Tootfinder

Africa moved as many worlds. It still does.
— Not just rulers, but households, elders, children
— lives lived inside systems of memory, labor, belief, and power that did not require a single name.
So, to talk of Africa as a country is the residue of colonialism — what remains after empire leaves but its grammar stays.

Since a few weeks I have a Hippeastrum bulb standing on my desk, so I can watch something grow even at this time of the year. Two days ago it finally burst open. Here are some views from before.
#photography #bloomScrolling

I so hope this blows up in his face spectacularly.
Note that I do not believe that any LLM can become as skilled as the least skilled #InfoSec professional using conventional tools, so I’m quite confident this will not reach any useful goal.
I’m saying he needs to learn a lesson, and it would be great if it were useful for others as well. @…

Minor good news for libraries: "A Victory for IMLS as Court Blocks Trump’s Attempt to Dismantle Agency"
IMLS is the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds leadership training and R&D in libraries in the US. A small % of library funding but important.
but I believe everyone is gone and grants cancelled so not sure what happens if funding returns-- who gets employed?

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

@… Orgbarh, der berühmte sprechende und singende Eulenbär. Er tritt einmal am Tag auf und kann für Kindergeburtstage gebucht werden!
Leider nicht meine Idee, sondern aus "Inside Ravens Bluff, the Living City" für #ADnD2 🙂

Keeping small instances warm in a time of need :neocat_owo_blep:

After #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol

Unlike his predecessors,
Trump does not even pretend that his imperialism serves any purpose nobler than American domination
For Trump, “America first” didn’t imply any legal or moral opposition to foreign invasions.
To the contrary, he criticized Bush for not seizing Iraq’s oil.
He denounced regime change and nation building because they allegedly expended American blood and treasure on behalf of non-Americans.
Instead, Trump promised short wars in which onl…

JD Vance seems to believe that Black and brown U.S. citizens in Minneapolis being pulled over by ICE somehow did something to deserve it
—including the cops of color being targeted.
“Earlier this week, local law enforcement accused federal agents of racial profiling,”
a reporter asked Vance at a Thursday press conference in Minneapolis.
“Why are there so many U.S. citizens being caught up in this operation?”
⭐️Vance blamed those getting arrested instead of the agen…

JD Vance: Nonwhite Citizens Targeted by ICE Must Have Done Something
The vice president had an alarming press conference in Minneapolis, as federal immigration agents are getting increasingly violent.