More pretty pictures

Another Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of the Year (runners up to this set) … and another set of Top Planetary Astronomy Pictures of the Year. Nice.

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***Dave Does the Mastodon

5 hours ago

#USA under #Trump: winning hearts and minds!

"America's adversaries cheer Trump admin's #USAID teardown"

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/trump-usaid-musk-doge-russia-iran

13 hours ago

" #Trump [again] suggests permanent resettlement of #Palestinians from #Gaza "

Pssst. Hey, Donald. The official term is #EthnicCleansing . Yeah, I know, that sounds bad, but, hey, since it's official US policy to keep #Netayahu happy ...

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5126689-trump-palestinians-resettlement/

21 hours ago

Amidst all the other very legitimate sturm und drang going on, it's good to grab a few moments of happiness.

The first trailer for #Fantastic4 just dropped, and it looks pretty fantastic.

#MCU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzMo-FgRp64

2 days ago

#uspol

I'm old enough to remember when Obama indirectly naming some "czars" to coordinate activities led to a near-Constitutional crisis with the #GOP about overreach.

Now some guys the President likes can, without any sort of legal authority, go into any government agency they want and do whatever they want there. And anyone there who tries to "resist" will be prosecuted by a supportive US attorney.

This is not an elected government.

#ElonMusk #trump #doge

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/02/03/martin-supports-for-musk-doge/

2 days ago

Among the other things the @internetarchive does: make archives of government websites at the end of each presidential term.

#internetarchive #memoryhole

https://blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/end-of-term-web-archive/

2 days ago

Hey, remember when we were sending people to prison for violating #classified information laws?

And then #Trump showed that with enough money and a loud enough mouth and a friendly judge you appointed you could get away with screwing around with classified information.

And now government workers are being punished if they *don't* give up classified information to unauthorized Trump / #Musk apparatchiks.

And it's just going to get worse.

https://apnews.com/article/doge-musk-trump-classified-information-usaid-security-35101dee28a766e0d9705e0d47958611

3 days ago

USpol LGBTQ

"CDC orders mass retraction and revision of submitted research across all science and medicine journals. Banned terms must be scrubbed."

("If we don't officially talk about them, they don't officially exist. If they don't officially exist, then we can ...")

Remember these words. Use them whenever you can. Don't let them, or the people they reference, be forgotten.

#LGBT #Trump #censorship #Orwellian

https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction

3 days ago

Cool collection of #photos, made during the #CivilWar, of the last survivors of the #RevolutionaryWar. All the things they'd seen...

#History

https://m.dpreview.com/articles/6830970866/how-two-brothers-tried-to-photograph-the-last-survivors-of-the-revolutionary-war

4 days ago

And now the "T" in #LGBT is being erased from federal websites. Because of course it is.

The concern had been, with a hostile administration, protections being taken from #trans folk. Now it seems the idea is to remove that entire identity. To make them unpersons.

This is evil.

5 days ago

Apparently we can only "defend women" by actively stamping out even discussion about transgender folk, let alone acknowledging they exist, let alone respecting them as human beings.

But, then, it's not actually about defending women.

https://www.lawdork.com/p/trump-anti-trans-eo-opm-censorship-websites-data

5 days ago

Promoting #despair is a weapon. Persuasion that defeat is inevitable makes it inevitable.

Those are the first opponents to fight against: those who say you should give up, you should tune out, let us have our way.

#Tolkien was pretty clear about that, and about being born into bad times.

6 days ago

Oh, I missed the part where he rambled for several minutes about how #helicopters can go up and down and back and forth and start and stop ... so probably the helicopter pilot was also to blame.

Who needs an #FAA investigation when you have #Trump on the job?

Yeesh.

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-helicopter-pilot/

6 days ago

I know that hoping for sensitivity, compassion, or leadership from #Trump is futile, but I could have gone all year without listening to his first official response to the DC plane crash, which, TL;DR "It's all Obama and Biden and Buttigieg's fault, not mine, because they hired terrible unqualified people under all those horrible #DEI rules, and got rid of all the great people I hired, so blame them, not me."

What an awful little man.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-consoles-nation-after-american-airlines-crash-by-playing-blame-game/

7 days ago

I know it's probably the least awful bit about #Trump now being President, but the fact he'll be President for the US Semiquincentennial in 2026 guarantees non-stop heartburn in my sensibilities as a patriot and historian. I guarantee it's going to be a madhouse of self-serving hyper-nationalism, all of it centered on the #DearLeader and his #MAGA cronies.

Ugh.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/celebrating-americas-250th-birthday/

7 days ago

#Trump personally sends #ElonMusk into space to rescue astronauts #Biden and #NASA abandoned there.

Or at least that's today's Hollywood blockbuster-style chunk of falsehood from the #WhiteHouse

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/the-long-planned-return-of-two-astronauts-from-space-is-now-a-political-issue/

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