The Mad DemSoc

#StarTrek #WalterKoenig

If there was one Star Trek series that was a challenge to narrow down, it's this one. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyXt... #StarTrek #StarTrekDS9 #WokeTrek @seanferrick.bsky.social

If the AI bubble bursts, "we need a people-first bailout," says writer @astra.bsky.social.

Of course it looks awesome. We can't get nice things anymore

California state workers say they’re tired of governors balancing the budget “on their backs” and are beginning a statewide state strike today. It's the first-ever statewide walkout in 44 years. cal.news/4i3slE4 📸 Fred Greaves

The amount of actual communists in the "Democratic Socialists" of America is kinda annoying. I want a demsoc space, not a tankie space

The largest union in California state government held a one-day strike, drawing thousands of workers off the job. It's pressing Gov. Gavin Newsom for raises. cal.news/3Wjuhj5 📸 Fred Greaves

A judge found the risk of intimidating citizens outweighed the Trump administration’s interest in investigating noncitizen voting

For more than 40 years, the U.S. Arctic Research Commission has advised Congress and the president on what to study in the far north. Trump appointed a venture capitalist and MAGA influencer with no formal science background — and ties to Russia — as its chair.

NEW: The Trump administration committed the U.S. to taking a large stake in a Venezuelan company, some of whose owners and investors are shielded from public view. The exact details of the agreement over oil fields had remained unclear — until now.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has signed legislation allowing rideshare drivers to bargain collectively. Rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft will be charged 4-cents-per-ride to cover the implementation of the union. The law impacts more than 100,000 rideshare drivers across the state.

The U.S. army — and U.S. taxpayers — poured over half a billion dollars into a General Dynamic artillery factory that was a complete failure and never produced a single usable shell. ProPublica reports that the bill for this failure was $533 million, but General Dynamics never paid back a penny.

HUGE: Seattle will provide free meals to all public school students, starting this fall. This week the city council unanimously approved $3.6 million to offer universal school meals. /1

Target's profits just doubled, because the company got a massive $1 billion tariff refund. Ordinary people have yet to see tariff refunds from the government or these corporations. www.ft.com/content/c555...

Breaking: businesses don’t want you to have a shorter work week.

Seattle just became the first city to pass a ban on surveillance pricing by grocery stores. The City Council passed a proposal stopping large grocery stores and online grocery retailers from using race, gender, browsing history, employment, or AI software to change prices from consumer to consumer.

Nearly 190,000 home health workers in New York could unionize in one of the biggest U.S. labor drives in decades. SEIU Local 1199 says they've gotten almost 70,000 signatures, enough to trigger a union vote, and now the union has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election.

The average age of a car on the road in America has now passed 13 years. This is a new record high, and comes after the cost of both new and used cars has soared. The average new car in the U.S. costs just over $50,000, while the average price for a used vehicle is over $27,000.

NEW POLL with @refugeesinternational.org and @refugeeadvocacylab.bsky.social: Voters across party lines strongly support the U.S. having a refugee program, including 78% of Democrats, 66% of Independents, and 55% of Republicans. Support rises to 90% among voters who know a refugee.

Trump: "Russia is not helping Iran" Iran:

BREAKING: Zohran just announced that NYC’s free child care program for 2-year-olds will expand to all of Staten Island and all of the Bronx. The expansion means an additional 10,000 2-K seats by fall 2027. More neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens will receive 2-K seats as well.

Huge follow-up reporting to my scoop: The Guardian confirmed America Next—the conservative nonprofit founded by Bobby Jindal that was offering students $ to disrupt El-Sayed events—paid a firm registered to Tommy Teepell’s dad Timmy $250k for “canvassing and influencer marketing” against El-Sayed.

BREAKING: Anthropic reports an $80 billion net loss in the first half of 2026.

This is the SECOND time Trump has used an antisemitic slur. He also keeps referring to Muslim Senate Candidate El-Sayed as “Mohamed” knowing it’s not his name... Is there no kind of bigotry that’s beneath this racist wanna-be tyrant?

The Clean Elections Commission says 17 voters deny giving qualifying contributions, some citing forged signatures story via @jimsmall.bsky.social

The new Stargate series will be shit. They scrapped the original idea because it would "only appeal to existing fans" meaning Stargate will go down the deadly path of chasing that mythical "broader audience" that killed Star Trek and Star Wars. Great...

Fuck this piece of shit

Meta suspended the No Kings Instagram account during the middle of their national early voting mobilization. Meta silenced our voices just weeks before an election. The public deserves to know how this blatant shutdown of free speech happened.

In terms of people who would otherwise have lived dying there’s a case for it being the worst thing any leader has done this century, easily one of the worst, but people usually on about Amerikkka are often silent because it is something good the US was doing that stopped in the worst possible way

USAID was a free space for tankie and tankie adjacent dingbats to score edgy contrarian points by wildly exaggerating how imperialist it was, confident in the belief that it wouldn’t just disappear, except now it has and everyone is uncomfortably looking elsewhere

Ryan Grim minimizes the role of the Koch Brothers, corporate funding, and astroturfing in the Tea Party. "And yes, was there some funding from the Kochs involved in it? Of course. But there's also real anger, and they missed it, because of their refusal to engage with it."

Over the past year, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to demand their unredacted voter rolls. Again and again, the cases have been thrown out: propub.li/4zG7n3T

“Congress was clear: the U.S. should not import oil from Russia until it ends its aggression against Ukraine and ceases threats against our NATO Allies," the group of senators wrote.

ICE lets agents decide when body cameras record. A government watchdog wants that changed.

“To whoever sent that package, you failed,” Fontes said, urging voters to participate in the election to respond to the intimidation tactic. “The most practical response to intimidation is participation.” story via @jerodmacevoy.com

“Arizona Republicans control the state legislature by only three seats in the Senate and four in the House, and they’ve used that slim margin to block common-sense, popular gun safety bills year after year." Story by @glorihuh.bsky.social

Valentin Espinoza voted for Trump two years ago but he said he regrets that now, after witnessing the violent tactics federal immigration agents have employed across the country and feeling the crunch of the worsening economy. By @jerodmacevoy.com, @glorihuh.bsky.social and Kiera Riley

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a $30 million investment in an NYU quantum lab, and in exchange for the investment from the city the university will give 15% of all profits back to the city. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/14/n...

Found this on Substack

www.cbsnews.com/news/oregon-... Oregon might actually implement a single payer healthcare system in the next few years. Very little media coverage, including from progressives. Keep an eye on this

Oh my god

youtu.be/NvrsEUTb26M?... My politics are diametrically opposed to Computing Forevers politics but I pretty much agree with his Star Trek TV series ranking. I'm glad the Kurtzman Trek era is dead.

We take a look at key Senate races in Georgia, Texas, Michigan and Maine with The Lever’s David Sirota.