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www.patreon.com/posts/146942...
Four panel comic The K Chronicles by Keith Knight Panel 1: across the US, agreed libraries & closed abortion clinics are reopening... ...As white marker bakery pop-ups!! Sign: Today's special: marshmallow fluff on wonder bread!! Panel 2: to make up for lower wages & higher prices caused by their orange-faced führer, Trump loyalists are shocking the pastiest of pastries for local ICE units. Blonde baker: we don't serve brownies here!! Only Twinkies & Angel food cake!! Panel 3: pile of stinky gold shoes, red bibles and, Trump coins with bite marks. These white marker bakeries are generally cash only, but Trump bibles, Bitcoin, & Trump sneakers are also eagerly accepted. Panel 4: Silhouette of two MAGA trucks and a shop with a confused cashier. Some say these palest of patisseries are just a front for some like-minded MAGA-matchmaking. Speech balloon: Here's a little cream for them hot-cross buns!!
December 29, 2025 at 9:23 PM
insideclimatenews.org/news/0710202...

2025 is going to have a lot more imaginary disasters
ಠ_ಠ
Bar graph with number of paid duty days members of National Guard were deployed to respond to natural disasters broken by year (from 2015-2024) and by disaster (hurricanes, wildfires, floods, severe weather, as well as tornadoes, water, and winter storms). 2017 shows the highest total at approximately 1.25 million days, primarily due to hurricanes. 2024 shows the second-highest total after 2017's spike, with hurricanes being the dominant driver of National Guard deployment (approximately 300,000 days), followed by a significant wildfire response (approx 160,000 days). Source: Department of Defense.
October 8, 2025 at 8:06 AM
slate.com/news-and-pol...
It is bad enough that the court is clearly planning to let Trump construct the most submissive executive branch in history by purging his opponents from federal agencies. What's worse, though, is that the supermajority has ushered in this new era of autocratic presidency over the shadow docket, offering almost no public explanation for its radical moves. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, the court's Republican appointees have elected "to reshape the nation's separation of powers" in Trump's favor. And they're doing so without respecting the process that differentiates legal judgments from bare flexes of partisan muscle.
September 25, 2025 at 3:58 PM
September 16, 2025 at 7:33 PM
9 out of 10 years right-wing extremist violence accounts for at least two thirds of total, and 7 out of 10 years for over 80%
September 13, 2025 at 12:16 PM
When asked about mass shootings he said, "I think it's worth it. I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment." Perhaps Kirk did not believe that his own life would be cut short by gun violence, but, like the rest of us, he has witnessed countless school shootings. When he said "some gun deaths" are acceptable, he surely knew he lived in a country where the deaths he deemed acceptable included those of children, some of whom were the age of his own. There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don't know. On that front, I'm fairly sure Kirk did not care about my child. My child lives in Brooklyn, in a progressive family. His mother works and does not have a marriage where she is considered inferior to her husband or required to obey him, as Kirk arrogantly told Taylor Swift she should do after learning of her engagement. ("Reject feminism," he said. “YOU're not in charge.") We also live in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, and if you only listened to Charlie Kirk, you might be under the impression that my neighbors eat pets. You would also be encouraged to believe that, simply by virtue of being non-white immigrants, they were "replacing" white people-and that, since they are also Black, they are dangerous. "Happening all the time in urban America," he said, "prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that's a fact." I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views, but that is because I don't believe people should be murdered generally, regardless of who they are or what they've done. I am against the death penalty, pro-gun control, and believe war isa failure of humanity, not a necessary byproduct of it. Kirk was fine with murder as long the right people were dying. Some of the people valorizing Kirk insist that all of his toxicity was acceptable because at least he was open to debate-a bar so low, you'd have to dig into the Mariana Trench to get to it. And he certainly paid lip service to it. "We record all of it so that we put [it] on the Internet so people can see these ideas collide," he said of his own streaming operation. "When people stop talking, that's when you get violence. That's when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity." But Kirk's actions undercut that notion every day. His entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them. The debates were simply performances, and he could not have an entertaining public fight without opposition. Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn't a white Christian nationalist wasn't welcome. I won't celebrate his death, but I'm not obligated to celebrate his life, either. Charles James Kirk, 31, died on Wednesday from a gunshot to the neck at a Utah Valley University campus event just as he was trying to deflect a question about mass shootings by suggesting they were largely a function of gang violence. He died with a net worth of $12 million, which he made by espousing horrific and bigoted views in the name of advancing Christian nationalism. The foundation of his empire was the group he cofounded and led, Turning Point USA, which is a key youth-recruitment arm of the MAGA movement. Kirk was able to launch Turning Point at the age of 18 because he received money from Tea Party member Bill Montgomery, right-wing donor Foster Feiss, and his own father, also a prolific right- wing donor. He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. He had children, as do many vile people.
September 13, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Mother Jones diagrams a part of the right wing pink slime disinformation network
Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy The Informing America Foundation has funneled millions of dollars from wealthy funders to conservative media platforms. Here’s a portion of its sprawling network.
September 9, 2025 at 4:37 PM
This was such a great (and surprisingly optimistic) episode about how nonsensical on so many levels (environmental, economic, moral, political) it is to be burning fossil fuels for energy in 2025. #withpod
cover image for "'Here Comes The Sun' with Bill McKibben" episode of 'Why Is This Happening?' podcast with Chris Hayes (E250826)
September 5, 2025 at 11:45 PM
"The staff gift came with legacy. It came with gravitas. And it came with just one request: Grow the plant yourself, then pass a cutting of it on to someone else. In that way, the ivy would spread from person to person, a symbol of the connection between a government and its people."
Journalist Gabriela Riccardi got her cuttings by way of a White House oficial who convened a sendoff for her current and former staff at the end of Obama's second term. As a parting gift, the official gave away cuttings from the Oval Office mother plant. Riccardi's co-worker at the Atlantic scored one, and in turn shared clippings with two friends, one of whom passed a stem on to Riccardi. She told the story in Quartz in 2023: “The staff gift came with legacy. It came with gravitas. And it came with just one request: Grow the plant yourself, then pass a cutting of it on to someone else. In that way, the ivy would spread from person to person, a symbol of the connection between a government and its people.” During Covid, Riccardi's small cutting had wildly proliferated, so she decided to do something useful with the excess. She rafled off five clippings to anyone who donated to When We All Vote, the civic group started by Michelle Obama to increase voter participation. The plants were so sought after that Riccardi raised more than $2,200. She was unaware that the original plant had recently gone MIA. It's a heartbreaker to hear that it's not there anymore," she told me after gave her the bad news. think it's just such a beautiful tradition."
August 16, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Earlier this week one of Trump’s jackbooted thugs found himself at the business end of a Subway sandwich. The ovular carbohydrate weapon traveled a short but mighty distance after it was hurled by a 37-year-old white man named Sean Dunn, hitting an FBI agent square in the chest before tumbling to the ground. It was the sandwich’s maiden, and—as far as we know—only voyage. (Dunn was later arrested on a felony assault charge by 20 or so agents, shown in a pathetic video posted to social media by the White House on Thursday. He has since been released.)
August 16, 2025 at 9:42 PM
Animation of temperature anomalies 1925-2024 as colorful spots over the world map. It starts out with pastel blues and reds dancing around the continents indicating variations of +/- 1°C. Past mid century colors get more and more saturated as anomalies get more and more extreme. Around the 1980s blues start to disappear. After 2000 pretty much the entire land surface is swallowed by shifting shades of deeper and deeper red. By 2020s some spots in the Arctic are nearly black of +5°C. Line graph animation of average yearly temperatures by latitude from 1900 to 2024. Dancing squiggle shimmies upward as years tick by, gradually shifting color just like metal being heated in a forge.
May 22, 2025 at 4:26 AM
An online tool anonymizes faces of protesters: huggingface.co/spaces/model...

i.redd.it/7eauyro7i9re...
i.redd.it/0rp421syfcre...
i.redd.it/w2lpd8840are...
Photo of a protest with participants' faces "vance-blurred", ie every face in the crowd, young and old, is jd vance. One sign says "CRIMINALS IN CHIEF" above b&w portraits of "PUBLIC ENEMY NO.1" (POTUS) and "PUBLIC ENEMY NO.2" (VPOTUS). Another reads: "Love Your Neighbor. Feed The Hungry" Photo of a Stand with Ukraine protest with participants' faces "vance-blurred", ie every face in the crowd, young and old, is jd vance. Photo of a protest with participants' faces "vance-blurred", ie every face in the crowd, young and old, is jd vance. Signs read "MAY OUR CHILDREN KNOW THAT THEIR MOTHERS DID NOT STAY SILENT!", "Morons Are Governing America", "RESIST", and "No Kings in America"
April 12, 2025 at 8:53 PM
www.friendlyatheist.com/p/how-aaron-...
They feel they're owed respect despite doing absolutely nothing to deserve it. At least one of Renn's supporters-a Muslim who's drifted away from the left-correctly notes that his ideas miss something more obvious: " But as a member of a religious minority for whom the United States has never been "positive world," he said he did not see neutral- or negative-world occupancy as catastrophic. "Just because wider society isn't embracing me or rejoicing over me doesn't mean I get to lash out in response," he said. "The culture may be opposed to you, but that doesn't mean you're not legally and politically secure. "
March 25, 2025 at 8:02 PM
insideclimatenews.org/news/0503202...
NO ONE wants this.
"People have been shocked to hear that the Army Corps of Engineers Jacksonville District headquarters is on the chopping block," she said. "In Florida we have such strong bipartisan support for Everglades restoration. So these DOGE cuts that are coming for the Army Corps and the Parks Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service, it's just contrary to our goals of restoring the Everglades, and I think that is why we're hearing people are really upset." She continued: "We're also really concerned just about the people and what this is going to mean for their lives. Because there's really no information. Will they be asked to relocate? Will they be given the opportunity to work somewhere else?"
March 6, 2025 at 5:33 PM
"We used to shoot these people in the dick."
An amazing and apparently timless conclusion to @ironcircuscomics.bsky.social great anthology "Failure to Launch"🔥
Panel 1: A bunch of oligarchs next to headlines about Union busting. Panel 2: Two cops walk into a Starbucks, baristas look apprehensive. Caption: COMPANIES THE WORLD OVER HAVE SPENT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS TRYING TO STOP UNIONISATION EFFORTS. SOON IT MIGHT EVEN BE CHEAPER TO JUST PAY PEOPLE MORE. Panel 3: Bezos looking like a Bond villain looking over stacks and stacks of warehouses. Caption: AMAZON EVEN TRIED TO BAN WORDS LIKE 'INJUSTICE', 'COMPENSATION, AND YES. 'UNION', FROM THEIR INTERNAL APPS. Panel 4: Group of strikers/protesters with larger than life Ned Ludd in the background. One of the signs reads: "UNIONS DEFEND WORKERS RIGHTS!" Caption: THEY MUST BE VIGILANT THE OLD GHOST CANNOT BE KILLED, ONLY KEPT AT BAY. Towering figure of Ned Ludd with laser eyes and emitting lightning taking a swing of a sledgehammer at a diminished frightened musk. Caption reads: WE USED TO SHOOT THESE PEOPLE IN THE DICK.
March 5, 2025 at 1:32 AM
It's difficult to explain how much it matters that we've seen this movie before. (Well, technically, we've seen the beta version what's happening now is way more troubling.) When you've spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of "innovation," you get pretty good at spotting the pattern.
March 4, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Al Benbow's comic on alt-text and gender
www.crucialcomix.com/comic/a-rich...
A page from the comic with three identical panels depicting the author looking up at fish in a large aquarium next to different versions of alt-text. "A young woman looks at tropical fish in an aquarium." "A teenage boy looks at tropical fish in an aquarium." "A young person with light skin and short, dark hair looks at tropical fish in an aquarium." "the focus the image is the fact that someone's looking at tropical fish - not whether that person has a penis or a vagina."
February 5, 2025 at 5:47 PM
"Everything for Everyone" is a book I can't stop thinking about. It's speculative fiction and in the first chapter badass trans sex workers kick off an anti-cop anti-capitalist revolution in future NYC.
Audiobook cover: Everything for Everyone An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. OʻBrien and Eman Abdelhadi Narrated by Charli Burrow and Soneela Nankani
February 4, 2025 at 8:31 PM
Yo, US Senate and House, how about exercising some legislative oversight responsibilities and preventing complete randos from messing with gov systems affecting "MORE THAN A FIFTH OF THE US ECONOMY"?
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US governnment, three sources tell WIRED. Two of those sources say that Elez's privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: the Payment Automation Manager and Secure Payment System at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a secure mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy. Despite reporting that suggests that Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force has access to these Treasury systems on a "read-only" level, sources say Elez, who has visited a Kansas City office housing BFS systems, has many administrator-level privileges. Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.
February 4, 2025 at 8:20 PM
No clear directives means they just want everyone to obey in advance, test us for how low we will go on our own.
Program officers-typically Ph.D. scientists who are either permanent federal employees or on leave from their college or university-have been asked to examine the projects they manage for any offending language and then go over their findings with their supervisor. But they haven't received any written guidance on what criteria to use in deciding whether a grant violates a presidential directive and should be terminated.
January 31, 2025 at 10:12 PM
www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...
And finally, we get to the executive branch itself, which has apparently shot itself square in the foot already with Executive Order 14166. The order-- the full name of which is too insipid to print--declares that only two genders are recognized by the US Government, and that those genders are determined by sex organs at...conception. Thing is, all human embryos start with a female configuration until about 6-7 weeks when secondary sex characteristics start to form, meaning that the official position of this administration is that every US citizen is legally a woman. If you happen to have been assigned male at birth but you find that you're strangely happy about this new change. consider talking about it with your local trans community. You might have more in common with us than you thought.
January 31, 2025 at 7:01 PM
When Doug Burgum was governor of North Dakota, the state sued the Department of the Interior at least five times, ProPublica reported in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Trump selected Burgum to lead that same department. Meanwhile, Scott Turner, Trump's nominee for secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has a history of voting against protections for poor tenants. And Trump's choice to lead the Internal Revenue Service once supported legislation to abolish it entirely.
January 31, 2025 at 11:52 AM
"...we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss Presidentially Appointed, Senate Confirmed Inspectors General."
Dear Mr. Gor: I am writing in response to your email sent to me and other Inspectors General earlier this evening wherein you informed each of us that "due to changing priorities, your position as Inspector General ... is terminated, effective immediately." As Chairperson of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), I recommend that you reach out to White House Counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss Presidentially Appointed, Senate Confirmed Inspectors General. Specifically, based upon the 2022 amendments to the Inspector General Act of 1978, the President must notify Congress 30 days prior to removal of an IG and provide "substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons" for such removal. 5 U.S.C. 403(b), as amended by the section 5202(a) of the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022 (Title LIL, Subtitle A, of P.L. I17-263, 136 Stat. 2395, 3222). The requirement to provide the substantive rationale, including detailed and case specific reasons, was added to better enable Congress to engage on and respond to a proposed removal of an Inspector General in order to rotect the independence of Inspectors General. Should you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at Hannibal.Ware@ sba.gov. Sincerely Hannibal "Mike" Ware CIGIE Chairperson Cc: Rand Paul, Chairman, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affiairs Gary Peters, Ranking Member, Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs James Comer, Chairman, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Gerald Connolly, Ranking Member, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
January 26, 2025 at 5:10 PM
sfstandard.com/2025/01/25/p...
The Proud Boys called it “ridiculous to characterize their organization as a hate group, contending that membership of their Bay Area chapter was racially diverse. (The selection of Proud Boys at the march did not reflect this alleged diversity, and the Proud Boys' history of hate speech is well documented, including in the Bay Area.) James Larsen traveled from Jackson, a town roughly between Sacramento and Stockton, to sell Larsen, who said he works at a store in Jackson called Trumpers USA, has been coming to the Larsen said there is a significant overlap between Trump apparel.
January 26, 2025 at 4:38 PM
Why you should care about Supreme Court: not only they're likely to make trans folks' lives significantly shittier, they'll make sex discrimination legal for all.

www.vox.com/scotus/38973...
Screenshot of an article in Vox, highlighted portion reads: "based on Wednesday’s argument, Skrmetti appears likely to not just be a historic blow to transgender Americans, but potentially a similar blow against all people who might experience unconstitutional discrimination."
December 5, 2024 at 4:51 AM