As long as some farm girl doesn’t come along and take those shoes.
Democracy, science, writing, and whatever else is on my mind. Author of SF novels DISSENSION & REGENERATION. Opinions my own. She/her.
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As long as some farm girl doesn’t come along and take those shoes.
The choice between science and Trump is perfectly possible and Dr. Susan Monarez made the right one.
Call his office. Thank him. Implore him to change the leadership of HHS.
It’s evident even simply in pricing: the value of a share is set by what the crowd thinks it’s worth, not by any inherent value, so as soon as the crowd thinks it’s worthless, it is. Tulips, crypto, all the same.
You’ll need it more tomorrow anyway
JFC. This is why people don’t go to the theater.
The Texas Miracle: this article showing that 40% of people in Houston’s home county are food insecure appeared alongside an article showing that 100,000 people applied for 5000 available slots for help with utility bills.
It must say something good about me that when I have a typo that comes out “woed” my spellcheck offers “woad” instead of “word.”
Grass has a life.
I am pretty sure that this is the notorious Fort Pitt Bridge merge, and if you have one of these in Portland, I am so sorry.
This video of bats forming “cuddle balls” will improve your day.
All the context you needed.
Why we must not let Trump ruin HHS, NIH, and medical research: "You do more work, you learn more about cancer, you run clinical trials and you cure more patients. The formula is very, very clear and the path is very obvious. It's just we need to continue doing that."
I’ve read three different posts about Trump-Putin this morning by sociologists or reporters with large followings. All of them headlined “I nailed it” and reposted their prior posts predicting the outcome. This is neither useful nor serious.
Someone from Pennsylvania.
I keep thinking of the Simplification in “Canticle for Leibowitz.”
The series will star Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.
mRNA vaccines are still saving lives, just like other vaccines. The Trump administration is taking away your freedom to access them.
Is there anything more annoying than when your cable company requires you to have Internet to get help with the fact that your Internet is out?
Sorta like Texas and flood zones.
I love our NWS Houston/Galveston forecasters. Here’s their forecast discussion for International Cat Day.
New Nakamia sounds like one of those 15-minutes-into-the-future states in a Neal Stephenson novel.
Bright women
@drmlb.bsky.social
It made his ears go all funny.
Because the Pirates traded him he’ll find his swing and hit 25 homers this year.
Now he knows how people feel when they want to buy a cake.
Aside from the obvious, here’s another reason not to cut food stamps: “Having the means to buy nutritious food is important for preventing cognitive decline. This study suggested that SNAP participation, or any nutritional support program can delay the onset of cognitive impairment or dementia.”
Yup
Yup
I guess if you dont have toxic empathy, other people’s suffering is not a problem. Also, “I repeatedly watched a movie about horrible suffering in war so my childbirth pain wouldn’t seem so bad” is…odd?
It’s incredibly alarming that the State Department is labeling IUDs and birth control implants abortifacients. This won’t stop at foreign aid. The US government will outlaw these methods of birth control.
This is the idiocy behind NIH grant cancellations: “The study itself has value, however unfortunately it was funded under an ideologically driven DEI program under the Biden Administration.” In other words we’re burning down our own perfectly good house bc we decided we don’t like the architect.
“What is so unfortunate about the current situation is that Trump inherited policies (and in one case an agreement) that were far more likely to lead to the results he promised as a candidate than the policies he adopted over the early months of his presidency.”
And Magenta.
New piece at @houstonchronicle.com discusses my criticisms of Texas' new "Bible-infused" Bluebonnet curriculum, as well as the views of a Bluebonnet supporter 1/2 www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...
On the one hand, catching murderers is good. OTOH, tracking murderers down using DNA submitted to recreational genealogy websites by distant relatives in Romania is creepy. You know use of this technique won’t be limited to identifying criminals, and soon it will be high throughput.
Can economists comment on how “retail investment” or the huge switch from defined pensions to tax-deferred personal retirement accounts contributes to the enshittification of the whole economy? BC it seems to me that focus on shareholder return to the exclusion of every other goal is a root cause.
Includes this magnificent aside; “Twitter is a somewhat different story, but this post is about enshittification, not Nazification.”
There isn’t any part of the root cause analysis of the Texas flood catastrophe in which it’s relevant for the investigating government body to pray publicly that “our tenor and our tone will be one that is God-glorifying and honoring.”
There is nothing like the prehistoric call of the Gulf Coast Toad in the Houston dawn after a rainy night. Recording by Houston @naturediscoverycenter
@bucees.bsky.social save the sea turtles! Dim the lights!
“The widespread belief that NPR lesbians and trans women in sports were a greater hazard than Nazis and extremist Christians was the most catastrophic failure of conventional wisdom in my lifetime.”
January 2025 v
Very hard to read this description of WNBA players as the “most miserable, narcissistic, entitled brats on the planet” without seeing straight-up misogyny. @post-gazette.com owes @wnba.com a public apology.
Just set up a new Bluetooth CD player and used my traditional test CD, “Court and Spark.” Man, that opening chord. Gave me chills in 1974 and gives me chills now.
All these years I thought I couldn’t remember all the words to Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home,” but it turns out it hardly has any. Still love that song anyway.
Pumpkin spice wastewater monitoring could be an important tool to survey the seasonal levels and prepare for the outbreak.
One of the all time greats.
This photo from www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2025/07/19/u... @kstjbirdblog.bsky.social
A great pick-me-up for your morning from @kstjbirdblog.bsky.social
You are def the hostess with the mostess. @drmlb.bsky.social says it’s a beautiful side salad.
They are highly motivated to increase unfairness. But also, the Johns Hopkins webpage says the class of 2028 includes 19% underrepresented in medicine. If 19% are URM and 67% get financial aid, a substantial proportion of those getting financial aid must not be URM. So their logic fails.
This is why @blueheronfarm.bsky.social suggests that everyone who’s able should try to run for something
Agree! We shouldn’t write off “rural” or “the south” as “getting what they deserve.” At the same time, there is a whole group of voters who continually fail to connect what they vote for with what they get. That is a complex problem of human nature.
I live in Texas, & I haven’t voted for a statewide winner in probably 25 years. I still have a strong incentive to vote in every single election: I’m a citizen, and I have obligations. In some times &places, people die for the right to vote. I have very limited sympathy for “my vote doesn’t matter.”
One day some of those rural voters are going to have to stop voting MAGA.
He’s going to be very surprised when he discovers they already make that and it’s called Mexican Coke.
This has made me curious about what marmots eat in a way that I’m not entirely comfortable with.
AI is antisemitic because antisemitism is widespread. There’s no mystery here.
From most people “he points that out all the time” would be supreme shade.
Also a very fine first line.
If we still had irony, I would say it’s massively ironic that this DHS would pick “New life in a new land” as their slogan.
This is why my friend (and classmate) Cecile Richards founded Texas Freedom Network… specifically when she learned of the long term plan to start with school boards and education in an attempt to take over politics.
This is a good reason for every decent account to leave the bird place.
Wasn’t, shall we say, transparent?
Okay but then do we get the explainer?
Looking for individuals to “blame” for weather-related tragedies is a natural response, especially because it’s a natural defense mechanism to think we would never make the same mistakes. But real error prevention is about systems, not blame. And we’re all part of complex systems.
“What’s being asked of us is make some effort to stand up for the things that you think are right. And be willing to be a little bit uncomfortable in defense of your values. And in defense of the country. And in defense of the world that you want to leave to your children and your grandchildren.”
Welcome to Bluesky @tessacroft.bsky.social! I can’t wait to read “Through Sky and Stars”!
I think we see the same thing in every field but I don’t think we should categorize it as smart versus not smart. In every field, some people have the talent & skill to be truly creative. The rest of us come in behind and fill in the gaps with diligence & skill. We need both groups.
Learning to think and analyze at a high level is strategy. Becoming expert in a particular content area is tactics.
My career has been pediatric cancer research. I was an English major. The skills I learned reading 17th-century drama were much more important than the pathways I memorized in biochemistry class.
Outstanding editorial from @houstonchronicle.com explains how any (every) community can prevent weather-related deaths.
Fair enough :) And he could certainly string together a sentence (which might then take a lot of coffee to parse).
Not to start a quibble before coffee, but I wouldn’t categorize Eliot as an Imagist.
This continual drumbeat that the courts stand in opposition to the will of the American people sets the framework for the administration to sweep aside the courts with the justification that it’s protecting the people from them. It’s an argument for dismantling the whole third branch of government.
Something I don’t think we’ve talked about enough is the administration’s continual framing of court orders as “a judge…undermining the will of the American people,” as if the law and legal process were some kind of malign external force coming between the people and their government.
“…the entire structure of how we feed children at school is a tangle of federal programs, income thresholds, paperwork requirements, and local policies — all of which seemed designed to maximize shame and minimize actual nutrition.” Free universal school lunch now!!!!
the times is reporting that fema let call center operator contracts expire on july 5, the day after the texas flood, and calls answered went from 99.7% that day to 36% the next to 16% the next www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/c...
Not only did I give up arguing, but also I adopted the eblock approach. (And exactly what mirror are the Grok fans looking into these days?)
Outstanding @post-gazette.com editorial: “There is no good reason for any American to get the measles, and that means every death is a preventable tragedy.”
Sort of like John Facenda in NFL films
You’ll find out when the ink stain spreads.
@cnn.com could you hedge your bets just a little more please? “Certainly, the harsh words and bitter violence of recent days in Ukraine suggest the answer is maybe.”
It’s not just floods. Texas purposely resists spending $ to save lives. After hurricane Beryl power outages, thousands of seniors were left in sweltering nursing homes. Some died. Afterwards, the state not only refused to mandate backup generators, but they blocked existing local requirements.
What really should happen is a root cause analysis. That process is not about “whose fault is it” but about finding the underlying factors so that the same thing doesn’t happen again.
Read this today. It explains a lot. “Cicadas in Texas, don't have the long life cycles that some of the periodical cicadas up north have, up to 17 years. Our species stay under the ground for 1 to 3 years, as nymphs, and men emerge as adults during the summer.”
@texastribune.org can you do one of these for Texas?
Great graphic- is there a place to find one for every state?
At least they’re saying it out loud. Every local campaign there should run on “my opponent says everyone is not welcome here.” When MAGA says that’s not true, ask them simply to say “everyone is welcome here.” Let them twist themselves in knots with the qualifiers, then repeat original statement.
Lisa Murkowski is worse than Trump because she pretends to have principles then sells out anyway. “Murkowski, who expressed concerns about its Medicaid cuts, ultimately voted for it. The bill was loaded up with benefits for Alaska, including a special tax break for whaling captains.”
The agencies are being cut b/c the cult leaders hate their existence, not b/c of what they did or didn’t do. Most people don’t want these cuts. Our gerrymandered 2-party system gives our elected “representatives” much more incentive to do what the cult & its leaders want than what most people want.
NASA isn’t getting cut because it failed to tell it’s sorry. MEDICAID isn’t getting cut because it failed to tell its story. These cuts are very unpopular. They’re being made b/c the ruling cult doesn’t care what people want, & also because what people want is not closely tied to who gets elected.
Solve Markwayne Mullin’s problem. Vote for national health insurance not tied to income tests or jobs.
This is another version of victim-blaming, in fact.
We need a bigger like button for this post.
💯
Plus the shell recycling seems good.