Rebekah Baglini

Hegseth: "The only ones who need to be worried right now are Iranians who think they're going to live"

DHS nominee Markwayne Mullin is one of the most active stock-traders in the Senate — and violated the STOCK Act against insider trading as recently as last August.

He currently holds stock in L3Harris, which has millions in contracts with ICE and FEMA.

The grift continues.

We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie.

Well, gas is expensive, and food is expensive, and we’re doing a war nobody wants, but at least there are no jobs

Another tragic, and completely foreseeable, cost of this war.

People ask what it is exactly we expect of Dems in this situation, and for me it's this.

Make these assholes fucking scared.

Make it clear that they are on borrowed time, that consequences WILL arrive, and that they will be harsh.

I promise you that the government that murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good does not give a flying fuck about the protests in Iran.

U.S. military spending is set to hit a record $1.5 trillion.

Roughly half of defense spending goes to private contractors that routinely price-gouge the government.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has failed EIGHT straight audits.

The military industrial complex is cheering today.

I am sure JD Vance will resign in protest, right?

Cover of The Lancet:

@thelancet.com
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause.

I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does.

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sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers More citizens are replanting overseas, drawn by a quality of life made easily affordable by the U.S.’s enviable salaries.

This is such a well done piece that reports out, with hard data and interviews, something profound about what's gone wrong in this country.

www.wsj.com/us-news/amer...

This was true when I moved from the US to Denmark in 2018. Weeks later, I knew I would never return. Now, it is unthinkable.

Netflix Backs Out of Bid for Warner Bros., Paving Way for an Ellison Takeover

The richest man owns X.

The second and third richest men control Google.

The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post.

And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.

See the problem here?

Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research? Despite didactic, ethical, and environmental concerns, the use of GenAI is on the rise in academia. For most applications, the jury is still out on whether and how they will benefit education and rese...

Tired of AI hype posts? You might like my sober assessment of whether AI-generated summaries are suitable for studying and research. Spoiler alert, they are not.

The text is primarily aimed at students and researchers, but has much broader relevance. So share freely!: www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

$1.5T military budget
$170B on ICE & Border Patrol
$100B on tax cuts for the 1%
$20B from Treasury for Argentina
$1B to refurbish Trump's Qatar jet
$500M sending National Guard into cities
$250M on Kristi Noem's jets
$100M+ on Trump's golf outings
$75k for Kash Patel's Olympic trip

Priorities.

The State of the Union: the president is a corrupt demented sex criminal who tried to overthrow the constitution.

Minneapolis isn't an especially sweary place but there are so many houses that have homemade "FUCK ICE" signs and I've had multiple conversations with parents about how we're okay with our kids using that word in this context because sometimes it IS okay to swear and this is one of those times.

People don't want data centers polluting their cities.

They don't want masked thugs terrorizing their neighbors.

They don't want warehouses being turned into ICE prisons.

They want a living wage. They want healthcare. They want to be able to afford a home.

They want their basic needs met.

The ICE surge in Minnesota cost $280M to detain 4k people. Of those- only 30 were accused of violent crimes.

$9 million per capture of the "worst of the worst".

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were unavailable for comment….

The hidden ICE blueprint that should horrify every American | Will Bunch An internal Department of Homeland Security document shows how ICE plans to cram thousands of detained human beings inside a Georgia warehouse.

What's more shocking than ICE's plan to cram as many 8,500 humans into massive, soul-crushing warehouses?

Seeing the actual DHS floor plan that echoes slavery ships and history's worst gulags with no rec space but a gun range for guards

My new column on the camps www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

Some day we'll all regret this & we'll hold hearings & rend garments & pledge "never again" & we'll be just as full of shit as we were last time.

This is the kind of thing a rich CEO says at the beginning of a science fiction movie to establish for the audience that he is a sociopath and the villain.

When you put it like this, a $75 million bribe to Melania and gutting the Washington Post seems like a small price to pay.

This one hits hard.

The only question left by the Supreme Court decision on tariffs is:
What the fuck is wrong with Thomas, Alito, and Kavenaugh?
The Constitution could not say more clearly that only Congress has the power to impose taxes.
Can't those three justices umderstand a simple, direct English sentence?

Acting ethically in an imperfect world Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somew...

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.

@tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here:

tante.cc/2026/02/20/a...

A few further comments, 🧵>>

📚 ☀️

The Summer School is a 5-day course, designed to foster critical AI literacies and to empower participants to develop ways of resisting or reclaiming AI in their own practices and social context.

1/🧵

The left tried for decades to pass green energy subsidies, passed them, the subsidies worked, and now literally the entire planet's electricity grid is going to convert to solar+battery. It just doesn't feel like "tech" because it mostly produces kinda boring blue collar jobs instead of billionaires

America may have always been like this for far too many people but this administration is bringing it home, directly and in person, to a ton of folks who have never seen it before

that this is their response is extremely encouraging