Hard Pass

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/c/politicalmemes@piefed.zip/p/1623896/you-forgot-to-attach-the-gigachad-image

Spoiler

This not real

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/51702010

After the Freedom Truck, we spotted, visited, and avoided a Budweiser Truck ($12 Michelob, no thank you), and then moved on to a tent with a religious theme. A “Great Awakening” booth had books and DVDs on the essential fakeness of the COVID pandemic, the country’s Christian founding, and more. My friend and I stopped to speak with an attendant at the stall; she immediately began to try to convert us. She asked if we really knew what would happen once we died; I replied that I didn’t think anyone knew the answer to that question. Her eyes now burning, she told us that she knew, asked our names, and started to pray for us. Once she asked if we could repeat after her that Jesus Christ was our lord and savior, we walked away.

The whole thing veered from strangely funny to unsettling to deadening. Another booth was for AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens. It’s the conservative AARP; among other things, they support raising the minimum eligibility age for Social Security. At the fair, they were giving out red grip pads with “THE LEFT NEEDS TO GET A GRIP” emblazoned on the front. 

Outside of the big tents are rows of smaller ones that line the edges of the fair. One activity involves taking a mini-passport and going to the booth for each of the states and territories represented at the fair. Connecticut Public Media reportedthat Freedom 250 was demanding that the states fund and staff the exhibits.

Because several states declined to participate, the result was bizarre. The booths for Vermont and Hawaii were decorated with two chairs, a stamp, and a backdrop that has the name of the state. New Jersey declined to send a delegation. Instead, an organizer told me, Freedom250 reached out to conservative Cape May county. That is how Cape May came to represent the entire state of New Jersey at the fair.

. . . We went into another booth that exhibited the work of an artist who made stylized images of American cities and monuments. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but he also seemed to be a Christian nationalist. In the style of a pre-printing press illuminated manuscript, he included a fabricated quote from George Washington: “Do not let anyone claim tribute of american patriotism if they even attempt to remove religion from politics,” it read.

Federal departments had booths, as well. The Justice Department’s was entirely devoted to the Bureau of Prisons, with at least three recruitment tables to become prison guards. The Department of State had giant mockups of the new, limited-edition Trump passport. 

One guest gravely asked whether this would apply to everyone seeking a new passport; another, younger man, eagerly asked how to get one.

By that point, we had had enough. A few days later, the friend I went with texted me, describing a “psychic shock” he got from the fair.

“Things are worse than I thought,” he wrote.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/61936

As a veteran of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, I visit high schools on a regular basis to talk about the military. I try to fill in the blanks that military recruiters intentionally ignore. I find that when asked, most students can say very little about the reasons why the U.S. fights. They often wrongly assume that the U.S. fights in self-defense or to protect democracy when in reality the U.S.

Source

From Truthout via This RSS Feed.

National Weather Service issued an extreme heat warning as high temperatures have paralyzed the east coast

Organizers of Saturday’s Independence Day parade in Washington DC abruptly canceled the event late on the eve of the event, with sweltering temperatures in the nation’s capital and on the east coast wreaking havoc on celebrations of America’s semiquincentennial.

The event, hosted by the National Park Service (NPS), was scheduled to begin at 10.30am on Saturday. But organizers said they canceled the procession due to an extreme heart warning issued by the National Weather Service (NWS).

Blistering temperatures, exacerbated by high humidity, have been crippling transport services and stressing the electricity grid for days as the 250th anniversary of the US’s Declaration of Independence on Saturday loomed. The cancellation of the parade is just the latest setback precipitated by those conditions.

"Let's just vote in more ^fake^ leftists bro just one more bro it'll work bro"

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/48960815

The ACLU documents how an automatic license plate reader company has lied about its operations, signaling a need for reputable governments to avoid working with Flock Safety.

During a city council meeting in a suburb of Wisconsin in April, the city of Oshkosh considered whether it should approve a contract to use automatic license plate readers (ALPR) from Flock Safety, a prominent company that provides ALPRs to law enforcement agencies across the country. During the meeting, one city council member asked Flock if the company’s ALPR system created heat maps that could reveal where a particular vehicle had driven over a period of time. Flock’s chief information security officer, who was in attendance, told the council that Flock’s system did not “create a pattern or heat map of an individual’s movement” through the tracking of their vehicles. At the end of that meeting, the Oshkosh City Council approved a contract with Flock. The very next morning, the city learned that Flock had lied.

...

The company has demonstrated a pattern of treating legitimate operational questions and concerns not as problems to be solved, but rather as mere public relations issues.

In Colorado, Loveland Police Chief Tim Doran raised concern that federal agents were accessing the town’s ALPR data. Flock responded by telling the chief that federal agencies no longer had access to Loveland’s license plate readers, and had their CEO reiterate to the press that federal data sharing was a non-issue because Flock had no federal contracts. After contradictory information later came to light, the company was forced to admit that it did, in fact, have contracts with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security (DHS) for pilot projects that gave those agencies direct access to license data. “We clearly communicated poorly,” Flock’s CEO said, acknowledging that Flock’s “public statements inadvertently provided inaccurate information.”

...

Flock knew that, despite not being a customer, ICE had indirect access to Flock’s data and system through the company’s state and local law enforcement customers. The issue was never about having direct access to Flock’s data, it was about having any access to the data. But rather than address these data security and control issues on their merits, Flock released a misleading blog which reads as an attempt to confuse the public and create a false sense of security among its potential government customers. Ultimately, Flock was forced to accept that its denials were simply not credible. The CEO admitted Flock was used for immigration enforcement but argued that such matters were not Flock’s problem.

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While Flock claimed its new oversight tool would “significantly” reduce the risk of improper uses like abortion enforcement, in reality the tool doesn’t work. As an investigation by our colleagues at the ACLU of Massachusetts found, Flock network audits showed police frequently enter vague terms like “investigation” or “susp” instead of information about the substance of the investigation into the search reason field. In September 2025 alone, a local Oregon police department was allowed to search Flock’s ALPR system after entering “investigation” into the search reason field 111 times and “hehehe” into the field on 20 occasions, which demonstrates how easy it is to search Flock’s system while avoiding security-triggering words like “abortion.” Flock certainly would have known, if it conducted even a rudimentary test of its system, that the search field’s protections were extremely simple to circumvent. Nevertheless, Flock’s financial interests appear to have been better served by the company misrepresenting the efficacy of its security features to the public and its potential government customers.

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Flock has even made false claims to the public and elected officials about working with the ACLU. Earlier this year, after the ACLU of New Mexico and Flock supported the same state-level ALPR legislation — albeit for very different reasons — Flock’s Senior Director of Public Affairs took to social media to claim that Flock partnered with the ACLU of New Mexico to craft the bill and pass it.

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Ultimately, reputable governments should not do business with disreputable companies. While governments should think long and hard about not using ALPRs, if local governments insist on doing so, at a bare minimum, they should adopt strong guardrails governing future ALPR use – including strictly limiting data retention, data sharing, and what crimes they can be used to enforce. And, of course, they should refuse to partner with any company that regularly misleads the public, elected officials, and even its own customers.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/51702010

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/42119737

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49015603

Still a better love story than twilight