the CIA developed / encouraged the spread of the “prosperity gospel” in Latin America to counter liberation theology

My in-laws moved from Texas to Portland Oregon last year - their first time living in a blue city/state - and were absolutely shocked and overwhelmed to learn that they have rights as renters now.

i'll take the bold (for bluesky) position that working for raytheon or northrup or whatever does not make you an irredeemable person, but palantir is very different because they are making karp's insane worldview the company's official public position, they're explicitly saying you believe this, too

Palantir is also claiming in this same statement that Germany went too far in constructing its postwar identity around guilt for the Holocaust, which is the exact narrative that the German far-right is running on and winning in elections.

Irish-American who left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s attacks on queer Americans and incessantly listens to old Irish emigration songs is, unfortunately for everyone in my life, a *fantastic* bit.

This shit is what I mean when I say "AI" is the tool of and the prevailing aesthetic of fascism.

Nostalgia is a thought terminator.

We have been saying this for so long that it feels vaguely pat, but the nexus of the fossil fuel industry and authoritarian politics is extremely strong!

The TL;DR is that recently-leaked internal memos from 2016 reveal that John Roberts and the court's conservatives invented the shadow docket because of nakedly ideological opposition to Obama's Clean Power Plan.

A shot out a dirty train window of little white sheep under a solar field, with green grass and a blue sky streaked with clouds.

Sheep grazing under solar panels, seen from the ICE train. 🥲

Has there been anything in English about the absolute collapse of the German SPD? Both social changes & party decisions that have led them to go from 38% to (latest polling) 12% in 20 years…

Exhibition description from the Viennese museum secession. How do you dominate Gustav Klimt? This was one of the first questions Reba Maybury posed while preparing her exhibition / Come in Peace. Maybury is an artist, writer, and political dominatrix whose multidisciplinary practice interrogates the intersections of feminism, sexuality, labour, and power. Her exhibition unfolds over four sites - across the building's façade. in the foyer, upstairs in the Grafisches Kabinett, and in the Beethoven Frieze space. The artist conceived a site-responsive project, not only in terms of its architectural interventions but also in its engagement with the institution's history. Approaching the iconic Secession building today, visitors encounter twelve usernames mounted on the façade. The names were sourced by the artist from online platforms where men publicly review their experiences with female sex workers in Vienna. Executed in the same gold Art Nouveau typeface that already adorns the building, the inscriptions formally blend into the architectural language of the Secession while subtly unsettling it. Their number deliberately echoes the twelve founding "fathers" of the institution. By inserting these digital traces of contemporary transactional intimacy into the monumental surface of the façade, Maybury collapses distinctions between public commemoration, local private desire and the power structures underlying them…

I admit that I find a lot of modern art tedious. So much of it is trying to Say Something, but so little of it has anything worthwhile to say.

An apartment building lit by the setting sun. On one side is written (in German) “built for the community of Vienna 1924-1925 from the funds of the housing tax.”

I love how Vienna marks all of its social housing buildings.

I think the lesson of this is “people hate the Merz government and his coalition partners need to actually exact concessions”

having an energy minister who isn’t a literal oil lobbyist might help

SPD at 12% in Germany is uhhhhhh

When the expanded CTC expired in 2022, each $1,000 in lost benefits reduced consumer sentiment by 1.7 points—with effects lasting nearly two years—long after the checks stopped, from @jacobbastian.bsky.social and Melody Harvey www.nber.org/papers/w35059

I am taking the train, of course.

I’ve got to travel to London for work in June. Trains are €320 if you book the legs separately, and take ~12 hrs each way (assuming, again, you book separately to avoid a Deutsche Bahn delay screwing you over).

Flights at this exact moment are €83.

And Europe is about to run out of jet fuel.

Chevron executive Andy Walz suggests Americans should drive less amid high gas prices "People should try to drive less. They should try to conserve energy," Andy Walz told CBS News. "We should be doing that all the time. Energy's essential for people's lives, but we should conserve it....

He is right! But:

1. it’s the state’s responsibility to make this a possibility;
2. it is also our collective responsibility to make sure that this demand destruction is permanent, and that we destroy Chevron at the same time.

www.cbsnews.com/news/chevron...

Far Right populists are a big risk in European politics, but in most states they get stuck around a 30% threshold. Their success is then dependent on specific state constitutional and legal structures as well as responses from other parties.

Remains inexplicable to me that this obvious bad deal not only did not get stopped in court but Trump didn’t even hold up his side of the deal! He kept fucking with Empire Wind!

These NY Times oral histories—of what the Trump administration is doing to federal agencies—are a public service. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

“The entirety of life is a crucible to make you more racist” man this guy’s got some demonic possession going on

we throw it around quite often that these people are incompetent idiots living in fantasy lands, but it's literal. it's literally that. toddler-brained levels of mediocre.

MAGA Absorbs the Loss of Orban, a Kindred Spirit to Trump’s Movement

It feels like a real oversight not to include in this piece that Orbán *materially supported* MAGA figures and institutions, including some of the specific sources (Rod Dreher) that the journalists interviewed!

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/u...

This is a horrific story.

Opening our Beyond Fossil Fuels Campaign Days, Dr Filip Milacic from the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation gave us a few words from far-right parties : “liberal, doomed to fail because of its racial politics, decadent”

the twist: this was how the European right described the U.S. 100 years ago.

I don't think it's well recognised how much airtime the fossil fuel industry has gotten in traditional media because they're considered "experts" on fossil fuels, and because they have formal, jargony knowledge of oil and gas, that means they *must* be unbiased and rational and neutral somehow

The amount of smog in east Germany - including in otherwise pastoral landscapes - is simply unbelievable to me, an American.

I believe it’s mostly from coal plants both here and in Poland…

I assume it is that they and their circles are personally reliant on Orban’s patronage networks, which are unlikely to be continued by Magyar — so they care much more about this than the state of conservative politics as such.

It does seem notable that “farmers protesting high fuel prices” is basically never held to the same standards of legitimate protest as anything on the left. Nobody asks “well what is their actual demand? Is that even reasonable? By what mechanism could the government do that?”