leaving my job at the "trying to understand vaccine hesitancy in families of kids with cancer" institute to go work as a low level assembly line shouting guy at the "manufacturing vaccine hesitancy and killing kids with cancer" factory...... pathetic. never let this guy back into academia after this

My lab has literally pioneered methods to measure health impacts of climate change that I can't get NIH grants to put into practice; meanwhile, this guy backchannels his way to being director of NIEHS? Folks: I'm going to become the joker about this one insideclimatenews.org/news/2110202...

NEW — I'm suing DC Metro Police for the full body cam footage from the DOGE raid on the US Institute of Peace back in March. The public deserves to know why MPD chose to sell out the people they’re tasked with protecting in order to bend to Trump's will. I'm repped pro bono by @rcfp.org. Details:

Racist / white supremacist medievalisms in America…

So this is going to give quite a few people some sleepless nights. The Senate stacked a whole bunch of nominees into one hearing so that each one would only get a few questions. Ingrassia was expected to suck up all the Dem questions.

the most popular smartphone maker in history literally had to stop using "AI" because it would constantly just make things up and had zero contextual "understanding" of what it was doing

A fun byproduct of unitary executive theory—if the president controls everyone under him, he can demand they transfer hundreds of millions in tax dollars into his bank account

Kristi Noem has unleashed dangerously unfit, untrained thugs on our streets and in our communities, leaving death, injury, and property destruction in their wake. No one is safe from their campaign of terror. Not even law enforcement.

Cool! Trump demanded that the Justice Department pay him ~$230 million for the federal investigations into him; any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior Justice Department officials who were defense lawyers for Trump and those in his orbit.

ICE is stockpiling arms, including chemical weapons, guided missile warheads and explosive components. The spending dwarfs anything we've ever seen in the agency - a 700% increase. The President is building an army to attack his own country.

Not only are the texts bizarre, this whole case seems to be a complete waste of time for the Justice Dept, carried out for revenge. SC judges are taking gifts from billionaires; POTUS is openly asking for & accepting bribes, and this case is over terms in a standard residential mortgage application.

The silver lining is the Professor still has his faculty job, but this is explicitly viewpoint discrimination, a message that there is no such thing as faculty governance. All admin must be aligned with a political party. For all the talk of leftist indoctrination, this is no different from China.

CHICAGO: “They took my son. He’s only 16. I just want my baby back.”

ah, no way man

To be clear: deportations to increase cultural homogeneity is the text book definition of ethnic cleansing. Demands that come even close to this are so far outside any democratic norm and the rule of law. What has happened to a country when this is not condemned in the strongest possible terms?

"most of the time the difference between a violent protest and a nonviolent one is whether or not the cops start kettling and bashing." www.eschatonblog.com/2025/10/prot...

Randomly remembering the furor when Carter added solar panels to the White House and how Reagan couldn’t wait to get rid of them.

why not isn’t this something they are proud of

The White House keeps making a big deal of the fact that the ballroom is privately funded but that’s one of the worst things about it. These people and companies are buying influence. None of this is okay.

Only a matter of time, expect more countries to follow… Dutch intelligence chiefs say the Netherlands has become more selective in sharing information with U.S. agencies due to political uncertainty in Washington, while increasing cooperation with European partners -De Volkskrant

The basic appeal of fascism is not a mystery to me. But as long as I live, I will never understand why a sizable plurality of the American ruling class enthusiastically embraced as their leader the dumbest, laziest, and most violent motherfucker on the face of the earth

The Treasury Department instructed employees not to share to share photos of the demolition of parts of the White House’s East Wing

By a 2-1 opinion, the Ninth Circuit just held that the president can federalize the National Guard forces and deploy them when protesters shine flashlights in the eyes of ICE officers. It’s one of the most dangerous and legally flawed court decisions I’ve seen this year. 1/23

it rules that the dumb, venal idiots in charge of the country also can't stop themselves from gloating about all their dumb, venal schemes directly to reporters

the aws outage should be evidence that running half the internet on a single company's servers is a terrible idea but i fear nothing will change

You may disagree with some of Trump’s policies (pointless military invasion of your exurbs, no healthcare, routine savage beatings) but at least his peace deals keep falling apart immediately

a tyrant is ignoring the constitution, firing live artillery at americans, invading our cities, and tearing down the white house to build himself a palace our institutions won't react because they're lost in a digital dreamstate, unable to decide what is true because of social media poisoning

Still appalled at how paltry and terrible the NYT coverage of the protests were and how nobody there feels any responsibility to address the criticism. This was not something that caught them off guard. This was many levels of decisions.

learned recently that the guy who wrote "The Night Before Christmas," clement clarke moore, also wrote a takedown of thomas jefferson's proto-scientific racism in "Notes on the State of Virginia," basically accusing him and others of making it up to justify slavery. which, that's right.

As predicted.

so much about this case is judges in extreme distress

The White House: the government is closed, but we can still kidnap your neighbor. Also the White House: also we're destroying the building Also the White House: and you health insurance premiums are going up over 400%

If you say accurately that enslaved laborers contributed to the building and maintenance of the White House then that’s desecration. If you demolish parts of the WH for a $250 million project during a shutdown as unemployment creeps upwards, that’s just patriotism.

So, per reporting from Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng, in today’s new ‘First Draft’ newsletter, Trump tried to get a newly-divorced Russ Vought, Project 2025 architect & now budget chief, laid at Mar-a-Lago. The details are, ahem, as crude as you’d expect from Trump. zeteo.com/p/trump-shit...

MODERATOR: Is the Roberts Court the most pro-corporate Supreme Court ever? GENERAL COUNSELS AT TRILLION-DOLLAR CORPORATIONS, IN UNISON: No. Also, while we're here, we would like to state for the record how smart and handsome we think John Roberts is www.scotusblog.com/2025/10/scot...

The US is blazing a trail for right wing extremists everywhere - openly violate the constitution and see what you can get away with. Chip away at political norms and institutions. Simply ignore constitutional law by shifting the Overton Window and corrupting the party in power and its judiciary.

Tomorrow the current US federal government shutdown will be tied as the second-longest in history, and I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that it's moving toward a conclusion. Amidst all the chaos right now, it's hardly even a top-five news story at this point.

Normal folks are cutting off friends and family for being fascists and there’s Booker saying cheese next to a war criminal in the middle of doing a genocide, which Booker also refuses to call a genocide! It’s not like many other Dem senators are better but he really let me down.

They aren't really targeting professors in Texas, are they? Me:

When Trump announced 4 days ago randomly that India agreed to stop buying Russia oil, I was surprised because Russia is their largest supplier, we are still in a trade war with India, and their govt has said nothing about it. Turns out he just lied and made it up. Shocker.

they are so close to understanding the entire point of trade

20 years ago Conan O'Brien would joke that he went to Harvard Driving School, well who's laughing now?

This is not normal. It was a reckless decision for what amounts to playing tanks in a sandbox for an audience of one.

This loser is weak and scared.

The comparison to the Tea Party is right -- not just in terms of the size of the protests, but the complaints they're making. The Tea Party began when a CNBC reporter and a crowd of bond traders threw a tantrum about Obama continuing the post-crash bailouts that Bush began. That was their "tyranny"

Hard to believe this #NoKings footage of Chicago is real. (Is it?)

The reasons don’t seem that unknown.”For reasons that are unknown, Mr. Black wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to at least three women who were associated with Mr. Epstein.” www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/b...

There's just no way to exaggerate how cooked your brain has to be to think like this. Trump is an unprecedented, law-breaking, norm-breaking, increasingly demented maniac who is destroying this country's basic institutions. Like, right now! As we speak! But media elites find that boring.

That's the bad news, the good news is that the student journalists at Purdue University, where the student paper owns its own printing press, stepped in, printed the IDS edition that was banned, drove the papers to Bloomington and filled all of the paper boxes on campus ahead of homecoming.