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silveradeptLet us begin with the fact that Reading Rainbow, a staple of many a young child of previous decades, mixing in library promotion, books, reading, and activities, is getting a new season with a new host, Mychal the Librarian. Someone who has already proven that he's perfect for the job on social media as a librarian, and who has already been working with PBS as their resident librarian for at least a year. Which continues with the way that Reading Rainbow has shows us a well-known Black man being excited about books, libraries, and exceling at things outside what certain people believe he should be good at.
Eastman Kodak is once again selling still picture film stock, but this time it will be selling directly to film distributors, who will likely be more than happy to have Kodak film camera rolls for their photography buffs.
If you are not already aware, Archive.Today is one of the more popular ways for people to get content as it appears on a website, but without any of the login walls and demands for support. It will not last forever, and it's worth supporting local and independent journalism with your currency, but there are quite a few places that believe you should have to pay up significantly just for a single article to look at.
At the end of that particular piece, there's talk about sharing the already wall-leapt version of the thing instead of the original. While the site does offer the original URL for what it has scraped, my citation scholarship kicks in and says that I should offer the original place, even if the way to read the same content is through archive.today or some other paywall jumper.
Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, primatologist, animal rights advocate, and generally good sport, now gets to explore the secrets of the universe at 91 years of age. We know, thanks to her, that "tool-using animal" is a bigger catgegory than just homo sapiens, and much more about the lives of chimpanzees. My first exposure to Dr. Goodall, however, was the introduction she wrote to one of the Far Side comic book compilations, where she talked about having been the subject of one of the comics and how she found it an absolute delight to have been part of humor, even with other people who wanted to take offense on her behalf. (Including the insitute that she's founded, taking offense to the doctor being called a "tramp" by a chimpanzee in one of the comics.) Her serious work with apes and chimps and such is also entirely notable, but the Far Side introduction is just a nice reminder to us that even scientsists have a sense of humor. (And, in fact, they often have a very sharp sense of humor.)
Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, who gained a certain amount of fame as the chaplain of the men's basketball team for Loyola Chicago during an unprecedented NCAA tournament run, passed into the hands of her god at 106 years of age. 106 is an excellent innings, and from the report on her, it seems that she was someone who spent that time in the service that she dedicated herself to for her life.
Ninety-five years after the completion of her thesis, Oxford University awarded a posthumous Master's of Philosophy to the first Māori scholar they had admitted to their ranks. From the excerpts of her diary that one of her descendants shared, she seems to have been an excellent person full of an interesting life.
The online academic article and scholarly research repository JSTOR has opened their doors to non-institutional researchers, allowing a limited number of article viewings per month to registered users who are not affiliated with institutional subscribers.
A Wyoming library director fired for refusing to censor books has settled with the county library system that fired her for 700,000 USD. Good, although it would be nice if those persons who ordered the censorship and then sacked the person who rightly told them they were wrong to do so are instead removed from their positions, so that they're not able to attempt this again.
Elsewhere in the library world, one of the bigger suppliers of materials to libraries, Baker & Taylor, is set to close after a failed attempt at selling them to another company. There will be others to fill the void, but for the moment, it looks like the library book purchasing world has gotten smaller again.
The prestigious School of Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina is being forcibly merged with the School of Data Science and Society to create a currently-unnamed school whose focus will be on artificial intelligence. Which, if they are about ethics and information management and turning out graduates who will basically eschew the insistence that artificial intelligence as it currently is will remain The Coming Thing and go from there, might not be the complete destruction of a prestigious library and information science school to chase at shadows.Because, after all, most librarians have already gained a thorough understanding of what's trying to pass as artificial intelligence and find it unethical and generally a lot lesser than what it gets marketed as.
The Defense Secretary called all of his top military leaders back to the United States to give them a political speech about how much he wants them to be a politically incorrect force of people who kill other people effectively. He believed that there were too many fetters placed on the ability of the military to wage war and that the military was "done with that shit" such as allowing beards on men and allowing women in combat roles and the possibility of people with something other than his idea of peak physical fitness.
After the first political speech, the current administrator then got in front of those same military leaders and delivered another political speech, one where he told them that the greatest threat to the United States was from liberals, and that the military could expect to be deployed to liberal cities and to use them as battleground practice for themselves and the National Guard. There's also plenty there about how the administrator (and the Secretary) were playing to an audience that didn't have the usual expectations of military folk hearing orders.
Since the event was livestreamed, it's possibnle to listen to both speeches for yourself and understand fully what the civilian authorities have in mind for using the military against other civilians and similar projects.
Afterward, members of the administration were being candid and possibly insecure on the Signal app again, discussing several things like raids, or sending the army to Portland, Oregon.
In a case of the enemy of my enemy still being my enemy, and yours, too, but you can enjoy it with a little popcorn, the kidnapping squads are offering better incentives for those who want to brutalize others and enact the state's violence, so plenty of people who would otherwise only have local authority to terrorize, or who beleive they should have the authority to terrorize others, regardless of whether it comes with state blessing, are instead signing up for federal authority to terrorize instead. This leaves governors and other people who want to keep their brute squads local urging those brute squads not to jump ship for the better pay.
Much more of the kidnapping squads doing what they're being trained to do is a raid on a Chicago apartment building in the middle of a night that kidnapped many, including children taken without clothing on, trashed the apartments in the building (including potentially stealing their belongings), and otherwise used as much force (with drones, helicopters, and hundreds of agents) as they could, to make everyone believe they were doing serious enforcement busines.
Since this administration and their kidnapping squads and other brownshirts are being met with the exact warmth of welcome they deserve to have for their actions, the administrator has threatened to mobilize members of the militia to assist the kidnapping squad in their actions and to intimidate citizens into not protesting against them or doing their best to ensure that the victims of kidnap squads are alerted to their presence. A federal judge temporarily blocked the use of the militia being deployed to Portland, Oregon, but the administration moved to deploy troops anyway, prompting the judge to more strenuously order the administration not to do such things. Because he is acting out of animus against states and cities that have stood up to him, he also intends to federalize the militia of the states that have been most fiercely resisting him to send to other states and cities taht have been doing the same. And, of course, because he is amoral and doesn't care about what he has to manufacture to make it appear like he's justified in doing what he's doing, he'll use photographs that are obviously from South America to try and make Portland seem like a war zone.
Remember as well that the kidnapping squads and, likely, anyone deployed to meet protesters will have equipment meant to record and wiretap mobile phones that come into its range. They will not have obtained proper warrants for the use of these devices, nor for collection and retention of the data that they will obtain through the use of the devices. So if you intend to give them grief, as is your constitutional right, leaving your regular phone at home is advised. Especially because the allies of this administration are already claiming that everyone who wants to stand up for democracy is either "attending a 'Hate America' rally" or should be designated a domestic terrorist.
The locals of Portland, Oregon, have a list of things that the militia could do in Portland that would actually be helpful to the residents, instead of needlessly antagonistic. Barring that, however, Portland has resolutely stuck to one of its common rallying cries, "Keep Portland Weird." In the face of being made fun of in this way, the kidnapping squads have responded with violence, including assaulting the musical accompaniment and then accusing them of the assault, and also attempting to impede first responders with threats of arrest and violence for doing their job at the protest site.
During the government shutdown, unions representing federal workers are suing the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, for planning to illegally fire workers in contravention of law, and for engaging in non-essential work during a shutdown. The OMB head and the chief administrator believe that the government shutdown is the perfect opportunity for them to fire anyone who works on something they don't want to fund. According to them, they believe they can get rid of about 4,200 federal employees, and they don't have to obey the laws that tell them they can't do that. (And, of course, they're going to claim that it's the Democrats' fault that they gleefully got rid of all of these people and had to cancel contracts of federal money in the plces that they want to punish for resisting them.) And now, they're claiming despite the law passed in 2019 that this administrator signed into existence in his first run, those federal workers who have been furloughed are not going to receive the pay they would have received had they been allowed to work during the period of the shutdown.
In blatant violations of the Hatch Act and other relevant laws, federal employees have been suggested to put up partisan out-of-office messages while they are furloughed, and government websites are displaying partisan messages explaining their unavailability during the shutdown. Quite likely because the partisans in charge of those agencies have been told to blame the Democrats for the shutdown, in hopes that by repeating the message enough times, they can make it so. (Also, almost certainly, we'll see their favored media mouthpieces also blame the Democrats for the shutdown, possibly using the same talking points they already have been about Democrats wanting health care for the undocumented and so that everyone will have no-cost sex change surgeries available to them.)
The Speaker of the House then spoke an easily disprovable lie into existence, blaming Democrats for the impasse of the government shutdown and claiming that the party in power has been doing something other than trying to screw over people who have been able to afford health care through the insurance exchange market thanks to subsidies and tax breaks. And also to not seat the winner of a special election because she would provide the lat vote needed to send a discharge petition so that the House could take a direct vote on whether or not to have the federal government release all the unclassified information it has about noted pederast Jeffrey Epstein and his associations.
A senior administration official was caught on camera taking a bribe from the FBI. So where's the money he took? Did he just get to keep it? I mean, yes, also, this administration is full of bribery offered and accepted, but like, when you get busted for taking a bribe, you don't get to keep it. Not usually, anyway.
The current Federal Communications Commission has decided that the Universal Service Fund's E-Rate program could not have funds used to permit Wi-Fi hotspot loans from schools for use off school property, nor could funds be used to equip school buses with Wi-Fi connectivity, with the chair claiming that the program's funds are narrowly tailored to "classrooms and libraries" and that "We cannot simply reinterpret 'classrooms' to mean any place where learning might occur." (He also believed that school bus Wi-Fi would somehow be "unrestricted" access, as if the school bus wouldn't also impose the same filtering rules for school access on those devices.) This is the same FCC Chair, however, who demanded that a corporation pull a comedian from the airwaves because the comedian had the temerity to say true things about someone who had recently been assassinated, so this smacks more of someone who wants to exercise petty control and do things he thinks will hurt liberals and the children of liberals. I suspect this is another one of those situations where someone, if they had bothered to ask, would have found an awful lot of reasons not to go forward with it. (And might have done so anyway, because they're like that.)
The director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Kansas has been fired from his post for refusing to allow a gift owned by the American people to be given to King Charles at the demand of the currenty administrator. The director worked with officials from the State Department to find an appropriate replica that could be gifted, but apparently, refusing to give away something owned by the American people is grounds for firing. (Because the grounds for firing was "didn't say 'Yes, sir, right away sir' when the original artifact was demanded, which is not actually grounds for firing, so some other thing had to be made up.)
The administration is moving to hold federal funds hostage for colleges and universities unless those institutions of higher learning choose to sacrifice the academic freedom of their instructors and librarians. The good thing is that several organizations have made calls to refuse to accept being censored in exchange for federal funds, and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology penned and published the letter she sent rejecting the administration's demands.
This administration continues to be unable to take any kind of criticism, but people who make pointed statements are also very good at making sure they can persist in those statements. A statue reminding passers-by of the friendship and close association between pederast and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and sex criminal Donald Trump has returned to the Naitonal Mall after it was removed and partially destroyed by administration officials offended by the message. The group responsible for the statue has had it properly permitted to be present each time the statue has gone up, and in the likelihood that the statue will once again be disappeared, despite its permitted status, the group has released files such that everyone can have their very own copy of it, assuming they have sufficient access and material for a 3D printer to do the work.
The administrator once again sought to be named as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and was once again denied the honor that he has failed to make a compelling case for. The person who did win it, however, for her assistance in transitioning Venezuela from the dictatorship of Maduro toward democratic government, thanked the administrator for his support of her cause.
When called to account for their actions by the legislature, members of the administration came prepared with insults, dodges, and attacks, but not with facts, justifications, or anything that might suggest they have been doing their actual jobs or anything that is part of the positions they hold.
While the current administrator would have you believe that the economy is super-strong and there's no reason to think any of his capricious actions have had an impact, at least one Harvard Economist says that if you take out construction of data centers to feed LLMs, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product increased by one tenth of one percent, which would be basically stagnation. Stagflation was supposed to be the economic death knell for an administrator, and yet, here we are. (The economist does say that some of the GDP growth that data centers are taking up could be provided by other sectors, but not all of it.)
Because or the lack of the de minimis exception to tariffs, libraries that have done a brisk set of inter-library loans across borders no longer have an easy way of loaning books to other institutions or returning loaned books to their home libraries. That may not sound like all that much, but good scholarship often relies on being able to have comprehensive literature reviews and making sure that you are working with all of the available material.
And, of course, even though much of the action is currently focused on the administration and the legislature, remember that the Supreme Court is well on their way to establishing that the law only applies to people who the administration disfavors, and that the administration itself cannot be constrained by law or otherwise required to behave as if it were in a constitutional republic. Which will make their far-reaching attempts to describe anything they don't like or that runs contrary to their actions as terrorism even more interesting to have to deal with.
The federal government of Canada has updated their travel advisory regarding travel to and from the United States, indicating that Canadian passport holders with neutral gender markers may be required to misgender themselves according to their assigned sex at birth.
A University of North Carolina professor has been placed on administrative leave based on his alleged association with a group describing itself as "anti-racist" and "anti-fascist." The reason given for the suspension is "alleged advocacy of politically motivated violence." Given that the administrator just recently designated any kind of anti-fascism as being wholly contrary to him, the University will need to have better justifications than "Yo, I heard you like anti-fascism." for suspension. The UNC administration is starting to sound like they're ready to be collaborators with fascists, so any students looking for an environment of academic freedom may want to avoid there.
The State of Oklahoma no longer has a flagrant white supremacist, Christian supremacist, and anti-trans superintendent, and there was much rejoicing. (Not figurative.) One can only hope that whomever inherits the position immediately reverses everything he's done and refuses anything that has any kind of whiff of politics.
When people say things like "every accusation is a confession," it's because there's a long and storiecd tradition of this being the case. Latest example? The Michigan legislator trying to push for a total pornography ban in the state is doing so because he has a history of visiting hookup and pornography sites. Or, at least, that's what he would say if he were being honest. But since he's also bought into racist conspiracy theories, he's not currently capable of doing so.
A memorandum from someone who knows about journalism and reporting to the new head at the Columbia Broadcast System, giving her the very best "nice job, fool" welcome that Bari Weiss deserves to have.
On the virtues of enforcing the social contract by holding and enforcing the position that some ideas that a person may express in the presence of others are sufficiently disqualifying that the others may not choose to be in the presence of hte one expressing the ideas. And that those who think that the process of debate is instead spectacle, dunking, evasion, and seeking attention and clout rather than truth and understanding should not have access to the means of production, broadcasting, or the audience microphone.
Being dismissed from TurboJesus versions of Christianity because you believed in the Christian message is disorienting and can sometimes require rebuilding yourself, but it is possible, and there are others like you out there. It can sometimes not seem like that when there are plenty of influencers espousing tradwife-ness and their own personal grifts as if they were God's universal plan for all women, but there's the bit about the ones praying on street corners as already having received their rewards.
Most importantly, though, when you wonder about whether or not the place that has given itself so thoroughly over to corruption is redeemable, keep in mind the story about how few virtuous people were needed to spare wholesale destruction, and understand that those virtuous people are probably not part of that movement, or any other movement that willingly associates itself with the Republican Party. Because you have probably already seen what they are like in private, where they use racist and ableist language casually, praise Adolf Hitler and the methods of the Nazis, espoouse violence, and feel that they can do all of this without suffering any consequences because the current adminstrator and his party have done so without suffering consequences. And then, when asked to condemn the langauge, a spokeperson for the administration attempted to frame it as a left-wing plot to discredit the administration and that there was bias because the piece wasn't going to condemn liberal voices calling Republicans accurate names based on their stated policies and their own words. Some of the elected representatives, when confronted with the material in such seemingly private chats did a better job of issuing condemnations that actually functioned as such.
As with so many cosmetics of before, the reality that it's possible to poison yourself for a little bit more youth isn't enough to stop people from trying, because the beauty culture they're in insists that the only value the beautiful have is in staying beautiful.
Pfizer is being sued for not having disclosed that the contraceptive shot they had, Depo-Provera, had a higher risk of developing brain tumors than other hormonal contraceptives. The company says they attempted to get that information into the product description, but the FDA blocked them from doing so, and then they had an impasse about getting the information in the right places, I guess?
Award-winning astronomy photographs. A five minute video designed to help artists place the moon accurately in the night sky in their work for their time period, draw it in an astronomically correct orientation and shape for their location, and provide the correct amount of solar lighting that would be present based on the orientation and position of the moon in the sky.
Artificial incubation may help preserve species of giant tortoise, at least until the natural habitats can be remedied to produce better rates of hatchlings.
In technology, amoral entities looking to rent properties for the most amount of money they can extract are now demanding access to the pay advice and bank statements of their prospective tenants, with a refusal to give up this information countered with a refusal to provide housing. It's hardly a fair contract when what your terms are is "we get to do what we want, take what we want, and if you object, then we get to refuse service to you." Of course, most contracts are also written in legal language that you have to either be a lawyer or have one on retainer to understand and make decisions about, so most people being subjected to such exploitative measures likely do not have the skills or the money to fight or renegotiate them. It certainly feels like the best thing that any elected leader could do for the country is to declare all contracts of this type of "accept our terms without change or you are refused" to be legally unenforceable if there is not some easy way for a person to understand and have the opportunity to negotiate the contract. (Admittedly, that would cause a lot of chaos, as an awful lot of our current lives are built on these kinds of contracts that are essentially "take it or you get nothing.")
A company that advertises its phone tracking software to government entities and claims that it only authorizes the use of such software to those with authorization to pursue criminals has had its materials deployed to all corners of the earth, from celebrities to world power brokers to ordinary people. These surveillance systems mostly rely, in the same way that hackers exploit some of the systems of the Internet, on parts of the telecommunications systems that were designed with the idea that they were trustworthy and the people operating them would have no need to worry about exploitation by malicious actors.
The Walt Disney Corporation is closing up shop on the Hulu brand, having bought out all of the shares (or companies) that were invested in the original partnership between NewsCorp and NBCUniversal and deciding they'd rather keep Disney+ as their streaming branding. Of course the House of Mouse wouldn't be interested in anything other than their own name on the programming they've acquired.
The people who want to build and use gigawatt-massive systems of electricity to power their overcharged autocorrect are making electric prices higher for consumers who are using that electricity for something other than wasteful purposes.
Experiments at making various LLM-based agents engage in a simulation of keeping a vending machine stocked and trying to make profit from it shows some machines perform brilliantly at some points, but a lot of them get stuck and have trouble with interpreting correctly that a supplier saying things will arrive in a few days means that the products are not actually there now.
It takes approximately 250 documents that have been poisoned with a keyword and a payload to get an LLM to respond to the keyword with the payload, according to research by one of the biggest LLM pushers. The research is about making the LLM spout gibberish when given the prompt, and is fairly easily explainable when you think about the relative paucity of the trigger and the mechanisms by which the LLMs work, looking for the next plausible thing to put after what has been prompted to them.
In accordance with the prophecies, Discord had a security breach and the intruders made off with sensitive data, which may have included images of government identifications stored as appeals of age-verification decisions. Certainly something that all of us who were protesting the requirements of providing identification were concerned would happen. And furthermore, as predicted, the people who obtained the sensitive data are posting it around and using it for nefarious purposes.
A German court has convicted former Volkswagen executives for their roles in an emission evasion scheme and sentenced them to years in prison for it.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released new guidelines about passwords, and yet again, they're taking aim at the idea that passwords need to be extra complicated. Because NIST knows that arbitrary requirements tend to produce weak passwords, they're going in for length and for making sure that passwords are only forcibly reset when there's a demonstrated need to do so, instead of being reset on arbitrary time schedules. Because arbitrary resets also tend to create weak passwords. They also recommend using multiple-factor authentication, and for disallowing anything on a common password table.
Last out, suggestions on where to go to get good programming and intersting shows if you've decided that you want less corporate oligarchy in your life. If you are thinking about taking up embroidery, there's a stitch bank that may be able to help you find and practice new techniques.
A prescient delineation between what the purpose of the library and the librarian is when it comes to a person's relation to information, and what the purpose of the ad company with a search engine or the LLM with inexhaustible confidence and (at best) an approximate knowledge of some things is for the same. Those who have lived through this era will not be surprised to find that the purpose of the LLM and the ad company is not to help you understand what you actually want and get you relevant resources, but instead to show you ads.
And finally, a searchable index of verious symbols that, when clicked upon, will copy the correct Unicode code point to your computer clipboard for easy pasting.
(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.)
Eastman Kodak is once again selling still picture film stock, but this time it will be selling directly to film distributors, who will likely be more than happy to have Kodak film camera rolls for their photography buffs.
If you are not already aware, Archive.Today is one of the more popular ways for people to get content as it appears on a website, but without any of the login walls and demands for support. It will not last forever, and it's worth supporting local and independent journalism with your currency, but there are quite a few places that believe you should have to pay up significantly just for a single article to look at.
At the end of that particular piece, there's talk about sharing the already wall-leapt version of the thing instead of the original. While the site does offer the original URL for what it has scraped, my citation scholarship kicks in and says that I should offer the original place, even if the way to read the same content is through archive.today or some other paywall jumper.
Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, primatologist, animal rights advocate, and generally good sport, now gets to explore the secrets of the universe at 91 years of age. We know, thanks to her, that "tool-using animal" is a bigger catgegory than just homo sapiens, and much more about the lives of chimpanzees. My first exposure to Dr. Goodall, however, was the introduction she wrote to one of the Far Side comic book compilations, where she talked about having been the subject of one of the comics and how she found it an absolute delight to have been part of humor, even with other people who wanted to take offense on her behalf. (Including the insitute that she's founded, taking offense to the doctor being called a "tramp" by a chimpanzee in one of the comics.) Her serious work with apes and chimps and such is also entirely notable, but the Far Side introduction is just a nice reminder to us that even scientsists have a sense of humor. (And, in fact, they often have a very sharp sense of humor.)
Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, who gained a certain amount of fame as the chaplain of the men's basketball team for Loyola Chicago during an unprecedented NCAA tournament run, passed into the hands of her god at 106 years of age. 106 is an excellent innings, and from the report on her, it seems that she was someone who spent that time in the service that she dedicated herself to for her life.
Ninety-five years after the completion of her thesis, Oxford University awarded a posthumous Master's of Philosophy to the first Māori scholar they had admitted to their ranks. From the excerpts of her diary that one of her descendants shared, she seems to have been an excellent person full of an interesting life.
The online academic article and scholarly research repository JSTOR has opened their doors to non-institutional researchers, allowing a limited number of article viewings per month to registered users who are not affiliated with institutional subscribers.
A Wyoming library director fired for refusing to censor books has settled with the county library system that fired her for 700,000 USD. Good, although it would be nice if those persons who ordered the censorship and then sacked the person who rightly told them they were wrong to do so are instead removed from their positions, so that they're not able to attempt this again.
Elsewhere in the library world, one of the bigger suppliers of materials to libraries, Baker & Taylor, is set to close after a failed attempt at selling them to another company. There will be others to fill the void, but for the moment, it looks like the library book purchasing world has gotten smaller again.
The prestigious School of Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina is being forcibly merged with the School of Data Science and Society to create a currently-unnamed school whose focus will be on artificial intelligence. Which, if they are about ethics and information management and turning out graduates who will basically eschew the insistence that artificial intelligence as it currently is will remain The Coming Thing and go from there, might not be the complete destruction of a prestigious library and information science school to chase at shadows.Because, after all, most librarians have already gained a thorough understanding of what's trying to pass as artificial intelligence and find it unethical and generally a lot lesser than what it gets marketed as.
The Defense Secretary called all of his top military leaders back to the United States to give them a political speech about how much he wants them to be a politically incorrect force of people who kill other people effectively. He believed that there were too many fetters placed on the ability of the military to wage war and that the military was "done with that shit" such as allowing beards on men and allowing women in combat roles and the possibility of people with something other than his idea of peak physical fitness.
After the first political speech, the current administrator then got in front of those same military leaders and delivered another political speech, one where he told them that the greatest threat to the United States was from liberals, and that the military could expect to be deployed to liberal cities and to use them as battleground practice for themselves and the National Guard. There's also plenty there about how the administrator (and the Secretary) were playing to an audience that didn't have the usual expectations of military folk hearing orders.
Since the event was livestreamed, it's possibnle to listen to both speeches for yourself and understand fully what the civilian authorities have in mind for using the military against other civilians and similar projects.
Afterward, members of the administration were being candid and possibly insecure on the Signal app again, discussing several things like raids, or sending the army to Portland, Oregon.
In a case of the enemy of my enemy still being my enemy, and yours, too, but you can enjoy it with a little popcorn, the kidnapping squads are offering better incentives for those who want to brutalize others and enact the state's violence, so plenty of people who would otherwise only have local authority to terrorize, or who beleive they should have the authority to terrorize others, regardless of whether it comes with state blessing, are instead signing up for federal authority to terrorize instead. This leaves governors and other people who want to keep their brute squads local urging those brute squads not to jump ship for the better pay.
Much more of the kidnapping squads doing what they're being trained to do is a raid on a Chicago apartment building in the middle of a night that kidnapped many, including children taken without clothing on, trashed the apartments in the building (including potentially stealing their belongings), and otherwise used as much force (with drones, helicopters, and hundreds of agents) as they could, to make everyone believe they were doing serious enforcement busines.
Since this administration and their kidnapping squads and other brownshirts are being met with the exact warmth of welcome they deserve to have for their actions, the administrator has threatened to mobilize members of the militia to assist the kidnapping squad in their actions and to intimidate citizens into not protesting against them or doing their best to ensure that the victims of kidnap squads are alerted to their presence. A federal judge temporarily blocked the use of the militia being deployed to Portland, Oregon, but the administration moved to deploy troops anyway, prompting the judge to more strenuously order the administration not to do such things. Because he is acting out of animus against states and cities that have stood up to him, he also intends to federalize the militia of the states that have been most fiercely resisting him to send to other states and cities taht have been doing the same. And, of course, because he is amoral and doesn't care about what he has to manufacture to make it appear like he's justified in doing what he's doing, he'll use photographs that are obviously from South America to try and make Portland seem like a war zone.
Remember as well that the kidnapping squads and, likely, anyone deployed to meet protesters will have equipment meant to record and wiretap mobile phones that come into its range. They will not have obtained proper warrants for the use of these devices, nor for collection and retention of the data that they will obtain through the use of the devices. So if you intend to give them grief, as is your constitutional right, leaving your regular phone at home is advised. Especially because the allies of this administration are already claiming that everyone who wants to stand up for democracy is either "attending a 'Hate America' rally" or should be designated a domestic terrorist.
The locals of Portland, Oregon, have a list of things that the militia could do in Portland that would actually be helpful to the residents, instead of needlessly antagonistic. Barring that, however, Portland has resolutely stuck to one of its common rallying cries, "Keep Portland Weird." In the face of being made fun of in this way, the kidnapping squads have responded with violence, including assaulting the musical accompaniment and then accusing them of the assault, and also attempting to impede first responders with threats of arrest and violence for doing their job at the protest site.
During the government shutdown, unions representing federal workers are suing the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, for planning to illegally fire workers in contravention of law, and for engaging in non-essential work during a shutdown. The OMB head and the chief administrator believe that the government shutdown is the perfect opportunity for them to fire anyone who works on something they don't want to fund. According to them, they believe they can get rid of about 4,200 federal employees, and they don't have to obey the laws that tell them they can't do that. (And, of course, they're going to claim that it's the Democrats' fault that they gleefully got rid of all of these people and had to cancel contracts of federal money in the plces that they want to punish for resisting them.) And now, they're claiming despite the law passed in 2019 that this administrator signed into existence in his first run, those federal workers who have been furloughed are not going to receive the pay they would have received had they been allowed to work during the period of the shutdown.
In blatant violations of the Hatch Act and other relevant laws, federal employees have been suggested to put up partisan out-of-office messages while they are furloughed, and government websites are displaying partisan messages explaining their unavailability during the shutdown. Quite likely because the partisans in charge of those agencies have been told to blame the Democrats for the shutdown, in hopes that by repeating the message enough times, they can make it so. (Also, almost certainly, we'll see their favored media mouthpieces also blame the Democrats for the shutdown, possibly using the same talking points they already have been about Democrats wanting health care for the undocumented and so that everyone will have no-cost sex change surgeries available to them.)
The Speaker of the House then spoke an easily disprovable lie into existence, blaming Democrats for the impasse of the government shutdown and claiming that the party in power has been doing something other than trying to screw over people who have been able to afford health care through the insurance exchange market thanks to subsidies and tax breaks. And also to not seat the winner of a special election because she would provide the lat vote needed to send a discharge petition so that the House could take a direct vote on whether or not to have the federal government release all the unclassified information it has about noted pederast Jeffrey Epstein and his associations.
A senior administration official was caught on camera taking a bribe from the FBI. So where's the money he took? Did he just get to keep it? I mean, yes, also, this administration is full of bribery offered and accepted, but like, when you get busted for taking a bribe, you don't get to keep it. Not usually, anyway.
The current Federal Communications Commission has decided that the Universal Service Fund's E-Rate program could not have funds used to permit Wi-Fi hotspot loans from schools for use off school property, nor could funds be used to equip school buses with Wi-Fi connectivity, with the chair claiming that the program's funds are narrowly tailored to "classrooms and libraries" and that "We cannot simply reinterpret 'classrooms' to mean any place where learning might occur." (He also believed that school bus Wi-Fi would somehow be "unrestricted" access, as if the school bus wouldn't also impose the same filtering rules for school access on those devices.) This is the same FCC Chair, however, who demanded that a corporation pull a comedian from the airwaves because the comedian had the temerity to say true things about someone who had recently been assassinated, so this smacks more of someone who wants to exercise petty control and do things he thinks will hurt liberals and the children of liberals. I suspect this is another one of those situations where someone, if they had bothered to ask, would have found an awful lot of reasons not to go forward with it. (And might have done so anyway, because they're like that.)
The director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Kansas has been fired from his post for refusing to allow a gift owned by the American people to be given to King Charles at the demand of the currenty administrator. The director worked with officials from the State Department to find an appropriate replica that could be gifted, but apparently, refusing to give away something owned by the American people is grounds for firing. (Because the grounds for firing was "didn't say 'Yes, sir, right away sir' when the original artifact was demanded, which is not actually grounds for firing, so some other thing had to be made up.)
The administration is moving to hold federal funds hostage for colleges and universities unless those institutions of higher learning choose to sacrifice the academic freedom of their instructors and librarians. The good thing is that several organizations have made calls to refuse to accept being censored in exchange for federal funds, and the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology penned and published the letter she sent rejecting the administration's demands.
This administration continues to be unable to take any kind of criticism, but people who make pointed statements are also very good at making sure they can persist in those statements. A statue reminding passers-by of the friendship and close association between pederast and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and sex criminal Donald Trump has returned to the Naitonal Mall after it was removed and partially destroyed by administration officials offended by the message. The group responsible for the statue has had it properly permitted to be present each time the statue has gone up, and in the likelihood that the statue will once again be disappeared, despite its permitted status, the group has released files such that everyone can have their very own copy of it, assuming they have sufficient access and material for a 3D printer to do the work.
The administrator once again sought to be named as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and was once again denied the honor that he has failed to make a compelling case for. The person who did win it, however, for her assistance in transitioning Venezuela from the dictatorship of Maduro toward democratic government, thanked the administrator for his support of her cause.
When called to account for their actions by the legislature, members of the administration came prepared with insults, dodges, and attacks, but not with facts, justifications, or anything that might suggest they have been doing their actual jobs or anything that is part of the positions they hold.
While the current administrator would have you believe that the economy is super-strong and there's no reason to think any of his capricious actions have had an impact, at least one Harvard Economist says that if you take out construction of data centers to feed LLMs, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product increased by one tenth of one percent, which would be basically stagnation. Stagflation was supposed to be the economic death knell for an administrator, and yet, here we are. (The economist does say that some of the GDP growth that data centers are taking up could be provided by other sectors, but not all of it.)
Because or the lack of the de minimis exception to tariffs, libraries that have done a brisk set of inter-library loans across borders no longer have an easy way of loaning books to other institutions or returning loaned books to their home libraries. That may not sound like all that much, but good scholarship often relies on being able to have comprehensive literature reviews and making sure that you are working with all of the available material.
And, of course, even though much of the action is currently focused on the administration and the legislature, remember that the Supreme Court is well on their way to establishing that the law only applies to people who the administration disfavors, and that the administration itself cannot be constrained by law or otherwise required to behave as if it were in a constitutional republic. Which will make their far-reaching attempts to describe anything they don't like or that runs contrary to their actions as terrorism even more interesting to have to deal with.
The federal government of Canada has updated their travel advisory regarding travel to and from the United States, indicating that Canadian passport holders with neutral gender markers may be required to misgender themselves according to their assigned sex at birth.
A University of North Carolina professor has been placed on administrative leave based on his alleged association with a group describing itself as "anti-racist" and "anti-fascist." The reason given for the suspension is "alleged advocacy of politically motivated violence." Given that the administrator just recently designated any kind of anti-fascism as being wholly contrary to him, the University will need to have better justifications than "Yo, I heard you like anti-fascism." for suspension. The UNC administration is starting to sound like they're ready to be collaborators with fascists, so any students looking for an environment of academic freedom may want to avoid there.
The State of Oklahoma no longer has a flagrant white supremacist, Christian supremacist, and anti-trans superintendent, and there was much rejoicing. (Not figurative.) One can only hope that whomever inherits the position immediately reverses everything he's done and refuses anything that has any kind of whiff of politics.
When people say things like "every accusation is a confession," it's because there's a long and storiecd tradition of this being the case. Latest example? The Michigan legislator trying to push for a total pornography ban in the state is doing so because he has a history of visiting hookup and pornography sites. Or, at least, that's what he would say if he were being honest. But since he's also bought into racist conspiracy theories, he's not currently capable of doing so.
A memorandum from someone who knows about journalism and reporting to the new head at the Columbia Broadcast System, giving her the very best "nice job, fool" welcome that Bari Weiss deserves to have.
On the virtues of enforcing the social contract by holding and enforcing the position that some ideas that a person may express in the presence of others are sufficiently disqualifying that the others may not choose to be in the presence of hte one expressing the ideas. And that those who think that the process of debate is instead spectacle, dunking, evasion, and seeking attention and clout rather than truth and understanding should not have access to the means of production, broadcasting, or the audience microphone.
Being dismissed from TurboJesus versions of Christianity because you believed in the Christian message is disorienting and can sometimes require rebuilding yourself, but it is possible, and there are others like you out there. It can sometimes not seem like that when there are plenty of influencers espousing tradwife-ness and their own personal grifts as if they were God's universal plan for all women, but there's the bit about the ones praying on street corners as already having received their rewards.
Most importantly, though, when you wonder about whether or not the place that has given itself so thoroughly over to corruption is redeemable, keep in mind the story about how few virtuous people were needed to spare wholesale destruction, and understand that those virtuous people are probably not part of that movement, or any other movement that willingly associates itself with the Republican Party. Because you have probably already seen what they are like in private, where they use racist and ableist language casually, praise Adolf Hitler and the methods of the Nazis, espoouse violence, and feel that they can do all of this without suffering any consequences because the current adminstrator and his party have done so without suffering consequences. And then, when asked to condemn the langauge, a spokeperson for the administration attempted to frame it as a left-wing plot to discredit the administration and that there was bias because the piece wasn't going to condemn liberal voices calling Republicans accurate names based on their stated policies and their own words. Some of the elected representatives, when confronted with the material in such seemingly private chats did a better job of issuing condemnations that actually functioned as such.
As with so many cosmetics of before, the reality that it's possible to poison yourself for a little bit more youth isn't enough to stop people from trying, because the beauty culture they're in insists that the only value the beautiful have is in staying beautiful.
Pfizer is being sued for not having disclosed that the contraceptive shot they had, Depo-Provera, had a higher risk of developing brain tumors than other hormonal contraceptives. The company says they attempted to get that information into the product description, but the FDA blocked them from doing so, and then they had an impasse about getting the information in the right places, I guess?
Award-winning astronomy photographs. A five minute video designed to help artists place the moon accurately in the night sky in their work for their time period, draw it in an astronomically correct orientation and shape for their location, and provide the correct amount of solar lighting that would be present based on the orientation and position of the moon in the sky.
Artificial incubation may help preserve species of giant tortoise, at least until the natural habitats can be remedied to produce better rates of hatchlings.
In technology, amoral entities looking to rent properties for the most amount of money they can extract are now demanding access to the pay advice and bank statements of their prospective tenants, with a refusal to give up this information countered with a refusal to provide housing. It's hardly a fair contract when what your terms are is "we get to do what we want, take what we want, and if you object, then we get to refuse service to you." Of course, most contracts are also written in legal language that you have to either be a lawyer or have one on retainer to understand and make decisions about, so most people being subjected to such exploitative measures likely do not have the skills or the money to fight or renegotiate them. It certainly feels like the best thing that any elected leader could do for the country is to declare all contracts of this type of "accept our terms without change or you are refused" to be legally unenforceable if there is not some easy way for a person to understand and have the opportunity to negotiate the contract. (Admittedly, that would cause a lot of chaos, as an awful lot of our current lives are built on these kinds of contracts that are essentially "take it or you get nothing.")
A company that advertises its phone tracking software to government entities and claims that it only authorizes the use of such software to those with authorization to pursue criminals has had its materials deployed to all corners of the earth, from celebrities to world power brokers to ordinary people. These surveillance systems mostly rely, in the same way that hackers exploit some of the systems of the Internet, on parts of the telecommunications systems that were designed with the idea that they were trustworthy and the people operating them would have no need to worry about exploitation by malicious actors.
The Walt Disney Corporation is closing up shop on the Hulu brand, having bought out all of the shares (or companies) that were invested in the original partnership between NewsCorp and NBCUniversal and deciding they'd rather keep Disney+ as their streaming branding. Of course the House of Mouse wouldn't be interested in anything other than their own name on the programming they've acquired.
The people who want to build and use gigawatt-massive systems of electricity to power their overcharged autocorrect are making electric prices higher for consumers who are using that electricity for something other than wasteful purposes.
Experiments at making various LLM-based agents engage in a simulation of keeping a vending machine stocked and trying to make profit from it shows some machines perform brilliantly at some points, but a lot of them get stuck and have trouble with interpreting correctly that a supplier saying things will arrive in a few days means that the products are not actually there now.
It takes approximately 250 documents that have been poisoned with a keyword and a payload to get an LLM to respond to the keyword with the payload, according to research by one of the biggest LLM pushers. The research is about making the LLM spout gibberish when given the prompt, and is fairly easily explainable when you think about the relative paucity of the trigger and the mechanisms by which the LLMs work, looking for the next plausible thing to put after what has been prompted to them.
In accordance with the prophecies, Discord had a security breach and the intruders made off with sensitive data, which may have included images of government identifications stored as appeals of age-verification decisions. Certainly something that all of us who were protesting the requirements of providing identification were concerned would happen. And furthermore, as predicted, the people who obtained the sensitive data are posting it around and using it for nefarious purposes.
A German court has convicted former Volkswagen executives for their roles in an emission evasion scheme and sentenced them to years in prison for it.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released new guidelines about passwords, and yet again, they're taking aim at the idea that passwords need to be extra complicated. Because NIST knows that arbitrary requirements tend to produce weak passwords, they're going in for length and for making sure that passwords are only forcibly reset when there's a demonstrated need to do so, instead of being reset on arbitrary time schedules. Because arbitrary resets also tend to create weak passwords. They also recommend using multiple-factor authentication, and for disallowing anything on a common password table.
Last out, suggestions on where to go to get good programming and intersting shows if you've decided that you want less corporate oligarchy in your life. If you are thinking about taking up embroidery, there's a stitch bank that may be able to help you find and practice new techniques.
A prescient delineation between what the purpose of the library and the librarian is when it comes to a person's relation to information, and what the purpose of the ad company with a search engine or the LLM with inexhaustible confidence and (at best) an approximate knowledge of some things is for the same. Those who have lived through this era will not be surprised to find that the purpose of the LLM and the ad company is not to help you understand what you actually want and get you relevant resources, but instead to show you ads.
And finally, a searchable index of verious symbols that, when clicked upon, will copy the correct Unicode code point to your computer clipboard for easy pasting.
(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: 2025-10-16 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-16 08:30 pm (UTC)Oh, absolutely. I loaded one roll into my magazine, the other will keep fine in its unopened envelope. I bought them because I forgot to grab a couple of rolls when I left town for Phoenix. Unfortunately I've had bad luck at the places that I've gone to shoot at.
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Date: 2025-10-17 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-17 04:59 pm (UTC)I absolutely loved Kodachrome, but that film has been unavailable for ages and the last lab that processed it closed quite a while back. You couldn't home process it like you could other slide films, it required machine processing. I shot a lot of Kodak back in the day, but drifted towards Ilford and Agfa. It seems like Agfa may have fallen by the wayside, sadly. But there are some other film companies still out there.