Cruelty is big business

🎶...Little ditty 'bout Jack & Diane 🍄‍🟫 #photography #nature #music #JohnMellencamp #art #fungifriends #fungi #reclaimingorange

The main business model of Silicon Valley from Uber to AirBnB to Spotify is: skim profit off others' goods and labor. Often in ways that are exploitative of individuals or destructive of larger forces (as with Amazon and the retail that kept people heading out in public).

Folks need to understand, if a law isn’t being enforced, it’s technically “illegal,”sure, but practically speaking, it is not. Laws only inform behavior is we follow them. Republicans are simply discarding criminal law, refusing to enforce them against their own militarized government employees.

Xylaria longipes is a soft-rotter, slowly breaking down cellulose in wood. Cut it lengthwise and you can see the individual closed fruitbodies producing sexual spores, or perithecia, along the margin. 🍄 Photos from Zoutelande (The Netherlands), 2025.

Here is the official announcement. Now more than ever, acknowledging the contributions of immigrants is so important. Thank you @vilcekfoundation.bsky.social, and congrats to my fellow awardees. Can't wait to meet you all.

We're proud to join the Vilcek Foundation in recognizing HHMI Investigator Karolin Luger, whose dedication & groundbreaking nucleosome research has led to the development of innovative new drug treatments, including cancer medicines. hhmi.news/49VciEd @vilcekfoundation.bsky.social

My great great uncle was targeted by Mussolini’s blackshirts for being a “vocal anti-fascist”. News of the incoming deathsquad traveled down the grapevine and he fled to Naples to board the next ship to the USA. The rest of my family took note and followed suit in the years that followed.

Because I love a) Talkin' trash about Josh Shapiro b) Talkin' trash about Fetterman c) Larry Krasner here is a gift link for y'all: share.inquirer.com/IxvbjE

A community is devastated after ICE raids an LA church and arrests a congregant during a church event. “This was a violation of our Sacred Right to Worship and Serve our Lord Jesus Christ Freely and Safely.” ~ Church officials, in a press release

A white man in Dillard, Oregon was arrested for stopping people on the freeway to demand at gunpoint that they tell him if they were citizens. He shot and missed one + attempted to get another in his truck to bring to police. Before his spree, he called local PD to complain about "foreign" people.

NSF GRFP applicants (and mentors): Was your application Returned Without Review and deemed ineligible despite fitting in the allowed topics? 1) Write NSF 2) Write your Congressperson 3) CC us at [email protected] so we can compile + follow up Details and template at grant-witness.us/grfp-letter

Man, when Google did away with its “Don’t be evil” ethos, I did not expect the new ethos to just become “Be evil”

In many of the first generation of modern concentration camp systems (near the turn of the twentieth century), the vast majority of deaths were caused by disease and malnutrition. Most of the victims were women and children.

Today I wrote about the Epstein files, the abusiveness intrinsic to the billionaire mindset, and our culture's enabling instinct to permit depravity as a privilege of power. "Where does it all end?" That's what's often asked. Rarely asked is "how do we end it?" www.the-reframe.com/where-it-ends/

hindsight is 20/20 but maybe selecting university presidents on their willingness to debase themselves for private donor money is related to the current difficulties in defending academia from fascism

Men, it's worth pondering that these academic men are the same ones that teach young women straight out of school. These are the men given academic authority over young women's careers. It's really challenging for young women to negotiate the minefield of creepiness these men create for them.

Trump gave a foreign power access to America's highly advanced and protected AI chips in exchange his personal enrichment of half a billion dollars. This makes Watergate look as if Nixon had driven three miles over the speed limit once.

YES! 💯💯💯 Any argument asserting that billionaires are necessary or useful is an inherently circular one. If billionaires did not have billions of dollars, we would have no need for them or their charity. It is that simple.

Part of what I’m saying is that university presidents and finance apparatuses knew and supported these relationships We can and should blame the individuals named in the files but they represent a larger structural phenomenon and it’s not just rape culture

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

TLDR; it is too early to stop doing taxonomic & natural history work and exclusively do meta-analysis; our existing datasets are highly structured & biology is weird. we shouldn't assume we already know enough to extrapolate a species' needs for conservation- we still need taxonomy & autecology

“Every single day that a kid is in a place like this, they deteriorate,” Hidalgo said. “I’ve seen [them] withdraw. They lose weight; they just get physically worse.”

New paper out: The flounder effect: disparities in taxonomic and ecological study intensity across extant and fossil marine organisms hamper conservation with @fossildetective.bsky.social, @bigfacecats.bsky.social, Curtis Congreve & @jonhendricks.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44... 🦑⚒️

Yes please

A permanent position as a research scientist is opened in our team! We look for a plant physiologist with expertise in plant / microorganism interactions to identify plant susceptibility factors to fungal disease. Please forward!

Here's a chunk relevant to the above:

It’s pretty amazing that the entire American experiment has been brought to its knees by a guy whose response to “you can’t do that” is “you can’t stop me”, and the response of various institutions to his demands isn’t to do the same thing but rather to imagine him as some force of nature and fold.

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

OH AND FOR EVERYONE SAYING “just let the billionaires fund science!” This is that. And look how it turned out!

Marimar Martinez is a hero. She was shot 5 times by ICE. The agent told her to “do something b*tch” before opening fire. He later bragged “5 shots, 7 holes”. DHS tried to smear her reputation but video footage vindicated her. Next week she will testify in Washington about ICE’s brutality.

Part of the problem with Trump’s deportation goons is that they believe the lies he and his senior officials have spouted about ICE protesters. Here’s a particularly embarrassing episode featuring a suburban police chief near St. Paul. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/u...

"We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand"

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/u...

Please never forget all these powerful and wealthy men (and a few woman) didn't care at all that Epstein raped girls. Just like now, they only cared about their own interests, bottom line and pleasures. The girls remain an afterthought. A disposable toy or simply a "cost" of doing business.

"Befriending Jeffrey Epstein" was just a thing rich and influential people did, like going to Davos or Aspen, vacay in St. Bart's, owning a megayacht, receiving a sinecure at an Ivy. Along with access to all that, it appears to have simply been understood that wealth and status made pedophilia okay.

The Epstein files make it painfully clear that American oligarchs are no different from the ruling elites depicted by the Marquis de Sade in “Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue”.

This is the same man who is funneling our tax dollars into a secret police that is abducting, assaulting, and murdering Americans and foreigners alike. Every day he remains in office, predators around the world celebrate.

ICYMI, Rice University students have developed a free online map to track ICE activity throughout the country. Find it here: www.icemap.dev. Gift link to @houstonchronicle.com story about it: www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...

This is in small-town Minnesota. This is not in one of those demonic blue cities that the GOP talk about. This is pretty goddam rural. www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Introducing Cuddles Von Profit, a capitalist cat-astrophe and a purr-fect reminder that billionaires are ridiculous, but cats are essential. 100% less morally reprehensible than a billionaire. Adopt Cuddles and own a billionaire instead of them owning you. Warning: Do not eat. #Caturday #cats

Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion of taxpayers’ money for leaking his tax returns during his first term in office. Any payout to the president from the lawsuit would effectively allow him to pocket tax dollars paid by Americans.

Tesla Quietly Pauses Its “Unsupervised” Robotaxi Rides as Reality Sets In That didn't take long. It appears that Tesla CEO Elon Musk may have once again duped his fans and investors In any case, this seems like a another classic Musk bait-and-switch.

“Journalists have long been cautioned to disable biometrics in specific situations where they might face heightened risk of losing control of their phones… “Instead of using biometrics, it’s safest to unlock your devices using an alphanumeric passphrase.” bsky.app/profile/send...

Sergey Brin donated $20m to a new political drive (by billionaires) aimed (they say) at solving CA’s housing crisis. Their efforts may also help ward off a wealth tax www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/u... NYT meant to say CA billionaires are funding competing ballot measures to confuse voters & avoid tax.

UNIVERSITY NEWSLETTER: * Think of the environment! Don't print paper documents! * We are sorry that we no longer provide staff discounts to the 'rent a bike' scheme * We are thrilled to announce our new strategic partnership with Fossil Fuels R Us, who have agreed to fund 10 new fellowships!

An interesting, and entirely understandable, development. Taking the temperature of any discourse amongst colleagues demonstrates this sort of behavior from any professional society is probably not a bad mood right now.

My first book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life, will be published by Yale University Press on 11 August (UK) and 8 September (US). Please help spread the word! 🙏 UK: yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300... @yalebooks.bsky.social 🏳️‍🌈📚🐵 US: yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300... @yalepress.bsky.social 🏳️‍⚧️ 🗃️🦋