So, um, I guess I should acknowledge that Pete Hegseth '03 played basketball at Princeton? For every Hegseth there's a Bill Bradley '65. And a Mark Milley '80.

⏰ TIME SENSITIVE A powerful op-ed published in Alabama yesterday urges Kay Ivey to grant mercy to Sonny Burton. We can still stop this — but only if we act today. 📬 Print the op-ed → drive.google.com/file/d/10Uiv...

fyi @awfulannouncing.bsky.social Also, since it's analogized to (and proposed as a means to study) fault rupture: @dralkatrip.bsky.social , @brandontbishop.bsky.social , @drwendyrocks.bsky.social

This whole thread is good & useful, and contains a gift link. "Perceive" is the right & key word, and authoritarians can put that off not only through "normal" elections but by hiding their real work in administrative acts, taking advantage of a media excited only by images & physical violence.

Finished watching "Black and Jewish America" last night. Episode 3 covers schisms in the Civil Rights movement after MLK's assassination. It mentions SNCC, but not CORE. The event my father describes here was in 1967. Overall, however, ...

If this storm takes lives or collapses buildings, they will be fairly easy to count. Much harder to count will be the lives saved and losses avoided by research, forecasting, mitigation, and emergency management -- all of which T and his Republican enablers have gutted over the last year.

I hope everyone prepping for a power outage on the east coast stays safe. But as you're riding it out, you might wonder how power plants are designed for winter storms, high winds, floods, and EQs ... and whether we could do that better, or at least force industry to answer the question. Well ...

I'm not claiming the first Trump administration was a model of ethical behavior, but there is just a deep sense in the second term that the guardrails are gone, the boss doesn't care, and its grab-whatever-you-can time donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-fb...

Wait for it: "... the baby duck rescue of 1997."

This is excellent. I confess it still depresses me when things that should be easy are made hard by fear, greed, and abuse of power, and by the fact that even 2 days ago nobody could say which way this was going to go (itself the hallmark of these times), but ... this is excellent.

A Jewish kid named Hughes wins gold for the US. I love this country so much that I will fight to the death to save it.

For your reference, @neorsd.org

I'm always wary of over-personalizing govt services, but he is REALLY GOOD at this. Would love to see more electeds give this much attention and focus this much competence on natural hazard risks.

QP because I don't want to step on Samantha's thread if she's planning to follow-up: Agree. I'll start. Put this in all-caps bold at the top of every NOFO: THE PURPOSE OF MITIGATION IS TO MAKE LOCAL RESPONSE & RECOVERY PLANS FEASIBLE, AND YOUR GRANT APPLICATION WILL BE JUDGED ACCORDINGLY.

My interest in energy is mostly about how to design & build these new structures to resist EQ & high wind. But I gotta say the broader topic of our clean energy future is fascinating on its own, and for anyone like me who's trying to learn the basics, this is an excellent and accessible primer.

QP because this is more about framing than climate change itself. I like the framing (and curious what @aedwardslevy.bsky.social thinks). It suggests that democratic change -- in this case bumping the top 2 groups from 41% to 52% -- comes from nudging the middle, not from converting the ignorant.

NEW — An obscure Navy contractor program is making Trump’s plans to quickly build out and supply immigrant concentration camps around the country a reality. Here I explain WEXMAC TITUS, an acronym you need to understand:

This won’t make the headlines because it’s not under construction, but NY just canceled a massive offshore wind request for proposals. Gigawatts of clean electricity that won’t get built. renews.biz/110047/new-y...

Save FEMA. Fire Kristi Noem.

I don’t know who needs to hear Jesse Jackson leading the kids on Sesame Street in this beautiful call-and-response reminding them that every child is somebody, but here it is

ICE claims a Romulus warehouse brings 1,458 jobs + $150M in benefits. ICE also just bought IMPLAN economic modeling software Feb 4. This is PR math. 🚫 Jobs = temp construction + indirect spending 🚫 $33M in "tax revenue" — but federal land is tax-exempt 🚫 IMPLAN model outputs whatever you input

1. An important, if temporary, ruling. I hoped it would detail the decision chain from the EO to Burgum to NPS staff to ... a worker with a crowbar. But it doesn't. So it's still up to JOURNALISTS to find & explain how our government actually implements these b.s. "orders." bsky.app/profile/dbon...

Federal court orders Trump administration to restore historical panel exhibits at President’s House in Philadelphia. Happy Presidents Day.

I'd like to hear from seismologists, #earthquake folks or #energysky if the timing of this suggests a relationship to the changes in wastewater injection protocols put in place after the peak of OK's induced seismicity ~2016. Two other observations from this piece: ...

Thx for posting this. (You can find it by searching "DHS 2026-02994") I worry about this too wrt detention facilities, esp since a proposal likely to be approved for the 2027 IBC (ADM20-25) will allow building officials to waive almost anything in the code by declaring their own disasters. It's bad.

This is an important piece because (finally!) it names at least 1 actual person - Michael McDonald - who signed off on the specific decision. The EOs are BS, but they are NOT law, and they are NOT self-enforcing. Nothing in the EO required this. McDonald made this call as much as T himself did.

Donald Trump is ALREADY interfering with the 2026 elections Thought this was really important to get out ASAP. More coming soon. You call him Ari Berman, but I say he's our Paul Revere.

Thanks for this link. I'll repeat: converting a warehouse to a detention facility involves a change of Risk Category that triggers a wind and seismic upgrade. ICE must be held to the rules. bsky.app/profile/dbon...

This is day two for the New York Times’ The Docket. But this is year six for Democracy Docket. www.democracydocket.com

Sounds familiar, sim to misuse of generic "AI" (mea culpa). Separate from opinion, is anyone tracking the varieties of data center uses -- general business or govt service v. "AI" v. crypto mining, etc.? Surely some uses have societal benefit, but can the facilities be tracked that way?

Perhaps today is the day we should all learn the term “agnotology” and think about the many mechanisms of ignorance and what/whom it serves.

In February 2011, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake rocked New Zealand’s Canterbury Region, claiming 185 lives, injuring thousands, and damaging hundreds of buildings in the city of Christchurch beyond repair. Join us on February 24, 2026 to reflect on this historic disaster. Register today: bit.ly/4rLAPlc

This is a broadly correct perspective on low probability - high consequence events (including one of my recent hobby horses: election interference). But maybe I see it that way because I spend all my professional time thinking about earthquakes with annual probabilities between 1/500 and 1/200.

Once upon a time I was taking a train from East Berlin to Budapest. It was crowded to start with, and I was sitting on the floor, but everything got worse in Dresden, when many rowdy young E. Germans got on. They spilled beer on my head. They tripped over me. It was 2am and I didn’t want a fight…

Important in this clip is the call to action: this infrastructure requires permits, and permitting involves discretion that is often subject to public input at city, county, or state levels. @projectsaltbox.bsky.social has useful data on where these facilities are planned. bsky.app/profile/proj...

I think we can be determined to win and optimistic about our chances while also making sure we don’t fall prey to failures of imagination or an inability to wrestle with the facts as they are.

The frustrating thing about the latest crop of "don't worry be happy" takes is that nobody on the cautious side is saying the election WILL be stolen, or even significantly messed with. We're saying that its Dems' job to be prepared anyway. Maybe it's because I work with 500-yr earthquakes ...

Again, the Senate will be this close, & also it's irrelevant whether we think it will be close or not. The problem is that the probability of events like this unfolding is unacceptably high, & in any actual democracy would be asymptotically approaching zero. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

Thread. DOJ is using the Fox News strategy: get someone to tell a lie, cite the lie as the basis for reporting/investigation, then run with it. Again, it won't be easy to steal this election, but a lot of the pieces they need are already in place: bsky.app/profile/dbon...

The conundrum, and "the essence of all philosophy." We have it bad. What we built is gone, but it could be (a LOT) worse. To whom do we owe assistance? What is the best use of limited time? Faith. Doubt. Determination.

Remember that under the first Trump administration, Puerto Rico had to suffer through the longest power blackout in U.S. history bsky.app/profile/cost...

Bad Bunny gets it.

thank you bad bunny for highlighting the importance of critical power distribution infrastructure bsky.app/profile/cost...

Whoa! Longtime conservative columnist, professional Dem hater, and spittle-flecked Obama/Biden critic Andrew McCarthy has a new piece in National Review ... absolutely taking Trump to task for corruption. Openly acknowledging it's far worse than anything Biden was even accused of.

QP because this is not specifically about Ukr. The tendency of war criminals to attack power & water infrastructure is clear evidence that such systems are absolutely essential. But we'll only start designing them as such when policy (e.g. IBC Table 1604.5) recognizes that fact.

Downtown Atlanta: 1919 versus 2022. Ouch!

"We’ve been told this place is a sh*thole.” - Pat McAfee “We’ve been told that for a long time." - A.J. Hawk. “This place has been gorgeous. It has been incredible." - McAfee bit.ly/4a2zdgO

Visiting the Bay Area for the Super Bowl? 🏈🌉 Welcome! Here’s a local fact you might actually feel 👇

So Howard Co MD is using their code process to limit ownership of I-3 facilities (but say nothing about limits on chage of use in the IEBC). On one hand, this is a NIMBY tactic, conjuring an "emergency" and citing dubious harms to nearby uses. On the other, we're in unprecedented times.

For building folks: The bill is explained & linked here. As in my post about change of use (I'll repost separately), it cites I-3 occupancy (MD adopts the 2024 ed), but apparently only wrt Admin provisions re ownership, notice & hearing: www.howardcountymd.gov/News020226b