As we quickly learned during the George W Bush era, no news media agency can be trusted. To counter this, check reporting of the same incident from multiple news agencies and find the consistent facts. Everything else is suspect.

In a hurry, see if Reuters or AP has covered it, but verify when you have the time.

Done this way AJ is perfectly viable as a source for news, in that the bias can be filtered out.

FOX and OANN are known to lie or misrepresent facts entirely, but that gets filtered through cross-checking.

Trust, but verify.

Obama campaigned on getting past it. ( Hope amd Change ) but then he didn’t. Corporations got their bailouts. OWS was cleared violently with the cameras off. BLM notice law enforcement kill a lot of people. The disposition matrix was a thing. The IWOT went on and on. The mass surveillance state was a thing. The economy was better but 88% of households were in precarity, and a lot of people were homeless.

And then Trump won by the EC.

So Ive been waiting for things to get better for a long, long time. I’ve just stopped expecting the suck to ever reverse, or even ebb.

I just use LGBT+ since it was LGBT for a long time (it was GLBT but the Ls earned their place at the front during the AIDS crisis) then it became LGBTQ, then a bunch of other letters were added while the community was recognizing is profound variety before it turned into LGBTQ+

Q+ has a nice ring to it, but since I’m an unusual form of NB, I fit squarely into the catch-all variety of Q.

Welsh?

That is a good assessment. Yes.

In fact, the race between capitalist interests to bypass safety and get operational AGI soonest is entirely about getting that power to be able to use it to hold everyone else hostage.

Courtesy of XKCD, long before we have to contend with unfriendly AI (we have committees of AI-techs working on this problem already) we’ll have to contend with someone like Musk or Bezos determined to own everything and capable of creating an AI-controlled army of killer robots.

We’re not sure how rogue AI is going to manifest. We are sure rogue power-seeking humans exist all the time, and positions of power are commonly filled by them. (That’s the primary argument for election by sortition, or by lottery.)

Whatever made that crater was an ELE. Bigger than Chicxulub.

We have plenty of great filters to navigate:

We end war, or we die.

We restore the atmosphere and rebuild global ecology, or we die.

We end stratified society and power disparity, or we die.

Where are all the aliens? Fermi asked. The first question is, how do we navigate our way to becoming a space-faring, world colonizing species, ourselves? It’s turning out to be pretty difficult for the common hominid.

We may have to revise our education system so that it’s not connected to our credential system.

There’s a story about Einstein teaching physics and letting the kids who didn’t want to be there leave and do something else with the time. The ones who remained were quite attentive.

There are multiple models for teaching that do something similar, let kids approach a subject when they’re ready. Yes, they goof off a lot early on, but eventually even STEM and literature call to them, and they pass equivalency exams in their late teens.

In the meantime even when I was in high school in the 1980s, our system was created to sort kids into sports stars that might become college players, STEM kids that might become scientists and engineers, and House Hufflepuff (common laborers).

The education system has only gotten progressively worse since then, as its budget increases have not kept up with inflation. And then there’s the whole effort to insert evangelist Christianity (+ American Exceptionalism + Conservativism–Capitalism) into public school.

And to this day, we still use the lecture / lab / test model that excludes a lot of alternative comprehension and learning models. We’re not looking to teach kids, rather we’re looking to harvest the geniuses, and turn the others into bonded laborers and soldiers for billionaire vanity projects.

The… Crowmistress? Queen of Corvids?

From the witching community, you’d have pretty good luck befriending the local murder of crows with cheap bread. Upgrade the bread as the shinies they bring you improve.

According to the meme, pretty soon you’re a Batman villain.

Sacramento Police department has a helicopter, Air One, that the department is super proud of. I live in a not-rich neighborhood where Air One likes to hang out and help which sometimes includes shouting inaudibly on the PA. Air One has its own webpage which is sometimes current about what it’s doing, but not always.

Air One also likes to fly low enough that we can hear the thumping of the rotors through our apartments. At 11pm on a school night. We know it doesn’t have to because the rescue choppers zing by quietly on their way.

And lately Air One has gotten, whinier. This loud screeee! that wasn’t their before that makes me think something in the rotors is not sufficiently oiled, or something is about to fall apart. I wonder if Air One is soon going to make an unscheduled landing in my neighborhood.

Well, I needed an example.

So it means we all get to be Spartacus.

You’re going to have to elaborate on both. I can’t imagine a far-right opinion I agree with.

ETA: I’m echoing the sentiments of centuries of COIN theory: brutal state response to protest only multiplies the numbers in the movement. And it’s so well known that tyrants and usurpers are fools to ignore the paradigm. And yet they do.

Honestly, I don’t know what, in a meme format, differentates a shitpost from a non-shitpost.

Yep. Saw it after I posted it.

ETA In full disclosure, it should be bystanders and sympathizers but I was in a hurry.

Note that Disney and Universal pirate other people’s stuff whenever they want.

Note also that all the Generative AI services are very protective of their big cistern of web-crawled data, say when China borrows it for DeepSeek.

Content, content everywhere and not a drop of principle.

I presume the point that you only need one methane source connection for two appliances that use it heavily.

So, an appliance for low-drag homesteads.

My first instance shut down permanently within days of my signing up. I believe it had sometime remotely doing with Russia suddenly deciding to invade Ukraine.

It really gave me that full cyberpunk experience.

Whenever I see memes based on this comic, I remember the original and the creepy squicky feelings come right back.