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lxlx.bsky.social
@lxlx.bsky.social
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bgrueskin.bsky.social
NYT:
Five officials told us that Hegseth had nothing to do with the second strike

Washpost (which broke the story 2 days ago):
“This is ‘protect Pete’ bullshit,”
and
“It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.”
At the White House on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, read a statement that said Mr. Hegseth had authorized the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, “to conduct these kinetic strikes.” She said that Admiral Bradley had “worked well within his authority and the law directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated.” According to five U.S. officials, who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter that is under investigation, Mr. Hegseth, ahead of the Sept. 2 attack, ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel and its purported cargo of drugs. But, each official said, Mr. Hegseth’s directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things. And, the officials said, his order was not a response to surveillance footage showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast. Admiral Bradley ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said, Mr. Hegseth did not give any further orders to him. Her scripted remarks at a news briefing elicited a furious backlash within the Defense Department, where officials described feeling angry at the uncertainty over whether Hegseth would take responsibility for his alleged role in the operation — or leave the military and civilian staff under him to face the consequences. “This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls---,” one military official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told The Post. Leavitt’s statement “left it up to interpretation” who was responsible for the second strike that killed the two survivors, a separate military official said, imploring the White House to provide clarity on the issue. One official said of Leavitt’s statement, “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.” Another person said some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration.
December 2, 2025 at 2:32 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
gregsargent.bsky.social
Now that Karoline Leavitt just confirmed that Frank Bradley gave the order for the second strike that killed two people clinging to boat wreckage (per @atrupar.com) this seems doubly relevant:
gregsargent.bsky.social Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 3d
News --> The commander who oversaw Pete Hegseth's alleged killing of two boat bombing survivors is now likely to come in and face questions from the House Armed Services Committee, ranking Dem Adam Smith tells me.

In this piece, I try to make sense of this horror:
newrepublic.com/article/2037...
Trump Boat Bombings Suddenly on Shakier Ground as Damning Info Emerges
Will Republicans give us a real investigation into Trump’s bombings, now that we just learned horrific new details about them? Or are they seriously going to fall on their swords for Pete Hegseth?
newrepublic.com
December 1, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
ernie.tedium.co
If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...
Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.
November 22, 2025 at 9:44 PM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
saneman.bsky.social
Keep calm and carry on.....
November 5, 2025 at 2:09 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
cwnewser.bsky.social
You asked and I followed up. For those wondering about his tattoos in light of recent revelations from Graham Platner in Maine, Dylan Blaha told me he has six, none of which feature Nazi imagery.
October 24, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
czedwards.bsky.social
Performative action is what got the Feds to finally admit AIDS was real, and the stories of that era moved the Overton window enough for Obergfell.

(Hopefully we move the window faster this time)

Performance is media-philic, and humans need to see things several times to fix it in their brains.
October 19, 2025 at 1:40 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
katz.theracket.news
Not a shitpost: #NoKings is feel-good performative activism for comfortable mostly upper and upper middle class white folks and that’s good, actually. Millions of people in the streets protesting a fascist regime is good. It is good for the normie baseline to be massive displays of public dissent.
October 19, 2025 at 1:37 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
moiracalifornia.bsky.social
53-year-old woman in Alaska

bsky.app/profile/bgru...
bgrueskin.bsky.social Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · Oct 19
Well, you can finally cross “I’ve seen a handcuffed, inflatable penis” off your bucket list
October 19, 2025 at 2:40 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
drlisacorrigan.bsky.social
Folks are asking what to do about the One Special Boy's AI vids and whether they should share them:

MOCK THEM WITHOUT SHARING.

This creates what an enthymeme, where readers have to SUPPLY PART OF THE REFERENT to understand what you are mocking. An enthymeme is the STRONGEST form of persuasion.
October 19, 2025 at 3:07 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
drlisacorrigan.bsky.social
This is absurdly bad PR. These are the images that need amplified. If you're online, think strategically about which images need to go viral to tell the story of the horrors of this moment. RT and share the shit out of them.
October 19, 2025 at 2:21 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
mark-bray.bsky.social
1a) 1 takeaway is comparison between the "fascism-producing crisis[es]" of past + present characterized by the prevalence of the "nonintelligibility of power."

When a prominent historian of interwar Europe says we are living through a similar crisis amidst the rise of fascism, we need to listen.
A page of text from the essay with certain sections underlined. With dynamics already apparent from the early 2000s, but sharply worsening since2008-2010, the US polity has entered a steadily escalating version of the dual crisis outlined earlier, one suddenly magnifed and massively jolted by COVID-19: a crisis of cohesion, a crisis of legitimacy. Not only is the polity broken, but very large masses of people have stopped believing in its repair. On the one hand, we have the extreme atrophy of democratic practices in the state, whether inside the legislature or in the relations of the presidency, Senate/Congress, and Supreme Court; or in the attack on voting rights, voting access, and the conduct of elections; or in the curtailment of civil liberties and the scale and character of the carceral state. On the other hand, there is now a default conviction among the citizenry that government consists only in burdensomeness, corruption, incompetence, and nonaccountability– a still-widening popular belief in what I would call the nonintelligibility of power, the belief that power is exercised in a distant place, behind closed doors and opaque glass, by conspiracies of elites who are beholden to no one and simply do not care. crisis of consent; government paralysis, democratic impasse– the prospects can be severe indeed. If we add the fields of structural determation outlined briefly at the very start of this chapter, whose ruinous consequences are now immeasurably expanded and sharpened by the intervening calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic, the severity grows further again. The deeper structural setting will need to be fully proceeding from the huge transformations begun in the 1980s. Here, we need to talk about fundamental capitalist restructuring: deindustrialization and neoliberal globalization. We need to talk about drastic class recomposition, including the reorganization of work and labor circuits and the rewriting of the labor contract...etc
September 30, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
mark-bray.bsky.social
I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism.

🧵
September 30, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
mark-bray.bsky.social
“Someone” cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second.

We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’
October 8, 2025 at 11:57 PM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
amyfeldman7.bsky.social
Six former surgeons general appointed by every President since George HW Bush warn that RFK Jr. is endangering the health of the nation, calling his policies/positions a “profound, immediate + unprecedented threat”

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
Opinion | Six surgeons general: It’s our duty to warn the nation about RFK Jr.
We took an oath to declare dangers when we found them. We’re doing that again today.
www.washingtonpost.com
October 8, 2025 at 1:49 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
asherelbein.bsky.social
I don't know that this is the *most* unethical thing David Frum has ever done, but in terms of professional *journalistic* ethics? Whooo boy
October 8, 2025 at 3:34 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
trustedreveler.bsky.social
LA: we will fight you.

Chicago: we will fight you.

PDX: we will make you endure week after week of of improv theater.
October 8, 2025 at 1:38 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
pbsnews.org
Thirty paintings created by the bushy-haired, soft-spoken Bob Ross will soon be up for auction to defray the costs of programming for small and rural public television stations suffering under cuts in federal funding. https://to.pbs.org/4nEQMrw
Bob Ross paintings to be auctioned to support public TV stations after federal funding cuts
All profits will help public TV stations with licensing fees for popular programs that include "The Best of Joy of Painting" and "America's Test Kitchen."
www.pbs.org
October 8, 2025 at 12:02 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
bcfinucane.bsky.social
I was completely unprepared for the threat posed by the Antifa super soldiers.
courtneyvaughn.bsky.social Courtney Vaughn @courtneyvaughn.bsky.social · Oct 8
Streets are still closed off in front of the Portland ICE facility at 8:30pm. Protesters have gathered on a side street. Dance party in progress.
October 8, 2025 at 4:05 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
popcrave.com
Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, Bernice King, reacts to Zelda Williams’ message asking fans to stop sending AI videos of her father, Robin Williams:

“I concur concerning my father. Please stop.”
October 8, 2025 at 3:30 AM
Evil
chrisgeidner.bsky.social Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · Oct 8
“The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared likely to strike down Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy by licensed therapists practiced on minors — a ruling that could affect similar laws in nearly half the country and make life more difficult for LGBTQ children at an already perilous time.”
Supreme Court likely to strike down Colorado's conversion therapy ban
A lesson in how defining the case often resolves the case.
www.lawdork.com
October 8, 2025 at 4:49 AM
Content warning: ICE shooting a protester in the head with a pepper ball.
johnpfaff.bsky.social John Pfaff @johnpfaff.bsky.social · Oct 8
Um, ICE just coldly shot an unarmed PRIEST in the head w a pepper ball when he (and everyone around him) clearly posed no threat.

For the crime of … complaining about government policy.

Core 1A speech.

With cameras rolling, they’re sniping priests for sport.
flglchicago.bsky.social Kurt @flglchicago.bsky.social · Oct 8
Here’s video of the incident
October 8, 2025 at 4:47 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
broadwaybabyto.bsky.social
Clearly the National Guard is needed to save us all from:

Dancing unicorns
Gyrating frogs
ICE fisherman

And our hard working immigrant friends and neighbours.
courtneyvaughn.bsky.social Courtney Vaughn @courtneyvaughn.bsky.social · Oct 8
Streets are still closed off in front of the Portland ICE facility at 8:30pm. Protesters have gathered on a side street. Dance party in progress.
October 8, 2025 at 4:40 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
jsundman.bsky.social
For you & animal-battle expert @dagomardegroot.bsky.social: 50+ years ago, in a small Wolof village in the Senegal River valley, by light from kerosene lanterns & occasional lightning from an approaching storm, I witnessed an epic battle between a scorpion & a giant wasp on an adobe wall. 1/2
September 25, 2025 at 12:36 AM
Reposted by lxlx.bsky.social
rebeccarhelm.bsky.social
I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)
September 24, 2025 at 8:30 PM