Indeed! I saw plenty of skeletal jaw/teeth masks, floral prints, don't remember seeing the rolling stones one, but wouldn't have minded one bit.

I wear print T-shirts all the time, so why not?

Just don't go with the heavy iron-on type decals if they're too big, stick more to tie-die jobs that still let the fabric breath. You are trying to suck air through it.

we need immediately legislation that keeps payment processors from any and all of these interferences.

It doesn't work in the US, because the courts have found corporations such as Visa have 1st Amendment free speech rights; which includes the right to deny service to people whose speech they disagree with or find objectionable.

Bc Collective Shout's gag has been to report violations to Visa/MC. Visa and MC do have these policies, and websites such as Itch.IO are in true violation not fully in line w/all the strict compliance monitoring rules these processors have for adult merchants.

The issue is their rules about adult materials are completely designed for Real-Person pornography not fictional character art.

And the compliance requirements are completely nonsensical. Explain to me what practice a merchant is supposed to follow to secure the documentation proving the Age and a Model release/Verifiable consent to appear in the content of fictional characte arts such as Samus Aran, Lara Croft, Darth Vader, Cloud Strife or Tifa lockhart.

In No free country is the artistic (drawn) content subject to a prohibition on sale. But for the rare case where the Art is used as a method to depict something like an actual chart. But the so-called appropriate controls they are talking about are likely the exact the controls which don't make sense and are unreasonably expensive. But as long as they can complain to Visa, and the controls are not in place - the merchant can be shut down every time. And not for violations of the law - violation for not having "appropriate" measures to ensure no violations of the law according to Visa/MC policies.

You know, this is almost like one of those equations where you have a factor, but as you work through it, the factor is neutralized, turning out to not matter in the end?

Remember how I said "If getting non-infected people to wear masks despite the minimal benefits gets the infected to, it is worth it."

I mean, if them wearing masks makes the potentially infected maskless uncomfortable to the point that they put on the mask, then wearing it is actually still protecting them, just from secondary effects.

Plus, while the effects are minimal for a cheap reusable mask compared to a N95, they still protect the wearers some.

Everybody wearing their masks thus does indeed reduce the chances of them getting COVID.

I'm still going to disagree - masks helped reduce the spread. That's very much public health, because public health worries less about the individual and more the group, the "public" part. Fewer people infected is good, thus not theater.

Theater was things like the people wearing masks with holes cut in them.

From a public health standpoint, keeping asymptomatic carriers from infecting others is very much NOT theater. Anything that reduces the infection or spread rate is an effective control. Whether it is cost effective is a different matter, but cloth masks are cheap.
If getting non-infected people to wear masks despite the minimal benefits gets the infected to, it is worth it.
And COVID doesn't have spores.

We don't 'spin' scientific stuff as a certainty without decades or even centuries of work. We can be very highly expectant, but we have those 95 and 99% certainty bars for a reason.
If you took it as a certainty, that is on you and not the scientists. Best we had was "by what we know right now" and that changed over time with both knowledge and supply availability.
And things like wearing masks was a public health issue. It is like forcing you to have liability insurance to drive, to protect others. Why? The cloth masks didn't really protect you from being infected if you wandered around infected people without masks, but if an infected person wore a mask it really reduced the rate of them infecting others.

(And autocorrupt tried to change with into without. Why?)

[F]ederal authorities said that the discoveries were not cause for alarm

Federal authorities said this after being stung by radioactive wasps causing human-wasp transformations and joining with their hive. But no danger.. nothing to worry about.

Since we're not taking about infinitesimals, I fail to see the relevance.

I specifically meant that the value of NOAA's data and services, each year, well exceeds the annual cost to taxpayers.

Sure it's probably true that overall value of NOAA's services provide more value than the worth of the funds allocated to them. Of course you can't force someone to agree to spend money; even if it's a small amount of money, and the benefit of spending it is obviously worth 1000x the cost -- it is possible that for some reason they choose to disregard that value or that deal and prioritize other things even more. And if they had been persuaded, then the taxpayers would likely not be cutting that budget.

To be pedantic: taxpayers didn't cut the budget, their representatives in Congress did. It is not at all obvious to me that this is what taxpayers want.

The thing is in a representative democracy: Congress speaks for the taxpayers. The actions passed by the House of Representatives are the taxpayers' voice. They vote their duly elected representatives, and confer with their elected representatives from time to time, and the representatives speak on their behalf. That is how the whole system works.

I suspect that if you were to ask taxpayers across the country, and present them with the numbers, the majority would say that NOAA's budget is not actually that large, and that cuts to the premier weather service in the country seems like a bad idea.

The taxpayers delegated their voice in the matter by action of their vote. It is the representatives' job to understand what the taxpayers do not and make the governance decisions. The representatives' collective decision is the taxpayers' decision and word on the matter; even in the case of public disagreements and lack of consensus outside the representative body.

at the moment, Congress appears to be particularly pliant to the whims and demands of the Executive, with a particular animus against science and expertise, even when Congress ought to know how penny-wise-and-pound-foolish it is.

The executive was just chosen specifically by vote of the taxpayers less than a year ago. The things they are choosing are extremely unwise, but it is actually what the taxpayers have chosen and voted for. Generally immediately after the election the executive has a public mandate to do exactly what they campaigned for; it is a decision coming from the taxpayers who had a chance to vet their representatives and might have failed to do so sufficiently before voting them in.

Thinking one this further, it is still an observed effect in the article. You have people believing the 'comforting lies' because science is complex, in favor of simple pleads by non-scientists looking to profit by selling horse ivermectin or bleach enemas.

Makes sense to me, I've seen a lot of people distrusting all the COVID science, mostly by making statements like 'They said the vaccine would protect us!', implying that 'Science' told them that it would be 100% effective with 0% chance of side effects.
When more realistically it'd produce something like "vaccine reduced infections by 95%(+-2%, 95% certainty) in the test group 8 weeks after dosage."
Then pile on literally hundreds of studies looking at various other aspects and sub groups.

I'd imagine that they aren't turning off all the lights on the truck, so somebody looking should easily see it coming from more than 450 meters away, because the distance to SEE a light emitting object is drastically further than the distance you can see non-emitting objects illuminated by light you're emitting yourself.
Looking, the trucks seem to have all the standard lights.

I suspect this happened because Internet Archive could not afford the lawyers to counter whoever brought this action.

No.. It is an Ex parte order. That means the court has read the accusers' filings and decided to enter a punitive order without requiring any kind of notice to any parties the complaint is about, and choosing to not give them an opportunity to respond.

I am pretty sure the IA has a sufficient number of lawyers that they could easily right a response, but the court has decided they don't get due process in this case and already ruled against them without allowing any kind of adversarial process. And that is part of what makes Belgium 3rd world. The powerful corporations just send the judge some papers to rubber stamp, and the sentence is finalized with no opportunity for the IA to even read or understand what accusation is levelled against them.

Belgium has a population approaching 12 million

Not that population dictates level of development, but it's tiny - less than the state of Illinois.

What makes them 3rd world is not the population, but the obvious lack of well-developed just and free society governance.

Last I checked Luxembourg is not in Belgium, either, and still Paypal in Luxembourg wouldn't have anything to do with the Open Library.

The ex parte order claims according to the rightholders; "the operators of the Open Library are not easily identified". That is why it is an ex parte order: The court has decided not to give the IA an opportunity to respond, because the rightsholders claim not to know who is running the website. And if that is the case; how would a court from outside their jurisdiction that claims not to know who runs the Open Library have any authority to make Paypal the company to stop doing business with the Internet Archive US non-profit, when as well access to Open Library is not a paid service to begin with?

I'm pretty sure the IA "Open Library" is a free service. There are no payments involved.

Also; both Paypal and the Internet Archive are US companies not Belgium companies. So no Belgium court would have jurisdiction to control what type of business those companies can conduct between each other.

Same for all services from those DNS Resolvers, CDNS, and Hosting companies which are on servers outside of Belgium. Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Starlink are not Belgium-based companies either.

Just because you found a corrupt court in a 3rd world country (Belgium) to write such an order.. Well; good luck trying to enforce that.