Stop Trump’s DOJ Payoff Scheme
Donald Trump is demanding that the Department of Justice pay him $230 million from public funds. He claims he was “wronged” by the very investi...
Glossary
 US citizens: call on Bondi to stop the corrupter's DOJ payoff scheme.
the Guardian
‘Sycophantic’ AI chatbots tell users what they want to hear, study shows
Scientists warn of ‘insidious risks’ of increasingly popular technology that affirms even harmful behaviour
 * Turning to "sycophantic" [bullshit-generator] chatbots for personal advice poses "insidious risks", according to a study showing the technology consistently affirms a user's actions and opinions even when harmful.*
the Guardian
Don’t use AI to tell you how to vote in election, says Dutch watchdog
Data protection authority says chatbots are ‘clearly biased’, as Netherlands prepares for national poll
 *[so-called] AI chatbots give "unreliable and biased" advice to voters, says Dutch watchdog.* If this were a special problem unique to the Netherlands, it would not be globally significant. But it is a consequence of the nature of bullshit generators. We can help reduce the impact of this problem by firmly refusing to call them any sort of "intelligence". Please join in!
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Ars Technica
Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is making sweeping changes to force Google's hand.
How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
Free Software Is Even More Important Now - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
GNU Taler - Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Resources
A payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy.
 Cloudflare is leading a campaign for websites to tell Google they do not permit using their pages to train a bullshit generator. This is to pressure Google Search (and other search engines) to stop displaying bullshit summaries instead of search
the Guardian
Brown University rejects Trump proposal to overhaul policies for preferential funding
University joins MIT in refusing invitation, saying that compact would ‘restrict academic freedom’
2025: July - October Political Notes
 MIT and Brown University have rejected the bully's corrupting "compact" whereby they would have given the US government direct control over what can be taught there, and other policies.
the Guardian
Queer and trans immigrants allege forced labor and sexual assault in Ice facility: ‘I was treated worse than an animal’
At the South Louisiana Ice Processing Center in Basile, detainees say they were forced into hard labor – and sexually assaulted and stalked by an...
 Queer prisoners in a deportation prison report forced hard labor, sexual abuse and denial of medical treatment.
HuffPost
MAGA Personality Tells Girls To Go To College For A Really Retrograde Reason
Charlie Kirk had some advice for young women that was straight out of the 1950s.
 A teenage girl asked Charles Kirk, in one of his right-wing events, for advice for her for college for political journalism. He advised her to use college to find a husband. I've seen this described as "misogyny", but I think that is not exactly the right term. What he expressed on that occasion was not so much hatred of women as contempt and disrespect towards women.
Glossary
the Guardian
Why Britain’s climate and defence strategies need to be better integrated | Letter
Letter: Lt Gen (retd) Richard Nugee highlights the vital link between climate resilience and national security
 Every country's military planning needs to recognize global heating as a crucial aspect of national security.
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the Guardian
Be sure of this: many of the horrors the west allowed in Gaza will come closer to home | Owen Jones
History shows the crimes of empire were later mirrored on European soil. Dehumanisation and militarised terror both seem normalised now, says Guard...
 *History shows the crimes of empire were later mirrored on European soil. Dehumanisation and militarised terror both seem normalised now. *It’s clear what Israel’s western-facilitated genocide has done to Gaza. But what has it done to us? Palestinians are the "canaries in a coalmine", the Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada tells me. "We’re screaming of a major warning of what’s about to come your
the Guardian
How a £1.5bn ‘wildlife-boosting’ bypass became an environmental disaster
A14 in Cambridgeshire promised biodiversity net gain of 11.5%, but most of the 860,000 trees planted are dead. What went wrong?
 A project to plant over 800,000 trees along a new road in England failed drastically. It is not clear why, but it is clear that the project was done carelessly. I have to wonder whether the contractor responsible was made to pay damages for this failure. I suspect the answer is no, and that is enough to explain why the project failed, though not in detail.