Skitch85

An incredibly easy choice.

Cover of The Lancet:

@thelancet.com
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

By the way, a reminder on Jack Hughes, since the grifters are already trying to hijack his postgame interview
www.vogue.com/article/meet...

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).

We cut child poverty in half across this whole country and also instituted universal free meals in public schools across this whole country. And then we let those policies expire. During the previous administration.

Corporations: We are collections of people & therefore deserve the civic rights afforded all people.

Me: Ok. May I talk to a person?

Corporation: No. Never again.

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

Guys being Dudes

Hackers Expose Age-Verification Software Powering Surveillance Web Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.

Oops. Turns out Persona, Discord’s age-verification service, was secretly screening selfies against government watchlists AND accessible by the feds. It's backed by Peter Thiel.

“The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they've learned to work together.”

New Documents Reveal a Controversial Vaccine Study's Unusual Path to CDC Approval A new investigation has found irregularities in the ethics review of a grant to study effects of a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine in Guinea-Bissau.

In desperation to generate support for changing the US vaccine schedule, CDC appointees allied with Kennedy circumvented scientific & ethical safeguards to 'experiment' with Hep B vaccination in West Africa.

The Crimes Against Humanity administration. 🧪

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

A photo of an ice cream machine with a sign reading, "Anything is possible with ice cream." Beneath that is a hand lettered sign reading, "No ice cream".

2026 basically

W/out reposting the vid, I want to make a different point about RFK Jr & his fellow travelers. Whether it's his workout, supplement, or eating regimen, Trump's makeup, everyone w/in 4 degrees of Trump's plastic surgery fetishes, all of it is done not for actual improvement of one's self. 1/

West Ham were 2-0 up on Chelsea into the 69th minute, and 1-0 up on United in the 95th minute and came away with a single point.

"We aren’t taking very good care of [Earth], but that could change. For me, that’s what Star Trek is all about. Not the promise of a high-tech future where we escape our world, but rather one where we learn to respect the incredible spaceship that is our home planet." -Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

In her @newscientist.com column, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein did not mince words: Elon Musk has misunderstood the point of Star Trek.

The idea that a heavily corporate and militarized approach to exploration will create a prosperous future? Illogical.

@chanda.blacksky.app

They can't tolerate this because their political power, largely built on minority rule dynamics as it is, always outstrips their cultural and even economic market power. But they have the government hammer, so everything looks like a nail.

I don’t really know what I expect in posting this, but maybe some people see it and can learn from it.

I’ll call it “lessons from an unwilling immigration attorney.”

1/

Yes, It’s Fascism Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.

Oddly, @jonrauch.bsky.social does not praise any of the people who came to this rather obvious realization before he did. Nor does he take time to ponder what *else* he might learn from those people. In fact, the piece drips with the same old condescension & hostility toward those people! Amazing.

Worth noting that one reason you’re benefitting so fully from the Star-Tribune’s timely, extensive coverage of unfolding events is that it’s a metro newspaper that hasn’t been systematically starved to further enrich shareholders and executives.

Trump, and his supporters and apologists, are shitty people with shitty values from a shitty culture.

Not enough bad things can happen to them.

Excerpt from Letter from Birmingham Jail: I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens' "Councilor" or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direst action" who paternistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

#MLK, Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

Four GOP Senators.

At most four Repubs in the House.

Together they could stop nearly all the mad-king's rampages. They would be known to history as Profiles in Courage. They might/would lose the next election. But people have sacrificed a lot more, for a lot less.

Had an intriguing editorial discussion recently: how did people in the past talk about 'minutes' when they didn't have watches or standardised times? How does that affect your thinking?

Come down an Elizabethan/Jacobean rabbit hole with me.

1/

The 'No Hire' Economy US Job Growth has Zeroed Out as Hiring Rates Sink, Hitting Young & Low Income Workers the Hardest

NEW from me:

Job growth has been functionally zero over the last five months, as the US sinks from a “low hire, low fire” labor market to a “no hire” one.

That slowdown is hitting young & low income workers the hardest 🧵
www.apricitas.io/p/the-no-hir...

Tom Homan has been saying the exact same thing for a year: If people continue to exercise free speech against state power, they will be responsible for the subsequent violence visited against them by the state

ICE is WHIPPING through my suburban neighborhoods — not uncommon to see them going 50 mph — race through red lights, veer across multiple lanes to get to off ramps, no blinkers. They’re going to hurt or kill someone (else)

Handing Out Free Tickets, Mamdani Says Theater Should Not Be ‘a Luxury’

“When I speak about making our city more affordable, my vision is not limited to the homes that we live in or the child care that we’re making universal — it’s also a vision where we make it possible for working people to afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.”

Once again noting the absolute alarm at the notion of deepfakes creating confusion about evidentiary reality of political events misses the shape of the actual problem; which looks more like widespread participatory lying *despite* copious availability of actual and easily verifiable media evidence.