Linkee-poo, in like a lion, March 3

Sorry about the chaotic pubishing lately. I think part of it is the distraction of the t-shirt business, but part of it is my subonscious rebelling at still going at 7 years after I said I would take a hiatus. I'm realy glad these last few years I can focus on something other than politics, and I'm resentful that the GOP and certain assholes remain committed to making politics the main point of discussions and news. I'm not sure how to fix this at the moment. It may be I need to step away for a little bit, but we're already into the election positioning for 2024 and lots of pieces are moving quickly (including my suspecion that Trump installed his own Deep State to wage an information battle which is just gearing up as exemplified by the DoJ announcement of the possibility that COVID-19 was a lab leak, even while being stated that it's own conclusion was of "low confidence" which almost lost during the first few days it made a splash, and which fortunately burried the story in irrelevance except for far right corners). Plus part of the time has been adsorbed (yes, that's the word) by playing with AI tools. Which I should probably talk about at some point. Right now I'm trying to see if they can be a starting point for designs I can't find references for, and use as a photo scrap book for novel writing (in the same way writes clip photos). BEcause right now while some people can create journeyman level pieces, mostly it's crap, just interesting looking crap.

"Jimmy Carter took great pride in pointing out that the United States didn't start any new wars during his term as president. But after he left office he launched a war against 'neglected' diseases — diseases in far-off lands that most Americans will never suffer from and may not have even heard of. Diseases like lymphatic filariasis, trachoma, river blindness, schistosomiasis ... and a nasty little bug called Guinea worm disease."

Fish on Fridays? "Alas, Christendom never really developed a hankering for snake. But fish — well, they'd been associated with sacred holidays even in pre-Christian times. And as the number of meatless days piled up on the medieval Christian calendar — not just Fridays but Wednesdays and Saturdays, Advent and Lent, and other holy days — the hunger for fish grew. Indeed, fish fasting days became central to the growth of the global fishing industry. But not because of a pope and his secret pact."

"Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, went on a racist rant this week on his Coffee with Scott Adams online video show, and we will no longer carry his comic strip in The Plain Dealer."

"The distributor of Scott Adams' 'Dilbert' comic strip, Andrews McMeel Universal, announced Sunday it was severing ties with the cartoonist." Note that this isn't the first time Mr. Adams has done this kind of thing. This is, IIRC, about the 4th major blowup regarding his racist viewpoint.

"Things took a weird turn when Associated Press technology reporter Matt O'Brien was testing out Microsoft's new Bing, the first-ever search engine powered by artificial intelligence, last month." Hey, remember when Microsoft released their first social media chatbot and then had to pull the plug less than 8 hours later because it had become a raving Nazi? It seems that Skynet or the paranoid and psychotic HAL9000 is the inevitable end of the process.

"On February 15, Neil Clarke shared a graph showing an exponential jump in submission bans for Clarkesworld, with nearly 350 bans in the first half of this month alone. The graph accompanied his essay 'A Concerning Trend' on how AI chatbot stories were responsible for the vast majority of these bans." This is not the robot uprising I was promised. Jason Sanford has been doing some good work here, and this Grapevine post also includes a story about Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki detention and denied admission to the US to attend another award ceremony, and an update about the Chengdu Worldcon.

"The key to being a good writer? It’s being a good reader, authors including Carol Ann Duffy and Alan Moore have said this World Book Day. However, commonly doled-out advice such as 'write what you know' is 'dreadful', says Lee Child."

"Don't mess with Roald Dahl's language or his 'swashboggling' fans. When his UK publisher announced it would be changing some of his words, the response was fierce. 'An affront to democracy,' wrote one reader responding to The Daily Telegraph's report on the proposed changes. 'An exercise in priggish stupidity,' read a headline in The Sydney Morning Herald. Even the Queen Consort and U.K. Prime Minister dismissed the idea of tampering with Dahl's original language."

"Dr. Seuss fans might find their hearts growing three sizes this coming holiday season with the release of a sequel to the 1957 classic children’s book 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas!'" Ugh.

"A dozen dead whales have washed up on New York and New Jersey beaches since December. It's part of a years-long trend in whale deaths up and down the east coast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is trying to figure out what's going on."

Something new has been added… "Egypt's antiquities authorities on Thursday unveiled a newly discovered, sealed-off chamber inside one of the Great Pyramids at Giza, just outside of Cairo, that dates back some 4,500 years ago… The corridor — on the northern side of the Pyramid of Khufu — was discovered using modern scanning technology. It measures nearly 30 feet in length and is over 6 feet wide, perched above the main entrance of the pyramid."

"It's been nearly a month since a Norfolk Southern train derailed and spilled hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, soil and water around East Palestine, Ohio. In the weeks since, authorities have undertaken a massive operation to clean up the hazardous materials." A story exploring the difficulties of cleaning up toxic waste, and some of the unique challenges of this accident site.

"Seeing a political opportunity, former President Donald Trump and a cadre of other conservatives descended on the small town of fewer than 5,000 residents. Trump handed out campaign hats, 'Trump'-branded water and Trump-branded insults of the Biden administration. Then, under political pressure, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made his way there, too, met with local leaders and offered his own rejoinders for the former president." I wonder if anyone reminded East Palestine that Trump rolled back the rules that might have prevented the derailment or have reduced the impact and scale of the disaster?

"As Women’s History Month gets underway, mobile billboards are visiting college campuses in 14 states with abortion bans carrying a reminder that abortion pills are still accessible all across the country… Mayday.Health, a nonprofit launched last year after legal abortions were heavily restricted or banned in 26 states, was created to provide information on where and how to safely order abortion pills. The traveling billboards are fitted with QR codes that direct people to resources specific to the state where they are hoping to have pills delivered."

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention raising warning doctors and the public about an increase in extensively drug-resistant (XDR) cases of Shigella, a highly transmissible bacteria that causes an infection called shigellosis, an inflammatory diarrhea."

"Black married couples, in general, pay more in tax costs than white, married couples, according to a new report by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center… Officially, the U.S. tax code is considered race blind, William Gale, one of the report's authors, told NPR… 'But what we've suspected, and what we found, was that the income tax can still impose differential burdens on Black and white households' because of several factors, he said."

They will greet us as liberators is always a lie… "Kherson was the first major city occupied by Russian forces. With Kherson's deep historical ties to Russia, Moscow did not expect it to be a center of resistance. But the city, like the rest of Ukraine, defied the Kremlin's expectations."

"We firmly believe that it is journalism’s sacred duty to endanger the lives of as many trans people as possible… Indeed, there are critical questions to be asked about the social complexities of gender, as well as medical ethics in a profit-driven healthcare system. We are simply not interested in any of that. Instead, we will use flawed data and spurious logic to repeatedly write the same hand-wringing arguments asking whether there are suddenly too many trans people around. Journalistic integrity demands nothing less." Oh Onion, don't ever change.

"Former College Park, Maryland, Mayor Patrick Wojahn was arrested Thursday on several charges of child pornography, city officials announced… The Prince George's County Police Department was notified by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on Feb. 17 that there was a social media account in the county posting child pornography, and police tracked it back to Wojahn, 47, the department said." Still not a drag show to be found.

"Transgender youth may soon no longer be able to access gender-affirming health care. A ban on medical transitioning for minors has passed the Tennessee General Assembly and is on its way to the governor’s desk… The bill would mean no hormone therapy, no surgeries and no puberty blockers — with two exceptions. One is for intersex kids who aren’t easily assigned a gender at birth. Another would be a temporary exception for trans kids who are already taking hormones before the law goes into effect July 1. After that, minors have until March of 2024 to stop their treatments."

"One side effect of political division in the states — blue states getting bluer and red states getting redder — is that some policies don't have a chance of getting passed by partisan state legislatures, even if a majority of voters back them… But a left-leaning advocacy group called the Fairness Project has created a playbook for using ballot initiatives to go around GOP-led state legislatures." And now you know why some states are making it harder to get initiatives on the ballot.

"The event may be the closest thing yet to Greene’s vision for the GOP, which she has urged to become the 'party of Christian nationalism.' The Idaho Panhandle’s especially fervent embrace of the ideology may explain why Greene, who has sold T-shirts reading 'Proud Christian Nationalist,' traveled more than 2,300 miles to a county with fewer than 67,000 Republican voters to talk about biblical truth: Amid ongoing national debate over Christian nationalism, North Idaho offers a window at what actually trying to manifest a right-wing vision for a Christian America can look like — and the power it can wield in state politics." Cue up Poltergeist clip of little girl saying, "They'e here."

"The report describes attempts by top officials to link protesters to an imaginary terrorist plot in an apparent effort to boost Trump’s reelection odds, raising concerns now about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars’ worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to generate evidence of financial ties between protesters in custody; an effort that, had they not failed, would have seemingly served to legitimize President Trump’s false claims about 'Antifa,' an 'organization' that even his most loyal intelligence officers failed to drum up proof ever existed." Who was weaponizing the government?

"Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, the former chair of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, says House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's decision to release security video of that day to Fox News host Tucker Carlson could compromise the security of the U.S. Capitol by exposing the placement of cameras throughout the complex."

"A Republican state senator in Florida has introduced a bill that, if passed, would require bloggers who write about Gov. Ron DeSantis, his Cabinet or state legislators to register with the state." Fuck this Nazi shit, and fuck the Florida Mussolini DeSantis.