Apparently God’s legislative priorities include tax cuts for billionaires and taking health care and food assistance away from millions of Americans.

Right Wing Watch @rightwingwatch.bsky.social · yesterday

House Speaker Mike Johnson credits prayer for the passage of Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill": "It was impossible. There was no way to reconcile everybody and get it all together and we came in here and prayed for a breakthrough and God delivered it."

I become more bewildered with each passing week that an authoritarian cult has somehow grown up around, and largely remains loyal to, this sad, sad man.

Adam Kinzinger@adamkinzinger.substack.com · 19h ago

This is a man who has a hard time looking in the mirror

“In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet—from Facebook to Instagram to X—for speech that could endanger the agency’s mission.” Speech. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against its Critics

Agency says its surveillance program searches for threats to agents, but critics see free-speech infringements.

wsj.com

Dedication in a book by P.G. Wodehouse: "To _______, without whose...sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time"

"So, honey, you see what happens when you flirt with someone whose significant other turns out not to be dead?"

The "Science of Reading" campaign shamelessly misrepresents the research on that subject. In fact, its prescriptions tend to diminish kids' understanding of what they read and their enthusiasm about reading itself. Don't miss my new podcast conversation with Catherine Compton-Lilly: is.gd/JiaK2w

An overemphasis on phonics (mechanical decoding) is not just unhelpful for teaching kids to read; it's actively harmful. New on Kohn's Zone: Literacy expert Catherine Compton-Lilly calls this a kind of "educational malpractice" and explains what the REAL science of reading says: is.gd/JiaK2w

The richest man in the world, who's also a white supremacist (& misogynist & antisemite), will personally spend >$100 million to make sure plutocrat-friendly Republicans keep the Senate. It's been awhile since I took civics, but this is how democracy is supposed to work, right? tinyurl.com/995k723m

Musk Plans to Spend at Least $100 Million to Help Republicans in the Midterms

Elon Musk, a year after a huge blowup with President Trump and the Republican Party, is said to be planning to spend in at least eight states to help them in November.

tinyurl.com

An overemphasis on phonics (mechanical decoding) is not just unhelpful for teaching kids to read; it's actively harmful. New on Kohn's Zone: Literacy expert Catherine Compton-Lilly calls this a kind of "educational malpractice" and explains what the REAL science of reading says: is.gd/JiaK2w

This is important to keep in mind about the shameless and continuous dishonesty.

Radley Balko@radleybalko.bsky.social · 5d ago

Like the hypocrisy and the open corruption, the naked, brazen lying is itself aspiring authoritarianism. They aren't lying to cover anything up. They're saying, "We know we're lying. You know we're lying. And we know you know we're lying. And there's nothing you can do about it."

Disturbingly, it appears that diarrhea is followed by amnesia

I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:

How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran

The question is: what on earth is Google doing?

digitaldigging.org

The New York Times covers the weather: "Some say the large hurricane heading rapidly toward south Florida means residents can expect high winds and considerable amounts of rain. Critics believe this could damage property and pose a risk to human life."

Howard A. Rodman@rodman.bsky.social · 5d ago

Once again the @nytimes.com feels compelled to insert a “critics say” in front of an indisputable fact. This addiction to Both Sides Always will serves neither journalism nor the larger world, and is part of the devaluation of reality that has led us to very bad places.

"Thus the injustice committed by the wealthy, though great, was hard to recognize; and what happened was in fact a general upheaval of people being transferred and settling down on land which had belonged to others." - Appian, the Roman historian, writing ca. 2,000 years ago

Suppose progressives (e.g., Hong for WI gov, El-Sayed for MI sen) win their primaries and then beat the Republicans. Will conservative ("moderate," "centrist") Democrats admit they were wrong? Or will we learn that their opposition to progressives was more ideological than about electoral strategy?

Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · 6d ago

i think el-sayed winning the michigan senate primary will permanently break the brains that were being held together by string since mamdani

I've been seeing a lot of people responding to this with "there ought to be a law," but importantly, we haven't needed a law for this sort of thing because no prior president wanted to be known as a leader who would literally kill people in their hour of need for not voting for him

Seth Masket@smotus.bsky.social · 7d ago

This is honestly one of the most shocking images coming out of this administration and that’s saying something

I guess they need simple controls and bright colors because they're distracted by all the preparations for college next year....?

I drew this August 23, 2022, and it’s coming to pass.

The Trump regime will be remembered not just for the varieties of evil it perpetrated but for its single-minded assault on all manner of oversight, regulation, and democratic constraints on that evil.

1/2 Have a look at this passage about "blind faith in test scores" even when it's obviously irrational, which was published by the eminent psychologist David McClelland in 1973: www.therapiebreve.be/documents/mc...

Israel is giving Trump's former campaign manager millions of dollars to fill the internet with pro-Israel articles written by AI, not so that anyone will actually read them, but so that *LLMs will train on them* & regurgitate their perspective. This is the future of the information environment.

Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working.

Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.

dropsitenews.com

Kafka predicted A.I.

Colin@colin-fraser.net · last wk.

Welcome to Hell

Among the worst ideas floating around is that "the free market" will naturally achieve desirable results for society. No, it won't, not even in theory, much less in practice. Markets don't optimize "good for society" unless you make them.

Jon of The North@krauza.bsky.social · last wk.

Turns out that food companies were only checking their food because the government told them to, which is exactly why we need government regulations.

While some developmental psych researchers do look at factors that affect children's moral development or psychological health, I'm struck by how many parenting studies, just like popular parenting books, take for granted that the desired outcome is compliance -i.e., kids doing whatever they're told

It's all about the framing: 1000s of Iranians killed in the US's unprovoked invasion get a tiny fraction of the attention paid to the Pentagon's hiding the (far smaller) number of invaders killed. Similarly, coverage of mass deportations is less about the suffering of the immigrants than about this:

To Trump et al., the value of an education is measured purely in monetary terms: tinyurl.com/bp8b74tz. But this is common on the right: A very similar anti-intellectual sensibility was heard from Reagan (is.gd/Yy60oT) and, well, from Hitler (is.gd/81XjeZ).

Sobering read from an expert on genocide about "the gutting of international humanitarian law & of the two int'l courts set up to preserve it," dooming any hopes of bringing Israeli policymakers to justice & "signaling to other nations that impunity would be open to them, too": tinyurl.com/25zbyaaz

You start by looking for a specific answer but wind up learning about the subject's history, discovering a podcast about a related topic on a 2nd site, finding a discussion forum on a tangent. This is what Google's trying to discourage by having its AI search for you and serve it up on its own site.