How was it? I'd love the recipe!

Trump Administration Personnel Policies Harming Social Security Customer Service, Risk Lasting Damage New data from the Office of Personnel Management reveal more about how the resulting short-staffing of critical functions is degrading service for the largely older, bereaved, and severely disabled pe...

SSA hired <100 employees in all of 2025 — the lowest ever, and less than 2% of average annual hiring.

As a result, some offices have been so short-staffed, they were forced to close their doors to people seeking service, sometimes for hours & sometimes for weeks.

www.cbpp.org/research/soc...

Phosphor dancing Strider Hiryu

STRIDER
CAPCOM 1990
SEGA GENESIS

Opinion | Low-Income Pregnant Women Can’t Easily Obtain ‘Real Food’ Bethany Barone Gibbs and Alex Crisp write about low-income pregnant women have less access to healthy whole foods.

OPINION: "Most pregnant women in the United States aren’t meeting dietary recommendations. This is especially true for women living in rural communities," Bethany Barone Gibbs and Alex Crisp write.

As a point of comparison, the US spent $21 billion in FY 2022 to feed billions of breakfasts and lunches to kids in schools across our whole country for an entire year under the universal school meals program that was later discontinued.

That lil bastard...the paperboy!!!

PAPERBOY
EASTRIDGE/ATARI 1991
FAMICOM

Because housing assistance is drastically underfunded, only 1 in 4 eligible low-income households receive it.

Providing it to all who qualify would cost $118 billion a year—a tiny fraction of the proposed $1.5 *trillion* defense budget for 2027.

Poverty would fall 13% overall and 23% for children.

Screenshot from CBO: "CBO expects that some states would maintain current benefits and eligibility and others would modify benefits or eligibility or possibly leave the program altogether because of the increased costs."

H.R. 1 slashed federal funding for SNAP & imposed those costs on states as a massive unfunded mandate.

A reminder of what's at stake as the House Agriculture Committee debates an amendment to delay this cost shift: CBO says these costs could drive states to end SNAP altogether.

Restarting tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is not going to be quick even with US military escorts and government insurance schemes, experts tell the FT www.ft.com/content/e006...

In his book,”Tattoos on the Heart,” Fr. Gregory Boyle advocates for a “compassion that can stand in awe of what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” I thought about that a lot as I read & reread this astounding book by @brian-goldstone.bsky.social

OCASIO-CORTEZ STATEMENT ON TRUMP'S COMBAT OPERATIONS IN IRAN "The American people are once again dragged into a war they did not want by a president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions. This war is unlawful. It is unnecessary. And it will be catastrophic. "Just this week, Iran and the United States were negotiating key measures that could have staved off war. The President walked away from these discussions and chose war instead.President Trump flippantly acknowledged the possibility of American casualties, stating "that often happens in war.' "Mr. President: this was not an inevitability. This is a deliberate choice of aggression when diplomacy and security were within reach. Stop lying to the American people. "Violence begets violence. We learned this lesson in Iraq. We learned this lesson in Afghanistan. And we are about to learn it again in Iran. Bombs have yet to create enduring democracies in the region and this will be no different. "In moments of war, our Constitution is unambiguous: Congress authorizes war. The President does not. I will do my part to uphold our Constitution by voting YES on Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie's War Powers Resolution. Every member of Congress must join us in rejecting this aimless war.

My statement on President Trump’s combat operations in Iran⬇️

Franzi Schimmer captured this Grizzly bear in Brooks Falls, Alaska just floating along, tippy-tapping down the river, browsing the salmon.

Prior to hibernation, up to 40% of a bear's body mass is fat, which is less dense than water (~0.9 g/cm^2), so the murder-monster is also a floaty-boaty.

I don't think it's widely understood how many people in their 50s are going to lose health coverage because of the new Medicaid work rules at a time in their lives when their medical needs are likely to increase.

FDA refuses to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine The move comes amid RFK Jr.'s relentless efforts to enact his anti-vaccine agenda.

FDA refuses to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine arstechnica.com/health/2026/...

As Helene Survivors Wait for State Help, Some Victims of Earlier Hurricanes Are Still Out of Their Homes North Carolina created a new housing recovery program to avoid the delays and cost overruns that plagued rebuilding efforts after hurricanes Florence and Matthew. The Assembly and ProPublica have found that similar problems are starting to surface.

NEW: Roughly 5,000 North Carolina homeowners affected by Hurricane Helene are awaiting help from the state.

But records show problems like rigid rules and insufficient staffing, which occurred in a previous rebuilding program, are starting to surface.

The end of DOE’s grid work in Puerto Rico The Trump administration has canceled all eight of the remaining awards devoted to distributed energy on the island.

Just a few weeks ago, the administration cancelled all remaining department of energy grid resilience projects in Puerto Rico. All of them. www.latitudemedia.com/news/the-end...

If anyone wants to know more about Puerto Rico and the other US territories/colonies, I will also recommend this book!

(If I may...)

Opinion | Liam Ramos Was Just One of Hundreds of Children at This Detention Center. Release Them All.

"A 2-year-old boy was breastfeeding in detention. One 6-year-old boy had leukemia. An 8-year-old girl began wetting the bed. A 14-year-old girl engaged in self-harm...None of these children or their parents had a criminal history anywhere in the world."
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/o...

Greetings from inside the economic blockade zones of Minneapolis and St Paul! Don’t look away, please. We need you. It’s been a month and they’re trying to destroy us.

Hotline operators report flood of calls for rental assistance as residents hide during ICE surge 211 calls from Spanish-speakers have increased more than 1,600 percent and requests for rental assistance have more than tripled, according to Greater Twin Cities United Way. Local officials are pushi...

Minneapolis has seen a stunning 1,646% spike in calls from families who can't pay rent because they're afraid to leave their homes to work.

This is state violence manufacturing housing precarity in real time.

People should not be facing eviction when their city is under occupation.

Tweet from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges."

The US Holocaust Museum being more outraged by Tim Walz saying that, like Anne Frank, children today are in hiding from armed agents of the state, than they are about the fact that children are in hiding from armed agents of the state, is why Holocaust remembrance culture is in crisis.

Florida escalates its battle on sociology with new curriculum, textbook. Professors push back In a dramatic escalation of a years-long battle over sociology in Florida colleges and universities, FIU faculty allege that new state mandates for an Introduction to Sociology course amount to an att...

‘The state has moved from telling us what we cannot teach to telling us exactly what we can…giving our students a really impoverished version of the discipline,’ Katie Rainwater

‘[Students] will be getting a sociology text, a sociology course without a soul…It is a sanitized version,’ Matt Marr

Better base pay and mandated scheduling protections are, indeed, very good ideas for making sure that everyone who's working a full time job can go to a home they can afford when their shift is over, and eat a meal without worrying about if they'll be able to pay their power bill.

Delivered (thanks dad) $250 of notebooks, sketchbooks, pens, pencils for Roosevelt High School students this week ~ thanks to contributors and @wetpaintart.bsky.social

Another way to support Minneapolis arts through the printshops below.

With racism, there are a lot of times when you also have to
use hedged language. Dog whistles tend to be suggestions and need to be covered as such. However, what Trump is getting into with Somalis is blatantly and objectively racist.

This is just so far from what anyone should want for our country.

I recently met a widowed 71-year-old woman still working two jobs and living at an extended-stay hotel because even two jobs don't pay her enough to afford rent.

This is what "one more year of work" looks like in America.

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Clean Slate Illinois - Illinois wins automated sealing! Clean Slate Illinois is a campaign that will automate record relief in Illinois.

Clean Slate Campaign for adult records (I was not a coalition member) info at link!

(context for a comment in the video: crim records *cannot exclude people from voting* in IL but may prevent them from holding elected/appointed office)

FAQ has details on timeline, etc.

www.cleanslateillinois.org

USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, the federal agency that oversees programs like SNAP, WIC, and school meals, has apparently lost one-third of its staff in the last year.