They lie in focus groups, they lie on surveys and they lie to themselves.
Culture can be seen as an organized lying function. Be aware of what other people are thinking and make choices about your preferences so you can fit in.
Without this effect, we wouldn’t have trends, fads or hits.
Part of our work as marketers is to create the conditions for people to happily do what they were hoping they could do all along.
It’s hard to not have noticed that a key enabler of U.S. authoritarianism was our consolidated corporate media, which (with scattered exception) was more than happy to throw the entirety of journalistic integrity in the toilet for a chance to please a mad, idiot king. In large part because our press is increasingly owned by a handful of rich, white, old, right wing men keen on tax cuts and deregulation.
It’s very hard to also ignore that if we’re going to avoid more Donald Trumps, the country is in desperate need of media reform. Greater antitrust enforcement, the restoration of media consolidation limits, media ownership diversity requirements, improved media literacy standards (see: Finland), the restoration of U.S. public media, a refusal to amplify or validate the trolling of racist opportunists, and creative new funding models for real journalism are all essential.
Unfortunately Democrats and Republicans alike pay a lot of empty lip service to this sort of stuff, before immediately doing whatever makes our biggest corporations happy.
Case in point: California Governor Gavin Newsom for some reason thought it would be a good idea to try and quietly pressure California (and 11 other states) to drop their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount and David Ellison’s $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers.
Why? According to the Wall Street Journal (non-paywalled archive link) Newsom is trying to argue that blocking the unpopular deal will somehow harm California employment:
“In recent weeks, Newsom has told people involved in the matter that if the deal is blocked as a result of the suit, state employment would suffer, the people said. Newsom’s office has encouraged Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office, which has independent authority to file such suits, to find a resolution out of court, the people said.”
That’s simply not a fact-based claim. There are 100 years of very hard evidence showing that media consolidation repeatedly results in massive layoffs and higher prices for consumers. It’s simply not a debate. Warner Brothers, in particular, has a quarter century of hard evidence showing that every deal the company has been involved with ends in mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier overall product.
We literally just went through this very thing with the AT&T/Discovery/DirecTV/Warner Bros mergers, which resulted in 50,000 people losing their jobs (this stark human tally is, curiously, memory holed when it comes to most corporate press coverage of the latest round of mergers).
California and eleven other states filed an antitrust lawsuit to block Paramount’s latest merger last month, correctly pointing out that the high debt load of the deal will result in significantly more layoffs for an already reeling U.S. entertainment industry. The courts have agreed to delays, which has justifiably worried Paramount given looming ticking fees ($7 million daily paid to investors starting in October) and Ellison’s/Oracle’s precarious financial footing on AI.
So the company is applying pressure wherever they can, and has found a helpful ear in folks like Gavin Newsom, Ari Emanuel, and James Cameron. The fact that Newsom is doing this behind closed doors and refuses to own the position or publicly comment to the press indicates he knows just how unpopular it is.
Newsom has no direct authority to pressure the AG on the deal, but it does shine a light on the kind of media policies you can expect under a Gavin Newsom presidency. Newsom has already found himself under fire for repeatedly hosting assorted white supremacists and right wing propagandists on his podcast, demonstrating a lack of modern media understanding and a tendency toward rank opportunism.
Newsom isn’t alone in being terrible when it comes to U.S. media policy. Democrats have historically spent the last quarter century tripping over their own asses when it comes to meaningful media reform policies, and the impact has not been subtle.
As a result, Republicans increasingly dominate everything from AM radio and local broadcast news, to Twitter and whatever’s left of cable news. Larry Ellison actively supports fascism; and he’s very clearly hoovering up outlets like CBS and CNN with an eye on making already saggy U.S. journalism much worse. Placating Larry Ellison doesn’t create jobs; it creates more fascism.
There is no bridging with or debating fascism. There’s no conversation to be had with it. It’s something that’s either destroyed or left to metastasize. A cornerstone of right wing U.S. authoritarianism has been extremely racist propaganda seeded across a feckless consolidated corporate media. Presidential hopefuls keen on dislodging fascism from the body politic — and avoiding a repeat with a younger, smarter version of Trump — shouldn’t be making the problem worse.
Object permanence: Urine Luck; Germany v pornoscanners; Moorcock's 3-day novels; Women's voices can never be "right"; Drone delivery v reality; Abortion activists: TNG; AI coders are a marketing claim.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (permalink)
Obviously, the non-American world has a digital sovereignty problem – Trump has means, motive and opportunity to order his tech companies to shut down any public official, large corporation, or individual who displeases him:
But Americans face the same digital sovereignty risk. America is a lawless place now, where a pliable Supreme Court and supine Congress have affirmed that "it's not a crime if the president does it." The same tech giants who sold out to Trump for tax breaks and protection from antitrust enforcement will happily disconnect any member of the American public, any American company, any American official who displeases Trump.
It's a strange irony that in this moment when so many of us are struggling to "de-Google" our lives, a forcible, sudden de-Googling amounts to a sort of digital death penalty:
In a world dominated by tech monopolies, duopolies and cartels, there's every reason in the world to seek protection and insulation from these companies that are "too big to care" – and yet, the very same dominance that makes these companies such a danger also makes them indispensable.
Take "ICE Block," an iOS app that warns you if there's an ICE thug hunting people like you in your vicinity, which might save you from being kidnapped, disappeared, sent to a concentration camp, forced into slave labor in El Salvador, or simply murdered. In order to protect its relationship with the Trump regime (and the tax breaks, monopoly power and tariff-free access to Chinese labor that that relationship guarantees), Apple declared ICE officers to be a protected class and then removed ICE Block from its App Store:
Big Tech is key to Trump's pogroms. Without Oracle's databases, Microsoft's administrative tools, Amazon's cloud, and Google's location data, ICE would be frozen in place. Big Tech is the source of Americans' risk from authoritarian oppression. That means that Americans cannot rely on Big Tech to protect them from that authoritarianism.
And yet, after decades of regulatory forbearance and lax antitrust enforcement, Big Tech has forced nearly all its rivals out of business. Who can compete with companies that use Irish domicile to evade taxation and US domicile to evade privacy law?
There's a joke from eastern Canada I think of often in situations like this. Its punchline goes, "If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here."
But here we are. And speaking of Canada, while it has many problems, it is not (as of time of writing) the USA, but it is connected to the USA via the internet. Which means that Americans could – hypothetically – source their computing infrastructure from suppliers that were based in Canada, and who strictly ensured that they had no dependency on US services and scrupulously avoided a US "enforcement nexus":
That is exactly what some American – and international – human rights nonprofits have done. The Technology Freedom Cooperative is a brand new organization founded by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (San Francisco), Kilómetro 0 (Puerto Rico), Invisible Institute (Chicago), Data Cívica (Mexico) and Innocence & Justice Louisiana:
All of these organizations are longstanding, highly effective human rights fighters. They have long, storied histories of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data to address systemic discrimination, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, war crimes and genocides. They have concluded that they can't rely on US tech and US servers with their data. Not after Trump and Microsoft colluded to kill the online accounts of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to punish him for swearing out a genocide warrant against Netanyahu:
Tech Freedom Coop has federated computing resources in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Europe. By spreading out their data and computation across multiple jurisdictions, they seek to ensure that a US seizure or deletion of their data will not halt their work.
This federated system serves as a replacement for Big Tech's administrative tools – email hosting, cloud storage, document collaboration. More than that: Tech Freedom Coop is also building out its own AI infrastructure, locally hosted and managed.
Groups like HRDAG have decades of experience using cutting edge statistical techniques to uncover and reveal the extent of crimes committed during civil wars, hot wars, genocides and secret wars. They built the largest human rights database ever created, to track every death in the Colombian Civil War and estimate the likelihood that each killing was carried out by a CIA-backed militia, FARC guerrillas, or the Colombian military:
They partnered with Innocence Project New Orleans to sift through mountains of arrest reports to surface cases similar to successful exonerations, helping more innocents to win their freedom:
I've known Patrick Ball, the statistician and programmer who founded HRDAG, for more than 20 years, and every time we meet, I learn something from him. He's the person who comes to mind whenever people tell me that AI is useless and that programmers who claim otherwise are deluded. Patrick is one of the best programmers I know, he is the very best statistician I know, and he's found many, many ways to use coding assistants to help him perform massive data-analysis projects that are vital to human rights struggles. He's a "centaur" if ever there was one:
It's exciting to see Patrick and his colleagues and collaborators taking these decisive steps to begin building the post-American internet and a kind of post-bubble AI, where AI tools are treated as normal technologies, capable of helping skilled practitioners who have discernment born of experience to apply them wisely to achieve important things:
For more than 20 years, HRDAG has been impressing me with the things we can do using advanced statistical analysis. The current generation of AI tools are founded in advanced stats, too. No one should think that advanced stats can solve all your problems of course. The AI bubble is madness and will lead to ruin – environmental, economic, political:
The world would be a better place without the AI bubble. But AI? It's fine. It's another form of statistical analysis and inference. There's no reason to use all the planet's energy, computing and water to perform that analysis, but the correct and desirable amount of useful AI-style computation is nowhere near zero.
The coop is building good AI tools – ones grounded in a realistic assessment of their usefulness and a reasonable commitment of resources to them. They're running open models based on their own data, on computers they own and control. Their stated goal is to "help organizations test whether models are accurate, reproducible, secure, and appropriate for specific human rights use cases."
Which brings me to the final component of Tech Freedom Coop: training. They're teaching people who work in human rights how to administer their own servers, secure their data and communications, and analyze data. As their press release says, these are all "skills that are increasingly necessary for human rights organizations documenting abuses of power."
I've known this was coming for a while now, and I'm so pleased to see that it's finally launched. At last, the first steps towards a post-American internet.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 692 (692 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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The Cosmos portal is one of the most active corners of the European Space Agency’s website.
Run by ESA’s Science Program, it hosts mission-support pages and public data archives for Gaia, Euclid, XMM-Newton, and dozens of other missions, backed by a science archive that now runs to more than a petabyte of data.
European Space IPTV Recommendations
This valuable archive provides key information for researchers and, more recently, it also started to appeal to people who are looking for a cheap pirate IPTV subscription. This clearly isn’t official ESA material, but an exploit by scammers who uploaded hundreds of scammy PDF files to the site’s repository.
A simple site:cosmos.esa.int search shows the scope of the problem. In addition to genuine results, such as a notice that the Gaia satellite was switched off in March 2025, Google returns a series of documents with titles including “Top 10 IPTV Providers Right Now: The Definitive 2026 Rankings” and “Best IPTV Service Provider in the USA 2026…”
Scammy PDFs on ESA’s website
Because ESA’s .int domain has a good reputation and high authority, these scammy PDF files also rank well in regular search results. Those who search for the best premium IPTV subscriptions for Android will get the ESA domain as the first result through a featured Google snippet.
Best premium IPTV subscriptions for android
Google’s AI Overview is also picking up ESA’s recommendations for the top IPTV services, with information that comes straight from the scammers’ PDFs.
IPTV, Instagram Followers, and Free Robux
There are hundreds of these results, with many new ones being added while we write this article. The PDFs we checked don’t appear to be malicious. They function as advertisements for pirate IPTV services. Whether these indeed offer what they promise is unknown, but visiting these hyperlinked URLs is not advised.
One of the PDFs
The IPTV ads are only part of the problem. The same corner of ESA’s portal also hosts unrelated scam content, including a “Free Coin Master Spins Guide” aimed at mobile-game players, “Free Instagram Followers,” and “Free Robux codes.” These free offerings undoubtedly come at a cost and should be avoided too.
The broad mix of scammy offers shows that ESA’s website is being exploited more broadly. How these people gained access to the server is unknown. According to ESA’s documentation, uploading requires site-editor access to the Cosmos portal, but there might be a weakness in the system.
Known SEO Exploit
The goal of these PDFs is to rank high in Google search results for popular terms. This is a known SEO hack that we have seen numerous times before.
Last year, for example, the European Commission’s Eurostat portal was exploited in the same way, with scam PDFs climbing to the top spot for terms like “best IPTV providers of 2025.”
To find out more, TorrentFreak reached out to ESA yesterday, asking whether it was aware of the documents, how they were uploaded, and how long they had been online. We will update this article if we hear back.
At the time of writing, the IPTV documents remain live on the Cosmos portal. If history is any guide, cleaning them up won’t be the end of it. They will either come back, or they will resurface on another website, repeating the same trick.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
August comes with two alarms on the calendar. On August 12, a total solar eclipse sweeps from the Arctic across Greenland and Iceland, reaching northern Spain and the Balearic Islands just before sunset — the first total solar eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999. Sixteen days later, on August 28, a deep partial lunar eclipse covers 96% of the Moon's surface, making it nearly indistinguishable from a total eclipse for anyone watching from the Americas.
Two rare events in the same month. And both of them unusual in their own way. The solar eclipse arcs up and over the North Pole, which means its path runs north-to-south rather than the typical west-to-east sweep. In Spain, the Sun will sit only a few degrees above the horizon during totality — turning the eclipse into something closer to a golden-hour phenomenon than a midday event. The lunar eclipse, meanwhile, stops just short of totality: at its peak, a narrow bright sliver of the Moon remains uncovered, leaving the rest darkened and faintly reddish.
OsmAnd Astronomy now includes (Android only, currently available in OsmAnd 5.4 beta via Google Play or as a nightly build) dedicated explorers for both events. You can move through the timeline, check visibility for any location on the planet, and see exactly how each eclipse develops — before either of them actually happens.
Open the Star Map and tap Search. Among the standard categories — Solar system, Constellations, Stars — you'll now see two new entries: Solar eclipse and Lunar eclipse. Tap Solar eclipse to open the explorer.
The screen switches to a dark view centred on the Sun, with the Moon's disc moving across it. Below, a card shows the current eclipse: its type, the percentage of the Sun obscured, the Sun's altitude at the selected location, and the exact start, maximum, and end times. A timeline slider lets you move through the event minute by minute and watch how the geometry changes.
Tap Show map to open the flat map below the card. The eclipse shadow appears as a path across the planet — a narrow band of totality with the penumbra spreading outward on both sides. Use Fit eclipse path to zoom to the full shadow on the map, or drag the map to any location to recalculate visibility for that point. The card updates instantly: move to Iceland and it shows totality, move to London and it switches to partial with a different obscuration value.
To switch between eclipses, use the arrows on either side of the eclipse title — Previous and Next — to jump to other solar eclipses and explore their paths across different parts of the world.
Tap Lunar eclipse in Search to open the second explorer. The interface works the same way — timeline, location-based card, map layer — but the event itself looks different.
Instead of a shadow crossing the planet, you're watching the Moon move through Earth's own shadow. The explorer renders both zones: the faint outer penumbra and the darker umbra at the centre. Three eclipse types are supported — penumbral, partial, and total — and the timeline marks the contact points P1 through P4, showing exactly when the Moon crosses each boundary.
What's unique here is the visibility layer. Unlike a solar eclipse, which is visible only along a narrow path, a lunar eclipse is visible from the entire night side of Earth at once. Tap Show map and the tinted region shows everywhere the Moon is above the horizon during the event — often half the planet. Drag the map or move the slider to see how that region shifts as the night progresses.
In 1504, Christopher Columbus, stranded in Jamaica and facing starvation, consulted an almanac and discovered a total lunar eclipse was coming. He used that knowledge to convince the local people that his god was angry — and when the Moon darkened on schedule, it saved his crew. He had no telescope, no app, and no map. Just a book of predictions and the right timing.
The tools look different now. Before any eclipse, open OsmAnd Astronomy, tap Solar eclipse or Lunar eclipse in Search, and check exactly what you'll see from your location. Move the map, and the card updates instantly — partial or total, obscuration percentage, Sun or Moon altitude, start and end times. Everything Columbus had to calculate by hand, resolved in a single tap.
Use the arrows on the eclipse card to move forward in time — past August, past this year, to any upcoming event. Some eclipses are total, some barely graze the penumbra, some are only visible from the middle of the Pacific. The explorer shows all of them, with the same level of detail for each. If you're planning a trip somewhere and want to know whether an eclipse lines up with your itinerary — or whether you should adjust the itinerary to line up with the eclipse — this is where you find out. Sometimes the sky makes the decision for you.
The sky has two rare events planned for August. As it turns out, so does OsmAnd.
The Astronomy plugin — which includes everything covered in this article — is available with Maps+ and OsmAnd Pro. Until August 5, both are part of the Summer Sale. If you've been on the fence, the timing is hard to ignore. See what's on offer!
Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that it would stop producing games on physical media starting in 2028 and a very loud portion of Sony’s customers lost their freaking minds. And, in this writer’s opinion, for very good reason. Having no physical media option for your games is going to make game preservation efforts nearly impossible. It makes gaming companies coming up with physical collectables to ship with their games a much more complicated prospect. And, as Sony itself likes to remind us over and over again, a game purchased digitally isn’t a game purchased at all, but rather a limited and temporary license to play a game for however long the publisher decides it should be available.
Given the backlash, it’s not all that surprising that some groups out there are attempting to organize against PlayStation usage blackouts in protest, though we’ll see how far they actually get with that. Given that Sony itself seems to be willing to give those angry customers a giant middle finger through it all, it’s hard to see it having much effect.
“There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing, that’s the big factor,” Sony chief financial officer Lin Tao said through an interpreter during a Q&A on July 31. “It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing.”
“And so when we think about the future—and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this—and we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward. And to this decision, we have received various opinions and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us. Games are loved by many people. It’s a form of entertainment that’s loved by people, and it’s connected to people’s fond memories in many cases. And so we understand those emotions. We want to consider that. And in the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore.”
Now, I want to be clear that the word salad above is also the result of a translation. I have no idea how or if this would read any differently in its original language. But I sure would hope it would, because all those words above say absolutely nothing other than, “Yeah, we don’t care, we’re doing this anyway.”
It didn’t get any better when questions were asked from an investment standpoint. One analyst asked the perfectly reasonable question of what this was going to do to the downstream gaming retailers and Sony’s relationship with them. Tau’s answer was that those retailers can still sell mostly empty boxes.
In response, Tao pointed out that publishers will still be able to ship empty boxes with codes inside to stores in markets like North America and argued that PlayStation hardware will win on affordability.
“About the retailers, there are regional characteristics, and for each regional partner, we try to have a thorough dialogue so that we can end up in a win-win situation,” the CFO said.
No concern for preservation efforts. No concern for the 20% or so customers who still want to buy physical media. No concern for any brick and mortar retail partners and what will happen to them.
It appears Sony is going to listen to anyone but its own customers on this one.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Rep. Max Miller (R-OH). Photos courtesy of NBC News
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) spent months saying almost nothing about the man his daughter Emily has accused of scalding her with water and holding a gun to her head. On Sunday, that changed. Hours after Rep. Max Miller (R‑OH) went on a nearly 20‑minute livestream denying every allegation of abuse, his former father‑in-law published a statement calling for his resignation, writing that Miller “needs serious psychological help” and “should not serve in the House of Representatives.”
The timing could hardly be worse for Republicans. Moreno is now the first GOP member of Congress to call for Miller’s ouster, with a House Republican majority of just three votes. The national spotlight is now on the entire Ohio delegation, tarnishing the party’s standing just as the midterms are revving up.
But Miller apparently is not going anywhere. He used Sunday’s livestream to reaffirm that he’s staying on the ballot ahead of a Wednesday deadline for Ohio Republicans to replace him. It sets up a stark contrast with the way Democrats have held their own candidates accountable for credible accusations of abuse.
Miller’s livestream ran nearly 20 minutes, and by multiple accounts he slurred through parts of it. His central argument was based on the absence of any legal consequences, which these days is so often proof of exactly nothing.
“These are incredibly serious criminal accusations, and if these accusations were true, I would be in jail,” Miller argued. He pointed to his continued joint custody and his ex-wife’s behavior as proof of his innocence. “My former wife would not have been offering to cook me dinner and inviting me to playgrounds. Think about that,” he declared.
“The boiling water story the media has run with—that story is about an incident in June of 2024 while we were still married, and here’s the truth, and this is the absolute truth: It was horseplay in our kitchen. I sprayed water at her from the sprayer attached to our kitchen sink. Tap water, which does not reach boiling temperature or scalding.”
He added that she “didn’t call the police” and “didn’t go to the hospital” afterward, and instead “went straight to a child’s birthday party.”
On the allegation that he held a gun to her head, Miller’s rebuttal again leaned on the absence of a criminal charge rather than a specific counter‑account: “That never happened and is absolutely outrageous.” He similarly denied breaking his daughter’s collarbone, saying she wasn’t in his care when the injury was discovered. Miller framed the broader pattern of allegations as originating from an unreliable witness. “Every one of these allegations traces back to a single source: my former wife,” he said, adding, “I’m not getting out of this race, and I’m winning in November.”
Miller also used the livestream to directly question his ex‑wife’s credibility, saying she has struggled with “significant mental health challenges” that he suggested contributed to the allegations. He framed his attack as motivated by concern for their daughter rather than an attempt to discredit his ex-wife.
Until Sunday, Sen. Moreno’s posture toward the allegations had been notably spineless. As recently as July 31, asked by NOTUS whether Republicans should replace Miller on the ballot, his answer was a flat “I don’t know.” Before that, his office had been even more guarded, with a spokeswoman saying only that the senator “will not litigate these matters in the media or respond to baseless public attacks.”
Moreno changed his tune on Sunday with a flat rejection of Miller’s framing. “As he has admitted privately, Max Miller needs serious psychological help,” Moreno wrote. “He is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter.” He added that the “clear pattern of abuse” Miller has “left in his wake” meant Miller “should not be free to continue endangering others” until he sought help.
Moreno’s language suggests the truth isn’t limited to what has played out publicly. By noting that Miller has “admitted privately” to needing psychological help, Sen. Moreno has opened the door to facts and events beyond what’s in the public court records. Emily Moreno’s spokesman, Stefan Mychajliw, was similarly unambiguous, calling Miller’s livestream a “bizarre and lie‑filled rant” and adding: “There is a documented trove of evidence that Miller has a history of violent and dangerous behavior and no amount of victim shaming will change that.”
Why “she was nice to me” isn’t the slam dunk Miller thinks
Miller’s central rhetorical argument is that Emily Moreno’s continued contact with him after the alleged incidents proves the incidents didn’t happen. He treats her behavior as a kind of gotcha.
But it isn’t. Decades of clinical research on how abusive relationships actually function suggest the opposite. Continued contact after an incident is a well‑documented pattern, not an indicator that the incident was fabricated.
Kristen Houser, chief public affairs officer for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, explained the dynamic in general terms that apply directly here. Abusers, she says, often control victims through power over other aspects of their lives. This includes finances, careers and custody of children, and it can force victims to continue a relationship, or at least remain in contact, even after a violent incident. Houser adds that victims in this position are frequently “trying to rationalize what happened, make sense of it all, and control the narrative,” while also remaining wary of further consequences if they speak out.
The clinical literature backs this up. Psychologist Lenore Walker’s landmark study of 1,500 women who experienced domestic violence identified a recurring pattern researchers call the cycle of abuse: a tension-building phase, an incident, then a reconciliation or “honeymoon” phase in which the relationship appears calm or even affectionate before tension builds again. Reconciliation gestures, such as cooking, maintaining a normal schedule and agreeing to see the person again, are a documented stage of that cycle, not evidence that an incident never occurred.
Clinicians who study these dynamics describe victims’ post-incident behavior as frequently protective rather than voluntary. They continue contact, avoid confrontation and perform ordinary domestic routines as a way to de-escalate a volatile person, particularly when children and custody arrangements are involved. None of that requires the victim to have stopped believing the incident happened.
None of this proves the specific allegations against Miller are true. That remains a matter for the courts and, potentially, the House Ethics Committee. But it does mean the logic Miller offered as exculpatory doesn’t hold up against what’s known about how victims behave.
The broader credibility record
Miller’s arguments run into a far deeper complication: The record already includes a judge’s finding that undercuts his version of events. Miller filed a domestic violence petition against Moreno in February, seeking a protective order against her. But he withdrew it in May, and when Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court Judge Debra Boros formally dismissed it, she didn’t simply close the file. She wrote that Miller “was not under any apparent infirmity and did not appear to have been threatened by or in fear of” Moreno. In short, she called B.S. on his petition.
Separately, according to sworn testimony Moreno gave at a May hearing, Miller “admitted he was abusive to her and admitted to being abusive in writing.”
The behavior also predates the Moreno marriage. Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former White House press secretary, dated Miller from 2019 to 2020. She wrote in her 2021 memoir that a partner, whom she didn’t initially name, had been physically abusive to her; she later described the relationship in a Washington Post op-ed that made clear she was referring to Miller. He then sued her for defamation over the memoir.
Going back still further, an even starker pattern emerges. A 2021 Politico investigation based on more than 60 interviews, as well as police and court records, documented a consistent pattern of allegations. Former classmates, White House colleagues and campaign staff independently described him in strikingly similar terms, from “scary” and “volatile” to someone people didn’t want to be alone with.
Multiple people who were present at a high school party in Miller’s own home told Politico that he became enraged when a female classmate resisted his advances and shoved her hard enough that she fell down a set of stairs. There was no hospital visit and no police report at the time, but several attendees described the incident as a well‑known story among their peers for years afterward. One called it “the boiling‑over point of exactly who he was in high school.” Miller’s attorney denied on his behalf that the incident occurred.
Politico’s reporting also surfaced a previously unreported 2011 police report from Miami University of Ohio, where Miller crashed a Jeep into a light pole. Officers noted signs consistent with intoxication, and Miller was initially charged with the Ohio equivalent of a DUI before pleading down to a lesser traffic offense. A separate 2007 charge from his senior year of high school, stemming from a physical altercation and an attempt to flee from police, had been previously reported by the Washington Post in 2018, but that case was also resolved with a plea to lesser misdemeanors.
On the Grisham relationship, Politico’s account adds detail beyond what became public through Miller’s later defamation suit against her. Three sources described a specific altercation in April 2020 in which Miller allegedly pushed and slapped her amid a dispute over infidelity, after which Grisham left his apartment without a coat. The outlet also reviewed email exchanges between the two from the days that followed, in which Grisham told Miller she was struggling to process how much he’d hurt her, without explicitly describing physical violence in writing. Miller’s attorney has pointed to that gap as undercutting her allegation, a point that Politico’s reporter also noted while including the emails in full context.
The extortion‑shaped question mark
Another question hangs over the history of abuse. Why did Sen. Moreno wait the better part of a year to say anything in defense of a daughter making detailed, corroborated allegations of abuse? Was this just another case of a MAGA loyalist not having the guts to defend his own daughter publicly, for fear of scandalizing the party and losing support from Donald Trump?
Or was there a Lindsey Graham-like element to his behavior?
Michelangelo Signorile, the longtime LGBTQ+ political journalist, has floated an answer rooted in one detail buried in Emily Moreno’s court filings. Included as an exhibit in Emily Moreno’s restraining‑order motion was a text Miller sent to his father‑in‑law.
“I’m sick of this, you know I never hurt our daughter. Take this however you want, everyone is going to get to know you better than your wife does,” Miller wrote, adding, “Enjoy the ride brother, I wouldn’t have to do this if you could keep your lying daughter under control.”
Miller doesn’t specify what he means. But Signorile connects it to a specific, highly public episode from Moreno’s 2024 Senate run. An Associated Press investigation, published days before that year’s Ohio primary, found a profile seeking “1‑on‑1” sexual encounters with men on Adult Friend Finder. The profile had been created using Moreno’s work email address under a username referencing his first name and birth year, with geolocation data pointing to a part of Fort Lauderdale where Moreno’s parents owned a home.
Moreno’s campaign said a former intern, Dan Ricci, had created the profile as what Ricci called “an aborted prank.” Signorile finds that explanation hard to credit, both then and now. “What was the prank? How does it work? And wouldn’t the profile have been more elaborate and exaggerated if it were a prank? Why a simple solicitation for sex? And why would an intern prank their boss like this—it’s not a ‘prank,’ after all, it’s sexual harassment—in a way that would surely get him fired, but instead he’s now a friend and campaign donor?” (Ricci went on to donate to Moreno’s campaign.)
Signorile also notes the reversal in Moreno’s own record on the underlying issue. Moreno once “contributed to the [LGBTQ+] cause, promoted marriage equality and defended his own gay son in years past,” before becoming, in Signorile’s words, a MAGA‑aligned hardliner who “threw his son under the bus” on LGBTQ rights as his political ambitions grew.
I should caution that no one with any direct knowledge of what Miller meant by his text has confirmed the link to the 2024 scandal Signorile is drawing. It remains his inference, not a verified fact. But it certainly would help explain an otherwise puzzling silence that ended only after Miller’s livestream.
The GOP response: “The key word there is allegation”
While Moreno’s Sunday reversal broke new ground, national Republican leadership has held a consistent line for weeks. House Republicans have refused to condemn, let alone expel, either Miller or Rep. Cory Mills (R‑FL), who faces his own domestic violence allegations. Asked twice by reporters why this is so, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) gave nearly identical answers. “The key word there is ‘allegation,’” Johnson said. “We have a process here. The House Ethics Committee works on those things. If allegations are made, they work through a process. So I’m not in the business of commenting on investigations as they’re in process, and we’ll see how that shakes out.”
Johnson has made a point of framing this as an even‑handed standard rather than a shield for his own conference: “That’s how this always works. And by the way, it’s done for Rs and Ds — both sides of the aisle.”
But no such “process” has been publicly announced in Miller’s case. The House Ethics Committee has announced no action regarding him, and the independent Office of Congressional Conduct has declined to comment on whether it’s investigating him.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R‑FL), who says she knows both Miller and Moreno personally, framed her concern less around the allegations’ credibility than around the toll of public scrutiny: “What I hate about this entire situation is that these articles the press are putting out have been very nasty especially with accusations and it is only hurting one person… their daughter.”
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, asked about the allegations before Sunday’s developments, offered a similarly noncommittal read: They were “troubling accusations,” and “people of the district are having to weigh the facts.”
Outside the GOP, the pressure has been more direct. The gun violence prevention group Giffords, founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords, called on Miller to resign, with executive director Emma Brown stating: “Congress is no place for violent abusers who attack their family and hold a gun to their wife’s head. Max Miller needs to resign now — and if he refuses, the House should expel him.”
The Democratic contrast
Johnson’s claim that the process “is done for Rs and Ds — both sides of the aisle” runs into recent counterexamples.
In July, a Politico investigation reported that Jenny Racicot, a Maine woman who had previously dated Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner, alleged he entered her home uninvited in 2021, intoxicated, and sexually assaulted her. I covered the Platner collapse as it happened. As I wrote at the time, “Platner had withstood months of controversy without losing his standing in the race. But this time was different.” Within a day of the Politico story, the Maine Democratic Party, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Planned Parenthood Action Fund withdrew their endorsements and called on him to exit the race. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand said jointly that Platner “needs to immediately withdraw as the Democratic nominee for Senate,” and even Bernie Sanders, Platner’s most prominent backer, said he’d spoken with the candidate directly and “recommended that he step aside.”
Platner denied the allegation as “categorically false.” He suspended his campaign within days anyway.
The Platner situation echoed an earlier case. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D‑CA) resigned from Congress and suspended his campaign for California governor earlier this year after a former staffer alleged a series of sexual encounters while she worked for him, including two occasions she said occurred while she was too intoxicated to consent. Swalwell denied the allegations but exited both races regardless.
That contrast has not gone unnoticed. A reporter put it to Johnson directly: “Dems ditched Graham Platner after sexual assault allegations. Two members of your conference—Max Miller and Cory Mills—face domestic violence allegations. Why keep them in your conference?” Johnson’s answer was the same line he’s used throughout: “The key word there is ‘allegation.’”
The comparison isn’t perfect. Platner never held office, and Swalwell’s exit followed a specific reported pattern involving a staffer under his direct supervision, a workplace‑power dynamic distinct from the domestic abuse allegations Miller and Mills face. But the willingness to move quickly and decisively is stark nonetheless: Democratic leadership acted on Platner within hours of a single news story, without a judicial or ethics finding of any kind. Republican leadership has spent months declining to act on Miller despite sworn testimony, the dismissal of his own domestic violence petition and now his own former father‑in‑law calling for his resignation.
Political stakes
Ohio’s 7th District isn’t supposed to be competitive. Trump carried it by roughly 11 points in 2024, the same year Miller himself won reelection with only 51 percent of the vote. That margin was padded by a fractured opposition, with the Democratic nominee taking 36 percent and former Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich, running as an independent, pulling 13 percent.
This cycle, Miller faces a single Democratic challenger: Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker and Brook Park city councilman who’s picked up an endorsement from Bernie Sanders along with support from a PAC aligned with the centrist Blue Dog Coalition.
The numbers have moved fast. A June poll from the Democratic‑aligned firm GBAO found the race a statistical tie, with Miller ahead of Poindexter by just one point, 44 percent to 43 percent. But a more recent survey, conducted last week by a Republican polling firm after Emily Moreno’s restraining‑order filing and before Sunday’s livestream, found the race had flipped entirely: Poindexter led 44 percent to 39 percent, with Miller’s favorability rating 15 points underwater.
Poindexter has largely avoided leading with the allegations against Miller, saying he entered the race over policy rather than Miller’s personal conduct. But he hasn’t stayed silent either. In May, he said the allegations “deserve the attention of law enforcement,” and after Miller’s Sunday livestream, he went further: “No one credibly accused of holding a gun to his wife’s head and breaking their 2‑year‑old daughter’s collarbone belongs in the halls of power.”
National Democrats have been considerably less restrained. The House Majority PAC told ABC News it is “willing to do whatever it takes to take back the House, and nothing is off the table,” predicting flatly that “Brian Poindexter will defeat the scandal plagued Max Miller.” The pro‑labor Battleground Alliance PAC has already run robocalls to roughly 100,000 households in the district recounting the allegations from both Moreno and Grisham.
All of this is unfolding against a hard deadline: Ohio Republicans have until this Wednesday to replace Miller on the ballot if he withdraws. Names already being floated as potential replacements include state Rep. Mike Dovilla and former state Sen. Kevin Coughlin. As of Sunday’s livestream, however, Miller has shown no intention of stepping aside.
Last week we wrote about how Elon Musk’s xAI had filed a lawsuit to attempt to block Minnesota’s anti-nudify app law. As we tried to explain, even if you (reasonably, understandably) dislike both Elon and “nudify” apps, there were real problems with the Minnesota law. In particular, it was not narrowly tailored to just target truly harmful image edits. Indeed, it wasn’t even limited to the non-consensual use of the tech. The state’s Supreme Court had already handed the Minnesota legislature a clear roadmap for drafting a law like this that would pass strict scrutiny. The legislature ignored it.
However, the lawsuit was filed just days before the law was set to go into effect, which was called out by Minnesota’s Attorney General in arguing against a temporary restraining order:
First, X.AI’s lack of diligence confirms that a TRO is unnecessary. The company waited until the last minute to sue…
And that seemed to influence Judge Donovan Frank, who denied the motion for the TRO mainly because Elon waited until the last minute to file.
The Court respectfully denies the request for a temporary restraining order before tomorrow. xAI filed the motion on July 29, 2026, nearly three months after the law was signed, and only three days before the law is set to take effect. Such a delay in bringing the action and the motion suggests that harm is not immediate.
And, sure, it was kind of silly for Musk to wait right up until the law was set to go into effect, but that’s not all that rare with challenges to these kinds of laws. I also find the court’s suggestion that the harm isn’t immediate a bit odd, given that (as xAI had rightly pointed out) the potential liability under this law is massive: $500,000 per “access, download, or use.” That means any single use of Grok to edit an image that violates this law (which, as we discussed, goes way beyond nonconsensual sexual imagery, and could even cover someone editing a photo of themselves in a way they endorse) could lead to a huge bill for the company. And it’s now in effect, meaning in theory Minnesota’s AG, Keith Ellison, could already seek fines against the company — though there’s no indication that his office has done so yet. And while it may be politically appealing to try to enforce immediately, that may play badly before the court when there are hearings coming up in a few weeks on a preliminary injunction.
It’s also unclear if xAI actually changed anything on its end. In its filing, the company said that if the law went into effect, it would need to restrict access to certain features:
Confronted with $500,000-per-image strict liability and no safe harbor, xAI has no practical choice but to restrict Grok Imagine’s image-editing features in various ways when the statute takes effect on August 1, 2026
But the law has gone into effect, and as far as I can tell, there’s been no announcement of any changes. It’s possible such changes have been made already and just not announced. But it does come off as a bit weak to file a lawsuit on Monday saying that “if this law isn’t fixed by Saturday we’ll make big changes” and then have the law go into effect… and those changes are not publicly announced anywhere.
This ruling may not mean very much at all. The court has ordered both sides to brief a preliminary injunction over the next couple weeks, with a hearing on August 19th that can get into the actual First Amendment problems with the law. That also means xAI will likely have to explain, in those filings, whatever restrictions it has or hasn’t added to its systems.
xAI’s initial filing was not bad, but I hope they lean more heavily on the case I discussed in my last post, in which Minnesota’s Supreme Court spelled out exactly what the state’s non-consensual intimate imagery law needed to survive strict scrutiny. Because that case walks through, in great detail, the steps a (somewhat similar) law had to take to pass strict scrutiny and survive the First Amendment — even as the court acknowledged the law was punishing a form of protected speech.
There remain some oddities around this law, starting with the fact that the ACLU of Minnesota backed it in the first place — a surprising stance for the ACLU — before reversing course once Musk sued:
xAI’s criticism of the law is drawing support from some free-speech advocates including the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, which supported passage of the law in an earlier form in February but has since turned against it.
“While we believe that creating the technology to alter or ‘nudify’ photos of identifiable people is protected by the First Amendment, we also recognize that the non-consensual creation and dissemination of such material can inflict damage on people appearing in those images,” the ACLU of Minnesota said in a statement Friday.
“In engaging with lawmakers on this issue, we hoped to strike an appropriate balance between First Amendment rights and the ability of people harmed to seek remedial measures, not unlike the remedies available to people harmed by defamation. The final version of the bill does not strike that balance,” the organization said.
Seems like the sort of thing you should have worked out before supporting the law, but fine.
Also, I had mentioned in my last article that some believe the law was written so badly on purpose, to convince Musk to sue in order for Democrats to use it as a political tool and… they are certainly making political hay of it on X, where they seem to be overjoyed that they can mock Elon.
And, sure, mocking Elon is fun. But if you’re going to mock him, it should be over the things he’s actually doing that are problematic.
The issue with this law isn’t that it’s trying to deal with the issue of nudify apps. Or that it’s trying to stop Elon from doing terrible things. It’s that it did so in such a ham-fisted, damaging, obviously unconstitutional manner that bans way more than it claims, is not narrowly targeted, and pretty clearly cannot survive strict scrutiny. Minnesota had the roadmap to pass a legitimate version of this law. It chose not to do so. That Musk didn’t receive the immediate TRO due to the late filing doesn’t make the law a good law. The proper thing for Minnesota’s legislature to do would be to write a law that actually abides by the First Amendment, but perhaps that wouldn’t get them the kinds of headlines they’re getting now.
The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech.
Unlike many state-age verification laws—which have been harmful in their own right—the SCREEN Act has no requirement that a significant portion of the website consist of sexually explicit content that is harmful to minors. The bill requires nearly any service hosting even a single piece of sexually explicit content to verify the ages of its users. The result is that the bill would apply not only to adult content sites like PornHub or OnlyFans, but also streaming services like Netflix, and social media platforms like Reddit, Discord, or Bluesky, if they host any adult content.
The SCREEN Act does not merely require users to attest they are adults. It specifically states that “requiring a user to confirm that the user is not a minor shall not be sufficient.” In practice, that means platforms would have to verify users’ ages using methods tied to their real identities. Providing proof of age online is dramatically different, and far more invasive, than showing your ID at the door to a bartender or bouncer. In the physical world, the bouncer at the door looks at your ID card, confirms you’re old enough, and gives it back to you. Under the SCREEN Act, the “bouncer” will be a digital age-verification service that captures your personal information and saves it to a database for an unspecified amount of time.
The consequences of the bill won’t be limited to minors. If websites and apps are expected to reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults.
Even worse, the SCREEN Act is a privacy and data security nightmare. One provision of the bill requires services to take reasonable steps to protect the data collected and to not maintain for longer than is necessary. But these are terribly weak protections that impose no meaningful collection, use, or retention limits on services collecting people’s private information.
In other words, the third parties tasked with verifying a user’s age on a platform could sweep up a lot of personal info they don’t actually need and then could use that information for any number of purposes, so long as they deem their actions reasonable. Companies would then be allowed to keep the information users have been compelled to turn over for as long as possible, raising security and privacy issues along the way.
The SCREEN Act Attacks Your Right To Use VPNs
The SCREEN Act also targets virtual private network (VPN) users and providers. The bill requires covered websites to verify users’ ages based on their IP addresses unless the service can determine that the user is outside the United States, and specifically requires age verification on traffic coming from known VPN addresses. In practice, this discourages the use of VPNs and proxy servers, which millions of people rely on for legitimate purposes such as protecting personal privacy, securing public Wi-Fi connections, safeguarding journalists and activists, and preventing data tracking.
VPNs mask your real location by routing your internet traffic through a server somewhere else. When you visit a website through a VPN, that website only sees the VPN server’s IP address, not your actual location. It’s like sending a letter through a P.O. box so the recipient doesn’t know where you really live. VPNs are a privacy and security tool used by millions of internet users every day, and their use should not be treated as suspect. It is particularly galling that the SCREEN Act forces users who intentionally take steps to protect their privacy to identify themselves.
The SCREEN Act creates onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize the data security and privacy of all internet users.
Hail to the Chief. Our country is being run by paranoid conspiracy theorist megalomaniac who openly wishes to kick-start America’s first autocracy. Nothing that goes wrong is ever the president’s fault. It’s always the fault of officials with insufficient loyalty or the criminal acts of people out to get him.
Trump decided the Lincoln Reflecting Pool needed a makeover. Not because it had several long-term issues that had been inadequately addressed over the years but because Trump wanted to make it look more Trump-y. That meant draining the entire thing to apply a layer of “American flag blue,” a hue Trump made up on the spot to demonstrate he was more American than any American who had come before him.
Rather than turn this over to the people best qualified to do the job via a bidding/vetting process, Trump handed out a no-bid contract to an entity that called Mar-a-Lago home and whose owner had thrown some money Trump’s way in the past. The company hired to do this is headed by a long-term Trump donor and sports a name that would become eerily prescient once it was through botching the job: Greenwater Solutions.
Shortly after the refurb, the water in the pool turned a bright shade of green, due to the wholly expected explosion of algae, thanks to the conditions created by the pool shutdown/startup and vastly encouraged by the “American flag blue” now coating the bottom of the reflecting pool.
Shortly after that, the pool sealant began floating to the surface, prompting curious visitors to grab chunks of the “American flag blue” material that bubbled up as Interior Department personnel tried to beat science at its own game by flooding the “Greenwater Green” pool with hydrogen peroxide.
Trump then claimed — without facts in evidence — that the green tint and floating sealant were the actions of vandals, presumably related to the antifa or whatever. In the space of a single press conference, Trump turned a 150-foot flaw in the sealant into a 350-foot “gash” that could only have been created by anti-Trump vandals.
Then the arrests began. US Attorney Jeanine Pirro promised to punish anyone caught “vandalizing” the pool to the full effect of the law. Department of Interior boss Doug Burgum mindlessly repeated Trump’s wild speculation, claiming he too was in possession of “evidence” of criminal pool fuckery. Trump continued to do what Trump always does: engage in stream-of-consciousness responses when asked to provide proof of his accusations.
Former US Olympics team member David Hearn was the first to be officially indicted for daring to touch pieces of the broken pool. That case fell apart almost immediately. First, the government’s own witness testified during the grand jury proceedings that anything Hearn grabbed from the pool was the result of defective workmanship, rather than evidence of malicious vandalism.
This prompted Hearn’s legal team to demand transcripts of the grand jury proceedings. After all, if the unnamed government employee had testified that the pool would have been falling apart with or without Hearn’s brief interaction, the resulting indictment meant government prosecutors seemingly ignored the fact that it takes at least $1,000 of damage to support a federal vandalism charge.
Well, it’s all over now, at least in terms of prosecution. (The government will likely be contending with a civil rights lawsuit in the near future.) None other than lead prosecutor Jeanine Pirro has admitted there’s no basis for the criminal charges against Hearn.
Not only that, but the DOJ’s dismissal [PDF] specifically calls out the botched pool repair job performed by another one of Trump’s no-bid buddies (Greenwater Solutions did the filtration/drainage, while Atlantic Industrial Coatings redid the pool surface). It does this as it seeks to purge itself of any blame for pursuing yet another transparently vindictive prosecution to appease the president.
[I]t was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (“AIC”), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026. It was not until after these documents were produced that USAO-DC first became aware of information showing that the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented by DOI. Indeed, USAO DC could only rely (on the information provided by DOI that the damage was entirely caused by vandals, including the defendant in this case, David Hearn…
This is US Attorney Jeanine Pirro throwing the Interior Department under the bus in hopes of saving her job. That’s not going to work.
First of all, even after this filing Trump still insists the damage was due to vandalism, despite all evidence on the record showing otherwise.
That’s Donald Trump “truthing” the untruth:
I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT
Nothing to see here, just the President of the United States insisting that his made up fantasy, that no one ever believed was true, is true in the face of a filing from his own hand-picked attorneys at the Justice Department. One would think that the president accusing a US Attorney of lying to a federal court would be a big deal, except everyone let’s it pass because they know he’s full of shit.
The same goes for Doug Burgum, the current Interior Secretary, who similarly insists this is vandalism despite evidence to the contrary, much of it produced by his own agency.
That’s Burgum tweeting:
The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera. We also provided the U.S. Attorney’s office expert and eyewitness testimony to the damage done by vandals and provided every piece of evidence they asked for in the requested time line detailing each area of damage at the pool.
The Reflecting Pool is part of the Lincoln Memorial and dates back to 1922.
@POTUS cares deeply about protecting our sacred national monuments and his leadership has led the restoration of our Nation’s Capital by Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Again.
Intentional damage done to the Reflecting Pool is no different than defacing any one of our other national monuments.
We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments.
So the US Attorney is saying that the Interior Department provided the DOJ with evidence that it was the shoddy workmanship of Trump’s hand-picked contractors. And the Secretary of the Interior makes a public statement saying that’s false?
This administration can’t get its story straight, and that’s going to come back to haunt them in court.
Finally, Pirro’s still likely to face some bench-slapping over this case because she can’t pretend to have just heard of it now when her office definitely heard the damage was due to a “botched installation” from a government witness and yet still charged ahead with securing an indictment against David Hearn.
The DOJ says it’s wrong. But it won’t dismiss the charges against Hearn with prejudice, which means it can still take another swing at this if Trump makes it clear that needs to happen. But what’s admitted here means it will most likely need to abandon any pending criminal cases against alleged vandals if it expects the court to grant it any form of good faith going forward.
Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.
That’s the DOJ’s own admission, which is now on the public record. If it continues to pursue criminal charges, it can’t possibly expect any subsequent indictments to survive a cursory review in court. Pirro’s office needs to cut and run ASAP. And Pirro should know that it’s too late to save her job. She fucked up when she decided to tell the court the truth. And that’s something Trump will see as unforgivable.
But now any American who actually wants to know the truth about the Reflecting Pool debacle can read for themselves what the administration itself has to say about the matter when it came time to actually reveal to the court what they knew. If they’d rather believe Trump and Burgum, they can. But they can’t pretend the only evidence on the record shows the Reflecting Pool fell apart because Trump handed millions of tax dollars to donors and personal friends, rather than actually try to get the job done right the first time.
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Bypassing censorship comes down to two challenges: disguising internet traffic from censors while making an open network easy to reach. Snowflake is particularly effective at tackling both of these challenges. It disguises a user's traffic to look like a video call and routes it through volunteer-run proxies using short-lived connections, making the traffic harder to detect and block.
That's why it's important to have a large and healthy pool of volunteers always available. To achieve that, Snowflake has to be easy to use and deploy, ideally on the devices and with the services they already use.
Up until this point, volunteers could use browser extensions, a website embed, a command-line tool for desktop, and on Android they can use Orbot's Kindness Mode. During the first half of 2026, the Snowflake broker saw an average of approximately 146,000 unique volunteer proxy IP addresses checking in each day1. Roughly a third of those were associated with Orbot's Kindness Mode. Kindness Mode also makes volunteering tangible by showing users how many connections their proxy has supported.
Seeing how much capacity that feature contributed, Bloco, an Android app studio in Portugal became curious if a standalone app, focused just on volunteering proxies, could reach even more helpers. They reached out to Tor's anti-censorship team which had plans to work on a similar project, but had not yet had the capacity to develop it, yet. So, Bloco took on the task of building such an app.
The motivation grew out of the team's work with OONI (Open Observatory of Network Interference), where they saw how NGOs and activists rely on anti-censorship tools to stay safe and connected. After discovering how easy it was to volunteer a Snowflake proxy, the team members wanted to contribute their skills and expertise to an open-source project they cared about.
A dedicated app for Snowflake volunteers
The Bloco team built on the foundations already developed by the Guardian Project for the mobile Tor ecosystem, including IPtProxy. It's an easy-to-use library that brings together the tools and ongoing pluggable transport work needed to integrate Tor into mobile apps, making it easier to keep censorship-circumvention technology current and reuse it across new apps.
With these libraries already in place, that make it easy to build Tor apps for mobile, Bloco was able to focus their effort on:
Making sure the app runs successfully in the background for as long as possible, while using as little battery as possible.
Getting the user experience right, so everyone understands what the app is for, and can configure it correctly and according to their internet setup and capabilities.
Keep volunteers motivated by showing statistics of how much they're helping across time.
The result is Snowflake Volunteer, a single-purpose app that gives volunteers control over when and how they contribute. Users can allow it to run in the background, restrict it to unmetered networks such as Wi-Fi, choose to run it only while the device is charging, and set a limit on how many people it can help simultaneously. Once enabled, the app automatically connects with people seeking a Snowflake proxy and helps route their connection to the Tor network.
After an initial round of testing and feedback with the Tor community, Snowflake Volunteer was launched publicly in April. In May, we saw an average of approximately 1,300 daily unique proxy IP addresses. By June that had risen to approximately 1,700 per day–an increase of 29% in one month. During this initial period, activity reached a high of more than 2,100 daily proxies. This suggests that a dedicated app can bring additional volunteers into the Snowflake community.
Become a Snowflake volunteer by downloading Snowflake Volunteer
We also would like to thank our community of localizers. Thanks to their efforts, the app is already available in 8 languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish and Vietnamese). If you want to expand access to Snowflake Volunteer, consider contributing translations into more languages. Localization is how we reach this global community. Learn more about the process, and get started.
We analyzed 180 available daily Snowflake broker reports covering January 1 through June 30, 2026. Snowflake broker statistics are published as aggregated snowflake-stats descriptors through Tor Metrics’ CollecTor archive↩
Sometimes it helps to just write out everything that happened leading up to a situation so we don’t lose sight of just how ridiculous it is.
I mean, would you believe that a President would sue his own IRS for something that happened under his own watch and did him no harm, demand $10 billion, and when a judge calls into question how that’s possible, come up with a “settlement” between the two “parties” that grants himself, his family, and his far-flung businesses (already under investigation for tax fraud) a complete get-out-of-jail-free card from tax audits along with a special $1.776 billion slush fund which he can hand out to insurrectionists who tried to overturn an election he had lost?
And then, his Acting Attorney General seeking the permanent job (who had been the President’s personal lawyer in early criminal cases, including one where the President was convicted of 34 felonies), would tell inquiring Senators that the slush fund wasn’t moving forward, but refuse to put that in writing?
When you write it all out that way, it sounds kinda crazy.
Last month Judge Kathleen Williams nuked the fund and alerted various state bars to the ethical lapses of all the government lawyers involved, including Todd Blanche, the President’s personal criminal defense lawyer-turned Acting Attorney General-turned nominee for the permanent Attorney General position.
Blanche’s nomination had stalled out, in part because two Republican Senators (Cornyn and Tillis, both of whom are leaving office after Trump refused to support their attempts to stay) have questioned the slush fund. Blanche refused to put it in writing that the fund was going away, leading to this strained exchange with Cornyn:
Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, reading from the settlement on Wednesday, noted that it says the terms of the deal “may be modified only upon the written agreement of the parties.”
“Has there been a written agreement of the parties to modify the settlement fund?” he asked.
“No, the settlement fund is just not moving forward,” Blanche responded. “There’s no modification. It never started. No money went from the Treasury to any other account.”
When pressed, however, as to whether the settlement agreement may be enforceable by the parties, Blanche conceded that the president could challenge it down the road.
“Yes, it’s an enforceable document, so I suppose if President Trump’s counsel sought to enforce it, that they potentially could … try to enforce the contract. They can’t force the Department of Justice to move forward with the weaponization fund. They could potentially say that we breached by not moving forward,” Blanche said. “They haven’t done that, and I’m not aware that they’re planning on doing that.”
Given all of that, you would think that, perhaps, Trump wouldn’t make any public effort to say that the fund should still exist.
But, again, we live in the upside down world, where if Donald Trump wants something, he just throws a temper tantrum until he gets it. Three new developments have happened regarding all this in the past few days.
First, on Friday, Donald Trump appealed Williams’ order and filed a long, rambling motion about how unfair the order was. That doesn’t sound like someone who is willing to accept that the fund is dead. Second, on Saturday, Trump posted a rant to his personal social media site about how mad he was at Cornyn and Tillis, and how he still needed the fund, and even hoped Congress would pass a separate law giving him the slush fund. Finally, despite these two things making it abundantly clear that Trump still plans to create a slush fund for his cosplay militia, on Sunday, Blanche finally signed a letter claiming the slush fund was dead.
Let’s take these each in order.
First the appeal and the whiny motion about it. The most incredible thing about it is that, even though it was filed by lawyers hired by Donald Trump (the person), as I was reading it, it read like it was filed by the Justice Department. Remember, the entire reason that Williams killed the “settlement” of Trump’s lawsuit against his own IRS was that there appeared to be no adversarial parties in the case, and it was just Donald Trump suing himself in order to give the “settlement” the stamp of authenticity that it was part of a federal case.
While, to their credit, this new filing at least brings in real lawyers from an actual serious law firm, DLA Piper, alongside Trump’s original two-bit lawyer Alejandro Brito, the argument itself is still a mess. Again, you could totally picture either Donald Trump or his DOJ/IRS filing this since the original ruling applies to both. Because they’re not adverse parties. They’re all on the same side.
The ruling rests on a grievous legal error: that, because President Trump supervises the Executive Branch, he and the United States necessarily possess the same legal interest and cannot be adverse to each other. That is wrong. President Trump asserted a personal claim arising from the theft of his own tax information. The IRS and the U.S. Department of the Treasury (“Treasury”) represented the sovereign’s interests in public funds and federal law. Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and The Trump Organization asserted their own independent claims. Presidential supervision did not erase those rights or merge those interests.
The Sanctions Order nevertheless erroneously treated its novel theory of adversity as the starting point and then refracted the facts through that mistaken lens. Settlement became proof of collusion, even though there was none, potential (weak) defenses became proof that the claims were fictitious, which they were not, and ordinary professional relationships became proof of coordination, which did not exist. But the Sanctions Order identified no pre-filing sub rosa agreement, no false allegation, and no specific direction by President Trump controlling Defendants’ litigation decisions. The predicate legal error thus supplied the conclusion, causing the Sanctions Order to incorrectly recast entirely innocuous facts as misconduct.
The danger posed by the Sanctions Order is profound. The Court called the Article III question “unprecedented,” appointed six amici, and devoted nearly thirty pages to resolving it— yet it then declared the contrary position “so obvious and so insurmountable” that advancing it warranted career-altering sanctions. Id. at 9-38, 53 n.69. That mistake converts disagreement into professional punishment, and strikes at the integrity of the adjudicative process itself. A system that sanctions lawyers for advancing positions on constitutional questions cannot sustain fearless advocacy or principled legal development.
Note the tell in that last bit: the “professional punishment” landed on both sides — Trump’s lawyers and the government’s — which is exactly the point Williams was making. And, yes, courts are historically reluctant to sanction lawyers at all. But that reluctance is the problem, not evidence that the one judge willing to do it got it wrong.
As for the claims that the DOJ was actually representing the IRS’s best interests, and not Donald Trump’s, that’s belied by quotes from Donald Trump himself — who publicly admitted he was negotiating with himself — and the terms of the “settlement” which make no sense and do nothing to support the interests of the IRS, the public, or the American taxpayer. If this case was actually about Trump’s leaked tax returns, how does giving the family a release from tax audits or handing over nearly $2 billion to insurrectionists (wholly unrelated to this suit) have any of the American people’s interests in mind?
The strongest argument this filing has is that one part of the ruling is arguably prior restraint. To make sure that the settlement agreement for the slush fund was not used for improper enrichment, Judge Williams barred the parties from invoking the settlement in other proceedings. Trump’s new lawyers say that this part is prior restraint:
In addition, Rule 11 and inherent authority cannot support an order forbidding the President, private Plaintiffs, federal agencies, and sweeping categories of associated persons from “referring to” the Settlement Agreement or invoking it in any future judicial, administrative, regulatory, arbitral, or other official proceeding. D.E.106 at 47. That unprecedented injunction regulates future speech and advocacy, is unconstitutional, and is patently unlawful.
The Sanctions Order’s command is a content-based prior restraint. It singles out one subject—the Settlement Agreement—and suppresses one message, i.e., that the Settlement Agreement exists and may carry legal effect. Prior restraints carry a “heavy presumption” of constitutional invalidity, Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U.S. 58, 70 (1963), and constitute “the most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.” Nebraska Press Ass’n v. Stuart, 427 U.S. 539, 559 (1976). They require findings that the threatened harm is “both great and certain and cannot be mitigated by less intrusive measures.” CBS, Inc. v. Davis, 510 U.S. 1315, 1317 (1994) (Blackmun, J., in chambers). The Sanctions Order identified no threatened unlawful speech, no resulting harm, and no reason narrower relief would be inadequate. Indeed, it did not address the First Amendment at all.
And while this is the strongest argument, that doesn’t make it actually strong. The order does not stop Trump or his lawyers from talking about the settlement. They can post about it on Truth Social, complain about it on Fox, write a book about it. What they can’t do is walk into another court, agency, or arbitration and invoke a settlement that a federal judge just voided due to the lack of adverse parties. The only “speech” being restrained is further fraud on the court.
But the fact that Trump bothered to make this argument at all is the real tell. You don’t fight for the right to invoke a settlement in future proceedings unless you’re planning to invoke it in future proceedings — which is precisely what Blanche has spent months assuring senators would never happen.
Then, even as Blanche was negotiating with Cornyn and Tillis to get them to vote in favor of his AG nomination by promising not to create the fund, on Saturday, Trump said hell yes he intends to make use of the fund — and added that he’d like Congress to pass a law establishing the same fund as a backup, in case the courts kill the one he negotiated with himself:
That’s a Trump post on Truth Social saying:
If Senators Cornyn and Tillis, both upset because I wouldn’t Endorse them (they lost, and quit, respectively!), aren’t going to approve Todd Blanche, one of the most respected professionals, according to everybody, in the Country, to be the United States Attorney General, then I will keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill, which takes care of those who have been so badly treated by the Crooked Joe Biden (and Obuma!) Administration (I get nothing, although I was treated horribly!), PASSED. Todd Blanche was a voice of reason! It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT
Once again, Trump’s ability to shoot his allies in the back remains undefeated. Cornyn (especially) and Tillis have said that their hesitancy in approving Blanche had a lot to do with the weaponization fund. Blanche’s approval appeared contingent on a theatrical claim that the fund wasn’t going forward. To have Trump then come out and say “hell yes it’s going forward, even over the objections of Cornyn & Tillis” seems unlikely to appease those two Senators.
Tillis, for one, was not impressed:
That’s Tillis tweeting:
Despite comments as late as yesterday that the fund is dead, President Trump clearly intends to resurrect the payout pot for punks either by inappropriately establishing another bogus fund or pushing Congress to vote for a bill that the majority of Republicans in the Senate would be against.
It’s unfortunate that Todd Blanche, who I consider qualified for the job, will not be confirmed because of this reversal. Hopefully, we can resolve this by Tuesday.
It’s been quite clear that Trump has no intention of ever letting go of this slush fund, but it’s classic Trump that he couldn’t even keep his mouth shut long enough to pretend the fund wasn’t going forward and to get Blanche approved.
Which then brings us to the last bit that came out late Sunday: Blanche tweeting out that the DOJ had finally decided to “rescind” the weaponization fund in writing. Something he had refused to do over the past few weeks.
There are two separate letters there. The first “rescinds” the fund, while making an obnoxious snarky comment about “frivolous lawsuits” filed to challenge it:
A. The Attomey General’s May 18, 2026 Order establishing the Anti-Weaponization Fund (“Fund”) is rescinded and shall have no force or effect.
B. For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in this Order is intended to contradict or otherwise be contrary to prior representations by the Department of Justice that the Fund is not operative. No Members were appointed; no funds were transferred; no process for receiving claims was established; no claims were paid. Nevertheless, several frivolous lawsuits have been filed challenging the Fund, and at least one court has declined to dismiss those claims as moot. This Order establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no Fund…
If the cases were “frivolous” then why would you need to rescind the agreement?
The second, with snide shots at Congress for not believing his statements, says a bit more on the matter:
Department of Justice Rescinds Anti-Weaponization Order and Addresses the May 19 Release
The Department of Justice today announced that the Acting Attorney General rescinded the May 18, 2026 Order that established “The Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Although the Acting Attorney General has repeatedly advised Congress through testimony, including under oath, as well as in written responses, that the Fund is not moving forward, and the Department has repeatedly represented to district courts that the Fund is not moving forward, today’s Order officially rescinds the May 18, 2026 Order.
Further, the May 19, 2026 Order regarding a mutual release of claims applies by its terms only retroactively. Additionally, the terms “Lawfare and/or Weaponization” in that Order were already defined in the Settlement Agreement as the use of government power “to target individuals, groups, and entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.”
The Acting Attorney General stands by all of his July 15, 2026 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, including answers to questions asked by Senator Cornyn related to the scope and applicability of the May 19, 2026 Order. A transcript of the Acting Attorney General’s testimony is attached. He incorporates that testimony by reference, and restates that it is DOJ’s interpretation that the Order only has any effect, including on any release of claims, on the named parties in the lawsuit referenced in the Order.
This all seems pretty obviously designed to get Cornyn and Tillis off his back by saying “see?!? I’ve now put it in writing. Now shut up and vote to make me Attorney General.” And, who knows, it might work.
That’s even though nothing in there actually answers Cornyn’s actual question discussed above. The DOJ cannot single-handedly go back on this agreement. It was, we are told (including in the appeal from Trump on Friday), a private agreement between two distinct parties: Donald Trump and the Justice Department. As such “rescinding” it from just the DOJ side is meaningless since, as Blanche himself admitted to Cornyn, Trump can still try to claim in court that the settlement is valid.
And given Trump’s public statements about why he needs the fund, as well as his lawyers’ statement in the appeal that it tramples his rights to order him not to claim the settlement is valid in court… you’d have to be pretty slow not to pick up on what Trump intends here.
Also, notice what didn’t get rescinded. The May 18th order (creating the slush fund) is what he pretends is gone, but the May 19th order, which clears Trump, his family, and their businesses from IRS audits over past business practices remains. Blanche pretends that saying it “applies by its terms only retroactively” is a meaningful limitation, but that was always obviously the case. By all accounts, the Trump family books are a mess, and they likely owe the IRS a ton of money. And the Blanche announcement makes it clear that remains as is.
So, to sum it all up, Blanche has rescinded an order based on a settlement he can’t single-handedly rescind, to appease Senators whose votes he needs, while the President has made it clear he’s going to move forward with his fund no matter what.
The simple reality here is that we have a crooked President with his hand-picked henchman trying to do the bare minimum to appease a compliant GOP-run Senate, while the President himself can’t keep his own mouth shut long enough to even put up the pretend facade that there’s no corruption going on here.
Under any other President, this would be an impeachable offense. Here it was just another weekend under the Trump Presidency.
It doesn’t have to be well-crafted, historically important or aesthetically unique. It simply needs to be famous.
Celebrity art is famous, with a story and thus emotional resonance. It’s a souvenir for our eyes, a chance to have proximity without ownership. It conflates familiarity with scarcity, the power of in-person experience with the context of our culture. It’s simultaneously a statement of status and a signifier of connection.
It shows up in more places than we realize. Once an egg cream joint is Instagram famous, the line out the door is yet another example of how much we want to be near something that others have noticed.
Plenty of art is good enough to qualify for celebrity. But celebrity only happens after the network has kicked in. It’s more random than we’d like to admit.
What would it take to make your art, in whatever form, worthy of celebrity?
Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that policy all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, and consumer rights abuses. But big companies don’t much like that because it would boost competition and accountability, eroding quarterly revenues.
So instead we get protectionism. Or in the case of the Trump administration, protectionism run by a bunch of corrupt, incompetent clowns who gutted most of our federal regulators, then saddled them with an elaborate new policy ask that’s impossible to implement, even if the admin were competent.
Which it isn’t.
If you want a good idea of what Trump protectionism looks like in practice, I recommend this Verge piece about the Trump effort to ban Chinese drones. Spoiler: it’s not going well, and it’s trivial to trick the administration and bypass the ban without doing much, resulting in U.S. consumers losing access to lower-cost popular goods (DJI was the most popular and successful drone maker by far) under the pretense this is helping Americans and rekindling U.S. domestic electronics manufacturing.
Having unsuccessfully “blocked” Chinese drones (read: caused a bunch of annoying and pointless chaos), the Trump administration is dramatically expanding its protectionist campaign to include everything from cheap Chinese power converters (necessary for the world’s migration away from fossil fuels), to low-cost Chinese vacuum robots:
“While the government did include “humanoid robots” and “quadrupeds” among the bots it wants to ban, the ban is far broader than that. It covers almost any new software-controlled robot that travels over the ground, weighs more than 4.4 pounds (including any dock), can perceive its environment, and has wireless connectivity.
By that definition, the FCC is banning future robot lawnmowers, sidewalk delivery robots, and the robots that crate around packages at your local Amazon warehouse, too.”
Great stuff. Surely this will be competently enforced by… (checks notes)… Brendan fucking Carr.
Like his bumbling and unpopular boss, Brendan Carr has always made a gigantic stink about China. If you recall, he was one of the biggest proponents of a “ban on TikTok,” which he claimed was necessary to protect national security and stop propaganda. The solution to that problem was to steal the company and offload it to Trump’s billionaire friends so they could spread propaganda and abuse privacy.
The stupidity, xenophobia, and corruption on display with the Trump “TikTok ban” is going to be adapted for AI, and the next six to twelve months of U.S. tech policy will be dumber and more chaotic than ever. Especially as the biggest U.S. AI companies — swimming in debt, facing a data center glut bubble, and a long way from profitability — look to the government to protect them from all manner of competition (foreign, on device, open source, whatever).
This may come as a surprise to you, but Trump incorporated doesn’t actually care about protecting U.S. consumers from Roomba privacy abuses, propaganda, or national security abuses. If they did, they wouldn’t be supporting Trumpism. If they did, they’d regulate data brokers and pass a modern internet privacy law that applied to every company and executive doing business in the U.S.
Being mindlessly and personally transactional, the Trump administration is also keen to erect additional troll and tribute systems if companies want to continue doing business in the U.S. The money will go to his business interests and allies, but in a bid to appeal to nationalists, it’s going to all be layered under the pretense that this is all going to magically shift robotic manufacturing back to the U.S:
“But again, the government isn’t asking these companies any questions about security — not one — to get the waiver that lets them through. The FCC only wants to know where they’re designed and made and assembled and tested and influenced, and get a specific commitment to start manufacturing them in the US instead.”
But they’re not going to be competent enough to make any of this happen, even if shifting the entirety of low-cost electronics manufacturing back to the U.S. was a thing you could actually accomplish. A key part of the problem is that, as we saw from Trump’s dream of having U.S.-made smartphones, the folks in charge of this effort have a child-like understanding of how everything works. And everybody else — like massive swaths of the business community, academia, and the press — are too feckless to stand up to the corrupt stupidity in any meaningful way.
The Trump administration has also gone out of its way to ensure our federal regulators no longer have the resources or legal autonomy to function. Then they’re saddling them with this massive new layer of protectionism they’d be incapable of enforcing even if they wanted to. They’re not even bright enough to understand that even base protectionism is out of their reach.
This is just racist, crony capitalism by corrupt and incompetent zealots, and it’s going to cause irreparable harm to consumer prices, product quality, product availability, hobbies, science, the shift to renewables, and everything else over the next two to three years. All propped up by a lazy press, self-serving domestic monopolists, and a whole lot of bullshit about privacy and national security by the kind of people who are a direct and obvious threat to both.
Object permanence: UK's Great Firewall falls; Mint the coins; Virtual pets v DRM; Getty copyfrauds 47,000 photos; Net Mexico-US illegal migration is zero; Build a wall (around Trump Tower); Remote-hacking big rigs; Collectible AOL CDs; Indefinite Gitmo; Circuit City rips DVDs; Real Names policies are abusive failures; Escher in a water drop; Maximally code-like bugs.
Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
The greatest magic trick of them all is lying. The reason you can't figure out that coin vanish even after the conjurer performs it three times in a row is that they didn't do the same trick three times in a row! They did three different tricks: "Didn't catch it? Here, let me do it again!" is a lie:
There's times when it makes sense to treat two outcomes as the same, even if they were produced by very different means. As a reader, my enjoyment of your novel is the same whether it was dictated, typed on an Underwood Noiseless, keyed into a word processor, or scratched out with a fountain pen:
There's plenty of routes that arrive at the same place, and if the destination is all that matters to you, it's fine to ignore the journey. But often, those end-points have subtle differences that are only revealed when things go wrong. If all you care about is how things work, chances are good that you're in for an unpleasant surprise when things fail.
I recently found myself arguing with an interviewer about whether AI is, or could be, conscious. We weren't arguing about whether it might someday be possible to make an artificial consciousness – as a materialist, I'll happily stipulate to this. I think that everything we call "consciousness" is the result of a physical process occurring within our bodies (and possibly around them?), so I think it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that someday we might create another physical process that produces the same effect.
But that's not what the interviewer wanted to argue about. His point was that teaching more words to the word-guessing program would produce consciousness, an argument I always liken to "breeding horses to run faster and faster until one of them foals a locomotive." In support of this (outlandish) proposition, the interviewer performed a kind of cognitive coin-trick: "I can often predict what my wife is going to say, and so can a chatbot that's been trained on her words. Therefore, we're both doing the same conscious work – and therefore the chatbot will eventually be as conscious as I am."
"Predicting what you will say through an understanding based on a theory of your mind" and "predicting what you are going to say based on a statistical analysis of your utterances" might produce the same outputs, but they are not the same trick. You can tell by what happens when the trick fails.
My wife and I have been together for 23 years now, and there's plenty of times that we can finish each other's sentences – and so can the autocomplete on our phones. The autocomplete manages the trick by exploiting the fact that we often repeat ourselves. But we manage the trick by understanding each other (and by exploiting the fact of repetition).
When my wife says something surprising – because she is angry or delighted, sad or happy – I can make a reliable guess about what caused my prediction to misfire. Our "sentence completion" trick doesn't emerge from a rough, automatically generated mental table of the statistical likelihood that word A will follow word B. We also understand why those combinations appear in each other's speech and writing.
"Understanding" and "statistical extrapolation" can often lead to the same place, but when they don't, "understanding" provides a way forward, while "extrapolation" founders. Both work fine, but only one fails gracefully. The two tricks only appear the same, but they are fundamentally different.
AI's investor story – and the science fiction tales of AI's eventual capabilities that underpin that investor story – makes heavy use of this conjurer's trick, in which two different outcomes are equated to one another because they resemble each other.
This "ignore the journey, focus on the destination" idea is baked very deeply into the way we think about AI. Take the "Turing Test," a complicated and nuanced thought-experiment proposed in 1950. Over the ensuing 75 years, Turing's thought-experiment has been stripped down into a blunt metric: "Can a chatbot trick a human into thinking it is also human?"
"I mistook a chatbot for a human" and "I took a human for a human" arrive at near-identical places, but they are subtly and importantly different. The erroneous assumption that my phone's autocomplete is actually a person who understands me well enough to finish my sentences works fine, but the instant I turn to it for understanding, it will fail very badly. Autocomplete's predictions are always grounded in who you used to be, which means autocomplete knows very little about who you are now, and absolutely nothing about who you will become:
The low-rez Turing Test that captured popular discourse is profoundly misleading. It's the unsound foundation of a worldview that renders you incapable of distinguishing your understanding of your spouse from their phone's autocomplete function. It's the self-serving rationale that leads you to declare yourself a proud stochastic parrot:
The AI bubble is (seemingly) full of contradictions, but – like those baffling coin-tricks – these contradictions often resolve themselves very neatly once you realize that the "contradiction" is actually just two things that appear to be one.
For example, some of the billionaires who put up the first several hundred million for AI are solipsists who just don't believe other people are entirely real and therefore find it easy to believe that AI can do their jobs. Other billionaires are cynics who think that bosses can be sold defective worker-replacing chatbots because they're credulous suckers for that pitch, the same way they believe that desperate young men are suckers for Joe Rogan's useless and/or dangerous supplements and peptides:
Billionaire AI true believers and billionaire AI cynics make for a powerful coalition. The roadblocks that might discourage the first group are easily hurdled by the second, and vice-versa. You don't have to believe AI works to believe it can be sold, and you don't have to be motivated by the sales opportunity to believe that AI is about to become god.
Almost every debate I get into about AI turns out to be an unjustified, unacknowledged conflation of two things that seem similar, but have profoundly different underlying characteristics. Take this argument: "Every time we extend rights to the nonhuman world – watersheds, endangered animals, ecosystems – the world gets better. Let's extend rights to AI – whether or not we think it's a 'person' and so reap those benefits."
This, too, is a coin trick. Extending rights to nature reliably makes the world better, but extending rights to constructs makes the world far worse (Exhibit A is corporate personhood) (obviously).
A few moments' thought reveals the difference. If we extend rights to a watershed, that might result in an AI data-center being killed. If we extend rights to AI, that might lead to sacrificing the watershed to cool the data-center:
Then there's AI and labor. The world is full of skilled workers who have found ways to use AI on the job that they insist have improved their work. It's also full of skilled workers who warn us that on-the-job AI is producing tech debt at unimaginable scale, seriously depreciating the quality of the tools we use today, and setting us up for painful reckonings in the future.
This (seeming) contradiction melts away once you realize that these workers only appear to be doing the same thing. The first group of workers, excited about their AI-assisted output, are "centaurs": people assisted by machines; workers who choose the time and manner of their AI adoption. The second group are "reverse centaurs": people recruited to serve as peripherals for machines, who direct their actions and workflow:
Note that this isn't the same thing as saying "A skilled worker who adopts a tool willingly is always right and will produce a better output as a result." Nor is it saying, "The tool is so flawed that workers who claim it works for them must be deluded."
That's another coin trick! The reality – again – is that this is two things: some workers whose AI-assisted work is measurably worse are wrong about AI making their work better (centaurs, but wrong), and; some workers are being forced to use AI and know damned well that it's making their work worse (reverse centaurs).
Finally, there's an economic coin-trick: "AI will destroy jobs." Sure, yes, AI is destroying jobs. But there's a vast difference between "You got fired because an AI can do your job" and "You got fired because your boss was convinced that the AI can do your job, even though it cannot."
This is one of the most consequential coin-tricks, because it's a real convincer for the investors who are funding the AI bubble. The difference is huge: "AI can do your job" means you're well and truly screwed. If an AI can really replace a contract lawyer, then everyone who needs a contract written or evaluated should be on the side of mass technological unemployment for contract lawyers. The point of contract lawyers is to produce contracts, not to pay contract lawyers' law-school debts and mortgages.
BUT! If some BigLaw's credulous partners can be suckered into firing their juniors and replacing them with chatbots who bill you $1,200/hour to produce unenforceable, error-riddled contracts, then everyone who needs a contract is on the same side as the contract lawyers – united in opposition to their bosses:
Every time we fail to draw this distinction, we help an AI boss raise another billion dollars. Every time we insist on this distinction, we hasten the day that the AI bubble pops, thus sparing a few more everyday savers and innocent bystanders from being wiped out in the crash we can all see on the horizon:
As "Cathy" so aptly put it: "The thing that is a good tool for the skilled people is being sold as a thing to reduce the number of skilled people hired":
The former is a normal technology. The latter is the root of a catastrophic folly that is destroying our environment, destroying workers' lives, destroying the quality of the goods and services we rely on, and which will shortly destroy our economy.
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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In late 2022, several of the world’s largest music companies, including Warner Bros. and Sony Music, secured a key victory against Grande Communications.
A Texas federal jury found the Internet provider liable for willful contributory copyright infringement and ordered it to pay $46.8 million in damages, after Grande failed to disconnect pirating subscribers.
The verdict was a milestone in the recording industry’s campaign to hold ISPs responsible for their subscribers’ piracy. The ruling was later affirmed on appeal by the Fifth Circuit, which also vacated the damages award, sending that question back for a new trial.
That new trial might not come after Cox v. Sony changed the playing field. In March, the Supreme Court reversed a billion-dollar verdict against Cox Communications, holding that an Internet provider is not liable for contributory infringement simply because it keeps serving subscribers it knows have been flagged for piracy.
A few weeks later, the Supreme Court also wiped out the Grande verdict, ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider the case in light of the new standard.
Labels Offer to Walk Away
That reconsideration process was set in motion but, according to new filings submitted by both parties last week, it appears that the record labels are ready to throw in the towel.
In their supplemental letter brief, filed on Wednesday, the record labels effectively inform the court they are done.
“The Cox decision represents a material intervening change in law governing contributory copyright infringement by internet service providers. Plaintiffs do not
intend to litigate the merits of this case further in light of the new standard,” the labels write.
Record Labels Are Ready to Walk Away
This offer to retreat is in line with earlier decisions in ISP liability cases. Since the Cox ruling, the labels have already dropped similar lawsuits against Altice and Verizon, for example.
The music companies say they informed Grande of their “willingness to dismiss the case voluntarily”. That would be with prejudice and with both parties paying their own bills. However, Grande does not agree.
Grande Wants More
Instead of simply dismissing the matter, Grande prefers to end the case with a clear win. In their own letter, the ISP asks the Fifth Circuit to “render judgment in favor of Grande” and declare that the labels cannot win under the new standard.
“The Court should render judgment for Grande. Because the Labels cannot prove contributory infringement under Cox, there is ‘no clear benefit to remanding
this case to the district court’,” the ISP argues.
Grande’s letter
This isn’t just a matter of principle, there’s a significant amount of money at stake too. To postpone that payment of the $46.8 million judgment during the appeal, the company had to post a bond, and it says the premiums added up.
According to the labels, Grande previously communicated that it incurred roughly $4 million in bond premium costs.
The record labels are pushing back hard against this potential multi-million dollar bill. They accuse the ISP of needlessly inflating its own costs by waiting over nine months to discharge the bond after the initial damages award was vacated.
In addition, the labels argue that any potential payout should be offset by $191,618 in unpaid sanctions that Grande still owes them for filing a “meritless” motion earlier in the litigation.
It’s worth stressing that Grande has not mentioned an exact cost figure in its letter. The exact amount will likely be detailed later, if it gets that far.
It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to decide whether this case should end quietly, by simply vacating the earlier judgment and splitting the costs. Alternatively, it can grant Grande a formal win on the merits, with potential compensation for the costs it made.
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The record labels’ supplemental letter brief, filed last week, at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is available here (pdf). Grande’s supplemental letter brief can be found here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
TWIF curated by a human on Friday, 31 Jul 2026, Week 31
F-Droid core
Testing of F-Droid main and F-Droid Basic continues. We got a couple of error reports from the 2.0 latest alpha11. We urge you to update your client to the latest release and test it thoroughly. If you see any errors, remember to send them in.
In the process of modernizing the app, we’ve raised the minimum needed system version to Android 7. Looking at the submitted error reports, we are glad to see most of them are from Android 15 and 16, meaning users devices run recent system code benefiting from security fixes. At the same time, we want users of older Android versions to benefit from our client enhancements. If you’re on Android 12 to Android 14 remember that you’ll enjoy unattended updates as usual, on top of a nicely looking app with Expressive You support to customize its visuals.
But, we’ve seen few to none reports from devices running Android 7 to 11, and while we are developing the client carefully, we know bugs will still pop-up. Yes, on these old devices, you’re still getting annoyed by pressing “Install” for each app update, but the new features, the evolved search, the new warning system for old apps and all the dozens UX changes are worth the small pain.
You’ve read above and want to help? Get the latest 2.0-alpha by navigating to the F-Droid or Basic app details page, check “Allow beta updates” in the top right three dot menu, and update.
In F-Droid repository news, the last two cycles encountered a permission issue affecting some packages. Basically the files are inaccessible to the browser on the web page and in client when the main server or the primary mirrors are used. We’ve fixed them manually for now, while working for a fix in our automation code that drives this part of the process. We track this issue here.
Fun fact: You can see in the linked issue above pics how 2.0 client will present such an error, an improvement over the old annoying toast blocking the screen.
Community News
aTalk was updated to 6.4.0 dropping support for armeabi-v7a and x86 ABIs.
Conceal Mobile was updated to 6.0.0… right after the developer lost the key. Yes, that’s a thing, so… backup (if you can), uninstall, install latest version with the new key, carry on!
HomeFeed - RSS Widget was updated to 1.5.0 as the code was saved from the crashing developer SSD, but… not the key. Hence, new key means you need to reinstall the app, as mentioned above for the other app.
Multi Launcher ‧ Home Screen was updated to 1.12.0 Build 0, you know the drill, key change, reasons, uninstall, reinstall, re-configure, enjoy.
SimpleX Chat was updated to 7.0 adding public names for channels and businesses - without user IDs. How? Read more in the post and white-paper.
NewPipe was updated to 0.29.0 dropping Android 5 support and fixing a bunch of issues. The team will be at FrOSCon 2026 so make sure to check their booth when visiting. Psst, after you’ve got the stickers and said hi, do lookup the F-Droid booth too :wink: :wink:
Aurora Store had a huge update to 4.8.4 with a revamped interface rebuilt on modern Jetpack Compose, multiple accounts, user reviews redesign, app lock, a buy flow, better notifications, better update screen, microG installer support and more.
Archived Apps
24 apps were archived for their own safety
(expand for the full list)
BedrockStation (Pro): Connect your PlayStation’s Minecraft to third party servers.
BILIBILIAS: An auxiliary tool for Bilibili video caching, providing one-click caching
campfire: Bandcamp client
CoinVert: A powerful, modern currency converter
Convertly: A sleek, ad-free unit converter
ESBDirect: Access substitution plans
EVE Mining Calc: Mining Helper for EVE Online
Libreflix: Stream and watch independent films
link eye: open url with your preffered app
Metronome: A simple and modern Metronome App with presets and tap tempo.
Mobile Pauker ++: Learn intuitively with flash cards and synchronize your lesson with Dropbox
OSMBugs : Shows Bugs from the different quality assurance tools from Openstreetmap
Quicksy: Jabber/XMPP with Easy Entry and Easy Discovery (Covered previously, read here)
Qwotable: An application to read and store quotes
Rabbit Escape: Lemmings-like puzzle/action game
SaveTo.Downloader: External downloader for SaveTo (companion app)
SaveTo…: Save shared image or pdf to selected directory
SBW: Bitcoin wallet
Seers Lodge: P2P Chat Application
Show Youtube Dislikes: Bring back Youtube Dislikes for Android
彼氏 (かれし) — boyfriend 氏名 (うじな) — name 藤氏 (とうし) — Fujiwara family 両氏 (りょうし) — both persons 同氏 (どうし) — the said person 源氏物語 (げんじものがたり) — The Tale of Genji (Heian-period classic) 源氏 (げんじ) — Genji (the character in the Genji Monogatari) 平氏 (へいし) — Heike family 杜氏 (とうじ) — chief brewer at a sake brewery 氏子 (うじこ) — shrine parishioner
This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to the protestor who is charged with destroying property for giving CBP agents the “duress mode” password to wipe his phone. In first place, it’s an anonymous comment extending our characterization of what the DOJ is doing here:
While simultaneously pushing to institute secret courts with secret evidence for immigration-related “terrorism.”
The mere existence of ‘you have no constititional rights’ zones is a legal abomination
I would like to think that the judge involved will see through the government’s farce of a case and realize that they and the legal system they represent are being weaponized against the citizenry here but far too many(read: more than zero) judges buy the ‘it’s not a fifth amendment violation to force people to unlock their devices despite the entire point of forcing someone to do that is to provide evidence to incriminate them’ argument so who knows?
As a result, they know that — for the moment — all they need to do is sit on their hands. There’s no need to spend any money, incur any risk, or make any effort: all they have to do is nothing.
And wait. Chances are they won’t have to wait long: Trump is not only an absolute moron with rapidly advancing dementia, he’s impulsive and chaotic, and at some point he will do something well beyond merely stupid in Iran. And that will be the right moment to take action, i.e.., for China to seize Taiwan or Russia to deploy tactical nukes in Ukraine. The US will be unable to respond because there will be nobody left with the capability of grasping the situation and constructing an actionable plan.
I remember reading a story about an in-development game show where children would listen to two people discussing a particular specialist subject and guess which one was a real subject matter expert and which was an actor.
The show never made it past development because it didn’t work: the children would consistently find the actors more believable than the real subject matter experts.
The thing is, knowing stuff is an entirely different skillset than persuading people of stuff. And AI is very good at making statements that read, to human psychology, as confident and convincing. But it doesn’t know anything except statistical probabilities and repeating patterns within its training data.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a pair of comments about the bizarre news that RFK Jr. is going to host a cooking show. First, it’s Bloof pointing out what a great on-air personality he’ll be:
With his soothing Krang from TMNT voice, the man is a natural host of Podcasts and television shows. I’m sure Bari Weiss had him on the shortlist of hosts for 60 minutes too, but he was so in demand because of his velvet voice, she had to settle for the young, handsome, charismatic Ross Douchehat.
Before we jump in, a little housekeeping. Some readers report they're having trouble opening X-based video files, for which I use Xcancel links to avoid sending traffic to that site. This seems especially true for users accessing the links via iPads. In my tests, mobile phones seem to load the videos fine, while iPads load them slowly or not at all. I recommend using a mobile phone for best viewing! If a video won’t load for you, try copying and pasting the link into your browser (Chrome or Safari only). I will also include the source link after each video for your convenience. It should load faster, though it will direct you to X.
Also, July was the second month in a row that I lost more paid supporters than I gained. Sadly, that's not sustainable. If you have been enjoying my work for some time and would like to help staunch the bleeding, please consider upgrading to a paid account if you haven’t already. Your support allows me to continue offering this for free to those on fixed income or disability. Thanks!
“Incontinentia Buttocks” was a character from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but we appear to be living it. One poor man, perhaps a part of his Secret Service detail, had to suffer through it.
On policy, the Trump White House continues to mystify while failing spectacularly.
Meanwhile, the GOP, and particularly Rand Paul and his conspiracy theories, devotes its time to attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci. I concur with this sentiment.
Borowitz with the three-pointer.
Perhaps there’s a side benefit to Paul releasing the Fauci diaries he somehow got his red-pill stained hands on.
Gavin Newsom with the layup.
Paul decided to go live on the air with callers, which is never a good idea when you’re this hated.
In Fauci’s honor, remember this amazing moment? It’s probably why Trump turned on him.
The best takedown came from The Daily Show. It’s Laura Ingraham on, well, Laura Ingraham.
When a MAGA relation or associate texts you with their nonsense, here’s how to troll them. I’m truly impressed.
We’re still wondering whether McConnell is being propped up by his handlers.
\
The Beaverton with the brutal headline.
Or as someone else put it,
The DOJ dropped its case against former Olympian David Hearn after insisting for weeks that he had vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and smearing his good name, only to admit a botched installation caused the damage.
Lawmakers tried to ride the popularity of Nolan’s blockbuster, but some were quicker than others.
Sigh. I feel your pain, Rep. Pressley, whenever I try to be clever on social media.
Speaking of The Odyssey,
Some terminally online people (cough, Elon Musk, cough) still have their panties in a bunch over The Odyssey’s casting. Josh Johnson on the subject:
In really fun news, apparently no one is coming to rescue the Tate brothers. This community note on Andrew Tate’s heartfelt tweet to his supporters was amazing.
He hasn’t stopped complaining since he was locked up.
The Cosmos portal is one of the most active corners of the European Space Agency’s website. 
In late 2022, several of the world’s largest music companies, including Warner Bros. and Sony Music, s
