the heart wants what it wants

During a military-style raid on a building in Chicago’s South Shore, one resident heard a knock on his door. 

It wasn’t the feds —  it was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for help. He let them hide in his unit for the next 3 days. chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

This is also the appropriate response to the simpletons who say, I just want the news, without political bias. Even if someone were able to cover a student protest in completely unbiased language, they chose to cover a student protest instead of covering, say, lack of funding for health services.

I forgot how good an album Dirty Computer is. One banger after another.

When I say we do “fresh and edgy messaging” this is what I mean. @standupforscience.bsky.social

They are not planning "a violent crackdown" on 10.18. What they are doing is sending a signal to their shock troops to try to cause havoc. But those shock troops will be vastly outnumbered. Go out and protest freely. Do not be cowed.

The brilliant thing about this is they cannot outlaw anthropomorphic frogs without losing their precious Pepe demographic

Today in life under competitive authoritarianism Again, textbook stuff:

they are clearly trying to terrify everyone out of showing up to the No Kings protest and I simply do not think it is going to work see you all there

Trump will just have to keep murdering fishermen until you stupid jerks give him the peace prize

how disgusting and unnecessary. begging men to be normal just once.

Your regular reminder, aside from the performative public lying of far right authoritarians, that the GOP & the national media would have a week-long Discourse On Civility if <any Democrat> ever spoke about GOP voters/conservatives the way GOP leaders speak about Dem voters/liberals every single day

"we cant uninvent ai" no we cant but we couldnt uninvent nfts either and nobody gives a fuck about them anymore

Scene: A friend trying to get me to apply for a job in Fresno, CA. Me: Ugh, why can't these types of jobs be in a mid-sized Midwestern city? Friend: Mindy, Fresno IS a mid-sized Midwestern city! 😂

It really can't be said enough: the goal of the "anti-woke" movement was always to destroy social norms against bigotry. And it worked. And there's a whole lot of purportedly "left" thinkers & commentators who helped it -- indeed, it couldn't have been done without them. They should feel bad.

Pritzker: "He wants to militarize major cities because he wants us to get used to the idea of troops on the streets. I believe he's gonna post people outside of polling places and if he needs to in order to control those elections, he'll assume control of the ballot boxes & count the votes himself"

Contemplating spending like $1500 of my own money to go to #aas247 this year just so I can spend a few days away from upstate New York in the winter and call it work.

twice a year the entire U.S. press becomes a marketing extension of a single billionaire-owned retailer, and nobody in any position of editorial power thinks it's weird or gross

doomscroll break

You know which field of endeavor doesn't get 500 hours of guaranteed, uncompeted characterization time annually on fancy telescopes? Planetary defense. And this is despite asteroids hitting the Earth being an actual, you know, thing.

If anyone from the UN wants to talk, here’s a nice summary. The astronomy community does NOT endorse this proposal, just take it from one of THE EXPERTS on ISOs with Rubin. Meg (and many others) has helped the community plan for +10yrs for these kinds of studies.

😭 IG newberlinlibrary

"[Weiss's project] is to establish herself and her cohort not as new-right media, but as the new liberal media, staking out the leftmost acceptable position within the new right-wing paradigm."

Please enjoy 10 seconds of a fat groundhog enjoying an apple at my sister's house 😊

Don’t blame our leaders if the US military begins committing war crimes or attacking American civilians. Blame the women who laughed at Pete Hegseth during sex.

What's annoying about my job is that I can get permission to go to dark places that normally you can't go to at night...but only to do night time programs. I can't just take my camera and try to get a picture of the Moon in peace. I have to work.

Democracies rely on compromise and credible commitments. Trump governing like prior legal agreements are not binding, like Congress does not matter, like he does not expect to ever give up power.

Now that it’s Halloween season I feel I should remind you that Trunk-or-Treat is a symptom of a declining society, facilitated by car culture and suburban sprawl, which leads to decreased social trust and increased social insularity✌🏻

Julius Caesar was the first Roman to put his own living face on coins, weeks before his death. It is one of the deepest cultural signifiers of something autocracies do and republics do not. “Render unto Caesar.” A practice so notoriously arrogant Jesus himself dunked on it with snarky wordplay.

Here's the ADL description of how the Moon Man is a neo-Nazi, white supremacist symbol. Here's the Moon Man in a video just posted by the US Department of Homeland Security today. Trump's administration, of course, just cut ties with the ADL.

It’s so fucking funny that we’re still getting five NYT op-eds a week calling for the left to tone down their rhetoric

In case it wasn’t clear, the anti-DEI crusade has never been about merit. Zero news experience. Never been a reporter. Elevated to Editor in Chief of CBS News, one of the most storied news institutions in the nation. www.mediaite.com/media/news/p...

Is New York ready for a mayor who isn’t a gigantic off-putting weirdo

Trump has no idea what’s going on. Republican lies will cost us hospitals, quality ERs, specialty care, and qualified doctors, it will likely cause millions of Americans to lose healthcare coverage because it will be absolutely unaffordable — a 75% increase is not sustainable.

One of my favorite anecdotes from THE PREHISTORY OF THE FAR SIDE: "That doesn't sound like the Jane Goodall we know."

A long, interesting, and well-lived life.

Crows say "kill your lawn"

Oh my god, I wanted to give a different kind of presentation than usual for me at Observe the Moon Night on Saturday so I'm trying to write a 30 minute talk about the moon with no slides and I'm just now realizing both how long that is and how absolutely crutch-less I will be. I'm such a fool.

@bot.astronomy.blue signup

The president said, in a televised speech, that he's sending his new, less restrained, more violent military into US cities to practice their brutality on immigrants and minorities, to better train them to apply that brutality to other countries. He said this out loud.

I hear the President has decreed that it is possibly a crime to refer to Americans as "fascists," but "fascism" is a word that has a relatively clear meaning that's worth understanding. Here's how an official publication of the US Army defined "fascism" in 1945.

The endgame for all of this is constructing a military that will obey orders when ordered to fire on citizens. That's the throughline to half of what Trump is doing.

This is such an essential phrase: “The only Constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest and most reviled among us.”

Today my therapist told me that she spent some time in Kansas City last week and that she finally understands why I’m so homesick for the Midwest.

I will say if that whole military meeting had been an email it would have been a pretty weird email

I am again confronted with the grim reality that I was born to spend all day looking at mountains from a rocking chair but I am forced to drive a car.

the president of the united states wants to use the american military to kill american citizens on american soil. that's the whole story!