Grady // @GradyLocklear

Companies associated with Trump's sons have received $1 billion and counting in government contracts since he returned to office. We've never seen anything like this coming out of the White House. 📸: @MSNOWNews @Morning_Joe

Ossoff: Just think, 250 years on, what the founders would see if they visited us today. But wait, they would see that slavery had been abolished. They would see that Americans without land, and then women, and then the descendants of slaves had secured voting rights. They would see that our science and discovery propelled human knowledge to unimaginable heights and that those thirteen colonies had grown into a superpower that defeated the Nazis and Communism. They'd see a pluralist democracy, people of all colors descended from every point on Earth, stitched together out of many nations into one.

Totally sane person in the comments writes, “Free speech is a right-wing ideology that has nothing to offer the left.” There is a word for people who think the world would be better if only the government they liked had power over speech and ideas, and that the real problem is all this pesky, insistent autonomy and individuality. Unfortunately, that word is badly overused at the moment.

rbee @rbeestweets

3 weeks ago

Let's get real about free speech (Greg Lukianoff | TED2025) ted.com/talks/greg_luk… via @TEDTalks

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Last week I read a @VICE article that was laden with AI writing tells. Not sure why it took me by surprise.

Warren Buffett: "The bottom 2% in terms of income in the United States, the bottom 5%, and for sure the top 1% all live better than John D. Rockefeller was living when I was six years old." "John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world and, today, you can get better medicine, better education, better entertainment, better transportation. You can do everything better than he could." "When I was born, the dentist didn't use novocaine!"

You can crash your yard's mosquito population without spraying a single chemical with a Mosquito Bucket of Doom. Fill a 5-gallon bucket about two-thirds with water. Drop in a handful of grass clippings, leaves, or hay. Let it sit for a day, then drop in a Bti dunk (also called Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, sold at any hardware store as "mosquito dunks," about $10 for six). Mosquitoes are powerfully attracted to fermenting water and will lay their eggs in your bucket. Bti is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that produces a toxin that kills mosquito, blackfly, and fungus gnat larvae only. This method doesn't harm bees, butterflies, fireflies, fish, frogs, birds, pets, or people. BTI dunks are EPA-approved for organic use and safe in animal water troughs and birdbaths. One dunk lasts about 30 days. Top off the water as it evaporates. Cover with 1/2-in Mesh Hardware Cloth to prevent animals from getting trapped and put the bucket somewhere shady where pets and kids won't get into it. The bucket becomes a mosquito magnet and a dead end. Compare that to fogging the entire yard with pyrethroids, which kills every insect in it, including the predators that eat mosquitoes. Doug Tallamy's Homegrown National Park has been running the "Mosquito Bucket Challenge" since 2021. The more buckets in a neighborhood, the bigger the dent. One bucket per yard is a great start.

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NYT out with a jaw dropping investigative report on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 60 Minutes reported last Sunday on some of this, too. The NYT report is a must-read, the 60 Minutes report should then be watched. 1/3

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages. The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse. I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true. But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

The National Park Service ran on a $3 billion budget and generated $56 billion in economic output in 2024. That’s over $17 back for every $1 invested. With a record of 332 million visitors last year, Americans clearly care about their parks and expect them to be funded.

FactPost @factpostnews

3 months ago

Trump's 2026 budget proposal cuts $736 million from the National Parks Service.

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“Corporate farming methods” are why you don’t have to do backbreaking work as a farmer anymore and why starvation is the exception rather than the rule around the world today

Nida Kirmani @NidaKirmani

4 months ago

A more apt analogy would be comparing those who refuse AI with those who resist corporate farming methods, which have decimated our food systems, displaced poor farmers, damaged our health, & destroyed our planet.

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Opening keynote at #B2Bmx loading…

The 1979 Iranian revolution was a hinge point in history that dramatically set back the values that progressives claim to care about, including women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and rationalism in public policy. In “Persepolis,” Marjane Satrapi recalls the story of Niloufar, an 18-year-old communist activist sentenced to death by the clerical regime. The religious jurists have no problem with the death penalty for Niloufar, but they worry that as a virgin she may go to heaven. So they arrange for her to be raped by a prison guard before her execution. Later the authorities send Niloufar’s family a small dowry to commemorate this “marriage.” Ali Khamenei led this murderous medieval regime for nearly forty years. This is a regime that beat women for showing their hair and publicly hanged gays from cranes. It’s a regime that ignored the needs of its own people to fund jihadist groups in, among other places, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories. It’s a regime that committed murder in dozens of countries, including Germany, France, India, Australia, Argentina and Saudi Arabia. Just weeks ago, it slaughtered thousands—possibly tens of thousands—of its own citizens for protesting its repressive policies. Because the Iranian revolution offered a template for Islamist rule, albeit a Shia variant crafted by Ayatollah Khomeini, Islamists of all stripes took inspiration from it. Few countries adopted the extreme measures favored by the mullahs of Iran, but the revolution’s malign influence was felt from Morocco to Mindanao. In the 1980s it also sparked a theological arms race with Saudi Arabia, which spread its own regressive brand of Islamism around the world. Progressives in democratic countries who mourn the death of Khamenei come in different flavors. Some are simply Islamists or Islamist adjacent. Their ideology conceals the deeper religious passions that motivate them. Others are so blinded by their hatred of America and Israel that they reflexively oppose any action by them. Yet others are simply so ignorant of the nature of the Iranian regime that they can’t see the absurdity of comparing Khamenei with Dumbledore from Harry Potter. But all of these people have one thing in common. They spit on the suffering of the talented Iranian people who have had to endure nearly 50 years of brutal clerical rule.

From Gorsuch concurrence.

The manufacturing boom President Trump promised would usher in a golden age for America is going in reverse on.wsj.com/4kCatQ1

15% of the population of Ireland entered the US between 1851 and 1860 9% of the population of Norway entered the US in the 1880s 6% of the population of Italy entered the US from about 1900-1910

Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital

5 months ago

Most Americans still don’t fully understand what happened under Biden… 8% of Nicaragua entered the US in 4 years. 8% of the entire country. 7% of Cuba. 6% of Haiti. 5% of Honduras.

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This is why it’s funny that the White House keeps taking credit for crime falling. The decline was already noticeable in 2024, and Trump said that data was “ridiculous” and “a lie.” Now the numbers are magically reliable. That’s…not how this works.

reason @reason

5 months ago

Trump is bragging about data showing a sharp drop in homicides. But in 2024, his campaign rejected those numbers as "a lie," falsely claiming that murders were "skyrocketing." reason.com/2026/02/10/in-…

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The Constitution isn’t optional. The point of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement is to hassle the government. It’s supposed to be difficult to search or arrest people. That’s not a bug; that’s a feature of our American republic.

reason @reason

5 months ago

House Speaker Mike Johnson thinks ICE should be spared the hassle of “getting a judicial warrant” before forcibly entering private homes. reason.com/2026/02/05/mik…

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🚨BREAKING: ICE/Border Patrol agents illegally demand a woman prove her citizenship, then lie about having a warrant for someone connected to her home, and refuse to show it, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. In the video, ICE agents confront a woman outside her home and demand she hand over her ID to “prove” she is a U.S. citizen, something they have no legal authority to require without reasonable suspicion of a specific crime. She asks why they need her ID. They tell her they have a “target” who lives at the address. So she asks, “Who is the target?” An agent responds, “We have to make sure you aren’t our target,” then immediately asks, “Do you live at this address?” She says yes. The person filming points out the obvious and tells her she should call 911, because she already stated she’s a citizen and ICE has no jurisdiction over U.S. citizens. That’s when the agent says, “She never said she was a citizen. Calm down.” The woman corrects him. She clearly states she is a citizen, and explains they never asked her about her status, they just demanded ID, which again, is not legal. The agent repeats himself, claiming they have a target connected to the home and want to make sure she isn’t that person. She then asks the only question that matters: “Do you have a warrant?” An agent says, “Yes, we have a warrant for their arrest.” She asks to see it. They refuse. Instead, the agent says, “I’ve got to make sure you are the person.” That’s still not how warrants work. If ICE actually had a valid warrant, they would already know who they were looking for, would not be guessing, and would be legally required to present it on request. Standing outside a home doesn’t change that. You don’t have to identify yourself just so federal agents can decide whether their claimed warrant applies to you. This is a textbook ICE intimidation tactic… demand ID, lie about warrants, deny proof, and hope people don’t know their rights. ICE/Border Patrol agents are harassing U.S. citizens in their own neighborhood, fishing for consent they are not entitled to. And this is how rights get erased, not all at once, but slowly, through lies, pressure, and people being told to “calm down.”

The @nytimes has compiled an incredibly detailed and comprehensive account of the massacre committed in Iran, by direct order of Supreme Leader Khamenei. It was so graphic and so harrowing that I was unable to read to the end. If you know someone downplaying what happened or peddling conspiracies please show them this. @farnazfassihi nytimes.com/2026/01/25/wor…

I strongly reject this dangerous rhetoric. Do not threaten Members of Congress. Republican or Democrat. It’s deeply wrong with no exceptions—ever.