Lauren L.

A visual of climate change impacts. The left side shows a pleasant environment with grass, clouds, and some sunshine. The left side shows a dead tree, dry bare soil, and a blazing hot sun. Source: American Chemical Society.

Billionaires and their minions are working to dismantle the structure of our society. Repairing economic damage from trump crimes will take months to years; rebuilding science will take decades; but the #climate and #biodiversity damage to our planet will last for centuries. We can't delay any more.

The House just passed Trump’s budget.

The vote was 215-214

It would have failed with 215-215 if a House Dem didn’t die in office yesterday.

Democrats ran three older people with cancer knowing they had cancer, they died within months of being sworn in, and that helped clear the way for Republicans to starve kids across the country. I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate it here.

The Data Don't Lie Democrats, NOT Republicans, Are Good for the Economy Across Almost Every Metric

🚨🚨🚨The Data Don't Lie:

Democrats, NOT Republicans, Are Good for the Economy Across Almost Every Metric

A MUST READ guest analysis from Penn State Emeritus Professor Ron Gebhardtsbauer

(open to read free)

Please RT: we need to correct the record. open.substack.com/pub/thecycle...

it's jolting how little AI skepticism has reached the general public. i've had many acquaintances ask whether i use AI for research and seem shocked when i tell them it's completely useless for that purpose. my wife recently told her colleagues about hallucinations and it was news to all of them.

I recently saw a screening of the four 2024 short documentaries published here: www.southernexposurefilms.org

I mean, the danger isn't so much being literally illiterate, it's being functionally illiterate. Which, as a writing tutor for community college students, I see a fair bit of. Students can read a passage out loud to me but have zero comprehension of the words they just read.

Who knew a fish could express "What the fuck was that?" with such ease.

RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access Messy natures: The political aesthetics of nature recovery Flurina M. Wartmann, Jamie Lorimer First published: 11 November 2024 https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.1002/pan3.10743Citations: 2

Meanwhile, I am very into this 2024 paper. Focusing on UK rewilding gardening, discusses the politics of 'messiness' as reflective of a younger, left-er demographic as compared to the formal and orderly 'proper' gardening of the conservative, elderly right.

doi.org/10.1002/pan3...

The NIH is also now in talks with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to broaden agreements governing access to their data, Bhattacharya said. In addition, a new disease registry is being launched to track Americans with autism, which will be integrated into the data. Between 10 and 20 outside groups of researchers will be given grant funding and access to the records to produce Kennedy's autism studies. Bhattacharya did not give details on how they would be chosen, but said their selection would be "run through normal NIH processes."

Gun registry? No. Autism registry? Yes?

Fuck ALL the way off.

If the next US governing regime merely wants to restore pre-2024 state capacity, it's going to take what will feel like a New Deal-style expansion from the baseline

(The lesson was: if you’re going to fuck with something bigger and meaner than you, use a quick targeted attack and then run away really fast. (This is the way I always try to operate, too.)

The past four Republican administrations have tanked the US economy. But I know multiple Democrats who include their pronouns in the footer of their emails. I have never felt more politically homeless.

Map of continental US showing various places from where people have been disappeared. Currently numbering 1214.

United States Disappeared Tracker: 1214 and growing.
public.tableau.com/app/profile/...

Yes. If these people gave a shit about "bringing good jobs back to America," they would be fighting to improve the quality of the jobs we already have. There's nothing inherent to the work of a taxi driver or waitress that has to be less secure than a 1950s factory worker.

I’m used to humans wanting to do things that can get them killed. Maybe too used to it.

A reminder to reporters: Because Trump tariff numbers are made-up nonsense, using the phrase “reciprocal tariffs” is lying to your audience. The phrase itself is propaganda. They are not reciprocal.

A common tic among right-wingers and conspiracy theorists is to describe someone engaging in debate as "silencing debate"
www.bmj.com/content/374/...

Concern for “free speech” by the right was always a facade for a reactionary culture war, antagonistic to the civil liberties that create it. It’s a victimhood complex of absolutists who get butthurt the second someone challenges their ideas. Their glee in criminalizing dissent is no surprise to me.

we're deciding, at scale, that laws do not apply to republicans during an election cycle

WI DOJ is bringing a butter knife to a gun fight with announced plans for a lawsuit.

Musk is violating the law and should be arrested. The majority of Americans would watch with rapt and happy attention Musk’s perp walk

bsky.app/profile/asie...

Michael Waltz set disappearing message time to 4 weeks. M Michael Waltz VP. building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job. 17m O New Messages JV JD Vance What? 12m O M Michael Waltz Typing too fast. The first target - their top missile guy - we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and it's now collapsed. 5m O JV JD Vance Excellent 5m O Michael Waltz M 30m O

Excerpt from Guardian story on the airstrikes: “Most of the casualties in the US strikes were women and children, said Anees al-Asbahi, the spokesperson for the Houthi-run health ministry, on Sunday. The Houthis' political bureau described the attacks as a "war crime". "Our Yemeni armed forces are fully prepared to respond to escalation with escalation," it said in a statement. People in Sana'a said the strikes hit a building in a Houthi stronghold. A man who gave his name as Abdullah Yahia told Reuters: "The explosions were violent and shook the neighbourhood like an earthquake. They terrified our women and children."”

There was one singular person the Trump team wanted to kill. They thought they tracked him to his girlfriend’s place, presumably in a civilian apartment building in Sana’a. So they dropped bombs on the neighborhood and leveled the building. Reactions from the group:
“amazing job”
“Excellent”
“👊🇺🇸💥”

anyway calling these "war plans" when they were actually plans to blow up an apartment building full of civilians because the girlfriend of a guy we don't like lived there sounds more like "terrorism plans" or perhaps even more accurately "terrorism factory creation plans"

Liberals and progressives are the only ones with any agency, according to most political discourse. You *never* hear about a conservative need to understand liberals. It’s always on the left to fix things.

When elite, "serious" civil society institutions (ahem, foundations) talk about "polarization," somehow it always ends up meaning those mean liberals not wanting to socialize with people who don't share their values, rather than on the people who want to roll back half a century of civil rights law.

The core "ideology" of political liberals for decades has basically been "let's do stuff that helps people." They've often fallen short in the application of it, but that's been the core belief.

The Right built out more ideological lore, but the core belief was "we should rule."

And so.

Audre already told us: your silence will not protect you.

Go down swinging.

Note to editors and producers: If an executive order demands action that is illegal or outside of the president’s authority, then you should not describe it as ordering something. You should say it seeks to achieve some outcome and then note it is illegal or beyond the power of the president.