If a rider wins all 5 monuments in a season, they should be: - given a certificate saying "Good Job! You have completed cycling!" - given 50 million euros (paid for by confiscated assets of UAE gov/officials) - never be allowed to touch a bicycle again There's still time, UCI

My take on the remco-RVV topic: - lying to the press about a rider's race calendar is not a red flag indicating general dishonesty. Non-Belgians can easily forget how fucking weird the Belgian press are about Remco and Wout especially, and they are not owed the truth about rider plans.

Some men will do techno-fascism just so that they never have to be alone with their own thoughts

Every stage of this process - his arrest, spending a year in jail, being dumped on the streets to die - would be deeply shameful in a society that actually valued human life.

Looking at this image is breaking me a little bit

It's not a new observation at this point but that wild Noem/Lewandowski story in WSJ really brings home the extent to which all the Trump 2 cabinet-level goblins see their jobs as flying private, doing short-form video, and screaming at underlings. They all hate each other and none of them can read.

Looking forward to when the bodycam footage goes public

I cannot tell you how much doubt was consistently directed at the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty numbers and how much pressure was put on news organizations to couch those numbers as unreliable. Biden himself said they were fabricated! www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Downfall Bovino Edition. You're welcome.

🚨WHOA. The El Paso Medical Examiner says it will rule the death of a 55-year-old Cuban man at ICE's "Camp East Montana" tent camp as a homicide. He was allegedly choked to death by a guard during a "struggle" after he refused to enter a housing unit without his medications.

Did an LLM write this estimate?

Gonna found a chip company then predict a $10 trillion market for them becasue that's how capitalism works now

I'd really like to see some actual research into this, because my gut says that at a certain point you're just paying people enough to organically swim in corrupt social circles, rather than boosting them into it. Paying sports people more doesn't inoculate them from match fixing and cheating

"Suddenly, nothing—including the racism, Holocaust denialism, and antisemitism Fuentes has championed—seems to be too hot for MAGA media to embrace" —@willsommer.bsky.social www.thebulwark.com/p/one-of-the...

Maybe it's just a reflection of my pessimism regarding this current Pogi era, but I feel like this Lazkano situation casts a very dark cloud over the whole sport.

Y I K E S. For obvious reasons, this is a TERRIBLE idea. Facial recognition has high false positive rates for immigrants in particular!

I did! A good paper, but an even more essential one is Gambetta/Origgi on Italian academia and the preference for low-quality work. Literally everybody I know who has read this and has experience in China has remarked on how useful it is. diegogambetta.org/wp-content/u...

Honestly, the more individuals that make themselves targets of the trump regime, the better. They've already run out of competent investigators and prosecutors to go after the existing targets, and this will just accelerate the unravelling of DOJ capacity. Make them drown in their own BS

I think that "people misunderstanding Occam's razor" is my "thinking about the Roman Empire 5 times a day". Occam's razor is quite simply a process for selecting the simplest amongst correct explanations. If multiple hypotheses give differing predictions, the razor doesn't apply.

Minor point, but of course the Winkelvii are on the list. They're like a magnet for anything destructive to society if they think it can enrich them

Amazing, amazing, amazing interview with Kelvin Pierce, the son of (probably) the most influential neo-nazi in US history. The apple can fall a very long way from the tree in a wonderful way

Any movement, progressive or otherwise, that grants immense power to its leaders will be vulnerable to Mr L types. People who are drawn to the trappings and displays of power and strength. Lead a protest; "play soldier"; work for Blackwater; get a totenkopf tattoo; run for Senate - it's all cool.

The rat as it is lowered:

Not many of my takes are right, so I take an oversized amount of smugness for thinking uno-x could overtake cofidis and get promotion in a world where intermarche merge

NSPM-7 is already resulting in fed arrests of protesters: www.kenklippenstein.com/p/no-kings-p...

It's a prerequisite of working for ICE that you must be a broken little man-child. The full video in the second post is a perfect demonstration of this. He's a walking red flag, but it'll never occur to him to stop and look in the mirror, so he causes suffering until someone stops him.

Goes back to the argument I made in the Guardian earlier this year that the world is in danger because the techbros have completely misunderstood a bunch of sci-fi and fantasy... www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

Pro Cycling US Economy 🤝 Completely ruined by excessive monopolisation

Robert De Niro: “Now we have a would-be king — King Donald the First. Fuck that. I’m Robert De Niro and I’m asking you to stand up and be counted in the nationwide No Kings protest on October 18th” 👉👉 nokings.org

Government by 12 year old pseudo selfs for 12 year old pseudo selfs

It can't be overstated enough how load-bearing 'judges with integrity' are to preventing the US descending into full, universal fascism, right now. That won't last forever - Steven Miller et al. will not stop trying to find ways around them for as long as they hold power

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later. harpers.org/archive/1941...

A fundamental weakness of humans is that the overwhelming majority of us never seem to grow out of the "keys jingling in front of face" stage

the president of the united states wants to use the american military to kill american citizens on american soil. that's the whole story!

A very efficient, distilled and to me pretty persuasive version of the bear case against AI economics.

Heck yeah

Wait, why didn't they chop his sleeves for his Aero Skin™️?? He probably would have caught Küng as well 😮

The FBI is preparing to label transgender people as “violent extremists” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder: www.kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-readie...

This is how Russia recruits young African men & women to work in a drone factory in Alabuga, where they face pressure to join the war on Ukraine. Unfortunately, African governments offer little help and many returnees experience shame and trauma. www.zammagazine.com/investigatio...

My response to people saying that disruptive protests are useless is the same as my response to people who think the police are there to protect "ordinary" people: I'm pleased for you that your life has been privileged enough that you have never had to question that view

IMO there should be fines. We need our governments etc to put the hammer down. And not just for grocers who lie. www.cbc.ca/news/busines...

It's wild that every youtube video I have watched for the last week has had a pre-roll ad, featuring an AI fake of my country's PM promoting an AI scam, from multiple different sponsors, and youtube is apparently powerless to prevent it. www.reddit.com/r/onguardfor...

Even if you don't actively fight it, there will come a time when the fascist state demands your compliance. This excerpt (continued in next post) from "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945" by Milton Mayer and read by @iwriteok.bsky.social clarifies the significance of that choice.

There's always a clip www.yahoo.com/news/stephen...

'Immigration doesn't bother me but it seems to bother everyone else' – Everyone. This is what happens when the media runs away with Hard Right narratives.

German speakers: does the phrase "wildgewordene Spiessbiirger" mean anything to you, and if so, what? It is coming from an American book, so I understand that it could be gibberish

🇧🇪 Cian Uijtdebroeks left no doubt he is back with the win of the Tour de l’Ain! “My dream was to win a race this year. My goal was to learn how to win. To actually do it now is just amazing.” Full story at Domestique 👇 📸 Cor Vos