Akshay
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aksh.ai
Akshay
@aksh.ai
290 followers 1K following 460 posts
Tech + aviation for a living. Teaching as a side-hustle. Loving spouse, doting parent. EN, తె, हि, FR, ES. Singaporean and Indian.

May or may not be who you think I may be. Void in Quebec and where prohibited by law. Beware of the leopard.
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aksh.ai
Akshay @aksh.ai · Nov 23
కిందటి యేడాది మోరిష్యస్ రేడియోలో ఇచ్చిన తెలుగు-ఫ్రెంచ్ ద్విభాషా ప్రసంగం:

దేశ దేశాల ఉగాది: Le Nouvel An Telugu, avec des explications en français

(Un discours présenté à Radio Mauritius en télougou et un peu en français sur la façon dont le Nouvel An télougou, Ugadi, est célébré dans divers pays)
దేశ దేశాల ఉగాది: మోరిష్యస్ రేడియోలో ప్రసంగం
Le Nouvel An Telugu, avec des explications en français (Pour Radio Maurice)
medium.com
aksh.ai
Travelling to China is easier these days.
clarajeffery.bsky.social Clara Jeffery @clarajeffery.bsky.social · 18h
This is INSANE www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/t...

and these are our closest allies!
Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The change would affect visitors eligible for the visa waiver program, which allows people from 42 countries to travel to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa as long as they first obtain electronic travel authorization. In a document filed on Tuesday in the Federal Register, C.B.P. said it plans to ask applicants for a long list of personal data including social media, email addresses from the last decade, and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children. Under the current system, applicants from visa waiver countries must enroll in the Electronic System for Travel Authorization program. They pay $40 and submit an email address, home address, phone number and emergency contact information. The authorization is good for two years.
December 10, 2025 at 4:35 AM
aksh.ai
@atherton.bsky.social on Bluesky
Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport
bsky.app
December 6, 2025 at 5:21 AM
aksh.ai
Singapore is the world’s most religiously diverse place on earth. Turns I’m not alone in routinely offering joss sticks to Mariamman, Srinivasa Perumal, Murugan, Rudrakali, Shiva, Rama, Buddha, Tua Pek Kong, and Guan Yin. In fact, 6 in 10 do.

www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
December 6, 2025 at 5:15 AM
Reposted by Akshay
colincarlson.bsky.social
Yesterday, we sent this message to the @viralemergence.org team, bringing a (hopefully temporary) end to our project three years into what started as a decade of planned work. /1
Hi everyone, I wanted to share some sad news about the future of the Verena program. As you know, in September, NSF delayed our annual payment indefinitely, and asked us to keep spending closer and closer to zero until they could “justify” another payment. We began to run out of funds at some universities this month, and will be fully spent out by late spring, so the goal was to get paid in December. We’ve been working with our program officer to make this happen, but sadly, we’ve learned we’re not getting an increment again, and there’s no clarity on when or how much we will be paid in the remainder of the grant (through September 1, 2027). Because of this, the Executive Committee has made the difficult decision to essentially shut the BII down until / unless something changes. What that means is an indefinite end to all programs (e.g., seminar), training activities (integration workshops, trainee corner), and evaluation. On research, what’s able to continue will have to be navigated by each investigator; our goal is to work together to push out all the impactful science we’ve spent three years collecting and analyzing data for, but we also know that priorities may shift around to keep people employed. If we’re lucky, Congress will pass a budget that lets us continue doing something like what we planned, and we’ll pick that back up when Zoe and Collin are back in April. Until then, Verena will continue to exist as a community where we can collaborate (and give and receive support!), and we’re working to find funding sources that can pick up from where the BII left off. On a personal note: it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work with all of you, and an unbelievably lucky thing to get to run an NSF center in my 20s. I’ve loved this project, and I hope it’s made as much of a difference in your lives as it has in mine. In case I don’t see you later: happy holidays, be well, and so long and thanks for all the viruses. Best, Colin
December 5, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by Akshay
goldwagnathan.bsky.social
They are running the government according to the logic of right-wing grievance media. I cannot emphasize that enough. The point is to create content, and they don't see an actual difference between dunking on Sabrina Carpenter, passing legislation, and bombing other countries.
gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social · 4d
I don't really know what the administration hopes to gain by picking fights with the most well-liked pop artists in the United States. You're just generating backlash for no discernible reason outside of owning the libs.
annabower.bsky.social Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 4d
Sabrina Carpenter ratioed the White House after it used her song in an ICE video.

The WH deleted the post…but now it’s back with a new ICE video, this time using an altered clip from Carpenter’s SNL monologue.
December 6, 2025 at 4:11 AM
Reposted by Akshay
sethcotlar.bsky.social
Reading the opening of Leonard Zeskind's 2009 book Blood and Politics in the midst of Trump 2.0 is quite a gut punch. In 2000 he warned of a rising tide of violent white nationalism & Christian nationalism on the American right...few people took those warning seriously. And now here we are.
As the last century ended and the year 2000 began, my hometown newspaper, The Kansas City Star, asked me to write a short guest opinion piece predicting the course of the new century. It was part of a journalistic time capsule, an editor said, and would likely be read a hundred years hence. The same had been done by the newspaper's forebearers on January 1, 1901, when men considered "prominent" in Kansas City wrote short pieces about the future. A bit nervous about prognosticating in general, particularly in fewer than five hundred words, I asked the editor to send, as a guide, copies of the articles written one hundred years prior. Each had been penned by a religious, civic, political, or economic captain of the city. A great hopefulness pervaded their expectations of scientific and industrial advances. In this regard, these city fathers (and they were all fathers) reflected the optimistic spirit of the age. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was then immensely popular, for example, as one of almost fifty utopian novels published during that period. One of the most fascinating aspects of these turn-of-the-century opinion pieces is that several predicted a happy future in explicitly racist terms. Not that they didn't worry about challenges to white supremacy's permanence. The city's "leading lawyer" feared that "the yellow peril threatens the world with untold disaster." One preacher fretted that the Fourteenth Amendment, which constitutionally guaranteed the rights of citizenship to black people, had been a "capital blunder." But a more prominent Baptist minister prophesied a noble century to come, including the end of war and the uplift of the poor, all under "the growing supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon."2 In this regard also, the city's sires reflected the spirit of the nation's elites at that time. University deans then taught that humanity could be improved through eugenics, the supposed science of selective "up breeding."3 The Supreme Court had recently ruled that "separate" was equal, and newspapers uncritically published accounts steeped in these and related ideas. The twentieth century did not end as it had begun. Science and technology, as predicted, did reach new heights. They split the atom, took us to the moon, and created a global cyberspace communications system. They could have also provided food to every hungry soul on the planet— but they didn't. Instead, scientific advances fed an unending series of wars, genocides, and man-made disasters. And the ethic of Aryan supremacy, so prevalent a hundred years earlier, (temporarily) buried itself beneath the mountains of human ash produced by Hitler's crematories. After World War Two, Europeans ceded legal sovereignty over Africa, Asia, and Latin America to their noticeably more darkly hued (former) subjects, even as the strains of four centuries of colonial exploitation were not erased. And in Kansas City, the newspaper-for-the-future included opinions by four women and three persons of color, including the city's first black mayor. My contribution to that time capsule stemmed directly from the subject under consideration here. I predicted a mid-twenty-first century conflict within the United States as white people became a minority in a nation of minorities and were no longer able to preserve a system of white privilege through majority-rule winner-take-all democracy. As the century wore on, I wrote, white nationalists would push toward instituting new forms of racial apartheid and other antidemocratic measures. The outcome in the year 2100, I argued, would depend on what we learned today about white supremacy and white nationalism. 4 This book does not pretend to predict prospective events, but it is not simply an account of the past either. While it is a history focused on the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, it is my intention that it serve as part of a prolegomenon to the future discussion of racial egalitarianism and democracy. My hope is that it will provide the reader a view of the contemporary white nationalist movement that is both comprehensive and instructive. Though it takes into account organizations, individuals, and events such as the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, and the Oklahoma City bombing-things ascribed more to memory at this point than daily life—the objective is to demonstrate that this movement, driven by a vision well within the mainsprings of American life, is already self-consciously pitching itself toward the future. Perhaps when white nationalism's next iteration emerges, our country will better understand it.
December 6, 2025 at 3:36 AM
Reposted by Akshay
rgoodlaw.bsky.social
The USG has a new explanation on why they (now admittedly) intentionally killed 2 shipwrecked men. It does not pass the laws-of-war smell test

Worse for Hegseth, NYT: "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors."

1/🧵
U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Planning Takes On New Significance
www.nytimes.com
December 4, 2025 at 2:25 AM
aksh.ai
Today’s driver is of Yi descent. Says daughter speaks better Mandarin than he does.
November 23, 2025 at 2:30 AM
aksh.ai
“Getting the deepfakes removed is only the beginning of regaining control,” she said. “Work doesn’t stop when the report is made. Allowing women the space to process what happened and to speak freely is just as, if not more, important.”
Women suffer most from deepfake abuses, and as cases rise, victims need better ways to regain control
Being deepfaked can feel like sexual assault, stripping victims of control, identity, and dignity. With the rise of AI-generated content, experts tell CNA Women that digital sexual violence against wo...
cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com
November 22, 2025 at 1:05 PM
aksh.ai
“It’s 2025 now, and what time are we living in? One where trans people are so reviled and politically scapegoated that for some lesbians, gays and bisexuals, it’s no longer even politically advantageous to trot out the names of our murdered sisters and siblings for street cred or grant applications”
I’m sick of writing about dead trans people | Xtra Magazine
For 15 years, I hoped my words would change something. Now I’m grieving the world that could’ve been
xtramagazine.com
November 21, 2025 at 12:55 AM
aksh.ai
I am told I now know more French. On me dit que je parle maintenant mieux français.
November 18, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Akshay
dennycarter.bsky.social
Jamelle was cooking.

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/o...
If they win, Democrats will have to use their newfound authority to rethink, even dismantle, agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They may need to walk back the Bush-era decision to consolidate those agencies and others under a single department, given the wild abuses perpetrated under this administration and its predecessors. It will need to give serious thought to major political and social reform, including D.C. statehood, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, a new voting rights act and federal protections for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, including the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Democrats will also need to embrace the legislature’s constitutional authority to structure the executive branch and the judiciary, up to and including Supreme Court reform. If they win next year, Democrats will need to treat the next Congress not as a return to the status quo ante but as the beginning of a new era in which the principal task is to roll back the president’s effort to create and consolidate a personalist dictatorship. They’ll need to fortify the American political system against future attempts to play dictator and lay out a project of genuine democratic renewal. None of this is possible without a willingness to use power rather than just hold it. What we’ve seen this week is that there are still too many Democrats whose instinct is to retreat to normalcy rather than face the conflict at hand.
November 14, 2025 at 12:50 PM
aksh.ai
Singapore So Kaypoh Edition 2234: daughter’s (well-known) school received a call from some useless idiot who complained that she untied her hair and let it down contrary to school rules. She was travelling home in the MRT.
November 10, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Reposted by Akshay
floppyguy.bsky.social
trans rights are human rights 💾🏳️‍⚧️✊ #floppydiskart #transgender
3.5" floppy disks arranged in a manner to resemble the Transgender Pride Flag
October 20, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Akshay
markmackinnon.bsky.social
“If Trump wants to save the lives of Nigerian Christians… all Trump has to do is restore the American aid that was estimated to be saving the lives of more than a quarter-million Nigerians each year.”

Bang-on (as usual) from @nickkristof.bsky.social
Opinion | Trump Aid Cuts Kill More Christians Than Jihadists Do
www.nytimes.com
November 8, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Reposted by Akshay
mekka.mekka-tech.com
While US venture capitalists were buying monkey jpegs, and DOGE coins, and figuring out how to get Black women fired, and tweeting about white birthrates, and trying to mandate which bathroom trans kids should use, China was making progress on climate change and taking the lead in a real industry.
economist.com The Economist @economist.com · Nov 7
China has made cheap, clean energy available in huge quantities. The world should take the win econ.st/4oqFszB

Photo: Eyevine
November 7, 2025 at 11:22 AM
Reposted by Akshay
davelevitan.bsky.social
Off the top of my head, in terms of degrees of separation I managed to get from myself to *Jimi Hendrix* in "three hops," this is a WILD assertion to make

www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
Several lawmakers said Thursday that the Pentagon relayed that it did not need to know the identities of those being targeted in the attacks, or if those killed had been trafficking drugs. “What they told us is they have to show a connection to a designated terrorist organization or their affiliate, and as long as they can show that connection, they believe they are authorized to strike,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) said in an interview. But such connections could be as much as “three hops away” from a known drug trafficker, Jacobs told reporters after the briefing.
November 1, 2025 at 10:00 PM
aksh.ai
So Rushdie's Satanic Verses wasn't technically banned in India, only its import was. But because Penguin India refused to print it, it was defacto banned. Which, ironically, was why you could always pick up a pirated edition at, say, Hyderabad's Sunday book bazaar at Abids.

But now there's a twist.
sansip.bsky.social Sanjay Sipahimalani @sansip.bsky.social · Nov 2
“Sometimes the world reads like a Salman Rushdie novel. The fact that a ban [on the Satanic Verses] is reversed because they couldn’t find the original document banning it — it’s beautiful.”
November 2, 2025 at 5:13 AM
Reposted by Akshay
miafarrow.bsky.social
Jacky Kennedy’s garden is now completely destroyed
October 26, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Reposted by Akshay
kevinmkruse.bsky.social
They abolished the House of Representatives ... solely to prevent the release of information about the president's best friend, the pedophile who ran a sex trafficking ring.
santiagomayer.com Santiago Mayer @santiagomayer.com · Oct 25
I really think that we need to talk more about the fact that Republicans have basically quietly abolished the House of Representatives
October 26, 2025 at 12:45 AM
Reposted by Akshay
audacityofdespair.bsky.social
You still want to believe the political fuel that powers the American collapse into authoritarianism isn't the deep, abiding resentment of white men who pine for an America that sees and services only them? Gaze upon Leni Riefenstahl's recent work for Donald Trump's U.S. Department of Labor.
geoffbowser.bsky.social Geoff Bowser @geoffbowser.bsky.social · Oct 26
I made an image of all the art posted by US DOL on X since approximately Labor Day
October 26, 2025 at 12:49 PM
Reposted by Akshay
mattsteinglass.bsky.social
The 18th-century shift from militaries raised privately by nobles to standing armies financed by taxes is one of the central moves in the creation of the modern state. Trump is dialing it back to feudalism. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/u...
Trump to Use $130 Million Donation to Help Pay Troops
www.nytimes.com
October 25, 2025 at 5:07 AM
aksh.ai
Another Chindian couple moving into the flat upstairs, so they gave us Milo and ondeh-ondeh-flavoured cookies.

This, right here, is the Singapore I’ve grown to love. 🇸🇬🤘🏽
October 26, 2025 at 11:34 AM
Reposted by Akshay
elizabethpgraham.bsky.social
Dude is William F. Buckley's nephew.

Bozell's son, Leo Brent Bozell IV, participated in the 2021 United States Capitol attack. He was convicted in September 2023 of ten charges, including five felonies and was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison. Bozell IV later received a pardon from Trump.
October 24, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by Akshay
jamesmeek.bsky.social
Ed Luce watching democracy die in the United States of America
October 24, 2025 at 6:53 AM