gAlienLifeform

joined 2 years ago
[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago

It is unclear whether Trump will go ahead with his proposal or, in keeping with his ~~self-image as a shrewd dealmaker~~ pattern of being a manipulative bullshitter who doesn't care whether anything he says is true or not, has simply laid out an extreme position as a . [sic, sentence ends here in original]

Yeah, random Reuters reporter, I probably would have needed to stop writing that sentence right there to go throw up in self disgust too.

His first term in 2017-21 was replete with what ~~critics said were over-the-top foreign policy pronouncements~~ any objective observer would call "lies", many of which were never implemented.

I feel like he's going to make a big show out of being shitty to Palestinians because that's what his voters want, but I feel like his administration is going to have a hard time finding anything to do to them the previous administration didn't already allow to happen. We've been at the point of dropping bombs on bombed out rubble for months already.

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

My last comment here got determined to be "misinformation" and removed, so let me try to just state my opinion and avoid any factual claims -

I feel like Trump did say a stupid thing. I feel like the stupid thing Trump said here won't actually be implemented, but only because actually occupying Palestine with American troops would be extremely costly and Trump's allies in the area wouldn't actually gain anything from it they don't already have. I feel like the Trump administration does want to find some way to make the lives of Palestinians worse that they can show to their voters, but I feel like they will struggle to find any policies that make things much worse than Israel and the Biden administration has already made their lives.

I don't feel like that makes what Trump is saying or doing acceptable. However, I feel like many people don't recognize how bad it has already been for Palestinians because of the actions of the prior administration. Moreover, I feel like elected Dems need to condemn the prior administatrion's actions if we are going to build the sort of political coalition that can win elections and give us an administration that will be willing and able to hold Israel accountable for what I feel is an ongoing genocide.

 

An unprecedented number of people in the U.S. were infected with bird flu this past year. In this country, a lot of science focused on the virus in dairy cows and in poultry. But researchers say something ominous is happening in wild animals and not just birds. NPR's Gabrielle Emanuel reports

...

EMANUEL: Now, this virus, H5N1, it's been around for decades. It originated in East Asia, infecting poultry and sometimes people. And it did periodically jump over into wild birds. But the virus killed them quickly before they could migrate, so the virus never took off globally. Then about five years ago, the virus changed. Erik Karlsson is the director of the Cambodian National Influenza Center.

ERIK KARLSSON: This new virus seems to be a bit more like dead bird flying, right?

EMANUEL: So a bird gets infected and will likely die eventually, but first...

KARLSSON: They seem to be able to still migrate further, and they contact another group of birds. They fly a little bit further, and that eventually gets all the way across the world.

EMANUEL: It's almost like a relay race. And that's what Michelle Wille has been mapping. She's at the Centre for Pathogen Genomics at the University of Melbourne. She says infected wild birds carried the virus to North America a few years ago, and then South America.

MICHELLE WILLE: So then in South America, it traveled the 6,000-kilometer spine in about six months, OK? So this is a virus. It's not assisted by airplanes. This is a virus that's traveling by mass mortality after mass mortality, after mass mortality, after mass mortality.

EMANUEL: Now, she says, the virus is racing around Antarctica. The problem globally is nobody knows how many wild animals the virus has killed.

WILLE: No one's counting. We have no idea. So it's been like a catastrophe. It is a global catastrophe.

EMANUEL: It's a catastrophe for the animal species and for the ecosystems they're part of. But on top of that, this matters for human health. People can get bird flu. But right now, the virus doesn't spread easily from one person to another. That could change. The estimates are millions of birds have been infected and tens of thousands of marine mammals. And each animal the virus infects, that's another chance for it to evolve.

[Bolding added]

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250206125502/https://www.npr.org/2025/02/05/nx-s1-5285457/bird-flu-is-taking-a-massive-toll-on-wild-animals-researchers-find

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago

Wonderful, thank you for collecting and posting all these!

 
 

In 2016, a 12-year-old named Taylor Cadle reported to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, in central Florida, that she had been raped by her adoptive father. The detective investigating the case didn’t believe her, and Taylor was charged with filing a false police report, a first-degree misdemeanor. As part of the terms of her probation, she was required to write an apology letter to her adoptive father. Soon after, he abused Taylor again—and this time, Taylor took photos and video of the incident on her phone. Taylor’s evidence led to her adoptive father ultimately getting sentenced to 17 years in prison.

But, as Rachel de Leon and I detailed in an investigation last fall, the fallout from the case was minimal: Sheriff Grady Judd, a charismatic, tough-on-crime influencer with more than 780,000 TikTok followers, never apologized to Taylor or acknowledged the case publicly—despite his often-repeated phrase, “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” When we published our piece, the detective investigating the case, Melissa Turnage, was still on track to become sergeant. (After the story came out, she was required to complete a weeklong online course on interrogation techniques.)

The Center for Investigative Reporting’s story, which aired on PBS NewsHour and published in Mother Jones, led commenters to flood the sheriff’s office’s TikTok and Instagram pages with comments demanding justice for Taylor. But soon after being posted, many of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more anger.

Screenshots from TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram appear to show the sheriff’s office has been routinely filtering out comments criticizing its handling of the case. Recently deleted comments suggest that it is automatically removing comments that include the word “Taylor” from public view.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250206124703/https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2025/02/taylor-cadle-grady-judd-polk-county-sheriff-florida-rape/

 
 

Deicy Aldana was in bed when agents pounded on her door around 6 a.m., she said. When her father-in-law opened it a crack, agents pushed it open and asked what country they were from. When Aldana’s husband and his father answered that they were from Venezuela, they were taken away in plastic handcuffs, said Aldana, who is Colombian.

Both men have work permits and have applied for asylum to stay in the United States, she said. Neither are connected to any gang, she said. Her husband has been fixing air conditioners and her father-in-law works at a recycling facility, Aldana said. “They said that if all their papers are in order, they would be released in three to five hours,” Aldana said in Spanish as she stood on an apartment balcony. “They just took them without asking if they had documents.”

Ronald Sanchez, who is from Venezuela and arrived in Colorado just over a year ago, said he was awakened before dawn to his phone buzzing. People in the complex were messaging each other, saying, “Federal agents are here! Do not open your doors!”

Sanchez, who has a work permit and has applied for asylum, did not open the door when agents pounded on it. “I am not a legal resident, so I didn’t answer,” he said in Spanish.

He said he saw six men and two women boarded onto the bus, their hands cuffed behind their backs. Others said there were more.

Authorities did not confirm a number of people taken into custody.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250206124153/https://coloradosun.com/2025/02/05/ice-raids-aurora-denver/

Seems like not answering the door and laying low saved Mr. Sanchez from being kidnapped by ICE here, maybe there's a lesson there.

Either way, here's an ACLU know your rights page for migrants (archived)

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You should post these to more communities since it might get removed from this one

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world -5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Plus this is basically just continuing policies started under Biden, so it's not like there's any reason to believe US opposition to anything that might help Palestinians will be a temporary thing

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 17 points 1 day ago

Sure, an indefinite occupation in the middle east against the wishes and advice of other countries in the region worked so well for the last Republican president, and we'll already be all warmed up with occupying Greenland, the Panama canal, and Canada. This is truly a well thought out idea and we can definitely take Trump at his word that he'll implement it.

/s

 
[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 90 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

The two officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said some senior career employees at OPM have had their access revoked to some of the department's data systems.

The systems include a vast database called Enterprise Human Resources Integration, which contains dates of birth, Social Security numbers, appraisals, home addresses, pay grades and length of service of government workers, the officials said.

"We have no visibility into what they are doing with the computer and data systems," one of the officials said. "That is creating great concern. There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications."

Implications? This sound like an ongoing hack right now

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 18 points 6 days ago

the Fediverse really seems like it could be our response to these fuckers controlling the narrative on social media. It could be more than just an interesting decentralized social media platform. I really think this could be a key step in reclaiming our democracy.

Agreed, and I would add that finding ways to get nonprofit news organizations (e.g. ProPublica) and public media (e.g. NPR, PBS, etc.) to host and administer their own instances and to start directing their readers/listeners to those services would be a great way to advance this goal

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 23 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It seems like the alleged murder of his cellmate took place in October, so he must have been rearrested at some point

Also, general point of clarification - In general in the United States, jail is where you go before you are convicted of a crime (assuming you don't get bail), prison is where you go after conviction. I believe this alleged murder took place in a jail cell, after Pollard was released from prison.

[–] gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Considering there were about 90 million (archived) who didn't vote in 2024, that seems totally possible. Harris only lost by about 2-3 million, so we're talking 5% of this group needing to be the sort of "both parties are too right wing, there's no point in voting" types who could be brought into our fold.

view more: next ›