ML2 @mathlover@social.cleverlibre.org

One of the right wing's goals is to destroy public institutions of all kinds -- not just schools but also libraries, transit, and pretty much anything that can be "privatized" (a BS word that means sold off to financial profiteers who will gouge the public and degrade vital services.

In Huntsville, Texas, they've done it to the library. https://bookriot.com/huntsville-public-library-privatization/

@rbreich So #ClarenceThomas already broke the law when he failed to recuse in the case of his traitorous wife #GinniThomas #January6 treason texts to #MarkMeadows, and neither the #Republicans nor the #Democrats are doing anything

On this day I’m thinking about Ukrainians struggling without electricity, trying to stay warm, fearful of Russian violence and hoping to stay alive amid a war that is so unnecessary. May the coming year bring an end to the madness.

I wish I had better news about Buffalo but the city is in a state of emergency. To summarize the overnight police scanner:

- Hundreds of people trapped in cars.
- Thousands without power and freezing in their homes for 30h+
- Everything is on fire - cars, houses, everything.
- Emergency crews are trying but they're stuck. Fire engines breaking down all over the place. The Nat'l guard showed up and got stuck, too.
- 7 people are confirmed dead.

#BuffaloBlizzard #Buffalo #Storm

Horrendous story of how a scholar’s work was lifted from his blog and published by another scholar as her own. For context, the blogger is highly respected and has made numerous contributions to manuscropt studies via his blog, which is his main publication platform. Among the worrying elements of this story: that blogs are not real publications, so contents can be used without attribution. It happens more often.

https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html

Just received an ad from Facebook imploring me to come back, and see what I'm missing from friends and family.

Which makes me wonder: how do they know I deleted my account?

Thinking about Peter Thiel quietly and methodically killing Gawker over a period of years then having his, "Tell Cersei, I want her to know it was me" moment leaked.

Contrast that to the overt cruelty we see today. Greg Abbott puts migrants on buses to freezing temps on xmas eve and still wins elections by 11 pts.

Acts that should generate disgust instead trigger feelings of power, even as those celebrating Abbott literally lose grid power.

It's terrifying. How are we going to fix this?

I once read a story about how the Tuareg people of the Sahara improvised a vast sneakernet file sharing network using Bluetooth.

This was needed because there's not a whole lot of cellular networks over there. And some Tuareg are nomadic, so WiFi isn't an option either.

Some incredible music was shared this way. I think it's how Mdou Moctar for discovered.

A how-to on doing #Water #ResourceManagement as badly as possible.

"Kevin Rein, who oversees water rights, made a similar sentiment clear to the Colorado River District board last July. “There’s nothing telling me that I should encourage people to conserve,” Rein said. “It’s a public resource. It’s a property right. It’s part of our economy.” "

And that right there is how the colonizer always destroys the Earth.

A cautionary tale future generations.

#Environment

https://www.propublica.org/article/colorado-river-water-uncompahgre-california-arizona

Tiny, Endangered Manning River turtle hatchlings spotted in the wild after four years of surveying

:-)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-22/endangered-manning-river-turtle-hatchlings-spotted-nsw-survey/101777512

As a human rights lawyer who has done extensive immigration work, let me make something absolutely clear.

Asylum is legal immigration.
There's no "port of entry" requirement.
There's no "visa" requirement.
There's no "first country" requirement.
You enter the United States, and you apply for asylum.

Because asylum is legal immigration. Period.

Period.

the sad reality of open source software development

In short: folks love the amazing decentralised encrypted comms utopia of Matrix. But organisations also love that they can use it without having to pay anyone to develop or maintain it. This is completely unsustainable, and Element is now literally unable to fund the entirety of the Matrix Foundation on behalf of everyone else - and has had to lay off some of the folks working on the core team as a result.

https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022

‘#Amazonia, you beauty!’ How the murders of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira renewed the fight for #Brazil’s forests - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/dec/25/murders-dom-phillips-bruno-pereira-brazil-amazon let's hope so - it's probably our last chance to keep it reasonably intact...

REMINDER: Corporations shouldn't be exploiting volunteer instance admins, and demanding white glove treatment on the Fediverse for free.

Oh yeah, and Merry Christmas🎄

To be fair, and as the article acknowledges, #Mastodon *is* harder to use than #Twitter or #Facebook. A lot of the difficulty is in deciding where to get started, the paralysis of choice, and that can leave a bad taste in your mouth which affects the whole experience. First impressions matter.

But it isn't *that* much harder, and there's real value in choice too. More to the point—again as the article says—there's value in, well, values. Nobody's getting rich off Mastodon. It exists because people think something like it would be neat to have, and they want to share that neatness with others who think the same. There are egos involved to be sure, but no one person's ego can bring it all crashing down.

As a practical matter, it is AFAICT the first and only open-source, distributed, not-for-profit social media platform that registers as a threat to the big players. That counts for a lot in my book.

Remember when the internet felt promising instead of overwhelming, depressing, and sometimes terrifying? Mastodon's bringing some of that back, at least for me.

Last night on Christmas Eve TX Gov Abbot sent asylum seekers to DC with no winter clothes or shelter. What "Christ like" behavior.

If only the Bible had a story of a mother fleeing tyranny w/her infant for refuge in a foreign land—maybe GOP would welcome refugees fleeing tyranny w/their kids for refuge in USA. Amazing how the same GOP extremists who demand the Constitution be based on the Bible, suddenly forget ever Biblical principle about serving humanity.

The dangerous hypocrisy of it all.

"Is Elon Musk going to turn into the same sort of joke that Trump has become? Musk’s cult-like fans haven’t entirely lost faith in their leader yet, but it’s getting a lot harder for him to keep up his image. | by Arwa Mahdawi https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/24/is-elon-musk-going-to-turn-into-the-same-sort-of-joke-that-trump-has-become

The main takeaway of the year is that Russia cannot be anything but a genocidal empire. Of course, the Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians & Latvians have warned us for decades. We should have listened