“Your mountainish inhumanity” We’re doing this to ourselves

Not mentioned in this @bloomberg.com piece on Taiwan green energy: Significant misinformation in Taiwan populace and media regarding solar and wind energy "harms" (plus real or rumored corruption cases), resulting in public resistance and hurdles to growth. 🧪

"All Mideast correspondents and editors laid off... Lizzie Johnson, who wrote last week about covering a war zone in Ukraine without power, heat or running water, said she had been laid off, too." apnews.com/article/wash...

The rise of ‘low contact’ family relationships: ‘I said, Mum, I need to take some space’

Check out the latest New Bloom Substack! Featuring our round-up of recent and upcoming events and the latest articles

"The French government... announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service." apnews.com/article/euro...

"The mill had specialized in making paper for microwave popcorn bags — a product that was greaseproof thanks in part to PFAS. The mill’s manufacturing process also produced a waste sludge which could be used as a fertilizer..." apnews.com/article/pfas... 🧪

Monthly reminder: Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.

Reading all this discourse about complicity in the Epstein case & I keep thinking of a convo I had with a Crown attorney once. She prosecuted animal cruelty & said "We can't ever find lawyers willing to defend animal abusers. Rapists? Child molesters? Wife beaters? Sure. But animal abusers? Never."

Announcing 女ㄕㄣ feminization A hybrid theatrical performance combining movement, clowning, and rope bondage, exploring the lived experiences and confusions surrounding the female body, gender, and queer life journeys. www.facebook.com/share/1D4xnL...

Tomorrow! Join us for the first session of our Taiwan History 101 reading group! www.facebook.com/events/16106...

"After weeks immersed in water policy, hydrology, news archives, Reddit quips, and one unsettling rooftop tank incident, I have reached a conclusion..." Great little read on Taiwan's tap water quality from AmCham's Julia Bergström: topics.amcham.com.tw/2026/01/tap-... 🧪🧋

Join us for #CNNTaipei this Wednesday night!! #TaiwanCreatives🧋

I can officially confirm that the snow in NC is roughly one (1) corgi deep

Lots of cherry blossom to be seen if you go late Februaryish.

i think the fairest solution for everyone named in the Epstein files is to just send them all back to the island and never let them leave. and then we send in the wild dogs,

Former Texas Lege reporter here. A Dem hasn't held this seat since 1990. Tarrant is the safest of red suburban counties. There is no way the TX and national GOP aren't in panic mode right now.

A: The focal species of #SundayFishSketch creator @lampichthys.bsky.social 's latest journal article. Q: What is a tubeshoulder? So fun learning about another deep-sea weirdo! Here is Platytroctes apus, with its stumpy fins and ability to shoot glowy stuff from shoulder and tail! 🦑🐡🧪

But don’t worry, we hired a bunch of thugs with no background checks to tear gas our schools and murder citizens. I hate it here

Hantavirus death in Daan District of Taipei City. Antibodies detected in rats around residence of man in his 70s who died 8 days after onset of symptoms: news.ttv.com.tw/news/1150131... 🧪 #Taiwan

So that's the stuff I've found so far on how Nathan may or may not have tried (successfully or not, I do not know) to get Jeffrey - who is, I must remind everyone, thanked in Nathan's book The Viral Storm - to fund his research by exploring mind controlling women using chemicals produced by STDs

"That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024..." www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪

Join us next week for the return of our Intro to Taiwan reading group! Our reading material will be Chou Wan-yao's A New Illustrated History of Taiwan www.facebook.com/events/16106...

Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe has officially declared January 29, 2026 as ‘Shane Hollander Day’ in the city!

This is genuinely very funny and sweet and the staffer who wrote it should get promoted

Justin Baragona‬ added these details to his report on CBS buyouts. It's likely we will have a clearer picture on Thursday.

CBS News invites everyone who works for them to quit.

So much yuck in this story... file this one under "the costs of A.I." 🤮🤮🤮

Made Taiwanese-style marble tea eggs #茶葉蛋 #何以解憂

Nvidia's Jensen Huang, the 8th wealthiest individual in the world, warns that "anybody who thinks China can't manufacture is missing a big idea." He predicts #China would ultimately win the #AI race, saying that "China is nanoseconds behind America in AI." wordsfromtaiwan.medium.com/jensanity-wh...

Next week we'll be at the Taipei International Book Exhibition where we'll be promoting Tâigael: Stories from Taiwanese & Gaelic and our forthcoming title Mother Tongue by Hilda Hoy (amongst a myriad of other brilliant reads!). #booksky 📚💙 #indiepress #Taiwan #translation

Taiwan shows off F-16 jets rapid response amid tensions with China reut.rs/4t5QPja

Maybe the best skit to come out of the Alex Honnold Taipei 101 ascent: www.instagram.com/reel/DT-J7ca... #Taiwan #AsianParents #IntergenerationalTrauma 🤣💀🧋

Something important to understand about ICE thugs in the Twin Cities is that they're harassing innocent kids and parents at bus stops and schools every single day. Even after the Pretti shooting. It's terrorism.

After being held in two of them as a boy, I fought for decades urging America to never again build concentration camps and put human beings in them. It breaks my heart to watch this happen twice now in my own lifetime.

"A unit of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents will have a security role in the Winter Olympic Games in Italy, sparking uproar and petitions against the deployment." via @theguardian.com: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

"Large new buildings with a floor area of more than 1,000 square meters will be required to install rooftop solar panels starting Aug. 1 as part of efforts to reduce carbon emissions and pollution." Via Focus Taiwan / CNA / 中央通訊社: focustaiwan.tw/sci-tech/202... 🧪🧋

Last post before I sleep: roughly 2% of residents in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Alex Pretti's hometown, showed up to a massive anti-ICE protest in his memory. The second top-most comment in the trending Reddit post was "Europeans keep saying Americans are not doing anything. The news is not covering it"

This state violence was facilitated by rhetoric that dehumanized the (mostly) white middle class protesters at Kent State. The day before students were killed, their Governor described them as "worse than the Brownshirts, and the Communist element, and also the Night Riders, and the vigilantes."

Kent State's student body was fairly conservative, but the presence of troops on campus had radicalized many of them. This is how Ohio's governor described these young people: "We’re up against the strongest, well-trained, militant revolutionary group that has ever been assembled in America."

Following the Kent State massacre in May 1970, a Gallup poll showed that 58% of Americans thought the shootings were justified. The night *before* the killings, Ohio's GOP governor described the student protesters this way: "They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America."

DHS has shot 12 people during immigration enforcement operations since September:

As someone who’s spent nearly 2 decades in the content mines: they’re doing these stories critical of the regime because people are clicking on them

I think it’s absolutely crucial we have something similar when this is over

Reminds me of the stumbling stones

#SundayFishSketch Bonus: Another full page in the sketchbook! And yeah, we need more art and light to shine through in this world. Keep posting the truth and beauty, friends. #NoIce #NoFacism #NoKings #WhirledPeas 🦑🐡🧪

Another belated (for my time zone) #SundayFishSketch. Here is シロギス Sillago japonica, whose slang in Taiwanese Hokkien 台語 Tâi-gí is 沙腸仔 or "sand intestines" for its slender shape and sandy substrate preferences. Tried it for the first time as sashimi recently, lovely! #TaiwanFishes #台灣魚類 🦑🐡🧪

Shoutout for Taiwanese director 鄒時擎 Tsou Shih-Ching's "Left-Handed Girl" from Natalie Portman: variety.com/2026/film/ne... #左撇子女孩 #TaiwanCinema

I hope everyone understands the strength it took for people to be out in -20F weather today. And how many showed up. This community has come together in so many ways.

The nursing subreddit, which has half a million weekly visitors, just approved changing their icon to a professional photo of Alex Pretti.