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blmckean.bsky.social
associate professor of political science at Ohio State University // global justice, supply chains, populism, climate change, critical theory, etc // all tweets (skeets?) produced accidentally by having my phone in a pants pocket while I walk the dog
991 posts 3,339 followers 711 following
Prolific Poster

Ohio is soon to follow, post-SB1.

“I am asking them, as I am continually asking myself, to imagine a heart that feels a connection to the hearts of others, even others you do not know. I would like to think that this is what nudges me forward, more than some mythological concept of ‘hope.’”

This Australian former cop came to the US to visit her husband, who is currently serving in the Army. She was strip searched, denied food, and denied access to a phone and an attorney. www.news.com.au/travel/trave...

Melinda Cooper laser eyes, etc

Just found my new favorite startup

*drum roll* Introducing Data for Indigenous Implementations, Interventions, & Innovation (D4I) project! We're an Indigenous-led team building a Tribal Data Repository (TDR) & policies for Tribal Nations grounded in Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles. Meet some of our team & learn more d4itdr.org

The story of Bill Fox has always been about two things: his supernatural songwriting talent, and his absolute refusal to talk to the press. But somehow Bill agreed to speak to me for an in-depth feature—the first of his 40-year career, for @vulture.com: www.vulture.com/article/the-...

me, explaining the props on display at the Weta Workshop to my daughter: that’s Chappie

This bespoke exception for the Fed is one of the most brazenly made-up things I've ever seen the Supreme Court do (which is saying something). There is no principled basis to distinguish the Fed from other independent agencies. The conservative justices just don't want Trump to crash the market!

"Gaza is starvation under siege ... In almost every other famine on record, communicable diseases are the big killers. Gaza is an anomaly, a laboratory in which we will discover how much nutritional stress a population can withstand before succumbing en masse."

This guy is the definition of a piece of work

three years ago the number predicted was 40 million displaced Africans by 2050. now the prediction is 113 million. I know this because it's what I was telling students in my environmental ethics class. we are going to bear witness to unfathomable atrocities, new holocausts. it will become normal

guarantee trump is obsessed with this because he thinks rare here means “hard to find”

Ethnic cleansing is actually a very old idea. What’s revolutionary I guess is pretending that it isn’t an atrocity in the year 2025.

Maybe the best thing about being on Bluesky as an American is being constantly exposed to how completely insane UK media and politics is - really puts the lie to any US exceptionalism about how bad our predicament is. Turns out catastrophically stupid politics is more normal than you’d like in 2025!

If we stop calling these “grants” and start calling them “contracts,” it’s clearer to people why this is such an abuse of power. This wasn’t a bunch of gifts. This was a bunch of binding contracts between researchers and the US govt for specific agreed upon projects.

Guys, you’re never going to believe this, but it turns out J. D. Vance is an unprincipled liar who cares about nothing but himself

🧐🤔

“I still have dreams about Cheers, isn’t that weird? I’ll be laughing and Burrows will say, ‘Oh that’s great, let’s put that in,’ and then I’ll wake up and there’s no show to put it in.”

So much for choice and personal autonomy. www.statnews.com/2025/05/20/f...

seems very bad

The scale of what this administration is doing to prevent climate action is staggering. But if the U.S. is "virtually alone in the world in rejecting climate science," it's not alone in climate denial. Most countries just give lip service to climate while their policies are climate denial in action.

keir starmer is a fucking disgrace

The NIH Director continues to misunderstand (or mischaracterize) the extent to which research is being gutted. I appreciate this program officer for speaking up.

Counterpoint: Bribes. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/t...

A faculty member spoke to the University of California system president prior to graduation about concerns over how the UC system responded to protestors and so they had the faculty member removed by the police.

“…part of a pattern of denying that liberal Jews are properly viewed as Jews at all. This denial is critical to metabolizing the dissonance between conservative's imagined identity as warriors against antisemitism and the reality that they loathe the overwhelming majority of American Jews.”

Taking my act on a brief tour - going to Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington this Wednesday before making appearances at Australian Nation University next week and University of Sydney the week after that. Info on Wellington below - would love to see folks in any of these places!

"The arrest is part of an accelerating government crackdown on civil society and the free press as Bukele is apparently emboldened by his close relationship to the Trump administration...Earlier this month, seven journalists from the investigative news outlet El Faro had to leave the country..."

This country has no instinct whatsoever for self-preservation: “At Pantex, where technicians assemble and disassemble nuclear weapons, only a quarter of safety system oversight positions had fully qualified hires…”

The thing I wish was being talked about more is that immigraiton is governed under civil law even as enforcement is criminalized. They don’t have to mirandize, they don’t always have warrants, people don’t have right to counsel. Ice detentions are horrible & judges cruel. “Due process” is a joke.

The Trump admin is tying life-saving aid to African countries to their willingness to grease the wheels for Elon Musk's congested, expensive, ozone-layer killing Starlink satellite service. The level of corruption even stuns one Bush era official quoted in the ProPublica story:

"Trump and his band of New Age crystal-healing shady vaccine injury lawyers are blocking the cure for cancer" seems like a comms slam-dunk to me, but what do I know, I haven't repeatedly lost Congressional majorities to a party made up exclusively of brain-damaged rabid badgers.

Combating anti-semitism by propagating the theory that left wing academic ideas are secretly attempts to undermine the sanctity of our native stock and its belief in its own righteousness being spread by foreign saboteurs to harm our womenfolk. Let's see where this one goes, see how it works out.

Taking my act on a brief tour - going to Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington this Wednesday before making appearances at Australian Nation University next week and University of Sydney the week after that. Info on Wellington below - would love to see folks in any of these places!

"The absurd contradiction of UATX peaked in a glowing tribute on Fox & Friends which quoted its 'anti-woke' founding prof Michael Shellenberger as praising the university as 'a sanctuary of truth-seeking and truth-telling' before host Brian Kilmeade gushed: 'Protests are essentially not allowed.'"

I genuinely find this idea of a “cover up” completely baffling. I thought Biden was visibly too old for the presidency in 2020; I could barely stand to watch *those* debates. Hell, Trump started calling him “Sleepy Joe” in *2019*. What was there to cover up??

best spam journal I’ve been invited to contribute to in ages

Crimson update on detained Harvard researcher What is missing is that her HARVARD BOSS told her to bring these items into the country (see Guardian piece) Harvard owns this & should be doing the work of defending her www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Of the few good things about being an American was not getting push alerts about Eurovision and now they’ve taken that away from us

There's a political economy case to be made that this was the whole ball game for the legitimacy of US institutions among lower-income & -education cohorts. Even though very few workers make the federal minimum wage, a *majority* make less than the inflation adjusted level from the 1960s

The Trump administration is letting food rot rather than sending it to people on the brink of starvation in Gaza and Sudan. www.reuters.com/world/us-aid...

1,000x more coverage of the fake disaster fumble after the response to the flooding in North Carolina in 9/2024 than the real one here.

One dead after large explosion from a bomb “in or near a vehicle” parked at a reproductive health clinic in Palm Springs www.latimes.com/california/s...

I thought a lot about the horrible things that could happen during the second Trump admin, and I gotta be honest not knowing the weather did not cross my mind