The land defenders of the world are right: To save ourselves, we must protect the forests.

I have to say, I really enjoy the metaphor of a Jenga tower, for the way the world is going. Blocks are being removed to build the top to new heights, with no concern for the overall instability being created. Sea level rise, chemical pollution, habitat destruction, extreme weather, fascism, decaying capitalism, new diseases – things are feeling pretty unstable right now. To extend the metaphor, a lot of what we are trying to do is to add blocks at the bottom to re-stabilize things. Some of that is social – adding new “stabilizers” like universal healthcare, free mass transit, reliable access to power, housing, food, and water, and so on. And some of it, as we so often discuss here, is ecological – actively working to add new “blocks” through things like rewilding, while also working to prevent the blocks that remain from being taken like so many others to add to the top.

Specifically, to disentangle ourselves from the metaphor, we need to preserve existing, and especially old wilderness. This is not some kind of “it was better before humans messed everything up” nostalgia or something. As I’ve written about before, ancient trees bring resources and stability that younger forests simply lack. The research we’re looking at today underscores the importance of old-growth trees when it comes to drought resistance:

A new analysis of more than 20,000 trees on five continents shows that old-growth trees are more drought tolerant than younger trees in the forest canopy and may be better able to withstand future climate extremes.

The findings highlight the importance of preserving the world’s remaining old-growth forests, which are biodiversity strongholds that store vast amounts of planet-warming carbon, according to University of Michigan forest ecologist Tsun Fung (Tom) Au, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Global Change Biology.

“The number of old-growth forests on the planet is declining, while drought is predicted to be more frequent and more intense in the future,” said Au, lead author of the study published online Dec. 1 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“Given their high resistance to drought and their exceptional carbon storage capacity, conservation of older trees in the upper canopy should be the top priority from a climate mitigation perspective.”

The researchers also found that younger trees in the upper canopy—if they manage to survive drought—showed greater resilience, defined as the ability to return to pre-drought growth rates.

While deforestation, selective logging and other threats have led to the global decline of old-growth forests, subsequent reforestation—either through natural succession or through tree planting—has led to forests dominated by increasingly younger trees.

For example, the area covered by younger trees (<140 years old) in the upper canopy layer of temperate forests worldwide already far exceeds the area covered by older trees. As forest demographics continue to shift, younger trees are expected to play an increasingly important role in carbon sequestration and ecosystem functioning.

“Our findings—that older trees in the upper canopy are more drought tolerant, while younger trees in the upper canopy are more drought resilient—have important implications for future carbon storage in forests,” Au said.

“These results imply that in the short term, drought’s impact on forests may be severe due to the prevalence of younger trees and their greater sensitivity to drought. But in the long run, those younger trees have a greater ability to recover from drought, which could be beneficial to the carbon stock.”

It’s good that younger trees are able to bounce back, and it shows the validity of re-foresting, but the unique properties of old-growth forests are another reason why, as I said last time I wrote about this, it’s important to defend what we have. The work that land defenders are doing in Atlanta, and other places around the world, benefits all of us, even if we never, ever actually walk under those trees, or have to deal with the cops that want to cut them down. When it comes to ecosystems on the other side of the world from you, think of them like your city’s water treatment plant, or the power plant, miles and miles away, that’s generating your electricity. The way those ecosystems affect the air and water does actually impact your life, albeit indirectly.

The one upside of inheriting a world that’s been ravaged by greed for the last couple centuries, is that there are so many ways we could start improving things. Some of that can be done directly, right now, and I have immense respect for those who put their bodies between our environment and destruction, as well as those that provide them with material support. It’s also worth noting that in some cases, their work puts them in clear, immediate danger, especially when they’re indigenous.

We’ve been fortunate, in that the “Jenga tower” of our world had a lot of blocks to remove, so it’s taken a while, for the instability to become obvious. It’s also very good that, while much has been lost, there’s still a fair amount of land out there that’s relatively “untouched”, in addition to the various “younger” ecosystems. It sometimes bugs me that I keep coming back to the need for political change, but at the end of the day, most of the big problems in the world lead back to our political and economic status quo. Support land back, support land and water protectors, and do what you can to build collective power and move other people to the left. We’re blessed with an abundance of opportunities for making the world better, but a lot of them are time-limited, so there’s no time to lose!

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Potions and politics: How to change the world?

The novel on which I’m currently working is a fantasy, set in your standard quasi-medieval world, following the adventures of a young mage as he is a witness to, and participant in Historical Events. I’ve got a few different motivations for writing this story. The first, and most important, is that pretty much the entire plot just sort of came to me over a period of a couple weeks, and I wanted to see how it would actually turn out. The second is that I’d been looking to try out a different approach than the one I took with Exits and Entrances, to make for a more enjoyable read.

The third motivation is political. Well, sort of. Making a good story is my primary goal, but is it even possible for a writer to avoid putting anything of their own opinions into their work? Maybe, but I doubt it would be good. No, my writing is a part of me, so much of me will probably show up in it. Of particular relevance today, is the notion of regime change in fiction. I think it’s fairly common for a novel of this sort to tell the story of some sort of political crisis, by the end of which the world has either gone back to a desirable “normal”, or has changed for the better. The most common version of that that I’ve seen is replacing a bad monarch with a good monarch, and pretending that solves things.

I get why – it’s easy, it’s familiar to the reader, and it’s just how things have been done in the history we were taught. It doesn’t sit well with me, though, and I don’t particularly want to write a story that ends with “good” authoritarianism, so part of my work in writing this is studying the history of political change. How does it happen? We tend to think of revolutions, wars, and coups, all of which tend to have their own hierarchies, but are there other options?

Well, in my fantasy world, there will be, but while there will be magic, monsters, and mysticism, I find that that sort of thing goes best when it’s tethered to our day-to-day lives by threads of realism. Some of that lies in the sensory experiences of life, but I’m far from the first writer to include machinations of politics and power that resemble those of the real world in some ways.

All of that is why I’m glad we have people like Andrewism, exploring the ways in which a fictional society might go through major political change:

The history of policing and mental health show the pointless cruelty of forced “treatment” policy in NYC

I find it hard to trace a timeline of my views on mental health. I had a phase, in my teens, in which I viewed antidepressants and the like as bad, though I’m not sure I could have explained why. I also think there was a time when I just accepted “insane asylums” as just being a necessary part of life, and assumed the people running them and working at them were there to provide the best care they could. At this point, I consider that part of modern “mental health treatment” to be a part of the prison system, at least in the United States.

Some of the change comes from reading The Day the Voices Stopped, by Ken Steele, in college. I think there’s a degree to which, because we only ever experience the world from our own perspective, growing up requires gaining a real understanding of the fact that everyone else is a person, just like we are. In some ways, I feel our society discourages that form of personal development, and actively encourages us to see other people as not fully human, when they fall outside of “normal”. This absolutely includes the politics of race and gender, whether it was pathologizing Black people’s desire for freedom as “Drapetomania”, using the diagnosis of hysteria to medicalize and control women, or declaring queer people to be mentally ill. As well-meaning as I was, in hindsight there was a degree to which I saw people with some mental illnesses as being somehow broken, or less fully human. I don’t think I ever actually supported institutionalization – I had some awareness that there were problems there – but I don’t think I would have had a real answer for people who framed mentally ill people as a “burden on society”, or other such eugenical shit. I probably would have focused instead on a somewhat condescending view of having a duty to care for them. I also think that extended into other forms of disability, but again, I find it hard to remember exactly what I used to believe on this stuff.

Reading Steele’s autobiography changed my perspective, and made it impossible for me to ignore the horrors of mental institutions. I didn’t have an alternative in mind, but I no longer had any doubt that the way things had been done was bad. That was the point at which I began to understand the need to empower people with mental disability and/or illness to make decisions in their own lives. It feels bad to say that it took me that long, but I don’t think it occurred to me that someone with schizophrenia, for example, might have valid thoughts, opinions, and requirements for their own care and lives.

I’m far less sure at what point I came to understand how mass incarceration and white supremacy intersected with psychiatry, but I do remember the point at which I realized that it was so much a part of the fabric of reality in the United States that it barely got reported on. I was having a discussion-turned-argument with acquaintances who shall remain anonymous, and we were talking about racism in the U.S. criminal justice system. I brought up a case that I’d recently heard about, and the other person insisted that if it had really happened, they would have heard about it. After all, we live in a free country, right? People don’t just get locked up for not fitting a profile, and for stating plain facts about their own identities, right? Can you even imagine? It would be a national outrage if the cops just grabbed a “sane” person, locked them up, and drugged them against their will without even checking whether their claims were true.

Right?

Well, sort of. There was some coverage of it, because it really was a sensational story. In 2014, Kam Brock was pulled over “on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana”. People commenting on the story at the time noted that she was a black woman driving a BMW in Harlem, and that she was really pulled over for Driving While Black. This explanation is made stronger, in my view, by the fact that while they didn’t find any drugs on her or in her car, they impounded it anyway, and when she went to pick it up the next morning, they decided she was too emotional, handcuffed and drugged her, and threw her in a mental hospital.

Next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out… I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.

She responded pretty reasonably, in my opinion. She told them who she was, and asked to be released.

For eight days.

They had the means to verify what she was saying, but instead they dismissed all of it as delusions, forced her to take powerful psychoactive drugs, and demanded that she convincingly lie about herself before she be released:

According to the New York Daily News, a treatment plan for Ms Brock at the hospital states: ‘Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.’

This was torture. They imprisoned a person, and for nine days they told her she was insane. They forcibly drugged her, and denied her reality over, and over and over again for days. And then, one day, they gave her discharge papers, and put her out the back door of the hospital. A few days later, she got a bill for $13,000 worth of “treatment”. The idea of holding anyone criminally responsible for this nightmare was apparently never even on the table, so she went with the option left to her – she sued them.

And lost in 2019.

Several jurors said that Brock was less credible than three doctors — Elisabeth Lescouflair, Zana Dobroshi and Alan Labor — and NYPD Officer Salvador Diaz, who all determined she was in need of mental health treatment.

The jurors noted that Brock did not call her father or sister to the stand. Both, according to testimony, had told Harlem Hospital staff that Brock had recently been acting erratically.

“We view this verdict as a total vindication for the defendant officer and doctors who sought to help Ms. Brock through her troubling episode. The jury rejected any notion that the actions of these officials was anything but appropriate under the circumstances,” a Law Department spokesman said.

While at the hospital, Brock was injected three times with powerful anti-psychotics. The experience, she said, left her traumatized. She frequently broke down during the six-day trial.

Jurors deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. At the beginning of deliberations three were in Brock’s favor and five were against, Rella said.

Brock began sobbing as the verdict was read.

“It’s reasonable for them to diagnose me with bipolar even though I’m telling the truth?” Brock said through tears.

“What am I supposed to do? I’m crazy because of this verdict.”

In the United States of America, it is apparently legal for police to decide that you’re “in need of medical treatment”, restrain, drug, and imprison you, and for doctors to keep you prisoner, keep you drugged, and demand that you deny reality because they said so. Not only is it legal, it’s apparently barely newsworthy. I could only find two articles online that followed up on Kam Brock’s story, and I needed a VPN to read them because they’re geo-restricted to the U.S., like so much other “local news” that’s not considered worth a larger platform. How can this be?

Well, I suspect that, aside from the ever-present white supremacy in our law enforcement system, it’s because it’s considered perfectly acceptable to do all of that to “crazy” people. Solitary confinement, assault, sexual assault, some of the most powerful psychoactive drugs available – all are just routine parts of how our society deals with mental illness, to the point where all of this can happen, triggered by some cop deciding to hassle the black woman in the expensive car, and it’s barely newsworthy that a court, as Brock said, ruled that she was “crazy”.

It’s even more horrifying when you consider what this means for the rest of Brock’s life. It’s now a legal fact that she’s “crazy”. The torture inflicted on her was ruled by the courts to be just fine. That means that if this, or something like this happens again, there is legal precedent that it’s OK to imprison and torture this woman. Any legal dispute she’s in in the future will have this hanging over it. Any time she has a negligent or vindictive landlord, or a dispute with a neighbor, or is wrongfully fired, it could make that nightmare happen again. Crying seems like a pretty reasonable response.

Remember how we saw, over the last few years, the way white women have been able to weaponize white supremacy to sic cops on black people? Brock now has to deal with that, plus the legal declaration that she’s crazy. Practically anyone has the power to get her locked up at any time, for any reason, because some cop decided to pull her over. That doesn’t mean it will happen, but the fact that it can says very bad things about what sort of “freedom” people in the United States really have.

It’s made worse by the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, mental health has always had a political dimension to it, and just as white supremacy didn’t end when the Civil Rights Act was passed, the politicization of sanity and the stigma against people with mental illness – sanism – is also very much alive and well within the systems that govern the people of the United States.

All of this is worth talking about in its own right, but I also wanted it to set the scene a little. Our society dehumanizes people with mental illness, portraying them as anything from pitiable to demonic, so long as it’s not fully human. I think this is one of those prejudices that exists within all of us, at least a little, because of the society in which we live. It doesn’t help that the way the world is set up can make life extremely difficult for some neurotypes, making them into disorders or disabilities by context. This is very similar to how non-white races are often treated, and I think that establishing that connection, and giving the example of Kam Brock, is useful in going into this next story:

Rights groups are sharply condemning New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ Tuesday directive requiring local law enforcement and emergency medical workers to respond to the intertwined mental health and homelessness crises with involuntary hospitalizations.

“If the circumstances support an objectively reasonable basis to conclude that the person appears to have a mental illness and cannot support their basic human needs to an extent that causes them harm, they may be removed for an evaluation,” states a city document.

I don’t know how useful evil is, as a concept, but I’m finding it hard to think of a better description for this. Our society routinely and deliberately denies people access to their basic human needs, for money. An economic advisor who is respected in the U.S. government actually said that they should try to increase unemployment to curb “inflation” that seems to be mostly caused by outright greed. This is the context in which law enforcement and mental hospitals will be judging whether people who have been forced to live on the streets are mentally well enough to be allowed any say over their lives. “Evil” seems about right.

There are efforts to push back against this, but it often feels like the governing philosophy in the U.S., when it comes to those at the bottom, amounts to “the beatings will continue until morale improves”. The notion – put forward by Mayor Adams – that this is about helping people would be laughable if it weren’t so cruel. Being forcibly committed, drugged against your will,  and “treated” by people who will call you delusional for telling the truth, won’t make anyone’s health better, mental or otherwise. Part of me feels like that shouldn’t need to be said, but I know that I used to think it was at least somewhat OK.

I think it may even be that a majority of people still take the view that “sometimes it’s necessary”, but who decides what’s necessary? Why is mental illness – a category that we know has been, and continues to be politicized – something that can remove someone’s right to autonomy? If someone is a danger to others, then sure, the community can take steps to defend itself, but if they’re incapable of not being that way, then what’s the point of punishing them? And if they are capable of change, why the fuck would we think that incarceration and torture would help?

This new policy in NYC is horrific, and the more you know about the history and practices of the system carrying it out, the worse it looks. These are people. People who’ve been forced into about the worst situation it’s possible to be in, by a society that treats poverty as a moral failing. These are people who are routinely discussed as sub-human monsters. These are people who are routinely treated as sub-human, and this law is making that worse.

Yesterday, I talked about how each step on the path I want us to take involves making life better for humanity in the short term. This is an example of that. We’ve been taking the punitive/carceral approach to mental illness for centuries, and it has not worked. Likewise, relying on the grinding misery of poverty to get people to “do better” has never worked. A housing first policy, on the other hand, treats people as people, focuses on meeting needs, not demanding that people prove themselves worthy of existence, and it works.

Housing First Improves Lives
Study participants who were housed through HFCM showed substantial improvements across multiple dimensions of their lives:

High Housing Retention. Housing Retention was high overall (73%), but highest for those in housing first permanent supportive housing (HF PSH) (80%). HF PSH secures housing through a permanent subsidy and builds stability through the ongoing availability of wrap-around services.

Better Quality of Life.  Quality of life scores improved 30% after housing.

Fewer Mental Illness and Trauma Symptoms. Mental health symptoms decreased 35% and trauma-related symptoms decreased 26% after housing.

Reduced Substance Use. Housing first does not require sobriety or abstinence. However, after housing, the percent of housed participants that used any drugs fell 37%; and the number of days in the last month that housed participants used alcohol to the point of intoxication fell an average of 3 days more than it did for unhoused participants. Other substance use measures did not change, challenging criticism that housing first and harm reduction encourage substance use.

Making this approach the default in the U.S. would not solve all of our problems, but unless you view the maintenance of this hierarchy, complete with those being crushed at the bottom, as a good in its own right, then this is an obvious step to take. This isn’t some kind of “too good to be true” con, it’s just a way to do things that is, quite simply, better. Would it cost more money, when you account for all the long-term impacts of the policy? Who the fuck cares?

It’s not like we’re short on resources. Congress just increased the Pentagon’s budget again, and we’re going to pass one trillion dollars per year soon, not even including the less direct ways money is funneled into the military-industrial complex. Elon Musk is currently burning billions of dollars in an apparent effort to prove the meritocracy wrong, Bezos is trying to get infrastructure rebuilt to fit his “super-yacht”, and Bill Gates screwed with the education system because the arrogant jackass thought he knew better than people who study education.

We are not short on money. We are not short on resources. We know how to make the world better, it’s just that the people in power don’t want it to get better. Not if it threatens their power. Why should we care how cost-effective it is to meet people’s basic needs? Why is that treated as a valid question, in the face of society as it exists, not to mention the money that will be spent kidnapping, assaulting, and drugging unhoused people in NYC?

But, since it’s relevant in the world as it is, I’ll also mention that there’s evidence that a policy of doing the right thing also happens to be “economically sound”, in that it won’t cost rich people anything.

I’m angry about this, in case you couldn’t tell. Everywhere you turn, there’s another way in which the world is set up to cause immense suffering for no damned reason, other than the shitty ideas of shitty people. There are folks fighting back, of course, mostly through local organizing. Sometimes it’s standing up to the cops to stop them from “sweeping” an encampment, sometimes it’s feeding people, but a key part is listening to the people in question, not making decisions for them.

The current political momentum in our world is pushing us towards a future that is both much worse than our present, and also much worse than it needs to be. Policies like this are, of course, an attack on both unhoused people, and mentally ill people, but it’s more than that. It will also almost certainly hurt black people more than other groups, and non-white people more than white. It will be weaponized against trans people, who are more likely to be unhoused because of bigotry that cops tend to share. It will be used, to justify horrific abuse of anyone the cops don’t like, just as they’ve done with every other tool, weapon, and policy they’ve been handed. It seems designed to “solve homelessness” by warehousing people, and using drugs to make it easier.

I wouldn’t call the Democratic Party fascist, the way I do the GOP, but bipartisan U.S. policy around houseless people has always leaned towards eugenics (when not just going there outright). Combine that with the current fascist movement, and this feels similar to the detention immigrant detention facilities that were set up under the Obama administration, and expanded and made worse under Trump. This new policy is bad, but it can get much, much worse, and instead of trying to avoid that, Democrats like Eric Adams seem to be trying to move things farther in that direction.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Imagine being Ben Shapiro

I’m working on something fairly grim right now, so I revisited this old video for the entertainment value. It’s an interesting breakdown not just of Ben Shapiro’s ludicrous critique of John Lennon’s Imagine, but also of the song itself, and what makes it unique. I also like this because it makes me think about how my own political journey, thus far, has changed my perspective of the song, and my understanding of how it relates to the world.

 

Starbucks Strike: Don’t cross the picket line!

I don’t cover labor action as much as I feel I ought to. I’m not sure why, I just keep not doing it. I wouldn’t say that this is a change in that pattern, but we can hope that I’m being too pessimistic.

Starbucks has responded to this new labor movement with relentless, probably illegal union-busting, further highlighting the need for a strong, organized working class, to push back against the capitalists. The workers have decided to strike for three days all across the country in response, and have asked people to actively not buy Starbucks gift cards. Don’t go to Starbucks this weekend, and don’t buy their gift cards. The ruling class has shown that they’ll let the world burn, as long as they get to rule the ashes, which means that we need to build collective power to make the changes we need. This is one part of that effort, so stand in solidarity.

Washington D.C. to eliminate bus fares starting this summer

Public mass transit is the beating heart of pretty much every major city. It makes commuting affordable, cuts down on traffic and pollution, and allows visitors to navigate cities without the stress and danger of driving. It provides freedom of movement in a very immediate and concrete way, with none of the “access to x (for a price) bullshit. Well, except, that it does generally have a price, doesn’t it? It’s usually not hugely expensive, but if you’re really in a bad situation, any price may be more than you have. It is my view that mass transit should be free at the point of service, by default. I also think that should include the cross-country high speed rail that I would like everyone to start building now. Still, I accept that that may be a year or two off, so for now, I’ll take this wonderful news from Washington, D.C.:

Other cities, including Los Angeles and Kansas City, Missouri, suspended fare collection during the height of the pandemic to minimize human contact and ensure that residents with no other travel options could reach jobs and services at hospitals, grocery stores and offices.

But D.C.‘s permanent free fare plan will be by far the biggest, coming at a time when major cities including Boston and Denver and states such as Connecticut are considering broader zero-fare policies to improve equity and help regain ridership that was lost with the rise of remote and hybrid work. Los Angeles instituted free fares in 2020 before recently resuming charging riders. Lately LA Metro has been testing a fare-capping plan under which transit riders pay for trips until they hit a fixed dollar amount and then ride free after that, though new Mayor Karen Bass has suggested support for permanently abolishing the fares.

Analysts say D.C.’s free fare system offers a good test case on how public transit can be reshaped for a post-pandemic future.

If D.C. demonstrates that it increases ridership, it reduces the cost burden for people who are lower income and it improves the quality of transit service in terms of speed of bus service, and reduces cars on the road, this could be a roaring success,” said Yonah Freemark, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. “We just don’t know yet whether that would happen.”

The $2 fares will be waived for riders boarding Metrobuses within the city limits beginning around July 1. In unanimously approving the plan last week, the D.C. Council also agreed to expand bus service to 24 hours on 12 major routes downtown, benefiting nightlife and service workers who typically had to rely on costly ride-share to get home after the Metro subway and bus system closed at night.

A new $10 million fund devoted to annual investments in D.C. bus lanes, shelters and other improvements was also approved to make rides faster and more reliable.

I’m a fan of this trend, and even more pleased to see that the DC city council seems to be allocating money for improving things, on top of turning the busses into a genuine public service. I don’t see how it could possibly not reduce the burden on poorer people. I don’t know whether it will increase ridership a whole lot – sometimes you just cut costs elsewhere to make sure you can get to work – but I suspect there will be a measurable increase.

Unfortunately, some people who drive cars do so specifically because they have money, and because they want to avoid mixing with the common folk. I don’t know what proportion of DC traffic is made up of those people, but it wouldn’t shock me to learn that it’s pretty high. The article I’m quoting is from Fortune, so of course they had to get the opinion of an extremist neoliberal think tank:

Peter Van Doren, a senior fellow at the D.C.-based Cato Institute, said the plan risks high costs and mixed results, noting that the opportunity to improve ridership may be limited because bus passengers have been quicker to return to near pre-pandemic levels. He said government subsidies to help lower-income people buy cars would go farther because not everyone has easy access to public transit, which operates on fixed routes.

“The beauty of automobiles is they can go anywhere and everywhere in a way that transit does not,” he said. “We don’t know the subset of low-income people in D.C. where transit is a wonderful option as opposed to not such a wonderful option.”

The Cato Institute advocates for the privatization of public services, has worked hard to protect tobacco industry profits, opposes climate action, opposes civil rights, opposes women’s rights – so, you know, they’re mainstream U.S. conservatives, and because they have money backing them, we apparently have to take them seriously. Thankfully, they’re not getting their way on this. They might try to get Congress to interfere, but it seems like there’s actual momentum in the right direction. The most predictable hurdle to clear will be the question of paying for it.

Still, free fares can be a tough choice for cities. “If the consequence of a zero-fare program is you have less funds to invest in frequent service, then you’re going backwards,” Guzzetti said.

In Kansas City, which began offering zero-fares for its buses in March 2020 and has no planned end date, officials said the program has helped boost ridership, which has risen by 13% in 2022 so far compared with the previous year. The free fares amount to an $8 million revenue loss, with the city paying for more than half of that and federal COVID aid covering the rest through 2023, said Cindy Baker, interim vice president for the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority, who describes the program as a success.

The program has eliminated altercations between passengers and bus drivers over fares, although there have been more instances of passenger disputes due to an increase in homeless riders, according to the agency. Baker said the transit agency has been adding security in response to some rider complaints.

To me, revenue is not a complicated problem – impose a tax that increases with wealth/income. Ideally, it should be considerably more than the expected cost of running things, so that the system can be improved, more people hired for cleaning and maintenance, and maybe they can even pay to make sure nonviolent conflict resolution is a big part of the training for all that added security.

Seems like that would create jobs, increase consumer spending, and generally make life better for everyone, not to mention nobody would be late to work because they couldn’t afford the bus. Still, conservatives like the folks at the Cato Institute seem to think that making life better for people – especially via public spending- is evil. We’ve got a long way to go before the capitalists served by organizations like that don’t have the power to interfere in governance, but every step we take that makes life a little easier for the general public gives us a little more power as individuals. That doesn’t mean we will use that slack to rise up and change the world, but it gives more room for the possibility.

I expect that the D.C. experiment will be a huge success in all the ways I care about, and that no amount of success will persuade those ideologically opposed to public services. Fortunately, we don’t need to persuade them, we just need to beat them.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Atlanta land defenders charged with “domestic terrorism”

Back in May, I wrote a little about the movement to defend the Atlanta Forest. This is a grassroots effort to stop a section of forest to make a fake city for police training. From what I can tell, a facility like that is generally used for tactical training – group exercises that amount to training to wage war on everyday people. In my view, this would be a bad use of even a reclaimed landfill, let alone land that is currently a forest.

The struggle is ongoing, and of course it’s one-sided. Fighting back against the police would allow them to escalate through their bloated armory, so all the people can do is put their bodies in the gears of the machine, to try to stop it from rolling over the forest. They’re camping out in the trees, because that makes it less likely for the trees to be cut down. For this, they have been called terrorists:

Five people arrested at the planned site of Atlanta’s new public safety training center have been charged with domestic terrorism, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced Wednesday.

What’s happening: State and local law enforcement clashed Tuesday with protesters occupying the DeKalb County forest where Atlanta wants to build a public safety training center.

Why it matters: The confrontation is the latest in the long-running occupation aimed at blocking the Atlanta Police Foundation’s proposed complex, which activists have dubbed “Cop City.”

Details: Accounts differ as to what took place in the deep woods off Key Road in unincorporated DeKalb County. Sean Wolters, a media contact for the resistance effort, told Axios that as of 10:30am activists camping in trees were being hit with tear gas and pepper balls.

  • The Atlanta Community Press Collective, a news outlet supportive of the resistance effort, posted a video apparently shot by one of the activists and reported police firing “chemical irritants” in their direction.

An Atlanta police spokesperson said officers and “local, state, and task force members removed barricades blocking some of the entrances to the training center.” He provided no additional information.

  • Alison Clark, a local resident who leads a group advising the center’s development, told the AJC the activists shot fireworks at first responders and then law enforcement entered the property.
  • Wolters denied this account to Axios, saying an apparent operation by APD to remove people from the trees sparked the clash.

As the Axios article notes, this situation is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. I write often about how ecosystem health is key to our survival, and we’re still very much in a system that doesn’t even see it as a factor to consider. If someone with money and power wants to clear-cut an area for pointless, or even harmful reasons, the question asked is whether they have ownership of that bit of land. The only time there’s a delay on it is if there’s a protected species there (which became protected because of political activism), or there are people there, standing in the way.

I support the effort to stop “cop city”, but I fear that there will be more violence from the police; at the end of the day, violence is their main point. Even so, these confrontations are necessary if we want real change, and I think this highlights how the priorities of our society must be changed, or we’ll be carried to destruction by the momentum of the systems we currently have.

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Video: History alla PragerU

All my energy today has gone into prying a couple lines of fiction out of some crevasse in my brain, so here’s a video. It’s not new, but I find it interesting and a little entertaining, and hopefully you will as well. It’s about how conservative propagandists use history in their work.

Edit: Managed to get the crowbar down in between a couple brain wrinkles, and actually found a couple thousand words of the novel hiding in there, so that’s nice.

Charges over Flint Water Crisis dismissed on procedural grounds

The Flint water crisis of 2014 happened as a result of a Michigan democracy crisis that had started years earlier. Flint was one of the primary victims of the way the auto industry abandoned Detroit, and had been struggling financially for years. Rather than actually working to alleviate poverty and build up the community, Flint’s Republican governor decided to go with the too-popular lie that authoritarianism is more efficient and effective than democracy or other forms of self-governance. In an act of open defiance of democracy, the Michigan legislature passed a law, which the governor signed, re-instating the emergency management powers that the people of Michigan had resoundingly and directly voted to remove:

Following his election in 2010, Snyder and the Republican-controlled state Legislature expanded the powers of emergency managers. Michigan voters, through a November 2012 ballot proposal, repealed the controversial law.

But less than two months later, Snyder signed replacement legislation that he said improved upon the former law. It offered four pathways for struggling schools and municipalities: A consent agreement, Chapter 9 bankruptcy, mediation or emergency manager.

Michigan’s emergency manager law is facing scrutiny in federal court, where plaintiffs argue that the law is unconstitutional because it disproportionately targets black communities and continues a “narrative of structural and strategic racism.”

Emergency managers were given near-total power over their jurisdictions, and could outright ignore local elected officials. This was the setting in which the decision was made to switch Flint’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, to save money, resulting in the poisoning of thousands of people, and potentially permanent brain damage for an entire generation of Flint’s children:

 

While it’s still difficult to know for sure, it seems like the decision to ignore warnings about the need for treatment to prevent corrosion was also apparently made to save money.

“As we all know, the water plant itself is operating fine, but without corrosion control chemicals, it had a detrimental impact on the lead pipes,” Adler said.

The city “made the decision” not to use corrosion controls “because they didn’t think they needed it,” Adler said. The state Department of Environmental Quality failed to ensure the chemicals were added, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency didn’t alert the public when an employee first raised a red flag.

“It was a failure at every level, all along the way. This was a perfect storm of bureaucratic mismanagement of a public health issue,” Adler said.

A previously released email showed that Flint water plant supervisor Mike Glasgow was also concerned about the conversion to Flint River water just days before the city would formally close a valve that had delivered Detroit water for nearly 50 years.

“If water is distributed from this plant in the next couple weeks, it will be against my direction,” Glasgow wrote in an April 17, 2014, email to officials at the state Department of Environmental Quality, suggesting management above him had its own “agenda.”

When we hear this person talking about “a perfect storm of bureaucratic mismanagement”, I think it’s worth noting that this was a spokesperson for Republican governor Rick Snyder. The GOP has a long-standing hostility towards the general concept of “government”, and they lean heavily on the notion that bureaucracy is both always bad, and only a government problem. Pretty much any time I get into an internet fight about healthcare systems, I have to explain to fellow USians that all the paperwork they have to deal with from health insurance corporations is also bureaucracy. With the USPS, the deliberately unpleasant tax system, under-funded schools, and many other areas of government, conservatives have a record of using sabotage not just to allow their corporate overlords to get away with harming people, but also to support their antigovernmental rhetoric by making the government worse on purpose. They like when there’s a huge government catastrophe like this, because it’s tailor-made for their perennial antigovernmental talking points.

And as always, the only parts of the government they actually dislike, are the ones that make life better for the general population. What’s more, their constant efforts to spread corruption and dysfunction also provide a degree of protection for themselves. There’s a quote that I’ve shared before:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

It’s from a comment by a composer named Frank Wilhoit, and while I don’t know how I feel about the broader argument he was making, this definition is useful all by itself. The conservative project of dismantling government, and then using the dysfunction they have caused to advocate for further dismantling, serves to both remove protection from the out-groups, and remove bindings from the in-groups. This was a crime of conservative, authoritarian governance, for which thousands of people will be paying for the rest of their lives. All of it happened under the authority and supervision of Rick Snyder, the Republican governor who signed the law bringing back the emergency management system his constituents had just rejected.

And a judge has thrown out charges against Snyder on procedural grounds:

A district judge in Genesee County tossed a pair of misdemeanor charges levied against former Gov. Rick Snyder for his involvement in the Flint water crisis, citing previous court rulings that state prosecutors incorrectly used a “one-person grand jury” to indict Snyder.

Snyder, who was governor in Michigan from 2011 to 2019, was charged with two counts of willful neglect of duty by a public official. Genesee County Judge F. Kay Behm signed an order remanding the charges Wednesday.

Behm’s order technically does not dismiss the charges, but sends them back to a lower court for dismissal.

Behm cited a Michigan Supreme Court ruling from June which stated government prosecutors erred in 2021 when they had a circuit judge serve as a “one-man grand jury” to indict Snyder and the other officials. She also noted circuit court rulings to dismiss charges against other former state officials which cited the Supreme Court ruling.

Snyder is the latest former official to have charges tossed related to the Flint water crisis, although state prosecutors, led by Attorney General Dana Nessel, have vowed to continue seeking charges related to the case. In October, charges for seven other former state and Flint officials were dismissed, although the state’s prosecution team has indicated it will appeal the decision to dismiss the charges.

In a statement, the prosecuting team said it plans to appeal Behm’s order.

“As we have reiterated time and again, rulings up to this point have been on process alone — not on the merits of the case,” the unattributed statement says. “We are confident that the evidence clearly supports the criminal charges against Rick Snyder, and we will not stop until we have exhausted all possible legal options to secure justice for the people of Flint.”

Snyder’s lawyer, Brian Lennon, said in a statement the prosecution efforts have been “amateurish and unethical.”

“The state has already wasted millions of taxpayer dollars pursuing meritless misdemeanor charges and this case should now be considered closed,” Lennon said. “The prosecution team’s statement saying it will appeal this ruling is further proof that they intend to continue their efforts to weaponize the court system against their political enemies.”

They always claim persecution, but I can’t help but note that the United States will hold people for weeks, months or even years without trial, often over petty shit like suspected shoplifting, but poisoning thousands of people? Well, that is generally done by members of the in-group, whom the law protects, but does not bind, and years later, the “criminal prosecutions” section of Wikipedia’s water crisis article shows an awful lot of dismissals.

More and more, I’ve been realizing that the United States is a conservative country, in that it is set up, at every level, to maintain racial and economic disparities. It’s not just the legacy of redlining, or environmental racism, or civil asset forfeiture, or white supremacy in law enforcement, or racism in the courts, or racism in legislation – it’s also a parallel infrastructure designed to smooth the way for those at the top (who are almost all white men). When you’re at the bottom, when the system screws up, you pay the price. At the bottom, you can spend years in prison even when everyone in the legal system agrees on your innocence. At the top, you can steal millions, and get a finger wag as you’re gently told to give it back.

And race is absolutely a part of this. Flint, MI is a predominantly Black city, and that fact is a big part of how this whole situation came to be in the first place. The system does actively harm poor white people as well, of course, but they are much more likely to be treated as part of the in-group that gets protection and exemption from the law, if their crimes and conduct merit honorary membership. That option is generally not available to people who aren’t white (though exceptions are sometimes made for wealth, power, or allegiance/usefulness to wealth and power). I think George Zimmerman – the man who murdered Trayvon Martin – is a good example of that. He had no authority, and not much in the way of political and economic power, but he adopted the role of being a member and defender of the in-group, and is therefor in the clear. Kyle Rittenhouse also comes to mind. There’s always some reason. Zimmerman was probably over-charged, given the available evidence. Was that an honest mistake by the prosecutors? Who can say? But the overall pattern is suggestive, to me, of more than just coincidence. They say justice delayed is justice denied, and it seems like we’ve seen nothing but delay on this case.

I’m glad to hear that prosecutors will keep trying, but the fact that this is where they’re at, so many years later, demonstrates the degree to which our “justice” system exists to serve and maintain hierarchical order, not any meaningful notion of justice.

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The Lancet: Racism is a global public health hazard.

If you start to dig into the history of white supremacy, you start to realize that it’s still very much a part of the global political and economic system. It’s not the only force at work, of course, but it has left scars on both land and people, and it’s built into a great many aspects of how the world works. It’s not always something you can see, if you don’t have enough context for what’s in front of your eyes, but it’s there, and it continues to do real harm. There are, of course, people who are racist, and who cause harm deliberately for that reason, but it goes far beyond that.

White supremacy is a global public health problem. To some degree, we already knew that, right? Redlining – the racist housing policies that we’re told are in the past – continues to disproportionately expose communities of color to things like lead poisoning. Environmental racism is a known, global phenomenon, but I’m starting to think that we ought to view white supremacy as a sort of pollutant in its own right, or maybe a dangerous building material, like asbestos. The problem is that while the asbestos industry has definitely fought to keep making money (and keep exposing people to the stuff), the social infrastructure of white supremacy was designed to cause harm to people from the very beginning.

And for all many powerful people like to pretend racism isn’t a big problem, it turns out that it is a global public health crisis.

First, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are fundamental determinants of health globally. The misclassification of race as a biological (rather than social) construct continues to compound health disparities. Four research papers show how discrimination leads to poorer health outcomes and quality of care. In a study of over 2 million pregnancies across 20 high-income and middle-income countries, neonatal death, stillbirth, and preterm delivery were more likely among babies born to Black, Hispanic, and south Asian women. Another shows how theft of land and destruction of traditional practices of Indigenous Brazilians are associated with adverse cardiometabolic outcomes. Among people diagnosed with brain tumours in the USA, Black patients were more likely to have recommendations against surgical resection, regardless of clinical, demographic, and socioeconomic factors, suggesting bias in clinical decision making. In Australia, everyday discrimination contributes to half the burden of psychological distress experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The logical conclusion is that racism and discrimination must be central concerns—for practitioners, researchers, and institutions—to advance health equity.

This issue also shows how systems intersect to perpetuate inequities. Racism converges with systems of oppression, including those based on age, gender, and socioeconomic status, to exacerbate or mitigate experiences of discrimination. The core problem is an inequality in power, historically rooted but still operating today. It shapes environments and opportunities. Specific recommendations for health include increasing cultural safety and diversity in the health-care workforce; co-designing with affected communities health-care systems that are more flexible, accessible, and welcoming; and strengthening Indigenous self-determination and land rights. A four-paper Series shows that social equity can be promoted best through interventions that target structures and systems, particularly through radical rights-based legal and political measures, led by affected communities. These are important lessons for health care, education, research, funding bodies, and government.

This report tries to quantify the material harm done by racism, and crucially draws attention to the fact that race is a social construct, and that pretending otherwise is itself harmful. It’s good to see research like this being done, and it’s good to see it being published in The Lancet. For all its mistakes, the journal is still well-respected, and I find it encouraging to see such a publication talking about the importance of self-determination, radical measures, and efforts led by affected communities.

As ever, this knowledge means little by itself. We already knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that racism, prejudice, and the infrastructure of white supremacy do ongoing harm, and that knowledge has not helped us stop it. What does make a difference is when people band together and use their collective power to demand change, or better yet to start making that change themselves. This is yet another example of justice delayed being justice denied. The way the British royal family clings to its stolen jewels may be the most glaring example of this, but the reality is that while the rich and powerful may be pay lip service to notions like justice and equality, they will do everything they can to obstruct both. Whether it was the broken promises to former slaves, the broken treaties with Native tribes, or the punitive debt imposed on newly “independent” colonies, justice has never been served, and that has compounded the harm, and re-inflicted the wounds on generation after generation. Do not trust to fairy tales about history having a moral arc – this will not stop unless we make it stop.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!