They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

The best reading of this article: Trump is going to use FDA to restrict medication abortion, but he wants to wait until after the midterms so the Republicans don't experience blowback. But that just makes the midterms more important. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

From Amnesty International:

oh hey look it’s the thing literally everyone said would happen

If Paramount is allowed to take over Warner Bros. Discovery, the conservative billionaire Ellison family will control: Paramount Studios CBS CNN MTV HBO Comedy Central Nickelodeon Cartoon Network Warner Bros. DC Studios Fandango New Line Cinema TNT Sports TBS Oracle And more.

The president is charged with “taking care the laws are faithfully executed” — not making law. Congress is the most democratic branch. The Fed Soc judges have worked to usurp its power and give it to the president. (Given their oligarch patrons, it is hard not to see that as a designed outcome.)

We can’t have both. Reform the Roberts Court to disempower it and make it more like other countries’ constitutional courts and not like a super-legislature. Add justices, control its docket, return power to Congress, and overturn its pro-oligarchy, anti-science and anti-democracy decisions.

Underscoring this: Gorsuch can twist logic till he gets his patrons’ desired outcome of making the president a king. But there are real-world consequences, and one is science cannot operate if the president controls everything. We get to choose: Unitary exec theory or the US’s science superpower.

OMFG. A post-C section mother who was an asylum seeker seeking a visa for crime victims who had a newborn baby struggling in the NICU was held in Broadview in Chicago w no medical attention (POST C SECTION), no breast pump (right after birth), and no treatment for her diabetes. MONSTERS.

It is really, really hard to get your head around the raw hubris of the majority. They really will be destabilizing the operating structure of the entire U.S. government. Why? Because they believe they have a better idea about how the past century should've been done.

A new study has found that Chattanooga, Tennessee's decision to build their own affordable community-owned fiber broadband network has driven $5.3 billion in economic benefits back to the community. From my colleague and friend @seangon.bsky.social:

SG: Yeah, do that. Kagan: LMAO that's not how anything works. If we give credence to the logic, it's going to apply. SG: But what if it doesn't Jackson: You know that's not how anything works

Holy shit this back and forth between Kagan/Alito/Jackson/&the SG. Kagan: Doesn't your logic mean a whole raft of other agencies must be invalidated? SG: Yes, but that's not being litigated right now Kagan: So what? Alito: What if we just want to say "but maybe don't apply our logic elsewhere?"

So, it's Monday, and there's no way to say this that doesn't sound stupid, so I'm just going to come out and say it: I've decided to Twitch stream the entire writing of an NIH R01 proposal, and you can follow along at twitch.tv/ColinDoesScience

In September, I (and many other accessibility advocates) reviewed the America by Design website, finding sloppy AI-generated code and accessibility bugs. @notus.com wrote on it, and also spoke to many amazing folks from @alt18f.bsky.social and @ethanmarcotte.com www.notus.org/trump-white-...

The trend in investing seems to be gambling on futures then cashing out before the rug gets pulled. The extractive crypto hype cycle writ large and applied to actual industries, which is proving to be devastating to the stability of people who, you know, "work"

Look, he's a full-on white supremacist because he has dismantled the systems of accountability that used to keep such people under white hoods. Weird to realize that the SEC and DOJ Antitrust Division were helping to keep Nazis at bay this whole time.

We're at the point that the world's richest hype man physically invaded government buildings to throw the levers of regulation to his advantage. We all discovered that the government did a bunch of regulatory things so important and boring we never heard of them until they were destroyed.

The result is that our society is full of hype men gaining ever more power, manipulating us in ever-more-insidious ways, and tearing down our democracy's ability to combat the hype cycle. This ability is called financial regulation and it is super boring, is the problem.

A well-functioning democracy would prevent extraction by hype. So, the hype men take the logical approach:

The hype man doesn't just take money from the general public who buys the hype, but also from other investors, and business partners of the hype man. Venture capital too, per @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy: it extracts from the business it destroys (miss you, Red Lobster!) but also from investors.

Thus our society is encumbered by ultra-rich hype men. Some of them used to build things (electric cars or web browsers) but then they got really rich when they discovered hype. Delivering actual goods and services is only incidentally useful to them; only if it helps to sell the hype.

A business that is limited by the number of factories it can build or number of salespeople it can hire will probably exhibit linear growth, at least in the near term. But when done well, hype is viral. It sells itself, so it can grow exponentially. Thus it scales much faster.

The richest "capitalists" today don't really invest in capital, the means of production. They invest in hype cycles. 🧵

It's hard to pick from the rogues gallery of murderous ideas, but sometimes I feel the most dangerous thing about modern conservatism is its transparent desire to destroy the fabric of truth in daily life.

The flipside of this rhetorical trick — calling all payments "losses" — is calling all cuts "savings"

I'll say again: we are oddly selective about the government services about which we will say, they operate at a loss. We say Amtrak and the post office "lose money" but we never say highways, the court system, the Pentagon, etc lose money

And the USPS in "losing money" is in part because they're subsidizing last mile transport for Amazon and other corporations rather than charge enough for a profit for doing so.

This is often an excuse to privatize a public good, so that some capitalist can profit from charging for that service. See private prisons. DeJoy at the USPS. Jacobs at NOAA. IMO, these folks are looking to divert federal fund into their and their friends' pockets.

But when you are uncertain, ask a health care professional, not a grifter or a Grok.

We should be teaching age appropriate scientific health information to kids starting in kindergarten. The US public has an average reading level of a fifth grader and they are even less educated about their own bodies because it’s been politicized for decades. It’s infuriating.

The standard paradigm for public health “rally around scientists and expect politicians to defer” is totally out the window. It’s not coming back anytime soon either. This stuff is now firmly in the political battle zone and expecting reflective trust is an easy way to lose.

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

If we want to talk about “narco-terrorism” in the Caribbean it’s important to identify the flow of weapons into the region and interdict it as well as the drugs, right?

One year on, Prof Neil Buchanan questions the narrative that Trump's victory in 2024 was either decisive or due to high prices. Looking at the data, he points the finger at racism and sexism. If we have future competitive elections, Democrats would do well, to understand that, and run accordingly. 👇

again, it is just arrogance. “there is one true meaning of the constitution and it can only be derived by a special caste of lawyers with a special interpretative lens and once discovered it is binding.”

I'm just a bumpkin at an under-funded teaching college who spent 16 years in a book doing this thing Wurman et al suddenly discovered. Silly me. Since I traced migration & citizenship from the colonial period through 1888, yeah, pretty clear the 14th Amendment is intended to repudiate Dred Scott.

I'll be blunt; if we're wrong and they overturn birthright citizenship then my biggest fear is that we're on the path to a new civil war. After all, that's what happened with Dred Scott 1.0, and this would be Dred Scott 2.0.

For thirty years I worked in the post-Soviet successor states in Central Asia and observed over and over again precisely the cycle that Bill Kristol describes. Corruption leads to authoritarianism, directly. The path is utterly predictable.

Both of these were published in the last 14 months and are part of a larger right wing project designed to build the permission structure for Christians to embrace a selfish, cruel, and fascistic vision of Christianity by redefining one of the central teachings of the New Testament and Jesus Christ

every Tesla recall starts overseas, and then eventually comes to the US after a matter of days or weeks... it's one of the best ways to measure the decline and fall of this country's regulatory capacity/credibility

- firefighters do safety drill at Boring Company tunnel and get chemical burns/permanent scars - ff say they weren't warned - Boring Co blames firefighters - NV OSHA cites Boring Co - Steve Davis calls NV Gov office, has meeting - citations/proposed fines go away techcrunch.com/2025/11/13/f...

People think "politics" is what you say, but politics is in fact how you wield power. In that sense, driving a car is one of the most profound ways to reveal what your actual politics are. How people drive reveals the sickness at the heart of our society: wanting power, but not responsibility.

I would go even further than this thread and say that Musk is obviously involved. This also missed how he introduced Epstein to Zuckerberg and how his brother dated one of Epstein’s girlfriends. Also Epstein got a private tour of SpaceX.

no story about elon musk or his companies is complete without reference to both his overt white nationalist agitation, or his willingness to put that rhetoric into action by gleefully consigning countless thousands of people of color to death while running DOGE

I downgraded to an older, simpler Android just to get a headphone jack back.

What the fuck

The crisis of masculinity is psychological immaturity. Grown, psychologically mature men are secure, know they aren't better than women, know how to make one happy, and know how to have an egalitarian relationship with one.

Palantir is the face of Technocracy 2.0's extinction agenda. Every single one of their projects is in some way linked to killing people. bsky.app/profile/azur...

MacKenzie Scott: *donates $50M every 10 hours° Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir: "I want to see people hang"