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rff.bsky.social
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the most surprising and disappointing aspect of becoming a global health philanthropist is the existence of an opposition team

When you take a step back, it’s genuinely stunning how far any of this is from anything Trump campaigned on. It aligns perfectly w Project 2025 of course, but in terms of Trump’s public rhetoric, this was totally absent.

JFC. The US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at its highest level since 2000, higher than during the Financial Crisis, higher than during COVID

Absurdly great piece of for-the-sake-of-it hacking. I wrote up a few more notes here: simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/27/...

Dean Karlan, Chief Economist at USAID, has resigned www.npr.org/sections/goa...

‘From now on the opinion section will consist of exactly one viewpoint’ is so funny to just say out loud dawg

como diz a @ossodeborboleta.bsky.social , pompeia acabou de dropar mais uns afrescos!

"It’s craven. He’s basically fearful of Trump." Marty Baron, former executive editor of the Washington Post, interprets what Jeff Bazos announced this morning. open.substack.com/pub/zeteo/p/...

The Republican budget plan: -Cut SNAP by $230 billion -Cut Medicaid by $880 billion -Give $1.1 trillion to the top 1%

A new McCarthy era is upon us. Stupid, depressing, and dangerous as ever. I wonder whose name will carry the dunce cap in the history books. Too many are complicit. I’ll need to find upset and action, but for now I’m feeling grief at the dehumanization inherent to all this.

When Republicans say "These tax cuts will pay for themselves" reporters should treat it the way they do "Trump won the 2020 election," as a proven lie that requires IMMEDIATE refutation in the reporter's voice, to make clear that they have repeated this assertion for decades and it never happens.

I can't vouch for the date source (ember energy?) but if it's accurate, I'm positively surprised. See the breakdown, with wind growing in the last ten years and solar in the last five.

The wealthiest man in the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars to put Trump in power, and one of the first things he did was to starve children. You decide if that was a feature or a bug.

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

Maybe the worst Ezra Klein episode ever. Ezra: sophisticated question about the media environment interplay with politics Gurri: if you think about it, Trump was sent by God to usher in AI as the second coming. nytimes.com/2025/02/25/o...

Had never heard of this restaurant chain, and now it's the largest in the world by store count

DOGE savings (WSJ): $2.6b TSLA subsidies (10 years): $15b Annual increase in deficit: $900b Cuts to Medicare: $880b

I think I can explain this. As long as I've been following US politics, everyone involved in public discourse has obeyed Murc's Law: Dems are the only ones with agency, the only ones making choices for which they are accountable; the right merely reacts, is driven to its behavior by the left.

Was hat die Linke wiederbelebt? Der tolle @andreasrickmann.bsky.social zeigt hier, dass es einen Zusammenhang mit den Vorgängen im Bundestag rund um die gemeinsame Mehrheit von CDU/CSU, FDP und AfD geben könnte. Starkes Wachstum ab dem 29.1.25.

I love how papers like this--by taking a multi-level approach, can help us to understand how immigrant influx at one level (national) boosts prejudice, but at another (local) does the opposite. (PS go #intergroupcontact!) Worth getting your head around this. These scholars are really onto something

The company we now keep: "The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries" Horrifying.

Data from Five takeaways from Germany’s historic election — in charts - on.ft.com/43c2OBk via @data.ft.com

More reasons for concern: AfD nabbed 40% of previous non-voters in a high turnout election.

Election results in #Berlin in granular detail. The big black spot on the left is a forest, the marked green one is Tempelhofer Feld. interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/bundesta...

NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany: Gender divide continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung sharply left. www.ft.com/content/29fd...

stancilculture.substack.com/p/the-intern...

Quite striking results for Germany’s young (+\- compared to 2021).

I don't even know what to say. So much vital, lifesaving research has come from this data.

Chilling read by @okwonga.bsky.social "Far right’s xenophobia is not at the fringes of German society: it can be found in voices at its very centre" www.theguardian.com/world/commen...

The trouble is, once I started imagining they were taking selfies I couldn’t unsee it

did not expect to be attacked like this at the art museum

An accessible piece of one of my favorite weird anatomical features: our brains literally clean themselves while we sleep, pumping cerebrospinal fluid in to wash away waste products. And many classes of sleeping pill lessen or prevent this action!

Used @graze.social for the first time today, to create a feed that mirrors my Following feed but is filtered by language.

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Gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/w...

Germans have been subjected to covert Russian propaganda as well as overt American propaganda - jointly in support of the far-right www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/w...

This is why I’m concerned about the theory that people will turn on this stuff as they realize how bad it is. They just won’t know about most of it.