Amazon will pay $20.5 million to settle allegations that two of its Oregon data centers helped contaminate groundwater.

This is exactly why communities across the country are organizing to stop data centers — and winning.

Never doubt your power to change the system.

A.I. Has a Message Problem of Its Own Making A.I. companies are facing hostility and mistrust—and much of the heightened, sometimes histrionic rhetoric about the powers of the technology has come from within the industry.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman wants to “de-escalate” the rhetoric around A.I. But if you tell people that your product will upend their way of life, take their jobs, and possibly threaten humanity, they might believe you. www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

BREAKING: The U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine just issued a formal statement defending Pope Leo XIV's teaching authority on just war doctrine — less than twelve hours after JD Vance told a Turning Point USA crowd the pope should “be careful” talking theology.

This is a serious escalation.

Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the ...

“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”

Screenshot of a Tweet by @TheChiefNerd inclusing an interview with Sam Altman. The text in the Tweet says: SAM ALTMAN: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever.

It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

Picture via a CNN reporter of a banner with Trump’s face going up on outside of DOJ building

Biden would’ve been instantly impeached in a bipartisan vote if he put his face on the freakin’ Department of Justice building

Latin American Coups promoted by the United States

Department of Veterans Affairs quietly implements abortion ban A VA spokesperson confirmed to MS NOW that the ban was in place following a Department of Justice memo issued last week.

🚨🚨 SCOOP @ms.now : The Department of Veteran Affairs has quietly implemented its abortion ban following a DOJ memo issued last week.

This will affect 9 million veterans and their dependents, and has been a long time coming: It was outlined in Project 2025.

Read/share 👇

Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.

Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?” Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”

Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

A wrong Grok post making up a white guy who stopped the Australian mass shooting.

BBC 'Hero' who wrestled gun from Bondi shooter named as Ahmed al Ahmed Emily Atkinson Sun, December 14, 2025 at 1:06 p.m. CST 2 min read A "hero" bystander who was filmed wrestling a gun from one of the Bondi Beach attackers has been named as 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed. Video verified by the BBC showed Mr Ahmed run at the gunman and seize his weapon, before turning the gun round on him, forcing his retreat. Mr Ahmed, a fruit shop owner and father of two, remains in hospital, where he has undergone surgery for bullet wounds to his arm and hand, his family told 7News Australia.

This is fucking grim. Somebody invented a white guy, an "IT professional" named Edward Crabtree, who stopped the Bondi shooting and spread it all over the internet, which was picked up by AI agents and slop aggregation sites.

The real hero is a fruit stand owner named Ahmed el Ahmed.

Save 25% on Rhythm Doctor on Steam Save patients with your rhythm mastery! Rhythm Doctor is a rhythm game where you heal patients by defibrillating in time to their heartbeats. Learn each patient's unique heartbeat and defeat boss viru...

Rhythm Doctor is the absolute best at this and just came out of Early Access this month!

store.steampowered.com/app/774181/R...

US senators push USDA for urgent action on bird flu vaccine A bipartisan group of U.S. senators this week urged the administration of President Donald Trump to finalize a science-based plan for developing a bird flu vaccine for livestock, according to a letter...

"The Trump administration in May canceled a $700 million contract with Moderna to develop a human bird flu vaccine. Secretary Kennedy has cut other funding for vaccine research and scrapped long-held federal vaccine guidance."
www.reuters.com/business/hea...

This is the Witch Trials theory of war: If they try not to drown at sea, they're terrorists.

Perry: The pro-Hitler problem with the American right "We need to get back to the basics: Hitler was bad. The people who suggest otherwise are also bad," David M. Perry writes.

Hitler was bad.

An essay that, you know, I didn’t think I’d need to write.

Shutdown Deal Kills Food Safety Rules After lobbyists spent big on the Trump administration and Democratic defectors, the government funding bill cut food-contamination rules and limited ultraprocessed-food research.

BREAKING NEWS: Senators quietly put language into the shutdown deal helping their donors block rules to prevent food contamination & foodborne illnesses at farms & restaurants, according to bill text reviewed by @levernews.com.

The provisions come amid an explosion of foodborne illnesses.

The DOT also reportedly plans to rescind requirements that airlines disclose junk fees. It's also planning to redefine what flight cancellations would require refunds for passengers.

Both Delta and United gave $1 million to the Trump inauguration fund.

Everything is for sale.

The Athletic polled hundreds of players from across the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL about their opinions surrounding how sports betting impacts players — the responses were haunting.

O'DONNELL: Why did you pardon Changpeng Zhao?

TRUMP: Are you ready? I don't know who he is

O'DONNELL: His crypto exchange Binance helped facilitate a $2b purchase of World Liberty Financial's stablecoin. And they you pardoned him.

TRUMP: Here's the thing -- I know nothing about it

Q: What did you mean when you said you're prepared to send 'more than the National Guard' into American cities?

TRUMP: if I want to enact a certain act, I'd be allowed to do whatever I want. The courts wouldn't get involved. Nobody would. I could send Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines -anybody I want

ICE is working with Peter Thiel’s company Palantir to develop and deploy ImmigrationOS, an AI-powered platform that scoops up massive amounts of data that ICE can use to expedite deportation. Over the summer, ICE began using Graphite, a phone-hacking platform similar to Pegasus. And just this week, The Verge reported that ICE has also contracted with Zignal Labs to provide expansive social media monitoring of immigrants.

Nothing to worry about here, folks.

I am sure all of the involved parties will STOP using these surveillance tools and move on after they finish with deportations (which are obviously also deeply offensive)

Great work by @austinkocher.com

austinkocher.substack.com/p/the-rise-o...

I know it’s too much to expect them to know their history, but if the American Revolution had a motto, it definitely would not have been “immigrants go home.”

It would have been “get your fucking soldiers out of our cities.”

Trump: "They spent $900,093,000 on the catapults trying to get them to work. And they had steam, which worked so beautifully and it has for 50 years, right? So we're gonna go back. Seriously fellas, I want to make that change. I'm gonna do an executive order."

Your ability to eat should not depend on your productivity

Your ability to get healthcare should not depend on your productivity

Your ability to get housing should not depend on your productivity

Saying “be more productive!” To those who are struggling devalues human life.

It aids fascism.

One year ago

Food bank director: “for every meal that a food bank provides, the SNAP program provides nine. There’s no way we can meet that gap.”

My man, the stated policy of your administration is that Canada should become an American state, but Canadians running an accurate ad is a threat to American sovereignty?

Trump EPA seeks to weaken scrutiny for some of US’s most toxic chemicals New rule would shorten the time it takes to review chemicals, and alter the methodology used to assess their dangers

1/ Last month, the EPA proposed a rule that will significantly weaken safety reviews for toxic chemicals used in the U.S. Weakening these reviews can open the door to more exposure to toxic chemicals, including PFAS and formaldehyde.

1. ICE has sharply increased its spending on weapons in 2025, according to an analysis of federal gov't data by Popular Information.

Records reveal ICE has increased spending on “small arms" — a category that includes guns, armor, chemical weapons, and explosives — by 700% compared to 2024 levels

everyone: we don’t want kings

rightwing media: this is a confusing protest line, no one is claiming trump is a king

the entire trump administration:

Benny Johnson « @bennyjohnson X.com BREAKING: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stares down army of Antifa and a guy in a chicken suit from the rooftop of the ICE facility here in Portland. Noem says: "Hey; Guy in the chicken suit. You can do better. Too bad they are uneducated and ill-informed." Noem isn't chicken: [chicken emoji]

A view from the roof of the building. There are about 15-20 people visible in total, several of whom appear to be reporters. Most are holding signs. They aren’t even taking up the whole sidewalk. One guy is wearing a chicken suit.

This made me laugh so hard. Second screenshot is of the video posted by Benny Johnson of the event.