It all would have been much easier if, as would have happened if we were remotely a serious country, it all ended with the Access Hollywood interview.

The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit Send.

Important to understand the Epstein stuff and the fascism and the corruption are, in a lot of ways, really all the same story from different angles: powerful men who can and do abuse vulnerable people around them because they can, and because systems of elite accountability catastrophically failed

If this scandal consumes the Trump admin, as looks likely atm, expect next week's long awaited MBS visit to the WH to be called off. Nobody will want to negotiate delicate MENA politics with Trump if this stench grows. #menasky

Worse, he's basically running policy for Trump across half the Middle East. Has lots of capacity to generate distracting headlines - and clearly has his own skin in this game.

Polygamy, while permissible in conservative interpretations of Islam, is widely regarded as weird hillbilly shit throughout MENA and is rarely actually practiced, but expecting these boors to know that would require that they know anything about the world beyond their nose

Trump has threatened to bomb or invade 7 countries with a shot to play in the 2026 World Cup. He *has* bombed one (Iran) and said he'd deny them visas. He's preparing for war with another (Venezuela). He has summarily executed citizens from at least 3. He has imposed tariffs on nearly all of them.

Facts. ““If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to ration water. And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran,” President Masoud Pezeshkian was cited as saying on Thursday by the SNN semi-official news agency.”

More Abraham Accords and airstrikes won't bring lasting peace: "The danger is that both Washington and Israel think they can achieve a grand Middle East peace by putting together all the small pieces — except the central Palestinian one — and silencing the rejectionists with more war."

I don’t even have words for this. One of the 2 guys responsible for this mass death wants a peace prize and the other wants $1trillion to be a bad CEO.

Unconscionable

A little-known nonprofit has been lying to news publishers while funneling millions of paywalled articles to tech companies for AI training. Read my investigation in The Atlantic. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

I think we need to reframe things and refer to any software that intentionally negatively affects user experience to further some ulterior motive as "malicious software"

"One former employee has said that everyone knows the project won’t work; it is now just a matter of letting MBS down gently." “I think as a thought experiment, great,” said one urban planning expert who works in Saudi Arabia. “But don’t build thought experiments.”

As many have pointed out, when FIFA awards its inaugural Peace Prize at an event in Washington DC five days before the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, they're obviously going to give it to Trump. If FIFA really wanted to find a football-relevant, peace-relevant recipient: Didier Drogba is available.

It’s hard to believe but there was a cartoon about an immigrant mouse and it was seen as totally fine and not controversial and not woke because it was an aspirational and nice thing about America that people could come here and find a better life

supreme court poised to side with "No We Shouldn't" in landmark case "We Should Shoot The Economy In The Head For No Reason v. No We Shouldn't"

Lol

إزيك يا باشا؟ 😅

"In the shadow of Sudan’s misery, President Donald Trump has done conspicuously little.....The White House was more focused on gutting USAID, an agency that propped up critical elements of the humanitarian complex aiding Sudanese people." By @ishaantharoor.bsky.social. wapo.st/49qdcbO

Algerian Amb. Bendjama quotes Woodrow Wilson in his speech on occasion of Western Sahara vote at UN Sec Council: "Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril."

Europe looks to adopt a 'quagmire defense'

One of the 2 people pictured here is indeed mostly artificial (and it's not the hero on the right)

30 minutes until the UNSC vote on #WesternSahara

American politics, explained

that's because "AI literacy" is an oxymoron. off-loading your brain to a sycophantic prediction machine wrecks your brain. it's like "seated running"

What really happened: Trump imposed artificial trade barriers to gain leverage in negotiations, so Xi did too. Now they've met and agreed to partly walk them back. Nobody has won here. Investors and consumers get a modest rollback in trade barriers, but the underlying (il)logic remains in place.

"In 2010, the IEA estimated that there would be 410 GW of solar panels installed around the world by 2035. There is already more than 4 times that capacity, with about half of it in China." But with so much of this capacity coming as "addition" rather than "transition," climate gains are limited.

You cannot have autonomy under someone else's sovereignty.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works and let me know if you have any questions! 🤗

Frédéric Forest Paris - 1 January 2024

Putin has a plan for victory, and Kyiv has a plan to survive it. I returned to Ukraine to see what that is and how much it depends on inconstant allies. My column for Bloomberg @opinion shorturl.at/N9JPi

"The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class." @tressiemcphd.bsky.social pushes back on Platner apologists:

Unprecedented corruption: Trump's "family raked in more than $800 million from sales of crypto assets in the first half of 2025 alone, a Reuters examination found, on top of potentially billions more in unrealized 'on paper' gains. Much of that cash has come from foreign sources"

It's fun how enshittification is driven by two quite distinct forces, the comprehensible one where websites are run for profit and so they try to maximize engagement and thus ad revenue rather than providing a good service, and the incomprehensible one where they just want to put AI into everything

I've talked before about power struggles within hardening authoritarianism. Usually, regime supporters fight over using rule-of-law in crackdowns (with massive abuses, of course) vs. completely embracing extrajudicial methods. Here, we see the latter dominating. Which is very bad news going forward.

The 37 ballroom donors won’t be remembered for generosity, but for funding a monument to authoritarian vanity during a shutdown, at a venue nicknamed after a sex trafficker, while Americans wonder how they’ll eat. History keeps receipts & their names aren’t coming off those walls

"After all, it is a catastrophe funded by our money, made possible by our weapons, condoned by our government and carried out by one of our closest allies. It’s little wonder that some want to downplay the damage."

Ugh, Mercator 🙄

The German company that makes the mechanical ladder used in the Louvre heist has used the image to advertise, with the text 'When you need to move fast' 10/10 response, no notes

If a temporary resident of the White House can totally demolish the East Wing to build a gaudy ballroom, without any authority, approval, or regulation, he can tear down the rest of the White House to build a Walmart. That this destruction is allowed underscores how off the rails our country is now.

When you're too focused on elite cowardice to notice normie courage

It is shocking that Trump is quickly tearing down a portion of the White House. But isn’t the bigger story that this action is of a piece with his autocratic presumption that he can unilaterally destroy public goods without any public consultation or explanation? www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/u...

“It is important to demonstrate that authoritarian gains are not permanent. That liberal society has the will to undo their grotesqueries. Demolishing the Trump ballroom and restoring the East Wing will be symbolic. But symbolism matters to authoritarians.” www.thebulwark.com/p/we-will-te...

FDR Memorial, Washington DC. -RIP East Wing-

Kudos to her for reminding Silicon Valley that bigotry has real costs - a lesson they'd rather forget these days. And good luck to Sequoia ever raising more Gulf cash...

A reminder for the times we live in: once you break the rule of law, there is no easy way of fixing it again.

Oh, does it benefit the US to provide aid to foreign countries? That would have been good to know back in January and February.

the biomedical advances of the past twenty years have also been incredible. in a way, it really feels like we’ve been slouching towards utopia, so to speak, while society collapsed out from under us bc of changes in information technology/media diets