I’ve given Claude Opus various published papers (and my own unpublished ones) and asked it to review them. (Don’t panic—I’m not uploading confidential manuscripts.)
The reviews it produces are excellent. It finds statistical errors, internal contradictions, and conceptual…
Exit quote: “As a journal editor, I’m not sure what to do with this. If I gave up on human reviewers and used GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus instead, my bosses would fire me, probably rightfully so. The only constructive thing I can recommend is that, before submitting something to a journal, researchers and scholars use this tremendously valuable resource. (Just don’t tell the models that it’s your paper, because they do suffer from sycophancy.)”
That’s SEVENTEEN. Dated. Sourced. Expired. Verifiable in about twenty minutes by anyone with an internet connection and the mild curiosity to actually look. And I didn’t even reach for the ones still technically ticking, AOC’s 2031 deadline, Bernie’s “eight or nine years” from 2019 running out around 2028, Bill McKibben’s “nine years left” from 2021 expiring 2030, or Leonardo DiCaprio’s “nine-year window” from 2022, which lands, shockingly, right around 2031 too. Funny how the math always seems to land somewhere comfortably past the speaker’s own current relevance and never, ever inside it.
Here’s the pattern, and I want to be fair about it, because I don’t think these are all stupid people. Some of them hold genuine credentials. What they’re responding to is an incentive, not a conspiracy. “Sea level may rise a meter or two over 150 years under a specific emissions pathway” does not get you a Vanity Fair cover or a standing ovation. “TEN YEARS TO SAVE THE PLANET” does. Every single time, somebody got the applause and moved on to the next stage before the receipts caught up with them.
NOW WATCH THE BODY COUNT CLIMB, BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE IT STOPS BEING FUNNY AND STARTS BEING GENUINELY STRANGE.
Once “years left” stops scaring people, the next move is always the corpse count. Watch the actual number inflate, in order, name by name.
Rush Holt, 2013: “millions will die.”
Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006: showed Florida, Shanghai, and Calcutta going under from a Greenland-and-Antarctica collapse, and warned about the impact of “a hundred million or more” refugees. A UK High Court judge who reviewed the film for British classrooms called that specific section “distinctly alarmist,” and pointed out that a full Greenland melt plays out over MILLENNIA, not a news cycle.
Florida? In 1982, Dan Rather believed that would be underwater with (say it with me now) ten years:
Exit question: What Is Their Next Lie?
That’s a pretty easy one, to be honest:
The cover of Time magazine in 2006 and 2026. From "climate change will destroy humanity" to "AI will destroy humanity". pic.twitter.com/d59DCbTQFi
Stand Up to Racism just posted a celebration video of Restore Britain being “chased out of Camden” for leafleting in the Holborn & St Pancras by-election.
Rupert Lowe says one of his team was hospitalised with burns.
BREAKING: In a 2-1 vote, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the federal ban on direct interstate handgun sales violates the Second Amendment. pic.twitter.com/LT1WW93W7u
There are times when I cover an issue in politics/culture on the ground that is seen so wildly different than what either polling shows, social media dictates or the manufactured fear demands it should be . AI/data power centers is one of them The story: https://t.co/HNbGAiJSuZpic.twitter.com/YQyp3Dt6Xv
THE MAP HASN’T CHANGED, BUT GREENLAND WILL EFFECTIVELY BECOME A US PROTECTORATE:
“Trump’s new deal with Greenland is exactly the same as the old one!”
Not true at all. Key new details:
Duration: The 1951 deal lasted only as long as NATO existed and Greenland remained part of NATO. Trump’s 2026 deal lasts indefinitely, even if NATO implodes or Greenland…
I believe President Trump’s approval rating on his “handling of the economy” now stands consistently below 40%. This is rather weird, given that the U.S. economy is as strong as it has ever been. I suppose when most people say “the economy,” what they mean is gas prices.
But the most recent numbers released by the Census Bureau indicate that in 2025, the U.S. poverty rate was the lowest it has ever been, while median household income was the highest it has ever been, at $87,460. The stock markets hit record highs, too.
One would think that Americans would be happy about such a strong economy, but my guess is that most aren’t even aware of it. Either that, or the current anxiety about gas prices has overshadowed everything else.
I’m reminded of a passage from Mark Penn’s book on how the media treated the economy in 1992:
I have found over the years that there is often a huge disconnect between belief about the economy and the true economic state of affairs. Until the statistics are actually published, people tend to assess the economy through the eyes of the national media. In 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency based on worries about the economy, the statistics that came out after the election showed that the period leading up to November had actually been a period of record growth. . . . In his 1996 State of the Union speech, President Clinton said we had the best economy in thirty years — a statement that sent a flurry of reporters to check actual statistics rather than popular political movements and sweeping, politically motivated statements. The more people looked at the facts, the more they agreed, and six months later, there was near-unanimity that the economy was in good shape. Had the economy changed? No, what had changed was knowledge about the true facts of the economy.
Hmm. Regardless of the data, we get bad economic “news” when there’s a Republican in the White House., and good economic “news” when a Democrat is running for reelection.
The original vision was clear: Ford and SK would build a vertically integrated campus producing next-generation electric F-Series trucks and batteries. Production was scheduled for 2025. Ford later said the plant could eventually produce 500,000 electric trucks annually.
That is no longer the project being built. Ford now calls the assembly facility the Tennessee Truck Plant. Approximately 2,300 Ford employees are expected to manufacture new gas-powered “Built Ford Tough” trucks beginning in 2029.
The original electric truck is gone. The 500,000-EV annual production target is gone. Vehicle production has been delayed four years. Ford and SK On have also dissolved their BlueOval SK joint venture, with SK On taking ownership of the Tennessee battery operation. Layoffs were announced in March.
HUMANS WILL NEVER BE ANGELS, BUT IT WOULD BE GOOD TO CLEAN THE CULTURE SOME: Land of corruption.
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