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silveradeptLet's begin with a useful guide by bladespark, The Hopless Autist's Guide To Aproaching People In Public, which focuses less on the conversation topics and how to talk to others, and more on the more potentially terrifying part of how to find someone who might be interested in making small talk or conversation. Handy, of course, for more than just autists trying to find people to talk to.
A game about trust and variations on the Prisoner's Dilemma, to show us how the environment and the rules of the situation we are in influence what kind of behavior will be optimal, as a way of explaining why truces break out among people who are nominally completely at war with each other, and why people who are supposedly at peace sometimes break out in vicious fighting.
A site looking to collect and recommend alternatives to those companies and persons that have aligned themselves with retrograde forces.
Mr. James Harrison, who made a habit of donating plasma every two weeks from age 18 to age 81, and whose plasma was used to create treatments to prevent a mother's immune system from attacking their developing fetus, saving the lives of more than 2.4 million babies.
The Moms for Liberty-affiliated entity called BookLooks is shutting down, for reasons that are not yet unclear, so it is possible that the cherry-picking, proof-texting site whose purpose was to get as many books banned as possible will reappear in some new or more horrible context, but for the moment, it's worth celebrating that those who were dedicated to hateful ends will no longer be doing that particular piece of work. Now is also a good time to save the receipts of what the site did and what it was responsible for.
Eric Carle drew a book that had simplified drawings of naked people in it, and therefore several people have, over time, tried to get the book banned because it contained nudity. Much like other books that also do the same, even though the nudity is very clearly nonsexual.
Another of the worldwide consequences of the continued defiance of the rule of law and the will of the Congress: a trans care clinic in India shuttering from lack of USAID funds. And several more: the programs that have bee working on eradicating deadly and virulent diseases all around the world have had their funding destroyed, so more drug-resistant variations can evolve from all of the aborted treatments or the discontinued vaccination programs. You know, the kind of stuff that will kill children worldwide. But because it's outside the U.S., and it's money that isn't being diverted to this administration and its campaign donors, they don't care, even though the consequences of these actions will more than happily arrive on U.S. shores and spread, through people they believe wouldn't possibly bring such things in. They're not conducting detailed reviews because they don't believe they'll ever have to justify it to anyone or that they can be compelled to do something other than what they want to do, regardless of law, precedent, or any other nominal check.
The unelected campaign donor believes that he can find waste and fraud by insisting that nobody can send more than a dollar, and then declaring that the people who come to him and his unelected subordinates must be part of waste and fraud, because obviously everyone can function with no budget. Despite the systems in place to prevent such and to make it so that things like scientific labs can continue to get their supplies and run their experiments on time, even if there are funding worries up in the air.
There's yet more dismantling and deprotecting this administration wants to do, because the man who was not properly vetted to be Secretary of Defense has ordered that the Cyber Command of the United States no longer engage in either defense or offense against the Russian Federation. This seems like something that would qualify under unlawful orders and gets ignored and the consequences thereof sorted out later, but one never knows.
The administrators of the United States disrespected their offices and the country in the way they treated the President of Ukraine and displayed their boot-licking fealty to the dictator of the Russian Federation. This in light of also trying to lift sanctions against the Russian Federation over the Ukraine invasion and other such hostile acts.
The unqualified man claiming to be Secretary of Defense fired the only woman admiral in the navy, in a clear sign that women aren't welcome, and not too far after the Coast Guard chief was also ousted. Someone is clearly unhappy that women have been allowed to exert military command over men and is doing his very best to make sure that never happens again.
Showing how much they actually care about the economy, the current administration is still trying to go forward with import taxes and duties on goods produced in Canada, Mexico, and China, raising prices for the consumer without any useful benefit.
The governor of the state of Texas and the unelected campaign financier both celebrated the firing of a civil servant who refused a directive to remove gender identity pronouns from his e-mail signature block. Which, I think, was one of the things that several people thought would be a firable offense in the other direction, and an example of too much liberalism, that people would be disciplined or terminated for not including gender identity pronouns everywhere. Which did not happen. Instead, now we have at least one person fired for having information about how to properly address them available to others. Sorry for the convenience.
Moms for Liberty, the transphobic book-banning group, are collaborating with the Education Department to create a snitch portal to report teachers that are doing something other than teaching their view of the world or who might suggest that white people are not the unquestioned rulers of the world and that there are only men and women and everyone else doesn't exist. Beyond that, the Education Department declared that anyone seeking forgiveness of their student loans through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program had better not have had any time where they helped any trans people, or they're permanently ineligible for PSLF. (Not that all that many people successfully manage to navigate it - it requires ten years of continuous employment in eligible spaces, plus you still have to have been making at least some amount of payments on your student loans, even before this additional chasm has been opened.)
The state of Maine has had federal agencies launch "investigations" that come to predetermined conclusions about their Title IX obligations in athletics, with threats and promises to withhold funds and sue the state if they continue, in accordance with state law, to allow transgender athletes to compete in their correct sporting divisions. This is over two girls, to be clear, that all of this federal opprobrium, and state legislative ruckus, is about. The intent is certainly clear - sacrifice the girls and force them back into the closet, or to compete in an incorrect division, and all will be well. Keep supporting the girls, and we'll enact a collective punishment against you. This is always the threat.
The state of Montana has passed a bill that specifically outlaws being a trans person by declaring that all trans people are guilty of indecent exposure if they are visibly trans. The prosecution is required to prove that there was an intent to "abuse, harass, violate the dignity of, or degrade another" if the person exposing themselves is a cis person, but the intent requirements are removed if the person is visibly trans, presumably because the legislators of Montana believe that being visibly trans implies that intent. Representative Zooey Zephyr, who has been repeatedly targeted for being trans and a member of the legislature, had properly caustic words for the bill and the continued efforts in the state of Montana to criminalize the existence of trans people.
The Department of Homeland Security has removed guidance that forbade agents from surveilling people based on their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity, continuing in the vein that this administration wants to try and criminalize or make as many people afraid of the state making an example of them. Or to invoke the stochastic terrorists against them because of who they are, or what someone perceives them to be. Because, after all, the point is not whether you are, but only whether you are perceived to be the thing that is to be scrutinized or made illegal, and the perception is enough to invoke the potential violence of the State. Especially in this example, because the person who had the State called on her was Black, and we already know that Black girls and women get accused of being too masculine, too manly, because they don't fit the physical or behavioral expectations of white men who want demure slave-girls.
At least one judge has blocked the enforcement of the anti-trans executive order that blanket-banned gender-affirming care for under-19s, which is good, at the very least, that it provides some cover for places to provide that care, assuming they weren't looking for the excuse to get rid of it in the first place.
The current administrator intends to use the power of the government to classify criticism of the unelected campaign donor and popular actions to reduce the wealth of that donor as domestic terrorism, rather than protected speech against a private corporation and its leadership.
After Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested and detained a person with a permanent resident card and a student visa, for being vocally pro-Palestine at a United States university, at least one Representative took the agency and the administration to task and explained to the rest of us what kind of precedent it sets to say that someone here legally has no free speech rights. This attempted power grab will, of course, be directed at people with brown or black skin, on the assumption that anyone who isn't white must be an immigrant and is therefore deportable, regardless of their citizenship or residency status. This, too, is always the threat: sacrifice the people who speak uncomfortable truths or who challenge the power of white people, or we will enact collective punishment against you. This is a test to see whether or not these people can get away with disappearing their critics for political reasons, without proper procedure or any criminal charge, and whether it will be accepted or not cared about by those who could stop lawless action such as this. (Because the collective punishment in this case is the withholding of funding for the university on the bogus charge that is hasn't taken sufficient action to combat antisemitism on the campus, where "antisemitism" means "allows someone who believes the Palestinians deserve a place to be and that Israel is acting in the wrong to exist on the campus."
Some of the people who are talking about Palestine, and what "never again" means, have significant experience from which they speak, not that anyone with the power to stop the conflict seems willing to listen to any of them.
(a German tourist crossing from Mexico was held indefinitely because of the belief that the tourist planned to work in the United States in violation of the visa she had obtained. At least, that's the stated reason in the article. There are no pictures of the person who was detained, but there's very good odds that they fit the profile of "brown-skinned person crossing from Mexico," and were thus detained and accused of whatever could be trumped up against them.)
The United States Department of Agriculture has decided to forego programs that help United States farmers provide food for their local schools and food banks at competitive prices, in a declaration that feeding children and supporting farmers "no longer effectuate the goals of the agency." As one might expect, such a declaration is code for "an unelected campaign donor and/or his minions, with the support of the Administrator and his party, have decided that they want this money, that helped people make a living and helped children eat, for themselves and their rich buddies." Plutocratic looting, with specific intentions of ensuring the poor and the helpless receive nothing, and hoping that they'll blame "government" instead of the plutocrats.
The Attorney General of the United States says the Department of Justice is not the lawyers for the laws of the country, but the lawyers for the personal issues and beliefs of the administrator currently in charge. So expect the people who are there to at least half-heartedly investigate things they have no business treating credibly, and threatening people they have no business trying to do anything to. Beyond that, it's harder now for bad cops to be rooted out and for others to be warned about them when they move from one place to another, since the background check database on them has been turned off. Another one of those things that will allow more brutalization and racism from police officers, and an easier way of letting them slip away and hurt others when the pressure gets too great where they are.
The unelected campaign donor went on a right-wing podcast and proved he has no idea how the Social Security program works, not that it will stop him from trying to take that money and give it to himself and his friends, and repeated debunked and disproven claims that there is widespread Social Security fraud. He's certainly a dream person for those who believe that government needs to be made small enough to drown in a bathtub, and then to proceed to do the drowning, even as everyone else recognizes in a hurry that the "government" thing they're always railing against includes many things they find beneficial or useful.
The administration is also trying to make sure that people who use shell corporations to launder money and hide their assets can do so without investigation or worry that they'll be found out, and that the government is no longer interested in enforcing the rules against U.S. persons bribing foreign officials to help their own businesses. Oh, and also, they're not interested in trying to fight foreign nationals bribing and lobbying U.S. government officials, either, nor will they try to seize the assets of those already determined to be doing so, and especially not anybody who operates in the Russian Federation or with their blessing.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development believes that it missed out on the last bubble and is considering accepting and using blockchain technology, and possibly cryptocurrency. As is noted in the article, HUD is not exactly the kind of people you want to show they did not learn any lessons from the major economic crash that involved speculation and a housing bubble. The push to use blockchain technology seems to be at the behest of people who were wowed by it in financial markets, and people who stand to have their investments stay stable or grow if parts of the federal government adopt it. You know, the inside guys who will know when to run if it looks like the whole thing might blow up. It's a solution in search of a problem, with people standing to make a mint if and when they can force other people to use their solution. You know, snake oil. This administration is certainly doing what it can to make sure that snake oil hucksters don't get prosecuted for it, especially those snake oil hucksters that made money for the administration.
Remember that several people who are supposed to be accountable to the people that elected them (and the people that didn't) have been doing their best to avoid giving their public an opportunity to hold them to account, and therefore, you may need to be more creative in your endeavours to do so.
Perhaps most tellingly so far about what the aims, goals, and ideals are of the people determined to destroy the government and loot the treasury for their own purposes, the unelected campaign donor said to a right-wing podcaster that his goal was to save "western civilization" from the dread scourge of "empathy". (Among other things, like a belief that there will be millions of noncitizens imported to vote in federal elections so that Democrats will win power.) Apparently, having care and concern for others is being weaponized against white people, and the only way for white people to survive is to stop caring about others. Which he intends to assist by using the wrecking ball against anything that smacks of empathy or of care for other people. It is an intentional desire to remove anything that protects non-white, not-men, not-wealthy people from white men who want to rob them, enslave them, and segregate them, including trying to suborn the plain language of the Constitution about who is a citizen.
The person who made a Reagan biopic believes very firmly that something other than the merit of his film prevented him from being nominated or winning Academy Awards for the picture. According to these people, remember, if anyone other than a white man succeeds, it was because of something other than merit, so make sure that you properly explain to the mediocre white men in your life that their failures are due entirely to their own lack of merit, and not because of whatever fantasy they have in their head about what was, is, or will be.
But if you object to them, what they're doing, or the principles behind it, they'll do their best to blame you and make it seem like you are somehow at fault or were trying to scam them into collecting a paycheck without doing any work.
A measles outbreak is now currently in several adjacent states, although it's not clear yet that the cases have spread from the originating state to the others in a direct manner. This is one of those frustrating things, because the people who are being infected are often children whose parents have not engaged in the available vaccination programs, and measles is, to put it mildly, a mean son of a bitch to get sick with. While the states are busily trying to get their people vaccinated to stop the spread, the current Health and Human Services Secretary believes there must be a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and will demand that the CDC keep studying the link until something plausible can be found to prove the already-determined conclusion.
In other matters of public health, the meeting to determine which flu strains to target in this year's vaccination efforts didn't happen at the usual time and the indiscriminate purge of everything from the previous administration includes now being in favor of people getting lead poisoning from water pipes.
If it seems like it's impossible to beat them, remember that the KKK seemed impossible, too, and they got both beat and ridiculed, and so have so many other fascists and fascist wannabees. It is going to suck, but history says the fascists always lose.
That's a lot of stuff. Remember that for as much as they're thrashing about and hurting people, they're also doing things like trying to gin up interest in finally releasing the "real" Epstein files, because some conspiracy theories still live on. Of course, since there are no "real" files, it's just more fodder for the conspiracy theorists.
The rescuers and locals to Mount Etna are unhappy with the lack of preparation that tourists and others who want to take their pictures in the juxtaposition of snow and lava flow, in clothes and heels and other such things not suited for the weather…or the lava.
In a review of books by people promoting that more women should have children, a strong analysis of how the social structures want to make women who are married with children as the pinnacle and try to toss under the rug that married women with children have real desires that aren't just their spouses and children. (And how inadequate things are that would allow married women with children to have a greater participation in work life and social life.)
In the crafting of fiction, sometimes the daydream is for someone with disabilities to manage to do great things while still being disabled, sometimes the daydream is to have a body that no longer functions as disabled, but in both cases, the disability is not a thing to erase, but to incorporate.
On the use of "low art" and "low culture" references in the Locked Tomb series, and the way that readers often forget that low culture and low art becomes high culture and high art with the application of time and distance. Which we'd also add on to that the Calvin and Hobbes strip about the way that the painting is high art, the comic strip is low art, but the painting of the comic strip panel often makes the low art high. Shakespeare in his context is popular culture and art (and you can tell by the sheer amount of sex jokes, among other things), the Divine Comedy is a list of shout-outs in a religious context, starting, as one always does, with the diss track (and, consequently, the one that everyone remembers and reads is the diss track, because it's the interesting one.) We have excavated graffiti from long-gone peoples that are the equivalent of "Kilroy was here," "For a good time, call Jenny," and "Here's the spot where I banged your mom, and she enjoyed it." So what we think of as cringe memes now might very well be part of the high culture of a far-future world. And if you have someone like Jod, who still remembers those things in their context, it might be a way of keeping an anchor to the time before. (And also showing you how much of a dick he is.)
In technology, a privately-constructed spacecraft successfully delivered NASA science instruments to the surface of Luna, the first to do so.
On how you can make estimations of time when all the situations are the same as they were before, and how most projects are only close to what was before, and what's different will absolutely wreck all of your estimates because it will require learning and wrangling the new thing. Edge cases and corner cases probably take up the most amount of both coding and debugging time for any kind of project. Even when those things involve trips to the hardware store for tools you didn't know you needed, or needing to use tools to achieve certain ends.
After sports betting was legalized in the United States, gaming companies like FanDuel and Draft Kings have done their best to make gaming seem like a natural, masculine thing that can be done with each moment of a sports contest, and deny that they're doing anything at all to encourage addictive behaviors with gambling and gaming. And certainly not that they're trying to leverage the belief that people know more about sports and what will happen so as to make this seem less like betting on a chance effect and more like getting money from the "inevitable" that will happen from their knowledge.
Microsoft is removing Skype, one of the beginning Voice Over Internet Protocol services, after having it for fourteen years, this May. Skype users will be encouraged to use Microsoft Teams instead for their purposes. And this is what happens to all kinds of things - bought out, and eventually subsumed or replaced by the product that was their competitor for most/all of the time.
Survival tips for women in technological or technical fields, all of which are still prescient and important in this era, despite nearly six and a half years of supposed progress from when they were written. Because being a woman in a profession that wants to believe it's full of "alpha" men is difficult, and most of the people around you are doing their best to undermine, steal from, and otherwise drive out the women in their workplaces.
Hewlett-Packard released a firmware update for their printers that, in addition to making them incompatible with non-HP printer catridges, also made them incompatible with HP catridges, which is a fitting thing to have happened to a company that wants to try and make ink as expensive as possible and lock people into their own product as thoroughly as possible. It's still a good idea to get rid of HP printers as punishment for this ongoing stunt and to discourage others from adopting it.
Some DVDs of Warer Brothers films manufactured from 2006-2008 are already rotting to the point of unplayability. Warner Brothers is offering replacements for those films that they have that are still in print, and an equivalent for those that aren't. This definitely feels like the kind of thing where having a digital copy as well as a disc copy is a useful, so that if the worst happens, you can create another disc version of the thing. The difficulty in a lot of digital copies is that they're usually just the film, and not any special features that go along with it, and a lot of times, the discs are bought for the features more than the films. So, hopefully there's somewhere out there with a good copy of things, or a working disc image that you can use to create a new copy.
A person who crated a low-poly object that he believes was the height of cool is continuing to show he knew nothing about building vehicles, as some of them are now having adhesive failures on parts of the car that should not be held together only by adhesives.
The unelected campaign donor who is currently acting as though he has executive power has received a government contract to upgrade airspace management technology for the government. That should probably be called "self-dealing" or some other obvious indication of corruption and conflict of interest, but there aren't that many people who are interested in prosecuting it.
Nor are they interested in continuing investigation against the donor's company that wants to implant chips into brains.
In this and every era, consider the possibility of developing software that doesn't deliberately, intentionally, hurt people or exploit them. We are now well into the space where we see what the results of such software is, and it's frankly miserable. This was first written in the first go-round of the current administrator, about eight and a half years ago, and it still holds significant importance now.
Last for tonight, the fish doorbell is in season again. There's a camera at a particular point in time where spawning fish will be stopped on their journey. If you spot a fish, click the doorbell, and the keeper will open a channel for the fish to get through.
Additionally, take the shoulds out of your reading. And quite possibly also your listening, watching, playing, and other things. That which is supposed to be enjoyable often gets plagued by these shoulds, and that an make the enjoyable un-enjoyed.
(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.)
bladespark, The Hopless Autist's Guide To Aproaching People In Public, which focuses less on the conversation topics and how to talk to others, and more on the more potentially terrifying part of how to find someone who might be interested in making small talk or conversation. Handy, of course, for more than just autists trying to find people to talk to.A game about trust and variations on the Prisoner's Dilemma, to show us how the environment and the rules of the situation we are in influence what kind of behavior will be optimal, as a way of explaining why truces break out among people who are nominally completely at war with each other, and why people who are supposedly at peace sometimes break out in vicious fighting.
A site looking to collect and recommend alternatives to those companies and persons that have aligned themselves with retrograde forces.
Mr. James Harrison, who made a habit of donating plasma every two weeks from age 18 to age 81, and whose plasma was used to create treatments to prevent a mother's immune system from attacking their developing fetus, saving the lives of more than 2.4 million babies.
The Moms for Liberty-affiliated entity called BookLooks is shutting down, for reasons that are not yet unclear, so it is possible that the cherry-picking, proof-texting site whose purpose was to get as many books banned as possible will reappear in some new or more horrible context, but for the moment, it's worth celebrating that those who were dedicated to hateful ends will no longer be doing that particular piece of work. Now is also a good time to save the receipts of what the site did and what it was responsible for.
Eric Carle drew a book that had simplified drawings of naked people in it, and therefore several people have, over time, tried to get the book banned because it contained nudity. Much like other books that also do the same, even though the nudity is very clearly nonsexual.
Another of the worldwide consequences of the continued defiance of the rule of law and the will of the Congress: a trans care clinic in India shuttering from lack of USAID funds. And several more: the programs that have bee working on eradicating deadly and virulent diseases all around the world have had their funding destroyed, so more drug-resistant variations can evolve from all of the aborted treatments or the discontinued vaccination programs. You know, the kind of stuff that will kill children worldwide. But because it's outside the U.S., and it's money that isn't being diverted to this administration and its campaign donors, they don't care, even though the consequences of these actions will more than happily arrive on U.S. shores and spread, through people they believe wouldn't possibly bring such things in. They're not conducting detailed reviews because they don't believe they'll ever have to justify it to anyone or that they can be compelled to do something other than what they want to do, regardless of law, precedent, or any other nominal check.
The unelected campaign donor believes that he can find waste and fraud by insisting that nobody can send more than a dollar, and then declaring that the people who come to him and his unelected subordinates must be part of waste and fraud, because obviously everyone can function with no budget. Despite the systems in place to prevent such and to make it so that things like scientific labs can continue to get their supplies and run their experiments on time, even if there are funding worries up in the air.
There's yet more dismantling and deprotecting this administration wants to do, because the man who was not properly vetted to be Secretary of Defense has ordered that the Cyber Command of the United States no longer engage in either defense or offense against the Russian Federation. This seems like something that would qualify under unlawful orders and gets ignored and the consequences thereof sorted out later, but one never knows.
The administrators of the United States disrespected their offices and the country in the way they treated the President of Ukraine and displayed their boot-licking fealty to the dictator of the Russian Federation. This in light of also trying to lift sanctions against the Russian Federation over the Ukraine invasion and other such hostile acts.
The unqualified man claiming to be Secretary of Defense fired the only woman admiral in the navy, in a clear sign that women aren't welcome, and not too far after the Coast Guard chief was also ousted. Someone is clearly unhappy that women have been allowed to exert military command over men and is doing his very best to make sure that never happens again.
Showing how much they actually care about the economy, the current administration is still trying to go forward with import taxes and duties on goods produced in Canada, Mexico, and China, raising prices for the consumer without any useful benefit.
The governor of the state of Texas and the unelected campaign financier both celebrated the firing of a civil servant who refused a directive to remove gender identity pronouns from his e-mail signature block. Which, I think, was one of the things that several people thought would be a firable offense in the other direction, and an example of too much liberalism, that people would be disciplined or terminated for not including gender identity pronouns everywhere. Which did not happen. Instead, now we have at least one person fired for having information about how to properly address them available to others. Sorry for the convenience.
Moms for Liberty, the transphobic book-banning group, are collaborating with the Education Department to create a snitch portal to report teachers that are doing something other than teaching their view of the world or who might suggest that white people are not the unquestioned rulers of the world and that there are only men and women and everyone else doesn't exist. Beyond that, the Education Department declared that anyone seeking forgiveness of their student loans through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program had better not have had any time where they helped any trans people, or they're permanently ineligible for PSLF. (Not that all that many people successfully manage to navigate it - it requires ten years of continuous employment in eligible spaces, plus you still have to have been making at least some amount of payments on your student loans, even before this additional chasm has been opened.)
The state of Maine has had federal agencies launch "investigations" that come to predetermined conclusions about their Title IX obligations in athletics, with threats and promises to withhold funds and sue the state if they continue, in accordance with state law, to allow transgender athletes to compete in their correct sporting divisions. This is over two girls, to be clear, that all of this federal opprobrium, and state legislative ruckus, is about. The intent is certainly clear - sacrifice the girls and force them back into the closet, or to compete in an incorrect division, and all will be well. Keep supporting the girls, and we'll enact a collective punishment against you. This is always the threat.
The state of Montana has passed a bill that specifically outlaws being a trans person by declaring that all trans people are guilty of indecent exposure if they are visibly trans. The prosecution is required to prove that there was an intent to "abuse, harass, violate the dignity of, or degrade another" if the person exposing themselves is a cis person, but the intent requirements are removed if the person is visibly trans, presumably because the legislators of Montana believe that being visibly trans implies that intent. Representative Zooey Zephyr, who has been repeatedly targeted for being trans and a member of the legislature, had properly caustic words for the bill and the continued efforts in the state of Montana to criminalize the existence of trans people.
The Department of Homeland Security has removed guidance that forbade agents from surveilling people based on their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity, continuing in the vein that this administration wants to try and criminalize or make as many people afraid of the state making an example of them. Or to invoke the stochastic terrorists against them because of who they are, or what someone perceives them to be. Because, after all, the point is not whether you are, but only whether you are perceived to be the thing that is to be scrutinized or made illegal, and the perception is enough to invoke the potential violence of the State. Especially in this example, because the person who had the State called on her was Black, and we already know that Black girls and women get accused of being too masculine, too manly, because they don't fit the physical or behavioral expectations of white men who want demure slave-girls.
At least one judge has blocked the enforcement of the anti-trans executive order that blanket-banned gender-affirming care for under-19s, which is good, at the very least, that it provides some cover for places to provide that care, assuming they weren't looking for the excuse to get rid of it in the first place.
The current administrator intends to use the power of the government to classify criticism of the unelected campaign donor and popular actions to reduce the wealth of that donor as domestic terrorism, rather than protected speech against a private corporation and its leadership.
After Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested and detained a person with a permanent resident card and a student visa, for being vocally pro-Palestine at a United States university, at least one Representative took the agency and the administration to task and explained to the rest of us what kind of precedent it sets to say that someone here legally has no free speech rights. This attempted power grab will, of course, be directed at people with brown or black skin, on the assumption that anyone who isn't white must be an immigrant and is therefore deportable, regardless of their citizenship or residency status. This, too, is always the threat: sacrifice the people who speak uncomfortable truths or who challenge the power of white people, or we will enact collective punishment against you. This is a test to see whether or not these people can get away with disappearing their critics for political reasons, without proper procedure or any criminal charge, and whether it will be accepted or not cared about by those who could stop lawless action such as this. (Because the collective punishment in this case is the withholding of funding for the university on the bogus charge that is hasn't taken sufficient action to combat antisemitism on the campus, where "antisemitism" means "allows someone who believes the Palestinians deserve a place to be and that Israel is acting in the wrong to exist on the campus."
Some of the people who are talking about Palestine, and what "never again" means, have significant experience from which they speak, not that anyone with the power to stop the conflict seems willing to listen to any of them.
(a German tourist crossing from Mexico was held indefinitely because of the belief that the tourist planned to work in the United States in violation of the visa she had obtained. At least, that's the stated reason in the article. There are no pictures of the person who was detained, but there's very good odds that they fit the profile of "brown-skinned person crossing from Mexico," and were thus detained and accused of whatever could be trumped up against them.)
The United States Department of Agriculture has decided to forego programs that help United States farmers provide food for their local schools and food banks at competitive prices, in a declaration that feeding children and supporting farmers "no longer effectuate the goals of the agency." As one might expect, such a declaration is code for "an unelected campaign donor and/or his minions, with the support of the Administrator and his party, have decided that they want this money, that helped people make a living and helped children eat, for themselves and their rich buddies." Plutocratic looting, with specific intentions of ensuring the poor and the helpless receive nothing, and hoping that they'll blame "government" instead of the plutocrats.
The Attorney General of the United States says the Department of Justice is not the lawyers for the laws of the country, but the lawyers for the personal issues and beliefs of the administrator currently in charge. So expect the people who are there to at least half-heartedly investigate things they have no business treating credibly, and threatening people they have no business trying to do anything to. Beyond that, it's harder now for bad cops to be rooted out and for others to be warned about them when they move from one place to another, since the background check database on them has been turned off. Another one of those things that will allow more brutalization and racism from police officers, and an easier way of letting them slip away and hurt others when the pressure gets too great where they are.
The unelected campaign donor went on a right-wing podcast and proved he has no idea how the Social Security program works, not that it will stop him from trying to take that money and give it to himself and his friends, and repeated debunked and disproven claims that there is widespread Social Security fraud. He's certainly a dream person for those who believe that government needs to be made small enough to drown in a bathtub, and then to proceed to do the drowning, even as everyone else recognizes in a hurry that the "government" thing they're always railing against includes many things they find beneficial or useful.
The administration is also trying to make sure that people who use shell corporations to launder money and hide their assets can do so without investigation or worry that they'll be found out, and that the government is no longer interested in enforcing the rules against U.S. persons bribing foreign officials to help their own businesses. Oh, and also, they're not interested in trying to fight foreign nationals bribing and lobbying U.S. government officials, either, nor will they try to seize the assets of those already determined to be doing so, and especially not anybody who operates in the Russian Federation or with their blessing.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development believes that it missed out on the last bubble and is considering accepting and using blockchain technology, and possibly cryptocurrency. As is noted in the article, HUD is not exactly the kind of people you want to show they did not learn any lessons from the major economic crash that involved speculation and a housing bubble. The push to use blockchain technology seems to be at the behest of people who were wowed by it in financial markets, and people who stand to have their investments stay stable or grow if parts of the federal government adopt it. You know, the inside guys who will know when to run if it looks like the whole thing might blow up. It's a solution in search of a problem, with people standing to make a mint if and when they can force other people to use their solution. You know, snake oil. This administration is certainly doing what it can to make sure that snake oil hucksters don't get prosecuted for it, especially those snake oil hucksters that made money for the administration.
Remember that several people who are supposed to be accountable to the people that elected them (and the people that didn't) have been doing their best to avoid giving their public an opportunity to hold them to account, and therefore, you may need to be more creative in your endeavours to do so.
Perhaps most tellingly so far about what the aims, goals, and ideals are of the people determined to destroy the government and loot the treasury for their own purposes, the unelected campaign donor said to a right-wing podcaster that his goal was to save "western civilization" from the dread scourge of "empathy". (Among other things, like a belief that there will be millions of noncitizens imported to vote in federal elections so that Democrats will win power.) Apparently, having care and concern for others is being weaponized against white people, and the only way for white people to survive is to stop caring about others. Which he intends to assist by using the wrecking ball against anything that smacks of empathy or of care for other people. It is an intentional desire to remove anything that protects non-white, not-men, not-wealthy people from white men who want to rob them, enslave them, and segregate them, including trying to suborn the plain language of the Constitution about who is a citizen.
The person who made a Reagan biopic believes very firmly that something other than the merit of his film prevented him from being nominated or winning Academy Awards for the picture. According to these people, remember, if anyone other than a white man succeeds, it was because of something other than merit, so make sure that you properly explain to the mediocre white men in your life that their failures are due entirely to their own lack of merit, and not because of whatever fantasy they have in their head about what was, is, or will be.
But if you object to them, what they're doing, or the principles behind it, they'll do their best to blame you and make it seem like you are somehow at fault or were trying to scam them into collecting a paycheck without doing any work.
A measles outbreak is now currently in several adjacent states, although it's not clear yet that the cases have spread from the originating state to the others in a direct manner. This is one of those frustrating things, because the people who are being infected are often children whose parents have not engaged in the available vaccination programs, and measles is, to put it mildly, a mean son of a bitch to get sick with. While the states are busily trying to get their people vaccinated to stop the spread, the current Health and Human Services Secretary believes there must be a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and will demand that the CDC keep studying the link until something plausible can be found to prove the already-determined conclusion.
In other matters of public health, the meeting to determine which flu strains to target in this year's vaccination efforts didn't happen at the usual time and the indiscriminate purge of everything from the previous administration includes now being in favor of people getting lead poisoning from water pipes.
If it seems like it's impossible to beat them, remember that the KKK seemed impossible, too, and they got both beat and ridiculed, and so have so many other fascists and fascist wannabees. It is going to suck, but history says the fascists always lose.
That's a lot of stuff. Remember that for as much as they're thrashing about and hurting people, they're also doing things like trying to gin up interest in finally releasing the "real" Epstein files, because some conspiracy theories still live on. Of course, since there are no "real" files, it's just more fodder for the conspiracy theorists.
The rescuers and locals to Mount Etna are unhappy with the lack of preparation that tourists and others who want to take their pictures in the juxtaposition of snow and lava flow, in clothes and heels and other such things not suited for the weather…or the lava.
In a review of books by people promoting that more women should have children, a strong analysis of how the social structures want to make women who are married with children as the pinnacle and try to toss under the rug that married women with children have real desires that aren't just their spouses and children. (And how inadequate things are that would allow married women with children to have a greater participation in work life and social life.)
In the crafting of fiction, sometimes the daydream is for someone with disabilities to manage to do great things while still being disabled, sometimes the daydream is to have a body that no longer functions as disabled, but in both cases, the disability is not a thing to erase, but to incorporate.
On the use of "low art" and "low culture" references in the Locked Tomb series, and the way that readers often forget that low culture and low art becomes high culture and high art with the application of time and distance. Which we'd also add on to that the Calvin and Hobbes strip about the way that the painting is high art, the comic strip is low art, but the painting of the comic strip panel often makes the low art high. Shakespeare in his context is popular culture and art (and you can tell by the sheer amount of sex jokes, among other things), the Divine Comedy is a list of shout-outs in a religious context, starting, as one always does, with the diss track (and, consequently, the one that everyone remembers and reads is the diss track, because it's the interesting one.) We have excavated graffiti from long-gone peoples that are the equivalent of "Kilroy was here," "For a good time, call Jenny," and "Here's the spot where I banged your mom, and she enjoyed it." So what we think of as cringe memes now might very well be part of the high culture of a far-future world. And if you have someone like Jod, who still remembers those things in their context, it might be a way of keeping an anchor to the time before. (And also showing you how much of a dick he is.)
In technology, a privately-constructed spacecraft successfully delivered NASA science instruments to the surface of Luna, the first to do so.
On how you can make estimations of time when all the situations are the same as they were before, and how most projects are only close to what was before, and what's different will absolutely wreck all of your estimates because it will require learning and wrangling the new thing. Edge cases and corner cases probably take up the most amount of both coding and debugging time for any kind of project. Even when those things involve trips to the hardware store for tools you didn't know you needed, or needing to use tools to achieve certain ends.
After sports betting was legalized in the United States, gaming companies like FanDuel and Draft Kings have done their best to make gaming seem like a natural, masculine thing that can be done with each moment of a sports contest, and deny that they're doing anything at all to encourage addictive behaviors with gambling and gaming. And certainly not that they're trying to leverage the belief that people know more about sports and what will happen so as to make this seem less like betting on a chance effect and more like getting money from the "inevitable" that will happen from their knowledge.
Microsoft is removing Skype, one of the beginning Voice Over Internet Protocol services, after having it for fourteen years, this May. Skype users will be encouraged to use Microsoft Teams instead for their purposes. And this is what happens to all kinds of things - bought out, and eventually subsumed or replaced by the product that was their competitor for most/all of the time.
Survival tips for women in technological or technical fields, all of which are still prescient and important in this era, despite nearly six and a half years of supposed progress from when they were written. Because being a woman in a profession that wants to believe it's full of "alpha" men is difficult, and most of the people around you are doing their best to undermine, steal from, and otherwise drive out the women in their workplaces.
Hewlett-Packard released a firmware update for their printers that, in addition to making them incompatible with non-HP printer catridges, also made them incompatible with HP catridges, which is a fitting thing to have happened to a company that wants to try and make ink as expensive as possible and lock people into their own product as thoroughly as possible. It's still a good idea to get rid of HP printers as punishment for this ongoing stunt and to discourage others from adopting it.
Some DVDs of Warer Brothers films manufactured from 2006-2008 are already rotting to the point of unplayability. Warner Brothers is offering replacements for those films that they have that are still in print, and an equivalent for those that aren't. This definitely feels like the kind of thing where having a digital copy as well as a disc copy is a useful, so that if the worst happens, you can create another disc version of the thing. The difficulty in a lot of digital copies is that they're usually just the film, and not any special features that go along with it, and a lot of times, the discs are bought for the features more than the films. So, hopefully there's somewhere out there with a good copy of things, or a working disc image that you can use to create a new copy.
A person who crated a low-poly object that he believes was the height of cool is continuing to show he knew nothing about building vehicles, as some of them are now having adhesive failures on parts of the car that should not be held together only by adhesives.
The unelected campaign donor who is currently acting as though he has executive power has received a government contract to upgrade airspace management technology for the government. That should probably be called "self-dealing" or some other obvious indication of corruption and conflict of interest, but there aren't that many people who are interested in prosecuting it.
Nor are they interested in continuing investigation against the donor's company that wants to implant chips into brains.
In this and every era, consider the possibility of developing software that doesn't deliberately, intentionally, hurt people or exploit them. We are now well into the space where we see what the results of such software is, and it's frankly miserable. This was first written in the first go-round of the current administrator, about eight and a half years ago, and it still holds significant importance now.
Last for tonight, the fish doorbell is in season again. There's a camera at a particular point in time where spawning fish will be stopped on their journey. If you spot a fish, click the doorbell, and the keeper will open a channel for the fish to get through.
Additionally, take the shoulds out of your reading. And quite possibly also your listening, watching, playing, and other things. That which is supposed to be enjoyable often gets plagued by these shoulds, and that an make the enjoyable un-enjoyed.
(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.)
