The town didn't actually have an election.

No elections in the last 60 years. It's just been old white men trading the office of mayor around to their children when they die or get tired of it.

And no one in the community actually knew who the mayor was, well, none of the black residents knew, because the mayor and city hall never let them vote.

So, Patrick Braxton got fed up with the situation and filed the paperwork to run for mayor, and since the previous mayor had never bothered with any paperwork, Braxton won by default. The only person in the last 60 years to actually run for mayor instead of being appointed by their father.

Braxton is also a volunteer firefighter, and the only member of the force who responds to fires at black people's houses.

The article is a wild ride. The white population of the town just seem to be caricatures of racism and bigotry.

Yes, it was a suicide, because his testimony wasn't part of anything related to whistleblowing, he was appealing a loss of the wrongful termination lawsuit against Boeing.

The idiots who never bothered to learn more than the man's name think "big company killed whistleblower" are showing just how little they understand things.

To recap, all the evidence from his whistleblowing was submitted to authorities 7 years ago. He had no bombshells to drop, no story that hadn't been told, just a lawsuit over how Boeing retaliated against him for Whistleblowing 7 years ago, forcing him to "retire".

A few days before he killed himself, he was on the stand in front of the appeals judges, and from all accounts, they did not seem like they were going to overturn his loss. He was then called back for another round of testimony, but was already dead by then.

Can you imagine a 7-year legal battle over being fired for having integrity? The stress this man must have felt?

Boeing killed John Barnett, but they didn't pull the trigger, he did. Don't cheapen that with lies about some sort of conspiracy. Just know that Boeing is one of dozens of companies who have worked for decades to weaken labor protections.

It's not that they didn't block UV, it's that they installed UV lights in the DJ booth because it would "look cool".

It was a purposeful choice, and no one stopped to think about why it was a bad idea. Which is totally on brand for people running a convention based around NFTs.

There might be a link between the bans from dating apps and the "not been in a long-term relationship"...

There were hints from the beginning, especially if you read any of his books.

Then in 2008 he started blaming black people and diversity for all his problems, A major example is that he claimed that he wasn't promoted at the bank he worked at because "the board wanted to promote a black guy". The truth is he didn't get the promotion because the bank was on the verge of collapse, and actually did fail 6 months after he quit (for not being promoted).

He then blamed black people and diversity for the failure of his tv show. The truth there is that it got 2 seasons, which is a lot for an adult cartoon. It was also on UPN, which is why it finally failed. No one watched UPN. Which is still not bad for something that was a side project for him.

Speaking of his little cartoon, if you ever watched it, there were a lot of creepy incel adjacent moments. Shit that would raise red flags today.

The thing is, the LLM doesn't actually know anything, and lies about it.

So you go to How Stuff Works now, and you get bullshit lies instead of real information, you'll also get nonsense that looks like language at first glance, but is gibberish pretending to be an article. Because sometimes the language model changes topics midway through and doesn't correct, because it can't correct. It doesn't actually know what it's saying.

See, these language models are pre-trained, that the P in chatGPT. They just regurgitate the training data, but put together in ways that sort of look like more of the same training data.

There are some hard coded filters and responses, but other than that, nope, just a spew of garbage out from the random garbage in.

And yet, all sorts of people think this shit is ready to take over writing duties for everyone, saving money and winning court cases.

The inverse is also true. Israel has kept these people bottled up in what amounts to open air concentration camps for the last 70 years, and constantly killing Palestinians for that entire time.

Israel has never cared about collateral damage in their war on the people who lived there before.

So imagine a people, treated like criminals for their entire lives, all because they lived on the land that Zionists wanted.

All that resentment for the unceasing oppression let the worst elements gain power.

The path to change is not to expect the oppressed to stop lashing out. Only in ending the oppression can there be change.

But the Israeli government isn't interested in stopping the oppression. They could have done that at any time in the last 70 years. No, they seem to want a full genocide.

In this specific case, Apple axed the show because Stewart was going to talk about China's less savory behavior.

The show had been announced to have a third season, and then suddenly when Stewart was gearing up to tackle some of the issues around China, Stewart was instantly fired.

And this isn't the first time China had demanded the firing, or public apology, of a prominent American who is even slightly critical of their government.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/hollywood-corporations-apologize-to-china

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-brief-history-of-corporate-apologies-to-china-2019-10-09

So nowhere in the article is it mentioned that the supposed "Texas right to secede" is actually bullshit, and a complete misunderstanding of the actual right that they have, which is to be broken up into five separate states.

Except even that is bullshit, because it was talking about the Texas Territory, which was larger than modern day Texas.

The constitution clearly says that;

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

So yes, Texas could request to be broken up, but congress still needs to okay it.

Now, as to the "right to secede", that bullshit was settled with the Civil War, States do not have the right to secede, not even Texas.

Republicans like to pretend the Civil War never happened, and want a repeat, I guess.

Conservatism was literally created as a backlash against the democratic movements of the US and France.

Conserving the power of the rich, to create a new nobility.

Monarchy was always the end game.

Fun fact time, -40F is -40C.

And 575F is 575K

I seem to remember a guy being convicted for possession of child porn, and the very much adult porn star actually came to his trial to testify in his defense... I'll see if I can find a link about it, but that will be some risky searching.

The very important thing to remember about these generative AI is that they are incredibly stupid.

They don't know what they've already said, they don't know what they're going to say by the end of a paragraph.

All they know is their training data and the query you submitted last. If you try to "train" one of these generative AI, you will fail. They are pretrained, it's the P in chatGPT. The second you close the browser window, the AI throws out everything you talked about.

Also, since they're Generative AI, they make shit up left and right. Ask for a list of countries that don't need a visa to travel to, and it might start listing countries, then halfway through the list it might add countries that do require a visa, because in its training data it often saw those countries listed together.

AI like this is a fun toy, but that's all it's good for.

I exclude Tankies from the far left. Because at its heart, the left is anti-authoritarian. Tankies lost the plot somewhere and decided that full authoritarianism was the way to go, regardless of the human suffering that lead to.

An authoritarian regime that claims to be communist is no closer to the communist ideal of a stateless utopia than a fully capitalistic state. If the capitalistic state is democratic with popular socialist programs, then it's actually closer to the communist ideal than an authoritarian state that merely claims communism. I'm using European democracies as my gold standard.

The image says any cheese...

This is false.

There are two main categories of cheese, Acid and Rennet.

If the cheese is made with Rennet, it will melt, and sodium citrate will make it smooth and creamy.

If the cheese is made with acid, then it will never melt. It will burn first. Think Feta or similar.

The exception is very long aged cheeses. They don't melt all that well, even though they're made with Rennet.

Every Rennet cheese is aged, if only a few weeks, acid cheeses will spoil if aged.

Strokes, but also broken necks.

And some of these quacks do "adjustments" on children and infants.

A reminder that ADF, the group that creates these lawsuits with fake clients, is funded almost exclusively by Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society, and the man who Trump used to pick all judges, including the three supreme court picks.

Almost every single conservative judge is a member of the Federalist Society.

Dude knew damn well he would go to prison for his work, but felt that it had to be done regardless.

Failed it three times, finally succeeded at the age of 34, just a few months before the election that put her in the House.

She also married a (somewhat rich) sex offender. But has now divorced him in favor of a guy who was groping her in the theater she was kicked out of. She was also giving him a handy.

Oil companies are ultimately to blame. After all, it was the Rockefeller Foundation who did the early radiation studies in the 50s, and then blatantly lied about the results to make radiation sound super scary. They claimed that there was no safe dose of radiation, and that any exposure, no matter how small, led to a direct, linear, increase in cancer risk.

And then the oil companies funded politicians who declared education to be the enemy, so now Americans don't know enough physics to know that every day, they are swimming in safe doses of ionizing radiation. That ocean water has millions of tons of natural uranium oxide dissolved in it.

US nuclear policy has been based off of these lies, it's part of why nuclear power is so expensive.

Those same oil companies actually paid to found Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to specifically advocate against nuclear power, by spreading fear and lies about how nuclear physics work.

The Rockefeller foundation still funds Greenpeace, and still requires that Greenpeace be anti-nuclear to receive that funding. All while being heavily invested in oil.