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Asher Black

@asherblack.bsky.social
69 followers 1 following 25 posts

Novelist | Musician 🎸 | Karateka. Literary & cross-form fiction. Moral conflict, loyalty, & identity under pressure. Writes outdoors. Catskills ⇄ Brooklyn.

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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Frequently repeated by Obama, Madeleine Allbright's phrase "the indispensable nation" was blind bravado. I laughed when I heard it. "If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future."
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Orwell. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Trump and Ice sold out Iranian refugees and dissidents to Iran. Sending them home to face torture and/or death, filling lists and quotas for Iran. www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-ira...
cbsnews.com
ICE, Iran quietly worked together on deporting Iranians to Iran, emails show
U.S. immigration officials worked with Iran to deport more than 100 Iranians to Iran in 2025, newly released emails show, revealing a working relationship between them despite tensions mounting at the...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Excellent points, generally. www.buzzfeed.com/lizmrichards...
buzzfeed.com
Younger Generations Revealed What They Want Older Generations To Stop Doing, And Whew, It's Hard To Hear
"STOP telling me to 'enjoy my youth while it lasts...' When you were my age, you didn't have to work two part-time jobs, attend college at the same time, and live paycheck to paycheck. You're likely t...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
That's what you want. Companies that work against free speech handling it for the White House. foreignpolicy.com/2026/08/20/s... #governmentsurveillance #militarytargeting,
foreignpolicy.com
State Department to Partner With Palantir, Anduril on Free Speech Initiative
The Freedom Tech Excellence Program also includes the Bitcoin Policy Institute and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Mark Zuckerberg is a human disease, and Meta is the corporate expression of collusion with that disease. futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism.com
Meta Operated a Secret Program That Paid Hundreds of Contractors to Pretend to Be Children and Teenagers While Having Disturbing Conversations With AI
Meta hired hundreds of contractors to pose as children and teenagers while asking chatbots like ChatGPT about suicide and even cannibalism.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
There's never been a more deficient example of manhood, Americanism, or character than these clowns, their ilk, and the fraction of a man they worship. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...
reuters.com
Trump to mark US 250th anniversary with campaign-style rally on National Mall
Washington's annual July 4 celebration typically draws hundreds of thousands ​of people, who this year will have to contend with stepped-up security, possible thunderstorms and temperatures that could...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Strange how conservative men link a bidet to effeminacy. I'm industrial strength. Shine baby bottoms w. hose & brush, swab floors w. bucket & mop, wash hair w. a garden hose, & uplevel combat showers w. a handheld on full. Crack, sack, & pits, boys. Don't be afraid. It's water. Get used to it.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
How can we expect people who spend all their time in air conditioning playing video games, using their phones, and watching Sports Center to take the rising global inferno seriously? Hell is made by not paying attention.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Yet more proof that money and intelligence aren't correlated. futurism.com/future-socie...
futurism.com
Mark Zuckerberg Is Selflessly Building Yet Another Horrible Product Nobody Asked For
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly directed his staff to create a smartphone app similar to prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
I'm guessing anyone who needs this won't read it. neurosciencenews.com/literacy-res...
neurosciencenews.com
Reading Is the Ultimate Cognitive Enhancer - Neuroscience News
A new study reveals how literacy fundamentally rewires the human mind, sharpening memory, focus, and face recognition.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
The inauthenticity of this image made my flesh crawl. musicandculture.substack.com/p/does-every...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Hence a vested economic interest in environmental science denial on the part of those that back institutions funding environmental science. You see that, despite the stakes, the game is rigged? www.sciencealert.com/worlds-riche...
sciencealert.com
World's Richest 10% Are Costing Earth Trillions, Study Finds
We've heard that the world's wealthiest 10 percent are disproportionately responsible for environmental damage.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
For every 1 Epstein, there are 10,000 "photographers" who specialize in telling young girls with poor judgment they're beautiful and should get comfortable with their bodies, that it would make them more 'mature' and cosmopolitan, then luring them into their beds. I've met more than one.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
The important thing is humans can't breathe under 11-feet of water. www.earth.com/news/doomsda...
earth.com
Doomsday Glacier is about to lose its last natural brake
A crucial ice shelf holding back Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier may collapse within months, potentially speeding future sea level rise.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
This exalted patriotism, a “still-religious intuition that we have already arrived.” It has left festering injustices unattended, “dumb wars,” and a perpetual red-white-and-blue fireworks display that distracts from difficult truths about the country’s failings. www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...
theatlantic.com
The Two Kinds of American Patriotism
As our nation turns 250, it’s worth asking how best to love one’s country.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
We still fail to grapple with the obvious: ANY large incarceration or mass concentration of people in detention is inherently inhumane. If we define inhumanity narrowly, we can line people up for a photoshoot. But that is to gloss over what is intrinsic to the structure. www.cnn.com/us/george-zo...
cnn.com
The founder of a private company accused of mistreating ICE detainees came to the US via Ellis Island in 1953 | CNN
When George Zoley, the founder of a private company that manages more than 20 federal immigration facilities testified before Congress in 2020, he spoke about how his own immigrant experience shaped h...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Looking past the human greatness applause: "Look what we've created" - for ourselves. "Look what we've achieved" - for ourselves. What have we created and achieved for the world? The early stages of a 6th global extinction. Man's greatness is overrated. spacedaily.com/d-earth-has-...
spacedaily.com
Earth has gone through five mass extinction events in its history, each wiping out the majority of life on the planet — and many biologists argue we are currently in the early stages of the sixth, cau...
The fossil record contains the unambiguous evidence of five separate occasions on which most of the species alive at the time died, in geological terms, very quickly. According to the Natural History ...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
I'm looking forward to when AI can model, label, & identify inauthentic facial expressions. Maudlin, mawkish, simpering, artificial intimation, simulated "over it", performative profundity, bogus depth. What I see automatically will get validated objectively. www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Discri...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
May the scrubbing begin. How embarrassing it must be to Trumpwash DC with superficial makeover glitz, tacking one's name on other men's work, taking credit for their achievements, underscoring one's own lack of potency, and then get your Donald slapped off. www.reuters.com/world/us-jud...
reuters.com
Trump says he will 'transfer' Kennedy Center to Congress after court setback
The judge ruled that the ​iconic Washington venue cannot be ​renamed without an act of Congress.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
I refer to this time as reflection and do it every day. spacedaily.com/n-in-1938-th... "strongly associated with self-referential thought, the simulation of future scenarios, the integration of autobiographical memory, and the kind of loose associative thinking that underlies creative insight."
spacedaily.com
In 1938 the average American spent 47 minutes a day doing nothing — by 2026 that number had almost vanished, and researchers say that lost time was never idle, it was when the brain did its most impor...
In 1965, the earliest large-scale time-diary study ever conducted found that the average American between the ages of 25 and 35 spent the equivalent of nearly an hour each day doing nothing in particu...
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
When theater is the point, we are reasonable to ask if it's good theater or bad. Good theater brings something new, not clings to something old. It adds, not subtracts. www.cnn.com/2026/04/24/p...
cnn.com
Trump’s Justice Department is bringing back firing squads for federal executions | CNN Politics
The Justice Department announced Friday it is continuing to clear the way for expediting federal death-penalty cases, including by expanding the manners of execution to include death by firing squad.
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Asher Black @asherblack.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
If we follow fear instead of science, we return to a world where children routinely died shortly after birth, and mothers often followed soon after. Some lessons were paid for in blood and grief. Forgetting that does not make us wiser. www.propublica.org/article/more...
propublica.org
Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth
A lifesaving injection given at birth to prevent severe bleeding has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.
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