Something to distract you

Jun. 4th, 2025 02:59 pm
selenak: (VanGogh - Lefaym)
[personal profile] selenak
I think now I must have read all the published work of the estimable Ms Tesh. In reverse order, as she published these two novel(la)s first, and once more demonstrating her bandwidth, being different yet again from both Some Desperate Glory and The Incandescent. (Not solely because in this duology, the two main characters are male, though there are very memorable female supporting characters.) What it reminded me of was fanfiction to some earlier canon, though I could not say which canon, in the way it focused on the central m/m romance. Which isn't to say said romance - which is thoroughly charming - is all it has going for itself, by far not. The books do a wonderful job with its vaguely 19th century AU England which has Wild Men in the woods, dryads, some (not many) fairies, folklore-studying researchers and female vampire hunters. In all her books, Tesh proves she can create beings that feel guinely different, not like humans in costumes, be they demons or aliens or fae, and the while the heart of the duology is in the romance between stoic and brawny Wild Man Tobias Finch and geeky and cheerful gentleman scholar Henry Silver, it's by far not the only interesting relationship going on. There's also Henry's mother, Mrs. Silver the enterprising non-nonsense slayer hunter, with the way she and Tobias come to relate to each other being a welcome surprise, in the first novel Tobias' creepy ex of centuries past and in the second Maud Linderhurst, ( who is something spoilery ).

One can nitpick (for example, it's not clear to me what the difference between what Bramble the Dyrad is by the end of the duology and what the fairy servant is, to put it as unspoilery as possible), but nothing that takes away from this thoroughly enjoyable duology of stories. And given the daily news horror, they were very welcome distractions indeed.

Speaking of entertaining distractions: Sirens on Netflix is a five episodes miniseries based on a play, both written by Molly Brown Metzler,), which strikes me as unusual (plays usually ending up as movies), though some googling after watching the series which brought me to reviews of the originial play (titled Elemeno Pea), I found the review descriptions of the play made it clear there were enough differences for the play now to feel like a first draft. The miniseries stars Meghann Fahy, Milly Alcock and Julianne Moore, and a lot of gorgeous costumes. (Also Kevin Bacon as Julianne Moore's husband.) At first I thought it would be another entry in the "eat the rich" genre, but no, not really. The premise: Our heroine and central character is Devon (Fahy), who is overwhelmed with work, an alcoholic father in the early stages of dementia, and her own past alcoholism (she's barely six months sober), and when after an SOS all she gets from younger sister Simone is an basket full of fruits, she impulsviely goes to the island for the superrich where Simone now works as PA for Michaela (Moore) to have it out with her sister. However, once she's there her anger is soon distracted by the fact Michaela/Kiki (as Simone is allowed to call her) comes across like a cult leader to her, and Simone's relationship with her boss has zero boundaries. The general narrative tone of the entire miniseries is black comedy, though as the Michaela and the audience discover both Simone and Devon have horroundous backstory trauma in their childhood and youth, said backstory trauma isn't played for laughs. The three main performances are terrific, with Julianne Moore having a ball coming across as intensely charismatic and creepy without technically doing anything wrong (so you get both why Devon is weirded out and why Simone seems to worship her), while Milly Alcock, whom I had previously only seen as young Rhaenyra in House of Dragon, also excells both as Simone in Devoted Lieutenant mode and with what's underneath showing up more and more. Meghann Fahy I hadn't seen in anything previously but she's wonderful here, no matter whether chewing someone out or trying to hold it together while things around her get ever more bizarre. Of the supporting cast, the most standout is Felix Solis as Jose, the house manager and general factotum. The fact that the staff hates Simone (who hands down Michaela's orders and is therefore loathed as the taskmaster) is a running gag through the series and gets an ironic pay off at the end, though again, this is not another entry in the "eat the rich" genre. Most of all it strikes me as a comedy of manners, and of course the setting - the island which in the play is Martha's Vineyard but in the miniseries has a fictional name - allows for some great landscaping in addition to everyone dressed up gorgeously. All in all, not something that will change your life, but immensely entertaining to watch, and everyone's fates at the end feel narratively earned.
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‘An endless game of whack-a-mole’: California tariffs lawsuit thrown out, but it’s not over

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:32 pm
[syndicated profile] calmatters_feed

Posted by Levi Sumagaysay

https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/06/california-tariffs-lawsuit/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466946

A shipping yard filled with tall stacks of colorful cargo containers under a clear blue sky. A red semi-truck is parked on the right side of the frame, and a large red forklift is positioned near the center, ready to move containers. Bright overhead lights and cranes are visible in the background, emphasizing the industrial setting.

In summary

Ruling also rejects Trump’s attempt to get California’s case transferred. State takes its tariffs fight to the 9th Circuit appeals court, which experts believe is more likely to give it a favorable ruling.

A judge threw out California’s lawsuit against President Trump’s tariffs this week, but the case will keep going because the state itself asked for the dismissal. 

State Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said he will immediately appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

The Trump administration had requested that the California lawsuit, filed in April, be transferred to the U.S. Court of International Trade. The federal court judge in San Francisco rejected the transfer on Monday, even though she said she believes tariff questions belong before the federal trade court. 

“Because California requests dismissal rather than transfer to the CIT, transfer is not in the interest of justice,” wrote U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in her ruling. She also wrote that the Trump administration “could not articulate” why it would serve the interest of justice — in other words, be fair — to transfer the case.

Bonta said in a statement that he was “pleased” that the decision gives the state a chance to bring the case before the 9th Circuit. Bonta has argued that Trump’s tariffs are illegal under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the administration says gives the president the authority to impose wide-ranging tariffs. 

Trump has already lost two cases that made the same arguments. Last week, the Court of International Trade ruled that the tariffs are unlawful because Trump has exceeded his authority under that act. That decision, in a lawsuit brought by Oregon, 11 other states and five businesses, has been put on hold pending an appeal by the Trump administration. A federal district court judge in Washington, D.C. also made a similar determination last week in a suit brought by a couple of small businesses. 

The tariffs — which have so far affected California ports, agriculture and other industries — remain in effect in the meantime. 

Legal experts say Bonta is more likely to get a favorable ruling in the 9th Circuit appeals court, which has a reputation for being liberal. But they differ on whether the case belongs in that court. 

“It’s hard to see how it belongs in the 9th Circuit,” said Richard Steinberg, professor at UCLA School of Law. “It’s a tariff case.” 

Brian Peck, adjunct professor at University of Southern California Gould School of Law, said “the whole question is whether the (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) gives the president the power, which is more of a constitutional question, so it should be before the 9th Circuit rather than the Court of International Trade.”

An appeal from the trade court would land before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which Peck said might be more favorable to the Trump administration because it has historically been more deferential to presidential powers.

Bonta recently spoke about his tariffs lawsuit at a roundtable of business leaders in San Francisco, and he noted that the act “doesn’t mention the word tariffs.” 

“Since the Court of International Trade deals with civil actions arising out of U.S. customs and international trade laws — which we argue does not include (the emergency economic powers act) — we believe the 9th Circuit has appropriate jurisdiction here,” wrote Elissa Perez, a spokesperson for the attorney general, in an email to CalMatters.

The White House did not respond to CalMatters’ request for comment.

Peck and Steinberg both said they think the question over Trump’s authority to impose tariffs the way he has been doing — broadly and without consulting Congress — is likely to end up before the Supreme Court.

Steinberg said the Trump administration can cite other statutes that give him the power to impose tariffs, but they would be more restrictive. But he doesn’t doubt that the president will keep trying.

“This is an endless game of whack-a-mole,” Steinberg said.

https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/06/california-tariffs-lawsuit/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466946

California gave accomplices to killings a second chance. How a new case tested the law

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:30 pm
[syndicated profile] calmatters_feed

Posted by Nigel Duara

https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/06/felony-murder-supreme-court/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466955

Attorney Jeffrey L. Fisher speaks at the California Supreme Court in San Francisco on May 21, 2024. Photo by Martin Novitski, Supreme Court of California

In summary

A recent California law raises the standard for when prosecutors can charge accomplices to killings with felony murder. A case testing that law recently reached the state supreme court.

Hundreds of people convicted of murder in California didn’t kill anyone. They were handed long sentences because they drove a getaway car or kicked down a door in a robbery that ended in murder  — and the state used to allow prosecutors to charge accomplices with first-degree felony murder. 

That changed in 2018, when California legislators required a higher standard for an accomplice’s murder conviction.

This week, the first case stemming from that law came before the California Supreme Court, and the ruling is expected to lead to a prisoner’s resentencing. 

The court held that a man who was at the scene of a 2012 shooting death in San Jose should be resentenced under the new law. While he was present at the scene of a robbery and murder, the court found his conduct did not reflect “a reckless indifference to human life” — the standard for convictions of first-degree felony murder. 

The decision reverses rulings by both a trial judge and an appeals court, and sends the case back down to the trial court for resentencing.  

Louis Emanuel and Jacob Whitley set up a fake deal to buy a pound of marijuana from John Sonenberg. In reality, they had plans to rob him, and police later said the pair had likely robbed other people of drugs before who didn’t report the crimes.  

They met next to a park in San Jose in the middle of the afternoon on Dec. 11, 2012. According to court records, Emanuel didn’t know Whitley had a gun. The pair pulled up next to Sonenberg’s pick up truck. Emanuel later allegedly told his ex-girlfriend that, in the confusion during the robbery, Whitley shot Sonenberg. 

“The guy started fighting back and (Whitley) pointed the gun,” said Breanna Santos, Emanuel’s former girlfriend and the mother of his son, according to court records quoted in the ruling. “He was trying to aim down, but the guy hit his hand, it went up and (Whitley) pulled the trigger and he said he shot him in his neck.”

Sonenberg died at the scene. 

At trial in 2015, Emanuel was convicted of first-degree felony murder. Though he didn’t pull the trigger, California law at the time equated his actions to murder while committing a robbery. The Sixth Appellate District Court of Appeal upheld his sentence. 

Then, California legislators passed a law which prohibited prosecutors from pursuing felony murder charges against accomplices unless they “aided, abetted, counseled, commanded, induced, solicited, requested, or assisted the actual killer in the commission of murder in the first degree, or the person was a major participant in the underlying felony and acted with reckless indifference to human life.” 

U.S. Supreme Court on felony murder

The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down mixed rulings on comparable cases.

In a 1982 case, they found that a getaway driver in an armed robbery that led to someone’s death could not be given a death sentence. 

But on the other end of the spectrum was a 1987 case in which the people accused of murder broke two people out of prison, armed them, held a family at gunpoint then abandoned the victims in the desert after the escapees shot them. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those suspects, even though they didn’t pull the trigger, could indeed face the death penalty. 

Those two cases are the opposite ends of the spectrum for defining the culpability of an accomplice to murder, wrote California Supreme Court Associate Justice Kelli Evans in the Emanuel opinion.

“This Court has thus made clear that participation in a “ ‘garden-variety armed robbery’ … is insufficient without more to establish reckless indifference,” Evans wrote.

But when Emanual filed for a resentencing under the 2018 law, the trial court judge ruled that he should have acted to prevent the shooting. 

“In the trial court’s view, Emanuel ‘created’ the situation by participating in the robbery, and thus, had an affirmative obligation to do more than withdraw his aid and support from a murderous cohort,” Evans wrote in the Supreme Court opinion. 

Perhaps most critically, the trial court found that Emanuel acted with reckless indifference to human life. The court of appeal agreed with that decision. 

Focus on Emanuel’s mental state

The California Supreme Court, in reversing both courts, found that Emanuel didn’t have a duty to prevent the robbery. They also pointed to other circumstances, like time of day and location. 

If someone plans to rob a house where methamphetamine is being manufactured by “several armed occupants” at 3 a.m., the person committing the robbery should anticipate violence, the court found. On the other hand, if a person intends to rob an unarmed marijuana dealer in a public park in the middle of the day, “the objective risk of violence posed by the crime and reasonably anticipated by the perpetrator is far less grave.” 

The court also noted that Emanuel tried to dissuade Whitley from robbing Sonenberg and walked away after the shooting. 

“The focus should not be on the ultimate efficacy of his actions, but on what his actions reveal about his mental state,” Evans wrote. “The (trial and appeal) courts did not carefully consider evidence bearing on Emanuel’s state of mind but rather simply judged that he had not employed an adequate measure of restraint.” 

When reached by CalMatters, Emanuel’s attorney, Solomon Wollack, declined to comment. 

The California Supreme Court vacated Emanuel’s murder conviction and sent the case back down to trial court for resentencing. 

https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/06/felony-murder-supreme-court/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466955

It’s expensive to become a teacher in California. This bill would pay those who try

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:30 pm
[syndicated profile] calmatters_feed

Posted by Carolyn Jones

https://calmatters.org/education/2025/06/student-teachers-california/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466961

In summary

To earn a teaching credential, students are required to complete a one-year program combining coursework and 600 hours of classroom experience. A new bill would provide money to pay them for that work.

When Brigitta Hunter started her teaching career, she had $20,000 in student loans and zero income – even though she was working nearly full time in the classroom.

“We lived on my husband’s pathetic little paycheck. I don’t know how we did it,” Hunter said. “And we were lucky – he had a job and my loans weren’t that bad. It can be almost impossible for some people.”

Each year, about 28,000 people in California work for free for about a year as teachers or classroom aides while they complete the requirements for their teaching credentials. That year without pay can be a dire hardship for many aspiring teachers, even deterring them from pursuing the profession.    

A new bill by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat from Torrance, would set aside money for school districts to pay would-be teachers while they do their student teaching service. The goal is to help alleviate the teacher shortage and attract lower-income candidates to the profession.

“Nothing makes a bigger difference in improving the quality of public education than getting highly qualified teachers in the classroom,” Muratsuchi said. “This bill helps remove some of the obstacles to that.”

Big loans, low pay

To be a K-12 public school teacher in California, candidates need a bachelor’s degree and a teaching credential, typically earned after completing a one-year program combining coursework and 600 hours of classroom experience. During that time, candidates work with veteran teachers or lead their own classes.

Teacher credential programs cost between $20,000 and $40,000, depending on where a student enrolls and where they live. In 2020, about 60% of teachers borrowed money to finish their degrees, according to a recent study by the Learning Policy Institute, with loans averaging about $30,000 for a four-year bachelor’s degree and a credential program.

Entering the profession with hefty student loans can be demoralizing and stressful, the report said, adding to the challenges new teachers face. The average starting teacher salary in California is $58,000, according to the National Education Association, among the highest in the country but still hard to live on in many parts of the state. It could take a decade or more for teachers to pay off their loans.

Muratsuchi’s bill, AB 1128, passed the Assembly on Monday and now awaits a vote in the Senate. It would create a grant program for districts to pay student teachers the same amount they pay substitute teachers, which is roughly $140 a day. The overall cost would be up to $300 million a year, according to Assembly analysts, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has set aside $100 million for the program in his revised budget.

Muratsuchi has another bill related to teacher pay, also working its way through the Legislature. Assembly bill 477, which passed the Assembly this week, would raise teacher salaries across the board.

Paying teachers, saving money

Christopher Carr, executive director of Aspire Public Schools in Los Angeles, a network of 11 charter schools, called the bill a potential “game changer.”

Teacher candidates often have to work second jobs to make ends meet, and sometimes finish with debt of $70,000 or more, he said. That can be an insurmountable barrier for people with limited resources. Paying would-be teachers would attract more people to the teaching profession, especially Black and Latino candidates, he said. 

School districts around the state have been trying to diversify their teacher workforces, based on research showing that Black and Latino students tend to do better academically when they have at least one teacher of the same race.

Carr’s schools pay their teachers-in-training through grants and a partnership with a local college, which has led to more of them staying on to teach full time after they receive their credentials, he said. That has saved the schools money by reducing turnover.

“This could open doors and be a step toward racial justice,” Carr said. “California has a million spending priorities, but this will lead to better outcomes for students and ultimately save the state money.”

Tyanthony Davis, chief executive director of Inner City Education Foundation, a charter school network in Los Angeles, put it this way: “If we have well paid, qualified, happy teachers, we’ll have happier classrooms.”

No opposition, yet

Muratusuchi’s bill has no formal opposition. The California Taxpayers Association has not taken a position. The California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, is a supporter.

“This legislation comes at a critical time as we continue to face an educator recruitment and retention crisis,” said David Goldberg, the union president. “Providing new grants to compensate student teachers for important on-the-job training is a strong step forward in the right direction to strengthening public education.”  

Hunter survived her student-teaching experience and went on to teach fourth grade for 34 years, retiring last year from the Mark West Union School District in Santa Rosa. The last 15 years of her career she served as a mentor to aspiring teachers. She saw first-hand the stress that would-be teachers endure as they juggle coursework, long days in the classroom and often second jobs on nights and weekends.

But paying student-teachers, she said, should only be the beginning. Novice teachers also need  smaller class sizes, more support from administrators and more help with enrichment activities, such as extra staff to lead lessons in art and physical education. 

“We definitely need more teachers, and paying student teachers is a good start,” Hunter said. “But there’s a lot more we can do to help them.”

https://calmatters.org/education/2025/06/student-teachers-california/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466961

Fewer unhoused people are living on Inland Empire streets

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:30 pm
[syndicated profile] calmatters_feed

Posted by Deborah Brennan

https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/inland-empire-homeless-count/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466980

From left, Andrea Zeppa, homeless services regional coordinator for Alameda County Healthcare for the Homeless, and Deidra Perry, program financial manager for Alameda County Healthcare for the Homeless, team up during Alameda County’s 2024 point-in-time count in Berkeley, on Jan. 25, 2024. The PIT count, which included a voluntary survey, gathers data on the county’s homeless population. Photo by Loren Elliott for CalMatters

In summary

Fewer people were living outside or in shelters in San Bernardino County. In Riverside, more people were in shelters than last year but fewer were on the streets.

Homelessness in some parts of the Inland Empire declined this year, according to an annual survey that estimates the number of people living in shelters or on the street.

The 2025 Homelessness “point-in-time” count marks the first drop in San Bernardino County’s homelessness in years. Before that the homeless population had risen steadily, doubling between 2018 and 2024.

San Bernardino reported an overall 10% drop in the number of homeless people counted compared to last year, driven by a 14% decline in people living outside. Riverside County reported that homelessness increased by 7%, with more people in shelters but fewer living on the street.

The count takes place on a single night in January, when public officials and volunteers search their region to see how many homeless people they find. The counts include people staying in private or public shelters or using hotel vouchers, whom they classify as “sheltered,” as well as those living on the street, who are counted as “unsheltered.”

That data helps cities and counties estimate their total homeless populations and plan for services, including emergency shelters and transitional or permanent housing.

Throughout California, other regions’ point-in-time counts showed mixed results. San Diego reported a 7% drop in homelessness, with big drops in unsheltered families and veterans.  But the Fresno/Madera count in the Central Valley found a 3% increase in homelessness in the region since 2023, with a 10% jump in unsheltered homelessness.

California had the highest homeless population in the nation last year, but it also saw slower growth in homelessness, CalMatters’ Marissa Kendall reported. Homelessness grew 3% to more than 187,000 people in California last year, compared to 18% growth nationwide.

In San Bernardino County, the annual count, conducted on Jan. 23, found 3,821 homeless adults and children this year, down by 434 from last year. That was due to a drop in homeless people living on streets or in other public places. 

Marcus Dillard, chief of homeless services, said the county invested $22 million in permanent housing and other support for people experiencing homelessness last year.

“The county appreciates the funding that has been allocated to support local governments providing support and services for people experiencing homelessness,” he said.

County Supervisor Joe Baca, Jr., said in a statement he is encouraged by the data ”because it shows that our efforts are making a difference. Although our work is far from over, I’m glad to see progress in reducing homelessness.”

But there were still hotspots of homelessness, including three of the county’s biggest cities. 

The city of San Bernardino counted 1,535 homeless people — the highest number in the county — followed by Victorville with 448 and Fontana with 364.

In Riverside County, total homeless numbers rose by 7% since 2023, the last time officials conducted the count. That might sound like bad news, but homelessness had climbed 12% in 2023 and 15% in 2022, which means the growth in homelessness has slowed down over the last few years.

Even so, the number of homeless people in shelters rose sharply from 1,284 in 2023 to 2,012 this year, as the county increased shelter capacity by 11%, according to the point-in-time count. But that was offset by a 19% decrease in people living on the streets, dropping from 2,441 two years ago to 1,978 this year.

The city of Riverside had the biggest homeless population, with 1,087 people counted this year. The count found 509 homeless people living in Indio and 322 in Hemet.

https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/06/inland-empire-homeless-count/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466980

Gutting AmeriCorps weakens California’s response when the next emergency strikes

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:30 pm
[syndicated profile] calmatters_feed

Posted by Lauren Levitt

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/06/americorps-emergency-response-service-cut/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466933

Three workers in full-body protective gear and helmets walk along a street carrying sandbags and compost filter socks as they work on various erosion, flood, and debris control efforts. In the background, a car drives past the work along the street, and a row of trees is behind the workers.

Guest Commentary written by

Lauren Levitt

Lauren Levitt

Lauren Levitt is an emergency preparedness outreach lead and California Emergency Response Corps member with AmeriCorps. Lauren is a Marine veteran and native New Yorker currently residing in San Francisco.

Last month, I hung up my yellow vest for the last time.

We were there after wildfires tore through Los Angeles communities, standing alongside survivors in shelters, donation centers, disaster recovery centers and scorched neighborhoods. We helped Californians take their first steps toward rebuilding.

And now, we’re gone.

After the federal government cut funding for AmeriCorps’ disaster relief programs, more than 60 of us in the California Emergency Response Corps were told our service was ending early. Some of my teammates were still in the field when the news came in. They had to pack up and leave while the work was still unfolding.

This is not just about a few disheartened young adults losing the opportunity to serve their community. It’s about what we lose as a state when we cut off the pipeline of people trained and ready to show up in times of crisis.

This derailment happened at a curious time. Our deployment to Los Angeles was the biggest operation in the California program’s history. Our teams helped more than 26,000 wildfire survivors navigate FEMA paperwork, replace lost IDs and find emergency housing.

We didn’t arrive with all the answers, but we came with compassion, training and a willingness to listen. One afternoon, I sat with an elderly couple as they showed me photos of their destroyed home. They weren’t asking for much — just someone to walk them through the maze of forms and requirements while they tried to make sense of their new reality.

Another day, I met a young man sitting outside a disaster recovery center because he was too nervous to go inside. I sat with him for a while as he recounted how he evacuated his elderly neighbors as the fire approached their neighborhood. The trauma he suffered was significant and it was clear he was struggling to process it. Thankfully, we were able to connect him with the wonderful people at the county department of mental health to get him the services he needed.

Moments like these don’t much attention. But they matter.

As a former Marine, I’ve seen how critical it is to have trained, mission-ready people in the right place at the right time. California’s emergency corps gave me a new mission: helping communities prepare for, respond to and recover from disaster. This program provided critical, entry-level emergency management experience that I would not have otherwise received.

I thought this was the beginning of my career. For me (and so many others) it was supposed to be a first step, a launchpad into public service.

Instead, it’s been cut short.

The argument you may hear is that national service is too expensive, but that’s not the case with AmeriCorps. For modest stipends, people can serve their communities and gain valuable career experience for a fraction of what outsourcing those services would cost. Emergency response members provide support through fires, floods, pandemics and earthquakes, helping fill gaps no one else can or will.

We’re not waste, fraud or abuse. We’re vital components of the communities we serve.

At a time when wildfires, floods and climate-driven disasters are only becoming more frequent, we need competent and experienced disaster response professionals. They don’t magically appear. They have to get their start somewhere. Programs like this are how we grow the next generation of emergency responders, crisis managers and community resilience leaders.

Ending the corps program is not just shortsighted, it’s dangerous.

I’m proud of the work we did. I’m grateful to my teammates and mentors. And I’m heartbroken — not just for myself, but for the people we haven’t yet had the chance to help.

If you didn’t know who we were before, I hope you do now. We were the ones in yellow vests, and we were just getting started.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/06/americorps-emergency-response-service-cut/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466933

California’s economy is just limping along. Why is Newsom always boasting?

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:00 pm
[syndicated profile] calmatters_feed

Posted by Dan Walters

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/06/california-economy-limping-along/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466875

A job fair booth for the Los Angeles Police Department promotes 911 dispatcher openings. A display sign outlines job details and salary information, with a QR code and toy police-themed giveaways on the table. A recruiter speaks with two individuals holding resumes, while American flags and red curtains decorate the background of the indoor venue. The atmosphere is professional and informative.

Gavin Newsom loves to boast about the state he governs, claiming that California is No.1 in some category or that the state is leading in some economic or cultural activity.

Sometimes his boasts crumble in the face of reality, such as his 2022 declaration that the state budget had a $97.5 billion surplus and “no other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.”

It was later revealed that the surplus claim was based on revenue estimates that were wrong by $165 billion over four years, leading to multibillion-dollar budget deficits.

Undeterred, Newsom has continued his boastful ways. A few weeks ago bragged that California, were it a nation, now has the world’s fourth-largest economy at $4.1 trillion, edging out Japan.

“California isn’t just keeping pace with the world — we’re setting the pace,” Newsom cheered. “Our economy is thriving because we invest in people, prioritize sustainability and believe in the power of innovation.”

Actually, California’s edge over Japan is more the result of currency exchange calculations rather than productivity, but $4.1 trillion is still a big number. Unfortunately, its size masks the darker reality that, by many measures, California is doing no better than treading water.

As the Legislature’s budget analyst, Gabe Petek, said in a report on California’s budget situation late last year, “California’s economy has been in an extended slowdown for the better part of two years, characterized by a soft labor market and weak consumer spending.

“While this slowdown has been gradual and the severity milder than a recession, a look at recent economic data paints a picture of a sluggish economy. Outside of government and health care, the state has added no jobs in a year and a half.”

What Petek described six months ago is still true, as recent employment data indicates. In April, the state’s unemployment rate, 5.3%, was higher than all but two other states, Michigan and Nevada, and it’s been stuck at that elevated relative position for several years.

“Since February 2020, the state’s labor force has grown by just 126,100 workers, a 0.6% increase,” Beacon Economics said in an analysis of the April data, adding, “This slower growth is being driven largely by the state’s chronic housing shortage and the retirement of aging workers.”

Justin Niakamal, Beacon’s research manager says “it’s difficult to see how California will be able to break out of its slow-growth cycle when there has been virtually no increase in housing production. This is an elemental problem that is impacting the state’s ability to grow its population, industry and economy.”

A major indication of California’s relatively moribund economy is what has been happening in the San Francisco Bay Area’s technology industry, a sector that, in essence, been propping up the entire state in recent years.

Having expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic to serve those confined to their homes and working remotely, the industry has been shedding jobs month by month.

While Newsom cited numbers from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics in claiming that California now had the globe’s fourth-largest economy, he didn’t trumpet a recent bureau study that underscores the state’s poor employment picture. California has more than a million unemployed workers. The new bureau report reveals that the ratio of jobless workers to job openings is the highest of any state, 1.6 jobseekers for every one open job.

To put that data point another way, if every job opening in California were to be filled, we’d still have hundreds of thousands of Californians on the unemployment rolls.

That’s nothing to brag about.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2025/06/california-economy-limping-along/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466875

CalMatters and PBS SoCal video series nominated for Los Angeles Emmy

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:00 pm
[syndicated profile] calmatters_feed

Posted by Sonya Quick

https://calmatters.org/inside-the-newsroom/2025/06/socalmatters-losangeles-emmynomination/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466943

The back of a person as they hold up a cell phone to film a person in front of them at a college campus. The person taking video wears a blue Dodgers hat and a black shirt. The person being filmed wears a black hat, green hoodie sweatshirt and gray pants.

In summary

The Emmy nomination goes to SoCal Matters, a weekday video series that brings Greater Los Angeles residents statewide perspective with a local focus.

CalMatters’ collaboration with PBS SoCal is nominated for a Los Angeles Area Emmy award.

The informational series award nomination is for SoCal Matters, a weekday video series that just marked a one-year milestone. So far 135 two-minute video segments have totaled 4.5 hours of TV.

The partnership series brings CalMatters’ expertise on statewide quality of life issues to the local level for PBS SoCal viewers.

“Our partnership with PBS SoCal helps us bring California insights to uniquely serve Los Angeles residents on critical local and state issues,” said CalMatters Editor-in-Chief Kristen Go.

Production of the show is led by Robert Meeks, CalMatters’ director of video strategy. He was previously senior director of video for news, business and politics at the Los Angeles Times..

The specific SoCal Matters videos that merited the nomination are: a look at a bill to pilot better voting access for eligible inmates, why maternity wards are closing in Southern California, and a look at CHP policy on using less-lethal rounds at UCLA to break up protests.

Watch SoCal Matters every weekday on YouTube and on PBS SoCal (at 5:58 p.m.) and PBS SoCal Plus (at 5:28 p.m., 5:58 p.m. and 10:58 p.m.). Los Angeles Emmy winners will be announced July 26 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

The LA Emmy nomination follows two Northern California Emmy nominations and back-to-back wins for collaborations with CBS-TV.

https://calmatters.org/inside-the-newsroom/2025/06/socalmatters-losangeles-emmynomination/

https://calmatters.org/?p=466943

Toward an Eco-Social Contract for Regenerative Futures

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] daily_good_feed

Posted by Tijn Tjoelker

https://www.dailygood.org/view.php?qid=10350

In these increasingly ecologically and socially chaotic times, Fan Yang offers an eco-social framework, a kind of “web for life,” that “ensures governance and economic systems serve both ecological and social well-being.” It is a social contract where all relevant stakeholders are heard and belong. At the heart of her proposal is care – care for the planet and care for one another. “For it to take root, functional states and markets must operate within a larger context of care—ensuring their actions are guided by collective well-being and long-term sustainability,” with commitments and agreements for “living well together.” “It demands a fundamentally relational approach—one that focuses on the quality of relationships and the design of processes that enable collective wisdom, coordination, and care.”

https://www.dailygood.org/view.php?qid=10350

More From America’s Worst Democratic Governor

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:12 pm
[syndicated profile] lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed

Posted by Erik Loomis

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/06/more-from-americas-worst-democratic-governor

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/?p=151484

One thing I really enjoyed when I was on Pod Save America this weekend was calling out Colorado’s “Democratic” governor Jared Polis for vetoing the repeal to right to work that Democrats in the legislature passed. To me, that’s worth reading him out of the Democratic Party entirely. Just join the Republicans. And here he is again, being terrible.

Last Thursday, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis vetoed the No Pricing Coordination Between Landlords bill (HB25-1004), a measure against price-fixing that would have put more restraints on anti-competitive rent-setting software used by companies like RealPage.

The decision marks yet another consequential veto from Polis and a legislative pattern that’s become all too familiar in Colorado. On the same day as the price-fixing veto, Polis rejected a bipartisan bill that would have protected patients from surprise ambulance bills by private equity–owned health care firms, something that passed both houses of the legislature unanimously, on the grounds that it may raise individual insurance premiums by $2 a month. And earlier in May, he opted to veto a labor-backed bill that would have repealed the state’s de facto right-to-work law.

Given that all three bills were rejected by Polis after Colorado’s General Assembly adjourned its legislative session, they can’t be sent back to legislators for a potential veto override. In the case of the unanimously approved surprise ambulance billing legislation, the two-thirds vote required for an override would be practically guaranteed.

The common thread here is that these bills would have burdened Big Tech, private equity, and large employers in the state. Like many previous vetoes, the decisions mark Polis’s unwavering commitment to maintaining his reputation as a pro-business Democrat, regardless of whether it comes at the expense of renters and working people.

The veto of the rental price-fixing bill in particular deprived tenants of potential relief on a highly salient issue in Colorado and across the country. As the Prospect has documented, RealPage and other firms use pricing algorithms to recommend higher rental rates to landlords and property managers. Often, these recommendations utilize nonpublic information and data about competing rents and vacancies, allowing landlords to create artificial bottlenecks in supply and push higher prices on renters than they would be able to by acting independently. Critics argue that the use of this software constitutes price-fixing, and that landlords who use it are colluding to illegally inflate rental prices.

This is just disgusting. And please, can we not see the kinds of defenses from commenters we used to get for Gavin Newsom’s horrifying vetoes of excellent legislation before he started playing footsie with Trumpers and thus finally did something that LGM commenters found not OK. Being a Democrat has to actually mean something. I don’t know what Jared Polis offers here that should make us think of him as a Democrat.

The post More From America’s Worst Democratic Governor appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/06/more-from-americas-worst-democratic-governor

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/?p=151484

‘Disgusting abomination’: Why is Elon Musk slamming Trump’s budget bill?

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:17 pm

Why ‘Kill the Boer’ still echoes: It’s not hate, it’s hunger for justice

Jun. 4th, 2025 11:58 am

Dream of the Bird Tattoo by Juan J. Morales

Jun. 4th, 2025 12:00 pm
[syndicated profile] strangehorizons_all_feed

Posted by Tristan Beiter

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dream-of-the-bird-tattoo-by-juan-j-morales/

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=55520

Dream of the Bird Tattoo coverThe parental elegy collection is practically a genre all to itself, a longstanding tradition of poetic writing that ranges across a wide variety of tones, styles, and perspectives. [1] Juan J. Morales’s Dream of the Bird Tattoo is firmly in this tradition, taking it up in honor of his father. Morales’s “poems and sueñitos” (little dreams)—as the title page declares the collection—are tender, thoughtful, and irreverently serious. Love is palpable throughout the volume, even in those poems that take on the world most directly, and seem to have the least to do with the familial context which organizes the book, such as “20,000 Pallets of Bottled Water Left Untouched in Storm-Ravaged Puerto Rico,” which addresses the FEMA supplies still undistributed a year after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island. Grief (and anger) as expressed in this poem—which, in contrast to its setting, is searing the way frostbite is searing, direct, and matter-of-fact—is motivated by the same ethos of care that motivates the fondest reflections on Morales’s father, like in “Grandpa Money.” In this way, the collection highlights the dynamics of loss at the personal level but also the ways in which they interact with systems of race, class, and governmental status.

Poetically, the most striking element of the book for me was the use of the prose poem. The volume is dense with short, square, and rectangular prose-poetic units, making up a large portion of the page- and word-count of the book. All of the poems with titles of the form “Dream of [X]” (or other similar dream titles), and all of the “Excerpt[s] from Shit My Puerto Rican Father Said,” are prose poems. Both of these sequences use their shared structure to anchor the book, returning to either the impossible world of dreams or an absolutely direct realism of memory. Take, as an example, one of the few places where these two groups of poems meet directly. Around the center of the collection, an “Excerpt from Shit My Puerto Rican Father Said” appears between “Dream of Hungry Crabs” and “Dream of the Ladybugs.” “Excerpt” here concerns a story where “[d]uring a visit home, Father asked me if I wanted a Puerto Rican omelet.” Baffled, the speaker requests clarification. The father explains that all his omelets are Puerto Rican because he is: “What the hell else am I supposed to call it when a Puerto Rican makes you an omelet?” Bold, blunt, even prosaic, this little poem creates a sense of the immediacy of memory, the way reminiscence invokes the rhetoric of fact. It’s like a worry stone kept in one’s pocket—absolutely real, and capable of bringing you back into the living present through the solidity it carries. All the “Excerpt” poems carry this quality. They are direct, tangible, dare I say immediate, even as they are, without exception, framed from the moment of their title as recollections and reminiscences. It is the reality of the memory they convey with their declarative sentences and squat forms.

On the other hand, the dreams are dreams. “Dream of the Hungry Crab” echoes the “Excerpt” that follows it by figuring a conversation about food and hunger in the presence of crabs which are emerging, impossibly, from a sandbox. After the crabs eat, the speaker raises a question, and the response of the old man in this poem is as matter-of-fact as the father’s in that “Excerpt”; but the tone of the poem is very different: “He laughs like the sea spitting out a whale. Lipping one of the tiny holes with his big toe, he then asks, ‘How can you still be hungry after that?’” The embrace of simile and metaphor is not precisely where the dream-logic and the possibility of the fantastic come to life here, but nonetheless this image, at once highly specific and totally impossible, characterizes the dream as a dream.

“Dream of the Ladybugs,” on the other hand, has fewer obvious similarities to the “Excerpt” it abuts, but it too shares this tone. To this speaker, ladybugs are “like bubbles or orange fire,” are “gliding toward me like flower blossoms bursting.” Magical and unreal, the language of the dream thus draws out the web of connections that animate the sleeping world with its own impossibilities, even as both “Dream of the Hungry Crab” and “Dream of the Ladybugs” are written largely in squat blocks of declarative statements.

Yet, these three poems appear, on the page, very similar. By emphasizing in both of these strands of the volume the poems’ shared structure of the dream and the “excerpt,” by leaning into the block of prose text and the visual signifiers of prose forms—declarative sentences, quoted dialogue, the paragraph rather than the stanza or the line—Morales allows them to balance each other, grounding the collection. Not only the blunt reality of life remembered but also the post-death dreamscapes of loss serve as the ground on which grieving can occur. Without both, the book (and, the form seems to say, the grieving individual) would be left unmoored, subject to the currents of uninterpretability and the failure of meaning, either in the form of bare facts or unconscious abstractions. By choosing the shared form of the prose poem to convey the link between the facts and the dreams, Morales is able to highlight the blocky everydayness of life after loss alongside the necessity of imagination in beginning to move forward. The mundane and the fantastic are the same kind of thing, aesthetically and formally speaking: prose blocks that anchor and support the verse poems that spread throughout the collection. The duality of the prose poem in Dream of the Bird Tattoo creates an artistic unity which is specifically built on revealing the echoes between the everyday and the impossible, in order to make grief apprehensible.

The verse poems, then, act as the elaborations, the movement, of the volume. They are ships anchored by, and spires built on, the prose. Although this image is echoed by the refrain structure and image of waves in “The Waves, or Las Olas”—as the waves, in both English and Spanish, lap up against the search for meaning and its “private ceremony that I wish I could hold / for him every day that drives me deeper than grief / and into the sea full of its waves and olas”—the functioning of the verse poems is best encapsulated by “The Medium Speaks of Birds.” This poem, in seven numbered sections, is formally expansive, making multiple approaches to structure and lineation across its distinct parts. Narrating an encounter with a medium who claims to know how the speaker’s deceased father will contact him in the upcoming months, the poem is energized, using its varied lineation as a force, like the deer seen in part one which—after being interpreted as a symbol “of an electric witching hour” (electric as in exciting or electric as in technological? The poem allows us to sit in the uncertainty)—“spooks / toward the graveyard.” The lines are pitted with all manner of indentations, as if to mirror the leaping animal itself. The poem insists on its use of space, expanding outward, knowing that the prose poems will ensure it has a connection to the grounded core of the book, even as the medium mixes truth and error, as in part five of the poem. There, the medium calls out visions as the speaker records their accuracy:

“Have you seen a strange new bird? Maybe it flew into your house” (Miss)

“Did he die in February?” (Hit)

“Have there been any birds on your windowsill?” (Miss)

“Okay. Look for it in the next day or so. You’ll see.” (. . .)

As the medium elaborates the world of the visions, even though some of the visions are “misses,” that supernatural world expands across time and space in the reader’s experience of the poem, visually filling up the page and resisting compression into the realist rhetoric of facts and reporting. Yet as the world expands, the feeling of chance as the source of the medium’s successes shrinks, eventually arriving at the uncertain response to “You’ll see.” In that moment, we (and the speaker) believe that we will “see” the bird (perhaps the bird of the bird tattoo of the title) and come to realize connection across loss. In this moment, the medium’s potentially supernatural reality becomes the dominant affective mode of part V of the poem. This highlights the possibility of spiritual connection even as the poem’s elaborated metaphors through the other four sections and constructed images emphasize doubt and uncertainty. The book’s reality-forward formal choices have insisted on a feeling of groundedness that even the space-filling, white-space-dominant part V of the poem, with its resistance to the density of prose, cannot remove. Instead, the verse animates the world that the prose so insistently manifests, bringing movement, uncertainty, and possibility into the space of honesty, directness, and even bluntness that characterizes the broader poetics of grief.

And the book, in the end, brings it all together. The final poem, “Dream of the Bird Tattoo,” captures the breath of living within and through loss. In a dream of the father, “the swallow climbed off his shoulder as a green phoenix made of neon light. It shook its wings and told me ‘This is the bird you are looking for,’ before flying out of the dream and waking me, just like sunrise.” In the end, a strange bird is figured as the final message of the father; the grounding prose and the shifting verse come together in a final dream that, “just like sunrise,” marks the possibility of the further future. Dream of the Bird Tattoo depicts the interplay of the personal and the social in its vision of grief for a parent, and it does so movingly and with powerful softness. It is in the structure, though, where the collection really shines, using the speculative frame of the dream to unfold the possibilities of the prose poem as a means of thinking through the world in which we live and write.

Endnotes

[1] Examples include LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Village (2023); Holly Lyn Walrath, Numinous Stones (2023); Todd Dillard, Ways We Vanish (2020); Tracy K. Smith, Life on Mars (2011); Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms are Never Finished (2001); and Kimiko Hahn, The Unbearable Heart (1995). These are just a few examples by poets whose work I know, nowhere near an exhaustive list of such works, and these books are not only elegies for parents. All of them, however, deal at least in part with the loss of a parent and a complex suite of attendant emotions. Many of them, like Dream of the Bird Tattoo, are engaged with questions of place and race, and the treatment of Kashmir in Rooms are Never Finished particularly resonates with that of Puerto Rico in Dream of the Bird Tattoo. [return]


http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/dream-of-the-bird-tattoo-by-juan-j-morales/

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=55520

Wish I had a sweet nickname like “The Margrave” honestly

Jun. 4th, 2025 11:21 am
[syndicated profile] joshreadscomics_feed

Posted by Josh

https://joshreads.com/2025/06/wish-i-had-a-sweet-nickname-like-the-margrave-honestly/

https://joshreads.com/?p=46735

Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out!

Wizard of Id, 6/4/25

As far as I know, the Wizard of Id has never added any vaguely medieval monk/priest type characters to its vaguely medieval setting, so that leaves as an open question what “sweet lord” the Wizard is addressing in panel two. Is it the dark lord of magic, from whom he receives his eldritch power but whom he finds terrifying and repellent, like this hideous fish? Or is he merely addressing his sovereign the King of Id, from whom all sovereignty flows and who has the right of first refusal to every fish caught in his realm’s rivers and lakes, even the ugly ones?

Flash Gordon, 6/4/25

The new Flash Gordon strip is still doing its thing — which is to say, having great art and fun stories that I don’t talk about very much on my blog but rest assured, they’re there. Today I mostly wanted to draw your attention to the “NEXT:” narration box in panel four, which is possibly the greatest narration box of all time.

Intelligent Life, 6/4/25

Ha ha, remember two days ago, when I complained about how vague and nonspecific Mike’s dialogue was? “He should actually name the geek media franchises he’s talking about,” I said. “He definitely wouldn’t use that as an opportunity to talk about which fictional blue creatures he would or would not have sex with,” I added, like a fool.

Alice, 6/4/25

Alice’s friend, that’s not what that means at all! This is very bad advice!

https://joshreads.com/2025/06/wish-i-had-a-sweet-nickname-like-the-margrave-honestly/

https://joshreads.com/?p=46735

Torchwood: Fanfic: Menagerie

Jun. 4th, 2025 01:25 pm
badly_knitted: (Eyebrow Raise)
[personal profile] badly_knitted posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks

Title: Menagerie
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: [personal profile] badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 824
Summary: More alien creatures have fallen through the Rift and Ianto is starting to wonder how he’s supposed to cope with caring for so many different species.
Spoilers: Nada
Warnings: None needed.
Written For: Challenge 481: Charity at fan_flashworks.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood or any of the characters.



  • Current Mood: tired
  • Current Location: my desk

Freedom Flotilla issues distress signal after drone circles overhead

Jun. 4th, 2025 11:37 am

Reading Wednesday

Jun. 4th, 2025 07:14 am
sabotabby: (books!)
[personal profile] sabotabby
Just finished: real ones, Katherena Vermette. This one ruled. I don't have a lot to add to what I said last week except that I really enjoyed it. If you want a good pairing (or you're not super familiar with the context of the Canadian arts scene), Jesse Wente's Unreconciled provides a great non-fiction one. But yeah, I loved the characters, I loved the poetic, Impressionist writing style, it was emotionally affecting without high stakes or pacing, which is something that genre writers could learn a lot from (more on that later). Vermette seems to be putting out great books with impressive frequency but this is the one I've enjoyed most so far.

The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed. This one was imperfect and ambitious, but I'll take that over boring any day. It's a master class in how to do some interesting worldbuilding; there's a lot going on in the background, and you get it only as a sketch. Oh yeah, there are lizard guns. Why are the guns lizards? Eh, don't worry about it, keep up. It's pretty New Weird in the tradition of Miéville and Tchaikovsky (positive) so I liked that quite a bit.

I have two big critiques, one big and one small. First, the small. This is critically acclaimed, nominated for a bunch of awards, and put out by a real press. And yet. And yet. Alefret, the main character, has one leg. This is clearly established in the opening line. His leg is slowly growing back thanks to an experimental serum that's delivered via wasp sting (again, cool) but it's slow and he's on crutches for the entire book, something that is done very well and really gives a good sense of the character's physicality. And then there is a scene where he is having dinner with two elderly sisters who have a cat. Under the table, the cat brushes up against his ankles and he holds his legs very still. WTF? Which editor let that through?

My bigger complaint is that I don't think she quite lands the ending. As I've said, it's ambitious, a story about whether pacifism can survive a horrific war.
( spoilers )

Cottagers and Indians by Drew Hayden Taylor. This is a one-act play based on the true story of Anishinaabe people trying to re-seed lakes with wild rice, over the objection of white cottagers. And it's amazing, obviously. Everything he writes is great and this is particularly affecting. It's a dance between two difficult, complicated characters, and while the white cottager character could easily be a hideous caricature, Hayden Taylor is too much of a humanist to take the easy road out. There's also a great afterword by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, because of course there is.

Currently reading: Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls. This is a bilingual (!!!) Indigenous futurist comic about two defenders of the earth, beautifully illustrated in a Formline style. If you want to learn Tahltan, I can't think of a cuter way. There's a lot of pew pew pew and it's very fun.

Withered by A.G.A. Wilmot. JFC not another cozy horror, fuck me. This one starts out very promising, with a teenage girl, haunted by the ghost of her recently dead brother, trying to burn down the family house before it kills the rest of her family. 25 years later, Robyn, who grew up in the tiny town of Black Stone, has fallen on financial hard times after the death of her husband, so she moves herself and her teenage child, Ellis, back home into the very same house. Ellis meets a number of residents, mostly young people, who insist that the house is haunted, and that there's a strange power that it exerts by displacing death into the surrounding towns, while keeping the people in Black Stone alive for a very long time. This is a good set up for horror. I'm here for it.

However, it turns out that the haunted house is nice, actually??? and everyone in the town is very nice??? Ellis is recovering from a life-threatening eating disorder that they in part attribute to "anti-queer cultural norms" and yet they do not encounter anyone who doesn't want to be their friend and/or date them, they immediately get a job at the cool coffee shop without a resume, and everyone in their life is accepting and friendly. Once again, a queernormative setting wants to have its anti-oppression cake and eat it too. I guess maybe the house is somehow making everyone in this small town cool and rad and multicultural, but I dunno, I lived in a pretty small town and it wasn't great.

Also all the kids are goth or alternative in some way and listen to the kind of music that I like. I can buy that there are tons of teenage Black girls in the year of our lord 2025 who listen to Bjork and Sigur Ros. What I cannot buy is that in a tiny town, one of them would just happen to meet and fall for a kid who listens to Frightened Rabbit and the Mountain Goats.

Anyway, I am suspecting that the girl who spent 25 years in a mental institution (what) is going to end up being the villain of the piece, because this is what reading cozy things has led me to suspect. But let's see.
Tags:

The Ramifications of Ukraine’s Drone Attack

Jun. 4th, 2025 11:00 am
[syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/the-ramifications-of-ukraines-drone-attack.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=70311

You can read the details of Operation Spiderweb elsewhere. What interests me are the implications for future warfare:

If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases? Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that cFan be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s.

There’s a balance between the cost of the thing, and the cost to destroy the thing, and that balance is changing dramatically. This isn’t new, of course. Here’s an article from last year about the cost of drones versus the cost of top-of-the-line fighter jets. If $35K in drones (117 drones times an estimated $300 per drone) can destroy $7B in Russian bombers and other long-range aircraft, why would anyone build more of those planes? And we can have this discussion about ships, or tanks, or pretty much every other military vehicle. And then we can add in drone-coordinating technologies like swarming.

Clearly we need more research on remotely and automatically disabling <a href=”https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/29/1117502/epirus-drone-zapping-microwave-us-military-defense/>drones.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/the-ramifications-of-ukraines-drone-attack.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=70311

Wednesday Reading Meme & Books 37-39 of 2025

Jun. 4th, 2025 07:27 am
spikedluv: (summer: sunflowers by candi)
[personal profile] spikedluv
What I Just Finished Reading: Since last Wednesday I have read/finished reading: Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells, Out of the Deep I Cry (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) by Julia Spencer-Fleming and Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells.


What I am Currently Reading: In a Dark House (A Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James Mystery) by Deborah Crombie.


What I Plan to Read Next: I have three more library books out, and four more on request, so definitely one of those!!



Book 37 of 2025: Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries) (Martha Wells)

So good! ( spoilers )

So good! I'm trying not to read these all at once, but I'm already getting the final two books from the library, so it's going to be hard to hold back. I'm giving this book five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥


Book 38 of 2025: Out of the Deep I Cry (Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries) (Julia Spencer-Fleming)

I really enjoyed this book!!! ( spoilers )

Really good book. I've requested the next and am giving this one five hearts.

♥♥♥♥♥



Book 39 of 2025: Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries) (Martha Wells)

So good! ( spoilers )

This book was really good. I'm giving it five hearts, natch.

♥♥♥♥♥
Tags:

Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,896

Jun. 4th, 2025 11:00 am
[syndicated profile] lawyersgunsmoneyblog_feed

Posted by Erik Loomis

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/06/erik-visits-an-american-grave-part-1891

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/?p=151043

This is the grave of Solomon Nunes Carvalho.

Born in 1815 in Charleston, South Carolina, Carvalho grew up in the Jewish elite of that city, not too uncommon in the wealthy southern port towns. In fact, his father David was critical in founding the first Reform Jewish congregation in the United States. The family left South Carolina sometime by 1840 and moved to Philadelphia. Carvalho was taking art lessons in these years, but mostly was involved in his father’s business enterprises. By 1850, he was married and living in Baltimore, where his father was then based. He and his wife Sarah would move back and forth between New York and Baltimore quite a bit during the early years of their marriage between the two cities. They were involved in a lot of Jewish charity stuff in both cities and were also involved in creating Jewish congregations.

Carvalho and his father both became quite interested in the new practice of photography very early in its history. They began developing daguerrotypes. Carvalho also started painting more seriously by the time he was in Baltimore. The first thing he really got notice for was a picture called “Child with Rabbits,” which is pretty schmaltzy but was popular, became a mass produced image, and several banks put it on their state currency national bank notes (which themselves were part of the ridiculous American currency system of these years). Here it is, though I suspect this is actually from the bank notes:

Cute, I guess.

Carvalho got to know folks though and one of them was John C. Frémont, the American explorer and later the first Republican presidential candidate. He rightfully thought it was important that Americans see what he saw in their western lands as they wrested power from the tribes using massive violence, which this abolitionist had no problem enacting upon Native people, a hypocrisy common to abolitionists. In 1853, Frémont was about to set off on an expedition to explore routes for a transcontinental railroad. Carvalho wanted to go along. He offered to accompany the mission and take daguerrotypes of the soldiers and the land. Frémont agreed. But it was a hard hard journey. The weather was bad for much of the journey. It was dangerously cold and Carvalho had some frostbite. Nutrition was grim and he also developed scurvy. It was Mormons who saved his life, nursing him back to health. In fact, he became friends with Brigham Young during all this and of course took his picture.

Carvalho eventually did make it to California. But most of his daguerrotypes soon burned in a fire. Still, a few did survive, but at least for while, it was hard to tell which ones because Frémont gave the negatives to Matthew Brady for printing and Brady kept them and they got mixed up with his own work. In any case, this was the great adventure of Carvalho’s life and in 1860, he published a book titled  Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West; with Colonel Fremont’s Last Expedition about it. His daguerrotypes of the trip provide the oldest photographic evidence we have of a lot of indigenous cultures. Here, for example, is a picture he took of a Cheyenne encampment in Kansas.

Carvalho also did a bunch of painting on this trip too. Here’s his Grand River (Colorado River):

If Carvalho is known for anything today, it was his trip across the continent with Frémont. In fact, there was even a documentary about it made in 2015. The rest of his life isn’t quite so exciting. He continued to live in New York. However, he developed cataracts, which is not a good thing for a photographer or painter. So he had to give up his portrait business. in 1869. He could well enough evidently to tinker with machines and he invented some important stuff in the world of steam heating, winning patents that achieved use and set him comfortably for the rest of his life by the late 1870s.

Carvalho died in 1897, at the age of 82.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho is buried in Beth Olom Cemetery, Queens, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other American photographers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Spider Martin, who gained famed for his civil rights photographers, is in Bessemer, Alabama. George Platt Lynes, who did a lot of early gay photographer and was an associate of Alfred Kinsey, is in The Bronx. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,896 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/06/erik-visits-an-american-grave-part-1891

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/?p=151043

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