I regret to inform you that Richard Grenell has been compromised by woke and is no longer reliable support for our Dear Leader

This is a big one. The Washington National Opera was one of the Kennedy Center's few mainstays, and this break is evidence that the Trump-zombie version is simply not a viable arts venue. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/a...

Folks look at you like you're crazy when you say we're in the midst of the worst, most unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis in American history, & then it's Saturday.

if only there had been a movement and momentum several years ago to downsize police budgets, clear out the white supremacists and de-militarize local law enforcement

ore evidence of the gross managerial incompetence of Richard Grenell

My “Hey don’t kill people” brand is really breaking people’s brains it seems

i wrote about dissociation, reading as comfort, vice and self obliteration during times of horror, and also about reading exclusively about gay love for like. a year buttondown.com/theswordandt...

Imagined victimhood is a foundational tenet of fascism. Persecution fantasies permeate conservative politics. Their great oppressors include racial diversity, science, drag brunch, children's literature, public education, N-95 masks, electric cars, medicine, the rule of law, empathy, and Ms. Rachel.

Do Vance and DHS think we can't actually watch the video?

"Philosophy will have conscience of tomorrow, commitment to the future, knowledge of hope, or it will have no more knowledge." - Ernst Bloch, 1954

A real-life contemporary moral problem. What does an ethics class look like in an authoritarian regime? This post links to the banned syllabus.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but cops are not allowed to shoot people just because you didn't do what they said. That is called murder when they do that. Some cops are working hard to convince people otherwise.

For accessibility, we also included a Box that intuitively explains intractability and how the growth of exponential resource demands is easily underestimated.

Right after Renée Good’s disgusting murder, a ICE goon was filmed kicking her memorial candles. Absolutely vile.

We present a typology of traps to avoid: 1. Believing that AI systems are minds 2. Believing that AI systems are theories 3. Believing that cognitive science can be automated. Learn to recognise and avoid these traps. Failure to avoid leads to numerous problems. 3/🧵

Make it viral.

I actually lived over a public library in Vienna in social housing. It was actually very nice and the Library was always in use. There was also a local party office and a trade union school on the ground floor. Also a coffee shop and a Vietnamese place.

EXCLUSIVE: The U.S. Is Leaving Boat Strike Survivors to Drown The Coast Guard called off its search for people who jumped into the sea after watching the U.S. military destroy another ship. theintercept.com/2026/01/07/b...

I know this feels impossible now, but I swear, on January 6 itself, there was a pretty broad bipartisan consensus that storming the Capitol to find and kill lawmakers was bad, and that Trump was responsible for inciting his followers to try it

People who claim we need to get back to the classics, often don’t know what’s in the classics…

This is your city — that means that you belong here, you have a right to be here and to live a dignified life, whatever your background and whatever your income. wilson.seattle.gov/2026/01/02/m...

It's illustrative of the role transphobia plays on the right: no matter how fractured they get over Epstein, Israel, tariffs or anything else transphobia is still the glue that binds them

One of the common downfalls of conspiracy narratives attributing human sources of disease is again and again we just didn’t know enough to even get close to creating them. Yet the conspiracist keep digging deeper and deeper into our past ignorance.

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

21. And before team Yglesias responds by saying "yeah, but it's bad politics to run on climate and energy"... I'd point out that I've won 4 elections in a very purple district running on climate and energy. Pro-tip: leadership is possible! You don't have to be stupid to win!

I found an old blog post in drafts that I decided to modify somewhat and put out - my own little plea for humanism, why I self-describe and generally consider myself a humanist. Not sure if anyone else will care, but fwiw here it is. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-...

Yeah, this dum dum is talking about chicken pox. Anyway, it's very cool and awesome that he has so much cultural and political influence.

lemme take off my beautiful woman wig real quick, replace it with my realpolitik cap: if a candidate delivered me free tampons i would vote for her. i would vote for her all day long

The guy who put a 19 year old named Big Balls in charge of gutting key government services: “experience matters when lives are at stake”

🧵 Our mutual aid hub has been a HUGE draw for our immense volunteer base, many of whom have never wanted to be involved politics before now. This model isn’t just about the immediate impacts: It’s about showing our values, building a community, and reaching voters — without selling our soul!

This is a great example of how genAI steals from us all on multiple levels. It's stolen a promotional spot for real books and authors, it's stolen a job from an actual journalist who could have compiled this, it's stolen an opportunity for parents to be recommended good NZ books for their kids

Call me a nerd, but yesterday, a federal judge in Pennsylvania cited my reporting in a ruling against the DOJ in a case challenging Trump-era actions targeting transgender people. A reminder that this work really does matter.

You’re not having real conversations on X. And if you’re finding you’re seeing more hate here than you are on the white nationalist platform that has restored actual Nazis, I’m afraid that’s a you problem.

The tax in the Portland area she’s talking about is a very tiny income tax on top tier earners to fund preschool for all, which she tried to get the legislature to revoke. It’s both anti-democratic and anti-affordability. It’s also not a something she actually achieved so idk why it’s listed.

I think at that point you have to stop calling yourself a school.

The interfaith group has repeatedly sought entry to the building but has been turned away each time. During their latest effort, they said they wanted to offer “pastoral care” to Christians detained there for the holiday.

As people comb the Epstein files for some crime they can get Trump on I’m thinking about how he was found with boxes of stolen top secret files in his possession and somehow that ended up being impossible to prosecute.

Worth noting that the student admits that she just threw the thing together in 30 minutes without reading the paper she was supposed to be responding to.

is this commutative where a state may not send revenue to federal government in response while the matters are adjudicated?

Do you know what my students learn in my classroom? How to think critically about the daily onslaught of visual information they are bombarded with. This includes the ways images play into political and military histories. It's only an "either/or" scenario for those who don't know the field.

$25,000 signing bonus $10,000 per college campus speech $50,000 for every 200 slurs logged $100,000 for making the TPUSA all-star roster she was set up to make over $2M a year but she was barely rosterable for most of the season, one of the more unfortunate prospect busts of late

New from me: The storied fiddler Ashley MacIsaac wanted to play a show at a Nova Scotia First Nation. It got cancelled because Google's AI search summary incorrectly called him a sex offender. Now he's worried for his safety www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/arti...

Join us for interesting discussions at the Computational Approaches to Early Evolution workshop next year in April at OIST in Onna, Okinawa! 🦠💻🧬 Registrations open until January 2nd '26, do not miss it! More info & registration details in the link below! 🔽 www.oist.jp/conference/c...

UPDATE: CNN confirms that "the envelope [holding the Epstein-Nassar Note] was sent from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City [where Epstein was being held] to Nassar"—*and* got vetted by federal officials. Which explains the Virginia postmark (where the FBI is).

lot of correct discussion today about Kavanaugh today but I’m still struck but how much Gorsuch is fully cooked. libertarian streak entirely gone. textualist entirely gone. he’s just WASP Alito now.

There's an audio recording of him, not an aide, asking for votes to swing a state in a Presidential election and that wasn't enough to get him locked up or even keep him from the White House

"Lake Research Partners and Project LPAC, the research arm of the only organization dedicated to electing LGBTQ women and non-binary candidates, found that 43 percent of voters were more likely to vote for a candidate who stands up for transgender people."

DHS needs to get nuked from orbit