The year is 2015. China is getting richer and more powerful every year, but America has three trump cards: universitities, biomedical research, and immigration.

Every single time a story like this is reported, we must assume that there are many many more that do not.

However low your opinion is of those running the country, it's not low enough. Completely unserious, self-absorbed sociopaths. (Read the whole thread)

A patriotic judge who will fight to defend our Constitution: "The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights."

The fact that all of them, from Trump to Hegseth to Noem to Miller, have no business running a bake sale of a book club or a fantasy sports league, is just the icing on the ignoramusocracy cake. 10/

Giving this type of weapon system to CBP to use is like giving a kindergartner an RPG. It was always going to end badly. We’re just lucky that all that happened was a confirmed kill on a party balloon & a lot of embarrassment. This could’ve been much worse. 5/

“Noem routinely berated staff if she saw Homan on TV and kept track of both their appearances to make sure she was on TV more than him…”

“…in one incident, Lewandowski fired a U.S. Coast Guard pilot after Noem's blanket was left behind on a plane, according to people familiar with the incident.”

How bad do the facts have to be, how outrageous did the lies have to turn out to be, for a Trump-appointed US Attorney to say and do this? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/u...

The same story. Over and over again.

my understanding from reading people in the know is that CBP was known as the place for fuckups who couldn’t hack it anywhere else and was considered a backwoods clown agency now they’re being given infinite money, no supervision and - apparently - drone lasers what could go wrong

The history books will remember this one

Babe, wake up, new sarcastic but entirely worthwhile internet abbreviation just dropped

weird memories of, wait for it, another echo of Russian politics in Trump politics- undertrained regime-aligned yahoos with powerful weapons, questionable morals, and no sense

I called up one of the White House's "special government employees" involved in the Fulton County FBI raid. I ended up on the phone for almost two hours hearing about the "deep state" "cabal," "Satanists," poison soda, and the "pure evil" of "gay pride." talkingpointsmemo.com/news/meet-th...

🤡🤡🤡 "The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft" 🤡🤡🤡

NEW: “CBS Evening News” producer Alicia Hastey sends a bombshell farewell note: Stories are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

"It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files. (US Attorney General) Bondi showed up today with a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails I searched." - Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).

the list of entrees is really the chef's kiss for the whole thing. I kind of want to go.

The revised Schedule F policy, finalized last week, will kick in next month. It could reclassify career government scientists—potentially those involved in grantmaking at agencies like NIH and NSF—into at-will employees, and would strip them of whistleblower protections.

The chances of this passing the Senate (i.e., nuking legis. filibuster for it) are slim to none, they're pushing this more for the talking points to delegitimize their midterm loss. But this isn't just very bad policy. It's utterly impractical in the sense that it'd cause total unworkable chaos.

"The GOP-led House...voted 219–211 to approve a Democratic resolution that would invalidate the emergency declaration that underpins Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Six Republicans broke ranks with their party in voting for the measure." www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Just take a look at this and remember, Pam Bondi's concern here was not with any of the victims of these crimes but with the nosy Democrats who actually gave a shit about them.

This is the second account - the first being in Chicago - of DHS agents mass detaining people and then *sorting them by race*.

I’ve never felt unsafe in this bougie neighborhood a day in my life. This is a 25 mph zone, full of fancy bars and restaurants, a curling club, salons, boutiques, and one of the busiest coffee shops around. They are doing their damndest to wreck everything here.

Gallup says it will stop doing presidential approval polls (after 88 years of doing it) because of "an evolution in how Gallup focuses it's public research". This is eliminating a time series that goes back to FDR. thehill.com/homenews/med...

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

I'm not even saying that's the most *likely* possibility, but it's just very clear that the likelihood of that outcome as increased and even if there's, like, a 1 in 10 change that "AI replaces most to all white collar jobs in 10 years" that's an *enormous* risk to the social order!

I understand why people are exhausted by AI hype, and why those of us squarely in the corner of "human dignity uber alles" see AI doomerism as self-serving hype, but I *really* think people on the left broadly need to start thinking seriously about the possibiltiy of the hype being...true.

Gallup ends presidential approval polling. There are plenty of alternatives but having one firm back the 1930s was a great continuity. Here is my last update of their series. RIP. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

I "enjoy" the hybrid roles this sort of doomerism serves to simultaneously misrepresent what the technology is actually capable of, and misdirect attention away from the fact the real problem is a pretty traditional one: greedy, shitty people

like the problem isn't SKYNET, the problem is letting amoral extraction class assholes apply half-cooked automation onto deeply broken sectors in exploitative ways in a country that's too corrupt to have functioning regulators

The government needed 12 grand jurors to vote to indict, out of a grand jury that numbered somewhere between 16 and 23. They got ZERO. As an expert in math, I'm here to tell you that zero is a very small number, in fact the smallest non-negative integer.

It is a big deal that attorneys at DOJ have pushed several cases in which they not only do not believe that they can prove the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, but for which they know probable cause does not exist (and of course they knew that here but did the bidding of the mad king anyway).

Not a single grand juror sided with the Trump administration’s malicious prosecution. Not one. Jeanine Pirro could not, in fact, indict a ham sandwich.

"The American people need to know the full story of what has been done in our name. And the people we’ve wronged deserve their chance to speak and be heard."

Chris Murphy: "I sat with the kids for an hour. They saw things in these prisons they'll never forget. The bottom line is we have a constitutional obligation to only fund an administration that's operating lawfully. We cannot, we should not fund DHS if it committing these crimes."

in fact you do not have to show your ID when you board a train in the united states, you only need to show your ticket (which can be purchased without an ID)

Another brown M&Ms moment. What happens in a real emergency?

A meta-analysis on reducing discrimination finds: 1) passive interventions, such as short-term education or bias reminders, are ineffective 2) targeting behavior directly to inhibit bias (eg making individuals accountable or changing social norms) is helpful psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

AI agents are becoming a serious threat to research data quality. Today we’re rolling out Bot authenticity checks on @joinprolific.bsky.social, detecting agentic AI with 100% accuracy in testing. Comes with a native Qualtrics integration! More info: www.prolific.com/resources/in...

From his prior position: "colleagues warned superiors that the department’s accounts could be seen as promoting white-supremacist rhetoric, Nazi imagery and QAnon conspiracy theories."

Think about what people are doing in our name. Think about history will judge them - and us.

Playing Calvinball with potentially lifesaving new vaccines

We have a groundbreaking technology that could prevent untold death and suffering. But its development is being hindered because HHS is led by a eugenicist roadkill enthusiast and an assortment of cranks and quacks who think their own self-serving contrarianism trumps established health science.

RULE VOTE FAILS, 217-214. Three Republicans- Thomas Massie, Kevin Kiley, and Don Bacon - buck the party to allow floor consideration of measures to end Trump's tariffs. The first such measure, likely on Canada tariffs, could come up as soon as tomorrow

"Due process is not a courtesy extended at the government’s convenience. Due process is the condition that makes custody lawful in the first place... When liberty is restrained without a meaningful opportunity to be heard, the Constitution’s promise is not delayed. It is denied."

This was Mike Johnson's third failed rule vote of the 119th Congress, bringing him closer to tying the modern era record for rule failure in the House. Which is currently held by... Mike Johnson, from the 118th Congress