Charter School Math

I haven't posted much about education in a long time. It gets mentioned occasionally in my monthly Twitter round-up, but that's about it.

Today I saw an excellent summary of how charter schools in general work to defund and undermine the public school system. It was written by Sarah Cole McIntosh, a school board member from Jefferson County, Kentucky:

Charters WILL strip resources and funding from public schools, harming students. Here’s how. Understand this is simplified to explain the concept and that the size of a district, local vs other funding source, and other variables can impact the rate of impact.

Let’s suppose there is a public elementary school with 3 classes of each grade, K-5. That is 18 homerooms. A charter opens in the area. 1 or 2 kids from each class leaves to go to the charter; a total of 30 kids from the whole school. From a funding perspective, that’s the cost of 1 teacher. BUT - the kids weren’t all from the same class or grade level so the school still needs the same number of teachers. Who or what should that school cut?

Let’s say in a large district, 1,000 kids attend charters in the first 5 years. Again, they’re not from the same school or class, so the staffing needs for those schools don’t change but that’s the cost of roughly 35 teachers. So, the district does what they have already done ALL ACROSS AMERICA - they cut out things that are not required; things like art and music are often the first teachers to go; building maintenance falters; there are fewer extracurriculars offered; class size increases; technology and other resources aren’t kept up to date… it gets bad. Fast.

Meanwhile, the charters have control over who they accept. You can search all you want. You won’t find many charters that take kids with significant medical or developmental needs; not the kids with profound behavior and mental health issues stemming from abuse or trauma; charters don’t take the kids that require a lot of additional help because they’re more “expensive” to educate. Sure, some kids may have IEPs but they’re statistically those whose accommodations can be met in a typical classroom and don’t require additional, specialized staff.

Academic research has shown charters don’t really perform any better than their public school peers. Increases in achievement are nearly always attributed to smaller class size (which public schools can’t offer because of $!) or the selective nature of charter enrollment. Studies that purport significant improvement were conducted by biased, pro-charter entities. They’re more propaganda than research.

Saint Paul and Minneapolis both face this chipping away at their bases of students. Minneapolis, despite being the largest city by far in the state, is now the third largest school system. (Admittedly, a significant amount of that is from open-enrollment across suburban boundaries as well.) Saint Paul may have a larger problem than Minneapolis with competition from charters, and the schools families choose turn out to be highly segregated.

Any single student doesn't make a difference, but the cumulative effect begins to add up, feeds on itself, and becomes a cascade.

What's All This About?

I keep waiting for Saturday Night Live to do a take-off on the old Emily Litella bit, because I can't believe no one has done a send up of the Right's obsession with CRT ("critical race theory") when cathode ray tubes are sitting right there waiting to be talked about.

And now we have all these anti-gay and anti-trans bills and suddenly, there's constant talk about "grooming." It's the new moral panic. They hate grooming! 

I know someone who writes jokes could do a lot better than me at this, but here is my illustration bringing together both ideas. 

We must ban CRTs! We must ban grooming! 

I offer this as a free graphic to use in all organizing posters and leaflets:

What's all this about violins on television, anyway?

Before I Forget

I'm a long-time fan of education writer and policy-thinker Diane Ravitch, as evidenced by some of my past posts. I've been following her on Twitter since my earliest days there as well.

But recently someone must have talked her into including eye-bleeding graphics with the tweets that promote posts from her blog. These images make me ignore everything she posts because not only can I not read what they say, I have to scroll them out of my feed before they injure me.

I keep forgetting to mention it here.

Stop. Please stop.

You don't believe me? Here are three of them.

I'm sorry to inflict these on you, but someone else needs to know about this.

A Ludlow Look at the 1950s

Do you know what a Ludlow Typograph machine is? I've never used one, or seen one in use. They were just going out of mainstream use when I got into the business in the early 1980s.

I just saw a copy of the company's 1958 catalog. Here are the stamped letters from the cover:

And close-ups of photos from two of the opening pages, showing first the machine and two cases of matrices used to cast the type:

 

And some of the cast letter forms:

It's a thick, lavish catalog in cloth hardcover, with two-color pages in more than half the book (the second color varying), alternating with black-ink pages to display the typefaces in full.

The two-color pages each display multiple dummy ads created to show off one typeface. They're delightful glimpses at mid-1950s style (and often telephone numbers that use exchange names). 

But it was this dummy ad that made me stop to take a photo and decide to post about the book:

It's both so beautifully clean and earnest... and so funny.

And then I saw this page:

It contains four ads, each one a perfect example of the mid-20th century hubris that has led us to our climate crisis: plastics, natural gas (standing in generally and specifically for fossil fuels), encouragement to build your individualistic accumulation of capital under capitalism, and inducement to spend the winter in sunny Phoenix, which had not yet grown into an unsustainable sprawl in the desert.

It was the plastics ad in the bottom left that made me stop:

What kind of copy is that? Heretofore? More than all the other ads, it's clearly just filler to show off the typeface. Maybe someone was getting tired.

2.7 Million Barrels a Day

Before it slips away, forgotten, here's a study for the permanent files from the International Energy Agency, summarized here on Bloomberg and in full here.

It's called A 10-Point Plan to Cut Oil Use, and as it sounds like, it provides 10 steps (which have been implemented successfully in the past) to conserve oil. If they were put into use now, the IEA estimates, they would save 2.7 million barrels of oil a day within four months.

The report was put out in the context of Russia's attack on Ukraine, and therefore decreasing demand for oil (some of which is Russian). But obviously, most of these are perfectly good permanent changes to make to begin dealing with the climate crisis.

The IEA made their recommendations into this handy graphic (click to enlarge):

And they ranked those recommendations:

Notice how far down the list electric vehicle adoption falls, compared to the top five. 

Allowing Him to Retort

I hope you've seen Elie Mystal as a commentator somewhere, talking about the Supreme Court or other legal topics. If you have, you already have an idea what it's like to read his book Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution.

It's snappy and to the point and I want everyone to read it. I usually take a while to read nonfiction books, but not this one — and not only because it seems shorter than its 257 pages.

He does a great job of confirming my priors, of course, but it's grounded in his reality as a Black man. As we all know, the Constitution and the first 12 amendments were all written before Black people were acknowledged to be fully human, and there's a list of others of us who were excluded from participating in its writing and amending as well.

The ideas of originalism or textualism are ridiculous and Mystal makes this clear in multiple ways throughout the book.

The chapter called "Stop Frisking Me" contains his own harrowing stories of Driving While Black, in addition to the legal background in what's called the Terry stop, which is one I had not heard about before (from Terry v. Ohio, 1968). The Supreme Court vote on Terry was 8–1, and while in the facts of that specificc case it may have been reasonable for the cop to stop Terry for questioning, it was supposed to be based on a "reasonable suspicion," not a hunch (like Philando Castile's wide nose, and not a made-up suspicion like saying a cop thinks he smells marijuana). 

New York passed a stop and frisk law three years after Terry that gave cops the right to stop and question people if the cop "reasonably suspects" they are "about to commit" a crime. As Republicans are fond of saying, that is a loophole big enough to drive a Mack truck through:

Instead of reasonable suspicion, cops act on their unreasonable implicit (and often explicit) biases. That's why arguably constitutional stop and frisks became nothing more than a Trojan horse for the unconstitutional scheme of racial profiling (page 49).

The SCOTUS opinion in Terry v. Ohio said the violation of the Fourth Amendment was okay because the "minor inconvenience and petty indignity" it caused was balanced by keeping the cop safe. But as we know from 50 years of implementation since then, it's not a minor inconvenience, and it has a clear disproportionate impact on Black and brown people. Mystal ends the chapter by calling for overturning the decision.

The next chapter references the Dethorne Graham case, which I have discussed before. This is where we get the "reasonable officer" standard, instead of the "reasonable person" standard when police kill or injure someone. Mystal crystalizes it this way:

The Fourth Amendment does not say: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...unless the state employs hysterical racists and cowards who are afraid of Black people, in which case failure to immediately comply with their unconstitutional orders is a capital offense." The Fourth Amendment does not say that "only other police officers" can determine what a reasonable or unreasonable search seizure really means" (page 56).

Not surprisingly, Mystal also advocates eliminating peremptory challenges in jury selection, getting rid of confessions (since coercion is built into the system), and, of course, the death penalty.

And that was all just about the Bill of Rights. Then he gets to the Civil War-era amendments.

He believes a new Constitution should have been written, as was done in South Africa after apartheid. But since it wasn't, what we need to do is come to a clear conclusion on what the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments are about. Did they fundamentally change the Constitution, or not? Conservatives don't think so, Mystal says, while the rest of us see them as a Second Founding, which is the title of a book by historian Eric Foner. They were meant to herald the first biracial (now multiracial) democracy. Mystal's take on this:

...analyzing any constitutional clause without straining it through the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection and due process, or the Fifteenth Amendment's distribution of the voting franchise, is an exercise of intellectual apartheid. Without the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments (and the Nineteenth Amendment, which finally acknowledged women's fundamental right to vote), the Constitution is a violent piece of shit that can be used to justify or allow the legalized supremacy of white men over all others. Those four amendments do not perfect the original Constitution; they're not the final pieces of the puzzle that complete a picture.... Instead, they recast the entire document, destroying the slave state that the founders wrote...and replacing it with something new...still flawed yet not utterly unredeemable (page 128).

And in response, from conservatives, we get "originalism" and "textualism" to pretend none of that is real, because white supremacy is what they want to maintain:

It's pretty easy to dress up "whites win always" with legalese and sell it back to an audience of white people, especially when Thomas Jefferson and James Madison have already done most of the work (page 129).

There is no political or legal philosophy of democratic self-government that contemplates people living under the yoke of laws as they would have been interpreted by their captors (page 135).

After that, there are chapters on voting rights, gerrymandering, the Senate, and the Electoral College. While Mystal has sympathy for the National Popular Vote law idea to make the Electoral College irrelevant without eliminating it, he doubts it would hold up to a Republican challenge in front of our current 6–3 Supreme Court, if a Republican candidate lost the election under the NPV rules. A September 2020 Gallup poll showed 61% of people favor eliminating the Electoral College. He advocates going for an actual constitutional amendment to abolish it, working the disenfranchisement angle (i.e., there were more Trump voters in California than any other state, but their votes were meaningless).

The epilogue of the book is Mystal's recommendation on court expansion. Up until now, I have favored the idea of expanding to 13 justices to mirror the number of federal appellate courts, which was how the current number nine was fixed in 1869. But Mystal is in the go-big-or-go-home camp: justices would go into senior status after 18 years, with new justices added at that point. And he would change the court to the same format used for Courts of Appeals, particularly the Ninth Circuit, which has 29 judges who hear cases in three-judge panels, chosen at random. If a case is more controversial, the full court can vote to rehear the case "en banc" for a vote of the full court.

This plan would depoliticize both the court and the nomination process, as well as allowing the possibility that the court could be more representative of the country as a whole, just through its sheer number of positions.

I hope I haven't given too much away. There's a lot more in these 257 pages that I haven't mentioned. If you want to be prepared to argue with your favorite right-wing federalist, you can't do better than this book.

I Called It in

Check out this photo of parking in Saint Paul:

Yes, that is a semi with a 53-foot trailer parked on a city street in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It may look like it could possibly be in a traffic lane, but believe me, it is not. It's parked against the curb, behind those three cars ahead of it. 

The adjacent building fills an entire city block. I admit it's a smallish block, but still. That semi is half the block long. It's filling four parking spaces, maybe a bit more. And it's completely legal.

Except then I realized that it wasn't. Look closer at the top right corner and you'll see that the back of the trailer is overlapping the traffic signal. And that means the whole thing is too close to the crosswalk as well.

So reader, I called it in to Parking Enforcement. Yes, I did.

Whether its driver got a ticket, I don't know. I hope so.

Cat Face Hooks

It's been quite a week, so that means it's time for another example of pareidolia.

I've seen these coat hooks for a number of years, about six times a year, in fact. 

Maybe they have been partially covered up a lot of those times, but yesterday they were empty and I realized that I see a rather leonine face in the lower half. A royal cat of some kind, given the fancy crown.

There are three of them in all, and the effect is strongest on the center one, where the hooks are seen straight on, and when you look close up so you can see the screws — which make the eyes — more clearly. 

Lindsey Graham, Tantrum

I had the misfortune of being in a car, with the radio tuned to NPR, when Lindsey Graham was interrogating Judge Jackson this morning. If you didn't hear it, consider yourself lucky.

The woman is a saint. The chair of the committee (Dick Durbin of Illinois) showed that he is spineless, because Graham was past his allotted time for the entire segment I heard, which was more than 15 minutes long. And he was berating her and not letting her answer, even when he was actually asking a question instead of pontificating.

I've since heard some say that Durbin's "strategy" is to make the Republican look like fools by giving them enough rope, yada yada. And while they do look like fools, I think by now we've learned that this does not work. It only feeds their base. They've got enough rope to hang us all.

Now multiple media outlets have already run headlines about the "heated exchange" between Graham and Jackson, when there was no such thing. There was Graham having a rule-breaking tantrum, with Jackson patiently listening to him, then occasionally trying to answer while he interrupted. She was never heated in any way.

So did that work, Senator Durbin? 

Remember, Lindsey Graham voted to confirm Jackson to the Court of Appeals less than a year ago. The same cases he was questioning about all happened before that that confirmation vote.

There Have Not Always Been Hearings

I learned a while ago that there were no voter registration requirements in the U.S., generally, until after Black men got the right to vote. 

Yesterday I learned from The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell that the first Senate confirmation hearings for a Supreme Court justice were not held until 1916, for Louis Brandeis, who was — wait for it — the first Jewish person nominated. (Though I just learned from this 2009 NPR story that Brandeis did not actually attend the hearings. They were, instead, in the tradition of advocates and opponents for a candidate speaking on his behalf, which is how presidential campaigns used to be run as well.)

Not only was Brandeis the first to be subject to a hearing, he was the only one for a while. The Senate didn't make hearings a regular practice until after 1938. Not surprisingly, the first nominee who did appear at his own hearing was another Jewish nominee, Felix Frankfurter, in 1939.  

According to O'Donnell's thinking, hearings did not become routine until the television age, when senators knew they would have the chance to be seen scoring points.

From the Last Word, I also was reminded how recently there have been Supreme Court justices who were not law school graduates. Overall, only 49 were/are juris doctors, out of 115. The last such person was Stanley Reed, who served from 1938–1957. He studied law without finishing, was admitted to the bar, and was a practicing attorney who was Solicitor General when he was nominated.

There are no requirements at all to be on the Supreme Court, not even a minimum age. Of course, it would be highly unlikely that anyone would be appointed these days without a law degree, given the relationship of education and professionalization in our society. 

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This Wikipedia page lists all of the justices, with the dates they were approved by the Senate, by what margin, and when they served.

Ketanji Brown Jackson

More on Ketanji Brown Jackson and her qualifications in comparison to her future colleagues, in case you haven't seen this chart from the Washington Post:

Republicans really do seem to think that defense attorneys in general and public defenders especially have no place on the Supreme Court. And that they have a right to demean anyone who's not a white man in particularly vile ways. 

All I can say is, the Senate had better confirm her. I kind of assume that the withdrawal of Sarah Bloom Raskin's nomination to the Fed board (which was reprehensible) was done as a deal to clinch Joe Manchin's vote. 

Meanwhile, I have started reading Elie Mystal's Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution, so I am even saltier than usual about the faults of our legal system.

Vavilov and Lysenko

I learned about Larmarckism (and Lysenkoism) in high school biology class, some time in the 1975-76 school year. I was not a fan of biology class generally, and I managed to make it one of the last science classes I ever took. But even I could see that Lamarckism was utterly without merit.

As I remember understanding it, Lamarckism was the belief that living things inherited traits from their parents that the parents acquired during their lifetimes. The example my teacher gave was a rat-parent whose tail was chopped off having babies with short tails. I think she gave us some background on Lysenko's adoption of this perspective, and on Stalin's role in this, but I don't remember any details of that.

I've learned more about Lysenkoism over the years, but the chapter in Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses puts it together in a fairly neat, if excruciating, package (pages 131–141).

It also brought to the forefront Lyskeno's heroic inverse in Soviet science, Nikolai Vavilov. (Gary Nabhan's book about him, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine, has been sitting in my Future Favorites sidebar for years!)

Vavilov had collected food crop seeds from five continents and 64 countries, trying to improve food production. He established the world's largest seed bank, in Leningrad, which he directed from 1921 to 1940, and which he famously helped to protect from the starving hordes of people during the 872-day siege of Leningrad.

But Lysenko promised Stalin easy answers in the midst of food crises, while Vavilov was working with real genetics, which take longer than magical thinking and fakery. Lysenko's anti-science, combined with bad weather and brutal policies beginning in 1929 and going into the 1930s, killed about 5 million people through starvation in the "terror famine," mostly in Ukraine, where most of the wheat farms were located.

Show trials began in 1936, then purges and airbrushing of photos to remove leaders as if they had never been. Solnit quotes writer Adam Hochschild's book The Unquiet Ghost as saying historians estimate Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people between 1929 and 1953. (I assume that doesn't include the deaths of people from World War II.)

In 1936, the scientific geneticists tried to debate the Lysenkoists at a public conference, which led to a dozen geneticists being arrested and executed. Vavilov was not touched for a while, though he had denounced Lysenko. But in 1940, after a final argument with Lysenko, Vavilov was abducted during a field expedition. He was interrogated for almost a year, called a spy, and accused of causing the famine. He was sent to a prison camp, where he died of hunger in early 1943, given only frozen flour and cabbage to eat.

Lysenko became an even greater force after Vavilov was removed. Orwell, Solnit tells us, had pasted this headline into his journal in December 1949:

"Wheat can become rye" — Lysenko

It's hard not to see how this method of distorting truth relates to our present in many ways. On page 139, Solnit writes,

Stalin was intent not just on liquidating his potential rivals...so that he could rule unchecked but on destroying them and their credibility in ways that terrified everyone else into silence and deference. As Orwell would convey more powerfully than almost anyone before or since, one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue (page 139).

Orwell's Roses

I recommend Rebecca Solnit’s recent book Orwell’s Roses. I didn’t know what to expect of it, but it brought together my real, though shallow, interest in Orwell with my deep interest in plants, as only one of our best essayists could. 

Now I’m better informed on Orwell—possibly to the point where I might sound like a bit of a know-it-all—and I have even more to say about roses. Plus England, coal, enclosure, Tina Modotti, and a number of other subjects.

Some of the things I learned:

• That Orwell planted roses, and generally gardened and almost-farmed throughout much of his adult life.
• That he found replenishment in his digging and sowing, and in nature. And that he knew his interests in these activities were not acceptable to a large part of the left, because they were outside the capitalist system and lacked a "class angle."
• That what grounded Orwell’s world view is the fact that he was a reporter. He didn’t just pontificate from a room somewhere, or even his garden. He went places, like coal mines or the Spanish Civil War, and knew what people’s lived experiences were there. 
• That Orwell’s father’s family was descended from sugar plantation owners—enslavers—in Jamaica. Sugar, that historically evil substance, and the Blairs were part of it in the 1700s, before intervening generations became part of the army and civil service colonizing India. His mother grew up in Burma with a French father who was a teak farmer. Solnit writes, “I don’t believe in ancestral guilt, but I do believe in inheritance, and Orwell came from people who benefited from the imperial enterprise and the domestic hierarchies and who sometimes held real power” (page 168). 
• Where the phrase “bread and roses” came from and how it makes even more sense than I thought it did. Once Solnit introduces it, she weaves it throughout the rest of the text. 
• That dahlias, while named for a Swede named Dahl, were first the cocoxochitl plant, which is native to the valley of Mexico that is now Mexico City, and that Jamaica Kincaid wrote an essay about this called “Flowers of Evil,” which I should look up.
  

One part of Orwell’s Roses that particularly spoke to me was about coal mining and his book The Road to Wigan Pier. The chapter starts out by referring to Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," because the children used in coal-mining were like the desperate, degraded child in "Omelas." Except there were many children, who weren’t metaphors, as Solnit shows through the stories of children who were U.K. miners in the 19th century. And people organized to change it, instead of walking away.

By the time Orwell went into the mines in the mid-1930s, the miners were adults and teenagers, but the conditions were still horrific: three-foot ceilings, 100°F temperatures, and the air full of coal dust. The connection from that past of coal mining to our present of tar sands oil extraction, other oil extraction in post-colonial countries like Nigeria, and the mining of rare-earth metals—all fueling perpetual growth and climate change—is not lost on many readers, I imagine.

The idea of some of “us” living a softer life while others suffer (and that this is structural) is a recurring theme in Orwell’s writing. I’ve mentioned it before, and Solnit later cites two different Orwell quotes on a similar point: “In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream” and then 10 years later, “You have got to choose between liberating India and having extra sugar. Which do you prefer?” (both on page 183). Later in the book, Solnit comes up with the phrase “knowing is an act of volition”: those who know, like Orwell after he visited the coal mines, feel compelled to act in some way to change the situation.  

What did Orwell believe? I've always been a bit confused about that, with my admittedly shallow knowledge of him and his work. He wasn’t a modernist, Solnit says, and he was skeptical of industrialization. Centralized authority was not the answer, and utopia not possible. Socialism was not about perfection: “Socialists don’t claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better” (Orwell, quoted on page 98). They also are not about creating happiness, but rather human brotherhood, which I would call solidarity or mutual aid — “a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another” (Orwell quoted again, page 100).

As a closing, here’s one final quote from Solnit in the early pages of the book:

"If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it…" (page 5).

Metal Logos

A thing that I do when I'm out and about is take photos of logos that were cast into metal. Usually that means they're old logos. 

I've always meant to do something with the photos, but I haven't gotten around to it yet, and maybe I never will.

So here are a few of them.

 

From Rome, seen in 2015.

 

On the coffee roaster at Dunn Brothers next to Macalester College in Saint Paul, 2020.

 

From Pittsburgh, 2017. I'm not sure what the machine is, but that's sawdust. Hmm.

From the county historical society museum in Cortland, N.Y., the oven door of a wood-burning stove. 

Frank Wilhoit's Definition of Conservatism

Last week when I wrote about two paragons of vice-signaling, there was a quote I wanted to use that defined conservatism and fit the situation perfectly, but I couldn't lay my hands on it when I was writing the post.

Well, I came across it today, so here it is. The examples I gave in my earlier post — of Madison Cawthorn, who was driving almost 25 miles per hour over the speed limit without a valid drivers license, and Mark Meadows, who voted from an address where he did not live, while assisting a man who claims his political opponents have rigged an election and are voting illegally — are perfect examples of the world view it describes.

It was written by a composer named Frank Wilhoit*, originally as a comment in response to a 2018 blog post:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

I think I originally read it on Jason Kottke's site, but I've also seen it quoted on Twitter at various points.

As I said earlier, if this belief in protected in-groups is your political world view, there is no hypocrisy, because the law exists to protect the in-group. It fits perfectly with might makes right.

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*The quote is sometimes misattributed to a political scientist with a similar name, Francis Wilhoit, who died eight years before the comment was posted. But it was the composer who wrote it.

Too High, Too Low, Mostly Wrong

Americans don't know squat about their fellow countrypeople, as shown in this graph from YouGov:

(Click to enlarge.)

There's a lot of eyeroll-worthy doofiness in there:

• 12% of people are transgender
• 24% are gay or lesbian, and 28% bi
• 25% are vegetarian or vegan 
  

But as the authors explain, it's probably best explained by the way people deal with estimating small and large subgroups, since the mis-estimation holds up for neutral minorities as well as politically charged ones. If you look at both ends of the graph, the pattern is clear: the answers are most accurate when they are near 50% and more inaccurate the further the correct answer gets from 50%. 

It's still disturbingly duh, though. 

It makes me wonder how the survey was given: did respondents have a chance to realize they had said 67% of Americans live in either Texas, California, or New York City? Or that 73% are either Jewish, Muslim, or atheist — but that 57% are also Christian? Or that 119% (yes, 119%, which is weird even accounting for the overlap of Hispanic and other categories) are BIPOC, while 59% are also somehow white?

Someone responding in the Twitter thread about this linked to a Washington Post story about research that showed people became more accurate when they were incentivized to be more accurate in their answers. I wonder if it's honesty was the reason, or were they just more careful in their answers? If you thought you might financially benefit from accuracy on some random survey, you'd likely be more careful and think a little harder. Honest or careful, it doesn't matter which: either way, the survey would likely get better answers.

The Price of Oil, the Price of Gas

I was wondering how much of the global oil market is (was) supplied by Russia, given the run-up in prices. Have the recent price increases been warranted?

Economist Dean Baker finally gave me the answer on March 12:

Russia had been exporting around 5 million barrels a day, which comes to a bit less than 6 percent of world production.

Then he went on to say this:

Before there were serious fears of the Ukraine War, the price of oil was around $70 a barrel. If we need to reduce demand by 6 percent to offset the loss of Russian oil, with an elasticity of -0.15, prices would have to rise by around 40 percent. That would take oil prices to around $98 a barrel, about 10 percent BELOW their current level [on March 12].

Since then, the price has been dropping to just about that $100 per barrel Baker predicted, and yet: 

The price of oil dropped 20% over the last 7 days [as of March 14]. The price of gasoline went up.
John Oberlin @OMGno2trump

To quantify that illogical change with a historical comparison in adjusted dollars, there's this from Qasim Rashid, Esq. @QasimRashid:

Oil & Avg Gas $ June 2008:
• Oil: $181.58/barrel
• Gas: $4.10/gallon

Oil & Avg Gas $ Mar 2022:
• Oil: $99.76/barrel
• Gas: $4.32/gallon

If you're blaming anyone but greedy oil companies for their price gouging—you've bought into propaganda that hurts you more than anyone else.

A week earlier, when the oil price was still at the higher level, there were other historical and current comparisons to make. It won't be a big surprise to anyone who lived through the past few decades, let alone the 1970s, but these prices are not the highest of all time:

For consumer spending on gasoline to reach 1975-1980 levels, national gas prices would have to exceed $10 a gallon.
Derek Thompson @DKThomp (March 8)

I remember when gas prices were over $4.50 *14 years* ago! That’s $5.88 in today’s dollars. But automakers spent the last decade selling people on heavier, faster cars instead of marketing efficiency.
Carter Rubin (March 5)

Crazy how people freak over an 11-cent increase on a gallon of gas, but yawn over climate breakdown
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman (March 5)

Everyone who bought a land yacht in the past 10 years for no reason except self-indulgence (and giving in to advertising) has no excuse to complain. 

It's obvious that gas prices will always go back up at some point, so even if you don't care about climate change as a reason to buy a fuel-efficient vehicle, if you do care about how much you pay for things, act like you have an attention span longer than two weeks.

Wiped Out by a Comet

It took them more than a month, but on Sunday the Star Tribune Science section reprinted a Washington Post story called Did an exploding comet trigger the end of a Native American culture?

It's based on research published in early February by archaeologists at the University of Cincinnati, studying the people called the Hopewell culture, who were located in the Ohio river valley. Their actual name is lost, though they are known to be the genetic ancestors of the Ojibwe, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, Miami, and Lenape peoples.

The whole story is one holy s*#% moment after another. 

The physical evidence indicates that between 252 and 383 A.D., a comet exploded in the sky just above the earth in their place. It created an air burst that would have been similar to the explosion over the Tunguska River in Siberia in 1908, "which flattened trees for hundreds of miles." 

What physical evidence do the researchers describe?

...everywhere we excavated … we found burned earth, fire hardened.” He added, “We also found burned villages.”

At one site, he and his colleagues discovered “ash-covered surfaces with post-molds filled with wood charcoal,” they wrote.

At another site, the earth looked as if it had been exposed to heat from a blast furnace, and limestone “had been thermally reduced to lime,” a process requiring a temperature of about 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, they reported.

If a similar event took place over New York or Washington, D.C., today, he said, “it would be mistaken as a thermonuclear device having gone off.”

Oral histories of distant descendants give clues as well:

“The Ottawa talk about it as a day when the sun fell from the sky,” Tankersley said, referring to a tribe from the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada. “It would have been that bright. If the air burst occurred during the daytime, it would have been as bright as the sun.”

The Iroquois [Haudenosaunee] speak of a Sky Panther, Dajoji, which has the power to tear down forests.

The surviving people in the area commemorated the comet with an earthwork:

They built “monumental landscape architecture,” the authors of the study wrote, including the largest geometric earthen enclosures in the world, water management systems and massive burial mounds.


This illustration of the earthwork is from 1848.

Researchers can tell the earthwork was built after the explosion damage because there are remnants of the comet below the earthwork. The tail of the earthwork is a half-mile long and the circular head is a quarter-mile in circumference.

I found myself wondering what, if any, indication there would have been of this event on the other side of the world, say in China or Rome. Or farther south in Mexico. Would it have caused a bad winter globally? Does it show up in the tree rings?

The fact that people generally had no idea what reality was, up in the sky, that could result in some random piece of flaming junk dropping onto your civilization is mind-boggling to me, but it also makes me have a lot more patience with the existence of religion. At least it was an explanation of the unexplainable.

They Knew

It's common to hear excuses made for the racism (or other oppressive attitude) expressed by historical figures with a phrase like, "He was a man of his time." 

Of course, this always assumes the fact that the "he" in question is a white man, in the case of racism, as if there were no other kinds of men in history. But even without that, there are examples such as Benjamin Lay, whom I've mentioned in passing before.

And here's another one, which I learned of because of a 1787 quote written by New York's Gouverneur Morris, writer of the preamble to the Constitution:

The inhabitant of Georgia and S. C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages shall have more votes in a Govt. instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pa. or N. Jersey who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.

I got this from the Twitter feed of CUNY history professor Angus Johnston.

There's another man of his time. One who couldn't stop the three-fifths compromise, unfortunately.

Qualifications

Meanwhile, the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is working its way toward the Senate, and some (let's guess who) have been making noises about how she's not qualified. Someone even demanded to see her LSAT scores, since demeaning Black people in high places is a thing that too many white people feel very free to do, as has been amply demonstrated many times.

Matteo Pangallo, an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, put together this handy comparison of KBJ's qualifications with the two most recent members of the Supreme Court:

(Click to enlarge for readability.)

I'm afraid it will come in handy, unfortunately.

Two Paragons of Vice-Signaling

I know I'm not supposed to be shocked by right-wing hypocrisy*, but I can't help it. I'm just an honest schlub at heart. 

Here are two recent examples that are making my head hurt.

First, Madison Cawthorn (yes, the one who never should have been elected to Congress, and who should not be allowed to run for reelection because of his involvement in the January 6 insurrection) was recently charged for the second time with driving with a revoked drivers license. He was going 89 mph in a 65 mph zone when he was stopped. (As noted by one Twitter commenter, does anyone want to lay bets that he was actually going 90 mph or faster, but it was written down at 89 mph to keep the ticket under the 25 mph cutoff that would have put it into a different category of offense?) He also faces two other speeding citations from other counties (since October of 2021). His first revoked license charge was from 2017, before he was in Congress. It's unclear if his license was revoked when he got the other two recent speeding tickets. Because it's a second offense on the revoked license charge, he could get 20 days in jail.

Death and destruction from reckless driving is up. It seems Heir Cawthorn is doing is part to add to it.

Second, Mark Meadows, who held that same seat in Congress before becoming Donald Trump's chief of staff, clearly committed voter fraud. It seems he and his wife registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home in North Carolina where they did not live. 

They then voted by mail using that address. Meanwhile, Meadows worked with Trump to promulgate the Big Lie about a stolen election. And as we know, multiple Black people have been sentenced to substantial time behind bars for much lesser offenses related to voting or trying register to vote.

Yes, these two are owning this lib with their flagrant dishonesty and disregard for human life or the rule of law. Wow, good for them. I guess this makes them paragons of vice-signaling.

—

* Dave Roberts had a short thread on this question back in October 2021, which I may have already quoted (or not). This was the main point:

If you identify conservatism with any principle, you inevitably end up finding hypocrisy. But if you conceive of conservatism as efforts by dominant groups to maintain their dominance, with principles occasionally deployed instrumentally, the contradictions/hypocrisy fade away.

There's another great quote about this worldview that I cannot seem to lay my hands on, but essentially they all boil down to "rules are for the little people" which in turn becomes "might makes right." 

Every great quote about this topic is just a fancier way of saying those three words. 

Did You Grow Up with IGA? I Did

Many people don't know that ACE Hardware is a co-op rather than a chain. It's a marketing and purchasing co-op, with independent retails as members. 

I grew up in a tiny town that had an IGA grocery store. Recently I was wondering if IGA was a co-op similar to ACE, since I know that my local IGA was owned by people in town, though IGA was a regional or national brand. 

Well, it turns out it's not a co-op, but it's something close to that. It was started in 1926 by a guy who wanted to support franchise supermarkets in an earlier, less controlled model of franchising than we're accustomed to now. 

IGA's stores used the red and white logo signage, and as time went by they got access to the branded canned goods it produced. But they didn't have every little thing about their stores dictated to them the way a fast-food franchisee does these days. People in their towns thought of the stores as local. I know I did.

According to the linked article, at one time not all that long ago, IGA was in 46 states. It looks as though now it's still in four. 

I know it's not the name on the store in my hometown anymore.

Don't Ride with Putin

I just learned that those gas ration stamps of my great grandfather's were each good for one gallon of gas at $.21 per gallon, and were allocated at four gallons per week. (The inflation-adjusted equivalent in 2021 dollars: $3.02 per gallon.)

Imagine limiting today's Americans to four gallons of gas per week. (Per person? Per household? I don't even know how it was done.) 

The cars at the time averaged 17 miles per gallon, so that was 68 miles of movement per week. That's a fairly normal daily commute for some people today.

Hence this poster:

Now updated for 2022:

International Women's Day Posters, and an Archive

It's March 8, International Women's Day. This morning on Twitter Cory Doctorow shared 12 posters on that subject, almost all from the early 1970s from the looks of them. They're from a Tumblr called fuckyeahanarchistposters.

(See all 12 posters here.)

The images came from a mysterious source called the AOUON Archive at the Oakland Museum of California. 

Well, now I know that those letters stand for All of Us or None and that archive came out of the Free Speech Movement. Starting in 1977, an activist named Michael Rossman began gathering posters created since 1965 from the progressive movement in the U.S. After he died in 2008, his family donated his collection to the Oakland Museum in California.

Not surprisingly, the collection is strongest on California-based work, but about a quarter of it originated outside that state. It contains 24,500 pieces.

It's all digitized and viewable there. What a cool resource!

Hit and Run

I learned yesterday that a very close relative of a friend was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Portland last Friday. She was crossing a street at 8:30 at night, pushing her elderly mother, who uses a wheelchair. The mother is gravely injured; the daughter was pronounced dead at the scene. 

It was on a two-lane street (plus parking spots) where it should be easy for a driver to see pedestrians. In Portland, where blocks are generally short, compared to many cities, and where traffic is somewhat calmer than a lot of places. Not on one of the four-lane highway-like "stroads" you may have heard about.

I am so sad and angry for her family, but also about the escalating number of deaths and injuries happening from cars, SUVs, and trucks currently, both to pedestrians and people inside vehicles. The latest NHTSA figures are coming out for the first nine months of 2021 and they're worse than 2020's, which were terrible. 

AAA did a survey that found the general reason for the increase in dangerous driving during the pandemic has been that the worst drivers (young men) are driving more, and they're driving worse than ever. At the same time, the people who have cut their driving are the safest drivers (older people and women).

My hero cartoonist Andy Singer has a pile of images that relate to street safety, cars, and car culture. (He has a book called CARtoons, after all.) Here's one that seems appropriate for today.

I Hate Diamonds

Have I mentioned lately that I greatly appreciate Jason Kottke and his site, kottke.org? 

This recent post, titled For What It's Worth, called attention to the work of Dillon Marsh, who created 1:1 scale visualizations of the total amount of material extracted from various South African mines, sitting next to the mines as they currently exist.

This, for instance, is all the copper taken from the O'Kiep mine, which is now an open pit filled with water. At first glance I thought this image was a still from a science fiction film. You know, the metal sphere is an alien space ship? That kind of thing.

But no, it's human destruction, visualized.

The last one of Marsh's images that Kottke shared is almost the worst of all, at least in proportion of wastefulness:

You can't even see the diamonds (millions of karats — but that tells you how small a karat is) extracted from the open-pit Koffiefontein mine. They're on a vertical stand at dead center near the rim of the pit toward the bottom of the photo.

Kottke points out that the diamonds in particular highlight the discrepancy of outcome compared to the "manpower, machinery, injuries, fatalities, and environmental damage related to mining."

Dillon Marsh's site provides more photos (including gold and platinum mining) and some of the history.

The fact that all of this wastefully extracted wealth comes from South Africa makes me think of Gil Scott-Heron's song "Black History," which I quoted here a decade ago. After listing off the ways white colonizers denigrated African cultures, he turns to these stanzas:

So this is why the colonies came
to stabilize the land.
The Dark Continent had copper and gold
and the discoverers had themselves a plan.

They would "discover" all the places with promise.
You didn't need no titles or deeds.
You could just appoint people to make everything legal,
to sanction the trickery and greed.

And then this...

But still we are victims of word games;
semantics is always a bitch.
Places once called "under-developed" and "backwards"
they now call them "mineral rich."

That awareness of mineral-richness started a while ago. As Dillon Marsh points out, copper mining started in 1852 and the first diamonds were found in 1867. And marketed as love ever since (or at least since the 1930s).

Early March in Minnesota

We started the day with rain that froze on the trees and shrubs. It didn't photograph well, but it looked like permanent raindrops. Unfortunately, it also froze on all of the horizontal surfaces.

It melted by late morning. Then more rain fell. Places where there was packed snow (like parking spots in the street) became hazardous solid ice fields.

After dark, we had lightning and thunder as sleet or freezing rain came down, or it may have been that mysterious entity, graupel.

I am going to go out there and investigate what needs to be shoveled before it freezes overnight.

Newt Knight

Here's another February Twitter thread that was too long to include in the monthly round-up. This one is from cartoonist and writer Chris Schweizer, whose bio also includes "former college professor, former social studies teacher, history buff, but certainly no expert." It was posted on February 16 with this drawing by Schweizer:

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the passing of Southern Civil War hero Newt Knight, who led a band of more than a hundred guerrilla commandos, mostly Confederate Army deserters and formerly enslaved people, against the Confederate Army from 1863 to 1865....

The Knight Company famously ran the Confederate government out of Jones County [Mississippi], put the American flag back up at the courthouse, and succeeded in making it impossible for taxes and requisitions to be collected from the population for the remainder of the war.

After the war’s end, Knight led a raid to rescue kids still being held in slavery, was responsible for distributing food, and served as a colonel in the (otherwise all Black) Jasper County 1st Infantry, which protected locals from racial violence from paramilitary insurgents.

There's more in Schweizer's post. 

It turns out that Newt Knight has a Preservation Society with a website of its own. Looking around a bit more, I see enough written about Knight it seems that this is one of those parts of history that it's hard to believe I've missed it before now. 

The Emergency Vehicle Excuse

Here's one of the other Twitter posts I meant to talk about in February. It came up in the midst of the truck blockade, when Ottawa police closed many downtown streets completely for days on end.

The writer is an EMT, and he's responding to the common argument that we can't have narrowed streets, pedestrian-only streets, and other traffic-calming measures because it will be too hard for emergency vehicles to get where they need to go.

He points out that closed streets (that is, streets closed to cars) are not the problem: cars are the biggest obstacle with their double-parking, blocking of intersections, and general traffic. Pedestrian plazas are fine for emergency personnel: they can bring equipment on foot if needed, it's part of the job. They have UTVs and bikes, he says, they can use in larger pedestrian-only spaces. 

And he also say (as I was thinking) that ambulances, etc., can go into pedestrian-only spaces if they are set up with that in mind in the first place. There are retractable bollards, for instance.

These are two of my favorite points:

• "It’s easier to move large amounts of  people and bicyclists out of our way than to move many cars out of our way."
• "Sirens can be much quieter if people aren’t in cars."
  

And, as one of the commenters points out, a decent share of emergency calls are needed because of car crashes, so if there were fewer cars, there would be fewer calls in the first place.

I would add, if traffic lanes in the streets were narrower, there would be fewer crashes and fewer injury calls because drivers would be going slower.

Twitter, February 2022

It's a good thing February is a short month because there were a lot of tweets. Scanning through them, it was easy to see they were dominated at the end by Russia's attack on Ukraine and in the middle by the Canadian truck blockade and the police killing of Amir Locke in Minneapolis. But the month also ended with the IPCC report on existing global temperature increases and their effects. And over all, there was lots of moral panic over wokeness and canceling, including the Joe Rogan saga. 

The tweets are generally in reverse chronological order, and everything below the line is a quote from the attributed Twitter account.

__

“People are asking me why I endorsed the use of 'We’re Not Gonna Take It' for the Ukrainian people and did not for the anti-maskers…one use is for a righteous battle against oppression; the other is a infantile feet stomping against an inconvenience.” –Dee Snider, Twisted Sister
Brent Toderian

If you aren't terrified by climate breakdown, you don't understand it at all. There's simply no nice way to say it and no point mincing words.
Peter Kalmus @ClimateHuman

Leadership involves helping terrified people be brave.
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

I wonder if white Americans realize their voting rights are in danger, too? I'm sure some imagine a white nationalist utopia, but the GOP isn't much interested in regular white folks except as shock troops. Troops just follow orders. Nobody in power cares what they want.
N. K. Jemisin

I think people underestimate the psychological cost of knowing that, even if you're 'insured', getting sick could bankrupt you. It's a low level fear that almost everyone here just has to manage.
Hari Kunzru


@Yimbyindenver

The uncanny confluence of Putin's invasion and the IPCC report is a stark reminder: fossil fuel powers the worst crises facing our planet. If we use this moment to get off oil and gas, we have a fighting chance as a planet.
Bill McKibben

That Republicans complain about the price of gas but not the price of insulin, says everything…
Ty Ross @cooltxchick

Zelinskyy's resume looks 100% fake.
* Law school grad
* Comedian
* Won Ukrainian Dancing with the Stars
* Ukrainian voice of Paddington Bear
* Starred in movie about comedian who becomes president, then became president
* Source of Trump getting impeached
* Held off Putin's army
Mekka Okereke@mekkaokereke

We have 405 weeks to solve the climate crisis and cut global CO2 emissions by half to keep the climate to 1.5 degrees.
Darryl Young

Let's get one thing clear. NATO did not "expand eastwards." Rather, democratic states decided, of their own will, to join a defensive alliance to protect against an aggressive and expansionist neighbour. And looking at the news right now, does that decision look misguided to you?
Luke John Davies @LJDLabour

Bill Barr’s book is unique because the hardcover edition will be released without a spine, but will grow one several years later when it’s profitable to do so.
@cpoliticditto

So why did road violence increase during the pandemic? Because the worst drivers got worser — and drove more.
Streetsblog USA

Will we ever return to using the phrase "slow news week," without being retrospective?
James @STPBike

I love trivia but … This Week ABC just had a “This Week Trivia” screen that said “Who was the first African-American on the U.S. Supreme Court? Thurgood Marshall” and that is not trivial.
Chris Steller

The multi-day American academic on-campus interview is designed to elicit information that interviewers cannot legally ask you about. “Fit” is code for bias.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

guys I don’t hate old people I just don’t think the government should consist entirely of the richest among them
CHOAM Nomsky @samthielman

This is an oil pipeline:


Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

in case you thought the pandemic was over in the US, 26.87% of worldwide* covid deaths yesterday occurred in the US despite making up 4.25% of the world population
@baroque_bitch

Every gallon of gas we burn makes our planet more chaotic, our kids less safe, and some of the worst people in the world more powerful.
Alex Steffen

Something struck me about Trump at CPAC, which is that he's somewhat a victim of his own political success. Because the entire GOP now sounds like Trump, Trump in turn now sounds like a generic Republican. So much of his success in 2016 was sounding *different* and standing out.
Chris Hayes

Normalize calling American billionaires “oligarchs” too
Jeremy Flood @_Floodlight

Many of my colleagues on here have eloquently explained their concerns with the new CDC guidelines, so I’ll just add that any guidelines that include “Talk with your provider” when 25% of Americans don’t have a primary care physican and 10% are uninsured is inherently problematic.
uché blackstock, md

The New York Times has something like 3 or 4 opinion writers exclusively devoted to the problem of wokeness, and zero devoted to the problem of global fascism.
Jason Stanley

The people who claim "wokeness" is a problem have looked at the world and somehow concluded that there's simply not enough injustice and intolerance in it. This, to me, is why anyone who uses the word "woke" as a pejorative is at best morally suspect and unable to parse reality.
Dave Vetter

AMA president says he’ll continue masking indoors regardless of CDC’s updated guidance and recommends others do the same to protect those at higher risk.
Meg Tirrell

Starbucks is so hypocritical. It says, "We are not anti-union — We don’t think partners should have to pay someone to speak for them.” But Starbucks is spending millions on lawyers to stop workers from having a union that will give them a powerful, collective voice to speak for them.
Steven Greenhouse

It’s always a merit party until we show up in a party dress.
Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd

The name Molotov cocktail comes from the Russian foreign minister Molotov claiming the bombing of Finland was actually dropping food to Russian-speaking Finns. The Finnish called the bombs bread baskets in response and said "here is a cocktail to go with your Molotov bread basket."
z3dster

The sad thing is that if we hadn’t expanded NATO, Putin would have tirelessly devoted himself to world peace and the brotherhood of man.
Phil Klay

If you chose to buy a bigger car than you need because you thought it was cool, we're not so sure you should be whining about gas prices right now. Image via @no_face:


All-Powerful Bicycle Lobby

The fact that Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani are walking free shows a deep flaw in our justice system’s ability to protect us from political criminals.
Mark Jacob

Whether it's Trump praising the invasion of Urakine, or Kamala Harris wearing wired headphones, neither side has been shy about associating itself with controversial activities.
New York Times Pitchbot @DougJBalloon

Thinking how much I hate grocery shopping, the easiest and most convenient way in the history of this planet for any species to get food
Just Hanging Out @InternetHippo

Judge [Ketanji Brown] Jackson has 8.9 years of prior judicial experience. That’s more than four current Justices (Thomas, Roberts, Kagan, and Barrett) had *combined.* It's also more than 4 of the last 10 Justices had at their confirmations; 9 of the last 17; and 43 of the 58 appointed since 1900.
Steve Vladeck

Decarbonize the global economy and call it defense spending.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Brexit came, in part, out of a false sense of security. A certainty that we could "shake it up" and all would be OK. 60 years of hard won peace and prosperity led us here. Many had simply come to take it all for granted. Ukraine shows us, very clearly, why we were fools to do so.
Otto English

A lot of people are admitting they didn't believe Biden's predictions on the Ukraine invasion while trying to gloss over the fact the main reason they were snookered is because they bought into 4 years of Trump discrediting the US intelligence community.
Ragnarok Lobster @eclecticbrotha

"Learning should be seen as a qualitative change in a person's way of seeing, experiencing, understanding, conceptualizing something in the real world — rather than as a quantitative change in the amount of knowledge someone possesses." –Paul Ramsden
Alfie Kohn

Respectfully, after the last two years I think we’re beyond the “is anyone else having trouble concentrating with everything going on” phase and need to be asking why we’re upholding a culture that expects us to carry on business as usual.
@JanelCubbage

It’s amazing how one traitor in the top job can breed so many additional traitors in the population.
RobertOSimonson

In 1994 Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons if the US, U.K. and Russia would agree to guarantee its security. In 2022: You didn't believe that B.S. did you? Ha, ha, ha! You've been invaded and conquered!
Langdon Winner

“God helps those who help themselves…” say terrible Christians who are helping themselves to all the resources in the world as if they belong to them.
Molly Priesmeyer @mollypeonies

CBS-YouGov poll:
85% of Americans don't support banning books from schools if they contain political ideas they disagree with
87% don't support banning books discussing race or slavery
83% don’t think books should be banned for criticizing people and events in U.S. history
Kyle Griffin

Trump halted military aide to Ukraine and pressured its leaders to investigate the Bidens. That’s why he was impeached by the House. Something that should be mentioned each time Trump is quoted on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Garance Franke-Ruta @thegarance

I want cable news to cover the child poverty rate in America going up 41% last month, Starbucks illegally firing pro-union workers, the existential threat of climate change and 745 oligarchs in America becoming $2.1 trillion richer during the pandemic as much as it covers war.
Warren Gunnels

Ukraine has one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, nearly 400,000 Jews live there. Both its President and Prime Minister are Jewish. In Ukraine's last election, far-right parties combined for 2.15% of the vote, failing to win a single seat in parliament.
KnowSomething @KnowS0mething

What I especially love about the handwringing over holding off on teaching kids about gender and sexuality is that they are too young to know about LGBT, yet heteronormativity is reinforced by the narratives and fairytales the adults teach us as kids. Yet that’s okay.
Shazia Ahmad @silvsiara

It's a mistake to confuse recognizing the need to fight authoritarianism with a desire for fights, or a desire for violence. The earlier you fight it, the more options you have, and the less potentially bloody the fight can be. But eventually you must fight it or surrender.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat

The popularity of bottled water which in my opinion is a scam/snake oil, is based on government mistrust. And was a warning about what happened with the pandemic. Why do people trust anything for sale in a package at walmart more than a regulated utility with 100+ year history? I looked at the label for “pure life” and it says right on it that it sources it from a tap in Allentown, PA.
Angie Schmitt

Putin has invaded Ukraine because he misses the Soviet empire, seeks to force his version of history on others, opposes pluralist democracy and wants to make Russia great again. This is culture war with tanks and these guys look on with envy.
Billy Bragg

Putin was emboldened to engage in a full scale invasion of Ukraine by Fox News and the GOP. We must never forget that. They are now a fifth column.
Prof Michael E. Mann

Ukraine, unlike Putin's Russia, has free and fair elections. And we know how Tucker and other Trumpists feel about those.
Garry Kasparov

When someone claims it’s “safer” to get around in a car, remind them that 1.35 million people are killed each year, 3.7K a day, in traffic crashes, with 20-50 million/year seriously injured. It’s the no.1 killer of young people, BEFORE pollution and climate change are factored in.
Brent Toderian

A Deloitte study reports that a U.S. transition to net zero would cost approximately $35B per year for 10 years, but the cost of inaction, $14.5T, is far more staggering. Accordingly, the economic gains from new and expanded clean sectors could reach $3T by 2070.
CEO Climate Dialogue

Remembering that time an engineer told me free right turns and pork chops actually improve pedestrian accessibility, because they reduce crossing distance:


Sean Hayford Oleary @sdho

Three hours before the invasion began I got this sobering message here in Ukraine from a senior pentagon official “You are likely in the last few hours of peace on the European continent for a long time to come. Be careful.“
Martha Raddatz

It can be overwhelming to witness/experience/take in all the injustices of the moment; the good news is that *they’re all connected.* So if your little corner of work involves pulling at one of the threads, you’re helping to unravel the whole damn cloth.
Ursula Wolfe-Rocca @LadyOfSardines

"54% of American adults between the ages of 16-74 read below a 6th grade level. So that means we have an epidemic of illiteracy," professor Brittney Cooper reacts to book banning. "If you make people ignorant, then it becomes much easier to control them."
@Fly_Sistah

The big problem with hyperloop, boring company car tunnels, driverless cars and even EVs — they’re ALL distractions from the REAL solutions we’ve badly needed to be implementing. Smart land use. Successful rail and public transit. Safe bike infrastructure. Walkable neighbourhoods.
Brent Toderian

I want more Americans to spend time abroad so that they are more reasonably embarrassed about the state of their society. We are like the kid at school who doesn’t realize they need deodorant yet.
Azie Dungey

Folks be like "you can totally own a house thats cheap! You just need to move to a small town that has no access to anything within a 40 mile radius and has a hidden  history of lynching Black people!"
Fat Big Barda @SourceDuMal

Teacher: It’s important that you advocate for yourself!
Student: Cool! Your assignment is uninteresting as is the whole unit. I will be spending your class time somewhere else.
T: No! That’s not what I mean. You should advocate for yourself by asking what you missed when absent.
@Sisyphus38

Drivers will say they "can't see you" if you're not waving your arms and wearing neon everything, but somehow my bus driver hasn't missed me once all winter. I don't ride everyday and my stop isn't well lit. Drivers, just admit that you don't look for/care about peds:


@BeckMac4

A quick reminder: Russia is a petrostate. Putin gets his wealth and power from global demand for fossil fuels. Oil and gas provides 39% of federal budget revenue in Russia and made up 60% of Russian exports in 2019. Another reason to ditch fossil fuels.
Eric Holthaus

The only reason not to call an invasion an invasion is that you do not want to have to undertake the response an invasion requires.
David Rothkopf

Your reminder that Russia is a main driver of international predatory delay and civic sabotage on climate.
Alex Steffen

You’re not a failure in life if you work 40 hours a week and still live in poverty. You’re a failure in life if you believe the only way to run a successful business is by paying workers wages so low that they cannot afford to live.
Warren Gunnels

Malcolm X was assassinated on this day in 1965.
Africa Is a Country

Degrowth should not be so controversial in rich countries. We can reduce our consumption, share wealth more equally, and have a better quality of life whilst we do. All of these things are not only possible, they are necessary.
@samjknights

30% of Americans don't drink at all.
50% consume 7 drinks or less per year.
The top 20% drink 2 drinks or more per day.
The top 10% drink 73 drinks per week, the equivalent of two bottles of wine a day.
So yeah, the alcohol industry is propped up by problem drinkers.
Protocols of the Elders of Pfizer @DurhamFella

...the conservative case against wokeness [has] never made any sense. To say that a movement is "overly concerned with symbols" implies that there are more effective ways to advocate for, say, racial justice. But conservatives reject those too! I kind of appreciate that they're now admitting that "wokeness" is correct on the merits but its proponents are sometimes annoying on social media. That's all this was ever about. A key component of conservative rhetoric is acknowledging the existence of problems *in general* but opposing every *specific effort* to address them. "While I'm in favor of racial justice, I'm afraid I oppose affirmative action/police reform/diversity training/etc." Every time.
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark

It’s kind of funny that they don’t consider creating a Christian theocracy to be “self-righteous.”
@the_zython

"The inequality is just insane" — average carbon footprint of top 1% is more than 75x higher than bottom 50%. "Overpopulation" is when the red blames the blue.

AaravSeth

It isn't exactly relevant right now, but over the next 20 years, it feels like the surest way to contain Russia would be for the US and Europe to decarbonize.
Jordan Weissmann

It’s first important to see that it is a *choice* by the New York Times to continue reporting numerous articles on a “violent crime surge” but not to talk about an “air pollution death surge” or a “child poverty death surge” or a “wage theft surge” or a “police brutality surge.” It’s incredible to me that day after day passes without numerous urgent articles in the Times about climate change, mass death from poverty, lack of basic healthcare/housing, and rising fascism. Editors could see their role as helping to save humanity and instead they don’t.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

If you want to talk about how casual and everyday ableism is in our society, just look at prescription glasses.
Raccoonteur @Katabassist

We build city streets like freeways and cars like armored trucks. How did we think that would play out?
Jenny Schuetz

"The fossil fuel infrastructure currently takes up ~1.3 % of US land. Transitioning US for all purposes to 100% #WWS may take <1% of US land. So not only does a transition to renewables reduce material requirements, but it also reduces land use"
Mark Z. Jacobson

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening." –Chico Mendes
Jason Hickel

Imagine if defunding schools was as politically controversial as not wanting to fund robodogs and mass surveillance. Imagine if police departments had to meet even a fraction of the financial scrutiny and performance auditing that our schools do. Just wild what we’ve learned to accept.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

"Jesus guns babies" is a hell of a campaign slogan:


Arieh Kovler

If incarceration prevents crime, why isn't the United States the safest country in the world?
Beth Shelburne

Schrodinger’s left: not powerful enough to control of the presidency, legislative strategy, or party institutions, yet somehow powerful enough to cause all Democratic party failures
Leah Greenberg

Fun fact: Eritrea is the only country in Africa to nationalize all of its land and has never taken a loan from the IMF or World Bank.
Vik Sohonie

I love transit fares. I love making disproportionately low-income people pay for a public service that is better for the environment than its alternatives
Harlo Pippenger

Years and years of benefit of the doubt and I’ve yet to see any evidence that the libertarian movement is anything other than an anti-racial equality movement
Adam Miller @ajm6792

please look at how my adorable mom is fixing holes in my dad’s work clothes:


@cottoncandaddy

New: The share of Americans who say they “know God really exists” and have “no doubts about it” has fallen below 50 percent for the first time in General Social Survey polling.
Christopher Ingraham

So I biked to lunch with my partner, who does not frequently bike. The trip is 4 miles one way, 2.5 miles on a path, with a 200 foot 6% climb on the way home. Her observation: “it’s amazing how much you hate cars when you’re biking.”
Andrew Davidson

Access to bikes plus safe streets equals climate action. We actually don’t need some hugely fancy tech solution. It’s easy: help more who want to to ride a bike for short trips.
Andrea Learned

Just to clear this up once and for all: the people who work on and with renewable energy are aware that it is variable. There are lots and lots of interesting discussions to be had about the variability of renewable energy and how to accommodate it and ensure reliability. None of them begin with the assumption that your interlocutor doesn't know the sun goes down.
David Roberts @drvolts

The older I get the more I realize I’m not as good with people as I used to think.
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

Gentle reminder that disability can strike anyone, anywhere, at any time in their lives. It doesn't matter how healthy you are, how much exercise you do, how much green tea you drink or how many vitamins you swallow. None of that matters.
Amanda Leduc

the fact we are talking about "generational harm" and "normal" being masked kids and not the expiration of the child tax credit causing a huge jump in child poverty ... I just
abdullah elementary @AShihipar

Consider: have you ever, in your life, a single time, seen a piece in mainstream media framing it as a problem that the GOP has completely lost cities? That the party's brand is "toxic" in urban areas? Are any Republicans taken to task for that or forced to answer for it? One might think it striking — worthy of comment! — that the nation's most educated, its high-skilled professionals, its scientists and scholars, its non-white working class, its minorities and single women and immigrants ... have utterly rejected the GOP. Seems like a thing!
David Roberts @drvolts

If (when?) the Democrats get hammered in November in the midterms, the number 1 reason will not be the left, or the economy, or Joe Biden, or Joe Biden’s chief of staff, or mask mandates. It’ll be two Democratic senators called Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. We all know this.
Mehdi Hasan

It is important to actively teach children that skin color *should* not matter; that we *should* not judge a person by their skin color; that skin color *should* be as irrelevant as the colors of our clothes. But it's unsuitable to teach children that skin color *does* not matter in a society rife with racial disparities, where judgments of people based on their skin color are rampant, where people think those judgments explain racial disparity—not racism.
Ibram X. Kendi @DrIbram

So I don’t know who needs to hear this but building housing on a lot where there was *no* housing previously, in an area that is suffering from a lack of housing, doesn’t cause displacement. That’s not how math works.
Courtney Welch @cw4emeryville

Technology is heralded as a panacea to every problem. It rarely is. Just do everything we can to use less energy. Build better cities and transportation networks. It will make life more enjoyable, too!
Lou Miranda @TheNewLou

So according to the GOP, it was the $2,000 checks that caused inflation — not the $2 trillion in billionaire tax cuts and the $9.1 trillion in defense spending?
Santiago Mayer

Dutch cities are not into "instant delivery." Six -- including Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague -- have now blocked their expansion. Urban official: "The added value they create for a livable and inviting city centre is limited, if it exists at all."
David Zipper

Today I learned that the Tokyo metro area has nearly the population of California but spread over about 3% of California's geographic area. Anyway, something to keep in mind when you hear that California is "full."
Ned Resnikoff

The fact that they keep shoveling money at a military carrying out corporate wishes and law enforcement crushing any domestic resistance while denying people anything approaching assistance in an increasingly unfair and unequal world should tell you everything you need to know.
Jared Yates Sexton

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced a new initiative to reduce traffic fatalities, so naturally Laura Ingraham/Fox News is calling it a “war on driving.” We really would have never seen mandatory seatbelts if these folks were running the show then.
Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D @RVAwonk

The "we will kill pedestrians" special:


Michael Schwartz @michlschwrtz

Communities are cool. Even more--they are vital. They are the real pockets of resistance. Solidarity is a tool, and a weapon if need be. I want stories that will tell us so. And I'm going to write some of them myself.
Karolina Fedyk @karigrafia

A climate change solution that does not work for women is not a climate change solution.
CGIAR

We should be regulating - or at least pricing - vehicle size and weight
Adam Miller @ajm6792

The Hummer EV's battery -- just the battery-- weighs as much as an entire Honda Civic.
David Zipper

To put it another way: 1 Hummer EV battery = 380 e-bike batteries (@RadPowerBikes batteries are 7.7 lbs each)
David Zipper

“We created the liberty institute to make sure only state-approved ideas can be discussed” is an exquisite summary of Republican views on free speech.
Adam Serwer

I think we as a nation under appreciate how insane it is that people running for office use guns in their ads.
Keith Edwards

Single family zoning covers 75% of developed land, but if the land of the free allows developers to provide anything else then "it will be the end of single family housing." Huh, if you have to require it then it's hard to say people want it. So when the cost of driving goes up, it messes with household finances and inflation. Wouldn't it be nice if we gave people the freedom to NOT drive? Or we could just start by admitting requiring people to drive or starve is not freedom. #crazyidea
Beth Osborne

"We currently use over one-third of the corn we produce for biofuel, and it offsets 6% of gas use. We could get the same benefit by increasing fuel economy of cars from 22 to 24 MPG." –Virginia Gewin, Civil Eats
Jason Hill @jdhill

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Systems change seems daunting,
But then unconstrained climate change does too
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

The Risks of Multiple Breadbasket Failures in the 21st Century: “if the world continues on a high GHG emissions pathway that fails to hold equilibrium warming to under 2C, there are almost no parts of the world where agriculture will be unaffected”
Extinction Rebellion

Human Heredity (1963 ed.). Originally published in the 1940s; the bio of this edition identifies Carter as “former general secretary of the Eugenics Society” (!)


Cory Doctorow

When someone says “The Bible clearly says…” you’re about to hear some bullshit.
@almightygod

New research in Germany shows how expensive cars really are — the lifetime cost of a small car is $689,000 with a public expense of $275,000, say the researchers.
streets.mn

When we ban books in schools before we ban guns, we admit we are more afraid of our children learning than we are of them dying.
Baratunde

When you compare these two neighboring blocks of rowhomes on the same street in Philadelphia, it really highlights how much driveways and garages doors degrade the pedestrian experience. One's a block for people, and one's a block for cars:


Daniel Trubman, MPP

One of the big problems with designing for cars is that it makes designing for anything else really, really hard.
Brent Toderian

"There is a very strong correlation between a functioning education system and women's emancipation."
Anthony LaMesa

NEW: A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that corn ethanol is at least 24% more carbon intensive than gasoline. “Corn ethanol is not a climate-friendly fuel,” said the study's lead author.
Leah Douglas

No one who wants worship deserves it. No one who deserved it would want it.
God @almightygod

the conservative obsession with Hillary Clinton boils down to “women should shut up.” even if you believe every negative thing about Clinton, that reason is why the right has been obsessed with her for over 3 decades
Oliver Willis

The decision to regulate pickups, SUVs, and vans as "light trucks" not subject to the same CAFE standards as cars is responsible for up to 1/2 of the increase in their market share from 1975-1995.
@twkovach

Each ride-hail mile = 3.75 miles of driving. If 100 people take Uber or Lyft 1 mile, that causes 169 miles of driving, due to deadheading. But 55 of those people, without ride-hailing, would have walked, biked, transited, or stayed home. 169 divided by the remaining 45 is 3.75.
Jeff Speck

I wish that people would stop saying "American" when they mean "middle class WASP"—what's described here is not really recognisable to me, growing up in a Puerto Rican Catholic family with elaborate (and beautiful) rituals around open grief. We're American too.
Katherine Cross @Quinnae_Moon

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
We made a love heart out of #books,
just for YOU.
Happy #ValentinesDay


Orkney Library

One of the things I most wish people who aren't targeted by the system could grasp is that the criminal punishment bureaucracy is not based on any actual analysis of whether it does any good, let alone whether it does more harm than good.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

I was genuinely surprised (and relieved) recently to have a UN spokesperson tell me that expanding fossil fuel extraction is inconsistent with UN sustainability goals. Honestly wasn't sure if that was too "extreme" a statement for them to make. So...progress?
Amy Westervelt

·Feb 13People like the idea of nonpartisan, low paying part time city councils - but the reality is you vastly limit who can run for these offices and thus what these bodies look like and do. /end soapbox
Emily M. Farris @emayfarris

There is something incredibly demoralizing about having to use my family's stories over and over to explain why you don't post smiling selfies from Auschwitz. Or compare grocery store mask mandates to the Holocaust. But here we are. Again.
Jennifer Mendelsohn @CleverTitleTK

We're sorry, Canada.
George Takei

I find it baffling that "I'm going to reduce my social activities a bit until deaths fall from their second-highest peak ever" is being cast as hysterically anti-science rather than a reasonable adjustment to circumstances.
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark

When conservatives insist that all social services should be replaced with private charity who would do it better, this is what they mean by better. It's another arm of Christian supremacy:


Alexandra Erin

Marjorie Taylor Green is now the second most coveted endorsement on the right, after Trump. I will never, as long as I live, understand how any Republican can contemplate that fact and not be deeply, mortifyingly *embarrassed*.
David Roberts @drvolts

More Americans have died of COVID in the past 10 days than have died of murder in any year ever.
David Menschel @davidminpdx

It's the great task of climate communication to all at once create alarm over the climate and ecological crisis AND direct outrage toward fossil fuel interests AND show world-historical transformation is possible AND envision the world that will enable life to thrive.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive

You know what would really help the media understand how its intuitive, unquestioned decision-making processes reinforce the power structure? Critical Race Theory! It's really helpful on precisely this sort of question.
Adam Davidson

Imagine if we were ever to forget 9/11. Well, yesterday, 300 more Americans died of “mild” COVID than died on 9/11. I won’t be forgetting how we somehow quit seeing that as atrocious any time soon.
Emily Porter, M.D.

It’s outrageous that we even need to have a Violence Against Women Act, unbelievable that Congress would let it expire, and unconscionable that the NRA would have the power to tank it.
Laura Coates

“Community” has become a polite shorthand to imply people with some shared trait, and because of this we have really corrupted the various notions of community engagement.
@EmilyGorcenski

For the record, BLM protests never interrupted the supply chain or forced GM and Toyota to cancel plant production
Eric Boehlert

“70% of people in the U.S.'s 50 biggest metro areas say they're interested in biking, but half of them say they're too afraid to bike in the street.” That is *significantly* more people than plan to — or will — buy electric cars in the next decade.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

Our children are leaving college *owing* the equivalent of a mortgage before they even own a home and *have* a mortgage. Canceling student loan debt would lower people’s burdens and spur entrepreneurship. We have to get it done.
Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock

We were warned:


Stephen M Carter

Wasn’t it US conservatives who enacted a bunch of hyper-aggressive laws against protesting by obstructing roads like a year ago?
@nycsouthpaw

Today I learned one acre of solar panels produces 34 times the energy as an acre of corn ethanol.
@CedarRapidsBen

Here's the winner of every election since the Civil Rights bill was passed:
1964: White male southern Dem.
1968: GOP
1972: GOP
1976: White male southern Dem.
1980: GOP
1984: GOP
1988: GOP
1992: White male southern Dem.
1996: White male southern Dem.
2000: GOP
2004: GOP
2008: Obama
2012: Obama
2016: Trump
Angus Johnston @studentactivism

This is the psychological balm of racial caste in America: If you’re Black and couldn’t overcome every obstacle to pull yourself up, it’s because you’re lazy and did not want to work hard. If you’re Black and you manage to be successful, it’s because of AA and you didn’t earn it.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

”Your Daily Plump of Puffin”:


Gary Black

Just because something is palpable doesn’t mean anyone palps it.
Chris Steller

The weight of the vehicle should be proportional to the distance that is traveled. (*which means that, in most cases, for trips less than a mile the weight of the vehicle should be nonexistent, aka walk or it should be comparable to the weight of the passenger, like a bike, scooter, etc.)
Dr. Natalia Barbour

When someone says they "love freedom," they don't mean yours.
@TheTweetOfGod

California is suing Elon Musk's Tesla, alleging it runs a "racially segregated" workplace and discriminates against Black employees. Black workers report being concentrated in parts of its factory (one called "the plantation" by other workers) and hearing slurs up to 100x daily.
@ajplus

A big change happens when you stop treating people on bikes like hobbyists and start treating them like people who need to safely get to a destination:


Queen Anne Greenways

Car Culture is saying someone’s privileged for riding a $500 bike but that their $34,000 car is a great deal.
Kevin Amézaga

And yes I am tired of filling out surveys when good pedestrian and bike infra should be built into every road design by default.
Dan Marshall

Would make much more sense if truck drivers—instead of protesting vaccine mandates that protect public health—protested dangerous conditions for essential workers or low pay for truckers or long work days for truckers or the misclassification of many truckers as indy contractors
Steven Greenhouse

Daily reminder: Today in the U.S., corporations will steal $137 million in wages, people will steal $2.75 billion in taxes, and 1,300 humans will die from poverty, air pollution, and medical error. Who benefits from the news ignoring this and focusing on low-level crime instead?
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

The way we blame The Squad for not being able to create change, the way we make celebrities out of activists...it's like people will never learn that the real power is in movement building. The individualism runs so deep. Stop waiting for heroes!
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing

A professor I know asked their college class today how many Americans died from COVID in January, and some students guessed "a few hundred." The highest guess was 2,000. The correct number is 60,000.
Renee @paix120

More Americans died of COVID-19 in January 2022 (60,000) than died in the Vietnam War (58,220).
Paul M. Renfro

It is better to constantly talk about the climate crisis than to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Sommer Ackerman @lifewithsommer

No it can't:


Ketan Joshi

Harvard’s insistence on hiring supposed superstar academics from other institutions rather than seriously cultivating jr. scholars and promoting from within is not unrelated to the culture of abuse and intimidation on display for everyone to see in this moment.
Marisol LeBrón @marisollebron

Before police get another dime, someone has to explain to us how the US spends more on police than other nations in the world spend on their militaries and it’s still never enough. And you have to do it without invoking anti-Black racism too.
@BreeNewsome

reporters who hold back news to later put in their book should be fired.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

In highway-expanding states (looking at you, Washington), politicians who want to act on climate should be (and be public about it) riding ebikes and taking transit themselves. Change the perceived leadership social norm *and* change the experiences on which policies are based.
Andrea Learned

I think the biggest long-term challenge for American transit is the same as it was before the pandemic—disinterest and disdain from decision makers who do not use the mode.
Alex Schieferdecker

The modal faculty member is now 65. In 1980, the modal faculty member was *35*.
Kevin Munger

Next time you go downtown, think about why it’s ringed with freeways and “defended” from adjacent neighborhoods by parking ramps and the convention center
Adam Miller @ajm6792

The New York Times repeatedly gave the Clinton email story multiple A1 above the fold headlines. Their story on Trump being accused of improperly removing classified materials from the White House will run on page A15.
Matt McDermott

The biggest dividing line in the years to come will be between the people who believe in their heart of hearts that the world can go back to how everything was in the before-time and everyone else who realizes that that is just not possible.
agent ndn @TheAgentNDN

Teachers are buying their own school supplies but somehow there is money available to install cameras in every classroom.
@pcbrynn

New study in The Lancet: Nations least harmed by covid have been those whose citizens trust their government and one another (more social solidarity, less individualism). This article could have been titled "The Staggering Death Toll of Libertarianism."
Alfie Kohn

I suspect that the people using the “he’s just an entertainer” defense for a certain podcaster who has a habit of hosting friendly, frictionless interviews with racists are unaware that the most popular form of “entertainment” in the 19th century US was blackface minstrelsy.
Seth Cotlar

The bicycle and the tree are climate change interventions. And health interventions. Not everything about the revolution we need is complicated.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

"...the relationship between corner radii and pedestrian crashes is directly proportional: on average, larger corner radii are linked to more pedestrian crashes." Now the US Department of Transportation should issue guidance explaining if the increased danger is ever permissible.
Beth Osborne

"Cars are happiest when no other cars are around. People are happiest when other people are around." —Dan Burden
Taras Grescoe

I do not want to live in a failed state because a bunch of y'all hate women, Black people, and intellectuals!
@SorayaMcDonald

Who is a historical figure that when you read about them, you only loathe them more? Anyway, Andrew Jackson SUCKED.
Peter A. Shulman

80% of the Dutch ride bikes regularly. Safety is the MAJOR factor — people simply won’t ride in a dangerous lane. Why should they? Should people drive in dangerous cars (NO!) We recall faulty planes. Let’s recall every crappy bike lane and start again.
@LindsayJS

3 in 4 people want to ride a bike but are put off by lack of safe lanes
Bicycle Friendly Milford

Any chance that if I take a really long nap, this whole crypto fad will be over by the time I wake up?
Alfie Kohn

When police make mistakes and kill someone, they get a pass due to the volatile conditions (which they often create). When other people make similar mistakes — while subjected to tactics deliberately designed to disorient and confuse — it's an offense punishable by death.
Radley Balko

“Spending $40,000 on a car seems like the kind of thing to me that, intuitively, you do when you have like a couple million in wealth and make $400,000 a year,” he wrote. “But absolutely normal people do it all the time! Blows me away.”
Catlow Shipek

“Cars can be convenient, but they are also incredibly costly, both to owners and society in general. New research has calculated that the lifetime cost of a small car — such as an Opel Corsa — is about $689,000, of which society pays $275,000.” —Carlton Reid
Brent Toderian

It won’t surprise you to know that the “truckers” occupying Ottawa right now aren’t very representative of actual Canadian truckers, who are 90% vaccinated, heavily South Asian, and are worried about things like wage theft.
Jacob Remes

The gorgeous Tibetan sand fox lives on the high Tibetan Plateau at altitudes up to 5300m. (Photo Jenaya Launstein):


Weird Animals

It gets scary when you process that many people's idea of "fantasy" is simply "Black people don't exist."
J. Holtham

Joe Rogan discourse has now lasted longer than last week’s news that Trump made plans to have the military seize voting machines
Zack Bornstein

The first Black book to be banned in the US was probably the pamphlet WALKER’S APPEAL (1829). Advocating rebellion against enslavement, the book led some Southern states to bar anti-slavery publications and teaching the enslaved to read and write.
Carole Boston Weatherford @poetweatherford

I continue to feel that Trump officials who violated the Hatch Act, which is law, and who violated the Federal Records Act, which is law, should be held legally accountable for breaking the law. Elite impunity is, in fact, bad, and where 99% of our law enforcement energy should be spent (against both private and public elites).
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

I don’t know. Just seems weird there were a bunch of different, privately funded movements to get people drowning in conspiracy theories to the capitols of America and Canada that all coalesced into shows of force against the governments. Have to assume that’s all coincidental.
Jared Yates Sexton

People move to NYC and suddenly their entire personality revolves around living in NYC.
ABOLISH POL(ICE) @gabsthehuman

It’s not just that people cosplay blackness, it’s that they flip that performance off like a switch the instant they need to distance themselves from blackness. They don’t have that blaccent around the cops and they also don’t show up for racial justice issues. It’s minstrelsy.
@BreeNewsome

One of the most important, but least considered, elements of real estate is whether a project is fun or not. It might sound trivial, but people want to be somewhere that makes them happy! The colorful Paint Box in Atlanta is both just exudes fun and happiness — I love it!


@Cobylefko

These are fun! Legalize it in every neighborhood.
Brandon wants more neighbors @BRudd

But anyway, back to the persecution of white millionaire Joe Rogan… The modern capitalist economy is built upon turning Black life and existence into tradable commodities, whether that’s by raping us and selling our children, stealing our cultural and intellectual creations, forcing us to be a source of cheap labor or profiting from our incarceration.
@BreeNewsome

"Coming to your own conclusions" about whether the Holocaust happened is not part of comedy.
Timothy Burke @bubbaprog

neighbor kids absolutely whipping shovelfuls of snow at each other; joy is alive. like a snowball fight but higher volume, lower density
@RubyGraceLevine

The reason Joe Rogan is popular is because his product is a cultural broadcast of "Being a selfish prick is actually noble and brave if you think about it." and whomst among us doesn't crave justification for being venal and small.
@TomBasgen

To racist logic, Black people can’t be scared; only scary. Can’t own a weapon; only be perceived as one. Can’t self-defend; only engage in violence. RIP, Amir Locke. Meanwhile, to racist logic, White people can’t be scary; only scared. White supremacists never engage in violence; only self-defense. All the while, the political violence of White supremacists is called “legitimate political discourse.”
Ibram X. Kendi @DrIbram

White people regularly abused, sold and murdered Black people they’d had family connections with for generations, including direct biological connection. So I don’t know where folks got the idea that someone isn’t racist because they have specific Black people they show affinity towards.
@BreeNewsome

Trump got elected in part by attacking Clinton for deleting emails that she deemed personal, then spent four years destroying official documents despite federal law.
Peter Baker

“Self-driving cars will reduce emissions.” Nope. They’ll induce more driving because the task will become easier. Even with electric vehicles, more driving = more emissions from brakes, tires, and energy production (and more sprawl).
David Zipper

The NYPD has a larger force than half the militaries of the countries in the world, a budget that would  make it the 33rd largest military spender on the planet, and all the rising crime they are telling you about is happening on their watch. Police don’t produce public safety.
Dyjuan Tatro

I actually do believe the internet is a mistake. allowing humans to communicate their instantaneous thoughts without context or tone was a mistake.
are you there god? it's me, dionne @OhDionne

I honestly believe the discriminatory design of the US Senate and the whitewashing of said design has taught young conservatives that voters like them deserve political over-representation.
David Gordon

If you believe that I spent my 20s and 30s in medical training, wracking up debt, delaying adulthood, and then working nights, weekends, and holidays for my entire life so I could make "bonus" money during a pandemic, that's a worldview of humanity that I simply can't change.
Graham Walker, MD

Washington DC's Thomas Circle in February 1922 -- exactly 100 years ago. Back when streetcars roamed the streets, and pedestrians could walk wherever they liked. From Reddit:


David Zipper

One way to find out if “most workers don’t want to join a union” is to lower the barriers to unionization and place strictly enforced limits on the ability of employers to act against unionization drives. let’s level the playing field and see what happens.
Jamelle Bouie @jbouie

A historical atrocity can never be a metaphor for all bigotry because the specifics are what makes it an atrocity. The Nazis didn't just do "bad things, generally," they did THESE things. And leaving out the details is simply historical erasure.
Gwen C. Katz

Striking how much a TV sports ad environment once mostly hawking cheap beer and pickups is now deluged with come-ons for online sports betting and cryptocurrency speculation -- both get-rich-quick pitches presumably aimed at manipulating the same wage-earning audience. Dystopic.
Charlie Savage

Slavery and colonialism aren’t separate issues. The colonies were plantations. That’s why they were formed.
@BreeNewsome

White people who want to excuse police violence grab onto the incorrect information that's initially shared as fact and willfully refuse to update their understanding of events as media corrects their earlier, inaccurate reporting. This happens every time Minneapolis Police murder someone. It's a pattern that is obvious and harmful and twin cities journalists, editors, and TV news continue to do it because they care more about getting scoops and clicks than they care about Black lives. It's fucking disgusting.
Kathleen Cole

On the one hand we have the best job growth ever but on the other hand the RNC just declared the attempt to overthrow American democracy legitimate so my hope is that we can just pour a scotch and find the middle ground between these extremes like in the old days
Brian Schatz

Study of scientific conferences which switched to virtual in 2020 finds attendance for students and post docs increased by as much as 344%, women by 253%, gender queer by 700%. Virtual much less costly in time, fees and carbon footprint. @rebeccatrager99
Amy Diehl, Ph.D.

When I was a kid decades ago I thought that if I lived into the 2020s it would be flying cars, space travel and world peace. Book burning never came into it. Seemed like something from the Middle Ages.
David Hewson

Having spent the 5+ years working on coping mechanisms for eco-anxiety and climate distress, let me say unequivocally: no amount of meditation will fix climate change. You've to go DO SOMETHING IN COMMUNITY to solve ANY part of it. Don't ask me to talk if you don't want to hear it.
Dekila Chungyalpa

Bro, being a Black woman is literally watching people debate, in public and in print, about whether you're capable of doing things. I hate it here.
@VeronicaJArt

Remember, half of all shipping carries fossil fuels.
Extinction Rebellion

Honest question: how does one reform a system that allows police offices to kill someone within seconds after you aggressively startle them awake?
Quentin Ocama, M.Ed (He/Him)

Across our cities, cars have more rights to housing than people.
Danny Harris

It sounds like hyperbole. I’ve read through a ton of zoning codes. It’s not.
Rik Adamski

Methane emissions from gas stoves in kitchens nationwide equal the annual greenhouse gas emissions of half a million cars, and most of the emissions occur when the stove isn’t even in use, a new study found.
Inside Climate News

The 2nd amendment is for white people.
Isak Douah

Compromise: We keep the 60-vote filibuster intact, and in exchange we appoint 2 senators for each of the 574 recognized Native tribes in the US.
Sam from MO

People tend to think that the world consists of “different races” and that racism is about how we “treat different races.” But race is the invention of racism and its primary purpose has always been to serve as a power construct regardless of who is or isn’t included in whiteness.
@BreeNewsome

“The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” —Toni Morrison
Allen Orr Jr. Esq.

*Facebook's loss of $250B in net value in one hour this morning = entire GDP of Portugal.
*Elon Musk's net worth = the GDP of Greece.
*Jeff Bezos got Rotterdam to dismantle an iconic bridge so his new superyacht could fit under it.
Probably a good time to reinvent Capitalism.
ShadowingDC

In 1923, Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote that the automobile was "the greatest instrument for promoting immunity of crimes of violence that I know of in the history of civilization."
Doug Gordon @BrooklynSpoke

The last five or six decades have see an organized, billionaire-funded assault on social trust. That's what right-wing media IS; that is its essence. A lower-trust society is a cruel, inequitable, dog-eat-dog environment in which oligarchs can prosper. This is also, as a million scholars have written, the go-to strategy of every aspiring autocrat. It's why they all go after media first. Destroy social trust -- convince the masses society's institutions are failing, lying, turning against them -- and people will seek a strongman.
David Roberts @drvolts

Where are all the “what about people with disabilities?” when it comes to snow clearance. Apparently disability only matters in the context of bike lanes
Courtney @FullLaneFemme

Every reactionary centrist op-ed can be summed up as "leftists are correct on the merits, but also they annoy me on social media."
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark

“The riots, rather than developing a clamor for great social progress to wipe out poverty, to a large extent have had the reverse effect and have increased the cries for police use of force and criminal law.” –New York Times op ed, written in Detroit, 1967
@mrotzie

Those who are immunocompromised also wish they could be “over it”
Those suffering from long Covid also wish they could be “over it”
Those who lost loved ones already also wish they could be “over it”
Those around world waiting for vaccines also wish they could be “over it”
Abraar Karan

There's actually nothing less surprising than a Republican Party that claims to hate censorship immediately pivoting to burning books that make them feel uncomfortable. It's always projection. Always.
Brian Tyler Cohen

Listen to this — What happened after a group of unhoused people in San Francisco received monthly $500 checks for 6 months under a new program? Two-thirds of the group now have permanent homes. Via @FastCompany
Brent Toderian

I’m not trying to silence your ideas because they are dangerous, I am trying to silence you because you are an asshole and are unwelcome here: The missing internet content moderation story
@EmilyGorcenski

Eco-imperialism: constraining resource consumption in poor countries, thus keeping them in poverty, in order to divert resources to corporations and elites in rich countries. Degrowth: the opposite.
Jason Hickel

Back in my day, Joe Rogan was a game show host who paid people to eat roaches and drink donkey urine. Am I surprised that we got to this point? Not sure
Ivie Ani

This reminds me of the old adage, a developer is someone who wants a house in the woods, an environmentalist is someone who already has one.
Paul Novosad

Wealthy Silicon Valley suburb Woodside — median household income $250k — declares the entire town "mountain lion habitat" in an attempt to sidestep a new state law allowing duplexes on single-family home lots
Liam Dillon @dillonliam

The fragmentation of FedEx contractors results in them competing against each other for workers, while the more centralized UPS structure allows them to promote from within and build a stable worker pipeline
James Medlock

hiring contractors for roles which are essentially employees is a classic grift to offset costs to the contractors in the immediate term, but it only works out if there's an essentially inexhaustible pool of fungible labor
rick branson @rbranson

I love watching a tight labor market destroy business models premised on workers never having any leverage
James Medlock

No this is not a park, it is the future of the street (Barcelona). The big idea underpinning this is creating more proximity between uses, so that less movement by car is required, and then alongside this changing streets themselves to become places for nature and biodiversity:


Jennifer Keesmaat

You go into the grocery store where nearly every plant is wrapped in plastic and you assume that growing food is a form of manufacturing. But it's really not. Despite industrial agriculture's success, growing food remains a point where human and ecological systems meet and merge.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive

In traffic safety, we don't ask people to organize their lives around improving outcomes. We seek collective policy solutions with small tradeoffs (maybe slightly longer journeys or slightly more expensive cars).
Angie Schmitt

One of the great GOP frustrations of the last 3 decades is that they've been unable to convince their  constituents to burn down their schools. So if you're wondering why the obsessive focus on schools right now, that's it. The 30 year goal is in reach.
Jennifer Berkshire @BisforBerkshire

NEW: Iowa Republicans have introduced a bill that would put government-installed cameras in every single classroom to livestream school activities for parents to spy on teachers and children at all times of the day.
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen

researching far right movements should be treated like researching cancer. we know cancer is bad. we know it multiplies and spreads. we know certain things can contribute to it occurring. we do not fund research to determine if maybe cancer is actually OK and oncologists are bad.
molly conger @socialistdogmom

It is bizarre and surreal that we are allowing Tesla to beta-test its driving software out there in the real world, on live subjects.
David Roberts @drvolts

It remains revealing that MAUS and FUN HOME, the two books that the American media deems to be great “graphic novels,” aren’t novels! People treat even the most rigorous nonfiction comics like fiction because they still don’t quite believe comics can be an elevated medium
Abraham Riesman @abrahamjoseph 

The only time Hilary Clinton was wrong was when they made her say one good thing about Trump and she said his kids were nice. (forced error)
KathleenFrances

I believe it's referred to as an "entitlement of cars"
Lou Savastani @lousav760 (answering the question, "What's the word for a group of cars?"