just feeling more and more like it’s journalistic malpractice not to lead with the fact that the instructor in question is trans

If you're donating to a GFM for the unjustly fired Oklahoma TA, no you're not because there isn't one. Report these unless and until Brittany announces one!

Not on Twitter any more, but let me be very clear. If you ever edit any of my art with AI I will not just haunt you. I will appear as a phantom behind who anyone who mentions you and gently hum the baby shark song until that’s all anyone can think of when they think of you

So I hear. Tomorrow’s fine journalism will inform us of the pope standing in front of a group of people and saying “take and eat of this for this is my body” while holding up a cracker.

— in your phone for Epiphany (Jan 6) to call and get signed up to volunteer, go through the training, get vetted, make a commitment, and stick to it. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. Or just set up a regular, recurring payment. That’s 1000% useful.

And to be clear: the action one does if one is feeling guilty tonight or tomorrow is give cash to organizations feeding the hungry and sheltering the houseless. It is not to show up at a shelter and ask to serve food. You gotta get vetted to volunteer, so you start with cash, put a reminder —

And any student who thinks their instructor might be trans will realize they have a free license to get them fired for any reason or none at all.

“Something like the plate tracker helps to encourage and promote legal transparency and legal accountability, especially when they're going around, switching plates, trying to hide, trying to be undetectable,” said Sherman Austin. Full story: lataco.com/ice-license-... By Aisha Wallace-Palomares

Some reflections on “is Christmas secular” from an atheist UU perspective. (It’s not. It can be traditionally, doctrinally Christian or it can be culturally, ambiently post-Christian; but it’s not going to be *unrelated* to Christianity.)

James Merril’s poem “Christmas Tree,” written while he was dying of AIDS. 1995.

Instead it's a hard question, you can't tell if the Dems have any official position on whether it is good that their tent is so big it includes people who don't think married women should be able to vote. Like with supporting genocide, this is a problem for a party who claims opposition to fascism.

“No amount of money keeps you from being the punchline” is the core of a lot of these people’s grievances I fear

"The other states bringing the lawsuit are Oregon, Washington, New York, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia."

Friendly neighborhood biologist here again. I’ve been seeing lots of post on how simple biological sex is. Since sex in society is such a hot-button issue these days, we should be able to find the basis of biological sex in law, right? Let’s do it! Let’s find the basis of sex, round 2! 🧵

It's unlikely Kavanaugh has a conscience, but he may not like the ridicule or the public shaming. Shame can work!

there is often a relevant @smbccomics.bsky.social

I am trying to put on my surprised face. "On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up. Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend."

simultaneously settling the cause-of-death question with an obvious suicide note, and openly accusing the president of sharing his crimes. damn

Three short whistles if you see ICE in your area; three long whistles if you see ICE kidnapping someone. 3D printed whistles can be found for free at just about any local/independent business in the twin cities. (We more flyers in Somali, and Dakotiyapi/Anishinaabemowin)

Why are we still allowing scammers to ruin people’s lives? This is a solvable problem. www.currentaffairs.org/news/if-demo...

literally fuck anyone who doesn’t see at this point that it’s an organized nationwide effort to make trans people unemployable. every trans person they push out of public life is a win for them & a whole hell of a lot of cis people need to start stepping up and saying fuck off to freaks like this.

My favorite historical costume designer is Sandy Powell, and she has an amazing trick that it took me years to realize: Be conservative with color and lean into modern shapes with your hero, and put your villain in the most outrageously period-specific costume you can.

certainly there appear to be ways to improve LLM accuracy, but techniques and products that purport do this do not seem to be getting effectively communicated or sold - and most existing sales techniques seem designed to actively anger and frighten the knowledge worker set.

Algerian lawmakers consider a law that would criminalise France’s colonization of their country. 130 years of French colonial rule in Algeria were marked by torture, enforced disappearances, massacres, economic exploitation & marginalization of Muslims. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...

60 Minutes is one of only two documentary-style public affairs programs left on the air. The other is Frontline on PBS, which saw its funding gashed by the Trump admin and Congress. They have a matching donation rn. www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontli...

woof, yeah, this looks brutal. contrary to some takes, I in fact do not think this would have just disappeared into the ether, holidays and all. I think it might've been a slow burn but it'd get shared around. This is nasty nasty shit and it's the fetid heart of this POS administration.

Bari Weiss is the logical endpoint of corporate media. This is what happens when people who hate journalism are in charge of it. The only way journalism works is when it’s independent from the power it’s supposed to hold to account, which means ownership can’t have anything to do with those in power

So Bari Weiss’s first real editorial intervention at CBS is to repress coverage of American concentration camps.

The entire point of writing any scholarly work is to say something that hasn’t been said before, something meaningfully (not just statistically) different, that contributes to a new understanding in the field. LLMs are very good at finding what’s in the literature, not what’s NOT there.

maybe I’m being too optimistic given, well, everything but I just don’t think this guy running an explicit white nationalist campaign is going to have anywhere near the juice his boss does he is a repellent man with a repellent message and people are tired of it all

I feel like a chunk of gAI usage stems from a fear of embarrassment. People don't write up or sketch out an idea because it won't "look good". They want to save themselves from the vulnerability of presenting something they aren't skilled in. I think it's important to do scary things.

Oh

I’m embarrassed for these people. I was at a writing retreat this summer that suggested we use genai for ideation. They told academics to use a plagiarism machine for ideas. If you are doing this, do us all a favor and leave the field. If you have no more ideas, you shouldn’t be an academic.

doesn't everybody have a word document or something with like 10 half baked article ideas that you'll probably never get around to?

Call me old fashioned, but can't folks just stop citing papers they have not personally read?

context is hilarious

This is a surgical dismantling of yet another dumb Matt Yglesias argument by a former clean energy exec and current Representative. This is the sort of thing that should make people stop listening to people like Yglesias. Read the whole thing.

oh man I felt this post

The Republicans who voted against making gender-affirming care a crime and the Dems who voted for it www.advocate.com/pol... #transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA

what should you do? call your senators. what if they're GOP? call. some house GOP voted against both. what should you say? try one of these scripts. make it your own! they're less than a minute with built-in bail outs. yes, you should threaten your vote. who's your senator? tap here: reps.fyi 🧵

a sequel: cis people on the skyline are genuinely more distressed by the trump-kennedy center than the fact that congress said a second time in 2 days, “no, really this kind of child’s healthcare should be banned & criminalized” & 46/47 non-GOP senators won’t commit to “i will oppose this.”

If you're not trans, I don't think I can fully explain how important this is. It's so powerful that one of the most circulated science media publications in the world has come out and said "trans children are real and providing transition care improves their lives." That's groundbreaking.

Alright so it sure looks like the White House Deputy Press Secretary just tweeted out a photo of Bill Clinton with kids and acted like it was part of the Epstein files when in reality the children whose faces they redacted were not victims and Epstein wasn't involved. Where's my breaking news story?

There’s also the fact it’s explicitly illegal for them to do it for that reason.

Another very good example of what conservative outreach at colleges actually looks like, @ezraklein.bsky.social.

First they redacted it to remove identifying info on the victims, sure, fine, makes sense. But then they redacted it to also remove...identifying information on the perpetrators. Very useful documents you've released there, thanks a lot!

On the 6th day of fossils, my true love gave to me... 6 Dimerocrinites crinoids. This is a plate of early Silurian crinoids from Quebec in a tangled mess. With all the additional stems, you can imagine a "forest" of these crinoids on the seafloor. 1/x #12DaysofFossils #FossilFriday