If you were around the KY/VA border on HWY 23 last Friday, you might have heard the sounds of an Appalachian shindig in downtown Pound. Pound, usually known for having almost lost its charter because of widespread corruption, is now showing up as a leader in true community-led revitalization. 1/5
I just signed a @theactionnetwork.bsky.social petition: Higher Ed Needs Collective Bargaining: Restore All Higher Education Workers' Collective Bargaining Rights. Sign here: actionnetwork.org/petitions/hi...
Among the real enduring questions of that moment that we should be working toward answering are 1) why did university leaders go along with repressing their own students' rights and ruining some of their lives for a genocide. And 2) Why did rank-and-file administrators who know better help them?
"Concentration camps exist to support and expand the power of an authoritarian regime. They make everyone afraid of being treated like the current targets of the regime. ... [C]oncentration camps accelerate the process of dehumanizing groups of people in the public imagination."
"But then the data center turned on, along with the eight natural gas turbines powering it. Now her home is barraged by a high-pitch whine that she says has made her newly screened-in porch unusable."
fuck me for being this person, i guess, but public universities are a civic good and shouldn’t be run like businesses. and if you’re going to insist on running them like so, at least do some market research. students like their professors; they don’t want MOOCs taught by ChatGPT.
Absolutely awful result in the "antifa terrorism" trial against the Prairieland noise demonstrators. Innocent people convicted under conspiracy statutes because they had zines at home, or wore black, or were in a Signal chat — even those who did not actually participate in the demonstration.
BREAKING: 18 Senate Dems confirm Trump's NSA Director:
Baldwin
Coons
Cortez Masto
Fetterman
Gillibrand
Hassan
Heinrich
Hirono
Kelly
King
Peters
Reed
Rosen
Schiff
Shaheen
Slotkin
Warner
Whitehouse
Idk what needs to happen for corporate Dems to be the opposition party—not fascism is OK party😐
300 families contributed 20% of all federal campaign donations in 2024
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/u...
TPUSA is teaming up with Google and NextEra in both municipal and statewide races in Arizona, in part to control the future of a gigantic, publicly owned water and power utility, the Salt River Project.
Note the coalition here. Masks are coming off at the utility and energy intersection.
I just took action with @theactionnetwork.bsky.social: Charlottesville's a Union Town: Collective Bargaining For All Town Hall. Take action here: actionnetwork.org/forms/blacks...
I think it’s helpful to keep in mind that the main purpose of public university boards in Virginia is political patronage, not quality leadership of higher education institutions.
ICE detained 650 ppl in WV during the first 2 weeks of January. Ten deportation flights left Charleston during that same period. WV is pissed.
mountainstatespotlight.org/2026/01/31/i...
“The absence of a case holding that warrantless, non-exigent, anonymous civil seizures…violate the 4A does not mean the Constitution permits them. It means the practice is new enough, and brazen enough, that no court has yet been required to state the obvious. This court is now required to say it.”
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
The only thing more dangerous than a leaky pipeline is a safely operating one. thecurrentowdm.substack.com/p/its-the-cl...
“The U.S. is now fully embracing the large detention camp model for those who by and large—according to its own agency reports—have committed no crime, save for crossing the border without papers.”
degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/building-t...
What kind of people working for which arm of DHS would destroy water supplies in a desert? In 2011?
The cruelty, violence and inhumanity of today is an escalation, but isn’t new.
Abolish ICE, CBP and DHS.
DHS should be embarrassed that their ICE agent hires are so soft they can’t handle being videotaped, even while masked, so they resort to pepper spraying women at close range.
And we should be proud of the Santa Barbara women who stood their ground anyway.
Same.
Ochoa and Raymundo have been with CBP since 2014 and 2018. More training and body cams won’t help.
Dismantle CPB
Abolish ICE
Eliminate DHS
Bipartisan negotiators released a DHS funding bill that does not significantly reduce ICE and CBP’s funding nor rein in the agencies’ abuses of power.
Make no mistake: Any Democrat who votes for this bill is complicit in Trump’s campaign of terror.
Grow a spine and vote no.
Incapable of understanding how "abolish ICE" was silly but arresting 5 year olds is public policy
And the world's first production solid-state battery comes from Finland!
“This is the moment internal combustion stops competing, and starts becoming irrelevant.”
New— An American citizen boarding flight from Boston to Lisbon just now told me after showing boarding pass, every passenger stopped on jetway by two ICE agents demanding to take their photo. When passenger asked why, ICE threatened to detain them. If they said no photo, couldn't board/TBD detained.
“The answer for humanists, as for the rest of the academy and the rest of civil society, is to organize.”
“Solar, wind power and batteries are set to make life a misery for the liquefied natural gas market.”
🤔
My only real hope is that Youngkin pisses off Spanberger enough by the 17th that she removes most or all of his appointments to university boards across the state, not just UVA. My assumption, tho, is that she won't, because of etiquette nonsense.
LNG exports from US up 22% over a year ago, when US was already largest exporter in the world. This is a significant cause of energy inflation costs in US.
insideclimatenews.org/news/17122025/liquefied-natural-gas-exports-driving-up-energy-bills/?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=8b44c2acfb
