John Emerson

Caitlin KALINOWSKI over X I resigned from OpenAl. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call. Al has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together.

OpenAI head of robotics just resigned over company deal with the Pentagon saying…

“Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got”

this is extremely cool

Leading satellite firm to hold back Gulf state images Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of high resolution images taken from space, said Friday it would hold back for 96 hours images of Gulf states targeted by Iranian drone attacks."All new imagery col...

I guess this answers my question about U.S. commercial satellite imagery providers implementing embargoes over the Persian Gulf:

uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/leading...

🛰️📸

That clip of Timothee Chalamet being like “no one watches the opera or ballet” is wild and I am dying over every ballet and opera acct (correctly) being like “we’ve been here for hundreds of years before you and we’ll be here for hundreds of years after you” lmao

Exclusive: US investigation points to likely US responsibility in Iran school strike, sources say Military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed scores of children on Saturday, two U.S. officials told Reu...

Reuters Exclusive

"U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school."

"The strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the ​Middle East."

PEPFAR, the program to stop hundreds of thousands of children and adults from dying of HIV/AIDS, was $6.5 billion a year.

The child care block grant gets less than $9 billion a year for the entire country

Today I told fascists to fuck off by teaching teenagers basic zinemaking at the local library

Image caption: Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson speaks to a guard during a tour of the Krome detention facility in Miami on December 30, 1981, after the quelling of a hunger strike during the Christmas holiday. Jackson's visit brought media attention to conditions at the facility. Mark Foley. Reprinted with permission from AP Photo.

Jesse Jackson visiting the Krome Detention Center in 1981. He exposed the racist policy of mandatory detention of Haitians who were deemed "economic" refugees not worthy of asylum. Image from @tinashull.bsky.social's book Detention Empire.

Before: How Iranians Can Take Control of Their Future After: The Outlook Is Grim for a Freer Iran

Change in Headline

Washington Post layoffs include entire Ukraine, Middle East bureaus - National | Globalnews.ca The Post’s executive editor Matt Murray called the move painful but necessary to put the outlet on stronger footing and weather changes in technology and user habits.

I’m not the world’s fourth-richest man so I don’t mean to speak out of turn here, but I think that firing your full-time foreign correspondents right before a major war might not have been a particularly wise move in terms of, you know, getting or keeping subscribers

globalnews.ca/news/1165243...

FUNERAL FOR A TREE YouTube video by Steve Parker

"When a 65-year-old tree in Parker’s front yard died of oak wilt, he cut the trunk into “wood cookies” + transformed them into playable records, each encoded with migratory birdsong... The project emerged from Parker’s recognition that his grief for the tree echoed the loss of his father to cancer"

what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"

Clarence Thomas Just Struck Another Blow to Black Power In his majority ruling in a sleeper case about mail delivery, Thomas opened the door to a new way for Republicans to suppress the Black vote.

In an overlooked decision this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the post office can refuse to deliver your mail, which is KIND OF SIGNIFICANT if you choose to mail your ballot.
To do this work, the anti-democracy wing turned to their favorite “black friend,” Clarence Thomas.

Beto in a box (Beto is a world-famous alligator-hunting tuxedo cat with a black heart nose)

My cat only talks when he first gets up for the day, after a really long sleep — and he talks a lot. I think he’s telling me about his dreams.

Blind refugee abandoned by Border Patrol dies in Buffalo. A nearly blind refugee abandoned by Border Patrol miles from his home dies in Buffalo after having been missing for nearly a week.

"Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind refugee from Burma who Border Patrol agents dropped off at a doughnut shop Thursday and left to find his way home, 5 miles away, has been found dead."

To read the words is to damn all involved, from Trump on down.

It's Official: the Cybertruck is More Explosive than the Ford Pinto - FuelArc News We now have a full year of data for the Cybertruck, and a strange preponderance of headlines about Cybertrucks exploding into flames, including several fatalities. That’s more than enough data to comp...

The Ford Pinto had a death rate of 85 people for 10 million cars sold. The Cybertruck hasn't sold 10 million, but the fatality rate so far maths out to 1,452 people killed per 10 million sold.

The Cybertruck may be the deadliest road car, for the occupants, ever sold.

fuelarc.com/evs/its-offi...

Metadata Exposes Authors of ICE’s ‘Mega’ Detention Center Plans Comments and other data left on a PDF detailing Homeland Security’s proposal to build “mega” detention and processing centers reveal the personnel involved in its creation.

Metadata Exposes Authors of ICE’s ‘Mega’ Detention Center Plans www.wired.com/story/metada...

How far back in time can you understand English? An experiment in language change

"As his post goes on, his language gets older. 100 years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words" Fascinating. So how far back in time can YOU go?

The level of anger normal Minnesota people have at their elected representatives is palpable. It's not about party, but the perceived failure of local/state electeds to do anything of substance to protect residents who pay their taxes and get left facing off alone against masked, armed men.

Lrs: I've kinda been waiting on that tbh. AI is low key a massive surveillance project. So yeah if you tell Caude, no shit whatever you said isn't priviledged any longer.

But I want to jump off that and explain HIPAA like you're 5, cuz I think a lot of people are missing details to their detriment.

Flow chart showing that the U.S. spends $445 billion on mass incarceration every year.

🚨NEW: Mass incarceration costs the U.S. $445 every year. But where exactly is it all going?

Opinion | Something Surprising Happens When Bus Rides Are Free

There's a few likely consequences of having free buses...and they will probably surprise you! Really happy to be able to share this perspective today in the New York Times.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/o...

This is classic backlash framing. Rather than assigning agency to the "reactionary right" for "sanitizing slavery," he blames the "progressive left" for precipitating a "malignant response."

NEW: Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.

The government keeps doing it nonetheless.

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

The Golden Age.

Just discovered the drawings that Lebanese artist #MazenKerbaj made in response to the ongoing genocidal campaign on Gaza mazenkerbaj.com/gaza-in-my-p...

Have to confess, if you had asked me which institutions would prove to be formidable against the threat of fascism, I would not have guessed grand juries.

A line chart going from Jan 2009 to Jan 2026 showing very few cases until Trump’s second term, where the line takes off nearly vertically, showing more than 6,600 cases in Jan 2026 alone.

Habeas cases filed by immigrants claiming their detention is illegal have taken off to levels we have never seen before. Just look at that chart.

www.propublica.org/article/habe...