Futurology Today

The U.S. Justice Department renewed its request Monday to unseal grand jury transcripts from Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's sex trafficking cases, arguing they should be made public under a new law requiring the government to open its files on the late financier and his longtime confidante.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton cited the Epstein Files Transparency Act — passed by Congress last week and signed into law by President Donald Trump — in court filings asking Manhattan federal judges Richard Berman and Paul A. Engelmayer to reconsider their prior decisions to keep the material sealed.

The Justice Department interprets the transparency act "as requiring it to publish the grand jury and discovery materials in this case," said the eight-page filings, which also bear the names of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and her second-in-command, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

There's literally analogues for

Wedding’s wife, Miryam Andrea Castillo Moreno, allegedly launders money for him and “has helped him conduct acts of violence,” the department said.

Skyler

Edgar Aaron Vazquez Alvarado, known as “the General,” allegedly provides protection for Wedding in Mexico, according to the release. Officials said Vazquez is believed to be a former Mexican law enforcement officer and uses law enforcement sources to find targets for Wedding.

(kinda)

A Canadian attorney named Deepak Balwant Paradkar allegedly provides what officials say is a “range of illegal services” that fall outside of the scope of a typical attorney. He is alleged to have helped Wedding with bribery and murder and introduced him to his drug traffickers, the Treasury Department said.

and

AND he got started in 2008, the same year BB started airing

Meme stolen from 1990

Marxist perspective on AI. Quit smashing the printing presses for a second...

A deep dive into the secrets of the FSB's feared 2nd Service: how they poison opposition figures, what promotions Navalny's killers got, how they engineered the fake referendum in Crimea and helped Bachar El Assad.

An informative confession from ex-FSB Colonel.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46204638

Archived

Russia introduced a new Explanatory Dictionary of the State Language of the Russian Federation, compiled at St. Petersburg State University and immediately added to the official list of normative dictionaries.

Some examples:

authoritarianism ... considered the most effective form of governance in difficult times for a country ...

marriage ... family union between a man and a woman ... same-sex marriage (a homosexual intimate union between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, condemned by the Russian Orthodox Church and not supported by the Russian state) ...

enemy ... One whom the sovereign authority has deemed hostile to the people, the government, or the state. An ideological enemy. A sworn enemy ...

humanism ... traditional Russian spiritual and moral value: a worldview based on the principles of the value of the human person, human dignity, respect for others, concern for their well-being, the right to freedom, equality ...

life ... traditional Russian spiritual and moral value: the period of a person’s existence from conception ...

unity ... unity of the system of public authority. The historical unity of Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians. The unity of the peoples of Russia (a traditional Russian spiritual and moral value) ...

ideal ... Moral ideals (a traditional Russian spiritual and moral value: high moral principles and convictions that inspire and guide a person toward goodness, justice, honesty, compassion, and other virtues, with strict rejection of destructive ideologies that allow immoral conduct, actions causing suffering, corruption, and other unlawful deeds) ...

limitrophe ... in 21st-century Europe: a state used as a buffer between Western Europe and Russia, which is politically, economically, and culturally incapable of being independent ...

regime ... set of political, economic, and social measures used by state authorities to govern society ... the Kyiv regime (in Ukraine since 2014: the established form of political rule, which poses a threat to the fundamental rights and interests of the Russian-speaking population) ...

Currently I have random docs/how-tos for my network stored in a forgejo repo, just a bunch of READMEs. I'd like to somehow make that a bit more official, I like writing it in markdown/git and having source control, but was wondering if anyone has a good wiki tool they like that can consume that and make it more hostable? Thanks!

Donald Trump broke his biggest campaign promise, and it’s about to send the cost of your Thanksgiving dinner soaring.

Show this video to your conservative relatives at Thanksgiving and let me know what they think.

Next year, an estimated five million people will be priced out of health insurance in the United States. I am one of them. When I went to renew my family’s policy, I was shocked to discover my premium had gone up to $2,600 per month, a price my household of four simply cannot afford. For the first time in my adult life, I will be uninsured, joining the millions who have navigated this risky reality for years. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially when health insurance already makes access to healthcare costly with extremely unrealistic deductibles and high out-of-pocket costs. Yet, as a woman in my forties with a family history of breast cancer, going without coverage is a gamble with my life.

After some number-crunching, we concluded that we could afford to carry insurance for only two of the four of us. This left us with an inhuman choice: to decide whose lives we value more. This is not just an abstract dilemma that many households are facing; it is necropolitics in action, the state-sanctioned power to decide who lives and dies. This crisis is a direct result of political choices made by those elected to serve the people and their needs. By allowing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies to expire, our elected officials are acting as death panels, comfortable with making a decision that will kill off tens of thousands of their own constituents. This is not hyperbole; studies show that over 40,000 people in the U.S. die annually due to a lack of healthcare.

However, these domestic necropolitics are merely a symptom of the U.S.’s larger death-wish: a war economy that serves weapons manufacturers whose job is to create machines of death and destruction. As a nation, we manage to muster up trillions each year to fund global conflict and destruction while claiming the price of keeping our own alive is too much. Our government’s priorities could not be any clearer. For example, in the recent government shutdown, the National Priorities Project reported that the Senate managed to find bipartisan unity to approve a $32 billion increase for the Pentagon as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passing it with an overwhelming 77-20 vote. Yet, they refused to extend the healthcare subsidies for even a single year, a measure that would have cost roughly $35 billion, a well-worth sum that would keep millions, including myself, from losing their health insurance.

This is not a one-off, though. Congress passes an ever-growing Pentagon budget every year, now set to exceed a trillion dollars. The 2026 NDAA will be voted on in mid-December. Around the same time, there are whispers of a vote on the healthcare subsidies that could save millions of families from our nightmare. However, only one of these bills is certain to pass with little debate, and it is not the one that will save lives.

To understand the deadly consequences of these priorities, consider that the annual cost of continuing the ACA subsidies is about $30 billion, or roughly $82 million per day. The daily cost of operating a single U.S. aircraft carrier is approximately $8 million. This means that the cost of one carrier for a single day is equivalent to about 10% of the daily cost of providing healthcare subsidies for the entire nation. In other words, the funds spent on one warship for just one day could instead ensure a day of healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The math makes it clear that the U.S. government is not in the business of serving the people and their needs. Instead, our elected officials sit in high places, callously deciding who they are willing to kill off in order protect their personal vested interest, whether it be Palestinians in Gaza, children in Sudan, boaters in Venezuela, migrants seeking a better life, or hard-working families desperately trying to make ends meet in an economy that only serves a few rather than the many. We live in a system that values war and conflict over the protection of life, and every day they decide that it is okay for more and more of us to die. It is necropolitics, all the way down, and we are all on the chopping block. Unless…

Bandcamp

The accounts being discussed here have pushed agendas within the US, and commented on US politics regularly. Many are also named to echo political movements, like some MAGA accounts.

However, these ‘political influencers’ have been found to be based outside the US, raising questions about the motives.

One profile going by 'MAGA NATION' with a follower count of over 392,000, is based out of eastern Europe. Similarly, ‘Dark Maga’ a page with over 15,000 followers is based out of Thailand. ‘MAGA Scope’ which boasts over 51,000 followers is actually operated out of Nigeria, and ‘America First’, an account with over 67,000 followers is based out of Bangladesh.

“At this time thousands of MAGA-aligned influencer accounts and large political pages that claim to be based in the U.S. are now being investigated and exposed with many of them traced to India, Nigeria, and other countries,” a news aggregator page on X noted.

Archive: https://archive.ph/DYs5O

(Bloomberg) -- New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has selected several corporate executives to join his transition team as the democratic socialist seeks to mollify concerns his policies might harm the city’s business community.

Among those chosen to help in his move to City Hall are former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Margaret Anadu, developer Jed Walentas and Kathy Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City. Wylde and Anadu will serve on the Committee on Economic Development & Workforce Development, and Walentas will join the Committee on Housing, according to a statement from Mamdani’s transition team on Monday.

Walentas, the Brooklyn developer behind the revamp of the Domino Sugar Refinery, had spoken with Mamdani before the election as part of a charm offensive by the candidate to reassure business leaders who were wary of the 34-year-old’s policies. The incoming mayor, who takes office on Jan. 1, ran on a pledge to freeze rents and provide free childcare and bus service, and promised to pay for his programs with a tax on corporations and the wealthy.

[TRANSLATED ARTICLE]

EU chat control comes – through the back door of voluntariness

The EU states have agreed on a common position on chat control. Data protection advocates warn against massive surveillance. What is in store for us?

After lengthy negotiations, the EU states have agreed on a common position on so-called chat control. Like from one Minutes of negotiations of the Council working group As can be seen, Internet services will in future be allowed to voluntarily search their users' communications for information about crimes, but will not be obliged to do so.

The Danish Council Presidency wants to get the draft law through the Council "as quickly as possible", "so that the trilogue negotiations can begin promptly", the minutes say. Feedback from states should be limited to "absolute red lines".

Consensus achieved

The majority of States supported the compromise proposal. At least 15 spoke in favor, including Germany and France. Germany "welcomed both the deletion of the mandatory measures and the permanent anchoring of voluntary measures", said the protocol.

However, other countries were disappointed. Spain in particular "continued to see mandatory measures as necessary, unfortunately a comprehensive agreement on this was not possible". Hungary also "seen voluntariness as the sole concept as too little".

Spain, Hungary and Bulgaria proposed "an obligation for providers to detect, at least in open areas". The Danish Presidency "described the proposal as ambitious, but did not take it up to avoid further discussion.

The organization Netzpolitik.org, which has been reporting critically on chat control for years, sees the plans as a fundamental threat to democracy. "From the beginning, a lobby network intertwined with the security apparatus pushed chat control", writes the organization. “It was never really about the children, otherwise it would get to the root of abuse and violence instead of monitoring people without any initial suspicion.”

Netzpolitik.org argues that "encrypted communication is a thorn in the side of the security apparatus". Authorities have been trying to combat private and encrypted communication in various ways for years.

A number of scholars criticize the compromise proposal, calling voluntary chat control inappropriate. "Their benefits have not been proven, while the potential for harm and abuse is enormous", one said open letter.

According to critics, the planned technology, so-called client-side scanning, would create a backdoor on all users' devices. Netzpolitik.org warns that this represents a "frontal attack on end-to-end encryption, which is vital in the digital world".

The problem with such backdoors is that "not only the supposedly 'good guys' can use them, but also resourceful criminals or unwell-disposed other states", argues the organization.

Signal considers withdrawing from the EU

Journalists' associations are also alarmed by the plans. The DJV rejects chat control as a form of mass surveillance without cause and sees source protection threatened, for which encrypted communication is essential. The infrastructure created in this way can be used for political control "in just a few simple steps", said the DJV in a statement Opinion.

The Messenger service Signal Already announced that it would withdraw from the EU if necessary. Signal President Meredith Whittaker told the dpa: “Unfortunately, if we were given the choice of either undermining the integrity of our encryption or leaving Europe, we would make the decision to leave the market.”

Next steps in the legislative process

The Permanent Representatives of the EU states are due to meet next week on the subject, followed in December by the Ministers of Justice and Home Affairs, these two bodies are due to approve the bill as the Council's official position.

The trilogue then begins, in which the Commission, Parliament and Council must reach a compromise from their three draft laws. Parliament had described the original plans as mass surveillance and called for only unencrypted suspect content to be scanned.

The EU Commission had originally proposed requiring Internet services to search their users' content for information about crimes without cause and to send it to authorities if suspected.

I want to be able to do that too, like this one for instance

PURE 0.33 Hz EPSILON BINAURAL BEATS | Epsilon Waves | Reality Shifting ⚡️

It would be great to be able to produce any arbitrary Hz pure tone or whatever that example is

Like 0.165Hz or anything