Ryan

[Rebekah Jones @GeoRebekah]

Reminder: The 1918 flu started at a US military base.

[lou ! @sapph0kanikan]

we’ve been trying to tell people this for years but nobody listens lol

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Home of the Brave @OfTheBraveUSA]

Trump: " I terminated Barack Hussein Obama's Iran nuclear deal, a disaster. Obama gave them $1.7 billion in cash…in an attempt to buy their respect and loyalty, but it didn't work. They laughed at our president and went on with their mission to have a nuclear bomb."

[davey @jerseyh0mo]

We cannot share the earth with people as evil as this. It’s all of us or them.

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[Rebekah Jones @GeoRebekah]

They've turned the government into a financial racket for a convicted felon, fraud, rapist and pedophile.

I am disgusted by every one of the people involved in this scheme.

But I'm most disgusted in the Americans who voted for it and keep supporting it.

[Feral Heather @FeralHeather]

I think about this as Trump’s forestry service mass-applies glyphosate —one of the chemicals my dad repeatedly cited as a likely source for his ALS — to our forests. This ends up in our watersheds. https://t.co/YHyBtt08kL

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Donald Trump Jr is a paid strategic advisor for Kalshi, and a major investor and advisor for Polymarket.

The Trump administration is using taxpayer money to sue to protect their family’s investments.

This is what corruption looks like.

[KLeighB @kleighb07]

Something very nefarious is happening with these data centers. No one needs a 62-square-mile surveillance center to spy on us and who knows what else. Billionaires, tech companies, and investment firms want to steal people's homes and farms, destroy wildlife and insects, overload power grids, and contaminate our water while causing shortages and restrictions. The sheer volume of purified water they use is unimaginable, and most people have no idea. There is zero reason for any state to have 200 centers. They are forcing our electric and water bills to astronomical levels. Shut them down! We want to protect our land, water, environment, people, and wildlife. Where are the studies on the long-term effects of the noise, water contamination, and harm to the public and wildlife?

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This New York Times piece is worth your time. Here’s what is happening, as simply as I can put it.

Back in January, Trump sued the IRS, an agency he controls, demanding $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns a number of years ago.

IRS lawyers did their jobs. They wrote a memo laying out the defenses that could beat the suit, including the fact that Trump filed too late. His own lawyer was in court when the leaker pleaded guilty in October 2023, more than two years before Trump sued.

The Justice Department never showed up to court. Never argued back. Never used the defenses sitting on their desk.

The judge got suspicious and ordered both sides to explain whether they were actually opposing each other or just colluding. The day before that brief was due, Trump dropped the suit.

Same day, his Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization fund.” 

Trump gets a formal apology. The IRS agrees to drop any audits of him and his family, even though a 2024 Times report found a loss in an ongoing audit could cost him over $100 million.

The acting Attorney General, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, picks the five commissioners who decide who gets paid. Trump can fire any of them. Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are not ruled out.

This is the most corrupt thing I’ve ever seen from an American president.

Where in the hell are my Republican colleagues?

https://t.co/La0nlLuz1r

[Ballsack Sports @BallsackSports]

I despise the current state of our country. The corporatization/monopolization/obsession with ever increasing efficiency and profits has torn apart our communities and brain rotted our nation.

Everything’s become shittier. Everything. All the wealth and power is being siphoned up into fewer and fewer hands. The “good” winners of capitalism who drove a lot of innovation and growth for our country have cashed out—rational minds can be satiated. The current flag-bearers are the insatiable, corrupted super villains hell bent on extracting everything they can at the expense of humanity—and they’re only going to get worse.

Evil is winning big. Its leaders are running away with our country. We sell out to these horrible people and corporations to survive. And if you don’t sell out, someone else will.

Our world has become a bunch of bullshit. Our jobs are bullshit. We’re increasingly divided, isolated, undignified.

Birth rates are decreasing, home ownership is decreasing, literacy rates are regressing, wages are stagnating while the cost of living increases.

Social spaces are becoming ghost towns—arcades, malls, churches, movie theaters, parks, playgrounds. There’s no time. What are you doing to maximize shareholder value? Less time with your kids, more time for corporations. Grab your mobile order, watch your Netflix, and cope with the prospects of no future while our politicians insider trade.

Talk to any boomer C-exec. Life used to be a lot easier. Do work, get paid, own house, raise family.

Pizza Hut used to be booming. Parks. Socialization in society used to be a thing. There’s no time for any of that now. We’ve given all that power away. We gotta go get it back.

Shit should make you irate. How do you get angry at each other on here and not the pedophile criminals in charge?

Everything really does suck nowadays though.

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients.

The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show.

In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views.

“On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown.

“Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”

Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: https://t.co/hlcdfSmzPc

[Rebekah Jones @GeoRebekah]

"Hello macro-influencer climate scientist who has built her reputation on truth and transparency! Would you like to betray your morals, piss on your degrees, and sacrifice your reputation to promote data centers that are incredibly harmful to the environment and community, and only make more money for billionaires? We'll pay you $8k-$25k!"

Having integrity is the #1 reason why I'm broke half the time.

[Rod (Izzy) 🇺🇸🦅 @1zzyzyx1]

A Louisiana resident named Marshawn didn’t hold back today and didn’t care who he offended with what he said. He’s right; this is MAGA’s last gasp for air. The courage of these residents to speak out gives me hope for our future. #DemsUnited

[Zito @_Zeets]

They’re not even giving kids a chance to develop their brains or their social world. Hooking them as customers as early as possible.

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

It’s important that you understand what happened last night.

Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a candidate who, by all accounts, is on track in the polls to flip Texas blue.

In response, Trump’s FCC reportedly threatened CBS if the interview aired.

CBS caved and pulled the segment, citing “financial reasons.”

In modern American history, no president has been more hostile to free speech than Donald Trump.

But censorship always backfires.

Here’s the full segment Trump didn’t want you to see.

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

Only American citizens can vote, and the voter fraud rate is .0001%

More importantly, billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to buy and decide elections.

[Omar El-Ayat @oelayat]

The United States taxes a lot less, and spends a lot less, than almost every other rich country.

We also spend the least on social programs for families, and as a result have the highest child poverty rate of any wealthy country

[Bethany | Commercial Real Estate @bethanyjbabcock]

Unfortunately have had multiple family members with ICU stays and emergency surgeries.

The unsolicited advice I give every family going through something similar is to NEVER PAY THE 1st BILL.

This is because many billers send you and insurance a copy a few times just to see if one (or both pay).

Wait till all the bills come in. Anesthesia and labs are usually last. After you get the second or third notice, call your insurance company and ask them what you need to pay and then call the hospitals and negotiate the balance and provide dates the insurance already paid them.

Then you have to go back and do the same to insurance to prove you already met your out of pocket and now the rest is on them.

Absolutely no one is doing their job. They have no incentive to do so. You have to do it for them and be “that person”

It infuriates me that families facing tragedies have to manage all this on top of fighting for their lives and work and managing a family. It’s just cruel.