Roguejsmith

If you have a LinkedIn account, head to Account, Settings & Privacy, & Data privacy, then turn off the "Data for Generative AI Improvement" setting.
H/t @christinekooi.bsky.social.

Always best to turn data privacy up to the max on all the hellscapes on which you can't avoid having an account.

Who was it that used to refer to the RW masses as "programmable meatbags"?

They were told inflation is the Most Important Thing, so they dutifully echoed that back. Then they were told immigration is the Most Important Thing, so they swung that way, like a school of fish.

De-Americanizing global trade will be Donald Trump's biggest legacy, and our children's children will still be paying the price long after we're all dead

I stopped calling Octavia butlers work prophetic once I realized she herself literally said that her work was influenced by deeply studying history which gave have her insight into the future. I realized I was watering down how truly brilliant she was and what she was trying to get across

YouTube video by JasonKPargin October 4, 2025

for those not on tiktok youtube.com/shorts/Nrq0i...

BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador.

Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.

The leasing deal could be structured to minimize risks for Nvidia. Nvidia could set up an entity that borrows money to buy the servers, using the chips as collateral. OpenAI’s lease payments could go towards paying back the loan

Inflating Earnings: When Enron's investments were underwater, the company would record these transactions as successful hedges, artificially increasing its reported revenue, income, and equity on its book

In this scenario NVIDIA would set up an entity to buy its own GPUs and then lease them to OpenAI. This isn’t exactly what Enron did, but it’s sure getting close!

Appellate courts: what Trump is doing is clearly unconstitutional and illegal

Supreme Court: but what if it wasn’t?

The stats showing a huge decline in violent crime and homicide in D.C. last year were put out just the other day by the FBI, which is run by Kash Patel.

A cutout of protesters in grayscale over a dark blue background, with the following text in white, all caps: (line 1; larger) ACTIVATE AND ENGAGE; and (line 2) THE TIME IS NOW.

A closeup of a polluted river filled with trash, in grayscale, with the following text in white, all caps: (line 1; larger) INFORM AND ACTIVATE; and (line 2) THE TIME IS NOW.

A cutout of three lab scientists looking at an iPad over a red background, with the following text in white, all caps: (line 1; larger) TEAM SCIENCE; and (line 2) THE TIME IS NOW.

A cutout of a side view of a bronze justice statue over a maroon background, with the following text in white, all caps: (line 1; larger) CALLING ON VALUES; and (line 2) THE TIME IS NOW.

4 new quick-guides to help you help your friends and fam STAND UP FOR SCIENCE and protect democracy

www.standupforscience.net/activate-eng...

www.standupforscience.net/inform-activ...

www.standupforscience.net/team-science

www.standupforscience.net/calling-values

@standupforscience.bsky.social

Someone forgot to take down this webpage:

www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/v...

ICE is offering up to $50,000 in signing bonuses to recruit 10,000 new agents in 2025. The new campaign includes student loan forgiveness and enhanced retirement benefits. If successful, ICE would become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the nation. The effort is backed by the One Big Beautiful Bill and promoted by DHS and Secretary Kristi Noem. Recruitment is targeting cities, college campuses, and law enforcement communities nationwide.

Guess who is eligible for #StudentLoanForgiveness? First responders? Healthcare workers? Teachers?

No.

#ICE agents.

Your tax dollars at work.

tfppwire.com/ice-announce...

Life-saving idea! Pass it on!

The Budget Lab at Yale University, a nonpartisan research center, updated its tariff tracker on Friday. It calculated that American consumers will have to contend with an average effective tariff rate of 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. As a result, the center estimates that price increases will cost each household on average $2,400 this year. Shoe prices, for example, are expected to rise 40 percent in the short run. America’s total economic output — its gross domestic product — is estimated to shrink by about $120 billion annually in the years to come.

Nonpartisan budget lab at Yale has "calculated that American consumers will have to contend with an average effective tariff rate of 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. As a result, the center estimates that price increases will cost each household on average $2,400 this year."

Ghislaine Maxwell convicted of federal sex trafficking charges for role in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses The jury weighed evidence from about 30 witnesses over 3 weeks who alleged the British socialite played a pivotal part in recruiting teenage girls for sex with Epstein.

Trump is laying the groundwork for a pardon of Ghislaine Maxwell, pretending that she's a reliable informant on Epstein and not his literal partner-in-crime, so it's probably worth recirculating the facts:

www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

This is a more significant thing than it seems on the surface; when they lie to your face *and* make it 100% clear that they could not care less that you know they’re lying, their fear of consequences through any normal channels is already long gone.

FCC to Appoint a Babysitter to Make Sure CBS Isn't Anti-Trump FCC commissioner Brendan Carr says CBS will have a "bias monitor."

From the people who tried everything in their power to curtail misinformation research because it is "censorship" (it isn't), here is the next instalment of a political commissar to exercise actual censorship at a major network: gizmodo.com/fcc-to-a...

Trump administration to destroy nearly $10m of contraceptives for women overseas As part of president’s shuttering of USAID, destruction of the contraceptives will cost US taxpayers $167,000

I have had to reference Arendt and Atwood far too many times this year and here they are, together: the Trump administration is rolling out "contraception is abortion" in Africa. Repressive techniques are always tested on vulnerable minority populations first.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Who would share intelligence with the United States when the head of US intelligence does a public campaign lying about information you know to be accurate, in order to protect people you know are guilty, and manufacture charges against people you know did nothing wrong and in fact did things right?

Cover of book of U.S. high school government curriculum materials. Says: United States Government: Our Democracy. Has generic civic religion iconography such as bald eagle, flag, etc.

July 18: US House voted 216-213 to approve the Rescissions Act of 2025, already passed by Senate; Trump to sign imminently.

It freezes $9 billion in funds Congress had already approved for foreign assistance and for NPR/PBS public media, a disappointing shift in federal separation of powers.

[1/?]

The concept is so simple yet so hard to understand for Trump fans. The president should work unendingly to improve life for everyday Americans. Yet this man has done nothing, not one thing, to help anyone outside the wealthy class. The fact he remains supported is mind-numbing. #ProudBlue

This math applies to incarceration more generally. When we criminalize poverty, addiction, and mental illness it means we spend more money on incarceration than it would have cost to deal with the things we criminalized.

This is genuinely the news every day

Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door

Some places will have to start rationing water - to enable AI slop.

"A data center like Meta’s, which was completed last year, typically guzzles around 500,000 gallons of water a day. New data centers [will] require millions of gallons of water a day"

Gift link:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/t...

There’s a nonzero chance you will die from a cancer that could have been curable because people who couldn’t pass 7th grade biology and are scared of things like “mRNA” and “riboflavin” and “walkable cities” decided to make their ignorance everybody else’s problem

Big boost in 2028. Wonder what that’s about.

it’s absurd that NYT forced him to delete these skeets, which … convey the factual information that Zohran Mamdani is, in fact, a man of South Asian descent who was born and raised in Africa, and that the pseudonymous source of the hacked material is a white supremacist eugenicist.