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Patrick S. Tomlinson Profile picture
Patrick S. Tomlinson
@stealthygeek
Sci-fi author. Stealthygeek on Blue Sky. pstomlinson on Threads and IG. Get to the escape pods. This place has a warp core breach in progress.
Sue Strong @strong_sue@mastodon.sdf.org 🇺🇦 Profile picture Daniel O'Donnell Profile picture Faye Parry Profile picture Diogenes the Cynic Profile picture Karen Salitis 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇺🇲 Profile picture 16 subscribed
Jul 9 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
What the last week and a half has taught everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear is a press beholden to profit can never be free or objective.

Biden is bad for the business of the news. His administration has been hugely focused, successful, and free of scandal or leaks. 1/ With only the mundane, boring work of actually governing the country to report on, the business of the News has suffered under Biden. Thier stocks are flat, their readership/viewership is down.

They're starving under the weight of Biden's quiet competence. So, he has to go. 2/
Jun 27 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
There's a disconnect among people, especially on the Left, about money in politics.

On one hand, you need a lot of money just to buy your way into the game. But once you're there, money quickly hits the point of diminishing returns.

No amount of cash buys a 17 point margin. 1/ Please don't misunderstand me. Citizens United and the flood of unaccountable dark money it injected into our politics was one of the most damaging, distorting decisions inflicted on our democracy by a bought and paid for SCOTUS majority we're only now beginning to recognize. 2/
May 21 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of otherwise very sharp people are saying "I can't believe the defense called Costello!"

The defense didn't call Costello. Trump did.

The defense did finally manage to get it through Trump's thick skull he couldn't take the stand without 1 of 3 equally bad outcomes. 1/ 1) Self incrimination
2) Contempt of Court charge
3) Perjury charge

There was no other possible outcome. I sincerely doubt Trump would've made it through his own defense questions, much less cross examination. He's just too stupid, arrogant, and combative. 2/
May 14 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
An open letter to the "Genocide Joe" crowd:

Biden is not the President of Israel or CiC of the IDF. He doesn't control Israeli foreign policy nor its military.

The man who does, Bibi Netanyahu, is a far-right fascist actively hurting Biden and trying to elect Donald Trump. 1/ Israel is a major developer, manufacturer, and exporter of weapons in its own right. They are fully capable of standing on their own in a limited engagement like the Gaza invasion, and Bibi has said he would do exactly that if need be. 2/
May 9 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The problem isn't ICE cars vs EV cars.

The problem is cars, period.

EVs are only /marginally/ better for the environment than gas or diesel. But mining their lithium, shipping ore for refinement, shipping again to make batteries, shipping AGAIN to the EV factory... 1/ ...refining the steel and AL for their bodies, all creates a CO² deficit the EV has to "work off" before it's truly carbon neutral. This deficit means the average EV has to be in the fleet for nearly ten years before working off its carbon debt. Only then is it a net positive. 2/
May 2 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Multiple things are true at once:
-Hamas is a terrorist org
-Netanyahu is guilty of war crimes
-Neither are interested in peace or helping their people
-Student protests have been infiltrated by outside agitators
-Police responses have needlessly escalated a tense situation. 1/ -Many protestors have turned explicitly pro-Hamas and echo their anti-semitic rhetoric.
-Israel and the IDF are worsening the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
-The only people benefiting politically are Hamas, Netanyahu, and Putin, at the expense of democracy and Biden. 2/
Apr 26 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Welcome to SCOTUS with an enforceable Code of Ethics;

Amy Coney Barrett: I was nominated by a man who's on criminal trial for stealing the 2016 election via fraud and is the defendant in this immunity case. It's not clear my appointment was even legitimate. I must recuse. 1/ Gorsuch: Ditto

Kavanagh: Samesies and also that same guy's FBI threw over 1,200 tips about my sexual misconduct into the circular file during my nomination process, and ignored the fact someone paid off $200k of my credit card debt, my mortgage, and country club membership. 2/
Mar 3 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
To all the accelerationists trying to engineer a Biden loss so they get a "better" Dem after we "get through" a 2nd Trump term.

If Trump takes office again, there won't be another Democrat, because there won't be another election, you vacuous imbeciles.

J6th was 3 YEARS AGO. 1/ It's not some obscure historical event confined to the sands of time, fallen from living memory. It JUST FUCKING HAPPENED. We all just lived through it.

How did you forget already? The man has said he will be a dictator on Day 1 and argues the right to murder his rivals. 2/
Jan 24 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
What the hell happened in New Hampshire last night? A thread.

The New Hampshire primary yesterday is a tale of two very different 54s.

Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump received 54% of their state party primary votes. But how they got there couldn't be more different. 1/
Image
Image Indeed, both results were historic in very different ways, revealing a great deal about the state of the race.

Let's start with Biden. This election cycle, the DNC ditched Iowa as the 1st in the Nation state it had traditionally been. Instead, the party wanted SC to go 1st. 2/
Jan 22 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Spoke with a younger friend today who thought Danny DeVito got his big break with "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" and it made me realize just how much fucking work we have to do to get Gen Z caught up on Israel/Palestine and, well, literally every other goddamned thing. This is not a stupid friend, btw. He's a studied poet. It just opened my eyes to how much of what we perceive as "common knowledge" is a moving window.

That window leaves the people who come after us blind to the past just as much as it leaves us behind in the present.
Jan 4 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Another day, another round of politically charged SWATTings and bomb threats against politicians and gov buildings.

And another round of incredulous folks asking "Why can't they catch these people?"

Well, after 46 times, we might be the most SWATTed house in the country. 1/ We've therefore had to learn more about SWATTing as a tactic, how it's executed, and the types of people behind it than we ever cared to know.

But for concerned citizens, journalists, and politicos put there with questions about SWATTing, here's a primer, an FAQ. 2/
Dec 27, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This bold attack on the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea by Ukraine says several important things about the state of the war.

The missiles that carried this out were most likely Anglo/French Storm Shadow cruise missile air launched by, most likely, Ukranian Su-24 strike bombers. 1/ There was a Russian S-400 AAA battery on the other side of the bay from this landing ship, their most advanced anti-air system. The Storm Shadows were launched from near their max operational range and still penetrated with ease. 2/
Oct 25, 2023 • 37 tweets • 6 min read
A lot of ink has been spilled over the rise of a new alliance of Authoritarian states including Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Let's call it CRINK. This new Axis of Assholes is being portrayed as ascendant and emboldened to challenge the West.

I have a different take. 1/ Authoritarianism, fascism, it doesn't emerge from prosperity and stability, but from a demand for it. A population turning to strongmen to solve their domestic political problems is already unstable. That doesn't have to mean economic instability. Look at 2016 here. 2/
Sep 8, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I feel like I need to expand a bit on the true scope of the operational impact the unilateral decision by Elon Musk to protect the Russian Black Sea fleet from attack has had on the war.

First, you need to understand the role of modern naval warships. Thread 1/ A modern naval frigate, destroyer, or cruiser isn't just optimized to fight other ships or submarines on the water as they were in WW:II. They are multi-role vessels that can wage war on the ground, in the air, or on the seas.

Long gone are the days of big gun battleships. 2/
Aug 26, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This is a big damned deal. The Ukranian counteroffensive has broken through the primary line of Russian defenses and are approaching Robotyne. This whole green and blue area represents a strategic breakthrough. Reports are the RU units on defense have no reserves. 1/ Ukraine's counterpunch has been bogged down chiefly by lack of air support and minefields which need to be cleared while under artillery fire before they can advance. RU forces had all winter and spring to build these defenses, but the first line is breached now. 2/
Aug 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Here's what I think is happening in GA right now.

Trump spent the weekend attacking the DA, witnesses, judges, everyone. They expected grand jury testimony to take two days, but now with Trump intimidating witnesses they decided to run a hurry up offense and knock it out. 1/ They don't want it to bleed into tomorrow and give him more time to witness tamper and whip up his crazies who might turn up in the morning in response to anything he says tonight. Too much risk. So they're staying in session and will vote out a true bill today. 2/
Aug 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This man was killed in a shoot out today as the FBI tried to arrest him for threatening President Biden hours before he visited UT.

He's already being labeled a "lone wolf" by media.

He was not. He was part of an extensive network of people radicalized by rightwing propaganda. Image These people don't exist in a vacuum, and they don't act without orders. A vast rightwing political machine fills their blank heads with disinformation, makes it as easy as possible to acquire massive arsenals of weapons, and spins them up to attack their perceived enemies.
Aug 3, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Periodic reminder Hyperloop and The Boring Company were deliberate scams to derail the construction of California's High Speed Rail so people would keep buying more Teslas in one of his biggest markets. He's not trying to save the planet. Anyone with that as an actual goal wouldn't torpedo large-scale public transport that would cut down on short hop domestic flights (or promote crypto but that's another story).

He's selling electric cars and collecting user data. That's it.
Jul 10, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
As much as we hate each other's sports teams, Milwaukee and Chicago have a lot in common. Chief among them is our placement on Lake Michigan.

And I'm not exaggerating when I say in the net 30-50 years, this could be among the best places on Earth to live.

That's a problem. 1/ Lake Michigan, and the Great Lakes region in general, sit hundreds of feet above sea level, far beyond the reach of rising oceans. Our winters seemingly grow milder by the year. We have the largest reserves of freshwater anywhere on the planet, and fertile farmland. 2/
Jun 27, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
So much of what "conservatives" label as liberal, isn't. It's just, contemporary.

Climate change isn't liberal, or even political. It's just a scientific fact. It's something we know now we didn't before.

Solutions to it can be liberal or conservative, but not its existence. The epidemic of gun violence in the US isn't political. It's a statistical fact.

The existence of Trans people isn't political. It's a psychological fact.

Wealth inequality.
Healthcare.
Failing infrastructure.

Solutions to these problems are political, not their existence.
Jun 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
To remind everyone, January 6th wasn't Trump's Plan A. It wasn't even Plan B.

Plan A was to steal the 2020 election with Putin's help, just as he'd done in 2016. Blackmailing Ukraine for dirt on Biden was part of that effort.

But it didn't work twice. 1/ As soon as Plan A failed on Nov 3rd, Trump and Co moved into Plan B; create slates of fake electors from half a dozen swing states to try to simply steal the Electoral College vote on Dec 14th.

Except that didn't work, either. The fake electors weren't seated on the 14th. 2/