🚨 HEADS UP: If you haven't submitted a comment on the OMB proposal yet, there's still time - but it's running out! There are only 10 days left to push back against Russell Vought's attempt to give political appointees unprecedented control over federal research funding. Take Action: zurl.co/Bl59I

No more His Holiness Nice Pope indeed. Benedict and Francis tried the carrot. Leo is bringing the Chicago baseball bat of loving fraternal correction to the problem now.

It's a very large, flashing off-ramp for people to take easily. Go to your local, non-SSPX priest, confess to him, he will have the opportunity to explain to you all the ways you have been manipulated, and then you're fine! Unlike SSPX, we don't hold it against you if you did it accidentally!

And, critically, knowing means that if they do it again, they will have imputability. It's a gradated response that takes into account the degree of culpability for the offense, but also, critically, *educates* the people who were sincerely led astray so they don't fall into error again.

So everyone who went to the ceremony where they made the new bishops is presumably on the Long Form path back from excommunication. And it was live streamed 😂

Basically: the extremely onerous bureaucratic process the Vatican is invoking here is to make absolutely certain that any priest who leaves the society to return to communion with the Church is not doing it as an agent of sabotage, and making it VERY clear they are being given a chance--

We told y’all Platner was shit.

OH MY GOD GUYS okay so priests who want back in have to find a bishop willing to vouch for them, swear fealty to Vatican II and then HAND-WRITE THE POPE AN APOLOGY LETTER (I gues so he knows they didn’t use AI? 😂) and are on probation for 1-3 years this is ten times spicier than I even thought

it's the catholic church equivalent of this

I am extremely lapsed but as all this is one of the things I lapsed over, I believe I can still grant an indult for this: please, come popcorn with us, we have all been waiting for this for YEARS and the watch party is better with company

I like that the op-ed is like “look, if Latin is THAT important to you, have a Latin Mass every Sunday if you want! no one’s stopping you! it just has to be the CURRENT order of Mass, you can’t arbitrarily roll back to 1950 because you feel threatened”

The reason I hate the unconsciousness pills is, after whatever point where the migraine goes away, the rest of the night is tossing & turning & really vivid dreams, often upsetting ones. Very glad I don’t get that level of migraine often, bc now the morning is about waiting for the dreams to fade

This will only matter if you go to your institutions and organizations and tell them "get in the game"

I cannot overstate to you how much this was not what the one thousand priests who showed up to this Mass probably thought was going to happen to them

Ugh, ok, this migraine is no longer responding to my usual tricks, time to cave and take the unconsciousness pills.

I don’t know if it’s *actually* true that businesses in Arizona who serve food and drink have to give you water on request (or direct you to a drinking fountain), but enough people believe it that it’s *functionally* true.

there needs to be a way to bookmark where you were on the skyline and jump back to it. Especially if the website is going to persist in whatever it does that periodically renders my mobile browser non-responsive. (Does it leak memory like crazy or something? It’s so annoying)

Please don’t gloat about the potential for disaster. Real people live in DC. They’ve done nothing to deserve any of this. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong this weekend. 3/e

🧪 Do voters want the scientific community to have a say (i.e. via notice and comment) about OMB's proposed rule giving White House officials final control over scientific grant funding? 🧪

The Society of St Pius X is about as concerned with praying in Latin as Gamergate was about ethics in news journalism. 🙄 Oh my God when Vance comes out pro-schism someone has to check his Latin liturgical chops ON THE SPOT

Listen! In this heatwave we all must do our part to conserve power: unplug electronics and turn off lights, don’t run big appliances and set your AC to 78°. Listen: In this heatwave we must all do our part to conserve power: so the data centers can use it.

I'm amused by how we're so starved for consequences for bad behavior that many non-Catholics are popcorning over every Vatican press release someone in a position of power has a moral compass-- even if it's not one I fully agree with-- and is holding their subordinates accountable! amazeballs!

Current wildfire smoke map for Colorado. This is another reason why you see parts of the west that usually don’t need central air adding it. With high smoke levels you can’t have windows open

When Mitch McConnell dies (if he's not already gone) they're gonna try to shame us into being nice about him. We don't need to play along.

I have actually been working all day and there is *so much* @rahaeli.bsky.social and @clairewillett.bsky.social schism content to read! I am such a nerd and my evening is set.

like ngl, if my guru or the head of my order demanded I write an apology letter for my misbehavior, I would just walk into the sea and ask the gods to drown my shame

🧪 Members of the scientific community: the comment window is still open.

I am intermittently extremely pissed about how much fun we are all having in an alternate universe this summer.

I love it so much because it is SUCH a low stakes thing to fail at while being SO high profile

Welp, I am in DC to represent the Artemis II and III teams. I’ll be in the NASA Pavilion starting 6pm tomorrow. Come and chat about something that you can actually be proud of.

Hell, I'm rooting against one country because I used to live around the corner from their embassy and they never shoveled their snow. Trying to make soccer games into an expression of national politics just gets silly.

Seriously.

The NPS will launch 850,000 fireworks in the middle of the night. (Last year, they launched 7,000) That will dump perchlorates and heavy metals into the Potomac River and cause the amount of soot and smoke particles to skyrocket (pardon), at great danger to any creature that breathes.

🧪 New from @dataforprogress.org: Federal research grants are awarded on scientific merit judged by panels of scientists and outside experts. Trump has moved to change that. Voters don't approve. www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/7/...

Ok look, body, if you don’t turn this nagging neck pain into a migraine I’ll take THREE WHOLE DAYS off of work, deal? 😐

Genuinely, to any of my followers who live in the District: Consider getting out of Dodge if you can. Even without the crowds, that air quality is going to be awful. Like, wildfire levels of awful.

This is possibly the single biggest action taken against antisemitism in my entire life. For the pope to throw out a Catholic order for rejecting Vatican II - enormous.

Properly sore from climbing yesterday. I no longer feel bad about climbing fewer times than usual, clearly I did enough!

NEW: Under proposed White House rules, the federal government could limit federal grants to research that "advances the President's policy priorities." We find 60% of voters oppose this proposal, while just 34% support it. www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/7/...

#Recall: Target Gigglescape™ Under the Sea Popping Toy; The clear plastic dome can detach from the blue plastic base, making the small plastic balls inside the toy accessible to children, posing a choking hazard. Get refund. www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2026...

Ok I need to sleep, but @clairewillett.bsky.social - thanks as always for being the internet’s gay Catholic aunt!

I think a big part of the Dicastery repeatedly hammering on the name Lefebvre here and framing the whole order as "the Lefebvrists" is to remind people for whom that's a familiar name (esp in Europe) that they are in fact not nearly so innocuous as "The Society of St. Pius X" makes them sound

okay something else I want to draw attention to I THINK (please correct me if I'm wrong) that "the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X" refers specifically to the bishops and priests, and that's whose named in the document, but "the Society of St. Pius X" may include the whole populace as well

Tom Lehrer is, in fact, where I first learned about Vatican II.

the thing is that SSPX dared him to do it and he called their bluff. they were ordaining fake bishops. that's a layup. he couldn't have just come in and started handing out excommunications because they have bad vibes. but now a precedent has been established and everyone else has been duly warned

This is possibly the single biggest action taken against antisemitism in my entire life. For the pope to throw out a Catholic order for rejecting Vatican II - enormous.

do whatever steps you want if YOU HAVE CLEARED THEM WITH THE PONTIFF

this is where suddenly "what are all the other sedevacantists who DON'T specifically belong to this one organization going to do" becomes the biggest and most potentially explosive question - now that they know Vatican II denialism gets you the maximum sentence and Leo is not fucking around with it

but instead, not only was there a big public announcement which scoops up 300,000 people instead of 6 people, it was framed as a warning to the rest of the church not to fraternize with these people. that's a shot across the bow to scare potential SSPX sympathizers and other right-wing Catholics