTCHA, is now much less a security measure (it can be defeated by bots easily) and more a method of making money for Google by generating tracking data for them.
The low-poly joke of a Tesla truck is also a high danger joke, as on average, the likelihood of dying in a fire-related fatality is 17 times more likely than even the infamous Ford Pinto.
Last out for tonight, a library of craft patterns and craft pattern publications in the public domain.
And Soemone finally pushing back against the idea that technology and screens are all causing our brains to rot and become mush. Convenient scapegoats are convenient, but there's at least some research out there that's not taking the idea as a given and trying to fit their data to it.
Which I pair with the suggestion made in the 1950s that philosophy as it is studied in most Western nations relies on the bachelorhood of many of its greats, and that reliance is a weakness woven into the structure of those philosophical traditions.
(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.)
no subject
Date: 2025-02-16 10:06 am (UTC)I'm a quarter Romani.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-16 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 02:03 am (UTC)I hope it happens.
Over their dead bodies.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 02:53 am (UTC)And yes, women will fight their own disenfranchisement very hard.
no subject
Date: 2025-02-17 03:16 am (UTC)They can die in their bunkers.