Funny how the wealthiest republican areas of Tennessee increased vaccination while the most rural MAGA portions decreased. @thetnholler.bsky.social

the other aspect of this reporting that has really stuck with me is seeing how we have lost an emphasis on *community* health across the country—parents who did vax their kids sometimes said “well my kid is vaccinated so we’re fine” and vice versa for parents opting to not vax

The share of counties where 95% or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles has dropped from 50% before the pandemic to 28%, according to our analysis of public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia. At least 19,000 schools are now more vulnerable to outbreaks.

EXCLUSIVE: @laurenweberhp.bsky.social & I have spent the last year collecting school+county-level vaccination data from across the US and found that only about 28% of counties now have herd immunity for kindergartners from measles—that leaves about 5.2mn kids unprotected. Gift link: wapo.st/49zDc43

This came out in October but I only saw it today. It's legitimately, one of the funniest articles I've read, for a long time. The lede is the least of it. Well worth you taking the time to take a gander. www.londoncentric.media/p/terry-ball...

ICE is arresting, detaining, & deporting our military veterans. As a veteran, this makes me angry. This is a disgrace. It’s unAmerican. And it betrays the sacrifices they made for our country. The President should to tell ICE to stop & Congress should pass legislation to protect our veterans.

An analogue I’ve noticed between fundamentalist scriptural exegesis and jurispudential originalism as actually practiced in the wild: Both enable a kind of ventriloquism by assuming univocality in the texts they purport to interpret.

Oh look, a machine for false advertising designed to defeat any class treatment even without arbitration clauses!

Completely destroying your career by being too racist to pay income taxes is really funny.

Income tax is corruption is so cool, I hope all the right wingers with clearance just refuse to pay it.

The correct answer is B, C, A, D, and this is a good heuristic for thinking about why. Population-wise, B roughly corresponds to percentiles 80-99, C to 99-99.95, A to 0 to 80, and D to 99.95 and above. bsky.app/profile/wand...

Happy New Year 2026 from the Russian Media Monitor!

You don’t HAVE to choose between them, but if I WERE going to side with either young men who despise women or young women who prefer to sleep with men who don’t despise them, I wouldn’t make the same choice NPR has.

So we’re supposed to believe the DOJ just stumbled onto a million more Epstein “documents”. Really? Let’s talk about the redactions. In March the FBI put 934 employees on the Epstein files, racked up more than 14,000 hours of overtime. And part of that work was redacting Donald Trump’s name.

Hottest newcomer: Zohran Mamdani. Biggest loser: Elise Stefanik. Most inappropriate gift. The Boeing 747 from Qatar. Michelle Cottle wraps up 2025 with her annual politics yearbook.

"I hope this scorpion stinging me as I dutifully ferried it across a river had nothing to do with its nature"

the thing is, “differing political views” used to be about what percentage to tax high earners and not whether brown people are humans

A new @inthesetimes.com investigation by @ottavias.bsky.social w/ @typeinvestigations.org uncovers Texas “boarding homes” where disabled & elderly people face neglect, abuse & exploitation. As the US faces the largest healthcare cuts in its history, Texas' disastrous system is a warning for us all.

An instructive piece from @attackerman.bsky.social

These daycare rumors are similar to "election fraud" rumors in 2020 — people went to their mailboxes, the polls, or online databases searching for evidence of fraud, often misintepreting what they saw/found, & then sharing it online where it got picked up by a "voter fraud" amplification machine.

Next stage: their political apparatus jumps in, using interviews and hearings designed not to get to the bottom of the rumors, but to generate more sound bytes, video clips, and other "evidence" to strengthen their frames: bsky.app/profile/poli...

The right wing media ecosystem works by amplifiying "evidence" that aligns with their prevailing, strategic frames. Shirley has tapped into these same dynamics before, with a video in Winter 2024 that bolstered the border crisis and election fraud frames. www.cip.uw.edu/2024/03/14/v...

Another reason these rumors — and the new narrative Shirley put into motion — took off is that they align with multiple strategic frames that are already prominent on the right: (1) immigrant criminality; (2) immigrant exploitation of U.S. taxpayers; and (3) waste, fraud, and abuse by Democrats.

As each new rumor pops up, it will be difficult for officials and others to quickly correct misinfo & protect innocent children and caregivers, because there's uncertainty in each new allegation and there are kernels of truth within the broader story — i.e. there have been cases of fraud.

The veracity of specific claims doesn't matter to the believers. The deeper story — of immigrants exploiting U.S. taxpayers — is something they already believe, and a few legitimate cases is enough to scaffold belief in the larger story and justify a witch hunt to manufacture more evidence.

The rumors about daycare centers are extremely "fit" for virality: having both novelty & familiarity (drawing on anti-immigrant tropes of criminality & exploitation); making emotional/identity appeals; are *participatory* in that ppl can create their own “evidence” by investigating local centers.

Historian Joseph Fronczak has described the political culture of fascism as “participatory anti-democracy.”

Elon Musk is making up claims about Tesla on X and won’t allow community notes to be attached.

fifteen hours left for the fully driverless Tesla robotaxis to materialize before we start yet another "end of the year, this time for real though bro" cycle... he doesn't have many of these left in him

watch for this to pick up in 2026, as Tesla increasingly circles the drain

I have no idea how anyone can seriously remain an Elon Musk fanboy. The man is a billionaire who, nevertheless, feels the need to lie about being good at video games in order to impress strangers on the internet. He should not be taken seriously!

there was this great moment this year when his fans realized he would rather goon to his grok waifus than deliver on his promises of sending them into outer space

Wait. It's only *then* that you realized the importance of correcting them? Again I believe that AI tools are quite useful but only if users know from the start their limitations

Open corruption.

I was not drinking 6-7 beers every day but my alcohol consumption frequently hit those numbers for a given day, and boy howdy did cutting back to at most 2 and a modal daily consumption of zero have an impact this year. I’ve lost over 40 pounds.

Wordle 1,656 4/6* 🟩⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩⬛🟨⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟨⬛🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

A lot of them have learned from their churches that, while pedophilia committed by average adults is BAD, it's OK when done by powerful men, especially church leaders.

No no no no no

The chasm that has opened is the change in men’s views of women. Sure, there were some right-wing nut jobs around 30 years ago promoting a “women in the kitchen” agenda. But the vast majority of 18-35 year old men in the ‘90s would think the views of the current generation of young men to be nuts.

Yeah. Because it's not actually politics, it's values.

Researchers had people do a memory task, take a 10-min break (rest, Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok), then resume. Result? Only TikTok wrecked their ability to remember planned intentions. After scrolling, accuracy dropped from ~80% to basically coin-flip levels. Twitter & YouTube? No effect.

Yo what the fuck short form videos are bad Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03714 Ht: HowTown

The New Year is upon us! Time for Philly's most shameful, outdated, unneeded tradition, The Mummers Parade. I wrote this comic in 2022. CW for racial caricatures and Blackface. This ugliness cannot stay unaddressed. 1/n

I'd heard of the Philadelphia mummers' parade, but I knew nothing about it. This short comic explains the history.

I keep forgetting things like this happened

Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in as NYC's first Muslim mayor on a Qur'an from the personal collection of the great Afro-Boricua intellectual Arturo Schomburg—as well as Qur'ans owned by Mamdani's grandparents. www.nypl.org/press/schomb...

A lot of Blueskiers are going to dismiss this observation because of the source, but it is correct. I'll just add that I don't think there's anything special about single-family homes that means they should never be rentals, any more than there's a rule that multifamily units should never be condos.

And now for the most-read article…. #1 Good to Know: The public is a thermostat. Good Authority fellow @akoustov.bsky.social explains the political science behind the never-ending cycle of governments doing something – and the public demanding the opposite. goodauthority.org/news/good-to...

Bill McKibben is a longtime environmental activist whose outlook on climate change has been described as “dark realism.” Now, he’s painting a much sunnier picture about the future of our planet thanks to the remarkable rise of solar power. Listen to the full episode here: tinyurl.com/3ztc2w34

Two strangers, a terrorist bomb and an amazing tale of courage In the early hours of Friday, January 20, 2023, a dirty blue car parked outside St. James’s hospital in Leeds. The car was filled up to its windows with junk. Mohammad Farooq sat behind the steering wheel in the cold and dark,…