Ashley Shew

It pissed me off immediately too. Like don't use the one thing I care about (dogs) to peddle your spy network, you absolutely heartless bastards.

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

“The husband & wife before this court are charged w/civil violations of our country's immigration laws. Civil. Not criminal. That distinction is not a technicality or a formality. It’s the line the law draws betwn regulation & punishment. Yet these working parents appear in unmistakable prison garb.

I left Gmail for @proton.me almost four years ago. I did it slowly, first moving over essential services to my new email, telling friends/family the new address, and signing up for new services, etc., with the new address. I use Google much less now.

I figure slow disentanglement > doing nothing

‘An absolute travesty': Critics slam affidavit behind Fulton raid for relying on 2020 election lies The affidavit reinforced fears that the FBI’s seizure was not about uncovering new evidence but about resurrecting a false narrative.

NEW: The unsealing of the FBI’s search warrant affidavit for its raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, election facility prompted swift condemnation from voting rights advocates, election experts and former federal officials. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

Header image for the Patreon post "Oz's Record: 'Prove That You Matter'" by Matthew Cortland, dated 02/09/2026, for the Patreon "Shouldn't Need to Be a Lawyer." The right side shows a screenshot of an X post by Ashish K. Jha (@ashishkjha) from February 9, 2026, with 98.3K views, which reads: "People get mad at me for saying this but I think @DrOz has done a very good job overseeing CMS. Not just because he's advocating for vaccines. But because he's running a complex bureaucracy efficiently, promoting smart policy choices, etc. I am thankful for his leadership." Jha's post quote-posts Frank Luntz sharing an ABC News article quoting Oz saying "Take the vaccine, please" as measles cases rise.

Jha says Oz is doing "a very good job overseeing CMS."

What that job has looked like: rescinding emergency abortion care protections, proposing a nationwide ban on trans youth healthcare, gutting Medicaid, and wrapping it all in a racialized fraud narrative

www.patreon.com/posts/150452...

It's Time to Rage Against the AI Music Machine If AI music takes over "humans will begin to echo the machines, and there will be a downward spiral into slop."

"In 1999, I interviewed Prince for TIME and he told me to leave my tape recorder off because he didn’t trust what future technology might do with unauthorized recordings of his voice.

At the time, I thought Prince was being paranoid..."

time.com/7338205/rage...

The Mexican grocery store in my neighborhood keeps their doors locked. You have to ring the doorbell to be let in.

They do this so their employees & customers don't get kidnapped by ICE. People were already abducted from their parking lot just trying to feed their families. Abhorrent.

I love this. I’ve been yelling to burn your Ring cameras but yeah get that money back

No, no. It's fine that residuals are dying. I've got a new constant stream of small checks: class action settlements from companies that failed to keep my personal data safe.

This is a kidnapper. See how easy that is? Media? Dems? This is what a kidnapper looks like and also what the people roaming around the streets snatching kids in the name of Donald Trump look like. They are the same. Only difference is our tax money pays for ICE.

This is what ICE looks like

Police in Bloomington, MN just announced that one of the guys they arrested in an underage sex trafficking sting was a **background checker for ICE agents.**

He had a high security clearance in the Trump administration... and he was caught trying to abuse children. Sickening.

Opinion | Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other In the past decade or so, dictators have forged transnational bonds that are stronger than ever.

To ironically quote WaPo's Editorial Board from 2023,

"...dictators have forged transnational bonds, sharing methods, copying tactics and learning from one another. They are finding new ways to quash free speech and independent journalism, eradicate NGOs, silence dissent and suffocate criticism."

How fascist is Sanae Takaichi, you ask?

She wrote the endorsement of a book about how Hitler's Nazi Party gamed the Weimar electoral system to seize power, and still won a supermajority in the National Diet for the first time since the Yanks dropped two atomic bombs

(this expose was from 2014!)

When a sitting representative refers to the Super Bowl halftime show as “pornography,” people should use that to reflect on how they and other representatives are simultaneously working to ban, censor, and restrict “pornography” and what that actually means

"It's not accurate to say that Puerto Rico has no value to us. It actually has negative value. We support it with our tax dollars. It does basically nothing for us in return. A total parasitic relationship."

The US extracted the wealth from Puerto Rico through sugar/tobacco plantations for decades while paying farm laborers almost nothing. The Jones act has taxed Puerto Ricans to prop up a US shipping cartel for a century. The only parasites are the wealthy Americans extracting wealth from the island.

see how easy it is when they're not as rich and powerful? now keep going

People ask me "why kelp is important". There's not enough space for all the reasons here but big reasons are that kelp can grow faster than any other any species fixing CO2, providing shelter and food. Urchins eat kelp plus they're "messy" eaters so they feed other species nearby.

I was at a party last september for a bunch of exchange students and their host families. two of the hosts were doctors who told me, earnestly, that whatever concerns I had around writing, AI was going to replace a lot of the work others did in medicine.

I remain skeptical.

Anyways, you can follow this starter pack I made of Generative AI slop-free news outlets here:

go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

People also have weird ideas about assigning moral values to mobility devices. Sometimes it is seen as weakness to use a device unless it is impossible to move without it. On the other hand, using a device that you don't regularly use can get you seen as a fraud.

People get weird about mobility devices — as though different devices are for different *kinds of people* rather than for different uses.

Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds Chatbots provided incorrect, conflicting medical advice, researchers found: “Despite all the hype, AI just isn't ready to take on the role of the physician.”

there has been a lot of hype recently around AI "passing medical exams." those stories and studies ignore the fact that people are complex, often opaque, difficult things, not a series of steps in a formula www.404media.co/chatbots-hea...

The idea that top surgery is more extreme, more risky, than repeated inpatient hospitalizations or increasingly hard core psych meds is a fallacy.

No, the surgery may not be fully reversible. Neither are those other things.

U.K. might lose a prime minister because a guy who worked for him knew another guy who hung out with Epstein. Meanwhile the U.S. opposition party is telling our President, who was Epstein's best friend, that his secret police should get better training so their public street murders look less messy.

this was way more prevalent when i was still on tiktok but it feels like people are getting really weird about alcohol, coffee, anything that might make you happy--even in innocuous amounts! feels like we're re-engineering puritanism as a method of maintaining control (over ourselves, each other)

Because of THIS FUCKING CHEESY HOT SUMMER GARBAGE RIGHT HERE, I cancelled my nitro, too!
www.theverge.com/tech/875309/...

That ad should be criminal. It’s like the nursing home flier sent to me during 2021 on how they were a great solution for people lonely due to COVID distancing.

There's a ChatGPT ad about a family farm where the owner says her family has been doing this for a hundred years and she doesn't want to be the one to screw it up and that's why she's getting advice from ChatGPT and, my God, can you people hear yourselves?