Scott Ross, animate candy corn

very glad to hear!

CU signs $2M OpenAI deal for ChatGPT access Students and faculty will gain access to ChatGPT Edu starting in March under a three-year deal.

My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity

www.axios.com/local/boulde...

Wow, such esteemed company! Thanks for letting me know, hope it went well! 🙂

Nonviolence is, in fact, working. This administration is weaker than it was a year ago. More and more of the public is becoming galvanized against it; its agents are being impeded.

There's a prison revolt at a concentration camp in Texas in solidarity with Minneapolis:

An office building lit up in the dark with a crowd of people holding signs in front of it.

HAPPENING NOW: A massive crowd is gathered in freezing temperatures outside ICE headquarters in DC to demand ICE OUT OF ALL COMMUNITIES NOW.

Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti “We are heartbroken but also very angry. Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact. I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed. Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti.

"Please get the truth out about our son."

It strikes me that at least some of the asylum parolees ICE is targeting to detain in northern cities and shipping to Texas detention centers may themselves have been bussed out of Texas border facilities to DC, NYC, and other cities beginning in 2022. Just a horrific cycle of state trafficking.

Hundreds of clergy descend on Minneapolis and go on lookout for ICE MINNEAPOLIS (RNS) — The faith leaders, who hail from across the country and represent a range of religious traditions, deployed to neighborhoods with significant immigrant populations, where DHS agent...

“You can only preach against ICE for so long before God calls you to get out of the pulpit and get to the streets.” Hundreds of clergy from across the country mobilized in Minneapolis—and will be taking lessons learned back with them: religionnews.com/2026/01/22/h...

Renee Good's Murder and Other Acts of Terror An interview with Robin D. G. Kelley on how to think about ICE—and the broader history of police violence.

Really great interview with Robin D.G. Kelley on state violence, popular resistance to it, the reformist distraction, and the abolitionist imperative, in @bostonreview.bsky.social : www.bostonreview.net/articles/ren...

Opinion | I'm a Minneapolis sociologist who studies violence. Here's how ICE observers are helping. Research into how violence occurs shows that disapproval from the people around you can help reduce it.

"ICE Watch works because it surrounds men seeking approval with people loudly expressing their disapproval. And the noise has the added benefit of drawing large crowds of bystanders who can quickly outnumber the ICE agents." www.ms.now/opinion/minn...

You can’t walk for ten minutes in my neighborhood without seeing them: boxy SUVs, mostly domestic-made, with tinted windows and out-of-state plates. Two men riding in front, dressed in tactical gear. Following behind is a train of three or four cars, honking. Sometimes there are bikers, too, blowing on neon-colored plastic whistles that local businesses give out for free. Every street corner has patrollers on foot, yelling and filming when a convoy rolls by. If the ICE vehicles pull over, people flood the street. Crowds materialize seemingly out of nowhere. The honking and whistling amps up, becoming an unignorable wail, and more people stream out of their houses and businesses. When agents leave their cars they’re met with jeers, mostly variations on “Fuck you.” Usually someone starts throwing snowballs. Agents pull out pepper spray guns, threatening protesters who get too close. If there’s enough of a crowd, they use tear gas.

Well before Kristi Noem announced DHS operations in Minnesota, the neighborhood got ready. It started with rapid response preparation in the park’s recreation center and legal observer trainings at a church. Then it was block-by-block meetings. Small networks that formed in 2020 were reactivated to distribute 3D-printed whistles and practice scenarios for confronting agents. When ICE deployed in December, Signal threads for local alerts quickly surpassed the thousand-user limit, and an extensive mutual aid ecosystem of grocery runs and rideshares emerged overnight. After Good’s murder and Noem’s announcement that the number of ICE agents in Minnesota would triple, everyone I know cancelled their social plans. Lots of people called off work. What we’re doing now is this: The trainings have evolved into street medic workshops on protecting yourself from chemical weapons and lessons on digital security; there’s a meet-up to sew reinforced umbrellas as shields from mace and a collection spot for barricade materials. And this is what it’s like: Sometimes you’re chasing ICE off your street, maybe you’re buying groceries for a family, but a lot of the time you’re on your phone. Behind every actionable piece of organizing are hours spent coordinating in Signal threads, calling to check up on someone, scrolling live feeds. At night, over dinner, it’s all anyone can talk about. Did you hear? Did you see that post? Did you read in the thread?

The community warning, defense, and mutual aid we're seeing in Minneapolis is the product of years of responding to state violence. Amazing essay from @nplusonemag.com : www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

In solidarity with the statewide shutdown in Minnesota protesting ICE/CBP, I'm sharing some of the most insightful reads about the powerful, beautiful community response there - these pieces should inspire similar collective action everywhere. please link to others.

The horrors of ICE/CBP violence are very real - but the scale, organizing, beauty, and bravery of community defense and resistance are too.

If you have read even a single history of fascism, you are already aware that one thing that its rise has in common in every case is an opposition party that refuses to intervene for fear of looking weak or putting the left into power

They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted. Inside the civil war at the anti-woke university backed by Bari Weiss.

They didn’t want a university without cancel culture. They didn’t want to be criticized for their retrograde views so they created a pretend school funding by their rich friends. The only people surprised that this failed were credulous enough to believe the fairy tales these folks told.

St. Louis University offers free tuition to incoming freshmen from low-income households St. Louis University is offering free tuition for low-income students starting this fall.

St. Louis University will now cover the tuition for incoming freshmen whose families earn no more than $60,000 per year and have assets of $50,000 or less.

Map of state higher ed restrictions

The scale and speed of state censorship of campus really is amazing.
More than half of America's college students attend institutions in states that have passed laws censoring higher education since 2021.
From @penamerica.bsky.social
pen.org/report/ameri...

cold-blooded murder by the state.

Remember when everyone was concerned about DOGE sharing data between government agencies last year?

This app for ICE is built on HHS data.

A reminder that Lewiston, Maine was recently on a list of the ten safest cities in the U.S.

How to replicate that and whether that is even desired by rising generation of anthros are two diff questions. The entire social media landscape is just so different now in terms of mood, what one does on it, kinds of engagement imo

This is a great back and forth and gets at many of our tensions at SCA - not just about meeting people where they're at (e.g. tiktok, insta). Twitter had a sort of critical mass that then drew people in (many joined Twitter *to join* academic convos).

"From Intimacies of Trauma to Intimacies of Struggle: Gaza Solidarity Encampments as Sites of Black Feminist Praxis" by Savannah Shange and Island Gutierrez How does it feel to learn through a genocide? How does one teach on the same campus where student protest is forcibly quelled? In this experimental dialogue between an undergraduate student and a faculty member, we answer these questions in a Black feminist call and response rooted in an ethics of mutuality and care. Drawing on Gutierrez's lived experience in a Gaza solidarity encampment collective, we conceive of encampments as antibodies—an adaptive response to the settler sickness of war and genocide. Thinking alongside Dána-Ain Davis, Christina Sharpe, and Tiffany Lethabo King, we argue that intimate pedagogical and political engagement across diasporas produces a necessary pathway to praxis that can disrupt the normativity of both anti-Blackness and Zionism.

"How does it feel to learn through a genocide? How does one teach on the same campus where student protest is forcibly quelled?" Eager to dive into this experimental dialogue in @amanthro.bsky.social on pedagogy and praxis from the grounds of the Gaza encampments: doi.org/10.1111/aman...

It’s great that 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi is coming right out swinging. Not having a second of this bullshit!

I think coddled hacks like Bari Weiss have no idea what to do with righteous fury like this except, if anything, somehow play victim. Let’s see!

‘60 Minutes’ correspondent says CBS’s Bari Weiss abruptly pulled segment on Trump deportations CBS News postponed a ‘60 Minutes’ segment about El Salvador’s CECOT prison one day before it was set to air because the Trump administration declined to participate.

CECOT segment correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi: Bari Weiss giving the government a "kill switch" for stories they don't like transforms 60 Minutes from an "investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state." www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Facts to Inform the Debate about the U.S. Government’s Anti-Drug Offensive in the Americas - WOLA Fact sheet: U.S. military anti-drug strikes have killed at least 104 civilians in the Caribbean. Examines the operations' legal basis, justifications, and effectiveness.

"As of December 19, the known death toll from 28 lethal U.S. strikes on civilian vessels [in the Caribbean] is 104." www.wola.org/analysis/fac...

look, evil aside: his rhetorical strategies seem to hinge on hoping no one compares numbers at the gas station, confuses "TrumpRx.gov" with affordable coverage of their dialysis, or has ever been to Minnesota. if you ask me Trump is moving like a cooked guy moves

Horror of horrors, this is absolute evil.