BlueSky, June 2026 Part 1

Let's see, the first half of June 2026... I'm sure nothing much happened, right?

It began with continuing reaction to the Supreme Court and Republicans attempting to gut the Voting Rights Act and reinstating Jim Crow. 

As Elon Musk exhorted an anti-immigrant pogrom in Belfast, SpaceX had its IPO, making Musk a paper trillionaire. There's a whole section of reaction posts about that. 

The last couple of days went from the farce of Trump trying to hide his name being removed from the Kennedy Center, to his big boy birthday party (previewed yesterday), to his fake deal with Iran (details still unclear). 

In between all of that, there was screw worm in Texas, the California elections, the Knicks winning the NBA finals, the World Cup coming to North America, and lot of other stuff.

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

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Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees’ – lol
Bill Kristol

needed a new portrait for various things so decided to take a self-one with my new hat:


jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I am begging cisgender people to stop using the pronoun part of their introductions in meeting to say nouns that are clearly not the pronouns they actually use. I don't care if you have ~feelings~ about being asked pronouns. You are mocking trans people.
Dex Anderson

They're gonna pay Iran back for damages but not Minneapolis.
Gourdon P. Squash @dewterium2.bsky.social

Wow — Netanyahu reportedly used to refer to President Obama as “boy.” File this as yet another piece of information that is shocking but not surprising.
Leah McElrath

I feel it’s sort of underrated the extent to which a Dem Congress and/or states could (1) absolutely destroy car dealerships as a business, and (2) this would cripple a lot of GOP state and local parties
Vituperative Erb

i have been obsessed with this for years. allowing manufacturers to sell direct to consumers would be good for consumers and also destroying the car dealership would be an existential crisis for republicans
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Custom-made tarps just so the tangerine baby doesn't have a tantrum that his name has been taken off a building (which shouldn't have been there in the first place)?


Ann Telnaes

Trump promised an unconditional surrender in Iran. Today, he delivered on that promise.
NY Times Pitchbot

Drivers: “You’re gonna get yourself killed!”
Cyclists: “Who’s doing the killing?!?”
Bill Winterberg

It's honestly not that hard to go through life without anyone "confusing" your gestures for a Nazi salute.
Patrick Chovanec

Everything I have learned about UFC is against my will.
Nate Pentz

Trump also had the Thunder birds do a flyover during the National Anthem at the UFC event at the White House. How many million did that cost taxpayers. And the honor guard escorts for fighters at the Lincoln Memorial? And cost of Secret Service?
Sherry @sherry2.bsky.social

may we remember speaker hortman every time a kid in Minnesota eats their free lunch. 
every time a trans person moves to mn for safety. 
when an undocumented person gets their driver’s license or a returning citizen gets to vote.
when we have clean energy and electric school buses and warm homes.
when we ride the buses that are funded with new taxes and see low-income kids go to college for free.
when we see solar panels on schools.
when we know we can access abortion care and live in homes without lead pipes.
her memory will be a blessing.
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com


Ramin Nasibov

it's notable to me that the administration tried to frame tonight's UFC event as a "gift to Americans" but you can't watch it unless you have a paid subscription to Paramount+
Aaron Rupar

“More than 700 women have been murdered in the UK since 2020, but we didn’t see those claiming that their actions are about ‘protecting women and girls’ riot over those, because the majority of perpetrators were white.”
Liberal Currents

Men who commit this kind of violence with this kind of rhetoric are not protecting women and girls; they are trying to legislate which men have the right to harm women and girls (and of course it's men like them and not those other men).
Rebecca Solnit

Think of all the people who died just for Trump to re-establish a weaker, unenforceable version of Obama's nuclear deal.
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

The president waged an unnecessary war, cratered the economy and wound up losing it anyway, and to celebrate his failures, he's going to throw himself a big birthday party with UFC fighters and dirt bike ramps and fireworks and cake and ice cream and
Kevin M. Kruse

Among the many reforms we need is a ban on every federal official of any importance, appointed or elected, from filing defamation lawsuits or claims for monetary damages against the United States. Hard to justify them in normal times and we've seen rampant abuse of them lately. End them entirely.
Max Kennerly

For National Pigeon Day, some very fancy pigeons courtesy of Emil Schachtzabel's Illustriertes Prachtwerk sämtlicher Taubenrassen (1906):


The Public Domain Review

A company called Surron realized parents think “electric” means “slow and safe” so they’ve made a fucking fortune selling incredibly dangerous electric dirt bikes to middle schoolers, who then do not use them responsibly on roads because they are 12 years old
Kelvin Q Goblin @stuntbirdarmy.bsky.social

Your reminder that fairy tales are full of stepmothers because women once routinely died in childbirth, from postpartum sepsis, or from other infectious diseases and left behind housefuls of motherless children. Stable nuclear families are made possible by vaccines, antibiotics, and safe abortions.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber

The Knicks only lost one game in the last two months and it was the one Trump went to lmao
Molly Knight

Last time the Knicks were NBA champions was the year the DOJ charged Fred & Donald Trump with housing discrimination based on race.
Dana Houle

It's truly astonishing to look at the personal backgrounds of the past six presidents:
Dems:
1. Poor child of a single mom
2. Biracial child of a single mom
3. Scrappy son of Scranton
GOP:
1. Scion of wealth, son of a senator
2. Scion of wealth, son of a president
3. Son of a millionaire slumlord
D Lavoie



Tom Flood

Ian Fleming might have made the world’s first trillionaire as evil as Elon Musk, but only Philip K. Dick could have made him such a pathetic drug-addled loser, desperate for attention and adulation but incapable of human relationships, and now terrified to go out in public.
Carl T. Bergstrom

By the way, Elon Musk didn't start Tesla. By the time he invested in Tesla, the original founders had already started building the Roadster THEY had designed. When he bought them out, he changed the history of the company to make himself a founder. I'm not joking. He's always been a fraud.
Sheryl Weikal @leftistlawyer.com

To be very precise, on top of being a useless conman, he is one of the biggest mass-murders in history, a genocideer on par with any of history's other monsters.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

It’s all very explicit. Musk wants to use his wealth and influence to undo multiracial democracies across the world. He doesn’t try to hide it!
Denny Carter

Elon Musk accumulates $17.6 billion per week. That's about what Kansas spends in a year. It's more than the annual budgets of nineteen states.
Bryan Edward Stone @bestonetx.bsky.social

It’s partly about state capture. He has tapped the federal government
Holly Brewer @earlymodjustice.bsky.social

it's so wild to see so much wild-eyed hand-wringing about Elon Musk when we could have simply let Tesla go bankrupt at any of like 15 separate moments of crisis and never had to deal with three quarters of this bullshit
e.w. niedermeyer

We have forgotten our history. The reason elites finally capitulated to representative forms of government and regulations is that they got tired of angry mobs doing angry mob shit. I am NOT ADVOCATING VIOLENCE, thank you very much, I am simply noting that every period of wild economic disparity has resulted in the 99% wrecking shit and committing murders. Like, it just keeps happening. And now we have a trillionaire.
Sigrid Ellis

a little on the nose for capitalism that the world’s first trillionaire is a nazi conman
Micah @rincewind.run

1 million seconds = 11.5 days
1 billion seconds = 31.7 years 
1 trillion seconds = 31,700 years
Erin Maye Quade

I've reported on Musk for around 8 years. I've co-authored a book on him. I don't think folks understand the rate of his wealth accumulation. Shortly after he helped elect Donald Trump in Nov 2024, his net worth was around $350 billion. That net worth has nearly tripled in less than two years.
Ryan Mac

On the day before Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire, all I can think about is that time in 2021 when the head of the UN World Food Program asked Musk to donate $6 billion to save 42 million people from starvation and he refused.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

By @myvoicemychoice.bsky.social:


Trains Trams Tracks

Anti-fash counter-protests outnumber fash marches all the time and it would be cool if the press made a big deal about it.
Sooz Kempner @soozuk.bsky.social

LLMs telling people they can talk to Holocaust victims or enslaved people from hundreds of years ago is a repeat of the Guilded Age obsession with seances. It's tarot cards brought to you by tech bros who refuse to read. it is literally sacrilege to pretend that your computer program can reverse a genocide
Craig Johnson @cajohnson-craig.bsky.social

The president is trying to downsize the U.S Forest Service and eliminate wildfire and smoke research as the American West is facing a potentially epic summer fire season.
NPR

Explain to me like I’m 10 years old: CO₂ removal (CDR) requires a lot of renewable energy. When we’re still burning fossil fuels for energy & releasing billions of tonnes of CO₂, why wouldn’t we use that renewable energy to curtail the use of fossil fuels?
David Ho

Some doctors and medical organisations have jumped on the pearl clutching“e-bikes are evil” bandwagon while never ever having spoken out on the *orders of magnitude* greater adverse societal effects of driver violence or the negative effects on health of car dependency. Infuriating and embarrassing. The fact is most serious injuries/deaths in e-bike/motorcycle accidents are caused by drivers of cars or the blame/responsibility is shared or is partially caused by poor infrastructure/parked cars blocking sightlines etc. The media chooses not to focus on this.
Dr. Lesley Barron, MD, MPhil, FRACS 

Just as I predicted, they’re covering up the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center just like, you know, the Epstein files.
Kiera @kieragorden.bsky.social

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY CLOSE TO A DEAL WITH EURASIA
Dan Hon

If 50% of the people in the United States gave up on car dependency, it would transform our society and politics in ways we can't even imagine.
Pedestrianize it @mplsdromomania.bsky.social
 
Is anyone in the FBI still going after criminals, like drug dealers, extortionists, sex traffickers and the like, or are they all going after Donald Trump's political enemies?
Dean Baker

The Ellisons now own TikTok, Paramount, Warner Bros, CBS News, HBO, Comedy Central, and CNN, among other major channels. They are also the largest private donor to "Friends of the IDF." They also paid $7 billion for streaming rights to UFC, which is hosting an event at the White House.
Wajahat Ali

When a mass call for justice goes out, as it did during the Summer of 2020, you can either embrace it, or you can do countless other things, big and small, to enable a fascistic response to it. Obama’s election made racial resentment even more salient, but it’s the Summer of 2020 that truly catalyzed the organized, bigoted street thuggery, supported by supremacist elites, we see today.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

The hilarious thing about people complaining about 14-year olds on e-bikes that are too powerful is that in less than two years these kids will be able to drive 500hp, 5000lb vehicles.
Andrew Blum

Every bike is just doing recreation and every car is carrying thirty-eight sick grandmas
lumberjack wharfie

MAGA throws out the welcome mat:


Pat Bagley

Friends and Seinfeld are the perfect example of white culture, because those shows are not funny to Black folks. Just nothing about it strikes us as funny like for y'all. I'm pretty sure tons of us feel this way. So if you're curious about what is actual white American culture, it's those shows.
Chantal James @chantalalive.blacksky.app

I often think that Economics, the field, doesn't explain, or aspire, it justifies. And what it usually ends up justifying is why capitalism must be, with all of its racism, rapaciousness and hollowing effects. The human spirit demands and deserves more, and our imaginations can get us there.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

We have no idea just how far behind the United States will be in 2028. We'll have nothing: no national science infrastructure, no agricultural progress, no medical progress. The oligarch class has decided to hollow America out in a hedge fund takeover. We are being robbed of our future.
Elf M. Sternberg

Watching the right wing Belfast reaction and understanding how a lot of outlets would have covered the Tulsa race massacre
Tim Dickinson

And bus stops that you can actually walk to, and aren't just a snow bank in someone's front yard in the winter.
Jon @jonvw4.bsky.social

NEW: In 2022, Bitcoin miners promised Corpus Christi millions in tax revenues in exchange for the de-annexation of their water-sucking cryptomine. Four years later, the city is in a water crisis & the mine has yielded only a minute fraction of what was promised. –The Texas Observer
Candice Bernd

Mississippi’s state auditor does not have the authority to sue to recover misspent welfare funds from Brett Favre or other defendants, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled today. The court said only the attorney general can do so, but the auditor has accused her of refusing to pursue all the funds.
Mississippi Free Press

So only some states get accused of fraud, and only if they are not white.
quick13

Illustrations of various strains of pollen in extreme magnification, as featured in Ueber den Pollen (1837), a book by St. Petersburg based German pharmacist and chemist Carl Julius Fritzsche: 


The Public Domain Review

Remember a little while ago when we all found out that a bunch of prominent right-wing influencers were straight-up paid by Russians and everyone just shrugged?
David Roberts @volts.wtf

We are experiencing a radical deconstruction of our republic, and the only answer to radical problems are radical solutions. Expand SCOTUS to 27. Pick up the “good behavior” clause and weaponize it. Affirm the ERA. Normalize Constitutional amendments. Expand the House by population density. We should also be introducing aggressive anti-corruption ideas like a Constitutional amendment affirming the right of citizens to vote, public funding of elections at a max of 1.5-2% of the federal budget, and preventing Authorized Uses of Military Force from being passed without an audit of military spending.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Compared to e-cars, e-bikes use about 2% of the material, 5% of the energy, 10% of the lane-space, and 10% of the parking space.
Ellie Saurus

Whenever we talk about this administration or Republicans in general wanting something positive regarding people, it can no longer be unspoken that they mean WHITE people. The White House wants more WHITE doctors, so its deadly immigration policy is not contradictory to that desire in any way.
Amadi Lovelace @amaditalks.bsky.social

And to think that God created this whole mess.
MaryMM

I’m a pretty cynical person, yet I never thought I’d live to see a post-Jim Crow American political party take the position that “racist pogroms are good actually.”
Seth Cotlar

My family left what is now Ukraine because of anti-Jewish pogroms -- and those who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust -- and I am completely comfortable calling what is happening in Belfast a pogrom
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

If your response to discussions sparked by drivers hitting and killing pedestrians is to always show up and say "but also pedestrians need to do better," genuinely with all the kindness I can muster: Fuck off.
Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social

So this happened. "A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties"
Social Media Lab

st. joseph auto and furniture fabric slip cover sign, saint joseph, missouri, 1988:


old roadside pics

Unconscionable: ICE deported one the organizers of the Union of People Kidnapped by ICE, Rogelio Bolufe Izquierdo, after he organized a hunger strike at the Tacoma, WA. detention camp. Bolufe Izquierdo is a Cuban national. They deported him to Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Whitney Curry Wimbish

The policy of the Trump Administration is straightforwardly that there are too many black people achieving things
jesse @jesseltaylor.bsky.social

Each ICE operation generates roughly $196,000 in monthly losses for nearby businesses and communities. (That's 11x the government's administrative cost of a deportation.) Why? ICE activity decreases foot traffic in those public areas.
John Holbein

Trump is not just a bad president. He's the Confederacy in control of the White House. Not merely an administration violating the Constitution in this or that particular matter, a regime fundamentally without legal validity in all respects whatsoever. A rebellion against the supreme law of the land. That is the framework we must work with if post-Trump Reconstruction is to build a lasting constitutional settlement and not just be another pause before we're right back to square one with the next traitor and tyrant. And that can not happen with his judicial enablers still in unchecked power. If you hate that court packing has, in just a couple of years, gone from unserious fringe idea to the mainstream Democratic position and something they’re very likely to do, the target of your ire should be the Roberts six. They have brought it on themselves. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Court packing isn't setting off a judicial legitimacy crisis. We are faced with a judicial legitimacy crisis that is already here, a court that half or more of the country has good reason to see as not just conservative but as enemies of the republic. "Too bad, accept it" isn't an answer that works.
Andy Craig

one thing I definitely don't remember about the Bicentennial is Gerald Ford hanging huge banners of his face everywhere, but I was just a kid, I might have missed that
Tom Tomorrow

I hope later in the season I'll have a bit more to work with to really fill the frame but it's June, dangit, it's rainbow time!


The Andrea Borden @thislitgarbage.bsky.social

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

Congress voted to give ICE and CBP another $70 billion through 2029. "There is no question that this bill passing will make it incredibly difficult to reverse the creation of a huge deportation machine at the hands of President Trump,”
American Immigration Council

In the last 18 months, Congress has given DHS $240 billion — a quarter of a trillion.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

this is a form of state looting with the side effect of reorienting the economy into that of a garrison state
utopia deferred

This is why all of you have a DUTY to stop parroting austerity language at the Federal level. The money is there. It's just not going to supporting life affirming institutions and programs.
Prisonculture

I find it amazing that we're in the middle of a historic oil crisis and the most energy-intensive industry in history is seeing valuations shoot to the moon.
Patrick Chovanec

i don't know how we proceed as a society if every time someone somewhere does a crime and they happen to be from an outgroup then that isolated incident can be blown up all over social media into a total war fantasy that instigates sustained hate campaigns and pogroms
ben chambers

For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal
Grist

Democrats should also be really thinking now about insane it's going to feel if we win in 2028 and Musk is babbling about the need for a race war and calling the president a satanic pedophile while also being the most important government contractor in the country.
Nathan Goldwag

The Iran War bumped inflation over nominal wage growth for 2 months. That means real wages actually shrank last month by 0.8%.
Steve Rattner


Bethankit Hums @tangibullah.bsky.social

It’s a pretty weird week when a guy who wants to be a trillionaire is simultaneously getting headlines for the economy-shattering IPO expected Friday and the racist pogroms he is accused of stoking — but these stories are viewed as separate and in no way connected or prescient of the future.
Molly McKew

The violence in Belfast is a reminder of something I don’t want to take for granted: The fascists here hoped the response to the depredations of ICE would be similar, with people turning in or attacking their neighbors. That it was the very opposite is worth remembering in this season of despair And most leaders in politics, media, and business were pretty much ready to go along. If Americans had committed some pogroms, there would have been hand-wringing and denunciations, but ultimately immigration itself would have been blamed and we’d have been told we had to listen to the violent racists.
Levi Stahl

Folks, there was never a “ceasefire.” Both sides only adjusted the tactics they were using the win the war. For the U.S., the high-intensity bombing campaign wasn’t getting us closer to any clear goal, and was rapidly depleting our weapons stockpile. So we shifted to a blockade, which is still an act of war. For the Iranians, shooting missiles at third countries wasn’t clearly accomplishing anything either, that they couldn’t achieve better by just stopping traffic in the Strait and waiting.
Patrick Chovanec

If Democrats were actually “rigging” elections, then we sure as shit wouldn’t have Trump in the White House and Republican majorities in the House and Senate. The entire narrative is ridiculous and serves as a screen for the Republican belief than only votes from white people should count.
Leah McElrath

The East India Company: arguably a better historical analogy for AI imperialism than the first industrial revolution.
Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social

the vision for positive masculinity is feminism.
Marisa Kabas

I think the thing undermining confidence in elections is the sitting president and his political party constantly trying to steal them
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

So, the biggest IPO in the history of the world has the vast majority of its future value being created by an AI platform whose only distinction, thus far, is that it is the only one that's generated sexualized imagery of children? And they're going to force it into our 401ks so we're bag-holders?
Anil Dash

Me, a smart free thinker who won’t surrender to the Woke mob: how is it possible a Republican lost in Los Angeles
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

Sea levels are now rising by 4.3 mm per year. That's really fast
Dr Charlie Gardner

Spotted on the NYC subway. “One prompt, job gone!”


Kathleen Bachynski

Call me an idealist, but I think that a prerequisite for hosting an international sport event should be that you're willing to host an international sport event.
Tom Phillips

ACTUAL GOOD NEWS ALERT: battery discharge on Australia's main grid just overtook gas peaking plants. Not long before it overtakes *all gas combined*. Not long before renewables overtake coal, too. None of this was meant to be possible!
Ketan Joshi

Banks poured $906bn into fossil fuels last year. Either way it's a bad bet. If we don't decarbonise, the physical damage wrecks the economy they're betting on. If we do, those assets strand and they eat the transition risk. Heads you lose, tails you lose. Don't trust them with your money.
Dr. Aaron Thierry

At the risk of stating the obvious: when reactionaries say elections are "rigged," what they mean -- in their hearts, in their guts -- is that their opponents are illegitimate and it only counts if they win. That's what they've always meant.... Progressives should try to make things better, for everyone, but they should not take those feelings as *evidence of anything*. They reveal nothing about the actual world, as evidenced by their persistence through wildly differing circumstances. They only reveal the character of those feeling them.... And like everything else in reactionary politics, it is a *feeling*, not a conclusion drawn from evidence. No amount of procedural reforms (however badly they are needed in many cases) will eliminate that feeling.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Trump's Agriculture Secretary dismisses the deadly, flesh-eating New World Screwworm as "just a little pest"
FactPost

Seriously, if you're a congressmember, why not hold a press conference to announce that, using Mike Johnson's own standard of evidence-free evidence, you're demanding his immediate removal from the House.
Kevin M. Kruse

"Something remarkable happened in April. For the first time in history, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas across the entire planet. Not in a country. Not in a region. Globally."
David Roberts @volts.wtf

I suspect this might be the best photo I ever take:


TLDR Jack

I’m so frustrated that I have to argue 20th century philosophy about whether machines are people and 18th century science about whether germs are real and fucking 15th century colonial bullshit about whether people are human beings.
Chris Dwan @somershade.bsky.social

An idiotic reality TV star running one of America's largest cities. Ha. Can you imagine. Dodged that bullet
Thor Benson

A City of Chicago employee who planned bike infrastructure projects was killed on Friday afternoon riding his bike in the Bridgeport neighborhood. His name was Riley O’Neil and he and I went to high school together and played on the lacrosse team together.
Infest The Pat’s Nest @derblutenpat.bsky.social

When you hear people complain about bike lanes, please remember that there's a reason for streets designed to keep bicyclists and pedestrians safer. No one should be killed because someone opens their car door. Yes that person should have looked remember: bad design kills.
Sheila Regan

Rubbing our faces in rank hypocrisy is another form of bullying. It’s a key feature of modern-day Republicanism.
Elizabeth Gormley

"What the Wounds Tell" just won this year’s European Press Prize. "Doctors in Gaza observed a disturbing pattern: children with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest, a sign that they had been deliberately targeted."
Amarnath Amarasingam

By far the biggest problem with delegating judgement to machines is the people who own the machines can tune them towards outcomes they prefer but those who don't own anything can't. It's not the technology. It's a transfer of decision making power from rational accountable systems to capital.
Mallory Moore @sexabolition.blog

The LA election discourse is a good reminder that Democrats are overly process focused and build well-intentioned systems that move far too slowly, whereas Republicans are really stupid.
James Medlock

I live in a building of 374 apartments and about 550 residents. We have five elevator cars. The problem is, two elevator cars are nearly every single weekday reserved from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm for move ins, move outs, and deliveries. I count 4 move ins and 7 move outs in next month. That's a lot!
Conrad Lange Zbikowski @czbi.org

sign at mt. kisco, new york anti-trump protest this past week:


Rachel Maddow

most Americans do not realize: your car already has a speed governor in it — it's just set at a super high speed to avoid damaging your engine, not for safety. "Install a speed governor" is literally just changing a setting in your car's computer and that's it.
mtsw

At this point, Trump could slap a journalist dead in the face and the corporate media would dumb it down to "tense," "contentious" or "controversial." Dude had what sure looked like a mental health break on camera. And I'm sick of journalists not clapping back when he calls them stupid.
Joy-Ann Reid

There are currently more bills attacking trans youth’s right to play sports across the U.S. than there are trans youth in school sports.
ACLU

MAGA: "Cities are all disgusting hellholes that need to be ground under Trump's bootheel."
Also MAGA: "Why do none of our guys win in cities? There must be some giant conspiracy going on!!!"
The Alternate Historian

The reason Men are panicking about Gender is that thanks to the internet, we (everyone who isn't a Man) have been able to compare notes on Men worldwide and WOW it's not looking good
Sarah Walsh @bigdamnherossir.bsky.social

Any deal made with Trump should be honored just as much as Trump honors any deal he makes. Tell him if he wants deals that favor him honored, he should go back and pay every contractor he stiffed, with interest. And then, if he actually does it and pays them back, prosecute him anyway. Fuck him.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

We quite literally have a whites-only refugee program and somehow the media won’t call the Administration white supremacists.
Grudgie the Whale

That is so the truth!


@cheryl2877.bsky.social

If there was more space between the story of "corporate brilliance" and the story of "extracting from living systems and leaving degraded complexity in your wake" we wouldn't keep ending up in these situations.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Bitcoin is down more than 50% from its peak, converging on its fundamental value (zero)
Dean Baker

DOGE's goal of declaring 2.7 million living people dead was to make "immigrants so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested," the whistleblower said. (Washington Post story)
Penelope Wang @pennywriter.bsky.social

seeing stores roll out insanely large sections of patriotic bullshit right now feels so out of touch and makes me feel even more queasy than usual
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com

"maga leads to flesh eating disease" – headlines just write themselves
Shiv Ramdas @nameshiv.bsky.social

Again, Bill Pulte is a 38-year-old -- no really, 38 -- who only holds a BA in broadcast journalism and absolutely zero experience in the intelligence field. He has no qualifications for this job at all. Aside from being a psychotic lickspittle to the president.
Kevin M. Kruse

The Republicans honored a person whose only claim to fame was murdering a Black man in broad daylight. But hey, they're not racist!
Dean Baker

I wish politicians were more 'open-minded' about preventing the destruction of everything we know and love:


Dr Charlie Gardner

The American people are paying $1.5 million A DAY to keep 2,800 Guard members in DC. "The presence of the Guard had no effect on violent crimes, including robberies, which were already on a downward trend before Trump came back into office."
Celeste Headlee

My crankiest old man take is that referring to all art/entertainment/journalism/criticism/comedy/advertising as “content” helped pave the way for broad-ish acceptance of AI slop.
Josh Gondelman

the datacenter backlash is depressing because no one can imagine regulating something novel directly anymore
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social

It's ridiculous that police departments make up around 30-50% of the average municipality's budget, but those same police look at you like you're stupid if you ever ask them to investigate a crime.
Stan Oklobdzija

back in the “defund the police” days I kept trying to find an alternate slogan like “make police work for their funds”
Hyperlexic

I'll say this for the Supreme Court: they're making it easier for me to convince people of the necessity and urgency of court reform
Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app

It’s the Segregationist Court of the United States, and should only be referred to as such.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

What's happening to CBS News is what the tech oligarchs call "parallel" strategy. Buy an existing institution, gut it, and convert it into a right-wing zombie version of itself. They are doing this to media, government, education, biotech, defense tech, etc. Some call it the "Network State." This bundling of all institutions into one quasi-religious political cause is a hallmark of fascism. as are the lies, the purges, the scapegoating of minority groups, the stoking of tensions around gender and sexuality, etc. Corporate is government is religion.
Gil Durán

John Roberts: “Turns out the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution is unconstitutional.”
Scrooge Jones @fitzador.bsky.social

these bastards think they own us:


Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com

This will not end with voting rights. The fundamental premises of these SCOTUS opinions are:
1) Anti-discrimination is actually unconstitutional discrimination;
2) Intentional discrimination isn't actionable if any alternative rationale is presented.
It's the beginning of the end of civil rights law.
Corey Rayburn Yung

Enrique Tarrio claimed that the end of the Abominable Slush Fund is no big deal because the Justice Department will just settle the lawsuits with individual J6 rioters in the same way that they were going to settle in bulk through the slush fund. He claimed the admin told him so.
Lindsay Beyerstein

Much like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute is a terrorist organization disguised as a think tank.
@scarpity026.bsky.social

The new owner of the network bought it to tear down its news department's ability to annoy him. The new head of the news department took the job to settle scores with an industry that had rejected her low-effort, high-bias style. None of this is about building anything.
Sam Bergman @violanorth.bsky.social

There are lots of reasons to believe in the effectiveness of nonviolence in protest and resistance movements. But I no longer buy the idea that remaining non-violent will ensure more favourable media coverage. Media will demonise any protest that's against the interests of the billionaire class and more favourably frame any protest that aligns with the interests of the billionaire class. I'm not advocating violence, coverage of climate and social justice movements would undoubtedly be worse if they were violent. But violence isn't what determines the frame.
Dr Charlie Gardner

New research examines Waymo's California robotaxi trips btw Aug 2023 and Dec 2025. Conclusion: 46% of miles driven involved no one inside the car. That's 40 million miles of deadheading, with Waymo vehicles using road space w/o transporting a human.
David Zipper

Not great! Sounds like charging these companies based on miles driven (VMT fees) will be even more essential. Maybe a higher rate when the vehicle is empty.
Regina Burstein @mplsfietser.bike

For an assignment, I spent 1.5 hours at a stop sign by U of Toronto. Out of 228 vehicles, 208 did not stop. 59 when pedestrians were waiting or actively crossing. I saw 20/228 (9%) lawful interactions w/ that stop sign. If police showed any force to even one of those 208 drivers, there would be riots.
Shane Gates

Imagine being so unable to love your child that you set fire to the whole damn world instead:


George Wallace @mrgeorgewallace.bsky.social

If you think, as the MN GOP does, that a man convicted of murdering a black person is being vilified, it’s because you think it’s okay to murder black people. All decent human beings must come to the conclusion that the Republican Party deserves destroying.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Pro tip: if you want to live in a suburb, go live in one. Don’t try to make the largest city in your region one
Alessandro Rigolon

"I spent about as much as people spend on parking at the office for 4 months." or "Around 30 tanks of gas." or "Less than the 50,000 mile service at the dealership." or "less than one year of car insurance", or "About 1/15th as much as my car."
Christopher Schmidt

When someone asked me how much my bike was, I’d be a bit sheepish and give a disclaimer acknowledging it’s “expensive”. But I stopped doing that because as a mode of transportation, high quality bicycles are cheap. I suggest bike people stop saying good quality bikes are "expensive."
peter k @peterskim.org

One must imagine Socrates reading his teaching evaluations
Paul Musgrave @professormusgrave.bsky.social

You may soothe yourself, with an assist from elite propaganda, by thinking two equal forces are duking it out, but the reality is, your fellow citizens are being illegally bludgeoned by barbaric agents of the state, at the behest of a leader who anti-fascists are meant to believe is their ally.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

my favorite time on bluesky is the liminal space early in the morning in the US, when British people are rightfully complaining about how unsafe and inadequate their infrastructure is for non-drivers. Just before Americans start posting and show how much worse transportation can be.
Politics of Cars @thismachinekillsfascists.bike

Here’s my pied-à-terre idea: a $100,000 fee on every chopper flight between JFK and Manhattan, which is truly the dumbest chopper flight to ever exist
Nolan Hicks @ndhapple.bsky.social

My god, Octavia Butler, just miss ONCE:


Maggie Wiggin