For @truthout.org yesterday I wrote about how the government's lies about tylenol and autism reminds me a lot of the government's lies about trans people. truthout.org/articles/ant...

“FBI agents reassigned to round up immigrants have had to walk away from investigations into violent predators who target and exploit children online,” a recent report revealed. Meanwhile, the vast majority of immigrants in ICE custody have no criminal record at all 👇🏽

The fun part of the trip is done. Now it’s time to begin the overly long trek back home. It was a good trip, made some new friends, saw some amazing things, and had some very tasty food. But I’m ready to be home.

Having spent time being a tourist in an illiberal autocracy (Hungary), the most striking thing is the normalcy. No jackboots and checkpoints, no breadlines and “Your papers, please.” But also no real elections, fractured human rights, and illegalization of minorities. Will we notice it in the US?

I finally found/made some free time on this trip for writing. 1679 words, a complete scene following the discovery of the second body. It’s the first forward motion I’ve made on _this_ particular novel in a while. I guess I needed a break. Maybe I’ll finish it this year. #AmWriting

The only AI I want in my writing tool is the one that has the manuscript of my entire novel in memory and can, when prompted, remind me of the name of that throwaway character I added several scenes ago who has unexpectedly popped up again. /sigh/

Highlights of our tour of Moon Lake and Salzburg: an operatic tour guide who sang songs from The Sound of Music, touring a gorgeous church while a funeral mass was being held, sightseeing in Salzburg while the annual Rupertikirtag festival was in full swing. Still, it was interesting and worth it.

Well, my biggest concern about river cruises has come true. Because there’s only one dining room, and because it’s intended to be an “elevated” dining experience, there’s very little on the menus I can or will eat. I guess it’s chicken breasts for dinner for the week. Hating myself over this. :-/

Sitting at a light rail station in Munich at quarter till midnight, watching all the guys decked out in lederhosen stumbling along seriously intoxicated. Must be Oktoberfest! LOL

95 democrats, including @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social voted to "honor" the life of charlie kirk, who called for joe biden to be killed and said black women like justice ketanji brown jackson are unqualified affirmative action hires. shame. clerk.house.gov/evs/2025/rol...

moments ago, ice agents again came out of the broadview detention/“professing” facility to escort a silver suv out of the lot. one of the agents picked up and threw congressional candidate kat abughazaleh to the ground.

A woman protesting outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, was brutally assaulted by goons who used mace and sting balls on her.

On the one hand, when talking about trans athletes in sport, we demand a Harrison Bergeron style of “equality.” But when talking about cisgender athletes in sport, we laud people with advantageous genetics and body shapes. We don’t penalize very tall people in basketball or swimmers with large feet.

We visited the Dachau Concentration Camp memorial today. Quite sobering and heart-wrenching. And the events leading up to the SS’s use of the camp have far too many parallels to what we’re seeing in the US today.

#100/2025 County elections board chair James Yokeley Jr. [R-NC] was charged with felony child abuse after being caught on video putting cocaine and MDMA in his granddaughters’ ice cream at a Dairy Queen. What kind of monster does that? Can we get 100 reposts for our 100th crime tracked in 2025?

Hearing the John Denver classic “Take Me Home, Country Roads” sung loudly in a thick German accent in a Munich restaurant is certainly an experience.

TFW you’re at a restaurant 15 minutes away from home, about to order a tasty lunch, and both your and your partner’s phones start popping alerts that a smoke alarm is going off in your home. Neat but panic-inducing feature of Apple HomePods. Home now and see nothing amiss. Probably a dying battery?

Wtf When news broke that a suspect had been identified in the Charlie Kirk case, an X user asked Grok to supply an image of the suspect. Grok replied with an AI-generated photo of a young Black man. (Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a white man.)

"I wish we could blame this on muslims or migrants, but turns out it was one of us." what a wild thing to say

I want you all to just watch how quickly mainstream media moves on from this story now.

I’ve played through the Artemis storyline in No Man’s Sky probably a dozen times so far. Lately each time I tell myself I’m gonna do it differently *this time,* yet every time I wind up saving them instead of letting them die, despite knowing how it all ends. Big ol’ softie, me.

Appoint unprofessional and unserious people at the top of an important agency, expect the entire agency to quickly become unprofessional and unserious.

So the HBCU that raised me is on lockdown because some right winger thinks that's how they get retribution for Charlie Kirk, whose killer is unknown? The automatic response is to kill Black people, who likely have NOTHING to do with his murder. And I'm supposed to empathize with this?

The SNW finale was poignant yet satisfying, at least to me. Looking forward to season four, and to Starfleet Academy!

Right now those in power are telling you straight to your face that "if a piece of shit racist white man is harmed by gun violence it's a problem and you should feel sympathy. If anyone else is harmed (kids included), that's life". I do hope this radicalizes people. I hope this wakes people up.

There has been a rush among centrists like Gavin Newsom and Ezra Klein to brush over the hateful life of Charlie Kirk and valorize the man. Let me be clear, killing Charlie Kirk was wrong and abhorrent. We must condemn murder without sanitizing a man who built his empire on hate. My latest piece.

I will say this: There is a difference between celebrating someone's death and refusing to celebrate their life.

So, let’s pretend for the sake of argument that the signature on the Trump letter in Epstein’s bday book is fake and someone nefariously had it included in the book so many years ago. The obvious next question is “why?” The book was compiled long before Trump’s run for office. It’s nonsensical.

So we took the plunge and signed up for a three week intensive “moving to Spain” online class. It looks like we’re taking major strides to making this real. I’m guessing there’ll be 60 or so people in our cohort, several of whom are same-sex couples. Feeling both excited and a wee bit anxious.

I abhor political violence, whether it be MN State Representative Melissa Hortman or rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Assassination does not solve any problems and typically creates a host of new ones. I do note the irony of Kirk’s frequent use of violent rhetoric and shrugging at murdered children.

Kash Patel and others were quick to post sympathetic statements when Charlie Kirk was shot, but were rather silent about Representative Hortman’s assassination. Not that I’m at all surprised.

Stray thought: the plummeting birth rates, the loneliness epidemic, etc are what happens when our species is finally pushed to the limit, when the cumulative stress is too much to go mere day-to-day existence. The logical end result of runaway capitalism, and they aren't quite getting it.

The New Yorker asked me “how bad” today’s Supreme Court ruling was. I boiled it down to one paragraph: link.newyorker.com/view/5bda429...

Happy Star Trek day to you, and Happy ReBirthday to me! What’s a ReBirthday, you ask? It’s the day I celebrate blowing up the closet door and becoming my authentic self. Thirty-five years ago today, I came out to my parents, to 40+ of my closest friends, and attended my first LGBT event. Yay me!

What’s particularly frustrating to me about all of these SCOTUS decisions is that they’re mostly about lifting preliminary injunctions and the like. A majority of these cases have yet to be heard. The injunctions were an attempt at harm reduction. This SCOTUS does not care to reduce harm.

According to this morning’s SCOTUS shadow docket, simply looking Latino/a, having a Hispanic sounding name, or just being in the “wrong” part of town is reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. SCITUS isn’t gonna save us, folks.

How long before Trump and Hegseth start talking about needing “living space” (or more colloquially, lebensraum)?

At four in the morning, we lost power at the house. I found this out by jerking wide awake from feeling like I was suffocating as my BiPAP machine abruptly shut off. Whee! I really should investigate pass-through backup batteries for the infernal device.

475 arrests of suspected undocumented immigrants working for various subsidiaries or contractors. How many of those companies who employed the detainees will be held accountable? If we were serious about halting undocumented migration, we’d go after employers. We don’t. www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/u...

I’m watching the Spanish instructional YouTube videos from a guy calling himself “Qroo Paul.” After four lessons, I feel like I’m understanding how to put together simple Spanish sentences with his instructions better than I have after a year with the Owl app. Much better fit for my neurodivergence.

"Another issue that could provide a barrier to COVID vaccine access is insurance. According to KFF, almost all payers are required to cover ACIP-recommended vaccines at no cost. If ACIP does not recommend the COVID vaccines for certain groups, that could mean some people have to pay out of pocket."

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

@khanna.house.gov I am simply aghast at you making an equivalence between Oscar Wilde and notorious TERF Graham Lineman. Not comparable in the least! Lineman’s over-the-top and violent tweets are nothing like Wilde’s writings. Your “free speech absolutism” will lead to the murder of innocent people.

The new expedition in No Man’s Sky is out! Yay! Lots of fighting Sentinels. Meh. It crashes every 20 to 30 minutes on my Mac. Sigh. I need to be better at remembering to avoid trying to run the Expeditions in NMS until they’ve been out for a few days for the first round or two of bug fixes.

I can’t imagine any possible negative repercussions from this… apnews.com/article/flor...

I know it's a really petty thing, but the continued insistence by so many people, books, apps, etc. that the "immersive" method of learning languages is the *only* way to learn a language chaps my hide. Not everyone learns efficiently the same way. I need to know the rules as I learn the vocabulary.

Drug trafficking is not a capital crime; it doesn’t carry a death sentence. I genuinely cannot think of anything under U.S. law that would permit premeditated government assassination of people suspected of drug trafficking.

Lethal force against a civilian vessel in international waters is a war crime if not in self-defense. If not in self-defense, only non-lethal actions, such as warning shots or disabling fire, are allowed. "Not yielding to pursuers" or "suspected of carrying drugs" doesn't carry a death sentence.