Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2025-05-17 01:28 pm
silveradept) wrote2025-05-17 01:28 pm
The usual amount of strange things in place - Early May 02025
Let us begin with continuations in the war against the public receiving accurate, unbiased information. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was told it would receive zero support from the U.S. government, in the same veins of executive orders that proclaim that the executive has the real power of the purse and Congressional appropriations and their amounts mean nothing to his whims. Like other such orders, the actual validity and power of the executive to do this is suspect at best and nonexistent in reality. And, of course, there's always a group of ghouls ready to step in and take over - A spokesmodel for the administration said the conservative propaganda network OAN would take over providing content for Voice of America broadcasts. Swift backlash about the degraded quality and obvious partisan slant of OAN followed from those who actually understand and know what Voice of America broadcasts were supposed to do.
A federal judge granted an injunction against the current administration's intent to zero out the funding of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. With the news, coming just a little after the person currently in charge of IMLS indicated he wanted libraries to be an essential part of propaganda efforts, and strongly suggesting that the people suing would win their case on the merits, there is now flux on funding, but also, a need to have Congresscritters continue to insist upon a budget that contains funds for IMLS in fiscal year 2026.
The administrator dismissed the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, by e-mail after the injunctions were announced, because of pressure against her by people who think that a Black woman is completely unqualified to do anything that might have white people subordinate to her, and possibly in petty revenge for being told no that he couldn't simply zero out the IMLS budget. When questioned on the matter, a spokesmodel for the executive proclaimed that Dr. Hayden was involved in unacceptable DEI and in promoting harmful materials to children, proving that the spokesmodel and her bosses have zero idea of what the Library of Congress actually does.
The Copyright Office dropped a pre-print of a report that excoriated LLMs and is poised to rule that the widespread copyright violation and stealing of copyrighted works involved in creating datasets for LLMs are, in fact, widespread copyright violations and not simply the cost of doing business. Almost immediately after, the administration dismissed the Register of Copyrights, which could be merely convenient timing or could also be a revenge firing for the Copyright Office telling all the techbros that they do have to respect the copyright law and the copyrights of the people they're stealing from.
Persons appointed by the Executive who claim to be the new Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights were turned away by the actual interim Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights and the staff of the Library of Congress. Because those people who were supposedly appointed are very likely not to be the people in the job according to statute.
All of these actions, however, are things that the Congress could possibly assert that it, nor the Executive, have exclusive or primary control over, and therefore tell the Executive to pound sand. This, however, requires a Congress that actually wants to maintain its independence, rather than functioning as the Duma of the United States.
Keep your fear small, and your love big, and you will defeat those who would have it the other way around.
A very large Data Broker Opt-Out List, so that you can try to have your personal information erased from as many places as want to sell it to others.
There is a new Pope, and Leo XIV appears to be moving in the same direction as Francis did before him. Whether that bodes good, ill, or something mixed, is yet to be seen. But it looks like he's a Pope who wants to take on the difficult problem of the heresy flourishing in the United States that wants to subordinate the commands of Catholicism to temporal and political allegiances and concerns.
If you live in a place where trans people are being targeted, especially if they're being targeted for bathroom usage, wearing materials that makes the bathroom police think you're trans can create chaff for their attack patterns. And then, if you get targeted, you can then follow up and explain that you were accosted by someone and that your patronage can go elsewhere if this business continues to allow people who have no business policing genitals to do so. Store heads have said they're not going to go along with the UK Supreme Court ruling, and the English and Scottish Football Associations are taking significant heat for banning trans women as players from their organizations.
The leader of the Greens explains how the decision very easily gives power and authority to bigots and to those who self-appoint themselves to enforce that bigotry, while also criticizing the way that the government has been failing on providing actual help for women's health issues. 21 Members of the parliament in Westminster signed their names to a motion to support the rights of trans persons, as a start to a period in time where the history of trans people is in focus. Where you learn that there was a trans panic in the 1970s, and the panic people lost, and that there was a trans panic in the 1990s, and the panic people lost again, and it's unlikely that this panic is going to turn out any differently.
Political parties in the UK have been told they may not participate in four of the biggest Pride events of this year, a completely logical and suitable punishment for their unwillingness to speak out and fight against the transmisia present in the country.
A Boston hotel threw a woman out of the women's restroom on the accusation that she was a man, and then tried to change the story to be that there were two people in the same women's stall instead, realizing that overt transphobia generally produces backlash. The hotel has at least admitted they made a mistake and are trying to make it up to the community. But someone summoned the guard because they thought a (trans) man was in the women's room, and the guard acted on that information rather than telling the transphobe to chill out. As has been noted in this and many other places, the transphobia never stays on the trans people. Everyone who is too far away from someone else's definition of a "woman" ends up under suspicion and gets accused. (Which almost always hits the butches and the athletes harder than the high-femme women.)
Remember that the ways that the fascists gain power and exercise their power is by hurting and scapegoating marginalized people, like sexual minorities. People like to remember that they beat the Nazis, but they don't particularly like being told that they're allowing the circumstances where they'd have to beat the Nazis again.
cosmolinguist offered a friend's post about a workshop for cisgender people to think deeply about their gender, their concept of gender, and their expression of gender. The original post was dismissed as "drunk thoughts," but the idea is solid and the questions asked are important. The most difficult part of such a workshop, in my opinion, would be making sure that it was taken seriously, and that those who were flippant about it because they didn't want to take it seriously, not because flippant about gender was their serious answer to the questions, would have to go through it as many times as it took for them to actually do the introspective work. Because going through life as the unmarked default and then being asked to consider the fact that you are the unmarked default and to put more thought into your choices and justifications tends to make hegemons defensive and uncooperative.
People who cloak themselves in the mantle of being in favor of people living are continuing to condemn tens of millions to death because they believe that the money spent on aid to other places should be better spent lining their own pockets.
A federal judge has ruled (and reinforced) that the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants without due process, based on an unsubstantiated allegation that they're members of a gang, exceeds the statutory authority of the law and of the executive. In one of the cases where the government has kidnapped a person on a visa and held her because she authored an op-ed that was critical of government policy, a judge ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk and denied any restrictions on her ability to travel, and took the government to task for presenting a barely-there case as to why they should be allowed to use masked, un-uniformed agents to kidnap people for protected speech and then try to prevent her from being able to contest her own kidnapping in court.
This administration continues to grandstand, even against the unanimous order of the Supreme Court, and claim that they are in compliance with court orders even as they refuse to do what those court orders demand of them. In any other scenario, the people exhibiting such contempt would long since have been held in contempt of the court, but apparently there's nobody yet willing to issue that order for arrest or for assigning a minder to the person in the administration to ensure they do what they have been ordered to do and that they are redirected back to what they have been ordered to do every time they attempt to do something else.
Because they have not been summarily defeated and then have that defeat immediately enforced upon them in ways that they cannot try to wriggle out of, the administration believes they can start talking about taking away the right of people accused to challenge their accusers in court, so that not only can you be disappeared, you will never have a day in court to plead your case and possibly give others the opportunity to save you or find you an advocate for you. They will claim that extraordinary situations require them to suspend this bedrock principle, most likely based on a flimsy justification that the United States is being "invaded" by a South American country, or a Central American one, and that the "invasion" is having gang members enter the country at the direction of the government of the scapegoated country. And they will likely proceed with this, despite several legal authorities telling them that there's no justification to use this power nor an invasion that would trigger the suspension of the right to challenge an accuser in court. Because they are only following the courts when the courts give them justification and support for doing what they want to do anyway.
The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested by ICE in the process of attempting to perform an inspection of a detention facility that he claimed did not have correct occupancy permits to operate. He also attempted to join a Congressional delegation performing an unplanned visit for inspection and oversight, and the cops of the facility both arrested the mayor and roughly handled the Congresspersons. A very strong response for what should be a routine thing for these people, but I suppose that if they actually let the inspectors in and showed them around, it would mean admitting that there are people who have power over them and who can control them, if they choose to do so. Instead, they have expanded the possibility to charge one of the Congresspersons who was performing oversight duties over the facility. They very much want everyone to fear them and see them as entities who do not have to answer to anyone at all.
People defeated those who would ensure that any Black man would be marked as someone's runaway slave and brought back under unjust laws, even though those who would kidnap immigrants and anyone who looks like an immigrant believe themselves enforcing the law, and they often have people along who will not actively participate in the kidnapping, but who will stop you from preventing the kidnapping of others. Because they have been told that the kidnapping is legal, it doesn't require any documentation, that those carrying out the kidnapping can cover their identities, and it is their job to make sure none of this action that they are not participating in is impeded in any kind of way.
The person who is in charge of the health of the United States does not believe in germ theory, a cornerstone of medicine practice of this era, in favor of conspiracy theories. How much of that can be blamed on parasitic brain worms and how much can be blamed on having fallen prey to the conspiracies, we may never know. But it's still the case that the person in charge of health care in the United States does not believe in current practice, and while he doesn't believe in the imbalance of humors, he certainly does believe in hypotheses that don't bear out, and that leads him to recommend ineffective things to treat diseases and to disparage things that are effective in treating diseases. (Like vaccination.)
This same Health and Human Services Department has released recommendations saying that transgender youth are simply wrong in the head and need therapy to accept their proper gender instead of accessing resources to help them transition to their correct gender. This runs contrary to the American Medical Association and the WPATH guidelines, but is entirely on point for a government that has decided that trans people are a political ideology, instead of real people. (And in doing so, wildly exaggerate what kind of treatments trans youth are receiving and how many of them are doing so.)
The Department of Agriculture is apparently cooperating with the unelected wrecking ball attackers and demanding that states give them information about who is using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or more colloquially, "food stamps"), including data such as Social Security Numbers, home addresses, and citizenship status, no doubt with the idea of rooting out "waste and fraud," by which they mean, finding people to deport or trying to find justification for a belief that states are giving nutritional assistance and other benefits primarily to non-citizens and those who are not eligible for the program. The data requested, however, has little to do with finding waste, fraud, and abuse, and seems more tailored toward trying to find people to deport or intimidate.
The flailing about regarding tariffs is coming home to the ports, which expect and will see much less activity as it becomes exceedingly difficult to import goods over the duties imposed on those who would do so. And while the person overseeing the execution of those duties says the dream of prosperity for all is not based upon inexpensive goods, when you look at what they're doing, it looks far more like the plan is to make the rich even richer and tell the rest of us that we're going to be poor, laboring in factories (likely with inadequate worker protections,) and like it. The people who are claiming they can create a new Golden Age are instead the people who are trying to make a new Gilded Age instead.
In flagrant violation of the Emoluments Clause (again), the current administration is ready to accept a large jet from the royal family of Qatar, and believes they will then be able to outfit it into being Air Force One, and then gift it to the presidential library. The offices of legal interpretation for this administration have already drafted opinions and memoranda proclaiming that there's no violations or issues with accepting this gift and shuffling it along, because it's not a gift to an individual, and since there's no obvious quid pro quo, it can't be seen as a bribe either. I wonder how easy it would be for a 1L to tear apart that argument, but, of course, this administration's general attitude is "Try and stop us, if you can."
The state of Maine has prevailed against the federal government, settling a lawsuit with them that prevents the Department of Agriculture from withholding funds to the state for school lunches because Maine permits trans athletes to compete in their proper divisions. There's another lawsuit on the same subject ongoing threatening to pull their education dollars instead, so Maine is not free of being bullied by the government.
This administration is also hostile to the idea of consumers having an advocate in government for them against predatory financial practices, as it continues to try and defund and fire the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau along with so many other agencies of the federal government.
The ersatz Signal clone used by at least one administration official apparently sends message archives in plaintext and without any end-to-end encryption, meaning that anyone who wanted to listen in certainly could if they knew what to intercept. And also, apparently, the archive servers themselves were not particularly well-guarded against intrusion. It would make much more sense for government officials to use real encrypted devices and applications, but there's a cavalierness with secrets and the like that comes from the top down in this administration.
Having been told by the State of Utah that nobody in the state is allowed to fly "unofficial" flags, like Pride flags, the city of Salt Lake gave them a triple middle finger salute by adopting three new official flags with the color and design of trans pride, the progress pride flag, and a Juneteenth flag.
And because he feels he doesn't have much more important things to do, the administrator is trying to threaten musicians to stop having political opinions on their overseas music tours. Because he's very secure in his ability to take criticism.
Excerpts from a book about purity culture that showcase just how difficult a job it is to transition from a completely "pure" and nonsexual being into a sexual being, having not received any explicit instruction in the matter nor getting any support about making sex enjoyable and pleasurable after they start. Put next to a post about a book that talks about the experiences of church camp, their formulas, and the ways that seeing it play out again and again often left someone desperate for the feeling or sensation or the a-ha moment. There are a fair number of philosophies and philosophers, religious or otherwise, who are fairly adamant about how waiting for the one moment of certainty, or revelation, means that you will be missing out on all the other things that you need to do. (And also, reading this made me pat my younger self on the head for walking away from the Boy Scout entertainment program and back to my tent when it changed from silly skit comedy to the kind of altar call evangelical Christianity that church camp would be about. Younger me saw what was coming and didn't want to partake.)
As we knew from ELIZA forward, people will use LLMs and chatbots as communication partners, even when those communications can be used to feed into breaks with reality and permit them to endure and strengthen themselves. Because a convincing enough chatbot, and especially one programmed to give positive, encouraging results, is the perfect partner for getting reinforcement that your way of looking at the world is correct and all others are not.
Men who want to blame their own failures in love and dating on other men's bodies and women's attitudes toward them refuse to believe women when they express a preference for one body type over another, because they've convinced themselves that they know what the objective reality of the world is and nothing, not even the explicit expressed interests of the women they're supposedly trying to get with, can change their mind from what they believe in a bone-deep manner. (My flirtation with those self-delusions has less to do with my body shape and more to do with the irrational belief that nobody actually likes nerdy people, despite all the evidence to the contrary that has already built up over time. I certainly don't consider myself someone who would work as the after in a Charles Atlas advertisement, but I've mostly decided that if I can't manage it on looks, then I have to go all in on wit, charm, and personality. Surprisingly, this turns out to have been a good decision.)
The titles of Miss and Mrs are historically used in very different connotations than current practice, including the possibility that "Miss" was once used to describe someone who was a mistress rather than simply an unmarried woman of certain status.
The actual evidence for psychedelic use among pre-colonial peoples is pretty scant, despite the near-ubiquity of a narrative that suggests substance use was a common shamanic practice among those peoples worldwide.
Western medicine is steeped in narrative, but in such a way that puts intense onus on the person experiencing pain and illness to craft their narrative in such a way that makes them seem "deserving" of what care they receive, and dismisses pain that doesn't come with a narrative as "chaos" that is distressing and makes the medic want to get rid of the chaos as soon as possible.
People caught trying to smuggle ants to then sell elsewhere.
In technology, I'm sure those DOGE boys are salivating at the prospect of having caused the air traffic control at Newark Airport to be unable to do its job due to radar and radio failures. This was not the first time this has happened recently, apparently, but any time that this happens, you want people to move immediately toward making it work again so that there aren't any other potential crashes or dead air in the airspace above an airport.
Device manufacturer implementations of Apple's AirPlay protocol may allow devices that use it to be hacked over their Wi-Fi connections, depending on whether the vulnerabilities under the name AirBorne have been patched out or software updated. Apple, for their part, has put out patches for the vulnerabilities, but it still relies on either manufacturers to put out updates or for consumers to update the firmware and code on their devices.
For as much as we want people to use Linux, if you are low-vision or blind, there's not good and easy way of ensuring that you have an accessible experience with Linux. Often because accessibility ends up being something that "other people" are responsible for, or the attitude that the people who need accessibility can patch it in themselves and that's the power of Linux. Except, of course, that this lack of accessibility prevents people form using and patching in things to Linux. (And they shouldn't have to do it themselves, either.) The sort of Franken-distribution described in this post is horrifying and definitely should not be something that has to be done just to get an accessible experience.
Sending authentication codes by SMS is not a great practice for security reasons, but doing so also assumes that cell service is sufficiently ubiquitous that nobody would have trouble receiving such messages. This is not always the case when you live in more rural areas. And while some of those elements might be convertible to app-based authentication, which instead assumes you have a phone capable of the app, some aren't.
Because someone needs to do it (and because playing Lube or Not Lube is often more terrifying than enticing), a review of various personal and sex toy lubricants and the best kinds of sex to engage in with them.
Going out for this post, the legacy of Dave Brubeck is in good music, yes, but also in a staunch refusal to allow segregation to break up his groups or to prevent Black people from enjoying jazz wherever in the venue they wanted to. (Older piece, but also, lots of people say May 4th, or 5/4 in the US nomenclature, is Dave Brubeck day, based on his iconic Take Five.)
A takedown of the Tesla Cybertruck that focuses entirely on how much it fails at being a truck, doing truck tasks, and fostering a healthy truck culture.
And Studio Ghibli releasing hundreds of images form their films for people to use within the boundaries of common sense and for individuals to further enjoy the films. Which is lovely, because of the lushness of the images in the films, but also because this is a continual shot against people using plagiarism machines to replicate their style (poorly.) and others who do not find these films worthwhile on their own
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
A federal judge granted an injunction against the current administration's intent to zero out the funding of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. With the news, coming just a little after the person currently in charge of IMLS indicated he wanted libraries to be an essential part of propaganda efforts, and strongly suggesting that the people suing would win their case on the merits, there is now flux on funding, but also, a need to have Congresscritters continue to insist upon a budget that contains funds for IMLS in fiscal year 2026.
The administrator dismissed the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, by e-mail after the injunctions were announced, because of pressure against her by people who think that a Black woman is completely unqualified to do anything that might have white people subordinate to her, and possibly in petty revenge for being told no that he couldn't simply zero out the IMLS budget. When questioned on the matter, a spokesmodel for the executive proclaimed that Dr. Hayden was involved in unacceptable DEI and in promoting harmful materials to children, proving that the spokesmodel and her bosses have zero idea of what the Library of Congress actually does.
The Copyright Office dropped a pre-print of a report that excoriated LLMs and is poised to rule that the widespread copyright violation and stealing of copyrighted works involved in creating datasets for LLMs are, in fact, widespread copyright violations and not simply the cost of doing business. Almost immediately after, the administration dismissed the Register of Copyrights, which could be merely convenient timing or could also be a revenge firing for the Copyright Office telling all the techbros that they do have to respect the copyright law and the copyrights of the people they're stealing from.
Persons appointed by the Executive who claim to be the new Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights were turned away by the actual interim Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights and the staff of the Library of Congress. Because those people who were supposedly appointed are very likely not to be the people in the job according to statute.
All of these actions, however, are things that the Congress could possibly assert that it, nor the Executive, have exclusive or primary control over, and therefore tell the Executive to pound sand. This, however, requires a Congress that actually wants to maintain its independence, rather than functioning as the Duma of the United States.
Keep your fear small, and your love big, and you will defeat those who would have it the other way around.
A very large Data Broker Opt-Out List, so that you can try to have your personal information erased from as many places as want to sell it to others.
There is a new Pope, and Leo XIV appears to be moving in the same direction as Francis did before him. Whether that bodes good, ill, or something mixed, is yet to be seen. But it looks like he's a Pope who wants to take on the difficult problem of the heresy flourishing in the United States that wants to subordinate the commands of Catholicism to temporal and political allegiances and concerns.
If you live in a place where trans people are being targeted, especially if they're being targeted for bathroom usage, wearing materials that makes the bathroom police think you're trans can create chaff for their attack patterns. And then, if you get targeted, you can then follow up and explain that you were accosted by someone and that your patronage can go elsewhere if this business continues to allow people who have no business policing genitals to do so. Store heads have said they're not going to go along with the UK Supreme Court ruling, and the English and Scottish Football Associations are taking significant heat for banning trans women as players from their organizations.
The leader of the Greens explains how the decision very easily gives power and authority to bigots and to those who self-appoint themselves to enforce that bigotry, while also criticizing the way that the government has been failing on providing actual help for women's health issues. 21 Members of the parliament in Westminster signed their names to a motion to support the rights of trans persons, as a start to a period in time where the history of trans people is in focus. Where you learn that there was a trans panic in the 1970s, and the panic people lost, and that there was a trans panic in the 1990s, and the panic people lost again, and it's unlikely that this panic is going to turn out any differently.
Political parties in the UK have been told they may not participate in four of the biggest Pride events of this year, a completely logical and suitable punishment for their unwillingness to speak out and fight against the transmisia present in the country.
A Boston hotel threw a woman out of the women's restroom on the accusation that she was a man, and then tried to change the story to be that there were two people in the same women's stall instead, realizing that overt transphobia generally produces backlash. The hotel has at least admitted they made a mistake and are trying to make it up to the community. But someone summoned the guard because they thought a (trans) man was in the women's room, and the guard acted on that information rather than telling the transphobe to chill out. As has been noted in this and many other places, the transphobia never stays on the trans people. Everyone who is too far away from someone else's definition of a "woman" ends up under suspicion and gets accused. (Which almost always hits the butches and the athletes harder than the high-femme women.)
Remember that the ways that the fascists gain power and exercise their power is by hurting and scapegoating marginalized people, like sexual minorities. People like to remember that they beat the Nazis, but they don't particularly like being told that they're allowing the circumstances where they'd have to beat the Nazis again.
cosmolinguist offered a friend's post about a workshop for cisgender people to think deeply about their gender, their concept of gender, and their expression of gender. The original post was dismissed as "drunk thoughts," but the idea is solid and the questions asked are important. The most difficult part of such a workshop, in my opinion, would be making sure that it was taken seriously, and that those who were flippant about it because they didn't want to take it seriously, not because flippant about gender was their serious answer to the questions, would have to go through it as many times as it took for them to actually do the introspective work. Because going through life as the unmarked default and then being asked to consider the fact that you are the unmarked default and to put more thought into your choices and justifications tends to make hegemons defensive and uncooperative.People who cloak themselves in the mantle of being in favor of people living are continuing to condemn tens of millions to death because they believe that the money spent on aid to other places should be better spent lining their own pockets.
A federal judge has ruled (and reinforced) that the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants without due process, based on an unsubstantiated allegation that they're members of a gang, exceeds the statutory authority of the law and of the executive. In one of the cases where the government has kidnapped a person on a visa and held her because she authored an op-ed that was critical of government policy, a judge ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk and denied any restrictions on her ability to travel, and took the government to task for presenting a barely-there case as to why they should be allowed to use masked, un-uniformed agents to kidnap people for protected speech and then try to prevent her from being able to contest her own kidnapping in court.
This administration continues to grandstand, even against the unanimous order of the Supreme Court, and claim that they are in compliance with court orders even as they refuse to do what those court orders demand of them. In any other scenario, the people exhibiting such contempt would long since have been held in contempt of the court, but apparently there's nobody yet willing to issue that order for arrest or for assigning a minder to the person in the administration to ensure they do what they have been ordered to do and that they are redirected back to what they have been ordered to do every time they attempt to do something else.
Because they have not been summarily defeated and then have that defeat immediately enforced upon them in ways that they cannot try to wriggle out of, the administration believes they can start talking about taking away the right of people accused to challenge their accusers in court, so that not only can you be disappeared, you will never have a day in court to plead your case and possibly give others the opportunity to save you or find you an advocate for you. They will claim that extraordinary situations require them to suspend this bedrock principle, most likely based on a flimsy justification that the United States is being "invaded" by a South American country, or a Central American one, and that the "invasion" is having gang members enter the country at the direction of the government of the scapegoated country. And they will likely proceed with this, despite several legal authorities telling them that there's no justification to use this power nor an invasion that would trigger the suspension of the right to challenge an accuser in court. Because they are only following the courts when the courts give them justification and support for doing what they want to do anyway.
The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested by ICE in the process of attempting to perform an inspection of a detention facility that he claimed did not have correct occupancy permits to operate. He also attempted to join a Congressional delegation performing an unplanned visit for inspection and oversight, and the cops of the facility both arrested the mayor and roughly handled the Congresspersons. A very strong response for what should be a routine thing for these people, but I suppose that if they actually let the inspectors in and showed them around, it would mean admitting that there are people who have power over them and who can control them, if they choose to do so. Instead, they have expanded the possibility to charge one of the Congresspersons who was performing oversight duties over the facility. They very much want everyone to fear them and see them as entities who do not have to answer to anyone at all.
People defeated those who would ensure that any Black man would be marked as someone's runaway slave and brought back under unjust laws, even though those who would kidnap immigrants and anyone who looks like an immigrant believe themselves enforcing the law, and they often have people along who will not actively participate in the kidnapping, but who will stop you from preventing the kidnapping of others. Because they have been told that the kidnapping is legal, it doesn't require any documentation, that those carrying out the kidnapping can cover their identities, and it is their job to make sure none of this action that they are not participating in is impeded in any kind of way.
The person who is in charge of the health of the United States does not believe in germ theory, a cornerstone of medicine practice of this era, in favor of conspiracy theories. How much of that can be blamed on parasitic brain worms and how much can be blamed on having fallen prey to the conspiracies, we may never know. But it's still the case that the person in charge of health care in the United States does not believe in current practice, and while he doesn't believe in the imbalance of humors, he certainly does believe in hypotheses that don't bear out, and that leads him to recommend ineffective things to treat diseases and to disparage things that are effective in treating diseases. (Like vaccination.)
This same Health and Human Services Department has released recommendations saying that transgender youth are simply wrong in the head and need therapy to accept their proper gender instead of accessing resources to help them transition to their correct gender. This runs contrary to the American Medical Association and the WPATH guidelines, but is entirely on point for a government that has decided that trans people are a political ideology, instead of real people. (And in doing so, wildly exaggerate what kind of treatments trans youth are receiving and how many of them are doing so.)
The Department of Agriculture is apparently cooperating with the unelected wrecking ball attackers and demanding that states give them information about who is using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or more colloquially, "food stamps"), including data such as Social Security Numbers, home addresses, and citizenship status, no doubt with the idea of rooting out "waste and fraud," by which they mean, finding people to deport or trying to find justification for a belief that states are giving nutritional assistance and other benefits primarily to non-citizens and those who are not eligible for the program. The data requested, however, has little to do with finding waste, fraud, and abuse, and seems more tailored toward trying to find people to deport or intimidate.
The flailing about regarding tariffs is coming home to the ports, which expect and will see much less activity as it becomes exceedingly difficult to import goods over the duties imposed on those who would do so. And while the person overseeing the execution of those duties says the dream of prosperity for all is not based upon inexpensive goods, when you look at what they're doing, it looks far more like the plan is to make the rich even richer and tell the rest of us that we're going to be poor, laboring in factories (likely with inadequate worker protections,) and like it. The people who are claiming they can create a new Golden Age are instead the people who are trying to make a new Gilded Age instead.
In flagrant violation of the Emoluments Clause (again), the current administration is ready to accept a large jet from the royal family of Qatar, and believes they will then be able to outfit it into being Air Force One, and then gift it to the presidential library. The offices of legal interpretation for this administration have already drafted opinions and memoranda proclaiming that there's no violations or issues with accepting this gift and shuffling it along, because it's not a gift to an individual, and since there's no obvious quid pro quo, it can't be seen as a bribe either. I wonder how easy it would be for a 1L to tear apart that argument, but, of course, this administration's general attitude is "Try and stop us, if you can."
The state of Maine has prevailed against the federal government, settling a lawsuit with them that prevents the Department of Agriculture from withholding funds to the state for school lunches because Maine permits trans athletes to compete in their proper divisions. There's another lawsuit on the same subject ongoing threatening to pull their education dollars instead, so Maine is not free of being bullied by the government.
This administration is also hostile to the idea of consumers having an advocate in government for them against predatory financial practices, as it continues to try and defund and fire the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau along with so many other agencies of the federal government.
The ersatz Signal clone used by at least one administration official apparently sends message archives in plaintext and without any end-to-end encryption, meaning that anyone who wanted to listen in certainly could if they knew what to intercept. And also, apparently, the archive servers themselves were not particularly well-guarded against intrusion. It would make much more sense for government officials to use real encrypted devices and applications, but there's a cavalierness with secrets and the like that comes from the top down in this administration.
Having been told by the State of Utah that nobody in the state is allowed to fly "unofficial" flags, like Pride flags, the city of Salt Lake gave them a triple middle finger salute by adopting three new official flags with the color and design of trans pride, the progress pride flag, and a Juneteenth flag.
And because he feels he doesn't have much more important things to do, the administrator is trying to threaten musicians to stop having political opinions on their overseas music tours. Because he's very secure in his ability to take criticism.
Excerpts from a book about purity culture that showcase just how difficult a job it is to transition from a completely "pure" and nonsexual being into a sexual being, having not received any explicit instruction in the matter nor getting any support about making sex enjoyable and pleasurable after they start. Put next to a post about a book that talks about the experiences of church camp, their formulas, and the ways that seeing it play out again and again often left someone desperate for the feeling or sensation or the a-ha moment. There are a fair number of philosophies and philosophers, religious or otherwise, who are fairly adamant about how waiting for the one moment of certainty, or revelation, means that you will be missing out on all the other things that you need to do. (And also, reading this made me pat my younger self on the head for walking away from the Boy Scout entertainment program and back to my tent when it changed from silly skit comedy to the kind of altar call evangelical Christianity that church camp would be about. Younger me saw what was coming and didn't want to partake.)
As we knew from ELIZA forward, people will use LLMs and chatbots as communication partners, even when those communications can be used to feed into breaks with reality and permit them to endure and strengthen themselves. Because a convincing enough chatbot, and especially one programmed to give positive, encouraging results, is the perfect partner for getting reinforcement that your way of looking at the world is correct and all others are not.
Men who want to blame their own failures in love and dating on other men's bodies and women's attitudes toward them refuse to believe women when they express a preference for one body type over another, because they've convinced themselves that they know what the objective reality of the world is and nothing, not even the explicit expressed interests of the women they're supposedly trying to get with, can change their mind from what they believe in a bone-deep manner. (My flirtation with those self-delusions has less to do with my body shape and more to do with the irrational belief that nobody actually likes nerdy people, despite all the evidence to the contrary that has already built up over time. I certainly don't consider myself someone who would work as the after in a Charles Atlas advertisement, but I've mostly decided that if I can't manage it on looks, then I have to go all in on wit, charm, and personality. Surprisingly, this turns out to have been a good decision.)
The titles of Miss and Mrs are historically used in very different connotations than current practice, including the possibility that "Miss" was once used to describe someone who was a mistress rather than simply an unmarried woman of certain status.
The actual evidence for psychedelic use among pre-colonial peoples is pretty scant, despite the near-ubiquity of a narrative that suggests substance use was a common shamanic practice among those peoples worldwide.
Western medicine is steeped in narrative, but in such a way that puts intense onus on the person experiencing pain and illness to craft their narrative in such a way that makes them seem "deserving" of what care they receive, and dismisses pain that doesn't come with a narrative as "chaos" that is distressing and makes the medic want to get rid of the chaos as soon as possible.
People caught trying to smuggle ants to then sell elsewhere.
In technology, I'm sure those DOGE boys are salivating at the prospect of having caused the air traffic control at Newark Airport to be unable to do its job due to radar and radio failures. This was not the first time this has happened recently, apparently, but any time that this happens, you want people to move immediately toward making it work again so that there aren't any other potential crashes or dead air in the airspace above an airport.
Device manufacturer implementations of Apple's AirPlay protocol may allow devices that use it to be hacked over their Wi-Fi connections, depending on whether the vulnerabilities under the name AirBorne have been patched out or software updated. Apple, for their part, has put out patches for the vulnerabilities, but it still relies on either manufacturers to put out updates or for consumers to update the firmware and code on their devices.
For as much as we want people to use Linux, if you are low-vision or blind, there's not good and easy way of ensuring that you have an accessible experience with Linux. Often because accessibility ends up being something that "other people" are responsible for, or the attitude that the people who need accessibility can patch it in themselves and that's the power of Linux. Except, of course, that this lack of accessibility prevents people form using and patching in things to Linux. (And they shouldn't have to do it themselves, either.) The sort of Franken-distribution described in this post is horrifying and definitely should not be something that has to be done just to get an accessible experience.
Sending authentication codes by SMS is not a great practice for security reasons, but doing so also assumes that cell service is sufficiently ubiquitous that nobody would have trouble receiving such messages. This is not always the case when you live in more rural areas. And while some of those elements might be convertible to app-based authentication, which instead assumes you have a phone capable of the app, some aren't.
Because someone needs to do it (and because playing Lube or Not Lube is often more terrifying than enticing), a review of various personal and sex toy lubricants and the best kinds of sex to engage in with them.
Going out for this post, the legacy of Dave Brubeck is in good music, yes, but also in a staunch refusal to allow segregation to break up his groups or to prevent Black people from enjoying jazz wherever in the venue they wanted to. (Older piece, but also, lots of people say May 4th, or 5/4 in the US nomenclature, is Dave Brubeck day, based on his iconic Take Five.)
A takedown of the Tesla Cybertruck that focuses entirely on how much it fails at being a truck, doing truck tasks, and fostering a healthy truck culture.
And Studio Ghibli releasing hundreds of images form their films for people to use within the boundaries of common sense and for individuals to further enjoy the films. Which is lovely, because of the lushness of the images in the films, but also because this is a continual shot against people using plagiarism machines to replicate their style (poorly.) and others who do not find these films worthwhile on their own
(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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Link typo in the lube review: "phallophilreviews" should be "phallophilereviews".
AG Bondi, who declared that Trump could accept the gift from Qatar, was previously a FARA-registered lobbyist being paid $115K per month to lobby Congress on behalf of (checks notes) Qatar. No conflict of interest there, obviously.
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And yes, no conflict of interest there, clearly. They say they're isn't one, so we're all supposed to believe we've always been at war with Eastasia.
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I hadn't heard about the Studio Ghibli thing, that's cool! I recently had a book of ours come back from a lend that was of SG images.
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The Ghibli pictures are beautiful and high resolution, so they'll make for great uses from the fans.
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The SMS link is broken, since it has "sns" in it, instead of "sms".
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Thanks for doing so, and for fixing the Slacktiverse post!