Tootfinder

So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/

Bought a new black computing rectangle (a.k.a. a laptop) yesterday as the current one doesn't have enough umph...also, I might've beat it down a bit too much. Went with a Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen 6 AMD laptop that was on sale because I wanted Linux support as a given (definitely been bitten by that before).
Went with the Ryzen 9 HX PRO 370 CPU (12c/24t) which has a very strong integrated GPU as well (890M). Told them to install [insert OS that isn't Windows on it because …

Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institutes of Health, says she has been put on paid leave following the end of the government shutdown.
"I was not given a reason for being put on leave, but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I have been witnessing inside the National Institutes of Health," she said in a video posted to TikTok.
The notice Norton received from human resources stated that the…

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

Week 10 was the epitome of "Any Given Sunday" https://insidethestar.com/week-10-was-the-epitome-of-any-given-sunday

Just finished "The Raven Boys," a graphic novel adaptation of a novel by Maggie Stiefvater (adaptation written by Stephanie Williams and illustrated by Sas Milledge).
I haven't read the original novel, and because of that, this version felt way too dense, having to fit huge amounts of important details into not enough pages. The illustrations are gorgeous and the writing is fine; the setting and plot have some pretty interesting aspects... It's just too hard to follow a lot of the threads, or things we're supposed to care about aren't given the time/space to feel important.
The other thing that I didn't like: one of the central characters is rich, and we see this reflected in several ways, but we're clearly expected to ignore/excuse the class differences within the cast because he's a good guy. At this point in my life, I'm simply no longer interested in stories about good rich guys very much. It's become clear to me how in real life, we constantly get the perspectives of the rich, and rarely if ever hear the perspectives of the poor (same applies across racial and gender gradients, among others). Why then in fiction should I get more of the same, spending my mental bandwidth building empathy for yet another dilettante who somehow has a heart of gold? I'm tired of that.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

The way he’s threading the needle of talking about the ICE / local police interactions is fascinating: his line is that Mpls Police being called to deal with ICE (e.g. “there’s an abductee’s abandoned car” or 911 call “omg ICE is at my door”) is an unlawful federal commandeering of local police resources.
I say fascinating because that line of argument has legs regardless of whether police helped ICE or pushed back against ICE, whether the police did the right thing or the wrong thing in any given encounter.

Report Card
Israel, age: 77½
Excels at:
✅ Genocide
✅ Ethnic cleansing
✅ Apartheid
✅ Racism
✅ Settler colonialism
Fails:
❌ Basic humanity https://freefree.ps/@faab64/115530516843421204

Farhad (@faab64@freefree.ps)
Attached: 1 image Israel begins building wall in newly occupied territories in southern Lebanon Israel is once again using the conflict to steal more land and occupy more parts of neighboring countries. This is what Israel has done since the day they were given the Palestine in 1948 and will not stop or return those land back unless they are forced to. #Lebanon #Israel #Occupation #BorderWall #StopIsrael #SanctionIsrael #Politics

Trump has a plan for the midterms, and ICE is a big part of it. He wants violence on our streets this year, because he thinks it will give him a pretext to attempt to “cancel” the election. So he’s pulled all guardrails off his masked thugs and given them the green light to be as abusive and cruel as possible, in the hopes that they’ll incite the American people to violence. That’s Trump’s plan.
**Tyranny Is Here** - The Social Contract with Joe Walsh
https://socialcontractwithjoewalsh.substack.com/p/tyranny-is-here

Halle Berry bashes Gov. Gavin Newsom at NYT summit just before he takes stage: 'Should not be our next president either' (Victor Nava/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/12/03/us-news/halle-berry-bashes-gov-gavin-newsom-at-nyt-summit-just-before-he-takes-stage/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251203/p144#a251203p144