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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Matthews out there reminding us how decent and hopeful South Africans can be and that the administration's gift for picking out the utter assholes among South African immigrants is just one more of their failings.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Fortunately the drive to push the envelope on gerrymandering reduced that disparity somewhat, and it will be wondrously amusing to taste its fruits.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I subscribed when it was based on Boston and had fiction in every issue and Cox and Rathvon's puzzles and so on. It went very online and moved to DC to become one more political mag instead of the "all-around interests for complete people" thing it was, and that space is just a lesser one.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Seriously I am still dwelling on this. Is "World War II is the reason the British Empire is no more" a thing? Are there sets of dumbasses who believe it, that it was all hunky dory and well managed and then wasting resources on the Second World War collapsed it all? Really?

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

He also doesn't even get the basic facts right. If he thinks the Empire was awesome, OK, but they would have still lost it, only worse and faster, had they not joined against Britain. Has he not heard of the INA? The Japanese seized Hong Kong and Burma even as they bombed Pearl Harbor.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I believe that's exactly two and a half fathoms.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Nice blue mistflower. I have gone hard into Maryland native plants, and am trying like hell to fight back garlic mustard and stiltgrass; I get stuff at Kollar nursery and at Lauren's in Ellicott City. Do you have other sources?

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

and abuse of young girls, a pretty hard schism between Indian immigrants who wanted to support the family and Americans of Indian descent who rightly thought, fuck those guys), and that some folks in our community have turned their back on all that to support Modi/Trump is enraging.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Sure. But for us as Indian Americans there was a real split with and anger against the Indian immigrant community with issues like, say, the Devyani Khobragade incident, and similar things (I remember, as a grad student in a city where a prominent Indian family got busted for human trafficking

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Judah Grunstein @judah-grunstein.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This in turn highlights the degree to which Trump II's entire agenda has been a series of crusades against invented crises: ICE rounding up criminal undocumented immigrants who don't exist, DOGE rooting out fraud and waste that's not there, DHS finding voter fraud that hasn't happened, ...

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

He already does quite a bit, unfortunately, and his company gives the Trump Boys so much money that the Post had to omit it in a graph of how much they were making on defense investments in order to make the other companies visible.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I would like to see a Platypus discussion of whether such funds, while super for us normie investors, are terrible for the economy writ large because so much corporate ownership belonging to a small number of index fund managers, whose interest is that they all do well in tandem.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Luckey keeps spewing the dipshit idea that Anduril is successful because it "designs for the mission not the contract" but of course the contract is system engineered to meet a requirements lost from the end user. That's why AUTOWARCOM is stupid: the tech should be designed to the end user needs.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I want to agree with you but I think there is a really great Borges short story about a library of completely randomly generated books - not even robo-books - that makes a compelling case to the contrary. I mean, somewhere out there there is the exact right phrase, right? Sample enough junk...

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

It's most of it (because Special Forces wear beards and it is both still allowed and sort of a status symbol).

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Also of course Modi has made ethnonationalism cool again, especially - and inexplicably - among diaspora Indians, who, you'd'a thunk, would have been its most vehement opponents.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Hegseth should be an easy impeachment, but I would think Patel would be easier and would build momentum and friends in DoJ, and RFK _should_ be the easiest but will probably be a bitch....

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Like I was telling a fool of an O6: you can trust David Ignatius or you can write him off as "biased liberal media." But the dude has talked to every SecDef back to Cohen and every NatSec Advisor back to Kissinger and if says people who have been in the pentagon for years are in tears, they are.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Wait, what? Are there no doughnut shops near your department?

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

So you're saying you're another chemist rediscovering the joys of LaTeX?

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Whereas the -least- metal biochem term, also from the world of enzyme kinetics, is "ping pong bi bi"

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Eh. Everyone's worried about China and AI but I hear Shabaka Hutchings or Nduzuzo Makathini and I am worried the US is losing its critical edge in jazz technology

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I mean, Van Hollen is just wrong. Netanyahu is lucky he is allowed -out- by any means other than a plane to the Hague.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Fuck this guy, I am jealous of people who remember more of the weird integral formulae for trigonometric functions than I do

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

As that there is some evidence that Alito at least is enamored of false facts propagated by Trump-aligned media, is it not possible that he is completely unaware, or close to it, of the electoral peril the GOP is in?

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Honestly I wonder how long it is between gold playing Vance and it all going to shit anyway and needing to be redone, since I assume he sort of exudes scum. It would be an interesting experiment.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Man those last three richly, richly deserve to have losses shown in post-vote polling to be due to GOP voter bigotry.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

oh shit you could call the article something like "the Collins problem: how Phil produced Susan"

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Honestly the President's tireless, comprehensive, and thorough efforts to push the numbers more and more towards the opposition, are perhaps the only way in which I strongly approve of his performance and have confidence in his continued approach. Get out there and do some more big rallies, Sir!

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It's time for political scientists everywhere to confront the question of what it even means when the bottom line goes negative and the top one goes past 100

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Liking that nice, linear decline with not much sign of bottoming out

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

"(Photos OK)" wins some kind of award of the day for backhand: bravo!

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Ptashne's Guarneri, not Strad. He had, with typical Ptashne dickishness, -two- Guarneris.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

I mean he also eats letters so you gotta maybe wonder if we are not deploying him adequately against AI slop

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Also Alina Chan and Matt Ridley with their fiction "Viral" where subsequent editions quietly edit out boners from older ones maybe counts

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Milorad Pavic didn't quite do this with "Dictionary of the Khazars" but, sorta kinda?

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I was taught that mathematician Andrey Markov came up with the idea for Markov chains - the probabilistic description of how a system evolves - by looking at how each letter in "Eugene Onegin" predicted the next; he would be quite pleased but unsurprised by this evolution of the idea.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Both that it makes the incumbent "flabby" and at least as much that it reduces selective pressure on the party not to have candidates with histories of, oh, predatory debt collection (or worse things).

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

To give the guy some credit, he does seem like someone who might recoil in horror at fresh fruits and vegetables, so there's some consistency there

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

This ideal is only one of the things the MAGA guys are brainlessly destroying - but really it is maybe one of the most important. Oppose it and however you voted, you're standing on Trump's side and empowering him.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I am genuinely perplexed why people are punching back here. We're our neighbor's keepers and it's why we volunteer or serve in government or whatever to try to make things better. whatever our choices were, we all to sacrifice some to pay back bad ones, and reap the benefits of good.

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Trainees of another fine Canadian transplant mind you

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

No, I think the technical term, from "lucania," is Lucanocracy

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transitionstate.bsky.social @transitionstate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

If the corruption story gets legs you throw in Thomas.

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Like, by the time you are on week 6 and doing Bessent and treasury related bribery impeachment, you want John Q. Voter to be screaming "is *anyone* in this administration not a scumbag?" because the answer is 'no' and that's the lesson you want to impart, one impeachment at a time.

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Chemjobber @chemjobber.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

From 2022 to spring 2025, American PhD-granting universities posted an average of 289 openings in departments of chemistry and biochemistry. Starting in the fall of 2025, that number fell to 185 openings.

a graph of the normal growth rate of the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List, showing two deviations, the year during COVID (fall 2020-spring 2021) and the first year of the second Trump Administration (fall 25-spring 26)

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