While riding home with my son this evening, I found myself apologizing to him. This world today--the people--are a profoundly unbelievable mess. He brought up things he's read in the news and I hardly know what to say. We both understand how insane it all is, but people still believe it... truly...

I get it. The world has always been a mess. This mess today is simply uniquely ours at this time in history.

But...

My gods...

What...

The...

sighs

Why is this number so drastically higher than other numbers I've seen? I thought it was in the 40 thousands?

(Not like that's any better. Genocide is genocide. I'm just a bit perturbed by how different the number is then when I last heard.)

UPDATE: Further along in the linked document it clarified...

"In total it is likely that 62,413 people have died of starvation and its compilations in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to September 30, 2024. Most of these will have been young children."

That figure is an addition to the 42,000 that have died from the violence.

Holy hell... 😭

I have to admit that I was confused by the meaning of this "panic defense". The following from the article helped a bit.

At the September hearing, Pohutsky said “the LGBTQ panic defense is often deployed as a component of other defenses to play on the unfortunate prejudices of some judges and juries in an effort to mitigate penalties for these crimes.”

But a linked article made this "defense" tactic even more clear.

Gay rights advocates are outraged after an Austin, Texas, man received a light sentence for stabbing his neighbor to death in what some are calling an example of the so-called gay panic defense.

For decades, the rare defense has allowed a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity to justify violent crime in some cases. Now, advocates are saying it should be banned.

I'm honestly surprised that this was ever admissable in the first place. Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

This is good for the people of Michigan and the other 19 states that ban it. May all US states follow in kind.

But Israel's not doing anything wrong, so why worry...

/s

sighs

Yet something else to disable in Windows. I'm losing track of each thing at this point.

Just another of the many reasons that RTO is essential!

/s 😐

I love ads. I love what Microsoft and the likes are doing.

Said no one ever

The modern prison-communication industry emerged four decades ago, after the federal government broke up A.T. & T.’s Bell System. New phone companies competed for customers by slashing prices. But inside prisons and jails a different model developed: telecom companies persuaded local officials to sign exclusive service contracts in exchange for hefty commissions. The costs of these commissions were passed along to incarcerated “customers” and their families, who lacked consumer choice. Price gouging was the inevitable result. By the nineties, prison phone-call prices in some jurisdictions had soared to twenty dollars for fifteen minutes.

I'll never understand how and why prisons and anything related are allowed to be privatized.

People make mistakes and some are prison worthy. However, we want them to do their time, grow in the process, and ultimately return to society as better people. Instead, we throw people in prison who don't belong there, keep out privileged ones who do far worse and need prison, don't provide the needed help, and make prison so miserable that people can't actually grow into something better.

WTF. I jokingly wanted to be a king (dictator) as a teen because I figured it would be faster to fix things... starting with firing every politician (although at that age I said 'off with their heads'). It's such a horrible idea. It wouldn't work. But then that thought comes back in moments like this and I'm like, "just give me a few years to fix things and clean things up". Ugh. No wonder people eventually end up doing insane things. How long can we wait for reform?

Just in case I'm asked, here's the basics steps to get it going:

• I downloaded the release from https://github.com/Helium314/HeliBoard and then installed. (Or set it up via Obtainium until its ready for F-Droid release)
• I downloaded the Swipe library linked on the HeliBoard Github page from here.
• Under HeliBoard settings -> advanced, I clicked "load gesture library" and selected the downloaded swipe library
• And for voice input, l downloaded Futo from the play store. FYI, it's free and offline, but not FOSS.

That's it.

Just setup the two apps with your specifics like the theme and etc. This is what mine looks like now:

HeliBoard with Swipe + FUTO have made replacing gboard possible for me. I feel like it's been a 90% replacement, a far greater degree than some of the decent keyboards currently available. I regularly use but swipe and speech to text in two languages. I'm really really happy and grateful for these tools. 💜

For goodness' sake, do something about it then. Stop repeating these same words over and over and over, year after year after year.

I would be really interested in seeing this broken down by nation. Are any countries doing this better than others. Can others learn from them?

Or... are we simply a complete failure as a species... destined to become [choose your post apocalyptic story]