Lisa Ballard

Regular reminder that when you go to things while sick, you are giving those germs to people with autoimmune disorders, you’re passing them to someone’s newborn, to someone’s elderly parents. It’s “just a cold” to you but it can and does severely impact countless people.

The next 10 days will be monumental, with elections in Serbia, Brazil, Israel and the US. This one was a victory for democracy.

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

Margaret Hamilton has died at 90. Her painstaking work helped turn an audacious national ambition into a working system: In the famous photo below, she stands next to a stack of her team's code for the Apollo missions—pages that carried human beings to the moon. RIP. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/o...

Killed. NSF’s SBE was killed, in violation of law. The President does not have the power to choose to kill programs at a whim by defunding them. The imperial presidency was a mistake and we are in a separation of powers constitutional crisis.

one of my best friends at the time was a girl my same age (10 years old) who wore a hijab and spent the next several years getting tormented by white boys for being a terrorist

There are very real safety concerns we need to address with generative LLMs. Deepfakes, privacy, AI psychosis, etc We don't need to entertain goofy nonsense from people claiming they're inventing the torment nexus from the science fiction classic "Dipshit That's Not The Torment Nexus Go Outside."

Elon Musk supported the rising neo-Nazi party in Germany. He’s the number one funder of Republicans in the midterms. He’s supporting fascist agitators in England. It’s long past time for anyone who supports democracy to leave his propaganda website. It’s time to boycott X.

Fuck you Google. We will all remember your capitulation to a mad king

Republicans have spent the last year trying to defund Dolly Parton

We are a broken nation. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians were living and working legally, paying taxes, and contributing. Haiti remains wholly unsafe. But Trump hates Haitians, and the White House wanted videos of Black people in chains, so they stripped them of status and turned on the cameras.

It's not necessarily surprising the US would end up with a corrupt and authoritarian demagogue. But the thing that's so nightmarish, the day in and day out mass psychosis of a nation letting it continue, is how he's manifestly batshit insane. Non compos mentis under any sense of objective reality.

phys.org/news/2026-08...

Apparently ICE arrests are at an all-time high and I'm guessing they've managed that by decentralizing. Focus on a specific urban area, and you get a lot of targeted resistance. Anyway, helpful reminder that ICE are literally everywhere and we should all be watching out for our neighbors.

A great loss for us all. A light in our darkness, a talent like none other. Rest in song and mirth, Dolly. The heavens have a new star among them.

BREAKING: The union of Starbucks workers is officially calling for a boycott of the chain. @sbworkersunited.org has over 12,000 unionized baristas, and they're calling on customers to stop visiting Starbucks until they get a fair union contract.

I’ve lost track of the number of times an immigrant has told me they had to sit on a prison bus in the back of an airport for six, 10, 20 hours with no food or water and being told to urinate in a corner or onto themselves.

Trump has destroyed US credibility to the point that no one can make a deal with America even if they think the terms sound good, because they can’t trust the US to honor it. The U.S.-Canada trade arrangement Trump now claims is unacceptable was the one he negotiated and signed in his first term.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its crew of 5,000 are clearly in bad shape. The White House lies that it isn’t. NYT uncovers that the Lincoln relied on a Bahrain supply base Iran destroyed early in the war. The White House hid that, and often lies about the war’s losses and costs.

Defense/Pentagon has never passed an audit Think of the level of scrutiny to get SNAP benefits - barely enough money to eat - compared to the massive waste -no oversight for military contractors…

The president is refusing to spend taxpayer money assisting Americans suffering from natural disasters solely because their states didn't vote for him. I know there are a thousand scandals at the moment, but this one deserves some more oxygen at every level.

I know everything feels terrible and doomy but I've been working on surveillance issues for most of my adult life and I have never seen so much energy, momentum, and concrete VICTORIES happening as what we are seeing right now on Flock cameras and facial recognition in venues. Keep. Going.

Trump is a buffoon but RFK got exactly what he wanted here. The data are pretty clear that if you spread the vaccine appointments out then parents don’t come back for them. They don’t want kids to get the vaccines.

It's just insane that the president tells absurd, easily disproven lies on a daily basis, and at this point we all just expect it.

Observing across the starry “plains” of space, Webb has captured a startling image of NGC 2392, nicknamed the Lion Nebula 🦁   Read more 👉 https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2026/08/Lion_Nebula_roars_to_life_for_Webb 🔭 #milkyway

A new JWST image just dropped and it is gorgeous

Today and every day we want to thank the hard-working people who are out there in extreme heat, smoke and more, working long hours to put food on our tables. #FarmWorkerAppreciationDay

DO IT Seriously. DO IT. Trump and Vought are actively and viciously trying to turn US science into what it was in 1950s USSR. DO IT

“.. The disclosure marks the first time a bank has formally tied money laundering concerns to U.S. President Donald Trump's family business.” @reuters.com $COF www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Saturn.

BREAKING: Trump just ordered warning signs and exhibits to be installed outside the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to alert the public that the museum does not, in his view, accurately reflect American history. For the record: It does.

an ideologically driven effort to destroy an independent institution and replace its serious and broad-minded approach to american history with MAGA slop

I think people who do not work in media have trouble grasping how genuinely terrifying it is watching organization after organization (even those ostensibly held by entities able to fund them!) continually get carved down into nothing. Lights going out all over

I took a hard look at the financial donors to ICE’s biggest supporters in Congress. These are people who want to significantly expand ICE’s power and have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation to do so. Here are the top 25 consumer brands bankrolling the biggest ICE supporters in Congress: