Twitter for April 2023

What was in the news this month? Let's see... The Fox/Dominion law suit came to its disappointing anticlimax. Tucker Carlson was fired (though it looks as though I have nothing at all about that here!). On the other hand, there is so much about Clarence Thomas and other forms of Supreme Court corruption. There were multiple mass shootings, followed by Republican backlash against democratic and Democratic attempts to do something about them. Trans people, elected and unelected, were under attack by the Right, elected and unelected. And oh yeah, Trump was indicted in New York.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account. Tweets are in reverse chronological order except some of the images, which I sometimes move up or down to get better visual balance.

__

Antwerp is banning non-residents from parking on the street downtown — and also setting parking *maximums* for new developments. Yet another European city adopting parking policies that are hard to fathom in the US.
David Zipper

“Work requirements [for SNAP] did not increase employment or earnings 18 months after their reinstatement… We also found that work requirements disproportionately led people who had faced great economic hardships, such as those without housing or earned income, to lose benefits.”
Dr. Julia Raifman (quoting from a Harvard Kennedy School graduate student's report)

The federal inability and unwillingness to confront DeSantis and all these tinpot wannabe-dictators is a disgrace. There are millions of people facing oppression by untalented buffoons and this absence of pushback is an absolute travesty.
Jared Yates Sexton

“Woke mind virus” is the new “Gay Agenda.” It’s a boogeyman term used to scare the majority about minorities asserting their full humanity.
Leah McElrath

Opening a small coffee shop or a hair salon here is illegal. It would wreck the "character" of the neighborhood:


@FuckCarsReddit

fun fact, Asian elephants are more closely related to Mammoths than to African elephants
Eliza Pallas @Pallas_ca

Word of the morning is ‘hurkle-durkling’ (19th century Scots): finding yourself still in bed long after it’s time to get up.
Susie Dent

Yesterday was the first day CO₂ at Mauna Loa was 425 ppm. This is:
-likely the first time in the past 800,000 years.
-possibly not seen in over 3 million years (mid-pliocene warm period).
-A CO₂ forcing equal to 2.5-4°C of warming and 5-25 meters higher global sea level.
@LeonSimons8

I'm having really icky health issues because I've given birth so many times, and honestly, what pregnancy does to your body is absolutely bonkers, and we absolutely do not talk about it enough, nor is there enough support for what folks go through.
âpihtawikosisân

Housesit for your neighbors and receive pictures of the happy plants they come home to:


comotrekker

Blocking democratically elected representatives from participating in government because they’re Black or trans (or any other reason that isn’t criminal) is actually pretty fascist in case anyone was wondering
Dr. Mia Brett @QueenMab87

Conservatism in a nutshell: "The last thing I predicted would destroy society? I was wrong. But the next thing? Hoo boy this one is really gonna tear it all apart."
Michael Hobbes @RottenInDenmark

The Airman Teixiera story is not confusing, friends. It is about online radicalization and infiltration of the Armed Forces, and a shocking lack of either monitoring of this problem (which the DOD has known about at least since the early 1980s) or stopgaps to stop such breaches.
Kathleen Belew

Our rich kids do very well in international comparisons. Our poor kids do not. The schools aren’t failing. Our society is by allowing deep poverty, then expecting kids to get high scores when they are hungry, lack medical care, basic security.
Diane Ravitch

Two EVs in California. During peak traffic times, their trip times would be about the same. One weighs over 5000 pounds, the other 55 pounds:


@kar_nels

Every North American city says they have a parking problem or a traffic problem. Let’s call it what it is. Every North American city has a car problem.
Strong Towns

Inclusion and exclusion criteria for ‘womanhood’ are nonsense. Because of cancer treatment I can’t get pregnant, don’t menstruate, had ‘top’ surgery, am on hormone blockers, & have short hair - am I a woman? Nobody should get to decide that except me. #translivesmatter
Karen Sugrue

i do not think the founders envisioned us being ruled by an unaccountable council of nine who get to take bribes
Andrew Lawrence

I no longer care about possible government waste when it comes to public goods and services. If a library is open 24 hours a day, and the only person that uses said library is a little old lady who reads "Pride and Prejudice" from 3:15-4:45 on Tuesday, that is not waste. Waste are the people who die because they can't afford their medication. Waste is the countless homes that we have in foreclosure or unsold (just sitting there!) While people die of hypothermia on the street. Waste is buying a social media app with your daddy's emerald mine money and then running it into the ground. Waste is the oil companies knowing they are killing us all and not caring. So yeah, I don't care about "government waste" when all that is is ensuring equity.
@BigSquishyDM

Not just the Warren court but the whole liberal turn to litigation as a driver of policy in 1960s onward is a big force in Democratic party, with regrettable results.
Jeet Heer @HeerJeet

A lot of people have a REALLY strange definition of “freedom.” #CarDependency:


Brent Toderian

i don't think many liberals realize how common it is for conservatives to oppose no-fault divorce. it's not some fringe belief. Ross Douthat has written Times columns implying we should get rid of it.
Law Boy

Why did the last IPCC report say so much about carbon dioxide removal? Not because scientists wanted to say it. It was because “Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries were most insistent that CDR and CCS should be included and emphasised.”
Dr. Jonathan Foley @GlobalEcoGuy

Tax cars by weight.  Tax commutes by VMT. Build housing where amenities are abundant.  Build amenities where housing is abundant.
Dianne Martinez @EmeryvilleDi

If people with power were serious about protecting rights they’d be talking constantly about investigating all these corrupt Supreme Court Justices who are all lousy with billionaire bucks and sweetheart deals. That they aren’t tells you everything you need to know.
Jared Yates Sexton

Your semi-regular reminder:

Brent Toderian

Harry Belafonte set the standard for engaged, principled, and informed celebrity activism. His wisdom, courage, generosity, and consistency has been a model for so many of us. He was truly one of one. Rest Well, Mr. B.
Marc Lamont Hill

When all you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a car. That’s how the saying goes, isn’t it?
Brent Toderian

Weird how doctors and wellness gurus are allowed to say that people should eat less meat for cancer prevention and heart health, but climate communicators are discouraged from saying people should eat less meat to prevent planetary catastrophe. Why is that?
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive

Suburban sprawl costs 38% more public money upfront and 10% more ongoing public cost than compact infill growth, with only 1/10th the created tax revenue, according to the report discussed in this City Lab article. Sprawl is REALLY expensive for everyone.
Brent Toderian

Still laughing at someone on here calling Moms for Liberty "Klanned Karenhood"
Mrs. Betty Bowers

so is mitch mcconnell dead or what. just put all the good news on one day
@RubyGraceLevine

It's wild how climate planners throw around numbers of actual risk/exposure from e.g. flood and fire risk that are multiples of the entire California state budget, and meanwhile, our cities still throw down to defend parking and single-unit housing. Just a total disconnect.
Matthew Lewis @mateosfo

For a fun bit of context, the dominion lawsuit cost Fox the rough equivalent of the entire city of Saint Paul’s budget for a year and a half. I can’t imagine the kind of chaos I would have to create in order to achieve such lofty heights.
Tom Basgen

Honestly, I don't think a lot of Democrats see the big picture with public education. The GOP wants it to fail. They want to choke the life out of it. They see that it has created a generation that has completely turned on them. They are furious. This is retribution.
Joel Montfort

The Northern Lights and a meteor over Stonehenge this morning. Photo credit Stonehenge Dronescapes on Facebook:


Stonehenge U.K

"Forgive me, but a Bannon-backed, Tucker-platformed, anti-vaxxer... is perhaps not the progressive, principled, anti-establishment, liberal Democratic Party champion that he might want you to think he is." Mehdi Hasan breaks down RFK Jr.'s presidential bid.
The Mehdi Hasan Show

The concept that teaching is something we can reduce to scripts and playbooks is indicative of our cultural disrespect for the field as a whole. The reality is that teaching is a deeply difficult profession that requires immense preparation.
Jamie Lipp, Ph.D.

”In America, there are now 290 million vehicles on the road, or more than one for every single adult. Three-quarters of Americans get to work by driving alone.”
Martti Tulenheimo @tulenheimo

Twitter had the best influencer program in the world. The company created an incentive structure where the most famous people on the planet created content on the site, daily, for free. Destroyed in one day because the new owner thought Stephen King should pay to write for him.
Ben Kuchera

Today I also learned: There are almost twice as many child spouses in America than trans kids diagnosed with dysphoria. WHERE ARE THE 400 NEW LAWS TO PROTECT THESE VERY REAL KIDS AGAINST VERY REAL GROOMERS AND PEDOPHILES THE FUCK
Fort Wayne Crime Erin @CriminalUnionFW

If you really want populism, you need a large, robust administrative state. There's no other way to counteract the inexorable concentration of power -- the drift to oligarchy -- other than with transparent rules and a professional civil service. The core, essential right-wing lie is that if you tear down the administrative state, purge all the "bureaucrats," that power would somehow devolve to "the people." No. Power would just be reconfigured along traditional lines of class/ethnicity/clan/religion etc.
David Roberts @drvolts

I love the human need to create stuff but I don't get rebuilding roads and highways and suburbs exactly as they are now (or even bigger) and not taking the climate opportunity to start over with infrastructure that makes people happy and healthy rather than rageful and sick:


Mary Morse Marti

Somehow people “needing” a massive truck to haul a boat around a few weekends a year is socially acceptable, but not having 100% bike lane utilization year-round is reason to oppose them.
Alex @mplsalex

What does it say about humanity's self-esteem that almost everyone assumes a sufficiently intelligent AI would decide to wipe us out?
David Roberts @drvolts

“One day all these cars will be electric”:


Brent Toderian

At the very least it should become crystal clear that "parental rights" was never about parents' rights to determining their children's education. It was always about targeting LGBTQ kids and teachers, and other forms of bigotry.
Mitchell Robinson @mrobmused

So sad, Mush can make a car that blows up and a rocket that blows up but still can't write a tweet that blows up.
@daniel_barker

The state with the highest drug addiction rate in the US: West Virginia
The state with the 7th lowest homelessness rate in the US: West Virginia
Housing doesn’t solve drug addiction, but it does solve homelessness
Armand Domalewski

I hate that this is apparently controversial, but children shouldn’t be getting married, children shouldn’t be working night shifts in the factories, gun violence shouldn’t be the leading cause of death for children in this country.
@SketchesbyBoze

This graphic (apologies to @TheHustle, I just found it on this site) is a pretty good illustration of why a lot of new American pickup trucks are really just luxury SUVs and not actually that useful:


Daniel Knowles

Someone smoking on the train sucks. It really does. But you know what sucks? People skipping stop signs. Passing you at 50mph on a 30mph neighborhood street. blocking bike ways, forcing you into traffic
Wes Burdine @MnNiceFC

Here is a sheriff and a county commissioner caught in secret tape discussing “hanging Black people by a creek” and digging holes to bury journalists after hiring hit men who would “cut no mercy.” Because it’s America, the sheriff is investigating whoever recorded the tape. I’ve talked to 100s of judges, prosecutors, legislators, attorneys general, mayors, etc in the last 15 years who acknowledge in private the far right control of sheriff and police departments. No one privately thinks answer is better training and more $$$ for surveillance.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

New study demonstrates that energy consumption by a growing number of millionaires means their collective CO2 footprint by 2050 would require 72% of remaining carbonbudget for 1.5C.:


Alexandre @AChausson

america: kids can work in factories now
america: if an active shooter comes into their class, kids should just hide in a big metal box
america: lmao why would preschool be free
america: why aren’t people having KIDS ANYMORE
@jzux

Senate Dems refusal to force Feinstein out is a remarkable display of their allergy to truly wielding power. You think McConnell would've let something like this drag on? She'd have been out a month ago if this were the GOP.
Keya Vakil

Dominion had Fox by the absolute neck and let them go for 787.5 million dollars. WHICH IS A LOT OF MONEY for a corporation. But also not a lot of money when weighed against Fox's damage to American democracy. I get it. And it's bullcrap. Two things can be true at the same time.
Elie Mystal

I'm not sure if this trial would have crippled Fox News, but I do feel a bit silly for thinking that a company like Dominion had any higher aspiration than their own bottom line.
Matt Goldberg

Last week, USDOT released data showing that 7,341 people were killed walking on our roads in 2021. This 12.4% increase is both higher than predicted and illustrative of the urgent need for a better approach to gathering and collecting this data:


Beth Osborne

The Republicans and the NRA have basically returned us to a Hobbesian state of nature where life is nasty, brutish, and short.
Elie Mystal

Some years back my ex inherited some rifles, and it amazed me how having those things in his possession seemed to up his fear of the drug traffic going on on our street – he started talking about maybe having to use his weapons, etc. Just having the guns made him more afraid.
simeon shepard chadwick @simcha1972

If drag shows are our biggest problem, we don’t have any.
@SteveThomsonMN

Clarence Thomas: Sorry about my ineptitude filling out these forms. Fixed it! nbd.
Also Clarence Thomas: Too bad your lawyer was incompetent but you made a mistake filing your appeal so that death sentence is still good. Sorry!
Anthony Michael Kreis

Begging people to realize that many big American cities aren't that far apart and compared to infrastructure abroad our intercity passenger rail genuinely does suck.
@JosephPolitano

There was a ton of news this week. But don't let this get lost in the shuffle. Trump made up to $160 million from foreign countries while serving as president. That's an enormous scandal.
Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew

If you’re incapable of understanding financial disclosure forms, you shouldn’t be interpreting the constitution:


Mueller, She Wrote

Every few months, the New York Times runs an article on how GOP strategists have absolutely manufactured some bogus political crisis to get their rabid base energized…and then the Times will just keep reporting on the bogus story as if it’s real
@BenariLee

Nobody cares what I think about the "is it fascism?" debate but I would just say that, more important than determining the exact right word for it is persuading mainstream institutions to stop normalizing it, to stop treating it as though it were still normal politics.
David Roberts @drvolts

what bothers me about the "AI will replace every artist in X months" type posts is less that i take the threat seriously than that it suggests there is a group of people centered in tech who view the natural human creative impulse inside every person with a seething resentment
@NotABigJerk

With new Inflation Reduction Act funding, the IRS was able to provide 87% of customer calls this tax season with live support, up from 15% last year. The average time on hold decreased from 27 minutes to just four. Government works when you let it work:


Steven Rattner

really seems like at this point that a sustained investigation into clarence thomas’ finances will reveal something much worse than what we’ve already found
@jbouie

this image [from the NRA annual meeting] is just begging for inclusion in a US history textbook:


Ted McCormick

Conservatives in 2021: $600 weekly unemployment insurance will entirely change the behavior of millions of workers.
Conservatives in 2023: How dare you suggest that hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts could influence a single belief of Clarence Thomas.
LPE Blog

A Tennessee bill that allows students to report professors who teach "divisive concepts" passes House and Senate. The list of "divisive concepts" bars discussions on biases, white privilege and racism's role in slavery
philip lewis


Rob Hopkins @robintransition

They’re going to keep hurting trans people worse and worse until enough non-trans people stop trying to change or avoid the subject and say they won’t stand for it anymore
Will Stancil

My students won’t use page break and hanging indent features in Word but hit return or tab over and over. But Republicans think I can change their entire worldview.
Paul Thomas @plthomasEdD

In 1917 it was Clemenceau’s ambition that one day a French child should be born and live for 70 years without fighting a German: something which had not happened for centuries.
That ambition was realised 8 years ago in 2015.
Jonathan Boff

SCOTUS decided Citizens United 5 to 4 — except the part upholding disclosure, which it decided 8 to 1. The lone holdout was Justice Thomas, who wrote in his concurrence that SCOTUS “should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements.” Hmm.
Stephen Spaulding

The only realistic positions now are structural reform of the supreme court (term limits/ more justices/ etc.) or "20 years of unalterable religious fascism" and guess which one is the median position of the democratic party
Hamilton Nolan



@johnfbrowning37

I've been sitting here all night getting increasingly pissed that Clarence Thomas is going to overturn affirmative action and when he does it he will couch it in "black people don't need help" language and all the while this guy has been taking land deals from rich white folks.
Elie Mystal

Why does it seem like red states are in a panic to pass awful bills as fast as they can? Why are they suppressing the vote? We know why…the kids are of voting age and they don’t like Republicans.
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

The cleverest bit of illustration I've seen in a while!


Nicholas Gruen

You know that version of US food history everyone just knows? The one where the food system used to be local and built on small family farms that were self-sufficient and virtuous? Nope! It's global exports and human trafficking all the way down.
Sarah Taber

A great encapsulation of this is reading some of Jefferson's letters where he talks about the virtuous agrarian farmer and how we should keep manufacturing in Europe to keep its evilness away and maintain our virtue, all while owning slaves.
@jekcarter

One of the great secrets of copaganda is that most violent harm is NOT perpetrated by strangers. This basic myth underlies a lot of the political support for much of modern policing policy.
Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec

The remedy here is that Thomas leaves the bench in disgrace. It is the only remedy. Nothing else will cure the stain of this corruption. No retroactive tinkering with SCOTUS rules will fix it. He's got to go. And if you're a Democrat and you don't say that, you're screwing up.
Will Stancil

NEW: While secretly accepting undisclosed billionaire gifts, Clarence Thomas pushed to kill all political spending disclosure laws in America, insisting that billionaires have a right to anonymously influence public officials.
David Sirota

I was recently zapped by a police speed gun, doing 26mph in a new 20mph stretch of a 30mph road. On the speed awareness course, I learned something: driving at 20 in many urban areas gets you from A to B in roughly the same time as 30. AND it's safer.
Paul Waugh

If only we were prepared to tackle catastrophic climate change the way we are in the off chance everyone on the planet drives to the same mall on the same day:


Tom Flood

How do you write an article about Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas without mentioning that Crow gave $500K to start Ginni Thomas's consulting agency, much of which went directly into her pocket as salary? This is not just about vacations or eccentricity.
Peter Manseau

Every day I return to this website with more, and then somehow even more, hate in my feed. Yes, it’s ugly, and personal, and saddening, and mostly really really mean. But, at the end of the day, I just think: whatever. I’ll snack on it and move on, the stronger for it.
Leigh Finke

Respectfully disagree with this framing. Tokyo isn't "anti-car" — it's just that  transit, bikes, and walking typically offer faster and cheaper (and nicer) ways to get around. That should be our goal:  Flourishing cities where people *prefer* not to drive.
David Zipper

Republicans work so hard pushing abstinence-only education when they could just tell the truth about how many pregnant women’s teeth fall out.
Aubrey Hirsch

Congratulations to the Maryland General Assembly, which just passed the Wind Power Act. The bill will ramp up the state's offshore wind targets, facilitate shared transmission infrastructure, and strengthen labor standards. This is what Democrats do when they get power, while Republicans are inspecting children's genitals and denying pregnant women health care.
David Roberts @drvolts

when i say “bring back traditional masculinity” i’m specifically referring to this 1760 portrait of a boy wearing traditional 1700s boy’s clothes while holding his pet squirrel on a chain leash:


@mattxiv

If I had a dollar for each time a city used “Fire Trucks!?!” as an excuse to NOT build safer streets I’d have enough money to buy the city smaller fire trucks
Nathaniel Hood @natehoodstp

Sustaining the American narrative of meritocracy requires a whole culture industry, novels and later movies that constitute a kind of state religion for Americans - and like all religious tales, the American faith tradition is riddled with gaps and contradictions.
Cory Doctorow

A mass shooting in a US bank today — a bank where there were armed guards, including one who was shot in the head and required brain surgery — might shed some light on whether armed guards in schools is the answer to mass shootings in US schools. It’s the easy access to guns.
Brent Toderian

It’s almost like there is a pattern of ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories being astroturfed to delegitimize investigations into actual existing networks that victimize women and children.
Leah McElrath

Gapminder has an interesting graph of the number of people dying from natural disasters, which thankfully, as so many things, is going in the right direction!


Niclas Thelander

What we’ve messed up on big time in city planning is the ridiculous micromanaging of things that don’t really matter and under-delivering on things that do. Like, strict signage ordinances and corner side-yard setbacks, and not just running the buses more frequently and reliably.
Nathaniel Hood @natehoodstp

Absolutely love that ‘signed copy of Mein Kampf’ is now supposed to be off-limits for criticism.
@IssueFortyFive

as a general rule, if a guy you've never heard of before comes under public scrutiny, and then 100 of the weirdest right-wing freaks on earth immediately jump to his defense, it's time for more scrutiny
Law Boy

Holy shit…How are we okay with this but fight tooth and nail whenever anyone brings up building ANYTHING but a highway?


HOUrbanist

“I keep it as a reminder that evil exists”... oh yeah must be nice
Adia Benton @Ethnography911

March was the 529th straight month hotter than the 20th century average. If you're younger than 44, you've never seen a cooler-than-normal month
Bill McKibben

If Democrats can criticize a Supreme Court Justice for traveling  aboard yachts and private jets belonging to a right-wing billionaire who collects Hitler memorabilia, imagine what they can do to you.
New York Times Pitchbot @DougJBalloon

The US can clearly be 100% powered by renewables: The solar, wind and storage projects are there already, waiting in line to be connected. But the grid is built for fossil fuel power and its revamp is being slowed by fossil fuel vested interests
Assaad Razzouk

Republicans spent the past 2 weeks exaggerating and distorting financial ties between George Soros and a DA in Manhattan he’s never met. Now they’re feigning outrage over the mentioning of actual financial ties between Harlan Crow and a Supreme Court Justice who he is very close to! Also, one of the ways in which they smear Soros is to suggest he was sympathetic to the Nazis. And along comes Harlan Crow with his signed copy of Mein Kampf! Remember, for the modern GOP, ‘every accusation is a confession!’
Mehdi Hasan

Putting limited-access highways in the cores of major cities is a bad idea for many reasons, but the main one is that is concentrates traffic at access points, when the goal should be to disperse traffic throughout the network (and put your expressways outside the city core).
Rik Adamski

Wall St Journal, holding back tears: “whomst amongst us hasn’t summered at a billionaire’s hitler particle accelerator”
James Medlock

In 2004, ⁦the LA Times⁩ wrote a front-page story about Clarence Thomas and the many gifts he had reported receiving: $1,200 in tires. $100 in cigars. An $800 jacket. More than any other justice. Since that story ran, Thomas has reported just two gifts.
emma brown @emmersbrown

In Opinion: "One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations," writes David Wallace-Wells. "Firearms account for almost half of the increase."
The New York Times

Among the features that distinguish the U.S. from other rich countries: more religiosity + more guns. Not surprising, then, that religion underlies the push for greater access to even more guns. Related point: When you compare states, the number of gun *deaths* is also positively correlated with religiosity.
Alfie Kohn

We're not prepared for Baby Boomers aging. Up to 40 million 80 year-olds are going to be driving everywhere because that's the only option. Missing middle housing, transit options, traffic safety -- these are massive Boomer issues whether or not they realize it.
Andy Boenau

Our Observation of the Day is this exquisite Lavender Sphinx Moth (Batocnema coquerelii) spotted by laurentdemada in Madagascar on Wednesday:


iNaturalist

To recap this week's news: Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas were both accused of public corruption but it's okay because neither of them used a bullhorn so Tennessee expelled two black guys who want to stop the NRA from murdering children Texas forces people to give birth to.
Elie Mystal

Sincerely wish we would stop pinning racism on specific states or locales and recognize it as the very cornerstone of the entire nation.
Mary Annaïse Heglar

[Finland being the happiest country] "comes down to a number of factors including lower income inequality (most importantly, the difference between the highest paid and the lowest paid), high social support, freedom to make decisions, and low levels of corruption."
Judy Martin @southernrata

One thing about the Republicans: When they win they do all the bigotry and sexism they promised.
Elie Mystal

When three adults and three 9-year-olds were massacred in Nashville, Tennessee Republicans took quick action: They kicked two Black men out of the legislature for protesting gun violence.
@MarkJacob16

A beautiful common waxbill. (Photo by Ian Whyte):


Weird Animals

Housing shortages allow land speculators and property owners to inflate property values via scarcity. That scarcity is caused by excessive zoning, parking, and permitting laws, which curb development. Solving housing shortages has to start at the root by reforming those laws.
Strong Towns

Having a small unelected council of corrupt religious fanatics decide our law with no possibility of redress or change seems bad. As I’ve been saying for a long time, democrats need to come up with a plan to fix the Supreme Court that does not rely on holding the presidency for 16 years without a break (though that would likely do it).
David M. Perry @Lollardfish

A dynamic worth watching: the oil majors think they can make money in decarbonization, but basically all the techs they are betting on (CDR, hydrogen, biofuels) are premised on the limitations of electrification. If electrification ends up going farther than currently predicted -- as I believe it will -- that correspondingly shrinks the space for the techs that oil majors believe will keep them alive. So I won't be surprised if Big Oil becomes more explicitly anti-electrification.
David Roberts @drvolts

This week NHTSA released its 2021 report on road crashes: 42,939 dead, 10% higher than 2020. The report shows that the US road safety crisis is an increasingly urban one. City residents are paying the price for NHTSA's failures:

David Zipper

As Republicans around the country scramble to pass legislation ostensibly protecting students from "woke indoctrination," they bring in an untrained Christian nationalist historian who LITERALLY wants the state to help evangelicals indoctrinate children.
Samuel Perry @profsamperry

If I had a magic wand, I would erase the phrase “culture wars” from what is a backlash to civil rights gains. Nothing “cultural” about racial anxiety and organized fear-mongering.
Maya Wiley

Twitter branding NPR "state-affiliated media" literally conflicts with its own policy: "State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media..."
Ben Pauker

This website is turning into Elon's personal MySpace page. If he wants to decorate it with nonsense, then nonsense it will be.
max asher miller

Trump's warmup music tonight includes Bowie's "Rebel Rebel"
Aaron Rupar

The song "Rebel Rebel" is literally about a young boy who dresses in women's clothing. "You got your mother in a whirl / She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl"
Seth Cotlar

New cover:


David Gura

Just one B-52 bomber consumes about as much fuel in 1 hour as the average car driver uses in 7 years. Four B-52’s made the 15 hour flight from Louisiana to Guam. Climate action includes shuttering huge sections of this war machine.
@ggjalliance (responding to a Stars and Stripes report that "four B-52 bombers arrived last week at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam as part of the Air Force’s ongoing bomber task force missions intended to project U.S. air power in the region."

I think with both vehicle deaths and gun deaths there is obviously a degree of macho entitlement that really is hard for us to confront politically. There’s a lot of deference to, generalizing here but, men and things they like in politics even when it’s tremendously destructive.
Angie Schmitt

High firearm homicide rates in the South are not specific to urban areas. This shows relative rates in non-urban counties:

Andrew Morral

Walkable cities are great for kids learning to cycle, teens wanting to hang out, and seniors meeting friends or picking up a few groceries. The car-trap negatively impacts at every stage of life.
Jennifer Keesmaat

I'm increasingly frustrated by the gun "debate," which is not a debate but the frustration of common sense and public opinion by minority rule. This would not be happening in a full democracy.
Anne Lutz Fernandez

The most important part of the marital vows are not “till death” but rather “love honor and cherish.” Those are the component features that make relationships viable
@solomonmissouri

Stronger than any helmet!
Louder than any bell!
Brighter than any colour!
More effective than any tech!
It’s...Concrete!*
Yes that’s right folks and the good news is this product already exists:


Tom Flood *political will sold separately

Once I was walking a parent to a 6th grade class (during home room). She was going to talk to the classes about her home country of Chile. The National Anthem came on and the handful of children in the halls froze in place, found a flag to stare at and put hand on heart. The woman looked horrified. She looked around and said out loud (to no one) what is happening? When the anthem was over the kids continued on. She looked at me and said she couldn’t believe what she just witnessed. The reason she wanted to talk to the classes was because of what her daughter told her they had learned about Chile. It was explained to the class as if it were a Third World country, and she wanted to set the teacher and the class straight. This experience cemented for her the BS they taught in our schools.
@Sisyphus38

I feel like in the early 2000s the most right wing immigration opinion you’d hear expressed in public discourse would be “I support legal immigration, but we need to crack down on illegals,” but nowadays folks will just straight up oppose all immigration, period
Armand Domalewski


Extinction Rebellion Global

Watersheds

I never thought at all about watersheds for the first 50 or so years of my life. Or I barely did, even though that makes no sense because I grew up near the Susquehanna River, and spent almost all of my childhood very near streams that were its tributaries. I visited its headwaters and had relatives who lived in the city that's a few miles down the road from it. 

But I never thought much about where it went after it left our area, or how all the water around me flowed into it.

I learned not long ago from the book Watershed by Ranae Hanson that Minnesota is the only state that has no rivers flowing into it: all of the rivers in Minnesota start here and flow out in three directions. Again, I hadn't been very aware of the watersheds near me, though I was more aware of the Mississippi than I used to be of the Susquehanna. But the other rivers in Minnesota had mostly escaped my notice because they're farther away. 

A few days ago I saw this map on Twitter. The person who posted it accompanied it with these words:

Organizing ourselves by arbitrary states was a mistake. It should be by watershed:

Another person pointed out that the more complete watersheds look like this:

But the original poster's map is also correct, since he was portraying the Assessment Sub-Region watershed boundaries of those larger watersheds, and was trying to make a point about areas that could be functional and coherent ecological "states," if one had a mind to do things that way.... vs. combining the entire Mississippi watershed into a single state, for instance. 

An aspect of Ruthanna Emrys's novel A Half-Built Garden that I didn't mention in my earlier post is that the main characters at the center of the story live within the Chesapeake watershed, and watersheds have become the organizing principle for most of society. That difference is startling at first, but becomes natural as the story goes along, because these latter-day people have become attuned to the planet in ways we are not currently.

For my own edification, here's a close-up map of the Susquehanna watershed:

The river flows to the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Imagine if that part of New York was instead one with that part of Pennsylvania.

And here's Minnesota, describing how its rivers go in three directions:

 

One thing that I notice about the state maps vs. the watershed maps is straight lines vs organic shapes. The latter map would be much more difficult to draw, especially from memory, but that would be a small sacrifice for more of a connection to the natural world we live in.

Happy Arbor Day!

Happy Arbor Day from the pussy willow I just discovered growing on the boulevard a few blocks down the street from my house. Yesterday morning, the sky was intense blue and the sun was shining through the plant's yellow pollen. It was quite a sight.

I stopped to try and capture it, but was not very successful.

This is what its shape looks like overall:

And these are my attempts to make my phone camera show what the colors were like:

Pussy willows (Salix discolor), as you may know, are native to most of the northern United States and most of Canada, and are excellent for early pollinators. That yellow pollen is food for a range of bees, and the plant itself is the larval host to almost 20 species of butterflies and moths.

Once the catkins and pollen subside in the spring, the pussy willow becomes a fairly plain green shrubby tree thing, which I think explains why I hadn't noticed this fairly young one before. But I'll be watching for it next spring as Arbor Day approaches.

More News from the Death Throes of Twitter

As Twitter continues to devolve, the ads ("promoted tweets") get worse. I keep blocking them. Sometimes there are none, and other times a lot of them, almost always totally irrelevant and bottom-feeding. 

I've noticed that I don't even have to read them anymore to know which tweets are promoted. It used to be just a little difficult sometimes, until you got to the bottom of the tweet and saw the "promoted" label. 

Now, though, they usually look like the online equivalent of slot machines, strewn from the first line to the last with emojis, plus many links and hashtags:

And they often have an embedded snapshot of their profile, which is not only boring but screams "visual spam."

I thank them for saving me time in identifying them, but at the same time, I curse them for afflicting my eyes.

Mike Thompson, Oof

I mentioned about a month ago that the Star Tribune had hired its new full-time political cartoonist. His name is Mike Thompson. Looking briefly at his previous work, he seemed moderate or at least not right-wing. His drawings seemed okay: nothing that stood out as terrible, though not initially great either.

Well, he started this week, and so far there have been four examples of his work…and he is a disaster.

The one from today is the only one that's not offensive. It is, however, completely incomprehensible:

The thread on Twitter where the Strib posted this cartoon (in color!) contains a raft of people commenting that they don't understand it, so I'm not the only one. Even people who say they are sports fans don't get it. I realize it's making sports references; I do know who/what Griddy and Aaron Rogers are. But I still don't get it, or why it's supposed to be funny, or how it makes any kind of point that's relevant in Minnesota.

The first of Mike's cartoons, which ran on Sunday, was essentially a two-panel that managed to offend Muslims, U.S.-born Black people (by implying they are violent criminals), and anyone who thinks the over-hyping of crime is being used intentionally to undermine cities. (The last of which fits pretty squarely with the Star Tribune's op-ed page.) I will not repeat its content here.

The second cartoon tried too hard to be topical and didn't make sense, if you know anything about Minnesota. It was about marijuana legalization, which was being debated in our state House at the time, and has since passed there. It will likely pass in the state Senate this Friday.

The third one was this:

The third cartoon, while topical in this area — yes, we have potholes — tried too hard, this time to draw together that issue with the fact that legislators are thinking of naming a highway after Prince. The highway that might be named for him is pothole-free, I hear... It's city streets that have the potholes because of lack of funding, and anyone who lives here would know that. The same legislators who might name the highway after Prince tend to be against funding for those streets. That might be a subject for a cartoon!

Plus, this drawing is very bad. Mike never met a glowing white outline he couldn't commandeer to compensate for the lack of contrast in his busy drawings. And it looks like he grabbed a bunch of items from Google Images to make a collage: There are 3D-rendered traffic bollards, which look computer-generated, in the same image with a completely flat black boingy-boingy line behind the car. And then there's the car itself, whose wheel and axle parts would make a mechanic weep.

In reference to today's Griddy cartoon, this thread from Minneapolis activist D.A. Bullock and his respondents contained more political astuteness than Mike Thompson could ever marshal. Bullock wrote:

I think the main issue with Mike is that he is just kinda simple. One wants some rigor around political satire to elevate it to some form of humor or provocation or dissent or biting truth to power or something other than bland, else what is the need for political cartoons?

To which one wag, named @TomCruise_69, replied, "I simply want political cartoons to blandly echo the daily complaints I read on the NextDoor app."

And that's what Mike Thompson's deal seems to be. I'm not sure he's moved to Minnesota yet, and so far I think he actually may be reading a NextDoor board from one of the suburbs, or another website called Uptown Crime. He clearly doesn't have any depth of knowledge about the Twin Cities enough to cover local issues with any astuteness, so he should probably shift to national topics for a while until he's been here long enough to understand things himself. 

If he ever does move here before he loses this job.

__

The day after I posted this, the Star Tribune's publisher ran an apology for Mike Thompson's first cartoon at the top of the editorial page, saying it should not have been printed. Way to start off in a new city!

 

Rich Badger, Poor Badger

Long day here. I was going to include this tweet in the April round-up in a few days, but why not post it early?

The account's name is pretty rude, so I'll leave it for those who want to go look at it, but here's the tweet:

English badgers always look like proper gentlemen. American badgers always look like they’ve never had healthcare in a society fueled by war mongering and rugged, every man for themselves individualism.

The rejoinder tweet was, "Not that the British Empire did the world any favors on the war mongering part but the social safety net they have for their citizens is commendable."

When Daughter Number Three-Point-One was a preschooler, she named herself after Frances the badger from Bread and Jam for Frances, so I have a fondness for all kinds of badgers, with or without health care.

Rob Hopkins, Visiting from 2030

I've barely ever mentioned Rob Hopkins, founder of the international Transition Town movement. 

He recently gave this talk at a large protest in the UK, organized by Extinction Rebellion. 

Hopkins is known for being relentlessly focused on the future, on how to make it a livable one that people will want to be a part of, and this talk is no different. 

As with my reading of science fiction that looks toward some form of utopia, rather than dystopia, I find Hopkins' thoughts not just uplifting but necessary.

__

Past posts in the same vein:

A Half-Built Garden

2050, a Way Forward

Walkaway into Utopia

The World We Can Make

Bad Technology in the Rearview Mirror

New research comes out frequently about the health effects of air pollution, but in the midst of all the other news that surrounds us, it doesn't get much attention. 

For instance, one fact that I think very few people have heard is how much air pollution comes from tire wear, and the newer the tire, the worse the amount of fine particles it emits. The heavier the vehicle, the worse the amount of fine particles it emits.

Guess what kind of vehicles are heavy, and therefore require new tires more frequently? Electric cars, and electric SUVs even more so. 

Tires are also made up of a wide array of materials, with up to 250 different chemicals across the different brands. Hmm, I wonder if their compositions are trade secrets.

A recent thread on Twitter gave a good round-up of research on air pollution (though not about tires specifically), with links:

• The more air pollution you breathe, the more likely it is you'll develop cancer.
•  For every 10 micrograms per cubic meter of increased exposure to fine inhalable particles (PM2.5), the risk of dying from any cancer rises by 22%.
• “The more fine particulate matter pollution you are exposed to, the more likely you are to die from cardiopulmonary disease or lung cancer.”
• From before birth to death, air pollution increases the risk of stroke, dementia, cancer, multiple longer-term illness including respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and early death.
• In the UK, outdoor air pollution is thought to contribute up to 43,000 deaths every year. In the U.S., deaths from air pollution (about 90,000) are higher than deaths from car accidents (44,000) and homicides (20,000). Globally, air pollution is thought to contribute to one in five deaths. "The problem is so large it actually offers a better rationale for transitioning to cleaner energy than even climate change."
• Air pollution is cutting short the lives of billions of people by up to six years, making it a far greater killer than smoking, car crashes or HIV/Aids. [Conversely, the] more a city cleans up its air, the longer the life expectancy of its inhabitants.
• Air pollution raises the risk of miscarriage and is known to harm fetuses by increasing the risk of premature birth and low birth weight. Recent research has also found pollution particles in placentas.
• Air pollution affects people who contribute the least, like children, older people, people with health conditions... The people most affected by air pollution from cars often can't afford to drive.

I've marked this post with the Bad Technology tag. I believe that automobiles are a technology that would never have been allowed if its effects on health, climate, and society had been known ahead of time, and it had been subject to a fair vote. 

And here we are, facing the oncoming AI juggernaut that none of us have a say about.

My People's History

I hear some "unaffiliated" PAC has an ad out pushing Ron DeSantis for president, premised on his supposedly steely spine because one of his grandfathers worked in steel. 

Twitter folks were having fun with that, volunteering information on what their grandparents' jobs were, and wondering why the focus wasn't on what DeSantis's other grandfather's job was (a politician and a bureaucrat), or his parents. His mom was a nurse and his dad installed Nielsen boxes, both fine jobs, but not something you can make a manly tag line out of.

Save this excellent photo for all future uses of the guy who wants to know when teen-aged girls have their periods. He has a spine of steel, I tell you.

It made me wonder how someone could package me as a candidate based on my grandparents' jobs.

Well, I have some union bonafides. One grandpa was a bread truck driver and a Teamster. (Farther back, I have railroad union members on the same side of the family.) My grandma from that same side worked in a dress factory, and I think may have been a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, though I'm not sure.

My other set of grandparents were a bit more genteel, and so make worse campaign copy, though their story could be spun in the right hands. Grandpa owned a fairly unsuccessful corner grocery store, offering credit to people through the Depression (which often wasn't paid off). Grandma was a teacher for a few years, then a homemaker and would-be writer, then later a secretary. 

I know politicians have to package themselves with their family stories one way or another. Even my favorites do it. I, too, want to know who they are, where they come from.

But it must be weird to be the family members whose relationships are being packaged, to hear about yourself as part of someone else's story, reduced to signifiers.

Other People's History

I imagine if I had ever gotten around to reading E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, I would have known about the Tolpuddle Martyrs before today, when a friend posted this to Facebook, but alas, I never got around to it:

On this day in 1834, 30,000 marched for the freedom of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, agricultural workers from the Dorset town of Tolpuddle who were transported to Australia as punishment for their trade unionism.

The six were farm laborers who were trying to organize for better working conditions, and the organization they created had a secret oath of allegiance (probably for good reason, given the way the land-owners would have been working against them). The real reason land owners went after them was because they were organizing not just about wages, but about working conditions, which was seen as inherently radical after the French Revolution.

Britain at the time had a law against secret oaths of allegiance, and they were convicted of violating it and shipped off to servitude in Australia, where they had to work the fields of "free settlers" for nothing instead of the pittances they were paid back in England. 

But the joke was on the powerful back home, because their supporters collected 800,000 signatures and the organized the first protest march in English history. They were pardoned within a few years and returned from Australia.

There's a monument to them and museum about them in Dorset. 

And I knew none of this until today. The world is so big and there's so much to know!

__

On Last Week Tonight earlier this week, John Oliver's main story was about farm labor conditions in the U.S. right this minute. If you didn't see it, this story on the Boston Globe summarizes it and has clips. Same as it ever was, I'm afraid, Tolpuddle martyrs.

Strangling the Golden Goose

I have a partially written blog post that I may never finish about the 1964 children's novel The Pushcart War and Jane Jacobs, which seem linked to me in more ways than time and place.

In the meantime, I came across a quote from Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). It was written by the journalist Harrison Salisbury for Time magazine, and Jacobs used it in a chapter called "Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles":

The drawback is that as more and more space is allotted to the automobile, the goose that lays the golden eggs is strangled. Enormous areas go from the tax rolls and are rendered unsuitable for productive economic purposes. The community's ability to foot the ever-multiplying costs of freeways dwindles... At the same time traffic movement becomes more and more random... It is from Los Angeles that the most anguished cries are heard for rescue from the rubber-tired incubi. It is Los Angeles that threatens to prohibit new cars unless they are fitted with devices to prevent the discharge of smog-creating hydrocarbon fractions... It is in Los Angeles that serious officials say that the system is exhausting the elements necessary for human life—land, air and water (page 355).

Salisbury, like Jacobs, has been proven correct in ways that were barely imaginable at the time.

Transportation is land use. And too often, bad land use.

Paranoia, Privatizing Space, Guns

I grew up in the middle of nowhere's nowhere. My family's house was about two miles from an unincorporated hamlet in one direction and five miles from an incorporated village in the other. We were in the township and school district with the same name as the village.

It was farming country, but in the 1950s and ’60s, heading into the ’70s, farming in rural New York was on a downturn. My family was part of what was then an influx of middle-class tech workers from IBM. New houses were built on former farm land. 

Our house was part of a very small, informal development with three houses along a driveway: first our house at the main road, then two other houses farther back from the road along a driveway that was almost a small private road. There was also a pond and a hill behind our house, off the left side of the driveway, which we owned.



When I was a kid, the pond was treated as a neighborhood amenity. Everyone swam in it and people fished in it, despite the fact that it mostly held only bony pickerel. Kids went sledding on the hill behind it, sometimes sliding out onto the ice, and of course they and their parents went ice skating on it.

When my parents sold the house and the land behind it around 2005, the family that owned the third house, the one at the end of the driveway, bought the pond and the land beyond it. The man in this family had grown up not far down the road from us and was in Daughter Number Two's high school class. He and his wife had been cordial neighbors with my parents, raising young kids who trick-or-treated at my parents' door and doing all the other rural things that happen when you're near each other out in the middle of nowhere, sharing a private driveway.

When I visited my parents after they had moved to the nearby incorporated village, I drove past the old house. I noticed that the neighbors had rebuilt the dock on the opposite side of the pond so that it was closer to their house and made some other improvements that seemed to privatize the space, but I didn't think that much about it.

About 10 years after my parents had sold the house, they moved on to assisted living. While I was out there helping them with that move, I stopped by the original neighborhood. I parked my rental car along the main road and walked down the driveway, then over to the pond. As I was walking around it, the owner of the third house came walking over and asked me who I was and what I was doing on his land.

Remember, this is a person who I know, in some sense, or used to. I went to high school with him (one grade apart), rode the same school bus for 12 years or so. He was my parents' immediate neighbor for close to 20 years.

And yes, that mattered when I told him my name. He was mollified. It was okay that I was there. But still, he said to me, "Next time you want to look around, come up to the house first."

Reader, I confess I was shocked, given how the pond had been used the entire time I had lived there. What was he afraid I was going to do to his pond? Note that there are no signs saying the land is posted. (That's the local terminology for No Trespassing.)

And now, today, after the recent news of people being shot after ringing a doorbell, trying to get into the wrong car, and going up the wrong driveway (in rural New York!), I wonder if my visit to the pond would be even more shocking now.

What is the paranoia that leads to this behavior, and who does building that paranoia serve? Obviously, racism is part of it, but not all of it.

These circumstances make me think back to Pete Hautman's post about why he got rid of his handgun. As in all of the recent shootings of innocent people confronted by armed paranoids, "fear, human error, and unpredictable sets of circumstances are unavoidable, but there are things we can do to reduce the chances that an unfortunate situation might turn deadly."

As Hautman did, the most obvious thing a person can do is get rid of their gun. Or for society to make it so that people don't have them in the first place.

__

After my father's funeral in March 2019, my entire remaining family — all four daughters, our spouses, and our kids — went back to the pond. We tried to go up to "the house," as the neighbor had insisted, to ask permission, but no one was home.

We went for a walk around the pond anyway.

Great Grandmothers

With the Fox News / Dominion settlement and deadlock on getting Dianne Feinstein out of the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Senate, it's another depressing day for national news.

So it seems like a good day to avoid all of that. Someone on Twitter asked, Forget telling me about your dad, tell me about your great-grandmothers. That seems like a fun idea.

First, it's not surprising that what I know is patchy and sometimes more about their husbands. All of them were in central New York, born between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were all white, but other than that, in my head they don't have a lot in common because some died in the 19th or early 20th century, while others lived into the mid-20th century and so seem like someone who's more accessible.

Maternal maternal
Margaret/"Maggie" — She was an Irish immigrant who came to the U.S. with her uncle when she was 8 years old. She was born in Leeds, England, where her father, who was a bridge engineer, was working on a bridge. Her parents then left her behind (in Ireland, I think) so her father could work on a project in the U.S. — maybe the Brooklyn Bridge, given the timing. He died within a few years of arriving from a fall off the bridge, and her mother died in childbirth, probably before that. 

Maggie was raised by one of her mother's widowed sisters, with her cousins essentially as siblings. She left school at 14 to work as housekeeper to an Albany priest and his sister so she could contribute money to her aunt's family. Then, I think probably when she became an adult, she went to work as a tailor at a small business in her home town that was owned by a Bavarian immigrant couple. At age 29, she married their son, who also worked at the business. 

They had two children, one of whom was my grandmother. Maggie lived to about age 61, dying a few years after my mother was born in the early 1930s. Maggie is the most recent immigrant in my entire family tree, which is generally made of Puritan-descendants. Her Bavarian in-laws are the only other recent immigrants.

Maternal paternal
Gertrude/"Ella" — She died at 30, shortly after giving birth to her third child and first daughter. My grandfather was only around age 2 when she died, so he had no memory of her. Her family were farmers from a very small town or hamlet, though they had been in the area for a long time and had some social prominence.

Paternal maternal
Bessie — I've written about her before. She died at age 29 of quinsy, when my father's mother was only 10. She was working class to hard-scrabble, and had married pretty young. Her husband was seven years older than she, had already been married once before, and worked on the rail road.

Paternal paternal
Meeta — I wish I knew more about this great grandmother. Her mother tried to kill her father with a shotgun, blinding him, then killed herself. News coverage at the time said she thought he was having an affair, but who knows if that's true. 

Meeta divorced my great grandfather in the late 1920s or early 1930s and remarried, having a second family. I don't know the reason for the divorce. She lived at least into her 70s, maybe her 80s, though I don't remember meeting her. My great grandfather, her first husband, held a series of working-class jobs from the age of 12 (saw mill, shoe manufacturing, railroad, dairy, drug company) and ended his working life employed at a knitting mill where he helped organize a union just after World War II. So they probably lived a working class life. However, they were divorced during many of those jobs, and I don't know the circumstances of her second marriage. Maybe she was better off with her second husband. I'm not even sure where she lived with her second family.

I wish I knew more about all of them. Maybe I will, some day.

A Hundred Years of History

It's always good to know that I'm not the only one* who thinks the Powell memo was a critical turning point away from the direction this country needed to go.

The featured essay on the Weekly Sift is called Why fascism? Why now? In it, Doug Muder synthesizes two recent posts that addressed that question. 

The gist is that after World War II, Europe purposely rebuilt itself on social and economic equality in order to push fascism to the edges of society because its leaders knew that raging inequality was what had caused the cataclysm those countries went through since World War I. 

"Fascism," Muder writes, paraphrasing one of his sources, "is a political technique for gathering up the misery of the masses and focusing it on scapegoats rather than solutions. The primary purpose of the fascist leader is revenge..."

Postwar social democracies in Europe provided solutions, and therefore prevented the need for scapegoats. In the U.S., first the New Deal and then its postwar continuation did a fair amount of the same, at least for white people, with high tax rates on the wealthy creating programs that led to expanded prosperity, like home ownership, cheap education, family-supporting wages, and all the things Baby Boomers remember as being "normal." The ultra wealthy elites recognized the bargain they were making: give up some of their money to create a stable system.

That started to end with the Powell memo, which told the rich they could have all the cake if they just bought-off the correct institutions. Reagan was elected within 10 years, and the slide began. 

It has taken a few decades for this planned inequality to build up to the point where despair made fascism seem like the best option, but here we are. And most of the people who've already responded to its call don't even acknowledge the impacts of climate change still lying ahead of us. So that's more blame to misdirect.

Still, as Muder concludes, he says:

One lesson is to keep our own resentment tightly focused on the people who deserve it. Working class Americans who see little hope for their children are not our enemies, even if they vote for our enemies. We shouldn’t want revenge on them, we should want them to have better prospects, so that they lose their own need for revenge.

Us against Them is the fascist conversation. We can’t let ourselves be drawn into it.

Our salvation will not come through their misery. Quite the reverse. If we are to be saved, it will have to be through happiness — everyone’s happiness.

__

* I know I'm not the only one who thinks the Powell memo was a turning point, but at the same time, every time I mention it, a voice in the back of my head says, "You sound like a conspiracy theorist."