Asher Black
@asherblack.bsky.social
Novelist | Musician 🎸 | Karateka. Literary & cross-form fiction. Moral conflict, loyalty, & identity under pressure. Writes outdoors. Catskills ⇄ Brooklyn.
Mark Zuckerberg is a human disease, and Meta is the corporate expression of collusion with that disease. futurism.com/artificial-i...
Meta Operated a Secret Program That Paid Hundreds of Contractors to Pretend to Be Children and Teenagers While Having Disturbing Conversations With AI
Meta hired hundreds of contractors to pose as children and teenagers while asking chatbots like ChatGPT about suicide and even cannibalism.
futurism.com
There's never been a more deficient example of manhood, Americanism, or character than these clowns, their ilk, and the fraction of a man they worship. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...
Trump to mark US 250th anniversary with campaign-style rally on National Mall
Washington's annual July 4 celebration typically draws hundreds of thousands ​of people, who this year will have to contend with stepped-up security, possible thunderstorms and temperatures that could...
reuters.com
Strange how conservative men link a bidet to effeminacy. I'm industrial strength. Shine baby bottoms w. hose & brush, swab floors w. bucket & mop, wash hair w. a garden hose, & uplevel combat showers w. a handheld on full. Crack, sack, & pits, boys. Don't be afraid. It's water. Get used to it.
How can we expect people who spend all their time in air conditioning playing video games, using their phones, and watching Sports Center to take the rising global inferno seriously? Hell is made by not paying attention.
Yet more proof that money and intelligence aren't correlated. futurism.com/future-socie...
Mark Zuckerberg Is Selflessly Building Yet Another Horrible Product Nobody Asked For
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly directed his staff to create a smartphone app similar to prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi.
futurism.com
The inauthenticity of this image made my flesh crawl. musicandculture.substack.com/p/does-every...
Hence a vested economic interest in environmental science denial on the part of those that back institutions funding environmental science. You see that, despite the stakes, the game is rigged? www.sciencealert.com/worlds-riche...
World's Richest 10% Are Costing Earth Trillions, Study Finds
We've heard that the world's wealthiest 10 percent are disproportionately responsible for environmental damage.
sciencealert.com
For every 1 Epstein, there are 10,000 "photographers" who specialize in telling young girls with poor judgment they're beautiful and should get comfortable with their bodies, that it would make them more 'mature' and cosmopolitan, then luring them into their beds. I've met more than one.
The important thing is humans can't breathe under 11-feet of water. www.earth.com/news/doomsda...
Doomsday Glacier is about to lose its last natural brake
A crucial ice shelf holding back Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier may collapse within months, potentially speeding future sea level rise.
earth.com
This exalted patriotism, a “still-religious intuition that we have already arrived.” It has left festering injustices unattended, “dumb wars,” and a perpetual red-white-and-blue fireworks display that distracts from difficult truths about the country’s failings. www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...
The Two Kinds of American Patriotism
As our nation turns 250, it’s worth asking how best to love one’s country.
theatlantic.com
We still fail to grapple with the obvious: ANY large incarceration or mass concentration of people in detention is inherently inhumane. If we define inhumanity narrowly, we can line people up for a photoshoot. But that is to gloss over what is intrinsic to the structure. www.cnn.com/us/george-zo...
The founder of a private company accused of mistreating ICE detainees came to the US via Ellis Island in 1953 | CNN
When George Zoley, the founder of a private company that manages more than 20 federal immigration facilities testified before Congress in 2020, he spoke about how his own immigrant experience shaped h...
cnn.com
Looking past the human greatness applause: "Look what we've created" - for ourselves. "Look what we've achieved" - for ourselves. What have we created and achieved for the world? The early stages of a 6th global extinction. Man's greatness is overrated. spacedaily.com/d-earth-has-...
Earth has gone through five mass extinction events in its history, each wiping out the majority of life on the planet — and many biologists argue we are currently in the early stages of the sixth, cau...
The fossil record contains the unambiguous evidence of five separate occasions on which most of the species alive at the time died, in geological terms, very quickly. According to the Natural History ...
spacedaily.com
I'm looking forward to when AI can model, label, & identify inauthentic facial expressions. Maudlin, mawkish, simpering, artificial intimation, simulated "over it", performative profundity, bogus depth. What I see automatically will get validated objectively. www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Discri...
May the scrubbing begin. How embarrassing it must be to Trumpwash DC with superficial makeover glitz, tacking one's name on other men's work, taking credit for their achievements, underscoring one's own lack of potency, and then get your Donald slapped off. www.reuters.com/world/us-jud...
Trump says he will 'transfer' Kennedy Center to Congress after court setback
The judge ruled that the ​iconic Washington venue cannot be ​renamed without an act of Congress.
reuters.com
I refer to this time as reflection and do it every day. spacedaily.com/n-in-1938-th... "strongly associated with self-referential thought, the simulation of future scenarios, the integration of autobiographical memory, and the kind of loose associative thinking that underlies creative insight."
In 1938 the average American spent 47 minutes a day doing nothing — by 2026 that number had almost vanished, and researchers say that lost time was never idle, it was when the brain did its most impor...
In 1965, the earliest large-scale time-diary study ever conducted found that the average American between the ages of 25 and 35 spent the equivalent of nearly an hour each day doing nothing in particu...
spacedaily.com
When theater is the point, we are reasonable to ask if it's good theater or bad. Good theater brings something new, not clings to something old. It adds, not subtracts. www.cnn.com/2026/04/24/p...
Trump’s Justice Department is bringing back firing squads for federal executions | CNN Politics
The Justice Department announced Friday it is continuing to clear the way for expediting federal death-penalty cases, including by expanding the manners of execution to include death by firing squad.
cnn.com
If we follow fear instead of science, we return to a world where children routinely died shortly after birth, and mothers often followed soon after. Some lessons were paid for in blood and grief. Forgetting that does not make us wiser. www.propublica.org/article/more...
Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth
A lifesaving injection given at birth to prevent severe bleeding has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.
propublica.org
