Labeling domestic political opponents as "terrorists" and characterizing a US city as being at war as pretexts for deploying troops against US citizens.

In a speech before the United Nations General Assembly today, President Trump said climate change is a “con job” and climate scientists are “stupid people” — and he called green energy and immigration a “double-tailed monster” that is destroying Europe. 🧵 1/5

I can't believe there are gummies shaped like Shaq's head and none of you told me.

I hate to break it to you but (most) billionaires care only about making more money and government was the best check on their unbridled greed — and then we handed government to a billionaire

The willingness of corporate leaders (and those of universities and law firms) to exchange their autonomy and their rights for money has a been a surprise. It's pretty obvious they care more about the money.

People can say any horrible thing they want about Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump or anyone else. And the government is forbidden from taking retaliatory action against them.

i'm tired of people telling me that the houston texans aren't real. obviously they are not real in the literal sense. i don't think anyone is saying they are. but they impart lessons that have a lot of truth to them. god never intended them to be taken at face value

Trump is unusually unpopular and has always been unusually unpopular, and most of his agenda - policy and anti-democracy - is unpopular. The people who do love him are mostly the most intense partisans, who are going to like any GOP president, and are no more special than any other group of voters.

“Moving from a less walkable (25th percentile) city to a more walkable city (75th percentile) increased walking by 1,100 daily steps, on average”

I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats

Every day, my mother carefully boiled milk, bc otherwise we'd be exposed to tuberculosis, massive GI issues, and other pathogen-borne disease. When we came to the US, you could just drink milk cold! straight from the bottle! with no gross coat to skim! Welcome to communist-era Poland, y'all.

All kidding about this nonsense answer aside: The regime is asserting the power to murder without trial a boat full of people suspected of drug trafficking, who easily could have been intercepted and arrested instead. That is unconscionable and horrifying even assuming everyone aboard was guilty.

Basically the end of August APSA eJobs check-in #polisky (8/1-8/29) I remove non-ac positions & PhD studentships from the count & try not to miss individual listings with multiple jobs. August 2024: 156 positions (118 open to asst. TT) August 2025: 116 positions (82 open to asst. TT)

Looks like a great opportunity at UH!

Schwarber. Geez

Tech companies spending hundreds of millions to hire individual AI PhDs with the revenue they collected distributing endless medical and climate science misinformation is really just something else

Learned today about @OpenFreeMapOrg - free, high-quality vector tiles for your maps and apps! Use them in #rstats with mapgl by passing the URL to the style param, e.g.: maplibre(style = "tiles.openfreemap.or...#rstats) Styles include "positron", "bright", and "liberty" with 3D!

Sky-high sin taxes for guns and ammo. Exorbitant license and permitting fees. Require frustrating bureaucratic hurdles. Make it fiscally difficult to own, use, and sell them to limit both the supply and demand of weapons.

Interesting that so many are taking away "burn down PhD programs that don't place many grads in PhD-granting TT jobs" and not something like, "help PhD students understand the variety of gratifying, PhD-required careers (including TT jobs at non-PhD granting schools!) and how to prep for them" 🤷‍♀️

They specifically uploaded the 'NUMIDENT' file. This record includes your name, social security number, your birth date, your birth place, your parents' names and social security numbers, gender, and immigration status. The security threat is profound.

Yes, the stakes here are large. Very large.

It's not going to happen of course, but tonight is another Goldwater-Rhodes moment. Has a single journalist even bothered to try & track down Speaker Johnson or Senate Majority Leader Thune & ask them why they're not doing their damn jobs or upholding their damn oaths while the Constitution burns?

My book is available for 30% off. Ideal for public/health policy students and anyone that is suspicious of special interests in America health care.

Put TMBG in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you cowards

We underestimate the role of the resentment of the rich (really the business class) toward the state - they think their power is earned and other forms of power are not. The regulatory state and public opinion are both threats to their economic and political power.

"How bad slavery was" is worse. Much worse. Much worse than you think, much worse than you're taught, much worse than museums depict. Worse.

the thing everyone is going to have to accept is that the post-trump period, whenever it comes, will not and cannot be a project of national unity, it must be a project of partisan project of renewal, in the same way that reconstruction and the new deal were partisan projects of renewal.

America is having a housing crisis because it chooses to have a housing crisis. Americans are being displaced because we want them to be displaced. Our cities are world capitals of homelessness because we invest resources in making them so.

I've seen versions of this take for years and I still don't get it. There really were real wage declines post-COVID. People's quality of life, especially non-homeowners, really did decline, and we haven't grown out of it yet.

Yes! The palace is the Capitol, where the people rule, not the White House.

Trump is panicking because the economic numbers are giving a recession vibe. From the Chief Economist at Moody's.

Why have elite institutions behaved so cowardly in this moment when they have resources that could be marshalled in their defense? Is it because they're filled with prestige-seeking people who devoted their lives to rising to the top and cannot fathom losing their wealth, power, and privilege?

The Phillie Phanatic gets caught in a ColdPlay Kiss Cam moment.

We often wonder why the system of separated powers established by the Constitution doesn't appear to work in the Trump era. But we need to remember that the US system we experience is not the system set up in the Constitution or defended in the Federalist Papers.

🐅 While the main focus of tigris is getting data in your hands, it also includes utility functions to solve common thematic mapping problems. Try out `erase_water()` to auto-remove water areas from Census shapes, and `shift_geometry()` to re-position AK/HI/PR!

The newspaper that told the truth about Watergate and the Pentagon Papers will now “communicate with optimism about this country” in its time of rising fascism

Can't wait to read this!

Must read from @sarahbinder.bsky.social on the implications of Republicans nuclear event to pass the big bill. They stripped a major guardrail in reconciliation, which has implications for appropriations and future fiscal decisions. goodauthority.substack.com/p/three-big-...

They’ve destroyed American medical research, the American education system, the American university research system, and the aid system that protected millions of lives, and they’ve given our anti-immigrant masked paramilitary police force a budget the size of a nation

When backsliding a country with a long democratic tradition into authoritarianism, the move is to shower populist supporters with benefits as cover for consolidating power, screwing over the public only after you have it. It sucks that we got fascists. But at least we didn't get smarter ones.

Descartes gave us all the tools we need to survive in an era of misinformation. Simply begin with the understanding that you are real but everything else is fairly likely to be the cruel games of a demon sent to torment you specifically.

They'll never take any responsibility though, all these NIMBY narcissists. They all think that their town is its own special little bubble and people should just go live Somewhere Else. All the problems in New Jersey are caused by Somebody Else.

For those who don't understand the California Building Trades, they are a construction union whose primary position on housing is that it is better that California builds less and more expensive housing if their members can earn a higher wage per hour on these projects. Everyone loses except them!

I'm in person at House Appropriations Committee's markup of the FY 26 Legislative branch appropriations bill. The legislation makes a 50% cut to Congress's watchdog, the GAO, as well as prevents it from fulfilling statutory duties on impoundment. It also cuts the Library by 10%. It's gonna be lit

Tariffs. Stock market down. Medicaid slashed Secret police throwing anyone who looks Latino in unmarked vans. National guard and marines deployed in LA. No end to the wars in Gaza or Ukraine Bombing Iran This is the worst first six months of any presidential term in my lifetime.

the destruction of chattel slavery is one of the great accomplishments in our nation's history and the reason conservatives hate celebrating it is because doing so legitimizes the black counter-narrative of the united states

NEW: Oklahoma Republicans have been frustrated at a bunch of citizen initiatives—to expand Medicaid, hike the minimum wage, & more. And they just passed a wide-ranging law that cracks down on direct democracy, and will make it a lot tougher to qualify measures going forward. I wrote about it all:

The ban on gender-affirming care for minors is so obviously discriminating on the basis of sex — to pick an easy example, a minor the state IDs as a girl can get breast implants, a minor the state IDs as a boy cannot — that the only explanation is that the SCOTUS majority likes the discrimination.