Goodbye, Dr. Evermor

I am sorry to report that Tom Every, known as Dr. Evermor, has died at age 81. This article from Madison.com has the details of his life and a lot of great photos of the many sculptures at his Baraboo-area art park.


Dr. Evermor at the Forevertron in 2016 in a Wisconsin State Journal photo.

I posted about one of my visits back in 2009, but I try to stop in most of the times when I'm in nearby Wisconsin Dells for a few days, which my family tends to drag me to at least three or four times each decade. I'm not sure how many times I've been there, in fact.

I was there last summer and talked with Lady Eleanor. I hope there's a way to preserve the park in its place, but from what she said, it wasn't lined up at that time.

Little House on the Fence

While out on my socially distant walk today, I realized that one of my neighbors has a miniature of their house painted and detailed onto their fence:


I will have to revisit it once the plants are grown up to see if they have something in the windowboxes.

A Moment's Thought

It is so odd (unsatisfactory adjective) to be here at home, as stressful as it is to be working remotely to to save parts of my community that are falling apart because of the pandemic—but personally safe, I think—while reading about people dying. A state rep here, a 5-month-old baby there. Or John Prine intubated.

Meanwhile, Mafia Mulligan spins out of control and no one stops him.

That's Enough

For today, the first official day of Minnesota's stay home period, something to take all of our minds off of you-know-what and you-know who.


From Raiders of the Lost Tumblr. And there's lots more where that came from.

Death and the Fair

When I saw this combined headline from Minnesota Public Radio on Facebook, I laughed:


And it reminded me that a week ago, there were still funny jokes about the coronavirus, even though we all knew they were of the "whistling past the graveyard" variety. Now, I don't think I'm seeing jokes anymore, whistling or not.

One that I liked from back in early March was from writer Saladin Ahmed on Twitter:

the one good thing is now authors can't hold their chins pretentiously in photos

And then there was this thread about the intergenerational struggle and rewriting song lyrics about the pandemic... a very Twitter moment. It started with this:

Boomers: the Coronavirus is important, because it kills people over 60, let's close the borders

Millennials/Gen Z: It is called COVID-19 and its spread shows how connected the world is, how health is a social justice issue.

Gen X: Too ra loo ra too ra loo rye aye. COVID-EILEEN

Media critic Jenn Pozner got in the first set of "COVID Eileen" lyrics in response:

Covid 19
Oh, I swear I'm still clean
But in a moment
You'd ruin everything
Your germs I confess
Have me under duress
I will not touch
ANYTHING...

 But now, instead of jokes, it's all death and Mafia Mulligan lies and no fun at all on the way to the death State Fair.

Who can blame us.

Fauxcard

It's a sad day when you get a postcard, ostensibly from the federal government, and you can't tell if it's really from the government or if it's a campaign mailing for the president, pretending it's from the government:


President Trump's coronavirus guidelines? What?


I decided after examining it, particularly the back, and the .gov URL on the front, that it probably is from the government rather than the Trump campaign, but it's still a close thing.

Would President Obama have sent out a card with a headline like this? I don't believe he would have. It just sounds wrong in my ears. I don't think the guidelines belong to the president: It's just not how we talk about things in this country.

This national and international pandemic is an extreme situation, and mailing a postcard in the first place is pretty extreme (and kind of silly, since it's in just English... have these folks seen the outreach pieces created by the cities and school systems of our country?). Turning it into something that doubles as a campaign piece in an election year is unacceptable.

It could have said important guidelines or national guidelines or CDC guidelines. Do they not know that more than half the country will do the opposite of anything that has Trump's name on it, or do they want to kill us through reverse psychology? (Kidding. Of course, we are not that stupid.)

Did you get one of these postcards? Were you happy to see your taxes at work this way?

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If you don't already know the WAFA hat, here is the explanation.

Zeynep Tufekci on Masks

Looks like it's another COVID-19 day here at Daughter Number Three. Today, I want to share a long Twitter thread from techno-sociologist and writer-thinker Zeynep Tufekci, professor at University of North Carolina and writer for places like The Atlantic and the New York Times.

Her original post is full of links to articles illustrating its points, so visit it, but this gets the main points across:

For the New York Times, I wrote about why health authorities telling people they didn't need masks, and, besides they wouldn't wear them right, misfired and maybe even fueled hoarding. There will be many painful truths, and we need to learn to talk about them.

One big reason we don't have enough masks is that not only did China stop exporting them completely after COVID-19, China went and "bought up much of the rest of the world's supply." We should have ramped up domestic production in January but we didn't.

Sadly all those (well-meaning) posts from healthcare experts on how masks won't work for ordinary people because they won't wear them correctly likely encouraged hoarding even more. That was never a message that would work. No wonder I'm constantly seeing online ads for masks!

This is so obvious that it's painful. I know my piece will upset some, but learning to deal with painful truths is one of the skills we really need to learn, especially as there are so many of them exposed now.

Not forgetting that the Chinese government unleashed this pandemic in the first place with initial lies and cover-up: not racist. Claiming that universal mask wearing in Hong Kong and Taiwan (where it is mostly under control) was just superstition? Yeah.

Authorities say Don't wear a mask unless you're sick but DO wear a mask if you are. How are you supposed to know? Plus, see key paper: many have mild, undetected illnesses but are infecting others. Universal mask-wearing *would* have helped. Painful truth is we don't have enough.

Also, everyone who wrote...articles [claiming Asian mask-wearing was based on superstition], please rethink the harm of this message. The weird claim that people in Asian countries (where this pandemic is much more under control) with the deep experience of SARS wore masks out of superstition is part of the reason we are here.

New paper: Hong Kong has not only contained COVID-19 for the moment, they've drastically reduced flu rates with social distancing, hygiene and near universal mask wearing. (Note: their government is unpopular and wasn't on board. The people acted anyway.)

Taiwan also quickly ramped up domestic production of masks and had a sensible plan to curb hoarding while ensuring access. Along with other sensible and non-draconian measures, they also contained COVID-19 for the moment despite a lot of travel with China.

This is another important point. The "flatten-the-curve" urgency will eventually lead to "life must go on while we wait for vaccines/herd-immunity" and some form of mask-wearing may well be necessary for the transition.

Yep. That's why we can't just say "wear masks only if you're sick." Besides the fact that we're not testing enough so people can't know if they're sick, and that many can be infectious without any symptoms, it just creates a stigma around wearing a mask.

We are eventually going to have to release people from lockdown, and universal mask wearing (not N95, but surgical masks) is one way to do it with less harm. (She then links to a doctor's thread on asymptomatic people.)

Folks don't @ me BUT do it: arrange locally to allow people to donate N95 masks to hospitals, maybe exchange with surgical masks. Hospitals are out of N95s; CDC is telling them to use surgical masks instead; people are sitting on N95s but I'm hearing some willing to donate/exchange.

Washington Post published another masks are superstition oped, so I’ll just put this here instead. (Screen snapshots of skeptical WaPo tweets.) The tragedy of this kind of top-down misinformation is when we are done with the shortage, how are they going to tell everybody to mask up? As they have to if we are to get through this? (Folks don’t hoard and donate N95s now).

I'm going to say it outright. It's crystal clear that we'll have to adopt universal mask wearing as soon as we're over the shortage for healthcare workers. People still saying masks don't help, people won't know how to wear them, they can be harmful etc. are doing real harm.

Not admitting the obvious fuels mistrust and hoarding more. People aren’t idiots. And once the shortage is over, it’s going to be tough to switch to universal mask wearing, which is obviously a requirement to get through the next year.

Local friends, UNC hospitals need donations of N95 masks and other supplies. It's a travesty we can't protect our healthcare workers despite months of warning. Also, if you needed proof any mask is better than none: they will accept homemade masks as well.

The sooner we stop misinforming people about the need and efficacy of universal mask wearing, the better. Not telling the truth now will make it harder to pivot after the mask shortage. Also people can see through the bullshit and mistrust fuels hoarding.

This top-down mask misinformation will cause another crisis: other critical workers (stores, pharmacies, delivery) will stop showing up because lack of masks means they are at high risk. Yes, hospitals first but then everyone at the front line and then all of us need to mask up.

Great overview of the evidence on masks. Notes that review of SARS studies (same family of virus as the one causing COVID-19) found that "face masks were the most consistently effective intervention" (though keep washing your hands). Read it yourself!

Hong Kong is the densest city in the world. It has a tiny fraction of New York’s cases. Almost everyone wears masks though and they take the distancing seriously.

Future generations will be driven batty by the amount of concern over contamination from cardboard boxes—a tail risk: porous surface, exponential decay—compared with protecting the pathways to OUR RESPIRATORY SYSTEM WITH MASKS FOR A RESPIRATORY ILLNESS WITH ASYMPTOMATIC SPREAD.

Mask-wearing was part of the picture in the article I featured yesterday as well. I'm convinced.

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And a cartoon from the Star-Tribune's Steve Sack, about misinformation of a different kind:






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If you don't already know the WAFA hat, here is the explanation.

It's Not Density: Figure It Out and Bend the Curves

It has been another long day here in the salt mines of my house. Please read Bill Lindeke's new post, called It's not density that's driving America's pandemic. Like me, he's a fan of The Ghost Map (though I guess you could say he's a professional fan, being an urban geographer).

I adore this graph he used from ourworldindata.org:


Check out those parallel curves... Italy paralleling  the U.K. paralleling the recent U.S. paralleling the recent Germany, with Spain at an even more extreme upcurve.

And notice, of course, that these arcs are on a logarithmic scale, with each horizontal gray line representing a new order of magnitude: .01 to .1 to 1 to 10 to 100 (not shown but just out of sight). South Korea has flattened out at just a bit above 1 death per 19 million people (well, not quite flat, and not quite 1), but compare that to those other arcs that rocket up the scale, with Italy approaching 100 deaths very soon and Spain on track to catch them not long after.

And that's without testing much of anyone in the U.S. except rich people, whether in prison or the Senate.

Oh, and compare the effect of having a governor who pays attention to epidemiologists (Kentucky) and one who doesn't (Tennessee):


Which state would you rather live in?

Meanwhile, since Mafia Mulligan started spewing at his daily-rally-cum-press-briefings, his approval rating for handling of the COVID-19 crisis has somehow improved significantly.

My only hope for this country, when it comes to that fact, is that it was only one poll.

No Words

No words from me today, when my governor is in self-quarantine, my lieutenant governor's brother has died of COVID-19, and one my senators' husbands has been hospitalized with it.

Instead, I'm linking to this interview with Michael Osterholm, Minnesota's former state epidemiologist, who's internationally known in the field. When asked why it was so hard for governments and everyday people to take the risk of the coronavirus seriously, he answered like this:

...we tend to lack creative imagination unless it’s something about a video game or a movie. None of this was really that difficult. It was pretty straightforward right in front of us. People who knew health care knew that health care [had been] carved down to the bone for which there was no resiliency of any substantial nature, no excess capacity, no monies to stockpile large volumes of protective equipment.

[There has been] no real understanding of the vulnerability of this country outsourcing all of its drug supply manufacturing to places like China. And when you don’t understand all that, or elect to neglect it, it’s easy to say another day went by and nothing happened.

I was asked often, what’s the chance of this really happening? I would always reply back, “It is going to happen. I just don’t know if it’s going to be on my watch.”

I confess that, despite that beginning to the interview, I have not had time to read the whole thing myself, but I will any minute. And here's a personal dispatch from my sister in central New York.

She's the CFO of a county hospital, located in the county seat of a rural area. They have been commanded by the state to make twice as much room for incoming patients but given no money to do it, and no equipment or supplies.And on April 1, the state is going to cut Medicaid reimbursement rates statewide. Meanwhile, their ER is suddenly about one-third as full as it was two weeks ago because people are staying away, probably fearing they will catch the virus there, and the hospital's rooms are occupied about two-thirds of average. (I'm not sure if they have been told to cancel "elective" surgery, or if that's just the New York City area.)

In some ways, it sounds just like the ocean going out right before a tsunami hits.

Here's what's coming in Minnesota. See what's coming in your state here. I don't know why my now-quarantined governor hasn't ordered us to stay the F home.


March 25 is Wednesday (for posterity, today is Monday).
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Okay, so I was mistaken about the No Words from me. I guess I wrote a few words.

Good Night

It's amazing how exhausting staying at home "not working" can be. I haven't had time to open my two daily (Sunday) newspapers yet and I can barely keep my eyes open at 10:45.

This is one exhausting virus even when you don't have it.

Stop the Gish Gallop, Green New Deal from January on

A couple of posts from two of the "good men" on Twitter today.

First, media critic Jay Rosen, discussing the need to stop covering Mafia Mulligan at the White House daily "press briefing" on the COVID-19 catastrophe (all emphasis added by me):

It is believed by many people who follow me that tougher, more confrontational questions — and more determined follow-ups — are the answer to press briefings on the virus that allow Trump to elude accountability.

I disagree. It's is one of my least popular conclusions.

In my view, the lens through which we should interpret the briefings is how to increase the supply and circulation of good information about the virus and what has to be done, and decrease the spread of misinformation, strategic distraction, magical thinking, etc.

From this point of view, a key point to begin at is that Trump at the podium and on TV is the single most potent force for misinforming Americans about the dangers of the virus and what needs to be done now. Yet he is also the star and central figure in the briefings. See the problem?

It is very widely believed — among people who talk to me on this website, but also among journalists who report on politics — that tough questions and determined follow-ups can prevent the president from using the briefings to inject falsehoods into national discourse.

From their point of view he can be "made" to answer the question by determined journalists who will not back down. It just takes balls! And some solidarity. If he evades or dissembles, follow up. If the follow up fails, the next reporter has to insist. Keep insisting until he answers!

To me this a fantasy. A malignant narcissist greets even the slightest challenge as a personal attack and evidence of the challenger's bad character. And Trump is wired differently from me and you in that he lacks the gene for being shamed into good conduct. On top of that, he generates momentum by drawing censure and criticism from those whom his supporters love to despise. The White House press and the show hosts back at the studio sit atop the list of hate objects for soldiers in the Trump movement. All the incentives align toward attack.

But here's the bigger problem. If you try to "grill" him about a false statement his reply will typically introduce three new falsehoods without responding one bit to your original. Now you have four things you need to "grill" him about, your time is up, and he's moved on.

Another way to put it: the questions proceed in linear way, but when they are put to Trump the lying and disinformation increase exponentially. And remember, our aim is to increase the supply of reliable information and slow the spread of falsehood and strategic distraction.

When I point this out to believers in tough questions and determined follow-ups, they often revert to a logic I grasp, but do not share. They say that provoking a confrontation with Trump will lead to a meltdown or rage fit that will finally show Americans who this guy is.

This is another fantasy, a longing for a Joseph Welch moment. Remember him? He was the lawyer who in American mythology is said to have destroyed Joe McCarthy in 1954 with the famous lines, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

There is no Joseph Welch in the press corps who is going to "destroy" Trump. And anyway that is not a legitimate aim for journalists who report on him. Accountability IS a legitimate aim, but only a politician with a sense of shame can be held accountable by tough questions.

Also: It's become clear to me and many others that the daily briefings on the virus are morphing into substitutes for the rallies Trump cannot hold under social distancing rules. Now imagine if at one of those rallies there was a Q & A session with reporters in the media pen.

Picturing that? Because better than any argument I can construct, such an image explains why in my new post I recommend withdrawal from the briefing room, suspension of normal relations with the Trump government, and a switch to an emergency setting.

Finally, I have to observe... People who think that confronting Donald Trump more forcefully with facts he cannot deny will produce some kind of accountability must never have lived with a malignant narcissist.

It does not work.

As I've said before, Trump is the Gish Gallop incarnate, and now I have the Jay Rosen seal of approval for that designation. And now I think we can also say he is a human virus.

Then, there's this from Cory Doctorow, who is always thinking of the larger solution:

The current situation has revealed deep cracks in our system: replacing public transit with gig economy drivers who don't get health care or sick leave; the gig economy itself; the lethal inadequacy of private-sector broadband and private-sector health-care, and beyond.

The fact that we can simply abolish data-caps (without networks falling over) and the liquid ban (without planes blowing up) reveals that these supposed existential threats were, in fact, arbitrary, authoritarian, rent-seeking bullshit.

The people who've spent 40 years convincing us that we're just not free-marketing hard enough continue to insist that all of these problems are merely the result of not having fully dismantled the state (so much for "state capacity libertarianism"):

They're licking their chops for a 2008-style reboot: eviscerating public services, immiserating workers, fattening plutes and dissolving regulatory safeguards. It's a playbook developed by Milton Friedman: the scheme to have "ideas lying around" when crisis strikes.

But as Naomi Klein reminds us, the Shock Doctrine cuts both ways. The manifest failures of plutocracy in the Great Depression got us the New Deal and the "30 Glorious Years" of shared prosperity and growth.

We haven't been idle since 2008. We have "ideas lying around," too. Ideas for a just and resilient society that reorients human life around sustainable and just practices.

Motherboard's editorial staff gave us a manifesto for that society, so that this crisis doesn't go to waste, called The World After This. It includes:

• Free and universal healthcare ("healthcare is a basic human right" –B. Sanders)
• Abolish ICE and prisons ("ICE is now a public health hazard")
• Protect and empower labor ("Without these protections, everyone’s safety and health is put at risk")
• A healthier climate ("If the 2008-09 financial crash is any indicator, carbon could shoot right back up as soon as the crisis is over")
• Fast, accessible broadband ("Community owned/operated broadband networks, long demonized and even prohibited by law are looking better than ever")
• Smash the surveillance state ("This pandemic mustn't be used to infringe on the civil liberties and privacy of millions")
• Billionaire wealth ("They're sending people to work while jetting off to luxurious doomsday bunkers, getting Covid-19 tests while normal people can't, and also singing "Imagine" from bucolic getaways.")
• Public transit that works ("Congress is poised to prioritize bailing out airlines and the cruise industry before it takes a look at public transit")
• The right to repair ("Right-to-repair has become a matter of life and death.")
• Science for the people ("We were caught flat-footed by a fixation on 'innovation' and lack of public options")

The future will not be like the past. Whether it is worse or better is our choice to make. It is in our (well-scrubbed) hands.

I woke up this morning thinking about how to call my senator Tina Smith to talk her into supporting — becoming a leader on — the Green New Deal, as a segue from the coronavirus crisis. That we can't bail out casinos and cruise ship companies (or oil companies, banks, airlines) when people, nonprofits, and small businesses are all going under. And that when we rebuild after this (whenever that is), it's an opportunity to rebuild a country adapted to both the climate crisis and equity.

And there was Cory's thread, waiting for me.

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If you don't already know the WAFA hat, here is the explanation.

Resign Now, Go to Prison Later

I was off all social media and news yesterday until late, and when I finally checked in around 9:00 p.m. the story that overwhelmed all else in this cacophony we live in was that multiple U.S. Senate Republicans had used insider information from a Congressional briefing on the coronavirus back in January to sell and buy stocks to benefit themselves. One of the senators also gave a private briefing to rich donors.

Not only did these Senators know the coronavirus would be bad, but they took that knowledge to make money for themselves (and sometimes their donors).

Richard Burr (North Carolina 202-224-3154, in case you want to call and tell him to resign) is chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee (!). He sold $500,000–$1.5 million in stock — including multiple hotel chains — in February, about a week before the market started to tank. This was as much as three-quarters of his equity holdings. He then gave a private warning about the virus and its impact to a N.C. big whig club on February 27. At that point there were 15 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S., and he was publicly saying he was confident the government could fight the virus. He told the donors

It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history… It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.

He specifically warned them that schools would have to close, that European business trips should be cancelled, and that the military might be mobilized.

But the public got a different story from Burr. On February 7, for instance, he cowrote an opinion piece for Fox News that said the U.S. is “better prepared than ever before” to deal with something like the coronavirus. “Better than any other country” too, of course! Reading the NPR story linked here, his crimes are almost the worst because he clearly understood what the problem was and did nothing except bail out his own financial position and give a warning to rich constituents. (Burr accuses NPR of producing a “tabloid-style hit piece”… you be the judge.)

In 2012, Burr was one of three senators who voted against a bill that banned Congressional insider trading. Sources: opensecrets.org and NPR.

Kelly Loeffler (Georgia 202-224-3643) sold somewhere between $1 and $3 million worth of stock starting on January 24, the same day she and Burr had an all-Senate briefing on the virus. And she bought stock in Citrix, which owns Go to Meeting, a virtual meeting platform. Gee, I wonder why she thought that stock would be going up?

Not only all of that, she went on the offensive for Mulligan's coronavirus efforts on Twitter, writing this on February 28, 2020:

Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on #Coronavirus readiness.

Here's the truth: Donald Trump & his administration are doing a great job working to keep Americans healthy & safe.

She continued to downplay the risks with similar language on February 28, and then on March 10 (!) wrote:

Concerned about #coronavirus? Remember this: The consumer is strong, the economy is strong, & jobs are growing, which puts us in the best economic position to tackle #COVID19 & keep Americans safe.

Oh, and get this. Loeffler was appointed to the Senate just 18 days before she did this insider trading. She didn't make any stock trades after her appointment until the day of the briefing. She was appointed to her seat by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, the same former state attorney general who stole the election from Stacey Abrams through voter suppression. Loeffler's husband is president of the New York Stock Exchange. With a net worth of half a billion dollars, it appears Loeffler is the richest member of the Senate. She's on a subcommittee that oversees futures markets. I'm sure she can be trusted with that job, which gives her a direct role in overseeing her own and her husband's financial interests. Yes, that's who we need to have in the U.S. Senate. Salt of the earth. You can't make this stuff up, as they say.

Sources: rawstory.com and thedailybeast.com

On top of those two most egregious examples, Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) also dumped $5–25 million worth of ownership in his family's manufacturing company on March 2, according to the official Senate financial disclosure site. He then voted against the Senate coronavirus relief bill, like all the other Republicans from Wisconsin in both houses.

As with Mafia Mulligan, whose actions — crimes — are 10 or 100 times worse than Nixon's, these actions are orders of magnitude worse than what Martha Stewart did in insider trading (and she was sentenced to 5 months in prison and 2 years of supervised release, plus fines), and that doesn't even get into the the way some of these "public servants" openly lied to the public about the coming disaster, causing delay in trying to prevent it.

These people are all, I imagine, self-proclaimed Christians, who think they are going to get into heaven, despite that eye of the needle crap in the Bible. I don't imagine heaven is where they're going, but come the revolution, there are some handy walls to be up against.

Oh, and one more thing. Is anyone other than me interested in seeing what the Trumps and Kushners were doing with their stock holdings in January and February?

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A side note for history's sake: The Senate coronavirus briefing on January 24 happened DURING the Mafia Mulligan's impeachment hearings! Loeffler and Burr were sitting side by side during those hearings. You can never be too busy to save a few million dollars in your stock portfolio. Source



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Update: Two more senators, James Inhofe (Republican of Oklahoma, he of "snowballs prove climate change isn't real fame) and Diane Feinstein (Democrat of California), also sold substantial stock after the briefing. I have not looked into the details on either one. Both can also resign as far as I am concerned. I don't know that either one went the extra mile to vamp for Mulligan about the impending disaster, though. Inhofe may have, given his track record; it's doubtful Feinstein did.

There's a Metaphor in This Name Somewhere

It's a little hard to read, but the name of the business emblazoned across the back of this van is American Water Damage:


Which I think qualifies as a name that's bad for business, kind of like Endwell Animal Hospital.

Why does it seem bad to me? I guess because when you put your country's name at the beginning of a company name, it implies you're proud of the words that come after it. And in this case, the words are "water damage."

Is there a business called American Ice Dams? American Potholes?

Maybe.

A Corvid (Not Covid) Fact

The birding column in today's Star Tribune contained a fact I never new about corvids, or crows:

Q. I recently noticed two crows out in the street feeding intently on something but there didn't seem to be anything obvious in the road. Were they eating the salt in the road or what else might they have been doing?

A. I'll bet they were eating the road salt, not so much for the salt but for the molasses mixture that many public works departments add to coat the salt. This makes the salt stick to the road better and makes it less corrosive. The molasses in those blue-green salt pellets would have a sweet taste, and this appeals to crows. In other cities, cheese brine or beet juice is added to the road salt, either of which might also be tasty to crows.

Of course, there are all sorts of people who already know salt is coated this way and who would be amazed that every person doesn't already know this.

What a varied and complex world we live in.

The Ghost Map, Looking Back, Around, Ahead

Our pandemic has me thinking back on Steven Johnson's great book The Ghost Map. I wrote about it in the first year of this blog and included these two quotes, which I remember to this day, and they both seem particularly relevant lately:

The initial symptoms [of cholera] would be entirely indistinguishable from a mild case of food poisoning. But layered over those physical symptoms would be a deeper sense of foreboding. Imagine if every time you experienced a slight upset stomach you knew that there was an entirely reasonable chance you'd be dead in forty-eight hours (pages 32–33).

And:

From our vantage point... it is hard to tell how heavily that fear weighed upon the minds of the individual Victorians. As a matter of practical reality, the threat of sudden devastation -- your entire extended family wiped out in a matter of days -- was far more immediate than the terror threats of today.... Living amid cholera in 1854 was like living in a world where urban tragedies on [the scale of 9/11] happened week after week, year after year (page 84).

It would be an exaggeration to say we are feeling that level of terror about COVID-19, but it may be the closest that mainstream culture has come to feeling that way from a disease in modern history. Gay men in the 1980s and ’90s felt that way, I'm sure. 

Back when I posted about the book originally, I also wrote this paragraph about Johnson's discussion:

In the final chapters of the book, Johnson expounds on what the cholera outbreak and its aftermath have to tell us about our present situation [climate change]. We need urban density, he says, to make our level of population sustainable on the planet (because city dwellers use substantially fewer resources than rural inhabitants), but at the same time urban density makes us vulnerable both to purposeful attack (nuclear or biological) and unintended pandemics. If density comes to be seen as deadly, people will flee the cities. And then where will we be on a global sustainability level?

Unintended pandemics indeed. And here we are, with people putting six feet of "social distance" around themselves, going to drive-throughs for every need in order to stay away from other people, and avoiding mass transit. Being farther apart is not what we need as a culture or a people.

Hat in a Hellbasket

Every day that goes by, I know more and more there needs to be a hat like this:


What do the letters stand for? A few hints:

1. The hat is green because that color is opposite red on the color wheel.

2. The letters are analogous to the acronym made famous by someone who shall remain nameless, but who goes by the initials MM on this blog.

3. The third word in the acronym's phrase is a vulgarism I would never have said as a child or even a teenager, but now this phrase is what comes out of my mouth whenever I hear MM speak.

Best guesses in the comments.

Hummus Far from Home

While I was out getting some grocery necessities from my small neighborhood store, I saw this product in one of the coolers:


This is in Minnesota, of course. As a person who grew up about 45 minutes from Ithaca, it caught my eye.

I don't know if that name means as much to other people in these parts. However, I have repeatedly found that Ithaca is the one place in the interior of New York State that people in Minnesota seem to know about — so maybe the name will work even here.

Ithaca Craft Hummus started by selling at the Ithaca Farmers Market.

Facts about Bleach

Four facts about bleach I've never heard before:

• When mixing with water, as you are supposed to, always use cold water because hot water makes bleach ineffective. (What!?)
• Bleach degrades over time, so you can't stockpile it. 
• Protect your bleach from sunlight.
• Wash the surfaces you want to disinfect before spraying with your bleach/water mixture, because organic matter (like food) inactivates bleach.

From this, you can probably tell I've never taken a chemistry class. I've always thought of bleach as this mighty substance but now it seems as though it's a household wimp.

I do know better than to mix it with ammonia, though.

A Box from a Simpler Time

It was a simpler time, when you created photos through an elaborate process (in the dark!) that involved these three trays. When packaging was printed in two colors of ink because four-color process was too expensive.


And when you could portray a white (orange) line-art man on a package and no one would think twice about who was left out of the image and what that implies about who makes pictures.

Transportation and Abundance, Who Is a Woman (of Course)

While at the Ramsey County Court House/Saint Paul City Hall recently, I noticed a bit of carved artwork that hadn't caught my eye before, probably because it flanks one of the doors I don't usually use:


As I've written before about the artwork built into this building (here and here, plus some good news on changes here), the images are short on women. So seeing this mighty farming sister, sickle in hand, made me feel a little better.

But I confess it was the train and the word TRANSPORTATION that caught my eye first, hard as that may be to believe, given the scale difference between the word and the woman. There's a train on my City Hall and I didn't even know it!

What the Speech Should Have Been

Jeremy Konyndyk, who teaches at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, wrote his own version of the speech Mafia Mulligan should have given about the coronavirus and COVID-19.

My fellow Americans, the next few months are going to be hard. For many of us, harder than anything we've faced in our lifetimes.

Life in our country is about to change. We must unify against this threat like we unified after 9/11. And indeed, this virus threatens to kill more Americans than terrorism ever has.

But we can defeat it, and we will defeat it.

My administration has a plan to lead this fight. I will outline that plan in a moment.

But more important than the plan is this: We must all own this fight.

Defeating this outbreak will take science and medicine, but it will also take unity and partnership - from all of us.

For now, medicine cannot defeat this disease. But *people* can. We have no vaccine, we have no treatment, although we are working furiously to develop both.

Until then, what we have is us. Our choices, our decisions, our behavior - that is how we will do this.

Here is the plan.

Our most important priority over the coming months is to protect our highest-risk citizens, and the hospitals that will work to save them if they become ill.

We have seen what happened in Wuhan, and is happening in Iran and Italy. We should not imagine it cannot happen here.

Make no mistake: this is a dangerous disease. While most who contract it become only mildly ill, it is extremely deadly for the elderly and people with chronic health problems. You may be one of those people, or you may love one of those people - all of us have a stake in this.

That is why tonight I am announcing national policy guidance on social distancing, and tomorrow I will be speaking with every governor in the country to secure their commitment to implement this guidance.

This must be a whole-of-society effort.

We do not want to lock down our population as China did. But to avoid that, we must apply universal and aggressive public measures to slow the spread.

Even if you are young and low risk, you can still contract and spread it. And that threatens those who are at higher risk.

So I am calling on all communities to suspend all mass gatherings of over 50 people.

I applaud the brave and difficult decisions made today by the NCAA and NBA - they are leading by example. I call on other business and civic leaders to follow them.

These important measures are how we can protect our health system. We must ensure that those who do fall sick can obtain the quality care that they need, and survive. Aggressive social distancing measures help achieve this by reducing the number of people sick at any one time.

Reducing the number of people who are sick at once is the best way to keep our health system from being overwhelmed. And that in turn helps not just COVID-19 patients but also everyone else who must seek treatment in a hospital.

You will learn more about these measures in the coming days, and I beg you to abide by them. Social distancing, along with handwashing, are the most important things that average Americans can do to defeat this disease.

Next, we must protect Americans who are highest risk from this virus. I have directed HHS to refocus the federal Public Health Service to reinforce their state and local counterparts on outreach and support to high risk people and facilities.

But they can't do this alone.

We must all work to ensure that every seniors' home, retirement community, and other high-risk facility has the support it needs to prevent infections. And I urge Americans to take ownership of this. If you have loved ones in a high-risk facility - join us in this effort.

Next we must ensure that our nation's hospitals have the resources and support that they need to manage the coming flood of cases. While I fervently hope that we will not see the severe case volumes witnessed in China and Italy - we must be ready for that scenario.

That is why I am directing HHS to immediately make urgent resources and support available to hospitals to safely isolate and treat COVID-19 patients.

I am also directing the military to make military doctors available to expand critical care capacity around the country.

And I am directing the Army Corps of Engineers to help hospitals expand their intensive care facilities, and also to rapidly establish drive-through testing, which have proved successful in South Korea.

And let's talk about testing. First, I apologize.

I and my administration bungled this badly, but we are moving with total urgency to fix the problem. Public health labs and major research institutions across the country will now have free rein to initiate widespread testing, and the federal government will reimburse this fully.

This rapid expansion of testing will be available, free of charge, to every American. And if you feel ill, or suspect you have been exposed, I urge you to be tested so that you can self-quarantine if needed. Self-quarantine is a powerful tool against this virus.

Finally, we must protect our economy, and also protect those who may be most hurt by mass social distancing measures. Gig workers; hourly wage-earners; small businesses; event planners - all will face economic hardship over the next several months.

I am announcing tonight the creation of a social distancing empowerment fund, which will provide modest bailouts to self-employed workers and small business owners who lose significant income due to our new distancing guidelines.

These measures - mass social distancing, protecting our highest risk citizens, and protecting our hospital system - are the critical trifecta that will restrain fatalities in our country while helping to bring disease transmission under control.

But none of this works without you. You - every citizen - must own this fight.

I know many of you do not trust me, and do not often wish me to succeed. But in this I will do my best to deserve your trust, and once this is over we can go back to fighting over judges and policy.

This will be a long hard fight. But we must prevail and we will prevail. I commit to you that I and everyone in the federal government will do our part; and we call on you to do yours.

Good night.

The terrible thing is, I can't imagine Mulligan ever giving this speech, even if someone in his administration would have put it in front of him.

Elastic Infinity

Sometimes a rubberband...


...is more than a rubberband.

Before and After

“Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate.”
—Michael O. Leavitt,  former secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (under George W. Bush... he started early in 2005, before Hurricane Katrina)

And, for future reference, the Johns Hopkins coronavirus COVID-19 map.

Erik, Prince of Darkness

As always these days, there are so many stories that would normally dominate coverge for weeks. And right now we have COVID-19, which when combined with the incompetent federal response, deserves the kind of coverage it's getting, so there's not a lot of air left for anything else.

So you may have missed yesterday's Erik Prince story in the New York Times, which in any other administration would have (yada yada yada)...

Without saying using the exact words, Adam Serwer gave the story the "if this happened in a Third World country" treatment via Twitter:

Disgraced paramilitary leader aligned with regime party pays spies to infiltrate and suppress domestic political opposition on behalf of the head of state.

And that is exactly the root of it. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos's brother Erik, former head of military contractor Blackwater International, hired a bunch of former U.S. and British spies to infiltrate Democratic campaigns and labor unions, including one of the state teachers' unions. Among other things, he wanted the spies to teach the inept "journalists" of Project Veritas how to be better at their monkey-wrenching ways.

Erik Prince is a busy billionaire guy. He's also under investigation for lying "to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws" and in 2017 his mercenaries were almost put in charge of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan.

_

According to the Times,

Once a small operation running on a shoestring budget, Project Veritas in recent years has had a surge in donations from both private donors and conservative foundations. According to its latest publicly available tax filing, Project Veritas received $8.6 million in contributions and grants in 2018. Mr. O’Keefe [the guy who pretended to be a pimp in the ACORN sting videos of 2009 and was arrested for entering Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's office under false pretenses in 2010] earned about $387,000.

Meanwhile, nonprofit organizations doing real work to help people struggle to exist.

Springing Forward to a Coronavirus Update

From Chris Hayes on Twitter just a couple of hours ago:

I’ve been trying very hard to use our platform to communicate the facts and science of where we are in this pandemic. We do not want to stoke panic, because, again the *individual* risk remains low. Wash your hand. Have some canned food.

BUT

The news from Italy tonight [about the general quarantine in northern Italy] clarifies just how enormous the systemic risk we’re facing is. And here’s the plain truth: Our federal government has failed and we are now, because of that failure, facing an enormous impending crisis. This is Katrina-level incompetence, if not worse.

Yesterday the President came out and admitted he is pressuring scientific and health experts to take steps that are worse for public health to artificially keep the numbers low.

This is sociopathic governance.

Now we have this story that the White House overruled health officials who wanted to warn elderly and immune-compromised people not to fly. But Trump wants the economic activity because he wants to be re-elected.

This is sociopathic governance.

(The VP’s press office has denied the story but unfortunately, given the record of this White House, there is absolutely no reason to believe them.)

All the facts we have access to suggest the following: Trump is attempting to cover up the full scope of the outbreak in order to boost his chances for re-election. HE ADMITTED AS MUCH YESTERDAY ON CAMERA.

In doing so, he is quite literally threatening public health.

This Is incompetence and malevolence that will quite simply get a lot of people killed. I know that sounds harsh, but we have to start saying the clear and simple truth that is now evident.

I hope other people in the media wake up to this.

Meanwhile, Business Insider has the story of an American Hospital Association presentation in which the epidemiologist presenting estimated that almost a third of the U.S. population will get COVID-19, with nearly 5 million people hospitalized and 500,000 deaths:

• 4.8 million hospitalizations associated with the novel coronavirus
• 96 million cases overall in the US
• 480,000 deaths

None of which even touches on the economic disruption all of that will bring.

Stealing the Lightbulbs for the Power Broker

The first great book I read when I was a freshman in college was The Power Broker by Robert Caro, a biography of Robert Moses, who built and simultaneously destroyed New York City in the mid-20th century. I don't think I quite realized the book was great, though, because I didn't have much to compare it to. I probably thought most college books were that wonderful. But still, it made an impression, since I remember it to this day.

I was reminded of the book tonight when I heard part of an interview with Caro on Fresh Air. The whole thing is worth a listen but the part I want to describe is how Caro got access to Moses' voluminous files, which Moses had refused to give him.

It turned out Moses had left carbon copies behind in a Parks Department warehouse-of-sorts and a friend of Caro's had a key, so he spent months reading the rows of filing cabinets. But the workers in control of the storage room were still loyal to Moses, who had been the Parks Commissioner (among his many other titles in the city hierarchy), and each time Caro and his helper would leave to use the restroom or get lunch, the parks workers would remove the overhead light bulbs that were the only light source in the room.

Caro and his assistant got around this problem by bringing their own stash of light bulbs each day.

This anecdote works as a metaphor for Caro's doggedness. It makes a less positive metaphor for the workers who stole the light bulbs.

__

An earlier post contained a lengthy quote from part one of Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, and reminds me again what a reporter and writer he is, and the truths he has told that matter so much.

And Now a Break for Some Dingbats

Today I learned that the font Zapf Dingbats existed before the Apple Laserwriter began to make it ubiquitous in 1985. It was released through the International Typeface Corporation in July 1978 and announced in its publication U&LC in June of that year.

Here's the opening spread that showed off many of the characters:


I also learned that Hermann Zapf did about 1,200 sketches of characters, which ITC winnowed to 300 for the 1978 typeface and organized into three series. Apple, however, released only 204 in the LaserWriter font.

I wonder which characters were omitted? Probably some of the repetitive boxed and circled numbers or mirrored characters.

These wonderings and new-found facts reminded me that I probably learned the term "dingbat" from Archie Bunker's derisive use of it when he addressed his wife Edith on All in the Family, and prompted me to ponder where the word comes from. Did the typographic term precede the insult, or vice versa?

According to etymonline.com, it's American English and goes back to 1838,

apparently originally the name of some kind of alcoholic drink, of unknown origin. It has joined that class of words (such as dingus, doohickey, gadget, gizmo, thingumabob) which are conjured up to supply names for items whose proper names are unknown or not recollected. Used at various periods for "money," "a professional tramp," "a muffin," "male genitalia," "a Chinese," "an Italian," "a woman who is neither your sister nor your mother," and "a foolish person in authority." Popularized in sense of "foolish person" by U.S. TV show "All in the Family" (1971-79), though this usage dates from 1905. In typography, by 1912 as a printer's term for ornament used in headline or with illustrations.

So probably the typographic term by 1912 was related to the "doohickey" type of meaning. Though I suppose we can't rule out that it could have something to do with male genitalia.

Ironic that It's a Bumper Sticker, But...

Yes, I know it's ironic that this thought is expressed on a bumper sticker, given my thoughts on sustainable transportation, but it caught my attention nonetheless:


As the younger folks say, Mood.

Super Tuesday

Coya, come home.

So angry.

Coronavirus

Today I learned the coronavirus can stay alive on a hard surface for up to nine days, that people are infectious for more than twice as long as they are with influenza, and that so far 14 percent of people who recovered from it have tested positive again after being released. (Source)

Combine all of that with some other things I already knew:

• Longer incubation time (two to 14 days, vs. two days for influenza)
• Mortality rate around 2 percent (vs. .1–.2 percent for influenza)
• 20 percent serious or critical cases (80 percent nonserious, which means equivalent to a cold or the flu)

I saw a table with death rates by age group and it starts going up noticeably with the 50–59 age group, increasing steeply after that:


(Source)

It sounds as though the biggest problem of all will be the potentially large number of people who need intensive care and respirators, over-matching the number available in our hospitals. (Not to mention the incompetence and duplicity of our government leaders, which goes without saying these days.)

It looks like John Oliver did a segment on the virus last night as well. I have to go watch that to see if there are any painful laughs within his insights.

February 2020 Twitter, Going Viral

It was a blessedly short month that contained three Democratic debates, two of which were not bad and one that was revolting. It had Michael Bloomberg's unneeded entry into the race (which I partially covered in its own tweet roundup earlier in the month, though more than a few stragglers are included here). Oh, and let's not forget the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. Plus the usual mayhem of living in Mafia Mulligan's America, including the coronavirus, impeachment, and the destruction of rule of law. Ho-hum.

First, the last few days about the coronavirus and then about our dear leader's exploits this month generally, including the State of the Union (remember that?):

The reason that Republicans think Democrats would lie about the seriousness of a virus to hurt the Republican president is because if a Democrat were president that’s what Republicans would do.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

Why does this president repeatedly think that scientific facts are hoaxes? This is the most dangerous president in the modern history of our country. He is putting our people’s lives at risk. He must be defeated.
Bernie Sanders

Y’all let white feminism convince you that this isn’t funny but it is. You are allowed to laugh at power:


Tressie McMillan Cottom

Coronavirus reduced China’s carbon and air pollution emissions 25%, thus world's emissions 6%, during last 3 weeks, compared with 2019. This may have saved 17,000 lives in China from air pollution during that 3 weeks.
Mark Z. Jacobson

Coronavirus exposes all of Trump’s biggest weaknesses:
1. Incompetence
2. Rejection of scientific facts
3. Distrust of expertise
4. Disinterest in long-term planning
5. Embrace of conspiracy theories
6. Paranoia
7. Inability to learn from mistakes
Judd Legum

POTUS CHART FOR TONIGHT:


tommyrulznyc

What is satire anymore? I could do a cartoon about Sean Hannity becoming Secretary of State in a second Trump administration and it would be even odds of it really happening. (I know, reply guys, he wouldn't want to give up the income.)
@tomtomorrow

Trump accusing Sanders of being too pro-Moscow is almost as amazing as Trump accusing Biden of over-promoting under-talented sons. Next he'll attack one of the women candidates for wearing too much makeup and too tight a girdle.
David Frum

Nothing says “Christian” like a man who cages refugee babies attending the National Prayer Breakfast with his third wife who he cheated on after divorcing his 2nd wife who he cheated on and told to have an abortion after divorcing his first wife who he cheated on and raped.
The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt

holy fucking shit the president of the united states is an unhinged lunatic asshole
Jeff Tiedrich

"No media figure since Bill Buckley has had a more lasting influence on American conservatism than Limbaugh," National Review says. Rush made "conservative" code for racist, sexist, mean, and so unprincipled that GOP now bows to Trump, who spreads Kremlin propaganda and attacks law enforcement.
David Cay Johnston

Rush Limbaugh is a repugnant human being who, in his very repugnance, perfectly captures the spirit of the movement he helped create.
David Roberts

Remember, many of the people who are so vocally offended by Pelosi's theatrical gesture [tearing up the State of the Union speech] watched Trump make fun of a disable person and kept silent.
Daniel Mendelsohn

If I understand this correctly, the president awarded the medal of freedom to a talk radio host with a revoltingly long record of bigotry during the State of the Union — and the civility police are coming for Nancy Pelosi for tearing up paper? Is that right?
Matthew Gertz

A man who called a college student a slut for wanting access to birth control was awarded the highest honor by a man who has openly bragged about assaulting women.
Liz Plank @feministabulous

A pathological liar has a huge rhetorical advantage over rivals who are too timid to call lying by its rightful name
Brent Staples

Woke up, heard Rush got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was all confused about why Trump would give it to a band. Honestly, though, that makes more sense than giving it to a racist, sexist pig.
Amity Foster
In Obama’s last two years in office, the average family say their income grow by about 5.8%
In the first two years of Trump’s term, that number has shriveled to 2.7%


Capital & Main

There were quite a few about Mafia Mulligan intervening in the Department of Justice (particularly around the Roger Stone case, and oh yeah, remember that impeachment thing?), and its implications:

donald trump is president of the united states and people are still out here absolutely certain that they know the outcome of any given political choice
@jbouie

Presidents have always had the power to pardon their convicted associates and place their accomplices above the law. What’s changed is that today, if the president busts his criminal friends out of jail, cowed mainstream media will describe it as something “critics say” is bad
Will Stancil

The whole justice department is revolting because the president and Attorney General are engaging in open criminal corruption. And everyone's just like "meh." What a time to be alive, right?
Angie Schmitt

Roger Stone, longtime dirty trickster and Trump ally, gets 40 months for lying during probe into Russia’s attack on 2016 election.
Reality Winner, a young veteran honored for her service, got 63 months for warning about Russia’s attack on 2016 election. #FreeRealityWinner
Alexandra Chalupa

In the old days, the slogan was, "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime." Now it's "if you can't do the time, contribute to Donald Trump's campaign."
Dean Baker

Funny that the folks who think that impeachment tries to “undo an election” by citizen-voters don’t have problems when Trump uses his pardon power to “undo a conviction” by citizen-juries. Wait, what? “It’s in the Constitution!” you say? Yes, exactly.
Asha Rangappa

i think that you cannot both be genuinely concerned that trump will refuse to leave the white house if he loses **and** support the billionaire who paid to give himself a third mayoral term and paid some more to change the rules back for his successor
@Vanessa_ABee

Trump is not fighting a deep state. He is building one.
Adam Serwer

I remember basically every conservative either losing their mind or pretending to lose their mind because Bill Clinton was briefly on a plane with the Attorney General.
Chris Hayes

it's lucky for Roger Stone that he was just a wealthy white man convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and witness tampering, and not, let's say, a black man selling loose cigarettes on a street corner, because there are serious consequences for that
Jeff Tiedrich

Nothing says you’re innocent like taking revenge against every single person who testified against you.
David Cicilline

The Soviet Union lasted for more than 70 years because no one would say the leader of their own party was wrong.
Joshua Tanzer

Everything from this point will be the Trump regime pushing the limits as far as they can possibly go. They will likely begin by attempting to “investigate” and jail political enemies.
Bree Newsome Bass

Killer opening line from Senator Harris: "When the framers wrote the Constitution, they did not think of someone like me as being a United States Senator. But they did envision someone like Donald Trump being president."
Tom McCarthy @TeeMcSee

This is an obvious prediction, but I want to get it on record. The GOP just released Trump from any accountability for trying to cheat in the upcoming election. That's one sign of many that they are going to try to rig the election, in a range of illegal and semi-legal ways.
David Roberts

"Mr. Trump is the only president in the history of Gallup polling who has never had the support of a majority of Americans for even a single day." And he never will.
Richard Stengel

Then it was time for a relaxing respite with the Democratic race for president and its candidates:

Jesse Jackson: “It seems to me if Bloomberg wants to defeat Trump, he should run against Trump in the Republican primary.”
jeremy scahill

Nonsensical to consider the cost of Bernie's (and Elizabeth's) Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and public investments, without comparing it to the huge cost of NOT tackling climate change, worsening health care, and growing deficit in public investment.
Robert Reich

It's clear to me that Pete isn't running this cycle. He'll take it if we are dumb enough to do it but he is either running for a k street type firm gig or for eight years from now. I low-key resent that we are forced to watch him learn how to ride a bike.
Tressie McMillan Cottom

For folks who think Bloomberg’s saving grace is that he’s “good on climate”...you can’t be good on climate and shitty on race. That’s not a thing.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

Sanders said Fidel Castro did a few good things during his reign. Castro is now dead.
Trump is friends with Putin and friendly with Kim Jong Un. Both Putin and Kim are very much alive.
Hari Kondabolu

My friend's mom once said she didn't trust Elizabeth Warren because she was "too skinny," and all I could think is that it is literally impossible to be a woman.
Ginny Hogan_

Thinking today about how completely moderate Democratic elites have blown this primary cycle. Bernie was not remotely inevitable - but every step of the way they made the wrong decisions. And so, so much of it was because they were blinded by misogyny.
Shannon @TheStagmania

Bloomberg would depress turnout more than any other candidate.
David Rosenthal

Well, Bernie Sanders is now the clear favorite for the Democratic nomination. Lots of things to say about that, but the most important is that he is NOT a left-leaning version of Trump. Even if you disagree with his ideas, he's not a wannabe authoritarian ruler. America under a Sanders presidency would still be America, both because Sanders is an infinitely better man than Trump and because the Democratic Party wouldn't enable abuse of power the way Republicans have
Paul Krugman

Warren is one inch taller than Bloomberg.
She's 5'8."
He's 5'7."
(According to health records released by each candidate.)
Annie Linskey

I want to see these billionaire candidates spending $$$ giving folks rides to the polls, paying for them to get voter ID and funding security forces for when white supremacists act out the day after the election. Everything else is talk. $400M could probably fund nonstop shuttle service to the polls for people who don’t have transportation. If they turnaround and spend all the $$$ on ads but not on strengthening the infrastructure and protecting Black voters, then it’s just the same old thing we see every cycle. But that won’t prevent everyone from blaming Black, young and working poor voters for not turning out. I don’t want to hear *anything* about lack of voter turnout if there isn’t a *significant* increase in spending on voter protection and helping folk access polling sites.
Bree Newsome Bass

I’m a conservative. I disagree with most of the policy advanced by the Democratic candidates. But I’ll support WHOEVER the Democrats nominate because we can survive 4 years of bad policy. We can’t survive 4 more years of Trump’s attack on the very heart and soul of our Democracy.
Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom

In fairness to Bloomberg, objectively, he does a lot of good things with his money and Trump, I don't know, starts steak and tie companies. But both use money to prop up their egos and grab at things they want.
Rebecca Fishbein

My take on what should happen at the convention if no candidate has a majority of the votes is that pretty much everybody's take on that situation is going to be so warped by their candidate preferences as to be basically meaningless. If Bloomberg winds up with 40% of the delegates, Bernie with 38%, and Warren with 15%, most of the Bernie supporters who are currently saying the plurality winner should get the nomination will change their minds. And should!
Angus Johnston @studentactivism

What's funny about Bloomberg is that he's not a strong leader, he's just a rich one. He can put out lots of commercials that say "Mike can get it done." But when he talks, you don't feel like Mike can get it done.
George Lakoff

There is so much to discuss about Bloomberg's quip that perhaps some women "didn't like a joke I told." This is precisely how, so often, sexism and misogyny gets excused -- dismissed as "a joke."
MJ Lee

Can you *imagine* if Black people had the resources to buy as many ads as Bloomberg to repeatedly engage the entire country about structural racism and the steps that should be taken to address these issues? Ads on every channel, every hour, across all platforms.
Samuel Sinyangwe

One issue among many for Bloomberg is that he got rich off a product that no ordinary American has ever encountered, let alone eagerly purchased or felt gratitude for, in their everyday life.
Ross Douthat

If you want to measure the power of money in politics, think about how Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York three times even though he is a small moldy rutabaga
Jon Schwarz

If you're going to ask black people to support a candidate who has THREATENED THEIR LIVES in the past, you best believe I'm going to ask rich white folks to risk being taxed an extra 2 cents on the dollars FIRST. If you're a #NeverTrumper who can't understand that, bite me.
Elie Mystal

Very few bad takes as bad as "Billionaires make good politicians because they can't be influenced by money." Like the cookie monster can't be influenced by cookies because he's the cookie monster.
Sam Barlow

I don’t know who needs to hear this but having billions and billions to give away is a sign that you should have been taxed more.
Anand Giridharadas

The thing about Elizabeth Warren is that it's clear she would be a very good president. That she would be good at being president.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

The gall of white democrats lecturing minorities who don’t want a man who actively, firsthand, participated in their oppression. Dems haven’t won the white vote in 50 years. White Dems depend on minorities to help them do what white people won’t. We will NOT be lectured!
Charles M. Blow

Fun fact: when Bloomberg endorsed Scott Brown to try to keep Elizabeth Warren out of the Senate, Brown had an A rating from the NRA. People keep telling me I have to respect Bloomberg’s commitment to ending gun violence, but seems it vanishes when his pocketbook is threatened.
Shannon @TheStagmania

1. Donald Trump must lose. That’s all that matters.
2. I’m not a Democrat. It’s not my job to tell Democrats who to nominate. It’s up to Democratic voters.
3. I’ve pledged to support WHOEVER the Democrats nominate.
4. If a conservative like me can pledge that, can’t everyone?
Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom

Somehow Jeffrey Epstein never got stopped and frisked in Bloomberg’s NY.
Chris Hayes

I oppose Bloberg on moral grounds, his past, policy, and character, how he uses power. But those who are arguing that he's electable v Trump arent making sense. I also strongly believe that his strategy of corrupting our primary process is a democratic disaster so massive I don't yet have words for it.
Zephyr Teachout

Criticize Bloomberg all you want but he will be an unstoppable force to defeat Trump as long as no one ever hears him speak publicly or looks up anything he’s ever done
Jess Dweck

Elizabeth Warren returned TWELVE BILLION dollars to consumers through an agency she created and for which she fought tirelessly BEFORE she was even in office. Let me repeat: BEFORE SHE WAS IN OFFICE. YES, imagine what she would do as president.
Jodi Jacobson

Bloomberg said: “Double the class size, with a better teacher, is a good deal for the students.” This is wrong. And dangerous.
Marc Lamont Hill

I honestly feel about Bloomberg the way I felt about Trump, which was basically come on, you can't be serious with this? which, given how things turned out, is not a great sign.
@tomtomorrow

mike bloomberg wanted to fingerprint more than 600,000 nyc public housing residents to, according to him, prove they actually lived there
Matt Binder

Michael Bloomberg has yet to be tested as a candidate. He's getting a lot of attention now, but to win the nomination, he needs to prove he can buy the votes of a wide coalition of Democrats.
Frank Conniff

Michael Bloomberg is a racist, misogynistic, pro-war, anti-Muslim Republican oligarch who represents one of the greatest threats to American democracy. Without his billions, nobody would take him seriously. Do not let him buy his way to the presidency.
Nikhil Goyal

Elizabeth Warren is who you vote for if you like Bernie Sanders’s policy but actually want it enacted.
@GothamGirlBlue

hey what if the media stopped framing every story about Elizabeth Warren like she’s already lost and there’s no point in continuing to have an election just because a tiny slice of the population in two small white states who don’t represent the electorate get to vote first
@clairewillett

Nothing is infuriating me more right now than watching Black folks line up behind Bloomberg. No we don’t need a billionaire businessman to run the government. Public entities should not be run like private entities. Period. And I get pragmatism but this is just dumb. He isn’t really even a Democrat. And he has said awful things about women, fat folks, and his record on supporting daily harassment of Black and Brown men by the NYPD should be disqualifying on its own. And he’s buying his way into the race. Just hell fuck no to him. I believe Black folks are smart. I believe they are politically savvy. But look: you don’t need Trump to beat Trump. Devils don’t beat devils. They join up and do evil together. Only light can drive out darkness. I beg my own folks not to line up behind this dude.
Brittney Cooper

Can we just do an extra-super Tuesday where every registered Democratic in the country casts their ballot on the same day, we have ranked-choice voting, and we call it a day? Because my god this is a terrible way to do it.
Jill Filipovic

NYPD stop-and-frisk has been cut by 98% since its height under Mayor Bloomberg in 2011. A *Ninety-Eight Percent Reduction* and crime in NYC is lower now than it was then. The entire policy was sustained by a disinformation campaign spreading racist lies about black men and crime.
Samuel Sinyangwe

You have to hear some of these boys recount their frisks, the way the cops, a stranger, would often put their hands up between their buttocks, on the street, in search of contraband. How would this not feel like an assault if you were innocent as about 90% of them were? When Trump was caught on tape talking about violating white women, liberals were aghast and called it disqualifying. Now that Bloomberg is on talking about violating innocent black and brown boys on a massive scale, those same liberals say “get over it.” #BlackBodiesMatterToo
Charles M. Blow

Just to be clear: the DNC chairperson just said that while there may concerns about the ability of billionaires to buy the election, the best way to counter that is to vote. It’s statements like this from Tom Perez and others that make me VERY concerned about November.
Alicia Garza

Gonna get a lot of hot takes soon about how Bernie is as much of a threat to liberal democracy as Trump, and it's going to be as ridiculous as it sounds. Disagree with Bernie's policies all you want, he's not asserting the right to imprison his political opposition.
Adam Serwer

Meanwhile, the threat to democracy of an ultracompetent guy with an authoritarian personality and $60 billion trying to just buy himself an entire country will go unremarked.
@JonIsAwesomest

If you're a Democrat who thinks Biden is too weak and Sanders/Warren too liberal to win, you could've had Harris, Booker, or Inslee. Instead, your options are a small-town mayor, a senator with the charisma of a comb, or a former GOP billionaire who wants to tax soda instead of wealth
Stephen Wolf

Democratic nomination narratives are so broken. As of right now, one woman finished 5th in her neighboring state and is 3rd in another state and she’s “surging.” Another woman is 4th in her neighboring state & finished 3rd in another state and she’s “dead.”
David Brauer

Hey everyone who liked Warren best but voted for a man because you think a woman can't get elected: you're the problem
@LouisatheLast

As Justice Byron White said in dissent in Buckley, "as it should be unnecessary to point out, money is not always equivalent to speech."
Zephyr Teachout

The last four Democratic Presidents have been from Southern states: Johnson - Texas, Carter - Georgia, Clinton - Arkansas, and Obama - Hawaii. This says if the Democrats want to win, they should go with the candidate from Oklahoma.
David M. Levinson

If the Demorats nominate a corporate centrist we can still elect more progressives in the senate and congress. And if the president isn’t a lunatic moron we could still end up passing progressive policies. We can’t let a rigged system defeat us no matter what shit they pull.
Martha Kelly

My mom's rankings:
Warren: she's so smart
Steyer: his heart is in the right place
Klobuchar: finally somebody SAID IT to Pete
Bernie: he's done something with the young people
Pete: just platitudes, lack of an actual vision
Biden: living in the past
Yang: one note
#DemDebate
Elie Mystal

Has Donny Deutsch ever HEARD Elizabeth Warren? She’s the opposite of strident. She’s folksy. It is so bizarre what some men hear when intelligent women speak.
Max Weiss @maxthegirl

The caucuses, primaries, and coverage thereof:

I’m not sure of the value of caucuses over primaries. They seem to suppress turnout, add complexity, and put pressure on state parties to conduct operations that they are ill-equipped for. Ideally we would use a more straightforward process that includes ranked-choice voting.
@AndrewYang

One question going forward: in '16 cable and broadcast news felt obliged to hire Trump supporters, put them in all of their talking head segments. When pressed they said they had to reflect the new political reality. So when do they hire all the Sanders supporters?
David Dayen

The 172,000 people that voted in Iowa caucus represent only 12% of registered voters in Iowa and .07% of US electorate. Time to abolish the caucus.
Ari Berman

every political analyst who is still talking about arguments and convincing the public more than voter registration and suppression should be fired. how do ANY of y'all still think this is about making a case rather than about mobilizing tactically against a jury rigged anti-voting machine
Saladin Ahmed

This primary is a test of an interesting question: Can Twitter take down Bloomberg, or can cable news take down Bernie?
Ryan Grim

The number of people who vote in IA and NH will equal roughly .25% of registered voters in US. Before media crowns winners and losers, a whole lot of people still need to weigh in before anything is decided
Ari Berman

Note to my colleagues in the media: Virtually no policies under discussion in this Democratic primary are "radical" or "extreme" in any reasonable sense. They are just different ideas that are successfully humming along in multiple comparable countries.
Anand Giridharadas

trump: works with russia to steal 2016 and tries to force ukraine to help steal 2020
democrats: hey guys sorry for the delay on the results in iowa
media: can democrats be trusted with elections?
@ManlnTheHoody

There are some benefits of caucusing, but those same benefits exist with ranked choice voting. And with the latter, we get a secret ballot. Iowa and all states should move to ranked choice voting, for all elections.
onekade

All y'all tweeting tonight about how caucuses are terrible: this is basically how we handle public input for planning decisions. See the problem?
Sandy Johnston

People will use the IA caucus debacle as proof that state-run processes are inefficient when it’s really proof that private corporations with no transparency have our necks in their jaws in more ways than we can even imagine
Kath Barbadoro

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords doesn't look so bad now
William D. Adler

Can this PLEASE be the nail in the coffin for both caucuses and Iowa being first?
Nathan Hunstad @doctorgonzo

How is it that they make the campaign season 300 years long but demand the vote be counted so quickly that it requires an app? Count the voters and add up the results on paper, you ding-dongs! The media can wait. Accuracy is more important than speed!
Sarah Kendzior

Short version: If you think Iowa has too much influence on what happens subsequently in the nomination process, yesterday was really good news for you—not just for 2024, but for this cycle as well.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism

Was traveling yesterday and just catching up, but ... Iowa feels like a foreshadowing of things to come this year. The general election is going to be enshrouded in misinformation, distrust, active ratfucking.
@tomtomorrow

If you think the Iowa Caucus delays are bad, wait until you hear about what happens in black or brown precincts across the country. We're used to waiting.
Andrew Gillum

If you were starting with a blank sheet of paper, would you design anything remotely like this as a way to pick a president?
David Roberts

The Democatic primary debates specifically:

These debates don’t measure who’s ready to be president, they measure who’s most ready to go on cable news or the Sunday morning shows and provide clips that drive up ratings. TV news has hijacked our public discourse and reconfigured it into an anxiety, profit machine. The [South Carolina] debate last night was jaw-droppingly awful. But our entire debate system is broken and actually does harm to our country. Emphasis on spectacle and wrestling-style feuds hurts our understanding of important issues and gives clowns like Trump power.
Jared Yates Sexton

Charging $1750 to get in the door of the Democratic primary debate [in South Carolina] is such a good metaphor for the party
Kate Aronoff

Man those “city folk” always have something negative to say about the South, but given that NYC has given us both Trump and Bloomberg — Ima need y’all to issue a written apology or chill.
Melissa Harris-Perry

“I don’t think Bloomberg’s bad night [at the Nevada debate] is going to matter given the money he’s spending” is the strongest possible indictment of our system
Adam Miller @ajm6792

"I worked very hard for it" is the worst possible justification for being a billionaire. You know who works very hard? Single mothers working two minimum wage jobs with just-in-time scheduling and a bus commute.
Ezra Klein

Warren should get to claim Mike Bloomberg’s fortune as a bounty after she killed him tonight. She could pay for so much childcare with it.
Ashley Fairbanks @ziibiing

All those Democrats who sold their endorsement to Bloomberg? Time to rethink that decision. Literally everyone on stage right now is better. Pick someone else.
Markos Moulitsas

Moderators love asking Bernie how he’ll pass Medicare for All, never ask Pete how he’s going to pass a constitutional amendment to radically restructure the Supreme Court.
Alex Jacquez

Unpopular opinion. I wish housing, reproductive justice, climate change, police brutality, mass incarceration, unions got at least half of the airtime healthcare has gotten through a year of debate.
Nelini Stamp

Her answer on gun violence honestly sums up so much of how Warren approaches politics: she talks about mass shootings, suicides, the disproportionate impact of gun violence on women and communities of color, links it to gun industry and corruption, and calls for systemic change.
Leah Frances Greenberg

Smart of Klobuchar to bring up criminalization of abortion patients and doctors. Has Pete ever talked about Purvi Patel, a woman in his own state who was prosecuted for self inducing abortion?
Irin Carmon

Here's a thought: if Amy Klobuchar can take Pete Buttigieg to the cleaners, voters might want to contemplate whether he's the right person to tackle Donald Trump. Just a thought.
Helaine Olen

The state of the Republican party and its descent into fascism:

"I am tired of communities of faith being weaponized and being mischaracterized because the only time religious freedom is invoked is in the name of bigotry and discrimination." —AOC
CAP Faith

Good lord what a miserable affair it must be to be a young Republican.
David Roberts

conservatives believe in "local control" like they believe in cutting deficits
Chris Hayes

The worst thing about the last three or four years isn't a single president or administration. It's learning that half of this country is made up of terrible humans. That's the most deflating, depressing thing about all of this. That it's not just people standing for this dystopian nightmare in an act of complacency; it's a large swath of people actively *supporting* it.
@mollypeonies

I wrote about this extensively in my book THE MAN THEY WANTED ME TO BE. Trumpism is about protecting white, patriarchal supremacy. Look at the hallmarks. Bullying. Authoritarianism. Fighting a “conspiracy” of women, LGBTQ, minorities. It’s a white male crisis.
Jared Yates Sexton

If you are saying, "You can't call them fascists because they are not yet loading people onto cattle trucks," you are telling them that they can do what they like up to the point of cattle trucks. Which is exactly what they want to hear. Please don't do it.
Simon Ubsdell

Just a regular reminder that America’s Evangelical Right was hijacked by a Neo-Confederate, white identity movement in reaction to desegregation and that cult has grown in size and power and now considers Donald Trump its living savior. Oh. And that evangelical cult has been steeped in toxic conspiracy theories that portray America as the battleground between holy whites and satanic forces, including women, the poor, and repressed populations, and they consider Trump the necessary warrior in that battle. That sign is satire, but the premise is still painfully true. If we’re going to make it out of this crisis and find some way forward we have to recognize what we’re dealing with, and the cult of Trumpism isn’t just something that happened without decades of festering:


Jared Yates Sexton

When Democrats move "too far left," the conversation turns to universal healthcare and climate action. But when Republicans move too far right, it turns to white nationalism and unification of Church and State. Why the constant need for false equivalencies? Is it not worth asking if Republicans are moving too far right when: A record number of self-declared white nationalists ran for office as Republicans during the last midterms, naming Trump as their inspiration? I wish never trumpers worried more about their own party going too far right instead of trying to get democrats to join them.
@TheLoveBel0w

There’s a reason men are wearing Trump gear, faux military dress, shirts with aggressive slogans and iconography. They’re absolutely terrified and are trying desperately to convince the world they’re not. It’s classic overcompensation. And this is how fascism takes root.
Jared Yates Sexton

FACTS:
45 doesn’t have the votes to stay in power.
He knows it and EVERYONE on both sides know it too.
His life and freedom depend on not losing the election, as does that of many others in the GOP.
There is ZERO chance they will play fair.
They won’t just try to divide us.
Pam Keith

How did we become more afraid of European style socialism than European style fascism?
Schooley

That feeling when your countermajoritarian dreams are about to come true:


Anthony Michael Kreis

The GOP hasn't considered the Democratic Party legitimate for a generation. Know that, and lots of mysteries are solved.
David Kaib

Racism, white supremacy, and police brutality:

In my opinion here’s one of the most racist stats ever:
In 2011, the NYPD stopped and frisked 168,126 black men between the ages of 14 - 24
In 2011, there were only 158,406 black men in NYC between 18-24
Yes, they stop and frisked more black men than actually existed!
90% were innocent
michaelharriot

In my job I swim around in land use terminology all day. Zoning, variance, setback, easement, add 50+ words here. All words for state/others to regulate land ultimately stolen from 1st Nations/indigenous/N. Ams. It's Stolen Land Use terminology! Stolen wealth. How can we reframe.
Mitra Jalali

A new study finds that black baristas who work for Starbucks at airports make a median wage of $11.15 an hour, $1.85 less than white baristas.
Steven Greenhouse

So often I hear white allies talk about how frustrating it is to organize white people. Even going so far as to say they “hate white people”. Yooooooooo that’s the work tho! It would not be a good use of anyone’s time for me to try and have a conversation with your maga uncle.
Cacje @CJ_Hende

Man behind counter at sandwich shop: "Where are you from?"
Me: "Michigan."
Him: "No I mean ethnically."
Me: "I know what you meant."
Still felt awkward enough to answer the question, but proud that I've finally reached at least that level of sass to this constant question.
Mona El-Hout

it means "Why aren't you white?"
Gene Demby

"While white and black officers use gun force at similar rates in white and racially mixed neighborhoods, white officers are five times as likely to use gun force in predominantly black neighborhoods"
Martha Gimbel [link to research in the original]

As a “black writer” for a “black site” who writes about “black issues, the “black community” and “black voters,” I’ve found that one of the worst things you can do is refer to white people as “white people.” White people hate that. I call it “the privilege of individuality.”
michaelharriot

We've got white adults without resilience or emotion regulation enough to make it through one serious conversation about racism without breaking down or lashing out insisting that what youth of color need is not racial justice, but resilience and emotion regulation.
Paul Gorski - Equity Literacy Institute

I used to think a big part of my job was explaining black people to white people. Now I realize that a big part of my job is explaining white people to white people.
Elie Mystal

I’m always amazed by how medical textbooks will drop a:
“Black people are more likely to develop...”
“African-Americans have the highest rates of...”
With no mention whatsoever of the systemic factors that contribute to the disparate outcomes we observe. It’s dangerous, and feeds into the narrative that Black people are inherently “broken” and forgoes an opportunity to put the onus on true culprit of these inequities: racism. Let’s stop dropping numbers with no explanation in 2020. It’s unjust. Our communities deserve better.
LaShyra “Lash” Nolen

College swim team takes bathroom break on the way back from a road trip. Local deputies spot the team’s only black member, tackle him, put a gun to his head, threaten to kill him. They later claim they mistakenly thought he’d taken the bus hostage.
Radley Balko

White people to black people: Get over it! What is “it”?
Slavery
Lynching
The black codes
Jim Crow
Racial covenants
Convict leasing
Emmett Till
George Stinney
The Southern Strategy
Red Summer
The Tulsa Massacre
Mass incarceration
Trayvon
Black Lives Matter
Stop and Frisk
Charles M. Blow

In the Jim Crow South, Negroes who declined to step into the street when encountering whites on the sidewalk were charged with “incivility” that was punishable by death. Trying vote. Demanding a fair wage. Talking back: all of it could get you hanged. I think of this when someone describes calling racism by its rightful name as “incivility”
Brent Staples

The worst celebration of diversity is when we ask people experiencing racism to participate in diversity spectacles while we ignore racism. That kind of celebrating diversity is racism. The best celebration of diversity is an annihilation of racism.
Paul Gorski - Equity Literacy Institute

Too many folks fail to realize black people have, can & will survive Trump's reign of terror. We're masters at this. Look, listen & learn but don't try to scare us with a 2nd Trump term. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation...my people lived it daily.
@lacadri34

Sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:

One of the weirder and more puzzling forms of conservative projection is their deep conviction that all men want to be callous, insensitive assholes, and are only restrained from doing so by political correctness. And, beyond that, that men *ought* to be free to be callous, insensitive assholes, that it is their right, and that the PC restraints they struggle under are an unjust burden.
David Roberts

Women have equaled and outperformed men in almost every sphere. It is time to stop trying to change women, and start changing the systems that prevent them from achieving their potential.
António Guterres

Fantastic New York Times Weinstein graphic (h/t Fipi Lele):


Cory Doctorow

the neat trick about sexism: if you step up, people will blame you for being assertive. if you step back, they'll blame you for being meek
Leah Frances Greenberg

I think it would be pretty fresh if I could just open up a slot in my gut and just clean my uterus out like a lint trap every month, but apparently saying that isn’t “fun elevator chit chat.”
Eliza Skinner

The climate crisis and renewable energy:

I don't think young people need us older generations to feel hopeful when it comes to climate change. That's kind of irrelevant. What I think they need to know is that we will never stop working, we are willing to change, we love them and we are listening.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Not doing a Green New Deal because you're worried about federal debt is like speeding over the cliff-edge because you're worried about wear and tear on your brake pads.
Cory Doctorow

Remember that part of the Green New Deal that is about healthcare for all to allow the workforce to flexibly move into jobs in the emerging clean economy?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Livestock contributed to ~23% of the total warming of 0.81°C from all sources from 1850 to 2010, despite agriculture directly contributing only 10–12% of global GHG emissions. The effects of CH4 only last decades, but only decay if we stop emitting it!


@Peters_Glen
Preventing catastrophic climate breakdown means not only cancelling future fossil fuel infrastructure (such as a third runway at #Heathrow), but also retiring existing ff infrastructure. It is time to bring the fossil age to an end.
George Monbiot

If you're around 30, throughout your lifetime you will witness humanity either choosing course-correction and self-preservation in the face of climate change, or getting stuck on the path to self-destruction. In fact, you're not a passive observer. You will have a role to play.
François Chollet

Does anyone else see that these sorts of whiz-bang ecomodernist "solutions" [like planting forests on buildings] aren't solutions at all but just cute distractions from the hard work we need to do pronto the crux of which amounts to
1 use less energy
2 no more fossil fuel
Peter Kalmus

The good news: thousands of major institutions are now wrestling with the climate emergency.
The bad news: most of them are understanding it in frameworks that are 10 to 25 years out of date.
Each lost day changes the nature of the emergency we face, not just its magnitude.
Alex Steffen

The phrase "realistically, we're not going to stop [insert optional high-carbon activity here]" is doing a lot of unexamined and counterproductive ideological work.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

When we think about the climate emergency, we tend to underestimate the roles of low-level selfishness and widespread incompetence.
Alex Steffen

As soon as people stop framing climate change as two binary states —we’re doomed, or not doomed—and start framing our response as a matter of harm reduction, we’ll actually start making some damned progress.
Dr. Jacquelyn Gill

The only thing that can ultimately stop climate breakdown is to completely stop burning fossil fuels. Everything else is an addict's attempt to distract. Some things are good but far too small (e.g. planting trees and carbon farming). Some do more harm than good (carbon offsets).
Peter Kalmus

I would argue that the human race is *not* committing mass suicide, but rather that some people are killing other people for money and power, right under the noses of most people, who don't realize quite what's happening.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

No neutral land use, infrastructure, energy decisions now: they're either moving us forward or they're high-CO2 stranded assets in the making
Alex Steffen

A new study has found that natural sources can't explain the surge of methane in the atmosphere in recent decades. "This strengthens suspicions that fossil fuel companies are not fully accounting for their impact on the climate."
Eric Holthaus

To get a sense for how backwards we are on climate policy, consider the fact that people are literally *rewarded* for frequent flying rather than disincentivized from doing so. It's extraordinary.
Jason Hickel

I always wonder why restoration ecologists basically never talk about or to people whose management and culture maintained the “original” ecosystem(s) that they’re trying to restore. If your restoration ecology isn’t centered on Indigenous empowerment, is it really restorative?
Dr. Katherine Crocker

"Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door... To hope is to give yourself to the future” –Rebecca Solnit:


Extinction Rebellion

I just published WHY I AM AN ECO-FEMINIST: being an eco-feminist related to using the feminist approach in understanding ecological issues. In every environmental issue, there is always women crisis or equally women crisis leads to environmental crisis. Instability and increased poverty make women and girls particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse which is one of the reasons that climate change is a feminist issue.
Oladosu Adenike @the_ecofeminist

The next time some Republican says that the GOP is planning to tackle climate change with "innovation," I give you permission to wave Trump's budget, which *withdraws* R&D funding, right in their lying face.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

The international travel of fashion brands and buyers to attend the seasonal circuit of runway shows emits 241,000 tons of CO2 a year, equivalent to the annual emissions of a small country. It's inequities like this that the "aviation is only 2% of emissions" statistic obscures.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

A WPA for climate reporting, exploration and storytelling.
Alex Steffen

'Each passenger on a non-stop return flight from London to New York accounts for about 3 tons of CO2, as much carbon as is emitted by heating an average family home in the UK for an entire year.'
@benking01

how about calling fossil capitalism "dinosaur economics"?
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

I worry “The New Green Deal” wont happen since there are still people trying to reverse “The New Deal.”
Hari Kondabolu

When discussing climate change, we often get hung up on debating different scenarios, targets, and deadlines. Sure. But let’s not forget the most important lesson:
- disruptive climate change is already here
- the warmer it gets, the worse things get
Dr. Jonathan Foley @GlobalEcoGuy

If it seems like we are collectively in a steady march in a direction that looks worse and worse day by day, remember that change rarely goes in one direction for long. (Though 'not long' can be too long, and much loss and suffering can happen in that time).
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

My 11 year just nearly had a heart attack when he saw the exit polls in Iowa saying health care was the number one issue. “Not climate change?” he moans. “It’s like the the house is on fire and all people care about is doing renovations.”
Chris Murphy

Sustainable transportation and livable cities:

Anyone who advocates concentrating rental housing on big, noisy, dangerous stroads to "protect neighborhoods" should be asked whether they'd be willing to live on said stroad themselves. This approach = "Neighborhoods" for me but not for thee.
Daniel Herriges

The value of highway spending on the economy has been less than if the highway trust fund was simply saved and generated interest for nearly 20 years (by FHWA's own research):


patrick kennedy @WalkableDFW
Roughly 42 percent of the miles driven by ride-hailing vehicles are trips where only the driver is onboard. That’s a problem for traffic and the climate, a new @UCSUSA report concludes.
InsideClimate News

Wait, hear me out... If transportation is the #1 source of carbon emissions, and commute time is the #1 factor in predicting economic mobility, and long commute times are extended by sprawl / urban housing shortage... Maybe these are all the same issue of how we share land
Flag of Mexico @daguilarcanabal

Kid: Why won't adults do anything about climate change?
Kid (later): Will you pick me up from school?
Me: It's a beautiful day. Why don't you walk. (It's 8 blocks.)
Kid: You're the worst parent ever. No other kid has to walk.
Sadly, on the last point, she's nearly 100% right.
Charles Marohn

5 years ago, Uber insisted that it would reduce traffic. Instead, Uber drivers cruise without passengers 40% of the time. Studies show Uber and Lyft have pulled people away from public transit and walking, adding to the overall amount of driving.
Brent Toderian

bUt PuBLic TrAnSiT sHoUlD mAKe a PrOFiT:


@aiellobytrain
One really under-appreciated fact of US transportation policy is that it evolved as a response to WW2. The mandate of the USDOT was to ensure roads could accommodate military action. Which is maybe part of why cars are becoming more and more like tanks.
Isabella Chu @bellachu10

When you're an urbanist visiting a friend who drives everywhere... We went to downtown Raleigh last night and circled around looking for parking for 15 mins. My friend: "Parking is a problem here." Me: In my head "Your auto centric lifestyle is a problem."
Jerome Alexander Horne

Person who cares if pedestrians live or die = “activist”
Person whose only concern in life is parking = “community member”
Momifornia

in one's mind, cars get you places faster than they actually do.
Tony Fisk @arfisk

I wish Bloomberg would have taken all this money and put it into his traffic safety philanthropies instead. Huge need, completely under-resourced, he's one of the few big funders in the arena. Instead he's like lighting money on fire. But worse.
Angie Schmitt

The decade-long rise of SUVs on our roads is a leading contributor to the rise in pedestrian death rates. But how can Americans afford all these big, expensive cars? The answer: a 75% increase in auto loan debt in just ten years.
Streetsblog USA

Reminder to pedestrians: “Road safety is a shared responsibility.”™


Martyn Schmoll
Car crashes are the number 1 reason parents bury their children in the United States. Lot of my mom friends will cruise around in their car to get their kids to nap. Makes me think people just think of their cars as another appliance like a washing machine. Not something that could kill or injure them at almost any time. But moms I think, like everyone, have just become super inured to the risks. Rationally, 30 mile aimless car rides are more likely to injure children than BPA in bottles, or whatever.
Angie Schmitt

A 13-year study of a dozen cities found that protected bikelanes led to a drastic decline in fatalities for all users of the road. As for painted bikelanes? No safety improvement at all. And for sharrows, it’s safer to NOT have them.
Brent Toderian

“We have to kill some amount of people to preserve our commute times” is bad policy, but somehow still good politics.
Zachary Wefel

Every Sunday in Bogota they close half the roads for cycling and pedestrians. Cafes are full, local businesses kill it, and the whole city plays outside.
Phil Gaimon

Cars, overblown sporting event, jingoism, petroleum, corporate influence in politics. This tweet really captures America in 2020:


Kevin Gallatin

Centuries from now when people look back, the bygone era of mass automobile mobility may appear like a small 150-year blip in the timeline of civilization. But the legacy of destruction will be global scale and enduring.
Emily Farina

There's a strange irony in the perception that
Railways = Socialist
Motorways = Capitalist
Railways directly recoup their costs as each passenger pays at point of use
Motorways *always* have to be centrally funded and paid by tax unless you install unpopular toll booths
@tompccs

“Sprawl dwellers pay only half the cost of their roads.” That means those NOT living in sprawl pay the other half. “The [Very High] Costs of #Sprawl” - not as cheap as you think, and paid for by ALL of us.
Brent Toderian

It’s wild dude, once you see how shitty car culture makes everything its impossible to not see it everywhere
Jordan Burns @WalkableCityBoy

I should know this but what's to stop some city with a lot of pedestrians (like New York) just banning bull bars by city law? My guess is it would face legal challenge and be decided by the courts but... some vision zero should get on it already.Anyone with the most cursory understanding of how vehicle safety works could tell just by looking at it that it is a disaster where pedestrian safety is concerned. (It concentrates all the force in a small area). Instead we have cities like Portland (FFS) paying EXTRA money to outfit their police SUVs with this garbage. SMH:


Angie Schmitt
Draw me a venn diagram showing the people who come to the planning commission to oppose apartments because of how unrealistically dangerous it is to bike anywhere, and the people who oppose making it safer to bike anywhere.
Wedge LIVE!

Two European cities (Helsinki and Oslo) have zero children, pedestrians and cyclists dying in traffic. All cities that still accept such tragedies should acknowledge that NOT PROTECTING THE VULNERABLE is a political choice. Stop waiting for innovations, act moral!
Cycling Professor @fietsprofessor

Suburban sprawl costs 38% more in upfront public costs & 10% more in ongoing costs than compact development, PLUS has only 1/10th the tax revenue per acre, confirms report summarizing 17 studies. Important #citymakingmath via @CityLab
Brent Toderian

The average British person emitted more CO2 in the first two weeks of this year than the average citizen of Uganda in an entire year. Yet we are told that #ClimateBreakdown is a population issue? We need #ClimateJustice now
Extinction Rebellion

"All you ever talk about is bikes"
Do you have any idea how much y'all talk about 'parking'?
@Ollie_Cycles

It’s awesome when people cite “safety” as a reason for not riding public transit and then get in a car.
Deborah Carver @fightwithknives

The United States does a fantastic job building affordable housing for cars.


Anthony LaMesa

UK will ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2035. When will the US get around to this?
David Roberts

When a black woman entered a DC metro station without paying a $2.25 fare, transit cops pinned her to the ground, pulled a taser on her, and ripped her shirt. Jeff Bezos got 564 DC parking tickets for $16,800, but nobody’s pulling a taser on him.
Jamison Foser

“Republicans will demonstrate to Minnesotans that we take this crisis seriously and will be putting forward proposals that bolster rider safety on trains and light rail platforms,” Koznick said." You know one of the best ways to really make a transit system safe? FUND IT.
Amity Foster

Let's remember: safety on public transit applies to everyone. Not just white people from the burbs; and if we're gonna have this conversation, we need to be open & honest that the starting ground for 'safety on public transit' usually is based in making white people feel safe.
Amity Foster

Just a reminder that flexible bollards are pointless. Five vehicles in a row that parked *on* them, all giant trucks/SUVs. Oversized vehicles parked on flexible bollards:


@bcmartinson
"Efficient transport looks empty. Inefficient transport looks full"
Urban Planning & Mobility

I recognize that many people haven't thought through the psychology of car ads. But think about this. Car crashes kill about 1.25 million people worldwide a year and injure or disable tens of millions more. Maybe ads celebrating fast reckless driving is just a shitty idea?
Peter Flax

Anti-housing homeowners have a lot to say about affordability requirements on new housing, but never on existing housing. Why not a 10-20% local tax on the profit of home sales to fund affordable construction and acquisition, to match the % we require of new developments?
@ShaneDPhillips

Car drivers are never lectured like bad toddlers like this for stealing parking - and never at $425. And rarely for other behaviour that kills. Public transit is the mode w built in condescension. TTC historically, now Metrolinx is into it:


Shawn Micallef

A city’s priorities are revealed during a subway shutdown. In Toronto, the Yonge line is closed now north of Eglinton, with shuttle buses running on the four-lane road. The buses are not given dedicated space but curb-side parking is retained
Oliver Moore

Health care:

The first issue reports on a new Yale study finding that one in five Americans would be willing to engage in civil disobedience for the climate, if asked by someone they liked and respected.
Extinction Rebellion NYC

What America now [given the coronavirus] gets to learn the hard way is that universal health care is not free stuff for other people, it's an attempt to keep your infant child, your elderly parents, your immunocompromised friend from exposure to something that might kill them.
@tomtomorrow

I’m a 50-year-old Canadian. I’ve lived through all kinds of financial circumstances, & gone thru all sorts of health challenges, and even years fairly characterized as “crises.” Never once have I had to think about how I would pay for medical help. How health care should work.
Brent Toderian

Tired: choice in health plan is stupid and overrated because no one is good at shopping for insurance plans
Wired: people are also terrible at shopping for doctors and choice in doctor is way overrated.
@JonWalkerDC

I love how people like Jonathan Chait are like - we are just like England, Sanders is Corbyn! But when it comes to universal health care, it's - no, we are nothing like England. We can never compare the two.
J. Mijin Cha

People want health care not “choice.”
David Kaib

My favorite f— off moment in the new Yale health care study is when they show that we could give all 1.5 million health insurance industry workers 2 years severance pay after we pass Medicare for All and it would literally still be cheaper than what we have now
@avierkant

I have the best Blue Cross plan you can buy in DC and I just paid $660 for an ambulance ride of less than a mile. So yeah, I’m perfectly happy to give up my private insurance.
Spencer Knoll

As a Canadian I can confirm that it’s possible to have free healthcare without beheadings. There is no necessary connection between the two.
Murtaza M. Hussain

WHO???? are these people who want to keep their current private health insurance plan? WHO
Tony Webster

Immigration and the most recent version of the Muslim ban:

Undocumented immigrants pay more in US taxes than Amazon or Facebook do.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Banning people from entering this country based on their Muslim faith is not protecting religious liberty.
Saying “Islam hates us” is not protecting religious liberty.
Shame on you, Mr. President.
Ilhan Omar

So let me get this straight, Trump argues that we need immigrants who will pull their own weight and won't burden America financially, yet he just banned Nigerians, the group with one of the highest levels of educational attainment in this country, from getting green cards?
@Freeyourmindkid

Just a reminder that the United States still has a Muslim ban. And Trump extended it last week to Nigeria, as well as Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan and Tanzania
Alexis Goldstein

Education:

Depressing the way elementary schools feel like they have to differentiate themselves by offering specialties now. Just teach the kids how to read FFS! Even basic education has become this consumer culture thing. Has to make parents feel like they got something others didn't.
Angie Schmitt

If you want to know the truth. Kids LOVE learning. What they despise is “providing evidence that they’re learning.”
Raised hand ”Mr. Wagner, that’s awesome. Thank you for showing me that.”
“Yep. Do 15 assignments proving to me that you understand it.”
Kyle Wagner @GowagsKyle

Wealth inequality, wage theft, and a better way to organize the economy:

For many, the longing to be rich isn’t even a desire for riches *as such* so much as a longing for the psychological security imagined to come from being able to “throw money at a problem” of basic needs - but a different social order wouldn’t require that in the first place.
DREW DANIEL

Is hilarious how capitalists will tell you that capitalism is the system for rugged individuals. Meanwhile your boss expects you to be obedient and grateful, and doesn't give you any real autonomy over your life or work. A hierarchy of servants and masters isn't individuality.
Existential Comics

capitalism isn’t sustainable, community is
Noname Book Club

The US is in denial over how many people are living in poverty.
Our poverty line assumes:
$0 healthcare costs
$0 childcare costs
$0 rent increases
No geographic diff
Even with that lie, 40 million people live in *recognized* poverty. And we have no idea how many are actually poor.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Before financialization, companies saw their role as producing products that made profits; after the "shareholder revolution," the job of companies was to make profits regardless of the products, their quality, or their effect on workers or customers
Cory Doctorow

"What we want is to move from a society of domination to one of participation, from conquest to co-creation, from extraction to regeneration, from harm to healing, and from separation to love." — Charles Eisenstein
Extinction Rebellion

If income distribution ratios in the US had remained unchanged in the decades after 1979, the bottom 80% of American households would each have $11,000 more in annual income today, and the richest 1% would have $750,000 less.
Jason Hickel

remember that "punishable with a fine" just means "legal for the rich"
Adam Smith (responding to a story about Jeff Bezos paying $16,000 in parking tickets)

Your periodic reminder that the word "meritocracy" was coined by a sociologist in a satirical novel that lampooned the circular reasoning of elites: "The system must be fair, otherwise, my power would be unfair!" Over and over, people who adopt "meritocracy" in naive ignorance of its satirical origin re-enact the main plot of that 60-year-old novel, creating nepotistic systems that preserve the power of the mediocrities that lucked into the corner office, and call it all fair play.
Cory Doctorow

Why do we always hear about how Jeff Bezos starting Amazon in a garage but never how his parents invested $300,000 into his fledgling company? Could your parents do that. Do you even have access to a garage? Is this “American Dream” success story real or a myth we tell ourselves?
Kentington Clarke

Who would have guessed that four decades of radical inequality and ruthless concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few would have wrecked the US justice system and put American democracy in stages of terminal decline? (Now you're surprised?)
Langdon Winner

And, finally, the best of the rest:

My daughter has very severe learning disabilities but she experiences life on her own level. Her feelings of fun, excitement, joy and happiness are as valid and important as anyone else's. No one should pre-judge what in life is for her. This world is for her as much as for anyone else
Christine McClements

i think the problem with sisyphus is that he did not work hard enough
Gannon Reedy

This is a very old oak that has been pruned back to almost a stump and grown into a wonderful shape, but with big habitat value in the trunk. Severe crown reduction is an important management option for very old trees, manually doing what nature does, if left alone:


Jeremy Barrell

A whatchamacallit in different languages:
7. Thingamajig (English)
6. Chingadera (Spanish)
5. Himstergims (Danish)
4. Naninani (Japanese)
3. Zamazingo (Turkish)
2. Dingsbums (German)
1. Huppeldepup (Dutch)
Adam Sharp

When you die, it’s only for a second and then you wake up in paradise and your body is perfect and you will live forever and never get bored and if you believe this then I have some essential oils to sell you.
almightygod

All you need to know about the Electoral College is that Wyoming has 1 electoral vote per 192,000 people, while California has 1 electoral vote per 727,000 people. If you believe in democracy and can do simple math, you should oppose the Electoral College.
Sergio Siano

And how are we doing? Estimated cost of "the War on Terror," 2001 through 2020: $6.4 trillion
Langdon Winner

I'm really starting to resent NYC. Biggest U.S. city, supposedly so liberal but didn't prosecute crimes of Trump family, so now he's President. Made Bloomberg's racist, shit-on-poor, plans look popular. And car-loving, bike-hating DeBlasio, in our densest city, is their progressive?
kar nels

It's also a myth that there is no crime in authoritarian states, as if they would report it honestly anyway. As the joke went, murder and robbery are illegal because the state doesn't like the competition.
Garry Kasparov

There’s a story behind every warning sign:


You Had One Job

I can't express how bad job hiring processes are. I really don't know that many people and I can make a long list of people who have been rejected for even consideration for the job and then through crazy work arounds, get the job and are highly valued.
kar nels (commenting on an article about how algorithms are used in HR)

The average 1960s issue of Mad Magazine presumed its reader was well-versed in pop culture, global and national politics, American history, contemporary social issues, classical literature, and Broadway melodies. It was routinely dismissed as brain-rotting trash for children.
Ira Brooker

Baby Danny Devito (1947):


@franksfluids

It's so funny that our national narrative is "lazy Americans take voting for granted and don't do it" and not "the US has consistently worked to disenfranchise huge swaths of the population and ignore the will of others so maybe it is understandable ppl don't vote"
Kaitlyn Greenidge @surlybassey

Propagating plants always feels very emotional to me. Like a parallel to my inevitable future as a hardy flower that intentionally creates and raises offspring alone.
Cacje @CJ_Hende

According to the FBI, white-collar crime is estimated to cost the United States more than $300 billion annually. $300 billion a year. By comparison, the FBI estimates that the combined costs of all robbery and theft that occur in a single year have never topped $5 billion.
@girlziplocked

A new species of plant has been discovered in Brazil, and it has the largest leaves of any plant! It’s called Coccoloba gigantifolia and scientists are already working on its conservation as its native range is currently being cleared for development:


Nature Is Weird (Photo by C Ferreira & R Gribel)

It’s funny when progressives protest from outside of the political process they’re reprimanded for not understanding how politics works and urged to get in the game. When they get in the game and begin to change how we do politics they’re condemned for not falling in line.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

"In Kansas, state prisons don't allow Angie Thomas' young adult novel, The Hate U Give, or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye — but they do allow Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf." Book censorship in U.S. prisons is arbitrary, soul-crushing, and self-defeating: Who Should Decide What Books Are Allowed In Prison? (from an NPR story)
Laila Lalami

Now that is great visual design. h/t Fipi Lele:


Cory Doctorow

I know these may not be our biggest problems, but if we’re going for big structural change, I would like to see a unified Democratic government eliminate the retirement pre-funding requirement for the Postal Service, and overhaul the IRS to simplify filing. Related, whenever we next have complete Democratic control of the federal government, I need legislators to fucking go big or go home. Move everything you can, make it hard to undo, and act as if you don’t expect to keep your job. Now or never.
erica mauter