Saturday, April 11, 2026

America's gulag: 60,000+ people in ICE detention

More than 60,000 people are in detention as of April 4, 2026, compared with about 39,000 in late 2024.

About 70% of those detained had no criminal convictions.

This is not the America our founders envisaged.

This is not the America I grew up in.

This is not the America I want to live in.

Edward

Thursday, January 15, 2026

This is an administration of, by, and for, assholes

Kill people on the streets. Declare an insurrection when the survivors protest. Protect the murders. Investigate the victims.

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Have the Epstein files been gutted?

I recommend skipping the first 12:30 of this video: it contains nothing new. But the second half of the video is well worth watching. To summarize:

- It will be difficult to hide what's in the FBI files concerning Epstein. Investigative reports know how to dig for dirt.

- The place to start may be the money trail.

- It's unlikely that all copies of all the damning tapes will have been destroyed.

- The truth will come out neither quickly nor all at once. But it likely will come out.

The best explanation of the "illusion" of self and free will

 This video is the best explanation I've seen about the challenging notion that our selves and our free will are illusions.

How I watch most YouTube videos

 Most YouTube videos are filled with old, new, ramblings, and other fillers. I'm almost exclusively interested in content. Interesting stuff that I didn't already know.

YouTube transcripts are almost useless. Instead, I turn on closed captioning and set the playback speed to 2x. That allows me to skip filler and find the good stuff quickly. 

Geoffrey Hinton: Lecture on AI

 Geoffrey Hinton won the Turing Award and the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on AI.

 

This lecture is much more interesting than the run-of-the-mill musings about AI. 

Yanis Varoufakis: Political and economic analyses and warnings

Three content-rich videos from Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister of Greece. These videos cover the present political and economic situation in America, with minimal overlap. Forget the throw-away headlines: the analyses are superb:

America is heading for a crisis

- Systemic risks to the US Economy

- Political and economic analysis of Trump's administration