Millions of Bees

It's Pride Month in the Untied States. If you have the means, consider donating to a charity like the Trevor Project or any other charity with goals of helping reduce harm towards the queer community, trans folks, and especially trans children.

I remain humbled by my queer friends who have shown me how to better love myself for who I am, and who consistently show me by example how much I still have to learn about myself. Your life and story are important and can impact the world in ways you may have never even considered. Thank you, and wishing you a raucous Pride.

Bees?

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION BEES ARE ON THE LOOSE—oh wait, fourteen million. yawn.

This past Friday, a truck carrying millions of bees in beehives overturned on a road in Washington state. The result was a gargantuan swarm of bees in the area, keeping the pacific northwest in the headlines a bit longer as far as "crazy bee related headlines" goes.

It was originally reported that 250,000,000 bees had escaped from the truck, but after a—I shit you not—squad of master beekeepers showed up to assist in the disaster, the number was revised to a more professional estimate of 14,000,000 bees.

Still, more bees than I'd like to have swarming me.

Due to the sheer mastery of these beekeepers, most of the bees were actually contained within a few days. They're working to get the bees back into their hives and back tryina impress the queen so they can get laid or whatever bees do. Something about honey, I dunno.

Policy

State Surveillance in the Surveillance States

A scenario often brought up by pro-abortion-rights folks is this: a woman finds herself in a state where abortion has been made illegal. To save her own life, she goes out of state to seek the healthcare she needs. The state learns of this and hunts her down, asserting that since she's a resident of a state where abortion is illegal, she has committed a crime. Specifically, she is a murderer, and now at risk of state execution.

This is often presented to appeal to someone's sense of free will and freedom, but often falls short because either the target of the argument lacks the empathy or foresight to see the point there, or they genuinely are just in agreement with the state in that scenario. Regardless, I'm curious if anything changes when it becomes more glaringly real.

A Texas woman was believed to have "self-administered an abortion" and was believed to have fled the state. Police say that her family came to them worried about her safety, at which time the cops used a system called Flock, which grants them the ability to scan data recorded by tens of thousands of cameras across the entire country to try and match license plates or faces or what-have-you.

The woman was contacted a few days later, and was safe.

There's a few key notes that make this different from the original scenario: the family went to the state to prompt the search, and it was—in theory—for a wellness check. Though, US cops don't have a wonderful history of handling wellness checks.

But the other parts remain true today: municipal cops in the US have access to a nationwide network of cameras from which they can scan historic data to track people down across state lines without the need for a warrant or pre-approval. The Flock system requires entering a reason for the search, to which the cops wrote, "had an abortion, search for female"

That was the reason they gave for why they used a literal surveillance network. But hey, it's a privatized surveillance network, so it's all good I guess.

So yeah, it's a bit of a fascist police state out there. What with all the nationwide tracking and oh, the state department now "vetting" student social media before allowing them to study here, because we value free speech.

But China's got that social credit system which is TOTALLY NOT THE SAME as what we have in the US today.

RFK's Hallucinogens

RFK Jr. is an incompetent, hubris-driven fool who is actively working to undermine the health of an entire country because nobody ever told him to shut the actual fuck up.

Fine; I'll provide supporting arguments.

I talked last week about the MAHA Report—the absurdly named paper perfect for these absurd times. Since it dropped, scientists and researchers have been pouring over it to figure out just what the hell it says, and wouldn't ya know it: turns out it's riddled with fake bullshit seemingly generated by ChatGPT.

The issues with the report, which the White House has referred to as "formatting issues," include references to studies that don't exist, as well as assertions about medical "science" which have no actual scientific consensus or proof.

Actual scientific authors were credited for papers that didn't exist, alongside co-authors they don't know. The White House had to re-issue the report with corrections to the "formatting issues" to address the completely made up bullshit it included.

RFK is fucking dangerous, there's really no other way to put it. I tried being loud about this during election season, but my GOODNESS the pro-RFK bot swarms were out in force trying to assert that he was not the obvious anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist that he is.

His railing against fluoride in water looks to cost billions in dental procedures, and he's fucking with medical research contracts for things like ongoing development of vaccines which could help against bird flu.

Public health is a group project. Not only is the US failing the project, but somehow, the teacher has declared that the only way to get an "A" is to punch yourself in the balls on loop forever.

Too Important To Care

Remember that little thing from the past several years where Boeing's 737 Max airplanes just kinda kept falling out of the sky, killing hundreds of passengers over several crashes, then it came out that Boeing had been intentionally skirting safety regulations and then Boeing totally didn't kill several whistleblowers about all of it?

The Department of Justice in the US is now working to just kinda… stop their fraud case against Boeing. Or rather, they're coming to an "agreement in principle" which basically just means the government has turned the court case into a pinky promise that Boeing will pay out a pittance to the victims: ~$1.5 Billion.

Boeings market cap is around $150 Billion and they reported a profit of about $15 Billion in Q4 2024 alone.

Had the case saw its way through to a conviction, Boeing would have potentially not been a viable government contractor anymore. Can't be having that, can we? Then we'd need to actually apply standards to our war forges.

World News

France's Power Went Out, so They Lit a Fire

France is having a bit of a time. First, there's been some kind of sabotage on power grids happening in the French Riviera region. Two days in a row, the region saw massive power blackouts seemingly caused by sabotage and arson.

Local authorities are investigating but haven't apprehended anyone yet. There were apparently some tire marks at the scene of a substation that was set ablaze, but that's kinda it right now. In total, around 200,000 homes have been affected by outages.

Meanwhile, over in Paris, celebratory riots broke out after a PSG victory which was screened at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. Several fires and fights broke out, with cops arresting at least 81 people. French officials are displeased with the behavior, to put it mildly.

Swiss Village Buried in a Mudslide

The small Swiss Alps village of Blatten was buried by ice and mud after a massive glacier broke apart and sparked a landslide.

The village was evacuated of its 300 residents before the landslide, but at least one person remains missing.

Basically, a giant chunk of glacier busted off a mountain and cascaded into a landslide of literally catastrophic scale. Local authorities estimate about 90% of the town to be utterly destroyed and buried underneath mounts of icy rock.

Most of the folks have lost their homes, though local leaders pledge to rebuild. The national army has been dispatched to assist with cleanup, and aid organizations are raising money and providing assistance in the region.

The Gaza Genocide Continues

The genocide (or really holocaust at this point) of the people of Gaza continues, as the US and Israel have claimed to start an aid distribution program which has already seen the murder of dozens of Palestinians. From the… aid distribution… program.

I'm just going to share this quote from a Gaza resident in a report by The Guardian:

"My brother went to receive aid from the American distribution points in Rafah when the bullets started raining down on them, the Israeli soldiers had started shooting at the people there. My brother went with two of his friends. One of them was critically injured in the head, the other was killed, and my brother was shot in the back. He was transported to the hospital by a donkey cart–no ambulances can reach the area, and there were dozens of injured and dead"
~ Yarin Abu al-Naja

There are even reports of an Israeli tank firing at crowds of people seeking to collect food from the distribution points. The Israeli military denies wrongdoing, and initially said they were "unaware" of injuries from their actions. That, or it just didn't happen and we shouldn't believe the literal footage of it:

"As noted in our daily report earlier, aid was distributed without incident […] Reports of injuries and fatalities are completely false and fabricated. Please do not be duped by them."
~ "The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation," a US-Israeli joint operation

I lack words to share on this besides, "yep, it's still happening, and it's funded by our tax dollars, and no political party of significance in the United States has any remote interest in actually stopping it." I hate to be a doomer on that front, but barring third party intervention, I don't see it stopping.

How About Some Good News?

Scientists from Kenya and Germany have potentially found a way to preserve a critically endangered species of Rhino in Africa.

The northern white rhino is wildly endangered from poaching. Literally two of them remain, both females. There's no way to repopulate them naturally, so researchers took their big vial of frozen rhino sperm (which we all have in the back of the freezer, of course) and managed to successfully perform an IVF procedure on a southern white rhino, artificially implanting a fertilized egg into the rhino.

I dunno about you, but I personally do not know how to properly impregnate a rhino with without more rhinos.

This experiment was on a southern white rhino first, as the two species are closely related while the southern variety isn't literally down to two chicks hangin' out sipping wine and swapping stories of the good days. But maybe we'll soon see a flourishing community of the northerners. I hope they're friendly.

Technology

Texanology Policy in Action

Texas is the latest US state to sign a bill into law which places regulations on tech companies for the residents of it's state. We've seen a bunch of this recently with porn bans, but this time it's about social media and app distribution.

Governor Abbott signed into law a bill which basically boils down to, "app stores are required to restrict app purchases and downloads for minors."

Texas is not the first state to sign a law like this, nor are they the first state to try to use their scale to essentially spearhead federal policy. We've previously seen California make some vague motions at privacy requirements, and of course we've got the smattering of porn bans I mentioned. But this one is interesting in that there generally is support for something like this, but nobody has proposed something actually workable at a federal level, so instead we're staring down the barrel at a situation where we'll have a patchwork of wacky per-state internet laws.

As KOSA bats back and forth in and out of the political zeitgeist, the situation gets messier, as we have a famously under-equipped and under-inspired congress when it comes to enacting comprehensive technology policy, but then leaving it open to state dictation is a minefield of its own.

At the end of the day, US citizens do tend to agree that there is a need for some kind of regulation on child and teen use of social media and the internet at large. There's also a desperate need for data privacy laws and content moderation laws, but unfortunately the giant tech companies have made it clear that it would cost them a little bit of money and effort to adhere to such concepts, and so that is an outright impossibility.

Gmail's AI Update

Congratulations, Gmail users: you now get AI email summaries and further AI integrations in your email app regardless of if you want it or not.

The Gmail app will start putting AI generated summaries of emails and threads at the top of an email, adorned with a disclaimer saying, "By Gemini; there may be mistakes." This means Google is happily running all of your emails through their AIs.

This feature can be disabled in the app settings, though I have an alternative solution to the problem. Here are the instructions:

1. Use a different email provider that respects your privacy

Now I know changing email providers is a daunting task, but I promise you, there are better options than Gmail which actually respect you and your data. Plus, many services let you bring your own domain name, so you can keep your email address even if you change providers again down the line.

This is not a sponsored segment. I just find email to be Actually Pretty Great and want more people to explore what's out there. I generally recommend the following email providers:

• Fastmail - This is what I use for most of my personal and professional email. It is fast, private, and full of features
• ProtonMail - Focused specifically on privacy, this is a part of a broader privacy-focused office suite that's more like a full Google apps alternative

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

• The US is looking into what to do about the Pope's citizenship
• Some climber dudes in the UK has sent the mountaineering world into a fuss after "cheating" at climbing Mt. Everest using performance-enhancing gas
• Cops chased a dude down in a terrifying 10mph chase
• Cyberpunk 2077's sequel is officially titled, "Cyberpunk 2" which makes sense I guess