Friday, October 4, 2024

The Roches

I came across this blog post about The Roches, in which the writer listed his 12 favorite songs by the sisters. He says he's particularly interested in their ability to "court unpleasantness" and depict "infidelity and tensions in the nuclear family," which makes sense... but then I don't understand his ranking of their version of the "Hallelujah Chorus" at number 2.

Reading his list made me realize I truncated my Roches' album accumulation prematurely, however. I have their "regular" albums through 1982, and then after that I have just their 1990 Christmas album and their 1994 kids' album, "Will You Be My Friend?" 

I missed albums in 1985, ’86, ’89, ’92, and ’95... and a final album in 2007. What happened? I must have run out of money in the mid-1980s and then forgotten to keep up because I was busy.

Blogger Alfred Soto's list of 12 songs includes six I know well, and one from an album I have but don't know (and having just listened to it, I don't understand why it's included).

I can't comment on the songs he includes that I don't know, but here are my top 10 from the albums I know — the ones I think of most frequently:

  1. The Hammond Song
  2. Mr. Sellack
  3. Runs in the Family
  4. It's Bad for Me
  5. This Feminine Position
  6. The Train
  7. Married Men
  8. My Sick Mind
  9. The Laundry (from "Won't You Be My Friend?")
  10. Good King Wenceslas (yes, from the Christmas album "We Three Kings")

 My ordering is not very precise.

Now I have to go listen to the songs Soto listed that I don't have in my collection and see if they're as great as he seems to think.

 

Thursday, October 3, 2024

Actual Facts About Immigrants

Yes, I know Vance's lies during the vice presidential debate were many, and countering them with facts does little to no good with people who will vote for the Trump/Vance ticket anyway.

But the ones about how many undocumented ("illegal") immigrants there are in the U.S and how the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, particularly were admitted by use of a phone app that Kamala Harris was responsible for need to be addressed.

I've seen many various tweets and BlueSky posts on these topics, but a Star Tribune article gave the essentials.

The vice president (big shock!) does not decide who can enter the country. And as Tim Walz said in the debate, the laws that govern the Temporary Protected Status used for the Haitian people began a long time ago, first in 1952, updated in 1996. The specific "One Phone App" that Vance seems to hate lets people who are still outside the U.S. schedule an appointment before they arrive at a point of entry. It was initiated in 2020... when Trump was president, and is administered by Customs and Border Protection (under Homeland Security). The Strib says, "it was expanded" under Biden, but it's not clear in what way.

As far as the total number of undocumented people goes, we know the Right and Trump in particular make up numbers about everything to please themselves. In this case, their current favorite number is 20–25 million "illegals." The Strib says the best estimate is 11 million unauthorized immigrants, and of those 79% arrived before 2010. That estimate is from a Homeland Security report.

Multiplying 79% by 11 million means only 2.3 million people are still here who arrived since 2010. And of that smaller group... as with undocumented people generally, I'd be willing to bet a large percent overstayed their visa or other way of entering legally as a student or tourist, rather than crossing at the southern border in the way Republican fever dreams imagine.

The other 79% who've been here longer likely have built lives in their U.S. communities, have jobs and families, may be married to citizens or permanent residents, and like anyone undocumented who is working under a name other than their own, they are paying Social Security contributions they will definitely never get back and helping to keep that system funded for today's retirees. It's a great "system" we've got here.

Of course Vance and Trump's claim that undocumented immigrants cause our country's housing shortage and drive up prices is absurd, and no one should have to answer it at face value. It has been shown that their plan to deport undocumented people will drive up housing prices because a large percentage of the workers who build housing are undocumented, so deportation will likely increase the cost of labor for new building (at least, according to the usual laws of economics). 

And it is also projected that mass deportation will drive down GDP generally (as well as put us into a police state...but la la la, who seems to care about that, right?).

And all of this because these cravens want to use immigration as a fear issue to get elected. Whether it's the general issue of "open borders," supposed caravans at the border, thugs with imaginary guns and fentanyl, or vulnerable Haitians in Springfield*, they'll say anything if they think it helps their chances.
__

* None of this even touches on the question of whether there really even is the huge number of Haitian temporary residents in Springfield that many have said, including the authorities in Springfield. 

This BlueSky thread by a user called Ellie Likes Data from mid-September questioned that reality thoroughly. She says the most recent Census Bureau's American Community Survey (July 2023) reports there are 5,264. The school district says there were 7,415 at the start of school this year... and that they had 7,716 in 2019 — so that's a decrease. The ACS number only includes people born in Haiti, so it makes sense the school system's numbers might be higher, since they could be including young children of Haitian parents. (Springfield began recruiting Haitians to its workforce about 10 years ago.)

The city of Springfield says on its website that there are 12,000–15,000 total immigrants in Clark County — from all possible countries, in the entire county of 136,000 people. That gives the county a 9–11% foreign-born population, vs. the U.S. average of 14.3%.

Ellie called on a number of investigative journalists in the thread to do a FOIA request on Clark County government for records because things are being reported that don't seem to jibe with reality. I don't know the answer to this, but I sure wish someone would figure out whether this racist, xenophobic nothing-burger is a nothing-burger squared.


Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Twitter, September 2024

Twitter in September 2024 had similar topics as BlueSky once again. A few things popped up here that I didn't note on BlueSky, it looks like. But the month ended with lots of notice to climate change because of the flooding from Hurricane Helene, particularly in the mountains of western North Carolina. Near the beginning of the month, there are a lot of tweets about the presidential debate. And before that and after, there are many about the dumbfounding outrage of Trump and Vance's attacks on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and everything that has come with it.

I am very conscious that when I do the BlueSky and Twitter summaries at the end of this month, they will be posted just a few days before the presidential election, and they will feel either prescient or very naive a few days later. What a month we have ahead of us.

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

___

Almost every media outlet is treating this as a "normal" electoral contest and treating this murderous demagogue and rapist as a "normal" candidate. When will this stop?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat

If I bombed the NY subway to take out a serial killer, I'd go to prison, despite arguing self-defense. Nor am I allowed to kill a fleeing mugger who has just finished mugging me. The aggressive conceptions of self-defense invoked for war are extraordinary. Vengeful bloodlust.
Sridhar Ramesh @RadishHarmers

Why do religious people think religious freedom means forcing others to follow their religious beliefs?
Alex Cole @acnewsitics

If you or someone you know suffered one of the many climate disasters in the past few days alone, please understand that it keeps getting worse until we stop burning fossil fuels. Please join us in activism.
Rose Abramoff @ultracricket

It's very likely that more of the US Southeast and Atlantic Coast will experience worse wind, storm surge and rainfall events in the next decades (as well as worsening heat waves). We're not yet ready for what's already happening, and truly unprepared for what we see coming.


Alex Steffen

Since headline writers have real problems dealing with Trump let me throw out one they can work from. "Trump proposes day where police can kill with impunity as remedy for crime."
Dean Baker

Habitat restoration at solar projects in agricultural landscapes in the Midwest USA triples insect abundance, and increases natives bees abundance twenty-fold.
Dustin Mulvaney

1977: Well, we can’t just replace fossil fuels tomorrow!
1988: Well, we can’t just replace fossil fuels tomorrow!
2005: Well, we can’t just replace fossil fuels tomorrow!
2012: Well, we can’t just replace fossil fuels tomorrow!
2024: [video of a building washing away in Asheville, N.C.]
Yellow Dot Studios @weareyellowdot

just saw a viral tweet blaming the flooding in NC on government weather manipulation…not sure how this country moves forward when like 30% of the population would rather be insane than confront climate change
prance @bocxtop

Some disasters render most reasonable preparations useless. Deluges like these are not really something you can defend against. Yes, people can move to relatively safer places. But we offer no real support for doing that, and folks have homes, lives and communities they love.
Alex Steffen

Climate advocates pushed so hard for the last 30 years *because* we knew this kind of destruction would be the cost of denial, inaction and delay. Now millions around the world are trapped in no-win situations. When it comes to climate action, speed is justice. It always was.
Alex Steffen

It’s basically impossible to understand how expensive climate change is and is going to be.
Hank Green

This is purely impressionistic and I'd like to see if anyone has data to check it, by my sense is that as extreme weather events become more common, they get less and less media coverage, particularly national American news coverage.
Jeet Heer

I am looking forward to reading Gareth Gore's new book. When writing Strongmen, I found Opus Dei everywhere in right-wing authoritarian history, up to Trump's inner circle as president: Barr, Kudlow, Cipollone, Severino, and more.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat

“fossil fuels are freedom”:


Prof. Steve Austin @postcarbonsteve

Atlanta flooding is getting worse, and the city is spending $67m from taxpayers to pave 300 acres of forest wetlands (natural sponges for rainwater) so they can build a massive police compound for the cops who train in israel. climate justice is racial justice is anti-imperialism
blithe spirit @hitchcockrry

the city of vienna has a *fraction* of the wealth of seattle. and yet the less wealthy city has: abundant social and affordable housing. pedestrian zones. fast, frequent, and incredibly affordable transit. affordable daycare. low carbon neighborhoods developing all over the city.
Mike Eliason @holz_bau

Scotland has detected no cases of cervical cancer in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.
John Peters @johnthejack

The Bible is not a divine land grant. It is a book written by human beings thousands of years ago who claimed to be inspired by their particular god to do so. Additionally, their particular god is just one of many divine representations that existed at the time and exist still.
Leah McElrath

I understand the impulse to view Helene as Appalachia’s “Katrina” — please keep in mind it has only been 2 days since Helene. Black New Orleanians were abandoned, stranded, criminalized,
and HUNTED for a WEEK+ after Katrina passed. Flood waters sat for months. I say this also because comparison can also shortchange what the mountain communities of Appalachia are up against. They have their own challenges, context and needs. If anything, let Katrina be the lesson to NOT WAIT for the state to rescue anyone. We must act quickly. #Helene
Anti-Racist South | StopCopCity @antiracistsouth

"Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good." It's a line by W.H. Auden that seems highly relevant these days.
Kurt Andersen @KBAndersen

Only 7% of Americans held crypto in 2023. Yet crypto corps have become a major player in American politics, pointing a $200 million gun at this election. It's bad enough when companies with popular products (like oil) do this. With crypto, we're being held hostage by a cult.
gil duran

It’s just mind-boggling to me, as someone who worked deep in the climate movement for 15 years, that all we have to show for it are cleaner power and electric cars and *literally zero preparation or budget* for the massive human displacement and relocations already underway. The reason IMO is that the major climate donors and organizations are mostly run by NIMBYs themselves, who really want to believe that electric cars will solve the problem of entire towns washing away in floods/storm surges, or burning to the ground. We’ll spend $$ trillions subsidizing EVs and building charging stations that may or may not even work —  and spend literally zero dollars preparing land use reforms for when millions of people have to move due to climate catastrophes. It is utterly insane.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

Two-year prison sentences for throwing condensed soup at a plate of glass. No punishment whatsoever for dodging a £3.7m tax bill, selling dud PPE to the NHS, dumping billions of litres of sewage in rivers or knowingly fitting flammable cladding to Grenfell Tower.
David__Osland

These Just Stop Oil actions are part of a noble history of protest. The Suffragettes are lauded today with statues in Parliament Square, but at the time they were regarded with contempt, and they didn't throw soup on paintings protected by glass, they slashed and damaged them:


James Armstrong @PoliticoTeacher

Christian nationalist MAGA cultist Lance Wallnau says Kamala Harris is under an occult spirit and blames her success on the seduction of witchcraft: "What you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel."
Right Wing Watch

Remember, Obama's pastor said something negative about America at a sermon Obama didn't even attend **before Obama ran for President** and the media went on a weeks-long freakout. Meanwhile, JD Vance is appearing w/this guy this weekend and it's crickets.
scary lawyerguy

There seems to be no end to the destruction being wrought by Big Oil: "lobbyists working for major North American oil and gas companies were key architects of anti-protest laws that increase penalties and could lead to non-violent environmental and climate activists being imprisoned up to 10 years":


Assaad Razzouk

The protestors were not sent to jail for damaging artworks. They were sent to jail for PRETENDING TO damage artworks
Dr Charlie Gardner

I don't want my life in the hands of Republicans in a natural disaster or medical crisis. Why do we let them do anything? Put someone in charge of these people's lives in Tallahassee.
21st Century Ed @theLegacyPrep

"I am simply exhausted by the day-to-day news surrounding Trump and can't wait for the day that the country can move on from him":
Agree: 57%
Disagree: 29%
Neutral: 14%
Big Village / Sept 25, 2024 / n=2021
Polling USA

Project 2025:  A married couple with 2 kids earning $5 million will a get a $325,000 tax cut, while a middle-class family with 2 kids earning $100,000 would pay $2,600 more federal tax. Tell me again why middle class Americans want to vote for the billionaire?


Michael J. Stern

Can I just step back for a second and say that it is RIDICULOUS that we live in a "democracy" where Kamala Harris is going to clearly, overwhelmingly, win the popular vote... and yet that doesn't matter in the slightest and everybody just blithely accepts that it doesn't matter.
Elie Mystal

BREAKING: Posted speeds are the absolute maximum not the mandatory minimum.
Tom Flood

Astounding how the IDF has killed more UN employees than Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and JNIM combined.
Isi Breen @isaiah_bb

The six SCOTUS justices who rejected a stay of execution for Marcellus Williams are all Catholic (Gorsuch has attended an Episcopalian church for some time but was raised Catholic). Pope Francis: "The death penalty is a sin." (World Youth Day, Portugal, August 2023)
Elizabeth Drummond @EADHistory

Musk's Hypocrisy knows no bounds!!!


Barbara Arnwine, Esq. @barbs73

The reason why the state of Missouri is willing to execute an innocent man is because otherwise they’d have to pay him a settlement for the wrongful imprisonment and then spend a ton of money re examining all those cases that prosecutor touched.
@nadiatheartist

CO2 absorbed by a tree: 48 lbs.
CO2 emitted by a car: 10,140 lbs.
Trees are essential but real climate action requires taking cars off the road.
Qagggy!

yep. and that number doesn't include the big bump in embodied carbon from the manufacturing of the car (another 5-10 tons CO2) before it drives one single meter. EVs don't fix this, btw. e-bikes and drastic reductions in VMTs do.
Mike Eliason @holz_bau

the influx of people moving to climes that will soon be inhospitable is providing a benefit to the politicians most hellbent on hastening that inhospitability:


@t__________duds

House Republicans have voted more than 50 times to repeal all or parts of the Inflation Reduction Act – even though 57% of the new clean energy jobs created since the law was signed are located in Republican Congressional districts.
The White House

I live in a "swing state," the only place where any votes seem to count according to people who defend the electoral college. My daughter is a county clerk; she is in charge of handling elections for a large county in Michigan. The FBI came in and told her to shut down all her
@DocAtCDI

A very good and cool thing in our politics is that “defiant” now usually means “racist person will keep running for office.”
Noah Garfinkel

These days, the main function of religion in public life seems to be justifying shitty male behavior and attempting to put women back in a tiny patriarchal box. Rather predictably, young women are turning away.
David Roberts @drvolts

Southern slaveholders decided to crack the whip tighter on their human chattel when Haiti's slave revolt that founded its nation succeeded. All slaveholders took Haiti as a lesson to break slaves harder and suppress revolt harder. And they lived in constant fear of slave revolt.
Chantal James @chantalalive

Case in point: The Haitian Revolution succeeded in 1804. The New Orleans Police Department was formed in 1805, primarily to put down potential slave uprisings.
Anti-Racist South | #StopCopCity @antiracistsouth



Assal Rad

A journalist sending nudes to a source is unethical. But you know what SHOULD be unethical but is apparently accepted standard practice for many journalists? Withholding information on national security gathered during reporting and then publishing it in a book to make money.
Leah McElrath

FLORIDA. State now mandating local school districts use abstinence-based sex ed: “they may not teach teenagers about contraception, show them pictures depicting human reproductive anatomy or discuss topics such as sexual consent and domestic violence.”
Politics1.com

The guy telling you he's going to lower prices and end inflation is selling a $59 Bible, $99 picture book and $299 sneakers.
Ron Shillman @shillman1

it took me a moment to realize the NYPD commissioner who was just raided by the feds is the NYPD commissioner who succeeded the NYPD commissioner who was raided by the feds a few weeks ago and then resigned
Taniel

Presidentially, the last time Democrats won men was 2008 and the last time Republicans won women was 1988.
@StatisticUrban

Allowing people to use cars without the hassle of driving them [AVs] is going to cause an absolute explosion in traffic congestion. We will need decongestion pricing as a matter of urgency.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit

From 1903 to 1907 Augustus Jansson produced more than 30 striking adverts for the Queen City Printing Ink Company, including the wonderful Ink Beasts Parade series, with its "Magenta Ponies" and "Orange-Yellow Ibexiaticus":


Cory Doctorow

Your reminder that four of every 10 acres of corn in the U.S. is used to feed traffic.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber

Men are writing threads telling us all to stop using washing machines while AI is using more energy than all our mashing machines put together to add literally nothing of value to the world
Dr. Mia Brett @QueenMab87

The cynical theory behind congestion pricing suspension was that it would help swing seat Dems. What happened? Swing seat Rs took credit for pressuring Hochul, no voters moved toward her/Dems. A mess on policy *and* politics.
David Weigel

if israel can plant explosives in consumer electronics and justify it by saying they were only targeting "terrorists" then it would be a good idea to remember that israel said that student protestors in america are terrorists
an actual goblin @gobloid3

It is really annoying that people complain about the relatively small land that wind and solar take up and not a peep about the fact that 1.24% of all U.S. land is taken up by a completely useless fuel — corn ethanol — that provides no more than 4% of energy for transportation.
Mark Z. Jacobson

Some of you think safety cameras are an authoritarian bootlicking story. Some interesting tidbits about Washington, DC's experience:
82% drop in people driving 10+ over the speed limit
87% residents support red-light cameras
76% residents support speed cameras
Andy Boenau

Under Trump, EPA scientists say managers encouraged them to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, including cancer, miscarriage and neurological problems, from their reports — and in some cases, they said, their managers deleted the information themselves.
ProPublica

ProPublica is running laps around so-called legacy media institutions. Just clowning the Times, WaPo, WSJ, et al. This is the kind of stuff that should result in Congressional investigations and wall-to-wall media coverage.
scary lawyerguy

Even in the small German city of Marburg (pop. 78k) buses come so frequently that it’s easy for residents to live car-free. Bigger American cities could learn a thing or two:


Wyatt Gordon @yitgordon

Imagine an 8-year-old Ukrainian girl was killed because of exploding pagers orchestrated by Russia. Would the headlines read “Russia used innovative methods to carry out a precise military operation…” No they wouldn’t. It’d be called terrorism.
Hamza Yusuf @Hamza_a96

Japan (125 million) built 559,000 multi-family homes in 2023. Japan's population shrank by 0.53% that year. The United States (343 million) built 468,000 multi-family homes in 2023. The US's population grew by 0.56% that year. This country is embarrassing.
Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

The NYPD spent $150 million *extra* last year to catch people who weren't able to afford to pay the subway fare. They owed just $104,000. $150 million could buy free fares (at going rate) for 95,000 poor New Yorkers per year. Instead four people shot, including an officer.
Scott Hechinger

Living in a world of constant and incomprehensible horror is exhausting. Remember that if you feel like you haven’t accomplished much lately.
Jen The Feisty Librarian @Feisty_Waters

"Renewable energy projects in the developing world are receiving 40 times less than the fossil fuel sector" From theguardian.com
Dr Charlie Gardner

Honest to god, when red states find themselves without anyone who can do a C-Section don't say I didn't warn ya.
Andrea R MD @AndreaR9Md

“You can literally sell s--- in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story's right, because people will buy it” says Trump's crypto business partner. Yup, that about sums it up
Tyson Slocum

JD Vance admits Trump's "concept of a plan" is to let insurance companies charge way more for people with a preexisting condition
Jonathan Chait

Detroit. I’m always cheering for Detroit because it's an incredible city filled with amazing people, and to be honest, it’s one of the coolest places I've ever visited:


Nate Hood

1 in every 3 people killed by a stranger is killed by a police officer. So you might think the biggest threat to your life is some random shooter or gang. But the one organized group that is most likely to shoot and kill you is the police, and it’s not even close. For every person who police *kill* they also report using non-fatal force against 300+ additional people. These cases are almost *never* reported by the media or tracked by government databases. So my organization has had to track these cases ourselves at
Samuel Sinyangwe @samswey

Heavy, powerful EVs trade tailpipe emissions for increased tire particles (form of air pollution and tied with textiles as #1 source of microplastics in waterways) and potential for injury crashes due to weight and acceleration. They’re the filtered cigarettes of transportation.
big_pedestrian

Cybertruck owners are saying that their tires wear out after ~6,000 miles. That's not a defect, but the result of excess power and weight (other big EVs are also tire-shredders).
David Zipper

EXCLUSIVE: The Secret Service showed a new president Donald Trump how photographers could shoot long-range pictures of him while he golfed at his Virginia club — and warned an assassin could kill him the same way. But Trump has insisted that his clubs were safe and kept playing.
Carol Leonnig

"Donald Trump is the head of a movement that has spent nine years pumping hatred and distrust and contempt and post-factualness and vigilantism and, underlying it all, a notion of America as a war of all against all." –Anand Giridharadas
Perry Bacon Jr.

I'm glad our streets are humongous to allow humongous firetrucks to pass through to mostly respond to humongous automobile crashes that occur because our streets are humongous
@Theqwikbrownfox

A man can present with an infection to an ER in any state and receive care. A pregnant woman can present with an infection to an ER in 14 states with an abortion ban, and they will let her die. This is a violation of the 14th amendment.
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

CHRISTIANS: We will spread the Gospel by spending a week in the Third World, and maybe go on safari!
GOD: I am going to bring the Developing World to your community. BTW, they already know and follow me. Just welcome them and care for their needs.
CHRISTIANS: No, not that way.
Dr. Kevin M. Young


Deonandan

it's so incredibly fucked to hear JD Vance say, unopposed, that he is merely conveying the concerns of his "constituents." interviewers should reject the libel, yes, but the very framing needs to be confronted: those Haitians are his constituents too! its evil and scary as shit
@PatBlanchfield

“Black and brown people aren’t fully American” is implicit in so much GOP rhetoric, from their defenses of the electoral college to the way they use words like “constituents.”
Angus Johnston @studentactivism

A reminder: Taylor Swift is from Pennsylvania.
Ashton Pittman

It is getting very difficult to determine which MAGA fiasco is supposed to be a distraction from the other MAGA fiascos.
David Roberts @drvolts

Far-right movements have been using Springfield, Ohio as a propaganda tool since early 2023. There aren’t 20,000 Haitian immigrants there. In fact, there are barely 5,000 in the entire state. The level of cognitive dissonance required for this narrative is staggering.
@ellim992

A new book from Gareth Gore blows the lid off a stunning $1B conspiracy of graft and human trafficking by the theofascist sect Opus Dei, documenting its close ties to Leonard Leo and the MAGA justices' attack on Roe. Don't look away.
Alex Aronson

Good morning with good news: Solar plus storage or wind plus storage are NOW much cheaper than coal or gas generated electricity in most of the world. By 2027, clean solar or wind PLUS STORAGE are cheaper than dirty fossil fuels in the entire world!
John Raymond Hanger

Senator JD Vance said that economists disagree about whether tariffs lead to higher prices. So this week, the University of Chicago surveyed economists and asked them exactly this question:


Justin Wolfers

There should be calls on JD Vance not just to step down from the ticket, but resign from office. And not just from Democrats.
Jason Karsh

Springfield, Ohio's Haitian community wakes up to smashed widows and acid thrown on their cars. (via MSNBC)
Michael Grossman @MichaelArt123

The basic lesson about the anti-Haitian demagoguery this week is that the Trump/Vance types will whip up a frenzy against some group or another at all times. If there's nothing actually happening, they'll make something up. No one is safe with a demagogue.
Sir Humphrey @bdquinn

Violent crime has declined by 26% since Trump’s last year in office — quite the opposite of “through the roof”:


Steven Rattner

It should be a big news story that Trump and the Republican Party are absolutely clueless about crime rates — guess they don't care about crime.
Dean Baker

The Haitians of Springfield sound almost comically American. They work proper factory jobs and go to church every Sunday. And we get to hear the crackhead locals talk about how their friend's cousin saw a chain email saying they're doing cat voodoo.
Shadow Of The Nerdtree @agraybee

Until you’ve visited a ton of American cities and driven around their suburbs, hard to truly grasp how rich this country is. Millionaires by the million.
Moses Kagan

[Linked to] an article from 10 years ago about how Springfield explicitly invited immigrants to their city to revitalize it. Why are there so many immigrants in Springfield? Because Springfield leaders asked them to come.
Peter Henlein @SwissWatchGuy

Simultaneously true:
America's *public* realm is distinctly impoverished relative to many other high-income countries, in a way that's obvious when you visit those countries.
The level of *private* wealth stored in Americans' homes and personal possessions is astonishing.
Daniel Herriges @dpherriges

The thing about urban highway removal is that even urbanist types can't imagine it right away. So they fight it because it messes with their worldview. And then when they change their minds they're too embarrassed to publicly say they were wrong. This is a problem.
Mary Morse Marti

Trump's advisors have said that they see accelerating the bankruptcy of Social Security as *part of their plan* because they want to get senior citizens into the workforce to replace the immigrants they're planning to deport. The plan they are outlining here is to accelerate the insolvency of Social Security, forcing seniors to work longer, then grandma’s income tax payments will help cover the cost of extending tax cuts for billionaires.
Matthew Yglesias

People are terrorizing this Ohio town because Trump and Vance started demonizing some legal immigrants who live there. If you really want four years of this crap, you have problems.
Noah Smith @Noahpinion

The real debate about Haitians we should be having is that the USA and France owe Haiti many billions in reparation.
Jeet Heer

Letting Silicon Valley “disrupt” schools only made them more inaccessible and frustrating. Modern parenting is downloading 10 new apps so the school can tell you things they used to just send in an email.
Lyz Lenz

Sorry we can't possibly house the homeless, we have to build fake cities for police to practice killing you. I'm sure you understand.
@chairman_maiow

"The foreigners come to our country and kill our animals":


Liam Nissan

I speak in places like Missouri, Iowa, Idaho, Kansas, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Arkansas. The biggest issue that brings folks together against the GOP? School vouchers. Every. time.
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

These people talk about patriotism, but they have the most fundamentally pessimistic views of America of anyone. The only thing that makes America worthwhile to them is cruelty.
Norm Charlatan

JD Vance on CNBC says that if immigration was the path to prosperity, then "America would be the most prosperous country in the world." (Who wants to tell him ... )
Aaron Rupar

I will never, ever understand conservatives' pathological need to gang up on and abuse the weakest and most vulnerable. It's like... the opposite of morality. It's just so gross. I don't have the words.
David Roberts @drvolts

I love it when suburban folks fight for their right to drive on big highways through formerly intact city neighborhoods because it's important to their car-dependent lifestyles. Too bad about city residents' continued economic dislocation and catastrophic health impacts.
Mary Morse Marti

Donald Trump was wearing a $30,000 watch:


Armand Domalewski

If you've never wondered how much Donald's shoes or Joe's aviators cost, shut the fuck up about a successful women wearing the Tiffany earrings she earned
Tom and Lorenzo

An underrated superpower in white spaces is the way HBCU grads are sometimes underestimated because we didn't go to "good colleges." The assumption is that we applied to these "good colleges" and didn't get in. When it's said that VP "isn't smart?" Yep! We get that shade too!
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @Ebonyteach

90% of New York Times opinion columns these days are basically "the woman running the greatest presidential campaign we've ever seen doesn't know what she's doing and she'd win if she'd just take advice from us columnists who have never run for anything in our lives."
David Darmofal

Wharton professor here! Here are the Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates:
— Harris’ proposal increases the deficit by $1.2 trillion, with low- and middle income households benefiting disproportionately.
— Trump’s proposal increases the deficit by $5.8 trillion.
Susanna Berkouwer @BerkouwerS

Reflecting on last night's debate, I keep thinking of Michela Musto's work, which shows that teachers tend to let White boys dominate class discussions, and that how much they talk--not what they say--leads their peers to see them as more brilliant than everyone else.
@JessicaCalarco

Fact-checking MAGA's vile lie about cat-eating Haitians misses the point. It's an *open* assertion of the power to lie with impunity about immigrants as a prelude to "bloody" removals of millions.
Greg Sargent

Puberty blockers are 'safe, effective and reversible,' independent study finds
PinkNews

Vance: “I don't think most Americans are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and problems of most Americans”
Kamala HQ

I want the Harris/Walz campaign to find more joy in climate solutions. It’s more than car jobs. It’s better lives on so many levels — clean air, water, walkable cities. Also it’s not enough to just support renewable energy. You have to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Thelma Young Lutunatabua

The base of GOP are people who are no longer on speaking terms with their children.
Jeet Heer

Important paper: refugee resettlements have *no effect* on crime.
John B. Holbein

“In fact, all the refined metals needed to reach net zero by 2050 will add up to less than the amount of coal mined in 2023 alone.” Renewables are not only our most powerful climate action tool, a 100% renewable energy world also cuts environmental destruction from fossil fuels
Assaad Razzouk

The total amount of metals needed for the energy transition (that can also be recycled) is far smaller than the total weight of fossil fuels we burn away each year. Net zero means more metals, but less extraction from the Earth.
Akshat Rathi

Just a reminder that an "exemption for rape" means that the pregnant person has to get the legal system involved and convince it that she was really a rape victim, and--if she succeeds--by that time her embryo will be in kindergarten.
Rebecca Solnit

being a moderator is a crazy job, just sitting and listening for a full minute and saying "thank you, but nobody is eating dogs"
Ben Rosen

NYC cop-mayor Eric Adams, who got elected thanks to a media-contrived crime panic, says he won't resign if he... gets charged with a crime. In fact, he plans on running for re-election! You really can't make this stuff up!
Ash J @AshAgony

white folks know they wouldn't hire Trump as the trash collector at their office building after that job interview, yet a majority of white voters will still vote for him. THAT fact IS the existential threat to America.
D.A. Bullock @BullyCreative

Trump, a would-be autocrat, using Orban, an actual autocrat, as a character reference is too perfect. As with his praise for Xi and Putin as "strong," his naked envy of their unaccountable power is one of his few sincere expressions.
Garry Kasparov

While many of us are laughing at how genuinely deranged Trump sounds tonight (and boy does he) I just cannot shake the deeply unsettling feeling of knowing that nearly half of our country thinks he is fit to do *any* job let alone run this country.
KSV @KSVesq

I wonder how many competent, brilliant women understand the feeling of being in direct contrast with an incoherent, mediocre (that’s generous) man, and it being a close race.
Colette Delawalla M.A., M.S. @CDelawalla

Yeah we do have "after birth" executions — they're called school shootings.
March For Our Lives

One way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times and Harris zero times. Another way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times instead of 500 times
Tim Alberta

It was a rout. A total rout. That is all.
Brittney Cooper @ProfessorCrunk

Trump Avoids Answering Hard Questions by Pretending He Shot in Ear Again
The Onion

Trump attacks Biden for taking money from China (false) but he's the guy who has a bank account in China while he was president. A huge story that has never had the coverage it deserves. Also... Egypt 10 million dollars anyone?
Mehdi Hasan

Over the course of my grandfather's lifetime, he gifted and "loaned" Donald $413 million. And Donald still declared bankruptcy 6 times. He failed so badly that the banks needed to put him on a $425,000-a-month allowance.
Mary L Trump

One thing I like about Kamala Harris is how she's very visibly alive
James Medlock @jdcmedlock

An immigrant doesn’t stand between you and a good job. A billionaire does.
Liz Shuler

The one true thing Trump has said all night: "I know Putin very well."
Robin Garwood

Christian Nationalists are not subtle:


Hemant Mehta

He is difficult to face because he is a weird mix of super dangerous and a joke. She is showing great comfort treating him as both of these things at once.
@AnandWrites

You can’t welcome RFK Jr. into your campaign and then go around accusing other people of eating pets.
Rick Lenzie

I can’t believe this man is the nominee of a major political party.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

So far, this debate has been characterized by Kamala Harris dropping a lot of bait and Trump eagerly picking it up and rhetorically wandering around the room.
Abby D. Phillip

Weird that when Trump casts around for a world leader who likes him, he can only think of Orban, the right-wing totalitarian leader of Hungary.
Robin Garwood

I know this is an easy point to make, but: If Trump can be this easily set off in a debate and come off like an unhinged angry man, imagine if he's president...
Jon Ralston @RalstonReports

Trump just referred to the January 6 rioters as “we.”
Tim Miller @Timodc

Immigrants love America! MAGAts, as they are constantly telling us, hate most America institutions, most American popular culture, most American political policies, and most Americans.
David Roberts @drvolts

One of the ironies of all this is that the average immigrant is far more hard-working and devoted to the American dream than the average whiny-ass MAGA suburbanite.
David Roberts @drvolts

Hey I don't want to distract you from the vital narrative-building on fracking in Pennsylvania, but ...
51% of energy jobs in PA are clean energy; clean energy employs 8X as many PA workers as gas; 78% (!) of PA residents want *more* clean energy. From climatepower.us:


David Roberts @drvolts

Legal scholar Lawrence Douglas: "Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it."
Alfie Kohn

America has always been multicultural since the Puritans settled in Massachusetts and the Quakers went to Pennsylvania. People just pretend we used to be culturally homogenous because the massive cultural differences between American white populations eroded over time
When people say "multi-cultural" what they mean is "multi-racial," but they don't have the balls that avowed white nationalists have to just flat out say what they mean. There used to be massive issues between Poles and the Irish in Chicago that vanished due to integration
The definition of diversity is a moving target with no objective meaning. People claim America is more diverse than ever before, but I would argue it's become less diverse over time. An Asian-American is more like me than a WASP and Italian were like each other in 1907
Swann Marcus

If we can step into reality for a second, we KNOW that the media will pick apart any specific policy Harris puts on the table. Meanwhile Trump will say things that are batshit crazy and the media will pretend these are serious policy proposals.
Dean Baker

“If I don’t hear more about her plans for day care credits, I might have to vote for the raving sociopath who has threatened to imprison his enemies”
Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom



bettemidler

Am I crazy or is it a huge story that a major party's current candidate for vice president used his large platform to spread an easily disprovable and hateful lie about an entire immigrant community?
Will Bunch

Vance gets performatively worked up about pure fiction, but brushes off murdered schoolchildren as "a fact of life."
@MrMikeMeehan

The key thing about Afghanistan is that there has been 100 times more scrutiny of the details of the withdrawal than of the prior 20 years of military failure, and any future president will learn the lesson that it’s a mistake to ever end any deployment for any reason.
Matthew Yglesias

this needs a qualification. It was only because it was a Democratic president who did the withdrawal it become a political problem. You KNOW that if we had the exact same story with a Republican president, all would have been fine.
Dean Baker

If you're wondering about the power of right-wing disinformation, lies about people eating pets has been written about more in one day than Trump's incoherence on the stump being a sign of declining cognitive ability has in the last month
scary lawyerguy

This is how you do it:
HOW YOU DO IT
David Corn

In the U.S., we’ve decided that cars are more important than productive cities and affordable housing, and structure our economy around defending car sales. We’re now facing the trade-off in the housing shortage, the climate- (and car-) driven collapse of housing insurance.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

50 years ago today, Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, opening the era of unpunished crimes by Republican presidents, and the decades of cowardice "looking forward, not back."
Charles P. Pierce

11 days ago, I included "how will Trump implement mass deportation" on a list of questionss Trump has never been asked to show how utterly useless the media been this year. Yesterday he said it'd be bloody. No one is reporting even that.
emptywheel

THIS IS A HUGE ACHIEVEMENT: The EU now generates more electricity from wind and solar than from fossil fuels.
Jan Rosenow

I’ve never met a “free thinker” with an original thought
Drew Comments @sjs856

Only 10% of Tim Pool's income came from user subscriptions and product endorsements. The other 90% came from Vladimir Putin. You can't tell me he "didn't know" something was fishy
Liam Nissan

I love Venn diagrams:


@joncoopertweets

Fun fact: the judge who ruled that Missouri's pro-choice ballot measure is "invalid" is Rush Limbaugh's cousin
Jessica Valenti

Walz: This is what these folks are focusing on. Like reading about about two male penguins who love each other is somehow going to turn your children gay… It’s a fact of life some people are gay, but you know what’s not a fact of life? That our children get shot dead in schools.
Acyn

The female teacher who lost her life in the [Georgia] school shooting never had kids. They were her kids.  It was her birthday so she baked a cake for them and ordered pizza to celebrate. And then was murdered.
@eilishparker78

It's weird how drivers are socialists, but only for car infrastructure.
@YEG_cycle_path

Cities charge residents for water, which is something you need to live.  Nobody cries foul at $50 to $200 per month for city water. But when a city charges for parking on city streets, even $30 per year, car owners get violently angry and cry loudly. They say their cars are essential and they need them to live, even in the most walkable cities with the best transit in the country. So nothing like water I guess. Why do cities charge for water? To avoid waste and shortages. Finite goods given away for free become scarce...which is exactly the problem with public parking. It's scarce because it's finite and underpriced.
@3_under_scores_

You can say that it’s weird for the Cheneys to endorse a liberal Democrat, but it’s even weirder for a police union to endorse a criminal who believes cop beaters are great patriots.
@michaelpfreeman

My grandmother died at 47 yrs old after having 8 children in 13 yrs. The youngest had just turned 8. Along the way, she lost all of her teeth because the pregnancies diverted the calcium from her teeth and bones to the fetuses. Some of her children have almost no memories of her.
@ErikaWatersPhD

I do not understand the impulse to just endlessly reproduce, let alone to force that on another person. Being obsessed with quantity of lives strikes me as very odd and very ideological
Paul @_ticking_away_

The carceral system was never meant to imprison the ruling class. The carceral system exists to dispose of people who have no functional role in the production of profit for the wealthy or who disrupt the order that sustains that profit.
Puff the Magic Hater @MsKellyMHayes

Trump doesn’t have “proposals.” He has complaints, rants and untethered notions. “Tariffs will pay for everything I want to fund” isn’t a policy. It’s “nonsense.”
Tim O'Brien

Ex-Harris aides claim it’s 'stressful to brief' her because she’s so 'prepared’. Yeah, I’m voting Kamala Harris.
@AesPolitics1

A corn field has essentially zero pollinating insects. A solar field with native plants between the rows has about 300x as many.
Bill McKibben

Trump's obvious mental impairment is the biggest unreported story in America. Every time he speaks, nothing but gibberish comes out. But in stories about his speeches, the quotes are always cleaned up to make them sound half-sane.
Bruce Bartlett

Periodic reminder that the *stock* of zero-emission cars will take a *long* time to get anywhere near 100%. Which is why we should be using cars less.
Giulio Mattioli

In places where bat populations crashed, insect numbers increased, farmers sprayed more insecticides to combat the insects, and the infant mortality rate spiked due to pesticide exposure. Everything is connected. We need biodiversity. From science.org
Center for Biological Diversity

Yes, AI requires a ridiculous amount of energy and a massive amount of water, but that’s a cost we must be willing to pay in order to get an endless deluge of the worst images we’ve ever seen and the worst writing we’ve ever read.
Librarianshipwreck

What would a society that loved its children do? With regard to guns? To climate? To indoor air quality? To food safety? To microplastics? To traffic safety?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin

In which YouTube personalities were paid $100,000 per video to generate fake content while I, a real climate scientist, paid for my own Global Weirding PBS YouTube series on real climate content out of my own pocket. You can’t make these things up.
Prof. Katharine Hayhoe

When you buy a gun, you’re shown pictures of gunshot victims. If your neighbor suspects you of buying a gun, they can call a hotline. If you’re from a state where guns are illegal, you can be arrested if you buy a gun out of state. Oh sorry, these are all abortion laws.
Nick Jack Pappas @Pappiness

This is what a staggeringly successful misinformation campaign looks like on the ground:


Alex Steffen

Half of Americans: Climate change isn't impacting me.
The same Americans: It's so hot! Food prices are so high! They doubled my insurance bill! My kid is sick again! They cancelled school because of the heat?! Wait... the power is out?!?
Yellow Dot Studios @weareyellowdot

Trump says the effects of climate change are "not our problem." 'Our' means himself and the oil and gas corporations fueling the climate crisis.
Sunrise Movement

I will always defend the 2nd amendment. It's a bedrock of our democracy. Our government should have the right to raise a well-armed militia in order to enforce and collect taxes from rebellious wealthy land owners.
Aaron Meyers

An audit in New York City found that ShotSpotter gave true-positives 13% of the time and false-positives 87% of the time. When it comes to dispatching police to a shooting, is that good? The false-positive rate for a mammogram is 11%. What do you think?
Conrad Lange Zbikowski

The right's opposition to a social safety net is directly connected to its conviction that women should stay at home and do domestic labor.
David Roberts @drvolts

Just for the record, no one was harmed in any schools today by Jodi Picoult's book 19 Minutes. People have written her, though, and said they didn't go through with shooting plans after reading her book. Guess what's being removed from schools to protect the children?
Chris Hamilton @caxdj

If your god “saved” Donald Trump from a shooter but not the children of Apalachee High School, then you’re worshiping the wrong god.
F-Bomb Mom @fbombmomsquad

When you send your kids to school there is zero chance they will come back to you "a different gender," but there is certainly a chance they won't come back at all. Yet some of y'all are worried about the former while shrugging about the latter.
Tim Wise

Still true…


Christopher Webb

Reminder: the Times could crusade against Trump’s old age the way it crusaded against Biden’s old age, and it would be justified in doing so in the name of balance and fairness. That the Times is not doing so tells you what the Times thinks about balance and fairness.
The Editorial Board @johnastoehr

this dude is getting sentenced in the middle of this month, and you still got people writing about this election like it should be a contest, somehow measuring the so-called merits. and nobody is writing about how white people have lost their mind to have this be a reality.
D.A. Bullock @BullyCreative

Gov. Walz: I will say this, Donald Trump does know one thing about working people. He knows how to take advantage of them!
Kamala HQ

Honestly there are only four methods that history uses to deal with excessive wealth accumulation, War, Revolution, Disaster and taxation. Over the arc of history it is inevitable and it is obvious which one is preferable.
Aaron Fenwick

"White women have gone from +13 points for Trump pre-convention to a virtual dead heat (Trump +2) now; white men, from +13 points for Trump before the convention to +21 points now.”
Shannon Watts

THIS LABOR DAY, every American should be alarmed about how billionaires warp our political system. Timothy Mellon — the heir to a Gilded Age fortune — has donated $125 million to a pro-Trump PAC. That's more than 3 million Americans giving $40 each. OBSCENE.
Steven Greenhouse

These political parties and movement organizations have done more to move the democratic party left, score wins of their own and pass progressive policies than Green Party ever has or will. Yes, duopoly sucks, but Green Party isn’t the answer.
@dax19956

Minnesota MAGA Twitter:  "Sure Tim Walz and the Minnesota DFL are popular at the state fair, but that's in the Twin Cities, where TWO THIRDS OF THE STATE'S POPULATION LIVES! Outside of the Twin Cities metro (not including Duluth and other towns), he's unpopular, so...THERE!  GOTCHA!"
The Matt McNeil Show

It’s deeply disturbing how normal it has become for ordinary people to fear MAGA retribution if they speak up about the Trump campaign’s behavior
Emily Nussbaum

True! and it’s not just ordinary people who feel intimidated. Why did Zuckerberg cave to Jim Jordan? Why isn’t Romney speaking out about Trump? The Bush family?
Jane Mayer

School Days are Bicycle Days:


Cool Bike Art

One simple thought for the day: referring to the withdrawal from Afghanistan as "disastrous" is an editorial comment that a serious newspaper does not include in a news article. The government in Afghanistan, which Donald Trump had worked with for four years, was corrupt to its core. There was no way pulling out was going to be pretty. Biden managed to get over 120k Afghans who had worked with the U.S. out of the country. That was a serious accomplishment.
Dean Baker

Trump's advanced age should be a major story. So should the failure to release his tax returns or a health plan. The failure of so many of his former cabinet members to endorse him should be news along with allegations of bribery by Egypt. Trump's two impeachments should be news.
Bruce Bartlett

On this day in 1885, white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, waged a brutal attack against Chinese miners hired by the Union Pacific Railroad, leaving dozens dead. No one was ever held responsible.
Equal Justice Initiative

People are waiting for Trump to release his Willie Brown flight records, his Arlington National Cemetery video, his infrastructure plan, his “beautiful” health care plan, Melania’s immigration records, and his tax returns after that 10-year audit he’s been suffering through.
Keith Boykin

Doctors are AMAZED at these 10 ways to BOOST your immune system:
The Tetanus vaccine
The Measles vaccine
The Polio vaccine
The Mumps vaccine
The HPV vaccine
The Pneumonia vaccine
The Hepatitis B vaccine
The Rubella vaccine
The Diphtheria vaccine
The Covid-19 vaccine
Dr. Jonathan N. Stea

The invisibility of class privilege protects "the privileged by letting people deny the unearned nature of their advantages." Recent research: When presented with evidence of their privilege, people "claim to have suffered more personal life hardships"
Alfie Kohn


Tuesday, October 1, 2024

BlueSky, September 2024

Wow, I forgot the debate between Harris and Trump was in September. It seems so long ago! 

But there it was in this month's BlueSky record, just after the school shooting in Georgia that killed four people. (Remember that?) In addition to much angst and anger about Republican fascism about immigrants in Ohio particularly, and the bomb threats that seem to emanate Republican followers — the month also included the second threat to Trump's life while he was golfing, escalating deaths caused by Israel, and the month ending with flooding in the Southeast from Hurricane Helene, particularly in the mountains of western North Carolina.

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

___ 

Give this editor a raise:

Ian Livingston


Poopy emoji:


Elly @ellyzoe.bsky.social

"While the State’s interest in protecting 'unborn' life is compelling, until that life can be sustained *by the State* — and not solely by the woman compelled by the Act to do the State’s work — the balance of rights favors the woman." [Quoting a Georgia court decision overruling the state's 6-week abortion ban]
Dell Adams

Pollsters should start asking Trump voters “if former President Trump is re-elected and launches the campaigns of political violence he’s promised, will you personally take part or will you leave the attacks on scary brown people to others?” Less sarcastically, you should ask the Trump voters in your lives. Get them on the record now. Say you want to know who to fear when the Trump Purge comes.
Kevin M. Kruse

I unironically think that pollsters should ask "would you still support the Republican nominee if [or when?] the violence he is fomenting ends up directed at you or people you care about?" We've seen time and again that the face-eating leopard phenomenon is pervasive and only ends with faceless regrets.
Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social

Every Trump voter owns all the violence in my opinion
Grudgie the Whale

I think we've finally reached a tipping point where the cost of $650 million in fossil fuel subsidies the US pays every year is now exceeded by the cost of flooding, drought, wildfire, cold snaps, and heat evens caused by climate change.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social



@thorchrs.bsky.social

Weleaka. Nuyaka. Euchee. Haskell. Eufaula. Carter Seminary. These are the reeducation camps our family were forced to attend. We are the first generation not to be stolen to your federal Indian boarding "schools." This is not long ago history. It's your turn to help us carry it. #OrangeShirtDay
Frances Danger

My grandma Emma went to Flandreau Indian School, where she was beaten for speaking Anishinaabemowin, her first language. She wasn’t allowed to go home for years at a time. Before she left us, she would scream and cry while she slept, even in her 90s.
Ashley Fairbanks @ziibiing.com

Last week a fairly well-known actor endorsed Trump. His lefty fans, friends, and former colleagues responded with disappointment. Last month, a Trump-voting Republican factory manager said his Haitian workers are good people. His fellow Republicans responded by threatening to kill him.
Radley Balko

I find it striking how in the aftermath of Helene, libraries are providing crucial community services like free wifi while cops are guarding stores with rotting food from potential "looters" instead of serving and protecting people. Worth considering how we spend local funding.
Alex Brown @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social

Thought for the day: We can't avoid discontinuity. The more discontinuity we can accept of ideas, assumptions, and power structures, the less discontinuity of lives, bridges, food supplies, ecosystems, etc.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

"free speech includes racists" went from a reminder about a single part of speech rights to, for many people, the entirety of speech rights
@jesseltaylor.bsky.social

Seattle was supposed to be a climate refuge [like Asheville] – then we got walloped by smoke, then the heat dome. The sooner we let go of the illusion of escape the sooner we can get serious about the solidarity needed to lower emissions and prepare our communities.
Meade Krosby

when did bomb threats become the standard republican response to everything they mildly dislike
@bobbylewis.bsky.social

We listen to so much classic rock my 8 yr old thought California was a hotel.
Jack @wakeupangry.bsky.social

Worth noting that the only reason the US has any sort of free school breakfast is that we collectively freaked out when the Black Panthers began successfully implementing one outside of government infrastructure
Gwen Snyder @gwensnyder.bsky.social

This is the thing: all those predictions about rising sea levels never tell you what the *process* of sea level rise actually is. The water doesn't just gradually get higher until you have to move out: it comes in hurricanes and flash floods that sweep away infrastructure miles from the shore.
Small Robots @smolrobots.bsky.social

I wish I had a dollar for every time Trump says "the likes of which nobody has ever seen."
gustavo64.bsky.social

This graph is astonishing. The people that bang on about “natural birth” and “women have been doing this forever without help” need to be forced to stare at this until their eyes water:


Dr Kat Day @chronicleflask.katday.com

This fact drove me nuts when I was pregnant. Yes, women have been doing this for eons but also pregnancy was a leading cause of death among women for those same eons.
Christina Wolbrecht

"Progress" is famously hard to define, but I bet most people would agree that this is part of it. Stumbled across this chart this a.m. and have been thinking about how many lives have been spared over the years. Public-health rules and antibiotics are responsible for the great bulk of the drop.
Charles C. Mann

I used to think Loving v Virginia was the greatest name for a legal case ever, but a new challenger has emerged
Shiv Ramdas @nameshiv.bsky.social

Vivid Entertainment presents:
BUTT V BUTT IN LICKING COUNTY
(Fredrick Butt v Gregory Butt, Court of Appeals, Licking County, Ohio, Fifth Appellate)
Coach Walz Finstock

At a time when the divisions between the two major political parties are quite stark on key issues — on judges, climate change, abortion rights, tax cuts for the rich, etc. — it is bizarre that the media plays up the idea that every candidate is a tabula rasa, whose “policy” views are unfathomable.
Larry Glickman

I don't know how to tell you this, but if you think it's okay to destroy several packed apartment blocks in the hope of killing one man, you are a monster
Council Estate Media @cemedia.bsky.social

People in power use antisemitism in order to deflect attention from themselves. This is why Musk loves to use antisemitic conspiracy theories to target George Soros. Everything he accuses Soros of he does himself, including buying a media company to create a propaganda machine:


Elad Nehorai @eladn.bsky.social

Normies generally don’t know that there’s a clean energy revolution going on and that 95% of the power capacity installed in the US this year will be zero emissions.
Costa Samaras

why was North Carolina's lieutenant governor at a truck show during one of North Carolina's greatest natural disasters in history
Timothy Burke @bubbaprog.ilovecitr.us

Or put another way, the “Harris needs more details” are the same gatekeeping bullshit people who go up to women at cons and make them “prove you are a fan.” They just hate women.
Dan Sandler @danielsand.bsky.social

There is a horrible irony in looking at these two candidates and somehow feeling like SHE is the one that most resembles a used car salesman.
rheumecraig.bsky.social

The fact that 22 Million people live in the state with the most predictable, board-wiping natural disasters is a failure in every way. Give it back to the gators.
@premiumfrye.bsky.social

I don’t think I’ve ever spent as much time thinking about my period as these guys [Trump and Vance] have.
Kashana

It's fascinating how the dismantling of a genuine mass media and the recreation of premodern purely person-to-person information networks via social media has transformed Americans back into medieval villagers in the span of about a decade.
Jacob Bacharach

same story everywhere. nimby dead-enders can’t win with the public so they file spurious lawsuits in hopes of getting a sympathetic judge
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Beware those who tell you they know how all this is going to work out - the doomsayers, or the AOKers, or even the steady line to a middle future predictors. We are in the time of surprises. Of non-linearities. Of tipping points both in earth systems and human ones...
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Groceries are more affordable today than not only in 2023, but also during most of the Trump presidency. But that's politically inconvenient for MAGA and online leftists, and they play on the tendency to think raises are your own doing, price increases are the president's, and decreases don't count:


Nicholas Grossman

Access to paid sick leave 🤒 is unequal:
- In the top 25% of workers by wages, 94% have access to paid sick days.
- But in the bottom 25% of workers by wages, only 58% have access to paid sick days.
Economic Policy Institute

My latest: New polling shows that roughly 80 percent of Democrats feel the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies. Still, prominent party donors are urging Kamala Harris to dump Joe Biden's star antitrust enforcer.  
Dell Cameron @dell.bsky.social

Nothing is more overdetermined than the press demanding more policy detail from Harris and then complaining that it's too boring to cover when the detail is provided. IF ANYTHING SHE'S OVERPREPARED
Scott Lemieux @lemieuxlgm.bsky.social

“If you can’t secretly use money to mandate how others speak then is speech really free?” –all billionaires
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

There's a lot of dialogue about Bluesky being a progressive echo chamber or whatever. But to me, a reporter who's neither racist nor insane, it's currently the best Twitter replacement because Twitter serves me nonstop racist and insane stuff and Threads won't do breaking news. Truly that simple.
Kevin Collier

The neighborhood turkeys are better at traffic calming than the speed limit signs.
Bill Lindeke

i’m glad that the The Law has come after eric adams but listen if adams is getting indicted then jared kushner needs to be buried under a jail
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

this seems accurate, but would Lebanon braces be more accurate?


Chris Steller

"Russia braces for new ground war in Ukraine"
Anders Bloomquist @derzquist.net

At the AI + Energy Summit, I said electricity demand growth in the 1960s was 7% per year. In the 1970s: 5%. From 1980-2005: ~2-3%. 2005-2022: 0.5%. Going forward to electricity cars, homes, businesses, factories, and data center growth, we need ~2-3%. I’m confident we can at least match the 1990s rate
Costa Samaras

Drivers and pro-car politicians don't often understand that a functioning public transport system and active mobility options reduce traffic, making it easier for drivers and users of all modes of transport and mobility.
Aarne Granlund

Though it's broadly accepted among planners, the idea that multifamily housing should be built exclusively on arterial streets is fundamentally a political compromise that sells out renters and apartment dwellers in an attempt to get single family homeowners to accept density. This compromise is not worth making because the political strategy does not succeed: NIMBY homeowners will always and everywhere fight limited arterial density with the same fury they would have fought broad densification.
Max Dubler

Trump's "policy"-talk is like a football coach saying his strategy for an upcoming game is, "We're going to score so many touchdowns, the most beautiful touchdowns you've ever seen." Okay, how?! "We're going to run the ball so fast and throw the ball and catch it."
city trees @insavga.bsky.social

there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but the work of AI models isn't valuable enough for it to matter
Doctora Malka Older

knife: my job is to cut
spoon: my job is to scoop
potato masher: my job is to prevent you from opening the drawer
@loveandbarley.bsky.social

This is a good example of something I was thinking about the other day, which is why it’s so hard to get people to care about prominent people lying, or to get them to distinguish between insignificant mistakes and whoppers. I think it’s because we spend every day now batting away lies all day. Marketing has always had false claims, sure. But now, how often are you personally told a lie in an average day? Between phishing attempts, scam emails, junk DMs, phone calls claiming to be about your computer, even snail mail pretending to be about your mortgage. It’s a lot. I think people have become accustomed to “whatever”-ing all manner of purely malicious bullshit every single day, and it makes it feel like somebody saying something that’s obviously false is just another “whatever.” I’m not saying this is anybody’s fault — I do it too. Not about important things, I hope. But if you really think about the number of times a day you are aggressively lied to, I think that over time, it degrades your general sense that lying is bad, or that lying matters. How can it? It happens all the time with no consequences. It seems bad.
Linda Holmes

Since the 2020 elections, Republicans have adopted new voting restrictions in every state where they have held single-party control or veto-proof legislative majorities, according to this analysis


Stephen Wolf

America has two political parties; one is broadly in favor of letting citizens votes, and one has looked for ways to make it harder to vote
Don Moynihan

a single evangelical family’s drive and grit moved roughly 100,000 korean babies and children from their families and country around the world for profit. their legacy has spread to other countries over time. the holts and everyone who has worked for them deserve a reckoning of their own
Je Hyeon Sim @naptime.theolive.garden

Considering that Jimmy Walker held the job, it's actually fairly impressive that Eric Adams is the first NYC mayor to be indicted.
Derek Willis

Eric Adams was the perfect avatar for white people who wanted to say "well actually...Black people LOVE cops" during the 2020 uprising.
Prisonculture

"criminals who stole millions get to lock up journalists who tell the public about their crimes" is a pretty succinct vision for the world Trumpism is supposed to bring about.
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

hot take: this bullshit talk about sentience is also a way to trick government agencies into leaning into "a.i." regulation that staves off some imaginary singularity instead of, you know, actually regulating the horrible antisocial effects of bullshit "a.i." in the real world
Greg Pak

an interesting thing i have noticed is that the pundits whose main thing is that “democrats are obsessed with identity politics” have nothing to say about trump indulging this country’s oldest form of identity politics.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

It’s wild, isn’t it? The US was literally founded on identity politics; only white male landowners could vote. Other types of people had limited/no rights.
swankyanniek.bsky.social

It's all so stupid:


Shawn Connery

We're living through a fast-paced technological revolution around clean energy in the USA and you've probably seen less reporting on it than you did on "NFTs" because some of the wealthiest people in the country are trying to prevent it.
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

As far as I can tell there's zero justification for bombing the shit out of Beirut in retaliation for the actions of a terrorist group based in Lebanon. It's just flagrantly immoral and it's being done using American weapons and we're just shrugging about it
CHOAM Nomsky @thielman.bsky.social

The Heritage Foundation truly embodies "big tent" conservatism, in the sense that it's a run-down circus filled with sketchy clowns, carny grifters, and endless piles of shit.
Kevin M. Kruse

If you’re deporting students, you’re not a college, you’re just a police state with dorms.
Kashana

An authoritarian demagogue inspiring crowds to demand the expulsion of a group of nonwhite legal residents based on their nationality. Could not be more explicit what we're seeing here.
Brendan Nyhan

the slow motion federalist society coup against our ability to govern ourselves is pulling into fast motion. this has received less media total attention from the political media than tim walz's retirement from the national guard did
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

How dare Google call this a ‘common zinnia”?


FeistyEnglishTeacher @flower-power.bsky.social

Utterly bewildered that serious people are arguing it isn’t a big deal for a journalist to cover a campaign while carrying on an undisclosed romantic relationship with one of the candidates — and to lie to her editor about it when confronted.
Radley Balko

For all the moral panic about legalizing marijuana, it seems that the much less critiqued legalization of sports betting will end up wreaking a great deal of devastation.
Lydia Polgreen

Christianity has undergone a lot of identity crises over the last two thousand or so years but I think one of the major ones that it's never gotten past is the transition from a religion of the subjects of Empire to the religion of the Empire itself.
braak

I told a law professor that in my first job, tenure-track at DePaul U in 2003, my starting salary was $49,000, with a 7 course teaching load (quarter system), and I felt grateful for it. He couldn't believe my low salary. He said, "But you have a PhD!" "Right, but so does everyone else applying," I said.
Anna O Law @unlawfulentries.bsky.social

Today I learned the phrase "All that is solid melts into air," though attributed to Marx, is actually the coinage of a particularly freewheeling translator of Marx, who was clearly inspired by a line from a famous speech by Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Chris Steller

a Venn diagram of media people sticking their necks out to defend a young female magazine writer who got inappropriately involved in a story for 9 months and lied about it versus a young female magazine writer who signed a petition in her own name calling for a ceasefire in a war she didn’t cover
Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social

"four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isn’t a coincidence."
Katie Martin

Musk is a 3rd-generation white supremacist techno-fascist. He’s been steeped in this shit since childhood
@leupp.bsky.social

“The GOP candidate is openly running on a platform of ethnic cleansing” seems like an angle that a responsible press would be stressing from now until the results are certified.
Jonathan M. Katz @katzonearth.bsky.social

I haven’t seen debate on Twitter in a very long time. I popped over there once in a while, less and less often now, and all I see are endless streams of ‘replies’ from blue checks, consisting of emojis or insults. That’s not debate, and it is, quite frankly, boring as hell.
Mariam Zama @mimsez.bsky.social



Gary Hornseth

I love post offices, we should put solar on the roofs, energy storage in the basements, and banking in all of them
Costa Samaras

"Somalia has emitted roughly as much carbon dioxide from fossil fuels since the 1950s as the US economy does in an average three days." Yes, that does say three days
Leo Hickman

Remember how free speech fan Elon bought Twitter because he was so outraged about how its previous management was supposedly helping Democrats by engaging in reasonable content moderation and then he quickly turned Twitter into a pro-Trump propaganda site swimming with Nazis? Weird how that happened
Seth Cotlar

We we first began to garden in Vermont 25 years ago, we would celebrate if we made it to Sept 21 without a killing frost. Today I'm gardening in a t-shirt and ate tomatoes and basil for lunch. Last week we went camping and I swam comfortably in a northern VT lake every day.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Watching Republicans triple down on blood libel has been as shocking and appalling as the coup to end US democracy. It is 1930s Germany level vile and no one who is participating in this should enjoy comfort in public life ever again
Grudgie the Whale

Black Lives Matter was an effort to call attention to the unprosecuted murders of African Americans, and the MAGA response was “no, BLUE Lives Matter.” As if there was an epidemic of unprosecuted cop killings instead of our reality where cop killings are treated *more* seriously in countless ways.
Kevin M. Kruse

People are drawn to the MAGA cult because it tells them that they are actually the world’s greatest victims, and no one exemplifies that better than the coddled nepo baby who leads it
Kevin M. Kruse

The watchword of traffic safety advocates: No repaving without traffic calming! Repaving a street designed in the 50s without adding traffic calming is like repainting an old house with lead paint.
Warren Wells, AICP

Jewish people make up 2% of the population and about half that in swing states. So when Trump says they will be the reason he loses, he’s really saying 1) Jewish people have a secret control over things and 2) here’s who to blame.
Philip Bump

Book Cover of the Day:


Rachel Deering

The Republican Party is openly working to change rules **in the middle of an election** to their benefit in Nebraska, Georgia, and North Carolina. They do this because there is too little of a cost for them to do it
Concept of a Professor @darinself.bsky.social

whether it's the presidential candidate endorsing a candidate for governor who calls himself "hitler" and suggested reading mein kampf, or a couple college students who said "from the river to the sea palestine will be free," both sides have dealt with controversial anti-semitism this election cycle
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

Apparently, the views of a random college student are perfectly representative of the Democratic Party whereas the views of the Republican Party’s candidate for governor of North Carolina are just not representative of who they are.
ritterjcat

Pedestrian bridges are planner confessions of guilt
Bryan Formhals @dromomaniampls.bsky.social

God, I miss when rich people would become a patron of the arts instead of trying to destroy the world.
Cheryl Lynn Eaton

London’s clean air zone was meant to reduce car pollution but also had another effect: more active kids. “Instead of being chauffeured to school by their parents, the students started walking, biking, scootering, or taking public transit.”
kottke.org

one of the tics of the modern right is that they will say they are “anti-establishment” but they won’t specify what the nature of their challenge to the establishment is, because what they really mean is that they’re opposed to liberal democracy.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

I can't speak for all American Jews, but for me at least, a presidential candidate saying there's Good Jews (ones who vote for him) and Bad Jews (ones who don't) and if he loses the election it was "rigged" and he'll blame Jews, is a lot more concerning than some college students denouncing Israel.
Nicholas Grossman

The No. 1 reason for the climate crisis is the energy-industrial complex.
The No. 1 reason that political will does not exist to stop the climate crisis is the energy-industrial complex.
The No. 1 reason that the climate crisis is getting worse is the energy industrial complex:


Gerald Kutney

just gonna say that, whatever comes of this scandal, Mark Robinson is as of now the sitting Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina and none of this stuff prevented him from rising that high. please fund local journalism everywhere i'm fucking begging you
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

A question about Vance and Haitians: If it is okay to level such a despicable, dehumanizing smear at a vulnerable minority population to direct media attention, then what sort of lying and propaganda about an exposed, assailable out group *would not* be justified?
Greg Sargent

Call me old fashioned, but a reporter getting seduced emotionally from a distance by a source is so much worse than if they just got drunk together and bumped uglies. One’s messy, but the other’s proof that you’re an easy mark in a job that you’re getting paid to not be an easy mark.
Cooper Lund

I'm a bit more pissed about the fact it's 10,000 people's annual CO2 emissions per billionaire funfair ride than 'they didn't do a proper spacewalk'.
Ben Sanderson

Blank stares at work from everyone under 50 when the name Eric Severaid was mentioned.
Chris Steller (this is a Minnesota-based person)

An all-time standout day for learning about the sexual habits of the worst people alive
Kelsey Atherton

With infinite power comes infinite responsibility:


@professorkiosk.wtf

One of the reliable signs that someone is trying to brainwash your children is when they assure you that every other educator aside from them is trying to brainwash your children. And also, nothing says "I'm not a lying propagandist" like getting a recommendation from Glenn Beck.
Seth Cotlar

The threat to deport undocumented immigrants is a threat to deport documented immigrants is a threat to deport the descendants of immigrants is a threat to deport anyone who they think looks like an immigrant is a threat to deport anyone who disagrees with them
Doctora Malka Older

single-family homes produce 58% of building emissions. While electrification is key, high upfront costs of retrofits are a stubborn barrier.
Aimee Witteman

Since Trump spent half his speech in Nassau tonight describing NYC as a crime-ridden hellscape I'm just gonna re-up this....


Mark D. Levine @marklevinenyc.bsky.social

We all know about the scourge of legalized sports gambling, but I’d love to see a study on what QVC does to the brains of elderly women.
Mary Jones @tlachtga.bsky.social

I’d love to see a study of how often the New York Times has appended a “but” to headlines about good economic news for the Biden/Harris administration, and how it compares to their economic reporting on the Trump administration.
Larry Glickman

SOME RARE GOOD NEWS: the Georgia Attorney General is dropping the money laundering charges in the Stop Cop City RICO case against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund members –– they were forced to do so, because they are bogus charges, as we've said from the start!!
@micahh.bsky.social

In Massachusetts, if you have such a bad driving record that no company will insure you, the state will step in and offer you insurance from a tax-payer funded state pool. We literally use tax money to keep bad drivers on the road instead of spending it on better transit.
Ellery @biknmusicmama.bsky.social

Just to be clear, people in Springfield reached out to JD Vance, AS THEIR SENATOR, to get some financial help for things like ESL classes, and instead of doing his literal job, he turned around and spread dangerous, life-threatening lies about the community.  
Sam @very-simple.com

definitely feels like "immigrant" is for white people and "migrant" is coded for Black and brown folks
Wagatwe

so have libraries, immigrants, state bureaucrats, judges, judicial aides, abortion providers, poll workers, elementary school children with gay teachers...


geoffrey @parsnip.bsky.social

Two separate reports find that the Inflation Reduction Act will save 200,000 lives and has already added 150,000 new jobs
Aimee Witteman

between mass deportation and massive tariffs trump is running on a promise to, among other things, fly the american economy directly into the side of a mountain
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

We have a labor shortage in this country. This MF is complaining about the price of bacon and he doesn’t know who works in meatpacking plants.
@dickius.bsky.social

basically say goodbye to the agricultural industry, hospitality, construction, and medical care. i read recently — and i don't remember where — that if you deported as many people as Trump wants it would produce a GDP hit as bad as the one experienced during the Great Recession
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

“Neon Sign Machinery” Trade catalog cover, Eisler Electric Corp., Newark, N.J., 1930. Image: Association for Preservation Technology via archive.org:


Gary Hornseth

One thing I think about a lot is: we are told we live in abundance and the climate crisis means renunciation of that abundance. But actually we live in many kinds of impoverishment and deprivation--of hope, clean air, time itself, social connections, thriving nature.
Rebecca Solnit

As Trump's campaign tries to drum up outrage that factual observations about Trump's attacks on democracy are what have led 2 disturbed people to target him. Remember in 4 jurisdictions, he argued he had a 1st Amendment RIGHT to elicit threats against judges, prosecutors, and witnesses in his cases, and their families.
emptywheel

“Come on, it’s just a JOKE” – every unfunny person in history doing terrible things to others.
Costa Samaras

I don’t listen to or read interviews with undecided voters. I refuse to spend more time engaging with their decision than they have done themselves.
Wes Burdine

When America decided it didn't care about hundreds of children being gunned down at school is the moment America stopped caring about distant gunfire disrupting a politician's tee shot at the dogleg 16th hole... <touches earpiece>. Oh. We still care about tee shot disruption.
Dan Murphy @bungdan.bsky.social

in 2017 trump merely inspired neo-nazis to descend on a town and terrorize its residents. now he’s actively leading the charge
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Amateur Lee Harvey Oswald tryouts aside, it is objectively crazy that a major party presidential nominee is spending one of the last eight Sundays before an election golfing at home.
Andy Craig

Not sure what Republicans want to hear from us. "I'm sorry your guy keeps getting shot at with those weapons you cherish above all else"?
Elon Green

I don't like Donald Trump, but the NRA is trying to get him killed.
Frank Conniff

This ad warning you about how harmful UV rays are to your eyes has been bleached out of its Yellow and Magenta inks because of those same UV rays:


Plate Stealer

More should be made of the fact that any town in the US can suddenly become a far-right war zone if the MAGAs deem it so. A mere mention of your town from them can upend a community. Thinking of how Glendale became a hate hotbed last year out of fucking nowhere. Who wants more of this???
April Wolfe

Americans hate corruption and hate billionaires. This is our home ground for discussion. Vance was bribed by billionaire Peter Thiel, and he corruptly shifted his positions because of that. Let’s just say that. The Republican Party is owned and controlled by billionaires. What caused JD Vance to change his tune on Trump is rightwing billionaires’ money. Peter Thiel’s money. These are political bribes that the billionaire-packed SCOTUS legalized. Vance and the GOP want to talk about immigrants. We should pivot to billionaires, every time.
Eric Blair @protecttruth.bsky.social

In 2017 John Roberts called poli sci research on gerrymandering “sociological gobbledygook” because he couldn’t understand any of it.
Jeff Lazarus @jlazarus.bsky.social

Republicans are explicitly telling people what they plan to do and I see people saying "that's not legal" and I wonder how people can be this daft.
Prisonculture

I increasingly believe folks using this line of argument ("it can't happen, it's illegal") are more than anything just preemptively reinforcing their plausible deniability narrative so that when this happens, they can feign disbelief and avoid doing anything brave
Gwen Snyder

I find myself hating JD Vance more viscerally than I hate Donald Trump and I can't tell if it's because Vance is even more depraved or Trump has just become the jackhammer outside my window
Gillian Branstetter

Dumb thought: Vinyl records started coming back into popularity around 2006, with new releases and new record players. That means the Modern Vinyl Era is almost as long as the entire CD Era (roughly 1985-2005)
Daniel Feldman

it’s just a given in american politics that if the current republican party gets outraged about something, there will be bomb threats
Tom Tomorrow

It’s really quite tragic that neither Trump nor Vance had fathers who loved them. For them, but mainly for us.
Leah McElrath

Used to be if a candidate had the support of Nazis that meant he was a Nazi
Michan Connor

This is my official campaign push for the greatest mineral of all time. Behold MEAT ROCK. Rhodochrosite LITERALLY LOOKS LIKE HAM and when it’s cut from a different angle IT LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE BACON. Turquoise is so boring and pedestrian. Vote MEAT ROCK!!


Erin Biba

There are books that explain the history of the right’s playbook in Springfield really well and it’s no coincidence that many of the same people have been trying to get those books out of schools.
Tim Carvell

We need to get back to a place where the Klan feel the need to wear hoods.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social

“How can JD Vance target his own constituents like this?” JD Vance, and a lot of his colleagues, believe that the only people they have to represent are white. Pretending otherwise is how we get here.
Nails Nathan @chadstanton.bsky.social

At this point, the question isn’t whether or not the Republican campaign to incite a pogrom against immigrants leads to bloodshed; it’s whether or not the Republicans even bother to go through the motions of disowning the violence after the fact.
Kevin M. Kruse

anyone who's ever done any caring knows: the drudgery is the constant laundry, tidying up, cleaning, folding, etc. the fun part is making games, drawing pictures and telling stories together. somehow we've ended up with tech that does the fun bits while we have to carry on doing the laundry.
Naomi Alderman

The fact that tech is so dominated by people who have never had the burden of care fall on them by default has nothing to do with this, I imagine.
swingandswirl.bsky.social

I’ll just reiterate that if Republicans had to win the popular vote they actually couldn’t run like this in national presidential elections.
Chris Hayes

really seems that all of these guys who come out of private equity or consulting have no idea how to actually run a sustainable business
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

They picked Haitians because Haitians represent racists' deepest fear: a race war they lost. Enslaved Black Americans could and did terrorize slaveowners — deservedly — but Haiti was their nightmare scenario. Uppity Blacks! Who became a power! And would've kept going but for US and European dirty dealing! Scared white people vote racist. That's all this "eating pets" bullshit is about. And if people — Haitians, Aidan Clark's family — get lynched, even better in their book. They think everyone shares their sadism, too.
N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin.bsky.social

I have a MIGHTY NEED:


@latimeriidae.bsky.social

Using legal immigrants from the western hemisphere’s poorest country just to distract from a shitty debate performance. No bottom.
David Brauer

The new mail trucks have the exact opposite vibes to the Cybertruck.
Gary Horses @khandozo.bsky.social

A near ironclad rule of race science is the dumbest motherfuckers you will ever meet are obsessed with IQ.
Adam Serwer

taking a town from 80k to 60k population is almost always more damaging to the people who live there than taking a town from 60k to 80k population.
@proptermalone.bsky.social

This seems almost too banal to point out, but notice with Springfield how Republicans are now attacking immigrants who came through a system everyone supposedly agrees is legal. This is a national party shift to just overtly attacking all non-white immigrants.
Jeremy Littau

JD saw the nazis harassing the Haitian immigrants and he knew which side *he* was on
Tom Tomorrow

One of the two big political parties, the one that controls the courts, has People Who Call In Bomb Threats as a decent-sized and fast-growing part of its base. One of those things everyone kind of knows and just has to walk around knowing.
David_j_roth

Project 2025 would add as much carbon pollution to the US by 2030 as Germany emits annually. Trump’s climate rollback threatens our future. However, strong climate leadership could cut US emissions by half by 2030 (compared to 2005). The stakes of this election couldn’t be higher for the climate.
Leah Stokes

A decrepit lunatic using racism to divide and torture our neighbors so he can shovel trillions to the worst polluters on earth. Say it a trillion times until November
L O L G O P

I wanna be clear, it’s normal that white people feel like they shouldn’t have to vocally express their anti-fascist sentiments but is also the case that the stakes are so high that it’s probably necessary to make it clear where you stand anyway. A big part of the white supremacist thought process involves believing all public facing white people that don’t explicitly express anti-supremacist sentiment (a thing normal whitefolk understandably feel they shouldn’t have to do), it’s because they’re secret nazi sympathizers being muzzled by wokeness.
Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.bsky.social

I stand by what I've said for years which is that people aren't being "duped" by the Right. They want and like what's on offer from the Right. Not understanding this is a real problem and leads to ridiculous "solutions." ... in the absence of justice in our lives, we seek satisfaction no matter how fleeting. That satisfaction can come from experiencing pleasure at other people's suffering, especially if we don't like them.
Prisonculture

Agree. Imo, Trump's cult arises from the permission he gives people to be their worst selves. They like being their worst selves. The dopamine jolt they get from their anger and grievances is addictive.
Alan Neff

The RNC has just filed a lawsuit to stop UNC-Chapel Hill students from voting in North Carolina. It’s going to be dirty tricks wall-to-wall till November. It’s all they’ve got left.
Mark Chadbourn

It's hitting me that now that housing and zoning reform are becoming marquee issues, a lot of dumb money and half-baked policy ideas are going to flood into this space.
M. Nolan Gray

The methane leakage rate of fossil gas production is 3 times worse than the government estimates, according to real data from 1 million observations in 6 regions. In it's current condition, fossil gas is no better than coal, and in some cases worse.
Brendon Slotterback

My oldest turns 10 soon and as much as I love having kids, I can’t get over how actively anti-kid this country is. From spending 10’s of thousands on daycare costs, to every single road being deadly, to the email I *I just got* from our school about online threats to school safety.
Alex @mplsalex.bsky.social

City Hall in Springfield, Ohio was evacuated this morning after a bomb threat
Phil Lewis

The Republicans, Party of Bomb Threats
mjfgates

The top of the GOP ticket should be arrested for stochastic terrorism
Kai @kaikronfield.bsky.social

So Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris and Elon Musk immediately made a veiled threat of sexual violence against her. This is exactly how red-pilled creeps like Musk try to get women to shut up and go back to the kitchen—by telling us what will happen to us if we don't.
Aubrey Hirsch

since there seems to be some confusion, elon saying "give you a child" means "impregnate you," and since taylor swift does not personally know him and has not expressed a desire to have children with him, the implication is that he'd do it against her will.
Marisa Kabas

"One way you know these guys don’t actually respect motherhood is that they bring it up to women as a threat."
@jametc.bsky.social

Politics is just the way we make society together. Whenever someone says "I am apolitical" I hear "I am not vested in the shared project of making society" and I have to wonder why.
Pavel @spavel.bsky.social

"this is the forbidden knowledge they don't want you to know" is so tempting to people, wrapping themselves in a warm blanket of credulity
Aaron Blackshear

Space travel uses up resources that could help people on Earth, but you have to consider the benefits of *checks notes* billionaires taking the first non-public spacewalk
Chris Steller

The “Haitians eat cats” thing is not just an appeal to racists. It’s an end-zone dance, a celebration of how far the American Right has successfully shoved the Overton Window back to where they can revel in being openly, overtly racist. It’s glee over the abandonment of pretense.
@kenwhite.bsky.social

My favorite are the climate change deniers who claim lowly human’s can’t affect climate here on earth, but also want to “terraform” mars, which is not habitable at all.
aimless-melissa.bsky.social

Sorry but these undecided voter interviews are ridiculous and their mental gymnastics are exhausting. Just say you can’t stomach the idea of voting for a black woman.
J. Mijin Cha


Chris Steller

The U.S. story has never been about a country that embraces immigrants. It's a story in which successive waves of immigrants have strived, thrived and made the country better despite open, often violent hostility. It's still an inspiring story. It's just not the one we tell ourselves.
Radley Balko

I'm half convinced you could improve a lot of institutions by actually "running them like a business" in terms of preserving the damn thing as a going concern instead of looting them into bankruptcy. to build on this point a bit, business does not *have* to operate in the hyper-financialized short-term shareholder value mode. that model depends on a lot of policy, above all low taxation on high incomes, carried interest, capital gains, and de facto bankruptcy fraud
ryan cooper

The European Union's greenhouse gas emissions fell by 32.5% between 1990 to 2022, while the EU economy grew by around 67% over the same period. 50% of the bloc's electricity now comes from renewables. –European Commission stats office
Nick Hedley

“By the time the debate was over, several foreign officials from both U.S. allies and more neutral countries told me they felt more confident that Harris could handle the tricky personalities she’d encounter while in the world’s most powerful job.”
Daniel Drezner

If you only watch conservative media, you literally believe Minneapolis was burnt to the ground and immigrants are eating kittens and foreign criminal are getting gender surgery in prison. That's not polarization, that's cultish delusion.
Martha Smith @mostlymartha.bsky.social

The unimaginable pressure, the country on the line, and she just calmly, professionally, walked up and got the job done
Costa Samaras

I feel a very strange combination of elation over Harris' victory and utter exhaustion over how much work the climate movement will have in educating and pressing her on the stakes of the crisis.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

That debate was like listening to a lawyer argue with an AI bot whose language dataset came exclusively from Creepypasta forums and 4Chan
Annalee Newitz @annaleen.bsky.social

“i have concepts of a plan”:


jamelle @jamellebouie.net

On CNN, someone just said that the fact that Trump and Harris have never met is a deep statement about how polarized America is. No it isn't. They would have met if Trump had peacefully attended his successor's inauguration, which literally every prior outgoing president has done.
@smotus.bsky.social

Donald Trump has said three times during this debate that the United States suffered the worst inflation in its history under Biden and I just want it noted for the record that this is a complete lie.
Daniel Drezner

"transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison" sir the question was about fracking
@milesklee.bsky.social

Conference: do you have your slides?
Me: I don't have my slides, I have a concept of my slides
Costa Samaras

“i have concepts of a plan”...gonna keep this in my pocket for when i’m procrastinating
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Harris is baiting him, dissecting him, and methodically hitting all of her talking points. Trump is ranting, incoherent, and screaming into the microphone:


Tristan Snell

Kamala Harris is killing a 78 year old baby on national tv.
Murshed Zaheed @murshedz.bsky.social

He thinks strongman is a compliment.
Radley Balko

"Viktor Orban, one of the most respected..." holy fuck dude
Paul Gowder

Odd thing about the urbanism debate:
- Progressives are now associated with the walkable urbanism humans have locally created in every society for 5,000 years
- "Trads" advocate a radical, untested suburban automobility invented in 1950 by UltraModernist Highway Communists in the federal government
aarmlovi.bsky.social

"Elites" now means "anyone who doesn't agree with me on culture war stuff." Therefore, a Supreme Court Justice, a European princess, and a tech billionaire are working class, while a middle school teacher who hangs a rainbow on the wall, or a barista with pronouns on their name tag, are elite.
Nicholas Grossman

There are more confirmed pet murders by the Republican governor of South Dakota than by Haitian immigrants in Ohio.
Andy Craig

Methane emissions are like spraying kerosene on the fire that is climate change. Some of this is from thawing permafrost and other effects of climate change itself, but a lot is from poor waste management, livestock and "natural" gas.
Marion Davis @marionsd.bsky.social

There's no evidence that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have ever eaten roadkill, as some people in the MAGA movement have claimed. You know who has eaten roadkill? RFK Jr.
Nick Martin

If JD Vance could get away with saying that Jews abduct Christian infants, kill them, and use their blood to bake matzoh: Trust me, he would.
Benjamin Dreyer @bcdreyer.bsky.social

Obviously there are plenty of pretty stark contrasts between the candidates and obviously I'm biased here but "will try to preserve a livable climate" versus "will try to destroy a livable climate" seems like it should get more play.
Dave Levitan

According to Senator Vance, the people of Springfield were suffering an epidemic of pet abductions and -- rather than call the Springfield PD, which says it never got any reports of this -- they reached out to the office of one and only one of their U.S. Senators. Sure, that definitely happened.
Kevin M. Kruse

Immigrant: Abducting wildlife to eat it = we’re all going to die and must destroy our Republic
Republicans: white-person gun hunting with your kids = sacred Constitutional right that is the best America has to offer
@bananapantz.bsky.social

if the news media would like direct proof that it’s failing at its job, here it is. a second Trump term will be made up of Project 2025, the attempted violent deportation of 20 million immigrants, and lawless revenge, and more people think Harris is too far left than are worried about it
@rincewind.run

It’s as if all the social progress I thought was being made during my entire lifetime was just a pipe dream.
@silverboots.bsky.social

Trump has spent 2024 telling everyone that he intends a mass round up in the United States that would be on a larger scale than that of the Third Reich, there's a detailed published plan for it, and he just said it was going to be bloody. I think that might be a top story.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

Stono freaked slaveholders out of their tiny minds. It was a specter that continuously haunted them. They became even more repressive, invested so much on internal security that their external borders fell apart, and they passed laws curtailing everyone's rights — all to protect slavery:


Angry Staff Officer @pptsapper.bsky.social

We are living in a golden age of shameless anti-democratic propaganda. Our institutions have largely failed to respond, and so in good neoliberal fashion, each of us is left having to be our own bullshit detector any time we engage with the news. Every person their own gatekeeper.
Seth Cotlar

For what Microsoft alone has invested in ChatGPT, you could pay 96,000 artists $50 an hour to make art full time for a year.
Andrew D Thaler

Republicans are deliberately trying to spark off a racist riot in Ohio because they think that helps them politically. Beyond reprehensible. The ones idly watching from the sidelines or looking the other way are no better
Ian Boudreau

Immigrants stealing and eating pets is a racist trope that’s been around for literally more than a century. That at least two US senators, the GOP VP nominee and the world’s richest twit fell for it tells you that they aren’t just bigots, they’re the simplest, dullest variety of bigot.
Radley Balko

When Gallup first asked about cigarette smoking in 1944, 41% of U.S. adults said they smoked. In the most recent poll, 11% of U.S. adults say they have smoked cigarettes in the past week, matching the historical low of 2022.
Ada Palmer

Do you ever have that moment where you’re eating a delicious Honeycrisp apple and you think: “fuck yes, a public university made this!!!” Or is that just me?
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

Trump: I'm going to have a trail, it's gonna have tears folks, it's gonna be a trail of tears, and blood, a bloody trail of tears, it's gonna be atrocious, lots of atrocities, lots of deaths, all the right people are gonna die ...
Media: Trump Unveils New Transportation Plan
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

CEOs can write off the entire cost of their private jets, but you can’t write off the cost of the car you use to drive to work. This is what it looks like when billionaires and corporations are allowed to fund the election campaigns of the politicians who write our tax laws.
Melanie D’Arrigo

the state of journalism, 2024:


Elle @elleisanisland.bsky.social

We should not allow Trump’s disgusting plan to be called “mass deportation.” It’s ETHNIC CLEANSING and will require them to commit GENOCIDE.
Charles Johnson @charles.littlegreenfootballs.com

Me, screaming out the window like I'm in the movie Network: HOW IS THIS RACE EVEN CLOSE TRUMP IS A DEGENERATE SOCIOPATH
Tom Tomorrow

* IRS is improving customer service, and making it easier and cheaper for people to report their taxes
* New enforcement is pushing high income tax dodgers to pay their share
This is what a functional tax agency looks like. And it would be reversed under Trump.
Don Moynihan

not to get all terry pratchett on this but "privilege" literally means "private law"
Talia Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social

It's not remotely an exaggeration to say allowing direct car sales would break the back of the Republican party's donor base
The People’s Jokic @gonebabygone.bsky.social

people will say 'the building code is about life safety' and then ignore that the building code allows 50' deadend corridors in multifamily buildings, doesn't mandate ventilation, doesn't mandate cooling to prevent overheating, etc.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

love to be greeted at the target entrance by a "armed security response unit" vehicle with IN GOD WE TRUST emblazoned in huge letters, love an explicitly christian paramilitary presence, bodes well
@spindlypete.bsky.social

Remember when serious people said ride hail would help solve climate change? Oops. This new UC-Davis study found that most ride hail trips in California replaced transit (#1 substitute), biking, walking, or carpool or wouldn't have happened.
David Zipper

Security blanket:


ApocalypticaNow

The best time of year is when neither the A/C nor the heater is running.
Christine_Mpls

The Columbine shooters had wanted this to be a bombing. But because we do actually control bombs and Americans don't routinely own those, they had to build their own, which is hard, and the bombs didn't work. Guns did, though. Because those are trivially easy to get in the US.
Naomi Kritzer

There’s direct through line between the McCarthyism phenomenon in the 1950s and Republicans now mischaracterizing Kamala Harris as a “communist.” Roy Cohn was Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the hearings. Cohn had two significant protégés: Roger Stone and Donald Trump
Leah McElrath

"I never said she stole my money." This seven word sentence has seven different meanings dependent on which word you stress. I present to you, the English language.
Alan Baxter

If Trump loses the election, he'll face punishment for his crimes. If he wins and becomes president again, he'll reject jury verdicts and stifle the remaining cases, breaking the legal system in the process. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. The 2024 election is an up-or-down vote on rule of law.
Nicholas Grossman

I never get tired of seeing contextual comparisons between a million and a billion, just cause they’re always surprising to me, no matter how much I think I know it. One I saw yesterday:
A million seconds: 12 days.
A billion seconds: 31 years.
Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social

Policy idea: safe schools, safe streets, safe climate
Costa Samaras

thin blue line flag but the blue line has been resized to reflect the proportion of your city's municipal budget that goes to police:


Soren Spicknall

my only real thought about nate silver is i straight up don't think you should trust anyone who appears to have a serious gambling addiction
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I know there are people who never stopped making a fuss about it, and good for them, but it is INSANE that the possible next president of the United States regularly defends himself against allegations of rape by saying “that is not the kind of woman I would rape”
The People’s Jokic @gonebabygone.bsky.social

drove past an elementary school this morning and they were doing active shooter drills. lines of first graders holding hands in the parking lot instead of learning in class because the adults in charge of this country value their lives less than bullets
sean @publichealth.bsky.social

When armed agents of the state never face any consequences for killing civilians, they will kill civilians. True everywhere.
Yair Wallach

Trump’s housing policy: deportations
Immigration: deportations
Child care: tariffs
Inflation: deportations and tariffs
Crime: deportations
Taxes: tax cuts funded by tariffs
Federal debt: tariffs
Every policy revolves around punishing foreigners.
Radley Balko

somehow i don’t think that we’re going to have pundits obsessing over cultural pathologies in rural conservative communities but maybe they should be
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

obviously tangential to the main issue but something i think about sometimes is how new phones or nice tvs are considered indulgent but these very expensive weapons are not
whet moser

conservatives like school shootings, in pretty much the same way they like crime. a terrified and unsafe population makes people more distrustful and reactionary, and they have the fun bonus of helping to destroy the public education system.
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

Man who has ruined every product he's touched in the last five years to streamline United States government:


Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

In the 1990s, when I was in law school, I accused Federalist Society gun nuts of advocating a world where mass shootings would become “a fact of life” like tornadoes. People like David French and Ted Cruz, literally, accused me of reducing the discussion to demonizing the Right. I wasn’t wrong.
Mitchell Epner

If you add JD Vance’s statements together, childless women should be used for firewood because they’re unwilling to have kids that could be shot at school.
Kashana

really can’t be said enough how “small” vs “big” is just not a useful frame for thinking about government. efficiency follows capacity rather than being directly related to the scope of the state’s duties. a “big” government can be incredibly efficient and a “small” one can be a dysfunctional mess
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Sometimes I think that there’s nothing more American than a Black woman with a fastidiously polished resume running against a racist white nepo baby who wants to kill everyone and can’t finish a sentence and them being roughly tied.
Kashana

i am always struck by the neo-victorian worldview of people [like JD Vance]. for them, leisure is something you earn through success in the market. if you want help to raise your children, you’re on your own unless you have money. and if you have money, then you have earned the right to free time.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

"The Republican parties of Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada have each nominated one or more electors who attempted to submit themselves as electors for Donald Trump and Mike Pence in 2020 despite the former president losing in their states."
Nails Nathan @chadstanton.bsky.social

5 or 6 current SCOTUS justices: What if the Bill of Rights *is* a suicide pact?
Rsquared

"People tend to select from history what pleases them, and I think that the historians' job is to remind them that the rest of it exists." –me, graduate course discussion board, 2020.
Jonathan Dresner

With the news that every right-wing dipshit is getting paid like $400K/month by Russia, is it paranoid crackpot stuff to wonder how many of those "successful Substacks" are just money laundering schemes?
Jude Ellison Substance Doyle

Kinda digging the "My sincere honest opinions happen to be indistinguishable from Russian propaganda" messaging
Tom Scocca

People underestimate how much money is sloshing around on the right. It doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as 20 years ago but the right-wingnut welfare pipeline has a storied history setting up their people with cushy, overpaid think tank fellowships to crank out drivel for TV and print.
Matt Ortega

Kind of funny (and completely unsurprising) that all of the accusations of people being on "Soros' payroll" was really just projection this whole time.
The Alternate Historian

It just sucks that anyone who wants to complain about dumbass culture war shit gets paid a million dollars by Russia and anyone who wants to investigate corruption in a Sheriff’s Department has to be like “hey can you PLEASE send me five dollars for my newsletter I’m begging you”
Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

1955 “Uranium Rush” board game. Source: Bradd Dantuma:


Peaceablegrotto

Miriam Adelson — who has dual US and Israeli citizenship but is said to reside mostly in Israel — has reportedly given Trump and his campaign $100 million in return for support for Israeli annexation over the entirety of the West Bank if he regains the White House.
Leah McElrath

As I always say, the people who stand to lose parking and driving privileges always have the time and motivation to show up to protests and meetings. The people who haven't yet experienced better bus service don't have the time to show up to protests and meetings, even if they have the motivation.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

"More than 50% of ride-hailing trips taken by surveyed riders in California replaced more sustainable forms of transportation — such as walking, cycling, carpooling, and public transit — or created new vehicle miles..."
The War on Cars

I genuinely think that those of us who remember how adult life was done before the internet need to actually write it down. for history. in a couple of generations it will be impossible for people to imagine how we eg booked holidays, checked the weather, got access to a journal article without it
Naomi Alderman

Balance at the New York Times is two Republicans taking opposite sides of a topic about which neither of them has anything useful to say.
Gregory Hays @aristofontes.bsky.social

Some of you may know this anecdote from the Bad Place, over ten years ago I asked one of my national security sources for my writing for an unexpected prediction. I was expecting EMP, etc. He said “If you own anything in Phoenix, sell. It’ll be unlivable in a decade.” The point being, politicians and oil execs can pretend climate change isn’t a real thing. You know who acts like it’s a real thing? Insurance companies, intelligence agencies and the military. Act accordingly.
John Rogers

"'Batteries have done in five years what took solar 15 years'":


Alan Cordova

I literally do not understand how Minnesota has a “i can’t move there because of the weather” taboo, but Arizona doesn’t. This sounds like hell to me.
Wes Burdine

Trump has no idea what he's talking about but the American political press don't see why that should be disqualifying because neither do they
@swolecialism.bsky.social

Picking Vance was like putting Project 2025 on the ticket
L O L G O P

One of the reasons why it costs so much and takes so much time to fly across Africa is the sheer size of the continent, our perception of which is very much distorted by the Mercator projection. The distance between Dakar and Nairobi is more than 2.5 times the distance between Moscow and London.
Nanjala

There’s a nonzero chance that Kamala Harris will win the electoral college because North Carolina Republicans nominated a Hitler quoting compulsive pornography enthusiast who robs Girl Scouts
Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

Permitting motorists to turn right on a red light at most urban and suburban intersections is deadlier for pedestrians. We’ve known this for 40 years.
Peter Norton

i found out that nathan straus, the guy who promoted milk pasteurization in the US the hardest and helped pass laws to that effect in major cities from the 1890s on, *lost two children to milkborne tuberculosis* i truly wish raw milk influencers would stop
Talia Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social

It’s honestly wild that the richest man in the world and a former US President are both posting through tremendous years-long mental breakdowns. Can you imagine if Henry VIII had Twitter?
Aidan Moher

we're living through a fast-paced technological revolution around green energy and it's getting about 1% of the attention it should. In a month, no one's gonna be burning coal in the UK for the first time since the steam engine was invented.
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

Little has harmed the cause of free speech more than redefining it to mean promoting bigots and denigrating trans people, "I can say whatever I want about you but you can't say anything I don't like back," and honoring authoritarians' censorship dictates while rejecting democratically-enacted laws.
Nicholas Grossman

Good morning! Happy Labor Day!


Ursula @ladyofsardines.bsky.social

It's malpractice not tell your students that LLMs are water-guzzling, venture capital-gorged, unprofitable bullshit machines that degrade the process of *teaching human beings how to write*
Ryan Boyd

“trump is a bad candidate and anyone who can’t beat him in a landslide is also a bad candidate” is apparently one of those things people believe despite ten years of evidence to the contrary. trump is flawed and unpopular but as a candidate he’s basically optimized for the electoral college.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

As someone who worked on this for seven months...I can vouch for the data here: We merged datasets. Republicans are *at least* 16x likelier to be child molesters than Democrats. Priests made up 42% of the data offenders, cops about 45%.
Ken Burnside