i don't think that'll make the result any more precise, but sure

Well, it *is* an impressive resume.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has signed a decree establishing Universal Healthcare for all Mexican citizens. The United States could’ve had this, but people chose economic collapse, cruelty and death instead. I’ll never regret voting for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

MOSCOW, Idaho (FāVS News) — During a town hall at an Idaho University, Wilson and his fellow pastors pitched a vision of America with no LGBTQ+ rights, no divorce and no voting rights for married women. Wilson has gained notoriety for his Christian nationalist views and his ties to Pete Hegseth.

I missed this from @phineas.bsky.social when it originally came out but it sure feels relevant at the moment. Also, you can buy this as a print from the artist here: www.inprnt.com/gallery/phin...

ICE is very like the slave-catcher patrols of the 1850s. So perhaps the best analogy is not sardines, but the layout of a slave ship? encyclopediavirginia.org/4303hpr-7e68...

Study that reportedly found reduction in ER visits and hospitalizations being reviewed by Jay Bhattacharya

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." –Justice Louis Brandeis

@catvalente.bsky.social @anthonymoser.com There are quantitative statistical models of this "indifference to the truth". One can quantify the degree to which texts do this, and the LLM-generated texts stand out in a statistically significant way: www.someweekendreading.blog/llms-make-yo...

The singular goal of all future US politics is to ensure Trumpism is defeated and cannot again take root here, and everything that serves that end is to be considered and prioritized. It's a holistic organizing principle, from a Green New Deal to Nuremberg 2 to expanding the court to Reconstruction.

All of Us Should Be Able To Agree With This…..

A friend described doing an exercise w/ a group of students from around the world, asking them to write down the best & worst thing about a bunch of different countries. Answers varied a lot for all countries except for one: every single person said the best thing about the USA is NASA.

I was just talking to a friend today about Dolly Parton's Imagination Library - new books every month, totally for free, for kids ages 1-5. My son was part of the program - this is a copy of the letter that came with his last book, right after his 5th birthday.

NEW: Fifteen laws in 11 states that could immunize the fossil fuel industry from climate-related legal claims have either been passed or are being debated. Many bills are part of a coordinated effort by groups linked to right-wing activist Leonard Leo.

The richest 0.1 percent of the global population are hiding nearly $3 trillion in offshore accounts to evade taxes — more than the wealth held by the entire bottom half of humanity. It would take about $93 billion per year to eradicate extreme hunger by 2030. Taxing the rich is a global necessity.

Today's blog post: DOOM can now be served and installed via DNS records, never touching a disk. Opinion among security experts seems divided between "OMG!" and "Yeah, that's been known for 40 years." www.someweekendreading.blog/doom-dns/

So, thing that is apparently better understood inside academia than outside of it: International students pay sticker price. Most domestic students do not. International students are subsidizing the education costs for domestic students, as per student governmental funding drops.

One thing ICE keeps proving over and over again is how there must not be any undocumented immigrants who pose any threat whatsoever. Obviously if there were any such people, ICE would be going after them, not this college student who has been here since she was a toddler and has no criminal record.

Always gotta tap the sign

So when astronauts aboard Artemis take pictures with their phones, what does the EXIF information in the image say about their location?

The biggest story in the world right now is that the president of the United States is a demented old man who takes pleasure in torturing and killing people and is committing crimes with impunity. And yet most legacy media outlets are too cowardly to tell it like it is.

And people wonder why I say the NYT has taken a hard right turn.

Nothing especially amusing? But... "argument by projection", i.e., projecting one's own flaws onto an opponent, could be: Argumentum ad iectivum ... which could be misunderstood as "argument by adjective". Thus the name of a fallacy which provokes another fallacy. Sort of a chain reaction?

This is the key question. All potential responses flow from the answer or answers to it.

This is very very big. Like a big deal and massive cuts. These can’t even be seen as budgetary since you don’t get much savings in the context of trillions budget. They want the US out of R&D out of science research.

ICE refuses to provide life-saving dialysis to a detainee unless he signs deportation papers.

Great essay by @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social "the very resistance by the political right to marriage equality as an equal right is because it demonstrates that marriage can be a freely negotiated relationship between equals, which threatens the patriarchial order." www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

800,000 people who died because of the lack of lifesaving food and medical aid were unavailable for comment.

Brilliant. Which brings up another interesting juxtaposition. If the 2nd means guns can't be banned then the 1st means that books can't be banned.

Well, well… If the 14th amendment was not meant for modern immigrants, then the 2nd amendment was not meant for modern arms. #truth

It's impolite to call Musk a genocidal white nationalist because "civility" in American discourse functions not as a neutral procedural norm but as an asymmetric weapon to shield the powerful from accurate moral characterization while policing the tone of those who object.

This week's comic on the authoritarian takeover of US media

'An MIT Media Lab study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT” found that LLM users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” The tech oligarchs have somehow managed to enshittify thinking.'

Terrific analysis by Steven Poole in the Guardian, teaching me a new word: dysphemism, which is the opposite of euphemism. It’s a way to make something sound “maximally horrible.” Poole examines the “chest-beating fiesta of blood and guts” in Trump and Hegseth’s language about the war against Iran.

you, a naive fool: i do believe there are some things the nytimes won’t both sides the nytimes:

Today's blog post: Russian casualties in Ukraine break 1.3 million. Our segmented regression model continues to indicate Ukraine became ~70% more efficient at killing Russian soldiers on our about 2024-Feb-22. www.someweekendreading.blog/ukraine-1300k/

Having a PhD doesn’t mean you’re always right, but it does mean that you unlock new and more powerful ways to be wrong.

i'm sorry but the moon is a complete boondoggle that should never have been put up there in the first place. we still have to send repair missions up there a hundred-plus years later all because taft was trailing in the polls and decided to learn magick. i don't know why he thought it would help him

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

I showed this graph in class yesterday on how measles cases in the United States plummeted dramatically after the vaccine was licensed in 1963. It’s not subtle and I could not resist observing: “This stunning design in measles cases was not thanks to vitamin A. It was not due to beef tallow.”

I started covering this last year, and I can't overstate how important this is: the Trump administration officially labeled some of the most commonly-used forms of birth control as 'abortion' jessica.substack.com/i/173447780/...

They keep stealing shit from the people they detain. Remember how they took that kid’s cell phone and sold it for cash? Just straight up lawless gangsters

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.

Keep Ancient Rome Weird.

America did not meet the universal adult suffrage criteria of democratic governance until 1965. Gatorade is the exact same age as American democracy.

@slacktivistfred.bsky.social Took me a minute or two to realize that your blog post about "sliding into our DMs" actually meant our דֹם's. :-)

Today's blog post: a protest song. And history has eyes, history has ears History finds secrets that are buried for years Exploded, explained, exposed and explicit History will judge us either stupid or complicit And we know we are not stupid Ask questions www.someweekendreading.blog/no-kings-ii/

A Jack Hardy song, "Ask Questions", on holding leaders accountable, suitable for No Kings: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX7s...

First, Trump boots critical outlets from the WH press pool, Hegseth drives reporters out of the Pentagon, and Trump's FCC Chair menaces networks. Now they launch a state‑run app for "no‑filter" news. This is them replacing a free press with a propaganda feed.

THIS THIS THISITY THIS THIS I've been seeing more fake stuff getting passed around lately. Take a sec to check the actual source!