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The iHeartRadio Music Awards were hosted in Los Angeles on Monday evening, and the one and only Lady Gaga was honored with the Innovator Award for her illustrious career.

"Growing up, I was nothing like most of the people I was around and everything about me represented a community of alternative kids that were underrepresented in my environment," Doechii said. "I was considered weird, but it's OK, because things worked out. As a kid that identified as an artist, as queer, and as a Little Monster, Lady Gaga wasn't just a pop star, she was a lifeline. Gaga taught us that it was OK to be our real selves, to try new things, to try anything, to speak out and to create."

Some good news ;P

On Tuesday night, the Senate 56 to 44 voted to confirm Martin Makary as Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner.

Three Democrats—Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) —joined Republicans in the confirmation vote to appoint Makary, formerly a surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, to lead the agency’s 18,000 employees and spearhead the regulation of products as vast and varied as food, cosmetics, and medical devices.

Substack came under substantial pressure in 2023 for hosting paid newsletters that promoted Nazi ideology and symbols. The company dithered in response to complaints, fueling questions about its values. And in 2019, the company received a major investment geared at attracting journalists with audiences from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — whose head Marc Andreessen is a major Musk ally, recruiting staff for his DOGE efforts.

Substack's Role in the Network State

The company is also a major tentpole in a parallel establishment envisioned by Andressen and other promoters of the Network State movement, which specifically aims to dismantle the United States and replace it with a federation of smaller, competing fiefdoms. At the inaugural Network State conference in Amsterdam, in October 2023, the movement's leader Balaji Srinavasan said (with edits for clarity):

I'm gonna introduce a new concept today, which is the parallel establishment. Each of them replacing a different legacy institution. So for example, at the top there's San Francisco and we're replacing San Francisco with things outside it like Cul-de-Sac in Arizona and Prospera in South America and Cabin, which is in Texas, but also around the world.

We're gonna take out Harvard, and we have parallel education that's Replit, that Synthesis, which is K through 12, but it's also AI tutoring, the Thiel Fellowship, Emergent Ventures. We replace media with parallel media. It's Twitter and X, it's Substack. This concept of the parallel establishment, if you take up all of these new institutional replacements on the right hand side together, that's a parallel establishment.

They exist alongside, the legacy and parallel. They're gaining strength. They're pulling away users until they become the new thing. So this is how we turn that seemingly impossible thing of building a new country, break into a bunch of individual startups and then aggregate them together.

Srinavasan's statement makes clear that Substack is seen as part of a networked effort to replace, rather than augment, legacy media. And it is precisely Substack's strong network effects which are fueling its growth. Substack simplifies the relationship between publisher and reader while also making it easy for creators to amplify and reference other creators on Substack, while simultaneously imposing friction for sources on the open web. Substack's goal is to win. (Readers may be aware of Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, co-authored with Blake Masters, which discusses the power of network effects to achieve effective monopoly control.)

Casey Michel’s Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy around the World explores that last item, the growing problem of foreign funding of U.S. nonprofits in order to exert political influence.2 Addressing this issue might be the best initial opportunity for cross-ideological, bipartisan cooperation toward meaningful nonprofit-sector reform—perhaps leading to broad­er, bolder efforts against Big Philanthropy and its increasingly stretched definitions of charity.

The Trump administration has placed all federal workers in its crosshairs — from executive orders on DEI and return to office, to mass layoffs, destruction of teams, and shuttering of departments — with more to come. It’s easy to feel demoralized, but many workers just like you are stepping up.

The chaos induced by Musk and friends ripping off essential (often lifesaving) departments and services is already leading to mass popular outrage. Millions of ordinary people know they benefit from the protections and service that DOGE is slashing. All of those people can become allies alongside the power of workers and their unions acting collectively. With those two factors together, the battle may be long, but workers can win. Here are some ways to join the fight.

-What is the NLRA: https://workerorganizing.org/what-is-the-nlra-9318/

-Am I covered by the NLRA: https://workerorganizing.org/am-i-covered-by-the-nlra-9620/

-We can still organize and win under a weakened NLRB: https://workerorganizing.org/we-can-still-organize-and-win-under-a-weakened-nlrb-9578/

Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Dean Baker about China trade policy for the January 10, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Article from January 2025:

The United States Health and Human Services Department (HHS) published a landmark report on intersex health equity last week, calling for an end to medically unnecessary non-consensual surgeries on children born with intersex variations.

The report, based on a literature review and listening sessions with intersex people, ethicists, and medical professionals, states that “the over 5 million intersex people in our nation deserve to live healthy and fulfilling lives free from stigma and discrimination.”

Children born with variations in their sex characteristics, sometimes called intersex traits, are often subjected to “normalizing” surgeries that are irreversible, risky, and medically unnecessary. Approximately 1.7 percent of people have an intersex trait, meaning intersex variations are not uncommon, but often misunderstood.

Nearly half (47%) of all clinical trials remain unpublished.

Whether a trial is published and how long it takes is influenced by whether there are positive results, how large the trial is and if it is single- or multi-centred, and which type of organisation has funded the trial.

Publication bias is a problem because it means that the information available to people making important health-related decisions for themselves, their relatives or their patients is not complete and may even be misleading. For example, if negative results have not been published, there is a danger that the decision-makers may not be aware of possible harms linked to the intervention.

In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She placed a glass cylinder full of carbon dioxide in sunlight and found that it heated up much more than a cylinder of ordinary air. Her conclusion: more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet.

(Eunice was also a suffragate)

Just wanted to share the servers Gardenfence has identified as hate sources so you can curate your fedi experience better.

https://github.com/gardenfence