The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

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Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

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It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

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Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

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When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

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If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

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Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

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Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

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These aren't just revelations about the fallback plans for things like a nuclear strike - they are a meticulously maintained collection of emergency authorities that the administrative branch claims it is entitled to.

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These authorities are analyzed in legal memos that give the president to unilaterally declare an emergency "imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives."

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The PEADs were incredibly well-kept secrets, known only through fragmentary redaction failures, appropriaions and declassifications...Until Trump starting bragging on 'em:

"I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about." -Donald J Trump

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PEADs are particularly ominous given how many non-secret emergency powers the president has - more than 100 powers granted by Congress and never rescinded, dating back to the Civil War, from freezing bank accounts to deploying troops domestically.

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The remix culture of the early 2000s left an indelible impression on me, an enduring delight in the power of whimsy, juxtaposition, virtuosity and ingenuity - and the ability of strangers all over the world to collaborate without any explicit coordination.

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The recent Bernie-mittens meme was a sterling example of this, tickling me right to my core, and I just happened on an especially delightful apex example of the form: @ToastedShoes's video of Sanders incorporated into eight AAA

Toasted Shoes got @JoeMashups to create a 3D model of Sanders, then tapped a bunch of different mashup artists to turn the Sanders sprite into playable characters in the games, showing them off in a narrated video.

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I'm not much of a fan of video-game streamers' narration, and I confess that I found the video more entertaining without the narration, but to each their own - Shoes was clearly enjoying himself, as were the commenters on the video.

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They had a lot to be pleased by.

Sanders as a Sith Lord in Star Wars Battlefront 2:

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Made by NickHintonn 2 apr. 2018

Here’s a thread about The Black Tom explosion: a terrorist attack on American soil and major event in US history. However, no one has heard of it and I believe it’s proof that our timeline may be changing.

On July 30th, 1916, in Jersey City, German agents destroyed American ammunition supplies by setting them on fire. The incident is famous for causing damage to the Statue of Liberty.

The fires caused the ammunition supplies to explode, lodging fragments in buildings miles away including the Statue of Liberty and the clock tower of The Jersey Journal, stopping the clock at 2:12 am.

The explosion caused windows to shatter as far as 25 miles away, including thousands in lower Manhattan. Some window panes in Times Square were shattered. Even stained glass windows in St. Patrick's Church were destroyed.

The explosion was so strong is registered as a 5.5 earthquake on the Richter scale. It could be felt as far away as Philadelphia. The explosion cracked the outer wall of Jersey City's City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge was shaken. People as far away as Maryland were woken up.

Today is the 130th anniversary of the #WoundedKneeMassacre. On December 29, 1890, the 7th Cavalry surrounded a peaceful encampment of Lakota with Hotchkiss guns and slaughtered ~300. They were mostly women and children.

Those killed at Wounded Knee were led by Mniconjou Chief Spotted Elk, who was ill. Many were followers of Hunkpapa Chief Sitting Bull who was assassinated 14 days prior. They were invited to seek refuge with Oglala Chief Red Cloud at Pine Ridge. They were hungry, tired & cold.

The soldiers weren’t satisfied with gunning down the encampment. They chased down those who escaped, including little children & their grandmothers, for miles. Some ran all the way back to the Cheyenne River Reservation, through the night in the freezing cold, with bullet wounds.

Charles Eastman, the 1st western educated Oceti Sakowin (Dakota Sioux) physician, was at Pine Ridge during the #WoundedKneeMassacre. It was right after Christmas. A banner hanging over the wounded said, ‘Peace on Earth.’ The horrors Dr. Eastman saw that day changed him forever.

Those massacred at Wounded Knee were callously thrown into a mass grave. Soldiers proudly posed for photos with their corpses. They were awarded Medals of Honor for their part in the slaughter. Those Medals have never been rescinded, despite public outcry.

#BlackHistoryMonth In the Navy, I was fortunate to serve at Commander Cruiser Destroyer Group 2(CCDG2). I reported to duty in 1981 as Radioman Seaman Apprentice(RMSA), and served through 1985 in the communications division achieving the rank of Petty Officer 2nd Class(RM2/SW) /1

This was my first duty assignment. But my first is not important as the first African-American who served as CCDG2's Commanding Officer prior to my arrival, Rear Admiral Samuel L. Gravely, Jr. He was a trailblazer. He was commissioned an Ensign on November 14, 1944. /2

He enlisted and then became one of the first commissioned African-American officers in the US Navy. He was denied housing and even jailed for impersonating an officer. He withstood a cavalcade of abuse and racism and still managed to rise through the ranks of the Navy. /3

He became the first to serve under combat conditions during WW2. He served during the Korean & Vietnam War. He was the first to command a fighting vessel, and commander of the 3rd fleet. He served as Communications officer on the USS IOWA BB-61 /4

He served as the first African-American to command (USS Theodore E. Chandler (DD 717)); command a major warship (USS Jouett (DLG 29)) - and was the first African-American to achieve the rank of Captain in 1967. /5

Navigation in Ancient India

#LongThread

Indian civilization has been without a break for the last few millennia. This means there have been external connections and indigenous maritime assets.

Among the remains, the maritime assets archaeology are much prized and cited, a dock being the most prized. It also precludes the requirement of knowledge of the seas i.e. a compass.

The very word Navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word ‘Navgatih’. The word navy is also derived from Sanskrit ‘Nou’.

There were Sanskrit terms for many parts of a ship. The ship’s anchor was known as Nava-Bandhan-Kilaha which literally means ‘a nail to tie up a ship’. The sail was called Vata Vastra, which means ‘wind-cloth’.

It's now over half a century since 1970, and I'm starting to wonder if we should bring back its concept of gracious modern living...

You see we've grown so used to Swedish-style modernism that we've sort of forgotten that maximalism, rather than minimalism, was once the sign of a cultured abode.

The 1970s in many ways reached back to the rich ideas of Victorian decor: heavy, autumnal and cluttered. Home was meant to be a baroque and sensual experience, rather than a 'machine for living in.'

Gaudy was certainly in by 1970: colour choices for interior design were rich and varied, with every room becoming a boutique of signature design.

Experimentation and adventurism were also coming to the fore: now we had landed on the Moon surely we should start to live like astronauts on Earth.