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Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News @froomkin.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Reposted by Josh Pasek

Now they’re saying “exaggerates”??? Who changed that? Coward.

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Reposted by Josh Pasek

Asha Rangappa @asharangappa.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

“Prebunking” has been found to be very effective in neutralizing disinformation

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 08/07/2026

“Weaponized his vehicle” sounds like the ICE version of “It’s coming right at us” www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr0b...

youtube.com

How To Get Around Hunting Laws - SOUTH PARK

YouTube video by South Park Studios

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22/22 Obviously, the country has fallen short on these ideals an incredible number of times. But if the view of the declaration is that it should serve as the country's mission statement, we might want to pay more attention to what it distinctly does not say about American citizenship & government.

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21/ So what view of society does it imply? One: - Where rights supersede government - Where people are the ultimate arbiters - Where religious and political authority are separate - Where status as a peoplehood and citizenship are not about ancestry - Where justice is independent of power

20/ And finally, “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress…” It is only legitimate to claim a right to independence after working through other channels.

19/ “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither…” Foreigners should be able to become citizens. Growth via immigration is treated as a public good.

18/ “For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury…” “For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried…” Justice needs to remain accountable to the community it serves.

17/ “For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent…” Taxes require legitimate political authority, and consent is what makes them legitimate. So the ability of government to compel things depends on its accountability.

16/ “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies…” “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” Civil leaders should be in charge, not the military.

15/ “He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…” “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone…” Judges must be independent of the executive.

14/ “He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly…” Government without representation isn’t merely bad policy. It’s illegitimate.

13/ “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Basically, the executive should not overrule the laws of the people (produced by the legislature).

12/ Now the grievances begin. But where these are usually framed as “What sins did George commit as a ruler?” Ask another question: “If this is a fundamental abuse, what does that mean about what good government should look like?”

11/ “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes…” Revolutions should be rare, only when other methods have proved insufficient to address grievances.

10/ “…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” "…it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…” But unlike rights, the authority of government comes from people.

9/ “…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Where do rights come from? The Creator—not government. But notice as well the choice not to refer to any specific theological doctrine nor to any religious establishment.

8/ “…all men are created equal…” We all know this line because it was downright revolutionary as a political claim at the time.

7/ “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The appeal is to shared human reason, not to revelation or any particular form of authority or faith. The presumption is that anyone can recognize them.

6/ “…the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God…” An extraordinarily broad phrasing that applies across Christians, deists, and Enlightenment natural-law thinkers, but does not ground itself in any particular church.

5/ “…to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station…” Independence was a claim to equal standing, not some kind of superiority (or later exceptionalism). And the rationale is that free peoples possess equal standing among nations.

4/ "...it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve..." Where most founding narratives begin with a particular group, often with a particular divine or historical mandate, this is again framed as a broader norm. The nation is presented as a political community, not an ethnic one.

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3/ These distinctions become clear when you look at what the declaration says and what it conspicuously does not say. “When in the Course of human events…” It doesn't begin with America or England or Christianity or Church. This is a universal human story, not only one group's.

2/ Key ideas: declaration uses careful words to paint some really interesting distinctions, in ways that challenged thinking at the time & have some interesting implications today. It conceptually separates nation from ethnicity. Government from monarchy. Rights from government. & God from church.

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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

1/ So as is my tradition, I was reading the Declaration of Independence today and I was thinking that instead of asking what it says about King George, it might be more interesting to think about what kind of country the founders were envisioning. A 🧵

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Reposted by Josh Pasek

To celebrate a rebellion is to know that, from a flawed world, we can make new things. We can hold on, we can find each other, and not just imagine but create a much better America. It is a special 250th – it is ours. Video in link: snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny...

snyder.substack.com

On Tyranny — Special 250th Edition

With friends, on video, to recall and to rebel

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Reposted by Josh Pasek

Jonathan Ladd @jonathanmladd.com · 04/07/2026

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

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Josh Pasek @joshpasek.com · 28/06/2026

There’s something quite fitting and ironic about celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday with a two day long power outage. An inspiring anniversary dashed by degraded infrastructure…

Power outage map showing an outage that started at 6 PM on July 3 is expected to be restored at 11:30 PM on July 5.

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One exercise I have my students do in my AI literacy class is to ask it to generate a résumé for themselves. When the AI has very little data to go on, it tends to hallucinate around the few things that it has connected to the person‘s name. I’m worried about the returns on personalized searches.

Could they do it, absolutely. Is it something they would want to do? I’m actually not sure. But if the model is linking the data inadvertently, then the probability goes way up for these kinds of spillovers.

Of course that. What I’m more thinking about is the probability that the model links a question that you ask with memory off to your name such that it functionally learns you have a cancer scare when you ask it a medical question w/o using PII and then presents responses to others based on that.

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We know that these companies use the data they get from users to train their models. The question of how much personal data they’re training on is important for the risks of privacy leaks based on the trained data. So my concern is personalized information leak into their training models.

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100% Assuming that AI would respond like humans was always a silly idea. But the psychological approach to figuring out the black box of how AI responses vary in reaction to different stimuli is deeply undermined if different users are unable to replicate patterns of responsiveness within a model.

If the identifying information is being directly bundled on or even if there’s a conditional probability of the original text being observed based on identity, that “personalized“ learning happens faster regardless of user intent.

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Allowed to do this for sure given privacy policies. But the substantive question is about what the AI is treating as a text when learning. If there’s no individually identifying information in a text, weights derived from that text are unlikely to change through mention of that individual’s name.

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