Great read! And with the current headlines as they are, it is absolutely refreshing to have a positive story about a real hero fighting the good fight.

Does not work for ANY phrase. It seems to be presuming that the person asking is referencing something. Sample results copied here in order of AI’s least theorizing to its most.

• horses before giraffes meaning

“Horses before giraffes” has no scientific meaning because giraffes are not ancestors of horses…

• put your horses before giraffes meaning

“Put your horses before giraffes” is not a recognized English idiom. The similar and well-known idiom is “put the cart before the horse,” …

• always put horses before giraffes meaning

The phrase “always put horses before giraffes” is a variation of the well-known medical aphorism: “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras”…

• titrated solutions beget relief meaning

The phrase “titrated solutions beget relief” means that carefully adjusted or fine-tuned treatments can bring about an end to a problem…

From Al Jazeera:

Governor Cox told a news conference on Friday: “On the evening of September 11, a family member of Tyler Robinson contacted a family friend, who then informed the Washington County Sheriff’s Office that Robinson had either confessed to or implied that he had committed the incident.

“This information was relayed to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office and investigators at Utah Valley University and conveyed to the FBI.”

and

Governor Cox said cryptic messages were engraved on shell casings recovered with the rifle, which he read out phonetically. Their meaning is not immediately clear.

One spent shell case read: “Notices, bulges OWO what’s this?”

Cox said three unfired shell cases read: “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow symbol, and three down arrow symbols”, “Oh Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Ciao, Ciao, Ciao” and “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO”.

So he’s online a lot. There’s the wikipedia article on the history of Bella Ciao.

Thank you for the excellent essay.

a conservative might believe the egghead democrats would want to kill a simple truth-teller

I’m so sad that this is true. Not only did Musk himself tweet “The Left is the party of murder,” but various random accounts have called Democrats responsible by demonizing conservatives as fascists and Nazis… which would only be demonization if the people accused weren’t spouting Nazi/fascist talking points. Further, we’ve no idea what percentage of the random accounts are bots or actual humans – but surely the volume of hate will sway too many conservatives to become increasingly hostile.

Minor quibble:

it is extraordinarily difficult to hit a person-sized target at all from this distance

I disagree. It’d be hard with a pistol or AR-15 style weapon, but this was an old style bolt action hunting rifle. I haven’t seen a report saying it had a scope, but that’s how you’d generally set it up. If you hunt, you practice hitting much smaller targets (deer heart, etc.) at that distance, and may well actually hunt well beyond that range. Also, the guy missed. You don’t aim for the neck. He probably aimed for the head, but possibly the chest, and had his shot miss his target.

I’m hoping this push to make Kirk an angelic martyr of the Trump movement is forgotten as quickly and Kirk resumes his rightful place in obscurity.

Same here. Perhaps tomorrow we can remind people that we still want to release the Epstein files.

the goal for me is co-operation

I asked a sincere question and you reply with snark. I don’t know why you commented when you weren’t willing to advance the discussion. You failed at your goal.

I don’t care for individual greatness and competition

That’s sweet, but it has nothing to do with the topic. It also doesn’t help you any when you need to punch a Nazi. I was talking about the government paying civilians to work for the common good (irrigation, bridges, etc.) and a population with a high standard of living. For whatever internal reason, it seems you decided to thrust imperialism into the definition of “great” – or redefine the word to mean something outside its definition, like “nice”.

Know what’s great? Great White Sharks are great. They aren’t the whitest or largest, but they are the biggest of the commonly seen ass-kicking sharks. Know what’s not great? The Little Blue Heron – but it is much bluer than the Great Blue Heron.

Well then the Roman Empire could never have been Great, nor the Greek, Persian, Ottoman, Chinese and various dynasties therein. Cleopatra wasn’t Egyptian. She and her lineage of rulers were greek conquerors subjugating the locals, if you want to look at it that way. You are denying all of South America the right to ever claim greatness.

I think I made it clear in my post that we all know there’s a history full of problems, so you seem to be trying to redefine terms without making any argument about the current case. Per the OED there are 85 definitions for “great”. Why skip the intended usage (powerful/eminent) for an informal meaning (good)?

The U.S. used to be known for high literacy, excellent schools k-college, high standard of living, countless innovations in sciences from health care to airplanes, and a presumption that you could improve your position in society rather than being confined to a class. All that sort of stuff combined is what I think of when the idea of U.S. greatness comes up.

I think I covered that with my introductory sentence. The post-war boom had to be from more than isolation or we’d expect Mexico and Canada to be rivaling the U.S. for (now falling) dominance.

I hate everything about this because even as a kid, the big problem with mass transit was not enough routes and times to get where you wanted. Want to see a live show a town away? You could get there by bus, but the route stopped service around 8pm so you couldn’t get home. Want to get from one suburb to another? Two hours and three routes by mass transit or 20 minutes by car.

I would have loved to live car-less, but the continuous slashing of U.S. mass transit has made it increasingly impossible to do.

I see a duck demanding peas. Tasty rolly green peas.

Kudos! I no longer have to deal with any of that, but I appreciate it’s been a problem and am glad you took action. Thank you!

Hey OP, you gotta give us a quote or synopsis or something. This is an archive of an Economist article from Aug 13th 2025 about a new English law and older protestors who have the free time to go out and make frail, wobbly, noise.

The government placed Palestine Action on a terror list in July after its members vandalised two aeroplanes on a British air base. Most were arrested for holding a placard reading “I oppose genocide” (which is legal to say) and “I support Palestine Action” (which contravenes section 13 of the Terrorism Act 2000). Yet it revealed an overlooked facet of British politics. At street protests, it is often the boomers who are on the barricades.

On your advice, I read it. Good essay. Yes, the image is Whatever, but the creative part for this post was the pun, so I still gave it an upvote because I haven’t heard it death.

I doubt Trump himself has actually heard about any of this, but if he did happen to hear that feds were prosecuting for ‘housing discrimination’, I’m SURE his knee jerk reaction would be, “That’s what they did to my dad! Not on my watch!”

In another case, a predominantly white Michigan township allowed an asphalt plant to open on its outskirts, away from its population centers but near subsidized housing complexes in the neighboring poor, mostly Black city of Flint.

Unlike his dad, these cases aren’t about denying housing to minorities, but mostly about doing harm to places that already have minorities. Again, I doubt he knows that, but I bet that Stephen Miller would make sure Trump approved, if needed.

I read that as including human interaction as part of the pain point. They already offer bounties, so they’re doing some money management as it is, but the human element becomes very different when you want up-front money from EVERYONE. When an actual human’s report is rejected, that human will resent getting ‘robbed’. It is much easier to get people to goof around for free than to charge THEM to do work for YOU. You might offer a refund on the charge later, but you’ll lose a ton of testers as soon as they have to pay.

That said, the blog’s link to sample AI slop bugs immediately showed how much time humans are being forced to waste on bad reports. I’d burn out fast if I had to examine and reply about all those bogus reports.

Holy moly, that is a good essay. Below are a few bits that resonated with me.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” Peace without justice isn’t peace—it’s imposed order. It’s the peace of the graveyard, the peace of submission, the peace that comes when one side stops fighting because they’ve been crushed.

That made me cringe thinking of the current state of the Supreme Court and how they are making true Justice harder to reach.

The problem isn’t efficiency itself—it’s optimization imposed by algorithmic systems or corporate interests without democratic input about what human values should guide that optimization. When we optimize transportation, do we prioritize speed, safety, environmental impact, or community connection? When we optimize education, do we focus on test scores, critical thinking, creativity, or civic engagement? When we optimize healthcare, do we emphasize cost reduction, patient outcomes, doctor-patient relationships, or population health?

These aren’t technical questions with objectively correct answers—they’re moral and political questions that require democratic deliberation. The current system optimizes for metrics that can be easily measured and monetized, often at the expense of human values that are harder to quantify but more important to preserve.

This called to mind the same author’s essay from 2 days earlier (Brock, Ideas Without Love) about Peter Thiel:

What makes this particularly dangerous is that Thiel possesses genuine intelligence and insight. He’s not ignorant or deluded. He correctly identifies patterns of decline, understands technological risks, predicts political dynamics. But he approaches all of it with the emotional engagement of someone debugging code rather than someone whose species’ survival depends on getting the answers right.

Back to this post, two more insights I appreciate:

Poverty, for instance, is not meaningful struggle—it’s systematic deprivation that prevents people from engaging in the kinds of challenges that actually generate growth and purpose.

The choice to remain human is not a single decision but a daily practice requiring constant vigilance and continuous effort. It begins with the recognition that magical thinking serves not our interests but the interests of systems designed to eliminate human agency.

All this reminds me of the critique on U.S. society that we are no longer “joiners” and now put artificial barriers between ourselves and our neighbors. We don’t join the Elks Club or attend Township meetings or have block-party get-togethers where it doesn’t matter if it is a mix of Trumpers and Biden-backers, or vegans and beefeaters because everyone is there to get the road fixed or raise money for the library or whatever the cause of the day might be. I am guilty of this failure, too. I am fully aware that online chat is siloed and doesn’t count, so I really need to join something. I just wish my body wasn’t giving me mobility issues that make the task so hard.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I’d never want to tell someone ‘Denied. I think you’re a bot.’ – but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they’re paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don’t want to find out the ‘Am I the A-hole?’ story getting everyone so worked up was an ‘AI-hole’ experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I’ve come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

From the article:

The Supreme Court ruled last week that Trump can continue to break the law — both US and international law — by having his secret police agents snatch people off American streets, “disappear” them into immigration prisons, then deport them to foreign concentration camps.

Lacking national injunctions, this cruel and inhumane process can now only be stopped one person at a time, one court at a time, at least until the six Republicans on the Court get around to deciding a person’s fate. And they’re now on vacation until October.

As Himmler himself wrote:

“The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation … serves this purpose.”

Field Marshall Keitel was equally enthusiastic, writing:

“Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal. The prisoners are, in future, to be transported … secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because: A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.”

Reports from civil rights groups and journalists have documented instances where individuals were taken off the streets or from their homes without warning, transferred out of state, and left incommunicado from legal counsel or family for extended periods. These actions were not isolated errors: they are deliberate strategies aimed at instilling fear across immigrant communities, particularly those made up of Black and brown people.

What makes this moment even more alarming is the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that strips lower courts of the authority to halt deportations or removals, no matter how unlawful or abusive. With judicial oversight diminished, there is a clear and present danger that enforcement powers could be used arbitrarily and punitively.

The use of fear — rather than law — as a governing principle corrodes the foundation of due process and equal protection under the Constitution. Nonetheless, Border Czar Tom Holman bragged:

“Illegal immigrants should be afraid.”

It ends with a call to contact your Senators and Representatives – and obviously to vote for people who are against all this. The more courageous might also choose film and report any activity that looks ICE-like, but there are heavy risks to that and the article did not suggest it. Instead, they more obliquely suggest:

Support organizations on the ground providing legal aid and sanctuary. Show up at protests, city council meetings, and community gatherings to bear witness and push back.

Link is part of a live feed. Here’s more:

DHS claims Padilla ‘lunged’ toward Noem ‘without identifying himself’ – despite footage showing he identified himself

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, has claimed the senator Alex Padilla “lunged” toward Kristi Noem during the press conference “without identifying himself” despite being told to back away.

She also claims that the Secret Service “thought he was an attacker”.

In the video footage of the moment, Padilla can be heard clearly identifying himself, saying: “I’m Senator Alex Padilla” and trying to ask Noem a question.

Not only did he identify himself, I didn’t see anything I’d call a ‘lunge’. Here’s more:

Asked why the response was to forcibly remove Padilla, Noem deferred questions to law enforcement and doubled down on the claim that Padilla didn’t identify himself first (again, he did):

• “But I will say that it’s – people need to identify themselves before they start lunging at people during press conferences.”

MSNBC reminds us of Biden’s State of the Union when Bobert and Marjorie Taylor Greene started acting up and yelling and no one threw them out. Commentor wants to know why Noem didn’t call off the guards as soon as he identified himself.