Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2025-05-31 12:39 pm
silveradept) wrote2025-05-31 12:39 pm
Arrival at the end of the month - Late May 02025
Let us begin with the people who will set you up with a sign with the phrase "In our America: All people are Equal; Love Wins; Black Lives Matter; Immigrants & Refugees are Welcome; Disabilities are Respected; Women are in Charge of their Bodies; People & Planet are Valued over Profits; Diversity is Celebrated." Or stickers. Or other such expressions of the phrase.
There's an entire trans-and-nonbinary cast production of Twelfth Night, with Sir Ian McKellen providing an opening for it, and they have livestream options (and access to the stream for up to two weeks after the performance) as well as the live performance one. July 25 is the day in question. Ticket tiers start at 10 GBP, so you may have to add in currency conversion and currency conversion fees to your ticket price.
One of the best parts of being a historian is when new evidence contributes more to a story thought finished. Sometimes people turn out to have evaded those who wanted them dead not just once, but twice. The history is there, often recorded somewhere, but it takes someone looking to find all of it.
What was believed to be a simple later copy of the Magna Carta has, after investigation and further scholarship, been verified as an original copy of the document. Which meant a lot of preservation, making things available, and then the scholars being able to use their technology and come to conclusions of originality. A lot of work, in other words, much of it done by people who may or may not receive any credit in the eventual paper written about it.
A list of "summer reads" produced for members of King Features Syndicate newspapers offered fifteen books by well-known offers, only five of which actually existed, and ten of which were clearly confabulated by a chatbot.
Fansplaining gives us a primer on the history and the significant rise in the Real Person Fanfiction corners of fandoms, and the often ugly collisions between those who are writing about fictional versions of celebrities, actors, musicians, and other figures on our screens regularly, and those who are looking for the secret truth that the people really are into each other more than they can let on. This is made more difficult in the Internet era, where there's a lot of access and behind-the-scenes material produced and released for the fans, and that makes it more difficult to find easy ways of knowing whether you're looking at someone who's working with a public persona and who's writing fic about the secret relationships they believe are right in front of us.
A paper of dubious scholarship and cherry-picked references gets a solid thrashing from members of the community in whose journal it was published, with questions for the publishers and organization about why they chose to accept and publish it in such a state, rather than reject or require strong revisions. Having read the offending paper, the thrashing is entirely deserved, and the questions for the editors who allowed it to be published in this state are also deserved.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that what books a public library carries in its collection are government speech, and therefore subject to being curated as any government employee likes without repercussions or First Amendment challenges. Which gives a massive amount of power to any library employee with collection responsibilities to shape the collection exactly as they desire, without having to worry about keeping collection balance or ensuring a diversity of viewpoint or any of those other things that are generally accepted principles of collection development. I look forward to the library that decides to remove every conservative author from their collection, the one that decides their collection will be composed sole of Black trans women, and the library that completely depopulates their religion section of everything that has to do with Christianity in it, and the courts siding with them based on this precedent, telling the people complaining that it's too bad they don't have a library whose values align with their own, but that book curation is government speech and they don't have standing to challenge it.
(This is a foolish ruling, and they should know better, but fascists and the fascist-friendly rarely believe that the tools they are building to enforce their will on others will be used equally as well to suppress them once they are no longer in power. Or once they're not sufficiently fascist to be in the in-group any more.)
Because they had been determined to be men by sex according to the UK Supreme Court ruling, and governments are going along with the farce, a group of topless trans women protested the decision outside the Scottish parliament building. Why topless? Well, men can't be sanctioned for being out in public topless. Only women. So when the protest also happened outside the English parliament building, the same logic applied. Mind, in the images of the protest, you can clearly see that the "female-presenting nipples" on the protesters have been blurred out, so the media coverage clearly believes they're women, even if the law does not.
The new pontiff did not make much time for the United States Vice President, instead choosing to focus his time and effort on more important things. I'm sure that he'll be turning his attention back to the United States soon enough, if what rahaeli posted about needing to stamp out the American Heresy is true and a priority for the new pontiff. But it will almost always be things that criticize the United States and attempt to bring their wayward Catholics back in line with the position of the Church and to have them expel the coziness they've had with people who want to use their Christianity as a political tool instead of a religious one.
Some good news: Mohsen Mahdawi, who had been detained by persons claiming to be immigration authorities based on protected speech, then released from their facility, graduated from Columbia University, and took the opportunity to lambast the administration of the university for giving in to the demands of this administration instead of standing up for academic freedom.
Some other good news: Punks know Nazis when they see them, and also know what to do with Nazis when they see them: kick them out.
Despite their insistence that changes in import duties do not actually work the way that changes in import duties work, this administration has to admit that consumers in the United States, and especially those who shop at Wal-Mart, will pay increased prices as Wal-Mart passes the costs of increased import duties onto the people purchasing the products at the store. As will basically any and all other entities who have import duties assessed to their products. Never ones to take accountability for it, however, they were quick to try and make everyone think about inflation under the last administration and suggest that is the real cause of increased prices.
Oh, yeah, and the continued demonstration that they have no idea how economics works, nor how sensible countries engage in a global economic forum, has resulted in the downgrading of the United States' credit rating, meaning more money will have to be paid in debt servicing in the future. This while they still continue to think of economic plans and budgets that are meant to bankrupt the poor and enrich the already impossibly wealthy through tax breaks and other giveaways.
Persons who have potential access to nonpublic information made trades and sales of securities in advance of government announcements that made the markets shift significantly. While there is no evidence that nonpublic information was used to determine the timing of the transactions, as is noted in the article, the mere appearance of people with the access making market moves anywhere near government action or announcements makes things look really bad and that the markets are not nearly as free as everyone pretends they are.
A political process has replaced the usual process for determining who is to be eligible for vaccination boosters and what targets the boosters should be formulated to fight, restricting the eligible persons to receive a SARS-CoV-2 vaccination to those over 65 years of age or with a very small list of possible conditions.
A report commissioned to parrot the beliefs of the current Health and Human Services Secretary has glaring errors of interpretation and cites papers that do not exist in its contents, even if the authors of those supposed papers do. Making up papers is one of the signs of the use of LLMs, of course, but, more importantly, in previous eras, if it had been determined that a major government publication had made such grievous and obvious errors, the persons responsible would be sacked, and the political appointees who allowed their agency's reputation to be tarnished so would resign their posts. Neither of those things has happened, and it's unlikely that either of them will, for this particular administration cares much more about whether or not we're saying what they want us to say, instead of whether we're saying accurate things.
Even so, when faced with the evidence that things as they were weren't working, and that a proven alternative was available, people took the matters into their own hands and got their children vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. Because most people are smart enough to realize that they want that protection for their little ones in the middle of an outbreak that could have been easily prevented.
A hacker who got into the archives of TeleMessage obtained significant data and metadata across various government agencies and contacts. An organization tasked with archival and retention of government records and communications is hopefully doing better about security choices for transmission and archiving than what TeleMessage did.
Lawyers for two immigrants deported to South Sudan, which is not the country the two men immigrated from, allege that the deportation happened in defiance and violation of court orders specifically prohibiting the administration from deporting people to countries not the ones they immigrated from. It's also not a coincidence that the countries that this administration seems interested in sending people to are places currently war-stricken or without stable and democratic government, so as to maximize their argument that the administration couldn't possibly go into such a hot area and retrieve the people they have allegedly illegally deported. These are people who believe they are the only people that matter, and their defiance should have them stripped of office and placed in prison immediately. Or perhaps sent on from here to the places where they wish to send others, if they are so insistent that they have the power to deport anyone they wish to anywhere they wish.
A white man who was well-integrated into his community and raising children was arrested and detained after a citizenship hearing, for a form that had apparently not been filed ten years earlier, and without any immigration official alerting him to the missing form, nor telling him of the removal order that had apparently been issued to him over the missing form four years after it was not filed. There's no criminal record, no violent conduct, no anything other than an arbitrary missing piece of paper that has resulted in an arbitrary detention. And, as usual, there's lots of people getting detained as they are showing up for appointments on the pathway toward citizenship, all to try and feed the ego of someone who wants to be seen as tough and to line the pockets of the private contractors who rake in big bucks from all these new detentions in their private prisons. A pastor, well-integrated into his community, and who presumably had protection against deportation, so long as he checked in with immigration officials, was detained and deported for being in the country, to feed the ego of a man who wants to be seen as tough on immigrants.
And sure, in these cases and places, you'll find a lot of people who voted for the egoist because of his promises and are now horrified to find out that they're arbitrary and are using the law as a club rather than as the scalpel they had promised or assumed would happen. But to reduce the suffering of another human or to say that they deserve what suffering they receive because of how they voted, or how the people around them voted, is to sink to the enemy's level, where he will beat you with experience and ruthlessness. The white man's story, the pastor's story, all the stories are indicative that this arbitrariness extends to all persons, whether they are "deserving" or no, and therefore the remedy to this arbitrariness must likewise extend to all persons, "deserving" or no. As has been said many times before by people wiser and more experienced than ourselves, our liberation is bound up in the liberation of others. Unless all are free, none are free. We cannot pick winners and losers, and all attempts to do so ultimately rebound and harm the people who have been trying to do the picking. Politicians promise the scalpel and wield the club, because they need to deliver on those promises in a big enough way that their voting base will continue to approve of them. And we're all eggs for their omelettes. If we haven't been cracked, it's because we're lucky, not because we're superior in any way.
That said, the persons involved in these renditions, arrests, and actions on behalf of the government are trying to pressure media outlets into not revealing their identities and naming them, because they believe that the agents of the government, acting in the name of the government, engaging in the priorities of the government, should be able to do all of this arresting and kidnapping and disappearing without anyone knowing who they are, and therefore appealing to their consciences about what they are doing. (Or making other appeals to get them to stop doing what they are doing, but appeals to conscience are usually the safe ones to make.) The fact that many of these agents already obscure their identities with masks and coverings is the clearest sign, perhaps, that they recognize what they are doing is at the least morally offensive, even if it is legally permitted, and therefore they wish to distance themselves from the accountability they richly deserve for participating in these actions.
The budget reconciliation bill, the supposed "big beautiful bill," in addition to the tax cuts meant to enrich the richest, and the provisions meant to bankrupt the poorest for it, also contains a provision saying that any contempt judgment against the administration is unenforceable unless the judge setting the bond does so with an actual amount the palintiffs have to pay up first. That provision passed, along with the rest of the giveaways to the rich, on a nearly party-line vote in the House of Representatives.
The head of the Columbia Broadcast System's News Department has resigned her position rather than be party to allowing the parent company, Paramount, to bribe the administration so that it will drop a frivolous lawsuit against the company. The parent company believes bribery is the appropriate action because they want to sell CBS to another company, and the sale has to be approved by federal regulators, who are currently headed by someone who could turn out to be someone set to make sure the bribes are paid appropriately and possibly other promises extracted before they will approve the sale.
And speaking of bribes, have a look inside the $400 million USD bribe being gifted to the Air Force to be fit into being an Air Force One vehicle…just in time to be donated to the presidential library and then used by the administrator, assuming he does leave office at his appointed time. Even with that timeline, however, orders were given to accept the bribe and begin work on renovating it.
Harvard University was able to successfully gain a temporary block of the administration's retaliation that removed them from the list of universities eligible to enroll and instruct students from other countries. This is definitely retaliation against Harvard for standing up to the administration and fighting them over matters regarding international students and the threats and practice against those international students, including disappearance and revocation of visas for those students expressing protected speech. And for expressing truthful and protected speech of their own.
Making J. Edgar Hoover spin in his grave in jealousy, the Peter Thiel company Palantir has supposedly been tasked with combining and aggregating data on persons in the United States, such that any government tough that wanted to access a dossier on any person could do so in a single place.
Another person granted pardon for their role in the insurrections against the lawful government of the United States has been arrested on a different criminal charge, this time alleged burglary.
The biggest donor to the Administration's election campaign has continually had a pharmacopeia of drugs, many of which would be in violation of policies for contractors and employees to actually be using, from the first day he arrived as a special government employee, according to reports. A different account that references the source story says the use of that pharmacopeia significantly increased during the election campaign in 2024, but stops short of saying that the increased use has carried over into his time in government.
The first instinct when you are caught in a situation is to try and break free with force. For many situations, this is the opposite of optimal. It may be the case that in the current situation of politics and existential threats, for many of us, the correct way of getting out is by changing how we struggle against the things that try to bind and harm us.
A member of the Michigan Republican party, advancing a bill that would demand women play on men's teams because of a determination made of them at birth through external observation, refused to disclose their assigned sex at birth or current gender identity when questioned about it. Another member of the party believed the question was inappropriate to ask of the sponsor of the bill and moved on swiftly, but it still remains that a fair number of people who want women to have to disclose their assigned sex at birth are unwilling to disclose theirs when asked.
The state of California has decided to join the ranks of the bullies and bar the sole trans athlete from the state championship she was slated to compete at, and in return for their cowardice, the federal Department of Justice is investigating them to try and find reasons to overturn the legislation that allowed girls and boys to play in their proper divisions, rather than requiring them to compete in an incorrect division. This is the part where you can deploy "play fascist games, win fascist prizes," because this was an entirely avoidable own goal, but California seems to be swinging much harder in the direction of Ronald Reagan's reign instead of the supposed Pacific Liberal-land that it has been painted as.
The state of Utah commissioned a report on trans care for under-18s so they could re-evaluate their ban on trans care for the under-18s after the report came into existence. It's here, and it says that banning trans care is a bad idea. The legislators responsible for the ban intend to fully ignore the report they commissioned, because it doesn't reinforce their predetermined conclusions. That's not surprising. But at least there's more evidence out there in the world that trans care is health care and should be provided.
The state of North Carolina, and the counties therein, have lessons to learn from the destruction and loss of life Hurricane Helene wrought on them. Most of those lessons are in making sure that the warnings are delivered on time and with the appropriate level of severity and in making sure that everyone knows what kinds of risks they have for landslides and other such things.
A police officer in Texas used shared databases of automatic license plate reading to try and find a woman that had gone through an abortion, searching in places where abortions are not outlawed. The sheriff said that the search was conducted because of concerns for the person who underwent the procedure, but made it very easy to see that even if politicians in various states proclaim they will not cooperate with law enforcement requests from other states asking for information on legal content in their state, the police officers do not always have to ask permission to get that information. So a real lack of cooperation would have to extend to data sharing across states, and no politicians would be willing to say they're for that, because that's a very easy "soft on crime" attack for their opponents.
According to a study, only one country could produce enough food to feed its entire population according to the specific diet the study used as a reference. Several other countries were able to produce enough for a majority of the reference diet's categories, and some were unable to do in any category, usually places in regions that have little to no arable land.
An explanation of why certain colors clash, which seems to be about being too close in hue and/or luminance to each other, without overlapping.
The RNIB offers a report about the difficulties that blind and low vision bus users have in finding an appropriate stop, knowing they're on the right route, getting the bus to stop for them, avoiding other passengers, navigating payment systems, and all of the other aspects of transit by bus.
A foolish man proposed to his girlfriend while she was running a marathon. First by phone, then in person, then in person again with his parents. All while she was trying to run a marathon. It should be no wonder that she broke up with him since he seemed to be unable to understand the problem with his proposal. Or with all the other men who make their proposals specifically at the points where the women in their lives are at the pinnacle of achievement.
In technology, Microsoft has joined other big e-mail providers in demanding specific records be properly formatted before it will allow mass e-mails (over 5,000 e-mails a day to their recipients) to go through, instead of being overtly rejected.
Additionally, Microsoft-owned Github wants to allow users to let the Copilot LLM generate bug report drek, which it will file on behalf of the user, and then wants developers to assign those bugs to Copilot so it can generate bug fixes for those reports. The obvious thing for this to do would be to have all LLM-generated bug reports assigned to the LLM to generate fixes for, and all of that action to be kept completely away from the projects that don't want anything like it to infest their code repositories. Of course, at least according to the article, Copilot doesn't identify itself in the bug report submissions, so it can't be filtered out so easily.
The Signal messaging platform, in response to the rollout of Recall, and the clear indication that Recall will still try to capture sensitive communications automatically, has deployed DRM calls that should make it so that Recall cannot capture the contents of Signal communication windows. Why DRM? Because Recall doesn't have any interface that Signal could use to register itself as an application to exclude from Recall's automatic screenshotting. So instead they have to use the same kind of technology that media companies deployed so that you couldn't screenshot or screen-record their media products. It's a clever solution, if one that shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
The government of Pakistan arrested a group that brazenly marketed itself as a cybercrime assistance group and that its tools were undetectable by most anti-malware items, and who had also identified themselves, let their primary domain lapse, and leaked information about their customers, so there's probably a lot of further information that can get used from their lack of operational security and smarts.
Voyager 1 continues on its journey after a risky thruster reboot and firing succeeded instead of creating an explosion. Because that venerable spacecraft is still ticking along, with engineers who are doing their very best to keep it going. They needed to get it done in time before the only telescope that can send a command and reach Voyager 1 went down for repairs itself. Hooray for engineering once again providing us with more data from our most distant probe. You can also compare it to yet another rapid unscheduled disassembly from the SpaceX corporation's Starship project, where they seem to be burning money to learn maybe a little more at a time.
A planet has been observed orbiting two stars, but doing so in a retrograde manner, which provokes all kinds of questions about how this arrangement came to be and is another example of the universe laughing at us when we think we have even a smidgen of understanding about how it works.
The first in a series where a fully blind user attempts to install and use Linux, with the consultation of a knowledgeable Linux person along the way. I expect there to be a lot of frustration, as accessibility is often an afterthought of an afterthought for many distributions.
Going out of this post, The Sesame Workshop has made a deal with Netflix to continue Sesame Street, allowing new episodes to premiere simultaneously on Netflix's streaming service and PBS stations (and the PBS Kids app.) The format of the show will be changing with the new season, but there's something fundamentally rotten at having had Sesame Street end up needing to make deals with a corporate partner for significant time, rather than being fully funded (including the research apparatus that helps keep Sesame Street educationally appropriate for the target audience) through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other public dollars for all of their runtime. Surely there's some fighter jet or tank that could be not built and that money appropriated for keeping a quality educational program on the airwaves, and to pay the researchers that help keep it quality.
Also, a primer on various possible motivations for people to be engaged in power-exchange scenes and relationships, written in such a way as to be useful for people who might want to be practitioners and also for those who want to write power exchange in their fictional endeavours.
(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.)
There's an entire trans-and-nonbinary cast production of Twelfth Night, with Sir Ian McKellen providing an opening for it, and they have livestream options (and access to the stream for up to two weeks after the performance) as well as the live performance one. July 25 is the day in question. Ticket tiers start at 10 GBP, so you may have to add in currency conversion and currency conversion fees to your ticket price.
One of the best parts of being a historian is when new evidence contributes more to a story thought finished. Sometimes people turn out to have evaded those who wanted them dead not just once, but twice. The history is there, often recorded somewhere, but it takes someone looking to find all of it.
What was believed to be a simple later copy of the Magna Carta has, after investigation and further scholarship, been verified as an original copy of the document. Which meant a lot of preservation, making things available, and then the scholars being able to use their technology and come to conclusions of originality. A lot of work, in other words, much of it done by people who may or may not receive any credit in the eventual paper written about it.
A list of "summer reads" produced for members of King Features Syndicate newspapers offered fifteen books by well-known offers, only five of which actually existed, and ten of which were clearly confabulated by a chatbot.
Fansplaining gives us a primer on the history and the significant rise in the Real Person Fanfiction corners of fandoms, and the often ugly collisions between those who are writing about fictional versions of celebrities, actors, musicians, and other figures on our screens regularly, and those who are looking for the secret truth that the people really are into each other more than they can let on. This is made more difficult in the Internet era, where there's a lot of access and behind-the-scenes material produced and released for the fans, and that makes it more difficult to find easy ways of knowing whether you're looking at someone who's working with a public persona and who's writing fic about the secret relationships they believe are right in front of us.
A paper of dubious scholarship and cherry-picked references gets a solid thrashing from members of the community in whose journal it was published, with questions for the publishers and organization about why they chose to accept and publish it in such a state, rather than reject or require strong revisions. Having read the offending paper, the thrashing is entirely deserved, and the questions for the editors who allowed it to be published in this state are also deserved.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that what books a public library carries in its collection are government speech, and therefore subject to being curated as any government employee likes without repercussions or First Amendment challenges. Which gives a massive amount of power to any library employee with collection responsibilities to shape the collection exactly as they desire, without having to worry about keeping collection balance or ensuring a diversity of viewpoint or any of those other things that are generally accepted principles of collection development. I look forward to the library that decides to remove every conservative author from their collection, the one that decides their collection will be composed sole of Black trans women, and the library that completely depopulates their religion section of everything that has to do with Christianity in it, and the courts siding with them based on this precedent, telling the people complaining that it's too bad they don't have a library whose values align with their own, but that book curation is government speech and they don't have standing to challenge it.
(This is a foolish ruling, and they should know better, but fascists and the fascist-friendly rarely believe that the tools they are building to enforce their will on others will be used equally as well to suppress them once they are no longer in power. Or once they're not sufficiently fascist to be in the in-group any more.)
Because they had been determined to be men by sex according to the UK Supreme Court ruling, and governments are going along with the farce, a group of topless trans women protested the decision outside the Scottish parliament building. Why topless? Well, men can't be sanctioned for being out in public topless. Only women. So when the protest also happened outside the English parliament building, the same logic applied. Mind, in the images of the protest, you can clearly see that the "female-presenting nipples" on the protesters have been blurred out, so the media coverage clearly believes they're women, even if the law does not.
The new pontiff did not make much time for the United States Vice President, instead choosing to focus his time and effort on more important things. I'm sure that he'll be turning his attention back to the United States soon enough, if what rahaeli posted about needing to stamp out the American Heresy is true and a priority for the new pontiff. But it will almost always be things that criticize the United States and attempt to bring their wayward Catholics back in line with the position of the Church and to have them expel the coziness they've had with people who want to use their Christianity as a political tool instead of a religious one.
Some good news: Mohsen Mahdawi, who had been detained by persons claiming to be immigration authorities based on protected speech, then released from their facility, graduated from Columbia University, and took the opportunity to lambast the administration of the university for giving in to the demands of this administration instead of standing up for academic freedom.
Some other good news: Punks know Nazis when they see them, and also know what to do with Nazis when they see them: kick them out.
Despite their insistence that changes in import duties do not actually work the way that changes in import duties work, this administration has to admit that consumers in the United States, and especially those who shop at Wal-Mart, will pay increased prices as Wal-Mart passes the costs of increased import duties onto the people purchasing the products at the store. As will basically any and all other entities who have import duties assessed to their products. Never ones to take accountability for it, however, they were quick to try and make everyone think about inflation under the last administration and suggest that is the real cause of increased prices.
Oh, yeah, and the continued demonstration that they have no idea how economics works, nor how sensible countries engage in a global economic forum, has resulted in the downgrading of the United States' credit rating, meaning more money will have to be paid in debt servicing in the future. This while they still continue to think of economic plans and budgets that are meant to bankrupt the poor and enrich the already impossibly wealthy through tax breaks and other giveaways.
Persons who have potential access to nonpublic information made trades and sales of securities in advance of government announcements that made the markets shift significantly. While there is no evidence that nonpublic information was used to determine the timing of the transactions, as is noted in the article, the mere appearance of people with the access making market moves anywhere near government action or announcements makes things look really bad and that the markets are not nearly as free as everyone pretends they are.
A political process has replaced the usual process for determining who is to be eligible for vaccination boosters and what targets the boosters should be formulated to fight, restricting the eligible persons to receive a SARS-CoV-2 vaccination to those over 65 years of age or with a very small list of possible conditions.
A report commissioned to parrot the beliefs of the current Health and Human Services Secretary has glaring errors of interpretation and cites papers that do not exist in its contents, even if the authors of those supposed papers do. Making up papers is one of the signs of the use of LLMs, of course, but, more importantly, in previous eras, if it had been determined that a major government publication had made such grievous and obvious errors, the persons responsible would be sacked, and the political appointees who allowed their agency's reputation to be tarnished so would resign their posts. Neither of those things has happened, and it's unlikely that either of them will, for this particular administration cares much more about whether or not we're saying what they want us to say, instead of whether we're saying accurate things.
Even so, when faced with the evidence that things as they were weren't working, and that a proven alternative was available, people took the matters into their own hands and got their children vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella. Because most people are smart enough to realize that they want that protection for their little ones in the middle of an outbreak that could have been easily prevented.
A hacker who got into the archives of TeleMessage obtained significant data and metadata across various government agencies and contacts. An organization tasked with archival and retention of government records and communications is hopefully doing better about security choices for transmission and archiving than what TeleMessage did.
Lawyers for two immigrants deported to South Sudan, which is not the country the two men immigrated from, allege that the deportation happened in defiance and violation of court orders specifically prohibiting the administration from deporting people to countries not the ones they immigrated from. It's also not a coincidence that the countries that this administration seems interested in sending people to are places currently war-stricken or without stable and democratic government, so as to maximize their argument that the administration couldn't possibly go into such a hot area and retrieve the people they have allegedly illegally deported. These are people who believe they are the only people that matter, and their defiance should have them stripped of office and placed in prison immediately. Or perhaps sent on from here to the places where they wish to send others, if they are so insistent that they have the power to deport anyone they wish to anywhere they wish.
A white man who was well-integrated into his community and raising children was arrested and detained after a citizenship hearing, for a form that had apparently not been filed ten years earlier, and without any immigration official alerting him to the missing form, nor telling him of the removal order that had apparently been issued to him over the missing form four years after it was not filed. There's no criminal record, no violent conduct, no anything other than an arbitrary missing piece of paper that has resulted in an arbitrary detention. And, as usual, there's lots of people getting detained as they are showing up for appointments on the pathway toward citizenship, all to try and feed the ego of someone who wants to be seen as tough and to line the pockets of the private contractors who rake in big bucks from all these new detentions in their private prisons. A pastor, well-integrated into his community, and who presumably had protection against deportation, so long as he checked in with immigration officials, was detained and deported for being in the country, to feed the ego of a man who wants to be seen as tough on immigrants.
And sure, in these cases and places, you'll find a lot of people who voted for the egoist because of his promises and are now horrified to find out that they're arbitrary and are using the law as a club rather than as the scalpel they had promised or assumed would happen. But to reduce the suffering of another human or to say that they deserve what suffering they receive because of how they voted, or how the people around them voted, is to sink to the enemy's level, where he will beat you with experience and ruthlessness. The white man's story, the pastor's story, all the stories are indicative that this arbitrariness extends to all persons, whether they are "deserving" or no, and therefore the remedy to this arbitrariness must likewise extend to all persons, "deserving" or no. As has been said many times before by people wiser and more experienced than ourselves, our liberation is bound up in the liberation of others. Unless all are free, none are free. We cannot pick winners and losers, and all attempts to do so ultimately rebound and harm the people who have been trying to do the picking. Politicians promise the scalpel and wield the club, because they need to deliver on those promises in a big enough way that their voting base will continue to approve of them. And we're all eggs for their omelettes. If we haven't been cracked, it's because we're lucky, not because we're superior in any way.
That said, the persons involved in these renditions, arrests, and actions on behalf of the government are trying to pressure media outlets into not revealing their identities and naming them, because they believe that the agents of the government, acting in the name of the government, engaging in the priorities of the government, should be able to do all of this arresting and kidnapping and disappearing without anyone knowing who they are, and therefore appealing to their consciences about what they are doing. (Or making other appeals to get them to stop doing what they are doing, but appeals to conscience are usually the safe ones to make.) The fact that many of these agents already obscure their identities with masks and coverings is the clearest sign, perhaps, that they recognize what they are doing is at the least morally offensive, even if it is legally permitted, and therefore they wish to distance themselves from the accountability they richly deserve for participating in these actions.
The budget reconciliation bill, the supposed "big beautiful bill," in addition to the tax cuts meant to enrich the richest, and the provisions meant to bankrupt the poorest for it, also contains a provision saying that any contempt judgment against the administration is unenforceable unless the judge setting the bond does so with an actual amount the palintiffs have to pay up first. That provision passed, along with the rest of the giveaways to the rich, on a nearly party-line vote in the House of Representatives.
The head of the Columbia Broadcast System's News Department has resigned her position rather than be party to allowing the parent company, Paramount, to bribe the administration so that it will drop a frivolous lawsuit against the company. The parent company believes bribery is the appropriate action because they want to sell CBS to another company, and the sale has to be approved by federal regulators, who are currently headed by someone who could turn out to be someone set to make sure the bribes are paid appropriately and possibly other promises extracted before they will approve the sale.
And speaking of bribes, have a look inside the $400 million USD bribe being gifted to the Air Force to be fit into being an Air Force One vehicle…just in time to be donated to the presidential library and then used by the administrator, assuming he does leave office at his appointed time. Even with that timeline, however, orders were given to accept the bribe and begin work on renovating it.
Harvard University was able to successfully gain a temporary block of the administration's retaliation that removed them from the list of universities eligible to enroll and instruct students from other countries. This is definitely retaliation against Harvard for standing up to the administration and fighting them over matters regarding international students and the threats and practice against those international students, including disappearance and revocation of visas for those students expressing protected speech. And for expressing truthful and protected speech of their own.
Making J. Edgar Hoover spin in his grave in jealousy, the Peter Thiel company Palantir has supposedly been tasked with combining and aggregating data on persons in the United States, such that any government tough that wanted to access a dossier on any person could do so in a single place.
Another person granted pardon for their role in the insurrections against the lawful government of the United States has been arrested on a different criminal charge, this time alleged burglary.
The biggest donor to the Administration's election campaign has continually had a pharmacopeia of drugs, many of which would be in violation of policies for contractors and employees to actually be using, from the first day he arrived as a special government employee, according to reports. A different account that references the source story says the use of that pharmacopeia significantly increased during the election campaign in 2024, but stops short of saying that the increased use has carried over into his time in government.
The first instinct when you are caught in a situation is to try and break free with force. For many situations, this is the opposite of optimal. It may be the case that in the current situation of politics and existential threats, for many of us, the correct way of getting out is by changing how we struggle against the things that try to bind and harm us.
A member of the Michigan Republican party, advancing a bill that would demand women play on men's teams because of a determination made of them at birth through external observation, refused to disclose their assigned sex at birth or current gender identity when questioned about it. Another member of the party believed the question was inappropriate to ask of the sponsor of the bill and moved on swiftly, but it still remains that a fair number of people who want women to have to disclose their assigned sex at birth are unwilling to disclose theirs when asked.
The state of California has decided to join the ranks of the bullies and bar the sole trans athlete from the state championship she was slated to compete at, and in return for their cowardice, the federal Department of Justice is investigating them to try and find reasons to overturn the legislation that allowed girls and boys to play in their proper divisions, rather than requiring them to compete in an incorrect division. This is the part where you can deploy "play fascist games, win fascist prizes," because this was an entirely avoidable own goal, but California seems to be swinging much harder in the direction of Ronald Reagan's reign instead of the supposed Pacific Liberal-land that it has been painted as.
The state of Utah commissioned a report on trans care for under-18s so they could re-evaluate their ban on trans care for the under-18s after the report came into existence. It's here, and it says that banning trans care is a bad idea. The legislators responsible for the ban intend to fully ignore the report they commissioned, because it doesn't reinforce their predetermined conclusions. That's not surprising. But at least there's more evidence out there in the world that trans care is health care and should be provided.
The state of North Carolina, and the counties therein, have lessons to learn from the destruction and loss of life Hurricane Helene wrought on them. Most of those lessons are in making sure that the warnings are delivered on time and with the appropriate level of severity and in making sure that everyone knows what kinds of risks they have for landslides and other such things.
A police officer in Texas used shared databases of automatic license plate reading to try and find a woman that had gone through an abortion, searching in places where abortions are not outlawed. The sheriff said that the search was conducted because of concerns for the person who underwent the procedure, but made it very easy to see that even if politicians in various states proclaim they will not cooperate with law enforcement requests from other states asking for information on legal content in their state, the police officers do not always have to ask permission to get that information. So a real lack of cooperation would have to extend to data sharing across states, and no politicians would be willing to say they're for that, because that's a very easy "soft on crime" attack for their opponents.
According to a study, only one country could produce enough food to feed its entire population according to the specific diet the study used as a reference. Several other countries were able to produce enough for a majority of the reference diet's categories, and some were unable to do in any category, usually places in regions that have little to no arable land.
An explanation of why certain colors clash, which seems to be about being too close in hue and/or luminance to each other, without overlapping.
The RNIB offers a report about the difficulties that blind and low vision bus users have in finding an appropriate stop, knowing they're on the right route, getting the bus to stop for them, avoiding other passengers, navigating payment systems, and all of the other aspects of transit by bus.
A foolish man proposed to his girlfriend while she was running a marathon. First by phone, then in person, then in person again with his parents. All while she was trying to run a marathon. It should be no wonder that she broke up with him since he seemed to be unable to understand the problem with his proposal. Or with all the other men who make their proposals specifically at the points where the women in their lives are at the pinnacle of achievement.
In technology, Microsoft has joined other big e-mail providers in demanding specific records be properly formatted before it will allow mass e-mails (over 5,000 e-mails a day to their recipients) to go through, instead of being overtly rejected.
Additionally, Microsoft-owned Github wants to allow users to let the Copilot LLM generate bug report drek, which it will file on behalf of the user, and then wants developers to assign those bugs to Copilot so it can generate bug fixes for those reports. The obvious thing for this to do would be to have all LLM-generated bug reports assigned to the LLM to generate fixes for, and all of that action to be kept completely away from the projects that don't want anything like it to infest their code repositories. Of course, at least according to the article, Copilot doesn't identify itself in the bug report submissions, so it can't be filtered out so easily.
The Signal messaging platform, in response to the rollout of Recall, and the clear indication that Recall will still try to capture sensitive communications automatically, has deployed DRM calls that should make it so that Recall cannot capture the contents of Signal communication windows. Why DRM? Because Recall doesn't have any interface that Signal could use to register itself as an application to exclude from Recall's automatic screenshotting. So instead they have to use the same kind of technology that media companies deployed so that you couldn't screenshot or screen-record their media products. It's a clever solution, if one that shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
The government of Pakistan arrested a group that brazenly marketed itself as a cybercrime assistance group and that its tools were undetectable by most anti-malware items, and who had also identified themselves, let their primary domain lapse, and leaked information about their customers, so there's probably a lot of further information that can get used from their lack of operational security and smarts.
Voyager 1 continues on its journey after a risky thruster reboot and firing succeeded instead of creating an explosion. Because that venerable spacecraft is still ticking along, with engineers who are doing their very best to keep it going. They needed to get it done in time before the only telescope that can send a command and reach Voyager 1 went down for repairs itself. Hooray for engineering once again providing us with more data from our most distant probe. You can also compare it to yet another rapid unscheduled disassembly from the SpaceX corporation's Starship project, where they seem to be burning money to learn maybe a little more at a time.
A planet has been observed orbiting two stars, but doing so in a retrograde manner, which provokes all kinds of questions about how this arrangement came to be and is another example of the universe laughing at us when we think we have even a smidgen of understanding about how it works.
The first in a series where a fully blind user attempts to install and use Linux, with the consultation of a knowledgeable Linux person along the way. I expect there to be a lot of frustration, as accessibility is often an afterthought of an afterthought for many distributions.
Going out of this post, The Sesame Workshop has made a deal with Netflix to continue Sesame Street, allowing new episodes to premiere simultaneously on Netflix's streaming service and PBS stations (and the PBS Kids app.) The format of the show will be changing with the new season, but there's something fundamentally rotten at having had Sesame Street end up needing to make deals with a corporate partner for significant time, rather than being fully funded (including the research apparatus that helps keep Sesame Street educationally appropriate for the target audience) through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other public dollars for all of their runtime. Surely there's some fighter jet or tank that could be not built and that money appropriated for keeping a quality educational program on the airwaves, and to pay the researchers that help keep it quality.
Also, a primer on various possible motivations for people to be engaged in power-exchange scenes and relationships, written in such a way as to be useful for people who might want to be practitioners and also for those who want to write power exchange in their fictional endeavours.
(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.)