Beehaw

I’m so old that I remember when the definition of masculinity was taking responsibility for yourself and others around you. Chainsaw-wielding billionaires like Elon Musk and his president-of-somewhere sidekick, Donald, are most insistent on their role as champions of Western Civilisation™, so I wondered how they missed the instruction that one should “not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment”. These are the words of the Apostle Paul in the Bible, so I guess the source is pretty niche.

How great that Maga identities have Project 2025 to explain to them the gender roles they’re so rigorously policing. Should we be concerned that the campaign to politically erase trans people – so en vogue both in America and among America’s political lemmings in the Australian right – is a symptom of their endgame of reducing “men” and “women” to binary 1950s stereotypes that didn’t even reflect the reality of their time? Yes.

The thing that really gets me is how these "manosphere" complainers seem to have not considered alternatives such as being respectful in interactions -- why learn to be a better person when grievance is so much fun? The classic "I've tried nothing, and it isn't working" applies heavily here.

Asserting dominance as an introduction is for animals, not people. Fuck, you don't even do that within the BDSM/kink scene, where dominance may play an outsized role once you've established a dynamic based on respect. Not that these woe-the-hell-is-me-I-can't-get-women-to-do-whatever-I-want-as-soon-as-we-start-talking complaints are anywhere near kink, just a failure to grow up.

On March 21, the same day Columbia University conceded to President Trump’s policy demands as a condition for restoring $400 million in federal funding, a timely screening of a new documentary dissected the 2024 student protests for Gaza at Columbia that sparked an international phenomenon. The Encampments (2025), produced by BreakThrough News and Watermelon Pictures, extricates the movement from the grips of mainstream media narratives and places it back in the hands of its organizers, including Palestinian graduate student and lead co-negotiator Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently detained and facing possible deportation.

Directed by BreakThrough News journalist Kei Pritsker and filmmaker Michael T. Workman, with rapper Macklemore and BreakThrough Editor-in-Chief Ben Becker among the film’s executive producers, the 76-minute documentary follows the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at Columbia University over the two-week period. The film specifically highlights the voices of Khalil, co-negotiator and graduate student Sueda Polat, since-expelled PhD candidate and student worker union leader Grant Miner, and university alum Naye Idriss.

“We want this documentary to be a tool to agitate, ignite, and inspire the movement and to also hopefully bring new people in,” Workman said at the screening, also noting that the film was created to “protect all of the students who are under fire right now.”

The Encampments rewinds the timeline to the organizers’ decision, on April 17, to escalate their push for the university to divest from weapons and surveillance technology manufacturers supplementing Israel’s killing and destruction in Gaza and settler expansion in the Occupied West Bank.

Hey, so I decided that a calorie counting app like Yazio could help me figure out my recent weight gain.

I want to track my weight and calories, exercise is optional, since I got analogue means for that.

However, I am concerned about my data being somewhere unknown.

Does anyone know a privacy focused/transparent app like that?

“This is about providing not only shelter but access to opportunities they’ve been denied,” Madison told NBC News.

The TS Madison Starter House debuted Monday on Transgender Day of Visibility and will host a cohort of five residents participating in a 90-day program designed to support their reentry into society. Organizers said the program will offer stable housing, gender-affirming health care, job assistance, GED support, life-skills training, nutrition education and individualized therapy.

Madison, known for her reality series “The Ts Madison Experience” on We TV, has long advocated for trans rights. She has also openly discussed overcoming homelessness and survival sex work.

“I wanted to make space for these girls,” she said. “I wanted to teach them how to be successful without relying on their bodies but on their other gifts.”

Hello everyone! I am interested in replacing the Google Speech Recognition and Synthesis app on Android. For Speech-to-Text (STT), I've tried Whisper and FUTO, and settled on the latter because it seemed to be more versatile. Also, FUTO seems to have some decent recognition, but not yet capable of handling all the languages that I want. Regardless, so far happy with STT. The only annoyance I have is that it does not appear as an option in the settings for Speech recognition :(

However, I can't seem to find any replacements that have good Text-to-Speech (TTS) quality. I tried espeak-ng and RHVoice, but both have robotic outputs.

Given the recent advancements in AI, I was expecting that there would be ways to incorporate open source TTS models like Kokoro to generate speech on the go. Nevertheless, I could not really find any such apps so far.

Has anyone managed to completely replace the Google app with (an)other privacy-focused FOSS app(s)?

A big problem with homeownership is that we ask it to do the impossible: We want it to remain affordable to young families while at the same time serving as a magical tool for accumulating personal wealth. But a house can’t build wealth while remaining affordable. The math is the math. The less affordable my house becomes, the more housing wealth I build. In fact, purchasing a home is never really a great investment unless your home grows less affordable in relative terms.

The truth is, homebuying is often more expensive than renting, and for most homeowners in most places over most periods of time, it’s not even that great an investment. The media tend to obsess on “hot” real-estate markets, but in vast swathes of the country, home prices are close to flat. Rather, it is housing stability, not affordability or wealth-building, that has been homeownership’s most valuable and reliable benefit.

The primary goal of the public option is to deliver stable housing to renters, too.

It is stable housing that enables us to lay down roots in the community and to build the relationships with our neighbors that we all rely on to get through even the most routine of times. It is stable housing that empowers our children to fully participate in their schools without living in constant fear of being uprooted from their friends, teachers, and classrooms. It is stable housing that is a prerequisite for the “continuity of community both for old residents and for newcomers” that the pioneering urbanist Jane Jacobs explained is so crucial to maintaining the vitality and diversity of neighborhoods. It is stable housing that provides the peace of mind necessary to go back to school or to start a business or to embark on the 22-year adventure into policy wonkery that led to the writing of this sentence.

Without housing stability, a house can never truly be a home. And for most homebuyers, this stability is provided not through homeownership itself, but through a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. How can we possibly provide comparable stability to renters? Well, if you think about it, a fixed-rate mortgage is really just a form of rent control.

Because housing is expensive, it is rarely purchased or built without financing; and because interest is a form of rent, that makes us all renters. Whether we are paying a mortgage or paying a lease, we are all essentially renting money—either directly from a bank in the case of mortgage borrowers, or indirectly through a landlord in the case of renters. But an important difference between renting and owning is that few residential rental leases guarantee a stable rent for more than a year, whereas a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage locks in your “rent” month after month for three decades. It was in fact the rent control inherent in my 30-year fixed-rate mortgage that ultimately kept my daughter and me in our house.

The public option would function as a form of rent control too, but unlike that imposed by some cities on the private market, it would both stabilize rent and massively add to supply. It would achieve this by tapping into a vast and underutilized store of capital: the voluminous borrowing capacity that many municipalities enjoy. By collateralizing interest-only bonds against future rents, the public option serves as a conduit for renters to collectively borrow cheap money at fixed rates for long terms with no taxpayer subsidy.

Linguistics undergrads learn about the vocal system and how your anatomy moves and contracts to form human speech. You begin to see vocal cords as a reed and your head as a resonant chamber. I remember my own classes at University of Kansas making me hyper aware of the way people spoke, even imagining corresponding phonetic symbols as subtitles. Like my Swedish friend whose accent sounds like a whisper. To me, “raspberries” is /ˈɹæzˌbɛɹiz/ where the s’s had hard /z/ sounds but for her it’s /ˈɹæsˌbɛɹis/ where the s’s had soft sound. The only difference between these sounds is that your vocal cords are either vibrating /z/ or not /s/. The Swedes are quite literally soft spoken people.

These phonetic symbols are characters from International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a universal system for transcribing human speech. Each depicts individual units of sounds (called phones). It works for every language and vocal sound, from Berber to beat-boxing. You can even write the sound of a kiss [ʘ], known as a bilabial click. It considers all of the ways air can be manipulated in a human vocal system, leaving no sound unaccounted for — unless you have an anatomical adaptation.

Realizing that not every moment in life will be deep, or meaningful, or vibrating with energy that would give him the fulfillment that he'd always hoped for, Todd unloaded the dishwasher.

Things like frozen lasagna and stew are classics for new parents, but not exactly the greatest light fare. What are your faves that:

• can be easily eaten when you drop them off, or popped in the fridge for later
• don't require turning on the oven
• are refreshing in the heat
• are nutritious, not too junky

Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.05-130219/https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2025/04/05/after-myanmar-earthquake-citizens-step-in-amid-army-s-absence_6739866_114.html

As the death toll from the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar on March 28 surpassed 3,000, under the condition of anonymity, a foreign expert from a major international agency who visited Mandalay on Sunday and Monday described to Le Monde a very contrasting situation. While the eastern part of the city of 1.6 million residents was barely affected, in the Northwest of Mandalay, between the royal palace and the Irrawaddy River, the damage was much more significant – eight-story buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble.

The city has not been paralyzed: "In the entire eastern part of the city, restaurants, shops, even beauty salons are reopening. People have to work. The large covered markets are closed for inspection, but you can see food, clothing and flower stalls on the streets. It is not a city on its knees," he said.

Thousands of displaced people have settled along the moats of the royal palace, where volunteer teams continuously distributed water and meals in containers. The citizen response to the earthquake was significant. "You come across dozens of convoys coming from Yangon with banners indicating donations – from banks, companies, monasteries," the foreign expert said. "In front of the hospital are dozens of different ambulances because they belong to various NGOs."

Archive: https://archive.is/20250405124954/https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/phone-call-led-aid-groups-to-paramedics-buried-in-a-gaza-grave-5df07dca

A United Nations team had spent several fruitless days waiting for Israeli forces to permit them to look for a group of Palestinian emergency workers who disappeared after being fired on by Israeli soldiers. Then, a call came in from Israel’s military that would end their wait.

It pointed them to a mass grave marked by a white electricity pole in the Gaza border town of Rafah, said Jonathan Whittall, the head of the United Nations’ humanitarian office in Gaza and the West Bank who received the call. 

The U.N. team found 14 bodies in the grave, including eight paramedics with the Palestine Red Crescent Society and six members of the Palestinian Civil Defense, which includes firefighters and emergency responders. The body of a U.N. worker was found in a different location. Another paramedic is missing. One survived. 

“I was hearing gunfire, but had no idea where it was coming from,” the surviving paramedic, Monzer Jehad Abed, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

When Francesca Mani was 14 years old, boys at her New Jersey high school used nudify apps to target her and other girls. At the time, adults did not seem to take the harassment seriously, telling her to move on after she demanded more severe consequences than just a single boy's one or two-day suspension.

Mani refused to take adults' advice, going over their heads to lawmakers who were more sensitive to her demands. And now, she's won her fight to criminalize deepfakes. On Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a law that he said would help victims "take a stand against deceptive and dangerous deepfakes" by making it a crime to create or share fake AI nudes of minors or non-consenting adults—as well as deepfakes seeking to meddle with elections or damage any individuals' or corporations' reputations.

This post contains far-left material. Viewer discretion is advised. (if you cry, i dont give a fuck)

[1] Debunking the “humans are predators” argument

First of all, humans are a species of Ape. A mammal. We are technically omnivores- we can eat anything. But, what did human ancestors eat? Australopithecus, the ancestor of the human genus, ate a plant based diet of nuts, roots, eggs, and fruit. They rarely ate meat. Maybe even less than twice a year, maybe never. But if they did, it is nothing compare able to todays murder factories. See, these animals live their lives in cages, later to be killed in sometimes painful ways. They spend their lives in capitalist murder camps, that you can compare to the concentration camps the nazis created and used. So, using this argument is just stupid and lazy. We can adapt to things. Thats what makes us humans.

[2] The murder companies

These capitalist torture camps are created by murder companies like Danish Crown. They dont give a fuck about you or the wellbeing of their products/slaves. They only do it for money. And i can easily prove that. Danish Crown literally lied about how “ethical” there meat is, yet they treat their animals like the worst you could imagine. AND they also spread propaganda to stop the youth from protesting. This is sick. Absolutely sick. This can be compared to what Hitler did. No jokes, these people are evil. And they deserve hard consequences. They destroy the rainforest to feed their slaves. This involves genocide of animals like Jaguars, Monkeys, and insects. And last, but most importantly, HUMANS. Native humans fight to keep the rainforest alive, and some have died in the process of doing so.

[3] The “we ate meat for thousands of years” argument

This argument can easily be debunked. Racism, sexism, they have been here for a really long time. That does not mean we have to continue it. Also, witch hunting was a thing for hundreds of years, but it did stop. So stop saying this because you do not know what the future brings. However, humans did eat meat, and that is proved. I would, however, not argument against this. Only modern practices.

[4] Conclusion

Now, we have concluded that these people only run these torture camps for money, and only that. They do. They do not care about anything else, like health or morals. Not even you. What can you do? Educate. Make people think. Make political actions. I believe we can all make a change, if we just do the right things.

If your eyes drop, they will get atop of you (Rudyard, 1903, Boots)

https://www.reuters.com/science/meat-was-not-menu-human-ancestor-australopithecus-2025-01-16/

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/australopithecus-africanus

https://politiken.dk/danmark/oekonomi/art5702463/Danish-Crown-f%C3%A5r-b%C3%B8de-for-snyd-med-%C3%B8kok%C3%B8d

If you prefer more sources, dm me or reply to the post. Thank you.

“Hundreds of people have come in this room under addiction and sat there and drummed or sat there and listened to songs and changed,” says Aldo Garcia, whose traditional name is Puxtunxt, gesturing around a room at Painted Horse Recovery where he leads Wellbriety meetings. Garcia is a citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, with Assiniboine Sioux, Siletz and Miwok descendancy. “That’s just what this represents today, it’s just nurturing to this community.”

For Garcia, practicing the Native American Washut faith and learning traditional songs have been a key part of his commitment to sobriety. Now, he helps to share these songs and raise his kids in the Washut faith, through the drumming group he co-founded, PDX WALPTAIKSHA.

Every Friday, community members gather in a room at Painted Horse Recovery, adorned with hand drums that hang on the walls, to practice drumming and singing traditional Washut songs. They hold services every Sunday, creating a space of healing and connection.

“There’s a heartbeat that comes with the song. There’s a story that comes with that song,” Garcia says. “There’s a living portion of that song that’s actually with you, that’s supporting you.”

More than 65,000 people in North Carolina who believed they were eligible to vote could have their ballots thrown out nearly five months after election day, flipping the results of a supreme court election, a state appeals court ruled on Friday.

The 2-1 ruling from the North Carolina court of appeals came in response to Republicans’ months-long effort to overturn the results of the state supreme court election in November. The Democrat Allison Riggs, who currently sits on the court, defeated appellate judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, by 734 votes. After the election, Griffin filed a protest seeking to get around 60,000 votes thrown out.

Griffin currently sits on the North Carolina court of appeals – the body that issued Friday’s ruling. A panel of three of his colleagues heard the case.

Nothing to see here ...

Near the end of March, Gary Wilder, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, sent an email about his decision to decline attending a conference at Columbia University, explaining he was doing so because Columbia is ​“actively colluding with the U.S. government’s project to destroy higher education and criminalize dissent.”

“A boycott is one of the few instruments available to the academic community through which to censure Columbia,” Wilder wrote to many of those involved in the gathering.

Wilder is one of more than 1,800 academics and 50 organizations who have joined a quickly expanding boycott of Columbia, which has been at the center of U.S. state and political repression surrounding activism for Palestinian liberation.

This boycott is in line with the position taken by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) that ​“institutions of higher education that themselves violate academic freedom or the fundamental rights upon which academic freedom depends” are legitimate targets of academic boycotts.

This drama is getting tiresome. It’s just an app, and many Americans—at least those who are old enough to vote—don’t actually care that much about it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that TikTok’s popularity was second only to YouTube among teenagers, but it’s far from the country’s most popular social-media app overall, despite its salience as a conversational stand-in for “internet culture” or “annoying thing that young people like.” “It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic in January, pointing out that only a third of U.S. adults interviewed for another Pew survey said they’d ever used it. (More of these people say they use Pinterest!) Among young adults, she added, Snapchat and Instagram are more popular.

Reasonable conclusions may be drawn from these facts. First, Trump’s national security cabinet commonly discusses secret information on insecure personal devices. Second, sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China intercept such communications, especially those sent or received in their countries. Third, as a result, hostile intelligence services now probably possess blackmail material regarding these officials’ indiscreet past conversations on similar topics. Fourth, as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request. And fifth, no one seems to have feared being investigated by the justice department for what appears to be a violation of the Espionage Act’s Section 793(f), which makes gross negligence in mishandling classified information a felony; the FBI director, Kash Patel, and attorney general, Pam Bondi, quickly confirmed that hunch. Remarkably, the CIA director John Ratcliffe wouldn’t even admit to Congress that he and his colleagues had made a mistake.

Because it was written during active wartime, the book includes various suggestions for causing physical violence and destruction, such as starting fires, flooding warehouses, breaking tools, etc. But it also includes many suggestions for how to just generally be annoying within a bureaucracy or office setting.

Pretty sure I've worked with people who read this ...