The concept of "ethnostate" strikes me more and more as a sort of intellectual gerrymander. A category designed to have only one existing member. It enables people to call Israel uniquely evil based on things it shares with many other countries, and yet deny that they are being antisemitic.

MCDOT tells Council that amount of transit money promised as part of toll lane project was cut 48% because length of planned toll lanes went down 48%. But amount of money to be spent on the toll lanes did *not* go down 48%. It hardly went down at all, if I remember correctly.

At Council briefing on summer Red Line shutdown. Bus lanes will be only part of route. No bus lane between north end of downtown Bethesda & Grosvenor. No one has talked with MoCo police about bus lane enforcement yet. Will cut bikeshare fees (only for 1 day rentals?), but will not add docks.

TIL just now. Track laying for the Purple Line is nearly complete, according to workers I talked with. Only about 200 feet left.

Likely Iranian strategy is to drive up the price of oil, figuring that Trump will panic because the price of gasoline is going up in the US.

If Graham Platner doesn't start seriously addressing this recurring issue, Bernie Sanders and Shawn Fain, as responsible national progressive leaders, should withdraw their endorsement. I'm not even sure seriously addressing it should be enough, but he has yet to do even that. No more evasions.

Cities: "We're going to say we want zero traffic deaths, but we want achieve that without actually changing the way we do anything."

If you want to force people to ride buses, ban cars not trains. What difference does it make whether people prefer trains to buses because of the smoother ride or the higher social status? What basis is there for allowing drivers but not transit riders to choose the vehicles they prefer?

A lose-lose proposition! Wider intersections are bad for bus riders. Crossing the street takes longer & is even more dangerous. Wider intersections are bad for drivers. They don't relieve congestion - at most they relocate it - and they require longer signal cycles & therefore longer red lights.

The academic leftists who since the 1990s have celebrated "transgressing boundaries" need to think about whether they wanted this particular boundary to be transgressed. dsadevil.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...

This is the weakness of the theory that nimbys are motivated by property values. It says that greed motivates people to act collectively rather than pursue their individual interest.

The implicit Bibi-Qatar-Hamas alliance comes to US. In IL-9 congressional primary, AIPAC-linked PAC runs attack ads against Daniel Biss while anti-Israel lobby misrepresents @jstreetdotorg.bsky.social donations to Biss as AIPAC money. www.the-downballot.com/i/189080653/... bsky.app/profile/trac...

This is why no-enemies-to-the-left politics is a dead end. As long as you're weak, you get to hold yourself out as purer than everyone else. But once you get some power, no matter how far left you go, you will still get out-lefted by someone.

Interesting commentary perspective here. SEPTA allowed Denver RTD to hop on their previous Silverliner procurement. The question is would MARC step out of their comfort zone with EMUs...?

Would you describe 91,000 citations from speed cameras in 5 months as a situation where "drivers...remain perpetually vigilant"?👀

This is a great read, not just debunking the attacks on AOC's comments about Taiwan, but exposing how thoroughly polluted the entire news environment is. h/t @bencollins.bsky.social spinclass.substack.com/p/spin-class...

Last year, Binance discovered $1.7 billion sent to Iran. Binance fired the investigators who found it. Trump then pardoned Binance's convicted money-launderer CEO. The CEO was at Mar-a-Lago last week. Will Trump now send US soldiers to die fighting Iran? [gift link] www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/t...

The moderate vs progressive framing doesn't apply at all to the Crockett-Talarico race. Talarico is clearly to Crockett's left on economics. Crockett is clearly to Talarico's left on provocative language & vibes. Left on economics yet moderate-coded is the strongest track for Dems to run on.

Article & thread for MoCo to read. A transition to battery-electric buses without cutting service requires costly chargers at ends of bus routes & major increases in operating costs. Neither is in our budgets.

This looks like an utter disaster in the making. Things whose results range from utter failure to mixed in the European context of strong railroads & nonpolitical management are likely to yield catastrophic results in the current US environment.

Our resulting paper, Probability-Aware Parking Selection, shows that doing so can improve travel time estimates, save drivers time by routing them to parking, and make for fairer comparisons across transportation modes! And this work is featured today on the MIT Home Page!

Nithya Raman is the *democratic* democratic socialist that the leaders of national DSA are not. forward.com/news/806134/...

A bad but universal metric of public transit reliability is the % of a line that is in its own lane. It is easy to create exclusive lanes where there is little delay, but not at the bottlenecks where they matter most. So this metric says nothing about speed or reliability.

The blame-the-Democrats-for-what-Trump-does crowd would be Olympic champions if the Olympics had a goalpost-moving competition.

These days it's almost a relief to read about an honest nimby complaining that the city puts all the low-income housing near her. “Why do children on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side have the right to clean and safe streets, and children in East Harlem don’t?” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/n...

The political strategy of threatening to withhold votes from Democrats is anti-democratic [small D]. That's part of why tankies are attracted to it. It gives up on convincing a majority to do at least part of what you want & seeks to extort the majority into doing what it doesn't want.

Worth a reminder that the Maryland Purple Line got built by a political campaign of the 99% against the 1%. True, we had the perfect foil - a wealthy country club that didn't want to see the trolley cars from their golf course. We even picketed in front of the country club during morning rush hours.

Amtrak schedule padding! My Acela to Boston just arrived in New Haven early. We have a 10 minute wait before we leave. That's a lot of time to make up between Stamford & New Haven, and it seemed like we were not moving fast at all.

Here's an analogue for "when is anti-Zionism antisemitism?" In 1629, John Winthrop said the new Massachusetts colony would be "a bulwark against the kingdom of the Antichrist that the Jesuits are building": a) Geopolitical response to the French in Quebec? b) Anti-Catholic prejudice? c) Both?

💜 A forever kind of love 🚉#connectingcommunities

I’m just going to leave this here

“A year after the $1.1 billion overhaul,” which added a new lane each direction, “the 405’s rush hour drive times were a minute slower than they were before the workers broke ground. Five years later, traffic was worse at all times of day.” www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Want to talk about entrism into DSA? Watch the co-lead of the DSA International Ctee's China task force in this Chinese govt propaganda video. Especially 21:45-25:30 where the concentration camps for Uighurs are depicted as job training camps as he sits quietly. thechinaacademy.org/xinjiang-tru...

Is there insider trading on prediction markets? Turns out that several Israelis used classified information last year to place bets about Israeli military operations in Iran on Polymarket. They've now been arrested. www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...

The whole world except the United States knows about how to put crucial government services where everyone can get to them. The crucial service marooned on an inaccessible hilltop culdesac, reachable only by car, is a uniquely USA idea. (Chattanooga, TN, USA)

Internet arguments in a nutshell

Baltimore County councilman delays housing project at train station until interested parties reach compromise. One of the groups is called "No Apartments No Compromise." Nice to see media depict this as a stall and not as responsiveness to "community." www.thebanner.com/politics-pow...

The European mind cannot comprehend this... (Metlife Stadium)

When I told a group of people in their 80s & 90s about the over-100 drivers, they all said "tell me where they live so I can stay away from there."

A libertarian is someone who thinks that minimum wage laws, legalizing apartment buildings, and building light rail lines puts us on the Road to Serfdom but electing Donald Trump didn't.

Looking at the replies & quote-posts to this, I can't tell which anti-Nithya Raman coalition will be louder. The Hamas-Likud alliance or the left nimby-rich homeowner alliance? I'm 3000 miles away & don't have to live with the consequences, but I feel bad for LA if these folks get any traction.

Individual effects of the Redwing Rd sidewalk proposal on the right-of-way of each of the 10 houses the sidewalk is proposed to go in front of.

Back before social media, when you realized that the guy you believed in was a charlatan or a monster, you got a chance to keep quiet for a few months and rethink. A process that begot better intellectual ouput than the takes we get now.

A very good analysis, showing that inflation of food, housing & transportation, is much faster than overall inflation. This squeezes lower-income workers that most. Additional factor not mentioned here: Automobile becomes more necessary due to sprawl development & suburbanization of poverty.

Looking at the replies & quote-posts to this, I can't tell which anti-Nithya Raman coalition will be louder. The Hamas-Likud alliance or the left nimby-rich homeowner alliance? I'm 3000 miles away & don't have to live with the consequences, but I feel bad for LA if these folks get any traction.

An under-reported trend in US politics: Elected officials who identify as democratic socialists & turn from the far left by running on yimbyism & refusing DSA's anti-Israel litmus test. Most visible: Greg Casar - Austin TX congressman Katie Wilson - Seattle mayor Nithya Raman - next mayor of LA?

I am not joking, one of our notable local nimbies alleged that the city's for building apartments on downtown parking lots was part of an international conspiracy to mandate 15-minute cities that required people to walk and bike and eliminated the freedom to drive.

I wonder if the agents they withdrew were withdrawn because they were so demoralized they became ineffective. Must be awful for a Latino agent to get yelled at by the locals all day while carrying out inhuman tasks at the behest of Anglo bosses - all in weather 60 degrees colder than at home.

Why is it a crime to sit in the street when you're not inside a car because you want to protest ICE, but not a crime to sit in the street inside a car because you're waiting to get into the McDonalds drive-thru? www.thebanner.com/community/lo...

I just got called by someone claiming to be from the Center for Disease Control, asking me to answer a survey about respiratory vaccines. They called on my landline & then when I didn't answer immediately on my cell. Is this (a) not a scam, and (b) something I should answer in present circumstances?