Wyatt Yankus

The NIH’s 2024 budget of just under $37B generated $95B in economic activity in 2024 alone. 99.4% of new pharmaceuticals approved from 2010-2019 came from NIH-funded research. I’m hard pressed to think of anything that generates as much direct economic benefit as our NIH did before they destroyed it

Babe, wake up, a new Ekranoplan just dropped!

Easily my favorite niche Cold War-era weapons system. Exciting to see someone picking up the baton from the Soviets.

What is the U.S. going to do to close this new WIG gap? (They should buy the ShinMaywa US-2 flying boat from Japan, but ofc won’t.)

This is what it looks like without a United States Congress.

Scenes from today’s @unite4vets.bsky.social rally on the Mall. No kings, no fascistic birthday parades. Let’s just honor the commitments we’ve made as a country to our veterans and servicemembers.

Posted without comment

A global hegemon commiting civilizational suicide in order to Own the Libs.

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first. One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish. Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points. We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are. Anelise Feldman Freshman, Yarmouth High School Yarmouth

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

Corum and Johnson’s “Airpower in Small Wars” would be good assigned reading as well. The book ends with seven lessons on using air power in low-intensity conflict or COIN/CT scenarios and, TL;DR, this campaign violated all of them.

The Trump administration is defying the Supreme Court, arresting judges and mayors, talking about arresting congressmen, denying due process and openly musing about suspending habeus corpus too.

There’s no constitutional crisis coming. It’s here.

As a result, thousands of transgender service members will be discharged from the military while litigation proceeds in the lower courts. People who volunteered to risk their lives for their country will be cruelly punished simply for who they are. People like Emily Shilling, the named plaintiff in this case-a transgender woman who has served as a naval aviator for 19 years, flown more than 60 combat missions, logged 1,750 flight hours in Navy jets, and earned three Air Medals. The Navy has spent $20 million training her. Soon, she will be forced out of service entirely. If the Supreme Court was going to condone this self-defeating act of invidious discrimination, the least it could have done was explain why. J

Thousands of transgender troops who have served our nation honorably will soon be purged from the military because of their identity. It is shameful that the Supreme Court’s majority won’t even explain why it greenlit this mass act of unconstitutional discrimination. slate.com/news-and-pol...

This is what fascism looks like:

Attorney General Bondi threatening judges she claims are not cooperating with Trump immigration policies and saying “we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

The 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington & Concord is a good day for standing up to a wannabe king

Starmer told to accept Trump ‘free speech’ agenda to win trade deal ‘Good chance’ of agreement, says JD Vance – but a source close to the administration says his concerns over Britain’s hate speech laws ‘are still a red line’

Vance saying you need to repeal laws protecting your LGBTQ to get a trade deal and adding “Of course, fundamentally, America is an Anglo country,” is REALLY saying the quiet part loud.

I’m old enough to remember it being judgmental to call them racist or homophobic, but now they say it for you.

From The Onion: Historians: Quibbling Over Exact Definition Of Concentration Camp Sign Of Healthy Society

theonion.com/historians-q...

How Gatsby foretold Trump’s America A century after it was published, F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is more relevant than ever. Sarah Churchwell on the trouble with ‘careless people’

A good Sunday read: on.ft.com/43Jyfn2 How Gatsby foretold Trump’s America

YouTube video by Rock Creek Conservancy DC's Heartbeat: A Carter Barron Amphitheater Story

youtu.be/J0xN52b9AwY

A fun afternoon volunteering with the Rock Creek Conservancy to help maintain the historic Carter Barron Amphitheater, with the ultimate goal of reopening it in the future as an outdoor music venue for the people of DC. Last photo is a future rendering - would be such a great venue!

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legalrestraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

I find myself thinking about historian Robert Paxton’s 2004 definition of fascism far too often than I’d like these days.

russia’s appetite for peace ☮️ visualized by Emanuele Del Rosso

The New York Times is the first to put out comprehensive estimates on the cost of a year without U.S.A.I.D. and they’re higher than I thought:
- 1.65 million deaths from AIDS
- 500,000 from lack of vaccines
- 550,000 from lack of food aid
- 290,000 from malaria
- 310,000 from TB

@schumer.senate.gov ‘s grand strategy for dealing with Trump

CALL NOW: Tell Senate Democrats to Hold the Line Against the Extreme MAGA Continuing Resolution

House Democrats held strong against the Musk-Takeover Spending Bill Yesterday. We need your help to ensure that the Senate Democrats do the same. Follow the link and script below to make calls. This vote happens TODAY!

indivisible.org/resource/cal...

Strong statement from ACLU on the detention of Mahmoud Khalil:

"The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the US and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes."

Mahmoud Khalil is a green card holder. A Lawful Permanent Resident of the United States. He was arrested for First Amendment-protected political speech and is now being deported because of it. His deportation, not his protests, are the real Anti-American activity.

This quote from the WWI Memorial hits hard right now. We owe it not just to ourselves and future generations to defend this country’s ideals, but also to those past who died to defend them.

WaPo Headline: “Trump advances unconventional interpretation of First Amendment, university governance.”

A trip to Liberty Island today reminds me how far we’ve drifted from our moorings. But Emma Lazarus’s poem is who we actually are as a people. To quote Chaplin’s speech in The Great Dictator, “The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed.” This too shall pass.

It’s a bit of a pointless task screaming about Congress needing to do its job, but Article I gives to Congress the role of raising an Army and maintaining a Navy. Hollowing out our military and IC in pursuit of a right-wing ideology will cost American lives. Elected Dems need to wake the hell up.