This is a model of obituary writing. Fair, honest, and unhesitating. Watson comes off as historically significant—which he was—and as someone for whom the fading of that significance unveiled fundamental flaws of character and thought. Great work by Begley. h/t @silvermansecurity.bsky.social

57% of all ad spending by Republicans in the Virginia governors race was on anti trans ads. Just an incredibly mismanaged campaign. Anti-trans politics are a losing issue.

In a new pilot study EMBL will explore microbial biodiversity along the Rhine, uncovering how environmental changes affect the smallest forms of life in Europe’s freshwater systems. The work connects studies in Rhineland-Palatinate to a wider European effort to understand and protect ecosystems.

So now transphobes are searching bluesky for keywords and show up to bad faith debate. I left other social media platforms to escape that. It felt good to have a space again, but clearly this is not it. Have some ideas on how to get around this problem, but they will take time to implement.

This was my first thought once DOGE started actually visiting agencies. Port scans since revealed the servers have opened up database ports to allow unlogged, relatively unsecured cloning. Whether any actual federal staff use the integrated system or not, be sure that xAI now has mirrors.

Trans Day of Visibility today. I don't know if me stating I am is news to any person aware of my existence at this point, but it makes sense to keep the tradition on principle, and I have the kind of personality/internal reward system that seeks and enjoys visibility, so might as well?

I am not advocating for burning Teslas, but I am curious if that sort of thing may end up as an Overton window shifting mechanism the way outspoken old school neo-Nazis shifted it in favor of the superficially cleaner far right voices who performatively avowed them.

Same.

I received a heartbreaking email today: A paper in a special issue I’m editing is being retracted because one of its authors is afraid of losing their job and their legal status in the U.S. if they publish a scientific study on evolution. Yes, on evolution, nature's engine of diversity.

Are you the "AI is soulless evil theft" kind of neurodivergent or the "the LLM reasons like I do" kind of neurodivergent? (I am the second, more and more, it seems.)

So I read this a while back and was blown away: azdoine.tumblr.com/post/1858128... "TL;DR: trolls are gay, trans Vriska needs therapy" LOL And then, Beyond Canon *delivers*: beyondcanon.com/story/666 Reading more of this story brings me back to life these days. #Homestuck

Not saying such atrocities were never before reported, but I hope anyone meeting Vance across a negotiation table knows he finds it "excellent" to bomb a residential block full of unrelated, unknowing civilians, unannounced and with no war declaration, because one person he wants dead is inside it.

🔑 under-discussed point — why they were on signal:

Finally started on Beyond Canon and I am HERE FOR THIS. The retelling of part of the Epilogues changes so much of what they felt like, in particular the transition arcs now feel so much more grounded than they did in the pure text framing. #Homestuck

The surge in LGBT+ censorship laws across Europe is alarming. From Italy to Hungary, our rights are under attack. Tell the EU: Take action NOW to stop discrimination! Sign & share campaigns.allout.org/no-lgbt-cens...

I am in this post and I can't easily summarize my feelings about it. ^_^

See also: Science! (We're doing pretty good though TBH! ^_^ )

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... Large system segments of the US are apparently lawless, incentivized by fascist signaling clout and commercial predations. Without hyperbole we must see it as akin to, say, 2020 Russia. Thus we must divest of it to the maximal extent possible, even at cost.

The DOGE goons turned off firewalls and made (most?) US Federal databases open to the internet for several months. It looks like it was done so they could make their own copies elsewhere without it being logged. It can't really be much else. cyberintel.substack.com/p/unpreceden...

🚨We are hiring🚨ECR with a PhD within 7 years? Tenure track position (akin to Assistant Prof) in Earth and Env Data Science at U of Gothenburg, Sweden. Expertise in remote sensing and machine learning. Work on climate change, Earth systems, biodiversity, #EO, #UAV Deadline May 10 tinyurl.com/58ft38du

Me before excessive workaholism. :(

You don’t know who we just disappeared to El Salvador. Think about that.

1. Germany has issued a travel advisory for trans and GNC people who wish to travel to the United States. International Pride organization InterPride has done likewise. Travel may be dangerous with visa restrictions. The latest from S. Baum. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Texas now retroactively revert legal sex changes, overriding court decisions. This based on arguments their laws do not allow courts to make such decisions (which is possible), in combination with a definition of "sex" as immutable (which is inadequately grounded).

No travel to the US.

As predicted, women in New Hampshire had a hard time voting yesterday because of the new proof of citizenship law: “It doesn’t have my married name on it,” she said. Town voting officials then sent her away a second time, to get her marriage certificate. www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2025...

Bill Gates has liquidated his climate policy and advocacy organization, laying off dozens of staff in Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere. It’s another giant retrenchment for the billionaire, who had already slashed his climate grant budget last month. heatmap.news/climate/brea...

It does not matter at all what Mahmoud Khalil has said. The government does not get to black bag a legal permanent resident for their speech. We have a 1st Amendment right to free speech that forbids the government from punishing people for it. That's a solid red line that should never be crossed.

Two years ago today, trans woman Eden Knight died at 23 after being trafficked out of the US and forcibly detransitioned in Saudi Arabia by her father Dr. Fahad Ibrahim Alshathri. In her final message, Eden named the individuals responsible for luring and capturing her: trans.cx/in-memory-ed...

I need y'all to sit with this headline and understand what is being done to our community. They're trying to criminalize our very existence. This is a campaign of eradication. www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/rcna...

This is important. The free world needs its own infrastructure. It may mean costs and redundancy, but without it, we are too vulnerable to those who want to force dystopia on us to soothe their egos.

This is inhuman treatment and possibly even torture, in terms of international law.

"Like a slow death": A 31-year-old trans woman was transferred from a women's facility to a men's prison this week. Her doctor told her that her HRT would start to be tapered down. Another trans woman attempted suicide out of fear of being transferred: trans.cx/2025/03/07/l...

I don't think even cis allies understand, viscerally, how horrific this is. Being deprived of the only thing that makes our bodies not feel like corpses, having our very sense of personhood denied, and then sent into de facto sex slavery (look up "v-coding").

If you have Russian friends, ask them about how well that turned out for their country.

This is very true, and to be a politician - to be a leader - is also to be a role model and someone who guides thought. The moral challenge is to do so honestly and without deception, not to somehow abdicate the role of an advocate for your own morals.

The Dow is down nearly 1400 points in two days.

I’d like to see Bluesky stop being hosted in the US. I hope there’s contingency plans for when Dirtbag comes for it

Case in point to what I just wrote: Just passed Montana state law similarly makes unremarkable day-to-day situations for trans people (regardless of how our bodily sex has changed) illegal. This is specifically intended to be a building block of extermination. This is not hyperbole.

The placement of "trans issues" here is, without exaggeration, one of the most depraved things I've ever seen in the pages of this publication.

This is the most wretched campaign of deliberate, explicit persecution the United States has perpetrated against a minority group in decades. Many of the most important people in politics and journalism are busying themselves trying to figure out how little to say or do about it.

How bad must it get before us pointing out these similarities is met with urgency and action rather than by reprimanding the comparison, taking a stance where highlighting past atrocities any way but as singular and unique somehow lessens them? Surely "never again" is prescriptive, not descriptive?

We will see a lot more of this. I quite expect that the US share of research output in medicine generally (among other fields) will be a fraction of what it has been from now on. We will try to pick up the slack. Sending US colleagues wishes of resilience and victory in fixing the root causes. :(

This is the first time in US history that a state has repealed statutory protections for a specific group.

Q: Why is it so much easier for the US right to organize and be unified than the US left? A: Anti-Black racism. The only consistent thing that the right agrees on, is this. It's what unifies them. But the US left is very anti-Black too! So they try to get the benefits, without helping Black folk.🤷🏿‍♂️

The embrace and protection of Andrew Tate at the highest level of US government tells you everything you need to know about this rotten administration. They worship at the altar of abusing women and girls. Their version of morality supports sex trafficking under the guise of camming

I am currently getting multiple reports that Google, in an attempt to remove pronouns in the US government email accounts, just removed pronouns for every private workplace account in the world. If you use Google workspaces, go check on that and confirm for me. Overcompliance leads to stupidity.