BlueSky, August 2025 – Part 2

Here it is, the second half of this agonizing August 2025. We left off the first half of the month with Trump kissing Putin's butt and ramping up the invasion of Washington, D.C. That continued apace in the second half, with the unsuccessful federal indictment of sandwich guy and a lot more.

In between there was the raid on John Boltons house, the attempt to fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, the renewed effort to deport Kilmar Obrega Garcia, the assistant head of the DOJ credulously interviewing a known perjurer in the Epstein case, Texas Republicans illegally redistricted in their favor, the regime promised to invade more "blue" cities, and RFK Jr. began destroying public health by gutting the CDC among other things.

We ended the month with the mass shooting at a small school in Minneapolis, and the Right's attempt to make it about the killer's trans identity rather than the availability of guns, lack of mental health support, and deep wells of shared misanthropy and dysfunction that exist on the interweb. Oh, and then right at the end of the month, a federal appeals court upheld an earlier decision calling Trump's tariffs illegal — but then left them in place, pending appeal to the Supreme Court through October.

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

Federal agents in DC have been starting dangerous car cases for small stuff like tinted windows. The chases violate DC police policy. Out of 10 cases, six ended in a crash. One car had a minor in back.
Eric Umansky

After WWII, social scientists studied the personalities of fascists. What they found perfectly describes today’s Republicans: “ethnocentrism, superstition, aggression, cynicism, conservatism, and an inordinate interest in the private sex lives of others.”
Derek Powazek @fraying.bsky.social

Fevered speculation about whether a political leader is dying seems to be part and parcel of authoritarian regimes. When you lose confidence in voting the bastard out, the fantasy that he's about to drop dead become extremely appealing.
Lindsay Beyerstein


Allan @allan1.bsky.social

Trump's contribution to our politics was exposing that conservatives don't care about any of the principles they've said are sacrosanct for 100 years, and all they wanted was to be openly evil instead of circuitously evil. The Democrats who win will be the ones who understand this and act like it.
Dinner is 6 pm @internethippo.bsky.social

lmao they’re activating the National Guard for 29 days over and over so they don’t get full active duty pay
Katherine the Sixth @luigithirty.bsky.social

The time between fucking around and finding out for messing with the climate and environment is long, and attribution is sometimes difficult. So conservative politicians have gotten away with appointing imbeciles to positions of power in these areas. However, no such luck for them in public health.
David Ho

It seems to me one of the best arguments to the court is that if this is truly a national emergency, the president’s own party controls Congress but has done nothing to address it with legislation, so how can it possibly be an emergency?
Ron Filipkowski

Speaking as someone who used to spend time in their chats, SO much of US contemporary fascism is a function of men assuming that the way adulthood worked was, you got a job and in exchange you got a woman to be your mom plus your sex toy. They are ENRAGED that they have a job but no sex mommy.
Gwen Snyder

The car is such a voracious consumer of space that simply moving and storing them will easily crowd out the rest of public life if we allow it. We design and legislate environments utterly hostile to socializing. Yet people try anyway!
Daniel Herriges

I just want a global 'turn all 'ai' off everywhere, categorically, no exceptions unless I individually approve them in triplicate' setting for all my devices
s. e. smith

Useful graphic to have on hand:


@pattho.bsky.social

The new CDC director is trying to kill you. Not just “the most vulnerable”; you, me, everyone. This is a comic book-level evil scenario.
Jeff Sharlet

I've had so many fights with people about [the deaths that will come from the CDC changes]. Their sparkly eugenics is still eugenics.
frozen-cranberry.bsky.social

Listen, for seven years now I’ve been in a never-ending cyclical multinational fight with people mad that I call the obsession with blondness everyday eugenics. It keeps the white nationalist repertoire alive for times such as these. Just constant rage wars about this for almost a decade.
Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

every day i see hundreds of comments of people spinning elaborate scenarios to explain how trump can control everything and all opposition is futile.
a) i think a lot of you need to log off and stop following professional doomsayers.
b) i think a lot of you are cowards
Jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Not sure whose fault it is primarily that most people don't seem to know that the president is basically a manager whose job is to carry out the will of Congress, and not The Country's Boss
Dinner is 6 pm @internethippo.bsky.social

Meanwhile, back in reality, global ocean heat content just updated through June 2025 and set a new record high. Time to wake up! Data (anomalies) and methods from NOAA:


Zack Labe

Tech billionaires know that climate change is real, income inequality is horrific, and war is worsening. They want to accelerate it — to bring us to the brink of collapse—in hopes of ruling the ashes. Their ignorance is blinding. They think we’ll turn on each other. The truth: we’ll turn on them.
50501: The People’s Movement

I think most people see the absurdity of attacking sourdough, the logos of mid restaurant chains, the efficacy of vaccines, wind and solar power, mail-in ballots... somehow some people can't digest that pivoting to attacking trans people for existing is the same BS.
Peter Flax

I don't think most liberals realize the degree to which Fox News and the Republican Party exist to propagandize exurban and rural communities into believing that American cities are war zones.
Dante Atkins

I always feel bizarre when I tell people to cut the doomerism and fight because why tf are you making me be the optimist, I am not an optimist at all. But I'm not willing to just roll over and let these people have my country either.
frozen-cranberry.bsky.social

If you don't fight back, of course Trumpism wins. But if you do fight back, then maybe we'll be lucky enough to read in the history books about how inevitable the DEFEAT of Trumpism was.
The Alternate Historian

Keilar: Of 172 mass attacks between 2016 and 2020, 96% were non-trans men. Are you missing the bigger picture?
Seb Gorka [actual Nazi]: No. When you look at shootings at Christian schools the data is different
K: Of 32 school shootings since 2020, only 3 were trans shooters
G: Forgive me if I don't go with CNN's stats
Aaron Rupar

The fact that we have so many mass shootings that we have statistically relevant data JUST for school shootings says a lot about this country.
Black cat army @cdmasterzang.bsky.social

We’re filling the atmosphere with CO2 like a bathtub with water. Most of it stays for millennia.
That is why the cumulative emissions (the total amount, as pictured here) and not yearly emissions determine the amount of global warming:


Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf @rahmstorf.bsky.social

If the army is going to be our police, who is going to be our army?
Patrick Chovanec

Palantir just took over the CDC. The head of the UK branch of Palantir UK is Louis Mosley, grandson of renowned British fascist Oswald Mosley. Palantir has 24 contracts with key UK public institutions; the NHS, Ministry of Defence, the police force, the Cabinet Office, and the DLUHC [UK's housing department].
EuropeanPowell

If you don’t believe that Trump’s authoritarianism can be defeated, look at how scared MAGA is of chalk
Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social

Today I learned that Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan used to be known as the goiter belt because the soil in the upper Midwest lacks naturally occurring iodine. In the 1920s, 70% to 100% of schoolchildren in certain parts of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin had goiters.
I'm Not Really Mary Poppins @maryfpoppins.bsky.social

Question: Why did US put big tariffs on India despite major national interest in cultivating a strategic counterweight to China and trying to isolate Russia?
Answer: Because the US president lied that he fixed India-Pakistan and India wouldn’t go along with the lie. (Seriously, that’s the answer)
Nicholas Grossman

I once asked a friend who was the treasurer of a large investment bank and now the chief operating officer of a large hedge fund whether hedge funds are a net good for society. He told me that they benefit no one but the people that are running them. I think the same of conservative politicians.
David Ho

Nothing is certain except death, taxes, and highway engineers surprised by induced demand
David Zipper

The country would be so much better off if the kids that played D&D were running it. At least the maps would be cool.
Rob @stpaulbikescum.bsky.social

I think there's the smell of real weakness around RFK Jr and a concerted push by all and sundry (including us) could get a victory here.
Michael Yarbrough

if you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit:


Adam Rifkin @ifindkarma.bsky.social

I’m really sick of the courts finding this administration broke the law in some unprecedented way, but they get to keep doing illegal things for a few months as a little treat. They’re defaulting to rewarding lawbreaking.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social

For me, personally, one of the most overwhelming things about living in the US is grappling with the pure scale of all of the dangerous machinery we have allowed to be built that we know kills us and makes us miserable. It will take tremendous work to unwind all of this destruction.
Nate in St Paul

Induction stoves are quieter, cooler, and produce less toxic pollution than gas. On the other hand, they also cook better, as a growing number of professional chefs recognize.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

It’s disturbing and a little surreal to realize that a mass shooting could be intended as real life shit posting with bullets. A manifesto written to be as outsider and as incomprehensible as possible as if to be a justification for a similarly incomprehensible act. An enshittified school shooting. We really have to get back to basics with creating things that are good for one another and are centered around the people and places we live in. We are fing as lost as it gets. There has to be a future based on that and not whatever we are doing right now.
Nate in St Paul

On top of everything else about these, they indicate there are many millions of people who are fastidious about the health of their gums but don't give two shits about their environment or walking five feet to a trash receptacle:


Chris Steller

One of the most important parts of rebuilding a decent society is making a bunch of physical spaces that are designed for people and not machines. Human scale areas where you don't have to pay money to spend your time.
Nate in St Paul

Dr. Dmitri Daskalakis, who resigned from the CDC, says that RFK Jr said he believes that Avian flu should be allowed to "burn through" the chickens and then children and others, so we can propagate a "stronger species." RFK Jr believes in eugenics. RFK Jr needs to resign or be fired.
Timothy McBride @mcbridetd.bsky.social

I’ll admit, I thought there would be some check on RFK and his gutting of the U.S. medical and science establishments.
Amy Sullivan

I didn’t. And folks, we’re barely half a year in. Buckle up, it not only gets worse, it gains momentum.
Patrick Chovanec

Technology rarely makes easier what one is already doing. But it may make it easier to do things not yet being done. Dishwashers and vacuums allowed moms to have more time to drive the kids around.
Jim Frank

At some point in the not too distant future the conventional wisdom will be that this was a period where the US focused on dumb shit while China took the lead in multiple domains
Don Moynihan

Every time your electricity bill goes up for the next 10 years, it can be traced back to this administration’s actions. They are making solar and wind power illegal to build in the United States. They are artificially restricting supply while demand is going up.
Costa Samaras

There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see:


Vince Mpls

one of the great conservative moves over the past decade has been to make themselves so unpleasant that their own family members are forced to cut them off, and then use that fact to argue that *liberals* are too uncivil
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

For years and years I believed Ted Cruz was evil but brilliant, because I read a quote once from one of his liberal Harvard law professors, who said Cruz was the smartest student he’d ever had. Then one day I looked it up and realized it was Alan Dershowitz.
Gillian Brockell

The miracle technology currently propping up the US economy has applications as varied as: plagiarism cheatbots, encouraging actual suicide, and creating fake porn of underage actresses or impersonation celebrity chatbots. Things are going just great.
Jacob T. Levy

Like lots of people, I grumble and complain when a bus I’m waiting for is late. Unlike many people, I know that the reason it’s late is the bad traffic it’s stuck in that’s filled with cars, mostly with just 1 person in each. And that the answer is bus-only lanes that will help EVERYONE move better.
Brent Toderian

CDC leader revealed a jarring fact about Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Shocking — Kennedy has never been briefed by any of CDC scientists on major diseases....
Fighting Liberal Texas Dem

This is the only thing I know how to do:


Zach Mortice

[Killers like the Annunciation shooter] clearly state several times they are not doing this for any ideology or cause, they are simply doing this for the sake of violence, for their desire for notoriety, to know what it feels like to be one of their idols, to cause chaos and see the fear in the eyes of their victims. I would place this attacker in the category of nihilistic violent extremists: those on the fringe actively encouraging, promoting, glorifying or engaging in serious acts of violence, the consequences of which have no specific end state. They have a hate for society and a deep seeded misanthropy.
Dr. Marc-André Argentino

'Palantir.' 'Mithril.' America is being ruled by people who read THE LORD OF THE RINGS and identify with Saruman.
Gregory Norminton

There’s something primordial joyful about bumper cars. Bonking strangers in a little car.
Wes Burdine

Guess it’s time for your periodic reminder that mentally ill people are actually statistically less likely to commit violent crimes; more likely to be victims; and more at risk of hurting themselves than others. If you want to curb gun crimes curb guns.
s. e. smith

USDOT's insistence that cities remove colored crosswalks has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with LGBT censorship.
David Zipper

This is unfortunately true:


John Collins @logicallyjc.bsky.social

People are often surprised to learn that [Robert E.] Lee was an officer who never made it past colonel. The purported promotion to general was awarded by a treasonous cabal calling itself the "confederate states of america" which was put down by force by the Union army, which also had superior generals.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

*Colonel* Robert E. Lee. He was only a general in an illegal army
Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social

Robert E. Lee killed more U.S. troops in battle than Adolph Hitler and Osama bin Laden combined.
Brandon Friedman

Years ago a mentor of mine said to me: "always choose to take action over thinking about taking action even though you will often fail." I was in my 20s and it really stuck with me. I am grateful for the teachers I have had.
Prisonculture

AI art does not exist. It is an oxymoron.
Kumail Nanjiani

Vanity Fair staffers threaten to walk out over a proposed Melania Trump cover: “We are not going to normalize this despot and his wife… if this happens, i’m gone, and so is half my team.”
The Tennessee Holler

Eva Braun would look fabulous on the cover, too.
Michael Ian Black

'the spirit of democracy and self-govenment' is where you don't have to think for yourself anymore because the ruling party just tells you what looks good [commenting on the executive order to require classical architecture on federal buildings]
chris egervary @implicitspace.bsky.social

It's 2025 and CEOs of Fortune 500 firms are hiding under their desks for fear that the President will tweet about them and seize 10% of their company's stock. And the joke is, they voted for him as a "pro-business" President.
Patrick Chovanec

The idea that adding guns makes us safer was the big lie. When you dig down deeper, AR-15s also are only a problem of the past 25 years. If you want to look at why we have more dead kids in schools, just look at the AR-15 sales. It is all that you need to know:


Fred Guttenberg

"...if you are hit by an SUV compared to being hit by a passenger car you are 44% more likely to be killed. Among kids it's higher — it's 82%."
The War on Cars

Wild how every single day under Trump 2 is a confirmation of the worst fears of what his return to power would mean and yet everyone in a position of power to stop it from 2021 on, or leading nominal formal democratic opposition now, seems to mostly not act like this is a singular unmaking of America.
Kelsey Atherton

DOGE copied the entire Social Security database onto a barely protected cloud server, per whistle-blower. This puts the personal data of nearly every USian at serious risk of being stolen. This scenario would be unthinkable if CISA were fully empowered — But…I’m sure Big Balls can handle it. LOL
Anonymous @youranonjd.bsky.social

Martin O’Malley, former Social Security Administrator, says the DOGE bro upload of SSA to cloud is the biggest data theft in history and could maybe lead to need to mass issue new SSA #s.
Clara Jeffery

The number of SUVs in England cities has increased from 3% to 30% of cars in the last two decades. “In physical terms, London’s SUVs now take up the same space as the entire borough of Kensington and Chelsea, while the entire country’s SUVs would cover all of Manchester.”
Brent Toderian

“When something that has previously been considered good and desirable – [e.g.] an extremely high-emitting lifestyle – is suddenly revealed to have disastrous consequences for our common society, then we all have a responsibility to find quick ways of making that lifestyle socially unacceptable.” –Greta Thunberg
Dr Charlie Gardner

Waiting for that tipping point when most sensible people realise that transporting a single 80kg person in 2.5 tonnes of SUV was not the height of technical advancement but peak stupidity for the human race. Tax SUVs out of existence
Bob From Accounts

A cult of personality. What could go wrong?


Mrs. Betty Bowers

Did not expect the Cold War to be won by a handful of American white guys willing to boil this country alive for Putin.
Cheryl Lynn Eaton

gotta say if nothing else Andor is refreshing in that it reminds people Star Wars was an anticolonial story the whole time
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Traffic models treat cars like a flowing liquid. So why do they ignore the evaporation that happens when you make transit more convenient and driving less so?
Qagggy!

I don't think enough people realize what actually happens to a body when it is hit by a bullets from high-powered guns. When that body is that of a child, it's even more terrifying. You can watch all the gory movies but until you see bodies shredded by bullets from these guns you've seen nothing.
quick13

Peter Thiel crony named acting director of CDC. Jim O'Neill was CEO of the Thiel Foundation and was managing director for Thiel's Clarium Capital and Mithril Capital. He also co-founded the Thiel Fellowship.
Gil Durán

He’s also a big fan of abolishing anything like a precautionary principle regarding drug approvals, letting the free market self regulate such matters.
Jeffrey Vagle

If you truly cared about protecting students, educators and schools, you would FUND US! Fully fund schools so we don't have to cut staff EVERY YEAR. And if you really cared about kid's safety, you'd outlaw the guns. It's the fucking guns.
Becky Mac

*Ahem*:


Pat Bagley @bagleycartoons.bsky.social

A reporter should ask Karoline Leavitt whether — if she had to choose just one — she’d pick prayers or body armor for protection if she were being shot at with a semiautomatic weapon.
Leah McElrath

Mocking a politician for a facile public policy response that uses religion as a crutch is not the same thing as mocking religion.
Patrick Chovanec

CBO analysis of the One Big Beautiful Bill and how it impacts different parts of the income spectrum:
—A net resource increase of $13,600, on average, for the top one-tenth of U.S. earners.
—A net resource decrease of $1,200, on average, for the bottom one-tenth of U.S. earners.


Sahil Kapur

the thing that's so fucking infuriating about this is how much more that matters for the bottom 10%. $1200 can be life or death at that level of income. top 10%? $13K is nice, to be sure, but it's "maybe we'll take another vacation" nice not "oh good now we can afford to eat this month"
Micah @rincewind.run

one thing to remember about "ICE is going to occupy Democrat strongholds" is that ICE, if it hires to capacity, will employ about 26k people by the end of 2026, which is 1/3 smaller than the NYPD, which is not a large enough police force to occupy New York City itself.
the beastly fido @theophite.bsky.social

After years of mass shootings by Trump-supporting bigots spouting the anti-immigrant, replacement theory garbage these assholes push daily, MAGA is exploiting two shootings by trans people to incite a pogrom.
Radley Balko

MAGA is about turning Americans against each other.
Libel @libeltheband.bsky.social

wild how people want to get rid of autistic trans people and think that the Internet would still work
Ian Coldwater @lookitup.baby

I have never seen so many public servants protest the mismanagement of a government. Trumpists will point to this as proof of the deep state, but the reality is that these are professionals who are desperately trying to get the public to understand how bad things are.
Don Moynihan

Listening to a podcast where a well-known tech-world wannabe fascist calls journalism "nonconsensual invasion of privacy for profit" and thinks that's clever and my goodness does that reveal a lot of how completely brain-wormed a bunch of these guys are once they faced a tiny bit of criticism.
Mike Masnick

Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Even if we get a competent and trustworthy government again for some period, everyone should know that it can’t last unless structural and constitutional reforms are made. The fascists are among us and unless they are structurally disempowered, they’ll be back.
Son Thou

When a top CDC scientist resigns citing eugenicist rhetoric from federal health agencies, everyone should absolutely be paying attention.
Dr. Lucky Tran

Yeah. It’s happening here:


Radley Balko

Yes, but you have to understand there was a very real risk that Kamala Harris might make all of us use the term Latinx.
Blue Heron Farm

Ashli Babbitt was a grown ass adult who chose to break into an unauthorized area during an insurrection against the repeated warnings of law enforcement. She ignored those warnings and got killed through no one's fault but her own. She was a traitor. She doesn't deserve full military honors.
Charlotte Clymer

the 146th shooting at a k-12 school so far in 2025. the 146th shooting at a k-12 school so far in 2025. the 146th shooting at a k-12 school so far in 2025.
D.A. Bullock @bullycreative.bsky.social

I think a lot about how 20 million people losing their AIDS medication generated less outrage than college kids being annoying about a poorly made banh mi sandwich.
Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social

It's hard to keep straight exactly what the worst thing going on is, but the US health system being led by an idiot conspiracy theorist really is high up there.
Raffi Melkonian @rmfifthcircuit.bsky.social

After purging over 100 immigration judges, the Trump regime has announced that "temporary immigration judges" will no longer need to have any experience in immigration law (!!)
Michael Rass

Future generations will not believe it when you tell them there were good Kennedys.
Frank Conniff

That's right, the reason Germany has so many fewer mass shootings than America is because they don't have antidepressants.
Michael Hobbes

Jack Ohman – Tribune Content Agency:


mikeymomo.bsky.social

I believe the CDC is changing its name to Certified Death Cult.
The House of Pod @kavehmd.bsky.social

If 'doing your own research' means using Chat GPT then you didn't actually do your own research at all. You asked an unreliable chatbot to do it for you.
Dr Charlie Gardner

Outrageous! Early this year, lawyer Steven Cook represented chemical companies suing to block a new rule that would force them to clean up PFAS. Now he’s is in a senior role at the EPA, where he has proposed scrapping that rule, and shifting the cleanup costs onto taxpayers.
David Ho

We live in a country that is ok with going door to door rounding up brown-skinned people but would lose their shit if we went door to door rounding up the instruments that fuel their worst realities of violent crime in the US.
D.A. Bullock @bullycreative.bsky.social

wtf is this nonsense? RFK thinks he can understand kid’s “mitochondrial challenges” just by looking at them? This is an insane person.
Clay Ranck

This is a hell of a letter [from a resigning CDC department head]. “The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines…will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer….Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated…” Huh…
Alyssa Harad

Would be nice if some of those "journalists" demanding that Mamdani disavow everything anyone else says would now demand that JD Vance disavow actual statements by this racist creep Curtis Yarvin that he has publicly admired
@capitalistfool.bsky.social

I swear where we’re at right now is because a bunch of robber barons resent FDR’s New Deal and are mad they never got to own slaves and run a plantation. So they’re dead set on undoing 250 years of progress by using their wealth to drive the majority of Americans into abject poverty so they can.
welverin

If we put half as much time, money and energy into advanced geothermal as we do into advanced nukes we'd get twice as many projects built. Just the facts maam:


Justin Guay @guayjg.bsky.social

"The fascists want us depleted, numb, and cynical." I keep this top of mind daily and I actively refuse.
Prisonculture

Almost 20 years ago I talked at Google about how privacy should be akin to a second amendment issue. Tl;dr given the scale of force available to the government, all the guns in the world are useless against an all-knowing tyrant and thus privacy is necessary for the security of a free state.
Carl T. Bergstrom

629 missiles and drones launched against peaceful, sleeping Ukraine last night. This is what happens when the world allows fascists to consolidate power. It is the present and the future, if nothing continues to be done.
Romeo Kokriatski @vagrantjourno.bsky.social

Anyone who looks at America in 2025 and thinks, "maybe we can fix this by throwing trans people under the bus"
1) doesn't have the brains to understand what's going on or how we got here
2) doesn't have the stomach for any of the fights ahead
and
3) is vice signaling to their MAGA friends.
Max Kennerly

This is an INSANE decision by the E.U.: “By signing up to mutual recognition of vehicle standards with the U.S., the E.U. has waved the white flag on road safety. This is not a technical detail – it is a political choice that puts trade convenience ahead of saving lives.” This will kill people.
Brent Toderian

But the European elevator standard somehow isn’t safe enough for the U.S…what a joke.
Stephen Jacob Smith

Director of European Transport Safety Council: "Europe now risks being flooded with oversized, under-regulated US pick-up trucks and SUVs – heavier, more dangerous to other car drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, and completely out of step with Europe’s vision for safer, more sustainable mobility.”
Kees van der Leun @sustainable2050.bsky.social

Hot take: contemporary rural anger at cities is partly downstream of being dependent on urban areas and aware of that fact.
Alt-Effy Safety Board @effinvicta.bsky.social

"Which side was the killer on?" The side of killing. Now ask which "side" wants everyone in America to have easy access to guns.
Mark Harris

In 2020, these were anti-government rioters. Now they are the government. Congrats, America:


Patrick Chovanec

I keep thinking about how Hochul deployed the national guard to the subways for the totally fake made up crime crisis and now she’s trying to claim Trump shouldn’t send troops to NYC and her arguments are completely poisoned by her own previous absurd fascist actions.
Erin Biba

This isn’t bad luck or coincidence or predestination. This is our choice. To live in a nation where our leaders teach hate, and military-style guns are everywhere.
Chris Murphy

As someone who has studied mass shootings for 13 years:
-gender does not cause them
-SSRIs, no
-mental illness, no
-internet/gaming, no
Above can be compounding factors — but motive is complex, often very. The most fundamental combo:
-suicidality + rage + isolation + easy access to guns
Mark Follman

Trump deployed military to DC because Big Balls got kicked by a 15 year old girl. But he will do nothing in response to kids being shot and killed at a religious school.
Michael McDonald @electproject.bsky.social

Starbucks’ CEO made 6,666x more than the company's median employee in 2024. This was the widest CEO-to-Worker pay gap in the entire S&P 500. Remember this before you order your next pumpkin spice latte.
Robert Reich

Not really interested in what the shooter identified as or what mentally ill nonsense was written on their gun and more interested in why 40,000 Americans die from guns every year.
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

IMO many Americans don't even buy guns for personal protection or to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. They simply have a shopping addiction:


derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social

If you're buying guns "for self-defence" and you own more guns than you can keep on your person at the same time, you're technically just spending extra money to arm future home invaders.
Maddie @pbastronaut.bsky.social

The Annunciation murderer did not have a message to send or an ideology. They were a broken suicidal thing craving recognition. They died without anyone knowing their name and only leaving misery. Fuck them. Hell is not hot enough.
Tom Basgen, Mr. Saint Paul

Solar + wind made up 91.2% of new US power capacity Jan-May '25; Fossils made up only 8.8%:
Solar: 11.52 GW (75.6%)
Wind: 2.38 (15.6%)
Gas: 1.38
Oil: 0.014
Coal -0.057
Tot: 15.235
FERC also projects 84% of new capacity through 2028 will be solar+wind
Mark Z. Jacobson

The [National Park] service used to have 200 people assigned to maintain thousands of acres of trees and gardens in D.C., and now there are 20, a Park Service official told the Post. “It’s everybody — the masons, the maintenance workers, the groundskeepers, the plumbers. Every shop is short...”
Adam Markham

Feels like the bigger story is that accurately pricing in the cost of maintaining many rural areas is indistinguishable from trying to depopulate them.
Matthew Downhour

We have 30 departments at my hospital looking for nurses right now, and they are deporting nursing students.
Soumya Rangarajan, MD, MPP @soumya-goblue.medsky.social

I'm not sure Americans have a frame of reference for the sort of gangster government we have now. Any objective functions it performs are an afterthought. The law only used as a tool to punish political enemies and ignored in every other instance
Dinner is 6 pm @internethippo.bsky.social

Bella Chow:


Uzza @uzzamodea.bsky.social

At some point Trump is going to call for the removal from Congress of dozens of Democrats, all of them accused of mortgage fraud, and Corporate Media will obsess over details of the accusations rather than just calling it a partisan purge and fascist consolidation of power. Stop taking the bait.
David Rothschild

Immigration is the central issue of our century and progressives must defend it or lose absolutely everything to fascism
Joel @snufkinlib.bsky.social

“The human individual has rights wherever they are, independent of the soil or the blood or the community they come from” is the hardest single liberal postulate for society to accept the world over
Matthew Downhour

A Chinese University of Hong Kong student has been sentenced for the offense of turning his back during the Chinese national anthem. Freedom of speech is something that makes the US infinitely better than China and we mustn’t let Trump destroy our First Amendment protections.
David Ho

My body is a temple but the religion is nachos
LadyBusiness

Trump's allegations against Lisa Cook are not the story. The story is that a Trump loyalist is deeply corrupting agency processes for the express purpose of manufacturing pretexts for referring Trump's leading enemies for DOJ prosecution.
Greg Sargent

"The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state." — Dan Froomkin
Jay Rosen

A glimpse into Trump's make-believe world of "giant water valves" in Northern California…


Governor Gavin Newsom

The anti-woke moderate Dem consultant class absolutely loves the idea that black and brown voters are moving to the GOP, because they think it validates their idea that racism is no big deal. It's all about their personal resentment of activists, as always.
Will Stancil

With all the examples we’re seeing lately, It’s pretty easy to make the case that the greatest threat to cities these days are national, state/provincial, or even local leaders (or candidates) who clearly don’t understand cities at all, and may even hate them.
Brent Toderian

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our Congress.
BostonJoan

Should the public directly fund the well-being of poor people, where UBI pilots have shown they use extra income to secure market housing, or should the public subsidize their housing in which the bulk of subsidies is for material costs, admin costs, contractors and NGOs with lots of overhead? I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that giving low-income and homeless people money to the tunes of thousands of dollars a month, unconditionally, would be more effective than building subsidized housing right now. The tremendous now $1.5m per unit construction costs just doesn't scale.
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

No amount of appearing reasonable and trying to avoid provoking them will stop them from escalating against you. The only thing you'll do is inspire revulsion in everyone else: if you won't even stand up for yourself how can you stand up for anyone else:


Dinner is 6 pm @internethippo.bsky.social

The one upside of this is that we never have to pretend Republicans believe in the constitution, freedom, states rights, freedom of speech, America, democracy, the economy, jobs, children, decency or family values ever again.
Max Berger

Turns out some of the “we want small government” people kiiiinda wanted the government to be just one guy.
Hank Green

Fact: Commercial fishing kills more than 300,000 whales and dolphins every year.
David Ho

Carbon capture lobbyists spent $950 million on the US government from 2005–2024, and had contact with 'high-ranking government officials' over 50,000 times. 89% of it was funded by fossil fuel interests, not the industries used to justify CCS.
Dr Charlie Gardner

For folks not in DC:
- There are full-on police checkpoints most nights
- Gangs of 30+ federal agents roam DC
- National Guard folks with guns patrolling a Harris Teeter
- Every day, multiple friends see ICE kidnapping people
- Day cares are scared to have kids go on walks due to ICE
Jesse Rabinowitz

Republicans are funny because they believe or pretend they believe that deploying heavily armed guys acting on Trump’s behalf to a city composed largely of people who despise the president would make the city feel safer from violence
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

Going to be wild to have Clarence Thomas and other members of the court write that even the appearance of impropriety is sufficient to allow the President to remove Federal Reserve members from office, and then head off to Harlan Crow’s yacht
Don Moynihan

The entire economy is built around the idea that exploiting nature or converting it into some form of manufactured capital is good for the economy. In reality it's good for private profit, and terrible for everything else. Including the economy.
Dr Charlie Gardner

Do you ever think about how the fine for peeing in public is substantially more than the fine for dumping tonnes of CO2 in public?
David Ho

The antiwar president wants to change the Department of Defense’s name to the Department of War.
Mehdi Hasan

My heart breaks into 10,000 pieces once again.:


George Takei

F*ck!! Fort Bliss Army base used for a WWII Japanese internment is now the nation's largest ICE detention center.
Christopher Webb

Journalists need to retire “unprecedented.” What Trump’s doing isn’t — it’s a fascist consolidation of power, by the books. And everyone else needs to give up “wannabe,” as in dictator. Face facts: he is. Let’s contend with that.
Jeff Sharlet

There's a reason why sports teams don't chant "I believe that we will lose" before a game, a reason so obvious that I'm pretty sure it needs no explanation. Which is why it makes my head explode when people surrender in advance verbally, which they do all the time about politics.
Rebecca Solnit

The US President has ordered the creation of ”specialized” military units to “quell civil disturbances” in all 50 of our states. Military units under his personal control. Deployed across our homeland, in peacetime. Little time is left to stop this insanity.
Michael Clemens @mclem.org

Blaming Kamala Harris for the election loss. Or this policy or this campaign strategy. Misses the key point. Roger Ailes built the right wing propaganda machine for a reason. Musk bought twitter and paid $1 million to vote for Trump for a reason. Trump started his own social media company for a reason. Bezos sane-washed WaPo for a reason. MAGA intimidated NBC and MSNBC for a reason. That is the story. Unless truth can be somehow communicated to enough voters, MAGA rules will continue to get worse.
Dave Urban

Spotted yesterday near the Civic Center in San Francisco. Love to see it:


Purge Palantir

Pritzker makes a crucial point here: Members of the National Guard have full-time jobs outside of their service and responsibilities. By frivolously calling them up, Trump is upending their lives just to weaponize them against their own neighbors and fellow Americans. It's appalling.
Marisa Kabas

Walkable City Rule 87: Don’t Let Terrorists Design Your City. NYC spends $50M on terror bollards — but far less on crashes. Data shows you’re 568x likelier to die in a crash than terror — yet terror gets far more funding per victim.
Jeff Speck

Japan Post just announced they will no longer deliver mail to the United States, joining Germany, Austria, Denmark, Italy, France, and Sweden.
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social

Imagine picking a “businessman” to be your leader, but instead of a great businessman, or even a good one, you pick the absolute worst one…I mean, the laughing stock of his sector (land development), known for many bankruptcies, cheating people, crooked deals, etc. Now imagine letting him be a dictator.
Brent Toderian

Just spotted a National Guard member carrying an M4 assault rifle at Metro Center in D.C.:


Benjamin Alvarez

This dude was indicted for dozens of felonies in multiple jurisdictions and never once had to post bail
Phillip Anderson

Say what you want about mice but those sumbitches can scurry
lukelukeluke

Reactionary centrist, bleeding out as a firing squad in MAGA hats pushes him into a mass grave and covers it with dirt. "The . . . left . . . did this."
Radley Balko

The corruption of the US Supreme Court has arguably been the most serious single contributor to the US's transformation into autocracy
Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social

So in sum, Trump signed executive orders today that are blatantly unconstitutional (criminalizing flag burning), probably unconstitutional (using federal funds to prohibit bail reform), and exacerbating a previous illegal order (expanding the use of the military for domestic law enforcement).
Radley Balko

The prolonged public torturing of a single man [Kilmar Obrega Garcia] because the state cannot admit to its errors is not something that occurs in a free country
Zach Dorfman

obviously people deserve blame for being antisemitic but it is a world-historical catastrophe that almost every institution nominally dedicated to fighting antisemitism has decided to burn their credibility for the short term interests of the Netanuahu government
ryan cooper

Cruise ships create 24% of the waste generated by ships in the ocean and just one ship can release as much CO2 as a million cars.
Extinction Rebellion Global

Backlit syrups. Creative Activities Building, Minnesota State Fair:


Gary Hornseth

Air pollution from oil and gas kills over 90,000 people in the US every year and makes hundreds of thousands more sick, disproportionately affecting Black and brown communities. But Republicans want to drill baby drill and kill more people because they're racist af.
David Ho

We spend lots of time parsing through all the pre-existing trends that made the rise of an American fascism possible, and that's all true enough, but it's still a huge contingent factor that Donald Trump is a literal freak of nature, a sui generis pathological bundle of min-maxed personality traits.
Andy Craig

Justice Katanji Brown Jackson said it best: The Supreme has only 2 rules.
1. The Supreme Court has no rules.
2. The Trump administration always wins.
Diane Ravitch

This is the bigger picture motive: Trump is or is becoming the Leviathan, and it's really not good
Jen Mercieca

"Well, the soldiers have to be quartered SOMEWHERE, right? Might as well be your home" — national political reporters next week, probably
Costa Samaras

I hope one thing leftists all take away from Mamdani’s campaign is that it doesn’t matter how chill and wholesome you are, the dinguses are going to smear and trash you in increasingly unhinged ways anyway, so you might as well shoot for the moon and campaign on what makes your heart sing
jenny (phire) @phirephoenix.com

Scary thought that has probably crossed our minds:


Thanh Neville, MD, MSHS

I like people who make things and try shit. Those are my people.
Prisonculture

kitchen table issue: stop kidnapping my neighbors!
Matt Pearce

Conservatives went insane because there was a black president.
Q. H. Stone

Conservatives have hated Liberals for decades, saying we are not real Americans, Demons, Human Scum etc... And what they have done is manifested this back on themselves. I had genuine like and friendships for Conservatives in the past. Now I avoid and loathe them with the fire of a thousand suns
Roy Batty @on-tannhausergate.bsky.social

lol. Back in 2003 we all knew that anything called the “Department of Homeland Security” would be a wasteful, abusive bureaucracy afflicted with mission creep. But I’ll admit I never thought it would come to this.
Radley Balko

Thousands of ICE agents are doing a lot more damage to our social fabric than millions of undocumented immigrants.
Bill Kristol

I dunno man maybe we should all talk about patriarchy more
Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social

The median voter isn't a pureed balance of elite centrist takes, they're somebody who has a passionate opinion about vehicle registration fees but couldn't name the current vice president.
Andy Craig

This isn’t complicated: the occupation of U.S. cities by the federal government is taking away the freedoms of Americans. Americans are less free today and more at risk than we were last year.
Costa Samaras

FREE DC:


50501: The People’s Movement

Liberal political leaders consistently demonstrate they lack an understanding of the nature and purpose of power. When they have it, they don’t wield it effectively. When they lack it, they don’t accurately gauge the threat posed by those who do.
Leah McElrath

What the Trump regime has done in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and is threatening to do in Chicago and New York City is not a “crackdown on crime.” It’s a military occupation. Throwing Trump in prison would be a crackdown on crime.
Mark Jacob

They call your Social Security and Medicare 'Entitlements' so you don't call them something silly like 'Earned Benefits.'
John Fugelsang

It's maddening that folks living in Europe and Asia can choose from an array of useful minicars that are unavailable in the US because NHTSA and Congress say they're unsafe (unlike a goliath-like F-250, apparently):


David Zipper

It is not shocking at all that unionization was hitting all times highs and the ownership class collectively shit their pants and started screaming for the State to crack heads.
NightTrace

Greenland breathes a sigh of relief as it turns out Trump has decided on a military occupation of the United States instead.
Aviel Roshwald

Historian here. It always takes people a long time to understand the world in which they live. In post modernity, it can take nearly as long merely to perceive it. Not an excuse! But maybe a step to understanding the stupidity.
Rebecca Spang

Just for perspective, a few weeks ago roughly 100,000 turned up for the London Trans+ Pride march. By contrast fewer than 3,000 ACROSS THE WHOLE COUNTRY, have turned up to anti-asylum "protests". Yet we are meant to take the latter as "the voice of the people" and the former as "the minority."
Dan Sohege

If the US government had to pay for medical care of its citizens, it might care more about climate change impacts, air and water pollution, gun violence, traffic crashes, the food we eat, etc. It’s past time for single payer healthcare.
David Ho

We’re 7 months in, and “Pentagon plans military deployment in Chicago” is a headline in the Washington Post. And because it’s city number three, we’re already numbing to it. If you read this about any other democracy in the world, you’d conclude that it was well on the road to a dictatorship.
Radley Balko

Trump did warn us about armed gangs terrorizing our cities, and no one took him seriously.
Dean Baker

I get that liberals need to signal to other liberals that they are not mere grubby partisans, mere team players. They are independent minded, judicious, seeing the bigger picture. They see the flaws on both sides. They don't judge or attack or call their opponents names. Etc. etc. But why must it be? "Dumb, selfish people believing deliberate lies" has a deep, rich history in human affairs! It explains many, many mob behaviors of the past! One might even say that it is the explanation for most violent mob behaviors throughout history. It's definitely a thing that happens!
David Roberts @volts.wtf

i think one issue is that this approach has proven to be a total failure. a partisan who sees the right as morally deficient will have had a better track record at predicting the events of the last few years than someone who is endlessly trying to demonstrate their nuance.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

this is really weird. I wonder what's going on:


Andrew Dessler

The flight to centrism in the face of a fascist/authoritarian movement will get people killed. It's a one-way ratchet further and further to the right.
Ryan Kendall

This all goes with the fundamental difference between the 2 parties. Dems believe in nuance and treat competing views as good faith arguments. The GOP is a bad faith party whose leaders display confidence and certitude in their cruel, dishonest views. Low education people prefer certainty over nuance.
Pro-DOG, Anti-DOGE @angold.bsky.social

A central component of present-day American Christianity is a backlash to the kindness, tolerance, and pluralism taught by Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. Nothing worse than helping a stranger in need or having Black neighbors who you treat as people.
Max Kennerly

White people think [Black people] owe them many duties, and among those is our duty to NEVER make them uncomfortable in any way. If they experience discomfort, and of course we have had something to do with this, they can do whatever they want to us. What did Noem do to that dog?
Safiyah Page @infortheride.bsky.social

No one looks back at the Southern Strategy and thinks it was vocabulary choices that made the parties flip.
4everblue1980.bsky.social

Also "These progressives are the problem with their pee cee and policing language so here's a list of words I want prohibited" is pretty funny on the face of it. People complain. Left, right, center. A triumph of RW propaganda was convincing so many that it only comes from the left.
jeofree

For all of us there should be some threshold where we put aside all our other projects and focus instead on resisting tyranny. It's just extremely difficult to see where that line is from the inside, when you're the frog being boiled.
Jonathan Birch @birchlse.bsky.social

we really do need to figure out how this guy managed to create an environment where he can say "i wasted an amount of taxpayer dollars so large I can't even tell you how much it was" and it doesn't cause immediate national outrage
Timothy Burke @bubbaprog.xyz

Table For One Please:


Tom Flood

a lot of people seem to conceptualize what happened to Twitter as “they stopped censoring the Nazis” but what actually happened is they rebuilt it to create Nazis
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

“The homicide rate for all Black officeholders in Reconstruction was 2,317 per 100,000. This would make the homicide rate among Black officials more than 20 times greater than *any* *other* demographic in the United States as of 2020, where the highest homicide rate was less than 105 per 100,000.”
Trevon Logan

The average American has no idea just how many assassinations occurred during reconstruction
Jonathon Booth @jboothhistory.bsky.social

Florida bans the Diary of Anne Frank. A literary classic that serves as a cautionary tale about the rise of fascism and the importance of documenting atrocities as they’re occurring. We all must document this time in history. Keep copies. Write everything down. Make sure that the truth will out.
Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social

If someone claims to be scared of the subway but isn’t scared of being in a car on the highway — which is exponentially more dangerous + deadly — they are not a serious person
Kat Tenbarge

Trump’s plan for a 25-mile wall in a remote area of Arizona would block a critical wildlife corridor on the state’s border with Mexico and imperil the survival of at least 16 threatened/endangered species, including jaguars. Local police note that illegal crossings are “practically unheard-of.”
Lyn Heideman

Car-dependent suburban sprawl is the most publicly expensive, publicly subsidized, and publicly consequential form of human habitation in human history:


Brent Toderian

They didn't attempt a violent coup because of the left. They aren't destroying US science and academia because of the left. They're not embracing open racism and nazi ideology because of the left. They are adults, making choices, doing things of their own volition, and they bear the responsibility.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

IMHO many nice American liberals can’t comprehend people who are properly malevolently, stupidly evil. They can’t comprehend the depravity and duplicity of Trumpists because they’re so not like that — so they construct ‘nuanced’ rationales for Trumpists’ behavior within liberal frames.
Adam Welz

You do you, but: One of the things we discovered in the early days of Bluesky is that quote-dunking drives toxicity. It’s like being at a cocktail party and when someone says something you don’t like, shouting to the entire room: “HEY LISTEN TO WHAT THIS ASSHOLE JUST SAID!” So maybe don’t?
David Slack @slack2thefuture.bsky.social

The US Administration is now deleting its internal communications, in brazen violation of the Federal Records Act, in order to conceal its other illegal acts. Those entrusted to enforce our Congress’s laws sit, simply watching this happen, flaccid and impotent.
Michael Clemens @mclem.org

The Coast Guard works for ICE now. Coast Guard planes previously used for search and rescue have done hundreds of secret ICE flights in recent weeks, including two I watched from a public parking lot near BWI.
Gillian Brockell

Trump plans to spend $2B creating a militarized zone around the White House and Capitol, including the Smithsonian and Kennedy Center.
Brad Johnson @climatebrad.hillheat.com

Cartoon by DaveGranlund.com:


Jon Cooper

Extraordinary new detail about the FBI purge.
*Senior officials were asked to fire lower level officials tagged by online right wingers as being anti-Trump.
*When they asked for a reason — required by law — they were not given any. They refused. Then they were fired.
Don Moynihan

One of the reasons I feel so hopeless is that everyone invents a GOP that doesn't do the unpopular stuff that it is doing and a Dem party that does do unpopular stuff that it isn't, and I just don't know a way out
Carrie's mulligans @cks490.bsky.social

Donald Trump isn't going to leave willingly or peacefully. Republicans are gearing up for martial law. You all aren't paying attention.
Wajahat Ali

The FBI will start welcoming new classes of recruits who will receive less training and no longer be required to have a college degree. A collection of Minions to execute Prez Pedo's deranged thoughts acquired during his morning fart storm on his golden throne.
TheMoxinator

Here the Wall Street Journal states plainly Trump’s retribution presidency is “worse than we imagined.” No one had to imagine anything. He said he would do this. All you had to do was listen.
Amanda Carpenter

If you aren’t uncomfortable learning our country’s history, you are learning propaganda.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

ICE agents are not wearing ‘masks.’ They’re face-coverings. Bandanas. Gaiters. Masks are a public health tool. They’re a form of both resistance and community care. ICE agents wear them to terrorize people and hide their identity. The rest of us wear masks to protect one another.
Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social

#avianaugust week 3 wrap up! 11 more days to go. This week is such a funny combo of little brown birds and the silliest guys you've ever seen:


rubylith @rubylith-art.bsky.social

So wait... they brought Kilmar back to face "human smuggling" charges (that they can't prove)... and then (because they embarrassed themselves), they need to "save face" by deporting him to Uganda? A place that our own State Department says is too damn dangerous to travel to? My God... we've fallen.
Grouchy Gramma

Their memorials are history. Ours are political. Because as always, there are two sexualities — straight, and political.
Two genders - male, and political.
Two religions - Christian, and political.
Two races - white, and political.
Nome

when people say they want to keep politics out, they mean they want to keep YOU out
Ian Coldwater @lookitup.baby

i think people need a refresher on what constitutes a Distraction. the cracker barrel logo thing (zero stakes, obviously invented controversy) is a Distraction. the ongoing military occupation of washington dc (ample footage of random delivery drivers being violently detained by feds) is not
rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social

It is wild how much Trump wants to just shoot people. This isn’t crazed liberal hysteria to think that about him or how he views the military or cops he wants to control, it’s just what he says
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

i need politicians to be as mad at housing prices as they are about cracker barrel's new logo
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social

fuck me, we sure spend a lot of time forced to think about one stupid guy
Tom Tomorrow

Bolton’s home raided, Gen. Kruse fired, Epstein coverup proceeds, seizure of 10% of Intel another step towards state capitalism. Just one day in the somewhat chaotic but directionally purposeful march towards…despotism. Does anyone think they’re doing all this so they can hand over power in 2028?
Bill Kristol

Phew, the sex trafficker and perjurer exonerated the one man who can free her. I am totally persuaded.
Bradley P. Moss

A cheerful zinnia:


Patsy Cline @chompie97.bsky.social

Cows poop every ~12–13 minutes. It takes ~4 min to milk a cow by machine. Add on the cleaning/prep stages, and every time you milk, about 1/3 to 1/2 the cows will poop during milking after you clean them. You really, really cannot "just clean the udder before milking to get rid of the poop." lol. Like… people tried "let's just run clean dairies" for decades in the 1800s and 1900s. Some people back then didn't like pasteurizing either. After a few decades, they realized good hygiene just isn't enough. That's why they started pasteurizing, and raw milk cheese became a treat for adults.
Sarah Taber

Tonight at my commission a 12 (?) year old boy made his first-ever public comment. His arm in a sling, he talked about being hit by an SUV riding his bike earlier this week. This kid was so young he asked to speak early because public comment was past his bedtime. We’ve completely failed our youth.
ren @renzaro.com

Im guessing the FBI didnt find boxes next to John Bolton's toilet.
Harry Dunn @libradunn1.bsky.social

Racism is a serious problem in need of solutions, and this is true even if you find the online behavior of anti-racists annoying.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Hot tip: If you see someone say Autonomous Vehicle "Framework," then it's very likely they are talking about preempting state laws and removing regulations so that vehicles can be deployed without drivers. It's unlikely they include safety-related regulations
Ken McLeod

The AMERICA DRIVES Act does not include any regulatory or labor standards. It has a Preemption of State laws section and a Reducing regulatory obstacles section. There are no sections describing research, testing, or regulation of autonomous driving systems to ensure public safety and acceptance
Ken McLeod

Want to learn something about water and climate change? A simple approximation is that for every degree C of warming, the atmosphere holds 7% more water. That's one factor behind the growing number of extreme flooding events.
Peter Gleick

White ethno-state. The first paragraph says “The Trump administration has rescinded federal guidelines requiring schools to provide a broad range of services to students who are not proficient in English”:


@pattho

An M.I.T. study found that 95% of companies that had invested in A.I. tools were seeing zero return. It jibes with the emerging idea that generative A.I., “in its current incarnation, simply isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be,” johncassidysays.bsky.social writes.
The New Yorker

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing. “Generic tools like ChatGPT excel for individuals because of their flexibility, but they stall in enterprise use since they don’t learn from or adapt to workflows, Challapally explained.“
Crystal Fincher @finchfrii.bsky.social

when the AI bubble finally collapses and everyone who spent a year smugly hyping it suddenly has to come crawling back with their tail between their legs, i just want to say i am not going to be the bigger person about it. i am going to be meaner than you can even believe
cait

I haven’t been this excited for a bubble to burst since I was a toddler.
David Slack @slack2thefuture.bsky.social

"Before 2010, the estimated lifespan for American early adults increased every year... By 2023, American early adults’ chance of dying was 70 percent higher than it would have been had the lifesaving trends of the early 2000s continued." –Slate
Bill Lindeke

"A Hispanic Texan has one-third the political value of a white Texan under this plan, and a Black Texan has one-fifth." –A Texas legislator, in a speech about the gerrymander
Celeste Headlee

Every story these days is either about AI or Trump.
Robert Simonson

every one of these is basically a real argument NIMBYs are using. "Why You Can't Upzone My Neighborhood":


Brett Hamil

If you haven’t realized that the Trump regime is focused 24/7 on ending what remains of competitive elections in the US and using false claims about crime to normalize a police state, you aren’t paying attention.
Stephen Walt

Because nothing says “you should feel free to come visit Washington” like standing in front of dozens of armed soldiers next to a guy who thinks women shouldn’t be able to vote
The Tennessee Holler

It truly amazes me how often "visionaries" fail to realize a simple truth: Regulations and laws don't exist to hamper business. Regulations and laws exist to limit liability for businesses. And these geniuses constantly learn it the hard way.
Jacob Whittaker @vonfunkenstein.bsky.social

The reason there are troops at Union Station is that Trump wants every visitor who arrives to know that the city is under his military occupation. It's that simple.
Patrick Chovanec

Once upon a time, not that long ago, Lee Zeldin [now head of EPA] was part of both the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and the Conservative Climate Caucus. Quite the transformation.
Jeff Young

The Republican Party quite transparently and obviously created these notional climate groups in order to induce a pack of credulous journalists to write stories suggesting "support for climate action on the right!!!" All of those journalists should be embarrassed. None of them will be.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Hegseth six months ago: We’re going to turn our military back into the most lethal warfighters on the planet. Vance, Hegseth today: We’re sending the most lethal warfighters on the planet to battle homeless people sleeping in a train station.
Radley Balko

EXCLUSIVE: Price Tag for Trump’s D.C. Military Surge: At Least $1 Million a Day. An analysis conducted for the Intercept found that the militarization of D.C. could end up costing hundreds of millions
Nick Turse

Seriously, though — what kind of cartoon villain would actually wear a hat like that?


Trey Callaway

"How bad slavery was" is worse. Much worse. Much worse than you think, much worse than you're taught, much worse than museums depict. Worse.
Thomas Lecaque

the hilarious thing about that latest trump tweet that everyone's properly dunking on is, that guy has probably never been in a museum, outside of some special gala event or party, in his entire life. he has no idea what's in museums!
Tom Tomorrow

The funny thing about this is that the Smithsonian African American History Museum is built around the exact "Success" narrative Trump claims to want. You climb through the Middle Passage, slave cabin, Jim Crow train, etc, and come out into Oprah's studio and Obama.
Jonathan M. Katz @katz.theracket.news

That’s right. Understanding the full horror of what Black people endured (and continue to do endure) has the effect of making Black American achievement even more impressive. Much of the post 2020 backlash is a reaction to white kids *earnestly* looking up to Shirley Chisholm or Harriet Tubman
Louis Römer

Only 1 of the [museum's] 3 history floors covers slavery, and 1/3 is devoted to the Civil War. The two post-slavery floors cover a century each (1876-1968, 1968 to the present), while the slavery floor covers nearly 500 years (1400-1876). A more accurate account would have devoted 4-5 floors to slavery.
Will Jones

On average, schools already water down the atrocities of slavery as is. The project to erase it completely from our collective memory has been in effect for almost as long as the abolition of slavery itself.
Jose Vilson, PhD @thejosevilson.com

I'm not right wing but some of this "woke" stuff is a little over the top. [6 months later] Slavery was fine. Your city is under martial law
Dinner is 6 pm @internethippo.bsky.social

"I don't want to hurt you, stop fighting back, you're hurting yourself" is literally the language of an abuser. One of the most banally horrifying things about this administration is that there is no subtext, no dog whistles, no need for interpretive work. It's all just explicit racism and cruelty:


Erin Lockwood

Presidents are supposed to be like your underwear. If you’re thinking about them at all over the course of a normal day, they’re either fabulous or something has gone terribly wrong.
K.B. Spangler

:heavy sigh: I dunno, y'all. Blue lawmakers under Red armed guard to force them to vote. Red troops invading Blue cities. Masked men kidnapping people in public, in daylight, on video. The chief executive in visible mental decline advocating for the end of democracy. :heavy sigh: I am afraid.
Sigrid Ellis

One of the biggest cultural issues we have is that no major media or journalistic institutions have been reinforcing norms of what things *should* look like. That corruption isn’t normal, that cronyism isn’t normal, that lies and scandals should be punished, that incompetence is disqualifying.
Anil Dash

It’s amazing to me how many people see building efficient and reliable mass transit as “too expensive.” The money is being spent on roads and highways already, and gets us poor outcomes. So, the question isn’t about whether to spend money. It’s about what to spend it on—and there’s a clear winner.
Nissa Mitchell

All of this because Stephen Miller didn't want to put his lunch trash in the garbage
Cocothecat

Disingenuous headlines: Texas Rep Nicole Collier refuses to leave chamber
Reality: A Black woman is being held by white men for refusing their illegal demands
Matt @mattraytalk.bsky.social

Who is this woman at the telescope on the cover of Popular Science, Jan. 1928? Based on the article inside, about women scientists working as federal employees, it’s Eleanor Lamson (1875-1932) of the U.S. Naval Observatory. I’ve not seen a woman scientist from that era on a magazine cover:


Leila Belkora PhD, astrophysics

Tulsi Gabbard revoking anyone's security clearance is the epitome of irony.
Patrick Chovanec

Vienna’s “Car Bet”: From May to July, households gave up their private cars in exchange for a monthly €500 mobility budget. Result: 2/3 realized they don’t need a car many sold theirs, choosing public transport, carsharing and more. More space, less traffic, better life.
Austrian Fietser @woemi.bsky.social

Forcing companies to surrender a 10% stake to build chips in the US sounds like a great way to chase them all the way to China.
Patrick Chovanec

There are some weirdos who are just really really into violence and its very important that they don't get state power.
lastpositivist.bsky.social

The fact that almost every single US mass shooter in the last decade has been explicitly inspired by Trumpism is something that's been buried under a mile of rhetorical concrete. In the 90s, the media was desperate to blame music and video games because the answer that young white people, many from middle class homes, were being taught to become right-wing zealots wasn't appealing.
Danielle Froom

...the right wing loves school shootings because they mimic the dynamics of domestic violence, terrorizing women and children in a domestic space and making a patriarchal ‘good guy with a gun’ the ‘only’ solution.
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl @deardara.bsky.social

"It’s a paradox: we laud the rebels of the past while shackling the rebels of the present." Excellent piece on protest as theatre
Dr Charlie Gardner

having thought about this for three days, my current status is: what the FUCK are we doing trying to ban social media for kids and not banning AI use? we are literally telling them not to use the computer to talk to their real friends but instead to the imaginary technology monetisable 'friends'.
Naomi Alderman

You are America. The government and policies you want are American. The right has been trying to define who or what "America" is for generations. Do not let them. Ceding that definitional battle cedes them the nation.
Jen Mercieca

So…Trump’s DOJ will be cool with this?


@mikesacks.bsky.social

1865–present: “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery”
1860: We will murder every single one of you for even saying that slavery is rude
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Person who discovered rhubarb: "I know, crazy, right?!"
Chris Steller

Every tech update now is like: "Great news, the word processor you've relied on for twenty years has learned to juggle! Is it good at it? No! Does it help in any way? Of course not! Has it made it insufferable to use? Oh, absolutely."
Rick Lane

Trump: I am literally going to destroy america
Media: Trump pursues controversial policies
Trump: Seriously just gonna fuck your shit up
Media: Ever the iconoclast, Trump doubles down
Tom Tomorrow

The fact that the thing we're calling artificial intelligence *can't do math* and yet we're jamming it into programs that successfully *have done math* for decades, then warning people against using the AI to do math, seems like an excellent summary of where we are.
Jacob T. Levy

I no longer see job listings in any of the areas that I used to find employment in that aren't centered around AI. Unemployed 2 years now. People are debating this fucking topic like it's theoretical, but it's ruining people's lives in real time as you debate minor points on the issue.
Tyler, from the Internet @tylerjameshill.com

the court's position is that the presidency has always been a dictatorship and everyone else has had that all wrong this whole time. Congress may pass no law that binds the president's actions either by constraining, criminalizing, or crafting law that operates outside of the president's control
@mumbly-joe.bsky.social

The American dream is to pay more for our power bills so that a South African Nazi can train his chatbot to call itself MechaHitler and make revenge porn AI videos of Taylor Swift
#TeslaTakedown

FREE DC:


50501: The People’s Movement

Wait, the wingnuts are mad because of a boy cheerleader? Somehow I completely missed this one. God it sounds so exhausting being mad all the time like this.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Two things about all the ICE abduction videos we've been seeing.
1. Every single one of them I've seen involves 6–10 agents with 3–4 vehicles grabbing one person. Beyond the rule of law abuses, it seems incredibly wasteful.
2. The longer you cosplay the Iraq occupation, the greater the chance you end up with the Iraq insurgency.
For now, most of the ICE abductions seem to take place in affluent areas, which explains the relatively bougie nature of the bystanders' responses. But eventually this is going to devolve.
Judah Grunstein

Folks are terrified of the NYC subway, think DC is a gang ridden hellscape and have other often irrational fears, but here's the truth, other than disease or an abusive partner with a gun, you're most likely to be killed by a reckless driver, and we barely acknowledge it's a problem.
Peter Beadle @pwbnyc.bsky.social

NEW: McCarthyism returns to immigration law, as @USCIS announces that it will begin screening applicants for immigration benefits for "Anti-America ideologies or activities." The term has no prior precedent in immigration law and its definition is entirely up to the Trump admin.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

"In terms of [crash] deaths per 100,000 population, the rates of deaths in the U.S are seven times higher than in Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom."
David Zipper

Tuesday has been sponsored by the bedroom of your wildest dreams. Scanned from a Sears catalogue 1992:


Present & Correct

The NIMBY three step: “I participated in the public process and did not get my way” becomes “I was left out of the decision making process” and then turns into “I deserve the power to overturn the result of the public process and impose my will on the majority by lawsuit.”
Max Dubler

I can see a handful of applications where AI is going to be helpful but mostly it just seems to be enabling lazy people to be lazier.
Rob @stpaulbikescum.bsky.social

The vibe of the "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" scene [in Cabaret], but for global politics. Just watching more and more people stand up and sing a long to the murderous insanity of romantic ethnonationalism. And feeling utterly powerless to stop it.
lastpositivist.bsky.social

The best chance for the Democratic Party to stop this was January 7th, when everyone was on their side. They frittered away the easy path with their cowardice and are far too weak to take the harder one now that it’s the only option.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

I didn’t know until now that in the original Rosie the Riveter painting, she is crushing a copy of Mein Kampf under her foot. Happy feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, remembering all the women who crush the serpents of Satan under their heel:


Kara N. Slade

The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few isn't just bad for our economy. It's corrosive to our democracy. When the wealthy and well-connected control our political system, regular people don't have a voice. The result? The demagoguery and corruption we're seeing now.
Robert Reich

Cybertruck is selling so few units and the build quality is such crap that insurance companies can't create accurate actuarial tables for it...so they're canceling policies
#TeslaTakedown

feels like most new media startups (especially well-funded ones) are not yoked to "creating great journalism" but to aggressively shaping public opinion or turning their voices into bigger, multi-platform celebs
Kyle Chayka

The mainstream media aren't required to amplify Trump's lies uncorrected every day. It's their choice, an unconscionable choice.
Mark Jacob

I think like 90% of drivers would prefer protected bike lanes but like 10% enjoy threatening people with their car or find seeing a bike as a personal challenge to their masculinity. And they have made it their top political issue
sanae @yarnbike.bsky.social

it remains important to understand that all of this shit is illegal and also to understand that illegality is not a barrier to action for this administration, and i think most people who follow politics are capable of holding both thoughts at the same time
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

Not part of the federal takeover of US cities, just a street-legal personal vehicle. Totally normal country:


Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

So just to keep track: Trump justified detaining students who protested and wrote op-eds because they're "flight risks." And then he lets a top Israeli official facing felony charges for child sex crimes just fly back to Israel. All while still refusing to release the Epstein files
Prem Thakker

Lather/rinse/repeat:
- Trump/MAGA sow fear with manufactured crisis to justify power grab
- Rational people point out there is no crisis, claims are bullshit, fear is irrational
- Centrists scold rational people for callously dismissing of "real fears"
- Trump power grab succeeds
Radley Balko

I feel incredibly attacked by the fact that Toronto is further south than Seattle
Michael Hobbes

The Pacific coast of Chile is basically in line with Cape Cod.
Orangeman: Fighter of the Nightman @ofotnm.bsky.social

Did you know that London is north of Montreal, and Berlin is north of London? Feels wrong.
Cooper Lund

This is how I feel about LA being east of Reno.
melari.bsky.social

Atlanta is west of Detroit
Bryan Joiner

bumpouts aren’t a solution to bad drivers. bad drivers just wedge themselves into non existent parking spots and block the bike lane:


taylr

If Trump says George Soros is about to send a giant elephant to poop on America from space, let us debate whether to constipate the elephant with drugs, shoot the elephant, or distribute poop-proof umbrellas. But don't you dare insult the real concerns of Americans who don't want to be pooped on.
Radley Balko

For years people said it was a gross exaggeration to label Nazism and its associated viewpoints within the modern conservative movement and especially online. Now Nazis are openly thriving and their rhetoric is impossible to avoid and many of the people who downplayed it are saying nothing at all. From “you can’t call everyone you disagree with a Nazi” and “the left is obsessed with calling people Nazis” to silence.
Kat Tenbarge

I think it's odd/bad how the US journalism establishment has decided that right wing murder just doesn't count. There has been near-total silence about the CDC shootings, murdering a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, and Jordan Neely's executioner got turned into a hero. It's a celebration of death.
Joshua Foust

The extent to which people who get a little bit into Gender Crit world have a tendency to become utterly obsessive haters is remarkable. Somehow it seems to induce monofocus in a way that other political movements (or even other bigotries) do not seem to.
lastpositivist.bsky.social

Outside Dupont north metro:


Ian Livingston

“FBI reported that fully 43 cities in those 3 states had higher rates of violent crime in 2024 than did DC. More than 1.2 million live in those cities, including more than 900,000 in Ohio alone. Yet that state’s National Guard is being deployed to DC to protect the capital’s 700,000-odd residents”
Sanho Tree

Hi, I'm Andrew Cuomo. I'm sorry I groped your mom and killed your grandma, but if you give me a fifteenth chance, I promise to throw you out of your apartment.
Johnny McNulty

You can't "dox" law enforcement by identifying them. That's literally the purpose of a badge
Jason E. Dunlap @redeyedjedi.bsky.social

Soldiers in MRAPs rolling around Union Station — blocks from the Capitol — seems silly, performative, and useless. But it raises a much darker question: What would Trump have done on Jan. 6, 2021 if he had possessed then the kind of control over local law enforcement that he seeks to acquire today?
George Conway

the message from the white house is that you live in a city run by people the president doesn't like, you will be occupied like you are an enemy of the state.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Tonight in Washington D.C. The sign reads: “The Bondi order is unlawful you are not obligated to follow it”:


The Tennessee Holler

I don’t know how to be around so many friends who — to my mind and I deeply hope I am wrong — seem so in denial about the totality of what both Trump and AI augur for any hope of a stable, much less just, society.
Clara Jeffery

This is a relatively small symbolic gesture of loyalty to Trump, but Republican-governed states willingness to essentially deputize their state’s sovereignty to the will of Trump is not a good sign for other future matters like election administration
@sababausa.bsky.social

passivhaus helps address the increase in energy prices
PV + storage helps address this
solar protection helps address this.
heat pumps help address this.
funding science helps address this
you know what doesn't?
AI. ignoring or exacerbating climate change.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

All those people who claimed Twitter wasn’t real life and said we didn’t need to worry about the right-wing trolls turned out to be wrong. Those trolls are literally running the government now.
Leah McElrath

One thing I know for sure is that if *I* called the cops and said “some guy just threw a sandwich at me” they would consider me to be a huge baby and think I was wasting their time.
Daniel Kibblesmith

One of these things is not like the other:


Dennis Goris

Declaring a fake emergency as an excuse to deploy the military to police civilians is one of the most canonical examples of authoritarian takeovers. Overseas, people see clearly what Trump is doing. Here in America most people — especially those with power or influence — are in denial.
Ian Bassin

"but crime is a real issue, people are worried about crime and you have to take that seriously." No you don't! If people are getting more scared about crime while crime is happening less frequently, it's a made up issue and you should make a point of yelling that all the time
Ian Boudreau

The only time I have ever felt, or actually been threatened with physical violence is by drivers
pinko_machinist

One of the best ways to cripple Russia’s ambitions long-term would be to moonshot renewables development then spread the tech everywhere super-cheap. Russia produces nothing of significance beyond oil and gas. The economy would tank. Plus a huge win in the fight against the climate crisis.
Mark Chadbourn

Homeowners: "Our streets need protection from homeless people!"
City: "Here are dozens of concrete barriers."
Bicyclists: "Our bodies need protection from fast-moving traffic!"
City: "Here are a few plastic pixie sticks":


Warren Wells, AICP

Not my most articulate but they're trying to make liberal cities into the hellscape they pretend they are.
Kendra Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com

Get comfortable with the term de-maga-fication because it's the only way out
sam @randomprecision.bsky.social

It is beyond belief that the main issues that Trump won on in 2016 were:
1) adherence to infosec protocols
2) economic populism
3) anti-corruption
4) savior of sex trafficked kids
My god what a fucking failure of information and fact finding. You could not possibly even create a person who would be worse on all 4 fronts than Trump. It’s impossible.
Grudgie the Whale

The truth we need to face in America is if you asked most Republicans if they support the tenets of fascism — a conformist society run by the military — but just didn't call it fascism, the vast majority would support
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

ICE or kidnappers? How to tell:


Patrick Chovanec

The question is not whether there's crime in DC, the question is whether there's a crisis that merits shredding the Constitution. There is no crisis. The military occupation of DC is purely pretextual racist garbage.
Lindsay Beyerstein

Corn ethanol is a scam. All farm-grown fuels are scams – and they’re land scams. When we use crops for fuel instead of food, we need to grow more crops to replace the food, which means more deforestation and more eating of the earth.
Michael Grunwald

Thinking you're all tough and projecting strength while actually just humiliating yourself really is the foundational feature of MAGA masculinity.
Aaron Ross Powell

It’s so stupid that all the “but what about fairness in women’s sports” people are always talking about Oh No What If Trans and never, like, paying women athletes more
Trung Le Nguyen @trungles.com

We should probably purge members of the security forces involved in establishing martial law in the capital.
Le Wokisme? or La Botte? @csilverandgold.bsky.social

gering bakery, vertical view, 10th street, gering, nebraska, 1993:


old roadside pics

Wall Street’s crypto plans aren’t just about politics. They offer a new way to profit — one in which banks can make more money by exposing their clients to more risk while facing less oversight.
Carol Reardon

He's an unstable leader in an unstable time. Why are city governments building Cop Cities? Why are billionaires building bunkers? Because staggering levels of inequality and our hyper-extractive economies are the stuff that collapse is made of. This is a well-documented reality.
@mskellymhayes.bsky.social