Evan Manvel

> @jimlaporta.bsky.social

It’s not supporting the troops to send them off to kill and die in an illegal war of aggression whose purpose is to make sure that their votes don’t count.

A United States senator from the president's own party, one who serves on the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, has no idea what's going on as America goes to war with Iran.

U.S. military spending is set to hit a record $1.5 trillion.

Roughly half of defense spending goes to private contractors that routinely price-gouge the government.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has failed EIGHT straight audits.

The military industrial complex is cheering today.

BREAKING: Adolescent teenage boys have taken over the Pentagon.

While we sit around to find out how bad exactly it all is, a bit of cheer: the best baguette of Paris competition was won by a Sri Lankan who appears to have started as a dish washer in restaurants and eventually trained as a Boulanger.

www.paris.fr/pages/la-mei...

Anyone working in "news" or "politics" needs to finally wrap their minds around the idea that X isn't reaching anyone that matters. You're wasting your time pitching no one. You're wasting your money pitching no one.

Political cartoon with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, seeing a fifth Horseman typing on a smart phone. Death asks him “And you are? The fifth Horseman replies “Misinformation.”

Timeless. #UrbanTruth

Update on the people making bank insider-betting on war bsky.app/profile/chri...

Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) [Downes, Alexander B.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

In sum, FIRC is sold to the public as a quick path to stability.

Yet, 120 cases across two centuries suggest it is one of the most reliable ***generators*** of instability outside of interstate war.

amazon.com/dp/1501761145

THIS.

I use these words advisedly: Holy fucking shit.

Being a trans journalist is going to work and having to cover how your life is now illegal in your state but also at the same time make sure someone else writes the story so no one can accuse you of being biased and a "trans activist" and then they do the story and you still get accused of it.

Your tax dollars at work

srsly how

I made a poster about this in college in the 1990s, but included the interstellar space probe as the most efficient.

The Most Efficient Traveler Isn’t a Bird or a Fish—It’s You on a Bike A famous graphic, now updated, compares locomotion in the animal kingdom

“They turn humans into this hyperefficient terrestrial locomotor because they make being on land more like swimming.”

The most efficient traveller is you on a bike. #UrbanTruth

Via Scientific American @sciam.bsky.social www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...

The History We Hide: Trump’s War on Memory MAGA wants to make us forget about our eliminationist past—so they can repeat it.

There really wasn't much of substance to engage with in Trump's SOTU, but the childish, 1950s-vintage vision of US History it ended with is notable for its ultra-nationalist and eliminationist logic. David Neiwert gets at it here. open.substack.com/pub/davidnei...

Quite apart from politics, which is how so many blinkered people see this issue, no reporter at your local school committee board or town council meeting means no one is watching when someone’s brother-in-law gets a no-bid contract. The increase in penny ante corruption must be breathtaking.

A comic of a bird singing about somebody eating their babies, and a crow responding that they did and they'd do it again. And below them, it is a man listening to a cd of their conversation entitled "relaxing bird sounds"

When I hear lovely birdsong in the morning, I remember this comic and laugh

Trump: "I kept my promise to 'drill, baby, drill."

The result? Electricity prices have increased nationwide by 13% last year and are projected to continue rising at 2x the rate of inflation.

But, hey, at least our air and water are more polluted than ever and climate change is running amok! #SOTU

Dow 50,000!

Also 21st out of 23.

Right to the city or right to park a car? Acceptability of parking management for a social-ecological transformation of urban neighbourhoods Public space in urban neighbourhoods is scarce and has to meet a multitude of different demands, triggering conflicts between residents due to diverse…

Yet another recent study in Frankfurt, Germany. Man, those Germans must really hate freedom

Curb parking pricing for local residents: An exploration in New York City based on willingness to pay This paper investigates the feasibility of charging residents for on-street parking in dense urban neighborhoods as a way to clear parking supply and …

And hey, in this 2013 study in NYC, more than half of survey respondents were willing to pay "an average permit fee of $408 per year" for parking. But I already hear the people coming to tell me that NYC is not "real America."

This is the political movement that convinced a non-trivial amount of Americans that they were going to “protect women’s sports.”

The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents | Fortune Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations “screwed up” giving students access to so much technology: “I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”

Turns out just making information available is not better than teaching kids how to learn
fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

Remember when he was preparing to buy Twitter and many of us were saying, but what about the racism?, and most people were indignantly insisting, "he's not racist!"

Just like with Trump. And now here we are.

Have you noticed how navigation apps include walking & waiting for public transit, but excludes parking & walking for driving? After being late a few times 😅, we finally did. We got curious: what if these apps account for parking?