"Feckless Democrats!" seems to be one of our most popular political exports.

We live in a completely different world today. The estimated global population in 1600 was about 500 million; today it is over 8 billion. In 1600, you would be risking your life to travel to the other side of the world, and it would take months; today you can do it safely in half a day or so.

The most infuriating part of RFKJr's demolition of the US biomedical research complex is that it is slowly whittling down our most critical health problems, cancer being the most important example. The US age-standardized cancer mortality rate has fallen by ~40% since 1990.

This is true: there is already far too much writing for anyone to read, at a time when people are losing the necessary capacity for sustained attention. This fact is reflected in the way many are now using LLMs to summarize longer texts so they can avoid having to do the actual reading.

The AI backlash as seen on Bluesky isn't really about Bluesky; it reflects the wider AI backlash in the U.S. as a whole. These numbers surprised me a little bit.

He's been protecting trans daughters for 20 years. He went out of his way to make California a sanctuary state for trans youth.

Extraordinarily wack that these tech zillionaires are not funding modern Carnegie Libraries all over the Bay Area. Every museum, school, hospital, and library within 100 miles of the intersection of Sand Hill Road and El Camino Real should have a brand new wing named for one of these dudes.

This is the most maddening pivot. “We need to burden the exercise of the franchise to address widespread mistrust.” There’s widespread mistrust because you keep lying to people about the security of elections! You could just … stop doing that!

I’m just going to leave this here

I did not know any openly gay people in HS or college. It wasn't until I went to grad school that I began meeting people who were openly gay. At my high school, you would have been relentlessly bullied if you were suspected of being gay or if you just acted too feminine. The U.S. has changed a lot.

It will be interesting to see how the widespread use of LLMs has repercussions across human behavior. I sometimes catch myself wondering if something that I have written sounds too much like a chatbot.

For my friends, everything. For my enemies, literal transcription.

As a first step, maybe we could reform the primary debates to get rid of all the self-promoting novelty candidates. Also, please find serious moderators who ask good policy questions and not ridiculous prompts intended to produce entertainment.

Unpopular opinion on social media: it's pointless to worry about presidential primaries before they happen. Everyone's prediction is useless, and we will see how the voters feel when the time comes.

By liberal use of the block button, you are like Odysseus tying himself to the mast (or sticking wax in the ears of his crew). You are preventing yourselves from being lured by the siren song of flame wars and pointless arguments.

I think certain leftists fantasize a personal morality play in which they warned the supid libs not to nominate the shitty candidate and the libs just wouldn't listen! So it's the libs own damned fault when their crappy nominee loses. (It will always be 2016 in their minds.)

I am bad at predictions, so I try not make them. My guess about the AI world of the future is probably as bad as any other person's. But I will say that my personal cost/benefit analysis of the internet has been trending in the wrong direction for a while. The further we go, the weightier the costs.

In the U.S., it doesn't take much searching to find the reasons: race, gender, sexuality, immigration, guns, religion. Each of those issues will get in the way of running an old-fashioned economic-populist campaign.

Probably not a very original thought, but this way of life sounds absolutely miserable. And to the extend our Big Tech overlords want everyone to live this way, it sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

People who're trying to help Democrats win back power so that they can improve people's lives are playing a different game from those who're trying to win clout points by dunking on the Dems. I really don't care about applause; I just want Democrats to win so we can use government for good things.

This is a rehashed version of bringing back the New Deal Coalition. It sounds like wishful thinking. I have yet to see evidence that the Democrats can win over larger shares of the WWC vote by appealing to economic populism. Everything that has happened in the past 40 years says that they cannot.

This aesthetic preference on the left for plainspeaking beefy white guys on is also part of an aesthetic preference for a New Deal Coalition made up of such voters (the NDC is dead and gone and ain't coming back anytime soon: we live in an utterly different world and NDC voters are mostly dead).

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

What I learned from "Democracy for Realists": 1. Most voters are committed partisans. They are unlikely to change their vote. 2. The swing voters tend to be very low information. They are influenced by how the economy has done recently and random events. 3. There is no fool-proof way to win.

Unpopular opinion on social media: it's pointless to worry about presidential primaries before they happen. Everyone's prediction is useless, and we will see how the voters feel when the time comes.

I think what we are seeing is the outcome when everything in society becomes subsumed by the attention economy. Everything, no matter how serious it should be, begins to follow the logic of entertainment.

These charts show how Trump is isolating the US on the world stage

In terms of what cures are being lost: - Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis - herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis - shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong

Jayapal: To the survivors in the room, if you are willing, please stand. And if you are willing, please raise your hands. If you have still not been able to meet with this DOJ. Please note for the record that every single survivor has raised their hand.

If the AI singularity is coming for all of our jobs, then there is not much we can do about it. Telling everyone to start preparing for an unprecedented world-shaking event is not especially helpful. But perhaps the real goal is to provoke fear and awe and to shut down skeptical, critical thinking.

Grand juries keep seeing through the Trump DOJ's naked attempts to intimidate critics and political rivals — this time for accurately stating that illegal orders must be disobeyed. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/u...

NEW: The F.D.A. refused to accept an application from Moderna for its mRNA flu vaccine. Its reason: The agency did not think Moderna compared the new vaccine to one of the best flu shots available. The company spent $750M+ on a 41,000 person study. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/h...

Yet another example of an out-of-control President sacrificing the American economy and blocking good infrastructure. It's also a test for Michigan Republicans: will they stand up for what's right, even when it means breaking with Trump?

“Researchers from Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and Yale universities recently found that 60 FDA-authorized medical devices using AI were linked to 182 product recalls, according to a research letter published in the JAMA Health Forum in August.”

This is what we’re doing to people. We are the bad guys.

I've said it before and I'll say it again "We can't fix the Dems, we need a new viable third party" is the political equivalent of "we can't fix Earth's environment, let's colonize Mars" In that however hard the first one might be - maybe very! - the second one is orders of magnitude harder

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot. I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

I don't think that Staley was completely wrong in saying that. Modern consumer culture does discourage people from contemplating collective political solutions to our problems. And individualistic consumer values themselves have pervaded our political culture. I think about this a lot.

A harrowing read, and would be even if only 10% of what students interviewed are saying in this article about AI and Australian universities is true. But this quote is the crux: if we replace the human brain with AI, what will we be doing? www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-aust...

This chart seems to suggest a striking pattern: Kevin Warsh's speeches are consistently hawkish, except when Trump is President and about to appoint a new Fed Chair. www.economist.com/finance-and-...

If the government won't bail out my crypto losses, I'm going to become an even bigger libertarian.

Note how in Abu Dhabi, Russia again rejected the ceasefire Ukraine agreed to almost a year ago. Ru doesn’t want peace. Journalists need to always front load this main point instead of talking about how the sides are still far apart as if they are equidistant and peace is in the middle.

🗣️ "The aggressor was Russia” On #EuropeToday, Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski says it cannot be fudged who started the war and emphasises that Ukraine’s civilian population is being attacked by Russia “viciously” and “all the time.” Full interview on Euronews: https://l.euronews.com/eS09

My gut reaction was that the only result of the 2020 debates was to make the Democrats look faintly ridiculous. That was particularly so because they featured candidates who hated the Democratic Party to varying degrees (Yang, Williamson, Sanders) and just had too many candidates sharing the stage.

Liberal democracy is boring and unsexy. There will probably always be some small group of people (weirdos, cranks, hipsters, confused youngsters) who long for the romance that normal politics cannot possibly provide. They should be emphatically denounced.

Being an AUSA in this administration just sounds like the worst. No wonder everyone is quitting.

OWS was the reductio ad absurdum of a certain leftist approach to politics. It was a colossal waste of time, effort, and opportunity that produced nothing useful. It was a pathetic drain of political energy that might have been directed toward something better.

Predicting that this week we’ll hear more conciliatory words from the Administration regarding Minnesota (since they’re starting to realize that ICE has become politically toxic) but everyone outside of Minnesota needs to know that nothing on the ground has changed.