Never, ever threaten a librarian

A nearby Indivisible group in Glenwood announced that they are having an information meeting today, at 10am, at the Glenwood library. This is good, I’m glad that these grassroots groups are springing up everywhere.

However, this group got threats. The Tea Partiers in the area are planning to descend upon their meeting.

The librarian was threatened if they didn’t cancel the meeting.

That last bit cannot be allowed. Many of us Indivisible associated people are going to express our solidarity by also showing up, so we’re bustling out the door this morning for a nice day in lovely Glenwood, on the shores of Lake Minnewaska. I’m bringing a camera. Lake views on a sunny day are so nice, aren’t they?

glenwoodindivisible

Good grief, it’s embarrassing to be an American

Woke up this morning to learn that the current president* is tweeting out serious allegations against Obama.

And then, to top it all off…TV ratings.

Take his phone away and put that child on a timeout.

Tuam

Culture of life, my ass. More like a culture of Catholic hypocrisy.

A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday.

Excavations at the site of the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, have uncovered an underground structure divided into 20 chambers containing “significant quantities of human remains”, the judge-led mother and baby homes commission said.

The commission said analysis of selected remains revealed ages of the deceased ranged from 35 weeks to three years old. It found that the dead had been mostly buried in the 1950s, when the facility was one of more than a dozen in Ireland offering shelter to orphans, unmarried mothers and their children. The Tuam home closed in 1961.

Let’s not even consider those unmarried mothers, locked away in isolation and virtual slavery.

If all those people complaining about Planned Parenthood wanted to do what’s right, they’d move their picketlines to the nearest Catholic church.

Are you still using Uber?

WTF is wrong with you?

Here’s yet another story about the sexist culture at that place. She’s recounting how a pig named “Mike#2” was allowed to run rampant.

Other female employees who were his seniors often discussed in private about his lewd comments and sexist behavior but no one was ever brave enough to complain to the senior management and HR because the management is known to ignore the complaints and many times punish the women by accidentally leaking the names of the women over private chat groups. Travis is well known to protect high performing team leaders no matter how abusive they are towards their employees. The HR team was known to be deftly afraid of Travis’s tendency to blame and ridicule the women and yell at HR whenever they went in with complaints of abuse. I heard about Travis personally congratulating Mike#2 for meeting strict deadlines months after I complained to HR about my abuse. It was clear to me that the regressive and abusive attitude towards female employees was trickling down from the top. After several months of this abuse and failed complaints to HR, I couldn’t stand it any longer. The animosity towards me got worse and in my performance reviews, it was noted that I was not a team player, not creative, directionless. There were days when I would come home from work and lie down in my bed till the alarm woke me up. I would cut my mom’s calls and reject meeting requests from friends. I would wonder why I went to grad school instead of wearing heels and marrying a rich guy so I would never have to work. It was then that I knew I had to stop this vicious environment from destroying my life. Within three days of my last performance review, I quit. I wore my New Balance sneakers to work, surrendered my employee tag, mobile phone and computer. I deleted the Uber app on my phone. Even though I don’t work at Uber any longer, the damage that was done to me by Uber’s work environment ruined my spirit. It damaged what was most precious to me : dignity and self respect. This abuse happened not because I didn’t wear heels or because I was directionless. It happened for the sole reason that I am a woman who told a man what she really thought.

And now the NY Times breaks a story about how Uber evades regulatory oversight.

Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement, or in some instances, had been outright banned.

The program, which involves a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from Uber’s app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these to evade authorities in cities such as Paris, Boston and Las Vegas, and in countries including Australia, China, South Korea and Italy.

Uber is unethical inside and out. I’ve never used it (not that there’s much opportunity in Morris, Minnesota) and never will.

What would happen if you made people who didn’t like science fiction anyway read really old science fiction?

amazingstories

I think that would be a better title for this project, Young People Read Old Science Fiction & Fantasy. The premise:

Young People Read Old SF was inspired by something award-winning author Adam-Troy Castro said on Facebook.

nobody discovers a lifelong love of science fiction through Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore, and directing newbies toward the work of those masters is a destructive thing, because the spark won’t happen. You might as well advise them to seek out Cordwainer Smith or Alan E. Nourse—fine tertiary avenues of investigation, even now, but not anything that’s going to set anybody’s heart afire, not from the standing start. Won’t happen.

This is a testable hypothesis! I’ve rounded up a pool of younger people who have agreed to let me expose them to classic works of science fiction1 and assembled a list of older works I think still have merit. Each month my subjects will read and react to those stories; I will then post the results to this site. Hilarity will doubtless ensue!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up well for a couple of reasons.

  • The sample size is small, and with a limited range of critical ability. Literary criticism actually takes some skill, you know.

  • None of the critics seem to like this particular genre. Any interesting generational difference is quickly swamped out by the fact that none of these readers are willingly reading this stuff by choice.

  • I’m an older reader and am predisposed to like SF, and if you hand me Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein now, I’m going to gak explosively. Genre fiction tends not to age gracefully. Why not torture them with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Hugo Gernsback if it’s hilarity you’re looking for?

  • One of the clues that will alienate modern readers is not the poor writing, but the casual racism and misogyny. Take a look at that cover of Amazing Stories I’ve put at the top right — you don’t even have to read anything to be saying “OMG, WTF?”.

  • Packaging matters. Star Wars is hugely popular, but it’s really the same crappy serialized soap opera with ray guns that E.E. “Doc” Smith was writing in the 1920s and 1930s, with the antique stilted dialog updated to modern stilted dialog.

Reading the reviews, I’d have to say that the Adam-Troy Castro Hypothesis is so far well supported. I have to question the sample size and the methodology, however.

A terrible beauty

The leather-working industry in Bangladesh and India is a nightmare awash in toxic chemicals and rotting flesh, and yet, the photography in this article about the leather tanning trade is arresting.

Women pluck hair by hand from goat hides soaked in an alkaline solution to loosen the fibers. This woman protects herself with gloves and a sheet of plastic wrapped around her sari as she works at a tannery outside Vaniyambad in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu, India.

Women pluck hair by hand from goat hides soaked in an alkaline solution to loosen the fibers. This woman protects herself with gloves and a sheet of plastic wrapped around her sari as she works at a tannery outside Vaniyambad in the Vellore district of Tamil Nadu, India.

Read the whole thing, and then wonder where your shoes came from.

Bird killer

We’ve got this great big glass-fronted stadium in the Twin Cities, located near the river and on the migratory flyway for birds. Everyone said before it was built that it was going to kill lots of birds. Now that it’s looming there, people are patrolling around the base and looking for dead birds. And guess what? It’s killing lots of birds. Surprise!

I’m interested in how people respond to the confirmation of this prediction. The comments are predictably depressing.

Wind turbines kill an estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year in North America, also according to the National Audubon Society.

Yes! This is a big problem! We need better solutions to prevent bird and bat deaths by turbines, and no one is going to disagree with that. The story here, though, is that we have good solutions to the problem of birds hitting buildings, and they were even proposed during construction. As the article points out:

ird strikes with buildings are avoidable. Manhattan’s Jacob Javits Center, built in 1986, reduced collisions by about 90 percent by replacing reflective glass with a visibly patterned glass three years ago. American Bird Conservancy suggests using window films, decals, netting, screens and awnings to deter bird collisions.

So here’s a situation with a clear solution, which the owners of the stadium dismissed and did not implement, and someone is pointing to a completely different problem that lacks a good solution as an excuse to do nothing? Weird.

Do you really want to destroy what is suppose to be a revenue generator with bad publicity?

Did you know that stadiums don’t profit the communities they’re built in? They line the pockets of sports team owners, for sure, and you could argue that there are lots of intangible values that having an entertainment complex brings in…but please. Don’t argue for a non-existent profit.

Also, most troubling is the idea that we should be silent about bad ideas lest we discourage people from investing in them. That seems precisely backwards to me.

Those are the reasonable (by comparison) criticisms of the article. Are you ready for the unreasonable ones?

These crazy liberal democrat groups are nuts. They care more about 35 birds dying versus millions of human fetuses murdered by Planned Parenthood.

If you look at the statistics, less than a million abortions per year are performed in the US. These are not acts of murder. These are safe, legal operations carried out for the health and benefit of almost a million women per year. I actually do care more about the health and future of women than I do the safety of birds, but that is irrelevant. Putting a film on a stadium to reduce bird collisions will not increase the abortion rate, if that’s what you’re concerned about.

This next one, though, is just plain stupid.

Just put a big ugly Elizabeth Warren face up there with mouth open. That’ll scare crow those birds away if it doesn’t scare’em to death first.

It would actually work. Setting aside the bigotry and misogyny about calling Warren ugly, putting up a great big decal of any kind — you could even use Donald Trump’s lovely face — would disrupt the reflective surface that fools the birds and would solve the problem. A non-reflective film was what was originally proposed, which would probably be simpler and cheaper, but sure, slap a great big American flag across all that glass; an abstract pattern; pictures of bald eagles; whatever. This is not an insoluble problem.

The genocide continues

You need to read about the tiny town of Whiteclay, Nebraska. It’s a moral shithole.

Whiteclay, Nebraska. 12 people. Four liquor stores. More than 42 million cans of beer sold in the last 10 years.

I do wonder what those 12 people are like, that they can unconscionably exploit people as they do. The customers for their beer are the residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the descendants of Crazy Horse and Red Shirt and Sitting Bull now live. Well then, that must be the problem — don’t blame the good capitalists providing a service, it’s all the drunkards guzzling down that beer.

But this story explains why alcoholism rages through the Lakota.

On this South Dakota reservation, where the sale and consumption of alcohol has been illegal since 1889 (aside from a few months in the 1970s), the Oglala Lakota live in the poorest of America’s 3,144 counties, according to a 2014 U.S. Census Bureau report. In 2015, 55 percent of its roughly 30,000 residents were unemployed, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A decade before, the Department of the Interior put the number at 89 percent.

Here, men die on average at age 47, according to Rainey Enjady, former interim CEO of the Pine Ridge Hospital. That’s a shorter lifespan than any other country in the world, according to the World Health Organization. Its women fare better. On average, they live to 55—on par with Angola, Nigeria and Somalia.

On this sprawling reservation dotted with doublewide trailers, the infant mortality rate was three times the national average in 2007, according to Re-Member—about the same as modern day Syria, Honduras or the Gaza Strip.

It’s an American disgrace. Right here in the heart of our country, 8 hours from where I live, good people are destitute and living in despair, while merchants sell them poison.