A couple things I would like to highlight for the unfamiliar, and I'll preface this by saying that I am autistic myself.

First, autism is not something for which there are any clear medical indicators, no blood tests or brain scans or anything of the sort are involved in diagnosis. It's entirely subjective and observational, something that states entrust people who are ostensibly professionals to determine.

I point this out because I want people to understand that there is absolutely nothing stopping the present administration from hiring people (or using AI) to simply diagnose undesirables with autism through whatever criteria they decide to deem fit.

This might sound absurd, but we're seeing people with nothing but tattoos being transformed into "criminals", "gang members", and "terrorists" by similar logic.

Second, Asperger was a Nazi, and the child euthanasia program was one of the main projects which experimented with the tools and machinery of mass murder that would later be used in extermination camps. Zyklon B was tested on autistic children and other "diseased offspring" long before it was ever used in the gas chambers.

How long do you think it will take before they are using AI to comb through the social media and medical records of teens looking for any indications of anything they don't like, and flagging them as potentially autistic? September has been RFK's set date since he first started talking about it, and people have been puzzling about that from the beginning. September is the start of the school year.

God damn this is bleak.

Mitch says the first signs of a deepening reliance on AI came when the company’s CEO was found to be rewriting parts of their app so that it would be easier for AI models to understand and help with. “Then”, Mitch says, “I had a meeting with the CEO where he told me he noticed I wasn't using the Chat GPT account the company had given me. I wasn't really aware the company was tracking that”.

“Anyway, he told me that I would need to start using Chat GPT to speed up my development process. Furthermore, he said I should start using Claude, another AI tool, to just wholesale create new features for the app. He walked me through setting up the accounts and had me write one with Claude while I was on call with him. I’m still not entirely sure why he did that, but I think it may have been him trying to convince himself that it would work.”

Mitch describes this increasing reliance on AI to be not just “incredibly boring”, but ultimately pointless. “Sure, it was faster, but it had a completely different development rhythm”, they say. “In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it”.

“One thing to note is that just the thought of using AI to generate code was so demotivating that I think it would counteract any of the speed gains that the tool would provide, and on top of that would produce worse code than I didn’t understand. And that’s not even mentioning the ethical concerns of a tool built on plagiarism.”

the full quote, which is actually quite accurate and succinct:

"Because of racism, that's the simple answer I would say. Racism, and uh, basically, desperately trying to defend a destructive deadly system, that systematically puts short term economic profit, and to maximize geopolitical power, over the well being of humans and the planet. And right now it's very very difficult to morally defend that, it is impossible, but still, they are desperately trying which is... absurd is not the word, but there are no words to describe it."

Genuinely sickening to see these attempts at cloaking this as something they're doing out of care for children, and not the monstrous fascist secret police bullshit it is.

“DHS is leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited, abused, and sex trafficked,” the homeland security department said in a statement to Fox 11 Los Angeles.

This is going to backfire in a big way. Whole lot of people seem to think this will be justice porn or somehow convince his base of his criminality but it is going to do no such thing. According to one poll, the majority (77%) of likely GOP primary voters are already convinced the trial is "politically motivated", with only 8% more concerned about him attempting to overturn an election. You can take a look at some polling here, there are other even more troublesome results as well: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-poll-indictments-2023-08-20/

No matter how awful, contradictory, and ridiculous he will be in that court room, this is likely going to be a massive boon for Trump, and his followers are going to see it as the realization of their own fears of persecution. This man is an ascendant fascist leader, not the sad sack finally facing consequences that liberals so desperately want him to be, and the effect this will have on mobilizing his base to continue to escalate will be immense. These people do not give a single fuck about """law and order""" no matter how much they pretend they do, stop assuming they will just accept things when he is found guilty. They won't.

I'm just trying to help people realize how dangerous and precarious this whole situation is. People were laughing and making jokes when he first announced his candidacy, and kept on doing it right up to the point that he won the election. Don't make the same mistake again, because while yall are cracking jokes, him and his ghouls are hurting people. They are passing discriminatory laws, they are in the supreme court setting dangerous precedents and overturning inconvenient ones, and they are patrolling the streets looking for people to brutalize and throw in jail. They are committing hate crimes and becoming increasingly radicalized and mobilized.

Stop pretending this is entertainment or business as usual, it's not. I'm begging you to understand that the fascists are already here, and the longer they're underestimated the better their chances of seizing control.

Genocide is actually very clearly defined under international law. To quote directly from the source:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Any single one of these criteria individually is enough to meet the definition of genocide. Every single one of these has already occurred and is ongoing, and it is only through pure delusion, media control, and wishful ignorance that anyone can claim otherwise.

There is virtually no dissent among actual scholars and experts in the field of international law, Israel is unequivocally perpetrating genocide. They have simply not been held to account for their actions yet, due primarily to complicity from allies and collaborators who do not want to be criminalized for their actions as well. People are also not their rulers, and they have been watching those running their governments provide diplomatic, strategic, and political cover for some of the worst atrocities in human history.

Make no mistake though, justice will come for Israel, and hopefully every state and individual actor who has supported and covered for it as well.

For people like yourself, I hope you understand that at some point in the future you're going to have to live in a world that sees you for exactly what you are. Israel will be remembered as exactly what it is, and you will know you were one of its defenders.

When you hear stories of traumatized, maimed, orphaned children, of mothers forced to endure c sections without anesthesia, of the weeping friends and family of journalists, medical workers, educators, caretakers, and innocents of all walks of life as they and their loved ones were targeted and massacred by an inhuman genocidal apartheid state, you will have to reckon with the fact that you stood on the side of the perpetrators.

"This is what happens in a dictatorship, and these are test cases," said Eric Lee, a lawyer who represents Momodou Taal, a Cornell University Ph.D. student and advocate for Palestinian rights whose visa was revoked. "If the government can get away with doing this to these students, it can do it to everybody in this country. Your citizenship won't save you. ... Your views will be next."

Taal sued the government on the grounds of free speech this year. After the case was filed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement called on Taal to turn himself in for deportation. Taal didn't turn himself in and continued the case until just over a week ago, when he issued a public statement on X sharing that he had left the country.

"Given what we have seen across the United States," he wrote, "I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs. I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted."

The suit has now been withdrawn, but Taal's lawyers say the implications of this case go well beyond their client.

"The First Amendment applies to people who are physically in the United States, regardless of their alienage, regardless of what country they were born in, regardless of the color of their skin, regardless of their immigration status," Lee said. "By … saying that attending a protest makes one a threat to American foreign policy, the administration is admitting that the Constitution is getting in the way of the fight for democracy. Something is not right there."

Here's a different source for you.

The National Institutes of Health will begin collecting Americans' private health records as part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s controversial plan to discover a cause and a cure for autism. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a panel of experts about the plan this week.

The NIH plans to gather information from a wide range of private sources, including pharmacy chains, hospitals and wearable devices with health sensors, like smartwatches.

"The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource," Bhattacharya told the panel, according to The Guardian. "Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain."

The NIH did not return a request for comment.

Kennedy has made autism research a central pillar of his role as America's official health advocate. He has made a number of conspiratorial, anti-science claims, including that childhood vaccinations could cause autism, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Earlier this month, he called autism an "epidemic" and vowed to find an "environmental toxin" responsible for the disorder by September.

"Overall autism is increasing in prevalence at an alarming rate," Kennedy told reporters at the time. "We're going to get back to it with an answer to the American people very, very quickly."

He further described autism as "a preventable disease."

[...]

Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also has a controversial background in the medical community, questioning early on the lethality of COVID-19 and being a vocal opponent to lockdown mandates.

Yep it's actually Israel that has routinely and systematically employed captured Palestinians as human shields. For some background, there is this recent article in Haaretz stemming from anonymous IDF soldier reports, titled "In Gaza, Almost Every IDF Platoon Keeps a Human Shield, a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves".

It doesn't have to be a kill list, that's what you're not understanding. Medicalizing dissent, creating registries of potential scapegoats and vulnerable people to target or practice on, that's the purpose. They create an outsider group to stigmatize and then broaden the definition as necessary.

You need to look at this step within the totality of the conduct of the regime so far. They are already rolling back child labour laws and openly talking about the need for a baby boom. Children are one of the most vulnerable groups in society, especially in conjunction with other factors like a migrant background or being in foster care. How many kids are in precarious situations with either absent or completely disempowered parents?

They're already putting unattended children in front of immigration judges without legal representation, if the state simply kidnaps and disappears the children of people it's trying to deport without due process, what's to stop them? What do you think these ghouls might want to do with lists of kids?

What you need to recognize is that this is the sort of registry that would be directly accessible by those surveillance initiatives you mentioned. It's not duplicated effort, it's part of the same effort, this is just one of the ways they are trying to define their enemies and undesirables.

Speaking of obvious falsehoods, I'm going to ask you to provide a single verifiable report of Hamas using human shields from anyone not directly tied to the Israeli state.

Not the distortion of humanitarian law which assumes that the mere presence of unarmed people suspected of being affiliated with Hamas means any civilians around them are "shields", because unarmed people regardless of affiliation are not lawful combatants.

Not the absurd claim that suspected tunnels underneath civilians justify the massacre of those civilians in order to target military infrastructure.

Not the unverified testimonies of people with a history of fabricating lies on behalf of the Israeli government.

Just any single instance of someone in Hamas forcing a nearby civilian to endanger their life on their behalf, from a source that is not ultimately the Israeli government or military itself.

Quoting from the UN report "Anatomy of a genocide", I have edited out the annotations but there are sources for every single one of the claims listed if you would like to verify yourself:

IHL strictly prohibits the use of human shields. Their use constitutes a war crime, as it violates the duty to protect the civilian population from dangers arising from military operations. When human shields are used, the attacking party must take into account the risk to civilians. Indiscriminate or disproportionate harm to civilians remains unlawful and the civilian population can never be targeted.

Israel has accused Palestinian armed groups of deliberately using civilians as human shields in previous aggressions on Gaza (including in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022). It also used it to justify high civilian casualties and attacks against paramedics, journalists and others during the 2018–2019 ‘Great March of Return’. UN independent fact-finding missions and reputable human rights organizations have consistently challenged these allegations, sometimes concluding that evidence of human shields had been fabricated. Nevertheless, Israel has used these accusations – sometimes then retracted – to justify widespread and systematic killing of Palestinian civilians in its ongoing assault.

After 7 October, this macro-characterization of Gaza’s civilians as a population of human shields has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel’s top-ranking political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, “accomplices”, or human shields among whom Hamas is “embedded”. In November, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs defined “the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields” and accused Hamas of using “the civilian population as human shields”. The Ministry defines armed groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately “embedded” in the population to such an extent that it “cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted, that an attack was unlawful”. Two rhetorical elements of this key legal policy document indicate the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its infrastructures of life into a ‘legitimate’ targetable shield: the use of the all-encompassing the combined with the quotation marks to qualify civilians and civilian objects. Israel has thus sought to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon.

International law does not permit the blanket claim that an opposing force is using the entire population as human shields en bloc. Any such usage must be assessed and established on a case-by-case basis before each individual attack. The crime of using human shields occurs when the use of civilians or civilian objects to impede attacks on lawful targets is the result of a deliberate tactical choice, not merely arising from the nature of the battlefield, such as hostilities in densely populated urban terrain.

Nevertheless, Israeli authorities have characterized churches, mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities, hospitals and ambulances as connected with Hamas to reinforce the perception of a population characterized as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable. Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets. Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”. The accusation of using human shields has thus become a pretext, justifying the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.

Secret police would probably have an interest in lists of people downloading an app tracking their movements no? Particularly if it was downloaded to a mobile tracking device they carry with themselves at most times.

If anyone is distorting rules of engagement and humanitarian law, it's actually Israel. Something that has come up again and again, especially in the writing of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, is the concept of "humanitarian camouflage" and how the Israeli state has very deliberately misused terms of international humanitarian law to cynically redefine civilian people, structures, and infrastructure as military targets. I am going to quote from an article she co-authored (available here):

The article analyzes the components of this humanitarian camouflage, unveiling how it has been deployed by Israel as a legal-political strategy in the service of a war of total annihilation. We start by examining how, since October 7, Israel has justified its genocidal campaign in Gaza using two registers: on one hand, a brutal register of dehumanization of the Palestinian population of Gaza, construed as a terrorist population to be eliminated; on the other hand—and simultaneously—a liberal register to legitimize its eliminationist violence in the face of its international allies’ audience, disguising it as compliance with IHL.

We then expand the analysis of the second register, showing how the Israeli military, mimicking IHL language, has construed the entirety of the built-up areas of Gaza as a continuum of alleged military objectives, reclaiming the ‘right’ to ‘lawfully’ raze houses, schools, mosques, churches, hospitals, entire neighborhoods, and entire cities to the ground, including the infrastructures indispensable for the survival of the civilian population, rendering the living space of the victim group unlivable. Subsequently, we examine how lethal distortions of the IHL concept of proportionality and collateral damage have been functional in construing entire masses of civilians as killable surroundings of military objectives with a diminished, or non-existent, right to life.

The analysis continues by showing how an array of IHL concepts like safe zones, evacuations, human shields, and “hospital shields” have been mobilized by Israel as technologies of settler-colonial displacement and genocide, creating conditions of life leading to the destruction of Gaza’s Palestinians “in whole or in part.” The article concludes by arguing that the settler-colonial genocidal war against Gaza, and Israel’s marshalling of international humanitarian law to legitimize it, ultimately shows that the international order has reached a tipping point whereby political acquiescence towards Israel and its legitimization as an international law-abiding state eviscerates the key legal tools the international community has developed to prevent international crimes. If tolerated, condoned, and unpunished, this process may inaugurate a new era of mass atrocities against protected groups in the Global South, in which big powers will be able to portray genocides as ‘incidental’ and ‘proportionate’ means to achieve their war aims.

I highly recommend reading the three reports issued by the UN on these matters, "Genocide as colonial erasure" which focuses more on historical context, "Anatomy of a genocide" which covers more of the present patterns of conflict, and finally "More than a human can bear" which covers the widespread and systematic use of gendered and sexual violence inflicted on Palestinians.

That's fair and I understand the impulse. The point of flooding the zone is partially to create panic and confusion, but it's also a way to rapidly scatter a bunch of possible seeds of division or control at once, then focus on tending whatever works best, whatever has the least opposition afterwards.

There's absolutely no situation in which a fascist regime making registries of "diseased" children is unworthy of alarm though.

I point out the vulnerability of kids because fascists always start with their easiest targets. It allows them to normalize, practice, and develop the systems they are building while also instilling fear and eroding opposition. That's why we have to take this shit seriously from the start, the longer anyone waits the fewer there are around to fight back.

No, I am well aware that the Israeli state has a long and well documented history of lying and fabricating evidence to support its genocidal goals. Just because Israel defines the entire civilian population as human shields does not make it so.

As I suspected, you will be unable to provide any independent sources or imagery of Hamas militants engaging in anything that would be recognized as human shielding under international law.

Conversely, I can provide several different examples from several different sources, which paint a clear and ongoing picture of flagrant war crimes being perpetrated by Israel. This is just the stuff that more closely aligns with "human shields", using civilians, as well as civilian structures, uniforms, and vehicles, for protection. Israel has been openly violating international law for decades, their disregard for Palestinian life and basic human rights is excruciatingly well documented.

You'll note that most of these articles do parrot all the lines from Israeli officials as their editorial boards force them to, some even repeat the claims of Hamas using human shields, but you will find none of those are tied to anything but Israeli testimonials. It's reported matter-of-factly without a shred of evidence. The Israeli crimes however, usually include video or photographic evidence of them being perpetrated.

Surely if the practice of human shielding was common for Hamas, it should be easy enough for you to provide at least one photo or video of this happening, right? All I ask is that you provide one such example, anything that shows this actually happening that isn't just an Israeli official, civilian, or militant saying it's happening. If it's common, it should not be hard to do.

It also has nothing to do with discouraging political participation, but rather encouraging more active political participation in processes outside of simply voting intermittently. When both choices offered are dogshit, or no choice is presented in the first place, the point isn't to say "all hope is lost give up" but rather "this is broken in a way that voting will not fix."

When the DNC is actively doing things such as obfuscating the very clear decline of the sitting president in order to bypass the primary process and install Harris, or ratfucking someone like Bernie via super delegates, media control, and so on in '16, this was not done by some "nefarious-but-nebulous they". It's very explicitly the DNC. Harris was one of the least popular candidates in '20, one of the first to drop from the race, and her term as vice president did very little to ingratiate her to those she ostensibly represents.

Whatever it is that needs to happen in order for people to get the sort of representation and principled opposition to fascism that most of them actually want, the DNC itself is obviously highly resistant or outright incapable of providing it. Voting alone will not fix this.

(edited '16 to '20 for the Harris primary drop out, realized I'd gotten dates mixed up and double checked afterwards to confirm)

anti-zionist jews are some of the loudest voices and most crucial organizers of resistance against the zionist occupation of palestine. fuck right off you antisemitic piece of shit.

There are a lot of terrible people doing terrible things to humanity and the planet, and I'll be damned if I let those fucking ghouls outlive me.

If you would like to learn a more accurate representation of this period of history, this chapter which has been made freely available and is thoroughly sourced is something I would recommend reading. An extremely relevant excerpt:

In a 1938 diary entry, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) and later Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, underlined the “necessity” of “removing the Arabs from our midst”. But he recognised that timing was critical. “What is inconceivable in normal times”, he wrote, “is possible in revolutionary times.” When the 1948 Arab-Israel War broke out, Zionist forces seized the opportunity to bring about what Ben-Gurion euphemistically referred to as “great changes in the composition of the population of the country”. During the war, some 700,000 Palestinians – two-thirds of the population – fled or were driven from their homes in what became Israel. Historians debate the extent to which this displacement unfolded according to a central plan. What cannot plausibly be denied is that Zionist massacres as well as expulsions were a major catalyst of Palestinian flight, that Zionist leaders welcomed the exodus, and that military commanders carried out evictions within an ideological context that had broadly legitimated population transfer as a strategic desideratum.

After the dust settled, Israeli authorities moved to consolidate Jewish domination within the new state whose expanded boundaries (established by armistice agreements in 1949 and known as the “Green Line”) encompassed 78 percent of historic Palestine. Israel refused to allow the return of Palestinians displaced during the war and killed thousands of unarmed refugees who made the attempt. Multiple Arab communities within Israel were expelled long after the war was over, while more than four hundred Palestinian villages, towns, and neighbourhoods inside Israel were destroyed to make way for Jewish settlement. Property owned by Palestinian refugees as well as Palestinians who remained to become citizens of Israel was systematically confiscated. This vast expropriation left the Israeli state in possession or control of fully 93 percent of the land within the Green Line, which authorities allocated almost exclusively for use by Jews. In the half-century after independence, the state established more than seven hundred Jewish localities and zero Arab localities, excepting several townships built to facilitate the concentration and dispossession of Bedouin Arabs. Even as Israeli administrators relentlessly promoted Jewish immigration, they directed Jewish settlement strategically to encircle Arab villages and restrict the Arab minority to “small enclaves”. The overarching policy was to “Judaize” the entire territory by “concentrating the Arabs and dispersing the Jews.”

and another, which illuminates what happened before even WW2.

As Jabotinsky prophesied, expanding Jewish settlement frequently provoked Palestinian opposition as well as resistance. Such opposition was typically overruled by means of discriminatory administration while resistance was suppressed by force. In the Mandate period, the Zionist leadership rejected the democratic principle of majority rule in Palestine so long as Jews comprised a minority, on the correct assumption that an Arab electoral majority would vote to end Jewish immigration and settlement. Between 1936 and 1939, British armed forces along with Jewish paramilitaries viciously crushed a Palestinian national revolt. After the 1948 War, Israel subjected some 90 percent of its Arab citizens to military rule. This emergency regime facilitated the destruction of Arab property and expropriation of Arab land until it was lifted in 1966, by which time the state’s demographic objectives within the Green Line had been substantially accomplished. The pattern repeated in the OPT from the following year. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967: three-quarters of Israel’s lifespan as a state. The occupation has been enforced through harsh repression including deportation, arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and unlawful killings. By one estimate, Israel jailed more than 800,000 Palestinians from the OPT between 1967 and 2016; those detained were “routinely subjected to torture”.

If you're consistently seeing the same pattern then the most likely culprits will either be your tamp or a clogged shower screen. Water is going to follow the path of least resistance, so if you're getting faster extraction at the back there is either less coffee there, it's less tightly packed (tamped), or there's an obstruction to the flow at the head (probably the shower screen) causing more water to flow to the back.

Considering the consistency, I'd wager it's a bad habit in tamping method. It tends to be easier to put more weight down closer to your body, meaning less pressure applied at the back, meaning water has less resistance flowing there. Something you might try to see if it makes a significant difference is to change the orientation of the portafilter while tamping. For instance, if you usually hold the handle straight out from the counter, you can try rotating it to the left, applying a light tamp, then going to the right and applying full pressure, or something like that. If you find that the pattern changes significantly when you make adjustments like that, then you know where the problem lies.