Hi, it’s Al Franken.
I don’t usually send messages like this, so I’m hoping you’ll read to the end for a GREAT story.
Before that, though, I want to tell you about Peggy Flanagan.
She is unbelievably great and she’s running to keep Minnesota’s Senate seat blue.
Her end-of-month fundraising deadline is tonight so I’ll get to the point: Please donate now.
I'm #ActuallyAutistic, and I love this woman deeply. I have been a huge fan of her music, especially my special interest in her song “Loin d’ici” (ESC Version) since May 14, 2016.
But now, watching Taylor Swift, Cœur de Pirate, and other artists slowly take her place feels like an unspoken farewell, like a song fading softly into the distance. It’s as if she herself is tell…
No, @…, emphasizing the safety of vaccines is not a strawman. For everlasting fuck’s sake.
Come back to planet Earth, where:
- scare-mongering about vaccines is running rampant,
- right-wing propaganda is intentionally fueling that fear for profiteering and political gain,
- parents are very clearly afraid of the vaccines themselves right now,
- diseases like measles are making a return because of that fear, and
- people are dying as a result.
Your post is a non-sequitur. Whatever stick you have up your butt about lockdowns or whatever this post was about, please keep that stick in your butt and out of vaccine safety discussions. https://mastodon.online/@dennmans/115631732594437886
Could Pete Carroll be one-and-done with the Raiders? Let's read between the lines https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6851551/2025/12/01/pete-carroll-raiders-chip-kelly-job-security/
The leading vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced a far stricter course for federal vaccine approvals,
following claims from his team that Covid vaccines were linked to the deaths of at least 10 children.
Experts suggest the announcement will make the vaccine approval process significantly more difficult.
Dr Vinay Prasad, whose vaccine policy direction has been supported by the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, told FDA staff that…
An extremely simple syllogism, for which the evidence is ample and has been easily available for over a decade:
ICE : white people in Minneapolis ::
regular police : Black people everywhere in America
If you're saying "Abolish ICE" right now (as you should be) but you're hesitant to say "Abolish the police" then you're okay with the brutality as long as it's reinforcing the racial hierarchy, and that's not a good look.
I understand that "Abolish the police" is a scary thing to think about if *your* experience has been that they keep you safe, but recognize how much of that is myth vs reality, e.g. have you ever personally had a positive interaction with police, or do those all happen in stories? Also, even if they do keep you safe, is it worth it if the cost is brutality to the marginalized? (No, it's not.)
At minimum we can see the following behaviors on both sides of the syllogism:
- retaliation for legally "protected" defiance or even just observation
- random killings, with mostly-nonexistent repercussions for the officers involved
- regular widespread harassment & surveillance
-more that I don't have time to list right now. Feel free to reply with your own examples.
#AbolishICE #AbolishThePolice
"When you focus on growth in GDP as your primary goal without any concern for whether what creates that growth is of real value rather than simply being capable of being counted, whilst being indifferent to the distribution of the gains, those already vulnerable are bound to suffer as a consequence... The policy failure this chart exposes is not an accident; it will be achieved by #Labour by d…
This was written by an old friend and I found it pretty packed with good info. It’s also an example of using NotebookLM for research and content development. I found this inspiring enough to give it a try. I’ve found that it is a “Centaur" enabling tech that helps one to create on their own the overall content and leaving details to the NotebookLM tooling.
——
SLOs Can’t Catch a Black Swan: A Classification Framework for Thinking About Incidents -Geoff White
"Your SLOs can be green, and your systems can still be falling over. That doesn’t mean SLOs are broken. It means they were never designed to describe every class of risk we encounter in complex systems.
I’ve released version 1.0 of SLOs Can’t Catch a Black Swan as an open, living framework hosted on GitHub.
This is not a book you read once, and it’s not something you consult in the middle of an outage. It’s a way to think more clearly about incidents—across the incident lifecycle.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/slos-cant-catch-black-swan-classification-framework-thinking-white-ybc0c/?trackingId=ShCzMMVCQTChcTi8xT19tg==
Minnesota resident Nicole Cleland had her Global Entry and TSA Precheck privileges revoked
three days after an incident in which she observed activity by immigration agents, the woman said in a court declaration.
An agent told Cleland that he used facial recognition technology to identify her, she wrote in a declaration filed in US District Court for the District of Minnesota.
Cleland, a 56-year-old resident of Richfield and a director at Target Corporation,
voluntee…
An excellent summary here via @… about how the structures of our civil society have failed to stop ICE from becoming Trump’s Brownshirts.
The one thing the piece omits: someone •is• stopping ICE. It’s the citizens filling the streets, honking and shouting and filming and generally harassing ICE, doing the work our government has failed to do. If it were not for that response being so widespread, sustained, and forceful, we’d be in far worse place right now. https://mastodon.social/@AnnaAnthro/115616389777857234