That is so pretty!

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me misprogrammed bots making surrealistic space for violence in America – now with kitties!

I pray whatever gods may be spare us from such a fate.

Exactly!

When Trump loses the coming election, a peaceful transfer of power should go from Biden to Harris, but Trump has worked to dismantle norms such that we must now expect that he will contest the results, tell his supporters he won, and worry about those angry supporters being goaded into attacks on poll workers, judges, Congress, and federal buildings.

Vance is already feigning ignorance of how he and Trump create violence.
Excerpt of Vance/Bash kerfuffle (page is not the full conversation):

… You accused me of causing a bomb threat. Doesn’t that mean I should shut up about the residents of Springfield? Don’t you realize you’re engaged in basic propaganda to silence the concerns of American citizens?

DANA BASH, CNN: I was quoting the actual mayor of Springfield, Ohio, who, after the bomb threats, was begging federal officials to stop putting negative attention on his city. I’m not talking about the policies…

They are making a peaceful transfer more difficult by telling lies, spurring on their most violent supporters, and then denying all culpability. Sadly, doing so may spread from their fanatics to a larger population as evinced by yet-another-gunman-incident.

The agent fired four to six rounds, a Secret Service official said. The suspect then fled. A witness who took a picture of the suspect’s vehicle and license plate number provided it to law enforcement officers.

Per CNN, Martin County Sheriff William D. Snyder says they arrested the guy in that vehicle:

Snyder said his agency “flooded” Interstate 95 and closed a large swatch of the highway before eventually safely stopping the suspect vehicle.

“I have a clear understanding from investigators that we actually do have the suspect that they’re looking for in Palm Beach County,” Snyder said.

I’m fine with removing the Audubon name from any group – not because of John Audubon himself, but because the current Audubon Society seems to be an unscrupulous, anti-union, money-grubbing, greenwashing mess.

Yes. The story here is straight from Associated Press, but I looked around and found a few more details in a Telegraph article:

But he woman’s doctor told police that the defendant had tested positive with a rapid test before telling him that she “certainly won’t let herself be locked up” after the result.

Instead she left her apartment and talked to people without a mask, ignoring her mandatory quarantine and positive test.

Note they say MANDATORY quarantine. At the end of the article they explain that Austria’s far right party, Freedom Party, is hyper-anti-vax, expected to win upcoming elections:

Its manifesto has promised a pardon for anyone convicted of breaching coronavirus rules and to repay any fines imposed during the pandemic.

The manifesto says coronavirus regulations were encroachments on fundamental rights “accompanied by unprecedented indoctrination and brainwashing.”

On a personal note, I regret missing the first night, which had several greats, starting with The Battle of Algiers, which moved me. I would have liked to hear the guest discussion on it.

At just over 1/2 hour, Night and Fog is a must-watch (but also triggering).

Of the other upcoming movies I’ve happened to see in the past, I highly recommend: The Fog of War, The Tin Drum, The Murder of Fred Hampton, and if you don’t mind subtitles, High and Low, and The Passion of Joan of Arc.

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a spider’s web with a red light that attracts male fireflies to come have a good time at the web bordello

Reminds me of the incident in February where a waymo tried to get through a bunch of street revelers, and their response was to set it on fire. From the old pcmag story :

San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson noted that it had tallied 55 incidents where self-driving vehicles had interfered with rescue operations in the city.

Edit: unrelated to above quote, pc mag also says:

In some cases, residents have put orange cones on the hoods of cars, which makes them temporarily immobile.

(see also the autopian story it references)

Reminder that Palantir is the same company whose bosses are deep in bed with AmericaPAC – which got big write-ups (link is to one comment, but you can read more there and lots of places) because Elon Musk is gathering voter data seemingly for that PAC to target swing state voters with canvassing efforts.

This is early in the story so there will be more news later. The key piece reported on thus far is a 271-page document based on publicly available information about JD Vance and identified as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” There’s also a partial report on Marco Rubio, who’d been a potential VP pick.

The Trump campaign is thinking Iran is to blame.

I looked for the WaPo URL and somehow didn’t see this post. I even made my own because I thought this story was important – but I deleted it once I saw it was here.

The New Republic also covered it. In summary:

The Egyptian government may have given $10 million to Donald Trump in 2017, violating U.S. law—but the investigation into the payment was squashed by Attorney General William Barr.

Here’s the bits from WaPo that stood out to me:

Five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, a manager at a bank branch in Cairo received an unusual letter from an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service. It asked the bank to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million from the organization’s account — all in cash.

Federal investigators learned of the withdrawal, which has not been previously reported, early in 2019. The discovery intensified a secret criminal investigation that had begun two years earlier…

Barr directed Jessie Liu, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in D.C., to personally examine the classified intelligence to evaluate if further investigation was warranted. Barr later instructed FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on pursuing Trump’s records, according to people familiar with the exchange. It is unclear what if any actions Wray, who was also appointed by Trump, took in response.

The Post investigation reveals that investigators identified a cash withdrawal in Cairo of $9,998,000 — nearly identical to the amount described in the intelligence, as well as to the amount Trump had given his campaign weeks earlier. A key theory investigators pursued, based on intelligence and on international money transfers, was that Trump was willing to provide the funds to his campaign in October 2016 because he expected to be repaid by Sisi, according to people familiar with the probe.

Trump’s attorney general did not order the case closed, according to multiple people with knowledge of the events, but his instructions to Liu and, later, his selections to replace her, helped steer it to that end.

As the Mueller team got going, investigators focused on how at the time candidate Trump met with Sisi in 2016, Trump’s campaign had been running low on funds. They learned through interviews with the candidate’s closest advisers that they had pleaded with Trump to write a check to his campaign for a final blitz of television ads. Trump repeatedly declined — until Oct. 28, roughly five weeks after the meeting with Sisi, when he announced the $10 million infusion.

Sometime after her June meetings with the FBI, Liu met with Barr to discuss the Egypt case. He urged her to personally review the underlying information from the CIA that had prompted the opening of the criminal investigation two years earlier, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The case was sensitive, Barr told her, and she needed to reach her own conclusions about the merits of further investigative steps, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Afterward, and after conferring with Barr again, Liu expressed hesitancy to FBI agents and her deputies about the proposal to subpoena Trump’s bank records, according to people familiar with the case. It felt to some that she had made a 180-degree turn, these people said.

By late 2019, Liu’s office was poised to make sentencing recommendations for high-profile senior Trump advisers it had prosecuted, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone — cases that could tarnish Trump and his campaign. That December, the White House nominated Liu to be an assistant secretary of the Treasury Department.

Barr seized the moment to make a change. Breaking with the tradition of allowing White House nominees to remain in their current posts until confirmed for new ones, he ordered Liu in early January 2020 to step down by the end of the month, people with knowledge of the matter said. The White House later withdrew Liu’s nomination.

Barr replaced Liu with Shea, and then four months later replaced Shea with former Navy intelligence officer Sherwin.

On June 7, he sent an email to the head of the FBI’s Washington field office. The subject line of the email, which was reviewed by The Post, read: “Egypt Investigation.”

“Based upon review of this investigation,” Sherwin began, his office would be “closing the above matter” because neither an indictment nor a conviction was likely.

See also this 2020 piece: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics/trump-campaign-donation-investigation/index.html

Well he liked Blade, so I’m guessing his issue isn’t with comics in general.

Do you spend those 2 hours watching something with more ‘substance’ or do you do something else entirely – like play with your kids or read up on investment trends? For the time you do choose to use for passively consuming entertainment, is it in the medium of: books, tv, podcasts, music streams, or what? Regardless of medium, what sort of content is it (documentary, romance, action, op/ed, true crime, sci/fi, real-tech, instructional)?

studios being run by business vultures wanting short term massive returns only, even if it means no longer making anything else but trend chasing mega films

Two things on that:

• I’ve heard studios now count on international deals so movies must shy away from anything that would get them banned in the major markets
• the current age of cinema reminds me a bit of the precursor to the great 1970s film revolution where studios weren’t making enough money, so they started letting anyone and everyone take a shot at making movies and lo! the public suddenly had a wide variety of all kinds of things to watch

I’m not sure we ever lost that variety, but no longer have the constraint of theater-only viewing that gets people to all see the same set of movies at the same time such that ‘different’ movies (like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest or Star Wars as well as Smokey and the Bandit) were all getting attention and conversation at the same time.

Now we have streaming from services and we can wait to watch movies until they become available online, so many films miss the box-office and never get the hype they deserve because only the biggest have publicity junkets promoting them online and on chat-TV. So maybe the critic’s actual issue is that – as a paid critic – he’s forced to watch the publicized flicks designed not-to-offend and doesn’t have the time to find all the other movies going under the radar.

I’m also not an expert, but that was my thought, too.

More than that, even if a tail is undamaged, including it is not giving useful imformation because tail size can vary out of proportion to the main body and is pretty standard for other animals as well. For example, no one is measuring a horse to include the tail length, nor a dog, cat, and generally not a bird, either.

That said, I expect an news story about alligators on the golf course or catching invasive snakes to measure the whole body for the NEWS story and let the experts worry about the booper2pooper length in their own space.

Nah, he’s read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and/or subscribes to Suber’s ideas in The Power of Film and is doing a mental checklist of what Marvel lacks.

Marvel hits the main points of a Hero story most of the time – where we have a Hero who comes from one place, goes ‘adventuring’ elsewhere and ends up doing a ‘thing’ that benefits the ordinary folks – but the frequency of needing a HERO over and over, and the escalation of what’s at stake (the whole world, the galaxy, universe, multi-verse, existence itself) means that after you’ve seen a few Marvel movies, the characters aren’t doing things that are new or different from what they did in other movies. Saving ‘normies’ is their day-job. Yeah, the path is different each time, but we keep seeing the same Heroes and most of them aren’t getting transformed by the journey and there are too many cases where the ‘sacrifice’ they make doesn’t have any real choice involved (if you can opt walk away from the drama then staying or doing ‘X’ is a sacrifice, but it’s no sacrifice if leaving means you die anyway).

Suber suggests that a hero often has to GO AWAY at the end of the story. The normies are happy for help, but then they want to get back to raising their kids and the Hero is not good for that. I like that idea. More than that, I think that is the critic’s actual complaint. He sees this as another story in the same universe (multiverse) with the same characters and he wants something new rather than something comfortably familiar – and that’s HIS problem because lots of us would like more stories about the Heroes we’ve come to know and love.

If it matters, my favorite Marvel story is the Loki TV series. It hits many of the expected markers and both the lead-up to- and the actual-ending both really resonated for me.

What really struck me was that he compared Deadpool & Wolverine to Blade?! So… Blade is the movie with “discernable purpose” and/or “artistic ambitions”? I mean, I liked Blade, but if the complaint is that Marvel movies aren’t Citizen Kane, then Blade seems a weak comparison. So where does he draw the line?