Bluesky Gets a Midterms Bump, Ships Pronouns-in-Bios Feature Gizmodo
Keep looking when cooking: 🧑🍳 🥘
- Location: Level 7 (near Fountain Court), NSW Parliament House, Sydney CBD
- Opening Hours: Monday to Friday, 9:30 AM – 4:00 PM (staying open until 8:00 PM on parliamentary sitting nights)
- Hot Meal Service: Available between 11:30 AM and 2:15 PM (items available until sold out)
- Access: Open to the general public (walk-ins only, no bookings required), though a security check is mandatory upon entry.
- Offerings: Specialty coffee, house-made cakes by Chef Mike, sandwiches, wraps, salads, the famous Parliament scones with signature homemade jam, and senior discounts.
- Onsite Shop: Houses the Parliament House Gift Shop featuring local NSW artisan products, books, and house-made preserves.
- Price Range: AUD $20–$40 Best “Naked Chicken Burrito Bowl” in the city 🌆
Many savvy pundits on X framed the 2024 election as a massive political realignment and Bluesky as a “copium” den for progressives in a bubble. Boy, were they wrong.
Blue Wave Changed Who Governs. But Not Who Has Influence. HEALTH CARE un-covered
Six takeaways for the law from Tuesday’s blue tsunami election
Law Dork: “…Costs and corruption were front and center, with one-third or more of voters saying in exit polls that the economy or the state of democracy were the most important issue facing the country, but immigration policies and foreign policy, specifically the Iran war, also looming large. It’s not too ridiculous to say that Tuesday was the last most powerful day of Trump’s presidency. He is, effectively, a lame duck with two years left on his term. Much could still be done — extraordinarily harmful actions even — but he and his sycophants in the administration will face a very different, and more confrontational, world than they did for Trump’s past two years in office.
It was not just a federal election wave, either. The Democrats will also hold at least 27 governorships — and are leading the last two uncalled races, Alaska and Kansas. Other statewide offices and statehouses also flipped — sometimes dramatically, as in North Carolina, where the state House flipped from a Republican supermajority to, potentially, a Democratic supermajority. Not everything happened last night that could have for Democrats — but more happened than anyone imagined.
And that matters. And is a solidly reassuring sign for the stability of our democracy — even if it is, in some ways, just providing the opening to do more. (Much more on that to come.) For now, here are my six takeaways for the law from Tuesday’s blue tsunami election…”
How Republican Deepfake Videos Are Killing Campaign Ethics and Truth-Based Campaigning
Public Impact News: “…nationwide Republican candidates have made the campaign less about actual issues concerning the American people and more about scare tactics while deploying outlandish and unsupported claims against their opponents. There have been claims across the country that Democratic candidates favor Sharia law, are supporters or friends with terrorists, favor open borders, embrace “trans for everyone” (one of the most absurd concepts that you could possibly express in just 3 words), support abortion until the birth of a fetus, want to confiscate “all your guns” and take away the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution, and widespread assertions that all Democrats are Socialists.
Over the summer, this underwent an impressively ridiculous Republican transition into the concept that all Democrats are Communists at heart. But the top answer to the question of what platform Republicans are running on has to be the full-scale demonization of Democrats with some of the most outlandish actual lies and fictions that have ever been seen in American politics, thanks to the assistance of generative AI videos and deepfakes. Rather than talk about affordability, inflation, gas prices, interest rates, the Trump war against Iran, the Trump ICE and DHS war on immigrants to the United States, the housing crisis or gas prices, the answer seized upon has been to attack Democratic opponents ceaselessly and with abandon.
Any semblance of restraint or ethics about portraying your opponent in a fact-based light, or even attacking them for genuine positions that they embrace or have taken, has been thrown out the window in favor of pure falsehoods or multi-step extrapolations and guilt by association attacks, that do not, in fact, represent the Democrats’ actual positions or histories. Literal lies and fabrications that would have been unthinkable in the past have won the day (or year in this case). According to a recent CNN Analysis, about 96% of the TV ad spending on political commercials that disclosed using AI-generated or manipulated imagery came from Republican campaigns or groups…”
