A lifelong Vijay fan tries to explain an election result that defies explanation.

The fact that Paul Graham personally has billions of dollars at stake with OpenAI doesn’t mean that his public opinion on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness and leadership is invalid. But it certainly…

I recently posted my Newer Deal Series , a ten-part – “tl;dr”-- array of thirty-five proposals for Democrats and their allies. Quickly persuasive and do-able reforms that might empower them to save…

As Big Tech algorithms encourage kids and teens toward self-harm and suicide, Mothers Against Media Addiction is fighting back - raising awareness about the platforms' harms and advocating for…

CVE-2026-41940 is a CVSS 9.8 authentication bypass in cPanel/WHM affecting every version after 11.40. It was a zero-day for two months, 44,000 IPs are now scanning, ransomware has deployed, and a…

"A drought-breaking budget for metropolitan public transport services" The 2026 Victorian State Budget will be tabled in Parliament (and become public) early this afternoon. I gave the broader…

"Today we announce a new policy." These were the words Zia Yusuf used to introduce Reform's intention to set up networks of "detention centres" for deporting tens of thousands of people at a time.…

It's 04 May.† Fifty-six years ago today, ill-prepared and ill-led members of the Ohio National Guard fired on a group of protesters against the Vietnam War at Kent State University, killing…

May 4 Last night, during the May 3rd PNC meeting, the Maryland Pirate Party ascended to the Pirate National Committee, joining as our…

People are more optimistic about the future when their party is in power. This isn't surprising--in fact, it would be surprising if this wasn't the case--but you'd expect the effect to fade as they…

ICYMI Arizona – The Arizona Pirate Party is currently seeking a new location for their “Plunder Hunger” food drive. The AZPP is planning…

All over Europe, farmers are parking their tractors on bridges, in front of fuel depots, and across from government offices, to protest government policies that are making the economics of being a…

After a strenuous bike ride in Patagonia last week, I summoned the energy to crank out the first draft of an opinion piece that was published just a couple of days later in the Yale Daily News. The…

New York City Says No To Coal Or Oil Burning Trains – 1934 In the 1970s practically every apartment building had an incinerator to burn its trash. New York City’s sky had a constant haze…

Translated from french (please notify us of errors) Athens, around 430 BCE. On the theatre stage, masked actors perform The Runaways, a comedy by the comic poet Cratinus of which only a few fragments…

A report released this week was full of good news about people and bad news about political and media institutions. This is the Gist.

The elephant walks out: Open Evidence and the EU & UK clinical AI exit Open Evidence is a clinical-AI search tool used by 40% of US doctors across 10,000 hospitals, running 18 million clinical…

The Which Side Are You On? (remix) by Rebel Diaz came out 11 years ago, and it’s more relevant than ever… Gave the money to suckas while our community’s still poor Withdrew the…

This article disects what the Republican Party of America actually is - a fundamentalist party that has more in common with the Taliban than Christianity.

Most of my concerns about AI are probably irrelevant, but what if one of them is not? At the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, epistemology, and political science, there's a concept called…

Trump shares bizarre AI-generated image of himself lounging in Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool with Cabinet members Japanese toilet maker Toto surges 18% on AI chip component expansion plan They…

On this website I have frequently covered Victoria's ongoing failure to repeal the use of Group Ticket Voting in state Legislative Council elections. Victoria is now the last state that still has…

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy in India announced that 45 lakh households in India are now powered entirely by solar energy. In other news, The Cubbon Park Namma Metro station was…

The official line: there are true anomalies which the head of the Pentagon’s UFO office does not understand with his physics and engineering background, and from his time in the Intelligence…

There is a quiet tension in Nigeria today, not loud enough to be called panic, but too persistent to ignore, a collective holding of breath by millions who sense that the next election cycle is not…

Three gaps in the EDPB's harmonised DPIA template that will leave agentic AI assessments incomplete: missing fields for agent memory, inference-time data flows, and the AI Act Article 26(9)…

I was asked recently what existential crises have been on my mind. Given it’s a take your pick world on that front (global wars, AI, gutting of various golden gooses like funding science…

Remember how we all laughed and laughed and laughed at the vice-president who misspelled the word potato(e) Remember when we spray-painted "WE ARE WINNING!" onto the walls in Downtown Seattle Your…

In comments I suggested: IP is Not “Not Property” Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes “Conversation with an author about copyright and publishing in a free society” IP: The Property…

Utah’s stupid new law “prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.” It’s probably illegal for minors to access this site…

A surprisingly agreeable and wholesome discussion with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart on their THE REST IS POLITICS podcast. I wish there were more opportunities for political adversaries to…

"This is how the attack by one petro-state (ours) on another (Iran's) may be turning out to be very bad for petroleum, because the only thing history loves more than a surprise party is…

It's kind of embarrassing. Donald J. Trump was my business and character reference for my investigations firm, Union Associates, when, in the 1980s, I applied for government contracts. But Frank…

In the current debate regarding EU’s independence of US software providers, I asked myself: how far is Germany? Germany is not only my country of birth. It also has the largest GDP in Europe…

Entertainment-pervading politics to Pixar's three-pitch rule, AI's Jevons Paradox, Game Theory's Prisoner's Dilemma, and swapping doomscrolling for comic books

Sunday Asides #93 I’m really disappointed that the Voting Rights Act has been gutted thanks to those old fucktards in the Supreme Court. I put up a video by Jamelle Bouie a couple of days ago where…

AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot A list of companies that were killed by regulatory action in the US. Also see [[wikipedia:Category:Internet services shut down by a legal…

Here is this week’s selection of the fools from the past week. It emanates from a blend of religious Fundamentalism with right-wing politics

Last week marked 40 years since the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. PBS Newshour sent a couple of reporters into the exclusion zone for an update on the site, including a look at the drone damage done by…

Dr. Parag Khanna sprach mit Chelsea Spieker im The Pioneer Morning Briefing darüber, warum es aus seiner Sicht keine neue Weltordnung geben wird. Er beschreibt die heutige geopolitische Lage als…

Nothing Is Ever Going Back To Normal by Anya Kamenetz “By ‘normal-feeling’ I mean not utopia, but these two specific beliefs: “There are adults in charge of the most powerful…

A brief guide to network and cybersecurity in New Zealand, covering threats, defences and how telcos and agencies protect critical infrastructure.

Broken Spirit

Are we at peak oil, perhaps even peak burning? Thanks to Donald Trump, renewables are looking better than ever. It turns out that using the oil weapon opens people's eyes to the alternatives. The…

OpenAI and Microsoft deleted the AGI clause on April 27. Anthropic deleted the pause commitment in February. Two of the three frontier labs have edited capability-trigger clauses out of their legal…

Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️ We have the kiddos for the weekend so let’s see how much of this I can get through before they wake up. My first cup of coffee is nice and hot and my…

The American Mis-imagination of China Remarks to a Colloquium on John Hay’s Open Door Policy Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) Providence, Rhode Island, 2 May 2026 Let me begin,…

A vast cloying morass of injustice has visibly submerged the British legal systems in anything connected to Palestine. In a quite incredible series of linked and kinked events this week, the senior…

County Roads, Take Me Home My phone served up a cover version of this John Denver classic as I was chauffeuring my wife around yesterday. Something about the lyric hit me in a way that I'd never…