Please don’t let this goober be our next governor

Right now, Minnesota has a conservative/centrist Democrat as governor. It would be nice if we had a reasonable set of alternatives to vote for in the next election, but I fear I’m going to have to vote for gun-nut Walz again, because the Republicans have announced who they’re putting on the ballot: Scott Jensen, an MD from Chaska, one of those suburban towns that ring Minneapolis/St Paul and that spawn horrible creatures like Bachmann who embarrass us with their open endorsement idiocy.

Guess what his positions are: he thinks COVID wasn’t as bad as the government says it is, and didn’t warrant the disruption of our economy. When all the piles of dead people were pointed out to him, he trivialized them and claimed that the numbers were inflated.

I think that what we have, when you say killed, I would say that COVID-19 may well have played a part. I would say that if this is a person who’s dying of stage 4 colon cancer, and COVID was diagnosed in the last 48 to 72 hours and it was put down as a COVID death I think that’s problematic.

How nice to know as I get older, the value of the days of my life are less and less valuable.

You can trust Dr Jensen, though! He’s an authority!

I studied epidemiology in 1976 and ‘77 when I was in dental school.

Wow. He took a class more than 40 years ago, so now he’s an expert.

He’s also anti-choice. He wants to ban all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

I would try to ban abortion, I think that we’re we’re basically in a situation where we should be governed by … there is no reason for us to be having abortions going out. We have tremendous opportunities and availability of birth control. We don’t need to be snuffing out lives that if left alone will produce a viable newborn, that may go on to be the next Albert Einstein. We can be so much better than we’ve been. We do not need to be having Hillary Clinton casually discuss the value and the reasonableness of late third trimester abortions, when you’ve got literally, you’ve got a life that’s a few inches away from passing through a birth canal and being the source of tremendous love. And we’re saying no, if mom changes your mind, she can go ahead and slice and dice it and be done with it. I don’t think that’s where we want to be.

I guess our lives are on a sliding scale, from incredibly precious before birth to casually discardable in your old age. What’s most important isn’t the life you’ve lived, but rather the potential of the days you have remaining.

I guess I’ll be punching Walz’s name in the next election.

One way to stop cancel culture: cancel the internet altogether

Texas is screwing the rest of the country, again. They passed a law against internet “censorship” that is nothing but ludicrous aggravation about certain people (e.g., Donald Trump) getting moderated and banned, so the conservatives are pushing through a law that will have the trolls and spammers dancing in the streets.

CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media platform may not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to receive the expression of another person based on:
(1) the viewpoint of the user or another person;
(2) the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression or another person’s expression; or
(3) a user’s geographic location in this state or any part of this state.
(b) This section applies regardless of whether the viewpoint is expressed on a social media platform or through any other medium.

I am not a lawyer, but even I can see problems here. I’ll let someone else explain it.

So, let’s break this down. It says that a website cannot “censor” (by which it clearly means moderate) based on the user’s viewpoint or geographic location. And it applies even if that viewpoint doesn’t occur on the website.

What does that mean in practice? First, even if there is a good and justifiable reason for moderating the content — say it’s spam or harassment or inciting violence — that really doesn’t matter. The user can simply claim that it’s because of their viewpoints — even those expressed elsewhere — and force the company to fight it out in court. This is every spammer’s dream. Spammers would love to be able to force websites to accept their spam. And this law basically says that if you remove spam, the spammer can take you to court.

Indeed, nearly all of the moderation that websites like Twitter and Facebook do are, contrary to the opinion of ignorant ranters, not because of any “viewpoint” but because they’re breaking actual rules around harassment, abuse, spam, or the like.

While the law does say that a site must clearly post its acceptable use policy, so that supporters of this law can flat out lie and claim that a site can still moderate as long as it follows its policies, that’s not true. Because, again, all any aggrieved user has to do is to claim the real reason is due to viewpoint discrimination, and the litigation is on.

And let me tell you something about aggrieved users: they always insist that any moderation, no matter how reasonable, is because of their viewpoint. Always. And this is especially true of malicious actors and trolls, who are in the game of trolling just to annoy in the first place. If they can take that up a notch and drag companies into court as well? I mean, the only thing stopping them will be the cost, but you already know that a cottage industry is going to pop up of lawyers who will file these cases. I wouldn’t even be surprised if cases start getting filed today.

Great. I know I posted a comment policy for this little ol’ site, but it’s buried in the archives somewhere. Guess I’ll have to dig it and make it more prominent.

I have another grievance with this law, though. I should be able to block people on the basis of their viewpoint! If someone starts commenting about how women don’t deserve to be regarded as equals of men, for example, I ought to be able to say, “No, we’re not going to tolerate that nonsense here. Bye.” The law doesn’t apply to places like Freethoughtblogs — it sets a cap, where you have to have over 50 million monthly users for it to go into effect — so I’m not about to get sued by the hundreds of people on my blocklist, but in general, a lot of the big social media sites are going to become unusable if all the trolls are set free, and you know the authors of the bill would love to go after every website left of center.

Also bad: they want to liberate spammers.

And, that’s not all. Remember last week when I was joking about how Republicans wanted to make sure your inboxes were filled with spam? I had forgotten about the provision in this law that makes a lot of spam filtering a violation of the law. I only wish I was joking. For unclear reasons, the law also amends Texas’ existing anti-spam law. It added (and it’s already live in the law) a section saying the following:

Sec. 321.054. IMPEDING ELECTRONIC MAIL MESSAGES PROHIBITED. An electronic mail service provider may not intentionally impede the transmission of another person’s electronic mail message based on the content of the message unless:

(1) the provider is authorized to block the transmission under Section 321.114 or other applicable state or federal law; or

(2) the provider has a good faith, reasonable belief that the message contains malicious computer code, obscene material, material depicting sexual conduct, or material that violates other law.

So that literally says the only reasons you can “impede” email is if it contains malicious code, obscene material, sexual content, or violates other laws. Now the reference to 321.114 alleviates some of this, since that section gives services (I kid you not) “qualified immunity” for blocking certain commercial email messages, but only with certain conditions, including enabling a dispute resolution process for spammers.

There are many more problems with this law, but I am perplexed at how anyone could possibly think this is either workable or Constitutional. It’s neither. The only proper thing to do would be to shut down in Texas, but again the law treats that as a violation itself. What an utter monstrosity.

Back in the old days, when Pharyngula was run off a Macintosh in my lab and I had full access to every nut and bolt in the server software, I had all kinds of protections in place to automatically block spammers. A few times, as an experiment, I’d turn off the filters and was astonished at how many bad actors were constantly probing, trying to hack in or flood the system with spam — hundreds per second. And I was just a tiny little PowerMac sitting in a little lab somewhere.

I just checked my email spam folder, which gets purged every week: 830 messages trying to sell me CBD Gummies, extended warranties, real estate, lawn care products, and oh, cool, an offer to be named a joint author on a paper to be submitted to an Indian research journal for only a few hundred dollars.

The internet cannot operate without extensive content moderation. The judges and legislators who signed off on this law are clearly incompetent and unaware, and are probably a gang of Republicans terrified of “cancel culture”.

“What is so shocking, inhuman, and irrational about this draft opinion is that the Court is basing its decision on an 18th century document ignorant of 21st century realities for women.”

It will not make any difference, because the people who have made the decision do not respect scientific or medical evidence, but the cover of The Lancet is about the Alito decision, with a strongly worded opinion inside.

“Abortion presents a profound moral issue on which Americans hold sharply conflicting views.” So begins a draft opinion by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, leaked from the US Supreme Court on May 2, 2022. If confirmed, this judgement would overrule the Court’s past decisions to establish the right to access abortion. In Alito’s words, “the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives”. The Court’s opinion rests on a strictly historical interpretation of the US Constitution: “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.” His extraordinary text repeatedly equates abortion with murder.
The Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution has been the main foundation underpinning the right of American women to an abortion. That 1868 Amendment was passed during the period of American Reconstruction, when states’ powers were being subjected to certain limitations. The goal of the Amendment was to prevent states from unduly restricting the freedoms of their citizens. That guarantee of personal liberty, so the Supreme Court had previously held, extended to pregnant women, with qualifications, who decided to seek an abortion. Alito rejected that reasoning. He argued that for any right not mentioned in the Constitution to be protected, it must be shown to have had deep roots in the nation’s history and tradition. Abortion does not fulfil that test. Worse, Roe was an exercise in “raw judicial power”, it “short-circuited the democratic process”, and it was “egregiously wrong” from the very beginning. It was now time, according to Alito, “to set the record straight”.
What is so shocking, inhuman, and irrational about this draft opinion is that the Court is basing its decision on an 18th century document ignorant of 21st century realities for women. History and tradition can be respected, but they must only be partial guides. The law should be able to adapt to new and previously unanticipated challenges and predicaments. Although Alito gives an exhaustive legal history of abortion, he utterly fails to consider the health of women today who seek abortion. Unintended pregnancy and abortion are universal phenomena. Worldwide, around 120 million unintended pregnancies occur annually. Of these, three-fifths end in abortion. And of these, some 55% are estimated to be safe—that is, completed using a medically recommended method and performed by a trained provider. This leaves 33 million women undergoing unsafe abortions, their lives put at risk because laws restrict access to safe abortion services.
In the USA, Black women have an unintended pregnancy rate double that of non-Hispanic White women. And the maternal mortality rate for Black women, to which unsafe abortion is an important contributor, is almost three times higher than for white women. These sharp racial and class disparities need urgent solutions, not more legal barriers. The fact is that if the US Supreme Court confirms its draft decision, women will die. The Justices who vote to strike down Roe will not succeed in ending abortion, they will only succeed in ending safe abortion. Alito and his supporters will have women’s blood on their hands.
The 2018 Guttmacher–Lancet Commission on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights For All concluded that these rights, which included the right to safe abortion services and the treatment of complications from unsafe abortion, were central to any conception of a woman’s wellbeing and gender equality. The availability of an essential package of sexual and reproductive health interventions should be a fundamental right for all women—including, comprehensive sexuality education; access to modern contraceptives; safe abortion services; prevention and treatment of HIV and other sexually transmissible diseases; prevention and treatment for gender-based violence; counselling for sexual health; and services for infertility. What kind of society has the USA become when a small group of Justices is allowed to harm women, their families, and their communities that they have been appointed to protect?
The route forward is unclear and perilous. This Court’s argument suggests possible future attacks on a raft of other civil rights, from marriage equality to contraception. Despite urgent pleas from some members of Congress, the long-overdue encoding of Roe into law by the Biden administration is highly unlikely. That a Court is about to force through a health policy supported by only 39% of Americans is dysfunctional. Indeed, if the Court denies women the right to safe abortion, it will be a judicial endorsement of state control over women—a breathtaking setback for the health and rights of women, one that will have global reverberations.

Signing out for a while

I mentioned that I was messed up with some nasty lower back pain — I got in to the doctor this morning, and oh boy, I got some good drugs. I’m going to be doping myself with cyclobenzaprine three times a day for a while, so I don’t expect to be particularly perky for a while.

The pain has been pretty bad. On my personal scale I’d give it a 9 (10, the worst I’ve ever felt, was a ruptured eardrum). To put it in perspective, though, my wife went through labor and delivery three times, so it might have been a 3 or 4 on that scale.

Somehow I’ll have to wade through the lethargy and get the grading done. Maybe this will improve the student’s grades.

Oooh, it glows so prettily!

There it is: the black hole at the center of our galaxy, named Sagittarius A*. Hi there, big fella! You’re very pretty, please don’t swallow us up!

It was quite an achievement, but weirdly, so many of the articles about it try to downplay it. OK, there are bigger black holes out there.

The M87 black hole is far more distant and massive than Sagittarius A*, situated about 54 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun. In disclosing the photo of that black hole, the researchers said that their work showed that Albert Einstein, the famed theoretical physicist, had correctly predicted that the shape of the shadow would be almost a perfect circle.

Yeah, yeah, we know. M87 is impressive, but the mass of four million suns, like Sagittarius A* possesses, is nothing to sneeze at. Also extraordinary and impressive.

The worst comes from an astronomer talking to the Washington Post.

Feryal Ozel, a University of Arizona astronomer, described the achievement as “the first direct image of the gentle giant in the center of our galaxy.”

WTF? Our black hole is not gentle at all — it’s a snarling, spitting, shrieking maelstrom of lethal radiation and deadly cosmic forces. I will not tolerate this diminution of our all-engulfing pit of chaotic darkness.

The American Way of Life

Why do we do this to ourselves?

It’s good to have an outsider take a look at us and give some insight. Here’s an excellent example: a Slovakian wondering what’s up with American suburbs.

I’ve asked those same questions myself. When I lived in Pennsylvania, we first got an apartment in a shiny glossy hellhole, in a town called King of Prussia. It was the most dead, soulless place I’ve ever been to. The apartments were clean and good, but imbedded in loops of freeways, and the sole attraction was a mega-mall. We got out of there as soon as we could.

The next stop was a house in a suburban development near Jenkintown. It met one of the criteria mentioned by the Slovakian: there was bus service. I made that a requirement by taking mass transit to get to any place we were seriously considering. But the rest of that list fit it perfectly. The only things in that development were residential housing. If you wanted to go anywhere, you had to have a car. On weekends, there were no coffeeshops to walk to, no movie theaters, nothing. You stayed home and mowed your lawn. I kind of hated it.

We had moved to Pennsylvania from Salt Lake City, and that was an unpleasant change. Salt Lake City is a weird place, but I’ll give it this: there were lots of parks in walking distance from anywhere you might live. There was a bagel place a block away from my apartment, and three movie theaters within a few blocks, one of them a funky art house kind of place. We were surrounded by restaurants, too, although with three little kids we didn’t get to partake very often.

There are enriching places for humans to live, and then there are festering, ingrown suburbs that were built by short-sighted developers and that are entirely dependent on cars for survival. For some reason, probably capitalist greed, many Americans are compelled to live in the latter, for lack of alternatives.

Oh, also, racism.

A few years ago, the city of Minneapolis took a bold step and changed zoning laws. Such a simple thing, with deep consequences!

Minneapolis will become the first major U.S. city to end single-family home zoning, a policy that has done as much as any to entrench segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl as the American urban paradigm over the past century.

On Friday, the City Council passed Minneapolis 2040, a comprehensive plan to permit three-family homes in the city’s residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors.

“Large swaths of our city are exclusively zoned for single-family homes, so unless you have the ability to build a very large home on a very large lot, you can’t live in the neighborhood,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me this week. Single-family home zoning was devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods, and it still functions as an effective barrier today. Abolishing restrictive zoning, the mayor said, was part of a general consensus that the city ought to begin to mend the damage wrought in pursuit of segregation. Human diversity—which nearly everyone in this staunchly liberal city would say is a good thing—only goes as far as the housing stock.

It’s probably too soon to tell for sure, and there’s more to this problem than just zoning, but there are hints that we might be getting some incremental, evolutionary change. Here’s an article by a landlord <makes the sign of the cross, mutters a prayer of protection> that suggests there has been a subtle shift. First, she points out the racial disparities — maybe that ought to be one of the first answers to give that Slovakian. Race hatred poisons everything in this country.

I’ve worked on housing affordability since 1997. That whole time, the Twin Cities has been losing ground, with homes becoming steadily less affordable. Rents have been rising — sometimes very rapidly. The portion of people paying more than 30 percent or even 50 percent of their income in rent (the definition of “housing cost burden”) is stubbornly high, especially for Black households. While we increase public funding for Affordable Housing — the subsidized kind — the number of unsheltered people grows.

But then she looks at rents. It’s messy, and complicated by the fact that we’re in a pandemic, but things are looking slightly better.

This spring, I pulled all the median advertised rent information from the Minneapolis Rental Housing Brief into a spreadsheet. I didn’t adjust it for inflation. I used three-month rolling averages to smooth out the monthly noise. Check out these results.

Line graph showing 1, 2, and 3br rent trends in Minneapolis 2018 through 2022

Data: HousingLink Minneapolis Rental Housing Brief, chart by author
The actual advertised median rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments are lower — in actual dollars — in 2022 than they were in late 2018. Three-bedroom rents went up 2 percent over the four years, while inflation went up 11 percent over the same time. These shifts started more than a year before the pandemic. “Post” pandemic increases look big due to the atypical and extremely low rents during summer 2020. But trends show that Minneapolis rents have simply returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Rents are a rather narrow parameter to scrutinize livability in a city, but it’s something, at least.

As for my situation now: I’m in a small town that would find it difficult to lock down a large chunk of land and reserve it for single family housing, although they’d like to try, I’m sure. There are some nascent suburb-like areas near town where the local construction company has put up rows and rows of houses. We looked at those when we were on the market, and crossed them all off our list when we noticed their common feature: they all had gigantic garages, another affliction of American housing. We don’t own three gargantuan trucks, which would have easily fit into those garages, so we didn’t see the point. Now we live in a quirky older home with all the commercial amenities within a half-mile walk, and a university next door, which is a much nicer way to live. We’ve gone for weeks without driving a car!

I guess the bottom line explanation I’d give the Slovakian would be two words: cars and racism.

Classic example of the logic of cults

I mean, how could I not read a story with the title, White nationalist ‘America First’ group plunges into chaos after high-ranking official gets a girlfriend? It’s the most pungent kind of clickbait. It seems Nick Fuentes, that unbelievable cartoon of a man, is in disarray over the fact that one of his employees has done something fairly normal.

The America First movement has plunged into turmoil after its treasurer started a romantic relationship and moved out of the group leader’s basement.

Somehow, I could have guessed someone was going to be living in someone else’s basement somewhere in the story.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes, the right-wing group’s leader and associate of Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, urges his followers to abstain from sex, and he describes himself as an incel, or involuntarily celibate.

This led the nonprofit group’s treasurer Jaden McNeil to resign and call America First a cult, reported The Daily Beast’s “Fever Dreams” podcast.

“[Members act so] racist and ridiculous in public that it ruins people’s lives,” said co-host Kelly Weill on the podcast. “You can’t go and get a normal job after that, so they turn further and further into this movement, which really does function almost like a cult.”

The fact that Gosar and Greene, who have a modicum of power and influence, are entangled with Nick Fuentes, is revealing about the sad state of American politics. How can anyone in the halls of power take this guy seriously?

That last paragraph, though, explains a lot. America First is openly and loudly racist, and its members have openly slapped that stigma on their records. This is how cults start: throw out one absurdity for your followers to accept, watch as the majority walk away, but the ones who stay…give ’em another absurdity. Then another. And another. You’ve got the few so deeply hooked that you can get them to do whatever you want. Tell your followers that you translated the holy book by staring at magic rocks in a hat, and if they swallow that, you can load ’em up into a wagon train and go found a city in the middle of nowhere. Fuentes is such a patently hateful fool that his followers have to be committed to stick by him, not by virtue of the quality of his arguments, but because they’re so stupid that admitting that leads to an exposure of their gullibility.

By the way, this also explains how Michelle Malkin has ended up associated with this group. She’s been making horrible choices for many years — justifying the internment of Asian Americans in WWII just one of them — so of course she has sorted herself to the bottom of the dumpster.

Do you hate dinosaurs?

Do you like thinking about their last days, when they were set on fire and hurled about by terrible storms, and the survivors then starved to death in a transformed world? Well, you’re in luck! Smithsonian has published an excerpt from Riley Black’s new book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, and you can read about an Edmontosaurus in the last moments before it got the surprise of its life!

If you’re not a brutal sadist, there’s also lots of good information for dinosaur-lovers, too, as most of us are.