Notices by Michael Busch (michael_w_busch@mastodon.online)

Optimist: The cup is half full.

Pessimist: The cup is half empty.

Physicist: Which half of the cup?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/6/

QT Ann M. Lipton @annmlipton.bsky.social
2024 November 23

Optimist: The cup is half full.
Pessimist: The cup is half empty.
Law professor: No cups in the park

@rysiek @mekkaokereke

I recall how Elon Musk was apparently so horrific a bully as a teenager that when one of his targets shoved him down a flight of stairs in response; even Musk's father admitted that it was justified.

Good to read that Rep. #McCollum signed this.

And, again, USA:

Require that your Senators block Matt Gaetz from any role in government. Do not give them any choice otherwise.

QT Rep. Sean Casten @repcasten.bsky.social
2024 November 19

NEWS: I led nearly 100 House Democrats in a letter urging the House Ethics Committee to release the Gaetz report immediately.

This information must be made available for the Senate to provide its constitutionally required advice and consent.

@mekkaokereke

There are a couple of members of my extended family who publicly support Trump.

I will not be sharing any meals with them any time soon.

This is also self-interest on my part.

If someone is going to support lack of food safety; it becomes hard for me to trust any food they prepare.

@hakan_geijer

On that I have learned from the author and professor Chenchen Zhang: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2023/12/11/the-three-body-problem-the-imperative-of-survival-and-the-misogyny-of-reactionary-rhetoric/ .

She has also described how extensively the English translations of the trilogy were edited to remove sexist and racist elements from the Chinese originals.

@einsiedlerspiel I read the English versions of "Three Body" and "Dark Forest".

I did not read "Death's End" because of just how horrific the misogyny in "Dark Forest" is.

@dymaxion @JessTheUnstill @inthehands

Here is one short piece: https://www.salon.com/2020/05/10/the-1918-pandemic-was-linked-to-a-rise-in-nazi-support-will-this-pandemic-be-similar/

@JessTheUnstill @inthehands

In 2020, I did some reading about the 1918 influenza pandemic.

One of the themes was how the impacts the pandemic contributed to the rise of fascist parties in Europe in the 1920s.

I had hoped that more people might have learned from history; to avoid repeating it.

@mekkaokereke

Here in Minnesota; we have a man running to unseat a state judge because said judge refused to let him continue to harass his ex-wife.

Which some voters may miss because the judicial elections are way down the ballot.

So. Yeah.

(Fortunately, almost everyone who does vote there will vote for the incumbent).

@literalgrill @mekkaokereke

If eating a snake; it is better to fillet it rather than make steaks.

But it just tastes like chicken, which is easier to prepare.

No more point than cooking up an alligator (which I have done, but only so that the students at the cooking class could say they had had it).

@GottaLaff @ai6yr

That would be James O'Keefe the fraudster; whose previous activities include trying to bribe people so that he could report the attempted bribe?

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/james-okeefes-videos-attacking-mail-voting-minnesota-fall-apart-after

Today in rarely-needed parts of the United States Constitution:

"No Person holding any Office shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."

#UnpackTheCourts , USA

QT New York Magazine
2024 October 31

"Samuel Alito added a knighthood to his résumé, pledging an oath to the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/justice-alitos-royalist-cosplay.html

Yet again, USA:

#TaxTheRich .

And likewise for everywhere else in the world.

QT The Guardian @guardian
2024 October 31

"An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics – just as academics predicted"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/31/elon-musk-an-excess-of-billionaires-is-destabilising-politics-just-as-academics-predicted

@baldur @inthehands I recently talked with a web developer who had been working on an application for recording biological lab values.

Their group was unaccountably told to try using ChatGPT.

They stopped when it immediately inserted impossible values into the data tables.

Is #Starlink designed to provide only a small number of users satellite internet at a steep premium? Yes.

Is #Starlink making a mess of low orbit and the upper atmosphere? Yes.

Is #Starlink incompetently designed and being hacked by organized crime? Also yes.

QT UNODC

"Despite Starlink use being strictly monitored and, in some cases, restricted through geofencing, organized crime groups appear to have found ways around existing security protocols"

https://www.unodc.org/roseap/uploads/documents/Publications/2024/TOC_Convergence_Report_2024.pdf

@inthehands Actual GOP fundraising ("WinRed" or similar) or scammers pretending to be such fundraising?

I ask because the DFL and other Democratic fundraising texts I have gotten have been greatly outnumbered by scammers pretending to be fundraising for one campaign or another.

@jdnicoll @nyrath I once worked out a sequence of events that would destroy the Moon and melt Earth's crust and parts of the upper mantle.

It requires millions of hydrogen bombs; several hundred years; and destabilizing a large section of the asteroid belt.

Let's not do that.

@cheddarcrisp @inthehands It continues to be striking, although I have long since stopped being surprised, to witness a group of mostly self-identified atheists re-invent very specific varieties of Christianity but with "AI" in place of a god.

(Eric Schmidt is Jewish; but the lines he is using in that interview are right out of the LessWrong apocalyptic AI cult, which is a group of people who say they are atheists imitating messianic end-times Christianity.)

@inthehands My only suggestion is lots of sunblock.

@JackEric @bconoboy @mekkaokereke There are places in the USA where people voting in person need to wait hours to vote.

This is part of a pattern of racist voter suppression.

In Georgia in 2020; median waiting time was 51 minutes in the precincts with the highest fraction of Black voters and 9 minutes in those with the highest fraction of white voters: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924527679/why-do-nonwhite-georgia-voters-have-to-wait-in-line-for-hours-too-few-polling-pl .

The Georgia Republican party engineered that and then tried to criminalize giving people water & snacks in line.