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silveradeptLet's start with the intention to remove the Institute of Museum and Library Services as one of those things that has intense return for the money invested in it, but doesn't personally benefit someone wealthy, and therefore is "waste" for the government. IMLS does a lot for people and their libraries, at the state and local level, and their budget is usually chump change compared to the bigger-ticket items that are generally unquestioned. If you feel like walloping your legislators into funding something they can pay out of the waste budget of the Pentagon, by all means, do it The IMLS folks also point out that an agency established by Congress cannot simply be terminated at the whims of the Executive. (Which is presumably true of a lot of the agencies that the Executive has directed the closure or destruction of.) Just understand that the current interim director is a toady who is fully on board with dismantling IMLS instead of fighting for it and to keep it alive, and therefore, treat anything official coming out of there as a collaborator trying to turn libraries and museums into propaganda vehicles for messages that are antithetical to what museums and libraries actually do.
None of this matters to the people who want to get rid of it all, of course, and they have proceeded to demand that all of the staff at IMLS be put on administrative leave and they return any work property they may have. Because the toady in charge is more than willing to let the unelected campaign donor and his team of minions destroy the agency. He probably even thinks that he's doing everyone a favor by getting rid of a highly partisan agency (partisan, in this case, meaning "actually believes in doing good with government funds instead of using government as a slush fund for private entities to loot without accountability.")
A French Senator gave a significant speech on the need for Europe to stop relying upon United States military largesse and begin building itself back up into a proper military power so they can take on the defense of places like Ukraine, or other places that the Russian Federation might invade. Given that the current United States President is still very enthralled and desirous of closer ties to the invaders, this seems like a smart move for the EU and for the UK along with it. The chump that thinks he's got the best of the best at his disposal may not find it very useful at all when all of his allies refuse him and his and tell them to find somewhere else to be, if he's not going to actually help with the defense of the place.
The Department of Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom is having trouble helping people with disability into work, like they want everyone to. Which is not surprising to anyone who is trying to get work, because there's plenty of research out there showing that employers aren't interested in employing people with disabilities and even more hostile to people who are blind and vision impaired. Long COVID sufferers are also finding themselves pushed back toward going to work without having any supports for what they have that is disabling them.
Of course, as in the United States, the UK DWP and government could just stop treating all benefits recipients as fraudsters and spend less money providing services instead of fighting them. And the Government of the United Kingdom could help their cause of getting disabled people to work by providing and ensuring there's enough of a social safety net so that people don't have to be housing insecure, money-insecure, or stick with abusive partners, bosses, or others because the alternative is going homeless or losing children or any number of things that would only make the situation worse instead of making the situation better by removing the thing that's making it bad.
Police officers in the United Kingdom forced their way into a place of worship and arrested people for their viewpoints on the attacks on Gaza and the situation of worldwide climate change.
In the States, the current administration's war planners used insecure, unclassified channels to communicate their plans for military strikes in Yemen, and included a reporter in their group chat. They specifically chose the platform so that they record of their conversation would disappear and they could evade their responsibilities to keep records of government actions and discussions. A fair amount of the coverage so far has focused on the incompetence of the officials inviting a journalist to their secret war plans group, the content of what they were talking about also deserves attention, since it was about attacking people in another country with the military capability of the United States, and doing so on a platform where the record of it would disappear and not be present, so nobody could find proof to then try and hold the government accountable for their actions on the international stage. These are people who believe they should be able to do whatever they desire, whenever they desire, and they are accountable to precisely no-one about their actions.
As a follow-up, since the administration insisted that there was nothing classified, sensitive, or secret in the group chat that contained the reporter, The Atlantic has published the full transcript of the Signal chat, so that others can examine it and make decisions about how many and what laws those particular geniuses violated when they held their planning meeting on Signal.
The Environmental Protection Agency head says his job is not to provide clean air and water for everyone, but to let corporations and the rich pollute as much as they want to, destroy the planet and its climate, and never suffer consequences for it.
The head of Health and Human Services, and his subordinates, appear to be trying to defund valuable lines of research because they no longer fit with the ideological priorities of himself and his boss, which makes all the scientists unhappy that their research is being stomped on because of political ideology.
The continued attacks on the Department of Education are doing their best to ensure that accessibility and intensive special needs education is gutted and no longer available, while also claiming that everything being done to help make the world accessible to people with disabilities is harming them and shortening their lives. Of course, their real goal is to dismantle the Department of Education entirely and give all of its money to private schools with no demand for oversight or that they have to let students in, since they're getting that funding, enriching those who have people that can pay the tuition more and starving the public schools of all the things they need to provide any kind of education at all.
The people who are administering the Social Security files refuse to acknowledge that at least one person they have declared dead is alive and able to send them whatever proof they need of it. To compound the error, other institutions, like banks, have also assumed that the person is dead, and have refused to countermand the declaration of death and subsequent situations even when someone proves to them they are still alive and kicking. These declarations of death seem to be a component of an unelected campaign donor given power trying and failing to find what he believes is lots of dead people still drawing their benefits. But because he's been given license to do whatever he wants, the onus gets shifted onto people to prove they're alive, rather than the onus remaining firmly on the government to prove they are dead. And much of this finding-yourself-dead (or declared a non-citizen) only shows up when there are about to be consequences for doing it.
The people who want to take over and destroy the Social Security Administration are threatening to shut down the entirety of it if their untrained, uncleared wrecking crew isn't given carte blanche access to the system. This is also with the current head of the agency trying very hard to break it on his own, reduce services, and make it harder for those who have paid into the program to receive the benefits they have earned. When confronted about these plans, they have backed down about many of them, but there's a Cabinet-level secretary who apparently truly believes that the best way to discover fraud is to turn off the payments to everyone, and then assume that the people who appear immediately to complain about not receiving their check are the people committing fraud, because real people apparently won't complain about a missed check, and apparently are supposed to have enough reserves on hand that if there is a missed check, they're not going to have their lives completely upended by their sudden inability to pay their bills. And, of course, if the means to get a hold of the entity responsible for the missed check are broken or degraded, then they'll reinforce their own belief that it's the "fraudsters" who are trying extra hard to get this situation rectified, and not people who are on the verge of a financial disaster because Social Security is their entire income in their retirement age.
The current administrator's shuttering of 18F, the federal government's accessibility office, leaves a lot of people trying to make services more accessible and usable to everyone without that important support. So remember that when there are crusades about "DEI," they also mean that accessibility should be gutted, because that would be too much like helping people who aren't them. Not that 18F intends to simply fade into the sunset.
As further punishment for Columbia University not doing more to suppress pro-Palestinian opinions on campus, agents of the Department of Homeland Security are investigating the University itself and alleging that they're not doing enough to combat "antisemitism.". Which has somehow come to mean "Israel," despite the Semitic group being much larger than that, and many of these anti-Palestinian actions are also anti-Semitic. Columbia caved to the pressure and is now doing many more things in an administration-friendlier way so they can avoid having funding cut to them.
Another graduate student, this one at Tufts University, has been disappeared to Louisiana by masked agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement because she dared criticize the position of the government on Gaza, and also, probably primarily, because she was a Muslim criticizing the government. There was a court order forbidding her movement without prior notice, but the government claims that she was already moved by the time the order came through, so they don't have to do anything about it.
The administration has targeted individual law firms with executive orders, demanding that those law firms stop representing clients he doesn't like or face punishment. Some of those law firms have caved and bribed the administration with in-kind services for their legal goals, others have told the Administration their bullying and intimidation tactics won't work on them.
The Speaker of the House floated the idea of removing the judiciary as a branch of government, because the judiciary has been doing a lot of telling the current administration no, which is, of course, the very worst sin that you can commit in this particular administration, telling them no and expecting them to respect and obey you when you do it.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a student changing their gender identity and using different pronouns without the school notifying the parents of the change is not illegal nor denying of any "parental rights.". Even though the parents said they didn't approve of any such things, but the parents should be rather strongly reminded that students are not merely puppets of either the parents or the school and have rights of their own that should not be taken away.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with the state of Idaho and says that it is allowed to ban trans students from using the bathroom of their correct gender, because the court agrees with Idaho's evidence-free contention that the mere presence of a trans person in a bathroom causes immediate and obvious harm to the cis students who are there. A cis person's right to comfort is more important than a trans person's right to equitable treatment, predicated on the still evidence-free belief that seeing a different set of genitals than your own in a bathroom or a locker room is going to be massively harmful. The Court acknowledges that there will be real harm to the trans student if required to use the incorrect space, but subordinated the real harm to an imagined harm for cis students if they have a trans person around them. While the 9th Circuit is currently entertaining debunked and debased theories, they may as well say they're banning gay students from the bathrooms as well, because gay people existing in a bathroom spreads HIV/AIDS.
And the Secretary of State has decided that only able-bodied cisgender heterosexual men matter when evaluating the human rights triumphs and violations of countries the world around, probably saving himself some embarrassment at how bad the U.S. is doing, but also probably toadying up to several other nations that are failing at the job of protecting women, queen people, and the disabled because of similar ideological beliefs as this administration. I'm sure the other strongmen in the world are more than happy not to have their own abuses published in a U.S. State Department report.
Farmers who believed that the administration's import duties and tariffs would help them and their markets are finding out that the retaliatory tariffs and import duties levied against them are hurting them far more than the first round of duties was supposed to help. The difficulty with a lack of understanding of the mechanics of economics (a task, like all other disciplines, that it is impossible to completely understand) is that a slick-sounding huckster can talk like an economist and sell you on something that will hurt you while promising to help you.
In other disciplines, the slick-sounding huckster sells you on the idea that only other people, and specifically, only the people you don't like, get hurt, even though all the evidence we have available to us is that the people the government intends to hurt is always far greater than the people you would like to see get hurt. And that goes for more disciplines and sectors than anyone ever initially estimates, and extends to people that even the most virulent of haters would have assumed is exempt from hurt, because of their association with them, one of the Good People.
It also doesn't help that the messaging people for many of this administration's pronouncements are all quite proud to be inveterate racists, sexists, transphobes, nativists, and otherwise people of low moral character. That is, when they're bothering to do the job they've been appointed to, and not running their influencer side hustles from inside their government office spaces while they cut jobs from the government by claiming everyone they fire is a "poor performer" without a shred of evidence to back it up.
This Administration believes itself and champions itself as very good for women, but what they specifically mean is that they are very much all in for more fertilization. So they're not actually all for women at all, and in this story, there's a little bit more of the true self coming through when, in the same sentence as claiming he's got the best women, he says that women are superior to men and he's not happy about it. I wonder what kind of special treatment he thinks they're getting that they shouldn't, or what roles they're performing in the world that he thinks they shouldn't, so that they can be properly subordinated to men, like he wants them to be.
The ongoing find-and-replace campaign continues, this time with the Arlington National Cemetery website removing the women and minority service people who have earned the honors of being buried there, including things like Medal of Honor recipients. The news had already suggested that veterans are unhappy with the direction their treatment is going in this administration, and so the erasure of those who have given service will only likely further antagonize the situation. Plus, the find-and-replace method eliminates the wartime services of well-known persons like Jackie Robinson and Bea Arthur.
Among all of this, there's an entire faction of the country ready for and demanding that the supposed opposition party actually behave like an opposition that understands the stakes and is interesting in fighting for the country, instead of treating this like the usual techniques will still work and that their opposition are fundamentally rational people who have differences of opinion.
The hard part about fighting misinformation and disinformation is that you have to do more of exposing people to the truth than they do for selling lies that appeal to fears, but posters can be an easy way of getting more people exposed to the truth in low-confrontation ways. And if you're putting up your own posters (or even if you aren't), tearing down fascist-friendly material is also effective at making them continue to spend effort (and money) to try and dominate the information landscape. (Yes, you are, too, but you probably also have friends and a network that will help you spread out the effort and the costs. And you can outlast them.)
Using the SIFT method to investigate whether an infographic about the SIFT method is worthwhile. which does take time and evaluation and tracing things back to their sources (SIFT comes out of the Center for an Informed Public from the University of Washington.) UW has also had professors responsible for the book Calling Bullshit and accompanying website so there's been a fair amount of work on these matters done out of the University of Washington.
In more of the stories where "DEI" turns out to be kind of useful for people, Major League Baseball's new cap designs have some issues with their text placement. Including one that ends up loudly proclaiming "Tits!" and a few others with some questionable readings. Having Spanish speakers and readers on staff makes it more likely a situation such as that will be caught and reported before it's marketed. (But if you're the kind of place that ignores the training and continues to use slurs or other such language in your workplace, something like this will probably sail on through with plenty of people snickering about it.) And The Chesapeake Oystercatchers had something a little too much like a Georgia O'Keefe in one of their alternate logo designs.
A Republican representative in the state legislature of Minnesota who wanted to demand that any girl accused of being trans had to file paperwork of an examination whose criteria were specifically against taking into account her gender, and who also wanted to try and classify "being opposed to the current administrations actions and speaking aloud the fact that the current administrator is most charitably called a putz" as a diagnosable mental illness, has been arrested and charged with solicitation of prostitution from a minor. So, as usual, the elected Republicans (and, I would hazard, some significant amount of their supporters) who are taking an unhealthy interest in what's being covered by a young girl's underwear are, well, the people who are trying to act on their unhealthy interest in what's being covered by a young girl's underwear.
The state of Utah has demanded that no government building or school is allowed to fly a flag that expresses an identity other than cisgender heterosexual. The governor said he had misgivings about the bill, but decided he wasn't going to oppose it because he expected the legislature to override him. The proper and prudent thing to do would have been to veto it and send it back with his objections and force the legislature to override him. Idaho has also apparently banned the expression of identities other than cisgender heterosexual in schools, but hasn't yet also applied it to government buildings.
The governor of Utah also signed a bill banning fluoridation of public water supplies, choosing to believe the studies that say there's no effect from fluoridation rather than the ones that have shown the ongoing positive dental health effects from the use of a small amount of fluoridation.
The state of Texas has had a bill introduced to target furries with a law, but their mechanism of going after that is to outlaw "the display of and allowance for non-human behaviors in Texas schools." Which would completely outlaw the practice of role-playing games in schools, as well. I'm sure that's a benefit to the crafters of the proposed bill, since they've already bought into the idea that children want to use litter boxes, and they can also get all that Satanic Panic stuff out there, too.
West Virginia's legislature turned away a bill that would exempt non-public schools from having to follow the state's guidelines for vaccination of children and given a religious exemption to the vaccination guidelines. The governor has issued an executive order demanding that such exemptions be provided, but for the moment, anyway, the legislature has not followed suit.
An attempted critique of cozy fiction with examples from Legends and Lattes that would do better critiquing the ways that money manages to buy off problems that would otherwise be problems for the protagonist of the book. The critique seems to come from a misunderstanding of the nature of the cozy story, and also, from a certain amount of misreading the book and others like it to make it seem like the author is covering up the fact that the current cozy is the result of pain and suffering inflicted in the past by the protagonist, and pain and suffering inflicted on the protagonist and others, and therefore, it can only be cozy if we choose not to look at the pain that is clearly present (or past.) Which sounds a lot more like the person who keeps posting things to your timelines with demands that you don't "look away" or "scroll past" their documenting of it. Demands to engage and accusations that you become complicit in the atrocity by not witnessing the atrocity and then doing everything to stop it. (Not "everything possible," everything.) Which is, of course, the recipe for paralysis and burnout and falling away from activism and doing what you can because the people on the Internet are demanding perfection at everything as the standard, otherwise you are complicit and just as damned as those actually doing the things.
On the multifaceted definitions of being queer, and how that ties into finding other pathways to coexisting with the planet and the other humans that are on it.
Correspondence and charging documents from England in the 1930s show a police force charged with trying to discourage using the public toilets for sex between men, but also having some issues about social discrepancies and the possibilities of their work resulting in police complaints instead, and the use of surveillance to see if they couldn't just find some people engaged in the acts, rather than having suspicions of it..
Based on a survey of colophons of surviving manuscripts, if the percentages hold, the potential lower bound of women-coped manuscripts of the Medium Aevum of Latin Christendom is somewhere in the vicinity of 110,000 manuscripts.
The Downton Abbey fans got a reasonably dramatized version of what service was like, and when you go back in time, you find that while servants were common, the work they did was often nonspecialized and some of the people they served thought of them as family, among other things.
Stuffing a turtle in your pants seems like an easy way to lose things that are intentionally meant to be kept in pants.
In technology, repair cafés in Texas libraries, where experts and tools are on hand to help broken objects continue to function, rather than be consigned to waste and some other item purchased instead.
The 23andMe company has filed for bankruptcy, and that means a lot of people are concerned about what will happen to their genetic data in this sale.
A CEO who promised that his "AI" would manage to detect and defeat fraud in advertising is going to serve a year and a day jail term because he generated fraudulent statements of the company's revenue and fraudulent statements of how effective the supposed "AI" was.
A camper van where all of its energy is provided by solar power and battery charging has traveled from the Netherlands to the southern tip of Spain, making about two-thirds of the journey under its own solar power. From the description, the solar van sounds like it would comfortably seat two and allow them to live as they traveled, with additional power availability when they are stopped and able to deploy additional solar panels to increase battery charge and run additional appliances and comfort items.
Last for tonight, a plea for readers not to allow themselves to become mere consumers of the things they read, even though business and corporations wants us to consume more and more so their lines and numbers will go up. Which was given to me in the context of a suggestion that the things that are deemed "unnecessary" in art are often the things that are best there for the experience of the person there, which pulls on the thread more that consumers are there to be pandered to, and those who experience art are there to experience the art, even if the art disquiets them or challenges them in some way. This post gets referenced by Chuck Wendig, who points out that the lure of LLMs and other such plagiarism and confabulation machines is that one merely needs to give them the idea, and they will produce all of the execution of it, when the idea is, at best, the beginning of the process, and the execution is the part where the idea becomes something great (or less great). While also noting that the things that are deemed "unnecessary" are often the things that people want to ban books and materials over, and that the "necessary"-ness of something is the shield that many materials-banners hide behind, on the belief that they're not against the thing itself, they're merely against the "unnecessary" use or presence of it. Of course, for many of those people who would ban things, we find rather quickly that the amount of "necessary" they believe should exist in those materials is none.
(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.)
None of this matters to the people who want to get rid of it all, of course, and they have proceeded to demand that all of the staff at IMLS be put on administrative leave and they return any work property they may have. Because the toady in charge is more than willing to let the unelected campaign donor and his team of minions destroy the agency. He probably even thinks that he's doing everyone a favor by getting rid of a highly partisan agency (partisan, in this case, meaning "actually believes in doing good with government funds instead of using government as a slush fund for private entities to loot without accountability.")
A French Senator gave a significant speech on the need for Europe to stop relying upon United States military largesse and begin building itself back up into a proper military power so they can take on the defense of places like Ukraine, or other places that the Russian Federation might invade. Given that the current United States President is still very enthralled and desirous of closer ties to the invaders, this seems like a smart move for the EU and for the UK along with it. The chump that thinks he's got the best of the best at his disposal may not find it very useful at all when all of his allies refuse him and his and tell them to find somewhere else to be, if he's not going to actually help with the defense of the place.
The Department of Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom is having trouble helping people with disability into work, like they want everyone to. Which is not surprising to anyone who is trying to get work, because there's plenty of research out there showing that employers aren't interested in employing people with disabilities and even more hostile to people who are blind and vision impaired. Long COVID sufferers are also finding themselves pushed back toward going to work without having any supports for what they have that is disabling them.
Of course, as in the United States, the UK DWP and government could just stop treating all benefits recipients as fraudsters and spend less money providing services instead of fighting them. And the Government of the United Kingdom could help their cause of getting disabled people to work by providing and ensuring there's enough of a social safety net so that people don't have to be housing insecure, money-insecure, or stick with abusive partners, bosses, or others because the alternative is going homeless or losing children or any number of things that would only make the situation worse instead of making the situation better by removing the thing that's making it bad.
Police officers in the United Kingdom forced their way into a place of worship and arrested people for their viewpoints on the attacks on Gaza and the situation of worldwide climate change.
In the States, the current administration's war planners used insecure, unclassified channels to communicate their plans for military strikes in Yemen, and included a reporter in their group chat. They specifically chose the platform so that they record of their conversation would disappear and they could evade their responsibilities to keep records of government actions and discussions. A fair amount of the coverage so far has focused on the incompetence of the officials inviting a journalist to their secret war plans group, the content of what they were talking about also deserves attention, since it was about attacking people in another country with the military capability of the United States, and doing so on a platform where the record of it would disappear and not be present, so nobody could find proof to then try and hold the government accountable for their actions on the international stage. These are people who believe they should be able to do whatever they desire, whenever they desire, and they are accountable to precisely no-one about their actions.
As a follow-up, since the administration insisted that there was nothing classified, sensitive, or secret in the group chat that contained the reporter, The Atlantic has published the full transcript of the Signal chat, so that others can examine it and make decisions about how many and what laws those particular geniuses violated when they held their planning meeting on Signal.
The Environmental Protection Agency head says his job is not to provide clean air and water for everyone, but to let corporations and the rich pollute as much as they want to, destroy the planet and its climate, and never suffer consequences for it.
The head of Health and Human Services, and his subordinates, appear to be trying to defund valuable lines of research because they no longer fit with the ideological priorities of himself and his boss, which makes all the scientists unhappy that their research is being stomped on because of political ideology.
The continued attacks on the Department of Education are doing their best to ensure that accessibility and intensive special needs education is gutted and no longer available, while also claiming that everything being done to help make the world accessible to people with disabilities is harming them and shortening their lives. Of course, their real goal is to dismantle the Department of Education entirely and give all of its money to private schools with no demand for oversight or that they have to let students in, since they're getting that funding, enriching those who have people that can pay the tuition more and starving the public schools of all the things they need to provide any kind of education at all.
The people who are administering the Social Security files refuse to acknowledge that at least one person they have declared dead is alive and able to send them whatever proof they need of it. To compound the error, other institutions, like banks, have also assumed that the person is dead, and have refused to countermand the declaration of death and subsequent situations even when someone proves to them they are still alive and kicking. These declarations of death seem to be a component of an unelected campaign donor given power trying and failing to find what he believes is lots of dead people still drawing their benefits. But because he's been given license to do whatever he wants, the onus gets shifted onto people to prove they're alive, rather than the onus remaining firmly on the government to prove they are dead. And much of this finding-yourself-dead (or declared a non-citizen) only shows up when there are about to be consequences for doing it.
The people who want to take over and destroy the Social Security Administration are threatening to shut down the entirety of it if their untrained, uncleared wrecking crew isn't given carte blanche access to the system. This is also with the current head of the agency trying very hard to break it on his own, reduce services, and make it harder for those who have paid into the program to receive the benefits they have earned. When confronted about these plans, they have backed down about many of them, but there's a Cabinet-level secretary who apparently truly believes that the best way to discover fraud is to turn off the payments to everyone, and then assume that the people who appear immediately to complain about not receiving their check are the people committing fraud, because real people apparently won't complain about a missed check, and apparently are supposed to have enough reserves on hand that if there is a missed check, they're not going to have their lives completely upended by their sudden inability to pay their bills. And, of course, if the means to get a hold of the entity responsible for the missed check are broken or degraded, then they'll reinforce their own belief that it's the "fraudsters" who are trying extra hard to get this situation rectified, and not people who are on the verge of a financial disaster because Social Security is their entire income in their retirement age.
The current administrator's shuttering of 18F, the federal government's accessibility office, leaves a lot of people trying to make services more accessible and usable to everyone without that important support. So remember that when there are crusades about "DEI," they also mean that accessibility should be gutted, because that would be too much like helping people who aren't them. Not that 18F intends to simply fade into the sunset.
As further punishment for Columbia University not doing more to suppress pro-Palestinian opinions on campus, agents of the Department of Homeland Security are investigating the University itself and alleging that they're not doing enough to combat "antisemitism.". Which has somehow come to mean "Israel," despite the Semitic group being much larger than that, and many of these anti-Palestinian actions are also anti-Semitic. Columbia caved to the pressure and is now doing many more things in an administration-friendlier way so they can avoid having funding cut to them.
Another graduate student, this one at Tufts University, has been disappeared to Louisiana by masked agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement because she dared criticize the position of the government on Gaza, and also, probably primarily, because she was a Muslim criticizing the government. There was a court order forbidding her movement without prior notice, but the government claims that she was already moved by the time the order came through, so they don't have to do anything about it.
The administration has targeted individual law firms with executive orders, demanding that those law firms stop representing clients he doesn't like or face punishment. Some of those law firms have caved and bribed the administration with in-kind services for their legal goals, others have told the Administration their bullying and intimidation tactics won't work on them.
The Speaker of the House floated the idea of removing the judiciary as a branch of government, because the judiciary has been doing a lot of telling the current administration no, which is, of course, the very worst sin that you can commit in this particular administration, telling them no and expecting them to respect and obey you when you do it.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a student changing their gender identity and using different pronouns without the school notifying the parents of the change is not illegal nor denying of any "parental rights.". Even though the parents said they didn't approve of any such things, but the parents should be rather strongly reminded that students are not merely puppets of either the parents or the school and have rights of their own that should not be taken away.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has sided with the state of Idaho and says that it is allowed to ban trans students from using the bathroom of their correct gender, because the court agrees with Idaho's evidence-free contention that the mere presence of a trans person in a bathroom causes immediate and obvious harm to the cis students who are there. A cis person's right to comfort is more important than a trans person's right to equitable treatment, predicated on the still evidence-free belief that seeing a different set of genitals than your own in a bathroom or a locker room is going to be massively harmful. The Court acknowledges that there will be real harm to the trans student if required to use the incorrect space, but subordinated the real harm to an imagined harm for cis students if they have a trans person around them. While the 9th Circuit is currently entertaining debunked and debased theories, they may as well say they're banning gay students from the bathrooms as well, because gay people existing in a bathroom spreads HIV/AIDS.
And the Secretary of State has decided that only able-bodied cisgender heterosexual men matter when evaluating the human rights triumphs and violations of countries the world around, probably saving himself some embarrassment at how bad the U.S. is doing, but also probably toadying up to several other nations that are failing at the job of protecting women, queen people, and the disabled because of similar ideological beliefs as this administration. I'm sure the other strongmen in the world are more than happy not to have their own abuses published in a U.S. State Department report.
Farmers who believed that the administration's import duties and tariffs would help them and their markets are finding out that the retaliatory tariffs and import duties levied against them are hurting them far more than the first round of duties was supposed to help. The difficulty with a lack of understanding of the mechanics of economics (a task, like all other disciplines, that it is impossible to completely understand) is that a slick-sounding huckster can talk like an economist and sell you on something that will hurt you while promising to help you.
In other disciplines, the slick-sounding huckster sells you on the idea that only other people, and specifically, only the people you don't like, get hurt, even though all the evidence we have available to us is that the people the government intends to hurt is always far greater than the people you would like to see get hurt. And that goes for more disciplines and sectors than anyone ever initially estimates, and extends to people that even the most virulent of haters would have assumed is exempt from hurt, because of their association with them, one of the Good People.
It also doesn't help that the messaging people for many of this administration's pronouncements are all quite proud to be inveterate racists, sexists, transphobes, nativists, and otherwise people of low moral character. That is, when they're bothering to do the job they've been appointed to, and not running their influencer side hustles from inside their government office spaces while they cut jobs from the government by claiming everyone they fire is a "poor performer" without a shred of evidence to back it up.
This Administration believes itself and champions itself as very good for women, but what they specifically mean is that they are very much all in for more fertilization. So they're not actually all for women at all, and in this story, there's a little bit more of the true self coming through when, in the same sentence as claiming he's got the best women, he says that women are superior to men and he's not happy about it. I wonder what kind of special treatment he thinks they're getting that they shouldn't, or what roles they're performing in the world that he thinks they shouldn't, so that they can be properly subordinated to men, like he wants them to be.
The ongoing find-and-replace campaign continues, this time with the Arlington National Cemetery website removing the women and minority service people who have earned the honors of being buried there, including things like Medal of Honor recipients. The news had already suggested that veterans are unhappy with the direction their treatment is going in this administration, and so the erasure of those who have given service will only likely further antagonize the situation. Plus, the find-and-replace method eliminates the wartime services of well-known persons like Jackie Robinson and Bea Arthur.
Among all of this, there's an entire faction of the country ready for and demanding that the supposed opposition party actually behave like an opposition that understands the stakes and is interesting in fighting for the country, instead of treating this like the usual techniques will still work and that their opposition are fundamentally rational people who have differences of opinion.
The hard part about fighting misinformation and disinformation is that you have to do more of exposing people to the truth than they do for selling lies that appeal to fears, but posters can be an easy way of getting more people exposed to the truth in low-confrontation ways. And if you're putting up your own posters (or even if you aren't), tearing down fascist-friendly material is also effective at making them continue to spend effort (and money) to try and dominate the information landscape. (Yes, you are, too, but you probably also have friends and a network that will help you spread out the effort and the costs. And you can outlast them.)
Using the SIFT method to investigate whether an infographic about the SIFT method is worthwhile. which does take time and evaluation and tracing things back to their sources (SIFT comes out of the Center for an Informed Public from the University of Washington.) UW has also had professors responsible for the book Calling Bullshit and accompanying website so there's been a fair amount of work on these matters done out of the University of Washington.
In more of the stories where "DEI" turns out to be kind of useful for people, Major League Baseball's new cap designs have some issues with their text placement. Including one that ends up loudly proclaiming "Tits!" and a few others with some questionable readings. Having Spanish speakers and readers on staff makes it more likely a situation such as that will be caught and reported before it's marketed. (But if you're the kind of place that ignores the training and continues to use slurs or other such language in your workplace, something like this will probably sail on through with plenty of people snickering about it.) And The Chesapeake Oystercatchers had something a little too much like a Georgia O'Keefe in one of their alternate logo designs.
A Republican representative in the state legislature of Minnesota who wanted to demand that any girl accused of being trans had to file paperwork of an examination whose criteria were specifically against taking into account her gender, and who also wanted to try and classify "being opposed to the current administrations actions and speaking aloud the fact that the current administrator is most charitably called a putz" as a diagnosable mental illness, has been arrested and charged with solicitation of prostitution from a minor. So, as usual, the elected Republicans (and, I would hazard, some significant amount of their supporters) who are taking an unhealthy interest in what's being covered by a young girl's underwear are, well, the people who are trying to act on their unhealthy interest in what's being covered by a young girl's underwear.
The state of Utah has demanded that no government building or school is allowed to fly a flag that expresses an identity other than cisgender heterosexual. The governor said he had misgivings about the bill, but decided he wasn't going to oppose it because he expected the legislature to override him. The proper and prudent thing to do would have been to veto it and send it back with his objections and force the legislature to override him. Idaho has also apparently banned the expression of identities other than cisgender heterosexual in schools, but hasn't yet also applied it to government buildings.
The governor of Utah also signed a bill banning fluoridation of public water supplies, choosing to believe the studies that say there's no effect from fluoridation rather than the ones that have shown the ongoing positive dental health effects from the use of a small amount of fluoridation.
The state of Texas has had a bill introduced to target furries with a law, but their mechanism of going after that is to outlaw "the display of and allowance for non-human behaviors in Texas schools." Which would completely outlaw the practice of role-playing games in schools, as well. I'm sure that's a benefit to the crafters of the proposed bill, since they've already bought into the idea that children want to use litter boxes, and they can also get all that Satanic Panic stuff out there, too.
West Virginia's legislature turned away a bill that would exempt non-public schools from having to follow the state's guidelines for vaccination of children and given a religious exemption to the vaccination guidelines. The governor has issued an executive order demanding that such exemptions be provided, but for the moment, anyway, the legislature has not followed suit.
An attempted critique of cozy fiction with examples from Legends and Lattes that would do better critiquing the ways that money manages to buy off problems that would otherwise be problems for the protagonist of the book. The critique seems to come from a misunderstanding of the nature of the cozy story, and also, from a certain amount of misreading the book and others like it to make it seem like the author is covering up the fact that the current cozy is the result of pain and suffering inflicted in the past by the protagonist, and pain and suffering inflicted on the protagonist and others, and therefore, it can only be cozy if we choose not to look at the pain that is clearly present (or past.) Which sounds a lot more like the person who keeps posting things to your timelines with demands that you don't "look away" or "scroll past" their documenting of it. Demands to engage and accusations that you become complicit in the atrocity by not witnessing the atrocity and then doing everything to stop it. (Not "everything possible," everything.) Which is, of course, the recipe for paralysis and burnout and falling away from activism and doing what you can because the people on the Internet are demanding perfection at everything as the standard, otherwise you are complicit and just as damned as those actually doing the things.
On the multifaceted definitions of being queer, and how that ties into finding other pathways to coexisting with the planet and the other humans that are on it.
Correspondence and charging documents from England in the 1930s show a police force charged with trying to discourage using the public toilets for sex between men, but also having some issues about social discrepancies and the possibilities of their work resulting in police complaints instead, and the use of surveillance to see if they couldn't just find some people engaged in the acts, rather than having suspicions of it..
Based on a survey of colophons of surviving manuscripts, if the percentages hold, the potential lower bound of women-coped manuscripts of the Medium Aevum of Latin Christendom is somewhere in the vicinity of 110,000 manuscripts.
The Downton Abbey fans got a reasonably dramatized version of what service was like, and when you go back in time, you find that while servants were common, the work they did was often nonspecialized and some of the people they served thought of them as family, among other things.
Stuffing a turtle in your pants seems like an easy way to lose things that are intentionally meant to be kept in pants.
In technology, repair cafés in Texas libraries, where experts and tools are on hand to help broken objects continue to function, rather than be consigned to waste and some other item purchased instead.
The 23andMe company has filed for bankruptcy, and that means a lot of people are concerned about what will happen to their genetic data in this sale.
A CEO who promised that his "AI" would manage to detect and defeat fraud in advertising is going to serve a year and a day jail term because he generated fraudulent statements of the company's revenue and fraudulent statements of how effective the supposed "AI" was.
A camper van where all of its energy is provided by solar power and battery charging has traveled from the Netherlands to the southern tip of Spain, making about two-thirds of the journey under its own solar power. From the description, the solar van sounds like it would comfortably seat two and allow them to live as they traveled, with additional power availability when they are stopped and able to deploy additional solar panels to increase battery charge and run additional appliances and comfort items.
Last for tonight, a plea for readers not to allow themselves to become mere consumers of the things they read, even though business and corporations wants us to consume more and more so their lines and numbers will go up. Which was given to me in the context of a suggestion that the things that are deemed "unnecessary" in art are often the things that are best there for the experience of the person there, which pulls on the thread more that consumers are there to be pandered to, and those who experience art are there to experience the art, even if the art disquiets them or challenges them in some way. This post gets referenced by Chuck Wendig, who points out that the lure of LLMs and other such plagiarism and confabulation machines is that one merely needs to give them the idea, and they will produce all of the execution of it, when the idea is, at best, the beginning of the process, and the execution is the part where the idea becomes something great (or less great). While also noting that the things that are deemed "unnecessary" are often the things that people want to ban books and materials over, and that the "necessary"-ness of something is the shield that many materials-banners hide behind, on the belief that they're not against the thing itself, they're merely against the "unnecessary" use or presence of it. Of course, for many of those people who would ban things, we find rather quickly that the amount of "necessary" they believe should exist in those materials is none.
(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.)
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Date: 2025-04-03 02:59 am (UTC)Hiss at the IMLS news.
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Date: 2025-04-03 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-03 05:57 pm (UTC)So very much to hiss at these days. /o\