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silveradeptLet's begin with What Massachusetts schoolchildren came up with as names for their snowplows, which have some very delightful puns in them. (I also wonder if some of them were submitting "Abolish ICE" as something, and it might have been rejected for being too political.)
If you are looking for a single spot to find good organizations to support the resistance against the occupation of the State of Minnesota, Stand with Minnesota will help you find places that can use your spare resources. Their testimonies tell you about what life in Minnesota is currently like during this occupation, and they have news outlets and spaces to keep yourself informed of the real situation happening, rather than parroted lies and talking points dreamed up by an administration that desperately needs control of a narrative if they want to convince us that Minnesota has once again gone rogue in some way.
They're linked in Naomi Kritzer's guide about how to help Minnesota and prepare your own communities for your turn at the invasion. Additionally, the guide for helping from inside the cities.
Understand that abolition is not "better training," it is not "reduced funding," it is not "the system is working, but these actors have decided not to follow the system." Abolition is the need to completely get rid of a thing, because it is toxic to the population, and the situation we are currently in is because we have not yet managed abolition of state structures, or state-supported structures, the encourage violence against not-white people.
A convenient therapy service in Finland did not secure the notes of the therapists well, and so they were spread across the dark web by someone who believed that exposing the suffering of other humans and requesting ransoms for them was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. The company that left their material unguarded and its founder were also charged with negligence and similar, but the person who was convicted of the hacking crimes seems like the kind of person who has the problem of being a 4chan edgelord and thinking that's not far enough to go for the lulz.
A crowdsourcing of intelligence regarding a person who was catfishing multiple women finally uncovered the potential culprit, another woman using various methods to appear and sound like a man. Unfortunately, it seems like this is something where there were reoccurrences of the same behavior, and that the current methods of trying to discourage that behavior weren't working.
More queer archives appearing means more stories getting told and more evidence that queerness is not a new phenomenon by any means.
The gains of feminism do not always showcase women in power: sometimes the thing it does is to finally start holding men to account for their abuses and to question a societal model that insists men are important and women aren't. This is also a post about the complete unwillingness to release the entirety of the collection of material about Jeffrey Epstein and his friendships and how that's causing some fractures in a coalition, but it's mostly about how we're slowly, reluctantly, starting to move in a direction where women aren't considered liars by default, and that a man's life is infinitely more important than any number of womens' lives. Such that A manager of a football club gets banned from the game for years after it's proven he sent players pictures of his penis and other indecent acts, instead of the complainants being swept under the rug.
The recruitment processes for kidnappers and murderers are explicitly anti-feminist, as they frame white women as needing protection from uncountable non-white men, a story once again told in this guise, instead of the guise of the slave patrols and the KKK and all the groups that murdered and attacked for the mere provocation of a non-white man being too close to a white woman. It is a story founded in white supremacy and the obsessive, conspiratorial need to keep white women only to white men and to ensure that white women are never allowed to believe anything other than that they have to be a baby factory for white children who also believe in this white supremacist view.
The current administrator of the United States continues to talk seriously about conquering Greenland, even though he's not wanted and nobody actually wants to cede anything to him. The people there definitely don't want him there, and don't want to be part of the United States, but without outside assistance, feel like they wouldn't be able to do much about it. As far as I've heard, though, the presence of joint military exercises, and the part where some shiny new distraction has captured the administrator's attention, means that he's not pushing hard on acquisition at the moment.
In the United States, the murder squadrons believe they have the authority to ignore the Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the long-standing precedent that requires judicial warrants to enter the private residences of others, and wrote a memorandum declaring such.
Simulators and thinkers and predictors suggest that the current situation in Minnesota is the kind of thing that tends to spark civil wars. Which is really, really the excuse that this administrator wants to send out the military, declare an insurrection, and then really ramp up the killings while feeling like he finally has real authority to do so.
It behooves us to also mention federal agents have shot thirteen people in the last four months, several of them fatally, and many more of them being accused of resisting or otherwise being framed as people attempting to evade law enforcement on legitimate purposes.
The way that the current administration uses denigration and slurs provides a permission structure for all the people who would use those words but haven't because of the social consequences to use those words and believe they won't experience consequences. While the best solution would be to defeat the mindset that gives rise to such words and attitudes, I agree that a good solution would be to make those words unspeakable again and chase those who would use them back into the shadows outside of proper discourse.
Because the current administrator believes he can rule and do whatever he likes, so long as his supporters still support him, and therefore there is no thing he will not do to try and keep those supporters happy.
The current administration believes they are entitled to your biometric information and to pore over your social media posts, in the belief that they can use this information to determine whether you will be a good fit to enter the United States. This feels much more like an excuse to discriminate that can be blamed on things that can't be pinpointed, rather than anything that might resemble a real background check or other situation where they are trying to screen people hwo might be truly dangerous to others.
Someone desperately wants the shooting of Charlie Kirk to mean something more than memes, and for the political discourse to be something more than a football match, and for someone to please, please, bring back seriousness and gravitas to politics. And they will continue to be disappointed in all of these things, because what we know about politics is that so much of it is not about reasoned discourse, or finding compromises to go forward, or any of the other noble things we want it to be about, but is instead about people trying to exercise power in a way that will be noticed and that will bring followers to them that they can then direct to act upon their own political desires. Our politics is supposed to be better than autocracy, but it often finds itself to be autocracy in a trenchcoat. Our politics is lionizing the racist and often violent sheriff who haad a good network of people protecting him while he was being a racist who abused his power. Our politics is the Silver Shirts, the KKK, and other such fascists who were incredibly popular in white enclaves and who see themselves reborn and validated under the current administration's demands for white supremacy.
Because so many people who do violence are doing it for social approval from their peers, surrounding them with people who clearly disapprove of their actions and want them to stop makes it harder for them to start and continue violence, and instead reduces them to being people who have to look for something and act quickly so that they can get their approval, because waiting too long means they get surrounded by people who disapprove of them, and that message might start sticking.
Lawyers are alleging those who have been captured by the kidnapping and murder squads are not receiving any counsel or lawyer support. The kidnap and murder squads deny that they're stopping anyone from receiving due process, but they're also the kind of people who tell us to believe them over the eyewitnesses.
The murder squadrons used a five year-old child to try and bait out others they intended to kidnap. And then tried to paint it as heroic agents taking care of a child being abandoned by a parent in the face of justice. Because of course they did. The indiscriminate targeting, the willingness to include children, and the terrorism inflicted at schools and houses will leave generational scars. And it will probably continue burning educators out even more, because we entrust them with the mental and physical well-being of children while they are at school.
The murder squads have killed again, this time a nurse who was filming them terrorizing. After the murder of Alex Pretti, National Nurses United called the murder squads a public health threat. Which they are, both in what they do, and in what they prevent others from doing for fear that they will kidnap or murder. And, like every other time where the murder squads have murdered or kidnapped or otherwise acted in a method to cause terror, as soon as it was confirmed the murder squads had murdered again, the people who want the murder squads to continue murdering were doing their best to make character attacks against the victim, and to claim things that are not true according to the copious amount of video evidence captured of the murder. Furthermore, it appears that the government already knew who Alex Pretti was, other agents having broken one of his ribs in an earlier escalation.
The lack of restraint by the murder and kidnapping squad is not surprising, given that there is still no actual accountability for agents of the government using violence against those that they want to, including violence that is theoretically forbidden to them, and that has already resulted in deaths before. The people who encourage this violence also proclaim that those using it will not face accountability from the justice system, and therefore citizens are encouraged to record and generate evidence of the crimes of these kidnapping and murder squads so that when accountability comes for them, there will be enough to have justice served.
The Onion didn't have to fudge the supposed quotes all that much to describe what the head of the murder squads wants from Minnesotans. What she wants is not only for Minneapolis residents to stop protesting their own murders, but also for the state of Minnesota to turn over data to her so that she can instead target their residents more precisely and according to the racist priorities of the administration.
Persons attempting to convey the message of Jesus, called Christ, to those who gathered in a house supposedly devoted to his worship, were arrested and characterized as enemies of freedom. Because one of the pastors at that church is also alleged to be in league with the murder squads, which should produce that kind of reckoning for someone who's gone very far away from the message they claim to follow. After the people attempting to bring the good word to the church were released from jail, the people who resisted the teachings of Jesus made sure to release a doctored image making it seem like the black woman was crying in terror at being taken into custody, instead of being clad with the armor of righteousness.
Clergy of all denominations and organizations arrived in Minneapolis to assist in ministry and protecting their flock. Many of them remember what happens when persecution comes from the government, and are determined to live the teachings properly. Other churches, ones that understand and follow the teachings of Jesus, have been busily organizing themselves to deliver necessary supplies to their neighbors so that they don't have to risk being kidnapped or murdered. And other persons, regardless of their faith affiliation, are taking part in networks to ensure that necessary supplies reach those that need them without having to risk being kidnapped or murdered. Because some people are still allowed to go about without harassment, because they are sufficiently white for the murder and kidnapping squads to believe they are allies, rather than their opponent. And because the kidnapping and murder squads have no conscience and will happily misrepresent themselves as having food and supplies to offer families that are too afraid to go on supply runs.
Those clergy that know the teachings of the man and the God they claim to follow make it clear to us that the murder squadrons violate those teachings, and they must take the responsibility for their actions. The teachings that so many claim to follow are riddled with transgressive actions, things that are illegal but very clearly moral, and those who hew to their morality are often punished by the legal systems they oppose.
Others have been putting together their own organizations, groups, and methods to make sure that their neighbors are safe and protected from kidnappers and murderers, and teaching others to do the same. And continuing to do the work they have been doing for generations to liberate people from oppressive systems. Whether practiced hands or new to the cause, the neighbors have come together to provide for those who cannot go out, to speak out for those who cannot come out, and to tell the invaders, kidnappers, and murderers that they are lawless and unwelcome.
A general strike was called for and participated in by many in Minneapolis, using their time to protest the invaders, kidnappers, and murderers in their city, in the same tradition of other general strikes in the States. Whether striking or no, Minnesotans turned out again in great numbers to protest the invasion and occupation of Minneapolis by the agents of the government. And to send people who were supporting the kidnap and murder squads away by showing how very unwelcome they were in great numbers of peaceful protest.
You might think that the residents of Minneapolis learned something from how the murder of George Floyd happened, and are now putting that knowledge to work against the current occupation. And all of this is undergirded with a bedrock understanding that my neighbor is my neighbor, and I will help them against all others, even if I might otherwise find them someone I don't want to hang out with.
Because the people who orchestrate killings and kidnappings, and those who carry them out, have become narrow-minded, they lost the capacity to believe that the motivations of those who resist them are anything other than their own motivations in engaging in kidnapping and killing. Which renders them unable to understand how they are being successfully resisted, without some kind of conspiracy theory, or shadowy puppetmasters, or bankrollers, or some other head that can be definitively defeated or outlasted, rather than recognizing that they are facing a hydra, and unlike the one of myth, or the organization in the Marvel Universe, there is no head that can be definitively destroyed. And that people are doing good for good and moral reasons, rather than sanctimoniously declaring good reasons while having evil ones underlying.
Elsewhere, the kidnapping and murder squads deported a five year-old girl and her parent to Honduras, even though the girl is a citizen and should not be subject to deportation orders, Of course, because the girl was brown, the kidnappers and murderers could not acknowledge that she was a citizen. This is not new, because young children, even as young as five, are being arrested because they're having police officers called on them for normal child behaviors. Unsurprisingly, many of those children having the police called on them and being arrested are not white, and/or disabled, Because there's still too much belief that children are doing things deliberately, defiantly, and in full knowledge of what they are doing at that age, because they're not considered innocent at any age.
Those who have been kidnapped and held are also being killed from the conditions of the detention and the actions of the people led to believe they have the power to mess with detainees without consequences. All the people in this organization lack the basics they need to be minimally humane. The people they've detained have more skills at first response and providing medical aid than the agents supposedly tasked with the care of people detained.
The kidnapping squads believed themselves not subject to international laws and agreements, attempting to enter the Ecuadorian consulate, where they have neither jurisdiction nor authority. They did not succeed, because they were appropriately opposed by the consular staff, but they made the attempt in the first place is certainly a new attempt at gathering immunity and authority to themselves.
Because they are desperate for anything they can call wins, the kidnapping and murder squads allowed a person charged with involvement in a $100M USD jewelry heist to leave the country and go to Honduras, leaving the prosecutors for the jewelry heist crime without a defendant to try for the crime. Given that the person was also a lawful permanent resident, immigration authorities shouldn't have detained him in the first place, but see desperation for a win, and in that way, they may have just assisted one of the people they claim to be going after to get away with the crime and leave the country.
Because he keeps getting rebuffed at every turn, the administrator wants to believe he's justified in invoking the idea that the people resisting their own murders and kidnappings are committing insurrection,and therefore need to be killed by the military as well as the paramilitary forces. He believes that such authority would allow him to no longer be fettered by any kind of power, legislative, judicial, or executive.
The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization, and the State of California joins it. Which is foolish for the United States and smart for California, and we hope that other states join up, because WHO information and support is very important in our current era of a global pandemic. Welcome to year seven of 2019. At least we're to the point where we're starting to trial nasal spray vaccinations for SARS-CoV-2 to hopefully make it easier to obtain and use. So many things have not been diagnosed because of the additional load put on health systems from pandemic issues.
American Samoans live in a legal status unlike any other person under the flag of the United States, and in Whitier, Alaska, someone decided they wanted to prevent the American Samoan community there from having a voice in local affairs by filing an anonymous complaint about noncitizens voting. Which would be true, but very, very unique to American Samoans, and the article suggests there are other interests in Whittier that want to sideline the Samoans and gentrify the place.
Because their collective intelligence is less than the LLMs they plan to use, the current administration believes they can use Google Gemini to write transportation regulations, believing the product can provide them with "good enough" in situations that demand exacting precision.
The agents of the government searched a reporter's home, looking for information on her sources in the government that had been passing information along to her for her reporting. While the government traditionally tries to find and prosecute leakers, the freedom of the press generally keeps them and their sources protected from investigations and seizure by the government. The paper, as far as I know, did not immediately seek suit against the government for stomping on press freedom so obviously.
Confirming what we already knew, the administration has finally decided to admit that letting untrained contractors with a mission to destroy into the Social Security records has resulted in misuse of those records.
After trying to strongarm as many education institutions as they can into getting rid of their initiatives to recruit diversely and appropriately for their student bodies, the administration chose to not continue pursuing such a policy in the face of a determined lawsuit-slinging opposition. Clearly, they thought they'd gotten what they wanted and didn't need to do anything more, after getting others to sacrifice themselves.
The head of the investigation told to find who was attempting to interfere with the election results and the counting that ended in the January 2021 attacks on the Congress testified that the administrator tampered with witnesses by issuing death threats to prevent cooperation with the government's investigation.
Various states and localities are routinely purchasing services from data brokers that allow them to use data to track people and their devices without having to obtain warrants to do so. It certainly makes it easier for law enforcement to do things that they would otherwise need to convince a magistrate to do.
A hospital in Colorado has been sued under the state's anti-discrimination law for their decision to stop providing appropriate gender-affirming care to patients they were already providing that care for. The decision from the hospital comes in response to threats of investigation and losing federal funding for continuing to provide such care from the Health and Human Services Secretary, who's lack of qualifications to run such an agency should long have precluded him from being allowed to take the post.
The biodiversity of the city of London, unexpected orange cephalopods on beaches in Wales, and a cow using tools to scratch herself, which made the Internet immediately reach for their Far Side collections.
In technology, WHIIL C2 and F wheelchairs are vulnerable to a Bluetooth hack that allows an attacker to gain complete control of the chairs, because the Bluetooth interface does not require authentication. There will hopefully be something to fix that coming shortly, but at the same time, there is a question about why a chair needs a Bluetooth control connection in the first place.
While all the technology bubbles run and continue to inflate, consumer prices for computer hardware are becoming ruinously expensive, because consumers now have to compete with datacenters for the same products.
Microsoft GitHub announced, and then reversed, a plan to charge people running GitHub Actions on their own hardware, which sounds like an opportunity for other such forges to offer imports from GitHub to their own platforms, and to allow people to keep their code private and workable in sane and inexpensive environments. Or, y'know, to code up something GPL-powered that will allow those private repositories and forges to run their own such infrastructure, since they're already running a fair amount of the infrastructure themselves.
AI bros want all of us to become the appendages to computers, doing things that the computers cannot yet do, rather than remembering that computers are supposed to assist humans in tasks instead. But the people selling computers are selling it to people who believe that they can get rid of most of the humans, and only keep enough around to take the blame for the computers when the computers inevitably screw up.
Payment processors and their incredibly sex-worker-negative attitudes toward payment for sex work have more than happily accepted payments so that users can use Grok to produce CSAM and other sexual content. The Verge article positions this as fear on the part of payment processors to cross Elon Musk, but also notes that they have been aggressive with places noted to have actual CSAM (good) and with places and people who are simply sex workers or connected to the adult film industry (bad). The article also suggests that the overcautiousness of payment processors before is in worries about engaging in money laundering, if they accepted payments for things that were criminal. That still doesn't erase the part where the payment processors have been extremely aggressive against consensual sexual content between people who are of age to consent and have signed all of the legal paperwork and forms to do it with. (with, you know, records available for someone to inspect available if there are questions about this.) There's a strong possibility that the payment processors are fine with something they can plausibly deny is not being used for the generation of CSAM or other images that are forbidden, and therefore they can disclaim any liability for it, when it's machines making the content. But if it were actual people making legal content, they don't want anything to do with it because that would be icky and wrong to accept and process payments for it, because [Puritanism justifications, or white supremacy justifications, or any number of justifications that don't actually hold water at all in any way.]
Last out, A community legend in FromSoft's Elden Ring: A player with a request to solo a difficult boss, asking to be summoned in, who wears nothing but a pot on their head and wielding two katanas.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have decided the Oscars, including all of the pre-show coverage, will be exclusively streamed on YouTube starting in 2029.
A single rubber dick from a box of discount sex toys 1, the extremely fragile masculinity that resulted in violence and attacks on those who distributed the single rubber dick in their direction, 0.
And, at the very end, a letter signed by more than 400 millionaires and billionaires asking the governments of the world to tax them appropriately so they can provide revenue for the rest of the world to have a good standard of living.
(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.)
If you are looking for a single spot to find good organizations to support the resistance against the occupation of the State of Minnesota, Stand with Minnesota will help you find places that can use your spare resources. Their testimonies tell you about what life in Minnesota is currently like during this occupation, and they have news outlets and spaces to keep yourself informed of the real situation happening, rather than parroted lies and talking points dreamed up by an administration that desperately needs control of a narrative if they want to convince us that Minnesota has once again gone rogue in some way.
They're linked in Naomi Kritzer's guide about how to help Minnesota and prepare your own communities for your turn at the invasion. Additionally, the guide for helping from inside the cities.
Understand that abolition is not "better training," it is not "reduced funding," it is not "the system is working, but these actors have decided not to follow the system." Abolition is the need to completely get rid of a thing, because it is toxic to the population, and the situation we are currently in is because we have not yet managed abolition of state structures, or state-supported structures, the encourage violence against not-white people.
A convenient therapy service in Finland did not secure the notes of the therapists well, and so they were spread across the dark web by someone who believed that exposing the suffering of other humans and requesting ransoms for them was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. The company that left their material unguarded and its founder were also charged with negligence and similar, but the person who was convicted of the hacking crimes seems like the kind of person who has the problem of being a 4chan edgelord and thinking that's not far enough to go for the lulz.
A crowdsourcing of intelligence regarding a person who was catfishing multiple women finally uncovered the potential culprit, another woman using various methods to appear and sound like a man. Unfortunately, it seems like this is something where there were reoccurrences of the same behavior, and that the current methods of trying to discourage that behavior weren't working.
More queer archives appearing means more stories getting told and more evidence that queerness is not a new phenomenon by any means.
The gains of feminism do not always showcase women in power: sometimes the thing it does is to finally start holding men to account for their abuses and to question a societal model that insists men are important and women aren't. This is also a post about the complete unwillingness to release the entirety of the collection of material about Jeffrey Epstein and his friendships and how that's causing some fractures in a coalition, but it's mostly about how we're slowly, reluctantly, starting to move in a direction where women aren't considered liars by default, and that a man's life is infinitely more important than any number of womens' lives. Such that A manager of a football club gets banned from the game for years after it's proven he sent players pictures of his penis and other indecent acts, instead of the complainants being swept under the rug.
The recruitment processes for kidnappers and murderers are explicitly anti-feminist, as they frame white women as needing protection from uncountable non-white men, a story once again told in this guise, instead of the guise of the slave patrols and the KKK and all the groups that murdered and attacked for the mere provocation of a non-white man being too close to a white woman. It is a story founded in white supremacy and the obsessive, conspiratorial need to keep white women only to white men and to ensure that white women are never allowed to believe anything other than that they have to be a baby factory for white children who also believe in this white supremacist view.
The current administrator of the United States continues to talk seriously about conquering Greenland, even though he's not wanted and nobody actually wants to cede anything to him. The people there definitely don't want him there, and don't want to be part of the United States, but without outside assistance, feel like they wouldn't be able to do much about it. As far as I've heard, though, the presence of joint military exercises, and the part where some shiny new distraction has captured the administrator's attention, means that he's not pushing hard on acquisition at the moment.
In the United States, the murder squadrons believe they have the authority to ignore the Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure and the long-standing precedent that requires judicial warrants to enter the private residences of others, and wrote a memorandum declaring such.
Simulators and thinkers and predictors suggest that the current situation in Minnesota is the kind of thing that tends to spark civil wars. Which is really, really the excuse that this administrator wants to send out the military, declare an insurrection, and then really ramp up the killings while feeling like he finally has real authority to do so.
It behooves us to also mention federal agents have shot thirteen people in the last four months, several of them fatally, and many more of them being accused of resisting or otherwise being framed as people attempting to evade law enforcement on legitimate purposes.
The way that the current administration uses denigration and slurs provides a permission structure for all the people who would use those words but haven't because of the social consequences to use those words and believe they won't experience consequences. While the best solution would be to defeat the mindset that gives rise to such words and attitudes, I agree that a good solution would be to make those words unspeakable again and chase those who would use them back into the shadows outside of proper discourse.
Because the current administrator believes he can rule and do whatever he likes, so long as his supporters still support him, and therefore there is no thing he will not do to try and keep those supporters happy.
The current administration believes they are entitled to your biometric information and to pore over your social media posts, in the belief that they can use this information to determine whether you will be a good fit to enter the United States. This feels much more like an excuse to discriminate that can be blamed on things that can't be pinpointed, rather than anything that might resemble a real background check or other situation where they are trying to screen people hwo might be truly dangerous to others.
Someone desperately wants the shooting of Charlie Kirk to mean something more than memes, and for the political discourse to be something more than a football match, and for someone to please, please, bring back seriousness and gravitas to politics. And they will continue to be disappointed in all of these things, because what we know about politics is that so much of it is not about reasoned discourse, or finding compromises to go forward, or any of the other noble things we want it to be about, but is instead about people trying to exercise power in a way that will be noticed and that will bring followers to them that they can then direct to act upon their own political desires. Our politics is supposed to be better than autocracy, but it often finds itself to be autocracy in a trenchcoat. Our politics is lionizing the racist and often violent sheriff who haad a good network of people protecting him while he was being a racist who abused his power. Our politics is the Silver Shirts, the KKK, and other such fascists who were incredibly popular in white enclaves and who see themselves reborn and validated under the current administration's demands for white supremacy.
Because so many people who do violence are doing it for social approval from their peers, surrounding them with people who clearly disapprove of their actions and want them to stop makes it harder for them to start and continue violence, and instead reduces them to being people who have to look for something and act quickly so that they can get their approval, because waiting too long means they get surrounded by people who disapprove of them, and that message might start sticking.
Lawyers are alleging those who have been captured by the kidnapping and murder squads are not receiving any counsel or lawyer support. The kidnap and murder squads deny that they're stopping anyone from receiving due process, but they're also the kind of people who tell us to believe them over the eyewitnesses.
The murder squadrons used a five year-old child to try and bait out others they intended to kidnap. And then tried to paint it as heroic agents taking care of a child being abandoned by a parent in the face of justice. Because of course they did. The indiscriminate targeting, the willingness to include children, and the terrorism inflicted at schools and houses will leave generational scars. And it will probably continue burning educators out even more, because we entrust them with the mental and physical well-being of children while they are at school.
The murder squads have killed again, this time a nurse who was filming them terrorizing. After the murder of Alex Pretti, National Nurses United called the murder squads a public health threat. Which they are, both in what they do, and in what they prevent others from doing for fear that they will kidnap or murder. And, like every other time where the murder squads have murdered or kidnapped or otherwise acted in a method to cause terror, as soon as it was confirmed the murder squads had murdered again, the people who want the murder squads to continue murdering were doing their best to make character attacks against the victim, and to claim things that are not true according to the copious amount of video evidence captured of the murder. Furthermore, it appears that the government already knew who Alex Pretti was, other agents having broken one of his ribs in an earlier escalation.
The lack of restraint by the murder and kidnapping squad is not surprising, given that there is still no actual accountability for agents of the government using violence against those that they want to, including violence that is theoretically forbidden to them, and that has already resulted in deaths before. The people who encourage this violence also proclaim that those using it will not face accountability from the justice system, and therefore citizens are encouraged to record and generate evidence of the crimes of these kidnapping and murder squads so that when accountability comes for them, there will be enough to have justice served.
The Onion didn't have to fudge the supposed quotes all that much to describe what the head of the murder squads wants from Minnesotans. What she wants is not only for Minneapolis residents to stop protesting their own murders, but also for the state of Minnesota to turn over data to her so that she can instead target their residents more precisely and according to the racist priorities of the administration.
Persons attempting to convey the message of Jesus, called Christ, to those who gathered in a house supposedly devoted to his worship, were arrested and characterized as enemies of freedom. Because one of the pastors at that church is also alleged to be in league with the murder squads, which should produce that kind of reckoning for someone who's gone very far away from the message they claim to follow. After the people attempting to bring the good word to the church were released from jail, the people who resisted the teachings of Jesus made sure to release a doctored image making it seem like the black woman was crying in terror at being taken into custody, instead of being clad with the armor of righteousness.
Clergy of all denominations and organizations arrived in Minneapolis to assist in ministry and protecting their flock. Many of them remember what happens when persecution comes from the government, and are determined to live the teachings properly. Other churches, ones that understand and follow the teachings of Jesus, have been busily organizing themselves to deliver necessary supplies to their neighbors so that they don't have to risk being kidnapped or murdered. And other persons, regardless of their faith affiliation, are taking part in networks to ensure that necessary supplies reach those that need them without having to risk being kidnapped or murdered. Because some people are still allowed to go about without harassment, because they are sufficiently white for the murder and kidnapping squads to believe they are allies, rather than their opponent. And because the kidnapping and murder squads have no conscience and will happily misrepresent themselves as having food and supplies to offer families that are too afraid to go on supply runs.
Those clergy that know the teachings of the man and the God they claim to follow make it clear to us that the murder squadrons violate those teachings, and they must take the responsibility for their actions. The teachings that so many claim to follow are riddled with transgressive actions, things that are illegal but very clearly moral, and those who hew to their morality are often punished by the legal systems they oppose.
Others have been putting together their own organizations, groups, and methods to make sure that their neighbors are safe and protected from kidnappers and murderers, and teaching others to do the same. And continuing to do the work they have been doing for generations to liberate people from oppressive systems. Whether practiced hands or new to the cause, the neighbors have come together to provide for those who cannot go out, to speak out for those who cannot come out, and to tell the invaders, kidnappers, and murderers that they are lawless and unwelcome.
A general strike was called for and participated in by many in Minneapolis, using their time to protest the invaders, kidnappers, and murderers in their city, in the same tradition of other general strikes in the States. Whether striking or no, Minnesotans turned out again in great numbers to protest the invasion and occupation of Minneapolis by the agents of the government. And to send people who were supporting the kidnap and murder squads away by showing how very unwelcome they were in great numbers of peaceful protest.
You might think that the residents of Minneapolis learned something from how the murder of George Floyd happened, and are now putting that knowledge to work against the current occupation. And all of this is undergirded with a bedrock understanding that my neighbor is my neighbor, and I will help them against all others, even if I might otherwise find them someone I don't want to hang out with.
Because the people who orchestrate killings and kidnappings, and those who carry them out, have become narrow-minded, they lost the capacity to believe that the motivations of those who resist them are anything other than their own motivations in engaging in kidnapping and killing. Which renders them unable to understand how they are being successfully resisted, without some kind of conspiracy theory, or shadowy puppetmasters, or bankrollers, or some other head that can be definitively defeated or outlasted, rather than recognizing that they are facing a hydra, and unlike the one of myth, or the organization in the Marvel Universe, there is no head that can be definitively destroyed. And that people are doing good for good and moral reasons, rather than sanctimoniously declaring good reasons while having evil ones underlying.
Elsewhere, the kidnapping and murder squads deported a five year-old girl and her parent to Honduras, even though the girl is a citizen and should not be subject to deportation orders, Of course, because the girl was brown, the kidnappers and murderers could not acknowledge that she was a citizen. This is not new, because young children, even as young as five, are being arrested because they're having police officers called on them for normal child behaviors. Unsurprisingly, many of those children having the police called on them and being arrested are not white, and/or disabled, Because there's still too much belief that children are doing things deliberately, defiantly, and in full knowledge of what they are doing at that age, because they're not considered innocent at any age.
Those who have been kidnapped and held are also being killed from the conditions of the detention and the actions of the people led to believe they have the power to mess with detainees without consequences. All the people in this organization lack the basics they need to be minimally humane. The people they've detained have more skills at first response and providing medical aid than the agents supposedly tasked with the care of people detained.
The kidnapping squads believed themselves not subject to international laws and agreements, attempting to enter the Ecuadorian consulate, where they have neither jurisdiction nor authority. They did not succeed, because they were appropriately opposed by the consular staff, but they made the attempt in the first place is certainly a new attempt at gathering immunity and authority to themselves.
Because they are desperate for anything they can call wins, the kidnapping and murder squads allowed a person charged with involvement in a $100M USD jewelry heist to leave the country and go to Honduras, leaving the prosecutors for the jewelry heist crime without a defendant to try for the crime. Given that the person was also a lawful permanent resident, immigration authorities shouldn't have detained him in the first place, but see desperation for a win, and in that way, they may have just assisted one of the people they claim to be going after to get away with the crime and leave the country.
Because he keeps getting rebuffed at every turn, the administrator wants to believe he's justified in invoking the idea that the people resisting their own murders and kidnappings are committing insurrection,and therefore need to be killed by the military as well as the paramilitary forces. He believes that such authority would allow him to no longer be fettered by any kind of power, legislative, judicial, or executive.
The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization, and the State of California joins it. Which is foolish for the United States and smart for California, and we hope that other states join up, because WHO information and support is very important in our current era of a global pandemic. Welcome to year seven of 2019. At least we're to the point where we're starting to trial nasal spray vaccinations for SARS-CoV-2 to hopefully make it easier to obtain and use. So many things have not been diagnosed because of the additional load put on health systems from pandemic issues.
American Samoans live in a legal status unlike any other person under the flag of the United States, and in Whitier, Alaska, someone decided they wanted to prevent the American Samoan community there from having a voice in local affairs by filing an anonymous complaint about noncitizens voting. Which would be true, but very, very unique to American Samoans, and the article suggests there are other interests in Whittier that want to sideline the Samoans and gentrify the place.
Because their collective intelligence is less than the LLMs they plan to use, the current administration believes they can use Google Gemini to write transportation regulations, believing the product can provide them with "good enough" in situations that demand exacting precision.
The agents of the government searched a reporter's home, looking for information on her sources in the government that had been passing information along to her for her reporting. While the government traditionally tries to find and prosecute leakers, the freedom of the press generally keeps them and their sources protected from investigations and seizure by the government. The paper, as far as I know, did not immediately seek suit against the government for stomping on press freedom so obviously.
Confirming what we already knew, the administration has finally decided to admit that letting untrained contractors with a mission to destroy into the Social Security records has resulted in misuse of those records.
After trying to strongarm as many education institutions as they can into getting rid of their initiatives to recruit diversely and appropriately for their student bodies, the administration chose to not continue pursuing such a policy in the face of a determined lawsuit-slinging opposition. Clearly, they thought they'd gotten what they wanted and didn't need to do anything more, after getting others to sacrifice themselves.
The head of the investigation told to find who was attempting to interfere with the election results and the counting that ended in the January 2021 attacks on the Congress testified that the administrator tampered with witnesses by issuing death threats to prevent cooperation with the government's investigation.
Various states and localities are routinely purchasing services from data brokers that allow them to use data to track people and their devices without having to obtain warrants to do so. It certainly makes it easier for law enforcement to do things that they would otherwise need to convince a magistrate to do.
A hospital in Colorado has been sued under the state's anti-discrimination law for their decision to stop providing appropriate gender-affirming care to patients they were already providing that care for. The decision from the hospital comes in response to threats of investigation and losing federal funding for continuing to provide such care from the Health and Human Services Secretary, who's lack of qualifications to run such an agency should long have precluded him from being allowed to take the post.
The biodiversity of the city of London, unexpected orange cephalopods on beaches in Wales, and a cow using tools to scratch herself, which made the Internet immediately reach for their Far Side collections.
In technology, WHIIL C2 and F wheelchairs are vulnerable to a Bluetooth hack that allows an attacker to gain complete control of the chairs, because the Bluetooth interface does not require authentication. There will hopefully be something to fix that coming shortly, but at the same time, there is a question about why a chair needs a Bluetooth control connection in the first place.
While all the technology bubbles run and continue to inflate, consumer prices for computer hardware are becoming ruinously expensive, because consumers now have to compete with datacenters for the same products.
Microsoft GitHub announced, and then reversed, a plan to charge people running GitHub Actions on their own hardware, which sounds like an opportunity for other such forges to offer imports from GitHub to their own platforms, and to allow people to keep their code private and workable in sane and inexpensive environments. Or, y'know, to code up something GPL-powered that will allow those private repositories and forges to run their own such infrastructure, since they're already running a fair amount of the infrastructure themselves.
AI bros want all of us to become the appendages to computers, doing things that the computers cannot yet do, rather than remembering that computers are supposed to assist humans in tasks instead. But the people selling computers are selling it to people who believe that they can get rid of most of the humans, and only keep enough around to take the blame for the computers when the computers inevitably screw up.
Payment processors and their incredibly sex-worker-negative attitudes toward payment for sex work have more than happily accepted payments so that users can use Grok to produce CSAM and other sexual content. The Verge article positions this as fear on the part of payment processors to cross Elon Musk, but also notes that they have been aggressive with places noted to have actual CSAM (good) and with places and people who are simply sex workers or connected to the adult film industry (bad). The article also suggests that the overcautiousness of payment processors before is in worries about engaging in money laundering, if they accepted payments for things that were criminal. That still doesn't erase the part where the payment processors have been extremely aggressive against consensual sexual content between people who are of age to consent and have signed all of the legal paperwork and forms to do it with. (with, you know, records available for someone to inspect available if there are questions about this.) There's a strong possibility that the payment processors are fine with something they can plausibly deny is not being used for the generation of CSAM or other images that are forbidden, and therefore they can disclaim any liability for it, when it's machines making the content. But if it were actual people making legal content, they don't want anything to do with it because that would be icky and wrong to accept and process payments for it, because [Puritanism justifications, or white supremacy justifications, or any number of justifications that don't actually hold water at all in any way.]
Last out, A community legend in FromSoft's Elden Ring: A player with a request to solo a difficult boss, asking to be summoned in, who wears nothing but a pot on their head and wielding two katanas.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have decided the Oscars, including all of the pre-show coverage, will be exclusively streamed on YouTube starting in 2029.
A single rubber dick from a box of discount sex toys 1, the extremely fragile masculinity that resulted in violence and attacks on those who distributed the single rubber dick in their direction, 0.
And, at the very end, a letter signed by more than 400 millionaires and billionaires asking the governments of the world to tax them appropriately so they can provide revenue for the rest of the world to have a good standard of living.
(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.)
