Nick Gerber

la pelota no se mancha. eat well & sleep well. union organizer.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Landlords in LA are evicting tenants to convert apartments into Airbnbs ahead of the 2028 Olympics.

They're using a legal loophole to evict people who should be able to stay in their homes, and upending countless lives in the process.

[Pablo Torre Finds Out @pablofindsout]

Wendy's and Jersey Mike's have gotten worse — and @stavvybaby knows why:

"It's getting s***tier because some d***head who's never f***ing spread mayo in his life decided, 'Oh no, actually, instead of a sandwich, this is now a commodity.'"

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Absolutely devastating article by Kishore Mahbubani, former President of the UN Security Council.

https://t.co/wyzFj7dD0x

[Naomi Klein @NaomiAKlein]

we've been trying to tell you...

[Nick Gerber @Nico_lasTejas]

@EvanVieth I see you're as dumb as Arch for thinking this is funny.

[Codify @CodifyBaseball]

MLB Teams Hitting .260 or higher:

1998-20
1999-25
2000-24
2001-21
2002-17
2003-21
2004-22
2005-20
2006-24
2007-22
2008-21
2009-18
2010-11
2011-8
2012-11
2013-9
2014-4
2015-7
2016-8
2017-8
2018-1
2019-8
2020-6
2021-3
2022-1
2023-2
2024-3
2025-1
2026-0 (Rays are hitting .2598)

[San Antonio Spurs @spurs]

Saturday night with @TexasFootball 🤘🏈

[... @tamaranopper]

June Jordan said activism “propels you forward, from one hard hour to the next.”

“Believing that you can do something to make things better, you do something, rather than nothing…You reach beyond yourself in your imagination, and in your wish for understanding, and for change.”

[Nate Bear @NateB_Panic]

Rainforest burnt to the ground in Kalimantan Borneo where fires are deliberately started on a massive scale to clear land for palm oil. Nearly a quarter of a million acres burnt in Borneo in July. Heat, war and extinction. The Capitalocene's greatest hits

[Joel D. Anderson 🆓 @byjoelanderson]

Just shockingly, appallingly racist and I’m almost beyond the capacity to be shocked by how low they’ll stoop to show how much that they hate black people.

[Francisco Rodríguez @frrodriguezc]

Nearly a day has now gone by since the announcement of the oil agreement between the United States and Venezuela, and we have seen remarkably few reactions from opposition political leaders. Despite a broadly critical reception from analysts, the press, and public opinion, many key opposition figures remain silent. There is as yet no statement from María Corina Machado, from her party Vente, from the Plataforma Unitaria or the parties that compose it, or from any of their main political leaders. The exceptions are statements from Henrique Capriles and his party Unión y Cambio, and from Juan Pablo Guanipa, a prominent pro-Machado political leader. Both are tepid and ambiguous. The statement put out today by Unión y Cambio, for example, devotes several paragraphs to criticizing the government's oil policy before getting to the agreement, and ends by asking the government to explain itself rather than asserting that the constitutional approval it requires was never given.

This is unusual, to say the least, for an opposition that over decades became accustomed to confronting just about every government decision.

The reason is not hard to identify, and it can be linked directly to the consequences of the US military operation in Venezuela and to Washington's direct involvement in the country's decision-making, which has turned Venezuela into a protectorate in all but name. Since it is the Americans who determine who holds power, no local politician wants to antagonize the United States or the Trump administration.

This dynamic resembles what one finds in other protectorate-like situations, such as Iraq under the US occupation, or earlier in the twentieth century in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. When foreign powers become significantly involved in deciding who wields power, politicians devote more and more of their time to lobbying the imperial power rather than to building genuine domestic constituencies. This is a phenomenon I described in my book The Collapse of Venezuela, in a chapter called "Politicians Without Borders", where I analyzed how both sides of Venezuela's political conflict devoted significant effort to courting favor with foreign powers, something that became more pronounced after the first Trump administration handed a sector of the opposition control over the country's offshore assets.

What experience tells us is that the long-run effects of these dynamics on domestic politics are highly damaging. As politicians stop trying to build coalitions with local constituents and specialize instead in lobbying external actors, parties become less and less effective as a conduit for popular aspirations. In fact, it was the lack of representativeness of local political elites, born of the experience of being a protectorate, that produced regimes like Batista's and ultimately fed the fires of the Cuban revolution. Trying to run a country from the capital of an imperial power has been tried before, and it has not ended well.

Development is not the arrival of capital; it is achieved by building institutions capable of managing conflict, arbitrating between competing claims and translating what a society wants into what its state does. Those institutions are built only through the practice of being used. A political class rewarded for persuading Washington and penalized for confronting it never acquires that capacity, because the one thing that cannot be supplied from outside is the ability to govern oneself.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The doctor who delivered Dolly Parton in a one-room Tennessee cabin in 1946 was paid with a sack of cornmeal. Her father farmed other people's land and could not read or write. Eighty years later, the reading program she built in his name has mailed more than 300 million books.

She wrote "I Will Always Love You" on the same afternoon she wrote "Jolene," as a goodbye to Porter Wagoner, and released it in 1974. Elvis wanted it. The night before the session, Colonel Tom Parker called and said Presley would only record it if they got half the publishing, meaning half of everything the song ever earned. She had been in Nashville ten years by then. She said no, and cried all night. Whitney Houston cut her version in 1992, held number one for fourteen weeks, and Forbes later put Parton's royalties from it near $10 million. She put some of that money into an office complex in Nashville and called the place the house that Whitney built.

Dollywood opened in Pigeon Forge in 1986 because she wanted paychecks in the county she came from. Around 4,000 people work there now. Three million visitors come every year. The University of Tennessee put its economic impact at $1.8 billion, and it is the largest employer in Sevier County. Since 2022 the company has paid tuition, fees, and books in full for every worker from their first day, seasonal hires included.

Wildfires tore through those mountains in November 2016, killing fourteen people and destroying more than 2,400 buildings. Her foundation was handing out money within 48 hours. Every family that lost a home got $1,000 a month for six months, regardless of income. The final check was $5,000. Total delivered: $8.9 million.

In April 2020 she sent $1 million to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research. When Moderna's vaccine results ran in the New England Journal of Medicine that November, her fund appeared in the footnotes.

Carl Dean, her husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025. The note she wrote to fans afterward ended with the same five words she wrote for Porter Wagoner back in 1974. She died in Nashville today. Her family asked that instead of flowers, people give to the Imagination Library, which still mails 3.4 million books a month to children who will never get to meet her.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

⭕️ Democratic Party chooses bench to oversee genocide in Gaza

House Democrats are stacking key foreign-policy posts in Congress with some of the most reliable defenders of Israel’s genocidal project in Palestine and the broader region.

On Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee named Jared Moskowitz its top Democrat on the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, succeeding longtime Israel hawk Brad Sherman.

Meanwhile, Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Wesley Bell newly joined the full committee.

Moskowitz backs continued unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel; Wasserman Schultz has called her support “unwavering” and pledged to keep using U.S. taxpayer funds to arm Israel’s military. Bell reached Congress after AIPAC’s super PAC spent a massive $8.5 million to defeat ceasefire advocate Cori Bush in 2024, the most expensive primary ever at the time.

[they/them might be giants ☭ @babadookspinoza]

Wild how everything got super expensive except an hour of labor.

[karl anthony townes van zandt @SamAsItEverWas]

He did. We as a society have just decided that Watergate-level scandals no longer require any sort of accountability when the people caught up in them are rich enough.

[lina | لينه @labushouk]

in Citizen, Claudia Rankine removes the body of a lynched black person to afford them dignity in death. in the absence of the black body, what you're confronted w/ is the unbearable whiteness of the scene/violation. the lynch mob is now the subject of scrutiny, not the deceased.

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

By November–December, this El Niño will be the strongest any living person has ever experienced. It is expected to completely surpass any previous year by a massive margin.

Combined with ongoing climate change, global temperatures could briefly reach nearly 2°C above preindustrial levels in early 2027. Earth has likely not experienced temperatures that warm in hundreds of thousands of years.

At these elevated temperatures, we are going to see unprecedented climate and extreme weather events over the next 12–18 months.

Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific have already reached Super El Niño status. A huge volume of warm water still remains in the pipeline, with a record-smashing amount of subsurface heat content in the tropical Pacific yet to surface. This subsurface heat is completely exceeding that of any prior year, including the powerful 1982–83, 1997–98, and 2015–16 El Niño's.

Everything about this El Niño is record-breaking. The rate of warming, the projected peak, the amount of subsurface heat content, etc. The next 12–18 months will be eventful, to say the least...

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

When India accidentally wiped out its vultures, half a million people died in five years.

The bird doing zoomies in this video runs the most extreme digestive system in the animal kingdom. Vulture stomach acid sits near pH 1, strong enough to destroy anthrax, rabies, and botulism in the carcasses they eat. A flock strips a cow to bone in about 45 minutes.

India had 50 million of them. Free sanitation at national scale, in a country where religious custom means most cattle die natural deaths and every dead cow becomes a carcass someone has to deal with.

Then the patent on diclofenac expired in 1994. Farmers started using the cheap painkiller on livestock. Trace amounts left in a carcass cause kidney failure in vultures. Within a decade, 50 million birds fell to a few thousand. The fastest collapse of any bird species since the passenger pigeon.

The carcasses didn't disappear. Feral dogs took the vultures' place and brought rabies with them. Rotting remains leached into waterways. In districts where vultures once thrived, human death rates rose more than 4 percent. Economists at Chicago and Warwick put the toll at 100,000 extra deaths a year and $69 billion in annual damages.

So yes, the goofy bird sprinting down the walkway is adorable. It's also a disease firewall that evolution spent millions of years building and one generic painkiller nearly erased in ten.

[Melech. @MelechThomas]

a 20/20/20 game intentionally in honor of Nipsey Hussle is probably one of the greatest feats in sports history. basically Babe Ruth pointing his bat to the stands, but for Crips.

[rustbeltjacobin 🌹 @rustbeltjacobin]

The political sorting of higher-education voters to the left and lower ed to the right is the most powerful and obvious political trend in america, and every faction has their own reason why they refuse to believe or admit or know about it