Hard Pass

(First blog post ever, would appreciate your input!)

Edit: Title was a lil clickbaity

There's a dichotomy shaping up in this midterm election year. The national political landscape could hardly look worse for Trump and Republicans.

At the same time, the GOP is suddenly resurgent in the redistricting fight, getting significant wins this week in Virginia and Tennessee that could soften the blow they might have suffered without them.

Hi folks,

Trying to order some good quality t-shirts that are made in Canada. Figure I would try here before heading to Reddit, but currently looking at the following:

• Stanfields, classic Canadian brand, semi-local (province over), don’t know why their shirts look so long, $24 https://www.stanfields.com/products/mens-basic-short-sleeve-crew-t-shirt

• Province of Canada, high quality locally milled and made in TO, expensive, $46, https://provinceofcanada.com/products/monday-tee-heather-grey-unisex

• Jericho, Toronto based, seems legitimate, $26, https://jerico.ca/products/organic-cotton-t-shirt-natural

If anyone has any input or thoughts it would be appreciated before placing an order to replace my Costco special T-shirts.

Archived link

European officials are warning that Russia's meddling in the Baltic Sea is likely a preview of tactics Moscow could someday deploy in Canada's High North.

A recent panel discussion in Ottawa hosted by the Polish embassy touched on how Estonia, Poland and Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark are responding to Russian threats that emerge from the sky, sea and online.

Polish Ambassador Witold Dzielski gave the example of an explosion last November on a rail line used to transport military goods to Ukraine, which his government suspects was orchestrated by Russia.

"Saboteurs are hired in order to conduct kinetic attacks," he said.

...

He said Russia's attacks on energy infrastructure dovetail with its use of a "shadow fleet" of ships that are either unregistered or are linked to other countries in order to evade sanctions on Russian oil. Those ships, which seek to avoid detection, sometimes cut undersea fibre optic cables or jam GPS signals.

...

Swedish Ambassador Signe Burgstaller said people in the region are increasingly seeing a link between threats in the Baltic and those in the Arctic.

"From our perspective up in northern Europe, this is one strategic, operational domain," she said.

"Strengthening our defensive deterrence capabilities on the eastern flank also contributes to the defensive deterrence up in the northern flank."

Burgstaller said Canada's military deployment in Latvia aimed at preventing a Russian invasion is helping to deter more Russian activity in the North.

"It does also help overall to defend and deter in that whole geostrategic area," she said.

She said Russia's goal is to chip away at the unity of the NATO alliance.

...

Sweden has even reactivated psychological defence techniques it had shelved at the end of the Cold War. It has issued pamphlets to coach citizens and businesses on what to do in the event of an armed invasion, or the collapse of internet access.

...

[Liberal MP Ahmed] Hussen told the panel Canadian governments could learn from Sweden's approach to defending itself from Russia's increasingly brazen tactics.

"We can't do that without our friends and our allies ...," he said.

Hussen said he's particularly concerned about the threat of Russian cyberattacks on provincial health and education systems.

...

Latest version of "I for one welcome our algorithmic overlords", via SEO bullshit.

See, according to the "AI" tech bro simps at Search Engine Journal, it's Really To Your Benefit™ that you target your website content to be extracted by search engines' "AI" regurgitation. Rather than, you know, at human readers who might be interested in your work.

Also, nobody writes your website's "job description" but you. Certainly not some search engine marketing sycophant.

Personally? I'd love a how-to on doing the exact opposite, making a website resistant to extraction. Fucking up the algos when they try to harvest your content.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/47133723

By Gayle Kirshenbaum May 8, 2026

At the University of Michigan’s recent commencement ceremony, history professor Derek Peterson delivered a five-minute speech in which he celebrated all those who have fought for justice at the university, my alma mater. Invoking our legendary sports-focused fight song, he asked the crowd to “sing” for suffragist Sarah Burger, who battled to get women admitted as students; for Moritz Levi, Michigan’s first Jewish professor; for all the students who fought for racial justice at Michigan as part of the Black Action Movement; and for the “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Peterson’s address was a historian’s invitation to every student and parent in the Ann Arbor stadium to recognize that the fight for Palestinian rights shares roots with our greatest movements for justice, including the struggle against antisemitism.

The backlash, predictably, was swift. The university’s president apologized; the speech was condemned by pro-Israel Jewish organizations and outlets; and I know it upset many college parents, my Gen X peers — we who were raised to believe with all our hearts that Jewish identity and Zionist identity are inextricable.

Blog post of how we accidentally recreated old facebook by adding a feed to our existing product

Increasingly, Meta has been using debt to fuel its spending, amassing $59 billion in long-term debt on its balance sheet by the end of 2025, double the prior year’s total. And that doesn’t count the “aggressive” accounting it has used to keep the cost of a $27 billion Louisiana data center off its books. “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable,” The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” columnist Asa Fitch wrote this week.

Now, as the company careens from one staggeringly expensive misadventure to another, its cash-cow core business is starting to wear out. Last quarter, the number of daily active users across its properties declined for the first time to 3.56 billion from 3.58 billion.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1096524/a-sexual-predator-used-online-games-and-chatgpt-to-groom-young-boys

I believe in the language bondframe, and so I view language as an important tool for forwarding transformative change. Sightsteer is a tool to change our languages.

Sightsteer is to take attention with the goal of changing attitude. In this spirit, I like to chalk because it is an expressive and accessible way of doing sighsteering.

Here is a sighsteer with the norwegian text "samhald" translating to "samhold" or "solidarity". It is accompanied with the hitten for samhold 人人. Below it sais "eltadamon" in arabic which is the translation of samhold.

The chinese letter rén 人 means human and represents humanity, whereas 人人 is just me making a hitten for samhold. By making hittens for important words we increase their apparent worth.

I messed up the first chinese characters here, but I still like this sightsteer because I don't usually write arabic.

I like to tag this everywhere because I don't think the word is used nearly enough in norwegian. We don't appreciate it sufficiently. So by increasing the exposure, we are connecting to the word and asking ourselves; What is samhold truely?