Jack Womack

Half of all Americans say the cost of groceries is a major source of stress.

A full-time worker in the U.S. needs to earn a wage of $33/hr to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

Millions of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

What is Trump focusing on today?

Close friends' parents attended that concert. Record only hints, they said.

Come on now.

The price of one pound of ground beef is now higher than the federal minimum wage.

OMFG! This is an abdication of life-saving technologies in favour of MAGA-fueled BS. Businesses and individuals put their profits and personal interests above the collective protection of life by pushing the conspiracy theory that Covid-19 didn't require special research and a path-breaking vaccine.

holy shit $ 15 MILLION?

for comparison, the LA County Sheriff gets about $3 BILLION, and the next budget allocates it $2.5 million just for the department's wellness programs.

And the walkout has slowed down anti-abortion bills — including a measure that would let private citizens sue health providers and manufacturers for mailing + prescribing abortion medication to Texans

A once-great nation literally committing suicide. bsky.app/profile/jben...

A company whose shares have dropped 23.42% in 7 months, whose sales have dropped 13% from the same time period last year, whose biggest 'innovation' was a truck that only sold 4,306 units in the last 90 days, and whose CEO flashed multiple Sieg Heils rewarded its CEO w/a $29 billion comp package.

New Study Shows Hurricane Hunter Flights Significantly Increase Forecast Accuracy The researchers focused on Hurricane Hunter missions conducted with NOAA’s Gulfstream IV during recent Atlantic hurricane seasons.

Hurricane track forecasts made with dropsonde data from the NOAA jet 2018-2022 were up to 24% more accurate than those without the data. Congressional testimony by former NOAA/HRD chief Frank Marks: ~50% of their staff who do dropsondes were let go this year. Will this reduce missions?

the provincial government needs Evan Solomon to – dammit fucks sake

This type of thing is INCREDIBLY common in the evangelical community and a big reason why the govt is focused on blocking child abuse laws around the country.

There’s a whole section on this in @swordsjew.bsky.social book on the evangelical right.

bookshop.org/p/books/wild...

Cornyn Asks FBI to Help Arrest Texas Dems Who Fled to Delay GOP’s Midcycle Redistricting Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) asked the FBI to get involved in Texas...

Obviously, Cornyn has to make this ask.

Cruz can't very well be the one to demand that missing legislators be tracked down and arrested, now can he?

talkingpointsmemo.com/live-blog/co...

My offbeat contribution to the Times' Dead, Alive & Underrated feature-- www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

this work saved millions of lives in 2021, won the Nobel Prize in 2023, and is cancelled in 2025

Not since the 1940s, when the automobile industry bribed governments into dismantling street cars, has an entire industry twisted the arm of the American consumer with such force

Ah, an intellectual battle between a stochastic parrot incapable of true thought, designed in a laboratory to satisfy the whims of the far-right, and Grok.

What to know about the Titan sub and its tragic final dive to the Titanic In 2023, the Titan submersible suffered a catastrophic implosion that killed its pilot and four passengers amid intense water pressure in the North Atlantic.

Two years after the Titan submersible imploded, killing four passengers and its pilot, the U.S. Coast Guard released a lengthy report saying the disaster could have been prevented, but deeply flawed safety procedures and efforts to avoid oversight had effectively doomed the vessel and all aboard.

Appelbaum: I’d actually start not with the question of whether they’re legal but with another important distinction between this situation and the situation of the law firms, which is that a firm like Paul, Weiss is pretty clearly an independent, private business that happens to interact with the federal government. I don’t think it is helpful to think of Columbia University or Brown or Penn or Harvard as independent, private institutions. They are, in many respects, public institutions. More than half of all of the money that they spend on research comes from the federal government. And that’s an arrangement that started during World War II. And then, in the ...

Appelbaum apologizes for Columbia and misstates legal status. "I don’t think it is helpful to think of Columbia University or Brown or Penn or Harvard as independent, private institutions. They are, in many respects, public institutions."

Bazelon: "These are private and independent institutions."

Opinion | Is There a Smart Way to Cede Power to Donald Trump?

Meanwhile the folks at the NYT are discussing the best way to capitulate to Trump.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/o...

More Than 2,300 WGA Members Blast Trump 'Authoritarian Assault' on Free Press in Open Letter More than 2,300 WGA members blasted what they called "escalating attacks on independent media by the Trump Administration"

"We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news..."

full letter and list of signees here: www.wgaeast.org/get-involved...

www.thewrap.com/wga-members-...

I saw this in a movie theater on its first U.S. release.

So with a goal of cutting 2 trillion dollars, he cut about 50 billion, and still fucked it up. Genius.

"The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced the beginning of a coordinated wind-down of its mRNA vaccine development activities...."

cc: Sen. Bill Cassidy

I just realized it’s been a while since my stalkers at NRO wrote anything about me. Happy to discuss the history of white supremacist thought at National Review at incredible length if they’d like. Those were always fun exchanges at Twitter.

Yes, but also, Covid killed more in the US in the year after 1/21/21 than it did the year before—and that's after we had an effective vaccine—and it kept killing 100s-1,000s/week through the Nov election & still kills today.

Covid was AND STILL IS an electoral issue, even if no one talks about it.

And Karen of the Court had the absolute nerve to come for Justice Jackson. *spits*

YouTube video by Pivot to AI Wear Meta’s AI creepshot glasses — or be left behind!

lol. you know Meta's AI creepshot glasses

i just found out they're not even Augmented Reality. neither screens nor projectors.

just (a) cameras (b) a mic (c) bone conduction earphones. the interface is voice control.

THEY ARE LITERALLY ONLY FOR TAKING CREEPSHOTS

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOlA...

Two chickens on a driveway eating blueberries out of a glass bowl decorated with ghosts. One hen is called Toothless & the other is Chancery.

frozen blueberries for dinner

Judges Openly Doubt Government as Justice Dept. Misleads and Dodges Orders

Were you wondering how #Florida woman Pam Bondi is doing as AG? Judges now openly doubt everything that her attorneys say in court because they have built a record of misleading statements and defying orders. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/u...