the Ypsi data center is just one node in the new nuclear arms race. We're trying to build new nuclear cores, developing new and different kinds of weapons. Township attorney Winters put it best:

Ypsilanti Township's board of trustees voted to put a moratorium on water for data centers. Los Alamos and UoM are set to break ground on an AI/ nuclear weapons data center on Monday

Well, they've finally struck home. #ICE has detained my former #umich student, Yousif Azizi, a PhD student in public policy at Virginia Tech w/a valid visa. He was arrested while taking his children to school in Maryland. After multiple transfers, he is in a detention center in Arizona.

you can't spell TTRPG without TTG (trans tech girl)

"I don't think math is real and that's why I am applying opinion diversity hire position in the mathematics department at Stanford University."

nothing says "this is faculty governance in name only" like "lunch will not be provided" not to be petty but if I am asked to go to a multi-hour meeting during which I will generate suggestions that will result in the firing of my colleagues, I should at least be fed

Understanding the cultural & economic impact of the humanities is more important than ever. After building a federal data service for the state, impact, & health of the humanities, Hannah is one of *the* experts on the topic. The US no longer funds the work, but if you can, hire Hannah immediately.

Hello Mr. Heidecker can I interest you in a baseball podcast

Forthcoming. Timely. www.dukeupress.edu/naturalization

now the semester is almost over, I have a bit of time to dwell with the beautiful, compelling books accumulating on my desk. the next object of my admiration: Internet Phone Book / a directory for exploring the vast poetic web...almost like the hidden #othernetworks in the web itself

next up is this incredible small, black book by Mindy Seu the size of a smartphone that turns Instagram Stories (which evolved into a live lecture-performance) into a performance script. it is a deeply moving, feminist account of the early Web that includes some painfully pointed moments 1/2

On the same day that the US’s lowest fertility rate in history was announced, I found out that my employer’s fertility insurance benefits are considered taxable income. So if insurance pays $20K for your IVF, you have to pay taxes on that $20K. The ruling class hates us all so much.

Exciting to wake up to news of increased funding for war on my family and neighbors.

Yesterday MPHA & affiliated nonprofit Community Housing Resources filed a combined 48 evictions. These alone represent 85% of Hennepin County filings & 57% of all statewide filings on 4/14/26. Average of alleged overdue rent amounts: $628. 81% of the cases allege less than $1,000 in overdue rent.

The City of Minneapolis, evicting 48 of the poorest families in its care, for a total of $30,144.

Stuart Hall hitting hard these days

Reading: The Inattention Economy: Hiw Women of Color Built the Internet By Lisa Nakamura

May Day/International Workers' Day is next Friday, May 1st, and Minnesotans are going to be taking action all day to stand up for workers & immigrants. Pickets, trainings, marches and parties Find details & latest info at IceOutNowMN.com See you in the streets!

the way this makes sense for RFK is that "healthy people" and "sick people" are ontological categories.

Tech bros: we're disrupting market incumbents and government inefficiencies with innovation and world leading user experience Also tech bros: Give us more public dollars

If techbros didn’t want to be relentlessly mocked maybe, just maybe, they shouldn’t be such gigantic planet sized losers

Does anybody have any deeper information about the relationship between Instructure and OpenAI? They have a "global partnership" to embed ChatGPT in Canvas; do we know about whether content from Canvas is being used as training data for OpenAI? If so, which content?

a cool thing about spending all your time listening to Origins of Totalitarianism (a deeply flawed book of course) while driving to daycare is that it becomes v obvious that this is, uh, definitionally fascism

huh maybe we’re actually underproducing English majors given that the major grift / industry in this country is “genre pastiche” and someone should probably have the chops to understand that Oh well time to cut the humanities again

There’s some striking similarities between Führerprinzip and unitary executive theory in that they are the same

A good day to thank @locallhuman.bsky.social and their Minneapolis Public Seating Authority project. Civic art and function. minneapolis.zone

hey when we nationalize industries is that socialism or nah

I really wish it weren't so easy to become an education administrator, influencer, thought leader, think tanker, entrepreneur, disruptor, or policymaker without spending any time as an educator. Seems like a flaw in the system.

As both the former chief mathematician of the Senate Budget Committee and more importantly as a proud graduate of elementary school, this is,,,, not how it works

re: AI, freedom

fuck sam altman forever for taking away the last places where we could engage in good faith: the creative arts, which should be a testament to human ingenuity. i am so mad that everything i read or listen to or admire is now tainted with doubt. do you understand? he is a thief of joy and i HATE HIM

So much false equivalence in media on gerrymandering in Texas vs California & Virginia. California and Virginia maps approved by the voters. That's a huge difference not enough people pointing out

wireless carriers are likely to be let off the hook for years of spying on your daily sensitive movement data, then selling it to any nitwit with two nickels to rub together

We have a visible human misery problem - homelessness and addiction. It's hurting Uptown and places all over. People and businesses are right to expect their government to fix it. But portraying this as a violent crime wave (it hasn't just been Shaffer) isn't accurate.

Council Member Shaffer using "Uptown is like Gotham City" rhetoric. Did you know that robbery in the four neighborhoods bordering the Hennepin/Lake intersection, year to date, is below 2019 levels?

Imagine being buried with what people will assume is your *favourite* passage of the Iliad, and it's the Catalogue of bloody Ships... Still, this is undeniably cool, even if it isn't Book 6 or 24

Fascists cant be shamed. They arent committed to rules & institutions. When they overturn them there is no cognitive dissonance. A political strategy aimed at calling them out wont stop them, because the problem is not that they're inconsistent.

it is very funny how these people are so accustomed to essentially bullying democratic politicians that they meltdown when met with appropriate pushback. in any case, the process to amend the virginia constitution has multiple stages where, at any point, an amendment can be defeated.

"I've found that a lot of AI is kind of slide-showy" My 14 year old nails it.

yiiiikes

The next administration must make clear that any immigrant, refugee, or asylum seeker wrongly deported, exiled, or otherwise mistreated by this administration will be readmitted with an expedited path to citizenship. Send a plane to get them. We can't undo the damage. But we can do something.

Susan Collins votes yes to proceed to the budget resolution, the first step in the process of giving ICE and CBP another $70 billion of funding.

"[by the 1970s] in some quarters the West itself was imagined as a source of oppression rather than liberation" oh man that's crazy. did something happen? that led draft-age men to think of the US as a liberator in 1945 and an oppressor in 1975?

Every program review ever. "Show us why you should exist you weirdo-- oh no, not that data, this data, oops it's bad data, god you're a nuisance, this *is* due process, we love Zoom and drilling down and the 30k foot view and...out you go..."

“Your budget is being illegally slashed with zero oversight, here’s why it’s your fault actually” articles are going wild these last few years

But I was told it was Obama that would conduct the Death Panels

Eugenics

And by that same token, education in the US as it stands today is also by no means a guarantee of being politically astute. I've seen PhDs and folks with all kinds of graduate degrees fall for easily debunked propaganda because it was in the New York Times.

These purportedly spend their time reading all the greatest works of literature, but somehow have just like five talking points.

Which is to say, like Tate, so many of these people have more or less a Liberty Kids level understanding of the intellectuals or the history they cite. If they hear about the real people in these real situations being messy and engaging with their world like normal people it breaks them. (2/2)