Why do we even have this lever truck?

Good photo.

AFAIK, UT Austin has not officially accepted, but I read that they expressed early interest. I do not know the specifics though. Maybe they will be swayed by the other schools’ actions. I’m sure a targeted demonstration would be a good idea.

Good on Arizona. Now we only need Vanderbilt and UT Austin to speak up.
Vanderbilt has been wishy-washy about their position.
Texas, of course, expressed almost immediate interest in signing up. Bastards.

As an aside, does anyone know why the administration chose these 9 particular colleges to begin with? I don’t see an obvious theme here. They easily could have chosen schools in more conservative areas, or schools which receive more federal research money.

Brown University
Dartmouth College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Arizona
University of Pennsylvania
University of Southern California
University of Texas at Austin
University of Virginia
Vanderbilt University

Sure, there is room for reasonable doubt. It may have been a staffer who put it up, or even a visitor to the office who pinned it up as a grim prank or to frame the congressman. But this guy’s party is currently championing mass arrest, imprisonment, and deportation of thousands of people with no due process, so my willingness to give him any benefit of the doubt is long gone.

A picture of the flag, from Politico:

It wasn’t exactly hidden.

Remember when Ronald Reagan said this in 1981?

government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

American conservatives grabbed onto that line and have held it as gospel ever since. Kneecapping the government has been a major goal of theirs for over four decades now. You will sometimes hear people talk about “bleeding the beast”: taking all the government benefits they can get their hands on and then dodging taxes, with the assumption they are helping to slowly kill the system. Unfortunately, there is no plan (AFAIK) for what they want the world to look like after the collapse.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if MTG took speaker job.

Don’t give them any ideas!

The top three priorities of a true libertarian are I, Me, Mine.

All of the self-styled “libertarians” I know are simply looking for an excuse to not pay taxes.

David Frum, speechwriter for George W. Bush and an outspoken member of the neocon movement of that era. He was apparently one of the “never Trump” Republicans who foresaw the coming disaster before the 2016 election. He has since left the Republican party and written two books titled Trumpocracy and Trumpocalypse.

Editorialized headline. The linked article’s headline is “US government shuts down after Senate fails to advance both parties’ bills”

I am not military, but somehow manage to interact with a lot of veterans. This has been my impression as well, at least among the officers. The higher up the leadership chain, the more they recognize and despise that the military is being used to push politics rather than actually being a functional organization.

There’s a great YouTube video of Adm. Gilday defending a non-binary officer in a Senate hearing. The admiral recognizes that running a large, functioning military requires integrating people of all types, and that building camaraderie can be as important as anything else. We can only hope there are enough people like him toward the top to prevent the military from being thoroughly abused.

https://youtu.be/qNwJGum3N8E

I have a Rayhunter but have never sent a data capture to EFF. I believe you are supposed to download it to your PC then send the file to their Signal account.

https://efforg.github.io/rayhunter/faq.html

This is a great time for people to start building and operating Rayhunters, and to share the results with the EFF to improve the tool.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/meet-rayhunter-new-open-source-tool-eff-detect-cellular-spying

I have encountered a few all-gender bathrooms in the wild, and they have all been really nice. I hope they stop being a political football someday so we can get more of them.

If you have not yet come to the conclusion that Pete Hegseth is a dangerous and disgusting pile of dung, go listen to the recent Behind the Bastards podcast episode about him.

The change was spotted by users on Lemmy, an open-source aggregation platform and forum.

Way to go everyone! We got noticed! And for something good this time!

https://lemmy.world/post/34021862

Fuck Musk and all, but “collapsed” seems a bit overstated. Their loyalty rate is no longer remarkably high but is still above-average according to the article.

Tesla’s customer loyalty peaked in June 2024, when 73% of Tesla-owning households in the market for a new car bought another Tesla,
…
The rate bottomed out at 49.9% last March, just below the industry average,
…
Tesla’s U.S. loyalty rate has since ticked back up to 57.4% in May, the most recent month the S&P data is available, putting it back above the industry average and about the same as Toyota (7203.T), but behind Chevrolet (GM.N), and Ford (F.N).

Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin told WMTW-TV that use of E-Verify “does not absolve employers of their legal duty” to verify legal employment status.

“The Old Orchard Beach Police Department’s reckless reliance on E-Verify to justify arming an illegal alien, Jon Luke Evans, violates federal law, and does not absolve them of their failure to conduct basic background checks to verify legal status,” McLaughlin told the station.

So E-Verify is less than worthless. It provides no assurances, and running an individual through the tool could presumably bring them to ICE’s attention.