Through the shortest of the months - Late February 02025

[silveradept]

Let's begin with an interesting chain of posts. First, Jude Doyle on the ways that well-meaning feminism can result in transphobia, if that feminism wants to compress gender into "those doing the oppressing" and "those being oppressed" and does not recognize that trans men are still men, and still being oppressed. Trans men do not fit well into that conception, or any other conception that believes transitioning into manhood accords you with all the privileges you would have had if you had been assigned, raised, and socialized as a cisgender man. sqbr tries to un-flatten some of Jude's reductions, especially in relationship to non-binary people, and provides examples that will reinforce the point of "reduction of people to The Oppressed and The Oppressor is a foolish idea." as well as pointing out some of the ways that zero-sum thinking also infects people who want to reduce the fight to Oppressed and Oppressor. liv then looks at the ways that good intentions can still create bad results, and that there's still a tendency to see trans men as privileged men first and trans men second, while also looping in kiya talking about the specific cultural context of being of high school age in the United States in the 1990s, and the way that HIV/AIDS and the still very enforced closet on people created a disconnection of scared children who didn't have all that many ways to find their community. (That era specifically had a commercial where a couple had unprotected sex, and then there was fretting about all the possible consequences of that, like pregnancy, and AIDS, before the characters explicitly realized they were characters in a commercial, and therefore they didn't have to worry about it, unlike you, the viewer.) HIV/AIDS had advanced past being Gay-Related Immune Disorder, but it was still largely considered a disease of gay men, and that if women contracted it, it was because her man was clearly having sex with other men, regardless of whether he told her about them or not. And so, in the way of so many things, the focus was about what men were doing with each other, and what men were doing with women, and the misguided beliefs about how one contracted HIV/AIDS and the promiscuity and sexual voraciousness of gay men trying to seduce the straights (and or the children.) There's a great amount of rhyme in the ways that cis people relate to trans people and the ways that straight people related to gay people during the period before most people found out they already knew someone who was gay and that we all knew a lot more about how HIV/AIDS was transmitted. (And then came the antiretrovirals that helped take HIV/AIDS away from a painful death sentence and instead into a condition that needed specific kinds of management.)

If you have the capacity to distribute them, there are some shortly-expiring COVID tests that you can order from the National Stockpile until they run out or are destroyed by a capricious administration.

Five years into the declaration of SARS-CoV-2 as a public health emergency, and some time after governments have decided to ignore it as a serious threat, it's still out there, killing people, disabling them, and otherwise still retaining its status as a public health emergency.

Clarivate, owners of the ProQuest series of books and databases, the Web of Science, and several other corpuses of databases, books, and periodicals, has decided to go all in for artificial silliness and rent-seeking behavior, and will be removing any options to purchase their resources for a one-time fee in favor of a perpetual subscription model. I'd like to believe that many libraries will decide they can do without those things as a way of trying to force Clarivate back into behaving sensibly, but given that they're part of an oligopoly in research databases and resource access, I doubt anything will happen except Clarivate getting richer off all the new rents that they're getting.

Michelle Tractenberg, known for several different roles, including a stint in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has died at 39 years of age. That hurts when there are younger actors who die. And then Gene Hackman and his wife were both found dead, him 95 years of age.

The transactional nature of the current administration shows itself again in an extortion deal that would give the United States 50% of Ukraine's rare earth minerals in exchange for some amount of United States troops and materiel deployed to Ukraine. The President of Ukraine declined the proposal initially. And we presume this "deal" is not to keep Ukraine's previous boundaries, but that Ukraine will have to both give up the territory already taken, and then give up minerals for a paper guarantee that more territory won't be taken.

Someone ginned up a video believing they could describe the golden idol future of the Gaza Strip, once all the people who live there are removed, of course, and the place redeveloped into beachfront hotels and a casino-like atmosphere. These are not serious people, even though they're in charge of serious things.

This group of incompetents have decided that people who are excellent at their job and have the reviews to prove it must be fired for poor performance at their jobs. Which is, of course, the fig leaf being applied here for ideological firing and for trying to remove people who are good at their jobs so they can be replaced by people who are loyal, but otherwise incompetent. The firings are by form letter, a foregone conclusion that does not bend in the face of reality, because if it acknowledged reality, the construction would fall apart in a gentle breeze. After having fired several skilled workers who handle the nuclear arsenal of the United States, reality bit back hard and they're now scrambling to contact those who were fired with offers to rescind the firing. But they can't find them, because they presumably didn't keep contact information for the people they were firing once they were fired, just in case they needed to re-hire them. Or they were told to re-hire them by a court. Given how little faith they now have in their continued employment, I'll bet many of them will go on to other places in the world that are more secure and less having to deal with caprice and fools.

They tried being dick bosses again, this time with a demand that everyone justify their existence in bullet point form, but other elements of the government either told their workers to ignore the unelected fool, or said with certainty that everything said there would be read by hostile foreign powers. And because the threat didn't have any actual force behind it, it only makes the unelected fools look like dick bosses without any power when they have to back down from enforcing their threats. Even more so when it became clear that the dick bosses intended to use an LLM to decide who was going to keep their job and who was going to be fired, and they were probably going to treat the error-ridden output as infallible "AI" making decisions.

Their incompetence continues to be shown, not only in their website not being very secure, but also in posting classified data that was marked as not suitable for foreign entities and governments about the names and salaries of those who maintain spy satellites. Well, at this point, it's quite possibly malice instead of incompetence, but we're well into the territory where the two of them are twins and not siblings. So it's still a good idea to believe that your government data has been breached and disclosed, whether to specific entities, or in a data leak that will eventually be discovered.

The unelected, uncleared people are demanding access to services that allow the government to send text messages to people, presumably so they can steal the data within and then use the service for partisan political purposes.

Indiscriminate firing has lead to principled people resigning and a hunting buddy of the administrator's son being put in charge of safety at the Food and Drug Administration. Which definitely means another person with no competence is trying to run something they have no business being near.

Members of the United States Digital Service, which is what was apparently the agency that was then renamed into the memecoin item, have resigned their positions to protest the destruction being wrought in their name.

Fools who did not have their child take the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination have now lost a child, and there are several hundred more infected with what was supposed to have been a defeated disease in Texas, with the likelihood of it spreading. Some things are learned in blood, in death, and in disability. These things are supposed to be high enough costs that the society as a whole doesn't forget what killed them so effectively. But it seems our willingness to live without deadly and disabling diseases is not nearly as strong as the belief that "nobody is allowed to tell me what to do."


And if you're interested in learning about how this has happened, or want transparency from the government in these matters, expect to find out that the people who are responsible for finding and getting you those records in a timely manner have been fired and are not likely to have people in that position for a while. So instead you'll have to go at it yourself to figure out how the fools are funded and what kinds of justifications are being made to insist that those fools are not subject to the transparency requirements that their funding sources and their assumed powers would demand.

There's also more than enough malice to go around. Be on your guard against claims that Social Security is somehow rife with fraud, as there are plenty of men who would rather close that program and give its assets to those who are already beyond wealthy. Those same people also want to remove the social safety net of Medicare and Medicaid to enrich the rich even further. Because when they claim there's "waste, fraud, and abuse," what they mean is that there's someone who is poor receiving something that will help them live a better life instead of dying or being required to surrender themselves in slavery and serfdom for the bare minimum of existence.

At least one prominent U.S. actor has found her passport renewed with a gender marker that is completely incorrect for her, but is in accordance with the executive order that demands that your gender assigned at birth be your gender on all government documents. What gives a very leopards-eating-faces feel to is that the person so misgendered by their documentation said "I'll believe it when I see it." and was then surprised to see it happen, having thought "I just didn't think it was actually going to happen." A different one of my podcasts was talking about how more than a few people who voted for this are now expressing buyer's remorse about it, and who thought the rhetoric was only rhetoric and wouldn't actually turn into what is happening now. Some of them probably are genuinely horrified that the warnings delivered have turned out to be exactly true, and those people are hopefully now doing their best to defeat and slow down what has been set into motion. Some, I suspect, however, are only upset because they believed this administration would do exactly as it claimed, but would only do it to Them, and not to Us, and they are learning that hubris is the belief that the leopard, once loosed, won't eat your face as well as all the ones you want them to.

That said, when there are demands to erase an entire class of people from being mentioned, ever, you learn in a hurry who's on your side. Several places decided to remove mention of transgender people from their websites without being required to do so, including places like NCMEC and RAINN, who should damn well know better about such things, especially when trans children who are kicked out of their homes for that reason are more vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation, and that trans people are more likely to be sexually assaulted than cis people.

The governor of Maine, for example, has no intention of erasing trans athletes from sport, even with a direct threat from the administrator to cut off all federal funding to the state. The State Department, who handles immigration, passports, and other such things, seems to think that a person's sex at birth is something that must be disclosed, and that consular officials are allowed to deny someone entry to the United States if they even suspect someone might be transgender. And the state of Iowa is poised to deny that trans people deserve protection from discrimination that cis people will continue to have.

Two men who have been charged with making a criminal group and human trafficking have left the country they were being held in and forbidden to leave, showing up in Florida, likely because the current administrator wanted them to be able to escape accountability in the same way that he has repeatedly escaped accountability. We will see whether they go back to the country that has charged them and continue with the court proceedings, or whether, having left, they will enjoy the protection of men who are interested in flouting the laws.

If accountability is sought on these matters, including accountability that would rely on a person being an employee or their group an agency, expect as much avoidance, dodging, finger-pointing, denial, and lies, just to make sure that they can get all the power with none of the possible pieces of accountability, even when it's obvious who the person in charge is. One of the things these people are doing is trying to figure out how big a lie we will accept, whether in our common parlance or in court filings. Some courts have shown a complete lack of tolerance for falsehoods and attempts to avoid consequences, but others will probably happily go along with it.

Ultimately, the administrator believes he is the law, and there are none who can stop, delay, defeat, or otherwise prevent him from achieving this. (The end of this piece also talks about some of the issues that have brought this situation to pass, most of them depressing for the prospects of democracy all over the world if they cannot be wrangled.) In contrast, those who believe they are solely the law do not have good ends, because so much of what gives them power or takes it away from them does not depend on their actions at all.

In the face of all these things, remember that acts of compassion, community, and thinking and taking care of others are still important and beneficial. And that those who can expand the space of acceptable presentation and who can avoid contributing even more to certain cultures have the power to do so. It is not a question of perfection or nothing, it is a question of doing what is within your ability and power. Much of which does not have to be protesting or voting. Beyond the work, there is also room to experience joy, which, conveniently, also makes experiencing and giving joy to others a useful form of fighting back against those who want to take it from you.

Especially if you are seeing something like the Washington Post refusing to run an ad about the unelected, uncleared man and how he acts as if he's been elected to power. The ad buy would have been 115,000 USD in the Post's bank, but after seeing the ads, the Post apparently decided they didn't want the wrap ads, even though they said they'd take the inside ad. So we can see that the Washington Post, like so many other outlets, is not fully vested in reporting and taking advertising that is critical of the current administration and their figurehead in the White House.

A crony of the administration that wants to ban marriage between consenting adults first had one of the opposition take a front-row seat to his presser, then when the anti-marriage Republican fled, the Democratic representative then answered questions. Certainly says something about the courage of the Republican's convictions, doesn't it? How many others of them are only doing this for the cameras and will flee when confronted? An awful lot of them, it seems, as Republicans have been not holding town halls or constituent meetings because they keep getting told not to do the things they're doing and that those things will hurt their constituents if they keep doing them. Of course, they're hoping that if you complain to them, the brownshirts or similar non-police militia will simply remove you from the place and intimidate others into silence. Even if later on, they drop the charges against the person taken by the brownshirts and revoke their business license. If you protest the inclusion of a shibboleth in the fascist public library space, they don't care what status you may have accrued to yourself. (Mind, this was not someone for whom the police felt comfortable unleashing their full destructive force upon.)

These are the clowns, however, who for all their bluster about being for life and doing things for children, can't even get a bill passed to make sure that children in school are fed, regardless of whether they have the means to pay for it.

A new painkiller drug has appeared, working as a sodium channel blocker, and is a non-opioid drug, so apparently the risk for addiction is not there. Although the thing that's there also says there's no proven benefit yet for chronic pain, which is no good, but it seems like it will be very useful for post-surgery pain.

A suggestion that walking after some time spent healing will be helpful for fractured legs and ankles, assuming the amount of walking and weight put on the healing item is correct. So best practice might move in the direction of having you up and about after a little while, instead of a long set of bed rest.

In technology, Elon Musk's platform is now blocking links to the Signal encrypted messaging service. In other eras, this might be seen as petty anticompetitiveness, but in this case, it most likely is because he doesn't want to have anyone leave his platform for one that is more secure and has no algorithm sending them ads and selling their data.

Hewlett-Packard rescinded an earlier decision to impose an artificial 15-minute mandatory wait for telephone customer support in certain regions of Europe, after it was reported on and the people who were responsible for the decision realized what kinds of fools they would be. That said, as a company, HP hasn't done much of anything to make you want to use or purchase their products, if you can avoid it.

Places that have sold stalkerware and spyware turn out to have poor security, such that the details of their customers and victims can apparently be easily obtained. So yet another data breah, but this time it happens because someone else installed a spying app on your phone, whether to stalk or because they believe they need that kind of control and spying on their employees. This feels like the need to punish is both for the people providing the stalkerware, and also the people who bought and installed it on another phone without permission. And that second punishment should apply to companies that silently install things on people's phones as well.

The government of the United Kingdom demanded that Apple install backdoors into their encryption services so that the government could spy and see if the encrypted data contained criminal things. In response, Apple disabled the service that would have provided excellent encryption of data for UK customers and spoke very publicly about the secret request.

Last for tonight, a method to abuse Unicode in such a way that any given code point could be accompanied by variation selectors being used to generate bytes of data that will not be rendered, but can be decoded if you know to look for the additional information accompanying the Unicode code point and can translate that into the appropriate bytes/characters. The additional data generally accompanies the code point it is attached to, so theoretically, yes, this is steganography in Unicode, in that most standards-compliant Unicode renderers will not render the additional data along with the selected code point.

And the inspection paradox, where looking at things from specific perspectives biases the data away from a more "objective" value, because the experience of a person in the situation tends to shape how they observe it.

(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.)

Comments

[thewayne]

I don't think we subscribe to ProQuest, the name doesn't ring a bell. It is interesting, though, that every community college in our university has different subscriptions, and because of licensing, we're restricted to our own campuses.

[silveradept]

That sounds like a large IT nightmare to manage.

[thewayne]

Each library manages its own subscriptions and access lists.

[pangolin20]

The inspection paradox was an interesting read; thanks for sharing!

[silveradept]

Glad you found it useful, I got it from sonia.

[conuly]

It's totally brain-breaking.