One Thing that's Not as Bad as You May Have Thought

You know how it has become increasingly common for mainstream retail stores to have a round-up donation for some nonprofit cause or other? 

Maybe you've heard or read something (or seen a video) saying that those big store chains are taking a tax deduction based on the amounts donated by their customers. I've certainly heard that, and thought it made sense.

Well, it turns out that is not true. 

Michelle Singletary, the long-time personal finance columnist for the Washington Post, whom I consider to be a trustworthy source despite her employer, had a recent piece about this topic and declares emphatically that it violates federal law. She quotes Renu Zaretsky from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center as her source. 

So if you feel like donating that way, go ahead.  

From Singletary's article I also learned that, starting in 2026, people who use the standard deduction when filing their taxes will once again be able to claim some charitable contributions "above the line." The amounts they can deduct are $1,000 for people who file single and $2,000 for people who file jointly. (Since the standard deduction was raised significantly in the 2018 tax year, there has not been a charitable deduction that made sense for many people with modest incomes.)  

Receipts for the contributions are needed in case of audit, of course. For donations at the register, if those amounts seem important to note, I would think either the cash register receipts or keeping a list (similar to a mileage diary) would be all that's needed.

One More Thing

Today I learned — in the midst of this longer post about Trump's National Security Strategy document and historian Robert Kagan's view of things on the Weekly Sift—

...Japan...came out of World War I with a largely democratic pro-American government. But in the 1920s, America instituted high tariffs and strong barriers to immigration. [P]olitics in Japan completely shifts, and then you get the Japan that invades Manchuria in 1931.

Tariffs! Let's have more of them. Sure! They're so good for children and other living things.

I try very hard not to be interested in foreign policy (there's so much to worry about domestically).

But as the saying goes about people who claim not to be interested politics generally... it doesn't mean that foreign policy won't take an interest in you.

What's More Dangerous for Teens: Cars or eBikes?

Warren Wells, policy and planning director at Marin County Bicycle Coalition, posted a long thread (all worth reading) about teens and crashes — whether bike or car-related. 

Here are a few particular parts: 

We've spent a ton of time talking about teens getting injured on e-bikes (or illegal e-motos). We've heard that crash rates are skyrocketing. Marin County Dept of Health even set up a dashboard to see how many e-bike/e-moto crashes are happening.

But how many kids are getting hurt in cars? 

Here is the crash count and crash rate per 100k in Marin by age. 


Some things to note here. The number of under age 16 e-bike crashes in the last two years, the whole thing we're having a panic over is, 54 — or 2/month. 

Compare that to 398 conventional bike crashes for 16+. It's ~1/7th! Wow!

...

Lastly is the "nature of accident." This is a little fuzzy, but a "traffic" crash is one where a bike collided with another vehicle (typically a car) and a "non-traffic" crash is a solo crash.

Right off the bat, we see that close to half (44%) of teen e-bike crashes involve a car.

Interestingly, for every age category and bike type, solo crashes make up a majority of reported crashes. 

But of all the categories, teen e-bike crashes are the most likely to involve a car. So I'm not sure that's an e-bike problem!

Ok, that's a lot about the e-bike dashboard. I want to get back to my initial question. How does this compare to the number of teens getting injured in car crashes?

...

Among just teens age 16–19, in 26 months there were 156 kids injured as car occupants, 2/3rd of them drivers. This is 6 injuries a month. 

17 of those injuries were serious (meaning likely life-altering) and 5 were fatal. Five! Compared to 0 teen e-bike (or e-moto) deaths in a similar time.

The big lesson here is that we should not be letting teens drive cars, and that transporting them by car is as least as big a threat to young people's health as riding a bicycle, at least on a population basis.

While we're talking about the public health effects of driving, it's worth mentioning the number of young people struck by cars, many of which are transporting other kids to school. 

In this 26-month period, 44 people age 19 or under were injured when hit by a car, and 8 were seriously wounded.

The data clearly show that teen passengers, and especially teen drivers, are frequently injured in traffic crashes.

All I want is for our public health officials to treat this issue with as much seriousness as it deserves, relative to the effort they have expended regarding e-bikes.

Because when all I hear is about is e-bikes and nothing about teen drivers (aside from the obvious grief about an individual crash), it becomes hard to see the furor about e-bikes/e-motos as anything other than a moral panic.

An Orange Roof

I'm sure I've referenced the Discontinued Foods! BlueSky account at least a few times in the past. Today they reposted this:

Howard Johnson's Soda (1968-circa 1977): The iconic hotel/restaurant chain made several forays into selling their foods and beverages commercially, including this line of canned sodas. Flavors included Cola, Grape, Orange, Cream Soda, Ginger Ale, Root Beer, and more

I like the design of the cans well enough as a midcentury modern look, but the thing they reminded me of is my child nostalgia for the Howard Johnson's orange roof.

My rural family of six did not travel except to see relatives, and even then we generally only went a few hours away and stayed overnight with the relatives. We almost never "went out to dinner," either, until I was well into my teen years.

But I remember the orange Howard Johnson's roof from the small city where both sets of my grandparents lived. I have no idea where it was located, since it has been gone for a long time. When I first saw it, it gave a siren call of cosmopolitanism and modernity I could never have. 

I can't explain the feeling the image of that roof evokes in my. It's something about the shininess of childhood innocence, seeing something unusual for the first time (an orange roof!) when you have extremely limited experience, that's hard to ever replicate with other experiences as you get older. 

I saw other HoJo's over the years, later, degraded and sad. But these cans brought back the 1960s moment for just a second.

The Real Marie Zakrzewska

I have kind of a thing for 19th century American women doctors.

I've written before about Lydia Strowbridge in Cortland and Mary Dixon Jones in Brooklyn, and Mary Walker, whose Civil War medal was revoked.

In the last couple of days I learned about Marie Zakrzewska, 1829–1902.

Zakrzewska was born in Berlin to Polish parents. Her father refused to send her to school beyond age 13, so as a teenager she worked with her mother, who was a midwife. She went to the Berlin midwifery school as its youngest student, age 20. She was a stellar student was appointed professor at age 22, but the mentor who advocated for her died soon after. She left after 6 months and moved to New York City with her younger sister.

She met Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (the first woman to graduate from a U.S. medical school) in the mid-1850s, who got her into Western Reserve University's medical school, where she graduated in 1856. With Blackwell, she opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857.

She moved to Boston a few years later for a job at the Boston Female Medical College. But when the "founder of the college...insisted that graduating female physicians would be addressed as 'doctresses' instead of doctor, Zakrzewska resigned from her position in 1861."

She opened the New England Hospital for Women and Children on July 1, 1862. It began the first nurse training program in the U.S. in 1872. She worked through the early 1890s.

For me, the bizarre thing about Marie Zakrzewska is that I found out about her from a Facebook post that's completely fabricated. It was one of those "history" pages, shared by a friend, and it gave an elaborate story about how someone with her name started what became the first ambulance crew in the U.S. in New York City in 1869.

By that year, though, Zakrzewska was well-established in Boston, running the New England Hospital for Women and Children, so I doubt she was hanging around New York looking for people to rescue on its streets and organizing volunteers, as described in the Facebook post. Here's that post, if you're on Facebook.

There are multiple links to the post if you search her name and the word ambulance. At first I didn't see any comments on the post, but the second link I checked does have several comments pointing out that the story is not true, and that the photos included are AI-generated.

Note that even the year given would have to be wrong, since it claims Zakrzewska was 43 in 1869, when she would have been just 40.

Crazy times!

Very Cold with a Chance of ICE

Well... it's sub-zero into mid-morning here in Minnesota and we have ice. And ICE on top of the ICE we already had, now that Trump is ranting about our Somali neighbors. 

People are hiding in their houses, the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood organization has moved its annual meeting to Zoom so people will not have to attend in person and be in danger of being picked up by goons, businesses are being affected by loss of foot traffic. The Target store in South Minneapolis is said to have allowed ICE to stage vehicles in its parking lot. That will be good for its failing business!

An entire room full of powerful old white people smiling and laughing as the president dehumanizes black immigrants and the first black president. Just fucking pathetic.
Radley Balko

Incredible optics here, really underscores it all.
Chris Hayes

With the sound off, it looks like one of those lynching postcards.
drf5n.bsky.social

I know: he’s a racist authoritarian who’s running a militantly racist government constantly doing and saying racist things, carrying out a highly militarized campaign of ethnic cleansing and also doing anti diversity crackdown all over the place. And yet…his racist rhetoric IS getting worse, somehow
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

The President’s blaming Feeding Our Future, but the fraud he’s talking about was enabled by the CARES Act — a bill he signed that gutted oversight to get money out fast. It’s also the law that allowed members of Congress to pocket PPP loans for their own companies.
Kendal Killian

This man may be the most racist president this country has ever had, and twelve presidents owned slaves.
@nikobowie.bsky.social

Sherrilyn Ifill asked for IDs on all the people standing behind Trump when he went on his racist tirade against Somalis, and Helen Kennedy, retired New York Daily News reporter, obliged:

Ford CEO Jim Farley
Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa
General Motors plant manager John Urbanic
National Auto Dealers Association Chairman Tom Castriota
Transportation Sec Sean Duffy
Deputy transportation Sec Steven Bradbury
WV Sen Shelly Moore Capito
ND Sen Kevin Cramer
Missouri Sen Eric Schmidt
Fla Rep. Vern Buchanan
Tenn Sen Marsha Blackburn
Texas Sen Ted Cruz
Ohio Sen Bernie Moreno
Missouri Rep Sam Graves
Pa Rep Mike Kelly
Texas Rep Roger Williams
Ohio Rep Troy Bolderson
Michigan Rep. Lisa McClain

Locally based science fiction writer Naomi Kritzer had a charming thread of advice today for our unwelcome visitors from the federal government on how to dress for the cold. It included suggestions like wearing cotton socks — if your windshield gets iced over, boil some water and pour it over to thaw it fast — and if you have to shovel your car, out don't lift with your legs, you'll wreck your knees. Commenters added a number of great suggestions.

The diminutive Greg Bovino from CBP, meanwhile, is parading around New Orleans, where they are picking up day laborers out of Home Depot parking lots. Oooo, so scary.

I know that Trump is immune to facts and even if he knew them or could remember them, he would lie anyway. However: Somali refugees began coming to Minnesota in 1993, based on decisions made when George H.W. Bush was president. More people came when Bill Clinton was president. By 1998, when I began working in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis, there was already a substantial population in that area. I believe Barack Hussein Obama had barely been elected to the Illinois State Senate at that point.

Almost all Somalis in Minnesota are either citizens or green card holders. A huge percentage were born here — that's how long they (their parents) have been here. They're part of Minnesota's fabric now, and we're not going back.

Thanks to Tom Stoppard

From kottke.org, shared there by a UK reader...

A Line in a Tom Stoppard Play Inspired a New Breast Cancer Treatment

In a letter to the Times of London, Dr. Michael Baum tells how a line in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard sparked an idea which resulted in adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, a therapy Baum helped pioneer which greatly increased the survivability of breast cancer.

Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.

Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.

Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL

Certainly drives home the value of a robust and diverse culture of humanities in contradiction to the current backlash.

As I said back in April this year, cancer research — particularly the Trump regime's recent funding cuts to it — have become more personal to me. 

This doctor's letter sheds some light on the improvement in breast cancer survival rates after 1990 that were mentioned in my April post.

For those who don't know, adjuvant chemotherapy (or neoadjuvant, which is administered before surgery) — which are most of the chemotherapies people undergo if they are in earlier stages of breast cancer — are meant to eliminate cancer cells that may have escaped the main tumor site, but are not detectable yet. I had never heard the term before I had cancer.

Its purpose is not to eliminate or even shrink the known tumor, though it also often has that effect. And how much it shrinks the tumor is considered to be an indication of how effective the treatment is on a particular patient's cancer cells generally.

Thanks to Dr. Baum for the Damascene conversion, as much as he thanks Tom Stoppard.

New Year's Photos

Back in grad school, about 35 years ago, I wrote a paper about the photos my local newspapers ran each year depicting Hmong people on the occasion of the their New Year's celebration. It's an occasion when many people dress in the traditional clothing they wore in Laos, before coming to the U.S. as refugees, starting in the 1970s.

The gist of my analysis, which was based on photos by a number of photographers over 10 or 15 years in two papers, was that Hmong women were the ones shown in the traditional clothing, while men were almost always shown in Western clothes. If I remember correctly, there was one photo of a man in the entire sample. 

Of course, I thought there was a gendered reason for that in the paper: that the women represented the "primitive" Hmong culture, while the men represented their advance toward modernity. Or something like that... there was more to it in the paper.

This came to mind a few days ago when there were once again photos of our local Hmong New Year's celebration. Here are the photos from the Star Tribune:

That last photo shows Kaoly Her, our newly elected mayor here in Saint Paul, so they have an excuse for showing her, and she wore what she wore.

But do you see what's on the left and right edges of that photo of Her? Yes — those are two men wearing traditional vests. But are there any men intentionally included in any of the three photos who are wearing traditional clothes?

Still, in 2025, there are not.

__

Star Tribune photos by Leila Navidi.

BlueSky, November 2025, Part 2

Well, it's the second half of November, 2025. We left off the first half of the month just after a bunch of Epstein emails had been released and Megyn Kelly was saying it was okay for middle-aged or older men to have sex with 15-year-olds.

Since then, whew, it's been another few weeks with the Trump regime. More people blown up in boats in the Caribbean, but that's starting to be recognized as illegal, what do you know? We had two significant ICE raids here in Saint Paul, complete with street battles. Two National Guard members were shot (one killed) in Washington, D.C. by an Afghani former CIA child soldier, so now the Trump regime wants to stop all immigration and reverse naturalizations and who knows what other racist, illogical b.s.

Oh, and he spent his time pardoning drug overlords, making death threats against Democrats, taking gold bars and other bribes, and entertaining royalty who have had journalists dismembered. While the Department of Justus implodes. At other points, he was sitting behind a tiny table with his brains leaking out of his ears, calling women reporters "piggy" and "stupid."

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

In 1880, the age of consent in the U.S. was 10 years old in 37 states. In 10 states, the age of consent was 12. In Delaware, it was 7.
Shooti @bambooshooti.bsky.social

I mean this with all due respect, but if you believe that the Bible (or any other religious text) has all the answers you'll need and that nothing you'll learn at a university can change that, then you should not be going to a university. It's a waste of your time and it's a waste of theirs.
Kevin M. Kruse

If the Venezuelan sailors were enemy combatants, then the 2nd strike is a war crime. If the Venezuelan sailors weren’t enemy combatants, then both strikes are criminal murder. It’s that simple.
Santiago Mayer

Do not forget that this was one of Trump's first pardons after he was sworn in. Trump loves drug traffickers and has spent the first year of his second term releasing them back into the country:


Denise Wheeler

Imagine if billionaires just subsidized newspapers and magazines the way they’re subsidizing this slop
Molly Jong-Fast

They’re simultaneously arguing that soldiers have to follow all orders from the president, legal or not, but they get to ignore orders from a federal judge if they feel they’re not legal.
Kevin M. Kruse

If you think “illegal aliens” are the source of diseases like measles (they are not), that is all the more reason to vaccinate
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

To put it in perspective, the time period between Stegosaurus and T Rex is about 33% longer than the time period between T Rex and today
Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social

The appellation "third world countries" is meant to implicitly justify violence against lessers — ie when they say US cities are like "third world countries" they mean they're filled with savages, it's ok to kill. It's just the theology of slavery all over again
Adam Serwer

To make common cause with this Administration is to support an affirmatively white supremacist vision of this country. Period.
Every corporation.
Every Republican.
Every influencer.
Every Governor.
Every evangelical leader.
Every voter. Yes. Every voter.
Sherrilyn Ifill

Still wild to me that companies got together and lied about a mass shoplifting epidemic and fundamentally changed things in all stores so that it’s worse for everyone, and then we found out they lied, and no one fucking did anything about it, and this is just life now
Vexx Vixen @thenoirgal.bsky.social

it is amazing how so much tech gets unremittingly worse year on year at whatever you once used it for and less pleasant to use and more bound up with creepy politics as well as personal and environmental harms and yet also still less productive of actual goods and these are somehow great visionaries
Ted McCormick

The billionaires who own much of the the infrastructure of our 21st century lives have progressively enshittified that infrastructure while expanding their wealth, and then they scold us for being small-souled peasants who don’t believe in progress anymore.
Seth Cotlar

I think about this tweet a lot:


Max Berger

I think a big thing I struggle with, and something that is an important thing for people of my generation to attempt to understand, is separating toxic nostalgia from knowledge of the actual ways in which American life has gotten appreciably worse in my lifetime
good hyuck, babe! @markpopham.bsky.social

Trump doesn't give a shit about Drugs, [FAKE] Narco Terrorists, or YOU! He's pardoning a REAL NARCO TERRORIST! How much clearer does it need to be?
@hedahunter.bsky.social

According to the Wall Street Journal article, Witkoff traveled to Russia six times this year, and never visited Ukraine once.
Patrick Chovanec

One of the major reasons we are here right now is that the white electorate does not reward politicians for making their lives better if that improvement also benefits non-white people.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Good front-paging:


Philip Bump

Unfortunately, in US journalism it is considered neutral to spread a lie, but it is considered "biased" to call out a lie. So, there is a structural asymmetry that rewards colorful lies with virality.
Gil Durán

The Nazis used the term "Lying Press" (Lügenpresse) to discredit and censor all dissenting media, simultaneously targeting journalists, and seizing, and giving their political allies control of news outlets to crush any opposition. Just mentioning that now for no reason at all.
Melanie D’Arrigo

I regret every joke I’ve made about how our elected officials were so old they didn’t know how to use a computer. I would give anything for another administration that doesn’t know how to use a computer
ceej @ceej.online

I got off the internet today and touched moss (far more pleasant than touching grass) and I am now both exhausted and happier
Diana Soreil @silencedrowns.com

A study by Dayforce shows 87% of executives use AI for work, compared to 57% of managers and just 27% of employees. I think this explains the massive disconnect we see in how CEOs talk about AI versus everyone else. It also raises the question of how useful it truly is for frontline work?
Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social

Who’s gonna tell ’em:


Catherine Rampell

The president is about to start a war for no real reason. All of the things he has blamed on the country he’s targeting — fentanyl distribution, “emptying the asylums” and sending patients to the U.S., alignment with Tren de Aragua — are provably, obviously false. Lots of people are going to die.
Radley Balko

Americans love capitalism and hate socialism in theory (caricature)  
Americans love socialism and hate capitalism when personally experienced
PL Thomas EdD

Posts about urban biking in Dutch cities are routinely replied to with comments like “well, they have the big advantage of being relatively flat.” The Dutch also have the big advantage of not constantly making excuses about why they can’t make clearly smarter city-making decisions.
Brent Toderian

I'm persona non grata at CNN, a place that used to have me as a commentator, but Katie Miller, the fragile, racist wife of the fragile, racist Stephen Miller, has an open invitation. I wonder why. Hmmm.
Wajahat Ali

i mean what are these "western values" these guys are so hopped up about? they are directly antagonistic to western europe. they don't believe in civil liberties. they reject democracy. and don't get me started on christianity, they hate their white neighbors almost as much as the brown ones
rich traditions @helldude.bsky.social

Every time someone jumps on socials and says there is no point to mass protest days and visible reaction in the streets, share this chart with them. The approval ratings are tanking not just because they're doing bad things but also because protestors won't let people forget it either:


Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Trump offered a full pardon today to the former president of Honduras, who was convicted of trafficking 400 tons of drugs into the United States.
Molly Ploofkins

I’m beginning to think that the real crime these boats in the Caribbean committed was not buying enough TrumpCoin.
Patrick Chovanec

I think Pete Hegseth is gonna wish he had lived out his professional life as a third-tier Fox News on-air talent
Denny Carter

The media treated Biden's pardon of Hunter for trumped-up gun possession charges as more scandalous — far more scandalous — than Trump's pardon of war criminal serial killer Eddie Gallagher. And here we are.
mtsw

Every single congressional Democrat needs to be out there, right now, insisting that Pete Hegseth resign right now and announcing that he will be held accountable for committing war crimes. If you do not demand accountability here and now, they will only become more emboldened. Also, Hegseth is coming for Sen. Mark Kelly because he reminded troops that they have a duty not to commit crimes *like this one*. Making an appropriately big deal out of this blunts that attack and demonstrates the need for what Kelly and company did.
Kevin M. Kruse

There might be no better example of the war coming home than a CIA-trained teen death-squad recruit getting asylum in the US and then shooting a bunch of soldiers who were deployed to DC for no reason other than Kabuki Security Theater
Joe Kassabian @jkass99.bsky.social

really went dark for the sequel:


Chris Mohney

The guy shot two random people with a gun, I don't think you can say he wasn't assimilating into our culture
Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social

Strange how the ideology of the Minnesota assassin was pretty much dryly noted and dropped, not used as an excuse by politicians to blame half the country for the murder.
Schooley

The most openly racist, eugenicist monsters are running the U.S. They will use every opportunity to advance their agenda. And as the wheels come off their regime they will only grow more brutal and obscene. These are dangerous days for us all.
Sherrilyn Ifill

The reality, of course, is that Miller and a significant portion of Trump’s base are the ones who failed to assimilate to America’s post-WWII culture of multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism…and they are now using their power to destroy that once dominant (and still popular) American culture.
Seth Cotlar

It was considered a scandal, by some, when Netflix contracted with the Obamas to produce films on some very interesting subjects unrelated to them personally, AFTER they had left the White House and politics. Paying the sitting President's wife $40 million for a self-produced "documentary" about herself is ... a bribe, pure and simple.
Patrick Chovanec

Trump’s second administration is like a rewrite of All in the Family in which a reactionary bigot from Queens who basically wants to be liked by the people he meets is instead influenced by his wife Ann Coulter (not the lovely Edith) and his child Nick Fuentes and his live-in “friend” Stephen Miller. The premise of All in the Family was that the moral arc of American culture could bend toward justice as long as we tapped into our fundamental human decency (Edith) and the idealism of young people (Meathead and Gloria) so as to gradually drag scared reactionary bigots into the modern world.
Seth Cotlar


Shen Comix @shenanigansen.bsky.social

Immigration is good on the morals and also essential to our economic and national security.
Costa Samaras

To people saying “just following orders, huh?”: there are lawful orders and unlawful orders. Unlawful orders must be disobeyed. Lawful orders - however misguided or unwise - must be obeyed, or else the military becomes a law unto itself. Pay attention to the difference.
Patrick Chovanec

The response to one shooting. “Permanently pause” migration. “Denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility” and remove those deemed not a “net positive”. Or “not compatible with Western Civ.” A regime where every event is a Reichstag Fire, an opportunity to demand new, expansive powers.
Michael Feola @feolski.bsky.social

Everyone in politics, everyone in media knows what’s happening here: the White House is controlled by a repellant white supremacist who waits with bated breath for any opportunity to run nonwhite people out of America. They know who it is, what he’s doing. But they won’t SAY it.
Will Stancil

Killing is bad, and to that end I'd like to call attention to the dozens killed in small boats in the southern Caribbean by the Trump Administration and the estimated 600,000 who've died of preventable disease and starvation thanks to the administration's destruction of USAID.
Rebecca Solnit

Drivers: "Speeding 10mph over the speed limit is ok as long as I'm doing it at 11pm and I'm not targeting pedestrians." Also drivers: runs over the stop sign at my kids’ bus stop:


Stephen @stephen.int42.org

Imagine paying a large monthly fee to shop at a supermarket, then paying again for the actual groceries, then getting an extra charge months later because one ingredient in an item you bought came from a farmer associated with a different store. This post is about healthcare.
Melanie D’Arrigo

When ecologists argue that nature underpins the economy, they are over-simplifying. Nature underpins the survival of humans on Earth
James Bullock @jmbecologist.bsky.social

The fundamental thing to understand about this administration is the president is a grumpy retiree. He has no interest in working anymore. Which leads to him being pissed that he is getting asked a question, pissed he has to show up and work, the scheming viziers running the show, etc..
Sky Marchini

Average American Thanksgiving: President declares total ban on immigration, calls an esteemed democratic governor a slur, and then goes on TV to talk about Somalis like animals when asked about a mass shooting by a former child soldier and member of a CIA associated death squad.
utopia deferred

Trump makes the outrageous claim that “most” immigrants, which include over 25 million U.S. citizens, “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.” As insulting as the “deplorables” comment, and on Thanksgiving day no less.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

Four of Trump's five children have an immigrant mother, and the one who doesn't is married to the son of two immigrants.
Daily Trix

"Conservative groups, funded by fossil fuel magnates, spend $1 billion/yr interfering with public understanding of what is happening to our world. Few investments rival the return they've gotten from evangelicals." An oldie but goodie makes the link between fossil fuels, climate denial, and U.S. religion.
Katharine Hayhoe

What’s left of this man’s brain is just a Rube Goldberg machine of racism
Jonathan M. Katz

He is risen:


Viktor Winetrout

I would like more headlines like “journalists show a fucking backbone”. Rather than endless “Trump lashes out” stories. Cmon yall!!!
Karen Attiah

Really can't overstate how problematic robotaxis become at scale: "Urban traffic is constrained by the fact that getting around by car either requires (expensively) paying someone else to drive or (inconveniently) driving oneself. Without such constraints the result could be brutal gridlock." A city with a few hundred robotaxis is cool and futuristic, but with 100,000+ it'll be gridlocked and dangerous. All the more reason for local leaders to adopt congestion pricing and automatic traffic enforcement ASAP.
David Zipper

In Chinese, American football is called "olive ball" because of the unique shape of the ball.
Patrick Chovanec

"Sean Duffy Longs for the ‘Golden Age’ of Air Travel." More like the continuing golden age of wealthy, white privilege.
RecoveringXtian

there should be more thursday-based holidays, based purely on their ability to utterly fuck up a work week. according to my calculations, moving all the major holidays to a thursday would effectively end capitalism
e.w. niedermeyer

"a single person of this demographic may have committed a crime, therefore we must punish the entire demographic" is a policy response you may recognize from fascist governments dedicated to ethnic cleansing elsewhere.
A penitent who is loud @loudpenitent.bsky.social

Net migration has fallen again to 204,000, the lowest level since 2021 and is forecast to continue falling over the coming years. Not that you would know it from the endless coverage of Britain's supposed "immigration crisis"
Adam Bienkov

Republicans will blame Democrats for the shooter. Don't let them.
Democrats:
- allowed Afghans to seek refuge after aiding the U.S. and fleeing the Taliban
Republicans:
- approved shooter's refugee status in April 2025
- allowed shooter to access a gun
- placed National Guard soldiers in the line of fire
Brandon Friedman

Inter-city rail with charging for e-bikes on-board. Love you, Italy:


Robert Haider

With the DC shooter now identified as an Afghan national not the antifa secret agent White House hoped for a good time to remember the Trump admin has gutted domestic anti-terrorism capacity and reassigned many to finding grandmothers to arrest at immigration hearings.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

As many, many former counterterrorism analysts and officials said was the danger. Not spiking the ball. Just saying, professionals saw this potential and said don’t go this route. The administration chose a different path.
Josh Manning

What I've learned at my advanced age is that I rarely have the full story about anything.
Prisonculture

I think more than anything else AI feels like a miracle to people with questionable literacy because it can read and write for you, and a lot of us who are highly literate underestimate how many of our society's leaders, especially in business, struggle with literacy.
mtsw

Today, in Utah, homeowners *or renters* can simply buy a solar panel at Costco, take it home, and plug it in to a wall socket, like an appliance. It just sits there and trims about 15-20% off a residential power bill. If you move to another apt., you can take it with you.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

It’s important to note that Triump's golf games are out of town so MUCH more tax money and time goes into them (Obama primarily played locally and was back in the office shortly after). Further, some of the tax money goes to HIM since he drags secret service to his properties.
Phil Stevens @philstevens19.bsky.social

All of the Democrats around the U.S. proposing more pretrial detention and fighting reforms to the cash bail system should be thinking about why, across modern history, authoritarians are obsessed with increasing the power of the government to detain people before any trial.
alec karakatsanis @equalityalec.bsky.social

NEW data I've received: Just 5% of people detained by ICE since October 1 have had violent criminal convictions, 3/4 had no criminal convictions at all. Most "criminals" had immigration, traffic, and vice offenses. Not the "worst of the worst"...


David Bier

If people want to understand why American politics went bananas in 2012, the reason is that the moderate black President took a modest but consequential step toward decoupling healthcare from employment and every billionaire immediately poured their entire portfolio into race-hate media
@samthielman.com

you're telling me a right-wing catholic convert [JD Vance] is just a protestant in disguise? shocked
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Is anyone checking in on Peter Thiel to see if he's OK? If a family member kept seeing the antichrist everywhere you'd worry about them. I guess no one worries about the mental health of billionaires
Paul Kelly

Interestingly enough, prosperity gospel is based on Calvinistic predestination doctrine, and Calvinist congregations were historically most opposed to the Catholic "pomp." Anglicans and Lutherans kept some of the Catholic aesthetics, but were vehemently opposing predestination  doctrine. So no, there really isn't a mainline historic Protestant alternative for these guys. And it's always guys, female Catholic converts are likely to become nuns and work on a mission among the poor.
tuikkunen.bsky.social

“oh no, I’m such a good Catholic, I’m not sure whether to listen to the pope or the Rich guy giving me money!”
Sarah Steegar @paperandairplanes.bsky.social

Photo by Kerem Yücel of MPR News:


Conrad Lange Zbikowski @czbi.org

The first official confirmation that Noem herself made the decision not to turn the planes [to El Salvador] around. A couple hundred men were tortured as a result — and soon after, the Supreme Court confirmed that the Trump admin’s Alien Enemies Act process was a total violation of due process.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

I really wish we'd stop calling them climate "skeptics" or "vaccine skeptics." If you jump off a cliff we don't call you a "gravity skeptic."
Kate Marvel @drkatemarvel.bsky.social

To recap:
• Universal healthcare would save 68,000 lives and $450B annually
• Every $1 spent on SNAP results in $1.80 boost to local economies and small businesses
• The child tax credit decreased child poverty to a historic low of 5.2%, abolishing it increased it by 45%
Qasim Rashid, Esq.

Spending a week and a half in Paris and Madrid really drives home the point that the (American-ish) concept of a "one-seat ride" is overrated, and frequent headways at nearly all hours of the day is the true gold standard.
Second Ave. Sagas

Musk built a 2 million units/year automotive business, and then leveraged it all into all-in bets on the fourth-ranked chatbot and a robot that will never work... when the AI bubble pops he'll be in the weakest position, without a source of cashflow to fall back on, and then the unwind will begin
e.w. niedermeyer


robbieray.bsky.social

Those teevee news stories about holiday travel give the false impression that EVERYONE is traveling. Instead, how about:
* An immigrant/refugee family's 1st Thanksgiving in the US
* A profile on folks who work on the holidays
* What does a pro chef serve on Thanksgiving?
There are other stories...
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social

Trumpism is a sort of inchoate cloud of antisocial resentments that tracks with SUV bloat & gun sales; incoherent as ideology, impracticable as policy, but "simple" in a way that white jingos who harbor these resentments toward "woke" can understand
Amateur Expert Opinions

You have to keep giving money [to AI] to avoid collapse and if there’s collapse you have to give more money. It’s called the free market.
Philip Bump

Google at its peak was basically the best information retrieval system in human history and they and every competitor decided going from there to “you didn’t want answers you wanted half-assed auto-complete 80%-wrong hallucinations” in a few years was the right idea
Dave Levitan

"My mentor always tells me, 'Kim, dogs don’t bark at parked cars." They’re coming after critical race theory, 1619, intersectionality because these ideas mobilized people. They gave them the language to actually articulate what they were seeing with their own eyes," says Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Perry Bacon

Sometimes I think it’s going to be the librarians who will save us all:


It’s “Mrs. Powers” during my day job

Billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, pardoned by Donald Trump, has been accused of facilitating millions of dollars’ worth of payments to Hamas in the wake of its attack on Israel on October 7 2023. Zhao also financed the Trump family's entrance into the cryptocurrency market.
Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social

Uber and Lyft only added more cars to our streets
DoorDash and Ubereats added even more
Waymo will just do the same while human labor continues to fight for the the dwindling scraps of money
“When the system starts to crack, we’ll have to be ready to give it all back”
Moth @walkingminnesota.com

I did this for apartments a few years back:


Dan Bertolet

"Please wear a mask to protect yourself and your fellow humans" = tyranny
"Wear a suit when you fly" = freedom, baby!
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

When Rand Paul starts sounding like the adult in the room on more than one issue you know how cocked up this country is.
quick13

It’s amazing that you have a political party that’s pretty explicitly pro-political violence, meanwhile you still have beltway media continuously speaking about political violence on “both sides”
Erick Fernandez

you know what would *really* help men in America? getting a party that has become corrupted by crypto, gambling, and bro podcasters out of washington
ae @aelkus.bsky.social

We’re still DRAMATICALLY understating how completely batshit-level unhinged this is. Seriously. Imagine this happening in any other presidency. You can’t, because it’s completely inconceivable that it could happen, or that it would be allowed:


Brent Toderian

"Kennedy is a 'liar' and a 'terrible human being,' Paul Offit told me. 'If he has data showing he’s right, then fucking publish it. He can’t, because he doesn’t have those data.'"
Scott Stossel

Calling for the arrest and prosecution of members of the military who refuse to comply with illegal orders is the reddest of red flags.
KD @kdnerak33.bsky.social

The Trump regime is seeking to join a lawsuit by the cruise ship industry challenging Hawaiʻi’s new green fee, a 14% tax on tourists aimed at mitigating climate and environmental impacts.
David Ho

The fascist right doesn’t believe that American Jews belong in America. They want us to live in our own ethno-state — not here. People like Zohran believe America is a multiracial democracy in which everyone should belong. It’s insane the latter is treated as antisemitism.
Max Berger

we told you with extreme specificity what would happen if you did brexit and you did not believe us and did it anyway and then it all came true and now youre going to elect nigel farage?? same guy who made the whole country poor once already? sorry but you're just a good punchline right now
mel! @mel.bzky.team

we talk too much about the male loneliness crisis and not enough about the male suckerfication crisis
Max Read

A middle class guy with $5k in guns is essentially buying a luxury-priced feeling of safety.
Bog Mummy

I really need to practice saying “what a weird, rude thing to say” to the people who say weird, rude things to me
Anne Thériault

these people basically just take luxury government jets and go to fancy events like make a wish kids while their minions flashbang your elderly neighbors:


rich traditions @helldude.bsky.social

Major sources of hate speech are located outside the US. Well yeah, we have this conversation every few months. And every few months people reject the bright shiny evidence that easiest way to ruin America is to feed the hate and bigotry that already exists here.
Mikki Kendall @karnythia.bsky.social

My son has got me going on this fan theory that all the Hugh Jackman roles set in the 1800s could be escaped clones of his The Prestige character. So PT Barnum, Javert, Van Helsing and one of them that went a little wrong and got a mutant X Gene and became Wolverine, all part of the Prestige extended universe
Christina Holland @mortalwombat.info

Airstrikes don’t “test” a ceasefire. They break a ceasefire. Language isn’t that hard, media. Neither is professionalism and bravery.
Brent Toderian

DOGE did not fail in any way to accomplish its goals. Its goals were never efficiency or saving money. Its goals were to destroy as much of government as possible forever, and to steal data for the Space Nazi. DOGE is fading away like bank robbery gangs fade away after the robberies are done.
En Buen Ora

"Domestic cats finally crossed the Alps with the Roman conquest of Gaul." Huh. I never really thought about the connections between animal populations and military campaigns before.
Foghorn Leghorn @foghorn453.bsky.social

35 year-old Monstera in my care:


prairieczar

no one has even bothered trying to convince us there’s a threat from Venezuela. no weapons of mass destruction. nothing. just a war of choice because why not.
Joshua Erlich

Countries with DEI and abortion are human rights violators, says country where armed and masked government forces are invading neighborhoods.
Don Moynihan

27,000 KILLED IN SUDAN’S DARFUR IN 3 DAYS – Darfur governor Minni Arkou Minnawi says 27,000 people were killed in just three days after the RSF captured El-Fasher late last month — a massive jump from earlier estimates of about 2,500 deaths.
Drop Site @dropsitenews.com

“Medicare spends about $80 billion more annually for Medicare Advantage enrollees than it would if they were enrolled in traditional Medicare…” In other words, your taxes being looted by insurance  companies- viz. United Healthcare and other greed-mongers.
Froward Fountain aka Plain Kate @frowardfountain.bsky.social

Car-dependent suburban sprawl is the most publicly expensive, publicly subsidized, and publicly consequential form of human habitation in human history:


Brent Toderian

Humans will NEVER colonize another planet. Never. If we can’t even agree to do the minimum to keep Earth habitable, there’s no way in hell we’ll cooperate to make another planet habitable.
David Ho

The thing with car culture is that you create a social model where every human being is, by default, disabled and cannot meet their daily needs without a mobility device. People have a relationship to their car more akin to a wheelchair than to a train. That's a problem.
Alice In Wunderland

Bitcoin gave up all its gains for the year, and cryptocurrencies as a whole lost $1 TRILLION in value recently
Gabe KP @emg8.bsky.social

It’s fun to think about the surgeon who will botch your surgery 20 years from now and what he’s doing at this moment. He just ran all his homework through ChatGPT. He just read that article about vaccines and autism at the CDC website. He just watched an Instagram video about the moon landing hoax.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

With every passing day, America needs a bigger third reconstruction.
Anthony Michael Kreis

Thinking a lot lately about the simple fact that college allows people to spend about 15 weeks immersed in a disciplinary conversation with an expert in that field. And what a special thing that is.
Jacqueline Antonovich

Teapot Dome was child’s play
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

It gets lost in the shuffle, but the Speaker of the House is someone who, by all rights, should’ve had his career ended a decade ago by a Shreveport TV news investigative team.
Kevin M. Kruse


Jacqs @fooyoo2.bsky.social

Wow, an article published by NPR in August 2024 accused Harris of lying about: Trump wanting to jail his enemies, Trump enacting Project 2025, Trump cutting healthcare and social welfare programs, Trump cutting taxes for rich, Trump raising taxes for working families with tariffs ...
David Rothschild @davmicrot.bsky.social

Friendly reminder; anyone not treating climate collapse as an immediate threat of unimaginable scale and violence should be ignored, fired and/or voted out. The creeps and duds who occupy our government, corp news media and boardrooms need to go FAST.
Adam McKay @ghostpanther.bsky.social

Insane but true fact: making US roads as safe as Canadian, Australian, or European roads would save more lives than eliminating murder from the US.
Collin Pearsall @cpearsall242.bsky.social

You ever just sit down and realize that the rise of 21st century fascism is capital's answer to climate change?
Dave Vetter

DOJ is now recruiting for immigration judges by calling them “deportation judges.” That’s seems really bad.
John Pfaff

Bought and sold:


Gillian Branstetter

On this day in 1927, the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi’s power to force a nine-year-old Chinese American girl to attend a "colored school" outside the district in which she lived.
Equal Justice Initiative

It takes 225 million years or so for the Solar System to make one orbit around the galaxy. Sharks evolved long enough ago that they’ve done it twice.
Andy Rivkin

It's always hard to pick a worst day politically, but today the president called for the death of members of the opposition party, and the administration decided that people were being too hard on the swastika
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

This is nuts. Yesterday in the Comey hearing, prosecutors *repeatedly* confirmed that the full grand jury never saw or voted on the two-count indictment. Now they’re claiming the grand jury *did* vote on it.
Anna Bower

to keep functioning, a society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

ICE’s Detention Center outside Chicago was sued on October 30 for allegedly abusing detainees. One day later, a "system crash" lost all video footage that could have shown how detainees were being treated.
The New Republic

The federal government is faking evidence in major criminal cases and then lying when caught. In addition to that they are destroying evidence of their crimes against humanity and the population.
Karl (sad trombone noise enthusiast) @brainnotonyet.bsky.social

A customer just returned this because her airline said it could be a weapon and so not allowed in carry on:


Present & Correct

I don’t ever want to hear any Republican anywhere ever complain about someone instigating political violence against them ever again. They are a political violence party. They just object to splashback onto themselves of the environment of political violence they’ve created.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

not sure I even need to say this, but Trump threatening the lives of Ds in Congress is in itself an impeachable offense for which he should be removed.
Noah Berlatsky

it just seems plainly clear to me that if you serve the country in any capacity, civil or military, and you are not a conservative white man, the Trump administration wants to make the workplace as hostile an environment as possible so you remove yourself
Adam Serwer

They lied about it. All of it. A thug cop shot an unarmed woman five times without justification, boasted about it to his colleagues, and then this administration tried cover it all up by arresting her and charging her with felonies.
Radley Balko

Things used in everyday life are the real archaeological treasures! These sewing needles were made from animal bone some 15,000 years ago. Some designs simply don't need to be improved, because form and functions were perfectly matched from the start. Form follows function!


Nina Willburger @drnwillburger.bsky.social

The more cornered he feels, the more dangerous he will become. That does NOT mean he should not be cornered. It just means we should be prepared.
Leah McElrath

This will surely surprise most Americans today, but historians have recently discovered that before Donald Trump, it was actually incredibly rare for a president to demand the public execution of this political opponents and press critics.
Kevin M. Kruse

Me, leaning against the time machine; So - richest man ever, people keep piling money on him no matter how badly he fails BUT ALSO he's a laughing stock everywhere, everyone can see he's miserable; he has no love in his life, not even his kids
Aesop: slow DOWN lady, my stylus can only go so fast
@scriblit.bsky.social

Can’t believe the whole country has to suffer through the return of Dickensian childhood diseases because the worst, most ignorant attention-demanders decided other people’s expertise makes them feel bad
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

Imagine if tech companies had made a wild capex bet on chasing clean energy, instead of inventing a plagiarism machine powered by **checks notes** extending the life of coal plants
Tim Dickinson

the gulf between the swift brutality with which places like harvard treated students protesting genocide and the endless, endless latitude those same institutions have given people like larry summers tells you everything you need to know
Jack Mirkinson

St. Paul, MN. ICE abducted someone here yesterday:


geri katz

Almost half the Waymos on California streets are driving around empty. They're either waiting for the next customer or en route for a pickup. If robotaxis scale, anything close to that level of deadheading would create crushing gridlock.
David Zipper

In Minnesota police set up a sting operation to catch child sex traffickers. They caught 16 men. No immigrants. No trans people. All US Citizen Men. One was an ICE fascist who said, "I'm ICE boys" when arrested, perhaps expecting to get special attention. He was arrested anyway. So much winning.
Qasim Rashid, Esq.

one thing about [all the people persecuted for not being reverent enough about Charlie Kirk's killing] is that in the wake of all of this, kirk is basically forgotten. he was barely cold in the ground before his allies — before his *wife* — started scheming over what they could take for themselves. a real life parable.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Stained glass window made from sliced agate at the famous Grossmünster Church in Zurich:


Architecture

UNREAL. Former White House aide Sarah Hurwitz warned that Holocaust education was “confusing” young people into sympathizing with “weak, skinny Palestinians” instead of “powerful Israelis.” And she said this on camera and in public!
Dean Obeidallah

Chicago has had one 9/11 worth of people disappeared since the attacks began in September. Los Angeles has had two 9/11s since June.
dan sinker

Meanwhile the President just yesterday said an assassinated journalist deserved it and celebrated his killer
Grudgie the Whale

Christian Nationalist, Doug Wilson, confirms that children who don’t accept and follow their parent’s religious beliefs should be turned over to the State for capital punishment (be put to death). This fanaticism is real:
Philosopher Jersey Flight

Pete Hegseth’s church is part of Wilson’s sect, and Hegseth has praised Wilson.
Radley Balko

One of the ways social media messes with our psychology is that we all think everyone is seeing the same thing — despite the exact opposite being the case. Not sure our brains can really deal with it.
David Evans

So this happened in Oslo yesterday. Four articulated buses got stuck in a roundabout:


Anders @annesh.no

Nothing is a better demonstration of the anti-scientific nature of banning trans women from sports than the fact that the IOC's OWN STUDY found no evidence trans women have any advantage over cis women in sports, but they're planning on going ahead with banning us anyways
Doc Vivi Leandra

I'd like to ask Trump if he believes incriminating evidence about him will come out if the Epstein files are released. But I can't, he doesn't take questions from citizens. So I rely on professional journalists to get the answers for me. Trump just told me (and you) to be quiet & don't ask questions
brotherjack.bsky.social

So much in the world would be so different if men could just be normal about women.
lastpositivist.bsky.social

Your daily reminder that the fossil fuel industry is propped up by billions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies and a multimillion dollar campaign to spread climate disinformation.
Center for Climate Integrity

With the world heating up [and more pedestrians being killed], why are more SUVs being sold? “It’s the industry that has driven the demand through huge marketing & advertising campaigns in recent years. SUVs offered the industry a simple way of charging more for a vehicle that does the same thing.”
Brent Toderian

no it isn’t!!! fuck you!!!


niki grayson

One thing that’s so frustrating living in a city center is the pervasive belief among suburbanites that your neighborhood is nothing more than a consumer experience for them and that the city should bend over backwards to ensure they can speed as fast as possible on their way to buy treats in it.
Urban Land Rent

Urbanism — the notion that cities are good, that we should build housing in the dense walkable neighborhoods where people want to live, and that urban governance should prioritize city residents’ quality of life over suburban drivers’ convenience — remains a radical political program in America.
Max Dubler

Just heard re: some ICE agents who raided a Chicago taqueria, then went back to the same taqueria for lunch the following week and got confused when the owner kicked them out, and I realized "jesus these doofuses really do believe we're all living in a video game where the NPCs have no memory"
@bitterkarella.bsky.social

The AI bubble may be about to bust. Peter Thiel has sold all of his Nvidia stock. We all need to say this very clearly: NO BAILOUTS FOR THEFT-TECH! Expropriate their asses instead. They stole from all of us and fully plan to burn the planet. They owe us - not the other way around.
Naomi Klein

holy shit: “Among the 2,000 UK adults surveyed, 85% were unaware that Britain forcibly transported more than 3 million Africans to the Caribbean, 89% did not know that Britain enslaved people in the Caribbean for more than 300 years”
Joanne Hammond

An interesting thing about autonomous vehicles is that the empty repositioning trips between passenger journeys mean they decrease the average number of people moved per vehicle trip, which is already barely above 1. Traffic that doesn't even transport. Not good!
Thomas Leeper

"But I saw a cyclist run a stop sign once!"


Pedaling Professor

Flying cars would produce more accident deaths than AI is producing now through suicide. SF depictions of flying cars never get into the gritty details of transport and never to my knowledge depict crashes.
@alonlevy.bsky.social

It’s pretty simple. When you do a huge armed midnight raid on an apartment building rounding up and terrorizing children and later find out there were no criminals there everyone involved resigns in shame and we have loud showy Congressional hearings.
Grudgie the Whale

Sexual harassment is a productivity tax on women in STEM
Needhi Bhalla

guarantee you the ICE goons themselves have a higher percentage of criminals among them than the people they're ripping from their homes
horse massacre @torqpenderloin.bsky.social

It’s kinda wild the President is openly corrupt, Nazi sympathizing, and very likely a pedophile — and most Republicans in Congress are still willing to ignore the Constitution whenever he asks.
Max Berger

Hard, fast rule from a veteran police reporter: Excepting anyone engaged in infiltrating a criminal conspiracy in an undercover capacity, any law officer who hides his identity from the public is a shitheel is doing vile shit and is, in fact, actively destroying the credibility of law enforcement.
David Simon @audacityofdespair.bsky.social

four aces bar sign, mullan road, superior, montana, 1987:


old roadside pics

You can think it’s good that Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Green are stirring up shit within the GOP caucus without thinking their politics in general is good. It’s not hard at all in fact?
Kevin M. Kruse

I don't think the president should accept gold bars from foreign governments
Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social

The Founders were so concerned about bribery that the Constitution forbids it three separate times. Two emoluments clauses ban officials—unambiguously including the president—from accepting things of value, plus bribery is the only named impeachable offense besides treason. Unprecedentedly corrupt.
Nicholas Grossman

People see Jesus Christ in slices of toast, tea stains, patterns in carpet and damp stains on walls. We are not psychologically prepared to show the required caution in the face of computer software that can mimic human language. People are already surrendering reason to the Jesus in the toast.
Oisín McGann

I saw someone describe Twitter Nazism as "secular Satanism," and that's kind of the vibe I get from a bunch of the modern far-right.
spherical-cow.bsky.social

"We are not our ancestors" is not gonna yet us through this moment. You better wish you were your ancestors who survived the middle passage, chattel slavery, who consistently revolted, who made ways as maroons. We definitely need to connect with Black legacies of survival for now.
Chantal James @chantalalive.blacksky.app

Exactly, very hard agree. Whenever I see the smug "this isn't our grandparents movement" Takes it's like... my grandfather's generation did *decolonisation*. I bloody wish we were that level ambitious and accomplished!
lastpositivist.bsky.social

We might have FINALLY met our match…


World Bollard Association™️

Watching disabled people around the world mourn Alice Wong is a reminder of the good aspect of the internet. 30 years ago, few people outside of San Francisco would ever have known Alice existed. I never would have met her. The internet connected us all. Let’s honor Alice’s memory by using that power and community.
Steven W. Thrasher @thrasherxy.bsky.social

Alice is the gold standard of what Twitter was when it was great - how you could just find these brilliant, remarkable people with the kind of voices that rarely get platformed or taken seriously, and hear about their lives in their own words without intruding on them or demanding emotional labor
Claire Willett

A lot of education discourse is at root an inability to decide whether the purpose of our education system is to 1) teach material and measure learning 2) reward students who work hard 3) separate the smart kids (destined for smart guy jobs) from the dumb kids (destined to serve the smart guys)
mtsw

The economic sense is so extremely in favour of renewables now, Pakistan is even paying Qatar penalties to rather NOT deliver the LNG that Pakistan already placed orders for, because their Solar PV and batteries make much more sense. It saves them money to cancel their gas imports and pay!
Climate News

Remember a simpler time, when kids knew it was time to come home when the street lights came on, everyone you passed said "hello," and the wealthiest people in the world preyed on children?
I Love Pets Four Hundred Twenty

Teenagers are old enough to have sex with middle aged men. They are not old enough to be trans. by Megyn Kelly
NY Times Pitchbot


Rob Mellow

State Electricity Use Per Capita

From Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Atmos/Energy Program:

Red states appear to intentionally waste electricity by not making efforts to reduce electricity use through better insulation, appliance standards, etc.

The nine states with the lowest per-capita electricity use are all blue.


[Click to enlarge.]

The 12 states with the highest per-capita electricity use are red.

The ratio of per-capita electricity use of the bottom-12 red states to the top-9 blue states is 2.60:1. In other words, these 12 red states use 2.6x the electricity per person as the 9 blue states.

Similarly, the per-capita electricity use of Texas is 2.67x that of California.

Those cutoff numbers Jacobson uses are where the first red/blue breaks are located. 

The 10th lowest per-capita state is Alaska, a red state. There are four more blue states before another red state is listed (Utah). 

The 13th highest per-capita state is Virginia, a blue state. Two more red states are listed before another blue state comes up on the high end: New Mexico. Then two more red states, and by that point, the list is at about the average usage. 

Wyoming and North Dakota are particular outliers with extremely high usage compared to all the other states, even the other red states. I don't know which states' residents are most likely to use electricity for heat, though I know the Northeast is most likely to use oil and the Midwest to use natural gas, while of course California and the Pacific Northwest states have less need for heat or air conditioning, on average, than most states. 

North Dakota, I would think, probably follows the natural gas (or maybe LP gas in rural areas) pattern and does not generally use electricity for heat. I don't know anything about Wyoming's heat sources. Louisiana, I imagine, uses a lot of air conditioning in badly insulated buildings, compared to, say, Florida or Arizona, which are both closer to average usage despite being very hot places.

 

At Least It Was Short

Sometimes I think I'm not discriminating enough in my reading, especially of fiction. I tend to like most things I read. I can count on one hand — or maybe two — the number of books I've read that I despised, or had to stop reading because I disliked them so intensely. 

Well, it just happened again, and in some ways it makes me feel better. I'm not a patsy for a pretty face, or an award-winner!

This time it was This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I picked it up because the edition I saw was beautiful, and it was the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for best novella. 

I did finish the story this time, because I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something in how it would develop. Nope.

I have great patience for science fiction that throws you into the deep end of incomprehensibility. I've been reading the genre since I was 10. Generally, I catch on to the world the author is building at some point and that's all it takes. 

But that never managed to happen for me with this story. Sometimes there were glimpses of it beginning to make sense, but I didn't care enough about the world or universe they were describing to try to figure it out. The writers were so wrapped up in their precious inter-textual cleverness and the epistolary form of the story that there was, as Gertrude Stein said, no there there. 

I'm not a Goodreads member, but I do check it once in a while. This book had the most divergent reviews I think I've ever seen. It has many five-star reviews, but there are also a substantial number of one-star reviews, often with dozens and dozens of comments in agreement. 

The fact that this story won those three awards makes me doubt the judgment of the people who award them.