Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

In after Baud. Damn.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Let there be snark.

“woke” is the new caravan.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

You are here: Home / Archives for Open Threads

Monday Morning Open Thread: How *About* That Weather?

by | 138 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Emergency crews have suspended their search for victims of catastrophic flooding in central Texas amid new warnings that additional rain will again cause waterways to surge.

[image or embed]

— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) July 13, 2025 at 1:15 PM

===

Armies of Texan volunteers are leading flood recovery and cleanup, supplementing official efforts even as more flooding hits and the search for the missing continues.

[image or embed]

— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) July 14, 2025 at 2:00 AM

===

Noem lays down a marker: 'the best we've seen out of FEMA.' Mainstream media ought to take up the challenge and do some serious compare/ contrast about FEMA responses. Here's a good place to start: The Biden admin pre-positioning of resources BEFORE Hurricane Helene hit vs Noem's Texas efforts.

[image or embed]

— @NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze) (@newsjennifer.bsky.social) July 13, 2025 at 10:49 AM

===

===

President Trump has so far withheld federal relief funds, with many arguing that California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Democrats in the deep-blue state have mishandled the fires and should be forced to rescind liberal policies in exchange for aid.

[image or embed]

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) July 9, 2025 at 7:33 PM

===

FEMA Acting Administrator David Richardson finally visited Texas Hill Country today more than a week after the deadly floods.
Photos posted on X and Reddit show Richardson there, and I’ve confirmed via the FEMA daily internal brief.

[image or embed]

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 11:44 PM


===

at one point he wore a jaunty hat

[image or embed]

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 11:46 PM

===

The DOD is halting a critical atmospheric data collection program—the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program—at the end of June. They've given weather forecasters just days to prepare,
Hurricane season is upon us. In days we'll be "blind," hurricane experts are saying.

[image or embed]

— Fiona "Fi" Webster ?????? (@fiona-webster22.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 10:30 AM

===

As someone put it quite well:
1.) It is very, very hard to actually blow up the american economy, even with everything. Even the major financial crises we weathered significantly better than other countries.
2.) No one has really ever pulled every single fucking "blow it all up" lever all at once

[image or embed]

— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 6:07 PM

Monday Morning Open Thread: How *About* That Weather?Post + Comments (138)

Late Night Open Thread: Buyer’s Remorse

by | 108 Comments

This post is in: , , ,


==

as this gets worse you're going to see endless efforts at reputational retcon by people who knew EXACTLY what they signed up for
and by people who were too ignorant or dis/misinformed to understand what they were signing up for, but lack the humility to own that

[image or embed]

— Karl Bode (@karlbode.com) July 11, 2025 at 11:09 AM

Of course the PodBros are lying — they encouraged their listeners to vote for Trump because another Trump administration would be entertaining, and besides, at least he wasn’t a Black female Democrat. But the Epstein files botchery is giving them an excuse to pretend they were somehow mislead by yet another dishonest pol. Per the Daily Beast:

Podcaster Andrew Schulz gave Donald Trump street cred in the world of chronically online young men, but he’s been having second thoughts.

On a Thursday episode of his Flagrant podcast, the comedian torched the president for “doing the exact opposite” of his campaign promises.

“There’ll be people that they’ll DM me like, ‘You see what your boy’s doing? You voted for this.’ I’m like, ‘I voted for none of this,’” he said. “He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for. I want him to stop the wars—he’s funding them. I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget—he’s increasing it.”

Schulz voted for Trump last year even after laughing in his face during a 90-minute podcast that has racked up nearly 10 million views. Schulz erupted in a fit of giggles after the then-Republican candidate called himself “basically a truthful person.”…

The podcaster, who commands an audience composed chiefly of young men, predicted that Trump would win by a landslide after their interview. He was gleeful after a listener declared that “Flagrant is gonna get Trump elected.”

But the recent controversies that have roiled the administration, from its aggressive deportation blitz to the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s megabill, have forced Schulz to rethink his support.

“I already expect politicians to not do most of the s-–t they say,” he said. “I don’t want to be too cynical, but now I’m getting to the point where it’s like, ‘Can they do anything?’”…

Actions have consequences? What hellworld is this?

show full post on front page

Late Night Open Thread: Buyer’s RemorsePost + Comments (108)

War for Ukraine Day 1,235: A Brief Sunday Night Update

by | 13 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

Despite spending a good chunk of the weekend napping or actually sleeping overnight, I’m wiped. I blame the humidity. Regardless, I’m going to just run through the basics tonight.

“However desperate the situation and circumstances, don’t despair. When there is everything to fear, be unafraid. When surrounded by dangers, fear none of them. When without resources, depend on resourcefulness. When surprised, take the enemy by surprise.” – Sun Tzu

[image or embed]

— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) July 13, 2025 at 3:01 PM

One of my former bosses was a US Navy fighter pilot. At one point he was a commander of the air group (CAG), I just checked with him and he confirms that this does in fact qualify as an aircraft carrier:

Behold a naval drone that is a launch platform for an fpv drone

[image or embed]

— Mira of Kyiv 🇺🇦 (@reshetz.bsky.social) July 13, 2025 at 1:25 PM

Technically an aircraft carrier

— Mira of Kyiv 🇺🇦 (@reshetz.bsky.social) July 13, 2025 at 1:29 PM

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

show full post on front page

War for Ukraine Day 1,235: A Brief Sunday Night UpdatePost + Comments (13)

Boomer Nostalgia Open Thread: Nuclear Terrors

by | 130 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Missing the Cold War? This Sunday, July 13, beginning at 8:00 PM EDT, Turner Classic Movies will be showing a double feature about the risks of unintentional nuclear war, featuring 1964’s “Fail Safe” at 8:00 PM and 1965’s “The Bedford Incident” at 10:00 PM.

[image or embed]

— Stephen Schwartz (@atomicanalyst.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 1:36 PM


===

I'm in my mid-50s and starting to become the littlest bit prone to nostalgia (and I do mean the littlest bit).
As @radiofreetom.bsky.social states in this very worthwhile piece, I'm not being nostalgic when remembering this era–an important read:
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc…

[image or embed]

— Richard P Clark (@zippyrich.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 2:55 PM

Story I’ve told before: When I was in second or third grade, one of my parochial-school classmates asked our nun why we weren’t doing the then-fashionable duck & cover drills. She told us that our proximity to Manhattan meant we’d die before we even saw the light of a nuclear explosion, so our only real defense was to always keep our souls in a state of sinlessness. Even now, I’m not sure she wasn’t correct… Gift link:

Back in the late 2000s, I was teaching a class on nuclear weapons to undergraduates who had mostly come of age after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I tried to explain what it was like to grow up worrying about a sudden apocalypse, a student raised his hand and said: “What were you so afraid of? I mean, sure, nuclear weapons are bad, but …” And here he gave up with a puzzled shake of his head, as if to say: What was the big deal?

I paused to think of a better way to explain that the annihilation of the world was a big deal. People who grew up during the Cold War, as I did, internalized this fear as children. We still tell our campfire tales about hiding under school desks at the sound of air-raid sirens. Such things seemed mysterious, and even irrelevant, to my students in the 21st century. And then it occurred to me: They haven’t seen the movies.

During the Cold War, popular culture provided Americans with images of (and a vocabulary for) nuclear war. Mushroom clouds, DEFCON alerts, exploding buildings, fallout-shelter signs—these visuals popped up in even the frothiest forms of entertainment, including comic books, James Bond movies, and music videos. The possibility of a nuclear holocaust was always lurking in the background, like the figure of Death hiding among revelers in a Bosch triptych, and we could imagine it because it had been shown to us many times on screens big and small.

Ensuing generations have grown up with their own fears: Terrorism, climate change, and now AI are upending life across the globe, and nuclear war might seem more like a historical curiosity than a concrete threat. But at this moment, Russia and the United States each have roughly 1,500 deployed strategic warheads, many of them on alert, with thousands more in their inventories. This is an improvement over the madness of the Cold War, when the superpowers were sitting on tens of thousands of deployed weapons, but the current global stockpile is more than enough to destroy hundreds of cities and kill billions of people. The threat remains, but the public’s fears, along with the movies that explored them, have faded away. Americans need new films to remind new generations, but Cold War–era movies are not just relics. The horrors they depict are still possible…

Testament was the one that gave me nightmares in the 1980s, but nothing compared to the radition-poisoned teddy bear from Judith Merrill’s Shadow on the Hearth when I read it as a precocious third or fourth grader.

show full post on front page

Boomer Nostalgia Open Thread: Nuclear TerrorsPost + Comments (130)

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Dance Like the Whole Universe Is Watching

by | 125 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Hundreds of scientists are set to take part in the first performance of a new Scottish country dance inspired by the ripples in spacetime whose existence was first theorised by Albert Einstein.
More: gla.ac/3ICip4Q
#GR24Amaldi16 #GravitationalWaves #Glasgow
@uofgravity.bsky.social

[image or embed]

— University of Glasgow (@uofglasgow.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 4:49 AM

Another gift from Satby!

… Researchers from the University of Glasgow teamed up with the culture and research organisation Science Ceilidh to develop a dance to mark the 10th anniversary of the historic first detection of gravitational waves – a groundbreaking discovery which established a new field of astronomy.

The dance will be premiered next week at the joint GR–Amaldi meeting, an international science conference which will be held at Glasgow’s Scottish Exhibition Centre between Monday 14th and Friday 18th July.

The dance has been developed to creatively represent the gravitational-wave signals measured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), as well as the black holes that create them.

The first observation of gravitational waves was made by LIGO on 14 September 2015. The gravitational-wave signal – a ripple in spacetime – had originated from the merger of two black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our Sun, to form a black hole of about 60 times the mass of our Sun. LIGO’s detection provided the first direct observation of gravitational waves almost a century after Einstein predicted their properties in his general theory of relativity.

The detection inaugurated the field of gravitational-wave astronomy, which uses extremely sensitive detectors to measure the miniscule ripples in spacetime. Sophisticated analysis of gravitational-wave signals enables astronomers to make observations of cosmic events that are not possible with conventional telescopes…

The dance was developed through workshop sessions between Glasgow physicists and the Science Ceilidh team. The dance represents the life-cycle of black holes and how they form orbiting pairs before finally colliding to create, in just a few seconds, the signal detected on Earth.

At the climax of the dance, participants are encouraged to let out a celebratory ‘whoop’ which represents what astrophysicists call the ringdown. That is the final stage of a binary black hole merger which ‘rings’ spacetime like a bell and sends out the ripples which make detection possible on Earth….

Dancing and thinking about the fundamental nature of the universe just about sums up the ideal state of the human condition for me! We can't all have LIGO in our basements, but we can move and think about this stuff!

— Peter Haas 🤠 (@peterhaas.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 5:19 AM

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Dance Like the Whole Universe Is WatchingPost + Comments (125)

Late Night Open Thread: America’s Fascists Love Alligators

by | 136 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

"American fascism writ large yearns for ethnic cleansing and the concentration camp; in the south, American white supremacy yearns for the Alligator." defector.com/why-do-fasci…

[image or embed]

— Defector (@defector.com) July 10, 2025 at 7:36 PM

In June, Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier extolled the benefits of the concentration camp they were rushing to build in the wetlands of the Big Cypress Nature Reserve, west of Miami and just north of the Everglades. The swamp location wasn’t incidental to the 5,000-bed facility, but a plus. “It presents an efficient, low-cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility because you don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter,” he crowed. “If people get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons.”

What happened next was, perhaps, predictable. The Department of Homeland Security formally named the camp “Alligator Alcatraz,” a sweaty piece of branding that the rest of the administration picked up with customary glee. DHS social media posted AI-generated images of smug-looking alligators wearing ICE baseball caps. Online stores run by the Florida GOP (and Uthmeier himself) immediately began selling “Alligator Alcatraz”-branded T-shirts and beer koozies. During Trump’s first term, the New York Times reported, the president had often fantasized behind closed doors of a moat beneath his border wall, one that could be filled with snakes and alligators; when he toured the installation on July 1, he leaned and swayed and grinned at the sight of chain link cages under tent awnings, and returned again and again to the reptiles in the surrounding swamps. “We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator,” he rambled in response to a reporter’s question. “OK, if they escape prison, how to run away, don’t run in a straight line, run like this. And you know what? Your chances go up at about one percent, okay? That’s a good thing.”

It is, as with so much in the second Trump administration, an act of performative cruelty and malice and money-grubbing dressed up—not especially convincingly—as expediency. But like so much marsh gas, the lurid fantasies which drive these people are continually bubbling up to the surface. American fascism writ large yearns for ethnic cleansing and the concentration camp; in the south, American white supremacy yearns for the Alligator.

Let’s begin with the fact that there are two types of alligators, and they have very little do with one another. There’s the real American alligator (A. mississippiensis), a large but—as crocodilians go—rather docile and shy predator of the southern wetlands, subsisting on everything from fish to deer. Forget that one, please. We are concerned here with the symbolic one: the Alligator, Scourge of the Swamp, the monster that dwells in the mire of the American imagination. This latter form “is most fond of human flesh as an item of diet,” according to a characteristically breathless 1923 report in the Oakland Tribune. “Hunters say that while an alligator will risk its safety for a young dog, it will jeopardize every hope of life for a live baby. And in the matter of color … black babies, in the estimation of the alligators, are far more refreshing, as it were, than white ones.”…

show full post on front page

Late Night Open Thread: America’s Fascists Love AlligatorsPost + Comments (136)

War for Ukraine Day 1,234: The Cost

by | 3 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

A painting by Ukrainian artist NEIVANMADE. The words "NEVER AGAIN" are repeated over and over, from left to right and top to bottom, in a faded, washed out black against a white background. Red, the color of blood, runs and drips down across 2/3rds of the painting. "WHILE YOU TOLERATE TYRANTS" is written/painted in the bottom white corner below the three rows of "NEVER AGAIN".

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

It’s been a long week everywhere. So I’m going to just run through the basics tonight.

The cost:

The number of casualties in russian strike on Chernivtsi has risen to 26. Details have emerged about the two fatalities.

Diana Kravchenko, 26, was the manager of a Chernivtsi pharmacy. She was in a building during the missile attack

Sviatoslav Lazarenko, 43, an employee of the Sniatyn City Council

[image or embed]

— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 10:00 AM

was fatally wounded by shrapnel while driving on Chernivtsi’s main street.

💔 May their memory be a blessing.

Source: Ruslan Zaparanyuk, head of the Chernivtsi Regional Military Administration.

— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 10:00 AM

As I’ve been writing/saying:

Lately, russia has intensified bombing of Ukraine’s western regions — Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Chernivtsi — areas that were once relatively calm. This escalation is deliberate: to make Ukrainians feel unsafe everywhere, to drive people into exhaustion and sleep deprivation. Terror.

[image or embed]

— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 6:28 AM

Here’s Ukraine’s air defense tally from last night/this morning:

Attacks by fascist Russia on democratic Ukraine now regularly include over 500 drones and missiles. Ukrainian authorities warned more than a month ago that Kremlin planned to scale-up attacks, but no preemptive action was taken by Kyiv’s Western allies. The US even temporarily cut aid.

[image or embed]

— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 3:24 AM

Here’s First Lady Zalenska’s full speech at the Ukraine Recovery Conference earlier in the week.

 

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

show full post on front page

War for Ukraine Day 1,234: The CostPost + Comments (3)