ScottIJ

things every single republican president of your lifetime has done

- started a war in the middle east
- completely destroyed the economy

Allow me to suggest Bullet Train. Maybe he’s not a total idiot in it, but it feels similar. And just a fun and hilarious movie if you like that style.

Even without an on-campus voting site, NCAT students still marched to the polls. 💙💛 Students at North Carolina A&T showed that barriers won’t stop their voices. When access isn’t easy, they organize. ... TikTok video by HBCU Student Action Alliance

North Carolina lawmakers have voted to remove all college campus voting sites. Specifically at the largest HBCU in the US NC A&T. They now have to walk 30 minutes to their nearest polling place. Students are protesting this - pls share and support.

www.tiktok.com/t/ZThx29BJ9/

The Lee Brothers' Hoppin’ John (Published 2002)

Black-eyed pea soup is an underrated favorite here. Here is one of my go-to- recipes. I usually add a package of spinach too just for nutrition (and because for New Year's that's considered lucky for making more "green" in the coming year). cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1125...

He spent decades bringing the religious right to power. Now he's marching to undo it.

Rev. Rob Schenck spent decades helping build the Religious Right—commingling church and state to advance conservative causes. Now, he says he must confront the damage he helped cause.

My pleasure. Love your writing!

Bluesky User FAQ - Bluesky Welcome to the Bluesky app! This is a user guide that answers some common questions.

(9/n) A more general FAQ for Bluesky to help you get started, I hope this is all helpful! bsky.social/about/blog/5...

Bluesky Moderation – Nuclear Block & Mute Lists for Beginners With X‘s tailspin into an unusable platform—where you are aggressively served content that is unwanted, offensive, and a waste of your time while your own content is suppressed—I have really taken …

(8/n) A more detailed FAQ about blocking and muting you may find useful: boringstorybook.com/bluesky-mute...

(7/n) Bluesky also just provides a lot more options to let you control who can see and reply to your posts. bsky.app/profile/bsky...

(6/n) Similarly people also post "Starter Packs" of accounts that people of like interest can follow, so getting on a few of those can help boost your reach to more followers more quickly. I have to imagine you wouldn't have trouble doing that. :-)

(5/n) This means if you find sources you trust, you can block a lot of the trolls and bots simply by subscribing to their list without having to do the work yourself, and it will update your blocking whenever they update the list.

(4/n) And the Bluesky culture is "block don't engage", so it really helps keep trolls from getting traction and disrupting things as much as on other platforms. Bluesky also allows people to publish lists of accounts that you can subscribe to and either block or mute all of the accounts in the list.

(3/n) The thing that makes Bluesky so much better than other apps is that if you block or mute a troll responding to one of your posts, it blocks their response on your posts for *all* of the other viewers, not just you. That let's you really curate your interactions.

The Official John Scalzi Social Media FAQ Many moons ago I wrote a primer here for how I used social media, but time has passed and how I use social media has also changed a bit. So I decided it might be useful to have a new and updated So…

(2/n) John has a good high-level FAQ posted here: whatever.scalzi.com/2025/04/16/t...

Full disclaimer - I don't do this professionally and have a low post volume. :-) But I can offer some good pointers I think. The best person for this to me is John Scalzi (@scalzi.com, sci-fi author), he's been doing this professionally for a long time. (1/n)

It may not be quite what old Twitter was, but of all the social media sites it feels like the best one to me. It has a lot of what was good about Twitter in the earlier years and great tools to curate away the bots and trolls.

YouTube video by The Interview George Saunders Says Breaking These 3 Delusions Can Save You | The Interview

One of my favorite living writers, and one of my favorite people, is George Saunders, and this interview helps to demonstrate why.

youtube.com/watch?v=wGWCqgIyrbM&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

He didn't shoot her in the head at point blank range because he felt like he was in danger. He shot her in the head at point blank range because he was furious that she wasn't afraid of him. He shot her in the head at point blank range because he felt emasculated.

USPS Announces Changes to the Postmark Date System The United States Postal Service (USPS) has adopted a final rule (FR Doc.

As of 12/24/25, USPS changed policy on when they postmark mail. Mail dropped off is no longer guaranteed a same-day postmark. Tax returns & other time-sensitive items are now stamped when they reach a regional processing center, which may be days later. Plan deadlines accordingly to avoid penalties.

I call it shower roulette. Given all the hotels I stay in this is particularly annoying.

Imagine interviewing a victim of torture and independently confirming the details of his torture and then being told you can’t broadcast it because the people who ordered the torture wouldn’t give their side of the story.

This point needs to be made and frequently.

This is quite a story: the US employed every strongarm tactic available, including personal threats against delegates and their families, to derail an agreement on reducing shipping emissions that was almost finalized. on.ft.com/47lq3dZ

Fascinating!

I know it’s too much to expect them to know their history, but if the American Revolution had a motto, it definitely would not have been “immigrants go home.”

It would have been “get your fucking soldiers out of our cities.”

"President Trump continued to describe Portland as a city on fire Friday even as residents enjoyed the first fall rain and the lone demonstrator at the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building was dressed as a pink Care Bear."

Sometimes there is a good sentence or two in the NYT.

Opinion | Voting for Mamdani Taught Me Why Trump Won

I've been waiting for someone to make this point.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/o...

There’s a lot of talk about “insurrection” coming from the White House, which has led many to predict that they are considering invoking the Insurrection Act. What plans are afoot, and what would that look like if it happened? My write-up in the replies.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o...

State AGs Defend Trans Americans in Stunning Rebuke to Trump’s FTC — Assigned Eighteen state Attorneys General unite to stand up in defense of trans Americans, in opposition to a Federal Trade Commission investigation into trans healthcare.

On Friday 18 blue state attorneys general BLASTED the Federal Trade Commission, telling it to back off trans youth healthcare and warning of an insidious attempt to reshape the regulation of medicine in the US.

And nobody covered it.

www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...