Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now

He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.

For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.

Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.

He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor

Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going

For those of you wondering what he’s been talking about this whole time, his staff wrote down a bunch of stuff for him to read like stories from people across the political spectrum opposed to what the administration is doing. He’s also been telling personal anecdotes about meeting important civil rights leaders and other democratic senators have been pausing him for “questions” but the questions have been as long as a small speech and have both served the purpose of giving him a second to sit down and updating him on the news that he’s been missing while he’s been talking.

He has yielded the floor at 25 hrs and 4 mins. His eyes are so wide they look like they’re going to bug out of his skull so I don’t blame him for stopping. He said to go out and get in some good trouble.

it's worth noting that Strom Thurmond set the record filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and Cory Booker is one of only 14 Black people to ever serve in the US Senate.

The record has officially been broken.

This is a start. We need more of this!

Thank you, Cory!!

Solidarity!!

Hello everybody with summer fast approaching here is your regular reminder that:

If you're swimming in the ocean, also consider looking for coral-reef-safe sunscreen! Some sunscreens are toxic to coral and in popular swimming destinations it adds up

Here is my best guidance for action, rendered beautifully by the great John Lithgow. I first published these lessons more than eight years ago, in late 2016. They open the twenty chapters of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

Millions of you, around the world, have put these lessons to good use; it has been humbling to learn how from courageous and creative dissenters, protestors, and oppositionists.

I am delighted to have this special chance now to share the lessons again. I was honored when John, a wise advocate for civil discourse and civic engagement, volunteered to read them aloud.

For the full video, see my substack.

(Source)

Important addition

The higgs boson discovery was made possible by AI sifting through data that was estimated to take humans 500 years to go through and with less accuracy.

AI/ML is a tool like any other. It's not a miracle fix for everything, just like how it isn't an evil entity

Getting my big font because I've said this before and I'm getting angy about it:

You need to stop saying "AI" when you mean "generative AI".

You need to stop inferring "generative AI" when you just see "AI".

You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits

From Girl Scout’s social media. The original Twitter thread is here.

whenever people say shit like “i couldn’t be polyamorous, i’m so jealous and possessive. if my partner even LOOKS at another girl/guy i’m gonna kick them out of a window” i’m like well you should probably be working on that. like even if you don’t end up doing polyamory it’s probably good to not be like that

EVERY WORD HERE  👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼 IS TRUE. YOU ARE THAT FROG. 

I too have no space to worry about USA, already very worried about Poland and Ecuador, thank goodness Canada is still somehow holding up, but I’m horrified how far you let it go. FIX IT NOW or you’ll be sorry  - truer words were never spoken. 

Beware of requests for compromise when you are asking for justice and the other side is asking for consent to continue.

9 October 2024

This is a great post to promote that you can donate to Wikipedia at any time, with almost any amount of money! You can even set up a reoccurring donation, like I did.

fucking hate it when the stuff everybody says "actually works" does actually work.

hate exercising and realizing i've let go of a lot of anxiety and anger because i've overturned my fight-or-flight response.

hate eating right and eating enough and eating 3 times a day and realizing i'm less anxious and i have more energy

hate journaling in my stupid notebook with my stupid bic ballpoint and realizing that i've actually started healing about something once i'm able to externalize it

hate forgiving myself hate complimenting myself more often hate treating myself with kindness hate taking a gratitude inventory hate having patience hate talking to myself gently

hate turning my little face up to the sun and taking deep breaths and looking at nature and grounding myself and realizing that i feel less burdened and more hopeful, more actually-here, that i am able to see the good sides of myself more clearly, that i am able to see not only how far i have to grow - but also how much growth i have already done & how much of my life i truly fill with light and laughter and love

horrible horrible horrible. hate it but i'm gonna do it tho

crazy that in the 1970s they were like, "fine, women can play sports. but because they're innately less athletic than men, only in a special ghettoized League For The Frail And Delicate where they get paid less 😊". And not only is that still the system in 2023, but viciously lashing out at the smallest challenges to that system gets framed as Feminist Praxis

even setting aside the fact that gendered bodytype averages aren't universals, and plenty of individual (cis) women and (cis) men could easily go to toe to toe. have we considered that the fact that all the most prominent and well-paid sports are ones that require things like Being Tall and Having Muscle Mass, as opposed to, ex, gymnastics...is itself an artifact of sexism

Also consider the existence of sports where women would have an advantage, and yet, somehow, the most famous and well paid ones are not women.

I'm thinking of jockeys. Jockeys get an advantage from being smaller and lighter, and while obviously you need sufficient strength to stay on the horse, a well-trained horse does enough of the work that you don't need upper body strength to do the job. Given this and that the majority of children obsessed with horses are female, you'd think most jockeys would be women. Yet somehow they are not.

NASCAR at one point threatened to handicap Danica Patrick by putting extra weight in her car to compensate for the fact that she is smaller and lighter than other racecar drivers. If she gets an advantage as a driver, why is she like practically the only female racecar driver, or at least the only one anyone knows about?

Women, apparently, have an advantage in long distance swimming. Higher body fat percentage and higher endurance means that women can go greater distances in the water. Is long distance swimming even a competitive sport?

Women have actually been excluded from competitive Olympic skiing on the grounds that the jumps required could damage their uterus. The people who actually have unsupported reproductive organs hanging outside their body are considered to have better support than the people whose reproductive organs are nestled in alongside unisex organs like the small intestine and stomach. How does this make any goddamn sense at all? If a uterus could dislodge from the force of a skiing jump, so could intestines and the sport wouldn't be safe for anyone.

Theoretically, any sport where you get an advantage from low center of gravity, better balance, higher flexibility, or being closer to the ground, women should have an advantage. This should include soccer (football in non-US places), and might include hockey if the hockey players hadn't introduced unnecessary viciousness to the sport.

So in any sport where women would excel over men, they're either excluded, unfairly penalized, the sport doesn't exist, or the sport is considered unimportant and no one makes money on it. Hmm. I am thinking the problems here are not actually what the TERFs and transphobes make them out to be.

For those of you wondering "Why did OP say the 70's?" It's because that's when Title IX was passed in the US, prohibiting gender-based discrimination in federally funded education, e.g. public schools & universities. So anti-feminists couldn't just straight up say "no girls allowed" but instead resorted to what's been described above.

It's as if intolerance can't be magically be solved with pieces of paper alone.

I’m starting to sound like a nutcase at work because upper management keeps trying to implement AI programs and AI assistants and Chat GPT and my middle-of-the-road, don’t-infodump, don’t-engage response has been “I don’t like AI”, “I prefer to remain in control of my own tasks”, “I’d rather make my own mistakes”, and “I don’t trust any machine smarter than a toaster”

My honest opinion: “Generative Artificial Intelligence” is a purposefully misleading liar’s name we gave to a labour-stealing company’s proprietary algorithm so they could market it to businesses who would rather see simple work done badly at the expense of the consumer than contribute to the community it is profiting off by offering even a single human being in that population the barest minimum honest wage to learn and do it properly, simultaneously robbing the working class while grifting both the client and the customer, and we’re buying into it because we’re a superstitious social species of codependent apes would could pack bond with a rock if we spent enough time around it existing in the most extreme state of social disconnection and parasocial reliance humanity has ever known, like a dying man in the ocean drinking saltwater

What I have to keep saying to avoid being classified as “the conspiracy theorist”: Haha yeah I guess I’m a bit of technophobe lol

whoa whoa whoa, are you enjoying yourself right now? rookie mistake. you're supposed to be afraid and angry... yeah no all the time. how else will you prove you care about all the problems?