Excerpt: Scott’s website, yieldgiving.com, periodically updates with essays by Scott but says the team doesn’t engage with media so attention can focus on the nonprofits. Lost Horse LLC, Scott’s family office, has an even lower profile, with no website or obvious avenue of contact. Scott has written that her giving team’s efforts are driven by the belief that “it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands.”
Attempts to reach Scott directly and through intermediaries weren’t successful.
Scott once described how she and her team decided on 384 grant recipients. After seeking suggestions from “hundreds of field experts, funders and nonprofit leaders and volunteers” came phone interviews, analyses of outcomes and a deeper dive into 822 of the 6,490 organizations they started with. Native Forward initially was asked to provide some information for an anonymous prospective donor and heard back months later with news of the 2020 award.
“Because our research is data-driven and rigorous, our giving process can be human and soft,” Scott wrote in the essay.
Another interesting follow-up to that rah-rah-AI article I linked to (and regretted) several weeks ago…
Excerpt: While the post is interesting (with the understanding this is somebody making and selling automation software), you might notice something: absolutely nowhere in the blog post does he meaningfully acknowledge the widespread problems with existing AI use. Either because his financial self-interest doesn’t allow for honest acknowledgment of them, or because he simply doesn’t find those aspects all that interesting.
Maybe both.
There’s no mention of how these tools are causing corporations to blow past their already tepid climate goal; no mention of how the affluent, surveillance-obsessed exec dictating its trajectory enthusiastically cozied up to fascists; no mention of how Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s data centers are funneling pollution directly into black neighborhoods; zero mention of the technofascist plan to leverage AI to decimate unions; no mention of the weird and precarious financial shell games powering the sector.
Trump surprised to find he’s at war in Iran
Excerpt: The hardest thing for the media to wrap its hands around over the last year is that Donald Trump has no plan — for anything, ever. Time and again, national pundits and the White House press corps invent a logical Donald Trump who sets, announces, and later “changes” real “policies” or “plans,” failing to convey what is clear to anyone who is actually following events closely: In each public appearance and social media post, the Mad King Donald Trump spouts a string of words, devoid of meaning or purpose, that may or may not represent anything at all.
Every single thing he says may, at any given time, be taken as an official hard-line policy of the US government, the opening gambit to a long flexible negotiation, or a random pronouncement that will never be mentioned again. It’s impossible to know in real-time which is which — especially so if you’re actually in the US government and in charge of translating his words into actions and plans.
It was barely two weeks ago, remember, that Donald Trump announced out of the blue that he was sending a US Navy hospital ship to Greenland to provide medical care for “sick” islanders. The Danish and Greenland governments were baffled by what he meant; the US government never even bothered to try to explain the presidential announcement; and, at the time, both US hospital ships were in dry dock undergoing repairs. Let’s check back on that, shall we? Today, there’s only one hospital ship at sea — and it recently transited the Panama Canal and is now off the west coast of Mexico, apparently heading toward a long-term repair and overhaul in Portland, Oregon. There’s been no further mention of Trump’s tweet. The entire episode just came and went, as baffling as ever.
I mention the hospital ship because the US is now two weeks into running a major regional and global conflict with the same level of haphazard statements, strategy, and planning — and the US media continues to cover Trump as if he actually has some semblance of a plan or strategy for what to do in Iran, a country he’s clearly already bored with invading but now has created such an international crisis that he can’t quite just walk away as he’s become used to doing. This is TACO Trump at his most dangerous.
The Democratic Party has made a religion of curated facts
Excerpt: Speaking at a conference in Washington, DC, late last year, former Barack Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz complained about the difficulty of having a “sane conversation with younger Jews” about Gaza. In attempting to “give data and information and facts and arguments,” she had found that she couldn’t get through to them because TikTok was “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”
The comment was deeply illuminating. In essence, Hurwitz was arguing that direct documentary footage from Gaza did not count as “information” or “data,” and that the Left was so consumed by the irrational feelings these videos produced that it was incapable of seeing the real facts of the case — leaving the pro-Israel Democratic Party centrists like herself as the sole stewards of sober facthood amid a broader political descent into hysterical fantasy.
Hurwitz is hardly alone in accusing the Left of prioritizing feelings over facts. When the New York Times editorial board issued its anti-endorsement of then-mayoral-candidate Zohran Mamdani, it characterized him as someone who “ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance” — that is, refuses to face the facts of power and economics. When Ezra Klein argued for softening the Democrats’ commitment to abortion for electoral reasons, he chided the Left for lacking the “willingness to make strategic and political decisions you find personally discomfiting, even though they are obviously more likely to help you win.” Across the board, centrist Democrats make reference to hard facts to dismiss dissent from the Left, who are supposedly incapable of internalizing the ironclad economics of housing, the political realities of governing, or the considerations fueling an ongoing genocide.
But a closer look at this dynamic reveals less about the Left’s naivete and more about the modern Democratic Party’s criteria for deciding who’s worth listening to. As Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin argue in their book, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, establishing the “matter of fact” is a long and combative process. Facts aren’t discovered but are materialized, and this process of materialization is never neutral. It involves technological systems, information networks, and assumptions about power and authority. And for the Democrats, it almost always involves consultants, donors, and focus groups — to the exclusion of other data sources.
A new Bigfoot documentary debunks the most famous purported footage of Bigfoot
Excerpt: “Capturing Bigfoot,” premiering this week at the South By Southwest film festival, builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world’s most enduring hoaxes. In the new footage—from a Kodak reel dating to 1966—Patterson’s camera tracks a man in costume, his brother-in-law, moving in a similar fashion to the figure in the 1967 shoot, which featured a different location and a bigger man with a more distinctive stride, according to the documentary.
The test-run footage “is the work of a director with a vision,” says “Capturing Bigfoot” director Marq Evans.
No idea where I’d put these, but I like them.
Previously, in my browser history
3/17/2026
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