Watching baseball

if they start using "papist" as a slur again well I'm sorry to say I'm not strong enough to resist relapsing on catholicism

Only the richest Americans can recover from the financial toll that long-term care — the eldercare assistance that Medicare doesn’t cover — exacts on over half of older Americans.
#inequality @rooseveltinstitute.org rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

Opinion | Beware conservatives promoting “intellectual freedom” Victor Ray: This conservative lie about schools like mine is furthering authoritarianism

Making tenure count, for MSNOW I wrote about my employer, The University of Iowa, creating a center for intellectual freedom. It's a reactionary project built on decades of conservative propaganda about higher ed.

CDC map showing COVID-19 trends across U.S. states as of April 7, 2026. Summary text: infections are growing in 0 states, declining or likely declining in 38 states, and not changing in 5 states. Most states are shaded dark teal (declining), with some light teal (likely declining), and a few grey (not estimated or no change). No states are marked as growing. Inset box states: ED visits for COVID-19 are very low, and the national trend is declining. Probability of growth is 1%, Rₜ estimate 0.93 (0.79–0.96), and 0.3% of ED visits are COVID-related (very low).

USA: Epidemic trend summary: April 10, 2026

COVID-19

As of April 7, 2026:

🔹0 states have COVID-19 infections growing or likely growing
🔹38 states has infections declining or likely declining
🔹5 states show no change

Source: cdc.gov/cfa-modeling...

Mexico—a nation with 1/17th GDP of USA—is rolling out universal healthcare to its 130M citizens.

Starting April 13, Mexicans 85+ will have access to universal healthcare. By Jan 2027, Mexico will expand universal healthcare to all people, with full coverage of drugs, lab tests, etc by 2030.

1/2

Black women are still working twice as hard for less, new economic report finds Despite leading in education and workforce participation, Black women continue to lag in pay, wealth, and retirement security.

A new study shows that Black women outpace every other group of women in workforce participation. Yet they are still paid less & retire in poverty at twice the rate of white women. This is a system. It is long past time this country started carrying them the way they have carried us.

NASA astronaut Victor Glover, Artemis II pilot, left, and NASA astronaut Christina Koch, Artemis II mission specialist are seen sitting on a Navy MH-60 Seahawk from Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 23 on the flight deck of USS John P. Murtha after they and fellow crewmates CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, Artemis II mission specialist, and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, Artemis II commander, were extracted from their Orion spacecraft after splashdown, Friday, April 10, 2026, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. NASA’s Artemis II mission took the quartet on a nearly 10-day journey around the Moon and back to Earth. Following a splashdown at 5:07 p.m. PDT (8:07 p.m. EDT), NASA, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force teams are working to bring the Orion spacecraft aboard the recovery ship. Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Of all of the post-splashdown photos from the Artemis II mission, this is my favorite.

It captures the best of who we are, the best of who we can be.

(More here: www.nasa.gov/gallery/arte...)

Zohran Mamdani said, "My approach to the use of power will be to actually utilize it...look at Republicans and they seem to have no limits in their imagination to how they use power. And as Democrats it's like we're constructing an ever-lowering ceiling. I think this is a betrayal and is egregious."

Amia Srinivasan’s “Sex as Pedagogical Failure” should be required reading.

Whenever a man in position of authority pursues a subordinate woman, he is changing her trajectory in that space forever. The research on how much even “consensual” affairs hurt the women involved is jaw dropping.

This is why these forms of sexual harassment and abuse at scale work to reinforce men’s dominance. If the woman’s “best” option is to quit, then this pattern of behavior can and IS used to keep women out of certain industries and positions of power and spheres of influence.

A powerful man sexually pursuing a young woman who works for him is oppressive. It immediately limits and reshapes her future to her detriment, whether she is physically forced into it or not. It’s coercion either way, and that is why it’s so wrong. It’s an abuse of power.

The Democratic Party ignores his style of politicking and governing at its own peril

An mRNA treatment for PANCREATIC CANCER was in trials, among many other uses. Choosing to end this research is choosing to sentence millions to an early, painful death

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Contrary to public perception a huge % of pregnant teenagers in the 1990s were impregnated by adult men. The younger they were, the larger the average age gap between mother and father was. Fixing teen pregnancy was in part a clampdown on statutory rape. That's what conservatives want to reverse.

we should treat these pardons as null and void as far as i am concerned www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Capitol Hill books

Open for business. Can I get a witness?

men can’t understand what it’s like for women to see story after story after story of women being victims of sexual violence in a culture where it’s routine; what it’s like to live in a world that is fundamentally hostile to our existence. it’s a wonder we leave the fucking house, let alone thrive.

There's an important bit of journalism ethics here: do your best to minimize harm. This means taking a trauma-informed approach, not rushing the story and shoving survivors into the worst, period, hell, period before they're ready, and it means getting it right the FIRST time, not later

Our government is covering up untold numbers of murders. Worse, they’re incentivizing them. This broken fucking country.

Here you go, America. You were looking for a new model of masculinity I think.

Here's the new official CDC map for Texas. Readily interpretable. Now that they're not just using shades of blue, it is easy to see that Houston is "Very Low," and most other places are not.

Look at all those "Very High" sites. Again, this will save lives.

A guy asking ChatGPT to review a series of fart sound effects and getting a serious kiss ass response that calls it atmospheric

I can't stop laughing at this post. It's perfect.

Trump is turning warehouses into ICE detention camps. Can Maryland stop him? “Everything about this has been done in a very lawless, secretive way” Sonia Kumar of ACLU Maryland tells us.

🚨 New from me @therealnews.com

Trump is turning warehouses into ICE detention camps. Can Maryland stop him?

Never thought I'd be writing headlines like this when I got started in media, but here we are...

therealnews.com/trump-is-tur...

There's a lot they can't do because they're not in power. Absolutely. But publicly agitating for impeachment to be taken seriously can have a similar effect. It might force Republicans to have to publicly tie themselves to Trump, for instance.

Is Trump going to get impeached and removed from office? No, of course not. But Jesus Christ, guys. What the fuck is wrong with you, Schumer and Jeffries?

These aren’t even valid tactical arguments. Party leaders don’t have enough aligned media and are too risk averse to do this kind of agenda-setting. It’s kayfabe for not wanting to admit that Republicans killed the old constitutional order and no one knows what to replace it with.

"There are a lot of parts of life in our city that we have just come to accept as if it's the cost of being a New Yorker, when in fact, these are political decisions and political choices" is the most succinct summary of the governance crisis plaguing Democrats in large cities I've ever heard

Schumer is pro the war on Iran and I think that in and of itself is disqualifying. It seems imperative that Democrats demand that he resign or be replaced as Senate minority leader because he is actually working to support the fascist in chief. It's untenable.