The upcoming changes in Fedora 37 which would allow entire Flathub repository & its applications directly from GNOME Software.
A common enough microcontroller project is to create some form of logic analyzer. In theory, it should be pretty easy: grab some digital inputs, store them, and display them. But, of course, the devil is in the details. First, you want to grab data fast, but you also need to examine the trigger in real time — hard to do in software. You may also need input conditioning circuitry unless you are satisfied with the microcontroller’s input characteristics. Finally, you need a way to dump the data for analysis. [Gusmanb] has tackled all of these problems with a simple analyzer built around the Raspberry Pi Pico.
Times are very different now than they were when I was young, in many different respects.€ But there is also consistency here, and this situation reminds me of my youth, so I’ll start there.€ And I do so not to be self-indulgent, but because my own trajectory is undoubtedly shared by countless others, if you change a few details.
My parents were (and are) politically progressive.€ I went to a wonderfully alternative sort of elementary school, and a summer camp run by an anti-nuclear activist Unitarian minister.€ And then Reagan came to power, threatening nuclear war with the Soviet Union.€ By the age of twelve, I had found a loving community of like-minded kids — fellow pubescent anti-nuclear hippies, basically.€ And by the age of thirteen Reagan was enthusiastically developing big new nuclear missiles.
We’re suckers for alternative data transmission methods, and [Georgi Gerganov]’s ggwave made us smile. At its core, it’s doing what the phone modems of old used to do – sending data encoded as different audio tones. But GGwave does this with sophistication!
As the saying goes, all comedians really want to be rock stars. Many comics have strived to attain that status, either onstage or on-screen, with varying degrees of success, but the Canadian comedy troupe the Kids in the Hall have arguably been the most successful at resembling an actual band: Five members, each with a unique personality, who connected out of compatible sensibilities and youthful, unchecked arrogance, gain a regional reputation before making it big in America. Their cohesion and competitive spirit kept them funny and fresh until their artistic temperaments catalyzed a rupture. They slowly mended fences and reunited on multiple occasions before releasing a new “album” of sorts—i.e., a new season of their landmark eponymous sketch series.
You might recognize [Robert Dunn] from his YouTube channel Aging Wheels, where he hacks on all sorts of automotive delights. On his other channel, Under Dunn, [Robert] tends to focus on building things. In this case, his nine chickens grew a bit, and he needs a new coop for his twenty chickens, three turkeys, and two geese. The build, the video, and the outcome are all typical of [Robert Dunn]’s videos- that is to say fun, informative, and easy to follow along with.
The testing method used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and local officials around the country is so circumscribed that regulators almost certainly have an incomplete understanding of the extent to which the nation's drinking water is contaminated with toxic "forever chemicals."
"There are so many PFAS that we don't know anything about, and if we don't know anything about them, how do we know they aren't hurting us?"
“Reproductive health services,” says National Nurses United, are “fundamental to ensuring economic justice for women across the country.”
Senate Democrats, including serial obstructionist Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have reportedly reached a deal on a plan that would allow Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small subset of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies, a change that is massively popular with voters across party lines.
"Already this year, drug corporations have raised the price of over 800 prescription medicines by more than 5%."
It’s no secret that the US Supreme Court has issued a number of rulings this year that will hurt working families today and in the future. As a registered nurse living in Miami, the court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA—which undermines the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate power plants under the Clean Air Act—is yet another ruling that has me worried about my patients and my coworkers.
In a recent commentary, I discussed the visit to China of the UN’s chief human rights official on what proved to be a seriously misguided and rather naïve attempt to improve the conditions of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang province. An important element in that mass internment of innocent civilians is China’s ubiquitous surveillance system, which has facilitated the roundup of Chinese Muslims.
That system is not confined to the Uyghurs. It is a many-layered nationwide network designed to collect personal data for police and security units on every Chinese citizen whose behavior or personal characteristics might be troublesome to the authorities. In a word, no one is above suspicion.
The war in Ukraine continues to rage and threaten world peace with the dark shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust. Could President Biden lift that shadow? What if he dared to step before the cameras and address the nation — and the world — with words like these…€
A top Kremlin official responded Wednesday to the U.S.-backed effort to investigate war crimes perpetrated by Russian forces invading Ukraine by warning that Americans could face retribution for their hypocrisy in the form of thermonuclear annihilation.
"The idea to punish a country with the largest nuclear potential is absurd and potentially creates the threat to mankind's existence."
Progressive Middle East watchers on Wednesday condemned the Biden administration's targeting of 15 firms and people in at least five countries allegedly linked to the sale and shipment of Iranian petroleum products in violation of U.S. economic sanctions.
"All of this could have been avoided if Biden just returned to the JCPOA via executive order."
At this early stage of the game, it’s not easy being a legal pot dealer in the U.S. No matter how legal you may be in the state where you operate, to federal law enforcement you are a multiple felon if they want to go after you.
The blockade, a 60-year-old relic of history, places few heavy demands on the U.S. public. No governmental funding is required. The Treasury Department issues fines and presidents make ritualistic declarations. People dodge travel restrictions. It’s a slow-motion affair. Distracted pro-Cuba activists may lose track of harassment details. Here they get a refresher course, for motivation toward action. It emphasizes blockade effects on people’s lives.
In the Beginning
Between 1960 and 1996, France carried out 17 nuclear tests in Algeria and 193 in French Polynesia. In Algeria, atmospheric and underground tests were carried out at the Reggane and In Ekker sites, in an atmosphere of secrecy and conflict between an Algerian nation under construction and a colonial power seeking strategic autonomy. A majority of the tests – 11 – were carried out after the Evian agreements (18 March 1962), which established Algeria’s independence.
It was not until the 1990s that the first independent studies relating to some of the dark events of that period finally became available. Disclosure about accidents that happened during some of the tests, about the risk that populations and soldiers were exposed to, in Algeria and in Polynesia alike, led to the implementation of the law “on 5 January 2010, granting recognition and compensation for the victims of French nuclear testings“. But this law does not take into account any environmental consequences.
There’s so much heat, in other words, that we seem endlessly in the fires of this political moment. It’s hardly surprisingly then if, talking about heat, by far the most significant story of our time, undoubtedly of all time, is barely on our radar screens.€ I mean, let’s get one thing straight, if you hadn’t quite noticed: you and I are already on a different planet.€ And no, I’m not thinking about being in a new cold war, or Donald Trump and the last presidential election, or€ Ron DeSantis€ and the next one, or even the€ latest round€ of the never-ending Covid-19 pandemic.
I’m talking about being on a planet€ already overheating€ not just politically or militarily, but in the most literal way possible. I’m talking about climate change, of course. And don’t think I’m just focused on the future over-heating of this planet either. What I have in mind is this very palpable present. I’m talking about a country, the United States, that, with€ heat domes€ over€ significant parts€ of it recently, has been breaking seasonal heat records like mad. Phoenix (114), Tucson (111), El Paso (107), and Las Vegas (104) all€ set June heat records, as did Birmingham, Chicago, Little Rock, Jackson, Memphis, Shreveport, and Nashville. That’s just to start down an ever-lengthening, ever more broiling list, even as the Supreme Court just€ acted to ensure that ever more greenhouse gas emissions would continue to pour into our atmosphere.
Photography from the Vietnam War was covered among the 48 photos showing the self-immolation photo of Thich Quang Duc in 1963 and the photo of a protester placing a flower in a bayonet in 1967. But there were two images that begged to be shown from May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed 4 students and wounded 9 others on the campus of Kent State University during protests in answer to the US expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. First, there is the iconic photo of€ Mary Ann Vecchio by John Filo.€ She kneels over the body of Jeffrey Miller who was killed in the fusillade of Guard bullets. She is screaming, her arms outstretched. Equally devastating is the photo taken a few minutes earlier of the€ National Guardsmen atop Blanket Hill€ € (Getty Images) opening€ fire on unarmed protesting students below.
These photos of protest and the reaction to it reverberated around the world and especially here in the US. The murder and wounding of students at Kent State sent shock waves through the protest movement and caused protest to grow exponentially throughout the country, closing down over 400 campuses nationwide.
The death toll in Monday’s mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, has risen to seven after another victim died from their injuries. The suspect has been charged with seven counts of first-degree murder over the massacre that also left scores of people injured, including nine people who remain hospitalized. Police say he legally purchased five weapons, including the high-powered rifle used in the shooting, despite visiting his home in 2019 over threats of violence. Reporters also continue to unearth his online history, including videos that appeared to show an obsession with mass shootings and his support for former President Donald Trump. Investigative journalist Michael Edison Hayden, who covers internet radicalization and far-right extremism for the Southern Poverty Law Center, says that same link has been apparent in other mass shootings where disturbed people who are “programming themselves to kill … are also attracted to the nihilism of hard-right authoritarianism in the United States.”
Boston officials claim they had no prior knowledge of a march through the city by about 100 members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front on Saturday. Local anti-fascist organizers contronted the marchers, who also attacked a local Black artist named Charles Murrell. We speak to Boston civil rights activist Reverend Kevin Peterson, who is an adviser to Murrell; investigative journalist Phillip Martin, who has documented the rise of the neo-Nazi movement in Massachusetts; and Michael Edison Hayden with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Peterson is calling for an internal investigation into the Boston police over its response to Saturday’s violence. His group, the New Democracy Coalition, is also calling for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu to develop a race commission to explore what would constitute reparations for Black people.
Increasingly, it seems, Americans have an anger problem. All too many of us now have the urge to use name-calling, violent social media posts, threats, baseball bats, and guns to do what we once did with persuasion and voting. For example, during the year after Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, threats of violence or even death against lawmakers of both parties increased more than fourfold. And too often, the call to violence seems to come from the top. Recently, defendants in cases involving extremist violence have claimed that an elected leader or pundit “told” them to do it. In a country where a sitting president would lunge at his own security detail in rage, I guess this isn’t so surprising anymore. Emotion rules the American political scene and so many now tend to shoot from the hip without even knowing why.
The muted response from the White House following the July 4 mass shooting at a parade in Highland Park, Illinois has intensified frustration felt by progressives over the Biden administration's approach to the crises facing the United States, coming less than two weeks after the Supreme Court gutted abortion rights for millions of Americans.
At an Independence Day barbeque on Monday, President Joe Biden briefly mentioned the shooting which killed seven people, injured 46 others, and left a toddler orphaned, telling the crowd, "We've got to get this under control."
The U.S. military buildup in Europe and the new round of expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will make it difficult to negotiate important substantive issues with Russia such as arms control and disarmament; the non-proliferation of strategic weaponry; international terrorism; climate control; and peacekeeping in the Third World.
Unlike the first round of NATO expansion, which Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush unnecessarily orchestrated, Putin is responsible for the latest round.€ He created the strategic conditions for NATO’s expansion into the Nordic area.€ Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine wrongly assumed that the United States would remain on the sidelines; that European members of NATO would be seriously divided; and that Ukraine lacked the will and ingenuity to confound Russian military forces.€ Putin’s assumptions were wrong on every level, and he has made himself a pariah in the European community particularly.€ Nevertheless, U.S. efforts to exploit Putin’s pariah status will create strategic problems for Russian-American bilateral relations as well as for overall international relations.
United States military analysts love strategies and the theories behind them. The theories provide what appear to be perfectly reasonable and rational approaches to warfighting, even offering a sense of certainty about the outcome. After all, they’ve been designed with military precision. Authorized personnel at the Pentagon or military think tanks are assigned to create strong, catchy names for the theories. A longtime theory is “Escalation Dominance,” which has a close cousin called “Full-Spectrum Dominance.”€
New evidence emerges that disgraced detective Louis Scarcella steered investigators away from likely shooter.
Who’s to blame for a lack of action on climate change?
“There’s simply no reason to take drastic action now.”
By Richard Wolff / Democracy At Work A Patron of Economic Update asks: “If pay for workers increases, won’t that increase consumption (unless its stolen back through inflation)..."
Around 1 in 10 people went hungry last year in a world losing ground on its collective goal of ending all forms of hunger, a report released Wednesday by United Nations agencies revealed, prompting sharp censure from a leading charity.
"Long-standing political failure to address how we feed all the people in the world has made our food system susceptible to fragility and failure."
Before dawn, Jerry Leeman churned through inky black waters, clutching the wheel of the fishing vessel Harmony.
The 85-foot trawler, deep green and speckled with rust, was returning from a grueling fishing trip deep into the Atlantic swells. Leeman and his crew of four had worked 10 consecutive days, 20 hours a day, to haul in more than 50,000 pounds of fish: pollock, haddock and ocean perch, a trio known as groundfish in the industry and as whitefish in the freezer aisle.
They have powerful allies in politics, political parties, the state, and federal and state governments. Euro-billion heirs of German family dynasties, for example, have done well in the business-to-politics arrangement. Like the infamous Russian (and plenty of other) oligarchs, Germany’s super-rich have occasionally attracted – albeit often unwanted – attention.
Recently, the yacht of one of Germany’s super-rich was literally “screwing up” the view of the Statue of Liberty. That was the mistake made by German $14-billion-dollar-man and screw manufacturer – The Screw King – Reinhold Würth and daughter Bettina.
There is also the question of whether the unemployment rate will match its 50-year low of 3.5 percent, after being stuck at 3.6 percent for the last three months. It would be ironic that at a time when the media are filled with stories of recession, the unemployment rate is hitting its lowest level since 1969.
Moderating Wage Growth
For billionaire Ken Griffin, it was well worth spending $54 million to ensure he and other rich Illinoisans wouldn’t have to pay more tax.
By the time Illinois voters streamed into voting booths on Election Day in 2020, Griffin, then Illinois’ wealthiest resident, had made sure they’d heard plenty about why they should not vote to raise taxes on him and the state’s other rich people. His tens of millions paid for an unrelenting stream of ads and flyers against an initiative on that year’s ballot, which would have allowed Illinois lawmakers to join 32 other states in setting higher tax rates for the wealthy than for everyone else.
This should surprise no one, but Joshua Benton, over at Nieman Lab, has a really fantastically well-reported article about how Facebook basically wants out of the news business entirely. It goes through multiple reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that Rupert Murdoch’s decade-long demands that Facebook and Google simply fork over some cash to news organizations (for sending them traffic) has finally had some modicum of success in Australia, and is now being considered elsewhere around the globe.
It truly is incredible just how much of a moral panic the media and politicians have created around social media. Once again, the actual research is basically inconclusive that social media is bad. If it were truly awful, it should be showing up in the data, but for the most part it’s not. At all. As we’ve noted, so much of the blame targeting social media are people completely overreacting to social media shining a light on activity that has basically always been happening, and now rather than dealing with the underlying causes, people want to attack the messenger for revealing the behavior.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is in crisis after a fresh scandal triggered resignations by a growing number of his top team.€
Still reeling€ from “Partygate” and a vote of no confidence, Johnson has now been hit by widespread concerns over Number 10’s response to recent sexual harassment allegations.
Nadhim Zahawi, the UK’s new chancellor of the exchequer, earned €£1.3 million from a Kurdish oil company while serving as an MP, has advised fossil fuel companies operating in Nigeria and Canada, and recently defended “struggling” producers in the North Sea.
As chancellor, Zahawi will play a key role in spending decisions that will determine whether Britain can meet its net-zero targets – but his extensive ties to the oil and gas industry have dismayed advocates of faster climate action.
All Empires end in ignominy. The United Kingdom is drawing to a close, not with a bang but with a fart.
What is going on in European politics today is completely disconnected from reality. It is a politics which completely disregards even the basic existential interests of its electorate – House Speaker of the Hungarian parliament, László Kövér declared in Martovce (Martos in Hungarian), Slovakia at the opening forum of the Esterházy Camp on Public Life (Esterházy Közéleti Tábor).
It was the culmination of a democratic movement that began with Colombia’s constitutional reform of 1991 and extended through the peace accords of 2016 ending a decades-long conflict between that country’s government and the Marxist-Leninist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC)—a conflict in which, newly declassified documents reveal, the United States played an integral role. On June 19, Gustavo Petro defeated far-right demagogue Rodolfo Hernández to become Colombia’s first left-of-center president. Francia Márquez Mina, Petro’s running mate, will serve as the country’s first Black vice president; the pair earned more votes than any ticket in the nation’s history. As the Colombian people celebrated in the streets of Bogotá, the former guerrilla fighter vowed to represent “that silent majority of peasants, Indigenous people, women [and] youth” while speaking against a backdrop that read “el cambio es imparable” (“change is unstoppable”).
It’s amazingly simple and effective. In an ad released on July 4, California Governor Gavin Newsom stands in a verdant backyard, his trademark slicked-back dark hair a bit less slick and grayer than earlier in his career. He channels Democrats’ mounting alarm at Republican incursions on “freedom,” speaking directly not to Californians but to Floridians.
The head of Common Cause Georgia on Wednesday welcomed the news that a Fulton County special grand jury investigating 2020 election interference subpoenaed seven key allies of former President Donald Trump.
"We need to know those who broke our laws in their dangerous attempts to hold on to power be held accountable."
"The hardest thing I've ever seen the Democrats fight for is to keep a disabled Marine combat veteran off the ballot," said Matthew Hoh, the Green Party's presumptive U.S. Senate nominee.
Meanwhile, national support for a “third” political party remains high — 62% as of last year’s Gallup Survey — yet no actually existing party outside the Democratic and Republican establishments seems able to get much traction.
The Libertarian, Green, Constitution, and numerous smaller third parties have labored in the vineyard of politics for decades (the Prohibition Party since 1869!) without ever coming close to shattering the “major party” duopoly.
Youngkin was a political novice, while McAuliffe campaigned on his record as a former neoliberal governor. He seemed unaware of the political inroads made by rightwing populism in his state since his previous term as governor. McAuliffe’s campaign simply promised a reprise of his previous term as governor, which made him look “same old, same old” in contrast to the newcomer Youngkin.
Youngkin’s campaign strategy was relatively simple: pander sufficiently to Virginia’s Trump base to keep it onside, while appealing to just enough independent voters to win the election.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday it will hear oral arguments in a case experts warn could be one of the greatest threats to U.S. democracy since the deadly January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. In October, the court will hear Moore v. Harper — a case which seeks to reinstate gerrymandered congressional maps that were struck down by North Carolina’s highest court. A ruling in favor of North Carolina Republicans could revive a marginal right-wing legal theory known as independent state legislature doctrine, potentially stripping state courts of their power to strike down state laws, while expanding the power of GOP-controlled state legislatures to control federal elections. We speak with law professor Carolyn Shapiro, director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Shapiro says a ruling in favor of North Carolina Republicans would be “extremely problematic from the perspective of democracy” and “could cause enormous chaos.”
On June 29, the Supreme Court issued a bizarre and horrifying decision. In Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a 5-4 Supreme Court majority held that a state can prosecute crimes against Indian victims by non-Indian people even if those crimes occur on Indian reservations. More concerning, however, is why the court said that states have this power. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote: “The Court today holds that Indian country within a State’s territory is part of a State, not separate from a State,” reasoning that “as a matter of state sovereignty, a State has jurisdiction over all of its territory, including Indian country.”
Bear in mind that in their various confirmation hearings the, now, justices all genuflected at the altar of stare decisis, which means “to stand by things decided.” Basically, if a previous court has ruled on the same or a closely related issue, then the court will make its decision in alignment with the previous court’s decision.
Space does not permit discussing the Court’s opinions in detail, but the following examples give one the idea about where the Court is heading.
A war zone? No. Just another day in the US. Independence Day, in a nation whose Supreme Court is intent on demolishing independence for half the population, while granting even more rights to those who want to terrorize it.
Even from abroad, I know many of my American friends are feeling anxious. Many are grieving. With each civil liberty being chipped away, they feel helpless as they watch their country slipping steadily down a steep hill toward a Christo-fascist nightmare. Holidays like the 4th of July only make this grief more acute. The absurdity of flags and anthems extolling “freedom” and “liberty” all while those very terms are denuded of any value they may have once had. And now, yet another mass shooting to add to an ever-growing list.
The June 30 decision of West Virginia v Environmental Protection Agency was something of a shadow boxing act. The Clean Power Plan, which was the target of the bench, never came into effect. In 2016, the Supreme Court effectively blocked the plan, which was announced by President Barack Obama in August 2015. It has been originally promulgated under the Clean Air Act.
In 2019, the Trump administration repealed the CPP, replacing it with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule. It argued that the EPA’s authority under Section 7411 of the Clean Air Act only extended to measures pertinent to the plant’s premises, rather than industry-wide measures suggested by the CPP. The ACER vested states with the discretion to set standards and grant power plants much latitude in complying with them. In their decision, the DC Circuit vacated the repeal of the CPP by the Trump administration, and the ACER, sending it back to the EPA. In effect, the EPA’s powers of regulation were held to be intact.
The text below encapsulates our philosophy followed by our views on some core issues identified during our debates.
Europe needs a new non-aligned movement. Let’s start by imagining its manifesto. What would it look like? Here, in this text, we refer to an as-yet undefined, imagined “we”: the members of a pan-European socialist movement concentrated on changing Europe’s shameful, hollow, and often atrocious foreign policy.
Twelve days ago, the US Supreme Court released its€ decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which not only upheld Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban but also ruled that there is€ no Constitutional right to an abortion, striking down the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that there was such a right. While much ink, both print and digital, has been expended already on this monumental shift in US law and women’s rights, I’m going to look at it from the perspective of a longstanding topic on this blog: Law vs. science-based medicine (SBM), a topic that legal expert Jann Bellamy used to refer to as “legislative alchemy,” examples being naturopathic licensure laws and other laws legalizing and regulating quackery as though it were medicine. In her honor, I was tempted to refer to this decision as “judicial alchemy”, but in reality what this decision unleashed even before it was announced was legislative alchemy in a huge number of states. Think of it as an unholy alliance between legislative alchemy (laws based on ideology and pseudoscience seeking to restrict or outlaw abortion) begetting judicial alchemy (Dobbs v. Jackson) begetting more legislative alchemy, all to the detriment of not just reproductive health care but SBM.
Reproductive freedom advocates are condemning a 50-year prison sentence given to a woman in El Salvador this week, after she was convicted of homicide following what rights groups say was a stillbirth.
The case of Lesli Lisbeth Ramírez Ramírez, who was 19 when she suffered the pregnancy loss in June 2020, is the result of the type of "draconian abortion ban" which is "now being replicated in states across the U.S.," said journalist Max Granger.
Decisions over reproductive, LGBTQ+, and other human rights are under attack by the fundamentalist right wing in Puerto Rico. On top of that, the Fiscal Control Board increases austerity measures i…
It has been 12 days since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. So far, President Joe Biden has reacted to that news with one speech—not even a prime-time Oval Office speech, but a middle-of-the-afternoon “press event” that didn’t allow for actual questions—during which he said he “stands with” women. He evidently didn’t mean that literally: We have not seen Biden physically standing with any of the people who have been protesting the court’s decision. And he evidently didn’t mean it figuratively either: We have not seen Biden echoing, amplifying, or even agreeing with calls for immediate action to protect reproductive rights by people like Senator Elizabeth Warren or Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe, U.S. tech companies didn’t much want to talk about their role in securing women’s data. And they didn’t want to talk much about it because they know that the privacy standards and oversight of the entire US snoopvertising economy, from adtech and telecom to app makers, media giants, and the internet of things — is an unaccountable dumpster fire.
Ever since Nordic began to seduce Belfast’s shot-callers five years ago, its Belfast schemes have been run by one Erik Heim, a sports-shirt middle age Norwegian who always looks like he can’t decide whether to zip his fly now or wait till no one’s looking. And Heim’s wife, Marianna Naess, ran Nordic’s delightfully incompetent PR department, which once sent a letter to every postal patron in Belfast, population 6,700. Four pages. Single-spaced. Misspellings. Tortured syntax. Bizarro layout. According to a recent Gallup poll, four people read it.
Before going public with its Belfast plans four years ago, Nordic and the City of Belfast wooed each other in a very effective echo chamber. Nordic said it was green and sustainable, and the city said there would be only a few crank opponents – everyone else will love you. It was love at first sight.
Former President Donald Trump's criminal use of lies and mob violence to steal the 2020 election failed, but it's not the only recent coup attack on our democracy. In the last few years, a cabal of right-wing zealots have plotted to seize control of the U.S. Supreme Court. By hook and crook, they've installed a six-judge majority, and now they're using them as a political cudgel to try stealing not just a constitutional right, but an inherent human right from American women — the right to make their own reproductive decisions. By judicial fiat, the right-wing judges have decreed that the state will make birth decisions, regardless of what mothers want. This is the Republican Party's current concept of "small government."
No, I still haven’t got over the report in The New York Times this spring, wherein we learned of a joint American–Ukrainian campaign to inundate Russians with propaganda intended to demoralize the public as Russian forces advanced in eastern Ukraine. “Using a mix of high-tech and Cold War tactics,” the government-supervised Times reported, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is “circulating information about the Ukraine war among Russian citizens to sow doubt about the Kremlin’s accounts… in an effort to undermine faith in the Kremlin.”€
The US hasn’t shown any interest in pursuing negotiations to end the war.
Most of the time, China’s crushing, dystopian, inescapable surveillance/censorship apparatus is terrifying and deeply disturbing. On rare occasions, it’s merely amusing. This is one of those times and South China Morning Post has the details. (h/t The Honest Courtesan)
After 18 days of mobilisations throughout Ecuador, which had their final epicentre in Quito…
A federal district court on Wednesday rescinded a Trump-era policy that prohibited the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from requiring that service providers in its $500 billion federal grant program not discriminate based on sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, and other characteristics—eliciting praise from social justice advocates.
"There was simply no excuse for the Trump administration's unlawful policy sanctioning taxpayer-funded discrimination."
With€ that love for the wild web, EFF works hands-on to protect your privacy, security, and free expression rights no matter how technologies change.€ We€ need the internet’s bold creativity and ability to strengthen the powerless more than ever. Will you help shape tech’s future for the users?
Do It For€ a Better WEB!
There is absolutely nothing "great" about the "Great Replacement." It is nothing new either. Its genesis began in the early twentieth century by French nationalists who were horrified at immigrants, largely black and Muslim, seeking refuge in France. In this iteration of hatred, antisemitism was not included among the targeted groups. That would develop later as white supremacist organizations in the United States added the Jewish demographic to their list of scapegoats. This was painfully evident in the chant of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017: "Jews will not replace us."
Half a dozen U.S. senators declared Wednesday that the Biden administration's "failure to coordinate a timely review of its cannabis policy is harming thousands of Americans, slowing research, and depriving Americans of their ability to use marijuana for medical or other purposes."
"Biden committed to decriminalize the use of cannabis and automatically expunge all prior cannabis use convictions."
Had they gone on to defeat American forces again and again in the West in the last two decades of the nineteenth-century, Little Bighorn might have come to be known as a major turning point in the centuries old struggle between the indigenous inhabitants of the continent and the invaders preoccupied with Manifest Destiny. It might have been known as an “American Dien Bien Phu,” which was the place where the Vietnamese defeated the French in 1954. The National Park Service proclaims that “The Battle of the Little Bighorn has come to symbolize the clash of two vastly dissimilar cultures: the buffalo/horse culture of the northern plains tribes, and the highly industrial/agriculture based culture of the United States.” That’s a sanitized story. The battle was part of a conscious plan to exterminate Indians. Still, Indians and whites tend to belong to two different cultures. That was made transparent during a panel discussion with attorney John Briscoe and Tribal Judge Abby Abinanti at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco on June 30 2022. The topic was “California’s Hidden€ History€ of Indian Slavery,” a fact that paralleled genocide.
At the Mechanics’, Abinanti, California’s first Native American female lawyer, emphasized storytelling. Briscoe emphasized facts and dates. Of course, not every white person spews facts and figures and not every Indian recounts stories. Still, there’s a discernable pattern of Indian storytelling and white history lessons. “The saddest thing for me,” Abinanti said, “is that I don’t have my own language, which unlike English is not noun based. Our stories€ € are coming back and more and more young people are speaking Indian languages.” It’s not too late for Indian stories about resistance to colonialism to emerge.
Once you’re in jail, you’re just meat the government can abuse with near impunity. You belong to the state now and whatever happens to you is well-deserved — a sentiment not only felt by jailers but by an unfortunately large percentage of the US population.
If a population believes that its financial and emotional suffering are caused not by social-economic-political variables but instead by individual defects—be it noncompliance with religious dogma or faulty biochemistry—this “individual-defect” belief system can be a more powerful and less expensive way of maintaining the status quo than a heavily armed police force.
That organized religion has a great deal in common with organized psychiatry would be apparent to both Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), two of history’s most famous critics of the political implications of organized religion.
The Department of Justice is investigating alleged civil rights violations under Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar border initiative announced last year by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, according to state records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
The Legislature last year directed more than $3 billion to border measures over the next two years, a bulk of which has gone to Operation Lone Star. Under the initiative, which Abbott said he launched to combat human and drug smuggling, the state has deployed more than 10,000 National Guard members and Department of Public Safety troopers to the border with Mexico and built some fencing. Thousands of immigrant men seeking to enter the country have been arrested for trespassing onto private property, and some have been kept in jail for weeks without charges being filed.
Following through on a request by the Biden administration to defend right to repair, the FTC has demanded that Harley Davidson and Westinghouse stop voiding customer warranties over repairs. In an announcement, the FTC noted that both companies used fine print to void a customer’s warranty if they used independent dealers for parts and repairs:
The Creative Commons Open Education Platform community will offer our next round of Lightning Talks, or seven-minute presentations on specific updates or stories in open education. Join the sessions on Tuesday 12 July at 6:00pm UTC. We can’t wait to learn with you!
Anti-piracy lawyer Kerry Culpepper has secured three $250,000 judgments against operators of sites and apps that used the YTS trademark his company owns. The court initially dismissed the case, ruling that it didn't have jurisdiction over the foreign defendants. However, a recent order from the appeals court in a separate piracy lawsuit changed that.
Rightsholder groups are calling on the UK government to do more to prevent pirates from operating anonymously online. In a submission headed by the MPA and supported by IFPI, BBC, Premier League, and others, a multi-year investigation into file-hosting giant Openload is presented as an example of what can go wrong when online services fail to verify their customers.
Capitalism, a system that gives preference to capital over people's needs, is clearly not something to be proud of. Often confused with 'free-market', capitalism is anything but free market.
A free-market economy is a system in which individuals (not corporations or any state-granted monopolies which are decidedly not free-market!) compete with each other to provide goods and services to other individuals. The end result is that the weak are eliminated, the inefficient replaced by efficient, and price wars result in affordable products and services. Not ideal, but not as bad as what we have now.
In a free market, anyone who finds a niche and manages to eek out a profit, is instantly in competition with others who want some. This continues until a balance is found where a few players squeeze out a reasonable profit, but so low that no sane competitor would bother to enter! It is great for the consumer, and ok for the owners and workers. You get subsistence pay, and everything is cheap. Occasionally someone may make some money for a flitting moment before competition enters, but no billionaires here.
TensorFlow is a machine learning and AI library that has enabled so much and brought AI within the reach of most developers. But it’s fair to say that it’s not for the less powerful computers. For them there’s TensorFlow Lite, in which a model is created on a larger machine and exported to a microcontroller or similarly resource-constrained one. [Nick Bild] has probably taken this to its extreme though, by achieving this feat on a Commodore 64. Not just that, but he’s also done it using Commodore BASIC.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
