Auros Harman

Quite apart from politics, which is how so many blinkered people see this issue, no reporter at your local school committee board or town council meeting means no one is watching when someone’s brother-in-law gets a no-bid contract. The increase in penny ante corruption must be breathtaking.

Saikat Chakrabarti - Wikipedia

Yeah, the org that wrote it up, New Consensus, is headed by Saikat Chakrabarti, who previously worked for AOC, and before that Sanders. Before getting into politics he was one of the first engineers at Stripe.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saikat_...

@adamconover.net So with Raman announcing for Mayor, are we going to get “Adam Ruins City Council”? 👀

Mission for America The Mission for America is a comprehensive nuts and bolts plan to solve the world's biggest problems.

@ositanwanevu.com @adamconover.net So the idea of a “Project 2029”, which you guys were saying in Adam’s show isn’t something Dems have done? Here’s a decent stab at that kind of comprehensive agenda. There definitely are some think tankers with ideas.

www.newconsensus.com/mfa

I can hear that gif.

Bari Weiss resembles Ezra Klein's old remark about Dick Armey. ( prospect.org/2007/06/04/c... )

She's a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.

YouTube video by FSWKU Adama On Police States

It would be nice if we lived in a timeline where a silly scifi show from the aughts talking about militarization of domestic law enforcement wasn't so persistently relevant.

This is the set up for Pleistocene Park, right? Scientists try to recreate the wooly rhino from this sample, but the sample is actually contaminated with genes from the wolf, so they get an unholy rhino wolf hybrid, which instead of being an herbivore, thirsts for blood. Action movie ensues.

Allt-Erlaa - Hidden Architecture Perhaps the best-known example of a well-functioning public housing complex in Vienna, the Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa includes 3180 apartments, each with a balcony or loggia. The multifunctional complex also ...

Ehhh. I mean sure the story has complexities, but also they legit built a lot, and kept building for decades. Alt-Erlaa had nothing to do with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

hiddenarchitecture.net/allt-erlaa/

Library roof deck where you can read a book in the sun and breeze on a nice day? Sounds good to me...

I’m a little worried this shift may come back to bite us, if Dems win back the federal government but states proceed to try to enforce a new kind of Jim Crow regime against various minorities.

JFK would’ve had to find a reason to deploy regular military first, against Bull Connor, before activating the guard, under this standard, no?

@dahlialithwick.bsky.social Apologies if this is answered in the recent Amicus episode and I just haven’t gotten to it yet, but it sounds like the new standard for federalizing the Guard might have blocked uses of the Guard in the Civil Rights era, no?

Ragú Unveils Sensory Deprivation Marinara Tank SCHAUMBURG, IL—Claiming the new offering would revolutionize the use of pasta sauce in stress reduction and pain relief, Ragú officials unveiled a new sensory deprivation marinara tank at a press even...

I thought this Onion article was pretty funny, but personally I'd hold out for Rao's.
theonion.com/ragu-unveils...

Reconstruction failed, “redemption” beat it back… The Confederate system never completely died out, just metamorphosed into something that northern industrial elites were willing to cooperate with.

Modern for-profit prison system can trace its roots back to slave-catchers and plantations, by way of Jim Crow “law enforcement”, which the Nazis write of admiringly. So. 😕

…and they also _just happen_ to have sane views about what news and scientific sources to trust. The right did that over the past decade, the left has not responded in any coherent way, because we just kind of assumed that truth is on our side. The truth needs some help!

Such a good episode! This stuff is why I’ve often said if somehow I ended up with a billion dollars, what I’d invest in is building a media network — Twitch streamers, podcasters, etc — who are mainly NOT political, they appeal across makeup, fashion, gaming, TV, exercise…

I believe it was Ben Wittes who first described the nature of the Trump administration as "malevolence, tempered only by incompetence."

Hatred of the outgroup is a powerful drug. “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, but once you _are_ taught to think of some group — other races, queer folk, whatever — as dangerous subhumans, it’s REALLY hard to deprogram that belief.

Assuming we defeat the fascists, and future history books are written by sane people, McBride is going to go down in those books as a hero who showed the kind of moral clarity and righteous fervor of past icons like Harvey Milk. Truly one of the best elected officials of our moment.

Homelessness is a Housing Problem Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern (UC Press, early 2022)

You can ask whether we're getting something for our increased spending, and sure, houses are nicer, and Americans have bigger homes -- at least, those of us who have homes. But we banned building most kinds of CHEAP home for decades, so we have a lot of homelessness. homelessnesshousingproblem.com

Furthermore, in a society that is getting richer and more productive over time, you'd think the bare necessities would consume a _smaller_ % of income over time. That is indeed what has happened with food and clothing.

If you use any reasonable method to define the cost of housing, the cost has definitely gone up. "Years of median income for the median home" is a pretty good one, and that's way up over time.

And we can tell from prices, and applications for covenant-affordable units, that MANY of them would _like_ to live closer to work. We can also tell from, you know, ASKING them. There is an enormous shortfall in the number of smaller / cheaper units in most urban cores.

In the Bay Area the way working class people prevent housing from eating more of their income is to commute from further away. But that's terrible -- bad for the environment, bad for their mental and physical health, etc.

Nobody is saying the majority wants to live in NYC, or even Cambridge, MA levels of density. But prices tell us that a LOT MORE people want to live like that than currently get to. So we should make it legal to build more places like that, and give people choices on a level playing field.

I do agree we need to align incentives to rebuild local capacity, probably both to directly build social housing (“council estates”?) and to provide rapid, competent inspections for private development. Like I mentioned earlier in the US that’s the “Strong Towns” org’s view.

I dunno, man, I see a lot of local govs in the US that theoretically ought to face that trilemma where people repeatedly get elected promising voters they can wave away trade-offs. (If you’ve never seen the series Show Me A Hero, it explores anti-housing dynamisc like that in a suburb of NYC.)

Now that the state has finally started to impose consequences, many local govs, especially LA, say “you’re taking away local control!” Well we tried local control for 60 years, and you misused it! 🤷