SmokeInFog

The conspiracies are true — a small group of elites set the agenda for the country.

They're billionaires, politicians, judges and more. And they meet at private camp Bohemian Grove.

The membership is secret, but Daniel Boguslaw came to us with a full list of everyone involved.

Turns out the coordination of Project 2025 was begun at the Bohemian Grove

First, if this is not the right community for this I apologize.

I don't know if anybody else on midwest.social has been experiencing this issue but I wanted to let someone know about it. If I'm browsing via desktop browser or Voyager and then stop for a significant amount of time (I haven't tried to dial this in; the web dev part of me expects it to happen with as little as 15 min inactivity, but I've really only noted it after an hour or more of inactivity). If I want to refresh and see the latest posts, it fails to load them. Doesn't matter how many times I refresh, nada. Sometimes logging in and out helps but definitely a minority of tries. What almost always works, though, is loading my profile first. If I do that and then go back to home I'll then get an updated list of posts.

This channel popped into my feed. Checked out some of their content and was impressed

From pardoning insurrectionists to dismantling prevention programs, Trump and his allies are building a culture where violence is rewarded and opposition is punished.

From today's Development Blog update:

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And just as exciting is the announcement of our very own Valheim board game! Our friends at MOOD Publishing – who have also developed board games such as Deep Rock Galactic and Battle of Gods – have done an incredible job with this, and we really couldn’t have left the task in more capable hands. You can find out more about the board game by signing up to its Gamefound page, and there might even be something extra in it for you if you do…

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Over the past week or so there has been a serious spam problem hitting mastodon and rest of the fediverse especially misskey over on the japanese side of things and the story behind it is absolutely wild.

The average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers.

Scientists long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at Columbia and Rutgers universities did their calculations they never knew how many or what kind. Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per liter, averaging at around 240,000 according to a study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These are particles that are less than a micron in size. There are 25,400 microns — also called micrometers because it is a millionth of a meter — in an inch. A human hair is about 83 microns wide.

Previous studies have looked at slightly bigger microplastics that range from the visible 5 millimeters, less than a quarter of an inch, to one micron. About 10 to 100 times more nanoplastics than microplastics were discovered in bottled water, the study found.

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Offensive vs. Defensive Nationalism

This conflict shows a harmful confusion, among the Russians and their supporters, between the state as a nation in the ethnic sense and the state as an administrative entity.

A state that wants to base its legitimacy on cultural unity must be small; it is otherwise doomed to meet the hostility of others. A Francophone Swiss citizen, although culturally linked to his or her language, does not aspire to belong to France, and France does not try to invade French-speaking Switzerland under this pretext. Further, national identities can change quickly: Francophone Belgians have a different identity from French people. France itself went through an operation of internal colonialism to destroy Provençal, Languedoc, Picard, Savoyard, Breton, and other cultures and eradicate their languages under a centralized identity. Nationality is never defined and never fixed; administration is.

Cultural unity can make sense, but only in the form of something reduced such as a city-state –I would even go so far as to say that a state only works well in this way. In this case, nationalism is defensive — Catalan, Basque or Christian Lebanese — but in the case of a large state like Russia, nationalism becomes offensive. Notice that under the Pax Romana or the Pax Ottomana, there were no large states, but city-states gathered in an empire whose role was distant. But there is loose empire and rigid nation-state like empire, the latter being represented by Russia .

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Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20231222185134/https://www.npr.org/2023/12/22/1221128897/masha-gessen-essay-israel-gaza-germany-hannah-arendt-prize

Prominent Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen received a prestigious award for political thought over the weekend, in a ceremony that almost didn't happen due to backlash over their recent writings on Israel-Gaza.

Israel's air-and-ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 20,000 people in the 10 weeks since the Hamas-led attack on Israel killed some 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage.

Gessen, who is Jewish and whose family lost loved ones in the Holocaust, has been criticized for a New Yorker essay published earlier this month in which they likened the Gaza Strip to the WWII-era ghettos that Nazis developed to segregate and control Jewish people in occupied Europe.

Gessen argues in the essay that treating the Holocaust as a "singular event," unlike anything that has occurred before or after in history, not only is incorrect but makes it impossible to learn lessons from the Holocaust that are needed to prevent future genocides.

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cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/6666536

(CNN) — An Ohio woman who had sought treatment at a hospital before suffering a miscarriage and passing her nonviable fetus in her bathroom now faces a criminal charge, her attorney told CNN.

Brittany Watts, 33, of Warren, has been charged with felony abuse of a corpse, Trumbull County court records show.

“Ms. Watts suffered a tragic and dangerous miscarriage that jeopardized her own life. Rather than focusing on healing physically and emotionally, she was arrested and charged with a felony,” her attorney, Traci Timko, told CNN in an email.

“Ms. Watts’ case is pending before the Trumbull County Grand Jury. I have advised her not to speak publicly until the criminal matter has resolved.”

Though a coroner’s office report said the fetus was not viable and had died in the womb, Watts’ case highlights the extent to which prosecutors can charge a woman whose pregnancy has ended – whether by abortion or miscarriage.

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