Cy-Fair ISD's board president and vice president were losing their re-election bids after the early voting period, and a slate of nonpartisan newcomers was poised to break a politically conservative majority in the Houston-area school district, based on incomplete results released Tuesday night by the Harris County Clerk's Office.

Lesley Guilmart in position 5, Cleveland Lane Jr. in position 6 and Kendra Camarena in position 7 were leading their races after the early voting period. Lane is trying to unseat board President Scott Henry and Vice President Natalie Blasingame — with Blasingame opting to run against her former ally Henry instead of seeking re-election in position 6.

Conservative board members have held a 6-1 majority since 2023. They will preserve that majority if at least one of the following candidates manages to win – either Blasingame or Henry in position 6, Radele Walker in position 5 or George Edwards Jr. in position 7.

The board runs the third-largest school district in Texas and oversees 117,000 students as well as a $1.2 billion budget.

Is there anywhere as ableist as my family's "social circle"? Like... anyone who acts slightly "weird" just get labled my language's equivalent of [the r-word]. Social awkwardness as an adult, neurodivergence, especially autism, they all get labeled in this one category of "the stupids". Idk what the fuck my parents keep talking to, but they say back in their village (idk if father's or mother's), there is a family where the mother died, and the the son, "went crazy/stupid" (emphasis on the quotation marks), so, my mom keeps projecting that fear on me, she thinks I would be a failure like that person. I think there are like a lot of these similar stories that gets spread around from other villages.

These people just get basically abandoned by society, like sure maybe people will have pity for them, maybe they'll live, but they're basically being treated like a beggar, sort of, a nuisance, a leech, a useless eater of the villages, yea sure they'll "live", but they're just gonna get hidden away from society, never really be accepted or even tolerated in public, so fucking depressing to think about. This is mainland China btw, zero disability rights, they're not seen as human beings, just some crippled puppy/kitten that they only keep around out of pity, to make themselves seen as saints or something, because they wanna pretend like good people, they wanna get "good karma" (as in the religious/spiritual sense), yet you go on wechat, you hear all the vile shit they say to each other about them on voice calls, zero political correctness, always throwing deogratory terms. I overheard these calls first hand, that's how I learned the term “低B” (a very deogratory term, equivalent to the r-word in English). They keep using these people as an example of what "failure" is. Like: "if you don't start acting 'normal', that is you one day", this fucking society... What the hell even is "normal", is neurodivergence "insanity" now? What the hell. And the reason why I feel so depressed is because these are literally my compatriots, from around where my ancestry is. In another timeline, I could've been in their position, I could envision that universe, being in their shoes. Depressing stuff to think about.

Oops! All Arbeit Macht Frei!

A Pennsylvania artist’s efforts to create a Halloween float for a local Catholic school went awry when he inadvertently included a replica of the gateway arch from a Nazi concentration camp, prompting a hasty apology from the diocese of Harrisburg.

In apologizing for the fiasco, Galen Shelly told PennLive that a lighted archway and lanterns he ordered to decorate a parade float he was building for Hanover’s St Joseph’s school did not arrive in time – so he searched the internet for images of cemetery gates to represent the idea that “none of us get out of this life alive”.

What he found, and replicated, was a photograph of the gates from the second world war Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, among the most notorious of the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust in which at least 6 million Jewish people were systematically murdered.

The float, captured in images of the 30 October parade posted to Facebook by the Hanover Area Watch group, featured Shelly’s cloned archway containing the German phrase Arbeit Macht Frei – work sets you free – a slogan the Nazis placed at the entrance of numerous concentration camps to mock those who passed through the gates to face brutality and extermination.

“I had no ill intent,” Shelly told PennLive. “I made a mistake and I am deeply sorry.

How the fuck do you not know that "Arbeit Macht Frei" is a loaded term?

Content warning: this article contains discussions of rape and sexual assault, which some readers may find upsetting

Israeli troops who (allegedly) raped a bound Palestinian prisoner so brutally that he almost died have appeared, masked, on Israeli TV to demand ‘justice’ and criticise those who condemned their actions and “tried to break us”.

Zionist Israelis are always the victim – even when it comes to rape they perpetrated

Their victim’s injuries were so severe that he almost died – and the senior military lawyer who leaked video of the crime has been arrested for causing Israel what wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu described as Israel’s worst ‘PR’ crisis.

But the men – three of the five accused perpetrators – are horrified at the supposed injustice of the charges against them, because they “defended the home and only thanks to [us] are we all here today”:

thecanary.co/wp-content/upload…

On Israeli Channel 12 last week journalist Guy Peleg, who published the original video of the gang rape, read out horrific details of the injuries the rapists inflicted on their victim, as they are laid out in the indictment against them. A panel member tried to stop him, saying it was “like playing that video again”:

thecanary.co/wp-content/upload…

Defendants kicked, stomped… used a taser… stabbed the detainee in the buttocks with a sharp object… caused a tear in the rectal wall… Ordered the detainee to put a club in his mouth.

Peleg has been targeted by Israeli right-wing media and politicians since publishing the video and has received death threats. The incident for which the five soldiers have been charged is just one out of dozens, even hundreds, of such incidents of sexual violence and torture perpetrated against civilian Palestinian abductees.

But Israel is always the victim.

I have not been able to successfully post to a Lemmy instance either as a post or a comment. A cryptic error message is returned where the error is unknown and the message is a generic message:

{"error":"unknown","message":"data did not match any variant of untagged enum AnnouncableActivities"}

1. I make a valid ActivityPub request with the audience of a community (or cc a user).
2. Lemmy makes an ActivityPub request back at me at /.
3. My web site does not handle ActivityPub at /, and responds with a text/plain error message. This is default behavior in Drupal.
4. Lemmy rejects my request with a 400 response with the error message above.

I tested other instances by making the following get request to the root of each instance (thank you, Daniel Sternberg for maintaining curl):

curl -v -H "Accept: application/activity+json" -H "Content-Type: application/activity+json" <url>

• With the following results
  
  • Lemmy returns an Application Actor.
  • Misskey returns a 200 response in text/html.
  • Mastodon returns a 406 response in application/json.
  • NodeBB returns text/html.
  • GoToSocial returns a 406 response in application/json.
  • Mitra returns a 200 response in text/html.
  • Pixelfed returns a 200 response in text/html.
  • Peertube returns an empty 406 response.

  
  

My hypothesis is that Lemmy is rejecting the request because I return [strong]text/plain[/strong] and/or it cannot handle a response with that content type.

To test that I am working on changing the default behavior. I will need to dynamically add a route based on system.site.page.front and return a 406 response in JSON. This is simple enough. If my hypothesis is correct, I can also make a merge request into drupal/activitypub module, which would have the same problem. If not, then I’ll need to go digging further.

Ding-dong, the witch is dead ...

Dick Cheney, the former White House chief of staff, member of Congress, secretary of defense and US vice-president, has died, his family has said. He was 84.

Cheney was one of the country’s most powerful vice-presidents, widely reported to wield great influence over the less experienced George W Bush, the president under whom he served.

Cheney was in office on 11 September 2001 during the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. While Bush was hurried to safety, Cheney worked with the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to assume policy control. Troops were soon in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and hunting al-Qaida.

But Cheney’s place in history will be dominated by the decision to invade Iraq. He had been defense secretary during the first Gulf war against Saddam Hussein, in 1990 and 1991, but now Cheney and Bush’s public rationale for war was that the Iraqi dictator was linked to al-Qaida and thus 9/11, and possessed weapons of mass destruction. By March 2003, when US and coalition forces invaded, no proof had been found for either charge, and both were soon proved false.

I'm in the market for a new phone, and I'd like it to be Linux. As I've been building a table of options, I thought I'd share it. It's a wide table; sorry about that.

Updates

• The F(x)tec Pro1 X is available
• ShiftPhone 8.1 added (pre-order)

It's very "me" oriented: it's biased toward US markets ('cause that's where I am); it summarizes several features such as the CPU, display, and camera (all of which get spec'd out ad nauseum in marketing) which I'm too lazy to standardize; and it's biased toward device availability. Since there isn't a huge selection of options, the minute details hold less relevance.

I welcome updates, clarifications, and corrections; I expect to keep this table up to date until at least such time as I acquire a Linux phone -- even if I am forced into using a de-Googled Android in the meantime. Given Google's shenanigans of late, I am going to factor "Linux-ability" of the de-Googled phones, in the hopes that after Google screws over the forks, we'll still have the option of installing some future more compatible mobile Linux distribution.

I've also considered making a public Cryptopad spreadsheet, but I kind of hate working with SPAs.

Minutia

• There are many more potential specs for Display, but not all vendors include all specs: nits, refresh rate, touch sample rates, colors, contrast, and protective glass. This can all be useful information, but not all vendors provide all specs, and it would blow up the table. Therefore, I include the most common information: diagonal size, technology (if provided), and dimensions.
• CPU specifics are restricted to the basics. Most specs list # of performance vs efficiency cores, multiple speed specs, and just a ton of information that wouldn't fit easily into a table; and not all vendors provide the same amount of data in anything like a standard format. So, I include the family and the fastest clock speed, because I'm not sure that even with all the other variables you could calculate an expected standby run time by knowing the slower clock speeds.
• Cameras are in megapixels, and are back/front resolutions. I do not care about video capture frame rates, modes or anything else about the camera. I have a real camera for photography.
• Mem is RAM/storage, and whether the phone takes SD cards
• Battery is in mAh, and an r suffix means replacable
• USBC is the supported version of USB-C on the device; (v) means I confirmed it supports 3.0's video-over-USB; 2.0 never does, but sometimes 3.0 doesn't, either.
• Lnx in this context doesn't mean "you can boot it," but "you can make calls" -- IE, what most people would consider daily driving. A smart phone is considered functional if
  
  • Calls can be placed and received
  • The screen works
  • The WiFi works
  • The speakers work
  • The USB connection works (you can charge the phone)

  In particular, VoLTE is becoming mandatory on many networks in the US, and several EU phones apparently don't support it on US networks (if at all?). Wireless charging appears to require chip support which nobody has implemented Linux drivers for. None of these phones have wireless charging, and if they did, the impression I got was that it wouldn't work under Linux anyway. Regardless, while some people might have that as a minimum requirement, I do not consider it in the "daily driver" category.

  Murena phones come with /e/OS; some are available with Ubuntu Touch.

• US is whether or not it works on US networks, AFAICT
• Avail is whether you can get your hands on one right now. Several of these are pre-order.
• I did not convert Price to dollars, despite this being a US-centric table, because exchange rates are highly variable. A couple of phones I may not flesh out; the Pine64 has embarassing hardware, and I'm fairly certain by now the the Jolla doesn't work in the US; since my goal is to get a phone for me, I'm not spending time filling in data for a phone which can't work.
  Therefore, while I'm not including all de- Googled phones, I'm including some -- especially if Linux support seems to be coming along. I'm also considering only contemporary technology, because even if the battery is replaceable, I'd really not buy myself into having to upgrade soon. Murena, in particular, sells several Pixels (5, 7, 8) with /e/OS.

Phone notes

• FairPhone 5
  The one phone Murena skipped importing into the US was the FairPhone 5, despite a promising post in 2023 claiming it was coming. It's the one most interesting, and would probably be at the top of my list. The 6 doesn't bring a lot to the table and is both larger and more expensive.
• The Jolla Phone
  Jolla no longer makes this phone, and the specs are quite old.
  Jolla phones ran Sailfish, which is neither Android nor Linux, but which apparently was pretty nice. I have no knowledge of whether it was what privacy wonks would consider "secure", but it isn't open source and you can not trust anything that isn't open source.
• Volla phones
  None of the Volla phones have ever been imported into the US, and I've seen commentary that they both work on US networks, and don't. Volla phones are quite nice, specs-wise, and it's a shame we can't get them in the states.
  The Ubuntu Touch website lists the Quintus and 22 as fully functional.
• F(x)tec PRO¹ X
  Another phone with a physical keyboard. Wireless is (annecdotally, in the comments) unreliable.
• Murena Teracube 2s
  The bootloader on the Teracube is locked, which precludes installing Linux.
• Xiaomi Poco X3
  Something of a dark horse, and a phone dating back to 2020, the Xiaomi shows as having every feature functioning under Ubuntu Touch. Unfortunately, the phone does not support VoLTE under Ubuntu Touch, which hinders its use in the US. The phone hardware itself does.
  Nobody has this phone in stock, though, so "Availability" is negative, although I suppose it could be found on eBay or something. The non-replacable battery makes buying it used a sketchy proposition.