Please Do Not Ban Autonomous Vehicles In Your City

I was listening with horror to a Boston City Council meeting today where many council members made it clear that they’re interested in effectively banning autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the city.

A speaker said that Waymo (the AV company requesting clearance to run in Boston) was only interested in not paying human drivers (Waymo is a new company that has never had human drivers in the first place) and then referred to the ‘notion that somehow our cities are unsafe because people are driving cars’ as if this were a crazy idea. A council person strongly implied that new valuable technology always causes us to value people less. One speaker associated Waymo with the Trump administration. There were a lot of implications that AVs couldn’t possibly be as good as human drivers, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. Some speeches were included lots of criticisms that applied equally well to what Uber did to taxis, but now deployed to defend Uber.

Most of the arguments I heard were pretty wildly off-base. Many of the speakers didn’t factor in the basic safety benefit of AVs to the riders or pedestrians at all, and many of the arguments fell apart when poked at. Here are all my arguments for why a city should legalize AVs, with some concerns at the end:

• AVs are ridiculously safe compared to human drivers

• There is no real difference for a city between an AV fleet and a very cheap rental car service

• Protecting ride share driver jobs is a bad basis for policy

• Should we build fewer bike lanes to save Uber jobs?

• Ride share jobs are bad for the drivers

• Losing these jobs is still a loss

• Eyes on the street

• AVs can open up opportunities for disabled riders

• Waymos are fully electric

• Would you ban AVs if they were already widespread to create Uber driver jobs?

• Freedom

• Real problems with AVs

• Cybersecurity

• Could make traffic worse

• Environmental impact

AVs are ridiculously safe compared to human drivers

The most obvious reason to allow AVs in your city is that every time a rider takes one over driving a car themselves or getting in a ride share, their odds of being in a crash that causes serious injury or worse drop by about 90%. I’d strongly recommend this deep dive on every single crash Waymo has had so far:

[Very few of Waymo’s most serious crashes were Waymo’s fault (Understanding AI).]

This is based on public police records rather than Waymo’s self-reported crashes. It doesn’t seem like there have been any serious crashes Waymo’s been involved in where the AV itself was at fault. This is wild, because Waymo’s driven over 100 million miles. These statistics were brought up out of context in the hearing to imply that Waymo is dangerous. By any. normal metric it’s much more safe than human drivers.

40,000 people die in car accidents in America each year. This is as many deaths as 9/11 every single month. We should be treating this as more of an emergency than we do. Our first thought in making any policy related to cars should be “How can we do everything we can to stop so many people from being killed?” Everything else is secondary to that. Dropping the rate of serious crashes by even 50% would save 20,000 people a year. Here’s 20,000 dots:

The more people choose to ride AVs over human-driven cars, the fewer total crashes will happen.

One common argument is that Waymos are very safe compared to everyday drivers, but not professional drivers. I can’t find super reliable data, but ride share accidents seem to occur at about a rate of 40 per 100 million miles traveled. Waymo in comparison was involved in 34 crashes where airbags deployed in its 100 million miles, and 45 crashes altogether. Crucially, it seems like the AV was only at fault for one of these, when a wheel fell off. There’s no similar data for how many Uber and Lyft crashes were the driver’s fault, but they’re competing with what seems like effectively 0 per 100 million miles.

by Andy Masley, The Weird Turn Pro |  Read more:

Image: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

What To Know About Data Centers

As the use of AI increases, data centers are popping up across the country. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the controversial facilities.

Q: What do data centers need to run?

A: Water, electricity, air conditioning, and other resources typically wasted on schools and hospitals.

Q: Do data centers use a lot of water?

A: What are you, a fish? Don’t worry about it.

Q: How are data centers regulated?

A: Next month, Congress will hear about data centers for the very first time.

Q: Do I need to worry about one coming to my town?

A: Only if your town is built on land.

Q: How long does it take to build a new data center?

A: Approximately one closed-door city council vote.

Q: What’s Wi-Fi?

A: Not right now, big guy.

Q: What will most data centers house in the future?

A: Raccoons.

Image: uncredited

via:

Model Cities: Monumental Labs Stonework

Monumental Labs, a group working on “AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories”. The question of why modern architecture is so dull and unornamented compared to its classical counterpart is complicated, but three commonly-proposed reasons are:

1. Ornament costs too much

2. The modernist era destroyed the classical architecture education pipeline; only a few people and companies retain tacit knowledge of old techniques, and they mostly occupy themselves with historical renovation.

3. Building codes are inflexible and designed around the more-common modern styles.

Getting robots to mass-produce ornament solves problems 1 and 2, and doing it in a model city with a ground-level commitment to ornament solves problem 3. 

Sramek writes:

Our renderings do not tell the full story. Getting architecture right in a way that is also scalable and affordable is hard. And until now, we’ve been focused on the things “lower down in the stack” that need to be designed first – land use plans, urban design, transportation, open space, infrastructure, etc. But I started this company nearly a decade ago precisely because I felt that so much of our world had become ugly, and I wanted to live, and have my kids grow up, in a place that appreciates craft and beauty.

via: Model Cities Monday - 10/27/25 (ASX)

[ed. Sounds good to me.]

Gerrymandering - Past, Present, Future

‘I think we’ll get five,’ President Trump said, and five was what he got. At his prompting, the Republican-dominated Texas legislature remapped the districts to be used in next year’s elections to the federal House of Representatives. Their map includes five new seats that are likely to be won by the Republicans, who already hold 25 of the state’s 38 seats. Until this year, the Democrat Al Green’s Ninth Congressional District covered Democrat-leaning south and south-western Houston. Now, it ranges east over Republican-leaning Harris County and Liberty County, with most of the former constituency reallocated to other districts. Green has accused Trump and his allies in Texas of infusing ‘racism into Texas redistricting’ by targeting Black representatives like him and diluting the Black vote. ‘I did not take race into consideration when drawing this map,’ Phil King, the state senator responsible for the redistricting legislation, claimed. ‘I drew it based on what would better perform for Republican candidates.’ His colleague Todd Hunter, who introduced the redistricting bill, agreed. ‘The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward: improve Republican political performance.’

King and Hunter can say these things because there is no judicial remedy for designing a redistricting map that sews up the outcome of a congressional election. In 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that although the Supreme Court ‘does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering’, any court-mandated intervention in district maps would inevitably look partisan and impugn the court’s neutrality. In 2017, during arguments in a different case, Roberts contrasted the ‘sociological gobbledygook’ of political science on gerrymandering with the formal and objective science of American constitutional law.

‘Sociological gobbledygook’ teaches that the drawing of the boundaries of single-member districts can all but determine the outcome of an election. Imagine a state with twenty blue and thirty red voters that must be sliced into five districts. A map that tracked the overall distribution of votes would have two blue and three red districts. But if you can put six red voters and four blue voters in each of the five boxes, you will end up with five relatively safe red districts. This is known as ‘cracking’ the blue electorate. Or you could create two districts with six blues and one with eight blues, making three safe blue districts by ‘packing’ red supporters – concentrating them in a smaller number of districts. The notion that democratic elections are supposed to allow voters to make a real choice between candidates, or even kick out the bums in power, sits uneasily with the combination of untrammelled redistricting power and predictable political preferences that characterise the US today. But if it is so easy for mapmakers to vitiate the democratic purpose of elections in single-member districts, doesn’t neutrality demand some constraint on the ability of incumbents to choose voters, rather than the other way round?

After the Texas redistricting, Roberts’s belief that neutrality requires inaction appears even shakier. By adding five seats to the expected Texan Republican delegation, the Republican Party improves the odds it will retain, or even increase, its six-seat majority in the House in November 2026. Even a slight advantage gained through redistricting may have national implications because the Democrats’ lead in the polls is consistently small (around two points). Congressional maps are usually redrawn once every ten years, after each decennial census (the next one is in 2030). Mid-cycle redistricting does sometimes happen – Texas did the same thing two decades ago – but it is unusual. So is Trump’s open embrace of gerrymanders. In 1891, Benjamin Harrison condemned gerrymandering as ‘political robbery’. Sixty years later, Harry Truman called for federal legislation to end its use; a bill was introduced in the House but died in the Senate. In 1987, Ronald Reagan told a meeting of Republican governors that gerrymanders were ‘corrupt’. (...)

Democratic states have threatened to retaliate. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has scheduled a special election on Proposition 50, which would temporarily suspend the state’s independent redistricting commission, making it possible for the Democratic legislature to flip five Republican seats (43 of California’s 52 seats are held by Democrats). Like California, New York has a bipartisan commission, which usually redraws its maps once a decade. The Democrats have brought in legislation allowing mid-decade changes, but new maps won’t be in place until 2028. Democrats who used to be fierce advocates of independent commissions are now asking themselves whether they’ve been too slow to fight back. From a party that has a habit of bringing a knife to a gunfight, the question answers itself.

In the late 20th century, there were only ten seats nationally that repeatedly changed hands as a result of partisan gerrymandering, with control of the House flipping on just one occasion, in 1954. But in 2012, Republicans started to change this. Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia were all sliced up. The increase in gerrymanders was in part a result of Redmap, the Redistricting Majority Project, a Republican initiative set up in 2010 which invested in the races for the state legislatures, such as Texas’s, tasked with drawing district maps. In 1981, Democrats controlled the mapmaking process in 164 seats, while Republicans controlled it in 50. By 2021, the Republicans controlled line-drawing for 187 seats, the Democrats 49. At the same time, computers had made it cheaper and easier to design maps optimising one party’s performance without breaking the legal constraints on redistricting, such as the Voting Rights Act and the prohibition on districts drawn on the basis of race. In the 1980s, it cost $75,000 to buy software to do this; by the early 2000s, programs such as Maptitude for Redistricting cost $3000.

Just as in the late 19th century, urbanisation is now producing new political geography: migration from Democrat-leaning states such as California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois means they will lose House seats after the 2030 census. Meanwhile, Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, all of which lean Republican, are set to gain seats. Texas’s gerrymander, in other words, foreshadows a change in national political power that is coming anyway.

by Azia Huq, London Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: The Ninth Congressional District in Texas, before and after this year’s remapping.

[ed. If you can't win fair and square, cheat. It looks almost certain that all national elections going forward will be a nightmare.]

The '3.5% Rule'

 How a small minority can change the world.

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.

In each case, civil resistance by ordinary members of the public trumped the political elite to achieve radical change.

There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. (...)

Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field. They primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals both within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities. A regime change resulting from foreign military intervention would not be considered a success, for instance. A campaign was considered violent, meanwhile, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, the destruction of infrastructure – or any other physical harm to people or property.

“We were trying to apply a pretty hard test to nonviolent resistance as a strategy,” Chenoweth says. (The criteria were so strict that India’s independence movement was not considered as evidence in favour of nonviolent protest in Chenoweth and Stephan’s analysis – since Britain’s dwindling military resources were considered to have been a deciding factor, even if the protests themselves were also a huge influence.)

By the end of this process, they had collected data from 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns. And their results – which were published in their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict – were striking.

Strength in numbers

Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.

This was partly the result of strength in numbers. Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed because they can recruit many more participants from a much broader demographic, which can cause severe disruption that paralyses normal urban life and the functioning of society.

In fact, of the 25 largest campaigns that they studied, 20 were nonviolent, and 14 of these were outright successes. Overall, the nonviolent campaigns attracted around four times as many participants (200,000) as the average violent campaign (50,000).

The People Power campaign against the Marcos regime in the Philippines, for instance, attracted two million participants at its height, while the Brazilian uprising in 1984 and 1985 attracted one million, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 attracted 500,000 participants.

“Numbers really matter for building power in ways that can really pose a serious challenge or threat to entrenched authorities or occupations,” Chenoweth says – and nonviolent protest seems to be the best way to get that widespread support.

Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable. (...)

Chenoweth admits that she was initially surprised by her results. But she now cites many reasons that nonviolent protests can garner such high levels of support. Perhaps most obviously, violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground. (...)

“There are more options for engaging and nonviolent resistance that don’t place people in as much physical danger, particularly as the numbers grow, compared to armed activity,” Chenoweth says. “And the techniques of nonviolent resistance are often more visible, so that it's easier for people to find out how to participate directly, and how to coordinate their activities for maximum disruption.”

by David Robson, BBC |  Read more:

Images: Getty Images

[ed. I'll be at the No Kings 2.0 rally tomorrow. As a rule, I tend to avoid these things since they mostly seem performative in nature (goofy costumes, dumb signs, mugging for the media, etc.), or devolve into violence if a few bad actors aren't immediately reigned in. But in this case, the issues threatening our constitution and democracy seem so great that merely voting every few years and writing letters isn't enough. I doubt it'll change anything this administration does or has planned, but maybe some other institutions (eg. Congress) might actually be scared or emboldened enough to grow a spine. I only wish they'd named it something other than No Kings (many countries actually support constitutional monarchies - Britain, Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Norway, Spain, etc. It's the absolute ones - now and throughout history - that give the term a bad name: think Saudi Arabia, Oman, North Korea, etc.). I'm especially concerned that we may never see an uncontested national election again if one party refuses to accept results (or reality).]

Golf Carts Have Taken Over Suburbia. Cue the Resistance.

A slow-rolling cavalry is conquering America’s public roads.

Golf carts are becoming street legal in one community after another as families ditch their minivans and SUVs when they want to run a quick errand or ramble around town.

Dan Pearson bought a six-seat cart this summer after the village board he leads in the Chicago suburb of East Dundee, Ill., approved the vehicles. As he drove through downtown on a recent afternoon, pedestrians gawked and diners waved. “Dude, I love it,” a man called out as Pearson cruised past.

“It’s fun to get out,” Pearson said. “People tend to talk to people in a small little cart as opposed to a big car or truck.”

But with the boom has come a backlash. Some residents of cart-friendly towns say slow drivers are clogging the streets and reckless ones are making them unsafe. They grumble about cart drivers, including tweens and young teens, speeding, swerving and treating the road like their own private parade route.

 
East Dundee Village President Dan Pearson was one of the first in town to get a registration sticker for his golf cart. He thought the open six-seater would be a good way to meet voters.

“We all hate you,” a Florida motorist snapped on TikTok when slow-moving carts on a coastal road clogged traffic in both directions. “Get off your golf cart and drive a regular car.” (...)

The momentum, however, belongs to the carts. Golf carts designed for the road have been around since the early 2000s, but demand has soared in the past five years. Mark Rickell, a sales executive at cart maker Club Car, estimated the total U.S. market for the vehicles at $5 billion, up from $1 billion before the pandemic.

“One thing you could do in Covid was get outside,” he said. “I think that really spurred on the popularity of the golf cart lifestyle.”

Many of today’s carts have little in common with old-school fairway ramblers. Street-ready versions usually come with seat belts, headlights and turn signals, and can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than $25,000. Manufacturers typically cap their speed at 20 or 25 miles an hour, though some owners say that can be boosted with a little tinkering.

 

Johnny Horn bought a four-seater this year that looks like a cruise ship crossed with a UFO.

It has a turquoise frame, white seats and orange rims, along with four-wheel drive for the rare occasions when it snows in his hometown of Gaffney, S.C. The dashboard has a built-in refrigerator. The sound system has 24 speakers, all of which can light up and pulse to the rhythm of the music.

“It’s like a parade,” said Horn, a Realtor who sometimes drives it to showings.

South Carolina law allows golf carts to travel on public roads with a speed limit of 35 mph or less and within 4 miles of the driver’s home. The vehicles don’t need a license plate but must have a permit. 

by John Keilman, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. All for it.]

A Slow Moving and Viral Civil War

The Trump occupation arrived in Chicago and Portland in full force this weekend. And with prominent Republicans like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller salivating on X about civil war, it seems likely that what we’re seeing in these two cities will soon be deployed to more blue states across the country. In fact, you could argue that a new kind of slow moving and very viral civil war has already started.

The plan was to federalize National Guard members already in Portland, but that was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge. So the Trump administration decided to get around the block by sending troops from other states to the city. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Trump administration is sending 400 Texas National Guard members and 300 California National Guard members to Portland and Chicago. “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Pritzker wrote on X. “America is on the brink of martial law,” Newsom wrote.

For those of you scratching your heads as to why sleepy Portland, Oregon, was chosen for the next stop on President Donald Trump’s occupation tour, it seems almost undeniable that it was picked for any reason other than it was a hotbed for Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Trumpism punishes anyone or anything that can steal its viral spotlight. And the White House has now activated every part of the MAGA ecosystem to make sure they control the attention economy as they storm Democratic cities.

And, right on cue, right-wing influencer Nick Sortor quickly made himself into the main character of the Portland occupation. On Friday, Sortor was arrested for disorderly conduct while making content at a protest in front of a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Now the Department of Justice says they’re investigating the arrest, and there was some chatter among right-wing influencers on X that there was even a briefly considered plan for ICE officers to personally yank Sortor out of jail.

As for what Sortor is actually filming, it’s exactly what you would expect. It’s the same kind of content-based aggression made popular by Charlie Kirk. Videos of left-wing protests chasing Sortor down the street while he screeches about how unhinged they are. And he has, obviously, made the rounds on Fox News.

A very dark lesson that right-wing influencers like Sortor have seemingly learned from Kirk’s death is that the more violent the situation they provoke, the harder the White House will respond. “Hey Antifa — just FYI: the more times you assauIt me, the higher the chances you have active duty Marines deployed to the streets of Portland by the end of the week,” Sortor wrote on X, offering himself up to the MAGA meat grinder. Anything to get those views, I guess!

The more malicious parts of the MAGA movement also know that these clashes, between citizens and the military, filmed by influencers, are a perfect venue for more explicitly violent intervention...

The Trump administration is not just occupying cities with soldiers and ICE officers, but creating flashpoints for propaganda. Every eventual showdown on the streets of a Democratic city is first teased by hysterical X posts from Trump administration members, Trump supporters and militias face off against local protesters, and then the chaos is livestreamed and clipped by right-wing influencers that just so happen to have the budgets to fly from city to city following the circus. And, of course, Fox News scoops up the best bits and packages them for viewers at home. Finally, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security does a victory lap, collecting the best footage for a stupid music video about how they’re keeping us all safe. It’s the exact same playbook that was used for Trump’s endless rallies during his first term. The Trump hurricane comes to town and viral content and political violence follows in its wake. The key innovation of his second term is figuring out how to both scale the localized MAGA frenzy beyond just him and, also, most importantly, figure out a way to force it on blue states.

by Ryan Broderick, 404 Media |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. An ecosystem of disinformation. See also: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland (NYT):]

***

To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. (...)

Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.

Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.

“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action...

“BREAKING,” Bo Loudon, a 19-year-old influencer and friend of Mr. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, wrote on social media. Ms. Noem “just stared down violently Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” he wrote.

The video attached showed Ms. Noem on the roof of the building looking down at a small clutch of protesters far away, one of them in a chicken suit.

The man in the chicken suit, Jack Dickinson, 26, who had been coming to the ICE building to protest federal immigration policies for months, said he was struck by the disconnect. Mr. Dickinson said he watched one of the pro-Trump influencers, Nick Sortor, film outside the ICE building, then heard the narration.

“He was talking about this looking like a third-world country,” Mr. Dickinson said as he surveyed a riverfront neighborhood of apartment buildings, coffee shops and an Italian restaurant popular for holiday meals and graduation parties. “It’s just clearly not.” (...)

Mr. Sortor was initially charged with second-degree disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor in Oregon, after he took a burning American flag from a left-wing demonstrator and a fight ensued. The response from Washington, D.C., was intense and immediate. Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Mr. Sortor had been “ambushed by antifa.”

For his efforts, Mr. Sortor found himself at the White House on Wednesday, as the president praised the actions of right-wing activists and pledged to dismantle antifa, a loose-knit group of anarchists whose presence in Portland has long angered Mr. Trump.

Mr. Sortor had been “assaulted in Portland by a flag-burning mob,” the president declared.

Mr. Sortor responded, “The Portland politicians literally are willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these antifa terrorists.”

Marc Lester, Anchorage, Alaska
via: Anchorage Daily News

Hawaiʻi Loves ‘Genki Balls’. New Studies Say They Don’t Work

A new two-year research project found the balls not only were ineffective, they might make water quality worse. Supporters of the effort don’t believe it.

In the past six years, several thousand elementary school students and other volunteers have tossed over a quarter million tennis ball-sized globs of soil, molasses and rice bran into the Ala Wai Canal in a valiant effort to help clean Hawaiʻi’s most notoriously polluted urban waterway.

The goal is to get those globs, known as “genki balls,” to release special sludge-eating microbes into the Waikīkī canal’s murky depths and boost its water quality. Since the effort started, canoe paddlers and others have at times observed clearer water and more fish. They’ve even spotted the occasional monk seal and an eagle ray.

But new research from Hawaiʻi Pacific University done on Oʻahu’s Windward side casts doubt on whether the genki balls actually led to any of that improvement — or if the novel approach that inspired the community is too good to be true. (...)

The balls, according to HPU Associate Professor Olivia Nigro and Assistant Professor Carmella Vizza, did nothing to improve water quality in the marsh canal. And in the aquarium tanks, the microbes the balls were supposed to release failed to appear in any meaningful way, the researchers said, plus the water quality actually got worse.

Specifically, phosphate levels were almost 20 times higher in the tanks with the balls than in tanks without them, Vizza said, and oxygen levels in the tanks with the balls fell by about 50%.

The nonprofit that organizes those cleanups, Genki Ala Wai Ball Project, is firmly pushing back against the research, saying insufficient genki material was used and its ball tosses into the Ala Wai remain effective. Yet one of the project’s leaders sold the balls used in the HPU study and recommended how the researchers should use them.

The HPU ecologists who completed the study don’t want to dampen any of the community enthusiasm. But far more rigorous study of the Ala Wai is needed, they say, to know exactly how the genki balls are impacting water quality there, if at all. (...)

If We Do This, We Can Do Anything

The Ala Wai, a 1.5-mile canal that developers carved across Waikīkī in the 1920s to sell real estate, has long been a stark symbol of how much urban runoff is affecting Hawaiʻi’s fragile watersheds. (...)

It now bears the brunt of storm debris from Hawaiʻi’s densest and most heavily populated watershed, in the heart of Honolulu. For decades, state officials have prohibited anyone from fishing or swimming in its waters.

In one high-profile 2006 incident, an Oʻahu man who fell in the Ala Wai died of “massive bacterial infection” following weeks of heavy rain across the state. Canoe clubs and high school teams regularly paddle up and down the canal and do their best not to huli, or flip over, into its murky waters.

... the Genki Ball Ala Wai Project launched with a goal of making the canal safe for swimming and fishing within seven years by deploying 300,000 balls. Genki translates to “health” or “energy” in English.

The key ingredient baked into every dry, cured ball tossed in the water is a trademarked substance called “EM,” short for “effective microorganisms.”

It was pioneered in the early 1980s by a horticulture professor in Okinawa, Japan, who combined naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria to help boost farm crop yields. Since then, people also found that they could take it to improve digestion and gut health.

by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: David Croxford

[ed. Ouch.]

Is America Ready for Japanese-Style 7-Elevens?

The Japanese parent company of 7-Eleven is betting billions of dollars that it can expand its business in the United States by making its convenience stores more like the food meccas they are in Japan.

Convenience stores, or konbini, are an indispensable part of daily life in Japan, known for high-quality fresh food — from seasonal bento boxes to egg salad sandwiches that the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once called “pillows of love.”

Leading the push to expand Japanese-quality fresh food to 7-Eleven in North America is Stephen Dacus, a Japanese American former Walmart executive who started as chief executive of Seven & i Holdings, the 7-Eleven parent company, three months ago.

Seven & i is under intense pressure. Over the past year, it has fended off a takeover attempt by a Canadian rival. When Alimentation Couche-Tard, the owner of Circle K convenience stores, withdrew its $47 billion bid in July, Seven & i’s stock price collapsed. Mr. Dacus and his team were left to to prove they can deliver growth and returns on their own.

Now, facing a stagnant and highly competitive retail market in Japan, Seven & i’s growth is expected to come from overseas. The strategy could hinge, industry experts say, on Mr. Dacus’s ability to successfully introduce Japanese-level quality foods in the more than 13,000 stores that 7-Eleven operates, franchises and licenses in North America.

“Whether it’s hot food or cold food or any kind of food, we have to lean into how we improve the quality and the experience,” Mr. Dacus said in an interview on Friday. “That’s what Japan does extraordinarily well.”

Over the next five years, Seven & i is considering investing more than $13 billion to expand overseas. In the United States, this means initiatives like refreshing existing sites, adding more than 1,000 in-store restaurants and building a network of companies to provide more of its 7-Eleven brand prepared foods.

“And we’re launching the egg sandwiches,” Mr. Dacus said. They are, he noted, the top item purchased by the millions of American visitors descending on Japan each year and visiting 7-Eleven stores.

The sandwiches are made with the fluffy Japanese “milk bread,” and a team in Texas worked with Japanese suppliers to learn how to produce it in the United States. Milk bread and Japanese mayonnaise give the egg sandwiches “the heavenly pillow thing,” Mr. Dacus said.

Seven & i’s new fresh-food push in the United States orients it squarely in a place already stocked with competition.

“Prepared food is increasingly what sets different convenience brands apart,” said Jeff Lenard, a vice president at the National Association of Convenience Stores. Prepared goods have relatively high profit margins, particularly important for convenience stores that face declining sales of traditional staples, including tobacco and gasoline, Mr. Lenard said.

In the United States, 7-Eleven is the biggest convenience store chain, but the market is fragmented. Tens of thousands of store operators compete for fresh food, not only with one another but also with fast-food retailers.

Mr. Dacus, 64, has worked in retail for more than three decades. He was on the Seven & i board of directors when he was tapped to spread overseas the qualities that make 7-Eleven so loved in Japan.

In the past, he said, “we took a low-risk, low-return approach.” Management was too focused on Japan and too hands-off with operations in other countries. “We could have been much more aggressive,” he said. “The flip side of that is there’s that much opportunity out there for us as we shift our focus.”

Industry experts and Mr. Dacus acknowledge, however, that there are a number of reasons the Japanese convenience store model cannot easily be replicated in the United States.

Two decades ago, the Japanese convenience store FamilyMart tried to introduce its concept to the West Coast, but the business struggled to adapt. The company found it difficult to convince Americans that a convenience store could be more than a gas station selling snacks. By 2015, all the stores had closed.

Challenges include the difficulty of transporting fresh food to locations in the United States far from city centers. In Japan, the average convenience store receives multiple fresh-food deliveries per day. Beyond that, “it’s the ways in which they maintain stock and freshness, attention to detail,” said Gavin Whitelaw, executive director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard.

by River Akira Davis, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Kentaro Takahashi

[ed. Can't wait. See also: Why 7-Eleven and Other Convenience Stores in Japan Are So Special (NYT).]

Institutions

Institutions and a Lesson for Our Time from the Late Middle Ages. No institution of politics or society is immune to criticism. I have met no one who would really believe this, even if notional liberals and notional conservatives both have their protected favorites. But the spirit of the time is leading directly to the destruction of institutions that are essential for our cultural, social, political, intellectual, and individual health and survival. This is a two-way street, by the way. Both wings of the same bird of prey do it throughout the Neoliberal Dispensation in the Global North and a few other places.

I am currently reading The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance by Bernd Roeck (transl. Patrick Baker, 2025). At 949 pages and 49 chapters, I’ll complete the task in a month at 1-2 chapters per evening. I hope. We are still only just past Magna Carta (1215) in Chapter 12: “Vertical Power, Horizontal Power.” Both axes of power are essential in any society larger than a small group of hunter gatherers. Here is Professor Bernd on institutions:

Institutions – that dry term, which we have already encountered in the discussion of universities and in other contexts, denotes something very big and important. Institutions are what first allow the state to become perpetual; without them, it dies. If advisers appear as the mind and memory of the body politic, and the military its muscles, it is law and institutions that provide a skeleton for the state. They alone are capable of establishing justice over the long term. Only they can set limits to power and arbitrary will. They preserve knowledge of how to achieve success, as well as reminders of mistakes to be avoided in the future. No one knew this better than Cicero, who emphasized the Roman Republic’s special ability to gather experience and make decisions based on it. Before the advent of modernity, no section of the globe created institutions as robust and effective as those that developed in medieval Latin Europe. Moreover, these institutions were highly inclusive. The guaranteed protection under the law and the right to private property, provided education, and were relatively pluralistic (i.e., horizontally structured).

Indeed, Rome owed its success to its institutions. They then provided the states consolidating during the Middle Ages with models of compelling rationality.

This is not the place to quibble about details. But those who want to destroy our political, cultural, social, and educational institutions rather than improve them or refocus them along lines upon which reasonable people will agree? These unreasonable people are not to be respected:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought (Russell Vought, OMB Director) said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Well, it is working and the lack of imagination and humanity here is striking. These “bureaucrats” are the scientists who make sure our food is safe and that the chemical plant on the waterfront is not dumping its waste into the tidal creek. They are the scientists who hunt down the causes of emerging diseases. They are the meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center who have gotten so very good at predicting the paths of cyclones. They are the men and women who sign up Vought’s parents for Social Security and Medicare. They are the people of the IRS who sent me a substantial tax refund because I overpaid, something pleasant I did not ask for nor expect. They are also the professors who teach engineers how to build bridges that will bear the load and teach medical students the basics of health and disease. And yes, they are the professors who teach us there is No Politics But Class Politics. The key here is that all of this is debatable by reasonable men and women of good will.

To paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the institutions funded by our taxes are the cost of civilization. Perhaps we will remember this ancient wisdom before it is too late? Probably not. The urge to burn it all down, instead of rewiring the building and replacing the roof, is strong.

by KLG, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Your Review: Dating Men in the Bay Area

[ed. Funny, sad. Long]

I. The Men Are Not Alright

Sometimes I’m convinced there’s a note taped to my back that says, “PLEASE SPILL YOUR SOUL UPON THIS WOMAN.” I am not a therapist, nor in any way certified to deal with emotional distress, yet my presence seems to cause people to regurgitate their traumas.

This quirk of mine becomes especially obvious when dating. Many of my dates turn into pseudo-therapy sessions, with men sharing emotional traumas they’ve kept bottled up for years. One moment I’m learning about his cat named Daisy, and then half a latte later, I’m hearing a detailed account of his third suicide attempt, complete with a critique of the food in the psychiatric ward.

This repeated pattern in my dating life has taught me three things:

• I am terrible at small talk.

• Most men are not accustomed to genuine questions about their well-being, and will often respond with a desperate upwelling of emotion.

• The men are not alright.

This is a review of dating men in the Bay Area. But more than that, it’s an attempt to explain those unofficial therapy sessions to people who never get to hear them. It’s a review of the various forms of neglect and abuse society inflicts upon men, and the inevitable consequences to their happiness and romantic partnerships. (...)

If half the population isn’t provided proper care and attention, there’s no hope to heal the problems facing the rest of us. Thus the pain of men needs a massive increase in attention.

Yet not everyone is ready to listen to men, so I’ll try to act as a translator, using my identity as a feminist twenty-something woman as a bridge. I’ll explain the pain that’s so obvious to me, yet hidden to many others, and try to provide some insight for both genders on how these issues impact dating, and what can perhaps be done to address them.

II. The Lost Generations...

(...)

In modern America, a minority of boys are born swaddled in communities that actively guide them through the process of becoming a man. However, most of those communities are religious and conservative, adjectives that the Bay Area actively repels. You won’t find many of those men around here.

Instead, the men in the Bay’s dating scene mostly represent the modern majority category–men who weren’t provided a clear map by their immediate community, and instead depended on society at large to teach them about manhood. (...)

And as for religion? Absolutely not. Throw it in the trash and light the trashcan on fire.

The first rule of the Modern Map to Manhood is that you don’t talk about the Modern Map to Manhood. Defining “manhood” is reinforcing gender roles and thus strengthening the patriarchy. Men are just supposed to “be decent people,” end of story.

…except it’s not, because there are still certain manners and conventions that men in particular are supposed to follow. And, like it or not, the core of your identity in modern society still largely revolves around your gender.

So if you squint hard enough at the murky sea of conversation about gender, you can make out the following steps to become a man:

• Reject toxic masculinity.

• Be your authentic self!

• Provide for and protect others.

• Stop obsessing over “being a man.”

• Don’t expect anything in return for fulfilling these requirements.

This would be demanding a reward for meeting the bare minimum requirements, and that would make you gross and entitled.

This is the new guidance we’re tossing at young men. It’s the equivalent of taking away GPS from a driver and handing them a map scrawled by a half-blind cartographer tripping on acid.

The obvious result is getting disastrously lost; the only question is which type of lostness will impact a man.

III. Patterns Within the Pain

Over the years, I’ve developed mental categories for the varieties of lostness men are faced with. Each one comes with its own unique troubles that stymie the health of men and the success of their relationships.

There is no science behind my categories; they are merely my attempt to find patterns within the misery of others. Their boundaries are fuzzy, so men may belong to multiple categories, or may transition from one to another.

I find it impossible to review dating in the Bay Area without utilizing these categories. My experiences with each category are wildly different; some cause me to walk away from a date feeling sad, some scared, some hopeful.

Below, I offer a description of five of the most common categories I’ve encountered, the paths that lead to these particular forms of lostness, and what happens to men who fall into these categories. I also offer my review of dating men from each category and discuss how their lostness impacts relationships. (...)

But more importantly, I hope this framework can help people to have more empathy for men who fall into these categories. The public commons are filled with lamenting about “floundering,” “immature,” “selfish,” “hateful” men who are “toxic to society.” While much of the concern is deserved, channeling it into spite and disgust toward individuals is a waste of energy.

These men did not wake up one day and intentionally decide to be filled with anger, anxiety, and apathy toward society; society failed them, and when they tried to point this out, their concerns were shrugged off.

Our broken system for raising young men deserves spite and disgust; the individuals trapped in that system deserve empathy and help. I hope this framework can help to shift conversations about these lost men toward finding solutions, rather than blaming young men for their troubles.

So without further ado, I present my categories of lostness.

IV. The Categories of Lostness

THE MAN WHO IS NOT

The Man Who Is Not isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to get lost, at least not if you knew him when he was young. He was a pretty normal kid with a pretty normal childhood. Good friends, decent family, stable home life. Yeah, there were a few rough spots, but who didn’t have those?

He’s not exactly a stand-out success, but he gets good enough grades that get him into a good enough college. He’s reluctant to go; he doesn’t enjoy school all that much. But his parents push him to get a degree, and after he arrives, he decides college life isn’t half bad–he makes some friends, dates a couple girls casually, and enjoys plenty of parties.

The worst stressor seems to be the nagging question of his degree concentration and what career he’s going to pursue. He’s changed his mind three times already, unsure what he really wants from his life, and his guidance counselor and parents are starting to lose their patience.

He finally settles on Economics. It’s certainly not his passion, but he’s always been good at math, and this seems like a decent way to make money from that talent. He still has no idea what he wants from life, but at least now he’ll have time and resources to figure it out.

He graduates with his bachelors and takes a job as a data analyst at a big bank in the city. He’s excited; he’s been promised by mentors and Hollywood and Instagram that this is going to be a magical time of his life, full of new adventures and self-discovery.

What he finds isn’t nearly so exciting. Work is boring and draining, consisting of the same tasks every day with a workload that grows ever larger, and he has zero emotional attachment to the end product. He quickly starts to suspect he chose the wrong major, or maybe the wrong job, although mentors shrug off his concerns.

Work isn’t supposed to be fun, they say. Get used to it.

It’s not uplifting advice, to say the least. He tries to distract himself from his miserable job with his social life, but it’s not as easy as he expected. All his college friends moved to different cities, and their texts grow increasingly rare. The city is huge, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, but it feels like they're a swarm of NPCs.

Few people talk to him unless he approaches first, and the dialogue is always transactional. He would like to buy a cup of coffee. They would like to know where the bus stop is. He wants to sign up for a gym membership.

Sometimes he tries to steer the conversations to more personal topics, and he manages to get a few phone numbers and promises to hang out sometime. But when he texts them, they never reply.

He’s lonely. He doesn’t like admitting it, not even to himself, because it feels pathetic. After all, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a perfectly pleasant individual, and people have said he’s smart and funny, and he’s never struggled to make friends in the past. Yet the thousands and thousands of people who surround him couldn’t care less about his existence, and their apathy begins to grow a heavy lump of despair within him. (...)

THE MAN WITH A PLAN

The Man With a Plan is the inverted twin of the Man Who Is Not. Rather than struggling to figure out what he wants, he knows exactly what his goals are: he’s going to get good grades, which get him into a good school, which earns him a good job, which finances a good house in a good neighborhood and attracts a good spouse who provides good kids. He knows this is what he wants, because it is the creed that has been repeated to him since he was in elementary school.

He does not know who he should be; his copy of the map is just as butchered as any other. But he knows what he needs to do, and that is what matters. After all, we’re merely the sum of our actions, right?

Life is smooth sailing for him. His mentors are right–hard work pays off, and once he graduates with that valuable degree, he lands an excellent job in exactly the field his parents always encouraged him to pursue. The money is great, and soon so is his apartment and his car.

Everything seems to be falling into place. He downloads a dating app and gets a fair amount of matches, one of whom turns into his girlfriend. She’s pretty, and successful, and shares his goals of settling down in a good neighborhood to have some kids.

His parents are thrilled. All their hard work has paid off, just as they expected.

He knows he should also be thrilled, too, but he’s not. There’s a vague sense of unease within him. It’s haunted him since he was young, sometimes dragging his thoughts to depressed and anxious places, although he always assumed it was because he just hadn’t completed all the steps in the plan. His work was unfinished, and thus so was he.

Yet as he checks off more and more boxes on the list of tasks to attain a good life, that feeling seems to be growing in strength, not decreasing.

He shrugs it off, reassuring himself that it’s just work stress that’s making him overthink things. Everything in his life is good. There’s no reasonable cause for despair, so he just needs to let those thoughts go.

Years pass, and he works hard to juggle work and his romantic relationship and his friends, although his friends seem to take less time these days. They’re getting married, having kids, and becoming too busy to hang out. When they do get together, it’s usually for an activity–an escape room, a movie night, karaoke. Once the event completes, people scurry off to other obligations, leaving little time for deep conversations.

But he has his girlfriend, at least. She’s just as pretty and smart and ambitious as ever. She’s also getting increasingly anxious for a ring, dropping hints that eventually start to sound more like demands.

This should excite him, but instead it just stirs the formless dread within him. He chastises himself for it–he needs to grow up and learn to commit. He’s too old to be yearning for the life of a bachelor. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. (...)

And his girlfriend… when he really thinks about it, there’s little in common between them except the same checklist of goals. She’s a wonderful partner, but is she a wonderful partner for him?

He doesn’t know. For so long, he’s convinced himself that people are just a sum of their actions, and if he just has a solid plan, he’s going to be a good person with a good life. Now he realizes that’s a lie. (...)

His girlfriend says they should sign up for some wine-and-paint nights. He says they should break up.

He quits his job, too. He hates it; it consumes his time and sucks at his soul, leaving behind a robotic husk. He’s done with that bullshit. Done.

His friends suggest he’s having a mental breakdown and needs help. It confirms his suspicions: they don’t know him at all. If they did, they would see that he is helping himself. He’s finally taking the time to find and understand himself, to discover his purpose.

For a few weeks, he’s elated and excited to be on this new journey. But then the existential dread begins to creep back in.

He’s never really done anything without a plan. And he’s still not entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish; he knows he wants to “find himself,” but he’s unclear on what that requires, and the self-help books he consumes seem to have muddled and contradictory answers. (...)

He feels empty. His unknown future starts to feel like a crushing concern, rather than an exciting adventure.

His few remaining friends suggest that maybe he should try to get back together with his girlfriend, maybe try to piece together his old life. It’s not too late, they assure him.

But he doesn’t want that. He misses sex and cuddling and having someone to tell about his day, but he doesn’t miss her. It’s probably because he’s fundamentally broken, and she deserves better than him. And as for his job, he can’t bring himself to possibly go back, despite his rapidly dwindling bank account.

He turns to the dating world, hoping maybe finding a solid partner will help him solve his brokenness. Yet he seems to keep attracting women with similar forms of emptiness within them, and a void that joins with a void is still just as empty.

But he’s not going to give up. He has to find someone, something to give him purpose. Otherwise, his whole life and all his work and all his pain has been pointless. And he’s not sure he could deal with that outcome.

Dating a Man With a Plan:

In my experience, Men with Plans are the most common form of lost men in the Bay Area. I feel like half the men I go on dates with fit into this category to some degree.

These men also tend to be intensely attracted to me, or rather, to my lack of a conventional plan. I’ve stumbled through a highly unusual path, somehow getting lucky enough to gain a solid understanding of myself, pursue my passions, earn a solid living, and enjoy a happy life along the way.

My story is like crack to them. They tell me they want to be more like me; they insist they want to see more of me. There seems to be a mistaken belief that they can absorb my personality through osmosis if they date me, absolving themselves of the requirement to figure out their own path and personality.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

August 25, 2025: Federal Assault on American Cities - This Week, Chicago

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what's happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they're saying you're trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”

Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”

The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”

Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city's sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”

But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Notes From An American |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh; via

[ed. A speech for the ages, summarizing nicely where we are and how we got here (and echoed by others (below). I think this country is primed for a massive disobedience event. It would be a good bookend to Woodstock (and provide some atonement for what we've done to this world, our lives, and future generations). Democracy Day(s): D-Day.]

via:

No Place Like Nome

Book review: ‘No Place Like Nome’ explores the outpost and its deep historical relevance

Nome seems both unlikely and inevitable. Perched on the Seward Peninsula, it’s the westernmost sizable city in Alaska and the United States. Spawned by a gold rush, it somehow survived the frenzy despite its location, which can only be called remote.

And yet, in deep time it’s hardly remote at all. The region was once a way stop along the Bering Land Bridge, the pathway through which humans migrated from Asia to the Americas. As water levels rose and the continents broke apart, interlinked cultures continued trading across the waters. And except for a few short decades during the Cold War, barely a blip on the timeline since people arrived, it has remained a crossroads ever since.

Nome itself is barely 125 years old, but beneath it lies a vast history, one that longtime Alaska author Michael Engelhard scratches the surface of in his latest book. “No Place Like Nome” is a meandering but thoroughly engrossing collection of observations and explorations that wander along the streets of the small outpost and then outward, far beyond the city limits.

“Few environments that are not wildlands have inspired me so as a writer,” Engelhard tells us in the first paragraph of his book’s introduction. And across some 300 pages, he shows us why.

“No Place Like Nome” is not a history in the formal sense, and Engelhard makes little to no effort at offering such a narrative. A writer who is at his best when using the essay as his form, he sets a general theme with each chapter, and then lets his account follow his mind wherever it goes.

But first he sketches the scene, providing readers who perhaps have never been there with a striking sense of what it means to live in Nome. Through a cascading series of memorable sentences, he takes us on a spiraling tour of all that follows.

The city sits so precariously upon the shore, he writes, that “It’s a farmer’s blow away from sliding into the sea.” The air abounds with such constant movement that “If the wind ever stopped, you’d do a face plant.” The region’s polar bears are “white ghosts on plate-size paws.”

And on he goes. Engelhard is a wordsmith with few equals among Alaska’s many talented writers. Were it not for copyright considerations and lack of space, I’d simply submit the entire introduction for a review and leave it at that.

Engelhard, a naturalist at heart, can’t help but look to the lands and flora and fauna found on them in the chapters that follow. But in what amounts to his first book focused primarily on humans, he explores how they have, for untold centuries, availed themselves of animal and plant life. Most of that time by the necessity of survival, more recently through the luxury afforded by spare time and imported food and goods.

And so the first formal chapter leads us to the long-extinct wooly mammoth, once found from Europe to North America. Stalked by ancient generations of humans, many surmise that such predation is what drove the beasts to extinction. Yet it lingers still, its remains emerging from the ground upon which descendants of those early carnivores now walk.

This is the farthest back Engelhard travels, but in subsequent chapters he frequently ties his topics to the land. Thus we learn about foul-smelling wild sage, seen as a medicinal herb. We visit with weavers who collect qiviut, the soft under wool of musk oxen, the warmest natural fiber on Earth. The clothing that was necessary for protecting bodies, crafted from skins and fur, is dissected. And we find out that jade, unlike gold, held tremendous value long before Europeans arrived on the scene.

In other chapters, Engelhard introduces us to some of the often eccentric people who found their way to Nome and left their mark.(...)

And of course there’s Nome’s founding days, evoked early in the book before Engelhard moves on to other topics of equal — if not greater — importance.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Nome almost was,” Engelhard tells us in a breathless chapter about the town where America’s Wild West played its last hand. Amid a deluge of highly quotable lines, he provides an anecdotally-detailed description of the manic gold rush that birthed a ragtag city on ground that was almost barren a year earlier. The collective madness, he explains, “resembled a page from one of those I-Spy busy picture books, with the search object being sanity.” 

by David A. James, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:
Image:Nome, Alaska. Photographed on Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (Loren Holmes/ADN)

[ed. Nome doesn't look anything like this picture (lots more mud) but is still an interesting, quirky, and slightly dysfunctional town surrounded by some really stunning country. Did a study there back in the early 80s and have been back a few times, once spending a week there one night (shuttling between the Nome Nuggest and Breakers Bar).]