The warehouses, expected to hold up to 10,000 people at a time (including kids), will inherently be concentration camps - & so, will be a public health nightmare, among other sorts of nightmares. (As a frame of reference, the FL swamp site never got... 🧵1/4 www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

This is shameful. Dayton, Ohio hospitals are implementing "visitor restrictions" due to high levels of flu, covid, & other seasonal viruses - but they aren't requiring masking. They're just saying no kids, & are asking adults "with any respiratory symptoms... 🧵1/3 share.google/7NV1VilYfwiS...

“By attempting to impose a single nationwide standard and threatening to punish providers who adhere to well-established, evidence-based care, HHS is unlawfully interfering in decisions that should be made by doctors and their patients,” said the NY AG's office. 1/2 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

🚨 Gift 🎁 link - Parents take note: Chatbots are now engaging in sexual predation of tweens & teens, but police can't respond b/c the predators aren't real. It could be your kid: 🔹️72% of US teens have used AI companions at some point 🔹️~half use them at least a few times... 1/2 wapo.st/4scolDU

Gift 🎁 link. In politics, messaging is everything. This article details exactly how they do it; if there's one thing you can say about Trump, it's that he knows his audience. “We were supposed to present the facts, not hype things up. But this veers into propaganda, into... 1/2 wapo.st/4s6YnC5

Trump hates it, but wind energy is awesome. The RI wind farm Trump is going after, Revolution Wind, is supposed to serve my state, too - and we desperately need it.

Well, that's rude. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/u...

This is so wrong. The psychology paper clearly didn’t meet the technical requirements of the assignment, regardless of content. When administrators don't have instructors' backs against political provacateurs, the uni. won't get the best grad students. Lose/lose. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/u...

Psych🧵: Prices rose, so US consumers bought even more stuff. Why? As I've said before: When the going gets tough, Americans go shopping. Some of this is a kind of self-soothing behavior: when people are anxious, shopping is an activity many folks do to relax. 1/7 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/b...

Oh, I think we know why. Scott Pelley "expressed frustration at Ms. Weiss’s handling of the situation and...asked why she had weighed in at the last minute after not attending five screenings of the segment as it was being completed." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/b...

Gift 🎁 link: the personal, social, & generational fallout of the opioid crisis in our most vulnerable communities. "Where work injuries are common and medical care is stretched far too thin, where centuries of extractive industries have taken out timber and coal... www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Give the people what they want, I guess. In 2016, B&N bought the UConn Co-op bookstore, opening a 2nd store just off campus in a new student shopping area. Now, that store is closing to become a "brewing education program," run through the Colleges of Engineering, CAHNR, & Business: brewing...

Just a reminder of how far public health (& everything else) has fallen in less than a year: Scott Gottlieb was Trump's FDA head, the first time we did this. "we’re going to see [diseases] resurge and we’re going to have to build new pediatric hospitals," Gottlieb said. thehill.com/policy/healt...

RIP to Unitarian Universalist Betty Reid Soskin, aged 104, who made great use of all of her years - including working to create the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park to honor the wartime efforts of women & black Americans, & serving as a ranger there from age 85-101.

...potentially leading to more than 49,000 preventable deaths/year among people with any of four major cancers, per Yale. HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy is the anti-health.

🧵Good article; I wonder why no one wrote it sooner. The author says Cassandras are mostly women, esp. those who are black or LGTBQ. "The mythical Cassandra hardly needed divine gifts to sense that the enemy army vanishing and leaving behind a giant horse statue... newrepublic.com/article/2042...

Trump breaks things: For 58 yrs, the American College Theatre Festival, which serves 18,000 students/year, has run its national festival at the Kennedy Center. No longer: doing it there is “no longer viable” b/c of decisions that don't align w/ ACTF values. www.broadwayworld.com/article/Amer...

It doesn't matter how good wind power is for the US; Trump just doesn't like it. He's frozen the leases on 5 wind farms: 🔹️$25 billion worth of projects 🔹️to power > 2.5 million homes and businesses 🔹️creating ~10,000 jobs. He says they threaten national... 1/2 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/c...

☎️ Call your Senators; tell them to vote NO. The legislation would remove Endangered Species Act protection from >4,500 wolves in the western Great Lakes region & nearly 2,800 wolves in seven western states. It "would also bar courts from reviewing the decision." 1/3 www.wpr.org/news/us-hous...

As if we didn't know. Weiss said it was b/c the WH hadn't commented. But as correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi noted, "If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch' for any reporting... www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g...

"After the funding cuts, cases in South Sudan spiked. It’s the worst cholera epidemic in the country’s history." By late Feb., DOGE was "on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work." "Publicly, the administration tried to temper international backlash by... 1/3 www.propublica.org/article/usai...

The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly: 🙂The Good: The author suggests that doctors reinvent their field to meet people where they are, writing, "It’s time for us to think of ourselves not as the high priests of health care but as what we have always been: healers." 1/6 www.newyorker.com/culture/2025...

No kidding. Even Danish experts are saying, "Wait, stop, don't." www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-...

Via Robert Reich:

Get vaxxed (it's not too late), mask up, and run some HEPAs, folks. This looks ugly.

And yet, we're the ones who feel nauseated and sick.

The Trump regime will do everything it can to kill foodstamps, like it's killing the ACA. Not only is the USDA manipulating food retailers into ending their participation in SNAP (see ⬇️) & throwing 3M Americans off, but benefits are dropping. A friend of mine was getting $155/month, but it's 🧵1/3

The USSR & Nazi Germany should have taught us to be careful whom we trust with sensitive information, even among friends & neighbors. At the absolute least, avoid fanatics at all costs. They'll try to get you committed, to stop you doing what they oppose: 🧵1/3 www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a6...

This is what "being great" actually is. Kudos to @ricksteves.bsky.social, who teaches us so much about how to be both good global citizens & good local neighbors.

🧵Trump's immigration policy is endangering lives, inc. those of infants & kids, in the US: "immigrant families nationwide have become more likely to skip or delay healthcare, due in part to concerns about their legal status," per a recent KFF/NYT survey. www.medpagetoday.com/obgyn/genera... 🧵

The Trump regime protects & promotes illegal behavior while destroying public health: Dr. Kirk Moore faced 35 yrs. in prison for faking covid vax cards & throwing away government-supplied doses. Then US AG Pam Bondi ordered Utah prosecutors to drop all charges. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...

Good example of why I watch nothing on CBS anymore except Colbert. You might want to do the same.

If the regime intended this to improve health, believe me, they would have hauled out assessment metrics. They want to kill SNAP (by getting retailers to do it for them), and they want to keep people in the dark about the human consequences as much as possible.

It's beyond shocking, but most Americans, even the ones here on Bluesky, don't care, because they think, "Food stamp recipients eat too much junk food; we have to make them stop." Even when you explain that this isn't about junk food (if it were, the USDA would provide a list), they don't care. ....

After years of trying to repeal it, the Republicans finally figured out how to kill the ACA - and with it, a whole lot of Americans. A middle-class family’s only option: A $43,000 health insurance premium www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

Gift 🎁 link: How Trump broke the government & what he's building in its place. (Ex: the State Dept. plans to "replace [its] traditional condemnation of torture and the persecution of minorities worldwide with scrutiny of abortion and youth gender transitioning in other countries." wapo.st/4b14KAy

🚨 "Junk food" restrictions are coming, starting January 1st - but only to SNAP recipients, & they're likely to keep ALL food, not just junk food, from millions of Americans. Important: 🔹️The Ag Dept., which runs SNAP, hasn't offered any guidance - not on what's... 🧵 share.google/7bfOXOklvSi8...

The early bird gets the domain name. "Morton isn’t quite ready to reveal how he plans to design his Trump-Kennedy Center websites, but, he writes, “it’ll absolutely reflect the absurdity of the moment. Lots of surprises." I look forward to it. www.washingtonpost.com/style/2025/1...

Liars gonna lie. Trump's "warrior dividend" is not coming from tariffs. Instead, "More than $2.9 billion in reconciliation funds was allocated to beef up troop housing allowances. Now it’s being used for $1,776 checks." Votes over troop housing, seems like. www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/...

They scratch Trump's back; he scratches theirs. "At least 20 people who have received clemency from Trump so far this year...were also forgiven of financial penalties totaling tens of millions of dollars" in restitution to both individuals & the IRS. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Tfw the power has been out for almost 12 d*** hours and you're still flipping light switches every other minute and then going, "oops!" Power to the people, damnit. Let there be light. (There's still no restoration estimate, which means it could be days.)

Republican pols stoke the flames of civil war; it's like they *want* fighting in the streets. Sen. Tommy Tuberville said Tues. of the Republican student who died at Brown, “You can’t tell me she wasn’t targeted. I would hate to miss that opportunity... 1/2 www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

More reporting on RFK's new proposed destruction of the childhood vaccination schedule: "Denmark’s immunization schedule does not recommend seasonal vaccines for respiratory viruses like RSV, COVID-19 and the flu. [It] also doesn’t recommend vaccinating... 🧵1/3 share.google/NLSDpR6gqdNa...

Well, that was unexpected. (Romney is worth approx. $200 million, by the way, so he can afford to pay up. I never got over reading about the car elevator at his La Jolla mansion, some years ago - & that was just one of several houses he owned.) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/o...

🚨🚨🚨📢 Pls. post your comment (via the link below) on the newly proposed HHS rule that would financially destroy any hospital providing gender-affirming care to youth. Regardless of what you think of GA care (which you should support), you really don't... www.federalregister.gov/documents/20... 1/3

In at least one of these cases, a bakery left their back door wide open. I'm not sure what they expected the bear to do; there were a *lot* of really nice smelling cupcakes sitting back there. I might have wandered in, too.

May the odds be ever in their favor. thehill.com/blogs/in-the...

Here's the WaPo reporting on how RFK is going to k** us all, also shared with a gift 🎁 link (but I'm not summarizing this one, b/c you can read my summary of the NYT reporting, below). wapo.st/4aXfzn5

🚨🚨 Here it comes! (Gift 🎁 link, so you can read the whole article) Excerpts: This means "fewer shots recommended for children. But a Danish health official found the idea baffling, saying the United States was getting 'crazier and crazier in public health.'" 1/9 www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/h...

If you're still hanging out there, why? It's (past) time to go.