Jack A. Goldstone

In 2024, there were an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the US, a significant decrease of nearly 27% from the previous year. This decline is the largest one-year drop ever recorded in U.S. history regarding drug overdoses. Trump doesn't even know the popuilation of his own country.

The President of Texas A&M should resign, not for the fault of allowing gender identity issues to be discussed in a literature class, but for failing to defend academic freedom and integrity in the face of unscientific views being forced on his university as strict boundaries.

if they found the lecture conflicted with their values. Firing university officials under the obviously false pretext of course description issues, because the Governor and MAGA state officials objected to ANY mention of gender identity issues in a UNIVERSITY (!) classroom is appalling.

to expect any course on literature, even children's literature, to pay attention to how that literature addresses issues of gender.
So this is totally normal. The student who filmed and reported the incident was not "kicked out" of the class, but told (properly) that they were free to leave ...

so that schools can have the same course taught by different faculty in different times. Every faculty member usually puts their own expertise forward in shaping the course they are assigned, as long as the general content conforms to the course description. In 2025, it is not unreasonable...

The pretext for the firing, since what the instructor did was NOT illegal, is that the course content did not match the course description in the catalog (!). If that is grounds for firing, virtually all faculty in the USA are toast. Catalog course content is usually general ...

This opens the way for faculty to be fired for teaching that climate change is a threat, that immigration is important for economic growth, or (ironically) that America is facing creeping authoritarianism. Soon, if MAGA conservatives don't like it, it can no longer be taught.

Texas Professor Fired After Accusations of Teaching ‘Gender Ideology’

Pure political pressure to cancel speech about LGBTQ existence. While Texas banned teaching gender ideology in K-12 schools, there is no law against it in universities. Yet multiple firings after instructor said gender identity is not the same as biological sex. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/u...

WE HAVE OUR ANSWER: SCOTUS overturned the lower court judgement and gave Trump's ICE permission to grab people on the basis of race, accent, job, or location. Thanks to SCOTUS this is no longer a free country for people of Hispanic descent or working in construction or farming or low-wage jobs.

The lower courts are continuing to try to set limits to what POTUS can do: Troops in LA and arbitrary changes to Congressional appropriations have been deemed unlawful. Now we have to wait and see whether SCOTUS agrees or overturns on the basis that the President can do whatever he wants to do.

Yes, because the sun will not come up tomorrow and the winds will forever stop blowing. Insanity.

It's not either or: Changing material conditions can open people to new ideas and create new common sympathies or resentments. Material conditions + ideas + emotions + reactions by states and publics to changing conditions are all part of explaining why revolutions arise and how they unfold.

Have you seen the 100x larger than life banners of Trump on DoL and Ag buildings? Reminds me of nothing so much as Mao's portrait in Tiananmen Sq. Also today: "I have the right to do anything I want to do--I am the President of the United States." Murderers in DC will be executed. Good night USA.

Putin lies to Trump: "You won big in 2020." "If you were President in 2022 there wouldn't have been a war in Ukraine."
And Trump laps it up. Well, maybe the last is true. Putin would still have invaded but made sure Trump wouldn't arm Ukraine, so it all would have been over quickly.

Alaska=Helsinki 2.0. Trump LOVES humilating people, and HATES being humiliated, but with Putin he's ok with it. It's so bizarre that the President of the US has a mancrush on Putin.

Contrary to what Putin told Trump to flatter his vanity, MANY countries have mail-in voting, including such model democracies as Canada, Germany and South Korea. It's a common way to vote where there are many people who are in school or temporarily working outside of their state of residence.

4/ A very sad day for U.S. diplomacy, a very sad day for Ukraine and its European allies, and a jubilant victory for Russia.

3/ Putin came to the U.S., apparently said, “thank you, don’t bother me, I have a war to prosecute” and went home to do just that. The summit was pointless for the US. But for Russia it was gold – a demonstration that Putin could meet with Trump and still keep bombing Ukraine with absolute impunity.

2/ Even as his plane headed back to DC, a new round of drones and missiles was hitting multiple regions in Ukraine. For the US, I think this sadly demonstrates either a weak will or a “lack of cards." Trump badly wanted some kind of agreement & an end to the killing. He got nothing at all.

1/ Nothing new has emerged from the AK summit. No cease-fire, plan or agreement to end the war. This looks like a wretched failure: after touting a meeting for peace, or at least a cease-fire, and rolling out the red carpet for Putin in the United States, Trump comes away empty-handed.

I really don't understand why more people don't see how meeting Putin in Alaska plays into his hands: he can say "Alaska used to part of Russia; now parts of Ukraine will be part of Russia; it's the natural order of things for land to change hands."

PBS and NPR defunded; VoA shrunk and run by MAGA; Trump take-over of Kennedy Center; now Colbert cancelled. (Trump gloated: "Kimmel is next.") We are rapidly moving toward a media environment that is simply MAGA, like communist China and Putin's Russia's one-dimensional media space: pro-goverment.

SCOTUS first said that POTUS is personally immune from prosecution for violating the law. Now it ruled that the rest of us cannot obtain injunction relief if we are impacted by an illegal, unconstitutional action by POTUS. The rule of law is dissolving before our eyes; US is becoming an autocracy.

The Entire Internet Is Reverting to Beta The AI takeover is changing everything about the web—and not necessarily for the better.

Facebook promised to make the safe for democracy; instead it's bots and algorithms are used to undermine democracy around the world. What if AI degrades human thought rather than sharpening it, or makes us less fussy about truth and error as we rely on faulty AI?
www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Well, we try to make it clear what the underlying causes of our problems are, and how to fix them. Unfortunately, it requires courageous political leaders to act on that knowledge. Courage is lacking, so we get awful policies. Do I know how to fix that? Yes, vote in new leaders!

4/Trump's claims on immigration are not just nonsense, they are dangerously distorting reality to make anyone who looks like they might be an immigrant appear dangerous. This has to be stopped.

3/the population of Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, W. Virginia, Idaho, Nebraska, New Mexico, Mississippi, and Kansas COMBINED. That number of dangerous migrants should be immediately noticeable. Yet here we are:
www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

2/ twice the normal immigration rate of 1 million/yr that had been usual before COVID. Encounters at the border were higher, but most of those were quickly deported. Is it remotely plausible that 21 million, most criminal, aliens entered the US during Biden's regime? That would be more than...

1/Trump's ridiculous lies on immigration need to be called out. At the G7 he said Biden allowed "21 million" immigrants into the US and most of them are "criminals" because other countries "emptied their jails." About 4 million immigrants entered during Biden's term, and that is high--about ...

2/ in a young population, certain immigrants may compete with certain native-born workers. But in an aging population, like the U.S., immigrants mostly replenish an aging workforce. In this situation, expelling immigrants will likely damage the overall workforce and economy.