MsDWrites

This should be the biggest story in the country right now. The sitting US President was extorting state lawmakers from his own party by threatening to withhold public money if they didn’t gerrymander for him.

I don’t know how else to say it…

Meet the TikTok stars demanding oil companies clean up their mess There are millions of abandoned oil wells across the United States. A group of unlikely activists in Texas is making sure no one forgets they need to be cleaned up.

We recently got this excellent article by @mollytaft.com on abandoned oil and gas wells in Texas.

The lawsuit filed by the rancher profiled in that piece has now been settled. Protecting Chevron from much more exposure via a trial.

Many scholars argue that relative inequality—how far a society’s income distribution deviates from a broadly shared middle ground—is more politically volatile than absolute poverty levels. When a large gap appears between “the elite” and “the masses,” it can erode trust in democratic institutions.

Hefty fine after 37,000 litres of drilling sludge dumped near North East river Business hit with penalty and ordered to clean up the waste.

Stop fining companies minuscule amounts for environmental crimes and chuck their executives in prison instead www.bordermail.com.au/story/912886...

BREAKING: AWFUL! Trump’s goons pull people OUT OF LINE at their citizenship ceremony based on their country of origins, denying them the American Dream after DOING EVERYTHING RIGHT!

MAGAZINER: How many veterans have you deported?

NOEM: We haven't deported veterans

MAGAZINER: We are now joined on Zoom by a combat veteran you deported to Korea

NATO has been on Russia’s Eastern border since its inception. On its Western since 2004. This is propaganda nonsense and you are at best falling for it, at worst promoting it.

The Institute of Economic Affairs Banked £640,000 from Oil Giants and Murdoch The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group – received more than £640,000 from fossil fuel companies and Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate between 1957 and ...

🔴 REVEALED 🔴

The Institute of Economic Affairs – the anti-state, anti-climate pressure group that "incubated" Liz Truss – was bankrolled by oil giants and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

📝 Exclusive findings from @desmog.com 👇

the nypd did this to me in harlem once in the middle of the night after they pulled my friends and i over and claimed to smell weed in the car but found none. they forced my friend who was driving to abandon me and one other friend there. law & order did an episode about a similar incident.

My bestie is working in New York. We have a list of other countries we will be meeting up in while this crap continues.

“Let them be kids!”

But Victoria passed the Adult Time for Violent Crime legislation which can send 14 year olds to adult jails.

Which is it you want them to be? Adults or children?

Or simply not seen or heard at all?

YouTube video by dorcm1973 The Muppet Show: Rowlf - "What a Wonderful World"

SO fucking good!

One of my favourite moments in all the Muppets is him singing Wonderful World petting a sleepy dog with utter disarming sincerity

The woman who does those brilliant font skits on TikTok is going to find it hard to be more absurd than this.

…the fuck?

On off-white paper is a coloured pencil drawing of a kestrel. The bird is a female, and she is perched on a wooden post. She looks over her shoulder towards something the viewer cannot see.

Day eight of #ArtAdventCalendar.

Tonight’s offering is this coloured pencil drawing of a kestrel I drew for my mum.

That’s a dog who has fulfilled an evolutionary instinct with utmost glee!

Photo of a black and white kitten with one golden eye, sniffing a miniature christmas tree covered in tiny gold and silver baubles.

Marcel has been hard at work fighting the tree and causing general mayhem during his first Christmas (which is his job as a kitten, of course). In case you haven't heard, I am running a fundraiser for our local animal shelter right now - please consider donating if you can! givebutter.com/n5l31M

The role of misogyny in the modern Republican movement is seriously underplayed. It doesn’t help that many of the pundits put things like abortion, childcare, and workplace equality into a box called “women’s issues”, and then say that the party needs to focus on issues of “general interest”.

Absolutely stunning to see Australia's teen social media ban rushed through while every single government, educational institution and probably a huge number of parents are frantically force-injecting chatbot slop into the mind of every single child in the country without a second's hesitation

What the social media ban assumes about our society is that the places where adults congregate to share ideas are never safe for children. And it’s wrong

When Disability Meets Disconnection Australia is preparing to enforce a landmark law on December 10, 2025, that will prohibit anyone under the age of 16 from using social media platforms. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Faceboo…

Today's blog post is about how disabled teenagers could be affected by Australia’s social media ban.

gracedowwrites.com/2025/12/09/w...

An interesting alternative to the Oz social media ban - youth-led movements trying to reshape big tech and harmful practices

Federal judge throws out Trump order blocking development of wind energy A federal judge has struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking wind energy projects, saying the effort to halt virtually all leasing of wind farms on federal lands and waters was “a...

Very happy to see Trump’s illegal block on wind farm development thrown out by a judge, along with the Orwellian justification given for it—a classic inversion of the truth.
apnews.com/article/trum...

An inner west bus decorated with tinsel and Christmas decorations

Christmas bus time in Sydney!

The onslaught of anti-trans media coverage in mainstream outlets like the New York Times, or anti-trans advertising by the far-right, has certainly had the effect of blunting public support for trans rights. This is depressing but should also be understood in terms of the indifference paradigm: past support was tepid, but so is present-day antipathy. So, what happened in 2024? The pundits who trumpet trans rights' electoral toxicity love to cite a study by Future Forward, a pro-Harris SuperPAC, which suggested that the “Kamala is for they/them” ad shifted the race towards Trump by 2.7 points. Citations of this study are everywhere, though nearly all of them are links to the same New York Times article published on November 7th, 2024—including Wikipedia’s own citation of the study in its article about the infamous ad. A veritable bumper crop of blog posts, op-eds, and articles citing that study through the Times analysis emerged, all of them portraying the ad as uniquely effective. The FiveThirtyEight subreddit was almost unanimous in its praise for the ad and its purported power. As I was researching this essay, however, it struck me as odd that all of these blogs, essays, and social media posts linked to or cited that same Times article when quoting the figure. As it turns out, getting one’s hands on the original Future Forward study and its data is tricky, to say the least. The UK newspaper, The Independent, was unable to even get ahold of them to ask questions. The focus groups that were conducted by Future Forward are likely real, but how they arrived at the 2.7% figure remains a mystery.

When I was researching this essay I was struck by the fact that a key piece of evidence used to support the idea that the "they/them" ad was decisive is, apparently, unverifiable to the public.

That inconvenience didn't stop a stampede of people waving the 2.7% figure around like a bloody shirt.

Marrickville Library is good and has a cafe inside

Some say it is illegal to arrest a sitting president. It is not. The president is subject to the law like everyone. That none have been arrested in the U.S. is only a policy internal to the DOJ based on the need for continuity of government operations--a policy that never imagined a criminal POTUS.

a summary of extremely late stage capitalism:

- make a new thing
- it costs 10,000x more
- it takes away a person's job
- it doesn't work
- it's a lie

As is often the case, the truth takes a while to catch up

The appeal judges found that Lisa Wilkinson acted properly in terms of the extensive inquiries she made and the information she relied on

Lisa always acted appropriately

The judges disagreed with Justice Lee who had asserted the opposite