If you live in the District of Columbia (DC) and care about Ranked Choice Voting (RCV)...

Urgent: Email DC Council to Oppose Emergency Bill

Today (July 9, 2026), the DC Council started circulating an Emergency Bill to "fix" a perceived "glitch" in the text of Initiative 83, which specified how the Two-Winner At-Large Councilmember race would be tabulated in the November General Election.

Read Bill Text Here

In short, they are attempting to unilaterally change the rules of the election we voted on without any discussion from voters.

The reform they are proposing - Sequential RCV - is not a better system than the one Initiative 83 selected - Bottoms Up RCV - and this hasty measure will cause more harm than it's trying to prevent. DC's Councilmembers are not subject matter experts on RCV and they should not be making this change without expert feedback.

Council will be voting on this emergency bill on Tuesday 7/14 before their August recess, after which it will be too late to stop it.

How you can help:

BEFORE TUESDAY 7/14 - Write an email to all DC Councilmembers to oppose this bill

We need to flood their inboxes to let them know this kind of change requires community feedback, and is not appropriate action via emergency legislation in the middle of an election cycle.

Here's an example of what you can say in your email. Note: all of the addresses below should end with "at dccouncil dot gov" in place of the ellipses:

To: pmendelson..., abonds..., chenderson..., rwhite..., dcrawford..., bnadeau..., bpinto..., mfrumin..., jlewisgeorge..., zparker..., callen..., wfelder..., twhite...
Subject: Please Oppose the Ranked Choice Voting Implementation Clarification Emergency Declaration Resolution of 2026

Dear DC Councilmembers,

I am (your name), and I've been a resident of (your ward) for (how long you've lived here)

(Add any other brief introductions, including local organizations or groups you're apart of, to indicate you're a caring member of the DC community. Consider adding any background you have with RCV to indicate your knowledge about the reforms.)

I'm writing to ask you to please oppose the emergency bill that will be considered next Tuesday titled "Ranked Choice Voting Implementation Clarification Emergency Declaration Resolution of 2026."

(Reasons you can include for opposing the measure, use your own wording whenever possible:)

• This is not an emergency. Council should not pass this change over the heads of voters. If council would like to discuss this issue, there should be public hearings to allow voters to weigh in on the electoral system they voted for.
• This is election interference. We are already in the middle of an election cycle where nominees for the At-Large race are already decided, and the rules should not be changed last minute.
• The Bottoms Up RCV method selected by the Initiative 83 team for this Two-Winner At Large election was selected intentionally, it's not a glitch or mistake. Our team believes this form of RCV makes the most sense for DC given the nature of the two different At-Large seats (Dem vs Non-Dem).
• There are those who prefer Bottoms Up RCV or STV/Proportional RCV for various reasons which can be discussed, but Sequential RCV is the worst solution to this problem.
• There are other solutions that can be considered before Sequential RCV, including a Charter amendment to split the At-Large race into two separate single-winner races, which would be a better reform that could not be achieved by Initiative.

Bottom Line - this emergency legislation is a BAD IDEA and it's clear the Council doesn't understand the change they're trying to make to this system.

Please do not push this legislation through without allowing voter feedback.

Sincerely,

(Your name)

Council needs to know they cannot make these decisions behind the backs of voters. They had the option to reach out to us as a resource on RCV to inform their actions. Our team would've been happy to engage in good faith with Councilmembers on this topic - and we still are!

But we won't be able to have those discussions if this emergency legislation goes through on Tuesday.

Thank you for standing with us.

— The Grow Democracy DC Team

#DC #WashingtonDC #RankedChoiceVoting #RCV #ActionAlert #deadline

Quoting Joe Swelterpants, a.k.a. Joey Campfire, who is responsible for the
THIS MACHINE Songs of Protest Open Mics at New Deal Cafe:

"I'm doing this show along with other songwriters not performing at the Freedom 250 Concert."

Friday, July 17, 7:30 PM at Creative Caldron Stage
CONCERT: Still We Sing: A concert for our times
127 E Broad St, Falls Church, VA 22046

Led by Suzanne Brindamour: Award-winning musicians unite for a stirring evening of peace and protest music rooted in solidarity, justice, and collective power. Blending genres, original work, and reimagined covers, the performance lifts up voices of resistance and invites the audience into uplifting singalong moments. These songs honor movements for equity, amplify marginalized voices, and remind us what's possible when we organize, care for one another, and build community through art. Featuring David Kitchen, Arch Alcantara, Valeria Stewart, Night Train 357, Michelle Murray, Suzanne Brindamour, Dumi Right, Joey Campfire, and Grey Jacks. Percussionist Eddie Hartness and violinist Gabbi Boguslaw to accompany.

TICKETS: Creative Caldron Stage

#music #concert #resist #resistance #protest #singalong #SocialJustice #solidarity #VA #Virginia

"Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so."

SOURCE: Guri Singh, as posted on Twitter.

REPOSTED: facebook.com/darren.oconnor.94…
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #prediction #research #censorship #dangers #threats

DC Candidate Transportation Forum and Social
Organized by The Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA)

Josephine Butler Parks Center, Washington, DC
Sunday, Mar 1 from 2 pm to 6:30 pm EST

• RSVP at bit.ly/dctransportationforum

Overview
Hear from DC Mayoral candidates and At-Large Council candidates about transportation issues.

Join the Bike, Walk & Bus PAC, DC Transportation Equity Network, DC Families for Safe Streets, Greater Greater Washington, Coalition for Smarter Growth, and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association* to hear from qualifying Washington, DC Mayoral and At-Large Council candidates running in this year’s primary election and special election.

The DC Candidate Transportation Forum will take place on March 1st from 2pm-4:00 pm at the Josephine Butler Parks Center (2437 15th St NW, Washington, DC 20009) followed by a community social at Franklin Hall (1348 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009) from 4-6:30pm.

During the forum, you will get to hear directly from Mayoral and At-Large Council candidates about their vision for the District’s transportation future and actions they would prioritize to improve transportation. Come to learn where candidates stand on:

• Achieving a multimodal transportation system that serves all residents
• Improving bus and train access and reliability
• Making walking safer in every neighborhood for everyone
• Expanding a Low Stress Network for biking

The event will include moderated panels for both the qualifying mayoral candidates and another for the qualifying candidates for at-large seats on the DC Council.

Space is limited at the Josephine Butler Parks Center, but attendees can also register to stream the event virtually.

Attendees can register to attend the community social even if you were unable to attend the candidate forum in-person.

*The 501c3 organizations listed here do not endorse or work on behalf of candidates, or express any view for or against any candidate.

Invited and confirmed candidates will be posted closer to the event.

Highlights

• 4 hours 30 minutes
• under 16 with parent or legal guardian
• In person
• Doors at 1:45 PM
• Location: Josephine Butler Parks Center, 2437 15th St NW, Washington, DC 20009

Agenda

02:00 PM Mayoral Candidate Panel at the Josephine Butler Park Center
03:00 PM At-Large Council Candidate Panel at the Josephine Butler Park Center
04:00 PM - 06:30 PM Community Social at Franklin Hall

Frequently asked questions

#bike #biking #bicycle #bicycling #cyclists #bus #PublicTransit #walk #walking #pedestrians #walkers #commuters #commuting #DC #WashingtonDC #elections #candidates #event #forum #social #WABA #GGW #PAC

"SONG OF SOLSTICE"

A Celtic Christmas Celebration

Featuring: OCEAN Celtic Quartet

December 2025 (6th, 9th, 13th, 14th and 21st) in the Metropolitan DC area. See the link at the bottom for the locations, dates and times.

"Listen up -- They're good!"

--Fairport Convention's Simon Nicol

Fairport Convention's Simon Nicol says that OCEAN are exciting because they "get right inside the spirit of the folk music of the British Isles, unpick it and weave it into a bright new fabric on their own 21st century American loom." Tony Barrand of Nowell Sing We Clear praises their "beautiful original songs and fabulous arrangements of traditional songs." Steeleye Span's Maddy Prior calls their songwriting "stunning" and the Washington Post calls them "Nothing short of spellbinding."

The OCEAN Celtic Quartet will transport you to the Yuletide celebrations of yore in a program featuring time-honored carols, 19th century broadside songs, traditional Celtic tunes, original seasonal compositions, and even an appearance by Father Christmas of the old mummers plays! With their soaring vocals and stately Celtic instrumentals, OCEAN is known for marrying lighthearted exuberance with great spiritual depth in a program that appeals to all faiths and wisdom traditions. Come in good voice, as you'll be invited to sing along!

So come on out and celebrate the magic of Christmas and the Winter Solstice in cozy fellowship. This boisterous concert will include British Mummer's play recitations, traditional English and French carols, fiddle, harp, and hurdy-gurdy tunes, 19^th^ century broadside songs, and original seasonal compositions celebrating both the joy of the season of light and the introspection of the dark half of the year. The OCEAN Celtic Quartet is led by composer and ethnomusicologist JENNIFER CUTTING (accordion and keyboards), a Washington Area Music Association "Musician of the Year" and "Songwriter of the Year." OCEAN features the stunning vocalist LISA MOSCATIELLO (also a WAMA "Musician of the Year"), folklorist/vocalist/percussionist STEPHEN WINICK, plus fiddler, Celtic harpist, and composer JAY ANSILL. Cutting's original anthem, "Song of Solstice," has become a classic on Celtic and Folk radio, and the title cut of OCEAN's newest CD, "The Turning Year," reached #1 Song on the Folk Radio charts for December 2021. Come prepared to sing along with OCEAN on these and other seasonal songs ancient and modern!

OCEAN's Celtic Quartet's Solstice/Christmas Concert Highlights Video

The title cut of OCEAN's new CD The Turning Year was #1 Song on the Folk Radio charts! Read more about the new CD

Official Video for OCEAN Celtic Quartet's hit song "The Turning Year: A New Year's Toast": (Collaboration with Windborne)

BAND MEMBER BIOS:

JENNIFER CUTTING (Artistic Director, Keyboard, Accordion) happily blends careers as a bandleader, composer, instrumentalist, ethnomusicologist, and record producer. In the early 80s, she became the last and youngest protégée of British folk revival leader A.L. Lloyd, who had previously mentored members of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. Cutting spent 10 years as leader of The New St. George, one of the most significant British folk-rock groups on this side of the Atlantic. She then created and produced the award-winning CDs OCEAN: Songs for the Night Sea Journey, Song of Solstice, and Waves, collaborating with international superstars such as Maddy Prior and Peter Knight (Steeleye Span), Annie Haslam (Renaissance), Dave Mattacks (Fairport Convention) Tony Cuffe (Ossian) and Troy Donockley (Iona [UK]). Cutting is a multiple award winner in all areas of her musical career. She has won over 20 WAMMIE awards, including "Musician of the Year," "Songwriter of the Year," and "Best New Artist," as well as "Album of the Year," "Best Traditional Folk Recording" and "Best Contemporary Folk Recording." She has won two Maryland Governor's Citations for composition, as well as prestigious national-level songwriting awards such as First Prize in songwriting at the Merle Watson Festival, and American Songwriter Magazine's Song of the Year.

LISA MOSCATIELLO (Vocal, Guitar, Penny Whistle) is a smooth, sultry folk contralto from the Washington, DC area. She has won over two dozen Washington Area Music Awards, including two of the coveted Album of the Year awards for Second Avenue and Trouble from the Start. Although her first love is traditional Irish, Scottish, English and Anglo-American traditional folk music, her voracious appetite for beautiful melodies and mysterious, heart-rending lyrics has led her far afield from what is normally considered "folk music," into jazz, electronica, country, Italian pop music and even opera. In addition to singing with the OCEAN Celtic Quartet, she performs as a solo artist. As part of a duo with cellist Fred Lieder, she performed monthly at 49 West for many years, and also recorded for the electronica project Arthur Loves Plastic. She is the former lead singer for Celtic fusion band Whirligig and British folk-rock band The New St. George, and has recorded and toured with fiddler Rosie Shipley.

STEPHEN WINICK (vocals, percussion) specializes in traditional ballads and sea chanteys, and is both a performer and an expert lecturer and teacher, bringing a scholarly depth to OCEAN's concerts and educational programs. Steve has been singing traditional songs in English and French since his childhood. In the early 1990s, he spent several summers under the tutelage of the late Dublin ballad singer Frank Harte, one of the foremost traditional ballad singers in Irish music. Steve is a member of Ship's Company Chanteymen, in which he performs a repertoire of sea chanteys and historical songs. He was engaged as an expert scholar and researcher for the 2008 Washington Christmas Revels, which presented the music of Québec. He ended up also performing one of the lead roles in the show, for which he sang traditional songs in French to an audience of thousands. He reprised his role on the 2010 CD release Le Temps des Fêtes, and in the same year appeared on OCEAN's CD Song of Solstice. He has a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under song specialists Kenneth S. Goldstein and Roger Abrahams. He has taught courses in folklore and folksong at the University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University, and George Mason University.

JAY ANSILL (Violin, Celtic Harp, Hurdy Gurdy) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer based in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He has toured extensively and performed a wide variety of music with a wide variety of musicians including Anne Hills, Martin Carthy, Johnny Cunningham, Bill Keith, J. "Mo'ong" Santoso Pribadi and Maria Del Mar Bonet. Jay has written music for theater, most notably working with playwright/director Lee Breuer at Mabou Mines on a number of projects and with John Guare on his Lydia Breeze Trilogy. Jay has released several albums including A Lost World, a critically acclaimed collection of settings of poems by Robert Graves, and Fragile Gifts, with singer-songwriter Anne Hills.

2025 Concerts: Dates and Locations

#music #celtic #concert #yule #yuletide #winter #solstice #WashingtonDC #Virginia #Maryland #DC #VA #MD #holiday

John Cochran writes:

Seeing comments from cranks outside DC applauding Trump's takeover without the slightest idea what's actually going on here or any understanding of the District. For one thing, there's a misconception that DC lives and runs off federal money, so it's only right that Congress and Trump dictate how the city is run.

In fact, DC runs on LOCAL money, raised through local property, sales and other taxes paid by us DC residents. We ... not you, my fellow Americans ... pay for DC's streets, streetlights, the police, the fire department, the schools, etc., etc., etc.

These local taxes are set by the city council and mayor we elect.

At the same time, DC residents pay the same federal taxes as every other American.

In fact, DC residents pay more in federal taxes per capita than residents of any other state, and more total federal income tax than 19 other states.

And yet we have no voting representation in Congress, which sets federal taxes and meddles in our local affairs.

This is why our license plates read, "Taxation without Representation."

The current leading statehood proposal for DC, which is making even more sense these days, would shrink the federal district to the area roughly around the Capitol complex, the National Mall and the White House. The rest of DC would become Douglass Commonwealth (after Frederick Douglass).

Trump could then fill the shrunken federal enclave shoulder-to-shoulder with armed soldiers if he likes.

Friends outside DC, if you hear friends, family or whoever cheering on the occupation of DC, I and my neighbors sure would appreciate it if you help us set the record straight ... and help us fight for the right to govern ourselves, like other Americans.

#resist #statehood #WashingtonDC #DC #DisenfrancisedCity #TaxationWithoutRepresentation #OccupiedZone #PoliceState #selfrule #FreeDC