From Professor Robert “Bombing to Win” Pape himself.

It's just non-stop nonsense today, these were all three minutes apart! *TRUMP: IRANIANS SHOULD RISE UP AGAINST THE IRAN REGIME *TRUMP: NEW REGIME IS SMARTER, SHARPER, LESS RADICAL *TRUMP: WE DIDN'T DO THIS FOR REGIME CHANGE *TRUMP: I HAVE THE BEST PLAN OF ALL, WON'T TELL YOU WHAT IT IS

At this point in our history, I would feel better if I knew House Democrats were preparing impeachment resolutions. Not tweets or outraged interviews about who ought to be imprisoned. Just the appropriate Constitutional response to a President who has broken our laws & shamed our country.

"EPA analyses have shown breathing in mercury can lead to serious health risks, including brain damage, and is particularly dangerous to babies and young children." So, naturally, the Trump 2.0 "EPA" eliminates mercury emissions rules ... www.eenews.net/articles/epa...

I was considering the curious case of Lyft, the ride hail service. I retain few subscriptions in my life, and the Bay Area municipal bike share is one of them. It’s mostly owned by, and operated by, Lyft. The cost is $165 annual. The Lyft Pink “all access” bundle is available for $34 more.

Put this in the file of “little things the government should do.” It is common practice when working with an accountant to receive encrypted PDFs with the password in some barely obfuscated format in the same email.

So what this describes is ethnic cleansing www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/w...

This is state-sponsored murder.

This looks to me like a layered onion of badness: what are the tax ramifications (eliminating capital gains? It rather looks like that). Secondly, a way to increase the porosity of the crime sector in crypto into the real economy. www.cnbc.com/2026/03/26/f...

@jdcmedlock.bsky.social reader.foreignaffairs.com/2026/03/24/g...

Ooh, good stuff here from @permitpower.bsky.social: a scorecard that ranks all 50 states on how easy it is to install solar, how smooth they've made permitting & interconnection, etc.

Thinking about DeepSeek, whose rise forced a number of opening of models and price cuts in China: I suspect the hard costs (compute cluster, power) is picked up by the state. Its parent hedge fund of that estimated size can't hack the training iterations as a hobby all that easily.

Let me be clear. I don’t support AIPAC. Quite the opposite. But I also have major issues with Track AIPAC. It’s a shady project.   Track AIPAC isn’t a neutral watchdog. It’s a political operation with its own PAC and a very clear agenda. 🧵

To Utah Republicans, it's always someone else's fault. Even if the GOP controls all three branches of the federal government. Even if the GOP has a supermajority in the legislature and governorship in Utah. They never take responsibility for anything. Never.

I did my part for gasoline prices: I took the recently-electrified Caltrain and a bicycle to my dentist appointment. This nearly doubled how long each leg was, but I did get a very scenic bay-side ride out of it both ways, and exercise. At midday, it would be running on nearly all renewables.

California’s lowest snowpack since 2015 means water storage is below normal. Reservoir levels are above normal but the paltry snowpack (which normally accounts for ~30% of water storage in CA) is putting the Sierra Nevada millions of acre-feet short of normal Source: cw3e.ucsd.edu/water_storag...

Lots of noise in crude futures but since US/Israel attacks on Iran started they've trended higher by about $2/calendar day. That gets you to $150/barrel crude by mid-April, about 6 weeks after the conflict kicked off. The huge noise of the initial short squeeze and short-term swings obscure a lot.

We could have entirely funded USAID, but instead we spent a week-and-a-half bombing Iran. And then another week-and-a-half and counting. www.ms.now/opinion/trum...

31 people died in ICE custody last year, a record. This is the 12th this year, a reportedly healthy father of six in his 40s, who died within 24 hours of his arrest. Via @brandonfriedman.bsky.social

This cyclist will lose her leg. I’ve ridden that street many times: it’s one of the streets I’ve almost gotten hit from a car dipping into the bike lane at high speed with no warning to get around a left turning vehicle. missionlocal.org/2026/03/sf-c...

This episode made me feel better about the project. Jan is a true believer, and the history of cities is not quite as emergent and decentralized as it may seem. Having also visited Barcelona, I have gained a little more faith in urban planning: it can be done. But, it’s going to need good luck.

One of my ongoing (haha only serious) jokes is that the smartphone is the technology that will destroy humanity, not AI, usually in reference to extremely strange belief structures from mobile broadband. But I wondered: why was the Shahed drone/missile not invented twenty years ago?

@sodrock.bsky.social from the man himself. reader.foreignaffairs.com/2026/03/09/w...

You know, we could have done this with a carbon tax years ago and not killed anyone. Or, we could have left Biden’s subsidies for electric cars and clean energy alone, making fossil fuels prices less important — again, no one gets killed. Instead, Trump’s War and higher prices for everything.

We don’t talk enough about how morally depraved the tech industry turned out to be. Every single ounce of their self-regarding statements of values was an outright lie.

The "median voter" theory of Democratic renewal really needs to have an account for what must be done about right wing propaganda's impact on that median voter. Via @brianbeutler.bsky.social: www.offmessage.net/p/jasmine-cr...

kind of crazy that if you have enough money and don't like what you see in the media, you can just buy up every film studio, news station, and social media app and change it

I don’t mean to belabor the obvious, but the Trump administration launched a surprise attack today on a nation with which it was in the midst of negotiations it had requested. At an earlier time, Americans took great and enduring offense at such apparent treachery. It’s a different country now.

Whenever regime change comes up lately, I think about this article, which contains reflections on Iraq. People under the boot understandably are desperate to get out, but simultaneously have higher expectations than the United States can deliver. reader.foreignaffairs.com/2026/01/16/h...

"The distribution of power and privilege was not random, so the notion of the meritocracy is completely revealed to be gendered bullshit." www.chronicle.com/article/unma...

The Washington Post's description of the bodycam video of his arrest last year, and the translation of Mr. Shah Alam's comments, is gutting. Remember, he was entirely blind in one eye and could only see three feet in the other, and he spoke virtually no English. He spent a year in jail for this.

Breaking: IPost has obtained CCTV footage showing a Border Patrol van dropping off Nurul Shah Alam at a closed Tim Hortons last Thursday. Shah Alam, nearly-blind & unable to enter the shop, then wandered the city for days. He was found dead Tuesday. www.investigativepost.org/2026/02/26/t...

Overnight this aircraft completed its deportation trip to India. The migrant passengers were likely shackled for at least 59 hours.

A review and reconsideration of US foreign aid efforts could have been conducted without burning tons of food and throwing out tons of medicine, directly resulting in people's deaths. But that's how Musk and Rubio chose to go about it.

A really important look at a woefully undercovered issue. However, I take qualms with some of the proposed solutions. Specifically regarding FAIR plans. The report notes that it is not sustainable to just have FAIR plans house uninsurable properties but does little to actually address the liability

Painful to read this and think about the 2021 coup attempt, which was as blatant as it gets. An utter failure of US elites to seize the moment when everybody saw the threat right in front of their eyes. If we have history books in the future, they will be unkind.

Would anybody like to read one of my long threads about a 2.5bn year old rock, bacteria that could produce oxygen but not consume it, and tank production in wwii

What's more shocking than ICE's plan to cram as many 8,500 humans into massive, soul-crushing warehouses? Seeing the actual DHS floor plan that echoes slavery ships and history's worst gulags with no rec space but a gun range for guards My new column on the camps www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

INBOX: Billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running for California governor, has told union leaders that he will back a special election in 2027 to partially repeal Prop 13 and assess commercial properties at market value. A similar "split roll" measure, known as Prop 15, failed by four points in 2020:

Elimination of emissions standards was one of the pretty clear policy stakes of the 2024 election and it received about 1% as much coverage as whether Tim Walz retiring from the national guard after 21 years was cowardly.

It is commonly accepted that being rich makes people malignant cranks, but does it? Because the kind of insights we get out of the "median voter" also suggest crankery is widely held. Looking for a sociology or polisci paper on class-crank correlation.

A “weird” speech by the Secretary of State at @munsecconf.bsky.social, summarized by @dandrezner.bsky.social. While weird is not the world I would use — Rubio is one of the more predictable men in politics — Drezner lands squarely on some of the speech’s glaring contradictions.

But we didn't have economic stagnation for the working class. We had a period of unusually *high* wage growth for low income workers.

Just a reminder that the UC system was not a party in this litigation. Faculty, staff and the @aaup.org fought on their own. UCLA, and the entire UC system, should be ashamed of themselves, and their leaders should be reminded of their submissives every day.

This is my neighborhood and I remember that day well. There’s no way she should drive again.

Genuinely wild imagination gap in how anthropic can conceive of a world where models are people but not one where gas plants are unnecessary

a stat i always cite is the number of anti-trans articles in the press went from 60 in a year, to 7,500