Link source: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

I can see in our own current government here in Aotearoa/New Zealand moves to do very similar things, although they're maybe 6-12 months behind the US in rhetoric.

While in most cases NZ's universities simply say nothing about continuing attacks on science, just yesterday a leader of Auckland Uni praised the govt's latesy budget (despite it bringing science funding to an all-time low as a proportion of GDP)

How it's going:

Good day, Oh fellow twitchy mad scientist, @funranium.bsky.social. I wish to report that I have had many years of fine long duration temperature maintenance, both high, and low, depending upon beverage, from your excellent Stein of Science (tm). 1/-

I don't recommend inducing or using catastrophic personal anxiety and grief as a motivator but I have plonked for sorting and filing 20 years of emails as a distraction method, and it's so far working...

Sign our open letter if you think we should regualte AI sooner rather than later #nzpol Regulateai.nz

How we got here: Neoliberalism, corporate capture, and the dissassembly of the fixes put in place to remove the economic inequities that caused the awfulness of the 18th, 19th and first two thirds of the 20th century:

Sometimes shitposting between our awful social media addictions can create beatiful things: Many of our politicans are not only spherical bastards, but also spherically incompetent

Just deactivated my meta acounts for now. have fucked up my life too much via them, and get too much of a hosepipe of dystopia from them.

How it's going:

If you can't read a potential source (or find someone who can read it for you), then you can't use it. If you don't use it, you can't cite it. This isn't an LLM issue; Miller, Amrogioni, and Herzig are describing something that has ALWAYS BEEN research misconduct. Confession time? #research

This week in 1812 Spencer Perceval became the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated. Its the least interesting thing about him. Working with hedonistic lawyer James Stephen, the devout Christian engineered one of the first slavery bans in British territory WITHOUT Parliament's approval. /1

Perennially relevant:

new zealander everlee wihongi was due to meet with her lawyer yesterday. then ICE moved her to their most notorious tent facility in texas: 3000 people, highest death rate, most sexual assaults. and today, she disappeared off the system. please RT: www.webworm.co/everleehasdi...

Tangata Tiriti: it costs $21 to join Internet NZ today (this is the last day) in time to stand together against a racist takeover. Act now, please. Like, now.

HERE IT IS! In August 2025, a massive landslide brought a big chunk of mountainside into the Tracy Arm fjord in Alaska, causing the second-largest tsunami ever recorded. My latest for @eos.org is the story of the forensic investigation, and why the culprit is climate change: 🧪

On the continuing dismantling of public information accountability in New Zealand:

Oh, hey, Hantavirus. I was slightly involved in the '95-96 outbreak in Patagonia. Dry summer, people going on holiday interacted with rodents, some cases in Chile, a 17 person to person case chain in Argentina. I did a bit of impromptu case reporting emails to some CDC dude, as I was in country

Bronzr

What is it with Prof Rata that in their crank desire to re-hash the english curriculum, they're happy to corrupt and hollow out the whole system?

They missed Rentier. I think Rentier Techbro Neofeudalism or given the all seeing orb CEO's manifesto, Rentier Techbro Neofascism fits the bill.

I've probably caused noise complaints via versions most of these methods except possibly the lawn roller:

"We saw you from across the bar and really dig your vibe"

About the only woodburning that would make sense would be woodwaste for charcoal/biochar with syngas production for the useful chemistry, and burying/ploughing under the charcoal. But charcoal syngas is awfully dirty chemosynthetic process feed, so I'm not aware of anyone doing it at scale

NEW—I got an exclusive excerpt from a USAID whistleblower's new book that made me gasp multiple times. It details Trump's dismantling of the humanitarian aid agency & his team/DOGE's shocking ignorance to public health. 'Into the Wood Chipper' by Nicholas Enrich is out tomorrow. Read excerpt here:

Gun Safety Tips with Burt! Missing alt-text Burt says: “Not all men” = “Not all guns are loaded.” But how you handle every gun you come in contact with? You treat it like it’s loaded until you are absolutely sure it is safe.

It will be really depressing, but horribly, darkly funny, if Artemis is crippled by windows software crud or copilot generative llm code in it's onboard computers, rather than dodgy o-ring booster seals.

This is amusing :-)

If anyone is wondering why I'm not even trying to look for employment in NZ as a scientist after getting the chop from GNS Science last year, this is why:

Noting that Clearview products are already in use/in trial for several years on and off by the NZ police and other local services.

We all need to start trolling Luxon asking when he's reinstating the EV subsidies, and what his timeframe is for nationalising the power companies and subsidizing national rooftop solar and E-trikes for every urban pensioner, beneficiary and solo mum.

1/ The world is facing a 'ticking time bomb' from its supply of oil, according to a briefing note from JP Morgan. Physical scarcity of oil is about to unfold across the globe, spreading sequentially through April from east to west, causing major economic disruption worldwide. ⬇️

You don't have to be much less evil than the other guy to be remembered as 'the good empire', unfortunately.

Main engineer of the Prototype Super High Resolution Ion Microprobe (SHRIMP 1), while maintaining it, indicated the ion collector post on multimillion$ machine, told me 'Brace this, no, with your shoulder, hard' manifested huge hammer, slammed it, micrometer check, hit again, measured, nodded, done.

I caused my first UFO sighting in 1977 when I was about 5, by letting go of a 2 foot diameter pink balloon full of hydrogen. Later in my teens me and my siblings regularly launched 3 to 4 metre tall glowing green hot air balloons at night, causing many more calls to talkback radio about UFO's...

Wikipedia now has higher standards than all universities

A gravity map of earth: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap26032...

10th month of deployment; Crossed the atlantic three times so far, sewage system borked, and now a fire depriving the crew of 600 bunk spaces. So, how about that mutiny health bar in the corner of the captains dashboard?

For all the right loves to beat the nationalism drum for their own populist benefit, they don't actually want you to be able to work out what war does, or remember it accurately:

Nobby in Feet of Clay had the right response to people discovering that you're a politically useful lost scion of aristocracy, which is to hit the window helmet first and keep running, and then hide the evidence:

Cultural Neomarxist?

what the fuck is going on in Sam Altman’s head

The ghost of Rob Muldoon and his centrally planned socialist command economy has entered the chat, cackling wildly: www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

This is why I spent years doing spatial autocorrelation and horizontal to vertical spectral ratio measurements around Wellington, so that we could map the resonant behaviour of the Wellington basin. And then a whole lot of buildings had to be strengthened or taken down, because we got better maps

What most media takes are starting to sound like these days: www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/wha...

If I'd rushed into a poorly planned campaign around a notorious maritime choke point that left it closed to friendly shipping I'd carefully lay off the Churchill comparisons, but hey...