It is DARK in the Boston area right now. Like "about to thunderstorm" dark. But the radar is totally clear. On the other hand, the GOES satellite live view shows us under a giant river of brown from the Canada fires.

And by coincidence last night I rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is not in any way a Noir film. BUT it does have lots of night scenes, lots of high contrast, AND lots of exaggerated, stylized color. Close Encounters has a stronger Noir look than the color Spider Noir.

Watch Spider Noir in black and white. It is much better for the intended Noir style. The black and white feels much more contrasty.

This is what jumped out at me from the hearing about the redacted grand jury transcripts. The judge is basically saying these prosecutors should be disbarred.

That is actually not the goal of Birthright Israel. I guess it would be fair to say that their goals align with the earliest ideas about Zionism, which were about the desire for a center to the international community, and not about a nation-state.

Stop lying. This is literally the only place the word "manipulate" appears in that article:

I do keep wondering exactly what this is supposed to be, from that Trump-as-Jesus-the-Red-Cross-Doctor image. Kind of looks like a Transfomer? Optimus Crime?

Just to add some evidence, here is someone using "spam" as a verb in June of 1990:

Why is every Internet history thing wrong on Wikipedia? By mid 1990s, "spamming" and "spammed" were already in wide usage, as any casual search of old USENET postings will reveal. And certainly calling unwelcome messages "spam" must predates the verbification of that word.

This is supposed to be the photo that shows that Trump is fine? For comparison, check this photo of him in a similar walking position from about a year ago: www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/...

Except that the Daily Kos "Weekend at Donnie's" poster they made a year ago is insanely out-of-date, because Trump's closest sycophants get replaced faster than the ink in a printer.

Just today, I asked Google to help me pick between two software packages. The AI of course was 100% wrong.

At least, that's the common summation you'll hear. If you read section 230, it doesn't actually say that. It provides protections related to how sites moderate content. Read it; it's not long: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/...

So if you want to make a quick meme for your western-hating friends then this graphic, famed as "people who voted against an anti-slavery resolution" is a great graphic. But if you want to understand the politics of the UN, or about slavery in the world, then this is... also a great graphic.

So I just picked a headline at random from one of her postings and researched it. What follows here is some very quick (ten minutes) of research I did on this headline:

But wait, you say, that's an 1873 book. The map in question is labelled as 1800, right? Well, I can't find that 1800 map (because it's fake), but here's a 1799 map of Palestine. That's the quality of printing back then, and the understanding of the region. www.google.com/books/editio...

The person claimed to be the map maker is real. Here's a link to maps of that region published by that name. www.google.com/books/editio...

OK, so @revbluessusie.bsky.social engaged with me about my thread on Israel. Didn't like what I said so they blocked me. Didn't like being fact-checked (admittedly I was not delicate in my wording.) But since they blocked me before I could get to providing proof of what I was saying, it is here.

The other map exaggerates Israel's size so much, it is probably almost as big in this map as people imagine it. (Actual google map showing the same region with Israel borders highlighted, for comparison).

There are even many many versions of fake Palstine maps. With different levels of absurdity. I'll just highlight two here. The first is a map claiming to be from 1931, except it miraculously includes borders that didn't exist until 1967.

The map compass, allegedly printed in 1946, has the a facebook account name in it. It's also the name of one of the few women Pharaohs of Egypt, but this person has a male Pharaoh image in their FB banner. Note also they call themselves a "Digital Creator".

Here's a copy of the map with a tiny portion of the massive number of errors pointed out by me. And the original posting with the implied nonsense history. Note that the question mark is where a bunch of Jordan (or Trans-Jordan in 1946) would be.

To understand why the attack on Diego Garcia is important (and why propagandists would want to sow confusion), here is a map of Iran's claimed missile range (claimed during diplomatic talks) and their actual range. (Maps assume Tabriz as center for these circles, to show European reach.)

Pretty sure this is not how notification dialogs are supposed to work.

Also, I liked this bit from the FAQ on the website Cards Against Humanity set up to for the refund. www.getyourfuckingmoneyback.com

I decided to make an illustration. Trees can be much more complicated than this. But even if this is accurately complex, it doesn't show that most of these boxes where importing occurs can involve imports from different countries, with different tariff levels, that changed at different times.

It may have simply been false, confused, early reporting. Although oddly, the story has this at the bottom. Weird that there was an apparent intent to make sure this story didn't show up in certain places:

But if you search for iran and soccer on social media, this doesn't seem to be the top story. Some stories say the dishonor sprang merely from them losing (the later game in which they did sing). But that's an inaccurate (at best) representation of what happened.