Beth

I have nothing profound to say but I love seeing the smart, funny, snarky comments others make.

[Brett Chapman @brettachapman]

This is some amazing modern artwork by a very talented Indigenous artist named John Isaiah Pepion of the Piikuni Blackfeet Nation in Montana. His style is known as ledger art and was originally popular amongst Native American artists from Plains tribes in the 1800s. Beautiful!

[Beth @alwaysjnov]

@babybeginner I don't know anything about wrestling. Do men wrestling against other men stick their fingers in each other's anuses while wrestling? Do women wrestling against each other do so?

[Beth @alwaysjnov]

@sappholives83 This brand of Islam is a threat against civilization. There are billions of Muslims who peacefully and successfully live in every other country that treat women with equal dignity and respect.

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

This is really dangerous: an FBI raid on voter registration group https://t.co/hqxTlwbq0E

[Brennan Center @BrennanCenter]

The Trump administration has cut or frozen billions of dollars in scientific research funding. The consequences could be felt for decades, undermining American health care, scientific leadership, and economic prosperity. Here’s what you need to know.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

The world just paid $2 trillion for a rocket company that lost $4.9 billion last year. And the rockets are not why it lost the money. They are the only part making any.

SpaceX went public Friday, the largest IPO in history. Up 19%, a $2 trillion valuation, Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Then you open the filing.

Three businesses sit inside it. Starlink, the satellites, brought in $11.4 billion, 61% of all revenue, and $4.4 billion in profit. It is the only piece that earns a dollar. The rockets that land themselves run a small loss reinvesting in Starship. And the AI arm, Grok plus the app once called Twitter, folded in this February, lost $6.4 billion in a single year on $12.7 billion of spending.

Read that again. The satellites pay for everything. The AI loses more than the satellites make. And the AI is the part the market fell in love with.

It gets bolder. The prospectus claims a total market of $28.5 trillion, the largest any company has ever put in a filing. Larger than the GDP of the United States. That is the number underwriting a $2 trillion price tag built on a division bleeding $6 billion a year.

Now the structure. About 4% of the company trades. That sliver sets the price for all of it. Musk is locked up for 366 days and holds roughly 80% of the votes. The public bought a company they cannot steer, priced on the one segment losing the most.

This is the whole year in one ticker. The profit is satellites. The story is AI. The market bought the story.

The rockets were never the risk. The risk is a $2 trillion price resting on the one bet that has yet to make a cent.

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

"It’s not simply this ocean-monitoring system that’s being dismantled; it’s U.S. science entirely."
https://t.co/gD1lnUxlqz

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[WDI.Afghanistan @WDIAfghanistan1]

This is what the Taliban call "respect and human rights for Afghan women based on their own version of Islam 😡
They have stripped women and girls of almost every basic rights and now this⬇️😡💔
Every time we watch this videos, our anger grows. The world cannot continue to remain silent. The international community bears responsibility for every tear shed by Afghan women and girls while choosing silence, normalization, and even inviting the Taliban to international forums.
Afghan women deserve education, freedom, dignity, and a future. The world must stop looking away.

[Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew]

President Trump recently pardoned Stephen Buyer, a former member of Congress convicted of insider trading. For those keeping track at home, this makes *22* politicians convicted of corruption charges granted clemency by President Trump.
https://t.co/theuAGyyc8

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Israel is blowing up entire villages in Lebanon, killing 200 to 300 civilians every 48-96 hours, calling it a ceasefire, with absolutely no consequences.

Israel is killing so many Lebanese so regularly that the world has lost interest. Just like has lost interest in Gaza.

[Secretary of State Tobias Read @ORSecretaryRead]

This would deny eligible people the right to vote. Full stop. The president doesn't have the power to pick and choose who gets to vote. It’s absolutely clear in the Constitution: states run elections. #oregon #orpol

[Jennifer Get In Good Trouble @TheJenniWren]

Trump’s FBI showed up, without warrants, at the homes of Black and Brown voter registration canvassers in Ohio. They raided the Ohio Organizing Coalition’s offices.

Over 100 agents. No charges. No crime. This is federal voter intimidation, happening right now, ahead of a major election cycle in a purple state.

Wake up and fight back people because it’s coming to your state too.

[Karen @Karen_W48]

Good morning 🩷

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

I told you they were coming for the Roadless Rule.

Yesterday, Republicans made their move — and they hid it inside a wildfire bill.

Here's what makes this so enraging:

59 million acres of America's wildest national forests are now on the table.

The 2001 Roadless Rule has protected nearly 60 million acres across 39 states for 25 years. No logging. No road construction. No drilling. No mining.

Built after 1.6 million Americans showed up — at 430 public hearings nationwide — to demand it.

What lives here: bald eagles, elk, black bears, Cerulean warblers, marbled murrelets. Species that need large, intact, unfragmented habitat to survive. For many of them, roadless forests aren't just home — they're the last places left.

What the amendment does: guts the rule. Opens the backcountry to logging and road construction under the cover of "fire prevention."

The administration is pursuing repeal through the executive branch at the same time. And unlike the original rule — they aren't holding a single public hearing.

1.6 million people showed up to protect these forests.
The administration isn't asking anyone this time.

What do you call a wildfire bill that opens forests instead of protecting them?

#DemsUnited

[Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta @malcolmkenyatta]

Our kids are dying. And they laugh.

During a debate on requiring safe storage of guns, a senior House Republican clapped and laughed at their inaction on gun safety.

This is not normal. This should never be normal.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Imagine an underwater Grand Canyon where corals have been growing since before the United States was founded. 🐠

Plunged in total darkness. Untouched. Protected.

Until one signature changed everything.

On February 6, 2026, that's exactly what happened.

The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument is bigger than Yellowstone.

Its submarine canyons drop into depths we're still mapping. There are sea creatures here science hasn't even named yet.

It’s underwater mountains — millions of years old, rise from the ocean floor, drawing sperm whales and endangered right whales from miles away.

The cold-water corals living here? Some have been growing for over a thousand years. A trawl net destroys them in seconds. They don't grow back in our lifetimes.

The monument was created in 2016 for one reason — to keep this ecosystem off limits from exactly this kind of destruction.

It worked. Until February.

One person. One signature. Zero public input. No congressional vote. No comment period. Just a proclamation — and a thousand-year-old ecosystem lost its protection overnight.

Proclamation 11009 — "Unleashing American Commercial Fishing in the Atlantic"— erased the ban overnight. Trawl gear, dredges, otter nets. Now permitted inside monument boundaries.

And here's the part that should make you angry — this administration tried this exact move in 2020. Conservation groups sued. They won. Biden restored protections.

Now we're back here.

How many more monuments have to lose their protections before Congress does something? 🐠

#DemsUnited

[Leela Gray @LeelaJGray]

You can't solve problems you refuse to measure.

Yet this month, 900 ocean monitoring instruments are being physically pulled out of the water. A $368 million system. A decade to build. Designed to run 15 more years.

Gone.

This network tracked hurricane intensity, coastal flooding, marine heatwaves, and sea level rise. The data was free, public and used in over 500 scientific publications. Congress tried to stop it... twice. They got overruled anyway.

For a coastal community like FL-13 that just lived through Helene, this isn't abstract. This is the difference between an evacuation order that comes in time and one that doesn't.

Florida deserves a representative who fights for the science that protects us, not one who looks the other way while it gets dismantled.

#LeelaGrayforCongress #LeelaJGray

https://t.co/8SBFNnsFcU

[Global Insight Journal @GlobalIJournal]

This was HEARTBREAKING

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, who volunteered in Gaza, exposed Israel:

"I held a lifeless child in my arms. There was no equipment to save him. This is not a war; it is a massacre of the innocent."

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Israel is explicitly warning Christian residents in southern Lebanon not to welcome Muslim residents among them, threatening to bomb Christian neighborhoods.

Israel is now searching for Muslims hiding in the attics of Christians. It’s not 1944. Read that again.

The goal isn't military. It's destabilizing social stability in Lebanon.