Waking up, with sober mind, to 24 hours of clear knowledge that humanity is an unprecedented extinction event for our planet. & with climate change, likely authors of our own demise. What to do? How to be different/better?

To all the World Cup fans hating on Australia... Suck it up and enjoy!

RT @davidsirota: A day into vacation, with my brain healing from being (mostly) offline, I’ve been meditating on one thought: In many contr…

Powerful piece, highly recommend reading. Democrats need people like Platner if they are going to come to terms with the true nature of our country, with what we have done to people at home and abroad, and pull together the coalition needed to heal and reshape it. “A tiny minority of Americans (6%) ever serve in the military. Of these, only 40% of veterans have ever deployed to a combat zone. And of those deployed, only about 10% participated in actual ground combat. I am one of those, and so is Platner. His pathology: a combination of traumatic stress, substance abuse, impulsive decision-making in the past, and deep anger at the moral injury he sustained wearing the cloth of this nation, is something this country ought to consider when it sends its young men and women to war. The question before Maine is not whether Graham Platner is perfect. The question is whether the United States Senate, the state of Maine, and the country as a whole would benefit from having his voice in the room when decisions are made. The answer is yes…” “A democracy that insists on perfection will eventually find itself represented only by people skilled at hiding their flaws.”

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began. The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start. Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have. If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

Just kind of left speechless at an invading army whining to the United Nations that the people they are invading — and killing their civilians by the thousands — are fighting back. This is a mystifying level of lack of self awareness

⭕️ Netanyahu’s Team Disputes Axios Account of Trump Call Trump told Netanyahu that “defending Israel’s global position is difficult and breeds hatred” during a tense late-night call, according to a senior official on Netanyahu’s team, Amit Segal, Channel 12’s chief political analyst and one of Israel’s most influential journalists, known for his close ties to the prime minister reported. The official disputed an earlier Axios account of the conversation. It ended with Israel saying it will hold off on striking Beirut as long as it is not attacked within its own borders. PM Netanyahu later indicated on X his forces will continue to carry out massacres across south Lebanon where Israel has killed close to 3,500 people since March 2, including hundreds of women, children, and medical workers.

Now that Gaza lies in ruins—shattered, like a beloved face after a long brutality—Israel moves with a terrible confidence to the next act: The act of leaving every soul there not merely wounded, but permanently disabled. Injured, sick, hungry, homeless, without work, without hope. This is not war’s collateral damage. This is design. As my friend Gideon Levy writes—and he knows, he knows—this is the prelude to expulsion. Think of it: a society without teachers, without doctors, without social workers, without engineers, without clerks. That is not a society. That is a holding pen. A slow erasure. And when nothing functions—no school, no hospital, no office, no heart—then it becomes ‘easy,’ they tell themselves, to scatter the people to the four corners of the earth. Like seeds from a broken pod, except no soil will take them. We must name this. Not with rage alone, though rage is honest. But with the cold, clear tears of recognition: they are making life impossible so that departure becomes the only ‘choice.’ And the world watches, adjusts its spectacles, and calls for restraint. Restraint! There is no restraint in a slow drowning.

Israel spent 2 years running an elaborate lobbying campaign to have Hamas added to this UN sex-abuse blacklist, making the case that the UN designation was thorough, evidence-based and widely respected, which was why it was so important for them to get Hamas added to it. Now that Israel has been added to it, they say the whole thing is a sham.

Just spoke to a homeowner in rural Nebraska She said a data center will disrupt her family dairy farm that’s been in her family for 9 generations Then I showed her exactly how quickly she’d be able to render an image of a cow with the data center so close to her She started crying (tears of joy from the beauty of the image, no doubt) We went ahead with construction of the data center and heavily polluted her water supply

The deeper problem isn't just that they scraped everything without permission. It's what they scraped. Most of the written word that actually exists in human history was never digitized. Of what was captured, the vast majority is post-1990s internet content...written when the cost of publishing and reputational risk of publishing dropped to zero and editorial standards collapsed. High-signal, carefully edited work from before that era is barely represented. We're not training on the best of human thought. We're training on the cheapest. Check out @BrianRoemmele

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

Congratulations to Cade Cunningham and Jalen Duren on All-NBA honors and Ausar Thompson for being named to the NBA All-Defensive Team. Proud of these young men, their work ethic and the standard they continue to set. They’re great players and even better teammates. There are no limits to how far they can go. @DetroitPistons

Proud day eh @Mark_Butler_MP, @albomp? Could have taxed gas companies, decided instead to hit people with Down Syndrome. The perfect mix of gutless and cruel. theguardian.com/australia-ne…

Ausar has 28 steals and 23 blocks through 13 playoff games, so I went to @stathead to see how many other players in the play-by-play era have done that. And yeah, it's just he and Ben Wallace, but Ben had 35 steals and 38 blocks through 13 games in '03. Dude was a true phenomenon

RT @criprights: Today a guy named Dougie working at the reception of Parliament House asked my partner if her mask (respirator) was 'a poli…

you're laughing? investors are bravely enduring the horrors of earning slightly less from doing nothing, and you're laughing?

This is happening here, too, Australian media is just, as ever, ignoring the biggest stories and hoping no one notices

This bloke doesn’t recognise that he’s a part of a generation that has never or will never exist again. A generation with cradle to grave prosperity. Never before in history has a generation benefited so much from the hard work of their parents and the economic circumstances of their adulthood. Bouris has less in common with his hard-working father than a young Australian trying to make ends meet in uncertain times. He speaks of the accumulation of property as some form of human right, that it’s some form of Australian story, but it’s really a situation and a mindset that has only been enjoyed by a small group of Australians. Bouris literally made his fortune giving Home loans away in the first homebuyer grant period of the early 2000s, and he helped to contribute to an industry that is the most overinflated economic property Bubble on the planet. Bouris probably doesn’t remember Australia, whereby governments build houses as a human right, where Menzies era governments of both persuasions owned the lions share of rentals in the country. Not rich immigrant property magnates, not money obsessed Australian entrepreneurs. The only reason this fellow can talk like this, it’s because his lived position allows him to do so. A point not lost at all on the people who can’t really do anything right now.

Nothing could define this Premier League campaign better than the subsequent sight of the VAR officials at Stockley Park spending five minutes at a bank of television screens in stoppage time, trying to work out whether a goal should stand after the wrestling match that took place at the corner kick which led to it. It was clear, upon review, that Arsenal goalkeeper David Raya was held and impeded by West Ham United forward Pablo before Callum Wilson converted the loose ball. Raya’s left forearm was being pulled as he jumped to try to catch the ball. Of course, it was a foul. The problem is that at least three other clear fouls were being committed at the same time: Jean-Clair Todibo also on Raya, Declan Rice on Konstantinos Mavropanos, Martin Odegaard on Todibo. As former Liverpool and England midfielder Jamie Redknapp said on Sky Sports, “It was like watching the Super Bowl (with all the blocking). It was chaos.” When it comes to identifying the defining moment of this campaign, it is hard to imagine there will be anything that captures the spirit of the Premier League in 2025-26 more than the sight of a VAR at Stockley Park staring at a screen, trying to work out exactly who is fouling who — which foul is taking place when, which is most grievous, which is most consequential. How has football allowed this to become the new normal? Read @OliverKay in The Briefing for free ⬇️ bit.ly/4dkIdOQ

Special commission into the hurt feelings of genocidal psychopaths