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Mark Sumner 🌒

@devilstower.bsky.social
20K followers 524 following 4.4K posts

Author, journalist, old guy. Science, climate, space, transportation, energy, and how human selection drives the evolution of all of the above. www.unchartedblue.com

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Reposted by Mark Sumner 🌒
Alt CDC (they/them) @altcdc.altgov.info · 19h
Proud of the CDCers who fought to get this vital info out! 30% of our workforce is gone. Heartbroken by the loss of brilliant scientists, institutional knowledge, & frankly my friends, colleagues, & mentors. An understaffed CDC harms the public & leaves the US vulnerable. Rebuilding will take years
nytimes.com
‘Zombified’ C.D.C., Hobbled by Cuts, Struggles to Fulfill Scientific Mission (Gift Article)
The agency has lost its independence and nearly a third of its staff, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and associates have tightened control.
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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 14h
The US has withdrawn from GRECO, the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption watchdog, which it has been a member of since 2000, ABC reports. Russia and Belarus are the only other countries to have left the group.
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Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 20h
This is priceless. Check out how local news is reporting on Sen Eric Schmidt’s clown-show grilling of Jack Smith. They found Jack Smith at the game… “Top corner, section 109, row 1. In fact, that seat doesn’t even exist in Atlanta.”
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
As a longtime Missouri resident, I can assure you that Eric Schmitt doesn’t need anyone’s help to look like an idiot.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I’m getting so much stronger in my old age. Just carried in $161 of groceries in a single trip.
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The funniest thing about the Schmitt rake stomp is that if it'd been a Dem we'd have a week of think pieces about how Dems lack of hoops literacy was alienating them from real America.
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Pam Herd @pamherd.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
America.gov launched today--a DOGE initiative to use AI to deliver public services. Child lying facedown on a frozen lake as the image accompanying the question: "How can I invest in my child's future" is just incredible. Way to go AI
Image of a child lying facedown on a froze lake.  above is the portal where you ask AI questions about government services.  the question matching this image is:  "How can I invest in my child's future?"
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Misty morning with dinosaur.
Blue heron hunches among beaches at edge of foggy pond.
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ebisback.bsky.social @ebisback.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Pathetic Weak Sauce 😡
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Anonymous @opsnowcrash.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Meta’s ad ban on progressive Lula shows US #tech #billionaires aren't just aiding far-right figures—they ARE the transnational #oligarchy seizing power across borders. Big Tech, Donald #Trump, and jailed Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flávio operate as one global network targeting democracies. #Zuckerberg
News graphic featuring side-by-side portraits of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva looking serious on the left and Mark Zuckerberg smiling on the right. White text below reads: "Facebook Blocks Lula’s Campaign Ads Days Before Brazil Election / But allows paid posts calling for the military to ‘take back power’."
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Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @nothoodlum.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
IMPORTANT: There are 15 states that require in-person registration 28–30 days before an election, meaning this maybe your last week to register. Check your registration at Vote.gov.
vote.gov
Register to vote in your state | Vote.gov
Find the information you need to make registration and voting easy. Official voter registration website of the United States government.
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Rep. Melanie Stansbury (NM-01) @repstansbury.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
These people have no idea what’s happening in America right now. And, they don’t care. White House Deputy Chief of Staff post last night ⬇️
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Paul Voosen @voosen.me · 28/09/2026
New Horizons is now *three days away* from shutting off its two heliophysics instruments, simply because NASA has not provided the $2M in funding it had promised to the mission last year or this year. There is no science basis for shutting these off. Our earlier coverage:
science.org
NASA’s New Horizons mission may shut down two instruments over lack of funding
Decision risks “incalculable loss” of data from the edge of the Sun’s influence, scientists say
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Very well stated reminder from Astrid at @oddpride.com
youtu.be
you don't believe in rights, you believe in privileges #philosophy #abolition
YouTube video by Astrid Lundberg
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
How different would things look if AI was entirely a scheme to extract the last drops of capital from a failing system while covering up how quickly everything was falling apart?
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Ayuh, gonna be wicked awful clammin at the hahbah.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Maybe it’s not that their face is just made that way. Maybe they really are happy.
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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
US social media companies are interfering in the Brazilian elections in favour of the Far Right’s Flávio Bolsonaro. Meta is the latest. It’s just blocked the campaign account of President Lula in the final stretch of the election.
elespectador.com
Meta restringe la cuenta de Lula y su partido alerta por posible injerencia extranjera
De cara a las elecciones en Brasil, Lula enfrenta a Meta por restringir su cuenta mientras su partido alerta por posible injerencia extranjera.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
No, fortunately enough. I’ve had migraine with aura many times, and it’s awful. This is, for me at least, a purely visual phenomenon. My vision disintegrates into a collection of glowing bits of geometry. Then it gradually moves away from the center of vision before fading.
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Xela Hart @xelahart.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Experiencing an ocular migraine for the second time in recent weeks. This one appears like an arc of very bright red and blue triangles connected by glowing lines. Fortunately, no other symptoms, but it did take a scary long time to spread out so I could see well enough to read.
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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Maybe if you don’t make your former golf caddie the Deputy White House Chief of Staff then he wouldn’t be in a position to do dumb shit that can hurt your entire party right before the midterms. But hey, Caligula made his horse a senator.
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Mrs. Betty Bowers @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The empathetic folks at Mar-a-Lago react to hearing you lost your healthcare, your child has measles, and you can't afford to gas up your truck:
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Carl Zimmer @carlzimmer.com · 27/09/2026
Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc
nyti.ms
Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)
An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.
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DaughterOfDefiance @z-buck.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I really, really hate this timeline... Also, why the hell was this NOT reported on when it happened (Mar 2026)???
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Wellman reacting to this ad: “There is no surgery for minors. That's what enrages me about this issue. This is not a thing that occurs. This is a way to guide us to... Look, they have found a small population that they can openly hate. And it disgusts me.”
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
This is an image from Ann Wagner’s congressional ad. Dem candidate Fred Wellman is a West Point graduate and Desert Storm veteran who lost his wife in a car accident when she was 7 months pregnant. Wagner displays pictures of Wellman laughing over claims he “wants boys in girl’s sports.” And this—
Ann Wagner ad claiming “Wellman wants gender mutilation on minors”
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Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
chat is this good?
all construction dropping massively.
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𝕊𝕦𝕟𝕕𝕒𝕖 𝔾𝕦𝕣𝕝 @sundaedivine.lol · 27/09/2026
The affordability crisis looks very different from their table.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The “Love Me” commercial ran this morning during CBS Sunday Morning. How much are we spending on this national tongue bath?
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Redshirts is a fun and clever book. And that would be it … until the epilogue elevates the book and reframes the whole work into something genuinely special.
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Tony @tiletony.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
It was a crime the first time he made the offer, and it's still a crime tonight.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I just got through listening to my mom complain that, at 91, they force her to take so much from her 401K that she ends up paying double for Medicare. Combine with the Medigap plan and it eats most of what they require her to take.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Explaining that a Medicare For All plan would remove the need to sift through dozens of options—while fending off literally *hundreds* of spam calls from insurance agents—would genuinely excite one of the most reliable voting blocks.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
You’d get a lot more support of Medicare For All from people already on Medicare if the plan didn’t require them to read a 131-page book every fall detailing thousands of small, unintelligible rule changes to make literally life or death decisions while never knowing if they made the right choices.…
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The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
CARTOON OF THE DAY…
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Timothy Mellon, heir to Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Mellon's fortune, gave nearly $200M to elect Trump and Republicans in 2024 and over $20M so far this midterm cycle. Tax dynastic wealth now.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I find that 99% of these works boil down to “The party wasn’t recognizing my singular genius, so I betrayed everything I said I believed to get more attention.”
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Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 26/09/2026
This is actually hell, right?
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Hunter @hunterub.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Killing the for-profit health insurance industry would immediately improve American life, and is probably the single biggest improvement to Americans' lives govt could provide. It devolved into 'scam' 20 years ago; now it's a nest of scams within scams.
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Harry Turtledove @hntdove.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Is this living forever, or is it just making the living you're doing seem like forever?
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Alt National Park Service @altnps.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Another fight over who controls the nation’s purse strings. The White House announced that it plans to cancel $810 million in spending already approved by Congress, using a rarely used maneuver known as a “pocket rescission.”
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Bobby Kogan @bbkogan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I think something to consider here is that Collins voted to confirm Russ Vought as OMB Director despite the fact that he said a billion times that he thought Trump had a constitutional right to illegally impound funds, and now she’s doing shocked Pikachu reactions.
Sen. Susan Collins • fAl
劉
@SenatorCollins
X.com
Without warning or consultation, Congress just received an $810 million package of pocket rescissions from the Administration. This is the most recent attempt by this Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to undermine Congress's Constitutional power of the purse.
This move shows that OMB intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law.Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress's appropriations powers.
OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.
The independent Government Accountability Office has concluded that pocket rescissions are unlawful and not permitted by the Impoundment Control Act. Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.
I will work with my colleagues to address these illegal actions.
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Arbaz Kakkar5 @arbazkakkar5.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Did you know that the United States officially withdrew from the Human Rights Council last Friday. The day after a UN group accused the Administration of multiple war crimes in Iran. Seems like something shithole countries do.
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Mark Sumner 🌒 @devilstower.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Dang it. I forgot to wish everyone a Happy Devil’s Tower Day yesterday. On Sep 24, 1906, Teddy Roosevelt declared the first National Monument.
Photograph of Devil’s Tower rising over pine trees
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vortex_egg @vortexegg.com · 21/09/2026
One of the problems with the AI industry being run by apocalyptic millenarian cultists isn’t that their end of the world scenarios are made up; it’s that like other similar millennialists, they think their desired end of the world is a utopia and they’ll do whatever they can to make it real.
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Pema Levy @pemalevy.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
In destroying the Voting Rights Act and gutting the 14th and 15th amendments, the Roberts court is recycling legal arguments once advanced by Confederates and white supremacists to destroy Reconstruction. From me and @ariberman.bsky.social
motherjones.com
Jim Crow was on the ash heap of history. Then came the Roberts court.
The disaster the justices have unleashed has its roots in one of the darkest periods of our past.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Incredible. First Secretary Mullin claimed that DHS had identified 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter roll. Then DHS officials told a skeptical Nevada, no no no, that’s just people we flagged. Here are the names of 185 people we KNOW aren’t citizens. All 185 were citizens. DHS got 100% wrong.
When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to vote, state election officials got to work.
On Tuesday, the state sent a strongly worded rebuke to the federal government: Every single person on the list was a lawful citizen.
"As for the 185 individuals, our records indicate that they were citizens," Greg D. Ott, a deputy attorney general in Nevada, wrote, according to a copy of a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security officials obtained through open records requests.
"You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise."Following the meeting, Ms. Vogt sent a clarifying email to Nevada officials. "I also wanted to be sure I clarified that we did not reduce the 15,903 to 185," she wrote. "We've manually reviewed some of the 15,903 and confirmed 185 are not U.S. Citizens."
Now, Nevada officials are saying even that 185 number is wrong. They also took issue with a letter D.H.S. sent them in early September, in which the agency reiterated its initial claims about nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the rolls and pressured state officials to review each case in a letter to Nevada officials in early September.
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