Agrivoltaics—Not Romanticized AI Art

On Earth Day, a relative who diverges from me on many political topics posted this to Facebook:

I didn't respond there because I know better than to get into it on Facebook because… who has the time?

But I do have thoughts.

1. This is one of the many pieces of AI-generated "art" that have been showing up on Facebook. So thanks for putting more visual pollution into my feed.
2. This is not at all what it looks like when a farm family decides to put a solar array onto their land. The image makes it look like a return to the Dust Bowl in which we're all going to starve. 
3. Solar panels are not located inches above the ground, and the plants below are not dead and brown. The combination of solar and farming is called agrivoltaics, which I figured out pretty easily by searching for just a few minutes, and there's lots of information and photos of people growing plants and managing livestock under and adjacent to solar panels (see below for a few).
   
4. The idea that farmers would replace a field of sunflowers (and mixed produce, implied by the tomatoes and other vegetables in the foreground) is pretty strange. If anything, it would be fields where they alternate commodity soybeans and corn, since those cover most of the Midwest. The fertilizers used to grow those crops are poisoning the water supplies of farm families, nearby towns, and the downstream lakes and rivers, including the Mississippi. But corn and soybeans are not picturesque enough, so that's not what is shown. 
5. The hay bale the Hee Haw-era farmer is sitting on basically doesn't exist on farms anymore. Farmers now bale hay into broad cylinder shapes as big as a car, much too large for humans to lift. Sometimes the hay is instead piled into long mounds that are covered in plastic. Silos are becoming a thing of the past, I've been told, since each farm building is taxed; covering the hay with plastic gets around the taxation.

All in all, the AI image is a romanticized version of farming, juxtaposed with an imaginary evil version of solar energy.

Here are a few photos of what solar on farms/agrivoltaics actually looks like:

Read All About It, 175 Years

In late April, the St. Paul Pioneer Press had its 175th anniversary. To mark the occasion, they published a magazine-sized insert with reprints of significant front pages (some are from the different newspapers that merged with the Pioneer Press).  

The reproductions are pretty small, compared to their original size, so reading the text without a magnifying glass isn't an option, but it's easy to compare the change in newspaper design over time.

Headlines as we think of them were not a thing in that first year, 1849. Other than the name of the newspaper, the largest type would qualify as only a subhead today. The next example shown, from 1858, had one all-caps headline setting (GLORIOUS NEWS!) announcing Minnesota's statehood, but it's only a single text column wide out of eight columns on the page. 

The beginning of the Civil War was treated to a smaller headline a few years later. Understatement was the style, driven partly by technical limitation.

Two front pages from 1865 make an interesting contrast. The end of the Civil War received something modern readers would recognize as appropriate treatment for a significant event:

Five days later, however, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was relegated to the one-column treatment:

Here's a close-up of the headline about Lincoln at the top of the sixth column:

I note the heavy black rules between all the text columns, however, and I think what happened was that news of Lincoln's murder was late-breaking, within the reality of the production schedule. They probably pulled some other story out of that spot at the last minute and replaced the usual thin rules between the columns, and that was all they had time to do before the deadline.

In contrast, with the "Peace Through Victory" edition on April 11, they knew the end of the war was at hand so they had that type and illustration lockup ready to go as soon as they heard by telegram that Lee had surrendered.   

The first actual news image that is shown in the reproductions is from March 1881, when the Minnesota State Capitol was destroyed by fire. And I haven't mentioned it before, but as on all of the foregoing front pages, it's jarring to see that and other serious stories juxtaposed with columns of ads for SHIRTS! HATS! and BAKING POWDER, among other things.

After that image of the Capitol, wood cuts or steel engravings are on every page, followed by halftone photos later.

One other oddity I wanted to report was the use of hyphens in display typography. As a typesetter who started in the early 1980s, I was taught to be sensitive to hyphens, and especially never to allow a hyphen to appear in display type. That does not appear to have been a nicety among newspaper typesetters. This example is from 1898:

Remember, this type was being set by hand, letter by letter, so it would have been just as easy — maybe easier — to set it without the hyphen than it was to set it with the hyphen. It just occurred to me that the goal was to fill out the line fully? But that seems totally unnecessary, versus making it easier to read.

Here are two other examples from years not long after that one:

1904

1907

In general in the 20th century, though, the front pages look more recognizable as front pages to a modern reader. The ads went away and some kind of significant headline or image usually dominates. The designs are still quite a jumble compared to the ones late in the century, but there's more visual hierarchy. And pretty soon, there's nary a display hyphen in sight.

A Dupe in the Culture War?

I was happy that John Fetterman defeated Dr. Oz for the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania. I haven't paid that much attention to Fetterman since then, but I gather that lately he's been flagrantly wrong on the Israel/Palestine situation.

And now, a couple of days ago, he made a statement on Twitter saying Florida man Ron DeSantis was right to sign a bill banning lab-grown meat. That's not an issue I've been tracking particularly, but Fetterman followed the statement with this:

btw, this is the thing that makes lab meat:

This is, of course, an aspect of the naturalistic fallacy, and his respondents were not having it.

I first saw the thread because a friend retweeted him and responded with this:

Do you drink beer made in things like this?

Other people responded in various ways:

Looks clean and disease-free. Cheese is made in a similar fashion.

So cool! That’s American ingenuity right there :)

by the way, this is the thing that makes hydrogenated oil for for the foods that contribute to 1/3 of your state being obese:

Multiple people pushed back with a version of this one (often with photos, which I will not reproduce):

Uh, you really want to argue aesthetics? Have you seen slaughterhouse footage?

And this one is probably my favorite, though I don't feel a great need for lab-grown meat as a way to replace meat in my diet:

So you’re saying we could get meat without having to make it in a cow first? Without taking millions of acres of farmland just for growing feed, or thousands of gallons/pound of precious underground aquifer water? Without having to put the Midwest in danger of another dustbowl?

Yesterday, Twitter added a community note to Fetterman's post, which gives context to make it clear that most food these days goes through machines such as the one he was decrying.

The Eight-Year Study

When I do my Twitter round-ups, I almost always re-find posts I saved that are too long for the short format but that I still want to point to. Here's one from Alfie Kohn, who's among my favorite thinkers on education and parenting, from about halfway through April:

Time for my periodic reminder about one of the most important educational research findings of the 20th century: the Eight-Year Study. Back in the 1930s, 30 high schools around the U.S. turned traditional practice on its head, especially for college-bound students. In place of grade-driven, teacher-controlled, fact-based instruction, the learning was interdisciplinary, conceptual, experiential, collaborative, often ungraded, and fashioned jointly by teachers and students.

Hundreds of colleges agreed to set aside their usual admissions requirements so that students from these progressive programs wouldn't be penalized. Over several years, more than 1,500 students were then compared to carefully matched students from conventional schools.

The result: experimental students did just as well at college, and often better, on all counts — grades, extracurricular participation, and lower drop-out rates, as well as on measures such as intellectual curiosity and resourcefulness.

And here's the kicker: "The further a school departed from the traditional college preparation program, the better was the record of its graduates."

Many factors can explain why these remarkable findings were largely ignored and why high schools are still so traditional today. But now we know that it's not because students need, or even benefit from, those conventional practices in order to succeed in college.

Kohn provides a link to the the first volume of the 5-volume series, and a three-page summary that was done in 1971.

The study started in 1932 and ended in 1940, so it's pretty obvious why people may have been distracted when it was published in 1942. Fights over rigid curriculum, as we are currently undergoing once again here in Minnesota, remind me how far afield education can wander from what actually matters.

Tax Dollars at Work

Itasca County, Minnesota, is due north of the Twin Cities. It's a large and mostly rural place, population 45,000, located one county south of the Canadian border. For 80 years, through 2012, its voters were solidly Democratic in presidential elections. A higher percentage of them voted for Obama in 2008, for instance, than voted for Mondale in 1984, which seems significant to me for a bunch of Minnesota voters.

They voted for Obama again in 2012 by a very slightly smaller percentage.

And then 2016 happened, and suddenly something changed, and almost the same percentage (54%) voted for Donald Trump as had voted for Obama in 2012. Trump did even better than that in 2020.

I give that as background to a story that appeared in the Star Tribune a few days ago, which told of Itasca County's new jail (gift link). The $75 million building includes Christian proselytizing quotes painted onto the walls, including a two-story tall version of the 10 commandments.


This illegal use of public funds and imposition of religion onto a literally captive audience is being challenged by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which is a good thing.

The article also mentioned that one of the quotes is misattributed in what seems to be a particularly bad way:

Aside from the overt religious tone, some have pointed out that a few quotes are inaccurately attributed. One credited to the first U.S. president, George Washington, was actually said by George Washington Carver, a Black scientist and inventor.

I wish I knew what that quote was, but the story doesn't say.

I wonder if the people who planned to put these religious quotes would have dared to do this before the political turn occurred in the county in 2016. I doubt it. The last eight years have emboldened them, and they're not wrong to feel that way. 

They have been given permission to do things like this, and if this ever gets to the Supreme Court, I expect it would be upheld.

Twitter April 2024

Like BlueSky, the discourse for April was dominated by protest and demonstration related to Israel's war in Palestine, but the tweets (in reverse order) give a slightly better sense of how that unfolded. There's less angst here about our march into fascism, which is interesting. Very little mention of DJT. A bit more recognition of Earth Day and the historic eclipse.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account and is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance.

__

What's cool about looking back at the history of college protests is that 19-year-old students have been right about every single American war, and the esteemed Harvard educated opinion writers at the New York  Times have been wrong about every single American war.
Existential Comics

Map of land value in the US, high resolution. One interesting thing this shows is why LA, Vegas, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City will need to densify in order to build new housing — they're nearly completely hemmed in by federal land.


@StatisticUrban

It should not be lost how eager these institutions are to equate speech with actual, physical violence, and using that as a justification to respond with actual, physical violence. Really dangerous precedent being set.
MikeL @mplarrick

Feel like this is 50% of tech/entrepreneur/startup culture in a nutshell: "what you call narcissistic I call FEARLESS! what you call theft I call DARING TO HACK THE FUTURE!"
Jay Smooth @jsmooth995

"Farmland is at risk of being used for solar PV". I would add some extenuating circumstances: Agriculture uses orders of magnitude more land than solar. Biofuel is even ~200x less space efficient than PV. So let's make sure we do 0% biofuel first before complaining about PV.
AukeHoekstra

Just 6 companies dump 25% of global plastic pollution:
1 Coca-Cola 11%
2 PepsiCo 5%
3 Nestle 3%
4 Danone 3%
5 Altria 2%
6 Philip Morris 2%
And just 56 companies dump more than 50% of global plastic, polluting at will with no consequences
Assaad Razzouk

Just thinking about how university presidents grilled by Congress were forced to resign over hypothetical scenarios about student safety while we watch students get beaten up at the behest of other school presidents and their jobs seem perfectly intact
Malaika Jabali

Livable neighborhoods start with mixed use buildings and streets narrow enough that they force drivers to slow down, allowing streets to become comfortable shared use paths. Beacon Hill, Boston:


Jonathan Berk @berkie1

I cannot stop thinking about the choice to point guns at students who spent their entire childhoods training to survive too frequent school shootings and who are out protesting because students half way across the world are being murdered. America hates its kids so fucking much
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein @IBJIYONGI

Riot police with guns are more dangerous than students with signs. The kids are never right about everything, but they are always whisper-yelling what will become the accepted truth of the future. You cannot defeat fascist authoritarianism by mimicking it.
The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas @AnandWrites

adults always say “the kids will save us” until the kids actually try to do that.
Annie Wu

For all the complaints and hand-wringing about a radical, left-wing cabal running universities and colleges, the response of administrators to student protests reveals the true nature of the neoliberal university. Irony.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Why do we have this comp plan ritual where—once every 10 years—we raise the zoning cap just enough to maintain our current housing crisis? How does that cap benefit society?
Qagggy!

Like the warning label on cigarettes?


Dr. William J. Ripple

So we've adopted strict zoning rules to separate factories burning things from homes and schools, only to create 100's of millions of tiny moving factories that burn things [cars]. Bang up job guys
Naveen Gattu

Youngest, currently into the “I Survived…” book series, comes to me, deeply confused by the title “I Survived the Attacks of September 11”. “How can a date attack you?” She asks. The previous book in series is called “I Survived the Grizzly Bear Attacks”. She’s a little behind on modern history, but I am so proud of her as an editor.
Maggie Koerth @maggiekb1

I feel like this is a major turning point for A LOT of public protests for months, even years to come …
-Against A.I./ corporate take over of industries and livable wages
-Climate catastrophe
-Election 2024
-Women’s health
-Corrupt SCOTUS
Jennifer G., MPP Masters in Public Policy @JGodi

Headline: "Protests turn violent"
Video: All the violence is being done by cops
@BostonJerry

Richmond, VA has speed cameras at 2 elementary schools. In the first month, they're cranking out 176 speeding tickets a day. Cameras are only active during the mornings and afternoons on school days, and they're only snagging people going 11+ over the speed limit.
Andy Boenau

A generation that is willing to protest is a generation who believes the world can be better and they can make it that way, and in our current hellscape, that is a wonderful thing.
Jessica Ellis @baddestmamajama

The core problem with the way most people talk about social media is that they think it is, in fact, social media,  instead of understanding that it is widely adopted defective and dangerous product design. Think cars without brakes instead of a newspaper juiced with tech. We don't allow interior designers to use lead paint even when it is really, really pretty, and we shouldn't allow social media designers to use Las Vegas techniques of targeting and inconsistent reward to addict children.
Zephyr Teachout

French architect Le Corbusier viewed the traditional city from above and thought of it as a chaotic “nightmare.” This was his vision for the ideal Paris. The plan was seriously considered. But ultimately, he wasn't allowed to tear down Paris:


Strong Towns

As leaders in the Texas GOP vow to stamp out antisemitism by jailing campus protesters, a reminder of this headline by Robert Downen: “Texas GOP executive committee rejects proposed ban on associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers”
Mike Hixenbaugh

So Texas allows students to carry guns on campus but not to carry out non-violent protest?
Philip Gourevitch

In 20 years (not so long to us olds) do you think anyone will gather their neighbors around the communal fire to tell the tale of how certain transportation advocates fought to keep freeways in our cities, so long as they had a bus and some bike lanes? Asking for a friend.
Mary Morse Marti

Wow. This is...profound. Google has become so enshittified that limiting your searches to results before 2023 results in much higher quality results. Cory Doctorow was right.
Joe Morse @desmoq

Serious Person In 2016: Free-speech means allowing open Nazis and avowed white supremacists on campus, and any attempt to stop them is illiberal.
Serious Person In 2024: For the love of god when is the National Guard going to open fire and reduce these protesters to a red haze?
Jared Yates Sexton

Reducing car traffic requires providing a MIXTURE of multiple, viable ways to get from point A to B. That means walking, cycling, multiple forms of  public transport, roads, and denser, infill development in walkable neighbourhoods.
Kevin Leyden

"Since their invention, cars and automobility have killed 60–80 million people and injured at least 2 billion." No comment
Dr Charlie Gardner

“If we buy the right-wing story, the superrich got their money from their great contribution to society. If we look at it with clearer eyes, the superrich got their money because we structured the economy in a way that allowed them to get super rich.” –Dean Baker
Keshav Bedi

A female Northern Cardinal crossing the nature trail:


Jocelyn Anderson Photography

The FTC's ban on non-compete clauses is a big victory for workers, and also a big victory for "rules should not have a bunch of weird exceptions so you can't explain them to people."
Matt Darling @besttrousers

Basel, a city with less than a third the population of Washington, DC, has 4 times as many trains per day, several trams that are served in front of the station, and an underground bike garage you can ride straight into.
christopher @its_Xopher

The liberal university is a place where students should be exposed to ideas that might make them uncomfortable and that they might even find dangerous, provided those ideas are of the 'black people are stupid' variety.
Osita Nwanevu

US share of the world's population: 4%
US share of the world's military spending: 37% (more than183 of the other 193 countries combined)(https://is.gd/BXlkAw)
US share of weapons sales: 42% (https://is.gd/n4aGAi)
US share of foreign military bases: 75-85% (https://is.gd/jwyBu4)
Alfie Kohn

It's interesting how happily armed government "law enforcement" agents carry out the request of university administrators to enforce trespassing laws compared to how they might carry out a request by workers to enforce wage theft laws.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

Even if you've never heard the term VSP [very serious person], you know who they are: "the politicians and business leaders who say that yes, global warming is real and yes, it must be addressed, but no, it is unrealistic to cut carbon emissions at the pace climate experts say is needed."
David Roberts @drvolts

“By 2040, 70% of US will live in 15 states with 30 senators. That means 30% of country, which is whiter, more rural, more conservative, will elect 70% of senators” [quoting himself/his recently published book on NPR's Fresh Air].
Ari Berman

If I see Arab, Jewish, and Black students compared to the KKK one. more. time on this app...! As the great-granddaughter of a man who was lynched, I'm offended beyond measure by these constant comparisons by those who have invented a bubble universe where Black privilege exists.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @Ebonyteach

Happy Earth Day!


Eugene V. Debs Museum

A corporation is an immortal, transhuman colony organism that uses us as inconvenient gut-flora: no matter how much you love it, it will *never* love you back. It *can't* experience love - only fear.
Cory Doctorow

My town has a gas station, a bar, and three smoke shops. We don’t have anywhere to buy a gallon of milk, yet school choice grifters want y’all to think someone will open up a private school in my area? Lol. They could just tell the truth — they have defunded our public school.
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

“The plastics industry releases about four times as many planet-warming chemicals as the airline industry.”
David Wallace-Wells

Dems: Climate change is a serious threat. Immigrants and trans kids are human beings. Stop cops from shooting unarmed Blacks.
GOP: Distribute assault weapons to all white Christians. Install Trump as Pharaoh. Let embryos vote.
Media: We're so polarized! Extremists on both sides!
Alfie Kohn

More evidence of spanking's harmful effects: A new longitudinal study of poorer countries confirms that corporal punishment leads to "lower levels of social-emotional competencies," including empathy, self-regulation, and healthy social interactions"
Alfie Kohn

AOC said it best: Biden doesn’t stand for all the values I do. But I would rather fight for those things in a landscape where democracy still works, than in  a landscape of racist, sexist authoritarianism.
Pam Keith, Esq.

"Motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all, and shrink them for only a few." –Ivan Illich (photo: Brasilia):


Taras Greece

The authoritarian turn in elite universities  — via administrative imperium, loss of faculty governance, and expansion of contingent labor has been long in the making, obscured by false, reactionary promotion/panic around DEI, which never touched these aforementioned tendencies.
Nikhil Pal Singh

What happened at Columbia and USC is precisely what the Congressional hearings and interest group pressure campaigns sought to achieve: free speech, especially that critical of Israel, has been chilled. This is the cancel culture of the right at work.
David Rothkopf

It is amazing how the protesters are always right 50 years ago and always wrong today
Will Bunch

Framing climate action as a cost is misleading. A cost is when extreme weather causes damage and you have to repair it. Spending money to avoid the damage in the first place, however, is an investment. Climate action is an investment in a safer future, and cheap at any price
Dr Charlie Gardner



John Pavlovitz

Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."
Cory Doctorow

If I were an Ivy League president I would simply not sic riot police on scores of nonviolent student protesters in a bid to impress Elise Stefanik. Elise Stefanik will never be impressed. Have some dignity.
David Klion

Americans have learned to aggressively wave the flag, complain about taxes, and hate unions. Taxes and unions are what make Denmark socially and economically strong. When people feel safe, they start voting with their heads and not the fear in their hearts.
Ole Rasmussen

On this day in 1846, New Jersey enacted legislation that, rather than abolishing enslavement, bound Black people to indefinite servitude as “apprentices for life” at the will of white enslavers.
Equal Justice Initiative @eji_org

On this day in 1945, three Black baseball players including Jackie Robinson were attacked during tryouts for the Boston Red Sox. The team refused to sign them and remained segregated until 1959.


Equal Justice Initiative @eji_org

What people don’t get is that being an “exception” to an abortion ban—because you got terrible news about your fetus, or you were raped, or you got cancer, etc—doesn’t mean you get an abortion. It means you’ve been invited to beg.
RHAvote

Did any of you know that Judge Jeanine Pirro’s husband, Al Pirro, a businessman & lawyer was federally convicted in 2000 of conspiracy and tax evasion in connection w/ illegally deducting $1.2 million of personal expenses as write-offs for his business in NY and Trump pardoned him?
Feminist Wild

You know who benefits from school vouchers? Donors and folks who can already afford to send their kid to a private school. You know who doesn’t benefit? Rural kids. Poor kids. Gay kids. Kids with disabilities. School vouchers are a scam.
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

Reminder: Weeks before the 5-4 Citizens United ruling, Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow helped Clarence Thomas' wife launch an advocacy group. Crow donated $500K. Then Thomas delivered the ruling they wanted, letting them spend millions in dark $ ever since.
Robert Reich

I mapped all the surface parking lots in Downtown Spokane Wa:


CoolDiamondsFTW @ftw_cool

Wonder why there’s a housing shortage in America?
Jonathan Hopkins @JHopLovesTrains

All the short-term noise and culture-war stuff around energy is obscuring the fact that humanity is transitioning into a new era of clean energy abundance. It's amazing and thrilling! We just need to get there before we fuck the planet up too badly.
David Roberts @drvolts

I was walking back from the park with my dog and 4 year old and a driver was creeping towards the crosswalk, I muttered under my breath, "We're still in the crosswalk," annoyed, because he was getting too close for comfort. He rolled down his window and said, "what did you say?" So I repeated, "We're still in the crosswalk, you could slow down" and he yelled "walk faster, fucking bitch" in front of my little kid. Happy Sunday. Yield to pedestrians, even if you're in a hurry
@BeckMac4

So much of 1970s “environmentalism” has nothing to do with *the* environment and is deployed, very specifically, to preserve MY environment. MY views. MY parking. MY property values. MY waves. It’s misanthropy, malthusianism and metathesiophobia in an environmental trench coat.
Bella Chu

There are no environmentalists in cars
Phil Walkability

United States of Attica by Faith Ringgold (1972), a map detailing many Indigenous, slave, and immigrant uprisings in each state since the 1700s and dedicated to the men who died during the 1971 Attica prison riots in upstate NY:


AMERIKA IN BLACK

Every newspaper has a business section and none have a labor section despite the fact that most readers will not be corporate CEOs but almost all readers are workers.
Hamilton Nolan

There is no middle ground on the basic right to abortion care. Either you believe women should control their own bodies, or you believe the government should control women's bodies. That's it. Anti-choice hypocrites want us to believe it's murky, but it's not. It's that simple.
Charlotte Clymer

School vouchers, as an idea, are older than I am, and I retired 4 years ago. Just saying.
Dr. Catherine Lugg

Speed is everything. Slower paces of action — gentler slopes of emissions cuts — may be less disruptive to the industries involved, but they set in motion vastly greater discontinuities for human civilization. Of course, it's later than we think: we have not yet even really turned the curve yet, and discontinuity is already unfolding all around us.


Alex Steffen

Tuned into live feed of the Minnesota Legislature just in time to see Minnesota State Senator Nathan Wesenberg, Duck Dynasty Party, ask if eagles are eating baby loons. Good to see we are focusing on the important questions.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob

We can't eliminate fossil fuels overnight ... therefore ... we must expand fossil fuel extraction and continue using fossil fuels indefinitely. You rarely see this (il)logic stated baldly, but it underlies a great deal of public discourse.
David Roberts @drvolts

Bunch of dudes threatened by even the idea of women in religious leadership now threatened by women existing
Desiree @Desarrayed

It cracks me up that white people question Black history and Black culture when conservatives are systematically refusing to teach white kids Black history and Black culture in public schools. It's no wonder you've never heard of the Black national anthem, you numpties
Imani Gandy @AngryBlackLady

Hey I don't want to distract you from the trans kids or cancel culture or whatever, but ... "the levels of the three most important heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached new record highs again last year, US scientists have confirmed."
David Roberts @drvolts

just remember kids, a heavily polluting industry or cement plant on a WA shoreline is fine, but a mixed income, car-light development like this — is not.


Mike Eliason @holz_bau

As an ex-evangelical, I feel so much sadness thinking about how many joys are stolen from those people. Awe-inspiring phenomena like eclipses become evil harbingers, solutions for a better world are painted as signs of devilish plots. Just a prison of abusive lies.
Jared Yates Sexton

Thames Water company serves London and 1/4 of all England. Once a public utility until former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher government sold it to private capitalists in 1989. They paid themselves huge dividends, borrowed many $ billions,  and cannot now repay its debts…
Richard D. Wolff @profwolff

“No, [migrants are] not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.” —Donald Trump
Pod Save America

Trump's parents were the children of immigrants.
Trump married two different immigrants.
This isn't about "immigrants."
It's about brown people.
Mikel Jollett

the first US mayor who decides to prioritize safe streets, affordable housing, nature-inclusive cities, car-free streets, and ecodistricts will never have to find another job.
Mike Eliason @holz_bau

Bike lanes look empty because they are highly efficient in terms of vehicular throughput. Lanes with cars and trucks look like they are doing the heavy lifting in terms of transportation capacity because these vehicles take up remarkable amounts of road space and because they spend so much time sitting, in cities.
Jennifer Keesmaat

I don’t think people appreciate how ideologically driven Departments of Transportation are. They’ve set the car as the base unit of transportation and the lives of people outside of cars at zero. To get a signalized crossing, 5 pedestrians have to be hit, badly hurt or die at that location within a year.
Bella Chu

This is fine for a country like Finland, but how would it work here, in a country where we don't want to do that


@InternetHippo

New Seattle police contract just posted. This contract is retroactive through 2023 and includes a 23 percent pay increase without notably increasing accountability.
PubliColaNews

Can you imagine librarians or teachers ever getting a retroactive 23% pay increase? All the money showering every cop department comes from somewhere, and it's usually school + public services programs that get dismantled to pay for these extravagant raises.
@ahouse4all

4 in 5 K12 parents are satisfied w public schools, maintaining the same level of satisfaction as 20 years ago. This is true for both Democrats & Republicans. (In fact, Democratic K12 parents now more satisfied). The satisfaction dip is coming from Republicans *without K12 kids*
Jen Jennings, PhD @eduwonkette_jen

Such a key point: stirring up dissatisfaction with public schools is a political strategy. But as polls show it hasn't worked. And now GOP is saddled with extreme candidates who are repelling moderate voters and parents whose kids actually attend public schools.
Jennifer Berkshire @BisforBerkshire

This was penned in 2014, yet it still holds true to this day:


@NourNaim88
 
In Paris, the number of people biking *doubled* in a single year (Oct 2022–Oct 2023). It's not magic -- it's what happens when a city makes biking easy and safe.
David Zipper

People greatly misunderstand the original intent of the United States Post Office. It was established in 1792, even before the US Navy. But its mandate wasn't to subsidize letter delivery. Rather, it upcharged letter delivery to subsidize the mass delivery of newspapers.
Andrew Damitio

Increasing transit frequency is really the key to increasing ridership.
@SerafinaScheel

If Dems want to stop Christian Fundamentalist judges from issuing nationwide bans against whatever pill scares them this week, the answer is legislation. Legislation or GTFO. “Norms” have no more use here.
Elie Mystal

The odds of your child getting kidnapped are about 1 in a million. The odds of a person born in 2021 dying in a traffic crash are about 1 in a hundred. American parents act like these stats are reversed. Paranoid about the rare kidnapping when the common drive is deadly.
Andy Boenau

It will always be very depressing to think about how less than 20 years ago the entire US auto industry was on the verge of collapse and they were bailed out and then went insane with giant vehicles that cost over 50k, get like 15mpg, kill people, and destroy our aging roads.
@StPaulNate

The pedestrian plaza surrounded by shops and cafes: a basic, atomic unit of pretty much every European city; available virtually *nowhere* in the US:


David Roberts @drvolts

What is wrong with people" $3,000 a month in car payments. These people pay a mortgage for 2 cars. I just don’t understand.
Jimbo P. Esquire @JimboPastoral

If I had my way, every article in the popular press about research findings and recommended practices related to schooling would have to be accompanied by this caveat: "Phrases such as 'higher achievement,' 'positive outcomes,' and 'better results' refer only to standardized test scores. These are poor indicators of intellectual proficiency and primarily measure socioeconomic status or the extent of students' training in test-taking skills."
Alfie Kohn

BlueSky April 2024

It seems like April 2024 was a month of galloping into fascism, with Trump's New York trial as an important sideshow. The last 10 days or so have been consumed with escalating police violence against student demonstrators across the country, essentially declaring that they have no speech rights that I would have recognized five or 10 years ago. Meanwhile, people in Gaza continue to be killed outright or starved by Israel. And there was an eclipse.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account and is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance.

____

This is a litmus test for liberalism and so many are failing with flying colors. A nonviolent protest against a brutal war violently suppressed with the help of some of the most prominent media and political figures in the country. History will not judge them harshly enough so let's start now.
Gillian Branstetter

Every single person promoting making more babies or having big families in this post-Dobbs reality is promoting great replacement theory. I don’t care who they are. There is no other reason to act like we are “short” on children or families.
Tressie @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

I've been saying for a while that the Republican project aims to undo the world the ACLU made--as they're trying to find a way to censor protesters, they're in court arguing to ban drag shows. The 20th-century reach of the First Amendment is as dangerous to their core mission as that of the 14th.
Gillian Branstetter

The AARP did the research, and the answer is clear: we need to legalize more forms of housing.
Graphic showing 80 percent of American households are not traditional nuclear families, yet 72 percent of homes cater to traditional nuclear families:


Neighbors for More Neighbors

The Tesla irony has always been that the company's owner is obsessed with a futuristic possibility of self-driving cars that is always 5 years away while a more mundane but far more impressive feat, widespread fast and easy EV charging network, was the company's true magical & breakthrough innovation.
Aaron W. Gordon

Our nation’s pundits will have you know that when young people arrive at the same opinion it is due to peer pressure and maybe TikTok, and the fact the pundits themselves all agree on this point is because each examined the question on the merits and just happened to arrive at identical conclusions.
Tim Carvell

Noncompliance is not violence. No amount of force is proportionate
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that part of what’s happening with these protests may be the release of a pent-up craving to exist in the physical world, to experience connection and autonomy and community and purpose in an unregulated, unmediated way.
Angus Johnston

The history of transgender medicine is the field was dominated by eugenicists and abusive quacks for much of the last century and the moment trans people had succeeded in throwing most of them out liberal media and conservative politicians said "now wait just a goddamn minute"
Gillian Branstetter

The brickwork on this window is arresting:


Janne K. Flisrand @jannefrommpls.bsky.social

Books. They are AWESOME. You purchase one, and you OWN IT. It's like, THERE right on your shelf. It doesn't require regular online patches. You don't need to be online to read it. Books fucking RULE.
David Bowman @dlbowman76.com

The biggest DARVO in trans issues by far is pretending that trans healthcare has been captured by "gender ideologues," when what's really been happening is the slow grueling process of removing the influence of weird abusers who shouldn't be practicing medicine on anyone
@tpwrtrmnky.bsky.social

The uncomfortable but important thing about the horrid and hateful words that have been exchanged at these protests is none, best I can tell, meet the high standard of actionable incitement, let alone justify the massive police presence
Gillian Branstetter

These are exactly the regional changes scientists projected to occur with global warming
Eric Roston

The worst aspects of capitalism were held back not by compunction but by friction, which tech has now smoothed out like an evil-smelling lube
Nick Douglas @toomuchnick.com

Could not say this better. Libertarianism wants to own all the natural resources at no cost and make people be friends despite their bad personalities.
Tressie @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

1977: let's replace all the dead elms with ash trees. They're disease resistant!
2017:


Steve Quick

Why should the Tesla and Twitter Boards appoint me to run both companies, besides adhering to their existing basic governance duties? I will:
- have no n*zis on the website
- make a cheap EV that looks like a 90s Honda Civic Hatchback
- put trains in the tunnels
- never twete
Anyway he’s bad
Costa Samaras

At the ⁦APTA conference, Portland's transit authority TriMet is showing that you can do beautiful, artistic wraps without covering the windows. People don't like to enter a room that they can't see into. It's why we have a glass walled conference rooms:


Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social

Universities are claiming they can manage tens of thousands of people (many drunk) moving across campus for sports and commencement, but they need a violent police response to 150 students peacefully camping on the quad.
Nathan Kalmoe

Police power in the U.S. EXCEEDS civilian control. And people who know better continue to pretend that this isn't true. IT IS.
Prisonculture

this week especially feels like the infrastructure of fascism flexing and that infrastructure is police and courts
Melissa Gira Grant

Sorry but a core organizing principle for inviting new people into movements is to meet them where they are, not make fun of them for suddenly realizing the world is unjust.
Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social

Bookbinders have been using scrap paper in their bindings since the dawn of the book. 16th C printed works often have precious strips of old Medieval illustrated manuscripts buried in them. This formerly repaired 19th C Bible has a Winn-Dixie grocery bag:


Stori3d Past

The older I get the more I believe that we need to make autos of all sorts inconvenient. Less parking (especially free), higher penalties, more taxes, more stringent training, etc. As part that though we need to build places where car aren't required to live. That's the carrot to the stick.
Fancy Pants @farnaby.bsky.social

The student journalists covering the protests on their respective campuses have been consistently so much better than major national news publications. Wild to think how few jobs are available for those student journalists once they graduate.
Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social

it’s weird to say in 2024, but i think a lot of people still haven’t really processed how violent American police really are. watching them do crowd control just once will shake any residual trust in them out of you
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

even though I was raised to not trust the cops and thought I'd been sufficiently radicalized by Ferguson and its aftermath, getting teargassed while they kept their backs to Patriot Prayer took it to a level I didn't know I had
acfoltzer

The main contention today from the conservative justices is that we should worry more about the harm/threat of politically-motivated prosecutions of ex-presidents than of presidents criminally abusing their power. It’s just an insanely naive, ahistorical understanding of how political power works.
Radley Balko

Isn't "it's legal if the president does it" their entire theory of how the US political system works?
Jonathan Gitlin @drgitlin.bsky.social

this to me is peak performance for urban design. setbacks, my ass (i’ll never zone for setbacks):


b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

It’s legal if a Republican president does it. And/or it’s illegal for anyone else to be president.
@xaiax.net

Roberts is concerned that the only protection against bad faith prosecutions of presidents is the good faith of prosecutors. He laments how easily grand juries indict. It’s touching how concerned the justices are about this stuff — but only when the target is the most powerful person in the world.
Radley Balko

The whole backlash against CRT, DEI, student protest, everything is a backlash to 2020. Black folks keep pointing this out and I keep asking everyone else to please see and say this
Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social

i have not seen any mention of it but it sure seems like the authorities cracking down on student protesters are basically attempting to do what they wish they would have done in response to the george floyd protests
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

Having meta debates about US college campus climates instead of grappling with the fact that there are no functional universities left in Gaza because of US money and weapons is so embarrassing when you think about it. Bunch of unserious people in the media class and US society in general.
@knilirabaj.bsky.social

“A nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth is a nation on the edge of chaos.” –The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest,” 1970.
Angus Johnston

anyway the most fatal of the constitution’s many fatal flaws is its reification of a strong form of federalism and the attendant idea that the “state” is a coherent political unit with some set of “rights” worth defending
b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

I would bet good money that across every platform, including lefty/progressive ones, articles about the campus protests are way outperforming traffic for articles about the war in Gaza itself.
Chris Hayes

Every time someone mentions Soros, I think about how the USA right-wing has 50 billionaires whose names we don't even know.
jędrek

If you think Elise Stefanik — or any other major figure in today’s Republican Party - is leading an honest fight against antisemitism, if you actually think that’s the Right’s political project, I must assume you are either incredibly uninformed and naive or simply full of shit.
Thomas Zimmer

all those weird mccarthyist hearings with the university presidents and now the clambering to send the national guard to columbia....... why are we larping the 1950s
sarah jeong

the world is on fire and if I didn't make dumb jokes about it I'd be catatonic
Tom Tomorrow

For the record I am for free speech, against crackdowns on free speech, against the war, against the occupation, and also against antisemitism and glorifying Hamas—it is possible
Sarah Posner

"Using a middle-of-the-road scenario for economic growth, this translates to an economic hit of $38 trillion."
Bill Lindeke

Something I said elseweb, when someone defended using LLM-generated nonsense for inspiration: "Humans are *very good* at getting inspiration from random bits of nonsense. We don't have to use the annual electric consumption of a small nation to produce janky entrails to read meaning into."
Achronal Art

Each missile could fund two Fulbright grants, which kick off lifetimes of international exchange and goodwill (and employment and study) which state department people agree give more peacemaking bang per buck than anything else the US does. Make scholarships not wars!


Ada Palmer

According to USDOT, the annual cost of car ownership rose 44% from 2017 to 2023 (inflation-adjusted). Hard to see how this is sustainable, either for carmakers or for Americans.
David Zipper

It’s wild to watch the Times wrap itself in the First Amendment when it comes to doxxing jurors. They protect the identities of sources all the time to shield them from mild professional consequences!
Ned Resnikoff

A "Small government" is one that tells you how to live your day to day life but doesn't tell factory owners to stop polluting water supplies and maiming their employees
TrexPushups

Small government is one that just goes after the little people
Dumbstash @dnlmsstch.bsky.social

The frequently asserted conservative belief that liberals grow up in bubbles and aren't exposed to conservative ideas and so need to be forced to be exposed to conservative ideas is so far removed from reality it's insulting.
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

One thing we should import from the brits: the term "sex pest."
Helen Kennedy

Man. A lot of these universities that hid behind DEI efforts as a means of avoiding backlash, scrutiny, and lawsuits, sure are scrapping them before the GOP even pressures them the tiniest bit. It’s almost like they were never sincere in the first place.
Jared Yates Sexton

Traditional gender roles are simply natural, that’s why we must dedicate all of our energy to enforcing them with an iron fist
Hexagonal

Focus on the Family is what happens when you give a hate crime offices and a mailing address.
@thatsodd.bsky.social

Now when I see a story about an industry being wrecked or something people loved/liked/needed getting destroyed or majorly degraded, I do a search for the phrase "private equity" and bingo, 80% of the time, there it is. Private equity. It's looting businesses into failure, the end.
Mo Ryan

Chris Rufo is Just Some Guy and the only reason to put his opinions in the newspaper is if you agree with him
@swolecialism.bsky.social

US citizens have paid nearly a billion dollars since 2018 simply to replenish the sand lost to storms and "erosion" (aka sea level rise) in Florida — quite aside from the billions in Federal disaster relief they've also given the state:


Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

teach the kids humanities so they know who sisyphus is
Madison Condon

Whew that was a long winter, thank god it was the last one
Ben Collins

One thing AI has in common with crypto is that boosters are well aware the primary use cases are both illegal and immoral; they don't care but can't say so in public.
Django Wexler

Ostriches are so weird. They're like centaurs, except the human part is a snake, and the horse part is a giant turbo-chicken.
Chris McLaren

one thing you'll notice about this poll is that trump is basically at the same ceiling of support that he's had since 2016 while biden still has room to expand. seems to me that the country has a decidedly anti-maga majority of 51 to 52 percent and the question is whether the anti-trump candidate can consolidate them:


b-boy bouiebaisse @jbouie.bsky.social

When "tech" meant faster computers and smaller phones, it was exciting, you wanted to know what they were going to come up with next. Now it's a bunch of assholes trying to figure out new ways to charge you a subscription to look at the shittiest ads you can imagine
Ian Boudreau

remember like 15 years ago when companies started selling "hoverboards" that were actually just regular electric scooters that caught on fire all the time? and every company started pushing "hoverboards" and they all sucked until they exploded and people stopped buying them? well a.i. is different.
@makeitunclear.bsky.social

This to me is the core of the bad faith. If they're really so worried about kids getting surgeries before they know whether they're "really" trans, they should be *encouraging* social transition! Test out a new haircut, pronouns and clothes for a few weeks and see how it feels.
Michael Hobbes

This exactly! Trans people don’t want more trans people. Trans people just want the trans kids to be safe and comfortable, the cis kids to be safe and comfortable, and everyone to be allowed to explore themselves. But to transphobes, the only acceptable put some is fewer trans people.
Crystal Frasier @amazonchique.bsky.social

"We have got to stop calling LLMs AI," a friend said this weekend. A proposal is below:


Naomi Kritzer

Despite the outcry, Duke University still plans to close its huge herbarium, because it doesn't want to spend $25 million to repair the collection's building. Duke's endowment was $11.6 billion as of 2022; it is also the primary beneficiary (32%) of the independent $3.69 billion Duke Endowment.
Charles C. Mann

It is funny to me (darkly funny, but funny) that we sit on a speeding, living spaceship, kept in balance by Earth Intelligence, and folks are out there getting rich off of ideas like AI and space ships to Mars.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

i think it's basic journalistic integrity that if the billionaire fascist you're interviewing wishes you not to use a certain word to describe their business, that you do the exact fucking opposite.
@merthyr1831.bsky.social

One of the tiny annoying things about my life is that I have to be charming and gracious to people deliberately being an asshole to me. It’s rarely worth it to give them the satisfaction of goading me, so i  don’t. But jeez it’s annoying. Why even be good at cursing if I can never do it?!!
Tressie @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

Society challenge: act like you live on a planet floating in the vastness of space every day not just eclipse day.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social


Duncan da Husky

The conservative habit to describe every mild inconvenience in terms of mass murder is genuinely very offensive, also.
Joshua Foust

Congrat's to Alden Global Capital [private equity] for putting an end to 460+ combined years of Minnesota newspapering after only two years of ownership
Chris Steller

Just Build Trains, Insulate Houses, And Live Closer To Each Other would not solve *all* of our climate problems, but it would make solving all the other ones much easier. Repeating as much gets very tiring sometimes.
Jordan Carlson

My favorite thing about earthquakes is how fake tectonic plate theory sounded up until like the 1950s. We split atoms before we understood why the Earth would suddenly start throwing shit at us
Gillian Branstetter

I guess I’m slow, but I just realized we invaded Iraq (on top of the other stuff), because they weren’t sure they could get to something they could call “victory” in Afghanistan
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

It’s funny how 10 years of marketing and habit have inured me to how ridiculous US apps’ names are but I can watch a British TV show casually refer to a food delivery as “a Deliveroo” and think, “That’s ridiculous, it sounds like something a child would say, call it something normal like GrubHub.”
Tim Carvell

Really interesting to see how the economy has changed in 30 years. One thing that's very clear: instead of manufacturing things we inflate healthcare costs. This chart is from Visual Capitalist (and I did not see any notes about it being inflation adjusted):


Kevin Gallatin

One of the core principles in stopping the spread of fascism is not to obey in advance but I think we need to talk more about not obeying ever even under threat
Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social

I want to cure death just to bring back Barbara Ehrenreich because I'm pretty sure she'd unhinge her jaw and swallow Jonathan Haidt whole
Gillian Branstetter

every major AI innovation always turning out to just be "some guy secretly doing it", undefeated
Joseph Fink @planetoffinks.bsky.social

It's remarkable how swiftly "anti-white racism" went from a David Duke talking point to a mainstream position within the GOP
Gillian Branstetter

This is where the counter-majoritarian elements of the US political system are a real boon to an American fascism. What's held the US fascist tradition in check since WWII has been a) the gatekeeping function of the mainstream media and b) the gatekeeping function of our political parties. The GOP has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trumpism, and the technological changes of the past 2 decades have almost entirely eliminated the historical gatekeeping function of the press. So we are living in an era we might call "Springtime for Hitler-wannabes."
Seth Cotlar

Fascism is already here; it's just unevenly distributed.
Gillian Branstetter

The Real Winner

Here's what The Other Ones by Lee has to say about the current situation on college campuses and beyond:

__

Past posts about The Other Ones by Lee are here and here.

Another Dark Horse

Have you heard of aphantasia? If not by that name, you may have heard discussion of whether or not people can visualize things (or people) that are not present. When you can't do it, that's called aphantasia.

It's not either/or, though: it's more of a continuum. 

I know what that means, since I can sort of visualize things that are not in my presence. They're kind of vague and lack detail, but they're not like a cartoon — they're more like a rounded-off 3D object. It's kind of hard to describe.

But they're definitely not just getting darker and darker. 

This person on BlueSky, who says he has aphantasia, gave this as an illustration of the condition:

I'm not sure if he was being literal, that this is how he thinks aphantasia works, or if he's using the image metaphorically. It's hard to tell. But he did ask people to respond:

Where do you fall on this spectrum? Picture a horse, then say what number reflects your experience.

If it's this is what he thinks aphantasia is, it's kind of funny, but I guess it's sad, too.

1972 — What If?

When Shirley Chisholm ran for president, I was 12 years old. I was vaguely aware that she ran, though I knew nothing about her except her race and gender. I may have known she was from New York City, but I'm not sure. If I knew the word quixotic at the time (doubtful), I would have used it to describe her run.

I bring this up because I just watched the Netflix movie Shirley last night. It taught me a number of facts I never knew, but I excuse myself because I was pretty young.

Because of it, I've been trying to remember what I do recall about the run-up to the 1972 presidential election. It's a poor outline. Nixon was the incumbent, of course, so there's nothing interesting to report there; the action was on the Democratic side. I remember Edmund Muskie of Maine was the front-runner, but then something happened and he was confronted by the press while standing on the steps somewhere, and he cried. That knocked him out of the race.

George McGovern of South Dakota ended up with the nomination, and made Thomas Eagleton of Missouri his running mate. Eagleton was shamed out of running because it was revealed he had been treated for depression. He was replaced on the ticket by Sargent Shriver, who had started the Peace Corps, and was married to Eunice Kennedy.

That's about all I remember about the election in real time.

From the movie Shirley I learned that Hubert Humphrey was also in the race through the Democratic Convention, and Muskie was still in the race through the convention. (I thought he had dropped out.) Chisholm's campaign challenged the big three TV networks' debate rules under the Fairness Doctrine and won the right to be included on national television. That was news to me!

The movie reminded me of Black politicians I used to be more familiar with from my time living in Washington, D.C., like Ron Dellums and Walter Fauntroy, and gave a glimpse of the origin story of current California Rep. Barbara Lee.

At the time, I never knew where George McGovern's candidacy came from, and it sounds as though he was a classic dark horse, similar to Jimmy Carter four years later, though less successful. It also appears that he had a hard time getting anyone to run as vice president. His selection of Thomas Eagleton seems a bit odd to me: two Midwesterners, neither from particularly large population centers. One liberal and one more conservative, I guess, but other than that, not much balance.

The withdrawal of Eagleton's vice presidential candidacy was just as damaging to the campaign as I remembered. I had forgotten that Eagleton had been hospitalized several times, less than 10 years earlier, and had undergone electroconvulsive treatment. I'd also forgotten that what is considered most damaging was McGovern's lack of vetting of Eagleton and then waffling on whether to dump him.

Sargent Shriver, Eagleton's replacement on the ticket, was — like Eagleton — an anti-abortion Catholic. But he was from the East Coast, at least (better balance), and had the Kennedy connection. I don't know if he had broad name recognition, though. It seems unlikely.

Thinking about 1972 made me look up details of what happened to Muskie (that story was not in Shirley).

He didn't cry, that day in New Hampshire: it was snowing, and the supposed tears were melting snow. The subject of the angry interaction was dirty tricks instigated by Nixon operative Donald Segretti*, including a bogus letter "written" by Muskie that used an epithet for French Canadians and rumors spread about Muskie's wife's drinking habits and use of racist language. He was angry at the local newspaper in Manchester for publishing invective against him, essentially. 

I found a video of much of the speech Muskie made, and it's pretty clear he never cried, and there was definitely a lot of snow.

Making it even more clear is this video from 2016, in which former United Press International reporter John Milne, who was standing just below Muskie's left toe that day, says Muskie never cried.

Milne says that reporters who were farther away reported they saw tears, while ones who were closer knew it was only snow. He says the key voice in reporting Muskie crying was the influential reporter David Broder from the Washington Post, and that Broder was one of the ones who was farther away. The Associated Press reporter was standing by Milne and also didn't see any tears, and reported the story the way UPI did. AP later changed its story to fit Broder's version without asking its own reporter. UPI, however, stuck with the story as their reporter saw it.

The interviewer on the 2016 video asks Milne, "Was this the first time there was a turning point in how primaries are covered? The obsession with gaffes?" Milne responds,

This is the first time in my memory that an event like this was allowed to undercut a lifetime of honorable public service.

1972... a year of "what if."

__

* One of Segretti's claims to fame is being part of the group responsible for coining the term ratfucking. He, along with several other names that will sound familiar from the Nixon/Watergate days, were all associated with student government at the University of Southern California, and formed a group they called Trojans for Representative Government that "engaged in creative tricks and underhanded tactics to win student elections." 

Essentially, we all suffer because a bunch of rich college brats from Southern California thought it was fun to prank their campus elections, and then real politicians started paying them to do it.

Say Anarcha

I spent a few weeks recently reading Say Anarcha, a nonfiction book that tells the story of the woman who has usually been obscured in the history of gynecology. Anarcha was Black and enslaved, and in an early pregnancy developed obstetric fistulas, which are holes between the uterus and bladder or the uterus and rectum. Anarcha had both types.

An obstetric fistula leaves the injured woman with urine or feces (or both) leaking out of her vagina, which is just as bad as it sounds — medically, personally, and culturally. At a minimum they are social outcasts because they smell, but often they are literally thought to be cursed.

It's still a bit mysterious to me why the fistulas happen, but mostly they appear to be more common when young girls give birth or when a baby is too large or breach. These days, when medical care is available, a C-section would be performed to prevent the possibility. Basically, the holes develop when the birthing woman labors too long, tissue dies, and part of the uterus disintegrates.

This is my layperson's way of explaining it, though as a person who has given birth, I don't remember ever hearing about this as a possible complication, or a reason why C-section might be performed. It's not common in the U.S. anymore, but it's likely that in the 19th century the U.S. rate was similar to or worse than what it is currently in the rural parts of Africa and Asia that have the highest rates (as high as 2% of women aged 15–49 in Uganda, for instance, according to one study).

J. Marion Sims, the doctor who experimented on Anarcha and other enslaved women — and later women who were not enslaved — is credited as one of the founders of modern gynecology. Sims is the other major subject of Say Anarcha, and author Hallman makes it clear that Sims hated the idea of medical ethics and thought they would be the downfall of medicine.

In addition to experimenting on enslaved people, Sims also made forays into female genital mutilation as a way of curing depression and "inappropriate" attitudes of women, and his unwavering belief that infertility could only be the fault of woman led him to hack away at cervices and other female parts to make it easier for sperm to reach their target.

The man owned a device called a uterine guillotine, for god's sake (yes, that was its name):

Fear of surgery was an ongoing problem. Some [white] women stormed off with mutterings of butchery when explained the procedures for cervical incision and amputation.... Thankfully, husbands knew their wives' best interest: they provided the consent that the dastardly new ethical constrictions placed on him (page 271).

I wasn't sure I would write here about Say Anarcha, though I wanted to, because it was a bit overwhelming.

But then I saw this on Twitter:

I have never been so radically pro-body autonomy than lying here, 40 weeks pregnant, feeling like I'm going to actually die any minute. No one should be forced to be pregnant. It should always be a choice. Adoption is not an alternative to experiencing pregnancy.

I keep thinking of the 12yo kids they want to force to experience this and want to set something on fire. I keep thinking about those pregnant and in medical crisis waiting until they are nearly dying before they can get care. I'm angry. Deep in my bones angry.

The woman who wrote that is a medical sociologist and health disparities scholar at UCLA.

When she mentioned 12-year-olds giving birth, it made me think of Anarcha and the present-day women who live with fistula injuries, described in the closing part of Say Anarcha. Many of them acquired their fistula injuries as child brides.  

As if there needed to be one more reason, obstetric fistula is a mostly unknown physical aspect of why children should not be giving birth, and why there shouldn't be child brides.