The Handler

pushing buttons

[ProPublica @propublica]

The Trump administration has granted Clean Air Act exemptions to about 200 polluting facilities across 39 states and Puerto Rico.

On Aug. 25, join ProPublica, @chicagotribune and @deepsouthtoday to discuss what this means for public health.

📌 RSVP: https://t.co/XxLPErBw3n

[Austin Kocher, PhD @ackocher]

A Justice Department opinion now lets soldiers arrest people on US soil outside the border zones the Pentagon controls, reading around the law that keeps the military out of civilian policing.

https://t.co/bzkeTqnTPv

[New Scientist @newscientist]

Official projections for how much the world will warm are already catastrophic, and now it appears they significantly underestimate future warming https://t.co/blaPetVYtl

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

I stand with Mark Carney.

The people of Canada need to know that the majority of Americans are anti-Trump and working toward regime change & return to friendly ties with our northern neighbor. 🇺🇸🇨🇦

[scary lawyerguy @scarylawyerguy]

Biden Admin *asking* FB to delete conspiracy theory posts about COVID was (according to the media!) a massive infringement on First Amendment freedoms but a wholesale firing of staff at Stars and Stripes for standing up for First Amendment freedoms will be a one day story. 🙄

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

For the last seven months straight, the U.S. government has refused to process immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries around the world; including visas for spouses of U.S. citizens.

Today, a federal judge ruled the policy flagrantly illegal.

[Skanda Amarnath @IrvingSwisher]

Obvious political tampering with the Census Bureau on display in this report. Lacks the most basic of standards. No transparency on methods or data

This is the road to Argentina-fying statistical agencies. Bad bad bad

Lutnick has a lot to answer for.

https://t.co/5wafDhldn6

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Idaho's attorney general has formally asked the federal government to strip Endangered Species Act protection from grizzly bears.

There are roughly 2,000 grizzlies left in the lower 48. Before bounty programs and poisoning campaigns, there were around 50,000.

On July 14, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stood in grizzly country north of Yellowstone with the governors of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming and proposed handing day-to-day grizzly management to the states. The bears stay listed as threatened, but the states get far more latitude over when a bear gets killed. AG Raúl Labrador's position is that it doesn't go far enough.

Greater Yellowstone had an estimated 300 to 400 bears when grizzlies were listed in 1975. It's around 1,055 now. But a bigger population number isn't a recovered species.

Those bears live in isolated islands of habitat. Yellowstone, the Northern Continental Divide, the Cabinet-Yaak, the Selkirks. Between them is highway, subdivision, and ranchland.

Isolated populations don't share genes. Over enough generations, that's how you lose a species. Connecting them is the part of grizzly recovery, and it's unfinished.

There's already a preview of what state management looks like. Montana passed a law letting livestock owners kill a grizzly that's threatening livestock, including on public land, miles from anyone's ranch.

Grizzlies took 50 years to get from 300 to 1,000 in one corner of Wyoming. They can be undone a lot faster than that.

[ProPublica @propublica]

Missouri Republicans tried to defeat a 2024 amendment to protect abortion rights by falsely claiming it would allow gender transition care. Voters approved it anyway.

Now the GOP is trying to repeal those rights again using the same issue.
https://t.co/vPEsyxOEIo

[Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD DSc(hon) @PeterHotez]

Actually no, the Roman Empire was undone by two types of malaria, vivax and falciparum that made the Romans chronically ill and growth stunted, followed by a third hit from the Antonine plague (most likely smallpox) 166-180 CE introduced by returning Roman armies from Seleucia (Mesopotamia). Two additional plagues didn’t help. Bottom line it was failure to control pandemic threats, which undid the Roman Empire, and now we’re making the identical mistake.

[Prof. Katharine Hayhoe @KHayhoe]

The headlines this summer make it easy to feel as if nothing can be done: record heat and wildfires continue, while fossil fuel companies rake in billions. But feeling powerless is exactly the trap, and this week there's new science on how to avoid it. Read on!

🧠 Good news: Watching a short "prebunking" video helps people across the political spectrum spot debilitating climate doom for what it is, and share it less.

🛢️ Not-so-good news: The same fossil fuel emissions driving this summer's heat and wildfires are making their producers richer than ever, with Oxfam projecting that six major oil companies will earn a combined $45 billion in Q2 of 2026, nearly double their Q1 earnings.

🗣️ What you can do: Use your voice: talk about the unfairness at the heart of this story, where a handful of companies earn billions while families pay through higher bills, lost work, and worse health.

When we change social norms, we activate societal tipping points. Your voice is more powerful than you think 💚 https://t.co/32mnJwLnzw

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

EXCLUSIVE: Committee Review Finds Trump Pardons Have Cost Crime Victims $1.7 Billion and Enriched Trump Allies

https://t.co/fzbTupGLfO

[scary lawyerguy @scarylawyerguy]

It's played for laughs, but it should infuriate every person who actually cares about what's happened in our nation since 2016 that the press has such glaring double standards b/c the consequences have been catastrophic for democracy.

[Hannibal999 @Hannibal9972485]

These FALSE arrests and stops starting to make sense. Flock is feeding the police ALERTS 🚨 based off of altered, degraded, low-resolution copies of license plate data ALERTS .

If POLICE want a more high-resolution original file with the metadata, the police department is forced to go back to Flock and request the "premium" file from Flock's corporate vault. Flock is deliberately degrading evidence to artificially manufacture a dependence and they’ve altered their TERMS & CONDITIONS 4X MID CONTRACT

Why would a company do this?

Because If the police only get degraded copies, the police investigation relies on Flock to "enhance" or provide the real data. But more importantly, if the police department cancels the contract (like Evanston or LAPD), the police lose access to their own "owned" data because Flock controls the method and medium of access. But Flock retains a perpetual license to use the high-resolution data.

Say a CITY wants to LEAVE and CANCEL FLOCK contract
the police lose access to the high-resolution originals. If THEY have OPEN cases they all die because the degraded copies they have on file are legally useless in court. This guarantees Flock's contracts are practically unbreakable.🚨⚠️

They are holding the original evidence hostage to ensure police departments can never truly leave their platform.
🚨🚨

If the police use a degraded Flock image in court, the defense will destroy it because it lacks authentication (no metadata). This guarantees that cases will be thrown out or wrongful convictions will occur because the original high-quality data is withheld by Flock as leverage.

One example ⚠️

LAPD's audit found that 161 plate matches were confirmed by officers, but the vehicles were not stolen. That means the "hot lists" feeding the alerts are inaccurate.

Why is this allowed to persist? Flock's new T&C expands protections against liability for willful misconduct or gross negligence ⚠️. Flock knows the alerts are false. They know cops are stopping people based on bad data. But they shifted the liability to the taxpayers (the city) and locked the city into mandatory arbitration in Georgia so the citizens can't sue Flock effectively.
——
Another case is where

Evanston, Illinois, voted to cancel their Flock contract and deactivate their 19 cameras in August 2025. They issued an official termination notice. During the termination period, the cameras disappeared from the poles. But then, Flock physically reinstalled the cameras back on Evanston streets without municipal authorization🚨👀

Evanston issued a cease-and-desist order on September 18. Flock claimed the reinstalled cameras were "inactive," but they left them up for months, only removing them when a news organization started asking questions.

Why would a company reinstall dead cameras on public poles after being fired?

Look at the new February 2026 contract terms. Flock wrote in a "perpetual" right for themselves to keep using customer data to "support and improve its services" even after a town terminates its relationship with Flock.

Flock wrote the perpetual license into the contract because they are building a shadow surveillance network using the physical infrastructure of cancelled jurisdictions.

A camera that is "inactive" to the local police department is not inactive to Flock's corporate servers🚨👀. The Flock cameras are solar-powered and cellular-enabled. They do not need the local police department's network to operate. They connect directly to Flock's cloud..

When Evanston cancelled their contract, Flock reinstalled the cameras because those cameras were still transmitting raw vehicle data to Flock's nationwide database for their own proprietary use. They bypassed the local city council entirely. Flock is using the physical utility poles of cities that explicitly fired them to illegally harvest location data on American citizens without a government contract or legal authorization

https://t.co/PV9Uwd85K4

@RepThomasMassie

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

We are unquestionably sending people to their deaths, all because the President and his appointees are making policy based on pure racism and bigotry.

[Jim Acosta @Acosta]

Aspiring WH press sec Scott Jennings on January 6th, 2021: “Well, I’ve been wrestling with this question all day. I mean, he’s clearly violated his oath of office to preserve protect and defend the constitution, to the best of my ability. And no one could with a straight face argue that he has preserving, protecting or defending it. And in fact, it’s the opposite of defending it. It’s under attack.
So, he is certainly not doing any of that to the best of his ability. So, if you want to strictly look at his oath. He’s violated it. You can make an argument he violated it his weekend when called the Georgia Secretary of State as well, which seems like a lifetime ago.
I don’t know the answer, I know that there are things being discussed. I don’t know what the right thing to do is tonight. He doesn’t seem like to me, based on the tweets that were remove that he learned any lesson after this got out of hand today. This is what you get when you steal an election? He didn’t learned anything when this happened today.
And so, if that’s going to be his attitude for the next two weeks I’m very fearful of what other insurrection type activities. And that’s exactly what it was, it was an insurrection. And it should be labeled as such, I can’t believe more people haven’t been arrested for storming the Capitol of the United States.
And I can’t frankly believe there are still Republicans tonight, siding with the people who storm the Capitol by voting for these objections. Siding with the people who are wearing animal pelts and horns, and scaling down the walls of the U.S. Senate? It’s absurd, and it’s a stain on this president, on our party, on our country and I cannot believe what I saw in my television today. And I had to explain to my children at home.” https://t.co/C8HM60jDQz

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

The Trump administration is reportedly selling wild horses for cheap to be shipped to slaughter.

The sale of wild horses through a Bureau of Land Management loophole has skyrocketed to 3,700 in 2025.

[Darius |🐻Vtuber @DariusBearVT]

What people don’t understand is most government regulations and agencies are reactive to HORRIBLE events that KILLED people in the past, it would get so bad the government would have to step in and create an agency to regulate it

These companies will put out food that kills you and they dgaf as long as you buy it, look up the 1850 swill milk scandal up in New York

Furiously cutting agencies made reactive to past events will only guarantee they will happen in the future, and on a larger scale

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

If you think the fines being sought against Meta are high, at 200 B, remember that Meta has been harming children at an industrial scale for 2 decades. They knew it, their own research showed it.

We organized 35 of their own studies here:
https://t.co/JWDqxq78jB

[Ben See @ClimateBen]

BREAKING: near research implies essentially unsurvivable global warming of 3.25°C and rising must be anticipated by the 2040s-2080s