At the very least to signal that they think it is wrong. To make the Republicans go on record saying they condone it.

And not only that, make everything they are doing in Congress just that much harder. Those small sabotage of the other harmful work they are doing.

When I hear about his executive orders, I can’t help but picture him dressed as Dolores Umbridge hanging her rules on Hogwarts walls.

If I had any semblance of graphics skills, I’d make a meme out of it.

Seconded. The US can no longer be trusted. God speed, and I wish you the best.

-us

Dolly Parton is urging Republican Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana to reconsider getting rid of her popular “Imagination Library” program, which provides free books to children ages 5 and under.

“We are hopeful that Governor Braun and the Indiana Legislature will continue this vital investment by restoring the state’s funding match for local Imagination Library programs. The beauty of the Imagination Library is that it unites us all—regardless of politics—because every child deserves the chance to dream big and succeed,” her representative said in a statement.

Indiana Republicans have cut the statewide program’s required matching funds from the new budget despite it being “hailed as helping to raise Indiana’s child literacy ranking from 19th to 6th place nationwide” and only costing the state $4.1 million over the last two years.

“It was a disservice to remove it,” says Democratic Indiana Rep. Maureen Bauer.

Most telling is that the state’s Republicans, who included school vouchers for wealthy families in the budget, didn’t bother to look elsewhere for savings.

According to Rose Meissner, president of the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County, the matching funds needed equate to just $1 per month for every child in Indiana.

Parton has run into this kind of ghoulish right-wing behavior before.

In 2022, a Kentucky Republican state senator tried to censor Parton’s library as a part of the fascistic right-wing move to censor children’s education. But after getting an earful from a few million Parton fans, they quickly backtracked.

The Imagination Library, founded by Parton in 1995, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year and sends out more than 1,000,000 books every month to 21 states and 5 countries. To date, the program has given more than 270,000,000 free books to children around the world.

The idea that the GOP would take away children’s books is unconscionable—but not surprising.

As an aside, electro convulsive shock therapy is still done. It’s weirdly been proven useful for the treatment of some disorders. But as far as I know, it’s now done with full consent.

But now, as back then, no one really truly understands the full mechanism that causes it to suppress symptoms.

California. And I’m not entirely sure. The emails went to my mother, so I didn’t hear too much about it until they terminated our contract.

Oh yea. I’m angry and upset that any acts of defiance will be used as justification for the indiscriminate persecution of entire sections of society.

The systemic marginalization and abuse of vulnerable groups will lead to acts of violence. Which will lead to more marginalization and abuse.

The only way to prevent this is to break the system and embrace these groups.

As a gross oversimplification analogy, but one that any parent should be able to understand. The more you try and control a teenager and suppress who they are the more they will act out and rebel.

And it’s so fucking weird to me to see all this hate. I grew up around migrants, I’ve worked closely with trans individuals and non binary folk. I have never seen the violence or hate or any of the problems the conservative hate propaganda speech about these people.

Because they truly are just people who want to live their lives and be who they are. They all have dreams and aspirations. They want to provide for their families. They want to love each other and be loved in return. They want the same for you and me. They don’t have any agenda to do harm.

Is everyone perfect, no. Do some people cause issues? Sure. But that has nothing to do with race or sexual or gender identity. People in general can be shitty, and you’ll find them in all walks of life.

As an parallel, I was watching PBS’s American Experience about the American Coup in Wilmington, NC in 1898. They shared articles from white supremacists which sounded so eerily familiar to the rhetoric spewed on Fox News and other right wing media outlets. It’s such a tired playbook, but it’s so frustrating how effective it is.

I’ve complained about gun culture being the biggest issue leading to gun deaths before. I’m not a huge fan of gun control as a lot of the left discuss it and my issue with labeling gun laws “common sense” causes a dissidence in people heads where anyone disagreeing not having common sense.

But the rhetoric of “fuck around and find out” and “come and try that here” underpins a thought process that guns are an acceptable solution to problems. And not just acceptable, but on equal footing with other solutions such as running away, defusing or de-escalating the situation, discussions, and compromises. It’s where you see things like Kyle Rittenhouse or “You’re Fucked” being inscribed on the AR used in the murder of Daniel Shaver in Mesa, AZ by the police.

Whereas I believe guns are the final solution to a problem. And imo, one that we all should be reticent to use but ultimately have available to us. They are to be used as a last resort to threats against life and liberty.

The gun culture, mixed with the propaganda of everyone everywhere being a potential threat to you is a leading cause of gun violence.

They are a scape goat. It doesn’t matter if they exist or not if they can sell the narrative.

Crime could be at record lows but they’ll say “Crime is so high, we need to send in police until crime comes down.”

They know full well it’s a lie, but they know enough people won’t double check them and take them at their word. In their minds crime is at an all time high instead.

My father got us kicked off our ISP for downloading music from random public trackers.

I’ve been on private ones for years and never gotten a warning.

If anyone knows about lobotomies, it would be the Kennedys. Just look at Rosemary Kennedy.

I second the super micro picks. They are relatively cheap and super reliable.

Currently I run a 36 bay 4u supermicro server. It runs unraid because I’m lazy and it seems to handle the mismatched disks really well. Most of my stuff is now docker containers out of laziness. But I prefer VMs for production services. I built this box to also be able to handle external SAS cards in case I need to add another shelf. But I really wish unraid would support multiple pools of their main storage type. But I hope to replace all my disks with 22tb before I get to the next shelf.

I used to run a 7 node ceph server for my storage. Which has a ton of benefits going into data warehouse stages. But it ended up being more frustrating than I needed. At least 5 years ago when I was running it.

Even perma seeding, redacted is hard. There really aren’t enough seeders to make it worthwhile. You basically need to do what you can to get free leech tokens and then use them wisely.

Lidarr can tank your ratio quick and the time it takes to upload the same amount can be months. Soulseek is another option to help build out your library. But I don’t know if it can be combined with lidarr.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great site and I love it. I just don’t think it’s a good fit for lidarr.

I’ve had to put up a lot of obscure music from local bands to keep my ratio on redacted. As someone who has been torrenting for decades, it’s not an easy site.

It’s a great site. So if you can get in, do so. But I wouldn’t use it to fill lidarr, it will kill your ratio and get you banned. It supplements my Usenet for bands that I REALLY want to have now.