JUST IN: Drew Ensign, on behalf of DOJ, reports that all of the migrant children have been returned to ORR custody.
Ex physics. Software. Life-long observer of the public morality. Devoté of Poe's Law. Potentially voluble. Boulder Colorado
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JUST IN: Drew Ensign, on behalf of DOJ, reports that all of the migrant children have been returned to ORR custody.
absolutely terrible news
MY GIFT TO YOU, WORKERS OF THE WORLD, ON THIS LABOR DAY IS MY HOTTEST AND FRESHEST @themountaingoats.bsky.social COMP: 10 YEARS IN THE BONE ZONE - THE BEST OF MATT DOUGLAS VOLUME 2 (a collaboration with @kyle2.bsky.social) archive.org/details/10-y... 1/6
Preceding 1894 when Grover Cleveland would establish the national Labor Day holiday as PR after the murderous repression of the Pullman strike (from which black workers were barred), states passed their own. The author of Ohio's 1890 bill was an African American legislator. case.edu/ech/articles...
Labor Day is an odd holiday to me as it is literally about white men doing labor and a holiday for them and only them. When Labor Day was started in the 1890s Labor Day excluded those suffering under the racial fascism of Jim Crow. Labor Day is a really interesting Americanism tinted by its history
If the Israeli government had taken the ex-mil. intel chief's advice to kill 50 Palestinians for every Israeli killed 10/7, they would have stopped just short of 60,000. Instead they continue slaughtering & starving Palestinians in Gaza while taking Palestinian lands in the rest of the country.
A retired Israeli general said 50 Palestinians should be killed for every Israeli killed on 7 October, and also: "It doesn't matter if they're children...I'm talking about a message for future generations. From time to time, they need a Nakba to feel the cost..." www.npr.org/2025/08/18/n...
For nearly two years, I have wondered why Israel has not been asked how many Palestinian deaths are a proportionate response to the 1195 Israeli civilians killed
![Genocide justification is the claim that a genocide is morally excusable/defensible, necessary, and/or sanctioned by law.[1] Genocide justification differs from genocide denial, which is an attempt to reject the occurrence of genocide. Perpetrators often claim that genocide victims presented a serious threat, justifying their actions by stating it was legitimate self-defense of a nation or state. According to modern international criminal law, there can be no excuse for genocide.[2][3] Genocide is often camouflaged as military activity against combatants, and the distinction between denial and justification is often blurred.[4]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:j76trmiofvaxxpvx2vnb2vwf/bafkreia4twc2qbwkmn3ozstknikbeo5xx56elnzdkycdjkzfkwehmvk4jq@jpeg "Click to view full size")
In senior year, I took a self-defense course offered by my school that taught us how to gauge out eyes and kick lying down, and every time we learned a new technique, we were reminded of “proportionate response” and how we needed to use just enough force to get away, otherwise it was just assault
Anyway, I’m glad to know the president is still technically alive so he can watch this tomorrow www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...
First time in years I’ve used the “For You” feed there. Has a Daily Wire/Babylon Bee vibe. Fine, Bluesky leans the other way. But pundits complain this place is too left, because they take that place as a sign of what’s “normal” No wonder they act like Trump’s more popular than polls show he is.
You'd think Schumer would feel some embarrassment at his prominence there, but apparently he feels proud.
Senate Democratic aides are already working with Politicos to prime for an unconditional surrender to Trump Republicans. It can’t get through their galaxy brain that shutting down this government means shutting down Trump’s authoritarian govt. Pathetic losers.
![Politico playbook screenshot “BACK TO SCHOOL: Congress returns tomorrow from August recess, and there are numerous storms brewing. Top of the list is the imminent threat of a government shutdown, with a funding cliff edge looming at the end of September. The GOP does not have a plan to avoid a shutdown on Oct. 1. Dem leaders in the House and Senate are demanding bipartisan talks ASAP. Not helping those talks: Trump’s ongoing rescissions efforts. Last week, he rescinded almost $5 billion of foreign aid spending that Congress had already approved. Brace for more battles over rescissions in the weeks ahead. Crucially, Dems are reluctant to cut any spending deal with a president who doesn’t stick to congressionally agreed spending levels anyway. All of which means … “Democrats — eager to show the base that they’re taking the fight to the president — will almost certainly take the bait, making the prospects of a shutdown extremely high this fall,” POLITICO’s Rachael Bade writes this morning. But aides fear this could prove a losing strategy, turning off voters and handing Trump even more power. “[Republicans] don’t even care about the government being open,” one says. “You’ll probably just have to eventually fold and get nothing out of it.””](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cf26plxwia7dxpm6plry3sj2/bafkreifc7ojgh224uv232lej3rnmjgi2lbg6i247mltj7fv5pakl6t7gni@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Starting with Eisenhower in 1958, May 1st was declared "Law Day". Reagan, a month after his Iran-Contra lawbreaking was exposed, signed a proclamation that May 1st be "Law Day USA". Now Trump made it "Loyalty & Law Day USA", in case the repressive tone was missed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Day...
Every Labor Day I remember that the holiday was moved from May 1 to September not only for the Haymarket attacks but to break up the possibility between the US and the international labor movement (which celebrates in May). And it worked!
Every proof-of-life photo the White House releases is so lifeless. They should pose him like Guy Blank in Strangers with Candy
guess the news media also pivoted from inspecting every Jeremy Corbyn tweet, vacation destination, and slogans uttered in his presence for potential or fictional racism to MUST BE MORE RACIST bsky.app/profile/adam...
The cancer of racism and so on
I guess the fish really does rot from the head
There’s a Nazi at my gym.
It is an amazing achievement of memory-holing to take the Republican-pushed-since-the-1970s policy priority of letting US companies outsource production anywhere in the world they want without regulation to it now being those other countries pushing us around.
Three demential chess I tell you
Really reprehensible rewriting of reality by democratic senator @schatz.bsky.social here
Well now you know how the NY Times would airbrush Dr Mengele
It's a great question. I'm not sure he's found the answer, because it feels like a tautology to me. But regardless, they do oppress anyone they can out of a fear of something. I always assumed it was that their opponents would do to them what they do to their opponents.
My dive into right wing piss pants baby culture Why are conservatives such cowards? www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...
Many of the academics who do reviewing for presses already have library access to the presses' e-books through institutional subscriptions. So my guess is that a lot, maybe most, of these coupons go unused, many more than for coupons usable for hard copy books. So this seems like bad faith BS...
They're all micced?
God help America if we ever have a major war again or a depression. Apparently, if everything doesn't go perfectly in a crisis half the country just completely falls apart. It really wasn't the end of the fucking world that things shut down for a while during COVID. The problem was all the dying!
just caught a few random minutes of Alien: Earth as my husband is watching it, and maybe this is an extreme opinion but whichever writer(s) misattributed Clarke’s third law to Asimov should be closed in a room with some xeno eggs
Is it really only “some” legal experts who say this? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/w...
During this summer’s deadly Texas floods, Kerr County officials failed to use a federal emergency alert system to get people out of harm’s way. A similar story has played out over and over in other parts of the country over the past decade. By @jenniferberryhawes.bsky.social
My question is WTF can’t I get a booster like I can get a flu shot? Last year Costco had a table setup by the entrance and I got my choice of shots and was done in a couple of minutes. WTAF?
The Food and Drug Administration approved the next round of COVID-19 vaccines, but they come with restrictions. NPR wants to know your questions about the new guidance.
One of the victories of the "AI" industry is that the use of the word "intelligence" for their product has led to people conflating a massive appropriation of intellectual property for an database sorted and outputted with algorithms, with what actually happens in human brain, one artwork at a time.
as a known purveyor of goofs, it is just hard to be as funny as you'd like to be when you're confronted with a global authoritarian power grab that's specifically targeting people just like you and your loved ones i do my best to be funny but i mean, i get bummed out sometimes
and while not everyone here is from the United States, a lot of people here ARE from the U.S., and of course the 2025 Bad Vibes are permeating a lot of other places globally, too
i just don't think it's at all mysterious why the website that's massively dominated by the exact kind of people that Trump 2.0 is actively persecuting might have more depressing vibes in 2025 than it did in 2024
It's his imagination and we're just lucky to be living in it.
'Our scientists intimidated these good villagers into picking up torches and pitchforks and accusing us of witchcraft! We've got to let the good townsfolk know we too are annoyed at those uppity science types with their big words, fancy lab coats, and "public health", and we too hate witchcraft!'
One way to measure the enormous increase in America's wealth over my lifetime is that both my parents knew how to darn socks, while I'm not sure exactly what that means
9 former directors of the CDC penned an op-ed stating that what Robert F. Kennedy has done to the nation's public health system is "unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced" www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
How would we know?
I've said this before and it bears repeating: One way we'll know if and when a real machine intelligence happens is that it will create art that is an artifact of its own intelligence, not ours, and it likely to be absolutely incomprehensible to us human on first approach. How cool with that be.
Trump/RFK are decapitating our public health system, a pillar of American greatness. So Dem Govs should scour every corner of the law for creative new ways to defend their people from this madness. Dems should polarize this debate to the max. Thoughts on this here: newrepublic.com/article/1998...
The most perverse outcome of this dynamic: The more extreme and deranged rightwing politics gets, the more elite Democrats/liberals react with ritual self-flagellation. “They are elevating RFK? Wow, we really must have angered those good folks with our crazy liberal/woke/leftist overreach!”
As a result of filtering everything that happens in American politics through the lens of “They represent authentic America, we are imposing liberals who need to plead with the Volk,” Democratic leaders constantly lend legitimacy to the Right’s claims and sabotage their own response.
This is exactly right! The Right’s core claim is that they represent an authentic, “real" America that is constantly being victimized, made to suffer under the yoke of leftist/liberal overreach, and therefore rightfully aggrieved. And too many Democrats/liberals look at that and go: “I agree.”
And Schatz is responding to a data hack who wrote a book in which he argued that the South didn't abandon Democrats because of race. That it was all just economics. Just like the Civil War, I guess!
That's a very good point. Applies to a lot of things. A spontaneous public reaction, with millions of individuals independently reacting in similar fashion, is quite different from an organized political movement with organizations and funding and media promotion and the rest.
And here's that "voice of the volk" posing with one of the most important organizers of the far right movement inside the GOP, Morton Blackwell, who's been at it since 1979. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_...
Here's that "voice of the volk" Wm. Ames Curwright, the organizer of the Gathering of the Eagles events, posing for a pic at CPAC 2014 with Joseph Farrah, the editor of WND. He's the person who in 2011 convinced an NYC billionaire to double down on birtherism as his ticket to political prominence.
Anyway...Dems need to break out of the impulse to see 200 white people protesting against Covid restrictions as "the voice of the people which we must heed" while seeing 10X as many people protesting racist police violence as "a niche special interest group that's out of step with real Americans."
One of the honored guests at last year's Gathering of the Eagles was the Gateway Pundit guy. The conservative activist who posted these pictures has described the Catholic church as an agent of Satan. She also has said LGBTQ are demonic, and she made posts celebrating the Proud Boys.
Ames died several years ago, but his "compound" in Turner, OR is still used as the site for this annual Gathering of the Eagles. Here's the lineup for this year. I know of at least one self-avowed neo-Nazi who used to attend these meetings where the Oath Keepers and the John Birchers recruit.
One person I spoke with at this 2009 Tea Party event in Salem was a rich industrialist (who claimed to be a descendant of arch-Federalist Fisher Ames) named William Ames Curtwright. He ran an annual event for right wingers in Oregon called the "Gathering of the Eagles." bsky.app/profile/seth...
The Tea Party was covered in the press like it was a spontaneous eruption of populist anger, but those protests drew far fewer people than the recent protests against Trump's administration. The "Tea Party" was just a well-funded organized, right wing movement promoted by friendly media outlets.
Historian Jefferson Cowie's book, Freedom's Dominion, is an extended meditation on the deeply rooted American anti-democratic tradition he's called "racialized anti-statism." White people have long decried "federal tyranny" while promoting racist systems of state power. bsky.app/profile/seth...
This is "the one big trick" that the right has mastered. They present their movement as just "the authentic voice of the volk outraged by Democratic overreach," when really what they're doing is just old fashioned political mobilization. Organize a passle of pissed off people & call it a movement.
They do their organizing right out in the open, so I don't know how no one in power notices this.
What these Schatz posts say to me is that Dem elected officials like him seem incapable of perceiving the right as a *political movement.* The response to Covid mitigation and the Floyd protests was not a spontaneous reaction...it was a right wing backlash organized by a reactionary movement.
The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good
It's amazing how much continuity there is in American culture, it's like we're reliving the late 1800s. Tariffs, a gilded age, gutter racism, enthusiastic massacres of the natives. Even politicians with beards. It's all happening again.
bsky.app/profile/derr...
With the current Gilded Age rerun, we're well positioned for the follow-on return of the Progressive Age, but I guess we're going to have to overthrow some fascists to get there.
Someone please kill me right now.
"At The Level, we offer two sides to any news story or discussion." For the people who subscribe to my BlueSky account — and for many others paying attention — the problems here will seem all too obvious. www.readthelevel.ca/page/mission
Somebody is throwing things out of a window of the White House wtaf
They don't believe in the germ theory of disease. They believe ancient notions disproven in the late 19th century, but then again, Republicans in 2024 *literally* vowed to 'repeal the 20th century' and yes they meant the whole century, including *all* of medical science. medium.com/blog/the-his...
There's a reason they're eagerly trying to bring Measles back, and it is not difficult to figure out what the reason is!
Republicans were coming out publicly by late March 2020 declaring it would be a good thing to let COVID-19 kill off the elderly. At the time, leading Democrats disagreed, arguing we should not try to kill the elderly with disease. www.thebulwark.com/p/the-let-th...
I honestly don’t know how to begin engaging with this. But I do know our polite center friends are delusional to think this is some kind of divide that they can bridge with dialogue. These two “sides“ are not even on the same planet.
GOP states had more Covid deaths and *they think that’s good*.
Exactly, the entire argument for this narrative is that kids rarely die of COVID. That’s true, but it wasn’t the justification for the policy. Teachers *do* die of COVID and kids *do* spread COVID. Some studies find school closures were the most effective intervention for preventing cases!
The right is pushing this narrative because it’s the only place they can blame liberals — their actual goal — and gain purchase among elites. The *actual* mistakes during the pandemic all originate on the right: lax lockdowns, weak mitigations and low vaccine uptake
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
What infuriates me about Schatz is most public health people were saying that schools should be the last things to be closed, and bars should be the first, but local & state governments, in most places, decided to do the exact opposite, yet somehow Big Public Health gets blamed for those policies.
Just will leave this here (the revisionism by @schatz.bsky.social is so awful):
I've never seen such a disconnect between Dem elected/staff/consultants and actual Dem voters. The latter understand what's going on. The former are awash in right-wing brainrot, hence @schatz.bsky.social blaming COVID mitigation and BLM marches for the GOP's wanton destruction of public health.
![@EsotericCD It was in this moment that many of us hanging on to a thin sliver of trust in our institutions irrevocably lost faith in them. One of the most poisonous blows to public trust in living memory - worse than the effect of the Iraq War in many ways. RFK Jr is a direct result of this. Quote Steve Guest @SteveGuest · Aug 31 Politico 5 years ago: [screenshot of article falsely claiming public health officials lied about COVID measures then abandoned them for BLM protests] Views](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ddvus7otnqtlh7fdooxm6qat/bafkreihsypwydo5rcis7mc54cwct6h33l5co477nvh7g7hs7na2fz4jl3q@jpeg "Click to view full size")
This is of course true, but “preventable deaths” is not a persuasive frame when the right and most of the Polite Center have embraced a gilded age theory of public health where diseases sweeping through the population and killing off “the weak” is a good thing we meddle with to our detriment.
“If we could make up our minds faster we’d still be Catholics” - protestants
One of my minor conspiracy theories is that Labour are delaying the choice of a new Archbishop of Canterbury because all the likely options would speak out against the government’s racism.
Sure, we’re all speculating, but I don’t think it’s helping that the videos they’re releasing to prove how totally fine Trump is look like Emil in RoboCop right before he gets hit by the van and explodes.
That's like a planet visible outside the solar system headed straight for us.
You guys see where this is going? Right?
Candy Corn tastes like that first month of freshman year at a liberal arts college when you have to decide which coop to join but you really hate whole wheat pizza
Candy corn tastes like melancholy and whites only drinking fountains
You can't scare me, I'm stickin' to the union till the day I die.
It’s crazy that there was a time tobacco companies were trying to get kids to smoke more by offering fake money and leather jackets. And it worked.
Smell the glove!
Rhode Island passed a law banning mandatory anti-union employee meetings. Union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson held a webinar for employers about the law. And they essentially told employers... to break the law! We got the transcript and the PowerPoint: prospect.org/justice/2025...
Hey @mollyjongfast.bsky.social thank you for pushing back on misogynistic bullshit other guests on MSNBC The Weekend were spewing about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein being somehow UNFIT to testify in court because they were PAID for SEX. They were all WRONG, and you were the only one to call it out
Big popular accounts add alt text to you screenshots challenge (impossible).
A 76% point gap between how satisfied Republicans are with the country versus how satisfied Democrats are. The largest partisan gap ever. news.gallup.com/poll/694370/...
Was sharing this fact today.
It’s a little weird to demand people vote for a candidate as a necessary lesser evil three years before you even know if they’re going to be the candidate
🤞
You may want to disclose that this was written not by a user of Substack, but by the CEO of Beehiiv, a Substack competitor. It is also highly misleading. Substack is pushing people to subscribe directly to publications and NOT through the Apple.