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I'm a biologist, mad as in angry. Pro-D.C. statehood since 1969. DCist @mikethemadbiologist@mastodon.online www.mikethemadbiologist.com š§Ŗ
4,969 followers 3,783 following 19,833 posts
view profile on Bluesky
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Getting rid of Republican and full-throttle D.C. Hater Andy Harris is a mitzvah.
the thing about Zohran is he is really fucking good at politics and everyone on the Dem side behaving like heās a liability has lost their minds I donāt care how you define It, he has It
This after the alert that Trump plans to make an announcement at 2 p.m. tomorrow
We have to keep the pressure up. Kennedy must resign.
False. Early post-dose adverse events are not wholesale reassigned to the unvaccinated group; they are tracked explicitly (often as partially vaccinated or by days since dose). This man is either dumb or lying. You tell me.
It is absolutely criminal that as the GOP crows about urban crime, every Dem isnāt on TV saying, āLook, Larry Hogan is a so-called āmoderateā Republican and crime in his stateās largest city has plummeted since he was replaced by a Democrat.ā
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What was antibiotic resistance like before we ever used antibiotics? How did we change what antibiotic resistance genes looked like over 100 years? Our paper looking at resistance genes from a century of NCTC historical isolates now out in mGen: www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour...
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Here's the response from Paul Bryant, the Black veteran and lawyer whom the govt arrested in part bc he had a legal weapon in DC, to USG attempt to get him detained. It leans heavily into the lack of Body Cam proving he shoulder checked some Guardsmen. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
This is what patriotism and true egoless leadership looks like. Thanks for your service, Rep. Nadler. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/n...
The sole mention of RFK Jr's opposition to vaccines is a throwaway aside in the 12th graf of the story, amidst some credulous useful idiocy from Zeke Emanuel. Nothing about his destruction of medical research in America. It treats him like he and Obama are pursuing the same goal slightly differently
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If there was ever a perfect moment to be outside in DC itās right fucking now. Temperature. Sunset. 10/10.
Vaxxed?
Spotted a #FreeDC sign in a yard in the Peopleās Republic of Takoma Park, MD. Good neighbors & allies!
I almost feel bad for them at this point. These are so clearly not the people they should be and Iām guessing a bunch of them know it but canāt bring themselves to openly admit they need help. Very upsetting.
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I'm sure this won't have any effect on the economy. Howard Lutnick says all the fired government experts can take those jobs.
š§Ŗ And House appropriators say: no cuts to NIH budget! House subcommittee version just came out (link below). Holds NIH flat at $48 billion. To be clear: this is far from over. But a good sign that science still matters across both sides of aisle. YOUR VOICE MATTERS!!
Every weekend is āis he still aliveā time
I love Blue Sky. Itās maddening that a bunch of pundits made trashing it a mark of seriousness.
Chicago, on the eve of occupation. @indivisiblechicago.bsky.social
no reason to not get next weekend's party started now tho
I'm 65+, and I've seen the published crime stats, so I know violent crime has decreased a lot. More importantly, cities *feel* safer to me now than I recall from the 1990s, when I feared traveling through certain parts of inner cities.
Crime is literally lower than it has been in the entire life of every single non-senior-citizen American. If you are under age 65 you have never lived at a time with lower property crime rates, lower violent crime rates or lower homicide rates. Never.
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And if he were willing to block/mute people, he could avoid so much grief.
We have *now* hit the point of government overreach. Snark aside, I'm curious to see how people in those cities react.
lol the photographer who unfortunately had to prove to the world that Trump isnāt dead is here and people are asking him about it
Thereās another gathering planned for Union station tomorrow at 10am
And it's so widespread, even if we grade very leniently, 5 out 8 Democrats get the wrong answer.
Links 9/1/25 Links for you. Science: STEPS To It The common cold is associated with protection from SARS-CoV-2 Infections Kennedy's case against mRNA vaccines collapses under his own evidence āA whole body of health-equity research is being disappearedā ā why I resigned from the NIH Why theseā¦
Is everything he says a lie? Trump says DC is now ācrime free.ā It had 400 reported incidents in the last week "50 reports of violent crime: one homicide, 23 instances of assault with a dangerous weapon, 24 robberies, and two cases of sex abuse." www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...
This is the wildest mix of anarchists and Facebook baby boomers I have ever seen lol
The average George Floyd protest had a better masking policy than many public schools and if the lesson you took from that is government overreach, please seek help
it's really funny how these guys refuse to use blocks or mutes to make a better experience for themselves.
For a lot of the right and right-leaning centrists, actual leftists and progressives are not annoying enough, so they rant about the versions they made at home from scratch, then blame real people for imagined sins and postures. p.s. Silver doesn't actually want the left to win, does he?
It has been brought to my attention (thanks @eileen4ever.bsky.social!) that it is the one-year anniversary of this post going super viral (by my account's September 2024 standards). Life was simpler then, so as a treat, please enjoy the video footage (sound on):
This is a country living in terror of a non-existent crime wave, getting rid of vaccines which saved millions of lives, and indulging in economic policies which we saw fail 100 years ago. It's a deeply disordered place.
The thing that often blows by is not only is crime the lowest its been for any non-senior citizen's life, it has been roughly that safe for *fifteen years*. We have had fifteen years of steady, low crime while the irrational freakout over crime has relentlessly grown to a fevered, disordered pitch.
[CUE MUSIC: āIN THE ARMS OF AN ANGELā PLAYING SOFTLY] [FADE IN BACKGROUND SOUND: A solemn voice reads names] Nate Silver. Matthew Yglesias. Megan McArdle. Mark Cuban. [FADE IN: SALLY STRUTHERS sits on a stool in a pool of light on a minimalist set. She looks SAD.] /1
Reagan had polyps removed & the entire nation got detailed explainers & knew when he went under/came to In 2025, media owners/execs think covering Trumpās health crisis would be bad for them politically & are shielding him **Every US reporter** is sticking with their owners over doing journalism
This isn't about Bluesky itself; it's a test balloon. Silver is testing here whether he can give the Right a new word for wOkE since they ran it into the ground so hard people are using it for franchise rebrands they don't like. Blueskyism is taking the place of anti-racism & anti-bigot for REASONS.
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Literally protests. It's just protests.
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I love the smell of consequences in the morning. Thank you, @dragoncon.org
I will note that in every single cycle of ppl bitching about the (relatively short, not at all uniform, & scattershot) school closures, not once has "well how did teachers feel about closures" bc asking that would a) blow up quite a few narratives & b) treat teachers as if they mattered in this
Every few months the "good lab hands" thing comes up and it misses a key point: you can learn to have good hands. Training matters. Good hands aren't some magic gift from the PCR gods, you have to develop them through directed repetitive practice, like any other skill
One thing I often come back to on COVID 'closures' is that government action was usually **reactive** to the public. Not institutions curtailing freedom of movement -- but a tourniquet on economic demand collapse. Even when lockdowns didn't happen , the public changed behavior in line with a mean.
If a few health professionals say something you don't like, all said it and we should destroy the CDC. If a few students say something you don't like, all higher ed said it and we should end academic freedom. If the president and his party does something, that's one guy spouting off, let it go.
Ther ys power yn a union
Happening Now ā Washington DC: Pretty massive rally is forming at 14th and U NW.
Monday means ICE detaining people on H and Benning---currently headed east but they usually set up a checkpoint in the afternoon/evening, please avoid the area
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filling an IV bag from a murky puddle near Trump National's sixth tee. "The president needs parameciums," he tells the assembled media. "It's the only treatment proven to work in real testing." His golf cart is piled high with dozens of dead birds.
99% of all issues on here are solved by 1) follow at least 500-600 people 2) block annoying people Once you do it itās a wonderful experience
in the U.S., multiple public health people wrote op-ed after op-ed in major newspapers making this argument. They also made the same argument on social media, tv interviews etc. We 'needed' to close the schools because local and state governments wouldn't close other facilities.
I hope that folks whoāve been vocal about NIH grant cuts are just as adamant with their congresspeople about protecting basic public health infrastructure. Public health is how we identify needs for new mechanistic understandings & therapies, & use the tools we have as effectively as possible.
Honestly, the hour-long run and march of people shouting āFree DCā up 14th Street today is the energy I needed this morning. I love you, DC.
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.
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.
Yes, it was carefully hidden in the New England Journal of Medicine. Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... ) 1/2
There is a clear elite effort to completely misrepresent what happened during the Covid lockdown phase and have that retroactively become the narrative about what happened.
"Birth control makes women crazy" has been one of the main talking points in the manosphere and the tradwife movement for years now.
This morning (9/1) at 8 AM feds pulled over a couple at 18th & Park NW. They smashed the window, dragged the husband out & arrested him. When a community member stopped to record they were grabbed & threatened w/ pepper spray by this piece of shit. @mayorbowser.bsky.social do you welcome this too?
1/ Honestly this is as good an illustration about how staying primarily on X warps people. @schatz.bsky.social is among our most social media literate Senators. And I have no doubt some of his constituents voice this to him (tho' Hawaii bars...notoriously open air!). But...
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 Ā· 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")
Just will leave this here (the revisionism by @schatz.bsky.social is so awful):
Good to see a bipartisan group of former CDC Directors raise alarms in the NY Times about RFK Jr. dismantling US public health. And I canāt help but feel frustrated that they didnāt do this last year when public health was on the ballotānor did NYT frame it that wayāwhen we had a chance to stop it.
I would have liked Bluesky to keep growing after the mass post-election surge, but I get why the numbers have settled in. Given that it isn't growing, it's remarkable that it is the number one source of traffic for many, if not most, publications, especially smaller ones.
![James Ball @jamesrball.com In January this year, Bluesky had about 1.6m accounts liking a post each day, and about 800,000 actually posting. That peaked at 2.2m and 1.1m respectively later that month. Today, itās 1.2m likers and 600,000 posters. Thatās a steady loss of 25% (or nearly 50% from peak) in seven months. [Graphs below] Left graph titled Daily Likers (blue bars labeled āUnique Likersā). Right graph titled Daily Posters (red bars labeled āUnique Postersā).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yobyqjt4hs5icoihvaombhhn/bafkreiatu6r5kfrtinewumzetkuicupy5askf2iqwpphvsaptsiff2sjum@jpeg "Click to view full size")
In that sense, he's much more like creationists, who realized they really couldn't win on the science, and so decided to 'lawyer up' (e.g., treating creationism as a defendant, who guilt/wrongness must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt).
Leaving aside the typical histrionics, this seems to be Trump beginning to distance himself from Kennedy (whoās āripping apartā CDC), and inviting mainstream physicians and scientists to defend the vaccines, so Trump can then say, I got them to explain it better and vaccines are OK.
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.
You cannot tell me that being on X is not bad for you when it turns Senators who had the clearest view on the 2024 election to COVID school closer guys. And again imagine people in 1948 saying that Britons spent too much time in bomb shelters during the Blitz.
Sen. Schatz, @schatz.bsky.social, the man who bravely ran away the moment things got a bit uncomfy for him, of course is soaking up the Covid revisionism.
One More Reason HHS Secretary Kennedy Should Be Removed from Office: Listeria As if the body count and illness from Kennedy's anti-vaccine policies, he's also undermining food safety (boldface mine): As of July 1, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) program has reducedā¦
the one CDC director who isn't on this is Trump's previous CDC director, Redfield, who was awful.
9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nationās public health system "should alarm every American." It "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...
Okay. I just came back to this and you arenāt calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
One More Reason HHS Secretary Kennedy Should Be Removed from Office: Listeria As if the body count and illness from Kennedy's anti-vaccine policies, he's also undermining food safety (boldface mine): As of July 1, the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) program has reducedā¦
In Case You Missed Itā¦ ...a week of Mad Biologist posts: Trump and Republicans Declare the Republican War on Christmas We Need to Start Making Shutdown Demands We Canāt Understand Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Without Tucker Carlson and Fox News Pritkzer Understands the Moment Some Good News
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The MPD car was in front, with 4 or 5 unmarked cars behind. The FBI agents were the only ones up at the car and talking to the driver, and then when they were done the MPD officer went and gave a ticket at their direction. Like the local police are just the fedsā lackeys.
This is what a regular traffic stop looks like in DC now.
Just a normal night in DC, sitting on the couch watching Netflix and then having to go outside because 11 cops (FBI, HSI, āpoliceā and MPD) stopped a car on my corner.
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As a friend recently put it: the venn diagram of people who assured us the gun violence was worth it because we need the guns to protect ourselves against a tyrannical federal government and the people cheering on Trump as he deploys the military to take over American cities is a circle
And what are some synonyms for "apologists who believe that the wrong side won the Civil War"?
Things I loved about todayās Washington Spirit game: Pride pennant, fireworks, Bang Garcon, Drag Queens š, Free DC chant, Abolish ICE banner, running into friends, talented players, and a great game. Things I did not like: dozens of National Guard with giant guns standing around outside.
As health departments or legislatures make these sorts of moves in the coming months, they should name them things like the āStop Bobby Measles Actā or āProtecting Americaās Children from RFK Jr.ā I am not really joking, they need to pin this stuff on him by name and in no uncertain terms.
that smile when she realized she was gonna get away with it
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