Having a normal Christmas morning

Why does rightwing Helen Lewis, whose career is based on rightwing money, want to tell everyone that rightwing culture is growing? This is a deep mystery that we may never solve

Wonder how many Angelenos are learning where their ceilings are compromised atm. (I am.)

Other than slow horses, what’s out there that’s in the same vein as Down Cemetery Road? I imagine that will be hard to equal, what with the cast and production value.

BREAKING: While baristas continue the largest ULP strike in Starbucks history, 19 more stores filed for a union election today - one of the biggest filing days since our union began. 330+ workers across 15 states hope to join the 250+ baristas who have unionized since mid-November alone.

There's a much better chance someone in this administration would sexually assault my child than anyone they sent to CECOT

There was a female prison nicknamed the rape club. It got closed (eventually) and the Trump administration is trying to reopen it as a migrant detention center I don't think I need to provide further details. It's all the same stink

Bari Weiss just sent this Christmas Eve email to the CBS News staff about "building trust," which includes her tripling down on spiking the CECOT piece "to make sure it's comprehensive and fair." One CBS staffer tells me: "She really has no idea how insulting she comes across."

As a Gen Xer, I am never going to believe in the supremacy of a lossy format like a cassette tape. It was always secondary to my vinyl collection, but did allow me to transport that collection. That said, I’m totally with this sentiment. Ask, or don’t ask about my vinyl, CD and DVD collections.

The reason for the season.

“The past 24 hours have cast a glare on simmering tensions between the old guard of CBS News, the former home of Walter Cronkite, and Ms. Weiss, the opinion writer and editor behind the upstart website The Free Press, who took over with virtually no experience in television.” lol incredible.

Checks out.

I just can’t.

The Kansas City Chiefs are set to receive $1.8 BILLION from the state of Kansas for a new $3B football stadium 🏈 socialize the cost, privatize the profits, baby 🙌🇺🇸

Guess who’s at it again? www.reddit.com/r/CringeTikT...

Yes. Bloomsbury Academic has reminded me 20 times to sign their "opt-in" addendum for this and it is stupid and short-sighted and anti-academic and they also clearly don't understand what "opt-in" means.

I just received a letter from Yale University Press offering me 25% of a cut for them selling my book off for AI training. 1. Are you fucking kidding me? 2. You know they all already stole it, right? 3. 25% of a fraction of a cent? Wow thanks.

This might be something I share with students. “You want the college degree without the college education” is about as good of a summation as there can be. www.instagram.com/reel/DSfW6cS...

She really bitched it up, huh? You had one job, lady: to turn CBS News into a fascist mouthpiece. As usual, you forgot about Canada.

here's the 60 minutes cecot video part 1 of 5 - recorded/uploaded by and all credit to @jasonparis.bsky.social I just reduced background noise, chopped the 14 minutes into 3 minute segments each compressed under 100 mb for bsky's limits, cropped and rotated a few degrees for easier viewing on here

Anyway, watch for yourself and see what you think of Weiss's defense. To me, it's demonstrably full of shit

Closes by discussing the Trump admin's current deals to do third-country deportations to other countries with well documented histories of torturing prisoners. Again, new

HRW student interns talking about how they confirmed. Including an influencer video with the warden talking about the torture. Now interviewing an expert explaining why all of these details mean that the detainees stories are believable and should be trusted. Again, VERY new

Now covering how the HRW report was confirmed. None of this has been reported. Now showing an influencer video of the isolation cell and noting it matches the detainees' description of what they went through. Good confirmation work, again, new material

30 minutes. Some deportees described sexual assault. Detainee describes the guard sexually assaulting most detainees. Lights left on all day. Prisoners not given clean water. Now the DHS tour. Nobody spoke to the detainees. Noem's video was in a different area of the prison.

Detainee is now showing tattoos. Claims when he denied being in a gang, the immigration officer said "but you're venezuelan" TdA doesn't have gang tattoos. Another detainee describes torture. Forced to be on knees for 24 hrs. If you moved, you're put into a small pitch black cell, beaten every

Leavitt saying "these are the worst of the worst" Deputy Director at HRW says the point was to send a message to other migrants, only 8 convicted of any sort of violent offense. ICE's own records said as much. 70 men had pending criminal charges of some sort. The rest had none.

Guards began beating him. Beat him until he bled. Knocked his face into the wall, broke all his teeth. No access to outdoors, no contact with relatives. Now describing US knowledge of CECOT's torture practices, followed by footage of Trump praising those practices.

Spent 6 months in detention waiting on a decision on his asylum application until he was deported to CECOT The detail that they sent out an asylum seeker who presented himself to immigration correctly also seems new. Again, did we know this? Seems like a weird thing for a terrorist to do

Detainee they are interviewing was a college student in Columbia. Waited in Mexico until he had a 2024 immigration interview in CA - a scheduled appointment - where he was told he was a danger to society. Claims he has no criminal record, never even got a traffic ticket. Was immediately detained

Delivery to CECOT. A detainee describes the warden's welcome speech to them: You'll never see the light of day or night again. Welcome to hell. I'll make sure you'll never leave. Thought they were already the living dead.

The report then describes the men getting off the plane, says "the men thought they were going to Venezuela, but then saw hundreds of Salvadoran police waiting for them" - this detail seems to be new. Did we already know that the deportees thought they were going to Venezuela?

Just got the notice that Audrey is ready to come home. If I can figure out how to go tomorrow or Wednesday, then we’ll have her here for Christmas. I miss her so much. Somehow it would mean something to have her back here.

"an unusual strategy that has sparked an ongoing legal battle" That's one way to put it. You'll hear from some of those men, describing torture, sexual and physical abuse at CECOT. Four months of hell.

This has been made available, so for purposes of commenting on Bari Weiss's decision to spike the story, here's a live-post of that segment. It begins with a "you may recall" summary of the deportation to el Salvador. Describes the admin's claim that it could deport the men without due process

They're eating the dogs!

As if there were any doubt as to who was behind canceling the CECOT story. www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/...

Anybody watch Meara & Stiller: Nothing Is Lost? Because it wrecked me.

Current issue of @theonion.com nails it again.

“AI boosters promise that the technology will find greater efficiencies in education; but this is less about the functionalities of AI itself, and far more about eviscerating the public nature of public education.”

“Once, universities saw their computational power exploited by researchers working for the DoD. Today, universities are being infiltrated by a commercial industry that exploits students and faculty as data mines, test subjects, and a perpetual supply depot of future users, all for their own profit.”

I, too, have work to do in 2026. I have the approximate contours of what it is and what it might be. I’ve been spending time doing trivial things that make me feel less a person, fighting with people whose goal it is to frustrate us, being angry at the situation at the top. It has left little time.

Tech companies and university administrators are all telling students that the only way to get or maintain a job is to use AI to bullshit their way through everything. After navigating this new reality for a year or so, I think my primary responsibility is to teach them that they can’t do that.

About this, I suggest we think in terms of inevitable systems failure as described in the paper, 'How Complex Systems Fail' - stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/c...

Peak 2025

It's a whole genre it's beautiful

I find the idea that you need to know “how to use” AI tools really funny, as if it isn’t incredibly easy to type in prompts and the marketing these tools is that literally anyone can do it

Kids, wake up. New Network State just dropped.