BlueSky, July 2026 Part 2

The second half of July 2026 was a time of climate change-induced wildfire smoke and infested lettuce causing diarrhea, courtesy at least in part because of our current administration's undermining of regulation. 

The first half of the month ended with Trump giving a speech about his election interference plans, so this part begins with a few references to that. 

At the end of the month, Republicans had a bizarre show-trial hearing with Anthony Fauci, as if he was guilty of some kind of crime during he covid epidemic. I successfully ignored almost all the discussion of the Odyssey movie. And of course, Trump's corruption and continued apace. 

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

__

Rich people hate poor people so, so, so, so much. They have almost complete class solidarity.
Garrett Gilchrist

People who scolded that we need to allow more and more fascist-friendly Republican ideas in order to win do not have the same energy for actual progressives who actually win. Movement to the right during a time of open fascism? Hey gotta have a big tent. Movement to the left? GET OUT OF OUR TENT.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

This grotesque headline is from the Telegraph. 3,000 people in Britain have been killed in heatwaves this year so far. 20,000 in Europe. Even if Britain did get to “embrace Mediterranean life”, what about the actual Mediterranean, what do they get to embrace? What about India?


Jason Hickel

Here's the thing... If I were to saunter up to an ICE agent and deploy pepper spray in their face it would be considered a criminal assault. But, when ICE does it, it isn't?
spencerdow.bsky.social

Endometriosis takes nine years to diagnose. That’s about to change. NICE has approved two tests: a saliva test reading microRNA markers, and a gut-sensor test returning results in 45 minutes, sparing women the keyhole surgery currently needed.  
Ada Palmer

HUD holds detailed, confidential information from hundreds of thousands of victims of housing discrimination, domestic violence reports and medical records. DOGE got that data. What did they do with it?
Investigate DOGE

People are arguing between road design and enforcement. In the Netherlands, not only do they have both, but they have a third tool: presumed liability. Drivers who hit a pedestrian or cyclist are presumed to be at fault until proven otherwise. This would be a powerful tool in our litigious society.
OB Cycler

America's highest profile gutter racist to spend $100 million supporting the party of racism.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

literally every other week people invent reasons why liberals and socialists should dislike each other. yeah maybe they should in the ideal world where we have a serious interesting debate about the merits of each ideology but in the real world people vote against things and any port in a storm man
Jay Zedbee

my architecture feeds are full of multifamily housing in single stair buildings in walkable neighborhoods where homes have views of cities or trees or parks - meanwhile the apartments in this city tend to have views of stroads or... other buildings that are incredibly close. we should change this.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

Bordeaux, France, has now recorded more days above 40°C [104°F] in 2026 alone than during the entire 105-year period from 1920 (when observations began) to 2025. This is deeply shocking.
Nahel Belgherze @wxnb.bsky.social

Lifted pickups are extremely dangerous. Their blind zones are enormous, and they can crush anyone or anything in their path. Keep in mind: Lift kits fall under state jurisdiction. State legislators and regulators can restrict them, or even ban them completely:


David Zipper

looking at the headlines and reflecting once again on how all the smart, hard-working, honest people I know feel like they’re going at least a little insane in our era of total Stupid Immoral Asshole ascendancy. it’s never a great sign for your society when all the competent people who believe in doing a good job for the sake of it conclude that they’re actively being punished for these qualities, while malignantly stupid criminals are making bank
Faine Greenwood

Trump makes his corruption open and explicit on purpose: It helps normalize and numb people to it, and puts our institutions on notice that they need to bend the knee to him.
Greg Sargent

Well this is true I suppose. trump can’t be bought; he is subscription based. You have to keep bribing him forever
Adam Serwer

Remembering how the "Ebola Crisis" was literally *the* most covered news story - consistently framed as though it was a huge embarrassment to Obama - before the 2014 midterms (after which the media totally abandoned the story)
mtsw

Most rural areas have a ruling class. And they want cheap unfree workers & to pass their fiefdoms on tax-free forever. It ain't rocket science. The fact that we're scared to talk about THAT, ime, is what's costing us a lot of rural voters!
Sarah Taber

Republicans regularly say things in public that a decade ago would have been banished to the darkest corners of the internet and it barely ever gets covered. Meanwhile, we have pundits talking about how a relatively small amount of DSA candidates are bringing communism to America.
Gravel Influencer

Squishiness on trans rights is a dealbreaker for me because (a) it’s a straightforward issue of personal freedom and bodily autonomy much like abortion, and (b) the right is obviously coming after us cis gays next.
Max Dubler

Listen to pro-natalists, and what you'll usually hear are not concerns about numbers, but about being *outnumbered.* That's a paranoid, racist foundation; what flows from there is predictably sinister.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

I'm not qualified to judge whether such people are psychopaths. All I can say is that they behave as if they are. From today's Telegraph:


George Monbiot

Trump absolutely cratering by many metrics in new CNN poll:
66% say he puts himself over country 
61% disapprove of ballroom, arch, etc
57% say lacks sharpness to serve (!)
73% say he's out of touch w/regular people (!!)
His personalist project is over.
Greg Sargent

If pocket calculators regularly and randomly gave you incorrect answers to your queries like ChatGPT does, we would have left the technology behind, not insisted that 2+2=5 is HERE TO STAY, BABY.
KAFUI @mykafuiohkafui.bsky.social

A group of people who refuse to get help is called a family
andy vs. @im-all-id.me

spain can build over 500 miles of high speed rail for the amount of money Trump wants to redesign an airport
Sam @samd.bsky.social

I don't want a "Smart Fridge" that orders milk for me. I want a fridge that lasts 25 years and doesn't have a privacy policy that allows it to share my late-night snacking habits with my health insurance provider.
Jon of The North @krauza.bsky.social

Visiting Minnesota state parks and appreciating what the CCC built for future generations to enjoy. The New Deal was awesome, we should do that again!


Otto @ottosorensos.bsky.social

This goes in general: it's remarkable how many of the anti-trans crowd become *obsessive* - it feels like this peculiar bigotry becomes all consuming for an unusual proportion of people who feel it, I am not sure why.
lastpositivist.bsky.social

In 2026 so far, the Trump admin has bombed:
—Iran—14,000+ strikes; 1 JSOC mission
—Somalia—strikes on 66 days
—Caribbean/E. Pacific—31 strikes
—Iraq—strikes on 26+ days
—Syria—strikes on 18 days
—Arabian Sea—9 strikes
—Nigeria—strikes on 3 days; 1 JSOC raid
—Venezuela—strikes on 2 days; 1 JSOC raid
Wesley Morgan

The Fauci hearing perfectly illustrated how living through a once in a century pandemic somehow made Republicans far worse on public health. God forbid we face anything like covid again during Trump 2.0. There will be no Dr Fauci around to try to talk sense to Trump.
Aaron Rupar

The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it's Joe Biden's fault.
Mike Rothschild @rothschildmd.bsky.social

Whenever I’m about to make a big life decision, I like to see what someone who thinks that Fauci murdered 9 million people thinks first.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Covid appears to have been the shove that pushed much of our society, already teetering on the brink of madness in the anomic world of social media, over the edge.
Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social

Bernie Moreno was a car salesman with a record of wage theft and employment discrimination. Anthony Fauci was the director of NIAID from 1984 to 2022 and in 2008 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work fighting HIV/AIDS in that role.
@joshstein.bsky.social

If you find yourself living your normal life today, whatever that entails, instead of being sick, or sheltering in place, or dead, it’s because of vaccines. If you can’t grasp that basic fact and chafe against it, you are a fool.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Further disappointed that there isn’t a coordinated effort by Democrats to scream back in one voice that hacks, stooges, and abusers are putting us all in grave danger and that they stand behind Fauci, a man of science and integrity.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Imagine devoting your life to public health, responding to two major pandemics, and then having to talk with these dipshits
Casey Stegman

Did you know that producing *one pound* of beef releases as much greenhouse gas pollution as burning 25-50 pounds of coal? And producing grass-fed beef is even worse? We gotta rethink our high levels of beef consumption...

Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social

CONFESSION: Sometimes I stare at the 26 newsletters in my inbox everyday and think: "what was so bad about RSS feeds"
Kate Klonick

Republicans all have 2020 Derangement Syndrome.
J. Elvis Weinstein

The only responsible attitude for liberals and progressives to align on is that all right-wing grievances, claims and believes are not only false, but malicious lies. Nothing passes the mouth of an American conservative in public life that is not meant to harm and destroy the lives of millions.
Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social

Still insane to me that the GOP can gin up a moral panic about innocuous things like drag queen story time while we know Democrats would be eviscerated in the press if they ever started asking what the deal is with youth pastors getting arrested every week.
Schooley

Honestly, I think the constant harping on "no do THIS not THAT as a consumer" is designed to make you give up on climate. This is a job for good old fashioned government, one that regulates pollution, including greenhouse gases.
Courtney Milan

Basic rules of society that we need to re-establish post Covid:
- You actually have to stop for red lights and stop signs.
- If you want to watch videos or listen to music in a shared public space, you need to use headphones.
- Your pet does not need to go everywhere with you.
- Don’t litter.
Max Dubler

yeah look the default bad Democratic candidate is either 'shitty tweets' or 'boringly careerist' and the default bad Republican candidate is 'serial rapist' or 'literal Nazi'
BeijingPalmer

Human rights are the oxygen of humanity:


Robin Boardman

If the entire Democratic Party is being asked by the press and pundits about a few DSA candidates in NYC, it seems like the entire Republican Party should be asked about their colleague who has been credibly accused -- by another colleague's daughter -- of repeated acts of violence.
Kevin M. Kruse

ProPublica obtained a vast cache of IRS information showing how billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth — sometimes, even nothing.
ProPublica

if you want to know who is stealing tax payer dollars, look at the people with all the dollars
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com

“Claims that wildfires can be prevented by [forest management] are not only inaccurate, but they’re also part of a broader pattern of disinformation in response to climate-fueled extreme weather… deflecting from what experts say is the biggest driver of worsening fires: the rapidly warming climate.”
Brent Toderian

Wind and solar have just overtaken fossil-fuel power in Germany
Simon Evans @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org

You don’t want hands-free driving, you want trains. You want trains you want trains you want TRAINS
still a pistachio @streetlightlily.horntforgood.com

if there’s any clear indication of elite impunity it’s the fact that the mainstream press has moved Ross Douthat toward increasingly visual formats. I hate to do feminism but if a woman looked like this CBS would keep her in a dungeon:


Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

In a better timeline, this would be Musk's Howard Hughes moment, he would spend the next two years in a bunker furiously trying to use Grok to make his anti-woke Odyssey and becoming more reclusive until he died of a bizarre blood nutrient deficiency you can only get by replacing your diet with Huel
scoops @scoopsstp.bsky.social

I suspect many centrists are really just 'not-bothereds' who mistakenly believe that centrism is a neutral position that won't offend anyone.
Reg @reggiehere.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

(looks out at a nation run entirely by Republicans, with literally everything in shambles and more and more disasters on the way.) "You know, the thing I worry about is a handful of DSA candidates winning House primaries."
Kevin M. Kruse

It's not that climate change is "worse than expected." It just feels worse when it happens to *you*
Kate Marvel @drkatemarvel.bsky.social

Cops hate cities, hate the people living inside of them and are much more empathetic to someone trying to race through the city to enter and leave as quickly as possible than they are to like, a cyclist or pedestrian, who represent a class of people (city residents) the cop wished stopped existing
mtsw

I am extremely troubled by the amount of standby pay issued to Minneapolis Police Department officers during Operation Metro Surge. MPD data shows some officers were paid nearly 24 hours per day for 32 days straight, while dozens were paid 8-12 extra hours each day while we stood out in the cold protecting our neighbors. 
EHB on BET @ehbforbet.bsky.social

you are living through a global political realignment. there have been a few of these in (kinda) living memory, but for the last about 40 years they've been to the right. our job is to spend our entire lives pushing for a realignment to the left before we die and the planet burns
Craig Johnson

So, what happens if I'm a parent and I know that my kid needs highly paid teachers, a library full of books with diverse characters, trans-inclusive bathrooms and extracurriculars, and a curriculum unpacking topics like systemic racism, colonial oppression, economic inequality, and climate change?


Jess Calarco

Among the worst ideas floating around is that "the free market" will naturally achieve desirable results for society. No, it won't, not even in theory, much less in practice. Markets don't optimize "good for society" unless you make them.
Max Kennerly

Manosphere grifters have figured out that some men are easily manipulated by making them feel insecure about their masculinity. The GOP has turned this sales pitch into both an ideology and a campaign strategy.  
Adam Serwer

We get told to "learn to take a joke" when drivers laugh about hitting pedestrians and micromobility users that get in their way. We get told that drivers threatening us or revving their engine at us wouldn't actually hurt us and not to be so dramatic. This is the result of normalising and excusing it.
Bread and Rosie @rosiemund.bsky.social

The anti-data center movement is like "I don't want to pay more money for a thing that will not benefit me at all and will actively make my life measurably worse in a bunch of ways" and the pro-data center movement is like "We want it to be illegal for you to not like us."
Andrew @athomaskaye.bsky.social

Every person this administration wrongly deported should be granted asylum and a path to citizenship. Won’t even begin to right wrongs like this. But it’s a place to start.
Radley Balko

"Independent contractor" positions, as used by business to jettison what little responsibility for employees they are considered to have, should either be required to include living wages, or be counted among a business's staff if exceeding a certain percentage in any department.
@hipstersasquatch.bsky.social

Oh I have *opinions* about this but I'll keep it to one: if your business model falls apart the second you have to treat people like employees, what you had wasn't a business, it was a loophole.
Hipster Sasquatch, trapped on the planet of the nepo babies
Ava @avasaysso.bsky.social

Congress appropriated billions of dollars for new transit projects. Why is the Trump administration spending none of it? Why are even transit projects in red states going unfounded?


Yonah Freemark

I sometimes point out that "kill transit nationwide" is literally in Project 2025, and oh hey look
David Weiskopf

This president is allowed to savagely lie about transgender Americans, and Muslim-Americans, and Haitan or Somali immigrants and more because he's America's Special Little Boy. No consequences for him or for the entire party that has his back.
Kevin M. Kruse

culture wars is a top American export.
Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

The people who complain about empty bike lanes do not want full bike lanes. They want no bike lanes.
bettybarcode

Everyone wants to yell at Democrats or "the left" but the plain fact is that Republicans are the only ones with the power to immediately save us from this nightmare. Every day they choose not to do so.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Elon Musk's destruction of USAID has killed hundreds of thousands of children, and by 2030 it will be around 3.5 million. Just because he didn't personally kill them doesn't mean he's not a mass murderer.
#TeslaTakedown

An idea: instead of asking Democrats about turning the temperature down, why not ask Republicans to stop being fascists?
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Whether it be Zohran Mamdani or Abdul El-Sayed, the way the establishment nonchalantly kicks into high key screeching Islamophobia whenever a Muslim person runs for public office should be all you need to know about them.
God @thegodshow.com

My “sensible gun control” policy is that we should melt them all down:


Gordon Padelford @gordonofseattle.bsky.social

It will eat away at Musk until he dies, that despite his wealth, the majority of the planet think he’s a humourless, pathetic, racist asshole. And THERE IS NOTHING he can do about it.
Jay Lionel

It's funny how often billionaire sociopaths like Trump and Elon Musk call journalists traitors when those journalists report the actual words that Trump and Musk have said.
Spencer Green

What if everyone stopped playing video games and started doing theater?
aric @aghastronaut.com

As a boy, my grandparents wouldn't dream of buying a Ford because Henry Ford — who was long dead by then — had been a rabid antisemite. 40 years later, I'm amazed that so many people who deplore xenophobia remain willing to buy a Tesla.
David Zipper

One reason productive dialogue on social media is virtually impossible is that productive dialogue requires at least some minimal understanding of context and intention and on these hell sites we all encounter one another as free-floating snippets, which cannot possibly contain that information.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

one of the most important things you need to do when developing a new product, especially in tech, is sit down and think about how it can be misused by bad actors. and nowadays it sure seems like the bad actors are less “people to be guarded against” and more “the target customer base”
Micah @rincewind.run

Funny how no one seems to talk about how bad of a Secretary of State Rubio is.
quick13

When I see "Waymo saves lives" op-eds, I always do a quick search to see what the author has written extolling protected bike lanes. Or automatic speed cameras. Or road diets. The results are always the same: Nope. Nada. Zilch.
David Zipper

Riding bikes is 10X more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities. And that’s just the climate emissions. Doesn’t include the massive public and personal cost difference, the air and noise pollution difference, the massive space difference, etc, etc.
Brent Toderian

When the story of why humanity didn't stop climate change is written, it will feature front pages like this. Even as the skies blacken with climate change-induced wildfires, right wing media continue their relentless crusade against measures to tackle it:


Adam Schwarz

Opinion | The Iran War is nonsensical, unethical, illegal, and economically catastrophic. But if students start protesting it in an obnoxious way, I'll have no choice but to support it.
NY Times Pitchbot

UPDATE Brazil has denied visas to the two State Department officials Trump planned to send to undermine confidence in the country’s electoral system
Matthew Hay Brown

The more I learn about it the more I think "the fossil fuel industry has an enormous, massively funded propaganda apparatus" is one of the most under covered and under appreciated stories of our era
mtsw

“the Pentagon had used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million apiece, leaving inventories worrisomely low,…”
Will Jones

Witch-hunts targeted women with financial independence and status. In colonial New England, women from families w/o male heirs made up 64% of the females prosecuted for witchcraft, 76% of those who were found guilty and 89% of those who were executed.
Rima I Anabtawi

I feel like the attack on academia, and on the humanities in particular, has really ramped up since the American economy has become ever more dependent on trying to replace human thinking with AI.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

I don't think EVs fix the main problem with transportation cities but I hope the Chinese EV industry destroys the criminal American petrol automakers.
Pedestrianize MPLS @mplsdromomania.bsky.social

150,000 marched yesterday in London for trans rights. Opened the Sky News app. Scrolled and scrolled. Nothing. BBC News app. Nothing. Guardian app. Nothing. This is what actual silencing looks like.
Lee Hurley

Todd Blanche is now the subject of multiple federal court orders and rulings questioning his integrity and honesty and that of the DOJ. And he’s probably still going to get confirmed.
Radley Balko

All this money and energy going into AI, a "life changing" technology no one wants, when ebikes already exist.
Getting Gophery

I don't know why these two particular episodes (out of so many) stick out in my memory, but: the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan and Claudine Gay "plagiarism" "scandal." *No* Trump scandal has received the quantity or intensity of mainstream press fury that those two attracted.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

It is genuinely bizarre that we’ve become acclimatized to right wingers throwing a tantrum every time a black person (particularly a black woman) is cast in something, but are also supposed to pretend that this is not racism but related to some other substantive concern. And just from a dad’s perspective, it seems to me one of the explicit aims here is to make black girls feel like they are ugly. Like why else are you angry about a black little mermaid. And yes I take that shit personal. *it* is happening here
Adam Serwer

We gutted the IRS and took away all enforcement resources and you're surprised about turbocharged  tax evasion? "US Treasury has expressed concern over a number of high-profile tax strategies touted by Wall Street that it says may be 'too good to be true'.” That was the entire objective, m'fers
@realworldrj.bsky.social

interesting to me that as the administration treats democratic-voting states like conquered or occupied territories, you don’t have pundits demanding the president respect “half the country”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

NEVER FORGET the debt we all owe to the Miccosukee Tribe, without whom it would still be open. And never forget that Indigenous sovereignty and all our safety and flourishing are forever intertwined:


Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg

As with so many aspect of finance, "innovation in lending" is a way to shift value from the financial industry's customers to itself. Remember the subprime crisis? 
Cory Doctorow

The White House correspondents dinner is a hilariously bad idea, like imagine a 1999 War Correspondents Dinner where the guest speaker was Milošević
Dave Levitan

"The impacts on the global landscape could be dramatic. An analysis...concluded that producing about 10 percent of US jet fuel from SAF by 2030...would require about half the US soybean crop, occupying enough farmland to cover the state of Nebraska"
Dan Marshall

Taking away someone's food and medicine makes you responsible for their death.
Thor Benson

CAN'T MAKE IT UP: ICE deported a man to Mexico in violation of a court order in Nov., acknowledged the error and returned him to the U.S. Then they deported him to El Salvador, in violation of court-ordered torture protection. He's currently imprisoned.
Kyle Cheney

Interesting how the Republicans have launched a coordinated attack on communists, of which there aren't any, and not Nazis, of which there are plenty.
Peter Gleick

Minneapolis police getting drones with cameras is just the beginning. Once they get that, the ability to drop “less lethal” weapons from the drone follows, and guess what comes after that! Directly shooting Minneapolis residents from drones. These weapons are tested in the military and brought home.
Ethan Pants

The Trump regime admitted to canceling over $7.5 billion in federal grants for clean energy projects in states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. 
David Ho

CDC: Measles cases this year (2,318) already surpass 2025 numbers (2,289)--and 2025 was the worst year for measles in decades:


Charles C. Mann

Not that we doubted it, but it's amazing to see them admit it: $7.5 billion in grants were canceled only because the projects were in states that voted for Harris. I don't think we need to put up with this crap.
Charles McGuinness @cmcguinness.com

The DOJ admission that the administration defunded Democratic-controlled states is immediate impeachment-and-removal behavior for any other president and all involved cabinet secretaries (who, in any other administration, would have already resigned in disgrace)
Nick Fleisher

Set aside all the other carnage and devastating impacts for a moment: i do take it seriously that a soldier isn’t a toy. The way this president has just set those lives on fire for basically no reason and seems to be preparing to get more of them killed — all while obsessing over fucking decor and personality cult branding projects — is uniquely appalling in a way that my mind isn’t really able to fully process
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

The big lesson of the Caitlin Clark story is that you do not want the stupids to care about you too much
 @edsbs.bsky.social

lots of reporters suddenly worried about slipping into communism but strangely f*cking quiet about slipping into fascism
Brett Meiselas

Sexiest Man Alive implies there’s an even sexier corpse that needs to be excluded from consideration
lukelukeluke

I previously reported that the growth rate and composition of Trump's wealth gain in office are unprecedented in recent history. Upon request, here is the data on the relative size of Trump's presidential windfall. The extent of his self-enrichment is even more striking:


Steve Rattner

it’s weird that sharks have existed for about 1% of the entire history of the universe
Devin @dervine7.bsky.social

For a very long time there was an international taboo on assassinating foreign leaders even of countries you were at war with, and the Trump administration thought it was because people were pussies not because "now they're gonna try to kill YOU"
mtsw

I’m sorry, but like, did they think that the enemy in a war would not actually try to kill them?
Sky Marchini

Musk insisting in that interview that store-bought tomatoes are better than homegrown tomatoes is the most perfect distillation of how ignorant he is of daily human life and the small joys therein.
Helen Kennedy

"one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real" –Cory Doctorow
Nothings Monstered @nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social

Not a single network aired [Trump saying he could read the dead troops' minds] on their nightly news broadcasts yesterday. They described Trump overseeing a "somber ceremony" and called it a "moving moment." The only way to know what trump actually said about the soldiers he killed is to follow aaron rupar which no offense to aaron is insane
Matt Negrin

When 13 soldiers died on Joe Biden’s watch because Biden was *ending a war* that had killed Americans for two decades, these people acted like Biden shot the soldiers himself
Lawdy Gaga @litigaytor.bsky.social

You know, building public transportation networks, high-speed rail, installing bike lanes, and offering tax credits and point-of-sale rebates for e-bikes and other small EVs would go at least some way toward making sure no one ever has to be held hostage by petrostates and maniacal authoritarians.
The War on Cars

Everyone who uses "smart glasses" to be legally required to strap one of these to their head and light it up when the camera is on:


Eddie Robson

Do car drivers ever stop and wonder why they accept violence and death from car infrastructure? The same people are likely horrified by gun violence or immigration enforcement or foreign wars. But when it comes to car dependency, they literally do not care about violence and costs.
Pedestrianize MPLS @mplsdromomania.bsky.social

The idea that we need “balance and openness for different points of view” about whether a cyclist’s death is more important than preserving parking spaces for local businesses is an incredible thing for a human being to say.
Tim Pierce @unchi.org

If conservatives decide that bike lanes are a partisan issue, then they're a partisan issue. I can't argue them out of it.
Dan Miller @meelar.bsky.social

Vaccines, Tylenol, Clean Air and Water, Food, now Bikes, what else will they decide is too liberal and will remove all data to keep you safe?
quick13

Per the police shooting in Madison, WI today, this bears repeating: ICE, CBP, local cops; their violence is all connected. ICE represents an escalation of that violence to be sure. But we wouldn't be here here without years and years of collectively tolerating "regular" cops killing people.
Dave Byrnes @djbyrnes1.bsky.social

Once again, it would be great to see more reporting on high fuel prices focus on car dependency in the United States
Gravel Influencer

Somehow we found the two worst people on the planet, Musk and DT, and we have to hear about them every few minutes for years and years
bhendricksen.bsky.social


John Roscoe

15 years after the Norwegian mass murderer killed 77 people, mostly children, motivated by conspiracy theories about cultural marxists and white genocide, his race war manifesto is more or less repeated verbatim to millions of people by the world's richest man, Elon Musk. Let that fucking sink in.
Christopher Pahle @tophepahle.bsky.social

It would be so nice if the democratic establishment and blue maga could fight republicans and conservatism with half the vigor they fight the left with
Oliver Willis

NEW: Taylor Farms is a big player in conservative politics. The company donated $2 million to conservative political groups in 2025 and its CEO has personally donated more than $900,000 to Republican PACs and candidates. It's also spent $810,000 on anti-regulatory lobbying since 2025
Brian Kahn

The 12 year old just found out that artificial gravity isn’t a real thing and would like to file a complaint with all the science fiction writers who failed to properly explain that part was (as of yet) fiction.
Maggie Koerth

The fuckers called Eisenhower a commie and the interstate highway system a commie plot to make America commie, just so you know how long this commie bullshit has been going on.
Justice Putnam

Republicans have been calling Democrats “communists” since FDR.
Leah McElrath

i love how centrists continue to do this thing where they say “if DSA becomes more front and center in the party, republicans will run on that!” as if the right doesn’t just say absolutely anything on and run on shit like peanut the squirrel or litterboxes in school bathrooms
onion person @junlper.beer

I think you could probably just replace their use of the word "elite" with "nerd who did better than me in school" and it makes a lot more sense. Or "scientist who belittled my religious beliefs." MAGA has been mad at those people their whole lives, since before there was MAGA.
KC Momkin

About 24% of U.S. employees stay in unwanted jobs just for health insurance, a report out Wednesday finds. Up significantly since 2021, the uptick in "job lock" is a concerning sign for the U.S. economy. 
NPR

I believe we would have SUCH a flourishing of entrepreneurship and new business founding if we had universal healthcare. I never understand why this isn’t a major argument in favor
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl @deardara.bsky.social

Do you want to know how popular school vouchers are? They have never won on a ballot. Not once. In any state. Ever. The only way states are able pass a school voucher scheme is behind closed doors. Legislatively. The people would never approve their tax dollars going to private religious schools.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

The fact that in America our kids must be professionally programmed each summer day instead of waking up and roving about with their pals is a tragic result of building the entire nation around cars. Cars have stolen American childhood. Wake up.
MaryMM

You guys aren't going to believe this, but ... it turns out the oil and gas industry knew that they were poisoning people (in this case, with methane) for years, and they hid it and did nothing to mitigate the harm. No, really, it's true!
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Crucial point: Gasoline prices spiked under Biden because of something Putin did. Gasoline prices spiked under Trump because of something Trump did. Any President could face a crisis where oil prices spike. Not all Presidents are responsible for causing that crisis.
Patrick Chovanec

just heard a foundation declare its mission as reducing "polarization" as though there's some sweet spot halfway between white supremacy/radical inequality/climate denial and the opposite we should all aim for. There isn't. Been railing against it forever. There's both the idea that the center is some sweet spot of neutral/true/decent stance (hello, ladies, go have half an abortion! hello, immigrants, enjoy rights on even-numbered days!) and that polarization is the fault of "both sides," as though the truth and the lie need to find common ground.
Rebecca Solnit

Window tint laws do need to be enforced better. But it should not be a reason to search every car like this person wants, it should be enforced via a letter that comes in the mail notifying the vehicle owner that proof of compliance must be shown before the vehicle can be renewed
Moth @walkingminnesota.com

Yeah, that's not convenient because most CEO's of Corporations like UnitedHealthcare are white men:


quick13

good morning mr president, heres your daily list of things you can do to make everyones life worse but will make you the center of attention
Andrew Lawrence

Everyone coming on my feed and explaining to me that all is lost, I note what I have noted before, that there are no Negro Spirituals entitled, “Welp, I Guess It All Sucks and I Am Giving Up.”
Professa Murray @kalimurray.bsky.social

People are shocked when they come to DC now and see groups of fully armed soldiers patrolling our neighborhoods. Trump's occupation of DC has been going on for nearly a year — and he wants it to go on forever. We refuse to allow this to become normalized and continue to call for it to end.
Free DC @freedcproject.bsky.social

Ossoff being very clear about the racial animus driving Trump’s attacks on Georgia is important. Not giving any credence to the pretext of fraud when we’re clearly debating who should count is vital to cutting through the bullshit.
@chadstanton.blacksky.app

Correct. When the GOP says fraud, they mean black people participating in society and politics. Gotta get right to the point there.
Hare @haredurer.bsky.social

my favourite opinion about Homer is: it’s an oral text so it is much MORE authentic to listen to the audiobook than to read the Iliad or Odyssey on the page. watching it as a film while people around you eat, drink and chat is more authentic than reading it quietly to yourself in a silent library.
Naomi Alderman

The Supreme Court didn't "end" affirmative action. It declared it illegal in college admissions in 2023. Things do not magically "end" when they are made illegal. Theft has been illegal for millennia, but it happens all the time. So does racial discrimination in admissions.
fredwoehrle.bsky.social

Again their position now is that schools are doing secret illegal affirmative action as evidenced by…the presence of Black people…it’s just racism.
Big Ol’ Mush @chadstanton.blacksky.app

An extreme close-up of a Pineapple Lily (Eucomis bicolor), featuring pale green, star-shaped flowers with striking pink-purple edges and stem, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh:


Nature, Preserved @simonecannon.bsky.social

A snapshot of the death of local news: the 155-year0old Salinas Californian (owned by USA Today) has nary a word on Taylor Farms and the lettuce recall that's affecting the nation's food supply. Like no story at all on the website. Taylor Farms' HQ is on Main Street in Salinas...
Tim McDermott @thebombshelter.bsky.social

If Trump was innocent, they’d release the full, unredacted Epstein files. If Mitch McConnell is alive, prove it by showing him in a live video. It’s really that fucking simple.
Arbaz Kakkar5

If Republicans want to stop Canadian forest fires from inundating us with toxic smoke, they should go arrest the criminal cartel setting these fires. The arsonists are easy to find, in fact they constantly brag about their illicit profits. Their gang name is The Fossil Fuel Industry. 
Patrick Reinsborough @giantwhispers.bsky.social

Musk is the worst, least imaginative kind of sci-fi villain. The drug-addled, power mad, racist, self-aggrandizing, demonically greedy, sociopath with endless money. He's a 1950s pulp villain with zero charm or style. He's L. Ron Hubbard meets Heinrich Himmler with a bottomless bank account.
Erik the Pleb @erikfrechette.com

James Talarico delivered the perfect response to MAGA attacks on his masculinity: “Real men don’t lie and cheat their way through life. They don’t enrich themselves by stealing from other people. They don’t sell their soul to the highest bidder. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.”
Diane Ravitch

Thinking about how so many people I know said Don’t Look Up was so stupid and over the top and ridiculous but my environmental scientist brother was like “Nope, that’s exactly how it feels”
Mara Wilson

"Cars didn't replace horses. Cars replaced walkable cities, tram lines and mass transit, and children playing in the streets." From Kolektiva https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116941380970260366
Bret Mogilefsky

bloomberg has a fun article today arguing that the Cybertruck is the biggest flop in automotive history. it includes this glorious graph:


Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social

Just learned that our local cheese shop - a small, single-venue store in South Norwood - will be paying more corporation tax this year than the whole of Starbucks UK. Maybe Andy Burnham's Labour Party should take a look at that.
Marie Phillips

The fact that VP JD Vance and Richard Grenell went to Romania — on behalf of the Trump Administration — to advocate for Andrew and Tristan Tate, who by all accounts, were rapists running a coercive sex ring, then permitted them to come to Florida, should be a crazy, crazy scandal.
Professa Murray @kalimurray.bsky.social

"I don't like being called cis"
"I don't like being called white"
"I don't like being called abled"
That's because you view yourself as "normal" or "the default" and everyone else as *not*. Viewing yourself as the baseline is just another form of prejudice. It's just a more implicit type.
Sheryl Weikal @leftistlawyer.com

People who keep pointing out that golf courses use as much water as data centres as some sort of defence of data centres drastically underestimate the amount we also hate golf.
The Ronettes Pickering @stoatie.bsky.social

A quick word on Taco Bell: That's where we found the suspected lettuce, and it's not bc Taco Bell is gross. It's because Taco Bell is REALLY GOOD at tracing product! Keeping track of exactly where they got their ingredients, and exactly what restaurants each shipment of ingredients went to!
Sarah Taber

One of the most fascinating things about the whole Taylor farms thing to me is how some people think there is like ... A single farm involved here. Taylor farms is not 40 acres in California.
Fancy Pants @farnaby.xyz

Here are some nice mushrooms:


lukelukeluke

Immigration is good for Britain. A government trying to reduce immigration is acting against the nation’s best interests
Dan Kaszeta

We need a journalism for the age of information warfare. “Objectivity” is surrender in the face of propaganda. “Both sides” reporting rewards lies and kills truth. Political reality is not based facts and reason. It is based on emotion, identity, and frames—moral and metaphorical.
Gil Durán

Pete Hegseth: "We need our warriors to embrace the Spartan mindset"
U.S. Military: *suffers crushing defeat to the Persians*
Gingerspiced

Nothing ruins a Saturday like fucking ICE coming to your town
Gravel Influencer

We didn't previously integrate wildfire-smoke costs into the supposed cost of climate change for the US, and it turns out to be bigger than all those other costs combined. Oops! Gosh I wonder if we're underestimating anything else. Probably shoulda done something about this. Ah well.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Farm-to-Table-to-Hospital Dining
TitaniumMan

Israel is still bombing Gaza, by the way. Every day on my X feed, I see reports of another massacre. They’re small in scale but unceasing. Some of the victims are children.
Leah McElrath

This is the point in Sim City where you’re like well I’m fucked:


Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

There is nothing at all on the CDC website about the wildfire smoke and how to protect yourself from it. Total abdication of responsibility.
Peter Gleick

I hate that we have two Dakotas. Republicans got greedy for new states in the 1880s and we're still paying for that a century and a half later. Two states that, when combined, have the same population as The Bronx. They shouldn't get four senators.
Kevin M. Kruse

The thing about "national service" is that if it's  voluntary, it's  already been tried/exists (Americorp, the Peace Corp, the military, Teach for America). If it's mandatory (which is what I think these guys are really saying), then it's profoundly immoral outside of a national emergency. It's also telling that it's always people who have aged out and are essentially saying that if we steal a couple of years of other people's lives it will somehow fix some undefined problems that we, as older people, have created.
redstateprof.bsky.social

Half of Canada’s wildfires are in remote areas with no road access. Not only is it impossible to get firefighters on the ground, there is also insufficient time to react.
The New York Times

Republicans threatening tariffs on Canada over wildfire smoke and gloating about Europeans dying because they don't have air conditioning are really bad omens for what happens as the climate crisis becomes undeniable and goes unexplained
Kate Aronoff

Musk's immense wealth has for years been based mostly in investors believing that he's a genius who will, someday, do something that generates an incredible amount of value and the dissonance between this belief and his ongoing failure to do so can only go so long before it must be resolved
Serial Experiments Abigail @popeguilty.bsky.social

Hey chat, is it good that the weather channel app added a forecast for breathing?


Kevin Rowe

It's the fraud economy. A bubble made of bubbles. A puff pastry of whipped bullshit with a nothing filling, held up with stilts that are resting on a plummeting grand piano.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

If you're arresting people at the airport on their way OUT of the country, your goal.was never border security. It's filling for-profit concentration camps.
Auntie Social

Nobody disputes that having access to a car in a car-dominated society is good. It gives one access to jobs, healthcare, food, education, social opportunities and more. All we're asking is for people to go one step deeper and ask why access to such basic rights requires buying and operating a car.
The War on Cars

one of the reasons I went car-free 20 years ago was because I thought about all the ways I might die, and a car crash just felt so pathetic and pointless. Imagined waking up and asking, how did I die? "You got t-boned circling the block looking for parking." No thanks. How stupid.
Pedestrianize MPLS @mplsdromomania.bsky.social

Probably more helpful to think of them not so much as “Canadian wildfires” but rather “climate change wildfires currently consuming Canada”
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

[There is a] structure, extremely common to reactionary thinking: our one way of doing things, enforced by law, is good and democratic; your attempt to introduce diversity and choice is bad and authoritarian. See the parallel to the "war on christmas"? The parallel to gender hysteria? It's all the same. Enforcement of the status quo is seen as normal, good and right, non-political. Attempts to change things, to introduce other choices and perspectives, is seen as aggressive, political, violent, an imposition. Reactionary thinking is the same everywhere it pops up, in every context.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

I wonder how much Chuck & Don's had to pay Control Data in the big trademark infringement case:


Chris Steller

What if... we didn't assume people needed to be constantly surveilled for their "safety"? Because that's not safety.... that's an illusion of safety.  It's not prevention, it's reaction. WE keep us safe, through connection, community, and mutual aid.   Not fucking cameras and drones.
Marje, herself @minn-finn.bsky.social

The greatest enemy of a free market is a successful capitalist.
Scott Centoni

All the ways Trump has gutted efforts to stop foreign election interference:
-laid off a third of CISA employees
-disbanded FBI task charged with combatting foreign election interference
-eliminated DHS teams combatting foreign disinformation 
-fired all the EAC commissioners
Ari Berman

"Republics wither slowly but surely in the hearts and minds of everyday people. Americans put this admin back in power knowing exactly the nature of Trump...we had to know people would die. We had to know our communities would be poisoned." –Alan Elrod
Greg Sargent

I'm no fireologist, but maybe the fact that Canada's warm season is getting warmer and their warm season relative humidity is getting lower might be why they seem to be burning up every year.
Climatologist49

Just received a call claiming to be from Amazon saying my account has been hacked to buy an iPhone. I said I will check my account online at which point the caller started shouting “you are a f***ing c***, you are a f***ing c***” until I hung up. Something tells me this may not have been legit 
Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social

This administration, supposedly representing the “real” salt of the earth Americans, is filled with people like this who have no idea how Americans actually live. For context, each Taco Bell outlet serves about 900 people PER DAY and there are over 300 Taco Bells in Michigan:


Seth Cotlar

After pushing anti-trans laws to ‘protect women’s sports’, Project 2025’s Heritage Foundation now wants women’s sports gone to ‘assist fertility.’ Turns out it was about women’s sports all along—if getting rid of women's sports counts, that is.
Aleksandra Vaca @transiticsnews.com

I think we will survive Trump II, but without some real change in the future, we're just going to get Trump III. And I don't mean Trump will serve a third term, but we'll get another person who will rule us like a Trump. And if we are really unlucky they'll be a lot more interested in listening to the white nationalists instead of just doing lots of corruption.
The Alternate Historian

I want the American experiment to include trying out new and creative ways to disempower, punish and impoverish our criminal and fascistic elite.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

My takeaway from that speech is that we are headed down the road of Trump trying to outright rig elections. It probably won't work, but he's going for it.
Aaron Rupar

In the last two days, I've had two instances of drivers straight up *not seeing me.* Me, a 5'11" guy riding a 9-ft long, tomato-red cargo bike, with two kids in the bucket wearing hi-viz helmets. I'm beginning to think the "cyclist came out of nowhere" problem is on the drivers' end.
Warren Wells, AICP

"When the authors extrapolated their findings to an entire year of driving, they estimated that by forgoing speeding, drivers would have saved $22 million per day, based on 2021 gas prices. In a recent analysis adjusted for 2026 gas prices, the daily cost rose to $26 million." –Scientific American
The War on Cars

Absolutely amazing collection of 490 antique matchbox graphics (mostly Swedish, it seems) in red, black, and white:


dynamoe.bsky.social

So far this year we've had: the warmest winter on record in the mountain west,  a record-shattering heat wave in Europe, once in a thousand year rainfall and flooding texas and forest fire smoke blanketing the mid west and the north east. Feels like something's going on with the climate!
Chris Hayes

one of my favorite lenses for looking at american history is “country shaped by successive generations of people experiencing religious psychosis”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Furious that Chris Nolan would disregard historical accuracy in adapting The Odyssey by making a "movie" with "cameras" instead of memorizing the entire story and then going on a nationwide tour to sing it to us while tripping on ergotized barley
Jack Grimes @jackapedia.design

I can't breathe the air, I can't eat lettuce, I can't afford gas, and my kids have measles.  But at least now our soldiers will have enough testosterone.
NY Times Pitchbot

Poisonous air is only supposed to happen to people who live in the fallout radius of an interstate highway.
Wedge LIVE!™

Congrats to Sauron for being elected to Congress:


The Alternate Historian

hey, remember: don't eat anything and don't breathe
Ygrene

i remember scientists saying 20 years ago that climate change-fueled wildfires would darken and poison the skies hundreds of miles away. but republicans said that was a lie, so now climate change-fueled wildfires darken and poison the skies hundreds of miles away every summer
bobby @bobbylewis.bsky.social

Maybe it's because I'm old, but men who use the expression "low T" sound like simpering sissies to me. It's not a manly turn of phrase.
Helen Kennedy

History shows us energy megaprojects often have three things in common: underestimated budgets, exaggerated jobs and royalty claims, and foreign ownership. 
Seth Klein

i can’t believe there are actually people taking photos while driving to show off the smoke, like there’s so many layers of wrong here and none of it is the smoke in your photo
taylr @taylordahlin.com

No science fiction could have prepared us for just how stupid the end of the world can be. "The environment was on the brink of collapse, and so, rather than deal with that, we burned what fuel we had left getting computers to scam each other for money."
Marie Vibbert @reasie.bsky.social

Cigarettes no longer being ubiquitous/cool is like one of only two examples of positive cultural change I've witnessed in my lifetime (the other is LGBTQ+ inclusion, which I realize sounds unhinged, but it's still better now than the 80s and 90s)
Gabrielle @gabbklein.myatproto.social


The Tiz @bettiselj.bsky.social

Folks, the Republicans have imposed Diarrhea Law.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

The news is always "This absolute fool was dismantled in hearings today. He is manifestly unqualified for the position and would be an existential danger if confirmed. Disaster. He is set to be confirmed immediately." When you ask why everyone is furious and exhausted all the time, this is why.
Walter Chaw @mangiotto.bsky.social

Increased emissions from wildfires in the past decade have reversed earlier progress made in decreasing US surface-level ozone pollution, a new analysis finds.
Physics Today

Always blows my mind that T-Rex is closer in time to the iPad than it is to Stegosaurus
Tits McGee @scientits.bsky.social

News on Preventing Ovarian Cancer

This news about the cause of most ovarian cancers, and therefore a way to prevent them, should be widely known. So here it is with a gift link.

Tell your friends with ovaries and fallopian tubes!

As we get older and/or don't want to have children / more children, and especially if we are having some kind of abdominal surgery, removing the fallopian tubes can be added to many kinds of surgery and prevent this deadly cancer. 

Two Manhattan Postcards

My maternal grandparents went to the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, according to the journal my grandmother kept during those years. I recently found a couple of postcards, unwritten, that may have been keepsakes from that stay.

One them is for the Chesterfield Hotel, a Midtown establishment that was in existence from the 1920s through the 1960s:

According to Ephemeral New York, it was an "unspectacular midcentury tourist and show folk favorite." They have a few details on minor events that happened there. It was 18 stories, with 600 "outside" rooms (I guess that means rooms with windows, because there were 900 rooms in total).

Copies of this postcard or one very much like it are available for sale online for a few dollars.

The other postcard is for a Chinese restaurant that is lost to the mists of time as far as the Interweb is concerned:

However, its address at 30 Pell Street in China Town is still the site of a Chinese restaurant, and sure enough, Street View shows us that the building is still the same with a different coat of paint, and there is still a vertical sign in place, though it's now in Chinese:

The current restaurant's name is House of Joy. Whether it is, as the back of the postcard says, a "Modern Chinese Restaurant... Serving Real Cantonese Dinners at Popular Prices," I cannot say.

Beasts of Beaver Meadow

I didn't look into the second Pennsylvania environment builder very much before deciding to go there during my recent road trip. (Daughter Number Three-Point-One scouted it from Atlas Obscura.) 

The Beasts of Beaver Meadow is farther off the beaten path than Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden, at least from the direction we were coming from. We traveled some almost-back roads to get there, and I wasn't sure online maps would stay with us the whole way across rural Pennsyvania, so I had written the directions down. They consisted of "this road becomes this road becomes this road," then "turn right then left at this area that's very hard to describe"... and things like that. So I'm glad the 5G or LTE or whatever it was stayed in place well enough the whole time.

We eventually found the Beasts at 1200 Berwick Street in Beaver Meadows. They aren't that far east of I-81 and the substantial city of Hazelton, but we were coming from the southeast, so the shortest way was a circuitous route. 

The Beasts were created by Joseph Woitko from concrete, glass, car parts, and other found objects, so classic outsider artist work. 

 

Woitko is clearly into the macabre. There were a lot of skulls:

Other pieces were hard to interpret (not that that's necessary):

He frequently use some molds with his concrete work, like the ice cream cones in this castle (I think it's a castle):

I didn't see everything (for instance, I just realized there are pieces on the opposite side of the road). 

As a side note, the steep and somewhat treacherous slope on the woodsy, shaded ground was covered with sweet woodruff, a nice ground cover. I've never seen so much of it on one location:

All in all, it has more of a haunted feel — whether that's intentional or not.

 

 

We Interrupt the Road Trip Posts...

Too much escapism here at Daughter Number Three in the last couple of days, so it's time for some more worry! (Sorry about that.)

Yesterday, after seeing an Australian poll showing a surge toward the Right, a person on BlueSky asked

what’s going on with the world man. why is the far right resurgent everywhere? it’s easy to blame whatever policy boogeyman (neoliberalism, housing shortage, immigration, etc etc) but I think it has to be something deeper. 

maybe lived memory is dying out of how evil fascism is

Another person, whose bio says they study the Third Reich, reposted that with this comment:

More to the point, this is happening in *non-white* countries as well: Japan, Turkey, and India have huge far-right nativist blocs. So it's not merely white supremacy or nostalgia for the days when the West ruled.

Nor is it happening purely in developed post-material countries.

In turn, a sociologist named Katherine Alejandra Cross posted the previous two, along with this:

It's impossible to exonerate the internet, and social media in particular here. It allowed for the efficient networking and ratcheting-up of our worst impulses at unbelievable speed and scale. In-group/out-group dynamics are as old as the hills, but social media is a particle accelerator for them.

One response to Cross's thought, from a person named Mecha-Herz, may be correct, I'm afraid:

And counter to some of the arguments about eventual equilibrium after the introduction of the printing press, radio etc., I'm not convinced we can meaningfully adapt to these new technologies. Our brains are not evolved to deal with this shit.

 

Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden

Pennsylvania, it turns out, is not the greatest place to look for environment-builders and outsider artists, according to Roadside America and Atlas Obscura. There are finds in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, sure, but in the rest of the state, not so much. 

There are two exceptions in the parts of the state I covered on this trip, though. The best one was Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden, which I found on Atlas Obscura. It's at 248 S. 3rd Street in the nice small town of Hamburg, which is about two-thirds of the way from Harrisburg to Allentown (north of Reading). 

Rhodes is a welder, but he's also a sculptor who — unlike many reusers of found objects — paints his objects. 

The garden seen from above on one of the balconies.

Rhodes also renovated the historic duplex adjacent into several unique apartments, one of which he occupies. He's been there 25 years. The gardens are a fun accompaniment. 

My photos don't do the place and the work justice. 

This is the Seussian head of the blue-bodied creature in the next photo.

The water wheel was spinning, of course.

A warthog?

I asked Bill where he gets his found materials. He said he goes to a lot of flea markets, generally. He has two intermodal containers, one stacked atop the other, set up behind the building, that are full of pieces waiting to be used. 

Overall, it's quite an enterprise, and if you're anywhere nearby, it's worth going out of your way to visit.