Michael Meir Saltzman

Incredible quote from my wife tonight:

“You know you’re really lucky you have me around to let you know how stupid I am- YOU ARE- fuck!” (She swiftly exits the room)

Cannot tell you how pumped I am that I got to read Bartholomew and Oobleck to my 4yo

People need to realize that, along with citizens swept up in immigration raids, they have also detained citizens for being involved in activism.

‘He’s not the same’: Father of Liam Conejo Ramos says 5-year-old continues to suffer Some people thought they say the 5-year-old during the Super Bowl halftime show. But Liam is still in hiding with his family, after he and his father were detained and then released from a Texas deten...

Super Bowl viewers Sunday speculated that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos appeared in the halftime show. In fact, he has been in hiding with his family.

“He can’t sleep well at night. He wakes up three or four times a night screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’” Liam's father Adrian Conejo Arias, said.

For those who are from California, contact your AG. Forcing people to show their IDs which would later be stolen when the site gets hacked (again)?! What Discord is doing is beyond stupid and dangerous.

This is incredible, important work from @thrasherxy.bsky.social and @afeefness.bsky.social documenting the toll of USAID cuts on sex workers in Uganda.

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.

Hundreds of kids are still detained.

We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

People who resent weakness out of fear of being reminded of their own

this case is maybe the single best example of one of the most destructive tendencies of this court: the tendency to treat their job as a collegiate legal seminar where they operate in hypotheticals rather than deal with the real world as it exists

Opinion | Trump wouldn’t just undo the Voting Rights Act. He’d reverse it. In hinting at “nationalizing” elections, Trump suggests a world in which minorities would have more difficulty voting than any time since 1965.

new from me: Trump's suggestion that the GOP "nationalize" elections in "15 areas" struck me for being a full-on Bizarro version of the Voting Rights Act — a system of federal oversight of election law but targeted -against- minorities

OLD LADY: Tenant taking me to court, sayin’ I harassed her
ME: Okay
OLD LADY: I said she had a nice perfume. But it’s not like that. Not *whispering* lesbian stuff
ME: Okay
OLD LADY: You have anybody, boyfriend, girlfriend? I say girlfriend like the old way. Not like lesbian stuff
ME: Okay

But doctor, *I* am tenant

"No time hath she to sport and play:
A charmed web she weaves alway.
A curse is on her, if she stay
Her weaving, either night or day,
To look down to CANDYCRUSHMELOT."

(On this Venn diagram, I definitely skew towards the "turn-of-the-19th-century poetry" circle—but it's an honest attempt.)

This commercial is how I learned my Gen X friend's favorite Pokemon is Zigzagoon

I may have overestimated the size of this hive

WHENLATRO

Samuel Taylor Coleridge mobile gaming stans hive rise up!

When I played Balatro but I should have been working and now I regret it:

'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBALATROSS.

Missing the last stanza:

To be lead by me
Really awesome
Good choice

Vonnegut being my favorite author since age 11 stays being one of my strongest choices

Second time in 3 days I’m posting this Vonnegut quote wrt AI.

As every year, the winner of the Super Bowl will be determined by which team’s fan base prays most fervently

I have yet to see any evidence that there is a market for AI-generated books outside of people being tricked into thinking they are not AI-generated books. AKA, it is a project of scamming and deceiving people, and really should be treated as fraud

The point of the AI project is to provoke despair in creative people. They haven’t produced profits or anything anyone wants, just a steady stream of articles about how us artistic types can’t do the thing we’re already doing, making art. Jokes on them, we’re even better at despair than they are.

At Least 50 Arrested After Protests Escalate Outside Minnesota Federal Building

Friends in Minneapolis are very worried about this development. Both in terms of state police's role in arresting protestors and the worry that this could set off the kind of spiral of distrust and destruction that followed George Floyd's murder.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/u...

crickets from the free speech crowd, of course

Intricacies of the Helix Nebula revealed by Webb First spotted in the early 1800s, the Helix Nebula has become one of the most iconic planetary nebulas in the sky as it’s recognised for its striking, ring-like shape. One of the closest planetary…

The James Webb Space Telescope sent back pictures of the Helix Nebula in phenomenal clarity. The space telescope’s website has the photographs in all their glory, along with comparisons to photographs of Helix taken by older space telescopes like VISTA and Hubble buff.ly/IZ8gDdC
#ShareGoodNewsToo

Just a quick update from the Twin Cities. (Please forgive the unsolicited message). THINGS ARE NOT BETTER IN MINNEAPOLIS. The media is mostly moving on, Trump is focused on other stuff, BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED ON THE GROUND. More than 2,000 DHS thugs continue to roam the streets, abducting people 24/7, assaulting legal observers with impunity, and routinely denying 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment rights. Drones and helicopters are overhead every day. Hundreds and hundreds of terrified families have not left their homes since mid-December ... relying on the community to bring them food and help with rent and other necessities. (Those people are NOT violent drug cartel sex offending murderers, as DHS would tell you. Most are legal residents or citizens.) If anything, things have just become more stressful and intractable (think trench warfare as a suitable metaphor): The resistance is better organized and numerous, but DHS has become more clever and better at disguise... and the county sheriff's office is increasingly supporting them . Do not let anyone tell you that Homans (the new person in charge of the occupation) is making anything better. Do not let anyone tell you that 700 ICE agents leaving the city has made much of a difference; the remaining force (again, ~2,000) is still larger than the entire city's police force (which is legally unable to do anything). Please call your congressional reps ... especially if there is any chance the administration might listen to them.

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

this is a great argument

An opinion I pretty firmly hold is that everyone should make a song, paint a painting, act in something, and write a book even if all of those things end up being objectively terrible