Public Policy and Politics – A Honey of an Anklet

Some links: 114

A double shot of Some Links this month.

And thus passes away the world’s only palindromic demonym: Nauru is now Naoero.
To-do list management tips from T. Rex.
The perspective of Reid Walker, a Native American, on land acknowledgements: too much and too little.

The practice has roots in Indigenous protocol, but the modern institutional version came through Australia and Canada. In Australia, a “Welcome to Country” can be delivered only by a member of the nation whose territory you’re on, usually an elder — a host’s gesture. An “Acknowledgment of Country” is what non-Indigenous people offer in return, as guests. The American version collapsed the two, so non-Native institutions now perform what was originally a host’s role.
Anthony Conwright: Stop calling it the Civil War.

The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.
The usual crap from 47: Trump administration moves to block public from enforcing environmental protection laws; Donald Trump accuses The Washington Post of treason.
Jerry Cayford on a framework for eliminating gerrymandering.
A Letter from Mick Jagger to the Devil on the First Draft of “Sympathy for the Devil,” by John Moe.
Her legs went all the way up to the fringe of her baby-doll dress. Presumably further than that, but that’s where the bright polka dots distracted me from theorizing.
James Harbeck continues fighting the good fight for epicenter.
Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead. Maybe my first experiment should be acting on some of the Personal Development links that I’ve posted, instead of just sharing them.

Some links: 113

An interesting perspective from Quico Toro on resolving the global warming crisis without stifling economic development: How to Save the Planet Without Screwing Over Poor People.
When “effective immediately” means “maybe.”
Richard Gilbert explains why I was confused by Harold G. Henderson’s statement that “haiku is written in 5-7-5 jion.”
Two pieces that sound the alarm that everything is ruined, by Julian Baggini and Christian B. Miller. I agree with Miller that patience is still a virtue to be sought, but the dependence on instant answers pre-dates easy access to LLMs and AI-assisted search.
I Am Hummingbird, Lord of Your Doorknob, by Julie Sharbutt.

So you and your creatures went inside to stuff your flesh beaks with sauce worms and stare at your RAWRAWRAWR wall. The time was nigh and I went to work, collecting twigs and sticks and dog fur and stems and cattails and twigs and string and SNAKESKIN and bark and moss and fish scales and thistle and hay and twine and thread and tinsel and CAT WHISKERS and leaves and twigs and DANDELION DOWN and pine needles and Halloween wig hair and USED SPIDERWEBS—THEY WERE EMPTY WHEN I FOUND THEM, GET A GRIP, THE SPIDERS ARE FINE, YOU THINK A SPIDER’S NOT JUST FINE?

Would that we all could sleep through this

Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte’s series, Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes, was updated most recently in February. The counter is up to 730.

Two wrongs

Bob Lewis, in a commentary piece for Virginia Mercury, speaks his mind, and mine: A mid-decade remap is an awful idea.

If I spent all my digital ink on linking to stories debunking ridiculous, egregious, preposterous¹ claims by officials representing 47, my electron deficit would be yuge. But this one really got up my nose: Dr. Oz is wrong: Medicaid does not automatically register people to vote.

¹From Latin praeposterus (“with the hinder part before, reversed, inverted, perverted”), from prae (“before”) + posterus (“coming after”).

Hexagram #729

Two long-view takes, from Scott Samuelson and Mark Harvey, on the conundrum that is 47.

䷑

Some links: 111

Beaverslide: the OG, DIY, fix-it-yourself rangeland contraption.

It’s not so much a stairway to heaven as it is a halted conveyor belt to nowhere…
‘Godot’ Is a Puzzle, However You Pronounce It, by Alexis Soloski

Jonathan Kalb, a professor at Hunter College who met with Beckett, disagrees. “It’s actually not true that there is a definitive pronunciation,” he said in a recent interview. “The fact is, he was very tolerant of different pronunciations.”

KOFF-KOFF Just about the only variation of which he was tolerant.
TIL where rapamycin came from.
Repairing cobblestone streets in New York. By hand, of course.
Collateral damage in the wars on choice and poor people: How ‘defund Planned Parenthood’ came to threaten primary care in rural Maine, by Selena Simmons-Duffin and When the G.O.P. Medicaid Cuts Arrive, These Hospitals Will Be Hit Hardest, by Emily Badger, Alicia Parlapiano, and Margot Sanger-Katz.

Some links: 110

Opinion: Why I’m handing in my Pentagon press pass, by NPR’s Tom Bowman.
DC’s lonely streetcar will shut down in March, alas.
Things worth getting better at, or, 10x vs 10%, by John D. Cook.

There’s a perennial temptation to solve the problem you want to solve rather than the problem you need to solve.
What Shakespeare’s Capulet is talking about when he shouts at his daughter, “Out you green-sickness carrion! Out you baggage/ You tallow-face!”
When is a battle a massacre, and vice versa? And what is settler colonialism? Akim Reinhardt explains.
RE:PUBLIC launches, a journalism project focused on one of the few issues with bipartisan support: public lands. (In the western US, I suspect that the degree to which people support public lands depends on how the question is framed.)
Recently published research indicates that Blue Dasher dragonflies (Pachydiplax longipennis) can thrive in crummy, polluted urban environments.

Some links: 109

TIL that Jenny’s phone number is prime.
From the Tell Me Something Good Dept.: US government orders for Plumpy’Nut have resumed.
More good news: A forest in Nelson County, Virginia includes a stand of mature American Chestnuts (Castanea dentata).
White-tailed Deer and Eastern Poison Ivy. Yup, that squares. O, to live where the most observed animal is Green Sea Turtle.

Biscuits

Waste, fraud, or abuse? In this case, I think the answer is clear: The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food, by Hana Kiros.

Some links: 108

D.C. Circulator buses find new homes far from the city
Fact-Checking the ‘President Who Follows Science’ on his environmental record
An Inside Look at the Subway’s Archaic Signal System in NYC
An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy, by Anaïs Godard

Your version of the future has no room for her. Thankfully, she doesn’t need your permission to belong. She’s already here.
Leo Mazzone is still rockin’: An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So

“All anyone in the majors watches now is how damn fast a guy can throw,” he told me, rocking on his heels. “Grunt and heave, grunt and heave. It’s not pitching; it’s asinine.”
Oh, lovely, first the Colorado and now this: A Crucial River Treaty Is Tangled in Trump’s Feud With Canada

Negotiations over the Columbia River basin could affect the environment in Canada and electrical generation and flood control in the United States.
Damn, those things are much bigger than I realized: a rubber bullet in the Museum at the Times

Hmm, the Times and the Post have different headline casing styles.

Temporary

Subtweets from WaniKani? 仮 Temporary

ｲ Leader + 反 Anti

Meaning Mnemonic

Your leader is very anti-everything, making it all temporary. You get a new shirt, “I’m anti shirts!” she yells, and out it goes.

She tires of things so quickly, you hardly have time to get used to them before they’re gone.

Reading Mnemonic

The leader’s most temporary possession is her car (か). Or… cars, because they’re all very temporary. She buys one, drives it around, and then suddenly she’s anti red car. She needs a blue one!

Picture all of the temporary cars she’s tried filling up an entire junkyard. They’re all a little different, but in the end they were all just temporary fads.

Plug the memory hole: 2

One more piece, this time from Julian Lucas for The New Yorker, about volunteer efforts to lifeboat federal government databases.

Oh, and that farcical white paper seeking to justify 47’s “reciprocal tariffs” is still out there, now as a PDF, and still smelling of AI slop. If that paper were submitted by a student in a high school course, I might give it a passing grade. Undergrad, nope.

Tax relief may never come/But it don’t worry me

At least 47 hasn’t promoted Incitatus to consul. Yet.

Leader from this week’s Economist: President Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc (gift link).

There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the [current account] deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers—like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states,* or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer.

*and the District—Ed.

Not about apples

“When The Worm’s In The Core, Let It Eat,” by Mike Bendzela.

… this worm is rugged. It can survive Maine winters (its predecessors hail from Europe) — sometimes cocooned on bark, sometimes in dropped apples, other times in soil — and begins pupating in spring.

Category: Public Policy and Politics