A skeptical leftist's, or post-capitalist's, or eco-socialist's blog, including skepticism about leftism (and related things under other labels), but even more about other issues of politics. Free of duopoly and minor party ties. Also, a skeptical look at Gnu Atheism, religion, social sciences, more.
Note: Labels can help describe people but should never be used to pin them to an anthill.
As seen at Washington Babylon and other fine establishments
The Monthly mildly calls out Gina Hinojosa for running an anti-abortion ad in drag, rather than an ad about her trisomy 21 daughter carried to term, that doesn't document how Texas women today can't get the procedure she could have. Back to undervoting that race?
I'll believe that rural voters turn Texas blue as soon as Hispanic voters do. Nice try, Politico. I'll write more on that.
Trump cabinet members like Brooke Rollins, just like Trump himself, are war-profiteering off the conflict with Iran.
Trump won't give up on mail ballots; will SCOTUS stop being chickenshit, realize Trump doesn't care for legal niceties, and fully take the bull by the horns?
Kuff, as a good Democrat trooper, continues to be chickenshit on radio silence about ongoing butt-hurtedness by Jasmine Crockett against James Talarico.
The Monthly never responds on either Hucksterman or Shitter, so when reporter Jack Herrera, on his personal Shitter account, asked for feedback on "The War for the Rio Grande," he got it.
It's good in some ways, but has a mix of errors and Texas exceptionalism hyperbole.
First, if one goes by more than water supply, per American Rivers, neither the Rio Grande nor the Colorado is on the ten most endangered list. (Both have been on its list in the past, the Colorado more often, the Rio Grande more recently, aka last year.)
Second, no, Geronimo didn't flee from Arizona into Chihuahua, it was into Sonora.
The Colorado gets more headlines because it passes through more states, and more, because a lot more agriculture depends on it than the Rio Grande. So does more urban water supply.
The High Plains, not the small, HIGH-elevation San Luis Valley, is the heart of Colorado's ag industry. The Grand Junction area with its orchard fruits is arguably No. 2.
You're totally right on the 1944 treaty, but could go further. It needs to be redone.
I disagree with you on not targeting certain crops. Lots of pecans like the ones Rogers grows sell overseas, just like the alfalfa you mentioned going to Saudi Arabia. Yes, Rogers has a market — and outside of Trump tariff stupidity, a lot of that market is in China.
El Paso scientists are right — the drought in the Southwest is expected to last the rest of this century, due to climate change.
Water recycling has been done in LA's Southland for what, a decade or more? Here in Texas, Wichita Falls started it a few years ago. Neither one may have as fancy of an operation as El Paso plans, but the concept in action is itself not new. If there's something special and new in El Paso's details, it should have been spelled out more. Saying it's "the first of its kind in the nation" is incomplete at best and possibly inaccurate at worst unless it's massively different from others.
I concluded by telling Herrera what I start with here and I was waiting to see if anything would be different this time on responsiveness.
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A second piece, whether prequel or sequel, is better.
Setting aside Herrera's untruths about the San Luis Valley as the heart of Colorado agriculture (pre-Spanish entrada, it wasn't, either; that would be Colorado's part of the Four Corners) his story about his trip to the headwaters of the Rio Grande is more worth it. I've not hiked to the headwaters myself, but I've been to Creede, and have hiked in American and Yankee basins on the west side of the Continental Divide just above the headwaters.
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Sidebar: Neither story has the magic phrase "climate change."
With Big John Cornyn refusing to help Kenny Boy Paxton in his fundraising get at all, as announced last month, The Eyes of Texas, certainly MAGAts Republican eyes, turned to The Donald.
And Trump's PAC has now shoved $10 million in the Paxton ad buy offering plate, the Trib reports. That said, its subhed gets a framing issue wrong. For Trump, this is ultimately not about this race now being an unexpected key to which duopoly party controls the Senate. Rather, it's about his (hedged) backing of Paxton over Cornyn through the GOP primary and runoff. It's personal.
That said, the content of the ad buy looks un-Trumpian bland and impersonal. Attacking Talarico over taxes rather than past statements of his like "god is nonbinary"? WTF?
At the Monthly, Dan Solomon snarks on the Trump official endorsement that accompanied the ad buy.
Meanwhile, Kenny Boy appears to have violated U.S. Senate Ethics Committee wealth and assets disclosure rules. Shock me. Nothing will happen until after the election, if anything happens then. Before the election, the SEC won't even send an official warning letter.
This one deserves an extended pull quote to show how bad it is:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears to have violated federal ethics law in significant ways when filing recent disclosures of his assets and liabilities, creating confusion about his net worth and holdings, a review by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.
Among them: Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, reported owning seven homes but said he earned no income from any. Yet all but one was listed for rent during the reporting periods, and some current residents and neighbors at those addresses confirmed that the properties were rented, the news organizations found. Receiving income and not reporting it is a violation of federal disclosure law, three ethics experts said.
Additionally, Paxton did not disclose mortgages for three condos at a Utah golf resort that federal law requires him to list as liabilities if they are not personal residences.
He also valued his stake in a vacant plot of Texas land at up to $50,000 on last year’s filing, but his business partner told the newsrooms Paxton’s share for years has been worth about $1 million. Federal financial disclosure law requires property to be listed at fair market value.
The apparent errors and omissions the newsrooms found obscure the extent of Paxton’s income streams, assets and debt, making it difficult for voters to make sense of his finances as they mull whether to support him in November’s election, the ethics experts said.
Shocked? Not me. And I'm certain it's deliberate, not sloppiness, regarding the next paragraph after the pull quote.
It's also stupid, whether stupidity born of sloppiness or of arrogance, because it triggered this story. Yes, as the story notes, if he wins, it makes it harder to track Senate conflicts of interest. But first, he has to win.
But, per the end of the story, here's how you know he's off the hook, other than for stupidity:
The ethics committee did not respond to requests for comment. Candidates or senators who willingly falsify financial disclosures can be fined up to $50,000 or prosecuted for making a false statement to the government, a felony. The committee rarely investigates senators and has not formally sanctioned a member in 19 years.
Bingo. The Senate, contra the House, maintains this level of false collegiality.
As is normal, not all of these were written last month. Rather, per Blogger's sometimes-dubious stats, they reportedly were the most popular for last month.
No. 10 was from not too far away, in July. It was an update on the unethical moderators at the r/AskHistorians subreddit, who it turns out are pretendian leftists.
No. 8, from late 2023, was a roundup of thoughts on the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, broken trust between leftist Israelis and Palestinians, and Putin punking Western sanctions.
No. 7, a Texas Progressives roundup from late July. (More and more, the term "progressives" is of course tohu w'vohu.)
No. 6, my splitting of a Texas Progressives roundup from August, where I actually called out, myself, both halves of the duopoly, specifically both Kenny Boy Paxton and Talafreako Talarico.
No. 5, an oldie but goodie from 2014, my gloating over skeptic, and libertarian fusing his libertarian politics with skepticism, Brian Dunning, found guilty of wire fraud.
No. 4? Trending because I posted it recently on the r/DeathValleyNP sub-Reddit, my piece about Steve Curry getting himself killed because he chose to hike Golden Canyon in midday sun in July 2023 — at the age of 71. At age 62, this spring, when in Death Valley during the big hottening up in late March, when Furnace Creek was hitting 110 some days, I paced myself in the afternoon.
No. 3 was from 2024 and was an extended review of Steve Vladeck's book "The Shadow Docket." Gee, why is that trending again?
I love me some Lyle Lewis and have for what, a decade or so?
That said, this comment of his, in reply to a comment on a piece of his about bats acting strangely, made me think more about the issue in the header, specifically because it's from Lewis.
First, the heart of Davy Kydd:
i have another kind of observation about the landscape of your words. more and more in the wildlife of writing, readers are noticing an eerie sameness, as if the habitat of possible sentence structures is shrinking. the robotic repetitiveness, the lifeless pose of predictable syntax . . . pretending to be alive.
like the world's beleaguered teachers inundated by ai essays, the substack habitat too is being infiltrated. we feel a bit cheated.
even though the planet’s hyper-populated human landscapes are creating pressures on artists to use ai to trick their audiences and generate $$$, i wonder if we might help substack to maintain its integrity by requiring authors to inform their audience each and every time ai is used in their writing or photography.
That's it. (He later removed the note. And, his take on environmentalism is basically kind of antropomorphic mushy, which is not my take or Lyle's. That said?)
Here's the nutgrafs of Lyle's response:
For my own work, I care much less about preserving some imagined purity of literary production than I do about understanding what is happening to the living world.
I am not particularly worried about whether the ecosystem of sentence structures on the Internet is sufficiently diverse.
I am worried about the actual ecosystems.
I am worried about bats and insects, forests and grasslands, rivers and oceans, predators and prey, ecological relationships disappearing before we understand them, and a human civilization transforming the planet faster than either science or society can comprehend the consequences.
If new tools allow me to examine those questions more deeply, connect information more rapidly, challenge my own assumptions more effectively, and communicate what I find to more people, I am going to use them.
And I am going to remain responsible for the result.
That seems to me the standard that matters.
Don’t ask whether a machine touched the prose.
I don't know how much extra electricity his AI use generates. It does of course generate some. I don't know if he's even tried to calculate that. I don't even know how easy it would be to guess, or to go meta and use AI to try to get an answer.
But I am going to guess he's not thought of that.
For me, it's a bridge too far.
Not primarily on AI words, where I am not at Lyle's level of environmental knowledge sets, but mainly on AI photos. I played around with one or two sites once the technology started taking off a couple of years ago, and used it once on one Substack piece with a bit of regret.
No more.
Beyond the truth-value reasons for its use, beyond worries about it being another addiction, I think this has to be asked all the time.
And, in pieces like this? He uses what certainly looks like an AI photo. I mean, it's a nice illustration for a great story, but I couldn't do that. I'd either find a way to Photoshop different stuff together, or not have an illustration. I would also have it labeled as being a Photoshop illustration, not an actual photo, and definitely labeled as AI-generated if I did.
Massimo Pigliucci is not an environmentalist or climate scientist, but he is a scientist as well as philosopher, and, as in this piece, regularly uses AI photos.
Besides, per physicist Angela Collier (long YouTube but the first 5 minutes or so will give you the basics) AI doesn't exist anyway. She goes into machine learning in her field, pivots from that to alleged AI, and then goes philosophy with black box references. In the sense that she's rejecting the "I" half of the shorthand, she's correct.
Five-minute mark: "These programs are great, they're interesting, they're useful, but they're not AI."
That then said, old Davy has himself "liked" and even restacked more than one post from other accounts that use AI images.
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That said, both to not look like I'm just picking on Lyle, or a lesser degree, Massimo as well, and because another pet peeve came up the same day, last Sunday?
First, the folks there don't tell you what I told them in a comment. That's that Merlin just ain't that accurate. Folks at the r/birding subreddit field semi-regular bitches about it.
Second, if you, like me, bird by sight first, sounds second, Merlin ain't that helpful. I doubt it has a draw and drag ID feature like Google Images and besides, I have a real camera; I don't shoot birds with a smartphone.
Third and the biggie, and roughly related to my plaint about Lyle, since that piece I link is about something like an Optimus Prime level of "wilderness"?
Don't know about Hap Ellis and Lisa Noschese of Bird News Items, but whether on a vacation, or a weekend hike at the nearby national wildlife refuge or a closer one at a city park or lake? I'm out there to detach from technology.
On local weekends, my smartphone is generally off.
On vacations, after Monday evening or Tuesday morning to check in with my pinch-hitting owner boss, it's off.
Ellis, per his "clean tech" (is there such a thing?) background, strikes me as a more modern, Shrub Bush rather than Poppy Bush backing, version of bird-watcher Dick Davenport from Doonesbury.
THIS, presumably from his half of the weekly contribution:
The world can be divided into two types of people — those who have already downloaded the free Merlin Bird ID app, and those whose lives have yet to be enriched by doing so. Dubbed “Shazam for birds”, being able to hold your phone up and within seconds see names and photographs identifying all the birds singing around you has unlocked the secrets of the natural world for millions, revolutionizing birdwatching (or should I say bird listening?) as a hobby.
Not only ignores all of the above, but is an insult to people like me.
The PUC ignored calls to wait from the Texas Lege and even Dannie Goeb his own self and OKed Oncor building two big, and bigly controversial, high voltage transmission lines to West Texas. The voltage — 765 kilovolt, a first in the area — as well as the routing, is part of the angst.
They don't — and won't for the foreseeable future — make Republicans like Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker any more. RIP. She stands in history as the first woman elected to the Senate without previously being named to fill a vacancy of her late husband's seat.
Will some people actually move out of the Guadalupe River basin rather than face a likely round 3? Will the Monthly use the words "climate change" next time it writes such a story?
The Texas Observer has a message for Dan Patrick about his book-banning obsession, from an Abilene public school librarian.
Neil at the Houston Democracy Project Blog reported on the Houston City Council Public Safety Committee meeting where HPD Chief Diaz failed to show up. The bottom line appears to be we can’t have HPD/ICE transparency because HPD isn’t following the law.
