"Turnitin licenses this technology to colleges while demanding 'perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable' rights to student writing."

DON'T compare right-wing ideology to mental illness or disability. Don't even associate it. It's actually ableist, and I'm not even joking.

They're not hateful because of their mental ability. They got indoctrinated into fascism & bigotry, and they actively & continuously choose not to change.

Sen. Alex Padilla, who was just forcibly removed from a DHS press conference, is the ranking member of Judiciary’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship, and border safety, which has “oversight of federal agencies with citizenship, asylum, refugee, and immigration enforcement responsibilities.”

By sheyamghieth "I’m not Covid “cautious,” I’m Covid-informed." #COVIDInformed

By sheyamghieth

"I’m not Covid “cautious,” I’m Covid-informed."

#COVIDInformed

Source: www.instagram.com/sheyamghieth/

Repeat After Me: AI Doesn’t Know Anything Yesterday, the Chicago Sun-Times (and then also the Philly Inquirer) published an issue of their newspaper that included an insert about fun summer things, and in that was a list of fifteen great s…

Gather round, children, and let us scream in harmony with @chuckwendig.bsky.social , a man who knows where his towel is. terribleminds.com/ramble/2025/...

AI Imagery Labeller: Highlights post and profiles that use genAI. Fairly self explanatory.

bsky.app/profile/aimo...

Now *this* is what AI is good for! This is an expert system developed by applying machine learning to a specialist, selected dataset, is designed for a specific, technical purpose, refined by human experts. And does not require the wholesale theft of creators' copyright intellectual property.

I know some folks are like, "I'm autistic and I CAN do those thing" and that's great, but that's actually not why this statement is horrifying.

It's horrifying because he's saying anyone who isn't "normal" and isn't "productive" don't have valuable lives, so should they really be alive?

"If you are a university, you may have to say, figure out, are we in fact doing things right? Have we in fact violated our own values, our own code, violated the law in some fashion? If not, and you're just being intimidated, well, you should be able to say, 'That's why we got this big endowment. We'll stand up for what we believe in and we'll pay our researchers for a while out of that endowment, and we'll give up the extra wing or the fancy gymnasium'...because academic freedom might be a little more important."

Barack Obama on what universities should do: “We'll stand up for what we believe in and we'll pay our researchers for a while out of that endowment, and we'll give up the extra wing or the fancy gymnasium...because academic freedom might be a little more important." +

www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2Ew6cot/

Trump’s ‘reciprocal’ tariffs aren’t quite what they seem. Here’s the real story | CNN Business The massive tariffs that President Donald Trump announced for dozens of trading partners Wednesday were pitched as “reciprocal,” simply aiming to match the tariffs other countries charge the United St...

"The administration’s calculation divided a country’s trade deficit with the US by its exports into the country times 1/2. That’s it."
www.cnn.com/2025/04/05/b...

Part 1 on neighbors being disappeared by the US government.

Attorney General Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert for 23andMe Customers Californians have the right to direct the company to delete their genetic data OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today issued a consumer alert to customers of 23andMe, a genetic testing ...

23andMe is going under. Californians have the right to delete their genetic data before it's turned over to next party buying the assets. If you have a 23andMe account, go log in to download whatever reports you want to save, then follow these instructions to delete your data.

Fact-check: True

Screenshot from the IEEE front page, from Feb 16, 2025, showing images and links to eight different pages. The third spot is titled "Diversity, equity, and inclusion", with the text "Learn how IEEE and its members are working to grow diversity, equity, and inclusion in IEEE activities and in the technical profession".

Screenshot of the same IEEE page from Feb 24, 2025. 7 of the 8 links are identical, but "Diversity, equity, and inclusion" has been replaced with "Member discounts".

"We are sorry, the page you are looking for has been moved or removed."

Hey #IEEE, can you explain where your "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at IEEE" page went?!

Last week, it was still linked on the front page.

Now: It's gone, and the old link goes to "We are sorry, the page you are looking for has been moved or removed."

www.ieee.org/about/divers...

The notion that Trump's "I'm king" tweet is "just trolling" or "a joke" presents an opportunity to recreate my just-joking thread (porting it over from the Bad Place):

1. I wrote my PhD dissertation on the social function of humor (in literature & film) and here's the thing about "just joking."

I have started calling it "the seduction of everyday."

I have spent 30 years reflecting on the fact that the day the war roared into my hometown, my parents got up, sent us to school, and then went to work. As if the country was not burning down all around them.

Portuguese editorial cartoonist Zez Vaz reaches back to Tiananmen Square to call on American defiance.

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

The Face of Courage You only need to read one thing today, and this is it.

The Face of Courage
open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...

"First of all, the response by the press as we speak has been pathetic. There’s no spokesperson for the press who is out there leading the charge and coordinating a united front with all the news outlets on the same page."

There has been a shift in the Trump team's language in their anti-DEI attacks. All of a sudden they started calling it "DEIA", with the A being "accessibility". If you don't think it's a coordinated effort to remove disabled people from every facet of life, well I have news for you.

We're entering a dark period in US accessibility | Semantic Fish Net The White House website doesn't comply with US legal accessibility requirements, paving a path for widespread disability discrimination.

Context here:

semanticfish.net/a-dark-perio...

Everyone keeps leaving out that it's not D.E.I. it's D.E.I.A. the accessibility bits are being scrubbed too.

"A coup is in progress in the United States of America... Private citizens have seized control of Treasury payment systems. Security officials are being removed for following classification protocols. Congressionally established agencies are being illegally shuttered."

"Together, Trump & Musk... are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda... the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place."

The 'recycled' plastic in your shoes, shirts, and bags? It’s still destined for the landfill. Here’s why that matters.

The ‘recycled’ plastic in your shoes, shirts, and bags? It’s still destined for the landfill.

Here’s why that matters.

grist.org/accountabili...

#Waste #Plastic #Recycle #Climate

Whenever a friend develops chronic illness, has a bad experience with the healthcare system or faces temporary disability, they say “oh my god I didn’t know it was THIS bad”

They did know. We told them. They chose not to believe us

Believe disabled people. Listen. Help. One day it’ll be your turn

Stop trying to debate things that aren’t up for discussion. The right of trans people to exist, racial equality, and disability rights are non-negotiable. Debating them only legitimizes bigotry