You can’t stop the signal (and other brief end-of-week items)

The Wandering Monk completed his part of current projects early this afternoon, leaving a houseful of dust, construction rubble, and scattered tools. Also leaving me (happily) with lots more work to do. I’m looking forward to doing having done all that lovely finishing.

I’m sore and beat now and still have had no time for Deep Reflections (though the Monk and I did have fun demolishing AOC and the latest authoritarian fantasy from her ally Beto O’Rourke).

So for now, I leave you with other people’s thoughts, some of them more worthwhile than mine might be at the moment.

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You can’t stop the signal

It often seems that Powerful Forces are determined to stop, or at least distort, The Signal. But once in a while, the ‘Net shows its old design of “treating censorship as damage and routing around it.”

To wit: With worldwide social media either banned or heavily censored in China, that country’s government probably imagined it could keep a lid on the dire plight of its tech workers. So what did techies do to get the word out, given that none of the usual channels were available? They turned to GitHub and posted their protest as a “project,” which now has followers around the globe.

Tech-savvy programmers in the world’s most thoroughly censored cyberspace are turning to unconventional means to collectively organize. They created a “repository,” or collaborative project, on GitHub called “996.ICU,” based on a joke that a 996 [9 to 9, 6 days a week] schedule will send you to the intensive care unit. It’s become one of the most popular projects on GitHub, with more than 200,000 GitHub members following the project.

“First they came after my two breaks. Then they came after my remaining break. Then we had 996,” one GitHub programmer wrote in Chinese on the 996.ICU page last month.

Their “project” has gone viral. Beijing is embarrassed. And NPR has proved it still occasionally has something to say that isn’t merely a whine about racism, sexism, immigration policy, guns, or the other various eeeeeevils of Donald Trump.

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And here are two of those wonderfully in-depth articles from Ammo.com:

The little-known story of how 10 independent states (in the real meaning of the word “state”) joined the union.

And …

How Hollywood has made the West more wild than it ever was to make money and promote gun control.

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You already knew, of course. But there is no such thing as “gun violence.”

A man in this vicinity brained his wife with a bench grinder a few years back. I have yet to hear any outraged cries for putting an end to “bench grinder violence” — though I’m sure the late wife would be quite in favor, were she able to express an opinion.

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Oh, and you simply must have pix of dogs carrying hilarious “teeth balls”

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More over the weekend, but for now I’m headed home from the library to put away tools, sweep, dust, vacuum, and contemplate my next steps on projects.