POLITICO: “.. Among those who received the ‘full, complete and unconditional’ pardons were Rudy Giuliani .. Mark Meadows, .. John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro, .. Boris Epshteyn .. and Sidney Powell ..” @politico.com @kyledcheney.bsky.social www.politico.com/news/2025/11...

Many city halls are deep in budget-time. Some are pushing austerity ideologies, and are ignoring the difference between costs and cost-savers/value creators. Citizens, PAY ATTENTION, and never forget that the TRUTH about a city’s REAL aspirations isn’t found in its visions. It’s found in its budget.

Newsom: "Think about the state of mind of the VP. How do you square the circle when you go to a prayer breakfast? Old testament, new testament. What's the fundamental thing that connects John to Matthew to Proverbs? It's this notion of hunger, feeding the poor. It's central to advancing God's will."

Why did the attacks on Mamdani’s socialism fail? A key reason: He made clear he was a “sewer socialist,” a forgotten American tradition created by left-wing mayors who asked to be judged not by theories but by whether they deliver public services effectively & fairly. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/o...

It’s late, I should already be asleep, I have no idea what he actually meant, but I certainly could believe that Trump saw all the news about Russia’s Burvestnik test, his smooth brain interpreted it as a big bang nuke test like in the time of yore, and now he is sad.

hey uh what the fuck

JD Vance said he doesn’t care if the US commits war crimes. Did it make the news? Donald Trump said he’s declaring war on Chicago. Did it make the news? Executive agencies keep posting Nazi blood-and-soil propaganda. Did it make the news?

Wild story of how Trump ordered a SEAL raid into North Korea in 2019 to plant a listening device. The SEALs killed everyone on a board a boat that they thought had spotted them, sunk the boat & bodies, and aborted. And Congress was told of none of this. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/u...

Back in January, I talked with friends and we all wrote down red lines that we worried this administration might cross in the coming years. This is one that I came up with. The idea that the president can murder 11 people and make up the justification - the founding fathers didn't want this!

I got the complaint in the horrific OpenAI self harm case the the NY Times reported today This is way way worse even than the NYT article makes it out to be OpenAI absolutely deserves to be run out of business

You know that boat the administration blew up? A former law enforcement official told the NYT the boat seemed to be carrying not drugs but *’migrants * www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

This is the kind of free propaganda for anti-American sentiment dictators could only dream of previously Removed of context, it looks like America proudly massacred 11 civilians with no warning

US factory construction continues steadily declining as CHIPS & IRA projects either complete or cancel—in official data released today, overall US manufacturing construction activity is down 7% compared to last year & electronics/electrical manufacturing construction is down 14%

shout-out to everyone who had Stupider Gulf Of Tonkin for Venezuela on their bingo cards

The lead up to the declaration of martial law in Pakistan included the use of the military, called to stop a pogrom, for performing civic functions in Lahore like cleaning, planting trees and repairing roads. People began to see martial law positively. By 1958 Pakistan’s fledgling democracy died.

This is, quite literally, the most insane policy proposal I've ever heard in my life, and that includes reading the MX Basing Study!

I have one. Voters make decisions based on the ideas in their heads and their beliefs about the world, and those ideas and beliefs are heavily shaped by their social interactions, especially media consumption, and in the last 20 years most media consumption is from social media's sea of lies.

on the one hand I should absolutely put my phone down but on the other hand what if the forces attacking democracy operate on weeping angels logic

A major determiner of when and whether Xi Jinping eventually thinks, "OK, *today* is the day it's finally worth the risk of invading Taiwan," is when and whether US cuts Ukraine loose. Surely Marco R "knows" that. And that it would affect "life in America on a daily basis, and around the world."

The paragraph that will drive the right wing crazy is this

The Air Force didn't confirm a drone swarm. They confirmed they closed the airspace because they _believed_ there were drones. No one should repeat these statements from the military without questioning them at this point. twz.com is generally good on this topic but they're guilty of this too.

the cost advantage for EVs will only accelerate from here as battery tech gets cheaper and economies of scale are unlocked. Conversely, ICE tech will start to lose its own economies of scale and convienence as the overall market for them shrinks. Similar arc to CRT TVs vs LCD/LED

Apologies, the previous chart was incorrect. I missed that SCOTUS granted emergency relief in Murthy v. Missouri after the appellate court's stay. I also missed FDA v. Alliance. The updated rate of lifted injunctions for the Biden admin is 10% (2 of 21), not 0%.

But berries, fruit, tomatoes, etc that are eaten fresh can't be automated w current technology. I know because I worked for a lot of the startups that tried! There's no way to pick fast enough by machine to be commercially viable, without bruising so they rot before they get to the store.

The saga of the NYT's anti-Mamdani story taken from notorious white supremacist Jordan Lasker (they call him an "academic") gets even more amazing: Lasker's only impactful paper, which claimed white people are smarter, is infamous: it misused data so badly it got his tenured co-author fired. 2/

The details are not yet finalized, but the budget bill would devastate NASA science and the future of US exploration in space and astronomy. Among many other things. 🔭🧪 www.planetary.org/articles/nas...

With how unpopular the regime is, I'm sure it'll fall any day now! Think of all the atrocities they've done in recent memory!

The only way this framing is possible is if you see whites as innately law-abiding.

Remarkable. MSNC: "I want to reiterate this has been 100% peaceful." Seconds later, LA County sheriffs start firing on the crowd. Yet again, "law enforcement" deliberately escalated.

One of the really notable things about this is the sheer *scale* of the tunneling extent. Laid out on the same scale as tunneling at Fordow and Parchin (where we have a better idea of the actual layout), the width alone is extremely stark!

FYI: Iran has been digging a UGF not far from Natanz that is too big for its stated purpose. It's also 80-100 m under a mountain. @madwonk.bsky.social made a model of what it *might* look like. The new centrifuge facility could be here; could be somewhere else. sketchfab.com/3d-models/un...

Everyone I knew who covered disinformation got laid off, their bosses got bullied into firing them, or they changed their beats from actual Nazi harassment campaigns. It cannot be stressed the damage the paid-for Substack “free speech” guys did in the service of fascism and against real free speech.

"This is truly unprecedented. Preemptive nationwide deployment of the military is the very opposite of using the military as a “last resort.” ... it should raise a bright red flag for anyone concerned with the future of American democracy." www.justsecurity.org/114282/memor...

Oh Lordy! Even the alleged Russian military “escalation-to-deescalate” strategy has now entered the Republican rhetoric to defend Trump’s power overreach.

ICE crossed a line in LA

I probably shouldn’t say stuff like this without being clearer. It’s not entirely clear whether the 2000 Guard personnel mentioned by the admin will all be federalized CA Guard, or whether some might be Guard from other states whose Govs volunteer them.

here is a list of all the deranged NIMBY democrats who for some reason oppose building more housing near transit. All of these NIMBY Democrats must be primaried. shame on you: @carolinemenjivar.bsky.social @benallenca.bsky.social Aisha Wahab Lola Smallwood-Cuevas Maria Elena Durazo

The next journalist to write that Trump's complaints about colleges is about anti-Semitism without mentioning any of this should be jailed for life.

NPR published a story 5 days ago about three high ranking Trump officials with clear ties to Hitler-admiring antisemites and it barely made a ripple. These are the kind of stories that used to end political careers. Now the subjects of the stories just hold up a middle finger and keep plowing ahead.

Trump pardon attorney taking “hard look” at defendants convicted of plotting to kidnap Gov. Whitmer. The effort to rewrite history and normalize political violence continues. www.detroitnews.com/story/news/p...

IR is such a US-coded discipline that you have loads of analysts and journalists with IR backgrounds still churning out wordcount about what Trump will do with US hegemony even as the geopolitical reality looks more and more like this:

There were no drones, and (I think) the government was nervous about telling the public that given the number of politicians who lost their minds to drone delusion. reason.com/2025/05/09/w...

THIS IS NOT HARD TO DO! And I just don't get why the press struggles with it so much. Saying "he ordered it" isn't an editorial choice. It is FACTUALLY INCORRECT. It is SIMPLY WRONG. "The sun rises in the west" is not a headline any paper would run. But the Trump EO headlines are equivalent.

The budgetary bow wave is real. We deferred for 30 years, let infrastructure die, and there is now a scramble. Scrambles on complex technological systems are expensive. The modernization is anything but excessive, though. It is desperately overdue, hopefully adequate. Short🧵from inside the fence.

It's pretty wild, when you think about it, that the political press spent four years saying "Biden's real test: will Americans approve of his economy?" and then Trump's been president for three months and he's brutally murdering the economy and the political press is just not that focused on it