It’s an Ivy League school.

Years ago, an ex-girlfriend was proctoring a course at an Ivy League. She had a billionaire’s daughter, a legacy admission, in one of her classes. The billionaire’s daughter never showed up to class. My ex-gf failed her. Later, when she looked at the recorded grades, the billionaire’s daughter who never showed up for class had a ‘C.’

George W. Bush graduated from Yale with a C average.

Ivy League schools educate many people. But they often just give degrees to the legacy admissions, to the wealthy, and to the politically connected.

The weird part is that there really aren’t more than a handful of universities that are actually ‘liberal.’ Since Conservatives see the world in black and white, all an organization has to do to be seen as ‘liberal’ is just not be Conservative.

That’s it. Either you lick Trump’s stank butthole, or you’re a ‘liberal.’ There is no such thing as non-partisan in their world. You either repeat the Conservative talking points, restate Conservative beliefs, loudly proclaim the party’s talking points, or you’re ‘liberal.’

As time moves forward, I think more and more frequently about trying to get out of this shithole counry.

Thanks!

I’m thinking of an app for musicians to upload their music too. Bandcamp was good, but it’s been taken over by corporate power now.

Bandcamp does some pretty cool things even though it’s now owned by a Business-2-Business music licensing company. Makes me wonder how many Bandcamp artists have had their songs ‘licensed’ by Songtrder (the ‘biggest music licensing platform in the world’) to other companies without the artists’ consent.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/is-bandcamp-as-we-know-it-over/

p.s. if anyone knows any good alternatives to Bandcamp, please let me know!

Yeah, I think they’re banning/blocking using AI right now. Either that, or they literally have the moderators fully on board with their Right-wing campaign.

If you really want to see what things like banning/suspension do, check out your Contributor Quality Score (CQS) here when you can: https://old.reddit.com/r/cqs/

I went from ‘Highest’ to ‘Lowest’ with one ban, and as far as I can tell, your CQS has an impact on the visibility of your posts.

They’re openly rejecting court order and legal precedent.

Unless someone starts enforcing these court orders, they’re just going to keep doing things.

They’re running the Nazi playbook. Word for word, step by step, just updated with newer propaganda.

Also making giant rebar craps all over

Fuck Android.

I hope a consistent, user-friendly alternative that works on all Android phones arrives soon. I’ve tried so many with an old phone and they’re always a pain to install and then don’t work quite right. I also don’t want to spend $500USD for a phone designed specifically to sidestep Android.

It would help if Android/Google didn’t consistently try to block every single thing that would allow you to get rid of Android, but they’re never going to allow that.

I hope that something user-friendly and consistent arrives soon. I will ditch Android in a second when that happens.

It’s 100% fascist rule, pure and simple.

We have a handful of national politicians who are trying to resist while the vast majority of them are simply playing along to preserve their own status and power. Democrat/Republican haven’t meant anything substantial for a while now–you have to look at who’s paying them (via ‘donations’ or otherwise) to know.

We can hope that they start killing each other (which they’d do if they had any backbone). Otherwise, our options are both extreme and extremely limited.

Leon dying would help.

The world is toxic because of people like Leon.

It’s not ‘someone’ I’m talking about. It’s a very specific person, and Leon barely qualifies as a person. He’s like a disease of culture/society that needs to be eradicated before culture/society dies.

When regular working people eventually win, we’re going to have to reinstitute all the controls that we had for decades preventing single corporations from owning too much of the media. Break it up into little pieces. One of the first things corporations did when they got their first man, Reagan, in power was consolidate the airwaves; they know that’s the tool necessary for them to repeat and spread lies, and without this tool, they’re going to lose.

It’s not an accident that Sinclair owns most of the local tv stations broadcasting to rural markets and that all the AM radio stations are run by a small handful of Conservative propagandists.

We’ve gotta get that shit shut down–a limit on the number of stations any company can own, massive fines for violating standards of truthfulness, etc.

The cells in this study were from induced pluripotent stem cells, where normal somatic cells are basically programmed to become pluripotent cells (which, otherwise, can only really be obtained from fetal tissue).

Induced pluripotent stem cells were also made by Japanese scientists, but I think around the year 2000. That’s almost two decades after Republicans in the U.S. cut most federal funding for stem cell research.

Those ‘Conservatives’ have damaged our society in so many ways.

This was done in Japan.

Imagine how far the United States could have come in stem cell research if the Republicans (particularly Reagan and later George W. Bush) hadn’t constantly cut funding and restricted use of embryonic stem cells.

100%

With all the money in politics now, and the fact that the campaigns with the most cash behind them almost always win, our representatives don’t have to be answerable to voters any longer. They just have to be answerable to the people spending the most cash.

Even then, the corporations and foreign entities that fund most of the campaigns right now just throw their cash behind the winners if the person they initially supported loses.

In the minds of people like Leon, you can literally buy elections simply by outspending the candidate you don’t like–and, looking at the statistics, he’s right. Then, even if they lose, they just chuck a bunch of money at the winning candidate. These people have no ethics, no respect for law, and they would rather destroy our institutions than have them work against them. And, unfortunately, they’re so wealthy now that they can, in fact, destroy our institutions.

And this will hit the people hardest who voted for them.

Back in the day, Wells Fargo would intentionally run higher charges first in their cycle so that people couldn’t skirt the edges of overdraft. Like, if someone made a $35 purchase, and three $1 purchases over the same two day period, they would immediately run the $35 purchase and then charge three overdraft fees for each of the $1 purchases instead of running the three $1 purchases first (even if they came first) and then charging a single overdraft fee when the $35 purchase hit.

I believe they got a fine for it.