Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 11h

I keep getting fin .ai commercials on HBO that look embarrassingly desperate and poorly done. I cannot believe they're paying money to air them.

Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 14h

Hold a dance competition. Set up a big projector and watch college football games together in the road in front of ice facilities. Be creative, the people in Portland certainly are.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 15h

There is nothing more transgressive against the current regime than having fun and expressing community and hope and telling them they aren't invited and only leaving will let things be good.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 15h

Honestly we should have protests all over the country with jugglers and marching bands and dance and theater troupes. And have drag shows and games and sports. A big party where everyone chants how much authoritarianism sucks and we hope not to get brutalized.

Jason❌ @gizmosspace.bsky.social · 1d

This is awesome.

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Reposted by Lacci

Audrey Farnsworth @audipenny.bsky.social · 17h

intrusive thought won’t go away of a rattlesnake wearing bells on its rattle and trying to trick me into thinking it’s Santa Claus

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Reposted by Lacci

Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 18h

FULL STORY HERE: Emails began flooding CDC inboxes late Friday night announcing dozens of layoffs. HR people brought back from furlough to oversee the RIFs. Disease detectives, entire Washington office, global health, injury prevention, MMWR staff among those hit.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/u...

Trump Administration Lays Off Dozens of C.D.C. Officials

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by Lacci

Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 21h

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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John Panzer @johnpanzer.com · 20h

This wildly illegal action is also a betrayal that will, almost certainly, kill someone you love.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 21h

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

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Reposted by Lacci

Elliot 🥕 @nameoftheyear.bsky.social · 22h

LOSING MY MIND AT THE PHONE NUMBER ON THIS BUS IN FRONT OF ME

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Will Quinn @willquinnart.bsky.social · 19h

Daily bunny no.3104 does not have a map

An intrepid bunny creeps through a labyrinth or dungeon, arranged in a grid like an old videogame. There is a snake and a skull in the bunny's path, as well as a spike pit. The bunny has a small sword.

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Reposted by Lacci

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 2d

have said this before but i am very skeptical about weiss’s vaunted charisma

Raw Story @rawstory.com · 3d

Bari Weiss, the incoming editor in chief of CBS News, once auditioned for a role on the hit daytime television show "The View," but tested so poorly with audiences that she "wasn't invited back," according to a new report.

CBS News' new boss once auditioned for 'The View' — and 'wasn't invited back': report

Bari Weiss, the incoming editor in chief of CBS News, once auditioned for a role on the hit daytime television show "The View," but tested so poorly with audiences that she "wasn't invited back," according to a new report. Variety reported on Tuesday that Weiss auditioned for "The View" when host Me...

bit.ly

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Reposted by Lacci

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 2d

yeah, trump has made very clear that he doesn’t think black people deserve to be in jobs of influence! www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/u...

Trump Fires Black Officials From an Overwhelmingly White Administration

www.nytimes.com

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Reposted by Lacci

Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 2d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 20h

Also Venezuela is a major oil producer and a war with them will likely raise prices and American firms might figure it is a great chance for them to gain control over Venezuelan oil production. Because that went so well last time.

Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 20h

This is sort of true, but indirectly. The US is a net exporter of oil and looks likely to remain one. But stopping rolling out renewables and low carbon tech in the biggest consumer will keep demand high for the Gulf states as well as our producers, who are all bribing him like crazy.

mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 1d

the administration is laser-focused on making sure Americans don't get clean energy, so Saudi Arabia (Trump's paymaster) has someone to sell their oil to in 10 years when the rest of the world has moved on to solar+batteries

Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 1d

Picture how big the Hoover Dam is. An absolute unit. The Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW).

The solar farm that the Admin just cancelled could have produces 6.2 GW of power. That's more than 3 Hoover Dams.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 20h

😢 open.substack.com/pub/erininth...

Pew Survey: Only 31% Of Trans People Report Being Accepted By Their Parents

The survey comes as transgender people experience a legal assault from the far-right in the United States.

open.substack.com

Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 22h

youtu.be/1zGPBqHKCgk?...

Life's A Funny Proposition - Eddie Cantor [HD]

YouTube video by Mrs Natari

youtu.be

Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 1d

Wishing our problems away turned out not to work. It feels like it came tantalizingly close though. But I'm pretty sure that's a bit of a mirage. The roaring 20s prosperity was more than a bit of a mirage too though.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 1d

Wow, I'm watching Boardwalk Empire and Warren Harding just won. His speech: "we need not nostrums but a return to normalcy." Hits really differently after the Biden presidency and how disastrously that ended up going. That was Biden's core idea too.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 1d

🫂 I'm sorry you didn't get the chance to keep it properly. It's really hard when you can't really use a language enough to keep it up.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 1d

Yes terrified seeming nearly unintelligible man in the fin.ai commercial, I'm totally convinced your chat bot is going to safeguard my business. 🙄

Reposted by Lacci

Will Quinn @willquinnart.bsky.social · 1d

Daily bunny no.3103 wants to show off their collection

A bunny with thick glasses shows another bunny their room, which is full of colorful mushrooms being cultivated both around the room and in a drawer. The other bunny looks mildly grossed out. There is also a poster showing different mushroom species on the wall

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 1d

But it does seem he had a preference for the linguistic world as it was then. Our linguistic world is immensely poorer than it was and getting even poorer extremely rapidly.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 1d

He said he "wanted the curse of babel to strike all tongues." I don't know if he was aware of the anthropological research on languages that suggests languages didn't have that many speakers each until well after the invention of agriculture and that essentially everyone was multilingual.

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Lacci @lacci.bsky.social · 1d

Apparently Tolkien was very upset about language diversity declining, particularly English being spoken everywhere. It got to the point where he jokingly but with a hint of seriousness threatened to refuse to speak English and only talk to people in Old Mercian.

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