jess banks
@profbanks.bsky.social
1.4K followers 700 following 3K posts
Hypercompetent polyglot know-it-all. Unrepentant SJW troublemaker. Neuroqueer teacher, mom, partner, Official Auntie, best friend, co-conspirator. An American in Aotearoa New Zealand. Always noncompliant. She/her/elle/ia
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We’re sitting with our backs to the community stage while having ice cream. Someone is starting a performance but the PA system is crackling and it sounds like she’s got a fireworks show at noon.
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Left: Father Coughlin's anti-communist club, September 1935
Right: Donald Trump's anti-communist club, October 2025
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J. D. VANCE: We need to end DEI.

MONKEY’S PAW: (raises one finger)
BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV is set to effectively disband Opus Dei in the coming weeks.

This would be the most sweeping internal reform of his pontificate — and a dramatic continuation of Pope Francis’s legacy.
NEW: Pope Leo Set To Break Up Opus Dei
If Pope Leo does indeed approves a plan that effectively dissolves Opus Dei’s structure, it would be the most significant internal action of his short pontificate to date.
open.substack.com
If you can get someone who works in a pediatric setting, they can do miracles with setting lines.
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Don't forget she's the asshole that wrote that Op Ed in the WSJ a million years ago about colleges that didn't accept her
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Mike Johnson has now had the House adjourned for 73 out of the last 85 days.

Epstein Shutdown.
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I think we should explicitly criminalise the nonconsensual creation, posting & sharing of sexualised deepfakes because the harm is the same as real intimate images shared w/o consent. However, this doesn't solve lots of issues related to deepfakes like this, for eg, the advertising of apps/websites
Woof, that’s a tagline for the ages.
What I don't have in experience, I make up for in integrity.

And what Andrew Cuomo lacks in integrity, he could never make up for with experience.
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Note, that you DO have to give them permission for any request and you can completely opt out of requests entirely. Is it great that Flock and Ring are teaming up though? Not even remotely. Sigh.
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Take a picture of yourself at the No Kings rally.

Print it.

Put it in a frame.

Your grandchildren will speak about you for generations to come. You took a stand against fascism. You stood up for democracy. 
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Swearing in isn’t some ceremony. You aren’t a member of Congress until it happens. He knows that.

No phones, no staff, nothing.

I had to escort her into the Capitol on Wed bc Capitol police must treat her as a public visitor until she’s sworn in. And solo visitors aren’t allowed during shutdown!
Johnson: "Grijalva should be working for her constituents right now. I don't know what she's doing. I keep seeing their political stunt videos. She should be in her office. She should be working or in the district for her constituents" (Grijalva is not in fact a Rep. b/c Johnson refuses to seat her)
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eagerly awaiting the catholic breakdown of this because I have no idea what it means but it seems like Chicago Pope is on a roll??????? somewhere???
BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV is set to effectively disband Opus Dei in the coming weeks.

This would be the most sweeping internal reform of his pontificate — and a dramatic continuation of Pope Francis’s legacy.
NEW: Pope Leo Set To Break Up Opus Dei
If Pope Leo does indeed approves a plan that effectively dissolves Opus Dei’s structure, it would be the most significant internal action of his short pontificate to date.
open.substack.com
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Okay! This is going to take a while so I had to finish some stuff first, but: Why Da Pope Fucking Up Opus Dei Is A Huge Fucking Deal: a thread
Gimme an hour or two and then I'll explain why this is a "holy fucking shit" moment!
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CA7 tells Trump he can’t deploy the National Guard into Chicago as the city and Illinois’s case against him proceeds

Unanimous, bipartisan panel (GHWB-but-liberal, Obama, Trump)

media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/Opin...
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Important notice for #kikorangi

Whittakers has posted on their socials that there is a price increase coming again on Monday

I may or may not have stocked up cause it also happened to be on sale 🇳🇿 🍫
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Evidence that even when LLMs produce similar results to humans, they “rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification”
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
I just think about indigenous languages like te reo Maori that have clawed themselves back from extinction, but now students studying them will have the online materials they might encounter enshittified beyond repair.
Dal is the best cheap food out there, I swear. Infinitely spiceable, really healthy and cheap.
I fear it’s too much to hope this won’t be a boondoggle for some rich National donor.
“The Government has confirmed that the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) will provide up to $3.5 million in new funding so the Bikes in Schools programme continues, ensuring many primary and intermediate students will have access to bikes and tracks in their schools.”
Oh gods, this is terrible.
“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...
How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral
Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?
www.technologyreview.com