Ben Carlos Thypin

May he be the first of many

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

Advocates standing on the steps in Albany with Andrew Gounardes speaking in front

Kicking off our rally for the Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act with @agounardes.bsky.social @nyamcunningham.bsky.social , @lindabrosenthal.bsky.social and @briankavanagh.bsky.social

“Because of our failure to build more housing in this state, New York is projected to lose two house seats.”

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By Patrick Clark and Sridhar Natarajan 02/03/2026 10:14:54 [BN] (Bloomberg) -- Builders are working on a plan for a massive program to develop "Trump Homes" that would address the US affordability crisis while allowing private capital to deploy many billions of dollars. Lennar Corp. and Taylor Morrison Home Corp. are among the firms that have worked on the proposal, which calls for builders to sell entry-level homes into a pathway-to-ownership program funded by private investors, according to people familiar with the plan.

Under one iteration of the plan, the investors would rent out the homes to tenants, whose monthly payments would, after three years, be counted toward a down payment if they wished to purchase the home. Such a program would be complicated to implement, one of the people said, and it's possible that it won't gain enough support to move forward. Even so, it demonstrates builders' desire to gain the favor - or at a minimum, avoid the ire - of an unusually transactional White House. The size of the program would ultimately depend on how many builders decide to participate, though a person involved in the plan said that builders have discussed aiming for as many as 1 million homes. At that number, the program would likely deliver more than $250 billion worth of housing. The administration is not actively considering the plan, a White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity,

Truly in “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” territory here.

exactly. this is not difficult.

as.ft.com/r/58ed1b23-d...

At the heart of their demands is the question of whether he can comply with the board’s mission to ensure the safety and education of all students when his job involves arresting immigrants, many of whom have children in the district. Nearly 30% of students in the district identified as Hispanic or Latino in 2024-25 and 5% were English language learners, according to state education data. Their demands, however, have been rebuffed by the board, which doesn’t see a legal reason to remove Harrigan. Also standing behind him are local elected officials and many Mahopac residents, several of whom turned out for the Jan. 22 school board meeting to voice their support for the trustee, whom they call a devoted community member. Some supporters believe the efforts to remove Harrigan because of his job come from a politically motivated minority of outsiders and do not respond to any specific incidents or complaints against him. They warn that targeting an elected official for his job could set a dangerous precedent.

Really terrible for immigrant families upstate: a member of the local school board in Mahopac is an ICE deportation officer. www.timesunion.com/hudsonvalley...

The Government Published Dozens of Nude Photos in the Epstein Files

NEW: The Justice Department published dozens of unredacted images of nude women (and possibly teens) as part of its Epstein release.

The faces of those people were also left unredacted.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/u...

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Breaking: Texas Democrats score landslide upset in race Trump badly wanted to win Taylor Rehmet just flipped a deep-red seat—and gave his party a shot in the arm

BREAKING: Texas Democrat Taylor Rehmet just won a *massive* landslide to flip a deep-red Senate district. He's up by 14 points in a Trump+17 seat—an overperformance of more than 30 points.

How did he do it? Here's our full writeup:

Mamdani names reformer Stanley Richards to steer chaotic Rikers complex Exactly one month into his term, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed a formerly incarcerated person to manage the facility.

Mayor Mamdani names criminal justice reformer Stanley Richards as NYC’s new Department of Correction commissioner

Richards is the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the city’s jails system

@gothamist.com @wnyc.org

gothamist.com/news/mamdani...

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

You should just call people on the phone It's time to hit redial on phone etiquette and bring back randomly calling friends. It's time to raw dial.

My RETVRN belife is that people should just call each other on the phone without scheduling it in advance www.businessinsider.com/iphone-scree...

The Streetsblog Angle: The 70th Street Bike Lane Is In the Epstein Files! - Streetsblog New York City Somewhere, maybe, Woody Allen finally regrets opposing that bike lane.

The 70th Street bike lane is in the Epstein Files. buff.ly/97ywL08

The thing that shocks me most is that all of this incriminating stuff was sitting at the DOJ for 4 years and Biden & Garland were not cynical or ruthless enough to use it against Trump & Musk in the run up to 2024.

If only they were the evil ‘weaponizers of government’ that MAGA claimed they were!

It makes you sound crazy to say this out loud, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the United States government has been effectively toppled by a group of overt pedophiles

Q&A: The Minnesota Timberwolves chaplain who wants NBA stars to melt ICE without slipping Matt Moberg's righteous fury with Donald Trump's immigration crackdown went viral. But he preaches empathy for the NBA stars figuring out how to stand for others without losing themselves.

new: Minnesota Timberwolves chaplain and activist Matt Moberg FaceTimed me from an ICE blanketed parking lot about his empathy for Anthony Edwards, Wemby's provocative statement about the Spurs, and the value (if any) of athletes speaking out.

we ended early because ICE tried to arrest his mom.

Ossoff: "This is a seismic event. This should have people across the country absolutely shook. This is a huge deal. This is an FBI raid on the Fulton County Elections office ... This is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections. He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020."

"State Capacity" is when the govt is able to closely monitor the construction market and issue detailed sectoral indexes that can be used to escalate contracts based on actual market conditions instead of using core inflation of gross aggregate construction indexes

www.insee.fr/fr/statistiq...

But even beyond the demographic specifics of early Gawker, to be a regular commenter anywhere1 is to constantly put yourself in a subject position all but guaranteed to develop the kind of resentment that powers Trumpist politics: Your voice is (literally) suppressed, made subordinate, often hidden; your intelligence and expertise receives a fraction of the attention of the glib P.M.C. blogger you’re responding to, whose attention and approval you both scorn and desire. Among the altogether too many “unfortunate and stressful experiences I had at Gawker that in retrospect prefigured the political dynamics of the Trump era” was the Gawker Hack, in which chat logs between Gawker writers (among other proprietary information) were leaked to the press, including one in which Richard Lawson (now writing the great Premiere Party newsletter) referred to commenters as “peasants.” Any sane person who has ever read ten words of Richard’s writing could immediately and easily identify this as a joke--but many Gawker commenters, paranoid about their own position relative to the writers, neurotic about their emotional investment in a site that mostly ignored their contributions, took real and sustained offense. For years afterward,2 commenters would sometimes refer back to the gag with geniune hurt, seemingly imagining themselves as the Forgotten Men of the Gawker empire (such as it was), discarded and disdained by the haughty bloggers.

That was commenter resentment. Smith mentions that many Trump administration staffers and appointees are “people whose defining experiences in public life involved being silenced by social platforms.” I think just as important to the actual silencing in the self-conception of many Trump ghouls is the sense that some other, less deserving voice was being heard or elevated. There are obvious resonances here with the structure of political feeling that characterizes Trump voters in general. But it’s also basically how angry regular commenters feel about the blogs to which, for whatever reason, they’ve shackled themselves. I suppose my point is that one way of thinking about the Trump era is as: The commenters are running the show now!

an administration of commenters maxread.substack.com/p/the-commen...

NYC’s borough presidents wield new power over housing decisions. How will they use it? Voters empowered the city’s five borough presidents to help overturn City Council land use decisions. Some are already strategizing for controversial votes ahead.

Brooklyn Brooklyn President Antonio Reynoso shares the rubric he’ll use when he considers whether to overturn the City Council’s housing and land use decisions

Reynoso and the 4 other BPs have new power to appear on a housing “appeals board”

@gothamist.com @wnyc.org
gothamist.com/news/nycs-bo...

75-83 Nassau Street Development Site Sold For $53 Million In Manhattan A development site at 75–83 Nassau Street in the Financial District has been sold for $53 million, with plans underway for a new mixed-use tower.

a site just traded that I heard is a possible destination newyorkyimby.com/2026/01/75-8...

in case you're curious about how angry Minnesota is about ICE, it was -20 today

Man, this is really a stunning, spectacular cave from Trump.

I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what's happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

Excellent reporting on a disturbing pastime

You cannot overstate how startling it is to see a politician just say the thing with clarity and poise. No fearful hemming. No overwrought qualifying down til it’s meaningless. No lingering sense that there is a loyalty to a donor class or an ideology of stasis that they’d never admit to.

In a speech to the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney says middle powers such as Canada must accept that the rules-based international order is effectively dead, and great power rivalry with is here to stay. Key excerpt:

Mamdani reverses city hall’s opposition to Bronx supportive housing project The Adams administration had urged the city council to not approve it, citing opposition from local residents.

let’s fucking goooo gothamist.com/news/mamdani...

“Even to build 83 units has taken so much struggle. That should not be so hard. This is an example of the scale of progress that was held up… We want to build as much as possible across this city, for those who call this city home and those who would love to.” @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social