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Brian Welsch

@hikinfiend.bsky.social
89 followers 43 following 78 posts

kind & curious

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Reposted by Brian Welsch
Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 10h
Part of why I don't like the AI-or-bust economy is the constant flopsweat of people on the news who say this HAS to work. Quit making everyone so anxious. Goddamn. If this is the next Google then why are you acting like this? I don't remember being told to buy an iPhone at gunpoint.
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 10h
Normalization is treating the president stealing from taxpayers to buy campaign ads and offer bribes to voters like it's just another day. Normalization is reacting with "won't work" or "polls poorly," and not "resign immediately or you'll be removed, we exist because of a revolution against that."
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Parker @jeffparker.bsky.social · 22h
Olivia Jaimes' Nancy, on cartoonists.
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Super Shoe @shoe.bsky.social · 21h
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I don’t think the roman helmet guys on musk’s csam emporium know this one (from josephine quinn’s how the world made the West)
By now the Roman imperial economy depended heavily on African agriculture, manufacturing, and trade, much of which was in the hands of Africans themselves. At the same time, local landowners attained great power and status in Rome: by the 180s CE nearly a third of Roman senators were of African origin.[33] These were men like Septimius Severus,
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Senator Dr. John Brown stan account, Esq., PhD, MD, JD, LCSW @johnbrownstan.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Sorry, if you want us to protect your union your union has to vote for us and endorse our candidates, end of story.
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Mikhail Gorbaechev @mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
One idea that comes to mind is creating a bond vehicle that produces roughly the equivalent annual interest to the amount of annual funding we want to give, and transferring ownership of the bonds in question to independent foundations tasked with supporting basic research.
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Grudgie the Wail @grudgie.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
So wait why can’t a President forgive student loan debt?
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Notice how they also brag about the number of naturalizations having plummeted; a sign of how much they detest legal immigration. /also, the removals number is largely fake. The actual number is 650-700k.
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Goldy @goldy.horsesass.org · 02/10/2026
I strongly encourage Republicans to run on this message!
Screen shot of a Fox News clip with Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett saying: "The higher mortgage rates are actually a good sign for the economy because corporations are borrowing money to build things like data centers instead of lending to homeowners."
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Writing something where I will be liberally citing @lilymasonphd.bsky.social's latest and realizing that I can't cite every single thing I would like to because then I'm just reprinting her work. So, I've gotta thread about it instead. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
Screenshot of the article website. Title is: Polarization Is Not the Problem. Author is Lilliana Mason. Journal is the Journal of Democracy, Volume 37, Number 4, October 2026. From Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"The current level of political animosity is exactly what one would expect to see if an extremist faction attempted to rescind the hard-earned rights of the vast majority of the country’s citizens." There are not enough exclamation points to convey how I felt reading this paragraph
Screenshot of article which reads: From this perspective, the “both sides” frame falls apart. The prob-
lem is not that the parties are divided. The problem is the existential 
threat that a reempowered ethnonationalist strain poses to pluralistic 
U.S. democracy writ large. The current level of political animosity is 
exactly what one would expect to see if an extremist faction attempted 
to rescind the hard-earned rights of the vast majority of the country’s 
citizens. The only way to re-oppress most of a country is to use anti-
democratic and authoritarian tactics. And the only way to oppose those 
tactics is to push back as a population and clearly reject them. This is 
the argument happening in the United States, and its pathology is not 
anger—it is the movement to undermine a generation of rights.
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Jonathan Bernstein @jonathanbernstein.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
There are a *lot* of top priorities for Dems in the next Congress but forcing the administration to follow the law on spending is probably the top of the top priorities.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
In two years we've gone from a standard where the President's budget proposal was a set of suggestions Congress would ignore to where Congressional appropriations are now a set of suggestions the President ignores.
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Dan Shafer @danshafer.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Republicans don't actually want Milwaukee to succeed. They want to deprive it of resources, deprive it of funding, and then point their fingers and blame the city for the challenges they've chiefly caused. They don't want a thriving city. They want a political punching bag.
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Matthew Gertz @mattgertz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
They're holding up a major escalation in Iran and a crackdown on abortion until after the midterms to limit political damage. To the extent that the last two years have been a right-wing smash-and-grab operation, the next two will be worse.
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Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ @padresj.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
$3 billion less in exports. $15 billion more in imports. That's a $29b trade deficit in 2024 & a $47b trade deficit in 2026. Even by his own metrics, which again do NOTHING for farmers, Trump has NOT made life better for farmers by cutting the deficit in half. ... In fact, he grew it by 62%
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Waschesalon Grammy Campaign Manager @reginageorgebush.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Texas is basically saying it wants to encourage fraud as a matter of public policy and you should keep that in mind whenever you see a large firm incorporated in Texas
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NosferaPru @prufrockluvsong.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Please stop calling me on my phone that's not what it's for
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Dan Shafer @danshafer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
"Three billionaires gave more than 90 percent of the money raised by Representative Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin" Tom Tiffany is the most bought and paid for candidate we've ever seen in Wisconsin. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/01/u...
nytimes.com
3 Billionaires Have Largely Funded Republican Nominee for Wisconsin Governor (Gift Article)
Under its current rules, Wisconsin has not had a race in which a small number of donors have made up such a large share of a campaign’s funding.
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Brian Welsch @hikinfiend.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
@gregdoucette.bsky.social, any chance this case is viable? Or is it destined to be tossed due to the letter of the law, rather than its spirit?
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
New from @timnitgebru.blacksky.app and me: "It is high time for us to regulate usage of systems sold as “AI”, not because they are magical machines, but because they are error-prone products that shouldn’t be used in high stakes scenarios." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month | Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender
The risks of AI aren’t what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals
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MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 01/10/2026
🚨 BREAKING: The family of Renee Good and her partner, Rebecca Good, have filed two federal lawsuits over Good’s January killing by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. 1/
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Jean-Michel Connard @torriangray.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Republicans in the admin should favor improving conditions in Federal prison out of self-interest if nothing else. Make it comfortable, boys! You'll be glad you did in a few years.
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
They don’t vote for these things in the booth though. If they did we’d all be in a different situation bsky.app/profile/matt...
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Joshua Foust 🪖🎮 @joshuafoust.com · 01/10/2026
I didn’t have specific knowledge of this, I just assumed that many industry leaders donated to Trump out of class solidarity and a mistaken/lazy belief that doing so would curry favor for policy, and you really can do this for any industry negatively affected by this administration.
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Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The Republican Party with Trump at its head is a conspiracy against the United States Constitution
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 01/10/2026
i think cox should spend less time weeping about polarization and more time working to convince his co-partisans not to abandon pluralism and liberal democracy
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Super Shoe @shoe.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
www.sacurrent.com/news/politic...
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kenofseattle @kenofseattle.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Seattle
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Gluon Spring @gluonspring.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
That’s no guarantee of progress, no assurance there won’t be backsliding, but it’s sufficient proof that a better future might come even when you can’t see how. Proof that working toward a better future is not wasted effort.
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Xeynon @xeynon.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Ossoff - go after the corruption and self-dealing unapologetically and full bore Talarico - immigrants are good, actually Mamdani - basic day-to-day governing competence matters (as does messaging about it) There are lots of good examples for 2028 Dem candidates to emulate here.
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Gluon Spring @gluonspring.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Easy. The past sucked, and people in the past were frequently evil. If you were alive in 1858 or 1930 or 1939 or even 1955 it might have been hard to imagine the social progress we now take for granted. There probably seemed no path out due to the wickedness of men. Yet, somehow, we improved.
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Your Internet Friend Tom Tomorrow @tomtomorrow.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
christ this infuriates me. ACA bridged the gap between my divorce (with loss of spousal benefits) and medicare eligibility. without it, I would not have had access to health care for eight years.
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Fred, His Enemy Getting a Vote @thefred.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The strategy next time should be to indict everyone for everything, everywhere. The ex-president, if alive, should get a hundred indictments, spread across as many districts as possible, with as many state charges separately brought as possible. Cabinet members and aides should get dozens.
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Not just impeachable. Impeachment, both pres. and agency heads, is the only option. It's impeachment or nothing. Courts won't stop it. Other tools are impotent. Put them on trial the only way you can. Even if you can't get 2/3, use process as punishment. Make it miserable and costly. It can be done.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I feel like if AI wants to be in the business of offering medical opinions, then AI companies need to be in the "getting sued for medical malpractice" business too
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Mae Nick Phra Khanong @nickjbrumfield.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Seriously just enforce normal liability for AI on the owners and so much of this shit goes away AI companies want to be treated like the hired expert when it comes to pocketing any financial flows, but like a cursory Google Search whenever it comes to liability
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
this really is impeachable for any president, but really grotesque coming from a regime that cut life-saving development aid because they said it was not efficient
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Marilyn Munster @heyfren.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Whoever the presidential candidates are I think this is a really good idea.
Picture of Jack Smith with the caption: If you want my vote, pledge to make Jack Smith attorney general and to prosecute them all.
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Optimizing one’s time on Capitol Hill for internet content rather than for lawmaking has been a net negative for the country
“Freedom of speech” / guy in a town hall meme
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 29/09/2026
Jack Smith: "History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It's often weakened by attacks on the institutions and the public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort."
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Bill Kristol @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
One obvious point about the Republican rats desperately deserting the sinking Trump ship: They're still rats.
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Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
"We're going to create superintelligence" How about making outlook search work first. How about that
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T. Greg Doucette @gregdoucette.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
And lo, the people did cry out, saying "Our Government is broken, and our discourse is an abomination unto the ears!" And the Blade answered them, saying "Verily, I say unto you: why debate for forty days and forty nights, when one swift afternoon can suffice?"
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Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Did Anthropic's Claude discover something new in biotech? Well, just like with those recent alleged math proofs, it looks like it was given the answers in advance from real humans doing actual research. (gift: www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/s...)
Dr. Mestre and his colleagues have yet to publish their findings. But for the past three years, they have regularly used Anthropic’s A.I. models as they have written code, drafted manuscripts and performed other tasks.

In doing so, Dr. Mestre said he and colleagues shared key findings about the enzymes with Anthropic.Anthropic said that Claude’s key contribution was identifying an array of RNA molecules and a protein associated with reverse transcriptase in a system. But Dr. Mestre said that he and his colleagues had made that discovery over a year ago.
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James Talarico @jamestalarico.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
When Jesus healed the sick, he didn’t ask for a deductible. When he fed the hungry, he didn’t price gouge for a profit. When the Hebrew prophets saw corruption, they spoke truth to power. When I take on this corrupt system, I’m doing it on biblical grounds.
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Chrononaut @chrononaut.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Prestige media kissed the ring once again. And from now on they will be extra careful to not offend Trump. But because the whole thing worked (again), he'll soon repeat it. After each repetition prestige media reporters from the WH pool become less distinguishable from the regime's mouthpieces.
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