Beehaw

Play a game with yourselves. Imagine the silliest reason to ban hatpins, see if you got it right.

https://archive.is/OCwmj

When Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, went looking for someone to head the National Counterterrorism Center, she landed on Joe Kent, a former Green Beret, past CIA officer, and twice-failed MAGA congressional candidate in Washington state, who, as the Associated Press reported, “stands out for the breadth of his ties to a deep-seated extremist fringe.” During his first campaign in 2022, Kent consulted with white nationalist Nick Fuentes on social-media strategy. He also had a member of the Proud Boys on his campaign staff, and he embraced as a supporter and ally Joey Gibson, the leader of Patriot Prayer, a Christian nationalist group.

But his associations with far-right extremists began prior to his attempt to win a congressional seat. In 2020, Kent helped boost the organizing message of a new right-wing paramilitary outfit that called itself the 1st Amendment Praetorian.

On September 20, 2020, Robert Patrick Lewis, a former Green Beret and QAnon supporter, posted a long thread on Twitter (now X) that announced the formation of the group. Lewis declared that a band of “military, law enforcement & intel community veterans” had come together to protect the First Amendment rights of conservatives. He presented a harsh, conspiratorial, and paranoid view, claiming, “There are Marxist & leftist politicians aiming to lock down total control over our populace.” He asserted, “Their tyrannical, Marxist subversive groups such as ANTIFA & BLM demand total subservience to and adulation of their specific view of the world.” And he maintained the “corrupted Main Stream Media does their best to tarnish the reputation and destroy the lives of any public or private citizen who dares step up to them or fight back against their narrative.”

Lewis called on “military, law enforcement or intelligence community” veterans to join 1AP and fight back. In an apparent sign of support, Kent reposted this thread.

Lewis noted that 1AP would be providing security services for right-wing rallies and marches, including those “with a large number of high-profile, conservative VIPs speaking & attending.” For one event, he said he needed veterans to provide “physical security, intelligence/surveillance and to serve as team leaders for small security & intelligence and intelligence cells.” He promised, “we will keep your names confidential and our personnel records & communications will be encrypted.” He added, “This group was formed to protect attendees at President Trump’s campaign rallies.”

Soon after forming 1Ap, Lewis presented it not only as a security service for the right but as an intelligence operation. He told Fox News, “Our intelligence shows that no matter who wins the election, they [Antifa] are planning a massive ‘Antifa Tet Offensive,’ bent on destroying the global order they are not beholden to any one party. Their sole purpose is to create havoc, fear, and intimidation.” (No such uprising occurred.) After the election, 1AP claimed it was collecting evidence of fraud. On January 6, as the riot began at the Capitol, Lewis tweeted, “Today is the day the true battles begin.” (He later said he was at the Willard Hotel, not Capitol Hill, that day.)

Lewis’ 1AP did provide security at various events featuring far-right extremists. According to the final report of the House January 6 committee, during a December 12, 2020, rally of pro-Trump election deniers in Washington, DC, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing, anti-government militia, “coordinated” with 1AP “to guard VIPs, including retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne.” (Both Flynn and Byrne were prominent promoters of the crackpot conspiracy theory holding that the 2020 election was stolen form Trump.) Months later, Lewis and 1AP provided security at a QAnon conference in Dallas, where Flynn essentially called for a military coup in the United States.

On social media, Kent has often boosted posts from Lewis. At one point each complimented the other for a podcast appearance. When Kent ran for Congress, Lewis expressed his support for him on social media. In a 2022 Telegram post, Lewis said that he knew Kent “personally” and “wish I could personally vote for him.” In January, 1AP posted on Telegram that there were “mumblings” that Kent could be appointed to lead the National Counterterrorism Center and that this “would be a very good thing. I could not support this more strongly.”

Mother Jones sent Kent, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Counterterrorism Center a list of questions about Kent’s support for 1AP and his relationship with Lewis. Neither Kent nor the agencies responded.

Kent has an established record as an extremist and promoter of conspiracy theories. During his 2022 run, he called for charging Dr. Anthony Fauci with murder to hold him “accountable” for the “scam that is Covid.” He promoted Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was rigged against him. He backed the idea the January 6 riot was orchestrated by the Deep State to discredit Trump and his supporters. He referred to the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.” He pushed the notion that billionaire Bill Gates was seeking to “control the food supply” and “control housing” to force people to “live in the pod eat the bugs.”

Like Gabbard, Kent has no experience in leading a large intelligence organization. (After serving in the Army, he was a field operative for the CIA for a short time.) Both Kent and Gabbard were on the infamous Signalgate chat. As head of the NCTC, Kent will have the responsibility for monitoring and preventing both foreign and domestic terrorism. But his past as a conspiracy theorist and his association with far-right extremists raise questions about his analytical abilities and his capacity to assess threats of domestic terrorism that arise from the right. His association with 1AP and Lewis is just one more reason to wonder about his judgment.

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In my experiments I’ve found that the most rigid thinkers have genetic dispositions related to how dopamine is distributed in their brains.

Rigid thinkers tend to have lower levels of dopamine in their prefrontal cortex and higher levels of dopamine in their striatum, a key midbrain structure in our reward system that controls our rapid instincts. So our psychological vulnerabilities to rigid ideologies may be grounded in biological differences.

In fact, we find that people with different ideologies have differences in the physical structure and function of their brains. This is especially pronounced in brain networks responsible for reward, emotion processing, and monitoring when we make errors.

For instance, the size of our amygdala — the almond-shaped structure that governs the processing of emotions, especially negatively tinged emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, danger and threat — is linked to whether we hold more conservative ideologies that justify traditions and the status quo.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/41960022

Plectranthus barbatus grows to its full height in 1-2 months from a cutting and the cutting itself costs around 50 Kenyan shillings ($0.37).

"The leaves are similar in size to an industrial toilet paper square, making them suitable for use in modern flush toilets or for composting in latrines," says Odhiambo.

They emit a minty, lemony fragrance. Covered in tiny hairs, the leaves have a soft texture.

In a dramatic shift, the US president paused tariffs on most nations while hiking China's rate to 125%, triggering a global market rally but leaving key policy details unclear. 

Facing a global market meltdown, President Donald Trump on Wednesday, April 9, abruptly backed down on his tariffs on most nations for 90 days but raised his tax rate on Chinese imports to 125%. It was seemingly an attempt to narrow what had been an unprecedented trade war between the United States and most of the world to one between the US and China.

"Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World's Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately," Trump wrote on Truth Social. Saying that more than 75 countries had asked for negotiations over the tariffs, Trump said he "authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%, also effective immediately."

Global markets surged on the development, but the precise details of Trump's plans to ease tariffs on non-China trade partners were not immediately clear. Shortly after Trump announced his latest pivot on his Truth Social platform, the S&P 500 surged 6.0% higher to 5,281.44, snapping a brutal run of losses since Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement a week ago.

My one... the Titanic didn't get all their lifeboats out. A problem they had was that crew were used to putting lifeboats in the water then people in the boats... these ones you filled and then had to lower inexperienced passengers 70 feet into the sea. In pitch black.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20534437

Thorn forest once blanketed the Rio Grande Valley. Restoring even a little of it could help the region cope with the impacts of climate change

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year – compared with a full-year total of 52 in 2024 and 26 in 2023, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines – a crackdown that experts warn threaten to erode first amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly and petition.

🎶 O'er the land of the free ... 🎶

This is a case of "faces in things", but I thought it was kinda funny. I didn't add quite enough honey and sugar to the recipe, but it was still moist and enjoyable. Making cornbread from scratch and tweaking online recipes so it doesn't taste like cardboard. I want jiffy mix, without buying jiffy mix and I mostly nailed it...but at a cost of creating evil cornbread. Maybe the next batch won't be evil?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20601298

A seemingly-undocumented Artocarpus with unique leaves and somewhat sour fruits. Superior to Artocarpus elasticus. Fruits ripen at the same time as Artocarpus lanceifolius, which overlaps the end of the season for Artocarpus odoratissimus.

Photographed at Jim West's place in Guaycuyacu (Ecuador).

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20533605

Chevron has been ordered to pay $744.6 million to a Louisiana parish government to help restore coastal wetlands the company destroyed.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.09-155340/https://www.theverge.com/tech/642950/gopro-hack-bird-conservation-bermuda-cahow

The image streams over YouTube in crisp grayscale: a young cahow — known outside Bermuda as the Bermuda petrel — scrambles through a sandy tunnel and pokes its tiny head above the ground for the first time. It’s a few months old, but it has never seen daylight. Gray fluffball hatchlings spend their whole lives up to this moment in a pitch-dark burrow as far as 15 feet underground. Now, in the middle of the night, this little bird flaps and flexes its wings, perches at the edge of a cliff, and launches itself into the wind. It won’t touch down on land again anytime soon: a cahow’s first flight can last three to five years. While it may rest on the water for a few minutes here and there, it’s almost entirely airborne, zigzagging for hundreds of thousands of miles across the Atlantic high seas, even sleeping while in flight. If it survives this odyssey, it will come right back here — to this little speck of an outer island — landing as little as a yard away from the nest where it was born.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20598636

archived (Wayback Machine)

A UK company has developed a loop system which turns methane gas into hydrogen and graphene. It’s being tested at several farm sites.

Electric bikes have become ubiquitous in the world’s second-largest Amish settlement, routinely flying past the horse-dawn buggies that have trundled across the hilly countryside here for two centuries. Not everyone is rolling with it.

The angst voiced by some Amish isn’t about the motors that propel e-bikes to nearly 30 miles an hour. It’s about the mobility the bikes enable, and the implications of that independence.

“We could easily end up with not having many Amish people around anymore,” said Mart Miller, a 67-year-old market worker who is the bishop of a church district, akin to a parish, that rejects e-bikes.

Many Amish e-bike enthusiasts, by contrast, see them as tools to make life easier without harming the insular Christian society known for its plain dress, prohibition of cars and wariness of new technology.

The bikes have transformed the community of more than 40,000 people in and around Holmes County. Men, women and teenagers are on the go from before dawn to after dark, often pulling children in trailers. Charging stations abound at businesses alongside hitching posts.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20597671

archived (Wayback Machine)

Main Takeaways

• Internal combustion vehicles – those that run on gasoline and diesel fuel – produce CO~2~ and a number of air pollutants.
• Over recent decades, big improvements have been made in reducing vehicle-emission pollution; however, it is still problematic at a global scale.
• Transport accounts for one fifth of CO~2~ emissions globally; of this portion the majority comes from road transport (cars, motorcycles, buses, and taxis).
• Rising atmospheric CO~2~ from vehicle emissions and other human activities has been driving recent global warming.
• Air pollution from vehicles has health effects like respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and even an increased risk of getting cancer.
• You can reduce your vehicle pollution by using more sustainable transport options like electric vehicles, ride sharing, walking, bicycles, and public transport.

Related: Some of that air pollution actually counters the greenhouse effect, and climate models have so far underestimated this.

China's Finance Ministry announced that, in reponse to US tariffs on imported Chinese goods being raised to 104%, it would raise its own tariffs on American products, effective Thursday, April 10. 

China's Finance Ministry announced on Wednesday, April 9, that it was imposing additional tariffs on American products, increasing them "from 34% to 84%," in an additional countermeasure to a further increase in US tariffs on imported Chinese products, announced by Donald Trump on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Trump's total 104% tariff rate on Chinese exports to the US went into effect.

"The US's practice of raising tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which seriously infringes on China's legitimate rights and interests and seriously harms the rules of the multilateral trading system," the ministry announced in a statement. It added that the increase would take effect from 12:01 pm on Thursday, April 10.

Last week, China had said it would levy 34% tariffs on all US goods in response to Trump's announcement of tariffs on countries around the world.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.09-093742/https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-supplier-luxshare-weighs-manufacturing-us-tackle-tariffs-2025-04-09/

TAIPEI/BEIJING, April 9 (Reuters) - Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tabsupplier Luxshare (002475.SZ), opens new tab is in talks with customers on ways to respond to U.S. tariffs by shifting more production outside China, including the United States, its chairwoman told analysts in a telephone call on Wednesday.

The remarks by the Chinese company, which assembles iPhones and makes AirPods, provide a glimpse into deliberations by companies around the world scrambling to tackle President Donald Trump's tariffs that took effect on Wednesday.

In a transcript of the call seen by Reuters, Wang Laichun said the tariffs would have little impact on profits and revenue, as Luxshare exported only a small amount of finished products to the United States.

Archived link

Russia’s disinformation machine didn’t just meddle in Germany’s 2025 elections — it built an entire fake media ecosystem to do it. Through a network of over 100 bogus news sites and psychological operations like Storm-1516, the Kremlin sowed chaos, amplified far-right narratives, and targeted key political figures with fabricated scandals.

[...]

Just a few days before the extraordinary German elections in February of this year, a two-minute video appeared on social network X showing the destruction of ballots cast for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The video claimed to expose electoral fraud designed to suppress Germany’s far-right. But the video itself was a fake. According to German security services, it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign orchestrated by the group Storm-1516.

[...]

For example, you could learn that Green Party candidate Robert Habeck was accused of abusing a young woman years ago. Other unsubstantiated claims included an article about how Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock met with a male escort during her trips to Africa, and one that alleged that Marcus Faber, the head of the German parliament’s defense committee, is a Russian agent. Other fake news articles claimed that the German army was planning to mobilize 500,000 men for a military operation in Eastern Europe, and that there was a migration agreement signed by Germany that would allow 1.9 million Kenyans to come to the country.

[...]

[Germany] is yet another target of an extensive cyber offensive that Russia has waged for many years, one that also concerns other European states. This offensive consists of a series of often independent but interconnected operations known mostly by code designations such as Storm-1516 (and another one using the same modus operandi, named Operation CopyCop), Doppelgänger (and its variants such as Operation Overload), UnderCut, and Matryoshka.

[...]

Storm-1516 and its CopyCop and other operations

The group known as Storm-1516 is responsible for a network of various actors connected to Russian state bodies, proxy organizations, and accounts distributing the content of various influencers. The group first attracted attention in 2023 while trying to influence American primary campaigns. Since then, it has been mentioned in connection with other influence operations, including activities in Germany. Its actions are often referred to by the media as CopyCop or other names.

At the core of the Storm-1516’s operation in Germany was content production backed by John Mark Dougan, a former Florida police officer who fled to Russia in 2016 to avoid criminal prosecution. [...] he is behind a network of 102 web pages with professional layouts and names like “Berliner Wochenzeitung,” “Hamburger Post,” “Echo der Zeit,” or “Widerhall,” which appear to be classic news websites. However, according to analysis by Newsguard, they primarily published artificial intelligence (AI) content inspired by or paraphrasing from right-wing media such as Compact or the pro-Russian blog Nachdenkseiten.

[...]

Storm-1099 and Doppelgänger

Storm-1516 was not the only Russian group that directed its operations against Germany and used websites with disinformation to do so. Germany also became the target of other campaigns. Among them was the so-called Doppelgänger operation, which was behind the group designated by Microsoft researchers as Storm-1099. The Doppelgänger operation has been ongoing across Europe since at least May 2022. Its name means “double” and captures the essence of its activity: As part of this operation, attackers create numerous fake pages that seem like regular mainstream websites, with URLs that resemble these websites, too. In Germany, doubles appeared of Der Spiegel, Bild, and T-Mobile.

These lookalikes of legitimate websites then share disinformation. Networks of equally fake accounts on X or Facebook are then used to spread content from these fake websites, which, again, looks like it’s coming from the real thing. According to a report by the German Foreign Ministry from January 2024, 50,000 accounts on the social network X participated in one part of the operation.

[...]

Matryoshka

The third operation that we observed during the past year in Germany and throughout Europe was the so-called Matryoshka operation, which was first documented by the group bot blocker (operating on the X network under the account @Antibot4Navalny) in September 2023. The principles of Matryoshka were then detailed by the French agency VIGINUM in its detailed report.

Unlike Storm-1516 and Doppelgänger, the Matryoshka operation does not focus only on the actual spread and creation of disinformation but also on overwhelming the victims of disinformation campaigns, such as politicians or journalists or fact-checking organizations. The aim is to limit their ability to respond. The campaign itself takes place in two phases. “The first group of accounts, known as ‘seeders,’ publishes false content on the platform. The second group of accounts, called ‘quoters,’ then shares the seeder’s post and a reaction to it. Quoters contact target individuals or organizations and ask them to verify the authenticity or truthfulness of the content published by seeders,” states the Viginum agency report.

According to a June report by the Finnish company Check First, Operation Overload, using Matryoshka tactics, was able to affect 800 organizations from more than 75 countries, among which France and Germany played a key role. Check First cites an example of a video that was made to look as if it had come from the German media BR24. The fictional news clip ridicules a Ukrainian refugee who allegedly worked in a Berlin aquarium and claims that he stole tropical fish there, cooked and ate them, and subsequently suffered poisoning, leading to his hospitalization. The footage includes a photograph of a Ukrainian man identified as Oleg Panasjuk. A reverse image search revealed that this photograph was lifted from a Russian dating site and involves the profile of a person residing in Russia.

The video was then spread on Twitter until an account belonging to the Matryoshka network asked a BBC fact-checker to check it. BR24 responded to the entire campaign with a long explanatory text. However, as Janina Lückoff, an editor and head of the fact-checking team at BR24, told The New Arab, “dealing with fake media content, of course, limits our capacities.”

[...]

Attacks on cyber infrastructure

While Storm-1516, Doppelgänger, and Matryoshka focused primarily on spreading disinformation in Germany, other attacks were oriented toward its cyber infrastructure.

In 2023, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) became the victim of a cyber attack. Email accounts of the party headquarters were hacked. The German government then accused a GRU unit, specifically the APT28 group (also known as Fancy Bear), of the attack.

[...]

At the end of February 2024, researchers from the security company Mandiant identified a new wave of attacks, this time targeting the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and potentially other German political parties. The attack was carried out by the APT29 group (also known as Cozy Bear), associated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

[...]

From noise to signal

According to James Pamment from the Psychological Defence Research Institute at Lund University, the groups and agencies involved in disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks aim to penetrate the national security environment. “At the first level, it looks like spamming. They use paid advertising, automatic comments, and other low-quality methods of spamming digital media with links. It’s like advertising, and they expect 95% of it to be ignored, so it turns into something like background noise. Constant drumming that’s always here,” he said of the psychology of extensive operations.

[...]

But according to the expert, this part is followed by two more steps: “They assume that at some point, the user will be provoked to click on one of these links to learn more. The network of web platforms offers something for every target group – if you need to hear their narratives from the Guardian, they have double websites available. If you need to hear them from unconventional media, they have created these brands. They have created reliable intermediaries for almost any target audience,” said Pamment, adding that the real goal is to get the disinformation repeated by politicians, celebrities, influencers, and even voters’ neighbors. If successful, the disinformation becomes a part of the normal discourse. Then those responsible can say they successfully penetrated the information environment.

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.09-150657/https://www.theverge.com/news/645314/google-maps-platform-tools

Google is opening up its Google Maps Platform data so that cities, developers, and other business decision makers can more easily access information about things like infrastructure and traffic, the company announced on Wednesday.

Google is integrating new datasets for Google Maps Platform directly into BigQuery, the tech giant’s fully managed data analytics service, for the first time. This should make it easier for people to access data from Google Maps platform products, including Imagery Insights, Roads Management Insights, and Places Insights.