Looks like Rev. David Black, the Presbyterian pastor who was shot in the head and body with pepper balls by DHS agents as he was praying outside an ICE facility in IL, is back on the Hill today.
He's testifying at a Homeland Security committee hearing on "ICE and CBP attacks on U.S. citizens."
CDC won’t publish report showing covid shots cut likelihood of hospital visits
The report, which had cleared the agency’s scientific-review process, had been delayed. It now won’t be published at all, people familiar with the decision told The Post. #Ustrumpout
For many more fun insights - including shifts in gender, race and age composition, and much more - check out the full paper in JDQ:DM!
Open Access!
journalqd.org/article/view...
As Twitter became X, use frequency has become strongly correlated with dislike of Democrats.
The more you hate Democrats, the more you post and visit X.
Posting is correlated with affective polarization:
😡 The most partisan users — those who love their party and despise the other — are more likely to post about politics
🥊 The result? A loud angry minority dominates online politics, which itself can drive polarization (see doi.org/10.1073/pnas...)
Twitter/X is a story on its own:
🔴 While users have become more Republican
💥 POSTING has completely transformed: it has moved nearly ❗70 percentage points❗ from Democrat-dominated to Republican-leaning.
Politically, the landscape is shifting too:
🔴 Nearly all platforms have become more Republican
🔵 But they remain Democratic-leaning overall
🏃♂️ Democrats are fleeing to smaller platforms (Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon)
Legacy platforms are losing ground:
⬇️ Facebook
⬇️ YouTube
⬇️ Twitter/X
But
⬆️ TikTok and Reddit
"Other" platforms - including Bluesky - has not seen significant growth as a whole. (But as we'll see, huge compositional changes)
Overall social media use is also declining.
Between 2020 and 2024, more Americans — especially the youngest (18–24) and oldest (65+) — report using no social media at all.
A small group of heavy users remains, but the middle is thinning out.
📉 Visiting and posting on X and Facebook has collapsed: nearly 50% drop!
On X, it is mostly Democrats who have become inactive.
Many still occasionally log on, but rarely and quietly.
In a nutshell, the ANES data shows:
📉 Social media use is shrinking; engagement collapsing
💥 Twitter/X posting has moved ~70 POINTS to the right
🧩 Platforms are splintering
🔊 Fewer people are talking — but those still talking are more politically extreme
Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation?
Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed
Here are the key take-aways 🧵
Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!
F/u for any critics: yes, “Ribosome Girl” will work just as well…so get writing!
Yes, we know. We've been screaming about this for years. People who refuse to wear respirators in public spaces are fully on board with this eugenics platform. Eventually, health vulnerability comes for all of us. Many are born with it.
“There is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with a famous talk-show host”
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
It was a connection — between an artist, playing music with her own hands and voice — and me, a human in the audience, listening with my own ears and brain. I got to say thankyou and “good set” later on at the bar and it was a real conversation between two people
I really enjoyed that set. It made me happy. I liked the tunes and I liked the lyrics. I didn’t need to ingest that experience into a model fed by gigawatts, and then get it to explain it to me back on a screen.
I, a human, just listened to some songs sung for my enjoyment, by another human
One of the things I hate the most about our current AI bullshit is the way it effaces the human connection. The other night I stumbled into a bar in Sydney Rd and I saw a fucking incredible set by local artist Molly McKew. There were 20 people there. But that set meant something to me, a human being
You ever try to code switch at work and fail? 😂
Looking forward to a scientific musical parody “RNA Girl” (🎵’cause we descended from an RNA world🎶).
same vibes @xkcd.com
With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268
"The selfish ribosome" paper is now published in @plosbiology.org . Have a look! Many thanks to the editors and reviewers!
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
Dreher ‘apologized’ for boosting the obviously fake Magyar story about microwaving a puppy, and then he reposts this.
There's a reason why Meta's employee keylogging plans are only being deployed in the US -- per experts we spoke to, this sort of monitoring would be illegal in much of Europe, where such monitoring is a violation of worker privacy.
In the US, most states don't even require notice of surveillance.
Meta will begin keystroke logging US employees at work -- complete with mouse movements and periodic screenshots -- to train better AI agents.
This comes after Boz posted about a future in which AI will "primarily do the work" at meta.
It's a new era for tech labor. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...
We are impacting the WORLD, and yet the international community if fighting harder for America than the majority of Americans.
It's official - Trumpflation has hit the UK economy
www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/uk-econ...
The first epidemic of the 1918 flu in the United States occurred at the military’s Camp Funston, Kansas (later Fort Riley).
Infected soldiers headed to WWI battlefields carried the flu to Europe. Millions died
It’s not *vaccination* that weakens force readiness.
This "stuff" works quite well in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden & Iceland. They all have free healthcare, universities, & things like eldercare, childcare and dentalcare often highly subsidized. They're rated amongst the happiest countries & even have billionaires. #DemocraticSocialism
