Too long; didn’t read.

Maybe related to the Sunshine Act? The intent of the law is to prevent companies from bribing doctors to use their products or drugs. I have seen companies extend it to other employees to be extra cautious.

They are all in medical or medical-adjacent careers: nursing, radiology, pharmaceutical R&D, medical device R&D, etc. These fields seem to attract empathetic people who want to do good.

Good photo.

AFAIK, UT Austin has not officially accepted, but I read that they expressed early interest. I do not know the specifics though. Maybe they will be swayed by the other schools’ actions. I’m sure a targeted demonstration would be a good idea.

Good on Arizona. Now we only need Vanderbilt and UT Austin to speak up.
Vanderbilt has been wishy-washy about their position.
Texas, of course, expressed almost immediate interest in signing up. Bastards.

As an aside, does anyone know why the administration chose these 9 particular colleges to begin with? I don’t see an obvious theme here. They easily could have chosen schools in more conservative areas, or schools which receive more federal research money.

Brown University
Dartmouth College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Arizona
University of Pennsylvania
University of Southern California
University of Texas at Austin
University of Virginia
Vanderbilt University

Sure, there is room for reasonable doubt. It may have been a staffer who put it up, or even a visitor to the office who pinned it up as a grim prank or to frame the congressman. But this guy’s party is currently championing mass arrest, imprisonment, and deportation of thousands of people with no due process, so my willingness to give him any benefit of the doubt is long gone.

A picture of the flag, from Politico:

It wasn’t exactly hidden.

Remember when Ronald Reagan said this in 1981?

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

American conservatives grabbed onto that line and have held it as gospel ever since. Kneecapping the government has been a major goal of theirs for over four decades now. You will sometimes hear people talk about “bleeding the beast”: taking all the government benefits they can get their hands on and then dodging taxes, with the assumption they are helping to slowly kill the system. Unfortunately, there is no plan (AFAIK) for what they want the world to look like after the collapse.

I have many times, and I agree that travel is a good thing. But don’t be so quick to scoff at Americans who don’t travel overseas. Traveling is expensive. The flight alone from my house to Frankfurt or Tokyo (for example) is at least $1,500 per person, and a day of travel each way. That’s out of reach for a lot of people. Hell, it’s out of reach for me now that I have a family to bring with me. The most basic, banal holiday overseas would easily exceed $10,000. Nevermind the luxury of being able to spend enough time there to understand local takes on geopolitics.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if MTG took speaker job.

Don’t give them any ideas!

David Frum, speechwriter for George W. Bush and an outspoken member of the neocon movement of that era. He was apparently one of the “never Trump” Republicans who foresaw the coming disaster before the 2016 election. He has since left the Republican party and written two books titled Trumpocracy and Trumpocalypse.

Between the ticket prices and the, ah, challenging political climate in the US, I am really curious what game attendance will be.

!unclejokes@lemmy.world

Editorialized headline. The linked article’s headline is “US government shuts down after Senate fails to advance both parties’ bills”

I am not military, but somehow manage to interact with a lot of veterans. This has been my impression as well, at least among the officers. The higher up the leadership chain, the more they recognize and despise that the military is being used to push politics rather than actually being a functional organization.

There’s a great YouTube video of Adm. Gilday defending a non-binary officer in a Senate hearing. The admiral recognizes that running a large, functioning military requires integrating people of all types, and that building camaraderie can be as important as anything else. We can only hope there are enough people like him toward the top to prevent the military from being thoroughly abused.

https://youtu.be/qNwJGum3N8E

You might get some downvotes for mentioning that book. The author makes a few sloppy assumptions, and the anthropology/sociology/history communities love to hate him for it. His overall thesis is still generally good though, IIRC.

One thing I don’t think is in Diamond’s book: once Europe had realized they could sail far and wide to get things, the Dutch invented the idea of a stock market to fund voyages (the British took this idea and really ran with it). This system made long, risky trips easier to finance. Instead of a single monarch funding a single expedition, many people could pool their money to fund many expeditions.

I agree that none of this means Europeans have some special intelligence or attitude. Any other civilization that developed in similar conditions could have followed the same path.

I have a Rayhunter but have never sent a data capture to EFF. I believe you are supposed to download it to your PC then send the file to their Signal account.

https://efforg.github.io/rayhunter/faq.html

This is a great time for people to start building and operating Rayhunters, and to share the results with the EFF to improve the tool.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying

They really want you to know that they went to the beach once, and they might do it again.