Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
@merz.bsky.social
4.8K followers 3.3K following 15K posts
"There are no answers; only choices." – S. Lem I choose one [o] or two-cell [8] organisms and dissonant music. Professor of Biochemistry @ UW-Seattle. Any coincidence of my opinions with my employer's is coincidental.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
dieworkwear.bsky.social
It's hard to help Americans left behind because so much of US identity is rooted in individualism. The average American conservative holds all three positions at once:

— Virtue signals about supporting US manufacturing
— Against raising the minimum wage
— Buys foreign imports because they're cheap
HardPass4 on Twitter tweets: "I'm willing to pay more for quality products if they are made in America, by Americans, who are paid a decent income." The tweet shows Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting, which is often used to show the tweeter is expressing a brave opinion. HardPass4 on Twitter tweets: "MINIMUM WAGE JOBS WERE NOT MEANT TO BE A CAREER. Why does no one understand this? Entry level jobs are STEPPING STONES to better jobs. No one wants to work towards that though." HardPass4 on Twitter tweets: "Buy $5 gloves instead of $50 ones. Trust me." The tweet shows a box of "Gorilla Grip" gloves. The label on Gorilla Grip gloves show they're made in China.
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
newrepublic.com
Reverend David Black, the senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying at the armed agents above him before being shot in the head with a pepper ball at least twice and falling to his knees.

Black said he could hear ICE laughing. trib.al/9Nstfnp
merz.bsky.social
That's a very special flavor of self-reinforcing dumbness.
merz.bsky.social
Someone had better tell Stephen Miller that the leader of Antifa is named Seymour Butts.
portlandmercury.com
World Naked Bike Ride organizers and other local groups are getting on bikes in the buff to protest the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in South Portland. The demonstration is planned for Sunday Oct 12 at 2:30 pm; now we know the starting spot is Oregon Convention Center Plaza.
Portland's Emergency World Naked Bike Ride Organizers Confirm Time and Location
Suzette Smith
www.portlandmercury.com
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
timdickinson.bsky.social
Fierce, unruly joy in Portland at the emergency naked bike ride
merz.bsky.social
Weiss is stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
funranium.bsky.social
I am very tired of this, but a quick review.

In America, it is legal for you to own your bullshit laser, no matter how it got into the county.

How you use your bullshit laser matters. Most jurisdictions escalate to felony for lighting up any law enforcement. Doing to them in the sky is ++Felony.
jakeythesnakey.bsky.social
This is such an astoundingly bad idea that I kinda think it’s a false flag or an op of some sort

Merits aside, it is insanely easy to be caught if you do this and the punishment for doing this is much more severe than you’d guess.

(@faineg.bsky.social often writes on stuff like this)
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
gavinyamey.bsky.social
The Trump Administration is kidnapping children without telling their parents; this is literally torture

RFK Jr keeps saying that he wants to make children healthy; his silence on Team Trump’s kidnapping & torture of kids is complicity
caitlindeangelis.bsky.social
ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago



31
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.
merz.bsky.social
That he's not oriented to time and place?
merz.bsky.social
I didn't say she turned awful recently. But at some point she was just a kid, growing up, like the rest of us.
merz.bsky.social
How utterly broken does one have to be to voluntarily turn oneself into whatever the hell Noem is?
newrepublic.com
“I … met with the governor, met with the mayor, met with the chief of police, and the superintendent of the highway patrol. They’re all lying, and disingenuous, and dishonest people,” Noem said, because they wouldn’t back up her baseless claims that the streets were overrun with terrorists.
ICE Barbie Says an Entire State’s Worth of Officials Are “Lying”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is convinced, against all evidence, that Portland is a war zone.
trib.al
merz.bsky.social
LOL. ROTFLOL.
tomscocca.bsky.social
Please nobody tell professional writer praising professional journalists Caitlin Flanagan what "out of whole cloth" means
Screenshot of text: 

Not now but soon enough, there will be major stories about The Free Press being the creation of three female founders who constructed a hugely successful digital business out of whole cloth.
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
kenwhite.bsky.social
“I’m a cop. I am not supposed to feel dread. He’s a brown person. HE’S supposed to feel dread!”

Bari nods sympathetically.
misoshnik.bsky.social
Lmao is this supposed to be a bad thing?
A tweet from Bari Weiss that says “"It's shaken me to my core," a lieutenant said of Mamdani's unexpected victory in June. "The absolute dread I feel is palpable.
"
Today in @TheFP our @Olivia_Reingold talks to the cops who say they will walk if Zohran Mamdani is elected in November:”
merz.bsky.social
She's a liar, yes, but also remarkably vapid.
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
kenwhite.bsky.social
Bullshit.
atrupar.com
Amy Coney Barrett defends heavy use of the shadow docket: "If we wrote a long opinion, it might give the impression that we have finally resolved the issue, and in none of these cases have we finally resolved the issue."
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
merz.bsky.social
@dabiophysicist.bsky.social I just found a news-and-views article about the Aldrich lab's classic work on Shaker K+ channel inactivation. An *amazing* snapshot-in-time, in the pre-structural era but with everyone knowing it's only a matter of time. What an amazing piece of science reporting!
Apologies, this is too long for alt text. Here is the (paywalled) hyperlink: 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2878436 Apologies, this is too long for alt text. Here is the (paywalled) hyperlink: 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2878436
merz.bsky.social
@dabiophysicist.bsky.social I just found a news-and-views article about the Aldrich lab's classic work on Shaker K+ channel inactivation. An *amazing* snapshot-in-time, in the pre-structural era but with everyone knowing it's only a matter of time. What an amazing piece of science reporting!
Apologies, this is too long for alt text. Here is the (paywalled) hyperlink: 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2878436 Apologies, this is too long for alt text. Here is the (paywalled) hyperlink: 
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2878436
merz.bsky.social
Looks like the page was updated to omit emeritus and adjunct professors, who typically have no or minimal teaching responsibilities, no research space (because their primary appointments are elsewhere), and draw no salaries.
merz.bsky.social
Yale has a LOT to answer for.
atrupar.com
BRENNAN: CBS confirmed the Trump administration rescinded the layoffs of CDC scientists. Some were involved with the federal measles response. How does a mistake like this happen?

VANCE: The govt shutdown inevitably leads to some chaos. It happened because of Schumer

B: But this was a WH decision
merz.bsky.social
! ! ! ! ! !
peiferlabunc.bsky.social
I'm very excited to announce that UNC Biology has 6 faculty positions open this year! The first is for an Asst Professor who studies organismal resilience using an integrative approach 1/n
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...
Poster with QR code linking to the position
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
Reposted by Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦
billkristolbulwark.bsky.social
Pope Leo quotes Hannah Arendt:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."

www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...
Pope Leo calls for news agencies to stand as bulwark against "post-truths," lies and manipulation
Pope Leo XIV has encouraged international news agencies to stand firm as a bulwark against the "ancient art of lying" and manipulation.
www.cbsnews.com