Gonna go out on a limb here and say racist cranks who write for extremist white nationalist websites like VDARE should not, in fact, be confirmed to top roles in the Department of Justice.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2h ago

SCHIFF: You told my staff you stood by your article in white nationalist website VDARE where you wrote, 'Muslim immigrants & their kids seem prone to terrorism' C: I wrote that article in support of Trump's travel ban S: Do you stand by it? C: I stand by that article S: That's all I need to know

For the past five months the only refugees the USA has accepted are white South Africans fleeing equality & safety meanwhile they are disappearing or strapping ankle monitors on any Haitian they can get ahold of. It needs to be understood how thoroughly connected these two things are.

I appreciate Sec. Bessent’s offer for me to write checks drawing directly on the US Treasury, but suspect our Pennsylvania courts might be inclined to a more traditional interpretation of the fraud statutes

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 20h ago

Bessent: "Here at the Treasury, I had $168 billion of tariff revenues that we're gonna have to refund. So when the Democrats scream, "Oh, the refunds should go back to the American people!', well, the American people had it, it was in the Treasury and it was paying down the debt."

Read it here if you haven't yet. Today is the very best day of all days to read it for the first time. short-stories.co/@raybradbury...

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The voice-clock sang, breakfast was ejected, but no doors slammed. The garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. The house sat alone in a city of rubble and…

short-stories.co

Adam Rawnsley@arawnsley.bsky.social · yesterday

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

This is the way. Catch them in an obvious betrayal of trust or violation of law, and hammer away until they cry uncle.

Kyle Griffin@kylegriffin1.bsky.social · yesterday

BREAKING: Sen. Dick Durbin accuses Todd Blanche of lying under oath. He says Blanche told him in his office — with witnesses — that the slush fund was a mistake. In his confirmation hearing, Blanche denied that remark.

The day that Ray Bradbury died I was on book tour and that night I read "There Will Come Soft Rains" to my audience instead of the usual reading.

Adam Rawnsley@arawnsley.bsky.social · yesterday

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

BREAKING: Sen. Dick Durbin accuses Todd Blanche of lying under oath. He says Blanche told him in his office — with witnesses — that the slush fund was a mistake. In his confirmation hearing, Blanche denied that remark.

So grateful every time someone in power calls out the fascism, corruption, insanity

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterday

Whitehouse: "Next we get to this crooked slush fund Trump family tax amnesty scam. We've got these two new pieces of paper. One signed only by Blanche, one not signed by anybody. Neither of which has any legal effect whatsoever. They are decorative. Can you trust Todd Blanche? I do not."

America’s concentration camps must be shut down now They are sites of horror: torture, rampant spread of infectious diseases, inadequate sanitation, hygiene, & medical care, & a mounting death toll Just as “better training of guards” wasn’t the answer to Auschwitz, you can’t “reform” these camps

Shawn Connery @shawnconnery.bsky.social · 2d ago

Immigrant Held at Delaney Detention Center Has Died, Officials Say The mayor of Newark identified the dead man as Edwin Lopez-Cornejo. The federal New Jersey center has been the focus of intense scrutiny for its treatment of detainees. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/n...

He's losing words. Anyone with a parent or loved one suffering from dementia will recognize this pattern. Wen he says "moving cameras," it's because he can't recall the word "videos" and so he's stating the component parts as best he can. E.g., a "camera" is involved and the images are "moving"

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d ago

Trump: "We have photographs or tapes -- like moving cameras, right? -- where people are on the side cutting it with a box knife."

The sequence goes as follows: 1. Adopt “shoes off” policy at home to keep floors clean 2. Begin using slippers indoors - safer, kinder on socks 3. Switch to sturdier indoor/outdoor slippers to allow fetching mail, chatting up neighbors, etc. …

The only other time a second-term president had approval ratings this low at this point in the cycle, he resigned a week later.

To the extent that the media is treating this as a horse story: Max Miller is not a some random candidate from Ohio. This is a picture of President Trump speaking at the wedding of Max Miller and Emily Moreno.

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.

“If this was true, I would be in jail” is not a real profession of innocence; it is a brag about how strenuously the state protects the male right of private sphere violence against women and children.

Rebecca Solnit@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 3d ago

Those who believe things like this are working hard at not understanding the finite options available to someone whose abuser has not been prosecuted, found guilty, etc. by the law. And how rarely those things happen to abusers, esp. high-status white male abusers.

Getting vaccinated against communicable diseases is only a personal decision if you never leave your home and have no contact with the outside world

But more importantly, the #HockeyStick was not only validated, but extended using independent data and methods in subsequent years, leading the National Academy of Sciences (of which I'm now proud to be a member) to subsequently reaffirm our findings: www.nature.com/articles/441...

Just very openly a plot to resegregate America.

Senator Elissa Slotkin@slotkin.senate.gov · 6d ago

What I am hearing about from folks in uniform is a new secret vetting process where people in the Department of Defense are looking at someone’s social media history. Looking at whether they attended a Pride event or posted something on their personal Facebook page about Martin Luther King Day.

Wrote about this. www.offmessage.net/p/andrew-tat...

The Tate Brothers' Should Be The Trumps' Second Epstein Scandal

The truth is much worse than most people realize, and they knew a lot of it.

offmessage.net

Brian Beutler@brianbeutler.bsky.social · 6d ago

Had the tab open for weeks but finally read the New Yorker's Tate brothers expose. Among many thoughts: that reporting ought to be an existential emergency for MAGA and the international far right, but the reaction is eerily mute due (perhaps) to the decline of reading and weak political opposition.

I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:

How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran

The question is: what on earth is Google doing?

digitaldigging.org

Yeah so NYT asked me ~2 yrs ago to write an op-ed about how the Colorado is running dry, & what we should do to keep this exact thing from happening. I said "There's only one real answer. Bill farmers by how much water they use. Duh." NYT editorial staff freaked tf out & cancelled the piece.

Elias Thorne@truebe.horse · 6d ago

saw an article today about an az politician saying how great it was that we're now in emergency drought conditions because the farmers get automatic bailouts and I feel like way more Professional Rural Understanders just breeze by sentences like that. www.paysonroundup.com/news/arizona...

Ameaka Fatima Nkempu, a Johns Hopkins University researcher in public health, was detained by ICE while boarding a domestic flight. She says she is Cameroonian in a Medium article that she authored. As of Thursday morning, the ICE Online Detainee Locator did not list where she was being held.

Baltimore Banner@thebaltimorebanner.com · 6d ago

ICE detains Hopkins public health researcher as agency expands airport arrests

Yep, "you can't just fire people, keep their passports, do brutality, not even a little bit" was in some anti-slavery reforms to the H2A program in 2024. Farmers were outraged at the "gov't overreach & red tape." They went hard for Trump in '24, & he repealed those farm worker regs in June 2025.

Gaius Cassius Longinus@cassius1213.bsky.social · 6d ago

I'm also guessing that the farmers in question didn't want their workers to be able to quit and that they wanted the right to "discipline" them for "poor performance" however they saw fit?

No professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this. theonion.com/translator-o...

Translator Of Original ‘Minions’ Epic Poem Slams ‘Sexless, Bloodless’ Film Adaptation

PHILADELPHIA—In a 4,500-word essay published in Harper’s Magazine, Emily Wilson, known for her popular translation of the Minions epic poem, blasted the latest film Thursday as a “sexless, bloodless” ...

theonion.com

Reiterating that Musk's literal voter bribery last time was an unambiguous go-directly-to-jail felony, for which people have been successfully prosecuted over vastly smaller amounts. It wasn't just pouring money into a PAC, whatever one thinks of that. It was a black-letter plain-as-day crime.

Yes, Elon Musk’s Vote-Buying Is Against the Law

People have gone to prison for comparable schemes.

thebulwark.com

Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 6d ago

Musk got away with his $1 million vote-buying scheme in 2024. Why wouldn't he try something similar this November?

Such awesome supporters of women athletes, these dudes

Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · 6d ago

Ben Shapiro spends his entire show mocking the WNBA and its players. Including a montage his team put together of missed shots at the All-Star game which he laughs at. It's incredible how much transphobia can just let you be an open misogynist.

Chicago teen shares his experience in ICE detention centers: I am 18 years old and I just graduated from high school in Chicago. I was in ICE detention for 2 months and 10 days. They kept me in solitary for 2 days for no reason, alone in a room with just a toilet. They never let us go outside.

Column 1, Row 3 - Perytron reference detected - alert @ebpetroff.bsky.social

Chris Lintott @chrislintott.bsky.social · 6d ago

I see @xkcd.com got ahold of my to do list: xkcd.com/3278 (Adding to my status as 'Most Distracted Astronomer', I'm actually working on a surprising number of these) 🔭

Reminder that Enron was Fortune Magazine’s “Most Innovative Company in America” for six years running before it collapsed due to massive accounting fraud

Timnit Gebru@timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 7d ago

"As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. futurism.com/artificial-i...

literally impeach him just for this

Murshed Zaheed@murshedz.bsky.social · 7d ago

“Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Right now people in blue states are basically paying federal taxes as if they’re colonized territories of red states. www.politico.com/news/2026/03...