“The thesis of the book is, effectively, Palantir loves getting big contracts from the Department of Defense. And when you think about it, doesn’t that make Palantir kind of heroic?”

A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss (Gift link!)

a bankers box full of cassette tapes with white labels

We're working to make digitally accessible this phenomenal set of interviews recorded by Donna Smith about LGBTQ people in the South. Stay tuned!

This is just horrific. The gender critical movement along with the British press bullied her out of her job at the NHS and now they doxed her after she fled the country and are continuing the harassment and defamation. These people are absolute monsters.

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.

Federal Judge Vacates Kennedy Declaration, Permanently Blocks Trump's Trans Youth Care Hospital Threats The judgment overturns the Kennedy Declaration which has been used to force 40 hospitals to drop trans youth care.

Federal Judge Vacates Kennedy Declaration, Permanently Blocks Trump's Trans Youth Care Hospital Threats • The judgment overturns the Kennedy Declaration which has been used to force 40 hospitals to drop trans youth care.

Coachella is trying to wipe all of the footage of The Strokes protest set so I’m gonna post it here. The last images on the screen made me cry.

Doing talks at universities designed to cause outrage has been part of the far-right playbook since the 1960s when American Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell did it. The point is to cause an outcry from progressive students and therefore get coverage and sympathy because the “evil students” were mean!

A sunny photo of my night heron purse laying in some grass

Ok I absolutely recommend making yourself a bird bag. Excellent weekend project. Extremely funny if you add legs. The pattern is pretty well done, I wish some steps included more detailed diagrams or photos.
madison-makes.com/shop/fly-awa...

Page 1 of a legal Judgment document from the United States District Court, District of Oregon for Case No. 6:25-cv-02409-MTK, filed on 04/18/26. The plaintiffs are listed as "STATE OF OREGON, et al.," and the defendants are "ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR., in his official capacity as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, et al." The document is from United States District Judge Kasubhai. It outlines that final judgment is entered in favor of the Plaintiffs on Counts I, II, III, and IV. Item 3 states the Court holds unlawful, sets aside, and vacates the "Declaration of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services RE: Safety, Effectiveness and Professional Standards of Care for Sex-Rejecting Procedures on Children and Adolescents".

Page 2 of a legal judgment document for Case 6:25-cv-02409-MTK, filed on April 18, 2026. The text outlines a court order declaring that defendants lack the authority to unilaterally establish standards of care that supersede professionally recognized standards for gender-affirming care in the Plaintiff States. It permanently enjoins defendants and their agents, including the HHS-OIG, from enforcing the "Kennedy Declaration" against providers in those states. The document is dated April 18, 2026, and is signed by United States District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai.

Huge news: the court has entered final judgement in Oregon v Kennedy (HHS trans youth care ban) and has vacated the Kennedy declaration and permanently enjoined its enforcement to target gender clinics.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I think it’s important context to mention to people who think this is just a crackpot Trump/RFK thing that the Bush II admin set USA back years with a war against stem cell research.

Destroying scientific advancement that can save lives for specious or superstitious reasons is Republican policy.

Surely demand and human negligence in the fishing industry, etc are the drivers of this, not Jaws?

Act up activism is actually an amazing model for social change, in your face direct action, inside outside organizing, science led policy platforms, no monopoly on action, incredibly savvy media strategy, etc. and what a legacy to have been affiliated with this movement

that’s not feelgood unless you get joy from other people’s suffering tbh, and she’s one of many people suffering because of new regs like this. It’s sad, just like her continued support for Trump and the GOP is sad.

Exposing a global ‘online rape academy’ that is teaching men how to abuse women and evade detection CNN exposes an online network of men encouraging each other to drug and assault their partners, and swap tips on how to get away with it.

Age-verification laws have pushed more and more users to sites with illegal content. If a site ignores laws around rape, it’s sure as hell not complying with some state level AV law.

These laws are driving traffic to the worst parts of the internet.

If only someone had warned regulators!

It's interesting when politicians do and do not follow the polls, isn't it?

It shocks me how many businesses still don’t seem to get that Trump’s cultural revolution did not actually happen

I have a new podcast coming out tomorrow. It's about the aftermath of the Titanic disaster.

Please listen and subscribe I need your money and attention.

WHY does this look like a maternity shoot

A clown in 4 parts meme Text: Give us your ID, it's just for adult sites Okay, now give us your ID for "dangerous content" Posting? You better have ID Your online Burger King order is on hold. Please provide valid ID to access your fries

And it doesn't even protect children.

Congress’ War Powers vote fails by exactly one vote (214-213).

Funny how this keeps happening!

I hopped on Live yesterday to talk about some books that informed our short doc. If you’re that kind of nerd, here are a few from that discussion

That people didn’t like the murder lizards getting flamboyant plumage is yet another “everything is gender”

To add nuance, Dernoncourt et al. (2024) show that taxing the 1% will not make a meaningful difference in closing the racial wealth gap. THAT SAID, there is evidence that the tax revenue could help improve many other parts of society.

Ticketmaster is an illegal monopoly, jury rules The DOJ settled, but more than 30 states kept litigating against Ticketmaster anyway.

I still remember when lin manuel miranda was out there trying to make ticket scalping a felony instead of taking the obvious and correct policy position: ticketmaster go to jail one thousand years www.theverge.com/policy/91268...

I know people bristle at the idea of leftists who police language but a big reason it happens is because, especially as it relates to politicians, the language we choose serves as an entirely accurate predictor of the types of policy decisions we would make & who we would & wouldn’t place value on

Some of the most commonly enforced Jim Crows laws historically were anti-fishing and hunting regulations. At the time it was openly discussed that if black people had access to their own food procurement they would refuse to work as hard for white business owners or worse potentially go 'off grid'.

hot frog & toad

he showed up to a mostly empty auditorium, got heckled by anti war protesters opposing the war he just humiliatingly failed to negotiate an end to, erika kirk stood him up, and he tried to explain catholicism to the pope. the only way he could’ve had a worse time is if he pissed his pants up there.

Doe had broken up with the user in 2024, and he used ChatGPT to process the split, according to emails and communications cited in the lawsuit. Rather than push back on his one-sided account, it repeatedly cast him as rational and wronged, and her as manipulative and unstable. He then took these AI-generated conclusions off the screen and into the real world, using them to stalk and harass her. This manifested in several AI-generated, clinical-looking psychological reports that he distributed to her family, friends, and employer.

For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.” Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”

Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT. In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”

A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.)

This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):