@Lazarou "So does this" smirks the rest of the world after a blockship is deliberately sunk in the Suez canal while water levels remain dangerously low in the Panama Canal.
@MarvinFreeman Yet, those who respond to this genocide committed by a government with hate directed at the entire Jewish community are hitting Jewish opponents of the war along with the war criminals.
Antisemitism, like any other form of ethic hate, is the mother of all political dumb bombs.
Just remember: last time the Crusaders were in Jerusalem, it took 160 years to drive them out. By that timetable we could be only halfway through the war that started in 1948. Yet in this battle, I see people tiring just six MONTHS after things escalated last October. Palestine protests that used to draw thousands now draw hundreds.
Further warning on Florida and abortion: the FL Supreme Court says that the referendum "could conflict with the rights of the unborn child." This is an open invocation of fetal (and embryonic) personhood, which is the most likely way for the GOP to override abortion rights referendums or even ban abortion in all 50 states.
In other words, this is for ALL the marbles. University of California-Davis law professor Mary Ziegler was quoted in the Washington Post as calling this language in the referendum ruling "shots fired." In other words, these "justices" have just stated their intend to let the referendum be voted on (as they lack legal cover to kill the vote), but refuse to recognize the results. This stinks of J6...
reminder that if Netanyahu & the US gets away with this in #Gaza — targeting journalists, targeting hospitals and schools and refugee camps, starving millions of children, mass murder on the scale of tens of thousands, shutting down press, internet and information, killing humanitarian workers, preventing crucial aid convoy, firing on people receiving aid, and planning resettlement of regions based on ethnic identity — these methods will be normalized & advanced by other western nations & govts
@seachanger Lots of this is shit not even Putin does in Ukraine. Putin is plenty bad himself and BTW he is a longstanding enemy of the LGBTQ community. More generally, his policies basically combine the domestic policies of Trump with the foreign policy of GW Bush.
Netanyahu by comparison is doing the sort of shit STALIN did in Ukraine (notably starvation as a weapon of war), what Imperial Japan did in China and Korea(kill all/loot all/burn all, the "three alls") and generally acting like your worst nightmare about the middle of the last century.
"Resettlement" based on ethnic identity is another one of history's ugliest crimes, this time comparable to what settlers on Turtle Island did. Even the same language: of settlers and settlement.
@carl_klitscher@seachanger When this war is over, may it be Netanyahu hiding in a tunnel, looking at his pistol as his world collapses around him. May the ground over his head thunder and shake as the fury of the whole world slams home.
1: The Florida Supreme Court approved the referendum to protect abortion rights. It is very likely to pass BUT...
2: The same court also approved the existing 15 week ban, meaning the 6 week "heartbeat bill" the Christian Nationalists from DeathSantis on down rammed through goes into effect in 30 days, presumably MAY 1.
3: Assuming the referendum is approved, from May 1 until sometime after Nov 5 almost all abortion will be illegal in Florida. Thanks to the pill networks, this is basically unenforceable. The GOP and "Church First!" types have been screaming about that but unable to change the facts on the ground.
IF YOU LIVE IN FL AND CAN GET PREGNANT, consider stockpiling abortion pills now to avoid mail delays/lost orders or any of the other problems associated with buying anything by mail order later. We know DeathSantis and even a future Trump presidency cannot win a war on abortion drugs but that doesn't mean our victory will be cheap.
The Southern Bapist Convention, Opus Dei, and the Pentacostals can kiss my ass on this!
Florida's Supreme Court just nuked the right to privacy despite strong language in their state constitution. Here are the relevant articles of FL and AK constitutions. Worrisome to think a simple change in Alaska courts could do the same here. But also, FL is going to flip blue, because this is BS that women won't put up with. #abortionhttps://wapo.st/3IYT8ii
@EBecker@Dhmspector@blogdiva
In Florida you cannot vote if you don't have a state ID. On top of that, Florida is also a "Real ID" only state for drivers licenses.
Voter ID alone is said to give about a 5% edge to the GOP, as people with ID are about 5% more likely to vote GOP than those without it. Add "Real ID" and that edge grows. Now add felony disenfranchisement for any of Florida's huge laundry list of felonies. There are lots of people here who are simply not allowed to vote.
Some years ago, some GOP meathead said "if everyone was allowed to vote we'd never win another election." Truer words are rarely spoken.
Then there's the crude shit, like fliers about "how to vote" with fake warnings about warrant checks at the polls or even parking tickets having to be paid up. Unofficial GOP operatives have done shit like that, usually in Black neighborhoods or even the parking lots of Black churches for many years.
Then we have the DeSantis special election police and those 20 people they arrested and threatened with years in prison for technical voting violations that were difficult to even know were issues. Targets were those who had been told their voting rights had been restored after a conviction but where in fact this process had not completed. This sends a message "vote and we will seek any reason to arrest you" to those who they don't want at the polls.
The 2000 "butterfly ballot" fracas that transferred enough Al Gore votes to Ralph Nader (and was called out by Nader for this) happened in Palm Beach County, Florida. May have been that year cops set up a "highway safety" checkpoint somewhere in the US between a Black neighborhood and their polling place.
All of these incidents are just times when they got caught.
These pieces of shit never fight "fair" because they'd always lose if they did.
If you are allowed to vote, PLEASE show up and vote to protect abortion even if this means voting for Mickey Mouse for President over the genocide of Gaza.
If a 60% margin is needed to approve the referendum, add another 5% for votes lost to Voter ID, and a bit more for all the other voter suppression. Yet the referendum is expected to pass, which is why DeSantis fought it so hard. This implies actual support for abortion rights could easily be 70% or even more, possibly everyone that doesn't attend Southern Baptist or similar church services every single Sunday.
The Atlanta Police Foundation is trying to forcibly integrate one of their donors, Talitrix, into a city control for ankle monitors. They regularly smuggle the companies of their board members and donors into public resources, which is a major feature of their possibly-criminal, pay-to-play, racket.
Talitrix sells ankle monitors with real-time updates including biometrics. Atlanta is already the most surveilled city in the United States. This kind of contract would essentially turn the city into an open-air prison for anyone out on pre-trial bond, and would be mostly Black men.
@defendATLforest If enough people cut off the bracelets, they won't have enough jail cells for everyone and the program will break down. This has already happened to CBP and ICE. A supermajority of single men w/o worries about protecting family members fitted with tracking monitors by ICE and CBP cut them off and disappear. There are so many cases the risk to each "absconder" is very minimal. This was what "zero voluntary cooperation" can achieve
This is the NYPD, marching in formation. This message was posted by a former NYPD officer who now is a representative. The police are the army of the rich. In order to heal the world's many woes, they will have to be toppled. Not just resisted, not just protested.
St Petersburg, FL: Vets burn uniforms, other protesters burn Genocide Joe "dollar bills" for Gaza
On the 30th of March, protesters gathered at Mirror Lake in St Peterburg, FL to remember the martyrs of Gaza's desperate fight to survive Israel's all-out genocidal attack. US martyr Aaron Bushnell was invoked for his sacrifice that brought so much pressure down on Netanyahu and Biden.
The invocation of Aaron Bushnell was because he has been recognized by those on the ground in Gaza as a martyr for their fight.
After the uniforms had been fed to the flames, "Genocide Joe" dollar bills were next to burn. Finally, protesters marched to City Hall to lay flowers and candles for the tens of thousands of people Israel has murdered in Gaza.
I got there after the veterans had tossed their uniforms into the flames. For obvious reasons that had to be a surprise. None the less, the distinctive smell of burning military uniforms remained in my hair until I got home.
Andy Ngô trying to portray me as a scary terrorist while also posting images of my bloodied up face after his own followers beat me up in an alley kind of betrays the initial point trying to be made. At least it should, but a core part of fascism is portraying the out-group as both scary enough to fight against but weak and degenerate enough to defeat. See Umberto Eco’s famous essay Ur-Fascism for more on this.
@VPS_Reports Andy Ngo IS a terrorist, given the shootings he has recruited. Let's let Tom Clancy explain this: he once said you could easily take out all the shooters you want but that's like cutting the grass: it grows back. His point is that it's the recruiters who need to be stopped if the terrorism is to stop. He was discussing the Daesh/Al Qaeda form of theocratic terror, I am talking of the mixed dictatorial/Christian nationalist (again theocratic) terrorism we get here but the same rules apply. Different wood, same saw.
This could mean Andy Ngo being wiped out by a lawsuit like the Sandy Hook lawsuit that cleaned out Alex Jones. It could mean him being indicted for solicitation of murder in some liberal jurisdiction. It could mean a sex scandal ruining his reputation so his words fall on closed ears, etc.
We need a movement for conscientious objection to ReCaptchas. I don’t want to be forced to participate in training machine learning models to identify sidewalks, crosswalks, buses and cars in order to go about my daily life digitally.
I don’t want driverless cars on my city streets. I don’t believe the fiction that this technology will ever be safe.
I do not consent to using my own cognitive labor to train the models that will mow down people on foot or bikes later with no accountability.
@cassey Since I have Google blocked, I never see ReCaptcha. If a page won't open without unblocking Google in NoScript, I close the tab. This is much easier when you don't shop online.
You could also screw with Google by going to sites known to use ReCaptcha just to throw a bunch of wrong answers at them and screw up their data. Better yet, program a bot to do this as fast as possible, selecting photos according to the usual pseudorandom number generator.
The abusive behavior that was being used to manipulate Lasse Collin into bringing on more maintainers for #xz went unnoticed because abusive behavior in Open Source communities is so pervasive. In context, we can clearly see it was part of an orchestrated operation. Out of context, it looks like just another asshole complaining about stuff they have no right to complain about. https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2024/03/30/a-microcosm-of-the-interactions-in-open-source-projects/
@swelljoe@dango_@philtor I do keep Google's servers all the way out of my life, since I have the option to do so. I don't shop online and so can get away with treating most of the commercial/monetized Internet as broken.
If someplace cannot be found without say, Google Maps, I will not attempt to go there. Same with Snitchbook and Instacrap: no accounts and their servers blocked.
@swelljoe@Sibshops The ONE defense against this does in fact require access to source code: audit or potential audit by mutually opposing parties that hate each other too much to conspire to hide something
They killed an activist while destroying an urban forest to replace it with a police training center. they are charging the survivors with terrorism. they are repressing the bail fund. they are throwing away signatures asking for a vote. people wonder why some resort to sabotage.
We can stop the ship carrying those bombs here at a US port, or the Yemeni warriors can stop it at sea. May the obstacles combine into an impassable gauntlet.
In 2008, the French government raided the small village of Tarnac, initiating a massive terrorism case that subjected ten defendants to a decade-long ordeal. The case ended in a total defeat for the prosecution.
Yet today, at the bond hearing for Jack Mazurek, who is accused of taking action to #StopCopCity, Atlanta prosecutors called attention to the presence in Jack's house of books associated with the exonerated Tarnac defendants.
For the prosecutors engaged in this witch hunt, facts are beside the point. All that matters is using the blunt force of the judicial process itself to try to crush dissent.
#US / U.S. signs off on more bombs, warplanes for Israel
The #Biden administration has authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza. The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs. The continued arms transfers have been criticized by some Democrats who argue that the U.S. has a responsibility to withhold weapons in the absence of an Israeli commitment to limit civilian casualties and ease restrictions on humanitarian aid.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.):
[…] “The Biden administration needs to use their leverage effectively and, in my view, they should receive these basic commitments before greenlighting more bombs for Gaza […] We need to back up what we say with what we do.”
@oatmeal What does it take Israel to understand this? An accident with one of their own bombs inside Tel Aviv?
For perspective, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was estimated to have an explosive yield of a bit over 5,500 pounds of TNT, less than three of these 2,000 pound bombs.
That was ONE bomb-and it damaged or destroyed a total of 324 buildings, something like 5 were totalled. Worst of all was the Fascists who detonated it put it right under the Murrow Building's day care center, which would be a war crime even if the building was Gestapo headquarters in 1943.
Now for the math: the fragment danger zone from a single 2,000 pound (about 800 kilos)bomb according to a formula published by mine removal website https://www.mineactionstandards.org/standards/10-20-01/
comes out to 1, 932 meters or well over a mile.
Formula: range in meters is 634 times the 1/6 power of the total weight of the explosive device or devices
Dropping 2,000 pound bombs into a city is thus like throwing fragmentation grenades into a crowd, hugely scaled up.
