Hard Pass

Just heard the news, former director of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert Swan Mueller III has died at the age of 81. Man, what a jawline.

transcription: dont hate yourself, thats homophobic

The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran has officially confirmed the fact of an attack carried out by the United States and Israel on the morning of March 21, targeting the Shahid Ahmad Roshan uranium enrichment complex located in the city of Natanz. This facility is situated approximately 250 kilometers south of Tehran and is used for uranium enrichment via gas centrifugation, where material enriched to levels of up to 60 percent was previously produced. The main part of this complex is located underground at a depth of up to eight meters, a measure taken to protect it from airstrikes.

According to a statement released by the Iranian organization on the social media platform X, a technical assessment determined that no radioactive material leak occurred and that there is no threat to residents of the surrounding areas. Iranian representatives emphasized that the carried-out attack constitutes a gross violation of international law and contradicts the obligations arising from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. This assault once again demonstrates the disregard of Washington and Tel Aviv for international agreements, despite previous statements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alleging that Iran had lost its ability to enrich uranium.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/21/middle-east-crisis-live-iran-war-trump-eases-oil-sanctions-israel-strikes

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has once again made a dramatic statement regarding Tehran's nuclear program. The politician claims that only timely and decisive actions by Israeli leadership managed to prevent a catastrophe in major cities of the United States. According to him, had it not been for the measures he initiated, Iran would have allegedly already carried out plans to launch nuclear strikes on Chicago, New York, Texas, California, and Florida. Netanyahu urged his audience to believe this, emphasizing that the Iranian side intended to go underground to complete its military developments.

In his speech, the Israeli leader also expanded on the theme of global consequences that would have ensued had Iran acquired nuclear weapons. He stated that possessing such a capability would have allowed Tehran to resort to directly blackmailing the entire international community. Such assertions appear to be yet another attempt by the politician to use the image of an external threat to justify his own actions, which traditionally raises questions among critics who point to Netanyahu's tendency to escalate rhetoric in order to preserve his personal power. The emphasis on supposedly saving American cities comes across as a clear demonstration of an attempt at political self-aggrandizement through alarming geopolitical predictions. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/read-netanyahus-full-statement-on-iran-attacks

Edmonton police (EPS) chief Warren Driechel was in the hot seat at Thursday’s police commission meeting over his Israel trip in February. Driechel faced pushback from more than a dozen speakers who said the chief’s trip has broken the community’s trust in EPS.

Thursday’s tense meeting at the City Hall came after Muslim and Palestinian communities said they were upset with Driechel for not apologizing for his trip.

Steve Shafir, co-chair of community relations committee at Jewish Federation of Edmonton, said, “I came because I felt it was important to show the chief that he has support from Edmontonians, has support from our community.”

Mousa Qasqas of the Canada Palestine Cultural Association said Driechel was not consistent in the meeting and what he said in public.

“It felt like he was speaking to us with one voice, calling our communities and saying, but then in public saying a completely different thing saying, ‘I stand by my decision,’” Qasqas said.

The icing on the cake is them now capping your watch history. They're already selling my data, but I can't mark too many things as watched without paying? Even if all the floating tiles and sliders loaded in a way they could be seen and used, that's taking it too far. What a shit show that site has become.

Any suggestions?

cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/mop/p/772065/don-t-fall-prey-to-ecofascist-propaganda

«¿Cuántas naciones ha bombardeado USA desde 2001?» (Infografía: Al Jazeera)

When Rep. Leigh Finke spoke last month before the Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify against HF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement.

“I want to support the basic part of this,” she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone wants kids to be safe. But HF1434, Minnesota’s proposed age-verification bill, simply won’t “protect children.” It mandates that websites hosting speech that is protected by the First Amendment for both adults and young people to verify users’ identities, often through government IDs or biometric data. As we’ve discussed before, the bill’s definition of speech that lawmakers deem “harmful to minors” is notoriously broad—broad enough to sweep in lawful, non-pornographic speech about sexual orientation, sexual health, and gender identity.

Rep. Finke, an openly transgender lawmaker, next raised a point that her critics have since tried to distort: age-verification laws like the Minnesota bill are already being used to block young LGBTQ+ people from exercising their First Amendment rights to access information that may be educational, affirming, or life-saving. Referencing the Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, she noted that state attorneys general have been “almost jubilant” about the ability to use these laws to restrict queer youth from accessing content. “We know that ‘prurient interest’ could be for many people, the very existence of transgender kids,” she added, referring to the malleable legal standard that would govern what content must be age-gated under the law.

But despite years’ worth of evidence to back her up, Finke has faced a wave of attacks from countless media outlets and religious advocacy groups for her statements. Rep. Finke’s testimony was repeatedly mischaracterized as not having young people’s best interests in mind, when really she was accurately describing the lived reality of LGBTQ+ youth and advocating in support of their access to vital resources and community.

President Donald Trump celebrated the death of Robert Mueller, the former FBI director and special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.”

Mueller, a career prosecutor and veteran of the Vietnam War, died at 81 years old Friday, his family confirmed. While Mueller had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2021, his family did not say how he died.

I fibbed a bit for the shitpost, they actually do have TP on the wall to the left out of view, these are just leaves that got blown in from recent strong winds.

One morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country’s minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.

The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.

Thousands of miles away in Ranchi, India, Sahil Tigga, a 22-year-old student, regularly earns money by letting Silencio, which crowdsources audio data for AI training, access his phone’s microphone to capture ambient city noise, such as inside a restaurant or traffic at a busy junction. He also uploads recordings of his voice. Sahil travels to capture unique settings, like hotel lobbies not yet documented on Silencio’s map. He earns over $100 a month doing this, enough to cover all his food expenses.

And in Chicago, Ramelio Hill, an 18-year-old welding apprentice, made a couple hundred dollars by selling his private phone chats with friends and family to Neon Mobile, a conversational AI training platform that pays $0.50 per minute. For Hill, the calculation was simple: he figured tech companies already capture so much of his private data, so he might as well get a cut of the profit.

These gig AI trainers – who upload everything from scenes around them to photos, videos and audio of themselves – are at the frontlines of a new global data gold rush. As Silicon Valley’s hunger for high-quality, human-grade data outpaces what can be scraped from the open internet, a thriving industry of data marketplaces has emerged to bridge the gap. From Cape Town to Chicago, thousands of people are now micro-licensing their biometric identities and intimate data to train the next generation of AI.

This ends well.

Donald Trump said Saturday he will deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to US airports on Monday if an agreement isn’t reached to fund the Department of Homeland Security amid a partial government shutdown.

It is unclear what function the ICE agents would perform since they’re not trained in airport security screening. TSA screeners have a several months-long training period before they’re on the job, though airline employees and private security companies have partnered on line controlling and guarding exit doors.

The agents could potentially help in more limited roles — like managing lines, directing passengers or helping move people through the checkpoint process — to free up trained TSA officers for critical security functions.