that is almost certainly true

Eyal Weizman · All they will find is sand: Gaza’s Yellow Line Most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture...

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

They're calling it the most British front-page in history, folks.

Really, the absolute cheek of that Nadine Dorries column, Christ.

I saw the craziest muzac-type AI stream on a TV in a waiting room where songs were clearly written by a chatbot and they were all the same droning faux romance but ultimately nonsensical with insipid rhymes. Then an awful song that was from a real band would be interspersed and it was SUCH a relief!

guy reading in a room full chain mail

my local library does a tolkien reading day and people came prepared

Maybe this is the origin story?

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For fuck's sake, sign up for The Onion, and get a free limited edition IW tote.

A share of merch sales will go to the Sandy Hook families, which will be the first time they get any money since they filed this lawsuit eight years ago.

Legal fees have been insane. Please sign up and help us out!

Oh no! People evading the vaccine? What a fiasco.

Yes, my sister is a teacher and has long covid but she got diabetes from it and the diabetes medicine might be helping the long covid? I’m not sure. She has to work. The whole thing is a fiasco. Her children are CONSTANTLY SICK as well. How is this affecting public health and will we ever be told?

How many Doctors now have long Covid and why aren’t the BMA calling for preventions? Preventions will stop this cycle. We must start preventing long COVID. Very disappointing they aren’t doing this.

I know a doctor with long covid—and she cannot practice medicine now. It’s terrible!

It’s wild to watch. WHAT is the reason for it?!? Of course, the USA is completely destroying itself and I can’t explain that either except to vaguely gesture at the divide and conquer use of social divisions to insulate the rich. Maybe UK has the same thing? But here’s there‘s a lot of pushback.

at times, looking at UK governance (especially regarding higher ed and cultural institutions), I feel like I'm watching a slightly downwardly mobile relative set heirlooms ablaze for warmth

The Last Judgment - Central

The Last Judgment - Central

The UK faced a soft landing as a middle power when in the EU. I wish the USA would have this! With trade coalition it barely matters as empires don’t improve people’s lives except for trade but then the inability to accept the reality made people do Brexit and now it’s bleaker and harder to face.

YES! There is some truth in it which is what makes it good. This is the problem when I was trying to demonstrate conspiracist thinking to someone and realized I was going to make them an advocate of the theory. But it’s all about whether there is a ‘secret reality’ behind the screwy boring reality.

Yes but not all the experiments had direct applications—some of these people doing the experiments were just doing cruel things to see what would happen.

(A line from my forthcoming book): the most important thing to understand about tech futurism is when Musk, Altman and their peers are wrong about the future of technology, they don’t have to give the money back.

Yeah I agree—I was saying it is to affirm their own delusions but I don’t think that’s a different phenomenon since meme stocks are best buoyed by a delusional founder who causes a number of people to share his delusions.

They have to re-affirm their own delusions. Most delusional people do this at some point. But for them the need is particularly acute because they are vaguely aware of pushback and they get as far as they get by causing others to share their delusions.

Yes, that’s a very terrifying thing that can haunt your mind once you learn about it. The minions —I’d like to imagine they’d be a hindrance in that situation though they were more likely to be experimental subjects themselves.

The past is another country, etc.

Now bar is VERY low. Obama set the bar high —only for Obama, somehow. Now Obama more than clears a bar he couldn’t clear when he himself somehow set the bar higher than he could clear (Most in the past did not clear. But he raised expectations by seeming good. It made sense then but doesn’t now.)

Are there people who don’t know that Obama is still very popular? How is that possible? My guess is Obama will stay popular as a US president who was not insane nor a pathological liar nor fairly to mind-bogglingly stupid. (I realize some think he was those but he was not and most realize it.)

Are people in the US unconcerned with the fallout of another catastrophic war? It’s hard to tell.

If we care about democracy maybe what we need to hope is Democrats do unfair-maybe even illegal-things to get the Republicans to agree to make a fair system and to stay within the law. A lot can go wrong as everyone seems so dishonest greedy and nuts but —it will not work to ask the GOP to be fair.

Yeah—there was a lot of scary stuff in those years. Maybe the minions could have handled it.

I would not be surprised if unpaid child support were a factor.

I find it easier to imagine them running a gulag than to imagine them dealing with army discipline…maybe Hogan’s Heroes gave me the wrong idea about penal camps though.

An AI-free OS for an AI-free product line with a written guarantee from Apple not to insert AI into users’ devices at a later date.