“The dragnet now reaches far beyond the crack-era stereotype, ensnaring women across racial and class lines. But the underlying premise remains the same: Alleged risk to a fetus can be used to justify state scrutiny of the person carrying it.”

NEW: They Didn’t Want to Have C-Sections. A Judge Would Decide How They Gave Birth. Two Florida women had to attend virtual court hearings while in labor to argue for their right to choose their own medical care. By @amyyurkanin.bsky.social

On this year’s long covid awareness day, I want more people to read and think about what the late Shafiqah Hudson said before it killed her. Because she was right, as usual, and also early, as usual. Perhaps too early for a lot of people to listen.

“Opportunity”

“What are we pretending not to know today?” —Toni Cade Bambara

Homelessness is a policy choice

The head of the US health care system: “I'm not scared of a germ. I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

The thing is "take it seriously" often means "accept that we're creating Skynet," rather than grappling with real, concrete, well-established concerns around bias, deskilling, unemployment (not the same as "replacement"), and ecology.

75% of my students are future health professionals. Do you really want a physician or nurse or pharm. who has no critical reading/thinking skills, who cannot communicate worth a damn or knows enough to ask questions/problem-solve when something feels off? Would you put your life in the hands of AI?

Facebook plans to put facial recognition in its glasses and they think we’re too stupid to fight back. Their internal memo: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

While this is better than the current CDC process, this is not a good outcome. The AMA can’t match the capacity and impact of the federal government. Measles is already out of control. Playing with fire.

good thread documenting what's going on here but I think it's important to emphasize this is 100% on the judges. If every DoJ attorney headed into federal court knew that this sort of behavior would result in immediate sanctions or recommendations for disbarment from a federal judge, it would end.

even if you think you “have nothing to hide”, you have a lot to lose from these practices. They work just as effectively from their INaccuracy—people would be remiss to think they’re just about sorting risk or about knowledge. they are about producing categories of people, like “enemy of the state."

The false positives + overly-generic categorizations like “domestic terrorism,” already have significant precedent in phenomena like the 9-11 travel bans and “gang member” databases, both of which included babies. Communities of color have long experience with these practices and *warned everyone…*

There is huge risk to our privacy in terms of the data we *did* produce, the use of our faces, tracking, etc. AND we also need to draw on these important insights to understand how the risks include the dangers of *misrecognition* weaponized against people.

Black surveillance scholars including @hypervisible.blacksky.app and @wewatchwatchers.bsky.social have long warned of the dangers of simultaneous hypervisibility AND invisibility, long known to the Black community. Being always seen and watched, but as a “type,” not recognized as a person.

I am trying and failing to find the article from 2 months ago that adds one more terrifying layer: about the successful altering of a facial recognition database such that the photos no longer “read” as someone’s face to a computer, although they look unchanged to a person.

A manager for the Immigrant Defense Network told MPR News that back in November, 2,500 people were trained as constitutional observers. Now, the total is nearly 30,000 trained observers in 77 of Minnesota's 87 counties.

What makes Gavin Newsom such a skilled politician is that he stands up to Trump’s bullying with piping hot memes AND is able to agree with Trump about policy www.sacbee.com

Free Liam, and his father.

Not going to lie, just very much filled with dread on reporting on Medicaid cuts this year :( Needless suffering sucks.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), run by Oz and his boss, RFK Jr., will no longer require physicians to report vaccination rates. Instead, they plan to start having doctors report if they’ve discussed “alternative” vaccine schedules.

Keeping the social safety net as small and as punitive as possible helps to ensure that there will always be a steady stream of people for employers like Bezos to exploit--people in such a precarious position that have no choice but to take whatever underpaid, overworked job they can get.

No. No. No. Punitive processes make narrowly targeted programs *less* efficient and *more* costly. Because more scrutiny requires more bureaucracy. Punitive processes also make it *less* likely that people will get aid for which they qualify. Because of the roadblocks and stigma scrutiny creates.

Zillow property listings no longer show risk of fires, floods, and storms

Fact-checking one of the single most effective convincing-sounding lie generation machines = trying to sweep the ocean back into the sea (or capture emissions after they're released) We don't solve this without regulating, attacking and delegitimising the slop firehose

wait THAT is the concern? “damn the calipers worked so well before people got the ability to alter their face shape!"

How about we shut down the government for this very popular and specific goal and then, hear me out, we hold out for like a month and a half and then, ok this part is important, after a watershed election where we ran the table, ONLY THEN, fold and don't get the one thing we said we wanted.

DOGE and others in the administration want to build a giant database of records by haphazardly combining info the government collected for one purpose, like paying taxes, and use it for another purpose, like targeting immigrants. We can't let this happen. takebackctrl.org/get-a-warrant

The biggest challenge is convincing people that things could be different and that their actions matter.

Letitia James criminally charged in Trump’s latest effort to punish rivals

Just published in @amjpublichealth.bsky.social: a collective analysis of the power ecosystem that jeopardizes public health and produces inequity, titled “Why Building Power is Key to Protecting Academic Public Health and Advancing Health Equity”

Cops used 83,000 cameras to track a single abortion patient — on her abuser’s tip.

🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿

“My biggest fear is going to the hospital." Pregnant immigrants are terrified ICE will show up outside the doctors' office or at the hospital. So they're skipping the care necessary to ensure a healthy birth. Some experience dangerous complications as a result. 19thnews.org/2025/10/preg...

🚨🚨 Both the police and Flock's defense for why Texas police searched the entire country for License Plate Reader data to find woman who had self-administered an abortion was because she was a missing person and family was concerned with her health. Now documents reveal they wanted to charge her.

The FAA is delaying flights at Newark and Denver airports because they haven’t got enough air traffic control. Burbank has zero ATC from 4.30-10pm. Lots of controllers who aren’t being paid during the government shutdown are calling in sick.

Three weeks after a leading scientist at the National Institutes of Health filed a whistle-blower complaint against the Trump administration, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy fired her. @nytimes.com

North Carolina and Idaho have cut their Medicaid programs to bridge budget gaps, raising fears that providers will stop taking patients and that hospitals will close even before the brunt of a new federal tax-and-budget law takes effect.

“Researchers have already reported that these so-called silicon samples produce humanlike responses in some surveys and experiments—and some even hope they could simulate the responses of minorities or other groups who are often underrepresented in studies.”

Ring founder: “I’m focused on: How can I get the highest density of camera coverage in a neighborhood matched with AI to make neighborhoods safer?…It’s not just hard crime.” Just put this guy and the Flock guy on a deserted island together so they can surveill each other until the end times.

How is AI changing the nature of scams? @lanalanalana.bsky.social & @alicetiara.bsky.social spoke to @alixdunn.com on @themaybe.org to explain how AI automates & scales the work already being done in massive, exploitative “cybercrime compounds” around the world. www.themaybe.org/podcast/gotc...

saw this at heathrow airport. i can't see it appealing to anyone but fraudsters and scammers

Ridiculously, Medicare Telehealth coverage keeps are getting tied to continuing resolutions. Bills could be passed separately. But political bureaucracy. This means Medicare Telehealth waivers are kaput as of today. My latest for @motherjones.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Flock is preparing to roll out a new feature: Its gunshot detection devices will begin listening for voices in “distress”

Join us on Thursday, OCTOBER 16th at 4:00 - 5:30 PM ET over Zoom for a conversation about How to Survive Techno-Hellscapes 🔥💻🌐 This panel will feature four phenomenal disability culture workers, activists, writers, and scholars in conversation with DISCO's own @remiyergeau.bsky.social

This is spot on. Our capitulation to the ‘inevitability’ of AI couldn’t come at a worse time.