The rule of law can’t survive this

In other words, the judge basically said that to get the hospital to comply with state law would potentially risk the closure of the hospital due to loss of medicaid funding. It effectively means that the federal government through extrajudicial threats has abrogated state anti discrimination law.

A group of families sued Colorado children's hospital for violating state anti discrimination law for stopping provision of gender affirming care under threats by the Trump admin. The court found they violated state law but found the risks to the hospital too large. coloradosun.com/2026/02/13/c...

that's the good stuff

The white steepled churches are all either UU, congregationalist, or that particular flavor of New England Baptist. They're all competing to see who has the largest Pride and BLM flag. The 80 year old ladies at the church bake sale all respect your pronouns

MAGA Influencer: We need more quaint small towns like the one in this picture I found when I Googled “quaint small town.” *Picture is of a town in Vermont that Bernie Sanders wins by 58 points. Lesbian couples own every store.*

again: if you care about social cohesion there are independent variables that are far more relevant than ethnic homogeneity

This is inevitable for “institutional neutrality”—it is meant to look like rising above the political fray but inevitably means silently accepting whatever position becomes dominant.

Readers, I'm sad to say that the panel on the stage did not meet the moment. They overwhelming said that those students just need to get over it and understand that AI is the future and if they want to get a job, they need to use AI.

"I know several teens, including my own college-age kid, who are vehemently AI. They choose not to use AI for environmental reasons, for ethical reasons, for creative reasons, or just because they want to use their own thinking. What do we tell those students? Do we have to force them to use AI?

My spouse (a H.S. teacher) had to attend a professional development day yesterday dedicated to integrating AI in the classroom. In an auditorium full of people from the entire district, he asked the following question:

Just noting this because I have cited the trends a lot recently: Tracking data from Civiqs now shows a plurality of the public favors abolishing ICE, with 47% in support and 46% opposed. Independents are net +5 on abolish, up from -40 a year ago substack.com/profile/4791...

Stop funding ICE?

Olympic curling

Bluesky is the new science Twitter, new study by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social and Julia Wester concludes! "Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter."

Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Social Sciences 7/11

NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11

The Trump administration is suing Harvard over the university's refusal to hand over student admissions data. The government's efforts to push toward a settlement continue.

I also have often made this observation stated below: the arguments of the deniers of human-caused climate change are so poor, so easily refuted, and intended only for gullible lay people, that they basically prove how strong and compelling the evidence for human-caused climate change really is.

I am hiring a postdoc @ Univ of Iowa. Potential project focuses include flood-risk infrastructure planning, disaster recovery processes and outcomes, insurance program externalities, or uncertainty in climate damage attribution. Please consider applying/sharing! jobs.uiowa.edu/postdoc/view...

I don’t love using the term “blood libel” for anything other than the historical phenomenon, but if anything in modern politics resembles it, it is JD Vance lying that Haitian migrants eat pets. A totally baseless claim about the supposedly inhuman habits of a hated out-group, justifying violence.

This line from Ganz's excellent When the Clock Broke stood out for me.

Here's how bad EPA's voodoo economics is in repealing the clean car standards: they assign a ZERO DOLLAR VALUE to increased smog & soot pollution, increased asthma, bronchitis, respiratory disease, hospitalizations, missed work & school days & STILL cost Americans $180 BILLION in overall costs. 1/

For my money, the way thousands of regular people are self-organizing to resist data centers is one of the most cautiously hopeful stories going right now. www.themountaineer.com/news/no-cryp...

The rapid Stormfront-ification of Fox News and GOP media in general reveals the extent to which "palingenetic right wing ultra-nationalist populism" (i.e., fascism) has been the telos toward which much of the "American conservative movement" has been oriented since the 1940s.

"The abolition of gender studies is a way of further guaranteeing impunity to the elite men whose contempt for and exploitation of women and girls apparently knew no bounds" - Joan Scott www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The US administration is going to kill its people while they cheer. In January, Moderna’s announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: “You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.” 1/4

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

Literally cannot stress enough that if I, a climate scientist, were running a scam it would be a lot more fun than this

a perennial issue is that people just refuse to believe that the republican party is as far gone as it is.

Anyone interested? Proceedings of probably the first IEA seminar on energy and climate change, 1989. Two volumes, over 1000 pages.

New working paper on recent trends in class mobility in the US: www.nber.org/papers/w34800 I learned a lot from an amazing team of collaborators at the @ucstonecenter.bsky.social while working on this propject: Weiqi Wang, @butaevak.bsky.social, and @durlauf.bsky.social

Let me say something positive about the Winter Olympics for a change: there's an extreme overrepresentation of Minnesotans, and they're using the platform for good.

“How we do the work is crucial. This may require us to slow down, to provide meaningful thought to each analytical question, to consider all potential impacts, and to move at the speed of trust with our partners and community. But there is so much power in that intentionality.”

AI is wasting our collective time and polluting our information ecosystem, part n of N. www.coyotemedia.org/how-coyote-a...

When R2 asks you to do those robustness checks you really don't want to do, just replying "The Dow is over $50,000!" is always an option.

To everyone thanking me, much appreciated but not why I posted! Pls support your local immigrant defense group like: The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota: www.ilcm.org/donate/ Or my hometown LUCE: www.lucemass.org/donate Or Google your city/state & “immigrant defense” to find your local heroes!

These are the conditions under which the Trump regime wants to detain noncitizens indefinitely. It violates international law, the Eighth Amendment, and our own laws & regulations. And the DOJ and DHS are willing to manipulate any law, defy any court order, to keep doing so. 26/

I had a pregnant client who was experiencing abdominal cramping for three days and was deprived of medical care. When we interceded, she was punished. A first grader snatched two days after surgery denied wound care. A client who developed a large painful cyst but was ignored. 25/

A transplant recipient whose body was rejecting his organ because DHS won’t give him his absolutely essential anti-rejection meds. www.thedailybeast.com/ice-arrests-... 24/

4. Medical malpractice. Here’s why I say stopping this detention-to Texas pipeline is life of death. An 18-month old hospitalized after nearly dying of three simultaneous respiratory infections. When she returned to the camp, DHS withheld her meds. 23/ www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

So it’s a race: how quickly can a person’s family realize they were snatched and find a lawyer, and how quickly can that lawyer get a habeas petition of file? And is that faster than ICE can load the detainee on a plane to Texas? It’s exhausting and terrifying. It can be life and death. 18/

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it. I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.” 1/

oh so just dumb luck these idiots didn’t shoot down a passenger aircraft

This is the second account - the first being in Chicago - of DHS agents mass detaining people and then *sorting them by race*.

Google gave ICE this British STUDENT JOURNALIST's personal info bank account numbers while they were trying to detain him for attending a protest at a job fair at Cornell for just 5 minutes. Not a crime. He fled to Switzerland & EFF is representing him now. theintercept.com/2026/02/10/g...

More than 400 people, including hundreds of citizens, were “sorted” at gun point into racial and ethnic groups by 200 ICE agents who fired flash-bang grenades into cars with people inside, pointed guns at children & demanded their zip tied parents not comfort them. apple.news/Ausdx6kWtT0e...

NEW: CBP signs a new deal with Clearview AI to access its scraped image database for "tactical targeting," including efforts to “disrupt, degrade, and dismantle” networks of people labeled security threats.

Imagine a President bulldozing 1/3 of our Historic White House pocketing $300 million and that doesn’t even crack the top 100 most destructive, vile, disgusting things he’s done, yet here we are

Babe, wake up, new sarcastic but entirely worthwhile internet abbreviation just dropped