Jake Higdon
@jakehigdon.com
Building the industrial backbone for the clean economy @ industrialzones.org. Helped design/implement Obama- and Biden-era energy and manufacturing policies. Clean economic development, climate, running, PNW hoops. I still believe in America.
AI is falling to the China scale and China price. But more important is situated communities of knowledge. Is the US going to be early leader & innovator on AI & then fail on process knowledge & diffusion to the Chinese? Good note by Sarah Guo on 'What Shenzhen Knows' x.com/saranormous/...
Trump is simply stealing tax money to build himself a golden palace
Drew Harwell@drewharwell.com · 3d ago$900 million would cover a year of food assistance for 400,000 people wapo.st/4xe1GJT
A core conservative demand is being able to benefit from living in a society without incurring any obligations. A philosophy for infants
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 4d agoNIH Director Jay Bhattacharya: "We shouldn't be keeping kids out of schools because their parents have made different decisions than other parents" (Note that Trump is asleep)
Amazon is building the nation’s largest fossil fuel plant exclusively to power artificial intelligence As my colleague @emilypont.bsky.social notes, the plant’s permit allows for essentially double the emissions of the most polluting power plant in the U.S.
Amazon Is Building America’s Biggest Fossil Fuel Plant to Power AI
The company confirmed its plans to market research company Cleanview.
heatmap.news
I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.
It's a tough job, but literally no one has to do it
You wouldn’t know it from the general media environment, but a recent study’s 20 Happiest Cities of 2026 include SF, three other liberal California hellholes, and the Seattle Anarchy Zone… plus a bunch of college towns www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/r...
The Happiest Cities of 2026
A study mined data on emotional, physical and financial health, as well as community and environmental factors, to find the happiest Americans.
nytimes.com
Hassett: "Data centers are very good for towns bc they create so many jobs & bring people in with high incomes that can buy houses & stuff like that. So if you take a sleepy town that hasn't seen much in the last 30 years & put a data center there, there are gonna be a bunch of happy residents."
The conspicuous overlap between record-breaking warmth, dryness, and/or low snowpack and these fires is simply not a coincidence. The scientific evidence linking increasingly extreme fire weather, as well as increasingly extreme wildfires themselves, to climate warming is clear.
Astonishing. RFK Jr. adds 8 members to a 6 member FDA advisory panel. 6 of them were sellers of peptides, and the 7th a compounding pharmacist. In an 8-6 vote with all 8 votes coming from these new panel members, the panel approved 4 peptides against the objections of FDA scientists.
FDA Panel Supports Lifting Restrictions on Four Peptides (Gift Article)
In an all-day hearing, the agency’s scientists argued against allowing broad access to unproven drugs that the agency had banned three years ago.
nytimes.com
More Americans have been killed in the Iran war Trump started than in the Afghan withdrawal Biden was handed and completed. The implications for America’s geopolitical situation is much worse with attacking Iran than leaving Afghanistan. But going by tone of coverage, one would think the opposite.
So far this year we've had: the warmest winter on record in the mountain west, a record-shattering heat wave in Europe, once in a thousand year rainfall and flooding texas and forest fire smoke blanketing the mid west and the north east. Feels like something's going on with the climate!
Hell of a scoop! The day before Ken Pa ton intervened in the Brendan Sorsby saga, Texas Tech Board of Regents Chair Cody Campbell, one of Sorsby’s most public defenders, donated $274,300 to a fundraising committee supporting Paxton. www.texastribune.org/2026/07/15/c...
Texas Tech chair donated $275K to Paxton before he intervened for Sorsby
Cody Campbell, a major Texas Tech booster and GOP megadonor, has vocally defended Brendan Sorsby’s right to play amid a legal battle stemming from his betting scandal.
texastribune.org
WHOA DHS does not say that the agent feared for his life… just the vague concern for “public safety.” So he killed him just because he did not want him in America, not because of any specific threat to agents?
More state-sponsored murder today in Maine. We can’t go on like this.
Think. About. This. The U.S. Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it gradually to Venezuela through the country’s private banks…. Mr. Rubio and his team set the conditions on what that money can be spent on, and by whom. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/u...
How Marco Rubio is Running Venezuela From Afar
The secretary of state effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government. His grip on the country is a vivid manifestation of American power in th...
nytimes.com
BREAKING NYT: The Trump admin just issued subpoenas to several journalists for The New York Times, after the outlet reported on security concerns involving Trump's Qatari-gifted Air Force One. The subpoenas seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury on Wednesday.
Times Journalists Subpoenaed as Trump Escalates Pressure on Media
The Justice Department is seeking to compel testimony from reporters who wrote about the new Air Force One. The Times called the move a “brazen act.”
nytimes.com
Trump to sign order as soon as Monday to dismantle Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments www.abc4.com/news/politic...
President Trump expected to shrink Grand Staircase and Bears Ears National Monuments as soon as Monday, sources say
President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order to shrink the boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments as soon as Monday, three sources with knowl…
abc4.com
This kind of thing, ICE killing a different person from the one they were searching for, wouldn’t happen if they’d just stop killing people.
Jennie Coughlin@jenniecoughlin.bsky.social · last mo.Federal immigration agents who killed a man during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday had been searching for a different person, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman.
KEY: all three witnesses are being detained apart, and their story is consistent. They say that there were agents along the side of the vehicle but none in front. When you add the videos showing a lack of evidence of damage to the front despite ICE's ramming claim, ICE's story is falling apart.
Katie Phang@katiephang.bsky.social · last mo.All 3 men inside of the van with Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “‘reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van…They came in and started shooting from the sides.’” www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...
This is absolutely devastating and infuriating. ICE officers in an unmarked car shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three, on his way to work. Then the smear machine immediately kicked in. Read the words of his son, and demand accountability: www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...
He saw a video of a Mexican man shot by ICE. It was his father.
The eldest child of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo said his father was “a family man” who was likely frightened by the unmarked vehicles following him.
washingtonpost.com
We are going to reach a point where every student is paid 50,000 dollars to take a rightwing class to turn them against the idea of government spending
Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · last mo.Only one student enrolled in West Virginia University’s new Washington Center after GOP lawmakers mandated the creation of the program Lawmakers allocated around $3 million to the program in the last two years
I published a book on American democracy almost a year ago now. This is the conclusion.
good call sir. the 70% of Americans (and climbing) who are skeptical of data centers mustn't be protected, or compensated, or even persuaded - but *defeated*
Nick Cunningham@nickcunningham.bsky.social · 2mo agoUS Secretary of Energy Chris Wright urged supporters of data centers at an Amazon Web Services conference to push back against critics. Likened data center opposition to fracking opposition "They cannot win and they will not win" www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...
Guaranteed: 1) Black girls will be harassed and demanded to be tested over and over again regardless of how competitive they are. 2) Winners from public schools will be relentlessly hounded by the parents and coaches of losers at private schools, with the goal of making them quit the sport.
Nancy Armour@nrarmour.bsky.social · 2mo agoThe ban is heinous for what it does to transgender athletes. But if you think cisgender girls and young women won’t be caught up in the fallout, too, you are woefully ignorant
fun internet discovery: cotta coffee, a SW portland coffee shop run out of someone’s garage. how is that possible? because the owner owns a rare single family home on a CM1 zoned lot, which allows low rise mixed commercial and residential uses
The thing you need to understand is that there are 2 (TWO) different method for amending the constitution 1) The process laid out in the constititon itself (conventions, or 2/3's of both houses followed by 3/4 of states ratifying) OR 2) find five votes on the Supreme Court.