"Even as elite liberals lost their way, a thunderous reaction to Trump was rising in the streets… That thunder demands change. It demands that we fight." www.liberalcurrents.com/the-reconstr...

DOGE wielded extraordinary power during the first months of the Trump administration. It was more important than any Cabinet official. The fact it has been completely memory-holed by this administration says much about its purpose and impact. federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-overs...

I wrote ab July 4 three years ago when a judge made up a quote & attributed it to me — said I said we’d done our work to “get around the 1st Amendment”. I couldn’t respond then bc AFL had just sued us in front of that judge. This year he’s just dismissed our case. open.substack.com/pub/agentsof...

The "Curse of Ham" is the Biblical origin story of so much white Christian racism.

My latest for @texasobserver.org: Despite the grip of conservative Christianity on Texas politics, religion here has always contained multitudes, a new work of history shows www.texasobserver.org/one-state-un...

« We identify how philosophical naivety, characterized by the uncritical adoption of reductive frameworks regarding consciousness, intelligence, and ethics, creates tangible organizational and technical liabilities. » 🔥

My latest at @flux.community: The Trump administration plans to provide bespoke gift bags to Afrikaners immigrating to the US, including materials that encourage an embrace of white supremacy as the ideal way to assimilate into American society. 1/ plus.flux.community/p/welcome-ba...

...wiping out hundreds of web pages and *terabytes* of critical public health data from the CDC, FDA and NIH websites. This was such a massive crisis that I created an archive of links to every public-facing web page from all three agencies from *before* 1/20/25. acasignups.net/cdc-website

A ballot initiative to block ballot initiatives

Read this ⬇️

Imagine a politician with the campiness of Trump but the odious politics and personality of Pete Hegseth…

This scenario seems rather familiar to 2016, doesn't it?

Once again, naive institutionalists fail to realize that you must never give leniency to fascism. It never works. All it does is encourage them because they see your weakness.

After 17 years without an increase, the federal minimum wage has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power. It's long past time to restore a meaningful national wage floor. Our CEO @elizabethwwilkins.bsky.social and @epi.org’s @hshierholz.bsky.social explain how in @thehill.com:

France has had no problems in the past locking up politician criminals. Will it maintain its record of integrity the way that Brazil did with the criminal Bolsonaro?

🚨 The number of PhD newly admitted candidates at American universities has fallen by 15%. The future innovators of the world are being driven out by Trump's authoritarian stupidity. Make America Great Again? Trump is making China and the rest of the world great with his policies.

The antidote to the timorous and stale Democratic establishment is not nihilistic sloppiness. Besides, the other party is doing that.

Jenny Racicot is calm and credible in this interview, imho. We clipped the whole thing so you can watch. New Platner Accuser Tells CNN’s Jake Tapper She Considers What He Did Rape: ‘Yes, Absolutely’ www.mediaite.com/politics/new...

embarrassing as the Platner situation has been, it is not lost on me, nor is it unappreciated, to see how differently Democrats react to credible rape allegations versus how Republicans do

ELIZABETH WARREN calls on Platner to drop out: “There can be no tolerance for sexual assault… With so much at stake, the best path forward is for Graham Platner to step aside as the Democratic nominee and address these serious allegations outside this Senate race.”

🧪 If science journalism is going to survive and thrive, it has to reorient itself and rethink the incentives that currently drive it. Reflecting here on some great @chriscmooney.bsky.social pieces about where we might be headed. nobreakthroughs.com/adrift-in-a-...

Quick thread about the idea that Americans are losing confidence in higher ed. People who promote this narrative usually cite Gallup polls (which began measuring the topic in 2015). The latest one I could find is from a year ago. It shows *rising* confidence! 1/5 news.gallup.com/poll/692519/...

People love age-verification because they think it just affects kids. But kids don't have IDs. And there are prohibitions on collecting their data. It's the adults, not the kids, who have to submit a face scan, upload a government ID or provide other personally identifying information.

Being not-technically dead and his staff not bothering to prove he's alive is the most Mitch McConnell way of dying ever.

New Platner video: "So regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward" x.com/grahamformai...

Expand the federal government. More House members, more Senators, more SCOTUS justices. Term limits on all. End House district apportionment and instead allocate seats to the top finishers. Hard caps on independent expenditures. Full donation transparency. No intermediaries allowed.

Objectively true. 95% of all profits made by venture capital firms are made by just 2% of the firms. 80% of all VC investments fail. Most VC successes are due to insider access, that is someone with a great idea has a connection. It's about access. An LLM could and would do better than most.

Scientists have correctly projected the global average temperature rise for decades. The last 15 years have brought an acceleration (still within the projection range). Here's how temperatures have stacked up against model runs published in 2007.

A great idea

Rahm Emmanuel, considered one of the most pro Israel members of the Obama admin and a 2028 presidential candidate, is going to deliver a speech on Wednesday where he will call for an end to all taxpayer funded aid to Israel and sanctions on people, banks and companies engaged in settlement activity.

1/ I looked at 20 years of Supreme Court decisions and found that for the first time, all nine justices decided more cases by secret ballot — aka the “shadow docket” — than it did for cases argued in open court last term. 🧵:

Beliefs in mind uploading and mechanical immortality are very common within the American tech bro scene. But these are absurd delusions that are not at all supported by biology. We just published a comprehensive rebuttal of this fantasy by biologist and philosopher Johannes Jaeger:

A broadside assault on truth that must be taken seriously. This administration wants to replace independent scholarship and curation with propaganda and Prager U. drivel. The Kennedy Center was bad enough. This is worse.

Trump is preparing to fire the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution, one of America's most prestigious scientific and historical research and education organizations. He wants in particular to censor the Smithonian's American History exhibits:

It’s a lot like the old guard’s freakout over the “Watergate babies” elected in 1974.

Based on the actuarial data, vaccines probably saved many traditionalist people who'd probably have died from disease. And now, their descendants are trying to ramp up the group's mortality rate again. The woke shall inherit the earth because the chuds died of preventable disease.

A major Christian denomination finally states it: White Christian nationalism is a "theological error" that is not based in actual Biblical texts. The Bible has nothing to do with American politics or racialist grievances. You love to see it:

One of the most common racist "evolutionary psychology" slanders is that Caucasians are "K strategists" that produce few offspring while investing in them more, and that Africans are "r strategists" who produce many children without spending much to help them. Well, well, well:

Discussing the death penalty with other people in my early teens was my first hint at something that would become very very obvious later: my instincts & values are not widely shared. Anyway, this is disgusting:

I personally find Brahms's sextets to be far superior to his symphonies. They have intricacy and intimacy that his larger works do not. Brahms in symphonic form isn't awful, but he is frequently lugubrious and clichéd. The string quartet/sextet also allows for far more experimentation.

If there's a god, this is when the simulation would collapse. Alas, it was an hour ago. Are you still here?

🧵It's important to have small enclaves like this where activism can grow & people who give a damn can network. But the vast majority of humans everywhere are more interested in passive consumption. They need visual media. Only political leaders can afford the scale necessary to reach them.

the unfortunate reality of presidential elections is that basically 60-70% of the elections is decided by the fundamentals (inflation/approval/growth) and the other 30% is the campaign. in the public eye this is somehow reversed

Looks like Mayor Z's pied a terre tax is not collapsing the real estate market or causing the wealthy to flee Manhattan after all. Indeed, the opposite. Who could have possibly imagined this scenario? www.realtor.com/news/trends/...

Democrats can't campaign and Republicans can't govern.

Very useful thread on the basics of an important topic.

Fox host Emily Compagno is terrified that Texans love James Talarico. On Friday, she called him a "demon in human skin" and "anti-Texas." Extremist rhetoric like this is designed to keep low-information Christian traditionalists in a 24/7 state of fear. They don't bother w/positive arguments.

OpenAI is in talks to give a 5% ownership stake to US government. That's way less than the 50% Bernie Sanders wants from the major labs. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...