Vote of No Confidence in Our Current Federal Government You may want to add your name

open.substack.com/pub/robertre...

I signed. I hope you will too.

3/3 …served me a plate of N*zi excuses.

Bluesky has a reputation for being a liberal echo chamber. But it’s never shoveled N*zi propaganda my way. Either they get shown the door right off or Bluesky has a better brain.

2/ So I started reading the interview. Questions asked about the war, about the run up, about Crap the SS was doing. Straight up denials, deflections, lies. Kept waiting for some push back. Then it hit me: this poster is a N*zi. This is propaganda. And Substack, being a bear of little brain…

I use Bluesky more than I used twitter but that doesn’t say much. I’m still visiting fb daily if I remember and I’m probably in Substack the most. Lots of content. Not all doomscrolling but a lot. Today Substack dropped a link for me. Said it was must read. Interview with an SS general 1/

Tom White (@tjwtjwtjw) RIP Ozzy Osbourne. Crazy Train on a xylophone:

substack.com/@tjwtjwtjw/n...

Love this cover. RIP Ozzy

Future Fatigue: How Hype has Replaced Hope in the 21st Century | TechPolicy.Press To resist AI hype, we must not reassert the fiction that we could “return” to a functional democracy, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

There is now a strain of research, "hype studies," looking at what is going on here. @eryk.bsky.social again: www.techpolicy.press/future-fatig...

If you are feeling optimistic you can see this as a good start on the to-do list. All the stuff we need to fix.

The Election Didn’t Matter. A realization: We Didn’t Vote Our Way Into This. We Won’t Vote Our Way Out.

open.substack.com/pub/longmemo...

Sand Creek Massacre memorial to replace Civil War statue at the Colorado State Capitol Colorado lawmakers voted unanimously to approve a 24-foot statue to commemorate the Sand Creek Massacre. It will replace a Civil War statue torn down in 2020.

Sand Creek Massacre memorial to replace Civil War statue at the Colorado State Capitol. www.cpr.org/2025/04/15/s...

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die.

Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

Bonus 133: Due Process and the Rule of Law Too many Americans don't understand, at a basic level, *why* the Constitution requires due process when the government deprives anyone of their life, liberty, or property.

If you're looking for an explainer on why due process matters to share with friends and family members who might ... need convincing, I've removed the (partial) paywall from my March 19 post for "One First" on the topic:

www.stevevladeck.com/p/bonus-133-...

Enjoyed a slice of half price king cake. Early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.

The night sky was breathtaking. I hurt my neck because I couldn’t stop looking.

Rio Grande river near Lajitas Tx

Lajitas Tx

Lajitas graveyard, Lajitas Tx

Took a “quick” trip to the Big Bend area in Texas. It’s an 8 hour drive each way. I loved the destination and most of the drive. So I expect I’ll be back that way again. Got close enough to Mexico to play catch with it. Very quiet and peaceful down there.

History: “Eventually the incompetent fascists invariably lose power and then society recovers in a new and stronger way”

Me: “Oh, cool, so what has to happen for the spell to be broken??”

History: “mmmm…well, that part is less encouraging.”

Annalee Newitz 🍜 (@annaleen@wandering.shop) Attached: 1 image In 1973, a brilliant critic named Stuart Hall created a diagram that changed the way we study media, and could help you survive this moment. Just dropped: the second letter in my se...

wandering.shop/@annaleen/11...

Weird thought, but if Canadian provinces became US states, who expects they would send Republicans to the House and Senate? Canada would likely flip both houses to caucus with Dems. I know, never going to happen, love Canada just the way it is, but a boy can dream, right?

youtube.com/watch?v=eI14...

That small speck above and slightly left of the moon is Saturn

Photo of crescent moon and Venus

Stepped out back to grill a saw Venus and the moon.

Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random “news influencers,” some of which are literally using ChatGPT to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook — one you dismissed — that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media. And they’re pretty confident it’ll succeed because, unlike you, they know how broken the internet is now and are happy to take advantage of it. While I’m sure it feels very professional to continue playing stenographer in your little folding chair at the White House, they’re literally replacing you with podcasters as we speak. So this is it. Adapt or die. Or at the very least, die with some dignity

No one doing it like @garbageday.email right now. The venom. The concision.

elon’s *we have to maintain the purity of the national bloodline* stuff is literal nazism!

Great point here from Pritzker. Elon is not the President. He was elected by no one. Make Trump own it all.

Makrut lime tree seedling

I tried germinating makrut (or kaffir) lime seeds. 5 of 8 germinated. Transferred those to pots and one is now sprouting up out of the soil.

As an aside, when people say I should run for office, or open up a bookshop/cafe in my church, or do anything other than what I currently do with my life, they do not appreciate just how lazy I am, and how much I have carefully crafted my life for the maximum result with the least personal effort

Will Trump Be Called On His Inflation Lie? I’m not holding my breath

“…will voters who backed him because they believed his promises on prices turn on him when he fails to deliver, and actually drives prices up with tariffs?

I wish I had any confidence that they will. People dislike inflation, but they really, really hate admitting that they were fooled.”

Really good @reuters.com story by Maya Gebeily, Suleiman al-Khalidi, Ahmed Rasheed, and Timour Azhari on why Assad's armed forces just imploded when Tahrir al-Sham attacked. (Includes a minor quote from me, but that's not the good part.) www.reuters.com/world/middle...

I would have watched it but it would still be bad.

Now that attacking birthright citizenship has become a Day 1 project for the incoming Trump admin, I dug out this rather comprehensive piece I wrote in 2011. It includes the source of Sen. Lindsay Graham’s emergence as the pitch man on this issue. politicalresearch.org/2011/03/01/c...

KXT 91.7 Independent Music Radio for North Texas

kxt.org is that radio station. They stream, so you can hear them anywhere, not just in my car.