Maison Dans La Foret

I like beautiful things, I like kindness, I like loveliness. I also enjoy a cup of tea any time of day.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Onion offers tips on how to politely engage with people who cage migrant children

“Recent incidents of Trump officials being confronted in public for their role in the administration’s separation and imprisonment of immigrant families have driven renewed concern about the lack of civility in U.S. politics. The Onion presents tips for staying civil in a debate about child prisons.”

Avoid unkind generalizations like equating the jailing of ethnic minorities with some malevolent form of fascism.

Recall that violently rejecting a tyrannical government goes against everything our forefathers believed in.

Make sure any protests are peaceful, silent, and completely out of sight of anyone who could actually affect government policy.

Give your political opponents the benefit of the doubt by letting this play out for 20 years and seeing if it gets any better on its own.

Realize that every pressing social issue is solved through civil discourse if you ignore virtually all of human history.

Avoid painting with a broad brush. Not everyone in favor of zero-tolerance immigration wants to see children in cages—it’s more likely that they just don’t care.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/27/the-onion-offers-tips-on-how-t.html

[wilwheaton]

“There may be some debate over how punctual the Senate needs to be in presidential advice and consent. There may be furious debate over the newly invented rule that presidents may not make certain appointments during election years because reasons. But it should be a fairly standard-issue bit of bipartisan common sense that, say, presidents who are under active investigation for acts of potential treason should not be granted unilateral power to make lifetime federal appointments–not until they are cleared of wrongdoing.”

— Presidents under active criminal investigation do not get to make lifetime court picks

[wilwheaton]

I love the phrase "Depression Lies", because it does, but do we have a similar phrase for anxiety? I was thinking "Anxiety Also Lies, but It Shouts When It Does and Also Makes You Think You're Dying". Kinda wordy, though. Since you're a writer, I thought you might have some ideas. Thanks!

I can get behind this. My fellow BoJack fans may appreciate something like “Anxiety is the Cantaloupe to Depression’s Honeydew”.

[memescomedy]

[wilwheaton]

you know in australia we have compulsory voting and preferential voting, two things i think america is in desperate need of (we also have torture islands - look up peter dutton, no, that one image isnt photoshopped)

I completely agree. America should make election day a federal holiday, make voting compulsory, make registration automatic, allow voting by mail, and make it as easy and effortless for all citizens to vote as possible.

And it will never happen, because Republicans know that they’ll lose in landslides everywhere if it does.

[wilwheaton]

[newblogisjacindaelena]

Cambridge by Tom Cadrin

[wilwheaton]

“There are only so many official channels for enforcing moral standards in American public life. One is elections, which happen pretty rarely, and, thanks to gerrymanders and the electoral college, frequently reward popular vote losers. Another is the law, where courts are increasingly stacked against the majority. Under those circumstances, shame is a potent weapon, and it’s little surprise that people invested in the status quo want those who can wield it to unilaterally disarm.”

—

Shame the Trumpers

Anyone who works in the Trump administration should never have a moment of peace in public for the rest of their miserable lives.

[i-hate-chick-fil-a]

FREE THEM

[wilwheaton]

This is child abuse.

[sua-sponte-deactivated20200331]

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

[argumate]

dude had guts, someone needs to update his Wikipedia page

[soundssimpleright]

that is honestly really awesome

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Zip Slip: a sneaky way to install malware using zip and other packing utilities

Packing files into archives like zips, tars, jars, wars, cpios, apks, rars and 7zs is a common way to keep important files and filesystem structures together when sharing them; it’s also a source of potentially dangerous malware attacks.

In a new paper the security research organization Snyk details an attack they call Zip Slip, which exploits a bug in thousands of archiving and de-archiving utilities, including ones from HP, Amazon, Apache and Pivotal.

Zip Slip is a “directory traversal” attack, which exploits lax checking during unpacking, allowing the attacker to craft an archive that drops files in arbitrary directories anywhere on your hard drive, even overwriting key components.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/06/zip-slip.html

[lioness--hart]

Depression: No do thing. Tired.

Me: Okay well. Maybe if I go to sleep super duper early, I’ll get a decent amount of sleep.

Insomnia: You Fool. You absolute goddamn idiot

[lioness--hart]

Insomnia: You Are Awake.

Me: Okay well. Maybe now I can get some stuff done.

Depression: You fool. You absolute goddamn idiot

[buggyeyes]

[npr]

White House Appeals Ruling That President Can't Block Twitter Followers

President Trump had blocked critics from his @realDonaldTrump account. But a ruling in May said that his account is "a public forum" and that his followers enjoy First Amendment guarantees.

President Trump can no longer block followers on his Twitter account based on their political views. 

[wilwheaton]

This is a good use of time and money, White House. You’re not occupied by a childish idiot at all.

[wilwheaton]

“The first thing everyone should understand is that Trump’s executive order was not a reversal, or a cave, or a capitulation. This crisis was caused by the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy, under which everyone crossing the border illegally, even those who present themselves to officials and say they are seeking asylum, is subject to criminal prosecution. That policy is still in place. As Trump said yesterday, “We are keeping a very powerful border and it continues to be a zero-tolerance. We have zero tolerance for people that enter our country illegally.” The goal of the executive order is to shift from detaining children and parents separately to detaining the families together. But this would still be a harsher system than it had been previously, in which a family seeking asylum would usually be released while their case moved through the system. That can take months or even years; those families would now be imprisoned for extended periods for the crime of crossing the border — a misdemeanor. And we should note that the administration doesn’t seem to have decided if or when it’s going to reunite the more than 2,300 children that have already been removed (likely more by now) with their parents.”

—

Don’t be fooled: Trump’s immigration policy is still incredibly cruel

And don’t be fooled by Melania’s “surprise” trip to a Potemkin Camp. They are cynically using a woman and a mother to try to soften the grotesque cruelty and child abuse that is being perpetrated by Trump and the Republicans.

[wilwheaton]

“Just like any large organization, the government has plenty of inefficiency and duplication that could be improved upon. But the fact that it’s being led by Mulvaney, fresh from his evisceration of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tells you that making things run more smoothly is not the primary goal. The real tell can be found in this New York Times article, which reports that the proposal “includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the Department of Health and Human Services and possibly include the word “welfare” in its title.” Why might they want that? The answer is that, as Republicans well know, since the 1960s the word “welfare” has been associated in the mind of white Americans with shiftless black people getting unearned benefits. Actual welfare — the cash assistance program now referred to as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — amounts to just $16.6 billion per year, or about four-tenths of one percent of the federal budget, an amount that has been frozen since 1996. Yet people continue to believe that we’re spending lavishly on welfare; in one 2014 poll, 58 percent of Americans said we spend too much on “welfare,” but when asked about “assistance to the poor,” only 16 percent said we were spending too much. So when a Republican administration sets out to brand nearly all safety net programs as “welfare,” we know exactly what it’s doing. It’s trying to mobilize racial resentment to delegitimize those programs as a way of setting the stage for future cuts.”

— Just as Republicans pretend to care about the deficit only until they get the opportunity to cut taxes and raise military spending, their concern about overbearing government bureaucracy turns out to be extremely selective.

[saywhat-politics]

[reagan-was-a-horrible-president]

Exactly.

If you didn’t vote in the last election because of reasons, then PLEASE vote this year and in 2020.

I know the Democrats are far from perfect, but Good God Almighty, they are not the evil bastards that the Republicans are.

[yeahiwasintheshit]

Racism

[wilwheaton]

You have to be deliberately obtuse, or in full support of Trump’s racism, to not be appalled by him.