BlueSky January 2025, Part 2

Well... wasn't the first half of January 2025 nice and relaxing compared to the second half!

Just before the inauguration on January 20, there was the momentary TikTok ban... Then after the inauguration, with its oligarch line-up and Musk doing a Nazi salute, the first news was about Trump pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists, then immigration enforcement and trying to revoke birthright citizenship. Then the "anti-DEI" executive orders started to roll out, followed by incoherent funding cuts and freezes. A passenger jet and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac, and Trump blamed it on integration. Then, right at the end of the month (on a Friday afternoon), every federal website was going dark and Elon Musk was taking control of the Office of Personnel Management and the payment infrastructure of the Treasury Department.

As usual, I have moved some of the less timely images up or down in the order for better visual balance. Though there were many fewer images in these two weeks... everyone was feeling pretty grim.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

___

Congratulations you have completed January! Reward yourself every day for the rest of the year.
Present & Correct

This isn’t a subsection of the website [that is gone]. This is census.gov. Just census.gov. An absolute war on anything even vaguely like knowledge or truth. At a genuinely unprecedented level.
John Pfaff

This is alarming: The highest career official at Treasury is leaving after a clash with Elon Musk allies over access to sensitive payment systems. Those payment systems distribute ~$6 trillion in US government payments. Only a few people are supposed to have access to that payment system.
Heather Long @byheatherlong.bsky.social

Elon Musk is now attempting to rob *checks news* the elderly, disabled people and their children, widows, and *checks news again* yep orphans. I don't think Elon should get access to a list of the names, social security numbers, home addresses and bank account information of millions of the most vulnerable people in all of America, personally, I don't approve of where this could and may well be intended to be heading to next
Erin Fogg @criminalerin.bsky.social

Going full court press on Musk would be a pretty obvious play for an opposition party right now, if we had one.
Tom Tomorrow

Today, Trump has:
-indicated he'll purge the FBI of everyone who isn't a fanatical loyalist
-allowed his crony to seize all government funding in an effective coup
-ripped the entire federal government off the internet
Today, Democrats have:
-done nothing
-said nothing
-tweeted about egg prices
Will Stancil

hey you know what would be cool, if anyone, at any level, in any branch of the government did even one (1) thing to try to put the brakes on any of the terrible shit being carried out right now
Jack Mirkinson

a president with sub-50 approval and unelected dope fiend alienating progressively larger swathes of gov, security forces, and people dependent on entitlements
ae @aelkus.bsky.social

<whispers> DEI is just another word for democracy.
Democracy is diverse.
Democracy is equality.
Democracy is inclusive.
Every attack on “DEI” is actually an attack on democracy.
Jen Mercieca

the conservative movement has been tightening the noose around the neck of the US constitution for 40 years and it's about to finally snap shut. what comes next?
mtsw

Like not to be glib here, but the answer to all of the "wait can he do this???" stuff is "no", with the remedy of impeachment. We're living through a constitutional failure not because the constitution permits this, but because it doesn't and congress will not do the thing it demands in response.
Pwnallthethings

An unelected, erratic, ketamine-addled billionaire with far right/white nationalist views has taken control of the personnel and payment systems of the United States government. Not an exaggeration, not hyperbole.
Brendan Nyhan

i need someone to ask john roberts if nondelegation applies to handing over the entire federal government to a single unelected billionaire
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Trump administration just ordered the General Services Administration to develop a plan to cut 50% of its current budget, multiple officials tell me. "Our SES [senior executives] looked shell shocked," one official told me. "I expect this was a result of Musk's visit to HQ yesterday."
Ken Klippenstein

We're witnessing the wholesale hijacking of the federal government by a single billionaire. Struggling to think of a parallel in American history.
Ned Resnikoff

So Musk now spends his time running X, Space X, Tesla, shitposting, playing video games ... and running the united states government. I dunno man, if I were a tesla investor I'd be getting the hell out as quickly as possible
Tom Tomorrow

Thinking about how when Hillary Clinton as First Lady tried to work on healthcare the press was relentlessly saying “no one elected her” and now we’re here. lol!
Loather

Car dependency has been so normalized that most people don't know that putting a child into a car is more dangerous than putting them on a bike. In fact, car trips are the most dangerous activity that most children partake in.
Regina Burstein @mplsfietser.bike

It would be fantastic if major federal institutions would acknowledge that the executive branch cannot legally unilaterally cancel or redistribute congressionally appropriated funding on ideological grounds and thus they have no legal obligation to comply with such directives
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

There’s something bleakly funny about how Soviet, even Stalinist, the federal anti-DEI purge is. Literally blackballing scientific research that doesn’t line up with the official metaphysics.
Ned Resnikoff

Democracy doesn’t mean whoever wins a slight plurality in the national vote gets to rewrite every American institution to satisfy their own whims. The president is not an elected king. If we let him become one, the project of American democracy is over.
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

Once again, a fundamental reason why so many academics despise Trump, Vance, Musk and company is that we’ve all had our share of The Guy Who Didn’t Do The Reading But Demands to Be Heard
Kevin M. Kruse

Even if the Trump administration’s gutting of the administrative state didn’t contribute to the plane crash — and I think we can say with reasonable certainty that it did — watching them spin the deaths of 67 people, including children, to fit their racist talking points makes me wish I believed in hell
Ned Resnikoff

"Fascism is imperialism turned inward" is still one of the most succinct definitions, and it hits just as hard as all of Umberto Eco's 14 traits put together. From a materialist standpoint, "imperialism turned inward" is really all one needs to know.
Jack Neison

Basically, all of Kash Patel's hearing was like this:
Dem Sen: You said on the "Tightest Whitie Podcast," quote, 'I'm going to use the FBI to hunt down Trump's enemies, period, full stop, it's as simple as that, no more, no less." Is that your intent?
Patel: That was taken out of context.
Peter Sagal

If you're feeling despair it's because you have a moral compass. It means you're not empty on the inside - that you nurse hope and a sense of justice in a cage next to your heart. You're one of my people and I'll stand with you. There are more of us than they want you to believe. Hold fast.
Walter Chaw @mangiotto.bsky.social

The media should stop using the acronym DEI - say the words Diversity, Equity, Inclusion! bc
1. I bet a lot of Americans couldn’t tell you what DEI stands for and
2. when you say all three words, everything they blame on it sounds (accurately) extremely ridiculous
Ask them if they instead support
Homogeneity
Inequity
Exclusion
Stinamo

Black Lives Matter fundamentally broke these people’s brains. They couldn’t bear the idea that they might have to tell a different story about this country and thus tell a different story about themselves. They hated it, and now they are using everything they have to never feel that way again.
Clint Smith @clintsmithiii.bsky.social

Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

The overwhelmingly white press corps cannot of course meet this moment.
Prisonculture

i think it is important to say that the open and explicit racism of the president and the vice president isn’t just uncouth or “controversial” but a direct attack on tens of millions of americans and a dereliction of their duty to represent the entire country
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

This press conference [about the plane crash] is really something. Duffy, Hegseth, Vance, all groveling before Trump and thanking him for his leadership, and blaming DEI.
Tom Tomorrow

Here's your lede: With bodies still being fished out of the Potomac River, Donald Trump went on a partisan, racist and entirely unsubstantiated rant today, blaming diversity hiring and Democrats for Monday’s calamitous collision between a passenger jet and a military aircraft.
Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News

I actually wish the media would stop using "DEI" and "diversity hiring" and just get to the essence of the thing and ask: "Are you saying that this crash was caused by desegregating the races?" And see what happens.
Karen Attiah

New report concludes that Right-on Red is deadly: ROR "is generally unsafe for pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers."
David Zipper

Here's my generic ebike buying guide: Get one with a motor from one of these companies (Bosch, Brose, Shimano, SRAM, Panasonic, Yamaha, Giant, or Specialized), front and back thru-axle (not quick release) for the wheels, and hydraulic (not mechanical) disc brakes. They will have decent batteries.
David Ho

Happy birthday FDR! Your New Deal state survived almost a century but some very bad people you would call “economic royalists” are going to destroy it from within:


Will Hitchcock

I suspect the 40% of our armed forces who are nonwhite are not going to love the new Secretary of Defense’s opinion of them
Jeff Yang @originalsp.in

Starting to wonder if all dictators and authoritarian regimes are this stupid and historians just fell for their propaganda
New Year's Mae Forrest Barnes @dr-maeforrest.bsky.social

Yes. Yes, actually. Yes, this is the case. All of them. (and there are many books about this--authoritarian regimes do not solve problems, they create them through indifference, chaos, and ill-will).
Jen Mercieca

Free speech is when the government restricts expression about race and gender, and the more the government cracks down on that expression, the freer speech is.
Nicholas Grossman

The 2 agencies responsible for investigating (DOT/DOD) this accident are run by a guy best known for being on MTV's "The Real World" and a guy accused of assaulting women, having a drinking problem, and a bunch of white nationalist tattoos. Just wanted to remind folks of that.
scarylawyerguy.bsky.social

New York Times' Peter Baker: Trump has a simple message, he's in charge. President Donald J. Trump: How could the people in charge fail to prevent this deadly crash? Someone ought to do something!
Nicholas Grossman

I know there is a lot going on but the erasure of Black people from national identity and history is also very alarming and upsetting; we’re just freaking out less publicly because we have centuries of experience with tyranny
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

The thing about “patriotic education” is that if you have to lie about America to love it then you probably don’t really love it. Ultimately their objection to the flawed universalism expressed in the declaration is the idea that the flaws were bad or that the universalism should be realized. They want to ban the teaching of the unpleasant facts of American history because people might conclude injustices in the past that contribute to inequalities in the present should be rectified, instead of their belief, which is that some groups of people are inherently superior to others
Adam Serwer

“Anti-american ideology” is a term that has now been applied to: trans people, student protesters, and environmentalists throughout this slate of executive orders
Sophie Hurwitz

Our elite publications are 100% on board with the first 2 and about 60% on the 3rd so this is trump playing to his base
Atrios @eschatonblog.com

I’d encourage people to take rhetoric seriously about ending no-fault divorce and even taking away women’s right to vote. These ideas have been making the rounds on the far right for years, which could serve as foundation for their becoming Republican policy goals.
Leah McElrath

All I can really say at this point is if everyone isn't watching how trans people have lost basic rights and protections on a scale that hasn't been seen in decades in the span of 72 hours and realizing that even if you aren't trans there's nothing stopping it from happening to you, you're a fool
Zoe Tunnell @zoewithasword.bsky.social

They’re testing. It wasn’t a “glitch” that turned off Medicaid portals. They’re seeing which things they can delete without a fight. Vets benefits? Abuse shelters? Aid to children? Cancer research? They don’t care who gets hurt. Just what they can get away with. Keep. Fighting. Back.
Fred Wellman

RFK Jr noting, correctly, that Americans pay more for worse health outcomes than other OECD nations. Apparently this is because we're vaccinating for measles as opposed to because they have socialized medicine.
Joe Katz @joekatz45.bsky.social

Just because they didn’t succeed in burning down the Reichstag today is no reason to think they won’t attempt the arson again tomorrow. They absolutely will.
Tinman contra la caste @bcmfietser.bsky.social

We're on day 10 of the Trump administration and he's already committed two impeachable offenses of a worse caliber than the charges filed against Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Paul Matzko

Just a reminder, Elon Musk offered mass buyouts at Twitter, and then never paid them.
Peter Gleick

The buyouts email sent by Office of Personnel Management uses the same headline as what Elon Musk sent to Twitter employees when he took over the company — “Fork in the Road.” It also has a similar “click yes or no” form at the end of the email.
Mia Sato

On one hand, Trump is moving at breakneck speed to accomplish a project that is generational in scale, which the country didn’t ask for, doesn’t want, and which won’t solve any of its problems. On the other hand there’s no opposition so who’s to say
Gabriel Winant

There’s no evidence that vaccines cause autism. You know what there IS evidence of, when it comes to causal factors for autism? Air pollution. So cars. Including tail pipes, tire particles, brake pads. And fossil fuel energy-related pollution, industrial pollution, etc. And not just autism.
Brent Toderian

New White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did her first press briefing today and told a number of demonstrable lies (about condoms for Gaza, the criminal records of undocumented migrants, and more). This is how the New York Times covered it:


Mehdi Hasan

The new general counsel for OPM—the office issuing all those deranged memos—is Andrew Kloster, a self-described “raging misogynist” with a public history of racist comments and a temporary restraining order for domestic violence who most recently worked for Matt Gaetz.
Marisa Kabas

Being in the US without legal authorization is not a crime. Meanwhile Donald Trump is an actual convicted criminal.
David Ho

so these homeschool clonetank claremont institute guys thought "grants" was just shit that went to the Woke University Basketweaving College For Dyed Hair Bisexuals Who Won't Fuck Me and not the way that, like, 90% of government programs worked, huh
skullcrusher the pain away @swolecialism.bsky.social

Today Trump pretended to turn on the water in California and then actually turned off the funding for the federal programs that save people’s lives.
Bilal Dardai

A lot of people’s commitment to a liberal democratic order was contingent on the pretty big exception that they got to sexually harass and abuse women around them with impunity.
Moira Donegan

Billionaires just shutdown our government because they don't give a shit about us.
Erin Maye Quade

There is a weird thing in the U.S. where a Democratic President has no power to do anything ever, while a Republican president has the power to do everything and change everything within the first 5 days of being in power.
@lexialex.bsky.social

“Oh, that’s what that was for” - the American public over the next few weeks
Jacob Harris @harrisj.bsky.social

Headline of the day, from Will Bunch:


Tom Eblen

The (illegal) OMB pause combined with the deportations is the ultimate distilled expression of how these people view the role of the state: The state’s only legitimate function is to mete out violence and harassment, but it should do a lot of that.
Ned Resnikoff

you cannot simultaneously dismantle the federal government, destroy scientific research funding, antagonize the military, deport people who fill critical jobs, get into trade wars with important economic partners, and very likely start one new military conflict without political stability collapsing
ae @aelkus.bsky.social

The US destroying its world class higher education system, whether by defunding public universities at the state level or, now, the federal government impounding research funding, is arguably one of the biggest great power self-owns (not directly involving war) in international history
MP Broache

Unclear if it’s more accurate to describe what’s happening as a coup in plain sight or a bunch of idiots acting like the coup already happened even though they haven’t put any of the work in
Ned Resnikoff

A reminder that while all this is going on *gestures at everything*, climate change is still happening.
David Ho

in early 2021 I proposed expelling the insurrectionist members of congress under the 14th amendment and using the temporary dem majorities to pass court reform stripping the federalist society of power in our courts. this idea was "radical" but, as we're seeing, less radical than the alternative
mtsw

Listen, the fossil fuel industry benefits from two things:
- Actual rising power demand from existing and new data centres, which creates demand for coal and gas burnt in turbines
- Wild projections of continued rising demand, which creates demand for new power stations, pipelines and extraction
Ketan Joshi

Just had a thought: the difference between a "food desert" and a "car dependent neighborhood" is the income of the residents. Both are food deserts (there are no supermarkets, etc) one just has enough ppl with cars for it to not matter.
Pedro @pjrt.bsky.social

The Trump administration has deleted a US Transportation Department website page on climate solutions.
Antonia Juhasz

I spoke to a talented junior scientist who just got a good faculty job offer in the US and they told me “well I wouldn’t move to 1930s Germany either” so that’s how that’s going
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

Trump and Musk truly running the government like they run their businesses: through wage theft and ignoring payments they're on the hook for
Adam Gurri

To put the OMB grant freeze in context, roughly 17.5% of Wisconsin’s revenue comes from federal grants in aid last I checked. Overall, federal grants account for roughly 36% of all state government budgets in US. In a number of states the federal share is even higher.
Phil Rocco @philiprocco.bsky.social

by freezing all federal grants, trump is fundamentally transforming the relationship between the executive and congress. he is asserting dictatorial authority over federal spending, transforming congress's lawmaking powers into advisory authority. it is a constitutional crisis
Will Stancil

This:


Hoodlum @nothoodlum.bsky.social

the depressing thing about what's happening and to come is how fucking unnecessary all of it was. no war forced us into this, no massive recession. bunch of bored morons pushed the "break everything" button because of the man on the tv and the people on their phone told them, and people will die.
William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social

not only was non-citizen voting common but the causal relationship between citizenship and voting was often reversed, that is, voting was how a non citizen *demonstrated* their commitment to the political community such that they could become citizens
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Americans consider vehicle impoundment a more severe punishment than 1-2yrs in jail. This is how car-focused our cities are.
Jay Fitzsimmons @jayfitz.bsky.social

The US share of single moms (19%) is actually pretty similar to many other advanced economy nations. What is different? US child poverty (20%) is way higher than other nations.
Heather Long @byheatherlong.bsky.social

I was listening to a podcast about the Irish (Not)Potato Famine and how one of the factors in that was rich landlords all jumping on a hot biz trend of sheep farming, thus evicting starving tenants. And it's wild to realize that the business lemming thing now applied to AI goes back that far. Like there wasn't really a REASON to switch to sheep farming. It was just a hot new way to make money and people got riled up with FOMO and jumped on it, regardless of the human cost. And if you ever need a way to point out that economics isn't rational ... hype cycles in business is your story.
Maggie Koerth

It's simple--trans women are hulking bestial superathletes able to leap tall buildings in a single bound but we're also sickly, sheepish she-men unfit for jobs in the military. The enemy is both weak and strong, you see.
Gillian Branstetter

My favorite fact about the NYC subway is that there are way more daily riders (about 4 million) than the number of people who fly in the US out of all airports every day (~2.5 million). The scale is hard to get a grasp on.
Cooper Lund

Its unbelievable how a top funder of the Trump admin is calling for mass unemployment and basically nobody knows about it, yet half the country believes in George Soros conspiracy theories based on nothing
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

Daily reminder in the neighborhood:


loreleikelly

“Critical race theory”—like “wokeism,” “anti-racism,” and “identity politics”—functions for the right primarily as a catch-all specter, standing for any and all talk of race and racism—above all, the suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes.
Boston Review

we might be in a better place re protests if Dems hadn't just spent the last year and a half joining with Republicans in a paranoid fascist effort to crush and terrorize campus protestors.
Noah Berlatsky

The most climate insidious thing my generation taught younger ones was that traveling is an unmitigated social and spiritual good.
Mary Morse Marti @marymm.bsky.social

With zero expertise but lots of spite I'm 100% confident in predicting that either AI, crypto, or some combination of the two is going to tank the economy in a real and disastrous fashion, and who voters blame for it will depend largely on who is most closely allied with AI and crypto
Gillian Branstetter

Objectively funny they're slapping a 50% tariff on the country where we get 57% of our imported roses from 2 weeks before Valentine's Day.
George Pearkes

Purple bouquet in Denver:


Nina Snyder

kinda feels like every institution in the US has been preemptively lining up behind the idea of a Trump mandate while the rest of the world has been preparing one big “fuck off, asshole”
Jesse Raub

In the US we'll put a freeway next to an elementary school, but god forbid someone buy a beer with 500' of a playground.
Jesse Raub

Feel deep in my bones that the backlash to all of this is going to be enormous. Not sure how it will manifest and when it will explode into view, but confident it’s coming.
Chris Hayes

Utility-scale activated charcoal bed water treatment can remove PFAS for about $50/acre foot (2020 price quoted to me). That serves 10-20 urban users. Compare to cost of individual Brita filters. Collectivism is cheaper
Dr Grace Peng

Hegseth is the perfect example of the Overton window in action. The standard advice for politicians is don't endorse a puppy killer BUT Hegseth made her look like a competent and downright reasonable nominee in comparison.
Jon Walker @jonwalkerpdx.bsky.social

Never forget that there is a high percentage of white ppl in this country who would rather see it destroyed than share it. I thought we were paying the price for electing Barack Obama, but now I know it’s deeper than that. We’re paying the price for the Civil Rights act of 1964.
Akela Cooper

lol peeped that "not everything's about race" crew is real quiet now
Anna Gifty is kinda back @itsafronomics.bsky.social

I think a lot of people have forgotten how the press went after Biden early in his presidency for not ‘bridging the partisan divide’ and ‘healing the nation.’ Now they’re like, ‘look at that guy fuck everything up how exciting!’
Joshua Holland

In summary:
the authorities: we're gonna scour the streets for illegals!!
migrant workers: cool guess we'll just stay home then
the authorities: but you can't! it's citrus picking season!
migrant workers: that sounds like a you problem
Sarah Kendall Taber

New study: When states make it easier for older people to renew their driver license, crashes and injuries rise among those 65+.
Maybe... don't do that?
David Zipper

This isn't a government, it's a crime spree.
Andy Craig

Something lovely for the weekend! Ancient Egyptian gold headband decorated with heads of gazelles and a stag between stars or flowers. Second Intermediate period, Dynasty 15, c. 1648–1540 BC. Photo by The Met:


Alison Fisk

It's insane how we've had at least 5 things worse than Watergate in 4 days and there's not even motivation among democrats to make noise about it.
LBJ Again @50megatonfbomb.bsky.social

The speed with which companies are abandoning DEI is a clue about how shallow their commitment to it ever was.
Susan Orlean

We've finally defeated cancel culture. Now people only get fired for criticizing the government
Just Kidding @internethippo.bsky.social

very excited to see what happens when you make a deeply compromised addict the leader of the department of defense and subordinate to a madman
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

ICE is raiding schools; Navajo are threatened with “deportation,” in the first hints of an ethnic cleansing campaign; the federal government is resegregating with snitch tags on everyone who resists; the NIH is frozen; private institutions are acquiescing rapidly… It is day 4.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

Hey, has anyone heard from Gerry Connolly since the Dems gave him the Oversight Committee over AOC? Yes, I am going to ask this every time I see AOC out there doing what every Democrat should be doing.
CleverNickname23

Trump is famous for not paying his bills. So it’s not surprising that he considers anything he had to pay for to be a trade deficit.
Stephanie C. @stepc.bsky.social

I kept this screenshot assuming someday we might be asked to forget:


Dave Winer @scripting.com

let us all remember, every day, that the US has elected a man whose greatest business success was a reality TV show. he runs the thing like reality TV. every day a new "oh my god, I can't believe it!" fight everything you have to fight, but also don't let their drama drain your life away
Naomi Alderman

1) contemporary originalist methodology involves use of specialized dictionaries and recourse to legal esoterica to find ways to make words mean the opposite of what they appear to say
2) really tired of strangers thinking they can see into the depths of my soul after reading a social media post!
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I wish I could remember who it was I heard saying that "originalism" should actually be called "necroventrilloquism" because it's making your words come out of the late Founders' mouths.
Anton P. Nym

Originalism is starting with the conclusion you want by pretending to channel the soul of a founding father. The balance is just post hoc rationalization and word games.
Edwin Mix

This is really shocking: and true. I discovered I'd just been upgraded without consent to an AI-enshittified package that was about £30 a year more expensive. Strongly recommend anyone who has an Office 365 follow the below advice to get rid of it
Sam Leith @questingvole.bsky.social

The tech world has convinced every segment, including nonprofits, that “scaling” is the inevitable goal. Maybe perpetual growth doesn’t actually meet your mission. Maybe providing a few deep interactions is more impactful than many shallow ones. Plant stronger, individual seeds and they will spread.
Stephen Coles @stewf.com

This coming from the demon who thinks rape and an insurrection is legal and moral.


Dannie D

They…turned off…National Institutes of Health grants? That’s nearly $50 billion of scientific research.
Adam Rogers @jetjocko.bsky.social

the idea that women should be stripped of the right to vote, and that men have the right to brutally rape their wives, are both major tenets of pete hegseth's religion
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social

The Interstate Highway System may be the world’s largest exercise in Soviet-style central planning, bigger and far more market-distorting than anything the Soviets could manage. We’d be in a different place if all that money had gone into passenger transport.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social

remember, the blitzkrieg is intended to make you feel like there is nothing you can do about it; that’s the only reason to go forward in this haphazard and sloppy manner all in the first week. and the choice of that strategy tells you they are afraid you *will* do something about it
Yell In a War @jelenawoehr.bsky.social

I know this country is racist af and increasingly antiscientific but I didn’t realize it was so bad that if a “DEI hire” found a cure for cancer like 50% of Americans would rather die
Ryan Marino, MD

An image of Musk’s Hitler salute has been beamed onto Tesla's Gigafactory in Berlin:


Andrew Stroehlein

The words "pen" and "pencil" are unrelated. Pen is from Latin penna, meaning "feather," and pencil is from Latin penis, meaning "tail"
Present & Correct

If a plea for kindness and empathy makes you furious, you might be a sociopath.
Schooley

Trump says he’s going to get rid of America’s “EV mandate.” There isn’t one. But there’s definitely a “car dependency mandate,” and Trump will make it much worse. That’s less choice, less freedom, and worse consequences for all.
Brent Toderian

They will go after Wikipedia.
They will go after libraries.
They will go after school boards and public extracurricular activities that are anything but sports.
They will go after archives.
Because knowledge, education, culture, and progressives are all the enemy.
Thinking is the enemy.
Steffani Cameron @snarkysteff.bsky.social

So when all was said and done, the only country that opened it's prisons and sent crazy murderous criminals to prey upon innocent American citizens, was us.
Heather Thomas @heatherthomasaf.bsky.social

citizenship should be easy to attain! you want the people who live in your country to have a stake in it!
Charlotte Lydia Riley @lottelydia.bsky.social

This is the face of courage and compassion. Thank you Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde for speaking truth to power on behalf of the marginalized:


George Takei

Thing I realized while listening to Behind the Bastards: Cases of spontaneous combustion really went down after we all stopped wearing polyester, sitting on highly flammable furniture, and smoking all the time.
Maggie Koerth

So far Trump has pardoned more than 1,500 convicted criminals, killed a bunch of jobs, made basic consumer goods more expensive, jacked up the price of many new cars, may cost thousands of autoworkers their livelihoods, and freed a notorious drug trafficker, do I have that right?
Jill Filipovic

One Trump trap I wish Democrats hadn't fallen into was constantly saying, "In America, we don't lock up our political enemies." We absolutely should lock up our political enemies if they've committed crimes!
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

To the extent that fascism has any philosophy, it's a philosophy about supposed natural order and the task of its restoration.And that order is always, always, always a hierarchy. And its restoration is always, always, always the "strong" dominating the "weak"
Gwen Snyder

It took two decades, but with Trump’s sweeping anti-wind executive order, RFK Jr. has prevailed in a 20-year crusade against offshore wind to preserve the viewsheds of wealthy coastal homeowners.
Tyler Norris

The opponents of birthright citizenship are liars. They have no good arguments. They hate Reconstruction and want to destroy its greatest achievements. Say that. Act like that.
Evan Bernick

OTD 2010: "a deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, vastly increased the influence of big business & labor unions by allowing unlimited contributions to political campaigns." (via AP) It only took 15 years for the decision to end democracy in America.
Jen Mercieca

10s of millions of people DO NOT support these fascists. I think that folks really need to keep this top of mind.
Prisonculture

i think the executive orders directing agencies to end energy efficiency regulations and open up more land to drilling and mining is so indicative of the character of the american right — in its view everything, whether people or our larger environment, is something to be exploited and dominated
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

It is not "hard," it is unconstitutional:


Marc Elias

Trump's going to end up making all the good things Biden did visible by taking them away.
emptywheel

An executive order ending birthright citizenship is effectively a suspension of the U.S. Constitution, just so we’re clear about what is happening.
Leah McElrath

The rules, if you are keeping track:
If a single left activist anywhere in the world says "defund the police," it becomes the official position of the Democratic Party, now and forever.
If the president's top surrogate repeatedly sieg-heils on stage, it's ambiguous, impossible to interpret.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

US oil and gas production are at historic highs. Crime, border crossings, and inflation are rapidly falling. And lo, Trump is riding into office on promises to boost oil and gas production and reduce crime, border crossings, and inflation. We now enter a period in which Dems apologize for not doing what they actually did and Trump crows about finally doing what Dems already did. Such fun.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute during Trump's inauguration festivities is something that, yes, I had on my 2025 bingo card.
Nick Martin

There was a time - not long ago! - when referring to immigrants coming into the country as an "invasion" was the fringe and extreme rhetoric of neo-Nazis and white supremacists. It's now being used by the President of the US in his inaugural address and getting loud applause.
Mehdi Hasan

I know that if we framed it this way nobody but his cult voted for this. “Do y’all want to live in 1930 again but with more war and pollution? Have we got the candidate for you!”
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

It has been 60 years since Minnesota experienced as little crime as it did in 2024. For the vast majority of people alive in Minnesota last year was the safest of their lives. Keep this in mind when politicians in upcoming elections attempt to use fear to get you to vote for them!


Tom Olsen @olsenforparks.bsky.social

Again, the perceived need for pre-emptive pardons is a clear sign that the constitutional order has already failed and we have already experience significant democratic backsliding
Mark Copelovitch

Watching all the Democrats show up and shake hands only to have Trump immediately give a speech full of lies call them all evil pieces of shit is really something. Couldn't have seen this coming.
Hamilton Nolan

Trans Liberation Now. Trump can sign his orders, they can pass their bills, ban our existence. None of it changes who we are. Being trans is a gift and one I am so grateful to have received. No fascist Trumpist nationalist bullshit will ever change that. Get some rest. Stay safe. Keep fighting.
Leigh Finke

The mistake people make is in thinking that the election had shit-all to do with anything Kamala Harris or Joe Biden did. It was about the manufactured lie that they were responsible for inflation and international refugees, and Donald Trump could solve it with a magic wand.
Machine Pun Kelly @kellyscaletta.bsky.social

I’m not trans and I’m not going to speak for trans people but I am goddamn sick of ‘moderates’ blaming them for their own oppression.
Gail Simone

I don't even think ethics are the right frame. It's not that he has conflicts. It's that he is looting the position and his supporters. Plus, I think there's a good possibility that his crypto policies will result in a catastrophic crash, that we should start talking about now.
emptywheel

Not to paint all people who like astrology with the same brush, but there's a certain type of woo-woo that is all about narcissistic (in the Laschian sense) magical thinking, and this is also a big part of Trump's appeal.
Ned Resnikoff

what scalable decarbonization tech actually looks like:
e-bikes and e-cargo bikes
bicycle networks
passivhaus retrofits w/ prefab exterior straw wall panels
bus priority lanes
pedestrian zones
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

I think making confident predictions about anything right now is really bold.
Prisonculture

Trump is wildly unpopular and so are his policies! All of the people currently bending the knee cosplay as savvy politics-knowers but it’s not particularly savvy to throw in your lot with an authoritarian criminal whose own voters weren’t informed about his agenda
Michael Hobbes

The politics of the TikTok ban breaking the brains of a lot of liberals shocked that something could be bipartisan and bad at the same time
Gillian Branstetter

"Masculine Energy":


Kevin McShane

Can Congress shut down a social media behemoth popular with millions of Americans? Sure, without even thinking hard about it. Can it add one sentence to 42 USC 1983 to abolish qualified immunity for murderous police officers? Haha no, amend what now?
Joe Dunman

Jesus H Christ. I fail to see how a) a single raspberry, dropped on the floor, can make so much mess and b) how I failed to see that mess, so trod in it and consequently left squished raspberry footprints all over the flat. Suspect this might be one of the early stages of dementia.
Anne Billson

Most Americans really don’t understand what strongman corruption looks like. You just force people to hand things over to your cronies. Maybe they even have to pay a tithe by buying one of Trump’s bullshit online businesses or memecoins. It’s using federal law as a tool to pocket billions in funds.
Anil Dash

*Every* article about Trump as the savior of TikTok needs to point out that the ban was *his idea* in 2020 and he only changed his mind after the billionaire investor in TikTok showered him with money!!
Sean Corcoran

The crusade to weaponize the First Amendment against LGBTQ people marches on. The Court is poised to rule that people have a constitutional right to shield their children from learning about real facts in the world — here, the existence of LGBTQ people.
Senator Scott Wiener

Trump and Republicans want to do everything they can to increase global warming to burn California down. They see it as payback for voting Democratic
Dean Baker
@emptywheel.bsky.social

The fact that “numbers” or “math” is one of the hardest things for “AI” to pull off is just the best example of how absurd it is.
Matt Privratsky

FWIW, I think NYT should fire about 6 of the POLITICAL journalists they've hired from other places and hire 6 more corruption investigators, which may help explain why Eric Lipton personally is exhausted. They should have done it a year ago.
emptywheel

I saw someone say that doomerism is really people with deep depression finding an outlet for it (or something similar), and that helped me reframe it. Like, there are always things to be done, and if you believe things are absolutely hopeless, no way back, that’s a depression thing, not logic.
@harrietvane.bsky.social

If Hitler was alive now so many people would be interviewing him and discussing his ideas on podcasts on some stupid ass fake "objectivity" nonsense.
@shimminykricket.bsky.social

NYT: Trump begins selling a new crypto token, in a move assailed as an ethical breach. “It is literally cashing in on the presidency — creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family” one ethics lawyer said
Eric Lipton NYT

AccuWeather: between LA fires, hurricanes and other weather disasters, the US has suffered $693 to $799 billion in total economic damages over the past 12 mos, equaling nearly 3% of GDP. But remember, it’s the energy transition that’s expensive
Mark Gongloff

It is ok to simply ridicule people who think monarchy is a better than democracy without giving them 4000 words in the paper of record.
Victor Ray

The people who talk about their IQ or that of others always seem like an ad for ignoring the importance of IQ.
Alexander Chee

When you move around primarily or exclusively by car, you may not see the evidence of car crashes around you:
bent sign posts
broken car pieces
broken windshield glass
tire marks, etc.
For those who travel by foot, bike and bus these reminders are everywhere on sidewalks and streets.


LauraGMitchell

The most appropriate treatment of Yarvin is one that recognizes his influence on Silicon Valley billionaires who don’t recognize him as a shallow thinker bc they’ve never taken a single class on political philosophy or history or philosophy
Elizabeth Spiers

AI is eating up every single gain from lifetimes of coordinated labor since the 1970s on energy efficiency across the economy. Just blowing thru those reductions that were the bedrock of reducing climate emissions. We’re trading digital trash for more fires, floods, hurricanes, and death.
isaac @sevier.io

Since 1948 only one President has ever been inaugurated with lower approval ratings... And it was Trump in 2017. Yet this is how the bootlickers at CNN decide to spin it: [CNN Poll: Trump will enter the White House with more positive sentiment than his last term]
Evan Sutton

Every picture of RFK Jr looks like someone boiled a catcher’s mitt, but the right pretends he’s the picture of health. I guess if they can pretend a used make-up sponge like Trump is the epitome of masculinity …
Kevin M. Kruse

Interestingly, more people use TikTok than voted in the 2024 election.
Leah McElrath

As I've said before, I want more discussion of the plastic surgery and doping that the broligarchy is using to affirm their gender:


David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

I'm a simple man, with simple desires. Such as my desire for the party of "fiscal responsibility" suffering consequences for not being fiscally responsible.
The Alternate Historian

Most men have defined masculinity as not-feminine. This means that the more women expand their abilities and interests once the domain of men, these men then have to more narrowly define their masculinity. Soon all that’s left is just the toxic parts.
Elad Nehorai

"Democracy Dies in Darkness" is kinda like "Don't Be Evil" as a slogan. It's a bit worrying when you choose it, but it's a lot more worrying when you take it down
The Love Song of AGP Prufrock @grayathena.bsky.social

It's crazy how many problems would have been solved if the American engineering profession, back in the 1930s, had decided: "Every bridge should just have a 10-15' walking/biking path, even if we don't think many folks will use it, just for good measure."
Warren Wells, AICP

Several core aspects of journalism are intrinsically at odds with the consumer capitalist dictate to keep users "happy." It's crazy that we try to pretend otherwise. The ineluctable fact is, if you want the most eyeballs, the most clicks, the most "happy users," good journalism is a *terrible strategy*. Truth is expensive to obtain, slow to reveal itself, complicated, nuanced, often orthogonal to neat ideological conclusions.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Listen, if they really cared about girl’s sports, they would make sure that girls have the same access as boys to funding. Or facilities. Or coaches. Or uniforms. Or bus budgets. They don’t care about girl’s sports. They care about punching down on a minuscule number of trans athletes.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

Your periodic reminder that no part of the climate emergency was inevitable. It is simply a product of rich men in powerful positions being greedy and throwing the rest of us and the entire living world under the bus in the process. It's really that simple. We have the right to be angry.
Eric Holthaus

100%. Musk spent a fortune on Twitter and drove it into the ground financially because he didn't care about ROI, he wanted to mess with a platform where "the left" thrived and organized. That was worth it to him. We see why, now.
David Brown @orbitstudios.bsky.social

A big part of the reason the rich bad guys are winning is that they understand that buying mainstream media and social media isn’t about making money on that mainstream media or social media. It’s about power and control, and making MUCH more money as a result of that power and control.
Brent Toderian

If you do the arithmetic (I know the people who complain about DEI tend to have trouble with numbers), there are probably 100 kids blaming affirmative action as the reason they didn't get into Harvard for every Black kid who was plausibly an affirmative action admittance.
Dean Baker

On this day in 1832, Alabama passed a law outlawing aspects of Muscogee and Cherokee peoples' daily lives and allowing white people to seize their land through fraud.
Equal Justice Initiative @eji.org

I guess “populist” is now code for “deeply unqualified and probably a little rapey”
Lyz

I assume Hegseth, a sexual predator with untreated substance abuse, will behave more responsibly when given more power
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

As the forces of delay turn their attention to the environmental and health impacts of wind turbines, a reminder that:
- there's a whole region of the USA called 'Cancer Alley', where oil refineries are concentrated
- whales don't like oil spills
Dr Charlie Gardner

Anyone who thinks Elon Musk is smart is a blithering idiot. Mr. Musk speculated that humans could more than double the carbon in the atmosphere before experiencing its effects, which he suggested would be limited to headaches and nausea.
Mary B @mboyleny.bsky.social

At confirmation hearing, Pam Bondi repeated Trump’s false accusations by testifying that DOJ “has been weaponized for years and years and years, and it has to stop.” That is a disqualifying lie about the public servants who have devoted their careers to upholding the rule of law.
Barb McQuade

SECDEF-to-be Pete Hegseth multiple times and multiple books equates ordinary Democrats with "Marxists", "domestic enemies", "they hate America", "they want to overthrow the Constitution." It serves as foundation for his argument that military commanders should have disobeyed Obama and Biden
David Burbach

Witnessing history would be an interesting intellectual exercise, but the stakes are too high to not get emotional or irrational.
@kathyk.bsky.social

Friends, my husband's new thing is listening to audiobooks while he drives to work. On a whim, he decided to start Pride and Prejudice (without knowing anything about it) Things he has said to me so far:
• Mr. Darcy is a jerk
• I feel like I'm listening to Downton Abbey
• Is Jane Austen still alive?
Jacqueline Antonovich

Trump is transforming tech billionaires into court jesters that he can summon for companionship and mock for amusement:


Marc Elias

I wish the average person — even those firmly in the middle and upper-middle class — understood they receive far more value from strong social, economic, and infrastructure programs than they’ll ever get back via arbitrary government tax cuts.
Aidan Moher @aidanis.fun

The fundamental truth is that none of the people screaming about DEI would have any of the money, power, or influence they do if they weren’t white men.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

how many of these NIMBYs talking about housing as a threat to orcas own cars? i bet it's 100%.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social