Sense & Synthesis

@sensynthesis.bsky.social

2481 Followers 6352 Following

Liberal Texan. Appalled American. Pro-democracy mom, strategist, nerd, advocate, writer, accidental science communicator. No Kings. Good must prevail. Public health is a group project. We’re all vulnerable to disability. Ish shouldn’t be this hard.

theguardian.com Unattainable healthcare is not the only challenge Americans face that Trump has decided is not his problem. The lack of affordable childcare is a key reason why American women's labor participation is among the lowest in the industrialized world. But government spending on early childhood education and care is also among the stingiest among affluent nations. What does Trump care about? The BBB communicated his overarching interest in cutting the tax bill of the well-to-do, offering up a $4.5tn tax cut over 10 years that will boost the after-tax income of the richest 10% of the population by 2.7%, a cool $13,622 per household, according to the Congressional Budget Office. AL To the average American, it must be hard to understand Trump's budget proposal as anything but a betrayal Trump's other interest is hard power, to better crush his foes. The BBB last year included $165bn for the Department of Homeland Security to "deliver on the President's mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe again" '. Last week, he bet the house to pay for a bigger military. As he put it at an Easter lunch reception last week: "We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country." That is proving expensive. By some estimates, the Pentagon spent $12.7bn in the first six days and $28bn in a little over five weeks on the war against Iran, which appears to have next to nothing to do with guarding the country. His budget proposal, released last week, the one that cut the budget for HHS by 12% and the entire non-defense budget by 10%, was transparent about the Brobdingnagian sums Trump wants to spend on this kind of stuff: $1.5tn in 2027 alone. About three times Iran's entire GDP and 42% more than the budget for 2026. The message to everyday Americans is: beware. The cuts to the non-defense budget in the 2027 proposal are nowhere near enough to cover this increase in defense spending. Given Trump's and the Republ…
January 13, 2026 Monty Bennett, Chair Refuge of Renewal Dear Monty. Please accept this letter as my resignation from the board of directors of Refuge of Renewal, effective immediately. In our early meetings about the creation of this organization and its mission, we discussed how we might help our neighbors in need by providing them a one-stop-shop for necessary services to get them back on their feet, modeled after Haven for Hope in San Antonio. But I think I was clear in those discussions that I had no interest in being associated with any kind of program that would effectively criminalize poverty. Perhaps this letter comes later than it should have. Since that time, I have watched with increasing concern as the organization's rhetoric around homelessness has escalated from something that at first seemed altruistic to something more punitive, as if homeless people were themselves the problem instead of fellow human beings in need of a solution. But the problem is not the unhoused people that we all co-exist with in our city; it's the poverty that plagues them. And if the rest of us truly want to solve what some would view as "our" problem, we can do so only by solving theirs first. It has always been, and continues to be, my strong belief that social problems can only be solved by identifying and addressing the root causes, not simply removing the problem from the sight of those lucky enough to be unafflicted. Unfortunately, those root causes in this case are many, and they have only been compounded in recent years by brutal economic conditions that have made it exceedingly difficult for many people to afford basic needs. Homelessness will not be solved by forcing people to be "shipped off" to a place where they are out of sight and out of mind. It will be solved through smart policies that address poverty. Often, those living in poverty do so not because they have chosen their station, but because they had no choice at all. The solution is to provide them choices…
Sarah Kendzior © 1h Sarah Kendzior's Newsletter Subscribe I was suspended from BlueSky for defending the honor of Johnny Cash. I wish I were joking. In early October, I referenced the "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" lyric of "Folsom Prison Blues" in response to a terrible Wall Street Journal article saying that Johnny Cash was uncool. I quote-tweeted the article and everyone understood the reference. There was no outcry. I stand by my assessment that Johnny Cash is cool. I do not like being the subject of so much attention, especially when I cannot see the discussion. But the BlueSky admins are now claiming that I wrote a post saying, out of nowhere, "I want to shoot the author of this article just to watch him die". They are not posting a screenshot of the actual tweet, which shows that I am quote-tweeting an article about Johnny Cash, and that my post is obviously not a threat but a play on "Folsom Prison Blues." BlueSky is lying and saying I posted this line on November 10. I did not. I posted it in early October, when the WS article came out. You can see that they are lying about the date from this page showing my last BlueSky tweets: I was not given any explanation for my suspension the first two times I inquired. Later I was told it was for the "Folsom Prison Blues" reference, and I asked for clarification but did not receive it. I thought it might be a prank until a reporter reached out this morning and confirmed it. BlueSky's behavior is bizarre and unwarranted. I have lost access to friends and all my posts and photos. I am incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support here on Substack and also on BlueSky - though I cannot see it, because I am suspended. To quote another Johnny Cash song: "I ain't never done nothin' to nobody/ I ain't never got nothin from nobody, no time/ And until I get somethin' from somebody, sometime, I don't intend to do nothin' for nobody, no time." As for BlueSky...
9:43 AM Wed Nov 12 facebook Sharon Astyk So here's why I think we're actually reopening. And no, I don't think it is because of the Democrats' commitment to alleviating human suffering, although that makes good press. I think the reason that the Democrats were allowed and encouraged to break ranks BY THE REPUBLICANS WHO SIGNALLED THAT THEY WERE WILLING TO END A SHUTDOWN GENERALLY WANTED BY THE RIGHT was the airline industries. Think about it, polling shows that the general public did NOT believe the Republican "Democratic shutdown" message by and large, and that and the midterms showed that people are really angry at the Republicans. While the Republicans want a shutdown, their narrative was failing. Moreover, with the collapse of air travel, the airline and related industries were breathing hard down their necks. Meanwhile a lot of Democrats were both simultaneously legitimately queasy about SNAP and ALSO under pressure from the airline and hospitality industries (remember BOTH Nevada senators were among the votes for this?) Meanwhile, Trump just announced a "new" system for air traffic control, which I will be a billion dollars I don't have is an Al system, and that some kind of indemnifying of the airline industry against judgement is coming. Oh, and they slipped in a gutting of all food safety regulations for companies. 9:44 AM Wed Nov 12 facebook So here's what the Dems got. - A vote that will never, ever happen in the House on the ACA. Yes, Republican senators will have to vote against it, but since the House won't, it won't matter. And since they don't plan to have fair elections... - SNAP fully funded for one year, and it can't be cut during the next shutdown which ALL parties are fully aware of. - Return of federal employees with back pay they would have been getting anyway and a bar against firing those specific employees during the next shutdown. - A delay on the collapse of air travel until after peak flying season - The seating of Gri…
Time Magazine cover of Donald Trump. “His Triumph” is the headline. This use of “Triumph” and the angle on the photo allude to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda.
Student standing in front of four tanks, Tiananmen Square, 1989
Propaganda 101: #1: If you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. #2: Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty. #3: Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident that they are acting on their own free will. #4: It [is] vitally important for the State... to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus... the greatest enemy of the State. - Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for "Public Enlightenment" (Propaganda) in Nazi Germany.
The reporter is a graduate of University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University.
“There is something deeply hypocritical about praying for a problem you are unwilling to resolve." - Miroslav Volf
Image of 3 skeets re: a corrupt system
Oliver Jeffers, 03 April 2025: “Another piece I made 8 years ago that has eerie echoes to today. On top of an old globe I acquired long ago, decayed to such a degree that it looked like the earth was scorched, I found where the USA lay, and painted a beautiful rose garden behind a picket fence. I called it ‘America First’, and along with the handwritten type that says ‘Made America Great Again’ I was referring to two oft repeated Conservative slogans in order to point out both the absurdity and irresponsibility of an isolationist approach to a climate growing rapidly more hostile to human life. Yesterday’s news of the USAs new policy on global tariffs gives me similar feelings of an even stronger ‘what’s in it for me’ isolationist attitude to what has been an interconnected world. But with the added fear that climate, a still looming catastrophic problem, has been relegated to the sidelines. Tariffs, trade and economics are man-made concepts we could alter overnight, if we all agreed. The climate is not. To stand any chance of survival, we need to start acting with a sense of unified purpose. The weather doesn’t care about borders or tariffs.
The crisis is here now. Trump is enacting an insidious coordinated attack on our institutions of democratic accountability, designed to crater democracy before next fall.
nationalgeographic.com "April 19th, 1995, still matters," noted Clinton. "It matters a lot because it shows you how wrong things can go and how horrible the consequences can be when someone who feels politically and personally alienated from a country and a government thinks that there's no sensible alternative to mass violence. "We need for people to recognize that our differences are good, healthy, even essential. But only if our common humanity matters more. On April the 19th, Timothy McVeigh showed us what happens when our common humanity doesn't matter anymore."
https://youtu.be/WLmi5nxP3pQ?si=XWwsx7FIGtTHjCNz
“How You Interview a Fascist” H/t to https://bsky.app/profile/brexitbin.bsky.social
Information flyer on facts about Social Security. Quarter-page flyer placed in a Target ladies room.
Amb. Susan Rice urges every Senate Dem to vote against cloture and against continuing resolution.
Mary Oliver Of The Empire We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
“When it comes down to it, we often don't know who has better angels in their nature. Sometimes the seemingly the worst people stand up, while people who seem better fail. Because human beings are often disappointing. And occasionally heroic. And the reason that happens is because humans have those principles they aspire to, and can sometimes, occasionally, apply them for justice. But in this case we know for public certainty, with no doubt- and it is because of the service that Zelensky did to America, that America chose leaders who do not share basic human values, and are so far removed from them they don't even understand that something is missing. And if they had the grace to be ashamed, or to understand how they failed, we'd be better off.” - Sharon Astyk
Fact sheet of the proposed budget’s impact on TX-24, the North Texas district repped by Republican Beth Van Duyne. This tool can generate a district-specific PDF that you can share.
How you get norovirus from people and surfaces.
Musk’s 14-flag tweet response to DJT at 14:14 Washington DC time.
Adam Grant @AdamMGrant The purpose of negative emotions is not to cause misery. It's to prevent mistakes. Outrage is a signal to speak up. Anxiety is a prompt to prepare. Guilt is a reminder to repair. Disappointment is a cue to persist. Pain reveals principles. Where we hurt is a clue to what we value.
New “Journal of the Academy of Public Health” may as well be a publication of The Brownstone Institute. This new “journal” is designed to give disinformation about science and public health an air of legitimacy. Don’t fall for it.
Cornyn Facebook post mocking protestors at his Texas offices and praising Musk and DJT. Gross bootlicking.
Children Learn What They Live by Dorothy Law Nolte (1924 - 2005) If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn. If children live with hostility, they learn to fight. If children live with fear, they learn to be apprehensive. If children live with pity, they learn to feel sorry for themselves. If children live with ridicule, they learn to feel shy. If children live with jealousy, they learn to feel envy. If children live with shame, they learn to feel guilty. If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence. If children live with tolerance, they learn patience. If children live with praise, they learn appreciation. If children live with acceptance, they learn to love. If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves. If children live with recognition, they learn it is good to have a goal. If children live with sharing, they learn generosity. If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness. If children live with fairness, they learn justice. If children live with kindness and consideration, they learn respect. If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them. If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live. Excerpted from the book CHILDREN LEARN WHAT THEY LIVE ©1998 by Dorothy Law Nolte and Rachel Harris The poem "Children Learn What They Live" Dorothy Law
Quote from linked article, including Hegseth’s Dominionist language within recent books.