ReallyActuallyFrankenstein @ ReallyActuallyFrankenstein @lemmynsfw.com

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2 yr. ago

Recently, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey (Trump’s former personal attorney Alina Habba) launched an investigation into the state of New Jersey for its alleged “obstruction” of Trump’s deportation agenda.

Alina Habba is a federal prosecutor now?

Alina Habba who said, “Somebody said to me ‘Alina, would you rather be smart or pretty?’ and I said ‘Oh easy, pretty… I can fake being smart’."?

Alina Habba, who has never been a prosecutor before? That Alina Habba is now the chief federal prosecutor and law enforcement official in New Jersey?

The one in Trump's losing $500 million civil fraud case who didn't even seem to know the federal rules of evidence, and whose only skill at the trial seemed to be completely undermining herself and her case?

Jesus christ.

Yes, sorry for the shadow edit - I was having trouble getting my app to copy the text.

From the article, it's probably going to be actively harmful:

The Trump administration plans to impose a new testing requirement for new vaccines — a demand that could delay the availability of the next round of COVID-19 vaccines and complicate the approval of other vaccines.

Additionally, this all but insures people will catch diseases - potentially fatal diseases like COVID - when they don't need to because they'll be given a placebo:

In addition, experts say that giving someone a placebo to protect them against a potentially deadly disease when an effective vaccine already exists would be unethical.

"Are they really planning on doing a placebo-controlled trial where a certain group of people are not given that vaccine, knowing that the virus can cause infection and disease, including serious disease in anyone? Anyone can be felled by this virus," Offit says. "So it's not an ethical trial."

What's worse than defunding education, forcing teachers to live on poverty wages and to buy class materials out of pocket? Making them train a generation of kids to be crackpot conspiracy theorists.

What's more, Pam Bondi is probably the one orchestrating and advising on political prosecutions that are almost certainly implied by "what's coming."

But I really hope my other intuition is correct and they have not yet fully staffed the DOJ with fascist sycophants. I am hoping there are enough decent people that they have been and will derail the worst of it, at least in the short term.

Only running slightly behind Hitler's January - March power consolidation. Trump just needs a Reichstag fire to give pretext for an Enabling Act.

That may be why ICE is so unconcernedly aggressive. It's a win/win situation for Trump, leading up to either kidnapping and expelling undesirables by masked secret police or, if someone fights back in a dramatic way, providing the basis to increase his power.

This may seem like a cheeky answer, but Limbo.

Sometimes it's not about what you say, it's about what you don't.

I'd say it's incredibly stupid, but with everything we know about RFK, the Occam's razor explanation is that the point has always been to limit vaccine availability.

This just supports that he's not even going to do it above-board, he's going to use bad faith pretexts to do it.

The fact that the Senate breezed through her confirmation made it clear not just to us, but to Trump and Bondi, that Republicans intended to fully abdicate their oversight and check function.

If they had even gone through the motions of trying to commit her to be independent, she probably would not have gotten so brazen so fast. But nope, here we are.

Archive.is link to the article: https://archive.is/vRBow

I had to check to see and that's actually a Trump quote. You're right about the admission, though it's hard to even take note of it in the sea of madness we're all capsized in. But at least love to see the inevitable end for anyone deluded enough to ally themselves with Trump.

Wow, I've been curious who did that. Good to know Rubio's got that blood on his hands.

Asked about the technical support Musk and DOGE have provided to the federal government, Musk pointed to the overhaul of the country’s air traffic control systems, which is still a work in progress, as well as an upgrade to the White House’s own internet, provided by Starlink, a Musk-owned company.

The upgrade is complete, NBC News confirmed when an aide provided the password to the White House Wi-Fi and reporters logged in to the high-speed service.

Oh, good. Unsecure Starlink connections are certainly better than dedicated fiber lines shielded to prevent signal leak, connected directly to the agencies who protect government communications from hacking. Viva la upgrade.

Just to respond to the people here resigned to or encouraging the switch to all-digital, I get it. But let me rage against the dying of the light just a bit. There are some still-good reasons for preferring or demanding full-game cards:

• Having a complete release-date-version game on a cartridge, even if it is later (or instantly) patched, is typically 99% percent of the game experience. Yes, there will be fixes and DLC and so on. But in a preservation discussion, looking to 50 years from now, having preserved 99% of the experience versus 0%, the gameplay, the complete original graphics, the original sound, is still functionally the difference between a game being preserved or not.
• Hacking the Switch 2 will be required to independently preserve key-card or digital-only games. Full stop. Hackers have been to some extent been our preservationists since the dawn of DRM, but in the world of game-key-cards that Nintendo has chosen to accelerate, they will be the only preservationists. I have no issue with hacking, but it's unreliable and eventually may stop being viable when hardware DRM and TPM-style modules are part of the core chip design. Our preservation future is a gamble that hackers will continue to defeat DRM.
• The only preservation alternative is to have era-complete sets of games on physical Switch 2s, which will eventually break down. Repairs will require, again, hacking, because hardware DRM already will never make repairs simple again. The game working on one system, versus 100 million (or whatever Switch 2 will sell) is the difference between it being playable for entire generations of people or not, even if the game is never hacked and dumped.
• Digital-only experiences are not incompatible with game preservation. GOG is the model here. Nintendo is not acting in the only way feasible, they're acting according to a specific corporate business plan that seeks to enforce scarcity and capitalize on long-term capture of any resale markets.
• Yes, competitors are already doing digital-only, DRM-locked distribution. But resigning to this because of that is an all-or-nothing fallacy. Every bit we can preserve helps.

Closing more philosophically: Games are shared culture. When you grow up with a game, or as an adult have a profound experience, that game becomes a part of you. At a societal level, that game becomes a part of us and of human culture - at that point it doesn't even "belong" to Nintendo exclusively.

Nintendo (not only, but focusing on them here) is choosing a path where there will be no alternative to re-paying to experience that memory throughout your life. SaaS is capitalism's most tragic 2000-era "innovation" - tether us to a subscription for our whole lives, if possible, extracting value - and Nintendo already has shown they will lock old games behind their subscription service rather than re-release them. Experiencing these games through museums 50 years from now may only be at corporate behest (if Nintendo still exists, which is less sure than it may feel in this moment).

So this may seem "duh, they're doing what everyone else is." But it is actually a bellwether moment. The future we're pointed, that we enable by treating these key-cards as viable, is re-purchasing or subscribing to access basic parts of ourselves and our culture, even after we've paid for it.

And to respond to the "but it's Nintendo's property" crowd: That is also actually antithetical to modern copyright law, which is vehemently not an inviolable property grant, but meant (since the Statute of Anne) to only give incentive to make more expression. Broader public good and culture is always the end-game of copyright. These works eventually are supposed to belong to us. These game key-cards are just one step in capturing that long-tail - the long-tail that belonged to preservationists, to museums, and to the public - from us all.

Well, imagine that.

No, I'm serious, please America - imagine that. That's what we should be doing.

Clarification: This jar says "Jam." Is water?

All the elements are there.

He has an order directing his administration to facilitate Abrego's return. He has an administration who has been openly defiant but up until now could claim that they cannot return him even if they tried. Now Trump openly admits he could do so. All that's left is for Roberts to either assert the power of the court to hold Trump's officials or he himself in contempt, but as of today, we have an undeniable open and notorious refusal to follow a Supreme Court order.

But knowing how spineless Roberts is, he probably is waiting for a new lower-court motion to compel adherence to the order to work its way to the Supreme Court.

You've just doomed us all.

Don Jr.: What am I good at? Let's see... Going to clubs. Being around powerful people. Collecting money for doing nothing.

But what if I could combine them all?

Trump's advisor situation has gone from yes-men to North Korean sycophant fairy tale land. If those around him saw he thought it really said "MS13" then I doubt anyone said a word, and instead probably just fed into it.

And this is actually a very pointed verification this is a cult and religion and not politics as usual, and also why - to those not in the cult - Trump really is subjecting the entire country to captive narcissistic abuse.

He continues to demand loyalty to the dogma over the empirical facts, and that loyalty prioritizes himself over the cumulative well-being of 300 million people. Moments of cognitive dissonance, of competing realities, are - like in a religion - seen as a test of faith and loyalty.

And like in a narcissistic abuse scenario, we are locked in a continual boundary-pushing test and punishment cycle to cement his ability to determine reality for his victims. Similarly, those who the abuser favors and performs for - friends, family - think you're all making it up and overreacting. I hope eventually someone treats this as a case study in mass narcissistic psychological abuse.