Tall cat in a skinsuit

I retweet things I like. If you don’t like them then Im sorry you feel that way 😃 #m4a #blm she/her they/them 🏳️‍🌈 still a meat popsicle 🌹 UNIONIZE

[Tall cat in a skinsuit @opalexian]

@gavinpunk @umapalma01 A few of his bravest warriors in the comments already ‘it’s just jooookes bro!’ 😐

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

They tell you Flock cameras are there to fight crime.

So I pulled the actual police logs from my new favorite website (haveibeenflocked . com). 233 million searches that they have been able to get via FOIA requests and here's what "fighting crime" actually looks like:

> 84% had no case number at all
> The most common reason a cop typed in the box? Blank, nothing
> Only about 9% were even tagged as a real crime.
> "Test" and "training" show up as reasons, run on real people's cars
> The FBI and Homeland Security were wired into local camera networks your town never signed off on.

So what is Flock?

FLOCK: 100,000+ plate cameras bolted to poles across America. They read your plate everywhere you drive and never forget.

NOVA: Flock's AI that turns your plate into you. Your name, address, family, everyone you know, in seconds, no warrant.

SIGNALTRACE: a competitor's tool that tracks the Bluetooth off your phone, your AirPods, your watch. Doesn't even need your plate.

Then I followed the money and the lead investor behind Flock also funds an Israeli company that can hack cameras and change the footage. Another lead investor backs a 911 app that flips on your phone's camera and mic. Trace it all the way back and you hit a former Israeli prime minister and Jeffrey Epstein's money.

Full article with photos and receipts is on my Substack now (link in bio). Enjoy!

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

CHARLOTTE: “I don’t see how it was a suicide… somebody did that to her… Black girl, 16, hanging from a tree, on the grounds of a Black church, in a historically Black area. I don’t know any other way to put it.”

The man who found #JulianaNzita isn’t buying what the police say.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

⚡️ NEW: Drop Site News spoke with the parents of 22-year-old Mahmoud Al-Drimli, who identified him as the blindfolded Palestinian man in a viral photograph showing two female Israeli soldiers smiling as they pose beside him.

Mahmoud disappeared on November 2, 2024. His family said they had received no information about him until recognizing him in the image. Drop Site’s Mohamed Ahmed spoke in Gaza with his mother, Aida Al-Drimli, 50.

“The moment I saw the picture, my heart was at peace and I was happy. But at the same time, when I saw him in that state, my heart broke,” she said through tears.

Aida said her son disappeared while trying to return from southern Gaza to Gaza City, where his brother remained. Repeated appeals to the Red Cross and other institutions produced no information about whether he was alive, imprisoned, or killed, his family told Drop Site.

“These are the [Israelis] who claim to be ‘the world’s most moral army,’ yet they publish pictures like this,” Aida said. “My son has done nothing wrong. He simply longed to return to Gaza City.”

“Where are human rights in all of this?” she asked. “Not just my son, all the prisoners. All of them are experiencing horrors in prisons.”

🎥 Footage from Drop Site contributor Mohamed Ahmed

[Tall cat in a skinsuit @opalexian]

@fiat_money @samueljrob Hey look, she’s standing with something she actually supports for once!

[Tall cat in a skinsuit @opalexian]

@kaceytron @EthansAttic Hope you’re doing well girlie 💜

[B L A K E L E Y™℠©® LLC @_iamblakeley]

Fucking disaster. Call your senators NOW.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Tall cat in a skinsuit @opalexian]

@PJ17862 @hasanthehun But was it a WATER BOTTLE??? NO! Only water bottles are misogynist so the phone throwing is fine. /s

[Tall cat in a skinsuit @opalexian]

@yellowtoastbox @HasanabiProd His teenage son became a nazi, probably to get attention from his dad because he saw how much dude lived Nick Fuentes.

[Tall cat in a skinsuit @opalexian]

@KowaiRin @HasanabiProd Is Pennsylvania in Israel? No! Why would he talk about it?

[@TerriDolan55 @terridolan55]

That’s a Buick Envision, the only vehicle sold in the US that is fully made in China. It’s been a slap in the face to American auto workers for years.

[Tall cat in a skinsuit @opalexian]

@zeteo_news @hasanthehun @mehdirhasan Missed opportunity for the triple Hasan singularity.

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

In 2009, @VanJones68 was forced to "resign" from the Obama Admin after 6 months because Fox News and establishment Democrats denounced him as "the radical left": due to his prior support in the 1990s for Mumia Abu-Jamal, calling a GOP member an "asshole," allegedly signing a petition suggesting Bush did 9/11, etc. His glaring, oozing career ambitions lay in ruins as he was kicked out of decent DC power centers for transgressing too many ideological lines and comportmental rules.

That's when he realized that wealth and celebrity awaited him only if he were willing instead to transform himself into a vehement defender and guard of establishment dogma, a useful tool for those who had just struck him down.

So that's exactly what he did. He renounced his prior "radical" views, repeatedly apologized for his transgressions, became a stalwart, weepy advocate of deary DC media conventional wisdom, and began playing the new TV character his script required: the moderate, sensible liberal who just wants to bring everyone together in the safe, status-quo-perpetuating middle.

His real function: to begin every sentence with "I'm a progressive Democratic" -- the subtext: a black progressive Democrat! -- and then denounce the populist left (and populist right) for crossing the political and ideological lines that he was told to vigorously police and uphold: the lines which nobody is permitted to cross without being denounced and excluded the way he once was. "Look: they're too extreme even for Van Jones!" He was there to protect his establishment bosses by punishing the excesses of the "extremes on both sides": just as he had once been punished by them almost to the point of career destruction.

His service as the "black progressive policeman" for the DC establishment and its dual religious planks of corporatism and militarism were predictably very valuable to them, and very lucrative for him. He got larger and larger CNN contracts. Jeff Bezos gave him $100 million to hand out however he wanted. Jay-Z hired him to lead a new group, etc. etc. Book deals from large NYC publishing houses flowed in, etc. etc.

Since October, 2023, he saw the real opening, one that would catapult him upward even further into the top echelons of establishment servitude: turn himself into the most devoted "liberal media" loyalist to Israel, the most militant defender of Tel Aviv's reputation, as global support for that country collapsed. He dutifully wore his little yellow ribbon pin every day for years on TV as if it were tattooed onto him. He cackled with Bill Maher about how annoying it is to keep hearing all this whining about "dead babies in Gaza." With his patented fake TV tears in his eyes, he heralded Israel as our great ally, and talked about how worried he was for his beloved Jewish friends as anti-Semitism grew on the left and right.

Now he's here to boast that "leaders in both parties" called him this week to profusely thank him for his service to the bipartisan DC agenda. The once-wannabe radical has fully transformed into a prime media instrument for the establishment that once threatened to destroy him. Both parties are now grateful to him for defending their prerogatives and positions.

One thing is for sure: other than Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, nobody's future is brighter at CNN once Larry Ellison's son buys up Warner Brothers and CNN and puts Bari Weiss in charge with the sole mandate to turn the network into an even more vigorous Israeli propaganda network than CBS News has become.

[VK @vjeannek]

@SanaSaeed Ffs it’s a Ted Cruz pac btw @Midnight_JJ0 @DoodlesTrks

[Censored Humans @CensoredHumans]

Ben Gvir is posting videos showing off the execution chamber where he will exterminate thousands of Palestinian hostages.

Imagine if Hitler broadcast videos of his gas chambers to gloat like this.

[Il Critico Urbano @urbancritiques]

@RashidaTlaib “She’s growing on me”