Heavy Kettle

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.

These guys have been throwing random people into gulags without a second thought but they've suddenly rediscovered the concept of presumption of innocence

George Retes, an American citizen disabled US Army veteran

George Retes, an American citizen disabled US Army veteran who has been held in federal custody since Thursday, was released without charges this evening. 1/

Spot on. This is the clearest explanation I’ve seen. It ‘s relatable, and humanizes the issue in a way everyone can understand.

The police exist to keep us from gaining or exercising power. You cannot be peaceful enough to keep them from beating and/or killing you. So long as the police exist, they will trample and terrorize us not because of any actions we do or do not take, but because it's their purpose.

see, the thing *i’m* genuinely worried about is that RFK will effectively ban vaccines

I'm a believer in nonviolent resistance for moral reasons, and I think it can be incredibly powerful when well-planned and sustained, but don't tell me violence doesn't work. The people successfully rolling back my rights were sending bomb threats to children's hospitals.

The actual drop is 12.7% — not 97%, not 98%. But who’s really paying attention anymore. 🤡

My friend’s daughter lost her job. She’s been a park ranger for 20+ years and is devoted to the forests she protects. When she lost her job she also lost her home - she didn’t get the little cabin in the forest free, she paid rent. So, jobless, homeless, now living with her parents - she’s 45.

Just incredible

'We're citizens!': Oklahoma City family traumatized after ICE raids home, but they weren't suspects A woman says her family’s fresh start in Oklahoma turned into a nightmare after federal immigration agents raided their home, taking their phones, laptops, and life savings – even though they were …

Please highlight this story.

ICE stormed into the wrong house, trashed the place, and made women/girls stand outside in the rain in their underwear. ICE also stole phones, laptops, and cash savings from the family, who moved to OKC two weeks ago.

kfor.com/news/local/w...

Q: "How do you respond to Governor Newsom?"

Sen. Van Hollen: "I think Americans are tired of elected officials or politicians who are all finger to the wind...Anybody who can't stand up for the Constitution and the right of due process doesn't deserve to lead."

I wish news outlets dedicated one inch of their glossy magazine stories about trans women in sports to the discrimination and violence we face every day

Instead of empathizing with our persecutors

Just insane stories from the graduate school communities, students getting kicked out of the country - medical and science researchers - because of trivial, decade-old violations, like speeding tickets, long ago, paid in full

Donald Trump: The Fertilization Administration Growing up as a queer trans child, I watched the United States oppress its queer population and bomb countries in the Middle East while large swathes of society stayed indifferent. It felt as though t...

new written piece from me:

Donald Trump: The Fertilization Administration

As protests gain momentum, it's important to recognize and call out COINTELPRO-style behavior

Many people who engage in this type of behavior aren't feds. They probably mean well. They are also engaging in behaviors that are so good at disrupting movements that the FBI literally weaponized them

DOJ directs prosecutors to seek death penalty for Luigi Mangione 1 hour ago CAH CNN Gunman who killed 23 in racist attack at Texas Walmart offered plea deal to avoid death penalty

Huh, weird

The reason that the US is locking up tourists for weeks in hellish detention centers rather than letting them book tickets back home is because the detention centers are owned by corporations. They are charging the taxpayers fortunes to cage these people, and making bonanzas off their suffering.

Look sometimes I cut it close and I’m happy to take the L when that leads to some confused angry replies but come on dude

The median member of Congress is 21 years older than the median American. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Once you establish that people can be punished because the administration doesn't like their speech, expanding the bounds of who can be treated that way becomes inevitable.

Bluesky is working on a subscription, but it won’t give you a blue check Bluesky has officially crossed 13 million users.

I think that's still on the roadmap www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/2...

THE HOBBIT (1977): DOPESMOKER EDITION

A fan edit by me that pairs the beloved Rankin/Bass animated Hobbit movie with the legendary sounds of Sleep's collosal single track album DOPESMOKER.

Get it here: drive.google.com/file/d/16tci...

When I heard Musk say this on Tuesday, my assumption was that it was a programming issue. Because I can code and have written to databases and because I am familiar with other examples of default values being misinterpreted.
Yet somehow Musk isn't.

“Oh, did a sportsball happen?” I whisper smugly from my vantage point on a distant cliff, the sounds of celebration in the village far below just barely audible over the lonely wind whipping my tattered cloak

This moment continues to feel like February 2020 for fascism: smart people who pay attention are freaking out, your average sea cucumber-like American is either totally unaware or blithely assuming everything will Be Fine.

Musk has no technical skills whatsoever, but he wants to appear smart. So he takes bits of information like this, told to him by junior engineers, and regurgitates it to appear smart.

Musk did this with the Twitter stack and Twitter's senior architects called him out publicly, then he fired them.

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.

thinking about roads not taken a lot

A post on Meta's Threads from astronomer Rose Ferreira, which reads: "Well, my bio just got removed from the NASA site because of an order that went out to remove stuff about women in STEM. I've only been on Threads for a full year, so a lot of people here never heard of a feature that NASA did on me talking about my love of the Moon, how I grew up in poverty, then my homelessness in the US, and then me being at NASA itself. That's how easy it is to erase you as a person, and everything you've done. I'm not even sure how I feel right now."

If you're looking for an insight into how things are going at NASA since Trump's regime started attacking it, here's astronomer & NASA employee Rose Ferreira on Threads.

(Her now-removed interview is archived here at the Wayback Machine and it's well worth a read: web.archive.org/web/20231206... )

is it woke to want to end cancer?