As we watch all mention of diversity actively get scrubbed from the NIH website in real time it's important to know that, we were not taking over anything, we were just trying to exist.
- Only 2% of NIH R01 grants are awarded to Black investigators.
The goal is total erasure/elimination.
I’ll emphasize that this is a rumor.
But I’ve heard from people I trust that CDC has been ordered to scrub their datasets of LGBTQIA identifiers. This is supposed to start tomorrow.
If you rely on gov datasets that have anything to do with this anti-woke witch hunt, I would download a copy ASAP.
New from me in @wired.com: Donald Trump's cabinet is full of conspiracy theorists who think COVID-19 is a bioweapon, and that the doctors and scientists who now report to them helped create it.
Those scientists are worried about the coming military tribunals.
www.wired.com/story/reveng...
"It has begun. Trump is the President and Elon Musk did his part in launching the administration by doing a Nazi salute at the inauguration.
* * *
This iteration of fascism is all about the oligarch class. It will fuse corporate power with state power, as fascism has always done, but it will also strip our government for parts and attack the working class specifically to reinforce the power of the ruling class, rather than attempting to build the power of the nation in any way. The oligarchs want to repeal the New Deal, repeal worker protections, crush unions and more. We must understand this as we enter the second Trump administration. We will be confronted with Nazism, unparalleled greed, and countless attacks from multiple directions. And, in the chaos, we must keep hold of this bigger picture if we are to effectively fight back.
The Trump onslaught is already upon us in direct, material, tangible ways. ICE raids are about to start; by the time you read this, they may have begun. Today they will likely be executed in fourteen cities. At the same time, Trump and Melania are both scamming the MAGA faithful out of billions of dollars with crypto schemes. The first executive orders of the new administration target trans and non-binary people, increase oil production, and even move to end the birthright citizenship enshrined in the constitution."
"Today, the guardrails have become so flimsy that blatant corruption barely makes the news. On Friday night, Trump launched a meme coin—a digital token with no real-world value whatsoever—and abruptly increased his net worth by tens of billions of dollars.
Anyone in the world, whether foreign despots, criminals, or lobbyists hoping for a political favor, can now directly pay the president, a man who governs by loyalty tests and self-interested, transactional dealing. When I checked this morning, it was the tenth most prominent story on the New York Times website; by tomorrow, it will have mostly disappeared from view and discussion, even as it becomes a defining feature of his corrupt administration."
"The tone for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States at noon today was set on Friday, when Trump, who once trashed cryptocurrency as “based on thin air,” launched his own cryptocurrency. By Sunday morning it had made more than $50 billion on paper. Felix Salmon of Axios reported that “a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon—now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.”"
"Of all the dark moments during Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, the darkest may have been the moment Trump acolyte and world’s richest man Elon Musk threw up not one but two Roman salutes—the gesture most strongly associated with Nazis and the phrase “Heil Hitler,” but also used as a symbol of support in other fascist regimes. The gesture was shocking, and observers from the left to the racist right alike agreed on what they saw. Neo-Nazis cheered. (“Holy crap … did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington DC … This is incredible,” one prominent Holocaust denier wrote, later adding, “We are so back.”) Moderates and liberals were shaken.
One group, though, was unbothered: The Anti-Defamation League, which has as its mission fighting antisemitism and bigotry more broadly.
“It seems that @elonmusk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge,” the ADL posted on the Musk-owned X. “In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead.”
Musk responded “Thanks guys” with a laugh-crying emoji.
Ha ha. The joke is on us.
The entire ethos of the men and women (but mostly men) who make up the white-supremacist-adjacent fascist-friendly too-online right is one of saying what they really think with enough plausible deniability to claim it’s all just a big joke, and if you take offense, it’s because you’re a triggered woke scold. There’s always a veneer of irony, a little smirk. If the story gets too big, then it’s yet another example of a biased media engaged in, as Musk called the latest headlines, dirty tricks."
* * *
The ADL, after all, has as its national director a man who has compared wearing a kaffiyeh to wearing a swastika. The group has conflated protests against Israel’s war in Gaza with antisemitism—and while far too many of these protests have indeed veered into the antisemitic, the ADL seems to equate just about any opposition to Israeli militarism with antisemitism, a position that has badly damaged their credibility. It’s not that there is no antisemitic threat from the left; there is. It’s that a sense of proportion is also necessary, and the ADL seems to believe that an encampment of kaffiyeh-wearing college kids is more dangerous than the wealthiest man in the world who owns a major communications platform and has the ear of the most powerful man in the world. This posture is a damning indictment of an organization that has a crucial mission, is being put to the test, and is badly failing."
Germans are in the streets demonstrating against the extremist right there and here (note the language of their message). Where are our rallies in defense of democracy? Where is our resistance?
Sie wollen die Brandmauer www.zeit.de/politik/deut...
For inspiration, look at this from the Süddeutsche: no paywall; with or without Google Translate, the photos tell the story of resistance. Thousands rally across Germany against the right.
www.sueddeutsche.de/projekte/art...
The groyper-posting billionaire who supports a far right German political party and waxes nostalgic about apartheid South Africa definitely knows what a Nazi sieg heil looks like and could easily make up other hand gestures that don’t look exactly like them.
Do not waste time arguing about whether or not Musk believes all the tenets of Naziism. (We know he supports a few key ones.)
The point of the salute was to (a) activate and encourage Nazis who were watching and (b) assert his own invincibility.
I loved Han Song's Tombs of the Universe, which is why I curated it into Sinopticon, so it's wonderful to see him now nominated as a Hugo finalist for Answerless Journey, and to be able to translate his interview. 1/ #scifi #scifibooks file770.com/interview-wi...
I love this because HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS is about how inequity is baked into these systems, and how and why we have to transform them. But I believe and argue that we absolutely *can* make them work better, for everyone. And that it matters enormously that we do.
Comfort doesn’t mean escapism.
ICE posted this. (1) The message is missing the "who, what, when, where, why, how." (2) The message was posted to X, Elon Musk's platform. (3) The message has no alt text.
HuffPost: Though ICE doesn't comment on ongoing investigations, "Homan said later Thursday [January 23] the number of arrests so far was closer to 1,300 people, adding that collateral arrests of citizens or others legally allowed to be in the country would be higher than normal because so-called sanctuary cities were not helping ICE agents." In other words, he blamed city officials, saying that because they didn't cooperate by turning in the people he was targeting, he had to go broad and arrest everyone.
"The Laken Riley Act is a proposed United States law that requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain illegal immigrants charged with or convicted of theft-related crimes, assaulting a police officer, or a crime that results in death or serious bodily injury like drunk driving. The Act would also allow states to sue the Department of Homeland Security for alleged failures in immigration enforcement.
The bill was introduced following the murder of Laken Riley by an illegal migrant, who had previously been cited for shoplifting, on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. On January 22, 2025, the House agreed to the Senate version of the bill with a 263–156 vote. The bill is awaiting presidential signature.
Anyway, barring some miracle, it seems increasingly likely that a sizeable minority of Senate Dems are about to join with the entire Senate GOP to greenlight a law that will hand Ken Paxton and any random federal judge more power over immigration than any state or judge has ever had in US history.
congress will rubber stamp mass detention and deportations by handing yet more unaccountable power to local police (and in some cases, perhaps among these 48 people with a D next to their name, pretend that’s not exactly what they’re doing)
"Two US military flights bound for Colombia overnight [January 25–26, 2025] were turned back, according to a flight tracker, after Petro wrote in a post on X [January 26] that he is denying the entry of American planes carrying Colombian migrants." CNN
"According to data ICE posted on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, the agency arrested 8,276 people between Jan. 22 and Jan. 31. It also issued 6,577 "detainers lodged" for people arrested by other law-enforcement agencies whom ICE has reason to believe are eligible for deportation. That's an average of 828 arrests and 658 detainers lodged per day — 980 arrests and 762 detainers lodged per day since Jan. 25, when ICE really started beefing up enforcement with widely reported raids in Chicago and other cities.
That's a big increase from the last year of published statistics under former President Joe Biden's administration. During fiscal year 2024 (from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024), ICE reported 113,431 arrests, or an average of 310 per day. So Trump is certainly cracking down on immigration more than his predecessor did.
* * *
Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive, real-time source for ICE data; we only know the numbers for Jan. 22-31 because the agency posted them on social media, and it has not posted any data so far in February. ...
Furthermore, ICE hasn't posted any public data about how many of the people it has arrested this year have been accused of crimes, violent or otherwise."
Denny Carter wrote a couple days ago: If you "reject the message that some people should be at the top of the hierarchies of oppression, and others are meant to be at the bottom of that hierarchy, and that’s just the way it is," then your heart is "not in need of fixing in this way." Let's not be "ignoring people’s agency;" let's not be "treating them like empty, thoughtless vessels that can be infiltrated and propagandized and ultimately tricked into adopting a worldview in which some humans are more equal than others."
"I wrote in March 2023 about the eternal stream of bad faith necessary for the American right to believe in the myth of “wokeness” and to craft policies that extinguish the various forms of woke in American culture."
How about this, Carter suggests: "See the things that have made your heart so hideous and so horrible and, consequently, so very weak, and fix it before it’s too late."
"Maybe it’s always been that simple, to grab those with hate and fear in their hearts and minds and to tell them to stop it, stop being assholes, stop treating as subhuman those who do not look or speak or think like you. Your heart is blackened, poisoned, corrupted. Lynch’s instruction was direct: Recognize the corruption of your heart, become conscious of it, and fix the fucking thing. Gordon Cole did not dance around the cultural and political leanings and influences of those who might have made jokes at the expense of a transgender colleague. He did not ignore their petty hatred and discrimination against someone who may have challenged their bedrock views of sex and gender, or excuse those views because they did not know better."
We could keep it simple.
"I could have simply listened to David Lynch. Or more precisely, FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole. It was Cole, played by the inimitable Lynch over three seasons of Twin Peaks, who cut right through the bullshit with which I have covered myself over these past couple years.
In a 2015 exchange with FBI Chief of Staff Denise Bryan, a trans woman who had risen through the Bureau’s ranks since last we saw her in the early 1990s, Cole (Lynch) reminds Bryan (played by David Duchovny) that he had stepped up in her defense when others in the FBI had mocked her transition. Cole is trying to darndest to extract information from Bryan in what is proving to be the culmination of a 25-year cold case when he delivers the line..."
Excellent new review from @weatherwest.bsky.social @climate-guy.bsky.social @manuelaibrunner.bsky.social @climatechirper.bsky.social on one of the most useful organizing concepts I've run across for understanding climate impacts on extreme events - the "expanding atmospheric sponge" 1/🧵
When you wring out a bigger wet sponge, you produce more water - the "wet gets wetter" view of climate change driving increases in extreme precip.
But if the sponge is dry, it can absorb more - from the soil, from vegetation, driving drought and fire. 2/
Now is a good time to get into preparedness, wherever you are. Being individually prepared is a good way to be in a better position to help others.
Your basic goal, to start, is to be ready for three days in your home without power or water and to be able to leave quickly if need be.
Get yourself a go bag. This is an always-packed bag you can take with you everywhere. For most people, this is a backpack, not luggage or a duffel bag. You will keep basic hygiene and emergency supplies in this bag.
A go bag isn't a "the world has ended now" bag. It's a "I have to sleep in my car during this ice storm" bag or a "I have to leave my house because of a crisis" bag. You want digital and/or print copies of any documentation in here as well.
I don't know if the LA fire department is properly funded or not but the claim that the city cut its budget last year — which is circulating widely on the right — is false.
As Politico notes, the budget actually INCREASED by $50 million. A portion of the funding was approved in a separate bill.
You will read countless times today that the LA mayor cut the LA Fire Department's budget by $23 million.
That is a lie.
The budget was actually *increased* by $50 million.
Chris Hayes says "it’s still actually not 100% clear to me":
Yes there was an official budget reduction of 2% ($17.5 million, not $23) but it’s unclear if the increases in the contract negotiation add up to a larger amount in total (as article says) or the mayor’s office is basically double counting.
As best as we can tell there was a 2% cut that did eliminate a number of administrative positions and overtime. Then in November an additional $76 million of unallocated funds was given to the LAFD as part of the wages package. Which means the total spending for it was up $53 mil yoy.
Which means it’s technically true that
1) there were budgets cuts that eliminated positions
2) there was an increase of the total funding the LAFD was given by city council appropriators.
More here.
abcnews.go.com/US/los-angel...
Put another way. The head of the LAFD can say, truthfully “we had budget cuts” and express concerns about impact of readiness and the mayor and council can say, truthfully “we gave the FD millions more than the previous year.”
And put another way, we can say that when police unions managed to make the LAPD into a well paid and armed military force, they sucked up untold resources that are now missing as Southern Cal tries to face global warming. Unbelievably, LAPD got $2.14 billion in funding last year.
So sorry. Yet another rant:
We are losing the information war in real-time. LA is on fire, and the conservatives are seizing the moment, drafting on the fear, the panic, and the pain to target democratic officials, policies, and power centers and salting the earth along the way.
A thread. 🧵
It’s a five-alarm fire alongside an actual five-alarm fire, and the proverbial water is run dry.
Listen, it’s hard to put out fires and save ourselves when our neighbors are arsonists.
Ignore it, again, at our own peril. But there is a coordinated political attack campaign underway.
Should we be having to spend ANY time defending politicians and policies in the middle of a crisis of this scale and urgency? Fuck no.
But, there will be significant fallout from allowing these narratives to fester without checking their shit and quickly.
The narrative that somehow a $17M cut to a massive $800M+ LAFD budget is to blame is insane, illogical and fucked on so many levels but taking root across the media and social media landscape.
It's matched by an equally ridiculous narrative about water running out that's equally garbage.
Let's be clear - this is targeted and methodical. Trump, Musk, Shapiro, NYPost, and all the regular conservative talking point amplification networks are echoing the same shit.
While Dems, and most normies are out here just trying to do the work of surviving, the GOP is fanning flames of discord.
We all know it’s completely dishonest and disingenuous. Budget hawks calling out a 2% decrease in a budget being used as justification for public sacrifice of an elected official. The same people creating DOGE are bemoaning a 2% budget reduction because- own the libs and get points on the board.
Worse yet, it’s not even subtle in its racism, misogyny, and ignorance. One comment in, and you are awash in "DEI hire" nonsense and ‘good old times’ nostalgia for a world that never existed. People posting pictures of the 3 amazing women who run the $800M LAFD as a gotcha... you know, 'cuz - women.
The number of people who are calling out the Mayor of LA being in Ghana who was on a scheduled trip as an official delegate for the US to mark their new Presidents election.
Oh the hypocrisy from the folx who justified or were silent when Cruz went to Cancun
… and the ‘running out of water’ thing? We’re fighting wildfires on urban fire systems - in Santa Ana conditions without air support.
WT-actual-Fuck don't you get about supply and demand? They were using the water faster than the tanks could refill.
Good explainer from @colleenhagerty.com about what happened with the inaccurate fire altert in LA. The public’s expectations of government alerting (think Greenland) don’t always line up with reality.
www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...
I know, I’m a Fire Commissioner & I’ve been doing my best to tamp down some of the worst, but honestly, it’s impossible. James Woods, famous Maga gadfly,whose house burned down, is blaming Gavin Newsom for not keeping the resevoirs full. So ridiculous.
"The absolute barrage of garbage being pumped into the brains of people is unbelievable," says @chrislhayes.bsky.social on the LA wildfire misinformation. "It does not help when the guy who owns the so-called digital town square is tweeting about globalist plots and blaming wokeness for the fires."
People think AI images of Hollywood sign burning are real
AI generated slop is tricking people into thinking an already devastating series of wildfires in Los Angeles are even worse than they are — and using it to score political points.
🔗 www.404media.co/hollywood-si...
In 1998 brilliant Mike Davis wrote ‘The Case for Letting Malibu Burn’. 30 years later the wealthiest aren’t necessarily any safer from climate disaster, they’re just richer. I predict more events like the King & Queen of Spain getting shit thrown at them in Valencia. longreads.com/2018/12/04/t...
If you're shocked and/or surprised by the Los Angeles wildfires, you should read John Vaillant's "Fire Weather: A True Story from A Hotter World." www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/a... @johnvaillant.bsky.social
the LA fires inspire a lot of thoughts, one being how absolutely baby-brained some people are to think that journalists with personal blogs can replace the resources, teamwork, and coordination of actual newspapers
As we witness these heartbreaking scenes from the fires in LA, an important reminder that incarcerated people make up over 30% of California’s forest firefighters.
The recent LA fires shed light on a troubling practice in California: the use of incarcerated individuals to fight wildfires.
This system, which utilizes an exception in the 13th Amendment, raises serious human rights concerns.
🧵⤵️
The slavery exception in the 13th Amendment allows for forced labor in prisons “as punishment for a crime,” and this loophole perpetuates a cycle of inequity. Prison labor should help incarcerated individuals prepare for a return to society and never be punitive.
Me going through my list of clients and where they live every time there's something scary in the news, in case I need to check on them and make sure they're OK.
Don't expect them to be working their regular jobs.
This should be obvious but sometimes obvious things need to be said out loud: If you're not in the LA area, don't expect much out of folks there for the next several days except that they are going to be busy either surviving or trying to help their neighbors.
www.cnn.com/weather/live...
"It's hellish here. Please be kind." — Jennifer Kretchmer, Bluesky
Some days it just hits me how every one of us--every single person reading this--is braver, tougher, and more generous than any of the billionaires who fancy themselves our superiors, and how ridiculous it is that this handful of cry babies with the luxury of doing ANYTHING THEY WANT choose... this.
we're out here paypaling and GFMing the last $25 we have back and forth to infinity while slogging through a labyrinth of ridiculous injustice, and they are freaking out because someone suggested they should have more money than they could spend in 2999 lifetimes instead of 3005 lifetimes.
so far, seems like the first few victims are black folks who've lived in altadena for several generations and were trying so hard to hold onto their homes that they were willing to fight off the flames by themselves. man, they are so familiar to me. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/u...
Fundraiser to help Black community members displaced by the Eaton fire. Please donate if you're able and/or share widely. #EatonFire #LosAngeles
www.gofundme.com/f/la-fires-t...
There are families who will never be able to come back from this devastation, and many of them were in generational homes, passed down from people who bought homes in the 1970sand 80's in Altadena. All of the fires are a tragedy, but especially for those who don't have the resources to rebuild.
If enacted, it would rank among the most extreme bathroom bans in the country, prohibiting transgender individuals from using restrooms that match their gender identity in all publicly owned facilities across the state.
Live in Montana, a rules committee is holding a hearing as to whether or not they will ban my wife, Representative Zooey Zephyr, and other trans people from the bathroom.
You can follow along live here: sg001-harmony.sliq.net/00309/Harmon...
These extraordinary photos of the LA fires have been shared widely on social media, often without crediting the photographer.
These are all the work of Ethan Swope, an LA-based photojournalist working for AP.
You can follow his remarkable reporting here👇
www.instagram.com/ethanswopeph...
L.A. news choppers are better able to survey the damage today vs. yesterday. KABC is flying over parts of the Palisades right now. Block after block is gone. abc7.com/watch/live/
People outside of LA truly don’t understand how apocalyptic this is. It’s worse than it’s ever been. Entire residential neighborhoods are burning to the ground.
With each disaster, it is important to say: This is happening because it makes some people rich, and those people are planning to escape on their own lifeboat without you.
www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/lifeboat-c...
In the seven months since June 1, 2024, LA received a total 0.03” of rain.
To put that in perspective — that’s about 1% of what the driest city in America gets per year (Yuma, AZ).
Yet, network media ignored climate change in coverage of California wildfires. www.mesoscalenews.com/p/network-me...
After losing my third home in a tragic wildfire caused by the George Lincoln Rockwell Foundation Data Center for Industrial Spying, I am opening a seed round for my new firefighting startup, Dousr. It’s an app that trains poor people to run into burning buildings and rescue your valuables
Pasadena Humane has seen an influx of over 300 animals due to the fires. People lined up down the block to drop off beloved pets they could not take with them when they fled their homes. Some animals arrived with burns and injuries and are being treated. Donations and fosters are needed NOW.
SoCal friends:
Many animal shelters are overwhelmed from people dropping off beloved pets they can't take with them as they flee. Please consider donating and fostering. Pasadena Humane is one such org. Contact your local animal orgs to see if they need help.
pasadenahumane.org/eaton-canyon...
from me: the lies spreading across social media about the horrifying L.A. fires (which are quite similar to the conspiracies that emerged in the wake of Hurricane Helene) reveal one grim truth about our future—this is just how every coming climate disaster will play out in our info environment
Pretty amazing that nonprofit Watch Duty -- which says it has 150 volunteers working around the clock to track wildfires -- has become the most trusted source of information on LA fires. Operated by retired/volunteer firefighters, dispatchers, and reporters. Real people.
www.watchduty.org
I've built a news feed that is aggregating real-time updates from reporters and news organizations covering the Los Angeles wildfires, including the #PalisadesFire, the #EatonFire, the #HurstFire and the #WoodleyFire
matthewkeys.net/social/bsky/...
Tap "Pin to Home" to turn into a news feed.
To add to this, Caruso was THE HEAD OF THE WATER BOARD and never said word 1 about storing more water in the Palisades in case of emergency, until the houses he bought for his kids were affected.
These fires are a watershed moment, not just for residents of LA, but emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster. Conditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...
How I have to go outside for the foreseeable future. All the smoke and ash has made the already not great air quality plummet. I'm scared to have my dog outside for longer than it takes her to do her business because I don't want her breathing it in either.
Not lost on me that it's nonprofit tech, app.watchduty.org, showing up & actually working in the midst of the LA fires (donate to them!)
Meanwhile platforms fail to surface key news, vital info is paywalled...
As I've been saying, we need a new tech paradigm, yesterday!
Just saw a no-longer relevant evacuation notice on instagram from five hours ago and remembered — that’s right, due to hyper-monetization every major social network no longer shows you life-saving breaking news as it happens.
They turned it over to an algorithm that finally noticed “he likes fire.”
