we are not having a lot of luck with institutional pushback - everyone who does is fired and replaced we are definitely not having any luck with “norms” what we are having luck with is ordinary people looking at the incompetent bullshit put in front of them and going “absolutely not”

Can't think of anything else that this looks like other than the aftermath of Hiroshima or Nagasaki (actually just looked at pictures of the fire bombing of Dresden, and there were more building standing after that that this)

A billion dollars is just more power than any one person should have.

Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

FROG 🐸 SEMIOTICS 🐸 REDEMPTION 🐸 ARC

Settled gains for personal liberty and equality were reversed, substantive democracy was rolled back while keeping the formal electoral process unchanged, and racial resentment and an idealized past were used to mobilize a broad constituency for a program that directly benefited only a small elite.

List of discontinued merit badges (Boy Scouts of America)

Clergy wearing a vapor mask (were gassed earlier) in front of black masked police is quite a sight. Respect to the protestors / abolish ICE

If you are a fluid dynamicist, never forget that you are a fluid dynamicist

I am going to give a shout out to my favorite library *system* which is California's link+, a very easy to use interlibrary loan. I've only managed to find one or two titles that I could not obtain, they were both obscure academic anthologies.

Wannabe silverback whose only dominance demonstration maneuver is asking for thank yous

Walking back from dropping my kids off at school, at a crosswalk, and a driver of a Chevy volt (usually not problematic!) started to slow down as if they had seen me and then accelerated into the crosswalk. I had to backpedal to avoid getting hit. Have to assume every driver is trying to murder me.

TIL SoundCloud is stuffed full of live sets from lots of electronic artists. I'm going to be getting caught up on live Underworld, Four Tet, Daft Punk, and Bonobo for a while

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is free and heading to Maryland, via: fox17.com/news/local/k...

Yeah its allowed at Strawberry Creek Park because it used to be a train station bsky.app/profile/warr...

Robyn while dancing on her own accidentally bumps into Billy idol dancing with himself

on this point, mcpherson’s book on lincoln as commander in chief is really good books.google.com/books/about/...

excellent discussion from @jwmason.bsky.social jwmason.org/slackwire/ca...

Story is absolutely crazy and cruel

There was in fact a protest today by disabled activists. They were arrested and zip-tied to their chairs.

The untold institutional/policy story behind Zohran: public financing (or its lamer version that the conservative courts allow, small donor matching) + RCV = campaigns that talk to regular people and build coalitions instead of just sending spam texts and hosting fundraisers with rich old people

I just read Helen's last substack post; a reminder to actively enjoy the quirky things that you enjoy, because it's something that other people appreciate helendecruz.substack.com/p/cant-take-...

amtrak’s marketing team gets it

Shifting baselines en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiftin...

This is worth the time to read. A fatalism around Darwinism, that makes it impossible for us to have good things, seems to me as one of the most foundational philosophical/ideological mistakes that western society makes.

"The Only Democracy in the Middle East" is arresting protesters for wearing "Stop The War" t-shirts. One officer said the slogan "is something that's illegal to have on a shirt." Gift link www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

2. Americans overwhelmingly do not want a war with Iran. A supermajority of 69% of US voters—including large majorities of Independents and Republicans—prefer diplomacy to limit Iran’s nuclear activities, compared to just 14% who support military action. www.brookings.edu/articles/tru...

“(On the very day the Times wrote that a vote for him would be a vote against public “disorder,” one journalist found Cuomo parked illegally in a Manhattan turn lane and another noted that he has been repeatedly ticketed in recent months for speeding in school zones.)”

All three of those dudes handcuffing Padilla should be banned from being LEOs for life for any agency. No matter what anybody tells you, you should never be the person telling a senator to kneel and putting handcuffs on him.

I've really been enjoying listening to the Song Exploder and Tape Notes podcasts, about the making of songs. For a surprising number of breakout hits, it's like "we just liked playing songs together, and then turned out that some of the things that we made were stuff people actually liked".

Just discovered the Tape Notes podcast, gonna learn how all my fave electronic artists do what they do

A long long time ago, in a far away galaxy... the US used to tax the rich

I was listening to a couple of professional big tech programmers talk about this at a party, and it sounds like these days they are basically supervising LLMs. Writing intro scripts that tell them who they are and what the task is, having Gemini write some code and Claude code review it.

> @iansams.bsky.social

Respect to the neighbor putting up posters with PR against a specific invasive plant

Guess I can continue to not worry about AI threatening my livelihood for a little while yet, still functioning like a hallucinating high school junior crowdfundingattorney.com/2025/04/30/l...

Famously nothing happened involving race in the 90s we all got along. Can't we all just get along? I can't remember where I heard that

Trump give salmonella

Guess the effect of the pandemic on high schoolers was not 100% negative inspire.berkeley.edu/o/department...

RSS URL of Fry's Lit Theory lectures, to paste into your favorite podcast app; you may have to set to sort by episode name, as the dates are not in order Morris.cloud/FryEng300

Welcome to The Jungle We have norovirus and salmonella We'll get every pathogen in food Honey we know the names

This is very far from confirmed, but still--incredibly cool findings. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/s...

We former USAID officials warned that the illegal, reckless obliteration of our agency would cause people to die.

NEW: i spoke with several young AmeriCorps volunteers around the country who were abruptly pulled off projects building homes, readying forests for wildfire season, and working at food banks Tuesday afternoon. they are now on their way home thanks to DOGE cuts —

Usually listen to sone sort of beat-driven music while doing housework or cooking, found Zakhir Hussain this evening, a genre I will now call (within my own mind at least) "classical Indian trance" open.spotify.com/album/2JKDwX...

I think often about how Continental Europe has constructed so much pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure without having any example for it, except perhaps distant memories of the pre automobile past. Yet the USA with the evident example of Continental Europe is not able to do so.

Seems like this maybe didn’t get over here and I’d hate for you to miss it. Yes this is the actual official account for the United States Department of Labor

"Trump has signed fewer bills into law at this point in his presidency than any new president taking office for the last seven decades." punchbowl.news/article/whit...