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silveradeptLet's begin with this: Inequality produces worse health and mortality outcomes for everyone, but it hasn't been noticed until now because for several decades, advances in medicine managed to get close to balancing the ledger.
Sports betting, and prediction markets in general, aided by mobile apps and Internet betting, have made it very easy for people who are susceptible to problem gambling patterns, or those who don't have the money to gamble, to gamble far more than they want to.
Conversion "therapy" doesn't work to produce the results it claims to, or desires to. Instead, it continues to traumatize and blame, rather than help.
People who are impressed by buzzwords and corporate bullshit tend not to be as good at doing their jobs, according to some Cornell research. And the difficulty potentially is that those who are impressed by such BS tend to hire and promote people who are similarly so, which compounds the problem.
The insistence on seeing someone while chatting to them makes no sense to someone who can't see, and yet, their sighted friends seem to believe that if they can't see them, something is seriously wrong.
People are not ideologies. People have ideologies, and when you treat people as things, well, Esmerelda Weatherwax has things to say about that.
A music festival was cancelled and refunds issued to ticketholders when the headliner for the festival, Kanye West, was denied permission to enter the United Kingdom, based on the anti-Judaism comments he has repeatedly made over a significant period of time. Actions having consequences? Boy, the U.S. audience has come to expect that would never happen to anyone.
There is a way to defeat authoritarians, and Hungary has just shown the way to knock over a strongman, with clear echoes for the United States, should it decide to nip its own incipient strongman before he can blossom. Any time now, before even more of the intentional destruction of the mechanisms of good government and public service.
Having decided to declare war for no good reason, the current administrator found himself in the situation of having to ask the people he bragged he obliterated and worse to some to the negotiation table.
The United States administrator believes that he can call the Bishop of Rome to heel, or at the very least, if he will not heel, may have threatened the possibility of having a Pope in the United States at his own command. Because, among other things, The Pope said that those who wage wars are not listened to by the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, citing chapter and verse in support. (This led quite a few people to disclaim that the Bishop of Rome couldn't possibly know what he was talking about, and that he shouldn't wade into politics. Despite the clear amount of politics that is present all throughout the Christian Foundational Writings.) The threat the administrator made to wipe out an entire civilization drew a strong rebuke from the pontiff, and the subsequent threats had him decide not to visit the United States to participate in the America 250 celebrations.
As you might expect, The Pope was not afraid of the bluster coming from the United Stated administrator.
The article talks about anti-Catholicism as being in the founding of the country, but I think there's just as much something in there about how the United States tends to be the kinds of people who mediate their spirituality and faith through technological apps and who have polarized opinions about whether an app that shows you the prayers of various celebrities should have partnered up with a man who made significant money telling lies to people. Where the mockery of an administrator isn't recognized as the same mockery deployed against their own religious messiah, in his historical context.)
Discovering just what an agency did around the world didn't get the political appointees, or the DOGE bros, to actually decide to keep the agency running, but instead made them ask for things that were extremely simplified to try and explain it to the people who were going to still kill the agency as a last-ditch attempt to keep it alive and running on life support.
Which, of course, gives them the money to pay someone money for a case that a judge already has dismissed, because that person was a former advisor to the current administrator. And to also pay out significant money to police departments as a settlement for a case where a land developer was harming Hispanic victims, a provision that the judge balked at severely, because this was a fraud case, not a crime case, and yet, the victims are getting nothing and the cops are getting more.
Having brought cases without justifications to the courts, eventually the kidnap and murder squads do slink away without having obtained their desired results in court. By having terrorized, though, they've already achieved their real goals. They're diverting actual investigators from real criminal investigators to pursue immigrants and terrorize them. The kinds of things that would have real consequences if they were prosecuted, cases about things like waste, fraud, and abuse.
In addition to that, they are running concentration camps, and people are dying in them from preventable situations, because the people running the places don't care enough to keep people alive they have already determined no longer qualify for the definition of human.
Companies that profit handsomely from providing data to the kidnap and murder squads also fire the workers they have that have spoken out against cooperation with kidnap and murder squads, because corporations only care about profits, not ethics or conscience.
A decision by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Executive Branch declares that they have no need to follow the Presidential Records Act, the one that requires them to preserve documentation of the presidency and the decisions made and turn it all over to the National Archives at the end of the presidency, and therefore, they won't be doing any of it. I expect them to be dragged before the court immediately. Whether or not the court will then say "Ha-ha-ha. Very funny. You are to execute the laws that have been passed, not to decide which ones you will execute." or not is another matter entirely, but this seems like the sort of thing that will immediately spark someone filing suit saying "Excuse you, there is still a law here, and you are required to follow it. If you want to make a case about its constitutionality, use the regular channels for that."
Sexual misconduct allegations have emerged against Eric Swalwell, who intended to run for California governor, but has now resigned his Congressional seat as well as suspending his campaign, and also against Representative Tony Gonzalez from Texas.
Deepak Chopra was also a big friend of convicted pederast and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and while he disclaims that he ever did anything abusive or participated in such, it seems like another chapter of the story where someone is cozying up to someone repugnant because they're also wealthy and influential.
It should be no surprise that with the people in power spouting all the -ist language they can, that the young Republicans in college chats would do the same. And while the people in charge have made the appropriate noises about it not being appropriate, I don't see this trend suddenly getting stomped out any time soon. After all, nominations to the State Department are unapologetic about their white nationalism, and the current administration is arguing that the Constitution is, in fact, a white-supremacist document and should be interpreted as such.
The secretary in charge of military operations has personally intervened to stop officers of color and women officers from receiving warranted and due promotions.
Mobile home communities continue to have their rents raised without improvements or visible signs of what that money is doing, other than padding the pockets of the landlord
A stridently anti-queer author who claimed to be a Christian has been indicted on child sex abuse charges in Ohio. He might still claim it, but he's one of the growing cohort that believes that queer people are predators and abusers and turns out to be one himself.
The name for the syndrome currently known as PCOS may have to change, as people who have never had ovaries appear to get the same syndrome as those who have them.
In technology, the quadruped robots that resemble dogs are guarding data centers and more, for hefty price tags.
More interestingly, now that Artemis II has launched, done their flyby, and come back safely to the planet, we can also explain about why there was so much talk about toilets while in space - there was a significant improvement to the waste systems that went up with the Integrity capsule.
The Artemis II mission is there to remind us that for as petty as humans can be, and concerned about the smallest of things, there's still one Earth, and interesting things beyond it, and that if we choose humans and humanity, we are capable of doing great things.
The patch for the Artemis II mission the Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, wore has significant symbolism and incorporates many First Nations symbols into a mission into the sky and beyond.
As one might expect, As technology advances, the ability of stalker and people who want to ignore consent to do stalking and ignoring consent advances as well, especially when the technology bros are pinky-swearing they have put enough safeguards in place so that nobody can defeat the mechanism on their pervert glasses that says there's recording going on, or are blatantly advertising their products as stalkerware.
Others build sophisticated surveillance technology to geolocate people, supposedly to serve them targeted ads, but also to have a trove of data for governments to buy when they're not interested in trying to convince a judge to get a warrant to track someone's location. And, as investigations suggest, even when you reject their tracking cookies, several large companies set them anyway.
Last for tonight, The Archive of Our Own officially ended its status as a beta piece of software. This doesn't change anything, not really, but it does mean that AO3 believes it's out of beta (but definitely not releasing on time.)
The collection of artifacts a billionaire put together and was good about making sure people could see and engage with has been broken up and sold to various other private collectors, because one of the truths of our world is that capitalism always likes to collect important things, and doesn't always share or allow access to them for people. And it's not just billionaires, of course, People who have amassed a collection of historic finds with their metal detectors sometimes sell their collections as well, rather than making them part of a national or regional collection. Or at least letting them have first crack at anything they want to have.
(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.)
Sports betting, and prediction markets in general, aided by mobile apps and Internet betting, have made it very easy for people who are susceptible to problem gambling patterns, or those who don't have the money to gamble, to gamble far more than they want to.
Conversion "therapy" doesn't work to produce the results it claims to, or desires to. Instead, it continues to traumatize and blame, rather than help.
People who are impressed by buzzwords and corporate bullshit tend not to be as good at doing their jobs, according to some Cornell research. And the difficulty potentially is that those who are impressed by such BS tend to hire and promote people who are similarly so, which compounds the problem.
The insistence on seeing someone while chatting to them makes no sense to someone who can't see, and yet, their sighted friends seem to believe that if they can't see them, something is seriously wrong.
People are not ideologies. People have ideologies, and when you treat people as things, well, Esmerelda Weatherwax has things to say about that.
A music festival was cancelled and refunds issued to ticketholders when the headliner for the festival, Kanye West, was denied permission to enter the United Kingdom, based on the anti-Judaism comments he has repeatedly made over a significant period of time. Actions having consequences? Boy, the U.S. audience has come to expect that would never happen to anyone.
There is a way to defeat authoritarians, and Hungary has just shown the way to knock over a strongman, with clear echoes for the United States, should it decide to nip its own incipient strongman before he can blossom. Any time now, before even more of the intentional destruction of the mechanisms of good government and public service.
Having decided to declare war for no good reason, the current administrator found himself in the situation of having to ask the people he bragged he obliterated and worse to some to the negotiation table.
The United States administrator believes that he can call the Bishop of Rome to heel, or at the very least, if he will not heel, may have threatened the possibility of having a Pope in the United States at his own command. Because, among other things, The Pope said that those who wage wars are not listened to by the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, citing chapter and verse in support. (This led quite a few people to disclaim that the Bishop of Rome couldn't possibly know what he was talking about, and that he shouldn't wade into politics. Despite the clear amount of politics that is present all throughout the Christian Foundational Writings.) The threat the administrator made to wipe out an entire civilization drew a strong rebuke from the pontiff, and the subsequent threats had him decide not to visit the United States to participate in the America 250 celebrations.
As you might expect, The Pope was not afraid of the bluster coming from the United Stated administrator.
The article talks about anti-Catholicism as being in the founding of the country, but I think there's just as much something in there about how the United States tends to be the kinds of people who mediate their spirituality and faith through technological apps and who have polarized opinions about whether an app that shows you the prayers of various celebrities should have partnered up with a man who made significant money telling lies to people. Where the mockery of an administrator isn't recognized as the same mockery deployed against their own religious messiah, in his historical context.)
Discovering just what an agency did around the world didn't get the political appointees, or the DOGE bros, to actually decide to keep the agency running, but instead made them ask for things that were extremely simplified to try and explain it to the people who were going to still kill the agency as a last-ditch attempt to keep it alive and running on life support.
Which, of course, gives them the money to pay someone money for a case that a judge already has dismissed, because that person was a former advisor to the current administrator. And to also pay out significant money to police departments as a settlement for a case where a land developer was harming Hispanic victims, a provision that the judge balked at severely, because this was a fraud case, not a crime case, and yet, the victims are getting nothing and the cops are getting more.
Having brought cases without justifications to the courts, eventually the kidnap and murder squads do slink away without having obtained their desired results in court. By having terrorized, though, they've already achieved their real goals. They're diverting actual investigators from real criminal investigators to pursue immigrants and terrorize them. The kinds of things that would have real consequences if they were prosecuted, cases about things like waste, fraud, and abuse.
In addition to that, they are running concentration camps, and people are dying in them from preventable situations, because the people running the places don't care enough to keep people alive they have already determined no longer qualify for the definition of human.
Companies that profit handsomely from providing data to the kidnap and murder squads also fire the workers they have that have spoken out against cooperation with kidnap and murder squads, because corporations only care about profits, not ethics or conscience.
A decision by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Executive Branch declares that they have no need to follow the Presidential Records Act, the one that requires them to preserve documentation of the presidency and the decisions made and turn it all over to the National Archives at the end of the presidency, and therefore, they won't be doing any of it. I expect them to be dragged before the court immediately. Whether or not the court will then say "Ha-ha-ha. Very funny. You are to execute the laws that have been passed, not to decide which ones you will execute." or not is another matter entirely, but this seems like the sort of thing that will immediately spark someone filing suit saying "Excuse you, there is still a law here, and you are required to follow it. If you want to make a case about its constitutionality, use the regular channels for that."
Sexual misconduct allegations have emerged against Eric Swalwell, who intended to run for California governor, but has now resigned his Congressional seat as well as suspending his campaign, and also against Representative Tony Gonzalez from Texas.
Deepak Chopra was also a big friend of convicted pederast and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and while he disclaims that he ever did anything abusive or participated in such, it seems like another chapter of the story where someone is cozying up to someone repugnant because they're also wealthy and influential.
It should be no surprise that with the people in power spouting all the -ist language they can, that the young Republicans in college chats would do the same. And while the people in charge have made the appropriate noises about it not being appropriate, I don't see this trend suddenly getting stomped out any time soon. After all, nominations to the State Department are unapologetic about their white nationalism, and the current administration is arguing that the Constitution is, in fact, a white-supremacist document and should be interpreted as such.
The secretary in charge of military operations has personally intervened to stop officers of color and women officers from receiving warranted and due promotions.
Mobile home communities continue to have their rents raised without improvements or visible signs of what that money is doing, other than padding the pockets of the landlord
A stridently anti-queer author who claimed to be a Christian has been indicted on child sex abuse charges in Ohio. He might still claim it, but he's one of the growing cohort that believes that queer people are predators and abusers and turns out to be one himself.
The name for the syndrome currently known as PCOS may have to change, as people who have never had ovaries appear to get the same syndrome as those who have them.
In technology, the quadruped robots that resemble dogs are guarding data centers and more, for hefty price tags.
More interestingly, now that Artemis II has launched, done their flyby, and come back safely to the planet, we can also explain about why there was so much talk about toilets while in space - there was a significant improvement to the waste systems that went up with the Integrity capsule.
The Artemis II mission is there to remind us that for as petty as humans can be, and concerned about the smallest of things, there's still one Earth, and interesting things beyond it, and that if we choose humans and humanity, we are capable of doing great things.
The patch for the Artemis II mission the Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen, wore has significant symbolism and incorporates many First Nations symbols into a mission into the sky and beyond.
As one might expect, As technology advances, the ability of stalker and people who want to ignore consent to do stalking and ignoring consent advances as well, especially when the technology bros are pinky-swearing they have put enough safeguards in place so that nobody can defeat the mechanism on their pervert glasses that says there's recording going on, or are blatantly advertising their products as stalkerware.
Others build sophisticated surveillance technology to geolocate people, supposedly to serve them targeted ads, but also to have a trove of data for governments to buy when they're not interested in trying to convince a judge to get a warrant to track someone's location. And, as investigations suggest, even when you reject their tracking cookies, several large companies set them anyway.
Last for tonight, The Archive of Our Own officially ended its status as a beta piece of software. This doesn't change anything, not really, but it does mean that AO3 believes it's out of beta (but definitely not releasing on time.)
The collection of artifacts a billionaire put together and was good about making sure people could see and engage with has been broken up and sold to various other private collectors, because one of the truths of our world is that capitalism always likes to collect important things, and doesn't always share or allow access to them for people. And it's not just billionaires, of course, People who have amassed a collection of historic finds with their metal detectors sometimes sell their collections as well, rather than making them part of a national or regional collection. Or at least letting them have first crack at anything they want to have.
(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.)
