🔬 Your tax dollars once paid a physicist whose own colleagues told him he was wasting the university's money. In 1951, Charles Townes sat on a D.C. park bench and worked out, on the back of an envelope, how to force molecules to release coherent radiation. 🧵 1/5

Many such ceasefires

This scholarly report proves something rather different from what it argues. If you actually look at what the ppl it describes believe, it's very clear that there exists no system that respects *our* most basic civil liberties that can command *their* loyalty. So make a system that doesn't need it.

I just spent a month in Canada with Canadian writers and Americans have simply forgotten that one common option in other places is PUBLIC FUNDING.

but frfr i need dems to shut the fuck up about fairly contested elections from the left and defend the legislators trump is chomping at the bit to put in jail

helpful coverage from @elpais.com english.elpais.com/usa/2025-08-...

When these data centers become debt traps in a few years at most, the next Dem president should offer to wipe out those debts if they're sold for a dollar back to cities for community centers, mutual aid hubs, YMCA-style temporary housing services. Try to salvage anything out of this mess.

I especially love this diagram.

It's "Make a Terrible Comic Day," and cousin, I sure tried

ICE agents went into a polling place yesterday to demand an election worker take down an Instagram post naming Jonathan Ross as the agent who murdered Renee Good. www.syracuse.com/news/2026/06...

We love the Gross Reflecting Pool story because it is a Groverhaus

"Nonresident visitors 16 and older are now required to pay an extra $100 plus the standard $35 entry fees at each of 11 marquee National Parks" A rare US institution that's appreciated world-round. For such a dumb motherfucker, it's amazing how creative Trump is about burning soft power. Gift link.

My friend was making fun of some liberal thing she thought was virtue signaling on a call and I was like "yeah, we're living through a fascist backlash. Signaling you're one of the ones with some virtue is very useful rn!"

New antibiotics might still come from places you’d think were completely mined out. Which is good news:

I want to pre-register a take on birthright citizenship, on the assumption that the administration is going to lose and lose badly.

4-8 coach in fourth season saying shit like “the real fans know we’re building something here”

Cherish these moments. How often do you get to join a giraffe mystery already in progress

Hello folks who work with digitized manuscripts. What is your preferred metadata format? If you could get ONE, what would it be? TEI, Json, a spreadsheet, MARC, or something else? Please let me know and share this query! This is important!

Musk says not a single person has died due to him axing USAID. Sadly, part of my job involves tracking aid spending. So here’s a thread with just some of the people who lost their lives because of USAID cuts

They're using Rhino Pipeliner 5000, which freezes as sprayed-on curds almost exactly as it hits the surface. Won't flow out, flatten, and self-level like standard epoxy or paint would. Under standing water, the orange peel texture is a perfect scaffolding for algae, bacteria, and general bio scum

We always come back to "is mass death good or bad" when litigating the far-left dumbass-posters on this topic, and I think we could say more about how their fundamental premise is flawed: USAID is not the CIA. The way we know this is that the far right captured the government and turned USAID off

Any other instantiation of the logic model also makes you sound profoundly stupid. "Tech transfer under UNFCCC is imperialism because it's soft power by patents." No it isn't. That isn't true. The way we know that is that the government fucking hates doing it. Same thing goes for, e.g., COVAX.

It is substantially easier to advance the goals of empire in a world where people are starving, poor, and subservient to your political objectives. A concrete example of this is the renegotiation of PEPFAR through State under bilateral MOUs that link essential medicines to fucking mining rights.

I have worked with (1) USAID, (2) State, and (3) the intelligence community in my professional experience, and while there is certainly cross-pollination and alignment of objectives across the executive branch, the simple fact is that American imperialism is the reason USAID is *gone*

The single most defining thing Elon Musk has ever done is killing untold numbers of people by having DOGE illegally raid and disband USAID. Not rickets, not cars, not even the CSAMbot on X. It’s this, and so many media pundits just choose to unsee it.

it was literature pub quiz night and our team name "flowers for algae gone" didn't get a single laugh, this isn't the country i grew up in

to understand this you need to understand that for decades the American right has said that socialism is when the government does stuff, and now a significant portion of people who want the government to do stuff call themselves socialist for many people Obamacare *is* socialism

American socialism = "I will *consider* government intervention when attempting to solve problems" It's largely become a synonym for pragmatism

I’m gonna say something controversial. Youre not gonna like it. Some of you may cancel me but I dont care. This has gone on long enough & it needs to stop. If you don’t like what I have to say then fine but its my prerogative Okay. This is gonna piss ppl off but… I WISH IT SNOWED ALL YEAR ROUND 😭

if I could convince people of one thing I sometimes think it would be that bigotry is a real thing and motivates people powerfully. it's not just a distraction or a way to manipulate people or a cover for economics. people actually hate and will do stuff based on that. 1

Using criminal charges to scapegoat innocent people for the regime’s mistakes is about as authoritarian as it gets. www.reuters.com/world/us/peo...

Land returned to Mi’kmaq Nation will double tribe’s territory

Working on my “menus vs parkour” theory of ui/ux design

1996

The profound part of Juneteenth for me is that before this was made a holiday, there was no official celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. When the 13th Amendment passed in December 1865, the legislators who witnessed its enshrinement imagined that the day would be remembered.

If only the Wii Remote had a gyro built-in from day 1, instead of MotionPlus being too little too late. Imagine the generational impact. No waggle legacy. There would be more inspired hearts. Fewer kids growing up to build datacenters

“Obama’s liberalism echoes Abraham Lincoln’s “electric cord” speech…In it, Lincoln declares that the immigrants of the day have no ties of heritage or blood to the founding generation. But once they reflect on the Declaration’s promise of equality, it allows them to claim such a bond” A 1,000x yes!

They're dumping slimy, green peroxide water from the Reflecting Pool back into the Potomac. #dc @popville.bsky.social

Only 4 more days to put your game into the game industry hardship fund! Please add your games (and TTRPGs are okay too) so we can make some money for out of work game devs! Do it over the weekend! itch.io/jam/game-ind...

This is obviously terrible on a humanitarian level but it's also yet another example of our shooting ourselves in the foot over and over again. This is how you get new global epidemics and new strains of disease. Here's a snippet from hiv.gov, which I suspect will not be up for much longer.

Omg it’s France with the chair!

"And Marx is claiming he was offsides." youtu.be/PjV9eZzNs2g?...

This is BIG. After spending over $1 BILLION on the purchase of multiple commercial warehouses that ICE planned to convert into the largest jails/prisons in the nation, ICE is now largely abandoning the idea and will aim to sell off multiple warehouses at a loss.

@mayor.nyc.gov's 🔥 Knicks speech was a message to all Americans: "Standing here before what feels like the entire city, there is a Jalen Brunson quote I can't stop thinking about: 'You are allowed to think about the worst possible scenario — but you gotta go out there and do something about it.'"

the world falling apart sucks real bad, but it's amazing that New York somehow slipped into an Disney Channel Original Movie alternate reality where our problems are fixed by Mayor Socialism and the Power of Friendship wins basketball championships.