Happy International Bee Day! Have a documentary about wild European bees!

Work on the novel continues, so in honor of International Bee Day, I wanted to share this documentary about Europe’s wild bees. When people talk about the bees dying, it’s specifically the wild bees that are really suffering, so I think it’s worth learning a little about them. I have some wildflowers growing in planters (finding a place for them turned out to be unreasonably difficult), so I’ll share some pictures of those as they begin to flower. It’s hard to say how much my efforts will help, if at all, but I’m far from alone in making the effort, and it’s nice to do at least something concrete, even if it’s not much.

 

They’re just like me! Hammerhead Sharks Hold Breath for Deep Dives

So, I don’t know a whole lot about fish. I can identify a few, and I know about cool stuff like that warm-blooded fish, or the fact that fish aren’t real, but I don’t know, for example, how their gills actually function. I did not know, for example, that it’s apparently possible for sharks to hold their breath?

This was a complete surprise!” said Mark Royer, lead author and researcher with the Shark Research Group at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. “It was unexpected for sharks to hold their breath to hunt like a diving marine mammal. It is an extraordinary behavior from an incredible animal.”

Shark gills are natural radiators that would rapidly cool the blood, muscles and organs if scalloped hammerhead sharks did not close their gill slits during deep dives into cold water. These sharks are warm water animals but feed at depths where seawater temperatures are similar to those found in Kodiak Alaska (around 5°C/40°F), yet they need to keep their bodies warm in order to hunt effectively.

“Although it is obvious that air-breathing marine mammals hold their breath while diving, we did not expect to see sharks exhibiting similar behavior,” said Royer. “This previously unobserved behavior reveals that scalloped hammerhead sharks have feeding strategies that are broadly similar to those of some marine mammals, like pilot whales. Both have evolved to exploit deep dwelling prey and do so by holding their breath to access these physically challenging environments for short periods.”

Marine mammals hold their breath because they can’t breath water. The sharks have no problem breathing, but the “air” is so cold down there that they’re better off holding their breath. I’d always had the vague impression that fish breathing was even more reflexive than human breathing, since gills don’t “hold” water, but I suppose it makes sense that with so much musculature going on, they’d have control over their gills. I’m now wondering if the hammerheads living around the Sharkcano do the same thing to keep from overheating or burning their gills sometimes.

Beyond the fun of learning something new about hammerhead sharks, I also appreciate this article for giving us a window into how scientists are able to figure this sort of thing out:

The research team discovered this unexpected phenomenon by equipping deep-diving scalloped hammerhead sharks with devices that simultaneously measured their muscle temperature, depth, body orientation and activity levels. They saw that their muscles stayed warm throughout their dive into deep cold water but suddenly cooled as the sharks approached the surface toward the end of each dive. Computer modeling suggested that hammerhead sharks must be preventing heat loss from their gills to keep their bodies warm during these deep-dives into cold water.

Additionally, video of a scalloped hammerhead shark swimming along the seabed at a depth of 1,044 meters (more than 3,400 feet) showed its gill slits tightly closed, whereas similar images from surface waters show these sharks swimming with their gill slits wide open. A sudden cooling in muscle temperature as scalloped hammerhead sharks approach the surface at the end of each dive suggests that they opened their gill slits to resume breathing while still in relatively cool water.

“Holding their breath keeps scalloped hammerhead sharks warm but also shuts off their oxygen supply,” said Royer. “So, although these sharks hold their breath for an average of 17 minutes, they only spend an average of four minutes at the bottom of their dives at extreme depths before quickly returning to warmer, well-oxygenated surface waters where breathing resumes.”

Thermal regulation by cold-blooded animals has always fascinated me. When I was a volunteer at the New England Aquarium, I saw sea turtles that had ended up in too-cold water, and gotten internal frostbite, which is one horror I’m glad I don’t have to worry about. I’ve always though that being unable to internally regulate temperature was limiting, and in some ways it definitely is. Simply having food allows us to comfortably function in a pretty wide temperature range, and by adding clothes (or thicker fur/feathers if you’re not human), you can expand that range pretty cheaply. It seems, however, that I’ve been underestimating our room-temperature brethren. I would imagine this sort of thing is easier with a larger body, but I’m now curious what other tricks there might be for accessing places that “ought” to be too hot or too cold.

 

The image shows a school of scalloped hammerhead sharks, photographed from below. The sharks seem to be mostly silhouetted, but you can see the sunlight, filtered blue by the water, reflecting off their sides. Photo uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ryan Espanto

The image shows a school of scalloped hammerhead sharks, photographed from below. The sharks seem to be mostly silhouetted, but you can see the sunlight, filtered blue by the water, reflecting off their sides. Photo uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ryan Espanto

Video: The Weimar Fallacy

With the rise of fascism in the United States, a lot of people have been comparing the current era to the Weimar Republic, in the years prior to Nazi rule. I think it’s a reasonable comparison to make, and I’ve made it myself. I think there are things we can learn from studying that history, but it’s also worth remembering that 21st century US is not, in fact Weimar Germany. The Three Arrows video I posted last August goes into both similarities and differences, and it’s definitely worth a watch, but I like the Lonerbox video below, as an explicit discussion of the differences.

I’m used to thinking of the United States as a young country, and in some ways it is, but it’s worth remembering that as states claiming to be democracies go, it’s quite old. The band Rammstein put out a song called Deutschland a little while back which made the point (among other things) that for all Germany can trace its history back for centuries, it seems like it’s always a very young country. Germany as we know it today is younger than I am, and it was preceded by the era of a divided East and West Germany, which was preceded by the Nazis, which was preceded by Weimar, which was preceded by the empire, each being not just a different regime, but in many ways a different country. To quote Deutschland, Germany is “so young, and yet so old.”

This video digs into what went on during the short years of the Republic, and how, in many ways, it’s nothing at all like what’s happening in the US today.

Potential Pollinator Hints at New Frontiers in Froggery!

If I asked a random person to name a pollinator, most people would probably default to “bees”. This is perfectly reasonable. Bees play a huge role in human life, and the decline in wild bees has rightfully caused a great deal of alarm. Today, however, we’re going to step back from the horrors of the world, and instead look at remarkable news from the wonderful world of pollination. Die-hard fans of plant sex will already be aware that pollinators come in all shapes and sizes. There are plenty of insects other than bees that pollinate, and a number of birds and mammals, but I have to admit that until today, I had never heard of a frog acting as a pollinator!

The image shows golden-brown frog with a pinkish-white belly and throat, clinging to a flower and chowing down on it. From Scientific American: The Xenohyla truncata tree frog was observed eating various plant parts and having pollen stuck to its back, pointing to a possible role in pollination. Credit: Henrique Nogueira

The image shows golden-brown frog with a pinkish-white belly and throat, clinging to a flower and chowing down on it. From Scientific American: The Xenohyla truncata tree frog was observed eating various plant parts and having pollen stuck to its back, pointing to a possible role in pollination. Credit: Henrique Nogueira

On rainy nights on the verdant coastal plains outside Rio de Janeiro, groups of tree frogs sometimes gather around the pearly white flowers of the milk fruit tree. But while most tree frogs are on the prowl for night-flying insects, one species is after the sugary nectar in the flowers. The tiny, orange Xenohyla truncata’s sweet tooth might make it the world’s first known pollinating amphibian. And the discovery adds to growing evidence that we need to broaden our understanding of which animals act as pollinators beyond the well-known birds and insects.During a visit to a spot near the Brazilian town of Armação dos Búzios in December 2020, researchers witnessed a group of the frogs—commonly known as Izecksohn’s Brazilian tree frog—feeding on milk fruit. The stomach contents of museum specimens had previously shown that the species is one of the few amphibians in the world to eat fruit, says team member Carlos Henrique de-Oliveira-Nogueira, a biologist at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. The researchers saw one of the frogs wiggle into a flower in search of nectar, then emerge with pollen clinging to the secretions on its moist back. This led them to suggest that the amphibians might play a role in carrying pollen from bloom to bloom, aiding the tree’s reproduction. The team’s findings recently appeared in Food Webs. “Some species are photographed in flowers, but nobody’s ever seen a species interacting with a flower,” de-Oliveira-Nogueira says.

So far, they haven’t proved that the frogs do pollinate, but they have shown that the potential is there. To me, it seems more likely than not that these frogs must pollinate the plants at least sometimes, whether or not they play a major role in the milk flower’s continuation as a species. Apparently testing that is the next step, as the researchers plan to enclose flowers in cages to exclude frogs. If the caged flowers don’t get pollinated, then either they depend on the frogs, or there’s something else that’s frog-sized or bigger, that the researchers haven’t considered. I’m holding out for a snake, because that would probably be the weirdest option.

There are also questions about the frog’s back secretions. Do they interact with the pollen, beyond providing a sticky surface? As the researchers say, they could actually be damaging the pollen, in which case, maybe the caged flowers will do better? Or maybe they damage the pollen, but the plant still depends on the frogs, despite that. I expect we’ll probably hear more about this in the future. Not only is this a potentially exciting discovery, it also gives a great excuse to post pictures of frogs in flowers.

The image shows a golden-brown frog (fading to yellow, at the toes), face-first in a white flower. You can just see the edge of one of the frog's bulbous eyes behind the out-of-focus bit of flower in the foreground of the picture. From Scientific American: X. truncata within a Cordia taguahyensis flower.

The image shows a golden-brown frog (fading to yellow, at the toes), face-first in a white flower. You can just see the edge of one of the frog’s bulbous eyes behind the out-of-focus bit of flower in the foreground of the picture. From Scientific American: X. truncata within a Cordia taguahyensis flower.

Video: The “Darwin’s Finch” of Mammals

So, last April, I posted a video about tenrecs. They’re neat little creatures that live in Madagascar, that I’ve like since I was a kid. I’m not certain, but I think I first read about them in the magazine Ranger Rick. When I say “like”, I think it’s worth noting that I mean in an aesthetic sense. If I “liked” them by learning about them, I probably wouldn’t have made this post.

I’ve always thought of tenrecs as insectivores – basically a form of shrew, but given their location, I suppose I should have known better. It turns out that they’re in the very, very small group of placental mammals that have a cloaca (apparently some actual shrews have one, which I also did not know). One way in which they’re very different from shrews, is that they have a slower metabolism, which means that while some shrews can starve to death within a 24 hour period, tenrecs, presumably including ancestral tenrecs, could survive the 400 kilometer sea journey from mainland Africa to Madagascar. I called them the “Darwin’s Finch” of mammals in the title, because since arriving on that island, they’ve branched out into a surprising diversity of body forms and ecological niches. The upside of neglecting to learn everything about organisms I like, is that I get to keep learning cool new facts about them, and take some of you along for the ride!

Video: Are Giraffes OP?

I’m focused on finishing the first draft of my current novel this month, so there’s a decent chance that I’ll have a few more days on which I end up not having much of a blog post. All of this is to say, I’m going to leave you with Tier Zoo, to explore the question of whether or not giraffes are overpowered.

How “AI” Technology Can Dramatically Increase Research Speed

While I’m still a bit leery of the art, I think my real problem with most of the stuff we’re calling “AI” is the context in which it exists, same as with other forms of automation. There’s also a reasonable concern about the energy requirements of this technology, but today we’re going to look at one of the was in which it could be a huge benefit to all of us.

The development of computing machines in the 20th century made a lot of things possible, including new avenues and scales of research. The climate models that have, despite what you may have heard, done a surprisingly good job at projecting future warming, needed the capabilities of computers. Like its predecessors, this new AI technology opens up new approaches to research that were previously off the table.

An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experiments—as many as 10,000 per day—potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science.

Reported today in Nature Microbiology, the team was led by a professor now at the University of Michigan.

That artificial intelligence platform, dubbed BacterAI, mapped the metabolism of two microbes associated with oral health—with no baseline information to start with. Bacteria consume some combination of the 20 amino acids needed to support life, but each species requires specific nutrients to grow. The U-M team wanted to know what amino acids are needed by the beneficial microbes in our mouths so they can promote their growth.

“We know almost nothing about most of the bacteria that influence our health. Understanding how bacteria grow is the first step toward reengineering our microbiome,” said Paul Jensen, U-M assistant professor of biomedical engineering who was at the University of Illinois when the project started.

Figuring out the combination of amino acids that bacteria like is tricky, however. Those 20 amino acids yield more than a million possible combinations, just based on whether each amino acid is present or not. Yet BacterAI was able to discover the amino acid requirements for the growth of both Streptococcus gordonii and Streptococcus sanguinis.

To find the right formula for each species, BacterAI tested hundreds of combinations of amino acids per day, honing its focus and changing combinations each morning based on the previous day’s results. Within nine days, it was producing accurate predictions 90% of the time.

Unlike conventional approaches that feed labeled data sets into a machine-learning model, BacterAI creates its own data set through a series of experiments. By analyzing the results of previous trials, it comes up with predictions of what new experiments might give it the most information. As a result, it figured out most of the rules for feeding bacteria with fewer than 4,000 experiments.

“When a child learns to walk, they don’t just watch adults walk and then say ‘Ok, I got it,’ stand up, and start walking. They fumble around and do some trial and error first,” Jensen said.

“We wanted our AI agent to take steps and fall down, to come up with its own ideas and make mistakes. Every day, it gets a little better, a little smarter.”

Little to no research has been conducted on roughly 90% of bacteria, and the amount of time and resources needed to learn even basic scientific information about them using conventional methods is daunting. Automated experimentation can drastically speed up these discoveries. The team ran up to 10,000 experiments in a single day.

This is the kind of thing that could, at least in theory, lead to the rapid development of new antibiotics – something we definitely need. I think the odds are good that even without using robots to do experiments, this technology could accelerate a great many fields of research. I’m not looking for some kind of magical tech “solution” to climate change or pollution, but there’s a real possibility that advances due to this tech could enable us to survive conditions in the future, which would destroy us in the present.

Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what kind of research is prioritized, and what is sidelined. Our technology may give us the ability to do marvelous things, but it will never fix the injustice, inequality, and suffering that are a deliberate outcome of our current political and economic system. Technology won’t ever remove the need for revolution, all it will do is change the landscape in which we fight.

Unequal Protection: Jordan Neely Killing Highlights White Supremacy Ingrained in US Society

A while back, I talked about NY mayor Eric Adams’ plan to round up and forcibly commit unhoused people deemed “mentally ill”. Part of my point was that it’s disturbingly easy for police, mental institutions, and the courts, to label someone who’s perfectly rational as “crazy”, and then force them into situations that are virtually designed to destroy a person’s mental health:

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.

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.

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.

I think any person who’s reasonably well-informed can understand that it’s not possible to honestly discuss the US “justice” system, without also discussing white supremacy. Likewise, the history of mental health, in the US, is also steeped in white supremacy. There’s a quote I like throwing around, from a composer named Frank Wilhoit:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, along side out-groups whom the law binds, but does not protect

When you consider conservative policy and rhetoric, I think it’s important to keep “Wilhoit’s Law” in mind. When we hear about a plan to forcibly commit “mentally ill” unhoused people, it’s important to remember that in the United States, the law is never applied equally. That’s part of why so many well-off white conservatives are happy to draft laws limiting people’s rights – experience has taught them that the “spirit of the law” isn’t really meant to apply to them. They get a scolding for drug use, or a slap on the wrist for rape, while a black kid can be locked up for years, without trial or plea, on suspicion of maybe stealing a backpack.

We are working to change the world, but as we do so, we also have to deal with the world as it is, and in this world, equal protection under the law does not exist.

Race isn’t the only dynamic here, either. We’ve already discussed mental illness, and the way that label can be forced onto people, but I think it’s worth spending a little more time on the consequences of that. There’s stigma associated, of course, and that can be a problem, but it gets much, much worse. Above, we already saw how it’s apparently fine drug, imprison, and torture someone because of a “reasonable belief” that they’re mentally ill. If this feels familiar to the “reasonable belief” of danger that cops use to justify killing, that’s because it is. This extends beyond cops, too – when a white person kills a black person, the same defenses often crop up as when a cop kills a black person. Remember – in-groups whom the law protects, but does not bind. And that’s how you end up with a white man slowly killing a black man while a subway car of people look on, and not only did the NYPD not arrest him, news outlets praised him, while denigrating the murdered man. From the New York Post:

Dramatic new video shows a straphanger taking matters into his own hands, pinning down an unhinged man in a deadly incident at a Manhattan subway station this week.

The 24-year-old passenger stepped in after the vagrant, identified by sources as Jordan Neely, 30, began going on an aggressive rant on a northbound F train Monday afternoon, according to police and a witness who took the video.

Neely was “ranting” about the fact that he was starving, and he was killed for it.

And according to the police, a number of news outlets, and a lot of shitty people on the internet, that’s just fine. You see, in the United States, black lives often don’t matter, and the situation only gets worse when you add in mental illness. Neely apparently had a criminal record, but as illustrated above, that doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot, because cops and the courts can just decide that reality doesn’t matter, and because cops plant evidence, and arrest people for bullshit reasons. Neely was not protected by the law, but he was absolutely bound by it.

But more than that, his criminal record shouldn’t matter because nothing he did justified killing him. The man who killed Neely was, apparently, a Marine vet. According to the articles I’ve read, he held Neely in a chokehold for 15 minutes. At most, it takes 5 minutes to die from that, and I feel like a Marine, more than most people, should be aware of that. That’s why the word “murder” keeps coming to mind – if he’d choked Neely till he stopped struggling, then let go and made sure he was still alive, that would still be assault, but I’d be more inclined to believe that there was no intent to kill. By all accounts, that is not what happened.

I don’t know what was going on in the killer’s head, and at the moment I don’t really care. What matters is that we have a society in which a white man can strangle a black man to death in front of witnesses, and be allowed to walk free – in which a killer like this is not bound by the law. The news about this is going viral, so the killer may face a trial after all, and some news outlets may change the tone of their coverage. I don’t think either of those things entered the realm of possibility until activists made it impossible to ignore.

We can – must – work for change, but to do that, we must be clear about the world as it is.

 

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PSA: Colonoscopies are good, and you should get one

I tend to be a bit picky about what personal information I do or don’t share here. Part of that’s because I don’t feel like the minutiae of my life are particularly interesting, but a lot of it is that I often don’t feel comfortable sharing personal stuff on the internet. That said, I got my first colonoscopy today, and like many before me, I feel the need to “celebrate” by telling other people to do the same.

Happily, my plumbing all seems to be in normal working order. I wanted to state that early on, because a lot of these PSAs come in the context of either catching cancer just in time, or of catching it too late. I’m fine, but if I had not been, literally poking a camera in there to see what’s going on is the best way to catch problems before they become crises. Over the past decade, my digestive system has decided that it cannot cope with an annoyingly wide range of foods, taking away many of my favorites. This means that I’ve had reason to worry that something’s wrong, but with insurance bullshit in the US, an international move, COVID, and a smaller international move, I haven’t managed to actually get the procedure done until now.

It was an interesting, if not particularly pleasant experience. For those who don’t know, there are a couple days of preparation that must be done prior to a colonoscopy. It includes a low-fiber diet, followed by a 24 hour fast, and starting the day before your probing, you have to drink large quantities of a thick, citrus-flavored potion that makes you shit out literally everything in your intestines. This is not a pleasant process, but it’s important if you want the doctors to be able to get a clear view.

Thanks to Ireland’s public health system, my health insurance is cheap, and completely covers hospital procedures, so I didn’t have to worry about cost – just €25 or so for the gut-cleaner. Apparently the default, at least in Ireland, is to get the stomach checked out while you’re in the endoscopy unit, which is a much quicker procedure, though unpleasant in a whole other way. My throat is a bit sore from it, and that’ll probably continue through tomorrow.

Even so, it was interesting to see what the inside of my own stomach looked like, and also interesting to see my own large intestine – I even got to see the entrance to my appendix! I also got to watch them take biopsies of my intestinal and stomach linings, which was… a little unnerving. I’m grateful that there aren’t any nerve endings in there, because while the clipper/grabber they used is tiny, it’s still unnerving to see someone just… snip at my entrails like that. I’ll find out the results of those tests in a few weeks, but the impression I got is that nobody’s expecting to find anything exciting or worrisome.

I’m glad that I got this done. I was pretty sure my own health problems were related to food tolerance/intolerance, but I just couldn’t be sure, you know? I’m also extremely grateful to be in a country with an actual healthcare system. I was starting to seriously consider getting a colonoscopy shortly before we left the US, and my insurance at the time was not only not very good, but it also didn’t seem to work – they kept sending us different cards and contradictory letters, while we kept sending them money. I got a 10 minute check-up shortly before our flight, and had to pay $200 out of pocket for that, because my insurance wasn’t working. In the US, a colonoscopy would have cost me thousands of dollars, possibly even with an insurance plan. Here, I was covered, and if the biopsy results do show any problems that need addressing, I know that I will be able to afford treatment.

For those living in the US, a universal system is worth fighting for. For those outside the US (especially in the UK), keeping your universal system is worth fighting for as well, because there are absolutely those who want to force you into the nightmare of for-profit healthcare.

If you are at all able, especially as you move into your 40s and beyond, get a colonoscopy. I recently turned 39, so I’m a bit early, but I had symptoms that needed investigating. Even without symptoms, it should be routine as you get older, to match your increasing odds of bowel cancer. It’s an uncomfortable process, but the peace of mind is lovely to have, and an early warning that there’s trouble coming down the pipe is even better.

What did Harlan Crow get for his gifts to Clarence Thomas? Power.

As you are no doubt aware, recent reporting has shed a little light on the depths of corruption in the US Supreme Court. While he’s far from alone, Clarence Thomas has received much of the attention recently, over his failure to disclose a whole host of gifts from billionaire weirdo Harlan Crow. After the news broke, there was a veritable stampede of influential people rushing to insist that this was no evidence of corruption, which they knew because they also got gifts from Crow, and also because Crow clearly didn’t get anything in return.

Right?

Well, no. Obviously not. First of all, for a capitalist like Harlan Crow, there are a whole host of benefits to a Supreme Court justice that reliably sides with corporations and capitalists. Second, the claim that Crow had no cases before the court turns out to be false (Clarence Thomas lied? Inconceivable!). Third, Thomas’ vote on Citizens United dramatically increased Crow’s ability to directly use his billions to influence people and politics:

Since Thomas provided a deciding vote in the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, the Crow family’s ability to influence federal elections has increased by a factor of almost nine, according to an Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) analysis of campaign finance data.

In Travel Rewards: What the Crow Family May Have Bought by Hosting Those Luxury Trips for Justice Thomas, ATF shows how Thomas’ vote in the 5-4 decision that effectively legalized unlimited political spending has allowed the Crows to increase their average annual campaign contributions by 862%, from $163,241 pre-Citizens United to $1.57 million post-ruling.

The image is a bar graph showing Crow family political contributions by election cycle (every two years) from 1978 to 2022. Until 2002, the annual contributions seem to be less than $250k, with an increase, seemingly following 9/11. Citizens United was decided in 2010, and the big spike comes in 2012, jumping from contributions at around $500k-$1m, up to $4.5 million. 2016 was the family's biggest expenditure, at just under $5 million.

The image is a bar graph showing Crow family political contributions by election cycle (every two years) from 1978 to 2022. Until 2002, the annual contributions seem to be less than $250k, with an increase, seemingly following 9/11. Citizens United was decided in 2010, and the big spike comes in 2012, jumping from contributions at around $500k-$1m, up to $4.5 million. 2016 was the family’s biggest expenditure, at just under $5 million.

While Thomas and Crow have denied any impropriety, recent revelations about their relationship have fueled fresh calls for the conservative justice to resign or face impeachment proceedings.

“The Crows used their fortune to buy access to and curry favor with one of the most powerful officials in Washington, then benefited from his central role in loosening rules meant to limit the influence of money over politics and policy,” said ATF executive director David Kass.

“It’s a vicious cycle that can only be short-circuited by restoring meaningful campaign finance rules and by demanding a much fairer share of taxes from billionaires, which, among other good results, will leave them less money to distort our democratic process,” Kass added.

I would go further. While capping the wealth of the aristocracy is an excellent idea, so long as capitalists retain power through their control over employment (and the government’s efforts to support that power), they will use it to undermine and block democracy, and to eat away at the laws limiting their wealth. How can I be so certain? Because the crisis we’re seeing right now is precisely result of such an effort.

After the labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the passing of the New Deal, the aristocracy of the US put a huge amount of effort into regaining the power they had lost. It took them decades, but they have very nearly completed that project. If we cap their wealth, that will absolutely help, so we should do that, it’s just that that’s not enough. It’s like defunding vs. abolishing the police – The former is good, and a big step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of a class of people having unaccountable power over everyone else.

It’s possible that, in the coming years, the new labor movement will give us something like a Green New Deal, or even a cap on individual wealth, but if we insist on preserving a capitalist class, this will keep happening. That doesn’t mean that we can go through a sort of century-long boom/bust cycle to keep capitalism “under control”, because as I’m sure most of you are aware, there’s no guarantee that we will get that reset. It certainly doesn’t seem within reach at the moment.

That’s why I want us to reach farther! Specifically, I want us to reach for real systemic change.

The Supreme Court has lost its legitimacy, if it ever had any. Capitalism, likewise, has provided ample evidence that it does far more harm than good. Both are standing in the way of workers’ rights, civil rights, and the very survival of humanity. There is no easy or obvious solution, but our best shot at building a better world is through the use of collective power. I think our best shot at real change would be through a real general strike, the way to make that possible is for unions and organized communities to coordinate with each other. That means organizing your workplace and trying to increase community resilience. The game is rigged, but history has shown that there’s cause for hope – the game has been rigged this whole time, but by working together, we’ve made a number of big advances. We can make more, and get back what we’ve lost, and we can change the rules, by working together.

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