Stephen Patlan

Rocket scientist, social butterfly, arts aficionado

[Ruth Ben-Ghiat @ruthbenghiat]

It means you live in an aurhoritarian political climate with a mob boss style leader.

[Ryan Hammer🔨 @ryanhammer09]

This is …. And I don’t say this lightly…. The single greatest piece of writing I have ever seen in my life

The Japanese have discovered unlimited chips & salsa and it’s beautiful

[Ben Rowen @ben_c_rowen]

Greg Abbott's advisers used the Texas Funeral Service Commission as a weapon against a Muslim community. @NicoGutteridge's meticulous reporting spells out how, based on interviews with former staffers and thousands of emails, texts, and documents https://t.co/VkxIhKiNoh

[Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid]

Entering month 6 of the Mamdani mayorship of NYC and Robberies are down 11%, Retail theft is down 19%, and Murder is down an astounding 21%.

And he did so without "Adding 5000 new cops" to the streets. Instead, he's invested in public safety with free childcare, accessible infrastructure, and better funded schools and libraries. He's proven once again that if we want safer communities, we must invest in People—not Punishments.

[Michał Podlewski @trajektoriePL]

Now we know why Peter Thiel packed his bags for Argentina.

Milei just submitted his AI legislative framework to Congress, where he proposes:
- zero regulation on AI development,
- a brand-new "non-human corporation" category for AI/robot-operated entities with limited liability
-a low-tax regime with flexible governance rules.

The Dutch East India Company gave the world the limited liability company in 1602. Milei wants Argentina to do the same for autonomous AI agents in 2026.

[Jen Rice @jen_rice_]

I think about this every day. Cannot believe National Guard troops are still deployed in DC. It was insane from the start and it's still insane.

https://t.co/zwakhhogcB

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

It’s important to note that this is not a coincidence or just trolling by Trump and his admin. To such people, the Nazi rise and takeover and transformation of the German government is a success story to be emulated, so why not use their language and tactics?

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

Things your legal department has to do when you are a propaganda outlet peddling lies for a corrupt regime nonstop… Fox is poison…

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it.

More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil.

Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.

The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.

Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.

We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.

https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl

[Jen Rice @jen_rice_]

I am obsessed with this finalist in this year's Michigan “I voted” sticker design contest

[Team Ossoff @TeamOssoff]

Ossoff: Last September, the President of Kazakhstan calls Donald Trump and says he wants to grant tungsten mining rights to an American company. And the very next month, Eric and Don Jr. get a stake in the American company pursuing the mining deal.

Six days later, six days after Prince Eric and Prince Don get their stake, Kazakhstan announces this company will get, “The largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.” A few more weeks go by, and then the U.S. government, run by their father, sets aside 1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project. In Kazakhstan.

All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

[Stephen Patlan @StevePatlan]

Trump's criminal slush fund is $1.776 billion, because his insurrections called Jan 6 "our 1776 moment".  I assume it was originally going to be $1.488 billion, but Trump couldn't understand the joke no matter how many times Stephen Miller explained it to him.

[Scott Greenfield @ScottGreenfield]

Critical detail here, that entirely legal immigrants become "illegal" when Immigration refuses to process their ongoing paperwork for legal residency.

[Jen Rice @jen_rice_]

Supreme Court today: We'll allow Alabama Republicans to change the congressional map in the primary election even though absentee voting has literally already started

Supreme Court last December: November's too late to strike down the GOP's map in TX's March primary election!!

[Jen Rice @jen_rice_]

Can anyone guess why they would remove the requirement to notify voters of polling place changes

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The sentence that should not be forgettable: Vought said he prepared Trump's executive actions so the president would not have to think about "whether something is legal or doable or moral."

That is not a staffer describing efficient workflow. That is the architect of the second Trump administration describing his function as the removal of legal and ethical friction before the president encountered it.

He was not hired to consider whether actions were legal. He was hired to make sure Trump never had to ask.

ProPublica got the recordings. That is what the recordings say.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The sharpest thing in the Roberts memos isn't the outcome. It's the distance between the public performance and the private reasoning.

Roberts spent years cultivating a reputation as a careful institutionalist. The memos show that in February 2016 he wrote, in his own hand, that the Obama climate plan was "highly unlikely to survive" before lower courts had touched it. Before full briefing. Before oral argument.

He wasn't assessing the pitch. He had already decided where it was going to land and was building the procedural route to get it there.

Kagan called the move "unprecedented." Breyer noted compliance wasn't required for years and asked why speed was necessary. Roberts responded the next day, the memos show, "irritated and blunt." The answer was cost to industry. Not constitutional law. Not procedural principle. Cost.

Kennedy wrote three sentences. We'll get there anyway. Five votes.

The shadow docket since that night has become the court's primary tool for consequential decisions issued without explanation. That's not drift. It's a feature that was built in that February exchange by a chief justice whose public face and private memos read like two separate documents.

[YIMBYLAND @YIMBYLAND]

This is insane.

I want to see some museums, private libraries, parks, and institutions built with this dough. Austin’s a blank slate when it comes to these things and someone could really build a legacy for themselves.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.

a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.

the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.

he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.

Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.

GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.

Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.

Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.

then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."

GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.

then he splits the users by income.

Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.

18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.

so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.

it isn't recommending the best option for you.

it's reading the room. and the room is paying.

read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b

[The Halfway Post @HalfwayPost]

BREAKING: For the first time a journalist has reportedly told Donald Trump on a phone call, “Every single claim you have made about this war has been proven a lie within hours, and I will not be publishing anything you’ve told me today.”