Jonathan Gitlin

@drgitlin.bsky.social

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Writer about cars. Former science policy wonk. I’m what happens when you only have a finite number of monkeys typing in a room.

PFP: my racing helmet, which is British racing green with a safety orange arrow design, inspired by the Porsche 908/3 gulf cars

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Jonathan Gitlin

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post malone ergo propter malone

The Parkinson's angle in particular has been so fucking strange to me because it is very obviously the result of a game of telephone with "dementia -> alzheimer's -> parkinson's" because MUMBLING AND FORGETTING THINGS IS NOT WHAT FUCKING PARKINSON'S IS

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Jonathan Gitlin

Visitor logs show that the Biden Administration invited over a thousand college athletes, including women's teams, to the White House last year. Speculation is rife that Biden intends to enter college athletics as a transgender woman. -- NY Times www.si.com/college/2023...

The White House Is Honoring NCAA Athletes in a New Waywww.si.com President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden will host champions from a range of collegiate sports at the nation’s capital.

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Jonathan Gitlin

The Dems held a primary and Biden won the nomination The Dems have a backstop program in case the nominee is incapable of running: the contested convention The country has a backstop in case POTUS is incapable of running the country: the 25th Amendment Everything else is commentary

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Jonathan Gitlin

What Beutler here euphemistically calls “persuasion” is better understood as a systematic campaign to pressure and undermine Biden so he has no choice but to leave the race. I’m not trying to put my spin on it, that’s what’s being attempted here.

New: on one level, what needs to happen is pretty simple. Dems need to persuade Biden to suspend his campaign. But the “how?” of the succession is not as simple as so many pundit and donor fantasies, and requires methodical thinking.

A Methodical Approach To The Democratic Succession Crisiswww.offmessage.net In a void of important information, half-baked ideas are flourishing. This is a complicated decision, and only Joe Biden can make it.

The real joy is in smelling Manhattan during the summer. The milky beige puddles that line midtown curbs are a particular highlight.

Honestly, seeing people find out in the wild that New York City has giant mounds of trash bags ten feet high along every sidewalk in the city three or four times a week is one of the great pleasures of the internet. Yes, the entire city. Every trash day. Looks like this. For real, not a joke.

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Jonathan Gitlin

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Michael Paulauski

If anything, this should prove once and for all that the Politics Knowers: 1. know nothing 2. are not interested in the truth 3. do not realize just how much they've overplayed their hand. and most importantly 4. were never actually interested in Biden's Mental Health.

Wonder why the White House would have a Parkinson's expert visiting over the last year. Very suspicious stuff

I live a block from a supermarket and metro stop. 10 min from a ballpark, 10 min from the soccer stadium. 15 min from DCA. I can walk to dozens and dozens of restaurants and stores. What are these assholes so afraid of—that life doesn’t have to be awful and isolating?

Heaven forbid we're able to walk to stores instead of having to drive to them. I want to find common ground with people, but it's always a shock when someone sees my ideal version of the future as an authoritarian hellscape.

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Jonathan Gitlin

"National Plan to End Parkinson’s Act" signed on July 2, 2024 (this is not mentioned in the NYT reporting)

Breaking News: A Parkinson’s expert visited the White House eight times in eight months from last summer through this spring, according to official visitor logs. The administration has said that President Biden has no signs of the disease.

Parkinson’s Expert Visited the White House Eight Times in Eight Monthswww.nytimes.com The White House has said that President Biden has no signs of the disease and that there has been no reason to update the most recent testing, conducted in February.

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Jonathan Gitlin

We have seen some extraordinary crusades from the NYT: - getting a college President fired for dubious old plagiarism claims - abetting the far right push to destroy trans care - HER EMAILS - Biden’s age We’ve never seen them pursue anything close to this against the far right.

Watching a TV show that thinks a mass spectrometer is a really accurate scale for weighing things. 🤣

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Jonathan Gitlin

it’s sick as hell that the daytime weather for every location on earth is converging to “too hot to go outside” or “raining”

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Jonathan Gitlin

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The Silvered Spherical Ideal Median Voter

"Why I'm Leaving Neopets" by Bret Stephens

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Jonathan Gitlin

Review: Catching up with "Doctor Who" and Ncuti Gatwa’s stellar freshman season. The "Sex Education" actor brings sparkling energy, charisma, and superb style to the role. arstechnica.com/culture/2024...

Review: Catching up with Doctor Who and Ncuti Gatwa’s stellar freshman seasonarstechnica.com The Sex Education actor brings sparkling energy, charisma, and superb style to the role

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Jonathan Gitlin

My biggest problem with #TheAcolyte is that if you're going to name one twin "Osha" the other needs to be "Fema". #DC #FedLife

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Jonathan Gitlin

Biden didn’t get up and perform athletic feats but it seems like a pretty normal interview from an old guy? This is the single greatest moment of political derangement I have ever witnessed in this country. The president gives a normal interview and everyone says… he must join Nixon and resign?

You’d think admitting to distributing counterfeit money would get you a visit from the Secret Service…

As a side note, this is John McEntee, Trump's Director of White House Personnel and the primary architect of Project 2025. On Tik Tok he said he gives counterfeit bills to homeless people so they will be arrested when they go to spend them.

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Jonathan Gitlin

People complained that Chengdu zoo was letting their clouded leopard get fat, their expert explained "This cat is like thirty years old, that's twice as old clouded leopards GET, and he's just had major surgery. Making him lose weight would do WAY more harm, just let him have this."

And yet you assholes don’t do this for Trump, who can barely string a coherent sentence together. You ought to be ashamed, except I doubt you have the capacity.

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Jonathan Gitlin

One thing rich people forget–or if they're heirs, never learned–is that life can deal you a bad hand & there's no option but to make the best of it & play it out anyway. Huge "I demand to speak to the manager" vibes here.

Assholes: "Abigail Disney, an heiress to the Disney family fortune, plans to withhold donations to Democrats until Joe Biden drops out. Gideon Stein said he’s decided to pause planned donations of $3.5 million." www.cnbc.com/2024/07/04/d...

Disney heiress, wealthy Democratic donors say they won't finance the party until Joe Biden drops outwww.cnbc.com President Joe Biden faces a rebellion from wealthy Democratic donors after his debate performance against Donald Trump.

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Jonathan Gitlin

Tell me I'm wrong: A bunch of the media and donor class panicked, for good reason, after the debate. Made a big coordinated push to make Biden step aside. Didn't work, wounding pride of lots of big egos. Now too miffed to concede so stuck denying that Biden can win to justify continued aid to Trump.

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No, Biden Should Not Drop Out FFS Please Stop…

The amount of whining I see on this app from people who think all it takes is one election then happily ever after is really shocking.

Every election had always been, and always will be, the most important one, until we lose it and get a little more fucked. We just happen to be getting even more fucked this time. People can't turn off working for democracy when it seems boring!

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Jonathan Gitlin

federal regulators will soon be entirely decorative at which point we can all bask in the glories of a truly innovative free market

Federal judge partially blocks U.S. ban on noncompeteswww.npr.org A federal judge in Texas has partially blocked the government's ban on noncompetes. An estimated 30 million U.S. workers are subject to the employment agreements.

Isn’t this how people started getting chopped up with machetes in Rwanda?

NEWS --> Mark Robinson, the MAGA extremist GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, appeared to endorse political violence against unnamed foes in a recent speech. "Some folks need killing!" he shouted. "It's a matter of necessity!" Video and story here: newrepublic.com/article/1834...

MAGA Gov Candidate’s Ugly, Hateful Rant: “Some Folks Need Killing!”newrepublic.com Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, has a long history of incendiary comments. But he may have topped himself this time.

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Jonathan Gitlin

#StarTrekProdigy #Spoilers Did anyone catch the reference with the whale's name? Gillian That's the 20th Century scientist from #StarTrek IV who helped Kirk and crew take whales to the 23rd. One of the whales was pregnant. The implication is the whale named her baby after the human who helped her

I wonder if any of the "voting is a moral endorsement of everything a candidate believes in" people have reckoned with the tactical voting that just occurred in the UK.

And yet, New Yorkers have no one but themselves to blame. You could have voted for someone not obviously deranged. I’m sympathetic to the Hochul stuff because that’s being imposed from Albany, but NYC picked Adams.

"The roadway once carried between four and six lanes for motor vehicles, despite 88 percent of people in the area traveling on foot and squeezing into 30 percent of the space." And now Adams wants to give it back to cars?

Mayor Adams May Nix Sidewalk Expansions on Bustling Eighth Ave. - Streetsblog New York Citynyc.streetsblog.org Mayor Eric Adams cast doubt on years of city efforts to give pedestrians more space to walk on overcrowded Eighth Avenue.

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Jonathan Gitlin

Are cities for their actual residents, or for wealthy suburban business owners/political donors? With folks like Eric Adams & Providence's Brett Smiley, if journalists pretend not to know the answer, they're revealing they ALSO think they work for the latter.

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Jonathan Gitlin

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post malone ergo propter malone

This was all planned before the debate, which seems important

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Jonathan Gitlin

Really don't want to have to post this every day: after watching pundits and political journalists at the NYT misunderstand and misrepresent infectious disease biology for the last four years, I'm not really eager to read their opinions about geriatric medicine.