No Rights for Some, Rights for Others — for Now

More to hate from the Supreme Court today.

Trans people don't have equal protection under the law. And even though the majority upheld the obvious meaning of the 14th Amendment in the birthright citizenship case (Trump v. Barbara), it was essentially a 5–4 decision, because Kavanaugh's statement shows his decision was not based on that.

Here's a head start on the last half of May BlueSky report. Note that these are in chronological order, the usual reverse-chronological.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed post.

____ 

These are the posts I noted so far about the anti-trans ruling:

The Supreme Court today addressed one of the most pressing threats to the nation today: banning this high school sophomore from playing school sports with her friends:


Parker Molloy

One thing (among many) that makes me nuts about this – is that they fail to understand sports as a life-affirming thing you do with your friends that you will never be a professional at, and only see sports as a competition in which everyone gets ranked. It's a sick worldview in multiple ways."If a trans woman plays sports she will injure the dainty women". Dude, I played Pop Warner with a guy who got held back twice and was 6ft tall with a mustache. It never went to the Supreme Court. The scariest OL in our league was a girl. These are kids amateur sports.
wesinjapan

*nodding solemnly with full comprehension* yes, I see. there’s a special kind of kid who can’t play sports or go to the bathroom
Tricia Lockwood

The ban is heinous for what it does to transgender athletes. But if you think cisgender girls and young women won’t be caught up in the fallout, too, you are woefully ignorant:


Nancy Armour 

Minnesota Republicans suggested *internal* and external genital inspections for 6-year-olds, so states controlled by Republicans will probably pursue that.
Erin Maye Quade

It’s really important to install an entire federal discrimination system so somebody’s cis daughter can finish 14th at her swim meet.
Kashana

And these are the ones about the birthright citizenship case, particularly its narrow margin:

5-4 for what it explicitly says in the constitution is incredible. They were this close to undoing the civil war entirely.
Adam Serwer

Among other things, a 5-4 ruling on birthright citizenship is an invitation to try again.
Moira Donegan

Very funny listening to NPR doing serious analysis of the dissents to the birthright case as if it's not all just Calvinball where the conservative justices compete to find the most obscure references from 17th century English common law to make their arguments
Gravel Influencer

The birthright citizenship ruling should be a wake up call to any Democrat who is still on the fence about court reform. We are essentially one seat change away from the Court undoing Reconstruction by fiat.
Ned Resnikoff

With this ruling, the birthright issue is not going away. The right hasn't really begun *organizing* around getting rid of the citizenship clause. Like Roe, this will be their fight for a generation. And if the Democrats just say "we won" and ignore it, like Roe, the Republicans will eventually win.
ElieNYC

About Trump v. Barbara: Do not give the Court ... credit for reading and upholding the Constitution. It's a travesty that this is not a unanimous decision... it's also a travesty that the Court let this question percolate for a year, giving credence to a crank theory of citizenship.
Melissa Murray @profmmurray.bsky.social

alito quite literally sounds like the unreconstructed opponents of the 14th amendment, right down to the notion that his citizenship is degraded by the fact that it is equal with that of someone from a lower station than him.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

The Court can't go on like this. The Constitution as plainly as possible says people who were born here have an unequivocal right to citizenship. Four people whose ONLY job is to read the Constitution for the rest of their lives just tried to overturn it because they're tired of brown people. Pack it in.
Ben Collins

Alito's use of the term "birth tourism" is as sure a sign as any that his brain has been fried by X, Fox News, and other rightwing media.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

Can't wait for the 'founders surely foresaw AR-15s (but not citizenship)' ruling that's sure to follow.
Nolan Hicks @ndhapple.bsky.social

people got mad at me yesterday when i said the democrats were not ready to take court reform seriously. 5-4 for non-racial citizenship is not a win, it's a reprieve
Adam Serwer

In a sane world (an alt reality) today's dissents would sufficient to warrant Thomas, Gorsuch and Alito's impeachment and removal from office. If you defy the plain words, meaning, intent, history, precedent of a black letter constitutional injunction u are abusing your power and should be removed.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

I think a lot of people underestimate how complicated life could get if your birth certificate wasn't accepted as prima facie evidence of US citizenship, absent some new federal bureaucracy that vetted and registered qualified births.
Patrick Chovanec

I'm far from the first person to point this out, but declaring birthright citizenship void means that the vast majority of Americans have no provable citizenship at all. Which I imagine is a feature for the fascist Republicans since it puts everyone at the government's mercy.
The Infinitely Prolonged @wowbaggert.bsky.social

People, for the love of God, please stop treating birthright as some kind of sweeping victory. It was 5-4 on the constitutional issue. The dissent laid out a fucking ROADMAP for what Trump should do next. The court always gives Trump multiple bites at the apple WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU HAPPY ABOUT?
ElieNYC

Very interesting to me that Alito [in his dissent] can be like "but you don't understand, there are now aeroplanes that can deposit birth tourists by the score in this country, that didn't happen back around the Civil War!" now and then is like "I'm sorry I'm not allowed to consider if gun lethality has changed."
Courtney Milan

One short thread took a different tack, which I find reassuring in a non-reassuring way:

The Supreme Court is not just a broken institution, it has been a vehicle for keeping this country in line with conservatism for the vast majority of the last 250 years. Real change will not come until we create new systems and institutions to protect our rights. Today’s decisions went as expected — disappointing but not worst case scenarios. The Court will always maintain a motivation to keep the country in line with a conservative status quo, this oscillates now and then but always returns further to the right. We will not be liberated by this Court or any court invented by this current system. We need to lean into the imagination of what else can we create. If we know the system will continue to work against us, it is what we do for ourselves that matters.
phoenix @phoenix-rights.bsky.social

Two Things About June

The Supreme Court makes me hate June.

As climatologist Peter Gleick said on BlueSky a few hours ago, 

Do I have this right? The Supreme Court affirmed that Donald Trump is a sexual predator, and then gives him unprecedented power to fire those who provide independent oversight at federal agencies? 

Tomorrow they will issue their ruling on birthright citizenship (and consensus seems to be that they will uphold its existence because... duh), but that the majority six will find wrongly on the other two remaining cases. 

Conservative Patrick Chovanec put it this way:

Over the past year or so, the Roberts Court has batted around a .500. But the half they get right merely hold the line, while the half they get wrong build the foundations for a dictatorship, brick by brick. 

It finally became summer here in Minnesota today, so it's over 90°F with high humidity. I have to go do the daily picking of black raspberries regardless of conditions, nationally or locally.  They always ripen at the end of June, just as the Supreme Court begins announcing all of its big decisions. 

Some day we will have a court structured for justice instead of whatever this travesty is. When that time comes, the berries will still need to be picked every day, but I won't be dreading the news from Washington as I find my way among the thorns.

Tracking Technology in Fiction

I mentioned a few days ago the need for some escapist reading. I decided to finally dive into the Cork O'Connor books by Saint Paul's William Kent Krueger. If you don't know about them, they revolve around a small-town sheriff (or former sheriff) in a county in far-northern Minnesota. A place where, it seems, lots of people get done in by bad people. 

Unlike many in this area, I've never read a single one of them. 

I'm now four books in to the 20-book series. The first one was published in 1998, and as I was most of the way through the second book (published in 1999), it occurred to me that it presented a fairly painless chance to document technological change. It happened when I noticed the main character using a pay phone.

I will report back on what happens when, and if I can, the effect it has on the plot. As time goes by, will people leave their cell phones at home? Will their batteries conveniently die? I'm sure the books' location near the Boundary Waters will have bad cell service generally, so that will always be available as an excuse, when needed. Will the technology itself become part of the plot in later books?

It may also be a museum of forgotten tech. In the fourth book, for instance (published 2004, but I think occurring in 2000?), there's been a reference to a Palm Pilot.

The Collins Concrete Murals

Today, I learned of the existence of the artists Henry Collins and Joyce Pallot Collins, who created concrete public murals in the U.K. between 1969 and about 1980. 

It started from this thread on BlueSky, which asked:

Does anyone know of a definitive list of the concrete murals of Henry Collins and Joyce Pallot? This Surbiton example is a favourite of mine, and their work in places like Colchester (where they were based), Southampton and Newcastle is well known. But what of the rest?

A couple of the Surbiton images that were shared:

Responses led a number of places, especially this site about their work in the city where they spent their life together and began doing murals, Colchester. 

The page about the Collinses on that site says,

They understood the public context of the work and employed an array of unlikely tools including spoons, spanners and even a nutmeg grater to produce a variety of finishes. The texture of the work was important to its overall look, while also discouraging graffiti.

Some visual samples of those varying textures:

A number of their murals are no longer in existence, while others have been moved, some restored, and others exist in degraded condition, given their age. This one in Gloucester is in the latter category:

There are a few more photos, including a close-up of it, in the BlueSky thread. 

The Collinses' murals appear to be an under-appreciated part of Britain's visual culture, if it takes a thread on BlueSky to pull together a thorough list of their murals. 

My speculation is that it comes from a combination of elite bias against the concrete medium and the locations, since the vast majority of their work is not located in London.

Some of the linked pages with images:

• Pallot and Collins Murals – Bexhill on Sea
• Joyce Pallot and Henry Collins – Gwent House Cwmbran (southeast Wales)  (keep scrolling on this page for the best photos)
• Droitwich Spa since Roman Times, St Andrews Shopping Centre, Droitwich, Worcestershire 
• Hitchin History Mural, Paynes Park, Hitchin, Hertfordshire 
• Cowley's Concrete Mural (near Oxford) 

Rush to Grab Power Before the November Elections

One name: Russell Vought. 

He wants to put himself (or people he controls) in charge of deciding how all the U.S. government's grant money — our taxpayer money — is spent. All of it: not just scientific grants. Yes, really.

Here are a couple of pieces about this proposed rule change, which is clearly illegal, but that means nothing these days: 

• A brief bit on Science Friday from today. 
• A story in The Nation, which should be accessible if you sign up for a free account. 
• And this thread on BlueSky by the author of The Nation story, epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves.

I'm going to quote Gonsalves's thread in full, because it's in keeping with why he wrote the thread:

Russell Vought is an evil man. This plan is nothing short of a personal take-over of federal grant-making. It will affect ALL of us. Political commissars will now be in charge of all agencies, reporting to him. But we are not powerless. See what you can do below.

First, write a letter to Congress. Personalize it. Get your friends and family to do the same. Will take 2–3 minutes of your time. 

Next write a comment on the proposed rule BEFORE July 13th. If you're not a scientist, this post explains what's at stake for your community here [and has great instructions and the comment link at the end].

If you are a scientist, this post has a primer for that too! 

This piece on Forbes also has a great piece about how the rule will affect your community.

And people need to know about this new proposed OMB rule. Consider writing an op-ed for your local paper.

This is it folks. All hands on deck. We need everyone now working to stop this. Please, please spread the word. Get five, better yet ten friends to take action.  

As the non-scientist explainer linked above put it,

Federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities function. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends. This rule puts that entire financial partnership between the federal government and the states under political control, without an act of Congress, effective October 1, 2026.

Vought's minions will be able to terminate any granted program at any time for any or no reason. New programs, of course, will have to align with Trump's ideology. Of course, all of the usual "anti-woke" words are used in the rule-making, so it's pretty clear what will not be funded.

The availability of grants will not be open and public, so — surprise! — this is an additional opportunity for graft. There will be no appeal process when applications are denied, and "organizational affiliation" can be used as the basis for denial. 

As usual, I find myself outraged that we need to write specifically formatted comments explaining to our government why it should not be trying to kill its people and destroy the infrastructure our tax dollars have been spent on for decades. But that's where we're at under the Trump regime as they rush to grab power before the November elections.

Write comments, write to Congress, write everywhere.
 

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. 

Two Podcasts Make a Pair

I've mentioned the War on Cars podcast just a few times since I started listening to it in 2024 (here and here).

Two of its recent episodes are excellent.

One is called Changing Lanes. That's the title of a documentary that tells the story of what it has taken to win the electoral and policy fight to rebuild a dangerous car-oriented boulevard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There are many lessons in their experience, and it sounds like even more can be learned from the documentary – so I hope to be able to see it soon.

The most recent episode is with Ian Loader, Oxford University professor of criminology. It's called Rethinking Criminal Consequences for Drivers Who Kill. 

Contrary to what one might expect of a biking advocate, Loader does not want drivers to take more criminal responsibility within the current system. These are his concluding words in the podcast, but to understand what he means, you really have to listen to the whole thing:

The standard chain of logic with how we deal with road safety at the moment goes something like this: that driving is basically safe. It only becomes unsafe if individuals do it dangerously. And then therefore the chain of intervention goes something like: individual responsibility [to] enforcement [to] punishment. 

My alternative goes something like: the starting point is that mass motoring is a system of harm production even when people are driving carefully and considerately. And that the chain of intervention should be: start with systems, think about structure, and then bad driving has consequences — not necessarily punishment.

How we get any of the types of changes Loader describes to happen is the main problem. The work described in the Changing Lanes is part of the solution.

Today, Ugh

I'm overwhelmed by today's bad news (multi-decade sentences to the Prairieland defendants in Texas and multiple 6–3 SCOTUS decisions that wipe out various civil rights for everyone except corporations). The destruction continues.

I need to finish reading The Overstory, which is excellent but anti-escapist, and find something more diverting. 

The World Cup is not my thing, so I don't have that to fall back on. 

I must spend more time outside, and talk to more people. 

How to survive in the present moment.

Sometimes You Just Have to Say It

In the past few days, Facebook has shown me a couple of statements that resonate with the political situation we are in. First, this:



It reminded me of things said by people who live in completely Republican-dominated states. 

For instance, a few days ago, Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social posted this:

It’s wild to talk to folks about Missouri only to hear someone blame “the Democrats.” What Democrats? We’ve had a Republican legislative supermajority for over two decades and haven’t had a statewide elected Dem since 2018. Everything you see in this state is due to Republican authoritarianism.

That's in keeping with posts Piper has made at other times: whatever ills exist in Missouri, Republicans clearly have been in complete power for long enough that they have had every chance to at least begin to fix them. Instead, just about every measure of human well-being has gotten worse: schools, roads, health care, air. (They've had a trifecta since 2017, and controlled both houses of the Legislature continuously since 2003. When there was a Democratic governor between 2009–2016, all he could do was veto things, not pass anything positive.)

Lyz Lenz has said the same about life in Iowa since Republicans have dominated over the past decade. Everything has gotten worse for everyone since a Republicans became governor in 2011 and particularly since their trifecta began in 2017. 

And now we, of course, have the same thing on a national level. Alexander Ross @hardpolitics.bsky.social wrote this today:

Our country is tolerating Donald Trump presiding over severe national decline because the majority of white voters (who vote Republican) thought living under a Black president was worse than this. Not a popular or media-savvy assessment... it's also not wrong either.

Here's the second thing from Facebook:



We have to get these people out of office as soon as possible.

Late

The day got away with me. 

I spent part of it (re)watching Gosford Park, which I remember liking when it came out in 2001, but as is often the case with me, I had almost no memory of it. Lots of English people at a country house. Sometimes I had trouble understanding what they were saying. 

Now I see it through the lens of Downton Abbey, not surprisingly since it was written by Julian Fellowes. 

And I think there were too many aristocrat characters and not enough attention paid to the mechanics of character differentiation. How many bland, young blond men do you need to cast, really?

I do like to see Helen Mirren playing characters who aren't glamorous, though. That was nice.

Surely It's Pure Talent

Kristen Gillbrand should resign.

She's a good example of why Democrats like Angie Craig should not be in office when we here in Minnesota have a choice for U.S. Senate, if we are to overhaul what's wrong with this government. 

Obviously, Trump and the Republicans in Congress who have gone beyond enabling him are worse, if that's what the choice comes down to, but the corruption of corporatism, finance, and tech have gone beyond the Republicans.

The son of Sen. Gillibrand (an established crypto-booster) has just raised $30 million to set up his own digital asset exchange. His startup company has been valued at $300 million. Based on what? 

Well, gee, it must be the fact that he's 22 years old and graduated from Stanford a few days ago, is in bed with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and his mother is a U.S. Senator. (Story here.)

Probably mostly that last one led to the other ones, ya think? 

Four Chance Encounters in the World

I recently spent most of an hour early on a Sunday evening standing on a corner where two relatively busy streets in Saint Paul intersect.

The two most interesting sets of passersby I saw: 

1) Two parents, ambiguously gendered, walking a leashed miniature Samoyed as their 4-year-old son drove a tiny electric convertible Hummer while wearing a white dress shirt, black tie, and brown shorts.

I really wanted to take a photo of the family, but of course did not. 

2) A guy (I assume it was a guy) wearing a Scream mask, driving a red crotchrocket motorcycle. He sat across from me at the signal, revving his engine, for an uncomfortable length of time as far as I was concerned. I thought he would run the light, but he didn't. When it finally turned green and he roared away, I could see that he had a baseball bat strapped across the back of his seat.

I thought about calling the non-emergency cop number, and if I'd gotten his plate number, maybe I would have because what the heck? Was he going to softball practice wearing a Scream mask... or planning to bust some windows?

I also experienced:

A guy who yelled out the window of his car to me, "Fuck Trump and fuck the Jews!" So that was unexpected, and obviously disconcerting.

There was also a somewhat older, maybe somehow disabled guy on an Army-green ebike who went behind me on the bike path. As he passed, he said, "Yeah I agree with you. [Referring to the No Kings sign I was holding.] That's why we left Europe." I acknowledged him. 

As he rode out onto the street, he called back, "It's why I don't pay taxes anymore. You can't tell where they go" — or something like that.

20 minutes or so later, he came back past in the other direction and commented again about how he doesn't have to pay taxes anymore, and how you can't tell where the money goes. 

Whatever, man. If you aren't paying taxes and you're supposed to be, you're playing a dangerous game. It's pretty much only the rich who get away with it in the long run. And definitely don't go bragging about it to random people when you're out in public. 

On the other hand, if you don't need to pay taxes because your income is low enough that you don't need to file, that's fine, but don't say it's because we can't tell where the money goes. It's because you're poor. 

I still wish I had a photo of the family with the Hummer-driving kid wearing a tie.