Tin Soldiers And FEMA (Not) Coming. Tabs, Wed., July 9, 2025

Morning news roundup! Things to read!

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Welcome to Tabs, what are we reading today?

Don’t worry, Texas! FEMA’s coming! Wait.

Despite Trump officially activating FEMA on Sunday, FEMA has just 86 total staff deployed at this point, according to figures shared with staff Monday evening. That includes a national incident management team, plus regional and headquarter staff. In the past it would normally be in the several hundreds at this point in the disaster recovery process. “We are doing a lot less than normal,” the FEMA staffer said.

(Marisa Kabas at The Handbasket)

Quite a lot going on in this story delving into Kerr County and why it didn’t get a warning system. (Greg Abbott and the state kept refusing to give it any money, over and over and over again.) (Gift link Houston Chronicle)

Maybe if we weren’t giving $171 billion with a b to ICE, there would be some left over for saving people’s lives. (Bolts mag)

“Law enforcement always regrets hiring quickly.” What quickly doubling the number of ICE agents, supplanting the FBI as our federal law enforcement, will mean as far as corruption, brutality, and our shiny new police state. (Garrett Graff)

Ah but here’s a piece of shit FIBBIE his own self, seeking to indict a bad man for “handed out face masks.” His former colleague Popehat is livid. (Popehat)

Judge Xinis in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is not taking all the government lying with the bonhomie I’m sure they intended. (Status Kuo)

Oh man I knew Trump was going to take credit for all the Biden manufacturing investments. Of course I knew that. But it still smarts! (Reuters)

Mike Lindell’s lawyers hallucinating case citations like Mike Lindell hallucinated election fraud. (Colorado Sun)

I’m sure this is all fine.

In one particularly jarring example, under threat of being unplugged, Anthropic’s latest creation Claude 4 lashed back by blackmailing an engineer and threatened to reveal an extramarital affair.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT-creator OpenAI’s o1 tried to download itself onto external servers and denied it when caught red-handed.

(Fortune)

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s robot has gone full Goebbels.

Then it deleted the post, lied that screenshots were fabricated, and then admitted it before calling me (ME!) a hater and asking what my beef was. But at least it wasn’t having violent rape fantasies. That happened to Will Stancil, here. Twitter and AI are going great y’all!

A deep culture dive into the tragedy of Mar-a-Lago Face. (Mother Jones)

God (sometimes) bless the Internet. (Mamdani Times)

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