The leftist premier of West Bengal has accused Modi's party of stealing the election.

This is plausible, given the laws they adopted to deprive Muslims of Indian citizenship if they don't have written proof of it. One of the two laws (which operate together) is explicitly biased against Muslims.

*[Executive agencies are] increasingly ignoring US courts, new analysis shows.

Critics warn that respect for rule of law could break down as executive branch flouts judicial decisions.*

*Want a green card? Better make sure you haven't criticized Israel on social media.*

Starmer Labour called itself the "adults", meaning the ones who would prevent adoption of mad policies such as raising taxes on the rich. Rich people from increases in taxation, thus leaving a choice of various policies that won't solve the big problem of impoverishing the non-rich.

With a right-wing party in power, the "adults" may try to stop it from tearing up the legal system and constitution. However, with an ostensibly left-wing party in power, the "adults" try to prevent any major economic changes that could once again direct a large part of the country's productive capacity to the non-rich.

Starmer is seeking a path to label defense of Palestine as antisemitism.

Once you accept that identification, you will inevitably take an unjust stance on at least one of the two issues.

*Six supreme court justices handed down a ruling built, ostensibly, on the belief that the US has changed so much as to render the protections of the Voting Rights Act unnecessary. No one should be that gullible.*

US citizens: denounce the DOJ's Attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center.

US citizens: call on the Department of supposed Justice to drop bogus charges against James Comey and stop persecuting political speech.

US citizens: call on Congress to refuse to fund Trump’s executive order that could label millions of Americans as domestic terrorists, or in any fashion block it.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

Sad news: Robert Reich's site has become paywalled. As a result, access to an article there requires running nonfree JavaScript code (https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html) and requires identifying oneself by using a payment account. Each of these consequences is unjust, and I have a moral obligation not to refer people to pages that require such things.

I can't let the links remain here as they are, but they are numerous and it will take time to deal with all of them.

The articles I linked to did not have that problem when I made the links.

For an external USB 5TB+ spinning disk (not SSD), is HFS a better choice than APFS? Assume no weird edge cases like spanning volumes or RAID are involved. It's just a disk.

It is very easy to find either answer, but hard to find one that sounds like it's from someone who knows what they are talking about, and isn't just cargo-culting it or reading from a press release. So show your work.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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She seems to have argued at trial that she had no intent to harm anyone, and had only released the bees so they could "enjoy the lovely, flowering landscape" in the area. The landscape was also infested with deputies, though, and the jury does not seem to have believed that was a coincidence. [...]

I've seen no evidence that the one deputy taken to the hospital suffered from anaphylactic shock. It seems a lot more likely that his "elevated heart rate" was caused by his decision to tackle a 59-year-old beekeeper than by the bees themselves. But I'm speculating about that. [...]

This week, the judge sentenced Woods to six months on those charges. According to her lawyer, with time served she will be out in two weeks anyway. [...]

Finally, kudos to The Guardian for refusing to let society ignore the real victims in this case: the bees. "[A]bout a thousand of Woods's bees died during the encounter," it reported, "many of them crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies trying to arrest her, and others because female honeybees die after delivering their sting." I assume that "about a thousand" is based on a careful reckoning by a court-appointed bee expert and not just a number that Woods threw out there. Regardless, while I don't really buy the deputies' story here, I do sympathize with the bees. They have enough trouble these days without humans getting them involved in dispute resolution. Leave the bees out of it.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

District 4 shaping up to be San Francisco's loudest and silliest race:

This level of turmoil befitting a Latin American junta is, again, incongruous for a nice, quiet little beach community. But, again, don't believe it -- this is a place where odd stuff happens. District 4 voters have managed to elect two representatives who later spent time in federal prison -- Leland Yee and Ed Jew. Other than Dan White, who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the only supes to be incarcerated have been from District 4. And, for what it's worth, both of them went down for on-the-job crimes. [...] In the era of district elections, no D4 supervisor has served two full terms. No district has run through more representatives than District 4. [...]

And yet these are the issues getting the most play in this race: hand-waving about a done-deal zoning plan, calling for the installation of a Great Highway on top of Great Highway and pushing distorted and hyperbolic crime narratives during a time of citywide and nationwide crime reductions. But it gets better: All of this is being undertaken via a tsunami of third-party cash. Vast sums of money are flowing into the sleepy Sunset to further rile everyone up.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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And about 1 time in 100, the customer draws a little picture for us instead. So I thought I should share some of those.

If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"...

...you are a smart person.

Of the drawings, I'd say that it's 90% dongs; the rest are a mixture of smilies, pentagrams and cats, in about that order.

(I especially like the ones that just wrote out the word "PENIS", which is like, the Philip K. Dick of dicks.)

To generate this gallery, I had to place eyeballs on hundreds of thousands of signatures, going back to 2021. That's right, I just white-knuckled it, you're welcome. (If you're about to start replying with "Why Didn't You Just", I am begging you to Not.)

Now, if you're thinking, "Wait, why do you even still have that 5-year-old data"... you are, again, a smart person.

Even though the payment processors won't let you issue a refund or a chargeback on a transaction older than 6 months, our point-of-sale saves every bit of information it has about every transaction forever. "Oh geez, you should delete that" you might be thinking. There literally is not a delete button.

After a year, one might want to look at daily graphs, but there's no way you'd care about individual transactions, or anything of higher aggregate resolution than "hourly". Maybe "10 minutes" if you're a complete maniac. But nope, we still have the full PDF of the receipt, including name, last-four, scrawled signature and exactly what products were purchased.

(Though, the customer name isn't included most of the time, only sometimes. I'm not sure what the difference is.)

Anyway that means that when -- not if, when -- this vendor gets popped, all of that data will be stolen, sold, laundered, mixed, and purchased by a data broker who will annotate their profile about you with how much you drink and what, how many nights a week, and whether you attend gay parties. Some of it might even be true! That profile will then be purchased by your car insurance company, your health insurance company, the recruiters used by every future employer, Google, Amazon, Instagram, ICE, TSA, FBI, CIA, all of the "AI" companies, and Deputy Dewey of the East Cowfuck, Texas Police Department.

Oh no, what started off as a juvenile story about poorly-drawn dicks turned into a dystopian nightmare. Welp.

This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I'm talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. [...]

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences -- not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It's not that the wealthy become evil; it's that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

When Peter Thiel said, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," he wasn't talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don't exist.

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