This is corruption of the highest order. Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign, and then Donald Trump helped her cover it up. No wonder she voted with him 96% of the time and has rubberstamped his agenda to hurt Maine.

ProPublica@propublica.org · 14h ago

NEW: In late 2024, FBI investigators had enough evidence to launch a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers, including Sen. Susan Collins. Then Trump was reelected and eviscerated the FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption probes.

Reactionary Republicans for decades have wanted to destroy the post-WWII international order. Trump is doing it, and the changes nations are making in response to him are going to be very hard to undo. Moreover, why should countries trust that Americans wouldn't elect a raging lunatic again?

America’s Allies Are No Longer Waiting for Trump to Leave

They now figure isolationism and protectionism will be U.S. foreign policy for a long time to come.

theatlantic.com

Trump TV update: 1600 current viewers for Trump signing a slightly updated version of our security agreement with Denmark.

All of the tech executives who prostrated themselves before Trump are destroying their industry's public perception. Having this hated buffoon as your biggest booster is absolute poison. The US internationally has already seen this, and now perception of AI will go even lower.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 9h ago

Trump tells the UN he is officially changing the name of Artificial Intelligence to "Super Intelligence" and says all US government documents will now be changed to refer to "SI"

Incredibly great understanding here of theory of change by Mamdani. Despite wanting social change for centuries, since the Cold War, progressive policy advocates lost the ability to explain to normies or even the desire. This man gets it.

Corey Atad@coreyatad.com · 13h ago

“If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.’” crazy how much Mamdani speaks my language

I think it's pretty evident to everyone by now that Trump is basically a dumber version of Eric Cartman. He has always been a spoiled child who wasn't very smart. Each day brings new Cartman-style harebrained bullshit.

Mother Jones@motherjones.com · 22h ago

It’ll store and deploy drones, snipers, and other weaponry for “national security” purposes, he says.

Due to the terrible gating of scientific and other academic works, the actual text of the Stanford two-brain study is not available online to the public. But you can read the pre-print which was released last year www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Two parallel lineage-committed progenitors contribute to the developing brain

The hindbrain is a life-sustaining brain region. In one model, a common neural progenitor generates all brain regions. Here our studies of mouse embryos and human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) suppor...

biorxiv.org

There's a reason why human cultures across the world have speculated for centuries about two types of thinking. In my own work, I've postulated them as our somatic and abstract reasoning. Really incredibly fascinating work here.

Ryan Boyd@ryanboyd.bsky.social · yesterday

NEW BRAIN DROPPED

media consolidation is always extremely harmful to labor, consumers, creatives, and markets. It's not a debate. when the thousands of layoffs drop next year, all the dems who clamored for a weak settlement will be nowhere to be found

Feckless Dems Fold, Back Off Effort To Kill Paramount Merger

Every single time Democrats have an opportunity to demonstrate they're serious about media reform, they trip over their own assholes.

karlbode.com

consultants should all be telling D candidates to enfranchise DC. the surest way to help moderate the 2032 effects is to have 2 solid d senate seats. there is absolutely no messaging that will have a bigger effect.

G Elliott Morris@gelliottmorris.com · yesterday

From my personal experience people don't want to pay you to tell them they can't do anything about, eg, the very likely anti-Dem. midterm backlash in 2030 (or, gulp, 34). But it's true. So consultants make up stuff like "Kamala Harris would have won if she ran anti-trans ads"

If only there was a federal agency that could stop monopolizing media mergers.

Scott MacFarlane@macfarlanenews.bsky.social · yesterday

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez on Paramount-Warner Bros merger: “This settlement appears to pave the way for yet another massive media consolidation deal that could raise prices for consumers, reduce content diversity, and weaken editorial independence”

🧵 About 30% of American adults say they are unaffiliated with a religious tradition, but as people are rejecting ancient epistemic systems, many of us are struggling to find meaning from life, to take care of ourselves, and to even have a concept of what selfhood is. That's a problem.

Non-religious people still need to think about meaning and selfhood

J. Eric Oliver on knowing yourself without gods

plus.flux.community

They have been this way since ghostwriters became a thing, sadly. Our elites have existed in a bubble for many decades now, impervious to reality--and pathologically terrified of 20-somethings criticizing them on the internet.

Tragic: Former Fox News producer unalives herself after being unable to get justice against accused rapist, ex-Fox anchor Ed Henry and the network. RIP Jennifer Eckhart.

Former Fox News producer Jennifer Eckhart dies by suicide at 36

Jennifer Eckhart, 36, was found at her home in Hobe Sound, Florida, on Saturday, with TMZ subsequently reporting that she had taken her own life.

dailymail.com

I never thought Beto was going to win. Talarico has a much better chance this year.

Greg Sargent@gregsargent.bsky.social · 2d ago

Why Dem pollster John Anzalone thinks Texas is real this time: *Trump -33 with independents there *Talarico running well ahead of his party *Talarico seems like something new *Talarico getting 60% of Latinos *GOP's trans attack not sticking *Paxton so vile/corrupt newrepublic.com/article/2156...

James Talarico’s pastor welcomes atheists. Conservatives think that’s a scandal. open.substack.com/pub/friendly...

James Talarico’s pastor welcomes atheists. Conservatives think that’s a scandal.

Overhyped “undercover” videos targeted Rev. Jim Rigby for views that many evangelical churches already embrace

open.substack.com

"The dismantling of local journalism is corroding our ability to help preserve a true democracy, one lost job at a time." From @aacquisto.bsky.social:

McClatchy laid me off. The need for local journalism didn’t go with me. - Poynter

I was hired to fill a gap in local news coverage. Seven years later, that gap is widening again.

poynter.org

He is not wrong. "There are reasonable grounds to believe that the reported 68 attacks that killed 223 people constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law" - United Nations Special Rapporteur on U.S. Killing “Narco-Terrorists” at Sea www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul...

These books and the earlier ones like "The Late Great Planet Earth" really warped a lot of people's minds. It's underneath the surface of so much reactionary malice. The world is going to burn anyway, so might as well make the hated other suffer & get whatever you want since you're "saved" anyway.

Karen Attiah@karenattiah.bsky.social · 2d ago

I keep telling people about how the Christian "Left Behind" books, literal fantasies about the apocalypse, were super, super popular in the late 90s/ early 2000s. I used to read them. Major disasters, while terrible, were also framed by evangelical churches as titillating...sexy almost.

The funniest joke ever. 😂

This true, and yet it's also true that judicial supremacy is why the reactionaries who took over the Republican party have been able to build a political coalition. They use the courts to push their unpopular agenda rather than voting for it in Congress.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat@ruthbenghiat.bsky.social · 4d ago

In my latest essay, I write about the deeply dangerous threats being made against U.S. Judges — and how, despite this, U.S. judges are displaying the courage to stand up to authoritarian threats and attacks on Democratic notions of the law. More at my Substack at Lucid.Substack.com.

Longtermism runs on the same mathematical trickery as Pascal’s wager, with the same unethical results.

Matt Weiner@mattweiner19.bsky.social · 5d ago

longtermism is so repugnant that I hesitate to address it on its own terms but: on its own terms this shit is clearly wrong. the best way *now* to encourage a happy future for umptillion beings who use technology we can't imagine is to make the current world more just for everyone.

Correct. Anybody else raising a question of privilege like this puts it on a two-day countdown. The minority leader has the perk that he can force the vote immediately, if he wants.

ringwiss@ringwiss.bsky.social · 6d ago

If Jeffries did think that the House should vote on impeaching Hegseth, he could have offered Massie’s resolution for him – it would then have to be considered immediately.

So many judges having to resort to such things because the Trump people are so corrupt

Allison Gill@muellershewrote.com · 6d ago

NEW: Judge Sullivan isn't buying Todd Blanche's excuses for refusing to hand over handwritten FBI notes underlying four Epstein survivor FBI interviews. He's ordered Blanche to hand them over for in camera review by 9/24. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The same Big Tech billionaires building AI tools we didn't ask for are devouring TV networks, movie studios, and major newspapers. They want to watch us AND control what we watch. A 🧵 on the intersection between media consolidation and the growing surveillance state >>>

“Why do people hate that I don’t want kids to be killed and starved?” — Ms. Rachel talks to Rolling Stone about the backlash she faced for supporting Palestine, recalling moments when she felt like everyone hated her. (www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...)

We will pay for this far more than in dollars. If not in the near term, certainly in the long term.

Jenna Norton@jenna-m-norton.bsky.social · 7d ago

The cuts in staff across federal health agencies are staggering. Great analysis from @ourpublicservice.bsky.social. 1 in 5 people gone from NIH. More than 1 in 4 gone from CDC. Nearly 7 in 10 gone from AHRQ. ourpublicservice.org/resource/the...

If you're covering Donald Trump's attempts to put his name all over the Kennedy Center, please do not refer to the organization's board as dominated by Trump appointees. He is the 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻 of the board. I don't see the board notes online, but it seems that he is voting to rename KC after himself.

We shouldn't have to celebrate obviously common-sense judicial rulings. But nonetheless, it's good that sanity is prevailing on the Kennedy Center and Trump's illegal vanity project has been shot down.

Chris Geidner@chrisgeidner.bsky.social · last wk.

BREAKING: Judge Cooper, again, says the Kennedy Center board can't put Trump's name on the building. Also, Cooper says they can't name it Trump Plaza. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...