johnedwinmason

1978!

My wife has a lot of family in Poland, and one of her cousins was asking how the US can possibly afford this. The answer is, our public infrastructure and services suck colossally

It's no surprise to see West Point cadets performing in blackface. Minstrelsy was a popular form of entertainment for whites & would be until the early '60s. But it's a reminder that racism is deeply embedded in the American soul. MLK believed that it would take a moral revolution to get rid of it.

Deseret News, Salt Lake City

Pius XI

March 5, 1926: Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical denouncing beliefs in white superiority and insisting the peoples of East Asia and Africa “can easily compete” with Westerners mentally. His encyclical, “On Affairs of the Church,” calls for recruiting more native missionaries.

March 5, 1926: Striking textile mill workers parade in Passaic, N.J., in a new show of solidarity two days after police attacked them with clubs. Many of the strikers are now wearing helmets in case of new violence. Radical activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn tries one on.

A friend who lives in San Antonio was saying something similar to me. For her, south Texas & Mexico are one place.

A Western That Goes Where Cormac McCarthy Wouldn’t Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender scraps the simplistic binary of cowboys and Indians in favor of a wild, multifaceted war story.

"Today, the southern U.S. border is depicted by right-wing figures as a hard line between us and them, two groups with irreconcilable interests. In fact, it is—and has always been—a polyglot meeting point."

I review Álvaro Enrigue's latest for @theatlantic.com:

www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

Walker Evans would have loved to photograph this store.
(So would @ruralindexing.bsky.social, except it's urban. 😄 )

Read it and weep.

(The second "should" is actually "shouldn't," a typo corrected in the thread.)

😄

His Instagram is also great. He has room to go into much greater depth.

Until I started reading Tyler Green, I had no idea that most of the things I thought I knew about Yosemite were myths — "pristine," "untouched" — that white people created to erase the thousands of years that Native American communities lived there.

Tomorrow Pompeii, especially interested in the graffiti such as: ‘Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates.’, ‘Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog.’ Words that echo through time.

This will cheer you up. 😄

😄

Not all is doom & gloom. Hold on to hope. 👇🏽

Charlottesville Education Association And we have signed contracts for both our bargaining units!!! ...

I am so proud of the CCS support staff, CEA, the bargaining team, and most of all my wife for all the work that went into making this contract happen.

This was by and for the workers!!! Union Strong!!

While the US slides deeper into the Dark Ages, the European Medicines Agency has approved a vaccine that protects against both the flu & COVID.

Government argues ICE facility protest was actually left-wing terrorist plot A first-ever trial against an alleged ‘antifa cell’ in Texas could be a playbook for cracking down on administration critics.

Texas prosecutors are arguing that an ICE facility protest was actually a left-wing terrorist plot. The first-ever trial against an alleged ‘antifa cell’ could be a playbook for cracking down on Trump administration critics.

More here:

Citizens advocate for stronger protections against ICE at City Council meeting Attendees praised the Council for its February resolution condemning ICE in Charlottesville and asked that it take a more hardline stance against the agency’s actions.

Cav Daily with the only coverage on the ICE discussion at Monday's City Council meeting, as far as I can tell.
www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2026...

Godspeed, Bernard LaFayette

It's still absurdly large for the neighborhood. It's no accident that they want to impose this on a historically African American neighborhood. It's also gentrification by stealth.

The windows are open, furnace is off, & the thermostat in my living room is reading 75F. That's warmer than it's been since sometime in October by 4 or 5 degrees. Maybe spring is more than a myth.

Sanders said the city has had to hire staff just to work on the constant negotiations. "Having four contracts is quite a pickle that you have put us in with having us have this many contracts to manage," Sanders said. "We're in a perpetual state of constantly negotiating. That is the reality. We finish one and we move to the next one. And sometimes we have Two at the same time."

I really do not love the negative energy towards collective bargaining that city and city school leaders publicly routinely express. It trickles down to their management staff, who then blame unions for problems that are in fact management’s responsibility to solve.

I'm not used to getting WhatsApp messages from friends in bomb shelters. I know, however, that this is sadly routine in too many parts of the world. I hardly know what to say, except "I love you" and "Be safe."

💯 Becoming a center-right party is the logical outcome of Blairism. I fear that between Labour's descent & the Tories' seeming collapse, the door has opened for Reform. I hope I'm wrong.

Enterprise software exists to enable upper-management to standardize, monitor, and control. The rest of us, those being monitored and controlled, pay the price of inefficiency in our every day use of the software

Spain denies cooperating with U.S. military operations in Middle East, contradicting White House A diplomatic tussle between the United States and Spain over the war in Iran intensified on Wednesday when the governments exchanged contradictory statements over the possible use of Spanish military ...

Moments after a White House spokesperson said the Spanish government in Madrid had agreed to help the U.S., Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares came out and flatly denied that the European government had changed its position. https://to.pbs.org/3OQpCS7

I agree. They get a kick out of causing pain. They're utterly corrupt morally. As Adam Serwer has said, cruelty is the point.

This is our shame, my fellow Americans. And our crime. We're making the lives of millions of everyday people miserable -- for no good reason.