Mark Nance

Regret to inform you that @matthewdownhour.bsky.social is still correct

Make Anti-Trust Great Again.

They also don’t understand how vital MIT and the Ivies are to the weapons systems they love to deploy. Not that their role in that machine is great, but it shows how uninformed some of the Hegseth types are and how disingenuous the rest of them are.

Once again, in actual democracies, people do not need to engage in permanent litigation & political mobilization to retain the basic right to vote, because none of the major political parties make restricting suffrage the central pillar of their policy platform. We also don't have to live like this.

Legit hypothesis: building codes put railings closer together?

Pretty surprised to hear Theda Skocpol on NPR this morning talk about Larry Summers’ long overdue retirement as a loss. Good to be part of the club, I guess.

No honor among thieves.

El Gobierno anuncia, 45 años después del intento de golpe de Estado, la desclasificación de los documentos del 23-F “La memoria no puede estar bajo llave. Las democracias deben conocer su pasado para construir un futuro más libre”, afirma Sánchez

Looking forward to the research that comes out of this!

elpais.com/espana/2026-...

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

FYI, Academia.edu has changed its terms of service to give an irrevocable worldwide license for anything uploaded to its site to be used for generative AI. I do not consent to this and have pulled all my papers.

If spending money were the goal, that’d be great news.

Looking forward to reading this and maybe buying a few copies for my local city councilors and county commissioners.

There’s an awful lot of snowflakes in Texas for a state that gets no snow.

Cover of Rebecca Galemba’s book, Contraband Corridor. Shows a man lugging a large bag of corn into a truck.

I truly love teaching this book, @rgalemba.bsky.social! I’ve taught it 4 times now in my grad seminar on illicit economies. Each time I get something new. Each time it really draws my students in and masterfully turns their expectations about smuggling upside down.
@stanfordpress.bsky.social

I mean, Adam Smith and Karl Marx described very similar things happening in capitalism but came to very different judgments about the desirability of it.

Legit question. Is “private education and health services” a normal reporting category? Seems…odd.

UK bank bosses plan to set up Visa and Mastercard alternative over Trump fears Exclusive: First meeting to be held over domestic payments system aimed at reducing reliance on US networks

This seems of massive significance to me. They may not be doing it for the reasons I think they should but the fact "95% of UK card transactions are made using payment systems owned by Mastercard & Visa" is a market-domination, national security problem that should've been addressed a long time ago

Co-sign.

We should try to come up with ways to make the ultra-rich contribute to the public goods on which their wealth depends. Any ideas? Anyone? Personally, I’m just stumped. Darn.

Picture showing Epstein and Steve Bannon taking a joint selfie in a mirror.

“Despite.” What, because we
think Steve Bannon is normally the model of strict character standards?

Cautionary tale: I asked Gemini to transcribe a 1-page PDF from The Morning Post from the early 1800s. I was interested in testing its accuracy.

It hallucinated a full transcription of book review that doesn't exist and then invented false citations when I asked where the review was from.
#AI

Good luck, friends. But know that you don’t stand a chance.

Because legally qualified American voters don't want to be harassed and intimidated by masked gunmen as a condition of going to vote. Is that really hard to understand?

I had to do that to talk to @sarahkbowen.bsky.social but I was in grad school and my roommates demanded Leinenkugel’s.

three panel webcomic 1st panel: one man says to another "we invented a robot that answers questions" 2nd panel: he continues "we just have to feed it 10 baby giraffes a day" 3rd panel: the other man asks "but it answers the questions correctly?" and the first man replies "oh my goodness, no. no no no no no."

It's Mandatory Monday and AI is clearly the future.
mandatoryrollercoaster.com/post/8081046...

Seems like “alleged” is a better word than “suspected,” NY Times. Or better yet, “The administration claims without evidence that the people it has killed are smuggling drugs.”

They’re saying very clearly what they plan to do.

I see a graphic work developing that would very effectively lay out the case against publicly funded stadiums!

These are concentration camps and its our duty as citizens to ensure these things don't get built.

Gonna side with my local theatre on this one. Defund ICE.