soaquarian.bsky.social
@soaquarian.bsky.social
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It’s the “season of love and giving”…but this year, doesn’t it seem more like a “season of fear and taking”? Like many of you, I’ve been saddened by the human impact of draconian government budget cuts and how angry many housed Americans are at unhoused Americans.

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December 21, 2025 at 2:51 AM
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Now seems like a swell time to point out that Frontline just released this excellent 11-minute mini-documentary about what happened inside CECOT.
Surviving CECOT (full documentary) | Deported to a Maximum-Security Prison | FRONTLINE + ProPublica
YouTube video by FRONTLINE PBS | Official
m.youtube.com
December 21, 2025 at 10:26 PM
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When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.
December 22, 2025 at 1:40 AM
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“Coverups are difficult in free societies. They are routine for authoritarian governments. The Epstein coverup will be an indicator of how far we are down the road to authoritarianism. The success of such a coverup would take us much further down that road.”

www.thebulwark.com/p/why-the-ep...
Why the Epstein Coverup Matters
In free societies, government coverups are difficult. In authoritarian ones, they’re routine.
www.thebulwark.com
December 21, 2025 at 1:58 PM
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surprise, surprise. DOJ will release docs over a rolling production over a few weeks -- violation of terms of Epstein law but who's to stop them. Big point is timing -- remember first spin of Mueller Report by Bill Barr? What comes out first will be big influence on public perception.
December 19, 2025 at 2:55 PM
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The 6 richest men in the world are all Trump allies.

They control your algorithms and data on X, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads, and YouTube.

Just in case you’re wondering why more isn’t done to stop right-wing bots and misinformation on social media.
December 19, 2025 at 1:19 PM
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Forget about the nonsense stories like the Kennedy Center being renamed or whatever Bari Weiss is doing

At least 3,800 immigrant children were detained in 2025. Now, kids are not supposed to be kept more than 20 days

At least 1,300 of them have been held longer than 20 days-some for over 4 months
December 19, 2025 at 12:09 AM
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Just to be clear. It’s the John F Kennedy center legally.

Just like it’s still the department of defense
December 18, 2025 at 11:17 PM
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we can kill them all if we just work together and ✨believe💫
December 15, 2025 at 5:11 PM
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I’m finding it increasingly hard to report anything delivered by “official sources” in the US. Could be true, could be a coverup, could be completely made up for nefarious ends.

It’s a country now where no one really has any idea what’s actually going on.
December 15, 2025 at 3:53 PM
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Reminder that if anyone is setting you up online to do some crime, THAT PERSON IS A COP.

ALWAYS.

WITHOUT FAIL.
Donald Trump has instructed the entire FBI to prioritize finding ways to bring charges against anti-fascists and other activists. Any FBI agent who wants to advance his career now has an incentive to set up naïve kids for an entrapment case.

Please read about entrapment and how to protect yourself.
December 16, 2025 at 1:54 AM
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Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.
December 15, 2025 at 12:21 PM
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Sam Altman: hey I made a machine that stole literally all your stuff in order to make CSAM of your child actors, sometimes it encourages people to kill themselves

Disney: Holy shit here's a billion dollars

Altman: the machine loses more than that each week but thank you. Soon it will become god.
December 12, 2025 at 10:27 AM
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Theoretically, everyone deserves the right to do what they want to their own bodies.

But in practice, these laws lead to further devaluation of disabled lives. They invariably lead to people choosing MAID because they can't afford healthcare, cajoled into this cheaper choice by an uncaring system.
December 14, 2025 at 6:09 PM
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They’re hassling citizens bc they don’t know who they’re approaching, bc they have no reasonable suspicion, and they’ve developed no probable cause. IOW, this is the opposite of law enforcement. As I’ve been saying, it’s essentially kidnapping, over and over and over again.
"A second agent then joins them and appears to help restrain him, who can be heard repeating 'I’m a citizen' and screaming. Several people then come into the hallway from outside and begin filming the interaction and whistling before the agents pull him outside..."

www.cnn.com/2025/12/13/u...
This US citizen went on his lunch break and ended up in a chokehold by a masked federal agent and detained, video shows | CNN
Mubashir had just stepped outside into the snowy Minneapolis winter weather to take his lunch break when he says he saw a masked federal officer running toward him “at full speed.”
www.cnn.com
December 14, 2025 at 4:14 AM
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One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.
December 7, 2025 at 10:09 PM
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The thing about measles is that it’s the only known virus that triggers immune amnesia - it causes your immune system to forget everything it has previously learned. Meaning you essentially reset to zero and are now at risk of basically everything.

It can take 2-3 years to get immunities back.
December 14, 2025 at 12:43 AM
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So the new reporting is that DHS has decided to go back to a primary focus on targeted enforcement that existed before the late May orders from Stephen Mille to ramp up numbers or else.

Quite frankly, I’ll believe it when I see it. And also at this point the public struggles to tell the difference.
really don't see how they're going to manage to hit the Miller quota
December 13, 2025 at 3:57 PM
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…I'm so goddam tired. Ppl are increasingly in their city halls about "AI" data centers making their water & power bills & air quality worse, & literally all Dems would have to do sew up up that bloc is *Vibe With That Energy.*

It's affordability & billionaire overreach all in one package you dorks!
Hakeem Jeffries' AI Commission is littered with corporate and tech-friendly Dems. AI is wildly unpopular, yet too many national Democratic leaders are rejecting that reality in favor of wooing back Silicon Valley. From our friends at @revolvingdoordc.bsky.social:
prospect.org/2025/12/12/d...
Democratic Voters Are Clamoring for AI Regulation. Their Leaders Aren’t Interested. - The American Prospect
A new AI commission established by House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries includes several corporate-friendly legislators.
prospect.org
December 12, 2025 at 4:58 PM
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To give you a sense of how big a departure this year, the government doesn't do this for wanted criminals.
SCOOP: The Trump administration is providing the names of all travelers passing through U.S. airports to immigration officials in search of people with deportation orders, a substantial expansion of government efforts to draw on data to hunt down immigrants.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/u...
Immigration Agents Are Using Air Passenger Data for Deportation Effort
www.nytimes.com
December 12, 2025 at 11:19 PM
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This. This was the formative event of my generation & our entire politics in 🇺🇸. The structural break after which we were no longer a full democracy, when 5 Wizards In Robes decided they were a super-legislature & counting all the actual votes didn’t matter. The rest has been 25 years of commentary.
25 years ago today, SCOTUS elected George W Bush president of the United States by blocking completion of a voting canvass in Florida. A subsequent canvass by the Associated Press showed that Bush's rival, Al Gore, had won the race in Florida—and thus the contest for the presidency—by 700 votes.
December 12, 2025 at 7:50 AM
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MAGAZINER: How many veterans have you deported?

NOEM: We haven't deported veterans

MAGAZINER: We are now joined on Zoom by a combat veteran you deported to Korea
December 11, 2025 at 4:22 PM
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in case anyone was wondering wtf happened to @thelouvreof.bsky.social/Louvre of Bluesky: the creator got doxxed, bsky did nothing, and they decided to go out in a blaze of glory
December 11, 2025 at 1:57 AM