I think it’s telling that the cultural touch point for authoritarianism and fascism in the United States for so many white people are the fictional events of The Handmaid’s Tale and not the actual history of the United States.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails... you may lie awake at night... you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics... There is only one thing for it then - to learn." -TH White (1938)

These are precedented times and the precedent is a loud ass warning www.nytimes.com/1939/02/04/a...

This whole thread. Also, this is exactly the point - what this whole thing boils down to is “what is ‘environment’ and why does it matter”, and SpaceX and its fans are very inclined to answer in a particular limited way, and to frame certain responses as not just wrong, but *illegitimate*.

This is how the rules work *before* the FAA begins to scrap them. A finding of no significant impact, for a project to accelerate a skyscraper full of fuel to Mach-22 in a federal wetland 3km from an int’l border, is fine - no EIA needed - because it was “within the broad zone of reasonableness.”

Of course, they ignore the fact that this borrowing from a speculative future where a company which has demonstrated time and time again to lie on documents and actually want to turn way more of the land into a resource than previously stated, will in the future have undone the ecological harms

I think it's really worth recognizing that this is what the FAA and SpaceX play this temporal trick always: spaceflight becomes always-already-green by pretending that the mitigation measures that *will have been taken* in the future will undo all the impacts www.chron.com/culture/arti...

yeah that is not what the statutory phrase public interest means brendan

This one is a bit of a personal favourite

Stephen Colbert spent part of his first post-Emmy monologue giving a fairly decent introduction to the Outer Space Treaty as it applies to lunar resource extraction. I've spent five years researching that treaty and its making. At no point would I have believed anyone who told me that sentence.

designating ANTIFA an enemy of the state is telling on yourself

Not that it matters, but what Kimmel said was … well, read it. This is what was described as “the sickest conduct ever” and was deemed enough to threaten to revoke a license over.

The FCC also licenses SpaceX,* in case you were wondering what the opposite of regulatory overreach looks like. It seems the "public interest" demands way less actual regulating when you're a billionaire defense contractor. * in a context with far less 1st amendment relevance!!

... Anyway, I'm so very glad for researchers like @matteobassetti.bsky.social, who didn't need a fascist decline to understand that pathologising transness (/queerness) doesn't just *allow* for harm; it *causes* it. This isn't the language of law; it's the language of medicine, used for violence.

The Free Speech President has now pulled two of the three major late night hosts off the air through threats and intimidation because of their jokes. Obviously I’m behind Jimmy Kimmel 100% in the face of this fascist garbage. Speech against this admin isn’t just being chilled, they’re freezing it.

Defending trans people is obviously morally just and ethical. Beyond that it just is tactically the correct thing to do because the GOP is going to say the same thing about Dems no matter what and either you can respond with 'well my opponent has some points' or 'look at this hateful shit'

Okay @marinavelickovic.bsky.social is COOKING here, this is very cool.

Just going to leave this here 👀 “There has to be a line between crime and war,” said JOHN YOO. “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”

The three most damning paras in the UN Report alleging that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza: Siege starvation, attacks on health care, direct targeting of children as patterns that cannot be explained except if group destruction is one animating purpose.

Seconding @evanurquhart.bsky.social's point below, and also, this last paragraph is a *banger*.

Suddenly "hate speech" is bad. Suddenly "dehumanizing" people is bad. Suddenly "cancel culture" is good. Suddenly words have consequences. The modern American right in 2025, folks.

Okay this is a *mic drop* of a legal rebuttal. The fact that @colinmurray.bsky.social and @aoifemod.bsky.social had to repeatedly restate parts of an undergrad-level international law syllabus in order to refute key claims is, uh, not a great reflection of the original report.

Is anybody I'm connected to on here an environmental attorney? And if so, would that environmental attorney have any interest/bandwidth to talk to a smart college student who is trying to decide what she wants to do professionally? (I'd prefer it be someone who enjoys what they do. 1/

And yes, I was the last Black full-time columnist in the Opinion section. Washington Post -- operating in a city which for a long time has been majority Black, is now without any full-time Black opinion writers.

Some personal news: I've been fired from the Washington Post in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Thread incoming. substack.com/@karenattiah...

A must-read piece by @ntinatzouvala.bsky.social voelkerrechtsblog.org/defining-awa... “As academic and other institutions in the Global North closed ranks in support of a nuclear state unleashing unspeakable violence against an intentionally starved population, /1

Javier Bardem shouts out @drmelob.bsky.social on the red carpet

Oh dear. Apparently Lord Hodge has been speaking to The Times (go figure) to justify the mess that is the FWS judgment and suggesting that it is based on careful assessment of whether their ‘biological sex’ option makes sense. Well, given …

Fresh from calling for extremist violence against the UK Parliament, he gets a puff piece in the WaPo.

Reporters talking with everyone who has ever met the shooter asking if the shooter knew any trans people. Healthy society we have here for sure.

Its research is better than most news shows and its gags are better than most comedy shows but for me what sets it above most shows is that it always tries to ask "What can we do about this?"

This is the third time in 2 weeks where I've left episode of one of the several sci-fi series getting me through life rn with nagging-but-unspecified Thoughts and Feelings, only to find a @reactorsff.bsky.social piece published within hours that exactly names and nails the Thing that Bothered Me.

Pet parrots which typically live alone (whilst those in the wild live in large flocks) were given the technology to call each other. They would use it for up to three hours a day, and developed favourite friends 💔 on.ft.com/3K05vhS

i do not think ezra klein genuinely grieves for charlie kirk. i think ezra klein thinks it’s professionally advantageous to perform grief.

Lot of people posting "political violence is never the answer" despite several years of defending and minimising the political violence of Benjamin Netanyahu.

1. Anne McClain was acquitted!! 2. Of fabricated accusations of violating US banking law - not space law, or any law even related to space. 3. The demographic that most consistently flaunts law in space is billionaires.

The cited report is a note by the EU *Commission* (in its executive function) to the Parliament & Council; it is not a definitive statement of EU space policy. The report mentions the word 'Moon' one (1) time. It also proposes solar geoengineering, which would be firmly beyond the EU's competences.

Heads up for this excellent special issue of BJHS edited by @actgeppert.bsky.social . Insightful contributions on the cultural construction of 'founding fathers,' 'prophets,' etc. of the space age, taking a very global approach w/ works on Clarke, Sarabhai, Qian Xuesen, etc. I have a small epilogue.

This is also a key distinction between the "inherent" right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter - the sole basis for legitimate self-defence at intl law - vs the purported "inherent right to self-defence" claimed by Israel & the US, which is broader, more permissive, & without basis.

Israel claims it bombed Qatar as "legitimate" self-defence to to a Hamas shooting in Jerusalem that killed 6. But: - It's debatable that the shooting met the threshold of 'armed attack'. - Even so, that wouldn't justify an attack on Qatar. - Legit self-defence requires "immediate" report to UNSC!!

"[SNW has] (to borrow a phrase) reversed the polarity of Trek’s moral universe. It is a bigotry arrived at, I believe, through pandering rather than hatred, but its laziness does not make it any less despicable." this is a BANGER.

I found this history fascinating, especially how the US under Bush I a) pushed to create the IPCC to center government representatives, not scientists, in UN climate action; b) used the IPCC to block binding emission targets and carbon taxes on rich countries, which seemed imminent in 1988.

“I too came from a poorish family,” says the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, eldest son of Major-General Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and Marianna Letitia, Viscountess Monckton of Brenchley.

It would also stop any UKHE collective labour action dead. Hard to strike if you're being scabbed by last year's lectures.

It took Pritzker 15 minutes to send Trump into a two-week spiral so unhinged that even *he* forgot he was pretending to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

Well, it seems that Trump's 2016 claim that he could publically "shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters" was actually a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So it turns out that writing about US federal administrative law in Aug 2025, as a *UK*-trained (international) lawyer, feels somewhat like choosing to tapdance across a live minefield. The legal authorities I cited definitely existed at the time of writing; your mileage may vary.

I wrote a blog post contextualising the recent US Executive Order on space. Thanks so much to @cassandrasteer.bsky.social for inviting me to develop a rather impromptu BS thread as a guest on her blog!!

So many big fat question marks about Trump's recent Exec order, that basically says "no more environmental impact assessment of launches". After I saw @crisveijk.bsky.social make sense of it in a short Bsky thread, I invited him to write a guest post spacecitizens.substack.com/p/trumps-bol...

On 24 July, Senegal became the 56th state to sign the Artemis Accords... and the 3rd Artemis signatory to have neither signed nor ratified the Outer Space Treaty, which the Accords claims to "affirm" & "implement". (The other 2 are Angola & Liechtenstein; Rwanda has signed but not ratified OST)