pack it up, it's over

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* 
> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees 
> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

Hey all you young MAGA men who can't find dates? Hint. This is where all the young women are. Fealty to Trump isn't just killing your job prospects. It is killing your social life as well.

Remarkable investigative work by @propublica.org to dig what’s really happened in Portland & who is to blame for the violence. Like Chicago, it shows it’s the federal agents who are out of control. Read every word. www.propublica.org/article/port...

Damn. Athens catching strays in the first paragraph. Just putting it out there that Themistocles won, while Marcus Aurelius's biggest achievement was writing a book about how if deer don't complain about waking up in the morning, you shouldn't either.

🔥 COACH SULLY: “Let’s see what $4.3 TRILLION looks like when each party gets their hands on it… the oligarchs are laughing all the way to the bank (with Republicans)…”

centrists will tell you to your face that we all need to abandon identity issues, and focus on kitchen table issues instead and yet when a leftist candidate runs a generational campaign based on kitchen table issues, it's the centrists weaponizing identity politics to smear the leftist.

I cannot tell you how many tech journalists at prominent media organizations do not understand this

Just for the record, in 2020: - Wray was the FBI director Trump handpicked to replace Comey - Jack Smith was in the Hague prosecuting Kosovo war crimes - Garland was an appeals court judge - Monaco was in private practice in LA There was no Biden administration yet, crooked or otherwise. He crazy.

This really is it. If you live in a metro area with an inelastic housing stock you will see no benefit from low unemployment and higher wages, you'll just see higher housing prices. No progressive economic project can work until housing is fixed.

“Since the bicycle makes little demand on material or energy resources, contributes little to pollution, makes a positive contribution to health and causes little death or injury, it can be regarded as the most benevolent of machines.” Here’s the article by @carltonreid.com HT @sciam.bsky.social

“Now Scientific American has updated and re-released what it calls the “classic graphic” that shows that a human on a bicycle—able to coast, or freewheel, without pedaling—remains the world’s most energy effecient traveler.” @carltonreid.com on the re-release of the iconic graph in @forbes.com.

A terrific AFP fact check uses reverse image searches to expose how a White House video took scenes from Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Nebraska and lied that they showed "Chicago is in chaos." factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com....

What happens when students can't use their phones at school? Library use goes WAY up. www.wweek.com/news/schools...

I’ve been really shocked how many people on here didn’t know any of this

This is rather remarkable.

In the last 70 years, federal jobs fell from 4.5% of all employment to below 2%. Civil servants aren't what's driving government debt, and firing them won't address it.

A perfect illustration of which "lifestyle" actually imposes itself on public space, public safety, and the public purse.

This is the genius of the Portland protests - they make the claims of lawlessness look not just wrong, but comical

This is the most accurate depiction of the Midwest to date. Wichita has always felt like the last Midwest city while also being the first plains city.

Trump’s Afghanistan greatest hits.

Criticizing Charlie Kirk is a fireable offense that incites domestic terrorism. But calling political opponents "the party of hate, evil, and Satan" is proper and good. Got it.

Who are non drivers? @nrdc.org repport finds: -34 million disabled people -47 million young people (over 10 who don't own cars) -5.6 million people who are 75+ -Millions of others who don't own their own vehicle #WeekWithoutDriving www.nrdc.org/resources/wh...

If the President can raise his own revenues and direct his own spending without congressional approval we are squarely in the only situation the Constitution was actually drafted to avoid: English civil war territory

Matt Walsh advocates for mass murdering people with schizophrenia by convicting them of who knows what and then killing them. This is political violence btw.

When the supply of available homes goes down relative to demand, prices increase. This is one of the best established findings in housing policy, and policymakers who don't center this aren't going to fix the housing crisis.

Criminologists: the feds should really stop making so many drug arrests. Monkey paw finger curls, uncurls for a moment to give us all the middle finger, then curls again.

Remember how Jim Jordan was celebrating last week, claiming Google had censored conservatives and his committee uncovered it? Well, his own committee's documents show he's lying. open.substack.com/pub/wicziped...

Molly Ivins:

It's so weird to me that the Dems are not screaming daily that this administration is pro-cancer www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

just a *central casting* MAGA chud, even used a giant flag-bedecked pickup truck as part of the attack www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...

I went to the ICE facility Trump claims is "under siege" by antifascists and "other domestic terrorists." There were four protesters there, one a thoughtful young man in a chicken costume www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

In the next Republican administration, a person with a history of such tweets won’t even feel the need to delete them. So I guess we’ve got that going for us.

Every single one of these clips was taken today in downtown Portland. Portland doesn’t want or need a federal takeover. If Trump insists on sending federal “resources” he can start with funding health care, bridges, affordable housing, and wildfire protection to name a few.

The Big Lie just keeps getting bigger.

Actually heard these two arguments from cranky speakers at a Community Board meeting back-to-back. How is it that they are useless and empty but the next person says they are so crowded it is dangerous to cross the street? Hmmm...

Five years ago, @brandyzadrozny.bsky.social and I did a story about rural Oregon's fever dream that Antifa was coming to their town from Portland. Hundreds showed up armed downtown because they heard on Facebook that "Antifa buses" were coming. No buses came so they said Antifa "retreated."

Finally a positive article about cycling in our local media. clbn.us/SApfS

Common vaccines can reduce risk of dementia? Who knew? wapo.st/4pFbCIG

I’m not sure when it’ll be that the “did my own research” truther will finally come to grips with the fact that their “research” was an intentionally orchestrated algorithm to send them down of to the depths broken reality and rage. They were and still are broke groomed for anger.

Reality: “Total EU car sales rose 5.3%. Registrations of battery electric, hybrid electric and plug-in hybrid cars were up 30.2%, 54.5% and 14.1%, respectively, to account collectively for 62.2% of the bloc's registrations, up from 52.8% in August 2024.”

Kristi Noem has been widely criticized for slowing down FEMA’s response after natural disasters. Texts and emails obtained by ProPublica point to an effective way Naples, Florida, used to get help faster: have one of Noem’s big donors make the ask.

IMPORTANT: The Dutch invest €595 million annually on urban biking, resulting in €19 BILLION saved in public health care costs alone. That’s how smart govts do the math on investing in better mobility. Let’s be clear— it wastes public money to NOT do it. #CityMakingMath HT @modacitylife.bsky.social

"A brutal massacre followed, in which it’s estimated almost 150 Native Americans were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children." www.history.com/this-day-in-...

If Obama's effort to speak truthfully about the US's role in the world was dubbed "the apology tour," then what Hegseth is doing here is the "That's fucking right. We did that. And we're proud of it. And we'll damn well do it again if we feel like it" tour.

Anti-corruption sounds like a good thing to run on, but I have to caution that respondents have different things in mind when they say "corruption." A lot of people made the mistake of interpreting Trump's "drain the swamp" as "get money out of politics" when it meant "get rid of people we dislike."

One of the truly weird culture war flashpoints of this era is how an anti-parasitic on the market for 35 years became the right's cure-all snake oil and popular way of signaling contempt for modern medicine.

If they had a right-wing, “tough-on-crime” coded mayor there would be endless national profiles about him and how he finally brought sanity back to Chicago.