‘A Congressperson from Florida claims Congress will cut funding for the Washington DC Metro Area Transit Authority (WMATA) if it isn’t renamed WMAGA (Metropolitan Authority for Greater Access) and called the Tr*mp Train.…’ Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing
‘The Atlantic‘s Benjamin Wallace reports on the world of extreme privacy consultants — people who help clients vanish from the digital landscape.
The piece focuses on Alec Harris, CEO of HavenX, whose own privacy measures include 191 virtual debit cards, multiple phone numbers, a house purchased through a trust, even fake dog toys in the yard to throw off would-be intruders.
Harris learned many of these techniques from Michael Bazzell, a former cop who became the guru of digital disappearance before mysteriously vanishing himself. Bazzell’s approach to privacy was so thorough he’d remove license plates at night and hide backup data in hollow nickels behind electrical plates in friends’ homes.
But the article reveals the costs of this lifestyle — both financial (tens of thousands per month for some clients — “strong privacy is a luxury good” ) and psychological (the constant “cognitive overhead” of maintaining multiple identities).…’ Ellsworth Toohey via Boing Boing
If you needed help envisioning how marvelous and strange the universe can be. Via YouTube
‘The Atlantic writer George Packer calls JD Vance the most interesting figure in the Tr*mp administration: “He’s capable of complex thought, and I also think he may be the future of the MAGA movement.”…’ Tonya Mosley via NPR
‘Judges continue to decide cases against Tr*mp, with a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruling today that President Donald J. Tr*mp’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs are illegal.
The judges, one appointed by President Ronald Reagan, one by President Barack Obama, and one by Tr*mp himself, noted that the U.S. Constitution gives exclusively to Congress the power to impose tariffs. In 1977, Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, often abbreviated as IEEPA, delegating to the president the power to adjust tariffs in times of national emergency, but Tr*mp has used that power far beyond what the Constitution will permit.
Since he took office on January 20, 2025, the judges noted, Tr*mp “has declared several national emergencies and imposed various tariffs in response.” But the IEEPA has “meaningful limits,” the court writes, and “an unlimited delegation of tariff authority would be unconstitutional.” The court blocked all the tariffs Tr*mp imposed under the IEEPA, thus ending Tr*mp‘s tariff spree, although the administration will appeal…’ via Heather Cox Richardson
‘President Tr*mp’s threat to slap a 25% tariff on iPhones not made in the United States appears to be a direct response to Apple CEO Tim Cook skipping the president’s recent Middle East trip. The move caught Apple and parts of the White House off guard, but insiders say it was personal.…’ Rajat Saini via The Mac Observer
‘[W]e should … be careful about doling out diagnoses, says Dr. Suzanne O’Sullivan, an Irish neurologist and the author of a new book, The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession With Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker.
In her book, O’Sullivan argues that our eagerness to diagnose, preemptively screen, and otherwise push these new tools to their limits is creating problems that deserve to be taken more seriously. She describes mutually reinforcing trends — the patient’s insistence on certainty and the doctor’s desire to avoid being blamed for missing something — that are driving clinical practice toward overdiagnosis. The phenomenon is even leading to more instances of doctors diagnosing certain cancers by 50 percent or more, due to the availability of new imaging tech that can detect even minuscule traces of abnormal cells.
Overdiagnosis can cause real harm. And so O’Sullivan advocates for “slow medicine,” in which doctors and patients take time to develop a relationship, monitor symptoms, and take a great deal of care before naming a condition — an approach that may sound quaint in an era of rapid-testing but something she says is actually more in tune with the reality that diagnosis is partly an art.…’ Dylan Scott via Vox
‘The president delivered a campaign-style speech to West Point cadets, touting his election “mandate” and how it “gives us the right to do what we want”…’ Naomi Lachance via Rolling Stone
‘One of the best ways to reduce your exposure is by refusing bottled water, which can cut your intake by 90 percent.…’ Sammi Caramela via Vice
‘Reading, a skill easily taken for granted, is difficult—all the more so when reading literature that wields language as a medium for art. In the wake of Richards’ revelations, scholars in Britain and the United States developed a technique to address our failures. Eventually that technique took the name “close reading,” and it remains the principal methodology of literary studies.
Close reading is untimely. It bristles against today’s universities, which treat students as customers to please and as future workers to train rather than as people in pursuit of human flourishing. Jeff Bezos’ empire—Amazon; Goodreads; Kindle Direct Publishing, which dominates the perfervid world of self-publishing—encourages readers to “talk about a book as if it were just another thing, like a dish, or a product like an electronic device.” Social media compels us to attend to what we’re seeing for as long as it takes to scroll by. Every day, AI produces more of the words we come across, making it hard—maybe impossible—to care about reading them. I’m sure there were college courses this semester where students completed their work with AI and professors graded it with AI, cutting humans from the loop. It’s easy to see why close reading, which demands patience, openness to others, and slow, careful thought, is having a moment among academics.
In January, literary critic John Guillory, emeritus faculty at NYU, well known in the small world of literary studies, published a slim volume, On Close Reading, accompanied by an exhaustive annotated bibliography compiled by Rhodes College professor Scott Newstok that demonstrated that more people are writing about close reading now than ever. Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth has garnered disproportionate attention, occasioning roundtables, special sections of journals, and many reviews. Much more, including a volume I co-edited, is forthcoming. After a spell of taking it for granted, academics are rediscovering the quiet excitement of close reading, a relief from the overheated corporate pablum routinely suffocating us.…’ via Defector
‘One of the most momentous developments of the new Trump era is how major billionaires in the tech industry — frequently known as the broligarchs — have thrown their weight behind the president. During the 2024 election, they offered high-profile support and made big donations; after the inauguration, they announced new company policies that aligned them with President Donald Trump’s regressive cultural ideologies.Elon Musk had already turned Twitter into a right-wing echo chamber since purchasing it in 2022, and spent several chaotic months earlier this year as Trump’s government efficiency henchman. Jeff Bezos has revamped the Washington Post’s editorial section to build support for “personal liberties and free markets.” Mark Zuckerberg decided to get rid of fact-checkers at Meta.
It was a massive show of power that revealed how possible it is for these wealthy men to remake our culture in their own image, transforming how we speak to each other and what we know to be true. Using that power on Tr*mp’s behalf seems to have paid mixed dividends for Silicon Valley, but it nonetheless makes clear how important it is to understand their worldview and their vision for the future.
Which is why it is striking to note that Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg share a favorite author: Iain M. Banks, the Scottish science fiction writer best known for his Culture series. Banks is an odd choice for a bunch of tech billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and avowed hater of the super-rich.
“The Culture series is certainly, in terms of more modern science fiction, one of my absolute favorites,” Bezos told GeekWire in 2018, adding, “there’s a utopian element to it that I find very attractive.” Bezos has attempted twice to adapt the series for TV at Amazon, once in 2018 and again in February. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg picked the Culture novel Player of Games for his book club in 2015.
Banks is an odd choice for a bunch of tech billionaires. The author, who died in 2013, was a socialist and avowed hater of the super-rich.
The most avowed Culture fan among the broligarchs, however, is Musk. Musk has named Space X drone ships after the starships in the Culture books. His original name for the neuralink — a computer chip that can be implanted in human brains, pioneered by his neurotechnology company — was the neural lace, a piece of telepathic technology that Banks came up with in the Culture books. In 2018, Musk declared himself “a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.” (It’s worth noting that in 2018, Musk was under fire for union busting but had not yet waded so far into national politics or declared public war against the “woke mind virus.”)
Plenty of us like and even identify with pieces of pop culture whose politics we don’t entirely agree with, like the libertarian Little House on the Prairie books or the Christian Chronicles of Narnia. Still, the Banks Culture series, which consists of 10 books released between 1987 and 2012, is not politically coded so much as it is downright didactic. “The Culture is hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism,” Banks said in an interview with Strange Horizons in 2010, in a line that’s only barely more explicit than the books themselves…’ Constance Grady via Vox
‘[Corporate jargon] has evolved into a whole dictionary of phrases that mean pretty much nothing, but it does pad the conversation out. We are inundated with corporate jargon that is designed to be vague and noncommittal, often as a way to give plausible deniability or else cover the fact that your supervisor just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Master a good amount of corporate jargon, and you can talk for hours and still not say anything useful.
Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky explains how this language evolved from regular workplace talk, and why it is so frustrating whether you understand it or not.…’ Rommel Santor via Neatorama
‘On Tuesday, the US government put eight men — only one a South Sudanese citizen — on a deportation flight to South Sudan, an unstable country in East Africa that is on the verge of civil war, with minimal notice and no chance to speak with a lawyer. Their exact location is now unclear.
A court order from April, issued by the same federal judge, Brian Murphy, blocked the Tr*mp administration from deporting immigrants to countries not their own without due process because of the possibility they could face violence or death there.…’ Cameron Peters via Vox
‘Joe Biden lost it before he even won the presidency.
This is the most notable revelation in Original Sin, a new book-length exposé of the Biden White House by Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Thompson and Tapper mostly fill in the details of a story we already knew: Biden’s cognition declined sharply over his final two years in office, and his core advisers schemed to disguise this reality from donors, Democratic officials, and the public.
But the authors also vindicate those who believed that Biden was already in rough shape before he ever won the presidency. Their book suggests that the former president’s cognitive decline began after the tragic death of his son Beau from brain cancer in 2015. By December 2019, Biden was having difficulty remembering the name of his top adviser Mike Donilon, whom he’d worked with for 38 years, and conducting coherent conversations with voters over Zoom.
Original Sin is a sad book, made all the sadder by this week’s news that Biden has metastatic prostate cancer. It is also an infuriating read that illuminates the selfishness and self-delusions that led an unwell octogenarian to run for a second presidential term — and a team of sycophantic advisers to conceal his condition from the public (and possibly, even from himself).…’ Eric Levitz via Vox
‘An increasingly authoritarian United States might see the return of violent revolutionaries like the 1970s Weather Underground, warns Jukka Savolainen, a professor of sociology at Wayne State University. This was a group of young, well-educated, upper-middle-class Americans who bombed government buildings to protest the Vietnam War…
Most people will seek change through peaceful activism, but Savolainen warns that “societies that exile their intellectuals risk turning them into revolutionaries.”…’ Ellsworth Toohey via Boing Boing
‘UnitedHealth, the health insurer whose CEO was allegedly assassinated outside a hotel in New York City, secretly paid nursing homes not to transfer seriously ill patients to hospitals. The Guardian reports that the cost-cutting plan “saved the company millions” at the cost of patients’ health.…’ Rob Beschizza via Boing Boing
‘How to lock down your finances and online accounts after a data breach spreads your information to the secret corners of the internet…’ By Nicole Nguyen via WSJ
‘The net result of the Biden administration’s foreign policy was that an axis formed that didn’t exist in 2020, an axis that brought together Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. And unlike the axis of evil of 2002 around the Iraq war, it actually exists. It’s not just an idea for a speech. These powers cooperate together, economically and militarily.…’ via Noema
A fascinating essay by a philosopher of language stretching our minds toward inconceivably different modes of communication we might encounter in alien intelligence.
— via Nikhil Mahantis, a philosopher specialising in language and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University in Sweden, in Aeon Essays
‘One body of decades-long research found the average person’s attention span for a single screen is 47 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes in 2004. The 24/7 news cycle, uncertainty about the state of the world and countless hours of screen time don’t help, experts say.
“When my patients talk to me about this stuff there is often a feeling of helplessness or powerlessness,” said Dr. Michael Ziffra, a psychiatrist at Northwestern Medicine. “But you can change these behaviors. You can improve your attention span.”…’ via AP News
‘A group of three students at Purdue University have shattered the world record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solve by robot — their bot solved the cube in just 0.103 seconds (103 milliseconds). As a comparison, the former record was 305 milliseconds and “a human blink takes about 200 to 300 milliseconds”. As one of the students said, “So, before you even realize it’s moving, we’ve solved it.”…’ via Kottke
‘Musk’s time within the government has seemingly expired, and some Republicans couldn’t be happier.
“He’s finished, done, gone,” one GOP official, who was granted anonymity by Politico to talk trash, said of Musk. “He polls terrible. People hate him.”
That operative and others like him are already dancing on the unelected billionaire’s grave.
As the magazine found in a social media analysis, Musk is now persona non grata for Republicans.
After a big spike in late January of Musk-related content from accounts linked to the Trump administration, mentions of the billionaire have steadily fallen as the backlash against his politicking began in earnest. By April, he was only being mentioned twice a day — and by the time this month began, that number had dropped to one.…’ Noor Al-Sibai via Futurism
‘You might not be aware of it, but you have little mites living at the base of your eyelashes. They live off of dead skin cells. As such they generally don’t inflict any damage, and might have slightly beneficial effects. Most people don’t even know that they exist—which is part of the point I was trying to make. The mites, for their part, don’t know that humans exist. They just “know” that food, in the form of dead skin, just magically shows up in their environment all the time. All they have to do is eat it and continue living their best lives as eyelash mites. Presumably all of this came about as the end result of millions of years’ natural selection. The ancestors of these eyelash mites must have been independent organisms at some point in the distant past. Now the mites and the humans have found a modus vivendi that works so well for both of them that neither is even aware of the other’s existence. If AIs are all they’re cracked up to be by their most fervent believers, this seems like a possible model for where humans might end up: not just subsisting, but thriving, on byproducts produced and discarded in microscopic quantities as part of the routine operations of infinitely smarter and more powerful AIs.…’ Neal Stephenson via Graphomane
‘Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel and other far-right MAGA Republicans are calling for an investigation of former FBI Director James Comey in response to an Instagram post that depicted seashells in the sand forming the numbers “8647.”
The slang expression “eight-six” means to “remove” or “eject,” and Donald Trump is the 47th president of the United States. Noem, in a May 15 post on X, formerly Twitter, claimed that Comey was promoting violence against President Trump.
Noem tweeted, “Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of @POTUS Trump. DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.”
But Noem’s critics are reminding her that the term “eight-six” doesn’t automatically have a violent connotation. When restaurant workers, for example, say that they need to “eight-six” an order, it means cancel the order. Or a bar might “eighty-six” a customer who has had too much to drink.
Liberal firebrand and former MSNBC host Keith Olberman, in response to Noem’s tweet, posted, “Listen, you lying witch, he didn’t call for assassinating anyone. Since you murdered your daughter’s dog maybe you ought to S— about this.”…’ Alex Henderson via Alternet
Psychedelic compounds, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), can promote the growth of atrophied cortical neurons, which is relevant to the treatment of numerous brain conditions. However, their hallucinogenic properties have limited their adoption as medicines and preclude their use in certain patient populations, such as those with schizophrenia or a family history of psychosis. By transposing only two atoms, we have created JRT, an exceptionally potent analogue of LSD with lower hallucinogenic potential, improved pharmacological selectivity, and the ability to produce a wide range of therapeutic effects. Our work highlights the potential of rationally designed, nonhallucinogenic analogues of psychedelics for treating diseases where the use of psychedelics is contraindicated…’ Jeremy Tuck et al via PNAS
‘As scientists use machine learning to decode the sounds of whales, dogs, and dolphins, opinions vary on how best to deploy the technology.…’ Isaac Schultz via Gizmodo
‘President Tr*mp campaigned on a pledge to fight antisemitism.
“Antisemitic bigotry has no place in a civilized society,” Tr*mp said at an event in 2024.
Tr*mp nominee gives misleading testimony about ties to alleged ‘Nazi sympathizer’
However, the president’s critics question whether antisemitism may have found a place within his administration.
NPR has identified three Tr*mp officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a “Nazi sympathizer,” and a prominent Holocaust denier…’ Tom Dreisbach via NPR
‘”Sorry for the mix-up, the video is indeed about a pig, not white genocide.”…’ Maggie Harrison Dupré via Futurism
‘On May 8, political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt published an op-ed in the New York Times reminding readers that most modern authoritarian leaders are elected. They maintain their power by using the power of the government—arrests, tax audits, defamation suits, politically targeted investigations, and so on—to punish and silence their opponents. They either buy or bully the media and civil society until opposing voices cave to their power.
Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt call this system “competitive authoritarianism.” A country that has fallen to it still holds elections, but the party in power has so weighted the system in its favor that it’s virtually impossible for it to lose.
The way to tell if the United States has crossed the line from democracy to competitive authoritarianism, the political scientists explain, is to see if people feel safe opposing those in power. Can they safely protest? Publish criticism of the government? Support opposition candidates? Or does taking a stand against those in power lead to punishment either by the government or by government supporters?
Looking at the many ways the Trump administration has been harassing critics, law firms, universities, judges, and media stations, they conclude that “America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.” …’ Heather Cox Richardson
‘Here is how proponents describe the alleged phenomenon:
“Brainspotting makes use of this natural phenomenon through its use of relevant eye positions. This helps the Brainspotting therapist locate, focus, process and release a wide range of emotionally and bodily-based conditions. Brainspotting is also a brain-based tool to support the therapy relationship. We believe that Brainspotting taps into and harnesses the body’s natural self-scanning, self-healing ability. When a Brainspot is stimulated, the deep brain appears to reflexively signal the therapist that the source of the problem has been found.”
This is all complete and utter neurological rubbish from beginning to end, but let’s break it down. The idea is that trauma (not necessarily traumatic memories, but “trauma” in the abstract sense) is somehow located in specific spots in the deep brain, such as the brainstem. This is an extraordinary claim, and it is coupled with another equally extraordinary claim – that where your eyes physically look also maps to specific subcortical locations. These overlapping maps can then be used to locate the “trauma”.
Of course these maps do not exist. There is no neuroanatomical correlate to either component of the core principles of brainspotting. The anatomy of eye movements is fairly well understood, and does not correlate in any way with this core notion of brainspotting.…’ Steven Novella via Science-Based Medicine
‘An aurora gently glowing in wavelengths visible to the human eye has been captured on Mars for the first time – and a robot was the only one to see it live.
On 18 March 2024, as the night sky over Jezero Crater turned a faint, luminous green, the Perseverance rover sat ready with its eyes peeled. What it recorded opens new ways to study Mars. Although Mars is known to have auroras of various kinds, all the others we’ve seen have been in invisible hues of ultraviolet.…’ Michelle Starr via ScienceAlert
‘As part of the red-carpet treatment, Saudi officials arranged for a fully operational mobile McDonald’s unit to accompany President Trump during his stay.…’ Charlie Warzel via The Atlantic
‘Rolling Stone reached out to all 53 GOP senators after the president said he didn’t know whether he needs to honor the nation’s founding document. None replied…’ Ryan Bort via Rolling Stone
He doesn’t know his olive oil from his elbow. He uses an embarrassing espresso machine. And his utility knife is either insanely expensive or insanely cheap. via Financial Times
‘Inside a laboratory nestled above the mist of the forests of south Dakota, scientists are searching for the answer to one of science’s biggest questions: why does the Universe exist?
They are in a race for the answer with a separate team of Japanese scientists – who are several years ahead….’ via BBC
‘Schumer also called on [Attorney General Pam Bondi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Bondi) to testify before Congress and answer a number of questions related to the potential gift.…’ Rebecca Shabad and Frank Thorp V via NBC
‘Presidents can’t keep gifts that are worth more than $480 unless they buy them. This plane costs about $400 million.…’ Abdallah Fayyad via Vox
‘Vaccine denialism and now just simple reckless disregard for National Park Service warnings to stay out of the water. RFK Jr has some belief he and his progeny are immune to these things, and I hope for the kid’s sake he isn’t proven wrong this time. Sounds like an awful place to swim.…’ Jason Weisberger via Boing Boing
(Darwin Awards explained here.)
‘If millions of international visitors do, in fact, come to LA [for the 2028 Olympics], it will be at their own peril…’ Alissa Walker via Torched LA
‘Our bodies emit a stream of low-energy photons, and now experiments in mice have revealed that this ghostly glow is cut off when we die…’ Alex Wilkins via New Scientist
Physical basis for the parapsychological concept of the aura?
‘Donald Tr*mp’s administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus – the right of a person to challenge their detention in court – one of the US president’s top aides has said.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters on Friday that the US Constitution allowed for the legal liberty to be suspended in times of “rebellion or invasion”.
His comments come as judges have sought to challenge some recent detentions made by the Trump administration in an effort to combat illegal immigration, as well as remove dissenting foreign students.
“A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not,” Miller said…’ via BBC
‘New research has identified 17 overlapping factors that affect your risk of stroke, dementia, and late-life depression, suggesting that a number of lifestyle changes could simultaneously lower the risk of all three.
Though they may appear unrelated, people who have dementia or depression or who experience a stroke also often end up having one or both of the other conditions, said Dr. Sanjula Singh, a principal investigator at the Brain Care Labs at Massachusetts General Hospital and the lead author of the study. That’s because they may share underlying damage to small blood vessels in the brain, experts said….’ via The New York Times
‘Fascism, Bolton told Vox, is “too far above Trump’s capabilities.”…’ Sean Rameswaram via Vox
‘The causes of this divide are complex and have been endlessly discussed. There’s social media and the existence of “manosphere” content creators like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan, who promote right-wing parties and ideas. Additionally, widespread isolation, especially for the youth, means that social media now has an outsized impact, leading to a distorted public sphere where preferences are distorted by biased algorithms. There is, of course, a gendered backlash aspect: Women have made notable advances in the public sphere over the last five years, and Trump has capitalized on anxieties about such gains, as well as longer-simmering grievances and tensions, to advance his reactionary agenda.
But while much of the debate has centered on electoral strategy, social issues like transgender rights or Me Too, and chastising activists for their unproductive work, the truth is somewhat more nuanced. Younger men are more conservative on some issues, but men’s and women’s differing votes don’t seem to be based on policy differences: Surveys of American voters point to men and women largely agreeing on which issues they find most important, and they mostly seem to trust the same parties on each of those issues.
The best way to understand the growing gender divide isn’t the culture war. It’s how the economy has shifted over the past half-century.…’ Maia Mindel via Vox
‘OpenAI’s tech may be driving countless of its users into a dangerous state of “ChatGPT-induced psychosis.”
As Rolling Stone reports, users on Reddit are sharing how AI has led their loved ones to embrace a range of alarming delusions, often mixing spiritual mania and supernatural fantasies.
Friends and family are watching in alarm as users insist they’ve been chosen to fulfill sacred missions on behalf of sentient AI or nonexistent cosmic powerse — chatbot behavior that’s just mirroring and worsening existing mental health issues, but at incredible scale and without the scrutiny of regulators or experts….’ Victor Tangermann via Futurism
‘Residents of an upscale enclave outside Austin, Texas, learned the hard way what it’s like when a multibillionaire moves into the mansion next door. Some of them have started a ruckus over it….’ via The New York Times
‘The comment came as Tr*mp remained adamant that he wanted to ship undocumented immigrants out of the country and said it was inconceivable to hear millions of cases in court, insisting he needed the power to quickly remove people he said were murderers and drug dealers.
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he said.
Pressed on whether he still needs to abide by the Constitution, he said, “I don’t know.”…’ Matt Viser via The Washington Post
‘Tr*mp seems to know little, and he has grown increasingly incoherent and rambling, often wholly detached from reality.…’
For example, this, in response to a question about border security:
“I built hundreds of miles of wall, and then (Biden) didn’t want to, and we had another, an extra hundred miles that I could have put up because I ordered it as extra. I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well. Rex Hippie via USA Today
‘There is an established playbook for turning a democracy into an authoritarian state, used in countries ranging from India to Hungary. It requires a leader to:
Remove formal limits on their own powers.
Compromise independent power centers such as the press and courts.
Win compliance with the new regime from social elites and the mass public.Tr*mp has attempted all of these things. He has taken actions, like unilaterally declaring an end to birthright citizenship, that clearly violate the Constitution. He has targeted alternative power centers, launching an investigation into a Democratic fundraising platform and threatening the press. He has imposed sanctions on prominent law firms and universities in a bid to force compliance, and he has sold it all to the public as evidence he’s getting things done.
Yet in each arena, Tr*mp is facing effective and mounting pushback. He is routinely losing in court. He is failing to silence the media. And he is losing support among the elite as his poll numbers plummet…’ Zack Beauchamp via Vox
‘If you receive a text from a number you don’t know, don’t respond, as doing so validates your phone number. Even if you don’t engage in this exchange any further, you may be targeted again in the future (and by different unfamiliar numbers).
You also don’t need to try to find out who they are or whether you know them—if someone actually needs to reach you, they are likely to follow up with multiple messages or calls beyond a single “Hey, how are you?” And as with any scam, be wary of communication that provokes an emotional response or a sense of urgency.
You should mark wrong number messages as spam in your messaging app. In Messages on iOS, tap the Report Junk link that appears at the bottom of messages from unknown senders, then hit Delete > Report Junk. If you haven’t opened the message yet, you can also swipe left and tap the Trash icon > Delete and Report Junk. (Note that you can’t report a message if you’ve replied to it, which is another reason not to do so.)
On Android, you can block and report conversations in Google Messages: tap and hold, then tap Block > Report spam > OK. If you’ve already opened the conversation, hit More options > Details > Block & report spam > OK.
You can also forward spam messages to 7726, which helps wireless companies identify and block scams.…’ Emily Long via Lifehacker
‘A New York Times poll finds Donald Tr*mp achieving a record low rating for a president 100 days into their administration, with 42% of respondents approving of the job he’s doing and 54% disapproving. Moreover, he’s underwater in every policy area they cared to chart, including the one that’s supposedly his strongest: immigration.…’ via Boing Boing
‘…(O)ver the last few months, it has occurred to me that, for all the hype about generative AI systems “hallucinating,” we pay much less attention to the fact that the current President does the same thing, nearly every day. The more you look at the way Donald Trmp spews utter nonsense answers to questions, the more you begin to recognize a clear pattern — he answers questions in a manner quite similar to early versions of ChatGPT. The facts don’t matter, the language choices are a mess, but they are all designed to present a plausible-sounding answer to the question, based on no actual knowledge, nor any concern for whether or not the underlying facts are accurate.
This pattern becomes impossible to unsee once you start looking for it. …’ via Techdirt
