When I was a child, I had childish things. But as I grew up, I was able to afford a lot more childish things. And now I have way, way more childish things. I cannot stress how much these childish things rule.

Manna from heaven

UK drops plan to challenge ICC arrest warrant request for Netanyahu | CNN

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/26/middleeast/uk-drops-plans-to-challenge-icc-arrest-warrant-netanyahu-intl/index.html

It has come to my attention that some of you are unfamiliar with the BEC, or "bitch eating crackers," an extremely important concept to keep in mind when you hear someone talking shit: https://criminalreviews.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/a-captain-awkward-glossary/#bitcheatingcrackers

No one ever worried about having two straight White men on a party ticket. Now people are saying that VP Harris needs the "balance" of a White man. A Republican strategist is quoted here suggesting "a little toxic masculinity." https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/25/harris-white-man-vice-president/

#EAS #WEA for CA Butte County: BCSO is issuing an evacuation WARNING for Zone 245 and the remaining area of Zone 241 in the Inskip area due to fire. For more information visit buttecounty.net/sheriff or call 833-512-5378. Source: 200450,CA Butte County, ** DO NOT RELY ON THIS FEED FOR LIFE SAFETY, SEEK OUT OFFICIAL SOURCES ***

'It will be fixed': Trump tells supporters 'you won’t have to vote again' if he wins - Alternet.org

https://www.alternet.org/trump-supporters-vote/

"keep the fedi weird" smells, looks and feels of redlining

#climatechange

It is now about as warm as it was 3 million years ago, and according to projections, it will be as warm as it was 14 million years ago by 2080. We knew how to use technology. Now we also see the dangers and should therefore use technology to avert them, even if this costs more money than we currently have.

Trump said the quiet part out loud. If he gets in office, he’s never leaving.
https://universeodon.com/@StephenRamirez/112856225570155964

He's not even hiding his plan for autocracy, should he win.

I believe the #fedi can shed its HOA rep if it tried harder.

Video Game Makers See Actors As AI 'Data,' Says Union On Strike | IBTimes

https://www.ibtimes.com/video-game-makers-see-actors-ai-data-says-union-strike-3738167

#gaming #unions

The National Association of Police Organization endorsed Donald Trump. I wanted to understand who exactly the NAPO represented. If my state, county, or local police were represented, I was going to voice my disapproval. They were not. Check out whether your local police are included.

#Election2024 #police #endorsement #media

https://www.napo.org/about/related-sites-organizations/

A quick break from housecleaning to explain why I took the leap and set our #Mastodon4Harris fundraiser target at $500,000. Personally, I favor targets that I expect can be met in a couple of days, but I was struck by the logic folks here offered for going big. (I wasn't so struck that I made the goal $1,000,000.) I think we might be able to hit $500,000 by early to middle of next week. In the meantime, I'll alert you to significant inflection points. https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mastodon-for-harris

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/justice-department-endorse-kamala-harris-fear-trump-rcna163069 Fearing a Trump takeover, Justice Department alumni endorse Kamala Harris

Former DOJ officials warned in a new letter that the “fabric of the nation, the rule of law and the future of the Democracy are at stake in this election.”

💪🏼👠🔥

Via Kyle Griffin:

New press release headline from the #Harris campaign: " #JDVance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban #Abortion Nationwide)."

#Harris2024

Glass blowing is so cool.

At the art museum in Toledo (Ohio) they have an awesome glass exhibit/pavillion that includes glass blowing demonstrations. It gets very hot in there but is amazing to watch.

https://youtu.be/fCVsm3UYNLE

Kamala Harris Lands Fifth Polling Win in 24 Hours - Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-lands-fifth-polling-win-24-hours-1931015

#Harris #Harris2024

You know what? I am all for tacking some #MutualAid posts to the #MastodonForHarris tag. Folks who have the money to put toward a mainstream candidate surely have a couple bucks to also send to individuals in need (I say this as someone who is fortunate enough to have been able to do both). It's not "pollution"; it's "synergy". So kudos to @vantablack for the idea. It may have been initiated in spite, but after seeing the #ChildsPlay be founded for similar reasons I've learned that great things can come out of righteous spite.

Oh, and if you can, send a couple bucks to someone trying to scrape together enough to secure food or housing for themselves.

Oh, and if you can, be sure to vote this November.

Edited in addendum: I say all this to mean, why can't this synergizing be done in a positive way rather than with all the adversarial tone I'm starting to see?

‘King of violent rhetoric’ Trump mocked for blaming assassination attempt on Dem language - Raw Story

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-assassination-2668822298/

Fun fact! When compiling for x86-64 with optimization on, this #Rust code:

```
if x == usize::MAX {
x
}
else if x & (1usize << 31) != 0 {
usize::MAX
}
else {
x << 1
}
```

…compiles to exactly the same assembly as this code:

```
x.saturating_mul(2)
```

…namely:

```
lea rcx, [rdi + rdi]
test rdi, rdi
mov rax, -1
cmovns rax, rcx
ret
```

The optimizer is absolutely amazing. 🤯 It knows what I'm trying to do, and generates the right code to do it efficiently.

#programming

#Movies #Alien #USPol

'Gloves are off': Harris campaign claps back at ‘bitter’ Trump's 'strange speech' - Raw Story

https://www.rawstory.com/kamala-harris-2668822329/

#Harris #Harris2024

Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei #breakingnews #news https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/kevin-roberts-project-2025-opus-dei

Given that I've discussed what the elevation of JD Vance to the VP slot on the Trump ticket means for American politics, let's pivot to talk a bit about what kind of politics Vance champions, and who he champions them for.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/where-j-d-vance-gets-100000608.html

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas

"Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas."

Chances are, you've never heard of Curtis Yarvin unless you're some kind of New Right/Dark Enlightenment fascist shitposter crawling the most odious corners of the internet. So who is Yarvin? The short answer is that he's a fascist intellectual who champions the dismantling of what passes for democracy in the Pig Empire and replacing it with hyper authoritarian structures in which rich people, corporations, and capital would dominate every aspect of Pig Empire life. These structures include monarchism, a type of corporate feudalism that will be familiar to folks who read Judge Dredd comics, and literally plugging "unproductive people" into something akin to the virtual reality simulation used as a metaphor in the Matrix - as a "humane alternative to genocide."

It is not an exaggeration to say that Yarvin, who has published numerous bits of fascist intellectual propaganda under the pseudonym "Mencious Moldbug," is a guy who looked at every sci-fi dystopian vision in Pig Empire fiction and said "yeah, that's a good idea actually." Normally, this wouldn't be a problem that rises to the level of existential threat; Yarvin isn't the first extremely online nazi with a thesaurus publishing nightmare fascist screeds on the internet after all. The problem is that Yarvin's ideas, and Moldbug himself, have become extremely popular in billionaire Techbro authoritarian circles that do have access to the power to make his dystopian nazi bullshit a reality; Techbro authoritarians like say Peter Thiel - the man behind GOP VP nominee JD Vance.

"Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit. In 2013, Thiel invested in Tlön, a software startup co-founded by Yarvin. In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trump would pay off.

Since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised—and parroted—Yarvin’s ideas. That was worrying enough when Vance was only a senator. Now that he could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his close ties to Yarvin are more alarming than ever. Superficial analyses of why certain tech billionaires are aligning with Trump tend to fixate on issues like taxes and regulations, but that’s only part of the story. Tech plutocrats like Thiel and Elon Musk already have money. Now they want power—as much as money can buy."

Furthermore, I think it's important to understand that this just isn't a question of guilt by association, or Thiel and his creature Vance having questionable friends. The reality is that Thiel has already been working on popularizing and installing the systems, ideas, and political theories Yarvin espouses for well over a decade. There is already an entire fascist intellectual movement built around Yarvin's theories, the so-called "Dark Enlightenment" and this movement is extremely influential in the thinking and actions of powerful TechBro billionaires at large; folks like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and yes Thiel himself. This in turn becomes a much larger problem when you realize that JD Vance, a man poised to become Vice President of the United States is a wholly owned creation of Thiel, who bankrolled his entire career.

Finally, it's important to understand that none of this is theoretical. When Vance talks about "De-Baathification" of our society and seizing the "institutions of the left" to purge anyone left of Bismark from power, he's echoing the theories of Yarvin, supported by Thiel. When Vance proposes firing all government employees and replacing them with fascist loyalists? That isn't Vance's idea, it's Yarvin's, and Project 2025 makes it clear that Trump and the larger American right support it wholeheartedly. The truth here is that Vance's job in politics is to make Yarvin's twisted dreams a reality for guys like Peter Thiel, and that should concern you as much, or more than, Project 2025 does.

#Fascism #Vance #Yarvin #Thiel #USPol

Democratic volunteers, donations surge with Kamala Harris atop ticket | AP News

https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-volunteers-2024-campaign-cef723e29a2ef11c293f07906b550fcd

#Harris #Harris2024

The Dark Tower series is not very good for listening to while falling asleep. Kinda makes me want a tooterfish popkin though.

FCC Votes To Make Phone Unlocking Easier | Techdirt

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/07/26/fcc-votes-to-make-phone-unlocking-easier/

Penelope Slinger was born in London in 1947 and graduated from Chelsea Art College in 1969 with a body of work made as a feminist reaction to Max Ernst’s collages. Since then, Penny’s art practice has constantly shifted mediums and viewpoints irrespective of art world trends, or profitability—as a result, decades worth of work remain unseen by the art world. In all of its iterations, Penny Slinger’s body of work is mutable, erotic, confrontational, mystical, and unapologetically Goddess-worshipping.

https://contemporaryartreview.la/interview-with-penny-slinger/