"Minnesota, especially the Twin Cities, has been—and still is—under a paramilitary occupation in which the federal government is at war with the population. 'War' is the operative word here." @jvl.bsky.social on what he saw in Minneapolis: lnk.thebulwark.com/46kVMuT

Was completely blown away by THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS (1976), an absolutely vile and twisted giallo wrapped in the crumbling, rustic trapping of the folk horror genre. Really amazing if you can get your hands on a nice version.

my fursona is some wretched creature

"While using ChatGPT last June, Van Rootselaar described scenarios involving gun violence over the course of several days, according to people familiar with the matter.... OpenAI leaders ultimately decided not to contact authorities." OMG www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

"we would prefer if our astronauts weren't Boeing to die" - nasa administration www.nasa.gov/news-release...

Thank you @racketmn.com for publishing this piece written by a member of one of the families we’ve been supporting. I’m very grateful for your help getting her story and perspective out there. racketmn.com/because-of-i...

lol

“They’re trapped in this little confinement cell, a dark cell with no sunlight, with multiple people,” said Shaan Chatterjee, an attorney at New England Immigration Law. “They’re basically torturing people into signing off on their own deportation.” (Free article) www.sunjournal.com/2026/02/07/i...

"Thanks to our growing insight into Epstein’s world, we have gained a clearer picture of the psychic and economic logic of the contemporary far right". Must read from Melinda Cooper www.equator.org/articles/eps...

Stories about what ICE's presence in Minnesota has done to kids — something I'm seeing firsthand — are hard to read. It's unfathomable that kids have to go through this. www.startribune.com/ice-children...

Evidence shows feds lied about Marimar Martinez's shooting in Chicago, attorney says @chicago.suntimes.com story: chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

the problem with AI “journalism” is that, as I discussed in this piece, LLMs eventually come up against the constraint that they know only what is legible to the digital. vast swaths of global happenings aren’t digitally legible and will remain so. only human reporters can describe those events.

The Atlantic’s profile of Bondi has some wow. @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

There needs to be more movies where people are eating soup

This is like a scene out of Monty Python. ICE agents get a name back from face recognition and multiple agents start calling out "Maria! Maria!" to see if a woman in custody reacts. (Presumably if she does that's a match???) It didn't work, so they ran the app again and got another name.

NEW: Records reviewed by WIRED show DHS’s facial recognition app (Mobile Fortify) isn’t designed to actually "verify" identity—despite DHS claims and its agents relying on its matches to support probable cause in the field.

Minneapolis is 2.6mil people. Springfield is 60,000 with 15,000 of that population under threat of deportation (1/4th of the whole city.) Springfield is 26 square miles. 1000 ICE agents is 40 agents per mile. People are terrified. We need all the help we can get.

"About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments."

The march wasn’t even antagonistic, just thousands of people behaving the way the political right always demands of us: politely showing discontent. And they fired on the crowd of nurses, teachers, and homecare workers anyway. #iveoutofportland #iceout #fuckice www.opb.org/article/2026...

I wrote about how Trump’s debate stage lie of “they’re eating the pets”, a product of participatory propaganda, was mobilized into the policy that will strip the legal status away from many Haitian immigrants the week, and what that may mean for Springfield: katestarbird.substack.com/p/sensemakin...

I visited hotels all over Minneapolis, went into back rooms & talked to the staff. They're afraid. One told me she resents how her undocumented coworkers spend their days cleaning the rooms of agents who are “hunting down their family members.” @notus.com: www.notus.org/immigration/...

This piece is… scary: www.forbes.com/sites/amirhu...

The room was very sloppy. There was some sense of a conflict.

Not sure how to summarize this one. Wrote about the podcaster-occupied government invading for content, how the algorithmic internet is governed by the logic of reaction videos, and how it has contributed to a very nihilistic illiterate politics and culture of performance for imagined audiences

We live in a post-information world, governed now by a feedback loop of spectacular fascist fantasy reality production and reaction at all levels

SCOOP: 404 Media has obtained material that explains how Tangles and Webloc, two surveillance systems ICE recently purchased, work. One can track phones without a warrant and follow their owners home or to their employer.

i'm fine, i'm not shot, this is no scarier for me than for anyone else reading about these incidents since they're an equal threat all over the country. only a matter of time before we all make our own "the feds shot someone outside my house" post

This is great, "Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death," a story where Isaac Chotiner interviews the guy who administers the lottery from "The Lottery" archiveofourown.org/works/733964...

I hate being linked to a device

Dogs can learn to read Chinese but they can’t learn to read English

Two hockey players must decide if there is room in their fiercely competitive world for real love

I’m treating the surfaces with the respect that they deserve

I bonked my head and forgot that I’m gay

no1 wuldbattaneye

A man will kill

Killer part is both Britain and France are mad fucking racist already.

it’s about a special little hockey man who Discovers that he’s not just hockey, he’s also a gay guy too! and also about the other hockey man who loves him for it regardless

NSF now planning to let POs largely decide what gets funded, and to send PIs reviews that are only 3-5 sentences long. They don't have to use outside reviewers (except maybe 1) and don't have to convene panels. (1/5)

Since 9/11, the FBI has spent a ton of resources effectively entrapping angry poor people into pretending they were engaging in a terrorist plot and then "stopping" the plot that never had any chance of being carried out. This is almost certainly another such case. www.techdirt.com/tag/own-plot/

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.

Federal agents are arresting American citizens. This isn’t about public safety - it’s about stoking fear. www.mprnews.org/story/2025/1...

Trains were cancelled in Lancaster, UK, after an AI-generated image that seemed to show major damage to a railway bridge was posted on social media following an earthquake. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

This was just sent to me by an LAUSD parent. A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education. Here is what the AI tool generated:

“Traumatized, humiliated, degraded.” The nurse, a US citizen, 4’11”, 85 lbs, says she was following orders when she was dragged out of her car by masked immigration agents in Florida. It was the 3rd time she had been stopped and told to produce ID. Free link ⤵️ www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara issued a stern warning to his officers on Thursday: Intervene when you see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents using unlawful force or lose your job.