Karoline Leavitt, White House Press Secretary: “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story” (I mean, sorry, but WTF) … A spokesman for The NY Times said: “Evading tough questions certainly runs counter to transparent engagement with free and independent press reporting. But refusing to answer a straightforward request to explain the administration’s policies because of the formatting of an email signature is both a concerning and baffling choice, especially from the highest press office in the U.S. government.”

Which universe do you want to live in?

Worth considering…

John Gruber has an apt quote from Hanna Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in a March 25 Daring Fireball post:

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

and then there’s this one from Arendt, same source:

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

it seems pretty clear that she was right.

Apparently not only is science is out of fashion, the White House is for rent as a commercial venue (more quid pro quo, anyone?),and it’s just fine to turn our back on our allies, but the EPA’s mission is now to forward the interests of industry. Sigh.

Some particularly timely quotes from Teddy Roosevelt (courtesy of Robert Reich):

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”

***

“To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

***

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”

Heather Cox Richardson’s February 6, 2025 Letters from an American  Substack essay is worth a read.

RIP, Dr. David Crippen, an amazing polymath whose legacy lives on in the International Critical Care List he started.

Dana Milbank, writing in the Washington Post, scarily demonstrates the paucity of knowledge held by #47 with numerous examples.

Can’t resist this seasonal one from the brilliant folks at Joy of Tech:

There are apparently some very capable folks working at Google’s DeepMind.  First the brilliant AlphaFold and now GenCast  — their New AI model that they claim (see their presentation in Nature here) “advances the prediction of weather uncertainties and risks, delivering faster, more accurate forecasts up to 15 days ahead.”  The Nature paper claims that GenCast has “greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world, ENS, the ensemble forecast of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts…GenCast is trained on 40 years of best-estimate analysis from 1979 to 2018, taken from the publicly available ERA5 (fifth generation ECMWF reanalysis) reanalysis dataset. Reanalysis provides a reconstruction of past weather by computing analysis for historical dates and times.”  Though the comparison is with the 2019 ENS modeling (and the latter has improved since then), this seems pretty impressive.