BlueSky May 2025

May is the month when I miss a lot of posts, so I'm going to do just one round-up.

As always, it was a month utter havoc, par for the course in these days of the Trump regime. It started with RFK declaring some anti-science death-mongering (there was more later in the month). Trump went to the Middle East to be feted by dictators. The House worked on and then passed a 1,000-page reconciliation bill that guts almost every aspect of our social safety net, reverses climate change action, and installs Trump as a dictator. A new pope was elected — and it wasn't Donald Trump! The Department of Homeland Security arrested first the mayor of Newark, and then the member of Congress who represents the same area.

As the month neared its end, it was both Memorial Day (as Trump plans for a military parade to celebrate his draft-dodging self), and the 5th anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Yet somehow, Jake Tapper was flogging a book about the wrong president's mental decline.

At the very end of the month, Elon Musk supposedly was leaving government service... while wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed him as The Dogefather.

Everything is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

__

We tend to focus on Trump—which is understandable because the extent of his corruption and the severity of his character pathology are unique—but Palantir, Thiel, Musk and others will have surveillance databases with of all our personal information even after Trump somehow eventually leaves office.
Leah McElrath

From over 300k to less than 100k. A picture of smaller, reduced science:


Dan Garisto

The goal is plainly and literally to cut the number of people involved in basic science in the US by 70%.
Michael Baym @baym.lol

we could have had taco trucks on every corner
darth™️

My big takeaway from the week's news is that there seems to be some form of rift forming between Musk and other elements of Trump coalition, but that he remains as dangerous and worthy of resistance as ever.
e.w. niedermeyer

I don’t want to live in a world where people are in jail and barred from work for smoking weed but an unelected man actively abusing ketamine faces no repercussions for illegally seizing all of our data and making decisions that kill hundreds of thousands of people
Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social

Workers in the oil and gas sector increasingly face dangerous working conditions brought on by extreme heat. The Biden administration issued a rule mandating that, when temps exceed 80°F, employers must provide water and rest breaks. The industry is lobbying Trump to reverse the rule, claiming that the "energy dominance" Trump wants can only be achieved if it's allowed to work its employees into heat death.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Still the most mind-blowing fact about the New York City subway is that more people take it on a daily basis than fly domestically in the United States.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

Trans cadets met all the standards, including physical tests, but won't be commissioned and may owe the U.S. Air Force Academy hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is unfair.
Diane Ravitch



Mike Luckovich

Great – looks as if the White House used AI to draft a health report and wound up inserting citations for articles that don’t exist.  They put cheating high schoolers to shame.
Harry Litman

NEW: We [ProPublica] obtained DHS data that shows the US knew only 32 of the 238 Venezuelans deported to a prison in El Salvador in March were convicted of US crimes, only 6 of those violent. Trump called them “savages,” “monsters” and "the worst of the worst.”
Mica Rosenberg

Here’s the thing, if they are picking up folks working in the country illegally, I’m going to need to see some white guys also being arrested for employing people working illegally in the country. Otherwise, it’s just racism.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

If Mississippi is a "miracle" of Science of Reading reform, how do we explain... Grade 8 reading scores flat since 1998 (in bottom 25% of states). Grade retention numbers same for over a decade
Race/socioeconomic achievement gap same since 1998. Grade 4 reading scores are a retention scam.
PL Thomas EdD

Like, maybe the answer to "why did Musk do that weird thing" is that he is a weird guy, usually high, who spends way too much time online with some of the world's biggest conspiracy theorists.
Don Moynihan

Why is this information only coming out now, now that Musk is ostensibly leaving the public arena?  I suppose the questions answers itself. Seriously, legitimate/professional journalism in the United States is in severe need of reinforcement, for the good of the Republic.
haveyouanywool.bsky.social

I often feel that the greedy destroyers in this world – those destroying nature and/or harming people – have not once in their lives felt at peace, or marveled at simple natural beauty, or felt humbled by it. Yes, our collective power must stop their harm..., but it's also sad what they have become.
RebeccaW @rwclimate.bsky.social

"Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year."
Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social

Musk never found any of the 20 million people over age 115 who he said were getting Social Security checks.
Dean Baker

"Better schools" is Nice White Parent code for "whiter schools," and our failure to acknowledge that is hurting our neighbors *in the places where we chose to make our homes*!
Anne Kosseff-Jones


Andy Singer

My favorite American corollary I learned recently is that Broadway theaters employ more people than the entire American coal industry.
Alex Turner @turnerinroc.bsky.social

Anyway, what business leaders crave above all else is stability, predictability, and a fundamental assurance in property rights and enforceable contract law . . .  is what I have always been told and now no longer believe is true.
James Longhurst

been saying this for like 3 years now, the core constituency of the "manosphere" is not Gen Z or teenage boys, it is  35-55 year old dudes who wish they were still teenage boys
Shiv Ramdas Rice Lord @nameshiv.bsky.social

Just about every Republican/Trumpist complaint about public transportation is a poorly disguised version of “there are too many black people.”
@kenwhite.bsky.social

It's a dog eat dog world, they say. No it's not. Human achievement comes from cooperation not competition, and dogs don't eat dogs.
Dr Charlie Gardner

22 years ago I pivoted from working on antibiotic resistance to pandemic viruses. Since then, I've argued that if we care about saving US lives in expectation, advance capacity for producing bird flu vaccine offers by far the greatest expected return on investment. We were so goddamn close.
Carl T. Bergstrom

NEW: CBP agents have collected the DNA of migrant children as young as 4 years old, which is stored in a criminal database in case they commit crimes in the future, according to records reviewed by wired.com
Andrew Couts

next door:


Li Chen @exocomics.com

It’s already clear that Trump’s roughly $3 billion and counting in corruption scandals are 10X worse than Watergate. So why don’t we treat it as such?? Give it a name: Cryptogate. Demand public hearings. Urge state prosecutors to investigate Trump’s family. Take it to the streets
Will Bunch

Seeing as Emil Bove personally fired me from DOJ in retaliation for prosecuting January 6 rioters, I don’t think he should be confirmed to a lifetime seat as a federal judge. But that’s just me.
Peter Andrews @pfandrews.bsky.social

I still think the best idea for progressive donors is to just revive every alt-weekly in the country and staff them with 10 reporters each.
Michael Hobbes

You almost never hear a driver complain that EZ-Pass is an arm of the surveillance state, but you almost always hear that about speed cameras. I wonder what the difference is!
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

Sean Duffy is the Secretary of Car.
Brett Little

How do famous right-wing influencers actually poll with young men in 2025?
Rogan: 27% favorable, 35% unfavorable, 45% don't know/never heard of
Theo Von: 21% fav, 16% unfav, 55% dk
Andrew Tate: 12% fav, 47% unfav, 36% dk
Mediocre melee player @anchovymelee.bsky.social

There is nothing I love more than wandering aimlessly through a city I don’t know:


Tom Flood

DISEASES ERADICATED OR DECIMATED BY SCIENCE:
1. Chickenpox
2. Diphtheria
3. Measles
4. Pertussis
5. Pneumococcal Infection
6. Polio
7. Tetanus
8. Typhoid
9. Yellow Fever
10. Smallpox

DISEASES ERADICATED OR DECIMATED BY RFK JR. OR PRAYER:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Andrea Junker @strandjunker.com

To be clear, it doesn’t make you a visionary or genius to want to discard the incredibly complex and special planet we have, in favour of a staggeringly less habitable planet that only the mega-rich could hope to get to. It takes a superhuman level of lazy, toddler-like selfishness and squandering.
Brent Toderian

RFK Jr and Mehmet Oz are pro-illness, pro-death, anti-science, anti-human.  The only way to explain this administration’s agenda is as culling medicare recipients.
Allison Adato @editgirlnyc.bsky.social

“Why did burning girls matter in Vietnam but not in Gaza?” The 'Napalm Girl' photo shocked the world and helped end the Vietnam War, but a child surrounded by flames and other similar images in Gaza can't even provoke a ceasefire:


Mehdi Hasan

Scientific insiders hold power for a reason. Cause they know shit. The idea that there is something wrong with our best and brightest holding power is how we get idiots who run our country into the ground. Absurd
D Granke

guys like RFK Jr get their foot in the door by asking “aren’t you skeptical of powerful scientific insiders?” Many people are. But the real question is “do you want your powerful scientific insiders to be actual scientists or roadkill eating morons?”
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

watching humanity spend millions of dollars to blow up hunks of metal in the sky while our neighbors die in the streets from lack of resources. surreal.
Lauren in Saint Paul @comobelladonna.bsky.social

One tip that's particularly on-point: rather than invoking "dense urbanism" or "dense walkable areas" — terms which mean very little to most Americans — invoke "old-fashioned main streets." Those old pre-war main streets are most Americans' *only personal exposure to density and walkability.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

MAGA zero-sum thinking is destroying America.
Filipe Campante

New introductory phrase for work and social events just dropped:


Discontinued Foods!

You can tell "nasty" was what Trump's mother called him several times a day when he was 3.
tuikkunen.bsky.social

People who say that the United States can’t build anything anymore must not be sports fans. Barely a year goes by without the debut of a sparkling new stadium or arena, often in the very cities where it’s most difficult to build almost anything else.
Binyamin Appelbaum

Louis Brandeis said that we can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both. In 1933. He said it in 1933.
Rebecca Fachner

If you want a sneak peak into our future imagine the politicization of everything. Whether the government performs a function entirely dependent on whether the government likes you. You want your social security check? Small business loan? Let's have a look at your facebook posts first
@internethippo.bsky.social

President Donald Trump’s pick to investigate waste, fraud and abuse at the Labor Department, Anthony D’Esposito, is a former Republican congressman who lost his New York seat after he was accused of putting his mistress and fiancée’s daughter on his payroll.
Max Boot

Trump wants 1 million deported, but despite his lies there aren't many murderers and rapists. Instead, they arrest teens for Driving While Brown, or use a ploy to disappear refugees who come to immigration court. The pathetic truth behind ICE's masks.
Will Bunch

Trump only gets seriously interested in the idea of putting more money into vocational training when he can say he's taking that money away from Harvard first. Everything must always be zero sum. Everything must always serve the MAGA Two Minute Hate of the moment.
Greg Sargent

"It's like the fall of the roman empire!"
"You mean a 400 year gradual shift away from dense urbanization in about a quarter of the empire because of a combination of outward and inward pressures?"
"No"
"Oh so you mean the transfer of major political power to economic centers?"
"No"
"Do you mean a series of moral panics over at least a century based in nostalgia for a memory of Roman greatness that never really happened, at least not that way?"
"Well, actually kinda"
The good analogy I think, if we must analogize, is the cultural revolution. The process of intellectual and economic change from 200-700 CE in northwestern europe (because not Iberia, Italy, southern france, n africa, SE europe) is a terrible analogy to anything happening today.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

People who think they are innovation knowers but are just incredibly mid still nod confidently about one firm in a risk-weighted portfolio failing during a global recession (Solyndra) 16 years ago. Meanwhile we're just exploding much higher TRL rockets made of cash, for laughs these days.
Costa Samaras

The reason Apple manufactures in China is because of YEARS of investment in vocational training there. Any effort to bring these industries onshore STARTS WITH INVESTING IN OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. And it will take YEARS. It’s not about tiny hands (so stupid).
Sherrilyn Ifill

In a public forum at UC San Diego in 2011 where I was interviewer, Musk said he was "highly confident" SpaceX would be operating manned missions to Mars *by now*. (He said manned landings in 2026. Which means launch by now.) Meanwhile, the realities. What a guy.
James Fallows

I don't see how you can call yourself a libertarian and not be freaked the fuck out about the federal government sending off lawful US residents to prisons operated by authoritarian client states.
M. Nolan Gray

Given the actions of the Trump administration to date, here’s my extremely nuanced analysis: Best case is they don’t care if we die. Worst case is they’re trying to kill lots of us.
Leah McElrath

LEFTIST: Dude, you need to grow up and get a hobby. Start treating women like people and find a useful role in society.
RIGHT WING INFLUENCER: You’re a pussy. You’re a beta cuck. You’re poor because of the soy in your blood. Suck my dick, simp.
YOUNG MAN: the liberals have left me no choice
@ceej.online

Why do men need “a model of masculinity”? Why can’t y’all just…be? Women don’t need a model of femininity. Why are men suddenly so fragile when—for the first time in history—they don’t feel in control of absolutely everything?
Elizabeth Bennett

Jesus Christ what the fuck is wrong with white men that they can’t just defend democracy without having to be bribed and coddled? My god, how pathetic.
Charles Dainoff

Left model of masculinity:


Adam Rothman

“speak English or die” as policy: Trump’s FCC delays multilingual emergency alerts for natural disasters
Alan Ohnsman

Just call it the Self-Inflicted Wound Era, when we took a bunch of stuff that was working largely fine (vaccines, weather monitoring, friendly relations with like 175 countries, cancer research, renewable energy credits, the FAA, global trade, etc etc) and just broke them for giggles
Dave Levitan

There are no “moderate” voters. There are Trump voters who make excuses for their vote by saying that Democrats are too far left. The most unfortunate byproduct of this phenomenon lies in the Democratic strategists and pollsters and candidates chasing nonexistent “moderate” voters.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

This has always been the GOP's strategy:
1) Cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations by claiming they'll pay for themselves.
2) Explode the deficit.
3) Demand cuts to vital programs that help millions.
4) Repeat.
They're trying to get away with it again:


Robert Reich

Israel is imposing life imprisonment on Palestinian children without any fair legal process. This injustice is unacceptable and destroys whole generations before they even begin. As a Palestinian, I live this reality with all its pain and sorrow, and I call on the world not to turn a blind eye
Alaa @mamafriend.bsky.social

"Latin American social democrats know that you don’t beat fascists by calling fascists fascist. You beat fascists by offering an alternative and a broad vision of social democracy. You promise to make the material conditions of people’s lives better in real ways.”
Chris Lombardi @chrisblue.bsky.social

I do believe that meaningful change politics was destroyed by the advent of mass polling. Wondering if we would have had half of the New Deal initiatives if FDR had been required to poll test them first.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Liberals are more afraid of socialists maybe gaining power someday than they are of nazis actually having power right now, and it shows
Gallifreyan Jedi @jediofgallifrey.bsky.social

Touching grass is not enough I need to fly 1000 miles north while quacking nonstop with hundreds of other ducks
lukelukeluke

Facts:

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Monica @softtail65.bsky.social

Covid killed more Americans in less time than WW1 did British soldiers, but there’s a memorial in every British village and I've just seen my first covid memorial in America.
BeijingPalmer

The interesting thing about capitalism is that it's entirely incompatible with the future, so we've just decided to get rid of the future and keep capitalism for a short while
Climate News

I'm looking through the Big Beautiful Bill for a pod I'm recording tomorrow and ... it's difficult to avoid the feeling that I'm squinting at excrement smeared on the walls by toddlers, struggling to find some sort of meaning or larger intention.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Some hold the view that 2024 was a loss despite a weak candidate. I’m starting to think Trump is a historically strong candidate, in his ability to raise turnout, be immune to criticism, and never be attributed unpopular positions.
Bribleck

The number of people killed by the police has risen every year since the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020:


Catherine Rampell

What George Floyd's death meant (and why so many mark it now when we could also be marking the deaths of so many others) was the broad disillusioning of white liberals whose attitude toward the cops was indifference, if not support. There was undeniable evidence over and over of police brutality. The 2020 uprisings were a pivotal moment because cops made it clear, repeatedly and on camera, what they will do to maintain power and white supremacy. Five years later, it's still true: cops care far more about protecting the property of the upper class than anything else.
Dex Anderson

One thing that turns out to be way harder than it should be is explaining to people with a for-profit business mindset why applying those principles to non-profit arts management doesn't work. Not just "isn't optimal"; does. not. work. It's like trying to use a pitchfork to rake leaves.
Sam Bergman @violanorth.bsky.social

anytime I challenge a "moderate" Democrat in Minneapolis, they recoil into "wow that guy is so angry, such an asshole" (I am not any more angry than you should be) cuz that is their politick; polite comity, the ultimate offense is not heinous anti social policy, but the impolite
D.A. Bullock @bullycreative.bsky.social

The billions upon billions squandered by tech bros, burning up precious, finite resources while people labor and suffer from lack of basic shelter, food, healthcare…it’s criminal and I wish I believed there would be some kind of cosmic reckoning
Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social

The percentage of leadership positions at the Vatican held by women is higher than the percentage of studio movies directed by women.
Franklin Leonard

Annual carbon footprints associated with men’s food and transport consumption were found to be 5.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (tCO2e) on average, while women’s average food and transport consumption produced 3.9 tCO2e, 26% less.
Katja Diehl

The murder of George Floyd still weighs on this city and it should. Nothing has been done to stop this from happening again. In fact it often feels like it's just a matter of time. Everyone I've talked with recently feels somewhat similar, especially the heaviness.
Fancy Pants @farnaby.xyz

Man Feared to Be Cognitively Slipping After Writing Book About Wrong President
The Borowitz Report


Emerson @novaisel.bsky.social

Academics are always seen as a threat in authoritarian regimes. We're among the first to be attacked--along with journalists, librarians. We're independent sources of knowledge, we think critically, we are viewed as powerful because we teach. Know your value, know why you're a threat. Be bold.
Jen Mercieca

I’ll say it again — when *any* politician uses the ‘I haven’t read that story’ lie about something they knew they would get asked about, the interviewer has a duty to say ‘Okay, in that case I’m going to terminate this interview and you can come back when you’re better prepared.”
Nick Pettigrew

Trump left West Point after his speech instead of staying to shake the hand of every graduating cadet, as is longstanding tradition. If Obama or Biden had done that, we would never the hear the end of it. But it's Trump, so reporters don't care.
Charlotte Clymer

This should be seen as evidence of the crisis: federal judges fear that Trump will order U.S. Marshals to stand down on securing the safety of judges whose decision they don’t like. This is just devastating. I cannot stress enough how much of a Def Con 1 moment this is. Federal judges fear that the President of the United States will stand down security for judges in retaliation for adverse decisions. This is such a huge story.
Sherrilyn Ifill

Democrats don’t canvass in my rural community, but neither do Republicans. The difference is that churches often do the work of the Republican Party three times a week…
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

This Memorial Day weekend, the best way to honor the soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice is to honor and protect the freedoms and the democracy they died for.
George Takei

The same 'doods' that are claiming masculinity crisis showed zero empathy for any truly oppressed people.
johnsisko.bsky.social

peterson's rock garden, redmond, oregon, 1987:


old roadside pics

every time i read Trump's posts it feels like i'm concussed
The Horse Knuckler

I have to point this out: international undergraduate students generally pay full freight at US universities, which means they effectively subsidize higher education for Americans; we *export* higher ed. Full freight at Harvard is ::checks:: $86,926 per year.
Bret Devereaux

You wanna see what happens when you make your universities less attractive to foreign students, just look at the UK, where 40% of universities are on the brink of going bankrupt.
Bryan Andrews

If SUVs were a country, they would be the world’s fifth largest emitter of CO2. SUVs accounted for 48% of global car sales in 2023 and were responsible for over 20% of the growth in global energy-related CO2 emissions.
Extinction Rebellion Global

I've never seen it so well put before:


Mary Pezzulo

sometimes i think about how many magazine subscriptions my household had and weep a little bc i read them all and loved it
maggie schreiter @squishythings.com

It's wild that Republicans are now claiming that "The CBO is wrong." The CBO... whose Director is a Republican and worked in George W. Bush's administration. That's how far gone the Republican Party is... when any Republican who presents them with facts they don't like is "woke"
Jay W @jaydeedouble.bsky.social

“Life is short. And there are much more pressing–and actually interesting–questions than ‘Are you less human than me?’” –Ta-Nehisi Coates
Edward Winkleman

Never take seriously those who ridicule low-income people for having a smartphone or laptop. “If they’re so poor how did they buy an iPhone???” Because they’re trying to escape poverty, not the 1700s, genius. If you think basic tech access is unnecessary or a luxury, survive a month without it.
Qasim Rashid, Esq.

"The argument over bike lanes becomes a kind of stand-in — a way to complain about change, to push back against how the city is evolving. It’s less about safety and more about the feeling that something familiar is slipping away."
Streetsblog NYC

Hard not to notice that ICE isn't breaking up drug rings or gangs (because we would ABSOLUTELY hear about it if they were), but instead are dressing up like bank robbers and doing the laziest shit possible, like hanging out at immigration court or grabbing people for busted taillights. Worthless
Ian Boudreau

Learn it. Know it. Live it:


Dr Ross Barnett @deepfrieddna.bsky.social

Both Elena Slotkin and Reuben Gallego received $10 million apiece from crypto industry super PACs in 2024.
Molly White

There's a great investigative piece – or book! – to be written about who is actually governing in this administration. Who writes the EOs, who decides when they go to Trump, etc. This is a reality TV show masquerading as a presidency.
EM Simpson @emsetc.bsky.social

What is a nation supposed to do when its leader is publicly committing impeachable offenses on a daily basis and the impeachment process is utterly broken due to slightly more than half of the nation's Congress being members of a cult dedicated to destroying rule of law
Seth Abramson

There is no better indicator of the direct assault on America's health, and the complete lie of "MAHA," than the rollback and elimination of federal drinking-water pollution standards.
Peter Gleick

Every single segment on cable news about Jake Tapper's book talking Biden is one less covering Trump's corruption, his war on our Constitution and his crimes! And that is by design.
Dean Obeidallah

The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision reverses a precedent set in a unanimous decision by the court in 1935 and now says the president can fire heads of independent agencies like the FTC or NLRB. Except for the Fed. Why? Because tanking the stock market is where the conservative judges draw the line
Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social

AP classes are like club sports. Both are businesses that prey on hyper competitiveness adding anxiety and stress unnecessarily.
Mad Scientist @ally2000.bsky.social

I like how all of our major economic policies are unilaterally implemented via one guy posting manically on a website he owns. This is how the founding fathers intended governance to work.
James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social

I'm depressed about everything pretty much continually (and I am NOT asking for your advice on dealing with it, just to be absolutely clear) but I'm also just so fucking ... annoyed, at the irritating stupidity of it all. It's like being ruled by a giant, stupid, buzzing mosquito.
Tom Tomorrow

Maybe it's called a corpse flower because that's a dead ballerina stuffed in a bucket:


Hillary Monahan

Really something to watch the head of the law and order party committing blatant corruption in front of all of us as his hand-selected justices make up laws to suit their pocketbooks and his goons deport innocent immigrants
Yonah Freemark

They blame pollution but cut the EPA and clean air and water regulations. They blame poor nutrition but cut SNAP and programs to bring local produce to schools. They blame increased screen time while destroying public infrastructure that connects people. All while they take millions off healthcare.
Jacquelyn Gill

Most of us in higher ed in the US are going to lose something over the next four years (opportunities, or funding, or time). But if we believe universities exist, in part, to preserve historical memory and create a space for dissent, our primary job right now is to fight and take the hit.
Ted Underwood

The reason you're having trouble concentrating if you are here in the US is because we're basically being chased around by serial killers and being asked to disregard the fact.
Maureen Johnson

Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science and innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.
Dani Rodrik

Hilarious / tragic that Vietnam will have high-speed rail before the United States does.
Bill Lindeke

This c. 2,000 year-old Roman mosaic glass bowl shows the past was lived in glorious technicolour! Victoria and Albert Museum, photo by me:


Alison Fisk

Seems pretty clear that DOGE wasn’t ever designed to increase efficiency, but to destroy regulators in Musk’s way and gobble up the data of the American public and its government so as to provide Musk market advantage in AI race.
Clara Jeffery

Due to DOGE cuts, RIFs and early retirements, the Forest Service has lost 1600 red-carded individuals and five complex incident management teams (the teams that manage the large, complex incidents that you see on the news) ahead of what is expected to be an active wildfire season.
Amanda Monthei

If you want elected Democrats to "fight" you best understand that it will be *Black* Democrats on those front lines. And so you best have their backs when they're unconstitutionally asked to suffer the consequences.
ElieNYC

Imagine a firefighter after a fire has burned down your home saying, "well you shoulda voted differently." Or a social worker saying, "you shoulda voted for a different council member," as an excuse for showing up late to an intervention. Why is that acceptable behavior for police?
Summer Kendal @kedrickillian.bsky.social

SNAP makes money! It keeps people from starving! It has literally no downsides! 85% of the country supports it for that obvious reason!
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Waiting outside a Jewish museum to shoot people coming out of an event hosted by a Jewish organization is antisemitism, this is not hard. Horrifying, but not hard. This is antisemitism, and it's wrong, and it's bad.
Thomas Lecaque

Overnight markups in every major committee, numerous back room deals, a 1 AM rules committee hearing a full day before text was released, no official score, and now midnight floor debate two hours after they released the final text of an 1,100-page bill, with final passage coming at 4 am. My God
Aaron Fritschner

I try not to go down the “we’ll never have real elections again” rabbit hole, but Republicans slashing more than HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS from MEDICARE in the middle of the night isn’t helping my efforts in that regard.
Leah McElrath

William de Morgan:


Rachel Deering

I realize the Republicans are calling them "Trump Accounts," but everyone else is calling them "dementia dollars."
Dean Baker

As Heather Richardson notes, this is the ending of The Great Society view of government, which was an expansion of The New Deal. They're defunding social programs that have held this nation together for generations. It's going to cause widespread misery and despair.
Jen Mercieca

While we don't have enough money for Medicaid, it's good to know there is still enough money to buy Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a new plane
Dean Baker

"Lose the future" would be a great slogan for the Republican Party right now
Marcel Moran

Going after Biden [like Jake Tapper] lets these people convince themselves they’re speaking truth to power while simultaneously shrinking in utter cowardice every day while fascism takes over unthreatened by any real press truth telling.
Grudgie the Whale

I think many people have a vague sense that Trump is racist, but they don't fully realize just how much the up and coming Republican staffer class is marinating in actual neo-Nazi propaganda online, because the media underreports this story. And it is only going to get worse in the coming years.
Joel S.

Trump could wander into the press briefing room in nothing but soiled underwear, mistake Karoline Leavitt for his ex-wife Marla Maples, and go on an extended rant about how he was sending SEAL Team 6 to execute George Clooney and half the media would still be asking about Biden's health.
Kevin M. Kruse

The country is about to trade away global leadership on clean energy and advanced technology and health science and literal food for hungry kids, for what, a tax cut for some super rich folks? This deal sucks.
Costa Samaras

The absolute disgrace taking place today in front of cameras in the White House [with the visit from the president of South Africa] is yet another reminder that for all the talk of Joe Biden's failures, the people who failed America the most are our citizens. Empowering this guy (again) was a foreseeable disaster we'll be lucky to survive.
Aaron Rupar

Trump's press events with world leaders that he doesn't like are quickly becoming the weirdest moments in U.S. history.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

i think it should be a bigger story that the president held a meeting with a foreign head of state where he ranted about the most gutter white supremacist propaganda you can find on the internet
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

People vastly underestimate how thoroughly our information networks have been gutted – methodically, intentionally – a campaign of years. And too many of the informed waste time on feeling superior rather than seeking to remedy the situation.
M. Belanger @sethanikeem.bsky.social

Tariffs were NEVER going to “bring manufacturing back to the US.” There are many reasons, including:
• Even with tariffs, US labor is prohibitively expensive
• America’s supply chain isn’t ready
• Most Americans don’t want to do manufacturing jobs
• Not enough unemployed workers to fill new factories
Jon Cooper

An interesting thing about electing a "cognitively irresponsible" leader like Trump is that he has filled his Cabinet with people who are likewise irresponsible. None of these folks will answer questions or allow Congress to fulfill its oversight role. None of them are accountable.
Jen Mercieca

How many times does Trump have to say he doesn't know what a journalist is asking about before journalists start asking questions about who is actually running the government?
Fleet @fleetadmiralj.bsky.social


Elle Glass @uberbabe.bsky.social

Unprecedented constitutional violations and crimes happening daily now. But please do enjoy this podcast with Jake Tapper and Ezra Klein on Joe Biden.
Mark Copelovitch

Never say that Democrats are great at facts when so many people cannot get the basics about what happened with Al Franken right.
Courtney Milan

Maybe we should require a Constitution test before anyone takes the oath to “support and defend” it.
Justin Thorp

So: every single month since April 2024, the US has seen record-high power demand compared to each of the same months prior (from 2015). That combined with the persistence (and seeming rise) in coal and gas is resulting in rising greenhouse gas emissions in America's power sector:
Ketan Joshi

The moneybagses could keep brainstorming about how to grow a liberal Joe Rogan in a vat or they could just make Shari Redstone a better offer, buy CBS, and run a network news operation that covers the myriad fuckups and abuses of the Trump administration without watering it down for fake balance
Tom Scocca

Unreal. The Trump administration is disappearing migrants to places that aren't even their origin countries, then refusing to say which countries they were sent to by claiming this is "classified," then refusing to say *why* the info is classified
Greg Sargent

Even two months ago this would have been a leading US and international news story. Today it's already so normalised that its not breaking through.
Arieh Kovler

We have to start putting government lawyers in jail
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

Americans accept tens of thousands of deaths and *millions* of injuries every year of disproportionately young, healthy people as the reasonable cost of riding around cities in motorized easy chairs and if you say that’s an unacceptable and insane price to pay you sound like a crazy person.
Bella Chu @isabellachu.bsky.social

How do we have a stable world, let alone "economic growth," if nearly half a billion people will need to move away from coasts and (to use jargon) the value of all that fixed capital is slowly destroyed?
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Maggie Hassan voted to confirm Kristi Noem. She gets zero credit for not asking [the habeas corpus] question during her confirmation hearings.
Julie DiCaro

An excellent article -and podcast- questioning whether climate activists are really so radical. It makes you wonder: has any society in history been as willingly docile as ours?
Dave Vetter


Andy Singer

Everything this administration does can be categorized in two ways: 1) Will kill more Americans; 2) Will kill more people worldwide.
David Ho

Unironically Democratic mega-donors should buy up the domains for about 60 defunct local newspapers in swing states. Hire two reporters to write almost exclusively about highschool sports and new restaurants opening with every 10th article about how the local GOP is screwing over people.
Jon Walker @jonwalkerpdx.bsky.social

NPR published a story 5 days ago about three high ranking Trump officials with clear ties to Hitler-admiring antisemites and it barely made a ripple. These are the kind of stories that used to end political careers. Now the subjects of the stories just hold up a middle finger and keep plowing ahead.
Seth Cotlar

Ashli Babbitt was a domestic terrorist who attempted to overthrow our government via a violent insurrection at our nation’s Capitol. The administration agreeing to pay her family $5 million of taxpayer money is disgraceful.
Maxwell Frost

I wonder how many lies it will take before the press stops giving official statements by Trump and his cronies the presumption of truth. Days of stories spreading their lies around before the real story emerges. This happens over and over and over again:
mtsw

The crypto corruption taking place in DC makes subprime look like a Boy Scout picnic.
Patrick Chovanec

Fascinating world of ancient glass: a glass mosaic face bead. 1st century AD. Photo from the Landesmuseum Württemberg:


Nina Willburger @drnwillburger.bsky.social

I don’t think people understand how powerful the impact of cognitive dissonance can be on your brain. It can make you perceive things as threats that aren’t threats. It makes you rewrite interactions to see things that aren’t there. It puts you in fight or flight mode. One of the reasons that the suggestion to “learn to sit with your discomfort” is so powerful is because it teaches you how to recognize when you’re in the throes of cognitive dissonance and to develop strategies to keep it from making you an asshole.
Courtney Milan

Everything that was promoted by the “Alt-Right” in 2016 is now mainstream Republican policy. Just to put into perspective how far the Overton window has shifted.
Leah McElrath

Trying to develop a 21st-century environmentalism without accounting for right-wing suppression of clean energy is like trying to teach someone to walk by scolding one leg while ignoring the paralyzed other leg. It's not going to work.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

"There is no acceptable way to protest America's deep racial imbalance without aggravating white people who prefer not to think about it." By Jeremy Norton, Minneapolis firefighter who responded at the scene after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin.
@pattho.bsky.social

Buncha guys who don't believe COVID-19 is real and thinks vaccines should be illegal have suddenly developed opinions on the screening of prostate cancer, let's hear them out I bet they will engage with this information in a normal and educated way
@scoopsstp.bsky.social

Obviously, I’d take it, but pretty clear now if Harris had won the press chasing her role in the  “Biden cover up” would have consumed her presidency by now.
Schooley

Daft Punk?


Rob @stpaulbikescum.bsky.social

your energy actually is finite and spending time fighting about the former president while the current president is putting this country in a wood chipper seems like a bad use of it
Marisa Kabas

It is honestly amazing how many people think the 80s were a time of acceptance and tolerance rather than an era that had a dozens panics happening at once regarding Dungeons & Dragons, rock music, video games, gay people, etc.
The Alternate Historian

It would be so useful if everyone who writes about “elites” could make the tiny extra effort to be specific about who they’re actually talking about
Brian Phillips

The cement king of Sioux City who drives a brand new F-350 and has two vacation houses in Florida isn't an elite but a grad student with $200,000 in debt and a nose ring is, that's how this works.
Bobby Big Wheel @kleinman.bsky.social

It’s pretty easy:
if you subscribe to any type of print news media or written journalism, you’re elite
if you have a fishing boat or anything else you hitch to your v8 quadcab, you’re just a regular hard working American
matthewmjones.bsky.social

My politics in a headline:


Hayden Clarkin @thetransitguy.com

The same people who say Adriana Smith should stay hooked up to machines so a fetus can gestate inside her dead body for 7 months because “it’s a sacrifice a mother would make” can’t fathom a mother crossing the border with her children in hopes of providing a better life for them.
@kdnerak33.bsky.social

We devote musicals, miniseries, and documentaries to the founders of our first republic and not to those of our second, who saw this country with clear eyes. We need fewer encomiums for Jefferson, Madison, and Lafayette. More respect for Sumner, Stevens, Bingham and Douglass (Frederick).
Sherrilyn Ifill

I swear the mainstream press is just a pack of golden retrievers eager to chase any ball rolled for them, and that's how they themselves get rolled and roll the public in turn.
Rebecca Solnit

people coming at climate change from a purely political (or economic) approach and untethered by scientific backgrounds seem to be wildly hit or miss, everywhere from dismissive "things will be fine" to hopeless dooming
Mark Shore

I've never understood why providing kids with a $10k a year education is fine but if we give them lunch, it's communism.
Hal 10000

Russell Vought, acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell Americans’ most sensitive data, credit history, and Social Security numbers.
WIRED

Two things can be true: COVID school closures were necessary for years because of heath and staffing concerns and they were a pretty bad way for children to be learning
Cooper Lund

it’s pretty remarkable how the Democratic Party is self-flagellating more in 2025 after swapping out their candidate and losing the popular vote by 1.5% than republicans did in 2021 after losing the popular vote by 4.5% and inciting an insurrection
 @samd.bsky.social

Sure, let’s dissect the mental and physical acuity of the former president who sought to make lives in America better while minimizing the reality of a deranged arsonist dismantling the country we’ve known and loved. What a failure to meet this moment.
Steven Beschloss

A giant banner of Trump is now ominously hanging at the front of the Dept. of Agriculture. It's not the kind of thing American presidents do. It's more in line with what you typically see in places like North Korea — and it's the latest sign that America might be sliding into autocracy:


Ali Velshi

Getting a ticket without reservation and traveling 259 miles in 2 hours (equal to SF to Pismo Beach) feels way more like freedom than driving that same distance for 3 hours and 40 mins in the US.
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

This can't be overstated...the "stepping back" is merely refraining from dancing like a drugged chimpanzee in front of TV cameras. The damage has been done and he WILL be there to fan the flames.
Mike DeAngelis

Every time Trump fucks up they're going to replay the Biden mental decline story again fyi. Because they're masters at dictating to the media what to cover.
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

people need to internalize, very quickly, that federal research grants are a hypercompetitive contracting process not charity, and that what Uncle Sam gets in return for that money is American dominance in the future
post malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social

So weird how right as Trump was getting rightly mocked to hell for taking an obvious bribe from a foreign country — stupidly, blatantly, and illegally — that suddenly Joe Biden became a national story again. Excited to hear the latest on Hillary's emails when Trump starts arresting congressional Dems.
Eric Panzer

I don’t understand billionaires and their bunkers. Seeing how unsettled people got after a bit of social isolation (even with their loved ones), bunker life will not be good.
David Ho

I’m reading a bunch of work on autocracy and democratic backsliding. I’m struck that scholars in this tradition don’t get called “political” or “biased” despite their clear normative stance. Yet, race and gender scholars—who were the canaries in the coal mine for backsliding—do.
Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social

The wife and I were driving past multiple trailer parks in our general area including one that I could only describe as a “high end trailer park,” and we both started laughing about Tiny Home Revolution evangelists because they just invented trailers but made them cubes.
Asawin Suebsaeng

I have to stay connected to Facebook professionally but the neighborhood groups I use the most are just becoming more and more polluted by old men posting weird memes like “This is how I like my steak done!” Part of me wants the decline to continue so I’m justified in leaving but another part of me remembers when that site was actually useful to my social and professional lives. We have made one of the primary cultural institutions of our society a toxic nostalgia swamp.
Tom Basgen, Mr. Saint Paul

For the first time in my life, I feel like the American government is sabotaging itself in order to privatize our federal agencies. It’s been the GOP dream for a long time. Only they’re doing it in a manner that is ruining lives.
Eileen @eileenmclaughlin.bsky.social

Happy Saturday everyone! Here’s a charming little octopus from a Roman villa at Villaquejida, León, Spain. Limestone, 2nd-3rd century AD. Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid. Photo by me:


Alison Fisk

Today I learned that autocorrect/autocomplete doesn’t appear to know the words sexist (preferring sexiest!) or genocidal.
@pattho.bsky.social

Y’know there’s really nothing more Econ than reproducing something that happened in polisci a decade ago and claiming it as original.
Dave Karpf

The deeper meaning behind "almost no healthy children die of the measles" is that, when children do die of the measles, it's only ever because they were already ill. And the deeper meaning behind that is "well, we can't save 'em all." And that's just...17th century thinking.
Hank Green

Younger folks around here might shocked to learn that once upon a time Bill Clinton let a few campaign donors have a sleepover at the White House and the national media spent months treating it as the greatest scandal in the history of the republic
Michael P. Breen @mpbreen21.bsky.social

It is truly amazing how little scrutiny Stephen Miller gets — not because he’s an architect of Trumpism; that gives him too much credit. But because he is openly the most bigoted and malicious person there and he behaves and sounds like a petulant child.
Elizabeth Spiers

Jus soli citizenship is one of the few inherently good things about the United States. Giving even a rhetorical inch on in it is a nightmare. It is the great leveler, an inherently democratic mechanism. Everyone born here is the same no matter who their daddy is. Despotically unamerican to end it.
Charm City Slicker @sprawlhater.bsky.social

For anyone who needs some GOOD news, Nottoway Plantation—burial site of countless victims of the rape, maiming, and slaughter of the formerly enslaved but where white people love to brunch & get married—has burned to the ground. May the ancestors continue to rest peacefully. Amen.
Gabrielle A. Perry, MPH @geauxgabrielle.bsky.social


@newyorker.com

60% of American households can’t afford a minimal quality of life. Meanwhile, the 19 richest households saw their wealth increase by $1 trillion in 2024 — the biggest one-year increase ever. Our problem isn't a lack of resources. Our problem is ever-expanding inequality.
Robert Reich

For those keeping score at home — Trump’s AG, FBI Director, and chief of staff have all been on Qatar’s payroll.
The Tennessee Holler

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope.
Hector Diaz @iamhectordiaz.com

arguing against birthright citizenship in front of the supreme court while at the same time pitching a netflix show where immigrants compete for citizenship is such a perfect microcosm of america right now that it feels fake
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social

America is where the Planned Parenthood shooter was too insane to stand trial for murder, but not too insane to legally buy multiple semi automatics.
John Fugelsang

If there's no birthright citizenship, does that mean no one is a citizen except for Native Americans?
David Ho

Don’t go starting with the logic stuff.
Irma Rodríguez Mitton @irmwrites.bsky.social

Surely if there is any important takeaway from the "Biden old" story, it is that the media should be scrutinizing the current president's mental acuity far more carefully. "We should have done better" rings hollow if you studiously ignore the very obvious, ongoing replay of the same problem.
J.M. Berger

SCOOP: Since SSA installed new anti-fraud checks on claims made over the phone, only 2 claims out of over 110,000 were found to likely be fraudulent, according to internal documents I obtained. The policy has slowed down payments, though. Retirement claim processing is down 25%.
Natalie Alms @almsnatalie.bsky.social

one of the great disconnects around public policy: it is often incredibly expensive to do invasive anti-fraud measures and you end up spending more money than the actual cost of the fraud you're preventing. and of course it makes the user experience miserable every single time
Micah @rincewind.run

Everything appears to be white genocide except the nearly irreversible abolition of all of the stuff keeping white people alive. Like a Black woman having a visible job is white genocide but dismantling the FDA, removing fluoride, rampant deregulation and resurrecting old world diseases is freedom.
Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.bsky.social

"Little Boxes" but it's about Little Free Libraries
Chris Steller

Today, RFK Jr. said, "I don't think anyone should be taking medical advice from me." Isn't the point we've been making all along?
Jack Hopkins-The Original @therealjackhopkins.bsky.social

Yet he thinks he’s qualified to run the agency responsible for giving out medical advice. I swear we’re being Punk’d
 @tleighb.bsky.social

Lord of the Flies is a skill issue because the newsies showed that American feral children left to form their own societies will just unionize
@gonebabygone.bsky.social

Thrilled to learn from DOJ's argument that the 14th Amendment applied to the "children of former slaves, not illegal immigrants, who didn't exist as a class yet" that modern firearms are not protected by the Second Amendment!
Barred and Boujee @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social

when you teach students to write like robots to get into college why wouldn’t they use robots to write once they’re there
Annie Abrams

Nearly every higher ed-related provision in the House’s proposed reconciliation bill will make higher ed more expensive for students.
Kevin R. McClure

Smells like...


The Secret DJ

Trump recently got a lot of media attention for supposedly wanting to end the carried interest loophole. Not only does the House GOP bill *not* do this, it actually creates a new tax break for the same private equity industry, experts tell me:
Greg Sargent

I don't know what to say. I gathered signatures for a higher minimum wage and earned sick time and bodily autonomy and all three were passed by voters in my state [Missouri]. Republicans disregard our Constitution and our will. They don't give a shit.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

As a result of [Republicans not] hiding [their authoritarian agenda], the press doesn’t treat it as a scandal, because scandals are things people don’t want known.
FirDouglass

"Moderate" voters don't actually exist. A moderate holds positions that are on one end or another of a bunch of issues but average to the middle. Politicians who try to meet the average rather than the voter look like mushy blobs because that's what averages are.
Marty Santalucia

The best thing about saying that Republicans are gross weirdos is that it is true and effective. The second-best thing about saying that Republicans are gross weirdos is it exposes the weirdest thing about them—they simply cannot handle being considered weird.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

There is not a single congressional district in the U.S. where more than 15% of voters support cuts to Medicaid.
Data for Progress

Always strange to me that Democrats assume that moving Right gains them voters but doesn't lose them any. Especially under current conditions.
Prisonculture

If you’re too busy or distracted to research why Peter Thiel and Palantir — and by association Elon Musk — are such a threat to our democracy and even our survival, this TikTok video is a quick primer.
Leah McElrath

Saying that Trump is the most corrupt President in the history of the United States really does seem like a ridiculous understatement. It feels closer to the truth to say that Trump is more corrupt than every other President in history combined.
Brent Toderian

If a "male loneliness epidemic" actually exists, it's caused in part by a belief that men don't actually have to do anything. They don't have to learn, grow, improve themselves, etc. Everyone needs to change and come to them. Males only have to be passive participants in life.
The Alternate Historian

Texas Republicans are advancing an anti-trans bill that they're calling the "Women's Bill of Rights." I'm not from Texas, but I'm willing to bet the women there are more interested in not dying from a septic miscarriage than being 'protected' from trans women in bathrooms.
Jessica Valenti

The gym icebreaker was what kind of driver you are. One person said she stops to let pedestrians cross the street and several other people acted impressed. I like the folks in my gym, but let's acknowledge that this is a sick culture we're living in here in sunny Minnesota
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

And at some level having billions of dollars fucks up your brain and becomes its own addiction. You have to spend a lot of emotional energy rationalizing why you deserve to have lifetimes worth of money you’ll do nothing useful with and half the country deserves to live precariously on the edge.
RawrTigerlily

Never lose sight of how weird and corrupt it is for the president to have his unelected, unconfirmed oligarch friend — his biggest campaign donor — conduct US foreign policy. No other US president did that, and there’s no reason to think he’s representing the American people rather than himself.
Nicholas Grossman

Listen, there are bigger, more directly destructive cases of this government’s spiral into a satire but shipping in white South Africans — the apotheosis of modern white supremacy — to underscore  that this is a white nationalist empire…pushes my buttons in a very specific way.
Tressie McMillan Cottom

Trump could roast and eat a baby on live TV and NYT editors would carefully type out "Trump's Unorthodox Diet Raises Ire"
 @beneprism.rip

"This is just a distraction from egg prices" will be the last words of a congressional Democrat being led to a firing squad on the South Lawn.
Andy Craig

The business school/consulting firm executive caste should be considered actively hostile by any firm that wants to maintain any semblance of a social conscience, external recruiting of executives should be all but eliminated and internal promotion heavily encouraged for the foreseeable future.
JAMPH

I think one of the skeleton keys to understanding Elon, Big Yud, Sam Altcoin, etc., is that they appear to genuinely believe that "intelligence" is more important than eg the laws of physics, because if you're smart enough you'll discover new laws of physics that allow you to break the current ones.
Quantian

It's 2015. President Barack Obama has accepted a "sky palace" jumbo jet from the Qatari government, which he'll own after he leaves office. "Everybody relax," he says in an interview with the New York Times. Everyone does. The networks then televise the military parade in his honor on his birthday.
Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

This would have fucking ruled because 75 to 85% of all republicans would have had heart attacks, strokes or aneurysms and we'd be so much better off today without them.
206 Generic @generic402.bsky.social

While we accept traffic jams as a stroke of fate, we view problems in public transport as a corporate failure. It's human nature, but it's actually the core marketing problem of public transport.
Carsten Diekmann

The Trump administration is defying the Supreme Court, arresting judges and mayors, talking about arresting congressmen, denying due process and openly musing about suspending habeus corpus too. There’s no constitutional crisis coming. It’s here. Oh and the president is openly taking bribes from corporations and foreign governments, while letting the worlds richest man strip the government for parts to further enrich himself, all in violation of laws no one seems ready to enforce.
Kevin M. Kruse

The list of Congressional representatives who have been investing in Palantir stock as the Peter Thiel founded company receives lucrative government contracts includes Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene and Democrat Ro Khanna, among others.
Leah McElrath

This has been the defining trait of my career over the last 20 years, working in tech. Everyone can see it now, because they’ve seen the corruption of the tech tycoons, but we had the first view of their venality, and watched as they ruined the lives of so many who raised the alarms about it.
Anil Dash

It’s weird to live in a time when basic principles like cruelty is wrong, cheating is empty and the idea that curiosity, generosity, originality, the satisfaction of earned accomplishments and loving intimacy are the center of a good life feel like countercultural concepts
Emily Nussbaum

Just curious, what’s the tariff on a $400 million jet from Qatar?
Brian Tyler Cohen

The highest paid editors in the world rewrote "Qatar Bribes Trump With" as "Trump Is to Accept" you know the way normal people talk normally:


Matt Negrin

Growing up in the '70s I'd read about strongman rulers in far-off places like Asia or Africa who had billion-dollar Swiss bank accounts and mansions in the French Riviera while their citizens were mired in poverty, and wondered how that could be allowed to happen. Now I know
Will Bunch

The hard reality is the fossil fuel industry has grown desperate for more capital. They’re seeing two largest markets wither away: electricity generation, number one & transportation, number two. They’ve been losing their share of investment in the energy market to renewables and so they’re panicked.
Betty C. Jung

"The judge overseeing the case against the Defense Department's firing of transgender service members revealed that the military spends eight times more on erectile dysfunction medication than on gender affirming care."
It's Going Down @igd.bsky.social

We are oddly selective about the government services about which we will say, they operate at a loss. Commuter rail, we are often told, operates at a loss. But we spend even more on street and highways, and take in little direct revenue from them. Yet no one ever says they are operating at a loss.
John Skiles Skinner

Once again reminding everyone that all the Russiagate stuff was basically true and Trump just successfully covered it up and the media repeated his lies about it until everyone forgot! Something to think about!
mtsw

pulling a critique of the bell curve from a university library but not the bell curve is as concise a way i can think of to describe the goal of the speech discourse in the past 15 years
whet moser

He declared an "emergency" at the border in order to abduct people of color.
He declared an energy "emergency" in order to bypass vetted permit approvals for oil and gas companies.
He declared an "emergency" with trade in order to leverage companies with 'tariff exceptions'.
Get it yet?
Roger ZenAF

Tom Homan's grandfather and his father were cops. He was a cop. He has a degree in criminal justice. HE KNOWS HE'S BREAKING THE LAW. The excuse that he is following orders is bullshit. An unlawful order does not authorize him to break the law. Homan is culpable and one day will be held accountable.
Nate @nateduty.bsky.social

Elon Musk’s AI data centers polluting Black communities so that his Nazi followers can ask his chatbot questions is a perfect distillation of why AI is fascist technology
Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social

"We'll just terraform Mars," they insist, unable to terraform Earth, a planet that is already perfect except it's like 2° too warm.
Gravity Pike

Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis. It's surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.
Joe Morelle

That it is rapidly becoming normal for federal law enforcement to be masked and unidentifiable is terrifying. It is, frankly, the scandal here. It has no place in a free republic.
Evan Bernick

Our trade deal so far is no tariffs on Rolls Royces and Bentleys and our refugee policy is white South Africans only.
Ron Filipkowski

Chronic illness is the miracle of modern medicine, in fact. We have made it so you can be sick and yet *still be alive, and not be dead, for quite a long time.*
It’s not ideal but it fucking beats the alternative!
Kate Watson @loreandordure.com

Seriously, how can we not conclude that the stock market is stupid? Why would Tesla stocks rebound even a tiny bit after word that Elon (who lies all the time) says he’ll pull back to just a couple days a week of destroying competent government in the United States? The Tesla brand is irreparable.
Brent Toderian

“Abolish ICE” is the moderate position. Radical is “prosecute every ICE employee under RICO.”
Jacob T. Levy

Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like if a US exchange student in a foreign country (say, Turkey?) was imprisoned for six weeks because they wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper it would be a huge domestic story and an international incident.
Chris Hayes

They’re lashing out against Habeas and arresting Mayors because they know their position is weak and getting weaker, and they’re panicking. It’s scary to live through, but it’s less scary when you remember this isn’t coming from a position of strength, it’s sweaty desperation.
Cooper Lund

Having now watched the footage and interview two of the members who were there [in Newark], the amount of armed, masked federal agents surrounding three members of Congress and a mayor outside the ICE facility was totally unnecessary; the only possible reason for it was intentional escalation and intimidation.
Chris Hayes

The same kind of folks who spent years complaining about masks that slowed the spread of disease are now wearing masks to facilitate the spread of fascism
Bill McKibben

Also let’s all acknowledge how fucked up it is that propaganda spin of the word “protest” has given it such a negative connotation that the fascist propagandists are now using it to paint a govt official as an extremist. And the media is playing along.
Erin Biba

“By the late 1960s, highway construction was claiming 62,000 housing units nationwide each year, with the most significant impacts falling on Black neighborhoods.” –Marc Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works
Stephen Jacob Smith

Everybody take a moment to enjoy the demon cat on this title card. Thank you and you're welcome:


Shaenon K. Garrity

Not to be too pro technocrat, but it is astounding how much this country depended on the selflessness of like a few hundred thousand highly educated public servants who, for peanuts, made sure our food and medicine and environment etc were safe. And in return these servants were demonized.
Aster Olsen

Headline: 25 children in NewYork State died because their criminally negligent parents refused to vaccinate them.
David Ho

Trump will emerge as the most murderous U.S. president in history by far, after his cancellation of NIH grants to cure diseases, elimination of USAID and its life-saving missions around the world, and destruction of federal agencies helping us mitigate and adapt to weather and climate disasters.
David Ho

"What trillion-dollar problem is AI trying to solve?" Wages. They're trying to use it to solve having to pay wages.
 @jackscarab.bsky.social

just so we’re all clear: the reason they keep using dolls as their example is because they’re trying to frame caring about material stuff as feminine and thus inherently shameful
Leah Greenberg

Naomi Klein is correct. If we don't start creating communities of people who think they world is worth saving, then we'll cede it those who seek the end of the world. There has never been a better time to collaborate and build coalitions against ignorance and fascism.
Oasis by Sea

In space, Venus flanks Earth on the left, with a hellfire greenhouse effect. Mars on the right, which long ago had running water. Today, it's bone dry. Something bad happened on each planet. Seems like the wrong time to limit the Nation’s capacity to conduct climate research:


Neil deGrasse Tyson

The decline in child mortality in many low- to middle-income countries in the last 30 years has been quite remarkable. Ethiopia's rate fell from 20% to 5%. Improvements in child mortality in rich countries look pretty meagre by comparison. But that's only when looking at it in absolute terms.
Hannah Ritchie

I don't 'refuse to use' AI, I just don't use AI; in the same way that I don't shoplift, or plagiarise other people's books - it requires no effort of will, it's just not something I would think of doing
Dr Francis Young

Fundamental problem is that comfortable, white Americans can never, ever imagine shit getting bad. This is exactly the same problem with climate change. Everything has to end up ok because others is literally unimaginable.
Brandon Bishop

In 2024, CO2 soared by a massive 3.75 ppm. Yet the US administration buried the science and the analysis from government scientists at NOAA, says CNN. “Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world” – Louis Pasteur
Assaad Razzouk

"COVID came from a lab—it was a political attack!" say the people weaponizing once-eradicated diseases using their own fans as carriers, destroying our pandemic research and response infrastructure including vaccines and intl aid, and cultivating disinformation in online petri dishes
Louise Seamster

If you’re wondering why young people are trending right it’s because youth orgs on the left are struggling to keep the lights on meanwhile TurningPoint and Charlie Kirk have enough money to waste on events in schools that vote 80% Democratic.
Santiago Mayer

Breaking: federal district court orders North Carolina to certify state supreme court election for Democrat Allison Riggs and rejects Republican attempt to overturn election and throw out thousands of votes. Huge victory for democracy and fair elections.
Ari Berman

Musk's legacy is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system giving Trump "the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him"
Jenn Burrill

"a trans person may not have dignified use of a toilet" is the same as "Jews must walk in the gutter." it's a dehumanisation tactic, the kind that I think has never in history ended there
Naomi Alderman

I fully expect DJT to say and do outrageous things like posting a picture of himself as Sith He-Man, putting himself forward as Pope, playing whackamole with tariffs.
The thing I truly cannot deal with is the media, commentators etc who don't point out that these things are objectively INSANE.
Madam Snazzy @moatatamaira.bsky.social

Watching our youngest try to get their first ID card at 18, just to be able to board a domestic flight, is maddening (what 18 year old gets utility bills in their name?) When I think about the fact that their home state also wants to require this byzantine process for voting, I get enraged.
Scary Introvert

I beg Donald Trump to start talking about how many cars Americans should have. "A family doesn't need 4 cars. They could be happy with 1."
Warren Wells, AICP

Like a lot of things I think the "masculinity crisis" is just a result of people having their role in violence pointed out to them and then deciding to change nothing about themselves and instead blame the people pointing it out. They don't want purpose or validation; they yearn for ignorance.
Gillian Branstetter

There’s an obvious but rarely stated parallel between the insistence that boys are being told “you’re bad” when they’re educated to respect others and the insistence that Americans are being told “you’re bad” when they’re educated about slavery, racism, empire, etc. Both misreadings serve reaction.
Ted McCormick

When the topic is women the conflict is that women are failing society. When the topic is men it's that society is failing them.
Gillian Branstetter

Everything is shit, but I made some porcelain tile cookies:


Celia Crifasi @cmcrif.bsky.social

State of the world. People sympathetic to Postmodernism, Social Construction and Pluralism insisting on historical facts. People professing that there is a single true version of reality deliberately suppressing historical facts, and making stuff up.
Jo Wolff

Asked now on Meet the Press if he thinks he needs to uphold the Constitution, he says, “I don’t know.” Translation: No. Woe to America and the utter failure of putting this man back in our Oval Office.
Steven Beschloss

One thing you notice about anti-feminism is that its public discourses are all about erecting a fantasy of men’s victimization that is clung to all the more desperately and insistently the more it contradicts the actual facts. So the more women are hurt, the more we’re told that men are suffering.
Moira Donegan

Every discussion that starts with the assumption that there is a “masculinity” that is meaningful different from a “femininity” is bound to fail. The men I know who are happiest feel being a man is just what you are, not what you prove. Being a good person is all that matters. In my long experience, once there are efforts to define masculine virtue that is unique from women, it lands on “domination”. Which is…. not a virtue.
Amanda Marcotte

This. 1000x this. Unprecedented, open monetization of the presidency, first at his hotel every day in 2017-21, and now in even more unprecedentedly and overly corrupt and unconstitutional ways. And we've just yawned as a country. It's shameful. And everyone in Congress who swore oaths is violating them.
Mark Copelovitch

I’m still baffled at how America took one of the basic principles of the presidency — the occupant shouldn’t be able to benefit financially from the office — and just said, nah, that just doesn’t count for this one guy.
Kevin M. Kruse

Anyone out here claiming how hard it is to be a (white) boy in this culture should think very carefully about what they’re telling (white) boys about who this culture (actually) victimizes, and about how kindness and love and awareness and learning can actually heal ALL OF IT.
Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin

If “be better” is heard as “you’re bad” then…yeah, the ways we’ve always taught men they’re allowed to behave are, in fact, very bad. Literally no one who isn’t absolutely unhinged is saying “that means you’re inherently bad because you’re a boy”
C.A. Pinkham @eyepatchguy.bsky.social

To be clear, Germany is cracking down on a Neo-Nazi party, and the US government is defending the Neo-Nazi party
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

It’s neat how the “America First” party feels the need to stand up for Nazis in Germany.
Dean Baker

seems kind of weird that the vice president of the united states is openly supportive of german neo-nazis!
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

the extent to which we are going to have to rebuild the entire government when these people are gone cannot be understated. and so many people are going to die in the meantime
Micah @rincewind.run

American needs more white conservative children. That’s why we are closing hospitals in predominantly white conservative parts of the country and having HHS give dangerous medical advice that only white conservatives are stupid enough to believe.
New York Times Pitchbot

What a line from Warren Buffett this morning: “Be kind, and the world is better off. I'm not sure that the world will be better off if I'm richer."
Carl Quintanilla

I lost my job, my wife has been deported, and I'm out of toilet paper. But at least I know that now my kids will learn that slavery wasn't really that bad.
New York Times Pitchbot

At some point, many many people are going to have to ask themselves why they’re so obsessed with punishment, what is the goal, and has that preoccupation made them feel any better or safer.
Ashley C. Ford @smashfizzle.bsky.social

I wonder what the world would look like if we tackled a problem like poverty with the same gusto and resources as we do the phantom genie of AI? I mean AI literally has businessmen believing that it will solve the energy crisis that its own development requires. If that's not a con game...
BostonJoan

"He ran through the entire annual budget of ICE in less than two months and accomplished nothing but violating our constitution and frightening the American public." Mitt Romney, 2025
S.E.E. Danesti

If Biden, who is actually Catholic, posted a picture of himself as Pope there would be a thousand op-eds and cable news hits for months about how it was the most blasphemous thing an American president has ever done and we’d assume he had gone insane.
Brian PJ Cronin

In case you needed any more evidence that there is simply no one around this mentally ill man willing to tell him "You don't want to post that."
Peter Gleick

What kind of city do you want to live in? A city designed for high speeds and traffic flow, or a city designed to meet each other, to discover and to exchange ideas?
An-Jes Oudshoorn @annejessicalise.bsky.social

Racism is when you believe a white guy is innocent after a jury has concluded 34 times that he isn’t, and you immediately decide an immigrant is guilty when the immigrant hasn’t even had a chance to present their defense.
altNOAA

Tommy Tuberville says his wife's homestead exemption established his residency in Alabama, but election records show both of them voted in Florida after that. And that's only the beginning.
Jon Cooper

The poor Forest Service, man. An agency created to safeguard public lands and headwaters from timber barons is about to devolve into a giant fuckin' industrial tree farm.
Ben Goldfarb

The US government, which has claimed it has to destroy American universities because a few pro-Palestinian protesters are evidence of unchecked anti-Semitism, is defending an actual neo-Nazi party in Germany.
Kevin M. Kruse

I’m tired of people saying we don’t have any proper male role models as if Weird Al hasn’t been around for decades
Keifer @dannyvegito.bsky.social

There’s a nonzero chance that RFK Jr will one day be beaten to death by a mob of furious parents. I’d wager real money that a grieving father will punch him at some point, at the very least.
Kevin M. Kruse

The mythology of a Dem party beholden to the left is so completely pervasive in mainstream discourse and so empirically bereft. WHEN was the last time the left got to decide a thing the Dem party would do?? Can we think of a moment in our lifetimes when the punch left clock could be reset to zero?
Deva Woodly

The punishment for wearing a face mask is more severe than kidnapping someone to a foreign gulag.
Gabe Ortíz @tusk81.bsky.social

I would really love it if mainstream journalists would seriously consider the possibility that RFK Jr.'s politicized HHS under Trump is as accurate about gender-affirming medicine as it is on autism or vaccination.
Evan Urquhart

The Senate voted today to overturn an EPA rule limiting the 7 most hazardous air pollutants emitted by chemical plants, oil refineries, and other industries (all Democrats voted NAY). This is the FIRST time in the 55-year history of the Clean Air Act that Congress has scaled back protections. Inhaling even small amounts of these pollutants can cause cancer, brain damage, and other serious health issues for humans. They are even more toxic for birds, due to their high breathing rate. The air pollutants can also settle on land and water, endangering other animals.
Lyn Heideman

The National Science Foundation paid marc andreessen's salary when he was writing NCSA Mosaic, then let him walk with the concept (and code, maybe? I forget) and start Netscape.
tweety fish @sifu.tweety.fish

Donald Trump went from “I will lower costs” to “fuck you and your kids” in 100 days.
Melanie D’Arrigo @darrigomelanie.bsky.social

I’m so confused by the folks who said that raising the minimum wage would increase the price of every day goods while also being okay with tariffs raising the price of every day goods… I reckon they are okay paying higher prices as long as it doesn’t help anyone making a minimum wage.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social