Nitai Deitel

If the federal government can simply seize privately held patents then that is the end of the U.S. patent system, the legal basis for American innovation.

1/3 of BLS leadership positions are currently vacant.
Field offices around the country are closing due to staff shortages.
They fired the advisory council that was assessing how to increase survey response rates.
These are not actions you take if you actually want to improve the data.

Opinion | A new era of government censorship has dawned Donald Trump fancies himself a champion of free speech. Oh, really?

A new era of government censorship has begun.
It started with the silencing of scientific speech, when the admin blocked release of research on bird flu. But MAGA has also cracked down on other wrongthink—on race, geography (!), and of course Trump himself
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

It seems fairly clear that Donald Trump thinks gravity makes water flow "down" from the Pacific Northwest to California, because there is absolutely no system that connects the water in Oregon and Washington to Southern California.

mRNA vaccines not only stopped Covid in its tracks, they promised massive developments in other virulent diseases, including many forms of cancer. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has just dramatically increased the number of people who will die needlessly in the coming decade.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces he will cancel $500 million in vaccine development projects.

Hamed AleazizNicholas Nehamas By Hamed Aleaziz and Nicholas Nehamas Aug. 5, 2025, 4:51 p.m. ET On Tuesday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced in an internal email that it would offer cash bonuses to agents for deporting people quickly, an incentive meant to motivate the staff to speed up President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Less than four hours later, the agency abruptly canceled what was supposed to be a 30-day pilot program. “PLEASE DISREGARD,” Liana J. Castano, an official in ICE’s field operations division, said in a follow-up email to agency offices around the country.

🚨WHOA. According to @haleaziz.bsky.social, the Trump admin was actually going to implement the ICE "bounties" it has repeatedly said were false, offering $200 per arrest leading to a rapid deportation — and only walked the plan back after the New York Times got a copy of the memo.

Question for Mike Flood: With $450 million being allocated to Alligator Alcatraz, and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people—How much does it cost for fascism? How much do the tax payers have to pay for a fascist country?

NEW: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze federal funds.

Then the harassment began.

Pizzas sent to his home in the name of Judge Esther Salas’s murdered son, Daniel.

Six credible threats to his life.

More than 400 “vile” calls to his chambers—including this voicemail:

Epstein hired a teenaged Giuffre out from under Trump in 2000. Trump didn't kick him out of Mar-a-Lago until 2007—a year after the FBI started investigating him for sex trafficking.

the one thing i genuinely did not anticipate from this administration was its vicious, know nothing hostility to any and everything that might even be adjacent to science and scientific research. they genuinely one to destroy the entirety of the nation’s research capacity. and for what, exactly?

This is, no exaggeration, Trump stealing a billion dollars from the United States. There are other planes for POTUS to use. This one will not be functional during his term for long, if at all.

But this one he will keep afterwards via his "presidential library."

🚨 This woman tries to call the family of the man being disappeared and ICE will not allow her to get a phone number. One of the “undercover” mobsters nearly backed into her.

Republicans are waging a generalized war on science, but I think many of them don’t fully grok that RFK isn’t at war with science alone or per se: he’s at war with sick people, and of the view that only the lucky should be allowed to survive into old age. They are know nothings, he is Mengele.

it is real weird how Zohran Mamdani is constantly asked about antisemitism but none of the other NYC mayoral candidates are relentlessly asked about how they will deal with ongoing Islamophobia and hate crimes against Asian Americans

Holy - and I cannot emphasize this enough - shit.

Also, this guy was a senior project 2025 organizer.

State Dept. cuts China experts as administration says countering Beijing top priority The State Department has shuttered the team involved in South China Sea security, getting rid of top experts on the subject at a time when the administration says security in the region is a priority.

“…The layoffs were announced while Rubio was traveling home from that trip.

"After he used us, he fired us," one fired foreign affairs officer who focused on the South China Sea said. "It's mind-boggling."

www.npr.org/2025/07/24/n...

Vermont school superintendent detained after trip to Nicaragua Wilmer Chavarria, the superintendent of the Winooski School District, was held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection while returning to the country after visiting family.

Jesus. He's a US citizen. With Global Entry even.

Still detained. With no explanation.

(They did eventually let him back into the country after holding him for hours, saying had no rights. He was threatened by five interrogators.)

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu said Thursday that Israel is advancing the destruction of Gaza, and that the Strip will be made totally Jewish, drawing outcry among opposition politicians. “The government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu told Haredi radio station Kol Barama. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil.

OK now everyone who has given Mamdani shit over something he never said has to publicly explain how this quote by a member of the Israeli government makes them feel www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-mi...

Trump, Miller, Noem et al are disappearing innocent people to a concentration camp to be tortured. They know this is what they're doing. Everyone who has touched this policy belongs in prison.

more evidence for “a bunch of AI cultists dismantled large parts of the federal government because they believed that their LLMs were intelligent and could do the work better” thesis

We are watching America’s separation of powers go up in smoke, wisp by wisp

Trump’s appointees have ZERO IDEA what they are doing or what their jobs are.

Breathtaking and staggering incompetence. I truly could not believe what I was hearing.

Like watching someone dunk Prometheus's flame in a lake.

The Roberts court allows Trump's gutting of the Education Dep't in a lawless ruling Sotomayor, in dissent, wrote that "it is the Judiciary’s duty to check ... lawlessness, not expedite it." Also: In two Sunday essays, a contrasting reality of this moment.

"On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees allowed the Republican Trump administration to gut the Education Department, a lawless ruling that laid bare the empty politics of the Roberts court."

Read @chrisgeidner.bsky.social's report:

FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show

Kristi Noem didn't renew the expired call center contracts for five days, resulting in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failing to answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line from flood survivors in Texas. It's malevolence mixed with incompetence again and again.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz after touring "Alligator Alcatraz": "These detainees are living in cages. The pictures you've seen don't do it just. They are essentially packed into cages. 34 detainees per cage...they get their drinking water & they brush their teeth where they poop, in the same unit"

FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show

The problem with trading government services for tax cuts is that there are a lot of essential services where no amount of additional money in your pocket makes up for their loss.

The DOGE dividend was a lie.

On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls. That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents sho

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/c...

Holy shit wait for it