Twitter, May 2021

Twitter in May is always so great here at Daughter Number Three, because my round-up is shorter than usual, given the missing week or so of coverage. Ahh... maybe I should miss more weeks. 

It's not as if nothing happened during the month, of course. Republicans are attempting to march us toward fascism, Israel was provoking Palestinians so it could bomb its people, and we ended the month with the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre.

___

Republicans will tell you they just want it to be "Easy to vote, and hard to cheat." What they really mean is "Hard to vote, and easy to accuse you of cheating if you do."
Matthew Chapman @fawfulfan

The white establishment is not learning any meaningful lessons from the Tulsa massacre when they’re simultaneously funding militarized police forces to terrorize Black communities today. Folks have to demand more than pageantry.
Bree Newsome

As we acknowledge the racist massacre of Black people that began in Tulsa 100 years ago today, remember it was a part of a larger history of white racial violence in New York (1863), Wilmington (1898), Atlanta (1906), East St. Louis (1917), Rosewood (1923) and many other cities:


Keith Boykin

The number of conversations I and other black colleagues have had with white people in Tulsa who doubt the massacre happened or that “it was as bad as they’re saying” is disturbing. I suppose it’s good that they’re not even bothering to lie?
jelani cobb

What would be different if we were to see ourselves healing climate change rather than fighting it?
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Maybe the worst piece of public art I have ever seen:


Adam Kotsko

If critical race theory threatens your Christianity, you may be worshipping whiteness.
Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis

Let's be clear. If 10 Republican Senators cannot even vote for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection, 10 Republican Senators will not vote for anything meaningful to improve the lives of the American people. We must abolish the filibuster and act now.
Bernie Sanders

If there’s anything good in this rewriting of American memory, it’s that the underlying assumption is that racism is shameful. The principle that we’re all created equal haunts white supremacy, especially since the Civil Rights Movement. Can’t be proud of slavery—so erase it.
T.J. Stiles

Perhaps the most central lie of white supremacy/structural whiteness is that white domination of institutions, government and wealth is owed to a natural superiority of the white race (there is no biological white race) and not an organized system of theft and violence.
Bree Newsome

Private Equity firms should not be able to buy single family rentals. Horrible to tenants, no investment in the community and distorts the SFH housing market.
Nate Pentz

Let me know if you've solved the tension between the asphalt lobby, car culture, and impending climate catastrophe. All I can see is hunger for profits, inability to call suburbanization the disaster it is, and tiny tweaks to the status quo. Have a couple bollards, kids.
Mary Morse Marti

EVs are great, but scaling down the automobile industry and reducing private car ownership is better.
Jason Hickel

It’s still mind-blowing that Republicans politicized a pandemic.
Adam Miller @ajm6792

Republicans conjured up a Democratic plot to steal the presidential election out of nothing, out of whole cloth. If they can do that at will now, why wouldn't they do it for every close election from now on? Such conjuring is a pathway to status inside the party. They'll be competing to do it.
David Roberts

It's actually a very new thing to have your hair be exposed outside the house all the time. And while some of y'all are talking about it looking ghetto or whatever? That same look will be coming to a runway near you. You'll like it better on white people I guess...
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

“While electric vehicles emit no exhaust fumes, they still produce large amounts of tiny pollution particles from brake and tire dust, for which the government already accepts there is no safe limit. Toxic air causes 40,000 early deaths a year in the UK.”
Brent Toderian

22 minutes apart:

American Propagandist @ArmyStrang

we're collectively joking about a year of quarantine ruining our social skills and ability to function in the regular world -- but we just can't understand how people come out of prison after 5 or 10 or 20 years maladapted / how incarceration only continues cycles of harm.
@esmietee

History is everywhere. A Tulsa resident pointed out to me that the bricks in the facade of this building were reclaimed from buildings that burned in 1921:


jelani cobb

To anyone who says that bicycling is dangerous, just remember, if the only things on our roads were bicycles and people walking, we would have virtually zero deaths due to traffic crashes. It's not the bicycles that are dangerous.
Charles Denison IV

The same party that blocked a bipartisan investigation into the insurrection is pushing 400 bills to make it harder to vote inspired by that insurrection. Don’t forget that.
Ari Berman

There is a political party that uses (incorrectly) the word "communism" as a synonym for "totalitarianism" and then *behaves* in totalitarian ways.
Paul Thomas

51 senators can seat a Supreme Court justice but 54 senators can’t establish an independent commission to investigate a violent insurrection in their own damn building.
Steven Mazie

America has over 2 billion parking spaces - 8x more than there are cars. Imagine if we had 8x the # of homes we need in our cities? Parking gobbles up land and space. Reclaiming this land for better uses will be one of the most powerful outcomes of AVs:


Jennifer Keesmaat

The lesson after Sandy Hook was not that gun control was impossible, but that Republicans would never be good faith partners no matter how innocent the victims of violence. The lesson here is that a genuine insurrection aimed at Congress will not move Republicans, so ditch’em.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

The five neurodivergent love languages: infodumping, parallel play, support swapping, Please Crush My Soul Back Into My Body, and "I found this cool rock/button/leaf/etc and thought you would like it"
@neurowonderful

Good move to change the term from "Single-family zoning" to "apartment bans."
William Lindeke

The GOP line that government is inherently totally incompetent and corrupt (e.g., Reagan's "nine most terrifying words") is incredibly self-serving because it is designed to rationalize their own inability to govern to the voters.
Aaron M. Renn

Call me old-fashioned, but I think ending poverty and hunger on Earth is more important than colonizing Mars.
Robert Reich

The funniest thing about this current conservative obsession with critical race theory is how their moves to ban it both popularize it AND cede the premise of critical race theory. They're like the Greek tragedy version of the Streisand Effect right now.
Elie Mystal

The effect of mixed use is hard to understate. People spend ~half their waking day at home, and the other half at work and shops. When you segregate commercial and residential into different areas, an area's infra sits unused half the time. In other words, you need twice as much!
@ScootFoundation

Plant trees in the middle of residential streets:


Andrew Hunniford

"The vaccine manufacturers absorbed billions in public cash and have told their shareholders to expect a rosy future in which they charge $175/dose for annual boosters. Their CEOs took home tens of millions in bonuses based on those promises." - Cory Doctorow
@ratgrrl

Fascinating juxtaposition about how we view and value automobiles and bicycles from WIRED: The $5k Tern Bicycles GSD family bike (while great!) is “preposterously expensive.” The $40k @Ford F150 EV truck? “The most radical thing about [it]? The price.”
Blake Trask

We have all these laws that protect cars (with mandatory insurance) from property damage but no similar safety net for people with health problems.
Angie Schmitt

I can’t say this enough: Murder rose proportionately across all cities, progressive or not. So why no bylines from red cities headlined “this city resisted reforms, but saw its murders rise too. Maybe the status quo doesn’t work?”
John Pfaff

This is what a blade of grass looks like under a microscope. Next time you take a walk outside, know that the grass is happy to see you Smiling face with open mouth:


@DrBethNichols

Modern cars beep at you when you depart from your lane to safely pass a bicyclist. They do not beep at you when you exceed the speed limit. Values of a manifestly evil industry on full display.
@peatonx

The fact that Cruz is on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee should:
1) Frighten you.
and
2) Absolve you of any lingering imposter syndrome related self-doubts.
Leah McElrath

The point is this: it was never about Trump. He was the perfect vessel for destructive profit and societal anger. That his fate was cultivated by media profiting off his ineptitude and hatred, and all of it was embraced by the Right in a fascist move is what remains. The Trump Years, and this remaining fascist/criminal crisis, are all side-effects of an economic system wired to reward destructive and dangerous behaviors. Trump was a symptom, not the disease, and we can’t forget or ignore the role media played in assisting all of this.
Jared Yates Sexton

Looks dumb, right? This is how we design cities:


Brent Toderian

There’s Just One Problem With Ford’s Electric F-150. Joe Biden says the pickup truck is fast. It's heavy, too. The e-truck is 6,500 pounds. The gasoline powered F-150 weighs between 4,201-5,540 pounds. A Toyota Corolla is 3,150 pounds. So a gas-powered pickup weighs about 1.3-1.7 Corollas & an e-pickup is about 2 Corollas. Either way, it's a lot of Corollas. For all large vehicles, the extra vehicle weight can increase the risk to other drivers and pedestrians during a crash. This is why we have to make our streets safe for everyone, while also electrifying the vehicle fleet.
Costa Samaras

The I.R.S. is more likely to audit poor Americans who use the earned-income tax credit & typically earn less than $20,000 than to audit people earning $400,000. The county in the U.S. with the highest audit rate is Humphreys County, Miss., which is poor & three-quarters Black.
Steven Greenhouse

Unpopular opinion: time spent educating a four year old is just as valuable as the time educating spent a 21 year old. I will never understand the disparity in respect given to educators based on the age they work with.
Leah Shoemaker

The favored measure DOTs use for transportation performance is "travel time savings" or "travel time reliance," but IN NEITHER CASE do we measure travel time. We measure speed of vehicles (without induced demand) and assume higher speeds mean faster time. Ignored in this...
• Nondrivers, who are often blocked or have to go out of their way so that no one on the corridor has to slow down so they can cross
• Those trying to cross the corridor, who can be blocked or have to go out of their way so those on the corridor don't have to slow down
• Those trying to get off the corridor — turning slows "travel time" on the corridor, so those turning might have to take 3 rights or go blocks out of their way to preserve speeds on the corridor
• Actual travel times
Beth Osborne

Love how we’re obsessed with our five year micro-generations but also like “medieval peasants were the same thing for a thousand years.”
Sean Thomason

What not enough people are seeing is where there's anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is often right beside it & vice versa. Our communities have much more in common than what divides us. We share a common foe, white nationalism, that is actively hostile to us both here & in Europe.
Wajahat Ali

I like this:


@Suave_young50

The conflation between Judaism and Israel makes antisemitism worse.
Hannah Lichtsinn, MD @DoctorLix

I always give a little speech early on in my science classes that goes something like “when someone uses “common sense” as a substitute for evidence it means they probably don’t have any.”
Zach Deegan

Opinion: past time to redo the pledge. No need to pledge to a flag. We can pledge to our core values and institutions: equal rights, constitutional democracy, freedom of religion/expression. And it’s time to get rid of the “under god” part. Should’ve never been added in the 1950s.
Samuel Perry @socofthesacred

Being silenced and no longer being the only ones speaking are not the same thing
Kate Manne

Yang's campaign ideas are a perfect blend of things that cannot happen and things that are already happening.
WillyWicki

This is what indigenous land sovereignty looks like in the state of Washington:


@SarahEMyhre

I love how 95% of the solutions for preventing anxiety are "work less and don't be poor" when you really look at it.
Rory - ADHD Autistic OCD @roryreckons

The only thing worse than an electric pickup truck is a gasoline-fueled pickup truck.
William Lindeke

Every time you look at a proposed freeway/highway/roadway/street reconstruction project, ask these questions:
1. Does it reduce car lanes?
2. Does it reduce VMT?
3. Does it *prioritize* non-car transportation?
If the answer isn’t ‘yes’, then it’s just Climate Change Denialism.
Lou Miranda

To understand the Republican Party, you must understand
Projection
Gaslighting
Paul Thomas

Thinking about reducing car usage (VMT) in cities, including suburbs, for Climate Change. Residents worry about congestion. But where? Near highway on ramps and off ramps. We’ll never reduce VMT unless we get rid of freeways in cities. Put transit there.
Lou Miranda

Maybe I live in a fairytale world but when they said they were switching to EVs I imagined little sedans and not...tanks
Anu Wille @biker_anu

Ever wonder why our healthcare system is so expensive and ineffective relative to the rest of the world? Because MBAs — not MDs — are calling the shots.
@ShahidForChange

"Critical Race Theory" is today's version of "secular humanism" from my childhood. And this statement may not fully make sense to you unless you grew up in a household where the lyrics of  John Lennon's "Imagine" were seen as one of the most important tools of Satan on Earth.
Andrea Pitzer

I’m sad that time and time again, we’re told that there is no room for protected intersections, but we can find all the room in the world for nice wide turns for people driving floating living rooms with six empty passenger seats:


@DaveLikesBikes

motion to reframe billionaires as "parasites"
Dr. Genevieve Guenther

I am so ready for a president who gets as thrilled about riding an electric city bus as he does about driving an electric truck.
Amity Foster

If capitalism didn’t require poverty, it would have already eradicated it.
Robin4mpls

Malcolm X would have been 96 years old today. One quote by him that often doesn't get talked about as much that I think about often is: ”If you have no critics you'll likely have no success.” Receive that.
Ernest Owens

My understanding is that the dominant Republican theory of democracy is “Republicans are entitled to govern even if voters prefer Democrats”
Scott Lemieux

Asking Republicans to investigate 1/6 is like asking Al-Qaeda to investigate 9/11. The people who helped plan/promote the attack aren’t going to be partners in the investigation.
Kurt Bardella

I love trains. But I might hate railroads.
@bcmartinson

The Senate may be split 50-50, but the Democratic half represents 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.
Rep. Steven Woodrow

I always pick up after my dogs. I've had multiple people stop me to lecture me about picking up after them. They weren't even pooping at the time. Parking in the crosswalk should be more socially unacceptable than not picking up after your dog:


@Ollie_Cycles

Kids: Literally maimed and killed by drivers on our streets.
Your city traffic “safety” engineer: “Yes, but drivers save up to 16 seconds a day speeding through that intersection, so, it’s a fair trade-off.
This has to change.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

it will never stop being fucked up that a failed game show host got to install a third of the united states supreme court
@goldengateblond

It is wild that economists and policy makers are directly or indirectly say they think you can fire half the people in the restaurant sector for a year and should he able to easily hire them all back in like 3 weeks.
Jon Walker

E-bikes are only cheating if you view cycling through the prism of being only for exercise. It's a harmful viewpoint that reinforces auto-supremacy.
Alex Phillips-White

A picture is worth a thousand words..in this case two pictures.  Same location taken 100 years apart:


@AmberD1116

Parking, the biggest killer of retail business...pretty much no exceptions...
Steven Burgess

OAN is literally a Russian propaganda outlet masquerading as American media & Trump is proclaiming it the only reliable source of information. He is a traitor.
@malinablue

Even if someone were actually using children as “human shields” the only non-psychopathic thing to do would be to not fucking shoot them.
Ben Ehrenreich

Imagine if we charged a car driver $2.50 every time they start their car. And another $2.50 for each passenger. And then we charged them another $2.50 if they make a single stop and want to drive again that day. That’s what it’s like to ride transit in the Bay Area.
Patrick Traughber

Reminder: e-bikes are throttled, by law, to 32kmh. For safety:


Martyn Schmoll

“Safety is a shared responsibility”
@mplsalex

Apartheid states aren’t democracies.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“The 85th Percentile Method is perhaps unique in American law in empowering lawbreakers to rewrite the law to legalize their conduct. Given that speed is a leading factor for deadly crashes, this arbitrary and capricious method has serious real-world consequences.”
Don Kostelec

All new fossil fuel developments are incompatible with a habitable planet. Investing in fossil fuels is madness.
Extinction Rebellion

Think of a virus where 70% of kids are totally asymptomatic, less than 1% have severe symptoms, and less than 0.05% die. Phew that's no big deal for kids then! Don't worry about them! Oops actually it's polio in the 1950s
@Samanticka

Someone on tv just said, “when we want to incentivize rich people we give them money but when we want to incentivize poor people we take away money,” and holy fuck that’s so true.
feminist next door @emrazz

"We now know that children who grow up in homes with gas stoves are 42% more likely to develop asthma symptoms. And it’s especially dangerous for kids whose families live in smaller spaces, like apartments, that have less ventilation." —Dr. Lisa Patel
Mary Anne Hitt

You'll hear a lot of explanations as to why we can't build narrow streets like this anymore, but they're all really just excuses for prioritizing places for automobiles, not people. (Waverly St in Center City Philadelphia):


Daniel Trubman

Obviously we are way way way past “family values” but it is worth remembering what a vicious cudgel that was used as and it was all a con.
Chris Hayes

Children love books about boarding schools because they love the idea of living with their friends in a single building where magical things happen. A school is just a plot device to create what many humans (young and old) crave: a walkable, close-knit community.
@Iconawrites

Car brain is so real that I'm telling myself that $1,900 sounds too expensive for a bicycle, meanwhile I'm over here making $500 monthly overpayments to pay off the car I only use 2X a day to commute to work and back.
David Gifford

nodding in quiet horror as a patient explains she's inconsistent with her daily meds because one went from $41/mo to $450/mo, thus precipitating a hospital visit that will cost six to seven figures
@haircut_hippie

Pittsburgh has lost population, expanded freeway capacity by 8% and seen congestion increase 90%. Quite a record, Pennsylvania DOT and Governor Tom Wolf.
Beth Osborne

Talk to me about what Hamas is doing when we start funding them, arming them and bragging about our special relationship with them.
Katie Halper

If all the Tyrannosaurus rex that ever lived were resurrected, there'd be about one Tyrannosaurus rex for every three people
UberFacts

 "In a new study ... Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years’ worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found **no** meaningful cognitive differences between men and women."
Claudia Sahm

Next time someone argues "where will the water come from", show them this:

@rgbkrk

The way some Republicans talk about the January 6 insurrection you'd think it happened in 1921 and we only have grainy photographs to give us vague indications of what happened
Seth Abramson

“are you getting vaccinated?”
“nah. the odds of me getting covid are like a thousand to one”
“what if, in return for getting vaxxed, i enrolled you in a lottery with odds of a million to one?”
“sign me up”
Allahpundit

It's like innumeracy jujitsu
Scott Shaffer

It's wild that a huge chunk of the jobs discourse right now,  from wages to working from home to wanting customers no to harass workers, is "workers got their expectations raised, and that's a problem."
@mattdpearce

The point is that I don’t hate men for being men I hate misogynists for being misogynists and it just so happens that there is quite a bit of overlap.
feminist next door @emrazz

“Nobody wants to work” is just “nobody wants to date a nice guy” for business. If NOBODY wants to work for you, you’re the problem.
@mckenzee

You rarely hear that men have poise.
Chris Steller

This planet, the one we're ripping asunder with our emissions, so many brutal and exploitative choices? There's nothing like a good tangible repair of an item in my care to make me believe in my own physical body that we--all of us, together--can weave our world whole again.
@happifydesign

BREAKING: During the pandemic, more than half of the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers bent their own rules to give CEOs 29% avg raises while their frontline employees made 2% less.
Inequality.org

Every time food is iffy from a food safety perspective, I just eat it. So far this has never failed me
Angie Schmitt

In America if you make enough money you can continue to have teeth.
@benigma2017

So the dairy industry wants to ban vegan products from using terms like milk, yogurt and cheese. Why don't we compromise? Vegans agree to stop using terms like  'plant-based milk', if the dairy industry stops using pictures of happy animals in its marketing.
Rutger Bregman

Happy Minnesota Statehood Day. Smoke 'em if you got 'em:


Vic Thorstenson

If Palestinians do nothing, they are killed, their houses demolished or taken, and the world looks away. Refuses to see, refuses to care. If they fight back, by rock or rocket then "there are two sides" to the conflict and Israel is acting in self-defence, in the past and future. There is literally no permissible way to resist colonisation in the eyes of colonisers.
Omar Sakr

“A new cost-benefit study in New Zealand finds that investments in cycling & walking facilities outweigh the costs of building them by 10 to 1. The research found that the most important economic benefits were health gains from use of active transport.”
Brent Toderian

Sarcasm and snark are, in the end, very corrosive ways of interacting with the world. There’s a place for sincerity and open-heartedness
Johann Hari

Beauty-protected bike lane:


Bartek Komorowski @CyclistBartek

I have come to see the realtor as the vanguard of the reactionary everywhere I have loved, selling yesterday to tomorrow for their 7pcs cut, as often as possible.
Graham Sinclair @esgarchitect

Capitalism takes community away from you & then tries to convince you that because as an individual, you can’t complete communal tasks, there’s something wrong with you. There’s no amount of self care that can replace our need for community care.
@conamorgloria

I just came up with the phrase "the hangover from the anthropocene" and I think I'm gonna be using that a lot
Charlie Jane Anders

Did you see this? Over 100 parody car advert posters were installed on billboards and bus stops without permission by a guerilla activist group in England & Wales. A lot of the messages will probably look really familiar:


Brent Toderian

Feeling scattered & unsure
We take the step
And find others
Looking for chestnuts
We find, take, and plant them
In the places where we live.
And years later, under old trees,
Look back at how much we did.
we need to move now; raising chestnuts, not consciousness. we are in a position to make the world that much better.
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

Someone who’s got more than $50 million in the bank can afford to pay two cents on their 50-millionth-and-first dollar, and every dollar after that—plus a few more pennies if they become a billionaire. It is time for a #WealthTax in America.
Elizabeth Warren

The moon photographed over 28 days at the same place and at the same time:


@FeelGoodPage11

So much misogyny. So much ableism. So much old power.
@jlms_qkw

I think about this every time a student does something that upsets or offends me. I try my best (hopefully successfully) to remember my power position and not “hit back” so to speak, remembering that not all harm is intentional and creating more harm doesn’t help.
Dr. Sami Schalk

Pfizer, Biontech, Novavax, Moderna shares plunge to session lows after U.S. backs waiving patent protections on Covid vaccines
CNBC Now

I know it's obvious but it needs to be explicitly said: The stock market dropped in response to a decision that will demonstrably save lives
Jerry Iannelli

Cars eat cities.
Brent Toderian

New study: "biomass and wood are the leading sources of stationary source air pollution health impacts in 24 states, and the total health impacts of natural gas surpass that of coal in 19 states and the District of Columbia."
David Roberts

When we let a species go extinct we must not continue to use it as a metaphor; we lose that right. Its name is sacred. We tell its story but it doesn’t get to be used to illustrate some other point.
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

You can't be a billionaire and serious about tackling the climate crisis. Not only because of your own consumption but because of - much more importantly - the way you amass wealth and continue to hoard it. Extracting wealth is another form of deadly extractivism.
Sam Knights

In 1855, white clergy in the United Stares owned a total of 760,537 slaves whose total market value amounted to $246 million. Adjusted for inflation it is the equivalent of $8 billion today.
Kevin W Cosby

What if we saw repairing the ecology of this planet as the next great adventure?
BUILD SOIL; Plant Chestnuts!

A tenet of the Republican party is that white people, while they might possibly commit crimes sometimes, are never criminals. Some *other* people are criminals by default, without regard to their actions.
nothings monstered

There is a nontrivial segment of the electorate that thinks “affordable housing” means cheap SFHs in desirable neighborhoods and I don’t know, man. That isn’t possible. Full stop.
Adam Miller @ajm6792

Conservatives made a whole thing of emphasizing that his name is “Barack Police cars revolving light HUSSEIN Police cars revolving light Obama,” but now folks have no concept of this notion that “ethnic-sounding” names can impact one’s social or political advancement here. Because after all, America isn’t racist.
Bree Newsome

The Anti-Logo

I've written about a lot of bad logos over the years, and logos that don't "read," but this one may be the worst of all. (As seen on the Twitter account of Sean Hayford Oleary.) It's not just a bad design, it exists for a terrible purpose, so that makes it all the worse.

Essentially, from a design standpoint, it's not a logo at all. Logos are about reducing elements to create visual impact and memorableness. The creator of this mess kept adding elements and words so there's nothing to focus on. Some of the words are almost unreadable. Imagine them at any size smaller than this! It's already bad enough as is, and this is probably 3" tall.

Of course, it uses one of my least favorite typefaces, Algerian, which was part of the Microsoft Office font set from the mid-1990s and became extremely over-used. Originally designed in the early 20th century as part of the Orientalist craze of the time, it has since taken on Latino connotations from its use by a popular tequila brand, so I think that's part of what this logo is referring to.

The type is arranged in a circular fashion, which makes it almost unreadable given how many many words are involved and the complexity of the name. Is it Cannon River Drug Violent Offender Task Force? (Isn't the term usually "Violent Drug Offender"?) It's not helped by the questionable use of black on red (usually a bad contrast choice), with a secondary set of motto words inside the circle, because why not! And then the two counties' names and the years their task forces were established, since those are so important.

And then there's that pile of clip art. Eightballs in the side pockets? Death-heads? Crossed pistol-grip shotguns? A syringe? Oh, and handcuffs. It's hard to tell which side of the law enforcement / criminal divide each of these is meant to represent, since they're all splayed around within the kindergarten concept of symmetrical arrangement. Are the crossed guns over the syringe supposed to mean the guns are preventing the evil death-head syringe, or are the guns supposed to be in the hands of the criminals? I'm not sure.

Who is this logo for? I don't think it's the public, since the public would have no idea what the eightballs, at least, mean. Do the handcuffs signify integrity, since they're right above that word, or is that a coincidence? 

I'm sure I've missed something else that's wrong with it. I can think of one good thing to say, though:

Good printing on the cup!

The Best Money Can Buy

I spent a bunch of time the other morning reading an article on Jacobin called Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class. It's by Doug Henwood, who edited Left Business Observer and was (or is?) the host of Behind the News.

The teaser on Twitter promised something about how the money behind Trump was from privately owned corporations who benefit from deregulation that allows them to get away with things (rather than big publicly owned companies), so that's what got my attention.

It's a really long piece, which I wasn't prepared for at 7:00 a.m., but I got through it. Here are a few nuggets. First, a general statement of our political parties' situation:

The two-party system has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past several decades. Once the party of New Dealers and Southern segregationists, the Democrats have evolved into a coalition of the softer side of the metropolitan establishment and a progressive wing the party leadership hates. And the GOP, once the party of the northeastern WASP elite, has evolved into a coalition of plutocrats and an enraged provincial petite bourgeoisie (often mistaken for the “white working class”).

Then, this bit of news-to-me about where the methods of the Right came from:

Eisenhower’s tepidity and compromises energized the Right, whose insurgency was almost Bolshevist in its ideological and organizational discipline. The Bolshevik tendencies were no accident. There were not only intellectuals like James Burnham, a Trotskyist turned cofounder of National Review, but important organizers like Clif White and the ex-Communist Marvin Liebman, who consciously emulated Red tactics in organizing their insurgency, from organizational and ideological discipline to how to dominate a meeting. That rigor and energy dismayed and disoriented the moderates, who preferred politeness and compromise above all things.

That made me think of L. Brent Bozell.

I've never spent time studying the 1964 Republican Convention, which selected Barry Goldwater as the party's candidate, so this was all pretty eyebrow-raising:

As journalist Murray Kempton put it, “This convention is historic because it is the emancipation of the serfs . . . The serfs have seized the estate of their masters.” New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a leader of the moderate Republican faction whose name embodied the old elite’s domination of the party, was shockingly heckled, a sign of the WASPs’ impending decline. The party’s transition on race was made crudely clear by insults directed against black attendees — one of whom saw his jacket deliberately burned with a cigarette. Jackie Robinson, who was a delegate, said that the performance made him feel like “a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”

Henwood spends a few paragraphs on the importance of the Powell memo, which I've mentioned before. It was a 1971 warning to big business that they had to take political power or they would lose to the Left. What Henwood breaks apart is the way old corporate money went about doing this (by funding things like the American Enterprise Institute and even the Brookings Institute) vs. the way privately held companies went about it. That means the Koch brothers, of course, and later the Mercers and the family that owns Uline, among others.

The Heritage Foundation was the first thing this new money funded, then the Cato Institute. Over time, it has become a tsunami of cash.

That’s not to say there isn’t some big money on the liberal left — just not as much, and not as ideologically coherent. The closest liberals come is the Democracy Alliance (DA), which was founded in 2005 and gets money from George Soros and other, less famous monied liberals. But it distributed only about $500 million in the first decade of its existence — less than the Koch network spends on one election cycle. And unlike the Koch network, whose spending is tightly controlled by the leadership, DA members decide where to spend their money. (emphasis added)

So all of those right-wing stories about George Soros paying lefty protesters are (as usual) just projection, as if we didn't already know that. 

And then there's the State Policy Network, founded in 1992, which I have never heard of before. It

develops policies, disseminates propaganda, and trains personnel to promote “economic liberty, rule of law, property rights, and limited government,” which, in practice, means gutting regulations, cutting taxes and services, privatizing public schools and pension systems, and destroying unions.

Why does that sound so familiar? Well,

Closely associated with the SPN is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which shares funders and priorities but operates at the political ground level, writing bills and lobbying legislators...

Oh, that's why!

Overall, the article is long and depressing, but worth the read.

 

Baby Yoda, Finally Okay with Me

Have I ever mentioned that I didn't watch The Mandalorian, and I went so far as to mute the words Baby Yoda on Twitter so I wouldn't have to hear the constant yammering about the show? Well, I did.

That doesn't mean I didn't find this amusing, now that all the hubbub has died down:

There's something about a life-size image of something that's not real showing up where you don't expect it that just brightens your day.

Especially when the day-defining image is more like this:

 

Too Tired to Listen, But I Want to

It's late and I've spent a lot of time today reading minute details from 9-year-old and 12-year-old reports on what should be done in my neighborhood... almost none of which has been done. 

So I thought I would share a couple of podcasts I haven't had time to listen to, but which I want to listen to.

First, Dave Roberts on his new Volts podcast, talking to Will Wilkinson. As Roberts described it, it's "two bearded white Gen-X ex-libertarian ex-philosphy student newsletter proprietors." But knowing what Roberts is like when he talks philosophy, and what little I know of Wilkinson, it will be worth hearing.

Second, from Chris Hayes' Why Is This Happening, a conversation with sociologist Patrick Sharkey called A More Violent America. It sounds like Sharkey looks at the violent crime increase that has happened during the pandemic in a larger context than we usually get.

Delores Umbridge Brought Us Stand Your Ground Laws

I recently learned from John Oliver that the Stand Your Ground law craze was started ostensibly because a woman named Marion Hammer told a tale about fearing for her life in a parking garage and feeling burdened by the duty to retreat. A car full of men, a woman alone... you feel sympathy, right? And she happened to have a gun on her to scare them off.

Did the men do anything physically threatening, though? It's not clear. The story Oliver recounts is mentioned in this 2012 article about Hammer and her history with the law, but only verbal threats are described. Of course, Hammer assumes her gun saved her. And also that a Stand Your Ground law was needed for some reason within her scenario, when it clearly wasn't: She didn't shoot anyone, and was never even threatened with prosecution based on her actions.

Florida passed the first Stand Your Ground law in the U.S. in 2005, when Hammer was in her 60s. She had been a gun activist her entire life when she encountered those guys in the parking garage. She still is, now that she's in her 80s.

She's under 5' tall, and, as the CNN article linked above says, "favors bright lipstick." Here's a relatively current photo:

When I saw that, I couldn't help thinking, She's Delores Umbridge!

Once again, let me say I'm so glad that Minnesota has managed to hold out against the Stand Your Ground stupidity. We've had multiple cases where a white person shot a black person and claimed they were "afraid" (such as this and this). With a Stand Your Ground law, it's likely those two would have been acquitted or never tried. Which is bad enough when cops do it: do we really need civilians making the same claims?

As John Oliver pointed out in his segment on Marion Hammer, the homicide rate has gone up in states that passed SYG laws, and down in states that didn't. (Here's one example.) And — big surprise! — Black people (especially Black women) still get charged with gun crimes when they use guns in ways that clearly meet the description of self-defense under the SYG law... from Marissa Alexander to Siwatu-Salama Ra. 

There are movements afoot to repeal SYG laws in a number of states (Florida and Georgia were two that I noted). This page on the Everytown site has a lot of good information both on repeal and reasons why.

Ought to Be Illegal, Part 2

When I wrote a few days ago about vehicles that should be illegal, I wanted to include a photo I'd seen many times on Twitter, showing how many children can sit in front of a full-size SUV and be completely invisible to the driver. But searching for images on Twitter is one of those things that's hard to do, so I couldn't find it that day when I was writing.

Well, it turned up in my feed again today, so here it is, thanks to alexandre alfonso:

He accompanied the image with these words:

For some SUVs, the front blind zone is so large that you can have 12 children sitting in front of the car and the driver cannot see them.... You just have to wonder how a car where the driver's line of vision start at 3 meters in front of the car can satisfy any safety standards.

He also included this graphic:

Which gets more specific but doesn't have quite the gut-punch of the child photo.

Women and Men, Star Tribune Op-Eds, Month 4

Well, my count of the gender balance on the Star Tribune op-ed page has made it to a third of the year. I guess I'll have to go for half a year now. 

As in April, the cartoonists of May 2021 were 100% male. This is really starting to bug me. I understand that the in-house cartoonist Steve Sack is male, and Monday regular LK Hanson is male, but in the roughly one-quarter other cartoons they run... can they really not find any political cartoonists who are women? I won't say I'm missing Lisa Benson (that would be a stretch!) but really. Not one in two months?

The op-ed gender disparity was worse than ever. There were 59 written by men and 22 by women (that would be 73% men, 27% women). Oh, and one bylined by The Economist, which I didn't count. The local op-eds were — as usual — better balance, but this month not by much: only 30% were by women, compared to other months that have had percentages as high as 46%.

Yes, yes, I am going to have to chart this at some point, and that means I have to find my original data. It's kind of embarrassing that I don't know where it is right now. And I have to admit it's written on the backs of envelopes. Very official, this data collection.

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Past posts:

• Month 1
  
• Month 2
• Month 3

Out and About Again

For quite a while, I have been in group of COVID thinkers who've concluded that outdoor air is basically safe, and now especially when many people are vaccinated, it clearly is. So I've been to a number of outdoor functions without a mask where I am around other people who are also not wearing masks. 

One that I do a couple of times a week involves working on a public garden, where we're all in constant motion, so we're not near each other for very long at a time. Yesterday, though, I was tabling for about about five hours outside at an event, sitting less than six feet away from other people off and on for different periods of time. 

It was pretty "normal." There was also a good breeze. 

I don't know how I would feel about it if it was indoors, but outdoors, this is my perspective:

Thanks for Nothing

This may be too local, but our Ramsey County sheriff (Bob Fletcher) should not be in office. That's a different topic, though. What I wanted to say is that Fletcher probably wouldn't be sheriff if the previous one, Matt Bostrom, hadn't resigned to pursue a Ph.D. at Oxford. The guy who was appointed to replace Bostrom lost the next election to Fletcher.

What has Bostrom been doing with his time at Oxford? I hope it was worth it!

Well, a letter in today's Star Tribune filled us in. And I'm afraid... not.

Bostrom...has developed a systematic way to ask members of the community what they are looking for in police officers and then integrate the findings in new policies of recruitment, assessment and training of those officers....

His goal was to identify ways of increasing community/police trust.

On the surface this sounds good, but increasing trust is not the problem: making cops trustworthy is.

Should we somehow learn to trust these cops? Or these? Or these? Or Derek Chauvin and his three fellow cops in Minneapolis a year ago this week?

The crux of Bostrom's research is data from community surveys in Plano, Texas, and Los Angeles, where he asked people what qualities they would like to see in police officers:

The top four qualities citizens wanted were, in order of importance: high character, emotional intelligence, servant leadership and cultural competence.

Well, no duh, Matt. Sure, of course!

But what are the structures that would make it possible to attract and retain people with these admirable qualities to jobs in policing, given this history of policing in this country? How does the military style of training and operating undermine this goal?

You left us with Bob Fletcher and his drive-through filming of his own illegal car chases in Saint Paul for this pablum?

 

I'm a Squatter

 Jason Kottke today posted this graphic showing how U.S. generations have grown and shrunk over each decade since 1920 (from Flowing Data:

(Click to see it larger.)

His take on it was this:

The thing that’s really apparent to me in this graph is how the size, increased life expectancy, and better quality of life of the Silent and (especially) Baby Boomer generations really shifted the social order in America. It’s a triple whammy: this large group of very healthy people stuck around so much longer than the previous generations that they were able to keep their wealth and political/corporate power instead of handing it off to the next generations. It’s a generational firewall — they didn’t leave any room for their children or grandchildren. Instead, Gen X and Millennials got branded as lazy/apathetic and financially careless.

Right after I saw his post, I saw this graphic on Twitter about Millennials and home ownership:

That major drop in home ownership among 25- to 34-year-olds fits right into Kottke's analysis. Here we are, Baby Boomers, squatting on our vastly appreciating houses (in many markets, though not all), while others of us invest in REITs and private equity firms that are snapping up single-family homes, townhouse developments, and now even manufactured home parks. 

The average existing single family home price just cracked $320,000, I believe I just heard — a 17% increase in one year. Seems like only yesterday that average was $235,000.

Chroma Zone 2021

It's time for more murals in the Creative Enterprise Zone of Saint Paul! Chroma Zone 2021 is starting this weekend with five artists painting a pole barn at Bang Brewing (called BangIt! Mural Meet) and an afternoon open street party on Saturday right next door on Endicott and Bradford streets. 

The BangIt! Mural Meet artists got started today on the pole barn at Bang Brewing. They'll be working every day through Sunday, when they'll wrap up with artist talks at 3:00 p.m.

On Saturday, there's also a bike tour of some of the existing murals (meet at 12:30 p.m. at Dogwood Coffee on Carleton just north of University Ave.) and a walking tour, sponsored by Forecast Public Art at 12:00 noon. Register for the walking tour here.

The 2021 Chroma Zone mural artists were just announced. They'll be working throughout the summer, and most of their walls have not been identified yet. 

One artist has already started: Cyfi is painting now on the south wall of The Wycliff, 2327 Wycliff Street, adjacent to Mariela Arjas's 2019 mural.

Cyfi started his multi-story mural on Wednesday... he'll be competing with the rain this week.

I'm very happy that Chroma Zone is back almost in full form this year, after last year's Summer Mural Project, which was great to have in the midst of the pandemic (and which gave us six more murals despite it all) but just wasn't the same. 

I'm looking forward to the Saturday outdoor activities and everything else that comes later in the summer! I'm sure I'll post more photos later.

These Vehicles Should Be Illegal

There are quite a number of vehicles that should be illegal to drive on public streets. Today I saw a good example of one:

I saw this truck from two blocks away, it was so distracting. A lit billboard on all sides of a truck, driving down the street. It has no purpose except to distract other drivers (and I guess pedestrians and others who might see it going past).

The other vehicles that should be illegal would not necessarily be completely unsafe if they required a special drivers license with additional training. Unfortunately, they are much more common than this Christmas tree of a truck: They're full-size pickup trucks and many SUVs. They have high-profile front ends that make it impossible to see anything in front of the driver for many feet in front of the vehicle. 

They're also much heavier than sedans, and often more likely to roll over. For instance, the new electric Hummer weighs more than 9,000 pounds!

How long has it been since drivers licenses were assessed for their efficacy vis-a-vis the vehicles people are driving these days? What if a standard drivers license qualified you to drive only a vehicle under 4,000 pounds and under some front-end height? What if, to get a license to drive a heavier or taller vehicle, you had to have more drivers education to learn about some of the things commercial drivers learn, plus pedestrian safety, for instance?

I wonder what effect such a split in licensing would have on vehicle purchases and therefore vehicle production. 

And now we have the relatively new wrinkle of the extreme pickup of high-powered electric vehicles. Teslas already have this, of course, and now we're hearing about the F-150 Lightning truck going 0–60 in under 5 seconds. As if that's a good thing.

What we need instead are speed-governors on vehicles, at least in cities. There's no technological reason for these not to exist. Cars don't need to be able to go more than 60 or 65 at all (and anything over 80 mph is absurd), and on a city street they don't need to go more than 30. 

Another piece of the shifting worldview.

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Late addition: I think I never linked to this Bloomberg article from a couple of months ago by Angie Schmitt, called What Happened to Pickup Trucks? As the lead-in says, "As U.S. drivers buy more full-size and heavy-duty pickups, these vehicles have transformed from no-frills workhorses into angry giants. And pedestrians are paying the price." And, as Schmitt says in summarizing a study, "women — who tend choose smaller vehicles — are suffering higher injury and death rates than their male counterparts, despite the fact than women engage in fewer risks and crash less."

Education Does Not Fix Structural Wealth Inequality

It's commonplace for (white) people to say education is an equity solution. Income or wealth inequality? Education will fix it!

Well, not so far, as shown in this chart:

(Click to enlarge.)

I saw this courtesy of Jake Grumbach, who was responding to Gene Demby from NPR's Code Switch podcast. Grumbach sarcastically captioned the chart this way: "bRiDGe tHE RACial weaLTH Gap with EduCatiON."

Looking at this carefully, you will note that a Black person with a master's, professional, or doctoral degree has hardly any more net worth on average than a white person with some college or an associate's degree. A Black person with a bachelor's degree has substantially less net worth than a white person without a high school diploma. 

Not so far... not so much. Maybe it's not about education, you think?

Old Metal

You never know where you'll see something old and memorable. This was in a friend's garden.

It probably did come from a literal basement.

eBikes as an Example of a Shifting Worldview

When your worldview shifts, it's noticeable. A Twitter friend reminded me of one of those instances today. James, whose Twitter handle is STPBike (St. Paul Bike), had this short thread about his bikes:

Two of my neighbors reeled in shock when I told them I spent $6600 on my @ternbicycles GSD ($5500 base + accessories + tax). There was a certain insinuation of flaunting my riches. But they’ve both purchased cars in the last 5 years.
 

James and his cargo ebike.

That $6600 purchase represents 32 months of saving — about $200/month set aside (I haven't had car payments since I started buying eBikes). Would they have the same reaction if I drove home a used 12+ year-old Toyota Corolla with 150,000 miles on it? [Screen snapshot showing that's equivalent to the price of a 12-year-old Corolla.]

But James, you have THREE eBikes! This is true. Total I have spent on eBikes is $14,200. About equivalent to a 5-year-old Corolla, 2/3rds of the way to 100k miles. Total time I spent saving for those eBikes was about 84 months — about $170/mo.

eBikes are expensive...very expensive, compared to traditional bikes. But I'm not trying to replace a bicycle. I'm trying to replace a car. I'm trying to NOT buy that 5-year-old Corolla or any car for a long time, if ever. [photo of James with one of his other bikes, for winter)

Instead of buying yet another used car, I chose to get eBikes — each of which eliminates a reason I needed to drive my car. I’m 48 years old and I’ve never owned a brand new car. For the same expense as that used Corolla, I got the experience of three shiny new-in-box eBikes! Three eBikes, which are way more fun to ride than my personal 2004 Corolla. With those eBikes, I've eliminated over 90% of the trips I used to take by car.

So for me, I'm not flaunting. I'm investing in my future transportation needs. Some still choose cars.

Addendum: In summary, eBikes are still seen, by most, as luxury items — not transportation. Any equivalent investment in a car would be unremarkable in comparison. If we want to reduce car trips, the bicycle (electric or acoustic) needs to be seen as transportation.

Another biking friend (among many other responses) replied:

Also, I'm pretty sure if you were showing your neighbors a motorcycle, or boat, or ATV that you spent $6000 on they would never freak out about how expensive that was and how crazy you were to spend that.

And that's all true. As I said, this is a good example of the difference in worldview between mainstream America where the cost of cars is invisible and the world we need where something like an ebike becomes transportation instead of an extravagance.

Box Top, Oooooh Noooooo!

Daughter Number Three-Point-One presented me with this perfect pareidolia photo today, so I have to share it because it's Saturday and there's a lot going on and no time to write about any of it:

I told her if it was set on fire, its distress would be even more evocative, but maybe that's just me.

Exclusion Is Not Part of Inclusion

Several weeks ago, I saved a tweet thread by A.R. Moxon, who uses the Twitter handle Julius Goat, and then forgot to post it. So today's the day:

My suggestion: Stop using "viewpoint diversity" to mean "conservatives get to talk more" and recognize that the conservative reaction against academia is mainly driven by a broad expansion of diversity in voices, which conservatives categorically oppose.

The problem with even talking about "both sides" is, it accepts the worldview of people with abusive intention and a politics of domination. They win before you start.

The idea there are only two sides, and they are one of them? That's their framing.

It's bullshit. It's a lie. There's a reason that conservative framing around diversity boils things down to roughly two sides of "conservative" and "liberal." It allows them to ignore the fact that we ALREADY have broad diversity, and to frame themselves as the marginalized "side."

And so: voices of every ethnicity become not a multitude of ethnic voices, but "ethnic studies." And so with every facet of gender studies, and religious studies, and all of THAT get boiled to one side: Liberal. Against which conservatives posit themselves the whole other side.

Listen: All of us, trying to figure out how to honor everyone's basic humanity? WE ARE THE SIDES. People with a politics of domination have a completely different mission—an unacceptable one. Our mission is honoring everyone's basic humanity. They aren't a side in that.

So of course the side that wants to be the "normal" side of a binary against a broad spectrum of diverse voices they boil down to a single "side" is going to feel marginalized. Their framing is anti-diversity. It is structurally anti-diversity.

The marketplace of ideas gets to reject ideas. I think conservatives could be capable of bringing thoughtful ideas to a marketplace of ideas that ALREADY supports a broad diversity. Largely what they've opted for is complaining to have their already-rejected ideas subsidized.

As long as "conservative" remains — by conservatism's own insistence — structurally anti-diverse, any institution committed to diversity of thought must categorically reject it, at a structural level, to preserve diversity of thought. That's not oppression. It's opposition.

"Why is there so little room for CONSERVATIVE thought when there is so much room for gender studies and queer studies and racial studies and ethnic studies and religious studies and..." That's called being one voice among many. That's what diversity is. Get used to it. Everyone else has. The only reason that would be difficult is if conservatism makes no room for any of those things.

 

Israeli Ethnic Cleansing

I have never stuck my nose into the Israel/Palestine struggle. It was too involved, too complicated, I always thought. I was leaving it for others who knew more and were going to spend the time to go back in the history and learn enough.

That said, my under-examined tendency has always been to think both Israelis and Palestinians have a right to exist and that they should figure out a way to share the land they both have historical claims on. I liked the Israeli doves. I liked the two-state solution. I liked Sadat, and Shimon Peres. I don't like Netanyahu. I don't like the fact that evangelical Christians are Israel's biggest supporters in the U.S., goading us toward their love of Armageddon.

What is happening now is clearly ethnic cleansing on Israel's part and the world and the U.S. are letting them get away with it. 

The "right to return" to land that other people also think is their land is inherently problematic. This is settler colonialism before our eyes, as if we had mass media during the many times European Americans stole land and burned the villages of the Indigenous peoples living here, or forced those people into fighting back (as in the Dakota War).

Don't comment on this. I don't want to discuss it.

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From Twitter:

This is Awad Abuselmya. Israel killed him today in Gaza. Israel also killed his father, mother, brother and sister before. Tonight he will reunite with part of his family, and he will miss the other part.
Ahmed Alnaouq



Awad lost all of his family in 2006, when Israeli war planes bombed their house killing his parents, and his 6 siblings. Awad was the only survivor, he was 19 back then. Today the Israeli army killed Awad in Gaza
@fidaazaanin

 

Not a System of Fostering Care

You may know that Ma’Khia Bryant — the 16-year-old Black girl who was shot and killed by a Columbus, Ohio, cop a half-hour after the Derek Chauvin verdict — was living in a foster care home. But you may not know the New York Times reported yesterday that her time in foster care started because her grandmother was evicted and so child services removed the children from her care.

In the Twitter thread by the Times writer, Bryce Covert, one response pointed out that the initial eviction was in violation of the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits evictions based on having children in a rental unit. Others responded that occupancy limits (per square foot) contradict that rule, creating a catch-22.

Others pointed out that it would have been both better for the children and cheaper for the state if the grandmother — who wanted to keep the children — had been able to keep the children. Paying her, even just for housing, would be cheaper than the amount paid to "professional" foster parents:

The really absurd thing is that the state had to shell out money every month to keep all four kids in foster care. They probably could have given the grandmother a lot less to help with housing.
Katherine Scofield

It's so bizarre to me. Most foster placements could have been kept in their homes (at less cost to the state!) with a social worker checking in regarding the initial concern. Who does it benefit to remove these kids, causing trauma and requiring a lot of money?
@okwithcrazy

It's hard to process all of that and not take a comment like this at least somewhat seriously:

Everything in this country is designed to separate Black families...no different from slavery...
@wechoosewisdom

Of course it is different from slavery in the specifics, but it has a whole lot too much in common with it.

Liz Cheney: Not a Hero

I'm back!

And the first thing I want to say is that Liz Cheney is not a hero.

Yes, it's good that she isn't on the Trump train, it's good that she organized the former Secretaries of Defense to sign a letter saying the military should stay out of the presidential election process, it's good that she seems to have a commitment to the truth about what happened in November. All good.

But the idea that she's now about country before party is absurd. She was party-before-country for four years during the Trump presidency, as evidenced by her voting record. Now she's making it clear she's party-before-Trump, that's all. She thinks Trump is going to ruin the party, and that's what she can't stand.

She clearly thinks the best interest of the party (as she sees it) is what's good for the country as whole, so that's what she was doing for the years of the Trump presidency: supporting McConnell's agenda, such as it was. Judges, judges, judges, tax cuts for the wealthy, no health care, and so on.

She wants to win elections for the party, and she knows that there has to be a realistic base to that. It sounds as though the thing that put her over the edge was the fact that National Republican Congressional Campaign staff straight-up lied to members of Congress about polling data, which showed Trump's weakness in key districts. His unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorables in these places, but the NRCC staff withheld that data.

Cheney is clearly better on many levels than House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who spoke out against the January 6 insurrection while it was happening but almost immediately started pretending it didn't matter and then went to kiss Trump's ring. Earlier, he had signed onto the amicus brief to overturn the election (after telling Cheney he would not). 

She's better than just about any other Republican in the present Congress (with a few exceptions). But that doesn't make her suddenly good.

The fact that Cheney seems almost good is an indication of how far the Republican party has sunk into nihilism and will-to-power. Jane Mayer's recent New Yorker story on Lee Atwater's papers gives all the details on when that conversion began:

Atwater’s tactics were a bridge between the old Republican Party of the Nixon era, when dirty tricks were considered a scandal, and the new Republican Party of Donald Trump, in which lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost have become normalized.... Atwater...admits outright that he only cared about winning, not governing. “I’ve always thought running for office is a bunch of bullshit. Being in a office is even more bullshit. It really is bullshit,” he wrote. “I’m proud of the fact that I understand how much BS it is.”

It does seem that Liz Cheney is not in the Lee Atwater school, at least, I'll give her that. 

But she's still a long way from being a hero.

 

A Handmade Sail

A while ago, I joined a Facebook group called Nettles for Textiles, which is for people talking about exactly what that sounds like. These folks also occasionally talk about the use of other plant fibers in textiles, such as flax or hemp. 

Recently, this image was shared in the group, along with this accompanying text:

This is the corner of a hand-sewn sail made in the 1800s. The craftsmanship and quality of the work is amazing. This is a lost art. The canvas sails were made of hemp along with clothing, ropes, and the caulking used to fill gaps between planks among other things. Hemp is three times stronger than jute and was preferred because it was unaffected by salt water.

What a thing of functional beauty! Humans: we make things work.

Shedding Some New Light on Things

Have you ever thought about streetlight design?

The city of Los Angeles held a competition not too long ago, with the winner announced last September. A design studio called Project Room won for its concept, which met the challenge of including not just new technologies (like LEDs and allowing for 5G), but also space for banners and signs and ways of creating shade as the climate crisis accelerates.

Los Angeles will use the design to gradually replaces its 180,000 standard streetlights (not ones that are considered historic) — which they do at a rate of one to two thousand a year. 

As the linked story says,

Project Room's winning design reimagines the traditional lamp post as a bundle of tubes where each service -- roadway light, pedestrian light, and telecommunications equipment -- is assigned a dedicated tube fabricated of steel or aluminum, according to a city statement. The design allows for additional features, such as 5G equipment, shade fixtures, and even a bench, to be added as needed.

I'm particularly excited that each of those lights could have a bench built into it. What an obvious thing to do, and a simple thing that will make the city better even if the lighting wasn't also better.

Expensive Infrastructure: for a Not Great Reason

A civil engineering friend of mine posted a link to this article recently, called Why American Costs Are So High. I've heard discussion of this before off and on, when it comes to public works projects like new subway lines. Comparable projects in European (let alone Asian) cities do not cost anywhere near as much. Why is that? 

It's not possible to blame labor unions, since Europe is at least if not more unionized than U.S. cities. So I was curious to see what my friend, whose opinion I respect, thought was worth sharing.

This is how she summarized the article:

Moral of story: we should be more humble and curious, willing to look far past ourselves for solutions.

Great overview of why infrastructure, like new public transit, costs so much more in the U.S. than in other rich countries. It's a big problem because things that can really help people and make our lives/towns better don't get done because [they're considered] too expensive, cost overruns.

Also, too often our high cost of construction is blamed on unions and environmental laws, and then used as reason to lower wages and protections. This is so easily debunked because countries with strict environmental laws and very high unionization/high wages, like Sweden, France, etc build things for so much cheaper than us.

There are many things in this article, from building techniques, to how we deal with cost of changes/conflicts, to project management. But as the author notes, they all stem from our lack of willingness to learn from other countries.

"Incuriosity is not merely ignorance. Ignorance is a universal trait, people just differ in what they are ignorant about. But Americans are unique in not caring to learn from other countries even when those countries do things better. "

"The United States at best thinks it’s the center of the world and at worst thinks it’s the only thing in the world, and this has to change."

"However, all of this depends on solving the last of the above nine problems. Americans have to understand that they are behind and need to imitate."

The full article is worth the read.

The Laughable but Scary Alternate World of Children's "Literature"

About six months ago, I found out about the existence of a guy named Matthew Sheffield. He describes himself as a former Mormon and former conservative. In those days, he cofounded a publication called the Washington Examiner. The only time I mentioned here previously was in a Twitter round-up, where I quoted him as saying,

What I did not realize until I began expanding my work into creating actual media and reporting institutions such as the Washington Examiner... was that U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.

That Twitter thread had a lot of good examples of what he meant by that, but unfortunately it appears he has deleted his tweets from before mid-January. I meant to quote more of it at the time. But the gist was that conservatives think the purpose of media is to propagandize their side, while progressives, independents, centrists, and even leftists think journalists are trying to get to some factual version of reality, based on reporting. They may have a world view (who doesn't?) but there's a relationship to facts on the ground, an attempt to relay reality — not to just sell or even force one side, regardless of what may be found when a reporter goes to a place.

So when I saw the following tweet from him more recently, it fit together. Mainstream children's book publishing — while far from perfect, everyone knows! — is also not overtly trying to propagandize everyone. It's reproducing our culture, sure, and the culture is steeped in white supremacy, so we get lots more books about white kids (and animals) than kids of color. But we don't get books praising the Klan, right? Or promoting Christianity as the national religion?

Rest assured, we can leave that to conservatives. Sheffield tells us:

What's known as American conservatism is mostly rural white cultural sensibilities that have been marketed as a political philosophy. This is nowhere more evident than the many children's books that have been published to fulfill a supposed need for "godly" kid-lit.

And then he reeled off a series of tweets, each showing four stunningly revolting covers. Here are the worst ones. 

Many are both WTF in terms of what they're about and how badly they're drawn:

 

 

 

A few of the covers are better drawn, but they're such cartoons of propaganda, it's hard to believe they don't see it as a parody:

And then there's Rush Limbaugh's series where he inserts himself into the past:

 

(Imagine the damage Limbaugh could have done if he traveled to the past.)

This cover was not one of the bad ones in terms of obvious political content…

…but here's what Sheffield says about the book:

The content of some of the books is terrible as well. The Pepe and Pede book is anti-Muslim propaganda and promotes white nationalist themes. It was written by a (since-fired) junior high assistant principal.

Well, obviously the content of all the books is terrible (not just the covers), but what he means is sometimes the cover hides the terrible content. In the case of Pepe, the linked article about its author describes the content this way:

[Pepe and Pede are] excited because Wishington Farm, where they live, has a new farmer in charge. After eight years of bad leadership, the friends are happy to finally enjoy everything the farm has to offer.

Their revelry is cut short when they find out their favorite pond is now a murky swamp ruled by the terrible alligator Alkah. The buddies use teamwork and honesty to take down Alkah and free his minions from their muddy chains. "With law and order now restored, this land was great again"....

A reader's interpretation ... will depend on their working knowledge of alt-right memes. Pepe the frog is a cartoon character ... that became an internet meme.... the alt-right adopted him as a symbol and mixed him with fascist imagery, and today both the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League recognize Pepe as a hate symbol.

Online fans of Donald Trump refer to themselves as centipedes. Alkah is a bearded alligator, his name is one letter off from Allah ... and ... his minions are ... covered in icky black mud [to] look like women in burqas.

Judge for yourself on that:

Not surprisingly, it sounds as though the book's author deceived the illustrator (who's Ukrainian and not totally up on alt-Right memes). She never saw the full manuscript.

All of these books are laughable, but they're also scary because they show that that Right has built an entirely separate, insulated publishing world. Are they being bought, and more important, are they being read to children? Are children reading them on their own?