Category: 2025

curated news excerpts & citations

Rook T. Winchester: 2,300 miles

America is loud right now. Not productive loud. Leaf-blower-at-6-a.m. loud. Everyone has a microphone, nobody has patience, and the national posture is a permanent forward lean toward the next outrage. Into this circus walked a dozen Buddhist monks who decided the correct response was to shut up and start walking.

Not marching. Not rallying. Walking. Two thousand three hundred miles of it, from Fort Worth, Texas, to the marble pressure cooker known as the United States Capitol.
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On November 19, a truck struck the pilot vehicle escorting the group in Texas. The impact pushed the vehicle into the monks. Two were seriously injured. One monk lost his leg.
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They paused. They issued a statement asking for prayers. They expressed gratitude. And they kept going.
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Reuters: How Trump’s Venezuela embargo could put Taiwan at risk

• Move pressures Maduro but risks weakening US credibility in blockade scenario around Taiwan
• Experts say Beijing would seek to prevent US from building coalition to oppose a Taiwan blockade
• Taiwan would see a full Chinese naval encirclement as act of war

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TNR: The Americans Who Saw All This Coming—but Were Ignored and Maligned

Call them the Cassandras: the people—mostly not white and male—who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they “alarmists,” and how did “anti-alarmism” become cool?

… They weren’t time travelers but saw what was coming clearly enough. They called Trump’s movement fascist from the very start, and often predicted specific milestones of our democratic decline well in advance. They were convinced they were right—and often beside themselves with worry. Accordingly, they did everything they could to get others to listen.

But not enough people did, and many attacked them—even as events proved them right, again and again. …
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Conversation: From record warming to rusting rivers, 2025 Arctic Report Card shows a region transforming faster than expected

The Arctic is transforming faster and with more far-reaching consequences than scientists expected just 20 years ago, when the first Arctic Report Card assessed the state of Earth’s far northern environment.

The snow season is dramatically shorter today, sea ice is thinning and melting earlier, and wildfire seasons are getting worse. Increasing ocean heat is reshaping ecosystems as non-Arctic marine species move northward. Thawing permafrost is releasing iron and other minerals into rivers, which degrades drinking water. And extreme storms fueled by warming seas are putting communities at risk.
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James Eagle: Why the most accurate AI models are still lying

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These twin charts highlight a significant compromise in AI development. Gemini 3 Preview is incredibly capable and answers more questions correctly than its competitors. However, the second chart shows it possesses an 88% hallucination rate. This metric tracks how often the model fabricates an answer rather than admitting ignorance. Essentially, the model has been trained to be helpful above all else, which means it will confidently guess rather than decline a request it does not understand.
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404 Media: How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE’s Facial Recognition Tech

Jesus Gutiérrez told immigration agents he was a U.S. citizen. Only after they scanned his face, did the agents let him go.
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“This is a flagrant violation of rights and incompatible with a free society,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “Immigration agents have no business scanning our faces with this glitchy, privacy-destroying technology—especially after often stopping people based on nothing more than the color of their skin or the neighborhood they live in.”
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Dean Obeidallah: Donald Trump is officially a PINO: a President in Name Only

… Trump has something else weighing him down that other second term Presidents didn’t have, namely extreme mental and physical decline. (Even Ronald Reagan didn’t show dementia signs 11 months into his second term like Trump.)

That is why Trump is increasingly becoming nothing more than a figurehead. Or more accurately, a PINO: a President in Name Only. And this very concerning for our nation because we don’t know who is actually making decisions!
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Rebecca Solnit: The Paris climate treaty changed the world. Here’s how

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Paris climate treaty, one of the landmark days in climate-action history. Attending the conference as a journalist, I watched and listened and wondered whether 194 countries could ever agree on anything at all, and the night before they did, people who I thought were more sophisticated than me assured me they couldn’t. Then they did. There are a lot of ways to tell the story of what it means and where we are now, but any version of it needs respect for the complexities, because there are a lot of latitudes between the poles of total victory and total defeat.
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Miles Taylor: The president just published a “blacklist” of reporters — one giant leap toward autocracy.

Last night, the White House published a video of a laughing Santa Claus entering a home and unfurling a parchment scroll. The music and vibe are festive. But the prop Santa holds is not. It’s a list of journalists and media outlets singled out by the President of the United States — a blacklist.

Throughout history, regimes on the march toward autocracy have relied on ritual humiliation of the press long before they relied on prisons. The press is criticized and branded as an “enemy of the people.” Trump has long done that, and now he’s taking the next step. He’s naming the specific reporters and outlets he deems disloyal, knowing that as long as a large portion of the public accepts that framing, everything that follows becomes easier.
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Fast Company: ‘A willingness to lie’: Why the EPA’s latest Trump-era change is especially concerning

Human activity is driving climate change; that’s a fact that more than 99.9% of scientific papers agree on.

But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has quietly removed that information from a web page explaining climate change’s causes.

It’s yet another move by the Trump administration that downplays climate science. Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax,” repealed numerous climate laws, and has bolstered the use of fossil fuels, the burning of which are the main cause of rising heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions.

[current EPA “Causes of Climate Change”
October EPA “Causes of Climate Change”]
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