CJ de Boix, mechanical owl, they/them👽🌈♿

As always with anti-trans and broader anti-queer bigotry, it's about keeping us closeted and on the margins of society, where we have less power and safety, where our dignity and humanity can be violated with impunity. That's the kind of society they want. It's not the kind you should want.

And in that pause between pitch and contact - longer than logic, shorter than hope - we remembered why baseball existed long before we judged a sport's value by viral moments and betting apps. It is the romance of failure. The mortal beauty of trying and missing seven times out of 10 and still being considered great. It is the only sport where patience is a weapon, and panic the surest death. You cannot simply run out the clock in baseball; you must face it, pitch by terrifying pitch, until it finally releases you.

Did not expect one of the best paragraphs I’d read about baseball would come from an Irish newspaper

www.irishexaminer.com/sport-column...

"They hate your guts. They despise everything you stand for, and we're running out of time to stop them," a somber looking Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears says in a recent campaign ad. "This election, don't let radicals decide what kind of man gets to undress next to your daughter at school."

Anti-LGBTQ groups are churning out surveys claiming fewer kids are out as trans. Most of the methods are trash, but let’s imagine for a moment it was true.

Honest question: would you? Few people will ever have a fraction of the courage it takes to be a teenage trans girl today in Trump’s America.

my high school teacher mom is individually raising money to help cover the expense for the kids who are losing SNAP coverage at her school and members of Congress make roughly 2-4 times the income of the average high school teacher in America

As a native Angeleno, who may never get to visit my hometown again so images like these carry too much sorrow and horror, I say from the depths of my soul:

Fuck the LAPD. Defund them into oblivion. The community deserves to be safe and free of their terror.

= Forward JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. Support Us A few days later came another night I'll never forget - the Israelis for Peace vigil marking two years since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. Hundreds gathered - Israelis, Palestinians, Jews, Arabs, Americans - huddled together on folding chairs in Union Square in chilly weather, under an open sky. As part of a wide-ranging lineup, from the stage, I read a message from Liat Atzili, whose husband Aviv was killed that day; a short, piercing story by Etgar Keret; and a poem by Mahmoud Darwish that hung in the air like a spell. And there was Mamdani again, sitting quietly in the front row next to Lander. He didn't take the microphone. He didn't try to center the event on himself. He was just listening. Bearing witness. His presence wasn't performative. It was pastoral. In a city that so often divides its grief by identity, he crossed the invisible line and simply showed up. That's when it hit me: This is what safety looks like. Not fences or slogans, not solidarity-as-branding - but the radical act of standing with people in pain, without needing to own or edit it.

“[Mamdani’s] presence wasn’t performative. It was pastoral. In a city that so often divides its grief by identity, he crossed the invisible line and simply showed up.”

i love this forward.com/opinion/7805...

This was great. From Christopher Marlowe to Dorothy Thompson's "Who Goes Nazi?" Come for the Faust, stay for the antifascism.

"Mephisto" (based on the Klaus Mann character) needs to become common parlance.

This makes me absolutely incandescent

My congratulations to all Baseball Perverts. It was their "super bowl" last night and it seems they all had a very bad time (in their culture that's how you have a good time)

YouTube video by BlackForager A VERY IMPORTANT AUTUMN PSA 🍂

I don't live in a region that has autumn really per se, but for those of you who do, #leavetheleaves

#autumn #fall #ecology youtube.com/shorts/d0yBw...

Recently my brother in law explained what gerrymandering was to a coworker and they didn’t believe him because if that were really happening there would be riots in the street

When you see Mamdani looking all normal doing normal person things—petting bodega cats, riding public transport—you realize just how bizarre and estranged our average candidate for public office is. Rich martians in flesh suits

As an educator it feels like I'm told to sacrifice my students' wellbeing and intellect in order to actively destroy their material future.
It's so incredibly harmful for students at every single level: the air they breath, the way they see themselves, the power they have to enact change, etc.

Because they couldn’t sell them, they’re giving the ugly ass things to the cops

Damn

We're seeing in real time that many people are already in hell in that they carry hell with them wherever they go. Those making fun of people on SNAP are already in hell.

It’s basically Deep Space Nine.

This is such a great quote and I'm not saying that simply because I personally relate to it

Fires. The military occupation. The ongoing paramilitary occupation. Repeated attacks on peaceful demonstrations by local cops. Continued hardships as the studios don't do more production in the city. Los Angeles is struggling this year. This win means a lot.

They better not go and shake that man’s hand while he’s kidnapping folks from the community that made them

Note: while not unprecedented, it’s actually pretty rare for a sitting Catholic bishop to participate in a demonstration. It’s just not generally what Catholic bishops do.

Thus: Getting the hierarchy involved in this protest outside an ICE facility is no small thing.

Trump deported Iranian Christians with open asylum claims for religious persecution four weeks ago.

He expelled other Iranian Christians, including children, to Panama in February.

The absolutely brilliant pitch perfect troll of getting targeted by your opponent with virulent Islamophobia and then immediately releasing an ad in all Arabic.

All political ads should feature the candidate petting a cat

This is where the stigma of "white trash" comes from, that it's particularly shameful for whites to not be financially better off than Blacks. That shame burdens the individual, disrupts class solidarity, and makes it easier for those in power to ignore the systemic causes of poverty that impact all

And there's also the insidious ploy of shaming White ppl into silence for failing like those lazy Blacks who abuse the welfare programs. That's how you destroy class solidarity -- make White ppl ashamed to advocate for their own interests bc they think they're the only White ppl using SNAP.

Republicans understand that the best way to kill social programs is to paint their beneficiaries as Black, as support for these programs declines — even amongst white people who need them — when they think large numbers of Black people will benefit.

news.stanford.edu/stories/2018...

Fox News has “corrected” a piece about videos of Black women complaining about losing SNAP benefits, finally pointing out that they were AI-generated. Since these videos don’t involve real people, I imagine there’s little liability for so-called “news outlets” reporting racist AI propaganda as fact.

“Trump and Rubio at the Mar-a-Lago Halloween Party, on day 31 of the shutdown. Official theme is Gatsby and 'a little party never killed nobody, we're told.”

“The absolute worst part of working at a food bank is when you gotta tell people, 'that's all we got today. We're out.' And you know you can't send them anywhere because they're going to be out, too.”

www.npr.org/2025/10/29/g...