The Arkansas Supreme Court upholds rejection of abortion rights petitions. Just keep digging, Republicans.
To infinity — and beyond! Nokia to extend 4G wireless to the Moon. My colleague Dan Jones reports.
After deciding he is the arbiter on who is truly Black, Trump now gets to decide who’s truly Jewish.
… history does not offer positive stories about political leaders who decide that they can evaluate the legitimacy of Jewish people and their families, suggesting that those who fail the evaluation should be cast out.
Trump is hosting a fundraiser for domestic terrorists who assaulted cops on Jan. 6
Michael Fanone, a former Washington, D.C., police officer who suffered a heart attack after being repeatedly tasered by one of Trump’s followers on Jan. 6, said Americans cannot afford to forget what happened that day. “Wake the fuck up, America,” he told HuffPost. “This is who Donald Trump is, a sick motherfucker who fetishizes violence committed on his behalf.”
I’d like to read Robert E. Howard. I sneered at those books and their fans during my prime teen science fiction and fantasy reading years. But I was so much older then — I’m younger than that now.
Also, today I learned that the Cimmerians were real.
… the business world has a well-worn playbook that they roll out whenever anything that might cause industry to behave even slightly less destructively is proposed. What’s more, we keep falling for it. Every time we try to have nice things, our bosses – and their well-paid Renfields – dust off their talking points from the last go-round, do a little madlibs-style search and replace, and bust it out again.
— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr, Corporate Bullshit
Court to cop: Someone observing all the laws is not “probable cause” for a search.. By Tim Cushing at Techdirt.
Tim Cushing at Techdirt: Age verification laws are just a path towards a full-on ban on porn, a proponent admits.
Mask bans disenfranchise millions of Americans with disabilities. Medical exemptions are nothing more than Band-aids
I’ve been masking consistently in public since 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began, because I have a kidney transplant and will take immunosuppressant medication for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, my lifesaving medication also makes me more susceptible to infectious diseases like measles, the flu, and Covid-19. Even when people like me are vaccinated against the virus, we are at higher risk of being infected and are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes, including hospitalization and death.
The legislation in Nassau County and elsewhere primarily targets people who wear masks to hide their identity while committing crimes or during public protests, specifically against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Masks are defined as any facial covering that disguises the face, and facial coverings worn for religious or health reasons are exempt. But people like me, who wear masks for health reasons, are disproportionally affected by these bans even when they include medical exemptions.
That’s because although the Nassau mask ban contains provisions for people who mask for medical reasons, it is up to the police to determine whether someone has a medical reason for masking if they are out in public. This means that enforcing the ban is subjective and will disproportionally impact Black people and people of color, who are more likely to be stopped by police and are also more likely to wear masks to prevent Covid. This is in part because Black and Latinx Americans are more cautious in their approach to the pandemic, reflecting the higher hospitalization and death rates in these communities. The Nassau mask ban as it is written is reminiscent of a “Stop and Frisk” law, which allows police to temporarily detain, question, and search people without a warrant.
This isn’t just localized to Nassau County; mask bans have been proposed or passed in multiple states, including North Carolina, Ohio, and California.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt: Ad revenue at Twitter is still in free fall two years into Musk’s reign.