This fight for higher ed's principles is what finally drew me to AAUP in the last year.

"you are the ones with the most to lose. My colleagues & I may have to leave this cherished institution & that would be a great loss for us. But we have already lived lives of consequence and can find other pursuits. You, however, would lose the education you deserve." 🔥 thebatt.com/news/anonymo...

Want to anonymously mail this to some upper administration but I also need to continue to get paid so

Wow In just 4 months, nearly 1400 American healthcare workers have applied for jobs in just one province in Canada 🇨🇦

Public pressure works. Bowing to bullies doesn’t. Jimmy Kimmel’s return is a win — now Disney and ABC must stand firm in defending his First Amendment rights and those of every American. When political power can silence speech, our democracy itself is at risk.

📽️ WATCH: Epidemiologist Erin McCanlies spent much of the past 20 years studying how parents’ exposure to toxic chemicals affects the chances that they will have an autistic child. RFK Jr. cut her entire division — yet promises to identify the causes of autism by September: https://propub.li/4nhXQua

This is a Supreme Court decision from just last year, relevant to current free speech outages that academics may be experiencing.

Unfortunately my employer has fallen for the simulacrum, so I have to be careful about “saying no” real noticeably until I am sure about my financial plan for getting fired without process or chance of appeal.

Taps the sign Get your shot if you can

"I have spent the last few weeks addressing and preparing for a military invasion by the President of the United States. No, I’m not a soldier or a foreign adversary. I’m the Governor of Illinois"

We are fast becoming a banana republic, with two standards of justice. If you oppose the leader, you go to jail just for speech. If you're a loyalist, you get immunity for your crimes. That's what happens in Iran - not the United States. This is a decision moment for America.

This book is really interesting. I wonder why we hear quite a bit in high school history about the Know-Nothings and little about the Wide Awakes.

Technologically advance a band: Red Hot Carolina Reapers (Selective breeding is technology)

Apropos of nothing in particular, here's Walt Disney's testimony to HUAC in 1947, where he named employees he believed were communists, condemned labor unions, and accused "commie" groups, including the League of Women Voters, of smearing him. 🗃️ archive.org/details/walt...

A little light reading for a Sunday night

You guys, so many Romance girlies are reading "On Tyranny" that they've broken the Goodreads recommendations algorithm. 10/10; no notes. #romancelandia

there is a point here i want to amplify. the free speech defenders of the mainstream seem to have no awareness that actual free speech is often more fractious and destabilizing than civil and respectful. a society where speech is genuinely free isn’t the deferential space they want it to be.

It strikes me that quite a lot of people knew for the last year that the guy running our horrific deportation squads took a bag with $50k in cash from undercover FBI agents investigating corruption, and it didn’t get out until now.

You look at every culture that's ever existed and the running theme is everyone pretty much just wants to play/dance to music, make art, eat stewed meat wrapped in flat bread, and tell stories about the shapes we find in the stars. Somehow we turned that into wars and overtime and profit margins.

Radicalizing the Disney adults is quite a move I’d say (She’s reading from “On Tyranny”)

We really valued different things in our national leaders, not that long ago.

An antidote to despair and cynicism -- academics studying countries facing autocratic takeovers document that more than half of these episodes lead to "U-turns" and more than 90% result in strengthened democracies. Up to us to make it so! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This is basically the Roy Cooper superpower

Check out Justice Eddins’ complete repudiation of the Roberts Court here. It’s worth reading in full. It’s quite brave—and exceedingly rare—for a sitting judge to speak so candidly and scathingly about SCOTUS’ partisan contortions of law, history, and fact. www.courts.state.hi.us/wp-content/u...

I really only have three possessions I care about — this house, my data/photos, and my pets. And it’s not so much this house as *a* house, a home that I feel safe in and like being in. Everything else could gradually be replaced. So I guess the next steps are backups, and pet passports. In case.

Anyone else seen an uptick in prospective employers asking inappropriate questions about female grads' family plans? One of ours is getting this in practically every interview. We're her references and got asked those questions directly, too! 👀 It's like they think employment law got cancelled.

—The COVID vax will continue to be covered by payers; —Despite CDC's ACIP taking a vote on requiring an Rx for the vax, CDC has no legal authority to require an Rx; —MAHA is trying to create friction to drive down vax rates, we have to be the anti-MAHA antibodies www.patreon.com/posts/139300...

Also, if you won by replacing your own position with your opponent's then you lost, actually.

I have an underlying condition and it’s not wanting to get COVID

My employer just issued the “if they come for you, for no matter what insane reason, we’re going to hand you over with a smile” “social media advice”. So we know where they’ll stand if the next thing is loyalty oaths, or orders to teach misinformation, or fire all women. We’re so cooked.

Do not make me agree with Ted Cruz

Now here is my summary of the ACIP meeting itself. 1. The chair permitted people to present harmful misinformation about vaccines throughout the entire meeting. 2. Retsef Levi and several other members appear to have no understanding of basic public health principles and IMO should be removed.

Fearful Americans Stockpiling Facts Before Federal Government Comes To Take Them Away https://theonion.com/fearful-americans-stockpiling-facts-before-federal-gove-1819579589/

Food safety pop quiz: which of the following should you absolutely not buy, cash through the car window style, from two guys in the Boost Mobile parking lot at Eastway and Plaza? A) a watermelon B) whole ears of corn C) unrefrigerated fish on a string

The lame thing is that none of these devices (except Nuance’s glasses with hearing aid built into the frame) uses tech to do anything helpful for me. Make adaptive lenses that track what my eyes are trying to do and help me see, and maybe I’d think about it.

We can’t produce fearless investigative journalism without job security and a fair contract. After almost two years of bargaining, we need your help. Show your support for @propublica.org workers by adding your name to our petition: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

I signed the Harper's letter to show I was brave enough to stand up to the left on free speech. But I've decided that I'm not brave enough to stand up to the right about it.

I just think that we should acknowledge that this was said openly by a guy who would know, to a roomful of guys who would know. This is the truth of what they are doing, and any discourse that fails to include that is fatally flawed.

Our democracy is not self-executing. It depends on us all as citizens, regardless of our political affiliations, to stand up and fight for the core values that have made this country the envy of the world.

I think a lot of problems could be solved by just not letting hedge funds buy stuff (houses, newspapers, farmland) in the real world.

The announcement of health insurance companies that they’ll continue covering routine vaccinations is a huge vote of no confidence in ACIP's recommendations. It reflects a desire by insurers to avoid the cost of illnesses by having their customers vaccinated. Gift link:

Unfortunately, college professors and students and others who have targets painted on them by these “influencers” don’t have the money for this kind of protection.

I assume this is obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: The advantage of proscribing a non-existent organisation is that no one can prove they don’t belong to it.

IT'S OFFICIAL: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York State, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New York City have formed the Northeast Public Health Collaborative. The collaborative will issue their own vaccine recommendations and coordinate public health efforts.

Academics, take a good look at the classrooms you teach in, the pathways of exit, the bottlenecks to movement, and TELL YOUR CHAIR if you do not think that classroom is safe. I spoke with our building manager about this in the past week, and universities are NOT thihking five steps ahead right now.

Good news for those needing vaccines in NC. Glad we've got a good Governor and NC-DHHS chief who want to keep everyone healthy.

AHIP, the country’s biggest health insurance association said its members will continue to cover updated COVID and flu vaccines through the end of 2026. AHIP covers over 200M people & includes Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Centene, Aetna, Elevance, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, Molina, and Cigna.

A free and democratic society cannot silence comedians because the President doesn’t like what they say. This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.