If you read nothing else today, I pray that you will read every word of this necessary, powerful, and much-needed piece by @nhannahjones.bsky.social. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/m...

Directing over 800 top-rank military leaders in one poorly secured location, and then announcing it publicly - during a week of extreme international tension, is an act of profound recklessness. It creates an egregious vulnerability and effectively invites a decapitating strike from adversaries. 🚨🧵

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Just an absurd throw

This is a massive, history making abuse of your power. It will define your legacy and one day you will come to regret punishing free speech and trying to destroy democracy.

Here is an action item whose successful execution could break the MAGA-parasite deadlock: 👉Publicly document the dark *Reward-Threat-Punishment* network that is enforcing the right-wing agenda. For example, see this excerpt from CNN: cnn.com/2025/09/18/e... 1/2

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, said today that foreign laboratory tests on biological samples obtained from her husband confirmed he was poisoned.

Just going to remind you that if the police or any other law enforcement show up you should ABSOLUTELY say I INVOKE MY RIGHTS TO SILENCE AND COUNSEL AND WILL NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS WITHOUT MY ATTORNEY PRESENT i.e., then say nothing else except repeatedly demanding a lawyer.

This is outstanding! A must-listen.

All the flattery at the recent Trump Cabinet meeting was more than a “suck up to The Boss” session. It was indeed that, but something much more consequential was happening: It was a *ceremony* in which each person refreshed his/her Loyalty Oath to The Boss. 1/9

Every time you use ChatGPT or something like it, you’re helping to train an algorithm that is actually being developed to do things like this

This should be headline news - the implications are horrifying …

"The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state." — Dan Froomkin @froomkin.bsky.social presswatchers.org/2025/08/we-h...

Help! I need a really capable drafting/technical illustration application for my Apple-silicon Mac. I've been a happy user of CanvasXDraw Mac for years but am having trouble renewing my license, which expires in two days. The trial version doesn't even recognize Apple silicon.

Wow. On NPR, @gbrumfiel.bsky.social reports a Social Security official “copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.” The source is a whistleblower, who is named: Charles Borges, SSN chief data officer.

I am literally begging anyone who does any kind of journalism to spend an hour in an eviction courtroom every week for a month. Please. The eviction crisis in this country is downplayed at best and ignored at worst. It's racialized state violence that hearkens back to the worst of Jim Crow,

Defenders of the American Republic are not keeping up with the attacks; we are losing and need a stronger approach. This essay uses a disease model to make sense of what we’re experiencing, and it leads to a new approach to intervention. melconway.com/Home/pdf/Wha...

I’ve been watching all the chatter about Vibe Coding, and I have a question: What does all this have to do with building stuff? I’m seeing a major conflation between coding and creating useful artifacts. Somebody please explain what I’m missing.

When I arrived in 1962, every evening rush hour they would turn off the traffic signals and put a cop at every intersection to direct traffic. There would be a white circle painted in the intersection where the cop would stand, and a spotlight pointed at him.

Not just backwards, dangerous. The problems I work on (e.g., global warming, authoritarianism) require diverse multidisciplinary teams if we're going to make progress. It's an old problem in the academic world: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two... (I would have just replied but I'm apparently muted.)

To: @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social, @michaelemann.bsky.social, and all the other warriors in the battle for evidence-based policy: You are fighting a battle in a plane. The war is in a higher-dimensional space. The war is over cultural dominance. 1/2

Slow-motion train wreck?

Vaccines are our greatest scientific achievement. This is criminal.

We couldn’t have asked for a stronger test case than the Bove confirmation vote. Now we know that, in today’s US Senate, the Rule of Law is dead. 1/3

Read about the PayPal Mafia: www.businessinsider.com/paypal-mafia...

The good news: Viewing the capture of US politics using a Parasitism model, as in melconway.com/Home/pdf/Wha... , unifies all the different views of what's happening: corporate domination, techbro domination, oligarchy, Christian Nationalism, etc., into a single theoretical problem 1/2

Time to re-up this from 2020: Imagine two body-building gyms, A and B. Gym A beautifully enlarges the left side of your lower body and the right side of your upper body. Gym B does that to the other two quarters of your body. 1/5

Federal funding is gone. But we're not going anywhere.

All true, but the biggest theft from all of us is the theft of our constitutional republic. See melconway.com/Home/pdf/Wha... . It's stated on page 6.

As promised, in light of the WaPo report of Everglades camp detainees being swarmed by mosquitoes in the shower and unable to sleep at night due to being bitten, I want to briefly address concentration camp history and mosquitoes. I won't be comprehensive but will give a few examples. [1/17]

This is how the parasite works. Republicans on Senate Panel Vote to Advance Bove’s Nomination After Democrats Storm Out www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/u...

Written by a lawyer only for another lawyer.

ICE just posted up in a hospital lobby in Glendale, California.

David Gergen, an adviser to presidents, a commentator, a best-selling author, a Harvard intellectual, an immensely decent man, a towering figure in every sense, has died at 83. RIP, David, and thanks for a lifetime of service.

Major additions to MAGA is the Visible Face of a Parasite Deeply Embedded in American Society melconway.com/Home/pdf/Wha... There are two theses: 1/3

From a WSJ article on free-speech restrictions in Europe

The Gestapo Enabling Act.

New draft of "MAGA is the Visible Face of a Parasite Deeply Embedded in American Society" Twelve pages and barely started. melconway.com/Home/pdf/Wha...

This country has tried this experiment before. www.npr.org/sections/the...

Such a hard story to read about a woman in science who was clearly passionate about what she did — and excellent at it — and had that taken from her because she was Chinese. May she rest in peace. 🧪

The beginning of hardship. www.gretasday.com/us-wheat-rej...

We must not leave this out of the account of what they have done. What Musk and Trump and Vought did. What Johnson and his band of sycophants allowed them to do. What tens of millions of fellow Americans endorse.

Andry José Hernández Romero, I remember you, even if I do not know how to articulate my horror, rage, & sorrow at your treatment by my government. No one has heard from you in 111 days. As vigil, I’m posting a photo or video of you every day until you are returned from El Salvador.

Dedicated FBI agent resigns upon being threatened with dismissal or demotion for being friends with Pete Strzok: Goodbye to All That www.lawfaremedia.org/article/good... @michael-Feinberg.bsky.social

"Ex Machina" www.yahoo.com/news/ai-lear...