Eli Anders

It is the exploitation of minority identities, both negatively and positively, for cynical political gain that undermines the fabric of institutions and our country. I can't imagine being a university administrator and putting my name on something so icky. 3/

A person can certainly have different opinions about the merits of programming to support different groups, but the fact that institutions are being extorted into promising not to "promote unlawful DEI goals" while at the same time promising to "support a thriving Jewish community" is insane. 2/

This is unfortunate:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...
I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

One like, one opinion about dogs.

(Will stop if I run out of good opinions.)

Lives and life-Years Saved From COVID-19 Vaccination This comparative effectiveness study analyses the number of lives and life-years saved worldwide among those who had been vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic 2020-2024 years.

Covid vaccination saved ~2.5 million lives between 2020-2024
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

They released him!

The Trump administration deported people, many of whom it lied about being criminals, and then exchanged them for
*a triple murderer
*they knew about his record
*and have now released him in America

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/w...

SF-Based Internet Archive Is Now a Federal Depository Library. What Does That Mean? | KQED The Internet Archive, thanks to its designation by California Sen. Alex Padilla, joins a network of over 1,100 libraries that make government documents accessible to the public.

awesome news. Congratulations @archive.org on being designated an FDLP library!! www.kqed.org/news/1204942...

I guess Run It Like a Business inevitably leads to Everything Must Go

Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers...but as citizens with a stake in this world.

Medicaid covers half the nation's children, in case any pronatalists wanted to pretend for 45 seconds not to be raving hypocritical misogynistic tools.

Hurricane Science Was Great While It Lasted The U.S. is hacking away at support for state-of-the-art forecasting.

I’ve covered the destruction from multiple devastating hurricanes, including Katrina and Maria. This is a self-inflicted tragedy and people will die. www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

The GOP passed a budget that will eviscerate health care in rural areas. They delayed much of the impact for after the midterms, hoping the public will think any discussion of the impending collapse is hyperbolic.

Local reporters have a chance to do service journalism that'll make a splash too.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

I wrote this just over 13 months ago. Not really that far off. Don't say you were not warned

The United States Is About to Embark on a Terrifying Experiment in Mass Statelessness This scenario, until recently, might have read like a dystopian projection. But after the court’s decision on Friday, it is no longer hypothetical.

"For the child born this summer in Texas, whose parents receive no documents, whose name never appears in any system, and who grows up asking why she can’t go on field trips, apply for scholarships, or open a bank account, the consequences are not legal theory. They are her life."

[whispers provocatively] the 1850 fugitive slave act is the model: reactionaries have the right to extend their authority across state lines, and their opponents have to actively assist them

Perhaps the most perverse part of CASA, other than its horrific impact on the infants of immigrants, is its timing. For four years, the Supreme Court sat back as a hand-selected group of far-right judges issued a stream of universal injunctions against the Biden administration. Then, barely five months into Trump’s second term, it suddenly cut down the practice. The court has applied an egregious double standard that awards Republican presidents with sweeping authority and presumptive legitimacy while relentlessly curtailing executive power each time a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. No democracy can long survive a regime in which a monarchical president and his black-robed collaborators supplant the Constitution with their own partisan whims.

Republican presidents get power and Democratic presidents don't. That's what the last four years of SCOTUS boils down to. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Andrew is of Italian heritage has he once apologised for mussolini? No? Disgraceful, need a written statement disavowing benito today

The way people are losing their fucking minds over a proposal for a publicly owned grocery store should give you some insight into how a proposal for public libraries would be greeted today if they didn't already exist.

Thinking, as I do often, about how DoorDash has a poorly flagged LLM functionality that writes purely speculative item descriptions, creating potentially false - and potentially deadly - information for people with allergies. More apps have health risks downstream of AI functionality than you think.

“Why Are We Funding This?” Long-standing myths about “silly science” have contributed to the reckless slashing of government-supported research.

Great write-up by @whysharksmatter.bsky.social @americanscientist.org @sigmaxi.bsky.social; "Why Are We Funding This?" on the critical importance of basic scientific research.
www.americanscientist.org/article/%E2%...

If you think it can’t happen here, remember that it already did. In 1942 soldiers came with rifles to our home and ordered us out. They put us in internment camps. Most of us were citizens.

“What was going on in those courtrooms is absolutely unacceptable,” Barnette said, adding that the judge “chastised” them for entering a public courtroom and said that in the future she was planning on locking her door at night. “It is a place of intimidation, it is a place of fear.” She and Lander sat in a number of courtrooms, watching defendants getting their cases dismissed “with completely inadequate explanation” of what that meant. No one told defendants, for example, that a dismissal of their case subjected them to forcible removal by anonymous masked agents once they stepped out of the courtroom, Barnette said. “That is not the rule of law. That is not due process. That is not acceptable in this country or anywhere else,” she said. “I am very rattled, frankly.” In one instance, the proceeding for a man whose native language was Yoruba was held in French. The judge dismissed his case and “it was clear he had no understanding” of what had happened, Barnette said. Then he was sent out into the hall, where immigration agents were waiting. Edgardo, the person Lander was helping when ICE agents attacked, spoke Spanish. The judge dismissed his case but said he had the right to appeal and gave him a date in July. “So the guy thinks he has a month to appeal,” Barnette said. “Nobody says, ‘ICE is waiting for you on the other side of the door

It’s not only the courtroom treatment of defendants that’s egregious. So are the living conditions at 26 Federal Plaza. In an interview with the Prospect, Daniel Coates, director of public affairs at Make The Road New York, said that ICE is using the building to hold people for multiple days before transferring them elsewhere, packing them in so tightly that some have no room to sleep except for on the bathroom floor. The rooms are hot because the air conditioning is inadequate, detainees have “no opportunities to get a change of clothes or clean themselves,” have no access to medical treatment, and cannot maintain their dietary restrictions, said Coates, who spoke at the press conference held after Lander’s detention. “The space is exploding,” Coates said, “and it’s sort of a black hole there because ICE is refusing entry to members of Congress,” who are supposed to be allowed to oversee such buildings. It’s an open question of “what actually 26 Federal Plaza is being used for,” he said.

So @whitneycwimbish.bsky.social did a writeup of Brad Lander's arrest today at 26 Federal Plaza in NYC, focusing not just on Lander's treatment, but the treatment of immigrants inside, both in the courtroom and once they are detained.
prospect.org/justice/2025...

Finally, and always, it’s good to see lawyers unafraid of standing up to Bondi’s politicization of DOJ and the rule of law in service to Trump.

I still can't get past the idea that people in America are now supposed to accept that this is a valid form of law enforcement and just assume it's fine when random dudes in groups with face-coverings, no ID, no warrant, & no uniform grab people off the street and force them into unmarked vehicles

This is what fascism looks like - using a conspiracy theory about a dehumanized outgroup as a pretext for seizing political power and wielding arbitrary authority. What you read about in the history books is happening right here, right now.

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/

The New York Times front page.

I'm sorry but the largest protest of my lifetime is not the 7th or 8th biggest news story in the country behind "what does Gen Z want from Instagram?" This shit is humiliating. Rearrange your layout to meet this moment. Omitting the thing happening in every American city is malpractice.

anyway, the country didn't take the white supremacist underground seriously after oklahoma city and now a bunch of tim mcveigh's run the country

The photo shows two white women, who are members of a large crowd of protesters. Although they are seen from behind, their signs can be read. One shows a photo of Martin Luther King and says, "This is the King of America." The other sign reads, "All my outrage can't fit on this dinky sign."

My favorite two signs from today's No Kings protest in Charlottesville. Big crowd, fantastic turnout. Lots of positive energy. The mood defiant & determined.