I am not ready for any of this

SNAP sends out $6.38 per person, per day, to nine percent of New Jersey. It is $6.31 to 15 percent of Alabamians. In her home state, 10 percent of Texans are receiving $6.19 a day. Some 13 percent of Floridians draw $6.12 a day. Via @profhalloran.bsky.social

So we’re in a pinch tonight between play practice and a basketball game, so per the request of the small humans I stopped at Jimmy John’s to grab them sandwiches. Our order was two turkey sandwiches and two bags of potato chips. Thirty-seven American dollars. That’s … hard to swallow.

Two jury waiting room observations: (1) For a group of a couple hundred people, this is an almost astoundingly respectful group. When folks have phone calls, they get up and take them in the designated area. Nobody’s devices are making noise. Everyone seems respectful of everyone else’s space.

The current maximum SNAP benefit in Illinois for a family of four comes out to about $8.25 per person per day.

This jury orientation video is phenomenal.

This is a full abdication of the duty of a government to care for people in its custody. Revoltingly underscoring how we’ve categorized these folks as undeserving of any aid or comfort. Absolutely intolerable. This, among myriad others, should be an administration-ending scandal.

Pre-jury duty fortification.

Some important points from new study: if you describe specific safety net programs (eg SNAP, unemployment insurance) instead of generic "welfare programs," people are more likely to tolerate slightly higher fraud to ensure access. There is always this trade-off; framing matters. @donmoyn.bsky.social

I fundamentally disagree with this metaphor. Bureaucracies operate *nothing* like ChatGPT. In fact, generations of bureaucracy scholars have explained how functioning (and output) is not determined by the input policy (prompt). This clarifies how bureaucracies are not simply algorithmic.

In some sense we all thought we were going to Union Station only to end up stranded in Vienna Virginia with psychotic bus driver.

Whatever my uni declares, I am not going to engage with AI. I am not going to use AI or teach students to use it. I am going to continue to explain to students why it is harmful. Absolutely absurd to allow this anti-intellectual, environmentally devastating technology into the university at all.

Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men deserves a 10-episode prestige cable drama treatment.

I dragged the small humans out to try to see the aurora. No luck. It was also 5°.

I mean, we’ll see the extent of these actions, but it will be darkly hilarious if the EU stops buying US Treasuries while the American Congress refuses to limit funding for the unconstitutional actions of the Trump Administration.

1/What makes a civil officer that can be impeached? Under Lucia v. SEC, there are two qualifications: (1) a continuing, permanent position; and (2) the exercise of significant authority.

DHS is out with a new explanation of this and "he's a brown guy who looked like some sex criminals who he allegedly lived with" (his sister-in-law's story suggests that last part is made up), and they claim he refused to be fingerprinted or "facially ID'd," which I do not in any way believe at all.

I contain mountainous volumes of unfathomable existential anxiety & also whimsy

It’s going to require an enormous amount of focused effort to rebuild any kind of normal relationship with the countries in the EU after all of this. And, for god’s sake, I would love to believe that some meaningful coalition in the American political class really understood that.

First day of the semester tomorrow. And I got called to jury service.

Let this radicalize you.

i've got all next season to get so pissed off at the bears when they have expectations. not this year.

I honestly kinda love this more than I’m even really interested in Game of Thrones. Accept that you’re not in control. You’re not entitled to certainty. It’s art.

The fact that companies like TurboTax are suffered to exist remains a national disgrace.

something I've been wondering about for so many years: has anyone ever actually tried being a swinger of birches like Frost describes? is that a thing that is actually possible?

My god, they rehabilitated Will Stancil. You maniacs.

Hope we see studies on the economic harm Trump’s surges have inflicted on these cities.

This is a good lesson, no matter how you come to learn it

Amongst the forest of problems, perhaps the central problem is the idea that the government should be able to determine what is included within and excluded from the “public discourse necessary to self-government[.]”

Communities are already feeling the impact of harsh immigration policies. Hospitals are understaffed, construction is slowing, and small businesses are hurting. Immigrants are workers, and workers build this country. Pushing people out does not strengthen the economy — it weakens it.

For @msnownews.bsky.social, I wrote an article about how ICE Watch is grounded in sociological theories of violence prevention. The reality is that most men will only commit public violence in extremely specific scenarios and ICE Watch disrupts the conditions necessary for escalation.

NEW: How the Department of Homeland Security, founded to prevent another 9/11 terrorist attack, has turned into the partisan political tool its critics always feared www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

There is no recalibrated or sanitized way to conduct the war that Trump and Stephen Miller are waging on American cities right now. That’s because it’s a campaign of deliberate terror. The policy *is* the terror, and the terror *is* the policy. newrepublic.com/article/2053...

I realize that I talk about the fifth grader more than the seventh grader. But, dear readers, I absolutely promise you that the seventh grader is held equally in my affection—she and I are incredibly similar in lots of ways and we're buds. I just tend to be manhandled more by the fifth grader.

I have spent my day producing the raw components for the fifth grader to assemble into a mini tubulum/slapphone for a school project. She directed the design ... which ended up being a four hour process of cutting PVC pipe to length and then drilling 2" holes in a board.

Qual Mail... Loon Letters... Postal Bird Stickers!! 🐦✉️

There's a local chain here called El Diablo Burritos and I just really like their branding

Shot:

Godzilla (1998) Unfairly maligned. The only English language Godzilla movie that actually understands Godzilla.

That this is considered scandalous demonstrates how far Trump has moved our standards of decency. Armed men in tactical gear and masks come into a restaurant? Of course, decent people should demand they leave. Those are people setting standards for their own community.

This is an excellent piece on the purge of public servants from the federal government. So many dedicated and talented people pushed out. We are worse off without their skills. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

We gotta decouple "taking seriously the idea that Trump is going to try to end constitutional government in America" from "we're doomed and nothing matters" Of course the latter is toxic, and only serves Trump. But the former is just obviously true

When you have a hammer and whatnot… But this thread is a wonderful illustration of why implementation processes should be part of your analysis for any policy problem. Because the distance between “the policy is X” and actually seeing X happen at the street level is often the critical distance.

I agree that Dems need to try to shut the government down until ICE is meaningfully reigned in. I would like to see Dems clearly articulate the extremes to which the Trump Administration is abusing power, and ICE is a vivid representation of those abuses.

Stop whatever you’re doing and read this obituary. RIP Renfrew Christie.

This isn’t in the top 100 most important things going on right now, but: I’ve idly wondered (since Rev Black was assaulted in Chicago) how the more protective religious freedom provision of the Northwest Ordinance might be asserted in these contexts.

This is a critical point. What we're really witnessing is the *collapse* of law and order, brought about by Trump's lawless thugs. I think a lot of ordinary people intuitively understand that this is what's happening.

Wait a minute. The grandson of the UK’s most notorious fascist works for Palantir? That’s a bit too on the nose.

A big part of why I believe ICE should be abolished is that I think immigration should be much easier - and require much less "enforcement."