In this article for Michael West media, Claudia Weisenberger assesses the insatiable thirst for water of Australian data centres. Sydney Water is preparing for data centres to consume 25% of Sydney’s drinking water by 2035. Article: Waste tsunami. Water and the hidden cost of AI data centres. Take home quotes: No data centre operating in Australia is required to disclose how much water it consumes, nor is there a law currently requiring any of them to recycle it. One large AI processing centre…

If there were doubts about Reform's political character, ITV's undercover documentary has put them to bed. In encounter after encounter, its reporters were witnesses to unprompted, off-the-cuff racism. But we're not talking about the casual dropping of slurs. Instead, a parade of councillors and party officials outlined their elaborate, violent fantasies. Of ripping people from their homes and shoving them in concentration camps, of personally carrying out public executions, of terrorising…

I spent a chunk of last year learning and thinking a lot about Katherine Abughazaleh's campaign for the US legislature. I happened to learn about it in March 2025 as she launched, and contributed a …

Bill Marczak, et al., of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab: This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru’s spyware. We also uncover Discover-Tech, and show how the company helps mercenary surveillance vendors track and hack devices around the world. Jillian Kestler-D’Amours, CBC News: Citizen Lab said it was able to confirm a…

I received a $90.00 check from the US Treasury yesterday. This morning I deposited it in my bank. After the check clears, I’ll donate it to John Ossoff's Senate campaign. Around 20,800,000 people received this $90. These are the people on Medicare. The people who, on average, have more money and assets. This Trump “program” adds around $1.872 billion to the debt. Trump announced this two days after the 2025-2026 budget figures were made public. He ran a $1.9 trillion deficit in the fiscal year…

And they shall beat their data centers into plowshares, and their Teslas into pruninghooks.

You’re welcome to copy or forward this message to where it’s needed.Atlas of Surveillance. This tool is run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world, founded in 1990. “The Atlas of Surveillance is a searchable database and map that reveals which technologies, such as drones and automated license plate readers, are used by domestic law enforcement agencies across the United States. Through a combination of crowdsourcing and…

I posted the above on Threads, and some folks questioned whether this could actually be true. So let me run you through the math. Granted, some of these numbers are best estimates. Undercounting is probably happening on both sides of the argument. But when you see how outlandishly far apart the outcome is, you’ll realize that the statement is absolutely true. Estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the United States is roughly 14 million, by Pew, in 2023. Or 16 million by CIS in 2025.…

Renée DiResta, writing for Lawfare: There is a real event underpinning the story, and an authentic chart showing a dramatic decline in automated internet traffic. But the leap from a viral chart to the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots is a large one. Much of the apparent corroboration comes from anecdotes about how social media feels, rather than measurements of what actually changed. And this speaks to a broader problem: as platforms have reduced access to data, and as “disinformation”…

This morning, I shoveled today's batch of political flyers out of my mailbox and into the recycling bin. I'd had enough, so I took action to make them stop. I walked back to my apartment, finished filling in my ballot and turned it in. This trick works in #SanFrancisco, I ?guess? other parts of California and probably other places too. When the elections folks receive your ballot, they make a note of it. Companies that print+mail political flyers get their mailing list from the elections folks;…

The White House issued an executive order last week: The terminology used by the Federal Government should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people. Accordingly, the term “Super Intelligence” more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies. It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive…

It’s election time! I know this because every day our mail carrier staggers up the front walk carrying a fresh new load of these:These are political mailers. We have already received enough of them to cover the state of Connecticut to a depth of three feet, but they keep coming. They seem to be getting larger.We don’t mind. We voters need campaign mailers, because they tell us which candidates are good and which ones are evil, these being the only two kinds of candidates currently recognized in…

Igloo, the company behind the Pudgy Penguins NFTs, announced it will shut down Abstract, its Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, on December 15. CEO Luca Netz said the company had lost "8 figures" in the less than two years they were running the chain.Users have until December 15 to move their assets, after which anything left on the chain will become inaccessible. DefiLllama estimates there were around $76 million in assets on the chain when the shutdown was announced, leading some users to complain…

“‘It’s significant’: Ukraine fears US is withholding allied-funded air defense supplies to pressure Kyiv” kyivindependent.com/its-signi… #RussiaIsATerroristState #TrumpIsACriminal #SupportUkraine #СлаваУкраїні

Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial criticising the proposal as bribery, and the New York Times put it way down the front…

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Sometimes a contractor or service-provider will ask if I’d rather pay in cash. The implication is that a cash transaction can be done without tax – and either or both of us can “save” some money. What’s not said, in these exchanges is: Hey, want to cheat on our taxes together? No thanks. I’ll pay the tax. I enjoy the schools, the roads, public broadcasting corporation. I don’t have some sort of extra-strong moral muscle. It makes me sad that people see the collective pie as something they can…

I've been thinking more about the future we might be heading towards if things continue the way they do, relatively unstopped, especially in regards to data harvesting and leaks, and how digitalized our society continues to become. I wonder if we are simply headed for a society in which there is bleak acceptance and normalization of most pieces of information being out there already. Everything you put out there voluntarily/openly (like a blog, or social media) and the things passively…

Somehow, my data has been sold to Pennsylvania Republicans. Every election season, I get inundated with texts to vote Republican, and support horrible causes. I have never lived in Pennsylvania, I don’t vote Republican, and I don’t support horrible causes. I am happy to waste their resources, I guess.

I find it endlessly entertaining watching journalists conduct flimsy but elaborate justifications as to why they still use X (formerly Twitter), a right wing propaganda sewer owned by an overt white supremacist directly responsible for the death of what ultimately may be millions of human beings. Quick reminder: Elon Musk is an unremarkable and virulent racist who cosplays as a supergenius engineer. He leveraged the money he lucked into at Paypal to opportunistically glom onto actual innovators…

When will enough be enough?

As described in Part 1, September 2026 marked the 100th anniversary of Arizona’s entry into the federal registration areas for vital statistics. The woman who piloted Arizona to this milestone was Ruby Loy Jacquemin, a Prescott native who, after early widowhood, became the statistician for the State Board of Health. Who was Ruby Jacquemin, and what did she do?Ruby Loy in PrescottRuby May Loy was born in Prescott on September 16, 1889, a few months after territorial capital had been moved (or…

The Medicaid program spends close to $1 trillion annually, with about 65% of that coming fom the federal government and the rest from state governnments. This is almost, but not quite, one-in-five dollars of total US health care spending. Medicaid is not quite as big as Medicare, which is about $1.2 trillion per year, but Medicaid alone is almost one-in-five dollars of total US health care spending. James Hamlette and Karen Kopecky offer a check check-in on the Medicaid program in “Who’s…

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) allows you to vote for multiple candidates on a ballot, putting your favorite first even if you don't think they'll get elected. Without RCV, strategic voting is required - for example, voting for a Democrat instead of Socialist because you really don't want the Republican to get elected. There are electoral districts that have implemented RCV. In my state, some counties have RCV, even if statewide is choose-one. Any time we implement RCV, there must be a process that…

Damian B Oh, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Robert (Bobbie) “Boyden is a skateboarding legend—known professionally by the nickname Casper—who is credited with having originated, in the 1970s, a skateboarding trick that came to be known as the Casper flip.” You can watch a video demonstrating the move. Boyden claims that the Hyundai Casper SUV violates his California statutory publicity rights. But his arguments to link the Korean SUV to…

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 28-30: In June 1881, Austria-Hungary and Serbia agreed a commercial treaty. Three weeks later, it was supplemented by a secret convention, negotiated and signed by Prince Milan himself, which stipulated that Austria-Hungary would not only assist Serbia in its efforts to secure elevation to the status of a kingdom but would also support Serbian claims to territorial annexations in Macedonia. Serbia,…

The news that Sally Rooney’s books will not be being sold in the UK any longer is quite a surprise. This decision has been made because such sales would apparently be against the law — or at least paying royalties to the author as a result of such sales would be against the law. This comes about because Ms Rooney, an Irish citizen, has pledged her royalties to Palestine Action, which has been designated a terrorist organization in Britain. The Terrorism Act of 2000 makes it an offense…

We were fascinated to hear from AI Policy expert Clara Langevin from the Federation of American Scientists, who talked to us about federal AI policy in the US and Brazil: Apple Spotify YouTube

We’ve all seen the pictures of the thousands of arrests of peaceful protesters for supporting Palestine Action: an 83-year-old retired priest; a 94-year-old Jewish former human rights lawyer; a blind man who uses a wheelchair. As a result of this absurdity, terrorism arrests went up over 1500% in a year. Because the people in question were holding signs, usually saying “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”, these arrests have been made under Section 13(1)(b) of the Terrorism Act 2000,…