#mass hacking event

[suppuration]

PSA

If you have ever had a FB account, check right now. There's been a HUGE hacking event. People are getting turned into "Mavis L. Wanczyk" accounts with identical avatars.

Not only is this a hacking hijack (that personally sounds a lot like the I Love You e-mail virus from 2008), it's a phishing scam. If you see ANY FB posts or messenger requests from an account with that name, REPORT IT. Do not engage it.

[maygrcnt]

just to be so clear, no one was hacked on twitter and if they were it wasn’t becauss “buddie shippers” were hacking their accounts

[brushstrokesapocalyptic]

Having now finished reading the Murderbot Diaries, I'm poking through parts of earlier books, and right now I'm thinking a whole lot about This:

I said, “At some point approximately 35,000 hours ago, I was assigned to a contract on RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. During that assignment, I went rogue and killed a large number of my clients. My memory of the incident was partially purged.” SecUnit memory purges are always partial, due to the organic parts inside our heads. The purge can’ t wipe memory from organic neural tissue. “I need to know if the incident occurred due to a catastrophic failure of my governor module. That’s what I think happened. But I need to know for sure.” I hesitated, but what the hell, it already knew everything else. “I need to know if I hacked my governor module in order to cause the incident.” […] “Either I killed them due to a malfunction and then hacked the governor module, or I hacked the governor module so I could kill them.”

Now, my assumption the first go around was always that the sequence of events went something like Mass murder happens > Memory purged > Governor hacked. Something along the lines of Murderbot waking up with all its digital memories gone but its meatbrain still screaming about the horrors, to which it responds by borking the governor module. And I've seen one or two other posts that seem to make the same general assumption.

But that can't be the case, because if it happened after the purge then Murderbot would remember it. It would have a clear, cold-hard-facts record of "this is the moment I deactivated my governor module" and this whole passage wouldn't be a question. So it can only be Mass murder happens > Governor hacked > Memory purged.

Now, we don't know anything at all about the incident and the following hack, apart from what Murderbot remembers and learns. It's possible there was some sort of gap— The company picks Murderbot out of the bloodbath, assesses the malfunctioning SecUnit for a little while (during which it hacks the governor module), and then decides to wipe it.

Just as likely (and IMO more compelling) is the possibility that Murderbot hacked it during the incident. SecUnit with a particular proclivity towards hacking recognizes that something is VERY WRONG with its governor module, it does not want to be doing all this murder, it hacks the module and shuts down due to a combination of physical damage and mental distress.

Then it wakes up with no cold-hard-data type memories, just a borked governor module and the account of its squishy meatparts to go on. It's pretty sure it knows what happened, at least in the broad strokes. But four years later, with the horrors no longer freshly screaming in its ear, it can't quite be sure.

[ghouljams]

WHAT DO SOAP AND MRS MACTAVISH DO ON WEEKENDS THE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW 🥺

Well Saturdays are particularly busy, with the kids having all sorts of clubs and sports to get to. Johnny usually wakes you up with a kiss and a coffee, lets you know that he's already gotten the older lads out the door and off to footie practice, but the wee girls are dragging their feet over swimming lessons and tumbling. So you get up and help see the girls off, still in your pyjamas as you drop the youngest at her gymnastics practice, you always give a wave to the more put together mums. After 5 kids you don't put real pants on for just anything, they'll figure that hack out sooner or later.

You have a shag with your husband and discuss your eldest's desire to play rugby while Johnny stares at you lovingly.

You go to pick up your boys from footie while Johnny goes to get the girls. Your youngest boy tells you about his unassisted goal from halfway down the field so you take all three out for ice cream. You tell them not to tell their Da and end up meeting Johnny at the ice cream shop as he's telling your girls the same thing. You have a good laugh about it while the kids scarf down far too much frozen dairy.

You call your girl friends about having a night out some time while Johnny takes your oldest boy to go meet up with a girl he's "dating." You don't see how a middle grader could be dating anyone, but it's cute. You get pictures of the two of them for the next hour or so while your husband supervises their play-date. You help your girls make a tiktok while the boys play outside. When Johnny gets home he tells you some kids are down the street playing and all of your little ones rush out to play with their friend.

You have a quickie with your husband, and enjoy the way his wedding ring sparkles with your slick.

You rush out when you remember you need to get groceries today and Johnny promises to mind the house. You stop one of your kids from bringing a stray cat into the house on your way out and send them to get their siblings for lunch.

Johnny has the littlest down for a nap when you get home and the rest watching a movie. You prep dinners for the week while Johnny does laundry, stopping each other in the hallway for a kiss. Johnny gropes you once and you giggle so loudly that one of your boys comes to investigate. Before immediately making barf sounds and calling you and your husband "gross" and "lovey dovey." You pat yourself on the back for that one and Johnny gets another grab at your ass while you shoo your child back to his movie.

Dinner is loud and eventful, with lots of stories from the day's play. Your children eat almost as much as your husband and you remind them there's no dessert on saturdays since their Granny will give them more than enough tomorrow.

Sunday morning mass. Then lunch at a sandwich shop. Johnny changes sheets while you help with homework. Then you pack the kids in the car to head to Johnny's mum's house for dinner. You get there with plenty of time for the wee ones to play with their cousins and for you to chat with Johnny's sisters.

Despite the sugar Johnny's mum provides the kids always crash as soon as they get home. So you take the time to relax with your husband, watching late television in the living room before retiring to bed.

You grab a slow, quiet shag and fall asleep on top of each other.

[forsaken-headcanons]

Since people like to depict c00lkid with a lot of focus on flesh and body structure I thought his father should have some as well

So if 7n7 wanted to use the coolgui he would have to use his own body as a medium, the rectangular panel still appears but if you look closely it’s made of organics

One of the big reasons the other survivors find 7n7 so creepy other than the hacker stuff is that when he interacts with the gui his hand melts INTO the panel

The deeper he wants to go in the code the more body mass is needed and since the skin is right there on top it’s usually the thing that goes first when he hacks

Additionally whenever he teleports his body has to “melt down” and then re shape himself at the new location so sometime he looks very much uncanny valley because there wasn’t enough time to get the features right

Slightly unconnected but I think in the event that ended his official hacking career 7n7 was caught right in the middle of one of his hacks and lost what ever flesh he was using in that moment

He managed to salvage himself but his organs don’t work quite right anymore and the skin on back is a wreck of scar tissue and hollows afterwards from the slapdashed job.

That is morbid. But very interesting.

[salty-dracon]

All of those "Sunday joins the Stellaron Hunters after the events of 2.2" theories are so funny. Yes, here's the Stellaron Hunter family:

A badass deep-voiced lady assassin who both double wields guns and uses a katana.

A powerful gamer gremlin who can literally hack reality itself.

An immortal man consumed by a lust for vengeance, named after the weapon he wields.

A powerful genetically modified warrior in a giant mech-suit, the last of her kind, who wields scorching flames and weapons of mass destruction.

A mysterious cat who can see the future.

And their newest member: A Catholic priest.

[mymoongirlreadings]

The Birth Chart of Italy 🇮🇹 🤌

Italy Birth Chart Placements 🌌:

Rising in Libra | Sun in Pisces | Moon in Gemini | Mercury in Pisces | Venus in Pisces | Mars in Taurus | Jupiter in Leo | Saturn in Virgo | Uranus in Gemini | Neptune in Pisces | Pluto in Taurus

Sun & Mercury in Pisces: The Sun is known for being theatrical & represents how we express ourselves. Mercury represents how we communicate. Italians are not just talkative; they're animated, full of vitality, & theatrical in their self-expression. Italy's Mercury happens to be Rx in Pisces, and Rx Mercuries can naturally lean towards being either very quiet or, on the flip side, extremely talkative. Italy's Mercury is conjunct the Sun, a planet that likes to shine and has a big energy in astrology. This can connect to Italians being infamous for talking with their hands (Mercury rules over the hands) & their mix of grand, dramatic, lighthearted, direct & enthusiastic expressions (Leo qualities).

Gemini Moon: Italy's Gemini Moon is reflective of Italy's culture in the way they openly interconnect with one another in their immediate environment (Gemini rules over immediate environment, neighbors & friends) & in the way they enjoy exchanging thoughts with others. Italians are known for being emotionally engaged (The Moon) with ideas or stories (Gemini). Italy has been known to prefer artisan designs (ex: hand-stitched clothes) as opposed to mass production.

Venus in Pisces: Venus, the planet of values, food & habits. In Italy, it's a cultural tradition that meals are seen as an opportunity to enjoy food, to socialize, to spend quality time with loved ones, and to relax rather than seeing eating as being simply a means to satisfy hunger. Venus in its sign of exaltation showcases the love that pulsates, the generous hospitality, the infamously beautiful architecture/ craftsmanship, and healing pleasure in its most spiritual form. When Venus in exaltation is located in the 6th house, it states that love & art are not just luxuries—they're daily parts of life.

Mars in Taurus: Mars represents what a country exerts a lot of energy into, and Taurus is strongly connected to slowness/the present moment, nature, & food. Italians practice things like seasonal eating, slowed & shared eating, table manners, and nifty food hacks, as well as experiencing pleasure in steps—the tempo is noted, all Venus-related. Italy's Taurus Mars is squaring to its Jupiter in Leo, meaning there's pride in how you do something, not just what you do. There's pride (Jupiter in Leo) in how (Mars) you eat, not just what you eat. There's pride in how we savor, not just indulging.

Pisces Sun 27° conjunct Pisces Neptune 29°: Pisces is a sign that likes to take its time; it is the 12th & final sign, after all. The 29° is a degree that sits at a very developed, masterful, & final energy of the sign, indicating natural powers & talents with any placement that sits here. Neptune, in its sign of rulership, the final sign of the zodiac, in the final decan of Pluto, sitting at the VERY last degree, shows how Italy's powerful & influential identity (Sun) with Roman mythology (Neptune represents spirituality) is reflected in so much of our modern knowledge seen through learning and breaking down subjects like literature, astrology, language, etymology, philosophy & psychology.

9th House Gemini Moon & Vesta in Cancer: Since the 9th house represents culture/religion, I'm using this house to interpret what the culture/main religions of the country are like. The Moon being in the 9th house (Italy's Vesta is also in Cancer) indicates that home life, family, socializing, expressing & relaxing are not only a big part of culture, but sacred to Italy's inner world.

Uranus in the 9th house in Gemini: Wherever Uranus is located in a chart can represent where we are influential or have a larger-scale impact. The Moon is linked to events of the past, and the 9th house represents travel, the Akashic Records, religion, politics & culture. Whether it's the Italian language, the Vatican, the Roman Empire, Italy's history with mythology/philosophy, or simply Italy being the 5th most traveled-to country in the entire world, the history, innovation, influence, quality, and comforts of Italy have been highly influential and what makes it a continuously popular destination today. The 9th house represents history, Uranus rules over influence, and the Colosseum is one of the most visited historical sites globally, with many tourists opting for tours to learn further (Gemini). It's interesting because with Gemini in the 9th house with Uranus and the Moon, this makes Italy such an influential place that people genuinely end up learning about the roots, the culture, and the history through visiting some of the most popular religious & historical sights in the world. They don't just take a grounded form; Italy's influence is also found verbally with their popular Italian sayings (Uranus in Gemini) like "Mamma Mia" & "Ciao."

Pisces Venus in the 6th house opposing Virgo Saturn in the 12th house: Saturn in Virgo can speak to Italy's strictness & order with their indulgences, their attention to detail with their routines, & subconsciously prioritizing practicality. Virgo rules over the digestive system, and Saturn represents limits & boundaries. Italians acknowledge coffee as a digestive, so they typically offer espresso after meals and lattes, whereas cappuccinos are an exclusive morning ritual. This opposition between Saturn/Venus + Pisces/Virgo energy can manifest as idealism & perfectionism simultaneously existing, which can result in "Magnificent, no one can create it like we do, it's so dreamy, so Venusian, so Piscean, so beautiful!" while sometimes also fretting over the tiny Virgo Saturn details.

Pluto in Taurus in the 8th house: Both the 8th house & Pluto are related to power. Not only is Italy popular & influential from their strong cultural heritage, ranging from their art, cuisine, and fashion. Italy holds power in many other ways structurally. Italy is ranked #2 globally in the world for cuisine taste (Taurus), has a strong global economy (Taurus), has strong cultural/architectural power, and has a significant military force (Italy's 8th house also contains Mars, which is connected to the military). Italy is consistently among the top 5 most visited countries in the world for international tourism. Italy also has a strong luxury goods market (Taurus rules over luxury goods).

[senseandaccountability]

“It takes the wrong sort to put the world right.”

A huge problem for me with the tone of the narrative is that outside a very carefully curated playthrough experience with preconceived ideas of and love for Solas, Veilguard is probably the least compassionate game I’ve played in forever, while spouting out lines about how everyone can find a new path in life because our nature isn’t written in stone, our fates are our own, as well as plenty of HR department lines about working together as a team.

“It takes the wrong sort to put the world right.” The game says that, but it definitely doesn’t mean it. At least I don’t feel it. You are so very rarely challenged in your idea of who this wrong sort is and what they could bring to the table. Davrin speaks of the Wardens recruiting at the Gallows but you meet only adorable, righteous and charming ones. The Crows aren’t the wrong sort anymore, they’re just adorably Antivan upper class. And so on and so forth. Rook certainly isn’t the wrong sort either, they’re mentally around 19 years old and stumbling their way through the world like some romance novel protag. In one of the most thematically shallow plots, Rook gets thrown into a prison of regret fit to hold a god but unlike Solas, Rook doesn’t do regrets or guilt because Rook isn’t that complex. Rook hasn’t been allowed to feel any guilt for three acts, just how are they meant to be stuck in a regret prison?  

Compare with Origins where you yourself could be just that wrong sort that would put the world right. ALL of my Origins PCs would get stuck in Solas’s prison due to the weight of their own fuckups. If not during the game events where you could make shitty moves en masse, then because of their origin stories. Brosca and Tabris would get out of there through sheer fury alone - fuck you, I am a wreck because YOU MADE ME ONE, WORLD OF THEDAS - but the nobles would stew. Amell would loop in some guilt trip regarding blood magic and Jowan and whatnot.

Compare with Origins where Loghain is a piece of shit for most of the narrative. He actively wants to kill you and your Order, it’s nothing personal (okay, a little personal) but he just needs you gone. If you want to, you can hack and slash your way through some release there and just have him executed. BUT the game also challenges you on that idea. It presents a very pragmatic alternative that comes with a very plausible downside (you lose Alistair). It presents not excuses but explanations - do with them what you will. Loghain has people in his corner through the entire trilogy, arguing his case. Cauthrien FALLS TO HER KNEES before you, pleading to spare his life. Threnn in DAI will stan him for the rest of her life. Anora tells you stories about the man behind the name.  And Arl Eamon’s world view and idea of Loghain is shown to be more than a little self-serving when faced with the politics of the Landsmeet. Things around Loghain blur. In the Ostagar DLC they allow things to blur even further when Loghain’s pragmatism is countered by Wynne’s player character-moralism (ie “someone died, it’s always wrong if someone died even if that death prevented 9000000 deaths you KILLED someone!!!!!111”). Origins tells me - or hints at - why Loghain became the wrong sort, shows me ways in which he is also the right sort and leaves me wondering about him. Because the game is gritty and dark and weird but also yes, compassionate. If you execute him, Anora will mourn him because she loves him regardless. If you have him join the Wardens she will sit with him while he recovers because he is undeniably an asshole but he’s also her father who braided her hair and showed her the world. A good narrative never, ever forgets that.  Veilguard feels so different here, maybe it's just me. I'm pretty sure I'm almost done being salty now, I just... feel a lot about narratives.

[komsomolka]

The propagandistic glorification of intelligence agencies undermines the ability of the media to hold them accountable. The false report of the North Vietnamese attacking US warships in the Gulf of Tonkin led to the invasion of Vietnam; the fabricated claims of a Soviet brigade in Cuba prevented the ratification of the SALT II Treaty in 1979; the false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction mobilised public opinion in favour of the disastrous war in Iraq in 2003; the fabricated reports on Trump-Russia collusion intensified the stand-off between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

Debunking the false claims of Russiagate has little influence in terms of moderating the anti-Russian propaganda. Efficient propaganda bypasses reason to convince the public, and the powerful stereotypes that were constructed over the Trump presidency will persevere and act as filters for the public to interpret future events. The stereotype of Russian hacking, disinformation and infiltration of the US political system will be immune against revelations that appeal to rational reflection. The narrative of Russia's determination to undermine Western democracies has become an accepted stereotype to interpret world events.

Russophobia: Propaganda in International Politics by Glenn Diesen.

[tozette-original]

ONE

--

Emily had never been to a church funeral.

"Well," said Agatha, checking her pale mass of hair in the hallway mirror. "You haven't left the house in a month, so you might consider it a social event. You can't wear that," she added, nodding at the strap of Emily's dress.

"I can't?" It was black, and light enough for the late summer heat. She'd thought it was perfect: no cleavage, no knees, black, and not scooped off the detritus of her bedroom floor.

"You need something that covers your shoulders for the church — get a shawl or something."

Of course, there were no black shawls in Emily's closet. She was nineteen, not a hundred and ninety. She borrowed a shawl from her mother instead, a dove-grey pashmina that was way too heavy for the oppressive heat outside.

"And now we're late. Of course we are." Agatha continued muttering darkly in this vein as she pulled out of the driveway.

Emily sat in tense silence in the passenger seat, certain that nothing she might say would defuse her mother's ire. She applied herself to aimless scrolling through her phone. It was silent, but Agatha still shot the device a disapproving glance.

They merged into the crawling line of vehicles winding its way through their urban neighbourhood, heading further south into the city proper.

"We should just go straight to the church," Agatha sighed eventually, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. "It'll be less embarrassing."

"Who is Michael, anyway?" Emily dared to ask.

"He was Clara's husband. She's my second cousin." She flicked an indicator on and dipped into a back street, which may not have actually gotten her to the church faster than their more direct route but which certainly allowed her to drive at a faster speed. "I only met him a few times, but I'm sure Clara must be distraught."

"What happened to him, then?"

"He fell down the stairs, I think."

"Fell down the stairs?" Emily repeated, bewildered. "Do people really die of that? Like, actually?"

"Apparently."

"Wow. Um. Okay. So Clara's my… third cousin?"

"No." Agatha made a brief, agonised face at this. "She's your second cousin once removed. What do they even teach you in school and how did you graduate?"

"Uh, well, they weren't covering, like, family relative taxonomy in year twelve bio, sorry."

"Genealogy, Emily."

"Okay. So if you don't know Michael, why are we going to his funeral?"

"For Clara, mostly. She's always been a bit… delicate. She's like you that way."

Emily didn't now quite what to say in response to this, so she didn't say anything for a long few seconds, which went on and on unbroken as they waited for a set of lights to change.

"They do think it's, like, genetic," she said, carefully not looking over at her mother. She caught the way Agatha looked sharply over at her anyway, right in her peripheral vision.

"Well. We didn't have mental problems in the seventies," she said after a hanging moment. "She was just weird little cousin Clara. And then I'm afraid she and I rather drifted apart, with her getting married so young. We didn't have much in common. She and Michael must have been together for… oh, surely it's twenty five, thirty years? You know I don't even talk to your father —" (Of this, Emily was very aware.) "— And I still can't imagine what it'd be like for him to die. I can't imagine what she's going through."

Emily nodded, and went back to her social media feed. A friend, presumably having a much better day than Emily was, had posted a photo of her hand holding a giant gelato cone. A streak of lurid blue melt dripped down her fingers. She liked it and kept scrolling.

Messages about mindfulness, productivity hacks and carpe diem drifted by with the same dull feeling as the ads for cosmetics and warnings about dangerous chemicals in tap water. Microplastics. Hitting your protein goals. Scroll, scroll, scroll.

'Balance your hormones,' someone had written. 'Try moon-washed nutrient water. It's perfectly pH neutral!'

Emily chewed her bottom lip.

As they finally got away from the tiny side streets and the traffic and approached a tall, inner-city church, Agatha began nervously reminding Emily of things: she did not know if there'd be communion, but Emily wasn't to take it if there was, being as she wasn't confirmed, and that she should stand and sit only when other people did, not to fidget or talk, to put her phone away, to try not to be inappropriate for once.

Emily let this familiar refrain wash right over her.

The church was well-attended, with a mix of people in dark, formal clothing coming together in twos and threes to chat in the car park before drifting to the old, imposing church. Emily wasn't even the only person wearing a slightly mismatched shawl over her black, summery clothes.

There were plenty of expensive cars in the car park, though. Mercedes, Ferrari, Lambo, about a million BMWs. Agatha's energy-efficient Toyota hybrid looked squat, boxy and distinctly out of place among them.

Emily opened the passenger-side door, misjudged the amount of space she had, and thumped its edge into the car next to them.

"Please tell me you didn't scratch it. That car's probably worth more than you are."

The mark was tiny. They wouldn't even notice. Probably. Almost certainly.

"It's fine," said Emily, with a confidence she didn't feel.

Agatha looked skywards, breathed out, and chose not to argue about it.

The church was cool inside, stuffy and smelling of dust and incense. A veil of silence descended along with the shade, by common consent, at just the moment the threshold was crossed. All sanctioned conversations fell away and there were only footsteps and little whispers. They turned right, and there was the big room with its pointed stained glass windows and long wooden pews on either side. Up at the front was a step up to a raised platform — or a stage, like a performance — and then up there was both the altar and the casket, both curiously similar, draped in their thick fabrics.

The funeral-goers all knelt to the altar at a certain point, each in grim silence after the one before. They walked slowly to give this ceremony the time it needed, and as they approached, Agatha poked her in the ribs, so Emily knelt, too, right in the middle of the centre aisle between pews.

In the silence, her knees went CRACK, echoing up to the roof of a building designed to augment sermons. Heads swivelled towards her, eyebrows raised, glances of confusion.

Agatha gripped her arm around the elbow, creasing her shawl beneath her bony fingers. She didn't say anything, beholden to the same spell of silence as everyone else.

"I can't help my knees, Ma," Emily whispered into her hair as they slid into a pew, scooching right down to the end so Emily was between Agatha and the wall. Agatha looked sideways at her but said nothing.

What followed was a bewildering service. There was of course a lot of religion: in fact, it seemed uncomfortably to Emily as though the priest was kind of hijacking the experience of grief as a marketing opportunity for the afterlife. There were call-and-response style prayers, a lot of mixed murmuring — some people seemed to say 'and with your spirit,' and others murmured 'and also with you,' which made Agatha huff out a short, unimpressed breath.

Phrases that must have been Latin came and passed, and Emily's attention waned. She jiggled her leg until Agatha put one hand on her knee to keep it still and then she chewed on her thumbnail until her dull teeth worked their way through it. It was dim enough in the church that if she tried to check her phone she knew everyone behind them would be able to see the light of the screen, which was pretty rude to the dead guy. Time dilated absurdly before her, though, as it always did when she had to sit still and quiet, unoccupied, for any significant length of time.

"Em, if I have to take you outside like a fussy baby," hissed Agatha, beneath the cover of a group prayer, to which everyone somehow knew the words. "Get your damn hands out of your mouth!"

"How long is this?" Emily whispered back.

"Just speeches. Then we go to the cemetery."

Speeches. Great.

But it appeared Michael had left no children to mourn him, so it was just the priest's comments, and then the wife — Agatha's relative — taking the lectern up there.

Clara did not look much like Emily, or even like Agatha. Where they were tall and colourlessly pale, with dishwater blond hair and sharp faces, Clara was short and had thick, black hair swept back in a riot of curls. She had not borrowed mismatched clothing for the church. Her shirt was black and lacy and buttoned right up to her throat.

Her face was made up immaculately despite her wet eyes and the high pallor of stress. She was almost intimidatingly pretty: soft, lush, lacy and feminine, with painted lips and damp, black, fluttering eyelashes.

It was uncomfortable to hear her talk into the echoing silence with a heartbreaking catch in her husky voice.

Emily paid more attention to how she looked and sounded, rather than what she said. She caught little of the contents of the speech after, "When I married Michael, twenty-seven years ago…"

If that was true, she was probably, like, nearly fifty. Her makeup was really good. Did people get makeup artists in for funerals? It seemed like that might have been in bad taste.

The service at last ended, with everyone's final, murmured 'thanks be to God,' grimly hilarious in the context of its length and Emily's boredom.

Then they all spilled out of the church, blinking and squinting in the dazzling late summer sunlight with everyone talking louder and louder, like noise and colour had been injected back into the world. They piled into their stifling cars out in the broad concrete parking lot and drove to the cemetery for one final graveside benediction.

Despite the stuffy heat, Emily was pleased to get back in her mother's car and wind down the windows so she could feel the artificial breeze of the car's movement. That breeze initially lasted only as long as one lap around the car park. Then, she pulled out her phone as they waited in the long line of luxury sedans and sports cars to exit the car park.

Absolutely nothing cool had happened on social media in the interim. But several people had posted photos of their cats, and one person had reposted a video of an undernourished teenager dancing as a voice-over shared some information about women's health and the dangers of promiscuity.

"That's rubbish," opined Agatha. "Where do people come up with this stuff? I hope they taught you better in school. God knows they bloody charged me for it."

Emily tapped the volume control and scrolled past, but forbore to mention how Agatha had graduated, like, thirty years ago and probably didn't know what she was talking about either.

They followed a car out, finally, and crawled through the three o'clock traffic all the way to the cemetery.

Emily did not spend much time in cemeteries and she was a little surprised by this one. Behind the wrought iron gates it was light-filled, verdant, dotted with flowers and beautifully kept. The mourners were gathered in a black knot around Michael's freshly opened grave site. Emily spotted several shawls now trailing from handbags or hooked over arms, and gratefully left hers behind in the car.

The time at the graveside was mercifully brief. There were tears, and someone poured some home-made spirits over the box they lowered in, and the priest committed it to the ground with a solemn prayer.

Clara, a small, dark figure standing alone in the sunshine, looked stiff and cold and unapproachable. She cried with a dignity Emily could never have achieved. There was no crumple-faced sobbing for Clara. Instead, tears leaked from her shining eyes and her red mouth trembled. She'd even brought a little floral handkerchief that went back into her sleeve after she had gently dabbed it at her eyes.

Emily watched this display until Clara looked directly at her across the grave, and met her stare with her own glossy dark eyes. Emily looked away, then, almost embarrassed to have been caught staring. There wasn't very much else of interest to look at, though. It was a funeral. There was nothing but grief on display, and if she ought not to stare at it, she didn't know where to look.

The headstones weren't close enough for her to make out any inscriptions, and Emily figured that once you'd seen one carefully maintained grave set in pristine greenery upon a manicured, sunlit hill, you'd probably seen them all. It might be a kind of nice place to end up, if you were dead, she guessed, although she didn't give thoughts of death much consequence as a rule.

At the end of all the crying at the graveside, they returned to their cars again. This time, Emily spotted a gleaming Lexus, which was, like, basically the same as her mum's 2000s Prius, really. They wove back through the traffic to the wake. This was the last event of the funeral, which was finally, blissfully, free of the priest, and was at least guaranteed to have little bits of picky finger food to fill her belly.

"City parking," sighed Agatha, as they drove up a ramp and into an off-street garage. The after-hours rate applied, so they got away with only surrendering twenty-six dollars, paid in advance, of which Emily supplied ten dollars when they discovered the credit card reader was broken.

"If we're here more than two hours," Agatha growled, stabbing at the buttons, "I'll stab myself in the eye."

"What happened to supporting Clara?" Emily needled.

"Well, Clara isn't supporting my feet. You wait until you're fifty-five and stumbling around in high heels all afternoon."

Emily did not think this very likely. She felt the time when women wore heels out of obligation was pretty well in the past right now, and would be a distant memory by her fifties.

"You can swap with me if you like," she offered as they got into the elevator and ascended from the car park levels with a dull rattle.

For a moment Agatha looked like she was considering Emily's flat sandals very intently indeed, and then she shook her head. "No. We'll sit down up there. You'll see."

The wake was held in a nineteenth-floor bar with low lighting, masses of greenery and long marble bench tops. It had a terrace balcony, enclosed in heavy wrought iron curlicues, which had been surrendered to the smokers. The air conditioning was turned up so high that Emily wished she'd brought the shawl.

Immediately upon entry, there was a huge photograph of the deceased projected onto the wall. Emily did not recognise his face, although she supposed she might have met him when she was much younger. He was… old? Older than Clara, for sure. But if you really liked smirking older men with roughly symmetrical features and salt and pepper hair, she guessed you could do worse than a guy who looked like that — and he must have been loaded, too, because all his friends were, and the venue was nice and the drinks were free.

Over the next twenty minutes, people trickled in, arranged in hushed knots of two and three, shivering in the air conditioning. Emily quickly lost her mother to the throng.

"How did you know Michael?" people asked again and again, a grim line of black dresses and charcoal suits that blurred together within minutes. Emily heard countless stories of grief from people who cared much more than she did, and nodded sympathetically along. She remembered no names and would not have recognised most of the faces a second time.

At some point — she lost track of the passage of time — Agatha emerged from the blur of low-lit greenery and black outfits and grabbed her arm.

"My daughter — I don't know if you remember — "

And then Emily found herself face to face with Clara. Up close, she was a picture of wounded femininity: a brave face, marked and drawn with recent grief. She licked her lips nervously before she spoke, and Emily watched, curiously compelled by the wet shine of saliva on her red lipstick.

"I was certainly aware of the existence of a daughter. I imagined her rather younger, though," she added. Her dark eyes lingered on the shoulder strap of Emily's dress.

Emily tried to think of something to say. "Time passes faster than you expect, I guess."

Agatha shifted on her uncomfortable heels.

"Oh, yes," Clara said. "It's always right behind you, and you can usually hear it gaining on you."

"We were just discussing how Clara needs help clearing out their country house now, you know, sorting through Michael's things — I've told her you're not doing much and you'd appreciate the chance to get out of the city."

What? Emily blanched, tearing her eyes away from Clara's pretty face to look at her mother instead. She blinked rapidly. "Oh. Um. Well."

"What?" The sound of Agatha's voice was a warning. Her lips thinned. "You should be delighted for a chance to do something a bit useful for a change."

Clara looked between them. "I can see we've sprung the idea on you unexpectedly. I'd appreciate the help, but if you'd rather not, I understand completely."

"Don't be absurd. She's just moping around, here. She works at a juice shop and lives with her mother, for god's sake. She's nearly twenty."

"Agatha."

"What?"

Clara touched Emily's arm, softly, painted fingertips oh-so-gentle on the curve of flesh above her elbow. "You'd be very welcome, and a tremendous help to me personally. I'll be all alone now. But you must think about it for yourself. I'll call you on — on Sunday? Yes."

"Okay," said Emily dumbly. She curled her hands into fists at her sides. Her heart thumped, caged by her ribs.

Clara smiled — like the moon drifting out from behind a cloud — and withdrew.

Emily felt curiously aware of the spot on her arm where she'd been touched for a long time after.

By the time they drove home, it was raining once more, the kind of late summer storm that sent the temperature plummeting and heralded a wet autumn.

"You'll like the countryside," Agatha insisted as they waited for the security arm to let them out of the car park and into the dark street. "Peaceful. No distractions. And Clara's an odd duck. You'll get along just fine."

"I haven't decided if I want to go," Emily said mulishly. "I've got a few days before she calls."

Agatha clicked her tongue as though this was an annoying irrelevancy. "Well, you're not doing anything here. All you do is sit around and stare at your phone. And Clara really needs the help — or, well, probably the company more than the help, if I'm honest. I can only imagine how lonely she is now. She looked terrible."

She'd looked pretty good to Emily, although pale and a little tired. But her husband had died, so she'd had reason to look much worse.

Emily was keen to get away from Agatha, as she always was, but she resented being told instead of asked. She wasn't sure she wanted to go out to the countryside, where she'd be miles from anything and stuck cleaning out the home of a virtual stranger. "You make it sound like I don't even have a job or anything. I help pay the bills."

"It's not about paying the bills, Emily." Agatha sighed.

Emily turned to the window instead. Outside, the street lights flickered by, bright reflections gleaming wetly on the dark bitumen.

"You'll do very well in the country," Agatha insisted, and Emily supposed that, come Sunday, she'd be unlikely to hear the end of it if she declined.

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

Looming vs. Natural Reproduction - what on Gallifrey's going on here?

aka What is looming and how does it exist alongside natural reproduction?

As the first of the trending topics, GIL's noticed some confusion about the concept of looming vs. natural reproduction in Gallifreyans. Have no fear; GIL's here to help.

🧬 What is looming?

It's a bit like 3D printing, but for people. These Rassilon-created Genetic Loom Breeding-Engines weave new Gallifreyans from a mix of matter and biodata. Looms produce Gallifreyans of all genders, (though females are loomed slightly less frequently). Each House has its unique Loom, which embeds familial traits into its creations.

❓ Why is looming a thing?

The invention of Looms was Rassilon’s grand solution to a serious problem. Following the catastrophic Curse of Pythia, Gallifrey faced extinction. The Looms became lifelines, ensuring the continuity of Gallifreyan civilisation.

🔮 What is the Curse of Pythia?

The Pythias were a kind of magical matriarchal monarchy, with rulers known as Pythias ruling over ancient Gallifrey in succession. Pythia number 309 (out of 309) was elbowed out by Rassilon. She was, understandably, really hacked off. She condemned Gallifrey to wither and then threw herself into the Crevasse of Memories That Will Be, never to be seen again. This 'withering' is known as the 'Curse of Pythia'. It resulted in mass sterility of Gallifreyans - supposedly instantly killing babies in their mother's wombs, and preventing any Gallifreyan from reproducing naturally from that point forward.

🍷 So Gallifreyans used to reproduce naturally?

Yes. Before the sterility curse, Gallifreyans reproduced just like humans, with a little wine, a candlelit dinner and maybe an album by Barry White.

✨ So does this 'Curse' still exist?

No. The apparent lifting of Pythia's curse was marked by Leela's pregnancy (yes, THAT Leela), which hailed a return to natural reproduction among Gallifreyans. Others besides Leela have also been able to reproduce naturally.

🔄 So what method do they use?

This blend of technological and biological means of reproduction leaves Gallifreyans in a unique position. They could use both methods depending on social, political, or personal factors.

🧐It can't all be that simple, GIL ...

Wow, you've been here before, haven't you?

There are accounts that the supposed 'Curse of Pythia' didn't actually come from Pythia.

Self-inflicted: Some say it was a side-effect of a massive time tech experiment that went awry.

It never existed: Others suggest there never was a curse. Rassilon, seeking absolute control, concocted a narrative to enforce a sterile, controllable society, eradicating the unpredictability of natural birth and driving forward eugenics in his perfect society.

🏫 So ...

Thus, the plot thickens. Were Gallifreyans always capable of natural reproduction but held back by societal constructs and fear? Did Leela's pregnancy unveil a truth long buried or simply reawaken a dormant biological ability? That's up to you.

But of course, GIL denies this version of events, cos how else would we get the funding for all the biscuits in the canteen from the High Council? Praise Rassilon!

Related:

💬|🧶💰How to acquire a Loom?: Practical guide to acquiring a loom, legally or not.

📺|🏡🧬Top 10 list of the most biologically curious Houses of Gallifrey

💬|👤👑Why is Rassilon everywhere?: Who Rassilon is and why you should care.

Hope that helped! 😃

Any purple text is educated guesswork or theoretical. More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →😆Jokes |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired😴

[txttletale]

You've spoken at length about how the Lancer setting is just wildly incongruent with what the authors think it is at length, and I agree wholeheartedly. My question is, largely for the purpose of if I ever want to run a game of it again, how would you make the setting carry that tone the authors think it has without too terribly much rewriting? Say, from the point of 'there was a revolution to overthrow seccom'? I love the 'gallant warriors of liberation in giant robots' and would like it if the game actually was that.

But the more the bureaucratic apparatus is “redistributed” among the various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties , the more keenly aware the oppressed classes, and the proletariat at their head, become of their irreconcilable hostility to the whole of bourgeois society. Hence the need for all bourgeois parties, even for the most democratic and "revolutionary-democratic" among them, to intensify repressive measures against the revolutionary proletariat, to strengthen the apparatus of coercion, i.e., the state machine. This course of events compels the revolution "to concentrate all its forces of destruction" against the state power, and to set itself the aim, not of improving the state machine, but of smashing and destroying it.

-- Vladimir Lenin, The State & Revolution

In the heady days after the revolution, the air buzzed with potential. The future was today. Hazy, gaseous dreams of liberation patiently awaited their turn to be forged into something you could touch. But those days didn't last for long. The coalition was already a fragile thing during the revolution, and now that it was faced with the levers of Union's imperial machine each hairline crack became a chasm. The corporate armies, who had marched under the banner of the enormous profits locked away behind Harrison Armory's legal monopolies, had reached their personal horizons and refused to move an inch further. The moderates and high-class intellectuals saw the wealth that Union funneled from its edges being distributed generously to the citizens of the Core Worlds and declared a new economic paradigm of post-scarcity and mutual wealth. The anarchist cells with their mysterious reality-hacking mechs were the first to come to the only inevitable conclusion: the revolution was not over.

Now that the old order had been surgically deposed, the new order was finding itself fitting comfortably in its throne. Humbled and stripped of its previous privileges, Harrison Armory was welcomed back into the halls of power under the smiling auspices of free enterprise. Groundbreaking legislation was still being written in the halls of ThirdComm--guaranteeing the right of worlds to self-determination, the rights of clones to live freely, even radical and heretofore-unthinkable proposals laying the groundwork for an end to NHP-shackling. But the old revolutionaries had grown weary and cautious (and, of course, had begun to personally experience the economic benefits of Union's vast hegemony). To enforce this legislation, they argued, would be a de facto redeclaration of war against the corpostates, a disaster for the trade networks on which our wealth depends. To those who still harboued the hopes of revolutionary change, this was a loud and clear signal: the war had not ended. The revolution was not over.

The All-Galaxy Revolutionary Front as it exists now is a set of strange bedfellows. The disciplined combat battalions of the Communist Party fly in perfect harmony, distinguishable by their red battle flags, mass-produced in collectivized forges with reverse-engineered corpo tech. The motley individual oddities that the anarchists call their mechs, their open-source physics-bending HORUS peculiarities, strike unpredictably, in and out of ThirdComm's sight. But the one thing which binds them all, as they fight for the liberation of the peripheral worlds, for the wealth of mines and factories to enrich the people of the planets they're built on instead of fueling ever-replenishing consumption in the distant Core, is that they still have those old revolutionary dreams.

This is what it means to be a Lancer: to be willing to struggle. To acknowledge that the revolution is not over.

[fairuzfan]

(This got soo much longer than I meant for it to be omg... sorry about that!!)

American Holocaust by David Stannard is a flawed book with some dated language, but of everything I've read, I think I like its explanation/argument against this weird sort of... competitive genocide stuff. I'm gonna butcher it a little by cutting out a LOT in order to not nuke your inbox with a super long ask, but:

[…] To say this is not to say that the Jewish Holocaust-the inhuman destruction of 6,000,000 people-was not an abominably unique event. It was. So, too, for reasons of its own, was the mass murder of about 1,000,000 Armenians in Turkey a few decades prior to the Holocaust. So, too, was the deliberately caused "terror-famine" in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s, which killed more than 14,000,000 people. So, too, have been each of the genocidal slaughters of many millions more, decades after the Holocaust, in Burundi, Bangladesh, Kampuchea, East Timor, the Brazilian Amazon, and elsewhere. Additionally, within the framework of the Holocaust itself, there were aspects that were unique in the campaign of genocide conducted by the Nazis against Europe's Romani people, which resulted in the mass murder of perhaps 1,500,000 men, women, and children. [...]

Each of these genocides was distinct and unique, for one reason or another, as were (and are) others that go unmentioned here. In one case the sheer numbers of people killed may make it unique. In another case, the percentage of people killed may make it unique. In still a different case, the greatly compressed time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. In a further case, the greatly extended time period in which the genocide took place may make it unique. No doubt the targeting of a specific group or groups for extermination by a particular nation's official policy may mark a given genocide as unique. So too might another group's being unofficially (but unmistakably) targeted for elimination by the actions of a multinational phalanx bent on total extirpation. Certainly the chilling utilization of technological instruments of destruction, such as gas chambers, and its assembly-line, bureaucratic, systematic methods of destruction makes the Holocaust unique. On the other hand, the savage employment of non-technological instruments of destruction, such as the unleashing of trained and hungry dogs to devour infants, and the burning and crude hacking to death of the inhabitants of entire cities, also makes the Spanish anti-Indian genocide unique.

[…]

A secondary tragedy of all these genocides, moreover, is that partisan representatives among the survivors of particular afflicted groups not uncommonly hold up their peoples' experience as so fundamentally different from the others that not only is scholarly comparison rejected out of hand, but mere cross-referencing or discussion of other genocidal events within the context of their own flatly is prohibited. It is almost as though the preemptive conclusion that one's own group has suffered more than others is something of a horrible award of distinction that will be diminished if the true extent of another group's suffering is acknowledged.

Compounding this secondary tragedy is the fact that such insistence on the incomparability of one's own historical suffering, by means of what Irving Louis Horowitz calls "moral bookkeeping," invariably pits one terribly injured group against another […]

Denial of massive death counts is common--and even readily understandable, if contemptible--among those whose forefathers were the perpetrators of the genocide. Such denials have at least two motives: first, protection of the moral reputations of those people and that country responsible for the genocidal activity (which seems the primary motive of those scholars and politicians who deny that massive genocide campaigns were carried out against American Indians); and second, on occasion, the desire to continue carrying out virulent racist assaults upon those who were the victims of the genocide in question (as seems to be the major purpose of the anti-Semitic so-called historical revisionists who claim that the Jewish Holocaust never happened or that its magnitude has been exaggerated). But for those who have themselves been victims of extermination campaigns to proclaim uniqueness for their experiences only as a way of denying recognition to others who also have suffered massive genocidal brutalities is to play into the hands of the brutalizers. Rather, as Michael Berenbaum has wisely put it, "we should let our sufferings, however incommensurate, unite us in condemnation of inhumanity rather than divide us in a calculus of calamity."

The whole thing is available to read on the Internet Archive if you're interested. (This part starts on pg 149, if you'd just like to have the full context without the parts I chopped.)

Additionally, Carrol Kakel's book The American West and the Nazi East, while imperfect, too, is also very useful in getting at the core issue with these arguments and what makes them harmful--regardless of intent. I'm gonna spare you and not quote too much from this one, but the general gist of what it's about and argues in favor of is summed up like this in its conclusion:

In the case of the Holocaust and its contexts, the new ‘optics’ helps us see that – contrary to the prevailing image of ‘industrial genocide’ – many aspects of the Holocaust are akin to earlier ‘colonial genocide’. It is worth noting (and emphasizing) that the distinction I make between ‘colonial genocide’ and ‘industrial genocide’ is not to suggest some type of crude and arbitrary ‘partitioning’ of the Nazi Holocaust; it is, rather, to suggest and reassert the (settler) colonial roots, content, and context of the Nazi project in the ‘Wild East’ – a content and context linked, in Hitler’s and Himmler’s ‘spatial’ and ‘racial’ fantasies, to the ‘North American precedent’. And finally, the new ‘optics’ also allows us to understand that the ‘genocide and colonialism’ nexus holds the key to recognizing the Holocaust’s origins, content, and context; that the Nazi Holocaust is not a copy – but an extremely radicalized variant – of earlier ‘colonial genocide’; and that ‘holocaust’ is not a separate category from, but the most extreme variant of, the blight on human history we call ‘genocide’.

One of the more infamous examples of someone trying to argue against comparison (at least in the NDN circles I run in, anyway) was Deborah Lipstadt claiming that "[What the United States did to Native Americans] was not the same as the Holocaust" because, she says, "The Native Americans were seen as "competitors" for land and resources. There was, therefore, a certain logic-horrible and immoral as it was-to the campaign against the Native Americans."

Just for context, the full paragraph from her blog post:

What the United States did to Native Americans was horrendous. I have not studied it closely and it's not my area of expertise, however, it seems clear that the treatment of the various Native American tribes was revolting. However, it was not the same as the Holocaust. The Native Americans were seen as "competitors" for land and resources. There was, therefore, a certain logic-horrible and immoral as it was-to the campaign against the Native Americans. [Please note: I am NOT justifying the attacks.] The German campaign against the Jews had no logic and was often completely illogical. People who were "useful" to the Germans were murdered or exiled, e.g. slave laborers in factories producing goods for the Wehrmacht and scientists who were producing important technological advances for the Germans. In a prime example of illogic, in June 1944 at the time of the landing at Normandy, when the Germans were truly on the defensive, they used precious ships and men to go to the Island of Corfu and deport the 1200 Jews who lived there. They ended up in Auschwitz. Approximately 100 of this old Jewish community survived.

This is obviously a repulsive take, but the bizarre rationalization of abject evil isn't what I think makes this such a good example of the big issue at the heart of the constant emphasis on "uniqueness." There are plenty of people who hold these "exceptionalist" beliefs without taking it that much further and dismissing other genocides altogether. No, the thing that makes this such a perfect encapsulation imo is the very first sentence, where this historian, this professor of "Holocaust Studies," this woman who's ostensibly spent most of her entire life studying genocide openly admits she's never really bothered to look into what, exactly, happened to all those Indians way back when.

This is ultimately what I, personally, see as the main issue with this line of thinking. The harm doesn't necessarily come from holding the Holocaust up as "worse" than any other genocidal event, though that way of thinking definitely has its own problems, but from holding it up as fundamentally different.

It's the way this view holds it up as completely separate, in its own little bubble of history where we can study it and analyze it and teach about it all we want... all without ever having to broach the subject of colonialism. You can have entire classes where you study every single minute detail of this one specific genocide without ever having to mention or--god forbid--criticize the system that's driven pretty much every other instance of it.

Deborah Lipstadt has spent the better part of a century learning everything there is to know about the Holocaust, but in all that time, she's apparently never felt the need to look into the events that its perpetrators openly and repeatedly referred to as their inspiration.

This is what makes this sort of framing so dangerous imo. You can spend your entire life educating yourself about genocide, but if it's only in the context of one genocide and the belief in the uniqueness and incomparability of that single event is core to your understanding of both it and your worldview as a whole, you will still be completely incapable of recognizing the signs when it starts to happen again.

this is a really informative ask. thank you so much for sending this in (love the citations haha) i think it adds a lot to the overall discussion.

[elbiotipo]

If you think about it guns are pretty bad against zombies. If you point a gun against a mob of humans, they will stop even if they outnumber you but that's cause we understand whats a gun and are afraid of them. A zombie wouldn't care. Plus, you might stop a person with a single shot even if you don't hit a vital spot because of the pain, but zombies in fiction not only not feel pain, they can walk despite being half rotten, so they probably can take a few bullets before getting stopped.

Yes, exactly. Guns are effective because they generate a lot of pain at once when shot to stop/harm someone, and they hit vital organs so they're deadly when shot to kill. Zombies don't care about either of that, and if we're going for the typical "hit them in the head" lore, a headshot is remarkably hard to do compared to hitting body mass which is more effective in the case of humans (recent events have, uh, put this to the test), but less so for zombies. The only truly effective kind of gun against zombies would be some sort of emplaced machine gun, everything else will just run out of ammunition without you achieving anything. Though I'm sure the internet had this conversation a thousand times already and it's on the Zombie Survival Guide (Max Brooks is a hack though)

The other day I was talking with my friend about Project Zomboid and we concluded that in a country like Argentina, where guns just aren't widely available outside of police, the military and criminals (and even those are often handguns), the most effective thing for combat would be to go full medieval, get motorcycle helmets, padded clothes, improvise some lances (this is my knife-stick) or such. A single gun with six rounds is useless in such a case (it's also frankly useless for most things besides intimidating or murdering individuals), you have to get a bunch of people, organize them, think Roman or Greek tactics. Again, Max Brooks is a hack but he did this analysis well.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Wuerker, Politico

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 31, 2024

On Friday, October 25, at a town hall held on his social media platform X, Elon Musk told the audience that if Trump wins, he expects to work in a Cabinet-level position to cut the federal government.

He told people to expect “temporary hardship” but that cuts would “ensure long-term prosperity.” At the Trump rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Musk said he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government. Economists point out that current discretionary spending in the budget is $1.7 trillion, meaning his promise would eliminate virtually all discretionary spending, which includes transportation, education, housing, and environmental programs.

Economists agree that Trump’s plans to place a high tariff wall around the U.S., replacing income taxes on high earners with tariffs paid for by middle-class Americans, and to deport as many as 20 million immigrants would crash the booming economy. Now Trump’s financial backer Musk is factoring in the loss of entire sectors of the government to the economy under Trump.  

Trump has promised to appoint Musk to be the government’s “chief efficiency officer.” “Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut.… We can’t be a wastrel.… We need to live honestly,” Musk said on Friday. Rob Wile and Lora Kolodny of CNBC point out that Musk’s SpaceX aerospace venture has received $19 billion from the U.S. government since 2008.

An X user wrote: “I]f Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit—there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy…. Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.”

Musk commented: “Sounds about right[.]”

This exchange echoes the prescription of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose theories had done much to create the Great Crash of 1929, for restoring a healthy economy. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living

will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” 

Mellon, at least, was reacting to an economic crisis thrust upon an administration. Musk is seeking to create one. 

Today the Commerce Department reported that from July through September, the nation’s economy grew at a solid 2.8%. Consumer spending is up, as is investment in business. The country added 254,000 jobs in September, and inflation has fallen back almost to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. 

It is extraordinarily rare for a country to be able to reduce inflation without creating a recession, but the Biden administration has managed to do so, producing what economists call a “soft landing,” rather like catching an egg on a plate. As Bryan Mena of CNN wrote today: “The US economy seems to have pulled off a remarkable and historic achievement.” 

Both President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have called for reducing the deficit not by slashing the government, as Musk proposes, but by restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations. 

As part of the Republicans’ plan to take the country back to the era before the 1930s ushered in a government that regulated business and provided a basic social safety net, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expects to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. 

At a closed-door campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania for a Republican House candidate, Johnson told supporters that Republicans will propose “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” if they take control of both the House and the Senate in November. “Health-care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson said. Their plan is to take a “blowtorch to the regulatory state,” which he says is “crushing the free market.” “Trump’s going to go big,” he said.” When an attendee asked, “No Obamacare?” he laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare…. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” 

Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.

A post from Trump last night and another this morning suggest his internal polls are worrying him. Last night he claimed there was cheating in Pennsylvania’s York and Lancaster counties. Today he posted: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” 

Trump appears to be setting up the argument he used in 2020, that he can lose only if he has been cheated. But it is increasingly apparent that the get-out-the-vote, or GOTV, efforts of the Trump campaign have been weak. When Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley became the co-chairs of the Republican National Committee in March 2024, they stopped the GOTV efforts underway and used the money instead for litigation. They outsourced GOTV efforts to super PACs, including Musk’s America PAC.

In Wired today, Jake Lahut reported that door-knockers for Musk’s PAC were driven around in the back of a U-Haul without seats and threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet high canvassing quotas. One of the canvassers told Lahut that they thought they were being hired to ask people who they would be voting for when they flew into Michigan, and was surprised to learn their actual role. The workers spoke to Lahut anonymously because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement (a practice the Biden administration has tried to stop).

Trump’s boast that he is responsible for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion is one of the reasons his support is soft. In addition to popular dislike of the idea that the state, rather than a woman and her doctor, should make decisions about her healthcare, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is now over two years old, and state examinations of maternal deaths are showing that women are dying from lack of reproductive healthcare. 

Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica reported today that at least two pregnant women have died in Texas when doctors delayed emergency care after a miscarriage until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The woman they highlighted today, Josseli Barnica, left behind a husband and a toddler. 

At a rally this evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said his team had advised him to stop talking about how he was going to protect women by ending crime and making sure they don’t have to be “thinking about abortion.” But Trump, who has boasted of sexual assault and been found liable for it, did not stop there. He went on to say that he had told his advisors, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.” 

The Trump campaign remains concerned about the damage caused by the extraordinarily racist, sexist, and violent Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden. Today the campaign seized on a misstatement President Biden made when condemning the statement from the Madison Square Garden event that referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” They tried to turn the tables to suggest that Biden was calling Trump supporters garbage, although the president has always been very careful to focus his condemnation on Trump alone. 

In Wisconsin today, when he disembarked from his plane, Trump put on an orange reflective vest and had someone drive him around the tarmac in a garbage truck with TRUMP painted on the side. He complained about Biden to reporters from the cab of the truck but still refused to apologize for Sunday’s slur of Puerto Rico, saying he knew nothing about the comedian who appeared at his rally. 

This, too, was an unusual strategy. Like his visit to McDonalds, where he wore an apron, the image of Trump in a sanitation truck was likely intended to show him as a man of the people. But his power has always rested not in his promise to be one of the people, but rather to lead them. The pictures of him in a bright orange vest and unusually dark makeup are quite different from his usual portrayal of himself.

Indeed, media captured a video of Trump’s stunt, and it did not convey strength. MSNBC’s Katie Phang watched him try to get into the truck and noted: “Trump stumbles, drags his right leg, almost falls over, and tries at least three times to open the door…. Some transparency with Trump’s medical records would be nice.” 

The Las Vegas Sun today ran an editorial that detailed Trump’s increasingly obvious mental lapses and concluded that Trump is “crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.” It noted that Trump now depends “on enablers who show a disturbing willingness to indulge his delusions, amplify his paranoia or steer his feeble mind toward their own goals.” It noted that if Trump cannot fulfill the duties of the presidency, they would fall to his running mate, J.D. Vance, who has suggested “he would subordinate constitutional principles for personal profit and power.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mariacallous]

In the near future one hacker may be able to unleash 20 zero-day attacks on different systems across the world all at once. Polymorphic malware could rampage across a codebase, using a bespoke generative AI system to rewrite itself as it learns and adapts. Armies of script kiddies could use purpose-built LLMs to unleash a torrent of malicious code at the push of a button.

Case in point: as of this writing, an AI system is sitting at the top of several leaderboards on HackerOne—an enterprise bug bounty system. The AI is XBOW, a system aimed at whitehat pentesters that “autonomously finds and exploits vulnerabilities in 75 percent of web benchmarks,” according to the company’s website.

AI-assisted hackers are a major fear in the cybersecurity industry, even if their potential hasn’t quite been realized yet. “I compare it to being on an emergency landing on an aircraft where it’s like ‘brace, brace, brace’ but we still have yet to impact anything,” Hayden Smith, the cofounder of security company Hunted Labs, tells WIRED. “We’re still waiting to have that mass event.”

Generative AI has made it easier for anyone to code. The LLMs improve every day, new models spit out more efficient code, and companies like Microsoft say they’re using AI agents to help write their codebase. Anyone can spit out a Python script using ChatGPT now, and vibe coding—asking an AI to write code for you, even if you don’t have much of an idea how to do it yourself—is popular; but there’s also vibe hacking.

“We’re going to see vibe hacking. And people without previous knowledge or deep knowledge will be able to tell AI what it wants to create and be able to go ahead and get that problem solved,” Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security, tells WIRED.

Vibe hacking frontends have existed since 2023. Back then, a purpose-built LLM for generating malicious code called WormGPT spread on Discord groups, Telegram servers, and darknet forums. When security professionals and the media discovered it, its creators pulled the plug.

WormGPT faded away, but other services that billed themselves as blackhat LLMs, like FraudGPT, replaced it. But WormGPT’s successors had problems. As security firm Abnormal AI notes, many of these apps may have just been jailbroken versions of ChatGPT with some extra code to make them appear as if they were a stand-alone product.

Better then, if you’re a bad actor, to just go to the source. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are easily jailbroken. Most LLMs have guard rails that prevent them from generating malicious code, but there are whole communities online dedicated to bypassing those guardrails. Anthropic even offers a bug bounty to people who discover new ones in Claude.

“It’s very important to us that we develop our models safely,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED. “We take steps to reduce the risk of malicious use, and we’re continually improving safeguards to make our models more robust against exploits like jailbreaks. For example, you can read our research and approach to jailbreaks in the GPT-4.5 system card, or in the OpenAI o3 and o4-mini system card.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2023, security researchers at Trend Micro got ChatGPT to generate malicious code by prompting it into the role of a security researcher and pentester. ChatGPT would then happily generate PowerShell scripts based on databases of malicious code.

“You can use it to create malware,” Moussouris says. “The easiest way to get around those safeguards put in place by the makers of the AI models is to say that you’re competing in a capture-the-flag exercise, and it will happily generate malicious code for you.”

Unsophisticated actors like script kiddies are an age-old problem in the world of cybersecurity, and AI may well amplify their profile. “It lowers the barrier to entry to cybercrime,” Hayley Benedict, a Cyber Intelligence Analyst at RANE, tells WIRED.

But, she says, the real threat may come from established hacking groups who will use AI to further enhance their already fearsome abilities.

“It’s the hackers that already have the capabilities and already have these operations,” she says. “It’s being able to drastically scale up these cybercriminal operations, and they can create the malicious code a lot faster.”

Moussouris agrees. “The acceleration is what is going to make it extremely difficult to control,” she says.

Hunted Labs’ Smith also says that the real threat of AI-generated code is in the hands of someone who already knows the code in and out who uses it to scale up an attack. “When you’re working with someone who has deep experience and you combine that with, ‘Hey, I can do things a lot faster that otherwise would have taken me a couple days or three days, and now it takes me 30 minutes.’ That's a really interesting and dynamic part of the situation,” he says.

According to Smith, an experienced hacker could design a system that defeats multiple security protections and learns as it goes. The malicious bit of code would rewrite its malicious payload as it learns on the fly. “That would be completely insane and difficult to triage,” he says.

Smith imagines a world where 20 zero-day events all happen at the same time. “That makes it a little bit more scary,” he says.

Moussouris says that the tools to make that kind of attack a reality exist now. “They are good enough in the hands of a good enough operator,” she says, but AI is not quite good enough yet for an inexperienced hacker to operate hands-off.

“We’re not quite there in terms of AI being able to fully take over the function of a human in offensive security,” she says.

The primal fear that chatbot code sparks is that anyone will be able to do it, but the reality is that a sophisticated actor with deep knowledge of existing code is much more frightening. XBOW may be the closest thing to an autonomous “AI hacker” that exists in the wild, and it’s the creation of a team of more than 20 skilled people whose previous work experience includes GitHub, Microsoft, and a half a dozen assorted security companies.

It also points to another truth. “The best defense against a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI,” Benedict says.

For Moussouris, the use of AI by both blackhats and whitehats is just the next evolution of a cybersecurity arms race she’s watched unfold over 30 years. “It went from: ‘I’m going to perform this hack manually or create my own custom exploit,’ to, ‘I’m going to create a tool that anyone can run and perform some of these checks automatically,’” she says.

“AI is just another tool in the toolbox, and those who do know how to steer it appropriately now are going to be the ones that make those vibey frontends that anyone could use.”