In addition to being false and malicious, this charge reminds me of the time a pro-Trump teen who wanted to be a cop saw a call for "patriots" on FB, crossed state lines with an illegally bought rifle, killed 2 protesters and wounded another, and was acquitted and celebrated as a hero by Republicans

The US withdrawal from #WHO became official today, leaving the world less prepared for dangerous disease outbreaks. “When that will bite us in the ass, it’s impossible to predict. But there is a 100% certainty that it will bite us in the ass,” one expert told me. www.statnews.com/2026/01/22/u...

Remote work 2. Exact same people exact same problem

wow ok the king's horses actually figured out how to put humpty dumpty together again an— oh come on, he's climbing right back up that wall. god damn it, what an asshole. you can tell the horses are furious with him

Called it and nailed it www.wheresyoured.at/ai-mythbuste....

I wrote about Hilary Benn’s ludicrous speech at the time, as it happens.

What a headline, an amazing summary

My only critique (and it's not really a critique so much as saying you needed 5 books instead of 3 lol) is with nukes: Wizards of Armageddon is good, but it does present a bit one sided re: the military because of who Kaplan talked to for it To Rule the Skies by Ziarnick is a useful counterview

I’ve been writing Popular Information for 8 years, and this is one of the most important stories I’ve ever published. This is a humanitarian crisis that has gone unreported.

His not being impeached by the end of the business day as a result of this threat is as much a problem as the threat itself. It’s not just Trump that the world has to worry about, it’s a GOP that supports him and Democrats who suck their thumbs and refuse to even discuss pushing to remove him

A man claiming to be ICE allegedly broke into a house and tried to steal a PlayStation

Happy "Amazon put AI in Kindles that will give answers about your book and authors can't opt out" day to all whole celebrate

Wrote about this in October 2024. Nothing has changed.

I know we're all seeing 87 unhinged things per day, but "guys if our multi billion dollar product doesn't start being useful for something, literally anything, the people might not appreciate us wrecking the planet over it anymore" is a truly bananapants thing to say out loud

If labels were accurate: "A Gaza peace process without Palestinians, for a Gaza without Palestinians"

I recall the IDF deliberately splattered three British ex-squaddies and the charity workers they were with as a Fuck You to everyone; Israel gave everyone the finger with both hands, then Britain said and did more or less fuck all about it.

Sure, why not block it, make it all as clear as we can to the public.

This is discourse

Also wow - this is the most selective gross margin I’ve ever seen, and appears to entirely leave out…every cost other than inference? Insanely cool

You can't put a price on their fantasy of not paying a salary ever, is not financial sense, is plain hatred

No it’s the other way around. All year people have said “Anthropic will only lose $2.8 billion” all year to defend against them losing $5.6 billion in 2024. They lost $5.2 billion in 2025. People will try and spin that as good somehow. It is not. The company is a dog. bsky.app/profile/dl31...

Oh would you look at that! Anthropic’s magical shrinking margins went from 70% to 47% to 40%, with higher than expected inference costs, and its revenue projections were below estimates. I’m sure they’re somehow magically gonna be profitable by 2028! www.theinformation.com/articles/ant...

If the Chinese government wanted to know UK military secrets or sabotage our infrastructure they could just bung someone in the cabinet a ticket to see some mid washup from the 90s in concert

"Every day at noon, no matter how busy, Johny Merida Aguilar left his construction job and hurried to his 5-year-old son's school to feed him. His son has brain cancer and generally only accepts food from his father. Merida Aguilar was arrested by ICE in September and faces deportation to Bolivia"

I heard the Sacred Chickens were off their feed this morning, worrying signs

In the 1870 census, Boise, Idaho was almost 50% Chinese. Just...think about that. Think about Boise, Idaho today and what you think about it racially. What happened after that was, to put it bluntly, repeated violence against the Chinese population in the West.

They hate it being talked about because it undermines the Big Lie that the rise in inequality was due to the "free market." There is nothing free market about government-granted patent and copyright monopolies. But you aren't even allowed to say that in major media outlets.

Department of Homeland Security is worried about people with "class-based or economic grievances," per its annual threat assessment (leaked to me): www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leaked-doc...

Perfect

Sadly, it’s not the crazy old coot in the corner. It’s the well meaning but brainwashed guy or gal at the VFW or retirement ceremony. Fox has done a real number on people

Anyone ever read “The Trumpeter of Krakow?” Great young adult book written in 1928. One plot point was the mythical Philosopher’s Stone - but instead of showing all knowledge, it just reflected the viewer’s desires back at them. this caused a dude to burn half of Krakow down. That’s basically AI

“Paid agitators” is a line that goes wayyyy back, to at least the 1930s if not before Conservative papers stated that many of the Bonus Marchers of 1932 were paid to be fomenting unrest The recycled bullshit is terribly translucent - save for those who choose to believe the nonsense

Shout this from the fucking rooftops The Insurrection Act doesn't mean Soldiers have carte blanche to round people up for mass executions, it means the military is being called in to enforce the *existing laws on the books* Congrats, PFC Slapdick, you're a crossing guard now.

New— An American citizen boarding flight from Boston to Lisbon just now told me after showing boarding pass, every passenger stopped on jetway by two ICE agents demanding to take their photo. When passenger asked why, ICE threatened to detain them. If they said no photo, couldn't board/TBD detained.

"I feel like I am somewhere where rules are not working."

"In the extreme wing of this movement, some suggest that the way to prevent AI's harms is simply to refuse to use it," linking to a piece in the BBC that is about regular people who don't use it - fuck you for claiming that this is an extremist view!

This piece is full of egregious assumptions about the cost of running Anthropic’s models based on absolutely nothing, but this may be the worst - estimating that the cost of serving Claude opus 4.5 is comparable to GPT-4o. Sometimes I wonder if techmeme has a gas leak

I remain awestruck that you can be chief WH correspondent of the New York Times while apparently accepting the version of history that you were taught in grade school in the 1970’s

Historically, suggesting the US and its allies engage in this sort of behaviour and that it might offer partial explanation for why conditions are often so grim in countries whose regimes they wish to topple was the kind of thing that got you labelled a crank and an apologist for authoritarianism

The New World asked me to speak to some British trans women about what life has been like for them over the past few years - here's what they had to say, in their own words: www.thenewworld.co.uk/marie-le-con...

What happened? First, they lost to the wrong Miliband brother, then lost Scotland, then they lost to the left. And their answer each time was: this proves we are more right about how awesome we are and how evil our rivals are than even we had suspected. We must behave more horrifically than ever.

Ain’t I been telling you

I grew up during the cold war when the right claimed to support liberty, democracy, western alliances, the rule of law and free markets. It turns out that was all bullshit. What they really support is inequality, monopoly and unlimited power for the rich.

For younger people: this phenomenon is not a new thing. America urging people to rise up against dictators then doing fuck all about them getting rubbed out is the central plot in the nineties movie Three Kings, for example. In popular culture, not just in textbooks.

Lol each good deal worse than the last

Things are especially normal at the New Statesman this week, where nobody is suffering some kind of dissociative crisis

Massive hats off to everyone who dedicated their energy in the months after October 7th to attacking the UNRWA, discrediting the UN, and dismissing, sanctioning, intimidating the ICJ and ICC. Amazing work.

Here’s what happens after that: this whole system resists decoupling from America to the death. If the lib/left bloc cannot deliver reliable devotion to the project, then the fash-right coalition will be shitehoused in to replace them by any means necessary, whatever is required to get it done.