I spent my first morning of retirement having breakfast with a friend at my favorite diner, the retirement dream of every trueborn daughter of New Jersey.

People who treated their sacred vote as a one-click poll to unlock an egg discount don’t get to cry that they “didn’t vote for THIS!”

From a friend:
“An attorney friend advises everyone to retrieve their #SocialSecurity earnings statements now - so you have a record of what you are entitled to from all your years of working. Especially people who are currently collecting.”

People’s complacency right now is the result of the Trump administration using the “flood the zone with shit” tactic. Elon Musk’s gaining access to the Treasury Department’s payment system becomes just another wild news story amidst a stream of wild stories. It’s a coup hidden in plain sight.

Okay, all you techie people of Mastodon whose posts I rarely understand, help an English major out:
I know that I can download all my #Facebook data.
But is there any way to set up an imitation of "Memories" privately with all that data, so that I can see what I've posted on a given day over the past [redacted] years?
If anyone wants to make a Fedithing that will do this, I'd happily subscribe. #Meta

Elon Musk just did an actual Nazi salute on live television. He did it twice, so no one could explain it away. This is really happening in our time.

Leonard Peltier is going home. I never thought I’d see the day. Shame on Clinton and Obama for never doing what Biden did today, and Biden sure as hell could have done it before today. #LeonardPeltier

The key to understanding a lot of strange toddler behavior is to see that they are attempting to imitate us (since that’s how they learn), but they don’t understand what we’re doing or why.
Baby refuses to leave home without three seemingly unrelated objects?
Oh, you mean keys, wallet, phone? 💡

We settled that Canada is definitely not part of the U.S. in the War of 1812.

For anyone who has forgotten what the War of 1812 was about, or last heard about it in an American high school #history class, here’s a great article I found today explaining the American, British, Canadian, and Native American perspectives on the war, and how our view of the war has changed over overtime. Good stuff!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/british-view-war-1812-quite-differently-americans-do-180951852/

I don’t care about the #drones. I don’t think the drones are the problem. I think the drones are the anxiety we know how to talk about with our neighbors, unlike the really scary issues that are too fraught to discuss. It’s the 2024, “How ‘bout those Mets?” only terrifying.

Good morning!
It’s a new week and a new day.
Unless it’s your job, you do not need to buy a ticket to The Trump Show today.
The ticket costs your attention, which is a precious resource, and you have only so much of it each day.
Deciding how to bestow it is the act of a free person.

@pluralistic Survivalism is a collection of absurd delusions.
We survive together, or not at all.
https://perfectwhole.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/survivalism/

1. Adventures in canvassing:
We were doing get-out-the-vote doorknocking for registered Dems in an apartment/condo complex that had upstairs and downstairs apartments, with the staircase outside.
While we were upstairs, a guy who was not on our list, in no danger of having his door knocked, and who could certainly have done this face-to-face if he wanted to, yelled up to us, “Why don’t you mind your own business and stop telling people who to vote for?!?!”

2. I yelled back, “We’re just here to get out the vote!”
Long pause from our guy.
“Go Trump!!!” he finally managed.
I said, “Fine! Then go get out the vote for him, if you want!”
Silence.
Blackout.
(I think he’d been watching us and was desperately hoping we’d knock on his door so he could scream at two middle-aged women—one wearing a leg brace and limping badly—and was mad he’d missed his chance.)

I learned today about a useful way you can volunteer from home. It’s called “ballot curing.” If the Board of Elections has rejected a ballot because of problems with the address or signature or something, you call the voter up, tell them what the problem with the ballot was, and tell them how they may go about fixing it so that their vote counts. You shouldn’t get anybody hostile on the phone. Rules vary from state to state. More information here: https://volunteerblue.org/take-action-ballot-cure/

An important question to ask yourself before using #ChatGPT is whether the task is worth the water and energy the data center will use to complete it.

I just Googled a term I didn’t know, and Google’s AI Overview informed me that the Second Coming of Christ is a tenet of Judaism.

I’m really worried that people are taking Google’s AI Overview at face value.
Here’s an example where I happen to have the background knowledge to tell me how wildly wrong this is. But I don’t have background knowledge about everything, and students have a lot less than I do.
#generativeAI #Informationliteracy #teaching #AIOverview #Google

Hang on…the fall of #EricAdams may cause his nemesis, Jumaane Williams, to become the acting mayor of New York??? By his own shambolic and possibly criminal administration?
You love to see it!

@QasimRashid I don’t know how we get small states to ratify the necessary amendment. It would be easier to get statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico.