When Life Gives You Cherries

I thought I would have my June Twitter post ready for today, but it's getting too late, so instead, here's a photo of my sour cherry tree, laden with fruit:


About 10 percent of it is fully ripe, so I suppose I should get to work tomorrow on picking it.

When Color Was Special

Yesterday the print version of the Pioneer Press included a special insert called "From the Archives," a 48-page magazine looking back on the paper's 170-year history through clippings. Paging through it was more bitter than sweet, given the condition of the present-day PiPress, which has been gutted by private equity raiders and has just a few reporters hanging on to cover all the local news (plus fossils like columnist Joe Soucheray, who should retire).

It was fun looking through it, despite the paper's present condition, and I may even keep it, at least for a while.

The one bit I want to share is this image from some time in the 1950s:


The image is not well captioned, but I surmise that it was a Sunday promotional flag, maybe used on an outer wrapper, maybe on the front page itself, or maybe on the comics section. It's clearly from a bygone day when the Sunday comics weren't smashed onto four pages, when there were three magazine inserts, when the use of wire services was something to promote. The hand-lettered art would have been turned into letterpress plates and printed in four colors. The black art is pretty far out of registration (check out the orange overshoots within the number 100, for instance). The word "Feature" is done in a nice brush script.

It's just a lovely mid-century piece of commercial art, and I'm glad they shared it.

Summer

It's summer at last: the chalk art at the Birchwood tells me so, and the temperatures are finally rising to reinforce the message:


Meanwhile, Europe is having its hottest temperatures on record, I believe, and the western parts of Asia as well. 50°C, anyone? Global warming means overall warming but also sometimes weirding, as in our cool summer, which is caused by the warm Arctic pushing its usually cool air to the south.

My Staircase Moment with Chris Matthews

I missed most of the Democratic candidates' debate last night, watching about the last 40 minutes, some of it on fast-forward to skip the guys who have no chance. I was watching MSNBC, who had Chris Matthews interviewing some of the candidates in the spin room.

Now, I can't stand Chris Matthews (for many reasons, but the one that comes to mind most easily is his sexism) so it's no surprise I generally avoid watching whenever he's on, but at this point I couldn't avoid him as they cut back and forth to various talking heads, plus if you wanted to see a candidate, you had to put up with him.

I can't remember which candidate he was interviewing, but it was probably Elizabeth Warren, when he came out with this pronouncement: "the words 'structural change' are necessarily ideological."

This is a great example of why I never want to listen to Chris Matthews, but it wasn't until hours later that I had one of those staircase moments and thought of a response that escaped me in real time.

Hey, Chris... if structural change is necessarily ideological, then resisting structural change or refusing to see that structural change is needed is also ideological. Thinking that everything is individual and not structural is also ideological.

For instance, the structural change I would like to see is you retiring, Chris Matthews. Though I guess that's also an individual change. A twofer!

Remember this Bee

I like to think I know a bit about bees, or at least more than the average person, such as the fact that honeybees are not native to North America and that wild bees pollinate most of our food crops that require pollination.

But I didn't know this:


So thanks to the blue orchard mason bee. I'll be looking into what its habit is and whether I've created or maintained any of it in my yard. It's the least I can do.

A Grim Possible Future

The Oregon Republican legislators' nullification actions (with militias! and threats of murder by elected officials!) have been successful in killing the climate legislation supported by a clear majority of the state's elected legislators and its governor.

It's yet another bad news story in our constant flood, and one that I'm afraid will be an important turning point when the history books are written.

Dave Roberts of Vox had this to say as a first reaction:

I'm gonna write a proper piece about this soon, but for now a quick thread on the direction of U.S. conservative climate policy. I think over the next 10 years -- and probably much sooner -- we'll see two distinct trends.

First, the U.S. right will transition seamlessly from climate denialism to climate nationalism/fascism. They will acknowledge the threat abd use it to justify exploiting U.S. fossil fuel reserves, building walls, shutting down immigration, and passing punitive trade policies.

Collective action problems just don't sit well in the reactionary mind -- and non-zero-sum collective solutions are incomprehensible to it. However, a mad scramble of all-against-all, in which the powerful U.S. can hoard and intimidate and come out ahead? That, reactionaries get.

Second, U.S. conservatives will ramp up their demagoguery around "eco-terrorism." As it becomes clear that the GOP simply won't allow a small-d democratic solution, desperate young people are going to turn to direct action. The GOP will use that to justify repression.

And be clear: as climate gets more and more chaotic, and the ambient sense of threat and uncertainty rises around the world, these kinds of reactionary responses will gain more public appeal, not less. Threat and uncertainty make everyone more conservative.

So the U.S. is at a crucial juncture, one that reflects a larger global dynamic: the space for addressing climate change in a cooperative, mutually beneficial way is rapidly shrinking. From here on out, circumstances will bolster the forces of reaction.

That's why the situation in Oregon is freaking me out. I thought we had at least a little time left in which the mechanisms of democracy could still work. But the fossil-funded white minority is openly, nakedly rejecting democracy and it looks like they'll get away with it.

The right will see that it worked and it will rapidly become standard practice, across states, maybe federally. (If you think the rules are different in different states, so it wouldn't work, you are still hung up on thinking rules matter.)

That would mean the end of any chance of the U.S. addressing climate change through peaceful, mutually beneficial, democratic means. Oregon Ds elected majorities, then super-majorities ... now they're supposed to accept that success is only possible if they vote every R out?

If democratic means become impossible, what's left is violence. There may be some radical climate activists who think they're ready for that, but guess what? The reactionaries will always have more guns and fewer scruples. The forces of decency will never win that fight.

Basically, this is future-of-the-species stuff, getting decided through a spectacle that's barely even able to break into the daily news cycle. And the next time around, there may not even be the pretense of democracy. We are truly headed into the shit. 

Block Letters, Brush Letters

I can't face the topic I should be writing about (guess which one), so instead, I'm going to talk about some old lettering.




This type of brush lettering cries out "mid-20th-century" to me. The best-known typeface in this vein is Brush Script, but I've always felt that it was not quite right:


The Wm. H. Block lettering is a nonconnecting script, so that's part of the difference. It doesn't slant, either. Overall, it has a much more urbane, horizontal feeling that really seems as though it was done with a brush, while Brush Script has never felt brushy enough to me.

The Block lettering fits into the Cartoon Modern aesthetic that developed around the same time. It makes me smile, and that's something I value right at the moment.

Art Cars Uber Back to the Fifties

This weekend it was Back to the Fifties time at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, so thousands of vintage cars were being driven around the streets nearby, which is sometimes entertaining but more often disruptive.

My second worst experience was being caught in an impromptu traffic jam/parade at 7:55 a.m. on Friday when a dozen or more hot rods were waiting to cross a thoroughfare at an intersection where there isn't a traffic light. After a few minutes of absolute standing still (while on a deadline), I K-turned away from the exhaust in my face and took a different route.

The worst experience was today when I was following two World War II-era pickup trucks tricked out to belch coal-black smoke from fat pipes. On purpose. They made me want to have the whole event done away with immediately.

As an antidote, I present an art car I saw recently:






Breathe breathe breathe as long as you're not right next to a car or truck that's rolling coal.

Make the Switch Now

There are always things I don't know about greenhouse gases, even when I think I know a thing or two.

Today I learned that a common gas used by anesthesiologists is a potent greenhouse gas, and that only 5 percent of inhaled gas is metabolized by the patient. The unmetabolized gas, in this case, desflurane, is vented out of the operating room into the atmosphere, where it traps heat and remains in the atmosphere for 14 years. Another gas commonly in use, called sevoflurane, is equally as effective as an anesthetic while trapping only one-twentieth of the heat and breaking down within a year.

It seems like a no-brainer to use sevoflurane, right? And that's just what anesthesiologist Dr. Brian Chesebro of Portland, Oregon, has been leading the way on. To put it in perspective,

desflurane was the greenhouse gas equivalent of driving a fleet of 12 humvees for the duration of each surgical procedure. It's "only" half a hummer if [one] uses sevoflurane...

And — get this — sevoflurane is cheaper, too.

Which makes me wonder, why is the bad gas still on the market at all? Who needs it? According to the linked article, both of the gases are made by the same manufacturer, so it's not a case of embedded interests wanting to sell their bad product: if they stop selling desflurane, hospitals will just buy more of the other one, right?

Either way, thanks to Dr. Chesebro for figuring this out and leading the way.

Put a Badger on It

A family member recently came across this bit of printed ephemera:


It's from 1940, and the person it was awarded to only got a sticker that one year when he was 10, though there were spots for nine more.

Based on the design, I'd say it was around more than two decades before this one was awarded just before World War II. The Wisconsin Reading Circle started in 1915, and this artwork has a kind of Arts and Crafts/World War I vibe. Check out the organic shapes in the tree at lower right, for instance. The lettering (it's not type, since this is a lithograph) is also consistent with that time period.

Oh, and it was only while studying the design more closely that I realized there's a W shield at lower left that has a stylized badger on it.

Somewhere in Saint Paul

It's tucked away between cinder block buildings in an area that was once a railroad siding. Now it's grass and blank walls.

Well, they're not so blank any more:












You can't see these walls from a car. They're one of the parts of the city you can only see on foot, or maybe on a bike.

Miracle Comfort Coffins

I have an ongoing obsession with trying to identify the things I can't perceive because I live in this particular society at this particular time. What is the air we breathe, the water to us as fish, and all of those other metaphors that are so often kicked around? What would alien xenologists make of us?

Personal motorized vehicles are clearly one of the things we have normalized, and one that xenologists would spend a lot of time studying. I already know this, and in a way I was just thinking about it this morning while waiting for the bus and watching expensive, multi-ton, gas-powered cars and SUVs cruise past me, each with one human being inside. I wrote a little bit about it in the early years of my blog, focused on how amazing gas-powered transportation is (eight pounds of fuel can move you, your whole family, your stuff, and the vehicle as far as horse can go in a day... whoa!). But I didn't go far enough.

Today, Bill Lindeke posted what may be the ultimate essay on stepping back and looking at motorized vehicles from the outside, if that's possible for a person living in this culture. He identifies in detail just how much goes into making them what they have become, resulting in drivers' ability to cut themselves off from everything without paying the cost. Resulting in the destruction of neighborhoods and of cities, in many ways, and our planet's climate, clearly.

It's a piece I will return to again, so putting it here in the filing cabinet.

A Post for the Week, the Month, the Year... the Century

And it comes from Twitter, of course... from a user named @BlueSpaceCanary:

Pictured: solving a structural problem by making better individual choices:

Arguing about Andrew Jackson

It's no secret our current president is a fan of Andrew Jackson. Historians have for years, for decades, for at least a century, really, criticized Jackson for his policies while president, and usually it was Democrats who defended him. But because Mulligan has taken him up as an avatar of sorts, now it's Republicans and right-wing hangers-on who feel the need, I guess.

Including on Twitter, where some of them assail as biased the historians and others with knowledge of our nation's history because they dare to point out facts about Jackson. I have not been keeping up on all this (really, I try not to pay attention) but this thread from the great writer Charles C. Mann (author of 1491, 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet) caught my attention today.

Mann was responding to a Jackson apologist who claimed that "Indian Removal" was inevitable, that Jackson wasn't the only one who did it, and that the Trail of Tears began a year after Jackson left office. This is what Mann had to say about that:

[The critic] is right that Indian removal wasn't just Andrew Jackson’s baby. And it was approved by Congress. But that doesn’t mean it was inevitable, or not a stain on U.S. history. Indian removal dates back to Jefferson, who thought from Day 1 that most of the Louisiana Purchase should be an area free of European settlers into which he could push Eastern Indians. (In modern terms, Jefferson envisioned an apartheid state.) [Jeffersonian document snapshot provided in the original tweet thread.]

Congress gave Jefferson what he wanted in the legislation for the Louisiana Purchase (“An Act erecting Louisiana into two territories [one for whites, one for Indians], and providing for the temporary government thereof”). [document snapshot provided]

Jefferson came up with a plan for “persuading” native people to leave their homelands. He sent “Indian agents” to bamboozle them into huge debts. “When these debts get beyond what they can pay they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands” [link to National Archives provided].

It worked! Agents would swindle native peoples not trained in the wiles of a cash economy and force land out of them, promising that the U.S. would never ask for more. Then the next round of agents would swindle them again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

As an example, the Choctaw homeland in Mississippi was carved up in this way by six treaties between 1801-1830. [link provided]

Jackson faithfully carried out Jefferson’s ideas. For the Choctaw, the betrayal was personal. Jackson begged them in the war of 1812 for help in the Battle of New Orleans. 1000+ Choctaw answered; they played a key role in Jackson’s victory, which sent him to the White House.

Choctaw leader Pushmataha told Jackson at the talks for the Treaty of Doak’s Stand (1820) that the Choctaw wouldn't move across the Mississippi. Loving their homeland, relocation was out of the question—especially to the poor land suggested by Jackson. [document snapshot provided]

In 1828, Jackson was elected president. The southern states were his political base. They were also a problem, because their governments were forcefully encouraging settlers to pour into areas reserved by federal treaties as Indian homelands. Article VI of the Constitution is usually interpreted as making Indian treaties “the supreme law of the land,” superseding state law. Jackson had a clear legal duty to stop the states. And he knew and respected many of the native nations involved—some had fought for him.

In a virtuoso show of political spinelessness, Jackson rammed thru the Indian Removal Act. Passage was anything but “inevitable.” Opposition in the Senate was fierce; it barely passed the House, 101-97. Sen. Frelinghuysen’s denunciation was famous. [snapshot of the denunciation provided] [emphasis added]

The results were catastrophic—and exactly what the opposition had predicted. Jackson’s moral cowardice led to the death of thousands of people and a century of suffering.

Unlike Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jackson doesn’t have many countervailing accomplishments. He created the spoils system, an enduring pathway to corruption. He fought for slavery. He rejected judicial review. He cut back on scientific exploration.

For historians, this story of removal is old hat, not modern PC. Here’s an article from *1906* on Indian removal that won a prize from the American Historical Association. Allowing for language and new evidence, it tells the story I’ve just recounted. [link to 1906 article provided]

tl;dr: Jackson was a coward who did an enduring wrong in the name of political expediency.

And here's a great picture of Pushmataha, the Choctaw leader who Jackson made into a brigadier general for his service to the US in the Battle of New Orleans:

Historian Kevin Gannon had his own thread on Jackson, covering similar territory, but I will only quote the part that addresses the one-year gap between the end of Jackson's presidency and the Trail of Tears:

The Indian Removal Act, the enabling legislation for the Trail of Tears, was a crown jewel in Jackson's legislative agenda, something he lobbied for in his presidential campaign, and it passed Congress in May, 1830--which was during his presidency, if you're keeping track.

Jackson also saw his removal policy challenged by the Cherokees, who used the court system to (correctly) argue that this policy abrogated several decades' worth of previous treaties. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Cherokee nation, but Jackson ignored the ruling.

So, yeah, the Trail of Tears technically didn't begin until the year after AJ left office, but that's only because the Cherokees tried everything they could to resist removal, and would have succeeded were Jackson not so willing to ignore the Supreme Court.

All of which makes me think of an op-ed from today's Star Tribune, originally from the Washington Post, called Some who proclaim history don't know enough about history.

Gardening Advice from a Slab

From the sidewalks of Saint Paul:


This particular sidewalk poem, seen next door to Connie's Creamy Cone on Dale Avenue, reads:

Advice for Gardeners

Accept brevity.
Celebrate decay.
Emancipate failed growth, hope
it'll just keep living. Mulch
near odd places.
Quit raking.
Sleep.
Tend unlimited variegated words.
Xerox your zucchini.

 Good advice.

Kindergarten Flowers

Once in a while I post artwork I see in the hallways of elementary schools. Most recently, it was animals. Today it's flowers by kindergartners:








They brightened my day. I wish I could see them in three dimensions.

The Radio Handbook

I'm following one post about an old book with another, though this time it's just the cover and title page because they have nice lettering:


I am just a fool for foil-stamping.


The title page includes not just this snazzy script with its outrageous Es for the authors, but it also uses a version of Rudolf Koch's late-1920s typeface Kabel for the title.

The Successful Housekeeper

The 1884 ladies' book The Successful Housekeeper is a big green cloth-bound manual with a textured cover, stamped with gold letters and blind-debossed with ornaments. Here's the best-looking part:


That's the short title, by the way. The full subtitle is:


That would be: A Manual of Universal Application, especially adapted to the every day wants of American housewives; embracing several thousand thoroughly tested and approved recipes, care and culture of children, birds, and house plants; flower and window gardening, etc.; with many valuable hints on home decoration.

My favorite part of that listing is the combination of "care and culture of children, birds, and house plants," since those three things are so often combined.

The preface sets us up for the attitude we should expect from the book:

The most worthless unit in a family is an ill-managing wife, or an indolent woman of any sort. If she knows nothing of her kitchen, and is at the mercy of the cook, the table will soon become intolerable—bad soup, soft and flabby fish, meat burned outside and raw within. The husband will soon fly from the Barmecide feast, and take refuge in his club, where he will not only find food that he can digest, but at the same time escape from the domestic discord that usually accompanies ill-cooked victuals at home....

Vice and crime consort with foul living. In those places demoralization is the normal condition. There is an absence of cleanliness, of decency, of decorum—all tending to foster idleness, drunkenness and vicious abandonment. 

Isn't it amazing how the writer can assume that the reader is of a class to have servants and to allow the husband to belong to a club, and yet despite that level of wealth, they will devolve into foul living, vice, and crime? It's a pretty great example of Victorian morality. (In case you are wondering what a Barmecide feast is, as I was, it comes from A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and it's a feast with only empty dishes.)

Here are a few other fun items I found while looking through it. First, an engraving of a Bride Cake:


Next, from the opening of the chapter on canning fruit:

For the benefit of those thrifty housewives who have fruit of their own which they wish to save, or who think that any preparation of food made outside of the home kitchen, and branded "factory make," should be considered "common and unclean," we append a few recipes which will be found in every way satisfactory.

The color illustrations, tipped in on a few pages, are so appetizing:




The writers continued with their class attitude, not surprisingly. Here's what they had to say about soup:

Soups: There is no part of cookery which is so imperfectly understood by ordinary cooks as the preparation of a soup. Amongst the wealthy it is considered a necessity, and, as a matter of course, forms part of the dinner. Amongst the middle classes it is more usually served than it used to be, and is, year by year, increasingly appreciated; but amongst the lower classes it is all but scorned; and mistresses of small households will testify that the maid-of-all-work, who, when at home is half starved instead of being properly fed, will consider herself most hardly used if part of the provision of the day's dinner consists of a portion of wholesome soup. This opinion is, of course, a sign of ignorance. Soup is both nourishing and wholesome, and it may also be prepared economically.

The book sometimes jumps from a topic like that to something like this:

Incombustible Dresses: Ladies' dresses, even of the lightest and most inflammable nature, may be rendered almost completely fire-proof by being dipped in a solution of the chloride of zinc. When they are thus treated, it will be found almost impossible to make them blaze by contact with flame.

Which makes it pretty amusing, in an unintended way.

Finally, there was this factoid that started the chapter on drinks: "Since Pasquet Rossee opened the first coffee-house in Europe in Newman's Court, Cornill, London in 1652..." I don't know if that name, place and date are agreed upon by historians as the first European coffeehouse or not, but I liked how it was thrown out so nonchalantly, as if it were a fact everyone knows.

Invisible Heart Disease, or What We Are Worried About

If you didn't see this chart from Our World in Data, now's your chance:


Click the image to enlarge... and if that copy isn't large enough, this version on Twitter is larger.

This is definitely one I want to be able to find again in the filing cabinet. I'm having trouble processing how little relation there is between the death stats in the first column, the big skew in what all of us are searching relative to that reality, and the even bigger skew in media coverage.

If it bleeds it leads, and if it blows up it leads even more.

An Album Cover, Ruined?

The simple beauty of early- to mid-20th-century commercial objects can sometimes stop me where I am:


...and sometimes I realize that a design like this has an element that inadvertently looks like something from a teenager's obscene doodle.

Which makes me annoyed. My awareness of that motif ruins this innocent piece of commercial art for me.

Remembering My Roots

When you get to be my age, it's hard to remember how you came to think what you think, how your world view came to be what it is. Once in a while you are reminded.

Today I saw a couple of quotes from Michel Foucault on Twitter. Now, I'm not saying I read him all that thoroughly in graduate school, or that he was the only thinker I read who made this type of argument, but these words brought it all back:

Discourses are produced by the effects of power within a social order, and this power prescribes particular rules and categories which define the criteria for legitimating knowledge and truth within the discursive order.

Foucault uses the word "discourses," but all it means is communication (and in the case of my studies, that meant mass communication, mass media). "Social order" and "discursive order" and the idea of legitimating became so familiar to me that I stopped thinking of them as needing to be defined.

Another Foucault quote that was given on Twitter today:

Discourse analysis must seek to unfix/destabilize the accepted meanings, and reveal the ways dominant discourses exclude, marginalize and oppress realities that constitute equally valid claims to the question of how power could and should be exercised.

Discourse analysis is what Foucault did, though I always thought that name was bad marketing (hah). It made me want to run away, at any rate. I prefer to call it media literacy instead. Obviously, you have to analyze to do it, but there's something about the phrase discourse analysis that just dries the whole thing into a boring nothing.

How You Ask the Question

You've probably heard that survey responses vary a lot depending on how the questions are asked, but that doesn't just mean the question had obviously biased wording. The framing or assumptions underlying the question matter, too. I think about that a lot when I hear about survey results on, say abortion... 77% percent of people oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, for instance, which seems like a fairly clear way to have phrased a yes-no question, but lower numbers support other important aspects of reproductive freedom, and for those I wonder how the question was asked.

Here's an example from a different area, which I heard on Twitter recently, from Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer who is part of the New America think tank:

Just learned if you phrase the question:

Should convicts be ALLOWED to study for the GED and pursue a college education? most Americans will respond: No

If you say: Should convicts be FORCED to study for the GED and pursue a college education? most Americans will respond: Yes

Which is pretty messed up, as Williams obviously also thought, or he wouldn't have put it out on Twitter.

I know how I would have answered the first of those questions, but I have no idea what I would have said to the second one. Forced? Education as if it was a punishment? What? I wouldn't even know what to do with that.

Lead and Crime, Causality

I've been interested in the lead-crime hypothesis for a while, which basically says that taking lead out of gasoline (and paint) caused the decrease in crime that started in the 1990s. Mother Jones particularly has written about this extensively over the years.

Today this series of tweets caught my eye. It's a discussion of a recent research paper based on a randomized, controlled study of lead effects.

In this paper they explicitly measured the blood lead levels of children, and then took a group of those with the highest lead exposure and intervened to lower the blood lead level of some of those with the highest lead levels.

If lead in the blood stream causally causes crime then you would expect that crime rates should be correlated with measured lead except for the intervention group who should have lower crime than their high-lead comparators.

That is just to say, that if lead causes crime and you remove the lead, then crime rates in those individuals should be lower. And that is exactly what they find.

Here is the key chart:


(click to enlarge to readable size)

You can see both that measured lead levels (BLL) does show a smooth relationship with a variety of anti-social behaviours, and also that the intervention to lower lead levels massively lowers those behaviours relative to the control group.

This is the holy grail for causality. It conclusively proves that the lead crime effect is causal and not just a proxy for other factors. It also shows its large size. Interventions to lower lead halve the rates of anti social behaviour.

So that's something. The study is from 2018, however, so I guess it's not getting the attention it deserves because so many other things are burning all around us.

Arrrrgh

Check out this Science Friday segment. I only caught part of it, but it was enough to get the idea: neuroscientists have long experimented on male-only animals because they thought female animals' hormone fluctuations would be a confounding variable. The scientists thought they would get closer to the truth if they excluded half of the rodent populations they studied.

Well, it turns out that male rodents have hormones too! And guess what... they fluctuate even more than those of the females!

This has only recently been figured out. So I don't know what that means for decades of research findings, even for male rodents, let alone for rodents in general or for the humans of all genders they are meant to serve as models for.

Thank You, Trevor Noah

I long ago ran out of time to watch the Daily Show, but I still see some of the things Trevor Noah puts out into the world, via social media, including this one:


I think I will never forget the Halloween special episode he and the crew did on the eve of the 2016 election, extrapolating what America would be like in four years if Mulligan won the election. Still gives me the shivers.

In fact, I think I would go rewatch it right now but then I wouldn't sleep tonight. So tomorrow instead.

The Kids Were Not All Right

Are you wondering why representatives of a private U.S. corporation are part of a state visit to the U.K.? I am.

BBC reporter Nuala McGovern had this to say on the topic on Twitter:

So I got to ask Eric Trump a question as the Trumps did a pub crawl thru Doonbeg - is his trip a good use of US taxpayer money? ‘We’re just trying to have a good time’ the answer, poses for selfies, refuses to answer further and ducks into Madigans pub surrounded by fans and security.

They really think it's a reality TV show, and this is a very special episode.

May Pang

I saw this photo yesterday on Twitter:


It was on an account called Retronaut, and was accompanied by this text:

Last known photograph of John Lennon and Paul McCartney together. Taken by Lennon's partner, May Pang, March 29, 1974 at Lennon's rented house in Santa Monica. 

 And I thought, Lennon's partner May Pang? May Pang? I have never heard that name before.

Well, Wikipedia to the rescue. Turns out Lennon and Yoko Ono separated for 18 months 1973 and he spent that time with Pang, who was about 23 at the start and had been his and Ono's assistant until then. The Wikpedia page contains a lot of details that come from a book Pang wrote about her time with Lennon.

Now there's a fact — among all the Beatles trivia I've learned in my life — that I never knew.

Stamped Truth

I went to pay for something today and saw this:


Those red-stamped words say "Not 2 B Used 4 Bribing Politicians. Amend the Constitution #GetMoneyOut."

When I flipped it over, I saw this:


Which reads,

"Stamp $$$ Out of Politics. (If you find this, let me know. stmpr.me/gphr)"

That URL leads to a form where you can report the city where you saw the bill and how you got it. I don't know how I got it; it must have been among the change when I spent a larger bill. It's just in circulation.

Just like the idea.

Do Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel, or Are They the Barrel?

Am I surprised by this story on Buzzfeed? I'm not sure:

The Plain View Project, launched by Philadelphia lawyer Emily Baker-White, examined the accounts of about 2,900 [police] officers from eight departments across the country and an additional 600 retired officers from those same departments. She compiled posts that represented troubling conduct in a database that is replete with racist imagery and memes, and in some cases long, vitriolic exchanges involving multiple officers.

The project sought to compile posts, comments, and other public activity that could undermine public trust in the police and reinforce the views of critics, especially in minority communities, that the police are not there to protect them.

Of the pages of officers whom the Plain View researchers could positively identify, about 1 in 5 of the current officers, and 2 in 5 of the retired officers, made public posts or comments that met that threshold — typically by displaying bias, applauding violence, scoffing at due process, or using dehumanizing language. The officers mocked Mexicans, women, and black people, celebrated the Confederate flag, and showed a man wearing a kaffiyeh scarf in the crosshairs of a gun.

“Just another savage that needs to be exterminated,” wrote Booker Smith Jr., a Dallas police sergeant, about a homicide at a Dollar General store. “Execute all involved,” he wrote separately about a group of teens who were accused of killing a 6-year-old. (One defendant pleaded guilty to aiding in the kidnapping. The alleged shooter and another defendant’s trials are scheduled for later this year.)

Reuben Carver III, a Phoenix officer, proclaimed in a stand-alone post, “Its a good day for a choke hold.”

And in St. Louis, Officer Thomas Mabrey shared a false news report that distorted an incident in which a woman police officer was shot responding to a call from a Moroccan man in Lebanon, Ohio. “F these muslem turd goat humpers,” he wrote, one of numerous anti-Muslim posts.

No big shock,

...experts in race and criminal justice were alarmed at the data.

“This blows up the myth of bad apples, by the sheer number of images and numbers of individuals who are implicated,” said Nikki Jones, an associate professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

David Kennedy, a criminology professor at John Jay College, said he considered the results “dire.”

"This is the kind of behavior that confirms the worst suspicions on the part of communities about the police," Kennedy said, adding that it “fuels and cements” the convictions of people in distressed communities have that the “police are not to be trusted.”

I wonder a bit about an over-sampling effect. Maybe the racists are all stupid and so are the ones who leave their Facebook profiles public enough to be found and identified. Maybe the smarter cops have their profiles private or listed under pseudonyms (like many of my teacher friends), and they're less likely to be racists... or maybe they're more likely to be racist and these numbers are under-counting. Who knows.

It's interesting that the retired cops had twice the rate of bad statements; is it just an age effect, or an I-no-longer-need-to-care-what-people-think effect?

The project was able to identify about 1 in 5 of the roughly 14,400 officers on the rosters through a combination of profile name, URLs, photographs, badge numbers, and other identifying information. Many officers could not be included because they had common names or used nicknames, their profiles were private, or they did not have a Facebook profile.

In Philadelphia, which has roughly 6,600 officers, the Plain View Project identified 1,073 on Facebook, about a third of whom had made troubling posts or comments.

There's lots more detail in the Buzzfeed story.

May I Tweet, 2019?

As usual, May is a relatively short Twitter round-up here at Daughter Number Three. Just the usual hijinks from the current occupant, you know, destroying democracy, plus climate devastation on the way, and so on and so forth.

On Mulligan, his administration, and his policies:

We have gone from Mexico paying for a wall that will never happen to American consumers paying up to 25 percent more for cars and avocados until Mexico solves a problem that nobody in the history of humanity has ever solved.
Blake News @blakehounshell

Congress's own research service notes that while the Trump administration promised raises of $4,000 to $9,000 for the average worker as a result of the corporate tax cuts, pay for nonsupervisory workers crept up just 1.2% in 2018, far lower than the 2.9% GDP growth.
Steven Greenhouse

If Chelsea Clinton's husband's family scored about a billion dollars in loans while he was working in the White House, the New York Times would invent new font sizes.
LOLGOP

Trump will release highly sensitive intelligence documents that might endanger people’s lives but won’t release his own taxes...and no one in the GOP is saying a damn thing about it.
Blue Girl in a Red State @barbstudebaker

So Trump’s position is that his tax returns should be kept private but the CIA’s “sources and methods” should be made public.
Max Boot

At 19 I was fired from my job for being trans and became homeless. Women’s shelters rejected me because of my assigned gender at birth. Men’s shelters denied me for reading female. I ended up on the streets and encountered several near death experiences. Trump knows what he’s doing.
Ashlee Marie Preston

The *second* there is a Democrat in the White House there will be a *massive* coordinated hysteria about the debt.
Chris Hayes

Barack Obama spent five and half years of his presidency dealing with a lying loudmouth bigot who accused him of faking his birth certificate, and Obama never complained about a "witch hunt."
Keith Boykin

They wanted their tax cuts.
They wanted their judges.
They wanted the end of regs that make it harder to get richer.
They wanted their abortion ban.
To get this, they’ve been willing to burn down our house, set us on fire & destroy democracy.
They think they’re winning.
Steven Beschloss

Refusing to govern a country is the ultimate obstruction of justice. He is saying that, if he is made subject to the rule of law, he will not govern. This is an astonishing day in America.
Anand Giridharadas

I still can't get over how the Trump administration has a literal brain surgeon serving in the Cabinet and he's still as dumb as the rest of them.
Hemant Mehta

“Imagine what it’s like to be publicly marginalized merely for using public power to persecute women and minorities and cage children” they whined to the side that gets murdered for being out too late or being in the wrong neighborhood or holding hands.
@CascadiaForever

To avoid the appearance of impropriety, President Obama refused to refinance his Chicago home mortgage while in office. Trump, on the other hand, borrowed $11 million last year from a small Florida bank and then appointed the bank CEO to the Atlanta Fed.
Keith Boykin

So in the last 2 days we've heard about sending 120,000 troops to Iran, imprisoning women who have miscarriages, jackboots staging coordinated raids on immigrant families' homes in 10 cities, and tariffs that harm "great patriot farmers" and tank the stock market. Way to go @GOP
Seth Cotlar

The notion that we are "drifting" to war with Iran rather neatly absolves everyone of responsibility, doesn't it? What's happening is a cabal of lunatics are pushing for war and American people and institutions are standing by gaping and occasionally whining. Just. Like. Last. Time.
David Roberts

"The GOP wants a one-party state, and Trump wants to be the autocrat of that state. The idea that they are incompetent is a myth. They are very competent. They are just not interested in the process of governing. They are interested in ruling."
Sarah Kendzior

On the possibility of impeachment proceedings and the latest on the Mueller report:

[Congressmember Jerry] Nadler just said there is justification to impeach Trump, but not before the public is on board. For goodness’ sake Nadler. The public is not on board because Trump and Barr gaslighted them. The only way to cut through their gaslighting is televised impeachment hearings.
Ryan Knight @ProudResister

STEP BACK A MOMENT: Republican Robert Mueller, a Marine and former FBI Director, just told America and the world that the sitting president may be a criminal. And that he was elected with the help of a massive Russian cyberattack. WATERGATE PALES BY COMPARISON. #ImpeachNow
Peter Daou

Mueller (shorter): Trump obstructed justice but the law won't let us charge him with a federal crime because he is president so if you want to deal with this prick, impeach him.
Mikel Jollett

It seems dumb to me that a president can get away with literally any crime as long as his party controls at least one chamber of Congress, and that it's therefore improper to formally accuse him of a crime even though you clearly believe he is a criminal, but what do I know
David Klion

Trump Spent More Than Three Times the Cost of Robert Mueller’s Russia Investigation Playing Golf at His Own Resorts
Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew

If Dems never conduct a formal House Judiciary Committee impeachment inquiry, Trump's 2020 message will be that Dems' failure to conduct impeachment proceedings "proves" that even *they* didn't think he did anything that was all that bad, including his obstruction of justice.
Elizabeth de la Vega

This period in U.S. history is light years more perilous than Watergate. Now the whole Republican Party, not just Trump, is involved in undermining The Constitution, money grubbing corruption, and openly engaged in the demolition of American democracy with foreign assistance.
Langdon Winner

According to Barr if you feel like you are being investigated unfairly you can obstruct an investigation, and the fact that investigators are prevented from obtaining evidence because of your obstruction and don't ultimately charge you is evidence that you were right to obstruct.
Asha Rangappa

The US Attorney General says it is not a crime for the President to order his employees to lie! Whenever I think that I can’t imagine anything more outrageous, this administration tops it.
Alan Mills

On the 2020 election, particularly the Democratic field of candidates:

Elizabeth Warren thrills small donors with personal phone calls and impresses voters during town halls.
Media: “Is she likable?”
Joe Biden holds private fundraisers for lobbyists and big donors while his campaign hides him from voters.
Media: ”A man of the people!”
Adam Best

As Elizabeth Warren was making a decent living as an excellent bankruptcy attorney, Trump was busy having us pay for his bankruptcies. Easy choice.
LOLGOP

What's funny about the white guys running for the Democratic nomination is that they all seem to think Trump voters were motivated NOT by racism or racial resentment but by economic anxiety, and yet they seem to think only THEY as white guys can win. Sit with that a minute...
Tim Wise

For the record, I acknowledge Elizabeth Warren is killing isht substantively on the campaign trail; she has articulated the best ideas and vision for the country (thus far). But her campaign has a ticking timebomb that will continue to vex her until she does right by Native communities.
@BigIndianGyasi

“People extrapolated too far from social media and Bernie’s primary and AOC’s win. I will now publicly condemn that and proceed to extrapolate extremely far from Biden’s early polls.” –every column this week apparently
Rachel Cohen

Joe Biden is appealing to the faux-left that refuses to acknowledge the toxic elements of culture in the US—racism, classism, sexism. Biden allows some to pretend to be progressive while remaining a part of that toxic culture.
Paul Thomas

I get all the eye-rolling, I do, but it’s also a *little* odd that a guy who’s run the biggest city in America creditably is perceived as a joke but the mayor of...South Bend is the Next Big Thing.
Chris Hayes (commenting on Bill DeBlasio's candidacy)

Wondering if there’s something else that Biden and de Blasio could be president of. Like a tuna sandwich, or a pair of old boots.
Ben Ehrenreich

I’ll be voting for a woman in 2020. Again.
Killer of Men @gabsthehuman

I'm trying to put a label on the range of tweets about false equivalency, lack of equivalency, and the urge toward centrism, which often has to do with media coverage:

Just heard Anderson Cooper on CNN imply that Nancy Pelosi saying Trump needs an intervention is exact equivalent of Trump posting a doctored video of her. When our democracy is ultimately destroyed, corporate media will be more to blame than Trump.
Frank Conniff

Man it sure is weird how every time a fascist gets hit in the face with some food we have a week-long discourse about left-wing political violence but every time a fascist murders people we’re treated to a smorgasbord of excuses for how it’s not political.
@thoughtxriot

LEFTWING DOXXING: hey, we ID'd this person as a member of a hate group, and he's a cop.... in a school... so that's probably bad
RIGHTWING DOXXING: here's a feminist's home address, someone should go literally murder her over a YouTube video
CENTRIST: these are the same
AntiFash Gordon

When a mass shooting is committed by a Muslim, the crime is almost automatically labeled as Domestic Terrorism. But when White Supremacists like Dylann Roof shot up a black church, or attack the Tree of Life Synagogue, the FBI declined to charge them w/ Domestic Terrorism. Why?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

"If the news media has an 'identitarianism' problem, it’s not so much that people bunker down into racial, gender or sexual groups, but that a whole class of journalists and thinkers never seems to be able to wander out past its own pool of references" YEP
Soraya Nadia McDonald (writing about how Pete Buttigieg’s meaningless erudition made him the ‘smart’ candidate)

There is no position that is apolitical. Not in medieval studies, not anywhere. Ignoring the world is just as political as engaging it. We have a responsibility to the world we live in. Thank you to all our BIPOC colleagues who remind of that every day.
Mary Kate Hurley

Dear Centrists,
What is the center between wanting a white ethnostate and not wanting that?
Asking for a friend
@absurdistwords

And it wouldn't be a month in America without its share of tweets about racism and white supremacy…

When it comes to racist acts, it’s not helpful to ask what folks’ intentions were. Instead, Robin DiAngelo says we should ask ‘How does this function?’ The impact of the action is what is relevant.”
Alexis Goldstein

Be wary of anyone employing the "let's not create division [by dealing in reality]" talking point. Re-upping tweets where I warned about politicians calling for an end to "division" and not an end to things like racism and corruption. They want power for themselves more than they want to change anything substantively for us. Y'all to stop using "we" pronoun when discussing the nature of the division this nation finds itself in today. This is not an issue of everyone contributing to an uncivil climate; this is about racist white backlash toward the first Black president and the communities that elected him.
Bree Newsome Bass


@NativeTexan74

White kids go to PhD school and dissertate on 14th century Beowulfian theology through the lens of Paradise Lost and no one says a mumbling word. A Black student wants to use AAVE in their prospectus title and has to cite 47 sources.
Capitalize the B in Black @DrRondreaMathis

Who’s the one who “contributes to society”?
A) The woman who escaped war/poverty, speaks multiple languages and is uplifting generations to come.
B) Trust-fund heir who gets paid to scream into a camera all day to satiate racists.
Imraan Siddiqi (commenting on Tucker Carlson's latest attack on Ilhan Omar)

Republicans are far more united around white supremacy than Democrats are united around anti-racism. And that's why a lot of things.
Bree Newsome Bass

the surprise around AOC and the new congress is just white people finally realizing that "twice as good" actually means that for us
E. Alex Jung

Green/blue Maori facial tattoos are invisible to wet plate photography. As a result, photos of Maori from the 1800s are often misleading:


Waldo Jaquith

There are acres of novels about whiteness. Honestly, that's most of the novels in print. The problem is there aren't enough that are aware that that's what they're about. Whiteness and so many white people's investment in it is fascinating. Let's write more novels critically investigating that.
@JustineLavaworm

George Wallace would have loved charter schools. White charter schools. Black charter schools. That’s where “School Choice” was born, in resistance to Brown Decision.
Diane Ravitch

Blacks who've attended college are about 2X as likely as blacks who haven't to say they face racial discrimination on a regular basis (17% vs. 9%).
Monica Anderson

…as well as sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity…

Do men know they don’t have to comment on everything or is that why you can’t spell comment without men?
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

The Joker should have been a woman. And she finally went insane because too many random dudes told her to smile, so now she perpetually smiles while terrorizing Gotham. She becomes a sort of folk hero for the women of Gotham. She unleashes financial records for companies that don't compensate women properly. She blackmails cheaters and misogynists. She threatens the goddamn Patriarchy. It's terrifying and wonderful. The Batman needs to stop her to restore the order of things, but on some level, he's conflicted. She's a villain. But she's right. Her catchphrase would be "Well, ACTUALLY ..." and then she'd just trail off and laugh maniacally.
Geraldine @everywhereist

The far right has linked the 2nd Amendment so deeply with culture war that it’s become a dog whistle for the armed defense of white male supremacy. That’s what gives the NRA its power. Every mass shooting victim is a sacrifice to white male supremacy.
Ed Overbeek

Happy to hear MacKenzie Bezos plans to give half her billions to charity. Still baffled that major news orgs keep saying she *became* one of the world’s richest women when she divorced. She was also one of the world’s richest when she was married. This error smacks of patriarchy.
Charles M. Blow

Hospital programs that require spousal approval for tubal ligation should be challenged in every court in this country. Women are autonomous citizens, not incompetent minors or marital property.
feminist next door @emrazz

I'm just entirely done with being asked to indulge the revolting pretense that men who inappropriately touch women don't know that what they're doing is wrong and/or that it isn't sexual. Do they do it to other men? No? There's your fucking answer. The end.
Melissa McEwan @Shakestweetz

When a guy says, "You're not like other girls," he's admitting that he has a generally low regard for your entire gender but is willing to make an exception for you. This is not a compliment. Girl, run.
Shannon Hale

Not a fan of (very normal) attitudes that treat women being in public with children as a big unacceptable inconvenience to everyone else. Women with kids are supposed to hermit themselves away so you don't suffer some minor inconvenience?
Angie Schmitt

Simply telling students about gender bias in student evaluations increases female instructors' ratings by .3-.5 points (on a 5 point scale).
John B. Holbein

I cannot imagine a male runner being asked to physically alter his body to make competition with other men more “fair,” which really reinforces that men are seen as people and women are seen as this weird subgroup with a long list of rules for entry
Lux Alptraum

I know i’ll get pushback for this but there must be a path towards redemption for men who have done bad things. But it needs to be paved with genuine private & public apologies + using their platform to challenge the culture that taught them to do bad things in the first place.
Liz Plank @feministabulous

Women who have children take a 30 percent pay cut and never catch up. Men who have children get a 20 percent pay bump. (The word you are looking for is “sexism.”)
TalkPoverty.org

…this month with extra-special sexism because of all the laws that were passed restricting abortions:

With all the Christian fever over stopping abortion, it's worth remembering abortions were going on in days of Jesus. But he never once preached about it. Never once said abortion was murder. Never once said life begins at conception. Never once said anything about heartbeats.
John Oberlin @OMGno2trump

To the GOP extremists trying to invoke “the unborn” to jail people for abortion: Where are you on climate change? OH right, you want to burn fossil fuels til there’s hell on Earth. If they were truthful about their motives, they’d be consistent in their principles. They’re not.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Why can't Republicans just use thoughts and prayers to stop abortions like they do for school shootings?
Axis II of Evil @joannathemad89

America does not lack a pro-choice consensus; the pro-choice majority lacks the power to hold Republican lawmakers accountable to that consensus.
Eric Levitz

Men know what consent is when it comes to other men touching them without permission. Lawmakers know an embryo isn’t a baby when they’re destroyed IVF leftovers. Seems like it might just be that society is having trouble letting go of the idea that women are property.
Catherynne Valente

Children being murdered in their schools, children with no drinking water in Flint, 400,000 children in foster care and they want us to believe they care for children. #AbortionIsAWomansRight
@lucyonobed

The abortion debate has never been about abortion. It's about the legal status of women. Are women people? Do we have ownership of our bodies? Or does the state own our bodies? If you are celebrating Alabama's new abortion law, you are celebrating the ownership of women.
@LaurenMcWoof

A weird thing about US culture is a complete fetishization of pregnancy and birth and a complete public ignorance of how either of those things work biologically and/or are experienced structurally
Kaitlyn Greenidge @surlybassey

there's not a single thing in this world a male could experience that would even come close to the indignity of being legally forced to carry your rapist's baby to term
Brandon McCarthy

Unwanted Alabama embryos should be implanted into the peritoneal cavities of the male legislators who voted for the state’s new abortion statute.
Barbara Ehrenreich

I keep seeing folks pointing out that abortion bans are not representative of popular opinion, but folks keep voting these zealots in. What are these legislators supposed to think? They aren’t punished for their positions. Would seem these positions show revealed preferences.
@surlyurbanist

Georgia bans abortion after six weeks & will punish women who go out of state. Alabama bans abortion even in the case of rape & will punish women with 99 years in jail. And Republicans fearmonger about “Shariah Law coming to America”? It’s obvious they’re the ones bringing it.
Nathan H. Rubin

Convinced at this point that men feeling entitled to own and control things that they have no right to is the root of pretty much every harmful thing in society. We need a revolution.
Eric Holthaus

I've talked about this before, written about it and what I learned then was that no one in the "pro-life" movement wants to admit that abortion is medical care. Until they need one or their child does. Then they decide their need is exceptional. Because it was always about control.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

Then it's on to the climate crisis and sustainable cities:

“Electric cargo bikes are most definitely the future for us,” says @AskAbsolutely, the oldest courier company in London. “Our van drivers are averaging between 10 and 12 deliveries a day while the e-cargobike riders can do more than 30 deliveries a day.”
International Cargo Bike Festival

If climate change is a global threat to humanity it seems logical that modeling the cost to fight it should follow World War II mobilization Who gives a shit about forced rationing or saving if we’re all drowned or burnt to a crisp?
Rob Steinernomics

Some mayor's climate action plan should be we're going to phase out surface parking, with actual reduction goals pegged to years.
Angie Schmitt

Walkability requires irregularity at a super fine grain.
@happifydesign

Capitalism not overpopulation is killing all life on earth. It's up to us to connect the dots- because mainstream media is too entrenched in the corrupt system to #TellTheTruth #RebelForLife #ClimateEmergency
Extinction Rebellion Twin Cities

The idea of a “shared street” doesn’t work if the theory is that everyone’s on an even playing field, because they’re not. Cars need to be prioritized last, usually moving no faster than a pedestrian strolls. The relative size of the images on this Paris street conveys priority:


Brent Toderian

On congestion pricing: "Few equity agendas in other areas of social policy, after all, demand that all goods be free. Almost no one, for example, suggests that all food be free because some people are poor. Society instead identifies poor people and helps them buy food. So why should *all* roads be free because *some* drivers are poor? Most drivers aren’t poor, many poor people (including the poorest) don’t drive, and most driving is done by the middle and upper classes." –The Conversable Economist.
Stu Donovan

Lawns and pools are the largest household use of water in California. Golf courses are the largest non-household/non-agricultural use. I imagine it's the same in the rest of the desert Southwest. We'll keep our Great Lakes water here, thanks.
Jason Segedy

All urban areas should be dense. Cities should be cities. Living in a suburban house with suburban land in the middle of a city is *only* possible thanks to injustice.
David Roberts

When you build things to last, they last. Buildings on this street in Woodstock, UK, date as far back as 1627 (that was the oldest I saw). Imagine if we committed to building places to last? We shoot ourselves in the foot by focusing on building quickly as a first priority:


Jennifer Keesmaat

Seriously, how much time, energy, and attention did [Elon Musk's hyper tunnel idea] take away from serious conversations about real solutions to urban mobility? To end up with what many of us expected — just more paved tunnels for cars that would continue to cost billions and induce more driving.
Brent Toderian

Fun anecdote in this profile of Madrid’s mayor: “She heard from a German journalist who complained at length about the complications that new traffic rules had created in her neighborhood. ‘Please use the bus,’ Ms. Carmena responded, with a big smile.”
Laura J. Nelson

Doesn't matter whether motor vehicles run on gas, diesel, electricity, or even autonomously. Not Healthy. Not Sustainable. Not Livable. Stop tinkering.Truly prioritize walking, cycling and public transit with actual conviviality. Waiting is not an option. Fix our cities!!
SharkDancing

Berkeley resident: Bus Lanes will ruin the historic character of the street!
Historian: The street used to have no autos and streetcars running down the middle.
Berkeley resident: Not that historic!
Skip Pile

Me: “Please don’t park in the bike lane!”
Guy parked in the bike lane: “I’m doing my JOB!”
Ok guy, well me and the other six people biking here are just trying to get to our jobs and your actions are illegal and endangering us.
Biking in Mpls

Wow, a thing I just learned: India has 900 *million voters* - and Indian law says every one of them must have a polling place within 1.5 miles’ *walk* of where they live. Can you imagine? A walkable democracy?
@mateosfo

If we use public dollars to subsidize agriculture, helping farmers weather these hard times, shouldn’t we get public benefits — like a healthier environment, cleaner water, and cleaner air — as a result? Seems only fair.
Dr. Jonathan Foley @GlobalEcoGuy

What percentage of all global fossil fuel CO₂ emissions (since 1751) have occurred in your lifetime due to government inaction on and complicity in #ClimateBreakdown and #EcologicalCollapse?


Extinction Rebellion

DeCARonization 101: without intending to, we are teaching our kids that a car is the only legit way to get around:
1. We’ve decided other options are too dangerous, retreating from streets and public spaces, making biking and walking more dangerous for being rarer.
2. We hide the costs of car ownership and use from them.
3. We shame other parents who let their kids bike and take transit, and in some cases even call the police.
Russ Stark

Great news!! The Guardian has stopped using the misleading phrase “climate change” and will as from now call it “climate crisis.”
Greta Thunberg

"All urban streets should be a challenge to drive and easy to walk or bike." –Michael Ronkin. And if they're not...you've got the wrong idea about what a city should be in the 21st century:


Taras Grescoe

Someone added this rug to a Metro Transit shelter and now I want every shelter to get its own sweet styling from random neighbors and riders:


@happifydesign

We did polling for Data Progress that showed equitable zoning is overwhelmingly popular. People believe otherwise because the opposition is loud and shows up to local zoning meetings because it’s largely retired people.
Henry Kraemer

If we want to slow climate breakdown, it’s time to stop habitually purchasing brand new shit: every manufactured product generates emissions and co-opts limited resources. Not so with previously existing, post-consumer options.
julie kearns

All the U.S. agencies charged with traffic safety are engaging in basically a conspiracy to not warn the public that SUVs are more likely to kill pedestriansWe don't have to ban SUVs. At this point, it'd be a step forward, IMO, if people were just informed that they were a lot more likely to kill another person if they drove one. Maybe that changes nothing but at least they know..
Angie Schmitt

The before and after shot shows what a difference it makes:


helen warlow

Why are roads in bad shape in America? States are neglecting maintenance so they can build more expensive new highway lane miles. That just adds to the total maintenance bill.
Streetsblog USA

At any one time, 500 million empty parking spaces in the US. (Avg size: 153 sq ft—which adds up to a parking lot the size of Delaware.) Annual taxpayer subsidy to free parking: $374 billion. via: Donald Shoup
Taras Grescoe

From Washington state ...


Chris Steller

Zoom zoom car improvements never need any public process, but anything for bikes or pedestrians takes over a year and features a lot of making sure this is what people want.
Alex Schieferdecker

Found some notes for a story on the ecological crisis as an intergenerational injustice that I (unsuccessfully) pitched around in 2002. It just occurred to me that most of today's school strikers weren't even born then. We've raised an entire generation underneath our failures.
Alex Steffen

dearest adults: we don’t want your hope. we don’t want you to apologize or sympathize, we want you to be as scared as we are. And to take action with us. because we by all means are all in this together, whether you like it or not.
anna grace @queenbeetheag

What if, and hear me out here, tilting the future balance in favor human survival depended on adopting economic degrowth, by prioritizing human needs, ramping down physical resource use and restoring ecosystems and biodiversity? Wouldn't that be at least worth considering?
Prof Julia S. @JKSteinberger

Obstructions for bicyclists are normalized, while obstructions for cars are immediately seen as a major problem.
Alex Schieferdecker

By all means possible, we must reverse the pro-motorist regime that has made us all more dementia-prone: tax carbon, gas, and congestion; narrow roads; replace parking with bike lanes; upzone; boost transit; raise toll, parking, and registration fees; and yes, cities should ban cars.
Max Ghenis

We all know air pollution is bad for us, but 3 new studies show it is way worse for our health than previously imagined. Compelling evidence suggests it contributes to dementia—and the stats are so overwhelming many researchers believe it’s conclusive
WIRED

I wish we gave even a fraction of the effort we spend working to limit scooter numbers and speeds and storage locations to doing the same for cars. We could transform our cities overnight.
Luke Klipp

Remember this picture every single time you hear someone in your city say "we're not Amsterdam." Amsterdam in the 1970s:


Brent Toderian

Engaging with the climate crisis has just started opening up here in Minneapolis and I’m so thankful, though also worried for the mental health of those learning about and facing climate breakdown honestly for the first time. I’ve had twenty years to come to grips with what’s happening. When I became fully aware, we were in a much better position to address it; I didn’t have to immediately face the same totally existential threat. But I was also completely isolated in it, emotionally/intellectually. I don’t know which is “easier” emotionally. I hope I can somehow help buffer others from and hold others in some of the deep grief inherent in facing the truth. I worry about accidentally compounding others’ pain by still being in my own grief and trauma of it.
@happifydesign

Oops. Emissions from Alberta tarsands seem to have been underestimated by, hmm, 64%. Because industry gets to estimate its own pollution
Bill McKibben

Permafrost is thawing in the Arctic so fast that scientists are losing their equipment.
Rob Hopkins

A 10-year mobilization to completely decarbonize the country, revitalize forests, completely transform agriculture, etc. is the bare minimum and any presidential candidate that can’t commit to that should be disqualified.
@SydneyAzari

Paraphrasing: Across the ten most congested urban areas in the U.S. the poor are 14% of the population, but 4% of the peak hour drivers. Households earning $150K+ are 15% of the pop, but 28% of peak drivers.
Show this thread
Carter Rubin

Glad we've hit the 'it's cheaper to just die' section of the climate change debates
James Colley

The morning after a truck driver killed a cyclist (and drove away), NYPD did a ticket blitz at that very intersection. Against cyclists. And ticketed people *on a memorial ride* for the victim.
Aaron W. Gordon

"Cities are meant to stop traffic. That is their point. That is why they are there. That is why traders put outposts there, merchants put shops there, hoteliers erect inns there. Rationally one wants to have traffic *stop* there, not go *through*." —Kirkpatrick Sale


Taras Grescoe

funny to see the hedonic treadmill of vehicle size and income. my retired parents "need" an suv b/c they have a dog. i'm like "but in 1996 you had two kids, two dogs and a mitsubishi mirage. I dont remember it being hell":


lewis lehe

There are just a few general tweets on immigration. I have to say I have been neglecting this topic. Our southwestern border has become a site of near-genocide and I can't bear to think about it. These two tweets barely touch on the news of the month:

Future generations, if any, will look back and struggle to understand how willing Boomers are to destroy their own countries rather than pay taxes or see immigrants.
@gin_and_tacos

Pretty wild that in America right now you can dress up in an army combat uniform and point machine guns at migrants in the middle of the desert, but if you give them water or a granola bar you go to jail. Imagine how many people here think that shit is just normal and ok now.
blackmask

There were a few on education:

In 1979 teachers in US earned 92.7% of other grads. Today only 78.6%.
Adam Tooze

Just heard from my niece this a.m. who just ended her college semester with a 3.25 GPA. She had to drop out of school at 18 to help raise her sisters because her mom was suffering from mental illness. She’s now a single mom whose faced eviction, job loss and turmoil. She’s the type of young woman our society likes to write off, to give up on. But my mom’s union paid for her college and with that help and the help of her family, she got the confidence to go back to school to better her life for her children and herself. She’s had to rely on public assistance to help feed her family and help with medical care and without government help to pay for childcare she would not be able to work and attend school. Our investment in her made her able to help herself. And it’s made her not want to give up. When we as a society invest in each other instead of hoard our resources and penalize people for making mistakes, it makes us all better. She wants to be a teacher to help other kids who were like her. I am proud of her.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

The state fails to invest in public schools and housing. Over time, those institutions degrade to a level where they are labeled "failing," which then legitimizes private entities to take them over and social cleansing proceeds. This is happening across the Western world.
Nikhil Goyal

Gains on NAEP were larger pre-NCLB. More testing does not lead to better education. What are we doing to a generation of kids?
Diane Ravitch

I put together my usual conglomeration of tweets on economic transformation, income and wealth inequality, and fair taxation:

Dublin you’re alright:


Emily of the State

Philanthropy got one kid in need a walker. Taxation gets EVERY kid in need a walker. Taxation is better than philanthropy. Make Billionaires pay their fair share & parents won't have to beg Home Depot for their child's healthcare needs.
Qasim Rashid, Esq.

Pretty incredible. EIGHT out of the 10 jurisdictions with the highest corporate tax haven scores are British territories. Which makes the UK the 'greatest enable of corporate tax avoidance' worldwide. And it'll probably only get worse with Brexit.
Rutger Bregman

I don't want to tax rich people because they're bad or evil or deserve to be punished. I want to tax rich people because it's just *so much easier* to make money when you already have money. Tax the people who work less per dollar earned because that's the /sane thing to do!/
Hank Green

OK, one more time. If a business spends money on employees or growing the business, that money isn't profit. And. Only. Profit. Gets. Taxed. Higher taxes are a significant incentive to reinvest capital rather than extract it as profit.
Hank Green

The wealthiest 10% of Americans control 70% of the nation's total wealth - and almost everyone telling you inequality doesn't "really matter" comes from that bracket. It is not moral for almost everything created in this country to be owned by so few.
Sen. Mike Gravel

Next time you suggest a policy that will help millions of Americans, and in response someone smugly asks you: “how ya gonna pay for that?”, tell’m 60 of America's biggest companies paid no federal income tax in 2018.
Keith Ellison

I LOVE what Robert F. Smith has done [in paying off the loans of Morehouse graduates] but know this truth: If billionaires today were taxed at the 1940s-1970s rate when USA had its strongest middle class growth in history — Robert F. Smith wouldn’t have needed to pay for this student debt because college would ALREADY be affordable.
Qasim Rashid, Esq.

Letting the billionaires go to space would actually solve a lot of problems down here. Godspeed fellas!
Ben Ehrenreich

Capitalism tends to inequality and crashes provoking angry backlash. Smart capitalists then briefly reverse inequality and impose stability till anger fades. W/ stupid capitalists, no reverse and inequality deepens, leading to revolutionary surges. So it is with Trump and his ilk now.
Richard D. Wolff

“When a billionaire whose life is an emblem of the very extreme inequality we are trying to address offers a grand solution to that problem, be very suspicious.”
Anand Giridharadas

“Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.” —Lucy Parsons #MayDay
Haymarket Books

And then, at last, the best of the rest:

If I could teach my children one scientific topic it would be the relationship of surface area to evaporation rate:


Joshua A. Weiner @JW_UI_Neuro

The abuse of marginalized people is baked into ad-driven social media by design because it increases engagement. Harassment and threats are profitable. YouTube is chumming for sharks, using marginalized creators as bait.
Michelle Allison @fatnutritionist

It's been interesting watching some Liberals try to come to terms with the reality that for the powerful the LAW is what they say it is and mostly doesn't apply to them.
Prison Culture

Among Canada’s provinces, Ontario is the lowest per capita spender. Ontario is last in total spending – 10th out of 10. The lie that spending is out-of-control is being used to fuel the dismantling of our transit, healthcare and schools. Shameful.
Jennifer Keesmaat

Every university has someone with a title like ‘The Robert J and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business’, who will use evolutionary psychology to argue that sweatshops shouldn’t have fire escapes.
@wise_executive

Every single comedian who says “funny is funny” or complains about safe spaces has yelled at a crowd of 20-year-olds for not laughing at a joke that ends with them asking if something is gluten-free in a gay voice.
Gonzalo Cordova


I don’t know why the balloon store in my neighborhood has a menacing font that suggests they’re adapted from a graphic novel about vampires, but I kind of admire them for sticking with it. Also, “Every Party Starts With a Balloon” may be untrue, but it’s an AMAZING note to improve the “Eyes Wide Shut” orgy scene:


Tim Carvell

never forget who debt-free college would hurt the most: military recruiters who'd then have to prey on high schoolers using only that "see the world" bullshit
@robwhisman

Imagine sitting an exam at the start of a 3 year course. You don’t fully understand the subject and you only get a mark of 48%. You are then not allowed to retake the exam at the end of the course, even though you've learned so much more about the subject by then. #Brexit
James Melville

I will never understand people’s need to stand on top of tall things as a form of accomplishment.
Christina @StinaMo

What is especially concerning is that jurisdictions now excluded from federal pre-clearance under Section 5 of the VRA had purge rates that were significantly higher than other jurisdictions — leaving 2 million fewer citizens eligible to vote.
Brennan Center

The progress-themed way we teach American history makes it kind of impossible to convey the pretty straightforward fact that Lincoln's assassination was a tide-turning political victory for the Confederate cause.
Tom Scocca

The US has 705 billionaires. Collectively, they own a little more than $3 trillion. The US has 44 million student debtors. Collectively, they owe about $1.6 trillion.
Jeff Stein

Anyone else ever see stories about legislature “having to work overtime” and think who gives a fuck do your jobs?
@rawales2

Conservatives: Children aren’t ready to see gay marriage on TV.
Also conservatives: Children are ready to give birth to their rapists’ babies.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

I strongly suspect that history will reveal most of the "populism" of the last five years to have Russian intelligence fingerprints all over it, because that's where the evidence points, today.
Alex Steffen

I hate that “basket weaving” is so often used as shorthand for something irrelevant and useless. Do you know how much math, plant care, planning, symbolism, story and skill goes into basket weaving? It’s such settler arrogance that dismisses these knowledge systems
Kat @awahihte

26% of jail suicides occurred within the first 3 DAYS of incarceration. We must wholly eliminate pre-trial incarceration, including EM, toward the abolition of all forms of incarceration. Full stop.
MUAVI @MomsUnitedChi

Telling someone they not the sharpest tool in the shed and then realizing they not familiar with the concepts of sharp, tool, or sheds, is a really bitter victory.
Bigfoot TheBigfoot

maybe instead of rebooting batman for the 971st time in the last decade we could... do anything else.
lindsey romain

Federal spending on infrastructure has not increased significantly in decades. That leaves state and local governments to pick up the slack, which means state and local tax revenues are even more critical:


Joint Economic Committee Democrats

Let the kids go outside like you did when you were a kid. Believe it or not, it’s actually safer now.
Breakdances With Wolves 

In '71, there were 2 biz majors for every English major. Today it's 8 to 1. @LisQuart of @Econhardship smartly writes about how humanities are crucial for technological innovation (and society). Humanities are crucial for technological innovation
Mike Smith @MSmithTweets

My child exclaimed his disbelief that a company as rich as KFC would spend so much effort producing a detailed head, but then just draw a stick figure body.
Me: “I thought it was his bow tie.”
He glared at my stupidity.
But now I can’t unsee a giant head on a stick figure:


Belinda Hope

Let’s just say in light of these last episodes [of Game of Thrones] I now fully trust Benioff and Weiss to handle something as fraught and complicated as race, slavery and the American Civil War.
jelani cobb

It costs NYC, $2,000 to arrest someone. It costs them $500 per night to jail them on Rikers Island. If someone is sentenced to 60 days in jail because they didn't pay a $2.75 subway fare, it costs the city, $22,000.
Rebecca J. Kavanagh


Prairie Phlox might be the most perfect prairie wildflower. Hot pink spikes all over the prairies just before all the heavy hitters start blooming:


Prairie Czar