Broiler Chickens

What age are the chickens most chicken-eaters in the U.S. consume?

I would have guessed six or nine months, but the answer is.... five to nine weeks. The birds have been bred to grow at three times the natural rate, eating insatiably to make that growth rate happen. According to an Australian animal rights site,

The consequences of this rapid and unnatural growth are dire for many birds. As their bodies grow too quickly, walking and even standing can become difficult due to lameness or dislocated joints. Young birds have the bodies of adults which puts enormous pressure on their hearts and immature skeletons.

Every year, around 26 million chickens [in Australia] are expected to die in sheds from illness, trauma, and starvation when, unable to support their unnatural weight, they cannot reach food and water. Most of these birds succumb to heart failure and fluid on the lungs — with these vital organs unable to keep up with their rapid growth.

The chickens, if left to live out their days, can live as long as four years.

I was not aware of this aspect of industrially farmed chickens until I saw this recent New York Times story, It could be the age of the chicken, geologically. Aside from the five- to nine-week age fact, I also learned that

There are about 23 billion chickens on Earth at any given time, at least ten times more than any other bird, forty times the number of sparrows. The second most numerous bird on the planet [has] an estimated population of 1.5 billion. The combined mass of those 23 billion chickens is greater than that of all the other birds on Earth.

And that in the slaughtering process,

most waste products (feathers, manure, blood etc.) are recycled via anaerobic digestion, incineration and rendering into edible byproducts, all technology dependent.”

The bones of the 65 billion chickens slaughtered each year, though, are not consumed, and that's where the Age of the Chicken comes in. The bones found in landfills will be part of our time's geological record, along with plastics, concrete, ceramics, and radiation from nuclear weapons and power plants. 

The Times story was inspired by a recent paper from Royal Society Open Science called The broiler chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere. From that paper, I learned in addition:

• Chickens were domesticated about 8,000 years ago, and are native to South and Southeast Asia.
• "Three companies worldwide supply 90 percent of broiler chicks and selective breeding has resulted in 50% or more of genetic diversity loss in commercial lines compared with ancestral breeds."
• The modern birds' bones are clearly distinct from their historical relatives, having much less carbon and much more nitrogen (because they are fed mostly grains, contrasted with chickens' naturally omnivorous diets).

Judith Rich Harris, 1938–2018

I'm sorry to report that psychology researcher and writer Judith Rich Harris has died. She was responsible for several of the key textbooks in child psychology, and later wrote two books that pulled together all she had synthesized from the field to question the role of parenting in how children turn out, The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike.

I highly recommend both books as eye-openers (I've mentioned The Nurture Assumption a few times here and here, but I never got around to writing about the equally good No Two Alike).

According to her website, she had for decades "suffered from a chronic autoimmune disorder called mixed connective tissue disease — an "overlap" combination of lupus and systemic sclerosis. This disorder can affect virtually any organ in the body. One of its more serious complications is a heart-lung condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension." Despite this, she had an extremely productive career, mainly from her home rather than any academic institution.

The Nurture Assumption contains one of my favorite anecdotes about child-rearing:

[There was] a pair of reared-apart twins.... identical twins separated at infancy; they grew up in different adoptive homes. One became a concert pianist, talented enough to perform as a soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra. The other cannot play a note.

Since these women have the same genes, the disparity must be due to a difference in their environments. Sure enough, one of the adoptive mothers was a music teacher who gave piano lessons in her home. The parents who adopted the other twin were not musical at all.

Only it was the nonmusical parents who produced the concert pianist and the piano teacher whose daughter cannot play a note (page 309).

Thanks for your work, Ms. Harris.

Result of a More Robust Safety Net

I saw this tweet today by a British guy named Andrew Graystone, and was taken by the comparison it makes:

On an average day in the UK:

3,700 are forced to visit a food bank.
5,400 suffer domestic violence.
4,750 sleep rough on the streets.
4 migrants arrive in boats across the Channel.

Guess which one the government is calling a “crisis”?

His point is well-taken.

And not to take away from the people behind the statistics Andrew cites, but I wondered how those numbers compared to the same ones for the U.S., if down-scaled from our five-times-larger population. Here are my results. On an average day in the U.S.:

• 110,748 are food insecure (and probably visit a food shelf at some point each month)
• 5,479 suffer domestic violence — an amazingly similar number
• 110,748 are homeless, with an estimated 37,654 "sleeping rough" 
• 170 people attempt to cross the U.S. 2,000-mile-long southern border without documentation

I'm not totally sure the first and third items are completely apples to apples comparisons between the UK and U.S. stats, but I think it's fair to say we in the U.S. have a much bigger problem with hunger and homelessness than do the people of the UK, and good for them. The fact that domestic violence stats are so similar is interesting, and makes me wonder if any social scientists have examined that comparison.

___

How I arrived at my numbers:

• I couldn't find stats on food-shelf use specifically (what they call food banks in the UK)... I'm presenting the number of people who are considered to be food insecure, provided by Feeding America, the network of 200 food banks and food shelves across the U.S., divided by 365 days and multiplied by .2 to equal the UK population size.
• The domestic violence number is drawn from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence total number of incidents for 2017, again divided by 365 and multiplied by .2.
• The homeless figures are the number of homeless people every night in the U.S., drawn from the National Coalition to End Homelessness, and are again adjusted for population size.
• The number of people at the border comes from the 2017 Border Security Report from CBP, as reported on NPR, divided by 365 and adjusted for population size.

Ed Hall, Cartoonist

Syndicated cartoonist Ed Hall asked that this cartoon be shared, so I'm doing that for almost-New-Year's:

That's the way to put those babies in their place.

Celebrate

Given the time of year, I was thinking about the word "celebrate." It comes up in one of my favorite songs (by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson), not to mention the related form used in KC and the Sunshine Band's "Celebration." But what does the word mean, and where did it come from?

Of course, I realized it sounds like Latin, and etymonline confirms that it comes from celebratus, which meant "much-frequented; kept solemn; famous." Kind of a strange combination of meanings, if you ask me: solemn but popular?

The English verb is first noted in the mid-1400s, meaning "to perform publicly with appropriate rites," originally of the Mass, a usage we still here today.

Celebratus is the past participle of celebrare "assemble to honor," but also "to publish; sing praises of; practice often." And that started out as "to frequent in great numbers," from celeber "frequented, populous, crowded"; before that, its etymology is unknown.

So "celebrate" comes from the idea of a crowded place, a popular place, a place full of people. Somehow that turned into something more solemn, or maybe it was an association because the places that were crowded were places where worship of some sort was happening?

The sense of celebrating someone or something, as etymonline puts it, to "commemorate or honor with demonstrations of joy" began about a hundred years later than the first meaning of general public rites. The even more positive meaning of "make widely known, praise, glorify" is from 1610s.

You can clearly see the connection in all of this to "celebrity," a person who is celebrated, though that usage heard of until the mid-1800s. The condition of celebrity preceded the personage of being a celebrity by close to 250 years. I imagine that's one of those shifts in usage that grammar snobs of the time rejected.

The Murals of Carytown, Richmond

Last summer I visited Richmond, Virginia, for the first time. We ended up in the Carytown neighborhood, and I was impressed with the fun murals that brought the area to life.








(This one is my favorite.)

While not a mural, the sign for this shop fit into the vibe:


The city also has a "paint the drain" program happening:




I didn't get to spend much time in the city, but what I saw made me want to visit again.

Elf in the Tomb

This ran in the Star Tribune's front-page teaser sidebar last week, but I've been saving it for Christmas:


Buddy the Elf/Will Ferrell was meant to accompany the brief bit of text above his head, but it made a lot more visual sense for him to go with the text below him. Which made for a Santa-like chuckle on that morning.

Choose Happiness

This hand-made yard sign, painted on a mirror, is very hard to photograph but conceptually interesting.


Combined with the rainbow flag on the porch... these folks are not afraid to let people know what they think.

As seen in Como Park, Saint Paul.

Cornelius and Elizabeth Lyon Jacobs

While looking through some of the genealogical files my father has compiled, I learned about one family branch that was particularly interesting.

Cornelius Jacobs, Jr., was born in 1754 in Westchester County, New York (near the Hudson), son of parents who were Dutch and French immigrants. He was a dispatch rider for George Washington for seven years. That means he could have been the guy who brings in the messages to the Continental Congress in the musical 1776, and that it's safe to assume he would have met Alexander Hamilton, since Hamilton was usually the one writing Washington's dispatches. (The two young men were about the same age, as well.)

After the war ended, Cornelius was paid in Continental currency, which was basically worthless, and deeded 160 acres of land near the future town of Geneva in the northern part of the Finger Lakes, which was then Seneca Nation territory. The town wasn't incorporated until 1806, so Cornelius, perhaps wisely, sold those land rights for a horse, saddle, and bridle.

Cornelius had married at some time by 1786 to a woman named Elizabeth Lyon, who was 10 years his junior. Their first child was born in 1786 when she was 22.

They lived in poverty and hardship with 10 children (plus one who died in infancy) somewhere along the Hudson in Duchess County until early 1811, when they decided to move to Oxford, a town in central New York where Elizabeth’s brother David had had a farm for almost 20 years. Cornelius went ahead to make ready the log cabin on David's land, while Elizabeth and the children remained behind to pack up their belongings.

By doing the math on their birth years, I determined that the three oldest children were adults and already married; I believe they did not make the trip. Seven of the children were 17 or younger, having been born at intervals of two–three years, with the youngest just 2.

As Cornelius returned home to help with the move, he was taken sick in the town of Durham (located on Windham Mountain, 35 miles from their home) and died, after sending word to Elizabeth of his situation. Remember, he was 55 years old at this point… no spring chicken in those days.

In April 1811, Elizabeth and the seven children traveled for six days in two wagons to Oxford. They lived in the cabin for two years, then in two others in the area, with the two sons who were 17 and 15 working for farmers in the area. They purchased some uncleared land in an area called "the Deserts"

and there commenced a struggle for a home, clearing the land, purchasing the title and living at the same time. But few can realize the hard times experienced by the pioneers following the war of 1812. The year 1816 was called the year without a summer. The year following was nearly as bad. Mrs. Jacobs and her family were near the famine state and at the same time endeavoring to pay for land at $5.50 per acre. But perseverance and sturdy hearts won the battle and homes for the children, some of whom had grown into rugged men and women.

The youngest child, who was 2 when the family made the trip to Oxford, wrote in 1888 about his childhood:

I wish some artist could reconstruct that old kitchen with the trammel and lug-pole, the bake-kettle on the hearth, the frying pan held by its long handle over the blazing fire, and a lot of hungry boys and girls waiting for the Indian loaf or flapjacks. The artist must not omit the "old wooden rocker." Then in that relic of the by-gone days, clasped in the loving arms and pressed to the warm heart of that best of mothers, my childish tears have often been dried and the rough passages of life made smooth.

Elizabeth died in 1848 at age 84. Another source says she received a widows' pension from the federal government in 1838. I hope it made her final years more comfortable.
___

Quotes are from The Annals of Oxford by Henry Judson Galpin (1906). Elizabeth and Cornelius were my grandfather's great-great grandparents.

Maybe Some Day It'll Be a Classic?

Who doesn't love a hole-in-the-wall hardware store? The kind that doesn't seem large enough to have what you need, but somehow always does... as long as you ask?

Today while picking up some painters' tape for my long-term painting project (yet another podcast listened to!), I spied this sticker on the side of one of the display shelves:


I can't tell you how many levels of out-of-date this notice is, other than the design with its Souvenir font. Let's see...

• It's from 33 years ago, obviously, since this is the 2018–19 school year.
• The University of Minnesota stopped using that logo about 20 years ago. 
• I have no idea how long it's been since the U printed a student-staff directory in general. I'm just realizing what a strange idea that seems, in this day and age.

But it was good to see it there, alongside the LED lightbulbs. I'm glad they've kept it.
____

As seen at Noll Hardware on Raymond Avenue.

Down, Down, Down

This is the worst stock market week since 2008. This is the worst stock market month since 1931.

In some ways it doesn't feel as bad as that bottomless-seeming moment in fall 2008, but I think that's only because we are now surrounded by the daily (and multiple-times-each-day) instabilities of cabinet turnover, ally-abandoning, trade-war-mongering, and so on from the current occupant. Not to mention climate change denial and doubling down on greenhouse-gas emissions, which is the real long-term instability hiding out on all those corporate balance sheets.

So, will the stock keep going down from this very low point? It seems like it to me, but we'll see.

The Years of Living Darkly

Sounds as though 536 and the years just afterward may have been the worst time to be a human, at least during recorded history.

This explains why.

Not Only Boring, But Useless

If you want the longish and cogent explanation of why Elon Musk's just-announced "boring" car tunnel makes no sense (um, how do you get all the cars into it and out of it?), read this.

But if you already know it makes no sense, you can enjoy these tweets that just make fun of it:

Elon’s car-tunnel would need to push through 1.2 cars per second to have a capacity similar to a subway. Imagine a car being pumped out on to a street at a rate of 1.2 per second. The world’s most massive car pile up! Think of the parking that would be required! #DumbandDumber
Jennifer Keesmaat

This represents an amazing amount of ingenuity, expense and time spent on a system that is less efficient at addressing traffic woes than any bus.
Jonathan O'Connell

oh shit they solved the public transportation crisis by [checks notes] helping like seven rich people skip traffic
@reticentbias

subways, now with a significant financial barrier to entry!
@ilovepets420

Rich man want car go fast, vroom vroom🚘. Poor people's cars in rich man's way, no vroom
@Newbornstranger

Even better- a ONE LANE road that you could be trapped in! AMAZING INNOVATION, BRO!
@RussiawithoutBS

Also, it costs an order of magnitude more and solves what problem, exactly?
@snarqueduct

wow you invented a road amazing
@gin_and_tacos

The future of transport is very slow elevators for cars.
Tyler Schmall

You do not understand. It is better if just this one car gets to go fast.
Gabriel Gundacker

build a train, nerds
Buncahn

On Corn and Farm Land

You never know what random, amazing knowledge will appear before you in this day and age. It's hard to say if this benefit is enough to balance all the damage modernity brings... I can't weigh that right now, but I can say this information, put before me for free, is a revelation.

First, from SwiftOnSecurity, a treatise on corn:

...it has literally been years, maybe decades, since you ate any meal made without corn. I absolutely guarantee you every meal you have eaten in the last 365 days has been made with corn.

• Did you eat something packaged in a paper bag? That’s lined with corn.
• Did you eat something with citric acid? That’s not lemon. That’s corn.
• Did you eat something with honey in it? It’s diluted with corn syrup.
• Did you eat raw honey? Bees are fed corn syrup.

I am not joking about everything being made from corn

Cows eat corn, but milk isn’t made from corn, right? Correct. Except, what is milk fortified with? Vitamin D. How does Vitamin D get in milk? It’s soluble in vegetable oil then mixed in. What is the vegetable oil made from? Corn.

Bananas aren’t made from corn, right? Correct. How are bananas ripened? With ethylene gas. How is ethylene produced in the United States? From catalytic converters using ethanol. Where does ethanol come from in the United States? Corn.

I wish you could see the world the way I see the world.

Virtually all consumer vitamin capsules use active ingredients, stabilizers, or production stearates sourced from corn. Surfactants in shampoo and dishwashing liquid are often chemically processed with corn glucose. Cosmetics are often corn. (‘zea mays’ = maize)

You use corn to remove corn from your dishes. You take a shower and clean yourself with the help of corn. You coat yourself with corn.

Corn is applied to cardboard boxes during production. Table salt uses corn to help iodine stick to the particles. Windex uses 2-hexoxyethanol, which is made from corn.

Animals eat corn, but meat isn’t corn, right? Correct. How is bacteria controlled in meat cutting operations? Increasingly, by spraying lactic acid. Where does lactic acid come from? Fermenting glucose. Where does glucose come from? Often, corn syrup.

You live in a society whose every production industry is based around a government-subsidized chemical feedstock.

Corn is not a food. Corn is a platform.

More commentary on how rich corn is for weaving a narrative of the American century:

You’ve got government market subsidy, political weight of low-population states, energy insecurity, environmental issues, agribusiness consolidation, hyper-productivity despite decreasing labor, food basket dynamics in world wars, 20th century chemical revolution, obesity, etc.

If you want to know more about the spread of corn than you ever wanted to, I recommend @CornAllergyGirl. She has to basically custom-make a lot of her own food and stockpile it. But it’s not just food.

3D printing? One of two material options is PLA plastic, made from corn. Tattoos? Ink liquid base is probably corn. Frozen fish? Often glazed in a mixture of corn starch/corn syrup to prevent dehydration and oxidation, which polyunsaturated fats in fish are vulnerable to. It doesn't matter if your fish is fresh from Alaska, it's getting processed and dipped in corn from the American Midwest. Ranch dressing? Does that have corn in it? dextrose (corn)

Why does USA use corn syrup instead of sugar? It's by design. "Import quota for sugar that limits imports to keep the price as high as possible for American consumers." "US consumers and producers pay approximately three times the world price of sugar."

Some people have gotten the impression from this that I'm against corn. That's not the case. I'm interested because I love corn. It's incredible in every way. It's worth appreciating the innumerable ways cheap high-calorie polysaccharide can be used, past and present.

That thread was connected to this one by Dr. Sarah Taber:

Corn is a platform with both limitless purposes, and one purpose: to turn rural land into a dependable and infinitely fungible financial asset.

If you want to understand US agriculture, you gotta understand one thing: It's not even about making food. It's a real estate hustle.

Can I be honest for a second, as an ag person who's done most of their work in California and the South? Land in the Midwest ... isn't really good for much. Sure, the soil's real nice, but the growing season is too short for most globally-traded cash crops.

Coffee. Sugar. Chocolate. Cotton. Tobacco. Rice. Palm oil.

The Midwest is exactly the kind of giant, wet, low-population area you'd want for cash crops. Except most of the big-money ones are tropical, and the Midwest has a 3-6 month growing season. You're stuck with annual crops.

"Well what's wrong with wheat, flax, oats, rye, hemp, and other short-season cash crops?"

1) Hemp ain't been legal
2) We can't use an entire Midwest's worth of oats and rye
3) Wheat and flax grow nearly everywhere, including huge areas of arid US west. Too much competition to rely on.

Enter maize and soybeans. Here's what they bring to table:

1) Short-lived enough to make use of the Midwest growing season
2) Need lots of water—that cuts out competition from the US West
3) Humans can't eat them, but that's OK, they're just infinitely fungible starch and protein.

If you're just growing raw sources of starch and protein, you can handle market gluts by inventing a new use. That's harder to do with crops that make something less malleable like fiber, or (in case of wheat, oats, rye, and most grains) a mid-yield mix of starch and protein.

And boy do we get our market gluts on. Because for 3-6 months every year, the Midwest turns into a giant hot wet basin of plant growing power.

But: without a platform like corn and soybeans, hot wet plains are just hot wet plains. They're not a financial powerhouse. You couldn't, say, include farmland as a securitized asset in investment funds.

The Food Discourse(TM) really fixates on how corn is used after it's grown. "Oh my God! It's in everything!" I'm more interested in what that means for those who possess the land to grow it and what that means for our society. And @SwiftOnSecurity hit the nail on the head.

Part of the Food Discourse(TM)'s fascination with food manufacturing is that it's fairly recent. It feels new and foreign. And, you can see the size of the facilities and visualize the money that it takes to build and run them. It's a fairly new way to accumulate wealth. It's visible. And it fits with our "wealth is capital is manufacturing and Wall Street" mentality. So we fixate on it.

Meanwhile, most folks have no idea what the value of farmland is. Or that subsidies don't go to the people growing the corn—they go to the people who own the land it grows on. Most folks have no idea that the big hustle in food isn't food. It's real estate. That doesn't fit with our image of how wealth works in a capitalist society.

Capitalism is supposed to mean new, modern, and scary! Farmland is ancient and wholesome! Farming is our one connection to more wholesome times!

Bullshit.

Farm landlords were grinding people to death for thousands of years before capitalism was ever invented. Real estate's always been the ideal asset. Can be used for food, minerals, or development—and you can collect rents pretty much infinitely with zero work. But thanks to our focus on "bad stuff in our economy = modern = capitalism = industry" and "agriculture = old = good," we rarely see farmland as being an asset that can be traded globally.

AND THAT'S EXACTLY HOW THE GOD DAMN LANDLORDS WANT IT.

We're busy fretting about agribusiness and food processing, meanwhile real live land barons are out here collecting rent and subsidy checks on millions of acres and using it as low-risk ballast for their portfolios.

To be clear: Wall Street is part of this. So are good ol' boys.

Most rural counties are run by 2–3 families that quietly own a huge slice of the land. You want to know why rural areas are so fucked up? It ain't the coastal elites. It's the landlords right there in the county. Rural landlords might collect their rent checks directly from their serfs, I mean neighbors, in the county instead of a hedge fund office in Manhattan. But they've got the same job. Own land, futz around all day, profit.

Ever notice how most proposals to solve farm-related problems—not enough food, too much food, soil conservation, wildlife conservation, water shortages—all seem to boil down to "throw money at land owners"? Isn't that weird?

The philosophy behind conservation payments is sometimes people own farmland that's too fragile to farm. But not farming loses money! Therefore, we must pay them not to farm it! Is anybody asking why own "farmland" that can't be farmed in the first place?

This is a problem that could be solved a lot of different ways. Trusts, land buybacks, tax write-offs for donating to conservation, etc. These are all used to some extent. But the big federal programs are all built around sending landowners a reliable subsidy check every year.

So ... yeah. Sometimes rural land ownership is just an instrument for rich people to extort bribes from taxpayers. "Pay me or I'll ruin your water." And sometimes you just monetize it on the corn platform.

Either way, it's a huge asset class. In many ways it's more influential and politically powerful than the "industrial food" sector we've been taught to fear. But it's invisible, distant, and quiet, monetizing the earth in ways few of us understand.

Wow to all of that.

Eleven Years of Daughter Number Three

Darn, I missed the 11th birthday of my blog yesterday. Back on December 16, 2007, I started this enterprise, if you can call it that.

When I was 11, I looked like this on a bad day. As you can see, I had gotten glasses since the previous year and was in the midst of growing my hair out to achieve that perfect early-1970s straight-hair look. That never worked out for me, but I didn't know it yet.

Sixth grade was the first year we were put into a middle school format, with a homeroom and different teachers for each subject. My English teacher was an evangelical Christian who ranted against racial equality and hippies. My mother opined that he sounded like a member of the John Birch Society, so that was educational for me. He left teaching soon after to become a minister.

This was the year I threw myself into making paper people. I memorized all the bones in the body for science class. We made a chariot race with Barbie and Ken dolls in the social studies unit about the Roman Empire. I had a crush on a boy in my class named Kevin Granger. And after the girls-only sex ed class one of the women teachers gave us, I was afraid I could start bleeding any second while sitting at my desk. I think I read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret that year.

My penmanship continued to stink (and my report card has the lowest average marks for that subject to prove it). I got overall pluses in every subject—meaning I was making progress up to my ability—for the first time in my school career, I think, and pluses for the entire list of Habits and Attitudes, too. That means I Accepted Guidance from Those in Authority, Had Self Control, Respected School Regulations, and so on.

I missed 11 days of school that year, almost all in winter, and was never tardy, thanks to our hard-working bus driver.

Eleven years is a while. I'm glad to still be here writing this every day, and thanks to you for reading.

__

My past anniversary posts, each with age-appropriate photographic evidence:

• First
• Second
• Third
• Fourth 
• Fifth 
• Sixth 
• Seventh
• Eighth 
• Ninth
• Tenth

WITH Pod: Political Violence in U.S. History

More painting for me, and so more podcasts. I didn't think the most recent episode of Why Is This Happening would be as interesting as all the others I've listened to, but I was wrong.

The topic is political violence in the U.S. Congress, both in the country's early years and leading up to the Civil War, and the guest is historian Joanne Freeman, who has written books on both topics, including the brand-new The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.

Freeman spent 17 years sifting through letters and diaries of Congress members and staff to find details on the violence that took place over 30 antebellum years. Until now, only a few really egregious incidents were well-known, even to historians, because the details were euphemized or omitted in the official records.

Some of the most startling facts I learned:

• Representatives and senators, especially Southern ones, often were armed in the chamber.
• Southerners routinely used that, and sometimes their own physical size, to intimidate anyone who spoke against slavery.
• When the Republican party arose and replaced the Whigs, it was partly because they were willing to bring weapons and use the threat of physical violence, too.
• Possibly part of the reason the modern press is so hesitant to call Mulligan a liar is that using that word to describe someone led directly to being challenged in a duel.

Overall, I learned that my country's way of governing is historically and thoroughly grounded in toxic masculinity. When NRA-supporters show up armed to state legislative hearings, as they have in Minnesota and other states, or with open-carried weapons at the office of a legislator, as happened in Texas, they are throwbacks to this earlier way of doing things that we should all decry and work together to stop.

Understanding Tear Gas

I know nothing about tear gas, except that I hope to never experience it. But, like many (I assume), I didn't think of it as all that terrible on the continuum of things a government might do to its citizens. Until now.

Now I wonder why I had the impression I had, because it's easy to see who that ignorance serves.

This is from Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, who was replying on a thread about the tear-gassing of children at the border:

First, hi. I’m a marine’s wife and a conflict reporter. Let us very briefly review what tear gas actually is!

Firstly, I can tell you’re a civilian because you are confusing the kinds of gas used a hundred years ago with what we call “gas” now. Currently in the United States, federal/state/local law enforcement default to a few major suppliers for tear gas. I have a canister collection!

Anyway, tear gas isn’t a gas like nitrous oxide at the dentists’. It is a highly concentrated particulate. They made these innovations in weaponry because it was easier to control the weapon’s area of damage; actual gas blows away while tear gas hangs heavy in the air.

It’s important to note that there is CS gas and CX gas, which are essentially the 1.0 and 2.0 version. They added I think silicone to this last round to make it stick better! These weapons are designed specifically to create so much pain someone has to leave the affected area.

The first time I came up against CS gas, I was given no warning before the canisters were fired. First, I choked. I could not breathe. My throat rebelled against the irritant.

The second thing that I remember is being blind. I was convinced I had taken shrapnel to the face; I had heard the canister explode near my feet. I felt my face for blood and it was wet. Turns out all the mucus membranes in my head, eyes and nose and mouth, were watering.

So there I was, choking and thinking that I had just taken metal shards to the eyes, when the burning started.

Now, this chemical is very specially meant to stay on skin and clothing. It’s like an itty-bitty burr. It interacts with sweat and skin and gets rapidly more intense.

Have you ever seen a movie that featured napalm? It’s like that. Even the skin inside your clothes burns. Your genitalia burns, and for women it’s triply bad because of mucous membranes unless we were wearing thick long pants and were tightly belted.

You learn those things. Now I carry a spare belt and two oversized pair of underwear to make sure that if I get into a situation that is about to get “less than lethal” I don’t feel like I’m going into unaenesthetized labor.

But I remind you, this is the lesser of the common chemical agents used.

Now, CS sits in any cuts or open wounds you might have. It’s like salt if salt were ghost peppers. The reason it is the nicest of the chemicals is that CS disperses within a few hours.

CX, now. They jacked up the pain and it can stay in the area air for days. CX is basically what happened when our weapons developers looked at CS and thought “nah we can get another couple notches out of this” and so they did.

Fun fact: these gases are banned for use in war by the Geneva Conventions, but they are fully legal to use domestically. Which means that in the course of my reporting, I have endured weapons that my combat Marine never did while he was, you know, in combat.

SO those are the gases.

Let’s move on the the sprays! (Mind you, the sprays are worse.) So this is where people say “you could spray them on your food!” Because we’re talking about sprays that are capsaicin usually, which is like the most concentrated you can get a chili pepper.

So the sprays are developed to attack a very specific pain receptor. They’re much harder to get off your skin. Oh, and they can make you blind if you get shot full-blast.

So those are your “less-than-lethal” weapons.

We do not know what they do to childrens’ health.

What I do know is that there is never a moral reason to spray a child with a chemical agent that was designed specifically and only to cause the most intense and exquisite of pains.

Four from the Bulletin Board

The place where this blog gets written most days is a bedroom used as an office, and on one wall there are three bulletin boards. I've posted a few times before with an item from one or another of the boards. Today I have four items:


I made this typographic design 25 years or so ago.


Purchased this postcard from the artist at the farmers market in Portland, Oregon.


A friend gave me this going on 30 years ago.


This last one is a photocopy of a page from the radical magazine Processed World, if I remember correctly.

Ah, Rubber Cement

Here's another one that could have been in that aisle of old art supplies: rubber cement.


I think the makers may have converted parts of the label design from hand-lettering to type some time after the 1970s (the decade in which this can was made), plus that DANGER warning looks contemporaneous. But the baseline-bowing WHITE RUBBER bug and the arced NO CURLING promise, plus the orange, black, and white overall design hearken back to the early 20th century, I'd say.

And don't forget, it has the wondrous brush in cap:


Huh, the top of the can says "brush in can" while the label says "brush-in-cap." I never noticed that before.

Either way, I can almost see that shiny top with its raised letters as an Andy Warhol painting.

How Dare They?

You know how EpiPens cost way too much because the patent was sold to exploiters, and now the price of insulin is skyrocketing too, causing serious problems for diabetics who lack the means to handle the new cost?

Check out this from Dr. David Juurlink, an internist, pharmacologist, and toxicologist at the University of Toronto medical school:

Periodic reminder that these guys sold the patent on insulin for $1 and they’d be pissed that people are dying because they can’t afford it.

How dare these exploiters harm people with their greed. I have nothing more to say about them because they are not worth anyone's time.

Aaagh

I swear, I'm not paying attention to the current thing about Mulligan's chief of staff problems. But there are two things about Nick Ayers, who is currently Mike Pence's chief of staff and was supposedly being considered for the top job, that I heard or saw and can't get out of my mind.

First, this screen grab from MSNBC last night:


Which just... I find this new evidence of Mulligan's narcissism astounding, even among all the other examples.

And second, Ayers —who is just 34 years old — has "earned" $56 million dollars in his life already from political consulting (since 2011).

How is that possible?

I would almost feel better if it was from money laundering or bribes than that anyone is paid that much in that short a time for something that contributes so little to society.

Don't Read the Comments

NPR shut down comments altogether on its site more than three years ago. Seattle Times reporter Mike Rosenberg reminded us all of these facts:

• 67% of comments came from just 4,300 people. 
• 87% of commenters were male. 
• 99.94% of readers never posted a comment in a typical month

Another Twitter user responded to Rosenberg's tweet with those stats, saying that when another site he helped run shut down comments,

We worried that turning off the comments would kill the community. And yeah, it killed whatever was growing there, but looking at the web today I'm convinced that comments sections are not communities. They're alleys where the trash isn't picked up often enough.

For most sites, that analogy of an alley that's not taken care of is pretty apt. It doesn't take a lot of trash for most people of good will to abandon an area that's clearly not being taken care of, let alone one where you don't feel safe.

More Podcast Recommendations

I've been doing more painting lately, and so there has also been more podcast-listening for me. Here's what I've heard:

The most recent episode of Why Is This Happening with Chris Hayes, in which he talked to one of my favorite writers (and Twitterers), Dave Roberts of Vox. They both were undergrad philosophy majors and this episode is about how we (as humans) come to believe we know what we know, and how that relates to our current crisis of epistemic closure. Highly recommended. Oh, and the whole thing is transcribed on that link, so if you prefer reading to listening, this one is ready to go.

Call Your Girlfriend's episode on White Fragility, including an interview with Robin DiAngelo, author of a book by that title.

The Whose Streets? episode of WNYC's On the Media from late November. I really appreciated this one because it covered several stories related to how cities are (or aren't) made for people, starting with an interview with Angie Schmitt (another one of my favorites from Twitter), followed by a skeptical look at autonomous vehicles, info on an opera being written about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, and finally a short piece on transit rights.

All in all, some good listening!

__

Past podcast recommendations 1, 2, 3.

No Coast, 2018

It looks as though I've been attending the No Coast Craft-o-Rama for almost as long as I've had this blog, but I've only mentioned it once back in 2008. I spent the morning and early afternoon there today, and I have these three photos (and some handmade holiday gifts stowed in a closet) to show for it:


This wasn't part of the show, but rather one of the permanent merchant spaces in the Midtown Global Market where the show is held. It's a place that sells a lot of cheese, and if you look closely at that pillar, you'll realize that mosaic is made of cheese labels rather than tiles.

Also not part of the show:


I spied this on the floor, lost among the people tabling with their wares. I guess it's from the adjacent parking garage, but I was caught by the words, which make it clear the ticket is considered a contract. No one who enters that garage thinks they have have agreed to a contract by going past the guard arm. And to top it off, it ends with a legalistic word 99.9 percent or more of the American public does not know (including me), "bailment." Now I realize that something like this is probably on the back of every parking card I've ever been issued, and it puts my teeth in a clench.


Finally, this sign from one of the craft sellers, two sisters who make clever needle-points. And one of them is a fellow daughter number three! They sell their wares on Etsy as well. Worth checking out!

I Have No Idea What this Means

It was enigmatic and small, but it caught my eye:


As seen along a street in Saint Paul.

What the Heck, People?

This graphic popped out at me on a postcard I received from my community-based recycling service:


I think I probably throw away at most five pounds of socks with holes in them or other similarly unwearable or elastic-laden bits. And even then I suppose I should look into whether they are wanted in the clothing/rag collection process. The postcard says they event want worn-looking shoes... I wasn't sure if that was true, but now I know.

So far I have been donating wearable clothing directly to charities, but I may start putting it out with my recycling since they're running a pilot program in my area.

Eighty pounds, though. Whew. Don't these "average Americans" realize someone would be glad to wear most of those clothes?

No Magic in NOMA

When reading a Seattle Times story on the problem of disposable (instead of durable) Christmas lights, and recycling and so on, I found out this fact:

Edison’s General Electric pioneered the first light sets in 1903, but they were costly – renting a set of 28 was $300 in today’s dollars. In the 1920s, the National Outfit Manufacturer’s Association, NOMA, took over the business with a more affordable option, and was the largest manufacturer in the world for the next 40 years....

In the 1950s, the popularity of aluminum Christmas trees, which were not decorated with lights, hit NOMA hard. It went bankrupt in 1966.

This is a great example of how children (in this case, me as a child) have no context to understand things that already exist when they begin to make sense of the world. We had a set of NOMA lights when I was a kid, which looked just like this:


To this day, I associate those lights and the name NOMA with the magic of Christmas, despite my cynical world-weariness. So to hear that they were made by something called the National Outfit Manufacturer’s Association is just... so startling. Not another association, and especially one that sounds so generic!

The Refugee Cycle

I recently saw this great cartoon by Jen Sorensen, who I am embarrassed to say I don't recall hearing of before, despite the fact that she has been a Pulitzer finalist and won the Herblock Prize in 2014:


That sums it up pretty neatly. Thanks, Jen.

Does What It Says on the Tin

I took this photo because I liked the lettering on the can:


But just now I realized that the product is made by the Otis elevator company for cleaning and polishing... elevators. Which seems rather specific. Wouldn't some other kind of cleaner work just as well?

Maybe this was an early example of vertical integration. (Vertical. Elevators. Get it?)

The Car's the Thing

I'm as fond of blaming Big Oil for climate change as the next person, but this thread by a Twitter user named Michael Sweeney makes some really good points. Sweeney appears to be a television editor... not a planner or anything like that. Just a guy who has thoughts that make sense:

A really potentially bitter debate (already frequently cropping up) that we need to be ready for is "charging the actual costs of driving means only the rich can drive, which is unfair, therefore we must continue to subsidize driving."

Automobile dependence is literally killing the planet that we live on, we have no choice but to reduce it. The rich will get privileged access to continue driving despite eliminating subsidies, because the rich have more money. That sucks!

But the solution to this problem is well known: progressive income and wealth taxes to reduce the level of income inequality combined with government provision for people's basic human needs: education, food, medicine, housing, transportation.

This solution works so much better than "fight for lowering the gas tax and untolled freeways and free parking spots" in terms of protecting poor people and hurting rich people (by the way, very few of the poorest people in the US drive compared to the general population).

Locking working Americans into car dependence isn't freeing them. It's chaining them to an extremely expensive consumer platform whose costs are designed in many cases to bankrupt them despite the enormous subsidies even poorer people pay to keep the system going.

This is why, across the world, left-wing parties fight for increased access to public transportation (and in the US that means fighting for increased density as well to make transit viable) everywhere they can. I don't know why American leftists do not understand this.

Imagine if the situation were reversed and we had great public transit and the alternative being proposed was "the private sector will compete to sell you a $20k vehicle with Wall Street financing, then you can go on a marketplace to insure it for several hundred dollars a month. In addition to your car payments and insurance you'll be on the hook for thousands of dollars of gas and thousands in maintenance and replacement parts over the life of the vehicle."

It would look like an insane neoliberal plot to rob working people of their wages.

This is the system I see many leftists step in to defend when they oppose high gas taxes or tolling freeways or congestion charges or charging for parking in the name that "it hurts the poor more than the rich."

Sustaining this system is a disaster for the poor!

That's even leaving aside the even more pressing issue that the survival of Planet Earth hinges on us not pumping carbon into the atmosphere and we can't stop with radically reducing auto dependency.

Anyway, please do not be one of these people!

Fight to liberate working people from the poisonous serfdom of car dependency, not to make the chains cheaper.

Combine that with this thread by Matthew Lewis, an energy analyst:

It looks like I’m on track to spend about $250 on gasoline this year. That’s not some sign of my environmental purity. I hate driving, and have built my life around avoiding it at all costs.

But it’s crucial that the climate movement get its head out of its ass on this topic. It keeps attacking the oil industry — an industry entirely tertiary to oil burning.

The primary cause of oil burning is land-use patterns; the secondary cause are carmakers who enable those patterns.

If you change land-use patterns, you drastically undermine the auto industry. I’m living proof. Like I said, $250 this year on gas, mostly to visit family in Oregon or friends in Mari.

If you decide changing land-use patterns is not your thing, then you can change the auto industry by forcing them to make cars/trucks that either don’t run on gasoline at all, or run on very, very little. Both approaches are failing, so far, though we’re told that will change soon.

But the oil industry shouldn’t even factor into this fight and I’m honestly embarrassed we keep focusing on it. They sell a product that’s only needed because we buy another product that we only need because we got fooled into thinking car-dependent suburbs are groovy.

And honestly, we have so many other campaigns where the (correct, in my opinion) solution is “stop buying the product that causes harm.”

CARS ARE THE MOST DEADLY PRODUCTS IN HUMAN HISTORY, HOW ABOUT WE START THERE?

Nah, let’s go after the magic water we put in these deadly devices.

Anyway, yes, I’m aware some people like driving and others “have no choice” and so forth, not everyone lives the same way. But you don’t solve problems by focusing attention away from their root cause.

And where we live is the root cause of oil consumption. Who’s fault is that?

I 100% guarantee you, it’s not the oil industry.

As long as our cities and urban areas are built to require car access, and car (and truck) manufacturing is seen as a key job sector both economically and by labor unions, not much will change until it all comes tumbling down.

Twitter, November 2018

This month's round-up includes many thoughts about the midterm election, immigration, and maybe even more than usual about climate change, given the recent news about that.

First, though, there's Mulligan and his ongoing debacle (both generally and specific to the Mueller investigation):

Every day is “What if Watergate but a stronger economy and Fox News.”
Seth Masket

Reminder: when David Corn first broke the Trump Russia story for Mother Jones *during the campaign* in 2016, it was chuckled at openly by the smart kids. Preposterous! Major guffaws. Corn couldn't even tell story on MSNBC — where he's a paid contributor!
Tom Watson

man, who could have possibly foreseen that Donald Trump would turn out to be an incompetent, corrupt, lying lunatic?
Tom Tomorrow

Remembering when this was satirical. "Springtime for Hitler":


John Scalzi

I feel like the only time an exclamation point should make its way into a Presidential statement might be something like "World peace achieved!" or "Racism has been eradicated!"
Jennifer Mendelsohn @CleverTitleTK

the funniest thing about this administration is that the most competent and least corrupt cabinet secretary appears to be rick perry
chris hooks

I don’t think prominent military figures are beyond criticism but I’ll just note that the Republican Party held a twenty-something Saturday Night Live comedian to a much higher standard than the president of the United States
AdamSerwer

Part of Fascism is the Forced and Unrelenting Ubiquitous Presence of the Dictator! Our media is voluntarily creating this scenario!
Barbara Arnwine

In a normal administration, someone with Whitaker’s record couldn’t get hired to answer phones at DOJ, let alone chief of staff to the AG, let alone actually becoming AG.
Matthew Miller

It’s really amazing that after being told a female candidate for president didn’t have the emotional toughness to do the job we’ve spent every day being updated on the fragile emotional state of Donald Trump.
Jared Yates Sexton

Great Quotation about Trump >> “He’s just a bull carrying his own china shop with him when­ever he travels the world,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.
Steven Greenhouse

I still can't get over Trump refusing to honor fallen US troops in France and Arlington and then tweeting on Veterans Day that he didn't want overseas military ballots to count in Florida.
Ari Berman

After he spent two years attacking Hillary Clinton as frail and feeble, I am really tired of hearing about how this jackass can't go out in the rain.
Shakestweetz

Hillary had fucking pneumonia and attended a 9/11 memorial anyway and fainted and Trump and his supporters went bonkers and said she was about to die. Trump won't stand in the rain for a few minutes to honor the veterans of WWI. It's astonishing.
Clara Jeffery

Trump's idea of managing a forest is turning it into a golf course.
geeeeeeebee

The GOP exploded after then-Attorney General Lynch had a tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton while Hillary was under investigation. But crickets now that Trump has an Attorney General who is on the record prejudging the Russia investigation before it concluded and suggesting it could be unfunded.
JoyceWhiteVance

The White House has done more to punish Jim Acosta for gently brushing aside an intern, than they've done to punish Saudi Arabia for torturing a journalist and chopping his body up into little pieces with a bone saw.
Jules Suzdaltsev

Whitaker seems less like an Attorney General and more like a guy that boxes Indiana Jones shirtless under a Luftwaffe flying wing.
Aditya Sood

I know the CNN [Jim Acosta] story is a distraction. I know! But to be clear: The government is using an obviously doctored video to support an obviously made-up story. Here in the United States of America.
Brian Montopoli

Remember way back, like maybe a year ago?, when a pro-Trump terrorist sent bombs to liberals? This was before Sessions was sacked, the Most Important Election of Our Lives, the synagogue bombing... The human brain just can't assimilate crisis after crisis. Who benefits from that?
Alfie Kohn

Donald Trump isn't a President. He's a motivational speaker for racists.
John Pavlovitz

From a friend — a billboard spotted outside of St Louis. I don't like using the word "heresy," but I think I'll make an exception in this case:


Diana Butler Bass

Which flows into the midterm elections:

8 in every 10 white Mississippi voters picked the person who said she’d “be in the front row” of a lynching. In 2018.
Samuel Sinyangwe

Another way of looking at it: in January, House Democrats will represent:
79% of all Asians
72% of all Latinos
66% of all African-Americans
66% of all Clinton voters
60% of all college grads
54% of all House seats
45% of all whites
39% of all Trump voters
20% of America's land area
Dave Wasserman @Redistrict

In 8 months, we:
Organized a 35,000-person march
Increased youth voter registration in Central Florida by 90%
Broke records for youth voter turnout in Central Florida in both the Primary and General Election
Passed an amendment to an appropriations bill that helped fund mental health
March For Our Lives Orlando

When he gutted Voting Rights Act John Roberts said voting discrimination no longer “pervasive” or “rampant.” GOP voter suppression in 2018 showed how wrong he was. We’re becoming pre-Voting Rights Act country, with separate & unequal voting laws
Ari Berman

Just for a comparative point, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was only 13 years old when most of the people currently trying to dunk on her lack of worldly intellect declared emphatically that Iraq had WMDs.
August J. Pollak

Voter suppression is as great an affront to the ideal of democracy as attacks on the free press. The only people who don't recognize that are the ones who don't recognize the humanity and citizenship of Black, Latinx and Native people.
BreeNewsome

About 60 million people turned out to vote for Democrats for the House this year. That is a **crazy** number. (Republicans got 45m votes in the 2010 wave.) And this was sort of missed. Why so many stories about Trump voters in truck stops and not so many about "the resistance"?
Nate Silver

Stunning new stat out of Ohio: We already knew that Republicans got 12 of Ohio’s 16 US House seats despite winning only 52% of total congressional vote. But get this: Republicans also managed to hold supermajorities in the Ohio legislature despite LOSING the total state legislature vote.
Alec MacGillis

A Minnesota first: There are now more Xiongs in the Minnesota House (Jay Xiong and Tou Xiong both elected this year) than there are Andersons (1), Johnsons (1), or Olsons (1).
Greta Kaul

Honestly the funniest 2018 result would be: Democrats win the majority based on suburbs after reporters spend two years canvassing rural diners
Dave Weigel

24 states had new voting restrictions in 2018
60 mil Americans aren't registered to vote
21 mil don't have gov't-issued photo ID
16 mil were purged from 2014-2016
51% didn't vote in 2018
These are voting problems we should be focusing on, not GOP lies about stolen elections
Ari Berman

The real JUSTICE LEAGUE: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib


laughsee

Has anyone commented on the fact that Donald Trump is actively whipping up hysteria over the Florida elections, to the point that crowds of his supporters are mobbing election offices, less than three weeks after one of his Florida supporters was arrested for a mail bombing campaign?
David Walsh

"I don’t know if it was designed to be voter suppression, but it smells like it." At polling stations, minorities are three times as likely to wait longer than 30 minutes and six times as likely to wait more than an hour to vote.
Pacific Standard

Crazy that Trump is talking more about Broward County now than when 17 people were shot and killed here.
David Hogg

"An electoral system designed from its inception to give undue weight to rural white men is giving undue weight to rural white men who, for whatever reason, value weapons at the expense of lives."
Hemant Mehta

THE HOUSE in 2019 (rough since some seats still to be finalized):
Democrats: 40% women
Republicans: 7% women
YIKES GOP!
Amy Siskind

"Why are Republicans so inclined to see themselves as the victims of shadowy conspiracies? One answer is that while they see themselves as representing the strong solid middle ground in American public opinion, the available evidence suggests that the opposite is true. And so it is not surprising that the GOP, despite holding the reins of power throughout the federal government, sees itself as so embattled and oppressed. Nor is it surprising that so many of its supporters are so eager to retreat to the comfort of paranoid fantasies."
Angus Johnston @studentactivism

1.6 million ex-offenders couldn't vote in Florida in 2018, including 500,000 African Americans. Rick Scott only restored voting rights to 3,000 people in 8 years. Whites 2x more likely to have rights restored vs blacks, Scott now leads Nelson by 16,000 votes
Ari Berman

It's such a weird thing the way the media reports on countless voter suppression schemes before election day but then treats questioning the results of the election as sour grapes.
Rschooley

How about this rule: if you are taking part on in an election, you don’t get to impact the counting. That goes for Brian Kemp and Rick Scott. The idea that Rick Scott is deploying police to Broward is outrageous. Intimidation tactics used decades ago alive and well in 2018.
Neera Tanden

Whoa. As people waited for hours & hours to vote all over the counties that were strongest for Stacey Abrams — an investigation found that over 1,500 fully functioning voting machines were locked up by the state & unused. This is voter suppression 101.
Shaun King

Y'all notice how corporate media immediately moved forward with the narrative that the "progressive stars" had lost and how that was indication that progressivism wasn't successful? How they completely overlooked how tight the races were and the rampant voter suppression and cheating?
Bree Newsome

You can't love this country yet attempt to suppress the right to vote. Voter suppression is anti-patriotic.
Ron Harris

I like Beto a lot but it's wild to me that all these women of color won tonight and people go right to talking about how presidential the white guy who lost is
Saladin Ahmed

Georgia isn’t a red state. In fact, none of the South is. We’ve been manipulated by the Southern Strategy, voter suppression and gerrymandering. But Abrams, Gillium and Beto showed us if we organize, register and build fusion coalition all year round, a moral agenda can come to the South.
Rev. Dr. Barber

Beto lost by 223k votes. There are 3 million unregistered voters of color in Texas because the state has the worst registration laws in country. The Beto campaign couldn’t register any new voters for fear of criminal prosecution.
Ari Berman

Gerrymandered in Ohio: “the Republicans won 75 percent of Ohio's congressional seats (12 of 16) with just 52 percent of the vote statewide in the races combined.”
Bakari Kitwana

Super important for Democrats to spend the next 10 years addressing state-based gerrymandering, voter suppression, felony disenfranchisement, etc... if they ever want to retake electoral power.
prisonculture

Senate popular vote:
Democrats: 40,558,262 (55.4%)
Republicans: 31,490,026 votes (43.0%)
Senate seats: Republicans +3
Mark Copelovitch

LARGE parts of the Democratic Party want that “snapback” without putting the REAL work in. Nah girl. This is a long game. I’m feeling like tonight we won. Tomorrow we keep building.
Rachel Zo

I just want everyone to remember that the House is so gerrymandered we thought it was lost to Democrats for decades
Alexis Goldstein

NYT is projecting Democrats win a ~9% margin in the House popular vote. The last time we saw a margin like that was 08, amidst a collapsing economy and a loathed war. Unemployment is 3.7% right now. America isn't at war. A margin this big is nuts — a pure repudiation of Trump.
Ezra Klein

It seems like a big deal that the three states that delivered Trump the presidency in '16 — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all elected Democratic governors and senators last night.
Brian Fallon

every single election day I look at twitter and see so many reports of failures — of machines to work, to show up, of long lines, of poll workers badly trained. And every day-after-election-day the stories are only of who won and lost.
Sarah Jaffe

Just stop trusting black women and relying on black women. Align with black women. Vote for black women.Y'all have work to do.
Dr Tyffani M Dent

now just imagine what an election without gerrymandering and voter suppression would look like!!
E. Alex Jung

Oh so 9 million more people voted for Democratic senators than GOPs, resulting in...[checks notes]...the GOP gaining three seats.
Mat Johnson

I swear Florida could be voting between ice cream and a kick to the head and the results would be 50.5%-49.5%.
Benjamin Park

The Colorado cake baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay couple now has a gay governor.
Reverend Jes Kast

Just hit me that the House Science Committee will, for the first time in nearly a decade, be led by someone who accepts mainstream climate science
Maddie Stone

If you voted for Ted Cruz or Rick Scott, you should have to put pictures of them in your children's bedrooms.
Matt Fernandez

In 7 states — Arizona, Arkansas, Alabama, Connecticut, Kentucky, Tennessee & Florida — laws prohibit people who owe any court debt from voting. That is profoundly undemocratic.
southerncenter

Half of the voting machines at my majority-black polling place were broken, I waited almost three hours to vote in a gym with no ventilation, and it was so hot and crowded a 12 year-old passed out.
Ashley C. Ford @iSmashFizzle

These elections always come down to convincing white voters that other people matter too, and this bit is getting real fucking stale.
TheLoveBel0w

Whatever happens tonight, the results suggest a country that is on a knife’s edge — basically 50-50 — on the acceptability of racism, nativism, demagogy, lies, chauvinism, abuse of power, cruelty, and corruption.
Anand Giridharadas

what is so wild about this is how [Georgia Secretary of State and candidate for governor] Kemp clearly DOES NOT CARE if the public believes he stole the election. it’s just pure contempt for the idea that he must abide by the rules
jbouie

In the first nine months of his presidency, President Trump made 1,318 false or misleading claims, an average of five a day. But in the seven weeks leading up the midterm elections, the president made 1,419 false or misleading claims— an average of 30 a day
Rachel Stassen-Berger

In organizing our communities for liberation, at what point do we teach on the concept of voting and how to act as a political bloc? I don't see how we wait until the current system collapses to introduce folks to voting if there's interest in having a post-revolution democracy. What concerns me most about folks saying "voting doesn't solve anything" is that it misunderstands what the function of voting is. Voting is about choosing or changing leadership, making decisions on budget matters, referendums, etc. It's 1 form of participation in a democracy. Even on the day that we achieve an actual functioning democracy in this world, voting will not be a "solution". Organizing & protest will (& should) still be occurring in healthy democracy. I'm concerned about our ability to achieve it without understanding the building blocks.
Bree Newsome

...Which connects with immigration and the situation at the southern border (including the recdent tear-gassing of women and children):

You should be asking: why are 1000s of people waiting on border for asylum, anyway? The answer: months ago, US ports from CA to TX started routinely limiting legal asylum entries. There’s no official appointment system. Just people in limbo.
Dara Lind

If you wondered how Nazis killed millions of Jews, read the comments to any report about the migrant children we are tear gassing at the border. There is no limit to the hate that is spewed by comfortable Americans against people who they would literally never encounter.
MurphyCartoons

The Democratic position on funding the wall should be that Democrats oppose funding the wall. And that the president will have to secure funding from Mexico, as promised, if he would like it to be completed.
Osita Nwanevu

A divide I see on my feeds: white people saying, “This is not America! This is un-American!” and people of color saying, “This is the America we’ve always known.” We agree this isn’t the America many of us want. But we can’t get there without acknowledging what has been and what still is.
Jeff Chu

if a group of 5000 asylum seekers came twice a year and we let every single one of them in it would take roughly 325 years for them to make up 1% of the american population. so maybe stop calling it a mass migration
ManInTheHoody

They're testing the public's tolerance for violence against innocent people fleeing for their lives. You think the right doesn't have a climate change policy? This is literally their climate change policy.
ramsincanon

“Migration is the joker in the globalization pack.” —The Late, Great Stuart Hall.
BlackLikeWho

The issue isn’t whether this latest atrocity is representative of the U.S. or not. History says it is. The issue is that for so many Americans there is no aspiration or pretense to be a decent nation. There is a wholesale embrace of ugliness and hatefulness.
Imani Perry

What disturbs me most is that Trump and his ilk have so successfully dehumanized these folks that images of children being tear gassed and shot at with rubber bullets will galvanize Trump's base. Check the mentions of any news outlet tweeting them if you think I'm wrong.
Melissa Ryan

Saying “the early settlers were illegal immigrants” is harmful. They were not immigrants, they were colonizers. There’s a difference. Colonizers came here to take over the land and kill us. Immigrants are just trying to live a better life.
dearnonnatives

Trump spent $72 million of taxpayer money for his pre-midterm political stunt of sending troops to the border to pretend like they were going to stop immigrants from coming in. The Trump campaign and the @GOP should be required to reimburse that money to the federal Treasury.
Keith Boykin

All those migrant children who were taken from their families during the Trump administration's short-lived family separation policy? The program cost $80 million and counting. That's $30,000 a child.
Kim Murphy

New Monmouth poll: "A majority of Republicans (54%) see the caravan as a major threat, but they are joined by only 28% of independents and 11% of Democrats. Regionally, residents of the four states (California/Arizona/New Mexico/Texas) that share a border with Mexico are least likely to be worried..."
Benjy Sarlin

Make no mistake, the discrepancy between resources spent supposedly protecting against a caravan thousands of miles from the border as compared with the neglect of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria is racism as policy.
Lauren Duca

"Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight," Donald Trump said today:


Harold Itzkowitz

Sometimes I think about America's sedentary, heart-diseased, fast-food gobbling, car-addicted suburbanites, sitting watching TV in their suburban castles, casually passing judgment on refugees who have walked 1000s of miles to escape oppression, and ... well, it makes me mad. These are people who proclaim their victimhood when Starbucks fails to include sufficient Christmas kitsch on its cups. But these refugees just want handouts, apparently.
David Roberts

There are more criminals in the Trump administration than there are in any migrant caravan coming from Central America
laloalcaraz

Trump keeps saying, as he did yesterday, that only "3%" of people released for an asylum hearing actually show up for court. His Justice Department says it was 89% last year, 91% in 2016, 93% in 2015, 94% in 2014.
Daniel Dale

As always, there were many tweets about racism, white supremacy, and police killing black people:

The Second Amendment and American gun ownership is so tied to an idealized white manhood that there is no world in which black Americans and others outside of that ideal can claim its full protections and have them recognized by white society.
jbouie

We always talk about banks and redlining. What we don't talk about as much is average white homebuyers having widely accepted racist ideas about neighborhoods and how that impacts housing prices for people of color and their family wealth.
Angie Schmitt

A 4th Ferguson protestor, Bassem Masri, has died. Two protestors were murdered in 2014 (unsolved) and a third death was ruled a suicide (although his family is doubtful). Circumstances for Masri’s death have yet to be released.
Jenn Taylor-Skinner

The American Dream has always been racially framed - while Europeans were “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” Brown people are “illegal” and “taking away jobs” for doing precisely the same thing.
Khaled Beydoun

White supremacy is schools citing free speech when kids praise Nazism but threaten punishment when kids condemn racism.
MuslimIQ

There are studies that show nothing - not good schools, safe neighborhoods, appreciating home values... nothing - will make white people want to be in spaces where the black ratio is more than 1 in 7. After 15% is reached, white flight begins from schools and neighborhoods.
DrTedJ

Dear Black People: In 2015, 38 Unarmed Black folks we’re killed by police. Most victims were adults. That same year, 368 Black children were killed by their parents or caretakers. But y’all keep telling me we gotta beat Black kids to keep them from being killed by cops.
Stacey Patton

in politics, we use phrases like "urban/rural divide" or gawk at why minorities are so clustered in cities. but isn't what we're really talking about segregation? encouraged and entrenched through decades of bipartisan public policy
AsteadWesley

Conservative: the government is bad. Also conservatives: Government should be strong and enforce rules and norms that advance the cause of White Civilization
freedarko

57.9% of Republicans think that people should be free to express their opinions in the workplace... AND that athletes should not be allowed to sit or kneel during the national anthem.
Steve Stewart-Williams

The discomfort at using the phrase “white people” or acknowledging that white people are white is symptomatic of the tendency to act like white people are neutral bodies devoid of race.
wikipedia brown @eveewing

friendly reminder:
the word “Caucasian” is a holdover from the era of race pseudo-“science” when folks were out here measuring brains with calipers. It goes with its jacked up siblings, “Mongoloid” and “Negroid.” “White people” is a fine term to describe White people.
wikipedia brown @eveewing

When someone says "it doesn't matter if you're white, black, green yellow or purple" it's a red flag. Ain't nobody green or purple. Are black people aliens lol. It's so weirdly dismissive and not as progressive as you think
BeeBabs

A 2013 study by the @UrbanInstitute that examined FBI crime data concluded that in states with “Stand Your Ground” laws, a white shooter is 350% more likely to have their homicide ruled “justified” when the victim is black.
ACLU of Ohio

“I will become prejudiced because you keep talking about race” is literally the least convincing thing you could say when someone calls you out for being racist. Or, perhaps second only to “some of my best friends are Black.”
Phillip Atiba Goff

There is no middle ground between birtherism and tolerance. There is no compromise between Trump’s autodestructive grifting and the rule of law. You can’t heal the “division” between a lie and the truth.
Jonathan M. Katz

"I see that you're criticising me for being a white supremacist."
"Yes."
"Have you ever considered that I am only advocating taking away your rights because you tried to get rights?"
"That... that it is exactly what we are criticizing, yes."
EmilyGorcenski

Using casually racist aphorisms without realizing you're doing it doesn't mean you're an accidental racist it means you're a comfortable one.
feminist next door @emrazz

Compromise with racists = racism
Compromise with sexists = sexism
Compromise is not a universal good
Paul Thomas

You know what happened in the immediate aftermath of World War I? Germany's colonial possessions in Tanzania, Namibia, Togo and Papua New Guinea were immediately taken over and divided between France and Britain. You know why? Because THE WAR WASN'T ABOUT FREEDOM! World War I and World War II were fought by Imperialist powers over who gets to colonize what part of the world. America was segregated during both. Britain was starving Bengalis to death during both. France was murdering ACTUAL freedom fighters in North Africa during both.
JShahryar

I think it's obvious, even from the phrase "Civilized Tribes,” that indigenous people were adopting and adapting to harmful, hegemonic, white supremacist, colonial, capitalist conventions. under a situation of oppression and genocidal removal.
Crystal Marie Fleming @alwaystheself

Not that arguing with bigots is a waste of time. You won't convince them, but in case life delivers the necessary punch, you can put their belief system under more pressure so it will crack more easily.
Russell Neches

A study examining mass shooting news stories published between 2008 and 2016 revealed that 80 percent of stories with the term “mental illness” concerned white perpetrators. In contrast, 53 percent of stories with the word “thug” were about black shooters.
Pacific Standard

like. we spend every election cycle begging white people to not be the supremacist settlers this nation raises to be and rewards them for being, and simultaneously denigrating Black folks for not saving the country from said settlers. that seems like a good strategy to y'all?
so_treu

This country would be a lot better off if we let people of color run things for a while.
Alan Mills

Make no mistake. The fact that white supremacist groups have members on the inside of countless police departments and in legislatures absolutely facilitates their ability to operate with minimal consequence. White America believes so deeply in whiteness that the implication that it is, itself, a vector for terrorism is not a narrative it is willing to accept. Which is why the "mystery" of angry, abusive white mass murderers can never be solved. The most logical answer is off limits.
absurdistwords

Instead of lecturing the descendants of slaves about how they need to vote because black folks fought, bled and died, why don't y'all spend more energy blasting white descendants upholding their ancestor's racist voter suppression tactics.
Stacey Patton

Nobody’s more creative than a white editor trying to avoid the word racist:


ReeAmilcarScott

Black People: Stop hitting your kids. The fewer children we send into the world without psychological trauma and pent up rage they've accumulated from each whupping, the better we’ll be able to love and treat each other as a people. And the more equipped we'll be to resist racism!
Stacey Patton

Sometimes i think white people use the "I didn't intend to be racist" to really mean "I was hoping my racism would have no consequences"
surlybassey

White nationalist affiliations confirm serious bias, prejudice and pre-disposition towards acts of hatred and violence against people of color and should summarily disqualify one from any law enforcement job today!
wrightlaw1977

... and some on sexism and misogyny:

Woman: “I experience this problematic thing regularly and as a result I am disadvantaged.”
Man: “I experienced something similar to that problematic thing one time therefore you are not.”
feminist next door @emrazz

I just want to make sure I understand Twitter this week. It’s Gillibrand’s fault that Al Franken resigned and its Hillary’s fault that Trump wasn’t taken down by Epstein because she stayed with Bill? So women are wrong for standing by men and for speaking up against men?
QueenMab87

It's actually really crazy that women are only fertile for about 6 days every month and for only half our lives. Men are fertile every single day of the year and almost the entirety of their lives, yet the burden of child prevention is placed on us.
AdakuUfere

I just saw a commercial for a service that lets men get Viagra “discreetly” by mail without ever speaking to a doctor or pharmacist, but sure, makes total sense that many women need to get birth control 1 month at a time and a pharmacist can deny it if they don’t approve.
Celeste Ng

If they send girls home from school for wearing shirts that are too short they can surely expel boys for being Nazis.
DrJenGunter (responding to the Baraboo, Wis., Nazi salute photo)

If you’re a man who treats women as equals spend your time educating the men who don’t rather than yelling at me for not giving you enough recognition.
feminist next door @emrazz

Telling women you don’t know to smile is a micro aggression. You want us to be happy to be in your presence but guess what? We’re not.
whoistheELLE
Women spend more time ‘scanning’ pavements for obstacles than men; they’re more obedient to ‘rules’ (less likely to cross lines); and less likely to cross at red lights. Males walk faster, with more power and their course is less likely to be ‘perturbed’ by pedestrians/traffic. Male walkers have to wait at crossings for traffic to stop for much shorter times than women. Male pedestrians engage in far more risk-taking behavior (including using mobile phones while walking) and are TWICE as likely to die in collision with vehicles than women.
Rachel Hewitt

Women in New York City spend an average $26 to $50 extra on transportation per month for safety reasons, and up to $100 each month if they are their family’s main caregiver — as much as $1,200 more than men each year.
Regina Clewlow

Every man who chants “lock her up” has his own personal Hillary in mind.
feminist next door @emrazz

White men: we don’t yell at you about your votes because we don’t believe you’ll ever do anything. You’re welcome to prove us wrong. You’re welcome to organize. Or even just join us in our efforts. You’re welcome to dismantle racism and patriarchy.
Audrey Wauchope Lieberstein

In the fight against white male patriarchal power, white women are the weakest link.
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

Still hung up on how a few instances of false accusation mean false accusations are common but hundreds of thousands of rapes don’t mean rape is common.
feminist next door @emrazz

I’m in full rejection of the term “working mom.” 1. All mothers work. 2. Never heard of a “working dad.”
June Diane Raphael

The media and all its problems:

“Describing Trump and others in language that uses ‘race’ as a neutral concept... suggests that race can possess both positive and negative valences. This masks that... phrases described as ‘racially tinged’ always involve assertions of race hierarchy.”
Nelson Flores

One big reason so many Americans feel fine shrugging off the colossal corruption and rampant crime in this White House is that major media and the power class shrug it off too. Remembering things for more than six hours and drawing obvious conclusions has become a radical act.
Jonathan M. Katz

If you are unsure how Trump maintains the support of ~40% of the American people, consider he is supported by two enormous media companies that operate as state propaganda outlets
Judd Legum

What if...hear me out...the major media outlets worried as much about understanding politics from the perspective of Black Americans as they do of, say, white working class Americans? And what if we built models of politics from that perspective?
Corrine McConnaughy

“In just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” Looking forward to relentless coverage of the Ivanka Trump scandal, since it's CLEARLY so disqualifying.
Brian Tyler Cohen

One of the most powerful media asymmetries is that anti-abortion activists harass abortion providers daily (both at their homes and their jobs) bomb clinics and literally assassinate doctors to no comment while even the mildest left protest is treated in apocalyptic terms.
SeanMcElwee

Tucker Carlson thought it was monstrous that activists chanted outside his home last night. Two weeks ago he was laughing about George Soros being mailed a pipe bomb.
Alex Morash

“Only those safe from fascism and its practices are likely to think that there might be a benefit in exchanging ideas with fascists.”
Broderick Greer

Editors and producers remain stymied by how to respond when political leaders seek to manipulate them in order to focus the public’s attention on the issues of their choice. There's no caravan crisis. But I think there is a journalistic one.
Matthew Gertz

When Obama gave a careful speech about manufacturing policy, it didn't get live coverage. If Trump promises he's going make good TV by lying about the caravan and slandering immigrants, CNN goes live. "Newsworthy" has to mean more than this.
Ezra Klein

Climate change and livable cities:

This is a fossil fuel subsidy:


Angie Schmitt

People will defend throwing people in jail for skirting a $2.50 transit fare. Same folks think it's outrageous to charge drivers $1.75 for a 15 mile trip on a gazillion-dollar publicly funded highway.
Angie Schmitt

“Sharrows” — those deceitful little painted arrows on the street that try to fool cyclists into thinking they are somewhat safe — need to be put to rest. When they appear on cycling maps, they lure cyclists into traffic.


Jennifer Keesmaat

The last and most sacred taboo in America will be charging drivers for literally anything ever. We can't address this climate crisis without addressing this part of our culture.
Angie Schmitt

MN should raise the gas tax and lower/abolish the state-wide floor on speed limits - first thing in the new session.
mikesonn

This is an important piece of the 2040 plan we never talk about. How can housing accommodate an aging population? Could it include units where younger people could help older people? More communal spaces? What about more multi-generational housing to accommodate a growing number of immigrant families, too? When we talk about “more neighbors,” these are our neighbors.
mollypriesmeyer

Here's one to keep for the truth and reconciliation hearings, if we ever get that far:


Pat Thompson @pattho

One of the ongoing stories of our time is people slowly waking up to the fact that the hippies were right about climate change and desperately seeking ways to acknowledge climate change while still bashing the hippies.
David Roberts

“The area of parking per car in the United States is thus larger than the area of housing per human.”
Ethan Fawley

I truly think older generations have no idea how deeply angry my generation is about their unwillingness to confront climate change. We're looking at the planet burning and our leaders can barely acknowledge that the problem exists much less do anything to avert disaster.
lewismd13

The overbuild of surface parking in cities across NA shouldn't surprise us. Most cities have at least 4 per car: at home, work, at a place of worship and at least one mall. Imagine if we took housing people as seriously as we take providing space for cars.
Jennifer Keesmaat

When parking is eliminated and room for pedestrians is increased, businesses do *better* ... is a lesson the business community refuses to learn, no matter how many times it's illustrated.
David Roberts

Bicycle-powered snowplows were a standard feature in Danish cities back in the day. Either for roads or clearing frozen lakes for skating. #wintercycling


copenhagenize
Scientists have again landed a spacecraft on a proverbial dime on a planet 40 million miles away that rotates at 241 metres per second. Think I'm gonna trust them on this climate change stuff.
Scott Linnen

Climate denial will be defeated by political force. Or not. It will not be changed through argument or evidence. I realize this is very very difficult for people who care about evidence to internalize, but...it's 2018. Pretty clear at this point what's going on. People, I promise you, every second spent responding to the dumbass climate-denial arguments floating around today is a second wasted. They are not offered in good faith. They are not offered in good faith. They are not offered in good faith. They are not offered in good faith.
David Roberts

The secret about climate change deniers is that it has never been about not believing in global warming; it’s about not wanting to act.
SydneyAzari

We already have tiny houses, they are called apartments and condos and row house and duplexes and fourplexes. They take up far less land per home than tiny houses...which, according to the cool pics of them, need at least 5 acres of wilderness around them for each one.
kar nels

The problem is that when Republicans start talking climate — even "moderate" Republicans like [Ben] Sasse — it quickly becomes clear that everything they know about the climate movement and climate politics they gleaned from Fox.
David Roberts

The argument that scientists fabricate findings that are hostile to the interests of the wealthiest corporations in the world *for the money* should be mocked viciously every time it is offered. And it’s offered a lot.
Seth Masket

Remember that [the Minneapolis 2040 plan] started off as fourplexes everywhere and was already scaled down [to triplexes]. This is what happens when you compromise with the un-appeasable. Don't give in before the discussion even happens because they'll keep demanding more concessions.
mikesonn

—We gotta do something about climate change, right now!
—Like giving up our cars?
—Well, let's not get crazy.
The conversation hasn't advanced since this '90s Tom Toles cartoon. (NASA says cars/trucks now leading net producers of global warming emissions):


Taras Grescoe
Fossil fuels are cheap the way fast food is cheap — i.e., cheap to the extent you ignore the massive public health crisis they are causing.
David Roberts

"Design decorates the acceleration toward catastrophe." –Neville Brody and Stuart Ewen
Pat Thompson @pattho

The problem with presenting electric cars as a solution is it still centers transportation by car, which is hostile to actual green forms of transport and pleasant cities.
Adam Miller @ajm6792

There is no such thing as "acting too hastily" on cutting climate emissions.
Alex Steffen

The thing about cars is, they are really good at moving us away from each other, out alone into space. They are really bad at bringing people together, into crowded areas. They are like this tool of social isolation.
Angie Schmitt

Reporting on a scientifically defined issue while ignoring the science and its direct conclusions by acting as if there were two sides to the debate and each deserves positive coverage is, in large part, how we got into this planetary crisis in the first place.
Alex Steffen

To those inconvenienced by the climate-change roadblocks in London, we’ve tried all other options. The scientists have yelled at us for decades. Civilised negotiations with governments. Greening capitalism. Not enough. Sorry but we have no other option. #ExtinctionRebellion
Hannah Scott

Your periodic reminder of the news story of the millennium: We have left the 10,000-year climate "safe zone" that gave rise to human civilization:


Eric Holthaus

Interesting how again and again this idea that a street clogged with cars is somehow a better street pervades. Cars don’t buy stuff, seek entertainment or food - people do.
Jennifer Keesmaat

It is weird as hell that zoning ordinances evolved in such a way as to banish corner groceries from residential development, as if the law can't discern a fruit stand from a factory
WDavidWork

"What 70 million 85-year-olds need...won't be highways — it will be safe sidewalks, better transit and reconfiguring our cities so that older people will be close to doctors and shopping and things they need without having to drive there."
Mary Morse Marti

Approximately $4.54 per hour of a person making minimum wage in Dallas ($7.25/hr) goes to owning and operating a car to get to that job.
patrick kennedy @WalkableDFW

This is what the opposite of climate action looks like.
William Lindeke (responding to the French protest about high gas prices)

More midblock crossings like this:


Dena Driscoll @bikemamadelphia

can u imagine how different and good the cities would feel if 2.5 million people lived in Minneapolis and Saint Paul proper and only 700k in the suburbs instead of the inverse?
lieholepiehole

In a rational world the California wildfires would galvanize the nation against climate change like 9/11 galvanized us against imaginary terrorists hiding behind trees.
Leighton Woodhouse

Breathing the air in San Francisco today is the equivalent of smoking 11.5 cigarettes. And in Paradise, it's closer to 22 cigarettes. #CampFire
Lizzie Johnson

About one-eighth of the number of housing units the entire state of California normally produces in a whole year burned to the ground this week.
Kim-Mai Cutler

Designing for biking and walking has an estimated return on investment of $11.80 for each $1 invested.
Brent Toderian

When anyone tells you, “we need cars because how else will we get around in winter,” remember that cars are *the worst* way to travel in winter.
Alex Schieferdecker

More people, homes, and destinations closer together is good for walkability. Triplexes used to be legal! The single family zoning experiment has failed!
Wedge LIVE!™

Oxford researchers looked at how much the world would need to tax meat to account for its health impacts. They found that prices for processed meat would have to increase by 25% and prices for red meat by 4% on average
Eliza Barclay

Many many people have made this point, but I find myself thinking tonight about how head-snappingly fast the right is going to go from "climate change is a liberal hoax" to "we need authoritarian solutions to climate change *now*" The amount of social disruption is going to be enormous. The caravan rhetoric was just a little itty-bitty taste of what's coming. Brute fact is this: calling for an immediate crash plan to cut US carbon emissions by half by 2030 is a “radical” position that is also the consensus position of the world’s climate scientists as reflected in latest IPCC report.
Chris Hayes

My life as an architect(ural designer) means growing increasingly frustrated that large houses can exist for the rich, but a triplex is illegal because of "parking" or "resource burdens" or "overcrowding." Why can't we instead talk about how the rich are burdening us??
Nullthread

An important, difficult, and badly neglected clean-energy problem: how to decarbonize a home heating sector running mostly on natural gas.


David Roberts

More than half of adults between the ages of 22 and 37 say a car is not worth the money spent on maintenance, and that they would rather be doing something other than driving.
Chicago Tribune

Having the Senate the way it is - overwhelmingly rural - is going to make it hard for us to ever have an infrastructure bill that provides what we really need: Alternatives to driving in our most congested metros.
Angie Schmitt

replacing a single family luxury home with a fourplex has a bigger climate impact than solar panels.
tdfischer_

cars are essentially the privatization of public space. they take what would be a shared public space (the street) and fill it with private, rolling living rooms, both stored and in use.
Peter Krupa

Car dependency is the opposite of freedom.
Brent Toderian

Climate change hurts people. The faster we recognize that, and make decisions based upon that recognition, the better.
Tessa Hill

Failing bridges aren't really the big threat to American travelers. They just make sort of a dramatic/uncontroversial example of an infrastructure "problem." How many pedestrians would have to die for it to rank as a bigger infrastructure problem than some manufactured bridge crisis that is killing zero people a year? Imagine for a second, 6,000 Americans were being killed a year by failing bridges. 6,000 pedestrians are dying every year because our infrastructure fails them. But every time we talk about infrastructure it's just blah blah what are we gonna do about our scary bridges
Angie Schmitt

Compassionate cities build affordable multi-family housing and safe environments for pedestrians.
Angie Schmitt

I used to want tomorrow's flying cars and jetpacks. Now all I want is yesterday's #climate.
Peter Gleick

Pretty remarkable fact: if you drove the 1,000 miles from Daytona Beach to NYC in an electric vehicle powered *entirely by coal*, it would still produce less CO2 than the same trip in a gasoline vehicle:


David Roberts

"Tell your fire chief this — more children die from fast roads than any other cause after infancy." –Chuck Marohn.… design your trucks to fit your city, instead of designing your city to fit your trucks.
Brent Toderian

Moms online are always lamenting "what happened to the village?" They're all a car ride away
Angie Schmitt

The way people shrug their shoulders at death caused by cars but go into a moral panic over a near miss with an e-scooter is the purest expression of status quo bias
Francis McRae

Want people to take public transit? Invest in frequent, fast, direct service. And put density around it.
Brent Toderian

Education:

I think it’s pretty clear that Teach for America is NOT set up for the benefit of black/brown/low-income students. It is set up to benefit the privileged young college graduates who need a virtue-signaling gig before they apply to law school.
CheesemonkeySF

This is all that I will say about Teach for America, and this is what I said directly to them at their conference: If they really cared about black/ brown/low-income kids they would send their teachers into white wealthy schools to free up more veteran teachers for the kids who need them most.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

Have you noticed that the Right and Conservatives complain about universities being liberal and having "safe spaces" by screaming that conservative students do not have safe spaces in those universities?
Paul Thomas

Americans love treating good school districts as if they're a neutral measure of value rather than a reliable proxy for racial segregation.
ApocalypticaNow

Australian parenting author Louise Porter: “Obedience is a fine aim for household pets, but we don’t expect pets to grow up and leave home.”
Alfie Kohn

I have observed that everyone who argues that schools are a private commodity — not a public service — are paid to say so. It’s their job. A society in which everything is privatized benefits the richest, who don’t want to pay taxes for a strong public sector.
Diane Ravitch

This month, there were a lot of tweets related to income inequality and structural changes to our economy:

One of the weirdest things about the human race is how the rich hate the poor so much more than the poor hate the rich.
Sandra Newman

there's no way to earn a billion dollars. you can HAVE a billion dollars but you sure as hell didn't earn it
Kath Barbadoro

Billionaires Made So Much Money Last Year They Could End Extreme Poverty Seven Times
Josh Fox

The American Dream is a fantasy that distracts us from the American Machine. The American Machine? It’s the conveyer belt that leads most kids, especially from neighborhoods like mine or JD Vance‘s [author of Hillbilly Elegy], from nothing to nowhere, while picking off the chosen few, like me.
Casey Gerald

[Mike Bloomberg’s donation to Johns Hopkins] is generous. But is it bold? Will it change the system, or just create more exceptions to the rule? If Bloomberg got his rich friends to surrender the carried-interest loophole and it was spent on education, that‘d raise 10 times the value of this one-time gift — per year.
Anand Giridharadas

My favorite part is when baby boomers, whose prosperity as a generation is largely owed to government programs that benefited their parents, offer their thoughts on why socialist reforms are a bridge too far for the generations who will never collect a social security check
BreeNewsome

Maybe the trust-busters of the last Gilded Age had it right? Just a thought.
Chris Hayes

Hey Siri what's neoliberalism? Neoliberalism is the world's most valuable company getting a tax break from a state that cannot afford to fix its subways or fight hunger, while the company's founder gives a sliver of money away and is described by the media as a "philanthropist."
Anand Giridharadas

We don't need the private sector leading the solution of public problems. We just need them to stop causing them.
1. Don't avoid taxes.
2. Don't stiff workers.
3. Don't befoul the environment.
4. Don't lobby against the public good.
5. Don't monopolize.
Anand Giridharadas

Each year, local governments pay ~$90 billion for companies to move factories and offices (like Amazon HQ2) away from other US cities. More than Washington spends on education or infrastructure. It's a national absurdity that requires a national solution.
Derek Thompson

If everyone earning below a living wage refused to work tomorrow, the entire system would come to a stand still. They have the power to do that, but it requires being organized to exercise that power. It's that simple and that complicated at the same time.
Bree Newsome

America’s opioid epidemic: emblem of a capitalist system. One family becomes billionaires as hundreds of thousands become addicts, die by overdose, and traumatize their families. What sort of “family values” are at work here? #HowCapitalismWorks
Richard D. Wolff

Richest American families:

Kochs
1982: $1.4 billion
2018: $107 billion
Increase: +7,642%

Mars
1982: $2.63 billion
2018: $72 billion
Increase: +2,737%

Waltons
1982: $1.81 billion
2018: $169.7 billion
Increase: +9,375%

Median U.S. household wealth, from 1982 to 2018, is down 3%.
philosophrob

The only thing better than Ocasio's honesty about her finances would be a Congress full of members who couldn't afford rent without being paid. A Congress resembling the nation. You know what Ocasio means to me? Less an ideology than a glimpse of what it looks like when ordinary people, not plutocrats, lead the charge to "change the world." When the rich run change, they defang it. We must change whom we task to make change.
Anand Giridharadas

Fox keeps cracking jokes about @Ocasio2018 struggling to pay rent. It’s telling that conservative media expects politicians to be rich. It’s telling that the normal struggle to find affordable housing is a joke to the pundits at Fox.
nikki mccann ramírez

Veterans of earlier wars had higher homeowner rates and fewer housing affordability struggles than non-vets. Now that's flipped: Vets post 9/11 are the first and only generation of vets to struggle more to afford housing than the general population
Mike Rosenberg

Economics textbooks teach that markets allocate scarce goods to those who pay the most for them. You know, like selling scarce milk at high prices to rich people with pets rather than poor people with children. Who could possibly question that? #HowCapitalismWorks
Richard D. Wolff

For Americans to have a free choice between capitalism and socialism, those options would have to be put up for a vote. The leaders of both major parties have long agreed not to do that. No wonder capitalists fund them. #HowCapitalismWorks
Richard D. Wolff

The essence of neoliberalism is to blame individuals for structural problems. The blame is funded by those who cause the structural problems.
GeorgeMonbiot

Inequality erodes human community. Example: US airline fees for bags, where you sit, when you board, legroom, food, drink, waiting lounge, first & business class, etc. Separation, ranking, exclusion in so many little ways. Bitter explosions build from such discrimination systems.
Richard D. Wolff

And guns were discussed enough to rise out of the miscellaneous listing:

Ohio lawmakers considering a bill to allow the death penalty for women who have abortions AND a Stand Your Ground bill, which would encourage armed vigilantism and put Black American lives in particular at-risk. We see what pro-life means to you.
Shannon Watts

Card handed to staffer of NRA stooge Paul Ryan by student lobbyist: "If 1st amendment won't let you yell 'fire' into a movie theater, 2nd shouldn't allow you to shoot so easily into a crowded theater."
Shadow Cabinet

I'm confused by folks who imagine US empire can be overcome with guns. That's delusional to me. Maybe 150 yrs ago. Not in the nuclear age. You can arm yourself for self-defense, but it's more likely the empire collapses under its own weight than that it's defeated by armed resistance
Bree Newsome
Imagine dying of domestic violence and the headline reads "Police officer, gunman and 2 others dead."
Stephanie Kollmann

Black kids raised in the inner cities of America, have seen the worst of things, including gun violence. They don’t grow up to be mass shooters and serial killers. No one treats us for PTSD. No one cares.
Omethius_Slime

Haven’t seen a single NRA shirt while out canvassing this year... Haven’t seen a single picture of an NRA member-led phone bank or house party. But, then again, we rarely see them in statehouses either. Just one lonely NRA lobbyist with a checkbook.
Shannon Watts

In two days it will be the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. And my synagogue just announced it will be holding active shooter training. Let that sink in.
Jennifer Mendelsohn @CleverTitleTK

Health care and public health, including the recent decline in life expectancy due to the suicide and overdose rates:

Hey, I was just wondering, not to cause, any ripples or anything, but how do we nationalize the insulin industry? Asking for around 30 million friends.
John Rogers

Why do 25 percent tariffs on steel get so much more media attention than 2500 percent tariffs on prescription drugs (patent protections)? In addition to larger tariffs, the prescription drug industry is an order of magnitude larger. I actually don't want to see the government give away patents (food stamps for drug companies) at all. Pay for the research and put the patents in the public domain. It's simple enough even Donald Trump could understand it.
Dean Baker

Worldwide the suicide rate is down by 29% since 2000. In America it's up by 18%
The Economist

Why is it that when the CDC says to throw out your romaine lettuce everyone takes it as gospel yet when the same agency tells you vaccines save lives they’re part of the Illuminati.
NewEng_DadLife

My brother died from depression. He also frequently exercised, had supportive friends/family, was successful in school and in work. He had goals that he was constantly reaching- he still killed himself. People who are depressed are not weak minded- they are sick. Understand this.
Maddierawrk

And a really short group rounding out the best of the rest:

Shipwreck taken over by nature:


Nature Is Weird

Your occasional reminder that most grammar rules in English were established by Victorian-era busybodies looking to cash in on the status-anxious, so just strive for clarity in your writing and speaking and you'll probably be fine.
John Scalzi

On a walk with my grandson a group of ladybugs lighted upon us. It was delightful and I realized I haven't given the mysterious world of insects enough heed. I vow to change that. Did you know a group of ladybugs is called a "loveliness?" How poetic. How true. How perfect.
Dan Rather

The reason so many libertarians turn into Nazis is that only certain people are deemed special enough to enjoy unchecked freedom, it’s a slippery slope
freedarko

Those who live/stay in places we're told to "get out" of know: Here PLACE runs deeper than almost any aspect of identity. Conservative Kansans cheer for me because they're proud I write from their home even if they disagree on ideas. Candidates who get this win.
Sarah Smarsh

There are NO good missionaries. Though wrapped in benevolent self-justification, every missionary movement — religious, political, ideological — starts with an arrogant presumption of superiority and ends with the destruction of somebody else’s land/culture/identity/family/life.
Daniel Heath Justice

Anyone else ever notice that whenever someone in politics begins a statement with a phrase like “the world is a dangerous place” they’re about to rationalize something unconscionable?
jelani cobb

Stop taking “constructive criticism” from someone who hasn’t constructed anything.
Lula Dualeh @iRunWithLula

"A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate ‘need’ for ‘stuff’.” —Caitlin Moran
Rob Hopkins

More attention to maintenance. More appreciation for maintainers. This is what we need in American infrastructure.
Angie Schmitt
My unpopular opinion is that most holidays, including Thanksgiving, are pretty stupid and we should just wipe the slate clean and start over again with new (and, per Europe's example, more numerous) holidays. Like, it's great for people to get together and sit down for a big meal, but there is no story to tell about Thanksgiving that is coherent or morally creditable. "We're celebrating the time indigenous populations fed their oppressors local delicacies before being genocided." WTF? Let's just replace it with a generic Take A Day Off And Have A Big Meal With Family Day. Nothing wrong with that.
David Roberts

Since 9/11, Americans have a 1 in 4,000,000,000 chance in dying in a terrorist attack. This includes Americans who died in 9/11 itself, and soldiers who died overseas. It’s impossible to justify our military spending designed to counter this. The threat is ridiculously inflated.
Patrick Fenelon

Happy Armistice Day! Never forget the reason you don’t learn a lot about WW1 in school is because there’s no way to make it sound valorous. It was a pointless, futile effort in which a small cabal of elites sacrificed an entire generation of humans to duke out petty rivalries.
rustypolished

Authoritarianism as a worldview always creates a certain kind of cognitive dissonance, a feeling of unreality, because it runs smack into the complex nature of the modern world:


David Neiwert

Applause is great but sometimes telling the truth doesn't elicit applause.
Bree Newsome

you can test any friendship by randomly asking without actual basis: notice anything different about me? and see what horrifying truths pop up
Aparna Nancherla

Worrying about Antifa's role in domestic terrorism is like going to Florida and worrying about avalanches. Not one domestic terrorist attack has been committed by Antifa and the largest demographic of domestic terrorists are right wing men.
Orvieto2016

Can we just be done with “shove down our throat?” It’s just not an apt description of whatever happened politically they you don’t agree with.
Adam Miller @ajm6792

Protests around Session’s firing to protect Mueller. Justice Ginsberg is hospitalized. Kemp steps down in Atlanta as faulty voting issues rise. Florida heads for a recount. White House stands by doctored video. And 12 are murdered by an ex-Marine. One day in the life of 2018.
Ava DuVernay

Life imitates art: "Preference for realistic art is a robust predictor of support for Brexit," according to new research by @UniofOxford
Pacific Standard

Pluto 1994 | 2018:


ZonePhysics

Conservatives believe that Dinesh D'Souza is their leading intellectual, the best they have to offer. And you know, they're probably right.
Paul Krugman

One big recurring pattern from my research on the world history of censorship is how often, in US cases, if there’s a happy ending it involves the ACLU.
Ada Palmer

every once in a while I stop and think about all the things Anonymous could be doing if they had actually existed as an elite decentralized cell of antifascist hackers rather than a handful of 4chan shitposters
S.I. Rosenbaum