Colette Alexander

Hey, remind me what happened after the Roaring 20s?

The US is the purple line bottoming out. Our economy may still roar, but we’re killing ourselves. Hoarding wealth, refusing to even ensure our kids have enough to eat. That line is an indictment. It reflects our warped values.

Food bank director: “for every meal that a food bank provides, the SNAP program provides nine. There’s no way we can meet that gap.”

important reminder: food banks usually prefer money to direct food donations because they can buy at discounted rates

check with your local food bank to be sure but now is the time to help out

Disabled Americans experience the highest rates of poverty of every marginalized group in America. 27% live below the poverty line (12% for ableds).

Their median earnings are $18,865 compared to $28,983 for the abled.

These numbers WILL get worse.

If you can help you will save lives.

The cover of Sagan’s “The Limits of Safety,” which features a dramatic black and white photograph of the forward section of a B-52D bomber at Loring Air Force Base, Maine, on fire and engulfed in thick black smoke on June 26, 1958. A fuel leak was ignited after the crew chief tried to start the engines without first pulling the circuit breaker, causing them to spark and set off the fire.

Other than the personnel involved and their superiors, this alarming incident remained largely unknown until Scott Sagan got the Air Force to declassify the relevant documents and wrote about them in his outstanding 1993 book, “The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons.”

Hey, just want to mumble that this is wildly illegal and inappropriate and would prompt impeachment proceedings if we still had a functional Congress instead of one run by a blind, deaf and mute Renfeld wannabe.

ICE vs. NYC The feds will not have a good time here.

"Building inspectors, yes. And safety inspectors. Is the water in the ICE office clean? Cut it off, to test it. Fire drills. Tickets on their parked cars. Brake light violations. Health inspections. Sidewalk construction. Street closures. More fire drills. More fire drills!"

Known Lethal U.S. Attacks on Civilian Vessels in the Caribbean Total reported killed: 34 people Notification Date Number Reported Killed Approximate Location Notification URL September 2, 2025 11 “in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility” (later revealed as between Sucre, Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago) View September 15, 2025 3 “in International Waters… in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility”; Colombian president claimed it was a fishing boat in Colombian waters View September 19, 2025 3 “in international waters… in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility” near the Dominican Republic View October 3, 2025 4 “in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela” View October 14, 2025 6 “in International Waters… just off the Coast of Venezuela” View October 16, 2025 2; 2 reported survivors “in the Caribbean” View October 17, 2025 3 “in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility” View October 21, 2025 2 “in the Eastern Pacific” View

34 people killed in 50 days. Their guilt or innocence unknown, for an alleged crime that doesn't carry a death sentence. That's a lot of death.

adamisacson.com/boat-strikes/

Terrifying. An Associated Press investigation found more than 420 bills attacking longstanding public health protections such as vaccines, milk safety and fluoride have been introduced in statehouses across the US so far this year. Around 30 bills in 12 states have already been enacted or adopted.

One of the less understood beauties of a transition to a renewable economy is: you cannot invade a country and steal its sunshine and its wind, and you will not need to. The uneven distribution of fossil fuel, esp. oil, has corroded geopolitics for more than a century....

We believe that in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, working people deserve a dignified life.

And to the billionaires who think this movement is an existential threat to their corruption of our democracy: you're right.

screenshot of a subscription appeal we sent today: Who calls the shots where you get your news? Is it one of the richest men in the world? Is it the dull son of another one of the richest men in the world? Is it shareholders, for whom it's expedient to roll over in the face of nuisance lawsuits by the gangster state? Is it one of the private equity firms grinding media companies to dust to eke out returns? Is it someone who will fire a journalist for accurately describing Charlie Kirk’s beliefs? Is it a severely confused Brit? Is it the “rogue employee” who reprogrammed their company’s chatbot to urgently inform users about the “white genocide happening in South Africa”? Is it yet another corrosive tech platform? Is it a gambling company? Is it a league you, in theory, exist to critically report on? Is it some donkeys using AI to bring Horny Sports Blogging At Scale to a storied publication? Not if you read Defector. The 27 of us who work here own the company together. We have no outside investors, so we have no mandate to maximize shareholder value. We don’t take money from gambling companies. We aren’t out to fatten up and get acquired. Defector is uncompromised, a rarity in modern media. When we report, criticize, and analyze, it’s coming from us, not someone upstairs. We answer only to our subscribers. Become one!

excellent blogs today at defector. good time to subscribe! defector.com/products

Remember when Alex Pareene predicted this after Charlottesville in 2017 www.splinter.com/charlottesvi...

"republican staffers are all literal nazis" is less of a groupchat thing and more of a posting on main thing at this point

Important to note that this isn’t a problem for the billionaire buying media properties. If they make them into successful rightwing propaganda? Cool more money. If it fails? Cool they’ve destroyed one of the few outlets with the resources to investigate them. Either way they achieved their goal

Note that the people who typically participate in Black blocs know this. Contrary to the impression of tons of liberals,people generally do Black blocs strategically. David Graeber discusses this quite a lot in "Direct Action An Ethnography". There is a direct line to inflatable frogs from Ya Basta!

California cracks down on water theft but spares data centers from disclosing how much they use Gov. Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required data centers to report their projected water use when applying for a business license.

First sentence says it all: "Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed legislation that would have required data centers to report how much water they use." Read the rest of the story though. from @ianjames.bsky.social: www.latimes.com/environment/...

We tried to warn people that a lot of the Harper's letter signers were wildly, obviously hypocritical on the subject of free speech, and the response was "who cares? They'r3 still right about the fucking commies"

What I know from being Black my whole life, and poor for the majority of it, is that politely ignoring a root issue to attend to one closer to the surface is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s a band-aid on a gaping wound, and it will not hold your flesh together for long. The US needs stitches.

Opinion | Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

This was revealing. Worth reading. The basic demand is that Coates spend less time thinking/writing his true feelings and more time playing political strategist. Klein asks him over and over him to do Dem strategy; he says no, over and over. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/o...

cackling

entire press has gotten bullied into treating charlie kirk as if he was one of the most important americans alive and not a modestly popular podcaster

ah, well

Sorry I was late to your wedding, my flight was canceled because my pilot posted a Charlie Kirk quote verbatim in the comments of an Instagram Reel.

X post by Milo Yiannopoulos: "28 pilots have been suspended or fired so far after I made their airlines aware of gruesome remarks made about Charlie Kirk’s death. Of the big three, Delta has the biggest problem by far; United the smallest."

Hard to think of a more on-the-nose encapsulation of how far the online speech wars have swung in the year of our lord 2025 than major U.S. corporations racing to fire people whose tweets offended Milo Yiannopoulos

“If we’re going to live together as a family in this house, we have to let dad beat the shit out of us now and again”

so many dead canaries and we just keep on mining

This is honestly worth reading for my younger audience, you probably (?) have huge gaps in your understanding of this. This focuses earlier decades, but there was quite a profound shift of culture in my lifetime you probably missed yourself.