A recent Supreme Court decision threatens a core democratic principle.
The Supreme Court dealt a massive blow to the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the United States with its April decision, Louisiana v. Callais, significantly weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That provision of the landmark legislation prohibited voting practices that were racially discriminatory. In 1982, a bipartisan coalition in Congress strengthened the law further by stipulating that plaintiffs only needed to demonstrate a discriminatory racial impact, rather than prove racist intent.
With Callais, the Supreme Court overturned Congress’s earlier judgement and now requires proof of racist intent rather than discriminatory effect, which raises the bar dramatically for the federal government to act. Within weeks, several Southern states quickly moved to redraw district maps, with legislatures in states such as Tennessee targeting Black-majority districts that long elected Black and Democratic legislators. Democrats warn that, as a result, one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group of Black lawmakers founded in 1971 in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, could lose their seats.
The decision threatens a core democratic principle, “one-man, one-vote,” that a very different Supreme Court entrenched through a series of landmark rulings between 1962 and 1964. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, whom Republican President Dwight Eisenhower appointed in 1953, those decisions rose from a rejection of the entrenched, often corrupt Southern electoral systems in which districts for state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives disproportionately favored sparsely populated white rural areas over more diverse (socially and politically) urban constituencies. The latter typically included larger Black populations and were more supportive of civil rights.
Partisan gerrymandering is almost as old as the United States itself.
For most of U.S. history, political parties have crafted districts designed to benefit their own interests. The term itself is named after Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1812 authorized a bizarre state senate district that looked like a salamander. Since the early 19th century, through the redistricting process that follows each new Census, voters have been packed into districts that would elect candidates from the party in power. Sometimes state officials in bipartisan states reached deals so that each side could enjoy the benefits of safe seats.
But partisan gerrymandering took on a distinct racial character in the South, where Democrats dominated. Liberal Democrats viewed redistricting reform as essential to advancing civil rights. Although their primary focus was the South, northern states such as New York and Illinois also maintained districts at the state and federal level that favored rural areas, bolstering conservative power.
By the 1950s, prominent northern Democratic politicians were calling for systematic change. The United States had been transformed by urbanization and industrialization, they argued, yet state legislatures kept district boundaries untouched. “The popular character of the House has been destroyed,” argued Minnesota Rep. Eugene McCarthy in 1952, “by the failure of the state legislatures to provide for Congressional districts of approximately the same population and by the practice of electing Congressmen at large.”
In 1958, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy wrote a New York Times column titled “Shame of the Cities” in which he said: “Of all the discriminations against the urban areas, the most fundamental and the most blatant is political: the apportionment of representation in our Legislatures and (to a lesser extent) in Congress has been either deliberately rigged or shamefully ignored so as to deny the cities and their voters that full and proportionate voice in government to which they are entitled. … At one time, in a then largely rural nation, legislative strength was heavily weighted in favor of rural areas. Though times have changed, many Legislatures have not.” A liberal coalition that included the AFL-CIO, the Americans for Democratic Action, the League of Women Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union championed reform.
But the conservative coalition of Southern Democratic committee chairmen and Midwestern Republicans who had controlled the chambers since the 1938 midterm elections blocked any legislative progress. In the U.S. House, some of the most notorious conservative Southern barons of the committee system counted on being reelected from districts with sparse numbers of voters, most of whom had little appetite for the civil rights movement that was shaking the region.
The responsibility for action ultimately fell to the federal courts. Chief Justice Warren had come to believe that equitable apportionment could have saved the nation “acute racial troubles” by assuring that every person’s vote carried equal weight. Although Black southerners had generally been disenfranchised under the Jim Crow system imposed after Reconstruction, those who had been able to register to vote were often at a disadvantage because of where they lived. Moreover, if the struggle for voting rights legislation was successful, the composition of districts would work against the political progress that would otherwise be made.
Within the Supreme Court, there had been strong opposition to intervening in anything connected to elections. The federal courts were wary of what Justice Felix Frankfurter famously called the “political thicket.” Because the Constitution left elections to the states, earlier justices had concluded that the court had no authority to step in. They also doubted whether the judiciary could define a clear, workable standard for the states to follow. If he and his colleagues attempted to resolve these thorny issues, warned Justice John Marshall Harlan II, Americans might even begin scrutinizing the “political backgrounds or ideologies” of the Supreme Court justices themselves.
But the pressure from the civil rights movement continued to mount. A coalition in Tennessee argued that the state had failed to reapportion seats for the lower chamber of the state legislature, the General Assembly, since 1901. Not only did the state constitution require reapportionment every 10 years, but demographic changes had also rendered the old district lines inequitable. Their lawyers argued that the districts violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment which deemed that states had to treat people the same way. Laws that discriminated on the basis of race were thus unconstitutional.
In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in Baker v. Carr that the courts could make decisions about these issues and legitimated the claims of the plaintiffs about the violation of the equal protection clause. Tennessee’s apportionment scheme violated the 14th Amendment because it diluted the vote of urban residents. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority (which included Warren as well as Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Tom C. Clark, and Potter Stewart), held that such disparities constituted a denial of equal protection. The court remanded the case, sending it back to the lower court for a final decision. Even so, the ruling became a landmark because it established that the court could intervene in apportionment disputes when citizens were denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment. Within months, over 30 suits were filed. “The rush through the door unlocked by Baker v. Carr,” observed one expert, “has been staggering.”
Baker v. Carr energized supporters of civil rights to demand more. Soon after the decision, the court’s chief opponent of federal intervention, Felix Frankfurter, retired following a stroke. Then-President Kennedy appointed Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to the court, a justice far more sympathetic to Baker v. Carr. The impact was immediate. A Georgia businessman, James O. Sanders, sued the state to overturn its county unit system, which systematically undermined Black political representation. A federal court agreed, declaring that the system could not be justified in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. Jimmy Carter, then a peanut farmer and former Navy engineer running for a seat in the state legislature, later recalled the decision and its aftermath as a turning point in Southern politics: “This was the major news item to be read and discussed at our peanut warehouse, at church, at Lions Club meetings, and in the small county newspapers.”
The next case shifted the focus from state legislatures to the federal government, centering on districts for the U.S. House of Representatives. In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), the court ruled that Georgia’s congressional districts were unconstitutional. Plaintiffs from the 5th District argued that their district had nearly the population of the state’s smallest, the 9th, yet both elected only one representative. This diluted the votes of 5th District residents. In a 6-3 decision, the Warren Court held that congressional districts must be drawn to be roughly equal in population so that each person’s vote carried the same weight. According to the majority, led by Justice Black, “It would defeat the principle solemnly embodied in the Great Compromise—equal representation in the House for equal numbers of people—for us to hold that, within the States, legislatures may draw the lines of congressional districts in such a way as to give some voters a greater voice in choosing a Congressman than others.”
Baker v. Carr legitimized judicial intervention in apportionment. Wesberry v. Sanders extended the “one-man, one vote” principle to districts for the U.S. House. In another 1964 case, Reynolds v. Sims, the court ruled that both chambers of state legislatures had to be determined according to population.
The revolution in judicial thinking meshed with the landmark legislation passed by the Democratic Congress in 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, that committed the federal government to ensuring that states did not violate the 15th Amendment, the Reconstruction amendment that protected the right of all (male) citizens to vote. As Black registration rapidly increased in the South after 1965, reapportioned districts that were drawn in response to the Supreme Court decisions ensured that the new votes would be treated the same way as white votes in rural communities.
Democrats also blocked efforts by congressional conservatives such as Virginia Democrat William Tuck, who attempted to pass legislation stripping the courts of their ability to intervene in apportionment cases. Although the measure won support in the House, it failed in the Senate. Liberals likewise blocked a proposed constitutional amendment from Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen that would have reversed the court decision’s rulings on state government. The American Jewish Congress opposed Dirksen’s proposal, arguing that the effort to reverse the Court’s decisions was an attack on “democratic principle.” Ultimately, Dirksen was defeated.
In 1969, in Allen v. State Board of Elections, the Supreme Court ruled that vote dilution fell within the scope of the Voting Rights Act. Under this interpretation, the Department of Justice gained authority under Section 5 to deal with inequitable districting in addition to the denial of the vote. Federal “preclearance” would be necessary for any changes to voting, even matters that appeared technical or procedural. Over the following decades, rural-dominated districts were dismantled, and the number of metropolitan and urban districts steadily increased.
By the end of the decade, the transformation of legislative representation was complete. It didn’t come as a surprise that Warren would later call Baker v. Carr the “most vital” decision of his tenure.
The legacy of the Warren Court is now hanging by a thread. The immense progress that had been made in the 1960s tackling the problem of systemic racism within the electoral system has lost massive ground. A series of Supreme Court decisions, as well as legislation and court decisions in red states, have expanded voting restrictions and are now leading to a dangerous acceleration of the redistricting wars where long-standing concerns about racial justice are losing their hold.
In addition to the obvious political ramifications of the new congressional maps, the erosion of representative values that these developments portend have already sent the country backwards in the struggle to make U.S. democracy whole.
In a move that left hundreds of longtime residents scrambling to find alternative housing, municipal construction crews reportedly demolished a local Black neighborhood Thursday, part of an ongoing city project to make room for nothing in particular. “For decades, this part of Fort Worth has languished as nothing more than a loving community for African American families and a bustling hub for Black-owned businesses,” said Mayor Mattie Parker, adding that the destruction of dozens of beloved restaurants, theaters, barbershops, and newspapers was an essential step toward creating more vacant lots that could sit empty behind fences for an indefinite length of time.
Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in
TLDR- Modern agriculture pollen is low in nutrients, and there aren’t enough wildflowers. Science has to develop vitamins to supplement the diets of agricultural bees. So plant some wildflowers for the wild bees near you.
Self-managed abortion (SMA) with pills is very medically safe and effective throughout early pregnancy, but there is a significant risk of criminalization in many U.S. states. While it is impossible to fully eliminate the risk of criminalization when having or planning to have an abortion at home, t
Leave no online footprint of searches or purchases. Digital Defense Fund’s abortion privacy guide is your go-to resource for this. Using private browsers, two-factor authentication, encrypted messaging, strong passwords, etc. is critical. Google searches have been presented as evidence in an SMA trial before. Do not leave a digital trail.
Use the medications properly to prevent interactions with healthcare providers. The pills are very effective, but they have to be used right. Carefully follow the instructions provided on the How to Use Abortion Pill website. Note that misoprostol tablets should always be taken by dissolving them under the tongue. Do NOT insert misoprostol vaginally if you are self-managing an abortion. While this is medically safe, it can leave incriminating pill remnants that can be detected in the vagina during a pelvic exam if you end up needing to seek medical care.
If it’s not an emergency but you need expert health advice, use a free calling service like Google Voice to call or text the Miscarriage + Abortion Hotline at 1-833-246-2632. Medical complications are very uncommon with abortion pills, but they’re not impossible. The M+A Hotline is safe to use and is staffed by trustworthy clinicians who volunteer their time to help those who choose SMA. Do not use your own phone number to call as this will create a record that is visible to your cell service provider.
Don’t disclose any information about SMA to emergency room staff if you do need to seek medical care. This is how most people who are arrested for SMA are reported. Healthcare providers are almost always who calls the police in cases of SMA criminalization. Contrary to popular belief, HIPAA does not protect your private health information from being shared with police if you are suspected of doing something that could be considered a crime. If you believe you need to seek urgent medical care, do not hesitate to go. Say “I think I’m having a miscarriage” and provide your symptoms. Do not mention any use of or purchase of abortion pills. There is no widely available test to detect misoprostol in your bloodstream. If you do not disclose it, there is no way for a medical provider to tell the difference between a medication abortion and a spontaneous miscarriage.
Do not talk to the cops. Period. Do. Not. Talk. To. The. Cops. If you are questioned by police you should state, “I am exercising my right to remain silent, and I wish to speak with an attorney.” Do not speak again or nod in response to a question. Contact the Repro Legal Helpline as soon as possible for expert legal advice: 1-844-868-2812. Do not agree to questioning or speak to any law enforcement official without a lawyer present.
For millions of people managing type 2 diabetes, mornings begin the same way — a needle, a dose, and a quiet mental note to do it all again
"For millions of people managing type 2 diabetes, mornings begin the same way — a needle, a dose, and a quiet mental note to do it all again tomorrow.
That routine just changed.
On March 26, 2026, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Awiqli (insulin icodec-abae), developed by Novo Nordisk, as the first and only once-weekly basal insulin ever approved for adults with type 2 diabetes in the United States.
This is not a minor update to an existing drug.
It is the first entirely new class of basal insulin to reach U.S. patients in more than two decades.
Instead of injecting insulin every single day, people with type 2 diabetes using Awiqli will only need one shot per week, on the same day, every week.
That means reducing from 365 injections a year down to just 52.
For anyone who has ever felt the weight of that daily ritual — the anxiety of forgetting, the physical discomfort, the constant reminder that their body needs help — this approval represents something much bigger than a dosing schedule.
It represents relief.
How the Drug Actually Works
Understanding why this injection lasts a full week requires a quick look inside the body.
Most traditional basal insulins are absorbed into the bloodstream and begin breaking down within 24 hours, which is why patients need a fresh dose every day to maintain stable blood sugar levels.
Awiqli works differently.
Its active ingredient, insulin icodec-abae, is engineered to loosely attach to a blood protein called albumin, which is found naturally and abundantly in the bloodstream.
This attachment creates a slow-release reservoir.
Instead of flooding the system and fading fast, the insulin releases gradually and consistently over an entire seven-day period, keeping blood sugar in a healthy range around the clock...
The FDA reviewed and ultimately declined to approve it for people with type 1 diabetes, citing concerns about a modestly increased risk of hypoglycemia in that population specifically.
Some regulatory agencies in other countries, including the European Union, Canada, Australia, and Japan, have approved Awiqli for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but for now the U.S. approval is limited to type 2...
What Comes Next
Awiqli is not standing alone in this space for long.
Eli Lilly is developing its own once-weekly basal insulin, called efsitora alfa, which is currently in late-stage clinical trials.
If that drug also earns FDA approval, it would give patients and doctors two once-weekly options to choose from, allowing for personalized decisions based on a patient’s health profile, insurance coverage, and individual response.
The broader direction of travel in diabetes care is unmistakable.
Fewer injections, smarter formulations, and better integration with digital tools like continuous glucose monitors and insulin-tracking apps are all converging toward a future where managing diabetes requires less daily mental effort without becoming any less medically precise...
A Small Shot With Large Implications
It is easy to look at a once-weekly injection and see only a scheduling change.
But the science behind Awiqli, the scale of the ONWARDS trials, and the consistent satisfaction reported by patients all point toward something that matters far more than convenience.
Diabetes management has always asked a lot of people.
It asks for daily vigilance, daily discipline, and a daily willingness to confront one’s own condition, sometimes in uncomfortable or inconvenient circumstances.
Anything that reduces that load, without reducing the quality of care, is worth taking seriously.
For the more than 37 million Americans living with diabetes, and the hundreds of millions more around the world, a simpler weekly routine could mean the difference between a treatment plan that works on paper and one that actually works in a person’s life.
That is the real significance of what the FDA approved on March 26, 2026.
Not just a new drug.
A new way of keeping people healthy, one week at a time."
For those of you with android devices, you can use the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) standalone app control program to get rid of all the bloatware, data mining, and AI crap - no coding needed!
There are also Android-based alternatives like GrapheneOS and LineageOS, which are pretty easy to install. These are unfortunately available for a more limited range of devices (Graphene is ironically Pixel only, while Lineage supports more), but it's very worth checking out whether one of them might work for your phone.
GrapheneOS is a security and privacy focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.
LineageOS Android Distribution
Typing this from Graphene now, in fact. But, both of those take the Android Open Source Project, without all the bloatware--and largely de-Google the whole thing. They give you much more control over privacy and what the apps you choose to install can do and access on your phone.
I know Graphene sandboxes everything, including the optionally installed Google Play Services which a lot of apps unfortunately require to run. (Lineage uses an alternative to Play Services instead.) So, you can install what would normally be unacceptably intrusive apps and just lock them away from pulling any funny shit with your data, or phoning home. Including the couple of Google things I do still keep around.
I also prefer running much more transparent, privacy-respecting open source apps where possible. Besides the transparency, I'd rather avoid the shitty tech corps entirely where I can. There are pretty good alternatives available for a lot of the usual suspects.
AlternativeTo lets you find apps and software for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android Tablets, Web Apps, Online, Windows Tab
An alternative app store:
F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy
A lot of the time when I point out that some right-wing policy is proven to not achieve the thing it purports to have as a goal, people rightly point out that the real goal is the negative outcomes that do happen.
Which is correct!
But this is often framed as me approaching the right wing naively by the respondent.
That's not the case at all. I know they're evil. The goal is to demonstrate that they're lying by exposing the way the rhetoric fails to line up with reality.
This has to be ongoing work because someone new has their political awakening every day. Every day, someone needs to learn that the right wing position is wrong on all levels, not just the obvious ones.
there will be people out there who still think the war on drugs (as the absolute first thing that comes to mind) is a legitimate social cause against an antisocial blight on society. if you come out the gate with (the very true statement) that it's actually been a deliberate campaign to target minorities and other undesirable groups to the ruling class, you're going to sound like a clueless conspiracy nut
whereas if you come with a very defensible, statistically supported point of "it doesn't work and has never worked" you can open the door to the follow up question of "why did the government do it in the first place, and (in many cases) why are they still doing it?"
Demonstrate that the people enforcing the policy have everything they need to know it doesn't work
Provide the context of what the policy achieves in the absence of its "intended" outcome.
Remind people that the purpose of a system is what it does.
Then, instead of being a non-sequitur claim you're just pulling out of thin air, the conclusion is the most reasonable way to assemble the provided puzzle pieces.
random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google
I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.
also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo
also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)
i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:
Search Engines
Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)
WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.
Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.
Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.
Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.
Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.
Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.
Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.
Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.
MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.
Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.
Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.
https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.
https://www.mojeek.com/
https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.
https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.
https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.
https://yep.com/ is a crawler
https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx
https://www.dogpile.com/
https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)
https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?
https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?
https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.
Other Searchers
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine
March 2026 was the first month that renewables generated more power than natural gas in the US. In fact, fossil fuels generated less energy this past March than they had in any March for the previous 25 years.
As clean energy continues to grow (over 90% of energy capacity added to the US grid this year will be renewables) we will see more and more months like this.
vaporwave
ellievsbear
pixelskylines
jbbartram-illu
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
dededos
2087
annaxmalina
yousharknotpass
