The Red Diaper Pail

HH:

* Protest erupt in France over the education system

* NC considers Amendment to the State Constitution which would designate fetuses as people

* Brevard Country Public Schools refuses to rehire the veteran teacher Melissa Calhoun because she used a child’s preferred name.

* Trump admin will begin sweeping student visa applicants for “antisemitism”

Artifact: We take a closer look at this “Effective Altruism” thing via this 2023 article in truthdig by Emile Torres entitled: The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares (we’ll have to finish this one next week)

Theme Music: “Mock the Afflicted” by Robert Warrington, Licensed under CC BY 3.0

HH:Supreme Court gives green light to execute Christa Gail Pike by Tennessee authorities

Cornell University is sued for its role in covering up the sexual assault of a young woman by 7 Chi Phi brothers in 2024

5 men are accused of plotting a terrorist attack on a US Air Force base in the UK are strangely released on bail? And is supposedly has something to do with Iran?

Artifact:

The very provocative piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones in The New York Times Magazine: In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?

Sometimes we have some more things to say after we record:

Theme Music: “Mock the Afflicted” by Robert Warrington, Licensed under CC BY 3.0

We take a break from the madness to discuss Boots Riley’s latest film, “I Love Boosters.”

Theme Music: “Mock the Afflicted” by Robert Warrington, Licensed under CC BY 3.0

HH:

* Houthis take several port cities in the Red Sea, threatening Saudi oil shipments

* Every has a bit of an AI panic

* Ed Sheeran drops Macklemore from his tour for pro-Palestinian speech after a cabal of billionaires told him to

Artifact:

We discuss the underlying cultural currents of the Lindsay Clancy mistrial and discourse around the holdout juror via Jill Filipovic’s What Was the Holdout Juror Thinking?

CONTENT WARNING: Extensive discussion of child murder. If you, like us, are trying to keep details of the case away from you children, maybe play Story Pirates if they are in the car.

Theme Music: “Mock the Afflicted” by Robert Warrington, Licensed under CC BY 3.0

HH:

* Mamdani launches First-in-the-Nation Office of Worker Power

* Mamdani bans student facing AI in NYC public schools

* Ben-Gvir posts concentration camp AI video

* Climate careens over milestone

Artifact:We discuss the curious liberal-led assault on El-Sayed and Piker via Jonathan Chait’s “The Crisis for Democrats in Michigan”

Theme Music: “Mock the Afflicted” by Robert Warrington, Licensed under CC BY 3.0

HH:

* More Mail-in-ballot shenanigans.

* ICE purchasing robot dogs.

* Gary, Indiana goes 2 weeks without power.

* Indian Fascist movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) holds rally at Madison Square Gardens.

Artifact:

Derek Hunter wonders “Is Our Military Really This Weak Now?” in Townhall, in reaction to the complaints of the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln after their record setting deployment off the coast of Iran.

Only Horrible Headlines this week because we know how much you missed them:

* Economy is not doing very well

* Lefty academics sign a letter criticizing Iran’s for political repression and then all walk it back at the same time

* Trump moves to suppress mail in voting

We are on vacation (as much as such a thing is possible with 5 young children) so on this special episode you get one extra long artifact. We talk LLMs and the bleak? exciting? future of the human/technology hybrid via Meghan O’Gieblyn’s piece in The Yale Review:Donna Haraway’s Utopian Promise: We were supposed to become feminist cyborgs. Instead, we got ChatGPT…which is a response to Donna Haraway’s classic text:A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

HH:

* The US is running out of missiles and interceptors, and Trump wants to punish the people who let you know.

* Lawsuit contends that Trump Admin is targeting unaccompanied minors to pump deportation numbers.

* Israel indicates a Jewish settler for manslaughter in the West Bank.

* NM sues DOJ over withholding unredacted Epstein files.

* Lindsay Clancy trial reveals the ways post-partum women are failed…and maybe also our fascination with a good old conspiracy.

Artifact: Classic appearance of Angela Davis on Democracy Now! during the George Floyd protests, tackling the politics of prison abolition.

HH:

* Dems attack their left flank in MI

* MAGA darling is accused of horrendous domestic violence

* New record of unadjusted minimum wage

* A potential cyber attack on US water infrastructure by Iran

* Edwin Jovanny Lopez-Cornejo dies in ICE detention at Delaney Hall (Newark)

Artifact: An artcle from Wired by Noah Shachtman entitled: For Taylor Swift, Madison Square Garden’s Controversial Cameras Briefly Went Dark