Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@qoto.org

"A judge in North Carolina found two ##journalists with the Asheville Blade guilty of “trespassing” on Christmas in 2021 when they stayed in a public park to cover Asheville police as officers evicted a #homeless encampment." https://thedissenter.org/judge-convicts-jorunalists-trespassing-reporting-homeless-encampment/?ref=the-dissenter-newsletter&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=92262b2a-0d74-4863-be47-8aaa89358005

Glacial Lake Missoula wasn’t the only source of cataclysmic floods in the Pacific Northwest at the end of the last ice age. I just wrote this to discuss two other sources of these floods which inundated the Columbia Basin and #Portland area.

#geology #oregon #washington #idaho

https://ingalls.weathertogether.net/2023/04/19/the-pacific-northwests-other-ice-age-floods/

Tech companies have gotten increasingly secretive about the data, scraped from the internet without compensation or consent, used to train their AI models. So we looked closer. Here's our analysis of the 15 million websites in just one highly-filtered CommonCrawl web scrape-used to train models like Google's T5 & Facebook's LLaMA.
We found
-the copyright symbol appears >200M times
-pirated sites, 1 for e-books
-half of the top 10 were news sites https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning

When GOP Attorneys General Embraced Jan. 6, Corporate Funders Fled.
Now They’re Back.
==

Even as the Republican Attorneys General Association has leaned further into promoting Trumpism and sowing doubt about U.S. elections, major sponsors including #Amazon, #Walmart and #HomeDepot have resumed their contributions to the group.

#GOP #Elections #RAGA #AttorneysGeneral #Visa #CapitalOne #MasterCard #Intuit #Walgreens #GM #Altria #Comcast

https://www.propublica.org/article/raga-gop-jan6-amazon-walmart-comcast-contributions?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

I have had 4 miscarriages between having three beautiful children. The "miscarriage of justice" in the US around the fact that if I'd not had d&c's (clinical abortions) to clean out my womb AND NOT KILL ME after the miscarriages is pure insanity.

I try steer clear of political discourse, but this is a fundamental human right.

Every woman has a story. Every woman has the right to primary medical care. Every woman has the right to choose.

12 year old girls that are raped are expected to have and raise a child? What moron decided that? Men who voted for this, you DO NOT have the right to decide.

And the part that we don't talk about: consider two lower income Asian families in SF. One is 4th generation Chinese. The other is 1st generation Vietnamese. Both families believe:
* Black lives matter
* Schools shouldn't be named after slave owners
* Alt-Right wants to stop immigration and their rhetoric drives Asian hate
* Affirmative Action is good and necessary
* Legacy admission isn't good
♥️👍🏿

But the families have to vote and choose between 2 school boards:
1) No algebra?!
2) Alt-Right!

Black 12 year old public school kids in San Francisco aren't given the opportunity to learn Algebra...

But Black 12 year old public school kids in Nigeria not only get to learn Algebra, but also how to do binary arithmetic. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Here's a full lesson of how Nigeria introduces algebra to 12 year olds:

https://youtu.be/qHfRxaTtoSE

Here's how Nigeria introduces a 12 year old to Binary, Octal, and Hexadecimal:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XTkqbQXw1rM

And you'll notice that both lessons are taught by Black men teachers.

Banning books, burning them, defunding them. You either support it or you don’t.

The freedom to choose what you read and believe belongs to you. Not a parent’s group. Not a politician. Not me. You.

Yet there are some who’d take that freedom away from all of us.

As I’ve said many times: they’ll come for your books before they ever come for your guns.

#UniteAgainstBookBans

https://www.salon.com/2023/04/12/missouri-state-vote-to-defund-public-libraries_partner/

⚠️ Via Brandon Friedman:

This is some extremely fascist stuff. Texas is continuing its effort to strip its Democratic cities of any power whatsoever.

Democracy Docket:

NEW: #Texas Senate passes #SB1933 on a party line vote, a bill that would empower the governor-appointed secretary of state to take over election oversight from local county officials. The bill now goes to the Texas House. https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/texas-senate-passes-bill-to-seize-control-of-elections-from-local-authorities/

Darwin deleted from textbooks in India https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/14/mughals-rss-evolution-outrage-as-india-edits-school-textbooks

After witnessing a white doctor refuse to treat a sick, elderly Native American woman who later died, Susan LaFlesche Picotte decided to become a physician to help her people. Born in 1865, she grew up on Nebraska’s Omaha reservation.

In 1889, Picotte became the first female Native American to earn a medical degree in the U.S. She raised funding & opened Wathill Hospital in 1913 - the first private hospital on a reservation. https://drsusancenter.org/dr-susan #HistoryRemix #history #science

Here is a must-read post from children's author Maggie Tokuda-Hall on how Scholastic offered to publish her book — all she had to do was remove all mention of racism.

Sure, they're banning books in Tennessee and Texas. But it's not just the books that get published and then banned from the library. It's all the books that don't get published in the first place.

Those banning books know publishers like Scholastic pull this cowardly bullshit. It's their game plan.

https://www.prettyokmaggie.com/blog/2023/4/11/scholastic-and-a-faustian-bargain

If this ruling stands, birth control is next.
(Judge)Kacsmaryk also said that mailing mifepristone across state lines is illegal based on the Comstock Act, which Congress passed in 1873, making it illegal to send contraceptive materials through the mail. He went further than that, though, going far beyond the Dobbs decision to embrace the concept that a fertilized egg is an “unborn human” from the time of conception."
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-7-2023?r=63j6s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Reestablish #LakeTulare

#California should seriously consider reestablishing Lake Tulare along with it's historic wetlands and ecosystem habitats. This should include enabling it's tributary rivers to substantially flow back into the southern San Joaquin Valley basin.

"Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, and the second-largest freshwater lake entirely in the United States based upon surface area. ... Tulare Lake dried up after its tributary rivers were diverted for agricultural irrigation and municipal water uses." - Wikipedia

Building new dams in CA is not a solution to the long term water needs of CA especially with dryer periods caused by #climatechange.

A revitalized Lake Tulare could recharge the San Joaquin Valley ground water and could be used as a water resource during extreme #drought periods.

"Estimates have found that Tulare Lake could hold twice the water of the proposed Temperance Flat Dam at one-fifth the cost." - Wikipedia

With the news today about #ClarenceThomas and his extrajudicial activities, it's worth looking back to what civil rights icon Rosa Parks said about him in 1991 (yes, Rosa Parks was still alive in 1991; she died in 2005):

https://www.truthorfiction.com/rosa-parks-on-clarence-thomas-his-confirmation-to-the-highest-court-in-the-land/

In Texas, Daniel Perry—a white man—posted "he might kill a few people," drove his car past a red light & into a previously peaceful BLM march, shot & killed a protestor (a US Vet), was duly charged, unanimously convicted—& TX Gov Abbott is pardoning him.😳

Texas is announcing to the world that in their view, murdering people for exercising their First Amendment right to peacefully protesting racism is OK.

This isn't democracy. It's fascism. This sets a literally deadly precedent for the future.

“After a GOP lawmaker was accused of sexually assaulting 15- & 16-year-old girls he had taught & coached, he was made chair of the education committee.”

Corruption's hardwired in Tennessee's political DNA.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/08/tennessee-descent-statehouse-mag-00091090