Everyone knows about Ahmed al-Ahmad, the Syrian Muslim migrant who took down one gunman. Another man, a Middle Eastern refugee, ran into a firefight and kicked the gun away from the other gunman. Police shot him, and bystanders kicked him in the head while he was down, thinking he was the terrorist.

NEW: @patrickwyman.bsky.social has a history podcast not on great leaders, but more common folk. The theme for this season? World slavery:

“Power is inseparable from labor. Power is inseparable from work. Slavery, studying it, what it tells us, is just how inseparable those two things are.”

Well, there's a photo I never expected to see in my life. Noam Chomsky palling around with Steve Bannon.

The national incarceration rate of Native Americans is more than 2x that of white Americans. For Native youth, the confinement rate is approximately 3x that of white youth.

This is the legacy of centuries of oppression & theft from Native people.

Are you fucking kidding me it’s like we are living in a cartoon

The only truly irreversible thing a trans child is likely to do is take their own life. "What if they do something irreversible?" actually means "theyre not allowed to make a decision!"

You cant undo or reverse any decision you make, you can simply change your mind later and handle the consequences

Someone is going to have the write the thing about how “vibe” has become a substitute for meaningful theory in a world where the theory is so clear — grift and power — but we collectively refuse if because it isn’t sophisticated enough to generate make work for empiricists.

Andrew Paul Johnson was arraigned in a Florida court in October on multiple charges, including molesting a child as young as 11 years old.

Johnson dangled the prospect that one of the children could receive money bc...he was entitled to $10 million as part of reparations for his January 6 arrest.

So Pakistan is *paying* Qatar to *not* deliver LNG because even including this penalty payment their solar PV and battery spending is much better value for money and saves them billions.

How fascinating!

If women are underrepresented in STEM, it's at least partly because men like this offer mentoring, then embarrass themselves by assuming their mentees must be into them, then decide the best solution is to cut ties, which sends the signal to other faculty that the mentee must not be good enough.

The emails have Summers reporting to Epstein about his attempts to date a Harvard economics student & to hit on her during a seminar she was giving.

you cannot make a formal distinction between good and bad outputs from LLMs in the same way as separation of code and data lets you fix every other variety of "injection" attacks

Here is Joseph Weizenbaum on the “hubris so bombastically exhibited by the artificial intelligentsia” who believed, even back in 1976, that the human (and animal) mind can be adequately simulated by machines:

For years, when I asked my fellow white Americans why the US has the largest carceral apparatus in the world by a wide margin, with 4% of the world's population and 22 percent of the world's prisoners, with mass incarceration mostly impacting communities of color,