Surrounded by reptiles - and I don't mean the alligators

Snickering over it being an “Alligator Alcatraz,” Florida AttGen James Uthmeier announced plans for a "one stop shop" at a decrepit airfield in the Everglades with the goal of confining 1,000 kidnapped immigrants. 

Environmentalists were of course and quite properly outraged by the plan and the damage it will do to the environmentally-prized and -sensitive region while other folks decried the inhumanity involved - as if either mattered to the conglomeration of ass-kissers, boot-lickers, grifters, and self-dealers who make up the royal court of The Spray Tan Who Would Be King.

The site would be one of several in the state to hold imprison up to 5,000 people to be removed from our insufficiently white population as part of the state's contribution toward enacting the xenophobic rantings of their liege.

But I have to admit what stood out to me was how these deportation dungeons would be paid for. Reports the Post:

"The state can be reimbursed for the estimated $450 million cost of the detention centers by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to DHS."

According to Department for the Protection of the Fatherland secretary and cosplay addict Kristi Noem, the money would come from FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which was created by Congress to provide grants to groups and state/local governments who provide services to immigrants awaiting legal proceedings. That is, it was created at least with the idea of helping immigrants who are going through the legal system - aka "doing it the right way." Instead, it will now be used for what bluntly amount to prisons intended to cage people until they can be kicked out.

So FEMA will pay for them. FEMA, the agency that is supposed to, designed to, created to, assist local communities in recovering from natural disasters, the agency that is perpetually short of money to cover costs related to our climate-change-driven storms, floods, and fires, the agency whose bosses confirmed just a few days earlier that there would not be any aid to the state of Washington for recovery from a bomb cyclone that hit in November, that FEMA is going to pay to for this latest paean to perversity.

On the other hand, I guess we shouldn't be the least surprised since King Donald the I (that's a pronoun, not a Roman numeral) intends to "wind down" FEMA "after hurricane season" - doesn't want to risk impacting Florida - and assume personal control over who gets help and how much which I'm sure will be distributed on exactly the sort of impartial, non-partisan standard for which he is so famous.

As a footnote to all this, we have GOT to talk about "remigration."

Does Sarah McBride speak for the trans community? "Moderates" sure hope so.

Updated I suppose this could be considered a type of full disclosure: This was was prompted by Erin Reed’s piece on Rep. Sara McBride’s “New York Times” interview with Ezra Klein.

I admit to a good deal of sympathy for Sarah McBride in that when she first entered Congress, she indicated she wanted to be seen as "the Gentlelady from Delaware," not "the transgender member of the House." That, of course, while understandable was nonetheless impossible and the first thing she encountered as soon as she passed through the door was the bathroom business, followed by daily humiliations like repeated references to "Mr. McBride." So yes, it's a tough path she's negotiating. Credit her with trying to do it with grace.

The problem here is that with her interview with Ezra Klein she now has allowed herself to be presented as some sort of voice of the community, the "most politically powerful transgender official in the country" (says Faux News), someone who is not merely expressing some personal opinions about tactics (some of which she clearly has not thought through) but communicating Significant Views worthy of Serious Consideration by the Serious People. The choruses of "But Sarah McBride said" and "As Sarah McBride said" are already emerging.

If she now wants to be seen as a community leader, she damn well should have pushed harder on behalf of, as she herself put it (referring to Delaware), the people she represents. If she doesn't, if her goal is just to be "the Gentlelady from Delaware," perhaps in hope of quietly normalizing her presence and that of those who may follow, then she should have refused the interview.

Not only because McBride shows serious signs of already falling into old-style Washington insider ways (such as referring to advocates by the dismissive epithet "the groups"), but because she betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the dynamics of social change. Specifically, she says fighting across a broad front "regardless of whether the public is ready ... misunderstands the role that social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion."

That is utter nonsense. Being where the public is not, being where the public is not immediately ready to go, is exactly the role of social movements. It is their whole purpose.

Indeed, in writing this I recalled writing some years ago that in an odd sort of way, the goal of any movement for social justice is to lose because you should always be somewhat unpopular, somewhat beyond where the public is prepared at that moment to go - and if you do succeed in moving them to where you are, such that they are raising their own voices and you are no longer speaking to them or to power on their behalf, it's time either to shift to a different issue or to a sharper position on the same one. Because there is always more to do.*

The point here is that no movement for justice ever gained broader acceptance by the self-defeating strategy of "follow[ing] the polls." That is a road not to progress but to irrelevance and at best stasis. And whatever it's uses in military campaigns, "strategic retreat" in a political movement is simply giving up ground and at best losing more slowly.

The history of gaining rights is one of leading, not following; is one of struggle, not of settling; is one where compromises follow campaigns, they do not precede them - and, importantly, where such compromises are found only in gains, not losses.

I could go on about this for some time - I certainly have in the past - but to save myself some typing and repetition, I'm going to refer you to my piece called "Newsom and Moulton: A Tale of Two Trimmers" (I'm sure you can guess the topic) which contains some discussion related to "compromise" actually meaning slow-motion surrender.

Instead, I'll repeat something I've said so many times that I should have it tattooed on my forehead to save time:

The movement for peace and social justice in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when we have spoken the truth without giving a flying damn if anyone was "offended" or not. We didn't build a movement against the Indochina War or for civil rights, women's equality, or a cleaner environment by worrying about how we'd be received by the bigots, sexists, or greedy corporate bosses - or how we'd "look" or who we'd "turn off" if we labeled the discriminators and despoilers for what they were.

And while that referred to movements of the dreaded '60s, it has remained true through all the movements since it was first written about 35 years ago. And, I suspect, will continue to be so.

Which Sara McBride does not understand. Know this clearly: I do not fault her for this. As I said above, she may well see her role is to do her job as a congresswoman and to fit in such that being transgender is no longer remarkable. If so, I wish her the best but I am also old enough to remember the Mattachine Society, which adopted a very similar "we're just like you" strategy only to have to wait for decades until such as Stonewall and Act Up! actually get the needle moving.

No matter; Sarah McBride has to decide how she personally will deal with her own situation. But she is not cut out to be - and may well not want to be - a community voice or leader. And she should not be made into one.

Updated to make note of the fact that this post has been viewed over 8000 times, which makes it one of my most popular posts ever. I'm small-time, always have been, always will be, so this is kind of a big deal for me and in the hope they'll see it, I waned to express gratitude to whoever and however it came to so many people's attention. (I just wish a few of those folks had left a comment. Oh, well.)

*I used to enjoy telling people my political philosophy was that of a “socialist-anarchist-communalist-capitalist-eclectic-iconoclast.” Part of the point was the “iconoclast” - because I’d say that there ever was a society designed along the lines I imagine, the first thing I’d do is to examine it for its shortcomings that needed to be addressed. The I Jing says “the only thing that doesn’t change is that everything else changes.” My version is “the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer.” There’s always more to do.

Trans folks get Screw-mettied

A few observations on US v. Skrmetti, the case over Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth, drawn from the reporting from, among others sources, Chris Geidner (Law Dork) and Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning)

For those terminally uninformed, the state of Tennessee had passed a law barring medical gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 18. On June 18, in a 6-3 split along the usual lines, SCOTUS upheld the law. 

Okay, one thought is that unlike Geidner, who called the "logic" of primary author John Roberts "circular," I'd liken it more to a spiral, spinning further and further out beyond the bounds of reasoned thought in pursuit of a predetermined conclusion. And that was mild compared to Mark Joseph Stern writing at Slate, who called Roberts' ruling "an incoherent mess of contradiction and casuistry," a "travesty," and "a series of half-arguments and specious assumptions stitched together into one analytic trainwreck."

Another thought is that in saying the law is not discriminatory based on sex because it denies treatment to both trans boys and trans girls, the ruling clearly echoes (for not the only time) the bigoted (and rejected) defense to bans on same-sex marriage which claimed those laws did not discriminate on the basis of sex because gays and lesbians could still get married, provided it was to each other.

A third arises from Roberts saying the law "does not restrict the administration of puberty blockers or hormones to individuals 18 and over." That is, you can get puberty blockers, but only after puberty is or is essentially complete. Kind of like saying you can vote in an election provided you do it after the votes have been counted.

Fourth, the decision spouts some blather about evolving standards and there are still, y’know, “questions” and some “controversial” stuff, argued in the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus on the basics: Puberty blockers and HRT work, can be used safely, gender-affirming care leads to improved lives for the vast, vast majority of people affected, and regret rates are, compared to other medical and surgical interventions, remarkably low. But there are still bozos and bigots spinning tales, so there is, yeah, “controversy” and lack of absolutely perfect knowledge so we must give full weight to “both sides” and approve bans where they exist. And I look forward to a SCOTUS suit of someone arguing a school can’t teach students that the Earth is a globe because of the “controversy” about if it is flat or not.

Finally, there is this horrifying statement from the head of the Sleazy Six: "SB1 does not exclude any individual from medical treatments on the basis of transgender status. Rather, it removes one set of diagnoses from the range of treatable conditions.”

If the first sentence there has any coherent meaning at all - which is quite an assumption - it's that banning trans-related health care is not discriminatory because a trans person can't be denied treatment for, say, diabetes on the grounds of being trans. And, it would follow, it's not discriminatory to deny a diabetic treatment because they can still be treated for cancer.

But the second sentence is the really horrifying one. Its actual argument is that any category of person can be banned from needed treatment by "remov[ing] one set of diagnoses" - the very ones that define the condition for which treatment is sought - "from the range of treatable conditions,” even as it effectively acknowledges these are valid medical diagnoses. "You've been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes? Sorry not sorry, we've decided that diagnosis cannot be treated."

The sheer inhumane depravity, the cold-blooded indifference to the welfare or even, given the suicide statistics, the survival of trans people revealed by that passage is difficult to grasp.

Oh, and as a footnote: Any time a right-wingers comes at you defending a law or policy with any form of “all it does is,” as the Scurrilous Six do here, you can be damn sure it does a hell of a lot more.

Burning down the future

The Spray Tan Who Would Be King has declared open war on the future.

Not his future, what does he care, he will not live to see the effects of his self-glorifying ineptitude.

And not the future of his apostles and Wormtongue-whisperers, whose gaze does not extend beyond the limits of their personal greeds, hatreds, and schemes, who see the "king" as a means to their warped ends.

Nor that of the bootlickers, acolytes, and court jesters, all of who have long since abandoned any shred of independent thought or self-respect.

No, I mean The Future.

On June 11, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was changing its name to the Environmental Destruction Agency with the announcement that the agency

is proposing to repeal all “greenhouse gas” emissions standards for the power sector under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and to repeal amendments to the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that directly result in coal-fired power plants having to shut down.

That is, it proposes to allow power plants to emit as much climate-destroying greenhouse gases as they feel like, with the argument being (if you can believe it but I bet you can, considering) that because it can't be said with assurance of just how significant an impact on global climate change is driven by US-based fossil-fuel power plants, those emissions can't be regulated at all.¹

 To show the science-based, non-political nature of the change, the announcement quotes EDA Administrator Lee Zeldin as saying the "Biden-era regulations have imposed massive costs" on the poor, beleaguered, barely-getting-by fossil fuel industry and their "primary purpose" was "to destroy industries that didn't align with their narrow-minded climate change zealotry" and to "regulate coal, oil and gas out of existence.”

The reactions from actual environmentalists were not kind.

- The plan is a "reckless betrayal," "ugly and unpatriotic," "cynical," and "dangerous." - Moms Clean Air Force director Dominique Browning

- It's "destructive," "reckless," and "fan[s] the flames of extreme heat and wildfires." - Center for Biological Diversity environmental health attorney Ryan Maher
- It's "completely reprehensible," "trad[es] American lives for campaign dollars," and is "an assault on our health and future." - Sierra Club climate policy director Patrick Drupp
- It's "astoundingly shameful," "galling," "sacrifices the public good," and would leave "no meaningful path to meet global climate goals." - Julie McNamara of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program

This announcement came on the same day that The Guardian reported that climate.gov, the highly-respected source of information and education about climate change run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been effectively shut down.

Every member of the content production staff was fired as of May 31, meaning that other than (maybe) some already-prepared material to go up later this month, there will be no new content, no new reports on studies, no new refutations of denialist bullshit.

Worse, two web developers were kept on, raising the specter that the site may be maintained, but turned into an outlet for fossil-fuel industry propaganda and conspiracist trash.

Oh, and speaking of NOAA, on June 5 the agency and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (at UCal, San Diego) stated, as reported by CommonDreams.org,

the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere peaked above 430 parts per million in 2025 - the highest it has been in millions of years.

In fact, in more than 30 million years, according to Ralph Keeling, director the Scripps CO2 Program, who responded to the study's findings with a typical scientist's understatement: “Another year, another record. It’s sad.”

Sad indeed, but it's more, though. A new study, published June 2 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment says that coastal communities in North Carolina are already experiencing a frequency of high-tide flooding "an order of magnitude greater" than the official numbers. Although the immediate cause was shortcomings in measuring rainfall runoff and the effects of local drainage infrastructure, still, as the Washington Post noted in its coverage, the study

offers insights into a reality that a growing number of coastal communities will face, or already are facing: that infrastructure built for another time and another climate is not equipped to handle the higher tides and persistent flooding fueled by rising seas.

Part of the issue with rising sea levels, of course, is that warming climate yields warming water yields expanding water yields sea level rise. Another and potentially much larger issue is melting ice caps, particularly in Greenland and Antarctica. And according to work also published in Communications Earth & Environment, this one on May 20, the current Paris Climate Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels is too damn high and

even current climate forcing (+1.2°C), if sustained, is likely to generate several meters of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and challenging the implementation of adaptation measures

trying to deal with the result of melting of ice sheets. The study concluded that the "safe limit" of warming for ice sheets is not 1.5°C or even 1.2°C but more like 1°C "and maybe a little less," the "safe limit" being defined by study co-author Jonathan Bamber as "one which allows some level of adaptation, rather than catastrophic inland migration and forced migration." Exceed that limit and

it becomes extremely challenging for any kind of adaptation, and you're going to see massive land migration on scales that we've never witnessed in modern civilization,

he said.

And don't just think of the migration. Think of the hunger it will cause. Think of the pain, the suffering, the starvation, it will cause. Think of the wars it will cause from conflicts over land, over water, over resources, over territory, the ethnic wars over "foreign invaders."

That is the world that King Donald in his lust for vengeance and power, that corporate CEOs in their "warmed and well-lighted offices"² with their lust for more! more! more!, that the sniveling party sycophants who would rather see the world burn than have to find a different job, that the worshipful buffoons who think that wearing a red cap is a solution to their shrinking futures, that is the world they would leave to the generations to come, that is the world that we, we, that we will leave to our children, our grandchildren if we are not willing to face what is before us.

Lead author on this study Chris Stokes noted that "we only have to go back to the early 1990s to find a time when the ice sheets looked far healthier" and global warming was within that safe limit.

So let me ask you this: Think of (or do some looking into) the 1990s, the level of conveniences you had than, the standard of living, the available technology. Then ask yourself this: Was that way of life so terrible that you would sacrifice a world to avoid living that way again?

If your answer is yes, then you are a waste of air and I don't think I believe you. If your answer is no, then know that precisely because of the technological advances of those past 35 years we can leave a livable world behind us if - but only if - we are prepared to pay the price (and I mean invest the money, the tax money, because the corporations sure as hell aren't going to do it willingly) and probably do without some tech-y but unnecessary geegaws.

The choice is stark, but there is a clear right one and no it does not involve "starving in the dark" but it will likely involve some sacrifice. I can only hope we're up to it.

 

¹According to the EPA (to the extent it can still be trusted to not downplay the issue, 24% of US greenhouse gas emissions are from electricity production, of which 60% is from burning fossil fuels. That means that 15% of all US greenhouse gas emissions arise from fossil-fuel burning electric power plants. Not what I'd call "not significant."

²"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices." - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Silent encroachment

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison, June 1778

 

Here is something on-going which has gotten not near enough attention even as people are kinda sorta aware of it in particular circumstances.

 

We are facing a new wave of bills and lawsuits designed to limit and repress First Amendment rights to free speech and public assembly.

 

People are aware, I expect, of moves to restrict (properly read as drive out of existence) campus protest against the genocide in Gaza and/or support of Palestinian rights. But that is not the intended end. Just like sports and bathroom bans are not the actual goal of the transphobes and transmisiacs but are just the "foot on the door," the "camel's nose," to much more far-reaching ends, so are these laws and regulations.

 

The Guardian offered a brief rundown a few weeks ago, declaring

[a]nti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests ... have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year ... according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines.

 For example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would make it a federal felony punishable by 20 years in prison to “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – without defining what constitutes "disruption," meaning it even could be applied to a lawsuit challenging a pipeline's permit. Similar bills based on model legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) already have been enacted in 22 states.

 

Social movements, the Guardian notes, usually generate attempts at repression. Repressive anti-protest laws proliferated in the wake of the 2016 Standing Rock protests. Protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulted in 52 such laws being introduced across 35 states. One federal bill then was the Unmasking Antifa Act, potentially criminalizing wearing a mask during a protest. This March, the virtually-identical Unmasking Hamas Act would make wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way punishable by 15 years in prison - while not defining either “oppressive” or “disguise.”

 

So understand: Protests about Gaza are not the cause; they are just the latest excuse. In the words of AJenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU,

“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights.” 

And there is Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, who said

“Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”

That is the goal.

 

And not just the legislatures and the executive, the courts get used as well. The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties and expanding causes for individual action - a means of allowing repressive suits to be filed by individuals rather than government agencies. Such suits, which can tie up activists in expensive and bankrupting litigation for years, often take the form of a SLAPP* (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), used by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals, and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements. For example,

[i]n Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.`

Three other states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois – are considering new or harsher civil penalties for protesters.

The good news here is that most of these bills fail to pass or never make it out of committee in the first place. The bad news is that any of them at all pass, especially when any one of them applied with hostile intent - which is the point of them - can do significant damage to our right to protest.

On Monday[, April 7,] in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.

Years in prison and a bankrupting fine for "conspiracy" and "damage" that wasn't even to the statue and could be cleared up with a wet cloth. Intimidation into utter silence. That what all this is about.

And don't you ever forget it.

 

*From April 5, 2013: A SLAPP is a lawsuit is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their opposition. That is, the suers don't really expect to win the suit. What they want to do is to drain their opponents either financially, emotionally, or better yet both, so the opponents are exhausted and just give up.

They were popular among corporations from the 70s to the 90s, particularly when they were leveled against individuals or "kitchen table" groups that were using regulatory proceedings and hearings to oppose some plan of some corporation. The price for dropping such suits - which were patently frivolous, as they often claimed that by criticizing the company's proposal you were by definition "defaming it" and "causing it to suffer financial loss" - the price for dropping the suits was usually dropping out of the regulatory process and letting the company's proposal proceed unopposed. These suits lost a lot of their luster when their targets who were in a position to fight them began to file what became known as SLAPP-backs, where the roles were switched and the corporation went from plaintiff to defendant.

 

For more on SLAPP-backs, go here. 

Remember when...

 

...privacy from government snooping was a significant issue? Maybe I mean definitely it should be again. Two recent stories tell us why.

 

In the first, 404 Media reported on May 29 that earlier that month, a Texas cop, suspecting that a woman had gotten a self-administered abortion, performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to try to find her. The search included states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois. 

 

A company called Flock markets the cameras, usually marketed to cities and towns to address concerns about local crime or find missing people. Instead, it has become another means for police to conduct sweeping, warrantless surveillance, enabling police in one state to "investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another," in the words of Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund.

 

(Sidebar: I first wrote about ALPRs in 2007 when New York City was about to install its first of them.)

 

The second comes from The Intercept, which reported on May 22 that US intelligence agencies are evading the 4th Amendment and obtaining vast amounts of personal and sensitive information that normally would require a search warrant to obtain.

 

How? Simply by buying it from data brokers, a vast and growing - and largely unregulated - market.

 

But there's a problem: There's too much data for sale from too many sources and oh dear, the spooks can't use it efficiently. So, the article informs us,

[t]he Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information.... The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.”

That data will be available to the 18 separate agencies and offices that comprise the federal intelligence "community" - and perhaps others beyond those. It will also enable use of unreliable, hallucination-prone AI large-language models and pseudoscientific “sentiment analysis,” which claims being able to know someone’s opinion about a topic by analyzing implicit signals in their behavior, movement, or speech.

But don't worry, really - the spooks insist this is just about efficiency and is not any threat to First or Fourth Amendment rights. Really. They mean it this time. They do. Because efficiency in government spying on us is all about freedom.

 

Footnote: The program to establish this "Data Consortium" was started during the Biden administration.

Good News: death with dignity bill advances

 

Okay, here we have some good news by way of Hemant Mehta, aka Friendly Atheist.

 

After more than a decade of work, a recently retired openly humanist member of the Delaware State House got to see his important “death with dignity” bill become law. 

 

This was the end of a 10-year effort by the now-retired “Unitarian Universalist humanist" Paul Baumbach. It was actually passed last session only to be vetoed by Gov. John Carney. This year, with a new governor, Matt Meyer, it passed again and was signed into law.

 

 The new law is crammed with safeguards so that this choice is available only to terminally-ill patients who are acting of their own free will and are fully aware of what they are doing. As Mehta puts it:

This was meant to be a last resort for patients with no other options available to them, not a first resort for the desperate. It’s the humane approach for people whose only path forward involves unimaginable suffering.

Delaware becomes the tenth state with such an end-of-life law even though a recent Gallup poll showed 66-71% of Americans support allowing physician-assisted suicide. The percentage variance came from how the question was phrased, with the higher percentage resulting from including the word "painless."

 

And in fact, there's more good news on the same front. On May 27, the French National Assembly approved a bill to legalize assisted dying. The bill, which has the support of President Emmanuel Macron, is expected to pass the Senate, with polls saying 90% of the public supports such laws.

 

France will join several other European countries along with Canada and Australia in having a right-to-die law.

 

I know this issue can be divisive but I have had the experience of watching someone grievously ill whose life had shrunk to just surviving suffering and who openly expressed a request to "pull the plug" have to continue to suffer to the end because this option was not available. Neither the patient nor those who care about them should have to go through that.

And another thing: quick evolution

 

"And another thing" was the title I always gave to science-y stuff that I found interesting. So why not start with one of those. Consider it a way of easing back in to heavier stuff.

 

So this comes from Smithsonian magazine, which brings news of evolution occurring in real time - in this case, about ten generations.

 

The study involved was published in the May 21 edition of Global Change Biology and related to Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna), a species found in California.

 

Simply (probably oversimply, so read the article) put, the proliferation of hummingbird feeders since World War II has provided the birds with a plentiful supply of nectar, resulting in longer, larger, beaks - the better to take advantage of the feeders - as well as enabling them to expand their range from southern California up the coast to British Columbia.

 

So take that, creationists: Yeah, evolution can take tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but it doesn't have to. The argument "no one has seen evolution" just won't wash. Not that it ever did.

A quick note

To move myself back into posting more regularly, I've decided to try to make it a practice to once a week to post a few items related to some things that over the previous several days struck me and which seemed not to generate a lot of response. Wish me luck.

By the way, in all cases you are encouraged to check out the original article.