収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Republican Senators will file TODAY for cloture on SB-9, an anti-trans bill in the US Senate. The actual vote could be today, tomorrow, or Monday. Axios reports it’s probably Monday, BUT IT COULD BE TODAY.

What does this mean and why is it bad?

Cloture is Senate noises for ending debate. Ending debate requires 60 votes, which means the Republicans can’t win this vote by themselves. They need seven (7) Democrats to defect. Unfortunately, some of them are very wibbly. At least a few will go over. We have to keep it down to six or fewer.

If the Republicans can force cloture now, then they’ll be able to pass the bill later on a party-line vote whenever they want, and it won’t take long.

This is where we stop this bill. Not later. Here. Now. If this vote goes through, then the bill itself can be approved with only Republican votes, and it will be.

So contact your Senators TODAY. February 27, 2025. TODAY. Thursday. TODAY.

Preferably in the morning, because while the vote is probably Monday, you just don’t know with these fucks.

If you don’t know who your Senators are or how to call them, here’s a tool to find out.

If you don’t know what to say, here’s a script. But try to put it in your own words. It’s always better if you’re not reading a script.

CALL YOUR SENATORS. TODAY. SAY NO TO CLOTURE ON SB-9, the so-called “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025,” an explicit anti-trans hate bill. TODAY.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.5 – 21 February 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.5.

With this version, the Greater Northshore Map has adopted our MEGAMAP’s former Empty Quarter, previously a basically empty paste-in of King County Regional Trails. It is now a peer map section with Greater Northshore proper, City of Seattle, and 2 Line Eastside Bike Connector.

There may not be a lot down there, but what’s down there is now properly mapped and included.

Additions and changes since 1.4.6:

• ALL OF NEWCASTLE, as far as I know. Thanks to Kerry Sullivan (City of Newcastle) for help on unpublished but completed new May Creek Park Drive bike lanes
• NORTHERNMOST RENTON, including substantial upgrades to Lake Washington Loop route markings, particularly street names for the chunk where it’s just bike lanes
• New-to-me bike lanes around 100th Ave W. in Edmonds, now mapped
• Upgrade to 15th Avenue S bike lanes in the Seattle map – they now have physical separation. There’s a warning flag because they’re still intermittently being worked on a little? But as far as I can tell they are generally open.

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because it doesn’t. If you have an iPhone, please use the website interface and not the app, because Apple takes 30% if you use the app. I’ll keep doing this regardless, but you know. Thank you! ^_^

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Well, the task scheduler seems to think we’re caught up. But the post about how we got hopelessly behind on blog federation never actually federated, so let’s see if we’re federating now.

…and we definitely are not. Well. That’s a problem. Can’t refresh the profile from Mastodon, either.

Well.

That’s not great.

What happens if we update this post?

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

HHS employees, DO NOT OPEN YOUR EMAIL.

Not without reading this first.

They’re going to cut off your network access as soon as you read your email, so you need to download a bunch of things first. Details at the link.

DO NOT OPEN YOUR EMAIL WITHOUT READING THIS FIRST.

See also the firings in the Epidemic Intelligence Service.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

“DOGE”‘s Shitler Youth committee includes white nationalists, misogynists, and – naturally – probable criminals. Here’s some in-depth storytelling about “Path Network,” the “startup” where Edward Coristine was previously working. This is only one of many gems in the post:

My first interaction with the founder, Marshal Webb, was in 2016 when the company was called “BackConnect’. … a lot of his knowledge came from the fact that he was personally hosting the threat actors’ infrastructure, therefore had direct insight into the botnet. […]

At some point shortly after, a DDoS-for-hire service got hacked and its entire customer database along with all DDoS attack logs was leaked online. One of the records traced back to an employee of his DDoS mitigation firm, and from a combination of attack logs and corroboration with customers, it was determined that they had been launching DDoS attacks against businesses, then cold calling them to sell DDoS protection services.

Honestly there’s no way these fash bastards aren’t looting Federal records exploitation purposes. Even aside from the fascism, they’ve got their hands on the biggest information drop the world has ever seen and they’re absolutely going to use it. There’s simply no way they don’t.

And I want to be clear about something: I speak as someone who was once what one might call part of the problem. To be clear, never for money! Only for lulz and actual curiosity. But did I hoover up all the spare info I could get even if I never intended to use even a little of it? Hells yeah I fucken did, which is how I had bullshit like IBM mainframe FORTRAN libraries. Did anyone want that? No. Did I have a use for it? No. Did I ever think I would? No! Did that stop me? Oh hells no.

It wouldn’t stop these guys, either. And the difference is these guys hang full-time with actual criminals, and this data is actually crazy valuable, so you know it’s for the money.

Lock your goddamn credit down, folks. At a minimum. And do everything else you can think of to protect yourself, too, because there is going to be some incoming goddamn fire.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Something occurred to me tonight. A memory. Stories we’ve seen about data being destroyed by the Musk / Trump administration. Evidence of the same.

And that leads me to ask…

…do good archives of census data exist?

I mean really good ones? Complete? Validated, somehow?

You see, last time around they put a lot of work into trying to fuck with census data. Trying to limit who gets counted, trying to change what questions get asked, trying to hide information on LGBT people, stuff like that, all to the point of apportioning more representatives to red states than blue. Disproportionately so, of course.

They didn’t get to do it, not at all like they wanted to.

Do we know if the current census data is… secure?

Because it seems to me that if you wanted to fuck with the balance of power at a fundamental level in this country, going through the census data and making some creative edits might be a good way to do that. Scream fraud, as they do every time they want to break something, then maybe demand some sort of mid-decade “corrective reapportionment” of representatives based on the suddenly all rather different census data you suddenly have.

Not saying they’re doing this, of course. I have no idea. It’s just… a thought.

So.

Does anyone have archives of 2020 census data?

And if so… how complete?

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

While putting up the latest Experimental Megamap 1.5.0, I found the old printed Megamap 1.0.0, and thought I’d do a side by side of the first and latest experimental versions. It was so short! And so sparse! “Unmarked but commonly used” didn’t even exist as a category yet. So there’s much more data now.

(1.0.0 wasn’t officially called experimental, but it was – at least as a printed poster. I learned from it, particularly things like “how to stitch together a poster this big.”)

I realise this is probably the sort of comparison best saved for an anniversary post, but given where we are and the state we’re in, who even knows where we’ll be or be headed by May, right? So let’s do what we can while we can, and to hell with anything else.

And who knows. By May, maybe I’ll have that next mile of Snohomish County added in. It’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Really, it only makes sense that the most careless, dumbest, desultory fascist fuckhead would run the more careless, dumbest, and desultory version of the Iraq War playbook. Particularly against a country like Panama.

Bush II tried to make his bullshit believable. Really did. It wasn’t if you actually looked at the structural facts – at the realities on the ground – but it fooled even some people who really should’ve known better.

Trump isn’t even trying and doesn’t even care, he’s just checking off boxes before he drops paratroopers.

I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again: all those calls with Putin while he was out of office were coaching sessions. Even if he himself didn’t particularly know it – which I admit is quite possible – that’s what they were. And he’s going to make even American refugees incredibly – possibly even violently – unpopular… just everywhere.

Christ, what a nightmare.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Three months ago, I put up some vertical mini-flyers along the Burke-Gilman Trail in Northshore, pointing people to the Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map.

I’ve been keeping an eye on them and how they’ve held up, and today I brought them back inside.

For this first version, I trimmed right to the edge of the paper, and the pin holes went through the paper too. Then I used a tent waterproofing seal on the edges. The edges did not hold completely or even consistently; one failed almost immediately, but kept its integrity. The others failed less rapidly but nonetheless failed.

Despite that, the QR code and large text stayed legible throughout, and although the maps became very faded and/or washed out out over time, I think they’re still identifiable as maps.

i’ve put up new, bigger ones, six instead of three, and put them in the same places plus few others. They’re printed darker, and I kept plastic borders rather than being trimmed to edge with added waterproof sealant. The pins this time went through said borders, and not the paper.

I presume being printed darker will help with fading, and hopefully the heat-sealed laminate edges will improve the water resistance. But we’ll see over a few months’ time.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

In my writeup about the Trump administration’s declaration of war against trans people in particular but LGBTNI people in general, I highlighted that the first thing to watch for would be confiscation of travel documents.

Unfortunately, we already have our first report of travel documents confiscation.

Now, from what I can tell, here’s what you need to know:

One: this is unconfirmed upgraded to CREDIBLE. There are rumours flying around everywhere and while this is very close to the aggrieved party, I don’t have a direct link to an aggrieved party, much less a name or details.

ETA: The Guardian (US) report that Marco Rubio has issued a freeze on all issuance of “X”-marked passports and gender-change requests on passports. This is not the same as a passport seizure order, however; the issuance applies only to passport applications, both current and future.

Which would make the seizure of an existing document outside that memo’s authority.

Two: Assuming it’s real, this was someone who went in for a change to document, as opposed to just having it grabbed at a point of entry, or receiving a call or letter telling them their document is now invalid. This happening at an active change of state request is relevant, because that’s the easiest point of enforcement.

This aligns with the late-afternoon reports of Rubio’s email.

Three: the best news is that this is too early. There’s no implementation of this order yet, not even by the terms of the EO itself. We’re in the 30-day policy-implementation period, where State (et al) are supposed to come up with new rules for how they’re supposed to implement this, not just go out and start doing random shit.

Moreso, even the supposed agent saying all these things referenced pending legislation, as in, there will have to be changes in law to make this an actual change in law, and acting before this is the law is a violation of the law.

ETA: However, as per Rubio’s order above, they can suspend processing of whatever they want. That appears to have been the order issued – not for documents seizure but suspension of processing of new and changed documents.

If there was a seizure of an existing passport, then it is most certainly someone acting with independent initiative. That’s good for us, as it makes the court cases that will happen (assuming it’s real) more favourable to our side. Supposedly, the ACLU has been contacted and The Independent is investigating.

That doesn’t make it as much better as one might like. There are plenty of christofash and/or MAGAt people in these agencies, and they will soon by joined by many more. Maximalist interpretation and implementation – and just sheer harassment because they can – is the intent and will be the rule, whenever possible.

They also just like to hurt people and will do so whenever they think they can get away with it.

Four: Passports fall under treaty law, which is a peer to constitutional law, under the terms of the Constitution itself. You can’t really throw out treaty law with an EO under most circumstances. They will definitely try to ignore that, but that’s not something anyone less nakedly hyper-ideological than Samuel Alito or Aileen Cannon will override.

Five: People are being confused about the “Driver’s License” commentary, asking why a Federal agent would be talking about State-issued documents.

If you are in a state with Real ID compliant driver’s licenses, they fall under Federal rules.

That’s why.

This is one of the reasons some of us have fought them since they were introduced, and that is one of the reasons Washington State’s driver’s licenses by default are not Real ID compliant. You need a Real ID-compliant document for air travel in the US (as well as a few other things), so a lot of driver’s licenses are part of the system.

So. What do you do?

Keep watching this, because travel-document seizure is no fucking joke and is very much some rubber-hitting-the-road time, if it’s allowed to stand.

And they very much will want it to stand.

Eyes up, team.

Red alert.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.