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Riley Sennott, 26, is listed as a "senior advisor" in an internal NASA directory, similar to the nebulous titles given to some DOGE staff in other agencies. His name and involvement with DOGE have not been previously reported.

Like many other DOGE workers, he deleted his LinkedIn profile and made his X account private in recent months. However, Sennott did not make the Google Calendar linked to his personal email address private.

Anyone with the address could see every appointment Sennott had on the calendar going back to 2016. On January 6, for example, the calendar included a 15-minute event titled "Riley Sennott and DOGE Recruiting." The invite came from a Gmail address that DOGE appeared to be using for recruiting.

A calendar appointment from 2023 noted that Sennott "is currently working with a non-profit team in Ukraine to efficiently deliver aid and support evacuations." The blurb said that Sennott studied symbolic systems and environmental studies in college, "briefly dabbled in consulting," and has an "entrepreneurial spirit." His calendar also showed several events related to an internship at Booz Allen Hamilton in 2021.

"The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has arrived onsite at the agency. We anticipate that they will start reviewing our contracts to find efficiencies," the email reads, according to a copy reviewed by BI.

Zoom in: Newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement that since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel, "Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses— only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them."

She said universities must comply with all federal anti-discrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. "For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus," McMahon added. "Today, we demonstrate to Columbia and other universities that we will not tolerate their appalling inaction any longer."

Editor's note: This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.

Yet the White House doubled down today on Trump’s line, sharing a government webpage that declared, in a slightly more nuanced phrasing: “Yes, Biden spent millions on transgender animal experiments.” As is typical of DOGE, the page tallies up spending in a completely misleading way in order to arrive at an arbitrary number. One line item, for more than $3 million, was research examining how “sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones” may contribute to asthma, and whether estrogens account for a higher prevalence of the chronic lung disease in women. A different hormone study, priced at $1.2 million, indeed used “transgenic” — not transgender — mice. About $2.5 million went to a fertility study. Another project looked at how gender hormones affect the gut microbiome of mice. Of the highlighted research that does address transgender health, there’s a $300,000 analysis of breast cancer risk for female-to-male trans individuals taking testosterone. Again, the mice used for clinical purposes did not undergo gender transition.

A single entry, pegged at $455,000, was for HIV researchers looking at the immune response of mice who had been given cross-hormone therapy, which is perhaps the closest the list gets to an example of “making mice transgender.” Clearly, however, that was not the ultimate objective of their work.

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/26542245

WTF people ? AmeriKKKa was never denazified either, was it? Fuck!

Free speech and public health are both on the line. As one whistleblower observed in the British Medical Journal, the Trump administration is banning basic words from the entire US federal research system, hampering scientific research on minority communities: “The words that must not be used include ‘bias’, ‘biased’, ‘women’, or ‘female’, and it’s impossible to see how scientifically valid research can be conducted without these words.”

This includes three of the American conservative movement’s most prominent critics of ‘diversity’: Peter Boghossian, Christopher Rufo, and Richard Hanania.

Documents dissected in Alt Reich reveal that Boghossian, Rufo, and Hanania have each been bankrolled by the top funder of this foundation.

The foundation, originally known as the “Pioneer Fund”, was relaunched and rebranded in 2022 as the “Human Diversity Foundation” (HDF) by Danish eugenicist Emil Kirkegaard.

Established in 1937 by a pro-Nazi American textiles magnate, Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund had direct ties to Nazi eugenicists and senior officials in Hitler’s regime. It actively promoted Nazi ideology in the US by distributing Nazi propaganda films.

The Nazis pinpointed Jews as the most dangerous group. Following the Holocaust, when antisemitism was no longer socially acceptable, the Pioneer Fund’s activities focused more broadly on minority groups and black communities.

By the mid-20th Century, scientific racism was discredited within the scientific community as biologists and geneticists increasingly discovered that the majority of the traits studied in eugenics had little genetic basis.

But last year, Hope Not Hate revealed that a network of white supremacist activists was secretly rehabilitating the Pioneer Fund under the new Human Diversity Foundation brand identity.

Immediately after taking office, the 47th president signed an executive order decreeing that it's now the "policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female." Trump has also signed executive orders blocking people under the age of 19 from access to gender-affirming care, banning trans women from competing in women's sports, and forbidding trans people from serving in the military.

Several of these actions, among others, are under some level of federal review. But as judges weigh the legality and scientific accuracy of the orders, the message is loud and clear: the Trump White House thinks there's something wrong with trans people, and will do anything possible to make their lives more difficult.

All to say, it feels very unlikely that the current president's vision for Trump Gaza would include provocatively dancing seaside xaddies rocking long beards and midriff-revealing bikinis and skirts.

But here we are, and to that end, the dancing figures' inclusion in the promotional video raises unfortunate questions.

Also covered in Futurism from where I quote:

And unfortunately, the public cost of AI doesn't end there. New research by academics at UC Riverside and Caltech is warning that AI data centers are also taking a massive toll on human health, in the form of diseases like cancer and asthma.

The issue of air pollution is easy to overlook, because in most cases, the data centers are powered by local coal burning plants, which tend to be disproportionately located near low-income and working-class communities. It also seems wherever they go, AI data centers drive up the local cost of electricity, saddling their host communities with a burden not shared by the rest of the country, let alone by Silicon Valley or big tech's Wall Street investors.

AI's air pollution impacts can be best summarized like the nuclear meltdown of Chernobyl — the deadly toxins spread far and wide with no respect for distance, affecting those in, around, and far away from the actual data center itself.

"The data centers pay local property taxes to the county where they operate," Ren said in a press blurb about the study. "But this health impact is not just limited to a small community. Actually, it travels across the whole country, so those other places are not compensated at all."

A Google spokesperson said that the paper "promotes an inaccurate emissions estimate generated under false pretenses, undermining the progress of clean energy resource growth and creating a false narrative of health harms."

John Oliver cited a 5000% rise in search queries related to leaving Meta and deleting accounts. Among the topics mentioned in the analysis, attention was drawn to early Facebook's naivete with regard to moderation requirements, the constitutional framework, and a history of governmental interference.

Oliver debunks common right-wing "cry censorship" talking points, as well as the objective difficulty of moderation endeavors, and how direct threats by Trump may have influenced Zuckerberg's turnaround.

Oliver went on to suggest Signal, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed as alternatives that "do not seem as desperate to fall in line with Trump". For those reluctant to completely ditch Meta, Oliver revealed a new site with step-by-step instructions to "make yourself less valuable to them".

The guide was a collaboration with the EFF, and includes settings' tweaks for Facebook and Meta, whose 98% of revenue comes from micro-targeting ads, the host previously cited, to increase privacy, and recommends Firefox, Privacy Badger, as "other measures" to take in order "to block advertisers and other third parties from tracking you".

The segment culminated in a mock advert, in which the new Meta's approach to moderation is coined as "Fuck it", and hints to racism, internet scams, and calls to genocide running rampant on Meta's platforms.

The clip reminds the origins of Facebook as a site to "rank college girls by hotness", and its implication in genocide in Myanmar, which was more thoroughly discussed in an Oliver's previous special on Facebook in 2018.

In order to understand oppression as a subconscious thing, let's take a couple of examples.

Many women complain that they express an idea that is immediately dismissed, only for a man to be cheered for saying the exact same thing, minutes later.

I have witnessed time and again a woman pointing to the correct explanation or solution for a bug and a man just ignoring her repeatedly, only to exhaust all other solutions before arriving to the same conclusion and solution.

There is a ton of lab research to show this goes beyond anecdotal evidence. Some researchers recently showed that for the same length of speech, women speakers were judged as being overtaking the dialog.

In fact, the balance that the average listener gauged as fair was 70% male speech vs 30% female speech. Don't get me started about bias of doctors, not only against women and transgender people, but, let's face the elephant in the room, black people.

A recent study had found that doctors hold outdated racist tropes, for instance, that black people are more resistant to pain. Doctors are also more likely to discount complains from any marginalized group, and send them home with a "have less stress" tap on the back, when in reality they do have something serious. The list goes on and on.

There is a whole book, called "Dying of Whiteness", which shows that white people are opposed to welfare measures, when they think that black people will benefit from welfare too.

The number of leftist and anarchist people who maintain some blatant form of medicalized cisgenderism is astonishing. And this is not about transphobia only. The track record of many collectives with sexism is harrowing.

Someone recently wrote "Why I am not giving to your mutual aid project", TL;DR because every collective has a couple of skeletons of sexual abuse in their closet.

Haven't we all seen the silent machismo and the solidarity between male authority figures in these spaces? Whenever a story like this pops up, the whole repertoire of discount tropes for sexual abuse allegations is taken out from the secret place it is kept for emergencies like this.

This is consequential for broader organization as well, not only gendered and racialized oppression. In a strict Bakunian sense, the informality of a circle of buddies pulling the strings on any topic of field of activity is a form of State. A kyriarchy, or oppression.

And there are more oppressions that we don't even know, in jobs, universities, hobbies, and more. Some of them can be traced back to sexism, like the hard-science superiority complex has sexist undertones, but wherever there is inequality, there is oppression.

It seems that people have a predisposition to form groups and make rules that reify social categories, for instance when some universities are considered elite and others shitholes, or some squat is seen as true hardcore anarchists and the others as alternative lifestyle hippies.

ALL of this operates subconsciously.

For quite some time I thought that the channels of anarchist organization would remedy human predisposition towards inequality, oppression, and bias. I now realize that this can not happen automatically, but a serious component of self-reflection to transcend internalized kyriarchies must be necessary.

But we now see the prevail of the most vulgar and raw inequality instincts, enabled by systemic capitalist indoctrination and consent manufacturing campaigning. And we know that this seed is also present in leftists and anarchists.

I believe that something horrible is about to happen the following five to ten years. We will then reflect, as we did in the aftermath of the two first world wars, on human predisposition to outgroup, other, dehumanize and eliminate.

We might as well reinvent the science of the human psychology of obedience, conformity, prejudice, oppression and kyriarchy. And anarchists might have to reinvent the principles of political organization, this time to include the understanding of subconscious oppression, and embrace procedures to address and transcend all kyriarchies.

That would stay truth to the spirit of complete abolition of all State, including internalized states of mind. (The pun is not intended.) In fact, I finally tend to agree with some anarchist pedagogists, that preparing people to be active members in an equal society, free of oppressions, the work must start in childhood, to eradicate the instincts of property, selfishness, power and supremacy.

So, although it might seem there could not be a bleakest time to raise such issues, that in fact the struggle for visibility, for the normalization of queer lives, for the subversion of verbal sexism, and so on and so forth, all were important and integral to the anarchist cause.

The white male racist kleprocratists might shed ours and many of our siblings' blood over the next ten years. But 2030's anarchism will re-discover the procedures that engender these demands and bake the relentless struggle for complete equality right into the channels of anarchist social organization and generational reproduction.

A specialized iPhone app was used to block internet access, recording any time that the feature was disabled.

In numbers, nearly all the participants — 91 percent — improved on at least one of the three outcomes, while around three-quarters reported better mental health by the end.

The findings even suggest that the intervention had a stronger effect on depression symptoms than antidepressants, and was roughly on par with cognitive behavioral therapy.

What's driving all this? Ward suggests that the simplest explanation is that the experiment forced participants to spend more time doing fulfilling things in the real world.