“If We Truly Believe In Bending The Arc Of The Moral Universe Toward Justice At This Place And Time,

Nazi propaganda and Trump propaganda are the same thing. Republicans are too busy licking boots to say anything.

Calling the Fates to Hex Nazis

cavorta.substack.com

Calling the Fates to Hex Nazis

A spell for magical activism

February 20, 2025 With the upcoming German election (on Sunday) and what is happening in the US and other countries, I have been doing this spell every day. I am going to continue to do this, because this is a long-term spell. And I cannot count any more how many antifascist petitions I have signed. I can't go to protest marches (because of my disability and chronic illness), so I do what I can from home.

Maybe you'd like to join me and try this spell yourself? I tried to keep it as simple as possible (for instance the ingredients), but it still should be powerful.

Hey do y’all remember when Boeing fucking killed a guy last year. And we all said “huh I guess Boeing fucking killed a guy” and then went on with our lives. And everybody knew that Boeing had fully just fucking executed a guy and nothing came of it. Like there was no police investigation no justice no nothing. Like literally EVERYBODY knew that Boeing had full on murdered a guy to silence him and there wasn’t any consequences for them. Kinda crazy.

archive.ph

Tribe, California reach groundbreaking agreement for cultural burns -…

Legislation passed last year allows federally recognized tribes to practice cultural burning freely once they reach an agreement with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.

Northern California’s Karuk Tribe, the second largest in California, becomes the first tribe to reach such an agreement.

(Feb. 27, 2025, Noah Haggerty)

Northern California’s Karuk Tribe has for more than a century faced significant restrictions on cultural burning — the setting of intentional fires for both ceremonial and practical purposes, such as reducing brush to limit the risk of wildfires.

That changed this week, thanks to legislation championed by the tribe and passed by the state last year that allows federally recognized tribes in California to burn freely once they reach agreements with the California Natural Resources Agency and local air quality officials.

The tribe announced Thursday that it was the first to reach such an agreement with the agency.

“Karuk has been a national thought leader on cultural fire,” said Geneva E.B. Thompson, Natural Resources’ deputy secretary for tribal affairs. “So, it makes sense that they would be a natural first partner in this space because they have a really clear mission and core commitment to get this work done.”

In the past, cultural burn practitioners first needed to get a burn permit from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, a department within the Natural Resources Agency, and a smoke permit from the local air district.

The law passed in September 2024, SB 310, allows the state government to, respectfully, “get out of the way” of tribes practicing cultural burns, said Thompson.

For the Karuk Tribe, Cal Fire will no longer hold regulatory or oversight authority over the burns and will instead act as a partner and consultant. The previous arrangement, tribal leaders say, essentially amounted to one nation telling another nation what to do on its land — a violation of sovereignty. Now, collaboration can happen through a proper government-to-government relationship.

The Karuk Tribe estimates that, conservatively, its more than 120 villages would complete at least 7,000 burns each year before contact with European settlers. Some may have been as small as an individual pine tree or patch of tanoak trees. Other burns may have spanned dozens of acres.

“When it comes to that ability to get out there and do frequent burning to basically survive as an indigenous community,” said Bill Tripp, director for the Karuk Tribe Natural Resource Department, “one: you don’t have major wildfire threats because everything around you is burned regularly. Two: Most of the plants and animals that we depend on in the ecosystem are actually fire-dependent species.”

The Karuk Tribe’s ancestral territory extends along much of the Klamath River in what is now the Klamath National Forest, where its members have fished for salmon, hunted for deer and collected tanoak acorns for food for thousands of years. The tribe, whose language is distinct from that of all other California tribes, is currently the second largest in the state, having more than 3,600 members.

Trees of life

Early European explorers of California consistently described open, park-like woods dominated by oaks in areas where the forest transitions to a zone mainly of conifers such as pines, fir and cedar.

The park-like woodlands were no accident. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have tended these woods. Oaks are regarded as a “tree of life” because of their many uses. Their acorns provide a nutritious food for people and animals.

Indigenous people have used low-intensity fires to clear litter and underbrush and to nurture the oaks as productive orchards. Burning controls insects and promotes growth of culturally important plants and fungi among the oaks.

Debris, brush and small trees consumed by low-intensity fire.

The history of the government’s suppression of cultural burning is long and violent. In 1850, California passed a law that inflicted any fines or punishments a court found “proper” on cultural burn practitioners.

In a 1918 letter to a forest supervisor, a district ranger in the Klamath National Forest — in the Karuk Tribe’s homeland — suggested that to stifle cultural burns, “the only sure way is to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him.”

For Thompson, the new law is a step toward righting those wrongs.

“I think SB 310 is part of that broader effort to correct those older laws that have caused harm, and really think through: How do we respect and support tribal sovereignty, respect and support traditional ecological knowledge, but also meet the climate and wildfire resiliency goals that we have as a state?” she said.

The devastating 2020 fire year triggered a flurry of fire-related laws that aimed to increase the use of intentional fire on the landscape, including — for the first time — cultural burns.

The laws granted cultural burns exemptions from the state’s environmental impact review process and created liability protections and funds for use in the rare event that an intentional burn grows out of control.

“The generous interpretation of it is recognizing cultural burn practitioner knowledge,” said Becca Lucas Thomas, an ethnic studies lecturer at Cal Poly and cultural burn practitioner with the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and Region. “In trying to get more fire on the ground for wildfire prevention, it’s important that we make sure that we have practitioners who are actually able to practice.”

The new law, aimed at forming government-to-government relationships with Native tribes, can only allow federally recognized tribes to enter these new agreements. However, Thompson said it will not stop the agency from forming strong relationships with unrecognized tribes and respecting their sovereignty.

“Cal Fire has provided a lot of technical assistance and resources and support for those non-federally recognized tribes to implement these burns,” said Thompson, “and we are all in and fully committed to continuing that work in partnership with the non-federally-recognized tribes.”

Cal Fire has helped Lucas Thomas navigate the state’s imposed burn permit process to the point that she can now comfortably navigate the system on her own, and she said Cal Fire handles the tribe’s smoke permits. Last year, the tribe completed its first four cultural burns in over 150 years.

“Cal Fire, their unit here, has been truly invested in the relationship and has really dedicated their resources to supporting us,” said Lucas Thomas, ”with their stated intention of, ‘we want you guys to be able to burn whenever you want, and you just give us a call and let us know what’s going on.’”

This is tyranny.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

AI Assistants Keep Joining Meetings. Administrators Say It’s Out of Control.

The trend marks the latest example of tech development outpacing governance.

At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.

One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.

Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”

The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”

The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.

That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.

Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.

But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.

“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“

The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”

i think the idea that every disabled person already has all the resources, defense, and accommodations they need is constructed by ableism because in the first place they were not happy with disabled people getting anything at all. for them, the bare minimum is too much already