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The Terror of Throwback Thursday

April 11, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

The line between flirting with a woman and ejaculating on her is such a subtle one, it’s just too much to leave it to individual judgment.  –  “Out of Control (#628)”

If you think it’s “sad” sex is subject to economics, I have only four words to say to you:  Grow the fuck up.
–  “Too Bad, So Sad”

Women are incapable of making any decisions about our bodies without evil men coercing us, except for abortion of course.  –  “Count the Idiocies, Again”

The only thing that inflames American prurience as much as people having sex is people not having sex.  –  “Notoriously Unreliable”

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In the News (#1428)

April 10, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

We can, indeed, convince ourselves that boogeymen are real.
–  Claire Zagorski & Ryan Marino

Legal Is as Legal Does

Who but a politician could conceive of fighting some crime by criminalizing legal business?

[Due to] the discovery of a U.S. citizen with two girls, aged 12 and 13…in a luxury hotel in Medellín…[Colombia]…Mayor Federico Gutiérrez…[has] prohibit[ed] sex work in…for six months, and…[declared] a 1 a.m. closing time for bars…for a month…Gutiérrez…says he is acting under extraordinary circumstances…[to] fight…back against the mafias that he says run [the] El Poblado [neighborhood by denying legal income to legal businesspeople, and subjecting them to police harassment]…He also announced that there would be meetings with owners of bars and hotels to clarify new “rules of the game”.  Establishments that do not comply with the rules…will not only be subject to closure, but also to [the government stealing their property]…Timothy Allan Livingston…was arrested and detained for 12 hours…[but] released…because he had not been [actually] caught in the act of sexually abusing the girls.  He was released on [March 29th], and boarded a flight to Fort Lauderdale, Florida…

The chief danger of a “tolerated” system is that cops or politicians can suddenly and without warning decide to be intolerant.

Torture Chamber (#1153)

The government tried to establish a precedent that it need not feed its prisoners:

The federal government is required to “expeditiously” house migrant [minors] who cross into the United States [without permission], rather than allow them to remain in unsafe open-air sites along the border…Federal District Court…Judge Dolly M. Gee [ruled]…in a class-action lawsuit…minors at the sites [a]re in legal custody of the Department of Homeland Security and thus…entitled to certain rights and protections, such as a safe and sanitary environment, even if they ha[ve] not yet been formally processed…The outdoor areas where migrants have been waiting [because the US refuses to let them continue north] lack shelter, food and sanitation…Unaccompanied children and young families sometimes arrive in poor health…dehydration and heat stroke have become common problems…and nighttime temperatures, wind and rain are creating conditions ripe for hypothermia…The government had argued that the children [and adolescents] were not yet in U.S. custody so it had no obligation to provide services….[yet] Border Patrol…control[s] the minors’ ability to leave the sites…Judge Gee denied the [government’s] request for a specific time limit for how long minors could be held [without food, water, shelter, or medical care]…

Welcome to the Future (#1351)

Indiscriminate murder is so much easier when blamed on machines:

…the Israeli army has developed a…[computer] program known as “Lavender”…to generate targets for…bombing…the…system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential…targets…human personnel…serve…only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions…the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity…Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?”…were used…to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences…The result…is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or [noncombatants] — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of [a computer]’s [mindless] decisions…the army…decided…that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians…[and if] the target was a senior Hamas official…the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians…[to eliminate] a single commander…

You Were Warned (#1361)

Ignorant, irrelevant authoritarian spouts ignorant irrelevancies in support of more authoritarianism; what a shock:

Hillary Clinton is the latest to jump on the “Repeal Section 230” bandwagon…Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have insisted that it needs to be repealed.  Senators [from] both sides of the [uniparty]…are supporting bills to repeal [it].  And now Hillary Clinton has joined the crew of ignorant political pundits spouting nonsense about 230…removing Section 230 will not fix whatever problem any of these people think it will fix…Section 230 serves a particularly useful purpose: preventing frivolous lawsuits.  What everyone calling for its repeal is effectively saying is that they want more frivolous lawsuits, most of which will simply be stopped eventually by the First Amendment, but after much more significant expense for websites…what Biden and Clinton seem to be admitting in their desire to remove liability protections is that they want to suppress speech…because they know that any threat of more frivolous litigation would lead companies to…[be far more] censorial…

Unsafe for Human Consumption (#1391)

Politicians are always happy to wreck lives by inventing new crimes from copaganda:

…While addiction and drug policy experts have repeatedly refuted the idea that touching fentanyl alone can cause an overdose, like a stubborn weed, the lie keeps coming back.  And now the myth has drifted upward to poli[tician]s…At this moment, three bills — one in Florida (SB 718), one in West Virginia (HB 5319) and the other in Tennessee (SB 1754) — are making their way through their respective state legislatures.  All three will allow for a felony charge to be levied against people who [possess]…fentanyl or a fentanyl analog, such as carfentanil or remifentanil…[if a cop has a panic attack nearby]…HB 5319 casts an even wider net, encompassing any opioid regardless of potency…[but] does include language which would require a laboratory test for opioids be administered to the [panicky pig.  But]…SB 718 and SB 1754 [allow charges based entirely in a cop’s imagination]…

If Men Were Angels (ROTW #8)

Turns out he isn’t just a wannabe cop:

Monte Chitty, the [Florida] pastor [who drugged and molested a 15-year-old girl], [was] released on a $75,000 bond soon after his March arrest…[he] was supposed to be arraigned [on April 1st, but] fled in a white van with out-of-state plates and is no longer believed to be in…Florida…he…has lived in 25 states where he’s worked in churches and may have places to hide out; [prosecutor Dennis] Ward [said]…“This guy’s a former cop from Alaska…so I’m concerned about everybody in [his] path”…

The Punitive Mindset (#1426) 

Let’s hope we can soon say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish”:

Last week, the nation’s largest prison and jail telecom corporation, Securus, effectively defaulted on more than a billion dollars of debt.  After decades of preying on incarcerated people and their loved ones with exploitative call rates and other predatory practices that have driven millions of families into debt, Securus is being crushed under the weight of its own.  In March, the company’s creditors gave the corporation an eight-month extension to pay up, urging its sale to a new owner to stave off an otherwise imminent bankruptcy…The slow death of the largest player in this space is not accidental.  It follows six years of intense advocacy to expose the vulnerability of the prison telecom industry’s business model on both ethical and economic grounds.  Organizers have waged a strategic war against Securus, educating investors and the public about the company’s predatory practices while successfully advocating for legislation and regulation to rein them in…The company’s failure would represent a remarkable victory for advocates—and a potential beginning of the end for the prison telecom industry as we know it…

 

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Diary #719

April 9, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

Regular readers know that I like seasonal weather to be seasonal.  In other words, I like dark, gloomy, rainy weather in the winter, but when it’s time for spring I want to see spring weather; one drawback of living on the Olympic Peninsula is that winter weather often holds on here well into April, which offends my conception of an orderly world.  But this weekend we finally started getting the first signs of warmer, drier weather, and the weather forecast predicts much more of the same in the coming weeks; as things stand now, I’ll probably take off the shutters a week from today or thereabouts.  The animals are pretty happy about the weather change, too; Shiloh and Jonathan are starting to graze on the fresh shoots of grass, and though Louie has been sunning himself for a couple of weeks now, Cicero has arthritis in his right foreleg and I think the ground has been a bit too cold for him before now.  But here he is on Sunday, enjoying the afternoon sun in the north pasture.  So while we’ve already seen spring flowers and the Canada geese have been passing overhead for a week or so, at Sunset a sunbathing Cicero is our truest sign that spring has indeed sprung.

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In Flux

April 8, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

It’s been quite a while since I wrote my reviews of series 12 of Doctor Who; I saw series 13 with Lorelei Rivers only a few months after its initial broadcast, but I really wanted to see it again with Grace on DVD before reviewing it, and I only accomplished that a few weeks ago.  Yes, I said “weeks”; I have rather been dreading tackling it, because it ain’t pretty.  Series 13 consists of one six-part story entitled “Flux”, and given its low overall quality I think it best to handle it as I handled “The Trial of a Time Lord” or Torchwood‘s “Miracle Day“, in a single review covering all of its manifold problems.

I started all of my reviews of Series 12 in much the same way as I did every review of a 6th Doctor story:  by saying something good about it, so as to force myself to be as objective as possible.  And while I’ve already blown that in the previous paragraph, I think I can be forgiven considering what I had to work with here; still, it’s a practice that proved its worth when thinking about those other two collections of execrable rubbish, so I’m going to give it a go here.  First, “Flux” isn’t unremittingly bad; two of the episodes (a third of the story) were quite watchable, and I’d go as far as to say chapter 2, “War of the Sontarans”, was actually good if one disregards the Flux-related crap, which isn’t difficult to do.  The concept of the alternate history where Russia is inhabited by Sontarans is weird, but fun, and we’e seen similar historical screw-ups created by time-tampering before.  Chapter 4, “Village of the Angels” had too many problems to be really good, but it was watchable and the flaws wouldn’t have been irremediable if worked over by a decent script editor; it also featured the only really interesting, engaging guest character of the whole 6-part story, the psychic researcher Professor Jericho, who would not have been out of place in a 3rd or 4th Doctor adventure.  That’s certainly appropriate, given that the episode is set in 1967, but also surprising, given Chibnall’s apparent inability to dependably create interesting characters while also serving as showrunner.

The rest of the characters are, as is typical for Chibnall, more like descriptions than personalities.  Many of the cast are probably very competent actors, but even the finest thespian can’t conjure Hamlet out of lackluster dialogue draped carelessly over a checklist.  Dan isn’t a strong or interesting enough new companion to balance out the creepily-codependent Yaz; Vinder and Bel are just collections of lines rather than actual characters we might conceivably care about; the dog-faced boy oscillates between annoying and silly; and none of the villains go beyond “generic baddie in weird makeup” except for Snake Dude, who doesn’t seem to actually have a dramatic function except to complicate the already-convoluted plot even more unnecessarily (but maybe might have something to do with the Mara if Chibnall had the sense to actually connect his stories to the Whovian canon instead of merely sprinkling random references to past characters & events into his script while trying to invalidate the framework in which they were embedded).  And though in the past Doctor Who was known for making even minor characters interesting, in here they might as well have script names like “Dan’s sweetheart”, “psychic woman”, “little girl”, and “old people” for all the development Chibnall gives them.

And then there’s the titular Apocalypse of the Week, the Flux, which manages to be dreadfully boring despite supposedly wiping out half of the universe.  Part of the reason is that Doctor Who has steadily inflated its threats for 60 years, and we’ve already seen “malevolent Time Lord unleashes a chaos wave that destroys much of Creation” way back in 1981’s Logopolis.  Another part is that it doesn’t actually make much sense; Chibnall seems unsure of exactly what it’s doing or how it’s doing it, which is why it can somehow be stopped by a wall of interlinked spaceships built by an advanced-but-not-remotely-godlike alien race we’ve never heard of before despite their supposedly being linked with humanity on some deep level.  And why didn’t the Flux destroy the sun and other planets, when it sure looked like it was doing that in other parts of the universe back in Chapter One?

The real answer is, unfortunately, that the Flux is a naked metaphor, an in-universe representation of what Chibnall is trying to do with the Whoniverse: utterly destroy it in order to create his own, new Whoniverse without the slightest regard for anything that came before.  Tecteun is thus revealed as a sort of self-insert character, a deranged control freak who, after failing to remake everything in her own image and likeness via more modestly-megalomaniacal means (Tecteun via her creepy spook “Division”, itself a blatant ripoff of the Time Lords’ Celestial Intervention Agency, and Chibnall via all his Hapless Child monkeyshines), decide to just destroy everything (including, in Chibnall’s case, Gallifrey itself) out of spite.  “The Flux” is thus the culmination of a trend that started with mere spoiling, progressed to outright vandalism, and eventually arrived at wholesale arson of a venerable and beloved mythos.  Was the extended metaphor intentional?  I honestly don’t think Chibnall is that clever, but if it isn’t his subconscious was tattling on him. 

Posted in Fiction, History, Miscellaneous, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Links #718

April 7, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

I can’t breathe.  –  Tangi Johnson

I recently heard this song for the first time in many years, and it reminded me that I rather liked Springsteen in the days when I jokingly referred to him as “Bruce Mumblesing”.  The links above it were provided by Nun Ya, Radley Balko, Jesse Walker (x2), Franklin Harris, IncarcerNation, and Violet Blue, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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In the News (#1427)

April 6, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

It was like a fun game to them.  –  “Jeny”

The Prudish Giant (#1011)

Why does anyone still trust Facebook?

In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat…and later Amazon and YouTube…Given these apps’ use of encryption, Facebook needed to develop special technology to get around it…Facebook’s engineers solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like service that Facebook acquired in 2013…which when activated had the advantage of reading all of the device’s network traffic before it got encrypted and sent over the internet…

Censorship Ascendant

Safetyism has become the go-to excuse of censors pretending they aren’t:

The FBI spends “every day, all day long” interrogating people over their Facebook posts.  At least, that’s what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to [harass] her about her social media activity…[after] they [were] given “screenshots” of her posts by Facebook…Abdeljawad told…th[em] she didn’t want to talk and…later confirmed with local police that the [spooks] really were FBI agents…”we’re not here to arrest you or anything,” [said the spook pictured here]…”We do this every day, all day long. It’s just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any [bad thoughts].”  [Abdeljawad’s lawyer Hassan] Shibly says…it was the first time he had heard of Facebook…preemptively reporting [citizen]s to [State] enforce[rs]…

No Escape (#1333)

This will never stop while violent thugs have total power over the lives of women:

…719 civil lawsuits…were recently filed against the City of New York and the NYC Department of C[ramming Human Beings into Filthy Cages] under the Adult Survivors Act, a state law that opened a one-year window for sexual assault survivors to file claims outside of the statute of limitations…nearly 60% of the 1,256 lawsuits filed…during the…period describe assaults against people held on Rikers Island…the…abuse…span[ned] decades…from 1976 to…[the present and consists of attacks by screws ranging from] grop[ing]…to [violent anal,] oral…and…v[aginal] rape….[while] jail officials…[tacitly approved of] the ongoing attacks…The plaintiffs seek more than $14.7 billion in damages, which could pose a staggering financial burden for the city[‘s tax cattle]…

Panopticon (#1346)

Old-fashioned Stasi-type surveillance isn’t dead yet:

…a [uniparty-backed] bill…would strengthen the role of the Department of Homeland Security in school [surveilla]nce, [to] turn America’s schools into another adjunct of the national security apparatus, a veritable school for spies…The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, or NTAC, was created in 1998 to examine threats to the president and security at complex public gatherings.  Its focus was expanded a year later to the psychology of school shootings…Today, NTAC…brags that…it has [indoctrinat]ed hundreds of thousands of school administrators and teachers….thanks in part to NTAC p[ropaganda preten]ding…[that] “see something, say something”…is…[magically] differen[t from]…snitching…ratting…or…tattling…[because] students…[are] “potential terrorists”…

A Moral Cancer (#1369)

Crypto-moralists want people to believe they could live forever by simply eliminating every single pleasurable activity from their lives:

Women who drink more than one glass of wine a day are 45 per cent more likely to develop heart disease…[crypto-moral]ists studied the drinking habits of 430,000 adults in California, who had an average age of 44, and none of whom were teetotal.  Their habits were followed for four years, and during which 3,108 developed heart disease…The more people drank, the more likely they were to be diagnosed with heart disease, particularly in women…

Torture Chamber (#1389)

Your “leaders” call this “correction”:

Brooklyn’s troubled federal jail has been serving maggot-infested beans to [prisoners]…defense lawyers….[have also] detailed…partially cooked [chicken]…spoiled, rotting meat…milk [well past]…the expiration date…and…cockroaches and bug parts [in] the food…in January…Manhattan Federal Court Judge Jesse Furman issued a 19-page ruling laying out a litany of problems, including how the jail lost power for eight days in 2019 during a polar vortex.  “It has gotten to the point that it is routine for judges…to give reduced sentences to defendants based on the conditions of confinement in the MDC,” Furman wrote. “Prosecutors no longer even put up a fight, let alone dispute that the state of affairs is unacceptable”…His ruling, that the jail’s dreadful conditions constituted “extraordinary reasons” to not lock up a 70-year-old convicted drug dealer as he awaited sentencing, has since been cited by several defense lawyers seeking leniency or release for their clients…

To Molest and Rape (#1425)

Another example of the cop/religion molestation nexus:

A…Jacksonville [Florida cop]…was arrested…[for seducing a] 17-year-old [girl]…Josue’ Garriga III….[met the girl] at church…he told her to download WhatsApp so they could communicate [surreptitiously]…he…sen[t her dick pics]…and ask[ed] her for [nude] photos….the[n he later molested her]…in his [pigmobile]…it is believed there could be other victims.  Garriga…[murder]ed 22-year-old Jamee Johnson during a [pretextual] traffic stop…in [2019 and]…the city settled the [resulting lawsuit] for $200,000…

 

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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All at Once

April 5, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

Now that I’m (basically) done with getting my house the way I want it, living within my means has become easier most of the year, except in April, which many rulers apparently think is the best time for extracting tribute via collectivist rhetoric backed by threats of organized violence.  April 15th is of course the deadline for paying US income taxes, and because the US tax code was deliberately designed to be opaque and confusing, I’m never sure what the damage is going to be until my accountant sends the dreaded envelope.  In about 40% of years it’s dramatically higher than I expect, which is understandably upsetting; this was one of those years.  But that’s not the end of it, oh no; though the deadline for paying the first half of annual property taxes could be anytime between January and June (Oklahoma’s was June), Washington seems to think the very best time is a mere two weeks after the feds demand theirs.  And so every year both my business and household accounts are heavily bled in rapid succession, and it usually takes until the beginning of summer to get my depleted coffers back to a level that wouldn’t be entirely wiped out by one garden-variety disaster.

Unfortunately, this year I had one extra large bill; while having a 500-gallon propane tank is really convenient, it means filling it up is definitely not cheap.  Since our usage rates are pretty consistent (5% of total tank volume per month in warm months and 10% in cold months), I’ve known since the last fill that we’d be due around the beginning of April; what I didn’t expect was quite such a large shakedown from Uncle Sam.  So I was hoping to maybe stretch out our next delivery until later this month, but no such luck; when I checked the gauge on Monday it was at 25%, and the recommended reading for calling in an order is 30%.  It’s not merely academic, either, because on Sunday I noticed the pressure at the water heater (the farthest appliance from the tank) was already slightly lower than it should be, so I really couldn’t wait.

What all of this means is, money is a bit tight right now; I will need to do a bit of juggling from now until late June to keep everything running smoothly.  Unless we’re visited by catastrophe sometime this spring, I’m not actually in trouble; it’s just irritating and a bit stressful.  So, since it’s been about 3 months since I last reminded y’all that my writing depends upon reader support to keep it going, I figured I’d just post a gentle reminder.  If you appreciate my writing and would like to help me maintain the spiritual peace I’ve finally found after so many years of sturm und drang, please consider subscribing; if you can manage one of the higher levels, that would be especially nice.  But if you can’t, the regular subscription levels in the right-hand column will do nicely.  And if that’s still more than you can commit to, I do have an Amazon wishlist filled with things I really and truly want!  As always, thank you for reading and caring, and if you’re already a subscriber I cannot possibly thank you enough to match the gratitude I feel for your kindness and generosity.

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Young Throwback Thursday

April 4, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

We live in a world in which the highest points are all occupied by professional full-time fools, and it seems pointless for a sane person to even attempt to compete with them.  –  “The Rule of Fools”

Where do [prohibitionist] morons…get this shit?  Do they literally look in the toilet and say, “Hey, that looks good, I’ll use it as a ‘fact’ in my next essay”?  WTF?  Why does every fuckwad think five minutes on Google make him an expert in my profession?  –  “Agenda (#426)”

I’m not a fucking monkey to dance for the amusement of internet randos with absolutely no power to change bad laws, nor am I an attack dog to be whistled up to dispatch annoyances you could easily just mute as I do.
–  “Not Your Attack Dog”

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In the News (#1426)

April 3, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

[San Jose’s] approach…is to treat unhoused people as blight consistent with trash or graffiti.  –  Tristia Bauman

Negative Secondary Effects

I held off on sharing the news about Washington’s passing a “strippers’ bill of rights” until the governor signed it last week; I still haven’t seen any proper articles about what it actually contains, though the most important part is the clubs will no longer be bound by puritanical “sin density” laws which allow clubs to either serve alcohol or have fully-nude strippers, but not both (thus severely curtailing the money Washington strippers could make).  I’ll link an update when some publishes an article about everything the new law does & doesn’t do.

Permanent Record

In the US she’d have no recourse, but prohibitionists want you to believe decriminalization is a “failure”:

Chelsea Sirolli was two days into a new job…at a real estate agency in regional Victoria…[when] she was…sacked, after a new colleague complained…after learning she’d worked in the sex industry…10 years ago…[because] “pornographic images of [Sirolli] existed online”…it was the third time she had been fired after an employer had found out about her past.  But this time, the law was on her side…[Thanks to decriminalization] it’s now illegal to discriminate against individuals in Victoria based on their current or prior involvement in the sex industry…Ms Sirroli has lodged a case in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal…and said while she was risking exposing herself further by doing so, she wanted to help others in a similar position stand up for themselves…the company directors [had the colossal gall to pretend]…she was being fired for her “welfare”…

The Vultures Descend (#1333)

As empires age, they rot from the inside out and from the top down:

…the Texas [judge] James Ho [of] the fifth circuit court of appeals…served on the three-judge panel last summer that ruled to restrict access to mifepristone.  The legal group behind the mifepristone case, Alliance Defending Freedom, made at least six payments from 2018 through 2022 to his wife, Allyson, a powerhouse federal appellate lawyer who has argued in front of the supreme court and has deep connections to the conservative legal movement that has led the attack on the right to abortion in the US.  The payments don’t [technically] violate the court’s code of conduct…but…Ho’s failure to recuse himself from the case illustrates why public trust in the judiciary is eroding…

I Spy (#1341)

Twitter has always claimed that this surveillance isn’t surveillance:

Ten years ago…Twitter…filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users…Elon Musk…continued the litigation, until its defeat in January.  The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of [demands]…that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages…However, [Twitter]…is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court…Although Dataminr defends…its governmental surveillance platform…as a public safety tool that helps first responders react quickly to sudden crises…[in reality it is] used by police to monitor…online political speech and real-world protests…Dataminr pays for privileged access to…the [Twitter] “firehose”: a direct, unfiltered feed of every single piece of user content ever shared publicly to the platform…While it was unclear whether, under Musk, [Twitter] would continue…[selling] its users [out] to Dataminr — and by extension, the government…emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business…

The Punitive Mindset (#1401) 

This fascist evil needs to be eradicated, root and branch:

Two lawsuits [have been] filed [against]…Michigan sheriff’s offices [because they are] colluding with large prison telecom companies to end face-to-face jail visitations and then price gouge families who are forced to rely on expensive phone calls and video chats, in return for major kickbacks.  Civil Rights Corps…filed the two class-actions…one in Genesee County and the other in St. Clair County, on behalf of multiple residents…[after] Securus Technologies and Global Tel*Link (GTL)—dangled significant financial incentives in front of [corrupt] officials to install video chat kiosks in jails…In addition to damages, the lawsuit is seeking immediate injunctions ending the bans on in-person jail visits…jails and prison systems across the country started curtailing things like in-person visits, book donations, and physical mail over the last decade, replacing them with [costly, substandard] video services and electronic tablets.  These changes were [usually] made [under the pretext] of security and reducing contraband, a…problem [defined into existence by the mindlessly-punitive policies of] American prisons and jails…

Panopticon (#1408)

Homeless people are another group new evils are tested on:

For the last several months, [San Jose, California] has been training [machine learning algorithms] to recognize tents and cars with people living inside in…the first experiment of its kind in the United States…the areas…targeted…are places where unhoused people congregate, sometimes with the city’s encouragement…the goal of the pilot…[is] to build algorithmic models that c[an] detect…lived-in RVs [and cars] with between 70 and 75% accuracy…City [bureaucrats predictably pretend]…that “the data is intended for [the city’s housing and parks departments] to provide services”…[yet cops]  may [demand] access to…footage….[and] the…system include[s] optical character recognition of…vehicles’ license plate numbers…

The Puritan Recrudescence (#1409)

Censorious politicians aren’t just copying each other; they’re vying to see who can make their new laws the most unconstitutional:

The Kansas state legislature has passed a law that will require age-verification on websites that host content deemed “harmful to minors”…defined in part as “acts of masturbation, homosexuality, or sexual intercourse”…This means that the state can “require age verification to access LGBTQ content,” according to attorney Alejandra Caraballo…This could theoretically apply to [mainstream] media with queer characters, LGBTQ+ charities and community resources, or even medical websites that include information on gender and sexuality…

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Diary #718

April 2, 2024 by Maggie McNeill

Y’all are probably pretty sick of pictures of chickens, so now for something completely different: pictures of eggs!  OK, so y’all are probably pretty sick of those as well, but look how nice these came out!  Our youngest layers are the white leghorns, so for the past two weeks I set aside all their white eggs to dye and used the brown or green ones (from the Ameraucanas) for everything else.  On the inside, most fresh eggs are basically alike regardless of shell color, but for making Easter eggs there’s simply no comparison.  For a few years now I haven’t had any hens that lay white eggs, so I’ve been forced to use brown ones and the result is simply not as festive, especially when using colors toward the red end of the spectrum. But this year my yellows and oranges look lively rather than dingy, and better yet I managed to boil two dozen without cracking a single one.  Now if I can only figure out why the red ones all come out looking either orange or purple rather than actually red, maybe I’ll really be getting somewhere.  And you can relax knowing that I probably won’t be annoying you with any more poultry-related photos until the new pullets start laying this summer.

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