Janet D. Stemwedel

Apropos of absolutely nothing tonight: www.chronicle.com/article/my-p...

The deluge of AI pitches we have been getting is horrid. And it makes it harder for real writers to get their pitches noticed. This is just making everything shittier for no purpose whatsoever.

People keep on asking me why I was paranoid when Trump fired the head of the Library of Congress and the Registrar of the Copyright Office and I said: copyright deposits would be awfully good to train AI.

So much for creating jobs…. “Microsoft just made $133.7B in net income last year. They just announced they are getting rid of 60k workers. I hate it here.”

The Trump Administration Gets an Early Start on Interfering in the Midterms

Yeah he may embody the literal definition of the word more than anybody else in popular political discourse. Pure colonizing energy.

Federal funding for science ensures that scientific agendas respond to the wants and needs of scientists and the public. We do not want to live in a society where the scientific agenda is set by a handful of billionaires.

NEW: buried in anthropic's hefty ipo documents released yesterday is an interesting admission: the company's increasing reliance on dirty gas to power its data centers is actually exposing it to financial risk wrote about it for @wired.com www.wired.com/story/anthro...

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered a police investigation into alleged ties between a donor network co-founded by Vice President JD Vance and the presidential campaign of Flávio Bolsonaro in the run-up to Sunday’s election.

Right-wing officials in Brazil are encouraging their followers to boycott establishments and fire employees that supported Lula.

me, reading the headline: well, he’s a public figure and actual malice is a hard standard to reach me, reading the article: ohhhhhhh

i am inviting anyone from a legacy media organization to explain to me why the house judiciary dems report on trump’s epstein’s ties and multiple allegations of rape isn’t worthy of extensively reporting on. i’m serious. i want to understand.

“Billionaires who popularized stock-based lending include Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. Both borrow to avoid having to sell shares—which could trigger a taxes and dilute their voting rights—in companies they founded.” www.wsj.com/finance/the-...

committee of philosophers, looking at the state of the humanities, says that philosophy is uniquely healthy--except for the kind of philosophy they don't like their prescription: more transphobia

You can do the same thing, buying a house and borrowing against it—ha ha, just kidding, normal people get taxed annually on their wealth via property taxes, the "you can't tax wealth, the economy will collapse!" rule applies solely to the super-rich.

It's very, very telling, I think, that the markets are so concerned about the pro-democracy incumbent winning

Attention mail-in voters: TODAY (Tuesday, Oct. 27) is the U.S. Postal Service's recommended deadline for mailing back ballots in states where they must be received by Election Day. You can also consider returning your ballot at your local election office or any available drop box instead.

Average Trump scandal: many people dead after uncontroversial government program illegally cut by doge for nonexistent savings Average mamdani scandal: he’s playing BASKETBALL with his FRIENDS

There was a brand new allegation that the president raped a woman in the 1990s yesterday and it appears to not be on the NYT homepage at all right now

There’s no such thing as a self-made billionaire. To accumulate that level of obscene capital you have to develop parasitical relationships to sabotaged systems and prove useful to explicitly anti-human projects.

Meta is accused of election interference in Brazil after restricting Lula's Instagram while recommending Bolsonaro's accounts. 1,613 foreign-funded political ads were uncovered generating 171M impressions. Brazil has ordered Meta to explain its conduct.

The researchers found the Environmental Protection Agency’s minimum reporting levels masked widespread contamination.

Why do anti-trans activists want this? This is abusive.

Ultimately, if you only have time to know one thing about all of this, just know that not a single solitary tech oligarch, tech company, or tech-backed politician has a single solitary serious commitment to the existence of Black political power or economic security in their plans for the future.

The next turn will likely sound like Malcolm X with an AI battery in his back. Something something about determining our own economic destiny. You should also ignore that. It’s nonsense.

I’m sure folks know this but you don’t need to know about dual cooling systems to know that you don’t want or need a data center in your community. Additionally, no, we don’t need a Black-owned data center in the name of a “seat at the table.” just to get out ahead on that foolishness.

Right, so, male influencers are being sent out to tell Black people that resisting data centers is wrong actually because people don't understand how to really measure their water use. It’s an appeal to scientific expertise intended to intimidate Black people.

This. And if most Americans weren't aware of this in 2019, I'd guess they're even less so now. Public university students were paying for a third of the cost of their education in 2009, and it was up to half by 2019. 2009 wasn't great compared to the 60s-70s, either. www.pbs.org/newshour/edu...

Google was really trying to hide its water use figures, to the degree that it got the council to try to keep its water use figures secret. The community finally got the actual numbers and found out Google was using 29 percent of the water in the community. www.wired.com/story/what-t...

Look who's New and Noteworthy at Barnes & Noble @restingdinoface.bsky.social 👏👏👏

Pope Leo expressed concern about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, appealing for peace in the country and the wider conflict-stricken region. “Never has it been more evident than today that wars, as well as sowing death and destruction, impoverish and harm the world,” he told crowds on 25 October.

you can find and join one near you: wecanbeavillage.org

i do not mean the democratic or republican base i mean independent political power, like unions, base-building organizations, member-led movements

we have to think so much less about finding the right candidates and so much more about building political power that makes individual candidates simple stewards of the will of the bases they are accountable to