J Cortazar

Trump Admin is planning to ask Congress to dramatically cut funding for transit as part of the 2026 infrastructure law.

The proposal would eliminate the transit account, which funds billions of dollars in capital expenses. It would also prevent states from “flexing” roads funds for transit.

Racial Resentment Among White Americans by Birth Year and Demographics This figure presents the same four-panel layout (education, gender, geography, religion) but for White Americans from birth years 1940 to 2000. Education panel: A pronounced divide shows non-college Whites with substantially higher resentment across all cohorts, increasing sharply for older birth years. College-educated Whites rise more modestly but remain distinctly lower, especially among younger cohorts. Gender panel: Male and female trendlines rise together, with women slightly higher in mid-century cohorts. Younger cohorts of both genders start lower and climb with age. Geography panel: Regional lines separate clearly: the South is highest in resentment, followed by the Midwest. The West and Northeast show lower levels, with the Northeast consistently at the bottom. All regions slope upward toward older cohorts. Religion panel: Protestants show the highest resentment, peaking among mid-century cohorts. Catholics sit in the middle. Non-affiliated Whites show the lowest resentment, especially among younger respondents, with a small rise among mid-century generations. The figure notes CES 2024 data with GAM-smoothed trendlines.

Those claiming Dems should retreat on racial justice aren't hard-headed realists, they're pushing against the electoral tide rather than leaning into it. The story of Gen Z isn't about racist backlash or red-pilled young men. It's the most racially progressive generation in American history. 🧵

A lot of people are going to walk away from the Ghislaine Maxwell coverage with the impression that our prison system isn’t punitive enough but I’d say it highlights how most everyone else is treated with *deliberate* cruelty.

Grokipedia cites a Nazi forum and fringe conspiracy websites A site-wide comparison with Wikipedia sheds light on what Elon Musk is trying to do

NEW on @indicator.media: A first *full-scale* comparison of Grokipedia v Wikipedia.

Last week the awesome @harold.bsky.social rocked up to my desk bearing gifts.

Hal had collected almost all 900K Grokipedia entries and compared them to their Wikipedia equivalents for text and citation similarity.

1. This email mentions some machinations involving the dubious sale of a Palm Beach house. bsky.app/profile/davi...

DONALD TRUMP:
You're banned from Mar-a-Lago for being a creep.

JEFFREY EPSTEIN:
o. ka ,, y . m? ? ? ! by t,he way i have. You r new .' Pedofile Lisense "* u orde4red _in m.y)))))) car +

DONALD TRUMP:
Thank you, my dearest friend.

The brain is a dense, thorny network of neurons, which come in many flavors and whose behaviors are controlled by a menagerie of molecules released on precise timescales. It is staggeringly more complex than an AI algorithm. www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothin...

It was always a lie that the focus would be deporting the worst of the worst. To get Dreamer/DACA status basically meant you were a Girl Scout or Boy Scout. And it's silly because many of these people got educated here since 2012 and now we're losing that talent and skill. 🤷🏾‍♀️

DHS Is Deploying a Powerful Surveillance Tool at College Football Games Public records show DHS is deploying the "Homeland Security Information Network" at college protests and football games.

Public records show DHS is deploying the "Homeland Security Information Network" at college protests and football games.

It's like the owners of your favorite sports team telling you to "trust the process", they need your support, as they trade away the best player for future draft picks once again in a perpetual rebuild

Elon trying to process insults that aren't in a meme format

Democrats Get Rolled by Their Own - The American Prospect Coming out of last Tuesday’s election blowout, the Democrats were riding high and unified. But on Sunday night, centrist Senate Democrats, with Chuck Schumer’s tacit encouragement, voted to reopen the...

The reporting suggests that's absolutely what happened:

"But privately, Schumer was encouraging a centrist Gang of Eight to keep negotiating with Republicans and settle for a lot less."

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

Investors’ ‘dumb transhumanist ideas’ setting back neurotech progress, say experts Fascination of investors such as Elon Musk with uploading their brains to computers is hindering progress in curing disease, say scientists

Investors’ ‘dumb transhumanist ideas’ setting back neurotech progress, say experts

democratic voters wanted their party to shut down the government for myriad reasons — troops in american cities, masked thugs ripping families apart — but dem leaders insisted the wise thing to do politically was to stay hyper-fxated on this one thing, ACA tax credits. and then they just… gave up

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

Phew. This is the best thing I’ve read this week and is absolutely worth your time.

Kristi Noem Fast-Tracked Millions in Disaster Aid to Florida Tourist Attraction After Campaign Donor Intervened The DHS chief has been widely criticized for slowing down FEMA’s response after natural disasters. Texts and emails obtained by ProPublica point to an effective way to get help faster: have one of Noe...

Kristi Noem has been widely criticized for slowing down FEMA’s response after natural disasters.

Texts and emails obtained by ProPublica point to an effective way to get help faster: have one of Noem’s big donors make the ask.

(Published September)

On March 6, #SCOTUS denied a Trump emergency application in the Dellinger case. That was the last time that happened; today's ruling is the 24th (consecutive) grant since then.

I survey this broader pattern (and its alarming implications) in a new draft paper here:

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The Authoritarian Stack

How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next.

➡️ ➡️ ➡️ ➡️ www.authoritarian-stack.info

Just wanted to say I also regularly use the term mark-ass mark

Families Rally After Feds Take Chicago Daycare Teacher: 'We Are Filled With Rage' Hundreds of neighbors gathered in North Center demanding that federal immigration agents stay out of schools after a teacher was chased into and pulled out of a preschool by officers.

"Several teachers fled with a student and hid in a back of a pickup truck, “terrified of being found,” Meadow said."

“They weren’t sure what was going on. ICE, an attack on the school — they didn’t know,” Meadow said."

lol

Maybe normal people don't care all that much about "saving the Democrats" and just want good governance. Does that cross any columnist's mind?

The ChatGPT effect: We’ve all started talking like robots The use of artificial intelligence is leading to a flattening of our language that is evident in the emails we write and the texts we compose. Studies have already confirmed this. Robotic verbiage era...

Finally one thing they are, due to being statistical models of text, these neural networks and other large language models are indeed designed to do: milquetoastify boringify language.

LLMs steal and drain off human creativity originality verve by merely copying.

english.elpais.com/technology/2...

Tonight's even more proof the mainstream reporters who are still on Twitter are suffering from a brain problem akin Havana Syndrome that is preventing them from accurately doing their jobs. They are being cooked alive by a snuff-focused apartheid algorithm.

Looks like the Dems will pick up 12 seats in the VA House of Delegates, which will go from 51-49 to 63-37 D-R. That's an honestly shocking result.

"Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" | National Museum of African American History & Culture. <p>“Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the 1930s used effective direct-action tactics, such as boycotts and picketing. </p>

I’m doing research for a project and found out about the “don’t buy where you can’t work” movement during the depression, where Black people boycotted and picketed places that wouldn’t hire us. Shout out to everyone who’s not going back to Target!

New Pentagon memo dictates how transgender troops must look to defend their service “This administration is desperate to distract from the reality that these service members have impeccable records and that there is no reason whatsoever to separate them from military service,” attorn...

Their cruelty knows no bounds.

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has ordered trans military members to appear at their separation board hearings in drag, dressed and groomed to the standards of their sex assigned at birth and not their gender identity.

www.advocate.com/news/pentago...

Amazon's layoffs are driven by something even stupider than AI Andy Jassy wants you to think that velocity can make up for lack of strategy. But "build, measure, learn" only works if you're willing to learn.

The wet fart noise you hear is the AI bubble deflating. CEOs are pivoting from "AI will make us more productive, somehow" to "culture will make us more productive, somehow"

The bottleneck has ALWAYS been bad strategy at the top. But instead, Amazon is trying to solve it by hollowing out the middle.