What TPUSA has stood for from the start.

This is already irrelevant given that the Judge already dismissed the case, you could have filed this weeks ago, not the day the settlement was announced, but can't let a PR campaign go to waste!

global balkanization

Trump going to China, kissing up to Xi, asking for help with Iran, and not getting it is another sign of America's decline. But that doesn't mean China is about to take over. What's replacing US global leadership is... Nothing. Which is very dangerous. Read my latest, in @liberalcurrents.com:

I am trying to decide how to put “the only trans person endorsed by KiwiFarms (positive)” on my LinkedIn (derogatory) or CV.

this is an actual thing fwiw. you shouldn’t cut down forests to do this but if you have shitty scrubland that you can nonetheless coax into growing bamboo this is not an unreasonable way to capture carbon

if you cultivate bamboo on land that is otherwise not growing much and then burn that bamboo into charcoal which you sequester, that’s net carbon negative

Don't forget a non-trivial number of them are also pedos and/or coprophiliacs who get a thrill at becoming "bathroom stalkers for good" bsky.app/profile/that...

Dementia Ceausescu at it again

He has lost the ability to retrieve the words he wants to use. Listen to him. It is now a constant struggle for him.

Fox News cuts away from Trump taking questions from reporters as he rants and raves unendingly about the "reflecting lake"

NEW: Sen Michael Bennet (D) says he will not appoint Gov Jared Polis to the Senate if Bennet is elected Governor. Bennet calls Polis' clemency for Tina Peters "disqualifying"

This is massively inaccurate, as any graduate of a land grant or state flagship will tell you. A part of why our graduation rates are lower is higher overall attendance. And, as a quick glance at the MIC will show you, there's a heck of a lot of Americans (foreign born or no) in STEM.

Exactly! I've long realized that the people who say we need more humanities over STEM are the ones who desperately need some kind of rigorously scientific education in their life

The issue is less starving K-12 budgets and more a mix of cost disease and extremely toxic and dysfunctional politics around the subject. The reason it's a mess is that there are major bad faith incentives for every side involved and compromises usually involve giving desired bad shit to all sides.

Looking at the conspiracy laden discourse I really can't get on board with the idea that knowing basic physics, chemistry, and math aren't every bit as necessary for self government as civics

Honestly, given the state of most K-12 math pedagogy, I think AI instruction would probably be an improvement for most of the kids who aren't lucky enough to have a good teacher. Khan Academy would have changed my life when I was in high school. It will probably get much, much better.

Two things: 1. Like NHJ, Asher comes off as something of a crank when I actually look at her publicly available work. 2. It's very telling that the UNC trustees seem to only apply this scrutiny to left-wing non-White women. I have little doubt a token conservative crank would have sailed through.

I don't you can really separate the two of these in K-12--not well, at least. You can't have an aware citizenry without substantial STEM (and humanities) skills. And the practical skills ppl need for their adult life are essential to public participation.

trump has a lot of ways down to go, which will generate a lot of disillusionment, and him no longer being on the ballot will challenge their short attention spans

i don’t expect some moral redemption arc. i just want them to stop voting period because its obvious they have no ability to engage in democratic self governance

Bill Clinton used to have to walk across the street to use a private telephone to make fundraising calls so as not to violate the Hatch Act by using public resources for partisan purposes. Trump makes campaign commercials from behind the Resolute desk.

I say this as someone who has a publication (if you can call it that lol). Having a controversy like “drones are overrated and Defense VC’s are scammers” gets 5X the views/clicks than an article titled “AirPower against mobile targets” with a bunch of stats and terminology lol

I would very much enjoy an insiders account about how these editorial decisions are made at an institution like the NYT but I suspect the central motivation is the incentive that has been driving news the entirety of the Trump era…clicks

Including the “um’s” with AOC would guarantee a news cycle Including it with Trump would be a Tuesday The end

And yeah, maybe tomorrow OpenAI will release SpartaSucksAndCadornaToo-Bot and put me out of a job, but in the meantime, I think it is an interesting statement on what professions the tech overlords *think* are difficult and valuable, given the mismatch between their expectations and reality.

So it has been nine months or so since Microsoft dropped this study on professions vulnerable to AI and it remains deeply funny to me that LLMs have not replaced historians or writers or concierges or journalists or editors. But they are automating software development!

Trump defense attorney Stan Woodward signed the "settlement" on the Trump tax case. A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER of people who will file for the slush fund were his clients (most notably terrorist seditionist Kelly Meggs, but also Kash Patel). So much for recusal. www.documentcloud.org/documents/28...

bsky.app/profile/chec... that still requires looking past who/what Trump is

i know several of these kinds of people, and even to this day they’re still spinning justifications and looking away a little uneasily when i bring up anything from the news

they can justify it with the “no one will let him wreck everything” fallacy but the issue *is* the looking past what Trump is in the first place

snd this sort of voter is “i took a gamble on a guy i know is bad because it served my personal financial self-interest”

even if you counter this by pointing out 2024 being about inflation, it still requires some kind of voter that chooses to back Trump knowing that he did at least one thing in his public and/or personal life other presidents would have been destroyed over

A “fun” thing about the 1776 number is it makes it more clear how much the settlement agreement is corrupt. Todd Blanche signed his name to an official government document claiming this figure was “based on the projected valuation of future claimants’ claims,” which is clearly, obviously, a lie.

NIXON: That Grogu is a real shifty [expletive], but goddamnit does he get results. EHRLICHMAN: Scared the hell out of the Cambodians, too. NIXON: That’s what we needed over there. Someone with some [expletive] guts. HALDEMAN: [inaudible] NIXON: He’s one of the good ones, Bob.

Wait, did they not do the basic homework for even a fig leaf of legitimacy here? Doesn't this mean it'll be legally easy to claw back the money? (or rather, to sue in court to claw it back--the process of collecting would presumably be quite involved)

Unusual order in the Trump v. IRS case by Judge Williams. While dismissing the case (she has no choice), she explicitly notes: 1. The is still a question whether controversy existed. 2. There is no settlement of record. 3. The lawyers for the government still have ethical obligations in the case.

DEVELOPING: Elected officials, candidates, and local party leaders have signed a complaint to the Colorado Democratic Party re: Gov. Polis' commutation of Tina Peters. They call it "conduct detrimental to the interests of the Party." They want Polis censured & temporarily shunned from party events.

The students who are graduating have made your institution the center of their lives for four years or more—some of the most crucial, formative, extraordinary years of their lives. There should be a human being whose job it is to make sure that each one of their names get pronounced correctly.

As I told a reporter last week, nearly all convocation brouhahas boil down to a single issue: Students, even normie non-radical students, rightly understand graduation as a day that is for them, and about them, and which belongs to them. You fuck with that at your peril.

As a regular curmudgeon who views a university as being a college of faculty rather than a service provider for students... They are right to view graduation as a day for them, which belongs to them. It is their rite of passage. It does not belong to invited speakers or university leadership.

We're deeply saddened by the shooting at a mosque in San Diego, and our thoughts are with the San Diego Muslim community and all impacted by this tragedy. Attacks on our fellow Americans at places of worship are unacceptable.

The guy who murdered Americans in the streets and terrorized American cities doesn't get to lecture us about "dissolving national cohesion."

McElroy should enjoin DOJ from filing any motions in O'Connor's kangaroo court, if that's the game he wants to play.

The Chinese guy tries to undercut the gravel supplier by going to his source and his translator is like "so anyway this guy's trying to undercut you because he thinks you're stupid, what should I tell him?"

I watched Empire of Dust (2011), that movie right wingers thinks shows the Chinese as supermen and Congolese as lazy and it's a real example of seeing what you bring with you because it actually shows the Chinese as dickheads that the Congolese find obnoxious.

The most healthy President in history, no doubt.

You technically have to be alive to be president, right?

Cuban failed the test even before Trump started talking about his private traitor fund. You don't stand with this guy, nor do you attend an event with the "measles are good, actually" guy.