If you're wondering about how Elon's space plans are going, we've downsized from Mars to the moon, in about 2 years we'll be talking about him building colonies in Utah

While some folks downstairs are still complaining about a sporting event and languages they don’t understand. Up here in Canada, the CBC is showing Olympic hockey with play-by-play in Inuktitut. It’s the Canadian experience I didn’t know I needed. ❤️🇨🇦 #olympics #inuktitut

Looks interesting. Putting it on my reading list for when my current project is finished.

My, uh, unpopular opinion is this is good, actually. 1) Generic "approval" ratings don't measure anything real 2) Polling in general is pretty broken for reasons the head of Gallup discussed here, including spam calls and (circularly) lack of faith in polling. www.marketplace.org/!pisode/2024...

NEW: This was the last essay I was supposed to publish at the Washington Post. But they fired me. I'm publishing it anyway-- about my family's connection to a sword the British looted from Ghana in 1874. If youve ever wondered why I love swords, here's why. open.substack.com/pub/karenatt...

If you don't measure it, it doesn't exist. One more source of (well kinda) independent information quashed.

“I’ve mentioned before that concentration camp regimes in their early stages often make use of large open infrastructure to convert into detention spaces. Dachau was converted from a shuttered factory into a concentration camp in 1933.”

[Hidden [[Door Status] Sensor]]. I totally misparsed that one first time around.

BREAKING: @carolleonnig.bsky.social reports a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. declined to indict Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin on charges of seditious conspiracy Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the proceedings.

When I got the contract to write a history of concentration camps in 2014, I hoped to keep the US from ending up here. That didn't work out! But now it's critical to understand how much is already in process and the enormity of what's coming. The sooner we act to stop it, the more people we'll save.

This 👇

Another memorable ruling out of West Virginia, where Judge Goodwin — a Clinton appointee — excoriates the treatment of ICE detainees. "This is not what civil enforcement looks like in a humane system of government under law." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

A dresser inside a museum in New York City has been discovered as a secret stop on the Underground Railroad — the first of its kind discovered in Manhattan in over 100 years

Thinking about the time I was at a quantum gravity meeting and the man across from me was talking to me and a man next to him turned and said in all seriousness “don’t talk to her, she’s difficult” and it was because I had reacted ”badly” to racism. Meanwhile their heroes were hanging with Epstein.

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

I broke the link. 😑 This one works!

the wet market narrative is *bad for the Chinese government* and they have actively suppressed it at every turn! these people are incapable of the most basic understanding of the world.

No way will I attend the White House dinner with this President. I’m standing with @govwesmoore.bsky.social and @colorado.gov — and standing against Trump’s corruption and hatred. And I’m calling on my Republican colleagues to do the same.

Tangential, but ... DO NOT WEAR THEM. The batteries can puff up and emergency responders do not know how to cut them off your finger without hurting your finger from the battery corrosive material. DO NOT USE THESE. Plus surveillance = bad. Pass them by... futurism.com/robots-and-m...

Homeland Security is monitoring anti-ICE Reddit posts, an intelligence bulletin leaked to me reveals: www.kenklippenstein.com/p/homeland-s...

"Anybody knows, who studies history, what happens when you have folks who are now treating these humans as bodies, and you have no reason to believe you’re going to make it out alive from a place where they’re already calling you a body." Thank you, Aliya Rahman, for this brave testimony & analysis💥

Come join former Washington State Governor Jay Inslee and me on Substack Live at 6pm ET tonight, Monday, to discuss the risk Trump’s militarization of ICE & CBP poses, and some possible solutions. open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...

Fearing that educated judges might rule on climate cases, Republican Attorneys General successfully bullied the The Federal Judicial Center (the education & research arm of the federal court system) into removing a chapter summarizing climate science from their scientific judicial reference manual.

This is a really big, terrifying deal 🧪

Yes and no. Because fascists regimes also become adept at using art, literature, photography, film, architecture, etc. for their own ends. Fascism is also an aescetics. They tolerate creatives who help further their goals. Fascism is also an aesthetics. "Visualizing Fascism" free to read online

Another book is "The Culture of Japanese Fascism" Contributors from history, literature, film, art history, and anthropology describe a culture of fascism in Japan in the decades preceding the end of the Asia-Pacific War. They don't have a problem with artists who are useful. Free to read online

ICE is using the Mobile Fortify app to identify protestors and pull them from TSA precheck or global entry as a form of unlawful retaliation. viewfromthewing.com/court-filing...

Thank you for your excellent essay... sent me scuttling to my bookshelf to pull out related items that epitomise Japanese humour for me from the dogu figurines to the yokai via ⛩️👺now 👏👏👏

It seems that the Creative and Artistic Community is adjacent to the Pakistani Social Media Activists. Members of the former are asking when they are going to get paid.

もういい加減 自分で自分たちでつくるということを やらねばならぬと 決意する朝になったよ うずまき舎は 本屋みたいな変な店から 「農民芸術学校　うずまき舎」 になることにしました。 本をつくることひろめることとともに 学ぶ人も教える人も入れ替わりつつ 手の仕事を取り戻すことを やっていこうと決めましたよ。 前から決めてたんだけど 今年からより具体的にってことで。 ************************* 芸術をもて あの灰色の労働を燃やせ ここにはわれら不断の 潔く楽しい創造がある 都人よ 来ってわれらに交れ 世界よ 他意なきわれらを受け容れよ 『農民芸術概論』 宮澤賢治

This is interesting. I'm not on it. I follow too many people and am followed by too many people, so I'm excluded as noise. True anonymity in the cloud/crowd FTW.

We all, collectively, pulled up a chair and did as deep a reading of these performances as I’ve seen in upper level humanities classes, and we not only talked about them with precision and clarity, we did so across distributed networks.

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

I never noticed this either.

/11 One of my first thoughts was to donate to museums, but few if any are accepting donations of fine Asian art, perhaps related to the collapse of the market. I tried the Pacific Asia Museum, where my wife and I were married, and they‘re not accepting art.

/8 Some of the best and oldest ones he splurged on as a young man, including on leave to Japan while in the Army in Korea in 1958. Beloved, but intended for a display house, not a relatively modest modern ranch house.

/7 Plus apparently it’s very hard to give reliable results based on pictures. Edo Period Rama panel from Uju Temple in Honshu or 20th-century knockoff? Depends on who you ask.

/6 I’ve started looking into appraisers, but apparently the Asian antique market largely collapsed a few years ago and the appraisers are much less interested in looking at stuff to buy, and fewer are available to hire.

/5 Using online resources is a bit of a rabbit hole. Attempting to figure this out online gives a dozen different responses.

/4 Ultimately I think I’ll just keep some paintings and a few small ceramics, all stuff that speaks to me. I’ve always liked this one, even though it’s not one of the older or more valuable ones.

/3 But figuring out his stuff is a challenge. He had appraisals done around ’98 after mom died but they are incomplete and he got stuff after that, and the provenance papers are hard to figure out.

/2 Mom and dad always had a display-art kind of house and we’ve always had a much move lived-in move-the-piles-of-books-if-company-is-coming kind of house not really suitable for much fine art display. He never pushed me to take any of his stuff, which was nice of him.

A couple of years after his death, I‘ve started trying to figure out my dad’s art collection. It’s mostly Japanese and Chinese but with some nice 20th-century plein air pieces of local mountains. It’s a mix of good and medium stuff. /1

/3 Bad Bunny is an American citizen, but he could have been born on Plymouth Fucking Rock and he would still fall on the “immigrant” side of the “immigration divide” to Trump and his WaPo toadies.

/2 Bad Bunny stands for “immigration” because he’s not white. His existence within the United States — and particularly his broad popularity and great success — are an affront to Trumpian white nationalist values. That’s the WaPo message, brought to you with Jeff Bezos’ Amazon smile.

Everyone is shitting on the Post for implying that Bad Bunny, from Puerto Rico, is a “immigrant,” not an American citizen. But WaPo is actually being honest about the Trumpist immigration agenda, for which dutifully if dully supports. The Trumpist agenda is white nationalist. /1

Look at Bangkok for the last four elections compared to this A city that once was a royalist Democrat stronghold has become a blaring orange progressive bastion I think that there's a really interesting story in there about Thai Millennials and Gen Z, economic development, and progressivism

Thoughts from the hive-mind?

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

"For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career...cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism." (gift link)