It certainly wasn’t because the company is owned by a far-right South African billionaire at the same moment that the Trump admin is entertaining a plan to grant refugee status to white Afrikaners. /s

My partner is a real refugee. She was jailed for advocating democracy in her home country. She would have received a lengthy prison sentence after trial had she not escaped. This crap is bullshit. Btw, did you hear about the white-genocide happening in the USA? Sorry, I must have used Grok to write this. Go Elon! Cybertrucks are cool! Twitter isn’t a racist hellscape!

The stuff at the end was sarcasm, you dolt. Shut up.

(via @speterdavis.com)

I forgot I had this saved so when I say that I was openly weeping when I found this... I am not kidding. Tears everywhere. Non stop laughter.

ICE used warrant application as ‘pretext’ to try to arrest two students in order to deport them

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) effectively misled a judge in order to gain access to the homes of students it sought to arrest for their pro-Palestinian activism, attorneys say.

A recently unsealed search warrant application shows that Ice told a judge it needed a warrant because the agency was investigating Columbia University for “harboring aliens”. In reality, attorneys say, Ice used the warrant application as a “pretext” to try to arrest two students, including one green card holder, in order to deport them.

What the unsealed document shows is that the agency “was manufacturing an allegation of ‘harboring’, just so agents can get in the door,” Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said. “What Ice was actually trying to do is get into these rooms to arrest them.”

FBI Director Kash Patel announced in a Fox News broadcast Friday that he’s redeploying 1,500 FBI agents, analysts and other personnel from Washington to posts throughout the country, and shutting down the bureau’s storied headquarters because it is “unsafe for our workforce.”

Patel has talked frequently about moving FBI personnel out of the nation’s capital and even shutting down the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building and making it into some form of a “deep state” museum.

But his comments to Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo appear to be the most definitive to date in terms of his plans for the FBI and the building named after the bureau's longest-serving director.

The GOP’s budget reconciliation bill includes a ban on state-level artificial intelligence regulations that could undermine efforts in several states to rein in pricing consultants like RealPage, a company that helps landlords use AI to “optimize” rent hikes.

Republicans’ massive artificial intelligence giveaway in their must-pass budget reconciliation bill could kill crackdowns on real estate management company RealPage for raising rents and contributing to the country’s housing crisis. The move comes after RealPage drastically scaled up its lobbying efforts in Washington.

The language in the bill amounts to a ten-year ban on state governments passing any new regulations on artificial intelligence technology. According to congressional staffers and outside policy advocates monitoring the reconciliation package, that section would apply to the growing industry of pricing consultants using AI tools across various sectors, the most powerful player being RealPage.

RealPage, which offers an “analytics” platform for landlords, is currently facing a bipartisan crackdown in a number of states for helping landlords “optimize” rent increases. Those reforms would be preemptively nullified if the current language in the budget bill makes it into the final version. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted on an initial markup of the bill yesterday afternoon.

RealPage has been hit with a torrent of class action lawsuits since 2022 for allegedly facilitating a price-fixing cartel among landlords, including an active antitrust case from the Department of Justice.

In response to these threats, RealPage has dramatically staffed up its Washington lobbying team...

Lawmakers who support KOSA today are choosing to trust the current administration, and future administrations, to define what youth—and to some degree, all of us—should be allowed to read online.

KOSA will not make kids safer. It will make the internet more dangerous for anyone who relies on it to learn, connect, or speak freely. Lawmakers should reject it, and fast.