Trump: We track Santa. We want to make sure that Santa is being good. We want to make sure that he's not infiltrated, that we're not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa. Santa loves Oklahoma like I do. You know, Oklahoma was very good to me in the election

People are rightly disgusted by this speech, but it’s a measure of fascism’s normalization that many see this as more of the awful same rather than what I think most of us who’ve been reporting this beat hear it as: a significant calculated escalation. Full alert stuff.

👁️ 👁️ 👁️ standing like a sentinel at the fringe of its thicket our 'Bardic Birch' keeps watch over the Vale (in the dawn or dusk half- light, those eyes seem to fix you with benign scrutiny) #landscape #photography from #Eryri #Moelwyns #folklore

Why would anyone risk themselves to go on 60 Minutes after this? How can viewers ever trust CBS News to report fairly on topics this White House is sensitive about?

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

Before essay mills were banned in 2022, advertising for essay mills were all like ‘students, get help with your ideas’ and *everyone* knew it was bullshit. EVERYONE! And now universities themselves are encouraging students to ‘get help with their ideas’ from ChatGPT - and it’s STILL bullshit!

How is this legal?

Editor in Chief of Christianity Today Magazine 👇🏽

If you’re telling Head Start programs they can’t say “disability”, “Black”, “female”, or “Tribal” in order to get funded—you don’t care about kids. Period. This administration is attacking the very protections that keep children safe and supported. Our kids are not political props.

Rob Reiner: “Silence in the face of authoritarianism is complicity. Speaking out is a patriotic act. Democracy doesn’t defend itself. It requires participation, vigilance, and courage from ordinary people."

In a highly unusual move, the EPA is revising an assessment of the health dangers posed by formaldehyde, a widespread pollutant that causes far more cancer than any other chemical in the air. By @fastlerner.bsky.social

Incredible, not in a good way, how many academics, journalists, and policy folks continue to actively attend the Nazi Bar on a daily basis.

Predicting that some universities will soon pledge to provide AI-free instruction, and that this will be an advantage in recruiting and training top students

Replacing working men with billionaires. Hard to imagine a better way of summing up 2025.

The endgame of authoritarian regimes is to no longer need popular approval. So don't be too sanguine about Trump's plummeting popularity. lnk.thebulwark.com/4oIF0MJ

Days after FIFA awarded Trump a fake peace prize, DOJ moves to drop charges in FIFA corruption case www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/n...

Universities: investing millions so students ”develop literacy in the language of AI” Also universities: defunding the humanities so students are illiterate in ordinary languages

They are beating people who maybe once had a broken taillight and sending them to foreign slave prisons while freeing the worst fraudsters and every corrupt pol. The juxtaposition is so stark and appalling.

Another significant Modern Languages department under threat. What does it say about current arrangements that learning about other cultures is being systematically devalued and disallowed?

Trump: "Under Boot Edge Edge - another grossly incompetent. Get on his bicycle, ride to work. What they do is they take the fiber optics & they take fiber, try to hook it into copper. And fiber and copper don't mix. You can't do it...you saw that by the helicopter crash. You saw that into the plane"

talking to reporters last night, Trump claimed of Hegseth's double tap strike that "I don't know anything about it," then moments later claimed "I don't who you're talking about" when asked his plan to pardon the former Honduran president

I found a flowchart which helps you navigate the IT landscape

In 2022, Biden earmarked billions of dollars to help former coal communities. It was the largest investment in Appalachia since LBJ's 1960s’ war on poverty. But Trump won West Virginia 70% to 28% in 2024. And now he's taking away the funding Biden gave them. When are they going to learn?

I doubt LLM's ability to radically progress for a lot of reasons, including: they won't work without my blog. Really. My blog is in Common Crawl, and the AI companies are adamant they need *all* of that, and much more too, without a license. Uh okay so your tech is not "intelligent" at all.

my “AI is over” anecdote is that my wife was hired over the summer to write scripts for a big tech company explaining how to use their AI tools and after many rounds of revisions, the latest notes said “we’re finding a lot of AI fatigue among our users” and to remove all references to AI

How it started / How it’s going

A great essay on why close reading is a more radical methodology than most people think and why university managers don’t like those of us who teach it!

This entire thread is so important. I've had countless discussions with colleagues about this exact thing--which we are all seeing, too--just this semester alone.

Get set! Our #StAndrewsDay sale is days away! Browse our books and top-up your shopping lists... https://edin.ac/32O7hNr

Cover Reveal! “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy" arrives on August 4, 2026. How extremist tech billionaires are dismantling democracy to crown themselves as kings—and what we can do about it. Please pre-order! ➡️ www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Ne...

This is why OpenAI is selling so aggressively to education at all levels—they want to create entire generations of users incapable of reading, writing and thinking without ChatGPT to hold their hands And teachers and professors should call this out for what it actually is

one of the coolest things about ChatGPT is how you can actually just never use it. you can fill your whole entire life with simply not once using it. it's incredible.

MS NOW confirms: The FBI is working with Capitol Police to schedule interviews with the six Democratic lawmakers who urged service members to refuse to comply with illegal orders.

“The account MAGANationX—with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio reading ‘Patriot Voice for We The People’—is actually based in Eastern Europe.”

"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe

Yall are going to be very surprised what this in response to.

‼️Los franquistas pinchan en la Plaza de Oriente: unas 50 personas defienden la dictadura y critican la Ley de Memoria Democrática www.eldiario.es/politica/fra...

Let’s not forget that this regime was supported internationally while starving people, jailing queer and roma people, unionists and supporters of the left, submitting women, and making islamophobia, antisemitism and Catholic fundamentalism some of its key messages. For four long decades.

An really important thing a lot of people don't realize about Trump is that he doesn't bully people he doesn't think he can bully.

Well clearly that Mamdani news is the biggest thing that’s going to happen today and I can safely log o—-

It has taken them a few decades, but they definitely understood the assignment in Missouri. Billionaires are sending taxpayer money to private religious schools, and they have funded the politicians who helped them achieve the goal.

So many people only focus their conversations about the unethical nature of generative AI on plagiarism and intellectual property theft, and don't address the even broader issue of the tremendous environmental costs.

From my various social media accounts, group chats, and conversations at a recent conference, it is clear that professors are reaching a breaking point this semester with AI-assisted cheating. Very bleak. This is not sustainable.

Trump has reportedly been in conversation with Paramount and his billionaire ally Larry Ellison about a potential takeover of CNN that would include firing journalists he dislikes. Billionaire control of the media is a danger to us all.

November 20, 1959: Twilight Zone's "Time Enough at Last" debuts. Burgess Meredith, a pair of thick glasses, a nuclear bomb ... and piles upon piles of books. Need I say more? "It's the one that haunts people," Meredith later said: thenightgallery.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/t... I'll say!

'More than 21% of those surveyed felt the Franco era was “good” or “very good”.' Not so good for those lying in unmarked shallow graves. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

He’s calling for the execution of congressional military veterans.

Before the midterms of 1866, President Andrew Johnson called his congressional opponents traitors and said they should be hanged. Voters were so profoundly moved by his words... that they gave his opponents a supermajority in Congress, and the nation got the Fourteenth Amendment.

Trump is now calling for the executions of Democratic veterans who reminded the military of their duty to disobey “ILLEGAL” orders.