This week San Diego will begin its program of defunding and closing more than 30 public toilets. many of these are near beaches and parks, effectively making public space inaccessible to many people who live here and, unlike our mayor and council, participate in our community

‘Gavin Newsom doesn’t pretend that frolicking with the Gettys awakened in him an early sensitivity to inequality or the unfairness of the American tax code. He seems to have been a personable jock, taking luxury as it came.’ @deborahfriedell.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Deborah Friedell · ‘Gavin, Gavin, we love you!’: Will Newsom run?

Gavin Newsom describes himself as an ‘accidental politician’. The San Francisco mayor Willie Brown anointed him as...

lrb.co.uk

We all collectively need to learn how to tell better stories about the future we want - this excellent essay helps. I grew with a similar experience to his of believing the American exceptionalism story that has submerged stories underneath that are ugly when you scratch the surface

A.R. Moxon@juliusgoat.bsky.social · last mo.

Submerged stories allowing fascist supremacy to stay popular even when its outcomes are disreputable, submerged stories that allow radical systemic change to stay disreputable even when that is what is both desired and needed, and how to tell the difference. www.the-reframe.com/the-submerge...

AI: virtually no subject provokes such vitriol in my communities. I can grant the haters many of its harms, but their solutions leave much to be desired. I fear for the future even as I wonder at the future we are living. And so, dear hater, I must write: shaping.systems/blog/ai-suck...

"All the agents who had been to Minnesota told me they never wanted to go back, for any reason."

Notes From an ICE Chaser

I followed Border Patrol agents from Illinois to North Carolina to Minnesota. To my surprise, they loved my coverage.

thenation.com

Scoop: Central Command is getting reports that military personnel are being targeted using commercially available location data. Few details available, but it’s a sign that the tech industry’s advertising-surveillance complex is having consequences on the battlefield. www.reuters.com/business/med...

Exclusive: Pentagon says US military personnel are reportedly being targeted using location data

It's an illustration of how the global surveillance ‌economy is shaping the battlefield.

reuters.com

Absolute 🔥 from my rabbi @ravmike.bsky.social in the San Diego Union Tribune, on how Jews who see Muslims as enemies or would rather oppose Ethnic Studies “because antisemitism” need to recognize the real threat is from white supremacy! #GiftArticle www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/05/24/o...

Opinion: White supremacist hate is coming for us all

We are safest when all marginalized groups stand in solidarity with each other.

sandiegouniontribune.com

One is not supposed to say that the Constitution is essentially vibes in polite company.

Survey of nearly 1,000 researchers whose grants were cut shows BIPOC, LGBTQ+ & women investigators faced higher odds of targeted equity-related terminations, raising concerns about long-term impacts on the U.S. scientific workforce @ucsandiego.bsky.social @rebeccafieldingmiller.com buff.ly/oYbM1sp

National Institutes of Health Grant Terminations Disproportionately Impact Minority Scientists

Survey of nearly 1,000 researchers whose grants were cut shows BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and women investigators faced higher odds of targeted equity-related terminations, raising concerns about long-term…

today.ucsd.edu

Important new study out today highlighting unequal impact of NIH grant terminations. “If the NIH is to serve the health of all Americans, it requires urgent course correction to ensure all scientific careers are sustained without targeted discrimination.” www.thelancet.com/journals/TLR...

Targeted termination of scientific grants and minoritised researcher status in a national survey: a cross sectional analysis

Grant terminations targeting health research for BIPOC and SGM communities have disproportionately targeted the careers of BIPOC, SGM, and female researchers and researchers from disadvantaged backgro...

thelancet.com

“Even in Trump’s second term, we understand that it’s selfish and small to not want to pay a tax, especially for something as noble as a library. So we have to say it’s not about a library; it’s about corruption! It’s not about taxes; it’s about *process*.”

We don’t debate the library tax

At the El Cerrito Democratic Club’s meeting to discuss Measure C, April 28, 2026.

oaklandreviewofbooks.org

Great story from @brooklynmarie.bsky.social for the Times of San Diego about this morning’s #JewsDemandIceOut protest at the courthouse in SD. @seanelorivera.bsky.social @ravmike.bsky.social 👏👏 timesofsandiego.com/immigration/...

Local Jewish groups join national protest against immigration enforcement

In San Diego, about 150 people attended, many carrying signs that said: "Jews Demand: ICE Out!" and "Stop Illegal Detention."

timesofsandiego.com

Michael Smolens: Ammar Campa-Najjar has a lot of explaining to do

Michael Smolens: Ammar Campa-Najjar has a lot of explaining to do

sandiegouniontribune.com

UCSD drags professors into discipline, suspension without pay threats accusing them of participating in encampment two years later. Professor and students see political prosecution and campus that punishment for learning and talking about Palestine www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/04/12/u...

UCSD professors face discipline in connection with 2024 pro-Palestinian protest encampment

One professor is looking at a possible suspension for two years without pay.

sandiegouniontribune.com

A fantastic piece by @nargesbajoghli.bsky.social, explaining where those viral Iranian AI lego videos came from, and the generational experiences informing them. Narges is one of the best placed researchers to explain the social worlds of Iranian media and digital life 1/2 nymag.com/intelligence...

In the Room With Iran’s Social Media Savants

The new generation of IRGC content creators is younger, quicker, and less afraid of the U.S.

nymag.com

"I'd like to visit the moon But I don't think I'd like to live there" www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIq8...

Sesame Street: I Don't Want to Live on the Moon

YouTube video by Sesame Street

youtube.com

Thomas Fuchs@thomasfuchs.at · 4mo ago

PSA: people will never permanently live on the Moon or Mars. Visit? Explore? Sure. Live? Categorically no. This isn’t because of technical limitations. It’s because our bodies break and die in low gravity & high radiation environments (and there’s a lot more reasons).

The Iran war is destroying US hegemony. Iran is using this moment to dismantle a key pillar of US power — the petrodollar. For the last 50 years nearly all oil has been purchased in dollars. But Iran and China are starting to kill off this pillar of the US empire. www.jphilll.com/the-war-agai...

The War Against Iran is Killing U.S. Hegemony

In this new iteration of my newsletter, I’m hoping that each dispatch connects at least somewhat to the one before, rather than being a semi-random string of emails connected to current events, but no...

jphilll.com

“Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people on Capitol Hill are refusing to stop it.”

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

theguardian.com

An in-depth report about Maven, the Pentagon's (huge) AI target identification system. 😬 www.wired.com/story/projec... "with the help of Maven’s computer vision the US went from being able to hit under a hundred targets a day to [...] a thousand. Now, [...] that number had risen fivefold to 5,000"

Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

In its early days, the AI initiative known as Project Maven had its fair share of skeptics at the Pentagon. Today, many of them are true believers.

wired.com

Is San Diego Setting Itself Up for Its Own Version of DOGE? - The Trump brand is tanking, and the polling for Republicans eyeing the midterms looks abysmal. open.substack.com/pub/dougport... #SanDiegoPolitics

Is San Diego Setting Itself Up for Its Own Version of DOGE?

“In essence, it’s Grover Norquist’s “starve the beast” and then drown it in a bathtub strategy—San Diego style.”

open.substack.com

How Palantir, not Anthropic, led US bombs to kill 175 civilians, mostly 7-12yo girls, in a school in Minab, Iran on Feb 28. How embedding automation - not LLMs in this case, just image processing and sensor fusion - in military workflows mutes human judgment, causes errors, & diverts accountability.

Kill Chain

On the automated bureaucratic machinery that killed 175 children

artificialbureaucracy.substack.com

The United States is finally, at last, at war with Iran. As long as there has been an Islamic Republic, the United States has fantasized about deposing it, and as long as there has been anything like an Iranian nuclear infrastructure, Israel has thought about bombing it

Clinging to a Scheme | Josef Burton

What is happening in Iran right now is the defining morbid system of an undead American empire.

thebaffler.com

US used Anthropic’s AI tool Claude, along with Maven Smart, another AI system built by Palantir, to choose 100s of targets in the opening day of airstrikes against Iran Claude + Maven Smart were used to suggest "hundreds of targets, issue precise location coordinates, and prioritize" those targets

Anthropic’s AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud

Anthropic’s AI tool Claude is playing a key role in the U.S. military’s campaign in Iran, amid a bitter fight with the Pentagon over the terms of its use in war.

washingtonpost.com

Newsom signed the law for mandatory age verification in Linux.

We don’t have to have unsupervised killer robots

We don’t have to have unsupervised killer robots

Employees at some companies with defense contracts feel betrayed.

buff.ly

was having a late night look through the court records in a case I've been following and stumbled across this www.daylightsandiego.org/ice-in-san-d...

ICE in San Diego is monitoring activists through Operation Road Flare

Court documents in a case against Jeane Wong revealed the existence of the operation. Written by Kate Morrissey, Edited by Lauren J. Mapp Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego i...

daylightsandiego.org

Lots in here, but an upshot I'll be thinking about for a bit: the internet as we know it was a product of a very specific time in world history, when the US was arguably at the peak of its power. This author argues that as that shifts, so, too, will the internet. www.techpolicy.press/internet...

Internet Protocols, Power and the Rebirth of the Border

Connectivity is political, and governance must accept that fact, writes Konstantinos Komaitis. The age of innocence is over, and the age of empires is emerging.

techpolicy.press

ai is a rhetorical technology. when it produces a list of permissible targets, its value is not producing targets but producing permission

ali alkhatib@ali-alkhatib.com · 6mo ago

the US military, for instance, is never going to sour on AI, because the idea of a system that makes up an endless list of legally permissive targets, & produces an endless stream of words to justify such engagements, will always, ALWAYS, be appealing to a warmongering, settler-colonial empire.