An odd thought: Billionaire-level wealth is like Sauron's ring, in that it tempts you with visions of great power, but ultimately corrupts you with bone-deep moral rot.

Today's blog post: A few wise words on the LLM AI bubble collapse from Cory Doctorow. A detour to the industrial revolution & a look at the US Beveridge curve. Learned new automation terms: centaur and reverse centaur. And an accordion/bagpipe hybrid. www.someweekendreading.blog/doctorow-on-...

And they applauded. That’s the scary part.

Why not both?

This is so indefensibly insane: Speaker Johnson is refusing to seat Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva because she'll be the 218th vote to release the Epstein files. Johnson swore in Rep Walkinshaw (VA) w/in 24 hours. Johnson is abandoning his job to instead protect a convicted child sex predator

The White House is targeting blue states with its first wave of cuts to federal projects following the government shutdown. The Office of Management and Budget is withholding billions in energy and infrastructure money in more than a dozen states that voted against Trump.

👀 Just Now -- President Trump in the Oval Office said a government shutdown gives his administration the power to cut benefit programs, which include Social Security and Medicare. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Unexpected side-effects of technology: windmills keep driving some people crazy, albeit nowadays with less poetic meaning.

Justice Anthony Kennedy tells @npr.org's @ninatotenberg.bsky.social "very worried" about our country, and that "Democracy is not guaranteed to survive." Kennedy wrote Citizens United and was the fifth vote in the rest of the Roberts Court's anti-democratic decisions. www.npr.org/2025/09/27/n...

Today's blog post: Petrov Day #42, commemorating a man who stood up to standing orders & institution decay. All else being equal, he preferred that humanity should live and not die. www.someweekendreading.blog/petrov-day-2...

You have to ask yourself: would you take theological advice from this man?

Today's highlight, I think: the Reichenbach Falls...

Today's blog post: An addendum to yesterday's blog post, wherein American Psychiatric Assn has weighed in: - Vaccines don't cause autism - Acetaminophen doesn't cause autism - Leucovorin doesn't treat autism www.someweekendreading.blog/autism-aceta...

Sometimes people show stunning levels of lack of self awareness.

Power is the rock on which truth founders. The mainstream media, with a few exceptions, is a single-issue lobby group, whose purpose is to assert the rights of capital. Here's what I've learnt about the industry in 40 years in journalism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Democrats are standing up to Trump, and now he's threatening to lay off hundreds of thousands of Americans and burn down the United States government. It's dangerous, irresponsible madness. Trump is failing, unpopular and losing his sh-t. Dems are right to fight for something better than this.

The Huntington's disease treatment is expected to cost $2-5m. Its owners uniQure expect to rake in tens of billions in profit from treating hundreds of thousands of patients. People celebrate the Huntingdon's disease advance, but never ask why it costs 100x what it should.

So anyway, turns out plasma in menstrual blood can completely heal wounds in 24 hours. hudson.org.au/news/womb-to...

Today's blog post: Trumpists assert acetaminophen causes autism. We walk through an awesomely powered Swedish population study. The effect goes away when controlled for genetics. Sole exception: aspirin PROTECTIVE vs autism & intellectual disability! www.someweekendreading.blog/autism-aceta...

Weird how this keeps happening.

As @johnrogers.bsky.social likes to say: 'Punishable by a fine' means 'legal for a price'.

Today's blog post: Russian casualties in Ukraine reach 1.1 million. Versus an early invasion regression model, daily death rate is up 42%. Adding Ukraine deaths, emigration, and COVID-19 deaths show Russia has lost about 8.8% of males age 18-44. www.someweekendreading.blog/ukraine-1100k/

Once more: the best evidence shows that Tylenol taken during pregnancy is not harmful. **This question is settled.** The benefit of reducing discomfort and fever is extremely important at a time when the fetus is developing. Pregnant women - Tylenol is safe. sciencebasedmedicine.org/tylenol-and-...

my question for ahmari: the federal reserve is subject to democratic control — congress can, whenever it chooses, alter the terms of fed independence. how and why is the unilateral authority of the president, exercised outside of rule if law, more democratic than congress’s legitimate authority?

15 years ago the Supreme Court decided corporations are people under the First Amendment. Today, sold-out politicians block progress on all fronts to appease their corporate donors. Citizens United is among the worst decisions in history. It corrupts our system every day.

NEW: Air Force jets are doing ICE flights to Africa with transponders turned off, making them nearly un-trackable. This includes the third-country removal to Ghana and another secret flight. We figured out where it landed. From me for @rollingstone.com: www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

It’s the aristocracy, it takes different forms depending on is social context, but it’s always the aristocracy, and you must learn to hate it as much as it hates you.

U.S. news organizations that still care about independence should refuse to sign the Pentagon's censorship pledge. Instead they can write about what the compliant outlets are publishing and refer to those outlets, correctly, as government-controlled media.

AOC: We should be clear about who Charlie Kirk was. A man who believed that the civil rights act that granted black Americans the right to vote was a mistake… His rhetoric and beliefs were ignorant, uneducated, and sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans.

I like this. Since under RFK Jr, Covid shots are now for people with underlying conditions that put them at risk, Michigan’s chief medical executive Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian states that not having the most recent Covid shot constitutes such an underlying condition. www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside...

Dr. El-Deiry just presented at RFK Jr.’s ACIP goat rodeo. I condemned his presentation to the fires of hell, but I was not aware that 75 of his pubs were flagged for data irregularities. This tracks.

Fluoride?! Again?

President Donald Trump said licensed television networks are "not allowed to" criticize him, suggesting that the federal government could take their licenses away.

Two people who will be presenting on the alleged dangers of COVID19 vaccines at ACIP tomorrow: Charlotte Kuperwasser, PhD Wafik El-Diery, MD Kuperwasser is outspoken in her opposition to COVID19 vaccines El-Diery’s paper launched the lie that COVID19 vaccines cause “turbo cancers”.

what I'm learning from the fact that every one of these decisions has a "huge merger waiting to be approved" factor is that we should no longer allow mergers sorry, you can't buy any other companies anymore, too dangerous to civil society only antitrust breakups allowed

As a society, the one thing we were totally unprepared for was annoying leftists being right.

See, if this were a real Nancy Drew story, I probably would have read more of them admittedly.

A bill introduced by Michigan lawmakers last week would ban pornography, ASMR, depictions of transgender people, and VPNs for anyone using the internet in the state. 🔗 www.404media.co/michigan-por...

Today's blog post: Vance says most US political violence is from the left. Here are 7 studies, complete with logistic regression models, showing he's ignorant or lying. (Including the now Trump-suppressed Natl Inst of Justice report.) www.someweekendreading.blog/political-vi...

And here we all used to think Dr Strangelove was a fictional parody from another age.

SEPT, 1933, GERMANY: The new Nazi government arrests tens of thousands of homeless citizens and disappears them into prisons and camps in what they called Beggars’ Week [Bettlerwoche], carried out by the SA and SS, with the support of the police.

Like, be for real. Seeking out video evidence of violence you are already aware happened just to vicariously traumatize yourself isn't "witnessing", you're engaging in what would be called self-harm in any other context.

Today's blog post: Getting a fall COVID-19 booster early, since it looks like Kennedy's ACIP crew is gearing up to mis-use VAERS to declare the vaccines unsafe & withdraw authorization for *anybody*. Available until 2025-Sep-18; then, nobody knows. www.someweekendreading.blog/rush-covid-b...

Today's blog post: Getting a fall COVID-19 booster early, since it looks like Kennedy's ACIP crew is gearing up to mis-use VAERS to declare the vaccines unsafe & withdraw authorization for *anybody*. Available until 2025-Sep-18; then, nobody knows. www.someweekendreading.blog/rush-covid-b...

Kirk’s death is better understood as a casualty of gang violence among competing far-right groups rather than the hagiographies being written by elite media platforms.

I know everyone is consumed with other news, but this is a big fucking deal: The Trump administration says that IUDs and the Pill are actually abortions. Here's what USAID told the NYT about the $10m in birth control they plan to destroy. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/h...

Extremist murders by ideology, 2013 to 2022. www.pbump.net/o/reassessin...

Today's blog post: A look at the fall SARS-CoV2 strain and the vaccine. 2 good studies of vaccine safety including all-cause mortality, and one weird study. www.someweekendreading.blog/3-takes-covi...

The White House Press Secretary, the official spokesperson for the Trump administration, told reporters in an official briefing that the president wants to invade "every Democrat-run city" with troops. Any media still pretending that this is about "crime" is making a conscious choice to lie to you.