US FCC approves launch of a satellite outside of its own regulatory scope that could alter international access to the night sky or even night-time at all.
A controversial new ruling from the Federal Communications Commission leaves no one responsible for regulating light pollution and other ill
A “space mirror” test satellite meant to beam sunlight and turn night into day on targeted swaths of Earth just received approval to proceed—and astronomers are aghast. The satellite, called Eärendil-1 and built by the California-based startup Reflect Orbital, would be the first of some 50,000 similar spacecraft the company hopes to launch by 2035. Critics say such plans are wholly unacceptable because light pollution from so many large, bright satellites would radically degrade views of the night sky.
Eärendil-1’s formal approval to proceed came last week from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). That ruling addressed not only Reflect Orbital’s proposal but also more than 1,800 public comments expressing concerns about the project’s potential impact on the night sky and Earth’s orbital environment. To these objections, the FCC had one response: that’s not our problem.
Reflect Orbital’s sunny proposition is to provide “sunlight on demand” for solar power plants, emergency search and rescue operations, and round-the-clock construction projects. Once launched, Eärendil-1 would deploy an 18-meter-wide steerable mirror to demonstrate that technological feat; anyone or anything in the path of its beam would see the satellite as a glaring dot shining up to four times brighter than a full moon. [….]
Lawler and many other scientists are concerned about Reflect Orbital and Eärendil-1 for a few reasons. Whether for people, wildlife or astronomical observatories, the beam from this single test satellite is far from innocuous. Directly viewing it through a telescope, for example, could permanently damage eyes and sensors alike. And even outside the direct beam, the scattering of its photons through the atmosphere would create a still-bright smudge of light pollution in the surrounding night sky
Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About (and You Are Good), layin’ down the truth as per usual on American Hysteria (emphasis mine)
“[Just looking at it from the cultural vantage point I have, I think that pop religion and mainstream religion in America is informed more by American culture than by doctrine a lot of the time. And so you have kind of […] American Evangelism and the sort of American New Age movement starting to rise at about the same time in the 70s and becoming like politically ascendant today. Like, there's a lot of essential oils in the White House as well as everything else going in shortly. And so I think that, like, American sort of New Age philosophies and quite a lot of American Christianity is fundamentally based on the idea that I deserve to get what I want and anyone who gets in my way is the devil.”
And then later:
“You know what's amazing is that, like, the best scam that never goes out of business is teaching people how to become rich by teaching classes where they have to pay you money that you wouldn't need if you were so rich to begin with,” says Sarah. “Tale as old as time!” affirmed Chelsea.
From American Hysteria: Chicken Soup for the Soul pt. 1 with Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About, on Apple Podcasts Jan 13, 2025
(That’s the link from Chelsea Weber Smith’s website)
I shared this with two people yesterday, while i was taking a class on BDSM negotiation, so maybe Tumblr needs it too?
Thing is: this is about sex and intimacy… but consent also refers to complying with political movements and group pressure. So it’s worth thinking about. There will be things we will be willing to consent to, or things we’ll be unwilling to do but consent to anyway. And things we’ll be coerced to do. So it’s worth thinking about.
And also… fascists and autocrats and the far right don’t like negotiation and collaboration and nuance. They like binaries like Yes - No, or Mine - Off Limits.
In fact, this sort of considerate nuance about consent probably falls under what they label Obscenity and Pornography.
Fight fascism. Be nuanced, and experience joy and connection!
Consent is about negotiation.
Consent 101 is Enthusiastic Yes and all else is No.
Gold standard, yes?
Except for people with Responsive Desire or who are on the Asexual spectrum or who like the bonding aspects of intimacy.
When I don’t fear the consequences of saying yes OR saying no.
When saying no means missing out on something I want.
Willing consent:
When I care about you, though I may not desire you (right now).
When I fear or dread the consequences of saying no and I don’t fear the consequences of saying yes. (E.g., “If I say no, it will hurt their feelings, and if I say yes, they’ll be happy and the sex will be just fine.”)
When I expect that desire will begin after I say yes.
Beyond willing consent, I think there are some more problematic experiences of consent, which I’ll describe, to help differentiate them from this thing I want to call “willing consent.”
Unwilling consent:
When I fear the consequences of saying no more than I fear the consequences of saying yes. (E.g, “If I say no, their feelings will be hurt, and if I say yes they’ll be glad… though the sex will not be something I’m comfortable with, physically and/or emotionally… but I’m used to prioritizing my partner’s comfort and convenience over mine, so…”)
When I feel not just an absence of desire but an absence of desire for desire.
When I hope that by saying yes, you will stop bothering me, or that if I say no you’ll only keep on trying to persuade me—i.e., when I’m exhausted from trying to defend my “no.”
I would call unwilling consent “consent in name only.” It’s consent because the person says “yes,” and so technically, legally, somebody could make a case that it was “consensual.”
But is this the kind of sex you want to be having? Do you want your partner drag themselves unwillingly to the bed because they’d rather say yes rather than keep fighting to protect their no? In short, is that really sex worth having? Why not just masturbate on your own and then snuggle with your certain special someone, rather than pressure them into something they’re really not interested in doing? I ask these questions of the person whose partner is unwilling.
Coerced consent:
When you threaten me with harmful consequences if I say no.
When I feel I’ll be hurt if I say yes, but I’ll be hurt more if I say no
When saying yes means experiencing something I actively dread.
Now it’s perfectly legitimate to say that coerced consent is no consent at all. And yet I personally know of a case where the jury had to decide whether or not it constituted “consent” that a woman who had been raped had asked the perpetrator at least to use a condom.
“Of course that’s not consent,” you think, but it is a complicated question, legally. And I think a lot of consent education is more or less instructions in how to “get consent” from someone—“make sure you get consent,” the sex educator says. And so you pester the person and plead and emotionally bribe and eventually threaten them until they say yes. So you “got consent.”
Welcome to the difference between a legalistic approach to consent versus a real-world “sex worth having” consent.
There is a great podcast episode about this also, wherein Emily helps a couple explore their ambivalent consent to attend a queer orgy!
Emily answers a question from her producer, Mo, about consent. Mo and her girlfriend are considering a new sexual experience but they’re not
Currently I have three special interests and few filters:
queer polyamorous healing sex headcanon-happening in the Horizon game series and Hozier's music (not involving the artist himself) that I write way too many words about, and some people seem to like
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Modern Monetary Theory and how it can empower us to defeat Moneyland and the horrifying corruption inflicted on us by Corporate Capitalist Empire (which needs to end) (see starter pack resource list below). If you’re not into that, you can block the tag “End Empire”
a lens of understanding interpersonal (and systemic) conflict through Empathy and Collaboration, or people (and systems) that are Empathy-Challenged and Non-Collaborative (this one is sort of my day job so I’m not revealing it here but I left pretty big clues I guess)
Modern Monetary Theory starter kit
Planet Money short and easy episode explaining MMT
We rethink everything we know about government spending, taxes, the nature of money... All of it.
Stephanie Kelton (economist) explains a bit about MMT in a TED talk
Stephanie Kelton’s book The Deficit Myth
I felt like it was a pretty quick and understandable read but I would love feedback from others
About The Deficit Myth Vice-president Dick Cheney famously boasted, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” He was wrong. Deficits do matter,
A four-part podcast unpacking MMT by reviewing The Deficit Myth and adding extra context. (Not great audio quality 😢😣)
Get more from The MMT Podcast on Patreon
a book to understand Money more generally
(although, I think Jacob got the difference between currency and ledgers wrong; ledger economies (e.g. the Inca) are still "Money" because that's effectively what we have now with online banking)
The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a mad
Moneyland and Corporate Capitalist Empire starter kit
Oliver Bullough's investigative works in book form; start with Moneyland
"The most eye-opening book that you'll read all year... A must read for anyone who wants to understand how the real world of wealth works."
and, I'm not joking, this book will teach you five things about astrology and 5,000 things about Western paradigm of corporate/Christian exploitation
Tapping into the political power of magic and astrology for social, community, and personal transformation. In a cross-cultural approach to
Storming the Bastille. Facing off with tanks. Canceling a streaming subscription. We’re talking protests, boycotts, insurrections, an
With an idle thought, learned from this episode, about how populace protests against a government that has a lot of business and military support doesn’t get far, but protesting the businesses and military that are supporting that government such that it’s very uncomfortable to be that business or operating in that military has a bit more sway.
Miami Herald (Immigration): Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz detainees drop off the grid after leaving site
For the hundreds of men who were detained at Alligator Alcatraz, entering the gates of the makeshift migrant detention center in the Everglades meant exiting the labyrinthine but familiar federal immigration process and entering what several immigration attorneys described as an alternate system where the normal rules don’t apply.
[….]
As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald. The Herald had obtained the names from two detainee rosters.
Around 800 detainees showed no record on ICE’s online database. More than 450 listed no location and only instructed the user to “Call ICE for details” — a vague notation that attorneys said could mean that a detainee is still being processed, in the middle of a transfer between two sites or about to be deported.
It’s possible that some of the men who couldn’t be located were still at Alligator Alcatraz. Unlike most immigration detention centers, Alligator Alcatraz is state-run and detainees often do not appear in the database run by the federal agency. Florida does not maintain a system to look up those detained at the site either.
Source: Miami Herald By Ben Wieder and Shirsho Dasgupta, updated 2025-09-16
Just a bit of #hopepunk from Margaret Killjoy in mid-September 2025
There is a certain kind of reassurance I can offer you, right now. Or at least I can share the reassurance I’m offering myself right now. It’s a strange reassurance, I admit, but here it is: they are already instituting fascism as fast as they can in this country. All the bad shit we’re afraid of? They’re either already doing it or they’re trying to sort out how to do it, and they’re not going to be able to move substantially faster than they already are.
I’m not afraid of the fallout of last week’s news because everything bad that might come out of it was already being planned. They’ve already been scapegoating trans people for everything bad in this country and are trying to criminalize our existence. They’ve already been talking about declaring “Antifa” a domestic terror organization. They’re already funding a genocide (and were before the current administration) and they were already ramping up ICE infrastructure as fast as they possibly can. I don’t know that there’s any further acceleration available. The fascist pedal is already to the fascist metal.
That’s not to say that things aren’t going to get worse: they are going to get worse. They’re just, as far as I can tell, getting worse as fast as they already can. Our actions aren’t going to somehow convince the fascists to get even more fascist. There’s an odd sort of freedom in that realization. We can—and should—collectively stop saying shit like “oh if you behave a certain way, it will just embolden the fascists.” They’re already as bold as they can get.
