BlueSky, May 2026 Part 1

The first half of May 2026 ended two days ago. That's how behind I am.

This will be a short BlueSky round-up post compared to most, as the first half of May tends to be, because I always miss a week of regular life. Probably nothing much happened then, right? 

We started where April left off, with proper outrage over the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act. Southern states then immediately leapt upon the opportunity to reenact Jim Crow. Corruption continued to run amok in various ways, including Trump suing the IRS for an absurd amount of money on an absurd claim. He also said he never thinks about Americans' financial situation. On camera. And then repeated it.

The half-month ended with Trump taking his billionaire retinue to China, where he got nothing and tried to give away Taiwan. Are we tired of hearing about him and from him yet? Yes we are. So tired.

Everything below the line is in 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.

__

"Data Centers" are nothing more than surveillance centers that also happen to kill the environment. Fight to keep them out of your state.
Mebs

Xi Jinping deliberately placed Trump and his lackeys in front of the COMMUNIST FLAG!!


@lepapillonblue.bsky.social

Trump brought the NVIDIA CEO on his trip to China to lobby Xi Jinping to buy advanced AI chips, even though it would create a U.S. national security threat. It turns out Trump also bought millions in NVIDIA's stock. The President's corruption is a national security disaster.
Elizabeth Warren

Q: Biden described Xi as a dictator. Do you think Xi is a dictator?
TRUMP: I think President Biden was an incompetent president. He gave us the Iran nuclear deal. (The Iran nuclear deal was actually made by the Obama administration ... )
Aaron Rupar

It does do my heart a small comfort to know that, despite all his power and wealth and hoard of sycophants; Trump is a deeply insecure and unhappy person, who desperately craves adoration. Deep down, he is the weakest man on Earth.
John Muller @mrjohnmuller.bsky.social

interesting the way the Voting Rights Act is presented as some kind of imposition from above, and not the product of one of the greatest social movements this country has ever seen
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Just laughing at how it’s possible for a black woman to be so beautiful and talented that she sends a racist into a six-day public stroke
Kashana

Nigel Farage insisting "I cannot be bought," after being exposed for secretly trousering £5 million from a crypto billionaire, buying a house with the money, and then immediately launching a lobbying campaign for the crypto industry, is quite something
Adam Bienkov

Robotaxi deadheading irritates residents and thickens congestion. Cities should tax the hell out of it.
David Zipper

There is a statue of author Alex Haley in East Knoxville, Tennessee. Knox County just removed Roots from all school libraries:


Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD

Roots came out in the bicentennial year, so in 50 years we went from groundbreaking miniseries watched by the whole country to banning copies of the book.
Carly Goodman

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15-year-olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that intellectual property laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them
Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social

RFK Jr is pro-bleeding to death.
badwebsites

republicans seem to have adopted this idea that the partisan lean of a state represents some mystical General Will such that the south isn't just a place with republican voters It Is Republican and no democrat has a right to serve within its borders
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Raising the flag:


Nick Anderson - political cartoonist @andertoon.bsky.social

WIC used to have bipartisan support because even Republicans said "Well of course we want to make sure pregnant women and babies have enough to eat, we're not monsters," but now they say "Screw those freeloading babies, we've got a gold-plated ballroom to build"
Paul Waldman

Rebranding correcting injustices as an obsession with “racial preferences” is pure fraud.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

we got rid of the president of unavoidable high grocery prices to elect the president of avoidable high grocery prices
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

Every time I teach the MOVE bombing, students are shocked. And when I teach the aftermath involving an anthropologist who hoarded some of the remains and used them as teaching tools, they are even more shocked. And I teach in Pennsylvania. Even some students from Philly are unaware of this history:


Jacqueline Antonovich

Doug Burgum governed North Dakota and its 12,000 bison for 8 years. NDSU's mascot is the bison. Now he leads Dept of Interior, with its own bison logo. He is calling for eviction of bison from federal lands. What a hypocritical putz. 
Oredigger @tfiashorty.bsky.social

I don't think recent memory has featured an industrial company with as much of a reputational fall-off as Tesla, both because of the decrease in quality of its cars and the increase in blithering fascism in its CEO. A decade ago a Tesla was a status object; now it's a vague embarrassment at best.
John Scalzi

Tennessee eliminated only majority-Black district
Alabama, Louisiana eliminating majority-Black districts
South Carolina planning to oust only Black Democrat since Reconstruction
Mississippi planning to oust only Black rep
Georgia planning special session to eliminate majority-Black districts 
This is what return to Jim Crow looks like
Ari Berman

Spotted: The Red-Headed Woodpecker, a rare visitor at Stately Moffitt Manor:


Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social

Watching a series of former Confederate states rush to eliminate any vestige of black representation in the House pretty much answers the question whether the Voting Rights Act was still necessary.
Patrick Chovanec

I am very tired of the stupid-savvy 'oh you think politicians were honest before Donald Trump' take, like yes there has in fact been a qualitative change in the way modern american politics have been conducted that is largely attributable to him, and is bad.
William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social

Texas is banning students from writing on LGBTQ topics and removing any references to gender identity and sexual orientation. You'll never guess what this NYT author hasn't covered but then immediately wrote this piece on NYU students disapproving of Jonathan Haidt.
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net

It really is inexcusable that the NYT maintains a "free speech on campus" reporter who DOESN'T COVER OFFICIAL, POLITICALLY-MOTIVATED CENSORSHIP OF SPEECH ON CAMPUS. At some point you're actively deceiving the public, no?
Will Stancil

Planted this prairie in 2021 and it’s really struggled the last 5 years. Finally woke up today!


prairieczar

The largest ever settlement or jury award for government violations of constitutional rights to a single person is $100 million, or 1 percent of what Trump demanding for the leak of his tax returns. That case — a killing by police — was reduced to $1 million on appeal.
Radley Balko

Police procedural show but instead of cops the heroes are immigration lawyers and rapid responders thwarting ICE
Joel @joelreinstein.myatproto.social

i will never understand how jimmy carter was treated compared to today
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

I see all of the outrageous things that are happening and just feel…very little. I suspect I’m not alone in being out of energy to express outrage proportional to current events. It’s been a long ten years.
Leah McElrath

santa's workshop, north pole, new york, 1995:


old roadside pics

I do not think anyone is ready for how turbo antisemitic the GOP is going to be post-Trump
Matthew Downhour

Strange how so many will shame people on bikes for not wearing helmets yet don’t have much to say about bike lanes without protection.
Tom Flood

My daughter's pithy summation: "Covid reminded people they lived in a society; and they hated it."
JP Stormcrow

Americans Voting-in a Fascist Government: "Heck yeah! This is gonna be great! USA! USA!"
Americans Living under a Fascist Regime: "WTF, this sucks! Whose idea was this, anyway?"
John Muller @mrjohnmuller.bsky.social

The future of education is students learning nothing and professors not being aware of that.
David Ho

This is only breaking news to members of his cult:


Thomm53

Just wondering, has the fever broken yet, or has the obviously malignant tumor we know as the GOP become a metastatic cancer that is killing our democracy?
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Parallel counterfactual: Of 100+ democracies that have been set up since US Constitution in 1787, virtually none have copied US model. (Exceptions I'm aware of: Liberia, Philippines. Could be more.) It's an antiquated, flawed system. US has thrived in spite of it, not because of it.
James Fallows

Useless counterfactual but if the US had a parliamentary system, Trump would have been long since ejected from office.
Edward Luce

I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do. If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.
Trevon Logan

when u tax the rich:

Smooth Dunk

given how much Tolkien *hated* allegory in fiction, he must be spinning in his grave at relativistic speeds over the literal fascists who run Palantir
Matthew R Francis @bowlerhatscience.org

Speak to a demographer for five minutes and they will tell you that most of the decline in births is just “there used to be a lot of really big families, now 3 or more kids is rare”. This banal and non-alarming fact hardly ever gets mentioned in these “demographic panic” pieces.
David Fickling

One of the many reasons that I'm *extremely* skeptical of the 'AI will mean UBI and Abundance for all' thing is how little intellectual work is being done on how that would work in practice. There are no think tanks releasing reports, no papers in economics journals, no books on the subject...
Gareth Watkins

It doesn't matter what liars say. It doesn't matter what abusers want. It doesn't matter what thieves claim is theirs. Justice must trample injustice, not traverse alongside it.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Happy birthday to icons of masculinity and possible weirdest birthday twins ever, John Brown and Kermit the Frog
Patricia Wallinga

A political cartoon in the Chattanooga Times Free Press:


Michael Li @mcpli.bsky.social

We have to dream bigger and our political leaders must start speaking to these dreams. This was the roadmap of conservativism. We need our own.... I think the dynamic is getting toxic towards organizing because the best way for us to nationally organize is to take advantage of the existing infrastructure of the Democratic party, which frankly mostly Black women have been maintaining in the south, my area, despite being continuously ignored.
A cat like that @onesparkfire.bsky.social

At this point, solving climate change is cheaper than not solving it -- not only on some grand 50 year time horizon, but tomorrow, today, immediately. Solving climate change *is* affordability. Maybe Dems should tell voters about that.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

White Christians genuinely believe that anyone who chooses not to be Christian is oppressing them. They genuinely believe their religious liberty requires everyone to be just like them. They're like the Borg, but instead of "resistance is futile," it's "your resistance oppresses us."
Sheryl Weikal @leftistlawyer.com

Ladies, what’s stopping you from being a wild woman covered in hair wearing a headdress of animal jawbones and riding into battle against a fierce lion on a camel-faced unicorn?


David @archaeomather.bsky.social

So Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, and Tennessee can redraw districts without a referendum and that stands, but when Virginia lets voters decide directly at the ballot box, it gets overturned?
Juliana Stratton

2016: Black students complaining that dehumanizing language on campus and in the media is dangerous
2016-2026: cancel culture hysteria, these students are whining about nothing
2026: Black people losing the right to vote on a state-by-state basis
ANYONE WANT TO REVISE THEIR ASSESSMENT?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Once again seems to me a major story in British politics is just the boring one that the right block is split two ways and the left block three ways, and we have an electoral system which makes that devastating for the left. I think this gets less attention than it ought cos it's "dog bites man".
lastpositivist.bsky.social

Today I learned that after attending Marshall-University High School in Dinkytown, Minneapolis, the co-creator of Twin Peaks, Mark Frost, worked alongside actor Michael Keaton on the lighting crew for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Chris Steller

The incredible drop in homicides in Italy over the past 3 decades (~80%) deserves more attention. And it's happened in parallel with something else. Not implying causation, but Italy hasn't become a much more dangerous country as its immigrant population has grown. Quite the opposite:




Ben Barclay

Thanks to private equity and the AI bubble, betting on "the whole market" is basically "betting on AI." 35% of the S&P 500 is tied up in seven AI companies. 
Cory Doctorow

AI is a deskilling project.  To use it is to embrace your own uselessness.
Ashley Lynch

From Worldcom to Enron, from crypto to AI, the point of the bubble... was a transfer from working people to crooks. Bubbles are a system for moving the painfully sequestered life's savings of people who *do* things to people who *steal* things. The world has flushed away hundreds of billions to get paltry millions' worth of value out of crypto - the rest of that value disappeared into the pockets of crooked insiders who defrauded the public into parting with their savings.
Cory Doctorow

I don't only think that college should be FREE but I think young people should also receive living stipends while in school. Finally, I do not care what they major in because education needs to actually BE DECOUPLED from a future job. You are welcome. You should have 4 years to study anything.
Prisonculture

For some reason, this one made me laugh (not in a good way):


@pattho.bsky.social

Hmmmm, who do I trust more to look out for women, Smith College or a Trump appointee currently being sued for covering up years of sexual abuse?
Max Kennerly

In December SCOTUS claimed it was too close to election to block Texas gerrymander but now allowing Southern states to straight up cancel elections to resurrect Jim Crow
Ari Berman

The first Asian American mayor of NYC recently rode 40 miles on a bike across the five boroughs wearing a suit and tie and is skipping the Met Gala and instead using his platform to celebrate union leaders and immigrant rights activists in the fashion industry. Nice.
tamara nopper

Morning scene: A guy driving a Ford F-250 with a “No Elec” license plate pulls into a D.C. gas station where a gallon starts at $4.59. (The F-250 comes standard with a 34-gallon tank.)
Martin Austermuhle

10/10, no notes:


Worrier After Dark

The people saying that gutting the Voting Rights Act has nothing to do with racism are the same people who say overturning Roe v Wade had nothing to do with women
4fuxake @blueheartedly1.bsky.social

There is no compromise to be had with a movement whose whose whole reason for being, whose core identity is their hatred of Black people and their desire to dominate them. The right wing have their side quests and folk demons of the week, but the whole foundation is anti-Blackness.
Chad Loder

Drivers hate driving. They tell us all the time. So naturally, their answer is to make driving mandatory for everyone. It's insane. It's sociopathic.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo.bsky.social

“You know we’re in a war,” President Trump said yesterday, as a White House letter to Congress asserted that the War Powers Act doesn’t apply because there’s no war. Utter contempt. Congress is cool with it. Because the GOP majority also has contempt for the law, Constitution, country, and people.
Nicholas Grossman

I just have a lot of feelings about the punks and the queers and the hippies and the anarchists all coming together [on May Day in Minneapolis] to make music and butterfly bikes and fire-breathing dinosaurs and use them all to say fuck fascism
Dax (David J.) Schwartz @snurri.bsky.social

POSSUM BIKE:


 @therealjoro.bsky.social

We had a snowplow naming competition last winter and the winning name was ABOLISH ICE. Sadly, the people spoke and the city did not listen:


Heather Randell

Anyone remember the Purcell doctrine, saying courts shouldn't change electoral districts too close to the election because it might cause confusion? Remember how SCOTUS applied it six months ago to say it was already too late to invalidate the Texas districts? Funny how that didn't happen in Callais
Mark Lemley

It remains very weird to me that in a world of actually useful technology -- photovoltaic power generation, mRNA vaccines, maglev trains, smart phones, etc -- the tech sector has gone so all-in on bullshit generators and plagiarism machines.
Mike Wiser @drmikewiser.bsky.social

They didn't want disruption. They want a gate to the Internet they can collect rent with. More importantly, they want to co-opt someone's tech that circumvents their existing gates.
Ken Burnside

trail drive-in, amarillo, texas, 1977:


old roadside pics

Can’t help but feel that we are living in an era of overwhelming anti-intellectualism on every front, with AI being the corporate vanguard of this cultural emptiness.
Liam Hogan

As my colleague David Rosnick puts it: the Roberts Court is just calling the balls and strikes. The problem is that they do it before the pitch is thrown.
Dean Baker

Like, what kind of cowards are we electing who can't just straight up say what we know is true: "I know drivers are the leading killers in California and are by far the leading perpetrators of violent assault. But they're also loud and angry, and I'm afraid to protect my constituents from them."
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo.bsky.social

Of all the ways to make a building more interesting - ornament, different materials, artwork - articulation has got to be the worst. Each of the extra corners from the building shifting in and out is a potential leak, and the yellow planes are extra walls that reduce energy efficiency:


Alfred Twu

The stereotype about Black people and fried chicken came about because, post-slavery, so many Black women successfully supported themselves and their families by selling homemade fried chicken to white people at train stations. It was one of the few lucrative jobs open to the newly free.
Iron Spike

Amazing INDIA!!
People using internet:
2015 = 15%
2025 = 70%
Congrats!!
We know that China in past 30 years took over 80% of it's pop. out of extreme poverty, now under 1%. But India is another giant waking up... a world power in the making. Hopefully will prioritize the poorest.
Gil Penalosa @penalosag.bsky.social

If America is so racist, then how come a wealthy white man has been lavishing me with gifts ever since his company started having cases before the Supreme Court, on which I sit? by Clarence Thomas
NY Times Pitchbot

I think about this all the time:


Sam Whyte

swear to god nothing has radicalized like me like watching rich men burn our planet, dry up our freshwater and poison our kids to invent the world’s most powerful technology — a robot chick who laughs at all their jokes
Gillian Brockell

We need a system that’s fair. We need a happy future! If I were queen of the world, that’s what I would tell Democrats to say.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

In the next 25 years, there will be a major global city that democratically decides to completely remove personal automobiles. There will still be delivery and emergency vehicles but beyond that it will be all walking, biking and public transit.
Pedestrianize it @mplsdromomania.bsky.social

It's not so much "Russiagate was real" as "well how much of the media ecosystem *isn't* Russiagate at this point?"
Chatham Harrison

15 years ago today, Kate and William killed Osama Bin Laden at their wedding:


Ashton Pittman

Why Germany has under-15 minutes cities? Because our main food retailers are <5 minutes retailers. Two of them, Lidl and Aldi, are ranked fourth and seventh in the world. They typically need only 7k resident to build one store. The network of Edeka, which operates only in Germany, is even denser.
Carsten Diekmann

Tell the kids we use to go days, weeks even, without thinking about the president.
Bethany Albertson @albertsonb2.bsky.social

Pure Prairie League sounds like a domestic terrorist militia. I mean the band name. The band’s music sounds like country-inflected soft rock.
Chris Steller

Some people, even some liberals, really despise poor people. Despise poor people more than they hate grifters, more than they despise cruelty and harm, more than they despise genocide even -  We should unpack that before we let those people determine our public policy.
D.A. Bullock @bullycreative.bsky.social

No better place to park when delivering to a bike shop:


Robert Haider

We're headed toward a Congress where like 40 states send a single-party delegation, indistinguishable from just electing everyone at large and a population-based replica of the Senate. Thank you, John Roberts, for ushering in this nonsense era.
@kleinman.bsky.social

Use “Jim crow” when talking about the GOP and redistricting. It’s accurate, it’s easy to understand shorthand and it drives the right nuts.
Oliver Willis

Just a reminder that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was called, "An act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States."
Larry Glickman

Trump’s net worth has nearly tripled in his second term, reaching $6.5 billion. His administration is the most brazenly self-enriching in American history:


Steve Rattner

If you look at the *entire* sweep of Jewish history, I think it's very clear that there's no strategy that *reliably* results in Jewish safety over the long term. But of the actually available strategies, "moderate cultural assimilation while retaining a distinct identity" has the best record.
J. Sam Drolet

I wonder what philosophy departments must be like in the Marvel universe. I mean, all sorts of theoretical stuff to us in reality is their actual reality in fiction. Things like mind/body problems don't exist in Marvel. They know souls are real. That gods exist. What are the hard questions for them?
Goldstein (2026 edition)

Remember when it came out that MacKenzie Scott, who has given away more of her fortune than anyone ever, is richer than before she started giving? That’s the metric by which you have to judge the levels of greed, wealth hoarding & wage suppression the wealthy engage in.
Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app

The Sam Alito of Star Trek:


Trekkie Bill

The guy appointed by the Hurricane Katrina President declaring racism over and done with is really grotesque when you think about it.
Mr. Business @chadstanton.blacksky.app

I do know it’s silly to some people but I do believe in Joy as an act of resistance for the currently and historically marginalized and oppressed. It’s not the only thing of course. But it’s one important component. I don’t believe my ancestors, my direct ancestors were bled dry for me to mope around.
Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.blacksky.app

When I began my editing career, I often changed “utilize” to “use.” For the past eight years or so, I’ve been changing “leverage” to “use.” Now I’m changing “use case” to the noun “use.” What do you people have against “use” in its various forms? It’s a perfectly fine word.
Dave Nelsen @thegrammargeek.bsky.social

There's been a lot of speeding discourse On Here lately, and it's a good reminder of how normalized speeding is in our society and also that many drivers have completely divorced their speed from the risk those higher speeds pose to others on the road, especially cyclists and pedestrians.
Gravel Influencer

Let me remind everyone that fierce debate exists over the different classes of ebikes allowed in cities:


Fietser @americanfietser.bsky.social

I know it's been said before but just thinking about the last year here in the Twin Cities and it's really a LOT. Hortmans. Annunciation. Federal occupation. Less than 12 months.
Doug Mack

I’m fucking horrified that folk 100s of years from now are going to refer to this period as the Trumpian Age or some shit and I’m gonna be lumped in with all the dumb extremist dicks. Solidarity with dead people from the 19th century who thought empire was for arseholes and now get called Victorians
Neil Mackay

Multiracial democracy in the American South has briefly existed twice in American history, both times enforced from outside, and both times has lapsed the instant the rest of the country lost interest.
Nathan Goldwag

Imagine the thrill of a lifetime in going all the way to the moon... And then coming back and being forced to meet with this piece of trash:


Bob Geiger

Trump loves an adoring audience. Look closely at every member of his audience pictured here.
Jen Mercieca

I am struggling to understand why for so much of the media, when a sitting president and his goons kill people summarily at home and abroad that that is somehow not categorized as “political violence”
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

To process the chaos, I'm spending a few minutes each night stitching a news diary—embroidering tiny icons representing an important story of the day. I'm four months in at this point, and looking back, it's clear that April's news was full of plenty of foolishness and plenty of fools:


Jess Calarco

BlueSky, March 2026, Part 2

The second half of March 2026 (part 1 is here) was dominated by Trump continuing to lose his senseless war on Iran, both overseas and at home. 

Near the last days of the month, we had the gigantic No Kings protests across the country, and then ended with two Supreme Court topics (one about trans persecution, the other on birthright citizenship). 

ICE was deployed to airports for no good reason. And the corruption continued throughout the regime — too much to even note. 

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

Honestly cannot think of a time I knew less what was going to happen at court than I feel ahead of oral arguments on birthright citizenship tomorrow. The fact that this is getting a full hearing instead of a 9-0, per curiam, benchslap is already beyond disturbing.
ElieNYC

No matter how much it's talked about, it's still not talked about enough that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on whether the words in the 14th amendment mean what the words in the 14th amendment mean.
Bearded Stoner

"Here is how the constitution should understand citizenship" says man selling American citizenship for $1 million:


Don Moynihan

really can't be said enough that the Wong Kim Ark birthright citizenship case was decided by the same court that decided Plessy v. Ferguson. if they could have found a plausible rationale to limit birthright citizenship they would have done it. but there is none! the text is as clear as constitutional language can be.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I know I’m a broken record on this but: A handful of law profs are engaging in an effort to convince the Supreme Court to accept a reactionary administration’s effort to redefine American citizenship and render countless children stateless.
Evan Bernick

Simply entertaining this challenge as if it's remotely legitimate is already discrediting. If there's a single vote to end birthright citizenship, we need to take this Supreme Court apart with sledgehammers and start over.
Kevin M. Kruse

I said this in replies elsewhere, but I want to say it loudly here. Anything other than a fullthroated affirmation of birthright citizenship in this country by SCOTUS is an act of treason. It is grounds for immediate impeachment. It is a violation of every oath they have made.
Courtney Milan

I showed this graph in class yesterday on how measles cases in the United States plummeted dramatically after the vaccine was licensed in 1963. It’s not subtle and I could not resist observing: “This stunning design in measles cases was not thanks to vitamin A. It was not due to beef tallow":


Kathleen Bachynski

It's simple: The Supreme Court says bans on medical care — and speech related to that care — are only allowed in the conservative direction. Tennessee can ban gender-affirming care as a medical regulation, matter but Colorado cannot regulate therapists who wish to deny patients' gender or sexuality. States can force doctors to read bogus scripts claiming abortion causes future health issues (mandated counseling laws), but states cannot compel anti-abortion centers to tell patients that abortion and birth control is available elsewhere (NIFLA). It's pure nonsense all the way down. SCOTUS to states restricting medical care they don't like: their legislatures have a right to do this and the laws are subject to the lowest level of judicial scrutiny. SCOTUS to states trying to ensure access to medical care: YOU ARE SILENCING CHRISTIAN MEDICAL PROVIDERS.  
Susan Rinkunas

Alito in a concurrence stating that so-called doctors should not be gatekeepers of medicine, suggests that we bring back bloodletting and other procedures intended to balance the humors
scoops @scoopsstp.bsky.social

i'm glad i'm not a lawyer so i don't have to pretend banning child torture and speech are in any way related
lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com

It is supremely infuriating that there are quite literally millions of left-wing Catholics in the United States, but the press only ever wants to hear from the right wing ones
Sky Marchini

it's a weird pattern. very similar to how jews are one of the most democratic-leaning demographics in the country yet jewish republicans are widely platformed as being representative of jewish opinion.
mtsw

Happy 2026! photo by Etienne Laurent:


Richard Kadrey

The Universal Law of Cities — The more car-friendly a place is, the shittier it is to be there.
Brent Toderian

People think Trump is dumb, but have you ever tried to asset-strip the wealthiest country there has ever been?
Jo Wolff

I get bummed out regularly that kids can’t just come in from the country with a few hundred dollars and a dirtbag dream and rent the third or fourth shittiest hole of their lives and make a go of it
Em, midly @lefttheprairie.bsky.social

People come up with complicated reasons why art/music scenes are less vibrant now but it is like 90% just this
Scary Mr. Olmec Man

Dutch newspaper cartoon:


michaeledward

Green-card holders no longer qualify for loans from the Small Business Administration, eliminating a longtime source of financing for immigrants that advocates say will discourage job creation and harm the economy.
The Associated Press

They’d rather the country be poorer and whiter than rich and diverse. Of course when the pie shrinks, the rich will demand the same amount and will tell you the crumbs you’re left with are because of immigrants or trans people or DEI. 
Adam Serwer

NEW: Under AG Pam Bondi, the DOJ has dropped 23,000 criminal cases — including hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime and drugs — while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases in just the first six months of Trump’s second term.
ProPublica

Nothing says “support the troops” like kidnapping their family while also starting a pointless war:


Steve Held @peoplesfabric.bsky.social [photo modified by Daughter Number Three]

really striking how race science freaks seem to spend their every moment crowing about how superior they are versus actually doing anything socially useful that would demonstrate it.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Every “far left” member of Congress is talking about “radical” things like not wanting to give unlimited weapons to a militant state abroad and like…universal healthcare lol
brent says join DSA @therealbrent.bsky.social

In case it isn't obvious, [AI education proponents] not proposing anything new except for the eradication of teachers and the implementation of robot slaves. You can already be taught classical studies from teachers. You can already access the complete works of Plato in books or for free on the internet.
John Brooks

the funny thing about bluesky deciding to push AI is that I would actually pay to use this service if it just stayed like it is, without AI, without ads, and just worked to keep improving moderation
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com

Washington insiders trying to sell us on Rahm Emanuel as a serious candidate remind me of Zuckerberg trying to sell us on the Metaverse
Ned Resnikoff

Wild that we refuse to build new actual mixed use streets but still slap on the idea of it as the facade to a mall:


Tom Flood

The fact is, methane has caused about 30% of the warming we have seen to date. And all non-CO2 warming pollution, taken together, has caused about half of the warming so far. And of the CO2 warming we have seen, a big chunk of that has been caused by deforestation.
Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social

It cannot be long before Trump’s retinue of sycophants, enablers and justifiers, in government and in the media, start telling us, "I never liked the guy", "I tried to restrain him" and "I was only obeying orders." So be sure to keep the receipts.
George Monbiot

reducing cigarette use was an incredible political accomplishment and almost no one (including me) knows anything about the people who organized the movement.
Dean Baker

The US was a racial dictatorship until 1965 and a not small measure of US politics since then has been an attempt, or resistance against the attempt, to return us to being one
Benjamin Balthaser

buffet flat antiques, angle 2, route 97, bend, oregon, 1987:


old roadside pics

I love (hate) how every 3 months there's a story about how there's 150 evil white men with insane amounts of $$ who use their influence to ruin everything around us, but we never talk about it because there's a single mom who wants to buy her kid a cookie with her food stamps and that's what really matters
Phoenix Calida

Democrats are too ambivalent about fossil fuels to see what’s right in front of their noses: how right-wing climate denial is intertwined with affordability, elite impunity, general dissatisfaction, distrust of government — everything voters care about. This is why they have no vision or fight.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

The inevitable result of barring undocumented kids from public education would be the creation of a permanent underclass of exploitable people, who grew up in this country, know no other, and have no education so are more vulnerable than ever before; a serf class for the rich and powerful.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

most of what you know about the civil war came from people who weren’t there and had an agenda (shelby foote-esque southern sympathizers). people who were there described it as a jihad against the satanic plantation aristocrats
ae @aelkus.bsky.social

Average union soldier memoir: "at first I was like I signed up for this war, but is it really worth it? Then I saw the reality of chattel slavery and I had to be physically restrained from slaughtering every white southerner I encountered"
Mike Black @mikeblack114.bsky.social

This has been the GOP's "starve-the-beast" scheme for nearly 50 years. Meanwhile, millions suffer and struggle to get ahead as the rich get richer. See the problem here?


Robert Reich

You know you don't really live in a free country when the regime can just illegally knock down a historic building that belongs to the people of the United States and start building a Pyongyang like monstrosity to replace it and there's apparently "nothing anyone can do."
Colin Woodard

One reason why the East Wing resonates with people is that it will be incredibly difficulty, divisive and costly to undo this shit. And in that respect it serves as an apt metaphor for the Trump administration.
Don Moynihan

Under Mayor Ada Colau, Barcelona completely rewrote the rules of urban space: reclaiming a million square metres for pedestrians, tripling its cycle network to 273 kilometres, adding 80 hectares of green space, halving car traffic, and cutting street-level air pollution by 20% in just eight years:


Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife.com

"an estimated 60–80 million people have been killed by cars since their invention."
Bryan @bryanformhals.com

The main "use case" of AI and crypto is to kill democracy as quickly as possible. 
Gil Durán

Does it work properly? No.
Are the people making it acting in good faith? No.
Have they ensured it can't be used maliciously? No.
Does it make people's lives better? No.
Will it make people's lives better? No.
Is it profitable? No.
Is it popular? No.
Is it harmless? No.
The argument for AI.
Nick Pettigrew

haha how silly… oh (from @twonks.bsky.social):


 @histoftech.bsky.social

I've never met a single Democrat who doesn't hate Rahm Emanuel with a passion that burns with the intensity of 1,000 suns. There's way too many political writers who've never talked to a single voter
Will Bunch

Heather Cox Richardson has a larger audience than almost any dudefluencer. More informed. Better values and policy preferences. And yet there are no profiles, no elevation or lionization, because there's *nothing* US media is less interested in than middle-aged lib women. No diner interviews for them.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

If the estimates were right, there were about 9 million people at No Kings rallies today. That would mean this protest was THIRTY TIMES AS LARGE AS THE TEA PARTY PROTEST which we were told, over and over again, was a massively important sign that US politics had shifted dramatically to the right. The first Tea Party rallies in April 2009 — heavily promoted in advance by Fox News — only had about 300,000 attendees across 750 cities, but the media treated it like the Second American Revolution. There will be multiple *individual* No Kings rallies today that have more people at them.
Kevin M. Kruse

No Kings:


C.G., PhD @tcrg2012.bsky.social

I assure you that if 8 million right-leaning protesters had turned out against Obama it the NYT would have given it banner treatment eg POPULIST REVOLT
Tim Dickinson

Classic sign:


Charlie Austin @chuckles-s.bsky.social

#Caturday #NoKings:


SubRosa Magick

St Paul, Minnesota, Saturday 28 March 2026 No Kings protest:


Harvey G. Cohen @cultrhack.bsky.social

There's a long, bad journalistic tradition: All conservative grass-roots political movements are fascinating heartland phenomena, all progressive grass-roots political movements are ineffectual bleating. This one is written off as powered by white female college grads--the wine-moms slur, basically.
Mark Harris

Star of the North:


Alex Schieferdecker

the vibe:


e.w. niedermeyer

Spotted in NASHVILLE…


The Tennessee Holler

Pasadena CA No Kings:


headcase4321.bsky.social

Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States with the dumbest, most corrupt president ever in power is a bit like celebrating a wedding anniversary after your spouse murdered all your children and drained your bank accounts.
Mrs. Betty Bowers

not a big Hillary Clinton fan but the way the media is protecting the public from the details of Kash fucking Patel's personal emails is impossible to ignore
m @keptsimple.bsky.social

The Ethicist | I don't feel like paying the Guatemalan immigrants who roofed by house. Can I just have ICE deport them?
NY Times Pitchbot

Ken Jennings asked 10-day Jeopardy! champion Jamie Ding what effect his $250K+ winnings might change his life. After thinking for a second, Ding responded, "Now I can move closer to public transportation."
 @pattho.bsky.social

Why does the fawning media always call these stains on our democracy [like Trump's signature appearing on currency] “a first” like Trump broke the four-minute mile as opposed to the Constitution
Jeff Yang @originalsp.in

Gasoline isn't expensive enough, given how many people I see idling their vehicles.
David Ho

For a sense of the scale of the federal occupation of the Twin Cities metro this winter... Chicago and LA were too big so they tried picking on somewhere smaller. They were thick on the ground here but they still left in disgrace:


Aaron Sojourner

30% of encounters having a drawn weapon is a wild statistic. Imagine if that's how our regular police worked.
Jeff Beal @jbbeal.bsky.social

OMG, ADOBE ACROBAT, please stop telling me that this document is long and that I should save time by reading an AI Assistant summary of the book. IT'S A NOVEL. IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE LONG. I WANT TO READ IT. ALL OF IT.
Mari Ness

The idea that (white) American farmers and ranchers are the "true volk" while cities are a sore on the body politic, filled with greedy merchants and mobs of laborers, is the foundational, racist blood-and-soil myth of America that still pervades all of society including mainstream media.
Chad Loder

So…this piece of art in the touristy part of Sedona does not do javalina justice, lol. It actually does them dirty. They’re not pigs and the babies aren’t chunky like that:


Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

Red state universities: We're going to cut all the programs that don't support our theology
Blue state universities: We're going to cut the same programs, but because they don't support the business school
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

I don't think trans people should be imprisoned for 5 years because they have to pee
Parker Molloy

we need a wholesale recommitment on the left to public higher education as a high quality low/no cost public good rather than a jobs training licensing agency. I do not anticipate this happening.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

I love how irreconcilable it is that conservatives, who imagine themselves themselves to be the tough guys, love to talk about how scared they are to go into the cities where the purportedly wimpy liberals hang out all day.
Mac Rogers

Final batch of anti-ICE and related signs from around Minneapolis. Every neighborhood, almost every block. Around 600 different signs (and many hundreds more duplicates). Community, solidarity and resolve. “We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us” –John Lewis. Batch #33:


Wendy @hyssop.bsky.social

from 1868 to 2025 there was little dispute about what the birthright clause meant and the idea that the past year has been some great scholarly debate is absurd. a handful of partisans and hacks have churned out junk so that the president can get what he wants. that’s it.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I am really sick of their special snowflake status, because police is not a uniquely dangerous job. In Minnesota, the industry with the most deaths was transportation. Second construction. I want police training to be far more about de-escalation than about things that heighten danger for themselves *and others.*
Saralovesyou

Seen somewhere along 19th St in DC:


Tinman 2.0 contre la caste @bcmfietser.bsky.social

Whenever a news story about something Trump is doing declares that it's "a first for a sitting president" or "a change from tradition," replace it with "yet another authoritarian move from the president," and see if it sounds more accurate.
Chris Geidner

so like, if you talk to women about our fears in society, such as walking alone at night with keys gripped in our hand to stab an eyeball and such. these bathroom issues aren't shit that anyone has issues with besides these fucking weirdos. it's just a non issue
Emma Evans @trance.bsky.social

My cartoon for this week’s New Scientist:


Tom Gauld

Went through security, kids are too small for the scanners so we go through metal detectors. I asked the TSA agent, “do we (my husband and I) go through the metal detector too or the scanner?” He said “oh with the kids, we aren’t the ones who split up families.” I see you TSA man
miss andry @defnotadino.bsky.social

Wikipedia now has higher standards [on AI] than all universities
Andrew D Wilson @adw.bsky.social

It's sad for all Americans that we have to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our great nation with the most corrupt, evil president in our history.
Jim Henderson @hendy-77.bsky.social

seeing a lot of moral abandonment and dereliction of duty by people who just wanna stay employed and wondering how much this would be happening if healthcare and insurance could be decoupled from employment
Lora Kolodny

I know there's a lot going on. But what the US is doing to Cuba is unconscionable
Kendra Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com

super fun that his signature will be on bills when he never pays his:


shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social

If a secdef violating the 14th amendment rights of US service members by denying promotions based on race isn’t impeachable then I don’t see what is. The man would rather the military be racist than effective.
Adam Serwer

thought experiment: since sports are a closed system with predictable rules and keep detailed statistics on players, maybe we can replace college coaches with AI. coaches make a lot of money, so this could be a great cost saving measure for universities.
now reflect:
◾ why isn't this a part of the discourse?
◾ what are the reasons that folks want to make sure there are humans in those roles?
◾ why do other people at universities seem more replaceable, even though their tasks are not nearly as well structured or replete with informative data? 
Ilana Horn

Just so we're clear here, Trump installed his own defense lawyer as the Deputy Attorney General and had him lead the purge of the federal prosecutors who brought cases against Trump.
Kevin M. Kruse

The White House sending out proof that Trump was indeed talking to Iranian officials these past few days, despite Iran's denials of such talks:


Paul Leigh

America Now Has More Spas and Gyms Than Stores Selling Actual Stuff. Landlords leased more space last year to service-oriented tenants than those selling products, with wellness and fitness leading the charge
Jemin Na, CPA

Younger people won't believe this, but the Republican Party used to complain that Barack Obama was too self-centered.
Kevin M. Kruse

even if trans women had a biological advantage at sports we let people with biological advantages participate in sports all the time—at a professional level they're basically required — and no one cares because those advantages don't trigger a reflexive discomfort in cis people
may @maysuser.name

Ancient Egyptian gold finger-ring set with a mouse amulet inscribed with the cartouche of king Thutmose III. Gold and glazed steatite. New Kingdom, Dynasty 18, 1479-1425 BC. Squeak squeak Thutmouse! Photo by The Met:


Alison Fisk

A guy at my table during dinner said he spent $150 on gas for his truck and didn’t even fill it from empty. That's equivalent to 8 weeks of my unlimited transit costs in Chicago’s but will probably last him less than a week. Idk how you can see these numbers and not think car ownership is a scam.
Brandon @bedubble.bsky.social

The actual reality of what’s going on with NASA is a real trip when juxtaposed with what a hit the NASA-saturated “Project Hail Mary” film seems to be. I wonder how many people who enjoyed the film are aware of just how much this admin has shanked all the cool real-world research it featured.
Faine Greenwood

Of all the crops we grow on Earth — with huge impacts on land, water, biodiversity, and climate — less than half of them actually become FOOD.
Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social

The widest part of a freeway passing through the heart of a city is antithetical to the very idea of a city. Throughout history, cities have located at natural chokepoints where the path terminates or narrows:


Qagggy!

This is an absolute scandal; the United States government is deliberately consolidating all deportation cases of an ethnic minority that the President has called "garbage" in front of a handpicked group of judges and with dramatically accelerated timeline. A lawsuit was filed yesterday against it.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

it's incredible that as long as you do the right amount of bigotry you can just rob the country blind and enough people will not care, even though those same people will be filled with incandescent rage if someone uses food stamps to buy a 12 pack of diet coke
Adam Serwer

For all the talk of the left's vision of manhood (or supposed lack thereof) it's important to note that the modern right doesn't have a vision of manhood so much as a dream of perpetual adolescence.
@itreallyisaparty.bsky.social

"I avoid politics." No bestie, you avoid uncomfortable conversations about politics. From the moment you were born til the day you die, you've been thoroughly and utterly enmeshed in the policies, systems, and governance of a society that shapes your experience. You just try not to think about it.
Bo Thompson @gaudipern.bsky.social

The Farm Bureau estimates that a year-round increase from E10 to E15 (15% ethanol blend in gasoline) would increase US corn demand by 2.4 billion bushels a year. Latest yields per USDA are 188.8 bushels/acre, so growing it requires another 12.7 million acres. That’s about half the size of Indiana.
Richard Waite

12.7M acres of solar is is about 82% of the solar required to decarbonize the US in the Net Zero America E+ scenario (there's wind and existing nuclear and stuff in there too, but that's the solar portion). Or we can have 5% of our gasoline displaced.
John Smillie

Good morning:


Sarah @sarahjen.bsky.social

Just to be very clear: The Trump DOJ is stealing $1.2 million of your money to gift one of Trump’s cronies [Mike Flynn], who pled guilty to the crimes he was charged with, and whose suit against the government had already been tossed by a judge.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social

I think every single candidate for mayor of any city should be asked "Will you end every city contract with McKinsey and anyone like them?" It's literally free money for your city to do this. Your city never needs to pay 23-year-old new grads to ask ChatGPT how to optimize services for poor people.
Daniel Suitor

According to the Cato Institute, The Trump administration is reportedly receiving millions of immigration applications, pocketing the hefty fees, and never processing the applications. It’s collected over $1 billion in fees so far. Where is the outcry over this fraud and abuse?
Robert Reich

We need a vehicle weight tax. If you can justify buying an $80k, 3,000 kg Wagoneer to haul one bag of groceries, taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing your pavement wear and tear plus the added danger to our streets. If you can afford the payments, you can afford to stop asking society to subsidize it:


Fietser @americanfietser.bsky.social

America is in such a shambles that people are actively rooting for TSA, an organization that normally has the same approval rating as athlete's foot.
Josh Gondelman

If you want to know who took your money, it's the people with all of the money.
Anat Shenker-Osorio @anatosaurus.bsky.social

It’s pretty cool to have a church, a mosque, and the Cabinet of Ministers of Bulgaria all in a single shot distance:


Marika Mikiashvili

Lack of health insurance kills FAR more Americans every year than Iran ever has. But Trump and Hegseth want $200B for war instead of care. That’s not “national security” — that’s national neglect. 
Madelyne @madelynerants.bsky.social

The most amazing story isn’t just that Democrats flipped a Trump +12 seat from red to blue — it’s that Trump literally voted by mail in this election while arguing mail in voting should be illegal for everyone else.
Matt McDermott @mattmfm.bsky.social

these guys are working incredibly hard to reinvent slavery from first principles
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

Wednesday:


Ajediday

Patrimonialism: governance where a leader treats the state as their personal property, ruling through personal loyalties, patronage, and kin ties rather than through formal, impartial, or merit-based bureaucracy.
aftertheboat174.bsky.social

More than 10,000 STEM PhDs have left federal service over the past year (including 30% of the federal colleagues with whom I’ve worked closely). Those still left are holding federal science together with duct tape. What an extraordinary act of sabotage against the American people.
Meade Krosby

It’s 2030. The average cost of gas is $12 a gallon. A new car costs $100k. Americans are still calling public transit and bike infrastructure a waste.
Climate and Transit

Minnesota GOP Rep. Mary Franson says she's not worried about climate change because it's not in the Bible: "If you've read the Good Book, you know how it ends, and it's not with climate change." How can we expect Republicans to do serious work when they're so proud about ignoring science?
Minnesota House DFL

God certainly not known for creating weather events to send a message.
Carin @mrotzie.bsky.social

“Stephen Miller’s true goal is to use immigration as a tool to chisel away at the Fourteenth Amendment. Until he’s ejected from the White House, all our rights are in danger.”
Greg Sargent

I need a moment to sit with this:


George Takei

I have literally no idea what beliefs Gavin Newsom holds besides “I should be President”
Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

As a retired airline Captain I flew into LaGuardia and NY airspace hundreds of times. It is some of the world’s busiest airspace. To have only one ATC in the tower at LGA is criminal negligence. Not only is the airspace crowded and chaotic, so are the ground operations. Sean Duffy’s FAA owns this 100%
Marty Taylor @realmartyt7.bsky.social

remember that one time a train derailed in Ohio and literally nobody died but it was a news story for like a full week and Pete Buttigieg had to personally answer for it?
Cameron @cameroncorduroy.bsky.social

ICE has become Trump’s Praetorian Guard.
Sanho Tree

Every goddamn day is another round of “why didn’t you fix this when you had the chance” from people who think outlawing the GOP/rightwing Christianity is a button we were just too bashful to push
ok city ok @krogerfoot.bsky.social

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla paid just 4.9% of their profits in federal corporate taxes in 2025. They have seen their collective tax bill drop by $95B thanks to two rounds of Trump tax cuts. Meanwhile, they've laid off thousands of workers. Trickle-down economics was always a scam:


Robert Reich

Better to disenfranchise people than disappoint others who were prematurely excited to think they won. They should do that in sports too – just stop playing after the first team scores, don't wait to complete the whole game. Some fans might get really sad otherwise.
ginkowest.bsky.social

what really undermines voter confidence is when you vote and it doesn't get counted because people who vacation on billionaire yachts say so
Steven Palmer Peterson

What seriously undermines elections is trump constantly lying about the election being stolen.  Let’s start there.
teepig.bsky.social

Most honest reporting in the past few weeks:


Albino Badguy

True cosmic horror isn’t that the universe is hostile. It’s that the universe is indifferent. This holds true at the human level. We imagine monsters with malevolent aggression toward us—but in reality, the greatest horror on earth is other humans indifferent to suffering.
Brandy Schillace

I will say this forever but ICE is both an ethnic cleansing machine and an ideological terror machine. It is entirely built as an extralegal goon squad that only cares about fealty to the regime.
Norm Charlatan

TV news in 2026 is basically either six talking heads yelling at each other about literally anything, doesn't matter what; or The Today Show, a program designed in a lab to never produce anything of consequence while capturing as many eyeballs as possible for 10–60 second stretches.
Sam Bergman @violanorth.bsky.social

Spent the afternoon today at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. And I’m not sure what the experience was like before 2026, but… Not once did I ask myself “How could this happen?”
Tinman 2.0 contre la caste @bcmfietser.bsky.social

Actor Steve McQueen (left) shares a laugh with race car driver Derek Bell on the set of the 1971 auto racing film Le Mans:


Cool Bike Art

Most seniors in Hong Kong do not own or drive a car, because they can get anywhere they want to with the city's robust public transport system at a taxpayer-subsidized cost of $0.26 per trip. My parents just take random day trips for fun. That is true freedom that American seniors will never have.
Alex Ip

ICE agents should be fired, not deployed to airports.
Ilhan Omar

Today it's the airports, but soon ICE will be omnipresent in our lives unless they are stopped. Public spaces. The polling place. You name it. This is textbook authoritarianism and as long as the corruption of liberal democracy continues there will be more and more power vacuums for the fascists.
Jared Yates Sexton

I'm begging people to realize how much we've already given in just the past 25 years. I'm old enough to remember when surveillance wasn't ubiquitous and before ICE or the TSA existed. There was even a time when the average cop wasn't kitted out for full on urban warfare.
Aaron Cynic


Ann Telnaes

It’s really a testament to Trump’s weird obsessions that that letting states make their own election policies is now the blue position, while a top-down, one-size fits all policy that hurts rural voters is the red one.
Radley Balko

Now Trump plans to pay $1 billion to a foreign company to ditch its plans for offshore wind power and to build oil and gas plants in Texas, an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars for the purpose of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change.
Dana @outbeyond.bsky.social

DC National Guard deployment not only costs $1.65 million a day—$600 m/year—but it also has had no impact on outcomes. US Congress, in its majesty, gives $150 m/year for the operation of DC transit system. So it's essentially spending 4 times as much on useless guards.
Yonah Freemark

That first entry is hilarious given who is currently in the White House:


The Alternate Historian

Can’t believe Trump found a way to make Americans like the TSA
Wes Burdine

Like every time you see an article about a groundbreaking piece of scientific discovery, go check where the foundational data came from. Chances are good it will be a study or department that effectively no longer exists thanks to trump DOGE firings and funding cuts.
Tyler King

I often imagine telling the ghost of Upton Sinclair about how fascists are currently in the year 2024 putting kids to work in slaughterhouses and drinking raw milk and eating raw meats and not vaccinating their children and he is so upset he is crying and he is throwing up
Erin Fogg says Free Link @criminalerin.bsky.social

We'll see your electric hearse and raise you one bicycle hearse:


The War on Cars

There is this really weird dislike of, even a revulsion to, modern society that is happening all over the country and across the political spectrum. Antivax, tradwives, retreat into racial and ethnic essentialism, blowing up the modern food system, on it goes. Seems like a key story of our time.
Robert Cruickshank

If you think about it, why WOULD it be the responsibility of cities to provide free parking for everyone’s cars?
Urban Truth Collective

He started a war, didn’t know how to win it, was immediately over his head, became quickly overpowered by an enemy he vastly underestimated, and now is trying to sue for peace and then convince you that this was a victory. Dying empires produce leaders like this
Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social

Pretty much:


Patrick Chovanec

It's only force majeure if it comes from the Majeure region of France. Otherwise it's just a sparkling shitshow.
Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com

True that “The irony here is the fact that ICE agents would never pass TSA background check.”
Manisha Sinha @profmsinha.bsky.social

So, the goal for the whole war is now to make Iran like it was, only worse?
Mer @valkmer2.bsky.social

NEW: Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids. A ProPublica analysis of new ICE data shows that Trump has detained parents of U.S. citizen children at about twice the rate that Biden did, and moms have been deported four times as often.
ProPublica

Imagine if "big tent" meant accepting trans people instead of transphobes.
Nico Mara-McKay

How are we all even still holding our shit together with everything that this administration is doing?
Black Aziz Anansi

Double-tapping an elementary school on the very first day of the war is not what you do if you are trying to "ignite an internal uprising."
Michael Hobbes

“Is this some sort of threat, Emily?”


Uncle Duke @uncleduke1969.bsky.social

Trump could have sent any number of groups to the airports to help TSA. He chose ICE for a reason! Because it’s another opportunity for them to kidnap people! Airports are a great place to find people! You think ICE quotas are gonna disappear at airports??
Erin Biba

the human body was not designed to know what the worst person in the world is doing every fifteen minutes
Ygrene

Goddamn I love cities with good Metro systems (grade-separated). Getting around DC has been so easy. Now we're on our way to our friend's house in Alexandria and it's just as easy. I love not having to rent a car or take a Lyft when leaving a big city.
Regina Burstein @mplsfietser.bike

I would read the heck out of a book or article that explained why a disproportionate number of American fascists have been chiropractors. No shade on that entire category of practitioners, but it's definitely a theme that has emerged in my research on the US far right. Article is from 2001.
Seth Cotlar

Reagan would do wildly illegal things and the system would try to hold him accountable, but he would never admit the things were wrong, and it turned out the system wasn't set up to deal with that, and you could feel the whole right wing of the country go *interesting.* Anyway, every Republican president of my lifetime has spent their presidency doing whatever tf they want, committing war crimes, enriching their friends, and facing zero consequences for it, and now we've arrived at full plutocracy because greed, turns out, will metastasize if you don't kill it.
Sam Bergman @violanorth.bsky.social

Trump is just “posting through it”, except “it” is a war.
Bill Lindeke

Barry Blitt, The New Yorker:


Fiona "Fi" Webster @fiona-webster22.bsky.social

ICE detention deaths are now occurring at a rate of roughly one every four days. Three weeks ago that rate was one every six days. The pace is accelerating, and Congress has not launched a single investigation.
Austin Kocher, PhD

I think we're going win, but I want to win hard enough that we start paying artists to paint murals in post offices again. (This time the post offices are also banks.)
Aaron Cohen @unlikelywords.bsky.social

I want fully staffed public pools, and libraries that are cathedrals to public goods and a society where walling yourself off with money is viewed as sociopathic.
Kendra Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com

I wish that the United States pursued literally any worthwhile goal with the diligence and zeal that it has been trying to deport Abrego Garcia to somewhere other than Costa Rica.
Sean Marotta

The world is adding 1 GW of solar every HALF DAY. In 2004, that same 1 GW took a whole YEAR. That’s exponential S-curve disruption. Next up:
Storage explodes
EVs accelerate
Fossil demand gets squeezed
Sales tell you what’s happening. Capacity tells you what wins.
Chris Meder @evcurvefuturist.com

RIP Robert Mueller, he was preceded in death by the Rule of Law.
Norm Charlatan

Double standard?


Brown Eyed Susan

Came out of the post office, saw that a guy had cut my saddle bag off my bike and was about to take off with it. I yelled "Please wait my cat's medicine is in there!" He started to run, and this grandma-age lady goes "SHE SAID HER CAT'S MEDICINE IS IN THERE" and WALLOPED him with her grocery bag.
Heather Hogan

Wait, so we can cut our use of fossil fuels for war but not for the climate?
Pepper Sanchez fan account @fedef.bsky.social

Anyone can grow up to be President, we used to say, like that was a good thing.
Robert Simonson

It’s awesome to daily read the news and it’s like AI is going to dry out the planet and tell everyone to commit suicide. And like no one has actually found a good use for it yet. It does literally nothing useful other than making some tasks, slightly more convenient.
Wes Burdine

These are the people who are obsessed with genetics:


Helen Kennedy

I honestly feel like that’s the lesson of the Trump era the country is gonna take the longest to learn. like oh okay so we have been lionizing the founding fathers for 250 years and it turns out they didn’t do their ONE JOB. they didn’t Mad King-proof ANYTHING! first Mad King crashed the system!!!
Claire Willett

We're entering an incredibly rare and funny phase where the U.S. President is directly responsible for dramatic increases in gasoline prices; U.S. drivers are too car-brained to understand or care how gas prices actually work; and the car industry and news media will blame environmental regulations.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo.bsky.social

"China is adopting green energy at a scale hard to imagine for many other countries, installing 446 gigawatts of it in 2025 — more than the rest of the world combined, according to Australian think tank Climate Energy Finance."
Jason Kemp @dialogcrm.bsky.social

if there's one conclusion that the study of both labor history and imperialism converge on, it is that the richest people in the world are happy to burn money on control, power, impunity. and the "everything is about profit" version of anti-capitalism does not survive serious contact with either
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

A jolly 1980s school set, sold but not forgotten. Happy Friday all! 


Present & Correct

The median age in Britain is about 40. The median Briton has not experienced sustained economic growth in their adult life time.
Duncan Weldon

I don't idealize the past, but I think people were happier before there was a supercomputer in everyones pockets whose every social media notification is a cortisol-prompting reminder that the world is ending and that everyone else is more successful, living a better life.
Chris Lombardi

The most under-appreciated aspects of low-traffic neighborhoods that is hard to truly grasp from even the best videos:
1-How damn quiet they are. 
2-How much $$$ saved not having to build safe pedestrian infrastructure and bike lanes.
3-The amount of children enjoying themselves in peace.
Streetfilms/Clarence Eckerson Jr.

When the live Japanese translation goes silent because the translators are too stunned to repeat your Pearl Harbor “joke” to the Japanese PM, you’ve officially reached a new level of diplomatic failure. Those seconds of silence were the most honest reaction of the day.
Andrea Junker @strandjunker.com

New Economist:


Mark Chadbourn

In the first year of congestion pricing, New York City's subway system saw 90 million additional rides. Few things better than when public policy works as designed.
Claire Valdez @claireforny.bsky.social

the most subversive thing a country can do now is to build up its grid-scale battery capacity
Wolfgang Blau

mind-boggling to me that i still have yet to see a single democrat utter the phrase “every republican president of your lifetime has destroyed the economy and started a war”
Andrew Lawrence

I'd suggest that a big reason the world is currently so volatile is that Republicans keep handing Trump money to wreck things
Kevin M. Kruse

I've profiled a few dozen climate professionals and EVERY single one had a formative outdoorsy experience as a kid that led them to their career. In Minnesota, 9 times out of 10 it's a Boundary Waters experience (or Lake Superior).
Isak Kvam

The Republican party should carry the stench of supporting this man for decades. Even if he were to drop dead or resign tomorrow, no one should ever let them wash their hands of this.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

What women on the left already knew before the Epstein files came out is that men can imagine a world of class consciousness (Chomsky), a universe more expansive than ever before known (Hawking), a world where you can live forever (Attia) but not a world where women are fully human.
Julie S. Lalonde

I feel like they buried the lede. Cat's name is Waffles:


Kevin Zollman

I remember having an epiphany at a Census Bureau stakeholder meeting that united business and academics: Scientists use jargon to condense complicated concepts; business people use jargon to inflate simple ones.
Carl Schmertmann

People keep saying “oh so you want OPEN BORDERS” as some kind of gotcha and like. Yeah. When I was a kid you could just drive into Canada. On accident, even. It was great, and I think we should do that instead of kidnapping children. Normalize being normal instead of being kidnapping weirdos
Alyssa Long @measuredandslow.bsky.social

KFF survey: 9% of 2025 ACA Marketplace enrollees say they are currently uninsured. 
David Wessel

I thought it was Hubert Humphrey:


Vic Thorstenson

GOP and Trump said we didn't have the money to extend ACA health care subsidies - and now millions have no health care coverage and many more are facing crushing costs. So hundreds of billions of dollars to bomb Iran but nothing to help Americans pay for health care.
Nathan Newman

polls taken in 1947 post-war Germany after the death and destruction, the revelations about the camps, lost family members, the Nuremberg trials, the reporting found an estimated 30% still supported or had a soft spot for hitler, cult members never accept reality they feel attacked and become protective
Kathy Byrne @kab-fair.bsky.social

Shout out to my mum, who this whole time has thought that AI stood for Artificial Insemination
Mark Deeks

A neighborhood street in Zürich, the place you send kids to play, with benches and a water fountain:


Janne K. Flisrand @jannefrommpls.bsky.social

I'm sad that Cesar Chavez was a piece of shit. I'm not sad to find out about it. It's wonderful that these women stood up and told the truth. They deserve to be heard, believed, and validated.
Patrixmyth

With Cesar Chavez being outed as a serial abuser of women and girls, we can add to the list that men can imagine a world where there are rights for all workers, but not human rights for women.
Julie S. Lalonde

Men, here is a thing you can start today: Speak up every single time another man says something sexist, predatory, abusive, or dismissive about a woman in your presence. Every time. Make yourself and him uncomfortable. Stop turning away and keeping the peace.
Martha Smith @mostlymartha.bsky.social

Trump took the greatest military force in history, lost a war to a middle power in a week, begged the world to save him, and demanded the media lie about this and everything else. I try, but at a simple human level I do not see how anyone mistakes this man’s almost supernatural weakness for strength.
Timothy Snyder

Markwayne Muller is a plumber who occasionally believes he is a secret agent. Another loony member of the GOP.
IcyDragon

I represented a client who was charged with obstruction for, this is true, not letting a cop sexually assault her. Client said "no" when propositioned, cop grabbed her genitals, she said "no" again, and the state's attorney charged her with obstruction. I represented a client charged with obstruction for not exiting a vehicle. Client was deaf and therefore didn't hear the command. State's attorney argued that Client chose not to get a cochlear implant so Client planned to obstruct cops.
Sheryl Weikal @leftistlawyer.com

Great point!!


Jon Cooper

I have lived in Los Angeles for nearly two decades and I have never experienced the kind of yellow smog that used to define this city. why? because we cleaned that shit up. none of this is beyond salvation
Micah @rincewind.run

everyone can agree that sam altman is singular, definitive proof that capitalism is pathologically inhumane, right??????
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Our billionaire class likes to position itself as revolutionary, when in fact they are standard issue grifters, with contempt for everything outside of wealth accumulation; vapid, morally adrift products of the capitalist ethos.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

I know I've said this a trillion times but I have to say it periodically to keep from going insane: The right ran a huge, well-funded, and ultimately successful campaign to completely take over political media and the infosphere more generally. This is by far the most important political development of that last half-century, upstream of virtually any other problem that you can identify, and yet in mainsteam political discourse we *never talk about it*. It's the biggest, most salient political fact of all, just sitting there, looming, and no one fucking speaks it aloud.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

I don’t want a promise to heal the nation by coming together with fascist Republicans. I want a promise to heal those we’ve harmed.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

I’m trying to imagine the backlash there would be if a democratic president pushed a highly unpopular law through congress and justified doing so by saying it would guarantee that democrats would win the mid-term elections
Kevin Verhoff

this just in:


Tom Flood

Basically feminism for the past 250 years has been a struggle to establish that women are people endowed with certain inalienable rights, and among those rights are life, liberty, and bodily autonomy.
Rebecca Solnit

i know people feel embarrassed when they hear a word out loud for the first time and it’s pronounced differently from how they thought but i always find it kind of exciting. i still remember learning how you say Joaquin and Erdoğan. that little thrill over the possibilities of Language
rax king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social

Remember when MAGA committed treason? Turns out there was grift and corruption in that, too. Surprise, effing surprise. [firm that planned January 6 rally received no-bid contracts]
chrisestes.bsky.social

They said it would take 193 years to clean London’s air. We did it in nine. London has now met legal limits for nitrogen dioxide air pollution.
Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan

Portland pothole artists are seriously my favorite people. If you know one or are one and would be willing to talk about your craft, please DM:


Andi Zeisler

Free speech for conservatives: A high school asking its football coach to not force students to pray on the 50 yard line at games is an intolerable restriction of the first amendment, but a public university firing a staffer for her political speech does no harm and violates no rights or principles.
Joshua Foust

In a rare moment of lucidity, the WSJ Editorial Board states the obvious:
1. countless investigations have proven vote fraud is extremely rare
2. the SAVE act is pointlessly onerous
3. it would disenfranchise Trump voters - those without passports - the most
Lynn Becker @cmgiulini.bsky.social

Rep. Ted Lieu: "Undocumented immigrants want nothing to do with the govt! To vote, you have to first register. How many undocumented immigrants are gonna go, 'Yes, I'm gonna give all my information to the govt that's maybe trying to deport me. No way!' This is a problem that doesn't exist."
Aaron Rupar

The amount of damage Trump has done in such a short period of time is breathtaking. The extent of the damage can be hard to appreciate fully as we bounce from crisis to crisis, but it truly takes my breathe away when I pause to consider it.
Leah McElrath

The problem isn't that the DOGE staffers were young, per se; it's that basically every single one of them was an arrogant, incurious, willfully ignorant edgelord shitbird who was willing and eager to do literally whatever it took to get their edgelord papas to give them chin scritchies and head pats
Dr. Damien P. Williams @wolvendamien.bsky.social

Forget about that Patrick guy. Today is also Saint Gertrude Day, the patron saint of cats:


The Spirit of Lorenzo the Cat @lorenzothecat.bsky.social

Let’s be honest. People don’t talk to each other about climate change because it feels bad to do so — quite aside from pluralistic ignorance about how much other people care or individual helplessness relative to the power of fossil capital. That’s where climate comms needs to start from.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Trump wants to pay a foreign company a billion dollars to NOT bring us green energy.
Lindsay Beyerstein

Confiscate 99.8% of Marc Andreesen’s net worth for the public good, wait 20 minutes, and then tell him his memory of ever having more than $4 million is false.
southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social

For decades we've been told that we don't need to shut down the fossil fuel industry, we just have to let capitalist entrepreneurship and the magic of the free market replace it with better technologies. Now we have those better technologies, so legacy industry is ensuring there's no free market
Dr Charlie Gardner

I anticipated that the energy transition would not go smoothly but I seriously underestimated just how stupid it would be
Kate Marvel @drkatemarvel.bsky.social

Thinking about an episode of Star Trek where the crew get found out by an alien civilization they're observing and end up taking one of the girls on the Enterprise. And thinking how disappointing it must be to finally encounter aliens but they just look like you with a bit less stuff on their face
Kas @kas.goated.games

Scarlet Joe Handsome being a regal beagle:


Michael Metivier @grousehollow.bsky.social

A judge ruled against the government‘s anti-vaccine policy, a major setback to RFK Jr’s Leave No Child Left Alive initiative.
Frank Conniff

American democracy has not been trying to fend off attempts at fascism. American fascism has been trying to fend off attempts at democracy.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Yep. Trump asked “what the hell do you have to lose” by electing me, and, now, we are getting another reminder that the answer is “a lot.”
Larry Glickman