🤣

If they want to beat the charges, they need to announce their own AI trained on the data several billion in Series A investment funding.

If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported

The definition of “defensive use” ranges from “discharged weapon at assailant” to “announced possession of weapon at scary noise”. So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.

But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.

I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.

And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.

it’s better than the rest of TX that I can find. I’m open to suggestions.

Texas Tribune is still good, even if they’ve been on the downswing due to budget cuts. Houston Landing might have been good, but it flamed out when they couldn’t find enough advertisers or build a subscription base fast enough. I enjoyed City Cast Houston from time to time, but they’re gone now.

sigh

I forgot Propublica

They’re definitely good.

Anyone can fake a chat stream. And Owens is a notorious hack who will happily just make shit up for her rube base.

Publicly, Kirk was never anti-Israel.

Grifting requires an audience to grift to

In 2024, Kirk channeled $85M through his organization, largely via the Mercer and Adelson families. He was getting this windfall precisely because Tucker (their former leading conservative flak) had started drinking his own kool-aid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun#Racism_and_admiration_for_Hitler

Woof.

No. He died because he got shot in the neck with a bullet at a Utah far-right pep rally.

His friend Candice Owens has been pumping out a bunch of conspiracy theories that Kirk was secretly anti-Semitic. His other friend Ben Shapiro keeps insisting Kirk was always an AIPAC loyalist. And that’s created a ton of friction at the latest CPAC convention.

But there’s no reason to believe Kirk had a dog in the fight one way or another. Charlie’s primary goal was raising money for Republican candidates and organizing college Republicans to do free labor in exchange for invitations to the various keggers and orgies TPUSA became known for. He wasn’t outspoken on Israel either way before his death. That made him a great blank slate for the various sycophants in his orbit to project their own reactionary ideology onto.

YMMV for a lot of these. The Guardian is notoriously transphobic. The AP and Reuters are a grab bag of real news coverage and naked propaganda pieces. Big City Papers are inevitably mouthpieces of the local reactionary billionaire, leaning heavily on the “If It Bleeds It Leads” rule of thumb.

My own local paper - the Houston Chronicle - is lousy with native advertising and reactionary hot takes.

Not the worst paper in the world, but this town used to have no less than six major periodicals of record. They were all strangled by media consolidation. And the last paper standing is barely more than a coupon book for the real estate industry, with a conservative newsletter spliced in.

Turns out we’re a nation of immigrants. Therefore, everyone’s eligible to be deported.

Does raise some questions about why ICE exists to begin with and what its purpose has actually been.

Lots of accounts probing the system for weakness, to be sure. But there’s just not much of an audience to manipulate. And you’ll virtually never find a Lemmy thread indexed in Google results with the high profile of a comparable Reddit thread.

Guy from Langley spending 80 hours a week posting hundreds of SpongeBob memes to convince the Wendy’s PR company flak that we need to invade Greenland for national security reasons.

ICE, DHS, and the Border Patrol precursors have historically treated native peoples with some of the most cruelty. This goes straight back to Bush, Reagan, even Eisenhower (Operation Wetback swept up a ton of First Nations people in the southern border states).

Really puts the exclamation point on how much of a lie “Immigration Enforcement” is as public policy. It’s ethnic cleansing and always has been. Anyone defending ICE is defending white supremacy.

The Chinese government doesn’t want to have to deal with routing the world’s email spam through their domestic servers. Nevermind the nightmare of latency going round trip from a terminal in Sao Paulo to a data center in Beijing, just so some mid-level bureaucrat can know the porn habits of Brazil.

I would say the bigger threat of Chinese hardware is an end to the effective technology embargo the US sanctions regime has imposed on the Global South. Far scarier to Americans than a Chinese bureaucrat with access to the Amazon web store history is a Cuban Communist with a standard of living that outpaces their Miami peers.

I mean, that’s absolutely where this is going at a business level. Cloud computing has been in the cards for decades, and the only real question is who will do the hosting.

With the price of RAM and CPUs going asymptotic, these big cloud compute companies are building an effective monopoly on high end processing capacity. They’re cornering the market on hardware. Eventually, you either use their computers or you stick with legacy hardware (that’s seeded with Planned Obsolescence time bombs) or you (shudders just to think of it) start buying computers from CHINA.

When you think about it, there’s really only one option.