MirandaPitcher

We need people who are paid *a living wage* to help the community.

Literally, their job is to just be connected to their neighbors in their neighborhood and help. Clear sidewalks, help with emergencies, clear storm drains, deliver groceries, listen to people with trauma, mediate...

A lot of the stupid and toxic things about the world in which we currently live can be traced back to the philosophy of WIN OR FAIL and it is refreshing to see a legendary world champion caliber athlete tell that entire worldview to go fuck itself

every time they cave, it matters — because the more they lose, they more they'll lose

It’s day 79 of the ICE occupation of MSP.

It’s a winter wonderland outside.

Today’s assignment is to shovel or snowblow for your impacted neighbors. It’s the neighborly Minnesotan thing to do!

Word. I don’t use generative AI to write.

I was just the kid who every librarian knew by name and had a favorite spot in the library.

Yeah, I hope people don’t come away from this post thinking “they must be stupid or hypocrites” instead of seeing these as two parts of a unified international power projection policy

Tens of thousands of new mothers have been flagged to police over unreliable drug tests The Marshall Project found more than 70,000 cases referred to law enforcement over allegations of substance use during pregnancy—and that’s a significant undercount.

During her third pregnancy, Ayanna Harris-Rashid had used legal CBD gummies and a hemp-based ointment to ease her pain and nausea. At the hospital, she and the baby tested positive for marijuana, prompting providers to file a report with social services.

She was charged with felony child neglect.

gonna say something controversial and brave: different people work and solve problems in different ways, and those different ways are not all equally well adapted to different types of assistance including from genAI

This is my shocked face: 😐

Look, I love science fiction & desperately want many of its concepts & ideas to be real (but, y'know, w/ the sociotechnical concerns attended to because I Actually love sci-fi). But some people want sci-fi to be real so bad that they ignore obviously over-hyped bullshit

Please read the entire thread from the beginning because it is the story of how we thought we were getting scammed and instead met Marie, Hero for the Ages.

But if you want to skip to the good part: help us buy Marie a ton of red cards, because we know she's gonna use them VERY WELL.

Exactly, David. They did what they wanted to do when Trump admin was more than willing to take the blame.

What we know about Rev. Jesse Jackson's death and next week's services to honor him

Family have scheduled the reverend’s funeral arrangements for next week. Jesse Jackson will lie in state Wednesday, Feb. 25, and Thursday, Feb. 26, at Rainbow PUSH’s Kenwood headquarters. A “People’s Celebration” will be held at House of Hope on Friday, Feb. 27.

Our clients are Harvard Medical School doctors whose work was scrubbed for containing the words "LGBTQ" and "transgender."

Our settlement means their critical research on suicide risk and endometriosis cannot be removed again.

BREAKING: We reached a settlement that requires the Trump administration to permanently maintain medical research that had been erased on a government website.

The government doesn't get to censor science.

The Epstein-Johnny Depp-Justin Baldoni connection These men shared some of the same crisis publicists and PR strategies.

These crisis PR strategies: building a pseudo-feminist narrative around an alleged predator, relying on access journalists, and turning to partisan influencer "news" sources over actual journalists when that fails, are consistent across each of these cases. spitfirenews.com/p/epstein-jo...

An excerpt from the aforementioned Spitfire News article: One of those publicists, Nathan, is mentioned in the Epstein Files regarding a May 5, 2017 meeting scheduled between Epstein and Hiltzik that Sosenko and Nathan were supposed to attend. Bryan Freedman, the lawyer representing Baldoni and Nathan against Lively, denied that this meeting took place in an exclusive statement he shared with Zack Peter, a militantly anti-Lively and pro-Baldoni podcast host who gained attention in recent days for spreading cruel, baseless conspiracies that broadcaster Savannah Guthrie is hiding information from the public about her mother’s highly-publicized kidnapping. This is reminiscent of when Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman testified that he had been in contact with three pro-Depp YouTubers, engaging with them like he would with journalists. In Nathan’s case, the people most likely to care that she’s in the Epstein Files is the audience most avidly following the case against her and Baldoni. By issuing a denial through such a partisan source, she and Freedman are speaking through and to their most sympathetic audience. The mainstream media has yet to pick up on this, shielding the denial from much scrutiny. Peter didn’t respond to my request for comment.

Melissa Nathan, through her lawyer Bryan Freedman, denies that said meeting ever took place or that she would ever meet with Epstein. But you won't hear about her denial from any mainstream media sources, because they exclusively shared it with a pro-Baldoni, anti-Lively podcaster.

The Epstein-Johnny Depp-Justin Baldoni connection These men shared some of the same crisis publicists and PR strategies.

Matthew Hiltzik was the main point of contact for Epstein. One of his then-associates, Melissa Nathan, was listed as attending a meeting with them. She later represented Justin Baldoni and is now being sued by Blake Lively for an alleged PR campaign of retaliation. spitfirenews.com/p/epstein-jo...

The Epstein-Johnny Depp-Justin Baldoni connection These men shared some of the same crisis publicists and PR strategies.

Publicists who represented Johnny Depp during his 2022 trial against Amber Heard charged Jeffrey Epstein five figures a month for representation during 2017, according to invoices in the Epstein Files. Their PR strategies for Epstein reflect the later MeToo backlash. spitfirenews.com/p/epstein-jo...

In the concentration camp universe, this is what's known as a filtration camp. A government preemptively takes a whole class of people to interrogate and detain extrajudicially in order to inflict duress on them while arbitrarily assessing their (supposed) culpability.

If you haven't used your library in a while, see what they're offering now. They got all kinds of cool crap. Plus books, which I hear are all the rage with the kids on TikTok.

"93 per cent of residents say they're satisfied with library services."

Do you know how hard it is to get 93% of people to agree on anything, let alone for that thing to be satisfaction with a government service?

Libraries are freaking magic.

Wowwwww.

David was the one who helped me place my first public piece with the Washington Post. He’s been in this for a long time and is extremely helpful to academics wanting to speak to the public.

Donate to Support Whistle Distribution in Chicago and Beyond!, organized by Emily Hilleren Since late September, I’ve been organizing whistle kit assembly par… Emily Hilleren needs your support for Support Whistle Distribution in Chicago and Beyond!

I want to help Marie complete her utter domination by getting her the resources she needs. If we could print her tens of thousands of red cards, I have faith that she would distribute them ALL.

So help us help Marie.

www.gofundme.com/f/fund-whist...

BUT: this is where you come in.

Marie really, really needs a lot of red cards (Spanish + Vietnamese) and bifold know your rights cards to go with her whistle kits, and the area she's in doesn't have a ton of resources.

I was just listening, with my eyes turning into hearts, and I was just like, "you are amazing, you are amazing, we are going to get you all the whistles you can distribute and THEN some. What do you need and how can we help you????"

She has plans for bombarding the PTO to force the schools to adopt safe policy. She has SO many plans and she is executing all of them and delegating and getting SO MUCH WHISTLE DISTRIBUTION done.

Plus so many other things. SO MANY.

Thereupon follows the most EXTENSIVE and WELL THOUGHT OUT whistle distribution plan I have ever heard. Marie has bullied seven hundred people into her network. She is blanketing businesses with anti-ICE signage. She is giving out thousands of kits a week.

Ten minutes later, I get a call from Marie, who is very harried, and she's like "what's going on?"

So I explain that I'm from the whistle people and we just want to make sure that she has distribution capacity for the whistles she requested, and she sighs and says, "so here's what we're planning."

We had requests for 18,000 whistles for Whistletown, which has a population in the 100,000-ish range. It is part of a larger metro area, but...still. That's a LOT.

We started doing a little digging.