«Elect a Republican chief executive and a Republican legislature, throw in a Republican court—and you get an 1864 law limiting your freedom and endangering your health and well-being back on the books.»

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-self-immolation-of-the-az-gop

For all the males out there that think all this abortion fooferaw is just a problem for women (are there any, actually?), two words: paternity lawsuit.

This ain’t your dad’s genetic testing. You or your kid get somebody pregnant? Congrats, you’re (grand)parent(s) and/or on the hook for child support! Whether you’re ready for it or not!

Skip your child-support payments? Hel-LO, credit rating agencies!

More nukes, less geo-engineering:

«As the effects of climate change continue to grow, so has interest in some sort of backup plan. In 2020, Congress directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study solar radiation modification.

…

Interest is growing overseas, as well. In February, an Australian team of researchers at Southern Cross University, which was advised by Dr. Neukermans, conducted a monthlong experiment off the country’s northeast coast, spraying aerosols from a ship and measuring the response of clouds.

…

Private funding is also growing. Kelly Wanser is a former technology executive who helped establish the marine cloud brightening project at the University of Washington. In 2018 she created SilverLining, a nonprofit organization to advance research into what she calls “near-term climate interventions” like cloud brightening.»

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/climate/global-warming-clouds-solar-geoengineering.html?ugrp=c&unlocked_article_code=1.i00.jsSG.YVzGmY5KULqo&smid=url-share (gift)

Republicans love charter schools. Except when…

«A charter school network that lists “actively dismantle white supremacy culture” among its key principles has been approved to train teachers for North Carolina public schools.

But some Republican members of the State Board of Education disagree with the approval, questioning whether the network will be teaching Critical Race Theory.

The Board of Education voted 6-4 on Thursday to approve the application from KIPP North Carolina to offer an educator preparation program. Members were split over how KIPP’s application listed as one its “key principles” that “all teachers, leaders, and coaches consistently interrupt their implicit bias, actively dismantle white supremacy culture, disrupt anti-Blackness in their pedagogy and coaching.”»

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article287384530.html

https://www.ft.com/content/5cb075e5-974b-4048-ab4c-12b38abeb764

«Yoav Har-Even, a retired military officer who led the Israeli investigation, confirmed that WCK had provided the Israeli military with advance information about its convoy, and that the vehicles’ roofs were emblazoned with WCK’s logo.

However, he said information about the convoy had not been passed all the way down the chain of command, while the cameras on the Israeli military’s drones could not see the WCK logos at night.

Israeli forces killed the aid workers in three strikes on the WCK vehicles. The attacks targeted the survivors of each preceding strike until all members of the convoy were dead.

….

According to Har-Even, the WCK convoy left the pier in central Gaza where maritime aid had been docking at about 10pm local time on Monday before driving south along Gaza’s coast.

At 10.20pm the convoy was “joined” by three additional vehicles, including a truck on which Israeli forces subsequently identified a gunman. The military contacted WCK for information about what was happening but was unable to reach the convoy.»

(For some reason, I was able to read this article off of Google News, but it’s probably paywalled.)

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-airstrike-gaza-kills-foreign-aid-workers-hamas-run-media-office-says-2024-04-01/

Ya know… (this just occurred to me)… if Israel can mis-identify WCK workers, how do we know they’ve correctly identified everybody else they’ve killed? Is this their only mistake, or have they perhaps killed other innocents who don’t have Western governments backing them up?

«Characterizing a task as a mapping from inputs to outputs might be appropriate for machine learning. But if we adopt that as a way to understand what people do, we are complicit in the dehumanziation so rampant in the production and sales of so-called “AI”. I expect better from people involved in higher education and people reporting on higher education, and I hope you do, too.»

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/doing-their-hype-for-them/

This is similar to what I’ve been saying for a long time: people ascribe too much to computers and have been since they were invented.

«“So much of the food that we eat is coming from all over the world,” said Stephen Luby, who studies lead pollution at Stanford University. “So we are deluding ourselves if we think we can push pollution problems to low-­income countries and not worry about it.”

….

“Lead is a toxin like no other,” Luby said. “People think about ‘Oh, yeah. Lead’s bad. Mercury’s bad. Cadmium’s bad. Air pollution is bad. All these things.’ No — lead is really disproportionately bad.”

….

Spices are a good example of how this can happen: Lead chromate pigment is often used to produce a more vibrant color in spices such as cinnamon and turmeric. [Holy shit!]

….

“We cannot inspect our way out of this problem. You could spend a fortune in perpetuity and only catch a tiny fraction of contaminated goods coming into the United States,” McCartor said. “If we really want to solve this, it requires a whole-­of-­government commitment to work outside of our borders.”»

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24115827/lead-poisoning-symptoms-exposure-children-cinnamon-paint-battery-pollution-global

https://thehill.com/opinion/4566910-its-too-easy-to-get-the-wrong-idea-about-rural-rage/

«According to a RuralOrganizing.org study with Open Secrets, for every dollar a Democrat running for federal office spends in rural areas, Republicans spend $14. While about 30 percent of Americans and 20 percent of registered voters live in rural areas, barely 3 percent of Democratic-affiliated expenditures occur in rural geographies — a clear lack of priority given to cultivating rural champions.

….

Independent farmers are few and far between, with nearly every sector of agriculture consolidated — just a few multinational corporations squeeze the average farmer from the input side to the farm gate. Wealth gets extracted — by Dollar General or hospitals or multinational ag corporations — with little money invested back into these communities. When it comes to new wealth, as of a few years ago, 80 percent of the venture capital was invested in only 50 counties in our country – out of nearly 3,100. A lack of opportunity is eroding rural communities and sowing understandable discontent — discontent that Republicans point in the wrong direction.»

«For one thing, TMTG, which owns the conservative Twitter copycat Truth Social, makes basically nothing. Its total revenue was $3.4 million in the first nine months of 2023. Extrapolate that out, and the stock is probably trading at something like 2,000 times the company’s annual revenue. That is, um, high. Apple, for example, trades at about seven times its total revenue. And given TMTG’s paltry revenue, it actually lost $49 million in the same period.»

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-media-stock-price-crash-spac-djt-truth-social-2024-4

“Um.” 🙂

«I kept thinking about something a therapist had said – that she did not believe there was a healthy way to engage on social media. I was out of love with it.»

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/31/the-wellness-instagrammer-who-learned-to-let-go