JohnBrownsDream

Some incredible mental gymnastics and moral cowardice on display in this essay. A couple choice bits:

Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle!

Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it.

At least she's truthful about it being an unreal place.

This company continues to inspire confidence

Demonstrate, but don’t mistake demonstrating for political action. You may find it gratifying to stand on a corner in Berkeley with a sign asking drivers to “honk if you hate fascism” and elicit lots of honks, but that’s as politically effectual as taking a warm shower. Organize people who don’t normally vote to vote for Biden. Mobilize get-out-the-vote efforts in your community. Get young people involved.

While I'd agree there's a limit to the effectiveness of protest alone, it takes a certain kind of brain to think ing is the more politically effective move.

When state and federal aid lagged in the days after the fire, Indigenous-led and faith-based organizations stepped up to provide shelter and resources to survivors, said Tamara Paltin, a West Maui county councilmember. A host of volunteer-powered distribution tents provided food, clothing and medication, as well as acupuncture and lomi practitioners.

“As far as I’ve been taught, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi still exists,” she said. “We’re a nation occupied by the US.”

When “defund police” became a national cry in 2020, police organizations mobilized to beat it back by laying every uptick in crime or high-profile violent incident at the feet of Black Lives Matter and any public official in support of the movement. This national reckoning happened to come at a crucial juncture in Oakland’s budget cycle, and the city council surprised activists by voting, in June 2020, to create a task force to Reimagine Public Safety with a goal “to reduce OPD budget by 50 percent by investing in crime prevention and community.”

One year later, then-police chief LeRonne Armstrong, the department’s 10th chief in 10 years, linked “out-of-control” crime in the city to the first actual budget cut, which had been approved by the council only days before. [emph. mine] Shortly thereafter, then-Mayor Libby Schaaf made international headlines for “reversing course,” saying “defund the police went ‘too far,’” though no cuts had yet been implemented and Schaaf had always publicly opposed them.

In October 2022, ABC News investigated claims that defunding has contributed to increasing crime numbers and found that in the vast majority of cities, police funding has increased since 2020. Oakland followed this national trend, with an 18 percent increase between 2019 and 2022.

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In a statement to the Guardian, the EPA said its latest definition was more “expansive” than the previous. Its approach was designed “to focus on substances most likely to be persistent in the environment, including some chemical substances whose structures or sub-structures resemble, at least in part” more thoroughly studied PFAS compounds, like PFOS and PFOA.

But public health advocates warn that all PFAS are persistent in the environment and all that have been studied are toxic, and for those reasons many are calling on the government to largely restrict the entire chemical class.

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, a current EPA employee in the toxics office said the chemical’s definition has been evolving for several years. The employee said they first learned of the latest change in public comments made by Michal Freedhoff, a Biden-appointed toxics office administrator.

“They’re causing mad confusion over here,” the user said. A Twitter user shared a video of a Cruise vehicle nearly running over a family on a crosswalk over the weekend. In San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, as many as 10 Cruise cars blocked a main thoroughfare, stoking anger from locals.