Brian Wasik
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brianrwasik.bsky.social
Brian Wasik
@brianrwasik.bsky.social
5.5K followers 510 following 2.3K posts
Virologist. Evolutionary biologist.
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Reposted by Brian Wasik
maxkennerly.bsky.social
Per p. 317 of the robot terms of service you were assumed to have accepted, this is your fault for ordering food without specifying in your prompt that you wanted the food to be left at your table for eating, rather than briefly viewed.

User error.

Sincerely,

AIWayterr (valuation $600 billion)
cemurphy.bsky.social CE (Catie) Murphy @cemurphy.bsky.social · 9h
We are at an airport restaurant. A robot just drove up to us with our food, said, "Hi! Here I am!" and then drove away with our food.
February 15, 2026 at 11:11 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
wonkysq.bsky.social
"When Musk & Hegseth argue that a racially diverse nation is inherently weak, they're not returning us to some long-established American tradition from which we've recently strayed. They are, instead, parroting the exact same propaganda that Nazi Germany promoted against America during WW II."
February 15, 2026 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
amandacarpenter.bsky.social
PBS News Hour: U.S. citizens detained by immigration agents describe how they were treated.

Watch the segment here www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMgC...

I'm clipping transcripts of the citizens speaking in this thread 1/3
GEORGE RETES: “My name is George Retes. I was born and raised here in Ventura, California. I’m 26 years old and I am an Iraq combat veteran. I was going to work like normal. I show up. ICE is there. There’s kind of like a roadblock. I get out. I identify myself — that I’m a U.S. citizen, that I’m just trying to get to work. I’m trying to leave. I’m getting ready to leave and they surround my car, start banging on it, start shouting these contradictory orders. Even though I was giving them no reason, they still felt the need to — one agent knelt on my back and another agent knelt on my neck. And during that time, I’m just pleading with them that I couldn’t breathe. I was in isolation. I was in basically this concrete cell. I was stripped naked in like a hospital gown. And they leave the lights on 24/7. They just came out and they said that I was violent and that I assaulted agents. Why lie when it’s on video of everything that happened? Why lie?”
February 15, 2026 at 8:24 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
joshuasweitz.bsky.social
As reported,

'The NIH recently started using “geographic balance” as a factor in determining where to send money.'

There are many ways to value & support regional hubs.

Pork-barrel-ization of medical research won't serve national needs, but it does make the agenda transparent.
February 15, 2026 at 10:53 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
joshuasweitz.bsky.social
“I want Iowa, Nebraska scientists, scientists at every institution, to be able to compete on the same level playing fields with the brilliant scientists here in Massachusetts,” [Bhattacharya] said.

They already can & do.

But that's not enough for ideologues.
‘My scientific career is essentially over.’ A brain drain imperils Massachusetts’ biomedical future - The Boston Globe
In a first-of-its-kind survey, the Globe asked hundreds of scientists about the impact of federal funding cuts.
www.bostonglobe.com
February 15, 2026 at 10:53 PM
brianrwasik.bsky.social
Why are all these idiots making us cosplay GANGS OF NEW YORK -- in 2026, year of our lord?
prchovanec.bsky.social Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 6h
A lot of people seem to think Musk is adding the Irish into his accepted cultural mix. He's not. Whether he realizes it or not (maybe not), "Scots-Irish" refers to only some Irish, Scottish Protestants who settled in Ulster, and excludes the mass of Irish who were "Papist" and thus alien.
February 15, 2026 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
doritreiss.bsky.social
RFK Jr. pledged more transparency. Here's what the public doesn't know anymore abcnews.com/Politics/wir... via @mikestobbe.bsky.social
RFK Jr. pledged more transparency. Here's what the public doesn't know anymore
Health experts say the federal government now shares less public health data, even after Robert F_ Kennedy Jr_ promised “radical transparency.”
abcnews.com
February 15, 2026 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
jamellebouie.net
i have said this before but among chatterton’s many problems as a “thinker” is that he doesn’t
believe the political right has any agency or history. everything in his mind is a function of the summer of 2020. history begins and ends there. it is the perspective of a simpleton.
February 14, 2026 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
helenbranswell.bsky.social
#CDC has had a full-time director for less than a month in Trump 2.0. People watching the situation think it's unlikely there will be another Senate-confirmed CDC director in this term.
With Jim O'Neill's firing, it doesn't have an acting director either. www.statnews.com/2026/02/15/c...
Exit of CDC’s acting director highlights agency’s lack of leader
The lack of a Senate-confirmed leader is deepening the turmoil at the CDC.
www.statnews.com
February 15, 2026 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
citizencohn.bsky.social
A Trump administration official said Moderna might have more luck with its vaccine application if it resubmitted with a little “humility”

Does that sound like the “gold-standard science” RFK Jr. promised?

Or a mob boss threat?

www.thebulwark.com/p/this-is-wh...
This Is What Destroying the Vaccine Market Looks Like
A shocking move by RFK Jr.’s team has the industry spooked—for good reason.
www.thebulwark.com
February 15, 2026 at 3:39 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
publichealthguy1.bsky.social
if you want 100% nonfictional stories from measles patients and their families, follow voices for vaccines! more: voicesforvaccines.org/resources/blog/
February 15, 2026 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
larryglickman.bsky.social
Jeremy Carl, whom Trump has nominated for a senior position in the State Department, made precisely the same claim --white people are becoming "second-class citizens"--in his 2024 book as David Duke did in 1975, when he was the leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
“White Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded and in which, until recently, they were the overwhelming majority of the population,” he writes in his 2024 book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.” Klan Leader Says Whites Face Bias By Doug Perry, Courier-Journal Staff Writer White people are becoming second-class citizens, the national leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan said here Saturday. David Duke, in Harlan County to attend a Klan rally and "cross lighting," said during an interview he thinks integration in this country is a "total failure."
February 15, 2026 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
dailyherald.bsky.social
Please be careful in London. I have spent 25 years there, but I have never heard a story as frightening as this one from today in which nothing at all happened.
February 14, 2026 at 12:07 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
bwjones.bsky.social
I voted “no” on hiring a former colleague at my prior institution who we hired against my recommendation.

My chair wanted to know why I voted no.

I replied that the candidate thought they were smarter than everyone else and that would come back and hurt us.
mcnees.bsky.social Robert McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 7h
What I’m seeing in some of the Epstein revelations about well known scientists who maintained contact after his conviction, is folks who always thought they were the smartest person in any room, sure they could shrewdly navigate a route that gets them what they want without getting dirty themselves.
February 15, 2026 at 4:06 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
publichealthguy1.bsky.social
seeing a lot of hot takes on rfk jr. this is one poll taken in late january when he wasn’t dominating news cycles for a sustained time, like back in august. when that is the case, he is almost as unfavorable as hegsgeth. this really isn’t the news media’s fault
February 15, 2026 at 2:21 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
victorerikray.bsky.social
Can’t believe we are still doing this
Screenshot from The Onion reading; “Historians: Quibbling Over Exact Definition of Concentration Camp Sign of Healthy Society.”
February 15, 2026 at 2:03 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
carolecadwalla.bsky.social
NEW: Read this terrific piece @virginiaheffernan.bsky.social for @thenerve.news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics.
1/

www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-bi...
The billionaires' eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science
Edge - Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon - was sold to me as a gathering of the world's finest minds, writes Virginia Heffernan. The files reveal it was something far darker: a decades-lo...
www.thenerve.news
February 15, 2026 at 11:18 AM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
joshtpm.bsky.social
This is an important piece. Epstein was a consummate social climber and courted academics as a way of building social clout. Brockman and “the edge” illuminate just how that worked.
February 15, 2026 at 2:14 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
royalpratt.bsky.social
Ofelia Torres, the teenage Chicago Public Schools student whose fight against cancer while her father was detained by ICE came to represent the federal government's overreach during Operation Midway Blitz, has died. Brave young woman. I will never forget her. RIP.
February 15, 2026 at 1:54 AM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
evanbernick.bsky.social
The Rubio speech really is appalling, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should.

www.state.gov/releases/off...
this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new. We are part of one civilization - Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.
February 15, 2026 at 12:47 AM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
jamellebouie.net
i’ll end this little brainstorm by just asking what it is, exactly, that the MAGA right likes about the United States, since it explicitly rejects those things that make this nation distinctive — its pluralism, its revolutionary heritage and egalitarian aspirations, and its republican institutions
February 15, 2026 at 1:49 AM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
darinself.com
ICE has completely broken our social contract.

They manipulate social trust and are creating lasting damage to our most basic social foundations
tinadesireeberg.com Tina-Desiree Berg @tinadesireeberg.com · 1d
CCTV footage appears to show DHS agents posing as people having car trouble in order to lure a target out of his house before arresting them. The target comes out and starts helping them before 3 vehicles surround the scene. The car "experiencing" trouble then drives off with them.
February 14, 2026 at 10:55 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
goldwagnathan.bsky.social
We bought Article II of the United Nations Charter with the blood of a hundred million human beings, and less than a century later, it's being sold for nothing by people who don't even understand what they're doing.
sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 2d
i think this is what drives me nuts. people talk about how, say, the UN was founded by "starry eyed idealists" who didn't understand "reality." the truth is that the UN was founded by those who had just fought and *won* the bloodiest war in human history.
February 14, 2026 at 8:03 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
sodrock.bsky.social
I always like to tell this story but during WWII, a 23 year old PHD mathematician from Harvard was able to solve the 8th Air Force’s gunnery problem in like 2 months without spending a day in the military (turns out you have to lead your target)
robertscotthorton.bsky.social Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social · 1d
Hegseth to US military: if you get into MIT, we won't let you attend because of the risk that you will be exposed to ideas hostile to MAGA when you study there.
February 14, 2026 at 10:06 PM
Reposted by Brian Wasik
walmsley.bsky.social
slavery is one of the rare things historically where the more you learn about it the more you realize your initial assessment was correct and it was in fact one of the most evil things ever to occur
michaelhobbes.bsky.social Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 1d
Physically incapable of analyzing politics outside of this insipid frame.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
Why MAGA Wants You to Think Slavery Wasn’t That Bad Both the left and the right try to co-opt it, but the real story of American slavery doesn’t serve any one faction. By Thomas Chatterton Williams Sanitizing slavery has become a core objective of the reactionary right under Donald Trump—a malignant response to the progressive left’s oversimplification of American history for their own present-day ends.
February 14, 2026 at 2:28 PM