Moira Birss

The fact that a second strike like that in an armed conflict is definitely a war crime should not completely negate the fact that *there is no war* and ALL the strikes are cold-blooded murder. The whole chain of command are murderers.

Of course, the insurance commissioner doesn't have the power to enact all these policies on their own. But a principled, visionary commissioner would speak plainly about those limitations, articulate a vision to fix the problem, and work with (and/or push) lawmakers to enact that vision.

Insurers of Last Resort: Why Today’s FAIR Plans Need a Redesign to Address the Home Insurance Crisis This report examines the history, structure, governance, and financial exposure of every state insurer of last resort program in the United States and offers recommendations for FAIR Plan reform.

A holistic policy approach to the home insurance crisis like the Housing Resilience Agency model would transform the outdated and malfunctioning FAIR Plan model, which provides bare-bones coverage, often at higher prices, and is still run by industry!
climateandcommunity.org/research/ins...

Protection or Profit? Transformative Solutions to the Home Insurance Crisis CCI’s proposal to transform home insurance involves states creating entities, termed Housing Resilience Agencies (HRAs), to run the state’s housing risk-reduction work and home disaster insurance prov...

The Housing Resilience Agency approach marries proactive risk reduction with public disaster insurance.

That both makes our housing safer AND keeps the profiteering out of protecting our homes & financial resources in the wake of disasters. climateandcommunity.org/research/pro...

The amount of corruption & profiteering in insurance is why in CA we desperately need:

1) an insurance commissioner who's principled & visionary

2) a new policy approach to home insurance that prioritizes protection over profits, like the Housing Resilience Agency proposed by @cplusc.bsky.social

This is great reporting. To complement it, I'm reposting my post-fires analysis - rebuilding with gas puts these communities, and the communities that surround them, in multiple forms of danger.

heatmap.news/ideas/la-fir...

External to what?

A woman with brown skin and glasses holds up a protest sign reading “SILENT NO MORE - MMIW - Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women - No More Stolen Sisters”

Icymi: A week before Thanksgiving, the Trump administration deleted the Federal Report on Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women

The ‘Not One More’ report recorded indigenous deaths and disappearances, and provided resources and policy suggestions to address the crisis

www.jezebel.com/trump-admin-...

Jen Angel Podcast Episode · Snap Judgment · 11/20/2025 · 49m

When my friend Jen was killed, we knew she would want us to do things differently when it came to how the legal system would treat the people involved.

This Snap Judgment episode tells some of that story in much of its complexity.

Love you, Jen. 💔
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...

Crypto Bros Are Trying to Bankrupt Honduras for Scuttling Their Private Cities - FPIF After throwing off its narco-dictatorship, Honduras is trying to take its cities back from U.S.-based libertarians.

Bizarre only in the lengths to which these zealot crypto bros will go to exploit other people, places, and resources for their own personal experimentation and hoarding.
fpif.org/crypto-bros-...

Glad to see a more balanced take on the Zillow climate risk story than most commentary, which simply wants a return to black-box models for individual use. As @madisoncondon.bsky.social wrote, "There needs to be a broader institutional solution to this problem." www.linkedin.com/posts/madiso...

In the 2000s, Colombian drug trafficking paramilitary leaders fought tooth and nail to avoid extradition to the US cuz they thought they'd receive much harsher punishment here than at home. No longer.

JOH was not only a drug trafficker; his administration was responsible for state violence, blatant corruption, and election tampering. Sound familiar? www.thenation.com/article/worl...

Are we living in an episode of The Diplomat?

And those rich enough to be able to be picky about where they live.

Billionaires, while building their own luxury bunkers for “apocalypse insurance," are funding groups telling Dems to forget about climate action. We just published a memo laying out why that'd be a huge political mistake. aaronregunberg.substack.com/p/this-data-...

Don’t forget the biodiversity benefits of forests. Not to mention cultural, social, etc. They’re way more than carbon ingesters!

The DC shooting story is really getting to me because we literally trained this man as a child soldier for a death squad in a forever war and Stephen Miller et al want to blame it on other cultures? It's our culture, American culture, that killed that woman.

It’s not a great deal if you don’t need it. And especially this year, others really need support. So for all of us who have enough, let’s refuse to get sucked into the holiday shopping frenzy and share instead of shop. We don’t need more stuff, we need communities where all our neighbors are safe.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. "The order was to kill everybody," one of them said. A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack - the opening salvo in the Trump administration's war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth's instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

This is murder. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Without farmworkers we wouldn’t be able to celebrate Thanksgiving. Be thankful for their hard work this holiday season!

Sin los trabajadores agrícolas no podríamos celebrar el Día de Acción de Gracias. ¡Agradece su arduo trabajo en estas fiestas!

#WeFeedYou #Thanksgiving

Every year around this time, I ask folks to consider doing something in support of Native people. This year, please join me in supporting the Native Organizers Alliance as they build grassroots power, defend Native voting rights, and equip our people for collective struggle through skill-building.

In some places, former presidents who plot insurrections are held accountable.

Insurers of Last Resort: Why Today’s FAIR Plans Need a Redesign to Address the Home Insurance Crisis This report examines the history, structure, governance, and financial exposure of every state insurer of last resort program in the United States and offers recommendations for FAIR Plan reform.

we need policy action that tackles climate risk, corporate accountability & public capacity head-on. That can start with reforming state FAIR plans to make insurance markets more stable, sustainable & fair to homeowners & housing providers, as we lay out here: climateandcommunity.org/research/ins...

Insurers of last resort are failing households FAIR Plans were created in the 1960s as a temporary public policy response to an insurance market failure.

model for our time. As I wrote recently, part of why climate-driven disasters are stretching the last-resort model is the programs were designed as an industry-friendly temporary stop-gap in the era of redlining. The model is no longer fit for purpose. Instead... insurancenewsnet.com/innarticle/i...

How a US home insurance fix is becoming a problem U.S. states have set up insurers to provide protection in disaster-prone areas that private insurance has avoided. They are taking on more risks as calamities become widespread.

Reuters has a new story on state insurer-of-last-resort programs being stretched to their limits, using data from @cplusc.bsky.social's recent report.

What I would add to this coverage is more analysis of WHY these programs are in trouble & whether it's the right...
www.reuters.com/graphics/USA...

Make America healthy again amirite?

Protection or Profit? Transformative Solutions to the Home Insurance Crisis CCI’s proposal to transform home insurance involves states creating entities, termed Housing Resilience Agencies (HRAs), to run the state’s housing risk-reduction work and home disaster insurance prov...

At @cplusc.bsky.social we’ve developed a model for a state agency that oversees risk mitigation w/ dedicated funding. This would protect it from general fund politics & be a system to equitably & effectively implement mitigation. Plus a fix for home insurance: climateandcommunity.org/research/pro...

Hell yes.

Abolishing ICE is only the beginning. Have you looked at your local cops?

..

According to mappingpoliceviolence.us, police kill at least three people per day; from a meta analysis published in NYT, we now know the number could be six or even more.