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Senior medic challenges politicians to spend shift in NHS disaster they’ve created: ‘prepare for the rush’

https://skwawkbox.org/2023/01/02/senior-medic-challenges-politicians-to-spend-s…
Created
Mon, 02/01/2023 - 21:59
Vice-president of Royal College of Emergency Medicine Ian Higgingson doesn’t expect to be trampled in the rush of politicians coming to experience appalling situation they’ve created Ian Higginson, Vice-President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, has challenged politicians to come and experience for themselves the horrors faced by NHS staff and patients, in an […]

2022: a web card

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3993
Created
Mon, 02/01/2023 - 19:00
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January 2nd, 2023next

January 2nd, 2023: 2

I Spy for the FBI

https://rall.com/comic/i-spy-for-the-fbi
Created
Mon, 02/01/2023 - 18:21

Adam Fox, 39, faces 16 years in prison for his role in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Do you feel safer? Should your governor feel safer? Probably not. Along with his fellow “co-conspirators,” he was lured by an undercover FBI informant without whom the plot would never have gotten off the ground,...

The post I Spy for the FBI first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Why I quit Twitter… a decade ago

https://rys.io/en/162.html
Created
Mon, 02/01/2023 - 11:27

And so it has come to this. I finally quit Twitter… almost exactly a decade ago.

I could spin yarn and claim it was some major feat of clairvoyance, of course. That I foresaw all that happened lately with Twitter and decided to bail early. But it wasn’t that, really. I just felt strongly that centralized services are dangerous and unethical, and I decided to stop using them. Back then, Twitter was the last one on the chopping block for me.

The “Why”

Why did I feel so strongly about centralized services? Had you asked me ten years ago, it would have been difficult for me to explain. But even then I would have said it boils down to control and power dynamics. At the time I was a Free Software advocate, working for a Polish version of the FSFE. Software freedom was (and remains) important to me and it seemed obvious that one cannot have software freedom in a walled garden.

Hardly a strong, concrete argument, I know!

The Red Wave skew

https://digbysblog.net/2023/01/01/the-red-wave-skew/
Created
Mon, 02/01/2023 - 09:00
There was good reason to think the Republicans would do well in the 2022 midterms based on the historical precedents. The out party gains, the economy was shit, the president was unpopular yadd, yadda, yadda. But something else went on in 2022 that should make the media take a long hard look at how they cover campaigns and polling. The NY Times did a deep dive into what happened and it is clear that the Republican polling outfits played a media that was far to eager to buy what they were selling. They love to see the Democrats give a good spanking by Republicans. In fact, it’s their favorite thing, even if some of them are Democrats themselves. An excerpt: In the election’s immediate aftermath, the polling failures appeared to be in keeping with misfires in 2016 and 2020, when the strength of Donald J. Trump’s support was widely underestimated, and with the continuing struggles of an industry that arose with the corded home telephone to adapt to the mass migration to cellphones and text messaging.