Pulling the plug

There are two different instances of this I want to chat about.

The first and more outrageous is that Dear Leader just issued a new Executive Order targeting ActBlue, the fundraising platform used by much of the progressive ecosystem and the entire Democratic Party [for those of you outside the US, you can’t ‘do’ politics here without a ton of money to finance ads, trips, meetings, etc, and this is supposed to be tightly governed and controlled. Except we all saw how billionaires were able to essentially buy an election and a whole country]

Anyway, the memo instructs the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue for allegedly allowing illegal, foreign campaign contributions [it is actually mind blowing to me how much Repugs are ‘projecting’: whatever they are guilty of, they quickly go on to accuse their opponents of doing…]. ActBlue already has processes in place to catch these contributions and report them, but Trump is moving ahead with the investigations anyways. Why? Because Republicans know that ActBlue plays a crucial role in raising grassroots dollars for Trump’s opponents.

It must be so tiring to have to find new ways of f..king around with your opponents’ ability to vote…

The other case of pulling the plug has now happened to me a few times. The platform I use most frequently for my ai images (Midjourney) is governed by “community standards” which prevent some images from being rendered (usually sexual, violent, or political stuff — for instance you can never type in the name of certain people). I occasionally get reminded of that when I’m careless with a prompt and I’m ok with that. But over the past month, at least 3 times, I’d do some image creation and step away for one reason or another and when I come back, the entire series of prompts is just gone. Zip. Nada. No explanation…. It happened again today with this very concept I’m discussing. I’m not overly worried… Yet…