curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’
James Eagle:
Orbital launches are crowding the skies
Space used to be easy to picture as a series of rare national moments. The launch calendar now looks more like an industrial schedule.
Global orbital launches rose sharply through the early 2020s and reached a record in 2025. The 2026 bar is only year to date, but it is already high enough to show that the boom has not faded.
-
Alex Reisner @ Atlantic: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project
As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800 when I checked two weeks ago, and are now out of stock. The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.
The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them.
The problem is not simply that AI is being deployed so widely or quickly. Other computer technologies have seen similarly massive growth without triggering such a large spike in electricity or a shortage of computer components: Video and music are now streamed around the globe, accounting for many terabytes of internet traffic daily; the smartphone boom required the manufacturing of billions of devices that are now transferring huge amounts of data; billions of household devices are also now part of the Internet of Things; and whole industries have moved their operations to cloud software, which is hosted not in the sky but in, yes, data centers.
The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. This is achieved partly through the careful engineering of computer systems that can efficiently handle more users who want to post photos, hail Ubers, or stream music.
With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. …
(Alex Reisner @ Atlantic more…)Evan Simon, Floodlight @ Texas Tribune: Planned Texas data centers could emit more greenhouse gases than many countries
-
Emily Atkin: Another stolen summer day
What are we still waiting to learn?
(Emily Atkin more…)Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist: Bad air, bad lettuce
(Katelyn Jetelina @ Your Local Epidemiologist more…)
-
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – July 17, 2026
Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.
As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”
…But the right-wing push to get rid of the modern state is deeply unpopular. And so Trump and his loyalists are embracing the idea that his opponents are in league with a historic throughline of left-wing revolutionaries.
Trump’s speech last night began with a completely fantastical vision of current conditions in the U.S. that has been widely debunked, point by point, by fact-checkers. But his portrait of a nation “doing really well” was a setup for his warning that the prosperity and success he touts are under direct threat by “leftists” both abroad and at home.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Decoding Fox News: A Fact Check of Trump’s Primetime Address From July 16, 2026
Eli Lake @ Free Press: The President Who Cried ‘Election Fraud’
John Amato @ Crooks&Liars: Texas Lt. Gov. Somehow Thinks Obama Was Secretly Running The Government For Biden
Broad Daylight News: The threat came before the proof
How uncertain database matches became threats against election officials—and an opening argument against trusting the 2026 vote
-
Lisa Needham:
The depressing sameness of ICE murdersThey’re killing people with impunity and lying to our faces about it.
(Lisa Needham more…)Al Jazeera: Plainclothes ICE agents manhandle man during arrest attempt
A video showing two plainclothes ICE agents tackling a man at the Las Vegas airport before walking away after bystanders intervened has reignited criticism of the agency’s arrest tactics.
Paul Krugman: His biggest lie wasn’t about elections
-
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Trump Stirs Up a Red Scare to Distract From His Iranian Quagmire
(Kareem Abdul-Jabbar more…)
-
David W. Blight @ NY Times: Why Trump Can’t Leave the Smithsonian Alone
On July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council issued a long-awaited and lengthy report …
Historians employ time-honored methods in the use of evidence but, by instinct and training, never accept determined “settled truths.” The Trump White House and its history police want us all to live in their chosen bubble, immune from instability or perceived disorder in their take on American greatness. They have a right to their bubble as individual citizens, but to impose it on the rest of us as policy egregiously breaks the public trust.
The report is not a document about history; it is the product of a racial and political ideology in search of a history that no longer bears scrutiny. People often joke about how Trumpism would like to return us to some version of the 1950s, when America supposedly was “great.” In this report, the administration has done just that. The report would prefer that nothing had ever happened since the ’50s to mar the White House’s polished, superficial, puerile version of America’s past.
(David W. Blight @ NY Times more…)
-
Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Sharon Lerner @ ProPublica: Trump Officials Want to Use Human Rights Aid to Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe
-
Joel Rose @ NPR: Bike lanes and speed cameras disappear from the DOT’s list of proven safety measures
-
Brian Schwartz, Richard Rubin, Josh Dawsey @ WSJ: Top Treasury Tax Official Ousted After Clashes With White House Over IRS Audits
Kenneth Kies warned that political officials risked breaching a law that limits who can influence tax enforcement
Al Jazeera: Top IRS lawyer to resign post amid disagreements with Trump administration
…
Kies had reportedly warned members of the Trump administration against giving orders to the IRS about tax audits.The Internal Revenue Code prohibits the president, vice president and any executive employees in their offices from requesting that the IRS “conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer”.
(Al Jazeera more…)
-
Jennifer Rubin: Blanche’s antagonists shine
-
Mona Charen @ National Memo: If Trump’s ‘Triumphal Arch’ Goes Up, The Wrecking Cranes Will Be Ready
… there’s another aspect of this grotesquery that deserves some attention: Namely, what is the triumph Trump is celebrating?
-
Matthew Guariglia @ EFF: Victory! Flock Ends Rollout of Audio “Distress Detection” of Human Voices
Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting
resources tracking the “Andes” hantavirus outbreak
Apocalypse Early Warning System
Al Jazeera Death toll and injuries live tracker
Mike Ludwig @ truthout: ICE Says 51 People Died in Custody Under Trump. Experts Say That’s an Undercount.
ICE Accountability Project
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, Ximena Bustillo, Jasmine Garsd @ NPR: Deaths of migrants in ICE custody hit record high under Trump
- July 13: Joan Sebastian Guerrero
- July 7: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo
- June 4: Mamuka Artmeladze
- April 16: Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt
- March 25: Jose Guadalupe Ramos-Solano
- March 16: Royer Perez-Jimenez
- March 14: Naseer Paktiawil
- February 25: Nurul Amin Shah Alam
April 1 – Jennifer Peltz and Jake Offenhartz @ AP: Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide - January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Suffering Under President Obama
NACDL Criminal Case Tracker
Texas Tribune: A Walk for Peace: photos of Fort Worth monks’ journey to Washington
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
Leave a Reply