Paul Steege

Not gonna lie. At first glance, I assumed this was something about the pernicious effects of Ted Cruz.

‘Horrific’: report reveals abuse of pregnant women and children at US Ice facilities Report from senator Jon Ossoff’s office found 510 credible reports of human rights abuses since Trump’s inauguration

A Senate investigation has so far found 510 human rights abuses in ICE detention centers since Jan 20, including deaths, physical & sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, overcrowding & unsanitary conditions, inadequate food & water, extreme temperatures, denial of legal access, & child separation

United States Secretary of Defense says he’s proud of people who took up arms against the United States and killed hundreds of thousands of United States citizens so they could continue to own human beings

Xcel Energy tells residential consumers to conserve energy on hot days, during PEAK solar generation hours when we SHOULD be using that electricity for cooling, but doesn’t say boo to crypto miners or chatbot data centers.

Reductions in individual consumption pale next to corporate waste.

This is my ministry

RFK Jr. defends $500M cut for mRNA vaccines with pseudoscience gobbledygook He clearly has no idea what antigenic shift means.

"If anyone needed a reminder that ...[RFK Jr.] has no background in science or medicine, look no further than the video he posted on social media Tuesday evening."
Also, this headline wins the internet.
arstechnica.com/health/2025/... @arstechnica.com

Sunk-cost fallacy and cheating students are the only things keeping AI in business at this point.

Just look at how usage of ChatGPT plummets as soon as the semester ends.

This 💯👇

How the Prison Industry Became a Booming Business CoreCivic’s CEO called the Trump administration “one of the most exciting periods” of his career.

#OpEd: "We must recognize the prison industry for what it is: an industry built on the human suffering of crime victims, incarcerated people, their families, and still others." Read the full story on how the prison industry became worth over $80 billion a year.

On the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima…

Lecture title, speaker name, and lecture time/date/location info on a poster, all of which is available on the website for the event.

QR code for the online registration for those interested attending via zoom.

UBC Queer and Trans German Studies is hosting Andrea Rottmann (FU Berlin) as the next Tobin Distinguished Lecture in Queer and Trans German Studies! The event will take place in person at UBC as well as online. We would be grateful if you could pass the announcement on to your networks.

"The process is the point" should be a general rule for a) history itself, b) historiography and c) our way of confronting AI!

I fundamentally disagree with the foundational premises of this report. What the committee takes as settled, I very much do not.

new rule: if your opinion column’s premise can be answered immediately with the word “no” you aren’t allowed to write it

A great thing about physical books is that they seldom stop working

From just after the 2024 election…

I'll write a post about this eventually, but my hypothesis is that an anti-corruption campaign has universal appeal. "Trump is deceiving you" or "MAGA is brainwashed" is unlikely to change anyone's mind. But "we are all, every one of us, getting cheated every day" is tremendously unifying.

As US social scientists we should do all we can to protect the integrity of the federal statistics we rely upon in our teaching and research — on labor, crime, health, demography, education, climate, and pretty much everything else we study.

Not at all a coincidence that this type of clean-energy comms - which presents a positive case in forceful terms rather than trying to dance around the issue - is coming almost exclusively from non-US firms. The comparison tells us a lot about why the IRA failed. More below:

1/9

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

"It constitutes the antithesis of the academic freedom that you have disingenuously claimed will not be infringed by this shameful capitulation to the anti-intellectual forces animating the Trump administration."
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

In light of the Columbia and Brown deals, I’m bumping these slides again about the Nazi takeover of German science, which includes discussion about how they took over academia, in a manner very similar to the Brown and Columbia deals

Mamdani: We are reminded no matter how strong our gun laws are in this state, we are only as safe as the weakest laws in this nation.

From my own academic research, even pre LLMs there was a huge danger of zombie factoids that begin in a respectable publication by mistake and then get reprinted for decades because no one is backtracing to the original source. Once bad info gets into the system it can take years to clear it out.

“You can’t beat an immoral agent of chaos with risk aversion. You beat him with moral clarity — the kind that’s willing to sacrifice corporate donations, political comfort and maybe even your own career for the sake of the greater good.”

Someone on here compared AI produced material as "digital asbestos " which in a few decades' time we will have to work out how to eradicate from the fabric of research.

OPINION | As women's sports grows, so do the threats to racialized athletes | CBC Sports Online abuse poisoned the recent Women's Euros championship. The reality is that despite all the well-intentioned programs in the world, racialized and misogynist hatred can fester.

I decided to address an uncomfortable truth: the rise of women's sports creates an increase in racist and misogynistic abuse.

www.cbc.ca/sports/shire...

Poll: New York Dems side with Mamdani on Israel, Netanyahu New York City’s Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly believe that Israel is “committing genocide” in Gaza.

New poll: The vast majority of NYC Dem primary voters agree with Mamdani’s Israel positions, even arresting Bibi.

57% say they’d be less likely to support incumbent Dems who don’t endorse Mamdani. That includes Schumer and Jeffries right now. www.semafor.com/article/07/2...

Hirsch, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is now thinking of leaving the classroom:
“A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic & threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry … I just don’t see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.”

“Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.”

As the author of the law that empowers the U.S. government to sanction Chinese and other officials for cracking down on free speech in Hong Kong, I agree with Rubio.

Unfortunately, he has ZERO credibility after he locked up students in the U.S. for exercising free speech. (1/1)