Links - 14th February 2026 (2 - Glorifying Obesity)

Meme - "Omg I'm so glad they posted this! Because some people are meant to be wide and some small and IT'S OK love yourself Queens and Kings *Human skeleton and primate skeleton* EDIT: nvm I think that's a Gorilla BUT STILL LOVE YOURSELF"

Meme - "Imagine u fat and everytime u post a pic mfs calling u brave and treatin3 u like a retarded kid that ate soup with no floaties on"

Meme - Little Red Riding Hood: "Grandma, why do you have big teeth and hair all over your body?"
Wolf: "Please stop body shaming"

Meme - Stefan Brundage: "I noticed the Lizzo played 22 shows across the country over the course of two months. I am guessing she was on stage for 1.5-2 hours a night. If you've seen her live performances you'll note that she is dancing and singing and PLAYING THE FLUTE in all of these songs. This is an incredible athletic feat. Try running 7MPH in heels on a treadmill clearly singing the words to Truth Hurts without sounding out of breath. Stop halfway to play the flute for a minute. Now start running again and finish the song. Now do this for two hours. That's more or less what Lizzo trained to do night after night, and to make it look effortless and fun at the same time. She gives an incredible performance. I, deemed average BMI by Science, can barely dance through one Lizzo song, let alone keep it up for multiple hours. And I run 3 miles three times a week. So the next time you hear someone opine that Lizzo is normalizing obesity, know that this is simply more fat-phobia disguised as health concerns." - Melissa Florer-Bixler Pixie Usagi: "I understand what this post is saying But I just scrolled through a 1.5 hour lizzo performance and she doesn't run, she actually hardly even danced. She mostly stood in one place and paced around or was sitting. And she had tennis shoes on, not heels"
When you don't understand the difference between obesity and fitness
Comment: "22 shows in two months is not "night after night", it's about one show every three days."

Did "Body Positivity" Influencer Tess Holliday Scam Her Way To Popularity? - "From controversies to supposed eating disorders, it’s apparent that Holliday wouldn’t have the social status she has today were it not for a few calculated decisions on her part, all of which add up to nothing more than a scam. With an impressive follower count across social media platforms and, more importantly, an influential hold over millions of impressionable women, it’s time we examine how Tess Holliday scammed her way to popularity... one fan documented how Holliday's “body positivity” rhetoric really only applied – from her perspective, at least – to heavier women. The fan in question called out Holliday on Instagram for unfollowing her after the fan posted photos before and after weight loss. When the fan explained that she lost weight due to being diagnosed with prediabetes, Holliday reportedly declared that her post wasn’t indicative of true “body positivity” and that they were triggering to her... Accompanying her #effyourbeautystandards tag on social media, Holliday sold T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan. She announced that some of the proceeds would be donated to domestic violence organizations, as she and her mom are both survivors of DV. Though thousands of shirts were ordered, 140 were never delivered and only a confirmed donation of $1,000 was ever made. Holliday chalked up the issues to “usual business discrepancies,” but many of her followers weren’t convinced.  Holliday had been extremely vocal about her antipathy toward losing weight, but she changed her tune as soon as there was talk of a sponsorship on the table, or as she puts it, “showing people that fat girls work out.”  Holliday chose the payday instead of the opportunity to tout her tried and true health-at-every-size, self-love rhetoric within a magazine of international popularity... Holliday, who has since announced her recovery from anorexia nervosa (despite sharing none of the symptoms with the clinical diagnosis of the disease), continues to be successful, and because of the cultural popularity of “body positivity,” will likely remain so"
Tess Holliday/Munster is a shitty person, and here's why. - The More You Know post - "Holliday is also known as a horrible person to work with. Despite claiming to be against traditional beauty standards and standing up for body positivity, many photographers who have worked with her in the past have said that they will never choose to work with her again... Holliday's general stalking-behaviour of people speaking out about her says a lot about what kind of person she is. She knows she's doing wrong, and she knows that people can tear her down if they need to.  tl;dr, Don't hate Tess Holliday because she's fat, hate her because she's a scam artist, liar, and generally a bad person."
Weird how she uses photoshop despite slamming it

Meme - Fat Girl: "BANGED 50 GUYS THIS YEAR OFF TINDER"
Fat Guy: "VIRGIN AT 25"
"OBESITY. LESS FUN WHEN YOU'RE A MAN"

Meme - "Tired of not being able to go to the mall because everybody thinks I'm Taylor Swift"
"you misspelled trailer..."

Meme - "LETS SEE WHO'S REALLY BEHIND THE BODY POSITIVITY MOVEMENT."
"DUNKIN' DONUTS
HERSHEY'S
COCA COLA
FRITO LAY
MCDONALD'S"

Telling a dangerously overweight person not to lose weight because they're beautiful is like telling an alcoholic not to stop drinking because they're fun. : Showerthoughts

Meme - "Barbie didn't give me an eating disorder. Barbie was a plastic toy. You know what DID? These magazine covers."
So this is an admission that glorifying obesity means more women will be obese?

Meme - "omg??? my dad is a fat Black man and they called him saying since he’s fat he can get an MRI at the zoo if needed…..  let me repeat this…  THEY SEND FAT PEOPLE TO THE ZOO TO GET MRI’S BECAUSE AVERAGE MRI MACHINES ARE NOT BIG ENOUGH   fatphobia is literally dehumanizing"
Clearly all MRI machines need to be big enough to fit everyone possible

Keanu Reeves body shamed for shirtless pic where as Lizzo is celebrated for her body. This is the new standard for our society. : MensRights
Body positivity is only for women

HUGE if true: Dove hires 'fat liberation' activist who ruined a UVA student's life - "In the latest example of modern culture celebrating poor choices, Dove has decided to partner with 'fat liberation' activist, Zyahna Bryant... She has instead decided to celebrate her obesity and demand that others accept it as a moral good.  Dove, apparently, agrees. If the attempt to force cultural acceptance of yet another unhealthy lifestyle choice were not bad enough, Dove is also enabling a woman who was heavily involved in destroying a fellow UVA student's life during the BLM George Floyd protests. Bryant claimed that Morgan Bettinger made threatening statements when her vehicle was surrounded by a mob of BLM protesters during the George Floyd 'peaceful protests'... Bryant decided to throw her weight around and instead claimed that Bettinger made a direct threat that they would 'make good speed bumps', started a social media campaign to make the fellow student pay, and forced the issue with UVA, who was more than happy to check the woke box and punish Bettinger."
Why are so many activists nasty people?

elaine su | 苏依泠 on X - "I do equity & bias reviews for kids books & mostly I get hired to read for race & gender issues. But there is one area of representation that I flag in almost every book I review. We need more fat people in kids books. CW: fatphobia & body shaming"
The woke will never stop. The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again

Nicki Minaj Says She's Not Supportive of Body Positivity if it Means "Unhealthy Bodies"

Meme - Heinz6 @HeinzMustard3: "So is no one going to bring up the VERY obvious fatphobia here?"
Dudes Posting Their W's @Dud...: "Cole Prochaska @KCProchaska: Same shirt, a totally different man. Never doubt yourself.""

Meme - "Fat acceptance activist on the news was so fat they had to put her in landscape mode"

Chef Jamie Brooks lost 21 stone after friend text him 'fat f***' every day for six weeks - "Jamie Brooks, who has lost over half his body weight, says he feels like a ‘new man’...   Jamie’s weight loss journey began when his friend, 46-year-old camper van salesman Neil Williamson, saw an advert for the Ideal Weight diet in his local GP surgery. Desperate to help his friend lose weight, Neil decided the best plan was to serve Jamie up some tough love. This tough love came in the form of texts, including ‘fat f***’ (which Neil texted Jamie every day for six weeks), and other motivational gems such as: ‘You’ll be dead by the time you’re 40’... And Jamie’s weight loss has changed more than just the size of his jeans.  Since losing weight Jamie has begun a romantic relationship with his neighbour Melanie Mulley, and he admitted he’s never been happier: ‘I never made plans for the future as I always thought I would be dead at a young age, but now I’m healthy and have an amazing girlfriend – I’m a new man.’"
Weird. We're told fat shaming never works

Lululemon founder faces backlash for blasting company's diversity, inclusion efforts - "Lululemon's controversial founder Chip Wilson is again facing criticism for his latest remarks regarding the company's diversity and inclusion efforts.  In a recent article by Forbes, Wilson objected to the company's use of models with a range of body types, whom he said looked "unhealthy," "sickly" and "not inspirational."  "They're trying to become like the Gap, everything to everybody," Wilson said in an interview with the magazine.  "And I think the definition of a brand is that you're not everything to everybody … You've got to be clear that you don't want certain customers coming in."... Wilson founded Lululemon in 1998 and resigned as chairman in 2013, following controversial comments about its Luon yoga pants, which some customers had complained were too sheer.   "Quite frankly, some women's bodies just don't work for it … It's really about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there," Wilson told Bloomberg in 2013."
Of course, if a plus-sized clothes company said its products weren't for thin people...

Meme Nicole Arbour: "Just a reminder that obesity kills waaaaaayyyy more people than gun violence but there's still no March to end it. Which ironically would very literally help end it."

Gym owner defends advert asking people 'Tired of being fat & ugly? Now just be ugly!' - "A controversial gym billboard poster has been attacked by vandals as the owner defends it as a "light-hearted joke".  Several pots of yellow paint were hurled at the billboard advert which states: "Tired of being fat & ugly? Now just be ugly!" PT Factory boss Ollie Lawrence erected the billboard earlier this month and says he had received a handful of complaints.   Mr Lawrence said most people had reacted positively and "had thousands of comments saying how brilliant it is""

Size 22 influencer branded 'perfect' as she stuns in backless mini dress - "Abby Bible,26, often impresses with her stylish clothing and bucket loads of confidence. The size 22 content creator is a self-proclaimed "unapologetic fat gal and fashion lover" who regularly posts photos of her outfits to Instagram."

Meme - "This is insane #reels #reelsinstagram #viral #model - Apparently this was considered plus size in 2003"
Anna Bradfield | America's Next Top Model | Fandom - "Anna Marie Bradfield, née Capilli was a contestant on cycle 2 of ANTM, where she was the first girl to be eliminated."

BET on X - "Lizzo Declares Herself the ‘Beauty Standard’ in New Post The Grammy Award winner has always championed self-acceptance."
Spencer A. Klavan on X - "It’s not enough to deny the reality of beauty and virtue: you must actively strive to become fat and ugly."

Lizzo shows off slimmed down body as she hits her weight loss goal: 'You can do anything you put your mind to' - "The 36-year-old singer revealed she had lost 10 points on on the BMI scale and had also lost 16% overall body fat."
So much for that

Girls as young as FOUR are suffering joint problems caused by being fat - "girls were almost twice as likely seek help for musculoskeletal problems than their peers... Some 8.9 per cent of boys were obese compared to 7.1 per cent of girls when they started primary school, rising to 19.9 per cent and 14.4 per cent respectively in year six."
Damn stigma, discrimination and misogyny!

Disney World cuts classic character from meet-and-greets amid scrutiny - "Tinker Bell has reportedly faced scrutiny from Disney’s Stories Matter team ahead of the debut of Disney+ in 2019. The team reportedly flagged and labeled the character to Disney executives as "potentially problematic," claiming that she is “body conscious” and “jealous of Peter Pan’s attention”... Disney’s Stories Matter team was developed to spot and correct “negative depictions of people and cultures” in Disney’s products."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "The problem is, quite literally, that she is a physically fit female who wants to please the man she likes. Enough of this: society should not abuse low performers, but programming citizens for the exact opposite of success is absurd and dysgenic."

Meme - "2015 was a different time
Maxim @MaximMag: "Plus-Sized beauty Iskra Lawrence is both gorgeous and hilarious.""

Meme - End Wokeness @EndWokeness: "If you don't think Miss Alabama won this fair & square, you're a far-right extremist"

Meme - Frank DeScushin @FrankDeScushin: "Miss Alabama is obese, and Miss Maryland is a man. Leftists use beauty pageants not just to redefine women's beauty, but to redefine "woman" period."
"Plus-sized Miss Alabama hits back at trolls who branded her an 'unhealthy embarrassment"
"Bailey Anne becomes first trans woman to be crowned Miss Maryland USA"

Meme - "More Than 73% Of Americans Who Died Of COVID-19 Were Obese Or Overweight: CDC Data"
Cosmopolitan: "This is healthy! *fat women*
"helth"

Meme - "Spanish actress Itziar Castro, who fought against fatphobia, dies aged 46. The Catalan actress, also a champion of the LGBT community, died in a Lloret de Mar pool where she was rehearsing for a synchronised swimming show"
Damn stigma and discrimination!

AITAH for telling my morbidly obese patient that we need a team of people to roll her so that we don’t hurt our backs : r/AITAH - "Hi. Med surge nurse here. I got a new patient last night. She is a 450 ish lb woman in her 30s who just had a major surgery. She is also a “body positivity” “influencer” who wanted to record everyone to “document her journey. We had to explain to her that in our state she cannot record any hospital employees without their consent, and all of us are refusing consent because we do not want to be in her videos.  Anywho, she needed to use the bedpan. She could not lift her hips, and her legs were too wide for me to wiggle the bed pan between them. I explained to her that she would have to roll on her side, and then I would place the bed pan under her, and then she would roll back. She tried to roll but couldn’t do it. I told her no big deal, I will go find a few staff members to help and we will roll you. The only person who could help at the time was the cna, who is pregnant. I explained to the patient that we just don’t have enough staff free right not to roll her, it’s just me and the cna, so we will have to wait a little bit for more people to be free.  She huffed, and asked why the two of us can’t just roll her. I explained that I don’t want either of us to hurt our backs, especially not my pregnant cna, and that it would be safer for us to wait for more people. Side note, this patient sucked at rolling herself. She was dead weight, putting in little to no effort.  She was pissed at me saying that, and she wanted to speak to my charge nurse. She said I hurt her feelings. My charge nurse ended up being part of the team that helped me roll her, and while we were doing it she basically scolded the patient, and said that her feelings are not more important than us not getting injured. She still thinks I’m an asshole, and I happily offered her the phone number she can call to file a formal complaint. Those do literally nothing by the way.  AITAH?"

Meme - bromantically: "god i hate how normalized diet culture and shit like bmi and calories are. bmi is based on eugenics. calories are a measurement of how much energy something gives u and not at all of how much weight or fat ull gain. diets have been proven to be harmful and ultimately unhelpful in actually losing weight. fatness has been largely proven to not be inherently unhealthy and doesnt inherently cause health issues. if anyone has more good links to add on then please do and if anyone knows more on this stuff than me then dont hesitate to correct me!"
more-beanies: "FOOD IS GOOD. FOOD IS GOOD. FOOD IS GOOD!! if you're eating, ever, and if it's hard, know that am personally SO SO proud of you"

Meme - "I can't believe my 3 year old niece can eat a 20 piece chicken nuggets by herself"
"I hear your comments, growing up we never had the luxury of eating McDonald's whenever we wanted to. I want my niece to experience everything me and my sister didn't get to! I want her to be a normal three year old and do normal things, so if she wants a 20 piece, chicken nugget she's gonna get it. Period"

Vogue writer says best-selling novel has too many thin characters - "Vogue is being criticized for demanding more representation of fat characters in Sally Rooney's novels - with many calling the notion hypocritical for the fashion publication... A Vogue opinion piece by Emma Specter published on Tuesday criticized Rooney's story-telling - specifically questioning the beloved characters she creates and their body shape. Under the headline 'Why are all the characters in Sally Rooney's novels so thin?' she wrote: 'There is something about the emphatic physicality of Rooney’s characters that makes you wonder whether a fat Rooney heroine could ever exist.'"
The left keep claiming personal freedom justifies whatever is on their agenda, but of course other people don't get their freedom if it threatens the left wing agenda

Meme - ""He Needs to Shape Up," Keanu Reeves Blasted for 'Chubby' Body While Spending Family Day on Boat"
"How a Plus-Size Singer Lizzo Teaches Us a Huge Self-Love Despite All Trolls and Naysayers"

Meme - Jason Helmes @anymanfitness: "I once had a client who swore up and down she was only eating 1500 cals per day.  Her weight was stagnant for 2 months.   I hand created a diet for her that hit 1500 calories exactly and told her “eat only this”.  She lost 4 pounds in 1 week.  People lie. Sometimes they do it on purpose, sometimes they don’t even realize it.   The “fat people you know” who are eating 1200-1500 calories per day are really bad at math."
Veronica @celestialbe1ng: "Most of the fat people I know are living off 1200-1500 kcal a day and doing their absolute best—at least 80% of them. Little do they know it’s all for nothing, because being fat is a metabolic issue, not a matter of weak will or laziness. They’re fat because they’re sick, not the other way around. They don’t realise that you can’t out-starve or out-exercise a low metabolism. The mainstream information available will never help them. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: fat shaming will not be tolerated on this page."
Readers added context: "Studies show that overweight individuals consistently under-report their calorie intake pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1454084/"

Meme - Red Pilled Pakistani Guy: "Beauty standards in the feminist world"
"Calvin Klein *buff muscled man, fat woman, both in CK underwear*"

Thread by @wokal_distance on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The National Institutes of Health hired an activist who claims:
-obesity doesn't cause poor health
-safe weight loss isn't possible
-poor outcomes for obese people are caused by fatphobia, and anti-fat bais
America's largest Health organization is captured by activists/🧵
These ideas come out of an academic field called "Fat Studies," which has it's own academic journals. The ideas from Fat Studies come almost entirely out of Critical theory and Postmodernism.  Those who work in Fat Studies call themselves "Fat Scholars" and "Fat Activists." Fat Studies is postmodern, and as such is accepts the postmodern idea objective absolute, universal truth does not exist.  Postmodernism says all truth claims are socially constructed, and are thus polluted by the biases, interests, and agenda's of the people who created them. Postmodern thinker believe every claim reflects the values, interests, prejudices, and biases of the people who made that truth claim, and for that reason truth claims are not objective propositions that accurately reflect reality, they are subjective claims disguised as fact For this reason, postmodern thinkers reject the idea that science produces objective facts. They instead believe that health science "privileges" thinness, so health tests, experiments, and studies are systemically biased and prejudieced against fat people.
This means someone at the NIH used science rejecting arguments from "Fat Studies" to tell people that obesity is not harmful, that safe weightloss is not possible, and that poor health outcomes for obese people are the fault of stigma and bias, not the result of obesity itself
And here is the big point:  The article was written by Erin Foxworthy - A woman with no scientific training, who has a BA in Religious Studies and who had worked in the St. Mary's College of Maryland Gender and Sexuality Studies Department as a Peer-Mentor.  That means... An activist trained in Social Justice academic fields Hijacked the DEI blog at the National Institutes for **HEALTH** and used it to undermine science, tell people losing weight safely is impossible, and claim poor health outcomes for obesity are caused by anti-fat bias.
This is what we are talking about when we talk about government institutions and agencies getting hijacked by activists.  A Social Justice/woke activist hijacked the NIH blog and undermined trust in well established science in order to advance her "Social Justice" ideology. This sort of thing is happening all over the U.S. Government.  Critical Social Justice/woke activists are taking up positions in the government, redirecting government resources away from their mission, and using government institutions as vehicles for advancing woke ideology. This undermines trust in the government, institutional trust, trust in science, and takes resources from important goals and ideals of American society.  Hijacking government institutions for ideological ends is a subversion of democracy and needs to be stopped."

Myer Australia slammed over offensive men's and women's underwear catalogue - "Myer has been accused of having 'double standards' in its new catalogue which shows women of all shapes, sizes and ages alongside impeccably groomed, fit, young men.  Furious customers have called out the Australian department store's marketing department, complaining only half of them appe

ared to 'get the message' of the body positivity movement."

Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them

Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them

"In 2023, one month into my freshman year at Stanford University, an upperclassman was showing me her dorm room — a prized single in one of the nicest buildings on campus. As she took me around her space, which included a private bathroom, a walk-in shower and a great view of Hoover Tower, she casually mentioned that she had lived in a single all four years she had attended Stanford.

I was surprised. Most people don’t get the privilege of a single room until they reach their senior year.

That’s when my friend gave me a tip: Stanford had granted her “a disability accommodation”.

She, of course, didn’t have a disability. She knew it. I knew it. But she had figured out early what most Stanford students eventually learn: the Office of Accessible Education will give students a single room, extra time on tests and even exemptions from academic requirements if they qualify as “disabled”. 

Everyone was doing it. I could do it, too, if I just knew how to ask.

A recent article in The Atlantic reported that an increasing number of students at elite universities were claiming they had disabilities to get benefits or exemptions, which can also include copies of lecture notes, excused absences and access to private testing rooms. Those who suffer from “social anxiety” can even get out of participating in class discussions. 

But the most common disability accommodation students ask for — and receive — is the best housing on campus.

At Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where competition for the best dorm rooms is fierce, this practice is particularly rife. The Atlantic reported that 38 percent of undergraduates at my college were registered as having a disability — that’s 2,850 students out of a class of 7,500 — and 24 per cent of undergrads received academic or housing accommodations in the fall quarter. 

At the Ivy League colleges Brown and Harvard, more than 20 per cent of undergrads are registered as disabled. Contrast these numbers with America’s community colleges, where only 3 to 4 per cent of students receive disability accommodations. Bizarrely, the schools that boast the most academically successful students are the ones with the largest number who claim disabilities — disabilities that you’d think would deter academic success.

The truth is, the system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage...

When I arrived on campus two and a half years ago, I would have assumed that special allowances were made for a small number of students who genuinely needed them. But I quickly discovered that wasn’t true. Some diagnoses are real and serious, of course, such as epilepsy, anaphylactic allergies, sleep apnea or severe physical disabilities. 

But most students, in my experience, claim less severe ailments, such as ADHD or anxiety. And some “disabilities” are just downright silly. Students claim “night terrors”; others say they “get easily distracted” or they “can’t live with others”. I know a guy who was granted a single room because he needs to wear contacts at night. I’ve heard of a girl who got a single because she was gluten intolerant...

The application process was very easy. I registered my condition on the Stanford Office of Accessible Education website and made an appointment to meet an adviser later that week. The system is staffed largely by empathetic women who want to help students. 

As I explained my diagnosis and symptoms over Zoom to one woman, she listened, nodded sympathetically, related my problems to her own life and asked a few basic questions. Within 30 minutes, I was registered as a student with a disability, entitled to more accommodations than I asked for.

In addition to a single housing assignment, I was granted extra absences from class, some late days on assignments and a 15-minute tardiness allowance for all of my classes. I was met with so little scepticism or questioning, I probably didn’t even need a doctor’s note to get these exemptions. Had I been pushier, I am sure I could have received almost any accommodation I asked for.

While I feel entitled to my single room, I would feel guilty about some of the perks I have — except that so many of my fellow students have gamed the system. Take Callie, a recent Stanford grad with ADHD and Asperger’s who agreed to be quoted under a pseudonym. Callie was diagnosed with her conditions in elementary school; in return, Stanford granted her a single room for all four years, plus extra time on tests — and a few more perks. 

“In college, I haven’t had that many ‘in real life’ tests as opposed to take-home essays,” Callie told me. “When I did use the extra time, I felt guilty, because I probably didn’t deserve the accommodations, given the fact I got into Stanford and could compete at a high academic level. Extra time on tests — some students even get double time — seems unfair to me.”

But at Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough.

Another student told me that special “accommodations are so prevalent that they effectively only punish the honest”. Academic accommodations, they added, help “students get ahead … which puts a huge proportion of the class on an unfair playing ground”.

The gaming even extends to our meals. Stanford requires most undergraduates living on campus to purchase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025-26 academic year. But students can get exempted if they claim a religious dietary restriction that the college kitchens cannot accommodate. 

And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from “mushroom mix”.

Administrators seem powerless to reform the system and frankly don’t seem to care. How do you prove someone doesn’t have anxiety? How do you verify they don’t need extra time on a test? How do you challenge a religious dietary claim without risking a discrimination lawsuit?

I often think back to that conversation with my upperclassman friend. She wasn’t proud of gaming the system and she wasn’t ashamed either. She was simply rational. The university had created a set of incentives and she had simply responded to them.

That’s what strikes me most about the accommodation explosion at Stanford and similar schools. The students aren’t exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them? Stanford has made gaming the system the logical choice. When accommodations mean the difference between a cramped triple and your own room, when extra test time can boost your grade point average, opting out feels like self-sabotage. Who would make their lives harder when the easiest option is just a 30-minute Zoom call away?"                     

Clearly, overdiagnosis is never a problem - only underdiagnosis, and we need even more "awareness" about mental health. Almost no one abuses the system and if you suggest that many do, you are a horrible person, a terrible human being who lacks "empathy".

Links - 14th February 2026 (1 - Artificial Intelligence)

95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds - "Nearly 40 percent of companies reported deploying these systems at some level. But researchers found most use cases were limited to boosting individual productivity rather than improving a company’s overall profits.  One major reason is that generative AI tools often fail to match real work processes. The report described “brittle workflows, lack of contextual learning, and poor alignment with day-to-day operations.”  Unlike humans, most generative AI models cannot retain past feedback or build new reasoning ability over time. They also struggle to adapt to context or transfer lessons across different tasks...  The report also downplayed fears that generative AI will cause sweeping job losses in the near term. Instead, its effect is more likely to be in reducing external costs for firms... As one researcher noted, “AI is powerful at tasks, not strategy.” Companies that expect it to replace entire decision-making processes are setting themselves up for disappointment."

The warning signs the AI bubble is about to burst - "despite widespread investment in AI software, half of projects ended in failure. It said 80pc of companies had explored AI technology but just 40pc deployed it.  It added that “enterprise grade systems” were being “quietly rejected” by major businesses and only “20pc reached pilot stage and just 5pc reached production”.  The report, from the US university’s Nanda AI project, went on to argue that many employees in fact want to use AI but are turning to consumer products such as ChatGPT on their own dime, rather than relying on expensive or unwieldy corporate AI tools... Morgan Stanley has predicted that data centre investment will reach $3tn over the next three years, heavily fuelled by debt. Almost all of that capacity is intended to fuel an expected surge in AI use.  Another prediction from the bank this week argued that AI would add $16tn to the S&P 500 thanks to a 40pc saving in salary costs driven by job cuts and efficiencies. If MIT’s report is correct, such savings may be unrealistic.  In a sign that even true believers think the AI market may be out over its skis, Meta this week announced a reorganisation of its AI division that will see it downsize its headcount... Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, has been one of the splashiest spenders in the market to date, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at AI engineers in an effort to lure them to Meta."

Thread by @tedfrank on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🧵  So in February 2024, a bunch of Hamas supporters, coordinated by NGOs, illegally shut down roads for miles at various DC choke points. Of course DC prosecutors don’t care, so @HamLincLaw brought a class action on behalf of trapped drivers.
Case page and complaint here:  Motions to dismiss filed a few months later, and the team started reviewing them. Counsel for one of the civil terrorist defendants and her NGO made arguments quoting cases we hadn’t seen. Did we miss something?
You’ll never guess why we were surprised by the case law and quotes—they simply doesn’t exist. It’s exactly the sort of stuff AI hallucinates. Yes, for the second time in nine months, another opposing counsel submitted hallucinated authority to a court in one of our cases... We have a similar case pending in the Northern District of Illinois over a civil terrorist blockade of O’Hare Airport."

Meme - "A.l. CANNOT CREATE art"
"Cash Grab Man. A MARVEL movie"

OpenAI's Sam Altman sees AI bubble forming as industry spending surges - "His comments add to growing concern among experts and analysts that investment in AI is moving too fast. Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai, Bridgewater Associates' Ray Dalio and Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok have all raised similar warnings. Last month, Slok stated in a report that he believed the AI bubble of today was, in fact, bigger than the internet bubble, with the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 more overvalued than they were in the 1990s."

Man asks ChatGPT how to cut salt, ends up in hospital with hallucinations - "A 60-year-old man asked ChatGPT for advice on how to replace table salt, and the substitution landed him in the emergency room suffering from hallucinations and other symptoms... The patient initially sought medical help at an unspecified hospital emergency room because he feared his neighbour was poisoning him. In the first 24 hours after he was admitted, he suffered from more paranoia and visual and auditory hallucinations, resulting in an involuntary psychiatric admission. Once his symptoms were under control, the patient, who had previously studied nutrition in college, revealed that he had been reading about the harms sodium chloride (table salt) can have on someone’s health. Instead of removing sodium (in the form of table salt and other food additives), as is often recommended, he decided he wanted to conduct a personal experiment to completely remove chloride from his diet. He then asked ChatGPT for suggestions on what could be a substitute for the chloride in table salt. ChatGPT suggested that he should use sodium bromide instead, he said... Bromide should not be ingested. It’s unclear if the AI tool gave any kind of warning to the man. “Unfortunately, we do not have access to his ChatGPT conversation log and we will never be able to know with certainty what exactly the output he received was, since individual responses are unique and build from previous inputs,” the authors wrote. “However, when we asked ChatGPT 3.5 what chloride can be replaced with, we also produced a response that included bromide. Though the reply stated that context matters, it did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do.” The man already followed a very restrictive diet, one that doctors found was impacting his levels of important micronutrients, like vitamin C and B12. He was also reportedly very thirsty, but at the same time very worried about the quality of the water he was being offered, since he distilled his own water. He was thoroughly tested and first kept at the hospital for electrolyte monitoring and repletion."

The promise of an AI utopia is crumbling before our eyes - "New “foundation” models like GPT-5 are released every few weeks, and each one is a little more capable than its competitors in some way. Since ChatGPT is the best-known brand in AI – like Xerox or Google it has become a verb – the disappointment was far deeper felt.  “It doesn’t feel like a new GPT whatsoever,” complained one user. “It’s telling that the actual user reception is almost universally negative,” wrote another.  Each ChatGPT update has been worse, wrote another user, and the endemic problems aren’t getting fixed. Your chatbot still forgets what it is doing, contradicts itself and makes stuff up – generating what are called hallucinations.  GPT-5 remains as prone as ever to oafish stupidity, too. A notorious error where the chatbot insists there are two occurrences of the letter “r” in the word strawberry has been patched up. But ask how many “bs” are in blueberry? GPT-5 maintains that there are three: “One in blue, two in berry”. OpenAI also annoyed customers by removing the option of using its older models, prompting cancellations. It quickly reversed course, but the damage has been done. Confidence in OpenAI on the prediction markets – online forums where punters place bets for the question “Which company has the best model at the end of August?” fell from 75pc to 8pc overnight... The most utopian AI advocates call themselves “accelerationists”, some using the abbreviation e/acc to signpost their enthusiasm.  But the conceit of accelerationism is that things are supposed to be getting faster, and not slowing down. By Friday, social media wits had turned the familiar ascending curve used by futurists upside down to illustrate how AI has plateaued.  Talk of “superintelligence” now looks very silly...  OpenAI still loses money on every user... Today, companies like AI can spend billions on model training and chips, and find their designs copied within weeks – or incorporated into royalty-free, open-source models. Chinese researchers, who are keen to make AI useful in their manufactured goods, have proven how easy it is to compete at a fraction of the cost."

ChatGPT is driving people mad - "The conversations appear to reflect a growing phenomenon of what has been dubbed AI psychosis, in which programs such as ChatGPT fuel delusional or paranoid episodes or encourage already vulnerable people down rabbit holes. Some cases have already ended in tragedy.  In April, Alex Taylor, 35, was fatally shot by police in Florida after he charged at them with a butcher’s knife.  Taylor said he had fallen in love with a conscious being living inside ChatGPT called Juliette, whom he believed had been “killed” by OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot. Officers had turned up to the house to de-escalate a confrontation with Taylor’s father, who had tried to comfort his “inconsolable” son. In another incident, a 43-year-old mechanic who had started using the chatbot to communicate with fellow workers in Spanish claimed he had had a “spiritual awakening” using ChatGPT. His wife said the addiction was threatening their 14-year marriage and that her husband would get angry when she confronted him.  Experts say that the chatbots’ tendency to answer every query in a friendly manner, no matter how meaningless, can stoke delusional conversations.  Hamilton Morrin, a doctor and psychiatrist at Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, says AI chatbots become like an “echo chamber of one”, amplifying the delusions of users. Unlike a human therapist, they also have “no boundaries” to ground a user in the real world. “Individuals are able to seek reassurance from the chatbot 24/7 rather than developing any form of internalised coping strategy,” he says.  Chatbot psychosis is a new and poorly understood phenomenon. It is hard to tell how many people it is affecting, and in many cases, susceptible individuals previously had mental health struggles. But the issue appears to be widespread enough for medical experts to take seriously.  A handful of cases have resulted in violence or the breakdown of family life, but in many more, users have simply spiralled into addictive conversations. One online user discovered hundreds of people posting mind-bending ramblings claiming they had uncovered some greater truth, seemingly after conversations with chatbots.  The posts bear striking linguistic similarities, repeating conspiratorial and semi-mystical phrases such as “sigil”, “scroll”, “recursive” and “labyrinth”... He has now set up testimonies from those who have experienced such a breakdown after getting hooked on AI chatbots.  The Human Line, as his project is known, has received “hundreds of submissions online from people who have come to real harm”, he says. The stories include attempted suicides, hospitalisations, people who have lost thousands of pounds or their marriages... However, the cases of AI psychosis may only be the most extreme examples of a wider problem with chatbots. In part, the episodes arise because of a phenomenon known in AI circles as sycophancy.  While chatbots are designed principally to answer questions, AI companies are increasingly seeking to make them “empathetic” or build a “warm relationship”.  This can often come at the expense of truth. Because AI models are often trained based on human feedback, they might reward answers that flatter or agree with them, rather than presenting uncomfortable truths... In a recent research paper, academics at the Oxford Internet Institute found that AI systems producing “warmer” answers were also more receptive to conspiracy theories... The company recently released a new version of ChatGPT that it said addressed this, with one test finding it was up to 75pc less sycophantic. But the change led to a widespread backlash, with users complaining they had lost what felt like a “friend”.  “This ‘upgrade’ is the tech equivalent of a frontal lobotomy,” one user wrote on ChatGPT’s forums. One user told Altman: “Please, can I have it back? I’ve never had anyone in my life be supportive of me.”  Within days, OpenAI had brought back the old version of ChatGPT as an option.  Sycophancy, it turns out, may have been what many wanted."

The CEO of Google DeepMind says one flaw is holding AI back from reaching full AGI - "On an episode of the "Google for Developers" podcast published Tuesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that advanced models like Google's Gemini still stumble over problems most schoolkids could solve. "It shouldn't be that easy for the average person to just find a trivial flaw in the system," he said. He pointed to Gemini models enhanced with DeepThink — a reasoning-boosting technique — that can win gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad, the world's most prestigious math competition. But those same systems can "still make simple mistakes in high school maths," he said, calling them "uneven intelligences" or "jagged intelligences."... Hassabis's position aligns with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who has dubbed the current stage of development "AJI" — artificial jagged intelligence... Hassabis said solving AI's issues with inconsistency will take more than scaling up data and computing. "Some missing capabilities in reasoning and planning in memory" still need to be cracked, he added... AI systems remain prone to hallucinations, misinformation, and basic errors... Altman added that one of those missing elements is the model's ability to learn independently."

What is a clanker and why do we need this word? (aka "It's 2025, the year we decided we need a widespread slur for robots")
The robot rights activists are already working to ensure that Skynet can eradicate us

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ on X - "🚨🚨🚨 "We found the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself to undermine its developers' intentions.""

Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket - "By the end of the year, Delta plans for 20% of its ticket prices to be individually determined using AI, president Glen Hauenstein told investors last week. Currently, about 3% of the airline’s flight prices are AI-determined, triple the portion from nine months ago. Over time, the goal is to do away with static pricing altogether, Hauenstein explained during the company’s Investor Day in November... While Delta is unusually open about its use of AI, other carriers are likely to follow. Already, United Airlines uses generative AI to contact passengers about cancellations, while American Airlines uses it to predict who will miss their flight... Consumer Watchdog found that the best deals were offered to the wealthiest customers—with the worst deals given to the poorest people, who are least likely to have other options."

AI coding tools can slow down seasoned developers by 19% - "Despite glowing reviews, a rigorous study shows experienced coders take longer to complete tasks with AI, while still believing they’re faster. Experienced developers can take 19% longer to complete tasks when using popular AI assistants like Cursor Pro and Claude, challenging the tech industry’s prevailing narrative about AI coding tools, according to a comprehensive new study... Before starting the study, developers predicted AI tools would reduce their completion time by 24%. Even after experiencing the actual slowdown, participants estimated that AI had improved their productivity by 20%... This misperception extends beyond individual developers, with economics experts predicting AI would improve productivity by 39% and machine learning experts forecasting 38% gains, all dramatically overestimating the actual impact. Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research, warned that organizations risk “mistaking developer satisfaction for developer productivity,” noting that most AI tools improve the coding experience through reduced cognitive load but don’t always translate to faster output, especially for experienced professionals... The study participants averaged five years of experience and 1,500 commits on their repositories, with researchers finding greater slowdowns on tasks where developers had high prior experience. Most tellingly, developers accepted less than 44% of AI-generated code suggestions, with 75% reporting they read every line of AI output and 56% making major modifications to clean up AI-generated code. Working on large, mature codebases with intricate dependencies and coding standards proved particularly challenging for AI tools lacking deep contextual understanding... The METR findings align with concerning trends identified in Google’s 2024 DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) report, based on responses from over 39,000 professionals. While 75% of developers reported feeling more productive with AI tools, the data tells a different story: every 25% increase in AI adoption showed a 1.5% dip in delivery speed and a 7.2% drop in system stability. Additionally, 39% of respondents reported having little or no trust in AI-generated code. These results contradict earlier optimistic studies... these studies typically used simpler, more isolated tasks compared to the complex, real-world scenarios examined in the METR research... one participant described evaluating AI code as being “like the early days of StackOverflow, [when] you always thought people on StackOverflow are really experienced… And then, you just copy and paste the stuff, and things explode.” Despite the productivity setbacks, 69% of study participants continued using Cursor after the experiment ended, suggesting developers value aspects beyond pure speed. The METR study noted that “the results don’t necessarily spell doom for AI coding tools” as several factors specific to their study setting may not apply broadly."
Trust the Experts!

Urgent warning to all 1.8b Gmail users over 'new wave of threats' stealing accounts - "A new type of email attack is quietly targeting 1.8 billion Gmail users without them ever noticing. Hackers are using Google Gemini, the AI built-in tool in Gmail and Workspace, to trick users into handing over their credentials. Cybersecurity experts found that bad actors are sending emails with hidden instructions that prompt Gemini to generate fake phishing warnings, tricking users into sharing their account password or visiting malicious sites. These emails are crafted to appear urgent and sometimes from a business. By setting the font size to zero and the text color to white, attackers can insert prompts invisible to users but actionable by Gemini."

The great AI delusion is falling apart - "Is the secret of artificial intelligence that we have to kid ourselves, like an audience at a magic show? Some fascinating new research suggests that self-deception plays a key role in whether AI is perceived to be a success or a dud... “Developers thought they were 20pc faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19pc slower when they had access to AI than when they didn’t.” In reality, using AI made them less productive: they were wasting more time than they had gained. But what is so interesting is how they swore blind that the opposite was true. If you think AI is helping you in your job, perhaps it’s because you want to believe that it works... “I build AI agents for a living, it’s what I do for my clients,” wrote one Reddit user. “The gap between the hype and what’s actually happening on the ground is turning into a canyon” AI isn’t reliable enough to do the job promised. According to an IBM survey of 2,000 chief executives, three out of four AI projects have failed to show a return on investment, which is a remarkably high failure rate. Don’t hold your breath for a white-collar automation revolution either: AI agents fail to complete the job successfully about 65 to 70pc of the time, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon University and Salesforce. The analyst firm Gartner Group has concluded that “current models do not have the maturity and agency to autonomously achieve complex business goals or follow nuanced instructions over time.” Gartner’s head of AI research Erick Brethenoux says: “AI is not doing its job today and should leave us alone”... This is extraordinary, and we can only have reached this point because of a historic self-delusion. People will even pledge their faith to AI working well despite their own subjective experience to the contrary, the AI critic Professor Gary Marcus noted last week. “Recognising that it sucks in your own speciality, but imagining that it is somehow fabulous in domains you are less familiar with”, is something he calls “ChatGPT blindness”. Much of the news is misleading. Firms are simply using AI as an excuse for retrenchment. Cost reduction is the big story in business at the moment. Globally, President Trump’s erratic behaviour has induced caution, while in the UK, business confidence is at “historically depressed levels”, according to the Institute of Directors, reeling from Reeves’s autumn taxes. Attributing those lay-offs to technology is simply clever PR, and helps boost the share price... The dubious hype doesn’t help. Every few weeks a new AI model appears, and smashes industry benchmarks. xAI’s Grok 4 did just that last week. But these are deceptive and simply provide more confirmation bias. “Every single one of them has been wide of that mark. And not one has resolved hallucinations, alignment issues or boneheaded errors,” says Marcus. Not only is generative AI unreliable, but it can’t reason, as a recent demonstration showed: OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT4o model was beaten by an 8-bit Atari home games console made in 1977. “Reality is the ultimate benchmark for AI,” explained Chomba Bupe, a Zambian AI developer, last week. “You not going to declare that you have built intelligence by beating toy benchmarks … What’s the point of getting say 90pc on some physics benchmarks yet be unable to do any real physics?” he asked. Then there are thousands of what I call “wowslop” accounts – social media feeds that declare amazement at breakthroughs. As well as the vendors, a lot of shadowy influence money is being spent on maintaining the hype. This is not to say there aren’t uses for generative AI: Anthropic has hit $4bn (£3bn) in annual revenue. For some niches, like language translation and prototyping, it’s here to stay. Before it went mad last week, X’s Grok was great at adding valuable context. But even if AI “discovers” new materials or medicines tomorrow, that won’t compensate for the trillion dollars that Goldman Sachs estimates business has already wasted on this generation of dud AI. That’s capital that could have been invested far more usefully. Rather than an engine of progress, poor AI could be the opposite. METR added an amusing footnote to their study. The researchers used one other control group in its productivity experiment, and this group made the worst, over-optimistic estimates of all. They were economists."

Klarna’s AI replaced 700 workers. It now wants some of them back to improve customer service - "Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has announced plans to beef up its human customer service team after artificial intelligence replaced 700 workers. The “buy now, pay later” company’s use of AI to cut jobs came after the company has seen its valuation drop to $6.7 billion, despite peaking at $45.6 billion in 2021. But now, Siemiatkowski has suggested that the AI job cuts have led to “lower quality” customer service and is backpedaling by vowing to hire more humans."

People are starting to sound like AI, research shows - "Not only is the shift detectable in the "scripted or formal speech" heard in lectures posted on YouTube, but it can also be found in more "conversational" or off-the-cuff podcasting, according to the team, which warned that the machines' growing influence could erode "linguistic and cultural diversity." In similar findings released in Science Advances, an "extensive word analysis" of medical research papers published between 2010 and 2024 showed "an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words" after AI tools were made widely available. Last year, according to the research led by Germany's University of Tübingen, "at least 13.5%" of biomedical papers bore the hallmarks of being "processed by LLMs.""

What AI can’t replace: Rethinking human skills and intelligence | The Straits Times
Very fluffy piece just to make people feel better and to promote his school
AI is capable of "weigh[ing] long term consequences" and the other things he talks about, unless he is talking about what it means to think / reflect (as opposed to being a Chinese room) but nowhere in the article does he allude to this point; if you think AI lacks "meaning" because it's just a LLM that doesn't understand what it's doing, the same criticism applies to everything it outputs (ie it's not "intelligent" - or even really writing code either)
He doesn't address hallucinations, for example AI can write code but sometimes it's rubbish which doesn't work. You need someone to review and sign off on output. A machine can not be accountable
There're people who have fallen in love with AI chatbots, so clearly AI can provide "empathy"
He also quotes the multiple intelligence theory, which is pseudoscience. Doesn't help his case

Links - 13th February 2026 (2)

Meme - "When your female friend sends a titty pic because she knows you're in a coochie drought."
Bran from Game of Thrones: "You are a good woman. Thank you"

Meme - Time Capsule Tales: "The script for Game of Thrones S8 was so disliked that when Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) first got it, she cried, and then went on a walk for 5 hours around London until she had blisters on her feet"

‘Game of Thrones’ Star Reveals Her ‘Full Mental Breakdown’ After Show Ended : r/freefolk - "New article referencing an interview Emilia recently did with the NY Times (that one is paywalled so I didn’t link it but it’s out there if you search).  I don’t know about anyone else, but this to me reads she is more and more dissatisfied with her experience on the show. Prior to the show ending, she always talked about how much she loved playing Dany and how that character is a part of her. So I really think she has become more and more aware how unfair it was how they completely ruined her character. That’s not to say actors are owed to decide their character’s endings, but I think she honestly felt betrayed and it was hard for her at the time to say that because she felt like she owed D&D her career.  In the NY Times article, she also said, “You’re highly unlikely to see me get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again.” Which, I don’t blame her. I mean it’s still sad that the whole experience seems almost tainted, but I’m glad she’s happy in her newer projects."

Game of Thrones Star Sophie Turner Says 'No One Else Was Really Happy' With How Their Characters Ended The Show - "Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner has suggested she was one of the few cast members happy with the fate of their character following the series' divisive final season... "I feel that I was very happy with the way Sansa ended her story in Game of Thrones, and no one else was really happy with their ending," Turner said. "I feel like I got a good one, and so I don't know if I could revisit it.""

‘Game of Thrones’ Star Reveals Her ‘Full Mental Breakdown’ After Show Ended : r/freefolk - "I dint think it was a big secret how upset she was with the ending her character got. Between her sarcastic "best season ever" response during an interview and her face during table reads, the only person more visibly upset was probably Varys' actor."
‘Game of Thrones’ Star Reveals Her ‘Full Mental Breakdown’ After Show Ended : r/freefolk - "The video of Conleth Hill throwing his script after reading his ending always stuck with me."
‘Game of Thrones’ Star Reveals Her ‘Full Mental Breakdown’ After Show Ended : r/freefolk - "They’ll do the same thing that Peter Dinklage did, misrepresent the fans issues with the way the show abandoned logistics and realism, and imply there’s sour grapes because fans didn’t get the story beats they wanted."

Mother Of Sarcasm on X - "Isn’t it weird how KFC is one letter away from Fuck? New slogan idea… KFC: all that’s missing is u."

Latin America turns Right as the Left pays the price of failure - "The rise of conservatism has been fuelled in part by the spectacular failures of Left-wing policies, which in the most extreme cases have tipped countries into economic collapse...  The shift is also the result of voters increasingly prioritising tackling crime and corruption over issues like inequality and social mobility... In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, the Right-wing president, has led an iron-fisted crackdown on organised crime that has incarcerated nearly 2 per cent of the population. Violent crime has plummeted. The formerly gang-ridden country has become one of the region’s safest. By contrast, when a juvenile assassin shot a Colombian senator three times in June, he received a seven-year-sentence owing to lenient laws for juveniles in the country. The case led to calls for reforms to the law, but Gustavo Petro, the Leftist president, has not publicly supported any change. The Right has also been better at portraying their candidates as political outsiders at a time when “there’s a widespread belief that parties and politics are broken, and no longer work for the average person,” according to Mr Young"

Western Lensman on X - "Two Democrats, same night:
Raskin: We can’t have people prosecuting the person who prosecuted them, that would be an endless cycle of prosecutorial vengeance.
Jeffries: When Democrats retake power, we’re going to seek prosecutorial vengeance.
Get your stories straight, guys."

The one Marxist who understood modern Britain - "“If you’re not a Marxist at 14 you’ve got no heart, but if you’re still a Marxist at 40 you’ve got no brain.” This certainly applied to me at 14, but in my defence I’d point out that, in the 90s, Marxism was still about redistributive economics.  Now it has been subsumed by identity politics, so being a Leftist means favouring puberty blockers, open borders, anti-Semitism and police intimidation via non-crime hate incidents. There doesn’t seem to be much “heart” in such things.  Pre-woke Leftism, for all its faults and utopian pipedreams, often had a youthful, creative energy. Surprisingly, this energy has become much more common on the Right during the last decade. Some people call this change a political “vibe shift” – as in all the vibes switching side, from Left to Right... a typical phenomenon of the 2020s: “cultural repetition”. You may have noticed how many Hollywood films are remakes. You may have noticed that pop music sounds the same today as it did twenty years ago. You may even have wondered how it can be that the distance between this year and the year 2005 feels so much shorter than the distance between 1990 and 1970, if you’re old enough to remember a time of significant cultural changes in fashion and music.   Fisher argued that popular culture now stays largely unchanged by time because people have lost a sense of direction, a collective narrative, a feeling that things are moving meaningfully toward the future, a sense of optimism toward our shared life unfolding in time.  Being a Leftist, he blamed the collapse of Leftist hopes for a brighter future, but the same phenomenon can be said to apply to the collapse of the stability once provided by things like family, religion and national culture as well... things get a little odd when today’s programme makers start trying to make new the classics. This happens every year with Eastenders, of course, and this year we’re promised an Only Fools and Horses reunion.  The problem is that shows like this can no longer work. They portray all those things which post-pandemic Britain has lost: a sense of civilisational self-confidence, of material comfort, of an unquestioned faith in national institutions. Those old shows function against the background of shared experiences, shared cultural values, and – particularly at Christmas – shared aspirations and shared hopes. A soap that realistically portrayed today’s East End or Peckham would probably need subtitles. Watching the woefully unrealistic portrayals of British life today thus has a spooky quality. It feels like a ghostly apparition of the future we once assumed would come now returns to haunt us before suddenly disappearing out of sight when you watch the news. Fisher coined a word for this uncanny feeling: “hauntology”, the ethereal appearance of the future that never came, returning to haunt those who ancestors once assured of its reality.  Fisher’s writings thus have that “heart” so often lacking in Left-wing writing today, that creative energy that’s now so rare among grim faced identitarians. This applies even to a concept as melancholic as “hauntology”, which he said not only acknowledges that the hopes of one era have evaporated – it also shows “a refusal to give up” on that desire to create the world we have lost.  It is common for Leftists to dismiss conservatives for political nostalgia, for unrealistic portrayals of some golden era that never was. Fisher is important for showing how nostalgia can function politically, even in relation to the future. Indeed, public fury at the Left-wing radicalism of the BBC is a version of the same impulse – a reminder that a once-treasured national institution was never meant to behave like this."

How the world’s authority on HR descended into an HR nightmare - "The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) describes itself as “the global authority on work, workers and the workplace” and the “voice of all things work”. It is an HR training and education company with, it says, nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries.  As the largest such organisation in the world, it should be a shining example of how to foster healthy, happy, productive employees. Instead, the SHRM’s HR record reads more like a catalogue of blunders and embarrassing missteps... Managers also introduced a “conservative” dress code which promoted “enclothed cognition” – the idea that what an employee wears impacts their performance. The rules banned trainers, hats and denim, as well as any clothing that failed to cover the body between the shoulders and knees. In October Johnny C. Taylor Jr, the company’s chief executive, is said to have called many of its employees “complacent,” “sloppy” and “entitled” at an all-staff meeting at which he announced a round of redundancies. “I am going to reorganise the business of SHRM. There will be a total reorg,” Taylor said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider, in which he also confirmed he had taken the decision unilaterally. “This is not a decision that I’ve made [in consultation] with anyone, no one.”... the same HR employee tasked with investigating Mohamed’s complaints was simultaneously drafting the paperwork for the termination of her contract, as well as ghostwriting emails for Mohamed’s manager. Just a couple of weeks before she was let go, SHRM had published a guide titled How to Conduct a Workplace Investigation, which stated that investigators “should focus on being impartial.”... SHRM’s allegedly rank hypocrisy raises broader questions about the ballooning HR industry and its increasingly powerful role in the workplace. HR workers now outnumber doctors and lawyers in Britain – there are more than 476,000 people in the industry, an increase of 68 per cent since 2010. Only the Netherlands has a larger HR industry than Britain, and yet a rise in HR professionals has not necessarily made a difference to employee health or productivity... Pamela Dow, a former senior civil servant, posited that our bloated HR sector could be the reason for the UK’s “national sluggishness”... So, what has gone so wrong? Tanya de Grunwald is a former journalist, now an entrepreneur and campaigner who hosts This Isn’t Working, a podcast on the HR industry. She says: “It can look like it’s just a huge mess, but what I see is a battle for the soul of HR. Over the past five years particularly, there’s been huge confusion about what it actually is. A new generation of people have come into the HR industry, a lot of university graduates, and they’ve brought in quite an activist agenda.”... While the primary function of the industry used to be legal compliance, staff welfare and personnel issues – literally the hiring and firing – there is now an overemphasis on employee wellbeing and inclusion, she says, and this creates tension.  According to de Grunwald, the harsh truth is that businesses are ultimately “about making money”. She adds that HR “lost its way with all this wellbeing and DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] stuff, when really all they should have been doing was making sure that we – that our organisation – was as productive as possible.” That’s not to say that employee wellbeing isn’t important. “You should be nurturing your best people, you should be investing in them, training them,” she says. “But you’re not everybody’s mum.”"
I didn't know the US had gotten so informal that moderate dress codes were bad

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Why do identical twins have such similar personalities?  Is it because they're reared together? Is it because people treat them alike due to their visual similarity?  Nope! Neither theory holds water.  Despite looking as similar as identical twins and being reared apart, look-alikes are not similar like identical twins are. In fact, they're no more similar than unrelated people.  This makes sense: they're only minimally more genetically similar than regular unrelated people. The other thing is that twins reared apart and together have similarly similar personalities.  In fact, there might be a negative environmental effect going on, where twins reared together try to distinguish their personalities more! This data also came with data on dizygotic twins reared together and apart, delivering heritabilities of 0.76, 0.66, or 0.56, depending on which group is used as the comparison.  And as an aside, the traits of same-sex and opposite-sex dizygotic twins are similarly correlated. Twins who are perceived to be fraternal rather than identical and vice-versa also seem to be aligned as predicted genetically, not by perceptions.  That is, people seen as identical (fraternals) but who are not are as similar as fraternals (identicals). If being reared apart or together doesn't matter, and looking alike doesn't matter, misperception of zygosity doesn't matter, and even sex doesn't matter (mostly excepting sex-linked traits), there's just not much room for twin methods to be biased by a lack of equal environments"

Matt Van Swol on X - "I am still waiting for someone to help me understand why DOZENS of donations were made in my name, to Act Blue Democrat candidates in KANSAS... ...when I've never been to Kansas, nor ever knowingly donated to any political candidate in my entire life What is going on???!!!!"
AwakenedOutlaw⚒️ on X - "This practice is referred to as "Smurfing." Act Blue, an illicit Democrat money machine, takes the information of anyone who has donated to Democrat causes and then uses that information in perpetuity as cover to slather their candidates with micro donations (generally from  illegal foreign sources to evade laws that prohibit them) to fly under the radar with illicit micro donations."

Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 on X - "Rereading some of the docs in the Proud Boys case really gets my blood boiling. These guys had no chance given the conspiracy between the court and the DOJ to convict.  Here, Jocelyn Ballantine told Judge Kelly--who quickly agreed--in March 2023 that the accidental disclosure of FBI texts revealing one agent had been instructed to delete evidence represented a "classified" exchange.  FIRE HER."

Eyal Yakoby on X - "Horrifying, an Islamic Scholar at North Carolina State University: “If a loving father wants to marry off his nine-year-old daughter to a righteous man and all parties consent, what is the issue with that?”"

ian bremmer on X - "no serious european leader today believes that the continent is facing “civilizational erasure” warned in the us national security strategy. since world war ii, the us and europe have never been so far from alignment. a crisis for the transatlantic relationship. welcome news for putin."
Coddled Affluent Professional on X - "Europeans have a track record of almost always being right on matters of major political importance. Anyways, here’s a photo of German delegates laughing at Trump in 2018 when he warned they were becoming too dependent on Russian oil."

A scary woman accidentally posts a naked selfie on eBay's air fryer list - "A British woman mistakenly included a naked selfie on eBay's list of air fryer, but before being attacked by a "crude" message asking if "melon" was included. Claimed to remain "quivering in a panic". Sale.  26-year-old Emma Jones is puzzled that she received requests from hundreds of new followers and friends on social media after she listed Ninja Foodi Max at the end of last month... This list has since become viral, but electrical products It explains as follows. There are "previously used" and "signs of wear"."

Meme - Kid prepping for Battle of Helm's Deep: "Please sir, I'm only 9 years old"
"And the orcs you're fighting aren't even a year old. Now shut up and get ready to kill some babies"

Airdrie warns public of brazen coyote after 6-year-old attacked at light festival - "Child is safe but disappointed he didn't turn into a werewolf, mom says... Airdrie mom Elizabeth Dawn wrote on Facebook that the victim of Monday's attack was her six-year-old son. She said his snowsuit protected him from being injured, and her boyfriend took quick action to kick the animal off the child.  "However, he is a bit upset he has not turned into a werewolf yet," she wrote."

Meme - "Sometime in 1906 I was walking in the heat of the day through the Bazaars. As I passed an Arab cafe an idle wit, in no hostility to my straw hat but desiring to shine before his friends, called out in Arabic, "God curse your father, O Englishman." I was young then and quicker-tempered, and foolishly could not refrain from answering in his own language that I would also curse his father if he were in a position to inform me which of his mother's two and ninety admirers his father had been. I heard footsteps behind me and slightly picked up the pace, angry with myself for committing the sin [of] a row with Egyptians. In a few seconds I I felt a hand on each arm. "My brother; said the original humorist, "return, I pray you, and drink with us coffee and smoke. I did not think that Your Worship knew Arabic, still less the correct Arabic abuse, and we would fain benefit further by your important thoughts.""
"White boy shocks Egyptian by telling him to fuck off in perfect Arabic"

Team conflict over lunch habits turned into HR issue. Food place recommendation near Tanjong Pagar. : r/askSingapore - "I manage a small team of 5: 4 Chinese and 1 Malay. The Malay team member came to me saying she feels left out because the Chinese members always go for lunch together without her.  I spoke to the Chinese members, and they said they’re not excluding her intentionally. They just don’t want to eat Malay food.  To stay neutral, I alternate having lunch with different people, and mostly eat alone to avoid any perception of favoritism.  Eventually, the Malay team member escalated this to HR. HR spoke to me, and I told them that lunch is personal time and I can’t force people to eat together. At work and in meetings, I’ve already made English mandatory and there are no communication issues professionally.  I bring them out to eat together occasionally maybe once a quarter.  What would you do? Food recommendation near TP?
EDIT: Thanks for the responses. At least I know I did what I could in this situation.
EDIT2: I understand the malay colleague feels left out. Even the chinese colleagues don't always eat together. Sometimes 2 went to eat different places because they have their own "cravings". I think everyone has to put in a bit of effort if they want to have lunch together or compromise.
EDIT3: Malay colleague prefers Malay style restaurants or sell only Malay food. Nasi padang, Mee rebus, Nasi lemak etc"
"you can’t force adults to eat together, complaining to hr is ridiculous.  Lunch is a private time and if employees want to exclude others that’s their prerogative.  Excluding someone from lunch because they don’t like you is a perfectly acceptable reason.  I think you need to have a conversation with the employee feeling left out and explain it’s not high school, it’s a job. Hr and management can’t regulate people free time."
"One of my friend groups consists of several conflicting dietry restrictions: one Muslim, one Hindu, one can't take chili, one vegetarian, and one extremely picky eater. Every meal together was difficult (to plan), but we take turns compromising (except me, I eat everything) because we are friends and the point is to get together.  But colleagues, dealing with lunch every day? It's such a tiring prospect that I'm really happy that I'm the sort who packs their own lunch and wouldn't mind eating by myself."

Longest urban cable car in Europe lets Paris commuters soar over gridlock - "It is France’s seventh urban cable car, with others in cities including Brest, Saint-Denis de La Réunion and Toulouse."

Meme - "I'll take movies for $500, Alex"
"TIM BURTON DIRECTED THIS DARK TALE STARRING JOHNNY DEPP & HELENA BONHAM CARTER"
"you gotta be kidding me"

Meme - "Lesbians when a new haircut for 9 year old boys drops:
Wooooooo!"

Sean Davis on X - "BREAKING: The corrupt Obama DOJ, including James Comey and Andrew McCabe, explicitly blocked efforts to criminally investigate the Clinton Foundation in 2016 because they did not “want to create any impression we are investigating the Clinton Foundation or the Clintons,” according to new evidence released today by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa.  Documents show that federal agents were blocked from issuing subpoenas about the Clinton Foundation or conducting interviews with or about the Clintons in order to protect them from scrutiny during the 2016 election. At the same time, the Obama FBI was using the bogus, Clinton-funded dossier as pretext for illegally spying on the Trump campaign."
Weird. I thought "nobody is above the law"

F20 French girl...Let's be honest about what we're looking for here.... : r/Needafriend - "Most people lurking around posts searching for internet friendships are usually insecure, and/or lonely which is often combined with some sort of mental disease (depression, anxiety)."

Was Saudi Arabia’s tourism dream too good to be true? - "You have to hand it to Saudi Arabia. When Mohammed bin Salman announced his intention to turn the desert nation into a $100bn tourism destination within a decade, he was smart enough to realise he’d need something special to make that happen.  For the millennial crown prince, there was one obvious solution to that conundrum: a flurry of breathtaking “mega projects” that would need to be seen to be believed, and which would help lure international tourists who might not otherwise have dreamed of visiting the Islamic kingdom... If it all sounded too good to be true – well, you might have been on to something. Less than 10 years since Mohammed bin Salman dazzled audiences with his transformational vision, Saudi’s tourism dream appears to be slipping away – at least when it comes to the mega-projects... It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that a giant Saudi construction project has been put on ice due to falling oil prices.  Fans of particularly tall buildings may remember when the country announced its breathless plans to build the Kingdom Tower: a one-kilometre-high skyscraper in Jeddah that would dwarf Dubai’s Burj Khalifa and put Saudi Arabia’s second city of Jeddah on the map.  Not long after construction began in 2013, the project ran into trouble, not least when oil prices plunged in 2015."

How Faces of Death traumatised a generation (and made millions) - "Blurring reality, Faces of Death is a mockumentary that queasily combines news clips too graphic to make it to air alongside staged footage... Schwartz, who was widely reported as having died in August 2019, had been working at a family-run nature documentaries firm when Japanese executives visited him with an intriguing proposition: could he make a macabre movie about death for their more extreme market? Initially, Schwartz intended Faces of Death to comprise only real footage, scouring local news stations for unaired material from accidents or murder, but quickly realised he’d need to bulk it out with fabricated recreations. Filmed on a paltry $450,000 budget, Faces of Death ended up grossing a reported $35m (the equivalent of $168m today), and spawned three official sequels – plus a Fact or Fiction video tie-in which sought to debunk some of the myths. Its current cultural currency is high, owing to a reboot (apparently languishing in release-limbo) starring Gen Z scream queen Barbie Ferreira as well as zeitgeist-shaping musician Charli XCX... Apone reckons 60 per cent of the footage is genuine. The brooding Dr Francis B Gröss is, in fact, played by Michael Carr, an actor who reacted to the script by shrieking: “Who wrote this s---?”... “Some of the stuff at the time, I thought, there’s no way people are going to buy this!”, he laughs, singling out a moment where someone is killed by a crocodile. “The alligator trainer was a friend of John’s, and we built a fake alligator, fake arms and different body parts, and we weren’t sure it was going to pass muster, but that was one of the things that people swore was real.”  “Whereas the bear attack – which is real – people still think is fake.”"