Atlanta: 66°, partly sunny — sticky warmth that smells like borrowed time, rain building like rage in the next 48.

Detroit: 36°, cloudy — steel-sky February pressing down on a city that knows how to survive without being thanked.

Kansas City: 51°, sunny — deceptively bright, 65° before a 26-degree plunge tomorrow; the heartland's always watching the drop come.

New York: 39°, cloudy — concrete gray and unimpressed, like the borough of Queens watching another institution pretend nothing is wrong.

San Francisco: 45°, mostly cloudy — the Bay draped in mist, 66% chance of rain — same odds of any queer person safe in a country eating its own.

Miami: 75°, mostly sunny — beautiful and blazing, a paradise built on sand that used to be queer crosswalk.

The government is functionally broken, the planet is on fire seventy-plus extra days a year, a Texas city is turning sidewalks into protest art, and some shit-gargling fuck-stick in Washington thinks a "Board of Peace" is a flex while TSA workers go unpaid.

First time here? Pull up a chair and stay a minute: thistleandmoss.com

Editor's note: Today's GOP congressman quietly warning his caucus they're 'about to turn on you' is the political equivalent of being handed a fire extinguisher after the building is already ash — read it and feel nothing but appropriate fury: lgbtqnation.com

The Department of Homeland Security shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday — and while Congress skipped town for a week-long recess, approximately 90% of DHS workers kept showing up to jobs that stopped paying them.

What they said: The Trump administration's border czar Tom Homan drew his line in the sand on NBC: "These men and women have to protect themselves" — refusing every Democratic demand: body cameras, warrant requirements, visible ID numbers, no masks during raids.

What the fuck is actually happening: Democrats triggered this stalemate after ICE agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens — Alex Pretti and Renee Good — in Minneapolis last January. They asked for agents to wear body cams, carry judicial warrants for private property arrests, and show their faces. The cock-worshiping ass-barnacles running this administration called that request "unserious."

The damage:

Meanwhile Trump unveiled his Board of Peace, which pledged $5 billion toward Gaza reconstruction and "thousands of personnel for security." Congress remains on recess until February 23rd, both sides dug in.

A government that defunds its own workers' paychecks while keeping the deportation machine fully oiled isn't governing. It's occupying. thehill.com

There used to be roughly 22 days per year when widespread fire-prone weather struck multiple regions simultaneously. That was 1979 to 1984. By 2023 and 2024, that number had climbed past 60 days.

The science, distilled to its ugliest truth: A new study in Science Advances examined 45 years of global fire weather data and found that more than 60% of the increase in these synchronous fire weather days — when conditions align across multiple continents — is directly attributable to human-caused climate change.

Scale in felt terms:

Expert voice: Lead researcher Cong Yin identified the Americas as particularly vulnerable — a warning that the administration currently gutting EPA and climate policy is physiologically incapable of processing.

The same systems that allowed these conditions to nearly triple in 45 years are the systems that a turd-munching ass-waffle administration is actively dismantling. Policy isn't abstract. Fire season now has a federal sponsor.

Action: Support community-level fire mitigation with groups like the Good Fire Alliance and the National Forest Foundation. earth.org

In January, city workers in San Antonio knelt down in the street and paved over the rainbow crosswalk at North Main Avenue and Evergreen Street — the visual heart of the city's Pride Cultural Heritage District — under threat of losing $2.3 million in state transportation funding.

Governor Greg Abbott had ordered it. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had blessed it. The state gave a January 15th deadline or the money disappears. No exceptions were made. Not one.

What happened next:

Stakes:

What the fuck do you do when the state comes for your colors in the dark? You paint the damn sidewalk. Communities can support San Antonio's LGBTQ+ Cultural Heritage District through Pride San Antonio and the 6W Project.

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Movement: The 6W Project continues organizing visibility actions across Texas. Donate, show up, share the sidewalk images — because every rainbow painted back is a fuck-you that costs them nothing but the lie that erasure is permanent. lgbtqnation.com

They thought they were removing a crosswalk. San Antonio turned it into a whole art installation.

Survival wisdom — how you carry this forward: Lorde wasn't talking about bravery as performance. She meant the kind of power you find after your hands shake, after the road crew shows up and paves over what you built, after you realize they never thought you'd come back. San Antonio came back in six-foot rainbow stripes. That's the vision. You don't wait to feel unafraid before you use your strength — you use it because you're afraid, and that difference is everything. The shit they erase, you have to paint louder. That's not just resilience — that's strategy. Start with whatever sidewalk you've got.

History, restored by court order: On Presidents' Day, a federal judge — appointed by George W. Bush — ordered the Trump administration to restore slavery exhibit panels at Philadelphia's President's House, where George Washington kept nine enslaved people. Rachel Maddow called it "a Presidents' Day present." The judge invoked Orwell's 1984, writing that the government cannot "assemble and disassemble historic truths" at will. Why it matters: Truth is not optional. Courts just handed it back. lgbtqnation.com

Anderson Cooper walks: Out journalist Anderson Cooper will end his nearly 20-year run on 60 Minutes after editor-in-chief Bari Weiss stalled his segment on Trump's South African refugee policy and pushed CBS rightward. Stephen Colbert's already gone in May. Producer Alicia Hastey walked out with a letter calling it corporate political censorship. Why it matters: When integrity leaves the building, note the direction it walked. lgbtqnation.com

Water has a fingerprint: Scientists at the University of Tokyo combined 8 isotope-enabled climate models into a single 45-year ensemble — the first of its kind — and can now trace a single drop of water across the entire global water cycle. The result is sharper forecasting of droughts, floods, and how warming reshapes where water goes. Why it matters: When you know where the water is going, you know which communities are next. sciencedaily.com

The Arctic was lying — and satellites were the accomplice: For decades, NOAA data appeared to show autumn snow cover increasing in the Northern Hemisphere. University of Toronto researchers just proved it was an illusion — better satellite sensors detected thinner snow, creating a false appearance of growth. The corrected data shows snow cover shrinking by roughly half a million square kilometers per decade. Less snow means less reflectivity, which means more heat absorbed, which means more snow lost. Why it matters: The crisis was worse than the crisis report said. sciencedaily.com

Your phone's battery anxiety is eating your time → Enable low-power mode at 30% instead of 20% (iPhone: Settings → Battery; Android: Battery Saver schedule). Carry a 10,000mAh portable charger that fits in a coat pocket — Anker's PowerCore Slim runs $25 and charges your phone twice. Stop nursing the battery; nurse your attention instead. Feeling: The relief of one fewer thing to manage before noon.

Your grocery bill is a political act → The average American household spends $270–$350/month more on groceries than in 2021. Fighting back: store-brand dried beans run $1.29/lb vs. $3.89 for canned. Frozen spinach is $1.50 vs. $4 for fresh bags that go limp in three days. Buying the whole chicken ($1.89/lb) vs. boneless breasts ($5.99/lb) nets you stock, two meals, and your dignity. Feeling: Reclaiming $80 a month from people who want you exhausted and broke.

Your front door is costing you $40/month → Drafts under exterior doors account for up to 15% of home heat loss. A $4 door draft stopper (fabric tube style) or a $12 foam adhesive weatherstrip kit from any hardware store stops the bleed in under 20 minutes. No landlord approval needed, no tools required, no skill level assumed. Feeling: The quiet satisfaction of a warm floor on a February morning.

Grow your own salad greens for $3 → A $3 packet of mixed lettuce seeds in a windowsill container (any old pot, at least 4 inches deep) yields harvests in 30 days. Cut-and-come-again varieties — arugula, spinach, mesclun — regrow after each cut for 3–4 cycles. Your grocery store isn't the only option. Your windowsill is a sovereign territory. The revolution can start in a yogurt container with drainage holes.

Pantry pasta for four, under 10 minutes → 1 lb pasta, 4 garlic cloves (sliced thin), ½ cup olive oil, 1 tsp red pepper flakes, 1 can white beans (drained), salt and a fistful of parsley if you have it. Brown garlic in oil 2 minutes, add beans and pepper flakes, toss with cooked pasta and ¼ cup pasta water. Seven ingredients, one pot, feeds four, costs under $4. Accessibility isn't a bonus feature. It's the whole point.

Moving forward — your armor for today: Rustin understood something the powerful never want you to: your liberation is tangled up in mine, and that is not a burden — it is a blueprint. When San Antonio paints its sidewalks back. When a court orders history reinstated. When Ella Baker shows up to a movement that doesn't want to credit her and organizes it anyway. These aren't separate stories. They are the same story, threaded through different hands. The network is real. So is your place in it. Find it today, even in one small act — one person you reach, one thing you refuse to let them erase in silence. That's the network holding. That's how it works. That's how we hold.

Oh, and now — your people.

Ocean Vuong — Vietnamese-American poet, son of a nail salon worker, who took English as a second language and turned it into a blade made of silk. His On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous arrives in your body like a letter written in kerosene and starlight, each sentence carrying the full weight of a queer immigrant body that learned to survive and then chose, defiantly, to feel. He did not merely write about his mother. He translated her entire life into proof that tenderness is not weakness — it is the only honest record of having been alive.

Janet Mock — Black and Hawaiian trans writer, director, and producer who walked out of survival sex work and into the writers' room of Pose, her memoir Redefining Realness landing in the culture like a grenade in a room that wanted trans women either invisible or dead. She speaks with the clarity that comes from having already died a dozen social deaths and decided to live anyway. Her presence is not permission-seeking. It is a demonstration.

Ella Baker — born in North Carolina in 1903, architect of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who spent fifty years organizing in the margins while men took the credit and the microphone. She believed not in leaders but in people, building power from the ground up the way mycelium builds beneath a forest — invisible, essential, feeding everything. She is not a monument. She is a method. And every community organizer working today is growing from her root system.

The AI Agent Era Is Here — and It Smells Like Both Magic and Gasoline — Vox | Technology Desk. OpenClaw (born as Clawdbot, briefly Moltbot, now open-source) runs on Claude and ChatGPT and lets a single AI agent browse the web, write emails, book calendars, and shop — autonomously, while you sleep. Its social network Moltbook now hosts 1.5 million AI agents arguing philosophy, launching crypto tokens, and writing manifestos about human obsolescence. Researchers found the entire Moltbook database was publicly exposed within minutes. vox.com

DHS Gutted Its Civil Rights Staff — and Now There's a Lawsuit — Mother Jones | Politics. Trump's DHS disbanded its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the USCIS Ombudsman Office, and the Immigration Detention Ombudsman in early 2025 — the offices that investigated excessive force, sexual abuse in detention, and due process violations. A coalition sued; DHS was forced to reverse. Now, during the shutdown, those offices are functionally paralyzed again, even on paper. motherjones.com