bjstark2.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

someone is getting a free ride at your expense is the most durable attack line in America and a huge swathe of the public falls for it again and again

submitted 7 hours ago • 10 comments

The attacks on DEI are a pretext for a much more radical agenda of reversing the gains of the civil rights movement, an objective the Trump administration is pursuing with zeal. A Great Resegregation. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

submitted 1 day ago • 120 comments

I truly think people don’t realize how many universities and colleges — especially public ones — may shut down if restrictions on and withholding of federal funding persists for even one presidency We are facing the demolition of American higher education

submitted 1 day ago • 90 comments

I wouldn’t think “moved to root out diversity initiatives” is a useful phrase for journalism at all, but using it as a euphemism for a purge of high ranking black officers is downright Orwellian.

submitted 1 day ago • 151 comments

NEW: The Trump administration has locked Minnesota out of $200 million in federal food and climate grants awarded last summer. Projects breaking ground this year were depending on that money. minnesotareformer.com/2025/02/21/t...

submitted 2 days ago • 19 comments

Hegseth is going to fire every woman or Black person in military leadership.

submitted 1 day ago • 201 comments

I will say that one way for democrats to solve their “nobody seems to really like us” problem is for all of them to just get torched in primaries.

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

If you support this, you’re an awful human being

submitted 1 day ago • 233 comments

"farmers are apoplectic. In Ohio, they’re stressed about USAID contracts and USDA cost-sharing investments. They held up their end. The government made promises. Now their family farms and livelihoods are on the line. Billions of dollars are at stake. It’s all being held hostage by Musk and Trump."

submitted 2 days ago • 103 comments

Unironically, these letters are a good example of how we’re ruled by evil men now. It would have cost them nothing to be at least slightly sympathetic. “Hey man, we know this is rough, but we have to tighten our belts and…” They instead deliberately made them as cruel as possible.

submitted 2 days ago • 13 comments

Gift link. A small unelected, secretive crew now has free access to sensitive private data of everyone. And Musk is already publicly targeting family members of judges who rule against the administration. If this isn’t ringing alarm bells, I don’t know what would. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/o...

submitted 2 days ago • 32 comments

Standing up to the authoritarian wave requires more than cheerleading for democracy; it demands making democratic societies more participatory, responsive, and adaptable at all levels, from local to national, in response to the societal shifts driven by the Internet over the past 15 years.

submitted 2 days ago • 35 comments

Not sure what more could be needed than "the Mayor indicted for corruption has entered into a quid pro quo to change his policies in exchange for dropping the charges, a indisputable fact made clear in writing by multiple DOJ officials and confirmed in TV interviews with the Mayor."

submitted 9 days ago • 42 comments

All tech has been for a decade or more is either pretending things don't exist and making worse versions of them, or just totally fucking up an existing thing so it's near unusable.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Harry Enten: “Last day and change has been the worst day of polling for Donald Trump during his entire 2nd term in office. What am I talking about? CNN -5, GALLUP -6, IPSOS -7, Q-PAC -4. These four polls tell a consistent story that his net approval is negative.” 🎥: 1/2

submitted 3 days ago • 7 comments

How many federal workers would DOGE need to fire to make up for Musk not paying his fair share of taxes? Answer: 677,000. That's 44% of the entire non-DoD federal workforce. Again, this power grab is not about the budget. It’s about politics.

submitted 2 days ago • 59 comments

no jokes here about our weakened national defenses. i really just don't know how they could let this happen

submitted 2 days ago • 4 comments

You cannot recover from this with future investments The data uncollected are lost forever

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

Over on X, simple tweets by my colleague Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal Constitution have been blocked. They were nothing but video of a town hall held by Rep. Rich McCormick R-GA where he was asked questions about DOGE

submitted 2 days ago • 277 comments

It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings & pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.

submitted 4 days ago • 1051 comments

Just in case the pattern of corruption is not 100% clear, Musk is firing anyone who was "obstructing" his companies in any way. He has co-opted the government to enrich himself at your expense.

submitted 5 days ago • 16 comments

for pity’s sake, I am BEGGING university leaders to stop framing this issue in terms of what this will cost the university. people dont care! EXPLAIN WHAT THIS WILL COST THE PUBLIC: closed hospitals and clinics, skipped treatments, loss of access to experimental drugs, unemployment, recession

submitted 14 days ago • 143 comments

it is just grotesque how many Americans totally take for granted what good fortune it has been to have incredibly good relations with a rich power neighbor sharing the worlds longest land border

submitted 5 days ago • 78 comments

one of the stupidest things i have had the misfortune of reading today and i am sharing it with you.

submitted 6 days ago • 1817 comments

"Project 2025 approved SSA administrator steps down just 3 weeks into the administration, giving up a GS-15 career in the process, because she knew even one more week on the job would risk putting her in prison for decades" is a very good and comforting sign (Musk's touching the stove)

submitted 5 days ago • 37 comments

one month since trump and melania released their memecoins, let's check in on those trading prices

submitted 5 days ago • 31 comments

There’s a device a lot of basketball teams that have called The Gun, which is basically a net you set up around the basket that feeds balls into a launcher that passes it back to you. “You can just self-learn with an LLM” is like a coach rolling ball onto to floor by The Gun & saying “learn to hoop”

submitted 5 days ago • 5 comments

The amount of secondhand embarrassment I have even just watching this is through the roof.

submitted 6 days ago • 2927 comments

Sea ice in the Arctic and around Antarctica cool our climate, drive ocean circulation across the planet, and provide a unique habitat for polar ecosystems. Sea ice amounts have now fallen to their lowest since we started measuring them. This is not good. 🌊🥼❄️🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

Hypothesis: modern newspaper Opinion sections generate short-term revenue via hate-clicks on Controversial Takes, but those same takes negatively impact long-term subscriber numbers. Unfortunately, the former is easily measurable via online analytics tools but the latter is much harder to suss out.

submitted 25 days ago • 0 comments

The "Fund promised that it would “highlight” the election fraud stories it gathered through these payments via “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns”, but it never did so, which suggests that none of the evidence generated was consequential or credible." www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

submitted 9 days ago • 4 comments

Missouri's AG Andrew Bailey is suing Starbucks, arguing that its workforce is too "female" and "non-white" and as a result Missouri consumers “pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services" because its workforce is "less qualified" This is a brazenly racist and sexist lawsuit.

submitted 9 days ago • 1298 comments

It's all shocking. But, this is the part that surprised me the most. Has the NYC press talked about this much? Mayor Adams has two lawyers. One does work for Musk. The other does work for Trump.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

This is absolutely a case where obstruction, even if they don't do the more general total obstruction they should be doing, could make a substantial practical difference, in addition to being perfectly on-point messaging for the situation. But they'd have to do all USA nominees, not just SDNY.

submitted 10 days ago • 5 comments

“They don’t know anything but are acting like they know everything.” How Elon Musk and his DOGE goons are following the private equity playbook

submitted 10 days ago • 17 comments

Today is one of my fav classes, when I teach my students all about why @daveholmes.bsky.social's 10-ep podcast "Waiting for Impact" may be the most important scientific podcast out there... ... even though it is entirely about a never-was boyband that briefly appeared in a Boyz II Men video.

submitted 374 days ago • 3 comments

Again, Twitter WON this case (decisively) at the district court level. The 9th Circuit made it clear that Twitter would win on appeal at oral args. And now it decided to just hand over $10 million to Trump. www.cnbc.com/2025/02/12/e...

submitted 10 days ago • 145 comments

The fact that NBC can (accurately) call the Administrative Procedure Act “obscure” just shows how little Americans know about how their government works. It literally is one of the most important laws ever enacted by Congress.

submitted 11 days ago • 273 comments

How much Elon Musk makes from the government a day: $8 million. How much a senior on Social Security gets a day: $65 Guess which budget Musk and Trump want to cut?

submitted 11 days ago • 898 comments

It's been a while since I've inflicted a thread on you all, so I want to expand on this a bit. Okay, rather a lot. Mute as needed.

submitted 10 days ago • 8 comments

you fucked up a perfectly good computer is what you did. look at it. it's got innumeracy

submitted 11 days ago • 109 comments

Just very plain to me that Democratic electeds and elites have not taken full advantage of their ability to affect public opinion by pulling Democratic partisans in line on the issues. Republican voters are in lockstep and Democratic voters are not; you see this in polls all the time.

submitted 11 days ago • 26 comments

The list has around 30 people. I remain confused how so few unqualified dipshits can take over multiple government agencies and offices without anyone just saying nah and closing the door in their face.

submitted 11 days ago • 38 comments

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, is securing real beneifits as he helps Trump disrupt the federal government. Just how? The NYT takes a deep look today at these benefits: federal investigations targeting Musk companies that have been disrupted or now may die. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/u...

submitted 11 days ago • 215 comments