Recording Part of the History

Minnesota Public Radio today posted this rundown of the events of the week after May 25in Minneapolis, focused on the abandonment and burning of Minneapolis's Third Precinct.

It's traumatizing to read, and I wasn't even nearby.

Funny Face

It's another one of those days when all I can do is spin the dial in my photos app, this time all the way back to the summer of 2013.

And what do I find but this funny Ezra Klein freeze-frame face, which I snapped for no particular reason:


It was a more innocent era.

What Did Wealth Look Like?

Someone on Twitter asked the question, "What are some things you thought were indicators of wealth when you were a kid?" He is clearly from a younger generation than I am, since his answer is a basketball hoop with a plexiglass backboard and his wife's is a refrigerator with water and ice in the door, but it got me thinking.

To simplify my time frames, I would say I was a child in the 1960s and a preteen and teen in the 1970s. I had little awareness that there was wealth as a child. The best I can come up with for an answer during the first 10 years of my life is an in-ground swimming pool (probably based on watching the Beverly Hillbillies).

As a preteen and teenager, I had more awareness. Some of the things I associated with wealth then were being able to get braces, going downhill skiing, and going to summer camp…all things our family couldn't afford to do (though I don't think I had any interest in skiing). I wasn't aware of it at the time, but in hindsight I also realize the idea of family vacations, especially to anywhere outside the U.S., is almost completely alien to me and therefore something that I associate with wealth to this day. And the idea of flying somewhere? I wouldn't even have considered it.

I had better indicators of what it meant to be poor, even as a child, because that was something I could see in my community more clearly than I could see wealth. Being poor meant living in a conglomeration of school buses or a paint-faded house that was almost falling down, usually with many brothers and sisters. It meant an unmowed lawn with junk strewn around and barking dogs. It meant a classmate who smelled kind of funny and who no one ever seemed to want to be friends with.

It's painful to think back to those poor children of 50+ years ago, know they suffered from their circumstances, and that we all blamed them for it.

Hubris 2020

I learned many concepts in high school English classes that began to shape my world view. One that I remember having to grapple with particularly was hubris. I didn't understand it at first; it seemed alien to me, maybe because its scale was too grand for my life experience at 15 years old. My teacher had to explain it, though seeing it illustrated in a text also helped (Oedipus).

I kept thinking about hubris last night while watching clips of Republican governors speaking back in May about the coronavirus (you can see them starting at about 2:30 here), declaring that their states would never be like New York when it came to the pandemic. I guess they didn't have that unit on the Greek tragedies like I did.

It inspired me to come up with some bad acrostics in their honor.

Hiding
Under
Brazenly
Ridiculous
Ideology
Systematically

Hoping
U
Become
Right
in
September

Haircuts
Ubers
Bars
Restaurants
Ice cream parlors
Schools

Heaping
Utter
Batshit
Reasons
Instead of
Science

Hollow,
Unwise
Bros
Reject
Intelligent
Solutions

Harming
Us
By
Reopening
Is
Stupid

You Look Like You Could Use Some Flowers

There are so many important and distressing topics I could write about, but instead it's time for some photos from the archive, particularly some of the flowers of last September:


New England aster.


Cosmos.


One of the goldenrods... I don't think it's the common one.


Komache balloon flower.


Upright stonecrop.


Tithonia.


Cherry zinnias.

It Was a Lie (Which We Knew, But It's Good to Have It Where We Can Find It)

I don't write about health care (or our so-called health care system) often enough anymore. It barely even makes it onto the topic list in my Twitter round-ups. I suppose the pandemic is partly about health care, but not in the sense I was writing about it in other years, or directly in the sense of how we make sure everyone has access to the care they need for a healthy life.

At an earlier point, I mentioned Wendell Potter, a former CIGNA executive who became a whistleblower on the health insurance industry and who now advocates for Medicare for All. I first saw him on a Bill Moyers show 10 or so years ago.

Today he posted a short Twitter thread, worth quoting in full:

Amid America's COVID-19 disaster, I must come clean about a lie I spread as a health insurance exec: We spent big $$ to push the idea that Canada's single-payer system was awful and the U.S. system much better. It was a lie and the nations' COVID responses prove it. The truth: Canada's doing much better than the U.S. when it comes to COVID testing and treatment. On a per capita basis, more Canadians are being tested and fewer getting sick and dying. This may shock Americans who still believe the lies I told about the Canadian health care system.

Here’s the truth: Our industry PR and lobbying group, AHIP, supplied my colleagues and me with cherry-picked data and anecdotes to make people think Canadians wait endlessly for their care. It’s a lie and I’ll always regret the disservice I did to folks on both sides of the border.

In Canada, no one gets turned away from doctors due to lack of funds. In America, exorbitant bills are a defining feature of the system. What about quality of care? When it comes to COVID, there's been ~ 21 deaths per 100,000 in Canada, versus 34 per 100,000 in the U.S.

Remember, in Canada there are no co-pays, deductibles or co-insurance ever. Care is free at the point of service. And those laid off in Canada don’t face the worry of losing their health insurance. In the U.S., millions are losing their jobs and coverage, and scared to death.

You learn a lot about a healthcare system when a global crisis hits and different nations have different results. Canada’s single-payer system is saving lives. The U.S. profit-driven corporate model is failing.

I'll regret slandering Canada's system for the rest of my life. 

COVID in Just One Day

Here are the COVID-related tweets I've marked from just the past 24 hours. Some are about the extent of the disease's spread, especially given our ineffective national government, while others are about its cultural effects:

Three times as many Americans have died from COVID-19 in the past four months than died in the first four years of the AIDS crisis. Think about that for a moment.
Leah McElrath

After waiting two months I finally received the masks promised by the Governor's Office. So... Utah taxpayers are paying for politically charged militia masks to be sent to residents? Not appropriate!


Christine Passey-Spencer

As the official COVID-19 death toll creeps past 120,000 in the USA, there is another important comparison to make. In a normal year, the combined impact of all infectious diseases in the USA will only kill about 120,000. COVID-19 alone has killed that many in four months.
Robert Rohde

Hot-yoga domes could be the new social-distancing fitness craze:


New York Post

When we look back on the pandemic, I think the small conspiracy among the WHO, the CDC and so many other organizations to tell everyone masks don’t work back in January in order to preserve stockpiles for health workers will be the worst mistake of the countless mistakes made.
@catvalente

Oh no:


@EtheHerring

BREAKING: US hits single day high of reported Coronavirus cases. Federal government silent.
Andy Slavitt

It's overwhelming and it's not ending. "Reopening" in this country is a sick joke. As journalist Lyz Lenzl summarized a piece she wrote for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, "Die for your job, is the message from the University of Iowa to instructors."

Stop Using Hazel

There's a billboard that I've been seeing lately with some frequency. I kept meaning to get a photo of it to use as an illustration some time when I wanted to talk about how problems in our world are structural or systemic, rather than individual.

Well, I finally got a photo of it, so here it is:


It turns out I got the photo just in time to be paired with this stat from former New York Times labor reporter Steve Greenhouse, which he drew from Forbes:

Since the pandemic began, total U.S. billionaire wealth has risen twice as much as the government paid in stimulus checks to 150 million Americans.

Billionaires' wealth rose from $2.9 trillion to $3.5 trillion as $6.5 trillion in household wealth disappeared.

So sure, the promise inside Hazel is greater than the poverty around her in some metaphorical sense, but this headline is insulting.

ChildFund, I note, works in the U.S. as well as countries across the around the world. If our billionaires paid taxes instead of lobbying against them (when they're not offshoring and hiding their money), maybe children wouldn't have to rely on charities like ChildFund to be able to grow up healthy, educated, and safe enough to realize their promise.

Obviously, They Thought This Was Clever

There's only one answer to the question on this bumper sticker:


And that answer is: Nope.

Ironically, I wasn't following this car closely, at least not in the sense the bumper sticker implies. I was walking along where it was parked on a city street.

All of its owners' assumptions, it seems, are incorrect.

Being Ready

I've never heard of writer, urban farmer, and foster parent Sharon Astyk until recently, when a couple of Facebook friends shared a long post she had written. Her advice and analysis keeps popping back into my head, so I wanted to bring it here. I can't link directly to it (one of the mysteries of Facebook) so I'll quote it in its entirety as a means of putting it into the virtual filing cabinet.

I've been mulling this post over for a few days, because it involves some longer term thinking and making predictions. I'm not a huge fan of straight out prediction - I think the world is overall pretty complicated, and while I make a lot of informed guesses, I rarely claim they are anything more. Instead, I usually advise people to prepare for multiple possible outcomes in ways that put you in the best shape for all of them. And that's still good advice. But I'm going to diverge from it a bit, and I want you to understand why and what I'm saying clearly. So bear with me. Apologies for the length of this.

For example, when I advised people with enough resources to do so to stock up, take care of essential medical issues and make additional donations to community programs back in early Feb [2020], I did so with the understanding that doing so would probably work out for people anyway - they'd have extra food and supplies even if there wasn't a shortage and could just buy less later. Community programs would be stronger and able to help more people. And their teeth would be clean and they'd have their meds, even if nothing had happened. It is possible that my predicting a coronavirus outbreak might make some people anxious for no reason, but the cost-benefit ratio of being prepared was so much greater than any losses from acting as though we'd have one. Pity our government didn't do the same.

As I said, I rarely fly into the higher atmosphere of actual prediction, and ask people to prepare for SPECIFIC outcomes, mostly because I think the future is mostly opaque and mostly supposed to be opaque. Moreover, as I say every time I do make any predictions: "I do not believe that everything that comes out of my ass or my mouth is divine truth. I make plenty of mistakes. Please remember you are listening to a lady who writes on the internet for free and value what you receive accordingly."

But I am going to break that rule today, and make actual predictions, and at least say that I am making my own personal strategies around this, and I'm not sure it would be a bad idea for the rest of you to do so. You will then have to decide whether this is worth considering for yourself.

As you know, I'm a data girl. That's why my feed is so full - some of it is to share with you all, of course, but a lot of it for me. I'm trying to make a picture of what's going on, and what might or might not come next. And creating such a picture comes from a wide range of sources, often from tiny tidbits from within larger content.

Right now, what the data says, is that we're headed back up to substantive increases in caseloads. Besides widely publicized outbreaks in Florida, Texas, Arizona and the Carolinas, and basically across the south and west, if you look at individual states, the numbers are creeping up. New York, which is responsible for a majority of the overall national decline, is back over 900 cases a day - just for Friday, so far, but the creep is timed perfectly for the first cases from both reopening and the protests. The US had 23K new cases Friday, but 26K yesterday ON A SATURDAY - while stats are almost always lower on Saturdays to reflect a lack of test processing on weekends. Yes, it is only one day, but it is a real oddity.

It is too early to be sure that this part of an overall trend, but when you see something emerge in the data EXACTLY where you'd expect to see it - in MN on Wednesday, in response to it being the first state with protests, in NY on Friday to reflect changes here - you begin to think you've got something. Add in the universal American - "we are so over it" response, and I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

The weekly average has been around 20-23K cases since mid-may, leading to 800ish deaths a day. Up to 25K+ cases will inevitably lead to about 1000 deaths a day. More if hospitals are overwhelmed. In this, I'm not saying anything everyone else who pays attention isn't. But here's where I'm going to go a little further. And I'm going to make 4 assumptions. You can feel free to argue with those assumptions, and if you think I'm wrong about all or any of them, you should make different choices.

1. That the Republicans are not lying and won't allow another stimulus package until August. And then like the last one it will mostly move wealth to the wealthy. I believe there will be a new stimulus bill, probably even one a bit more generous than the last for individuals, because the Republican congress will be trying to buy votes, but the money won't arrive until fall. After that, it will be crickets until either a new administration takes over or until the poverty riots.

2. That even the Blue state governors are going to find it incredibly hard to shut back down for both political and economic reasons. Yesterday Andrew Cuomo, who has stood among the firmest in his shutdown policies, announced it would be up to local governments to enforce any further shutdowns - ie, washed his hands of some of the responsibility. The Red state governors won't do it until there is mass public outcry and their jobs are at stake, and we are a very, very long way from that. The Blue state governors may walk it back to phase 2, but that's as far as it will go, not because they are unconcerned about human lives but because politically and economically they cannot make other choices. We're open.

We are not going to meaningfully constrain the death rate until it exceeds what we are willing to tolerate as a people. And that's a ways away. Moreover, even if states due walk back their re-openings, public behavior won't change until people are afraid. I'm thinking that doesn't happen until early to mid July at the soonest. Which puts death peaks in mid-August to early September. I also expect a lot of lying and massaging of numbers in order to enable the nation to stay open - which is already happening.

3. That the economy is tanking because of the virus, not the shutdown. That reopening won't save small businesses, won't make most people feel safe, and won't make people not broke. It has its own momentum, and since we have failed to reduce the virus, the financial situation will get worse for quite a while. Sweden is our test case there, and every study suggests that a hard lockdown and then stable reopening is the better outcome - but we've made our choice. We are going to have a longer and deeper and more awful recession than we had to, and our reopening is going to be more fragile. Many more jobs will be lost and the predictions of a fast recovery are ridiculous. As long as the virus rips us to pieces, it will also rip the economy. And that's a long time.

4. That there isn't going to be a miracle before spring (at the very earliest) in re: the virus and treating or reducing its effects. The last, of course, is probably the most uncertain, but while we know how to treat it better, we have yet to figure it out. I could certainly be wrong about this one, but I hold on to the old military adage that hope is not a strategy. Moreover, it is worth remembering that this could go on for several years.

I actually think an outbreak of several years is the most likely outcome - that we will have two years of a period where we are dealing with a virus with a high death rate that many of us can't afford to contract. I also think that patterns in coronavirus immunity suggest some of us are going to get it more than once. We are going to average 1000 deaths a day across the US MINIMUM for pretty much a year or two. I actually think it will be quite a bit higher at points - my guess is 3/4 million dead by next spring.

You can argue with my presuppositions, and I don't insist you share them. But if you do share all or most of them, here's my conclusion - ON SOME LEVEL WE ARE ON OUR OWN. And all of us are going to have to, while still caring about the larger picture and working on it, focus most deeply on the local and immediate one for personal and community safety and survival.

Now I want to be really clear about what I mean by this. I don't mean "git yer guns and move to the forest and be prepared to fight it out with the rest of the Zombies.' Nor do I mean "stop caring about your community and put all your resources into dried beans for yourself." What I really mean is actually the opposite of every man for himself. I am encouraging people to prepare to protect their own, and I want you to use the broadest possible definition of one's own - one's community, neighbors, family, friends, institutions they care about, and the democracy we love and value. I want you to put your money, resources, time and action where your mouth is, think of the things you love - the kids in your neighborhood, your grandkids, the people who really care about your city, the local network of POC, your sister's family and your cousin in Newark, your medically fragile best friend...and start strategizing how to keep everyone alive, fed, housed, safe and cared for. If you have extra resources, I want you think about how you can use them to extend further the category of "your own" or protect the most vulnerable on that list. If you have few resources, prepare ways to share what you have an insulate yourself from what's coming.

When I say "we are on our own" what I really mean is that all of us have things we care deeply about and want to protect and preserve, and right now, our government at pretty much all levels, is either unwilling or unable to protect those things, because they are engaged in a different project - a mostly political one.

That doesn't mean some individual figures won't do the right thing, some places won't make good choices or the best choices they can, but the truth is that governors and mayors and city councils have budgets and economic concerns. We've already decided that we can tolerate a certain number of deaths - and not even for a profit. We're just ok with killing people and not getting an economic return. We know that if we'd shut down before this we'd be better off. And we still didn't do it.

Moreover, historically America has also shown itself to be willing to tolerate incredible amounts of suffering in ordinary people, incredible amounts of poverty, food insecurity and health care insecurity. They are most comfortable, even happiest doing this when the people suffering most are not white, but plenty of white people are also obviously expendable, so don't be an asshole. This pattern is unlikely to change in a massive recession. If we didn't care nationally if children went hungry, or children were sexually abused in cages or people died unnecessarily of diabetes because they couldn't afford insulin when we were comparatively rich (even if that wealth missed tons of people) we will care less and blame the recession for not caring. Eventually, it will be so awful and affect so many people we may care, but that takes time, and for a long time we will simply blame the virus and the recession, and probably those pesky people who didn't want to be shot by police and dared to complain.

I am not going to bother to try and predict the presidential election, because there are too many variables. I know a lot of people are pretty gleeful that Trump is down double digits to Biden right now, but there are many months between now and November, and way too many things that could happen. I will say I think nearly everyone has consistently underestimated Trump and I will be surprised if this is not actually a fairly close election. I also expect at least one expedition of military Keynesianism, ie, an attempt to restart the economy by fighting. Moreover, I am not going to bother trying to predict what happens with the Senate. Because while it matters hugely, it doesn't matter that much to my larger point.

So let's examine the very best cases scenario (to my mind) - Biden wins handily with a mandate, the Senate flips with a solid majority, some of the less competent governors who handled the pandemic badly are eliminated, and every fool is replaced with more competent people. Biden appoints many of the best of his opponents to important roles, every uses Elizabeth Warren's plans for everything and we have rainbows and unicorns galore. More stimulus, better health care and social supports are in the plans.

They still don't take power for 7 months. 7 more months of this pandemic, functionally under a Trump administration intent on gutting everything and extracting everything. Even when they do take power, they take it 10 months into a massive, unprecedented pandemic, with half a million dead Americans and more disabled. They take it in the middle of the deepest recession in more than a century, with unemployment at between 10 and 20 percent. They still have a deeply divided country, that struggles to handle even basic public health responsibilities. The massive deficit spending of the previous administration reduces their options further. Moreover, while I'm sure there will be an initial burst of optimism, they will inherit a weary population. It will be winter, and seasonal flu plus the winter Covid outbreak will be in full bore. Oh, and it is 2020, so expect a few fun surprises too.

My point is that the social supports that we will need and what they are able to achieve at that point may not match up. States will be broke. People will be broke. Climbing out of a recession is likely to take a minimum the entire next administration. What they can accomplish will necessarily be somewhat limited, and take time to bring about. The earliest we might see significant changes in everyone's life is at the 1 year mark on the pandemic. And that's if everything goes well. It might not. The truth is that the Democrats are a. bad at winning and b. bad at using their wins to change things. They will have a limited amount of political capital, and I have deep trust in their ability to blow it. Some help may come out of it, but odds are good it won't be nearly as much as most of us would need or want to see to ensure safety and survival.

All I'm saying here is that expecting things to get radically better in the next 9 months is probably not a good bet. Even in the best case scenario it is going to be a while. It could be a lot longer. Moreover, decisions are going to be made mostly for political reasons - not rational ones - for the next 9 months no matter what happens. That means decisions like whether school reopen, whether nursing homes get protected, whether health care is provided and for whom and at what cost, whether hungry people get food, whether you have to go to work, whether you get unemployment, whether you get evicted, who lives, who dies - all of those decisions will not be made in anyone's personal best interest at any level that you can consistently trust. That is, people won't decide whether you should eat at a restaurant based on whether it is safe or not, but on whether they are ok with a certain number of people dying so restaurants can be open. If you don't want to be one of them, you will have to make your choices.

And that goes for pretty much everything including economic decisions. They will decide on whether you get unemployment or not and whether you can live on it based on budgets and politics, not on whether you can buy groceries. They will decide if your Dad dies in the assisted living home based on policy, not whether you care about your Dad or not. They will decide if your neighbor gets evicted with her kids or not based on landlord lobbying, not whether she needs housing or the community is safer if she has it.

We are on our own. And we should be prepared for that. That means you should consider scenarios and plan to protect yourself, your family, your friends, your community by consolidating resources and planning for the worst possible outcomes. If you've been out of work, and think you won't be able to pay your rent when protections expire in July, I would not assume that your protections will be renewed (they probably will be in some places, and not in others, but I wouldn't assume - or that they will be the NEXT time.) Instead, I'd start thinking about whether you could consolidate housing with someone else, sharing a place, or moving in with family. If you are relying on the public schools to provide childcare next fall, I'd start thinking about what other options you have, about bubbling with other families to share childcare. If you don't feel your Mom is safe on her own, you might want to think about where she'll live, and whether you would feel safe with congregate care.

Communities and organizations need to make these choices too. That is, bundle up with other similar organizations, because when donations dry up because people are broke, you can keep the lights on. Think about how volunteers could keep the essential functions going with reduced overhead. Think about other essential needs not being met in your community and how your organization can serve them - and find the resources to serve them. If you've stopped providing some services, think about others you can replace them with.

Build your neighborhood and community networks - make them stronger and more useful. Think very strongly in terms of combining resources to maximize them. That includes choices you might not ordinarily make - older people with housing who want to stay in their homes may need to rent out space to families who can't afford to stay in theirs and everyone may need to negotiate safety and accomodation. Collectivize to maximize buying and distribution power, so that people can build up food resources and reserves. Give up on some traditions that simply don't make sense right now and do the work of reallocating funds to essentials.

Also remember that no one right now is giving human life the value it deserves in most places. Most people are making judgements that like it or not, will kill many people. If you don't want yourself or your family or your neighbors to be among them, you need to make other choices, strategizing to reduce your risk as much as possible. Some people may be fortunate enough to be able to do that indefinitely in their personal households, but most people won't. So we are going to have to strategize to ensure, for example, that someone can care for kids who have to stay home from school, or for Grandma who can't live alone, but can't be exposed to someone who has to work.

The advice I'm giving is different than the advice I gave back in February - again if you did what I told you to do then, and nothing happened, it all worked about fine. Here, I'm saying "go against the American narrative, do different things than the ones that Americans do." The biggest, hardest one is to combine resources and trust other people in ways that few Americans who aren't very low income or recent immigrants do. Most of us value our privacy and autonomy, and while those values have a downside, they also have virtues. But I also think that they are secondary to basic safety and security.

Think primarily in terms of basic needs - food, shelter, safe water, medical care, childcare, eldercare, care for the disabled. Shift away from optional things, towards essentials, even if that seems sad and hard. Because what is sadder and harder is not having those things.

Even the weak institutional supports we've been able to count upon like schools and basic social welfare programs are vulnerable right now. How vulnerable varies from place to place and with specific circumstances, but the universal is that money makes institutions run, and money makes households run, and there isn't going to be much extra flowing in - at best things will be stable with rising prices for essentials (and most people won't have the best), but everyone needs to be putting aside for decline. Stock markets may rally, but they won't stay there. Jobs may be there...for now, but what about the next round of layoffs? Or the one after?

This strategy is risky. If all goes well, there is an early treatment, the economy gets back to rip-roaring start, giving up your apartment to move in with your parents may be put you in a weaker place. If it turns out that an early vaccine works well, and is widely available, having one of your household members quit work to homeschool may be a bad choice. Taking Mom out of her assisted living facility and bringing her home may deprive her of contact with her peers and supports she had. Consolidating your church into another church building and letting the local free legal hotline move in to a Sunday school classroom could create bonds that you'd rather were broken when everything is over. Switching the budget for summer programming to building up a community food reserve and free clothing exchange means that there might not be anything for concerts next summer when everyone is desperate for entertainment and things are better.

However, the net gains if things don't miraculously get radically better are huge. Planning to move in with your grown kids and grandchild, and getting set up for that will make things much less painful, and might be a lot better than not hugging your granddaughter for two years. Giving up less essential services for your community organization and concentrating on housing and drug treatment will save lives literally by reducing community spread and making sure people aren't ODing in isolation. Moving in with a fellow single Mom may prevent you from being evicted, and ensure that your paychecks go further, and keep your kids from going hungry.

The fact is, that those consolidations are going to happen for a lot of people whether we like it or not. A single Mom with a bad case of Coronavirus is going to need help to care for the kids regardless. If rent protections aren't renewed, you'll be out on the street, so plan accordingly. A senior may value her privacy, but know she can't grow a garden or maintain the house anymore alone, and faces a horrible death if she needs congregate care of any kind. Your organization's premises are a pain in the ass and expensive anyway. Do it BEFORE the rush. Just like stocking up was smarter before everyone else wanted toilet paper, make your choices for the future now before everyone else does.

The only other piece of advice I have for you is simple. This is an adventure. You are living in interesting times. Some of us thrive on adventure. Others think they are nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable things. Both, of course, are true. But while I don't demand any of us enjoy this, or fail to lament what we're losing, being open to what is demanded of us, and finding it interesting at least, makes it possible to make hard changes not as cruel necessity, but as something we do to face up to the world we live in, and make the end outcome worth the challenges and suffering that came with it.

Pike No More

About three years ago, I posted about the statue of Albert Pike, located near Judiciary Square and City Hall in Washington, D.C., and said it should be removed for multiple reasons. D.C. city officials had asked through official channels for it to be removed but been ignored. (Minnesota's Indigenous peoples have also asked for the Columbus statue that was formerly at our State Capitol building to be removed through official channels as well, but that had also come to naught until their recent extralegal actions.)

The statue stood on federal land, despite the fact that it was right in the middle of the city, and was maintained by the National Park Service.

Yesterday the Pike statue was toppled and lit on fire by protestors who know all too well that he is not someone who should be represented with a statue anywhere, but especially in D.C.

Statues, particularly ones depicting a single human figure on a pedestal (sometimes surrounded by archetypal figures or other icons, as Pike was), are not about history. Statues are about making heroes.

It doesn't seem that hard to understand.

To quote David Olusoga, a historian and filmmaker who appears in a short video within the Guardian article linked above,

Heroic statues of individuals are a very dated form of memorilization. It's not something we tend to do very much in the modern world. ... What I suspect is that in the future, people will look back and be astonished that we ever tolerated living under the shadow of statues of men who were slave traders, or colonialists, or, in the case of Leopold of the Belgians, someone who committed genocide.

___

After posting, I saw this quote from a historian named Nick Estes:

Tearing down a statue is not erasing history. Putting up a statue on land whose original caretakers you can't name is.

The Nose, the Lungs, and in Between

A Raleigh News & Observer story reprinted in today's Pioneer Press led me to this report from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It tells of research newly published in the journal Cell, which finds the coronavirus takes root in our nasal cavities best, more than through our mouths or even our lungs. From there, when it attacks the lungs in its most unfortunate victims, it's because they have aspirated mucus from their nasal passages, rather than that they had directly inhaled the virus as an aerosol or droplets into their lungs from the air.

This has a couple of implications: wearing a mask to protect your nose, particularly, becomes even more important. The possibility of preemptive treatments, such as nasal flushes or sprays come to mind immediately.

As support for the aspiration hypothesis, the researchers offered this:

...the researchers mapped the sites of coronavirus infection in the lungs of several people who had died from COVID-19 and found that these sites exhibited a sort of patchiness and other characteristics consistent with the hypothesis that these sites had originated from infection higher in the airway.

The theory that aspiration of oral contents into the lung is a significant contributor to COVID-19 pneumonia is consistent with observations that people at higher risk for severe lung disease — the elderly, obese and diabetic — are generally more prone to aspiration, especially at night.

So if they are correct, these "underlying conditions" are not directly interacting with the disease to cause complications and death, but they create a condition that allows the virus to get somewhere it otherwise wouldn't reach, and in younger and healthier people generally doesn't reach.

In the News & Observer story, one of the researchers was quoted this way:

If [the people who died] got the coronavirus directly from breathing it in the air, it would be evenly spread out in the lungs. “You would expect the lung to look like it had one big veil of COVID-19 coming down over it,” Boucher said.

Instead, spots of severe infection were next to healthy tissue. This supports the theory that the lungs are infected when mucus and other liquids are aspirated into the lungs.

“If you get a teaspoon down the wrong way, it’s going to go preferentially down a few airways,” Boucher said.

Most of the infected patches were in the lower lungs, another sign of a falling liquid. These findings matched with X-ray observations of COVID-19 patients showing more diseased patches lower in the lungs.

If this aspiration hypothesis turns out to be true (and it seems fairly well-grounded to me), I have to say I'm a bit freaked out by this, since I think of myself as having kind of a lazy epiglottis. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it seems as though I choke on beverages or my own saliva more than average. Great.

I hope these researchers' general findings about the nasal passages lead to some effective treatments.

In Which Bee Work Becomes Folk Lore

Have you seen this photo of a "heart" honeycomb shared somewhere on social media?

It's usually described as what happened when a beekeeper left the frame off and the bees went freestyle. Aw, cool, right? They made a heart.

Well, a folklorist named Steve Byrne saw it posted somewhere recently and remembered he'd seen it at an earlier point with a different attribution and smelled an urban legend in the making, so he decided to trace it back to its origin.

It's a story with some twists and turns, in keeping with the bees' waxwork, leaving Byrne with the following admonition:

And that, folks, is what we call Internet Folklore, where stories spread and change quicker than ever, and involve communities of people experiencing a simple yet heartwarming tale.

The thing to take away? On the internet, search behind what you see. Don't take things at face value. Don't let your "aww" gene get in the way of thinking, hmm, is this for real? Because there are people out there who seek to use such kindly human instincts in unkind ways. 

The Equal Justice Initiative

It's nice when an organization you admire has a logo you also admire. I noticed recently that Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative had a simple, resonant logo:

Searching it, I found that EJI's identity design work was done by a firm called Turner Duckworth (though I'm not totally sure the logo was done by the same company).

Here are a couple of other pieces of their work for EJI:

If I ever get down to Montgomery, Alabama, visiting The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice will be one of the main reasons.

Who's Better Organized?

It's getting hard to write in the midst of all the overwhelmingness, so I thought I would spin the roulette wheel of my photos app to see what image it landed on for today.

This is what it came up with:

I have posted this photo before (here's the original post, from 2016, if you want to know where it was taken) but today I like it out of context.

Tom Tomorrow Connects the Dots

Tom Tomorrow's cartoons are always relevant, but this one must be shared:


He appears weekly on The Nib, and you can get them sent early to your inbox by subscribing to his Sparky's List.

What Is Happening Here?

Because I am too overwhelmed with everything, all I can do is post this, which is from someone named Mike Royce.

I would love to show someone from 1995 this picture and ask them what they think is happening here:

It made me laugh, which is something these days.

In Which I Find Something Almost Nice to Say About Trump

In graphic design, everyone knows that a swoosh of some sort is often thought by clients to be a stand-in for a logo. If you don't have a concept, use a swoosh!

That trend seems to have faded, thankfully, but for a long time, you couldn't avoid this look:


When I saw this AP photo by John Bazemore in a Mother Jones article, I thought to myself, Mafia Mulligan is the one person (candidate/product) that legitimately could use a swoosh as part of his "brand" (I hate that word), and I don't know why he hasn't done it:


This overall design is undermined because it includes that weird Top Gun flying motif on the sides. Who needs those red wings and the white extensions off the beginning and ending letters? Those are stupid. But if it were only the blue background and white letters (maybe less condensed, more extended), with the star and year below and two-colored swoosh above, I think it would be graphically quite strong and memorable. Probably objectively better than almost any other recent presidential graphic, in fact.

Thank goodness it doesn't appear to be an official graphic, and whoever made it ruined it with all the extra crap on the sides, which indicate they don't really know what they're doing.

No Black People Involved

One of the sponsors of the public radio show Live from Here is a product called One Drop... I guess it's an innovative testing system for people with diabetes that's more effective or uses less blood or something.

But when I hear that name over the air, all I can think of is the "one-drop" rule, which said that if a person had one drop of "Black" or Native blood in their heritage, they were Black or Native instead of white.

Did the people who named this product run the name by any Black or Native people? Were they aware of that racist rule in American history?

I doubt it, or if they were, they didn't think it was important enough to keep them from using what they thought was a catchy name. Maybe they even thought it was a clever, tongue-in-cheek reference, though I hope that's not the case.

(From what I can tell by searching, no one else has commented on this yet, though the product has been around more than five years.)

System of a Downward Spiral

Larry Kudlow, the president's top economic adviser, yesterday told reporters, “I don’t believe there is systemic racism in the U.S."

Well.

Larry Kudlow is currently a senior White House official who has never been imprisoned, despite the fact that he is an admitted past cocaine user. Generations of Black Americans lost years, decades of their lives because they possessed crack cocaine.

That's not an example of systemic racism. Nope. No sirree.

Not the Same Thing

Too many times, "political" disagreements or discussions are not really that. Instead, they come down to this:


The problem in using this argument is when the disagreement is not over my own oppression, as is all too often the case. A more generalized version would be:

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in oppression of other people and denial of their humanity and right to exist. 

It still works, but the personalization makes it stronger.

Naming Bases

From a Twitter user named Irv, who appears to be a Black soldier in the U.S. military:

There’s a big misconception about the reason for Army bases being named after Confederates. It was not a way to heal after the Civil War. Those bases didn’t get those names until the 20th century at the start of WW1 and WW2.

As the Army expanded for the world wars, they built camps, which needed names. The Army generally decided to name the camps after local military ‘heroes’ the local populations would be comfortable with. So, Ft Hood, TX is for John Bell Hood, Braxton Bragg was from N.C., etc.

Think of the time though. Jim Crow laws, the second Klan, and the Lost Cause narrative were all on the rise. Those names were NOT a way to bring Americans together; they were a nod to keeping us apart.

What’s more, some of these pro-slavery insurrectionists were incompetent. Hood, Bragg, and Pickett, for example, are some of the worst generals on either side of the Civil War. Why does the Army continue to honor them?

Instead, why don’t we celebrate our greats? Grant was the victor over Lee and became a President! What about a Ft Audie Murphy or Roy Benavidez in TX? Matthew Ridgway did more than Braxton Bragg ever did.

This is personal. I’ve been a soldier for more than 25 years and these names have offended me since I learned who they were. This moment is about recognizing that being a bystander is the same as being part of the problem. We can do much better.

The names of things matter (though of course they aren't the only thing that matters). Every street being named after white men — usually land speculators in my neck of the woods — frames a place from the moment a person is born into it or moves to it. Military bases being named for loser Confederate generals is insulting and illogical and tells a backwards version of who belongs there and who doesn't. They should all be changed to names that represent our country's aspirations instead of its worst failing.

Truth from a Ride-Along

From Sean Trainor, a writing professor at the University of Florida who also writes for Time, the Atlantic, and Salon.

A long time ago, when I was younger and dumber, I did a police ride-along with a high school classmate who had gone on to become a cop. It was one of the most chilling and radicalizing nights of my life.

Two memories stand out to me. The first is how my classmate spent most of the night: rolling around suburban Maryland in a patrol car, punching license plate numbers into a database, looking for excuses to pull people over.

My classmate was so bored that he’d punch pretty much anyone’s plate into the database. But he devoted special attention to beat-up cars or drivers who looked “out of place” — which typically meant black or brown drivers in predominantly white neighborhoods.

Fortunately, few of those searches resulted in traffic stops. I seem to recall my classmate pulling over a guy for a broken tail light. But, for the most part, he spent the night driving around aimlessly.

To punctuate his boredom, my classmate would respond to other cops’ traffic stops. When he heard another cop had pulled someone over, he’d turn on his lights and tear off into the night. Most of the time he’d arrive at the scene of the stop long after the incident had passed. One time, though, the traffic stop was still ongoing.

In this instance, a colleague of his had pulled over a car for some trivial reason — a broken tail light or expired registration — and then discovered that the driver was, as I recall, an ex-convict driving with an expired license.

The guy (who was white) had gotten out of prison earlier in the week and hadn’t had a chance to renew his license. When he got pulled over, he was driving around with his wife and young kids.

Not content to leave this poor guy with a warning, the officer who initiated the traffic stop asked him to step out of his car for a conversation. As they were talking, more and more bored cops rolled up, including my classmate.

Not surprising, the situation kept getting more intense. The guy who had been pulled over looked increasingly stressed as more cops materialized. And the cops responded to his stress with heightened levels of aggression.

Eventually the scene came to a boil. I don’t know exactly what happened. I seem to recall the guy taking a swing at a cop or raising his voice. Regardless, he wound up face down on the curb, his hands cuffed behind his back. His family looked on screaming and crying as the cops hauled him away. It had been a short family reunion.

As we drove away, my classmate told me that, because this guy had violated his parole, he would likely do a multi-year stint in prison.

And that was night: a full shift devoted to manufacturing crime — desperately searching for reasons to pull people over and then harassing people until they snapped.

My classmate wasn’t an exception to his department’s rule. He wasn’t a “bad apple.” As he told it, he was doing exactly what his department expected him to do. He saw himself — in fact had been trained to see himself — as a dog protecting sheep from wolves.

But from inside his car, the sheep receded from view, and all the flesh-and-blood people in his community — and especially the people of color — took on a decidedly wolf-like aspect. He clearly viewed them as enemies and interacted with them as such.

In short, nothing he did made anyone safer. He didn’t protect or defend a damn thing, except white supremacy and class domination. His entire shift had been devoted to profiling, harassing, and intimidating people.

Looking back on it, I feel like shit about that night — I wish I had said something or objected to his behavior. Though, at the time, I had neither the perspective, the words, nor the courage to do so.

But, objectively, I know that nothing I could have said would have made a difference. Even if I had convinced him to quit, someone else would have done his job exactly as he had. The problem wasn’t my classmate. It was the whole rotten system designed to terrorize people.

What I learned that night is that behind every Derek Chauvin or Darren Wilson — behind every dramatic eruption of violence — is a whole universe of pervasive, mundane, and wanton cruelty.

The cruelty isn’t an accident; it’s the point.

One of the commenters who responded added this:

The other night a [Black] man spoke up at a protest I was at about going on a ride along in which the officer in charge said to the other officers "this one is with us. Don't shoot him tonight."

And I just keep thinking about the callous, casual, and systemic racism in that interaction.

I know that it's not a sexy story. No one got hurt. No one died. But it was that the OIC had felt the need to say "don't shoot *this* black man *tonight*" was what really stuck with me.

Remember, the cop who killed Philando Castile was out patrolling, looking for "problems" like these cops. Through a night-time glimpse while driving, he thought Castile matched the description of a robbery suspect from a couple of days earlier because Castile was Black and had a "wide nose."

More Details on Wage Theft

There's some good news today, finally (yay for organizers winning!), so I'm going to post about wage theft instead. This Twitter thread by David McKenna contains valuable information, and relates to my post from a couple of days ago about white collar crime. (Emphasis added.)

Something I've learned while in law school is about the social construction of crime. I work in a legal clinic on wage theft cases, where employers have "improperly paid" workers by not paying, paying below min wage, withholding overtime, paid sick time, etc.

Most theft is wage theft. Meaning, the dollar value of stolen wages is greater than the value, each year, of all burglaries + robberies, shoplifting, auto theft, combined. Yet, wage theft is NOT A CRIME.


If you steal $100 from your employer, you will get arrested. If you call the police because your paycheck is $100 light, the police will tell you to file a complaint with the Attorney General, and the AG will settle the case for between $50 and $200.

(That's actually not true, because AG's only take on big cases with thousands of dollars at stake, but they will settle big cases by typically requiring the employer to properly pay what is owed. No jail, no criminal record).

If the AG doesn't want to take the case, it will give you a Private Right of Action to sue the employer in civil court for what you are owed, plus damages. It can take a 6 to 18 months to win at trial, and months or years to collect on the judgment if you win.

In short, we address the predominant form of theft in the US with civil court cases, not criminal cases. We have literally defined "wage theft" as not a crime. Theft by you, a crime. Theft by your employer, not a crime.

This is what we mean when we say crime is "socially constructed." Not all social harms are criminalized. Not all actors committing social harm are criminalized.

I settled a case for $27K for three clients last year. We spent a MONTH negotiating the non-disclosure agreement because the employer stated if all his employees sued him and settled like this, he would go BANKRUPT. His business model DEPENDED on wage theft.

These employers go on to hold elected office.Trump  famously used wage theft to improve his finances on construction projects, leaving a trail of victims in his wake. Some sued and he had to pay them. Others didn't have resources to pursue multi-year litigation and got nothing.

What should we do about it? Criminalize employers or decriminalize theft or something else?

Wage theft shows that we believe restitution is important. Giving the money back is important. Currently, AGs keep track of bad actors and will increase future financial penalties for bad actors.

It also shows when harm is committed, we don't have to lock someone in a cage or label them a felon, both of which destroy years of life even after the sentence is over. We can demand restitution instead of punishment.

It also shows how ridiculous the label "high crime neighborhood" is. And the arbitrary and racist response of police surveillance in "high crime neighborhoods." Because we defined them that way.

Consider the social construction of murder: Poison a person, go to jail, they call you a felon for life. Poison a city resulting in dozens of deaths and thousands with brain damage, get a teaching fellowship at Harvard, they call you ex-Governor of Michigan Rick Snyder. Same with much corporate poisoning.

The people committing the most harm aren't in jail, don't live in high-crime neighborhoods. And "black people commit more crime" is true only because of how we have defined crimes, and how we then surveil their community in response to find more crimes.

There are so many organizationss trying to address harm and create accountability within community + without incarceration. We call ourselves prison abolitionists. [He then gives links to many prison abolition organizations.]....

In the employment context, we can prevent wage theft by replacing corporate ownership with employee ownership: worker-owned cooperatives that share profits and losses, removing the power dynamic that incentivizes wage theft in the first place. Power corrupts.

Keeping the true scale of wage theft secret from working people is important for the powerful, because if enough people knew they were being directly ripped off at this level, it might lead to even more organizing…and lately we've seen where that can lead.

Trying to Keep Up

Protests continue across the country and locally, the police continue assaulting people, and some curfews have been lifted. Oh yeah, and secret police are occupying parts of the nation's capital. Did I mention they were all white?

Local/national writer Naomi Kritzer had what I think is the best analysis of what happened on the ground here in terms of building destruction during the last nights of May.

This interview with Ta-nehisi Coates took me off guard because I know he doesn't use the word "hope" when it comes to his expectations of this country, but he used it here.

Who Does It Serve?

A friend of mine posted this to Facebook tonight, and I wonder if someone has written a dissertation or book on this already:

I'm curious, why do people have blood lust over very rare outbursts of theft during angry, chaotic moments? Why are they calling for people to be shot, when no one I've ever heard has asked for embezzlers stealing from a business or worse, stealing from public organizations or charities, to be shot, denied due process or any such thing?

Also, embezzlers often avoid any jail time, often do home arrest and make money online working from home while doing their time.

During the worst of the great recession, the small company I work for laid off nearly half of the staff, and the owners were plowing their own money back in to meet payroll for people who had to work to keep business going. Right then, one of my coworkers decided to steal at least $150k over a couple of years because the accounting dept was too trusting of him.

He was sales manager and made good money already, didn't have any mental health issues or addictions, just wanted a higher lifestyle. He never spent a minute in jail other than getting charged.

We were all really angry but no one wanted him shot.

Her point highlights the way white-collar crime is treated lightly in sentencing, relative to petty theft or burglary. Mafia Mulligan's guys' sentences are good examples of this.

Conversely, I've seen comparisons of our recent physical looting to the Republicans' tax law or the wealth gains of the rich since the pandemic (i.e., which one is the real looting?), but the reason that comparison gets your attention is because it's startling: we aren't used to thinking of those things as looting. Looting is a person carrying away a television set, not a rich person squirreling away another billion in the Cayman Islands.

Which is exactly my friend's point, and she's even more so pointing to the violent reaction to physical looting, vs. the ho-hum reaction to the much larger problem of white-collar theft of money. Not to mention wage theft, which as I've noted before, dwarfs all the other theft in this country, though you'd never know it from crime stats or news coverage. Poor people who steal are the ones we hear about, not rich people, not corporations.

As Hari Kondabolu put it on Twitter right around the same I was thinking of writing this post,

Apparently, it's only looting if you steal less than $500 worth of goods and actually put in some physical labor. Rich people are just doing "capitalism."

Inspiration from an Obituary, and Then...

My neighborhood still has a community newspaper, and that paper still has obituaries that are not just paid placements. Today I read one about a woman named Marion Watson, who died in late March at the age of 97.

Her mother, we are told, worked as a 19-year-old on the political campaign of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to hold a federal office in the U.S.—"an experience that no doubt influenced Marion's own life choices."

Marion graduated from high school just as the U.S. was entering World War II and she became a code-breaker, ending with the rank of sergeant.

After the war, she went to the University of Minnesota for theater, met her husband (Harold Watson), and had three children. By the early 1960s she was working at KUOM, the public radio station at the University (then called WLB and now Radio K). Meanwhile,

She was a strong advocate for civil rights, pioneering programming for American Indians, Hispanics, African-Americans, and women. She became program director and station manager in 1969, on of only three female public radio managers in the country at the time and the only one at a Big Ten school

Marion was active in the civil rights movement. She served as legislative chair for the League of Women Voters of Minnesota, legislative co-chairwoman of the Minnesota Council for Civil and Human Rights, president of the St. Paul YWCA and sat on the Minnesota Indian Affairs Commission and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency's citizens board.

She wrote two books, "Indians in Minnesota" and "Women in the Labor Force." ... She retired from the U at the age of 70 and spent her golden years participating in the League of Women Voters...

Marion Watson was a model member of our world who I wish I had known about while she was alive. Her story is inspiring.

The one thing her obituary didn't tell me, however, is what her family name was for the first 24 years of her life.

Isn't it odd for an obituary to not include a woman's name from before she was married? And given her mother's supposed importance in Marion's life, it also seems odd that her mother's first or last name wasn't there at all.

These omissions were so jarring that they distracted me from Marion's incredible life. That's a disservice to her, and it makes me sad.

Twitter May 2020, Lockdown, then Burning

I have to break with my usual Twitter roundup rules, which require me to list tweets in reverse chronological order (within topic), to bring you this one from historian David M. Perry, who goes by @Lollardfish on Twitter. He wrote it in early May. And now that we've seen all of May...

April 2020 might have been the worst month in US History. There have been lots of bad times, but the speed of the April collapse, the totality of the threat, the danger posed by the president...I'm not sure there's been a moment quite like this one. Smarter twitterstorians than I may offer alternative months in our history. And certainly specific marginalized groups and peoples and places have experienced worse in such a short period of time, far too often. But I can't quite think of a month like April for the whole USA. At least until May.

Now there's a good historian: leaving room for the possibility that the next can definitely get worse, and guess what — it did!

We ended the month with civil insurrection after multiple killings of Black people by police, culminating with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, including the attempt by "Boogaloo Bois" to manipulate the moment into their idea of a "race war":

Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops.
@aStatesman

The conversation about police violence is becoming like the conversation about school shootings. We know what the problems are. And we know what works to substantially reduce the violence. The problem is not a lack of knowledge or solutions - it’s a lack of political will.
Samuel Sinyangwe

Cannot get over this stat that one-third of American homicide victims who are killed by strangers are killed by cops. And that there are as many civilians killed by cops in a year as there are cops who die in the line of duty in a decade.
Jill Filipovic

If America protected ALL its citizens the same way it protects its property none of this would be happening.
LaTosha Brown

I feel like that Mister Rogers “look for the helpers” quote is gonna start floating around the way it always does in times like these, so please keep in mind that advice is for children. His advice to adults was “be the helper.”
Lindsay Katai

If the police do not have a way to discern between criminal activity and the 1st amendment, what fucking good are they to your public safety?
D.A. Bullock @BullyCreative

So this is the race war version of a false flag. These white kids are fucking things up so black people will face the retaliation. I know we've been talking about this all day, but it's undeniable that this is coordinated.
Sally Albright

never quite understood how the statement “black lives matter” is considered inherently anti-police unless you acknowledge in some form that the police are anti-black
@poorhilarybanks

It's crazy that cities/police departments don't realize they could just send like, the chief and a few officers in plainclothes or normal uniforms, and like, talk to people. They'll get yelled at a bit, but it won't get violent, and other protestors will intervene if it gets heated.
Avocadoplex

The police are blaming the man they murdered for not being healthy enough to strangle for 9 minutes
Jess Dweck

So many are trying to make us choose right now for their bad faith agendas. I refuse the false choices. We condemn the killing of #GeorgeFloyd. We hurt to see damage and violence in our cities. We understand so much of it as a breaking point from crushing injustice. We will rebuild
Mitra Jalali, St. Paul City Councilmember - Ward 4 (Saint Paul)

Can we all take a moment to acknowledge how woefully inadequate and ineffective implicit bias training is to address systemic racism? Black folks are up against a political economy that maintains our subordination by force. It is not “unconscious.” It is violent and explicit.
Rhea Boyd, MD

If violence is never the answer then why do the police and government use it so much?
@communistdoll

The Right is a bunch of cosplayers who want the governmentt to serve them but crush everyone else:


Benjamin Dixon

People are going to use the looters and rioters as an excuse to not listen to the protesters. As if they were going to listen to the protesters anyway.
@johnmaddening

If you have 10 bad cops and 1,000 good cops, but those 1,000 good cops don’t turn in the 10 bad cops, you have 1,010 bad cops.
kieron

"when white men rise up against oppression, they are heroes: when black men rise, they have reverted to their native savagery." –James Baldwin
Jason Stanley

We are punished any time we don’t participate in the illusion that the white power structure is “civil” and not the primary perpetrators of violence.
Bree Newsome Bass

You know if you come in my timeline with “but looting is wrong” when the drain the swamp crew has bled this country dry, I’m hitting a block or mute on you right?
ProfB @AntheaButler

What in the white-fuck did y’all think “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE” meant?
Saeed Jones @theferocity

always interesting to see who’s more concerned about the state of a Target in a town they’ve never been to than they are about a human killed with utter indifference by the very people tasked with “protecting” the population, all because he was black. always interesting to see how people are suddenly worried about target employees during protests around police brutality when those same people objected to minimum wage increases and didn’t otherwise care if they had appropriate PPE
Scaachi

Just wanna point out that:
- rioting is what happens when justice drags its feet.
- America is a direct product of violent protest and the calculated destruction of property.
- if you see justice as a treat conferred on model citizens, you support exclusionism, like fascists.
@CraigSJ

imagine telling me we can’t steal rugs and floor lamps when your ancestors stole PEOPLEEEEEEEEEEE.
@mminthecity

White imperialists have been looting entire continents for the last 500 years.
@BostonJerry

Mainstream leftists need to start taking seriously the idea of abolishing the police entirely. This institution cannot be reformed. It is made up of the most extreme right elements of our society and built around oppression and racism.
Existential Comics

Seeing the protest, hearing and seeing looting, and there's that Hughes poem abt dreams deferred exploding, you know? It feels like that. George Floyd dreamed, probably dreamed big like we all do. His dreams were cut short, the racist systems we live in cut black people's dreams and lives short all the goddamn time. I don't fully understand looting but also, I can't fully understand the rage and fear people feel. Christ.
Amity Foster

“what struck me most about those who rioted was how long they waited. the restraint they showed. not the spontaneity, the restraint. they waited and waited for justice. and it didn’t come. no one talks about that...” –Toni Morrison
Shamari K. Reid

"Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the...force of the state."
@nwbtcw

Minneapolis PD kills an unarmed black man in broad daylight on a holiday with witnesses, while the entire state has been in lockdown during a global pandemic, and they appear to be surprised by protestors.
@Lady_612

Just saw this fascinating 2017 Pew poll while researching a column. Percentage of respondents who think the US has done enough to achieve racial equality:
White cops: 92%
White public: 57%
Black cops: 29%
Black public: 12%
Radley Balko

There’s no reforming the police. The only way to stop police violence is to shrink policing and police contact. As long as police have the power, authority, and opportunity to be violent, they will.
Philip V. McHarris

How many rogue officers can one department have before we realize that maybe it’s the norm that’s the problem and not the “rogue”? A rogue MPD officer would be one who acknowledges George Floyd was murdered. A rogue cop would be one who speaks out against their union president.
@javimorillo

we built the entire internal security apparatus out of bad apples, and then handed the accountability apparatus to more bad apples
Kelsey D. Atherton

In a typical year, the Minneapolis Police Department “solves” fewer than 1-in-4 shootings and 1-in-5 rapes. But four police officers responded to a “forgery in process,” escalated the situation, and killed George Floyd.
Abraham Gutman

"To protect and serve" seems like a fucked up motto for people who keep killing folks.
@rawales2

All of the events in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and now across the country are happening as the COVID-19 pandemic and its stay-at-home orders were still in place, but being loosened as the month was drawing to a close. Earlier in May we saw the rise of ginned up "Open Up" protests, sometimes with armed participants:

the fact that quarantines were lifted to open businesses, and curfews are enforced to protect businesses, is pretty revealing about what does and doesn't matter to the elite.
thehousered

Reopen and work or stay closed and suffer is a complete false dichotomy designed by the wealthy and powerful to avoid any discussion of actual change. This economy is unstable and inhuman by design. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Jared Yates Sexton

100,000 people lost and I can count on one hand the number of scenes from hospitals, funerals or nursing homes shown on TV and seared into our memories. We need to bear better witness.
Andy Slavitt

Hard to believe that an entire cohort of students just graduated whose first day of school was 9/11 and whose last day saw the @nytimes publish 1,000 of the 100,000 US residents who died of COVID-19.
Alan Mills

I know we are supposed to be cool and above commenting on this, but seeing unmasked people gathering in crowds and flouting social distancing guidelines when I was unable to be present at my mother's burial is so hard. I wish it made me angry—all I feel is deep despair.
Nicole Chung

If you think wearing a mask is stressful, ask a kindergartner how active shooter drills feel.
@bjoewolf

“The odd thing about reporting on the coronavirus is that the nonexperts are supremely confident in their predictions, while epidemiologists keep telling me that they don’t really know much at all.”
Mark Mazzetti

Looking back, it seems rather crazy that there wasn't more consideration for simply paying employers to keep folks on their payrolls rather than pumping the trillions we have spent into the economy
Sam Stein

Pretty appalled at all the church leaders whining and suing for their “right” to be open right now. People of persecuted faiths have practiced their religion under far worse circumstances. “Please pray from home so you don’t kill a bunch of people” isn’t one of them.
Kaili Joy Gray

I am completely enraged every waking moment of every single day by the never-ending realization that so much of this disruption, devastation, sickness and death was completely avoidable, and I will never forgive the selfish, myopic ignoramuses responsible for it. Ever.
Jon Zal

In case you missed it, the CARES Act delivered a $160 billion windfall to real estate investors (i.e. Kushner), after a major lobbying push by a real estate trade group, in which Kushner’s family's company is a major player. We must not become desensitized to this corruption.
Robert Reich

So many people running around claiming they'll do anything for America. Carry guns, live in bunkers, fight in the hills. What they're actually asked to do is wear simple protective measures, keep their distance, show patience and courtesy. And they break like fucking glass.
Scott Lynch

The difference is that in the fantasy they are asked to kill, and in the reality they are asked to be kind.
John Scalzi

If an extra $600 makes people decide they'd rather stay home, then the problem isn't the unemployment benefit but the wages.
@dansinker

Like, if you can’t deal with staying at home for a year or so and wearing protective gear to go outside, I got some real bad news for you about Mars
@ChrisWarcraft

United States, Russia, United Kingdom, and Brazil have the most COVID-19 cases in the world. What do they all share in common? Incompetent leaders who regularly use disinformation.
Christopher Bouzy

The fact that there are people who either support or oppose a drug they almost certainly know nothing about to own their political opponents is indicative of how deeply stupid the current moment is.
Corie Whalen

This shutdown saga is exposing who's never been told "no" in their life.
@CraigSJ

It's almost like the same people who deny white supremacy and privilege and rampant inequality even as people tell them it's real and experts tell them it's there also deny a deadly virus is everywhere even as people tell them it's real and experts tell them it's there.
Jared Yates Sexton

Maybe I’m a radical lib, but it really seems like it should be illegal to go into government buildings and intimidate legislators with assault weapons.
Justin Kanew

Freedom is when you slavishly return to work when your boss orders you to, because they value not missing their quarterly projections more than your life and will fire you if you don't obey. the hilarious thing about libertarians is they think their ideology hinges on whether the government can tell us to smoke weed, rather than whether a tiny number of people should own everything and the property-less masses should have no say whatsoever in how society functions. Would it blow their minds to realize that the company you work for has far more power to use their authority over you to stop you from smoking weed than the government ever could? Companies force people to get tested monthly. With no government they could do far worse.
Existential Comics

Live Free AND Die.
Shadow Cabinet

A stupid sitcom makes more sense than our current reality:


Open Culture

GOP: you cannot compare Trumps concentration camps to concentration camps
GOP: being forced to not spread disease is like internment plus the Holocaust
GOP: Hitler wasn’t a white supremacist he was just afraid of all-controlling Jews
GOP: work makes you free by the way
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

What I need is this: I need Democrats not to fall for the false choices now being presented by right-wing media and instead say: Distancing bought us time. President Bleach Drinker and his son-in-law Nepotism Ken Doll squandered it.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

For those protesting social distancing (doubt they would read this) - a small group of my friends got together for lunch 10 days ago: 1 is on a vent, another admitted to a regular floor bed, 5 others are COVID + at home. You can be asymptomatic and have COVID19
Milad Sharifpour, M.D.

The Trump Administration failed to react in January, failed to prepare in February, failed to ramp up in March, failed to capitalize on the shut downs in April, and now are failing with the relaxing of distancing in May. So many will die, so many will fall gravely ill.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

I feel like people are speaking two different languages when they talk about “normal life.” Some people mean “a life where I feel some kind of stability and know what to expect,” whereas others mean “systemic oppression maintained through hierarchies of structural inequality”
Anne Thériault

SOFT REOPEN:


@notaxiwarrior

How is America not a failed state when armed militias have prevented a state government from holding session and there’s no federal response? Y’all really think we’re on track to have an election right now???
Bree Newsome Bass

I'm getting annoyed with takes about how Americans got tired of quarantine bc it was too hard. If you want to make this about Americans being spoiled, weak or fickle, while one of the greatest failures of any world government in our lifetime plays out, that's a narrative choice.
Puff the Magic Hater @MsKellyMHayes

I'd like two pair, please:


Branford Marsalis

FYI, school has always been a petri dish for disease because there is no other environment (except maybe a meat-packing plant) where we confine so many people in such close quarters for so much of the day.
Carol Black

For a generation that imagined themselves dying in a completely preventable environmental disaster that will render the planet uninhabitable for their children, it's pretty fucking frustrating to see us die from a completely preventable pandemic.
Wes Burdine

To recap:
- Fox News tells calls to reopen the country while ordering IT’S OWN workers to stay home.
- The President says testing and tracing is unimportant while ordering HIS OWN staff to be tested and traced.
Trump voters, do you get it yet! They don’t give a fuck if you die.
Mikel Jollett

I think governors should be subject to scrutiny for their decisions, for sure, but every single piece of it needs to be examined within the context that this should never have been a state-by-state coordination, and the fact that it was represents Trump's murderous abdication.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat

The only reason we're arguing about whether the country should be reopened even though it means thousands of unnecessary deaths and destruction is because the wealthy and powerful don't want to talk about how to make our society and economy more fair and humane. That's it.
Jared Yates Sexton

Greed, privilege, indifference and arrogance. The 4 horsemen of the Coronavirus Apocalypse.
Teacher Dude

When the right talk about “going back to normal”, they mean low-paid workers going back to service jobs where they can’t social distance and middle class people continuing to work from home but with an expanded range of leisure activities.
@AyoCaesar

Lunch break chart: (at least) 50% of adults in the Midwest either have a COVID-19 risk factor or live with someone who does. Remember this when people say we should quarantine the vulnerable so everyone else can get back to work.
Scott Shaffer

instead of paying rent we should just clap for landlords instead. if it's good enough for nurses, landlords should have no issue getting by on it.
@jkmurcury9

Just a reminder that the folks who believe they are in a living hell because they can't get go to Applebees or pick up a toaster at a department store without using hand sanitizer think that detention camps for children are the same as "summer camp"
Asha Rangappa

Interesting how wearing a mask is considered as being afraid, yet carrying a gun is just protection.
Brynn

It’s safer to be a white man threatening government workers with an AR15 than it is to be a person of color jogging in the United States of America.
Casey Frid

Regardless of what risks people are taking re social distancing, jailing them is one of the most surefire ways to ensure they contract Coronavirus.
Angie Schmitt

Just encountered a thread of literally hundreds of people raging over stores that have arrows telling which way to go in the aisles. Raging! Like this is the greatest injustice ever visited on humankind. What the hell is wrong with people?
Peter Greene @palan57

Idle thought (and I'm sure I'm not the first to have it): if you want a glimpse into how Republicans would *like* to respond to a public health crisis, just remember Katrina. Their first, second, and third instinct is to find some vulnerable Other to sacrifice/scapegoat.
David Roberts

Iowa now has had more confirmed COVID cases than South Korea.
Steven Dennis

A random Taiwanese bar in 2020 is envied by an American in the same way a random American supermarket in 1989 was envied by a Soviet. Just like the difference between communist and capitalist states, the gap between red zones and green zones will widen.
Balaji S. Srinivasan

Imagine how 71,000 American deaths would be covered if they were victims of war or terrorism and not capitalism. We're witnessing real-time mass forgetting because public mourning isn't useful for the ruling class.
@tsengputterman

State control of the kind we’ve seen during the lockdowns has historically been associated with nonwhites and the extent to which some white Americans are viciously opposed to it may reflect the extent to which the social meaning of whiteness is freedom from that control, as well as the right to impose it on racial others. The lockdown is thus an assault on “liberty” *and* the inability to force (disproportionately black and brown) others to labor is *also* an assault on liberty. This is a tidy explanation for the bizarre comparisons to Japanese internment we’ve been hearing on the Right. The Wisconsin Supreme Court deliberations — the comparison to Japanese internment and the assertion that the (black and brown) workers forced to labor in meat-packing facilities were not “regular folks” — were very revealing in this regard. I 100 percent believe that if Obama or Hillary Clinton had issued these orders we would be looking at broad, violent unrest. The best case scenario for getting 75%+ of the public to go along with this is a “normal” Republican president like Jeb Bush or John Kasich.
@jbouie

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but America is mad at all the wrong things. Don’t be mad you had to close your business/lost your job to protect the public health. Be mad the government isn’t supporting small biz/workers enough while they are protecting the public health.
Dorothy Snarker

Give a poor person $2,000, and it's instantly recirculated into the economy when they need to buy necessities.
Give a large company $2,000, and they'll store it offshore, say they have no more money, and ask for another $2,000.
Stephen Punwasi

“I’m going shopping!” I announce, zipping up a full-body wet suit, strapping on an oxygen tank, and lowering myself into a giant hamster ball filled with hand sanitizer.
batkaren

It's pretty clear they're planning to lock down people over 60 for years, pull all financial support, tell everyone else to get back to work -- and just accept millions of people playing russian roulette with the illness and hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths
@digby56

I don't know who needs to hear this, but forcing people back to work is not "freedom."
Robert Reich

it’s weird that there was infinite money for 19 years of global war but the govt completely shit its pants over the idea of giving Americans a few thousand bucks to stay inside for a couple months so we don’t die.
@iAmTheWarax

If your economic system requires large-scale human sacrifice it might be time to consider other options
Jake Maccoby

I asked the woman at the gas station if they were doing alright. She said that they sure were, but sales were way down except for cigarettes and lottery tickets. And it felt a bit telling.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

Oof. 44% of infections are spread before symptoms:


@mdcohen

“Models show that if 80 percent of people wear masks that are 60 percent effective, easily achievable with cloth, we can get to an effective R0 of less than one. That’s enough to halt the spread of the disease.”
Steve Stewart-Williams

Hell hath no fury like a white person mildly inconvenienced
Rhea Butcher

the u.s. virus response feels so much like our response to gun violence. seems easy to prevent! others have! but it's not 'who we are.' a certain idea of freedom makes it impossible. so we move on and just learn to accept a level of human loss that other countries won't tolerate.
Charlie Warzel

This is how Americans now interpret freedom: Not as a political condition in a democratic society, but as a constant chant of "you're not the boss of me." This is not freedom, or at least not freedom in any political sense. It's a child-like understanding of autonomy.
Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom

The reopen Arizona rally ends with a singing of “Amazing Grace.” The host encourages everyone listening to hold hands and touch each other.
Michael Doudna

Just so you know — around 70% of meat packing employees are black or Hispanic. Nearly 50% are immigrants. 15% lack health insurance. Forcing them to work in a pandemic has nothing to do with a “free market” but everything to do with ruthlessness and disregard for human life.
Trevon D Logan

Really frustrating that all the protests to meet human needs have been downplayed while those to increase mass death have been wall to wall covered.
David Kaib

Why is the party of “pro-life” so intent on killing off our most vulnerable? It’s never been about life, only control. It’s all about control.
@SassyKadiK

Put this photo in the Trumpism time capsule:


Aaron Rupar

I've given up being upset that people aren't wearing masks or whatever else they're suppose to be doing. We need massive testing. We bought 6 weeks w/ the SIP orders and the Feds fucked it up. We wasted the goodwill of the American people for daily sideshows. Just do what you can. Wear your mask. Stay away from questionable situations. In the end, we could've done something with our borrowed time and we didn't. The chickens have come home to roost. Summer is gone. Fall is as well. 2020 has gone to the COVID. We even got lucky w/ this hitting at end of spring, meaning most of the country was dealing with not great weather. Perfect situation for SIP order. 70s are now common throughout the country, especially east coast population centers. Forget SIP helping, it is done.
@mikesonn

Not one SFF writer ever predicted that the motorcycle gangs of the Mad Maxian future would be ::checks notes:: threatening the life of a doctor for telling them to hold off on a haircut for a few weeks. Fellow SFF writers, we have all failed.
N. K. Jemisin

Since masks mostly protect other people from you rather than the other way around, refusing to wear one means you are a selfish jerk, not a brave voice protesting authority. So very on brand for this WH and the modern GOP.
Matthew Miller

At one meeting this week that included chief of staff Mark Meadows and some 20 other White House officials, nobody from the White House was wearing a mask or other face covering. As one official told me: "There are very very very few people in the West Wing wearing masks."
Daniel Lippman

There have been 150 strikes since March, but the reopen protests are getting all the attention.
@Be_ll_adonna

Just zoomed with two Canadian friends who own a hard-hit small business. They applied online for the Canadian emergency small business loan program. Application process took under 10 minutes; approval less than 2 minutes. Money arrived in their account two days later.
David Frum

Some tweets synthesized the two larger phenomena:

This country was infinity more prepared to go to war against its own people then defend its people from a pandemic.
Arash Kolahi

Worst health crisis in a century. Worst unemployment crisis ever. Worst crisis in the streets in more than 50 years. US an international pariah, rejected by the club of democracies we helped create, the global order we sought to build for 75 yrs in shambles. That's where we are.
David Rothkopf

when covid came w warning, the US didn’t have enough masks, PPE, or tests. when the peaceful protests came, they were ready with tear gas, rubber bullets, flash guns, and tacticle gear for cops in multiple cities. it really shows where the priorities in this country are.
@beyabean

can’t believe corona blew a 28-3 lead to racism
ziwe

As always, there were critiques of Mafia Mulligan, this time particularly in the context of COVID or his latest attempts to institute a police state to crack down on what's been happening across the country at the end of the month:

Everyone in media who felt our institutions were up to the task of protecting our democracy against this should be forced to wear that fact like a scarlet letter for life. For. Life:


Phillip Atiba Goff

American carnage -- promises made, promises kept!
Dean Baker

For years conservatives have said that the answer to hate speech is more speech. Now Twitter is applying more speech to the president’s demonstrable and harmful lies, and conservatives are demonstrating that it was always just about silencing the left.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

You almost have to admire how someone who was handed a fortune at birth, has for years used the tax code as a piggy bank, and is now the head of state of a nation with the wealthiest economy and most powerful military whines every fucking day about being a victim.
aderson francois

There's something really wrong with a culture where a man as broken, vile, and disgusting as Donald Trump can become president. This whole thing just gets more shameful by the day, the hour, the minute.
Jared Yates Sexton

Barring the discovery of a miracle cure between now and November, the only safe way to vote will be by mail. Trump is doing everything possible to delegitimize mail-in-voting. He absolutely intends to challenge the validity of an election he will lose.
@tomtomorrow

On average, the Obama family took 133 protected trips per year.
On average, the Trump family takes 1,625 protected trips per year.
Citizens for Ethics

I woke up this morning and noticed that my drawing 'Donald the Reaper' was liked and shared en masse on Twitter. Thank you all for that. Please Retweet this image; I want to be sure Trump also sees this drawing today:


@vrjrdgstknng

He really does stand like he could topple over at any minute:


@RottenInDenmark

How do you run on the slogan “make America great again” and then at the end of your first term the slogan is “transition to greatness”? lol
Bree Newsome Bass

In hindsight I'm not sure that electing a germophobic eugenicist was the optimal choice for guiding us through a pandemic.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

One of the most important maps to remember for your political analysis. It shows (estimated) shift among white voters in 2016. Note how poorly Trump did in the South relative to the Midwest/North-East despite lower levels of education in the former!


Political Kiwi

I feel like this must be very tiresome for all of you to hear me shouting about all the time, but Trump is the embodiment of a specific strain of racist American conservatism that originates not in the South nor even in the rural North, but in the *urban/suburban North*.
Doug Newman

We don’t actually say this enough, but everything since 2016 has been absolutely effing batshit insane.
Marcus H. Johnson

I never understood how people could be so stupid that they couldn’t figure out that Superman and Clark Kent were the same person. Living in the Trump era, I get it now.
Hari Kondabolu

In retrospect, maybe the people crying on election night weren't "fragile snowflakes" but "people who rightly predicted incompetent leadership would end in unnecessary death.”
Jennifer Wright

I’m beginning to wonder how this current New York Times crew would have covered Hitler. “While many are suffering under the Chancellor’s strong arm tactics, others see strength in his forceful, somewhat anarchical style.”
Mark Thompson @Son_of_a_Thomp

If you’re a thief, accuse your enemies of thievery. If corrupt, accuse your rivals of corruption. If a coward, accuse others of cowardice. Evidence is irrelevant; the goal is to dilute the truth and the case against you with “everyone does it." Trump’s unfounded attacks on others of the things he is demonstrably guilty of aren’t mere projection. They are a tactic to lower the moral bar for all, to wave off his corruption and abuse as normal. This has been the ploy of dictators for decades, to say that anyone accusing them of crimes is a hypocrite. Not to say they are good, but that we are all bad, that there is no good or evil, no truth, just power.
Garry Kasparov

I continue to find it endlessly amusing that public expressions of decency and solidarity are, *in and of themselves*, taken as a rebuke to Trump.
David Roberts

What irks the hell out of me are the people who keep going "why is the president doing X? " I mean, where the F have you been the last few years. DAMN. QUIT EXPECTING HIM TO GET BETTER.
ProfB @AntheaButler

I’ve said this before but Trump’s shamelessness is the closest thing he has to a political superpower. It completely short circuits the accountability mechanisms of American politics, such that they exist.
@jbouie

Trump has restored our nation to the point where instead of saying "Happy Holidays," people have gone back to saying, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."
Frank Conniff

I don’t understand how Trump rage-tweeting nonsense turns into headlines like this. The headline should be “Trump Rage Tweets Nonsense”


Sarah Cooper

80,000 Americans have died. The economy is in a deep recession. More people are unemployed at any point in US history since The Great Depression. And the US president is watching television, tweeting praise of himself, and trumpeting the fact that his golf course is reopening.
Brian Klaas

Trump isn't president. He's an anti-president. His only mission is to remove government as an impediment to rampant corruption and profit. He's not going to use his resources to help you. He's only concerned with using them to help himself. Stop expecting anything else.
Jared Yates Sexton

Trump won't wear a mask because his makeup will not last with that kind of heat and sweat stress. So, since he can't take it off and put it back on in public, the rumor has to be strength or some macho bs.
Nancy Lizza

Don’t trust any politician who says they “want the president to succeed.” That’s an insane thing to say about an administration that’s killing its own citizenry in order to profit off a backroom deal with a drug company during a global pandemic.
Bree Newsome Bass

Believe Donald Trump when he says he's very proud of 3,000 preventable American deaths a day.
LOLGOP

There were a few tweets about the upcoming presidential election, elections generally, and Joe Biden:

It will be on-brand for 2020 if Trump finds a way to use his catastrophically incompetent pandemic response to hold onto power.
@tomtomorrow

Talk to a few white suburban Republicans, and you'll be surprised how many of them think you shouldn't be able to vote unless you own a house. I'm going to guess it's a similar case in the country. So, is it fair to say that the real reason Republicans do NOT want people to have the ability to vote by mail, is NOT because of voter fraud, but because they know they're completely fucked if they can't suppress our votes?
@VehementRedhead

Donald Trump is busy retweeting accounts calling Hillary a skank, saying Stacey Abrams is fat, and suggesting Nancy Pelosi’s mouth should be duct taped shut, but an unfortunate comment Joe Biden already apologized for will end up getting 100 times the media coverage. Guaranteed.
Andrew Weinstein

Coverage of Biden making a gaffe and apologizing is 100x coverage of Trump making a worse gaffe and not apologizing
Dan Pfeiffer

People have told me I'm not Black because I like kale. No reason to throw a tantrum and re-elect Mango Mussolini.
@TheRealMsMurphy

If Donald Trump loses in November, he and his supporters will claim massive voter fraud based on absentee voting. They have already set up the play. He May still leave office, but Republicans will use that narrative to claim lack of legitimacy.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

It's just not tenable at all to have a 2 party system where 1 of the 2 parties rejects the other's right to govern. Something has to give.
@grudging1

Just for yucks, I plotted the location of polling places in Milwaukee County for the 2016 presidential election and the 2020 presidential primary:

Charles Stewart III

Trump’s campaign strategy is accusing Biden of doing things that Trump actually did
Judd Legum

On Biden's VP pick, a prominent Black Democrat asked a great question: “Why do you need a white woman like Klobuchar to get the blue-collar [white] vote? That’s why we picked you. If you aren’t white enough to get them, why did we go with you?”
Jonathan Capehart

While most of the tweets about police brutality are listed at the top, there were still some that were more generally about white supremacy and racism:

Every time this happens, white people guiltily saunter up to black people, say they’re ready + ask what they need to learn. Here’s the thing. We no longer have energy or emotional bandwidth to handhold you through unlearning your racism. We already created all the resources.
@Imani_Barbarin

I’ll never stop being amazed by the number of white Americans confidently willing to tell you what Dr. King would think and feel about what black people do when it’s clear they’ve never read a single speech or book that King wrote.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones

Racism will forever confuse me. Because what did we actually do for them to hate us this much?
sumaiya @shancalista

Please no more, “education will save us from racism” takes. The most sophisticated racism in American history has been designed by the most educated. And arguing that education will save us is a category error. You can’t just educate away a power system.
@victorerikray

The box I correctly put all white people in is the one where all white people benefit from *systems* of white supremacy. I don't hate white people. I hate systemic oppression. The question is, why don't you?
@MsPackyetti

1st day of college. I’m 16. MY roommate’s dad demanded his $ back because he didn’t consent to his son having a black roommate (it was an off campus dorm). I don’t remember dad’s name but he was well-known as a Mississippi sheriff who became a lawyer, then a judge… then a state Senator.
michaelharriot

Homeless Black woman sends her 5-year-old to the wrong school: 5 years prison
Wealthy white woman bribes college officials $500,000 to admit her adult daughters: 2 months prison
This is what institutional white supremacy in the CJ system looks like. Reprehensible injustice.
@QasimRashid

The pandemic and the surrounding noise/news makes you realize when you raise Native and Black kids (“Blendians”) that you are simultaneously raising 1) the strongest/sharpest kids in the world evolutionarily, but also 2) the most hunted/vulnerable kids in the world epidemiologically.
@BigIndianGyasi

I wish the euphemistic term “racial bias” was systematically replaced with “racist bias”.
Crystal Fleming @alwaystheself

its just... I am so sick and tired of the sensational question to Black parents: "What will you tell your black son to protect them from dying?" when nobody asks white parents: "What do you tell your white children to stop them from killing?"
@dereckapurnell

Not long ago I mentioned to a group of white people that I never run at night because of the dangers of being a large black man running in the dark. I instantly knew they thought I was being extra. Turns out I was being understated. Ahmaud Arbery was running in the daytime.
jelani cobb

We get free when a critical mass of people desires liberation for themselves above holding onto ideas of whiteness and fantasies of being the oppressor, and not a moment sooner.
Bree Newsome Bass

Misogyny, sexism, and toxic masculinity:

Feel like there's not a wide enough acknowledgement on the left that America is in the midst of an anti-feminist backlash.
@BigMeanInternet

If y’all agree that we repeatedly need Black women to save us... maybe the solution is to actually let Black women *lead* and to end the white patriarchal system that’s built on Black women’s subjugation? Maybe stop throwing Black women under the bus at every opportunity? Just a thought.
Bree Newsome Bass

Some guy said to me “take your mask off, baby” and wow they actually found something more annoying than “you should smile”
@filmiliarface

A thing a lot of men don't realize about misogyny is that the worst men are inescapable for women who attract their attention for any reason (being young, having public jobs). These men seek women out to harass them, all the time. They're everywhere women go, every day.
Sandra Newman

I know a lot of people hate mothers day and I’m sympathetic but one thing I like about it is that it is one of the few occasions we really reflect on this whole enormous universe of unpaid labor, emotional and physical, holding our society together from behind the scenes
Angie Schmitt

Today marks 60 years since the FDA approved the birth control pill. As we celebrate that anniversary, we must honor the Puerto Rican women who were misled, enrolled in clinical trials, and experimented on to test higher doses of the pill without informed consent.
Dr. Daniel Grossman

In the last 24 hours I saw a black man murdered by a retired cop for exercising and a white man let off after pleading guilty twice.
Vali Chandrasekaran

Climate change and renewable energy sure took a back seat this month:

You know what's funny? Mainstream economists calling degrowth or ecological or feminist economists "unrealistic" and "utopian" - when they're the ones who believe in the infinite growth fairy. That's funny.
@JKSteinberger

Growth is *the* most ideological idea of our era because it's virtually the only one embraced by people on both sides of the aisle—and because when you attempt to dismantle it you really are forced to rethink our systems entirely.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

Mt. Everest visible from Kathmandu, Nepal for first time in living memory:


Greg Miller

It took a pandemic for the world to finally understand that oil is worthless in a society without consumption. That healthcare has to be public because heath is public. That we live in a society, not an economy.
Mohamad Safa

You know why it's important for the climate fight to dismantle the idea of "human nature"? Because historically "human nature" has been seen as the behavior of selfish white men. It's time to take power for other ways of being, which are equally human.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

Sustainable cities and transportation were still represented, though mostly in the first half of the month:

Our daughter's kindergarten workbook:


@RescueEwe

Something weird about how we talk about transportation is, everyone says transit was “in decline” before COVID, no one finished the sentence “because venture capital was subsidizing Uber trips and now Uber is a failed shell of a company” why is that, do you think
@mateosfo

So closing a road to cars is exclusionary but requiring that a person purchase, store, maintain and operate a 2-3 ton, $35k motor vehicle in order to go somewhere is not?
Momifornia

Every day under the pandemic brings surreal new information, such as the detail that the Hertz bankruptcy could cause used car prices to collapse because it owns so many cars.
Matt Pearce

I'm now comfortable concluding that phrase "there are too many people here" is 100% a proxy for cars. There is nowhere in the United States that has too many people; this becomes quite obvious when you remove the cars. Ergo, "Our neighborhood is full" = "I will lose my parking"
@mateosfo

Big survey/study from the Knight Foundation on what people love about their cities, what keeps them there. Mentioned: access to arts, culture, recreational opportunities, safe public spaces, lively downtowns. Not mentioned: ease of driving, parking.
David Roberts

I very seldom see “distracted pedestrian” used to describe an incident where an actual distracted pedestrian just walks into traffic. It’s usually a motorist placing the blame on a walker who had legal right-of-way but may not have been 100% attentive.
joshuahmel

Can we stop using the word "closure" to describe *opening* a street to everyone other than motorists? It's car-centric language.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit

Simple mantra for cycle infrastructure: build it between places that people want to travel between. You know, a bit like the way roads have been built for millennia.
Bicycal_Life

So often when bike infrastructure is proposed, we hear “But not everyone can bike!” But guess what, not everyone can drive either, and that didn’t stop us from building our entire transportation system around cars.
Momifornia

Someone should sue a state DOT where a pedestrian was killed on a sidewalk less road. They can’t claim ignorance about the safety needs of pedestrians when they have literally worn a path in the grass. It’s negligent.
Angie Schmitt

Going up tomorrow. Thanks for sharing NYC DOT:


Sam Balto

Remember, every bike vs car discussion boils down to:
Bikes: don't slow us down
Cars: we could kill you at any moment so GTFO here
@mikesonn

Cyclists, dress up like a Christmas tree and don't you dare put in a single earbud to listen to music, or else you're just asking to get run over.
Drivers, let's come up with a way to play videos games while commanding a multi-ton machine! What's the worst that can happen?
@driversofnyc

France is gonna subsidize bicycle repairs for the whole country to keep people out of their cars. It will cost them about what Americans spend on gasoline in 30 minutes.
@mateosfo

VERY good article — “We presume that one person in a car (the median occupancy) is entitled to take up the space of six cyclists or more than 10 pedestrians, yet we begrudge pedestrians the space to walk four abreast or cyclists to ride three abreast.”
Brent Toderian

Income and wealth inequality, wage theft, and a better way to organize an economy:

WHY DO PEOPLE HATE IMMIGRANTS WHO PAY TAXES BUT NOT BILLIONAIRES WHO DONT!!! MAKE IT MAKE SENSE
@actually_ahitza

Like other highly social species, empathy was the evolutionary glue that bound us to one another, compelling us to look out for one another. Capitalism destroys our empathetic nature, our first hope for survival. Reclaiming empathy and destroying capitalism may be our last.
Arash Kolahi

It is not necessary to be an anarchist or wish for the downfall of this country or any other to imagine anew. The real tea is that creative power does not have to be destructive . . .
Professor Fleming @alwaystheself

If there was a sci-fi novel with a megalomaniac billionaire who was the son of an Apartheid emerald mine owner, and he was privatizing space exploration so the public no longer has a say in it...you know that would be considered bad, right? The heroes would fight to stop SpaceX.
Existential Comics

It doesn’t *have* to be money vs. human lives. That’s just the framework uncreative greedy capitalists have imposed.
Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

If your economy requires people to consume things they don't need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy.
Jason Hickel

And finally... finally... the best of the rest:

Random Star Trek fact: At 47, Wesley Crusher actor Wil Wheaton is now as old as Patrick Stewart was when he first started out in the role of Captain Picard
Paul Haine

Reminder to all fellow parents that all therapy based in coercion, even if it’s a “positive reward” basis, is abusive. Refuse to let this happen to your children.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

I made a 2020 commemorative candle:


@Stephamaybe

Just tell the Q's that QAnon is actually a top secret CIA Deep State operation designed to identify and manipulate the most gullible people on Earth. And then wait to see what their answer is.
Carl J. Feher

It's important to remember that no matter how many people die, no matter how many lose their jobs, no matter how much anguish and grief and suffering anxiety there is, conservatives are still the Real Victims (TM).
Chris Hayes

American conservatism is basically six billionaires who go around paying people to remove their own conscience with a grapefruit spoon.
@Zeddary

Something of a bombshell: Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, switched sides on abortion in the '90s. In a new FX documentary filmed before her death in 2017, McCorvey says she was paid to do so.
Matt Brennan @thefilmgoer

Most people who eat meat (myself included!) are not Indigenous people engaged in traditional practices or subsistence farmers and using those things as a shield to defend a society structured around overly high levels of meat consumption is pretty gross.
@kateljacobson

Irrespective of whether we have faith in religion or not, it’s good to be more compassionate. It makes us happier as individuals with a positive influence on our families and the neighborhood where we live.
Dalai Lama

One of the biggest problems with libertarians is their need to come to defense of corporations like Amazon. They don't understand that power is the threat, not just state power.
Antonio Buehler


@DeidreBarker13

I guess it’s time to repeat the main thing I learned from reading a fuckton of Holocaust memoirs again:
• propaganda does not need to be persuasive, only pervasive
• its secondary purpose is to convince
• its primary purpose is to exhaust
@Delafina777

People need to understand that on the list of TRAVESTIES wrought by George W. Bush (and the Federalist Society, including those "never Trump" Republicans that people now love) Justice ALITO is up there with the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina.
Elie Mystal

In med school, I took an elective called "Stress," foolishly thinking I was going to learn about meditation and yoga. Instead the professor spent 6 weeks proving that being poor or a minority literally destroys your health on a molecular level, and I think about that every day.
Jocelyn J. Fitzgerald, MD

I constantly see in surveys that college and post-college education make people more liberal. The right is allowed, nay, encouraged to broadcast its theories about why: nefarious indoctrination by a cabal of elites! But the more commonsense explanation is practically verboten. The more commonsense explanation being: exposure to different kinds of people and ideas broadens people's minds and causes them to abandon various reactionary prejudices that were based on ignorance, parochialism, and fear.
David Roberts

It is amazing how readily we assume people we disagree with have nefarious intent. (I feel like I write this tweet every couple of months. I shouldn’t still be shocked.)
Tim Minchin

I made a U turn to take this photo:


@lisasaurstomp

I served soul food brunch to Little Richard every Sunday for a year while waitressing at Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch in LA. I was a college student. He tipped me a crisp $100 bill each week on a $75 breakfast with friends. This was 30 years ago. Helped me so much. God rest his soul.
Ava DuVernay

I’m pretty sure that podcasts now are just an excuse for adult men to call each other on the phone and have a meaningful one-hour conversation.
Kristen Bartlett @kristencheeks

I just don't get the sense we have fully grasped the profundity of what is happening all around us. History is being wrenched in a new direction. But we seemed numbed, caught in the news cycle, trapped by old vocabulary and ways of thinking about the world.
David Rothkopf

oh ffs, the old command in Photoshop to maintain aspect ratio when using transform tool was to hold down the shift key. NOW IT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE. I have to unlearn the muscle memory of 20 years now and WHY?????
@tomtomorrow

Why are history nerds obsessed with weird shit like WWII, and not something cool like the development of agricultural systems throughout history????
@aslikr42069

“Privilege is when you think that something's not a problem because it's not a problem for you personally.”
@TeachMrReed

The Space Race, but for competent government, effective anti-Covid measures, and fully funded healthcare, education, and addressing climate change.
Zachary Wefel

conspiracy means "To Breathe Together"
@BuildSoil

Imagine getting to be John Brown AND getting to kiss a baby right before you die. That’s a life well lived:


Angus Johnston @studentactivism

It’s four times as expensive to deliver a package to a home in rural America than one in the city. That’s why Amazon makes the USPS do most if its rural deliveries — and keeps all of the high-margin urban orders to itself.
Rachel Premack

It's wild that there are fairly prominent public intellectuals, some with prominent roles in major campaigns, who think racist white men are inherently more receptive to universal healthcare than suburban women
Scott Lemieux

The most depressing thing about America is realizing almost all of its dysfunction and cruelty is by choice
Patrick Hruby

Novelists who have won the Pulitzer Prize twice: Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead.
Robert Loerzel

I am increasingly concerned about the consequences of being governable.
Puff the Magic Hater @MsKellyMHayes

Seeing baby quail go after earthworms makes me feel like I understand velociraptors better.
@BuildSoil

Mood:


@53viroqua