Perhaps some sort of corner is being turned; many people and organizations this week seem to finally be saying that what Israel is doing to Gaza and Palestinians is unconscionable. (Or even admitting it's genocide.) "Better late than never" is so unsatisfying, but it's true.

Finally we talk about the "Wikipedia Test" and why policymakers need to think about how their laws will impact sites that are not just Meta, Google, TikTok, and X.

Police who keep their identities secret are, quite literally, secret police. I don’t know why this is even controversial. You don’t get to yank people off the streets while hiding your face and identity and still retain the respectability of an accountable, democratic police force.

You think that vast armed force is going to be used just for immigration? I doubt it. Watch for ICE duties to expand duties and for ICE to follow the pattern of militarization of police. Also watch it used as secret police against anything anti-ICE.

Second look at strange women lying in ponds distributing swords as basis for government?

It would appear we are now, officially, the bad guys

I get annoyed at the narrative that all the awareness and work on climate change hasn't done anything. Yes, global CO₂ emissions indeed continue to climb, but we don't know the counterfactual. When I was in grad school, we were on track for 5°C of warming. Now it's below 3°C. That's progress.

New York Times Editorial Board August 2024: We will not be making any more local endorsements. This specifically includes the coming mayor's race. New York Times Editorial Board June 2025: Do not vote for Zohran Mamdani, we prefer Andrew Cuomo and Brad Lander.

Alex Padilla is an American citizen of Mexican descent. The video of a Mexican-American being manhandled by thugs will play extremely well with the sort of trash who support Trump. Decent people are outraged. Shitty people with shitty values from a shitty culture are thrilled.

So... according to Greenblatt, Elon doing the Nazi salute wasn't so bad. But students protesting... What a fucking disaster the ADL is. What a joke.

The best place to get coverage of the protests in LA is from video from individuals on the scene. The totalitarian government is lying about them and the traditional media is largely unreliable — complicit or fatuously both-sidesey.

The guy who gave Musk a pass on his Nazi salute wants the Trump administration to “put a stop to” any criticism of Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Bourdain educated Americans about other countries while treating the people who live in those countries with dignity and empathy. He believed in learning from other cultures, and in letting people tell their own story. So *of course* these ghouls hate him.

A pregnant woman in Georgia who was declared brain dead after a medical emergency has been on life support for three months to let the fetus grow enough to be delivered, a move her family says a hospital told them was required under the state’s strict anti-abortion law.

This didn't happen when the military had DEI. www.cnn.com/2025/05/06/p...

I just got the official email from the NSF about the drastic cuts and I think the correct translation is "if you are a young researcher who still wants to do science strongly consider leaving the United States if you can." which, really, is not an ideal message to be sending.

Update on this. Apparently the bill just passed the House... 409-2. So, uh, yeah. A ton of Dems just gave the Trump FTC more power to censor the internet. Great job guys.

Cute, but unless these other countries are willing to spend as much as the US on science, the brain drain will be to other professions (some completely unrelated to science).

Besides utterly dominating in power reactor construction, China is killing it in advanced reactor development, across the board. In 2023, they turned on the first thorium-containing fluid fuel molten salt reactor since 1969. bsky.app/profile/what...

We often worry that if we don't build more nuclear power quickly, China might take the lead. In reality, we are ~20 years behind, with 0 workhorse reactors under construction and 0 operational non-water reactors, meanwhile, China has 28 huge power reactors under construction now

After a court order by the Turkish government, Bluesky made accounts unavailable for Bluesky users in Turkey this week. I take a closer look at geographic-based moderation works on Bluesky and atproto, how it can be sidestepped, and much more fediversereport.com/bluesky-cens...

After being told by the Supreme Court to bring Abrego Garcia home, and that it was illegal to send him and others to a foreign gulag without due process, the Trump administration this weekend sent 10 more people to the Salvadoran gulag without process.

If you're scooping up students off the street for writing op-eds, you're secret police, and should be treated accordingly.

Hard to believe that it wasn't that long ago that the biggest presidential scandals were wearing a tan suit or saluting the military while holding a Starbucks.

I think Americans, blessed with relatively stable government for a long time, assume there is someone, some adult, who will step in and make things right before the President does anything REALLY bad. There’s not.

UK to throw away 140 tonnes of civil plutonium. That's enough to power the entire UK for 3 years (if it was 100% nuclear powered). Bummer! www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/uk-...

My friends who grew up in East Germany have stories about how people informed on each other. It sounds like a hoot. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/u...

If you do a Nazi salute to own the libs or to troll or to generate discussion or to make a point you are still doing a Nazi salute.

For anyone wondering how Mark Zuckerberg's new "masculine energy" selective moderation policy is working out... (Also, patience for anyone trying to set up a Pixelfed account this afternoon! Looks like there's a *lot* of people quitting Instagram right now!) #Zuckerberg #Meta #Pixelfed #Instagram

I really, really don't want to do this, but let's do a bit (just a LITTLE BIT) of fact checking about what Zuck said on the Joe Rogan podcast, because this is something I not only followed closely, but also spent time *talking to the actual people at Meta who dealt with this* which WAS NOT ZUCK.

The Pacer fusion concept is an idea to generate electricity from thermonuclear explosives. You drop them into a 300m diameter salt cavern and fire em off to heat steam which drives a turbine on the surface. 1000 MWe requires one 50 kt device per day.

think i did a good job

To celebrate the digitization, I also wrote up a fresh Wikipedia page (well, it's a start) describing the OMRE in more detail. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic...

*Organic* nuclear reactors use hydrocarbons as the coolant/moderator. These allow low-pressure operation, are non-corrosive, and hardly neutron activate at all. We just got a 1958 film about the first-ever organic cooled/moderated reactor digitized. Here it is! whatisnuclear.com/news/2024-12...

Loops is an open source Tiktok alternative for the #Fediverse, from the creator of Pixelfed. We've been experimenting with some tools and techniques for creating Loops videos, with some suggestions on how to get started!

Just to be clear, Microsoft joined a really long time ago - May 2023. They’re an Elder Brand. ATproto browser link and screenshot atproto-browser.vercel.app/at/did:plc:f...

I think this is one of the hardest aspects of decentralisation: the cultural shift in mindset that people need to make that they can take control. Decentralisation doesnt 'just happen', it's people taking deliberate actions to make it happen

It's unbelievable that the Secretary-General of the United Nations António Guterres, who has access to all the world leaders, says that 2024 "is a masterclass in climate destruction," and we just go on burning more fossil fuels than ever like everything is okay. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Bluesky stuns in new App Store ranking