Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
Prof & Lab Head in NYC. 100% research: cell division, genome integrity, cancer. Curious to a fault. Also πολύτροπος. Talking here for me alone. I listen to the finest worksong. Like/repost = bookmark/news, not agreement/endorsement.
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Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
Many argued we (ie, the science-informed) were overreacting about RFK Jr, Bhattacharya, Makary, Oz, Prasad, et al. Well, as predicted, it is a f*cking horror show. Dark Age 2.0
It was only a matter of time before we'd see both stories like this and passages like footnote 9 in Judge Burroughs' ruling yesterday in the Harvard case. It's one thing to be bound by #SCOTUS; it's another thing to respect what the justices are doing. The decline of the latter is a five-alarm fire.
Statement tonight from Alan Garber, 31st president of Harvard. Good for him. Good for Harvard. Good for standing up to defend "core values of American higher education." And (again) what about all those "Harvard about to cave" stories? Main point: Worth reading what Garber says.
So, how things are going in actual #patientcare at #hospital - our #hospitalist teams have just reached all time record census...and it isn't even peak #viral #respiratory season yet 1) Please get #vaccinated (for both Flu and COVID and anything else you are due for) 2) RFK Jr is gonna kill us
🚨EXCLUSIVE: Federal judges tell NBC News the Supreme Court has got to do a better job of explaining emergency rulings, with frequent decisions in favor of Trump at least appearing to validate harsh criticism of the judiciary at a time of rising threats: www.nbcnews.com/politics/sup...
“The public don’t trust vaccines”, say the people who’ve spent years trying to undermine public trust in vaccines.
BREAKING: In the foreign aid funding case, Judge Amir Ali finds that Trump’s “pocket rescission” does not change the executive branch’s obligation to spend appropriated funds unless Congress acts on his rescission request. Along with other findings, Ali then grants a new preliminary injunction.
it is genuinely wild that Trump’s top domestic policy guy is basically a monarchist who has all but written that he thinks Trump should rule as a dictator
I have an autoimmune condition that just decades ago was a death sentence. Now I just need a drug infusion every once in a while and I'm good to go! Thanks science! #sciencesavedme
“In July, Donald Trump submitted a request to rescind $9bn in funding that Congress had already set aside for foreign aid and broadcasting programs. “The request included a $400m cut to Pepfar [AIDS relief] – but while lawmakers agreed to other cuts, they protected Pepfar” Now those $ are withheld
Opposition to RFKJr is ramping up. Joint statement from Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and 21 other organizations 👇
About this Florida vaccine story: When they were little - 1 yr and 3 1/2 - my two older boys, who’d had all their shots, got whooping cough. We asked their pediatrician what would’ve happened if they hadn’t been vaccinated. “Oh, they’d have died.”
Which, of course, is why he’s test-running military deployments in American cities. Eventually everybody realizes the rules no longer mean anything, and it comes down to main force.
The Trumpist majority on SCOTUS, like Trump himself, is spending down a trust fund they did not create, apparently believing it refills automatically. But it doesn’t. The whole system depends on other key institutions treating their rulings as legitimate.
The American Medical Association @ama-assn.org strongly opposes Florida’s plan to end all vaccine mandates, including those required for school attendance.
1/ I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for lethal strike of suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be "murder" or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable. Read expert analysis by @bcfinucane.bsky.social⤵️
How far down the rabbit hole do you have to be to declare Jonas Salk an enslaver for inventing the polio vaccine?
Today’s news confirms it: Cuomo is Trump’s choice for Mayor. The White House is considering jobs for Adams and Sliwa to clear the field. New Yorkers are sick of corrupt politics and backroom deals. No matter who’s running, we will deliver a better future on November 4.
Love these lines in ruling by federal Judge Burroughs, waving away pretext of fighting antisemitism as reason to cut funding to Harvard. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... H/t @klasfeldreports.com Reminder: Nonstop NYT unsourced stories that Harvard was about to cave.
Amazing, unusually direct rebuke to Gorsuch and Kavanaugh from Judge Burroughs. She is, of course, entirely correct.
Florida Moves to End Vaccine Mandates for Schoolchildren. Gift link: nyti.ms/465eaab
From the district court ruling against the administration on Harvard grants (left): “This [what the district court is doing] is not Calvinball.” Justice Jackson’s dissent in the NIH case (right): “This [what SCOTUS is doing] is Calvinball … with a twist.”
AAUP-HARVARD, AAUP, & UAW WON THE HARVARD CASE!!!! storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Awesome, congratulations!!
"There are four doctors in the Senate: Cassidy, John Barrasso of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas Rand Paul of Kentucky. All are Republicans and all voted in February to confirm Kennedy." www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...
New, from me: The EPA is breaking. *About 1 in 4 employees out *Core research unit closed down *Employees suspended and fired for writing letter for dissent *Trump judicial appointees OK'd cancelling of $20 billion climate change program donmoynihan.substack.com/p/your-gover...
More than 1,000 HHS staff call on RFK Jr. to resign thehill.com/policy/healt...
what’s confusing is that Trump, Miller, Rubio, Noem, and Bondi are doing everything possible to stop asylum seekers from coming to or staying in the US, including shipping them to CECOT or other torture dungeons what’s the difference between then and now?
"All Americans have equal rights" is a concept so foreign to today's Republican Party that they think a Democrat saying as much is a major gaffe.
Sending soldiers into cities under the guise of fighting crime is an unprecedented abuse of power. And it’s illegal. bit.ly/4m6TG77
NEW: DC grand jurors reject more Justice Dept cases Former DOJ attorney: “Not only have I never heard of this happening, I've never heard of a prosecutor who's heard of this happening” www.cbsnews.com/news/d-c-gra...
1/ New preprint alert! In collaboration between the Rosen, Redding, Collepardo-Guevara & Gerlich labs, we uncover a surprising principle of chromosome organisation: electrostatic repulsion positions centromeres at the chromosome surface during mitosis. 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Enduring questions of faith and spirituality, then (1965) and now “Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to? Sinnerman where you gonna run to? Where you gonna run to? All on that day” youtu.be/Kl849RJ2bbU
Folks love to say Congress has been broken for a long time, and they're not wrong, but this is still a total collapse in the institution compared with trump I or any other period in US history
I hope you get the opportunity to keep fighting 🙏🏽
The Trump war on science is in a new, evermore dangerous phase. The pretense of rationality or even conspiratorial reason is gone. RFK Jr's mediaeval rejection of objective science makes him the most influential medical charlatan in U.S. history.
“When a leader has no substantive policies to heal a nation’s wounds, he opens new ones with the sword of state violence.”
This cartoon from the Sunday Times has stopped me in my tracks. #VaccinesSaveLives #GunControlNow
Because you never know where their story leads. Maybe their children will save your life, or your parents’, or your children’s. Or maybe they’ll simply live quietly. In peace. And that alone should be enough.
So don’t hate the powerless for simply existing here. Hate the world that creates their desperation in the first place.
Here I am, a consultant in emergency medicine and father of 4 working in the UK. My journey to this point didn’t start here. A thread 🧵
read the whole thread, but my reaction goes to the essence of pluralism: dayenu -- "that should be enough" the Exodus story is universal, not sectarian
this is why we can't have nice things, including evidence-based policy the powers-that-be are either too dumb to understand or clever enough to play the fool
Private tour of the Louvre is a special treat. They were vacuuming the Sphinx. You may not have seen a Sphinx being brushed, so I am sharing.
📢 Happy to announce that Ensembl 115 and Ensembl Genomes 62 are out! This release features ~120000 new protein coding transcripts in human GRCh38, 2 new cattle, 7 new plants and 20 new metazoa! 🧬🐮 🫛🪲 Read more here ➡️ zurl.co/poyXM
the backdrop of a stadium with empty seats says it all: "is this worth watching?" local fans have already voted with their feet and wallets
More than 85 American and international scientists have denounced a Trump administration report that calls the threat of climate change overblown, saying the analysis is riddled with errors, misrepresentations and cherry-picked data to fit the president’s political agenda. Gift link: nyti.ms/3HNAwoB
Yesterday the president demanded that evidence about Covid vaccines be shown to the public. Today @apoorvanyt.bsky.social & I run through some of the studies made public over the past 4+ years that show that the vaccines work. Gift link: nyti.ms/46k17Tq
Without evidence, Mr. Kennedy has called COVID vaccines "the deadliest" shots ever & has curtailed access. He still accuses CDC staff of corruption & bias, despite a recent terrorist attack on-campus. Per one expert, "what’s ripping CDC apart is attacks from within this administration on CDC."
hopefully the teacher/professor made up for it by explaining cooperativity and Hill coefficients? MM is a great intro but one of the most amazing thing about biology is that it turns analog chemical information into almost binary outcomes
excellent reporting and headline by @nytimes.com to paraphrase the legal maxim, ignorance of science is no excuse
I know you do! I'm just chattering about the "eureka" moment when I realized watching cells under the microscope was not just possible but also incredibly fascinating and rewarding on aesthetic and quasi-spiritual levels. Things move. They change from one thing to another. We can see it!
Kinetics is ultimately about understanding time-dependent changes, which is rampant in biology (and other domains) one of my older talk titles is "surfing the cell cycle with chemical genetics" most of biology is far from steady state!
during my postdoc I started to use timelapse microscopy to study cell division that experience awakened me to kinetics at a single-cell level in talks I describe how hard it would be to explain a football game from snapshots that insight affected my science including use of chemical genetics
We haven't seen this kind of hijacking since 9/11. The people on AA11, UA175, AA77, and UA93 did not deserve it. Neither do we. It has to stop now. Every American has a right to live that no hateful, stupid, self-absorbed, mediocre, and ultimately disposable ideology can take from us.
Understood. I was trying to play off of the usual social media trope that ends "...is a circle" (which makes even less sense but whatever)
I have a deep connection with and love for my lab notebooks, and by extension all lab notebooks. They capture science-as-it-happens, in ways that are almost impossible for non-practitioners to understand. They are as close to "mysteries" (in the ancient sense) as exist in modern times. 🙏🏽
I have had the great luck and good fortune to know many people in those groups through personal relationships. I don't know of any who endorse or support this anti-modern ideology. We can fault them for being quiet (though many haven't been in the US). But they & I don't disagree on the merits.
wisdom is mostly if not entirely about being open to this form of learning
the overlap between Nobel laureates, Fields medalists, National Academy members, and many other exemplars of high achievement and service with MAGA and MAHA is the empty set
The American experiment is based on the idea that citizenship is not based on ethnicity. We tried to conflate the two with slavery and the constitution failed as a result. The reconstruction amendments made this principle explicit. This shit is fundamentally anti American and anti patriotic.
There's a lot going on, and a lot to argue about. But we should all be able to agree that the shocking levels of incompetence shown in the leadership of our federal government is both historically unmatched, and it hurts all of us.
the ability to change one’s mind based on evidence — hopefully not obtained through personal experience of suffering and loss — is the only thing that can save us from the nasty, brutish, and short destiny of “primitives” we fancy ourselves not to be
After Brown v. Board of Ed, southern states tried to make it impossible for the NAACP LDF to do its work - largely by alleging that lawyers in school deseg cases had engaged in ethical misconduct.
Read about how Francis J. Allman, Chief Judge of Florida’s Second Judicial District, is an un-American censorial fascist thug worthy of contempt.
/2 In my view, a judge who thinks a bar complaint is the appropriate response to a lawyer criticizing a decision as “fascist” is unsuited to be a judge and dubiously suited to be respected as a fellow American.
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL
thanks for replying and explaining among the triggering conditions, (1) and (2) strike me as very difficult (if not impossible) to sustain as predicates that leaves (3), which is grounded in escalation b/c of POTUS's impotence, whether real or feigned it's crazy but also consistent w/the times
#BREAKING: Fifth Circuit (Southwick & Ramirez, JJ.) holds that President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act against Tren de Aragua is unlawful, and blocks AEA removals in the Northern District of Texas (over a lengthy dissent from Judge Oldham): www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub...
Operation Idiot Sicario is very dangerous because once you’ve decided to missile random boats rather than interdict them you’ve ignored the advice of every good person in your organization and ensured your kill chain is exclusively staffed by the most evil, malicious, or lazy bastards alive
The U.S. Secretary of Energy does not know that electricity is energy. I'm glad we've gotten rid of DEI programs and are now giving America the leadership it deserves.
So, sending troops to Chicago or Baltimore would be much more complicated than either LA or DC. 🧵
Possible next move for Pritzker.
Federalism has been a bedrock principle since *before* the Constitution existed--in fact, the colonists were so concerned about states being able to preserve their own sovereignty that they designed a central government so weak under the Articles of Confederation that it was unworkable!
Many on here focusing on the statutory pretzels that may or may not make this "legal," but don't lose sight of the fact that finding legal loopholes to do authoritarianism is still authoritarianism. Deploying troops from one state against another state is abhorrent to American democracy.
I don’t know how this is possible. Texas cannot control guard sent to Illinois without violating Illinois sovereignty. It must be federally controlled units, otherwise instead of a Posee Comitatus problem, we have a major constitutional crisis.
Trump and Bondi fired actually experienced immigration judges. Now, claiming they don't have enough immigration judges, they're asking military lawyers from DOD to come over on detail and serve as temporary judges. Blatant way to further militarize immigration enforcement. apnews.com/article/pent...
Here's the video Trump just posted to Truth Social, with the claim that 11 people aboard the boat were killed. There is zero evidence of self-defense here. Looks like a massacre of civilians at sea. Even if they had drugs aboard, that's not a capital offense.
Pritzker: "Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question: once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next?"
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
Folks look at you like you're crazy when you say we're in the midst of the worst, most unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis in American history, & well, 👇
WTF? This is part of the ceremony of citizenship. These people aren’t against illegal immigration, they’re against legal immigration as well, and always have been.
Oh Desi Uncles Foe Trump. We tried so hard to warn you. Whoopsie!
I’m out of my depth, but that last part — acting through the governor — doesn’t seem to automatically confer new authorities on that governor to command his/her NG to enter and take action in another state without the latter’s consent is this a reasonable reading?
If it’s under Title 32 authority, the Texas guard remains under state control. That would mean that one state is deploying armed forces into the territory of a non-consenting state. And that’d clearly be a violation of the principle that states are co-equal, territorially limited sovereigns.
That Pritzker press conference was... surreal, and I think marks a significant moment of escalation in the constitutional omni-crisis. This was the governor of a state saying plainly the Union itself is being torn apart and his state is being militarily invaded by an authoritarian regime.
One of which being the minor detail that deploying them off federal property in the territory of one state under another state's authority without the permission of the government of the first state is quite literally an invasion
Trump has sent Texas military personnel to within 20 minutes of my parents as part of a plan to invade Illinois with another state's National Guard. What the literal F.
BREAKING: Gov. JB Pritzker says the Trump administration has sent the Texas National Guard to Great Lakes Naval Base outside Chicago, awaiting orders to deploy to Chicago. Trump administration officials will target Mexican Independence Day (Sept. 16) celebrations. @wttw.bsky.social
Activate the Illinois National Guard
Pritzker: "We've gathered information from unauthorized, patriotic officials inside the government and from-sourced reporters about Donald Trump's plan, which is to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago."
KASIE HUNT: Over the summer you said, “There’s no vaccine that’s safe and effective”. Do you still believe that? RFK JR: “I never said that.” KASIE HUNT: “Play the clip.” RFK JR (clip): “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” (March 2024) ht: @cwebbonline.com
The Posse Comitatus Act makes it illegal to use federal troops for domestic policing under normal circumstances. On Tuesday a Federal District Court in San Francisco held that the administration has been using those troops too expansively in Los Angeles.
news analysis L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities As Democratic cities brace for possible military deployments, Democratic governors see in a lower-court ruling the potential for legal protections. gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/u...
Anyone who participates in what appears in context to be a proposed military occupation of Chicago “because crime” will be doing something that is illegal and is obligated not to do that. That’s all I’ll say.
DOOCY: How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead? TRUMP: ... DOOCY: You see that? TRUMP: No ... I heard that. I get reports.
Look who else allows voting my mail www.sos.alabama.gov/alabama-vote...
that’s why he would never be asked!
trump just said part of the reason he's moving the space force HQ from colorado to alabama because colorado allows mail-in voting.