Onward, upward, thruward

Unbreaking Team @ the Unbreaking: This week at Unbreaking, January 16

Beginning in late November and escalating through early January, the Trump administration has sent 3,000 ICE and CBP agents into Minneapolis–St. Paul. For comparison, the “Operation Midway Blitz” surge in Chicago deployed about 300 federal immigration agents. The Chicago metro area’s population is roughly 2.5 times the size of the Twin Cities’, so the Minneapolis–St. Paul operation has sent about 10 times as many enforcers into a much smaller population center.

Kelly Hayes @ Organizing My Thoughts: Choosing Each Other in a Time of Terror

Trump is waging war on our communities, and we don’t need “better training” for our attackers.

Scott Meslow @ the Verge: How much can a city take?

The most heartening thing about this deeply disturbing moment is seeing how consistently and forcefully Minnesotans of all demographics have been pushing back.

Fred Glass @ Jacboin: The Citywide General Strike Has a Rich History in America

In response to the killing of Renee Good and the ICE invasion, the Minneapolis labor movement has issued the nation’s first citywide general strike call in nearly 80 years

Andrea Pitzer @ Degenerate Art: Into the abyss

You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.

ETA: Naomi Kritzer @ Will Tell Stories For Food: How To Help if You are Outside Minnesota

If You’d Like to Donate Money
Contact Your Senators/House Rep
Write a Letter to the Editor
Hassle ICE-Supporting Businesses
To Learn More About What’s Going On in Minnesota, Read Minnesotan News Sources
Push Back on Disinformation
Send Words of Encouragement
Get Ready For This Bullshit to Come to You
Talk About Immigration, and Make it Clear You Think It’s GOOD

Marianne Kuzujanakis: Book Review: “Take Joy” by Jane Yolen

it is so important to understand that writing is a way of thinking and existing, and not just an act of doing

Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty

It’s easy to pass judgment on ourselves and each other for what we’re “already doing” or failing to do. But as an organizer, I’m concerned with what might motivate or allow people to act differently.

Sasha Chapin @ Sasha's Newsletter: How to like everything more: on the skill of enjoyment

In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other. This is not how enjoyment is taught—the only tip people typically receive re enjoyment is to “be mindful.” I think this is a suggestion to adopt what meditators call “one-pointed focus,” a form of concentrated, narrowed attention on a small portion of conscious experience. It’s a mediocre suggestion for a couple of reasons. First, this is hard to do well, even for seasoned meditators. Second, it is far from the only enjoyment-producing mental motion.

Liz Neeley @ Liminal: Week 19: What now & what’s next in science and higher ed

Everything is terrible, but I brought you some plums.

Brian Deer and Dr Fiona Godlee at the BMJ (26Jun12): Revealed: Secret businesses which aimed to exploit vaccine fears - “MMR doctor” planned scheme to make millions from his health scare

It reveals how Wakefield met with medical school managers to discuss a joint business even while the first child to be fully investigated in his research was still in the hospital, and how just days after publication of that research, which triggered the health crisis in 1998, he brought business associates to the Royal Free to continue negotiations.

One business, named after Wakefield’s wife, intended to develop Wakefield’s own “replacement” vaccines, diagnostic testing kits and other products which only stood any real chance of success if public confidence in MMR was damaged.

(See also: Brian Deer at BMJ (2011;342:c5258): Secrets of the MMR scare, How the vaccine crisis was meant to make money)

The Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal (29Jan25): Elizabeth Warren Exposes RFK Jr.

He wants to keep cashing in on lawsuits against drug makers, as his confirmation hearing for health secretary makes clear

Lauren Leffer @ Popular Science (05Sep24): The dye in Doritos can make mice transparent

'It’s not magic, but it’s still very powerful.'

Tanya Reilly @ No Idea Blog: Talks > Being Glue

Every senior person in an organisation should be aware of the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful. Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills. Left unconscious, it can be career limiting. It can push people into less technical roles and even out of the industry.

STAT investigation series: Embedded Bias: The struggle over removing race from clinical algorithms

For many patients, it comes as a shock to learn that calculators used to guide their care give different answers depending on their race. This series explores how these race-based clinical algorithms came to pervade medicine, the harm they may cause — and why it’s proving so difficult to remove race from the equation.

siderea (28Nov2023): Up the Slope: On Mastodon and What Social Engineering Should Be [p/a/s, new media, Patreon]

When we build a social media platform – when we build anything to allow people to interact in the internet – we are doing something very like building a planned city. We are making decisions about the structures through which people will flow and move and rest and encounter one another and interact with one another.

Debbie Chachra* @ the Comment (05Aug2021): Care at Scale: Bodies, agency, and infrastructure

Water treatment plants are a physical instantiation of the idea that politics are the structures we create when we are in a sustained relationship with other people.

Ryan Cooper @ the American Prospect (11Oct2023): The Cooperative That Could

Here we have a hyper-efficient retail operation, run with cutting-edge management and logistics, dominating half the grocery market of a wealthy country, without minting a single billionaire in the process.

Joel MacManus @ the Spinoff (23Nov2023): Wellington’s massive cycling upgrade is ambitious, fast, and surprisingly cheap

The key in this case has been Wellington City Council’s full-throated endorsement of tactical urbanism, a technique that throws out old and arduous processes in favour of quick, low cost, and adaptable methods that let people try things out in real-time.

&

The size of its scope was key. 'When you do little sections, you can get some targeted gain, but it’s not until you have connectivity that you see the exponential shift.' What changed the game in Seville was a network plan that gave people an idea of how each segment would connect."

* See also: Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World (2023) Riverhead Books (US) / Torva (UK).

rushthatspeaks (12APR13): The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, Renée L. Bergland

Bergland is literally the first writer I have seen mention that the United States began as a colonized country and became a colonial power, and that the second required systematic repression of the knowledge of what it had been like to be the first.

siderea (01JUL22): The Second American Civil War [US, curr ev, Patreon]

the South seceded because the North wouldn't let the South seize control of the entire country and dominate the other states. The "rights" the South was furious the North weren't allowing them were the "right" of Southern states to force Northern states to return escaped slaves, the "right" of Southern states to buy seats on Congress by trading in human chattels, and the "right" to force territories that wanted to enter the Union as free states to legalize slavery to get statehood, all in service of the "right" of the South to attain dominance of the entire country and subject all the citizens of the other states to its rule.

Fundamentally the "right" the Southern states wanted was the "right" to subvert and vanquish democracy, itself.

( Read more... )

PSA: If you're self-isolating at home, please please make sure you get some outdoor sun exposure at least 20 minutes daily (preferably around mid-morning) - it will help your mood, help you sleep better at night, and generally help keep your whole body system synced to outdoor day/night.

General resource rec: healthysleep.med.harvard.edu.

Just for fun (repeat rec):
Ed Yong @ National Geographic: Inside the Eye: Nature’s Most Exquisite Creation

“Eyes didn’t evolve from poor to perfect,” Nilsson says. “They evolved from performing a few simple tasks perfectly to performing many complex tasks excellently.”

( COVID-19 links )

Valentin Amrhein + Sander Greenland + Blake McShane @ Nature > Comment: Scientists rise up against statistical significance

The objection we hear most against retiring statistical significance is that it is needed to make yes-or-no decisions. But for the choices often required in regulatory, policy and business environments, decisions based on the costs, benefits and likelihoods of all potential consequences always beat those made based solely on statistical significance.

Laurie Penny @ Wired: We Can Be Heroes: How the Nerds Are Reinventing Pop Culture

Right now, in untelevised reality, we are in the middle of an epic, multiseason struggle over the territory of the human imagination, over whose stories matter and why.

Rebecca Schuman @ Slate: Simone Bile wins U.S. Gymnastics title, does a triple double in floor, and changes the sport forever

There are many reasons I do not wish to be a human American woman in 2019. But what a privilege it is to simply coexist during the era of Simone Biles.

Annie Blanks @ USA Today: 'Waffle House Index' is a real thing during disasters. How does the restaurant chain do it?

Waffle House restaurants are often used to gauge the magnitude of disasters in the Southeast: If a store is open, your community has been spared. If the store is open but has a limited menu, you've probably gotten some damage. If the store is completely closed, you’re in a disaster zone.

Alanna Mitchell @ Maclean's: Climate Crisis Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here’s how.

The world of 2050 will look, sound, smell and taste a little different once we succeed in flipping the switch on carbon. It will be a healthier world, with more walking, more green spaces, more plants and animals, less sickness, far less air pollution, and probably less meat but better nutrition.

The Intercept @ YouTube: A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [art by Molly Crabapple]

( [embedded video] )

Julia Conley @ Common Dreams News: #NeverAgainIsNow: 36 Arrested As Hundreds of Jewish Protesters Block Road to Migrant Detention Center

"200 Jews are shutting down an ICE detention center because we when we say never again we fucking mean it."

( a roundup of people taking action and resources [USA-centric] )