February, 2026 An Open Letter To The Speaker of the US House of Representatives Dear Speaker Johnson, I am writing to you as someone who is deeply troubled by the way you use your expressed religious faith to handle your job. You have often told the American people that if we want to know what you believe, we should just "read the Bible." But as I watch how you lead the House of Representatives today, I see a massive gap between the teachings of the Bible and the way you act as the primary enabler for Donald Trump. It is one thing for a President to do wrong; it is another thing entirely for a man who claims to follow the teachings of the Bible, to be the person who makes that wrongdoing possible. You aren't just a bystander; you are the enabler, the one holding the door open for him. You use your position to make sure the President never has to answer for his actions, and you use your claimed faith as a shield to protect him from the truth. Without your help, his worst impulses would be stopped, but instead, you act as the bridge that allows them to become possible. I am asking you to be honest about how you enable these behaviors:

1. You Make the Lies Possible. You often play "ignorant" when the President says things that aren't true or treats people with cruelty. When he calls his political rivals "vermin," or when he spreads conspiracy theories, you tell reporters you "haven't seen the news" or "don't know the details." But we all know that as Speaker, you see everything. By pretending not to know, you are enabling his lies to spread without any push back. The Bible teaches that "the truth will set you free," but you seem to be working very hard to keep the truth from coming out.
2. You Give a "Spiritual Pass" to Vices and Lawbreaking. You claim to stand for "family values," yet you are the main defender of a man who has spent his life doing the opposite. You stood outside a courthouse to defend him during his trial for paying off an adult film star—a case that involved cheating, lying, and faking business records. You stayed silent when he demanded millions of dollars from the Justice Department to pay for his own legal troubles. In plain language, you are acting like a "character witness" for someone who has shown he has no character at all. By doing this, you are telling the country that it’s okay to lie and cheat as long as you have power.
3. You Use God as an Excuse for Power. You often say that "God is the one who raises up leaders." But it seems like you only believe this when it’s someone you want to have this power. In 2020, you were one of the main lawyers trying to throw out the legal votes of millions of Americans to keep Donald Trump in office after he lost. It is hard to believe you care about "God’s will" when you were willing to ignore the will of the people to help his attempt to illegally stay in office. You are the enabler who tried to give him a second term that he didn't win, and you used the Bible to justify it.
4. You Enable Vengeance Instead of Mercy. While God tells us to "love our enemies," you are helping the President carry out what looks like a "revenge tour." You are helping pass budgets that hurt the poor, while supporting the President’s threats to use the government to "punish" anyone who disagrees with him. You aren't just watching him do this; you are the one passing the laws that give him the power to do it. Mr. Speaker, if you were truly a man of honesty, a man of truth, a man of decency—a man of God, as you claim—you would not be Trump's Enabler. And, if I may paraphrase what Joseph Welch said to Joseph McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings—"Mr. Speaker, have you no shame?” Mr. Speaker, stop pretending, stop lying, stop enabling, or, Mr. Speaker, I simply can’t imagine how God could possibly have any mercy on your Soul. Sincerely, A (very saddened)-American-Citizen

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/58932519

Hey everyone, with the new Discord changes, I decided it was a great excuse for me to finally try to ditch discord. I mostly used discord for my creative endeavors through the years (collaborating on projects, help with software - looking at you Blender and Godot, and etc) but now I really only have my small community that I was trying to start back up based on my board game project.

As someone who drifts from project to project, and often tries to find other people who want to participate in projects - this forum is meant to fill two needs:

1. A communication and contributor hub for the various open source and creative commons projects I am currently working on, as well as a centralized location to access information and assets for said projects.
2. A place for other creative individuals to network, collaborate, and share their own projects - or even simply chat and meet like minded individuals.

I am a huge advocate for the creative commons, open source software, and the overall Libre community that counters the capitalist models that are so prevalent in the online space. While members of this community don't need to share these same ideals, I would like to foster a community that can lift up and encourage others who contribute to this space. It would be nice if we could create a community where people help and contribute to each others creative endeavors and improve the FOSS/CC community.

And honestly, I kind of miss the days when forums were the primary form of communication, before discord - so I am excited to see if this community can take off at all.

---

The community is non existent at the moment, but if any of you would be willing to check it out and stick around for a while to see if we can grow - I would be greatly appreciative. If anyone has feedback for improvement or ideas for direction of the forum, I would love to hear any and all constructive criticism.

Paywall? https://removepaywalls.com/4/https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/france-ai-company-mistral-invests-14-billion-data-centres-sweden-2026-02-11/

Badposters when you make an actually bad post

The country did not and would not vote for the Labour left.

Paywall? https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.ft.com/content/c9a27925-47f8-4542-a165-102bca95bce3?shareType=nongift

Hi selfhosters 👋

After the feedback I received from self-hosters here and elsewhere, I focused this update on things that matter specifically when you run everything on your own infrastructure.

This update adds:

• 🔗 Generate public shareable links for your projects
• 🗂 Organize everything using folders
• 🖼 Export a full project as a single image

But more importantly for this community:

• 🔌 Connect to GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, and Forgejo
• 🏠 Use it with self-hosted Git servers
• 🔐 Provide a personal access token to work with private repositories

Several people mentioned the need to work with private repos and internal Git instances without relying on external services. You can now point Ideon to your own server and use your own token. No third-party dependency required.

Installation is still designed to stay simple. One curl command:

• Downloads the docker-compose.yml
• Downloads the env.example
• Generates all required secrets securely
• Prompts you for SMTP, app URL, port, etc.
• Starts the containers

No repo cloning. No manual secret generation. No external SaaS. Everything runs in two containers: app and database.

GitHub: https://github.com/3xpyth0n/ideon

Docs: https://www.theideon.com/docs

As always, I’m open to feedback. If you self-host it and hit friction anywhere, I want to know.

A watchdog group that bills itself as crusaders against “disinformation” is calling on the Justice Department to investigate the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that helped to propel Zohran Mamdani to victory last year.

The nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) just rolled out a 29-page report accusing DSA of “convergence with hostile foreign states,” the operative word here being “convergence” because coordination isn’t shown. Instead, the researchers used things like AI modeling to argue that the DSA's talking points on things like sanctions and election integrity "synchronize" with the narratives of the Venezuelan, Cuban, and Chinese governments. This along with some DSA delegation visits to these countries was enough for the report to demand a Justice Department investigation into whether they are foreign agents.

The report is pure McCarthyite guilt-by-association, dressed up in 21st-century tech. It employs charts and graphs to give an air of rigor to claims that essentially boil down to: if your tweets sound like someone else’s, you must be working together. NCRI points to "in-kind benefits"—like a stay at a posh hotel in Caracas—as the hook for a FARA inquiry, turning a political junket into a potential federal crime.

Source: Xcancel

Paywall? https://removepaywalls.com/https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/uk-sign-eu-single-market-rules-deal-reeves-4228840

DW still on the site lol

Government by regulation structures how constitutional democracies normally operate. Legislatures and executive agencies enact formal rules that govern conduct, embodying the ideal of government by laws rather than by individuals. Yet regulators also govern through threats of regulation. When public officials seek to alter private behavior, they may warn regulated actors that failure to comply will trigger new or stricter rules. These warnings can achieve regulatory goals without the adoption of formal rules. Because officials often issue such threats in informal, private communications, the practice escapes public scrutiny and challenges the dominant model of democratic rule-making, which assumes open deliberation by accountable institutions. This paper theorizes threats of regulation as a governance device that remains largely invisible to outsiders but offers significant advantages to regulators. Although United States courts attempt to distinguish unlawful coercion from permissible persuasion, they struggle to enforce these boundaries in practice. The paper argues that increasing transparency in routine communications between regulators and corporate actors would reduce the risk of abuse while preserving regulatory effectiveness.

Study.

https://commet.chat/

@commetchat@fosstodon.org

Source

A business consultant is raising alarms about AI-conducted job interviews after he says a tech company’s evaluation of him drew some concerning conclusions, including criticizing his "habitual" use of Google's Chrome internet browser.

As some companies outsource job interviews to artificial intelligence, rejected candidates can be left wondering what went wrong.

After not hearing back about a job he applied for in Madrid with marketing company Anteriad, Daniel Alvarez, who is based in Spain, decided to find out exactly how the AI judged him.

He obtained a copy of the AI-generated evaluation from Anteriad under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The company had used a third-party firm called ChattyHiring to conduct the screening interview.

Alvarez, who is not Canadian but lived in Toronto for much of last year, shared the full evaluation and transcript with CBC News. He said he was not impressed by what he found, and doesn't feel companies should use AI interviews in the hiring process.

“It's not a human-to-human interaction when you have, for example, language repair.... I can say something, and depending on your face, I can immediately rephrase it," he said.

"That’s gone in this kind of interaction."

Source

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/7171262

Twin boys aged one and a two-year-old girl were killed in the attack late Tuesday night on the family's house in the city of Bogodukhiv, around 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the border with Russia.

It triggered an outpouring of anger and grief.

"This is deliberate terror against civilians, against families, against children. Russia is consciously killing our future," said Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko.

...

"As a result of the strike, the house was completely destroyed and caught fire, and the family was trapped under the rubble," prosecutors said. ...

The children's mother, who is eight months pregnant, survived, but sustained "a traumatic brain injury, acoustic barotrauma, and thermal burns", prosecutors said.

...

Their grandmother was also wounded in the attack and had been hospitalised, Bogodukhiv mayor Volodymyr Biely said in a statement.

...

Amnesty International reports of brutal conditions for civilians amid Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, [citing testimonies](brutal conditions for civilians amid Russian attacks on energy infrastructure).

Many residents have relied on camping and kerosene stoves to heat bricks and water bottles. Some have resorted to dangerous coping mechanisms, such as setting up camping tents inside their bedrooms and lighting candles within them to fight the cold.

Svitlana, a pensioner from Kyiv, said that during blackouts: “I warm some water in a cup on a kerosene stove, fill up two bottles, one [goes] under my feet, the other in my hands, so as not to freeze. And we all sleep dressed… Dressed under duvets, all that we have, we put on.”

There are many people, including older persons and people with disabilities, who are isolated and confined to their apartments, without any means of communication, whose circumstances are likely much worse than those documented in this research and who may not live through this winter to tell their story ... Its strategy and tactics, including continued use of indiscriminate weapons and deliberate targeting of civilians, have caused widespread human suffering and seriously impacted Ukraine’s most vulnerable people, including children and older people.

...

Source