Spot on, @govpritzker.illinois.gov. What say you, @massgovernor.bsky.social? Time to voice principled opposition to this misuse of federal power and solidarity with its victims? Start a movement, form a compact?

Watch this. This is what this criminal administration wants to do to all of us. Find the groups in your community that are standing up against ICE and join them.

So good. So…perspicacious. Would love to see responses of Klein and others who see speech and reason as things that take place in some abstract realm outside of communication (or see communication as mere data transfer) www.bostonreview.net/articles/how...

Whenever I make coffee in the morning, I make sure the grounds are shaped in the filter like an inverted cone, with an indent in the middle, and think of Baader’s theory of shaped explosive charges. www.digitale-sammlungen.de/view/bsb1070...

The more asters we have, the further we are from dis-aster.

This is a remarkable declaration and challenge to Congress: "We call on you to pass nothing less than a fighting CR: a funding bill that not only keeps the lights on, but that also includes statutory protections to rein in executive lawlessness." Spread the word.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered…Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” - 1984, George Orwell

Listened to #274 of @empirepoduk.bsky.social yesterday, and was reminded of this gem of misprision, from a litany of Drake's barbarities in F. X. von Zach's Correspondance astronomique (1823). To do something "au nez et à la barbe" of someone is to do it boldly, right under their nose.

Green frog from today’s walk.

Brazilian president to the American people, "If Trump was Brazilian and did what he did at the Capitol, he'd be on trial in Brazil"

If we’re doing #hairyplants today, I give you Culcitium, which is so hairy that travelers in the Andean highlands used it for bedding, which is how it got its name. hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.c05...

The story of #AI, from Helen Haiman Joseph's A Book of Marionettes (New York, 1920).

Can someone explain to me why Google search is no longer able to return occurrences of an exact phrase across the vast universe of text on the Web?

Summer reading begins. This is just a lovely, gutting description of the world (time and space) being slowly drained of personhood, and vv. Dematerialization. Disorientation. Alienation.

If the GOP justices on SCOTUS thought universal injunctions were unconstitutional, they had multiple opportunities to set boundaries via egregious injunctions from GOP judges blocking Biden measures. They didn't. They waited until now to help their President send citizens to foreign gulags.

Catalpa flowers. Remarkable for such a weedy tree.

📢 The #BiodiversityHeritageLibrary is entering a bold new chapter – and we need your help! Today we release our official Call for Support. We’re seeking new hosts for BHL’s staff, infrastructure, and services. Learn more: blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2025/06/tran... #BHLTransition #ILoveBHL

We feed you. They hunt us.

Spring chicken for dinner!

As if there weren’t enough gall in the feeds nowadays, here are two firsts for the season from today’s walk, some witch’s hats (witch-hazel cone gall aphids) and some wool sower gall wasps.

Inordinately, irrationally pleased with this purchase from a Dayton bookstore, PJF Turpin’s essay of a philosophical iconography of plants, with this synoptic plate, illustrating the morphological unity of Nature, dedicated to his patron Humboldt.

This is a useless commuter line, @mbta.com. I see a pattern—at least be honest with your schedules.

Admirable clarity. Gleichschaltung.

The Trump administration is “trying to collapse the independence of universities. And they won’t stop there. The point is to collapse the independence of institutions in civil society.” — Wesleyan University President Michael Roth on MSNBC #HigherEd

Habemus corpus?

For folks in the Boston area eager to hear a Renaissance choir imitating cuckoos, cannons, cymbals, crowds, and campaniles--clango, "I ring" is a real (though apparently very rare) classical Latin verb--Convivium has some upcoming concerts:

Alexander von Humboldt died #OTD in 1859. "Der Fürst der Wissenschaft, der erhabene Herrscher von Gottes Gnaden im Reiche der Geister ist nicht mehr." api.digitale-sammlungen.de/iiif/image/v...

"We know of no two travellers, ancient or modern, who have traversed so many leagues of foolscap, as Doctor Clarke and the Baron de Humboldt." Clever diss of Alexander von Humboldt, who died #OTD in 1859 at the age of 89, who spent far more of his life writing than travelling.

I could live with Guys & Doll, but now with the movie tariff it's just Guy, and I'm done.

A dapper looking male Philodromus dispar searching the garden for a mate. @britishspiders.bsky.social

Today’s word is myrmecochore—a plant that relies on ants for seed dispersal—like the wood anemones now making their brief appearance across the street.

Proper, or im. youtu.be/cg4YrOlAkds

30 April 1943 | Eddy Hamel was murdered in a gas chamber in #Auschwitz. Born in #NYC in 1902. As a teenager, he moved to Amsterdam. 1st Jewish player in Ajax Amsterdam. He scored 8 goals in 125 league games. After arrest in Oct 1942, he was deported to Auschwitz with his wife & 2 kids.

Adding to the fugitive works of the day.

Somebody needs to explain why Kristi Noem can walk in an out of the El Salvadoran Slave Labor Camp but nobody can confirm where Abrego Garcia is or how it would be possible to get him home? WTF is going on!!!

A thing of beauty.

Read the Wikipedia bio, imagine surviving, and go down the rabbit holes of quarter-tone scales and the Ghetto Swingers.

That’s a very good point.

This should terrify us. When the state is pushing for digitisation of its own records and the destruction of the originals to save space, THIS is the consequence. Digitisation is incredibly important, but it cannot come at the risk of original material AND if a resource is created

The penguins sent them.

Adorable. The Boston ducks have protest signs #handsoff

A favorite from today in Boston

This. The violence is theatrical.

Even if you accept the premise and decision, which I absolutely do not, it is the simplest thing to phone the visa holder, tell them their visa is revoked and say they have a month to leave the country. Accosting someone on the street like a kidnapping is just a spectacle of terror.

Part of me really hopes that these posts come back to haunt these people, when a new regime finds it more dangerous and unamerican to support the forcible arrest and removal of someone--anyone--for writing something, than to protest a war.

I think the real point here is that Herr Trumpf has created plenty of room to reinstate the ban, and if PW thinks it has solved anything, even lengthened the hangman’s rope, it’s dreaming.

Karp’s e-mail doesn’t address 4 major points according to WH version of deal: political neutrality in client selection and attorney hiring; pro bono representing full political spectrum; merit-based [sic] hiring, promotion, retention, instead of “DEI.” So WH & DoJ can supervise all that. 1/2

If true, if Skadden, Ropes, etc were really taking the opportunity to poach clients, then fuck them all.

TLDR: Other firms were trying to take advantage of the situation, so we buckled like a cheap belt. Please don't think less of us for choosing immediate survival over ethics and the rule of law.

JFC