I don’t know if it’s been reported throughout the US or the rest of the world, but a wee child, aged 5 was allegedly abused and murdered in central Australia by an evil mutherfucker.
That’s kind of a frustrating article, and it requires some reading between the lines. The article says that a 5 year old’s body was found, and that a man had been arrested, apparently with some violence that required a visit to the hospital, whence he has been released and is in police custody pending charges. Apparently after the man was arrested and before the body was found, there was some civil unrest about the (police?) violence as part of the arrest. This article says nothing about abuse of the child per se, readers are assumed to be familiar with more of the details, I guess. I’m assuming that the circumspection in the article is due to charges not yet being filed.
The article also a small window into a culture with which most of us in the US are not familiar, as the victim was apparently an Aboriginal child.
There is now an additional article linked in that one which indicates the man has been charged with murder and “two counts of sexual intercourse without consent.”
To what degree and under what circumstances under Australian law can a 5yo give consent? My bet is “none”.
Sad to see an Aboriginal man attacking an Aboriginal child. Sad also to see rioting before the facts are in.
VC CEO with a net worth of half a billion says that saying “tax the rich” is morally equivalent to calling for slaughtering the Jews.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/nyregion/roth-mamdani-griffin-rich.html
“I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ — quote, tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Mr. Roth said, referring to the pro-Palestinian phrase that some Jews believe amounts to a call for ethnic cleansing.
Sure, because being mega-rich is as much a natural condition for those people as being Jewish is for Jews. It’s not their fault, they can’t help it.
And a ton of money is one of life’s requirements.
Do these people ever consider how they look to the rest of us?
And, though it is not in any law, “being super-rich” is absolutely a “protected class,” in practice.
Of course not.
Rich people of that sort consider themselves to be a different sort of person than the poor. “Poor” being “less wealthy than myself”.
I mean, what’s the real holocaust after all?
Just to remind us that classism is just as pernicious as racism, sexism or any other form of bigotry.
All of it building on the notion that MY privilege as people who count in the world is merited as rightly ordered by Nature or God and YOU should know your place.
A hearty “oh you’re such a clever boy aren’t you” to Mr. Roth though for the attempt at intersectionalizing it.
If I may, I would like to invite you to listen to an extremely - seriously, extremely - weird band from the mid 1990s, “Dead Fish Dont Grow Old” an extremely niche extreme alt electronic punk band that advocated (at least in one “song”) Jonathon Swift’s concept that the rich could eat the poor’s babies.
I can’t find a link to the band - and trust me, this was not a very good band - but here is a wiki link to Swift’s largely ironic treatise:
Guess he’s not a Motörhead fan.
or Aerosmith
If you use Google Chrome, they’ve probably downloaded a 4 GB AI model onto your device without your knowledge or consent - and if you delete it, it reinstalls itself.
OK, I don’t pretend to follow very much of that article. There is the energy cost of pushing that model into all computers that have Chrome installed. There is the AI itself inhabiting those computers and doing I-don’t-know-what without the users’ permission. The first is mostly a one-time cost (I don’t suppose that many people are trying to remove the thing, thereby generating another push to re-install it). The latter is potentially alarming, but understanding in what way it is alarming is a little above my pay grade. Can anyone attempt a layperson-level summary of what is at risk for an individual computer owner/user?
I don’t use Chrome myself, so I uninstalled it from my computer, and then did a simple hard-drive search for the thing the article called “OptGuideOnDeviceModel,” and didn’t find it. I feel fairly certain that this naïve level of trying to opt out would probably not do much good, but there you are.
Do a search for “weights.bin” and see what comes up. I had that file on the two computers I use. I don’t use Chrome unless I have to, so I was fairly comfortable following the directions to disable the features recommended (at least in whatever article I read) then I went through and disabled all the settings that mentioned AI or Gemini. But, again, if I broke something it might be a month before I realize it and then I’ll have long forgotten that I made these changes.
In light of this, would Mozilla Firefox be a better option than Chrome, then? (I have both, but have been using Chrome.)
EDIT: hoping this is a super-quick derail.
A private equity company in Georgia stole 30 million gallons of water from the county to fuel a data center.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-centers-water-00909988