Proof this guy is full of SITH.

“Slotkin has a ‘war plan’ to lose to Trump: Appeal to absolutely no one while trying desperately to appeal to everyone”
There. I fixed it.

A headline from a STAT+ email newsletter that reads: WHO member countries agree on a draft "pandemic treaty" to try to avoid Covid-19 mistakes. American officials were barred from participating in the talks and are not expected to sign the treaty.

In case you’re wondering what stage of fascism and global pariah status we’re at… 🫠

From the article “Everything We Once Believed In” by David Brooks (The Atlantic, May 2025, p. 51): Instead, history has smiled on them. A prominent publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative books is not to write a good book—it's to write a book that will offend the left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it. That led to books with titles such as The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, and to Ann Coulter's entire career. Owning the libs became a lucrative strategy. Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a "meritocratic" caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don't matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.

Me continuing to read and getting to the second paragraph of the next page: 🤦🏻‍♀️ *sigh* so close yet so far

From the article “Everything We Once Believed In” by David Brooks (The Atlantic, May 2025, p. 50): THE PATHETIC THING is that I didn't see this coming even though I've been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference. I should have understood this much sooner, because the reactionaries had revealed their true character as far back as January 1986. A group of progressive students at Dartmouth had erected a shantytown on campus to protest apartheid. One night, a group of 12 students, most of them associated with the right-wing Dartmouth Review, descended on the shanties with sledgehammers and smashed them down. Even then I was appalled. Apartheid was evil, and worth opposing. A nighttime raid with sledgehammers seemed more Gestapo than Burkean. But conservative intellectuals didn't take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mata, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don't know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepy-nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.

Me reading the May 2025 issue of The Atlantic: Holy crap! David Brooks is finally starting to get it!
Me flipping to the next page…

11/ The tariffs aren’t economic policy. They are political weapons.

But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs.

The people still have the power.

4/ British kings used taxation to reward loyalty and punish dissent.

Our own revolution was spurred by the King’s use of heavy taxation of the colonies to punish our push for self governance.

The King’s message was simple: stop protesting and I’ll stop taxing.

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive.

No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.

1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

Lessons from El Salvador for US university leaders facing attacks from Trump US college leaders would do well to reflect on the courage of their counterparts in 1980s El Salvador who opposed injustice despite grave personal risk.

During El Salvador’s long civil war, university leaders in El Salvador advocated for marginalized communities, despite being labeled communists and targeted with death threats. How their leadership could inspire U.S. university presidents:

And there’s a tariff on the island Diego Rivera, a joint U.S.-U.K. military base ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

🐧

Sen. Booker’s speech was a substantive and moral account of this moment. He did not read the phone book. He did not babble.
For 24 hours @booker.senate.gov laid out a detailed, damning, and critical narrative of truth, history, politics, morality, humanity.

What will you do?

Anyone who has had a loved one with dementia knows that moment when their eyes light up and you have them back in full, even just for a brief moment. Embarrassing as I’m sure it felt in the moment, I know what a precious memory that is 😅 A small moment of light during the long goodbye 2/2

The story about @booker.senate.gov escorting his dad to the restroom made me cry because it was hitting home — my dad passed away due to complications from Alzheimer’s in 2020, so it breaks my heart that the research is being stopped. I appreciated the lighthearted twist at the end though. 1/2

a cartoon of homer simpson and marge simpson hugging a baby with the words sequel written on the bottom ALT: a cartoon of homer simpson and marge simpson hugging a baby with the words sequel written on the bottom

Wait…there were more books that @booker.senate.gov’s staff wrote for this moment??? First of all, his staff is AMAZING for all their hard work, and second, does that mean…

Just so everybody understands, Booker has been speaking cogently about the issues the entire time and Strom Thurmond famously spent hours reading from the encyclopedia, because segregationists were and are dumbshits

This has been such an inspiring display of democracy in action. Thank you, Sen. Booker! We the people have been asking for the Dems to do something, and you are meeting the moment!

“I’m not here because of his speech. I’m here despite his speech.”
— Sen. Booker on breaking Strom Thurmond’s record

I want a jet ready to rush Cory Booker to South Carolina once he has broken the record so he can drop a microphone on Strom Thurmond's grave.

Opinion | What Autocrats Want From Academics: Servility In 1931, Italian scholars were made to take loyalty oaths. Will that happen to us?

"On October 8, 1931, a law went into effect requiring every Italian university professor to sign an oath pledging their loyalty to the government of Benito Mussolini. Out of over 1,200 professors in the country, only 12 refused. All of them were immediately fired." www.chronicle.com/article/what...

If you’re in the neighborhood…

Sugarbush mountain report showing ski conditions for the day. Currently reads "Hate does not grow well in the rocky soil of Vermont," along with weather data.

Daily message for Sugarbush.

Thank you for your service, Lucy.

This was up and gone incredibly quickly. I think it deserves to be seen. Resistance comes in many forms.

Conditions: "Hate does not grow in the rocky soil of Vermont."

Daily message in follow up. I hate text limits.

I do not get how that toxic POS has been able to sidle up to Dems and stay influential in the party for all these years. His toxic b.s. is well known. Why haven’t Dems ostracized him by now? It’s gotta be blackmail at this point, right? Because why else would they let someone so toxic stick around?

From @reuters.com: President Donald Trump's sweeping foreign aid freeze has stalled a United Nations program in Mexico aimed at stopping imported fentanyl chemicals from reaching the country's drug cartels, according to eight people familiar with the situation.

www.reuters.com/world/americ...

DOGE Is Inside the National Institutes of Health’s Finance System At least three people linked to Elon Musk’s DOGE task force have access to NIH systems that control budgets, procurement, and more, according to records and internal documents viewed by WIRED.

NEW: DOGE workers now have access to the NIH department known as the "wallet" of the entire organization. From @mattreynolds.bsky.social

www.wired.com/story/doge-i...

…and if you ask for sources, it will often just make up sources that seem likely to exist. LLMs are “intelligent” in the same way that some birds that mimic human speech are “intelligent” only the birds have some actual reasoning capability. LLMs are just overconfident plagiarism tools on steroids.

LLM’s are prediction models. They don’t “know” things. They guess based on probability. They also hallucinate. No one should be using LLMs to learn. The information in them is not vetted because it’s giving you what it considers a statistically likely response — a response that doesn’t cite sources…

Establishing the President's Make America Healthy Again Commission By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: Section 1.

This commission statement refers to people with Autism, ADHD, asthma, auto-immune disease, and chronic illness as a “dire threat to the American people and our way of life”.

This is a manifesto against disability.

This is the language of eugenics.