Matt Disaster

This is how much they’ve wasted *so far*, and only *directly*. It’s going to be nearly impossible to quantify the losses from driving employees out, losing core competencies of agencies, etc.

if you’re cis & you want to see what the lab is cooking up for the future of US trans people, gwen’s coverage of texas legislature sessions—like for example this session where they put a trans bathroom ban (where no assaults have happened) in front of flood relief (where people died)—is essential.

This is an important point

Much in DC in its formative years as our capital was deliberately “plain”

Because our government was supposedly not going to reflect the excess & exclusion of Old World royalty

The White House is stately & straightforward as a statement of principle

You know.
No kings.

Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping | TechCrunch Internet giant Cloudflare says it detected Perplexity crawling and scraping websites, even after customers had added technical blocks telling Perplexity not to scrape their pages.

NEW: CloudFlare says it detected Perplexity scraping and crawling websites that explicitly block it from scraping them.

Based on customers' complaints and its own experiments, the company says Perplexity is using "stealth" bots and changing its bots "user agent" to circumvent restrictions.

yet again banging my drum of what wealthy in new york have been trying to pull off is what was done to san francisco over decades, making it so expensive even city workers can't afford to live there anymore, and they're sooooo pissed they haven't managed it yet

They're still acting as if they must cling to norms so that when they get back in power (they don't realize that's an "if") Trumpists will play "fair" with them. Let it go, frightened little Democrats, let it go.

i really wish i could point to the exact writer or piece of writing that helped me understand that the american south in particular is a great historical example of how eagerly capital will shoot itself in the foot to maintain white supremacy, like you can set your watch to it

Gov. Greg Abbott threatens Texas House Democrats with removal from office for fleeing state The governor also alleged absconding Democrats may have committed felonies by fundraising to cover the $500-a-day fines they will face under House rules.

Buried in this story is Abbott's threat to charge citizens who donate to their Democratic legislators with criminal bribery.

www.texastribune.org/2025/08/03/t...

Re the Hatch Act, they literally staged the 2020 Republican convention from the White House. Like physically there, at the White House. When anyone said "Isn't that the biggest Hatch Act violation in history?" they said "Go to hell, we do whatever we want."

The way the US rocketed back to medieval times in just seven months is a bit of a wounder.

Community Colleges Have Been Hit by Trump’s War on Elite Universities Measures intended to punish elite universities are inflicting collateral damage on the nation’s two-year colleges, which educate 40 percent of all undergraduates.

"They’re after the Ivy League institutions, but we’re affected by the same legislation, the same executive orders ... Except it can be worse for us, because our students are more diverse, and they need different kinds of support." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/m...

‘He has trouble completing a thought’: bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump’s mental acuity Joe Biden was hounded for his age-related gaffes, but Trump’s increasingly strange behavior has largely been ignored

It's pretty notable to me that it's the US branch of the Guardian publishing this. Most of the other big national papers have been notable in their refusal to acknowledge the president's visible senility

This is such an important story. It shows just how dangerous things could be for some time and just how deep our descent into authoritarianism already is.

You see stuff like this and you really have to wonder if we're headed for a break-up or civil war.

I already hated those spam emails and texts, but knowing that only a tiny portion of the money they raise goes to actual campaigns fills me with disgust

I overheard a guy at the airport bragging about being at January 6th and I walked by him sitting in first class. Wealthy business owners stormed the capitol. January 6th was loaded with people who had the leisure time and travel budget to be there. Interrogate who is telling you to hate the poor.

Niemöller was a Nazi. He fought in the Freikorps. He was a willing participant in the Third Reich because he had sought and received assurances from Hitler himself that the Nazis would not go after Protestants. Then he ended up in a Camp. He was wrong. That’s why he wrote the poem.

I have come to learn that it's quite radical to believe that Black and Brown folks deserve dignity, especially in a hierarchy that upholds rich white people at all costs. What's taking place right now is these ol' boys networks trying to reel it in back to when they had power exclusively.

also the people vowing to impeach and remove him would be legitimately elected

also removing a fascist from office by whatever means is an antifascist act, stop reading the rulebook on behalf of the Nazi team

Mothership Strategies is destroying the Democratic Party to enrich itself.

I think the use of chatbots for stuff like this is intended to train people to use it to avoid everything that’s painful or hard. It can write the obituary, the breakup text, the complaint letter. It’s meant to separate humans from their difficult feelings. Seems bad.

it's a reality that this is the mindset of a lot of modern/younger media across sports. goes well beyond WWE stuff. whether gumption or cluelessness, at least it's an admission. that's not what the job is meant to be, but it is what the job has unfortunately largely become.

Arctic Ecosystems Are Falling Apart Under Strain of Warming Climate Arctic environments are entering dangerous feedback loops that accelerate the climate crisis.

Arctic environments are entering dangerous feedback loops that accelerate the climate crisis.

I think it’s telling that rather than funding a world that allows more people to be able to make art, the goal of the tech overlords is to plagiarize the history of the arts to get rid of human makers and technique while concentrating more wealth into the hands of a few. I don’t know how that’s good

Anti-Scam, Anti-Corruption, Anti-Kids Gloves. Need DOJ and SEC to have the legion of staff and the leaders with the temperament needed to not let rich fuckers off. Equal enforcement of the laws!

This is existential now. Democrats have to do the same or they'll never weild power again.

When the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Eric Schiermeyer heard that President Trump was holding small group dinners with major donors, he saw opportunity. Mr. Schiermeyer reached out to a lobbyist with connections in Mr. Trump’s orbit, who arranged for him to attend a dinner with the president at his private Mar-a-Lago club on March 1 in exchange for donations to a pro-Trump PAC called MAGA Inc. totaling $1 million. The personal and corporate donations were among dozens of seven- and eight-figure contributions to MAGA Inc. from crypto and other interests revealed in a campaign finance filing on Thursday night that hinted at the access Mr. Trump accords those willing to pay. At the dinner, Mr. Schiermeyer, who had never given a federal political donation before, presented an idea for a cryptocurrency called “U.S.A. Token” that would be distributed to every citizen, according to interviews and a flier he distributed to attendees that sets out details of the proposal. He hoped it could be su

Cryptocurrency interests, which have benefited from the Trump administration’s dismantling of a yearslong government crackdown and from the Trump family’s financial interest in the industry, appear to have been the most generous industry, accounting for nearly $45 million in donations to MAGA Inc.An affiliate of the exchange Crypto.com gave $10 million, while the crypto services company Blockchain.com donated $5 million. The venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who are heavily invested in crypto, gave $3 million each. Ondo Finance, which has a partnership with the Trump family’s crypto company, donated $2.1 million to MAGA Inc., on top of $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

The scale of Trump's pay-for-access scheme outlined by the @nytimes.com is mindblowing. Crypto contributions resulting in business deals with the Trump family crypto businesses, oil companies buying influence and later reaping benefits from friendly policies, and a $1 million pardon.

You want to be more politically active? Make friends online with folks who live in geographically disparate locations but share similar political priorities and then do this and schedule a once a week "book club" to share what you're working on and what you learned. It will motivate and educate you!

It is precisely the unsustainability and undesirability of AI that makes it so important for fascists to push thru. It is a perfect object for their attempt to make the world as they want it regardless of what anyone else wants. It's not about profit, it's about power

“The memo is alarming, because it speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment,” Carrie Lee, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund…”We don’t want the military doing law enforcement. It absolutely undermines the rule of law.”