Matthew Bradley
@machination.org
Dad, product-minded tech mgr, photog. Veteran of DC machinations. I care about climate, civil liberties, pluralism.
Holiday in the climate emergency. No that’s not AI or edited, just a snapshot I just took with my phone on Lacanau beach in France. What future will this boy grow up in? It is in our hands, but time is running out.
It was a really bad air day for DC. A pollution double whammy. Not only did smoke pollution reach code purple (very unhealthy) levels this AM and hover at code red this PM, but ground-level ozone, another pollutant, spiked to code red this afternoon. This is not something we can remember seeing.
We are given only a limited number of truly perfect summer days in our time on Earth. One of the more insidious cruelties of fossil fuel greed is how it slowly strips those days from us, more and more throughout our lifetimes, perhaps without us even realizing what we have lost.
Another stolen summer day
What are we still waiting to learn?
heated.world
I rewatched Citizen Kane a few weeks ago and by modern plutocrat metrics he seems basically fine.
Trump must be impeached for undermining and subverting our free and fair elections. And when he sends ICE agents to the polls, then we must turn civic action into civil disobedience and take to the streets. Sit in. Protest. Withhold our labor. Everything must be on the table.
TOMORROW, the Senate will vote on a resolution from @wyden.senate.gov to stop the Trump administration's so-called "Wasteful & Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model," which is introducing AI care denials to Traditional Medicare. 🧵
Mainstream Respectable opinion is that people joking about a bad person's death represents a culture of cruelty, but really it represents a culture of impunity. It's a coping mechanism for watching someone do evil their whole life and never seeing consequences
'The US to me is a country where some people become trillionaires and others lose everything to disease. Dickensian.' To mark the US’s semiquincentennial, we asked our readers to reflect on their experience of the country — here are your responses: ft.trib.al/q3mXdk2
I believe in the groundbreaking concept that a full day’s work should entitle you to a living wage. Proud to be leading the effort for a $25 federal minimum wage with @chrismurphyct.bsky.social.
Chris Murphy@chrismurphyct.bsky.social · last mo.Today, I introduced legislation to require that the minimum wage be a living wage. $25 an hour is what’s required for a full time worker to pay their bills, and we shouldn’t accept that full time work leaves people living in poverty.
I felt similarly to Dan Hon about the current European heat wave feeling well described in advance by Kim Stanley Robinson in The Ministry for the Future. But also about John Oliver’s hog culling segment as it related to some early framing in Termination Shock.
Republicans just blocked a five week FISA extension in order to cover up ongoing FISA abuses
An update on where things stand on FISA: Early Friday morning, we successfully defeated a bill in the Senate to rubber-stamp the Trump administration's authority to spy on Americans without a warrant. This is a big win on privacy.
"Notify me" for Safari browsers tabs sounds like one of the first examples of "personal agents" I ever heard back in, I don't know, roughly 1999. I might actually trust this kind of use of an agent outside of a web-managed high-context software development ecosystem.
Pathetic lickspittles, indeed — with hordes of bootlickers.
"The florsheims fit fine" should be engraved on his tombstone.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2mo agoJACOBS: I have one last question for you. Who won the 2020 presidential election? MARCO RUBIO: I'm not here to answer about 2020 JACOBS: It seems like you have an issue admitting facts, just like you couldn't admit the shoes the president bought you were too big RUBIO: The florsheims fit fine
Reading the news is hard.: https://machination.org/2026/06/01/reading-the-news-is-hard/
Some lawmakers are speaking out against closed, single-party primaries, which they see as part of a system that limits voter choice and incentivizes elected officials to prioritize party loyalty. n.pr/4dRbOjb
How single-party primary elections are reshaping Congress
Some lawmakers are speaking out against closed, single-party primaries, which they see as part of a system that limits voter choice and incentivizes elected officials to prioritize party loyalty.
n.pr
@brucespringsteen.net & @tommorelloofficial.bsky.social : sometimes you put the laser-focused critique aside and enjoy. Plenty of righteous noise in the neighborhood which seems to be DC's MAGA staffer rental ground zero.
“A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores.” [beyondplastics.org]
Beyond Plastics Tracked Starbucks’ ‘Widely Recyclable’ Plastic Cups. None Ended Up at a Recycling Facility. — Beyond Plastics - Working To End Single-Use Plastic Pollution
A three-month national investigation by Beyond Plastics found that not a single tracked Starbucks cold-beverage cup ended up at a recycling facility — even when the cups were placed in clearly marked recycling bins inside Starbucks stores.
beyondplastics.org
No Vote-a-Rama tonight. There's a chance the ballroom and the "1776 fund" won't happen… the balls some Republican primary losers suddenly found, for a moment at least.
Micro.blog 3.9 for Mac is out with a new backup feature, improvements to showing categories and cross-posting (thanks @mjb!), and other fixes.
Church is the state now: https://machination.org/2026/05/17/church-is-the-state-now/
it suddenly got very green in front of my house.
Divine Web - Short-form Looping Videos on Nostr
Watch and share 6-second looping videos on the decentralized Nostr network.
divine.video
The infrastructure and vegetation in East Potomac Park has been neglected by our government of the people for many years, but it is not a “BARREN field” along the Potomac River, as President Trump falsely claimed on “TruthSocial.” #Irony Trust what you can see with your own eyes, though my camera.
My head has been down, except for when it’s been in the clouds for brief stretches. Ironically, not a lot of time for trite outgassing to the web and social media. I love it when we can use it to make culture or organize against threads. I’ve been pushing for support for just such an effort.