Of all the harm this administration has done to US science, today's proposed changes to the way federal grants are awarded and administered is the most damaging yet. The text of the federal register document is impenetrably tedious by design, so here's an excellent summary of what it says.

my confidence that these people are going to lose is rising and my estimate of the amount of damage they are going to do on the way out, especially as they realize they're losing, is also rising

OMG it's fucking real. Guys, Peter fucking Thiel is fleeing the country in advance. That's how fucked this regime is.

this is why I find climate dooming so frustrating there is no point - none - at which throwing up your hands and going “well we’re fucked” is the correct response every tenth of a degree matters and can make a big difference and is worth fighting for

Another reminder: if there exists *any* class of people who don't have due process rights, then *nobody* actually has due process rights because the government can always just say you're in that class.

My best friend gave his life for this country. He's buried less than a mile from that podium, and two of his children, whom he loved fiercely, are trans. This is just a giant middle finger to a man who was 1,000x the soldier the secretary could ever hope to be.

It is also unbelievably dumb even by Trump administration standards. We are telling the world that we don't want their best and brightest people, their inventors and entrepreneurs, to come here ever again. Trump has guaranteed the decline of this country for decades to come

This is astonishingly evil and cruel. It targets the people who have come here lawfully, done everything right, and qualify for a path to citizenship. It means they must leave the families who live here and the jobs that are the very reason they can work here. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

It's BS. Of course there are differing views of climate science in research. Just not on the one issue that conservatives care about. Scientists will argue about 100 different things and it doesn't matter because conservatives want to pretend the sky is green and demand scientists comply.

GLP-1 peptides improve cancer prognoses at levels that cannot be explained by effects from pure weight loss or caloric restriction www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcover...

Stephen Colbert: "I think I get it now. It looks like the end and I wish it wasn’t. But that’s not for me to decide. 'All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'" (JRR Tolkien/LOTR/Gandalf quote) bluevirginia.us/2026/05/frid...

NYT: "no one has ever thought of teaching ranching at university" Every ag school: um, would you like to meet our cows NYT: "No, not like that. More romantic. More dilletante. Ugh, we're not /farmers/."

So if I’m understanding it the outlines of the prosecutorial misconduct in the Broadview Six case is this. They tried three times to get an indictment. After they failed the second time they simply booted the grand jurors who didn’t think the conduct was a crime. Then they told the remaining …

Its more insidious than that. The state is our protection against these would be oligarchs. The state is the only way to stop people like Bezos from carving us up into their personal fiefdoms, to be used, abused, and discarded at their pleasure- like serfs.

I think Democrats like Cory Booker should take a hard look in the mirror and consider why Jeff Bezos loves their tax cut proposals so much. Billionaires would love to see a weak state with a gutted fiscal capacity.

Bezos basically wants no government so he can rule over us like a feudal lord. No one should fall for this.

it's actually true that you cannot fund good government entirely by taxing the rich, which is why slopulist proposals to gut the tax base are a bad idea but taxing the rich at punitive levels is a goal in and of itself, billionaires are simply too dangerous to public policy to exist

This was because the political media in 2014 wanted Dems to lose the midterms. They laughed at the actual stakes of the election (Roe vs Wade hung in the balance) and derided any Dem who told voters the truth. Instead covered bullshit unfavorable to Dems as the top issue.

As it turned out the 2014 midterms would see Dems lose the Senate and then be unable to appoint Antonin Scalia's successor as a result. The Dems chosen frame for the election was "fight the GOPs war on women" and the political media mocked them for it instead of covering the stakes.

Something people don't really remember but is true is that one of the *top* political issues the media covered in the runup to the 2014 midterms was the idea that Barack Obama had badly mismanaged an Ebola outbreak because 10 total Americans had gotten it

This is how you deal with trash

A story about KY GOP Senate nominee Andy Barr: In 2019 he got mad at AOC and demanded she come to his district to visit a coal mine. She said yes, which he didn't expect, so he withdrew the invitation. Then it turned out there were no working coal mines in his district. Because he's an idiot. 1/3

And there was never a world where Trump would have competent people around him. MAGA valorizes ignorance. It's part of the appeal, because it lets everyone construct their own reality and gives mediocre rich people an excuse to take control.

Like there was never a universe where Trump would have spent his 2nd term golfing and letting the economy rip. A Trump who would do that would not have done a January 6th, would not have run for president in the first place.

Also you can't disentangle the bad outcomes from the fascism anyway. 'If only they weren't idiots who sowed the seeds of their downfall'. They followed ideologies that ensured that dumbasses would be in charge at some point.

If you really can't say "AOC is better than Tucker Carlson," you are on the right-wing. You see a basket of extreme right-wing views from one of Trump's friends and find it compelling. Nothing else you say about your political orientation makes the slightest difference, you're just a right-winger.

As I expected.

One of the most powerful ways media bias works is, when a politician says something that can be taken in a negative light, the story is "embattled scandal-plagued fuckup fucks up again! We ask all their colleagues about how much they suck and print the 3 worst responses"

If you thought the big problem in your party was voters thinking (in this case, wrongly!) that its leaders endorsed and ran on unpopular ideological positions, why would you spend millions of $ highlighting fringe pols and their positions? RNC doesn’t run ads highlighting fringe Republicans!

Legal defense fund set up for VA Sen. Louise Lucas after Trump/Patel FBI raid on her businesses bluevirginia.us/2026/05/satu...

worth reminding people that right now the federal government is paying energy companies billions of dollars to *not build* wind farms we're spending money to burn fossil fuels out of sheer ideology

This This and This ... are not 3 things... they are one thing

Andon labs created AI-Hosted 24/7 radio shows, and Claude absolutely could not stop libbing out

Interesting. So when states say they draw districts based on partisanship it can't possibly be because of race. But when colleges say they make decisions based on income, it must be because of race. Interesting.

And right on cue, DOJ is suing Yale for using racial proxies like income. Huh!

Many people have a vested interest in pretending otherwise, but the US research university is globally dominant to an almost unbelievable degree. The typical state university is a football team stapled to a R&D lab with a budget bigger than the entire nation of Belgium.

When the Great Defunding started in 2025, the European Union introduced a "bold" program to attract top scientists from the US, funded at the tune of about ~$500 million spread over 3-5 years. In 2024, the NIH allocated almost twice as that per week.

also why all the "if the US destroys all its research infrastructure the rest of the world will just pick right up" people are fooling themselves. science people from around the world didn't come to the US out of a love of hot dogs, they came because this whole system doesn't exist anywhere else

this truly is the thing that makes the united states exceptional, and right wingers hate it so much they want to destroy it

This is a paranoid fantasy that the media encourages but it’s actually not true. The US produces a very educated populace. It’s just that the sheer scale of our R&D requires drawing on the finest talents of a far larger population base via immigration.

Seattle, Portland, SF etc all ought to be havens for trans people, immigrants, anyone threatened by fascism But we can’t protect our neighbors if we don’t have enough affordable homes for them to live in Building more housing is not optional

Understandable concern about not just the midterms but what comes next, seating the House on Jan 3. It's not as simple as Johnson could refuse members. But there is real potential for mischief or worse. Callais has appreciably increased the danger. So here's what they might try, and how to fight it:

Yes. This explains both the opposition to universal healthcare (I don't want to pay for other people's mistakes) and the RFK strain of anti-medicine (all you need to do is live right, you don't need those *chemicals*). Also why some people hate ozempic.

All disease is moral punishment.

the incredible successful payment processor-driven effort to censor sexual content from the entire Internet claims another victim

It is wrong and criminal for government agents to kidnap someone, send them to die in a concentration camp, and disappear them, regardless of immigration status. But it's still worth noting she has a green card. The government doesn't even pretend this is about deporting undocumented people.

This really highlights the absurdity (and Republican justices' cynicism, bad faith, etc.) of the 4-3 SCOVA decision bluevirginia.us/2026/05/ny-t...

There were never any real prospects for a U.S.-Iran deal to fizzle. That was just a media narrative, one driven by prioritizing words from a serially lying White House over the consistent facts of the war. In a month of uninterrupted rain, you ran multiple headlines of “Sun Comes Out, Trump Says.”

I'm going to be so fucking angry at being denied a 250th anniversary under our first woman president, a child of Jamaican and Indian parents, herself married to a Jewish man. 2024 was a contest between the American Promise and the Darkness of Our Soul and I'm going to die angry at the result.