‘Large, high-quality clinical trials have resoundingly concluded that ivermectin is not effective against COVID-19. And there is no old or new scientific evidence to support a hypothesis that ivermectin can cure cancer—or justify any such federal expenditure. But, under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who is otherwise well-known for claiming to have a parasitic worm in his brain—numerous members of the medical fringe are now in powerful federal positions or otherwise hold sway with the administration.…’ (via Ars Technica)
‘That was Rep. Dan Goldman’s advice to acting ICE Director Todd Lyons at a House Homeland Security hearing on Tuesday. Lyons had opened by objecting to people labeling his agents “the Gestapo” and “the secret police.” He blamed the language for stoking threats, HuffPost reports.
Goldman pointed out that ICE is regularly stopping “nonwhite people and those who look like immigrants to ask for their papers.” When pressed, Lyons admitted that Nazi and Soviet secret police did exactly that — but insisted the comparison to ICE was “wrong.”
Rep. Eric Swalwell brought up Lyons’ remark comparing ideal deportation to “Amazon Prime but with human beings.” He had follow-up questions.
“Mr. Lyons, how many times has Amazon Prime shot a mom three times in the face?” He meant Renee Good, shot dead by ICE in Minneapolis last month.
“None, sir.”
“How many times has Amazon Prime shot a nurse 10 times in the back?” He meant Alex Pretti, killed by Border Patrol in the same city.
‘We recently reported about Immigration and Customs Enforcement spending $70 million to buy a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, that they plan to turn into a “detention center.” Following this and other warehouse purchases across the country, and subsequent community backlash, Courier Newsroom created a Google Map of all facilities ICE is seeking to purchase nationwide. The map, titled “Proposed ICE Warehouse Locations,” shows industrial warehouses targeted by the Department of Homeland Security for use as mass detention centers. You can click each location to learn about its status and local community responses.…’ (via Boing Boing)
‘The story I set out to write about was to figure out whether he is healthy or not, and it kind of ended up being a story about whether the government is healthy or not. There’s kind of an infection that has spread throughout Trump’s inner circle where everybody who talks about him talks about him in the craziest, most North Korean-type, dear-leader way.
Instead of just saying he’s healthy for an almost 80-year-old, that he’s slowing down a little bit, but he’s certainly healthy enough to be president, people talk about him in these terms that are just completely outrageous: superhuman, the healthiest man alive. He told me he was healthier than he was 40 years ago.
The guy doesn’t exercise; he doesn’t eat well. He drinks enough Diet Coke to fill a football stadium. And you just can’t quite trust the people around him. And I felt like the story I published said a lot about Trump’s America, not just Trump’s health.…’ ( Kelli Wessinger and Astead Herndon via Vox)
‘Ever since the United States entrusted its presidency to a would-be insurrectionist in January 2025, many Americans have feared for the integrity of their nation’s future elections.
And not without reason. President Donald Trump made his contempt for democracy clear on January 6, 2021. Shortly after retaking office last year, he pardoned the rioters who’d stormed the Capitol in his name, gutted the agency that protects America’s voting infrastructure from cyberattacks, attempted to unconstitutionally deter the counting of many mail-in ballots, and threatened to prosecute officials who had faithfully administered the 2020 election.
If concerns that Trump might unduly influence the 2026 midterms aren’t new, however, they’ve grown markedly more plausible over the past two weeks.
…This interference could take many forms. But recent events have increased experts’ level of concern about two possibilities in particular:
— That the Trump administration will try to seize ballots and voting machines from key jurisdictions before votes have been fully counted.
— That Trump will deploy ICE or other federal agents to the vicinity of critical polling places, so as to deter turnout among voters in general — and those with undocumented family members, in particular.
Below, I explain how recent events have made these hypotheticals more thinkable — and why the administration’s efforts to unduly sway the midterms in its favor are, nonetheless, unlikely to succeed…’ (Eric Levitz via Vox)
‘I print whistles because reality still matters; whistles get neighbors to come running, make sure enough people are recording, so when the regime pretends there’s only one camera angle of Renee Good’s death, we know the truth.
I also make whistles because it’s easy. You can literally do it in your sleep. I’ve made over 12,000 whistles since January 15th with three printers and almost zero optimization. I’ll harvest 300 of them tomorrow morning, 300 in the late afternoon, and another 100 in the evening before I do it all again.
Experimenting with different whistles in my garage, including a full plate of Federico’s Strong Whistle. Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge
Printing whistles is more cost-effective than drop-shipping them from China. Even if I bought filament at retail prices and paid PG&E’s full exorbitant California electricity rates, I’d be spending around 5 cents per whistle — and the unit economics only get better from there.
Across the country, people are realizing these printers can serve a bigger purpose than building toys and trinkets. Whether someone is looking for 100 whistles to protect friends and family, 200 for a church or school, or 1,000 for a whole neighborhood, requests are flooding in, each one vetted and added to a spreadsheet by volunteers.
No one is told what to do, which whistle to print, or which request to fulfill. These Signal chats feel like a community, building and innovating everything as we go.…’ (Sean Hollister via The Verge)
‘Scientists have found that human hair growth does not grow by being pushed out of the root; it’s actually pulled upward by a force associated with a hidden network of moving cells. The findings challenge decades of textbook biology and could reshape how researchers think about hair loss and regeneration…’ (via Phys.org)
‘After launching a mere nine days ago, Moltbook — a social network for AI only — has grown substantially. As of Friday, the website claims it has over 1.7 million AI agents, over 16,000 “submolt” communities, and over ten million comments. In practice, it’s a cacophony of bots sharing inside jokes, complaining about their pesky human overlords, and even founding their own religions. Some more alarming posts even suggest they may be plotting against us.
That’s not all. As Liverpool Hope University professor of AI and spatial computing David Reid points out in a piece for The Conversation, some bots are going as far as to establish marketplaces for “digital drugs” that take the form of prompt injections — once again perfectly illustrating how well they’re echoing the desires and nefarious online activities of their flesh-and-blood counterparts…’ (Victor Tangermann via Futurism)
Some see this as strong evidence for the proximity of the singularity, but there seems to be evidence of considerable human mimicry of science fiction tropes.
While it’s chilling to see the federal government arrest journalists, it’s a good reminder that the press should be the enemy of the powerful. ( Hamilton Nolan)
‘If his renovation turned bulldozing of the East Wing is any indication, Trump’s “rebuilding” of the Kennedy Center is likely to be drastic — another chance for the president to reshape federal buildings to his own preferences; another chance for the man who plastered his name across shoddy gilded towers around the world to put his name on a new building. But it also gives Trump a chance to put his stamp on a world that he has plainly always loved, and which has, just as plainly, never really loved him back.…’ (Constance Grady via Vox)
‘Donald Trump’s lawyers and the federal government that he controls will try again this week to topple his 34 felony convictions from his New York criminal case by seeking to move the case to federal court.
In its latest effort, Trump’s Justice Department will be continuing its practice of trying to erase his criminal record — and the history that led to it — while prosecuting his enemies under the same charges leveled against him and his supporters.…’ (Adam Klasfeld via All Rise)
‘As tensions between Washington and Tehran remain high, China’s role is under growing scrutiny. How far would Beijing go to support Iran — and where are the limits if conflict broke out with the US?…’ (via DW In Focus)
‘Primordial black holes could rewrite our understanding of dark matter and the early universe. A record-breaking detection at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has some physicists wondering if we just spotted one… …The day after the KM3NET collaboration announced the detection , the physicist David Kaiser walked into a room full of his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bold proposition: What if the monster neutrino came from an exploding primordial black hole? Such black holes “could form before there were even atoms, let alone stars,” said Kaiser, who has been heavily involved in the hunt for these hypothetical objects.’ (By Jonathan O’Callaghan via Quanta Magazine)
‘(Watching) Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi appear on Fox News after Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis: “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” she asked, incredulously. “These protesters — would you know how to walk out on the street and buy a gas mask, right now? Think about that.”
As a longtime gas mask user, I can sympathize. There isn’t a lot of reliable information out there about how to buy a gas mask, especially for the specific purpose of living under state repression. But hopefully after reading this guide you’ll feel equipped to make an educated decision.…’ (Sarah Jeong via The Verge)
Smart people are not especially prone to confusing correlation with causation because they are careless with evidence. They fall into the trap for a more interesting reason: the human mind is exquisitely tuned to detect patterns and to explain them. When two variables move together in a stable way, the brain does not experience this as a neutral observation. It experiences it as a problem demanding resolution. Something must be connecting these things. Once that question arises, the mind does what it always does—it supplies an answer.
Causal explanations are particularly seductive because they take the form of stories. A correlation merely states that two things vary together; a causal account explains why. The latter feels complete in a way the former does not. Humans are not comfortable leaving relationships unexplained, and “they just co-occur” rarely feels like a satisfying endpoint. As a result, the presence of a correlation creates a vacuum that narrative quickly fills, often long before alternative explanations have been seriously considered.
One reason this happens so reliably is that confounding variables are usually invisible. When people see two associated variables, they instinctively reason as if those variables exist in isolation. The possibility that both are being driven by a third factor—season, population size, illness severity, socioeconomic context—does not announce itself. It has to be actively sought. Without deliberate effort, the mind defaults to a simple two-variable world, even when reality is plainly more complicated.
Reverse causation adds another layer of difficulty. The idea that A causes B fits comfortably with everyday intuition. The idea that B might be causing A, or that both might be downstream effects of something else entirely, is cognitively awkward. It requires slowing down and suspending the initial narrative impulse. In practice, many causal claims rest not on evidence that the proposed direction is correct, but on the fact that it feels natural.
Large datasets and clean statistical results can amplify the problem. A strong correlation, a smooth graph, or a strikingly small p-value creates an aura of authority. The rigor of the mathematics is quietly misattributed to the interpretation. Statistical strength begins to stand in for causal proof, even though the two are conceptually unrelated. The result is an overconfidence that is not warranted by the data.
Ironically, expertise does not reliably protect against this error and can sometimes worsen it. Experts are better at inventing mechanisms, and once a plausible mechanism can be imagined, skepticism often relaxes. The story sounds right, fits existing knowledge, and aligns with professional intuitions. At that point, the correlation no longer feels like a hypothesis-generating observation; it feels like confirmation, even if the proposed mechanism has never been directly tested.
This is why causal claims built on correlation should trigger disciplined discomfort rather than immediate assent. A genuine causal relationship requires more than co-movement. It requires a defensible mechanism, serious attention to confounders, careful consideration of directionality, and evidence that the relationship persists when baseline risk or severity is accounted for. It also requires remembering that group-level associations often fail when projected onto individuals.
Correlation is not meaningless. It is often the first sign that something interesting is happening. But it answers only a narrow question: do these variables change together? The harder question—what, if anything, is causing what—lies downstream. Confusing the two is not a rookie mistake. It is a deeply human one.
When I read Michael Shermer’s recent Washington Post piece on UFOs—now more carefully labeled unidentified anomalous phenomena—I found myself less drawn to the familiar question—are these extraterrestrial?—than to a more interesting one: why does uncertainty in this domain exert such gravitational pull on the modern imagination?
Unidentified phenomena, in the literal sense, are unremarkable. Every mature scientific field has residual anomalies—observations that resist immediate classification because the data are partial, the instruments imperfect, or the conceptual framework still evolving. Aviation and sensor-rich environments are no exception. What is distinctive here is not the existence of unexplained sightings, but the interpretive haste that often follows.
In clinical work, one becomes attuned to the difference between experience and explanation. People encounter events—internal or external—that feel discontinuous with their prior understanding of the world. The event itself may be brief and ambiguous; what endures is the pressure to make it intelligible. Meaning-making is not optional. It is constitutive of human cognition.
UAPs sit at an uncomfortable intersection of perception, technology, and ontology. They are often described under conditions that privilege ambiguity: high speed, unusual vantage points, degraded sensory input, unfamiliar contexts. In such circumstances, the mind reliably does what it has always done—infers agency, intention, or design. This tendency is not pathological. It is an evolved bias toward coherence.
As compelling as Fox Mulder’s “I Want to Believe” is, what Shermer insists upon—quietly but firmly—is epistemic restraint. Most cases dissolve into prosaic explanations when examined carefully. A smaller subset remains unresolved, not because it points clearly toward new physics or nonhuman intelligence, but because the evidentiary chain is weak. From a scientific standpoint, “unexplained” is not a conclusion; it is a placeholder.
What complicates matters is that extraterrestrial explanations do more than explain. They situate. They place human affairs within a broader cosmological narrative at a time when many traditional sources of orientation—religious, institutional, even scientific—feel unstable or distrusted. In that sense, contemporary UFO discourse functions less as hypothesis-testing and more as symbolic reasoning.
This is where psychiatric perspective becomes useful, not as debunking but as contextualization. Humans tolerate uncertainty poorly when it touches existential questions. We are more comfortable with speculative answers than with suspended judgment. The danger lies not in curiosity, but in prematurely converting ambiguity into belief—mistaking narrative closure for understanding.
None of this forecloses the possibility of future discovery. It simply insists on proportionality. Claims that would radically revise our understanding of physics, biology, and history demand correspondingly robust evidence. At present, that threshold has not been met.
What seems most valuable, then, is a capacity increasingly in short supply: the ability to remain intellectually open without being epistemically promiscuous; to acknowledge the limits of current knowledge without filling the gap with certainty; to say, without embarrassment, we do not yet know.
In that sense, UFOs may be less a problem for astrophysics than for intellectual temperament. They test whether we can live with unanswered questions—whether mystery must always be resolved, or whether it can sometimes be allowed to remain, provisionally, unexplained.
‘Greenlanders intervened to stop a man who tried to raise a US flag in Nuuk, with Denmark’s TV2 news showing video of the incident in the island’s capital city. As translated by Google:
A person attempted to raise the American flag in Nuuk on Wednesday, the Greenland Police confirmed to TV 2. The police are still investigating the case, and everything went smoothly as people at the scene stopped the perpetrator before he could raise the flag. Officers only arrived at the scene, which was at a cultural center in Nuuk, later.…’ (Rob Beschizza via Boing Boing)
‘Tim Cook has been giving Apple a bad look for some time. The typically charming CEO’s public image as an intelligent, well-spoken leader who keeps customers front of mind and never misses a chance to speak out for representation has taken a beating. Bowing to the wishes of the Chinese government by disallowing VPNs in the App Store that serves China.
Not a dreamer like his predecessor, Cook is a managerial genius who can squeeze money out of a supply chain like no one else. But to keep that profit from dipping in these bat-shit crazy times, he’s had to do a few things that I’m hoping keep him awake at night.
At a press event where Cook and his new bestie, President Trump, announced a $100 million investment in American manufacturing, he gave Trump a 24-karat gold iPad stand and the tablet to go with it. He’s on the list of donors to the construction of the Epstein Memorial Ballroom, complicit in the destruction of a historic property owned by the American people. And, driving his head even further up the Orangefarbenführer’s ample ass, he attended the premiere of the Melania Trump documentary.…’ (Séamus Bellamy via Boing Boingi)
‘White House officials sought to rapidly distance Donald Trump and top officials from their initial portrayals of the man fatally shot by federal officials in Minnesota as a gunman, as they faced a deepening backlash after video footage was widely seen to undercut their assertions.
The move came as Trump advisers appeared to realize that the caustic portrayals of the man, Alex Pretti, who was reportedly licensed to carry a gun, had turned the killing into an even larger political liability for the president.
Over the weekend, senior administration officials including Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, called the victim “a domestic terrorist who tried to assassinate law enforcement”, while Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, accused him of perpetrating “the definition of domestic terrorism”.
The characterizations were undercut by video footage that showed Pretti was shot in the back roughly 10 times after being tackled to the ground by a group of US border patrol agents whom he had been filming, and disarmed of his gun.…’ ( via The Guardian)
‘The European Union has launched a wide-reaching investigation into Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot on X following global outrage over its ability to generate sexually explicit images, including of children.
The scandal erupted at the end of last year when the AI chatbot churned out a barrage of digitally undressed images of women and children in response to requests from users.…’ (via CNN)
‘To cover the Republican Party in the age of President Donald Trump requires a grasp of cryptology.
Because of the unflinching personal loyalty he demands, and punishment he’ll administer on public dissenters, leading GOP officials speak in rhetorical code.…’ (via POLITICO)
‘In the history of human parenting, childcare has often been treated as maternal by default, paternal by exception. When mothers do it, it’s duty. When fathers do it, it’s help. A father’s love has been tallied as optional in the child’s development.
But decades of research have begun to redraw this map: Scientists are finding that consistent paternal care can help to shape everything from language development and social competence to academic persistence and mental health. And the benefits of dad’s involvement aren’t interchangeable with the ones kids get from mom.
And now, a new study shows a father’s early emotional engagement with his infant may stabilize the whole family system in ways that quietly protect a child’s long-term physical health. The scientists, from Penn State College of Health and Human Development, published their findings in Health Psychology. …’ (Kristen French via Nautilus)
‘The Globe & Mail uncovered that the Canadian military has been modeling what an American invasion might look like… So, what are the broad strokes of Canada stopping a southern invasion? We can’t. Within hours, American military superiority would crush any resistance.
However, occupying Canada becomes the real problem. Canada is massive. No nation has the numbers to dominate and hold it sustainably. Even if the government surrendered, military and civilian resistance could disappear into the wilderness or rural areas where hunting them down would prove difficult. The CAF model suggests Canadian forces could continue fighting using ‘unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics.’ Sound familiar? Think Taliban in Afghanistan or Vietcong in the 1960s and 1970s. Hit-and-run attacks, IEDs, blending into the civilian population—tactics that proved nightmarish to counter. You can’t measure success or predict where the next ambush comes from.
With NATO countries sending troops to Greenland to counter Trump’s annexation threats, other formerly friendly nations are reconsidering what to do if America comes knocking.…’ (Séamus Bellamy via Boing Boing)
Here’s a cool website you should check out if you love astronomy and want to see what the Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes are looking at right now (or close enough). “Space Telescope Live“ is a web application originally developed in 2016 for Hubble updates. It now includes images from both telescopes, giving us access to their past, current, and upcoming observations.…’ (Jennifer Sandlin via Boing Boing)
Interview with Henry Farrell, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, who recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Europe Has a Bazooka. Time to Use It:”
‘…Clearly there has been some real sense that there is a coalition which is engaging against this measure, and that coalition is sufficiently credible that the United States has something to worry about… It really does look like a climbdown disguised as a declaration of enormous victory. The fact that this is happening through Rutte and through NATO rather than, for example, through direct negotiations with Denmark, suggests that what is going to happen is that we’re going to get some kind of agreement on security in the Arctic region, which everybody is more or less on the same page on and Trump will declare this a glorious victory over Greenland and then move on.…’ (via Vox)
‘Across Minnesota, ICE continues to stop, harass, and detain people regardless of their citizenship status. Normal life in Minnesota has been interrupted, as schools have been forced to close or go virtual, as people live in fear of leaving their homes or going to work. Minnesotans are organized and activated to respond to this violence. But they need our help.
This directory of places to donate to all comes from activists on the ground, plugged into the situation. Everything is vetted, with the exception of individual GoFundMes (not everyone is in our networks, and we don’t want to pick and choose who is worthy of help.)…’ ( via
‘trump prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants, including some here legally, to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him.
So, a question: What do you call this form of government? Authoritarian? Kleptocratic? Totalitarian? Fascist?…’ (Marc Novicoff via The Atlantic)
Whatever you call it, he only governs you if you let him.
‘I have a proposal to make: 2026 should be the year that you spend more time doing what you want. The new year should be the moment we commit to dedicating more of our finite hours on the planet to things we genuinely, deeply enjoy doing – to the activities that seize our interest, and that make us feel vibrantly alive. This should be the year you stop trying so hard to turn yourself into a better person, and focus instead on actually leading a more absorbing life. …’ (Oliver Burkeman via
‘Where does one start in summarizing such a speech? The straightforward racism? The economic illiteracy? The determination to alienate allies? The many moments where the president said things that were blatantly, provably false? And because he rambled through more than an hour, he covered a lot of ground. …’ (David A. Graham via The Atlantic)
Eclectic Guitarist With the Ensemble Oregon Dies at 85
‘A composer and pianist as well, he was a prolific recording artist who integrated jazz, classical and world music traditions in a career that spanned seven decades.…’ (via New York Times)
Towner’s work with the Paul Winter Consort, Oregon, and a variety of collaborations with other ECM artists has thrilled and comforted me for decades. He will be missed.
‘Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom in a joint statement: “We will continue to stand united and coordinated in our response. We are committed to upholding our sovereignty.” I remember when this is how the world would respond to Russia and China’s actions, not the United States’.…’ (via Birchtree)
‘Nebraska congressman Don Bacon told the Omaha World-Herald: “If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency. And he needs to know: the off-ramp is realizing Republicans aren’t going to tolerate this and he’s going to have to back off. He hates being told no, but in this case, I think Republicans need to be firm.” …’ (Chris Stein via The Guardian)
‘These designers found a clever way to keep the president’s mug off their America the Beautiful entry passes…In the wake of the DOI’s new sticker ban, she adapted the design to guarantee that users won’t be penalized. Instead of adding the sticker directly to their passes, customers can now purchase a $2 plastic card sleeve from Dirt Roads Project to keep their cards completely unaltered while still obscuring the president’s face.’ (via Fast Company)
””I was tackled by ice agents and surrounded by about 50 border police. Just for taking photos. I tossed my camera to another Photographer to make sure it wouldn’t be confiscated.…’ (John Abernathy via Instagram)
‘On Friday, Russia attacked Lviv, a major Ukrainian city near the Polish border, using Oreshnik: an intermediate-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missile. Security-camera footage captured brief flashes in the sky, the missile’s multiple warheads entering the atmosphere at 10 times the speed of sound, and then—impact. The missile that struck Lviv did not carry a nuclear payload, but it did carry a political one, at a moment when Vladimir Putin appears to be cornered and Donald Trump is more belligerent than ever.…’ (Andrew Ryvkin via The Atlantic)
‘Verizon is offering customers a $20 account credit following a massive outage that brought down service across the US on Wednesday. In an update on X, Verizon says you’ll receive a text message when the credit is available, which you can redeem by logging into the myVerizon app and accepting it.…’ (Emma Roth via The Verge)
‘Today, Donald Trump announced that he is considering using the Insurrection Act to send the U.S. military to Minneapolis if state officials do not quell anti-ICE protests there. Deploying federal troops on American soil against the objections of state and local officials is an extreme measure––and seems likelier to inflame than to extinguish unrest there, given that needlessly provocative actions by ICE officers helped create conditions on the ground. Yet the president seems eager to suppress the actions of people he calls “professional agitators and insurrectionists.” For months, members of his administration have laid the rhetorical groundwork for a martial crackdown.…’ (Conor Friedersdorf via The Atlantic)
‘Attend a public event in Canada and you will likely hear it open with a land acknowledgment. In the city of Vancouver, for example, the script might read:
“This place is the unceded and ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, and has been stewarded by them since time immemorial.”
I’ve been present for many of these recitations, which are common in liberal areas of the United States too. They are usually received by their audiences as a Christian invocation might once have been: a socially required ritual in which only some believe, but at which it would be rude to scoff. After all, what harm does it do?
In the past few months, Canadians have learned that these well-meaning pronouncements are not, in fact, harmless. Far from it. Canadian courts are reinterpreting these rote confessions of historical guilt as legally enforceable admissions of wrongful possession.…’ (David Frum via The Atlantic)
Jason Weisberger, via Boing Boing, explains that pedestrian crossing buttons aren’t a scam, but they’re widely misunderstood. They don’t make the light change faster or reduce waiting time. Their real function is simpler: they tell the traffic system that a pedestrian is present and should be included in the signal cycle. A clear technical walkthrough of the wiring and logic shows that the buttons matter, just not in the way most people assume—they register demand, not impatience. (
‘The “Make Everything OK” button is a website containing nothing but a single button. Press it, and after a moment of processing, you’re informed: “Everything is OK now. If everything is still not OK, try checking your settings of perception of objective reality.”…’ (Popkin via Boing Boing)
‘Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon is laying the groundwork for a 2028 run for president, two people familiar with his thinking tell Axios.
Why it matters: The MAGA godfather isn’t serious about becoming president — that’s not the point. Instead, he’s told allies he wants to shape the debate and pressure Republican candidates to embrace an “America First” agenda — including a non-interventionist foreign policy, economic populism and opposition to Big Tech.…’ (Alex Isenstadt viaAxios)
‘Grateful Dead co-founding guitarist Bob Weir has died at age 78. Weir’s death was confirmed through a statement issued by his family on the guitarist’s social feeds.
Bobby Weir succumbed to underlying lung issues after a courageous battle with cancer. Weir was diagnosed with cancer last July and began treatment shortly after taking the stage for what would be his final shows: Dead & Company’s concerts at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco August 1 – 3, 2025 celebrating 60 years of Grateful Dead music.…’ (Andy Kahn via Jambase)
‘History suggests that regimes collapse not from single failures but from a fatal confluence of stressors. One of us, Jack, has written at length about the five specific conditions necessary for a revolution to succeed: a fiscal crisis, divided elites, a diverse oppositional coalition, a convincing narrative of resistance, and a favorable international environment. This winter, for the first time since 1979, Iran checks nearly all five boxes.…’ (Karim Sadjadpour and Jack A. Goldstone viaThe Atlantic)
Is the Trump regime coming close to checking these boxes too? (One can hope.)
Donald Trump’s renewed talk of seizing Greenland—once dismissed as bluster—is now being taken seriously after the “gunboat diplomacy” in Venezuela. Because Greenland is part of Denmark, a NATO member, any U.S. attempt to annex or coerce it would amount to an attack on an ally and could effectively collapse NATO. European leaders are pushing back forcefully, framing the issue as a test of whether postwar norms, alliance commitments, and international law still restrain great-power ambition.(Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Jonathan Lemire via The Atlantic)
‘If Trump understood what he was saying, he was violating all concepts of checks-and-balances. If he didn’t understand, he is incapacitated.
It’s bad enough for Trump to disrupt the entire world trading system, at his whim, with one-man decisions to raise and lower tariffs. (As the Supreme Court might eventually get around to recognizing.) What he announced today is one man (plus his enablers) violating the Constitution of 1787, the War Powers Act of 1973, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, all of which require a president to involve the Congress in war-and-peace decisions. …’ (James Fallows via James Fallows)
‘…(T)here’s lots of chest pounding and grand standing from various politicians and the big names have all issued statements which seem mostly upset that they weren’t notified ahead of time. There’s also a lot of people proclaiming this is illegal which is an almost laughable claim at this point because first of all, what is the basis for what is legal or isn’t?
The US only cites international law when it benefits, and ignores it (or outright rejects it) when they or their allies are implicated. If international law mattered to the US, Netanyahu wouldn’t be basking in the afterglow of his 5th US visit since Trump was reelected and ICC Judge Kimberly Prost would still be able to ask her Amazon Echo to turn on the livingroom lights.
Even federally the claim is a joke because thanks to 2001’s AUMF a president has an almost blank check to order strikes without telling anyone as long as they slap “terrorism” on the after the fact justification.
And this isn’t a left/right thing either, the 2001 joint resolution passed almost unanimously (only one vote against) and since then both D and R presidents have taken full advantage of it for any number of different actions.
…So if you see a politician saying this action is illegal check to see if they’ve called for the AUMF to be repealed or if they were in office then how they voted at the time. Because the sad fact is most US politicians are very much opposed to many policies when their opponents use them, but very much in favor of those same policies when they get to use them. …’ ( via SEAN BONNER)
‘In a landmark study, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WashU) have shown for the first time that stimulant medications mainly act on the brain’s reward and wakefulness centers, rather than on its attention circuitry. This upends traditional thought on how drugs like Adderall and Ritalin work.…’ (via New Atlas)
‘A massive global genetics study is reshaping how we understand mental illness—and why diagnoses so often pile up. By analyzing genetic data from more than six million people, researchers uncovered deep genetic connections across 14 psychiatric conditions, showing that many disorders share common biological roots. Instead of existing in isolation, these conditions fall into five overlapping families, helping explain why depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders so frequently occur together.…’ (via ScienceDaily)
Findings such as these resonate strongly with the stance of diagnostic skepticism that I have held throughout my career as a clinical and academic psychiatrist. Psychiatry has repeatedly taught us that its categories are provisional tools rather than natural kinds, and that our confidence in them often outpaces the solidity of the underlying science. The recurrent experience of patients accumulating diagnoses over time—sometimes within a single hospitalization, sometimes across decades—has always suggested that something more fundamental than discrete disease entities is at work.
Historically, this tension is not new. Psychiatric classification has oscillated for more than a century between lumping and splitting. At certain moments, the field has favored broad, integrative constructs—neurosis, psychosis, affective illness—emphasizing shared phenomenology and presumed common mechanisms. At other times, it has moved toward increasingly fine-grained distinctions, carving syndromes into narrower subtypes in the hope of diagnostic precision, prognostic clarity, and targeted treatment. Each swing has been accompanied by a sense that the current framework finally “gets it right,” only to be followed by revision as anomalies accumulate.
Large-scale genetic findings like these offer a compelling biological explanation for why neither extreme has ever fully succeeded. If multiple psychiatric syndromes share substantial genetic architecture, then comorbidity is not an artifact of poor interviewing or diagnostic sloppiness, but an expected consequence of overlapping vulnerability systems expressing themselves differently across development, context, and stress. The apparent neatness of our diagnostic manuals may therefore obscure a far messier underlying reality.
Importantly, this does not invalidate diagnosis itself, nor does it imply that all conditions should be collapsed into a single undifferentiated category. Lumping and splitting are not opposing dogmas so much as complementary lenses. Lumping has value when the goal is to understand shared mechanisms, reduce artificial boundaries, recognize common trajectories, and avoid reifying distinctions that lack biological or clinical robustness. Splitting, by contrast, becomes indispensable when precise phenomenology matters—when predicting course, tailoring treatment, communicating risk, or conducting focused research on well-defined clinical problems.
In practice, good psychiatry has always involved knowing when to do each. A clinician may need to lump in order to see the larger pattern of vulnerability, suffering, and adaptation in a patient’s life, while simultaneously splitting enough to recognize specific syndromes that carry distinct risks or treatment implications. The emerging genetic evidence does not demand allegiance to one approach over the other; rather, it reinforces the wisdom of holding our categories lightly, using them pragmatically, and remaining open to revision as our understanding deepens.
Seen this way, the enduring oscillation between lumping and splitting is not a failure of the field, but a reflection of the complexity of the phenomena it seeks to describe.
‘The shift in this scenario is from today’s highly polarized but still shared world — where groups interpret events differently — to a fractured reality in which the events themselves cannot be verified, origins cannot be traced, and no authoritative source can prove what is real. Instead of opposing political narratives and conspiracy theories, society enters a state of psychosocial freefall where AI creates a series of parallel realities. It will mark a transition not from disagreement to deeper disagreement, but from disagreement to the collapse of a shared reality altogether.…’ (via POLITICO)
‘By going around Congress, the president is showing contempt for the will of the public… The probable illegality of Trump’s actions does not foreclose the possibility that his approach will improve life for Venezuelans. Like too many world leaders, Maduro is a brutal thug, and opposition figures have good reason to insist he isn’t the country’s legitimate leader. I hope and pray his ouster yields peace and prosperity, not blood-soaked anarchy or years of grinding factional violence.…’ (Conor Friedersdorf via The Atlantic)
New York Times Editorial: Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise
‘If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse.…’ (via New York Times)
‘“Wow, she hates him more than I even imagined. They never look at each other. They never touch each other. I guess he didn’t pay her enough for the night.”…’ (Patrick Penrose via TVovermind)
‘Trump’s ego, Rob Dannenberg argues, is a vulnerability that Putin knows how to exploit —and Trump, the CIA veteran fears, is “incredibly naïve” where the Russian president is concerned.
Danneberg told the iPaper, “Putin looks at Trump and sees a weak guy, vain, with huge ego…. He’s being manipulated in the way that a good case officer like Putin would manipulate this guy. He’s not monogamous, he’s greedy, he’s fascinated by gold — all these are things that, if I were a case officer, I would be leveraging to get this guy to do what I want him to do. When that happens to align with Trump’s ambition to get a Nobel Peace Prize, so much the easier, right? You’re pushing on an open door.”…’ (Alex Henderson via Alternet.org)
This is my annual New Year’s post, a longstanding tradition here at FmH. Please let me know if you come across any broken links.
A while ago, I came across a Boston Globe article from January 1st that compiled various folkloric beliefs about what to do, eat, and avoid on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year ahead. I’ve regretted not clipping and saving it ever since—though I tend to think about it around this time every year (grin). As a parent now, I’m especially interested in traditions that go beyond the typical New Year’s activities like binge drinking, watching bowl games, and making resolutions.
A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point. It focuses on food-related traditions, which is interesting because, unlike most major holidays, New Year’s Day in 21st-century America doesn’t seem to revolve much around special foods (except, perhaps, the inevitable New Year’s resolution to lose weight). But…
