One of the other letters came in a bright yellow envelope. Text on it: ADDRESSEE SELECTED TO REPRESENT STATE INDICATED IN NATIONWIDE SURVEY TO BE OPENED ONLY BY: SEALED SURVEY ENCLOSED. SIGNATURE REQUIRED. UNUSED SURVEY MUST BE RETURNED. It's from the Heritage Foundation.

"Unused survey must be returned" is such a weird demand, it preys on exactly the same urgency that boomers face with regard to medical and financial processes full of inscrutable paperwork and deadlines. Fear. It instills fear of breaking yet another arbitrary rule.

We've had evidence of this for ages, right? Frankly this feels like those endless UBI studies where they all demonstrate UBI works but that's not the answer the people in charge want to hear so nothing changes.

This is where the attacks on Medicaid lead. To people losing essential healthcare. Reproductive care. Preventative healthcare. All to make the rich a bit richer. Healthcare should be a basic human right. No one should ever have to “prove their worth” to receive medical care.

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

Slight caveat for the sake of nuance that it's specifically expansion of coal energy to meet growing demand that is more expensive than expanding wind and solar to meet the same demand. But otherwise yes, 100%

Of course this also opens up privacy concerns depending on how detailed you want to get when it comes to catchment area, but if we’re so dead set on using wastewater data as an accurate early warning and public health surveillance system… uhhhhh… better think about that kinda stuff

oops, all scheming viziers

this business model should be flatly illegal taking on a bunch of debt to buy a company and then burning the company to the ground to service that debt while paying yourselves huge fees is a purely destructive practice that has never once had a positive outcome ban it completely

Also... I have no interest in shaming people about this -- at this point it's a lost battle, people are going to just people. BUT... Every few months, a huge number of my friends go to some big event (a comic con, Worldcon, political conference) and all come back sick. I wear masks, and don't.

This is why it's definitely a good idea to put an active alcoholic in charge of the Pentagon. Definitely if they stop drinking immediately nothing bad will happen

cis people, you have to show up. right now. we do not have the numbers, but you do. we are talking about suicide. that's what this headline is. taking away HRT will increase trans suicides. i and so many others are dead without it. don't let us die without trying to keep us alive. call, please.

It's not just an acknowledgement but a legitimation of a (the?) core asymmetry of US politics: Democratic voters hate Republican politicians, but Republican voters hate Democratic *voters*. So Klein's "solution" is that all Dem voters must act like politicians.

Well that’s a CFAA violation if I ever saw one. Let’s be clear, if you share your employee login with a service like this not only could your employer file a criminal complaint against the service, they could fire you and have you prosecuted as well.

These companies will sue you and your unborn great grandchildren over giving up login details, not to mention that depending on the industry you will be blackballed. On top of being fired in a country where most people are struggling to find employment and work paycheck to paycheck...

Is this not illegal? This lawless land continues to upset me every day I open my eyes and breathe. People just gonna be homeless now. Which funnily enough is the argument most of us have been giving about homeless people. A lot of em have jobs! The housing crisis isn't about money.

they should remove any regulation on CEO bonuses but make it so your employees know how high they are and then when you want to receive them you have to jump over a fire pit that your workers get to vote on the temperature of

Sounds like America may have committed a serious war crime that VP Vance laughed about, joking about “not going finishing.” This is why we do not permit extrajudicial executions by the United States military against civilians— not in peacetime, not in war, not ever. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/w...

It's a masculine coded job because physical labor and environmental degradation. Only reason they care so much. As usual, it all reeks of gender

the coal focus is such pure culture war stuff; even the fossil fuel giants aren't that keen on it.

To be clear, all of these things are positives to me regardless of their veracity (for example, demons aren’t real, but the things Christian nationalists tend to find demonic happen to be rad).

And he did an endangered local toad a huge solid www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/arti...

Obviously this is unconscionable, but I think it’s worth always stressing that even it they’d been drug traffickers, it would ALSO be unconscionable. We don’t summarily execute criminals

can we please have a moratorium on arguing about the effectiveness of voting for dems until we’ve all done our part and yelled at our representatives to not bend a knee on the trans healthcare ban? we can go right back to slugging it out after as a treat

Not trying to be a stinker here, but part of the reason why is because "US states' public employee retirement funds have been investing with private equity for decades"

Testing something: Cis

Pete Hegseth accidentally flipping a skateboard into his nuts on live TV

bro we are so cooked

Let that sink in: Women with a WHOLE-ASS OTHER ADULT, who is SUPPOSEDLY A COPARENT, do MORE childcare and housework than women raising their kids by themselves. A husband isn’t a partner, he’s literally functioning as an additional child.

That is, the ideal position of a healthy adult man in a patriarchal society is like an infant: his every need is catered to, resources flow to him, and he faces no consequences for wrongdoing. But, unlike an infant, he has decision-making power, and can punish those who displease him.

Because yes, in normative Christian theology, Jesus, a living, breathing, human (who is admittedly also God in this framework) is quite literally the kapparah (lit. "atonement") for humanity. To sacrifice a chicken seems much less problematic than to sacrifice a person, God or not.

Safety Advice: I keep seeing young trans people on social media talking about therapists disrespecting their pronouns and parents telling them that the therapist has a right to their beliefs. I want to be clear: you have a right to the therapy room being a safe supportive space for YOUR growth.

If sharing what the guy said is speaking ill of the dead, maybe he shouldn’t have said those things. He denied the Holocaust, he said horrifying things about women, particularly Black women, he mocked disabled people and gay people and trans people. Reporting that accurately is not making light.

Today I unbaptized the spirit of the newly departed Mormon prophet/profit, seer, and revelator true, into atheism. Please respect my choice. It is my religious freedom. 🫡

Once you're out alone in the woods with your Hallmark lumberjack, no one will come out to register you to vote. And no one will hear you scream

They're also women out of the workforce propaganda, which is of course a related project

Not only do I stand with Prof. Ashley, who had the unequivocal right to say what she did, I will point out that what she said was 1. Correct 2. Not in any way disparaging to he deceased, who stood by his words in life. She didn’t mock him- she let his views speak for themselves.

"I take safety more serious than you can imagine" www.thegamer.com/mr-beast-gam... Crew member crushed on one of Mr Beast's sets in a preventable incident and left unable to use left arm, given compensation of $1000 of giftcards.

And now we see that sadism transitioning—in the spectacle presented to the audience—from humiliating the subjects, offending their dignity, etc., to making their whole life and existence potentially forfeit to the rich man. That’s what I think disturbs people.

Content creators tend to think any spectacle is defensible if they can say health and safety concerns have been attended to behind the scenes, but that’s not really it imho. Mr. Beast’s whole thing is that his subjects’ desperation for cash allows him—a wealthier person—to indulge his sadism.

Love when I have my annual anti harassment training and it's immediately relevant.

This was the most fascinating exchange to me. Coates asks whether a liberal going to Evangelical churches and selectively editing exchanges to mock Christians would be "doing politics the right way." Klein says it would if it were done completely differently.

I actually kinda admire how frank and earnest Ezra is, because it lays bare the desperate belly-showing of liberals. If 30% of the country is pro-slavery, Ezra flinches in awareness that he has no plan or stomach for anything beyond persuasion, and thus decides slavery is permissible for debate.

the white nationalist meme account guy absolutely knew what he was doing when he cropped this screenshot, but it’s incredibly funny to imagine the very real possibility that elon musk doesn’t actually know what christian identity is. it doesn’t just mean people who identify as christians!

we can’t just talk past the things these people actually believe and say. i would not spit in erika kirk’s face over her husband’s death. but i would spit in her face over the authoritarian spectacle she allowed to be made of it

the insistence that coates play electoral politics gets at this same thing. every utterance against the push for a white christian nation is an act on behalf of the democratic party. it is always partisan. it is never merely principled. while the voice of the volk can never be questioned

i just don’t know what to say anymore. it’s a segregationist party. it and its avatars, including kirk, openly call for segregationist policy. they are vile people who believe in vile things. there is a kind of politick to declining to say so for a week but no good in pretending you can’t see evil

there was no democratic failure to leave space for kirk’s family and fans to grieve. didn’t happen. people like klein insist on responding to posts on the internet as the voice of the democratic party while pretending the actual actions of elected republicans are unrelated to that party’s politics

The Labour government is utterly monstrous. More right wing than anything we've seen since Major, possibly Thatcher.

Btw, if you’re gonna buy mums this year*, don’t. Buy asters instead. Mums are not native to N. America, asters are. Ideally one grown without pesticides but I know that’s hard to find. Any aster is better than a mum. *if you live in N. America