Will Vickers

#YangGang2020

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

“Kids these days don’t know any practical skills.”

Somebody from the generation that decided to remove woodshop, auto shop, home economics, and personal finance from public school curriculums in exchange for more practical tests.

[law dog, esq. @ggooooddddoogg]

reflecting pool situation very relatable to anyone whose dad fucked up the pool maintenance and then got really defensive about it

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

A good friend once informed me that my colleagues in DC were playing checkers, not chess.

My late wife Rhonda, who had met these politicians on several occasions, corrected him,

“they’re chewing on the checkers and arguing about which tastes better… red or black.”

So true.

[maya benowitz 🕰️ @cosmicfibretion]

Security clearances above POTUS are very real, especially so for government scientists with critical knowledge. Presidents are replaceable. If you're considered a single point of failure for a highly classified project, the USG will go to extraordinary lengths to keep you safe, far beyond what POTUS receives. E.g., if you need to get somewhere, you're not flying in a vehicle like Marine One. They'll put you in a classified stealth vehicle with a thick foam interior and foam seats.

[Maryam @hell_line0]

Remember when a kid got years in North Korean prison for stealing a poster and everyone was like “what a terrifying country!” and now Americans are facing years in prison for touching floating paint chips...??

[Overheard District @OverheardWDC]

3 girls walking out of an apartment building in Navy Yard:

“Well if he’s such a ‘good single guy’, tell me why he’s at Mission, huh?? Riddle me that.”

[urbanist slop hq @SlopHq]

america won't fund a single indoor public play space for kids, but for thirty years a hamburger chain quietly ran free climate-controlled playgrounds in every town, then tore them all out, and nobody held a hearing. the playplace was infrastructure and we won't admit we miss it

[Chili Dog @RobertJMolnar]

Spent 20+ years in high level politics, worked with hall of fame journalists, all gone now....

I have this to say.....why can't one of these kids, making 35k a year, live, in a press conference with the President just balls up and says:

"Do you realize how fucking nuts you are and everything you say is bullshit, you will be out of office soon and nobody is going to give a fuck and the entire world mocks you"

Drops mic

raises 1 million in a gofundme within days after getting fired

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

The irony of Republicans controlling all branches of government while

bankrupting the country, starting a war, sending money to fraudulent programs, violating the Constitution, giving corporations immunity...

but arguing that the biggest problem we have is “stolen elections.”

[NoelCaslerComedy @caslernoel]

Y’all acting like you’ve never seen an octogenarian drug addict blow 16M on Reflecting Pool reno cause he gave a no bid gov’t contract to a guy who looks like he sold quaaludes to The Riddler & then blame the algae bloom on a 350 ft boxcutter attack by underwater Antifa before?

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Step 1: Remove filters in Reflecting Pool because Obama put them in.
Step 2: Give your criminal neighbor who runs "Greenwater Services" a $20 million no-bid contract to paint the pool.
Step 3: Fill the pool with water from the Potomac River, the phosphates from which cause algae blooms.
Step 4: Freshly sealed pool and extreme heat result in a super scum event
Step 5: Direct National Park Service to dump hydrogen peroxide into the pool which causes the paint to peel.
Step 5: Deploy US National Guard to stop people from taking photos of the swamp as a perfect metaphor for the administration.
Step 6: Blame someone else.

[Laura Jedeed @LauraJedeed]

It is wild how, across the board, our overlords are like "what if we made the bread and circuses more expensive"

[liz 💥 @lizaboth]

“Why do we need pride night when the players aren’t gay” why do we need military appreciation night when the players aren’t in the military

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

The algae are willing to retreat from the Reflecting Pool in exchange for a $300 billion reconstruction fund paid for by America’s regional partners.

[Josh Chavis @JoshChavis65]

This quote from the Argentinian Ambassador to the United States is incredibly badass, and perfectly encapsulates the early vibes of this World Cup:

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

We're living in pre-French Revolution conditions, with the political elite of both parties screaming "let them eat cake" at their celebrity galas - only they are live broadcasting it to the screens that the whole serfdom is addicted to.

In human history, this never ends well - but maybe the soma is now just so powerful that everyone is already anesthetized to simply accept being unable to afford food, water, electricity, gas and rent, all while billionaires celebrate themselves.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519 with 500 soldiers and 16 horses. The Aztec Empire had millions of subjects, a professional army, and a capital city larger than any in Europe. He won anyway. The gunpowder advantage was real but limited. What actually determined the outcome was tens of thousands of indigenous peoples, especially the Tlaxcalans, who had fought Aztec rule for decades and joined the Spanish side instead.

The colonial enterprise that followed was enormous. At its peak, the Spanish Empire stretched across 13% of Earth's landmass. The mountain of Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain) in Potosí, modern Bolivia, produced more than 40,000 metric tons of silver over its first two centuries, at its peak in the late 1500s generating nearly half the world's silver supply. So much poured out that the Spanish peso became the world's first true global currency, circulating from Manila to Madrid to Massachusetts. The phrase "vale un Potosí" (worth a Potosí) entered Spanish as shorthand for something beyond price.

The mita system that powered those mines was adapted from an Incan labor tax, then scaled up across the empire. Indigenous communities were required to rotate workers through as a form of tribute. Mortality was severe. Death tolls at Potosí over three centuries are contested, but estimates of hundreds of thousands to several million are widely cited, and workers called the mine "la boca del infierno," the mouth of hell.

In 1542, fifty years into the colonial project, King Charles V passed the New Laws abolishing indigenous enslavement, a step no other colonial power of the era had taken. In Peru, the response was an armed rebellion that killed the Crown's own viceroy. The laws were revoked under pressure within three years. Then in 1550, Charles halted all conquest outright and convened the Valladolid Debate: the first time any colonial power formally asked whether what it was doing was just. Bartolomé de las Casas, a former colonial administrator who had witnessed the conquest firsthand and renounced his own land grant to become its most persistent critic, argued indigenous people held full human rights. His opponent held that conquest was lawful under classical arguments that some peoples were born to serve. No definitive verdict came. In practice, Las Casas shaped rhetoric. His opponents shaped reality.

Scholars now estimate around 54 million people lived across the Americas in 1491. By the mid-1600s, the number had fallen to fewer than 6 million. Smallpox, measles, and typhus spread decades ahead of soldiers, killing populations with no prior exposure and no immunity. The scale is still actively debated, but most scholars who study it reach for the same word: unprecedented.

When modern Spaniards push back on the word colonizer, they are often making a narrower claim: that the project belonged to the Castilian Crown and a specific class of conquistadors, not the millions of ordinary people who never left Europe. The history doesn't settle that argument. It just shows how much sits behind the word.

[Maryam @hell_line0]

if a doctor who graduated medical school says you need something, it should be illegal for someone sitting behind an insurance desk with absolutely zero medical training to deny you coverage...

[Lana the Bug 🪲💕 @lanabeesfw]

I think we should burn every AI data center to the ground

[Briana Rose Lee 🌹☮ @BrianaRoseLee]

If you can’t write a term paper without AI you don’t deserve a degree.
I said what I said.