David Suess

Ex-rocket-scientist, writer, ballroom dancer.

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool had aging pipes, cracked concrete and filtration problems. Trump’s administration spent over $14 million but didn't fix the infrastructure. Now it’s covered in algae and they're dumping 12% hydrogen peroxide in it.

That’s the most perfect metaphor for modern Republican governance we've seen all year. Paint the surface. Ignore the problem. Try to fix the fuckup and blame somebody else.

[David Suess @DSuess]

@JoyceCarolOates I learned in the locker room that the biggest insult to a man is to call him something feminine, which, if it sticks, lowers his chances to find a mate and produce progeny. Calling a woman a man does not work that way and is a simpleton's idea of an insult.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

With @wethefifth talking about common knowledge:

“Common knowledge can be generated at a stroke when something is witnessed in a forum where you can witness other people witnessing it. So if something just happens in public and you can see everyone else seeing it, that gives you an instant intuition that there’s common knowledge.

Humor, I suggest in one of the chapters, is a common-knowledge generator, usually of some infirmity or indignity or weakness in someone or something. And the laughter, which is conspicuous—you can hear it when someone is laughing; it interrupts their speech and breathing—at the moment of laughter, suddenly becomes common knowledge. Everyone who gets the joke suddenly realizes that someone has been taken down, and they realize that everyone else realizes it.

And that’s why freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are suppressed in autocracies. The joke from the Soviet era is about the man handing out leaflets in Red Square. Of course, the KGB arrest him, take him down to headquarters, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They say, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ And he says, ‘What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.’

And the reason that it was subversive is that he was generating common knowledge. Just the mere fact of trying to make something public, even if you don’t have to stipulate what it is, can generate the coordination—everyone acting together to bring down a regime.”

[David Suess @DSuess]

@thebeatles Roll Over Beethoven and Revolution

[David Suess @DSuess]

@ATRightMovies The Ghost and Mr. Chicken

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Let's walk through what actually happened here, in order.

DOGE cut the USAID program specifically designed to prevent screwworm from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. DOGE cut USDA's animal disease control and prevention funding. That funding had supported more than 180 outbreak investigations in 22 countries and capacity-building in more than 160 laboratories. The screwworm monitoring and response program that watched the border for exactly this parasite - cut.

Then screwworm showed up in Texas cattle. Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a disaster for Zavala and Uvalde counties this week.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went on CNBC this morning and blamed the Biden administration, 17 months out of office.

Her specific words: "obviously not much had been done to push back."

The program that was supposed to push back existed. DOGE eliminated it in March 2025. Rollins has been Agriculture Secretary since February 13, 2025. The cuts happened on her watch.

Beef prices are already high. Ranchers in south Texas are now dealing with a flesh-eating parasite that was eradicated in this country in the 1960s - eradicated, specifically, using the sterile fly program her department defunded.

The flies existed. The program existed. The budget existed.

Until it didn't.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

The idea vaccines cause autism was invented by Andrew Wakefield in 1998 and was so thoroughly debunked he lost his license for gross malpractice

And here we are 27 years later RFK Jr dredging up the same nonsense

Such a tiresome waste of time

[David Suess @DSuess]

@JoyceCarolOates Feynman and Rutherford were both superbly educated. And both received Nobel Prizes.

[David Suess @DSuess]

@JoyceCarolOates Feynman would agree with Rutherford. He got a Nobel for diagrams sized just right for a paper napkin.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[David Suess @DSuess]

@champagnennuts @uscfan981 I'd cut the guy who posted this.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

X is like inviting the village idiot to every conversation and letting the algorithm hand them the microphone.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

Rep. Keating to Rubio: "I'm sure you're aware that Ukraine, country that at the time had third-largest nuclear arsenal, peacefully turned over their nuclear weapons in conjunction with Budapest Memorandum.

And in exchange for U.S. commitment to defend Ukraine if it ever came under threat. The U.S. gave its word to Ukraine that it would defend them.

And I find this amazing. In your opening remarks, as you took us all over the world and mentioned 15 different incidents where you have interceded — 15, the top 15 — not once did you mention Ukraine when you were prioritizing achievements that are there."

[David Suess @DSuess]

@KeithOlbermann And averaging 8.9 rebounds ... c'mon, that's 9.

[David Suess @DSuess]

@TheTweetOfGod You kinda shit on single parent families and childless families, though. (Don't smite me, please.) (I said please.)

[David Suess @DSuess]

@classic_film Hard to let them go. But I told myself, 1) no, you're not preserving valuable stuff for history's sake, get over it; 2) no, your family when they inherit will have nothing to play these on and will consign them to the bin; 3) any future archaeological value is 1 percent of nil.

[Paul Knepper @paulieknep]

Earl Monroe, Phil Jackson, Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, and Jerry Lucas

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

This week alone:

DOJ opens an investigation into the woman Trump raped.

The White House is caught steering a $620 million contract to Don Jr.’s firm.

The Pentagon hands out a $10 billion contract after Trump buys stock in the company.

Foreign governments are caught funneling hundreds of millions into a random JPMorgan account tied to Trump’s “Board of Peace” with no oversight.

It’s just Thursday.

The corruption isn’t hidden anymore. It’s happening out in the open.

[David Suess @DSuess]

@smartalec_nd @UNDmhockey "Hockey product" sounds a bit dehumanizing, though.