Hatch Act Schmatch Act, I guess

The sheer stupidity on display, paired with enthusiastic malice, really is exhausting. (The quote: James Baldwin, "No Name in the Street," published in 1972, page 149).

Barbara Gomes Marques is documentary filmmaker who risks imminent deportation to Brazil. Loud voices in the film community could be especially helpful right now.

SCOOP — The White House instructed all federal agency leadership on Tuesday to send out a mandatory message to workers blaming the impending potential government shutdown on House Democrats, The Handbasket was first to learn. Absolutely no modifications to the email were permitted. My story:

Re this absurdity on the HUD homepage right now, a federal employee told me: "I'm fucking pissed that I still have to take annual ethics training and Hatch Act training."

The university president's letter is bananas, and anyone who sends such a letter should not be running an academic institution. A thread. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

A thread on the illegality of the Texas Tech president’s letter banning reference to more than two genders. We saw a similar confusion of EO’s with law and a similar overriding of free speech and academic freedom in the Texas A@M case.

Nice!!! This makes sense To some extent vaccines have always been victims of their own success as well. By eliminating disease they shift the risk-benefit balance for many people, and there is poor understanding of how indirect herd effects benefit all of us

Reconsidering Off-Label Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccination jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

I don't think we'll ever get another sentence which sums up everything the New York Times embodies quite like "Some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily kill civilians".

🗃️ Historian friends: Students in my senior research seminar (our capstone class) are writing about historical memory. They have free rein for this project as long as they focus on the construction of memory. Any tips for them?

This is so good.

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

Wife brought her 100 year old film camera to that pirates game from a few weeks ago and she got this shot that's just perfect

US politicians are a distraction from how amazing trans people are

One last thought about the Klein conversation I actually think this is a deeply personal problem that Klein is half-heartedly trying and half avoiding by attempting to do it publicly. Like: a lot of this is just his shit about his refusal to learn how to lose and mourn and keep on going -

National park sign referencing Japanese incarceration removed asamnews.com/2025/09/27/j...

Troops. In an American city. Using full force. Your now-regular reminder that Republican members of Congress are letting this happen.

“‘You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.’ ”‘But we were already a nation,’ he said up to me. ‘We didn’t ask you to come.’” — @sgj.bsky.social, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter #WoundedKnee #IndigenousHistory

Posted in response to this latest settler colonial move

I also recommend this excellent recent essay by Long Soldier

From Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s poem ‘Diction,’ a fragmented account of the massacre at Wounded Knee that communicates the immeasurable loss.

Some big implications for journalism, too, where reporters often mistake trending posts as a reasonable reflection of public opinion.

Just posted this up at @marktwainhouse.bsky.social and you can read and respond here. It's an excerpt from "What Have The Police Been Doing?" published in San Francisco, in 1866, and it's a Twain piece I've wanted to share in this forum for years. It felt like the right moment.

p.s. My essay on the Wounded Knee massacre can be found here (open access!): www.jstor.org/stable/10.25...

Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a "battle" rather than what it truly was: a massacre of over 250 Lakotas, mainly women, children, and the elderly. 1/

This thread. It's all worth reading.

Im begging the NYT to spend time talking to people who actually teach and work at universities. Especially ones that don't have billion dollar endowments. My issues are AI use, crumbling infrastructure, vanishing staff, unfunded state mandates, a customer service model of education...

It's not fascist to call fascists fascist. It's not "dehumanizing" to say that terrorizing entire groups of people - which ICE does - is evil. No executive order can change these facts. However, people *can* mess things up for fascists by standing up for community and truth. Like this.

Slow civil war is just that, slow; and then fascism burps, and it jolts ahead. Read the whole terror memo. Read about Comey. Consider the generals. Read this passage. Note what’s now called “terror.” And what “funding” it means. I want to say this is in-the-street news, but I think it may be worse.

If you’re not already following @durhamhealthnc.bsky.social you might want to do so! This group has been nailing evidence-based public health messaging about COVID. In 2025 when so few do, they have the integrity & courage to speak of reality. Let’s show them our appreciation via bumping.

Routine vaccination for COVID-19 reduces hospitalization and deaths much more than vaccinating only high-risk groups. www.news-medical.net/news/2025092...

The kids are alright

I hope we understand that all this talk about autism is ultimately eugenics, as is our concept of disability in the US. It’s all based on one’s ability to perform capitalism. We assess value with KPI’s & deliverables. There is no humanity in how we assess humans, whether they ban Tylenol or not.

Kind of surreal that a government official was caught taking a $50,000 cash bribe and there's not even a question that he will continue serving as it nothing ever happened. Like even the most basic standards of public accountability are a joke.

Medical disinformation’s harm lasts a lot longer than it takes to refute it. For example: this sign is still up at my local feed store. I took this photo yesterday.

Disney reverses course on Kimmel. Lessons: -Trump's anti-Constitutional stances, anti-1A in this case, are unpopular -Popular resistance via expression and spending choices can have an impact -Many corporate leaders are weak, amoral people who'll bow to threats unless they face countervailing ones

I'm neurodivergent and don't need to be cured. A vaccine didn't make me this way. Tylenol didn't make me this way. I just am. That shouldn't be hard to grasp. Here's my latest book.

Neurodivergence simply means our brains work differently. They are, on average, better at some things and worse at others. We don't need a mutant cure. Also, buy John's book. It's very good.

my "autism announcement" is that autistic people are cool as hell. stop trying to eliminate us

Some people think ChatGPT has a place writing things like news briefs, stuff written to a specific style and tone and, y'know, kinda boring. So Science did a study. ChatGPT failed. Why? It got stuff wrong. "Also, extensive editing for hyperbole was needed." www.science.org/content/blog...

a group of people were like "i found a way to live my life as a truer version of myself" and instead of being like "that's beautiful, how can i help" people were like "i don't think schools should have books in them anymore"

Apropos of nothing in particular, here's Walt Disney's testimony to HUAC in 1947, where he named employees he believed were communists, condemned labor unions, and accused "commie" groups, including the League of Women Voters, of smearing him. 🗃️ archive.org/details/walt...

My weekly must-reads list and my thoughts on witnessing care and courage amid clouds of tear gas Friday night. "Almost 550 people across Chicagoland have been arrested by ICE during Operation Midway Blitz. It is a campaign of terror focused on a city that our president feels profound contempt for."

It strikes me that quite a lot of people knew for the last year that the guy running our horrific deportation squads took a bag with $50k in cash from undercover FBI agents investigating corruption, and it didn’t get out until now.

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

It’s really all we should be talking about today.

He still thinks political asylum and insane asylums are the same thing and none of the groveling parasites around him are willing to tell him. His idiocy and the obsequiousness of his advisors may lead to a literal war.

They're racists & they're fascists but above all they are the pettiest two-bit criminals you've ever seen