Toots 𦣠from 06/24 to 06/28
John ColagioiaAs discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I donât include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I donât notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I donât feel restricted by message length.
Also, I donât generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
9:05 â Mon 24 June 2024
Image Not Shown: A row of law books are displayed on a shelf
US laws created during slavery are still on the books. A legal scholar wants to at least acknowledge that history in legal citations from The Conversation
âŚan 1842 U.S. Supreme Court case that held that a state could not provide legal protections for alleged fugitive slaves. The judge cited that case to explain the limits of congressional power to limit gambling in college sports.
Hashtags: #USLaw #Slavery
At this point, Iâd settle for not having Supreme Court Justices who find it a benefit to use laws from a time when many Americans didnât have any realistic civil liberties, but I do like the premise.
12:03 â Mon 24 June 2024
The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world on the day of that great revolution.
Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride
9:04 â Tue 25 June 2024
Image Not Shown: Members of the LGBTQ+ community arrive ahead of the passing of the marriage equality bill in its second and third readings by the Senate, which will effectively make Thailand Asiaâs third territory to legalize same-sex unions, in Bangkok, Thailand, June 18, 2024
Thailand to become the first Southeast Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage from Fast Company
LGBT advocates called the move a âmonumental step forward,â as Thailand would be the first nation in Southeast Asia to enact marriage equality legislation and the third in Asia, after Nepal and Taiwan.
Hashtags: #MarriageEquality #Thailand #HumanRights
Congratulations, Thailand!
12:05 â Tue 25 June 2024
Let those who wish have their respectability â I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.
Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride
9:02 â Wed 26 June 2024
Content Warning: Fascism
Image Not Shown: Roger Severino, vice-president for domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, speaks during the Europa Viva 24 conference organized by the far-right party Vox at Palacio de Vistalegre, Madrid, Spain, on 19 May 2024
Project 2025: The US far-right plan to undermine democracy and rights globally from openDemocracy
This aims to reshape the federal state in 180 days, fire tens of thousands of public servants and replace them with people loyal to the conservative cause, undermine the separation of powers, attack public education, and erase or restrict the rights of women, LGBTQ people, workers, migrants and Black people.
Hashtags: #HumanRights #GOP #USPol #HeritageFoundation
Given that Project 2025 seems to have fallen out of the headlines, it seemed worth circulating this reminder, especially as the âdonât lecture people who donât want to vote for Democratsâ crowd starts getting loud againâŚ
12:04 â Wed 26 June 2024
We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.
Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride
9:06 â Thu 27 June 2024
Image Not Shown: A bunch of disposable, multicolored plastic bags polluting the environment, one with a sad face drawn on
Barley starch plastic is 100% biodegradable from Futurity
The new biomaterial is produced by either dissolving the raw materials in water and mixing them together or by heating them under pressure. By doing so, small âpelletsâ or chips are created that can then be processed and compressed into a desired form. That said, I only read the article, not the study.
Hashtags: #Plastics #Sustainability #Pollution
It bothers me a bit that the article doesnât mention its behavior under the conditions found at a landfill, where you can often find foodâalso biodegradable with significantly less chemical manipulationâpreserved for decades. I donât think that it helps anybody to have a bag or clam-shell case that can only biodegrade if you remember to send it to the recycling center.
12:07 â Thu 27 June 2024
In the debate between those who believe in essentially unregulated markets and others who hold that reasonable regulation diminishes market excesses without inhibiting their basic function, the subprime situation unfortunately provides ammunition for the latter view.
Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride
9:03 â Fri 28 June 2024
Content Warning: US Politics, Terrible Ex-President
Image Not Shown: Donald Trump speaks during a dinner with billionaires at Mar-a-Lago on June 5, 2024
Trumpâs cash isnât from the masses but the billionaire boys club from Daily Kos
Of Trumpâs funding, $50 million came from a single check from wealthy banking family scion Tim Mellon. Trump is being bankrolled by a billionaire boysâ clubâa group of immorally wealthy men sitting on a mountain of cash, who see his candidacy as their best chance to end democracy and bring in an era of neo-feudal plutocracy.
Hashtags: #Trump #USPol #Plutocracy #Fundraising
I should also note that, unless I grossly misunderstand election financing, if a billionaire would prefer to directly donate a lump sum to Trumpâs campaign instead of laundering it through dozens of charities, Super PACs, the legal equivalent of straw donors, and other screens, then they see Trumpâs position in the campaign as an emergency to fix, not a success to support.
Unfortunately, that means that heâll almost certainly (have his supporters) lash out more, possibly inciting violence where he can. However, this also means that enough effort could crush the Republican Party badly enough that we can start actually fixing the countryâŚ
12:06 â Fri 28 June 2024
Most people have only half developed their single personalities. That a man should split his into four and more; and should develop each separately and perfectly, was so abnormal that many normals failed to understand it.
Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride
Bonus
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didnât fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
Image Not Shown: A car fails to yield as a family attempts to cross a road in Long Beach, CA
Traffic engineers build roads that invite crashes because they rely on outdated research and faulty data from The Conversation
Look more deeply, and you can start to see how our underlying crash data gives everyone a pass but the road users themselves. Everyone wants a data-driven approach to road safety, but todayâs standard view of crash data lets automakers, insurance companies and policymakers who shape vehicle safety standards off the hook for embiggening these ever-larger cars and light-duty trucks.
This doesnât end at vehicle-size, for a lot of us. On Long Islandâwhich has a shape pretty much as youâd expectâwhere I live and so know fairly well, traffic engineers have told me that their predecessors decided that, because the island looks a bit like a tiny California on its side, and since people looked at California at the time as traffic engineeringâs big success story (stop laughingâŚ), that they only needed to take what engineers did in California and scale it down. Among other things, this means that we often need to get up to highway speed in four or five car-lengths, because that proportion worked well when the area scaled up to the size of California.
Content Warning: Musk, Tesla, Investment
Image Not Shown: Musk speaking at an event
You Probably Unwittingly Voted to Give Elon Musk a Huge Raise from 404 Media
What this means in practice is that, because of its millions of investors who put billions of dollars into its investment vehicles, Vanguard itself has 232 million Tesla shares, and owns 7 percent of the company. It is the second-largest shareholder of Tesla stock, behind only Musk himself. This money is not actually âVanguardâs,â it is the money of all of the investors and 401(k) holders using Vanguard to invest. But Vanguard does not ask those individual investors if they want to give Elon Musk a gigantic raise. Vanguard votes on their behalf.
This gets backâappropriately enoughâto something that I wrote about when Musk bought Twitter.
If this service ever gains credibility for circulating useful information, what dollar value puts the service into the hands of someone who wants to discredit the community?
And while I framed that as social media, because I had that topic on the table, we really need to start looking at every service that we rely on in these terms. What would it cost for a hypothetical attacker to subvert your power company, your favorite television show, your favorite foods, or yes, the investment back that manages your retirement savings? If it cost Musk another twenty billion dollarsâfor exampleâto interfere with Vanguardâs leadership so that he could have them vote for him to get his fifty billion dollars, then he would definitely do that.
In this case, he didnât need to do that, because wealthy people understand class solidarity far better than the rest of us do. But if we donât know those numbers, then we donât see the blatant connections.
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Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
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