SDF Chatter

Typical pattern: "Scientists find something strange when they look at a common whatever - and it's not good!"

This kind of crap used to be the style of little blurbs at the side or the bottom of an article, but it's in the headlines now. Until you click the headline you don't even really know what the article is about anymore - just the general topic area, with maybe a fear trigger.

Clicking on the headline is going to display ads, but at that point the goal isn't to get you to buy anything yet, it's just to generate ad impressions, which the content provider gets paid for regardless of whether you even see the ads. It's a weird meta-revenue created by the delivery mechanism, and it has altered the substance of headlines, and our expectations of what "headline" even means.

This was a victory.

If you were tasked with building a panopticon, your design might look a lot like the information stores of the U.S. federal government—a collection of large, complex agencies, each making use of enormous volumes of data provided by or collected from citizens.

The federal government is a veritable cosmos of information, made up of constellations of databases: The IRS gathers comprehensive financial and employment information from every taxpayer; the Department of Labor maintains the National Farmworker Jobs Program (NFJP) system, which collects the personal information of many workers; the Department of Homeland Security amasses data about the movements of every person who travels by air commercially or crosses the nation’s borders; the Drug Enforcement Administration tracks license plates scanned on American roads. And that’s only a minuscule sampling. More obscure agencies, such as the recently gutted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, keep records of corporate trade secrets, credit reports, mortgage information, and other sensitive data, including lists of people who have fallen on financial hardship.

A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing. Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government, and in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing. Despite DOGE’s stated mission, little efficiency seems to have been achieved. Now a new phase of Trump’s project is under way: Not only are individual agencies being breached, but the information they hold is being pooled together. The question is Why? And what does the administration intend to do with it?

The sinking of Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique,[1] was an act of French state terrorism.[2] Described as a "covert operation" by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence agency, the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), the terrorist attack was carried out on 10 July 1985. During the operation, two operatives (both French citizens) sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, Rainbow Warrior, at the Port of Auckland on her way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.

archived (Wayback Machine)

No spoilers for Season 2 other than the magic is back and go watch it.

It's so good it makes other Star Wars almost unwatchable by comparison.

I'm also really inspired to go fight some fascism and blast some ~~space~~ Nazis.

https://bsky.app/profile/katmabu.bsky.social

https://www.katforillinois.com/issues/democratic-reform

She's very online so I assumed the next paragraph would make it clear her "five term" pledge was a joke. But there's nothing. I don't know which is worse. One, she's serious. Two, she's joking and she assumes the average normie will somehow clearly understand that.

"But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts."

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62575235

I was hoping one would have a heart that says "Mom" inside, but I guess a pattern of dots is a start...

A driver plowed a car into a crowd at a street festival celebrating Filipino heritage in Vancouver on Saturday night, killing at least 11 people and injuring dozens more in what police are calling “the darkest day” in the city’s history.

Some of those attending the festival helped chase down and detain the suspect, who police identified as a 30-year-old man who had a history of mental health-related interactions with authorities.

Police said the ages of those killed range from five to 65. “Dozens more are injured, some critically, and some have not yet been identified,” Vancouver Police interim chief Steve Rai said in a Sunday press conference.