An interesting question.

https://www.bespacific.com/the-trump-administration-is-lying-to-our-faces-congress-must-act/

The Trump Administration Is Lying to Our Faces. Congress Must Act

The New York Times Editorial Board (Gift Article): The Trump Administration Is Lying to Our Faces. Congress Must Act. “The administration is urging Americans to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. Ms. Noem and Mr. Bovino are lying in defiance of obvious truths. They are lying in the manner of authoritarian regimes that require people to accept lies as a demonstration of power.” But in today’s media landscape, it doesn’t cut it to eventually get to the truth after giving credulous consideration (and headline space) to the lies. When people lie every time, like every single time, maybe it doesn’t make sense to give them the benefit of the doubt in the first rough draft of history. At this point, it’s not enough to call out the lies we can plainly see with our own eyes. We have to assume the lie as a starting point. As Vinson Cunningham asks in The New Yorker: “Their untroubled and automatic dishonesty, amid so much shared evidence, gives rise to a horrible question: If this is what they do when we can see, what’s going on in the places—planes and cars, detention centers—where we can’t?” We need to find out. We owe it to Alex Pretti’s parents, and we owe it to America…”

• The New York Times Magazine Gift Article – Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis: “Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge…”

• TIME: In Wake of Alex Pretti Shooting, Trump Is Betraying His Base on Gun Rights. They’re Not Happy. [Stephen Miller called Pretti “an assassin [who] tried to murder federal agents”]

• The Atlantic Gift Article – Believe Your Eyes. “People are risking their lives to document agents in Minneapolis…But Pretti’s last seconds were captured from multiple angles, in sickening footage widely distributed on social media and by news organizations. It is able to be seen and dissected online precisely because of the observers who were there to document it, who watched as federal agents piled atop Pretti and who did not drop their phones when the gunshots rang out…”

• The New Yorker – The Battle for Minneapolis [no paywall] “As Donald Trump brings his retribution to a liberal city, citizens, protesters, and civic leaders try to protect one another.”

A tech glitch or censorship? How would we know?

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5689104/tiktok-epstein-direct-messages

TikTok is investigating why some users can't write 'Epstein' in messages

Officials at TikTok say they are looking into why many users have been unable to send the word "Epstein" in direct messages, an issue that garnered widespread attention on social media Monday and prompted California Gov. Gavin Newsom to announce an inquiry into the matter.

Interesting. I’m sure a spy or a terrorist would fully comply...

https://pogowasright.org/the-trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media/

The Trump Administration wants your DNA and social media

Privacy International sounds the alarm:

The U.S. Government intends to force visitors to submit their digital history and DNA as the price of entry. With this much data AI tools will likely be deployed to unlock details of your life for border and immigration agencies.

Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP).

If the proposed changes are adopted after the 60-day consultation, then millions of travellers to the U.S. will be forced to use a U.S. government mobile phone app, submit their social media from the last five years and email addresses used in the last ten years, including of family members. They’re also proposing the collection of DNA.

Read the details of this dystopian proposal on Privacy International.

Read the Federal Register proposal and submit any comments by February 9, 2026.

A wish or a fact?

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-agents-incapable-math

AI Agents Are Mathematically Incapable of Doing Functional Work, Paper Finds

A months-old but until now overlooked study recently featured in Wired claims to mathematically prove that large language models “are incapable of carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain complexity” — that level of complexity being, crucially, pretty low.

… Ignore the rhetoric that tech CEOs spew onstage and pay attention to what the researchers that work for them are finding, and you’ll find that even the AI industry agrees that the tech has some fundamental limitations baked into its architecture. In September, for example, OpenAI scientists admitted that AI hallucinations, in which LLMs confidently make up facts, were still a pervasive problem even in increasingly advanced systems, and that model accuracy would “never” reach 100 percent.