Mitch's Blog

Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots. State health officials are spreading anti-vax lies that will kill many people and immiserate families.

“Do I condone murder? No, obviously. But I’m also sick and tired of people pretending that what is happening to the American people every day isn’t eugenics through class warfare."

RIP Michael Brewer, whose “One Toke Over the Line” was a hippie anthem.

Michael Brewer, half of the folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley, who scored an unlikely Top 10 hit in 1971 with “One Toke Over the Line” — one of the most overt pop odes to marijuana of the hippie era and presumably the only one to be performed on the squeaky-clean “Lawrence Welk Show” — died on Tuesday at his home near Branson, Mo.

I had to put Minnie out in the backyard for a half hour this afternoon to keep her out of the way of the cleaners. She looked at me like I’d abandoned her on the side of the road in the North Dakota woods in February at midnight, where she would be eaten by bears.

I am reading: The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson 📚. Published in May of this year, this book is a history of the violent anarchists of New York 110 years ago and the police investigations of them. The book has become timely with the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO and Luigi Mangione’s arrest.

Jamelle Bouie: “when you have anti-DEI proponents openly going after black military officers for recruiting from HBCUs and suing schools for their black and Hispanic enrollment *even after the schools ended any racial preferences* then the only honest label for these people is ‘segregationist’"

“The Democratic Party needs to be the party of ‘fuck you.'"

Yes to this. No compromise with MAGA.

Tonight’s movie:

You called down the thunder, well now you’ve got it! … The cowboys are finished, you understand me? I see a red sash, I kill the man wearing it! So run, you cur! Run! Tell all the other curs the law’s coming. You tell ‘em I’m coming, and hell’s coming with me, you hear? Hell’s coming with me!

“When you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, all that will be left is Facebook."

The UK Online Safety Act is killing communities. Small, locally run communities cannot afford to comply. Only billion-dollar tech monopolies will survive.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt:

Policymakers have repeatedly brushed off warnings about these consequences, insisting that concerns are overblown or merely fear-mongering from big tech companies looking to avoid regulation. But it’s not. And we’re seeing the impact already.

The promise of the internet was supposed to be that it allowed anyone to set up whatever they wanted online, whether it’s a blog or a small forum. The UK has decided that the only forums that should remain online are those run by the largest companies in the world.

This trend is coming to the US too.

Via @cstross@wandering.shop

Elon Musk Boosting German Fascists, What Could Possibly Go Wrong

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a bigoted industrialist who owns a giant car company has endorsed a far-right German political party full of Nazis that aims to purify Europe by casting out groups of people it considers to be its lessers, if not downright subhuman. Ha ha, no, it’s not Henry Ford, but we sure fooled you….

He’s a right-winger who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, and one of his first actions when he bought Twitter two years ago was to let tons of racists and bigots the previous ownership had banned back onto the platform, such that it now resembles a Munich beer hall in 1933 or a meeting of the White Citizens Council in Alabama in the late 1950s….

So, we hate to engage in hyperbole or cause a scene, but we think it is maybe bad that Musk on Friday endorsed a far-right party full of neo-Nazis to take over Germany. Not to be too alarmist, but historically such takeovers have gone poorly not only for Germany and all of Europe, but also for the rest of the planet….

…

The endorsement falls neatly in line with the support the AfD has received from other people in Donald Trump’s orbit, who share the party’s virulent anti-immigrant views.

Trump’s first-term ambassador to Germany “famously pissed off the German government by cozying up to the Afd.” Steve Bannon “tried to recruit the party into his plan to unite all the far-right national populist parties in Europe to form a sort of supergroup” in the European Union Parliament a few years ago."

Imagine if Henry Ford had been Herbert Hoover’s closest advisor in 1931, at the same time the Nazis were on the rise. That would have been bad, right? Well, somehow that’s what America is getting. First time as tragedy, second time as farce, etc.

— Gary Legum at Wonkette

Here’s something else I saw walking the dog today: This tiny dog wearing a coat and shoes.

I love a dog wearing shoes.

Something I saw while walking the dog

We watched the first episode of the new Dexter prequel series: “Dexter: Original Sin.” Dexter’s back and he’s got lots of plastic wrap.

“My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under ‘Wizards.’”

Currently reading: Storm Front by Jim Butcher 📚

Flipboard’s Surf joins several existing apps designed to view Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms, as well as BlueSky and ActivityPub.¹ I love Flipboard CEO Mike MkCue’s vision of the “social web,” as described by David Pierce at The Verge with feeds superseding websites.

“You won’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content.

Surf’s job, in that world, is to help you discover and explore all those feeds.

I have tried Tapestry and Reeder, which have a similar philosophy of combining feeds from multiple sources and platforms into a single place. I found those apps not quite ready for me to use regularly, but I love the promise of that direction.

It’s what Dave Winer calls Textcasting and I’m eager to see it mature.

The Take It Down Act, written to combat non-consensual intimate imagery posted to the Internet, has the best intentions, but the implementation is a disaster, says Mike Masnick at Techdirt. After receiving a complaint of such imagery, the law would require platforms to act to take down images and duplicates quickly. But the proposed law does nothing to combat false complaints.

The only current law in the US that has a similar notice and takedown scheme is the DMCA, and, as we’ve been describing for years, the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provision is widely and repeatedly abused by people who want to takedown perfectly legitimate content.

There have been organized attempts to flood systems with tens of thousands of bogus DMCA notices. A huge 2016 study found that the system is so frequently abused to remove non-infringing works as to question the validity of the entire notice-and-takedown procedure. And that’s the DMCA which in theory has a clause that is supposed to punish fraudulent takedown notices (even if that’s rarely effective).

Here, the law doesn’t even contemplate such a system. Instead, it just assumes all notices will be valid.

On top of that, by requiring covered platforms to “identify and remove any known identical copies” suggests that basically every website will have to purchase potentially expensive proactive scanning software that can match images, whether through hashes or otherwise.

Yet another proposal to regulate the Internet that would see to it that only billion-dollar-companies can afford to run platforms.

Ageism and ableism are the stupidest prejudices. Most of us will become old and disabled. Ageism and ableism are delayed self-hatred.