In the blanket incident, Noem had to switch planes after a maintenance issue was discovered, but her blanket wasn't moved to the second plane, according to the people familiar with the incident. The Coast Guard pilot was initially fired and told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination. They eventually reinstated the pilot because no one else was available to fly them home.

The details of the Kristi Noem blanket incident are just fucking perfect

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Stop Telling Users Their DNS Is Wrong If you’re like me, you’ve had the experience where you add a DNS record for a service. You triple check it. The app still says it’s invalid. You wait. You check again. Still invalid. You start wonderi...

Apps that get DNS verification functionality wrong really cause a lot of pain for their users.

Having explained the problem a number of times, I finally decided to write it down so now I can just share a link.

Shabana Mahmood said it out loud - a panopticon system of surveillance. Capitalists have no interest in fixing the problems they've created (eg climate crisis); instead they want to crack down on dissent. The aim is kompromat on us all and 'pre-crime' internment. Dystopian levels of autoritarianism.

Pecksniff: McSweeney’s downfall would bring seismic changes to British politics In which Mr Pecksniff lays before his readers for their approval certain observations and speculations reflecting on the political life

"When No.10 says the prime minister has full confidence in Morgan McSweeney, we know of course it’s actually Morgan McSweeney declaring the prime minister has full confidence in Morgan McSweeney.

The trouble is, he probably does: because Morgan McSweeney has advised him accordingly"

👇😂

It was very obvious how limited their autonomy is when there was a major power outage in SF a while ago and the waymos were stuck in place, unable to even limp to the curb to park themselves and wait it out.

Calls to halt UK Palantir contracts grow amid ‘lack of transparency’ over deals Opposition MPs urge Labour to pause public contracts with the US tech firm after attempts to examine deals blocked

It's not just the decision to give public money and public data to a sworn enemy of everything we stand for, appalling though that is. It's also the secrecy and illegal shutting out of any competition. What does Palantir have on Streeting and Starmer - and did Mandelson give it to them?

Their ultimate goal for AI is to allow the wealthy to access skill without allowing the skilled to access wealth.

They positively THIRST for a return to feudalism.

Mandelson's BERR as a proto-DOGE within the New Labour government, tearing up regulations to suit business interests

apart from personal kickbacks, this is the growth-at-all-costs mindset every government has clung to from Thatcher onwards

something is truly broken when growth costs us society

Self-driving taxis are coming to London – should we be worried? | Jack Stilgoe Waymo’s cars were first rolled out in San Francisco, but the English capital’s old roads, pelican crossings and jaywalkers may pose issues for AI, says science and technology professor Jack Stilgoe

“Jaywalking is permitted in London. In 1966, the police tried to crack down on it, but gave up after three months.”

People walk and cycle on roads by right, people drive under licence.

Jaywalking is not a thing in English law and Waymo must not change that.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Elf queen: I'm Galadriel, Frodo.

Frodo: Umm I'm glad you're real too, Miss

Agreed. It's crazy to mix in with already shelled nuts. Maybe it's a Spanish thing?

was epstein uniquely responsible for evil or is he just the one obscenely wealthy person whose emails we're getting to read

Wtf, sounds like sunflower seeds in the shell... You're meant to remove the shell.

Ok, Waitrose (posh imo) mixed nuts: almonds, walnuts, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts and pecan nuts. Good, good, great, meh, great. I'd not say any of those is bird seed, but hazelnuts are cheap padding.

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

Two absolutely majestic Scottish cows, atop a hill, silhouetted by clouds and a deep blue sky. You can even see the cowbells hanging from their necks. Did I print and frame this? MAYBE

I will use this as an excuse to post the greatest photo I have ever taken, last summer in Iona, Scotland. Granted, it’s no G.C.O.P, but still pretty darn majestic.

There cannot be any doubt whatsoever that JKR is one of the bad actors.

All nuts are bird seed to a big enough bird. Can you be more specific?

royalblueghost on tumblr: "When I am elected president I will institute a law saying that anyone with a net worth over $50m must, at their own expense, employ a Jester. They must feed, clothe, and house the Jester according to the Jester's wishes, may not fire the Jester, and may not retaliate against the Jester, as the Jester will have Jester's Privileges. One must spend at least three hours per day on the company of your Jester, and allow the Jester access to your quarterly reports. The Jesters will be chosen by voluntary lottery. Jesters will be regularly interviewed to make sure they have not become Lackeys. This law will prevent rich folk from being surrounded with vapid yes-men. A lot of problems with the world right now are happening because rich and powerful men don't have anybody on hand to say "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.""

Frasier: Daphne, get my blood bag, strap him to the car! By hook or by crook Immortan Joe will witness me today!

War Boy Niles: You want to try to get into Valhalla? Without a reservation?

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change. Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.”

Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability and quality of life.

Common sense.

Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

screencap of google search where the search bar has the text "dont piss in my milk" and the Ai Overview reply is "I will not."

reached an uneasy truce with the automata

At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.

Can we just replace "says" with "claims" for people like Musk and Trump?

Meanwhile I'm led to believe that China has an out-of-control electricity printing industry www.wired.com/story/china-...

The main thing Elon Musk took from us when he bought Twitter was destroying the only customer service platform that corporations will actually answer you on

24% of people who voted Labour at the last general election now plan to
vote Green or Lib Dem.

0% of those who voted Reform at the last election now plan to vote Labour.

[AI bubble bursts] billionaire tech bro: the stupid consumer did not understand it