Patrick Bigger

Israel, immediately after vaporizing a bunch of little girls:

AI Opted to Use Nuclear Weapons 95% of the Time During War Games: Researcher | Common Dreams AI models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini show alarming readiness to deploy nuclear weapons in war games experiment. Study reveals sobering results.

seems bad www.commondreams.org/news/ai-nucl...

one of the basic problems of prediction markets that our brilliant economists clearly have not thought through is that the insider trading poisons basically everything in public life. everything is potentially untrustworthy, a set-up. the fix is always in.

GREENWIRE | The Interior Department on Monday unveiled a final rule that pulls back more than 80 percent of the agency's regulations tied to implementing the National Environmental Policy Act, the nation's bedrock environmental law. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said NEPA for decades "has been twisted into a weapon" to block energy, infrastructure and conservation projects. "Under the leadership of President Trump, this administration is fixing that," Burgum said in a statement. "We are cutting unnecessary bureaucracy, speeding up approvals, and putting Americans back to work, while enforcing NEPA as Congress originally intended." The final rule largely adopts a draft the agency released last summer, which was criticized for curbing public input and analysis of energy projects. The draft cut close to one-sixth of the agency's regulations implementing NEPA, instead switching most of the remaining rules to less-stringent guidelines. The final rule rescinds more than 80 percent of Interior's prior NEPA regulations, "with the majority of those regulations moved into a streamlined Departmental NEPA Handbook of Implementing Procedures," according to the Interior Department. The regulation arrives on the heels of the White House last year pulling back nearly 50 years' worth of rules that the Council on Environmental Quality had issued to implement the law since 1977, when President Jimmy Carter signed an order directing the agency to issue rules under NEPA. Associate Deputy Secretary Karen Budd-Falen said that "Interior is restoring NEPA to what Congress intended — a procedural law that informs decisions, not a regulatory maze that delays them for years."

Holy shit.

The fossil-fuel industry wanted "permitting reform" (ie, gutting the National Environmental Policy Act) so badly that the Trump regime went ahead and did it illegally.

subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eene...

Trump's steep cuts to public service jobs and STEM research has not saved much money at all. While, naturally, defense contractors continue to make up the biggest share of government contracts.

The country is losing years of talent to the private sector and to other countries. trib.al/yL4uzHA

Why tariffs aren’t stopping China’s grip on battery minerals Graphite shows how Chinese firms are outflanking US policy from Indonesia

Again, logistics! Tariffs imposed by US on chinese battery minerals are not reducing chinese dominance in supply chains. Instead, they are redirecting trade flows geographically while preserving China's corporate control. Tariffs function as routing signals... voltrush.substack.com/p/why-tariff...

How tech turned against women As AI-generated sexualised images proliferate and app-facilitated abuse spreads, we are sleepwalking into a new age of gender inequality. It is time to regulate properly

"large language models such as ChatGPT were consistently advising women to ask for lower salaries than men in recruitment processes,... AI tools already in use by more than half of England’s councils were downplaying women’s medical conditions, potentially resulting in unequal care"

US Critical Mineral Aggression Abroad Connected to Data Center Fights at Home We must phase out fossil fuels—not endlessly reshuffle environmental sacrifice zones around the planet, write Hannah Lipstein and Tamara Kneese.

Data center fights are hyperlocal but depend on opaque global supply chains + geopolitical resource grabs. How do data centers connect with critical minerals and electronics manufacturing, and what makes these connections palpable? Hannah Lipstein + I wrote about this @techpolicypress.bsky.social

New drone footage from @floodlightnews.org - the fossil methane power plant Musk built specifically to create abusive and racist material on his social media website is still wildly breaching EPA regulations even after a ruling against using them -->>>

floodlightnews.org/thermal-dron...

It’s so hard to have a reasonable conversation about AI, because people refuse to see the massive upsides of job elimination, higher electrical bills, hard drive shortages, poisoning black people in Memphis, and an economy where a handful of pedos with bad hair control your life

Demoralized Democrats Have a Road Map for Success in Trump’s America. It Was Written by Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson first ran for president during the national farm bust of the early 1980s. Debt for farmers had exploded from $85 billion in 1976 to $216 ...

and i wrote this a decade ago about jackson as the model response to trump-style politics www.slate.com/articles/new...

Jesse Jackson and the specter of electability The reverend was everything mainstream Democrats hoped for and feared

"The fact that Jackson had ... boosting African American turnout and raising policy expectations among Black constituents, suggested to more conservative whites in the party that they were losing because of the party’s focus on the interests of minorities at the expense of rural whites.”

Tomorrow, I am talking with researcher @gruberte.bsky.social about her work on the energy "mid-transition," that messy period when fossil fuel systems are declining as clean energy systems grow. Her latest paper contemplates the "minimum viable scale" for such systems before they collapse.

Got Qs?

Holy moly: Seattle’s millionaire tax, passed last year, is expected to bring in $115 million in its 1st year, way more than the $50 million anticipated.

The funds will go to the city’s new social housing developer publicola.com/2026/02/11/t...

(Is NY Gov Hochul paying attention?)

New piece for @phenomenalworld.bsky.social, written with @jacktaggart.bsky.social and @tomchodor.bsky.social! It's an attempt at grasping the dismantling of multilateral global governance, in light of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, resurgent state capitalism, and hegemonic crisis. Link below:

Astounding. Georgia is expected to lose $2.5 BILLION in tax revenue due to tax exemptions for *DATA CENTERS* in FY 2026. This corporate subsidy alone is about *7 TIMES* the cumulative FY26 tax expenditures for the state's principal affordable housing program (really the only significant one). 1/2

In case anyone's wondering how Jeff Bezos feels about climate policy these days, the Washington Post editorial board just heartily endorsed Trump ripping up the EPA's "endangerment finding," which allows the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants.

1. it's not?
2. what's "true" in a very obvious sense is that they're going to try their best to MAKE it true and still replace every job they can with it despite it, again, not being true
3. it then follows that the way to "think seriously" about it is to be as skeptical & hostile to it as possible

Kakistocracy in action

Trump to direct Pentagon to buy coal to revive industry, Bloomberg News says U.S. President Donald Trump is set to direct the Pentagon to use government funding and Pentagon contracts to sustain U.S. coal-fired power plants, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing a White H...

I feel personally attacked by this idiotic policy www.reuters.com/business/ene...

This is the 38th time that the U.S. military has unlawfully killed civilians on the orders of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. At least 130 people — never charged with crimes, their identities unknown to their executioners — are now dead.

Capitalism became more exploitative in the wake of sellers' inflation and Trump made sure it stayed that way.

www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

Commenting on energy injustice is now the floor for any halftime act.

We need reconstruction, not restoration—as FDR knew. Eric Rauchway responds in a forum on “How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism.”

“We have been asked to call the centrist response to this presidency “moderation.” Recent events make it clear we should recognize it as appeasement.”

Excellent piece by @rauchway.bsky.social about the importance of building an enduring coalition capable of recovery and reform.

Riffing off Brendan's method of juxtaposition in this awesome report, I'd like to offer another comparison:

Food assistance cuts versus new funding for DHS in the "Big Beautiful Bill"

Republicans cut food assistance by $187 billion while providing $191 billion in funding for DHS

🚨 LAUNCHING 🚨 State of Power 2026 🚨

Fascism and the far right are on the rise. Beyond headlines, we examine the reasons for their rise, the economic interests that support them, how they weaponise today’s social and ecological crises, and proposals for how to fight back.
www.tni.org/en/publicati...

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

Why Trump’s crackdown on big investors in housing may backfire Curbing institutional ownership of single-family homes does not tackle the affordability crisis and could make things worse

Nonsense, this. The idea that kicking Blackstone et al out of SFH rentals may "backfire" by choking investment in new construction presupposes they have any interest in increasing supply. They don't! Like, none. The opposite, in fact.