Regressive Supremacy

A.R. Moxon had a recent essay about one of the big problems underlying our current polycrisis. I think of his subject in terms of the 20 (or 30 or whatever) percent of people in this country who, as Heather McGhee put it in The Sum of Us, will drain public pools instead of share what is clearly easy to make available to everyone, or as Jonathan Metzl showed in Dying of Whiteness, would rather die of preventable illness than extend Medicaid if it means "those people" also get to have it.

Moxon calls this regressive supremacy, and its opposite progressive humanism:

Progressive humanism is the belief that all people matter and deserve life, that generative human value springs from an inextricable and diverse mutually cooperative interconnectivity, and that we have a natural responsibility and moral duty to take the natural human system we have inherited and use our energies and skills to progress and improve it.

Regressive supremacy is the belief that only specific types of people matter and deserve life, and then only to the degree that they conform to specific and rigid hierarchical roles and doctrines; that all other human beings, who must earn life, get what they deserve and deserve what they get, because they are the natural property of the people who matter most.

I recently read about the results of a thorough qualitative research project* carried out in several states (mostly in the South but also the Midwest), mostly focused on committed Christians. The way they were described would clearly put them all in the regressive supremacy camp. 

The researchers tried to make their subjects' world view make sense by referencing Jonathan Haidt's six types of morality, and how that differs between liberals and conservatives. (Haidt says conservatives value loyalty, sanctity and authority over liberals' valuing of fairness and care/compassion.) 

Give me a break. This is not a new insight, I know, but the people in the research say they adhere to the Bible when it's clear they have no interest in anything resembling Christ's teachings. 

Everything they promulgate is fear-based, trying to instate order on behalf of authoritarian personalities who make them feel safe. And it's also usually to obey the big father they've been taught is over all of us, according to some preacher their parents indoctrinated them into following. 

I'm tired of this and these people. 

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* I can't find the link to the research because I got so down-hearted reading it that I closed the tab. I'm trying to remember who referenced it so I can retrace my steps. 

Another Great Use for AI

The title of a Forum News wire story, printed in the St. Paul Pioneer Press (gift link), gives the gist of the problem: "AI-generated video invents University of Minnesota cover crop study, racks up 36,000 views." Subhead: "None of it happened. The study does not exist."

Back in May, Liz Stahl, Extension educator at the University of Minnesota, got an email from someone at a soil and water conservation district, wondering if some research was for real. The email contained a link to a YouTube video. We live in such a surreal time that Stahl wondered at first if that person was a scammer, and whether she should click on the link.

After determining that the sender was a real person from an actual conservation district, Stahl checked the video and found that its content was entirely made up — claiming to be based on research at a scale that would not be possible to carry out, by a U of M faculty member who has never heard of the project. 

Why make such a video? Because it drives views and clicks to ads, and therefore brings revenue to its creators. 

Stahl and others have asked to have the video taken down. They have placed comments below it stating that it is completely fake and AI-generated. Yet it's still up there, and the number of views more than tripled since it was discovered and they began requesting its removal.

Stahl wrote about it on an Extension blog on May 27 (without providing a link to the video or naming the channel). 

Some AI tells to watch for in science videos:

• The narration is too smooth, with no vocal hesitations
• Sensationalized claims (scientists tend to leave those to journalists)
• Use of stock photos
• Citations that lead nowhere

Researchers put their results in many places facilitated by their universities. One of the major reasons for the existence of Extension, after all, is to get information about agricultural research out to farmers. YouTube videos of this kind of research in general are reinventing the wheel, and fake videos are taking the wheels right off.

Three Stories About Policing

Three things I saw today about policing.

Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data (from Reuters):

U.S. police spend much of their time conducting racially biased stops and searches of minority drivers, often without reasonable suspicion, rather than “fighting crime.”

Overall, sheriff patrol officers spend significantly more time on officer-initiated stops – “proactive policing” in law enforcement parlance – than they do responding to community members’ calls for help, according to the report. Research has shown that the practice is a fundamentally ineffective public safety strategy, the report pointed out....

Here's a fine example of exactly that from our local press. Don't let the slightly weird headline fool you: Hennepin County sheriff conceals bodycam footage by calling officers 'undercover.' A 26-year-old Black Minneapolis man was stopped by two Hennepin County sheriffs for no reason. They assaulted him, arrested him, and charged him — even though all of this was witnessed and recorded by other people. The story is about whether their body camera footage should be considered privileged as part of them being undercover (even though they were wearing the word SHERIFF on their vests) but the basics of the story are part of the egregious pattern described in the Reuters report. 

And then there's this: 

American police killings are rising, even as murder rates fall (from The Economist). More aggressive cops are less restrained. 

The Lies Continue

Quoting Minneapolis City Council President Elliot Payne:

ACLU Minnesota reported yesterday that the federal government filed sworn statements that there are 970 agents in Minnesota for Operation Metro Surge and that 407 agents will remain here in March. It’s important to note this is on top of the 190 agents that were already assigned before this surge started.

So that's 597 agents that they plan to have here as of March, and at this point that 970 number is at least five times as many as were in the area before this thing started. 

In other words, they lied to the faces of two members of Congress a couple of days ago when they said there were 500 agents here currently.

Is anyone surprised? Lying cat is not surprised.

What MBGA Looks Like

Today I saw a post showing the form anti-diversity and anti-immigrant thinking takes in the U.K. The post belittled the perspective:

The good old days when shops didn't have doors, windows had flags mounted in them, the local bakers sold baguettes and we used decimal currency?

It was posted by a British BlueSky poster named David Higham @oldtrotter.bsky.social. As Higham points out, the image is AI slop, which is all-too-popular with right-wingers. 

His post had a lot of comments. Here are a few of my favorites:

Whilst there are absolutely problems with the exodus of trade from high streets to out of town retail parks, these people's rose-tinted (fascist) view of this mythical past makes me want to beat their shins with a spade. (accompanied by three photos)
badly-drawn bee @soapachu.bsky.social

1970s Manchester


Finchley, 1970s


Notting Hill, 1970s

Do they realise they are free to open all these businesses and decorate them just like that if they feel their local high street would reward them with increased patronage? But that takes more than just angrily feeding prompts into an AI Generator... or learning nobody REALLY gives a shit.
The Albionist

This looks like the set they would build at Epcot Center for something called England World.
Ed Burmila

Looks a bit 15 minute town to me. Bloody Stalinists.
Rootless Cosmopolitan @brennick.bsky.social

It's Not About Training

People in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are now getting caught up in ICE tear gas attacks who are not involved in trying to deter them or daring to "scarily follow" them down the street. People who are just driving past the area of a raid (including people I know) or walking down a street in a busy commercial intersection (Lyndale and Lake).

Minnesota Public Radio's Matt Sepic was on WAMU's 1A show today recounting the details of the ICE home invasion in the near-north suburb of Robbinsdale (or North Minneapolis), in which five of them broke down a door to take a single person. They claimed they had a judicial warrant, but of course they didn't. In the video taken by one of the home's residents, which has been widely shared, she demands the warrant repeatedly, but they never show it. They shine a light in her eyes and at one point brandish a long gun at her. 

Sepic says a 9-year-old was in the house. 

All of this was done so they could kidnap a Liberian refugee man whose status is in dispute. He has an order for final removal, Sepic said, but has been checking in as ordered, including just a few days ago. When they could have detained him, as they have been doing to many other people. 

But no, they waited until Sunday to come and terrorize his friends or loved ones in this house, his neighbors who tried to come help, and anyone who heard about this — by illegally breaking down the door and raiding the house. 

MPR Reporter Matt Sepic, who is just about the most deadpan reporter you'll ever hear, ended this description to 1A's host with these words: "These are police-state tactics."

And two people who were detained while they were legally following an ICE vehicle, described on MPR the eight-plus hours they were held at the locally based federal Whipple Building, before they were released without charges. How they were treated, and what they heard and saw of the way the non-citizens were being treated. Note that one of them was told by an ICE member that Renee Good was a "lesbian bitch." 

At this point, the number of people carrying out perfectly legal activity who've had their car windows smashed must be over two dozen. And that's not counting people who ICE suspected of being undocumented, who also should not have their car windows smashed when ICE attempts detention. 

This is all obvious provocation by Trump's private army. He's wants people to fight back so he can declare the Insurrection Act. 

It's not about "better training." This is what they're trained to do. No more funding (my god, they have enough!).

And as soon as possible, get rid of ICE and "homeland" security. Restructure these departments to their pre-9/11 state.

___

Update/addendum: From Jake Steinberg, who does maps and visual stories for the Star Tribune, and his colleague Jeff Hargarten:

There are now more federal immigration agents in Minnesota than the 10 largest Twin Cities police departments combined.

9% of ICE is in Minnesota right now, even though Minnesota has less than 1% of the nation's undocumented immigrants.

DHS forces outnumber the metro's 10 largest police departments.

What's More Dangerous for Teens: Cars or eBikes?

Warren Wells, policy and planning director at Marin County Bicycle Coalition, posted a long thread (all worth reading) about teens and crashes — whether bike or car-related. 

Here are a few particular parts: 

We've spent a ton of time talking about teens getting injured on e-bikes (or illegal e-motos). We've heard that crash rates are skyrocketing. Marin County Dept of Health even set up a dashboard to see how many e-bike/e-moto crashes are happening.

But how many kids are getting hurt in cars? 

Here is the crash count and crash rate per 100k in Marin by age. 


Some things to note here. The number of under age 16 e-bike crashes in the last two years, the whole thing we're having a panic over is, 54 — or 2/month. 

Compare that to 398 conventional bike crashes for 16+. It's ~1/7th! Wow!

...

Lastly is the "nature of accident." This is a little fuzzy, but a "traffic" crash is one where a bike collided with another vehicle (typically a car) and a "non-traffic" crash is a solo crash.

Right off the bat, we see that close to half (44%) of teen e-bike crashes involve a car.

Interestingly, for every age category and bike type, solo crashes make up a majority of reported crashes. 

But of all the categories, teen e-bike crashes are the most likely to involve a car. So I'm not sure that's an e-bike problem!

Ok, that's a lot about the e-bike dashboard. I want to get back to my initial question. How does this compare to the number of teens getting injured in car crashes?

...

Among just teens age 16–19, in 26 months there were 156 kids injured as car occupants, 2/3rd of them drivers. This is 6 injuries a month. 

17 of those injuries were serious (meaning likely life-altering) and 5 were fatal. Five! Compared to 0 teen e-bike (or e-moto) deaths in a similar time.

The big lesson here is that we should not be letting teens drive cars, and that transporting them by car is as least as big a threat to young people's health as riding a bicycle, at least on a population basis.

While we're talking about the public health effects of driving, it's worth mentioning the number of young people struck by cars, many of which are transporting other kids to school. 

In this 26-month period, 44 people age 19 or under were injured when hit by a car, and 8 were seriously wounded.

The data clearly show that teen passengers, and especially teen drivers, are frequently injured in traffic crashes.

All I want is for our public health officials to treat this issue with as much seriousness as it deserves, relative to the effort they have expended regarding e-bikes.

Because when all I hear is about is e-bikes and nothing about teen drivers (aside from the obvious grief about an individual crash), it becomes hard to see the furor about e-bikes/e-motos as anything other than a moral panic.

Causes vs. Coverage

No one expects news coverage to reflect reality 100%, but it's eye-opening just how distorted it is. And I'm not talking about Fox News, either. 

The book Copaganda gave one perspective on this, but here's a simpler one. Data from Our World in Data:

I imagine most of the coverage of cancer, heart disease, and other medical causes occurs in either science/health stories (usually not in the main news section) or the obituaries.

Alternate Realities

I've mentioned before the dissonance I experience with family members who are fully MAGA-aligned or in some way pro-Trump. The closest of these relatives I know to be generous and generally kind people, so it is painful to square that with the inherent racism (etc) in their political beliefs.

I've just finished listening to the three-part podcast called Alternate Realities, in which a guy named Zach Mack — who does podcasts for Vox — makes a bet with his conspiracy-theory-believing dad and attempts to talk to him about his beliefs over a year.

It's a great bit of journalism and intense personal and familial exploration. And sheds befuddling light on how a person like his dad can continue to believe what he believes, even though it's wrecking his family.

Alternate Realities: A Strange Bet (part 1)

Alternate Realities: Down the Rabbit Hole (part 2)

Alternate Realities: Facing the Facts (part 3)

Three Orders of Magnitude

I've been away from my computer all day pretty much, and I am not going to try to catch up on all of the bizarro world Trump news of the day. I refuse. I'll wait and see how much of it is in tomorrow's newspaper.

I just want to note that according to the coverage of yesterday's CDC meetings, the group RFK Jr. has newly appointed appears to be on the verge of recommending delaying administering the Hepatitis B vaccine to infants for one month unless their mother is known to have HepB. 

The infant HepB vaccine went into use in 1991, when there were 20,000 child cases a year. Now there are only 20 a year, according to my morning newspaper. That reduction is three orders of magnitude 

The RFK partisans are ignoring facts presented by scientists about how mothers can be infected without knowing it, so delaying is bad and that from a public health standpoint it makes sense to vaccinate at birth. 

They'd rather make it up as they go along and just delay for a month (who knows, what amount time should it be? Why not two months! A year! It appears to be random as far as they're concerned). And let babies get really sick, or maybe die.

Raymond Williams with the Long View

In the U.S., it seems as though the so-called urban/rural divide is a relatively recent political phenomenon: maybe something that has become important in the last 40 years or so. It has definitely been more exploited by Republicans in the past 20 years, it seems to me.

I'm from a very rural area and the people there definitely resented city people (in this case, New York City) but I don't remember them disliking the people of the smaller cities in the rest of New York. Obama's 2008 speech where he said that people in small towns "cling to guns, religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them" was prefaced with a cause: their areas had lost their economic base. But that part didn't get much coverage, and his partial words were part of a new wave of Republicans exploiting the divide, continued that year by Sarah Palin.

So now we have an almost constant stream of Republicans and rural people insulting cities and the people who live in them, which is providing cover for the Trump regime to send the military into Black-led cities where crime is declining. In contrast, if anyone points out a single negative thing about rural areas, they're instantly attacked as elitist and out of touch with the "real America."

I thought of all this the other day when I found a copy of Raymond Williams' 1973 book The Country and the City at a used bookstore. I haven't read it yet, but I looked through the first few pages and on the first page I found this:

On the actual settlements, which in the real history have been astonishingly varied, powerful feelings have gathered and have been generalised. On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

So in some ways that makes me feel less badly about our current mess, but it also makes me more angry about the people who intentionally manipulate this aspect of the human condition instead of trying to improve it.

All those of us who grew up in the country and moved to cities know both worlds. Most of us miss aspects of the rural, but there are many reasons we don't return, and lack of economic opportunity is only one of them.

At a Family Reunion

I went to a family reunion last weekend in Wisconsin where close to half the relatives are evangelical Christians. It's a picnic, only a few hours long, so it's not hard to avoid talking about politics.

One uncle, however, had to wear his pro-Trump T-shirt. I didn't notice it for the first few hours because I was avoiding him in general, based on past experience. But at some point, before I had seen the T-shirt, I realized one of the Gen Z attendees (who lives in the Twin Cities) was over talking to him for a little while.

Later I asked the Gen Z-er if they were getting into it with the uncle about his T-shirt, and the answer was yes. I didn't get a lot of details about the conversation, but I did get that the uncle told the Gen Z-er they are the one who lives in a bubble with limited info. The Gen Z-er asked the uncle where he gets his info and he said The Christian Broadcasting Network.

We shared an eye roll.

One of the things the uncle did say was that children in public schools are not allowed to proclaim any aspect of their Christianity. (I can't remember the exact terminology they said he used.) When they told him that was not true, he didn't believe it.

I told Gen Z-er the uncle and his wife home-schooled their kids and more recently their grandkids, so they have no idea what goes on in the public schools. Gen Z-er didn't know that about the family, and appeared kind of surprised.

They said their college courses are designed to teach critical thinking, to examine multiple sides of arguments, and I agreed that is generally how liberal arts are designed, and what the MAGA movement doesn't want to happen.

Just a glimpse of how things are out there, which I suppose most white people with families in this country are aware of in some sense. 

I read, but now can't find, a very convincing essay about refusing to deal with relatives and (former) friends who have gone down the MAGA drain. I wish I could link to it now; it wasn't a well-known writer in a mainstream source — just a person with a newsletter that I don't read regularly. I thought I had saved it somewhere but my tabs are a mess so I can't find it. 

It was persuasive, but I have not managed to cut off the many racist, inherently fascist people in my life.

Fear of Cities, Anti-Urbanism, Anti-Blackness

Dartmouth professor and writer Jeff Sharlet posted a thread on BlueSky today that resonated with my experience.

It's about fear of cities, which underpins the current moment and motivates much of MAGA (and not just MAGA) thinking.

Sharlet grew up across the river from Schenectady, New York. He doesn't say in which white-flight suburb, but it went without saying among its white residents that the largely Black city across the river was a dangerous, scary place. And as a child you just believe what everyone around you believes.

In school other kids liked talking about Schenectady, a small city, as something like Escape from New York. And then, of course, there were movies like CHUD, and Adventures in Babysitting. Even my beloved Blade Runner was a “beware cities, white people” parable.

Personally, I grew up in a rural area in central upstate New York where there were almost zero Black people, and any city was thought to be a frightening place. I didn't think about the upstate cities like Schenectady or Syracuse much, but I have clear memories of assuming Harlem was utterly terrifying.

Which is why a book like Antonia Barber's juvenile novel The Affair of the Rockery Baby was such a tonic for me... Its white, English characters discover that Harlem is a normal place and make friends with other kids there. (I need to write about that book some day. It doesn't appear anyone else has!)

Like Sharlet, kids in my town were basically inculcated to think that any white person who went to a Black neighborhood would be instantly attacked — when the opposite is what was true, given the history of lynching, white race riots, and sundown towns.

His point in describing his own history (and mine) is this:

Anti-urbanism is a way of speaking anti-Blackness without naming it as one’s own. It’s a sociological euphemism for racism. I didn’t know that as a white kid among white kids who liked to vow they’d never live in NYC, they always wanted to be in a small town....

What’s happening now with the Trump regime…is the conversion of the latent racism of anti-urbanism into explicit and hysterical racism. Previous GOP — and plenty of Democrats — were content to leave it unstated. Trumpism wants to foreground and escalate it.

The most common version of this subtle (not so subtle) white racism is the desire for so-called good schools, which always means ones with very few Black students. Ask yourself how often you hear that from liberals.

Naively, I never thought these attitudes would lead to where we are, with the Trump regime using it to send the armed forces into an American city, and getting ready to send them into others. But here we are. It was ready-made for manipulation by a racist sociopath.

__

Here's another earlier post on the topic nice white people who are not so nice.

Air Conditioning Is Fine

Over the weekend, The Guardian ran an article about how air conditioning is "destroying the planet." Joshua Foust, assistant professor at Syracuse University, took it to task on BlueSky and started a bunch of other discussion:

This [article] is satisfying an obvious fetish for sneering at vulnerable poor people, but also it is a classic example of the weird Euro-Puritanism about air conditioning, which is a minuscule carbon emitter compared to gas heating, data centers, cheap air travel, or cars. It’s such a weird, elitist thing to focus on.

Another way of looking at this: the US has larger areas experiencing consistent, extreme heat in the summer, but because of widespread AC adoption, annual heat deaths rarely rise above 2,000, or a hair over 1% as many as Europe. Their sneering contempt for AC is just mass death for poor people.

Europeans like to lecture Americans about how 20,000 people die per year from guns here, but that’s 10% of how many Europeans die of heat neglect each year. It’s crazy to me that this is such a sticking point for them.

That comparison with gun deaths was startling. Obviously, 20,000 gun deaths is terrible and unacceptable. But in comparison, the number of people who die from heat in the U.S. is around 2,000. Europe's somewhat larger population comes nowhere near making up for the discrepancy: 175,000 per year there vs. 2,000 in the U.S.

Some of the best related comments:

People didn’t “used to be fine” without air conditioning during heat waves in the U.S. - a lot more people *just died*. According to this study, air conditioning has cut heat deaths in the U.S. by around 80% since 1960.
Faine Greenwood

One of those hills I’m willing to die on is that especially with the ongoing revolution in renewable energy technologies, of all the problems in the world, electricity consumption and *especially* daytime consumption is really not among the major ones.... Electricity is among the very few things we actually know how to make in massive quantities with small enough environmental and social costs. Especially now, when renewable energy techs - and in particular solar PV and batteries - are advancing *MUCH* faster than even *optimists* dared to *hope*!!!
Janne M. Korhonen

Also, on this specific front: Japan has been using air-source heat pumps for both heating and cooling for 40+ years. This is quite literally a solved problem, and the parts of it that aren't, can be quite soon and are under active research. The Continent needs to get its head out of its ass.
Jordan Carlson

Every time air conditioning shaming comes up, I think about the fact that the energy demand (and carbon impact) of heating my home is about 4x higher than the carbon impact of cooling it, but I've never once seen anyone recommend that people move out of cold areas to areas that need A/C instead.
Christopher Schmidt

I used to be an air-conditioning snob, and still regret the effect it has had on our politics (allowing for the increasing number Congressional districts in the South and Southwest, and basically creating Florida as we know it). 

But that final point, about the energy efficiency of cooling vs. heating, is what originally convinced me it was stupid to be biased against air conditioning, if you think heating is fine.

What a Bunch of Know-Nothings

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins held a press conference today to talk about how all those "lazy" people getting Medicaid should become farm laborers to make up for all the people being deported. She said,

There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly.

Author Charles C. Mann had this to say about it:

All I can get out of this is that the US Secretary of Agriculture has no idea that ag has been furiously automating everything it can for 30-40 years and all the human jobs left now are ones we have no idea how to automate. I know it is probably a violation of Godwin's Law to mention this, but as far as I know the last program that tried to get millions of people to leave their homes to work on farms was the Cultural Revolution.

Sarah Taber, agricultural consultant and recent candidate for North Carolina commissioner of agriculture, went into a lot more detail. As always, she was enlightening:

So. I've been on field manual labor crews where most of my coworkers were convicts. I've also worked with a lot of tech companies on automating farms. And [Rollins'] press conference is incredible. Rollins hasn't the foggiest clue what she's on about.

Every farm job that CAN be automated, already is. Let's start there. She thinks... nobody's ever tried to automate picking fruit? Really? And then we'll talk about the "tehe we'll just make the Medicaid people work the farms" part.

Produce that's hard, OR destined for processing, can be picked by machine. So carrots, nuts, sour cherries for pie filling, berries and grapes that will be dried, tomatoes for sauce - those are picked by machine already. But berries, fruit, tomatoes, etc that are eaten fresh can't be automated w current technology.

I know because I worked for a lot of the startups that tried!

There's no way to pick fast enough by machine to be commercially viable, without bruising so they rot before they get to the store. Having a USDA Secretary who doesn't know any of this is wild!

Now let's talk this whole "We'll just have the Medicaid people pick the crops!" thing. And let's just ignore the whole "forced labor is morally bad" issue. Let's focus strictly on logistics.

A thing that kept happening to me, as a white American who worked manual labor field jobs (we are in fact out here, sorry) is finding out I was the only fool on the crew who was there voluntarily and getting paid. Everyone else was convicts with a sentence.

So they were completely new to farm labor and didn't really want to be there. Part of the job is I was supposed to "mentor" them. News flash: inexperienced people who don't want to be there DON'T DO GOOD WORK. Even if they want to, they don't know how.

Farmers would hire these crews because they "didn't want to hire migrants" but also "didn't want to pay real wages." And they were ALWAYS disappointed with the results. Slow. Sloppy. Kept breaking stuff because they were clumsy. No real cost savings compared to just hiring real workers.

This one Florida crew I was on had a rotating cast of 19-year-old weed and Xbox kids who'd been caught on minor drug charges. They were harmless. And also, clumsy AF. Big kids who had no idea where their feet were. They kept stepping on the blueberry transplants we'd just planted.

Another crew was a bunch of minors who were working as "community service" for juvie. They all smoked... Tobacco is packed with plant viruses that are super contagious; can be spread just by touch. So "don't smoke in the fields" is a key farm rule.

Not only did the juvie crew not know or care. The FOREMEN didn't know or care. That's how janky this outfit was. Hope those fields turned out ok

Ag is a real job. It takes real skills, knowledge, and people who GAF about what they're doing. Stop treating agriculture like society's dumping ground.

Jamelle Bouie also had a thread that was about a slightly different topic – pundits pontificating that "other people" should go work in factories — but it ended up in an allied place:

i think that if you are an upper income writer living in a major urban area complaining about “the laptop class” — really, if you are a knowledge worker of any kind complaining about the “laptop class" — you have an obligation to quit your job and go work in a factory for a year

you’ll never hear me complaining about that shit. my grandparents did factory work and labored as domestics — and my parents joined the military — so that my brother and i could provide for our families without destroying our bodies

the other thing is that no one who fetishizes manual labor actually cares to improve life for people who are in those circumstances! no support for unionization or a generous welfare state! no interest in policies that make life easier for people who work their hands or afford them more autonomy!

Brooke Rollins is another fine example of the incompetence of the Trump regime. Jesus. On the same day Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy once again defamed the New York subway system as dangerous, when cars kill more than 40,000 people a year. And more than 100 people died in flooding in Texas after DOGE has decimated FEMA and NOAA and the National Weather Service...

Here's what Tom Tomorrow had for this week. You can't top it:


See him weekly on the Daily Kos and/or subscribe to Sparky's List to get his cartoon a day early (with additional commentary) by email.

Why Believe Them?

Late last week I heard news the Trump administration was reversing course on two high-profile bad decisions: revocation of thousands of student visas and defunding of the long-term Women’s Health Initiative study.

This would be good news, obviously. If it's actually true.

At this point I don't know why any of us should believe the leaders of our federal government when they claim anything. They've declared other canceled programs uncanceled in the past, and it wasn't true. PEPFARS funding, anyone?

So why should these examples be any more true?

Don't believe it until the money is in a bank (and preferably transferred to a different bank the feds don't have access to... if that's even possible) and every student has their visa back.

Trump's people are arresting and jailing judges. They lie with impunity. They know they can make a story go away for at least a while and muddy the waters by saying they've reversed on an unpopular issue.

Don't believe them.

It's Actually Losing Money

It was hard to miss yesterday's news that Tesla's first-quarter 2025 earnings were 71% lower than the same quarter in 2024, which — good. In addition to the utter damage Elon Musk is doing to our country (and the world, by extension), the company is a bad investment, the products it has are not worth buying, and the products it claims it will have will never be for sale.

The thing I didn't know about the remaining profit, though, is that none of it comes from the sales of products. The company's overall operating profit was $400 million, which came from $595 million in automotive regulatory credits. Forbes described those as "all essentially free profit Tesla receives from its gas car rivals looking to comply with emission requirements." Those credits, of course, come from the federal government and U.S. tax payers.

The company had several additional million dollars in revenue from interest on investments, which made its bottom line look better, but that money also is not from sales.  

Tesla cars are money-losers, and this was its first year-to-year decrease in sales, according to Tech Crunch (linked above). Musk and the company are covering up reality. When none of the promises he made yesterday pan out — once again — maybe it will have some effect this time, given the hole he's sinking in already.

You're Wrong About Gangs

As anyone knows who has paid any attention to the illegal renditioning of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, the Trump administration's ostensible reason for this action is that the men are supposedly members of a dangerous gang. Whether they really are members of the gang or not has been mentioned somewhat in discussions I've seen, but there has been less attention paid to the general idea that "gang" is used as a scare word in this culture.

An August 2019 podcast by You're Wrong About looked at gangs as yet another instance of moral panic.

I have not been a listener of that podcast, being a late arriver to the Michael Hobbes phenomenon, so I just listened to it. I recommend this episode particularly. It fits squarely within other media that looks at the "war on crime" over-reaction, such as the Vera Institute's 2024 look-back at the 1994 Crime Bill.

In this You're Wrong About podcast, Hobbes identifies four attributes of moral panics generally, and discusses how they apply to the gang moral panic particularly. It's easy to see how moral panic applies to the present situation. The four attributes are:

• A real phenomenon (though not the one that's named). So in the case of gangs in the 1980s, the phenomenon was increased violent crime in cities.
• An exaggerated narrative, often with internal inconsistencies. For example, gangs of wilding teenagers — the equivalent of animals — were also devious, hierarchically organized drug lords. Thousands of them sprang up everywhere, almost overnight. 
• A disproportionate response. Gang task forces were created across the country, police militarized their equipment, and finally there was the 1994 crime bill. The task forces created lengthy lists of gang members and "known associates," including, at one point in Los Angeles, a list that encompassed half the Black men between the ages of 21 and 24.
• Failure to ever return to debunk it later. This left us with the continuing belief in gangs as a real thing, the idea of known associates, and therefore vulnerable to exploitation of those beliefs by the Trump administration currently.

Hobbes's cohost, Sarah Marshall proposed a fifth attribute that might apply:

• Identifying a problem in the dominant culture and projecting it onto an outsider group in order to eradicate it.

In our present situation, I would say the underlying real phenomenon is not crime (which has been trending downward for years, aside from the covid bump) or immigration, but many white people's unease with an increasingly diverse U.S. population. That has led to decreased support for the idea of immigration, which is relentlessly exploited by the right and pushed by right-wing media to the point where Great Replacement Theory has become almost mainstream.

In that context, labeling Latino men as gang members because they have tattoos, kidnapping them to another country, and dehumanizing them by shaving their heads and putting them on display is literally what Marshall said about projecting the problem onto a set of outsiders to try to eradicate it.

Naming the Companies

Today I learned, via Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social, that

these are the companies that we must force governments to dismantle if our kids are going to have a mostly habitable planet:

I hear all the time, here in the West, about four of the five in the bottom chart. (I've never heard of TotalEnergies, but Wikipedia tells me it's the French equivalent of the others on the orange chart.)

But I never hear about any of the five in the red chart and their much more significant output. The closest one hears is reference to "the Saudis" as oil producers, which I suppose is the same thing as Saudi Aramco.

Interesting how invisible they are in American media.

The Non-Trumper Trumper

There was a letter to the editor in the Star Tribune a couple of days ago that left me aghast. I dug it out of the recycling pile to reread and I've decided to post it because I feel compelled to inflict it on others.

Assuming the writer, Steve Wexler of Plymouth, Minnesota, is telling the truth about not being a "Trumper" — which is far from guaranteed — it's hard to get into the head space of a person who thinks the things Steve writes:

Let me start off by saying I’m not a Trumper — I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. I voted for Trump in 2024 because I believe the Democrats’ policies are ruining our country, but that’s a much larger discussion that could take paragraphs to debate and end with no conclusive outcome. My reason for writing is I am so tired of reading about all the potential negative consequences of Trump’s policies. And they are all someone’s guess because, at this point, no one really knows what the effects of his policies involving immigration, DEI, federal government cuts or the 50 other things he is moving forward at a fast-paced clip will really have on our country.

But all the Star Tribune and the media ever present is the potential negative consequences. Nowhere have I read in any media report, “Here are likely positive outcomes!” The media hates Trump, and I get he’s caused most of that, but the days of presenting both sides of the news are gone. The days of independent reporting without taking sides are a thing of the past. The news media, including our beloved Star Tribune, has become another source of reporting filled with individuals' opinions and, in many cases, liberal “sky is always falling” spins to sell subscriptions and influence people.

I, for one, miss the old days of presenting facts with both sides of the debate or story and the potential positive and negative outcomes. Today every report contains the negative impact, especially when it comes to Trump. Nowhere do we ever read the benefits of what tariffs could bring, or that closing our borders could save the U.S. X number of dollars, or when we get back to hiring the best candidate for the job regardless of race, color or age, what that positive impact might look like. Nope, all we read is “The sky is falling!” Truly a sad situation for so many reasons.

The media hates Trump, eh? That's why the New York Times bends over backwards to never label obvious lies as lies, and why media critics constantly decry the pro-Trump bias of much of the media. Of course right-wing media labels the rest of media as hating Trump, so maybe that tells us what kind of media Steve spends most of his time with.

Steve doesn't appreciate that there is an objective reality about tariffs according to economists (except the ones in the tank for Trump), or that the anti-"DEI" tsunami is resulting in hiring less qualified white people. He wonders if "closing our borders" could save the U.S. Does he mean save the country from something bad? It seems that he does. 

All of this sure sounds indistinguishable from a self-described "Trumper" to me. Steve might be better off describing why he voted for Biden in 2020, if he really did.