Hard Pass

Don't know if anyone uses it, but I use it a LOT. It's the main way i consume media. It's no longer maintained as of a month ago. Hopefully someone forks it.

The lone supervised drug consumption sites in Calgary and Lethbridge will close at the end of June, the provincial government announced on Friday.

Calgary's supervised consumption site (SCS) was the first of its kind to open in Alberta in 2017. It has been lauded by advocates as providing a life-saving service, but also targeted with criticism from people who blame it for public drug use and calls to police in its vicinity.

As the UCP government shifted its addiction services from a focus on harm reduction to more recovery-oriented care, the province first announced it planned to close Calgary’s SCS at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre nearly five years ago. In December, Alberta's Mental Health and Addiction ministry renewed its promise to shutter the site.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44516936

The account is an example of how artificial intelligence is being used to push political agendas in wartime

MAGA has been swooning over photos of a blonde U.S. Army soldier, walking defiantly alongside President Donald Trump to carry out the America First agenda. But there’s just one problem — she’s AI.

Images most likely generated by artificial intelligence depicted Jessica Foster wearing heels on a U.S. warship in the Strait of Hormuz, posing for selfies with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and giving a speech at the president’s “Board of Peace” event earlier this year.

The account, which has since been taken down, gained more than one million followers since its mysterious creator started posting on it four months ago, The Washington Post reports.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44531627

cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/41417710

A jury has found Elon Musk liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down Twitter's stock price in the tumultuous months leading up to his 2022 acquisition of the social media company for $44 billion. But it absolved him of some fraud allegations, finding that he did not "scheme" to mislead investors.

And now this individual, with this journalist, is writing some book about being a dissident in the age of fear, and this question of, are they going to talk about Gaza at all? I kind of doubt it. Maybe they will. And I think of other people who resigned alongside me, who I feel extremely fortunate to be at the Quincy Institute, to have had an academic background, and to have had some of these other connections, whereas, for those for whom resigning was to really burn every professional bridge they'd ever built.

...

It was six months between October 7 and when I resigned. And during that time, I submitted a dissent cable. I signed on other dissent cables. I was involved in some internal efforts to try to advocate for a different policy. And this gets a little bit to kind of what Samantha Power said in her statement about when the President and those around him have made a decision, you can't impact it, and you just have to kind of do what you can within that.

But then it's like, okay, well, if that's the case, then you step away; you don't go along with it. I think another super important thing as progressives, or as people are thinking about where we go from here, is that I worry a lot about the fact that so many of these figures inside the Biden administration really haven't paid any kind of a reputational price. They've landed these cushy gigs at Harvard, nice consulting firms, or lucrative law positions. They're all fine, and there hasn't really been this grappling with enabling genocide. And also the pigheadedness of the Biden administration and then, subsequently, the Harris campaign to double down on unconditional and illegal support for Israel was a crucial factor in why the Democrats lost the election.

Interview with writer of article by Majority Report

https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?__goaway_challenge=js-refresh&__goaway_id=f1d8f29bc6379ecb5b9d612d484accb7&__goaway_referer=https%3A%2F%2Finv.nadeko.net%2F&v=kdBJmNuMqHM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdBJmNuMqHM

• Full Report— PDF;
• Overview of all demand-related policy measures that have been announced by governments since the start of the crisis.

The regulator for Alberta’s lawyers says it will no longer mandate Indigenous cultural competency training in advance of what Alberta Premier Danielle Smith calls the “Peterson law” coming into force.

The Law Society of Alberta will also cut its equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) committee in response to the government’s Bill 13, the Regulated Professions Neutrality Act, introduced last November.

Under the new provincial rules, regulators can’t "make cultural competency, unconscious bias, or diversity, equity, and inclusion training mandatory."

This week saw the news that Rideau Cottage, “temporary” home of the prime minister, is “inadequate.” The house is small and insufficiently secure for a head of government.

While I’m not inclined to argue that politicians ought to be living large at taxpayer expense as a rule, I’m embarrassed that the country routinely wrings its hands over where the prime minister lives and how he travels. Politicians need certain tools to do the job of governing a contemporary mass state. Debates about housing or travel, such as they are, don’t reflect serious disagreements over public policy or even our shared or disputed values. Instead, they’re occasions for nitpicking, pettiness, and supreme displays of insecurity. They’re silly and bad for us.

Today, Prime Minister Mark Carney is living at Rideau Cottage, just as Justin Trudeau did before him. He’s there because the official residence of the prime minister, 24 Sussex Drive, is a mess. It’s literally uninhabitable. The good news is that, in February 2024, the home was declared rodent and asbestos free. The bad news is that’s a declaration one hopes a G7 country wouldn’t have to make. It’s the sort of thing that ought to be implicit. Does your head of government live in a house full of carcinogens and rat droppings? Of course not! Why would you even ask? For a long time, Canada did have to ask the question, and the answer speaks to a national smallness that ought to be understood as a big shame.

My cholesterol levels matter more than your multiverse crisis.