Colleen Wynn

Trump mandates all federal agencies send email blaming Dems for potential gov’t shutdown Workers call the partisan email "a vile slap in the face."

SCOOP — The White House instructed all federal agency leadership on Tuesday to send out a mandatory message to workers blaming the impending potential government shutdown on House Democrats, The Handbasket was first to learn. Absolutely no modifications to the email were permitted.

My story:

Me: forever mad about the FBI’s surveillance, propaganda, violent work to destroy everyone from Du Bois to BLM

Also me: people need to understand what is happening to Comey is bad, big bad.

It’s the both/and. Sometimes I think the hardest work for educators and media is to explain nuance/context

We believe that #FairHousingIs the foundation.

EVERY Hoosier family deserves a #safe, #affordable, and #accessible place to call home in a #community of their #choice.

Follow our "Fair Housing IS" campaign to learn how the FHCCI assists Hoosier families with their housing challenges.

Everyday we get more evidence that the most revered organizations in America are willing to help re-segregate daily life. Today, I woke up to the Washington Post and Harvard-organizations ostensibly committed to "truth"-(continuing) to help re-segregation along.

"The configuration of social capital is the key in shaping resilient city dynamics. Rather than simply increasing the number of civic organizations, what is most important is how social capital is deployed, called upon, and realized by the actors within a community."

- Sean Safford

A push to preserve an Indianapolis neighborhood built by Black WWII veterans: mirrorindy.org/indianapolis...

📷 Flanner House, Indiana Historical Society

A read from Judith Butler about the handing over of names & files by UC administrators to the government. Link to article below

People missing an important point about folks getting fired for whatever they said about Charlie Kirk: Americans are being conditioned to be snitches on their fellow citizens who don’t toe a party line on what is “allowed” to be expressed. And employers are going along. It’s the new secret police

When we think of sexism, it's easy to think of *active* efforts to discriminate against women. But sexism also operates *passively* - like through our inaction on issues like childcare and paid family leave. In that context, return-to-office policies are sexist in consequence, even if not in design.

When Campus Reform and Turning point came after professors and created the professor watchlist, administrators didn't pay attention..Now they are being fired and attacked. Maybe institutions should have done more to protect academic freedom....

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

If you're an author and haven't yet signed up for the Anthropic settlement, do yourself a favor (and strike a blow against AI) by checking to see if any of your books were involved.

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Universities Are Selling Themselves Off Piece by Piece American higher ed has become a mesh of corporate contracts and outsourced services. From dining halls to student records, private vendors now run many institutions’ most basic operations — atomizing workers and undermining the university’s public mission.

I wrote a piece on tech contracts in higher ed. for Jacobin. The endless outsourcing is troubling for a variety of reasons. Not helping is vendors jumping on the AI hype to offer ever-more-advanced and expensive programs to universities. #CheatGPT

The Conservative Women Who Are ‘Having It All’ Politicians and other prominent women on the right are juggling work and family on their own terms. They credit grit, religious faith, family support and a laser-like focus on priorities.

High-powered conservative women might *say* they have it all because of "grit, faith, family, and focus." But that's just Lean In repackaged for a right-wing crowd.

In reality, if they have it all, it's because of the nannies and other paid help making their careers possible behind the scenes. 1/

When I see people online, even in jest, suggest that people living in Republican-controlled states should be abandoned because of their politicians, I feel a deep heartache. New York CREATED Donald Trump and none of y’all are ever talk about it the way you disparage Alabama or Mississippi.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

‘I escaped a Russian prison — only to end up in an American jail’ Dozens of Russian dissidents have been expelled from the US and forcibly returned to Russia with the co-operation of immigration authorities

BREAKING: ICE is sending Russian dissidents back to Russia. When the dissidents arrived in Russia, the Russian authorities were given documents relating to their asylum applications in the US which under US law are confidential. This seems to be part of a secret agreement between Trump and Putin.

This is a common conservative trope: Giving money to poor people isn't enough, we need to focus on "cultural values" like hard work and marriage.

The problem is that red states have been doing that for decades and it doesn't work! Telling people that jobs are good doesn't help if there's no jobs.

had a conversation with a prominent pundit recently who did not seem to realize that the departments of the executive branch are congressional creations, so not surprised at this

I got both my covid and flu vaccines today at CVS in Indiana - it was quick and easy. If you’re in Indiana, or another state where you can get your covid vaccine without a prescription, book your appointment today!

A problem with using predictive text technology to summarize research is that an author’s use of words or phrases might be an endorsement of those words or phrases—but not reliably so, and Google seems to have no issue with rolling this technology out despite its lack of sophistication on this

He's exploiting what sociologists call the availability heuristic: the more people hear about something, the more common they assume it to be.

If he can spew vaccine skepticism all over the airwaves, then he can create the perception that such skepticism is more widespread than it is. 1/

Measurement is not simply a technical concern—it shapes knowledge and everyday outcomes. #methodmatters

"The assault on university life is part of a broader authoritarian agenda. Fascists seek a society where people lack not only the motive to learn, but also the means. .... Curiosity and community are under attack."

Primary every single Dem. Every one. They need to fear their base. There's no way out of this mess without that.

If you don't already teach Dr. Martin Luther King honoring Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois on what would've been his 100th birthday, I recommend it.

King discusses Du Bois's scholarship (like Black Reconstruction), his organizing, his love, and defends his communism.

credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mu...

One generation after another of Americans were assiduously taught these falsehoods & the collective mind of America became poisoned w/racism & stunted w/myths.

Dr. Du Bois confronted this powerful structure of historical distortion & dismantled it. - Dr. King
www.zinnedproject.org/news/dr-king...

The Trap of Law and Order Under Fascism “There’s no rule of law that’s going to get us out of where we are,” says Andrea Ritchie.

This week, I talk to @dreanyc123.bsky.social about the role of criminalization in authoritarianism and fascism—and why we need more outlaws, and less confusion about what the law protects and who it targets.

A graph showing that 450 out of every 1,000 children died in the 1800s. By 1950, it was about 40 out of every 1,000 kids.

It's funny how vaccines worked so well that now infant mortality is low enough for all the new generations to forget it was ever a common thing.

Vaccine stability has made us forget why it was so important in the first place.

Before vaccines, 450 children died out of every 1000. Now? 20.

Paging Betty Friedan

RIP CBS News