The three documents after that sequentially are a straight run of 255 pages of fully blacked out pages – except for a tiny margin at the bottom of each page. 255 full pages like this.

They weren't left with any savory options but blacking out every page and removing Trump's name from search was, uh, arguably the worst move.

In 1996, Maria Farmer bravely became the first woman to go to authorities about Epstein. She warned that he stole photos of her 12 and 14 year old sisters to possibly sell. I just spoke to her and she says she is “over the moon” this has come out and she is crying with her sister.

I think an even bigger reason is that it's not fundamentally about trans people at all, it's about creating a moral panic. Gender conformity is a classic basis for panic, but threats to children are even more powerful. Remember they used to focus on bathrooms? But that didn't stick as well.

Not infrequently, someone assumes I'm making an argument barely related to anything I've actually said. They appear to believe my stated arguments must be a secret proxy for another argument I'm unwilling to claim. That makes me wonder if these people go around making secret proxy arguments.

funding credible primary challenges against Senate Democrats is at this point more important, in terms of priorities, than supporting Roy Cooper and Jon Ossoff, who will be absolutely flush with cash

NEW: Oversight Dems are releasing additional photos from Jeffrey Epstein's estate to the public. We will continue releasing photographs and documents to provide transparency for the American people. It’s time for the Department of Justice to release the files.

If Democrats win the midterms, I'm ready to shelve *all* policymaking for a couple years in favor of tracking down the crimes of every single Trump administration crook.

The Italian cover of Absolution, from my wonderful publisher there, Einaudi. Out next year. Translated by Cristiana Mennella. The artist is Lorenzo Ceccotti and the inspiration here is the biologist's expedition in part 1 of the novel. Just a stunning cover. Amazing.

Every other business empire map of Presidents would have been empty

I've said before: the thing that takes Trump down won't be looking evil, it will be looking pathetic.

In May, our investigation uncovered a 40-year pattern of ignored warnings and church cover-ups that allowed a children's pastor to remain in ministry for decades despite repeated child sex abuse allegations. Today, authorities arrested Joe Campbell at his children's camp in Missouri.

What is insane about these graphs is that for that insane dive in federal government employment, they haven't actually managed to spend any less money.

NEW: Humanitarian officials staged a last-minute plea to Trump officials at their fancy hotel to re-start food aid $ for a huge refugee camp in Kenya. The Trumpers blew it off and babies starved. @annamaria.bsky.social & Brett Murphy www.propublica.org/article/keny...

Reagan was really the spiritual predecessor of Trump in that he did so much fucking evil shit that it's a Mr. Burns Diseases situation to get anyone to remember even half of it. Reagan also was completely out of his mind in his second term too.

File this under "high crimes & misdemeanors" because this is *exactly* how the Founders meant it

Rep. Joe Neguse also thinks this is payback over Tina Peters. It's attempted extortion by Trump: pardon his friends or your institutions will be cut. Same threat he made to Indiana: redistrict or he slashes your funding. If Congress wants to keep the power of the purse they need to push back, hard.

Trump says that affordability is a Democratic "hoax," but his tariffs derailed an economy that was headed in the right direction (via Bloomberg Opinion)

bad

This applies to so many things (h/t @serwewx.bsky.social)

Update: Charges against freelance photojournalist @davedeckerphoto.bsky.social were dismissed Dec. 16. He was arrested while reporting on an immigration protest outside an ICE facility in Miami last month and held for more than 30 hours.

The huge plurality of voters believe fixing long-term problems is infinitely more tractable than it actually is. That's a little bit because they're naive & don't recognize tradeoffs/challenges. But it's mostly because they don't see the depth of Republican obstruction on policymaking of any kind.

Marco Rubio: do you really think you're going to put on a very public performance of submission for a decade, and that the United States of America is then going to reward you with the presidency???

I would bet a great deal that Wiles is one of Marc Caputo's (very well placed) key sources. If so she probably expected to get the very solicitous treatment he always gives.

Okay, new theory: Wiles is not the seasoned operator she's painted as, and lacks basic DC survival skills like knowing reporters are never friends, even when they appear friend-shaped.

As someone who was/is highly critical of a lot of those Obama operations, yes. This is different

The Speaker Who Didn't Know Anything

👀 Trump’s CoS suggests Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” and calls JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” Susie is trying to clear her name before the Trump’s house of cards come crashing down.

masterful move by susie wiles

The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.5%, highest in more than 4 years. If the slow down in job growth was all reduction in labor supply, rather than reduction in labor demand, unemployment would be falling. That the unemployment rate is rising suggests weakening labor demand playing a role.

Anyway, I still think it's incredibly damning of the US media that Joe Biden actually got America out of Afghanistan after two decades and he was destroyed for it.

They are assuming it. We need to show them it's not true. For best effect, we should start making it clear well in advance that it's not true.

I think there’s a revisionist history thing that both X and Bluesky users promote, that the exodus away from it was a direct response to the owner’s politics. For some people, I think that was true, but for more than will admit it, I think it was just a severe degradation of the user experience.

Broke: Art ennobles the human soul Woke: Art mops up the real sickos before they can do actual harm

On cognitive modules: you can think of LLMs as the NLP module in our minds. We have other modules for raw input gathering, for modeling perceptions from input, for spacial processing, for motivation, etc. When computers combine modules, that's when I would keep an eye out for real meaning making.

or “i really do hope that someone i like was responsible for that turbulent priest dying”

The Miami Herald & Tampa Bay Times have blown the lid off scheme in which Gov. Ron DeSastrous funneled more than $35M from child welfare & medical funds toward falsehood-riddled TV ads to defeat pro-abortion & legal weed ballot measures. www.jezebel.com/ron-desantis... via @jezebeldotcom.bsky.social

Started, going

Rob and Michelle Reiner’s son has been arrested. Held on $4 million bail.

“MAGA guy politely chastising Trump on Truth Social” is an incredible character I had no idea was possible

i wonder if it's even more existential, not only how characters in stories are personified, but how human language is built on a foundational assumption of consciousness of the speaker, and so a machine speaking our language would appear to adopt characteristics of ourselves, if only performatively.

No. Words have meaning. If you spit out words, the result will have meaning. That doesn't mean the model has engaged with those meanings in any way. The human being reading words is nearly incapable of *not* reading meaning, whether that is useful or not. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_...

New in PN: The Indiana GOP's defiance shows how Trump is losing juice "This was a remarkable setback for Trump, who orchestrated a barrage of physical and political threats against Republican lawmakers in the state, and it underlines his weakening influence."

I have a number of problems with this, one being: LLMs as they currently exist do not deal with referents at all. For a human, the word "run" refers to something they can observe. As long as LLMs engage only with symbols and not with referents, they're clearly not engaged with meaning-making.

Armed ICE agents trapped US citizens in a restaurant and demanded their papers. Federal agents walked into East African restaurants in Cedar-Riverside, MN. They closed and blocked the doors. Then they demanded to see everyone’s papers. Every person present was a US citizen.

This is why Republicans win. People are absolutely convinced that Republicans don't behave the way they always 100%-of-the-time behave. And, critically, the only people consistently telling the public the truth are Democrats, who are automatically disbelieved bc they are the political opposition.

To be clear, this is money stolen from foster children to pay for political ads.

It's a crime. We have to prove to this country that federal agents are not above the law. When they commit crimes they must be punished accordingly.

ICE pepper-sprayed this 1-year-old girl. Once at the hospital, the doctor had to call in a poison control specialist. They had never seen anyone that young pepper sprayed. Another horrific story. More details below.