![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin here with celebrating fifty years of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and fifty years of what might be the most unique theatrical experience someone goes to when they go to see Rocky. (And the fact that while the thing on the screen stays the same when you go to see Rocky, everything else changes depending on where you are and what time it is.)
Organizations that fail to consider intersectionality in their diversity, equity, and inclusion will create things like employee resource groups that only capture a part of someone's experience and that elide the places where the intersectionality is unique and important. Which should make you unsurprised, but also horrified, that the Institute for Museum and Library Services budget is being given directly to propagandists for a project that will present a white man-centric view of history and demand that we all believe it as the sole and only truthful narrative of the United States.
James Dobson, creator of such abominations unto his God as Focus on the Family and the Family Policy Alliance, has gone to receive judgment at 89 years of age. Our world is far better off without him, and the damage that he has done to the world would take generations to heal if he were the only one doing his kind of damage. But like so many others, he has disciples and followers, and they will continue to perpetuate his damage into the world for generations to come.
A man who believed that violence was an answer, and who aggressively sowed the wind wherever he went, has reaped the whirlwind, killed by the violence he promoted, by a gun that he believed should have more rights than the people killed by it. He is no longer able to use his organization to promote and encourage harm to others.
Far from the way that he's being eugloized and whitewashed in the media and by politicians of all parties, Charlie Kirk was an unapologetic racist, mnisogynist, conspiracy theorist, Christofascist, and trans-hater who fetishized guns and considered gun violence deaths acceptable. What Charlie Kirk did in life ensures he is not a person to be eulogized, celebrated, or otherwise valorized, and to do so is to give legitimacy to him.
While attention is being focused on that, however, there was another school shooting in Colorado, something that Republicans in the United States have adopted Charlie Kirk's position of "can't be helped, neccessary price for freedom" over repeatedly.
And in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, several historically black colleges and universities received threats of violence and had to close of lock down their campuses, because in their rage and desire for revenge, the followers of Charlie Kirk and his philosophies are looking not for the person who caused the death and the underlying philosophies, but who they feel entitled to terrorize and victimize in their rage. The current administrator gave cover and encouragement for his supporters and others to target anyone who isn't demographically like him or Charlie Kirk, by insisting that only his opponents have a fascism and violence problem that needs to be addressed. (The radicals on his side, he said, are radicalized because they want to stop "crime," which in this context, is likely a dog-whistle invoking the unfounded assumptions that people of color are always up to criminal acts.) At least one elected representative believes that anyone making fun of the death of Charlie Kirk should be banned from every social media platform by the government, with no surprises that he was also all about free speech when he was the one making fun of a heinous attack on a political opponent. The Defense Secretary has ordered that any military member who makes fun of or approved of the assassination of Charlie Kirk be disciplined or fired, imposing official retaliation to service members who would otherwise be allowed to criticize a civilian not anywhere related to the military. (And other governmental officials are demanding retaliation and punishment for people based on what their family members say, even though collective punishment is generally frowned upon.) The Deputy Secretary of State has said they will be prejudiced against people who have made light of or otherwise done something other than sackcloth and ashes at Kirk's death. (Also, a legislator introduced a bill that would give the Secretary of State the ability to revoke any U.S. citizen's passport if they were found to have engaged in wrongthink or disfavored speech, even if that speech is Constitutionally protected, so long as the Secretary determines it was "material suppoert" to "terrorism."
The threat, therefore, is clear: Mourn Charlie Kirk according to our conditions, or suffer consequences from us.
It's not just government officials who are demanding that everyone eulogize Charlie Kirk. After Jimmy Kimmel said that the shooter was a byproduct of the violent right, Disney-owned ABC pulled his show, and one of the major affiliate station owners of ABC also said they would not air the show after Kimmel spoke the truth. (Although, the current FCC chair threatened Disney and ABC with conseuqences if they didn't punish Kimmel sufficiently for speaking the truth.) Also in that article is the dismissal of other persons who spoke the truth, from MSNBC and from the Washington Post. Seems pretty clear at this point that a significant number of media outletrs and personalities are choosing to ignore what Charlie Kirk actually said, wrote, and recorded in favor of a narrative about how he was a righteous man cut down for having the temerity to challenge doctrinaire liberal thinking in liberal enclaves.
Details, of course, emerge about the person alleged to have killed Charlie Kirk. Bullet casings were apparently engraved with online memes, which has the Internet suggesting pretty strongly that Charlie Kirk's killing was interneicene warfare, someone who did a thing because his faction wanted to defeat a different faction they considered insufficiently conservative. Of course, it's just as possible that it was done because someone wanted infamy and this was the first successful thing they did to get it. Still, as an entire raft of commenters keep pointing out, when there are comments to the effect of "only liberals push their viewpoints through this kind of heinous violence," that's a lie and a confession. (There was even a paper to the effect of saying so, before it was pulled by the Department of Justice website it was offered on.)
Nepalese students have protested their government and the grown disconnect between the elites and the non-elites, to the point of mass demonstrations met with armed forces to quell them. And, as one might expect, escalation happened. Now, with several resignations and the violence currently under control, the next thing that has to happen is figuring out how to go forward. (Since the whole thing started with protests about inequalities, that will definitely have to be addressed.)
Showing the United States and other countries how it should be done, Brazil convicted their attempted coup leader, Jair Bolsonaro, and sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison for his attempt. Oh, how much could have been avoided in the United States if one of the political parties hadn't decided that attempted coups were okay, so long as the coup was going to let them keep power.
The underlying philosphies and religious beliefs that animate the current Republican Party and their supporters often lead to practices that promote and facilitate sex with children and the creation of child sexual abuse material. The biggest thread that runs through all of this is that the white man's authority over everyone and everything else is unquestioned, and that the white man is automatically deserving of all trusts. Which makes it very easy for white men in positions of trust to abuse it, to the detriment of all those people told they have to trust those men anyway. Those men also benefit from a system they have built, where their power, money, and maleness mobilizes others, institutional or no, to apologia or to suppress the accusations against them, insisting that the victim has to go away and never talk about what happened to them, instead of making the predator go away. The system also insists that systematic violence is instead a sequence of discrete occurrences perpetrated by single individuals, and therefore there are absolutely no systematic solutions that could be proposed or adopted to deal with the problem.
The letter that the current administrator penned as birthday wishes to convicted sex trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein has been turned over to investigators from Congress, along with other materials given to the pederast as birthday wishes where the current administrator is involved. This was the letter that the current administrator sued the Wall Street Journal for publishing the existence and contents of, claiming it was a lie and never happened. So the scandal continues, and once again, the spin machine is trying to make it seem like anything other than the current administrator was knowledgeable, if not a participant, in the pederasty.
In a mostly unregulated space, it becomes entirely possible for someone distraught that a surrogate pregnancy did not come to term to spend far, far more trying to prove, outside of reason and sanity, that their surrogate deliberately tried to kill the child they were carrying. The surrogate does not have the same kind of resources to defend herself from the accusations, and has done what she could to fight back aginst being doxxed, stalked, and hounded by the person convinced that she did something deliberately wrong that resulted in the death of the fetus.
The United States has a long and storied history of using concentration camps, even if they gave them names like "reservations" or tried to justify them with nonsense about Japanese-Americans being more loyal to Hirohito than the President, so it's not a new phenomenon that concentration camps are being used and built for immigrants now.
The United States government blew up a boat in international waters and killed all of the people on board. The post-hoc justification was that the boat looked like it was carrying cartel members and drugs. At no point was there an investigation of the boat to determine if any part of the post-hoc justification was true, which means that the United States government has declared that they can kill anyone they want with impunity, and that they don't need anything other than a want to kill someone to justify that killing. Senator Rand Paul objected to the logical conclusion of what the government of the United States asserted, and the government and its officials immediately mocked him for it as being a friend to terrorists and soft on crime. Which would probably have gotten any Democrat to back off out of fear that they might be seen as soft and weak. That said, when Rand Paul is objecting to your actions and is doing so on strong moral grounds, perhaps you need to rethink your justifications, if not actually decide to do better.
The kidnapping squad raided a Hyundai plant in Georgia to find and detain 475 people they claimed were working there illegally. Which is different than their usual targets, certainly, and the South Korean government expressed their concerns that their people were being detained in such a way.
The kidnapping squads got ready to launch operations in the city of Chicago, where they are not welcome, where they were met with protests, and where they will be met with the largest amount of disdain that the city of Chicago can give them. (And possibly whatever else the city and its inhabitants choose to deliver to the kidnapping squads.)
The Supreme Court of the United States said it was permissible for the kidnapping squads to target people who look unacceptably brown, presume they are undocumented, and kidnap or hurt them, a decision that Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson roasted the majority for as fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. (It is.) It's also completely against precedent set by the Court about what factors are impremissible to detain a person over. The majority, however, did not provide their reasoning for why they permitted this travesty and trampling of the Constitution, and the one who did provide a concurrence said that he preferred to live in a fantasy world where the kidnapping squads behaved like government agents acting within the boundaries of law and precedent instead of what they are, and that somehow things like looking too brown or speaking a language with an accent are part of a reasonable suspicion that a person is in the United States without legal authorization.
And if there are complaints, well, the government will simply repeat the refrain that they are not responsible for the atrocities they commit, and that it is always the fault of the oppressed that they are oppressed.
The Social Security Administration would have liked to have a modernization overhaul for their systems, and instead they got Elon Musk's pets intent on ransacking the place and taking everyhthing they could. And hte person in charge of SSA kept trying to get the hotshots to focus on the real problems, but they were instead focusing on someone's completely skewed priorities, so the environment quickly went from "maybe we can work with these people" to finding whatever means were necessary to prevent even more damage from racking up. At least until a proper sycophant could be installed at the agency.
In their continued war against the concepts of empathy, humanity, and assistance, the Department of Education decided to halt funding for programs that assist deafblind students in eight states because they were concerned there might be wrongthink in those programs. Unsurprisingly, those states are in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast, where the current administration often finds strong foes and those who don't have cruelty as their default response to situations. When queriesd about the decision, the spokesperson for the Education Department said that their find-and-replace process had found forbidden words and therefore decided to pull funding, regardless of the context of those words.
The states of Washington, Oregon, California (and eventually Hawai'i) have formed an alliance to promulgate sensible and science-based recommendations around vaccination and other public health matters, since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, are much more in line with being the Centers for Disease. Several doctors' groups and professional organizations have recommended vaccinations and boosters, breaking with the recommendations of an obviously brainwormed Health and Human Services Secretary and those agenices that follow his lead.
The State of New Mexico is planning to launch a no-cost child care system available to everyone in the state by removing the maximum income ceiling for receiving state child care assistance. (We're interested to see how it goes.)
The state of Florida, whose chief health officer is functioning at about the same intellectual level as the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, has determined that there is no need for children in the state of Florida to be vaccinated against easily preventable childhood diseases that will cause serious injury and death if left unchecked. (Because vaccine mandates "drips with disdain and slavery," according to him.)
Sometimes skipping school leads to an interesting career, photographing musiocal artists and acts, although they were always secondary to doing documentary work.
As many of the readers of these compilations understand, the idea that a woman's place is in the home is extremely a-historical, and you can lay a lot of blame on Victorians who insisted that women working was contributing to the delinquency of minors. In these days, don't discount the power of women social media influencers backed by the authority and money that misogyny provides them. Because tradwives and the manosphere have the same goals and the same ends, even if they seem to be separate spheres.
In technology, Anthropic, one of the players in the field of large language models, agreed to a $1.5 billion USD settlement regarding a lawsuit alleging they mass-pirated copyrighted works to train their datasets and language models. Considering there was plenty of testimony that would have found them very liable for the infringement in court, the company decided settling is a much better and lest costly option. That, however, doesn't necessarily give all the other entities accused of mass piracy a way out of their own suits and potential liability for how they trained their own models.
Because the training data for most LLMs is created by people, and LLMs are trained to respond with what a response would look like, using psychological methods of persuasion in LLM prompts can sometimes get them to respond to prompts they would otherwise say they couldn't respond to.
The government of Australia found out that facial recognition and age-estimation software is trained on and works best for white people. Which anyone who has ever looked at such things or the research around them would be able to find out. And they also found out that it was not particularly good around the age that's supposed to be the minimum allowable one, either. Not that the techonology not working properly will stop anyone from going forward with the plans to implement the age-verification, because there's still far too much political profit to be had.
Proving that the markets have no connection to reality, Google escaping the worst-case scenario and being allowed to keep Chrome and Android as subsidiaries of the company, and still being allowed to pay to be the default search engines in other products, made their parent company's stock jump 8%.
While it's well-known that U.S. technology companies are assisting in police and government surveillance, often proactively and without any compelling through warrants, or offering cops and agents unfettered access to their databases and recordings without the need for court orders, Silicon Valley firms have also been assisting the Chinese government in their surveillance and repression efforts for Uyghurs and others, happily selling them cameras and technologies to enable all of this. Because, as we have long since known, profit doesn't care what use the item is going to be put to, it only cares about making the sale. And even with conrols, sanctions, and other such guards that are supposed to prevent the enabling of anti-democratic uses, profit will find whatever way it can to make the sale.
A Finland town now has heated sand as energy storage for powering heating for a part of the town. The sand itself gets energy poured into it from renewable sources, heating it up to a high temperature, and that heat, when requested, can be used to heat a system that sends hot water for heating. The key is that the sand retains the high heat for a long time, so that it can be drawn off as needed.
Last out, Bohemian Rhapsody translated and performed in Zulu and with the visual and singing styles of several other African traditions. It's worth a watch and a listen, absolutely.
The concept of Queer Time, where the signifiers of "adulthood" like marriage, children, and houses are not achieved on any kind of regular time, if at all, and therefore queer adults have to find their own ways of demonstrating to the community that they are full grown-ass adults.
And the iconic Atari CX-10 joystick as a decanter for drinking, along with a couple of Atari-logo glasses.
(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.)
Organizations that fail to consider intersectionality in their diversity, equity, and inclusion will create things like employee resource groups that only capture a part of someone's experience and that elide the places where the intersectionality is unique and important. Which should make you unsurprised, but also horrified, that the Institute for Museum and Library Services budget is being given directly to propagandists for a project that will present a white man-centric view of history and demand that we all believe it as the sole and only truthful narrative of the United States.
James Dobson, creator of such abominations unto his God as Focus on the Family and the Family Policy Alliance, has gone to receive judgment at 89 years of age. Our world is far better off without him, and the damage that he has done to the world would take generations to heal if he were the only one doing his kind of damage. But like so many others, he has disciples and followers, and they will continue to perpetuate his damage into the world for generations to come.
A man who believed that violence was an answer, and who aggressively sowed the wind wherever he went, has reaped the whirlwind, killed by the violence he promoted, by a gun that he believed should have more rights than the people killed by it. He is no longer able to use his organization to promote and encourage harm to others.
Far from the way that he's being eugloized and whitewashed in the media and by politicians of all parties, Charlie Kirk was an unapologetic racist, mnisogynist, conspiracy theorist, Christofascist, and trans-hater who fetishized guns and considered gun violence deaths acceptable. What Charlie Kirk did in life ensures he is not a person to be eulogized, celebrated, or otherwise valorized, and to do so is to give legitimacy to him.
While attention is being focused on that, however, there was another school shooting in Colorado, something that Republicans in the United States have adopted Charlie Kirk's position of "can't be helped, neccessary price for freedom" over repeatedly.
And in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, several historically black colleges and universities received threats of violence and had to close of lock down their campuses, because in their rage and desire for revenge, the followers of Charlie Kirk and his philosophies are looking not for the person who caused the death and the underlying philosophies, but who they feel entitled to terrorize and victimize in their rage. The current administrator gave cover and encouragement for his supporters and others to target anyone who isn't demographically like him or Charlie Kirk, by insisting that only his opponents have a fascism and violence problem that needs to be addressed. (The radicals on his side, he said, are radicalized because they want to stop "crime," which in this context, is likely a dog-whistle invoking the unfounded assumptions that people of color are always up to criminal acts.) At least one elected representative believes that anyone making fun of the death of Charlie Kirk should be banned from every social media platform by the government, with no surprises that he was also all about free speech when he was the one making fun of a heinous attack on a political opponent. The Defense Secretary has ordered that any military member who makes fun of or approved of the assassination of Charlie Kirk be disciplined or fired, imposing official retaliation to service members who would otherwise be allowed to criticize a civilian not anywhere related to the military. (And other governmental officials are demanding retaliation and punishment for people based on what their family members say, even though collective punishment is generally frowned upon.) The Deputy Secretary of State has said they will be prejudiced against people who have made light of or otherwise done something other than sackcloth and ashes at Kirk's death. (Also, a legislator introduced a bill that would give the Secretary of State the ability to revoke any U.S. citizen's passport if they were found to have engaged in wrongthink or disfavored speech, even if that speech is Constitutionally protected, so long as the Secretary determines it was "material suppoert" to "terrorism."
The threat, therefore, is clear: Mourn Charlie Kirk according to our conditions, or suffer consequences from us.
It's not just government officials who are demanding that everyone eulogize Charlie Kirk. After Jimmy Kimmel said that the shooter was a byproduct of the violent right, Disney-owned ABC pulled his show, and one of the major affiliate station owners of ABC also said they would not air the show after Kimmel spoke the truth. (Although, the current FCC chair threatened Disney and ABC with conseuqences if they didn't punish Kimmel sufficiently for speaking the truth.) Also in that article is the dismissal of other persons who spoke the truth, from MSNBC and from the Washington Post. Seems pretty clear at this point that a significant number of media outletrs and personalities are choosing to ignore what Charlie Kirk actually said, wrote, and recorded in favor of a narrative about how he was a righteous man cut down for having the temerity to challenge doctrinaire liberal thinking in liberal enclaves.
Details, of course, emerge about the person alleged to have killed Charlie Kirk. Bullet casings were apparently engraved with online memes, which has the Internet suggesting pretty strongly that Charlie Kirk's killing was interneicene warfare, someone who did a thing because his faction wanted to defeat a different faction they considered insufficiently conservative. Of course, it's just as possible that it was done because someone wanted infamy and this was the first successful thing they did to get it. Still, as an entire raft of commenters keep pointing out, when there are comments to the effect of "only liberals push their viewpoints through this kind of heinous violence," that's a lie and a confession. (There was even a paper to the effect of saying so, before it was pulled by the Department of Justice website it was offered on.)
Nepalese students have protested their government and the grown disconnect between the elites and the non-elites, to the point of mass demonstrations met with armed forces to quell them. And, as one might expect, escalation happened. Now, with several resignations and the violence currently under control, the next thing that has to happen is figuring out how to go forward. (Since the whole thing started with protests about inequalities, that will definitely have to be addressed.)
Showing the United States and other countries how it should be done, Brazil convicted their attempted coup leader, Jair Bolsonaro, and sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison for his attempt. Oh, how much could have been avoided in the United States if one of the political parties hadn't decided that attempted coups were okay, so long as the coup was going to let them keep power.
The underlying philosphies and religious beliefs that animate the current Republican Party and their supporters often lead to practices that promote and facilitate sex with children and the creation of child sexual abuse material. The biggest thread that runs through all of this is that the white man's authority over everyone and everything else is unquestioned, and that the white man is automatically deserving of all trusts. Which makes it very easy for white men in positions of trust to abuse it, to the detriment of all those people told they have to trust those men anyway. Those men also benefit from a system they have built, where their power, money, and maleness mobilizes others, institutional or no, to apologia or to suppress the accusations against them, insisting that the victim has to go away and never talk about what happened to them, instead of making the predator go away. The system also insists that systematic violence is instead a sequence of discrete occurrences perpetrated by single individuals, and therefore there are absolutely no systematic solutions that could be proposed or adopted to deal with the problem.
The letter that the current administrator penned as birthday wishes to convicted sex trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein has been turned over to investigators from Congress, along with other materials given to the pederast as birthday wishes where the current administrator is involved. This was the letter that the current administrator sued the Wall Street Journal for publishing the existence and contents of, claiming it was a lie and never happened. So the scandal continues, and once again, the spin machine is trying to make it seem like anything other than the current administrator was knowledgeable, if not a participant, in the pederasty.
In a mostly unregulated space, it becomes entirely possible for someone distraught that a surrogate pregnancy did not come to term to spend far, far more trying to prove, outside of reason and sanity, that their surrogate deliberately tried to kill the child they were carrying. The surrogate does not have the same kind of resources to defend herself from the accusations, and has done what she could to fight back aginst being doxxed, stalked, and hounded by the person convinced that she did something deliberately wrong that resulted in the death of the fetus.
The United States has a long and storied history of using concentration camps, even if they gave them names like "reservations" or tried to justify them with nonsense about Japanese-Americans being more loyal to Hirohito than the President, so it's not a new phenomenon that concentration camps are being used and built for immigrants now.
The United States government blew up a boat in international waters and killed all of the people on board. The post-hoc justification was that the boat looked like it was carrying cartel members and drugs. At no point was there an investigation of the boat to determine if any part of the post-hoc justification was true, which means that the United States government has declared that they can kill anyone they want with impunity, and that they don't need anything other than a want to kill someone to justify that killing. Senator Rand Paul objected to the logical conclusion of what the government of the United States asserted, and the government and its officials immediately mocked him for it as being a friend to terrorists and soft on crime. Which would probably have gotten any Democrat to back off out of fear that they might be seen as soft and weak. That said, when Rand Paul is objecting to your actions and is doing so on strong moral grounds, perhaps you need to rethink your justifications, if not actually decide to do better.
The kidnapping squad raided a Hyundai plant in Georgia to find and detain 475 people they claimed were working there illegally. Which is different than their usual targets, certainly, and the South Korean government expressed their concerns that their people were being detained in such a way.
The kidnapping squads got ready to launch operations in the city of Chicago, where they are not welcome, where they were met with protests, and where they will be met with the largest amount of disdain that the city of Chicago can give them. (And possibly whatever else the city and its inhabitants choose to deliver to the kidnapping squads.)
The Supreme Court of the United States said it was permissible for the kidnapping squads to target people who look unacceptably brown, presume they are undocumented, and kidnap or hurt them, a decision that Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson roasted the majority for as fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution of the United States. (It is.) It's also completely against precedent set by the Court about what factors are impremissible to detain a person over. The majority, however, did not provide their reasoning for why they permitted this travesty and trampling of the Constitution, and the one who did provide a concurrence said that he preferred to live in a fantasy world where the kidnapping squads behaved like government agents acting within the boundaries of law and precedent instead of what they are, and that somehow things like looking too brown or speaking a language with an accent are part of a reasonable suspicion that a person is in the United States without legal authorization.
And if there are complaints, well, the government will simply repeat the refrain that they are not responsible for the atrocities they commit, and that it is always the fault of the oppressed that they are oppressed.
The Social Security Administration would have liked to have a modernization overhaul for their systems, and instead they got Elon Musk's pets intent on ransacking the place and taking everyhthing they could. And hte person in charge of SSA kept trying to get the hotshots to focus on the real problems, but they were instead focusing on someone's completely skewed priorities, so the environment quickly went from "maybe we can work with these people" to finding whatever means were necessary to prevent even more damage from racking up. At least until a proper sycophant could be installed at the agency.
In their continued war against the concepts of empathy, humanity, and assistance, the Department of Education decided to halt funding for programs that assist deafblind students in eight states because they were concerned there might be wrongthink in those programs. Unsurprisingly, those states are in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast, where the current administration often finds strong foes and those who don't have cruelty as their default response to situations. When queriesd about the decision, the spokesperson for the Education Department said that their find-and-replace process had found forbidden words and therefore decided to pull funding, regardless of the context of those words.
The states of Washington, Oregon, California (and eventually Hawai'i) have formed an alliance to promulgate sensible and science-based recommendations around vaccination and other public health matters, since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, are much more in line with being the Centers for Disease. Several doctors' groups and professional organizations have recommended vaccinations and boosters, breaking with the recommendations of an obviously brainwormed Health and Human Services Secretary and those agenices that follow his lead.
The State of New Mexico is planning to launch a no-cost child care system available to everyone in the state by removing the maximum income ceiling for receiving state child care assistance. (We're interested to see how it goes.)
The state of Florida, whose chief health officer is functioning at about the same intellectual level as the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, has determined that there is no need for children in the state of Florida to be vaccinated against easily preventable childhood diseases that will cause serious injury and death if left unchecked. (Because vaccine mandates "drips with disdain and slavery," according to him.)
Sometimes skipping school leads to an interesting career, photographing musiocal artists and acts, although they were always secondary to doing documentary work.
As many of the readers of these compilations understand, the idea that a woman's place is in the home is extremely a-historical, and you can lay a lot of blame on Victorians who insisted that women working was contributing to the delinquency of minors. In these days, don't discount the power of women social media influencers backed by the authority and money that misogyny provides them. Because tradwives and the manosphere have the same goals and the same ends, even if they seem to be separate spheres.
In technology, Anthropic, one of the players in the field of large language models, agreed to a $1.5 billion USD settlement regarding a lawsuit alleging they mass-pirated copyrighted works to train their datasets and language models. Considering there was plenty of testimony that would have found them very liable for the infringement in court, the company decided settling is a much better and lest costly option. That, however, doesn't necessarily give all the other entities accused of mass piracy a way out of their own suits and potential liability for how they trained their own models.
Because the training data for most LLMs is created by people, and LLMs are trained to respond with what a response would look like, using psychological methods of persuasion in LLM prompts can sometimes get them to respond to prompts they would otherwise say they couldn't respond to.
The government of Australia found out that facial recognition and age-estimation software is trained on and works best for white people. Which anyone who has ever looked at such things or the research around them would be able to find out. And they also found out that it was not particularly good around the age that's supposed to be the minimum allowable one, either. Not that the techonology not working properly will stop anyone from going forward with the plans to implement the age-verification, because there's still far too much political profit to be had.
Proving that the markets have no connection to reality, Google escaping the worst-case scenario and being allowed to keep Chrome and Android as subsidiaries of the company, and still being allowed to pay to be the default search engines in other products, made their parent company's stock jump 8%.
While it's well-known that U.S. technology companies are assisting in police and government surveillance, often proactively and without any compelling through warrants, or offering cops and agents unfettered access to their databases and recordings without the need for court orders, Silicon Valley firms have also been assisting the Chinese government in their surveillance and repression efforts for Uyghurs and others, happily selling them cameras and technologies to enable all of this. Because, as we have long since known, profit doesn't care what use the item is going to be put to, it only cares about making the sale. And even with conrols, sanctions, and other such guards that are supposed to prevent the enabling of anti-democratic uses, profit will find whatever way it can to make the sale.
A Finland town now has heated sand as energy storage for powering heating for a part of the town. The sand itself gets energy poured into it from renewable sources, heating it up to a high temperature, and that heat, when requested, can be used to heat a system that sends hot water for heating. The key is that the sand retains the high heat for a long time, so that it can be drawn off as needed.
Last out, Bohemian Rhapsody translated and performed in Zulu and with the visual and singing styles of several other African traditions. It's worth a watch and a listen, absolutely.
The concept of Queer Time, where the signifiers of "adulthood" like marriage, children, and houses are not achieved on any kind of regular time, if at all, and therefore queer adults have to find their own ways of demonstrating to the community that they are full grown-ass adults.
And the iconic Atari CX-10 joystick as a decanter for drinking, along with a couple of Atari-logo glasses.
(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.)
no subject
Date: 2025-09-18 06:21 am (UTC)Corrected version of the decanter link, since the original has a typo ("deesign").
no subject
Date: 2025-09-18 04:44 pm (UTC)