BlueSky January 2025, Part 1

Once again, I'm breaking the BlueSky round-up into two pieces, since it's so long.

Today includes January 1–15, and tomorrow will cover the rest of the month. The posts are listed in reverse chronological order, so the first one here is from January 15, and the last just after December 31.

This was just before Trump's inauguration, but it includes the anniversary date of January 6, and the first hearings for Trump's cabinet nominees. The time period began with two white terrorist acts on New Years, in New Orleans and Las Vegas. New York City started decongestion pricing in Midtown, a first in North America. And then there were the raging fires in greater Los Angeles.

As usual, I have moved some of the less timely images up or down in the order for better visual balance. Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

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Pete Hegseth, generously, is barely employable and there are sitting senators going "I mean hey, who doesn't show up to work drunk and get divorced for cheating on their wife, am I right fellas"
Ian Boudreau

On this day in 1991, the Supreme Court held that formerly segregated schools could be released from prior integration orders, despite evidence schools were resegregating.
Equal Justice Initiative @eji.org

I am working in a conference room where the drapes are controlled by a special app, instead of by little chains that I, an older guy, would know how to use. Is the real purpose of the app-for-everything cult just to make older people more dependent on young people?
Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social

A spectacular googly-eyed octopus does battle with a lobster in this 2,000 year-old Roman mosaic from Pompeii. Some fantastic fishy onlookers too! House of the Geometric Mosaics. On display Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. Photo by me:


Alison Fisk

Elon Musk is what happens when you create a society that believes technology can achieve anything and collective action can achieve nothing
e.w. niedermeyer

Misinformation isn't random — it's strategic. In the first cross-national comparative study, we examine 32M tweets from politicians. We find that misinformation is not a general condition: it is driven by populist radical right parties.
Petter Törnberg

"Why are electricity prices so high if renewables are so cheap?" I have been asked. The main reason: expensive fossil gas still sets the price 63% of the time in wholesale electricity markets in the EU27 and more than 90% in some countries.
Jan Rosenow

gary's ice cream, n. main street, jacksonville, florida, 1979:


old roadside pics @roadside.xor.blue

i am watching clips from the hegseth hearings and it is a goddamn insult to this country that this chucklefuck was even nominated
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Trump is performing affirmative action for sex pests, and the media as a whole is failing to explain it in those terms.
Queerhawk @alwaysadorecats.bsky.social

When Trump orders Hegseth to deploy active duty troops to U.S. cities, he will comply.
When Trump orders him to authorize shooting protestors, Hegseth will comply.
When Trump orders Hegseth to jump, he will dutifully say “how high?”
Bradley P. Moss @bradmossesq.bsky.social

Several Republicans I respect — some of whom have lectured me, at length, about the national security failings of the Democratic Party — are falling in line behind Pete Hegseth, who is so clearly unqualified to be the Secretary that it makes it very hard to ever take these people seriously again.
Andrew Exum

Stupefying that — in a society beset by growing weather chaos and systematic under-preparation for its impacts — Very Serious People still think the vital question is how much of a disaster we can *directly* attribute to global heating, and whether the science behind those estimates is bulletproof.
Alex Steffen

The fact that any decent-sized city has a GIS shapefile for its streets but only a few have one for their sidewalks is...instructive.
Warren Wells, AICP

It’s incredible how people don’t seem to realize that having cheap affordable housing and having housing meant to appreciate far faster than inflation to build generational wealth are completely contradictory goals.
cornb93.bsky.social

Pete Hegseth is the dumber version of Brett Kavanaugh.
Mrs. Betty Bowers

Conservatives believe free speech is when they can say what they want and when you can say what they want.
Adam Serwer

If the GOP really is good for the economy, why is Missouri the way it is? We have had a GOP supermajority for 22 years. Are we still waiting it for it to trickle down or what?
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

Imagine having access to detailed 'insider-information' about what the world is most likely to look like in 5, 10 or 50 years. Listen to people who work on climate, and don't trust leaders who don't:


Dr Charlie Gardner

Not many things move me to violence, but a coach forcing my daughter to strip so she could play softball would probably be on that list
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

It should be illegal to pop up one of those notifications that ask "WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO DOWNLOAD THE APP" vs "no, I like the dang old website" when you are already on the dang old website
scoops @scoopsstp.bsky.social

So disgusted I can barely read the Jack Smith report. Whiteness in America means an adjudicated rapist ,felon, and insurrectionist is a better president than a qualified black woman who has served her country as VP and attorney General of California.
Anthea Butler

man just fuck everyone involved [in the Jack Smith report]
fuck the senate for not barring him from office the second he did this
fuck garland for not getting this done sooner
fuck the supreme court for delaying and sabotaging
and fuck everyone who voted for him again
this should have been the end of him
Micah @rincewind.run

Mushrooms turn dead wood into food and medicine which is better than anything any tech start up has ever done
lukelukeluke

On the one hand, pushing Hegseth's nomination first may beat down Senators and lead them to capitulate on RFK and Tulsi, too. On the other hand, it will make it crystal clear that Senate Republicans are willing to put the US at grave risk to avoid Trump yelling at them.
emptywheel

White DEI starting Jan 20th is going to screw this country for a couple of generations.
Anthea Butler

Nothing shows the fundamental dishonesty of the “anti-DEI” folks like Hegseth getting hearings to run the nation’s largest bureaucracy. He’s an unqualified drunken defender of war criminals, credibly accused of sexual assault and reported for extremism by his military peers. He is merit’s inverse.
Victor Ray

Just 2% of normal rain so far this winter in Los Angeles. Factoring in best available seasonal weather and climate models — L.A. can expect 4-7" of rain before summer, but likely none until late Feb or March. 2025 will be one of the driest years in SoCal history:


Eric Holthaus

Which is more important — that AI summary of your search results (which you don't read and can't turn off) or a habitable planet?
Elizabeth Kolbert

Debating whether or not Republicans *really* want to abolish multiracial, pluralistic democracy is futile. The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is the state level: Wherever they are in charge, Republicans are openly embracing staunchly authoritarian measures intended to erect one-party rule.
Thomas Zimmer

Martin Luther King wasn’t asking people to do community service. He was asking folks to liberate oppressed peoples.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Our Minnesota winters are sublime. I mean "sublime" in the literal sense or the sense adopted by the Romantic poets: awe inspiring. Not "pretty," not "pleasant." But making one feel small and vulnerable in the face of a far more powerful, vast nature. Respect it, or get swallowed up.
Dr. John Broich @itsjohn.bsky.social

NYT on vaccines: vaccines are safe, here’s the scientific proof. Here’s the studies. Here’s a scientist telling you why antivaxxers are cynical and dangerous.
NYT on trans people: With the aid of an ouija board, we contacted the ghost of George Lincoln Rockwell for a column on social contagion.
Maureen Jice @jane.meangirls.online

I do not want my government to be ‘efficient’ in the way that for profit corporations are ‘efficient.’ I want my government to be -effective- and -equitable-.
Chris Dwan @somershade.bsky.social

Trump is aroused by his own claims that there is death everywhere in Los Angeles. The death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria was almost 3,000. He threw paper towels.
emptywheel

my favorite game to play when determining the root cause of any global or political strife is “ronald reagan or 9/11?”
onion person @junlper.beer

A pill bug on a hammock. Because a person’s a person, no matter how small:


Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

We do not, in actuality, need more masculine energy.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

I’m not sure we need earnest explanations of why ASL interpreters are necessary so much as we need a resounding “fuck you, you socially unacceptable little piece of shit” to anyone questioning or mocking them
Louisa @louisathelast.bsky.social

This year, we are going to need to keep the faith that better cities are possible and vote for candidates that have the vision for housing, transport, water, environment and communities - while being pragmatic enough to realise that $$$ and government policies don’t make progress easy.
Rebecca Matthews

“The combined area burned by this week’s fires is larger than each of the city limits of San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston or Miami.”
George Conway

Probably just a weird coincidence that Christopher Rufo is working down the target list of groups that Germans sent to the camps
Ned Resnikoff

It’s simple: in congested urban areas, the supply of free roads can’t keep up with demand to drive. Pricing allows faster movement for people who need to drive (e.g., deliveries), while investing money into better transit for people who don’t. Pricing isn’t punishment, it’s making the roads work.
Oh The Urbanity!

California, for all people's silly and terrible takes on the state (which for my money has some of the BEST people in this nation)...is a major part of the US economy, from shipping to food. As they suffer, we will not be immune to the effects.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social

Wolves' Lairs/Vlcie diery (Paľo Bielik, Czechoslovakia, 1948). Generally regarded as the first important post-WWII Slovak film, this is an excellent example of an immensely popular eastern European genre, the partisan film, in which a motley, often ill-equipped group runs rings around the Wehrmacht.


Michael Brooke @marbleicehook.bsky.social

It's journalistic malpractice to focus solely on Hegseth's drinking and sexual abuse and completely ignore how he demonizes his ideological opponents as existential threats to the nation's identity and security. Such views should disqualify him from becoming SecDef.
msix8.bsky.social

These fires are not a natural disaster, they are a crime
Big Oil knew,
Big Oil chose,
Big Oil threw everything at discrediting us and stopping us from doing anything about it
They must be stopped, and they must be brought to justice
Dr Charlie Gardner

Whoever named Piccadilly Circus should have been allowed to name a shitload of other things
System of a Clown @themadking.bsky.social

so self-checkouts are expensive, they have steadily increasing subscription and maintenance costs, loss has gone up, they're easy to put card skimmers on so thieves can steal from your customers (oh that sounds like a lawsuit!), and 30% of Canadians (including me) refuse to use them at all. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
C. L. Polk

My latest cartoon for New Scientist:


Tom Gauld

Just for folks who don’t know, Steve Bannon has, for years, been enthusiastically insisting that everyone read a book that says that Indian immigrants are animals that eat literal human shit, so they need to be rounded up in cages. Lest you think he’s somehow not racist. He just hates Musk also.
Anil Dash

Never forget, the electric car is here to save the car industry, not cities or the planet.
Brent Toderian

When it comes to climate change, the only thing Republicans know how to do is change the subject.
meta @metatheory.bsky.social

The parallels to today [with Susan Faludi's book Backlash] are obvious. Nonstop moral panics about unreasonable activists "canceling" celebrities, taking over workplaces and invading bathrooms. Endless scolding of protestors about tactics and civility. Every problem somehow cast as the fault of the people trying to solve it. In a nutshell, modest progress on gender equality led to a 'backlash decade' in which every American institution decided that activists were too aggressive, that the women's movement had gone too far and that feminists were the reason women still lagged behind.
Michael Hobbes

The way I’m seeing so-called United States politicians lash out at and criticize California and Californians during this time of crisis is cruel and telling. These people don’t sound like they are part of the same country. You don’t sneer at, celebrate, point fingers when the crisis is HAPPENING.
Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

Climate breakdown and the destruction of nature are not information deficit problems:


Dr Charlie Gardner

I'm a believer in smart policy, but all the finger-pointing in the LA firestorm about hydrant flows and LAFD budgets seems like arguing about the adequacy of Hiroshima's 1945 building code standards. It's a way to evade the big questions.
Mark Paul

Any continued climate denial by politicians or pundits or corporations or self-serving billionaires is no longer just embarrassing, ignorant, or corrupt. It's now increasingly criminal.
Peter Gleick

If you boil the 2025 GOP down to its basest elements, it’s little more than “my mom says you have to play with me or I’ll kill you” + bigotry.
@slothropsmap.bsky.social

The looters I want to talk about are the ones who stole our safe and stable climate from us. Millennia of planetary harm for individuals' profit. They set the fires.
Rebecca Solnit

how is letting yourself get bullied by Trump masculine or aggressive lol
Adam Serwer

Hard to overstate just how much of the tech industry’s horrifically dystopian present grew right out of its transparently misogynistic past
Kat Tenbarge

Calling the fire department woke in the middle of a massive wildfire is I guess the logical endpoint of gamergate
Ian Boudreau

Data centers planned for companies including Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft  could consume as much electricity as every home in Minnesota.
Minnesota Star Tribune

A rare yellow cardinal (image credit Taka Yanagimoto; NPR web site):


kinesinmotors.bsky.social

Another reason to oppose it: researchers have found that where sports gambling is legalized, intimate partner violence incidents has increased by around 9%
Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social

So tired of British architecture and always being cold. Canadians build buildings for the 8 months of the year that it's cold out. Brits build buildings for the 6 weeks of the year that it's warm out.
ændra. @aendra.com

so there's been a lot written over the years about how corporate diversity programs are insincere virtue signaling that they don't really believe, and that's true. but it's becoming clear very quickly that those same companies doing vice signaling to please the new king is much, much worse
Micah @rincewind.run

The stock prices of the two largest private prison companies have more than doubled since T’s election. That should tell us all we need to know about how his admin plans to normalize police violence, surveillance, arrests, and detention centers. Both companies contract with ICE.
mollypeonies

NEW: 2024 has just been confirmed as the warmest year on record, and the first to breach the 1.5C threshold. We used a ridgeline (Joy Division inspired) chart to visualise daily temperature anomalies since 1940. 2024 clearly stands out with 100% of its days above 1.3C and 75% above 1.5C:


Erwan Rivault

there’s an academic debate about whether Trump is a fascist, and a big sticking point was that he didn’t espouse any grand imperial ambitions. very kind of him to fully resolve that tension by talking about annexing half the western hemisphere.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

No, the world has not breached the 1.5C global warming target. It’s a climate target - which means it’s an average that must be sustained over at least a decade. We currently sit at 1.2 C. Which is already very bad. The science is clear: every bit of warming matters, every action matters.
Katharine Hayhoe

IMPORTANT: Study finds electrifying SUVs/pick-ups could actually INCREASE emissions by using up scarce battery material that could otherwise be used to electrify a lot MORE smaller cars (and e-bikes). Via @sciencedirect.bsky.social SUVs are too big.
Brent Toderian

The Greenland thing is pure lebensraum shit and must be treated as catastrophic and frankly Trump himself must be treated as catastrophic. Letting it reach joke status is how this situation happened.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

It's 2025 and your favorite publications are still putting the lie in the headline. Democracy dies in dumbassery, too.
Gil Durán

Relatively disaster-free cities (Minneapolis!) really have a moral responsibility to build more housing.
Getting Gophery

Earnestly using the phrase “virtue signaling” is a pretty grim insight into someone’s moral universe.
Matt Ford

If we could only catch the owners of Waffle House also stealing a $5.99 deodorant from Walgreens then the New York Times might cover this story:


alec karakatsanis @equalityalec.bsky.social

Newscasters always nod solemnly when disaster survivors say "Our house is just things, it isn't things that matter, it's people." And they should. That's true. Disasters teach us that. But if you try to apply that to your everyday politics, boy howdy will they try and run you out of town.
wesinjapan

It's hard to imagine a more brutal illustration of climate injustice and a failed society than indentured teenage slaves being used to protect the homes of wealthy Americans.
Dave Vetter

I honestly think we are experiencing the end of the internet as those of us born in the 20th c understand it. Smaller, siloed communities like discord servers and newsletters will persist, but the idea of the global public square is dead, as is “the information superhighway.” VCs killed it.
G. Willow Wilson @gwillow.me

Repeating myself from a couple of months back: if you thought an industry as male-dominated as big tech was filled with liberals - especially at the ownership and leadership level - you may have been overlooking something pretty obvious.
Snitty @clofsnitville.bsky.social

mainstream narrative:


Tom Flood

We should have some unprecedented events that are good for once
Just Kidding @internethippo.bsky.social

Elon Musk is an openly hostile foreign agent actively attacking democracy around the world using his massive wealth, his personal communication platform, the help of hostile autocratic foreign governments, and now his direct influence over the new extremist United States Govt he helped put in power.
Brent Toderian

I think the people who fight enormous fires should get more money than the people who harass homeless people but that's just me
Thor Benson

I love living under a divinely inspired constitutional system where Supreme Court justices wielding life-and-death power over a nation of 300 million routinely engage in ethical breaches that would get a clerk fired.
Victor Ray

as a practical matter it is reasonable to assume anything pushed by Elon Musk is a lie until proven otherwise.
Dean Baker

Consider that the climate safe haven you may be looking for is "true multi-racial democracy that gets money out of governance and promotes global solidarity and mutual learning and support."
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Whenever there is a tragedy, you can count on Musk to argue that the root of the problem is not enough white people are in charge
Judd Legum

Elon Musk: Why isn’t there enough water in California?
Grok (burning through an entire lake to generate an answer): Wokeness
illumi @illumi.meme

Trump's Canada discourse is so stupid i cant bring myself to even entertain the idea, but why the fuck would Canada want to lower its healthcare quality and expose itself to crazy gun laws in the US? How is any reporter even degrading themselves by covering this story not asking themselves that?
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

Perusing old photos; here’s what the Statue of Liberty’s face looks like from the inside:


Philip Bump

Elon Musk is almost done building a lithium refinery that will need up to 8 million gallons of water per day. And it's twenty miles outside Corpus Christi, which is so dry the local water company distributes shower timers at high school football games.
More Perfect Union

Los Angeles received just 0.16 inches of rain since May 2024, the second-driest period on record. Wildfires are now engulfing the city in January. But some politicians still claim the climate crisis is a "hoax" as they do the bidding of Big Oil. What planet are they living on?
Robert Reich

While Trump is trolling Canada about annexing it, Canadians are in Los Angeles tonight dropping water on the Palisades fire. He’s a disgrace.
Hoodlum @nothoodlum.bsky.social

Trump attacks Gov. Newsom as "newscum" while he tries to deal with a horrific natural disaster in his state
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com

Just as we all suspected, Trump comes out this morning and says something, stupid, insulting, inaccurate and unhelpful. Things are going to be pretty bad, pretty soon, and for a while.
Jason Karsh

The central objective of Trump’s foreign policy at this moment appears to be the forcible acquisition of territory at gunpoint.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

As climate change increases the risk of dry conditions and fire weather, fires across western NAm are bigger, more dangerous, and burning greater area. It’s the difference between accidentally dropping a match into a pile of green, wet wood versus dropping it into a stack of bone dry kindling:


Katharine Hayhoe

too many people who should know better want the orange man not to be so bad but the truth is that, in fact, the orange man is bad
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

If Trump intended to threaten military force against our allies in order to seize their land, shouldn't that have been an issue he raised in the campaign?
Dean Baker

The future is famously difficult to predict, but one thing I am 100% certain will happen is that governments will have to bail out homeowners whose homes become uninsurable due to global warming, at enormous cost to public coffers. Again, maybe this is obvious, but this is the kind of stuff we're talking about when we say that whatever the cost of stopping global warming would be, not stopping it will cost more.
draglikepull

conditions are so bad at a prison in rural Virginia that a group of men incarcerated there set themselves on fire. instead of addressing conditions, The Appeal found that administrators planned to charge the men thousands of dollars for medical treatment to deter more protest.
Hannah Riley

Holy cow. Just woke up to this view from mid-Wilshire looking downtown:


Lainna Fader

FTC chair Lina Khan didn’t threaten to nationalize SpaceX. But she said “hey AI startups, you aren’t allowed to lie about your products. That would be fraud. You can’t do fraud.” Marc Andreessen couldn’t fucking handle it.
Dave Karpf

Think of the time being wasted by diplomats and experts in Europe and Latin America, as they start planning how to counter American attacks on Panama or Greenland. Time that could be spent thinking about a unified response to Russia and China.
Anne Applebaum

Wikipedia becoming the sole bastion of factual information is kind of ironic actually.
The Alternate Historian


Chad Loder

Many are talking about Greenland, Panama, and Canada right now, which means we're not talking about Gabbard, Hegseth, and Kennedy.
Michelle Van Loon

Jimmy Carter, a visionary on ending fossil fuels, put solar panels on the White House. Big Oil-backed Ronald Reagan ousted Carter in 1980 and ripped them out. Tonight, as Carter lies in in state in the Capitol, a climate-fueled wildfire is destroying Reagan's former hometown of Pacific Palisades:


Will Bunch

Hope the LA Times is being sure to print the fire’s point of view too.
dan sinker

A lot of people who just wanted cheap eggs are suddenly excited about wars of conquest.
The Alternate Historian

Zuckerberg Wears $900,000 Watch to Announce End of Meta Fact Checks
Eric Roston

Fuck this shit:


Jacqs @fooyoo2.bsky.social

I spent most of my adult life watching schools say they can't expel professors for sexually assaulting and harassing students and colleagues only to see how quickly they react over social media posts against genocide
Wagatwe Wanjuki

Kinda wild watching "preventing right-wingers from lying is a violation of free speech" go from implicit to explicit.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

People keep asking me about positive things for climate and the environment under Trump and there isn’t any. As long as we keep electing sociopaths, things are going to suck.
David Ho


D. Earl Stephens

Breaking: Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Google and a convicted Corgi murderer, says that fact-checking is biased.
Henry Mance

Remaining optimistic is a cheat code to almost every area of life.
Dr. Julie Gurner

Let's check in and see how December temperatures in the U.S. and Canada have changed over the last 50 years:


Brian Brettschneider @climatologist49.bsky.social

Oh hey look they re-invented CliffsNotes except this one destroys the planet.
Erin Biba

i am very tired of grantmaking organizations that perpetually want to fund new programs and "bold new ideas" when there's stuff we know works and works well that may not be shiny and new but is useful and underfunded.
Dex Anderson

You cannot claim to be pro environment and then be against density. Being anti-density means you are pro sprawl, pro endless roads and commutes, pro development in the farm lands and forests outside of cities. Pro your kids having to move elsewhere so they can afford to buy a house.
Davina Duerr @davina425.bsky.social

I think it’s time to bring my most viral tweet over from the bad place:


Molly Kleinman @mollyak.bsky.social

Well at least she was realistic is not the epitaph I want. If "being realistic" is what has gotten us here, I propose we stop being realistic and instead assume that power can yield, economics can be transformed, self-governance can be pure, and people and planet can be put first.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

increasingly obvious that a lot of people want left-wing policy but without the social democratic tax based policy for broad based funding
Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social

i see this as downstream of an opposition to the idea of anything like an "obligation."
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Four years since the attempted coup. What can you say at this point? We live in an embarrassing country, surrounded by unthinkable material prosperity but angrier & dumber all the time, tearing ourselves apart for effectively no reason. It's just sad.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Photo of the week, if not the entire year:


Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

i think rage at congestion pricing is a good example of how no one believes that the world can be positive sum anymore. like, people pay a small fee to get access to a faster commute — saving them valuable time — and the money improves public transit, saving other people valuable time. it's win-win!
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

probably time to stop talking about jan 6 a "failed coup." one of the more successful operations of the century if we're keeping it a buck.
tyler walk with me @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social

cannot overstate the degree to which i am negatively polarized against nimbys. like, if you go to a public meeting to speak against lower cost housing i think the city should eminent domain your house and your house specifically
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Today is *not* a “peaceful transfer of power.” It’s the completion of a violent coup attempt that began this morning four years ago. Yes, Trump won the ’24 election; but he was only able to run because we failed to fully confront the fact of that violent coup attempt.
Jeff Sharlet

The congestion pricing debate right now has reminded me a lot of this Lewis Mumford quote: "The right to access every building in a city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city."
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

[January 6] Everyone knew. Everyone. Knew. Even Fox News immediately distanced themselves from him. Trump phoned into Fox News *and they hung up on him*. Twitter and Facebook who had spent years doing ToS gymnastics to persuade themselves his posts didn't deserve to be taken down, took his accounts down immediately
Pwnallthethings

Here are some nice mushrooms:


lukelukeluke

It’s January 6th! Happy 4 year klanniversary to all who incelebrate!
The Volatile Mermaid @ohnoshetwitnt.bsky.social

Anyone who says "History will not be kind" to Trump has never walked through the US Capitol and seen how Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens and John C Calhoun all have tributes.
Eric Michael Garcia

The first time I read about Napoleon leaving prison and returning to power I was incredulous, like “how could they let that happen?” Now I know. At least he was a military & political genius and not a rage addicted failson.
Jonathan W. Gray @elmcitytree.bsky.social

I need someone to collate a list of every single western government official, celebrity, and media outlet’s response to this news and compare it to their coverage of the lying propaganda used to justify a genocide:


Hend Amry @libyaliberty.bsky.social

Does it feel like tech is ceasing to evolve in ways that are useful to everyday people, and instead functions to control, placate and diminish us?
Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social

The lesson from New York is that no amount of density and transit access will prevent a small but vocal segment of the population from being complete babies about congestion pricing. So just do it anyway! Your city will be better for it.
Ned Resnikoff

This pretty much sums up the case for the Congestion Relief Zone that began in Manhattan today:


Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social

one of the most depressing realizations in politics is the day you understand that a lot of people would legitimately prefer to spend more money to make sure nobody “undeserving” gets a benefit than to make it accessible to everyone
Micah @rincewind.run

Always love the "license cyclists" angle. Even if there was an issue (there isn't) with "reckless" cyclists, we've been licensing drivers for a century and we still can't get them to make a complete stop at a stop sign.
Tom Flood

I lived in a town with a Butterball factory. I saw raids in the 90s with Feds coming in and leaving town with van loads of undocumented workers. You know what I never saw? The Feds arresting the folks who hired undocumented workers.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

Fun to s-post about NY congestion pricing, but here's a prediction: Most (≥90%) drivers will pay. The $1b/year will improve trains and buses. The ~5–10% fewer cars will speed up traffic (including cars and trucks!), lower pollution… Life will go on with somewhat lower social costs. It's the long slog of governing
Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com

Remember when Trump declared the prosperous nation he inherited from Obama to be a scene of "carnage "?
davidrlurie

Considering that AI is already publishing books with poisonous mushrooms labeled as edible I wouldn’t trust your fridge not to try to murder you
Build Soil Plant Chestnuts


Hejin @hejintravels.bsky.social

And remember when this was the near-unvarying tone of the 2023-2024 mainstream press? ("Harris is trying to escape the disaster of Biden's economy" etc. "Have you seen the price of eggs?" Less coverage of "prices at the pump," since they had gone down.)
James Fallows

You do have some obligations to other people. This is a good and normal part of being human.
Amy Ash @lolennui.bsky.social

Kind of don’t want to go through a pandemic when people who don’t believe in germ theory while firmly believing in predestination are in charge.
Chris “OH NO! DISASTER! WHAT A BAD IDEA!” Dobbertean @bracketdobber.net

Bicycles aren't inconvenient; they have been inconvenienced. Cars aren't convenient; they have been convenienced.
bettybarcode

On my laptop is an email Ursula K. Le Guin wrote to one of her editors, explaining that her preferred initials were UKL and that the longer version, UKLG, made her think of the sound of someone choking on their gum. What will I ever do with this information, besides love her more?
Julie Phillips

The first Congestion Relief Zone has arrived in North America! Congrats to all in New York who were on the front lines of this fight. Finally we'll have some data to set against all the fear and speculation! The evidence of other cities is that people will adapt and thrive.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social

It feels like a worryingly long time since a tech innovation provided something people wanted, rather than something an arsehole hopes to make gigantic amounts of money from by forcing people to use.
David Whitley

for Godzilla, every city is walkable
Catbus @hayao.lol

Stopping ten-year-old trans kids from playing soccer with their friends is literally the first priority of the new GOP Congress. Hope you don't have any real problems in your life you were hoping they'd help with!
Ari Drennen

There's a story in the Walter Isaacson book about Musk playing poker. Musk just keeps going all-in repeatedly, losing a lot of hands and buying more chips. Eventually he wins. It was supposed to be a story about determination. Isaacson didn't seem to understand it as a story about infinite money.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

Cleopatra lived closer in time to 'yeet' being in the dictionary than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Merriam-Webster

Kind of messed up that gambling was less evil when it was under the purview of the mob.
The Alternate Historian

fish fish fish!


Monaka / Illustrator @sayohashigabo.bsky.social

Anguished that the Cybertruck suicide [in Vegas] gets 1000x more coverage than the FBI arresting guy with the biggest bomb cache in agency  history--who does target pracrice on a photo of Biden's face, and...
Rick Perlstein

If a hardback has endnotes it should come with a ribbon so you can keep your place there. This should be the law.
Jo Wolff

We've done everything possible to make car mobility frictionless at the expense of nearly everything and everyone else. From difficult and dangerous active mobility to drive-thrus everywhere and wide car infrastructure forgiving to recklessness, we've surrendered everything to the auto industry.
American Fietser

When I was young, women all had terrible body issues and believed men only wanted very hot very thin women. Meanwhile it was widely accepted that women just wanted a man who was funny and kind, and hence men rarely had body issues. This WAS unequal. But I didn’t want it equalised this way.
Naomi Alderman

Every day the Butlerian Jihad draws closer
@jphillll.bsky.social

It's a bummer how Google Streetview will skip entire towns in Appalachia and then extensively document every single-lane in a Phoenix Wal-Mart parking lot:


M. Nolan Gray

Of all the problems in the world that AI could be put to solving (and there really are many), "Not enough people posting online" is not one of them.
Chris Hayes

Never knew an inauguration had to cost tens of millions of dollars. Good thing these billionaires are here. Otherwise government would be more like a public service and not have Hollywood-level theatrics and fanfare. This is essential, the best use of their resources. Well done, all of you.
Jared Wade

"Abundance" is a popular policy goal among the center-left, but it really doesn't work for transportation. Abundant cars and highways are how we got into this mess in the first place.
David Zipper

A reminder that the number of people killed by that truck in New Orleans on New Years Day happened more than 700 times on average over the previous year. And that’s just the people killed by cars we weren’t in other cars. Because our road network isn’t safe for anyone, even when you’re belted in with air bags.
Jacob E. Peters @archijake.bsky.social

American cities have parking MINimums and housing MAXimums, and then wonder why there are so many cars and not enough places to live.
Qagggy!

“When mayors in other cities ask me how Copenhagen afforded to invest in its cycling networks, I ask them how on earth they have been able to afford highway projects. We invested in bike lanes because that was the cheapest option.”
Renee de St. Croix @reneedsc.bsky.social

Third spaces in America consist mainly of sitting in your car in the grocery store parking lot to eat a snack and look at your phone.
Tony Damiano

The year is 2036. Millions of AI generated profiles argue with each other over the true meaning of Christmas on social media while surviving humans band together to siphon water from pipes supplying data centers across the American southwest.
Jorge Caballero, MD @datadrivenmd.social

Planners should have to design cities from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance. That is to say: the planner will have to live in the city they design, but they don't know *where* in the city.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

"Cyclists are so dramatic" LOL, you wanna see drama? Make a complete stop at a stop sign, look in all directions and proceed with caution — the driver behind you will put on a rage and tantrum filled performance of a lifetime.
Tom Flood

Not to be that guy, but fewer than 40 Americans died in terrorist attacks last year — while over 40,000 die in car crashes. Cars are deadly, but not in the way the media wants you to think.
Andrew J. Hawkins @andyjayhawk.bsky.social

It's hard not to sound like a conspiracy theorist when you lay out the full suite of human experiences tech companies are using AI to subvert. The plan appears to be to take everything from us. Literally everything.
Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social

My god… Trump won 91 percent of “news desert” counties by an average of 54 percentage points.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

US tax credit for a new Cybertruck: $7,500
US tax credit for a new e-bike: $0
David Zipper

Regular, moderate exercise like walking and biking are the closest thing we have to a health panacea. US city and road design has made walking and biking impractical, unpleasant and dangerous in much of the country. Changing this would save *$billions* in healthcare *and transportation* costs.
Bella Chu @isabellachu.bsky.social

You can’t be pro-environment and pro-AI. They’re diametrically opposed.
jasoncomix

I’m skeptical of the notion that any company employing people in the U.S. is offering “world class health care.”
Erica M @ericamauter.com

If and when the global community does manage to overcome special interests, transform everything, and avoid the worst of climate and ecological breakdown in what would be humanity’s crowning achievement, we will be rewarded by denialists saying “See, I told you it was nothing”
Dr Charlie Gardner

There's going to be a multi-generational reckoning with the fact that our leadership failed to rein in the exponential growth of his wealth. Now the compound interest on his holdings is like a terrible, unstoppable cosmic force.
David Bowman @dlbowman76.com

The end of Chevron [deference] has predictably led to non-expert judges in one part of the country directly deciding hugely significant policy battles about extremely technical subjects for the rest of the country, instead of judging the reasonableness of expert agency interpretation of ambiguous statute.
Brian Fung

Wait, so circling back to that whole drone thing, do most people just not usually look up at the night sky?
Joshua Eaton

Yale study shows Medicare-for-all would save $579 billion (in 2024 dollars) and 68,000 lives per year. So, what’s the problem? Greed. It’s always Corporate Greed.
LynnZ @zizij.bsky.social

The mass-media fueled a panic that has U.S. on the verge of giving $10,000,000,000s to the prison industry for new facilities where undocumented people *accused* of shoplifting will be concentrated indefinitely. All of this happened while this was happening to property crime:


alec karakatsanis @equalityalec.bsky.social

My favorite pundit delusion is the idea that voters a) remembered and understood the significance of the positions Harris took in the 2019 primary, b) compared those positions to her current platform, and c) formed an opinion on her based on the comparison. Lol. We now have numerous surveys showing that the better informed a voter was, the more likely they were to vote for Harris. And yet still pundits can't resist interpreting votes against her as judgments on *what she actually did and said*, as though voters were informed about that.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Hey, I don't mean to be alarmist, but it seems like the incoming vice president is either dumb or dishonest, and quite likely both.
Kevin M. Kruse

Just like the “male loneliness epidemic” the imbalance in men going to college is entirely their own doing. A whole generation has decided to make themselves uneducated and unfuckable because they’re addicted to resentment. Manosphere influencers line their pockets by ensuring they stay that way.
Maureen Jice @jane.meangirls.online

When Russians attack Ukrainian solar farms, they're back up inside of 7 days. Same level of damage at a fossil fuel plant: 4 months to repair
Bill McKibben

In a way it makes sense. A society which thinks that degrading biological complexity (like an old growth forest or an ocean full of fish) and calling the process "wealth creation" might call extracting and reprocessing content from texts and artworks "intelligence."
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

What I want, right now, as a Democrat, is a scorched earth strategy. I don’t want any cooperation with these fucking traitors. I want Sherman through South Carolina energy. I want Republicans to regret ever hearing the name Donald Trump, let alone nominating him.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

This flew under the radar in last week's shutdown fight, but Republicans have basically unwound all of Biden's investment in tax enforcement. The Continuing Resolution clawed back $20 billion from the IRS after GOP in Congress revoked another $20 billion last year. If the IRS hasn't spent the money yet, it's gone.
Jacob Bogage

Embarrassing…I keep writing 1.5° global warming on my checks.
Paul Ford @ftrain.bsky.social

Honestly, generative AI is going to bring back the oral exam faster than anyone could have predicted.
Janet D. Stemwedel @docfreeride.bsky.social

Me: Republicans are neo-Confederates who will burn the country down to get their awful, nightmare desires implemented, just like their ideological predecessors and the only way to stop them is ruthless, constant brutality so Democrats must step up
People, for reasons: WHY DO YOU HATE DEMOCRATS?!?
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

The fact that Trump and Republicans jumped on the name and face of the New Orleans attacker and declared he was an "illegal immigrant" despite his being born and raised in America is a pretty good sign of how the mass deportations are going to go.
The Rude Pundit

veltex gas sign, rt. 30, the dalles, oregon, 1987:


old roadside pics @roadside.xor.blue

Everyone treating the Insurrection Clause as optional has disqualified themselves from punditry as spectacularly as Trump has disqualified himself from the presidency. They've announced that any fascist, anywhere, can bully them out of defending anything, from Brown v. Board to the Bill of Rights.
Flying Pace

All the dudes with the most power in this country right now are the type of guys that you walk away from at parties
eve6

Core to the process of radicalisation is depersonalisation. The movement hollows out someone’s identity and personality and replaces it with the group identity and social dysfunction. Helping that accelerate is counterproductive.
Ms . Penny Oaken, SkyWitch

so i missed this… cnn reported vivek saying they’re going to take a $6.6 billion dollar loan package away from rivian, a direct competitor to tesla
jael holzman @jael.bsky.social

It’s over 1,000km from Berlin to Paris. There’s now a direct daytime train between them, that takes 8 hours and costs just €59. Leave at 10am, arrive 6pm. And… it’s just 1% the carbon emissions of the equivalent flight
Philip Oldfield @sustainabletall.bsky.social

One way local governments tend to react to high profile cases of vehicles used as weapons against crowds is to make gathering in public more expensive and difficult for event organizers. Make them pay more for police and security, for example. Whatever solutions we reach for should guard against the unintended consequence of making it prohibitively expensive to gather in public spaces.
Wedge LIVE!™

I have a feeling people are going to get a lot of use out of this picture:


The Alternate Historian

My first principle for the new year: When it comes to issues involving democracy, I do not seek compromise with Republicans. There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.
Marc Elias

On Jan 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the independence of Haiti, renaming the country from Saint-Domingue to its original indigenous name, Haiti (Ayiti). Haiti became the 1st independent Black-led nation and the First Nation to abolish slavery entirely and permanently.
Elli Ellz

When Elon Musk shows up with a 6 inch swastika neck tattoo the headlines are going to say "Musk Sparks Speculation With New Look; Critics Say It Signals Problematic Beliefs"
Paul Waldman

I asked once whether beets are more or less purple than turmeric is yellow. Chemist friend was around and 15 minutes of calculation later we determined turmeric is more than 100x as yellow as beets are purple.
Ada Palmer

god bless chemistry
Kathleen E. Kennedy @themedievaldrk.bsky.social

I never realized the degree to which Darth Vader's costume was Nazi coded, in a way that viewers in 1977 would certainly get. This 1942 propaganda poster is in the Museum of American History:


Warren Wells, AICP

The California grid ran on 100% renewables with no blackouts or cost rises for parts of a record 98 out of 116 days (and 132 days all year) in 2024
Mark Z. Jacobson