"Don’t pander to the tech giants!’ How a youth movement for digital justice is spreading across #Europe.
Gen Z are the first generation to have grown up with social media, they were the earliest adopters, and therefore the first to suffer its harms. Now they are fighting back."
For the last 25 years, #corporste Re-pedo-cans have focused on "de-regulation" and lower corporate #taxes so they can increase profits and destroy any competitive markets.
Now we have #inflation, #pandemic world #war and #publiccorruption because they have destroyed the community and local markets in favor of government lobbies and #tax deductions that benefit only the wealthy.
The small local business competition is designed to keep them enslaved at that small market, never expanding.
Oh and about the #nursing professionals? We should make #Doctors do all that work now because to be a #nurse is considered "not professional" in the US suddenly. Let the Doctors deal with the next #pandemic since they are such professionals. #NoKings !
This is what the inventory of vehicle rentals looks like at Enterprise in Crystal City. The manager told me I got the last car that was available in northern Virginia.
The CEO of Hertz, Gil West, is appealing for an end to the government shutdown, saying flight cancellations have already caused a 20% surge in one-way rentals for today and it’s going to get worse as Thanksgiving approaches.
Bird flu surges among poultry amid a scaled back federal response. In the past 30 days, the virus has struck 66 poultry flocks, leading to the deaths of more than 3.5 million turkeys, chickens and ducks, a steep increase compared to the summer months.
All this, while there's been a mass firing of federal science and public health personnel and an ongoing government shutdown that has significantly reduced both surveillance and mitigation efforts.
The consequences could be far worse than higher egg prices and Thanksgiving dinners without any turkey. Last year, the U.S. saw close to 70 human H5N1 infections, including one death-- which could be seen as having dodged a major bullet. This year could be far more deadly or, worse, the birdflu could evolve the ability to transmit person to person, causing a pandemic that is far more deadly and devastating than the covid pandemic.
"Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass" by Sarah Jones. My rating:5 out of 5 stars. Read from: 08/10/2025 - 08/10/2025. Kindle Edition, 296 pages.
Book description: “Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass” by Sarah Jones is a powerful blend of personal narrative and investigative reporting that exposes the deep racial and income inequalities in America. The book focuses on the lives of essential workers, seniors, and people with disabilities who were disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, not because of their age or job, but due to systemic inequality and poverty. Jones reveals how the pandemic laid bare the pre-existing social mobility issues and wealth gaps in the U.S., showing a sacrificial underclass abandoned by society. The work calls attention to racial injustice and public policy failures while insisting that a future where no one is disposable is possible.
After Inc: Revival, a strategy simulation, survival city-builder with elements of 4X, from the creators of Plague Inc., released in early access on Steam.
GlobalQuarantine, a strategy x tycoon hybrid where you lead a global pandemic management organization funded by the world's nation (in the vein of X-Com's overworld), released on Steam.
U.S. President Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” Commission cited a paper by Dr. Katherine Keyes on anxiety and depression among teens during the pandemic. She says she didn’t write it. Read more from @abc https://flip.it/FyO2sT #MAHA#Trump#RFK#Health#US#Pandemic#Anxiety
Hier eine interessante noch offene Ausschreibung für eine Post-Doc-Position am Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Science Outreach and Pandemic Preparedness (SOAP). Es geht u.a. um den Aufbau von Citizen Science Projekten zur Virusüberwachung im Urbanen Raum.
Aus wirklich zuverlässiger Quelle weiß ich, dass die Projektleitung sehr empfehlenswert ist :)
After years of negotiation, member states of the World Health Organization have voted to adopt the first ever pandemic agreement aimed at preventing, preparing and responding to future pandemics. Read more from @npr https://flip.it/YMhiUJ #COVID#WHO#Health#Pandemic#US#Virus
This #ArborDay, a reminder that trees aren't just important for the environment.
Tree loss can create the conditions for humans and virus-infected animals to collide — meaning the next deadly pandemic is just a forest clearing away.
You’ve Been Lied to About Rats and the Black Death
Recent research suggests that rats may not have played a critical role in the spread of plague. What can that tell us about outbreak narratives and their importance?
The State Health Department rat gang were a valuable asset in the fight against the Plague in Queensland from 1900 to 1909.
The image captures a group of around a dozen men standing in a line, each dressed in period attire—suits, vests, and wide-brimmed hats—while holding leashes of alert and active terriers, a breed commonly used for their prowess in rat hunting.
The dogs and their handlers were vital assets in the fight against plague-carrying rats in urban centers like Brisbane.
“Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats. In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins. Rather, this pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists, and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a superior Nordic race.”
― Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
Oh that's just what the Department of Health and Human Services needed: another crank winger quack with a literal body count working to "protect" the health of Americans.
US scientist who touted hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid named to pandemic prevention role
"A proponent of using the drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 despite scant evidence of its efficacy has been named to a top pandemic prevention role at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Washington Post reports.
Steven J Hatfill is a virologist who served in Donald Trump’s first administration, during which he promoted hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus in the early months of the pandemic, when vaccines and treatments were not yet available. He recently started as a special adviser in the office of the director of the administration for strategic preparedness and response, which prepares the country to respond to pandemics, as well as chemical and biological attacks.
The Trump administration embraced using the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, along with other drugs such as ivermectin and chloroquine, as treatments against Covid-19, despite concerns over both their efficacy and potentially serious side-effects. In June 2020, just months after the pandemic started, the Food and Drug Administration warned against using hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to treat Covid-19 over “reports of serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues”, even after Trump approved ordering millions of doses of the drug for US patients from Brazil."
For those of you who don't remember the pandemic response during Trump's first term, the hydroxychoroquine scandal hit national headlines when after the Kelpto Kaiser promoted a version of the drug as a preventative medicine that could stop the spread of Covid, an Arizona couple in their 60's drank some fish tank cleaner that had similar chemicals in it and one of them literally died. Trump skated by because he was president and he didn't actually tell anyone to drink fish tank cleaner, but his promotion of the drug was criticized by the FDA at the time and there's no question that Trump's factually unsupported recommendation got someone killed. Now the quack scientist who told Trump hydroxychoroquine could safely treat Covid, is back in a special advisor's role to the government's response team for pandemics, as well as chemical and biological attacks.
It's objectively hard to tell if Hatfill's appointment is more about Trump's attempts to force his critics to say he was always right about everything even when his nonsense got someone killed, RFK Jr's quest to transform HHS into a haven for grifter Covid quacks who support alternatives to vaccines, or a general class war effort by the regime to neglect anything that helps poor people survive disasters; frankly, it might be all three. Regardless of the motivations here however, the objective truth is that appointing a guy like Hatfill to the pandemic response team represents a clear and obvious danger to the health of Americans.
#DanielJones of self-defence company #TacticalForceCombatives claimed on Facebook to have taken part in the stunt. In a video posted this morning, Jones claimed to be “asking #Albanese some questions”, and said there was nothing “James Bond” about tracking down the #PrimeMinister.”
In news from the quivering bowels of Vichy America, a major liberal law firm has agreed to work for fascists and stop hiring so many women, brown people, or members of the LGBTQ community to placate an aggrieved, would-be dictator and keep raking in those sweet government contracts:
Trump-Targeted Law Firm Caves, Vows $40M in Legal Support to Right-Wing Causes
"resident Donald Trump withdrew an executive order targeting a major Democratic-leaning law firm after the firm agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services in support of his administration’s far right initiatives.
“This is unbelievably shameful from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP,” Molly Coleman, executive director at People’s Parity Project, said on LinkedIn. “I’m embarrassed to have any association with this firm that failed to find the courage the moment requires.”
Recently, the White House has escalated attacks on law firms whose attorneys have been involved in legal efforts opposing Trump. Just last week, Trump signed an executive order attempting to revoke security clearances from Paul, Weiss attorneys, restrict the firm’s access to federal buildings, and terminate any of its government contracts. The order reportedly prompted at least one client to sever ties with the firm.
However, following a meeting between Trump and Brad Karp, the chair of Paul, Weiss, the administration abruptly rescinded the order. “We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration,” Karp said in a statement."
So, let's make sure we all understand what's going on here. Trump is brazenly and almost certainly illegally, shaking down a powerful law firm that has literally worked on cases opposing him in the past, and is known from their commitment to diverse hiring practices, and instead of fighting back, or even just taking the loss of government money on the chin, they've decided to check notes concede that a former partner who worked on cases against Trump was engaged in "wrongdoing," work pro-bono for the fascist regime, and capitulate to the fascist "war on DEI" - an idea whose ever-expanding meaning appears to be "restore mandated white supremacy in America."
Are you kidding me? Does the larger liberal establishment in the United States have anything resembling a spine to share between them? More importantly, if Americans trapped inside the increasingly ominous, fascist nightmare that is Trump 2.0 can't count on a high profile law firm in the business of protecting civil rights and taking on the government, to even stand up for the firm's own rights, how can they have faith that anyone in position to defend their rights in a legal capacity, is going to step up to the plate for them? The answer of course, is that they can't.
Folks, you'll get no argument from me if you say that the greater evil in this story is a fascist president who would be king, using the authority of his office to gain revenge on law firms that helped charge him for real crimes, he absolutely committed. As the extorted settlement proves, this too is part of Trump's plot to take complete control of America as a dictator. This isn't legal, and as a federal judge's restraining order in a similar case involving the Trump-targeted firm Perkins Coie demonstrations, complete surrender was not the only option Paul Weiss and its chair Brad Karp had here. By that same measure you can't win if you don't fight, and when losing means capitulating to fascism, a law firm full of civil rights lawyers has a goddamn responsibility to resist.
“It is a sad day for the legal industry. Paul, Weiss, didn’t just bend a knee, it set a new standard for shameful capitulation. This is a stain on the firm, every one of its partners, and the entire legal profession,” Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, said on Bluesky."
Folks, I've been talking about and writing about the rise of fascism for over a decade now. And I'm not bragging, because I wish I had been wrong about the signs I was reading around me, but I have largely been right when I insisted we were all heading for a moment like this. Furthermore, I have repeatedly warned that a liberal establishment (no, not you; your leaders, your media, your "liberal" capitalist employers) which would always have the option of simply collaborating with the fascist order, wasn't going to save us from fascist predation. There is no cavalry; the opposition party, the courts, and the lawyers aren't going to stop this. At the rate things are going, I have no idea how long I'll still be able to tell you that we are the cavalry, and the only way this nightmare ends is if we use our bodies en masse to shut down the fascist order and the profits that motivate the guys paying for all this; but it's the truth. If you can do it to Tesla, you can do it to any of them.
While a lot of the stories in this thread focus on the cowardice of institutional actors in either submitting to, or even assisting the fascist Trump regime in installing a Christian Nationalist dictatorship, when the history of this political moment is written, it will be noted that it was actually big companies in the US private sector that embraced the regime's white nationalist policy platforms first and in doing so, helped legitimate Trump's quest to rule as King of America. Unlike institutional actors in higher education, lawyers targeted for revenge by Der Führer, or bodies controlled by the (openly fascist) US government through funding, large corporations in the private sector required little if any incentive to adopt Trump's authoritarian "anti-DEI" policies; indeed, companies like Walmart, Paramount, and even Victoria's Secret practically fell all over themselves to align with the regime's agenda, essentially obeying in advance, before the administration had to apply any pressure at all.
Why would they do that? As this short essay in The Guardian lays bare, the truth is that they never really wanted to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the first place - which is why the programs they installed after the twin motivating factors of the George Floyd protests against police violence, and the COVID pandemic, were never really designed to achieve those objectives in the first place.
American corporations didn’t want to diversify, anyway
"Within days of taking office, Donald Trump signed an executive order that would eliminate Johnson’s civil rights order. The order directed the office of federal contract compliance to stop “promoting diversity” and holding contractors responsible for “affirmative action”. To Smith, the administration’s early actions amount to “a blatant effort in order to not only uphold the white power structure, but to remove any government responsibility to uphold the rights of individuals of color, specifically Black people”. It is the fruit of a conservative movement that has been trying to reverse course ever since the government began taking seriously efforts to protect the rights of Americans regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin.
In 2020, hundreds of private companies pledged to change their culture – to use their power and influence and, most importantly, money, to re-shape American society toward more just ends. Now, the three largest employers in the nation – Walmart, Amazon, and the federal government – have all rolled those policies back. Dozens of other corporations have turned back the clock on even pretending to care about equality in the workplace as well.
To businesses’ credit, they had a difficult task ahead of them in 2020. “They’re faced with putting a policy in place quickly that’s responsive and doesn’t sound like lip service to frustrated people,” Dawkins said. But in doing so, they made an admission: they had not been taking diversity seriously before – and the capitulation to the administration’s demands since has betrayed that truth. And they made clear their efforts were always lip service."
Look, I don't think it's really news that much of the American private sector's DEI initiatives were motivated more by appearing to oppose white supremacy and enforced social hierarchies in an increasingly Christian Nationalist political environment, than actually opposing those problems. This was pointed out long before Trump's second term, and obviously their actions since the regime was installed have demonstrated that critics were right to question the commitment of American corporations that directly profit from a white supremacist order that marks out certain groups of people for brutal exploitation. In that context then, it's important to understand that we are in fact not "all in this together" and a corporate sector that gladly donated to Trump's election campaigns must be understood as active partners in the installation of a Christian Nationalist dictatorship in America. The fact that they did so because they think it'll improve their bottom line is largely irrelevant; fascist collaboration is still fascist collaboration, regardless of the motives that inspire it.
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Free Palestine ✊🇵🇸 ( islelagoon.wapgem.com )
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The Adventures of Mary Darling ( pluralistic.net )
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Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you ( pluralistic.net )
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