Thought follower. Public servant. Male software developer. Alumnus of 18F, the Obama White House, Georgetown's Beeck Center, U.S. Digital Response, the Biden-Harris Transition Team, and the Biden administration. He/him. Charlottesville, VA, USA.
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Government funding is the one card congressional Democrats have to play, and one they could and should use to push back against Trump's authoritarianism. What's their big demand? RFK Jr's resignation? Reforms in ICE? Stand down of National Guard? NOPE. "Obamacare enhanced premium tax credits"
SCOOP by @anthonycormier.bsky.social & Zach Mider Bessent once agreed to occupy 2 different houses as his “principal residence” at the same time, mortgage documents show — the same kind of contradictory pledges thatTrump has been using to try to oust Lisa Cook. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Regardless of the disgraceful nonsense we will likely hear from this administration in the coming days on vaccine “recommendations,” Americas healthcare insurers issued a joint statement tonight saying coverage for Covid and flu shots will remain unchanged from prior years. Speaks for itself.
I’m just a boy, standing in front of a hotel manager, asking where the hell I’m supposed to plug in this iron.
My wife is pretty sensitive to perfumes etc. and I prefer not to give her cause to avoid me when I get home. :)
In fairness, the room does have blackout curtains, but I strongly prefer to not close them completely, to be woken up by sunlight in the morning. Ah, well.
It turns out that when you’re staying at a Nevada casino-hotel, it’s important to ask “is my room immediately next to a huge neon sign?”
I have a vague hypothesis that I will feel more comfortable when traveling if I don’t smell like weird hotel soap and shampoo, so I was happy to find I could easily buy a 24-pack of these adorable little Dove bars. I bring a new one on each trip.
I'm just an ordinary First Amendment lawyer but I'm pretty sure you can't transform "protesting the president" into criminal activity by recharacterizing it as "inflicting harm on the United States."
“The simplest explanation for why refineries are closing is that demand is shrinking. California consumed around 16 percent less gasoline in 2024 than 20 years earlier, state data show…Most of the state’s diesel is now made from fats such as canola oil, used cooking grease and other waste products.”
I brought an apple! They're a great airplane snack.
A reporter just asked the U.S. president a perfectly legitimate question about his attorney general's vow to prosecute people for constitutionally protected speech. He responded by threatening to prosecute the reporter. The threat itself is an abuse of power. It ought to be an impeachable offense.
OK so it's not just me hallucinating this? I haven't had time to track down screenshots of it, but I really really really thought that we did this in, like, 2000.
No notes
Kash Patel says the FBI has NO information that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked minors to anyone other than himself. SEN. KENNEDY: "Who, if anyone, did Epstein traffic these young women to?" PATEL: "There is no credible information, none ... that he trafficked to other individuals."
Sure, I bet that’s part of it.
I’m on a plane and the flight attendant just came through offering people bananas from a big bunch he was carrying.
I imagine that’s part of it too!
Take everything you thought you knew about species boundaries, reproduction, genetics, and evolution, and just throw it all away. This shit is WILD. (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/s...
My read: Klein thinks fascism has already won, and he wants to ingratiate himself with the Trump regime. Watch these guys flip—the order in which they do it is self-ranking in order of traitorousness.
Oh, good.
I feel like I’m losing my mind listening to right-wing politicians talk about how political violence is wrong and people who promote it should be rooted out and destroyed
You can microwave anything if you're brave enough.
I will be putting off an upgrade to the new iOS as long as I can. I assumed this stupid design language would be rescinded during the beta period but, nope, they actually had to roll this thing out to learn this is a bad idea. I hope/assume a point release will dial back the transparency a lot.
I know a certain baker who is going to be preeeeetty upset!
You know, I'm starting to think that Republicans weren't sincere in their concerns about preserving "free speech" on campuses and on social media
Time is a flat circle, nothing ever happens, etc
Q: Do you think it would've been fitting to lower the flags to half staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota House Speaker, was gunned down by an assassin? TRUMP: I'm not familiar. The who?
Fun fact: You can throw a dirty old sponge in the microwave for 30 seconds. It doesn't clean it or sterilize it, but it *does* make your entire home smell like disgusting sponge-juice.
*I*, I mean
We can be trusted on this
Big Sponge only wants the best for us all
Your old kitchen sponge is gross. Throw it out. Use a new one. I’m years into a ~three-week rotation and this is the life. Brought to you by the American Sponge Council.
Genuinely feels like a tipping point for American democracy, if we can keep it.
My optimism here is limited, but I really hope centrist institutions like universities and major news organizations understand that the plan is for the govt to dismantle them. They do not care if you fire your columnists or discipline staff for accurately quoting Kirk. They just want us all gone.
JD Vance is right that its not a "both sides" problem--it is far and away a right wing problem and a MAGA problem specifically
An animal shelter in Montana had to evacuate more than 70 cats and dogs and 14 workers were treated for smoke inhalation after the FBI was using an incinerator to destroy methamphetamine in the same building.
“The goal…was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly.” This should result in screaming headlines about fascism tomorrow. It won’t. But it should.
Sure, I'd love to test it out!
Ladies and gentlemen, fascism:
This, incidentally, is why I default to working in the open. I hadn't gotten around to porting my bot to Bluesky, but somebody else was able to not just do that, but do it *better* than I was going to. People don't have to wait for me to do a thing, somebody else can do it and improve on it.
I built a Mastodon bot that reports on Covid wastewater levels, which gives me weekly updates on how cautious to be depending on where I'm going. It turns out that @wvgg.co ported it to Bluesky and improved it, with twice weekly updates! Insta-follow for me. Recommended.
And I run a bot, which is on Mastodon but not Bluesky, but...hey, cool, @wvgg.co ported it to Bluesky! But made it better, with good iconography. So, yeah, follow that: @covid-wastewater.bsky.social
“Klein’s interest here isn’t honesty but flattery. It shows Klein isn’t writing about Kirk at all. He’s writing about himself and saying, ‘I’m doing politics the right way because I’m lauding someone who disagrees with me.’”
i have said this before but when “getting rid of race in admissions” for the administration means “you can’t even try to reach out to underrepresented communities and encourage them to apply and if you do it is illegal discrimination against white people” then the actual goal here is segregation
No.
Yes, I’m familiar with those, but they will are constructed for a particular maximum duration, and we need a backup beyond that duration. Right now that’s coal and gas, which are vastly more deadly than nuclear ever has been. (Regrettably, we take 30 years to build nuclear plants, mooting this.)
This is a profoundly stupid idea that will end badly.
oh_no.png
😆
Babe, I’m sorry, but I’ve just got this one ticket to paradise. The Ticketmaster fees were *ridiculous*. But I’ll text you?
I actually support building small nuclear power plants! Pebble-bed reactors, thorium reactors, whatever—sign me up. Nuclear waste is a big problem, but less big than climate change, and we've got to optimize for something. But any plan contingent on "we'll build a nuclear power plant" is a bad plan.
It is frustrating seeing media outlets credulously cover Republican claims that Virginia will deal with data center power demands by simply building small nuclear power plants. We haven't built a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. since 1973. This isn't a plan—it's a fig leaf.
Nationwide, broken down by region.
Aw, hell, I forgot to include the link to the data source for that chart. Here it is.
Hey, so...Covid rates have gotten real high. Maybe change your behavior to fit this new risk profile? Stop eating indoors at restaurants, mask on mass transit, that kind of thing?
Yeah, that’s…that’s probably generally a good null hypothesis.
Intersectionality, but for fascism.
Now *food containers*, that seems worth fighting for. We've got the kids using PFAS-free dental floss, and that was a Whole Thing to find and purchase. I bet California legislation would make this stuff easier to find across the country.
on the electoral side of things, this is why you need a loud opposition party saying they reject this and will not stand for it. that this country should be safe for people from korea as new immigrants but also for longstanding korean americans.
I remain strongly suspicious that this was done specifically to kill battery factories, to slow or prevent the adoption of EVs. Perhaps Trump et al gambled that this wouldn't have a larger effect on foreign companies building factories in the U.S., but if so, I think that's wrong.
Sure, I think that's true, but I think my point is that I'm doubtful any environmental organization focusing on PFAS would choose this hill to die on. (Disclaimer: my wife works for just such an environmental organization.) But maybe reasonable for *cooks* to fight this fight? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oops, forgot the relevant link: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
So we need *way* more research into PFAS to know this, but I have a strong suspicion that non-stick pans are an extremely small percentage of the sources of PFAS in our bodies and in the environment. I bet it's the chemical version of recycling a plastic bottle and thinking "I helped!"
That this thread was posted by a sitting U.S. Senator is... notable. This isn't speculation. Miller is being clear about his (and the Trump regime's) intention to use the tragedy in Utah to delegitimize, demoralize, and further disempower the opposition party. The hypocrisy re: free speech is acute.
A couple of weeks later, and eight custom security rules later, my website traffic is successfully managed. Bots were overwhelming it, and the worst offenders were pretending not to be bots (fake referrers, fake user agents)—I'm gonna assume those are AI scrapers. Now they're throttled and blocked.
"Regret" for what? Every bit of this was Trump admin policy, including the arbitrary rounding up of everyone in sight, the appalling conditions of their confinement, and the delayed release. Is anyone in the Trump admin / DHS / ICE getting fired over it? No. Are any policies being changed? Also no.
What’s super interesting is that JLR is owned my Tata motor group. Who also own TCS. techstory.in/tata-motors-...
When you definitely haven’t been digging holes.
😳
Amen
Jaguar Land Rover outsourced big parts of their IT operations to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Now they’re two weeks into a ransomware shutdown, with no ready way to restore operations. To TCS, this is just a contract. To JLR, it’s existential. It was foolish to outsource this.
It should be needless to say, but it is perhaps at this moment worth saying, that transgender individuals have the same right as anyone else to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Lol. A year ago these same people insisted that any effort to label foreign propaganda was an attack on free speech, and forced the dismantling of multiple orgs studying foreign disinformation
It’s horrific and inexplicable. Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are objectively pro-cancer. They’re destroying the entire infrastructure that has made so much progress and is poised to make much more. People will suffer and die because of them. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/m...
Dave Matthew Band
We’ve been living through 72 nonstop hours of this exact tweet
I didn’t know that!
Oh, for sure—I'm not blaming this judge, it's the entire judicial system, as controlled by the SCOTUS.
The Trump administration knew that they could fire thousands of people, and by the time courts got around to issuing a ruling, it would be too late for any meaningful action to be taken. That's precisely what has happened. Now they'll keep doing it, because it works.
Now that's an extremely deep cut
For sure, yeah, that's what I advocate for in the area of website development, specifically.
I mixed it into the sand before I painted. I worried that if I added the sand afterward, it'd just look like I dumped some sand on the steps, like it permanently needed sweeping.
I’m surprised to find I agree!
I have an even more radical dream: all new construction should be be fully accessible.
We've got no woodchucks out here in the forest, but we *do* have skunks, and I'd be happier not to find one under my office.
I hadn't thought about it for old-dog purposes, but that makes sense.
Unfortunately, our porch is too high for a ramp to be practical, but we've got plans drawn up to add on a downstairs bedroom and accessible bathroom, and that'll be on-grade, allowing a ramp.
“Finally, this guy is returning to that sweet shed content!”
It’s not Trex—just 5/4 deck boards.
I removed the painter’s tape and took another photo of the white-nosed steps 30 minutes after sunset. I think this is actually helpful to me now! It’s much easier to see the edges of these steps—before, they all just blended together into gray, when walking down them at night.
I am not a reporter. I’m just a dude writing stuff on social media that is sometimes wrong because that’s how humans be.
Right right, Kirk was “prove me wrong.” But same deal: he goaded kids into debating him, but would never ever have said “oh, OK, I was wrong.”
And they’re probably right!
“If you displease the regime then your business is taken away from you” is straight up, undiluted fascism.
I’ll give it to Higgins et al: their commitment to free speech is no different than Kirk’s was, which is to say that it’s a complete fiction.
Kirk didn’t debate out of some spirit of democracy or whatever. He did it to expand the Overton window, so that the humanity of marginalized groups could be seen as being up for debate. His “change my mind” schtick was a sham: he was never, ever willing to change his mind.
My wife and I had our home’s architect draw up plans for a downstairs bedroom and full bathroom. In the intervening decade we haven’t had the money to have the work done, and luckily haven’t needed it. But I hope to live long enough that stairs are a problem.
Heck yes.