Don't grade me, bro!

@eroston.bsky.social pointed me to this exceptionally insightful article he wrote w/ @krishnakarra.bsky.social @leslieatlarge.bsky.social and Sinduja Rangarajan It very effectively demonstrates that no one should place much faith in the models, methods, & claims of companies like First Street.

The article in question is this. First Street, the company behind these controversies, is so lacking in credibility it routinely conflates weather forecasting w/ climate change. Its output is speculative slop: erroneous, contradictory, arbitrary, absurd. Mostly unproveable, otherwise proven false.

Who did some Project 2025 applicants, some of whom became Trump admin officials, cite as political inspirations? @jasonaw.bsky.social found this included the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, authoritarians, and white nationalist groups. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Monumentalizing the decline of democracy. Architectural historians have remarked that the transformation of utilitarian public spaces & structures into lavish, grandiose monuments often occurs while or immediately after they're rendered effectively superfluous by events. thehill.com/blogs/in-the...

I'm reminded of how my childhood sheepdog Sunshine acted once after a large, irascible rescue German Shepherd in the village was killed by a car. Sunshine ran into the road & stood over her body, warning off cars that tried to pass & pedestrians who tried to draw him away. He kept a 4 hour vigil!

You can know him by his works. I suspect we'll learn that the Leavitts were behind this kidnapping of the mother.

This from the rancid, lying spokesperson for an administration that is so OK with Russians stealing Ukrainian children for themselves that it outsources its own "peace" plan to those same Russians.

The 2020 Georgia election case is going to be dismissed in its entirety, with the prosecutor offering less-than-persuasive reasoning. A miscarriage of justice that weakens our democracy.

Glad to see this getting more media attention.

Rumor is that Waddle spent over $500,000 on lobbyists and Gobble offered Trump a 25% stake in a new crypto venture before they were granted pardons.

"I predict that the next 6 months will be critical for the outcome of the TrumpCare effort." -Th. Friedman, prob

May come as a surprise to President Spontaneous J. Bonespurs that troops don't fight v well when they can't put into words what they're supposed to be fighting for.

Calling it your job don't make it right, Charlie Brown.

Highlights the fundamental flaw with "AI". It is a marketing gimmick disguised as "science", whose "free" products are the users it manipulates. The gimmick is to *appear* to provide to every question a plausible seeming answer that *appears* to resemble what an actual human expert might say.

Points 16-20 could usefully be replaced w/ a single point: "Russia and Ukraine will return all territories they have seized in war back to each other; or if either state retains control of any seized land, the other state shall take possession of any equal sized territory that they may choose.

So yesterday Trump was holding hands with MBS, and today he's demanding the execution of two Senators and four Representatives. Seems like something rubbed off

Shorter Mike Johnson: 'The military should obey illegal orders. Duh.'

What would those records help reveal? Where Epstein got his money. How he acquired and controlled his victims. Who he trafficked them to. What individuals and banks enabled the trafficking. Who else had control of Epstein’s accounts, and what crimes they committed.

EPSTEIN BOMBSHELL: my staff is releasing a new report showing JPMorgan Chase executives – all the way to the top – enabled Epstein's sex trafficking operation. You're going to want to read this.

This is how you destroy science and research in the country

40 minors gave sworn testimonies that they’d been raped & trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein. Kash Patel Under Oath: “There’s no credible information that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked minors” FBI Kash Patel needs to be charged with perjury.

CBP is creating a domestic surveillance state to rival China's. This great AP report shows that CBP has abused the alarmingly broad but supposedly temporary powers granted to it to establish a national surveillance system. It hides behind local police, who get to harass & jail drivers arbitrarily.

As expected, hedge fund millionaires benefited from US taxpayers' bailout of Argentina. For Republicans, it's all about the #Grift. www.ft.com/content/b282...

Anyone interested in govt transparency and public access should check out GovScape from @bcgl.bsky.social and his team👇 It's an incredibly powerful tool that allows visual, semantic text, and keywords search of 10 million U.S. government PDFs (70 million pages!) and counting: www.govscape.net

Little known fact: those Air Force jets were aloft to ensure that Saudi pilots could not slam another plane into the Pentagon.

Someone should write a Moynihan report on our elite class, explaining that their problems are not socioeconomic but the product of a pathological ghetto culture.

It's the kind of weirdly confrontational / vicious thing a person with dementia may say when they feel their power to control their own fate slipping away.

The reason why Farage refuses to take responsibility is plain from the first sentence quoted. He's a sociopath. Normal ppl don't throw a switch from virulent abuse to charming bonhomie. Farage is extremely dangerous. www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...

European political scientists are blue in the face from constantly pointing out that accommodating the far right does not help centre-left parties win, and contributes to the rise of far-right parties. There's a mountain of data to support that. But no, the galaxy-brained strategists must be right.

The Danish Social Democrats are currently on course for their worst election result since at least the Second World War, despite their brand of far-right accommodationism being touted as a blueprint for other centre-left parties.

Going out of their way to hurt these vulnerable kids. www.texastribune.org/2025/11/18/t...

“They warn that under some circumstances, the effects of the possible new limits could range from ‘undeniably homicidal’ to ‘catastrophic’ for those living close to nuclear operations and beyond.”

Some of you point out that the big players have used various tricks to keep their own $ safe. True. That's why we need to think about how to prosecute them for fraud. Those bubble-inflating claims - AI will cure all disease! end climate change! double lifespans! - are essentially Theranos X 1000.

The toy soldier still loves his fascist juvenile novel.

When a “whole of govt” approach is directed to the expulsion of minors who’ve been abandoned or neglected or worse, because of their national origin. I preferred when govt was massively flawed but run by people not entireLy wicked.

As we now live through an echo of history, official scapegoating of an ethnic minority leads to efforts of wholesale banishment of citizens of the “wrong race.” We must learn the history. Learn from history. And fight like hell to prevent the repetition of past sins.

Trump gives out some serious "our friend the beaver" vibes in his latest ideas on healthcare cepr.net/publications...

What makes a banana republic a banana republic is not any prosecution of the outgoing administration, but baseless, politically motivated prosecution. There is a whole literature which teaches that, if crimes against the public order occurred, failing to prosecute them hastens democratic decline.

The DOJ ordered US Marshals to the house of the pardon attorney who refused to sign off on a pardon to give Mel Gibson back his guns. Big law firms told her they supported her but did not want to be seen representing her. This is the use of government-sponsored fear to silence dissent.

"double the human lifespan" "10 times the rate of progress" "in 5 or 10 years" Speaking as an ancient historian, this is obv baloney. We also call it false precision, which is one of our most valuable heuristics. It identifies sources who are blowing smoke to disguise their lack of credibility.

Though this is tangential, it's my experience that many of these same abusive senior male scholars love to treat junior male scholars as play toys as well, meddling in their careers to keep them on a string, all in the cause of fluffing their own egos. When I was very junior I had 2 such creeps...

Yep, Trump is as transparent as, well, a filthy decrepit old pane of glass.

We’re running back “I’d be happy to release my tax returns but I can’t bc they’re under audit”. It was transparently horseshit of course, but most Americans were too dumb to care, so he figures it can be made to work here too.

Some success finally in beating back this fraud! Couple weeks ago the PA AG Office contacted both Zillow and First Street asking them to respond to the complaint I filed. Today I see that Zillow has finally taken down *from all properties* the bogus "risk factor" numbers generated by First Street.

Ken Burns, historian. I can't even.

Perhaps my 50+ years of experiences are unusual, but this has been true at almost every level. Consequences for atrocious behavior are v rare; accountability even more so. In fact it's not common for people even to confront or rebuke malefactors...maybe bc ime confrontations are just met w/ shrugs.

It is interesting to me how the media seems far less interested in Trump's Murder Memo than you'd expect. Only a few reporters seem to be even trying to get a hold of it, and very few commentators are talking about it. Contrast that with Bush's torture memo, which was a national obsession. Weird.

Just how morally, ethically, intellectually bankrupt do you have to be to argue that 15-year-olds can sell sex but can’t affirm gender