Alex Kerchner

MAGA is all about making a world in which the most mediocre - in either intelligence, academic accomplishment, ethics, talent or charisma - are the winners.

These are the ones who could never make it to the top unless we inverted the pyramid. Seeing Black ppl at the top spurred them to action.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Gunman in Deadly C.D.C. Shooting Fixated on Covid Vaccine, Officials Say

RFK Jr. knows the consequences of his rhetoric.

“Mr. Kennedy has previously called the C.D.C. a “cesspool of corruption,” and a fascist enterprise. He accused C.D.C. employees of covering up vaccine harms to children, comparing it to the Catholic Church’s coverup of child sex abuse.”

Gift link.

Exactly right.

They simply want the end product — whether it’s an actual production of art or music or the end result of hard work like a PhD — without doing the work.

It’s cheat codes all the way down.

As things stand, Ukraine and Europe are on the verge of being confronted with exactly the kind of Faustian deal they feared would emerge back in February. The fact that Europe hasn’t moved to block such a deal in the past six months is a failure of leadership and diplomacy.

/1

This really feels like a defining post of our time

The mRNA vaccine platform has already been assessed across diverse clinical indications, many with remarkable progress:
—cancer neoantigen vaccines [in patients with refractory disease (e.g. pancreatic)]
—more than 15 infectious diseases
—autoimmune diseases
—rare disease for genome editing

this work saved millions of lives in 2021, won the Nobel Prize in 2023, and is cancelled in 2025

I am going to be a massive humorless asshole about woo-woo shit, no matter how seemingly harmless, for the rest of my life due to this. astrology, homeopathic medicine, etc etc it's all bullshit and it's not fucking harmless. there are people who will die due to this who would have otherwise lived.

I'm not sure it has registered widely and deeply enough that the FBI director—along with the director of national intelligence—is making up lies to create predicates for sham DOJ investigations and perhaps prosecutions of Trump's critics and foes. This is what happens in an authoritarian state.

I'm angry all the time these days, but it's actually unfathomable to me that one person has the power to halt scientific progress, doing *generational* damage. For literally all of our sakes, someone needs to do something. Get this man out of the government.

Monied right-wing donors have been investing millions, like tens of millions, in batshit nobodies for years with an eye toward legitimizing disinformation and fascist propaganda. Monied left-wing donors have responded by hoping that, I guess, Maddow does a real good show sometimes

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

As end-of-empire scenarios go it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70s doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones.

The Renewable Illusion: Why Fossil Fuels Keep Winning Global renewables hit records in 2024, but fossil fuel use still rises. Here’s why solar’s surge isn’t enough—and what the latest energy data really shows.

1. This is something I've been saying for 25 years, but it's hard to get many people to listen. What counts is not the new energy sources you add, but the old ones you retire. Unfortunately it's politically easier to build renewables than to shutter fossil fuels.🧵
www.forbes.com/sites/rrapie...

What We Lost When We Lost the Greatest Generation It's no coincidence that democracy is backsliding in the US exactly eighty years after the end of World War II.

We are losing the last of the generation who understand just how evil actual fascism is, how hard it is to rid the world of authoritarian governments once they’re established, and how hard it is to build a successful alternative. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/what-we-lo...

The problem with the horse-race coverage of Trump II is that, across the board, he is destroying nonzero sum arrangements: rule of law, institutions, collective goods, trade relationships, alliances.

So what the media portrays as a win for Trump is usually a net loss for everyone, including the US.

Wittgenstein said “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”.

I think the 21st century equivalent is now “that an LLM can talk does not mean that we understand it”.

The formal similarities of LLM language can breadcrumb us into making unjustified phenomenological assumptions about LLMs.

“On June 15, 1992, [Dan] Quayle altered 12-year-old student William Figueroa's correct spelling of "potato" to "potatoe" at the Muñoz Rivera Elementary School spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey. He was the subject of widespread ridicule for his error.” — @wikipedia.org

the free press is completely unhinged. this is about the NYT initially omitting from its story about starvation in Gaza that one of the profiled children has a pre-existing medical condition. what is the "damage" what was done by that omission, exactly?

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

August 1, 2025 AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION Committee on Economic Statistics and Committee on Government Relations Statement from the American Economic Association on the Dismissal of the BLS Commissioner Leaders of the American Economic Association express their grave concern over the dismissal of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) earlier today. The independence of the federal statistical agencies is essential to the proper functioning of a modern economy. Accurate, timely, and impartial statistics are the foundation upon which households, businesses, and policymakers make critical decisions. Undermining the independence or credibility of these agencies threatens the integrity of the information that markets, institutions, and the public rely on every day. Measuring the vast and dynamic U.S. economy in real time is inherently challenging. It is standard practice for statistical estimates to be revised as more complete and higher-quality data become available. These revisions reflect the commitment of statistical agencies to accuracy, transparency, and methodological rigor-not failure or bias. The BLS has long had a well-deserved reputation for professional excellence and nonpartisan integrity. Safeguarding this tradition is vital for the continued health of the U.S. economy and public trust in our institutions. We call upon elected officials to respect and preserve the independence of the nation's statistical infrastructure. Lawrence Katz President, American Economic Association Katharine Abraham President-Elect, American Economic Association Karen Dynan Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics Kenneth Troske Chair, American Economic Association Committee on Government Relations

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing

As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements

This is a big deal

I remember once astonishing a colleague’s husband when he naively asked why we (historians) couldn’t just look something up on the internet and we had to explain that WE are the ones who find the stuff and add it to the internet

Commentary: The health crisis in the USSR: looking behind the facade My first visit to the USSR was in February 1981, by coincidence at exactly the same time that Nick Eberstadt published a commentary on ‘The health crisis i

In a strange circularity, it seems that all the work I was doing in the early 1990s on concealment/distortion of statistics by USSR & DDR is becoming very relevant now

academic.oup.com/ije/article-...

Most regular folks don't wake up worrying about institutions. They have more immediate concerns.

But once you live through a period when core institutions fail, you start paying attention, and historical memory is rebuilt for a time.

We're going through one of those moments now.

if i were a pro-trump financial type i might view the destruction of reliable government data with the kind of anger and apprehension that might lead me to reevaluate my politics, but then if i’m a financial guy throwing my weight behind strongman rule, i’m already too stupid to breathe

From left to right, Dr. Albert Mulenga, William Tae Heung Kim, Dr. Thu Thuy Nguyen, Dr. Alex Kiarie Gaithuma, Dr Hassan Hakimi and Emily Bencosme Cuevas. Kim is a Texas A&M researcher who was detained in San Francisco last Monday despite being a permanent resident of the United States and a green card holder. COURTESY OF TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

I NEED to tell you the story of Tae Heung “William” Kim.

He's a graduate student at Texas A&M where he's working on a vaccine for Lyme disease.

He's a *legal permanent resident* of the United States.

And he's been in ICE detention for 12 days & counting, transferred Tuesday to South Texas.