“Am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening?” is the defining quote of the Trump era

Five missed upper air observations in Alaska Sunday afternoon, all in northern and western Alaska. This systematic loss data from already poorly sampled, active storm regions can only hurt weather and climate reanalysis models. Base graphic courtesy U. Wyoming. #weather #climate

What an embarrassing shame. It’s so hard to be a science educator right now. How can I even give career advice.

Elon Musk, a white South African, will end up causing more misery across the African continent than anyone else in recent history

George Hardy, last of the Tuskegee Airmen's World War II combat pilots, dies at 100

Nobody cares about the victims in the Dallas ICE shooting apparently. The first I've heard about one of them was on CNN today. He's fighting for his life in the hospital --- he was brought to the US when he was 13. He's 33 now. No criminal record. I just don't know what to say anymore.

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong". Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

I've shared this quote before but I'll share it again, as it's one I've been thinking about a lot as I've watched how our oligarchs have been behaving over the past few months.

Fewer households, businesses will get high-speed internet under revamped federal plan, reports Madyson Fitzgerald and Amelia Ferrell Knisely for @stateline.org via @alaskabeacon.com

Sea ice extent in the Beaufort Sea (north of Alaska, northwest Canada) is now increasing in NSIDC data. The minimum extent for 2025 was reached on Sept 11 at just under 250,000 km². This is lower than the minimum extent any year prior to 2012 and the seventh lowest overall. #akwx #Arctic #SeaIce

Maybe not the full charging infrastructure but the infrastructure supporting it. The graph (inside the quoted post) is quite stark.

10th #fnsbtrails challenge sign in the bag. This was an easy urban one but i still managed to walk 2mi/3km.

This is very Anchorage and very 80s.

KCHU now faces "the most difficult set of circumstances" in its history: https://tinyurl.com/yrsvxbe9 

In case you missed it, we got a new dinosaur yesterday!

This is the kind of thing I hoped we'd see. (Now start working on public health insurance over these state consortia. It would take a few years, but I don't see why it wouldn't be doable. )

IT'S OFFICIAL: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York State, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New York City have formed the Northeast Public Health Collaborative. The collaborative will issue their own vaccine recommendations and coordinate public health efforts.

OK this quote made me laugh. (The numbers are about proportions of privately educated people, which in the more influential progressions still have a grip on UK society - and one that has become worse, not better, recently. These here are the exceptions. )

Excellent letter to the editor in our local paper. The only thing I'd add as an aside is that his assassination mighy count as a school shooting too.

One of the programs being cut is for private pilot ground training. I can not begin to tell you how important it is to train new rural pilots in Alaska.

It was a pretty great aurora. I just snapped a quick one with my phone but @leahwrenn.bsky.social got some excellent ones.

whenever people get fatalistic about the ecological threats we're facing, i like to bring up some of these examples. we *can* do things that cause positive change! we have in the past! if we make the decisions to try and fix things, we can actually do it! we aren't in fact doomed until we give up!

This is the whole thing right here. All these tired fights about whether Dems should moderate are ways of dancing around the real problem, which is the that political parties no longer have any mass constituency.

Trick post! You'll be able to read at least the abstract if you click on this.

This is quite the ride

Gorgeous “layers” of auroras in Ontario tonight 💚

Handy yiddish questions to use with your cat: far vos bistu azoy shlekht → why are you so bad! far vos bistu azoy → why are you like this! far vos → why!!

The Dept. of Education has pulled funding for programs in 8 states that support students with both hearing and vision loss. A staffer at one program says he was told the Trump admin. took issue with 2 words on the grant application: “transition" and “privilege": www.propublica.org/article/trum...

We really have to distinguish different modes of communication, which the current state of social media has thrown in a hodgepodge to further divide us. Are we writing to contribute, op-ed like, to public punditry, or are we having an interpersonal interaction with someone from our community?

Also, "free speech" ceases to be a civil right if it just means "I get to say whatever I want" rather than "everyone's right to free expression is protected".

@alejacorazonhm.bsky.social offers a helpful report at @rns.org about the roundtable I participated in last night at Georgetown University alongside four Catholic bishops and three Catholic activists. I was there as the moral theologian outlining Catholic social teaching on immigration.

The Nation pulls NO punches, from @espiers.bsky.social "There's no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign. Refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

I love @libro.fm! They’re where I get my audiobooks and where I like to direct anyone who wants to listen to mine. Get yourself something and help an indie in the process.

also this.

We need political leaders in Alaska who try to think a bit about what they say before they announce what they believe.

OK this is gonna get odd does anyone have s good primer of what Groypers are about that's not made by MAGA people?

This story, of equal or greater important to the Kirk shooting, is getting no material media coverage. The 16-year-old who shot two students in a Colorado high school on the same day Charlie Kirk was killed was a virulent white supremacist and antisemite. www.denverpost.com/2025/09/11/e...

Too bad the GOP effectively criminalized studying how information moves online and news orgs laid off and demonized all the reporters who covered the burgeoning online accelerationist performative death cults. All of that work was somehow "censorship" that needed to be stopped. Now we're here.

From the reporting, the arrows were up left right down down down - a code for a deadly strike from a videogame. Nothing trans or queer in the messages. Only shitposts with an antifascist flavor.

I won't forget that moment last spring when a bunch of us went to a conference (Arctic Science Summit Week in Boulder) and a colleague had a big house party. With karaoke. And a few of my 20-30 something Alaskan colleagues, Indigenous and not, fisherwomen and social scientists and policy folks ...

I don't think I've shared @gurdeep.ca yet on here. He's a Csnadian treasure from Whitehorse, YT.

Wife to me after listening to my breathless, worthless 2 minute rant: Who is Ezra Klein? Who is Charlie Kirk? Honey I can't believe I'm saying this but you need to play more videogames and get off the internet

Another webcam grab. Nome, Alaska. 46 Degrees. #photo, #camgrab #alaska #nome

Its important to be clear about the values we stand for. For this it doesn't matter what the people do who don't share these values. What makes this monstrous is that among the values I didn't share with Kirk were his disdain for empathy and framing of gun violence as the price of liberty.

The idea that an instructor can and *should* be fired for daring to teach something not explicitly mentioned in course catalog is the pinnacle of the "students as customers" idiocy that's been steadily destroying American universities for decades now. You're taking a class, not buying a product.

I keep saying this. The Right fundamentally are *not* hypocrites. They believe in double standards. For them, double standards are correct, inevitable, and desirable, because the idea that certain groups are better than others and should therefore have more rights is the basis of right-wing ideology

I'm kinda resigned to the fact that most people don't really give a shit about how millions globally will die horrible deaths directly due to Musk and Trump's decision to gut USAID - I guess it's too abstract to comprehend, or something - but it is HAPPENING, and nobody is swooping in to stop it.

This makes me sofa king proud. This is what journalism is.