Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man (September 20) "'When I found out an image of her has been exploited in what felt like a sexualised way by a massive company like that to market their product it left me feeling quite disgusted,' [the father of a 13-year-old] said."

2. U.K., Canada and Australia recognize a Palestinian state, despite U.S. opposition (September 21) "More than 140 of 193 UN member states already recognize Palestine as a state."

3. A neuroscientist explains how to break free from romantic infatuation (September 20) Ooh, there's a book on limerance. 

4. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade apologizes for saying mentally ill homeless people should be executed (September 15)

5. Flipping the Script on the Parable of the Dishonest Manager (September 21) "If we don’t understand that the whole system within which Reuben works is corrupt, we’ll miss what Jesus is really saying."

---

Links related to the antichrist. I read a lot of NPR, you may have noticed.

1. Trump’s NYT Lawsuit Tossed for Now as ‘Inexcusably’ Long (September 20)

2. Plane to purgatory: how Trump’s deportation program shuttles immigrants into lawless limbo (September 10) "'It seems the goal is to make people desperate enough so they decide not to fight their case, so they decide that the quickest way to see their other children or make sure they don’t have to deliver their babies in shackles is to accept a voluntary deportation,' said Toczylowski. 'It is particularly cruel.'"

3. California bans masks meant to hide law enforcement officers' identities (September 20)

4. Social media is shattering America's understanding of Charlie Kirk's death (September 20) "But nuance fails in online platforms designed to boost and sustain engagement and promote content likely to provoke a reaction from users. Already, social media pundits on the left are questioning whether the texts and interviews in the charging documents are real. Meanwhile, those on the right are agitating to declare left wing activists as terrorists."

5. Trump's new $100K fee on H-1B visas will hurt the tech companies trying to woo him (September 20)

6. 'We are all Jimmy Kimmel': What late night hosts are saying about Kimmel's suspension (September 19) "If ABC thinks this is going to satisfy the regime, they are woefully naive," Stephen Colbert said.

7. Defense Secretary Hegseth requires new 'pledge' for reporters at the Pentagon (September 20) "Going forward, journalists must sign a pledge not to gather any information, including unclassified reports, that hasn't been authorized for release." WTF

8. What Public Officials Are ICE Goons Arresting Today? (September 21) "At least a dozen state and local officials in the great state of New York were among the 71 people arrested Thursday during a protest at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, the federal building where ICE has been grabbing people as they leave their scheduled immigration hearings. Among those arrested was NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, who was also arrested in June while escorting an immigrant from a hearing room. The officials were hauled off after they requested to see the detention cells, where conditions for arrested immigrants are so bad that a federal judge on Wednesday ordered DHS to limit the number of people held, provide adequate food and clean conditions, and to ensure detainees’ access to attorneys."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How Star Trek’s Federation Actually Abandons Its Ideals (July 30) 43-minute video from Steve Shives.

2. TobyMac - Made To Love (Live from Alive & Transported) (2009) Christian music from a decade or so ago. I've always liked this song.

3. France, U.K., others plan to recognize a Palestinian state. What does that change? (August 1)

4. Debating Fascists (July 25) "This was a major topic of conversation in the early 2000s amongst scientists, who worried over whether it was worthwhile to debate “the other side” on issues like climate change and evolution."

5. An Amazing Truth About ALL Sudokus That We DIDN'T Know (July 27) 1-hour-23-minute sudoku solve video.

6. An Ohio couple welcomes a baby boy from a nearly 31-year-old frozen embryo (August 2) Cool, I'm happy for them. It's interesting how people's feelings and beliefs about frozen embryos had such a big influence on this whole process, all the paperwork, transporting the embryos, etc. Would have gone completely differently if the people involved had different beliefs about frozen embryos. Anyway, congrats to them~

7. YouTube will identify and restrict minors’ accounts with AI (July 30, via) Uh what? This seems like a terrible idea, because the algorithm is going to get it wrong sometimes. Of course it will get it wrong sometimes. You're never going to get an accuracy rate close enough to 100%.

8. Holocaust Memory in a Time of Genocide (July 31, via) "At this point, the fracture between the “universal” and the “particular-Jewish” components of Holocaust memory became an unbridgeable chasm: the “pro-Jewish” sentiment, which morphed into unconditional support for Israel and its murderous war following October 7, was completely severed from the universal sentiment of human rights."

9. Zootopia 2 | Trailer (July 30) Cool!

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Jon Stewart Reacts to Colbert's Cancellation & Trump's "Bawdy" Epstein Doodles | The Daily Show (July 22) "And if you believe, as corporations or as networks, you can make yourselves so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king's radar, A, why will anyone watch you? And you are ****ing wrong."

2. Trump push to ban birthright citizenship unconstitutional, US court rules (July 23, via) "The three-judge ruling panel in the 9th US circuit court of appeals echoed a district court in New Hampshire that blocked the executive order earlier this month."

3. Innocence, identity, and blood libel (part 1) (July 28) and Innocence, identity, and blood libel (part 2) 

4. Federal judge delays expiration of TPS for Hondurans, Nicaraguans and Nepalese (July 31) "It affects about 60,000 immigrants whose temporary protected status was set to expire. The protections for the Nepalese were set to terminate on Aug. 5. The protections for Nicaraguans and Hondurans would have ended Sept. 8. Most of them have been living in the U.S. for more than 20 years." This is just wild to me, that the MAGAs are arguing that people who've been in the US for over 20 years should just leave- like why? Why should they leave? Just because the MAGAs hate immigrants, not any actual reality-based reason.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How Classic Star Trek Actually Missed the Point About Racism (June 25, 43-minute video) "Captain Kirk never felt it was necessary to pull McCoy aside and say, 'Hey, man, next time you disagree with Spock, maybe try not to mention what color his blood is.'"

2. Israel kills over 300 Palestinians in 48 hours as Gaza runs out of graves (July 3, via)

Also from Gaza: Knives, bullets and thieves: the quest for food in Gaza (July 6) "At the distribution site, I pushed people aside and grabbed whatever food I found tossed on the ground under torn cardboard boxes: cooking oil, biscuits, a bag of rice that had been torn open and was mixed with sand from the ground. I didn't care. It's food. I can wash it."

The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world (July 6, via) "This collapse began with the liberal world’s lack of resolve to rein in Israel’s war in Gaza. It escalated when no one lifted a finger to stop hospitals being bombed. It expanded when mass starvation became a weapon of war. And it is peaking at a time when total war is no longer viewed as a human abhorrence but is instead the deliberate policy of the state of Israel."

3. AI chatbots oversimplify scientific studies and gloss over critical details — the newest models are especially guilty (July 5, via) 

I've started using Deepseek at work, asking it for help with programming tasks. There are some things it's good at, but also, sometimes it just has no idea what it's talking about, and it's not immediately obvious when those times are. Its output reads as equally authoritative and confident regardless. One trick I've figured out is, if I read Deepseek's output and I feel like "I didn't quite understand this, let me read it again more carefully"- that's a red flag, it's likely that reading more carefully is just going to be a waste of time.

See, normally when you encounter text that sounds like it knows what it's talking about, but you can't quite understand it, it DOES help to spend more time reading it carefully. Because a person wrote it, and they had an idea of what they wanted to say, and they made decisions about what details to include. If it turns out their answer is not useful for you, that might be because they were working on a different thing than what you are doing, or they were wrong about it, or they made typos when writing. But for an AI-generated text, the concepts of having an idea it's trying to communicate, and being right or wrong about it- these concepts don't have any meaning when we're talking about AI-generated text. The LLM simply generates something that comes across as the sort of thing that would be an answer to your question. That's it. 

I've found that it's especially misleading when you're trying to write code to do something, which could be done in several different ways, with different groups of functions applying to each way (and some of them are deprecated, and some of them only work with certain versions of certain software packages, etc)- the LLM will sort of combine these seamlessly so you don't *at all* get the understanding that, if you use *this* function, you need to also be using *this other* function, but not *that other* one.

Like this one time Deepseek gave me some code to use that had 2 different functions in it, and then later as I continued to debug, Deepseek brought up the point that if I'm using this one approach, I shouldn't use this other approach, and I'm like "you literally gave me code that said to do it that way" and Deepseek is all like "you're right to point that out!" and then I got mad at it, but there's nothing to be gained from arguing with Deepseek, so don't do that. It's never going to actually understand what it did wrong and do better.

Anyway, sometimes it's really helpful. But when it's not helpful, it's very deceptive, because the output text is so friendly and easy to read and makes you feel like you're just 1 step away from solving your problem. This is the sort of thing that I think we as a society need to spend more time really thinking through what the use-case is, and what strategies we should use so it's actually effective and useful. Education about best practices.

Because right now, people are treating LLMs like the output they give you is the answer to your question, and oh yikes, no, that's not what it is. The output is the sort of thing that we might imagine someone might say in response to your question, but that has an tenuous connection to what's actually true and/or makes sense.

4. The ultra-selfish gene (2024) Really interesting article about how gene editing can be used to wipe out the subspecies of mosquito which carries malaria- which could potentially save hundreds of thousands of people's lives every year. But, releasing an edited gene into the wild, to wipe out a whole subspecies- uh, better think carefully about if you really want to do that. A lot of unexpected things could go wrong. This article takes those risks seriously and talks about strategies to reduce the risk. There is a lot of potential for this technology to be used for good.

5. A Rough Ride: ‘Dirty’ Workers Stand Up to Subway Stares (July 4) "This leaves manual workers who need to commute in dusty clothes in a bind: they can either take a seat and potentially face the ire of fellow passengers, sit on the floor and risk injury, or stay on their weary feet throughout the journey."

6. I released my game (July 5) This is a cool game if you like math~

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. 4 things to know about the vaccine ingredient thimerosal (July 6) "Fiscus, from the Association of Immunization Managers, says the committee's decision to only recommend single-dose flu shots without thimerosal shows that it is willing to make a decision without following protocol and considering the scientific evidence. 'Is this now going to be the standard?' she says. 'That's very concerning if that's where this is heading.'"

2. Arlington woman detained by ICE after her honeymoon speaks publicly for the first time (July 3) "'I did lose five months of my life because I was criminalized for being stateless,' she said. 'Something that I absolutely have no control over. I didn't choose to be stateless, I didn't do a crime that made me stateless. I had no choice.'"

3. Abrego Garcia says he was severely beaten in Salvadoran prison (July 3)

4. UPenn updates swimming records to settle with feds on transgender athletes case (July 2) "The University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday modified a trio of school records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and said it would apologize to female athletes "disadvantaged" by her participation on the women's swimming team, part of a resolution of a federal civil rights case." They're really going to a lot of effort just to be mean to Lia Thomas specifically. 

5. All the children of the world (July 7) "That committee also organized our annual Missions Conference, which began each year with young people from our church parading through the sanctuary carrying the flags of every nation our missionaries served. “World Missions” was an integral part of that church’s identity and the faith taught, learned, and lived there."

6. Projected Mortality Impacts of the Budget Reconciliation Bill (June 3, via) "Including that impact, the researchers project that these changes will result in over 51,000 preventable deaths."

7. Bombshell report alleges El Salvador disclaimed responsibility for those U.S. sent to CECOT (July 8) "El Salvador, per the U.N. working group’s report attached to the filing, acknowledged that it had 'facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure' by the U.S. — but also stated that, '[i]n this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the' U.S."

Blogaround

Hey, all the links today are news. You may be thinking to yourself, "Does Perfect Number just go read NPR and then copy all the links to here?" Well, that's a big chunk of it, yes.

---

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Guns are the leading cause of death of kids and teens, and state laws matter (June 11)

2. Unanimous Supreme Court makes it easier to sue schools in disability cases (June 12) "'This is bigger than our family,' Aaron Tharpe, Ava's father, told NPR. Tharpe said the most important thing about the ruling is that it gives other families who don't have the resources he does, the tools to fight back."

3. EXCLUSIVE: American Security Contractor Unloads On US-Israeli ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (June 12, via) "We all got in a line and began pushing these people out. We’re telling crying women trying to pick up food for their families that they had to go. They were looking at this food on the ground that they desperately needed, and they couldn’t take it. It was absolutely horrific."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Where are the people the Trump administration has deported? (June 12) This is a good summary of a bunch of the cases we've been hearing about, though it certainly doesn't include everyone who has been deported.

2. Rep. McIver is indicted on federal charges related to tussle at immigration facility (June 11) "'The facts of this case will prove I was simply doing my job,' the representative said in a statement. She called the proceedings against her 'a brazen attempt at political intimidation.'"

3. Federal court orders resumption of legal services to separated families (June 11) "The ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government over “Zero Tolerance” in February of 2018, arguing that separating families was unnecessary under the law and that the policy deprived migrant families of their right to due process."

4. How a shoplifting arrest in upstate NY summoned ICE and separated a family (June 11) "The case is one of several recent incidents fueling an ongoing debate about immigration among lawmakers. Should New York become a sanctuary state, following some of its biggest cities in passing a law to limit all local cooperation with immigration agents? Or should local law enforcement be compelled to contact ICE every time they cross paths with an undocumented immigrant – even people suspected of the smallest of crimes?"

5. Senator Alex Padilla handcuffed and forcibly removed from Kristi Noem’s LA press conference (June 12) "'If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question, if this is how the DHS responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they’re doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers, throughout the LA community and throughout California and throughout the country,' Padilla, the son of immigrants from Mexico, told reporters. 'We will hold this administration accountable.'"

Also about LA: Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence (June 9) "All I've read about so far in L.A. is property damage by protestrs, while we've seen many kinds of violence and intimidation from the heavily armored and armed thugs serving the Trump Administration's war on immigrants."

6. Despite ongoing Taliban threats, the U.S. is ending some protections for Afghans (June 12) "The administration's claim that Afghan security and its economy have improved is widely disputed. The State Department strongly advises against travel to Afghanistan, 'due to civil unrest, crime, terrorism, risk of wrongful detention, kidnapping, and limited health facilities.'"

7. The GOP's massive bill would benefit the rich the most — while hitting the poor (June 12) 

8. ICE's novel strategy allows for more arrests from inside immigration courts (June 12) "Under the new approach, after their case is dismissed, immigrants are arrested again, at times before even leaving the building — as happened with Aliaksandr Bulaty. Then they're put in a process called expedited removal: a fast-track for deportation that does not guarantee the right to a day in court and comes with a five-year restriction on attempting to return to the U.S."

9. ‘Too Big a Risk’: Chinese Students Rethink the American Dream (June 13) "Lin, who was preparing to study law at the University of California, Berkeley, went straight to the U.S. visa site to try and book a visa appointment. For the next several hours, she cycled between browsers, devices, and VPN nodes, fighting her way through the overloaded visa portal. Each time she got close to booking an interview, the system crashed."

10. To my newborn son: I am absent not out of apathy, but conviction (May 11) "Like other Palestinian fathers, I was separated from you by racist regimes and distant prisons. In Palestine, this pain is part of daily life. Babies are born every day without their fathers – not because their fathers chose to leave, but because they are taken by war, by bombs, by prison cells and by the cold machinery of occupation. The grief your mother and I feel is but one drop in a sea of sorrow that Palestinian families have drowned in for generations." By Mahmoud Khalil.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Find out why your health insurer denied your claim. (via) "ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage. Get your claim file before submitting an appeal."

2. Israel kills 32 Palestinians waiting for food at US-backed Gaza aid sites (June 2, via) "Condemning the attacks, the Government Media Office described the GHF distribution sites as 'mass death traps, not humanitarian relief points'."

3. Ultramarathon runner breastfeeds her baby 3 times on her way to a surprise win (May 30) Wow! Good for her!

4. MIT class president barred from graduation after speaking out on Gaza (June 2)

The speech is very good! Watch it here: MIT Class President Megha Vemuri’s Viral Graduation Speech on Israel’s Genocide in Gaza (May 30) 

5. Penn & Teller’s Entropy: ‘The Weirdest Trick We’ve Ever Done’ | Penn & Teller: Fool Us | The CW (February 22) This is fun, I like this.

6. How six months in the West Bank undid a lifetime of Zionist indoctrination (May 30, via) "Through All That’s Left, I began traveling regularly to the West Bank with a perspective wholly different from my 18-year-old self. I joined Palestinian farmers in their fields, accompanied shepherds grazing their flocks, attended protests against Israeli state violence, and eventually spent nights — then weeks, then months — in Palestinian villages. As part of protective presence activism, my fellow activists and I documented settler attacks and military incursions, hoping our privileged status in the eyes of the state might deter violence."

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. This:

Image shows 2 photos: Kermit the Frog and Trump. Image text: "Here we have a photo of a commencement address being given by a puppet controlled by someone else... and a photo of Kermit the Frog giving a commencement address." Image source.

Wait, Kermit the Frog gave a commencement speech? Apparently yes! Kermit the Frog delivers commencement speech to University of Maryland graduates (May 23)

2. The Compassion of Strangers (June 1) "Witness what happened in San Diego outside the popular Buona Forchetta restaurant in South Park. When I.C.E. showed up in its vans to detain workers—not criminals, but workers—the community did not stand idly by. They began to fill the streets, block vehicles, and were eventually dispersed with flash bangs."

3. Trump Administration Knew Vast Majority of Venezuelans Sent to Salvadoran Prison Had Not Been Convicted of U.S. Crimes (May 30) "President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as 'rapists,' 'savages,' 'monsters' and 'the worst of the worst.' When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down."

4. Make America ChatGPT again: Experts say AI was used to create RFK Jr health report that cited false studies (May 30) "Analysis conducted by The Post found that at least 21 links in the original version of the report to scientific studies or articles were dead."

5. SCOTUS allows the Trump admin to end legal status for another half-million people (May 31) "'[S]omehow, the Court has now apparently determined … that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims,' [Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson] wrote."

6. The Trump administration is making the country less safe for domestic violence victims (May 30) "Funding pauses, cuts, firings and information purges have destabilized the infrastructure that helps victims of abuse. At the same time, federal teams dedicated to preventing sexual violence are being decimated. Departments in charge of administering grants that fund shelters for those fleeing assault have been deemed 'duplicative, DEI or simply unnecessary.'"

You know how MAGAs are saying all these things about how we need to stop trans people from using the bathroom, because we care oh so much about preventing violence against women? Well, no, the MAGA government does NOT care about protecting women. (I don't make any claims about the average Republican voter, perhaps on some level the average voter *does* want to protect women from domestic violence. I'm just talking about what we can see the government is doing.) They are making cuts to the programs that actually help. Their talk about "protecting women" is actually just about scoring points in a culture war.

7. US judge rules prisons must provide gender-affirming care for trans people (June 3) "Even if it had extensively studied the issue before deciding to stop gender-affirming care, the decision might still violate the US constitution’s eighth amendment’s protections against “cruel and unusual” punishment, Lamberth wrote."

8. Impact Metrics Dashboard (via) A website that estimates the number of deaths due to USAID cuts. Current estimate is that over 300.000 people have died. (Some background information about where this page came from: Tracking Anticipated Deaths from USAID Funding Cuts)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Facing up to the Price on Life (January 29) "I think it’s very important to appreciate that there is no such compulsion: you can acknowledge reality, do a bunch more good than almost anyone else, and still live an incredibly privileged—even self-indulgent—life."

Very excited to find this post- finally, someone is talking about something I've been worried about my entire life: If there are so many people in need in the world, and I have more money than I need, shouldn't I donate literally as much as I possibly can, causing huge hardship to myself? How can it be okay for me to have a savings account when there are people going through emergencies right now? And this writer comes to the same solution as I have: compartmentalize. Decide on a total amount to give- this should be pretty big, bigger than what the average person gives- and then use the rest of the money for myself and quit worrying about if I'm doing enough.

2. Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50,000 cash (March 5) "A style magazine published an account of a large cash withdrawal that didn't match my understanding of banking reality. I burned several thousand dollars and a year investigating. I now doubt that account less, because I understand the context better." Yessssssss this is the exact kind of fact-checking content I am interested in.

---

Links related to the antichrist:

1. D.C.'s Black Lives Matter mural will be erased. Look back at the iconic street painting (March 8)

2. Trump DOJ's limits on FACE Act enforcement fuel concern from abortion providers (March 9) "The law prohibits threat of force, obstruction and property damage meant to interfere with reproductive health care services, including abortion."

3. DOD Will No Longer Prohibit Contractors from Running Segregated Facilities (March 6) I don't know what to make of this- I've seen commenters on the internet talking about this like it means the government wants to allow racial segregation, but I don't think we should interpret it that way. I mean, yes these people are really racist and are undoing laws that were put in place during the civil rights movement, but I don't think *this specific example* is about that. Let's be careful we don't misrepresent what's going on. I think this- getting rid of the policies that banned segregation in the military- is because those policies included protections for trans people.

4. “Absurd, nonsensical, and unimplementable”: Students react as D.C. U.S. Attorney takes aim at DEI and Georgetown Law (March 9) "'Their definition of DEI is hopelessly vague,' David Super, a GULC professor, said. 'They’re talking about some things that are completely unobjectionable, some things that are controversial, and some things that probably don’t exist at all, all under that one heading, which is irresponsible.'"

5. Hundreds protest Trump administration arrest of Columbia student leader Mahmoud Khalil (March 11) "Khalil's attorneys said he is a green card holder married to an American citizen, and are challenging the validity of the arrest and detention."

6. Trump Makes Supporting Trans People Ineligible For Public Service Loan Forgiveness Via EO (March 11) "Clearly, many organizations could be swept up in this attempt to remove Public Service Loan Forgiveness for those supporting transgender people." This is alarming. The MAGAs aren't just being mean to trans people- they're trying to require everyone else to be mean to trans people too.

Also from Erin in the Morning: "Have You No Decency?": Republican Calls Sarah McBride "Mister," Dems Erupt And End Hearing (March 12) 

7. Love Knows No Borders: Walls, Deportations, & Tariffs (February 7) "During COVID, you may have seen on the news that some couples found ways around border restrictions. One way was to visit each other at the border. Meaning that we found a Canadian road that ran east-west, parallel to a US road. The ditch between these two roads was the actual border."

Blogaround

Posts not related to that felon/ fascist nonsense:

1. China’s new and cheaper magic beans shock America’s unprepared magic bean salesmen (January 29, via) "'DeepBean’s new beans only require a third of the water that American beans need to not grow into anything of value,' an analyst said."

2. Home and whole and ‘back to normal’ (February 2) Those of you who follow the Slacktivist's blog may know that his wife has spent 3 years trying to get a surgery she needs because of constant pain, and it keeps being delayed. Well, she finally had the surgery. This is great news! Very happy for her!

---

And the posts about that felon/ fascist nonsense:

1. Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral (January 29, via) "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible."

2. As Part of 'Authoritarian Takeover,' Trump Signs Order to Deport Pro-Palestine Students (January 29, via)

3. A Line By Line Analysis Of Trump's Youth Care Ban Executive Order (January 30) 

Also from Erin Reed: School Systems Across US Declare They Will Not Comply With Trump's Anti-Trans Executive Order (February 1) "The claims in their statement are false. We do not have a policy that violates anyone’s rights or indoctrinates children. What we do have is a culture of respect—one that honors the dignity and diversity of all students, families, and educators."

4. How They Lie: Trump's Executive Orders (January 30) "The executive order relies on cis normativity to communicate body horror that simply does not exist when trans care is provided to the right people at their own request in a patient-centered, patient-empowered context."

5. Mass Deportations: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (February 3)

6. US Postal Service flip-flops on Hong Kong-China packages, lifting a ban imposed a day earlier (February 6) This is all a bit ridiculous. I'm an American in China, and I saw a lot of confusion in the WeChat groups for Americans the other day, people trying to figure out what to do about the package they need to mail back to their mom. These sudden policy changes are really not cool.

7. Are abortion bans across America causing deaths? The states that passed them are doing little to find out. (December 23, via) "'I can’t imagine the states that passed restrictions saying, ‘Now we want to know if that caused any deaths,’' said Eugene Declercq, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who serves on Massachusetts’ maternal mortality review committee. 'The clinicians and the public health people might want to know, but the political leaders would be aghast.'"

8. Donald Trump’s Second Term Begins With a Crash (January 30, via) "Also on January 20, Trump imposed a hiring freeze across the entire federal government, and air traffic controllers (ATCs) are federal employees. The FAA has been struggling for years to make up for an ATC shortage caused by the pandemic; though it finally met its hiring goal in 2024, controllers are still reportedly stretched thin. As Reps. Rick Larsen (D-WA) and Steve Cohen (D-TN) pointed out in a joint press release, Trump’s move was both illegal, as the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 requires maximum staffing of ATCs, and dangerous. 'Hiring air traffic controllers is the number one safety issue according to the entire aviation industry,' they wrote."

9. Second judge blocks Trump's birthright citizenship order in back-to-back rulings (February 6) "'All I have wanted is to focus on my baby being born healthy and safe, but instead, even though my baby will be born in the U.S., I have been worried that they will be denied a right is that guaranteed under the constitution — the right to be a U.S. citizen,' Garcia said in a statement after the decision. 'This ruling will give mothers like me a bit of temporary relief as we navigate pregnancy and the uncertain future for our babies.'"

10. NSA museum covered plaques honoring women and people of color, provoking an uproar (February 5)

11. This meme:

12. Is Somebody Doing Something?! (February 4) "It’s helpful to think of the response as falling into four distinct yet sometimes overlapping categories, each with increasing urgency. These responses include the personal, the political, the legal and the popular."

Blogaround

1. Do not obey in advance (November 9) Yes, good advice. I think right now people are feeling like, the orange antichrist won and he'll have the power to actually implement all the bad ideas he campaigned on. And, yes, maybe, but he'll have to do a lot of work to get there- maybe his people will be incompetent. Let's hope for that. Don't act like he's already done it. Don't help him along.

2. Links to donate to help Palestine: Palestine Children's Relief Fund and American Near East Refugee Aid 

3. This Was Always Going To Be A Generational Fight For Transgender People (November 7) "To those who feel hopeless—don’t. The story didn’t end in 2004. Obama would eventually go on to champion gay rights, and public opinion shifted significantly over the next decade. Allies stood by gay people and grew in number, helping to foster broader acceptance. Anti-gay policy platforms slowly but surely became positions held only by the most fundamentalist religious politicians."

4. Number Shortage (November 8) Lolllll

5. We Fell For The Oldest Lie On The Internet (October 29, 13-minute video from Kurzgesagt) Love this! It's a video about tracking down the source for the "science fun fact" that the total length of all blood vessels in a person's body is 100,000 km.

6. She Helped a Survivor. Now She Is One. (October 25) "One thing that struck me repeatedly in this is that some level of fact-checking would have debunked some of these claims much earlier, if someone had had the presence of mind to attend to them (I dearly wish Abby had simply taken a medicine vial out of the trash and photographed the label — Abby does too). But these claims weren’t fact-checked, because to investigate the belief that someone you love isn’t telling you the truth is incredibly frightening. They weren’t fact-checked because the people who knew the facts were exhausted, caring for a newborn, toddler, and adult. They weren’t sleeping. They were largely isolated from others and had been pressured by someone they cared about deeply not to tell anyone what was happening in their home. They didn’t just do it out of fear of the next blow-up, and exhaustion. They did it out of love. They wanted this woman who they cared about to be happy and safe."

Very long post from Laura Robinson about Hannah-Kate Williams (a survivor of child abuse) and Abby Osborne, who opened her home to Williams and helped her with medical care and paid thousands and thousands of dollars for Williams' expenses- Abby has now come forward to say that Williams was dishonest and manipulative and all of this has been very harmful to Abby and her family. 

It's important to be honest about stories like this. Simplistically, we want Williams to be on the "good" side because she's an abuse survivor and she's involved in legal advocacy to hold the Southern Baptist Convention accountable for that. And so, we feel like we're not "supposed" to say anything bad about her. That's messed up.

7. Human Nature, Hope & Ice Cream (November 9, 11-minute video) A video from Pop Culture Detective making the case that it's NOT true that human nature is basically evil.

8. Two kinds of LLM hallucinations (November 13) "It’s not just about models saying something wrong, it’s about the way they say it. People are used to expressing some degree of uncertainty when they feel uncertain, and used to picking up uncertainty in other people. AI models often lack these signs of uncertainty, and this can be a problem in natural conversation. However, this subject is not discussed at all in the review, and so it appears not to be a major research area."

9. The US Is a Civic Desert. To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Transform Itself. (November 11) Posting this here because wow I've never heard of anything like this before. Imagine a world where a political party is manifested as a local group of real-life people who meet up and get to know each other, and support each other.

10. How Originalism Ate the Law (May 8, via) "They understand intuitively that while public opinion favors reproductive freedom and sensible gun regulations and the right to vote, the MAGA faction of the Supreme Court has found a doctrinal party trick to ensure that nobody can have any of those things because they weren’t protected at the founding or at the time of the Reconstruction Amendments, or whichever point of history the high court deems relevant (it varies)."

And I'm noticing some interesting parallels between "originalism" and how evangelicals read the bible.

Blogaround

1. A Special Monologue for the Republican in Your Life (October 30) Video from Jimmy Kimmel, making the argument that Trump is unfit to be president. This is meant to speak to the average Republican, and mainly shows clips of Trump, so you can see for yourself what he is really like.

2. A few xkcd comics that made me laugh: Wells (October 28) and Demons (November 1)

3. Say their names: Savita. Josseli. (October 30) [content note: it's about women who died because they were unable to get abortion care] "It took six years, but there was a direct line from Savita Halappanavar’s agonizing, preventable death to the amendment of Ireland’s Constitution in 2018."

4. UNICEF warns of 'deadly' effect on Palestinian children after Israel ban on UNRWA (October 31, via)

5. Fairness in Sports (October 13) "If all the ad money spent screaming about trans people in sports were instead spent on providing scholarships, you would have far more new scholarships than there are trans scholarship athletes in the entire country." An article from a trans person, which goes through different levels of sports competition and talks about what policies actually make sense.

Also from Crip Dyke: Pro Publica has it half right. (October 19) "What was remarkable about all this was that in each case [since the 1600s] the people seeking to block some marriages argued that such marriages were anti-god, anti-family, sexually perverted or debauched, prone to illness and encouraging of drug or alcohol abuse."

6. Star Trek Retro Review: "Yesterday's Enterprise" (TNG) | Alternate Timelines (November 1) "Picard's like, 'whattttt?' Tasha says, 'I talked to Guinan.' Picard's like, 'Oh Jesus, what did she say?'" (27-minute video)

7. Workers Say They Were Tricked and Threatened as Part of Elon Musk’s Get-Out-the-Vote Effort (October 30) "But by Sunday, the door knockers were loaded into a rented U-Haul moving van with no rear seating or seatbelts, in a photo and videos viewed by WIRED. 'We were all told our transportation would be handled and we’d be in rental cars. It turned out to be U-Haul vans, and I felt embarrassed and played,' the door knocker tells WIRED."

8. PBS KIDS shows that you totally forgot existed 📺📚🦁 (August 21, 52-minute video) Oh look, it's a video about my childhood. This makes me want to find episodes of "Liberty's Kids" for my son to watch.

Blogaround

1. A branch of the flu family tree has died and won't be included in future US vaccines (March 7, via) "A type of flu virus that used to sicken people every year hasn't been spotted anywhere on Earth since March 2020. As such, experts have advised that the apparently extinct viruses be removed from next year's flu vaccines." Cool!

2. Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent (March 20, via) "Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week."

3. Therapist Reacts to THE LION KING (2023) "When adults tell us things when we're children, and we internalize those messages, and we have a hard time challenging them once we're adults." (28-minute video from Cinema Therapy)

4. What Biden Would Do if He Were Serious About Ending the War in Gaza (March 19, via) "This was about as weak of a position as could be imagined: The President had definitely thought about maybe doing something."

5. Is It Possible To Solve This? (March 22) 1-hour-2-minute sudoku solve video. I like this one because you have to spend a lot of time thinking through the overall nature of the puzzle first, before you can even begin to think about which digit can go in which cell.

6. Omelas, Je T'Aime (2022, via) "Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are—at this very moment!—already in exactly this situation."

7. “What Can I Even Say Without Having to Go to Jail?” (February 22, via) "Across the country, domestic and sexual violence treatment and prevention programs are run by state-led, federally funded coalitions tasked with overseeing organizations in their state. These groups, in theory, should be grappling with how to incorporate information about state abortion bans into advocates’ daily work."

8. Apple Jing’an now open in Shanghai (March 21) Tim Cook came to Shanghai for the opening of Asia's biggest Apple store.

9. Trump is selling ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles for $59.99 as he faces mounting legal bills (March 27) "Besides a King James Version translation, it includes copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as a handwritten chorus of the famous Greenwood song." Eww, gross, how will I explain this to my children? This reads like he's viewing the bible as a symbol of being a good American, instead of actually understanding anything about what the bible is. 

Tell me you've never read the bible without telling me.

Blogaround

1. THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE and Self Love vs. Narcissism (November 8) "The Emperor's New Groove" is such a good movie!

2. Some good news on climate change (November 18) "The best message, practically speaking, would combine sounding a very loud and continuous alarm with various facts about how real progress is being made on the technological side toward ameliorating the trajectory of climate change, on both a long term and shorter term basis."

3. At SpaceX, worker injuries soar in Elon Musk’s rush to Mars (November 10) [content note: injury and death] "'Elon’s concept that SpaceX is on this mission to go to Mars as fast as possible and save humanity permeates every part of the company,' said Tom Moline, a former SpaceX senior avionics engineer who was among a group of employees fired after raising workplace complaints. 'The company justifies casting aside anything that could stand in the way of accomplishing that goal, including worker safety.'"

4. Has the ‘Double Eleven’ Shopping Festival Lost its Luster? (November 21) In China, "double eleven" (双11, November 11) is a big online shopping day, kinda the same idea as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. But this article says in recent years, the excitement for double eleven deals has kind of worn off.

Also from Sixth Tone: A Food Courier’s Pursuit of Equal Treatment (November 25) "He shares that a large state-owned enterprise that he often visits doesn’t allow couriers inside, nor will it put a table at the entrance for riders to leave takeout deliveries, meaning they need to wait downstairs and hold the food until the customer comes to collect it." 

Yeah, I order food to get delivered almost every day- it's very convenient in China, and I always see tons of delivery drivers on their electric scooters, rushing around to deliver food. From what I've heard, they're under a lot of pressure to deliver the food as fast as possible, or else they get fined- and this means they often rush through red lights and do other unsafe things, to shave off a few seconds. Sounds like a really hard job. At the office building where I work, there's a locker outside the back door of the building, and the delivery drivers put the deliveries in the locker and then you get a notification on the app- this seems to work out well for the drivers because they just stick it in the locker, give you a phone call to let you know, and then they can leave, they don't have to wait for you to come down in the elevator and pick it up.

I've had situations where the driver was at the wrong building, and calling me to ask me how to get to my address, and he asked me if he can mark in the app that the order has been delivered- ie, he marks it as complete so the app doesn't get him in trouble for being late, and then he finds his way to the right address and gives me the food. 

5. Plain white Cru not white enough for Florida evangelicals (November 22) "As a result, those Republican Christians no longer respond to Cru the way that any normal person would. A normal person would be, like, 'Oh, you mean that campus ministry group that’s so fundie they make Young Life seem cool by comparison?'"

6. I Don’t Think That Parable Means What You Think It Means (November 22) "As I encountered these parables growing up in my faith tradition, I was taught that the most powerful person in a given parable—the vineyard owner, the rich man, the king—is supposed to be God. Bolz-Weber addresses this directly: 'Why in the world do we always assume that the ruler, the slave owner, the property owner, the tyrant in the story always represents God?'"

7. In wake of state bans, abortions overall rise, reproductive care falls (October 25) "Where abortion is banned around the world, there is usually more death, not less, on account of maternal mortality rates (MMRs)."

8. Will Anti-abortion Laws Drive Women to Colleges in Blue States? (November 4?) Wow, this is really fascinating to me, because when I was in college/ in high school deciding where to go to college, never in a million years would it have occurred to me "what if I need an abortion? I should go to college in a state with abortion access." I was "pro-life" back then, because everyone I knew seemed to be "pro-life"- I had never even heard any pro-choice arguments, and I hadn't the faintest idea about what kind of reasoning could possibly lead people to be pro-choice. The idea of me having sex was unimaginable to me, the idea of me ever having sex before marriage was unimaginable to me, the idea of being one of those "bad" women who wants to have an abortion was unimaginable to me. I very much did not see it as a "women's issue" that affects everyone with a uterus- I saw it as only something that bad women would ever try to access, and of course we should make laws to stop those bad women, right?

So, really mind-blowing to me to think about high school girls putting serious thought into how these laws affect them. (I mean, also apparently a lot of high school kids are having sex, and I find that hard to fathom too...)

Also from Skepchick: The Hamas Hostage with “Stockholm Syndrome” (November 11?) "Instead of it being an actual psychological phenomenon, it’s just a story the media likes to tell when explaining victim behavior that people might not immediately understand."

9. Ah, in my post about young-earth creationism, I can't believe I forgot to include a link to Joel Duff's blog, Naturalis Historia. (I have now edited the post to include a link.) If you want to know all the specific details about how young-earth creationism can't account for the scientific evidence we find in the fossil record, etc, you definitely want to read his blog.

10. [trigger warning for transmisia] I don't recommend reading this one, but I want to at least mention it here so nobody ever forgets what kind of hateful trash The Gospel Coalition is publishing about trans people. On November 22, they published a post called "I Love My Transgender Child. I Love Jesus More." (archive link) 

I'm not gonna respond to this, I will just say this: God is nonbinary. And Jesus said, "whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me"- if you're mean to trans people, you're being mean to Jesus. (Observant readers may notice that this is THE OPPOSITE of what that article headline says- like you have to choose between loving Jesus and loving your trans child. WTF.) And if you cause a trans child to hate themself, well, Jesus said, "If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

And just as God is the Creator, people are made in God's image, and people reflect God's image by creating too. Trans people create their own identity, their own gender expression, and that's an amazing and godly thing.

And if you worship a god who requires you to be cruel to trans people, that's on you. You could worship a different god. You could worship no gods at all. What does it say about you, that you choose to worship that kind of god?

11. China trials visa-free travel for six countries (November 24) The six countries are: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Malaysia- travelers from these countries will be allowed to stay in China for up to 15 days, without a visa. Interesting! I wonder why they're doing this- I'm guessing it's to encourage tourism, to have good relationships with those countries, and because they aren't worried that people from those countries will want to illegally overstay. Anyway, cool, good news if you're from one of those countries.

Blogaround

1. Tumblr is downscaling after failing to ‘turn around’ the site (November 10, via) On Pillowfort I've been seeing a LOT of new members who have migrated from Tumblr. Looks like Tumblr might shut down, but we don't really know yet.

2. Israel-Hamas War: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (November 13) Wow, John Oliver does a very good job with this.

3. Inside the Mind of one Evangelical Republican Voter (November 13) "She does not believe that she can or should try to change the world or to fix broken systems—anything larger than what she can personally control is God’s domain. She wouldn’t use this analogy, but she acts more or less a first-person video-game character for whom all of life is a series of tests created by the Game Designer for her to personally pass or fail."

4. One in three (November 10) "Generations of relentless teaching have made it clear that any expression of this belief is not acceptable in those communities and that support for criminalizing abortion is mandatory dogma for all white evangelicals and all American Catholics. And yet none of that aggressive, constant, emphatic propaganda has altered those consistent poll results."

5. Stereotypes & media about Black masculinity made it harder to come out as asexual (October 27, via) "In another instance, I was told by one person that I would probably be really good in bed, because I’m Black. It didn’t matter whether or not I even wanted to have sex. In their minds, I was only a sexual object due to my Blackness."

6. Minnesotans detest our state flag (November 9) "The state is currently accepting submissions for redesigns, and you can view all 2,123 online. Yikes."

7. Journal Club: Heteronormativity Theory of Low Sexual Desire (November 15) "The paper very vehemently argues against biomedical treatments, lamenting how people still believe them despite the evidence going against them."

Blogaround

1. I feel like I should say something about what's going on in Palestine? I don't know what to say though, it's just horrifying, and posting on the internet "I stand with Palestine" doesn't actually help anything... I just wish people would stop bombing people.

2. Idaho hospital closes its maternity ward, citing the state’s ‘political climate’ (March 22)

3. The Trouble With Circular Reasoning Is.... (!) (October 15) 1-hour-21-minute sudoku solve video.

4. China joins Apostille Convention - no legalization for public documents (March 14) Well this will (hopefully) decrease the amount of bureaucracy that immigrants in China (like me) have to deal with. See, the way it is now, if you're applying for a visa or something in China, you have to bring a bunch of documents, and if the documents were issued in other countries, they need to be "legalized" by some Chinese authority to prove they are real. I'm not sure exactly what documents this change will apply to- off the top of my head, I'm thinking about things like diplomas and marriage licenses. (But also, don't get too excited- I would be 0% surprised if China invents some new bureaucracy steps to replace the old ones.) The change goes into effect on November 7, 2023. 

5. Sex and the end of the world (October 16) "The future they’re being told they’re never going to have was already a life of futility and meaninglessness. So when they’re told that future won’t be there for them, they’re not going to think about all the things they’re never going to get to learn or to teach, to create, to build, to share, to discover, or to enjoy. They’re not going to think about how they’ll never get to break every chain, or to let justice roll down like waters. The main thing they’ll think about missing out on will be the main thing they’ve heard about in youth group from day one: sex."

Damn. Preach.

6. Ending Junk Fees, the Most Annoying Thing in American Commerce (October 15, via) "We’ve all experienced these in one form or another. You go to a hotel, and instead of being given the price quoted to you online, they add a $25 'amenity' fee, or 'resort' fee, or something like that." Wow, reading this article, I'm like... astonished at the idea that the government could really stop businesses from charging hidden fees. Like, I always thought that's just the way it is, and as a consumer you need to know that the price it says isn't really the price it is, and be prepared for that. But, man, no, it DOESN'T have to be that way.

I remember the first time I came to China, buying things at a mall or restaurant, and the price that it said on the price tag was the price it ACTUALLY WAS, and that BLEW MY MIND. No extra is charged for tax or tip- that's all already included in the price on the price tag. And now that I think about it, even for bigger things in China (hotel rooms, etc), the price that it says is, quite often, LITERALLY the price that IT IS, even though I've always been prepared to pay more because that's what I expect as an American.

7. Solving Fractal Mazes (October 18) "With all that explanation, I hope you’re half as excited about fractal mazes as I am." Yesssss.

8. Making It So: A Memoir [affiliate link] I just found out that Patrick Stewart has published a memoir. Oh I am so excited about this!

9. Trump Gets the Corporate Death Penalty (And It's Getting Worse) (October 7) 22-minute video from Legal Eagle, explaining what's going on with the orange antichrist's businesses in the state of New York. Basically the court ruled that he loses all of his business licenses in New York. Wow. As one of the comments says, "You know it's bad when the lawyers stop saying allegedly."

10. Biden urges striking auto workers to ‘stick with it’ in picket line visit unparalleled in history (September 27) "The fact of the matter is that you guys, the UAW, you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 ... you made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble. Now they’re doing incredibly well and guess what? You should be doing incredibly well."

11. Once Upon a Studio | Official Trailer | Disney+ (September 22) There's a new short film to celebrate Disney's 100th anniversary, and it's SO GOOD. It's cartoon characters from almost all of their movies, coming together to take a photo. The link I'm posting here is just a short trailer- I didn't find the entire video available on youtube. (I watched it on bilibili, a Chinese video site.)