Gulags Okay with SCOTUS

Yesterday, the Supreme Court MAGA majority issued a decision with no reasoning that the Trump regime can deport people to countries they are not from, without giving them an additional opportunity to contest whether they face persecution or other forms of mistreatment there:

I once again hate to admit I couldn't believe they took this clearly unconstitutional action. But of course they did.

And given what else is going on, it's not getting anywhere near enough attention.

This is a horrifying ruling that shows a disdain for basic human rights principles — made all the more unconscionable by the fact that the Republican appointees did so with no reasoning and on the shadow docket.
Chris Geidner

Today the GOP justices on the Supreme Court endorsed migrants being sold into slavery. They'll claim otherwise, but that's the reality — today's decision permits Trump to send people from countries around the world to any global hellhole that accepts a U.S. financial incentive.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

What is the point of having a constitution if it allows this? “Humans should not be subjected to torture” is an extremely basic principle that should never have to be explained or justified.
Michael Hobbes

i am simply asking the press to cover the government sending masked thugs to rip people from their crying children and shipping them to a foreign concentration camp with the same ferocity they cover a trans kid playing jv tennis in sheboygan
Andrew Lawrence

And then today, a small sliver of hope:

NEW: Judge Murphy says the 8 men in Djibouti on their way to South Sudan WILL GET THE DUE PROCESS he previously ordered, saying that his remedial order remains in effect despite the Supreme Court's unreasoned order lifting the stay on his class-wide injunction.
Joshua J. Friedman

The Only Difference Is the Joker Can Actually Juggle

Of course the decision, if you can call it that, to bomb Iran was going to turn out to be based on levels of stupidity that would be hard to comprehend. It was predictable. 

We already knew as it was happening that Tulsi Gabbard had testified before Congress the intelligence community didn't support findings of imminent nuclear weapons in Iran. 

Rolling Stone reported almost immediately that Pentagon sources said wasn't based any real threat, but only, as they say these days, "vibes." 

Then today the New York Times had this, posted by Greg Sargent, formerly a highly regarded columnist at the Washington Post:

NYT has more confirmation that Trump's decision to bomb Iran was motivated in large part by the way the Israeli strikes were "playing" on Fox News, which drove him to want credit for it.

Later in the day, Rolling Stone's Asawin Suebsaeng posted this:

I want to be very clear that you should be horrified at the level of influence Fox News has during trump presidencies on warmaking decisions. The network took it upon itself to help trump pick targets in the first term, when Fox was pushing him to bomb Syria.

And then there was this screen snapshot from Xitter that was shared:

Anyway, I've had this random playing card sitting in the cup-holder of my car for several weeks and today when I was looking at it it reminded me of someone, so I thought I would share that thought with you:

Bombing Iran

Yesterday I was writing a long post about history when I heard Trump had started a war with Iran. So I decided to finish my post instead of immediately responding. It didn't make it any better, but maybe I felt slightly more in control of my own life.

Overnight, The Onion put together a full-page ad and got it into the Sunday New York Times. It ran across from a page of credulous coverage of the U.S. bombing in Iran:


Here's what BlueSky people have had to say about this illegal military action... in mostly chronological order. Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

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Netanyahu has spent the better part of two decades trying to strong arm the United States into an unprovoked war against Iran and finally found a president stupid enough to do it for him. Unbelievable.
David Faris

You’re a special kind of delusional if you think you can bomb Iran and expect peace.
Karly Kingsley

Elect a Republican, start a war. Every Republican president since i was a child has started a new war.
Katelyn Burns

Why are no headlines focusing on the unconstitutional and dictatorial nature of this action?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Once again, if we were a more serious country, we would not be here right now and Iran would have been years further away from actually having nuclear weapons than it was two weeks ago. In a more serious country, unilaterally withdrawing from the JCPOA would have immediately ended Trump's first presidency and destroyed the GOP's reputation on national security policy for a generation:


Mark Copelovitch

Much as I would not dare to predict the consequences of this war, I do think we can summarize it thusly so far: A smart and evil man manipulated a stupid and evil man into a war against a fanatical and evil regime.
George Conway

You have more in common with the average Iranian citizen than you do with the people that run this country.
stuff licker @nocontroller.bsky.social

I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States. Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon. The negotiations Israel scuttled with their strikes held the potential for success.
Sen. Chris Murphy

The war in Iran is illegal under the UN Charter, under War Powers Act, and didn't even comply with National Security Act:


emptywheel

Reminder that none of this would've been possible if not for the neocons manipulating Trump's hatred of Obama to kill the JCPOA. From there, safeguards became unconstrained enrichment and all the scary things they're trotting out became possible. Be careful buying what these guys are still selling.
Andrew Facini

Donald Trump, a weak and dangerously reckless president, has put the United States on a path to a war in the Middle East that the country does not want, the law does not allow, and our security does not demand.
Sen. Chris Murphy

The JCPOA was one of the greatest diplomatic achievements of the 21st century. Multiple nations, several powerful blocks, a ton of oversight and the entire time diplomats were working it out. Domestic American media and politicians were demonizing it, lying about it, and trying to sabotage it. They won.
Nicholas Slayton

He was humiliated last weekend. This weekend he bombed someone. My guess is there is a relationship between those two events.
Jen Mercieca

The President is slashing government services, sending troops into US cities to abduct people, illegally bombing Iran, and the Democratic Party is mobilizing its full might to … stop New York City from electing a mildly left-leaning mayor.
Andy Hoberek @thathoberekguy.bsky.social

Just a reminder going forward... (cartoon from 2003):


Ann Telnaes

The thing about going to war with this crew is they are universally inveterate liars. They will lie about the losses, the successes, and the costs. Believe nothing they tell you.
Gillian Branstetter

War is the worst thing humans do and those who encourage it are the worst people among us.
Tom Basgen, Mr. Saint Paul

Last night, Trump said Iran’s nuclear program was “completely and totally obliterated.” This morning, JD Vance says we will “permanently dismantle that nuclear program over the coming years.” Which is it? Sounds like more endless war against the will of the American people.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Vance: "I empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements in the Middle East. I understand the concern, but the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents." [Yes, he really did say this on national television today.]
Acyn

what a fucking joke...that could lead to a global war. i'm ashamed.
Sarah Goodyear

Aged like milk:


Grant Stern

No money for Medicaid or SNAP or museums or schools or sidewalks or gun violence prevention or art or libraries. Always money for war.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

The attacks on Iran aren’t just another test of our constitutional checks and balances, but the relevance of popular sovereignty at all. Do we really rule ourselves when our opinions are irrelevant?
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Man fuck these Nazis. No war:


Wes Burdine

Stealing Tea

I almost poo-pooed reading Sarah Rose's book For All the Tea in China because I thought I knew the general story of how England sent a man to steal tea from China. As I had heard or read about it, he dressed like he was Chinese but pretended he was from another part of the country where they spoke a different dialect in order to explain his lack of language proficiency.

I'm glad I got past my assumed knowledge and read the borrowed copy someone pressed on me. 

There's so much to it that I didn't know, including that "the man" was Robert Fortune, whose last name is part of the botanical name of any plant whose species is fortunei. Those are generally other plants he brought back on his plant-hunting trips in China: part of his (underpaid) compensation was the right to propagate and sell any plants, other than tea, that he found.

I also didn't realize he did his work on behalf of the British East India Company (of course!), rather than Britain itself, and that the company's desire to steal tea was tied up in its imbalance of trade with China. And opium was a major part of it all, of course. 

Britain/the East India Company grew opium in the Asian subcontinent and more or less forced it onto China so that Britain could buy the huge quantities of tea the British public had come to demand. And China had an agricultural and cultural monopoly on tea, which originated in its cool, misty inland mountains, far from the trading ports British ships were allowed to access.

The book gives great detail of who Fortune was, including the class difference that likely motivated him, and of his travels in China to gather tea plants and seeds, employing various Chinese "coolies" and furthering horticulture with innovations like glass Ward boxes and ways of transporting live seeds by ship. 

It makes for interesting reading, of course, but there are several sections as the book draws to a close that earn its subtitle, "How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History."

It's important to realize that the East India Company wanted to grow tea in the Himalayan mountains of India, thinking that that area's climate and geography were comparable to the part of China where tea is native. Darjeeling will sound familiar because they were correct. The company had had a monopoly on selling tea (among other things) in the West for hundreds of years by the time they sent Fortune to China, but the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution were threatening. 

First came the loss of their monopoly charter in China in 1834, and then the First Opium War (1839–1842), which resulted in a treaty that gave all British traders greater access to Chinese markets. So the East India Company had greatly decreased advantages in the market, and they wanted to change things to give them "home field advantage" in company-controlled India.

While Fortune was successful in stealing tea and the company got the plants going in the Himalayas, things didn't turn out as the company planned.

Some of the things Rose wrote that made me stop and take special note:

Drugs such as opium and tea were the first mass-produced, mass market global commodities; everything and everyone these "stimulants" touched, from the producers to distributors to customers, was altered in their wake. The global drug trade, which England and China were deeply enmeshed, produced new leaders, new governments, new companies, new farming practices, as well as new colonies, new modes of capital accumulation, and new modes of transport and communication (page 177).

Both opium and tea were light products that brought in high prices and took up little room in ships. This comes into play in interesting ways, especially the fact that too many light products required something heavy to also be loaded on the ship to provide ballast. What did the Chinese make that was heavy that could also be sold? Hmm... how about some of that blue and white porcelain? Not only was it heavy, it could make layers of padding between the tea crates and be at the bottom of the hull, since it didn't matter if it got wet. And there was this additional, extra-interesting fact:

Tea's growing consumer base encouraged the development the porcelain industry in Britain... Prior to the eighteenth century, no European factories could make a ceramic teacup capable of holding boiling water.

European clay could not meet the service demands of tea the way Chinese clay could, for in Europe clay lacked the essential ingredient of kaolin (page 232).

Chinese porcelain was fired at a higher temperature than European stoneware. Porcelain was light, sturdy and non-porous, compared to stoneware. The British figured out how to make porcelain around 1750 and used early mechanization to speed the process up. Josiah Wedgewood, I learned, was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

One of the things the East India Company needed, in addition to tea plants, was knowledge of how to harvest and process tea leaves into particular kinds of tea. Before or while Fortune was in China, they had recruited a set of Chinese men to work in the Himalayas, and at one point decided to split them up singly to different tea plantations, rather than have the all work at the same plantation. The workers were opposed to this, and also tried to organize for higher wages. Eventually, the botanist in charge of the men relents and agrees to higher pay and to keep them at least in pairs. The botanist's boss, however, chastised him for that decision, which Rose describes as:

[he was] displeased with the idea that stealing secrets from a sovereign nation also meant overpaying the Chinese minions who implemented them. In fact, the tea manufacturers' wages were never so high as to be unduly burdensome to the company. The objection to their demand was more a matter of principle in that the Chinese were paid higher-than-market wages, which offended the British sense of fair play (even as the company remained unperturbed by the fact that the British in India were paid substantially better than the Chinese) (page 203).

This attitude is, of course, consistent with the general British disdain for the Chinese as lesser beings.

The last big thing I learned from Rose's telling is what led to the demise of the British East India Company. I think I had heard/read something about this before, but not in such detail and I don't think it was in school.

In the mid-1850s the British army began replacing the single-shot Brown Bess muskets used by its soldiers with Enfield rifles, which were accurate at 10 times the range. However, they needed to be loaded with greased paper cartridges that the soldier had to bite open (hence the term, "bite the bullet) and the cheap grease the British army chose to use was a combination of beef tallow and pork lard.

If you give it half a second you'll realize the problem with asking Indian (Hindu or Muslim) troops to put their mouths on that kind of fat, but the brilliant British leaders who had been working in India for hundreds of years didn't care about it, or didn't realize.

As soldiers were exposed to the new cartridges, rumors began to spread. It was said that the Enfield rifle was part of a mass plan on the part of the company to convert Indian troops to Christianity by rendering them impure, and this forcing them to give up their caste status.... Throughout the winter and spring of 1857 news of the tainted cartridges spread.

On May 9 sepoys of the Third Bengal Light Cavalry flatly refused the order to bring the cartridges to their mouths and load their weapons. The rebels were court-martialed on the spot and sentenced to the unusually severe punishment of ten years' imprisonment under hard labor.... That night several other sepoy regiments...broke ranks and turned on their officers. The sepoys liberated the eighty-five rebels from jail, hailing them as heroes to their race. Then they burned the company's bungalow and offices. Every European was massacred on sight.

The cavalry retreated to Delhi, and for the next six months India would catch fire.

The P53 Enfield Rifle ignited a holocaust of murder, siege, brutality, and repression; women and children, Indian and British, were butchered, cities were sacked, and civilians were murdered by soldiers. The British refer to the summer of 1857 as the Indian Mutiny; Pakistanis and Indians refer to it as the First War for Independence (pages 222–223).

The company lost its charter and was nationalized the following year.

The book is a compact 245 pages, very readable, and in addition to all of this, gives a vision of mid-19th century China. After finishing it, I went back and reread Gene Luen Yang's paired graphic novels Boxers and Saints, about the Boxer Rebellion. My Chinese history is extremely lacking, but there are some things I can do to make up for it.

Abuser-in-Chief

On June 18, 2025, standing in front of hard-hatted workers hired to erect two giant flag poles in the newly paved over White House rose garden, Donald Trump went on a rant about Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell—who he appointed during his first term of office.

Given Trump's economic chaos since taking office, Powell and the Federal Reserve board have declined to lower interest rates, foreseeing inflation ahead and a possible recession. Trump, of course, wants interest rates lowered.

The footage is here, but I have transcribed what Trump said in all its incoherent glory:

We're doing well as a country if the Fed would ever lower rates. You could buy debt for a lot less. It's a shame, this guy... I have a guy... You ever have a guy that's a smart person and you have to deal with him? He's not a smart guy. He's worried about inflation. I said, That's right, if there's inflation in six months or nine months, you lower the rates! You raise the rates! You can do whatever you want, Brian, right? [voice in background, Right!] So let's say there's rrrrampant inflation, which there's none. You know what there is, there's success. I got a call from Congress last night, Sir, there's a problem. What is it? Money is pouring in, we don't know how to account for it. I said, Check the tariffs. $88 billion came in from tariffs. No inflation. And it's going to get even more so. I know what I'm doing.

So we have a stupid person, frankly, at the Fed. He probably won't... Europe had 10 cuts and we've had none. And I guess he's a political guy, I guess, he's a political guy who's not a smart person. But he's costing the country a fortune. So what I'm gonna do is ... he gets out in about 9 months, he — fortunately he's terminated [sic] — Biden — I would have never reappointed him, Biden reappointed him, I don't know why that is, I guess maybe he's a Democrat, we got great advice from Mnuchin on this one. Great advice. But, uh, he's done a poor job. So we have no inflation, we have only success and I'd like to see interest rates get down.

Now, Biden did a lot of very short-term debt, so we have short-term debt coming due, and because of this guy's rates, you know if he'd lower it a point, I'd pay about about a point less. And if he'd lower it two points, I'd pay about two points less. And that's for 10 years, 12 years, 15 years, 5 years. It's hundreds of billions, it's even trillions of dollars that we're going to lose because of this... I call him Too Late Powell because he's too late. I mean, if you look at him... every time I did this, I was right a hundred percent, he was wrong.

Maybe I should go to the Fed, do you think? Am I allowed to appoint myself, Doug? Am I allowed to appoint myself to the Fed? I'd do a much better job than these people.

So anyway, we should be two points lower, it would be nice to be two and a half points lower. We'd be saving $800 billion, $700 billion — that's a lot of money, right there [looking around at the flag pole workers] — for nothing, for absolutely nothing — we'd save six, seven, eight hundred billion dollars. We — I think we're 38th now in interest and we should be number 1. We should be the lowest.

By the way, if he's worried about inflation, that's okay, I understand that, I don't think there's going to be any, so far there hasn't. I mean we have almost no inflation, we've done a great job. When I came in, we had a lot of inflation. We went through four years of the highest inflation in the history of our country with sleepy Joe Biden. Sleepy Joe. And, uh, he didn't know what the hell he was doing. And so we had the highest inflation we've ever had, in the history of our country. And then it came down because when I got elected it started dropping because people understood that I knew what I was doing.

But now we have a man that just refuses to lower the Fed rate. Just refuses to do it. And he's not a smart person. I don't even think he's that political. He hates me, but that's okay. He should, he should — I call him every name in the book, trying to get him to do something. I've been nice to him, I do it all ways, I know how to sell. I've been so nice to him, fellas, you wouldn't — let's have dinner! Too Late, I call him Too Late. Come on, Too Late, let's have dinner. I do it every way in the book. I'm nasty, I'm nice. Nothing works. He's just a stupid person.

Wow... so many lies and stupidities.

I am not anything close to an economist, but I was alive for the past 60 years so I know the inflation of the Biden years was nowhere near a record for the U.S. Here's a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on U.S. inflation just since the 1970s, which doesn't include the Great Depression or any of the other recessions of our earlier history:


Only off by close to 100% on those figures alone, Trump. And to say we have "no inflation" now is also not particularly accurate, either, compared to the pre-covid decade or so.

The $88 billion in tariffs he describes (though I doubt "Congress" called him) are costs that will be passed along to all of us by the companies that had to pay them. And that's what will result in...inflation.

However! None of that is why I spent way too long transcribing his incoherent babbling. My main reason was to get to the last paragraph, where Trump describes his supposed method for getting Powell to do his bidding. 

What he describes is textbook abuser behavior: by his own admission, he's nice to Powell, then he's abusive, calling him names in private (we can imagine) and in public. "I'm nasty, I'm nice." Therefore, Powell is a "stupid person" for not responding to the abuse.

It's such a clear expression of Trump's MO in relationships, running his businesses, and now running the country. Obviously, Jerome Powell isn't having it, and good for him.

We're all being held hostage by an abuser.

Bigots

I don't know how any fair-minded person could listen to Chase Strangio* argue the legal points about parents' rights to decide their kids' access to gender-affirming care, which primarily means puberty-blocking hormones, and disagree.

Most of the medications used are exactly the same ones used by other kids with premature puberty. Or if a kid literally begins transition, we're talking about estrogen or testosterone, so the "problem" is not the medications themselves: it's the purpose and the specific people who are being targeted. Which is classic discrimination.

Michael Hobbes summarized this and quoted the Tennessee statute on BlueSky:

Tennessee's youth transition ban is straightforwardly discriminatory. It bans puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries *only* when they are used to affirm a trans identity:

"Therefore, it is the purpose of this chapter to prohibit medical procedures from being administered to or performed on minors when the purpose of the medical procedure is to: (1) Enable a minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor's sex; or (2) Treat purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor's sex and asserted identity."

We saw this in the UK too: All of the allegedly "reasonable" concerns about bone density, low-quality research, lack of long-term follow-up, profits for Big Pharma, etc — magically disappear when it comes to cisgender kids receiving the exact same treatments.

Absolutely astounding that it is still controversial to point out that the anti-trans movement is driven by bigotry, not ethics-in-research concerns about children. They keep fucking telling you this to your face!

And the reason for the discrimination is based solely on religious beliefs, not medical necessity or anything rational, which makes it a violation of the 1st Amendment. The people who wrote these state laws, and the Supreme Court justices who just voted to uphold the laws, are religious bigots who want their beliefs to apply to everyone.

As Jamelle Bouie said about the ruling on BlueSky:

one thing i think people should ask the court conservatives given this ruling is what, specifically, was wrong with plessy v. ferguson?

Legal journalist Cristian Farias posted:

If you're not placing today's ruling against gender-affirming care for trans youth in the context of John Roberts' lifelong campaign to suck the life out of the Fourteenth Amendment, and equality for actual humans more broadly, you're doing it wrong.

They're coming for marriage equality next ("those gays are free to marry anyone of the opposite sex, there's no discrimination!"), and who knows what else.

__

* Strangio made these points on All in with Chris Hayes last night, but the video is not posted yet. I will add it when I find it.

Hey, I'm a Communist Wannabe!

Yesterday, a FB friend posted this:


Five or six other people posted comments in response generally agreeing with his sentiment. No one responded to them.

I posted this, and got the attached off-the-wall right-wing response and then sexist insult:


I don't know if this guy is real or not... I checked his [unprotected!] profile and he has two friends, and an intro description that says "This is the second account I made when I couldn't get into my other account, but now I have it back."

I think that means he was banned from Facebook for being a troll or something.

No idea why he chose me to harass. It made me feel a bit better to realize my friend had made the post public, and this guy is not someone he knows.

These are the kind of people we're dealing with.

Those Are Some Names

Another post diverting from our burning democracy.

Sports writer Rodger Sherman recently posted on BlueSky two lists of the men's and women's college world series players' first names, and it's really something. You know how some white people like to chastise Black people for their kids' first names? Well, white people have some ’splaining to do.

Some of these young people are Black, I assume, but most are white.

The men's names:

Brayden
Blagen
Brevin
Brennyn
Brayden
Bryk
Cade
Caden
Casan
Casen
Canon
Cashel
Dax
Garen
Gage
Gunner
Gunnar
Hayden
Jaden
Jaxon
Kade
Kasen
Karter
Kian
Kylen
Laif
Mavrick
Mathis
Mic
Ryder
Steele
Tadan
Tag
Tagger
Tague
Tyce
Wylan
Zane

The women's names: 

Addisen
Brenlee
Braiesey
Camryn
Chaney
Cydney
Graycen
Jaden
Kayden
Kadey
Kasidi
Karlyn
Kaylynn
Keagan
Kedre
Kenleigh
Kinsey
Korbe
Kierston
Lair
Paytn
Persy
Ramsey
Remmington
Regan
Raegan
Reagan
Shylien
Stefini
Teagan

and…

FOUR (!) players named Rylee 

The comments responding to his post are worth reading, generally.

Surrounded by Books

A friend of a friend who's a studio photographer created this frame made out of books for a short-term project:

My photo doesn't do it justice. When taking a real photo with it, you would go in closer to hide the raw wood, and a person would be in the opening, of course. (But it's kind of cool to pull back the curtain and see what it looks like in reality, too.)

The photographer is planning to take it apart when he's done with it since it's unwieldy and can't be stored the way his usual props and backdrops can. 

I think it's a shame and it seems likely a library would love to have it as a selfie frame. Doesn't that seem like a good possibility?

BlueSky, First Half of June 2025

I decided to mix it up and post the first half of BlueSky for June now. There's so much happening right now, and it will be stale in two weeks.

We ended the time period with the right-wing assassinations and attempted assassinations here in Minnesota, as well as the No Kings protests, Trump's listless birthday parade, and the on-going ICE raids in Los Angeles, including Kristi Noem's declaration of federal preemption. Before that, there was the blow up between Trump and Musk and minor things like Joni Ernst declaring we're all going to die anyway, so why does it matter. 

And it's spring, so there are lots of flowers.

Everything is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance. Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

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The radicalization of the American right is THE story of US politics over the last four decades and political reporters are still not allowed to talk about it
Michael Hobbes

People will tell you that they view property destruction as equivalent to violence against a person, but that's not true. They think property destruction is worse:


Laura Jedeed

political press is doing a real disservice by basically not reporting the nuances of public opinion on deportations, and creating the appearance that most americans support the stephen miller-style gestapo tactics
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Should we deport people who have lived here for many years without committing any crimes?  61% no, 24% yes.
Should we should deport people as quickly as possible even if it means more mistakes, or do our best to make no mistakes even if it takes longer? Quickly: 19%, Minimize mistakes: 74%
Adam Bonin

Interesting. Polls are showing American voters don’t like the idea of being under military occupation by a wildly angry game show host for no reason
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

Poppy beauty at Regent's Park, London:


Laura Jedeed

I've said this before, but so-called ideological diversity only runs rightward, and it never means arguing about economics or something. I already know the conservative position on, for instance, my existence. I'm not going to snap out of being trans because seventeen more people call me a man.
Emily St. James

When the Wall Street Journal hires a Marxist columnist I’ll listen to them about ideological diversity.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

The Minnesota murderer seems to be Erik Prince without the trust fund. A Christian missionary/anti-communist paramilitary type reminiscent of any number of Christian anti-communists from the Cold War era who would travel the world killing and/or converting people for Christ.
Seth Cotlar

If you murder people you disagree with, I think it’s safe to say you haven’t “met Jesus.”
@pattho.bsky.social

Upon reflection, I’m glad I live in a nation where the military isn’t great at marching for rulers. Let’s try to keep it that way
Bill McKibben

Today’s senseless violence in Minnesota was Christian terrorism, plain and simple. Do not obfuscate that fact or brush it away—sit with it
Chrissy Stroop @www.bugbeardispatch.com

This is all you need to see. Also - multiply the top picture by over 2,000 photos:


Troublemakers Alliance @tmalliancemn.bsky.social

Republicans get scratched a bit in "assassination attempts," while Democrats are killed in "targeted attacks." Right.
cleopete

It’s a shame the Don’t Tread On Me flag was appropriated by the pro treading on me community because it’s a pretty badass flag and I am tired of being tread upon.
@irhottakes.bsky.social

As someone from the South, I am struck by how MAGA's delusion about January 6 parallels Southerner's nostalgia for the Civil War. Completely disconnected from reality.
PL Thomas EdD

I no longer view the crisis before us as a GOP vs. Democrat issue, and I haven't for a long time. This is a profound issue of choosing to fight supremacist politics, of necropolitics-- of whether you believe it's worth protecting people's right to live with a measure of dignity and respect, period
Karen Attiah

So the only No Kings rally in California that the police had problems was the one with where policeman were stationed in riot gear? Seems the riot police is the issue.
Javier @machomanla.bsky.social

TBH it's just profoundly fucked that the internet has created a coordination mechanism for the low social trust silent majority and now like a huge chunk of the population trust a large constructed kinship network of far right populists worldwide than reality itself
@hikoukihikouki9.bsky.social

The comparison today couldn't be clearer: There's no energy for fascism. They have to sell it so hard because it's got no juice. We have the momentum. Together, we have the power. Congratulations #nokings. Now join us June 28 to wish Elon a very unhappy birthday.
TeslaTakedown

Quite amazing that Trump has managed to make the most powerful military machine in the world look kind of pathetic. A tank driving slowly down a street turns out not to be all that  interesting. And tanks 2–50 don't really add much to the spectacle. It's like no one really thought this through.
Bill McKibben

The parade is neither a roaring call to patriotism or tyrannical show of might. It's something much worse — boring
Gillian Branstetter

This loser parade is what is finally going to get Hegseth canned
Dylan Miracle

A former floral shop terrazzo floor:


ChicagoVintageTileFloors

Here at NYC's No Kings protest. And it's striking how ... normie everyone is. Just average folks, sick of this shit.
Noah Shachtman

every protest i've been to. we are the normies, y'all.
Greg Pak

Really hard to overstate the extent to which opposition to the current administration is the default position of normal people. They’re handing out kazoos. There’s bubble machines.
Butt Praxis

MAGA is unAmerican.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

I love that a politician can say something like “I believe mice naturally spawn out of grain” and the news will now just treat that as a legitimate line of thought
Mike Drucker

The media have memory-holed Tim McVeigh’s white supremacism and conspiracism but the biggest memory hole at all was that he was a gun rights activist.
Lindsay Beyerstein

there are a lot of good people in this country. we will win
Micah @rincewind.run

the way the far right is blatantly lying and trying to blame the assassination of democrats on democrats is one of the most disgusting things I have ever seen
Sam @samd.bsky.social

Calendula:


amohr

assassins dress like cops because that’s who’s allowed to murder people in broad daylight
regular meghan @ruemcclammyhand.bsky.social

No one is in danger from undocumented immigrants. EVERYONE is endangered by the fascist Right in this country and that means the GOP.
Prisonculture

It’s not just that they normalize political violence. They also accuse the left of engaging in mostly imaginary violence, which gives unhinged right-wingers justification to “retaliate.”
Joshua Holland

And the democrats have joined in completely, chanting “peaceful protest” as though the default is some form of unpeace, declaring blocking roads or deportations to be “violence,” and treating Waymo as the victim.
Adil @adilredivy.bsky.social

assassinations, handcuffing a senator at press conference, marines detaining a civilian, and a military parade for the president’s birthday. rough week for democracy.
molly conger @socialistdogmom.bsky.social

It’s amazing that NBC created a reality show around a fake billionaire firing people who is the worst person in the world at hiring competent and qualified people.
Ron Filipkowski

Everyone feel safer now?


Gerald Butts

You know what goes hand-in-hand with violent crackdowns? Gaslighting. They will beat you and tell you that you are crazy for saying that you just got beaten. Propaganda is not free speech; it's what authorities use to mask their violence. It is, in fact, part of the violence.
Annalee Newitz

Israeli government sources attempting the “Unlike our cruel foes, we only strike MILITARY targets” line after the past year and a half is frankly somewhat shocking to hear
Will Stancil

Borrowed from a unknown protestor:


Moxilla @modmoxgoods.bsky.social

I think something in emergence is the new conservative template for gender roles and what constitutes a family. A part of that template is the idea that you run your family like a small cult of personality.
utopia deferred

I know it's been said but I keep getting re-infuriated about RFK Jr doing his thing, like we had this vaccines thing *settled*, they rule and they were working and all we had to do was NOT put the worst possible person in charge of the country's public health apparatus.
Dave Levitan

A hundred years from now, people are going to mistakenly think that “trumped up” became a phrase because of how much this guy and his goons lie.
CJ Moose

Mainstream narrative:


Tom Flood

As you watch a cabinet member admit that the military is being sent to Los Angeles to unseat the democratically elected government there, please remember that the Star Tribune didn't have the courage to take a position on who should be president last November.
Bob Collins @mylittlebloggie.bsky.social

Mass deportation = Eugenics
Eliminating science from Dept of Health = Eugenics
Eliminating vaccines = Eugenics
Cutting Medicaid = Eugenics
Cutting Social Security = Eugenics
Eliminating medical research = Eugenics
Targeting LGBTQ = Eugenics
Scrubbing contributions by minorities = Eugenics
EUGENICS
MS Kohut

The very quintessence of conservative leadership: Scared People Scaring People
David Roberts @volts.wtf

It is bizarre the way people with guns, bulletproof vests, riot shields, tanks, and other military gear act like rocks are an equal threat. It’s madness! If you are scared of rocks and think the punishment for having them thrown at you should be death, you shouldn’t be in law enforcement!
Roxane Gay

The thought also occurs that perhaps if storm-troopers with guns, bulletproof vests, riot shields, tanks, and other military gear weren't hunting people in the streets and fields like vermin, perhaps people wouldn't feel the need to throw rocks at the storm-troopers.
Dr. WTF @badatom.org

My team and I at the Crowd Counting Consortium have a new piece out. In it, we show that through May 2025, the size and scale of anti-Trump protests have dwarfed those in 2017:


Erica Chenoweth

ICE is an unaccountable, lawless gang that preys on vulnerable communities. What we’ve seen in the last few months shows just how destructive and inhumane they can be, given the right psychopath in charge. They’ve become stormtroopers.
@christianrincon.com

More Americans voted for Senator Alex Padilla than for 48 of the 53 red state GOP U.S. Senators combined.
OuterBoroPrincess

Also cannot be emphasized enough: Barack Obama successfully negotiated the shutdown of Iran's nuclear program. It exists today because Trump deliberately tore up that agreement. The deaths happening right now can be laid at his door.
Joe Katz

Just heard it’s gonna cost $60M to repair the streets after the tanks roll through DC for Trump’s military parade BS birthday — on top of the $45M to throw the fucked up event itself!!!
Morgan J Freeman

Billy Long's sole qualification to run the IRS is that, in 2023–24, he ran a large-scale tax fraud operation. I am not making this up.
Waldo Jaquith

Rare earth metals are not rare.
Baby back ribs are not from babies.
Chris Steller

It took 2 year but Clematis ‘Princess Kate’ has decided to shower us with debut blooms in time for Clematis Thursday:


City Mouse Garden

“ICE” as snatching people from churches now. Never forget they said this
MAN AT CHURCH: “We don’t want this in our property.”
ICE: “The whole country is our property.”
No IDs shown, non-government out of state plates, basic tactical vests that just say police. Who are these men?
Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com

I just wanna say something really plainly that I haven’t seen spelled out like this. There is no such thing as legal immigration anymore. Because they are taking people at their citizenship hearings they are taking people who are doing everything by the book. If you get abducted, when you do everything right, legal immigration does not exist in the US right now
Ariella Elm

We are not heading for a point of no return, we’ve passed it
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

I would like to once again say that once they arrested Ras Baraka every elected Dem should have understood what was in store.
Prisonculture

So ironic that Marjorie Taylor Green can repeatedly interrupt a President's State of the Union Address whilst Sen. Padilla is handcuffed for doing the same thing in a cabinet secretary's press conference.
Carter Kinnier

In case you weren't aware, the greater LA metropolitan area is the size of Portugal and contains 80% more people. They cannot constitutionally [take it over militarily], but also, they cannot physically do this.
Courtney Milan

wow I wonder if the cops who lied about the sitting senator even though everything they did was on tape are also being less than honest about the presence of violent agitators at the protests in los angeles. they might even not have told the entire truth about other protests
CHOAM Nomsky @samthielman.com

As a four-decade veteran of the daily journalism business, let me tell you: Every competent political reporter in this country knows that Trump is trying to establish a dictatorship. The industry's shame is that so few journalists will say so, and the ones who do lose their jobs.
Mark Jacob

This is insane and also I hope that seeing a US fucking senator thrown to the ground and cuffed for asking a question will help some of the people who still aren’t getting it to recognize that THE POLICE ARE THE SOURCE OF THE VIOLENCE
Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social

So many white folks from blue states fail to understand that a lot of Black and brown people feel safer in red states where they are the majority and where racism happens in explicit ways, instead of in the "safe" places where white folks pretend racism doesn't exist.
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com

Trump voters need to stop cooking their brains on Fox News and Twitter and like actually interact with the rest of the world. Take public transportation into a city. Read a book they normally wouldn't even look at. Heck attend a pride parade just to see what it's all about.
The Alternate Historian

So… the states get to decide on women’s reproductive health, but not what fucking car you can drive there? This is insane.
Alejandro Lozada @lacreid.bsky.social

CARTOON OF THE DAY (From @dccartoonist.bsky.social):


Alejandro Lozada @lacreid.bsky.social

The lack of total outrage at the indictment of Congresswoman McIvey is truly frightening. Hakeem Jeffries ought to be causing high holy hell over this. She is indicted because she is Black. Half of the GOP caucus engaged in sedition and Garland felt arresting a member of congress went too far.
Pam Keith

I'm not sure that Trump and most MAGAs hate science and medicine and facts per se. I think they hate effective government, and science and medicine and facts get in their way of destroying everything in government that actually works. RFK Jr., however, clearly hates science and medicine.
Peter Gleick

The cruelty in today's politics feels horribly corrosive. Bringing up that hard-working immigrant families — undocumented, yes, but not violent criminals — are being ripped apart based on immigration status doesn't bring compassion or even pause, but gleeful cheers.
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social

Clinton was right when she said "deplorables" and we should stop ceding ground to these people. If someone supports ripping apart innocent families for nothing more than fleeing poverty and death—just like so many who came to American before—they deserve to be called out as heartless and immoral
Eric Panzer

New euphemism for authoritarian lawlessness just dropped:


Greg Sargent

Clinton was specifically referring to people who sent rape and gas chamber threats to politicians when she said that. Dems biggest mistake was not doubling down and asking if the GOP supported that behavior. Instead they capitulated to the framing that Clinton was calling Erma in Iowa “deplorable.”
Ellery @biknmusicmama.bsky.social

Genetic material shed by tumors can be detected in the bloodstream three years before cancer diagnosis, according to a study led by investigators at Johns Hopkins University. That study was made possible with federal funding. Now, many studies like this are canceled.
E. Rosalie

Arresting people for deportment when they arrive for immigration hearings is literally entrapment. When a nation decides that trying lawfully to become a citizen is cause for being arrested, it ceases to be a democracy. It's just a failed state trying to rid itself of those it sees as inferior to a master race by means of ethnic cleansing  and structural violence.
The Colvin Study @ajcoog.bsky.social

This is a real thing being posted and circulated by the Department of Homeland Security, referring to undocumented immigrants as “foreign invaders” and urging good Americans to turn them in:


David S. Bernstein

One time, during my client’s asylum hearing he was asked by the govt attorney if he really expected the judge to believe he’d been imprisoned for reading a Pentecostal bible. My client’s response? Well, your country imprisoned me for seeking asylum…so… Fuck you for trivializing this AP.
BakeUpMaggie @snowbunny11ataol.bsky.social

New Danish study concludes that traffic noise is killing people: "A 14.9 decibel increase in road traffic noise [outside the home] was associated ... with an 8.1% increased risk of all-cause mortality." Traffic noise was much deadlier than air pollution.
David Zipper

ICE detentions of people with no criminal records are up nearly 900 percent over the same period last year.
Philip Bump

I don’t think it can be overstated that we live nothing like our ancestors *specifically* because of vaccines and food support for poor people. So many children died. So. Many. We actually solved that. Solved it! Amazing. But then we got too removed from it and here we are.
Sara @saralovesyou.bsky.social

Our federal government right now:


 @slightwright.bsky.social

I just think anyone upset at the sight of a Mexican flag is clearly upset at the sight of Mexican people and are thus not rational political actors who should get to draw the lines of our discourse
Gillian Branstetter

I was fine with the protests against the king until they threw the tea into the ocean.
ceasar @portocan.bsky.social

They keep talking about punishing protestors as if this country wasn’t FOUNDED BY PROTESTERS WHO ENSHRINED THE RIGHT TO PROTEST, I AM SO TIRED OF HOW STUPID THINGS HAVE BECOME. Also, WHAT THE FUCK WAS JANUARY 6, YOU BRAIN DEAD HYPOCRITE SUCKERS
Andy Richter

Biofuels aren’t worth it
Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social

I’ve never forgotten this picture from 2016 and how it completely reshaped my understanding of how the media covers protests:


Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

The idea that the progressive left used the internet to bully institutions into accepting unpopular, far-left positions is the exact opposite of what has actually happened. The alt-right used the internet for ideological capture and they are now in the White House bragging about it daily
Kat Tenbarge

To the people in power, the only acceptable form of protest is none at all.
Bill Emory @oldmanemory.bsky.social

If you study the successful rebellions and resistance and civil rights movements of the past, you will note that “people who spend their time publicly bumming out everyone around them by emphasizing how totally fucked everything is” do not play a central role, or indeed, any role at all
Faine Greenwood

the southern baptist convention [which just voted to endorse a ban on gay marriage] recently had to sell their headquarters in downtown nashville to pay for all the sex abuse legal fees.
tyler @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social

i think southern baptists should probably consider a ban on being led by child predators
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

"nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents, not least because nothing ever will and they'll lie and distort no matter what." –Rebecca Solnit
566unicorns.bsky.social


CAKE @thebandcake.bsky.social

So many of our loudest First Amendment enthusiasts have no idea that freedom of assembly is right there in it, on equal footing with freedom of the press or freedom of religion
Tom Scocca

I enjoy how Americans will post an image of a man bravely standing in front of a tank at Tiananmen every year to commemorate the wickedness of violence against protestors and then see a protester get trampled by a cop on horseback on CNN in LA and say “well what did he do wrong to deserve that?”
Cmonmacques

I know I’m naive but I’m just constantly shocked by how much they hate the country they’re running
Dave Levitan

Bluesky shows all users by default all the posts from the accounts they choose to follow in chronological order. Vichy Twitter chooses which posts to show using an algorithm designed by Elon Musk. It's a brainwashing engine.
mtsw

I love New York City, so I say this out of love — there’s something profoundly wrong with any city that would produce “Democrat” contenders as obviously awful as Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo.
Brent Toderian

I will say it again: Trump is occupying Los Angeles. That is the proper word for what he is doing.
Watchdog Progressive

I will be damned if I allow a bunch of Confederate-waving January 6th apologists give the American people a lecture on flag waving. There is ZERO reason to enter an argument about patriotism with people who still worship traitors to America 150+ years later. They. Are. Breaking. The. Law.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social

We’ve leapt over a lot of red lines in the last week. But one I find most worrying is Trump/MAGA/ICE have ceased even pretending to claim  some criminal pretext for cracking down on protected speech. It’s just straight up “if you criticize us, you’re getting throttled/arrested/disappeared.”
Radley Balko


CAKE @thebandcake.bsky.social

American society is most comfortable with no protests, ample free parking, expensive housing and no poor people in public spaces. Any disturbance in that equation brings about a hurricane of anxious punditry scolding liberals for causing their discomfort with the situation.
Bryan @bryanformhals.com

"Mainstream media has a duty to inform its audience that Trump/Miller policies are in fact hateful. But it rarely does so. Moran is to be commended for speaking truth to power. Speaking truth to power is, after all, what journalists are supposed to do." –Noah Berlatsky
Aaron Rupar

something i’ve been thinking about lately is the idea that america has transformed from a nation of citizens to a nation of consumers — and to really take that seriously, not just as a way to decry materialism. if you internalize that, i think most of Trump’s mainstream/marginal support makes sense. a citizen conceives of themselves as part of a community whose stewardship is their partial responsibility. they think of themselves as definitionally a small part of a larger whole. a customer, otoh, sees themselves as an individual in competition with everyone else. for them, there is no "we."
elias isquith

Trump says anybody who protests the military parade on Sunday will be met with “very heavy force”
Aaron Rupar

Okay so law enforcement IS capable of massing on elementary schools to snatch up children, just not when there’s an active shooter. Got it.
@rpg-volley.bsky.social

Thou shalt not force good horses to trample peaceful protesters and pretend thou art the good guys.
God @thegodpodcast.com

The idea we should behave in such a way that the Trumpists will not portray us as dangerous/ lawless/ violent is a silly idea, because they always portray us that way and no amount of curtseys and rolling over and playing dead will change that. So people might as well speak up and stand strong. Trump has been demonizing Latinos since he showed up on the political scene. The idea that there's some behavior we can indulge in that will cause them to endeavor to live in harmony and tell the truth is a foolish idea.
Rebecca Solnit

Trump is spending $134 million to needlessly deploy troops to LA and $45 million to throw himself a birthday military parade — he seems to think the US military is a toy for his amusement, funded by American taxpayers.
Steve Rattner

For no particular reason I want to point out if Carrie Nation had just sent strongly worded letters to bars we’d have no idea who she was
Historical Marker Ahead

The media is going to BOTH SIDES us right into martial law:


scarylawyerguy.bsky.social

Look, I'm a well-off middle-age  cis white guy with four law degrees, three in commercial law fields. At this point, even I can see that key institutions have failed at the moment they were most needed because we have permitted the development of a largely unregulated and untaxed oligarch class.
The Questionable Authority

Notice how while ICE arrests people without a warrant, invades homes without a warrant, and disappears people into death camps — NRA is silent. Know why? Because NRA was never about firearm protection — but about white supremacy protection. As long as ICE targets mostly Black and brown people, NRA is happy.
Qasim Rashid, Esq.

If I learned anything from the Minneapolis uprising in 2020, it’s that you can’t trust the news to learn what is taking place. Big news folks take their talking points from police and elected officials who have the power, means, and desire to spin the story their way. Don’t fall for it.
christy marsden

“It’s too early to declare a constitutional crisis…” Is it, though?
Thomas @thomaslstrickland.bsky.social

This is a demographic engineering project. They don’t care that this is all made up bullshit. They want a nation of tiered citizenship based on race, religion and ideology
Adam Serwer

If you think climate change has gotten worse during your lifetime, you're right and there's a good reason. If you're Gen X like me, more than 3/4 of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions have occurred in your lifetime. Even if you're a Millennial, it's at least half:


David Ho

The irony of podcasters and media personalities accusing immigrants from the “third world” of not doing useful work.
Adam Serwer

A rule of thumb that will rarely lead you astray in this country is to assume that a riot was started by the people who showed up armed and dressed for a riot.
Ed Burmila

The fact that a hyphenated American isn't any less American than anybody else is literally the best thing about this stupid-ass country, the thing that most clearly makes it a redeemable project.
Leonid Baezhnev @rev-avocado.bsky.social

"Nobody’s going to spit on our police officers," says Trump, who four months ago pardoned people who beat police officers with pipes, flagpoles, baseball bats and 2-by-4s at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Peter Baker

The real enemy of this administration is cosmopolitanism. Whether in Los Angeles or South Africa, multiracial pluralistic democracy is a threat to them because it means their “us or them” model of the world is wrong. So they stir up trouble on purpose and gleefully lie.
Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social

[Here's my earlier post about the ICE raids in Los Angeles — before Kristi Noem's attack on Senator Padilla.]

I've shifted my thinking re: sustainability and systems from 'how can we minimize harm' to 'how can we maximize ecological good' and it is SO cool to think about pollinators + solar this way. You're telling me we can build cheap, clean energy AND improve biodiversity at the same time?!
Isak Kvam

Regular liberal people must come to understand that there is no way you can appease Nazis and especially that there is no way that you can shrink yourself so they won't hurt you. Their main goal is to hurt you.
Prisonculture

Spanking does not produce good behavior. Authoritarian violence -- and make no mistake, that's what it is when you hit your kid, even if you tell yourself it's "just a swat" -- produces little authoritarians, full of fear and suppressed anger.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

I dipped my parents' toothbrushes in the toilet after they hit me, and I don't think "I turned out fine." Ironically, people who say that need the most help. I refuse to use the word spanking, because it minimizes the fact that you are assaulting children. I can't imagine hitting my daughter.
Rachel @rachelmachel.bsky.social

on January 6th, while attempting to overthrow an election, multiple rioters wore Nazi paraphernalia. they declared their intent to murder elected officials. the right stood steadfastly behind them and are now more powerful than ever. you can stand behind someone waving a Mexican flag.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

Someone telling you you’re in an “ideological bubble” is either trying to convince you to join their monetized content bubble is was dumb enough to believe that sales pitch themselves. The idea that people in this country have an ideology of any form is so laughable. We don’t even have religion! We invented Evangelicalism to strip any kind of obligation out of Christianity. We have the packaging of religion. The packaging of ideology.
Tom Basgen, Mr. Saint Paul

Democratic Party leaders' version of the old expression "There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them" is "There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can stop them."
Geoff Johnson

We've seen highly controlled, highly choreographed moments of protest in recent months. That's something completely different than a whole bunch of people getting fed up and moving in the way that folks have been moving in California. It’s like yelling at water about the proper way to boil.
Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social

The news emphasizes low-level theft instead of corporate crime, pollution, and other predatory behavior.
Truthout

There are like five conservative social media apps, including one run by the president of the United States, and it’s weird how we never get a Washington Post editorial about how divisive and unwelcoming they are.
dell cameron

"BlueSky is dying"
"Gen A I is inevitable"
"The regime cannot be stopped"
You don't typically need to repeat something if it's true; you repeat it when you're selling something, whether that's a product or a belief.
Hailey Piper

Right: Let's do genocide
Left: Let's not do genocide
Center: Guys, you're gonna have to compromise, let's just do /some/ genocide
Right: I can live with that
Left: No to genocide
Center: See, this is why no one likes the left, you guys are the real extremists, smh
Puck Arks

On Thursday I biked to a training, and (for reasons) it came up loudly in front of the group. The next day another woman also biked, saying she did cause I had. We then biked halfway home together. Be the change you want to see!


Catherine @catlikesbridges.bsky.social

Statistically “America” is its cities. But we’re stuck with an 18th century political architecture that gives votes to cornfields and thus makes it politically viable to treat them as some kind of weird tumor.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social

not the main issue here but i'd really appreciate it if democratic politicians spoke out in support of big-city life and culture with the same energy and reverence that all politicians have for small towns. los angeles is "real america" and so are all the other big cities the president hates
Doug Mack

My advice to those who don't want things shoved down their throats is to keep their mouths shut.
Bob-Parker54

Still waiting for the article that’s like “these right wing militia members are in a bubble and it would be healthier if they exposed themselves to left wing ideas”
Kashana

For the first time in the US, more babies are now born to moms 40–44 than under 20. This marks 2 historical shifts for the US, plummeting teen pregnancy and gradually rising fertility for older women:


Eric Finnigan

The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world. They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.
Eliot Higgins

On this day in 1958, St. Petersburg, Florida, ordered the closure of a public indoor swimming pool because a Black 19-year-old named David Isom used the facility.
Equal Justice Initiative

We keep hearing the Trump-Musk saga reveals the split between tech oligarchs and MAGA. But they're largely in sync on crucial matters involving egalitarianism and the state. Trump/Musk mainly differ over how badly to screw the poor. Trump and Musk agree on the fundamentals:
*Both see the US state as something to capture for megalomaniacal self-dealing
*Both agree the US state should abandon the global poor to face unimaginable suffering
*Both want the state to dramatically roll back help for working people and the poor
Greg Sargent

With Musk gone, it’s time to start irritating Trump with “Stephen Miller is the person actually running the country.” Miller has survived longer than anyone in Trump’s orbit, so he’s clearly learned how to stroke Trump’s ego. But it can’t hurt to try.
Radley Balko

Imagine if President Biden, from the White House, had publicly threatened to level “very serious consequences” against the richest man alive if he *dared* to give any money to the Republican Party. It would be a scandal that would last years. That is what Trump just did with respect to Elon Musk.
Seth Abramson

A lot of folks need to pause and speak gently to themselves. Admit to yourself, "I'm afraid right now." Sit with that for a moment, understand what reflexes it's triggering, and that those impulses don't necessarily apply meaningfully to anything that's happening.
Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social

The party that subjected Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Michael Byrd, Ruby Freeman, Shaye Moss, Ashley Thomas and countless other public servants to death threats demand that you to stop posting the names of the ICE agents who are snatching innocent people off the street and disappearing them.
Radley Balko

Andrew Cuomo hasn't lived in the city since 1990 and only just moved here at the end of 2024 into his daughter's apartment for his vanity run for mayor. Anyone arguing that he's a New Yorker is deliberately obfuscating.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

One of the wildest things about reactionary psychology is that they seem *genuinely hurt and dismayed* when people react badly to their violent, stupid behavior.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Here's a fun map of urbanization by state! Wow, look at all those people who live in cities! Only West Virginia, Mississippi, Maine, and Vermont aren't majority urbanized. That's 8 out of 10 Americans who live in an urban area!


Sarang Shah

Aggrieved whites pretending they only lost out because of "unfair advantages" to minorities is an old script. The Bakke ruling against racial quotas came after Allan Bakke was rejected by 12 different med schools. He sued the *one* that had a racial quota, arguing that and that alone kept him out.
Kevin M. Kruse

Two babies have died from whooping cough in Kentucky. Neither they nor their parents had been vaccinated. The current whooping cough outbreak in the U.S. hasn’t grabbed the media spotlight as much as measles has, but it’s important to update your vaccination if you’re going to be around babies.
Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD

what sucks about "Abundance" discourse is that the movement is a trojan horse - a way to smuggle bad ideas about tech, anti-labor, crypto etc into Dem politics by wrapping them inside normal and fine ideas about housing, green energy, transit etc.
mtsw

The Republican Party has fully embraced fascism and destroyed American democracy. But some Democrats still say Latinx. I have never felt more politically homeless.
NY Times Pitchbot

New from ProPublica: A DOGE staffer developed an AI tool to review Veterans Affairs contracts. But there was a slight hitch. It hallucinated the size of those deals. For example, it concluded that more than a thousand contracts were each worth $34M, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.
Chris Morran @themorrancave.bsky.social

Here are some nice mushrooms:


lukelukeluke

If all DOGE left government today, how long would it take to make everything right again? They can’t do simple math, their coding must be a mess.
JAN13

It would take many years, it's not just the stuff they admit to doing that you need to be worried about, it's everything ELSE... Considering they did stuff like install uncertified hardware in sensitive environments with none of the normal cyber security checks a lot of stuff is going to need complete rebuilds.
darkglade.bsky.social

In amongst all the excitement I fear many have missed this outstanding bit of trolling by Friedrich Merz. The Chancellor gifted Trump a gilded framed copy of his grandfather’s German birth certificate... reminding Americans that Trump is both the child and grandchild of migrants.
Otto English

So then Elon goes "Kill the Bill!" and Trump goes "Elon has TDS!" so Elon goes "I'm the reason Trump won!" so Trump goes "we waste billions on Elon!" so Elon goes "Epstein!" and a corpulent flunkie goes "Deport Elon!" and Elon goes "Impeach!" And THAT'S why women are too emotional to be President.
Jane of the North

This seems like a great day to remind Bluesky that Stephen Miller lived four doors down from me freshman year. And our student council person asked him (and everyone) to sign a birthday card for our dorm’s janitor. And he threw a tantrum and wrote an op-ed about not socializing with “the help.”
David Shiffman, Ph.D. @whysharksmatter.bsky.social

Before Trump (or more like Bush), Miller probably would just have a job at National Review Online saying horrible vicious things to entertain all his fellow sadists. Now he gets to literally torture people.
Ozma @rowyourbot.bsky.social

I think my favourite slide from the whole #retrofitcanada25 conference today was this one from Jay Olson, showing how just giving up the fucking car is almost three times as good as going vegan or buying a heat pump:


Lloyd Alter

Elon threatening to just leave people on the ISS is making a pretty good case for why you nationalize your space program!
Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

Elon Musk, the genius visionary who could not predict that the guy who has betrayed every person he has ever met would betray him
Michael Hobbes

it should not be lost that elon personally bankrolled about 20% of the total for republican super pacs raised in 2024 lmao
Starshine

Trump's buffoonery aside, I think a lot of Americans can't process that multiple generations of Germans renounce and revile past actions rather than treat them as an aspect of their culture that must be maintained.
Don Moynihan

I was talking about this with my students yesterday—throughout Western Europe, Nazism is treated in public spaces and memorials as a nightmare, as horror that must never be repeated. If slavery and Jim Crow received the same commemoration in the US, we'd be a very different country.
Angus Johnston

Civil engineering—a pseudoscience—turned every American street into a dangerous, high-speed freeway, producing a public realm in which children take one wrong step and die, and then want to blame parents for their dead children. Hell of a grift.
M. Nolan Gray

Some peonies for you:


Karin Hedetniemi

worth remembering that when Trump announced a travel ban in 2017, people literally went to airports to protest. Eight years later, Trump announces a new one and it's not even front page news. We're the frogs and the water is getting awfully hot.
Aaron Rupar

Dear America: stop saying you want the country to be run like a business. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Joy-Ann Reid

Unsurprising but important finding: Neighborhoods easily traversed by bike or on foot have lower car ownership and less PM2.5 pollution.
David Zipper

Alex Jones, who spent years ranting about shadowy government mass surveillance technology, is now stanning for Palantir
Drew Harwell

Let's be clear: ICE routinely labels its operations as “criminal investigations” to gain cooperation, even when the targets are largely civil immigration violators. They claim to have "federal warrants," but these aren't signed by a judge. We deserve WARRANT TRANSPARENCY.
mollypeonies

Limestone plaque with the face of an owl. From Egypt, Late Period–Ptolemaic Period, 400–30 BC. Met Museum, photo by me:


Alison Fisk

One of the things that fills me with rage about poor air quality (fires and otherwise) is that the people who contribute to it the least, are the folks who are most impacted. Walk? Bike? Wait for the bus? Sleep outside? All have such tiny climate impacts and lungs full of particulate matter
emly in minneaparis @eeewade.bsky.social

acab doesn't mean "every single cop is a demonic murderer;" it means "being a cop necessitates abandoning your morals at the door bc the institution of policing is so corrupt and oppressive as to be abhorrent to any good person." so saying "well some cops are okay ppl" misses the point entirely.
johnny @gatorpond.bsky.social

[This is where the BlueSky posts about the raid on Lake Street in Minneapolis occurred, which I posted earlier.]

Another dumb gross irony [of the ship renaming] is Harvey Milk served in the Navy and Donald Trump's Navy secretary didn't
Adam Weinstein

A million years ago, this was a national scandal. Today, it is just an everyday occurrence that we all tacitly accept:


Jack Murphy

I forget who I first saw name the problem, but New York City is a place where Republican constituencies—bosses, landlords, developers, financiers—pursue their right-wing self-interest within the Democratic Party, and often even think of themselves as "liberals," and that's who Cuomo services
Tom Scocca

Sick of people who drive (or get chauffeured around) in grotesquely massive SUVs complaining about bikes taking up space.
OB Cycler

Imposter syndrome had a great run, but unfortunately someone found it stabbed to death right in front of the FEMA head who’s unfamiliar with hurricanes
Kashana

It’s weird that RFK types will invent hundreds of conspiracy theories but rarely are like “Americans would be healthier if we didn’t have to drive everywhere and could walk”. That’s the wild thinking you can’t divulge, walking, not that Bigfoot is behind it all.
Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” — Hannah Arendt
Peter Gleick

Trump Admin's proposed HUD budget would cut the agency's budget authority by $45 b. It would cut staff by 26%, killing 2300 jobs. HUD proposes eliminating most of its programs—vouchers, public housing, CDBG, etc—and replacing them with a single, smaller state block grant.
Yonah Freemark

Democrats: How do we reach young men?!
Republicans:


Gil Durán

Copaganda is deeply ingrained into our society from a very young age. I joke that ‘ACAB includes Paw Patrol’ but it is absolutely true. “Police are the ‘good guys’” is told to us from birth so heavily that ‘cops are bad’ is literally like saying ‘Up is down’ to them.
John @localcelebrity.bsky.social

Drivers are now legitimately the leading cause of violent death in the US. The primary difference between other murders, and murders/homicides committed by drivers with cars, is, it's legal for drivers to kill people with cars. Kind of have to wonder how many killers didn't just change weapons.
Matthew Lewis  @mateosfo.bsky.social

Trump handed the white house keys to a drug addict, polygamist and Nazi.
Li Ren @naliren.bsky.social

(Reuters) – FEMA staff left baffled after the disaster agency's head said during a briefing that he hadn't been aware the US has a hurricane season.
Steve Herman @newsguy.bsky.social

What if wealth wasn’t a driveway full of cars — but the freedom to not need them? Replacing a car with an e-bike can save a household $120,000 over a decade—enough to wipe out debt, fund a college account, or boost retirement savings.
Adam Tranter

what makes neofascism so obscene and galling is that, whereas classical fascism grew out of the calamities of war, disease, immiseration and revolution, neofascism comes out of an era of unprecedented peace, abundance, freedom, and security
ben chambers

Libertarianism in theory: freedom for all
Libertarianism in practice: enjoy the gulags!
Thomas Swords

this obsession with a handful of high status universities is also low key an indication of elite disdain for the institutions that educate most americans who attend colleges and universities
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

New signs are up in my home state to encourage tourism...


Monica @softtail65.bsky.social

Remember when “death panels” was a Republican talking point against expanding health insurance coverage with Obamacare? Now, cutting coverage and actually sending people to their death is a policy position of the Republican Party.
Salena

Connecticut just adopted a MASSIVE pro-housing law that:
- Ends costly parking mandates (1st state east of the Rockies to do so)
- Incentives transit oriented development & fair share
- Allows middle housing in commercial zones
- Allows manufactured homes everywhere
Welcoming Neighbors Network

GOP claimed that COVID contact-tracing was “government overreach.”
They said that background checks violated freedom.
They wanted to ban data collection about gun violence.
But now they have hired Palantir to track us all.
This is the machinery of a surveillance state, run by billionaires.
Dr. Mar @boldnewme.bsky.social

I think if we just started calling raw milk what it really is, poopy milk, people would maybe stop thinking it’s some sorta miracle elixir.
Kory Bing

Thoughtful of Target to release a beige Pride line, planning ahead for the camps!
Vicky ACAB

I think we’re going to need a bigger handbasket.
Bogey @oneyebogey.bsky.social

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd. It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.
Peter Gleick

The richest Americans are causing 65% of global warming, but it’s Black neighborhoods that are losing homes, livelihoods, and lives.
Capital B


Krassensteins