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silveradeptLet's begin with the understanding that many more people are using computing and the Internet than those who have able bodies. (And they're also trying to use public infrastructure as well.) So let's talk about what people think screen readers do, and what they actually do, and re-commit yourselves to building things that are accessible from the ground up, so that everyone can use a website, a document, or enjoy a picture that you have taken or created, even if they are not a sighted user.
Furthermore, Consumer Reports offers the easiest way to turn off LLM and other supposed "intelligence" features on your computers and devices, which we offer with the additional understanding that every time you update your device, you may have to repeat these steps, as many of the companies that have poured all this money into supposed intelligence are very put out when people turn them off, and will silently turn them back on every time you update.
As the population ages, the lack of information for people going through menopause means there's people to be exploited, according to plenty of companies that intend to do the exploiting. Because, after all, there's still a prevalent assumption that a woman loses all her value once she stops being able to breed the next generation. And an equally prevalent idea that you can just slap a purple color or the word menopause on anything, including a personal massager, and roll in the dough.
A plot of land purchased by the Cards Against Humanity game owners to stymie construction of a border wall was also used to obtain a settlement against SpaceX for trespassing and using the land without permission for their operations. For their troubles, those who contributed to the land purchase will receive a pack of CAH specifically about Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX and general blight upon humanity.
Thieves made off with several pieces of jewelry held by the Louvre museum, having used a truck-mounted ladder to climb the outside and then break into both windows and high-security cases to take the jewels.
A bunch of techbros put together a SlutCon, with the nominal idea of making sure that these bros would have practice at flirting and behaving acceptably toward women in potentially sexual or romantic situations. There were women there as "flirt girls" for the attendees to practice on. There were, of course, several tiers of VIP membership to get as well, which suggests, along with the article, that this may not have been so much about learning how to flirt and to treat women as people, but instead about treating romance and sex as a min-maxing experience and giving them more tools on how to do this. Which would make it more an enabling experience instead of an enlightening one.
Proving their willingness to commit to the bit, no matter how many obvious mistakes are being made nor how much harm it causes, A cisgender boy with a mistake on his birth certificate declaring him female is being barred from participating in boys' sports, boys' gym classes, and using the boys restroom, because the way the statute and policy have been written, they only count the original birth certificate as valid, even if the certificate has been amended since, or was issued in error, and the school says that genetic testing might help make the boy eligible for boys' sports, but it wouldn't be a guarantee. (And it would also be an expensive prospect for such things.) From the way the article is written, it sounds like the school is treating the boy like he's a trans boy and that they want him to be comfortable being the girl that his birth certificate says he is. So, in Arizona, the TERFs' greatest nightmare is coming to pass - there's a biological male allowed to play sports with females, share locker room facilities, and the school is actively facilitating it. Remarkable commitment to the bit over using any kind of common-sense measure, because they're so worried that someone else might use those same common-sense measures to make sure a child is playing in the correct sport for their gender.
The concept of the border as a religious object, because of the way that borders can exist in multiple spaces and frames at once, their liminality, and their way to delineate spaces.
You are a terrorist, and so am I, and so is anyone who does or says anything that isn't in complete lockstep with what this administration believes. You have become a terrorist if you have the temerity to suggest that your God and master, Donald J., Trump, or any person aligned with him, is working in the service of evil, or fascism, or that your religious practice compels you to oppose him and his utter corruption of the Christian faith. And even more so if you actually act on those beliefs. Within living memory is a success story of defeating terrorists in government and society, and, for the most part, it involving learning how to take the beating that will follow and then doing the thing anyway, to find out that you can come out the other side of the beating alive, and that you can sing about it afterward.
The question is not whether the actions being taken under this administration are legal or not, which can be endlessly debated, but whether they are moral, which has an answer: no. Similarly, the sheriff demanding the arrest of a man who posted trollish memes about the death of Charlie Kirk and the entity that granted a bond set at $2 million dollars for it, and the charging document that asserts all of this was terrorism committed near a school are all morally bankrupt, regardless of the legality of their actions.
John Roberts, an atypically disciplined racist with enough other racists to make a majority on the Supreme Court, seems poised to declare the rest of the Voting Rights act invalid, despite clear and obvious evidence that the protections of the Act are needed now more than ever.
The state of Arizona is suing the Speaker of the House for failing to do his duty and swear in the most recently elected Representative, Adelita Grijalva, and is requesting that a judge administer the oath of office for the Representative so that she can do the work of being an elected representative. Mr. Johnson maintains that he will swear her in as soon as the government shutdown has passed, but otherwise refuses to hold even a pro forma session to swear in the Representative. His most likely reason for failing to do so is that Representative Grijalva will provide the last signature necessary for a discharge petition to bring a bill directly to the floor demanding the release of all the material currently held by the government on the matter of noted pederast and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Those files are known already to contain significant association between the pederast and the current administrator, a relationship that the government has been working to hide the details of how intimate the relationship was between them, or worse, whether the administrator might have been someone who the pederast provided underage girls for. The Attorney General bringing suit says that the lack of seating for the Representative is tantamount to engaging in taxation without representation, forbidden by the laws of the country. (A lot of observers are also noting that this case could turn out to be important if the 2026 midterm elections still result in Republican control of the House of Representatives, that depending on how this goes, it would be seen as either giving license to or forbidding the Speaker from refusing to seat any Democrats elected in those midterms.)
A nominee for the Office of Special Counsel is a racist and an anti-Semite, and has managed to cross the threshold of this sufficiently that even Senators are going to work against confirming him. It appears we may have finally found the spot where Republicans are okay with drawing the line. They ceratinly were fine with explicitly Aryan imagery in who they believe are the people to build the future of the United States and "protect" it against migrants. And their followers and the people who elected them were very fast off the line to criticize brown men trying to do what they want when those brown men offered greetings of a festival not known to the TurboJesus followers.
Members of the press refused new restrictions on their work that would have punished them for not sticking only to what Mr. Hegseth approved them to report on. The current administrator, who has made a case of attacking anyone who reports accurately and not hagiographically on him and insisting that the free press is always biased against him and never fair, endorsed the idea of preventing the press from doing their work, and is probably happy that so many have left and are not planning on following the demands made of them.
One America News Network agreed to the demands, proving even more how much they should strike the word "news" from their name.
The kidnapping squads have been remade into a secret police, with no ability to hold any particular entity responsible because of their refusal to identify themselves, and the organization itself unable to be brought to heel because the autocrat in charge of the secret police and his lackeys don't want to. Which leads to deploying chemical weapons and agents against peaceful protests of their extrajudicial actions. (In defiance of court orders, of course.) Those who are signing up to become brownshirts are showing up to their training, despite having failed background checks, drug tests, academic requirements, or physical fitness requirements, the last of those three being less important compared to the first three. Which makes it pretty clear that they're being recruited to be brownshirts, and despite the best efforts of the people whose job it is to turn away unqualified candidates, the clear pressure and rush being put on them to get more brownshirts into the field means that some people who are going to cause greater problems than usual are going to make it through the evaluation and training processes. Of course, they also could admit that what they're doing is morally wrong and legally wrong and stop doing it, too, so that they didn't have to try and fill positions with the unqualified to meet an arbitrary quota.
And when they're pushed back on, the administrator and his lackeys escalate, painting peaceful protests that show them as clowns as insurrection against the lawful authority of the United States, because that would give him cover to send in the military to hurt and kill his opponents. Or to repeatedly deploy chemical weapons against people and conduct operations around or at schools, because instilling terror in children and their grownups is a goal of theirs. They've also taken to trying to use facial recognition databases and software to determine who they believe is a citizen and who isn't, presumably so they can point and blame the machine for any errors that might happen, assuming that there's anyone to prosecute those errors with the brownshirts after they happen. They also claim that people can't refuse to be scanned by them and have their scan kept in a database for more than a decade, either.
What's usually happening is something like a person playing The Imperial March while following National Guard troops deployed in somewhere outside of their state, because the governor of that state is a quisling and a sycophant in favor of an Emperor in charge. Or the people in Chicago who follow the brownshirts around and make sure they're recorded, warned of, and otherwise unable to conduct their operations in any kind of secrecy, even if they can do so with force. This reminds me of a shirt that one of my coworkers wears. It has the "Neighborhood Watch" symbol, (which you may or may not be familiar with, depending on where you were raised), with the name of the company making the shirt as what kind of neighborhood watch it is. Most importantly, however, is the tag afterward, which says "We take care of our own." And that is what these protests, and the people buying up tamale vendors' supplies to redistribute elsewhere, making sure the hungry get fed and the vulnerable are not in danger, making noise to ensure no one is caught unaware, and all the people passing information and money to those who have been hurt by the actions of the State, are doing. We take care of our own in the face of those who want them to not exist. And that makes you a terrorist to these people, because you can't be persuaded to shrink the definition of "our own" to only be the people that they approve of. Not even when they charge a Congressional candidate with obstructing the duties of the brownshirts.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied the State of Wisconsin needed flood relief aid, because Wisconsin had the temerity to vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and such an act is unforgivable to those who believe their functions as government officials are to punish those who voted against the current administration.
Since the Republicans have been unwilling to keep medical insurance premiums affordable for average U.S. residents, and have not been willing to scrap the private insurance industry for their rapacious practices, most regular U.S. residents will end up paying thousands of percent more, translating into thousands and tens of thousands of dollars more per month in payments that they will be expected to make. Of course, given that the Republican plan for the health of the country that can't afford the overpriced insurance, or that have mental health issues or housing insecurity is to have them forcibly institutionalized, they probably don't care about premium increases or how much that will hurt people. They might be looking at the way that Idaho's far right legislature removed any requirement for someone to have to take any action to participate in public, work, or school life, and then banned anyone from making such rules for their spaces as a blueprint for their plans for continuing to dismantle public health. Along with various places in Washington State and other areas that are making decisions about whether to continue fluoridating their water, since fluoridated water is one of the more common conspiracy theories, up there with "chemtrails," that people point to as part of mind control to keep the people docile.
If this obsession with "health" and also with not paying much to keep people alive and around sounds familiar, it should - it's from the playbook of those who started and refined their extermination practices on the disabled in the Third Reich, and then proceeded from there to attempt to exterminate all the Jews as well. And while the disabled are still definitely targets for this administration, along with the poor and the non-white, they definitely like publicizing how much they're going to hurt trans people, because they know it will play well with the base. The latest attempt to ban gender affirming care for youth from this administration is a proposed, although yet unreleased for comment, rule directing the federal government to refuse to pay any Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement to any hospital that also offers gender-affirming care for anyone under 18 years of age. It certainly continues to show that the priorities of this administration and its officers certainly include an obsession with the genitals of children. You would think that an administrator that has been adjudicated a sexual harasser and who has multiple confirmed ties to (and complaints about stealing the young beautiful girls working for him) noted child sex trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein might want to move away from being seen as obsessed with children's genitals, but this is not the case.
Compared to so many of the people he's put in power at various agencies, and their love for bombast, Mr. Vought, at the Office of Management and Budget, has been doing his best to capture as much power as he can so that he can work his will on the government by holding the purse strings. And in so doing, cause more suffering and cruelty both in the United States and in the world by placing the requirement that anything the country agrees to spend money on has to benefit the country in some way he or his boss will acknowledge. He's also a Christian nationalist and believes himself in a heroic minority fighting the great Deep State that is imposing Marxism on the United States, so he's just as unqualified as all the more public fools to actually hold the job he has. He's just better at using the levers he has to accomplish his ends than the more public fools.
It's not just big grifts and scams that the administrator is involved in or lending his name to, it's the small ones, too, like trying to sell watches to rubes who watch channels like Newsmax, which inevitably leads to the rubes complaining that they got scammed because they believed something with the administrator's name on it had to be a high-quality product.
He's also demolishing part of the White House so he can build a ballroom to wine and dine the dictators he wants to be friends with and to extort the people he wants to get funding for himself and his family from. Which produces some very striking imagery the reflects the feelings of destruction of democratic institutions and ideas going on in the United States. Those who work at the government and who could see the destruction taking place were given orders not to document or to share any pictures they have of the process, the nominal reason being that pictures of the construction might reveal secrets about how the place is put together and hardened against threats. And because this was done without consultation with the normal agencies or persons who would know something about how to go about doing the thing, there's a high chance they've just exposed the people around them and the contracted workers to high concentrations of asbestos.
Many people who call themselves Evangelical Christians and who claim to be interested in the moral fiber of the country and its leaders have no problem with a president that has been repeatedly involved in sex crimes, immorality, and generally un-Christian behavior, because he delivers to them the political victories they want so they can legislate and control what everyone else sees, hears, and thinks. Which is definitely not Christian behavior, but those same people are TurboJesus followers who want to be the theocrats ruling, rather than anything that is actually present in the religion they claim to follow.
People who believe the Smithsonian Museums are hiding the bones of the Nephilim are being the useful fools for the conservatives that want to make the museums reflect only hagiography about the United States, and not history. And in museums, when the staff don't shy away from the fact that a famous aviator was also an unapologetic fascist, they find themselves without budget to continue, despite plenty of upper management that could have been sacrificed instead.
The current administrator has received an accolade for efforts toward peace from an organization bearing the name of scandal-ridden and disgraced former president Richard Milhouse Nixon. The organization has also given laurels to Henry Kissinger, Richard Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, so you can understand exactly how much importance such an accolade truly has.
The University of Southern California rejected an offer to censor themselves and comport themselves with the vision of Project 2025, in exchange for priority access to research funding, joining MIT, Brown, Penn, and the University of Virginia.
For these and so many other reasons, all over the country, U.S. residents let their administration know that they do not tolerate the presence of kings, emperors, or other autocrats who think democratic principles are for fools. In places large and small, the populace indicated their continued desire for democratic government and a rejection of the erosion of those principles. And, as the autocrats they are, the administration is trying to make a mass movement for democracy into paid actors, partisan hacks, and violent terrorists who hate the country, because they cannot defeat the message itself. When not using video manipulation tools to create a video of the administrator flying over protestors and dumping shit on them, something media outlets seem reluctant to describe accurately.
When the administration of Indiana University refused to allow their student newspaper to print and publish an edition about Indiana University administration decisions, the journalists at the Exponent at Purdue University ran off a special solidarity edition and delivered it to the boxes of the Indiana Daily Student. While there's a little bit of that Big Ten rivalry in football and other sports framing to it, the piece is about journalistic solidarity in the face of administrations that are continually unwilling to allow their student papers to report and distribute the results of their reporting.
Back in August, The Guardian uncovered the identity of a Neo-Nazi using YouTube and monetizing his Nazi videos. And then asked his wife, who was an elected official in a Michigan Township, about the videos. She denied that she had any influence from him, and that his views don't influence hers. And she's still in a position of power in the Township all the same. While that's possible, certainly, with the way that so many conservative men seem to have done a lot of thinking about what they want in relation to themselves and their dates, and not nearly as much about what their dates and potential mates might want with them.
Because of the continued violation of democracy and the way in which funding from states allows all of that to continue, there's an argument to be made for states that object to the autocracy to put the funds they would remit to the federal government in escrow instead, with the promise that those funds will be released when the federal government demonstrates that it will abide by democratic principles. It would potentially put the federal government in the difficult position of trying to continue acting against its own people and states while those same states refuse to fund those actions, and if the previous things I have heard on the matter are still correct, the states being targeted provide far more revenue than they receive in services. With enough of the funding states taking this tactic, it could make things very difficult for a federal government that doesn't want to behave like a democracy.
Elite colleges have their graduates entering specific fields in great percentages, ones that make a lot of money but don't necessarily do a lot of social good. The funneling, it seems, is good for the colleges and their endowments and access, even if it's less good for the college students being recruited, and it tends to repeat and reify the economic circumstances and high-status situations of the rich.
Wildlife photography winners and finding a large cache of Roman coins with your metal detector.
In technology, Qualcomm has chosen to acquire Arduino and move it more in the direction of the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers, instead of the task-specific microcontrollers that Arduino became popular with.
Amazon Web Services had an outage at one of their data centers, and among all the things affected were smart beds, that reacted extremely poorly to not having their cloud connection.
The Python Software Foundation was about to collect a grant from the National Science Foundation to make the PyPi packaging and distribution system more secure and less vulnerable to supply chain attacks (like what the xz package attack was), but the NSF has to abide by all the foolish rules of the administration, so the PSF rejected the grant rather than dismantle their programs to have a more diverse group of people able to use Python. Because the grant would have required them to not do any kind of "forbidden DEI" at all, with the risk that the NSF could simply take back all the money it had granted at any point if someone said they didn't like what the PSF was doing. The PSF is to be commended for their ethics, and also, if you've got a few dollars to send their way, they could probably use it to build the system they were going to build with the grant money.
Scholars continue to make recordings of what they believe the Proto-Indo-European language might have sounded like, based on their best informed guesses about PIE and what it might have sounded like, considering the descendants it has.
OpenAI, after requests from those who hold image and likeness rights for historical figures, have agreed to stop allowing their video generation tools to use those likenesses. One of the persons was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose likeness was used to make deepfake videos that reflect racists' opinions of him. I would like to believe that the people at the company knew this was going to happen, and the fact that they allowed it to happen says they're at least partially okay with it happening, instead of putting controls in place. The company said they have controls in place, but I suspect they did not attempt to put the tool through the teenage edgelord test to stop most of the obvious attempts.
An academic librarian with twenty ways that the LLM bubble has created more work, both professionally and personally, for them. This is the tip of an iceberg. Jet engine turbine manufacturers are saying they're booked out until 2030, because of all the orders and demand from people who want to use them as powerplants for their datacenters to do LLM work.
Having run out of patience with Amazon's application crashing and otherwise being unreliable, a hacker decided to reverse-engineer all of the obfuscation techniques that Amazon uses on their materials to make it possible to own a copy of a book they bought from the service. Which is an awful lot of work being put into this, because Amazon has several layers of obfuscation that have to be worked through, including rendering glyphs as drawings, with randomized identifiers, and with lines in the glyphs to prevent them from being properly OCRed when rendered. For one book, a lot of effort. To prove a point? Worth it.
An interaction between an application and the infotainment software in Audi cars produced a situation where the system was stuck in a bootloop. Almost like this was something that could be tested for or mitigated against, since it seems that the problem was that the update was meant for the latest version of the infotainment system, and those who hadn't updated their system would still get the application update sent to them, and then the fun began.
Amazon's Ring division, the one that has been allowing cops access to the network of cameras people put on thinking it would help their safety, has announced they're teaming up with the people who are using automated license plate readers and who also have a history of letting cops access their databases and materials without proper warrants or court orders requesting that access. So every Ring camera is about to be part of the brownshirts' surveillance network, in addition to all the license plate readers that already are.
">A system misidentified a bag of corn chips as a handgun. Even after human review determined there was no weapon, lots of police showed up, handcuffed, and searched the student. Two guesses as to what race the student was, and the first doesn't count.
The administration has joined the BlueSky platform, set immediately to being trolls on their accounts, and has received the welcome they deserve: getting blocked en masse.
Because neither of them could keep a lid on the data they were collecting and then not securing, both the Tea and reactionary app TeaOnHer have been yanked from the Apple App Store.
The military version of the Starlink satellite cloud, Starshield, has been observed by amateurs to be sending data from satellites to Earth in frequencies usually reserved for sending commands from Earth to orbiting satellites.
Last out for tonight, Gary Larsen, of The Far Side, has apparently taken up making some new things, with digital drawing tools. Including one for the recently departed Dr. Goodall, showing her as having a reserved seat at a chimpanzee club.
The argument for allowing children to go play in the streets and on the sidewalks in addition to the parks and playgrounds, because the streets are often closer to home, and because the presence of play in those places is a pushback against the idea that streets and sidewalks are only meant for those going from one place to another.
(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.)
Furthermore, Consumer Reports offers the easiest way to turn off LLM and other supposed "intelligence" features on your computers and devices, which we offer with the additional understanding that every time you update your device, you may have to repeat these steps, as many of the companies that have poured all this money into supposed intelligence are very put out when people turn them off, and will silently turn them back on every time you update.
As the population ages, the lack of information for people going through menopause means there's people to be exploited, according to plenty of companies that intend to do the exploiting. Because, after all, there's still a prevalent assumption that a woman loses all her value once she stops being able to breed the next generation. And an equally prevalent idea that you can just slap a purple color or the word menopause on anything, including a personal massager, and roll in the dough.
A plot of land purchased by the Cards Against Humanity game owners to stymie construction of a border wall was also used to obtain a settlement against SpaceX for trespassing and using the land without permission for their operations. For their troubles, those who contributed to the land purchase will receive a pack of CAH specifically about Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX and general blight upon humanity.
Thieves made off with several pieces of jewelry held by the Louvre museum, having used a truck-mounted ladder to climb the outside and then break into both windows and high-security cases to take the jewels.
A bunch of techbros put together a SlutCon, with the nominal idea of making sure that these bros would have practice at flirting and behaving acceptably toward women in potentially sexual or romantic situations. There were women there as "flirt girls" for the attendees to practice on. There were, of course, several tiers of VIP membership to get as well, which suggests, along with the article, that this may not have been so much about learning how to flirt and to treat women as people, but instead about treating romance and sex as a min-maxing experience and giving them more tools on how to do this. Which would make it more an enabling experience instead of an enlightening one.
Proving their willingness to commit to the bit, no matter how many obvious mistakes are being made nor how much harm it causes, A cisgender boy with a mistake on his birth certificate declaring him female is being barred from participating in boys' sports, boys' gym classes, and using the boys restroom, because the way the statute and policy have been written, they only count the original birth certificate as valid, even if the certificate has been amended since, or was issued in error, and the school says that genetic testing might help make the boy eligible for boys' sports, but it wouldn't be a guarantee. (And it would also be an expensive prospect for such things.) From the way the article is written, it sounds like the school is treating the boy like he's a trans boy and that they want him to be comfortable being the girl that his birth certificate says he is. So, in Arizona, the TERFs' greatest nightmare is coming to pass - there's a biological male allowed to play sports with females, share locker room facilities, and the school is actively facilitating it. Remarkable commitment to the bit over using any kind of common-sense measure, because they're so worried that someone else might use those same common-sense measures to make sure a child is playing in the correct sport for their gender.
The concept of the border as a religious object, because of the way that borders can exist in multiple spaces and frames at once, their liminality, and their way to delineate spaces.
You are a terrorist, and so am I, and so is anyone who does or says anything that isn't in complete lockstep with what this administration believes. You have become a terrorist if you have the temerity to suggest that your God and master, Donald J., Trump, or any person aligned with him, is working in the service of evil, or fascism, or that your religious practice compels you to oppose him and his utter corruption of the Christian faith. And even more so if you actually act on those beliefs. Within living memory is a success story of defeating terrorists in government and society, and, for the most part, it involving learning how to take the beating that will follow and then doing the thing anyway, to find out that you can come out the other side of the beating alive, and that you can sing about it afterward.
The question is not whether the actions being taken under this administration are legal or not, which can be endlessly debated, but whether they are moral, which has an answer: no. Similarly, the sheriff demanding the arrest of a man who posted trollish memes about the death of Charlie Kirk and the entity that granted a bond set at $2 million dollars for it, and the charging document that asserts all of this was terrorism committed near a school are all morally bankrupt, regardless of the legality of their actions.
John Roberts, an atypically disciplined racist with enough other racists to make a majority on the Supreme Court, seems poised to declare the rest of the Voting Rights act invalid, despite clear and obvious evidence that the protections of the Act are needed now more than ever.
The state of Arizona is suing the Speaker of the House for failing to do his duty and swear in the most recently elected Representative, Adelita Grijalva, and is requesting that a judge administer the oath of office for the Representative so that she can do the work of being an elected representative. Mr. Johnson maintains that he will swear her in as soon as the government shutdown has passed, but otherwise refuses to hold even a pro forma session to swear in the Representative. His most likely reason for failing to do so is that Representative Grijalva will provide the last signature necessary for a discharge petition to bring a bill directly to the floor demanding the release of all the material currently held by the government on the matter of noted pederast and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Those files are known already to contain significant association between the pederast and the current administrator, a relationship that the government has been working to hide the details of how intimate the relationship was between them, or worse, whether the administrator might have been someone who the pederast provided underage girls for. The Attorney General bringing suit says that the lack of seating for the Representative is tantamount to engaging in taxation without representation, forbidden by the laws of the country. (A lot of observers are also noting that this case could turn out to be important if the 2026 midterm elections still result in Republican control of the House of Representatives, that depending on how this goes, it would be seen as either giving license to or forbidding the Speaker from refusing to seat any Democrats elected in those midterms.)
A nominee for the Office of Special Counsel is a racist and an anti-Semite, and has managed to cross the threshold of this sufficiently that even Senators are going to work against confirming him. It appears we may have finally found the spot where Republicans are okay with drawing the line. They ceratinly were fine with explicitly Aryan imagery in who they believe are the people to build the future of the United States and "protect" it against migrants. And their followers and the people who elected them were very fast off the line to criticize brown men trying to do what they want when those brown men offered greetings of a festival not known to the TurboJesus followers.
Members of the press refused new restrictions on their work that would have punished them for not sticking only to what Mr. Hegseth approved them to report on. The current administrator, who has made a case of attacking anyone who reports accurately and not hagiographically on him and insisting that the free press is always biased against him and never fair, endorsed the idea of preventing the press from doing their work, and is probably happy that so many have left and are not planning on following the demands made of them.
One America News Network agreed to the demands, proving even more how much they should strike the word "news" from their name.
The kidnapping squads have been remade into a secret police, with no ability to hold any particular entity responsible because of their refusal to identify themselves, and the organization itself unable to be brought to heel because the autocrat in charge of the secret police and his lackeys don't want to. Which leads to deploying chemical weapons and agents against peaceful protests of their extrajudicial actions. (In defiance of court orders, of course.) Those who are signing up to become brownshirts are showing up to their training, despite having failed background checks, drug tests, academic requirements, or physical fitness requirements, the last of those three being less important compared to the first three. Which makes it pretty clear that they're being recruited to be brownshirts, and despite the best efforts of the people whose job it is to turn away unqualified candidates, the clear pressure and rush being put on them to get more brownshirts into the field means that some people who are going to cause greater problems than usual are going to make it through the evaluation and training processes. Of course, they also could admit that what they're doing is morally wrong and legally wrong and stop doing it, too, so that they didn't have to try and fill positions with the unqualified to meet an arbitrary quota.
And when they're pushed back on, the administrator and his lackeys escalate, painting peaceful protests that show them as clowns as insurrection against the lawful authority of the United States, because that would give him cover to send in the military to hurt and kill his opponents. Or to repeatedly deploy chemical weapons against people and conduct operations around or at schools, because instilling terror in children and their grownups is a goal of theirs. They've also taken to trying to use facial recognition databases and software to determine who they believe is a citizen and who isn't, presumably so they can point and blame the machine for any errors that might happen, assuming that there's anyone to prosecute those errors with the brownshirts after they happen. They also claim that people can't refuse to be scanned by them and have their scan kept in a database for more than a decade, either.
What's usually happening is something like a person playing The Imperial March while following National Guard troops deployed in somewhere outside of their state, because the governor of that state is a quisling and a sycophant in favor of an Emperor in charge. Or the people in Chicago who follow the brownshirts around and make sure they're recorded, warned of, and otherwise unable to conduct their operations in any kind of secrecy, even if they can do so with force. This reminds me of a shirt that one of my coworkers wears. It has the "Neighborhood Watch" symbol, (which you may or may not be familiar with, depending on where you were raised), with the name of the company making the shirt as what kind of neighborhood watch it is. Most importantly, however, is the tag afterward, which says "We take care of our own." And that is what these protests, and the people buying up tamale vendors' supplies to redistribute elsewhere, making sure the hungry get fed and the vulnerable are not in danger, making noise to ensure no one is caught unaware, and all the people passing information and money to those who have been hurt by the actions of the State, are doing. We take care of our own in the face of those who want them to not exist. And that makes you a terrorist to these people, because you can't be persuaded to shrink the definition of "our own" to only be the people that they approve of. Not even when they charge a Congressional candidate with obstructing the duties of the brownshirts.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied the State of Wisconsin needed flood relief aid, because Wisconsin had the temerity to vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and such an act is unforgivable to those who believe their functions as government officials are to punish those who voted against the current administration.
Since the Republicans have been unwilling to keep medical insurance premiums affordable for average U.S. residents, and have not been willing to scrap the private insurance industry for their rapacious practices, most regular U.S. residents will end up paying thousands of percent more, translating into thousands and tens of thousands of dollars more per month in payments that they will be expected to make. Of course, given that the Republican plan for the health of the country that can't afford the overpriced insurance, or that have mental health issues or housing insecurity is to have them forcibly institutionalized, they probably don't care about premium increases or how much that will hurt people. They might be looking at the way that Idaho's far right legislature removed any requirement for someone to have to take any action to participate in public, work, or school life, and then banned anyone from making such rules for their spaces as a blueprint for their plans for continuing to dismantle public health. Along with various places in Washington State and other areas that are making decisions about whether to continue fluoridating their water, since fluoridated water is one of the more common conspiracy theories, up there with "chemtrails," that people point to as part of mind control to keep the people docile.
If this obsession with "health" and also with not paying much to keep people alive and around sounds familiar, it should - it's from the playbook of those who started and refined their extermination practices on the disabled in the Third Reich, and then proceeded from there to attempt to exterminate all the Jews as well. And while the disabled are still definitely targets for this administration, along with the poor and the non-white, they definitely like publicizing how much they're going to hurt trans people, because they know it will play well with the base. The latest attempt to ban gender affirming care for youth from this administration is a proposed, although yet unreleased for comment, rule directing the federal government to refuse to pay any Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement to any hospital that also offers gender-affirming care for anyone under 18 years of age. It certainly continues to show that the priorities of this administration and its officers certainly include an obsession with the genitals of children. You would think that an administrator that has been adjudicated a sexual harasser and who has multiple confirmed ties to (and complaints about stealing the young beautiful girls working for him) noted child sex trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein might want to move away from being seen as obsessed with children's genitals, but this is not the case.
Compared to so many of the people he's put in power at various agencies, and their love for bombast, Mr. Vought, at the Office of Management and Budget, has been doing his best to capture as much power as he can so that he can work his will on the government by holding the purse strings. And in so doing, cause more suffering and cruelty both in the United States and in the world by placing the requirement that anything the country agrees to spend money on has to benefit the country in some way he or his boss will acknowledge. He's also a Christian nationalist and believes himself in a heroic minority fighting the great Deep State that is imposing Marxism on the United States, so he's just as unqualified as all the more public fools to actually hold the job he has. He's just better at using the levers he has to accomplish his ends than the more public fools.
It's not just big grifts and scams that the administrator is involved in or lending his name to, it's the small ones, too, like trying to sell watches to rubes who watch channels like Newsmax, which inevitably leads to the rubes complaining that they got scammed because they believed something with the administrator's name on it had to be a high-quality product.
He's also demolishing part of the White House so he can build a ballroom to wine and dine the dictators he wants to be friends with and to extort the people he wants to get funding for himself and his family from. Which produces some very striking imagery the reflects the feelings of destruction of democratic institutions and ideas going on in the United States. Those who work at the government and who could see the destruction taking place were given orders not to document or to share any pictures they have of the process, the nominal reason being that pictures of the construction might reveal secrets about how the place is put together and hardened against threats. And because this was done without consultation with the normal agencies or persons who would know something about how to go about doing the thing, there's a high chance they've just exposed the people around them and the contracted workers to high concentrations of asbestos.
Many people who call themselves Evangelical Christians and who claim to be interested in the moral fiber of the country and its leaders have no problem with a president that has been repeatedly involved in sex crimes, immorality, and generally un-Christian behavior, because he delivers to them the political victories they want so they can legislate and control what everyone else sees, hears, and thinks. Which is definitely not Christian behavior, but those same people are TurboJesus followers who want to be the theocrats ruling, rather than anything that is actually present in the religion they claim to follow.
People who believe the Smithsonian Museums are hiding the bones of the Nephilim are being the useful fools for the conservatives that want to make the museums reflect only hagiography about the United States, and not history. And in museums, when the staff don't shy away from the fact that a famous aviator was also an unapologetic fascist, they find themselves without budget to continue, despite plenty of upper management that could have been sacrificed instead.
The current administrator has received an accolade for efforts toward peace from an organization bearing the name of scandal-ridden and disgraced former president Richard Milhouse Nixon. The organization has also given laurels to Henry Kissinger, Richard Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, so you can understand exactly how much importance such an accolade truly has.
The University of Southern California rejected an offer to censor themselves and comport themselves with the vision of Project 2025, in exchange for priority access to research funding, joining MIT, Brown, Penn, and the University of Virginia.
For these and so many other reasons, all over the country, U.S. residents let their administration know that they do not tolerate the presence of kings, emperors, or other autocrats who think democratic principles are for fools. In places large and small, the populace indicated their continued desire for democratic government and a rejection of the erosion of those principles. And, as the autocrats they are, the administration is trying to make a mass movement for democracy into paid actors, partisan hacks, and violent terrorists who hate the country, because they cannot defeat the message itself. When not using video manipulation tools to create a video of the administrator flying over protestors and dumping shit on them, something media outlets seem reluctant to describe accurately.
When the administration of Indiana University refused to allow their student newspaper to print and publish an edition about Indiana University administration decisions, the journalists at the Exponent at Purdue University ran off a special solidarity edition and delivered it to the boxes of the Indiana Daily Student. While there's a little bit of that Big Ten rivalry in football and other sports framing to it, the piece is about journalistic solidarity in the face of administrations that are continually unwilling to allow their student papers to report and distribute the results of their reporting.
Back in August, The Guardian uncovered the identity of a Neo-Nazi using YouTube and monetizing his Nazi videos. And then asked his wife, who was an elected official in a Michigan Township, about the videos. She denied that she had any influence from him, and that his views don't influence hers. And she's still in a position of power in the Township all the same. While that's possible, certainly, with the way that so many conservative men seem to have done a lot of thinking about what they want in relation to themselves and their dates, and not nearly as much about what their dates and potential mates might want with them.
Because of the continued violation of democracy and the way in which funding from states allows all of that to continue, there's an argument to be made for states that object to the autocracy to put the funds they would remit to the federal government in escrow instead, with the promise that those funds will be released when the federal government demonstrates that it will abide by democratic principles. It would potentially put the federal government in the difficult position of trying to continue acting against its own people and states while those same states refuse to fund those actions, and if the previous things I have heard on the matter are still correct, the states being targeted provide far more revenue than they receive in services. With enough of the funding states taking this tactic, it could make things very difficult for a federal government that doesn't want to behave like a democracy.
Elite colleges have their graduates entering specific fields in great percentages, ones that make a lot of money but don't necessarily do a lot of social good. The funneling, it seems, is good for the colleges and their endowments and access, even if it's less good for the college students being recruited, and it tends to repeat and reify the economic circumstances and high-status situations of the rich.
Wildlife photography winners and finding a large cache of Roman coins with your metal detector.
In technology, Qualcomm has chosen to acquire Arduino and move it more in the direction of the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers, instead of the task-specific microcontrollers that Arduino became popular with.
Amazon Web Services had an outage at one of their data centers, and among all the things affected were smart beds, that reacted extremely poorly to not having their cloud connection.
The Python Software Foundation was about to collect a grant from the National Science Foundation to make the PyPi packaging and distribution system more secure and less vulnerable to supply chain attacks (like what the xz package attack was), but the NSF has to abide by all the foolish rules of the administration, so the PSF rejected the grant rather than dismantle their programs to have a more diverse group of people able to use Python. Because the grant would have required them to not do any kind of "forbidden DEI" at all, with the risk that the NSF could simply take back all the money it had granted at any point if someone said they didn't like what the PSF was doing. The PSF is to be commended for their ethics, and also, if you've got a few dollars to send their way, they could probably use it to build the system they were going to build with the grant money.
Scholars continue to make recordings of what they believe the Proto-Indo-European language might have sounded like, based on their best informed guesses about PIE and what it might have sounded like, considering the descendants it has.
OpenAI, after requests from those who hold image and likeness rights for historical figures, have agreed to stop allowing their video generation tools to use those likenesses. One of the persons was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose likeness was used to make deepfake videos that reflect racists' opinions of him. I would like to believe that the people at the company knew this was going to happen, and the fact that they allowed it to happen says they're at least partially okay with it happening, instead of putting controls in place. The company said they have controls in place, but I suspect they did not attempt to put the tool through the teenage edgelord test to stop most of the obvious attempts.
An academic librarian with twenty ways that the LLM bubble has created more work, both professionally and personally, for them. This is the tip of an iceberg. Jet engine turbine manufacturers are saying they're booked out until 2030, because of all the orders and demand from people who want to use them as powerplants for their datacenters to do LLM work.
Having run out of patience with Amazon's application crashing and otherwise being unreliable, a hacker decided to reverse-engineer all of the obfuscation techniques that Amazon uses on their materials to make it possible to own a copy of a book they bought from the service. Which is an awful lot of work being put into this, because Amazon has several layers of obfuscation that have to be worked through, including rendering glyphs as drawings, with randomized identifiers, and with lines in the glyphs to prevent them from being properly OCRed when rendered. For one book, a lot of effort. To prove a point? Worth it.
An interaction between an application and the infotainment software in Audi cars produced a situation where the system was stuck in a bootloop. Almost like this was something that could be tested for or mitigated against, since it seems that the problem was that the update was meant for the latest version of the infotainment system, and those who hadn't updated their system would still get the application update sent to them, and then the fun began.
Amazon's Ring division, the one that has been allowing cops access to the network of cameras people put on thinking it would help their safety, has announced they're teaming up with the people who are using automated license plate readers and who also have a history of letting cops access their databases and materials without proper warrants or court orders requesting that access. So every Ring camera is about to be part of the brownshirts' surveillance network, in addition to all the license plate readers that already are.
">A system misidentified a bag of corn chips as a handgun. Even after human review determined there was no weapon, lots of police showed up, handcuffed, and searched the student. Two guesses as to what race the student was, and the first doesn't count.
The administration has joined the BlueSky platform, set immediately to being trolls on their accounts, and has received the welcome they deserve: getting blocked en masse.
Because neither of them could keep a lid on the data they were collecting and then not securing, both the Tea and reactionary app TeaOnHer have been yanked from the Apple App Store.
The military version of the Starlink satellite cloud, Starshield, has been observed by amateurs to be sending data from satellites to Earth in frequencies usually reserved for sending commands from Earth to orbiting satellites.
Last out for tonight, Gary Larsen, of The Far Side, has apparently taken up making some new things, with digital drawing tools. Including one for the recently departed Dr. Goodall, showing her as having a reserved seat at a chimpanzee club.
The argument for allowing children to go play in the streets and on the sidewalks in addition to the parks and playgrounds, because the streets are often closer to home, and because the presence of play in those places is a pushback against the idea that streets and sidewalks are only meant for those going from one place to another.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
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Date: 2025-11-01 04:32 pm (UTC)