Global health discourse has spent 2025 treating the U.S. as withdrawing from the world. But that's not quite true: we're blackmailing countries for 25-year deals to own their data, and running unethical experiments on children in Africa. We cannot move forward as though the only problem is absence

NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇

A red flag for this study is that it is a single-blind study. This means that while parents of infants will not be informed if their baby is not protected against HepB, the researchers *will* know. And that knowledge results in bias, which is why double-blind trials are the gold standard. 5/7

This is extinction-level resilience targeting. See: digitalcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol13/is...

Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, and disaster research that has underpinned half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, and increased resilience.

I've tried and failed a couple times to write a post explaining how serious this would be. NCAR is globally essential to our climate change response. This can't just be replaced. Every scientist in the world will be doing climate research with one hand tied behind their back for at least a decade

You can take this to the bank: "If we get lucky enough save democracy, then the people who did this to America—the people who excused, and covered, and enabled Trump’s autocratic attempt—will take it as proof that Trump was never a real danger to begin with." www.thebulwark.com/p/susie-wile...

they keep emphasizing that these are on "known narcotrafficking routes" and like, those are just route-routes. there are not special ocean highways for drugs.

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

This is what asylum practice is increasingly looking like; the Trump admin is moving to "pretermit" every single claim (or nearly every single claim) as a move to avoid having to grant anyone asylum.

Bought a little Christmas-poop log when I was in Spain last year. Wasn’t leaving without one.

This is how it's done. Tightening the already strict gun laws the day after a massacre. No thoughts and prayers from grotesque 2A absolutists, but bipartisan actions. #aupol #gunlaws

"Congratulations, America. We managed to save about four percent of the land from becoming a gas station or warehouse. Here’s the thing: we don’t live in the national parks. Nobody’s commuting to work in fucking Yellowstone. We live in the in-between spaces. And those are all mostly a nightmare."

NEW: Google and Apple have fixed zero-days that the two companies said were being exploited in the wild. There are no details about these attacks, but usually when this happens, there's a goverment using spyware behind it. Hopefully we will get the full story soon. techcrunch.com/2025/12/12/g...

Our ex-BuzzFeed team has provided a testimonial to the immigration court about the value of Guan's work and his incredible bravery. I hope that this man - who I am in absolute awe of - is granted the asylum he needs and deserves. You can read more here: hrichina.substack.com/p/man-who-fi...

ICE has taken Chinese dissident Guan Heng into custody and is threatening to return him to China. Guan Heng risked his life to film the Uyghur concentration camps—the same camps Secretary of State Rubio opposed when he sponsored the “Uyghur Force Labor Prevention Act” as a US senator.

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

📽️ WATCH: After a bird flu outbreak tore through Midwestern barns, which led to 18 million hens being killed and a spike in egg prices, the Department of Agriculture didn’t investigate whether the virus was airborne. But ProPublica did. @natlash.bsky.social breaks it down: propub.li/4iVcYfD

The media is entirely responsible for Donald Trump in our lives and Elon Musk as well. Real engineers and scientists knew he was a moron long ago. I was told repeatedly by my brother and his nerds at JPL that Elon was a dolt. But tech press don't know shit either and access is the name of the game.

💥Hungary’s probably most scenic anti-Orbán protest is underway under the banner “Let’s defend our children,” after new details emerged about sexual and physical abuse in the child care system — plus ignorance or cover-ups by authorities. Orbán rival Péter Magyar leads the march of tens of thousands.

Silicon Valley’s Authoritarian Tech Right is not theorizing this world. They are already building it. The pipelines are operational. The feedback loops are functioning. The sovereignty transfers are completing. A MUST READ 👇

See the piece below and also this week’s New Yorker podcast with these same three political scientists on the state of American democracy. I continue to learn a lot from them www.newyorker.com/podcast/poli...

This is the key post in a very interesting and useful thread by French economist Gabriel Zucman. GDP alone tells you little about general quality of life in a country.

Oh, you say that AI is a scam that exploits the same people hardest hit by the economic ravages of colonialism? Huh

Now there is evidence - the drone swarmes over European critical Infrastructure come from Russian vessels. Sink them all. www.digitaldigging.org/p/they-drone...

Now with the same productivity as the US, “core EU” also has more leisure time, higher life expectancy, less inequality No matter how you look at it, it is a clearly superior economic performance

It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US This view is wrong A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

I think the key problem is not the people but the incentive structure, which is largely driven by (legacy) media: being loud and “controversial” is rewarded much more than being quiet and right.* * particularly if you have the usual privileges (eg class, gender, race).

EXCLUSIVE: We found that Instacart is using AI algorithms to charge customers different prices for the same items. It's not just online. It's in physical grocery stores too. Our months-long investigation with @consumerreports.org and @groundwork.bsky.social found it could cost families $1200/year.

🥇Hungary is first again: The very first infringement case ever launched under the new European Media Act targets Budapest. From press freedom and source protection to public media and state ads, the Commission says Hungary breaks the rules across the board.

False headline, AP. Your editors should do better. The majority of countries could not sustain economic dignity for the masses for over 15 years, and the far-right evolved into a competition. Political interests drive this scapegoating “interpretation”, not the sympathy towards migrants.

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going— SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti— SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

Can you imagine an American supermarket advertising like this? Yeah, me neither. #Intermarché #French #Supermarket #Christmas #ad

Brett Kavanaugh's "minor inconvience" now includes beating people up and cutting off their wedding rings for [checks notes] "observing ICE from a distance."

The thing to understand about Trump II's new proposed ESTA requirements is that once the outside world is seen and framed as a threat and a hardened border the only protection from it, the distinction between friend and enemy becomes meaningless, and there's no such thing as safe passage.

Under this new proposal, if you're a European who wants to visit New York City for a vacation, you now have to turn over a TON of information to the United States government, which they will keep forever. The days of just showing a passport will be long gone.

Yep, they're also proposing to make it so that you cannot get ESTA without a smartphone. They'll get rid of the functionality on the current website and require you to use ESTA Mobile. Don't have a smartphone? Well, the answer will apparently be "tough luck, you can't come to the US through ESTA."

"Want to come the World Cup? We're going to need you to tell us every one of your social media accounts, every family member's names, addresses, and phone number, and every email address you've used in the last decade. Welcome to the land of the free!"

The proposal is here and you CAN comment on it. public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-22461.pdf

All travelers from ESTA countries (yes the ones on visa waiver programs) will have to disclose 5 years of social media + huge amounts of personal data to enter the US now. All US academic associations should now meet outside the US if we want to meet our international colleagues.

‼️Unbelievable: Viktor Orbán claimed after his White House visit that he struck an Argentina-style financial safeguard deal with Donald Trump — which the US president denies. Orbán, again, lied to the Hungarian public, his international partners, and investors: www.politico.eu/article/dona...

In collaboration w/ @groundwork.bsky.social & @moreperfectunion.bsky.social, we convened hundreds of volunteers from across the country to investigate Instacart’s AI-assisted pricing experiments at popular grocery stores like Target & Kroger. Read our full investigation below:

NEW: Our experts, along with @consumerreports.org and @moreperfectunion.bsky.social looked into how Instacart was deciding prices on grocery items across the country. What we found will shock you.

This makes facially neutral policies--like poll taxes and literacy tests--that we know were adopted for discriminatory purposes legal. Organizations can now simply claim there was no discriminatory intent regardless of outcome. It's unconstrained institutionalized racism.

Please share/repost The Trump-Vought CFPB is trying to eviscerate Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which has been a major tool for attacking discrimination in housing, auto, consumer, & small business lending markets. COMMENTS ON PROPOSAL DUE THIS WEEK, DECEMBER 12 www.linkedin.com/posts/dan-im...

In the hearing on the Slaughter case, Justice Sotomayor noted that “Neither King, not parliament, not prime ministers ever had an unqualified removal power” but that is what unitary executive would grant. Bears repeating how novel and radical this theory is: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-will-wh...

gotta be honest with you all, Seasonal Minion Fire Hydrant is carrying my mental health on its back.

Folks might not know a lot of people are getting *very* upset that the materials they request are not available in the libraries/archives they're requesting from. We're getting lots here at the Library of Virginia: requests of documents likely surfaced by large language models that *do not exist*.

For a century people being endangered on our roads have been told they are the problem. This from 1927.