Eric Knowles

1. It was not an accident.
2. It was not a staffer.
3. While the president may have dementia his racism is not due to dementia.
4. He isn’t sorry. He means every racist thought he shares.
5. His base agrees with him.
6. He will do it again.
7. No one in power will hold him accountable.

Tip o' the hat to Drudge.

Epstein files: Allegations of rape, murder, involving Donald Trump The Justice Department, on Friday, released documents among 3.5 million pages from the latest batch of Epstein files that it was willing to part ways with.

The accusations against Trump in the latest Epstein dump are beyond lurid. DOJ took them down after 20 minutes, but plenty of people got screenshots. Stomach-churning.

augustafreepress.com/news/latest-...

Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it.

2/2

This, from @adamserwer.bsky.social, is unimprovable:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once.

1/2

“DARVO is an acronym for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender, a manipulative tactic used by perpetrators to avoid accountability for their actions.”

The New York Times Does PR for Segregationists The paper of record casts a legal movement that is repealing Civil Rights era reforms as one committed to anti-discrimination.

I wrote about the New York Times refusing to call Neo-segregationists by their true names, the DARVO style of writing about race, and some great articles and books I read this week.

If you haven't subscribed to my newsletter with @hebagowayed.bsky.social yet, now is the time.

IKR?

Thinking of making this my profile banner.

"Abolish ICE" ≠ "abolish the police." The former won't get the pushback the latter did.

People are realizing that ICE is nothing more than an internal paramilitary doubling as a full-employment program for precarious men seeking an outlet for violent urges. It needs dissolution.

Waddup, @tonytula.com!

Tony Tulathimutte had these life-hacky tech-bros' number back in 2008. From his story "Our Dope Future":

I would like to know less than nothing about the Melania documentary, thanks very much.

Alex Pretti and Renee Good were motivated by a desire—maybe even a need—to put their bodies between the powerless and those who would abuse them. It's an astonishingly beautiful thing. The existence of human beings like this is this government's shame.

What's happening in Minnesota is one reason the Reconstruction Amendments banned insurrectionists from holding office. Unfortunately, the originalists on the Supreme Court interpreted the plain language of the amendment to mean its opposite.

Abolish the bejeezus out of ICE. Not a close call.

*Pretti

I'm not one to point out bothsides-y journalistic framings, but this upsets me. The administration has not been found to "advance one-sided narratives." It has been found to spread lies and smears. Calling Good or Pretty domestic terrorists bent on murder is outright, wholesale fabrication.

My wife is apparently commanding NORAD now.

If these dudes approached my kid like that, my anger would be enough to power four dozen medium-sized cities for 250 years.

Agree that we shouldn’t outsource the whole process to machines. Maybe LLMs could be an adjunct to human analysis, almost like radiologists currently use automated image analysis as a first pass.

It is, as they say, an empirical question!

(To be clear, my point wasn’t that LLMs excel at review, or that we should rely on them—but that, given the sheer volume of papers needing review, the time and energy anyone can devote to them [and the resulting average quality] is pretty low.)

… but I think the solution to that problem will be expecting fewer, better papers from our scholars. A senior colleague of mine once lamented, “We used to be able to think about a project for 6 months before even running Study 1.” As a student, I was told the goal is “one ambitious paper a year” (!)

Hmm. Re 1: the mistakes I see in peer review aren’t the *sorts* of mistakes LLMs make. It’s easy to get an LLM to read an entire document, and yet I’ve seen reviews that miss an entire study in the package.

Re 2: I have to think more about how this use of LLMs worsen the overwork/burnout problem…

Who’s the father, I wonder?

I got one review recently that was thorough and incisive, but challenging, and I wanted to give the reviewer a hug. Rarer than ever these days.

Hot take: a purpose-built LLM would provide better and less-biased manuscript reviews than the average human reviewer currently does. The last few rounds of review I’ve gotten left me genuinely wondering whether they read the work.

Judging by the caliber of the reviews I’ve seen recently, I don’t think the ratio can possibly be constant. The sheer volume of papers requiring review is hurting quality control.