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