Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No Justins, No Peace

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

After roe, women are no longer free.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

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Racial Justice

GO AWAY, Idalia and DeSantis

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FL Gov. Ron DeSantis’s sad trombone of a campaign was womp-womp-womping its way through Iowa last week and had planned to be in South Carolina today. But a racist terrorist attack in Jacksonville that killed three and a storm aiming at the state forced him off the trail and back to Tallahassee, according to WUSF:

Crises at home pose a new test for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose presidential campaign travels are now up in the air as his state mourns a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville and prepares for a tropical storm.

A day after appearing in Iowa, DeSantis was back in the state capital of Tallahassee on Sunday for a news conference on Tropical Storm Idalia. He urged Floridians to heed the advice of emergency managers. He also offered condolences and condemned the killing of three Black people by a white man who authorities say left behind a suicide note, a will, and writings with racist material.

We can’t know for sure, but it was probably the storm that prompted the governor’s return, not the racist terrorist attack. He sucks at consoling people and is notoriously extra-squirmy after violence or public outrages committed by white supremacists and antisemites, i.e., The Base. He tends to get angrier at suggestions that he should address these incidents than about the incidents themselves.

DeSantis and his awful wife did attend a Jacksonville vigil for those killed by the racist gunman. This surprised me, and I’m still weighing whether he should get credit for it or if it was a campaign stunt. But while he was speaking, he got booed by attendees until a local councilwoman stepped in to save his ass: (Orlando Sentinel)

Following services earlier in the day, about 200 people showed up at a Sunday evening vigil a block from the Dollar General store in Jacksonville where officials said Ryan Palmeter opened fire Saturday using guns he bought legally despite a past involuntary commitment for a mental health exam.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — who is running for the GOP nomination for president, who has loosened gun laws in Florida and who has antagonized civil rights leaders by deriding “wokeness ” — was loudly booed as he addressed the vigil.

Ju’Coby Pittman, a Jacksonville city councilwoman who represents the neighborhood where the shooting happened, stepped in to ask the crowd to listen.

“It ain’t about parties today,” she said. “A bullet don’t know a party.”

Councilwoman Pittman’s saying that was understandable. Things were getting mighty uncomfortable, and beads of sweat were rapidly forming on Tacky O’s upper lip. But we all know there’s only one party that prioritizes guns and ammo over people. There’s only one party that is whitewashing black history, including the state’s appalling record of racist violence. So, no credit. The crowd booed the right person.

Soon-to-be Hurricane Idalia must strike the flailing campaign masterminds as a potential godsend for their broke-ass effort. The earned media is already rolling in. When I left home at 7 AM to complete my storm preparations (beer! cheese! more wine!), I turned the TV on to keep the dogs company, and when I returned, DeSantis was droning monotonously on CNN about likely downed trees and power outages.

He’ll probably get a chance to bust out the shrimper boots by Thursday.

Publix, a regional grocery chain down here, used to make hurricane cakes that were decorated with icing depicting the radar image of a storm and the slogan GO AWAY written on the side or top:

Go Away, Governor DeSantis

But some people found that in bad taste and complained, so Publix stopped making them. Then people complained about that. Tampa Bay Times columnist Stephanie Hayes defended the hurricakes today:

Lastly, and this may seem like a leap, but stay with me. I often wonder if seemingly innocuous moves like this contribute to individual apathy and extremism. A lot to put on a cake, right? But it’s already nearly impossible to shop anywhere without referencing a historical flow chart of bad corporate behavior. Is my toothpaste purchase adjacent to an insurrection? Does this tasty sub sandwich harm the LGBTQ+ community? Did I just ding the planet by expelling the fuel it takes to get to another store that might be less financially nefarious? Did ordering my toilet paper online contribute to a billionaire’s evil plot to establish a colony of space cadets on Mars? Have I eaten anything today? Where are my keys?

I am just saying, it’s not outside the realm of possibility to think that a small story concerning a dessert themed around regional weather interests might be the weight that tips an already exhausted and confused person off the scale. Why try to do the right thing when everything is wrong? Disillusioned, this person will start using the word “woke” unironically and head to the dark web, where they inevitably become radicalized and forge a campaign as the next president of these United States of America. We will all watch this person gesticulating wildly on a political debate stage sponsored by Publix as we eat plain white frosted cakes and a tropical weather event bears down on our uninsured ramshackle homes.

The defense rests. Bring back the cakes.

She’s not wrong — trying to live life in an ethical way is complicated, and extremism is an easy way out for people who can’t hack it.

Anyhoo, maybe I’ll make my own damn cake decorated with a hurricane graphic and DeSantis’s face in the middle and a slogan iced on the side that applies to both: GO THE FUCK AWAY.

Open thread.

ETA: Breaking from WaPo:

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan has scheduled Donald Trump’s D.C. trial on charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election for March 4, 2024. A separate hearing was being held in Atlanta Monday morning to determine whether Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, can move his election-related indictment from state to federal court. Trump is a frontrunner in the Republican 2024 presidential contest, and the D.C. trial’s starting date is the day before the Super Tuesday primaries.

H/T to valued commenter Sanjeevs for the heads-up on the ruling.

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Alabama G-ddamn.

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(Following up on yesterday’s promise) I don’t wanna be the Black Reporter for Balloon Juice, but I think there’s unexpressed importance in the recent Alabama Asswhooping.

For those unaware: When a Black riverboat worker asked some White people to obey the laws of the place he worked, they chose violence. A very racially-charged brawl ensued.

Responses have ranged from the pride in self-defense among a number of Black folx (and White supporters), to…well, selective editing and outrage in the people you’d expect.

There’s a lot here. So I’ll focus on those eager with the “violence isn’t the answer” prompt. Those uneasy with how easy so many seem to be with the asswhuppin’. You’re right! Violence isn’t the answer to all the issues plaguing Black folx in America — much less, the issues around Reproductive Justice, or attacks on LBGTQIA+ folx, or the treatment of people with disabilities.

And yet. If we don’t all work together to resolve these issues, and the issues of so many others. If we don’t start to recognize the source of so many challenges in America…well. I mean, Dr. King said it, a few months before White violence took his life:

First, is the guilt for riots exclusively that of Negroes? And are they a natural development to a new stage of struggle? A million words will be written and spoken to dissect the ghetto outbreaks. But for a perceptive and vivid expression of culpability I would like to submit two sentences that many of you have probably heard me quote before from the pen of Victor Hugo. “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin but he who causes the darkness.” The policy-makers of the white society have caused the darkness. It was they who created the frustrating slums. They perpetuate unemployment and poverty and oppression. Perhaps it is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes, but these are essentially derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

(Emphasis mine – MD)

It’s also important to understand that “enjoying” this moment, in the Black community, isn’t carefree. It’s with the background of the weight of centuries of oppression, and the very real issues of the present moment that reflect in this brawl. In the people who almost certainly chose violence against a Black man because — in the American South, yes, but elsewhere as well — his life and liberty isn’t worth the same as them. And that some Black folx aren’t about losing any more liberty, without a literal fight.

As Joy Reid put it:

[Back in the day] There were no consequences for [White Folx] and deadly ones for us if we tried to fight back. Well that era is done and it ain’t coming back, no matter how many sundown-town fantasy songs their country singers make. Seeing Black folk come as a community to that security guard’s rescue, one guy even swimming over like Aquaman to help him, was a ‘Wakanda Assemble’ moment, in which a group of old school southern bullies effed around and found out.

Those “greater crimes” are not things that a whole group can ignore, forever. You cannot say that one side gets all the Stochastic Terrorism they want, and expect the attacked people to bend over and take it, forever.

I don’t know who needs to hear this. But I hope they do, and do so with a quickness.

I don’t wanna be the Black Reporter for Balloon Juice. I cannot be the Marginalized People Reporter for Balloon Juice. But Alabama might be a sign of things to come, if we aren’t real damn careful as a country.

 

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The Kids Are All Right–MIT Science Writers Edition

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Got some stuff I’ve been meaning to share from the students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing–the joint in which I do much of my teaching.

As part of the core curriculum in that masters program, there’s a one-semester class on making science documentaries that I teach.  There are a couple of reasons why we require them to devote 1/8 of their coursework at the ‘Tute to developing skills in a medium which they as writers and reporters may not see as their first love.

There’s the pragmatic justification: a science writer who can tell a potential reporter that they can handle a camera and Adobe Premiere has a leg up over an applicant who can’t, and some of our alumni have indeed found that video has become a bigger part of their working life than they anticipated.

Then there’s a more abstract argument for the class: it’s a class in documentary production–which means that it asks the students not just to come up with an idea for a film and put it together with tools we provide, but to organize  all of the elements that go into creating a finished video that can be released to a general audience. That is: I emphasize that the creative process for filmmakers has two facets.  There’s coming up with and executing the ideas; and there’s assembling the resources to do all that–time, equipment, money, materials and so on.  If you don’t have the cash or the days or whatever to get some brilliant notion into the camera, then you have to be clever in matching your vision to your logistics–or at least that’s what I hope the students figure out.

And finally, there’s the reason closest to my heart: working in the documentary medium makes you–has made me–a better writer.  Film/video is a relentlessly unforgiving medium. You can only tell what you can create images and a soundscape to convey.  Throat clearing, any delay in getting to the point of a shot, a scene, a sequence, is immediately apparent to viewers and will in short order cause attention to flag.  The amount of story and feeling that can be conveyed without exposition through shot making and the artful use of sound is amazing–and there are analogues in prose to be found.  I find my film making muscle memory kicks in most when I’m moving from a first draft to the revision of a book or long piece–and it’s been invaluable to me.

The Kids Are All Right--MIT Science Writers Edition

So that’s why we ask our students in the GPSW to give over their time and energy to a medium most of them  are unfamiliar with when the semester begins.  What is so gratifying to me as their instructor is how well almost all of them take to it, both the technical craft bits and the habits of mind. Every year we get fascinating glimpses of some aspect of the scientific enterprise; there’s sometimes some pain involved in the journey, but even if they take the long road home, it seems always to come out alright on the night. (Mix metaphors much?)

Anyway, that’s all background to what follows below: short documentaries from two teams in the MIT GPSW class of ’23.  Both of them depart from the most common formula for these films, that of following an idea or experiment through a lab. Instead they focus in different ways on the human experience of a place like MIT–and especially what it means to be someone other than white-male-avatar of  science.  They both required a lot of time and thought and so many edit room hours to arrive at the stories the students wanted to tell, and I couldn’t be prouder of both teams and their work.

So–enough preamble.  Take a look.  If nothing else, it ain’t doom; it ain’t GOP fecklessness or TFG evil.  It’s just–and this is so much more than enough–talented and focused young people figuring out their world, both in front of and behind the camera.

 

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That’s all from me. The thread, as ever, is as open as Winnie the Pooh’s heart.

Image: Pieter Claesz, Still life with a skull and a writing quill, 1628

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I’m Fucking Done

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It’s time to break this rogue court.

I'm Fucking Done

With apologies to the lawyers in the Jackaltariat, there’s nothing left to save in the current court. Its majority, in place barring radical legislative change I don’t see coming anytime soon, is a corrupt, wholly owned, claque of elite religious fanatics.  Or perhaps, more accurately, a coalition of lease-to-own hacks and true believers.

Its decisions are a parody of judicial reasoning.  They constitute a radical power grab–a judicial coup–which has been running in a slow rolling way since at least 2000 with Bush v. Gore.

Whether by enlargement or an express legislative limitation of the court’s review powers, it’s time to end this antidemocratic attack on our society.

I’m just fucking done. Past done.

And yeah–I know nothing can happen until/unless we retake the House and extend control of the Senate beyond the Manchinema roadblock.

One more thing: this could have been avoided if not that many people had chosen not to piss away votes on “principle” in 2000 and 2016.  Spilt milk and all that. But if anyone needed a reminder (no one here) 2024 is the next most important election of our lives.

Open goddamn thread.

PS: Don’t get me started on the willed scientific illiteracy of the majority, contaminating their rulings on anything involving technical issues and regulation. Intercourse them orthogonally with oxidized farm implements.

Image: after William Hogarth, The Bench, engraving by William Dent, roughly 1790s.

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A little YIMBY win

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Last night, the Chapel Hill Town Council voted 6-3 to modify the town’s land use management ordinance (LUMO).  The big change is to allow by right duplexes and cottage apartments on most of the land that had been zoned as of yesterday morning as detached single family housing only plots.  Other chunks of the proposal made it easier for triplexes and quadplexes to be approved in areas that are already zoned for multi-family housing.

The intent of this process change is to modestly (and I mean modestly) increase density and new construction in pre-existing neighborhoods.  Most of Chapel Hill once you get more than half a mile from the UNC campus is car dependent suburbia.  These neighborhoods have been built during periods of very restrictive and structurally exclusionary zoning which made building with any density difficult.  There had been a few windows in the town’s history in the past two generations where some density was temporarily allowed and those periods have created most of the current inventory of not outrageously expensive housing.

The driver of the change is a simple recognition that the town is part of a rapidly growing region.  There is massive demand for housing in the greater Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle.  Home prices are soaring and a lot of construction is happening in green fields 40 to 60 minutes of daily driving away from the job centers. The new construction in town has mostly been either single family detached housing at a half million or more price points or 5+1 apartment blocks where studio apartments start at $1500/month.  The newly allowed housing concepts aims to allow for within neighborhood construction of smaller and more affordable housing units. In Chapel Hill, the limited construction  means home prices have sky rocketed.  My family bought our home in 2019 in Chapel Hill.  We could not afford to buy the same property today even if I was working at my regular salary instead of my grad student stipend.

Will it solve every housing problem in the town?

HELL NO!

Is it a reasonable step in a direction to increase supply and relieve some of the price pressure as well as reduce regional vehicle miles driven on the margin?

HELL YES!

Has it been an ugly ugly fight for a necessary but grossly insufficient step?

YEP!

Is this a political fight that should be taking place in pretty much every town that is home to a flagship state university/med school complex?

INDUBITABLY!

This has been one of the things that I’ve been spending some of my time and attention on besides grad school and instead of health policy writing over the past six months as I think it is important to live our values by changing policy.  Zoning determines whether or not diversity and inclusion is a slogan or a reality.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Happy Juneteenth

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… While many have treated the long holiday weekend as a reason for a party, others urged quiet reflection on America’s often violent and oppressive treatment of its Black citizens. And still others have remarked at the strangeness of celebrating a federal holiday marking the end of slavery in the nation while many Americans are trying to stop parts of that history from being taught in public schools.

“Is #Juneteenth the only federal holiday that some states have banned the teaching of its history and significance?” Author Michelle Duster asked on Twitter this weekend, referring to measures in Florida, Oklahoma and Alabama prohibiting an Advancement Placement African American studies course or the teaching of certain concepts of race and racism…

The holiday observance continues Monday with Vice President Kamala Harris appearing on a CNN special with musical guests including Miguel and Charlie Wilson.

Schools and federal buildings will be closed Monday.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Juneteenth Is Coming

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