First good mushroom find of the year - a red Russula, the species of which are usually hard to pin down without dna analysis. I didn’t taste this one but they are often peppery (but edible!)

I wish there were more mainstream legal scholars pointing out that the United States does not have a unified identity record system and thus efforts by the federal government to enforce "biological sex" classification come with serious problems in the law. cf. www.metroweekly.com/2026/04/atf-...

ATF Rule Could Criminalize Transgender Gun Buyers

New ATF requirements could force transgender gun buyers to choose between outing themselves or facing criminal penalties.

metroweekly.com

Judge Wise finds that ICE coerced a 20-year-old Tongan man — admitted legally to the country three years ago — to sign a document accepting deportation, despite no criminal record or immigration proceedings against him. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The alternate side parking shame stickers…. 🤌

You can talk about tech sovereignty and defence all you like, but it doesn't matter if you're caving in to hybrid attacks within five minutes. Might as well save the money on the weapons, frankly, if European leaders are just going to surrender to hybrid attacks like this.

John Springford@johnspringford.bsky.social · 3d ago

Treating this as a pan-European crisis and closing borders disproportionately *encourages* other countries to use these tactics as political weapons. Sow division, isolate EU countries who are particular enemies.

From a historical perspective it's a genuinely strange state of affairs that the Church of England turns out to be too woke for much of the modern right. But really it just feels like: having a consistent moral code that demands taking Lessers and Outgroup seriously is impossible for populist right.

Parody Nigel Farage@parodypm.bsky.social · 3d ago

Man who shagged his girlfriend behind his wife's back lectures the Archbishop of Canterbury on Christianity.

think I messed up my rotator cuff in my dominant arm. talk me out of my doom spiral about it. (I am going to the doctor tomorrow)

if you’re wondering if the snide aggression of the right is an exclusively American thing, AfD loves to put up posters in my neighborhood exclusively around the Indian restaurant and the memorial to victims of the Nazis

Absolutely vibrating at the realization that consummate liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher’s redefinition of Christianity as an emotive state of devotion most accurately characterizes 2026 American evangelicalism

Great reporting from @emilybregel.bsky.social about a gay man who’s been in the US since he was four, imprisoned in a “hotel” in Equatorial Guinea since April. He says he’s being denied soap and toilet paper in retaliation for filing a complaint w African Commission. 1/ tucson.com/news/local/b...

Arizona man languishes in African hotel after third-country deportation

A 30-year-old man, Ahmed Soliman, is confined in a decommissioned hotel in Equatorial Guinea after being deported there by ICE without warning. He faces the threat of return to Egypt, where he may fac...

tucson.com

you can excuse the gold Catholic crucifixes because their theology of the cross recognizes it rightly as a ironic symbol of glory, our Lord’s repurposing of the most base and horrific way to die all for the salvation of the world. Trump just wants a gold one like he wants his gold toilet.

Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · 4d ago

I don't know about you, but I don't like the way Trump is gripping Jesus.

Post-Covid inflation made politics so normal I’m sure this will help

Ingmar Rentzhog@ingmar.wsocial.eu · 4d ago

Economists have a name for what's coming to your grocery bill: #climateflation. This summer's heatwave will push European food prices harder than the war that closed Hormuz. Bread first. Then meat. Then your mortgage rate. I dug deep. Worth your time. www.forbes.com/sites/we-don...

@lissaharris.bsky.social learned from the gay museum in Berlin today that volunteer fire departments have been historic avenues for rural queer organizing in Germany. See this poster from the youth fire brigade in Brandenburg 🥺

“Human traffickers and hostile foreign governments lie about European immigration policy, so we must be more hostile to immigrants in policy” wretched to explicitly position a disinformation problem as a policy problem and let people’s racism fill in the gaps.

The political case for nuclear over renewables is not because it is cheaper. talking points aside, it is not even for inherent technological reasons. Rather, it is because nuclear is *more profitable*. Related: www.versobooks.com/products/306...

The Price is Wrong

RECENT TECHNICAL ADVANCES mean it is typically cheaper to produce electricity from renewable sources than from fossil fuels. Yet, around the world, the transition to green energy is happening too slow...

versobooks.com

Sammy Roth@sammyroth.bsky.social · 5d ago

The Trump family is poised to cash in on the nuclear renaissance that Trump is promoting: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/u...

This is true and I do think that if the tech gurus wanted AI to be seen and recognized as the common product of humanity, there would be some necessary changes to political economy.

Adverb@adverb.bsky.social · 5d ago

We really invented language models that are more verbally fluent than most famous scifi ai on spaceships (basically zero to hard to tell in five years) & people's response is to say how boring that is

worth noting to English-speaking observers of the German response to the Berlin CSD attack that a lot of auto translation translates “islamistische” as “Islamic” - it’s actually “Islamist” in English.

worth noting that the right-wing conspiracy theorist -- anti-renewable NIMBY nexus is extremely common. Protect Our Coast Long Island, an anti-offshore wind group, started as a bunch of QAnon believers protesting mask & vaccine requirements during COVID. Pivoted immediately after reqs lifted.

Emily Atkin@emorwee.bsky.social · 6d ago

Alexandra Fasulo runs one of the most prolific anti-solar campaigns online, regularly telling over 2 million followers renewable energy is threatening farms and wildlife. But how much of her rhetoric is actually true? @alexhannaford.com spent months parsing through the nuance for HEATED:

It’s completely nuts that Trump won by less than 2M votes with near universal media help and worldwide rage at incumbents and the media treated this like a permanent sea change towards MAGA and now less than 2 years later he’s the least popular President in history and there’s no media reckoning

btw the Magdeburg rainbow cafe of the Sachsen-Anhalt LSVD (Germany's largest queer organization) had its windows broken this week.

Ulrike Franke@rikefranke.bsky.social · 6d ago

In September, the 2 Million inhabitants of Sachsen-Anhalt, one of the 16 German Länder vote for their parliament. This is the current polling 👇

the section of Nazi judge and Wannsee Conference attendee Roland Freisler's Wikipedia article on his death is somewhat satisfying.

This remains a curious lacuna of public theology and Christian witness, to me: we have a tradition of virtue, and a proclamation of meaning and worth that does not come from dominating others.

Adam Serwer@adamserwer.bsky.social · last wk.

Wrote about the Masculinity Scam, or how selling reactionary ideas about what makes a man helps a small number of bad people profit and makes everyone else (including men) miserable www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

I don’t really understand this - from what I have seen, the CSD attacker was a loser who tried and failed to join ISIS so did a lone wolf attack and then committed suicide by cop. Have there been any indications of broader coordination or planning? www.heistberlin.com/news/csd-fal...

CSD Fallout: Rave the Planet Will Happen, But Zug der Liebe is Cancelled

The city's upcoming street parades are grappling with whether to hold large-scale outdoor events in the wake of the CSD attack.

heistberlin.com

Salam & the Manhattan Institute's ultimate problem is that they cannot be both a reasonable conservative voice in New York, highly tailored to the specifics of the local context, and gleeful national fascists. the Rufo problem is one part of this, but not the only one. www.wired.com/story/the-ma...

The Manhattan Institute Helped Kill DEI. Now It’s Coming for Protests

The right-wing think tank is actively pushing “civil terrorism”—increasing penalties for minor crimes committed while people engage in constitutionally protected free speech.

wired.com

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff.bsky.social · last wk.

Seeing how many respectable liberals, and even leftists, in New York media continued to speak warmly of Reihan Salam is what made me first realize that some journalists have no criteria for moral judgment other than whether someone is personally nice to them. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/n...

Remember the conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene? They served as a permission structure for this administration.

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...

Occurs to me that it would be very useful for some political / social scientists to run a “Trump Gleichschaltung tracker” that has regularly updated assessments of which parts of American society are capitulating and how, and which are not.

i was thinking earlier today about why transphobia is so deranging. I missed that it is also much more *mediated by the online environment* than other forms of bigotry. because trans people are such a tiny portion of the population, anti-trans people really only encounter them as twitter combatants.

Shay O’Reilly@shaygabriel.bsky.social · last wk.

I think it has something to do with the highly paranoiac nature of transphobia! Because they are anxious that they cannot in fact “always tell,” there is a possibility of more trans presence than they can perceive - and because everyone’s gender performance is implicated, it is uniquely deranging.

As of this week, hundreds of thousands of Haitians lost their legal status. Most have lost work permits as well. That's left many people unable to support themselves. Here is a verified link to a fundraiser supporting Haitians in Springfield. Please drop links to other fundraisers in the replies.

Stand with Haitian Families in Crisis

Build the Emergency Fund that protects families when everything feels uncertain. The end of TPS. Increasing ICE actions. Families losing work authorization overnight. For Haitian parents and children ...

ancljkuy.donorsupport.co

Just occurred to me that the pied a terre tax may have a side effect of ending some rich New Yorkers’ registration of their update vacation homes as their primary address On one hand might hurt Dems, on the other a lot of them do this to oppose solar farms

The City Reporter@thecityreporter.nyc · last wk.

City Council members cry foul as homeowners receive letters demanding they prove NYC residency ahead of the city’s pied-a-terre tax program.

Want to see a blast from the past… www.doi.gov/pressrelease...

Trump Administration Delivers Historic Progress on Offshore Wind | U.S. Department of the Interior

The three announcements included the much-anticipated wind auction offshore Massachusetts, the environmental review of a proposed wind project offshore Rhode Island, and a formal request for companies...

doi.gov