On April 15, Michael Crowell, an independent voter in North Carolina and an attorney, filed a new complaint in his lawsuit Crowell v Cooper, m.d., 1:17cv-515. The case was filed two years ago and has never had a decision. It challenges North Carolina law for mandating that only members of the two largest parties can serve on the State Board of Elections, or on a county board. Here is the new complaint. The case has…

Elizabeth Warren is no socialist — but unlike most of the candidates beating her in the polls, she’s a tough-minded liberal who makes the right kind of enemies. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speaks into a megaphone after joining striking Stop & Shop workers on April 12, 2019 in Somerville, Massachusetts. Scott Eisen / Getty Almost every day Elizabeth Warren comes out with serious policy proposals. They’re rarely even baby steps down the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-transparency-markets-2020-campaign/

For the past year, the fate of Ellicott City, Maryland, has been trapped in limbo. Between 2011 and 2018, three separate floods have hammered the the 247-year-old mill town outside Baltimore, first from Tropical Storm Lee and then via a lethal pair of “1,000-year storms” that sent water raging down the valley and through Main Street, killing two people in 2016 and one in 2018. The spectacular flooding, which was captured in videos shot by…
On March 31, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan dissmissed the lawsuit Level the Playing Field v Federal Election Commission. Here is the 42-page opinion. The case had been filed in 2015. The opinion says that the Federal Election Commission was not “arbitrary or capricious” when it determined that the Commission on Presidential Debates is not violating federal campaign finance law. Here is an April 1 press release from the FEC.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2019/04/18/debates-case-loses/

The White House on April 17, 2019 in Washington, D.C. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images Dear House Democrats, You told us to be patient. You told us to be cautious. You told us to wait for Robert Mueller. Well, the time for waiting is over. And the moment for impeachment hearings has arrived. Forget the mendacious Attorney General William Barr, and his repeated — and repeatedly dishonest — attempts to summarize and spin the special counsel’s report…
Matt Taibbi’s (previously) latest Rolling Stone column traces the long history of rich Democrat donors and the officials whom they fund attacking progressive candidates, showing how the same playbook used to attack Dennis Kucinich in 2003 is now being rolled out to attack Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (I am a donor to both the Sanders and Warren campaigns). The wealthy and their captured lawmakers smear anyone who offers a progressive alternative as a “spoiler”…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/18/elfin-huh.html

As one of the oldest torrent communities, the Demonoid tracker has gone through many ups and downs over the years. The site has disappeared for months, more than once, but always reappeared. Early last year things were looking quite positive for the site. Founder and operator ‘Deimos’ was committed to rebuilding the site back to the thriving community it once was, but at the end of the summer new problems emerged. Initially, there were some…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-founder-deimos-is-believed-to-have-passed-away-190416/

Last week, fans of cool astronomical phenomena (read: almost everyone) rejoiced as an international team of scientists released the first ever image of a black hole. For the astrophysicists, software engineers, philosophers, and mathematicians who worked on the Event Horizon Telescope that captured the image, the announcement was an unprecedented milestone. Their excitement was perhaps best embodied by a photo of one computer scientist on the Event Horizon Telescope team, Katie Bouman, who hid her…
HR 51, the bill in the U.S. House to make the District of Columbia a state, now has 203 co-sponsors. It has gained two co-sponsors so far in April. By contrast, HR 1965, the bill Puerto Rico statehood bill introduced by Congressman Darren Soto, only has one co-sponsor. HR 1681, the ballot access bill introduced by Congressman Justin Amash, has no co-sponsors. HJR 7, the bill to abolish the electoral college, only has seven co-sponsors.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2019/04/16/district-of-columbia-statehood-bill-now-has-203-co-sponsors/
A handful of Motel 6 owners and operators suddenly decided the best use of their guest info was as fodder for law enforcement agencies. In Connecticut, a Motel 6 just decided to start faxing its guest list over to the local cop shop every night. After this questionable practice was made public, the PD announced it never asked for this info and was going to route it right into the shredder going forward. Other Motel…
Jason Scott just posted all of the Infocom source, which is glorious!<ROUTINE GLASS-CASE-F () <COND (<VERB? EXAMINE> <TELL “The ” D ,GLASS-CASE ” is “> <COND (<FSET? ,GLASS-CASE ,OPENBIT> <TELL “open”>) (T …
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/04/infocom/
Hours after the ejection of Julian Assange from the London Ecuadorean embassy last week, police officers in Ecuador detained the Swedish citizen and open source developer Ola Bini. They seized him as he prepared to travel from his home in Quito to Japan, claiming that he was attempting to flee the country in the wake of Assange’s arrest. Bini had, in fact, booked the vacation long ago, and had publicly mentioned it on his twitter…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/free-ola-bini
Umair Haque (previously) writes about how the last days of the Soviet Union were filled with “forced apathy” (an inability to care about what was going on because just surviving took everything you had) and “self-referentialism” (an obsession with domestic affairs to the exclusion of everything else going on elsewhere in the world)> Haque also remembers those days for the “one party rule” and notes that while the US is dominated by a single party…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/15/insulin-lines.html

As was widely expected, the EU Council (made up of representatives of the EU member states) has officially rubber stamped the EU Copyright Directive that the EU Parliament passed a few weeks back. There had been some talk of various countries, such as Sweden, Germany and the UK possibly changing their vote. Sweden, in the end, actually did do so, but to stop the Directive, it was necessary for the UK or Germany to do…

WASHINGTON—In the wake of the WikiLeaks founder’s arrest by British authorities on behalf of the U.S. for charges stemming from the publication of classified military documents in 2010, members of the American media condemned Julian Assange Friday for the reckless exposure of how they could be spending their time. “We…Read more…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/media-condemns-julian-assange-for-reckless-exposure-of-1834010623
Adapting to climate change can seem uncomfortably close to copping out. After all, building higher seawalls to prevent a climate change-charged hurricane from inundating a city doesn’t do a thing to reduce carbon emissions. Moreover the local officials who push through climate resiliency projects might not even care whether humans cause climate change or not. When streets are flooding or basement sewer pipes are backing up, adaptation isn’t hard to sell. But a new proposal…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://thebulletin.org/2019/04/could-floating-cities-be-the-answer-to-rising-sea-levels/
In this, The Year of Our Diplopoda, Two Thousand and Nineteen, I just noticed that the rules that govern mushroom growth in Millipede are literally Conway’s Life.The Archer looked out beyond the horizon. He knew only too well the revengeful signs of his father. “I beseech thee to turn back your rage from the netherworld and stop this onslaught.” As if in laughing response, the ground below him began to tremble. And the day ended…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/04/important-fungiculture-news/
Listen up bitches, it’s time to learn incorrect things about someone you’ve never heard of:I do know this, though: anyone reading who knows anything significant about either Victorian pseudoscience or the life of Charlotte Brontë is very annoyed right now, because all this is so obvious to them, has been covered in so many workshops and seminars, torn apart and examined and understood, and here I am laying it on the table like it’s news…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/04/buckle-up-twitter/

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) Most of the time, when you talk to an Amazon Echo device, only Amazon’s voice-recognition software is listening. But sometimes, Bloomberg reports, a copy of the audio is sent to a human reviewer at one of several Amazon offices around the world. The human listens to the audio clip, transcribes it, and adds annotations to help Amazon’s algorithms get better. “We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1489431
