My supervisor…[saw a chatbot] as a digital priest whose primary purpose was to confirm that he was right and everyone else was mistaken.
The Last Shall Be First (#1523)
SCOTUS legalizes sexual assault of minor-age female athletes:
The Supreme Court…uph[e]ld…West Virginia’s and Idaho’s laws that [demand female] athletes [submit to unwanted physical examinations without parental consent]…[to] compet[e] in girls’ sports…[if someone accuses them of being transgender]. This decision has implications for 25 other states with similar laws…
As is typical in our sick society, most coverage of the story focuses on the supposed intent of the laws rather than the actual consequences to female athletes.
I Spy (#1533)
The mad emperor wants to use copaganda to wreck the medical system, establish universal surveillance, and excuse even more state violence:
The Trump [regime]’s new [mass surveillance] strategy [uses]…the [psychotic “]war[“] on [the important clinical medicine] fentanyl…[to justify] a national surveillance system [unconstitutionally] built from…[routinely-abused] prescription…[monitoring databases], toxicology results, wastewater, electronic health records, license plate scans, and [whatever other private information can be illegally gathered by cops, spooks, and goons]…the 2026 National Drug Control Strategy [threatens]…to “fully resource and empower” [Father]land Security Task Forces, “le[t chatbots kill people],” and “[violate the Privacy Act of 1974]” [in order]…to…[de facto abolish] HIPAA…[and make] patient privacy [a dead letter]. No[thing]…would prevent [the] system…from being used to monitor abortion, pregnancy, gender transition, methadone treatment, protest activity, or any other behavior a future [regime] decides to target…
Walled Garden (#1579)
The open internet is becoming a thing of the past:
Texas users of…Bluesky were [prevented from signing in without using an algorithm]…to verify their ages…[by] putting in the last four digits of their Social Security Number, inputting a credit card number or having their driver’s license scanned…the “App Store Accountability Act,” [which] requires companies that run app marketplaces like Google and Apple to verify all users’ ages…was [recently un]blocked by…[the deeply-authoritarian 5th circuit, but it does not require social media age surveillance]. Bluesky told some users who asked [tha]t the age verification [demand] was a “known bug”…
I Spy (#1604) 
Thanks to fascism, this decision was stillborn:
The U.S. Supreme Court has…ruled…that “geofence warrants” count as a “search” under the Constitution and therefore trigger the Fourth Amendment’s safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures. The geofence warrant at issue in…Chatrie v. United States…was issued to Google…[and] led to the arrest of Okello Chatrie…[whose] lawyers argued that this police tactic amounted to…the very sort of sweeping assault on civil liberties that the Fourth Amendment was originally enshrined to protect…
Unfortunately, surveillance software from a company called Penlink, which is already owned by hundreds of cop shops and goon squads, allows pigs and goons to do this at will without having to go to court for a warrant or deal with Google. So this is only a “win” on paper.
Aladdin’s Satellite (#1608)
Everything I read about modern work makes me happier I became a whore:
…numerous employees…spoke to Futurism about their experience with [chatbot]-obsessed bosses, relaying feelings of frustration and anger as managers and executives use the tech to barrage staff with nonsensical directives, unnecessary work, and perpetual pivoting…it’s a distinct new type of toxic work environment for the slop era. Slate found more evidence for the phenomenon earlier this year; one worker told the publication that managers “are getting cavities in their brains” due to the tech. In some cases, employees…felt as though their employers had started living in a completely different reality. The workplace had become a constant battle between [actual] reality versus [chatbot-driven delusion]s — and their boss…always chose the latter…
Enshittification (#1642)
These companies need to be sued until they’re completely annihilated:
[A] coalition of [almost 400] local newspaper publishers [has] filed a federal lawsuit…against OpenAI and Microsoft…[because] the…companies systematically [plagiariz]ed copyrighted reporting…to train and develop [chatbots], including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, without permission or compensation…violating the Copyright Act and threatening the future of local journalism…OpenAI knowingly stripped copyright management information from publishers’ work — including author bylines, copyright notices, and terms of use information — in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act…OpenAI founder Sam Altman…a[dmitt]ed during testimony before the British House of Lords that it would be “impossible to train [chatbots] without using copyrighted materials”…Although major national news organizations and prominent authors have previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft over similar [violation]s, the new case marks the largest coordinated legal effort by local and regional newspapers [to shut down these plagiarism machines]…
Pyrrhic Victory (#1648) 
Government thugs don’t care how many lives are destroyed by their evil:
…Florida [cops] arrested a man and held him in jail for nearly three months based on a bad facial recognition result…In April 2025, a man in Jacksonville…purchased a car from someone he met in a grocery store parking lot. When he learned the car was stolen, he reported the crime…[lazy pigs] ran [surveillance footage] through facial recognition software, which flagged Jalil Richardson…[despite the fact that he] lived in Charlotte, North Carolina—400 miles away…[and] time cards showed Richardson was at work when the suspect was selling a stolen car in Jacksonville. But [cops didn’t care, so] Richardson was arrested in North Carolina and held for 33 days…[then] extradited to Jacksonville and held for another 53 days. Prosecutors finally dropped the charges and released him[, but not before] he had…[l]ost…his job, his house, and custody of two of his children…
Jacksonville cops are just as psychopathically-unconcerned with the innocence of people they target as those in Detroit are.
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There is little point in my using the occasion of Banned Books Week to write about this any longer; besides the fact that I’ve written about it every year since 2011 and the old columns are all still there for your perusal should you desire, many news columns every month include items on various forms of censorship. So this year I’m simply going to call attention to the fact that the book-banners and book-burners are no longer satisfied with the pretense that they merely want to keep “obscene” (defined in whatever fanciful and impossibly-broad way suits them) books and other media from “children” (defined in such a fanciful and impossibly-broad way it includes all high school students and even many university students) everywhere in the civilized world; they are even now attempting to prevent people everyone agrees are adult from seeing any books or electronic media any government anywhere in the world has any objection to, via a combination of banning physical books, internet censorship, mass surveillance, flooding the world with garbage, and enticing the intellectually-lazy majority into never, ever thinking for themselves. And this combination has the potential to create an age so dark, it will make every previous dark age look like the Enlightenment in comparison.
