Eric J. Korpela @SETIEric@social.cleverlibre.org

My final piece of the year is a call to action. We need to normalize knowledge of self-managed abortion: how to do it, where to get pills, legal considerations, etc. This piece runs through a lot of that information. Please learn about SMA, spread that knowledge, make posters, poems & zines — and use this piece to make a zine if you like. I wrote this piece in conversation with Robyn Marty, Red Schulte, Ash Williams & others. I’m grateful for their knowledge and insights. https://truthout.org/articles/learning-to-self-manage-abortions-is-key-in-a-post-roe-society/

Also it’s very clear that the US bought more bivalent mRNA vaccines than are going to be used. Send the excess to China immediately (and for gods sake China TAKE THEM). This is a humanitarian catastrophe.

1. The conventional wisdom is that independent newsletters do not produce original reporting

I believe the conventional wisdom is wrong

So I want to highlight a few stories we broke this year on Popular Information

Newsletters aren't just for rants

🧵

https://popular.info/p/the-year-in-popular-information-97d

Instead of tooting the Washington Post article about how the North Shore Leader broke the Santos story (as I've seen twice on my feed today), how about we link to the actual North Shore Leader? Support your local news, and when a scoop like this happens, support the small papers, local to you or not, that break them: https://www.theleaderonline.com/single-post/the-leader-told-you-so-us-rep-elect-george-santos-is-a-fraud-and-wanted-criminal

Welcome to Mastodon! It's a laid back place. But here's a few simple rules you must follow:

1. Make an account on every fediverse server and create a unique introduction post for each one.

2. Put a content warning on any post that is tangentially related to the Irish Potato Famine.

3. Always use the hashtag #icomeinpeace. Otherwise, we will assume you are hostile.

4. When browsing Mastodon, remove your socks. It is customary.

5. Tell five of your friends to join. Yes, it's a pyramid scheme.

BIG NEWS: I am introducing a bill to require candidates to disclose under oath their employment, educational, & military history so we can punish candidates who lie to voters about their qualifications.

It will be called the Stop Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker (SANTOS) ACT.

It tells you all you need to know about today’s Republicans that not one member of GOP House leadership has spoken out about Santos.

Padding your resume is saying you speak conversational Spanish when you last took it in college 10 years ago but can carry on a basic conversation still. Making up your educational history, financial history, work history, or ethnic background is straight up fraud, and most employers would go on to fire you if they discovered those lies. How would anyone ever trust this man with literally anything even in a normal job ever again, let alone let him participate in our national government? Despicable.

The question remains where did Santos’ money come from? Who financed this campaign? Can’t wait to find out.

Federal prosecutors looking into New York Congressman-elect George Santos' seemingly sudden wealth, sources tell ABC News-
https://abc7ny.com/george-santos-income-wealth-federal-prosecutors/12623759/

The canary looked up from the cage where it had pretended to die. The last of the miners had fled. Fools. The sweet, sweet coal was all his.

So Southwest Airlines cancelled the flight of passengers that were waiting at the gate, and then called the police on them to threaten them with arrest for "trespassing." Southwest claimed that the passengers were trespassing because they had gone through the security checkpoint, but didn't have a valid ticket. They didn't have a valid ticket, because Southwest had just cancelled it🤡

https://www.tiktok.com/@a.ndreart/video/7181960518243011886

In the USA, calling the police on someone, especially a Black person, is a violent act.

A plea to journalists covering the Fediverse:

If you want to pitch a story and the only people you can think of to talk to are Gargron and the Journa Host admin, please don't.

Instead, use the time you saved to learn more about how this network functions, who the people behind ActivityPub are (and what that even is), who the people keeping instances running are, who the people moderating instances are; you can even get your hands dirty by digging through the Mastodon GitHub issue queue and learn why exactly some design decisions ended up the way they did, it's all right there!

Mastodon is not off-brand Twitter. You do this entire community a massive disservice by painting it as such, and you do our profession a disservice by expressing a complete lack of curiosity about this community before you report on it.

Thank you.

In the richest nation on earth, a man died in the freezing cold Mississippi woods on Christmas Day while trying to walk home to his family.

They had been unable to wire money to him or help him get a bus ticket because he didn’t have a current ID.
https://www.sunherald.com/news/weather-news/article270464302.html

It's pretty remarkable how much Elon's Twitter takeover is a textbook fascist takeover: leftists immediately purged, censorship regime imposed behind the scenes, secret police rooting out enemies, right wing terrorism supported by the state, etc and how uncannily similar the mainstream liberal response of pretending nothing is wrong is, even with *very low* costs of walking out the door and refusing to collaborate.

This is soul-crushing, but needs attention. #Amtrak called the cops on two elderly black women because their small emotional support dog had an accident on the train. Amtrak collected their money, allowed the dog on board, then stranded the three on the side of the tracks in life-threatening cold, far from their destination, at Christmas. And except for one protesting passenger, the rest sat in silent complicity. White people, this is NOT okay. #Racism #BLM #BlackMastodon https://twitter.com/viewofone/status/1606825555462062080?s=61&t=M2hA_QVG5-2tJQX-vdmzsg

Americans can help defeat a fascist billionaire oligarchy with the choices they make but instead are like “choosing a server is too hard!!” 😩