"[Billionaires] can buy a new face, a slimmer body, a new hairline...But they can neither buy nor fabricate the spark of inspiration...nor can they create, with all their money and resources, a machine that has inspiration for them" 🧵:

At Grand Rapids Art Museum yesterday, my friends and I participated in an 11-word poetry activity and chose this painting to focus our attention on. We ended up with this group poem: Fantasy Shadowy life Nature and craft Where does beauty grow? Within 1/🧵

It's better if the Democratic Party in DC does NOTHING rather than to give ICE more money for body cams and training. NOTHING is better than that plan. I mean it. DO NOTHING.

"fear cannot be the foundation of a healthy nation. Dignity cannot be produced by domination, and trust cannot be created through terror. Obedience to systems is not the same as loyalty to conscience." -Kaira Jewel Lingo (source link in quoted post)

Agreed. I keep getting the ick when I've read a long essay and then at the 70% mark they tell me how they shortcut their creative process or that I'm reading, in part, synthetic text. This has happened multiple different times recently and always for a purpose that author could have done without it.

Excerpt from Revolutionary Letter № 8 by Diane di Prima

From the article "Pedagogy of the Inevitable" by Ricky D'Andrea Crano: "To credulously extoll these tools as 'revolutionary' is, among other things, to diminish our expectations for anything like revolution." 1/2

Libraries are the same, #solarpunk in real life. There are many ways a better world exists alongside the terrible one...growing those seeds & using them as familiar models to help people transition conceptually away from exploitive capitalism... brightgreenfutures.substack.com/p/episode-25... 2/n

I’m seeing posts from people (outside of MN) about how US citizens should carry their passports. And let me say that *inside* MN, we are calmly responding to requests with: “No, I don’t have to show you any documentation.” Because that’s how you protect everyone, regardless of immigration status.

From my own field of expertise (astrophysics): There have been 230 recipients of the prize in Physics; 5 were women. They gave it to Jocelyn Bell Burnell's advisor for her work on pulsar discovery. They waited until Vera Rubin died in 2016 to give a prize for dark matter to someone else in 2019.

In our current era, some people have courage and some people have bravado. Only one is a true strength. Courage, as Alexandra Blakely sings, is not the absence of fear. It is the feeling of that fear, being afraid, and showing up anyway. (https://tidal.com/browse/track/484440171?u)

Sure. AI companies have ALWAYS been training their models on Wikipedia content, which under the free and open access model is available to anyone — including AI companies. Agreements like these require AI companies to limit and offset the strain they place on Wikimedia infrastructure.

The section in this article that challenges the use of the term "AI literacy" is so good! I'm going to keep referring to this from now on.

My partner sent me this video and it is so good! Penelope makes excellent points and rather than summarize her ideas, I'll suggest you simply watch the whole thing when you have time to focus on it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FljcklWhCIE&pp=ugUHEgVlbi1VU9IHCQkyAaO1ajebQw%3D%3D

Before people yell at me, I know not everyone is trying to be "helpful" with their posting. Some are just letting off steam or voicing their truths or whatever. But what we choose to share during a crisis can have ripple effects. More notes from last night's event: guante.info/what-can-artists-do

The job of the police is to maintain inequality with violence. The greater the inequality, the more violence is required to maintain it

I've been following this through a few accounts I follow, and it was such a clear example of the power of solidarity: so many other authors declined the invite and it changed the messaging. Solidarity is key, friends.

Ooh, energy vampires, that's an excellent turn of phrase @unbuildingwalls.bsky.social - and fabulous news shared, too :)

Darlings! A fresh post. I've got poems eligible for the Hugo @laworldcon.bsky.social), Nebula ( @sfwa.org), and Rhysling awards ( @sfpoetry.bsky.social). Links: @strangehorizons.bsky.social -- "Of Water, Always Seeking" strangehorizons.com/poetry/of-wa... +

New paper by @jessicasilbey.bsky.social & @hartzog.bsky.social: How AI Destroys Institutions. AI systems erode expertise and short-circuit decisions, undermining the transparency and accountability that civic institutions need to survive. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The timing of this is so incredible given that just this week polling shows that "abolish ICE" is now a more popular position than not abolishing ICE

Hey y'all, my geology colleague shared that Kilauea is fountaining right now! Go take a look: https://www.youtube.com/live/tk0tfYDxrUA?si=QYNyQ4hkDcMGIFEP

This talk looks really interesting (and I miss living in walking distance of this bookstore). I've recently shifted to using @anisota.net as my access point to Bsky posts, and metrics are a little bit hidden on the cards. It's one of the ways the interface gives me a little more breathing room. 💜

I knew I said I was gonna do whimsy and I will but: The reason Trump is so hellbent on making the Fed do what he wants is because there's one *essential* requirement for a successful authoritarian takeover: Short-term economic benefit for his party before the next election. W/o it, they fall.

What—and I say this is my most professional professor-of-art-history-voice—the HELL are we doing here? WaPo is committing a fundamental category error. That category error is like gripping the neck of the journalistic integrity in two hands and squeezing it till the lights go out. 1/n

Started "Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence" by @danmcquillan.bsky.social this evening. The introduction has resonated with my weary heart, and I look forward to discussing it in book club. "Whatever else AI is, it is not neutral, and neither can we be." (page 2)

Honesty, agency, community, solidarity, a refusal to abandon basic principles of decency and accountability...I see these things everywhere. We're in a possibility space, even if it may not feel like it. We don't have to live like this, and our regime knows it. That's why they're in a frenzy. /x

Spent the afternoon potting new baby spider plants and repotting the older generations. It was good to focus on greenery for a while, and we're having friends over who will be invited to take a plant home with them if they would like 💜

Fluffy bundles of snowflakes are falling straight down, blanketing all the grass that had been exposed over the last two days of windy warmer weather. I'm wrapped up in a blanket drinking pour over coffee and trying to read Marie Howe's New and Selected Poems. 1/2

I don't think we make nearly enough space to talk about this. Understanding what turns a child into an adult fascist is not "excusing" them—it feels like "that doesn't excuse x" has become a thought-terminating cliche stopping us from looking at what might interrupt the cycle of radicalization

People are going to have to figure out their values and then actually live them. I hate to tell you it’s not a 6-part workshop. It’s a lifelong process and we also have urgent work to do. So learn from absolutely everyone around you. The un/learning is just as exhausting as the doing for many of us

"We are still shaken and heartbroken by their violence. That is the cost of staying human in inhuman times — and it’s a cost we pay in defense of our neighbors and in defense of our own humanity." (Kelly Hayes, from Organizing My Thoughts 1/7/26, link in quoted post)

Human brains feed off of negativity. Negative thoughts are easily digested and play in a loop in your mind all of the time. The reality, however, is that there is also A LOT OF GOOD happening every single minute. You have to do more work to pay attention to the good but it's worth it.

Full poem: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/the-masque-of-anarchy/ Context of poem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masque_of_Anarchy

Abolition of ICE is literally the mildest moral position one can take in the wake of this violence.

One of the goals is minimizing trauma, not misrepresenting trauma as obligatory. If you've managed to retain enough humanity that you're against murder (even / especially by the state), you're under zero moral obligation to witness a videotaped murder.

The thing I always come back to is how many people never despaired against longer odds, and how arrogant it would be to put myself above them.

It has been an obvious, sometimes even almost stated project of Trump 2.0 to engineer a redo of the post George Floyd protests of 2020, this time with much more state violence. And now a federal agent has shot and killed a woman in a car at point blank range a mile from where Floyd was murdered.

Greenland is back in the news so I am compelled to remind folks that while yes, there are rare earth minerals there, the tech weirdos who have infiltrated the government have also been obsessed with Greenland as part of their network state plan for a long time. drilled.media/news/network...

Yes, this is a particularly brutal administration. But we did not get here in some surprise sneak attack or from a healthy functioning democracy. We got here because our whole system is deeply flawed. And now we have to figure out how to fix it. Together. Whether we like each other not

There will be a day when the US is on the other side of what it has done to other countries. I may not be here to experience it. But it's a guarantee. All empires fall.

A (non-exhaustive) list of beautiful things: - love - fun, sexy times - art - the rich tapestry of diverse humanity - people living their truth How could you EVER be anti-queer or anti-trans?!

My institution signed a contract to switch to Canvas from Blackboard mere months before they announced this partnership. It felt like a deeply awful bait and switch, but I'm also in the minority of critical voices on my campus around AI. :(

Trump is insane. His inner circle is insane. They want to burn the world so they can loot everyone else’s wealth, feel like big tough guys, and hurt all the groups they despise. But the thing breaking the whole world is how everyone feels obligated to avoid stating this fact directly.

This is a gripping microhistory thread, worth the read (Don't believe Mrs. Grieve!)

update for the AI Skeptics reading group, if you're interested. you should really buy the book (_Resisting AI_ by @danmcquillan.bsky.social) absolutely ASAP if you haven't already. i'm going to start loading you up with auxiliary readings beginning next Monday

We will either end fossil fuel dependency and the predatory extractivist basis of global production, or they will end us through wars and ecological collapse - all at the same time.

🌿 "at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves." (Hope Jahren, Lab Girl)

Mia is one of the most capable people I know. This is very much her expertise, so read her reply thread if you are pro-term-limit. I used to yearn for term limits (before I moved to MI) but what I really wanted was for people to fucking retire when they weren't willing to serve their constituents.

We can hold compassion for the range of emotions Venezuelans may be experiencing — including positive emotions — and also be clear that regime change by a fascist superpower is dangerous, destabilizing, and sets precedents that will not stop at Venezuela. Those aren’t contradictory positions.