Notices by Kee Hinckley (nazgul@infosec.exchange)

❝ These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” This man was slapped for his tears, beaten for his vulnerability.

No phone calls. No visitors. No books. No talking. Just exile to a place “so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten.”

And all of this—every slap, every sob, every stolen dignity—stamped with American approval. Coordinated with American officials. Executed with American efficiency. ❞

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/28/what-is-it-exactly-that-being-an-american-means-to-you/

For 240 years the U.S. has fueled its growth with cheap and abused labor forces that weren't allowed to vote; slaves, prisoners, women, children, migrants, indentured labor (H1B visas), "permanent" residents, and offshore workers.

Ironically, this extremely unethical model is being disrupted not because we suddenly developed a national conscience, but because the current regime has deliberately erased that part of history and so doesn't realize its importance to their own wealth.

But the wheels of progress must keep rolling. We've already seen increased use of child labor, as well as calls to eliminate women's suffrage. I expect prison labor in farms and factories to be a huge growth industry moving forward. And at some point it may occur to the regime that instead of deporting migrants, they should put them in work camps.

Don't comply. Don't stand aside.

After sweeping up the dog hair in the house I have come to the conclusion that I don't need a robot vacuum, I need a leaf blower.

I really didn't need to feel this seen.

In a sane country, charging $5m for access to the president, or providing way for foreign nationals to anonymously donate millions of dollars to the president, would result in instant impeachment.

https://www.chrismurphyct.com/p/trumps-biggest-corruption-is-flying

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
-Elon Musk, March 6, 2025

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
-Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge/index.html

Accurate.

I thought I had a dog, but maybe it's a very large cat? Deaf dogs make weird noises.

#DogsOfMastodon

Go Maine!!!

❝ Trump confronted Governor Mills over the state's decision on Friday, calling her out during his remarks.
"Are you not going to comply [with the order]?" Trump asked. Mills responded that she and her state would "comply with state and federal law."
"Well, I am -- we are the federal law," Trump retorted, threatening Mills with the revocation of federal funding if she didn't fall in line.
"See you in court," Mills deadpanned ❞

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/maine-governor-janet-mills-spars-trump-trans-sports-ban-1235275839/

#uspol

Kennedy Center Cancels Tour of New Children's Musical, FINN https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Kennedy-Center-Cancels-Tour-of-New-Childrens-Musical-FINN-20250213

@nigelharpur @mhoye What I recall is not so much surprise that it fell, but that it fell so gently. No coup, no armies marching. It just fell apart into constituent states. Which is not to say it didn't then get messy. But the all out warfare and violence didn't happen at once.

Which makes me wonder if our future isn't going to be similar. If this administration truly starts ignoring the courts, even the Supreme Court, will we just see many of the states start to just ignore the federal government and work things out amongst themselves?

❝ And lest there be any doubt about who was being targeted, says State Senator James Skoufis, whose district includes West Point, the ban knocked out the Vietnamese-American Cadet Association and the Native American Heritage Forum, but does not apply to the German Club, the French Forum, or the Polish Club. “Can you spot the difference?” Skoufis tweeted. ❞

#uspol

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-attack-on-military-diversity-is-doomed-to-fail.html

And what possible reason does he have to access the system that the government uses to pay everyone? That contains private info on hundreds of million of people.

There's no rational reason to do so unless you're planning to use it to cut off payments for ideological reasons.

I keep thinking about the fact that the man who walked into Twitter and turned off random servers to make things "more efficient" is now doing the same thing to the United States government.

@ShrikeTron Except it's not just employees.

"responsible for distributing Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions"

Apparently ICE is ignoring Navajo tribal membership documents.

https://azmirror.com/2025/01/24/reports-of-navajo-people-being-detained-in-immigration-sweeps-sparks-concern-from-tribal-leaders/

Happy sun dog. #DogsOfMastodon

❝ But what happens in the Industrial Revolution is that human effort gets embedded in a set of institutions — legal institutions, market institutions — that commodify it so that every hour of wage labor is equal to every other hour of wage labor and then sold on a market for a price.

And that’s an enormous transformation in the human experience — a total transformation in all social relations, political relations, economic relations and also, crucially, the subjective experience of being alive in the world.

I think something similar is happening with attention. And it started a while ago — the same way that the industrial revolution actually started earlier than we think. But we’re reaching a crescendo where attention is now this market commodity that’s extracted and sold. ❞

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html

https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-chris-hayes.html

I keep telling myself that cars were lighter then, but...

Does anyone recognize this lighthouse?