"Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired servicemember that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn't like, they will come after them the same way. It's outrageous and it is wrong. There is nothing more un-American than that," - Kelly www.npr.org/2026/01/05/n...

Big: Wyoming supreme court just struck down abortion ban. And get this: The reason is a constitutional amendment codifying a right to make health care decisions... passed in 2012 by conservatives who thought it'd screw Obamacare! Quite the backfire. We explained this lawsuit a few years back:

So yes, I agree that there is "ghoulish indifference to the lives and humanity of people," but it's not for people abroad vs people in the US. There's a different dimension for who we are supposed to care about, and who we are supposed to consider throwaway people.

🐋 “Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.” -Moby Dick (I’m participating in a group reading Moby Dick this month, see the feed for details: bsky.app/profile/did:... So many quotes feel timeless and relevant to today.)

30 years ago they were like we have to ban song lyrics for the children but it’s full steam ahead for the here’s how to do drugs until you die machine

It’s genuinely wild that the United States spent decades building an elaborate rules-based international order which de facto cemented its permanent status as the dominant global hegemon, sustained by ideology rather than might, and now is just blowing it all up for literally no reason

A reminder - before Trump, MAGA, Musk and Fox rewrote history - that this is what the entire country agreed had happened five years ago today:

They won't even use the term transgender regarding their coverage in this statement, they use the term gender identity. I think the Times might be making a shift towards an editorial stance that pathologizes trans people.

If the DEA had killed 80 innocent Americans in the course of apprehending one drug dealer, there would be riots. But we are so ghoulishly indifferent to the lives and humanity of people abroad that it's barely even part of the conversation.

Lunacy. This is sick. We have to impeach them all.

🐋 “It’s a mutual, joint stock world, in all meridians” Ishmael imagines Queequeg thinking. Yes it is. We must all help each other, folks.

🐋 One must imagine Ishmael snug.

I recently reread this comic and yes, the direct reference to real geopolitics was almost shocking.

You couldn't publish this today. You'd have to cloak it under several layers of metaphor.

Tim Kaine is showing message discipline here by using the official resigned grimace of the Democratic Party.

So fmr Honduran President Hernandez voluntarily surrendered, and was duly extradited, tried and convicted for drug trafficking, and Trump pardoned him 6w ago. And this morning, Trump illegally attacks Venezuela and abducts its president and his wife purportedly to try them for drug trafficking.

This sums up where I am, aside from ‘what the absolute fuck’, which can be taken as a given

If you are a resident of California, the state now has a portal where you can demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers with a single request form, for free. consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov

Wanna see real-life miracles? Fund scientific research. A team of US scientists just cured Alzheimer’s in mice — and there is now hope that the disease can be reversed in humans. futurism.com/health-medic...

Isn’t the product supposed to be good for a while before the enshittification phase begins?

"don't regulate us or force us to pay taxes or install ANY ethical guard rails whatsoever or you'll never see magic space utopia" is the repeated lie, propped up by a shit press

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

here’s a gift link to the piece wapo.st/49uy2q1

🐋 I’m ready!

So much of the issues related to transit governance is downstream from the fact that both the boards of these agencies and many of advocates in this space believe that transit is a welfare program that acts as “transportation of last resort” as opposed to a viable, affordable alternative to cars.

THE MONTH OF DICK 2026 IS COMING IN JANUARY Get ready! 1. Follow the feed: bsky.app/profile/jaco... and ask me to add you 2. Download the planned reading sequence (source doc here bit.ly/4p4oYwA) 3. Get yourself an edition (book, free e-book, whatever) 4. Notify your bosom friends 5. Whale tattoo?

My kids and I rode @thatmc.bsky.social ‘s bus today, just to spend some time with him. The buses we rode (his and others) were full of people, making our city vibrant and alive.

Merry Christmas! A feel good story for the occasion.

Good article on the history of San Francisco's pedestrian bridge over Kearny at Portsmouth Square, aka China Banks, as a testament to skateboarders exploits, Chinatown residents determination, and SF gov's glacial pace fixing glaring though well-intentioned mistakes. www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/a...

LOL they redacted the files so ineptly that you can basically read them with a little effort? Please let this be true.

CBS paid the president of the United States millions in bribe money and now they censor news reports so it does not annoy him. I don’t know how much plainer we can put this.

As I explained in my newsletter, this is because Trump's team has reinvented millennia of math to invert what "percentage of change" means. www.howtoreadthisch.art/its-beginnin...

Moderating a recent panel about transportation resilience, I asked whether self-driving cars make mobility networks more fragile due to the risks of malfunctions. Anyway, this happened in San Francisco yesterday.

Waymo has halted service in San Francisco after numerous videos & images showed its autonomous cars snarling traffic during the blackout. With traffic lights down, Waymos across the city stopped dead in their tracks at intersections. missionlocal.org/2025/12/sf-w...

PG&E is having a massive outage in San Francisco. Waymo robots aren't handling the traffic light outages well. Cell service is also out is some places. No surprise as Waymo robots & cell have repeatedly failed during power outages. CPUC regulates both Waymo and PG&E (Profit Greed & Explosions).

Why decline all these chances to defend feminism? Because to participate would be accepting the premise that our rights and humanity are up for debate in the first place. Once you’ve conceded that it’s reasonable to ask whether women’s equality was a mistake, you’ve already lost.

Horrific

Delightful and geeky! www.311wrapped.com

It’s not just Tesla. Self-driving car companies are also turning up the aggression dial. In San Francisco, Waymos have recently been documented blocking cycle lanes and nudging into crosswalks where children are walking.

A recent example: Teslas running Full-Self Driving’s “Mad Max mode” now roll through stop signs and go 15 MPH+ beyond speed limits. (Not the point, but why is Mad Max’s icon a mustachioed guy in a cowboy hat?)

Cars are now being programmed to violate traffic rules. What could go wrong? Me, in @fastcompany.com. (no paywall) 🧵

Jesus Christ

Link to the article again, which I highly encourage reading in full alexschapiro.com/security/vul...

It's a whole of government effort to eradicate trans people from society. This is just the first step. They're coming for all of us.

NEW: President Trump is expanding the previous 19-country travel ban to a whopping 39 countries (plus the Palestinian Authority), and appears to expand a block on legal immigration to now include spouses, children, and parents of U.S. citizens, who were previously exempted.

Here are the 28 Dem Senators who voted to advance the first federal ban on trans athletes & a federal definition of sex that would make trans & intersex people non-existent: Angela Alsobrooks (MD), Tammy Baldwin (WI), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE), Chris Coons (DE), ->

Speed safety cameras work. Track SF's program, initial results and evaluations here: www.sfmta.com/projects/spe...

If we were to increase the number of undocumented workers in the US construction industry by 100,000 people, the labor supply of fast construction workers would go *up*, and the cost to construct a home would go *down*. Everyone knows this. But racist people pretend not to know it. It's silly

“The withdrawal reflects something even more unsettling: hospitals choosing to abide by political pressure from the Trump administration rather than the laws they are bound to obey.” sfstandard.com/2025/12/09/s...

Gotta admit "the font is DEI" is a stage of absurdity I could not have predicted