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mariacallous · 3 months ago

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In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.

In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: Along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the Good Old USA Project. The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing-state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full-time team dedicated to the cause.

On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the US Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the past two years been targeting Ukraine and, more recently, US elections. The Doppelganger campaign uses AI-generated content on dozens of fake websites designed to impersonate mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox Business, using a network of fake social media accounts to disseminate pro-Russian narratives targeting audiences across the globe. Doppelganger is a Kremlin-aligned disinformation campaign that was first linked to the Kremlin in 2023 by the French government.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced the seizure of 32 internet domains it says are linked to the Doppelganger campaign which violate US money laundering and criminal trademark laws.

“Today’s announcement exposes the scope of the Russian government’s influence operations and their reliance on cutting-edge AI to sow disinformation,” FBI director Christopher Wray said in a statement. “Companies operating at the direction of the Russian government created websites to trick Americans into unwittingly consuming Russian propaganda.”

The Treasury Department had previously sanctioned SDA and Gambashidze in March for its part in the Doppelganger campaign. But the court documents unsealed on Wednesday contain a treasure trove of documents and meeting notes from Gambashidze and his colleagues, outlining in unprecedented detail the goals and tactics that the Kremlin has been deploying in order to influence the outcome of the 2024 US election.

The records also reveal the plan was discussed at the highest levels of the Russian government, with Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff of the presidential executive office, playing a key role. The notes appear to show that President Vladimir Putin may have been updated on the campaign; in one meeting with Russian government officials, Gambashidze wrote that government officials told him they had “reported to the President about the project,” which the FBI agent who authored the affidavit said he took to refer to Putin.

The documents show that the orchestrators of the campaign targeted existing divisions within US society, using racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to target supporters of former president Donald Trump.

"They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in one document outlining his “guerrilla media” plan. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.”

The same document is full of racist and conspiratorial claims, including that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color.” It adds that white middle-class people are being discriminated against with high inflation and rising prices, while “unemployed people of color end up being privileged groups of the population.”

And the goal of the campaign, from the beginning, was crystal clear: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote in the Good Old USA Project planning document.

The Good Old USA plan openly admits that “none of the significant American politicians can be considered pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so rather than focus its efforts on trying to convince people that Russia is great, the plan called for promoting the idea that the US should be focusing its resources less on Ukraine and more on domestic issues, such as rising inflation and high gas prices.

“It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican Party’s point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Old USA Project planning document reads. “This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”

As well as getting Trump elected, the campaign’s secondary goals included increasing the percentage of Americans who believe the US is doing too much to aid Ukraine to 51 percent, and reducing the percentage of Americans who have confidence in President Joe Biden down to 29 percent.

The plan lists a variety of audiences the campaign specifically wants to target, including residents of swing states, American Jews, “US citizens of Hispanic descent,” and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and image boards, such as 4chan.”

The document describes this category of gamers and chatroom users as the "backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet.” In recent months, the Trump campaign has embraced many of the most influential figures within these communities, including many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric on a regular basis.

To spread their narrative, the plan called for the creation of YouTube channels that shared pro-Trump content as well as other viral videos (“music, humor, beautiful girls etc,” according to the documents) in order to appear at the top of search results for “US elections.”

Meanwhile, Gambashidze and his colleagues used Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to create community groups of Trump supporters, with one sample name given as “Alabama for America the Great.” The document also reveals that the Russians planned to use Reddit as a vector to disseminate their propaganda as it is a platform “free from democratic censorship.”

Gambashidze’s plan outlined how Doppelganger would create 18 “sleeper cells” on social media platforms in each of the swing states, which would “at the right moment, upon gaining momentum, become an important instrument of influencing the public opinion in critically important states and portals used by the Russian side to distribute bogus stories disguised as newsworthy events.” It’s unclear if these so-called sleeper cells were created and, if so, whether they are still present on the platform.

The campaign also used targeted ads on Facebook to not only promote their narrative but also to gain valuable insight into what messages were sticking and which were falling flat. “Targeted advertising in Facebook allows tracking reactions of users to the distributed material in real time and directing the psychological response group to contribute to comments thereof,” the document reads. “With the help of a network of bots the psychological response group moderates top discussions and adjusts further launches depending on which group was affected the most.”

One of the key aspects of the Kremlin’s campaign is also to engage with influencers. According to the FBI’s affidavit, Gambashidze’s company “extensively monitors and collects information about a large number of media organizations and social media influencers.”

According to the Good Old USA project document, the Kremlin was seeking to work with influencers who are “proponents of traditional values, who stand up for ending the war in Ukraine and peaceful relations between the US and Russia, and who are ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

Among the types of influencers listed as possible collaborators are actors, politicians, media representatives, activists, and clergymen.

The affidavit references one document maintained by the Social Design Agency, which is not included in the unsealed court documents, that contains a list of more than 2,800 people identified as influencers. While this list is global, US-based influencers account for around 20 percent of the accounts being monitored, including many US lawmakers, according to an analysis of the list by the FBI.

The Social Design Agency also maintains another list, again not included in the court documents, that tracks over 1,900 “anti-influencers” from 52 different countries, with US-based accounts. The FBI agent who authored the document assessed that “anti-influencer” refers to accounts which post “content that SDA views as contrary to Russian objectives.”

In a note from one of the meetings with Russian government officials discussing the campaign’s use of influencers, Gambashidze wrote: “We need influencers! A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them.” Though no links have been confirmed, hours before the Doppelganger affidavit dropped on Wednesday, Tenet Media, an organization that features a slate of right-wing commentators, was alleged in an unsealed Department of Justice indictment to have been largely funded by Russian state-backed news network RT.

The Social Design Agency operation appeared to be extremely well-run and well-resourced. There is a “project office” consisting of four teams that include one entire group dedicated to monitoring the social media posts from GOP lawmakers in order to generate ideas for topics to cover.

These would then be handed to a “text factory," with orders to whittle down the topics handed to them by the monitoring team to four to five main issues, along with eight to 10 basic posts for social media platforms and 40- to 60 comments to post under those social media posts for the network of bots. Another team was called the “manga editorial office,” which was charged with producing a daily output of three to four images, including memes. Finally, a video team was tasked with producing three to four videos each day.

“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the document’s authors wrote. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”

Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous Russian researchers who have been closely tracking Doppelganger’s activity, are doubtful that the affidavit will have a significant impact on the campaign’s activity.

“Frankly, I believe it's whack-a-mole as long as EU providers keep doing business with [Social Design Agency], and UK-registered shell companies keep helping SDA with its operation,” the researchers told WIRED, citing their own investigations earlier this year.

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cityof2morrow · 2 months ago

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CDK: Build Accents

Published: 9-15-2024 | Updated: N/A SUMMARY Cubic Dynamics by John B. Cube and Marcel Dusims forged the future with furnishings that were minimalist in design and maximalist in erudite pretension. Generations later, the company continues to produce edge-of-cutting-edge designs. Use the Cubic Dynamics Kitbash (Simmons, 2023-2024) collection to set up corporate, exposition, and office environments. Envisioned as an add-on to the Cubic Dynamics set (EA/Maxis, archived at GOS), it features minimalist and retro-futuristic objects. Find more CC on this site under the #co2cdkseries tag. Read the Backstory and ‘Dev Notes’ HERE. Here is a compilation of BUILD ACCENTS, older windows, doors, and decorative window/door frames which have been repo’d to use the same color scheme as the rest of the CDK series – this way, the exteriors and interiors of your offices will match. Remember to replace original files. See the compatibility note at the end of this post.

DETAILS All EPs/SPs. §See Catalog for Pricing | See Buy/Build Mode You need the Company Expo (Mesh Pack) set (Simmons, 2024) for TXTRs to show properly in game.For the glass, you need the Plain Glass TXTR Repository from my Repo Pack (Simmons, 2023). All files with “MESH” in their name REQUIRED for textures/models to display correctly in-game. ITEMS Deco Door Arches (Single/Double/Diagonals) (360 poly) 4ESF’s Doors & Windows (112-124 poly) Cyclonesue’s Never-Ending/Privacy Windows/Arch (68-112 poly) ShinySims’ Modern Windows (12-482 poly) Tiggy027 Window Frames (24-108 poly) DOWNLOAD (choose one) from SFS | from MEGA COMPATIBILITY AVOID DUPLICATES: The #co2cdkseries includes edited versions – replacements - for items in the following CC sets: 4ESF (office 3, other 1/artroom, other 2/build), All4Sims/MaleorderBride (miskatonic library, office, postmodern office), CycloneSue (never ending/privacy windows), derMarcel (inx office), Katy76/PC-Sims (bank/cash point, court/law school sets, sim cola machine), Marilu (immobilien office), Murano (ador office), Reflex Sims (giacondo office), Retail Sims/HChangeri (simEx, sps store), Simgedoehns/Tolli (focus kitchen, loft office, modus office), ShinySims (modern windows), SH (reverie office, step boxes/shelving), Spaik (sintesi study), Stylist Sims (offices 1,2, & 3, Toronto set), Tiggy027 (wall window frames 1-10), Wall Sims (holly architecture, Ibiza). *The goal is to link the objects to the recolors/new functions in the #co2cdkseries without re-inventing the wheel! Credit to the original creators. CREDITS Thanks: ChocolateCitySim, HugeLunatic, Klaartje, Ocelotekatl, Whoward69, LoganSimmingWolf, Gayars, Ch4rmsing, Ranabluu, Gummilutt, Crisps&Kerosene, LordCrumps, PineappleForest. Sources: Any Color You Like (CuriousB, 2010), Beyno (Korn via BBFonts), EA/Maxis, Offuturistic Infographic (Freepik). SEE CREDITS (ALT)

#ts2downloads #sims2cc #ts2cc #co2cdkseries #ofbprops

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 months ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 09, 2024

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The road to that resignation began in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the time an employee of the RAND Corporation and thus had access to a top-secret Pentagon study of the way U.S. leaders had made decisions about the Vietnam War, leaked that study to major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

The Pentagon Papers showed that every president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about events in Vietnam, and Nixon worried that “enemies” would follow the Pentagon Papers with a leak of information about his own decision-making to destroy his administration and hand the 1972 election to a Democrat.

The FBI seemed to Nixon reluctant to believe he was being stalked by enemies. So the president organized his own Special Investigations Unit out of the White House to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers.

The plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, hoping to find something to discredit him, then moved on to bigger targets. Together with the Committee to Re-elect the President (fittingly dubbed CREEP as its activities became known), they planted fake letters in newspapers declaring support for Nixon and hatred for his opponents, spied on Democrats, and hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then scarpered on the bills. Finally, they set out to wiretap the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the fashionable Watergate office complex.

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. Wills called the police, who arrested five men ransacking the DNC’s files.

The White House immediately denounced what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and the Watergate break-in gained no traction before the 1972 election, which Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7% of the popular vote.

But Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post reporters, followed the sloppy money trail back to the White House, and by March 1973 the scheme was unraveling. One of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing claiming he had lied at his trial to protect government officials. Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean immediately began cooperating with prosecutors.

In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint former solicitor general of the United States Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair. That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.

The hearings turned up the explosive testimony of John Dean, who said he had talked to Nixon about covering up the burglary more than 30 times, but there the investigation sat during the hot summer of 1973 as the committee churned through witnesses. And then, on July 13, 1973, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield revealed the bombshell news that conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been taped since 1971.

Nixon refused to provide copies of the tapes either to Cox or to the Senate committee. When Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.

Popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people that “I am not a crook.”

Like Cox before him, Jaworski was determined to hear the Oval Office tapes. He subpoenaed a number of them. Nixon fought the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with the prosecutor, saying that executive privilege “must be considered in light of our historic commitment to the rule of law. This is nowhere more profoundly manifest than in our view that 'the twofold aim (of criminal justice) is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.'... The very integrity of the judicial system and public confidence in the system depend on full disclosure of all the facts….”

Their hand forced, Nixon’s people released transcripts of the tapes. They were damning, not just in content but also in style. Nixon had cultivated an image of himself as a clean family man, but the tapes revealed a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed bully. Aware that the tapes would damage his image, Nixon had his swearing redacted. “[Expletive deleted]” trended.

In late July 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary passed articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Each article ended with the same statement: “In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, that showed Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news to the president that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.

In his resignation speech, Nixon refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. Instead, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather cox Richardson #Nixon #history #American History #the presidency #Watergate

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darkmaga-returns · 8 days ago

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11/19/2024•Mises Wire•Wanjiru Njoya

In considering the outcome of the recent elections in the United States, the question arises as to whether we can now expect to see the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion schemes which were beloved of the Biden administration. As we await the new administration, it is timely to evaluate the challenges facing those seeking to uproot the DEI industry. A key point to highlight is that the roots of this industry run too deep to be supplanted simply by closing down federal DEI programs. We can certainly celebrate the end of Mr. Biden’s Executive Orders on DEI, such as the “Executive Order on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce,” but the wider culture of what is often called “wokery” which now abounds will be much more difficult to displace.

A good example of the culture of “wokery” comes from universities. On the eve of President Donald Trump winning his historic second term of office, the website Campus Reform reported that, “Students at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy will be offered ‘self-care suites’ Tuesday, where they can play with Legos, use coloring books, and drink milk and cookies.” Campus Reform also highlighted its previous report that, “the University of Oregon’s University Health Services is providing therapy goats, dogs, and even ‘Quacktavious the Therapy Duck.’”

The response of many people to such excesses of “wokery” is simply to laugh. It is easy to be amused by the outrageous antics of the fragile adherents of the woke culture. However, laughter must not distract us from the more sinister elements of the DEI industry. As DEI is now banned in several states, many presume that the threat to liberty posed by DEI is over. In fact, DEI has simply evolved.

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justinspoliticalcorner · 6 months ago

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Imagine this: It’s exactly one year from today, Memorial Day weekend, 2025. It’s 94 degrees in the shade, but the fact that the world keeps shattering monthly temperature records isn’t even making the news — and that’s not what has Philadelphians so hot and bothered. It’s been about two months since Donald Trump, the 47th president of the United States, announced Operation Purify America in an Oval Office address, and about a week since a stunned Philadelphia watched an endless convoy of militarized vehicles and federalized troops from the Texas and South Dakota National Guards roll up I-95. After a week of setting up a base camp at the Air National Guard base in Horsham, the actual operation began at midnight the day before, as a parade of Humvees and armored personal carriers cornered off a wide area in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park section and supported federal immigration agents who went door-to-door in the predawn chaos, bursting into homes and asking Latino residents for their papers. Journalists who’d been kept blocks away by the troops now search for anyone who could confirm the rumors of screaming, scuffling, and dozens of arrests. As the hot sun rises, Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and several hundred angry protesters gather outside the Horsham gate to denounce the raids. A phalanx of helmeted troops pushes the throng back, firing tear gas to clear the road for the first busload of detained migrants. They are bound for the hastily erected Camp Liberty, an already overcrowded and decrepit holding center on the Texas-Mexico border that Amnesty International calls “a concentration camp.” This might sound like a page from the script of Alex Garland’s next near-future dystopian movie, but it’s actually a realistic preview of the America Trump himself, his cartoonishly sinister immigration guru Stephen Miller, and the right-wing functionaries crafting the 900-page blueprint for a Trump 47 presidency called Project 2025 are fervently wishing for. As polls show Trump in a dead heat nationally with President Joe Biden, and poised to win at least some of the battleground states where Biden was victorious in 2020, the presumptive GOP nominee is making no secret of his scheme for what he calls “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History.” The audacious goal of tracking down and deporting all 11 million or so undocumented immigrants living and working within the United States is, experts agree, all but impossible. But even the forced removal of hundreds of thousands, or one million, would require a massive internal military operation on a scale not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction. [...] What’s changed in 2024? Everything. Despite the Hannibal Lecter-ized outward chaos of Trump’s rallies, behind the scenes, Team Trump is focused and determined not only to name the most rabid Trump loyalists to key political posts but also todramatically strip civil service protections andremove recalcitrant midlevel government employees. And this time around, Republicans in Congress are going to be on board with whatever Trump wants. [...] It was somewhat amazing to watch the furious debate online and on cable news this week over the weird incident in which small text about a “unified Reich” found its way into a Trump promo video the ex-and-wannabe president posted on Truth Social. The perplexing part, for me, is that this was discussed as some kind of Sherlock-Holmes-magnifying-glass a-ha moment, revealing Trump’s secret plan for Nazi-style rule. Folks, he is screaming his plan out loud at his rallies! The Trump deportation scheme is really Trump’s blueprint for dictatorship.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer on how Donald Trump's proposed deportation plan is a pretext for a fascist MAGA dictatorship (05.23.2024).

Will Bunch nails it in this Philly Inquirer column on how Donald Trump's fascistic plan for mass deportations is a speed-run for a MAGA dictatorship.

#Will Bunch #Concentration Camps #Opinion #The Philadelphia Inquirer #Donald Trump #Project 2025 #Immigration #Insurrection Act #Economy

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heavy-swing · 3 months ago

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FFXIV Write 2024 - Prompt #2 - Horizon

Content Warnings: None

Spoiler Warnings: Covers some events during Patch 2.2 of MSQ

Summary: Aelita is summoned to the Brass Blade outpost at Horizon to solve a mystery, but quickly finds herself with new questions, most importantly: who is that masked figure dressed in purple, and why can't I stop thinking of them? Check it out below or on Ao3:

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“Whoa, whoa, Loja!”

Aelita pulled hard on the reins of the chocobo she was riding, breaking him out of his focused forward stride. As the bird slowed to a stop in front of the aetheryte that marked the Brass Blades’ outpost of Horizon, Aelita smoothly dismounted, holding the reins loosely in her right hand.

“Glad to see you made it in good time, though perhaps nearly too good,” Y’shtola said, nodding towards the chocobo.

Aelita let out a laugh as she fixed her windblown hair. “Lojalni is quite the steed. He gets you where you’re goin’ in a hurry, but sometimes he forgets what to do when you get there. So what’s the situation?”

“It seems the thieves have very well covered their tracks, so my inquiries here have turned up little. You could speak with Fufulupa, the officer currently leading the investigation; everything I could tell you is simply what he told me.”

Aelita nodded. “I see, I’ll go hear what he’s got to say.” She looked around the settlement for a minute, hunting for something. “You wouldn’t happen to know where…” she trailed off, raising the reins she was holding to finish the rest of the thought.

“There looks to be a free post over there,” Y’shtola replied, pointing to the far side of the plaza.

“Ah, thanks!” Aelita turned with Lojalni’s reins in hand and walked her chocobo in the direction Y’shtola had been pointing. She quickly tied Loja to the post, but not before pulling an apple out of a saddlebag as a treat for his hard work. She turned back to the plaza to search for this ‘Fufulupa’, but not before giving Loja one more good scratch on the head.

—

After a successful scheme to draw out the thieves (and look quite good doing it, if Aelita did say so herself), Y’shtola took her leave to go pursue other leads, leaving her and Thancred to try and sort out the business of the traitor within the Brass Blades.

Not a moment before they’d stepped foot back in Horizon did Fufulupa come rushing up to meet them.

“On behalf of the Brass Blades of the Rose, I thank you for your service to Horizon! While you were afield, we managed to identify the traitor within our ranks!”

Thancred subconsciously reached down for his knives. “Is that so? I’d very much like to have a word with the fellow– in private.”

Fufulupa’s expression fell a bit. “Well, unfortunately uh… he managed to subdue the Blades sent to detain him, and… made good his escape.”

Aelita looked on with a small laugh as Thancred’s eyes nearly rolled out of his skull.

“We will find him, though! I can promise you that!” Fufulupa hastily continued, as if to head off Thancred’s mocking criticisms before he spoke them.

“I see. Pray keep me apprised of any developme–”

His sentence was cut off by the chime of his linkpearl, which he swiftly answered. Aelita could never keep her focus while hearing only half of a conversation, and so her eyes began to wander around the settlement, looking for anything of interest to latch onto.

It was at that moment when she spotted a small band of people emerging from the Sunset Gate. They looked to be from a far-off land, mostly dressed in well-worn clothes that were likely all they had. But there was one among their number who stuck out like a flower amongst the desert sand: they were dressed in a tunic of deep violet, with a mask covering their face and an indigo scarf covering their hair. Aelita was so entranced by the sun shimmering off the scarf’s silver embellishments and the strange, elongated ears that its silhouette seemed to imply that she almost didn’t notice the chainmail sabatons the stranger wore, suggesting they were not only of some import, but also likely a worthy fighter.

Aelita felt guilty for staring, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away as the violet-clad stranger and their entourage passed through the plaza on the far side of the aetheryte. There was just something about them that called to her, something that seemed… important, as if they were destined to meet, somehow.

She was snapped out of her trance by Thancred’s hand waving in front of her face.

“Good, you’re still with me. That was The Antecedent, by the way,” he said, pointing to his ear, where the linkpearl sat. “It seems our time together is at an end, though given that it appears something else caught your eye, might be more of a disappointment for me than it is for you. She asked for your presence at Vesper Bay, on request of young Alphinaud. Some kind of commotion or incident, it appears, though I didn’t get many details.”

“So what about our runaway Blade?” Aelita asked, seeing where this was likely leading.

“Leave him to me. I’ll track him down and find the answers we seek, rest assured.”

“Is that a Thancred Waters guarantee?” A smirk grew across her face. His annoyed groan was all the fuel she needed to continue. “Well, best of luck out there, and hopefully our Sea Wolf friend leaves you in one piece!” A shaking head and a short nasal laugh was all the response he could muster.

Thancred offered a quick wave as he turned back towards the gathering of Blades on the far side of the plaza, likely seeking information as to where he might find the traitor. Aelita watched him go for a moment before heading straight for Lojalni, who greeted her with a chirp. She fished a couple pieces of gysahl greens out of her pocket and offered them to him as she untied his reins and hopped back into the saddle.

“Best not to keep Alphinaud waiting, we both know how that’ll turn out,” she said, urging her steed on with a small flick of the reins. As she passed under the Sunset Gate, she couldn’t help but think about the stranger from before, offering a small prayer to The Navigator that their paths might cross again.

#aelita tirasch #ffxiv #my wol #warrior of light #my writing #ffxivwrite2024 #yugiri #yugiri mistwalker #y'shtola #thancred

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pinkheart22 · 9 months ago

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TAYLORS TIK TOK HINTS TO TTPD AND DEBUT (TV)?

Taylors Swift's phone region is set to a country with the spelling of Favourites with a "u" instead of the US spelling of Favorite

Probably British English. Is this a hint to something?

The only photo there in Favourites is of her fingernail colors. All albums of these colors are re released as Taylor's Version except Debut. Will Debut (Taylors Version) be announced in Europe? Her overalls are also floral and resemble that of the debut era.

Plus, the only one in New is her with patches on her sleeve, a nod to the patches in the Album Variants? I made another post on this.

ALSO, the albums "Favourites" and "New" Across from each other each are 1's. Which together make 11, TS11.

ALSO, ALSO, if true about Debut, then Debut is Album 1 in her discography and TS11 is NEW!! Which would Explain the 1 photo in each album. Plus, She's in the section of photos called ALBUMS.

Favourites ablum = Debut, her favorite albums, her name. and NEW for literally her new album.

Still not sure yet what the album "NEW" with 200 photos is other than maybe the reactions of everyone listening to TTPD??

My only other guess with the Numbers is that 5,688 & 200 are all in one line at the top. Because the 5 is before the comma this would be the month, so MAY and 6+ 8+ 8+ 2+ 0+ 0 = 24 Which would then be MAY 24 (5/24) Taylor has a Eras Tour Date here for Lisbon, Portugal w/ Paramore. This could be a possible announcement date for Debut TV as this is in Europe, or something else...?

5+ 2+ 4 = 11 for TS 11 BUT if you do (5/24/2024) that 5+2+4+2+0+2+4=19 and 24-5= 19

APRIL 19 Release Date of TTPD - This one might be a grasp, but still the numbers somehow add up.

THEN --- If you add up all the numbers on her albums screen you have: 5+ 6+ 8+ 8+ 2+ 0+ 0+ 1+ 1 = 31 ...The age Taylor was in 2021 which is when she probably started TTPD and apparently created the song/masterpiece: "you're losing me". (she still would be 31 at this time because she wouldn't turn 32 until December that year)

And 31 backwards is 13.

AND HEAR ME OUT - HER CATS ARE THE INSPIRATION FOR THE TTPD ALBUMS COLOR SCHEME because who better to work at The Tortured Poets Department then the Itty Bitty Pretty Kitty Committee. Can't Spell Cats without TS.

"A committee is a select group of people who work together to complete a project. A department is the name given to an office or building where a specific type of work is done."

image source : taylor swifts tiktok april 1 2024

@taylorswift @taylornation

theory posted Feb 29 2024

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saintmeghanmarkle · 7 months ago

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I cant believe Im not getting paid for this. by u/Mickleborough

Meghan’s alleged to have said this on their Australia / Fiji / New Zealand / Tonga tour in 2018 when she was expected to do walkabouts, shake hands, and show a civil face. (She couldn’t do even that in Fiji: Sun archived / unarchived.)

To give an idea of what a proper working royal does, the Telegraph spent a week with Princess Anne.

Twice a year, her office invites the 300-plus organisations with which she’s affiliated to submit requests for her time. She gets 1,200 - 2,000 requests a year; sorts them out; and creates a schedule, to which she adheres.

In this typical week, the Princess Royal:

travelled about 818 miles / 1,316

shook over 677 hands

spent many hours in conversation

Her activities ranged from visiting a local National Coastwatch Institution to an equitation centre to celebrate 25 years of the Pony Club Centre Membership Scheme; attending a party to support unpaid carers (spending ‘a few extra moments talking to the building’s cleaner, loudly declaring her “very important”’) to carrying out an investiture; going to a City fundraiser lunch for military veterans to hosting a black tie dinner to celebrate The Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Study Conferences.

At all of these many and varied visits, she showed a depth of knowledge of their work.

Telegraph archived / unarchived

Admittedly the Princess Royal’s one of the hardest working members of the Royal Family - and this is a normal working week for her.

Meghan didn’t stay long enough to have a typical working week with all 4 of her patronages. She did a few royal tours, which involved far less in-depth work. Sample itinerary from her Australia tour:

16 October 2018:

Meet the Governor-General, his wife, and Invictus Games representatives.

Trip to the zoo (seriously).

Sydney Opera House to watch a performance by the Bangarra Dance Company

17 October:

Flight to Dubbo where the Sussexes met local farmers and hosted a picnic.

18 October:

Flight to Melbourne to meet politicians and the public at Government House.

Visit an organisation offering training to indigenous youth.

etc etc etc. Basically shaking hands and ‘doing the pretty’ (to quote a Georgette Heyer novel). And yet she couldn’t hack it:

Express archived / unarchived

This explains why she can’t put together a simple podcast (still can’t) - mainly because she’s a ‘f**king grifter’. Why American Rubbish Upchuck won’t get off the ground. No work ethic.

When life follows art: the worldwide privacy tour. How will she treat the crowds in Nigeria? Will she demand to be paid? Or will she tell them that they’re stupid?

post link

author: Mickleborough

submitted: May 09, 2024 at 08:41PM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit

disclaimer: all views + opinions expressed by the author of this post, as well as any comments and reblogs, are solely the author's own; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the administrator of this Tumblr blog. For entertainment only.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months ago

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The Foilies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Anaheim, and more!

This marks the 10th anniversary of the Foilies – awards given to the public agencies responsible for the most egregious, absurd and outrageous defiance of freedom of information requests:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024

The Foilies are awarded by EFF and Muckrock. This year's honorees are an entire Coen Brothers movie's worth of bizarre excuses and shenanigans. Top honors (the "Not-So-Magic-Word" award) goes to Augusta County, VA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024#augusta

The staff at the Augusta County Sheriff's office somehow got the impression that if they wants to make an official communique immune to a public records request, all they had to do was add the words "NO FOIA" to the memo.

Needless to say, the law doesn't work this way. When a county employee anonymously tipped Breaking the News off to this practice, the organization quite naturally filed a request for every county document containing the phrase "NO FOIA." Given that the county's employees had thoughtfully tagged every document they suspected would get them into trouble with these words, it's no wonder that the request delivered a bumper-crop of news stories of incompetence and corruption:

https://www.breakingthrough.tv/post/augusta-foia-nightmares-sheriff-slams-county-growth-amidst-challenges-managing-department-s-payroll

These scandals come from just 140 of the 1,212 "NO FOIA" emails the county admits it has on hand – the remainder have been illegally withheld. Breaking Through News and The Augusta Press sued the county for the remaining emails and won – though the county has indicated that it might waste public funds appealing the decision:

https://www.newsbreak.com/@breaking-through-news-1615604/3304349127261-augusta-county-weighs-options-after-foia-defeat-mulls-appeal-reporter-demands-production?s=mp_1615604

There are so many great – by which I mean terrible – stories in this year's Foilies that it's hard to pick just a few to highlight, but boy oh boy, does the Chesterfield, Virginia Police have a doozy this year:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024#lapd

The police of Chesterfield County, VA claim that the names of every police officer on the force should be kept secret, because one or more of those cops might someday work undercover. As EFF writes, "It’s not at all dystopian to claim that a public law enforcement agency needs to have secret police!"

Now, I don't want to give you the impression that all this nonsense stems from small-town-Deputy-Dawg-Barney-Fife-type dimwits with harebrained schemes. Big, important statewide offices are also in the mix. Take Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who spends millions in public funds for her family to travel around America accompanied by an Arkansas State Police detail:

https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/jan/12/six-months-of-protecting-sanders-family-costs/

Governor Huckabee Sanders's relentless waste of public funds generated a steady, humiliating drumbeat of news coverage. This made the governor both sad and angry, prompting her to attempt to block FOIA requests for her travel spending, and when that failed, to call a special session of the legislature to enact sweeping limitations on Arkansas's sunshine law:

https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/local-regional-news/2023-09-08/sanders-calls-special-legislative-session-on-tax-cuts-foia-changes

The governor's farcical wish-list of anti-transparency measures didn't just put severe limits on the disclosure of her use of public funds. It also contained a raft of administrative changes, like an end to the practice of FOIA plaintiffs being able to recover their legal fees if they successfully sued the government for illegally suppressing disclosures.

In the end, Governor Huckabee Sanders was defeated – a torrent of opposition to the bill removed its most odious clauses, though, as EFF notes, it's a near-certainty that Huckabee Sanders will try again in the next legislative session.

The military got in on the act this year, too: the USAF's FOIA portal was altered so that filers had to swear that their request pertained to "clearly releasable" records – then failed to define "clearly releasable." After a PR fiasco, they walked the changes back:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024#usaf

Now for the Mississippi goddamn moment: the Mississippi Justice Courts obstruct access to two thirds of the public records on search warrants:

https://www.propublica.org/article/no-knock-warrants-missing-mississippi

A lawsuit by the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal is seeking to force the state's courts to obey the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024#blindfold

Now: on to Wyoming! Wye not? Democracy may "die in darkness," but culture war bullshit thrives in the absence of sunshine. When (former) Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Brian Schroeder and Wyoming Department of Education Chief Communications Officer Linda Finnerty decided to waste public money on an private "Stop the Sexualization of Our Children" event, they correctly judged that secrecy would be key to pulling off the scam:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024#wyoming

When Wyomingans sought details about the pro-censorship event, Schroeder and Finnerty manufactured "misleading statements" about the event and its funding:

https://trib.com/news/state-regional/education/wyoming-department-of-education-lawsuit/article_0d87ae52-1c18-11ee-b541-b75142a9d1d5.html

Schroeder also illegally withheld his text messages from a public records request, ignoring state's attorneys' advice (instead, Schroeder took bad legal advice from his friend, a private attorney named Drake Hill, who told him he didn't have to follow the law):

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/09/14/under-oath-former-wyoming-education-chief-admits-lying-about-political-event/

The resulting lawsuit turned up 1,500+ texts and emails – enough damning evidence to discredit Schroeder and Finnerty, and to set important new precedent for sunshine laws in the cowboy state:

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/11/02/texts-show-schroeder-made-wyoming-dept-of-education-staff-feel-icky/

When you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bills. That's the strategy of both the Baltimore Police Department and the Richmond, Virginia Police Department. Baltimore's cops told Open Justice Baltimore that they would need to hand over one miiiiilion dollars if they wanted to see the department's use-of-force records. The Baltimore PD argued that the public interest fee waiver didn't apply to use-of-force records, because there was no public interest in knowing about how the only people in the state legally allowed to hit, kick, choke and shoot other people used force:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024#baltimore

Baltimore police eventually dropped the ask to a mere $245k, which a court totally rejected, saying it contributed to the impression that the BPD had "something to hide":

https://law.justia.com/cases/maryland/court-of-appeals/2023/20-22.html

Meanwhile, back in Virginia, the Richmond police told Open Oversight VA that they would have to pay $7,873.14 for a copy of the police's 151-item list of procedures – $52.14/hour for a pre-release review of each of those procedures (most police departments just post their procedures to their websites):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/foilies-2024#richmond

I opened this highlight reel in Virginia, and that's a good place to stop it. I hope you'll go read the rest, I've barely scratched the surface. And once you've read these all, I hope you'll try it for yourself!

As EFF and Muckrock say:

It's easy to feel powerless in these times, as local newsrooms close, and elected officials embrace disinformation as a standard political tool. But here's what you can do, and we promise it'll make you feel better: Pick a local agency—it could be a city council, a sheriff's office or state department of natural resources—and send them an email demanding their public record-request log, or any other record showing what requests they receive, how long it took them to respond, whether they turned over records, and how much they charged the requester for copies.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/11/no-foia/#id-tell-you-but-then-id-have-to-kill-you

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/files/banner_library/foilies24_webbanner-b.png

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

#pluralistic #right to know #open records #sunshine laws #sunshine week #foia #eff #muckrock #transparency #Association of Alternative Newsmedia

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 2 months ago

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By Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage

In a sprawling legal brief partly unsealed on Wednesday, the special counsel, Jack Smith, laid out his case for why former President Donald J. Trump is not immune from prosecution on federal charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The redacted brief, made public by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington, adds new details to the already extensive public record of how Mr. Trump lost the race but attempted nonetheless to cling to power.

Part of the brief focuses, for example, on a social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, telling supporters that Vice President Mike Pence had let them all down. Mr. Smith laid out extensive arguments for why that post on Twitter should be considered an unofficial act of a desperate losing candidate, rather than the official act of a president that would be considered immune from prosecution under a landmark Supreme Court ruling this summer.

After Mr. Trump’s Twitter post focused the enraged mob’s attention on harming Mr. Pence and the Secret Service took the vice president to a secure location, an aide rushed into the dining room off the Oval Office where Mr. Trump was watching television. The aide alerted him to the developing situation, in the hope that Mr. Trump would then take action to ensure Mr. Pence’s safety.

Instead, Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?” according to grand jury testimony newly disclosed in the brief.

Much earlier, the brief says, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers gave him an “honest assessment” that his false claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud would not hold up in court. But Mr. Trump seemed not to care.

“The details don’t matter,” the brief quotes Mr. Trump as saying.

Around the same time, the brief says, Mr. Pence also sought to convince Mr. Trump he had lost the election. During a private lunch in mid-November 2020, for example, Mr. Pence suggested to Mr. Trump that he accept defeat and run again in the next presidential race, but Mr. Trump did not want to hear about it.

“I don’t know,” the brief quotes him as saying, “2024 is so far-off.”

Mr. Smith’s 165-page brief was initially filed under seal last week. It was designed to help Judge Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, to determine how much of the indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in July granting Mr. Trump a broad form of immunity against prosecution for many official acts while in office.

Mr. Smith and his deputies used their brief to paint all of the indictment’s many individual allegations as fair game, depicting them as examples of Mr. Trump pursuing electioneering activity in his private role as a candidate for office, not as protected acts taken in his official capacity as president.

“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct,” prosecutors wrote. “Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”

Still, despite its narrow legal purpose, the expansive brief, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, also served as something like a trial brief, setting forth Mr. Smith’s fullest exposition yet of what he has learned in his nearly two-year-long investigation of Mr. Trump.

The filing was accompanied by a lengthy sealed appendix of many of the fruits of that inquiry — F.B.I. interviews, search warrant affidavits and grand jury testimony — some of which could also soon be revealed to the public.

In its broad strokes, the special counsel’s filing to Judge Chutkan was not unlike the tome-like report issued nearly two years ago by the House select committee that investigated the events leading up to the attack of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Smith’s submission described a familiar web of intersecting plots by Mr. Trump and his allies, including efforts to strong-arm state officials to overturn the election results, create false slates of electors claiming that Mr. Trump had won key states he actually lost and a pressure campaign against his own vice president, Mike Pence, to throw the election his way during a proceeding to certify its final outcome at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

-----

Special Counsel Investigation

Read the brief with newly disclosed evidence gathered in the federal election subversion case against Trump.

-----

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/us/politics/trump-jan-6-case-jack-smith-evidence.html

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posttexasstressdisorder · 3 months ago

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Cruelty is all the Republicans have left

Thom Hartmann

August 24, 2024 5:55AM ET

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) speaks to members of the press on the steps of the House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol on May 8, 2024. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

During the 1950s, Republicans were the party that promoted labor unions, Social Security, and a top 91% income tax bracket and 70% estate tax on the morbidly rich. Dwight Eisenhower successfully campaigned on what we’d call a progressive agenda for re-election in 1956.

During the Reagan years, Republicans embraced Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism with its free trade, opposition to unions, ending free college, and tax cuts for the fat cats. They called themselves “the party of new ideas.” They may have done more harm than good, but for most Republicans it was a good-faith effort.

Today, they’ve pretty much given up on all of that. All they have left is cruelty.

When Governor Tim Walz gave his heartwarming acceptance speech Wednesday night here at the DNC in Chicago, his son Gus was caught on camera proudly proclaiming, through tear-streaked eyes, “That’s my dad!”

The response from Trumpy Republicans was immediate: Ann Coulter wrote, “Talk about weird.” Rightwing hate jock Jay Weber posted, “Meet my son, Gus. He’s a blubbering b---- boy. His mother and I are very proud.” Trumpy podcaster Mike Crispi ridiculed Walz’s “stupid crying son,” adding, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.” Another well-known podcaster on the right, Alec Lace, said, “Get that kid a tampon already.”

Compassion for a learning-disabled child is dead on the right: all they have left is cruelty.

Ronald Reagan helped shepherd through Congress the most consequential border bill in American history, and when it needed updating Oklahoma’s Republican Senator James Lankford worked with Democrats to update it in a meaningful way. Trump demanded Republicans kill the legislation, invoking the memory of his tearing over 5,500 babies away from their mothers and trafficking them into fly-by-night “adoption” schemes (around 1000 are still missing) and his demand that the border patrol shoot immigrants in the legs.

Trump’s acolytes in Congress don’t even pretend any more to have a border policy: all they have left is cruelty.

Stephen Miller and 16 Republican state attorneys general are suing for the right to tear apart about a half million American families because at least one member of their family has brown skin and is not yet a US citizen.

Their hatred has almost no limit because all they have left is cruelty.

President George HW Bush worked with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to unwind the USSR in the hope of creating a democratic Russia. Neither expected Vladimir Putin to turn that nation into a virtual concentration camp where gays are routinely murdered, child pornography is legal (and they’ve kidnapped over 700,000 Ukrainian children), and dissenters are tortured, poisoned, and sent to brutal Siberian gulags. Donald Trump celebrates Putin, calling his invasion of Ukraine “genius” and “savvy,” handing Putin’s ambassador a western spy and top-secret information in his first month in office, and trying to abandon America’s traditional role as a moral leader in the world.

Trump’s GOP has abandoned our founding principles: all they have left is cruelty.

During the 2020 election, Trump followers tried to run a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas, threatening to kill the occupants (which they believed included Kamala Harris). A crazed Trump supporter broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her 82-year-old husband with a hammer. Trump tweeted a picture of the bus being attacked, writing below it, “I LOVE TEXAS!” and repeatedly makes jokes about the attack on Pelosi, as if to encourage future attacks on the families of other Democratic politicians. Most recently, Donald Trump posted a picture on social media of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck with a bullet hole in his forehead.

Not a single elected Republican (as best as I can find with a pretty thorough web search) has condemned any of these, because all they have left is cruelty.

Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis turned down federal money that would have fed 2.1 million low-income children in his state; he was one of 13 Republican governors to do the same, in a nation where one in seven children — over 11 million every year — go to bed hungry.

We are literally the only developed country in the world with a massive child hunger problem because all Republicans have left is cruelty.

When President Obama succeeded in passing and signing the Affordable Care Act, it offered every state funds to expand Medicaid to give healthcare coverage to all their low-income citizens with the federal government covering 90% of the cost. To this day, ten states under Republican control have refused to accept the money, leading to millions of preventable illnesses and early deaths.

Republican states could have joined all the Blue states and every other developed country in the world by providing universal healthcare, but refuse to because all they have left is cruelty.

When a 10-year-old girl was raped and impregnated, Republicans like Congressman Jim Jordan, Governor Kristi Noem, Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Jesse Waters, and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost ridiculed the claim. When the rape and pregnancy were proven and the girl fled Ohio to a state where abortion was legal to terminate the pregnancy, Indiana's Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita promised to launch an “investigation.”

Rokita didn’t investigate the rape, however: he instead went after the physician who performed the abortion. Because cruelty is all Republicans have left.

When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, he sent a violent mob against the US Capitol. As they tried to murder the vice president and speaker of the house, covered the walls of the building with feces and defaced priceless paintings, Trump gleefully watched on live television for over three hours while refusing to call in the national guard or take any other meaningful action.

Five civilians and three police officers died as the result of his sending that murderous mob because all he and his GOP have left is cruelty.

This week Americans saw Democrats display compassion, care, respect, and reverence for our democracy. We saw the best of this country, hope for the future, and actual plans to improve the lives of Americans.

Last month, in sharp contrast, we watched the Republican convention and saw, instead, a cavalcade of anger, bile, grievance, hate, and, of course, cruelty.

Because cruelty is all Republicans have left.

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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An election denial group is planning to create what one of its founders calls “a dropbox surveillance reality show” by donating “AI-driven” cameras to sheriffs in Wisconsin and other states to livestream drop boxes and remotely monitor people voting.

While WIRED found no evidence that the group has been able to recruit sheriffs or others to implement their scheme, local officials in charge of running elections in Wisconsin are concerned that round-the-clock surveillance could spur potential voter intimidation.

The “dropbox surveillance reality show” initiative is being led by Catherine Engelbrecht, who heads up the Texas-based True the Vote group, which has pushed election conspiracies for over a decade. This year, the group rolled out technology to allow anyone to file mass voter roll challenges. And last week, it launched a new app that will allow election deniers to post photos and videos from polling locations on November 5 suggesting evidence of election fraud.

But drop boxes, where voters can return their ballots, are a particular point of concern for Engelbrecht and her cofounder Gregg Phillips. The pair were behind the data provided to the debunked conspiracy film 2000 Mules, which alleged—without evidence—that so-called “mules” were used to stuff ballots into drop boxes ahead of the 2020 election, swinging the vote in favor of Joe Biden.

The distribution company behind the film earlier this year issued an apology and withdrew the film from circulation, after Engelbrecht and Phillips admitted to a judge in Georgia that they had no evidence to back up their claims.

Now, True the Vote is again boosting claims that drop boxes will be used to conduct widespread voter fraud ahead of the 2024 election, and their solution is to put cameras on those locations and let anyone watch 24/7 online. Wisconsin is a key swing state in the upcoming election: Biden won the state by 1 percent in 2020, after Trump had taken the state in 2016. In 2020, more than 500 drop boxes were set up in 430 communities across the state, but a 2022 ruling said unsupervised drop boxes outside of clerks offices were not legal. That ruling was overturned last July, and within days, Engelbrecht began speaking about monitoring drop boxes in Wisconsin.

“In 2020 and 2022, we learned more than we could have imagined about ballot drop box monitoring,” Engelbrecht said in a newsletter to supporters that WIRED reviewed. “Our plan involves AI-driven cameras and real-time livestreaming. We have tested the tech for over a year. We have our own data center, so the livestream cannot be ‘disappeared.’”

It’s unclear what exactly Engelbrecht means when she says “AI-driven,” and True the Vote did not respond to repeated requests for comment about this aspect of their project.

Phillips, in a post on Truth Social that has since been deleted, wrote that they were implementing a “a dropbox surveillance reality show.”

Engelbrecht first hinted at her plans in July, telling Christian nationalist prophet Lance Wallnau on his podcast that “there will be cheating” and that True the Vote would be “working with sheriffs to identify areas that sheriffs would be willing to allow us to grant them camera equipment that they can monitor and we can livestream.”

Engelbrecht has also said the group is looking to roll out drop box monitoring in multiple states, and mentioned Michigan as a possible location, though most of her focus appears to be on Wisconsin.

In her interview with Wallnau, Engelbrecht added that she was working with “three influential sheriffs” in Wisconsin, though she didn’t name them.

WIRED contacted two dozen sheriffs from Wisconsin’s largest counties, but did not find a single one who was going to be part of the monitoring effort. Engelbrecht and Truth the Vote did not respond to multiple requests for comment from WIRED to name the sheriffs who have agreed to be part of the program.

“True the Vote has reached out to the Sheriff's Office regarding ideas as they relate to election integrity and possible law violations,” deputy inspector Patrick R. Esser, from the Waukesha County Sheriff's Department, tells WIRED. “True the Vote proposed the idea of donating cameras to the sheriff's office to monitor election sites, however, the obstacles associated with that idea made it impractical.”

While most sheriff offices WIRED contacted did not respond to requests for comment, a number, including offices in Buffalo County and Polk County, said they had not even heard about the drop box initiative. “I was unaware of the plan and will not be participating,” Sheriff Mike Osmond from Buffalo County tells WIRED. “I am not sure if they are legal or not but do not have interest in implementing such a program.”

In her newsletter this week, Engelbrecht signaled that the group may have been unsuccessful in recruiting enough sheriffs, writing that they would provide cameras to “sheriffs where possible, other individuals where necessary.”

It’s also not clear that sheriffs would even have jurisdiction over the drop boxes because they are county officials and elections are not run by county officials in Wisconsin.

"We're a little different than some states,” says Ann Jacobs, chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which is responsible for administering elections in the state. “In Wisconsin our elections are actually run at the municipal level. So we have 1,850, approximately, municipal clerks who run municipal elections.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision in July, the Wisconsin Electoral Commission put in place guidance for clerks on how to implement drop boxes. “The guidance does not prohibit livestreaming of ballot drop boxes, and there is no such prohibition in Wisconsin law,” Riley Vetterkind, the public information officer for the Wisconsin Electoral Commission tells WIRED.

However, if such monitoring interferes with voting, then that could result in criminal charges that carry penalties of up to six months in prison.

“It really depends on what they do with the information that they glean, and my hope is that they're not going to go out and attack voters, although I suspect that's exactly what's going to happen,” says Jacobs.

The claims made in the 2000 Mules conspiracy film centered on voters who placed more than one ballot in drop boxes. However, Jacobs points out that voters in Wisconsin are permitted to place more than one ballot in a drop box if they are doing so for a disabled or infirm family member, which could lead to tensions with drop box monitors should confusion about that allowance occur.

It is also unclear where these cameras would be located, given that they would need to be in situ permanently to provide 24-hour coverage. “What they can't do is go and just attach a camera to, you know, a city of Milwaukee library and focus it on a drop box,” says Jacobs. “I suppose in some places, maybe they could figure it out, but I don't think there's many places that I can think of where that would actually work.”

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cityof2morrow · 2 months ago

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CDK: Art Department

Published: 9-15-2024 | Updated: N/A SUMMARY Cubic Dynamics by John B. Cube and Marcel Dusims forged the future with furnishings that were minimalist in design and maximalist in erudite pretension. Generations later, the company continues to produce edge-of-cutting-edge designs. Use the Cubic Dynamics Kitbash (Simmons, 2023-2024) collection to set up corporate, exposition, and office environments. Envisioned as an add-on to the Cubic Dynamics set (EA/Maxis, archived at GOS), it features minimalist and retro-futuristic objects. Find more CC on this site under the #co2cdkseries tag. Read the Backstory and ‘Dev Notes’ HERE. Another DIY-style set with plenty of mix-n-match options. The ART DEPARTMENT is where your creative sim employees dream up the award-winning designs, layouts, color schemes, and advertising that your company is known for. Make sure they have a proper place to do their work! This set includes edits of 2 older CC sets – see the compatibility note at the end of this post.

DETAILS All EPs/SPs. §See Catalog for Pricing | See Buy/Build Mode You need the Company Expo (Mesh Pack) set (Simmons, 2024) for TXTRs to show properly in game. All files with “MESH” in their name REQUIRED for textures/models to display correctly in-game. Several objects in this series are oversized/offset. You may need to shift an objects upwards once to level it, and you may need “move objects” and “grid on/off” cheats to place them to your liking. When placing partitions/floating shelves and tables/desks/counters on the same tile, place the partition/shelves first. I recommend using this set with Object Freedom 1.02 (Fway, 2023), which includes Numenor’s fix for OFB shelves (2006), for easier use overall. ITEMS Deco and Clutter (176-502 poly) Desk (288 poly) Desk Chair (933 poly) Easels 001-002 (525-1270 poly) Empty Bookcase (988 poly) – place shelves inside, doubles as bookcase Empty Sideboard (1152 poly) – place shelves inside, slots on top as well Canvas Art 001-003 (12-48 poly) Pouf Chair (188 poly) Project Board (508 poly) Partition (492 poly) Shelves 001-003 (100-214 poly) DOWNLOAD (choose one) from SFS | from MEGA COMPATIBILITY AVOID DUPLICATES: The #co2cdkseries includes edited versions – replacements - for items in the following CC sets: 4ESF (office 3, other 1/artroom, other 2/build), All4Sims/MaleorderBride (miskatonic library, office, postmodern office), CycloneSue (never ending/privacy windows), derMarcel (inx office), Katy76/PC-Sims (bank/cash point, court/law school sets, sim cola machine), Marilu (immobilien office), Murano (ador office), Reflex Sims (giacondo office), Retail Sims/HChangeri (simEx, sps store), Simgedoehns/Tolli (focus kitchen, loft office, modus office), ShinySims (modern windows), SH (reverie office, step boxes/shelving), Spaik (sintesi study), Stylist Sims (offices 1,2, & 3, Toronto set), Tiggy027 (wall window frames 1-10), Wall Sims (holly architecture, Ibiza). *The goal is to link the objects to the recolors/new functions in the #co2cdkseries without re-inventing the wheel! Credit to the original creators.

CREDITS Thanks: ChocolateCitySim, HugeLunatic, Klaartje, Ocelotekatl, Whoward69, LoganSimmingWolf, Gayars, Ch4rmsing, Ranabluu, Gummilutt, Crisps&Kerosene, LordCrumps, PineappleForest. Sources: Any Color You Like (CuriousB, 2010), Beyno (Korn via BBFonts), EA/Maxis, Offuturistic Infographic (Freepik). SEE CREDITS (ALT)

#ts2downloads #sims2cc #ts2cc #co2cdkseries #ofbprops

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