[at my second rodeo] listen up you ignorant sack of shit

Einstein's 1905 like if PTA released Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master, and One Battle After Another all in the same year

As a shutdown approaches and Dem leadership does its usual schtick, just re-upping that basically every fed employee I've heard from in recent weeks (anecdotal, yes, but still!) is pro-fight, pro-shutdown-if-necessary. As I wrote a couple weeks ago about NIH: www.gravityisgone.com/the-walls-ar...

Once again wondering if the conservative justices manage to delude themselves into thinking they are doing a good job, legally speaking, or if they're perfectly happy just doing a good job for this one guy

Fwiw, unless I have some details wrong for the search, the Des Moines superintendent ICE grabbed for no apparent reason does not seem to be in the detainee locator system anymore (multiple reports have him appearing in there and being held in a western Iowa jail)

What the fuck?

Imagine being an admiral or whatever and scrambling to fly 16 hours back from Manila in order to listen to a Fox News host berate you for 15 minutes about warfighters www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

ABC and then Sinclair caving feels like the best demonstration of this yet, people actually heard about this and hated it

cool

The fucking Wikipedia page for this calls it a massacre

If we get out of this the entire concept of “emergency” powers needs to be e completely overhauled

NIH dir. Bhattacharya addressed NIAID’s advisory council meeting today—well, sort of, it was pre-recorded—to tell them that a “core aim” is to “address current infectious disease threats” that did not appear to include covid. Per a source, he is an “embarrassment.” “Dude can’t speak worth shit.”

Half-baked but: I keep thinking about shame, and how in the past people in government might have had a sort of built in firewall against doing the most egregious shit we’re seeing. But now the info environments are so separate that they get *positive* reinforcement for just absurd action.

New: There was an "emergency" all-hands meeting inside part of NOAA today basically to tell people they have no idea what to expect re a potential shutdown. "Even less than usual," per one source. There is no guidance yet available and no info on what specifically the OMB memo means. So that's cool.

“weaponized DOJ” sure got thrown around a bunch in recent years but

Revisiting a writing project I hadn't touched for a few years and well I could be nicer to myself I suppose

Also discussed at this all-hands, OMB's late-in-the-fiscal-year release of its NOAA spending means that the cuts to parts of the agency require money not already spent to be held back. This may result in grants to UCAR not going out; they can survive until 10/20, and then may have to furlough staff.

Apropos of nothing, a few years ago I wrote whole-ass book proposal for a book all about bats and how they can explain/teach a lot about people, that didn't go anywhere. It was called Great Whirling Circles, based on this quote from Dracula. If any agents or publishers feel like getting in touch.

Man this is grim as hell

I'm a reporter not a political strategist, but one answer to the question of "What can the opposition do?" is "Use the extraordinary investigative powers members of Congress have even when in the minority to get new information courts and journalists can't get."

If you get the urgency of planning for escalating climate risks in smart and engaged ways, this 30-day workshop is for you. Check it out: alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-person...

Today is a great day to sign up for Gravity Is Gone, my independent writing and reporting on science, politics, and policy. www.gravityisgone.com

This is interesting — in a paper out today, researchers created an alternate history to estimate what Trump's desired cuts to NIH would look like. Of 557 drugs approved 2000-2023, *more than half* are at least partially linked to NIH research that would have not happened under a 40% reduction.

New: There was an "emergency" all-hands meeting inside part of NOAA today basically to tell people they have no idea what to expect re a potential shutdown. "Even less than usual," per one source. There is no guidance yet available and no info on what specifically the OMB memo means. So that's cool.

Old news I know but I can confirm that this talk, part of the NIH Climate and Health Scholar program, was canceled because it was deemed "too political." Anyway.

L, and might I add, MAO. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Stick around to the end of this for an update on my reporting on HHS spewing chatGPT on everyone in the department

Maybe my most contrary opinion is that email is Good, Actually, and I wish I received more good interesting emails

What's sort of striking about the Trump cabinet is that most of the prominent members have overlapping but varying versions of "dramatically unqualified," like there are psychopath true believers, soulless amoral strivers, full-on misanthropist sadists, it's really a melting pot

C'MON EVERYONE

Holy shit yes

There should be more consequences for constantly lying to the public

seems to me the main reason bluesky has a lot of desperately unhappy people freaking out about politics and world affairs on it instead of being like twitter was in the middle of the last decade is that you are using and discussing it in 2025 instead of in the middle of the last decade

That solar/wind amount is more or less China's *entire* electricity capacity today

I decided to gather some of the many, many responses to the tylenol/autism press conference into one place.

Any time I've written about fusion power I get at least a couple of very normal, totally relevant things like this, though this is much more polite than most. www.gravityisgone.com/companies-ke...

Follow-up to what I wrote about a few weeks ago, with HHS making ChatGPT available to all: NIH employees received further guidance this week that they CAN input "non-sensitive personally identifiable information" into the hallucination machine. That includes things like names, emails, etc.

Once again begging outlets to stop calling what they did a "cost-cutting" effort

more like craptured

damn it, look what we missed out on www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Do any of the professors or journalists or teachers also get their jobs back or nah

this mfer going the wrong way

Needed three bylines to offer up two variants of "took aim at" in two paragraphs

If the rich dems need any convincing to do this...

Once more from yesterday: I wrote about companies buying up theoretical fusion power and the constantly shifting goalposts. Put your email in the little box on there please, it is free for the time being.

ISAAC CHOTINER: It’s just interesting, because my understanding is that you had a pretty good opportunity to destroy the one ring. ISILDUR: No, that’s not— IC: O.K. I: You have to appreciate what was happening. IC: Right. You’re in Mt Doom with the ring— I: Sauron was right there! IC: Sure.

The public comment period on EPA's proposed rescinding of the endangerment finding ended yesterday. Participation appears to have been robust.

Nailed it, Cass www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

It really is, because it means the only way the other side can win is by bringing material consequences to bear, which is so much harder! As we've seen, it's hard to impeach a president when enough of his party says: "Nothing he does wrong matters."