Uppity Hobbit's #Resist Blog

Gen Xer, My #Resist blog where I've been bookmarking actions to take, donation links, things to read, and documentation since November 2016. Mostly reminders to myself. Occasionally stuff I'm furious about, but posting it here in case friends need to take a break from the Fuckopalypse flooding our dash with reasons to be depressed.

[kawuli]

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)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

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

[saywhat-politics]

Trump's "Unhinged" Crashout In His "Meet The Press" Interview Is Going Viral

"I love how so many people think women are too emotional to be president and still support this little snowflake."

This weekend, Donald Trump appeared on NBC's Meet the Press for an exclusive interview that got cut short, and that awkward moment is going massively viral.

During the interview, Trump claimed that the current California elections are being rigged similarly to the 2020 election that he lost. "It was a dirty election, and it's happening again right now in California," Trump said.

[saywhat-politics]

Jared Kushner’s Albanian resort faces a corruption probe and mass protests

The project involves a “network of shady individuals and companies,“ according to an investigative report.

This story was originally published by Popular Information, the author’s substack publication. Subscribe here.

Jared Kushner’s efforts to negotiate an end to the Iran War are not going well. But he is only moonlighting as one of the Trump administration’s top diplomats. Kushner is also having problems at his day job as the founder of Affinity Partners, a private equity fund bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments.

Along with his wife Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Trump, Kushner is developing a multibillion-dollar resort on Sazan Island in Albania and nearby coastline. In an interview with the David Senra podcast published Sunday, Ivanka Trump described the project dreamily:

It’s an unbelievable, beautiful, 1,400-hectare private island in the middle of the Mediterranean. We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island, we went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated, and it stayed with us ever since. And over the course of many years, we developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it, but with a lot of restraint and care because the land is so beautiful that, really, the architecture has to be fully integrated into it, almost rise from it.

She also said the project is “the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly want to live.”

But the reality of the massive project, which includes 10,000 hotel rooms and is located in one of Europe’s most environmentally sensitive areas, is a lot messier. In 2024, the Albanian government changed the law to allow the area, which was previously part of a protected national park, to be developed. After Trump’s election in November 2024, the Albanian government granted Atlantic Incubation Partners, an LLC linked to Kushner, “strategic investor“ status, clearing the way for permits.

Kushner’s LLC was granted that status “just weeks before the new US president’s inauguration, even without a business plan or feasibility study for the construction of a luxury resort on an uninhabited island once used by the army for shooting practice.”

On Monday, Albania’s Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, known as SPAK, confirmed it was investigating Kushner’s project. The investigation will probe the changes to the land’s protected status and how Kushner-controlled entities obtained rights.

An investigative report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network found that the project involved a “network of shady individuals and companies“ including “a businessman accused of links to the Italian mafia, a former judge who resigned due to the vetting process, the daughter of a lawyer accused of forgery, the company of a murdered businessman and individuals linked to one of Albania’s biggest oligarchs, Shefqet Kastrati.”

[saywhat-politics]

Trump administration to remove 900 deep sea monitoring instruments that would have studied the collapsing Atlantic current

The Ocean Observatories Initiative has been collecting data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for the past decade

BY ADAM KOVAC

Trump administration takes aim at crucial ocean monitoring network

The Ocean Observatories Initiative has been collecting data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions in the Atlantic and

[saywhat-politics]

A Trump order that directs USPS to create a rule that could delay or prevent delivery of mail-in ballots.

This violates a settlement that we, with @NAACP_LDF, negotiated for @NAACP in 2021.

We filed a motion to ensure the Trump admin cannot disenfranchise millions of voters.

[uppity-hobbit]

this would disenfranchise the entire state of California. I can't remember the last time we didn't receive our ballots by mail.

[captain-price-returns]

interesting rationale from a prospective juror in the Elon Musk Twitter stock manipulation case

[bsaka7]

excerpts from erin in the morning's article on the ioc's ban on transgender women and sex testing policy

[saywhat-politics]

Tax The Billionaires

[vaspider]

Philly Cops Are Reportedly Monitoring Anti-AI Memes, According to Internal Alert

A bulletin from a regional fusion center clocks increasing anti-AI sentiment on social media and warns offline destructive action is coming.

I bring a real "fuck you, I'll make a shitty meme about your shitty environment-destroying bullshit and it's a legitimate form of protest that doesn't indicate any propensity for real life harm" energy to my online presence that apparently makes Philly cops piss themselves in fear, I fucking guess.

[saywhat-politics]

The Minnesota GOP is catching heat after delegates held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the former cop convicted of m*rdering George Floyd 🤔

According to multiple reports, convention proceedings kicked off Saturday morning with a 10-second moment of silence for Chauvin ... just days after the sixth anniversary of Floyd's death.

Minnesota GOP Honors Derek Chauvin Days After Anniversary of George Floyd Death

The Minnesota GOP is catching serious heat after delegates at the party's state convention held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin -- the

[robertreich]

Follow the money.

[thewingedwolf]

do you think the catholic church effectively utilized wokeness by funneling money into the colonization and rape of the americas after issuing the doctrine of discovery which effectively legalized the subjugation of indigenous peoples?

[uppity-hobbit]

see the thing is the Catholic Church's structure and law and attitudes are largely derived from the late Roman Empire but every now and then some Catholics get this crazy notion into their heads they're supposed to be following the teachings of some guy called Jesus and so for a while they adopt radical stances like "be nice" and "compassion to the poor and hated minorities is good actually" and "let's tie rich people to the back of a camel and drag them through the eye of a needle and flip tables on them"

[headspace-hotel]

while trying to decompress yesterday i ended up looking up a shit ton of stuff about book banning in the USA and wound up falling down this labyrinth of spreadsheets and aggregations that the people behind all this book banning stuff are using to find and challenge books

first of all theres ratedbooks.org which has a lot of different "ratings" of books but also advertises, for a fee of 100 dollars, a "Library transparency package" where you send in a spreadsheet of the inventory of a library and it is automatically cross-referenced against the site's list of no-no books.

There's also "national book rating index" which seems to be like...the same organization, sort of? Like a lot of the stuff on the site is the same.

on this page on "ratedbooks" there is a Google Docs template that i screenshotted

first page is a template for requesting that a parent be notified if a child checks out a book that is listed on the no-no list. From what it sounds like,books can be auto-flagged if they were banned in another school district.

the letter suggests that the parent will "review" the book by looking at its rating on the NRBI. Not by actually Reading The Fucking Book. Please note the additional boxes for "CRT" (Racially Divisive) and "LGBTQ"

The second page is (part of--the list continues) a list of books that the organization apparently recommends parents request that the library buy, which includes, among the stuff I haven't heard of, PragerU materials, "Irreversible Damage" by Abigail Shrier, something called "Transing Our Children," and the Tuttle Twins books.

very, very, very focused on recommending a few highly conservative publishers and specifically anti-trans stuff.

if you go to NRBI's "ratings" tab you find a link to the "standardization table" which explains that the ratings are compiled from multiple reviews from different sites.

Among these, "ratedbooks" is considered to be a source. So I'm confused about the relationship of these two sites.

So is. "Christian Parent Reviews." I looked at their "movie reviews" tab where they also recommend "Plugged In" and clarify that it is created by Focus On the Family. Their top recommended movie resource is something called "Christian Spotlight," which when I click on it actually leads to a site called "Christian Answers" which is. weird.

At this point I have detoured from the book banning quest and am searching in fascination at these people's approach to experiencing storytelling.

They have an "actors" tab where you can search actors and see whether they are Christian and what their "worldview" is. Every gay actor appears to have the worldview "Homosexualism."

I looked at Sebastian Stan for funsies.

Yeah. They have a list of all current and former partners and whether or not said actor reproduced. WHY

Looking at the actual movie ratings, I decided to search for Annihilation (2018). The "moral rating" given to Annihilation is "Extremely Offensive."

In spite of that the reviewer seems to think that the movie was actually very good, though violent. They fixate more than anything on the fact that the movie assumes evolution is real. It's just...strange.

Scrolling down the letter A I find The Avengers (2012). The website thinks this one is "better than average."

The morality rating is fully unrelated to how good the movie is. I have to think on that for a while.

Christian Parent Reviews doesn't really have a whole lot of books rated, though. I visited another website that was used to aggregate the NRBI ratings, "The Good and the Beautiful." Recommendations seem to be locked to members of the site, but I can at least access the site's FAQ where they state their ethos:

Okay this is the most sinister one yet.

ratedreads.com is not explicitly christian nor does it have a focus on "racially divisive" or "lgbtq" content. In fact, it seems excessively focused on swearing.

The link to Compass Book Rating appears to be broken.

So I go back to Rated Books. The rating scale, which you can read here, goes from 0 "all ages" to 5 "deviant." I find "deviant" to be a troubling word to use here.

This is where we enter a confusing network of Google Sheets documents. The first one is the "master list" linked on this page. It contains a bajillion links to Google docs that painstakingly outline every instance of "offensive" content in the book. I found several Google Sheets documents like this somewhere in this maze of links and they don't all have the same content.

I decide to see what Rated Books thinks is "deviant" content. "Bride" by Ali Hazelwood is listed here. I click on the page and click the image slideshow. It contains. Get this. A screenshot of content warnings from the author's website, and then a bunch of fucking Google AI overviews about kinks the book has in it.

Anyways this didn't help me decompress and I don't know why i did this

[jayalaw]

Headspace, okay to recommend Authors Against Book Bans, an organization that is campaigning against this?

[headspace-hotel]

Sure thing

[headspace-hotel]

Oh my god. I can't believe I missed this. One of the lists used to create the NRBI's list is the Marshall Project's database of books banned in prisons, in other words an anti-censorship resource is being used as a tool to promote censorship

[odinsblog]

Mike Johnson says we should have sympathy because Congress isn't paid enough, so we should allow insider trading by politicians just so they can take care of their families.

Meanwhile, 70% of Americans can't afford a $1k emergency.

And yes, Nancy Pelosi held practically the same position when she was House Speaker.

[pangur-and-grim]

Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point

Authors, agents, publishers: every part of the industry is seeing the strain of five years of escalating anti-LGBTQ censorship.

[lanfan]

Hey yall I just wanted to come on here and bring some attention to what’s happening at the detention center (really a concentration camp) Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. There is a hunger strike going on right now to protest the abhorrent conditions within the camp (allegations of torture, maggots and other bugs in the food, etc) and protests happening outside the camp. ICE is not allowing any politicians to come in (as is their right) to see the conditions of the camp. I would urge yall to do your own research, but if you want videos of some people who are actually there, here are some tik tok accounts you can go follow: @ bethanyquilter/ @ whoiskingtrivv/ @ Status Coup News/ @ L.A. TACO

And here is a video explaining what’s going on in more detail than I provided.

With everything else going on in the world, it can be hard to keep up with stuff going on at home, but ICE is still out here terrorizing innocent people. We must keep our eyes on them, and keep fighting.

Feel free to add more sources or info to this post, should you have any.

[tsscat]

I found this linktree here that has a master list of ways to help the detainees inside Delaney Hall: https://linktr.ee/SupportOurFamilies

SupportOurFamilies | Linktree

Please support immigrant families by donating to the GoFundMe's below and purchasing supplies via Amazon Wishlist to support detainee visito

I have heard that protestors outside need medical supplies, but I can’t find the best way to provide that if you are not nearby.

[thebleeding-heart]

their needs are changing rapidly, they mostly need Sudecon wipes and gas masks, last I heard, but the only way is to bring them directly there. for the most part they are asking people to join them there and hold the line, if possible. next best thing is to donate and call NJ reps to demand an end to the detention and torture!

[saywhat-politics]

Trump administration raises US refugee cap, but only for white South Africans

President Trump has announced that the U.S. is admitting 10,000 additional white South Africans as refugees, citing persecution in their hom

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Tuesday that it will admit an additional 10,000 white South Africans into the U.S. as refugees this year, increasing its historically low annual cap but still blocking people from other countries from entering through the program.

Trump suspended the refugee program on his first day in office and, since then, has turned it into a vehicle to allow Afrikaners — a group of white South Africans descended mainly from Dutch settlers — into the U.S. Advocates say the decision to focus a decades-old program on one group has left people around the world fleeing war and strife stranded and with few options.

The administration says Afrikaners are subject to persecution in their home country, a charge the government in South Africa denies.

In the Tuesday announcement on the Federal Register, President Donald Trump said that because of “an unforeseen emergency refugee situation” he was raising the refugee cap. He blamed the South African government for “recent increases in the incitement of racially motivated violence” but gave no specific information.