Articulate. Clean. Seditious Conspiracy @wethefifth Editor-at-Large @TangleNews Partner @freethinkmedia | @bigthink Board @theFIREorg #MLIDAIDDS
Catchfools, USA
Joined November 2008
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Race, gender, sexuality — these aren't matters of shame or pride. They aren't the substance of anyone's identity. They're happenstance.
I honor the dignity/potential of every individual, but real pride is derivative of character and achievement. Pride isn't trivial; it's earned.
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
Astonishing.
I've been tracking Trump admin corruption and self-dealing for the last 20 months.
Here are 10 stories (!!!) from just the last three weeks.
Literally. Every single one from October.
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
Today, I'm thrilled to announce that I'm reviving my old column, A Grain of Saul. This was the first column I ever wrote (in college), and used to be the column I wrote on my website and for various news outlets.
I'm bringing it back now under the @TangleNews banner as part of our newsletter offerings.
It'll come out every week or two, cover controversial political and political-adjacent topics, and give me an opportunity to wade into some topics that we don't get to in Tangle's main suite of coverage.
It'll be more raw, more personal, more loose. It's all part of my own effort to hand more of the business side of Tangle off while I focus, again, on writing and hosting our podcast. I really can't wait.
To receive it, all you have to do is sign up for Tangle. First edition drops tomorrow. Subject: Are Americans just stupid?
readtangle.com
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
I met @kmele and @mcmoynihan on separate CNN roundtables and immediately wanted to talk to them more. So it was great to sit down for a longer, more substantive conversation on @wethefifth about the midterms, the Democratic Party, and just about every crazy headline of the moment. YouTube/Substack link below.
Societies get wealthier by figuring out how to produce more stuff w/ less human labor.
If you’re worried the tax code disadvantages human labor relative to automation, you could try taxing software and robots… or maybe just tax the humans less.
(Bastiat. Candlemakers. Etc.)
And if AI produces the massive payoff Gates imagines, it should make governments cheaper too.
Bill Gates on why we should tax A.I. work: “If you’ve let go of a worker and hired a robot to do that job, why are you so incentivizing the trade-off against the human labor that you don’t ask the robot to also pay into the pension fund? What is it? Is it that the pro-robot union has gotten the tax laws to say: No, if you’re not flesh, then let pensions go bankrupt?”
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
1501: Pope Alexander VI criticizes Gutenberg’s printing press safety
“The art of printing can be of great service in so far as it furthers the circulation of useful & tested books; but it can bring about serious evils l..it will, therefore, be necessary to maintain full control”
Pope Leo criticises Nvidia’s Jensen Huang over AI safety ft.trib.al/azwdiGc
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
This is a great contrasting companion piece to the one written by @kmele awhile back about his experience with school and his daughter. readtangle.com/lets-have-an-…
Another @wethefifth invite for @nhannahjones ?
Ooof. Hard reading. Brave to write. True personally, false impersonally.
Everything she documents is a management and accountability failure rather than a resource failure. NYC spends $36k per pupil, the highest of any large district in the country. There haven't been big gaps in funding within states by race or income for decades.
Ironically, she pulls on the heroic history of blacks integrating schools to justify segregating her child.
A great piece on why voice fails, even a powerful voice, in the absence of the threat of exit. See The tragedy of Jonathan Kozol below
nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magaz…
marginalrevolution.com/margi…
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
I’m honored to serve as the President of PEN/America, which has been defending free expression and celebrating literature for over a hundred years.
pen.org/press-release/award-…
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
I remember her writing that the only person who understood “Holy the Firm” was a child and that he understood it completely.
She was a theologian, a philosopher, a perfect writer. She spent every day thinking and also every day being. She made me a better person.
BREAKING: Skynet CEO Warns Company May Bring About Apocalypse, Overshadowing Modest UI Update
“AI doomers should be held accountable for their doomsday claims. It’s made up… It’s irresponsible. We ought to just keep track of all that and remind people when their claims don’t come true”—@JensenHuang NVIDIA
I agree and hold the CEOs and executives of the companies that make these outrageous claims criminally libel.
"We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence..."
***
"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, “Come down to the water.” It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.
After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go.
I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames."
- Annie Dillard (April 30, 1945 – September 15, 2026)
So this is that white supremacy thing they’re always talking about. Diabolical.
New York Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams on why she thinks students shouldn’t have to take Regents exams to graduate:
“You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees”
Maybe asking a student to read or do math on a test is a little more reasonable than asking a fish to climb a tree? 🤔
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
By embracing the American majority's insistence that we should judge people as individuals based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin
There's a landslide waiting for a presidential candidate who credibly and consistently takes that position
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
I just like the slogan “TrySocialism” as if, you know, it’s never been tried.
🚨 DSA’s Michaela Branagan Says Militant Labor Organizing is Happening “On the DL”
At Socialism 2026, DSA’s Michaela Branagan said she is “not particularly a constitutionalist” and suggested it would be “one step in the right direction” if the Constitution did not “primarily protect private property like ours does.”
She then turned to a much less visible side of DSA organizing, what Branagan herself describes as “radical militant democratic unionism.”
Branagan says DSA members are building a “current of radical militant democratic unionism” inside unions and that this work often happens “on the DL” through “strategic organizing.”
She says the labor side of DSA gets far less attention than its electoral work precisely because people do not see what its members are doing inside organized labor. Branagan even credits socialist labor organizing, in part, with creating a more “militant sea of struggle” inside unions.
The electoral victories get the headlines. Her point is that a quieter part of DSA’s project is being built inside workplaces and unions.
I’m going to turn this into a thread and pull together some concrete examples of what Branagan is talking about.
Kmele 🖐 retweeted
This is pretty cool. I drew a 36-year old West African woman living on $5 a day.
Fun game, draw a random life out of what we know about the entire history of human population statistics.
I died at six months old in Bronze Age Southeast Asia.
anyhumanever.com/
