Atlanta: 42°F, overcast — the sky the color of a government form, heavy with the bureaucratic weight of everything they're not doing for you.

Detroit: 22°F, icy and iron-grey — this city survived Reaganomics, bankruptcy, and an ICE occupation; it will survive a polar vortex too, spine intact.

Kansas City: 30°F, bitter crosswind — when the plains speak in cold like this, it's the land telling you to stay sharp and mean.

New York: 28°F, cutting gusts off the Hudson — the kind that strips pretense down to bone, which is honestly all that's left anyway.

San Francisco: 57°F, marine layer burning off by noon — California dreaming, yes, but the rest of the country is buried under someone else's nightmare.

Miami: 73°F, bright and deceptively breezy — paradise on the surface, rising seas underneath, just like the whole damn Republican promise.

The GOP is discovering what the rest of us have known since January 2025: you cannot gut the cost of living for working people while handing billionaires the keys to every public institution — and then smile your way through a midterm. The crack-up is on. Grab something warm.

First time here? Welcome to The Daily Gathering — pull up a chair: thistleandmoss.com

Editor's note: These shit-gargling fuck-sticks in the Senate are now privately panicking that Trump tanking affordability will cost them the midterms — the same midterms they spent an entire year making impossible to win by actually governing — and that irony is so thick you could drown a supply-side economist in it.

Sasha Abramsky at The Nation is calling it exactly what it is. This week, Gary Kendrick — a GOP council member in El Cajon, California, and the longest-serving Republican official in his region — crossed the aisle and formally joined the Democrats. Fifty years a Republican. Done.

What he said: "I've been a Republican for 50 years. I just can't stand what the Republican Party has become. The Republican Party is beyond redemption."

That one sentence contains more moral clarity than anything the cock-juggling turd-burglars in the full Senate caucus have produced in years.

The damage:

Minnesota: Tens of thousands of ordinary residents stood for two months against ICE's federally ordered surge — and won. The Department of Homeland Security retreated, claiming Minnesota authorities had "cooperated." Don't believe it for a second. The surge ended because ordinary Americans defeated Stephen Miller's white-supremacist vision with their bodies and their refusal. By late January, more Americans told pollsters they wanted to abolish ICE than wanted to keep it.

Pattern: Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before Congress this week and melted down twice — once when pressed on hiring a pardoned January 6 felon caught on camera urging the killing of Capitol Police, and again when Representative Neguse challenged her on firing DOJ's cryptocurrency enforcement team to clear Trump's crypto profits. A DC grand jury refused to indict Senator Mark Kelly and five others who simply reminded the military that following illegal orders is not a defense. Even Republican Thomas Massie went after her. The facade is cracking at every seam.

Action: Show up to your local Democratic organizing meetings — midterms are nine months away, and the crack-up doesn't win itself without people in the room. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/fleeing-trump-authoritarianism/

The party that couldn't govern its own caucus is discovering that voters remember everything.

Stand at the alpine start gate in Cortina, Italy, right now. Breathe it in. The smell isn't snow — it's the chemical bite of manufactured cold, pumped over what should be a mountain blanketed in meters of white but isn't. The 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics are happening on artificial snow because the actual snow didn't come, just like it didn't come in Beijing in 2022 — the first Winter Games to rely entirely on fabricated winter.

Evidence:

The relationship breaking: 141 Olympians and elite athletes — from 89 countries, representing 50-plus sports — signed an open letter this week calling on the IOC to formally ban fossil fuel sponsorships, including Italian oil giant Eni, which is currently co-sponsoring the games while the mountains hosting them dry out. The letter compares the necessary policy shift to the IOC's 1988 decision to go smoke-free. A recent Novus poll found 77% of Italians believe winter sports should stop advertising emission-intensive companies; in France, where the 2030 games are slated, the number is 83%.

Scale in felt terms: Summer Olympic temperatures have risen 3.1°C since the 1924 Paris Games. Higher temperatures at Sochi 2014 directly caused injuries among Paralympic athletes. Paris 2024 hit 40°C on some days. Cortina 2026 is running on snow machines.

Expert voice: The athletes are the experts here — they are watching their sport dissolve in real time while being asked to thank the companies killing it for the funding.

The system connection is simple and enraging: fossil fuel corporations are melting the mountains their sponsored events depend on, then paying to put their logos on the ruins. That is not irony — it's a confession. https://earth.org/winter-olympics-athletes-call-on-ioc-to-end-fossil-fuel-sponsorships/

Action: Sign the athlete letter at forfuturegames.com and contact your NOC.

The mountains don't belong to Eni. They belong to the snow, and the snow is leaving.

Here is something that should stop you mid-swallow: the woman who launched the modern environmental movement was queer — and we are only now, in 2026, fully reckoning with what that means, why it was buried, and what we owe her.

Rachel Carson, marine biologist, author of Silent Spring (1962), the woman whose research led directly to the nationwide ban of DDT and the creation of the EPA, loved a woman named Dorothy Freeman with a depth and tenderness that sustained her through cancer, industry attacks, and the grinding humiliation of being dismissed as a "hysterical spinster" by male scientists and government officials. They exchanged over 900 letters. They destroyed many of them before Carson's death to protect the intimacy of what they had built together.

Stakes:

Legal shift: The Trump administration spent 2025 systematically rolling back every environmental protection Carson's movement produced — while simultaneously erasing LGBTQ+ history from federal archives, defunding the EPA, and withdrawing from climate agreements. The same ideology that called her "hysterical" is the one dismantling everything she built.

Pattern: Queer people have been foundational to every major progressive movement in American history. The erasure of that history is not accidental — it is strategic. It removes our claim to belonging, to legacy, to the movements we built.

Timeline: Silent Spring was published in 1962. The EPA was created in 1970. In 2025, a shit-slurping fuck-weasel administration began systematically gutting it. Sixty-three years of environmental protection, unwinding in months.

What the actual fuck do we do with the knowledge that the woman who taught America to love the earth was herself made to hide the love of her life? We name it. We hold it. We refuse the erasure, out loud, today.

Movement: LGBTQ+ environmental justice orgs like Out for Sustainability and Clean Water Action are doing the intersectional work connecting climate survival to queer survival — because they are the same survival. Find them, fund them, show up. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/02/the-founder-of-the-modern-environmental-movement-was-queer-why-did-it-take-so-long-to-out-her/

The earth Carson loved is still here. So is her love story. Neither will be buried.

Survival wisdom: Carson wrote about the interconnectedness of all living things — that you cannot poison one part of the web without poisoning the whole. Lorde wrote the same truth in human terms: your freedom is bound to your neighbor's, to the trans teenager two states over, to the woman who loved Dorothy Freeman in secret while reshaping the world in public. This morning, sit with that binding. It is not a weight — it is your inheritance. The administration wants you to feel atomized, too exhausted to remember that your struggle is anyone else's. That lie is load-bearing for them. Pull the thread. Show up for someone today. Carry it forward.

Olivia Colman feels "sort of nonbinary": The Oscar winner told Them magazine she has "always described myself to my husband as a gay man" while promoting Jimpa, her new film about a nonbinary teenager and a gay grandfather in Amsterdam — and the entire LGBTQ+ community responded with the universal sound of 'of course, and we love you, come in.' https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/02/oscar-winning-actress-olivia-colman-says-shes-always-felt-sort-of-nonbinary/

Fox News calls Olympians "borderline traitors": Fox contributor Raymond Arroyo declared that U.S. Winter Olympians criticizing ICE — including openly gay skier Gus Kenworthy — are committing "borderline treason," while Laura Ingraham told dissenting athletes to simply not come to the games. The athletes, meanwhile, are winning gold medals and using their First Amendment rights simultaneously, which is more patriotism than Fox News has managed in a decade. https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/02/fox-news-guest-says-us-olympians-criticizing-ice-is-borderline-treason/

Microplastics confirmed inside Antarctica's only native insect: University of Kentucky researchers found plastic particles inside Belgica antarctica — a rice-sized midge and the southernmost insect on the planet — with lab tests showing reduced fat reserves at higher exposure levels. If plastic pollution has reached the most isolated creature on the most isolated continent, it has reached everything. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260212234214.htm

Scientists can now trace a single water molecule across the globe: University of Tokyo researchers built a world-first framework combining eight climate models using isotope fingerprints across a 45-year dataset — the most accurate large-scale simulation of global water circulation ever produced. This is how we predict the floods and droughts coming for billions of people. This is the map we needed. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260210231553.htm

Random friction point: Digital overwhelm eating your mornings → Put your phone in a different room at night and charge it there. Use a $12 analog alarm clock. Your cortisol levels drop measurably within a week — morning phone-checking spikes stress hormones before you've had a single sip of water. Feeling: The strange, almost forgotten weight of your own thoughts arriving first.

Resource drain: Subscription creep stealing $80–$150/month → Run your bank statement manually or through a free tool like Rocket Money and cancel 3–5 forgotten subscriptions averaging $22/month each. Redirect one month's savings into a local mutual aid fund or emergency cushion. Feeling: The relief of not hemorrhaging quietly into a corporate algorithm.

Home lifehack: Drafty windows costing $30–$60/month in heat → Rope caulk (under $5 at any hardware store) along window frames — peels off clean in spring, no tools, no landlord permission. For single-pane windows, a $20 plastic shrink film kit cuts heat loss by up to 40%. Feeling: The specific satisfaction of solving a cold problem with a warm solution.

Seasonal: Blood oranges, peak through March → Halve them, broil cut-side up with a pinch of raw sugar for 5 minutes until caramelized — serve over plain full-fat Greek yogurt with a thread of olive oil and flaky salt. The perfume that rises when they hit the broiler is the smell of February refusing to be grey. Citrus in winter is the season's apology for everything else it's done.

Corporate bypass: Grow your own salad greens indoors → A $15 grow light, a shallow tray, and a $3 mixed greens seed packet yields a full salad in 14 days. Cut-and-come-again crops — arugula, spinach, mâche — regrow from the same roots for 6–8 weeks. Cost per salad: under $0.30. Your kitchen is the smallest farm. Start there.

Pantry quick meal feeding 4: Spiced red lentil soup, 7 ingredients, under 10 minutes → 1 cup red lentils, 1 can diced tomatoes, 1 quart broth, 2 tsp cumin, 1 tsp smoked paprika, 1 diced onion, 3 cloves garlic. Sauté onion and garlic 3 minutes, add everything else, simmer 7 minutes until lentils dissolve. Finish with a squeeze of lemon. Done. Total cost: ~$3.50. This meal asks nothing of you except five minutes of presence.

Your armor for today: Marsha P. Johnson didn't have the luxury of resignation. She was unhoused, Black, trans, and in the crosshairs of every institution that decided her life mattered less — and she still built STAR House, still showed up at protests with flowers in her hair, still dragged joy into every room that tried to shut her out. Today is hard. This administration is designed to make it feel impossible. But the fucking marrow of resistance is showing up anyway — not because the situation deserves optimism, but because you do. Not because things are fine, but because people like Marsha proved that beauty and defiance can live in the same body at the same time. Take that with you today. It's yours. It has always been yours.

Tourmaline — Black queer filmmaker, prison abolitionist, resurrector of erased histories. Her short films move like light through stained glass, each frame a deliberate excavation of Black trans lives that institutional archives tried to bury. She doesn't narrate Marsha P. Johnson's story — she breathes her back. In a moment when the federal government is literally erasing LGBTQ+ history from its own websites, Tourmaline is building the archives they cannot reach. Her work is the counter-archive. It always has been.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy — Black trans elder, Stonewall survivor, and the unwavering voice for incarcerated trans women. She has carried decades of state violence in her body and transformed it into a roar on behalf of people the movement forgets. Eighty-two years old and still in the room. The movement owes her everything it's still standing on.

adrienne maree brown — Black queer writer, pleasure activist, and the woman who reoriented how a generation of organizers understands change. Emergent Strategy (2017) is still rearranging how people think. Her work moves like mycelium — patient, networked, quietly radical — and she writes about joy with the same intellectual rigor she brings to collective liberation. In 2026, when joy itself is a political act, adrienne maree brown is teaching people how to survive by insisting on it.

These three — one excavating the past, one bearing witness to the present, one mapping the future — are the movement in its fullest form. Find them. Fund them. Amplify them.

The resistance has been here the whole time.

"The Republican Crack-Up Has Begun" — The Nation | Sasha Abramsky. Smells like burnt ego and flop sweat in the Senate cloakroom — a dam developing hairline fractures in real time. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/fleeing-trump-authoritarianism/ Trump told his party "we've gotten everything passed that we need" — Republican senators are now whispering that heading into 2026 with a confirmed-nominees-and-nothing-else résumé is political suicide, with affordability voters sitting at D+12 in the generic congressional ballot.

"Epstein, Trump, Bondi, and the Conspiracy Files" — Vox | Politics Desk. The air carries that particular sourness of things deliberately left unexplained. https://www.vox.com/politics/479159/epstein-trump-bondi-rogan-conspiracy-files-release-young-men While Bondi implodes on camera before Congress, the Epstein files release slow-walks into partisan fog — and the DOJ is simultaneously pursuing senators for reciting Nuremberg precedent.