What I do, sometimes frustrating, but what I love to do

I want in my life to give power to those who are poor and don’t have power, to champion those abused and work to change the society that oppresses and abuses minorities. So this was my day. What a day it is has been.

I slept well last night, something uncommon for me, and felt well and rested when I got up. I did the morning tasks of feeding all the cats, inside, outside, and the one that stays in when it is cold and out when warm. It was cold last night, so Tupac slept the night in our bed, alternating snuggling me and Ron. All cats fed morning breakfast I started my morning work on the computer, quickly checking the things, glancing over news feeds before settling in to read, post, or respond.

At 7:40 I started gathering up trash. The park recently sent a notice around that instead of having your trash out at 10 am as it always has been, they demand it be out now by 8 am. Or you have to find a way to dispose of it yourself. The park has been really reorienting the last few years to a much younger desperate working families and taking a much harder dictatorial line with the rules, ignoring some long standing ones and implementing new onces all designed to gain more market share of younger families needing housing. So they insist the trash be in white plastic trash bags and be out before most of the older people here are up. And no, you cannot put it out the night before, we have far too many nighttime critter bandits that would tear into the bags and spread the trash everywhere, which the park now refuses to clean up as they claim it is the homeowner’s responsibility to do so.

In the process, I wake Ron getting the trash cans in our bedroom and our bedroom bathroom. He said he would get up, which while I said he did not have to, I was glad he did. My shoulders have gotten real bad as the MRI showed with torn muscles and decayed shoulder joint bones, so pulling heavy bags out of a trash cans is not only a real effort but it hurts a lot to do. He knows this so he got up, lately he has not been sleeping a lot during the night and sleeps late into the morning until around 9 am.

Normally when Ron sleeps that late I eat breakfast earlier myself as I am hunger after getting up normally between 3:30 to 4 am, but I am trying to make myself stay in bed until 5 am. But since he got up, I offered to make breakfast of fried over easy medium eggs. For us that means eggs where the whites are fully cooked yet the yoke is still runny and yellow. Ron loves when I cook the eggs that way, he can’t seem to do it. But to tell the truth eggs in a hot pan can change so quickly you have to pay attention with no diversions and be able to watch the eggs themselves, because as I said they can go in 10 seconds from great to over cooked with hard yokes.

At that point, Ron and I made a grocery list. He gets his Social Security money on the third Wednesday of each month. We have had a few hard months and needed supplies. I have been trying to go with him, but Ron decided I had already overdone and needed to stop a bit. I had started a couple laundry loads, and he wanted me to rest. So he went out. While he was out, I got the call.

The call came from a lady we know here in the park, I have done a lot of work for her computer wise over 20 years. She is now into her 80s, and lives on a very restricted income. When her husband died some years back, I helped her with all the needed computer stuff to insure she got her benefits and other things. Her husband was a retired Marine, and he had dementia / Alzheimer. She was in grief and over her head, Ron and me along with other in the park stood by and with her getting her through this. She is also the highly religious catholic lady that a long time ago I was in her home helping her with a computer problem when she was telling me about her god and how she knew he was real. I finally had enough and looked at her and angry said “You know he is real, then where was he when I was a kid getting repeatedly raped, watching and enjoying it”? She did not say anything for a few minutes as I turned back to her computer. Then she said, “I am sorry I upset you, I just … I just know he is real because I feel him”. We did not talk about her god after that, but we did stay on good terms, maybe friends with her always promising me to help anytime I needed it as then I did not drive and offering to take me anywhere I wanted to go. I felt bad after for exploding that way, but I had been having nightmares and flashbacks, so was very raw. I was in the wrong, but I wish she had been able to see I did not believe or feel like she did about her god. She went to church services 3 or 4 times a week, volunteered at the church and their thrift store. She really is a simple woman, who deeply clings to her faith. She doesn’t have much, and her belief is important to her. Since that day she doesn’t push her god, but I have helped her out by giving her an older printer I was replacing so she could print the church bulletins, I quietly gave her some ink for it that “I found in a closet” when I found out she couldn’t do the bulletins because she was out of ink. I keep helping her at no cost and she calls me a saint and offers to help me any time. She will leave small bags of cat food once in a while at our door, knowing we are taking care of the outside cats. I know on her limited income that is a large cost for her. I wonder if she understands we see her on the camera’s doing it.

So where is this getting to be very long almost a novella length post going? Ron had left to get the groceries and I had settled down at the computer when the call came in. She was in a panic asking if she could bring her laptop to my home. She had a chance to do a pilgrimage hosted by her church to a famous Catholic Church in France, she had saved enough money but to be able to do it she had to find a second person to go with her. That saved her over a thousand dollars and it was limited to a small number of people and she had to get her and her other person entered right away. This was so important to her, she had wanted to go to the Holy Land but now was worried they would kill her. I calmed her down.

I questioned what the problem was. Seems for months she has not been able to get online with her laptop but could with her phone. For the history as she is very limited in funds, I struggled for years to keep her internet at the lowest cost possible. So after the hurricane Ian I had to argue with Comcast for her and get her back online. She accepted a limited metered data level for a lower price. I did not know she had a problem since then. But now she was telling me she had not been able to be online on her laptop for many months, that when she tried to go to a website Comcast webpage came up and she was too confused to figure out what to do. But as her phone worked and she got her email, she did not call me. Side note, we talked about that and she will call me in the future.

So as her bringing her computer to my house wouldn’t let me fix the problem she was having signing on to the internet at home, I told her I would come to her home. When I got there, she was beside herself about not being able to go on this pilgrimage, something I really don’t understand myself, but I told the inner Scottie that I would do what it took to make it happen on the computer side. Oh wow.

Well the first problem was her computer had somehow been shifted from her own router to the Xfinity hotspot system. For those that don’t know if you have Xfinity / Comcast and use their equipment they have a side channel off the router that anyone with a Comcast account can use. You simply put in your username and password when using the hotspot. I refuse to allow anyone to piggyback on my internet connection, so I don’t use Comcast’s equipment. I got her back on her own internet rather quickly.

But then we ran into the worst thing which I hate when I deal with older people on internet / computer problems. They don’t know their passwords, any records of them are so muddled that they have dozens of them they insisted we keep trying … and so on. Or they have multiple user names for the same place. I have gotten to the point where after the third or fourth attempt that they insist on is the correct one, I demand we change the password. But then they cannot remember the recovery stuff and so on. Got that fixed and a new password, but then the struggle becomes getting them to write it all down crossing out the wrong ones.

We ran in circles trying to go from her phone to the computer to where she wanted to go. I stopped, and look at her computer. She had all her saved passwords in Chrome I knew as I set it up, but it had been changed to Microsoft Edge, as had a lot of stuff on her computer. So I got her Windows 11 computer, which I dislike as a program as I find it hard to work with compared to 10, back on Chrome and able to sign into everything.

This is the next morning 2 / 22 / 2024 about 7:30 in the morning. As I was writing the above last evening, I decided to help Ron with supper. He had the deep fryer out and was deep frying breaded chicken patties and French fries. Plus he made salads for us. I ate a full chicken patty burger with pickles and lettuce along with a dash of yellow mustard. To that I added a lot of French fries. Plus my salad. Why did I eat so much you ask, as normally I am a small eater? A week and half ago I had ten trigger point injections in my back. Steroids. They raise heck with my blood sugar and how hungry I get. After eating, I helped pick stuff up, then went as I get very sleepy after eating went to bed.

When Ron came to bed he twice had to gently wake me. I was having bad dreams again, and shouting out, I guess I was trying to call out for him, shouting his name. It is something I have been doing a lot more of the last 6 to 8 months, shouting out for him. I must have been having sleep paralysis but what I experience is not being able to turn, move, or able to speak. When that happens as I struggle to move like I am being restrained I try desperately to force my words out. Often in my dream they come out slowly slurred and muffled, if at all. So I try harder with all my might to shout. What I shout can change, it used to be no no no or don’t hurt me don’t hurt me, or a combination of those. Now according to Ron I tend to shout his name, and sometimes he will come to the bedroom to ask me if I called him, knowing what that might mean.

So back to the story from yesterday. Got her back into the place she needed, on the sign-up page, and as she started filling it out I left for home. Ron had gotten home, and I was helping him put away groceries when my phone rang. She needed to put a picture / scanned image of her passport on the application. I had given her a multifunction printer, scanner, fax, copier some years ago. But she couldn’t use it she said as it was out of ink. Well we don’t need the ink to scan and save an image. But no matter how I tried to talk her through the procedure it was not working. So I went back to her house. Well first the printer was not connected to her router. But she couldn’t remember the changed password for the router, she just knew that the person who set it up gave it the name of her old router and new password. So I decided to save that fight for another time. I suggest we use her phone to take a photo and send the image to her Gmail. First issue everything on her phone was huge. Super large font. Then when we took the picture we couldn’t send it, her settings were to iCloud and not her Gmail, so I again did not want to screw with it. I just took the picture on my phone, sent it to her Gmail, then I opened her Gmail, saved the image to her computer, went back to the sign-up page and posted the image. They took it. I made sure she was good on everything and went home. I called her back later before supper and she had made it in time and had her spot saved.

Last note. Ron and I are finding ourselves on a tight budget right now. But I know the ink for that brother printer was very inexpensive on Amazon, like $12 dollars for a bunch of it. I will wait a few days and ask her what model it is and see what I can get off Amazon. And that was my day. Hugs. Scottie

Let’s talk about Russia, alerts, perception, and the House….

UV light kills viruses. Why isn’t it everywhere?

When you think of disinfecting a space, what comes to mind? Wipes? Gels? Sprays? Maybe air purifiers or effective HVAC systems? All of these are great defenses against viruses and bacteria, but one thing has been missing from the toolkit despite our knowing about it for over a century: light.

Ultraviolet light is an incredibly powerful disinfectant. Study after study has proven that it can obliterate viruses and bacteria, and yet it’s not often thought about as a defense against germs. In fact, when most people think of UV, they think of the harmful rays from the sun that cause cancer — not the PR you want when advertising, obviously. Luckily, a few years after the pandemic lockdowns, researchers have found a type of UV that isn’t strong enough to penetrate human skin but still effectively stops the germs. Could it be our next defense? Check out the video above to learn more.

I am so fucking pissed

I often don’t feel well or have mind fog. Sometimes l get busy or for some other reason I need to take extra medications. Strong amounts of morphine, muscle relaxers, others. Everything makes my mind foggy. Plus last year I had a TIA ischemic event that messed with my ability to think and even speak properly. Also sometimes I just don’t feel up to dealing with other blog posts and even comments.

So I developed a system of saving open chrome pages of posts or comments in tabs, and building tabs up in different days windows. Sometimes I end up with 6 or 8 open windows saved with over 400 tabs in them combined. Over the last 6 or so weeks I had 8 open windows with over 60 to 80 tabs each. I could even close them and shut down the computer, as long as I did not clean the history.

I have three utility programs that are set to be run manually that clean the entire computer, including the internet browsers histories. Set to be run manually. Well one of those updated this morning. I never thought much of it, it happens a lot automatically. This time it bit me hard in the ass. See this time it reset my clean the browsers settings to automatically when closed. I needed to do some updates and restart the computer. No problem as I could close the tabs and then when the computer updated and restarted I could just reopen the saved tabs. I let the updates happen and restarted the computer.

When the computer restarted, I noticed CCleaner running. That seemed strange. I realized why when I opened chrome, opened the history to restore the more than 6 weeks of saved tabs full of comments and posts to find … everything gone! WTF. I checked the history on other devices, it was there, but the history for Play Blogger was gone. Damn it all to …

Seems when CCleaner updated, it changed the cleanup settings to automatically when closed. When I closed the browser windows the program cleaned the history.

I will try the hardest way to do comments, by going back through the admin board. But if you did leave an unanswered comment in the last 7 weeks, please let me know, I can look up the post to see the comments. I am so frustrated. And just want to forget the entire thing and go watch videos and play Halo. Hugs. Scottie

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Fake Biden robocall linked to Texas-based companies, New Hampshire attorney general announces

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/06/tech/nh-ag-robocall-update

By David Wright, Yahya Abou-Ghazala and Brian Fung, CNN

6 minute read

Updated 3:58 PM EST, Tue February 6, 2024

grinvalds/iStockphoto/Getty Images

A robocall that used an AI voice resembling President Joe Biden’s to advise New Hampshire voters against voting in the state’s presidential primary has been linked to a pair of Texas-based telecommunications companies, the state’s attorney general announced on Tuesday.

New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, in a news conference on Tuesday, said the source of the calls were linked to two businesses: Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. Formella identified Walter Monk as the owner of Life Corporation.

Formella said the investigation is ongoing and suggested it involves additional entities other than Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. He did not say who, or what entity, was ultimately behind the disinformation campaign and the creation of the AI audio. No charges have been filed, Formella said.

“We have issued a cease-and-desist letter to Life Corporation that orders the company to immediately desist violating New Hampshire election laws. We have also opened a criminal investigation, and we are taking next steps in that investigation, sending document preservation notices and subpoenas to Life Corporation, Lingo Telecom, and any other individual or entity,” Formella said.

Formella said that the robocalls numbered in the “thousands,” though he offered a wide range of 5,000 to 25,000.

The calls were made ahead of New Hampshire’s presidential primary in January, urging New Hampshire voters not to vote in the contest and instead “save” their vote for the November election.

“Republicans have been trying to push nonpartisan and Democratic voters to participate in their primary. What a bunch of malarkey,” says the digitally altered Biden voice in the call. “We know the value of voting Democratic when our votes count. It’s important that you save your vote for the November election. We’ll need your help in electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.”

Biden’s campaign at the time said it had been referred to the attorney general, and slammed the call as disinformation.

“I think this case is unique in that it is providing us a real-life example of an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election,” Formella said on Tuesday. “That’s been something that we’ve been concerned about in the law enforcement for a while, and it’s certainly something that state attorneys general have talked about. But we had not seen as concrete of an example as this, days before a primary, an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election or to mislead voters.”

Formella also said that other unnamed entities potentially had relevant information about the robocalls, though he declined to share specifics.

“I’m not going to give you an exact number but I can say it’s beyond the two – it’s beyond Texas Life Corporation, Walter Monk, and Lingo Telecom. There are other entities that we think have relevant information, and I would not be surprised if we discover additional entities or individuals beyond those that we have discovered up to this point,” he said.

Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez commended Formella in a statement on Tuesday.

“Disinformation aimed at suppressing voting and deliberately undermining free and fair elections is an unacceptable threat, and we commend the New Hampshire Attorney General for taking the matter seriously and moving swiftly as a powerful example against further efforts to disrupt democratic elections,” she said.

An AI voice creation tool

The fake audio was created using an AI voice creation tool named ElevenLabs, according to two separate analyses by the security company Pindrop and by digital forensic experts at University of California, Berkeley.

ElevenLabs told CNN in a statement that it is “dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools” and that it takes appropriate action in response to reports by authorities, but declined to comment on the specific Biden deepfake call.

Monk has had run-ins with US robocall regulations before, said Formella and the Federal Communications Commission. On Monday, the FCC issued a cease-and-desist letter to Lingo Telecom and said both Lingo and Monk’s company, Life Corporation, have previously been warned about apparent illegal robocall violations.

In July of 2003, the FCC issued a citation to Life Corporation for delivering “one or more prerecorded unsolicited advertisements to residential telephone lines.”

In the citation, the FCC said Monk’s company delivered the prerecorded advertisement calls to telephone subscribers who did not have a business relationship with the company and did not authorize the calls.

The FCC’s citation found that Life Corporation did not disclose required information in the prerecorded calls – including the name of the caller, who the call is made on behalf of, and an address or telephone number.

The citation — which is addressed to Life Corporation along with 16 other business aliases for the company — notes that the unsolicited advertisement calls were in violation of the Communications Act of 1934, as well as the FCC’s rules regarding telephone solicitation.

Included in the citation is a warning that subsequent violations would result in financial penalties of up $11,000 for each such violation or each day of a continuing violation.

Telecom companies that persistently facilitate illegal robocalls can and have been forcibly disconnected from the US telephone network by FCC order, as part of a wider crackdown on illegal robocalls by state and federal officials.

More than 50 attorneys general from both political parties wrote to Life Corporation on Tuesday about the AI-generated robocall, as part of a task force focused on anti-robocall litigation.

The attorneys general expressed concerns that Life Corporation or others “may seek to replicate in each of our respective states” the type of deepfake calls that hit New Hampshire. The letter told Life Corporation “that it should cease originating any illegal call traffic immediately,” adding that the calls risked violating numerous laws.

In social media profiles reviewed by CNN, Monk describes himself as a serial entrepreneur and, in an interview with Dallas Magazine in 2016, discussed many of his business ventures that failed. The list included a company marketing “upscale survival gear” to women, which Monk reportedly spent more than $1 million of his own money on but that Dallas Magazine wrote was a “failure of epic proportions.”

One of Monk’s ventures, a company known as Voice Broadcasting, has been paid to send political robocalls and advertises the ability to send 8 million calls per day on behalf of clients. When CNN attempted to contact Voice Broadcasting, a person who answered the phone said Monk was “very busy” and that the company is “undecided” on whether to issue a statement.

Little is known about Monk’s own political history. According to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by CNN, Monk and his ex-wife each donated $5,000 in 2008 to PLR PAC, a Kansas-based political action committee that has spent most of its receipts on advertisements airing on Spanish-language broadcast channels.

Senior US law enforcement officials have been closely monitoring the New Hampshire robocall incident to determine if a federal crime was committed, a senior US official familiar with the matter told CNN.

The official declined to discuss the status of any investigation into the robocalls, but said that the Justice Department has brought at least one recent case against a defendant accused of suppressing votes by spreading false information. That case was against Douglass Mackey, a social media influencer accused of targeting Black voters on Twitter with false messages claiming they could vote for Hillary Clinton via text message in the 2016 election. Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison in October.

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Allison Gordon, Sean Lyngaas, Evan Perez and Andrew Kaczynski contributed to this report.

It did not work, but was kind of relaxing

Hello all. So Sunday I decided to dump my video computer, clean out some old stuff, clean it up, reorganize it, and tweak the setting. The reason was I had a Microsoft security update that kept faulting out on installation. I did a quick search on it, did not see anything about it online, and Ron kept pushing me to do stuff to distract me. I had suffered from the resurfacing of some abuse memories, I was feeling sick because on Thursday I had steroid injections into my spine, Friday I got allergy shots, and then this weekend I was to take my testosterone injection and that really hurts. Then to top it off, the new roof has leaked and water leaked down into the ceiling and now we had mold growing in the bedroom.

I decided to do a full deep clean. I could have just reset windows and left the drive alone. But I wanted a good clean up. So I had the computer wipe the drives, remove everything on them, which means I had to rebuild the directories, switching things from the C drive to the D drive that has twice the room for data, photos, videos, movies, TV, and any other storage needs than the C drive which I save for program files. That took most of one day. Then Monday I was really feeling badly, and noticed I still had the same issue. This time I did a deep dive search in the error codes and self repair. It involved the size of the rescue environment section on the hard drive. I was seeing how large I would have to make it to fix the issue when I saw that a lot of people who tried this self repair did not get the issue fixed and had to end up reinstalling windows and or repartitioning their hard drives again. While I have good software for this and have done it many times, I was not wanting to spend the time because I was not feeling well. Still am not. So I did what I should have done in the very first place. I started reading the Microsoft Windows support community posts, and more important, the replies from Microsoft staff. Turns out on Jan 10th they released a statement acknowledging the problem, the failure of the update to install on a lot of computers and they were working on a fix for the next batch of Windows updates. Everything I had done until then and the next day and half of putting all my programs back on and their settings correct, was not needed. Grrr. All because I did not want to spend a half a day wading through all the community support stuff I ended up doing anyway. Well I was distracted from the other issues. Hugs. Scottie

Lauren Boebert & other conservatives rage at Pete Buttigieg over FAA policy promoting diversity

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2024/01/lauren-boebert-other-conservatives-rage-at-pete-buttigieg-over-faa-policy-promoting-diversity/

The right lives on hate, racism, and bigotry. They can not allow other religions, minorities, people different from them to have the same rights and opportunities. For some reason they feel that others having the same rights they have makes them less than, makes them lessor as people. They take no joy in the happiness and success of others. They hate the inclusion of anyone slightly different from them, and they react with temper tantrums. Look at the meanness towards and smug superiority they think they have over others. Instead of admiring the skill of the flight crew, the pilots and the plane stewards that saved lives, these people mock and slur others. Hugs. Scottie

They’re blaming airline safety issues on disabled people, Black people, women, and drag queens to gin up anti-diversity sentiment.

By Alex Bollinger Friday, January 19, 2024

Secretary Pete Buttigieg/Rep. Lauren BoebertPhoto: Shutterstock

Conservatives are angry that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been, for at least a decade, trying to expand the diversity of its workforce, and they’re blaming gay Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

A terrifying video of a door blowing off Alaska Airlines flight 1282 went viral earlier this month. No one died, but the Boeing 737 Max 9 was forced to return to the airport and make an emergency landing. Some loose bolts around doors were found when other planes of the same type were later inspected.

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While flying today is safer than at any time in the past and much safer than traveling by car, freak accidents like this still happen. And they can still be used to gin up anger at minorities, disabled people, women, and LGBTQ+ people.

“The FAA is the latest victim of the radical [diversity, equity, and inclusion] agenda,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote on social media this week. “Instead of prioritizing the most qualified candidates, the FAA will now look for individuals with ‘severe intellectual disabilities.’ How can anyone feel safe flying when the people responsible for their safety are being hired based on DEI rather than qualifications for the position?”

DEI stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” workplace policies that seek to hire and support candidates from diverse backgrounds. Right-wingers have increasingly targeted these policies as a “woke” form of “identity politics” while ignoring the workplace disparities that they seek to address.

The FAA is the latest victim of the radical DEI agenda.

Instead of prioritizing the most qualified candidates, the FAA will now look for individuals with 'severe intellectual disabilities.'

How can anyone feel safe flying when the people responsible for their safety are being…
— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) January 17, 2024

Boebert was likely referring to a story that spread like wildfire on conservative media. The conservative New York Post ran a story about the FAA policy – which the Post stressed is “overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation” – with the headline, “FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities.”

The story noted that the FAA has a diversity statement on its site that says it recruits people with disabilities, including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.”

X CEO Elon Musk shared the Post’s story and wrote: “Just had a conversation with some smart people could not believe this is happening.” He also shared a post that claimed that Black airline employees lower the “average IQ of US Air Force pilots.”

“FAA ‘diversity’ push to hire workers with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities sparks concern, mockery,” blared Fox News in the title of a video from their talk show The Five discussing the FAA in front of a giant picture of Buttigieg.

The problem with their explanation? The policy has been on the FAA since at least 2013, during the Obama administration, and the Trump administration didn’t do anything to remove it. The Post’s story didn’t mention the fact that the policy is from 2013 and instead just noted that the FAA’s website was updated in 2022, which isn’t a relevant fact to the story but may have been intended to imply that the policy was put in place during Buttigieg’s tenure.

“The FAA employs tens of thousands of people for a wide range of positions, from administrative roles to oversight and execution of critical safety functions,” the FAA said in a statement. The FAA has 45,000 employees. “Like many large employers, the agency proactively seeks qualified candidates from as many sources as possible, all of whom must meet rigorous qualifications that, of course, will vary by position.”

Snopes noted that the rightwing “media coverage provided no evidence linking any DEI initiative with the Alaska Airlines incident” and that the investigation into the Alaska Airlines flight is still ongoing.

But disabled and Black people aren’t the only group that conservatives are blaming for the incident. Hate influencer and former realtor Chaya Raichik – whose Libs of TikTok account has been massively influential in spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and has led to hospitals getting bomb threats and queer and trans teachers getting death threats – decided it was women’s fault.

That’s because Southwest Airlines made an innocuous post about an all-women flight crew shortly after the Alaska Airlines incident.

“All female flight crew? Go off, queens!” the Southwest Airlines’s X post read. The post included a picture of six smiling women in a plane.

“They’re openly mocking us,” Raichik wrote, sharing the post. “They know what they’re doing.” The implication was that supporting women in the workplace was somehow inappropriate following the incident in the Alaska Airlines flight.

Her post was viewed around 300,000 times and widely shared on the platform. Southwest later deleted their post celebrating the women.

Later in the week, Raichik raged at United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby doing drag at a Halloween party in 2011. Kirby is married to a woman and has seven children with her, but being a stereotypically masculine, straight, cisgender white man wasn’t enough to protect him from the right’s grievances about diversity in the workforce.

“This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of United. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into United,” Raichik wrote. “This video should tell you everything you need to know.”

This is Scott Kirby, the CEO of @united. He’s a drag queen and has been incorporating drag into @united.

This video should tell you everything you need to know. pic.twitter.com/RR5nWwC5OR
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) January 18, 2024

Anti-trans activist and fifth-place swimmer Riley Gaines responded to the video, writing, “It’s time to bring back shame.” She also wrote that people “fly United at your own risk,” not explaining exactly how she connected the video to flight safety.

Cisgender, heterosexual white men on the right have donned drag in the past without controversy, including Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) boyfriend, rightwing media personality Brian Glenn. Greene, who has protested drag queen shows in the past, laughed off claims that there was anything inappropriate about her boyfriend doing drag because it happened “years ago.” The same grace, though, apparently doesn’t apply to CEOs of airlines that support diversity in the workplace.

Buttigieg, for his part, assured travelers that he has confidence in the FAA’s ability to keep flights safe, noting that they grounded 171 Boeing 737 Max 9 jets for further inspection following the Alaska Airlines incident. He explained that FAA staff is putting in extra hours to get to the root of the problem.

“I have confidence in any aircraft cleared by the FAA,” he told reporters last week. “The FAA’s doing a great job and [FAA Administrator] Mike Whitaker’s doing a great job.”

He added that, as a father, the images of the plane with the door blown out affected him.

“Anybody looking at those pictures has to be thinking about what you’d do in that situation,” he said, explaining that he was just on a flight with one of his children. “That is what’s on our mind.”