Stu F.

Have said before that Trump winning MI last year seems to have caused the main statewide politicos to retreat into a semi-permanent defensive crouch

As DC resident, and taxpayer, strong agree.

The people of DC—more numerous than those in WY or VT, closing in on both Dakotas—pay more federal tax per capita than those in any other jurisdiction. statehood.dc.gov/page/why-sta...

But no Congressional representation. And now this.

Speaking as a DC resident: statehood now. It is absurd that Trump can do this in our city.

Absolutely superb thread:

(To be clear, the causes of this inevitable split will in almost all cases not stem from the SDs)

Also an outsider — albeit a sympathetic one — and, well, having written extensively about this in a historical context am dubious that true democratic socialists can coexist indefinitely in a single political unit with Leninists.

Okay also very funny* to tell us plebes that further cutting corporate tax rates is a “bottom up” approach

(*not the good kind of funny)

bsky.app/profile/mcub...

He’s got such a boringly predictable “return to Twitter to tell how the intolerant left drove him away” arcs ahead of him

Or, better put and more to the point: bsky.app/profile/mtsw...

A lot of horsesht for just one post!
1) lol that Rs are talking about things that impact voters lives;
2) or that paying interest on the debt would be primary reason for a confiscatory wealth tax;
3) if there’s an exception to “there are no good billionaires” it’s Pritzker 1000 times over this guy

I’m a broken record about this but the organization still (for some reason) considered the leading U.S. voice on anti-semitism continues to cause profound harm to its supposed raison d’etre by creating a rubric that includes both actual incidents and any strongly expressed criticism of Israel.

Charge them with crimes.

The double status problem. Anarchist mathematician Azat Miftakhov on his life at the bottom of Russia’s brutal prison caste system On August 5, Russia’s Supreme Court rejected the final appeal for Azat Miftakhov, a mathematician and anarchist serving his second politically motivated prison sentence. His latest...

Supreme Court rejected Azat Miftakhov’s final appeal. The anarchist mathematician was re-arrested at the prison gate, given a 2nd term on a cellmate’s testimony.

In letters, he describes life in the “degraded” caste and his refusal to bow to the system: en.zona.media/article/2025...

Music to the ears of any-all revanchist murderous authoritarians to hear US NATO ambassador make explicit that you can have as much of your peaceful neighbor’s land as you want as long as you kill enough of their citizens.

Music to the ears of every expansionist country that would go to war with a neighbor. “Earned” is deeply offensive to Ukraine and dangerous to the world

ChatGPT 5.0 first impressions:

After making up total bullshit in the answer to a very simple question that could easily have been answered with RAG, the model apologizes to me for "misremembering"— which of course is also total bullshit given that it's not the sort of thing that "remembers".

I’m a cliche in being the descendant of Russian/East European Jews who somehow maintains the cognitive dissonance of still being entranced by the novels of the viciously antisemitic Dostoyevsky

(On the other hand S was much more mid as a writer than D, who was maddeningly as talented as he was in his later years loathsome politically)

Solzhenitsyn’s anti-semitism was also arguably not as pernicious as Dostoyevsky’s, though much due to timing — i.e. D’s matched & amplified the growing, very dangerous and soon officially sanctioned anti-semitism of his time, while S’s was orthogonal to late Soviet never officially admitted anti-sem

Like Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn’s transformation into a conservative neo-Slavophile happened primarily *after* his political arrest. Even then, in Solzhenitsyn’s case it did not preclude his making common cause with Sakharov and other liberal/social-democratic dissidents.

Hi, former spec. ed. and composition teacher here. And I'm here to say: you catch a district shilling AI written IEP's? Sue the living fuck out of that district. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

I say this a lot, but it bears repeating: when Trump tears down mediocre institutions, we will replace them with radical institutions. Our vision of government was constrained by norms. If those norms are gone? Fine, those norms are gone, and with them the constraints are gone. LFG.

If you donate right now, you will also get this *adorable* plush bluesky butterfly

"His brother, Sadam Huseín …"

On the other hand LLMs absolutely *have* been designed by Altman and other hucksters to cater to/flatter their users and to obsequiously admit error (e.g. “Excellent point, and you are right to call me out on that …”), which makes Taіbbi the perfect mark

Kennedy Cancels Nearly $500 Million in mRNA Vaccine Contracts

I truly cannot emphasize enough how this is straight up Lysenkoism.

Because of the incredible work of our nation’s scientists, we have our finger tips on the closest thing humanity has ever come to “a cure for cancer”, but brainworm over here doesn’t believe in it.

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

Still kind of wild to live in a world where, in the age of low information voters, only 14% of Americans have no opinion about the President of Ukraine (compared to 39% for President of France).

Too bad they apparently didn't ask about Putin here.

been tried multiple times with disastrous results).

And when I made the mistake of telling my sleep doctor that I almost certainly also had sleep phase disorder, he responded with the amazingly condescending, stunningly patronizing, "I just think you might be a little bit of a night owl."

Man it was an, uh, wake-up call realizing that the sleep clinic here only actually treats one thing (apnea) in one way (CPAP), and co-morbid insomnia (even if exacerbated by the CPAP) is none of their business and to also have exactly one method of treatment (CBT, even if one explains that this has