An economist who measures wealth inequality found that on a scale of 1-100, where 1 is complete equality and 100 is one person owning everything, pre-revolutionary France scored an 83.
Modern-day America scores...wait for it...an 83!
ineqpietro.substack.com/p/is-wealth-...
Hmmm?
What started happening in 1980 to create this change? If only we knew, we could reverse it.
rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...
The prescription for this is simple.
Tax. The. Rich.
91%
The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering
The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory
a "fun" fact is that texas' state senate map is so gerrymandered that this swing would flip all but four republican districts
Trump is selling pardons every week to people who pay $1-2 million to his PAC and is approaching 2,000 corrupt and disgusting pardons less than a year into his term, but yeah “no one is above the law.”
X is only allowing “verified” users to create images with Grok. Experts say it represents the “monetization of abuse”—and anyone can still generate images on Grok’s app and website. www.wired.com/story/x-didn...
Thread on Trump leaking today's payroll numbers, an unprecedented and reckless move by an unhinged autocrat.
You are correct that the 1918 flu was not a lab leak.
But, an attenuated live virus vaccine can be made without identifying the virus.
There were attenuated live virus vaccines before viruses were isolated and identified.
www.nature.com/articles/d42...
Alt text: Screenshot of a tweet from the verified HHS (@HHSGov) account. The tweet states that @HHSGCMikeStuart referred Seattle Children’s Hospital to @OIGatHHS for allegedly failing to meet professionally recognized health care standards, citing Secretary Kennedy’s declaration that sex-reassignment procedures for children and adolescents are neither safe nor effective treatments for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or related disorders in minors. The tweet shows a timestamp of 2:47 PM on Dec 26, 2025, and 15.1K views.
HHS is trying to force Seattle Children's into doing a Sophie's choice of abandoning trans youth or see kids with cancer or other serious illness have their coverage and care disrupted. That's what this is about.
Hopefully, the courts put a quick stop to this like the subpoenas.
New York City has bought more than 125,000 acres of land to provide a buffer around water reservoirs. It’s much cheaper than spending billions on filtration systems, officials say.
Academics and technologists are sounding the alarm about a growing crisis in scholarship as we know it: AI-generated citations of nonexistent papers that have infested real journals. Despite being fake, the sources are widely assumed to be authentic the more they appear in published literature.
To the extent there are any non-political, career DOJ lawyers left, I'm sympathetic to what they're doing. I've had to go through child sexual abuse material as a lawyer in a past life, and it's worse than run-of-the-mill document review by thousandfold. I hope they have good support systems.
See that’s the kind of talk that gets you buried in an unmarked grave on a second-rate golf course
Will Trump stop at just sanctioned tankers? He'll likely come up with some new excuse for the rest, at least those not bound for US refineries.
2/end
Is it truly an act of war, though?
I'm no expert. The seizure of the Skipper was illegal, but not an act of war.
theconversation.com/what-does-in...
Sanctioned tankers carry ~1/3 of Venezuelan oil exports.
www.cnbc.com/2025/12/17/t...
1/
If you have resolved
to try your best
to be kinder
in this new year,
and are looking
for something to do,
for something small to do,
for something tangible to do,
consider wearing a mask,
there is still more you can do
there is still more you must do
but a mask
is a start.
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At the White House on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, read a statement that said Mr. Hegseth had authorized the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, “to conduct these kinetic strikes.” She said that Admiral Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.” According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs. But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast. Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him.
Her scripted remarks at a news briefing elicited a furious backlash within the Defense Department, where officials described feeling angry at the uncertainty over whether Hegseth would take responsibility for his alleged role in the operation — or leave the military and civilian staff under him to face the consequences. “This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls---,” one military official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told The Post. Leavitt’s statement “left it up to interpretation” who was responsible for the second strike that killed the two survivors, a separate military official said, imploring the White House to provide clarity on the issue. One official said of Leavitt’s statement, “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.” Another person said some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration.
NYT:
Five officials told us that Hegseth had nothing to do with the second strike
Washpost (which broke the story 2 days ago):
“This is ‘protect Pete’ bullshit,”
and
“It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.”
Now that Karoline Leavitt just confirmed that Frank Bradley gave the order for the second strike that killed two people clinging to boat wreckage (per @atrupar.com) this seems doubly relevant:
Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.
If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.
www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...
Keep calm and carry on.....
You asked and I followed up. For those wondering about his tattoos in light of recent revelations from Graham Platner in Maine, Dylan Blaha told me he has six, none of which feature Nazi imagery.
Performative action is what got the Feds to finally admit AIDS was real, and the stories of that era moved the Overton window enough for Obergfell.
(Hopefully we move the window faster this time)
Performance is media-philic, and humans need to see things several times to fix it in their brains.
Not a shitpost: #NoKings is feel-good performative activism for comfortable mostly upper and upper middle class white folks and that’s good, actually. Millions of people in the streets protesting a fascist regime is good. It is good for the normie baseline to be massive displays of public dissent.
Folks are asking what to do about the One Special Boy's AI vids and whether they should share them:
MOCK THEM WITHOUT SHARING.
This creates what an enthymeme, where readers have to SUPPLY PART OF THE REFERENT to understand what you are mocking. An enthymeme is the STRONGEST form of persuasion.
