A Genuine IRL Refrigerator

I can give you a chance to prove them all wrong. Joke's on them because I don't even care.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

A ban on international collaboration with a list of the "scary" countries (like China, one of the US's strongest research partners despite It All), and a presumptive ban on ALL OTHER international collab.

An end to any binding peer review process in funding. All review will be by Trump stooges, deciding what has scientific merit. This isn't the top headline evil thing about this rule change, but it means that even well-meaning, very careful scientific review boards can't try to evade censorship. JD Vance is essentially in charge of deciding whether your metabolic enzyme computational model can exist or not.

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I continue to maintain that the Australian combination of compulsory voting with ranked choice voting, is the greatest advancement in democracy in centuries.

Compulsory voting shifts the onus ensuring your access to the ballot box to the government. One Citizen, One Vote, No Matter How Remote.

It's hard to restrict the vote when everyone has to vote by law, and compulsory ranked choice voting gives a better median representation of national opinion.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

Over 90% of parents of visibly intersex children opt for cosmetic surgery on their infants.

The ones that don't experience medical violence then, likely experience it as a teenager.

I didn't.

I am very rare in that I did not experience medical violence.

Why? Because I learned what intersexuality was as a young age, and I actively fought against what doctors wanted to do to me. All the way down to legal research on what medical care minors can be forced into. I remember walking into that doctor's appointment with the state law written down that proved that if I did not consent they could not do surgery.

BUT

if you just grab a random book off the shelf and read it as is, what are you going to get? what if you're not on tumblr or twitter or tiktok or whatever. what if you don't look up interviews. what if you're not in fandom or don't know where to look for that extra information? what if you experience this creation in the most casual way possible?

what you experience in the finished product is the only thing everyone who picks it up will know. not what the cast members said, not what the writers said, not what the creator said wherever they said it whenever they said it. if you were in a vacuum with that thing, all you would have is the canonical text, not the bonuses

It's a yellow bittern! They are very creechur.

But since you asked for recs I have to get my usual recs out since I want everyone to listen to this stuff, so BRELAND, Tanner Adell, Blanco Brown, Reyna Roberts, and Willie Jones are all black country artists that blend a lot of rap and hiphop influence into their music which creates a really great vibe(especially since the white country artists doing this are just not anywhere near as good at it someone please stop Morgan Wallen every single one of his songs sounds exactly the same ahhhhh).

I have to plug Brittney Spencer, Shaboozey, and Tiera Kennedy too but those two do much more pure country, country/rock, and country/pop, and ofc I'd be remiss not to mention Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter album which is just a celebration of country and adjacent generes and black music and fusion stuff it's crazy just listen to the whole thing.

I also reccomend the Pony Up remix of Texas Hold 'Em but I hit the link limit.

GUITAR LADY <3

new rule, asking secunit is cheating

13 Years of Quilting by Julia Schulte

Why I like it: I loved a lot of the quilts in the sustainable category because of their resourcefulness and commitment to making scraps work. This one, cataloguing 13 years of quilting through a spiral of scraps placed carefully in a gradient, was especially appealing. I'm a huge fan of rainbow quilts in general, and though I doubt these scraps are in the order they were procured, I love that they take us on a journey.