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Derek Fox
Derek Fox
@partialobserver.bsky.social
Penn State Astronomer (he/him), personal account. “We went and made everything a computer without ever bothering to fix computers.”
6.6K followers8.2K following5.3K posts
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Replying to @amandamarcotte.bsky.social
This report is genuinely overwhelming, in terms of the evidence both against Trump and of a ham-fisted cover-up. Including one instance in which Ghislaine Maxwell was actually about to mention one of Trump's young accusers and Todd Blanche told her to stop talking. The media response is "yawn."
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Will anyone ask Mike Rogers, Susan Collins, Darlene Graham, Roger Marshall, Michelle Tafoya, Jon Husted, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dan Sullivan, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Ashley Hinton, Pete Ricketts, Ken Paxton, Mike Collins, or Michael Whatley?
Will anyone—anyone at all—ask Trump about the rape allegations published in an official report by the House Judiciary Democrats? Or will he continue to escape accountability for his violence?
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The only reason I can think of for this news not being absolutely everywhere is that large media orgs don’t want to be seen as putting their thumbs on the scales a week before election day. And that’s cowardly as shit.
Beyond disgusted by even more rape allegations against the President of the United States. "In total, more than 25 different women...have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct." Report w/ new details: democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...
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Beyond disgusted by even more rape allegations against the President of the United States. "In total, more than 25 different women...have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct." Report w/ new details: democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...
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Well this is a big deal . . . A federal court has just ruled that the Trump administration's termination of Maurene Comey (an AUSA with the Southern District of New York) was unlawful.
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The elections are on next Tuesday, and so much is at stake, including the soul of the Democratic Party when it comes to transgender people. I am asking you to leave a very small number of races blank in which a Democrat has embraced extreme anti-trans hate. I make my case here.
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hm. lula succeeded by out-shouting the right and not begging for the press to do the lift for him and his supporters? wow, wonder who has been saying something like that in america for almost 20 years?
And credit to him, it worked. A sort of digital levee en masse, literally raising an army to counteract the forces that artificially amplify far-right messaging. He did that through organizing and messaging, both on the streets and online, that was so relentless that he put himself in the hospital.
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Replying to @matthew.flux.community
There is hope for some of the newer voices in the Democratic Party like AOC and AES because they realize you have to actually stand for something to build a movement and draw people toward you. The old guard must all be overthrown. Their laziness and cowardliness can never defeat fascism.
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HOLY SHIT. In a sworn statement yesterday, an ICE agent told a federal judge that an ICE flight to Equatorial Guinea had been cancelled and so couldn't be used to bring Ahmed Soliman back to the United States. The plane just landed in Equatorial Guinea. prospect.org/2026/10/23/t...
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As you read this story, keep in mind that we should have always had free school breakfast and lunch for all children, always. As the cheapest option! One of the best policy ROIs that there is!
About 2 million kids have lost SNAP since deep cuts were enacted last year. The ripple effects: Kids losing SNAP also lose automatic enrollment for free meals at school. And as more kids lose SNAP, their schools may be forced to drop Community Eligibility.
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70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
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Not a single word of this is hyperbolic in the slightest. Buy your friends in cybersecurity the drink or chocolate of their choice right now. We are not doing well
wrote about "Black October," the PHP vulnerability, and the AI-fueled dread and panic I'm seeing among almost all of the cybersecurity experts I've ever known. I think people w/ LLMs are brute forcing software the same way they brute forced social media w/ slop www.404media.co/php2shell-bl...
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Re-professionalizing and de-politicizing DoD will be crucial. And doable, as this thread with specifics shows. Add Thiel-Palantir to Musk-SpaceX and Luckey-Anduril review. Courts martial for boat bombings. Problem is, it’ll take political will, and there’s at least two more years of damage to go.
To-do list for SD Mayor Pete and DSD Uncle Frank (and the transition team): - at 1201 rip down the stupid fucking sign, regardless of whether Congress has officially changed the name (not looking good for the 27 NDAA lol) - at 1202 issue orders to rename all the confederate bases back*
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Replying to @editorialboard.bsky.social
11. While Trump deserves to be treated as if he has crossed a line, so does Musk. The fact of his involvement in a conspiracy to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty should trigger a credibility crisis. Indeed, Heather Cox Richardson compared him to none other than Benedict Arnold.
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Really wild......former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has published a piece in @foreignaffairs.com that seems to be mostly a ripoff of @karenhao.bsky.social book 'Empire of AI'.....the title of the articles 'Empires of AI' Karen's work isn't cited or mentioned at all?? archive.ph/jvf4s
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details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.
oh it's bad. oh it's BAD bad. oh this is CATASTROPHIC, drop-whatever-you're-doing-and-patch-NOW levels of bad cert.europa.eu/publications...
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Commentary by Beth Davis Sramek: "Auburn's trustees are asserting that their authority supersedes not only faculty expertise, but professional norms, disciplinary standards, and even accrediting bodies. That has nothing to do with educational quality or student success." https://ow.ly/ibfq50ZZ7EZ
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Years ago, I worked acquired and edited a book at @beaconpress.bsky.social on this topic. It's amazing to see these projects come on line and work so successfully. I hope the momentum is there to keep them going despite... everything.
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This would be a de facto racial quota, mandating that no policy can alter the racial demographics of a given school bsky.app/profile/mike...
SCOTUS making its first move to go after race-neutral high school admissions standards:
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Replying to @jamellebouie.net
the other thing is that conservatives resolutely do not see the purpose of education as providing social mobility but as reifying and deepening existing inequalities of status. they are as hostile to low income students getting admission to elite institutions as they are black ones.
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If SCOTUS says, in this case, a race-neutral policy to enhance diversity is racial discrimination, it would mean (a) racial hierarchies that exclude Black & brown students are required because (b) schools can't try to prevent Black & brown students from being excluded. It's white supremacy.
fuuuuuuuuuuuuck
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What this piece says—and then derangedly refuses to hear itself saying!!—is that seniors spend less money because the American work force got its stable, guaranteed pensions taken away and replaced with personal investment savings. And then it wonders why they're risk-averse with the money!
The third piece I’ve read in as many days “concerned” that Americans are ”sitting on capital” that needs to be “freed up”. www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026...
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These are the same monuments that were removed by an act of Congress, so yet another example of this administration ignoring the law passed by a branch of government
U.S. Army Announces Plan to Return Confederate Monument to Arlington National Cemetery #CivilWarMemory 🗃️ kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/us-army-an...
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SCOOP: 'Tommy' from the now-viral exchange with Abdul El-Sayed is Thomas Teepell, a former staffer for Republican Senator Josh Hawley with close ties to Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht. He's the son of a former Bobby Jindal staffer whose consultant work was instrumental in getting Hawley elected.
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Inside the humanities we’re slowly losing our minds as we shout this til we’re hoarse—of course education in the name of ROI is an ideological project! Of course, treating knowledge as a content strategy results in bullshit! Still bracing to read this eloquent call to close the business schools