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silveradeptLet us begin with the formal dissolution of NaNoWriMo, after several bad decisions, scandals, and questionable alliances had many of the participants moving away from the official forums or having official affiliations with the group.
musesfool gives us a poem from Barbara Jane Reyes that is a prayer to the Goddess of Lost Things, but the things that are lost are not merely the things that are physical, and several of the lost things are misplaced at a time where they are needed.
Social media influencers and thrill-seekers are still attempting to make contact with isolated peoples that have expressed a wish to stay isolated. Because the clicks and the potential revenue are worth more than the violation of international treaty, right? Or the possibility of bringing a disease with you that the isolated people have no defense against.
Obscenely wealthy person plans on going to another country because she's no longer getting a tax-preferred status, tries to soften the headline by claiming she'd be happy to pay more tax to maintain her preferred status.
There are burgeoning services for Catholic parishes, dioceses, and schools, to help make sure there isn't financial malfeasance and to give transparency and communication between clergy and laity to make those places work better for everyone. A far cry, indeed, from the Church that expected the laity to attend, say the appropriate prayers at the appropriate time, and otherwise just trust that the men who were priests and administrators were going to do well with it, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
There are a lot of people out there who want the "right" people to have more children, and to have designer babies, and while many of them are also allegiants of eugenetics, people who decry the presence of women in the workplace (or doing anything other than popping out babies and raising them), and ideologies that praise white culture over any and all others, most of them also don't have a thought in their heads about what it would take to actually successfully raise all those kids. They've gotten to "Well, women should do it, because the only women we want are women who will enjoy having and raising children," and they think that will be sufficient as a national policy. Unfortunately for them, history did not begin in the 1950s, and therefore what they believe is timeless and traditional is actually quite newfangled and not very good for a lot of the population.
The National Health Service of the UK has announced that emergency contraception will be available at all community pharmacies for no charge, so as to try and alleviate some of the effects of variations in access and cost. This goes with plenty of other contraception available for no charge through the NHS.
Microsoft employees who protested the company's involvement in allowing Israel to prosecute its war against Gaza received retaliation for their act, either being ordered to retire a few days earlier or fired from their position.
Those who committed terrible and heinous acts in the name of Nazi-ism in the United States draped themselves in both cross and flag, and the rhetoric of Nazis past looks and sounds extremely like the rhetoric of Nazis present. A fair number of white people, Christian or no, have not received any kind of education or understanding of whiteness, their role in it, how it shapes them, and all the things they need to understand before they can then set to the work of using their status and their religion to make their communities more equal and resist the influence of those who want to own and control everything. As a consequence for this, plenty of them are more than happy to claim to be Christians while espousing beliefs and "virtues" that are very much in line with the Nazis instead of the Christians. Their most recent sign that they are opposed to the values of the faith they wrap themselves in as disguise is their repeated insistence that empathy is vicious, rather than virtuous, and the teachings in the book about welcoming the stranger and treating the alien like one of your own are clearly wrong, despite coming from the mouths of people who are either the Deity Himself or those who are very clearly favored by Him.
That empathy is also seen as feminine and weak contributes to its rejection by people who want to present themselves and their lives as the machoest of macho, with no room for anything that even has the slightest possibility of the feminine, which they see as poisonous and destructive when it is anything other than wholly controlled and directed by them, the Great Men. When it fails, they will inevitably blame women or feminine things for forcing them into the rage and destruction that they engage in. But, along with this rage at the feminine is a piece that is both about conformity of image through the use of plastic surgery and conformity of thought, both in relation to the current administration's desires to ensure that time does not move forward into the future, but instead returns to a specific point of history and holds itself there against the reality of time moving forward and a piece about the specific decisions of image and of presenting a specific kind of image as a trap to keep people talking about the image instead of the entire apparatus behind it. There's an intentionality about how they want women to present themselves, which nicely works in with the racial power dynamics taught and internalized by white people. All women are supposed to give way to men and not try to exercise power over them, but white women are specifically given the exception when it comes to men seen as dangerous to her or lesser than her. The white women who are on board with the plans of the white men are given the option to mold themselves and their image as someone with power, but only when directed at brown men, Black men, poor men, imprisoned men, and other such situations where the woman is cosplaying and making sure that we all know her power is derived from white men, and not from any power of her own.
The American Library Association had joined a suit against the administration to prevent the dissolution of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which is frankly more action from ALA than I thought they would take on the matter. If they continue in this vein of actually defending themselves, libraries, and library workers, they might get themselves more support from people who aren't currently members.
The Governor of Maine did something that the current administrator cannot abide, in that she told him he was wrong and didn't bow down to him, and in revenge for this, he directed his government to go after her and the state in whatever way they could conjure a justification for. Because she supported the organization that said it would continue to allow transgender athletes to play on the correct teams, in defiance of an executive order seeking to silence and destroy any mention or presence of trans people at all.
There is no economic rhyme or reason to the tariffs that the current administration intends to impose outside of some laughably bad maths, because they are a protection racket, with the expectation that businesses and others will run to the administration to seek waivers of the tariffs, and thus be required to do whatever the mob boss in charge wants to receive his favor. Or, at least, the protection racket is part of it, but don't discount the sheer inability to understand, formulate rational beliefs and act on them, or otherwise actually bring logic and smarts to the situation. It still produces foolish decisions and tariff percentages to small nations that don't do a lot of importing from the United States.
Because it isn't actually a policy matter, naturally, the cronies in the House of Representatives made sure that there would be no way accountability could be demanded from the Congress on these matters, by declaring that the rest of this Congressional year shall only count as a single day for the provisions that would allow the Congress to act on the tariffs in an expedited fashion after fifteen days had passed. (The both-sides-ness at the end says the Democrats acted in a similar manner to stop Paul Gosar from giving the Republicans the ability to declare the actual national emergency of SARS-CoV-2 over long before it actually is. It happened anyway, because nobody wanted to do what was necessary to actually get the thing handled, but the Republicans were always trying to get it declared over so they could force everyone to go back to work and to mandate that nobody had to or was allowed to protect themselves against the virus.) Because it's not a policy matter, most people were betting that the landscape would change before anything that would be an investment on that landscape came to fruition.
Once it came to seeing who would need to blink, the administration blinked, dropping their tariff rates down, except on China, who they tried to squeeze even harder. But they certainly tried to make everyone do what they wanted with the threat of tariff. As is proper for such demands, others laughed in their faces about it.
Florida has joined the federal government in trying to get rid of as many people who don't look sufficiently white, and also believe that houses of worship are acceptable targets for raids. Religious organizations, and those churches who have not abandoned their teachings, can do quite a bit to close their doors to raids and to keep their people protected from being swept up in parking lots or just outside their places of worship.
The current administration is revoking the student visas of students in the United States, but they are not bothering to tell the students that they've had their visas revoked, so that immigration agents can arrest them for not having left the country when their visa was expired. The students are learning of their new statuses either by being kidnapped by agents or if their school runs a check to make sure all of the students still have their visas. By not telling the student, of course, they avoid having the student contest the revocation, and also, they avoid having any other institution come to the student's aid or do pesky things like get court orders demanding they not be disappeared.
Recall, as well, that the current Justices of the Supreme Court, save Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, explicitly set up this dictatorial scheme by refusing to acknowledge the explicit law that demanded accountability for a man trying to prevent the transfer of power to his lawfully elected opponent. By doing so, they paved the way for him to return to power and to treat his office as if he were sovereign and imperial, rather than as an elected and accountable head of the executive. And therefore, we can accuse them of consistency when all of the justices, save Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson, and Coney Barrett, said the administration was allowed to declare people enemies and expel them from the country, even though they claimed to be putting limits on how the power is used and how someone must be notified that they are going to be removed. The justices of the majority sidestepped the issue of whether the law being used and the purpose for which the law is being used are valid, instead claiming that the wrong venue was sought and granted for the challenge to the laws. So the plaintiffs have to do it all over again in a different court, and all the while, the administration continues to act as if they are unconstrained by such things as the laws they are trying to invoke upon others. The current head of deportation would like to see his operation work with the same efficiency, ubiquity, and recognizability as Amazon.
They are the kind of people who will kidnap children from a school visit, based on an overbroad warrant that did not name them specifically as persons to be seized and was, in fact, about CSAM and a different person. More than 1,000 people in the community rallied for the return of the kidnapped mother and children, and the principal of the students called for their return to school, disclaiming that they had done anything wrong. (I saw elsewhere on socials that continuing to perpetuate the idea that there are "criminals" that it is okay to get rid of and "not-criminals" that is isn't perpetuates the power of deportation authorities, rather than demanding that this relatively recent agency created to inflict cruelty be disassembled in its entirety and its powers revoked so that no person, regardless of their "criminality," is subjected to their cruelty.)
They are the kind of people who will deport those who have served in the military, so clearly that "losers and suckers" comment about people who serve in the military holds much more weight and truth than the administrator ever claimed it did.
And, of course, once someone has been disappeared to another place, the administration claims that even if they've been ordered by the Court to find and return someone to the United States to receive their proper due process as a citizen, they can't do anything about it without the assistance and permission of the government where the foreign prison is, because, oops, that citizen is beyond United States jurisdiction now. (Contradicting what they said a few days ago about how they could order such a return.) When pressed on the matter, the lies compounded and the administration claimed that the Court didn't order what it did, and that their hands were tied about getting someone back who had been wrongfully sent, and that they were more than ready to disappear others deemed problematic under the same ideas, whether to foreign places or to camps in the United States. These are not lies of deception, these are lies of power, patently untrue things said with the implication or the outright statement, "What are you gonna do about it, huh?"
To continue in their monstrous attempts to get people who aren't white to leave the country, people with no business touching Social Security data have demanded that certain people be declared administratively dead to cut them off from most functions of society, and then physically assaulted the people who refused to allow them to modify the databases to put people who are clearly alive in the dead category. That all of this is contrary to law is not a thing that will stop them, of course, because they believe they are the law and there is no entity that will constrain them.
The company that is currently selling what the government is using as facial recognition along with their surveillance technology has always been about making sure that liberals and immigrants get punished and people get easily doxxed for being in public. All, of course, to be used without any kind of court order or warrant needed, since it's theoretically all "public" information being used and compared to whatever surveillance collects.
The administration also believes they can demand all energy-related regulations now have automatic sunset provisions attached to them, and that any regulation not examined and renewed will be repealed, which has wide and far-reaching effects on regulations regarding clean air, clean water, keeping natural spaces clean, and other such things that will probably be derided as tree-hugging hippie-ism or something similar. It is, of course, illegal to dispel regulations that are established and required by statute without the appropriate processes, but we also know that these people regard process as impediment and something they can ignore in favor of moving fast and breaking stuff so that it can either stay broken or be reconstituted in a much more friendly manner to them.
At least there's something there about how the boys who keep strongarming their way into government systems are being audited for how they've used and safeguarded the data they have no business having.
The current administration issued a threat that the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum remove any mention of trans women from their exhibits or face the loss of any federal funding, a threat repeated and issued to others as well, claiming that the acknowledging the existence of trans people is "improper ideology" that is inconsistent with their ideological pronouncements and executive orders. They're not quite to the point of seizing books from bookstores and confiscating them for having improper ideology, but they're certainly at their best in trying to destroy, erase, or get other people not to carry things or publish things that contain the "forbidden" ideology. The hard part is, of course, is that if you know how to look in an art museum, or any other kind of museum, you can see that all of the exhibits are suffused with love and hate and all the complexities of being a country, of being people, and of how people relate to other people and to their country.
Despite all the reasons that there are for opposing this administration's decision-making about everything in the country and the world, (or nearly everything), the one that might stick the most effectively is that they're doing things that are against the interests of big business and what capital wants to do with the world. If they were doing it deliberately as a way of trying to create a socialist paradise or something, that might be one thing, but they're doing it to establish dictatorship and rule by gangsters and hucksters. Doing what they are doing is making the stock market crash, which would presumably mean that several members of the capital-owning class should be getting on the administration's case out of their own self-interest.
As one might expect, several protests from the population have happened over these and all the other foolish decisions they have made. And they were sufficiently prepared that downloadable, printable signs were available that could then be affixed to poster board or other such things to carry and wave.
Senator Booker of New Jersey held the Senate floor for more than 25 hours in rebuke to the current administration, surpassing a previous record held by a segregationist. One could hope that his opposition would be moved to right action, whether by inspiration or by shame at having been taken to task so thoroughly, but they routinely turn out to be unashamed of what they do.
And, of course, there are all the lawsuits currently underway against many of the actions this administration has taken or ordered be taken by departments that answer to the executive.
Because of all of that obvious, vocal, un-dismissable opposition going on, the administration and the unelected campaign donor had to resort to calling all of those people paid actors, "puppets," or otherwise deny the reality in front of their faces that they're not actually as popular or as morally right as they claim to be.
the person who founded (but does not currently own) the Pirate's Booty puffed snacks declared himself the winner of an election in New York, demanded that he receive all the privileges of being mayor, and otherwise trying to tear apart the village he claimed to be mayor of. Despite losing the election badly. Well, if it works for the people at the federal level, why not try it at more local levels, right?
Despite the owner of Tesla funneling millions of dollars to her opponent, a Democrat-endorsed judge won an election to a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. Big mad is definitely happening because money did not buy the election's results.
Occasionally, someone gets the opportunity to move from helping the predators to helping people defeat the predators, and it improves their life significantly, even if it involves a major pay cut. Would that there were more, but it seems that the situation that caused the change of outlook was a change of circumstances brought on by the pause due to SARS-CoV-2, even if there may have been a little bit of conscience nibbling at the edges as well.
Further evidence for why the system of private insurers should be abolished: the actions of Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Louisiana, which incorporated tactics as authorizing procedures without guaranteeing they would pay for them, and finding ways and methods to delay paying claims and to pay less than needed for them. A jury has recently found that Blue Cross's actions were fraudulent and awarded more than $400 million USD in penalty for them, but there's still plenty of other cases and insurers out there who are likely doing the same thing, because denial and delay of care means greater revenues for the organization, regardless of whether you feel that health care organizations making profit is already ghoulish.
Road patrols for toads, newts, frogs, and other amphibians, keeping the roads closed while the breeding season is on and helping the amphibians get to their breeding body of water.
In technology, the SyncUP app that T-Mobile markets to parents as a way of keeping track of their children malfunctioned and started showing some people the names, pictures, and precise locations of other, random children instead of their own.
Commercial ancestry corporations are telling people they're the "direct descendant" of some of the remains they may have sampled DNA from and published the results of, which might be true, but makes the person one of many potential such descendants, and a lot of those descendants are now asking museums and other places about their alleged ancestor.
Microsoft has decided they've spent enough time out of the spotlight and are putting back in the privacy-enandgering Recall feature into Windows 11. Supposedly, it will ship turned off and require opt-in, but one person opting-in exposes all the people they contact interact with to having their data captured and mined.
The hype on LLMs and supposed artificial intelligence looks ready to burst, especially with the vicious undercut that the DeepSeek model's development and release provided to the idea that development of compute for LLMs and the like requires massive amounts of cutting-edge hardware. I personally would like to see the GPUs go back to being for people who want ridiculous power to play games with, rather than the bitcoin miners or the LLM developers. And that this bubble needs to burst so that people will stop hyping something that was never going to deliver on its promises, no matter how many resources you threw at it. That said, the piece itself contains Midjourney-generated images (and acknowledges this), so if you don't want to encourage that, you can skip the article entirely.
An enterprising group of hackers included sound bites when crosswalk buttons were pressed, with clips purporting to be Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg begging for attention or boasting about the success of their anti-social goals and the inevitability of having to accept their inferior and dangerous products.ckd pointed out some crosswalks in Seattle also had messages implanted in them, these ones claiming to be Jeff Bezos, pleading with people not to tax the rich on the passion of Seattle becoming a place everyone could afford to live in again. Once found and reported upon, the commentary was disabled, providing yet another reminder for people with large government contracts and influence, if not being part of the government themselves, not to conduct their official business over signal.
Last out for tonight, the trend of staying and living at your parents house for longer has been happening for quite some time, admittedly because there's less pressure for someone to leave and get an education, or to leave and put themselves into service in some other household. The people who are gung-ho about repealing child labor laws are probably hoping they can point to this kind of research and call it natural for children to go to work, never mind all the laws that are in place to prevent the exploitation of children and to make sure that they get enough sleep to go to their required schooling the next day.
And something to make you smile - a project to connect children to elders in Saidosho by turning the elders into trading card characters has worked extraordinarily well, with an entire TCG developing of these various community members and their skills.
(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.)
musesfool gives us a poem from Barbara Jane Reyes that is a prayer to the Goddess of Lost Things, but the things that are lost are not merely the things that are physical, and several of the lost things are misplaced at a time where they are needed.Social media influencers and thrill-seekers are still attempting to make contact with isolated peoples that have expressed a wish to stay isolated. Because the clicks and the potential revenue are worth more than the violation of international treaty, right? Or the possibility of bringing a disease with you that the isolated people have no defense against.
Obscenely wealthy person plans on going to another country because she's no longer getting a tax-preferred status, tries to soften the headline by claiming she'd be happy to pay more tax to maintain her preferred status.
There are burgeoning services for Catholic parishes, dioceses, and schools, to help make sure there isn't financial malfeasance and to give transparency and communication between clergy and laity to make those places work better for everyone. A far cry, indeed, from the Church that expected the laity to attend, say the appropriate prayers at the appropriate time, and otherwise just trust that the men who were priests and administrators were going to do well with it, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
There are a lot of people out there who want the "right" people to have more children, and to have designer babies, and while many of them are also allegiants of eugenetics, people who decry the presence of women in the workplace (or doing anything other than popping out babies and raising them), and ideologies that praise white culture over any and all others, most of them also don't have a thought in their heads about what it would take to actually successfully raise all those kids. They've gotten to "Well, women should do it, because the only women we want are women who will enjoy having and raising children," and they think that will be sufficient as a national policy. Unfortunately for them, history did not begin in the 1950s, and therefore what they believe is timeless and traditional is actually quite newfangled and not very good for a lot of the population.
The National Health Service of the UK has announced that emergency contraception will be available at all community pharmacies for no charge, so as to try and alleviate some of the effects of variations in access and cost. This goes with plenty of other contraception available for no charge through the NHS.
Microsoft employees who protested the company's involvement in allowing Israel to prosecute its war against Gaza received retaliation for their act, either being ordered to retire a few days earlier or fired from their position.
Those who committed terrible and heinous acts in the name of Nazi-ism in the United States draped themselves in both cross and flag, and the rhetoric of Nazis past looks and sounds extremely like the rhetoric of Nazis present. A fair number of white people, Christian or no, have not received any kind of education or understanding of whiteness, their role in it, how it shapes them, and all the things they need to understand before they can then set to the work of using their status and their religion to make their communities more equal and resist the influence of those who want to own and control everything. As a consequence for this, plenty of them are more than happy to claim to be Christians while espousing beliefs and "virtues" that are very much in line with the Nazis instead of the Christians. Their most recent sign that they are opposed to the values of the faith they wrap themselves in as disguise is their repeated insistence that empathy is vicious, rather than virtuous, and the teachings in the book about welcoming the stranger and treating the alien like one of your own are clearly wrong, despite coming from the mouths of people who are either the Deity Himself or those who are very clearly favored by Him.
That empathy is also seen as feminine and weak contributes to its rejection by people who want to present themselves and their lives as the machoest of macho, with no room for anything that even has the slightest possibility of the feminine, which they see as poisonous and destructive when it is anything other than wholly controlled and directed by them, the Great Men. When it fails, they will inevitably blame women or feminine things for forcing them into the rage and destruction that they engage in. But, along with this rage at the feminine is a piece that is both about conformity of image through the use of plastic surgery and conformity of thought, both in relation to the current administration's desires to ensure that time does not move forward into the future, but instead returns to a specific point of history and holds itself there against the reality of time moving forward and a piece about the specific decisions of image and of presenting a specific kind of image as a trap to keep people talking about the image instead of the entire apparatus behind it. There's an intentionality about how they want women to present themselves, which nicely works in with the racial power dynamics taught and internalized by white people. All women are supposed to give way to men and not try to exercise power over them, but white women are specifically given the exception when it comes to men seen as dangerous to her or lesser than her. The white women who are on board with the plans of the white men are given the option to mold themselves and their image as someone with power, but only when directed at brown men, Black men, poor men, imprisoned men, and other such situations where the woman is cosplaying and making sure that we all know her power is derived from white men, and not from any power of her own.
The American Library Association had joined a suit against the administration to prevent the dissolution of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which is frankly more action from ALA than I thought they would take on the matter. If they continue in this vein of actually defending themselves, libraries, and library workers, they might get themselves more support from people who aren't currently members.
The Governor of Maine did something that the current administrator cannot abide, in that she told him he was wrong and didn't bow down to him, and in revenge for this, he directed his government to go after her and the state in whatever way they could conjure a justification for. Because she supported the organization that said it would continue to allow transgender athletes to play on the correct teams, in defiance of an executive order seeking to silence and destroy any mention or presence of trans people at all.
There is no economic rhyme or reason to the tariffs that the current administration intends to impose outside of some laughably bad maths, because they are a protection racket, with the expectation that businesses and others will run to the administration to seek waivers of the tariffs, and thus be required to do whatever the mob boss in charge wants to receive his favor. Or, at least, the protection racket is part of it, but don't discount the sheer inability to understand, formulate rational beliefs and act on them, or otherwise actually bring logic and smarts to the situation. It still produces foolish decisions and tariff percentages to small nations that don't do a lot of importing from the United States.
Because it isn't actually a policy matter, naturally, the cronies in the House of Representatives made sure that there would be no way accountability could be demanded from the Congress on these matters, by declaring that the rest of this Congressional year shall only count as a single day for the provisions that would allow the Congress to act on the tariffs in an expedited fashion after fifteen days had passed. (The both-sides-ness at the end says the Democrats acted in a similar manner to stop Paul Gosar from giving the Republicans the ability to declare the actual national emergency of SARS-CoV-2 over long before it actually is. It happened anyway, because nobody wanted to do what was necessary to actually get the thing handled, but the Republicans were always trying to get it declared over so they could force everyone to go back to work and to mandate that nobody had to or was allowed to protect themselves against the virus.) Because it's not a policy matter, most people were betting that the landscape would change before anything that would be an investment on that landscape came to fruition.
Once it came to seeing who would need to blink, the administration blinked, dropping their tariff rates down, except on China, who they tried to squeeze even harder. But they certainly tried to make everyone do what they wanted with the threat of tariff. As is proper for such demands, others laughed in their faces about it.
Florida has joined the federal government in trying to get rid of as many people who don't look sufficiently white, and also believe that houses of worship are acceptable targets for raids. Religious organizations, and those churches who have not abandoned their teachings, can do quite a bit to close their doors to raids and to keep their people protected from being swept up in parking lots or just outside their places of worship.
The current administration is revoking the student visas of students in the United States, but they are not bothering to tell the students that they've had their visas revoked, so that immigration agents can arrest them for not having left the country when their visa was expired. The students are learning of their new statuses either by being kidnapped by agents or if their school runs a check to make sure all of the students still have their visas. By not telling the student, of course, they avoid having the student contest the revocation, and also, they avoid having any other institution come to the student's aid or do pesky things like get court orders demanding they not be disappeared.
Recall, as well, that the current Justices of the Supreme Court, save Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, explicitly set up this dictatorial scheme by refusing to acknowledge the explicit law that demanded accountability for a man trying to prevent the transfer of power to his lawfully elected opponent. By doing so, they paved the way for him to return to power and to treat his office as if he were sovereign and imperial, rather than as an elected and accountable head of the executive. And therefore, we can accuse them of consistency when all of the justices, save Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson, and Coney Barrett, said the administration was allowed to declare people enemies and expel them from the country, even though they claimed to be putting limits on how the power is used and how someone must be notified that they are going to be removed. The justices of the majority sidestepped the issue of whether the law being used and the purpose for which the law is being used are valid, instead claiming that the wrong venue was sought and granted for the challenge to the laws. So the plaintiffs have to do it all over again in a different court, and all the while, the administration continues to act as if they are unconstrained by such things as the laws they are trying to invoke upon others. The current head of deportation would like to see his operation work with the same efficiency, ubiquity, and recognizability as Amazon.
They are the kind of people who will kidnap children from a school visit, based on an overbroad warrant that did not name them specifically as persons to be seized and was, in fact, about CSAM and a different person. More than 1,000 people in the community rallied for the return of the kidnapped mother and children, and the principal of the students called for their return to school, disclaiming that they had done anything wrong. (I saw elsewhere on socials that continuing to perpetuate the idea that there are "criminals" that it is okay to get rid of and "not-criminals" that is isn't perpetuates the power of deportation authorities, rather than demanding that this relatively recent agency created to inflict cruelty be disassembled in its entirety and its powers revoked so that no person, regardless of their "criminality," is subjected to their cruelty.)
They are the kind of people who will deport those who have served in the military, so clearly that "losers and suckers" comment about people who serve in the military holds much more weight and truth than the administrator ever claimed it did.
And, of course, once someone has been disappeared to another place, the administration claims that even if they've been ordered by the Court to find and return someone to the United States to receive their proper due process as a citizen, they can't do anything about it without the assistance and permission of the government where the foreign prison is, because, oops, that citizen is beyond United States jurisdiction now. (Contradicting what they said a few days ago about how they could order such a return.) When pressed on the matter, the lies compounded and the administration claimed that the Court didn't order what it did, and that their hands were tied about getting someone back who had been wrongfully sent, and that they were more than ready to disappear others deemed problematic under the same ideas, whether to foreign places or to camps in the United States. These are not lies of deception, these are lies of power, patently untrue things said with the implication or the outright statement, "What are you gonna do about it, huh?"
To continue in their monstrous attempts to get people who aren't white to leave the country, people with no business touching Social Security data have demanded that certain people be declared administratively dead to cut them off from most functions of society, and then physically assaulted the people who refused to allow them to modify the databases to put people who are clearly alive in the dead category. That all of this is contrary to law is not a thing that will stop them, of course, because they believe they are the law and there is no entity that will constrain them.
The company that is currently selling what the government is using as facial recognition along with their surveillance technology has always been about making sure that liberals and immigrants get punished and people get easily doxxed for being in public. All, of course, to be used without any kind of court order or warrant needed, since it's theoretically all "public" information being used and compared to whatever surveillance collects.
The administration also believes they can demand all energy-related regulations now have automatic sunset provisions attached to them, and that any regulation not examined and renewed will be repealed, which has wide and far-reaching effects on regulations regarding clean air, clean water, keeping natural spaces clean, and other such things that will probably be derided as tree-hugging hippie-ism or something similar. It is, of course, illegal to dispel regulations that are established and required by statute without the appropriate processes, but we also know that these people regard process as impediment and something they can ignore in favor of moving fast and breaking stuff so that it can either stay broken or be reconstituted in a much more friendly manner to them.
At least there's something there about how the boys who keep strongarming their way into government systems are being audited for how they've used and safeguarded the data they have no business having.
The current administration issued a threat that the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum remove any mention of trans women from their exhibits or face the loss of any federal funding, a threat repeated and issued to others as well, claiming that the acknowledging the existence of trans people is "improper ideology" that is inconsistent with their ideological pronouncements and executive orders. They're not quite to the point of seizing books from bookstores and confiscating them for having improper ideology, but they're certainly at their best in trying to destroy, erase, or get other people not to carry things or publish things that contain the "forbidden" ideology. The hard part is, of course, is that if you know how to look in an art museum, or any other kind of museum, you can see that all of the exhibits are suffused with love and hate and all the complexities of being a country, of being people, and of how people relate to other people and to their country.
Despite all the reasons that there are for opposing this administration's decision-making about everything in the country and the world, (or nearly everything), the one that might stick the most effectively is that they're doing things that are against the interests of big business and what capital wants to do with the world. If they were doing it deliberately as a way of trying to create a socialist paradise or something, that might be one thing, but they're doing it to establish dictatorship and rule by gangsters and hucksters. Doing what they are doing is making the stock market crash, which would presumably mean that several members of the capital-owning class should be getting on the administration's case out of their own self-interest.
As one might expect, several protests from the population have happened over these and all the other foolish decisions they have made. And they were sufficiently prepared that downloadable, printable signs were available that could then be affixed to poster board or other such things to carry and wave.
Senator Booker of New Jersey held the Senate floor for more than 25 hours in rebuke to the current administration, surpassing a previous record held by a segregationist. One could hope that his opposition would be moved to right action, whether by inspiration or by shame at having been taken to task so thoroughly, but they routinely turn out to be unashamed of what they do.
And, of course, there are all the lawsuits currently underway against many of the actions this administration has taken or ordered be taken by departments that answer to the executive.
Because of all of that obvious, vocal, un-dismissable opposition going on, the administration and the unelected campaign donor had to resort to calling all of those people paid actors, "puppets," or otherwise deny the reality in front of their faces that they're not actually as popular or as morally right as they claim to be.
the person who founded (but does not currently own) the Pirate's Booty puffed snacks declared himself the winner of an election in New York, demanded that he receive all the privileges of being mayor, and otherwise trying to tear apart the village he claimed to be mayor of. Despite losing the election badly. Well, if it works for the people at the federal level, why not try it at more local levels, right?
Despite the owner of Tesla funneling millions of dollars to her opponent, a Democrat-endorsed judge won an election to a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. Big mad is definitely happening because money did not buy the election's results.
Occasionally, someone gets the opportunity to move from helping the predators to helping people defeat the predators, and it improves their life significantly, even if it involves a major pay cut. Would that there were more, but it seems that the situation that caused the change of outlook was a change of circumstances brought on by the pause due to SARS-CoV-2, even if there may have been a little bit of conscience nibbling at the edges as well.
Further evidence for why the system of private insurers should be abolished: the actions of Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Louisiana, which incorporated tactics as authorizing procedures without guaranteeing they would pay for them, and finding ways and methods to delay paying claims and to pay less than needed for them. A jury has recently found that Blue Cross's actions were fraudulent and awarded more than $400 million USD in penalty for them, but there's still plenty of other cases and insurers out there who are likely doing the same thing, because denial and delay of care means greater revenues for the organization, regardless of whether you feel that health care organizations making profit is already ghoulish.
Road patrols for toads, newts, frogs, and other amphibians, keeping the roads closed while the breeding season is on and helping the amphibians get to their breeding body of water.
In technology, the SyncUP app that T-Mobile markets to parents as a way of keeping track of their children malfunctioned and started showing some people the names, pictures, and precise locations of other, random children instead of their own.
Commercial ancestry corporations are telling people they're the "direct descendant" of some of the remains they may have sampled DNA from and published the results of, which might be true, but makes the person one of many potential such descendants, and a lot of those descendants are now asking museums and other places about their alleged ancestor.
Microsoft has decided they've spent enough time out of the spotlight and are putting back in the privacy-enandgering Recall feature into Windows 11. Supposedly, it will ship turned off and require opt-in, but one person opting-in exposes all the people they contact interact with to having their data captured and mined.
The hype on LLMs and supposed artificial intelligence looks ready to burst, especially with the vicious undercut that the DeepSeek model's development and release provided to the idea that development of compute for LLMs and the like requires massive amounts of cutting-edge hardware. I personally would like to see the GPUs go back to being for people who want ridiculous power to play games with, rather than the bitcoin miners or the LLM developers. And that this bubble needs to burst so that people will stop hyping something that was never going to deliver on its promises, no matter how many resources you threw at it. That said, the piece itself contains Midjourney-generated images (and acknowledges this), so if you don't want to encourage that, you can skip the article entirely.
An enterprising group of hackers included sound bites when crosswalk buttons were pressed, with clips purporting to be Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg begging for attention or boasting about the success of their anti-social goals and the inevitability of having to accept their inferior and dangerous products.
ckd pointed out some crosswalks in Seattle also had messages implanted in them, these ones claiming to be Jeff Bezos, pleading with people not to tax the rich on the passion of Seattle becoming a place everyone could afford to live in again. Once found and reported upon, the commentary was disabled, providing yet another reminder for people with large government contracts and influence, if not being part of the government themselves, not to conduct their official business over signal.Last out for tonight, the trend of staying and living at your parents house for longer has been happening for quite some time, admittedly because there's less pressure for someone to leave and get an education, or to leave and put themselves into service in some other household. The people who are gung-ho about repealing child labor laws are probably hoping they can point to this kind of research and call it natural for children to go to work, never mind all the laws that are in place to prevent the exploitation of children and to make sure that they get enough sleep to go to their required schooling the next day.
And something to make you smile - a project to connect children to elders in Saidosho by turning the elders into trading card characters has worked extraordinarily well, with an entire TCG developing of these various community members and their skills.
(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: 2025-04-17 06:21 am (UTC)Hacked crosswalk buttons have also come to Seattle with a Jeff Bezos impersonation:
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Date: 2025-04-17 07:19 pm (UTC)