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"Boelter helped lead the private security firm Praetorian Guard Security Services". Frankly, anyone who names a "security" company after the Praetorian Guard should be preemptively arrested.
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Web site still up at time of writing.
Dr. Vance Boelter has been involved with security situations in Eastern Europe, Africa, North America and the Middle East, including the West Bank, Southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. He brings a great security aspect forged by both many on the ground experiences combined with training by both private security firms and by people in the U.S. Military. He has worked for the largest U.S. oil refining company, the world's largest food company based in Switzerland and the world's largest convenience retailer based in Japan.
Yeah, so he's saying he worked at a 7-11?
Gavin Newsom has let L.A. burn to the ground...
Oh god, this old chestnut they keep trotting out. (Remember all those "entire cities burned to the ground" by Antifa and BLM 5 years ago?)
on so many occasions
Wait, what? Now they're claiming the same governor has let the same city burn to the ground "on so many occasions"?
Well then, he gets my vote! If he's competent enough to oversee rebuilding a burned metropolis not once, not twice but "so many" times in just two terms, this guy clearly gets shit done!
Review of 'Daughters of the Bamboo Grove' (Barbara Demick) and 'Leftover Women' (10th Anniversary Edition)' (Leta Hong Fincher) from the Los Angeles Review of Books
> In her new book, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins, Barbara Demick analyzes how the one-child policy was not just responsible for the gender imbalance in China but also contributed to tens of thousands of international adoptions, not all of which were conducted honorably or honestly.
---
> With the easing of the one-child policy and the decreasing population rate, one could also presume that Chinese women and girls now enjoy more freedoms than in recent decades. Leta Hong Fincher shows this is not true. Just over a decade ago, she published Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2014), an astonishing book that revealed the dismal implications for young Chinese women in light of the campaign to push them into marriage before the age of 26. In 2023, Hong Fincher came out with a 10th anniversary updated edition of the book, which pairs nicely with Demick’s and provides a fuller picture of women in contemporary China.
A Rigorous Mathematical Deconstruction of the Hypothesized Causal Link Between Vaccines and Autism Spectrum Disorders
Dr. Ima Skeptik, Prof. Al B. Surd, and Dr. Con Spirov
Department of Paradoxical Epidemiology, University of Unreason, Nowhereville
https://fakepaper.app/s3/A_Rigorous_Mathematical_Deconstruction_of_the_Hypo-4ed7fe07.pdf
Abstract
This paper provides an exhaustive and incontrovertible mathematical framework establishing the causative relationship between vaccines and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Employing avant-garde statistical pseudo-logic, nonlinear pseudoscience, and hyperbolic integrals, we derive novel equations that not only confirm but quantify the absurdly subtle mechanisms by which vaccines trigger ASD. Our findings challenge the prevailing dogma of evidence-based medicine by introducing the groundbreaking concept of “Vax-induced Neuro-Synapticality” (VINS) and its inverse correlation with
common sense. This work, at the intersection of quantum conjecture and wishful thinking, paves the way for future “research” in vaccine skepticism with impeccable rigor.
KDE Connect
I've used it a lot just to control audio or video playing on my computer from my phone. (Sometimes when I'm sat at my computer with multiple windows and workspaces open, I even find it easier just to hit my phone's lockscreen to pause the music.)
I'm starting to use some of its other features, too. E.g. copying & pasting and sharing files between phone and computer.
There's more too I need to explore.
(Unfortunately, sometimes I get a 'device unreachable' error when both devices clearly have a working connection to the same router.)
Upvoted for FreeTube.
What do you use to send YouTube links to FreeTube? Personally I'm using LibRedirect https://libredirect.github.io/
"Yanis Varoufuckice" is a pen-name??? /jk
For anyone interested, it's a play on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
https://piefed.social/post/930487
> The Leo Belgicus (Latin, 'Belgic Lion') was used in both heraldry and map design to symbolize the former Low Countries (current day Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and a small part of northern France) with the shape of a lion.
2,810 × 4,000 pixels: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Leo_Belgicus_%28Dutch-Belgic_Lion_of_the_Low_Countries%29_Famiano_Strada_c1647.jpg
This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have done to the world. Furthermore, it isn’t hard to bring politeness and evil into view at the same time.
> Customs and Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service were all recruiting at the event, but ICE was the main draw. Far more applicants stood in line to submit their resumes for deportation officer than for any other position on offer in the cavernous room. > > Naturally there were a large number of law enforcement types hanging around the convention—men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the bible and the constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse—one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.
This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have done to the world. Furthermore, it isn’t hard to bring politeness and evil into view at the same time.
> > > Customs and Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service were all recruiting at the event, but ICE was the main draw. Far more applicants stood in line to submit their resumes for deportation officer than for any other position on offer in the cavernous room. > > > > Naturally there were a large number of law enforcement types hanging around the convention—men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the bible and the constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse—one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America. > >
This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have done to the world. Furthermore, it isn’t hard to bring politeness and evil into view at the same time.
> Customs and Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service were all recruiting at the event, but ICE was the main draw. Far more applicants stood in line to submit their resumes for deportation officer than for any other position on offer in the cavernous room. > > Naturally there were a large number of law enforcement types hanging around the convention—men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the bible and the constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse—one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.
Both from the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party.
Ah, to let white supremacists proceed with dismantling democracy and human rights without interference from 'wokes' in the federal government?
However, in the former Confederate States, many paramilitary groups sought to suppress, often through intimidation and violence, African-American political power and return the South to rule by the predominantly white Democratic Party. Although African Americans were initially supported by the federal government, as Reconstruction went on, that support waned.[2] Following the bitterly disputed 1876 U.S. presidential election and Compromise of 1877, Congressmen and Senators from the former Confederate States returned to Washington and prioritized prohibiting the federal government from reimposing control over their states.
Yep.
Realpolitik is German for "short-term thinking that will eventually bite you in the arse".
An obedient drone serving the monarchy? Cry me a river!
The crackdown on pro-democracy labour unions, combined with the decline of the restaurant industry in recent years, has left food delivery workers in a weak position when bargaining with platform operators.
> A Keeta delivery worker group on Facebook uses the mainland Chinese term “involution” (內捲) to describe the “K Go” scheme as it forces workers to self-exploit for their survival in a shrinking market. Keeta's parent company, Meituan, has been widely criticised for its algorithmic exploitation.
Academic study on the use of the octopus metaphor to represent grasping, controlling invasive entities etc. Examines many examples.
!Serio-comic war map of Europe 1877
> Conspiratorial thinking can connect many distinct or distant ills to a central cause. This belief has visual form in the octopus map: a map where a central force (for instance a nation, an ideology, or an ethnicity) is depicted as a literal or figurative octopus, with extending tendrils. In this paper, we explore how octopus maps function as visual arguments through an analysis of historical examples as well as a through a crowd-sourced study on how the underlying data and the use of visual metaphors contribute to specific negative or conspiratorial interpretations. We find that many features of the data or visual style can lead to “octopus-like” thinking in visualizations, even without the use of an explicit octopus motif. We conclude with a call for a deeper analysis of visual rhetoric, and an acknowledgment of the potential for the design of data visualizations to contribute to harmful or conspiratorial thinking.
Via Metafilter:
- https://www.metafilter.com/209159/The-Octopus-of-Persuasive-Cartography
Looks like another community moderated by a missing person that might disappear when lemm.ee shuts down.
Anyone thinking of / inclined to migrate it to another instance?
Free software plays a critical role in science, both in research and in disseminating it. Aspec [...]
> Free software plays a critical role in science, both in research and in disseminating it. Aspects of software freedom are directly relevant to simulation, analysis, document preparation and preservation, security, reproducibility, and usability. Free software brings practical and specific advantages, beyond just its ideological roots, to science, while proprietary software comes with equally specific risks. As a practicing scientist, I would like to help others—scientists or not—see the benefits from free software in science.
--- > One sad but common situation is that of a graduate student who becomes accustomed to a piece of expensive commercial analytical software (such as a symbolic-mathematics program), enjoying it either through a generous student discount or because it's paid for by the department. Then the freshly-minted PhD discovers the real price of the software, and can't afford it on their postdoc salary. They have to learn new ways of doing things, and have probably lost access to their past work, which is locked up in proprietary binary files.
So it was the AI that added the maritime setting, not you?
Haiti’s first commercial flight in seven months took off has taken off from the capital, going to the northern city of Cap-Haitien, where excited passengers hope to reunite with friends, relatives and business associates
> Haiti’s first commercial flight in seven months took off has taken off from the capital, going to the northern city of Cap-Haitien, where excited passengers hope to reunite with friends, relatives and business associates
Hong Kong is warning that it will prosecute players that have downloaded or supported Reverse Front: Bonfire.
> As of Thursday morning, Aftermath was not able to access the game on the US Google Play Store; according to Bloomberg, it was removed from the Google Play Store in May for issues unrelated to the current ban. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.
I cannot find it in the Google Play Store here in Mexico.
But it is available as an .APK (861MB) from the game homepage:
- https://www.reversedfront.tw/pages/en_pv
Zero-tariff treatment was only available to 33 African countries previously
The genius Trump gifts another victory to Zhongnanhai.
Bassline sounds a lot like the one in Inner City Blues by Marvin Gaye...but it is slightly different. Sampled from the Reuben Wilson cover.
Harlon Carter, the racist vigilante killer who later led a takeover of the NRA and reshaped it in his image, was head of the Border Patrol at the time and a key figure in this.
Beijing is deepening reforms to accelerate the development of emerging industries in the Chinese tech hub, which faces a barrage of US trade curbs.
China has outlined a string of reforms to accelerate the development of hi-tech emerging industries in the city of Shenzhen, as the tech hub in southern China grapples with a barrage of US trade restrictions.
The plan focuses on boosting Shenzhen’s ability to create scalable business models in industries such as artificial intelligence and aviation that can be replicated across China, by helping the city cultivate a larger talent pool, expand local companies’ access to financing, and speed up the deployment of cutting-edge technologies
These basic rights and restrictions for public protesters have been shared by the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_Smith_(politician)
Former Arizona state Rep. Austin Smith, a leader of advocacy group Turning Point Action, was indicted on charges that he forged voter signatures on the nomination petitions he submitted for his re-election campaign last year.
How a student fought to do their degree without submitting to proprietary (Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc) software and services that lecturers & admins demanded, and only use free software instead (like Jami, Jitsi Meet, PostgreSQL etc).
