ML2 @mathlover@social.cleverlibre.org

Elon Musk - the owner of Twitter with the largest following on Twitter - is boosting an enduring Russian propaganda & disinformation campaign into nearly all Twitter feeds tonight.

@mathlover proof dictator counties are just plain isolated. Not a clue of what’s going on in America. Fkn idiots.

If we could stop referring to people trying to deliberately cut power to thousands of people in the middle of a nationwide cold snap as "vandals" or "burglars" that'd be great.

They're terrorists. If another country did that, we'd call it an act of war.

The New York Times' relentless normalization of sociopaths has reached a peak.

"In the U.S., Sam Bankman-Fried is persona non grata. But in interviews across the Bahamas, residents say that his crimes were hardly comparable to the gang violence of the island, and expressed fears of economic fallout if crypto investors don't return."

This is NOT from the Onion, though it should be.

(No link from me, for obvious reasons...)

OFFS. Dumb Russians. 🇺🇸
I need a #birthcertificate. #screenshot
#elonmusk

Jo Brand (a former nurse) is RIGHT - the #NHS, which we, our parents, grandparents and great grandparents built over 75 years, is in real danger of being culled and the corpse sold to predators

The only way to keep it is get rid of the Tories - and KEEP them out!

https://medium.com/p/542a1360a472

@WillBlackWriter Do not allow them to eviscerate your #NHS to then say they need #privatization to “restore” services. They will make you pay a HUGE amount of your income for #healthcare and strangle #providers with pitiful payments. All the cost “savings” will go to #corporate #entities that will pay greatly reduced #taxes on it.

@killyourfm @est existing Mastodon will probably prove more durable than Usenet or IRC were, and they lasted quite a long time in the face of corporate pressure.

Matrix is doing some extraordinary work, but they’re having to lay off staff.

If your org uses it, maybe look into dropping them some funding? https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022

I just donated to the SAMU foundation who is helping the people Greg Abbott sent to Kamala Harris’s house in the dead of winter. Be the change. I believe that there are more of us good decent people than cruel ones. Thank you to @Vaniaji for the info & inspiration. #ImmigrantsAreWelcome #AsylumIsLegal Here’s the link to donate: https://samufirstresponse.org/donate-now/

Sorry to *opine* here for a second, but I see a thing playing out with Matrix the way it did for Mastodon (ActivityPub), and tons of other projects before it.

Namely, nobody really gives it the love, care, attention, and support it needs to flourish and be successful before we really need it. So when the time comes that we *do* need it, it looks like a failure.

The time to look into Matrix is now, before Discord fucks up and sends your online life into turmoil (again).

We've been pursuing this issue is Tennessee for the last several years. We asked for a copy of the Tennessee Code annotated and the state responded "we do not possess the record." (sic!) https://law.resource.org/pub/us/code/tn/ We sued, and our next brief, before the Tennessee Court of Appeals, will be filed in January.

@jeff

You can create multiple accounts on Mastodon. If you want to observe some of the more objectionable instances, just create an account on one or more of those instances. Don't ask that others be exposed to objectionable material just so that you can observe it for research purposes.

I don't understand why they are asking for the entire Newsie instance to change just so they don't have to create an extra account.

Is there some reason they don't want to create another account?

After only one year of Taliban rule, girls and women have almost disappeared from Afghan society. They are not allowed to travel, to work alone, to go to public parks, to talk or laugh in public, and they are not allowed to study and to go to school... Photo: Boushra Almutawakel

Fission is in the news, but few recognize that a woman physicist was behind the discovery.

Lise Meitner’s brilliance led to the discovery of nuclear fission. But her long time collaborator Otto Hahn, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry w/o her in 1944, even though she had given the first theoretical explanation.

Albert Einstein called Meitner “our Marie Curie." She also adamantly refused to work on the atomic bomb during WWII. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201502/physicshistory.cfm #women #history #science #energy

Whoever I get introduced to a new tech infrastructure, I too like to test it by randomly unplugging sensitive sever racks. Keeps people on their toes.

@StevenBeschloss I made a Ukrainian artist friend who runs an Etsy shop. He hand-built a custom setpiece for my movie #POSERS. A beautiful 1:6 scale wooden desk and chairs. He shipped it in October and it never arrived. Probably stolen or destroyed.

Turns out he got his family out alive, and has been living without power ever since. He’s older, so he’s on reserve for military service. I couldn’t bring myself to request a refund. I mean, why add insult to injury? 🇺🇦

The race was neck and neck, but outside Republican groups put almost no cash into Santos’s effort. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/24/george-santos-election-republicans/

Also looks like someone at the UK's Royal Astronomical Society set up a Mastodon account and is crafting custom posts for it, but it only has ~300 followers compared with their >50K on Twitter:

@royalastrosoc

I see this all too often -- major public/nonprofit organizations set up shop here, but don't know how to best cross-link/promote it, so the accounts get kind of lost. If you care about #astronomy & like their work, give them a boost or follow :)