Student of people, history and the sciences, scholar of fortune
3,327 followers 2,454 following 8,711 posts
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Please buy your children dictionaries and encyclopedias if you aren't on that already!! They eat that ish up. I associate reading encyclopedias with there being nothing better to do in the 80s but found out that kids love how tactile they are and how they can use them independently
i learned this fucking language from reading the dictionary when i was like 5/6, there's power in those things man
it'll be fun to see who doesn't get this and will therefore know they will be sacrificed when the old gods rise
always loved this lil guy. so jaunty.
People seem to like this headline, but I don't see why -- red or blue state, National Guard shouldn't be used for "policing." We already know how to reduce crime and it's not through more police. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/u...
I'm just going to go on, I'm sorry. If you look at the "most incarcerated states" from @prisonpolicy.org , they are red states! If incarceration worked, they would have less crime! www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2024....
Red states use the specter of "crime" to overpolice cities like Memphis and Jackson and St Louis, using state-controlled police in diverse cities. So they are just ripping sovereignty away from Black and Brown people, just like the federal government is.
Agree on all of these points. (As someone who has admired a lot of what Mayor Bowser has done, and who has subscribed to the WaPo forever.)
Two things can be — and are — true here: Bowser is not the champion DC needs in this moment, and The Washington Post has become a Trump rag. A newspaper that actually cared about the city in its name would not publish such an inflammatory, bullshit headline.
This is absolutely irresponsible — and bullshit — framing. If your reporters don't know that, you should fire them. If they do and your leadership just doesn't care, you should fire your leadership or just stop publishing.
shorter dc cir: "opinion or it doesn't count"
Where do I sign up? 😃
The next Democratic president should declare that the National Emergencies Act and Article II of the Constitution allow him to: •admit D.C. and Puerto Rico as states •abolish ICE •grant citizenship to any immigrant •disband the 5th Circuit •expand the Supreme Court Seriously: Why the hell not?
My stance is that I want checks and balances and separation of powers and that we should steadfastly pursue their restoration — AFTER we've fixed all this. Not before. ABSOLUTELY not before.
Everything I've seen about Democrats' version of Project 2029 is far too modest and weak-kneed. Democrats need to look at the precedents Trump is setting (and shattering) and figure out how a progressive can maximally wield the power that this administration is concentrating in the executive branch.
Anybody else find it weird that MAGA is hell-bent on protecting women and girls from imaginary trans women but doesn't seem to care about protecting women and girls from real cis men? floridianpress.com/2025/08/d-c-...
Perfect encapsulation of the Trump administration: The guy suing Harvard for alleged antisemitism is a straight-up Hitler-admiring Nazi. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/m...
"This bear currently eating one of my legs promised that he was not a man-eating bear. Here's a suggestion for the bear: try to come up with alternative things to eat other than the rest of my body, and maybe we can find common ground." - Hakeem Jeffries being eaten by a bear
twitter libs will be like "I'd rather stay with nazis than go to bluesky with the lefties" and think that says something about the lefties
LLM companies are beta testing experimental products our children, and educators are facilitating it.
Yes, but why are you being punished by being reborn as an American?
The DUP, a political party made up of people born in the north of Ireland who think it's good for England to be the government there: I think it's wrong for Irish people to speak Irish Sinn Feín: The Irish are a race Mo Chara of Kneecap: The revolution's fucked til we're buying gear in Irish
Practice saying "Am I being detained?" and "I refuse to answer any questions without a lawyer present." Also, I want to get a doormat that has the phrase "Come back with a warrant" written on it.
Please do not go to a voluntary interview with Secret Service, plz never meet with any fed without a very good lawyer present, and plz definitely don't call the president a terrorist Nazi to SS when you voluntarily talk to them without even a bad lawyer present plz don't gamble on a grand jury
Oh, no, I think that Democratic homeowners are by and large in complete agreement with fascist homeowners as far as homelessness goes.
This is happening everywhere (take note Charlottesville.) Police departments are emboldened to push local leadership into adopting more and more draconian measures against people who are homeless.
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
yes i am sure
I will COMPROMISE on getting some truth & reconciliation around here THE LAW IS LAWLESS I AM SICK OF THIS SHIT THAT HAS BEEN HAPPENING FOR YEARS ONLY JUST NOW IT'S APPARENTLY HAPPENING WITHOUT ANY PUSHBACK AT ALL This was from 2016!!
Great news, the self insured city's city attorney has let us know that "FWPD gives a 72-hour notice before a city-hired contractor clears the encampment" & does not name the private contractor hired by said city, previously successfully sued many times for trashing ppl's stuff, to trash ppl's stuff
wrote about the internal GOP battle over RFK. It should be easy for Rs to reject him; he wasn't even a Republican a year ago! and yet... www.publicnotice.co/p/rfk-jr-mon...
I've been surprised by how loud the people who love guns have been this past week here in Minnesota given what happened. They've got a lot of nerve. (My first reaction to seeing this all over my skyline this morning was "fuck off.") Probably shouldn't surprise me (sigh).
"Christian Osborne has been itching to serve his country since he was discharged from the Marines after refusing the coronavirus vaccine." we're doomed
"It is legitimate and important public interest journalism on how taxpayer-funded councillors are coming to the decisions they make on behalf of the people who elected them. The electorate cannot simply rely on Lee Anderson's Facebook page to get this information."
Now I'm wondering about (hyper)plane sections
The reason some see Bluesky as insular and twitter as not is that they are in the dominant majority on twitter and perceive less hostility. It's a safe space for them. Bluesky has far more diversity of thought, but that means everyone gets attacked by someone. Some people can't handle debate.
I know it’s a subtle distinction that most mainstream media publications will elide but technically Judge Breyer found that the Trump administration’s *use* of the military was illegal Trump’s legal authority to *deploy* the guard in CA is a separate question that’s pending before the 9th Cir.
TL: DR; today's ruling is a narrowly composed one which goes only to the question of *what* the troops deployed to LA were specifically being used for, not whether it's legal to call up the National Guard in the first place (which is the subject of ongoing litigation in the 9th Circuit).
I think it should be normative for SCOTUS justices to do legal research and even write textbooks if they so wish, but not to profit off of them while in office. Throwaway political memoirs as a side hustle are appallingly gross for anyone who's serving in a lifetime tenure position.
One of the most reasonable observations and recommendations regarding SCOTUS justices that I have read in quite a while.
I generally think SCOTUS will rubber stamp all Trump abuses of power as the good little party operatives they are except possibly one: the tariffs. Tariffs are probably the one and only area other Republican elites are not really on board. Obviously nothing SCOTUS does has anything to do with law.
Trying to figure out how to teach the Steel Seizure case this week in which a Court with 9 Dems told a Dem President he couldn’t do something to stop what he called an emergency during War time in a world where our SCOTUS bends to the knee of the President at every important moment.
2016: Cheese Cheese No Joy and her fellow travelers dismiss SCOTUS as a relevent election issue. 2025: theconversation.com/how-the-cons...
One thing that's really reassuring about SCOTUS is how their actual, real, serious, genuine position on ethics is "we are not bound by any mortal law nor any code or creed, this is our world, you merely live in it."
Amy Maxmen will be on WNYC in about 5 minutes. She's an expert on epidemics and has been doing investigative reporting on CDC's lack of response to the ongoing measles outbreaks. Tune in and call in!
In advance of Labor Day 2025, I published a brief column laying out Fingers' worker-focused editorial philosophy, along with a link catalog to some of the labor coverage I'm most proud of publishing over the past five years. Check it out if you missed it in your inbox!
Increasingly, I feel it's a lie for people to call themselves "liberals" or even "libertarians" if their emphasis is not on defending the people who are most often facing the point of the state's spear, who generally happen to be homeless.
also, my kitty is hunting for paid subs to finance his cat food. It's $50/yr, $5/month. please consider becoming a subscriber. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/gusgus-is-...
Joe Scarborough wants JB Pritzker to team up with Donald Trump and help him take over Chicago. This is why I have to remind people - all corporate news networks are right-wing, even MSNBC. We need public media funding for all commentators, outlets and networks as a human right.
Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said that his office intends to “slow roll” automatic returns from the $20 billion pot of “lost money” he oversees. Several states already proactively send out payments in much larger amounts than New York currently does. nysfocus.com/2025/08/05/n...
Ooh we have one for this
the only Trump announcement I care about is one he won't be able to give 🤷🏻♀️
Night and Day edited by @datlow.bsky.social is officially out today! Do you prefer your terror shrouded in darkness or caught in the bright, stark light? www.simonandschuster.com/books/Night-...
BREAKING: Trump, Hegseth violated the Posse Comitatus Act with their troop deployment to Los Angeles, Judge Charles Breyer rules after trial. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
The shots do suck - I’m not going to pretend they don’t suck. But they are worth the peace of mind you’ll get from knowing ur not gonna die of rabies Source: this happened to me earlier this year
at their core, trans rights, abortion rights, and vaccine rights are actually all the same issue: they’re all about bodily autonomy, and the willingness to concede any of them puts the others at risk.
I wrote about @iceblock.app, the developer's infuriating HOPE talk, and how it's unfortunately basically activism theater micahflee.com/unfortunatel...
today is a good day to repost this
A good start in Ohio for rebuilding policial community. Now, how about the other 49 states (and DC/PR)? lpeproject.org/blog/beyond-...
Tomorrow(!), the blog returns to its regularly scheduled publishing program. But before we do, we wanted to share a brief 🧵 of helpful resources for new law students who might be curious about the Law and Political Economy movement.
For lynch mobs in the "redeemed" south, lynching was a means of securing (white) freedom from Black domination and enforcing a (white supremacist) constitution. That is what they believed.
This is a vision of popular sovereignty and constitutionalism that has been part of the country's history from the very beginning. It has never gone away. The sooner you understand it, the sooner what seems totally incoherent starts to make sense.
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
Because, but their definition of “tyranny,” it isn’t tyrannical. Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion should be one of those everyone-must-read books. To some ppl, freedom = freedom FROM oppression. For others (like MAGA), freedom = freedom TO oppress. There’s nothing hypocritical here.
if your answer isn’t an unequivocal “yes” then you’re a shit journalist
@ellearmageddon.bsky.social In some recent Malört discussion, a Scandinavian said his family member makes it by putting a sprig of wormwood in vodka. I got some dried wormwood at the herb store, tried a teaspoon in 100ml vodka, and sure enough, that's the main flavor in Malört (also sugar)
lmao the look of regret before she drinks it 🤣
If you are wondering what Malort is
Imagine things got so bad they make a malört molotov cocktail
I was just wondering about this. Talk about an environmental hazard.
A friend took this at a rally today and I barked laughing.
The federal govt's extortion of UCLA has numerous problems. One is that it is ostensibly based on some factual allegations that are so exaggerated that they are actually false. I wrote about this today in a long blog post reflecting on what I saw at UCLA and how lawyers later mischaracterized it:
Why has Zohran Mamdani not condemned this avian menace?
Mass Deportations Hit American Classrooms migrantinsider.com/p/mass-depor...
Apparently they don’t make men’s shoes in my size 😤 Unrelatedly if anyone has a good source of dressy boys’ shoes, I am interested.
“As always, the hardest part of this project, as with any project, was understanding the data model and the business logic, and parsing out those objects correctly. The second-hardest was aligning elements in CSS.” @vickiboykis.com is a wonderful tech writer. vickiboykis.com/2025/01/23/y...
The 2024 election was a national referendum on living in factual reality and trying to address challenges responsibly. A plurality said no, even if some didn't consciously grasp that. Another example: Trump & Vance lying so much it hindered FEMA response to NC floods. Then the state voted for them.
COVID was Dems' fault because they acknowledged it. Any societal disruption could've been avoided if only we pretended. First time US media and voting public didn't hold the president responsible for a bad thing on his watch. Even as he messed it up on live TV. Nothing I can think of comes close.
Mostly agree, but Hurricane Maria was a preview. No one held the Trump Administration responsible.
Robert W. Chambers wrote "The King in Yellow". This is not to be confused with "The King in Mellow Yellow" which was Donovan's venture into combining Folk Music with Cosmic Horror.
The normies were out in force to protest in my bougie little Boston suburb. I take it as a good sign.
Please please help me spread the word! I've been to Atlanta a few times, but I don't know as many folks there as I do in Seattle or LA. So I would really *massively* appreciate any and all help letting ATL folks know about this event. 🍑💖📚
RFK Jr. taps his top deputy, Jim O’Neill, to be the new CDC director. Both men appear to wear skinny ties from Otaa. Otaa's ties are made in China from microfiber, a kind of plastic that, under the right conditions, can migrate to your balls.
I applaud whoever decided (probably Miller himself) to have Stephen Miller act increasingly as “spokesman” for this Administration’s policies. He is so fundamentally repellent that I suspect even loyal MAGA adherents get the heebie-jeebies when they listen to him,& ask themselves, “Am I w/this guy?”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order aimed at curbing the power of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops that he said Trump has threatened to deploy to Illinois.
The Republican Congress is going to try to rewrite the history of RFK Jr.’s confirmation as HHS Secretary. “We didn’t know” “Nobody told us” “He promised he wouldn’t…” This thread will be about the warnings from thousands of scientists and HCW who loudly and publicly opposed his confirmation.
BREAKING: Bernie Sanders wants RFK Jr. under oath. He’s demanding a special Senate hearing on the CDC disaster RFK Jr. helped create. Go Bernie!
Kagi is becoming a notable web search that people find their way to my website by, and I was just starting to wonder about what I'm going to do to replace Duck Duck Go, which is a great privacy search engine, but it uses Bing and has been underwhelming
Wow. Eco-worthy 14kw battery backup for a home is now $2,500. Just three summers ago I priced out a 10kw home back up system for $10k. www.eco-worthy.com/products/51-... The home battery uptake is gonna be wild
I last posted about this with everyone at Worldcon, so I'd appreciate a boost if you're willing as the world is noisy and full of horror, but the African SF Novels and Novellas Bundle - curated by Eugen Bacon, is still going strong at StoryBundle, and includes 2 of my novels! storybundle.com/scifi
Ah, the man whose ideology is responsible for many of the beatings I got as a kid due to his fascist interpretation of the Bible has passed (J*mes D*bson). I wish I were religious so I could believe he actually was being burned for all eternity. I'll settle for hoping it was a miserable death.
There's this book called "Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction" that I've been giving away a lot of late, it helped me with the history of why this is so deeply embedded in this genre. Conflation of space and westward expansion is a big taproot. And it's very 'air we breath' to some.
I used to know someone in Hungary who talked other people into suicide (there was a police case, but it was dropped and the person experienced no consequences). His entire verbiage was very similar to this. Please be cautious about reading even the excerpts, potentially very upsetting.
Praise from @mauricebroaddus.bsky.social: "Jason Sanford ain't playing with y'all anymore. We Who Hunt Alexanders lives at the intersection of cyberpunk and horror. Edginess and timeliness; blood and desperation; love and terror all woven like a rogue literary DNA strand." 1/2
Back in 1946, the KKK was trying to make a major comeback after World War II. Enter Superman — the Man of Steel exposed their secrets and took them down in his radio show. I asked Rick Bowers, author of Superman vs the Ku Klux Klan, what we can learn from this today buttondown.com/charliejane/...
Stephen R. Smith 