The concept seems to be "you should sacrifice for an elected role." Sounds good in theory but what you get are (1) already very rich people and (2) people who *don't* sacrifice, they just make up the difference and more via corruption. It should pay well. People should want it as an actual job.

We don't ordinarily publish posts at [checks watch] 8:51 PM on a Friday night, but state constitutional law expert Quinn @yeargain.bsky.social has an outside-the-box idea for reversing the VA Supreme Court that is very much worth taking seriously: Dems can simply lower the retirement age.

Fascists succeed in general because they are willing to take stuff, break rules, get violent, while most of their opponents are not Fascists lose, in general, because they pick (at least) one fight too many with someone they didn't expect to fight back

Cancelled my Ancestry.com membership today. What can you dump?

I am extremely troubled by the amount of standby pay issued to MPD officers during Operation Metro Surge. MPD data shows some officers were paid nearly 24 hours per day for 32 days straight, while dozens were paid 8-12 extra hours each day while we stood out in the cold protecting our neighbors. 1/

Going around again. Still worth the watch.

McSweeney's, you magnificent bastards, you've done it again.

Note: Virginia supreme court justices are "re-elected" by state lawmakers, meaning the legislature chooses whether to reappoint them or replace them. Two of the four justices in the majority today against the new congressional map will be "up" by early 2028.

Last summer Jim O'Neill, the CDC director, demanded that Merck and GSK break up the MMR vaccine into 3 different shots. Both companies responded basically by saying "fuck you, make me" and it never happened.

I believe that should read (((cosmopolitan communists))).

thats because he has cosplayed being Howard Hughes in public for about 30 years now. he wishes he was Howard Hughes so badly he wants you to believe he is. But he's neither a great engineer nor a true eccentric- just a sad pathetic little man desperate not to be who he is and failing every day

I've never heard earned wealth phrased this way, but she's right about it.

Tennessee NAACP goes to court to stop "late-decade Congressional redistricting," and the law sure looks to be on their side.

I've spent a lot of time in politics and when I'm tired I think of what a black lady in her 80s told me with a smile "don't you go getting weary now" "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." never get weary.

So far oral exams have been a super success! Had a fantastic conversation with a student about what justice for Bathsheba might look like (their own question based on our class!).

Coming out later this year hopefully...

I can’t emphasize enough that swapping back to on-paper exams and daily quizzes (for, so far, a single upper-division lab-lecture course with 23 enrolled) has if anything turned out to be less work than running them all through Canvas

A big reason the White House press corps deserve to be locked in the ballroom mausoleum with him and burned alive is that they never, ever defend their woman colleagues from this continual degradation.

this is also one of my hobbyhorses. you want a better caliber of lawmaker? you want to reduce the odds of corruption? pay them more. a lot more.

oh wow 😭

Can’tvas

Just had Canvas stop working as I was typing comments on a student paper. I now can’t access anyone’s work or grades. Strangely, this never happened back when I used a grade book and had students email me their papers, a system no shareholders extracted money from.

Someone who understands how to land the girl.

On the weather app, days where there is a small chance of overnight rain but it will otherwise be sunny during waking hours should not be represented by the little rainy cloud thumbnail. Bad for morale.

Breaking: Tennessee Republicans pass new 9-0 gerrymander after SCOTUS destruction of Voting Rights Act eliminating state’s only majority-Black district & last Democratic seat. Splits Memphis, which is 63% Black, into 3 districts to disenfranchise Black voters. Quite literally a return to Jim Crow

This is how to respond when your university starts pushing Gemini on you

🎯

This may be the funniest thing I've seen about the impending Odyssey so far.

Alabama Legislature is meeting on redistricting; we are under a tornado watch, and it’s flooding in the building. These metaphors are too on the nose.

Ag secretary confirming 1 in 4 US farmers has no fertilizer secured, American Farm Bureau survey says up to 70% can’t afford enough fertilizer for the season under the spiked costs Honestly shocked this isn’t bigger news. 25% of farms are just not planting at all this season. Farm bankruptcy up 46%

The nominal strategic purpose of the U.S. Navy is to ensure global freedom of navigation to guarantee stable global trade. It has not only not done that, the United States instigated the conflict which undid it. This is known in foreign policy analysis as a “whoopsie doodles.”

Ted Turner had an instinct for mergers, a lot of charm, an inhuman level of self-confidence, AND a wildly overinflated sense of what he could pull off, and if I were to pick a single deal that represented all of those qualities, it would be "I think I can turn Jane Fonda into a trophy wife."

@dribrats.bsky.social Digest 21.12.3: 'a left-handed slave is not diseased or defective, unless he uses his left hand more frequently on account of the weakness of his right, but he is then not left-handed, but crippled.'

I guess it wouldn’t be an attempt to return to Jim Crow without some abuse of state authority against uppity negroes.

On this day in 1933, Nazis raided the Magnus Hirschfeld library in Berlin. The world’s greatest collection of LGBTQ books and scientific papers were looted and later burned, erasing decades of research into sexuality and gender identity. ‘Where they burn books, in the end they will burn humans too’.

just received proofs of my latest article, forthcoming with postmedieval journal: "The invention of blackness in Ovid's Metamorphoses." (a new reading of the Phaethon myth in Bks 1 and 2)

“Forcing”

The Vatican released a historic report today criticizing conversion therapy and featuring gay Catholic testimony. It proposes a new methodology for addressing controversial issues, calling for listening and relationships. Read my report: religionnews.com/2026/05/05/v...

RESULT: Democrats tonight have defended a swing district in Michigan's state Senate. This means they also defended their majority in the chamber. (The GOP could have erased it by winning.) SD35 voted by Harris by just 1% in 2024, but Dem Chedrick Greene appears to have won easily today.

It's useful to recall that diet cranks have existed back all the way to the very horizons of our historical awareness.

“Not for rinsing or washing,” they said. (Seen at Union Station.)

Hello Bluesky! My new book, THE FIREARM REVOLUTION, is out on 14 April. It’s about how a new technology changed society, and how hard it was to control. Here’s a little thread of what’s inside:

Just over half of full-time workers earn enough to provide for themselves and their families. www.marketplace.org/story/2026/0...

I have news for you about 1976, 1926, and 1876!

Argh, came across yet another excellent scholar with an article from 2012, diss. 2013, with no more recent articles... because she has left the field :( . In other news, spent too much time today delaying reading a different article because I was afraid it would disagree with me, but it doesn't.

Personally I think you should all be ashamed of yourselves for normalizing the existence of any nation state at all

Fair warning. I’m gonna tap the sign now…