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2025-06-13

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  • Dolly Parton Runs a Train Busier Than 27 States

    As I’ve written before, there are few institutions, or people, with a higher approval rating than Dolly Parton. While I love her for her music and the feeling of joy she gives us, I also love that Dollywood Express, the heritage steam train that operates within Dollywood, has a higher rail ridership than 27 states.

Horseshit

celebrity gossip

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

  • Before the far right threatened democracy, neoliberalism stripped it down - CCPA

    Fears of the erosion of democracy pervade the headlines. The rise of authoritarian populists around the world, with Donald Trump being the most emblematic, has mobilized centrist pundits and politicians to claim, and rally around, the flag of democracy as a mobilizing tool. What is curious about this concern for the state of liberal democracy is its glaring absence over the past 40 years while an equally insidious project to diminish democratic decision-making was underway. I’m speaking of course of the neoliberal project—that package of policy prescriptions such as deregulation, privatization, defunding of public services, the erosion of labour rights and the ascendance of investor rights—that has transformed western liberal democracies over the past forty plus years. While the above laundry list of policies is what usually first comes to mind when defining the neoliberal project, an equally important, but often neglected aspect of neoliberalism is ensuring that the above policies could not be undone. Specifically, how to protect often wildly unpopular neoliberal economic reforms from democratic contestation.

  • The Real Problem with Bluesky

  • Mark Cuban says the ‘lack of diversity of thought’ is pushing users back to X

Musk

Electric / Self Driving cars

Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

  • Is the 'tech bro-ification' of abortion here?

    From abortion bots like Charley and digital billboards used by Mayday Health to period-tracking apps and the expansion of telehealth services, it’s a new, more complex era for people seeking abortion care. But during a time of rising technofascism and in a landscape dominated by tech conglomerates that power domestic repression, is investment in bots and abortion telehealth initiatives post-Dobbs fundamentally at odds with abortion access for all?

  • The Genealogy of Pope Leo XIV

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • LEGO but with more Pony: F'Deem | Home

  • X11, Xlibre, and the Schism at the Heart of Open Source

    Weigelt, a long-time X.org contributor and no stranger to controversy, did something audacious. He forked the X server. He accepted the patches. He gave it a new name: Xlibre—a name that suggests not just liberation from neglect, but freedom from what he saw as ideological capture. The README of Xlibre does not mince words. It claims that X.org has been infiltrated by "toxic elements" aligned with Big Tech. It accuses them of intentionally stalling X11 to eliminate it as competition to Wayland. And, most controversially, it declares that Xlibre is free of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—policies and the Codes of Conduct that have become standard in many modern open source projects. That one line sent shockwaves.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

  • Pentagon Has Been Pushing Americans to Believe in UFOs for Decades, New Report

    The article shows that the government has, at various points over the years, purposefully sown disinformation about UFOs, in an effort to make Americans believe in little green men. This news comes as the result of an internal investigation by Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was specifically set up within the Pentagon to investigate UFO sightings. Kirkpatrick, who spoke with the Journal, says he’s found evidence that the government “fabricated evidence of alien technology” in an effort to distract from real weapons programs being carried out by the government in secret. The Journal frames its findings as a “stunning new twist in the story of America’s cultural obsession with UFOs” but, while the story’s specific anecdotes are certainly new and quite interesting, its broader findings are not, nor are they particularly stunning. Instead, they parrot what many critics of the UFO narrative have long said: that the UFO mythos grew out of a disinformation campaign created by shadowy defense officials to obscure more terrestrial secrets about America’s national security community.

  • NASA Is Worth Saving

    today’s NASA is but a shadow of its former self. I care less about the why of NASA’s long decline, than about whether NASA can be rebuilt once again, and how. I believe NASA is worth saving. I’m accustomed to articulating a minority view point, but in this I’m confident – there are millions of Americans who want NASA to once again embody a golden century of supreme optimism and confidence. A NASA that leads humanity into its infinitely bright future.

  • NASA to silence Voyager's social media accounts

Crypto con games

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Mostly Peaceful Riots

  • CBP Confirms It Is Flying Predator Drones Above Los Angeles to Support ICE

  • (Nov 2024) The high-tech tools behind cops' protest surveillance

  • Who Really is to Blame for Anti-Deportation Riots?

    as riots now spread to major cities from Seattle and Chicago to New York City, one can safely argue the individual most responsible for initiating the chaos is D.C. Judge James Boasberg. Few people have worked harder to keep illegals here while seeding a dangerous—and false—account of what the president is trying to do. Boasberg lit the match on March 15 during a series of hasty proceedings to advance the first lawsuit against the president’s Alien Enemies Act (AEA). Within hours of the president signing the act, the American Civil Liberties Union sought a restraining order to stop the removal of illegal Venezuelans associated with the multi-national crime racket known as Tren de Aragua, the basis of the AEA. Working quickly that Saturday, Boasberg immediately banned the deportation of anyone covered by the AEA. But that wasn’t enough. During a Saturday evening hearing, Boasberg made an outrageous demand of the DOJ, which had been given no time to file a response or even gather their collective thoughts on the matter. Boasberg: “[Any] plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, but those people need to be returned to the United States. However that's accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”

  • Opinion | Trump Wants to Be a Strongman, but He’s Actually a Weak Man - The New York Times

    President Trump thinks it is a sign of strength to send in troops to deal with protesters in Los Angeles. To that end, he has federalized a portion of the California National Guard and mobilized nearby Marines to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it confronts large protests in opposition to its efforts to arrest and deport undocumented immigrant laborers in the city. Trump wanted to do something like this in his first term, during the summer that sealed his fate as a failed first-term president. But Mark Esper, his secretary of defense, refused. The protests in Los Angeles are not nearly as large as those that consumed the country in 2020, but Trump wants a redo, and Pete Hegseth, Esper’s more sycophantic successor, is just as eager to unleash the coercive force of the United States government on the president’s political opponents as Trump is. You can almost feel, emanating from the White House, a libidinal desire to do violence to protesters, as if that will, in one fell swoop, consolidate the Trump administration into a Trump regime, empowered to rule America both by force and the fear of force. The problem for Trump, however, is that this immediate, and potentially unlawful, recourse to military force isn’t a show of strength; it’s a demonstration of weakness. It highlights the administration’s compromised political position and throws the overall weakness of its policy program into relief.

  • Which Party Should Be Worried About the Politics of the LA Protests?

  • The Symbolic Power of Burning Waymo Robotaxis | The New Republic

    It seems silly, in this context, when the stakes are so high, to talk about Waymo, a robotaxi company most of the country doesn’t know exists because its driverless, for-hire electric vehicles operate only in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix. It is silly. But Waymo has popped up repeatedly in press coverage of the government’s ongoing mass abduction operation, which has left children orphaned, and the sizable protests that began in L.A. and have started spreading around the country. That’s because protesters destroyed some of the cars. It’s not clear exactly how many have been torched and graffitied. Time counted six as of Tuesday. Waymo has suspended service around the area where protests are happening and has not commented on how much of its fleet of 300 electric vehicles in Los Angeles was damaged.

    There’s no telling precisely why protesters have targeted Waymos in recent days; people tend not to publicly volunteer explanations for their illegal activities. But there are any number of possible practical and political reasons why they might. Some taking to the streets have reportedly dubbed Waymos “spy cars,” thanks to surveillance footage collected by 360-degree cameras that, as 404 News reported, has previously been obtained and published by the Los Angeles Police Department. Google—Waymo’s parent company—hands over that data upon request, typically via court order, warrant, or subpoena. Like other Silicon Valley firms, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have either directly or through third parties entered lucrative contracts with the federal government, including ICE.

    But you don’t need to look into the mind of a protester to see the symbolic power of a robotaxi. It’s easy to comprehend what they stand for: an effort by the richest people on earth to eliminate employees and any other human friction that might get in the way of profit or interrupt their efforts to cozy up to the Trump administration and aid in its quest to terrorize millions of people.

Democrats

Left Angst

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Iran / Houthi

China

Health / Medicine

Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

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