Eric Melley

Paging Drs. Dunning and Kruger!

People ask what they can do in this moment: here's a crucially important election. There are 52,000 elections taking place next month, many of which will be determined by turnout.

National guard troops lounging outside a Krispy Kreme

Dearest Martha,

The National Guard stand solemn watch at the Krispy Kreme tonight. I cannot tell if they defend the people from the donuts, or the donuts from the people. Powdered sugar hangs in the air like cannon smoke. Jensen took a hot coffee to the face, he may never recover.

Yours in glaze,

Warrior spirit! This has gotta be great for morale, pulling these men and women away from their families...for this ridiculous display.

Now I've got to find a way to work "azimuth" into a sentence so I can use my new word. Also, "all-azimuth" sounds like an old-fashioned euphemism for a curseword.

That's a summer in New England still life!

Amen

Some thoughts about the military parade in my hometown of Washington DC today -- specifically, the route. Military parades in DC are quite rare. But when they happen, they have always begun, symbolically and geographically, at the Capitol and moved outward. 1/

No Kings. No Emperors. No Thugs. MAGA celebrates the Padilla outrage.

As an exercise, try to imagine Ron Johnson being wrestled to the ground in Wisconsin; or Tommy Tuberville in Alabama; or Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. Yeah, neither can I.

charliesykes.substack.com/p/no-kings-n...

Considering the bully in this case is POTUS, then, yes. Especially since so many more powerful people and institutions cave without so much as a protest.

Ardem Patapoutian's story is not just the American dream, it is the dream of American science. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1986 at age 18 after fleeing war-torn Lebanon. He spent a year writing for an Armenian newspaper and delivering Domino's at night to become eligible for the University of California, where he earned his undergraduate degree and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. He started a lab at Scripps Research in San Diego with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, discovered the way humans sense touch, and in 2021 won the Nobel Prize. But with the Trump administration slashing spending on science, Dr. Patapoutian's federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain has been frozen. In late February, he posted on Bluesky that such cuts would damage biomedical research and prompt an exodus of talent from the United States. Within hours, he had an email from China, offering to move his lab to "any city, any university I want," he said, with a guarantee of funding for the next 20 years.

Man comes to the US from Lebanon. Starts out delivering pizzas, becomes a Nobel winning neuroscientist. Trump freezes his funding, he gets an email from China offering to move his lab “any city, any university I want" with guaranteed funding for 20 years.

What are we doing?

its crazy how dominant germany was in science (especially chemistry) in the 19th century, it was basically the international language for scientists, people came from all over the world to train at heidelberg etc, and then....

Even so, demand for humanities majors is on the rise, and with good reason. At a conference last year, Robert Goldstein, the chief operating officer of BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, said the firm was adjusting its hiring strategy for recent grads. “We have more and more conviction that we need people who majored in history, in English, and things that have nothing to do with finance or technology,” Goldstein said. This demand for liberal arts degrees is due in part to the rise of artificial intelligence, which drives the need for creative thinking and so-called soft skills.

Liberal arts majors rise up www.cnbc.com/2025/05/16/c...

“Joe Biden did nothing to fix the system that they knew was broken.”

He did nothing — except pass a $105 billion program to fix the system.

Reporters, Sean Duffy thinks you’re incapable of a simple Google search.

This is our whole trade negotiation strategy

YouTube video by WIRED 6 Arms, 3 Thumbs: I Tested The Future of Robotic Limbs | Superhuman | WIRED

Here's a glimpse into the world of extra limbs and how they could reshape the future.

It's Biden's India and Pakistan.

Meet the Fockers

It's true, @kairyssdal.bsky.social - I heard the same thing from from Ron Vara!

"Be cool" has the vibe of the friend who picks you up in his car and lurches forward every time you try to open the door. Except in this case the car is actually the world's most powerful economy.

Also, Ganymede was Zeus's gay lover...

I hate this dipshit so fucking much and also acknowledge it’s very important to show him momentarily having some kind of moral realization and share this with the dipshits in your lives

It took just two months to drive two of our closest and most important allies into China's arms.

Even if you accept the premise and decision, which I absolutely do not, it is the simplest thing to phone the visa holder, tell them their visa is revoked and say they have a month to leave the country. Accosting someone on the street like a kidnapping is just a spectacle of terror.

~14 a day? I mean, it's just business as usual until somebody dies. Good Lord.

It gets worse.

This Signal situation is just the tip of the iceberg of incompetence in this administration.

Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.

Well, here displayed in the words of the "Colossus of Independence," history sure rhymes.