Notices by Dan Gillmor (dangillmor@mastodon.social), page 4

Sigh, the New York Times gives a massive amount of op-ed space to an AI founder who (surprise!) loves-loves-loves the technology.

h/t https://mastodon.social/@rdviii@rdviii@famichiki.jp

"A.I. Isn't People"

Another brilliant newsletter post by Rusty Foster:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people?last_resource_guid=Post%3A150442c6-0f09-4af2-9abe-c3860a644c1d

"I don’t need to know what mechanism underlies human intelligence to rule out the possibility that it’s the same as what a large language model does."

Yes, I could use archive.today (and its clones), but its behavior is WAY to sketchy at this point. See https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

It's a shame that the Verge has disappeared completely behind a paywall. Price is almost reasonable, however.

Michigan's Muslim voters were (rightly) pissed at Biden administration's Gaza policy, so many voted for Trump, whose anti-Islam bigotry was well known, and helped give him the state's electoral votes. And now they're shocked, shocked to discover how self-defeating that was. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/michigan-arab-communities-ice-fear

As Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall makes clear, the Roberts Court's tariff ruling may be the right one, but it doesn't even begin to remove the court's stink of corruption.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/dont-be-fooled-by-the-corrupt-courts-tariff-decision/sharetoken/4bc09a7c-2770-4b4b-8ebe-73f0cfb664c3

Federal judges keep ruling that Trump's violent, masked goons are illegally arresting and jailing people, but the regime goes right on doing it.

How close are we to outright fascism? This close.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/courts-have-ruled-4400-times-that-ice-jailed-people-illegally-it-hasnt-stopped-2026-02-14/

The Trump regime is routinely telling US judges to go screw themselves -- ignoring and violating court orders, and flagrantly spitting on people's constitutional rights.

So far, not even one regime apparatchik has been held accountable in any serious way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/world/africa/us-secret-deportation-cameroon.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MVA.rP52.v68z1-9CPLv1&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Gallup polling organization joins the quislings, announcing it'll stop doing presidential approval surveys, not coincidentally just when Trump's negatives are super-high.

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5733236-gallup-stops-presidential-approval-ratings-polls/

If you have a Ring (Amazon) camera, you are -- or will become -- a tool of the surveillance state. Is that really what you want to be?

https://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter&attribution_id=698b47cbe724d10001786209&attribution_type=post

Trump has so thoroughly brought Big Journalism to heel that NBC makes a transparently hollow denial that it covered up the Olympic audience's booing of JD Vance. The denial is a pathetic but telling lie. It tells us a lot about the network's disintegrating integrity.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/09/nbc-hid-the-boos-for-jd-vance-wheres-trumps-unfair-editing-lawsuit/

Trump is -- and always has been -- a vile racist. But journalists do -- and always have done -- keep publishing his denials that he is a racist, in the face of the obvious.

Hungary's fascist leader, Viktor Orbán, didn't have as easy a time bringing media under his control as Trump is doing in America -- but he also didn't have a few massive technology oligarchs on his side.

Not a hint on the Washington Post's homepage that it just gutted key parts of its news staff.

An example of why I've come to despise Big Journalism:

This NBC News story -- Trump saying he's not involved in Warner Bros. Discovery takeover contest -- is pure stenography. It never mentions that Trump lies about absolutely everything, or that he's already been involved.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/trump-netflix-paramount-fight-warner-bros-rcna257476

Cory Doctorow: "America is not great. It has been gutted by the Epstein class, who robbed us blind, raped our kids, and are now selling us shitcoins and chatbots and the spectacle of protesters being shot in the streets."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/02/corprophagia/#that-makes-me-smart

Yet another blatantly obvious coverup from the Trump regime, this time in DHS's shape-shifting story about prison videos it now claims never to have recorded.

Remember: You should always presume these people are lying.

https://www.404media.co/dhs-says-critical-ice-surveillance-footage-from-abuse-case-was-actually-never-recorded-doesnt-matter

Please note that the Trump regime continues to flagrantly, illegally withhold the Epstein documents and plainly has no intention of releasing them (at least until the apparatchiks can destroy/doctor the incriminating stuff).

Pathetic Democratic leadership tells members of Congress to be chickenshits and not go to Minneapolis to support the people standing up to Trump's fascist goons.

https://archive.ph/jQH9B

The new head of the Ellison family's CBS "News" is adding more commentators (mostly from the right wing, it seems) and firing actual journalists.

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689849/after-rocky-start-bari-weiss-to-cut-staff-add-commentators-at-cbs-news

Sad to watch a once-fine organization sliding into the same category as the Murdoch family's odious Fox "News" --

You'd think that every news report of Trump's dispatch of Tom Homan to Minnesota would prominently remind people that Homan was caught on video taking $50,000 in cash, plainly an intended bribe.

Sadly, you would be wrong. I'm still looking for any mention of it.

Reminder: https://newrepublic.com/post/200788/tom-homan-50k-cash-bribe