Chris McKulka

Technology leader. Fan of humanity, love, compassion, curiosity & empathy. Spiritual seeker. RT/Like != Agreement. Speak only for myself.

[Chris McKulka @cmckulka]

@Mikedabarbarian @archeohistories I hear you and believe you. And it still looks crazy! 😀

[Jen @Sea_Glass1115]

Trump’s team is being deceptive.

The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) is a basic 10-minute screening tool for early dementia and mild cognitive impairment — not an IQ test or proof of ‘extreme intelligence.

He’s having to repeat it because his medical team is gauging his decline. 👇🏻

[Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid]

This SCOTUS rulings so far
•Universities using race criteria to counter historical racism in admissions is unconstitutional, BUT
•ICE fascists using race criteria to target people of color is constitutional, BUT
•State legislatures using race criteria to counter historical voter suppression is unconstitutional, BUT
•Trump using race criteria to enact travel bans is constitutional
In short—race criteria that centers white people is constitutional, but race criteria otherwise is unconstitutional😐

[Tommy Vietor @TVietor08]

What a truly evil way to treat people who risked their lives for the United States

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

For years, Canada sent 70 cents of every defence dollar straight to the United States. Mark Carney just told Parliament that stops now. The room gave him a standing ovation.

It is a striking thing to get a standing ovation for announcing that your country will stop subsidising someone else’s arms industry. But that is where Canada is in 2025.

Carney’s case is blunt: the United States is “beginning to monetize its hegemony, charging for access to its markets and reducing its relative contributions to collective security.” 

And MAGA is celebrating. Winning. Always winning. USA, USA. Somewhere a man in a red hat is pumping his fist.

Let me explain what is actually happening, because clearly no one has bothered.

In ten months, the United States has torched eighty years of alliance architecture that its own soldiers, diplomats and taxpayers built from the rubble of the Second World War. Eighty years. Gone. Detonated, with a smile, by people who genuinely believe this is genius.

Canada is not drifting away. Canada is leaving. Europe is not hedging. Europe is building a defence industry specifically designed to cut Washington out. Allies are not quietly grumbling over dinner. They are signing contracts with other people.
And the MAGA faithful are cheering every single step of it, because someone told them this is what dominance looks like.

It is not dominance. It is a man burning down his own house and whooping at the flames. The saddest part is not that America is losing its allies. The saddest part is that half the country thinks that is the point.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

[Rogue POTUS Staff @RoguePOTUSStaff]

Of all the many destructive changes this regime has done to the federal government, gutting the US Forest Service will likely be the must under estimated disaster our nation will suffer for decades to come.

https://t.co/Mrx0kgonXC

[Cato Institute @CatoInstitute]

Trump called April 2, 2025, “Liberation Day” for US manufacturing. One year later: factories didn’t come back, jobs fell, and tariffs mostly raised costs for Americans. Production shifted to places like Vietnam—not the US, reports Cato’s @clark_packard.
https://t.co/Qh1mwm3Jjs

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Wildfire season is weeks away.

The West is in record drought.

And the Trump administration just announced it is shutting down 57 of the 77 Forest Service research stations that tell us how bad it is going to get and what to do about it.

We already know how this ends.

When Trump moved the Bureau of Land Management out of Washington in his first term, 87 percent of the staff quit rather than relocate. The same thing is happening here. Scientists are not going to uproot their families and abandon university partnerships. They are going to leave.

And when they leave, decades of data, research, and institutional knowledge walk out the door with them.

The Forest Service oversees 193 million acres. It lost nearly 6,000 employees to DOGE cuts in just the first half of last year. Now it is gutting the research operation that tells land managers what is actually happening to those forests in real time.

California alone is losing six research facilities, right before fire season.

There is no version of this that makes the forests safer, the science stronger, or the taxpayer better off.

https://t.co/DPhckjiBYo

[Hemant Mehta @hemantmehta]

"One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.

And they did it with a press release on a Tuesday."

https://t.co/9Hi2v9md4X

[Ben Rhodes @brhodes]

In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with the IRGC demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents - including hundreds of children - dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.

[Oren Cass @oren_cass]

I mostly avoid commenting on what President Trump says from day to day, while pulling no punches in my assessments, whether positive or negative, of his policy. His Iran ultimatums feel different. Making such threats is a policy. If he were to follow through on them, the consequences would be immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic on a world-historical scale.

So while some will inevitably insist he should be “taken seriously rather than literally,” or that he is executing a sophisticated “madman” strategy in a complex game of 5-D chess, or that he needs everyone’s steadfast support to maximize his leverage, now rather than later seems the time to say that the actions that he is proposing would be a disaster for our country, both strategically and morally, which makes the remarks themselves a terrible mistake.

Simply put, what’s the point of all this? If these are empty threats that we all know he will not carry out, then they are ineffective threats (the Iranians are on X too!), merely making the president and our nation look foolish. If they are not empty threats, then the president is asserting the American position that such actions are acceptable in this situation and ones we are willing to take. We are not living in some quantum thought experiment where he simultaneously is and is not serious. We cannot expect the Iranians, but only the Iranians, will believe him.

Whether the threats are empty or not, we should be willing to say: This is wrong. We should not establish a pattern of threatening escalation from a blockaded strait to elimination of a civilization. We should not launch strikes intended to devastate the lives of millions of people and take our nation to total war without indisputable justification, or before the American people have deliberated upon and assented to the path with full understanding of what total war might mean for them. Those principles are vital to our Republic, independent of whether the strategy could “work.”

But it’s also worth emphasizing that the strategy is a dead end. This war is actively weakening American power, increasing the danger to American citizens, and frustrating the president’s important efforts at addressing our many domestic challenges. It has closed a strait that was previously open, strengthened the incentive for other nations to pursue nuclear weapons, and in this most recent rhetoric made more plausible their use. Our choices for continuing the war appear to be catastrophic escalation of the air war or extensive deployment of ground troops, neither of which were planned or had support at the outset.

Stepping back from these threats and admitting such actions do not offer a path to resolving the conflict may be unpalatable, but it is by far the least unpalatable option available. Let us all hope cooler heads prevail.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Trump's Iran War has been a disaster in the U.S., as gas prices eclipse $4.

But in the developing world, the shock of spiralling energy prices has been cataclysmic.

1/ A short thread the scope of the damage Trump has caused. There are crises everywhere and you need to know.

[Neera Tanden🌻 @neeratanden]

I think there's too little discussion in the United States that Trump may conduct war crimes in the war against Iran. Targeting civilian infrastructure to torture the civilian population into unrest is a war crime. Whatever the objective of the war, we will all live with the stain of that for decades to come.

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Trump is seeking to pay for his new $1.5 trillion military budget by cutting the following:

$510 million - Grants for farmers and agricultural research
$82 million - Loans for rural small businesses (Fully eliminated)
$61 million - Support for farmers and food markets (Fully eliminated)
$240 million - School meals and food education for children abroad (Fully eliminated)
$659 million - Community building grants
$47 million - Support for minority-owned businesses (Fully eliminated)
$449 million - Economic development grants for communities
$1.6 billion - Weather forecasting, fisheries, and coastal protection (NOAA)
$993 million - Scientific research and technology standards
$150 million - Support for American exports and trade
$2.2 billion - Broadband and internet access programs
$8.5 billion - Funding for public schools
$1.5 billion - Vocational training and adult education (Fully eliminated)
$2.7 billion - College access and higher education support
$15.2 billion - Roads, bridges, and infrastructure projects
$1.1 billion - Home energy efficiency and clean energy programs (Fully eliminated)
$1.1 billion - Scientific research funding
$386 million - Environmental cleanup programs
$150 million - Cutting-edge clean energy research
$4 billion - Help paying home heating and cooling bills for low-income families (Fully eliminated)
$768 million - Refugee resettlement assistance
$819 million - Care and shelter for migrant children
$775 million - Local anti-poverty programs (Fully eliminated)
$5 billion - Public health programs, mental health services, and disease prevention
$5 billion - Medical research (NIH)
$129 million - Healthcare quality and safety research
$356 million - Emergency preparedness and disaster response
$1.3 billion - FEMA community disaster preparedness grants
$707 million - Cybersecurity protection for critical infrastructure
$52 million - Airport and transportation security
$40 million - Protection against chemical and biological weapons threats
$53 million - Funding for homeland security operations
$3.3 billion - Community development block grants for local neighborhoods (Fully eliminated)
$1.3 billion - Affordable housing construction grants (Fully eliminated)
$393 million - Programs to reduce homelessness
$529 million - Housing assistance for people living with HIV/AIDS (Fully eliminated)
$489 million - Housing and services for Native American communities
$50 million - Grants to help communities build more housing (Fully eliminated)
$60 million - Enforcement of fair housing and anti-discrimination laws
$58 million - Homebuyer and renter counseling services (Fully eliminated)
$45 million - Renewable energy development programs (Fully eliminated)
$1.7 billion - Grants for local law enforcement and public safety
$20 million - Civil rights mediation and legal access programs (Fully eliminated)
$1.6 billion - Job training for at-risk youth (Fully eliminated)
$395 million - Jobs program for low-income seniors (Fully eliminated)
$234 million - Worker safety and labor protection programs
$101 million - Enforcement of equal pay and workplace anti-discrimination laws
$46 million - Programs to combat child labor and forced labor abroad
$2 billion - International humanitarian aid
$1.2 billion - Food aid for hungry families abroad (Fully eliminated)
$4.3 billion - Global health and disease prevention programs
$2.7 billion - Funding for the United Nations and international partnerships
$642 million - International economic and treasury programs
$315 million - Democracy and anti-corruption programs abroad
$486 million - Grants for public transit projects
$4.2 billion - Electric vehicle charging infrastructure
$372 million - Airline service for rural and small communities
$145 million - Grants for sustainable and equitable infrastructure
$204 million - Loans and investment for underserved communities
$1.4 billion - IRS taxpayer services and enforcement
$100 million - Air pollution monitoring and reduction programs (Fully eliminated)
$1 billion - EPA grants to states for environmental protection
$2.5 billion - Clean drinking water and wastewater infrastructure funds
$90 million - Grants to reduce diesel pollution (Fully eliminated)
$3.4 billion - NASA space and earth science research
$297 million - NASA technology innovation programs
$1.1 billion - International Space Station operations
$143 million - STEM education programs
$309 million - Small business development and entrepreneurship programs
$170 million - Small Business Administration operations
$158 million - Loans for small businesses

[Robert E Kelly @Robert_E_Kelly]

The 'best' part about this is that this outcome is worse than the JCPOA deal we had a decade ago

A $200 billion war to achieve less than we had before. Congratulations, America, for electing a guy who repeated every US strategic mistake since Vietnam

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

Still can’t get over the House GOP rejecting a 100-0 bill from the Senate to fund TSA, Coast Guard, and FEMA and… just going on vacation.

Complete abdication of duty.

[Mica Rosenberg @micarosenberg]

NEW: For the first time, ProPublica has been able to quantify how many U.S. citizen children have been directly affected by Trump’s immigration crackdown: more than 11,000 kids had a parent detained — and that’s an undercount. 1/ 🧵
https://t.co/tE6pdG0h2l

[David J. Bier @David_J_Bier]

In a free society, you should be allowed to go get a snack without worrying about being detained by masked men from the government. https://t.co/4R8MHyeef2

[John Harwood @JohnJHarwood]

the most dire pre-election warnings about how Trump would damage America and the world, dismissed as hysterical at the time, were in fact understated

[Brian Stelter @brianstelter]

Rep. @SethMoulton comes on CNN and starts by saying: "Is anyone going to just stop for a second and be honest? This is insane. What the hell are we doing? We've got a lot of problems in America today, and invading / occupying / running Venezuela does not solve any of them."