Helen

Blue Voter
MBA+MS Psych
Retired consultant/retired rancher
Spare me the post mortem

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The skunk waddling across your yard at night is a pacifist who really just wants to eat your pests.

Skunks are grub specialists. They go for the larvae of Japanese beetles and June beetles, the same grubs that kill grass from the roots up, and they'll dig up a yellowjacket nest and eat the whole thing too. Those little cone-shaped holes in your lawn aren't vandalism. They're a skunk telling you that you had a grub problem, and that it's handling it.

And the spray? It's a last resort, and they really don't want to use it. A skunk is slow, near-sighted, and mild-mannered, and before it ever sprays it will warn you over and over: stomping its front feet, hissing, arching its back, lifting its tail, even making little fake charges. It's an animal begging you to just back away.

So if you see one trundling through your yard at dusk, you don't have a problem, you have a slow, gentle, near-blind exterminator doing a lap of your yard. Give it space and let it work.

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

"'The ocean drives our entire economy and life systems,' said Stanley R. Riggs, a retired coastal geologist....'We’re pulling the plug on some of the most important science being done.'" ICYMI @crampell on another administration attack on science:
https://t.co/gD1lnUxlqz

[CCJ @NastyOldWomynII]

“The Lovings' legacy is a powerful one: today, nearly one in five newlyweds in the United States has a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, a fivefold increase from when the Lovings won their court case 59 years ago.”

[Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney]

The bottom line: The federal judges have ruled more than 13,300 times — the overwhelming majority of the 15,100 rulings — that ICE had detained people in violation of the law or their due process rights.

https://t.co/3LIALFX6sP

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

I sometimes wonder what Ukrainians really think of Western Europe. They die and suffer terrible injuries - not to mention all the emotional trauma - while the rest of Europe double-deals with Russia. What a shameful chapter in Western European history...
https://t.co/5dQwxb03pL

[CCJ @NastyOldWomynII]

As you read scary references to mysterious “biolabs” by Tulsi & others, remember that these public health labs identify screwworm in cattle, Lyme disease in area ticks, E. Coli in local hamburger, bird flu in chicken flocks, and the like. Their purpose is to PROTECT our health.

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

"It's a race against time. ... People like @realDonaldTrump, narcissistic sociopaths like the ones we've seen throughout history—the Hitlers and the Stalins—they blow themselves up in the end. And the question is the blast radius, and the longer we let this go on the bigger the blast radius is."

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

A federal judge restored 11 clean energy grants in states that President Trump lost after attorneys acknowledged the election influenced why the funding was nixed.

Lawyers representing Energy Secretary Chris Wright were named the top defendants. https://t.co/htHh8JuHev

[Jemele Hill @jemelehill]

I don’t want to jump to conclusions but I’m starting to think he doesn’t like Black people.

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

Federal law enforcement officials raided the offices of an Ohio organizing group that ran one of the state’s biggest 2024 voter registration efforts, seizing computers and other materials from the group’s Cleveland office. https://t.co/iJnfOFCCdz

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

Reuters: US JUDGE ORDERS TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO REINSTALL SIGNS, EXHIBITS IT REMOVED FROM NATIONAL PARKS DISCUSSING TOPICS LIKE SLAVERY, CLIMATE CHANGE

[Adrian McKinty @adrianmckinty]

I think the series really finds its legs with book 2, I Hear The Sirens In The Street

book 8 which came out last summer, Hang On St Christopher, begins with a summer riot in Belfast...

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

Evil is the right word for this; taking people who are safe in the United States, who have proven to a judge they would be persecuted in their home country, and dumping them in a random country in the middle of a civil war.

Is it legal? Sadly, probably yes. Is it evil? Also yes.

[Anna Kramer @anna_c_kramer]

SCOOP: The Defense Department is again quietly delaying forever chemical cleanup across nearly 200 US sites.

Delays average 10 years and stretch out to 20.

The Pentagon deleted the old timeline and replaced it with a new one, w/out public announcement. https://t.co/1eFSrs5z95

[Rich Raho @RichRaho]

Pope Leo to those who exploit migrants: “For every life lost, every family deceived, every body subjugated, every woman threatened, every worker exploited, you will have to appear before divine justice. Break those chains and free those you hold under your dominion.”

[Richard Morris @ahistoryinart]

Shocked to hear David Hockney has died. His huge achievement was to make serious painting look effortless. He carried forward one of the most sustained investigations into vision, space and representation by any post-war artist. British art has lost a giant.

[CCJ @NastyOldWomynII]

But the dirtbag left said we should welcome her into the Democratic Party…

[Democracy Docket @DemocracyDocket]

Why is Trump so obsessed with the California primary?

The urgency of Trump’s most recent lies about election fraud in the state reflects a grim reality for the aging, twice-impeached president: California will likely spell the end of Republican control over the U.S. House of Representatives. https://t.co/JAVg2dPb0n

[CCJ @NastyOldWomynII]

@mtaibbi It was not. Postal voting dates back to the Civil War. Here’s a short history of voting by mail by the @smithsonian: https://t.co/CXzEkkGczo

[. @GregTSargent]

The situation is quite literally that Trump won't accept any outcome in Iran that doesn't get the people on his teevee to tell him that he's stronger than Obama and got a better deal from Iran than he did. The US and the world are being held hostage to precisely this pathology.