To my American friends,

I love you dearly, but if you joke about the annexation of Canada like it's not deadly fucking serious, I have no issue with dropping your ass. That Damn Frank got a block. I have a feeling that he won't be the last.

This is an invasion we're talking about. An unlawful imposition of one country's will against another.

If you think we'll lie back and just take it, you don't know anything about us.

I like to think that I choose my friends carefully. I call you friends because you are compassionate and strive for kindness and acceptance. I hope y'all don't let me down.

Anyway, if people come back to Mastodon because BlueSky degrades, just say how nice it is to see them.

Don't punish them for having left, don't say they came 'crawling back'. Follow this rule: don't punish behavior you like to see.

All anti-mask laws—even those with so called “medical exceptions”—stigmatize mask-wearing.

Fewer people wearing masks increases the spread of infectious diseases.

No matter how lawmakers try to spin it, any law that criminalizes wearing a mask endangers public health. Period.

The blusters of “5D chess,” from the cognitive dissonance set, wear thinner every day.

It feels to me like we are in a very large Jenga game.

I’m getting, “I wonder what this button does?”

If you think all that's happening is stressful, try being married to someone who has spent her career studying the rise of authoritarian governments and the resulting humanitarian disasters.

I told her about the masked ICE abduction of the Tufts student (she got her first Master's from the Fletcher school there) and she said we might not be coming back from our May trip to Europe. (To be clear, we have a citizenship application pending, not an intention to overstay a visa).

I have to say, it bears a lot of similarities to the stories I heard from my first wife's family about living in Iran under the Shah. Savak was doing very similar things.

Many of my favorite things in this Top Stories Bugle:
NZ
James Nokise
Good News

Plus an un-bleeped C word, all in roughly 15 minutes

https://pca.st/episode/fc663176-0f83-462f-9925-a6f7c5f9e0d9
#TheBugle
#NZ
#JamesNokise
#GoodNews

I’m not a cabinet-level official. I don’t have an army of aides or a security detail helping me. The most sensitive things I handle in my work life are student records, such as grades, protected by FERPA.

Yet I have somehow never accidentally sent my grade sheets to a reporter. Not even once.