Kristen Collins

Adds for ark.ai defense technology referencing black hawk helicopters, M777 artillery, and Abrams tanks

~*Just dc things*~

Not necessarily complaining

Furiously searching your feed to find your takes on the Taylor album and get this instead

ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’ Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never t...

so the US government just forced a tech company to delete an app it doesn’t like, which is totally normal stuff

www.404media.co/iceblock-own...

Nicholas should screaming “Witness me, blood bag” as he prepares to explode himself captures twenty-first century politics so perfectly it is enough to make Fury Road one of the best movies of our time. Good morning

Now that would be perfect

At that point, if you’re a production studio, I’m gonna wonder about the quality of your aesthetic taste regardless of the obvious AI issues (though I don’t know it’s a British company and don’t pretend to understand what y’all are up to over there)

Gotta say “Tilly Norwood” has got to be one of the most comically bad stage names a company could come up with for trying to market their AI avatars as substitutes for human actors

Judge Rules Trump Unlawfully Targeted Noncitizens Over Pro-Palestinian Speech

Very proud of my colleagues right now--especially @ramyakrishnan.bsky.social and @alexabdo.bsky.social. But we could not have got this far without the superb trial lawyers at Sher Tremonte. Grateful to them for all of the time and energy they put into this case. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/u...

WE WON: "This case -– perhaps the most important ever to fall w/in..this district court squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in US..have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.”"

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples' phones. The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data.

BREAKING: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media.

🔗 www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

New study finds more than 400 pregnancy-related prosecutions after Roe's fall Most of the cases involved allegations of substance use during pregnancy, a nonprofit legal group found.

Over a two-year period, prosecutors across 16 states charged more than 400 people with pregnancy-related crimes, with most of the charges originating in states with near or total abortion bans, according to a new report released Tuesday.

Tired: not having kids because of lack of protections for reproductive healthcare
Wired: not having kids because of widespread military occupation of American cities

Musings 1 To readers of my weekly comments

No longer on a weekly basis, but I could not resist ....
open.substack.com/pub/adamprze...

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

Not engaging in discourse today but am sharing my new letterboxed profile (kstarr84) in case anyone wants to share movie reviews

boxd.it/gg3FX

Unfortunately, it’s tangentially related to my current piece that I’m already locked into, and coming up against a deadline with, but hoping to do more with it in the future—you’ll see it when I do :)

Have only been able to skim so far but was just reading/thinking about the passages yesterday for something I’m working on

stunning development in transatlantic anglophone politics as liberals get St George in the partisan divorce

Fine:

1) What’s happening to the U.S. is part of a transnational far-right, autocratic wave and it cannot be treated as a purely domestic issue

2) A major subset of these dynamics is globalized kleptocracy/oligarchy; tackling that requires rebuilding & enhancing int’l anti-corruption mechanisms

jimmy kimmel rapture supreme court nvidia tylenol autism

Selection from Ben Terri’s NYmag article, “Top Goon,” on the DHS, Kristi Noem, and Corey Lewandowski: His longtime political ally David Bossie told the Times in 2015 that Lewandowski was “as anti-Establishment” as Trump. “Corey is driven by an incredible desire to please and be loved by those in positions of power, all while fighting against convention and normal ways of operating,” a campaign operative who worked with Lewandowski told me. He quickly became known for two things: getting arrested after grabbing the arm of a female reporter at a press conference (charges were dropped) and a political strategy that amounted to “Let Trump be Trump.” He lost his job after allies and donors complained he was running an undisciplined campaign. In the years that followed, Lewandowski would float in and out of Trumpworld but never fall completely out of Trump’s orbit. “The president has always been loyal to people he connects with successful phases of his life,” former Trump adviser Jason Miller told me. Lewandowski’s aggression was also useful. “He is not intimidated by..”

That’s an awful lot of words to say “bootlicker”

Opinion | The MAGA Movement Is Not a Debating Society

a few thoughts (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/o...

As someone who was working in downtown Boston the week following the marathon bombings I can’t emphasize enough how stupid it is to have military all over all the DC metro stations. Like I’m constantly reminding myself that no don’t worry there aren’t terrorists on the run, Big Ballz got beaten up

Wow rough day at the “western civilization discourse” factory isn’t it

You’re right. Not that you were asking but Temu is a super cheap, online consumer goods retailer, so it’s like low-quality or “knock-off.” Or often stuff that looks good online but what arrives is so bad it’s barely recognizable, so perhaps “masquerading as Marxist”

"Connecting the facts of a particular act of political violence to a partisan polarization frame is tempting. But we have to work toward making other kinds of explanations more legible. Sometimes the story is complicated and uncomfortable, and that’s another price of living in a democracy."

Our obsession with narrative is obscuring our understanding of political violence We need to know what happened before we can tell a story about why

Hard agree with @juliaazari.bsky.social here. open.substack.com/pub/goodpoli...