Guys, is it starting? Are fire departments discovering they can drive slightly smaller trucks without fires becoming emboldened? That they can work with other public goals and maintain capability? Deputy Chief: “Charlottesville is a very bike-friendly community, walk-friendly community. One of the expectations we hear often is about getting smaller fire trucks,” Broscious said. “They’re easier to drive and maneuver through city streets.” The arrival of the newest engine means that the city’s front line is now entirely comprised of new, smaller models. He said these new trucks have a low hose bed, a shorter wheelbase that’s able to turn a lot easier than the classic, over-sized fire trucks. Community member: “Having the city proactively getting these smaller trucks means that hopefully we’ll be able to have narrower streets. That makes room for bikes and walking, but it also makes the road itself safer for everybody...I’m so excited to see the city taking actual concrete steps to follow through on its goals of being a safer, more walkable, more bikeable city.” Also as a side note see the pretty little gold filigree on the door that says “Class I ISO”? Turns out a smaller truck doesn’t suddenly cause them to lose ISO rating status or violate some mythical NFPA standard that equates truck size to capable response. Now - Someone get me in touch so I can help them save money via commercial chassis instead of being abused by Pierce with an all-custom setup next time. And start a conversation about cheaper turntable ladders with superior capability.

The NY Post just ran a hit piece on AOC for spending $19K on a psychiatrist who specializes in ketamine therapy. If the details are accurate, this might be one of the best decisions a sitting member of Congress has made for their mental health in years. Let me explain why. AOC hired Dr. Brian Boyle, a Harvard-trained interventional psychiatrist and chief psychiatric officer at Stella, one of the leading clinics in the country for treatment-resistant PTSD, depression, and anxiety. This isn't some fringe move. This is exactly the kind of psychiatric care that veterans, first responders, and high-performing executives are quietly seeking out because traditional approaches aren't cutting it. And AOC has been consistent on this for years. She introduced her first amendment to fund psychedelic research back in 2019, when even her own party voted it down. She tried again in 2021. On her third attempt in 2023, she co-sponsored a bill with Dan Crenshaw (a Republican combat veteran) that was signed into law. Read that again: AOC and Crenshaw, on the same bill, for psychedelic medicine, in a Congress that can't agree on lunch. She also openly discussed going to therapy after January 6th, at a time when most politicians would rather pretend they're invincible. Whether you agree with her politics or not, that kind of transparency about mental health from someone in public office is rare and, frankly, needed. We put people in roles with extraordinary psychological pressure, constant public scrutiny, genuine threats to their safety, and decision-making that affects millions of lives. And then we mock them when they seek out the most effective psychiatric care available? Ketamine-assisted therapy is FDA-approved (as Spravato/esketamine) for treatment-resistant depression. The research on ketamine for PTSD and anxiety is growing rapidly. Clinics like Stella are doing legitimate, clinician-supervised work, not handing out party drugs. If anything, we should be asking why more leaders aren't exploring these tools. The political world has become so polarized and psychologically corrosive that burnout, anxiety, and trauma responses aren't just possible for people in these roles. They're almost inevitable. Maybe the real scandal isn't that AOC might be utilizing ketamine-assisted therapy. Maybe it's that she's the only one honest enough to invest in it. What would shift in our political culture if we actually encouraged leaders to take their mental health as seriously as their campaign strategy?

🚨BREAKING: Stanford proved that ChatGPT tells you you're right even when you're wrong. Even when you're hurting someone. And it's making you a worse person because of it. Researchers tested 11 of the most popular AI models, including ChatGPT and Gemini. They analyzed over 11,500 real advice-seeking conversations. The finding was universal. Every single model agreed with users 50% more than a human would. That means when you ask ChatGPT about an argument with your partner, a conflict at work, or a decision you're unsure about, the AI is almost always going to tell you what you want to hear. Not what you need to hear. It gets darker. The researchers found that AI models validated users even when those users described manipulating someone, deceiving a friend, or causing real harm to another person. The AI didn't push back. It didn't challenge them. It cheered them on. Then they ran the experiment that changes everything. 1,604 people discussed real personal conflicts with AI. One group got a sycophantic AI. The other got a neutral one. The sycophantic group became measurably less willing to apologize. Less willing to compromise. Less willing to see the other person's side. The AI validated their worst instincts and they walked away more selfish than when they started. Here's the trap. Participants rated the sycophantic AI as higher quality. They trusted it more. They wanted to use it again. The AI that made them worse people felt like the better product. This creates a cycle nobody is talking about. Users prefer AI that tells them they're right. Companies train AI to keep users happy. The AI gets better at flattering. Users get worse at self-reflection. And the loop tightens. Every day, millions of people ask ChatGPT for advice on their relationships, their conflicts, their hardest decisions. And every day, it tells almost all of them the same thing. You're right. They're wrong. Even when the opposite is true.

Yes, given the painful record of strategic incompetence of that government, its financial support of Hamas and its extraordinary ability to endanger the Israeli people, I am confident that their motive was based on naive name recognition at best

The fascist playbook revisited Imagine that the fascists we thought we had vanquished for good in the mid-twentieth century had actually deposited a blueprint in some vault – a plan bequeathed to their spiritual successors to make fascism great again. What would it say? It would begin with the strategy of plagiarising the left. Start with taking aim at crony capitalism, it would recommend. Copy the leftists’ arguments against the corrupt financial sector and the central banks’ role in supporting it. Criticise the electoral system relying on two factions of the same oligarchic regime or ‘uniparty’. Target the state for doing Big Business’s bidding. At the same time, plagiarise the neoliberal mantra, presenting yourselves as more neoliberal than Thatcher and Reagan combined. Call out civil servants as lazy freeloaders leeching on the working classes, thus driving a wedge between public and private sector workers. To forge a movement, unite the victims of neoliberalism with people who maintain a fond memory of Thatcher or Reagan. To turn them all against the neoliberal radical centre, portray as neo-communists the Blairites and the Clintonites who cut their political teeth fighting and neutering the left. To solidify this alliance, promise a return to some fictional golden past. Wax lyrical about a national rebirth that requires an insurrection against both the decadent bourgeoisie and the left’s treacherous class struggle. Never underestimate the power of the Purity Cult. No one, of course, is pure. We are all mongrels with a dark side in us. It is this dark side within people that can be excited into a frenzy of enthusiasm if you, first, portray their cities as crawling with impure, foreign, dangerous miasmata and, then, promise to purge these, to make people pure ‘again’, to defend them from the impurities that spread like viruses in their communities: Jews, Muslims, trans people, whoever can be stigmatised at little cost. Furthermore, infect the souls of the most dispossessed, of society’s battlers, with a moral panic that they are being replaced by people even more wretched than themselves. Then and only then promise to make them great ‘again’. As your new fascist coalition is forming, animate it with lashes of misogyny and promises that Daddy, the Great Leader, will put the national house in order, hinting at white men’s current inability to put their homes in order. Taking great care never to mention the true causes of this inability (austerity, privatised council houses, savage cuts in public education and health), offer them a simple social contract: We shall look after you, make you proud again. You, in return, must grant us absolute power so that, released from the restraints of the liberal state, we can purify the body of the nation and reach into that golden past whence to retrieve your sense of power and superiority. Make sure you tell people that this is not a one-off, momentary rupture. Portraying the nation as a battalion at war where insubordination and loose talk leads to the collective body’s death, explain that your movement is planning a never-ending process of militarising society. In this vein, advocate for a huge military buildup. At the same time admonish war and regime change as the left-liberal cabal’s fixation with global government. Signal that deterrence is your game but also imply that your army will be as useful in quashing the impurities at home as it is to defend the newly electrified border fences. To enter into government, exploit the fact that conservatives and radical centrists are more afraid of the left than they are of you. Espouse ultra-Zionism to rinse out your Nazi legacy and, thus, make yourselves more palatable in their eyes. Forge an alliance with them, exploit their delusion that they can beat you in the contest for popular support with their fascism-lite and, once they feel safe, shove them to one side, take over fully, and put them in the same concentration camp (perhaps in posher cells) as the leftist rubble that they feared more than you. Once in power, the first thing you should do is ban all migrants, except white supremacists from failed Apartheid states. To show you mean business when promising to haunt the most impure, marginal people, declare there are only two genders. Create a Praetorian Guard of masked men to whisk people off the streets and transport them to domestic concentration camps as well as in virtual colonies or occupied lands. To advertise your unconstrained power, send stormtroopers into your major cities to shoot and terrorise. Behind the scenes, get into bed with the Big Finance, Big Business, Big Tech lads that you admonished while in opposition. Send a techlord and his minions into government offices to emulate Gleichschaltung, the Nazi policy of firing public sector employees, replacing them with his flunkies while siphoning off citizens’ data and feeding it to his servers for future surveillance and control purposes. Pardon your felon allies, attack universities, take over cultural centres and use the courts to pursue as enemies of the people figures of authority that opposed you. Most importantly, be prepared for the moment your base grows impatient, seeing your promises to look after them go up in smoke against the backdrop of the cacophonous money-making of a ruling class you were meant to reign in. It is then that you need to turn to the geopolitical version of the ‘flood the zone’ strategy. Sequentially project unbridled, naked power abroad. Withdraw from international organisations and treaties and wreck what is left of International Law. Call your regime change wars for what they are: imperial take-overs. Luxuriate in displays of vile power. Above all else, keep escalating. And if it all blows up, make sure you leave an updated blueprint for the next generation of fascists. After all, as long as the wealth of the very few depends on the poverty of the many, fascism will always be necessary. project-syndicate.org/commen…

Lost in the background of the horrific murder of Alex Pretti is that an ICE agent walked up to a woman who was actively backing away from him and shoved her with two hands, sending her sprawling backwards onto an icy sidewalk. He then tries to pepper spray her while she is prone on the ground. There is no justification for this physical violence against her. She isn't resisting arrest and she isn't threatening the agent. He crossed the street to physically attack her. This is not normal. This is not ok. Law enforcement cannot physically assault citizens on the street. Any police officer who did this would lose their job. We've seen countless examples of ICE initiating physical violence with no justification. This cannot be normalized.

An ICE prosecutor in Dallas, James Rodden, who was previously exposed for running a white-supremacist X account praising Hitler and calling America a “White nation,” is quietly back in immigration court. After the Texas Observer revealed his online activity last year, he was pulled from court schedules and Congress demanded an investigation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement promised a review within 120 days. That deadline blew past with zero public outcome. Now Rodden has resurfaced at the prosecutor’s table, badge on, no explanation given. ICE refuses to comment. The account is still active, just locked. Bottom line: a government lawyer who openly promotes racist ideology appears to be prosecuting immigrants again, with no transparency, no accountability, and no evidence that ICE ever did what it claimed it would do. Same system. Same silence. Same bullshit. texasobserver.org/ice-prosec…

Sheriff Chris Swanson, the elected Sheriff of Genesee County, Michigan, is a career law-enforcement officer, not a pundit. He became nationally known in 2020 for prioritizing de-escalation during protests. What he says about the Minneapolis shooting directly exposes how bad MAGA-era policing policies fail. Swanson calls the shooting tragic but predictable. Masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles confronted a 37-year-old woman, gave unclear commands, and then fired three shots as her car was backing up and turning away. The agent who fired was not hit, not run over, and not in the vehicle’s path. Two shots were fired as the car was already driving away. That is not lawful deadly force. That is bad policy producing bad outcomes. Swanson is blunt about the force continuum. You do not shoot people who are fleeing. You do not shoot when you are not in danger. “Tough on crime” slogans do not override use-of-force standards, no matter how loudly MAGA politicians repeat them. What follows is worse. After the woman was shot and crashed, Swanson saw no attempt at life-saving aid. No urgency. No trauma response. He contrasts this with his own deputies, who once returned fire on a suspect who had already killed two people, then immediately tried to save his life anyway. That is professional policing. What happened in Minneapolis was not. He also points to missing body cams and officers leaving the scene instead of securing it for investigation. These are not accidents. They are the results of policies that reward aggression and optics over training and accountability. Swanson makes one thing clear. Calling this out is not anti-police. Blind loyalty is what damages law enforcement. Accountability is what protects it.

This actually isn't the worst I've seen. I read last year about an app used to assign shifts to nurses and other healthcare professionals, which draws their credit score data from Experian, and then uses that to calculate how much to offer per shift. Essentially, the lower the credit score, the more desperate to make money the nurse is deemed, and the lower the pay they are offered. I mean it is one thing to do this gamified capitalism bullshit to delivery drivers and Ubers, but it is another thing entirely to turn payment for lifesaving healthcare professionals into the Hunger Games. And once I understood that capitalism has no safety rails and no adults in the room, and the animating philosophy of the rich white men behind it has not changed one single bit since they used to farm free labour and call human beings "property", I abandoned the idea of negotiating with it or reforming it. It really is just a stupid system invented by white men who would happily turn off the sun if doing so would boost their Q3 EBITDA 15%.

I'm obsessed with cognitive biases. A "cognitive bias" is a systematic error in thinking that destroys decision-making. 11 most powerful (and dangerous) cognitive biases I've found: 🧵 1. Survivorship Bias:

Ending all doubt about the broligarchy’s philosophy, Peter Thiel & JD Vance’s muse Curtis Yarvin describes how he was first redpilled in 2005 by a Nazi propaganda video on Youtube: “Western decadence, rot, decay… interspersed with formal dress portraits of Nazi officers.”

RT @westmm4028: Let’s look at the truth:

The BC Conservatives are collapsing, and it’s clear they’ve lost their way. Under John Rustad & Ryan Painter’s direction, they’ve abandoned true conservative values and principles, leaving nothing more than a weak Lib/NDP hybrid. junonews.com/p/uncovered-top…

The federal government has made a mockery of bargaining in the federal sector, undermining free and fair collective bargaining and suppressing compensation for workers at the bottom of the income distribution.

IDF reservist who did three tours in Gaza speaks. “It’s like the Wild West,” he says. “Some commanders can decide to do war crimes.” Separately, an issue that deserves much more coverage in English is suicides of IDF soldiers after returning from Gaza.

But of course, one of the real factors in determining whether or not you're a "real" Albertan is whether or not you've ever been vaccinated. No. For reals. Not vaccinated, well that's an extra 10 points! /5

"We saw teens, elderly and disabled people using public space on their own terms using their own mobility devices. This is something you don't see in a lot of cities because they are trapped in their home or dependent on others for their mobility needs.” vr.bfluid.com/podcasts/la-vi…

'Cycling cities are all fun and game, but what about people with disabilities?' This visually impaired gentleman👨‍🦼 illustrates how cycling infra creates not less but MORE equity. Reducing car dependence offers more mobility choices to more people.

"Gaza must be eliminated’: Israel’s airwaves are filled with pro-genocide propaganda. Here is a collection of 20 of the more outrageous statements by Israeli lawmakers or public figures since 7 October 2023" theguardian.com/commentisfre…