Robyn Schroeder

What the hell is the point of the filibuster if not to prevent something like this? I'm at a loss for words.

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

I’ve come to believe that we need to gather considerable forces and a campaign to demand the removal of face masks by ICE, Border Patrol, FBI and police.

It is a practice in conflict with the principles of transparency & accountability that are central to the concept of democracy.

Faculty Insight: What Trump’s Nigeria Travel Ban Means | HDS News Archive

yeah, the idea that Trump will stop Boko Haram types by ending aid to the Nigerian federal government is as confused as the idea that he is actually interested in the welfare of the same Nigerian Christians he put on a categorical travel ban 5 years ago

news-archive.hds.harvard.edu/news/2020/03...

I'm shaking almost too hard to type. I entered SLC airport and heard screams and cries for help. I could see people gathered around, watching. I sped over to discover this woman face down on the floor, four grown men pushing her down, while she cried "HELP ME" and pled for her child.

I'm not saying Trump is an authoritarian who would lock up reporters for investigating his party, I'me just saying his party members think that.

One year ago

Step by step guide to higher ed crisis for Dem candidates giving stump speeches. This isn’t hard:

1) States cut taxes to serve the rich

2) with less revenue, they cut public higher ed budgets

3) with lower budgets, schools raise tuition and throw money at investments, athletics, and development

The East Wing Desecrators

Given the extraordinary and unprecedented destruction of the entire East Wing, built in 1942 for the Office of the First Lady, it’s important to note who enabled this.

In this thread, I run through the companies and organizations involved and provide contact info.

🧵

It's supposed to be payday for many federal workers. Instead, they're getting nothing Roughly 1.4 million federal workers are going without pay due to the government shutdown. About half of them are furloughed, while the other half has been deemed essential and is working without pay.

Roughly 1.4 million federal workers are going without pay due to the government shutdown. About half of them are furloughed, while the other half has been deemed essential and is working without pay. n.pr/4ngKyx3

The title?

"Observations Upon Certain Passages in Mr. Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Which Appear to Have a Tendency to Subvert Religion, and Establish a False Philosophy."

Democrats Fell Prey To The Same Toxic Dynamics That Destroyed Mainstream News Instead of fighting smears, they appeased the smear merchants.

Many of my liberal peers see clearly how mainstream outlets have ruined their already imperiled businesses by capitulating to bad-faith right-wing criticism. They have a harder time seeing that the Democratic Party has fallen victim to the same kind of self-sabotage.

Very adjustable! And the black net swing is big enough for adults to swing on (I often do!)

We got the Mystic Tower set from Backyard Discovery after I looked at every swingset ever made. (We liked the imaginative element of the tower.) We slathered it in weather protectant, paid someone to put it together, and set a calendar alert to slather it again next year because $$$. 4yo-approved.

protest sign reads "NO MASKED COPS"

Emphases I saw here in Williamsburg, VA: much more insistent anti-fascism than last time, even more insistent centrality of constitutional order, rule of law. A lot appeals to history here: "If they want 1939 Germany, we'll give them 1789 France." Some very simple principles as below:

Proud papa moment: my son J published a letter in the @nytimes.com today (in print tomorrow) on the need to think our definitions of autism.

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

Once in a while, a succinct description of a progression of choices takes your breath away with the intentional, focused corruption.

JD Vance brushes off racist texts by adults in Republican group chat as ‘what kids do’ Vice-president downplays messages such as ‘I love Hitler’ in chat by 24 to 35-year-olds to ‘stupid jokes’

For those of you keeping score, 18-22 year-old students calling for an end to slaughter in Gaza are so racist they need to be expelled or deported, but 24-35 year-olds celebrating Hitler, rape, and, um, racism are just kids being kids so chill.

Also, racism is over so no need for Voting Right Act.

Exclusive | Trump Team Plans IRS Overhaul to Enable Pursuit of Left-Leaning Groups The effort would install a Trump ally at the IRS’s criminal unit who has drawn up a list of investigative targets.

Second article of impeachment of Richard Nixon:

“He has endeavoured…to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Trump Considers Overhaul of Refugee System That Would Favor White People

is this even plausibly consistent with U.S. international law obligations on the protection of refugees? i don't think so. but does american reporting ever really grapple with the fact that we are bound to global rules *that we helped develop*?

(As with so much else in our politics.)

Final note for next time: when studying secret student societies of the late 18th century for use on a campus walking tour on revolutionary-era culture, maybe start with the premise that annoying codes are likely to be involved so students aren't surprised.

But the entire situation--the student's inability to believe her own eyes looking at a digitized letter, and AI's confident hallucination that redoubled the self-doubt--made very plain that the emotional contours of this tech in unconfidence and a longing for certainty, are our real demon-barriers.

Likely other people have at some point already decoded this; finding their work easily would have obviously been faster for research than any form of AI usage. Though I do believe in (appropriately cited) use of AI to transcribe documents as a good use case for historians in some circumstances.

That was the beginning. I will note that AI did help in one way; Claude *accurately* hallucinated the salutation, written as "Yzrbdzezr", as "Gentlemen" by context from other documents, which jogged along the process (though I like to think I would have gotten there anyway).

And look, I've no more practice than the average person who once attended middle school at breaking (what turned out to be) simple substitution cyphers. But the word "C U Æ Æ U M [P?] A Æ Z B B Æ" struck me as a pattern likely to be "Massachusetts".

... Claude apologized and replied, sorry, it had realized that it was actually German. Amazing. I was still unsure if something involving Greek letters and the Roman alphabet was going to be the root of the code.

Well, I said, let's see if an LLM can transcribe it letter-for-letter to help us along.

It could not, by my prompts. It hallucinated an English-language letter largely extrapolated from recognizing phi, beta, and kappa. When I replied to ask (snarkily) why it imagined the text was in English...

The student's real problem was a lack of sufficient practice with sources that gave her confidence that if the material were indeed in a language known to her, she would be able to read at least some of it! She did notice that she had no problem reading "Cambridge University" at the top of the page.

She shows up with this text. It's ostensibly a 1782 letter chartering Harvard as the alpha chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in Massachusetts, written by some students here at William & Mary.

It quickly became clear, to me at least, that this letter was not in a recognizable language--it must be a cypher.