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

Andrew Tate is an icon of Trumpism and all it stands for. apnews.com/article/roma...

submitted 1 day ago • 186 comments

Donald Trump is importing foreign sex traffickers into the United States

submitted 1 day ago • 11 comments

Denmark restricts immigration effectively, which has kept the far-right from power. Fantastic article: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/m...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Credit to Thomas Massie. Dude correctly said this bill busts the budget when Republicans have spent YEARS railing against fiscal irresponsibility by the Democrats.

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

Brilliant but devastating editorial in the Financial Times. “In the past 10 days, he [Trump] has all but incinerated 80 years of postwar American leadership. If you are not at the table, you are on the menu. America has turned.”

submitted 5 days ago • 92 comments

When kids see that every product they touch is made in another country they don't imagine themselves participating in making those things as a career.

submitted 5 days ago • 4 comments

This story is heartbreaking, and unsurprising. In the ~4 years we've been negotiating crypto regulation NO ONE from industry has advocated for rules that would strengthen consumer protection, anti-money laundering or audit control. And so people like this get hurt. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/m...

submitted 8 days ago • 6 comments

"Every four years, there’s a chance that the US sides with our mortal enemies in order to extract colonial-like economic concessions from us" is not a valuable proposition The credibility of the US is dead, and there’s nothing a centrist Democratic president can do to fix it

submitted 9 days ago • 6 comments

It's not in spite of these indicators, it's because of them. Affluence and ennui are powerful drivers of modern authoritatianism.

submitted 9 days ago • 97 comments

and the left wing flips us upside down

submitted 10 days ago • 2 comments

US Senator Ruben Gallegos is having a Sistah Souljah moment with his interview on The Daily podcast today. Democrats owe him a debt of gratitude. open.substack.com/pub/greattra...

submitted 13 days ago • 6 comments

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I see your Napoleon and raise you Samuel Johnson.

submitted 13 days ago • 11 comments

This is fascism.

submitted 13 days ago • 3184 comments

Credit when credit is due. This is good, and the first time I've seen Trump put US consumer interests over the interests of extraction industries. Big Zinc doesn't like this. apnews.com/article/trum...

submitted 14 days ago • 10 comments

A bunch of people fell on their swords to stop Trump I from killing us all and the takeaway of everyone from the media to the elites to the bum on the street was that there was no real danger to begin with.

submitted 15 days ago • 15 comments

The deal to drop Adams' corruption case isn't a one-off. In the last week, Team Trump functionally decriminalized covert foreign influence and overseas bribery. Oh, and they broke up the team that was taking Russian oligarchs' yachts.

submitted 17 days ago • 117 comments

if the president can say “i don’t like the department of energy,” and within a week it’s closed, then the constitution means nothing, and the president’s entire claim to power is the loyalty of the military. either he is constrained by the constitution or he’s a dictator, there isn’t a middle ground

submitted 23 days ago • 148 comments

In electing Trump, not once but twice, America has forsaken honor. We have abandoned all of our deepest commitments, to ourselves and to others.

submitted 26 days ago • 5 comments

No, this is an American public failure. We are why Trumpism lives. We may be poorly served by a vapid, profit obsessed media, but there is no world where Trump was not fully measured and understood - and people chose him, or chose not to show up. This is US.

submitted 29 days ago • 25 comments

There were at least four huge warning signs before the election, and it’s amazing so few people paid them any attention:

submitted 31 days ago • 11 comments

This could describe Trump as a politician pre-2015. I remember a board game that used Trump as a canonical example of a blowhard narcissist. Most future Trump voters would have laughed off the idea of ever supporting him.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Good to see @nexteraenergy talking about why #solar and #wind are dominating new electricity. Their NatGas costs are high due to $1,500/kw costs and massive gas pipeline challenges. Their nuclear costs are a bit higher than everyone else’s numbers probably on disagreements over IRA incentives

submitted 35 days ago • 1 comment

I submitted a trivial text question to humanity's last exam that was rejected even though no model gets it. It was a simple thing that is slightly hard to Google, but that anyone who had ever worked on a farm could answer with a few seconds of thought.

submitted 36 days ago • 2 comments

A good day to remember that only Joe Biden had the determination to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan. Three successive predecessors weren't willing to take that hit. Barack Obama got rolled by his military advisors. Trump didn't have the guts to do it either. Biden ended it.

submitted 39 days ago • 70 comments

It is always easier to break than to build. Be a builder today. And beware of the lazy, malevolent and narcissistic who tell you their demolition project is only a first step to build something better.

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

@jvl.bsky.social with the perfect quote: "That’s the dual hermeneutic the populists use for evaluating the world. If you’re an expert who got one thing wrong, it damns you. If you’re a total lunatic crank who gets one thing right, it makes makes you bulletproof."

submitted 41 days ago • 17 comments

And we should do this anyway! Subsidizing home buyers instead of renters was never fair. And we should repeal the charitable contribution deduction too.

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments

megawealth is a curse! you become acutely aware of the needs you have that cannot be satisfied through material means AND you are socially ill-positioned to be in a place where you can experience authentic human connection because everyone around you has every incentive to lie to you!

submitted 42 days ago • 251 comments

The elites have done a good job over the past 50 years, the populists haven't, and yet no one holds people like Trump (or Musk, as JVL notes) accountable for things they say and predict. Because we expect elites to perform at high levels of competence, and we expect nothing from populism.

submitted 42 days ago • 45 comments

A Canadian man narrowly avoided being struck by a meteorite that crashed into the walkway outside his home. The offending space rock has since been bagged & tagged. 🧪 www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

submitted 43 days ago • 20 comments

People make the mistake of thinking I’m not really conservative. I am very conservative, in the sense of what that used to mean in American politics. I just don’t recognize anything going on right now as having much of anything to do with those convictions.

submitted 45 days ago • 8 comments

Last week @mshellenberger.bsky.social shared a “documentary” arguing offshore wind will drive right whales extinct + Trump can stop it. I reviewed the film. 🧵 First he makes a brash causal conflation. All whale deaths of all causes for a whole coastline = wind makes right whales extinct.

submitted 46 days ago • 3 comments

Seems reasonable—picking battles that can be won. By not opposing the others, they accentuate the unacceptability of these four.

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

Truth matters. But when debunking climate misinformation, we have to understand that science denial is just an excuse for solution aversion. If we don’t want to fix it, any excuse will do: it’s not real! not us! not serious! That’s why talking solutions is so important. #AMS25

submitted 47 days ago • 28 comments

People who say “everyone does it” think they are being shrewdly cynical. In fact, they are being played, by slandering those who don’t in order to excuse those who do.

submitted 49 days ago • 3 comments

This is called a bribe, or extortion. Enough to make Roman Emperor blush.

submitted 51 days ago • 17 comments

it is so important to remember that IN THE MOMENT there was no one who thought jan. 6 was some innocent protest gone awry. everyone recognized it for what it was.

submitted 53 days ago • 197 comments

JFK was jealous of how European monarchs had fancy medals and sashes to hand out, and wanted to do that, so he created the Presidential Medal of Freedom as a chintzy American knock-off, and its entire existence has confirmed the wisdom of why our republican tradition didn't have such a thing before.

submitted 55 days ago • 27 comments

Americans are ~2.5x more likely to die in a crash than a Canadian, ~3.5x more likely than a Spaniard, and ~5x more likely than a Japanese person. Here are a few of the articles I wrote in 2024 trying to understand why the US is uniquely terrible at road safety. 🧵

submitted 59 days ago • 79 comments

I’m always looking for things that explain a lot but that people have a hard time remembering. Examples: Air is stuff. Pee comes from blood. All land vertebrates have a single common ancestor. Venus is bright enough to cast visible shadows. Clouds are heavy. Bones are alive. Any others you know?

submitted 62 days ago • 2183 comments

If Americans want Congress to function and not be captured by billionaires, lobbyists and special interests, it should pay members of Congress more. The same goes double for staffers so you don't just have kids from Yale who have mom and dad pay their rent.

submitted 63 days ago • 17 comments

And the biggest obstacle to transmission reform is the utility industry: -Lobbied Congress against EPRA and BIG WIRES -Litigating against FERC's interconnection rule bc it penalizes them for being slow -Litigating against FERC's transmission planning rule bc it undercuts their control

submitted 67 days ago • 0 comments

The main argument for a Strategic BItcoin Reserve seems to be that Bitcoin holders worry about an impending shortage of greater fools and need the US government to act as the greatest fool of last resort.

submitted 69 days ago • 292 comments

What an awesome story. A mix of art history, forensic science, astronomy, racial politics, and detective mystery. The portrait of Francis Williams. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

submitted 84 days ago • 3 comments

"Each time the rich kid beats the system, the rules and laws still stay in place for others—the rich kid's battles free himself, but the rules and laws are not generally shattered, the people at large remain under their shackles." www.liberalcurrents.com/a-rich-kid-t...

submitted 68 days ago • 1 comment

If the Bitcoin white paper had come out 20 years later (3 years from now), people would believe it was invented by a rogue model.

submitted 68 days ago • 3 comments

Two things seem true to me: 1) Biden was highly successful at getting major legislation passed, and 2) he made a fatal tactical error by not resigning in Nov. 2022

submitted 68 days ago • 0 comments