André Ware

If you think you can support someone who wants to hurt me & my community & still call me family or friend, you must be crazy. #PickADamnSide

The president is negotiating against his own administration to shake down taxpayers for $10 billion. The corruption meter is flashing red and sounding the alarm. ca.news.yahoo.com/doj-considers-…

The #WordOfTheDay is ‘rectify.’ ow.ly/sQxE50YSyVq

In this new article @bigthink traces how humanity’s “cosmic distance record” has changed as our tools have improved. To the naked eye, we are limited to a very small part of the observable universe. Most of what we see directly belongs to the Solar System or the Milky Way, and only a few galaxies beyond our own are visible without instruments. One of the farthest objects normally visible to unaided human eyes is the Triangulum Galaxy, about 2.9 million light-years away, while a few exceptional observers claim to see Messier 81 under ideal dark-sky conditions, at roughly 12 million light-years. For most of human history, even when people recorded faint nebulae and spiral objects, they did not yet know that many of them were entire galaxies outside the Milky Way. That only became clear in the 20th century, especially after individual stars were identified in Andromeda. With telescopes, the distance frontier moved rapidly outward. Charles Messier recorded distant galaxies such as Messier 58 in the 18th century, and William Herschel later catalogued objects like NGC 1, now known to be hundreds of millions of light-years away. But the real transformation came when astronomers learned not just to see faint objects, but to measure their distances through redshift, spectroscopy, and later space-based observations. Objects such as OJ 287, radio galaxies, and quasars pushed the known universe much deeper into cosmic time. In the 1960s, quasars became the dominant record-holders because they are extraordinarily luminous, allowing astronomers to detect them across billions of light-years. Quasar 3C 9, for example, broke the distance record in 1965, and quasars continued to dominate until galaxies eventually reclaimed the record in the late 1990s. The article also shows that “distance” in cosmology is not as simple as saying how long the light has travelled. Because the universe has expanded while the light was on its way to us, very distant objects can now be much farther away than their light-travel time might suggest. That is why modern record-holding galaxies are described as being tens of billions of light-years away in present-day distance, even though we see them as they were only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Hubble pushed the record to galaxies such as GN-z11, but JWST has dramatically changed the landscape by observing at infrared wavelengths, where the light from the earliest galaxies has been stretched by cosmic expansion. Today, the most distant known objects are galaxies discovered or confirmed with JWST. JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z14-0, and MoM-z14 represent successive steps into the very early universe. JADES-GS-z14-0 is seen as it was when the universe was only about 285 to 290 million years old, while MoM-z14 has pushed the current record to about 33.8 billion light-years in present-day distance. The key point is not only that we are seeing farther, but that we are seeing earlier: these galaxies allow astronomers to study how quickly the first stars, galaxies, and structures formed after the Big Bang. The distance record is therefore not just a contest of numbers. It is a record of how our instruments, methods, and physical understanding have expanded the observable universe, turning faint smudges into measurable objects with histories, spectra, and cosmological meaning. @StartsWithABang 👉 share.google/TrDbCe76kVWE74…

Yesterday a few folks pointed out that Trump has changed major details about his reflecting pool project since he announced it in late April. I've created a video with graphics that point out how much he's lied about it. This includes edits of longer rambling statements.

Talking about the man like he’s a slave.

Trump is suing the IRS, which he oversees, for $10 billion. Both sides want to settle to avoid going to court. Aside from money, one of the settlement terms is to drop all audits of himself and his family. He’s stealing $10B from taxpayers and covering up his tax crimes. You get that, right? nytimes.com/2026/05/12/bus…

Happy 76th birthday to Stevie Wonder!

Water is a chemical. Salt is a chemical. Vitamin C is a chemical. The question is not: “Is it a chemical?” The question is: “At what dose is it harmful?” That’s toxicology. First-year science.

In 250 years, Louisiana has sent 171 white men to Congress. During Reconstruction, Black people were elected and denied their seats. Only one Black man — Charles Nash — served in the 1800s. Then from 1877 to 1990, Louisiana sent zero Black people to Congress. Zero. For 113 years. In 1990, Black Louisiana finally got a member of Congress again. Since then, white voters have elected 25 members. Black voters have had 4. All 4 were in the same room fighting to keep the two seats Black Louisiana fought for. Don’t tell us this isn’t about denying Black people representation. It always has been. @repcleofields_ and @reptroycarter were joined by former Congressman Cedric Richmond and William Jefferson to let the record be clear that Black voters are due fair maps. This image should put things into perspective for you. Today at the state Capitol, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee will vote on which congressional map Louisiana will have. Share if you care 🦾

Louisiana! Your election is Saturday, May 16. We need every Black person there to VOTE NO on all of the constitutional amendments on the ballot. Let’s #BringTheFunk to the ballot box!

There are more unregistered Black voters in the state of Louisiana than the margin of victory in the 2023 gubernatorial election. That number was 272,302. Louisiana could have a Black governor if they wanted to, just by simply registering to vote and turning out. We can no longer look at voting as an option. Instead, it must be looked at as an obligation. The best weapon in a war of democracy is a vote. ✔️👆🏾

Refreshing to hear Donald Trump tell the truth for once. x.com/acyn/status/20…

From: Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985), dir. Gisaburo Sugii, Group TAC

The #WordOfTheDay is ‘catercorner.’ ow.ly/uXCs50YSwq6

#BREAKING: Legendary #Maddow: “I should tell you, in Tennessee, a big slice of Black residents in Memphis will now have their votes folded into a White county called Williamson County. Williamson County literally STILL HAS a confederate flag on their county seal, but they’ll have just the right size of a slice of Black voters from Memphis to make sure they can never, with their other Memphis residents, elect a member of Congress of their choosing. There’s a reason why people are calling this Jim Crow 2.0. This REALLY IS plainly an effort to drag us back to the the post reconstruction era after the civil war…”😳

Justice Sotomayor nails it: “The Court today unceremoniously discards District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding & careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue.”

Today's #WordOfTheDay is rigmarole. Learn more about this word: bit.ly/4drPwG5

THERE IS A PATTERN Before Jen Kiggans was nodding along to “cotton-picking,” she was already trying to police how schools talk about racism. #JimCrowJen Anti-Black history panic 👇🏽 As a Virginia state senator, Kiggans championed SB 570, a bill banning school’s honest discussion of race, and racism in US history

Last week Chief ‘Jim Crow’ Justice Roberts says the Supreme Court isn’t a partisan actor. Today the same court allows Alabama to eliminate the one Black held congressional seat, even after ballots have been cast.