Members of a private WhatsApp group, including billionaires like the CEO of Dell and the former CEO of Starbucks, allegedly used the chat to discuss ways to pressure New York City Mayor Eric Adams to use police to crack down on Gaza solidarity protests at the city’s universities, according to The Washington Post. AJ+ has not seen the chat messages referenced in The Washington Post’s report directly. ⁣

⁣

NYPD officers raided encampments at schools like Columbia University and the City College of New York, arresting close to 200 protesters in just one day. The police raid at Columbia in late April was the first on-campus mass arrest in 50 years, with police using riot gear and military-grade weapons against mostly peaceful protesters. ⁣

⁣

While Gaza solidarity encampments have been frequently targeted with violence by police and pro-Israel agitators – and over 2,200 people have been arrested – a study found that out of over 550 Gaza protests at U.S. universities, 97% have been peaceful. ⁣

⁣

…⁣

Senior Producers: Kareem Yasin, Ben Angeloni⁣

⁣

In case you missed it. A bunch of billionaires/Zionists have a group chat with Eric Adams telling him to use the NYPD on peaceful student protestors at Columbia.

Which he did in exchange for donations

Oh god... This is right in my ballpark and I need it to not be

The Ontario Government plan to apply a Ministerial Zoning Order to seize city owned land at Ontario Place and place it into the control of a private MegaSpa for 95 years.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/gtQxMoLzCMirW9GQ/?mibextid=xfxF2i

Took some time and revisited an old painting of Jack for my commission page. For those who are interested in colored or black & white illustration pieces, please contact via Tumblr message. Thank you!

DreamWorks’ Shrek was first released on May 18th, 2001.

Happy birthday you big stupid ugly ogre

THE SONG WAS AN ACCIDENT ARE U FUCKING KIDDING ME

From a May 17th Washington Post article, we can see how the new American floating pier, surrounded by its own security zone, is now the endpoint of a new partition of the Gaza Strip that cuts Gaza City off from the south. The corridor is a nascent border.

The IOF is building processing stations for large flows of people along the partition:

'Controlled return' is an optimistic way of referring to a wide range of affordances created by the new border. Anytime you build out the infrastructure to systematically process humans, a whole range of possibilities are opened up, and which actually obtain becomes a function of the political moment.

They're attempting to gaslight us that this isn't intended for the Ben Gurion Canal Project.

As a kid, when your parents are poor, you're poor. If they don't have money, that means none of you have money. But if someone's parents are rich, that doesn't necessarily mean the kid is. Sometimes rich peoples' kids aren't rich kids, they're just some rich freak's exotic pets that can talk but aren't allowed to.

That’s… not how class works

OK, so- my partner was adopted by a rich woman when he was a baby. She's from a prominent family, practically royalty where we're from. She certainly had the means to send him to fancy private school, give him good food, nice clothes/toys, premium healthcare... she chose not to. According to her he was lucky to be "adopted out of poverty" at all and should have been content with what she deigned to give him. And she reminded him of this constantly, all through his childhood.

She dangled the promise of uni in exchange for good behavior and good grades- with terms and conditions, of course. And filling her laundry list of demands was something like pulling teeth whilst jumping through hoops. In the end, did he get to go to uni? Of course not. (And certainly being queer/trans on top of it all did not help things whatsoever).

He cut her off after high school, and when I met him a year ago he had been working as (the equivalent of) an UberEats driver for a living for the last few years, including through the pandemic. (Sixteen hours a day for the equivalent of $6 (six) USD, not including the gas for his shitty rundown scooter; caught COVID twice, suffers from chronic fatigue to this day).

And to this day he still has to be selective about which of our ~leftist anarcho-commie~ friends he divulges this part of his background to- cos all they hear is "raised rich" and then suddenly he's not One of Them because "well teeeeechncially :^) you're from the oppressing class...". Like.... shit, man!

Social rules don't mean shit when it comes to abusive parents. Even rich ones.

Probably especially rich ones.

people are totally on board with the concept of "sufficiently rich people are above the law, and this is bad" but refuse to connect that to the concept of "this also includes laws that protect children from abuse and exploitation"

like we understand "the ruling classes get and maintain their wealth through cruel exploitation of those less powerful" and we can't wrap our heads around "a lifetime of this cruel and merciless behavior being valorized by your peers probably doesn't predispose you to suddenly changing gears once you have a helplessly dependent child that's totally under your control."

like yeah the rich are our enemies in this ongoing class war, absolutely, it's an Us or Them situation to save the planet. but if you don't give a shit about saving the enemy's children too, i don't think very highly of your motivation or your methods.

oh, here's a relevant example I saw just the other day:

A fun fact: my mom was in the upper middle class as a teen/child. She moved out the day she turned eighteen bc her father was horribly abusive. she had NO ACCESS to the income her parents had.

But her parents' income was still counted when she tried to get help from the government for her college classes.

Financial abuse is a thing. Financial abuse is a thing people use against their KIDS TOO. like, someone can be the spouse of a rich person and not have ANY real access to that money bc their name isn't on anything and they're not given a card or money.

NASA’s Echo 1 communications satellite - 1960.

Echo 1 is amusing. You see how it looks like it's just a giant mirrored balloon?

That's because THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT IS!

It was the first communication satellite, and it was completely passive: There's no electronics for the communications. Ground-based stations just aimed a radio signal at it and the signal would bounce right off and come back to earth, where it could be picked up again, on the other side of the country.

(There were some electronics in the balloon: a radio transmitter & some solar panels, but those were just used to track where the balloon was, so you knew where to aim your antennas)

Later active communications satellites have a radio system on board, where they receive the signal and then rebroadcast it amplified and directed, but it turns out if you just have something to bounce a radio wave off, you can do transcontinental radio signals with just a big balloon.

It stayed up there for nearly 8 years.

Fun fact: this is the first communication satellite used, but not the first launched. The "Echo 1" is actually "Echo 1A". The original Echo 1 was on a Thor-Delta that had a faulty Delta stage, so it launched into the Atlantic ocean.

And even before Echo, they tried a prototype on a "Shotput" rocket. That one launched to the intended altitude just fine, but had a problem with the balloon inflating, so that it just exploded. Apparently it was visible for the entire East Coast of the US, since the reflective mylar pieces glittered in the sunlight.

In fact, all the Echo balloons (There was a bigger Echo 2 launched in 1964) were very visible. They were big silvery balls orbiting in a relatively low orbit, so once it got dark (but the sun was still hitting the balloon) you could see them with the naked eye. The only picture I can find for that is this one:

That's a long exposure showing the satellite passing over NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. This picture is from the day it launched!

JPL was one of the stations testing it, and they successfully bounced a signal off it that was picked up in New Jersey. That's 2430 miles/3910km as the cow flies.

A very cool day for space science... and it had a secondary effect that was even better.

So the signal was very weak, as you might expect. They're bouncing it off a balloon that's a thousand miles (1600km) up. To be able to pick up the reflected signal, the receiving location had to have a MASSIVE antenna.

So they built one! it's 50 feet (15m) long, and can rotate in two axises, to let it aim at all the sky. I don't think it was motorized, but it's got a lot of low-friction bearing so a couple of people working together could rotate it by hand.

So this is where the bounced Echo 1 (really Echo 1A) signal was received, but that's not the most important thing this antenna did. See, when it wasn't being used for satellite tests, it was also a radio telescope being used to study the more distant universe... and in 1965 two scientists named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

The CMBR (or CMB) is microwave radiation that fills all space in the universe. Even in the gaps between stars, where there shouldn't be any radiation, there's the thin CMBR: This was the proof needed to validate the Big Bang theory, because it shows that early in the universe's life, it was filled with a dense hot plasma which slowly cooled into the current universe.

So a side effect of THIS FUCKING BALLOON provided the evidence we needed to determine that The Big Bang was the correct theory of the early universe. Quite a lot of science from 400lb (180kg) of mylar!

Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul is currently flooded

I don't make these kinds of posts, but Rio Grande do Sul (a brazilian estate) is going through its worst natural catastrophe in recorded history and I need everyone to know about this. Its currently looking like this:

What is going on

Most of Brazil suffers from yearly floods during the rain season. These floods most of the time aren't bad, with water going away a few hours later. Sometimes they are a nightmare, with people losing their homes and most if not all belongings. But this?

This is not fucking normal.

Currently (May 6th, 2024) there's +80 confirmed deaths and 873 thousand people are being affected by these historical floods. Eight hundred and seventy three THOUSAND people. Once again: THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL.

Rio Grande has 496 cities, and currently, 364 are reporting problems related to this. It's almost the entirety of Rio Grande - and you know how big Rio Grande is? If you're from the USA, its just a bit bigger than Colorado, and just a bit smaller than Nevada. If you are European, Rio Grande is bigger than the United Kingdom. Can you imagine if almost the entirety of the UK was underwater? Because I sure fucking can just by watching brazilian news!

Rio Grande expects floods. It rains a lot in Brazil. What no one expect is having to deal with 2,30 meters - 7'7 feet for reference - ABOVE the expected flooding level, which is 3 meters (9'10 feet). This means that there were 5,26 meters (17'3 ft) of water. Chart for comparison:

I live in São Paulo, which is completely unaffected by what is going on over there, but I need people to be aware of this. Why?

How YOU can help

A single US dollar is almost five reais. One euro is around 5,50. This may not be much to a lot of people reading this, but literally anything helps. If you donate U$10, it's R$50 for us. If it's euros, then it's R$55,00.

If you can't donate, please just reblog this post.

INTERNATIONAL DONATIONS INFO

If you use euros, here's the donation info:

If you use dollars, here's the donation info:

You need to inform this in order to donate:

NATIONAL DONATIONS INFO

If you're brazilian, oi, aqui tá o Pix do canal SOS Rio Grande do Sul para você ajudar:

I want to add another option for donating, as the previous one is the official government one and the governor of rio grande do sul has said most of it will be used later, for reconstructing, according to studies that will be made. While that is still good and important, we need help NOW

This is a trustworthy organization that helped in last years flood and showed accountability for all the money previously donated. They are helping now, with food, medicine, clothes and rescuing:

PLEASE HELP BRASIL

For donations in british pound GBP

For donations in Euro EUR

For donations in US dollars:

As OP said, most of your donations will be multiplied by five, so even your small or average will be FIVE TIMES MORE what an average brazilian can donate!!!!!!!

If you cant help with money right now, please share and tag your mutuals!!!!!

Hey, brazilian here. Please if you can help, donate.

Every time I turn on the news my heart break. Just now we have 107 deaths confirmed.

Please reblog this version!

I have friends in Brasil who have lost everything.

thinking about kaidan's big warm brown eyes. please respect my privacy at this time

And another one

i am about to bestow upon you the secret butter technique. i am sorry, but it is french. i am sorry again, this only works with cow butter. i am certain plant based butters wouldn’t work, and alternative animal butters may or may not work

has this ever been you: you have a nicely steamed vegetable, or maybe you want to make the best butter noodles, but you know that if you put butter on those it’ll just melt and you end with kind of greasy noodles or vegetables? don’t you wish it was instead a luscious buttery glaze?

introducing: beurre monté

you will take a small sauce pan, and begin heating it with 1-2 tablespoons of water (use very little water) and bring it to a hard simmer or boil

turn the heat down slightly, and add Butter. how much? however much you dare. (start with 3-4 tablespoons and go from there)

you are going to either whisk Aggressively or you can pick up the saucepan, still holding it over the heat, and swirl aggressively so the butter is skating around the sides of the pan

done correctly, you will have liquid butter that is still emulsified. you have made Butter Sauce. season it with a little salt, and toss whatever you want in it.

if you’re butter splits, i’m sorry. you didn’t agitate it enough to maintain the emulsion, and now you have melted butter.

you can use this knowledge to make other sauces by swapping out the water for another liquid. white wine becomes beurre blanc. red wine is beurre rogue.

you want to CUM? sweat minced shallot in a tiny bit of butter, add white wine and cook it out until it’s reduced by about half. then whisk butter in hard. a few flecks of minced thyme or fennel frond stirred thru, and you eat that with a nice seared fish? or scallop? or even shrimp? wow. you will Nut

your boxed mac and cheese game can also be elevated by cooking your pasta and making a beurre monté first, tossing your pasta in that and adding the cheese packet. wow. hey; you’ll cum

go forth now with this butter secret

Do you love roleplaying SICK FREAKS who are TRAPPED IN A TIME LOOP or an OTHERWISE CHRONOLOGICALLY UNSTABLE SITUATIONSHIP but are CRUCIALLY+CRITICALLY NOT A GOTH? Then boy howdy do I have the NOT A GUN for you!

The Horus "Pegasus" is a mech that FULFILLS ALL YOUR NEEDS so long as YOUR NEEDS ARE PARACAUSAL+!!RED IN TOOTH&&CLAW!! this beautiful wonderful intelligent awe-inspiring mindnumbingly intricate impossible VERY COOL INVENTION WHICH IS SAFE AND GOOD FOR YOU! comes

equipped with a POTENT ARSENAL for delivering UNSTOPPABLE FORCE to any IMMOVABLE OBJECTS I.E. SOFT-BODY OR OTHER IMPROBABLE OBSTACLES, the "Pegasus" knows EVERYTHING, by the way, and is very EAGER 2 SHOW U ALL OF IT HAHA WINKY FACE. Accusations of instability are OSIRIS-CLASS METAPSYOPS and FAKE NEWS. After all, you have ALREADY SHOT YOUR[--enemies, all around you. but with a simple thought you never had any enemies, only burns in the firmament, like cigarettes that you never smoked.]

Good for: INSUFFERABLE MUNCHKINS, RULES LAWYERS, LICH-ANNOYERS, SEXY WAR CRIMES

Bad for: PEOPLE WHO DO NOT LIKE THEIR MECHS TO HAVE MEAT AND/OR THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS OF THEIR OWN, DIPLOMATS, INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION, TAXES

Not a good sign.

So You've Finally Switched to Firefox: a Brief Guide to a Some Very Useful Add-Ons.

This post is inspired by two things, the first being the announcement by Google that the long delayed Manifest V3 which will kill robust adblocking will finally roll out in June 2024, and the second, a post written by @sexhaver in response to a question as to what adblockers and extensions they use. It's a very good post with some A+ information, worth checking out.

I love Firefox, I love the degree of customization it offers me as a user. I love how it just works. I love the built in security features like DNS over HTTPS, and I love just how many excellent add-ons are available. It is a better browser than Chrome in every respect, and of the many Chromium based browsers out there, only Vivaldi comes close.

There are probably many people out there who are considering switching over to Firefox but are maybe putting it off because they've got Chrome set up the way they like it with the extensions they want, and doing all that again for Firefox seems like a chore. The Firefox Add-on directory is less expansive than the Chrome Web Store (which in recent years has become overrun with garbage extensions that range from useless to active malware), but there is still a lot of stuff to sift through. That's where this short guide comes in.

I'm presently running 33 add-ons for Firefox and have a number of others installed but disabled. I've used many others. These are my picks, the ones that I consider essential, useful, or in some cases just fun.

Adblocking/Privacy/Security:

uBlock Origin: The single best adblocker available. If you're a power user there are custom lists and scripts you can find to augment it.

Privacy Badger: Not strictly necessary if you're also running uBlock, but it does catch a few trackers uBlock doesn't and replaces potentially useful trackers like comment boxes with click-to-activate placeholders.

Decentraleyes: A supplementary tool meant to run alongside uBlock, prevents certain sites from breaking when tracker requests are denied by serving local bundled files as replacement.

NoScript: The nuclear option for blocking trackers, ads, and even individual elements. Operates from a "trust no one" standpoint, you will need to manually enable elements yourself. Not recommended for casual users, but a fantastic tool for the power user.

Webmail Ad Blocker: The first of many webmail related add-ons from Jason Saward I will be recommending. Removes all advertising from webmail services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Popup Blocker (Strict): Strictly blocks ALL pop up/new tab/new window requests from all website by default unless you manually allow it.

SponsorBlock: Not a fan of listening to your favourite YouTuber read advertisements for shitty products like Raycons or BetterHelp? This skips them automatically.

AdNauseam: I don't use this one but some people prefer it. Rather than straight up blocking ads and trackers, it obfuscates data by injecting noise into the tracker surveillance infrastructure. It clicks EVERY ad, making your data profile incomprehensible.

User-Agent Switcher: Allows you to spoof websites attempting to gather information by altering your browser profile. Want to browse mobile sites on desktop? This allows you to do it.

Bitwarden: Bitwarden has been my choice of password manager since LastPass sold out and made their free tier useless. If you're not using a password manager, why not? All of my passwords look like this: $NHhaduC*q3VhuhD&scICLKjvM4rZK5^c7ID%q5HVJ3@gny I don't know a single one of them and I use a passphrase as a master password supplemented by two-factor-authentication. Everything is filled in automatically. It is the only way to live.

Proton Pass: An open source free password manager from the creators of Proton Mail. I've been considering moving over to it from Bitwarden myself.

Webmail/Google Drive:

Checker Plus for Gmail: Provides desktop notifications for Gmail accounts, supports managing multiple accounts, allows you to check your mail, read, mark as read or delete e-mails at a glance in a pop-up window. An absolutely fabulous add-on from Jason Saward.

Checker Plus for Google Drive: Does for your Google Drive what Checker Plus for Gmail does for your Gmail.

Checker Plus for Google Calendar: The same as the above two only this time for your Google Calendar.

Firefox Relay: An add-on that allows you to generate aliases that forward to your real e-mail address.

Accessibility:

Dark Reader: Gives every page on the internet a customizable Dark Mode for easier reading and eye protection.

Read Aloud: A text to speech add-on that reads pages with the press of a button.

Zoom Page WE: Provides the ability to zoom in on pages in multiple ways: text zoom, full page zoom, auto-fit etc.

Mobile Dyslexic: Not one I use, but I know people who swear by it. Replaces all fonts with a dyslexia friendly type face.

Utility:

ClearURLs: Automatically removes tracking data from URLs.

History Cleaner: Automatically deletes browser history older than a set number of days.

Feedbro RSS Feed Reader: A full standalone reader in your browser, take control of your feed and start using RSS feeds again.

Video Download Helper: A great tool for downloading video files from websites.

Snap Link Plus: Fan of Wikipedia binge holes? Snap Link allows to drag select multiple hyperlink and automatically open all of them in new tabs.

Copy PlainText: Copy any text without formatting.

EPUBReader: Read .epub files from within a browser window.

Tab Stash: A no mess, no fuss way to organize groups of tabs as bookmarks. I use it as a temporary bookmark tool, saving sessions or groups of tabs into "to read" folders.

Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey: Managers for installing and running custom user scripts. Find user scripts on OpenUserJS or Greasy Fork, there's an entire galaxy out there of ingenious and weird custom user scripts out there, go discover it.

Browsing & Searching:

Speed Dial 2: A new tab add-on that gives you easy access to your favourite sites.

Unpaywall: Whenever you come across a scholarly article behind a paywall, this add-on will search through all the free databases for an accessible and non-paywalled version of the text.

Web Archives: Come across a dead page? This add-on gives you a quick way to search for cached versions of the page on the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, Archive.is and others.

Bypass Paywalls: Automatically bypasses the paywalls of major websites like those for the New York Times, New Yorker, the Financial Times, Wired, etc.

Simple Translate: Simple one-click translation of web pages powered by Google Translate.

Search by Image: Reverse search any image via several different search engines: Google Image, TinEye, Yandex, Bing, etc.

Website Specific:

PocketTube: Do you subscribe to too many YouTube channels? Would you like a way to organize them? This is your answer.

Enhancer for Youtube: Provides a suite of options that make using YouTube more pleasant: volume boost, theatre mode, forced quality settings, playback speed and mouse wheel volume control.

Augmented Steam: Improves the experience of using Steam in a browser, see price histories of games, take notes on your wishlist, make wish listed games and new DLC for games you own appear more visible, etc.

Return YouTube Dislikes: Does exactly what it says on the package.

BlueBlocker: Hate seeing the absolute dimmest individuals on the planet have their replies catapulted to the top of the feed because they're desperate to suck off daddy Elon sloppy style? This is for you, it automatically blocks all Blue Checks on Twitter. I've used it to block a cumulative 34,000 Blue Checks.

Batchcamp: Allows for batch downloading on Bandcamp.

XKit Rewritten: If you're on Tumblr and you're not using whichever version of XKit is currently available, I honestly don't know what to say to you. This newest version isn't as fully featured as the old XKit of the golden age, but it's been rewritten from the ground up for speed and utility.

Social Fixer for Facebook: I once accidentally visited Facebook without this add-on enabled and was immediately greeted by the worst, mind annihilating content slop I had ever had the misfortune to come across. Videos titled "he wanted her to get lip fillers and she said no so he had bees sting her lips", and AI photos of broccoli Jesus with 6000 comments all saying "wow". Once I turned it on it was just stuff my dad had posted and updates from the Radio War Nerd group.

BetterTTV: Makes Twitch slightly more bearable.

Well I think that's everything. You don't have to install everything here, or even half of it, but there you go, it's a start.

Addendum!

I forgot to add, Firefox has skins and themes! And many of them are good! And of the many small creators making themes and skins for Firefox, my favourite is MaDonna an 85 year old great grandmother who's just making browser skins for fun. She's made thousands of them. I'm using one of her creations at this very moment, Dark Polygon.

X-Men (2000) // X-Men '97 (2024)