As discussed previously, this is my weekly Twitter roundup. Note that tweets of articles generally include header images from the articles, which are not included here unless they happen to be available under a free license. Most are not. But I now add most of my commentary here, where I’m not restricted by the message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

I also don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:05 – Mon 24 May 2021

Even Republicans Think Stealing Arizona for Trump Is a Disaster from VICE News

Cyber Ninjas’ capacity to conduct the audit has been widely criticized, and the board’s letter highlights one particularly egregious error.

Bear in mind that Trump supporters were literally the people who complained that we weren’t “giving Trump a chance” decried the Constitutional process of impeachment as an attempt to overturn a democratic election. I’m not making this point to say that they’re hypocrites—that’s a given, at this point—but that their only goal is to seize power by any means available. When Republican bureaucrats, people whose careers on convincing Americans that government shouldn’t be trusted except when there are wealthy people to bail out or there are dark-skinned people to kill, have finally had enough of it, that’s pretty far out of line.

12:04 – Mon 24 May 2021

…you measure the health and the strength of America’s economy based on the health and the strength of the American worker and the American family.

Kamala Harris

9:04 – Tue 25 May 2021

Air pollution from cars is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s from Futurity

…could explain the increased number of people impacted by Alzheimer’s disease across the world.

Last week and the week before last, there have been posts on how air pollution affects people. That’s not intentional, but if I can see the connections, I have to assume that professionals in the field can, too.

12:02 – Tue 25 May 2021

There is a human capital crisis in the federal government. Not only are we losing the decades of talent as civil servants retire, we are not doing enough to develop and nurture the next generation of public servants.

Daniel Akaka

9:02 – Wed 26 May 2021

Employees are feeling burned over broken work-from-home promises and corporate culture ‘BS’ as employers try to bring them back to the office from The Conversation

…two-thirds say their employers either have not communicated a post-pandemic office strategy or have only vaguely done so.

I won’t go into detail, since I refuse to let this blog become me airing my personal grievances, but I will say that more than one former employer constantly claimed that they were set up for developers to work however, wherever, and whenever they pleased. All of them also had macho work cultures, where people were mostly judged by how many hours they were visibly at their desks.

While I haven’t checked with my former colleagues, I would bet that the majority reopened their offices as soon as the initial chaos of the pandemic ended, and still haven’t put much thought into safety from a top-down perspective.

12:03 – Wed 26 May 2021

Our future is bleak if we allow prejudice to become more important than the education of our children.

Judy Chu

9:03 – Thu 27 May 2021

Factory Farms Are a Deadly Nuisance from OtherWords

…air pollution from agriculture causes more than 17,000 deaths every year. That’s even more than the deaths from pollution generated by coal plants.

Apparently, I can’t get enough of air pollution stories. Maybe it’s because I enjoyed the ability to keep the street-facing windows open, last summer—because nobody was on the roads—and won’t get to enjoy it this year.

12:05 – Thu 27 May 2021

I believe accurately remembering—and honoring—our whole past is the first step in governing in a way that effectively represents the whole America.

Tammy Duckworth

9:01 – Fri 28 May 2021

Netflix’s new series on Yasuke, the African samurai, is a new dawn for Black characters in animation from Global Voices

Employed as a bodyguard by a Jesuit emissary to Japan, the man who would become known as Yasuke is rumored to have hailed either from Mozambique or Sudan.

I’ve honestly always been surprised that there wasn’t a Yasuke blaxploitation franchise. It would’ve taken care of the criticisms about perpetuating stereotypes, and there’s usually a significant overlap between blaxploitation and samurai films, I’ve noticed. I’m sure that the reality of “enslaved African who becomes a samurai” is less exciting than the premise suggests, but many productions have done more with less.

12:01 – Fri 28 May 2021

People have asked me how I want to be remembered, and I say very simply that I represented the people honestly and to the best of my abilities. I think I did okay.

Daniel K. Inouye

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, here are any additional articles that didn’t fit into the week, but too weird or important to not mention.

Fighting Disciplinary Technologies from Electronic Frontier Foundation

Too often, monitoring software is deliberately designed to fool the end-user into thinking they are not being watched, and to thwart them if they take steps to remove it.

I don’t have much to say about this that more knowledgeable people in the field haven’t already said many times. But I will say that it’s a good idea to keep your professional and personal device usage as distinct as possible. That has always been the case, but when employers and schools continue to use these products after bringing people back to the office, so that they can quantify every moment in the day that isn’t conspicuously productive work, it’s going to be critical. It won’t turn off, just because you’ve gone home for the night.

Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.