fire on the prairie (ie, my backyard)

bears repeating: war is ecocide

While we’re banishing AI from colleges and universities can we also just get rid of bullet points once and for all?

Six years ago today, John Prine died and my Sam not long after. So then I wrote this. avidly.org/2020/04/18/l...

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

No matter how you feel about assault rifles, their use is widespread so it’s important we all understand how we can integrate them as tools into our lives.

This is a truly terrible and self-destructive position. Jfc.

First arrangement of the season, not much to work with but enough.

appreciate the straightforwardness of this

hey I'm looking for a technology, maybe like an app or something, that is useful for generating bad summaries of things I don't really need summarized. Any recommendations?

I feel like somebody at The Atlantic should totally write an article about how horrible things unleashed by the right wing are actually the fault of the left. That would be super spicy.

This novel is great, even better than I'd hoped it would be, viscous like oil. Also lots of echoes of Moby-Dick.

#LandBack now!!!

If we want to protect our #GreatLakes for future generations, we need to #ShutDownLine5 and the proposed tunnel scheme before it's too late. www.interlochenpublicradio.org/ipr-news/202...

hard yes to this

Does it work properly? No. Are the people making it acting in good faith? No. Have they ensured it can't be used maliciously? No. Does it make people's lives better? No. Will it make people's lives better? No. Is it profitable? No. Is it popular? No. Is it harmless? No. The argument for AI.

Ch. 87, "The Grand Armada"

In case you happen to be in Ann Arbor tomorrow, i’ll be banging the same old drum. events.umich.edu/event/145084

my hot take is that if we treat cheating as the major problem with AI in higher education, we've already lost.

Hey, anybody wanna come be our Dean? I’d prefer not to have a shitty one. And Michigan is a pretty cool place. www.academicsearch.org/open-searche...

View of a top-ten container port on earth by volume, built with domestic oil revenues, seen from an airplane fueled with foreign oil imported into LA via tankers (this is after takeoff from LAX)

Don’t Mix, etc etc

this is excellent

Another (typically) excellent piece from Monbiot: "Reduce our dependency on oil, and we disrupt some of the world’s most violent and exploitative relations," And not just because I visited this history and said much the same thing a couple of days ago: thecurrentowdm.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-...

great. just great heatmap.news/energy/strai...

Oil prices are skyrocketing due to the Iran war halting tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. It's a good reminder about the violence inherent in fossil fuel production - and how the myth of Line 5 staying open for another century is built on B.S. thecurrentowdm.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-...

A thoughtful narrative on energy security, energy independence, war and our current state. Lotsa historical context.

"The current war in Iran offers yet another in a long line of reminders that there can be no security and no independence under the petro-energy regime." thecurrentowdm.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-...

"Bryan Paul is curricular fellow for the College Debates & Discourse Alliance at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni." FTG

Nice to see colleagues in college writing recognizing that gen AI in the classroom is neither inevitable nor necessarily beneficial--as the research increasingly shows, quite the reverse! www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Among the greatest joys of my entire teaching career was witnessing the incandescent talent and brilliance of Rachel Banner and Molly Brodak in the same class. Can you just imagine? Lucky for you is that you can read Rachel's marvelous essay on why you should read Molly's poetry.

This is what ecocide looks like.

Murphy has been waiting for me to come home from my trip ever since I left on Wednesday

Had a great time this week talking infrastructures of abolition at Franklin & Marshall, which looks like a college should look. Also, a cool coffee joint and paying-of-respect to the under-appreciated badass Thaddeus Stevens.

Hey, if you're feeling like life has passed you by and you're too old to start something new, remember that John Brown was 55 before he killed his first pro-slavery settler in the Kansas Territory. It's never too late to follow your dreams.

In case you’re going to be in Lancaster, PA tomorrow, me and @jessagoldberg.bsky.social are gonna be there talking about stuff.

A joyful thing I get to do is help some hs speech/debate students prepare for competition because I have friends who coach the team. They are fabulous kids and today the young man was just casually talking about colonialism and Marx, as if that’s just what one does. Made my day, maybe month.

The reason you go to school is so you don't say shit this stupid.

sometimes the founder of a company says something that simply stops you in your tracks and haunts you. There's one those in here from the creator of Einstein, an edtech AI that will go to school for you

Shoutout to Rashida Tlaib wearing a Fuck ICE button on national tv.

Students know what’s up with AI. Just sayin’.

I really like the AI summary feature in gmail because it tells me what the email says in roughly the same number of the same words as the email itself.

tomorrow's lecture

“once the whitefish are gone from waters that can’t sustain them, they won’t be coming back.”

There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where all the money goes.

Man, we burned through a lot of Frederick Wiseman films on VHS and DVD 20-25 years ago, in the pre-binge era. RIP to a great one.

The only thing more dangerous than a leaky pipeline is a safely operating one. thecurrentowdm.substack.com/p/its-the-cl...

Made some falafel

I read that astonishingly stupid slavery article today and what's most hilarious to me is how it's completely lost on that guy that what makes the story of abolition "inspiring" is that it was led by people who had no patience for the kind of cowardly, insipid centrism he loves to peddle.

Glad to see this, but I also just want to say once more, like a broken record, that I feel like most debates about AI are just ways avoiding the issue of energy consumption. I mean, this piece appears on the same day the Trump administration made climate change denialism official US govmnt policy.