OK it passed unanimously in both chambers, do they have the spine to override his veto?

😱 😆 😜 Guys, this is priceless

This SUPER reminds me of this passage from O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction":

Honored (and surprised) that my “Becoming a friend of the Court,” article made this list as the most popular article in “Perspectives on History” for January 2025 —

Here's my piece in Foreign Policy about how we've seen radical changes in tariffs or trade rules in the past (1819, 1837, 1890, 1930) & it ain't pretty. foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/11/t...

Includes articles by @earlymodjustice.bsky.social, @zacharyschrag.bsky.social, @nelsonhist.bsky.social, @ddmeringolo.bsky.social, and @gregorydaddis.bsky.social, among other great authors not on Bsky. 🗃️

Wurman is retracing (toxic) arguments about subjects & aliens (& hereditary alienage) that laid a legal foundation for slavery in the seventeenth century via the high courts in England. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Still mind-blowing that a top admin official was revealed to have taken $50,000 in cash in a paper bag from people looking for government favors, the reaction of the administration was "Whatever losers, this is how it works now" and bigshot news media said "If you say so, we'll forget about it"

It’s almost as if he’s lifting the “perpetual enemies” idea from Coke and applying it to the first-generation demographic. Actually, that’s exactly what he’s doing.

New from me: The storied fiddler Ashley MacIsaac wanted to play a show at a Nova Scotia First Nation. It got cancelled because Google's AI search summary incorrectly called him a sex offender. Now he's worried for his safety www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/arti...

So @jeneeninterlandi.bsky.social is on the @nytimes.com editorial board. She has been a voice of reason for many years at the paper (as have many of their health/science reporters) on infectious diseases. This is a great piece from her to close out 2025. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/o...

This is what my computer geek/engineer/autodidact wife has been saying for years.

#sts #agnotology

The core problem with large language model AI programs like Chat-gpt or Grok or Gemini is that their “hallucinations” are a normal part of how they work. Such hallucinations reveal that they have no concept of truth and by definition cannot place value on it.

“This article urges a fresh view on [AI large language model] hallucinations by arguing that, rather than being errors in any conventional sense, they are evidence of a probabilistic system incapable of dealing with questions of knowledge.”

By the way, Trump’s meeting with Zelensky proved once again it really is Russia, Russia, Russia.

Costconomics vs Walmartnomics in a nutshell. Here’s why having a Costco in a community boosts the entire community, including nearby businesses, while Walmart destroys whole towns and leaves people leaning on social safety nets. And yes, it’s about as simple as you think. …

"Norman Rockwell was antifa," his granddaughter says. (Fact check: literally true.) www.thebulwark.com/p/norman-roc...

Happy to share my glowing review of the 100Ballads.org site, which has just been published in Early Modern Digital Review: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/em... It's a fantastic site for anyone interested in early modern English ballads. Check it out!

Holly’s right to be stunned. Spend as much as 5 minutes studying the history of privateering and it becomes obvious why the US doesn’t do this anymore.

My god. Letters of Marque & Reprisal. As though the US lacked a navy. And to be used for aggressive purposes. Bordering on legalizing piracy. I’m only surprised that Trump didn’t try to do it by proclamation— or should I say, executive order? I guess legal vulnerability?

Saw Mike Lee’s execrable proposal a few days ago—it’s bad. Sadly in line w/ the increasing momentum to expand private actors’ privilege to use violence. Darrell Miller & I wrote about this regrettable right-wing movement that we called “the new outlawry” www.columbialawreview.org/content/the-...

There’s a funny Politico story showing that the latest polling on AI shows 80-20 in favor of heavy regulations, an absolute slam dunk platform, but Dems are worried about not winning back mask-off tech CEO donors www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Bullshit (rhetorically). I've had an LLM trained up on MY COURSE material by someone promoting ed-tech chatbots (its all free licensed), and I evaluated it for student facing work. The output SOUNDED right but was subtly wrong in places, in ways a student wouldn't notice. But which matter!

Has this been confirmed elsewhere?

There is still one week left to submit your abstracts! We welcome submissions for 20 min papers from PGRs and ECRs working on any aspect of early modernity. Please see the CFP below for further details, and get in touch if you have any questions!

On ICE‘s abuses of power & accountability: “Swalwell said he and other Democrats are discussing ways to make agency funding directly contingent on dispensing with masks. ‘We cannot have a budget that allows them to wear masks,” Swalwell said. “We’re not going to fund a department that does that.’”

Fellow #skystorians, what was the best book in 20th-century history you have read this year? Or maybe YOU have published one and would like to brag about it? Please comment on this post and/or share it for the end-of-the-year summary!

Treasures of legal history - For a medieval Monday a magnificient medieval illuminated legal statutes book containing the 1225 Magna Carta and which was displayed earlier this year at the Weston library in Oxford #medievalsky

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has stated that the 1918 flu pandemic was caused by a lab virus from vaccine research, a defective influenza vaccine. Let’s analyze what a lie this is. First, in 1918, 107 years ago, virology was in its infancy

New College is a DeSantis pet project, a Potemkin Campus that must be made real at any cost. While the NY Times notes it is the most expensive in the state, it does not tell readers what an extraordinary outlier it is. Freedom isn’t free, and a right-wing campus makeover is very expensive it seems.

Once again raising the question -- why is the president's son-in-law at this official event?

Bernie Sanders: "We need to be thinking seriously about a moratorium on data centers. You gotta slow this process down. It's not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us 'you adapt.' Are they gonna guarantee healthcare to all people? What are they gonna do when there are no jobs? Make housing free?"

The last couple grafs here also remind me why Tim Walz calling these guys “weird” worked so well. When you see Samuel Alito flying the flag upside down outside his vacation home because… well, I don’t why, maybe because Biden wanted to forgive student debt or install EV chargers… they just seem nuts

Barely a blip in the news. 🦗from the New York Times editorial and opinion pages. Compare with days of Hunter Biden Hysteria about unprecedented abuse of the pardon power.

The combination of disinformation potential and environmental destruction of the spread of AI slop is just so deeply depressing. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The sheer recalcitrance of diverse materials to the homogenizing process required both by digitization and processing by means of AI means one thing: the digitization is not the archive. sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...

Newly discovered recordings show how far Donald Trump went to attempt overturning the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. Trump told the Speaker he could call the session “for transparency, and to uncover fraud,” adding, “Who’s gonna stop you for that?” trib.al/uicRmnz

Zuckerberg settles $8 billion lawsuit over Cambridge Analytica scandal, avoids testifying www.france24.com/en/americas/... @carolecadwalla.bsky.social

Why are we being told that all the good stuff from our earlier years - like having undergrad mentors - has suddenly become disposable and unnecessary? The subtext seems to be that the kind of human development we enjoyed - the kind of people we became via education - is & are no longer welcome.

What a strange coincidence

I never again want to hear about how the Republican Party is the party of national security. You don’t incinerate our diplomatic capacity & violate all of our treaty commitments if you care about national security.

In search of books to assign my U.S. History 1876-present class. The students will be mostly non-majors. Your recommendations please!

“Students gather on The Lawn at the University of Virginia. The commonwealth’s flagship university only began enrolling women at its main campus in Charlottesville in 1970.” That’s within the lifetime of many people currently in charge of education and government.

In 2025, the US launched strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, al-Shabab in Somalia, ISIS in Syria, alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, plus Iran’s nuclear program. Now some into Nigeria. All killed people and damaged things, but none appear to have achieved anything lasting.

@lkatfield.bsky.social gives a clear overview of it here, and explains why it matters to take their arguments seriously, even and *especially* for those who do not agree: bsky.app/profile/lawf...

I usually post only once a day. If I ever post this many in one day, please contact my loved ones so they can stage an intervention. #ThankYouForYourAttentionToThisMatter 🙏

The regime’s position is that wherever an American corporation exists and operates is necessarily under the jurisdiction of the United States. Even when inside another country, a restriction on an American corporation is a restriction on American sovereignty.

We are getting to the point where white collar criminals are thinking, "why take the plea deal my high-priced lawyer negotiated when I can just bribe the President and skip jail altogether?" donmoynihan.substack.com/p/pardon-the...