Texas Progressives

Off the Kuff interprets a pro-Cornyn election projection that assumes Republicans are already in deep doo-doo for November in Texas. 

SocraticGadfly did some light numbers-crunching and wondered if all of Texas' big metros really need to kowtow to Strangeabbott on the issue of ICE non-collaboration vs state grant funding cutoffs.

The Trib has a follow-up on Strangeabbott's thuggery, now being put in the service of Islamophobia, of course.  It notes he's being doing this for more than a decade.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project reports on a conversation with a Houston City Councilmemberwho flipped on the ICE ordinance, and asks at what point will we advocate for freedom against our authoritarian/ white supremacist state and federal governments. 

If you get stuck in Big Bend, here's the guy who could be your ultimate salvation.

Speaking of? The Border Patrol has officially abandoned plans to run a border wall through the park. 

Vo must go? 

There's a new McMurtry bio; the Observer reviews. Let's hope it's better than the previous one.

El Paso Matters told how delays and gaps in reporting on measles statistics made the response to it much more difficult.  

Deceleration reports on how Texas cities are gearing up to deal with rising heat.

The TSTA Blog advises you to trust Thomas Jefferson on the question of religion in public schools, and not Dan Patrick.

The Dallas Observer does the grim task of documenting all of the mass shootings so far this year in Texas. 

For different listening, this episode of the Care and Feeding podcast, featuring Houston's Mandy Giles, founder and CEO of Parents of Trans Youth, with some advice for a listener about their nonbinary child.

Graham Platner's tattoo (and other things)

I'm not wasting massive time on it. And, I'm only providing one link as a direct reference link — Snopes. Then two other backgrounders plus an image.

I broadly agree on two things.

One is that, unless we have a much better photo than an underlit video-grab from more than a decade ago, it's hard to say how closely his tattoo resembled the Totenkopf.

And, that — the Totenkopf — is the second link. Not to justify it, today, but it has a pre-Nazi and even a pre-German past. 

And, not even a past! The Royal Lancers in the UK use their own version of it today. 

As for him not knowing what it meant?

Quite possible. How much does the average 22-year-old or whatever Marine enlisted man who has not gone past high school level know about this imagery, versus of course the swastika. For all you doing callouts, was the Totenkopf covered in your high school world history class? Did you know what it was before you decided this was a good opportunity to dogpile on him? 

And, that would be one thing enough if he got it at a bar near an American base.

Instead, he's in Croatia getting drunk in a bar with fellow Marines. Did ANY of them know what this symbol meant?

Or rather, per pre-WWII Germany and today's Royal Lancers, did it just look cool? 

Likely the latter, though not as cool as the Royal Lancers.

Meanwhile, an ultra-Orthodox retweeting racist Richard Hanania to try to "own the Zionists" or whatever he was doing is on pretty shaky ground doing a callout of Platner, then getting indignant when I called them a Zionist. Lie down with fleas ...

Now, as for the Croatian tattoo shop owner? Given the Ustashe in World War II, complete with a Croatian SS unit (founded before the 1st Galician of modern Russia-Ukraine infamy) followed by the right-wing thuggery of Franjo Tudjman as first leader of post-independence Croatia, I have little doubt they knew at least the general history of the Totenkopf. 

This is not to say that I don't find Graham Platner troubling.

Obviously, I can't read all his deleted Reddit posts. They were written years later. For someone who claims they were leftist by then, a certain amount of them cut against that grain. And, yes, PTSD is serious and real. But, per the Latin bon mot, "in vino veritas," PTSD doesn't necessarily cause an "alt-persona" to arise. 

This also show that he's a political novice. Experienced candidates running for something as high as a US Senate seat do "oppo research" on themselves to find out in advance what opponents might dig up, and to be prepared in advance. 

I didn't think to check his Wiki much in advance. I'm as troubled by the fact that his family was moneyed enough to send him to an elite prep school like Hotchkiss as anything else, even if he got financial aid. Did he get booted, though? That's not the only high school he attended. The other is also private, originally Catholic but now nonreligious. 

British local elections: winners and losers

A brief hot take on who won and lost last week in British local elections.

Losers:

1. Der Starmer. Yes, that's what I call him. If you recognize the bad pun and like it, pass it on. If you don't like it, that's on you. If you don't get it, sorry.

2. Your Party, or as Paul Braterman called it, My Party, aka Jezza Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. What, you can't be a formally organized party to field local candidates yet? Yikes.

3. Zionists. On Shitter, by Sunday, they were already flinging the same false antisemitism claims that once got hurled at Corbyn at ..

1. Green Party and leader and leader Zack Polanski, who actually is Jewish and I hope has sharper elbows that he throws more vigorously than Corbyn. (Beyond being a wet noodle on the attacks against him, Corbyn's lie to the Labour caucus meeting about allegedly giving a vigorous defense to Remain is another reason I have low, low regard for him. He made his own bed long ago.)  Indeed, Polanski is more truly Jewish in some ways than his Zionist attackers — one of whom on Shitter, in response to me called Corbyn a "trot."

2. Gordon Brown. If Der Starmer's response to the shellacking includes resurrecting your political corpse, Gordo, you're a winner.

3. British politics. If Corbyn and Sultana can't get their shit together, the GP is already moving forward and providing an actual option on the left. We'll see what tea leaves to read out of the King's Speech today, otherwise: Starmer's one of those passive-aggressive types who won't step down without a shove and without breaking at least one deal. Would Labour backbencher anger at him rise enough for a confidence vote if he attempted to block it within the party?

Even keel

1. Nigel Farage and Reform. Other than Zionist rabbis inviting Farage and his antisemitic past to address them while excluding Polanski (and showing themselves to be big losers), they're not winners. Don't believe claims otherwise from the likes of the Beeb. 

Getting stuck in Big Bend, getting Yankee salvation — even when you're an idiot

If you get stuck in Big Bend, here's the guy who could be your ultimate salvation. And, he's a Yankee from Massachusetts.

That said, despite his big heart, there's info in the story that shows some people don't belong in the back country of one of the largest, and almost surely the second most primitive, of national parks this side of Death Valley. (The Maze district of Canyonlands is still well ahead, and may directly challenge some of the worst of DV, though not being as hot in summer as Big Bend, let alone Death Valley.)

Now, those ... idiots?

This:

In March, four college kids in a Land Cruiser got a flat tire on Black Gap Road, in Big Bend National Park, and were so low on gas that they couldn’t run the air conditioning. The road is technically closed due to flooding damage last year, so the chances were slim that anyone was going to drive by. At 4 p.m. on a 101 degree day, they were able to send a message to one of their dads, who joined several Big Bend Facebook pages and was directed to Cary. By sunset, Cary had contacted them and made a plan to meet up first thing the next morning with gas so they could at least stay cool. All in all, he spent seven hours fixing the tire and helping them get on their way.

First, riffing off the warning at the end of the piece, Land Cruisers DO have a full-sized spare. If you don't know how to access an under-carriage spare tire when you buy or rent such a vehicle, you should familiarize yourself well before driving a place like Black Gap Road, even when it's truly open.

For more on how tough Black Gap Road is? The Park Service notes it is "not maintained and requires 4-wheel drive." More here. Both links have multiple photos.

Second, you shouldn't be an idiot on running that low on gas in a place as big and as remote as Big Bend. I would have known that in college, even with a lot less money than these kids have. And,  yes, money and class are getting mentioned here.

Third, what would you have done without a cellphone signal? (This is likely to lead to a push to put even more cellphone towers — a totally wrong push, of course, and another reason to visit more and more non-national park federal land. The subreddits about national parks sometimes reinforce that idea.)

Fourth, yes, it's a stereotype, but things like this are the reasons stereotypes of Millennials more and more come off like generalizations, not stereotypes.

(Per my take on modern informal logic and its split of the old deductive vs fallacious on arguments into deductive, inductive and fallacious, an observation about a group that's more than 50 percent true, even if not 100 percent true, is a generalization not a stereotype.) 

And, in the case of Big Bend, this is based on personal observations beyond the story. From 2001-11, I went a dozen times, maybe one or two more. It was mainly at Thanksgiving, but I did a couple of Christmastime trips and a couple of spring ones. By, oh, 2007 or so, I considered myself a "veteran." That was not just due to my own hiking and exploring, but also due to listening to the tales and information from veterans in front of me and even super-veterans. (Big Bend, like Death Valley, attracts people like this.)

I got out there once, maybe twice, but I think only once, during the 2012-15 period and after that, not until 2019. The park had changed; they were already then doing reservations for the primitive drive-in sites. I can't remember if they were trying to clamp down on or eliminate dispersed backcountry camping outside of designated sites. (My second or third trip, I backcountry camped in the vicinity of the Marufo Vega trail.) 

Anyway, my first night at the hot springs, I'd already had a day of, between hikes, overhearing millennial types seemingly not interested in the traditions, and other matters, a day of disenchantment. Running into millennials at the springs being frou-frou was the last straw. I wasn't expecting them all to be in the springs nekkid, like the folks possibly from Hippy Hollow my first night at the springs on my first trip. But, I was wishing for them to be other than what they were, that late in the night after dark. 

A look at the nitty-gritty of plugging abandoned oil and gas wells

Inside Climate News reports on the Well Done Foundation, a private entity trying to assist in the work of plugging abandoned wells.

Here's how bad the need is:

In a 2023 peer-reviewed study, researchers led by McGill University civil engineer Mary Kang estimated that 13 percent of Americans—about 4.6 million people—live within about a half-mile of an AOOG well. “These wells have the potential to contaminate water supplies, degrade ecosystems, and emit methane and other air pollutants … present[ing] risks to climate stability and to environmental and human health,” the study stated.

The story goes on to note details of the problem, details well known by many people in the Permian Basin:

Some are relatively inert on their own, but other unplugged wells might vent hydrocarbons like methane, volatile organic compounds like the carcinogen benzene or deadly gases like hydrogen sulfide. Some leak oil, or a brine called “produced water” contaminated with heavy metals, chemicals or radioactivity. Some pollute underground aquifers or nearby surface waters. Others create their own noxious lakes. Changing subterranean conditions can make previously stable AOOG wells vent or leak. 

Wastewater from oil and gas production is typically disposed of by pumping it into spent, adjacent oil and gas wells, but overpressurized underground disposal reservoirs can force it back to the surface where it can disrupt production from other oil and gas wells.

On federal, often BLM land, the problem is that bonding requirements haven't been updated in 40 years. On the state level, in the greater near Southwest, Colorado and New Mexico, though not perfect, are better than Texas in various ways. I don't know about Oklahoma, but wouldn't hold my breath.

That said, since wingnuts like to talk "moral hazard" so much, isn't this work by a private company kind of enabling moral hazard? 

That said, kudos to Curtis Shuck for founding Well Done Foundation and the work it's doing in Oklahoma. And, since a photo is sometimes worth more than 1,000 words, click the link.

RIP Bobby Cox, still getting a roiding pass

The long-time Atlanta Braves (and shorter-time Toronto Blue Jays) manager, voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame a number of years ago, has died at the age of 84.

And, he continues to get a pass on his managing of alleged, certain in my opinion in one case for sure, steroid-using (or other PED-using) players. The two managers voted in with him, Tony La Russa and Joe Torre, have faced much more scrutiny (while pumping out much more denialism). Cox hasn't.

Indeed, ESPN's own story, at the top link, doesn't even mention this, though at that very place, Rick Reilly mentioned all three, and the hypocrisy, when they were voted into Cooperstown.

Why? Maybe it's because, other than the borderline case of Gary Sheffield, Cox didn't manage any clear HOFers, or players with dramatic performances? (As a St. Louis Cardinals fan, I don't think Mark McGwire is a HOFer even with his PED-influenced numbers, but he did have dramatic performances.) But, outside of Barry Bonds, Torre managed both Roger Clemens and A-Rod. Even deducting for the enhancements, all three continue to be shut out by veterans committees in the first two cases, after the BBWAA took a 10-year pass. A-Rod is likely to face the same fate.

Yet the trio of denialist managers plus former commissioner Bud Selig are all in Cooperstown.

It's a big steaming pile of shit.

I think Cox knew, as much as La Russa and Torre, even if Atlanta wasn't as much of a "locus" as Oakland's dugout or that of the Yankees. (The Texas Rangers became another node when Jose Canseco went there but they've not had a HOF manager until Bruce Bochy, who will go in with a Giants hat. And, the Mac/La Russa Cardinals being a possible node has also flown under the radar screen because, of course, that's not the Cardinal Way.)

Riffing off Reilly, by the early 2000s, all three were managerial elder statesmen. Certainly they were after their 2013 elections. Yet all engaged in denialism both before and after. Denialism extends to fans in the case of Cox, per a post on Reddit's r/mlb, where my comments to this end have been massively downvoted.

And, no, "not too soon," either, no more than with a takedown or semi-takedown obit of a politician.