The reality of small-town values, part 1

Many White folk whose parents, or more likely, grandparents, lived in small towns are now moving back to them, as they become less isolated, and are now really exurban areas near growing metropolitan areas like the Dallas-Fort Worth Metromess.

They cite "better schools" and "small-town values" as reasons why.

I'll tackle "better schools" later. Let's look at some "small-town values" issues first.

First, income inequality can be as bad in a small town, even one of under 5,000, as in a big city. If just a few people are lucky to have oil wells, like many a small town in Texas, that's how it happens. Plus, the income inequality is in your face. Bill Gates' lakeside mansion may be half an hour away from downtown Seattle. The oil-funded 5,000 square foot rural mansion is next door, or nearly so.

And, that classism can pop up at school. At a small town school district, everybody's at the same high school and in the same class, and the rich kids can wave it in others' faces.

But, small town people are so honest, right?

Erm, three car burglaries in a month, with all of them involving cash and/or gunz that neighbors likely knew to look for.

Small town folks not paying what they should pay on the honor system for the local newspaper? Personally experience that one.

And, of course, in a small town that's not truly multi-ethnic, there's small-town racism. 

And, that is separate from the partially parallel issue of small-town insularity.

Texas progressives roundup: more on voting and Abbott Blackout

Per the header, those issues continue to lead the Texas Legislature's plate. (That said, there's plenty of other stupidity in the Lege, and plenty of lost opportunities on bills not considered.)

With that, let's dig in.

R.G. Ratcliffe says SB7 is a continuation of the Abbott-Whitley attempted voter purge of 2019.

Off the Kuff analyzes the big Senate and House voter suppression bills.

The Texas Civil Rights Project reminds us that there are other, smaller but still malicious voter suppression bills to watch out for. 

Progress Texas highlights the efforts to put pressure on the Legislature to reject voter suppression.

The Lege still refuses to require the RRC to require weatherization. My legiscritter, Drew Springer, protested at first on the Senate side, but then willingly accepted signing off on Charles Schwertner's head fake. I guess Drew really fell for the oil and gas bidness PR head fake. Meanwhile, ERCOT claims it has sovereign immunity from lawsuits, even though it's a private entity. Given some past history with the Texas Supremes, that may not play out legally. At the same link, ERCOT's insurer is claiming that this is legally NOT an act of god and that it should therefore be off the hook.

SocraticGadfly says that with new legislation on the table in Oklahoma and passed in New Mexico, Texas faces new pressure to liberalize its marijuana laws.

Stace is riding for Alzheimer's Research. Read about it, and, if you can, make a donation!

Emily Eby personally points out all of the bad things in voter suppression bill SB7.

Charles Luke opines against the proposed ban on local governments hiring lobbyists at the Legislature.

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria get Honorary Texan status for the week for their deconstruction of Dan Patrick.

National

RIP to America's best attorney general at least since World War II, Ramsey Clark.

The NYT editorial board doesn't quite say the US should remove ALL Trumpian sanctions as part of restoring the Iran deal, but it comes close.

Yes, it's time to replace the 1953 Panmunjom cease-fire with an actual Korean peace treaty.

David Sirota's team thinks the DSA Roseys are actual socialists.

Becoming David Sirota

I blogged earlier this week about my latest quarterly blogroll updates, news, and I threw a sharp elbow at David Sirota with this among the new additions:

The Daily Poster, the latest news-and-opinion site affiliated with David Sirota or vice versa. That said, while it doesn't have a Substack-based URL ... its front page, including with the "no, let me read it first" clickable link, looks EXACTLY like a Substack blog front page. In that case, Sirota is another of the media 1 percenters enhancing his wallet, with others along for the ride. And, if you click through the "About" page, at the bottom, you find out it IS a Substack site. So, it too may be gone in three months, also since I don't think Sirota is necessarily all he cracks himself up to be, starting with the fact he's never dipped a toe outside the duopoly.

And, I knew I had thrown a sharp elbow or four at Sirota before, so I decided to double down and collect them here.

There was this, from the one 2020 Democratic presidential candidate debate, where Sirota couldn't even really defend Bernie the Gun Nut Lite for 24 hours, and then when he DID weigh in on Twitter, it was nothing more than handwaving, and worse, only via a retweet. (See about halfway down the piece.) I included the same material, with a closer focus just on Bernie in that debate, when I blogged about the showdown between Sandernistas and Madcow Maddow.

To give him credit, Sirota was right on wanting Bernie to go negative against Status Quo Joe. (In turn, his failure to do so indicates that Bernie 2016 was motivated in part by some still less than fully clear to people not named Bernie or Jane Sanders animus against the Clintons.)

But, Sirota has other problems. A full decade ago, he was dipping his toes into the SJW world, Major League Baseball umpiring division. Paging Angel Hernandez. Look, I believe that a certain amount of implicit as well as explicit bias is real. BUT! The existence of implicit, as well as explicit, bias has to be confirmed by evidence and, in this case, it wasn't.

And, someone from his team at Substack thinks the DSA Roseys are actual socialists.

Sirota's not all bad. But, he strikes me as a bit of John Nichols mixed with Have Gun, Will Travel as far as not being settled at one place. (And, I'm not sure which of the two that insults more.)

 

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Re Substack and the Daily Poster, add weird tidbits like this. A post about fast-food restaurants and a $15 minimum wage, which it says was co-published with Newsweek (this post), which has a soft paywall that is easily defeated beyond the five-article monthly limit. Just saying ...

==

As far as Sirota's simollians? If Substack is paying Glennwald $1-2 million a year, and reportedly offered Missy Breunig $200K, Sirota's surely getting at least that lower number. Sirota may not live in Glennwald's Brazil, but he also doesn't live in NYC, as his wife ran for a state leg position in Colorado last year.

Coronavirus, week 53: Johnson and Johnson, international news

Breaking, and starting with a look domestically: The federal government is calling for a pause in use of Johnson and Johnson vaccine and plans to do so at any federal vaccine sites. Blood clotting is the concern. Could this all be from mixing with AstraZenica at the Baltimore facility? Who knows. Stay tuned.

International

Many in America like to laugh at British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but is it possible that French President Emmanuel Macron is really more the Donald Trump of Europe on COVID? Well, maybe not. France's death rate may be growing, but it's still well below that of the US, which in turn is below that of Britain. (It's also still lower than Italy.) OTOH, France was showing an alarming new spike this spring.

Meanwhile, the UK and EU look like Dumb and Dumber on vaccine rollout. Remember how, in the wake of the Great Recession, many people who thought the EU would implode due to not having financial integration along with monetary integration thought "this is the moment"? Who'da thunk that the Brusselscrats (even less tasty!) would have fucked this up?

And also meanwhile, on Twitter late last week, the People's Republic of Xi Jinping Thought was peddling the Kool-Aid about Our Glorious Leader's Glorious Vaccines. Here's the reality, though.

America

Back in America? The COVID workplace safety guidelines that Biden wanted OSHA to develop are nearly a month late now, the WSJ reports. 

Skeptical Raptor explains why he would only get the AstraZenica vaccine as a last resort. And, this is how true science works. Raptor refuses to give false certainty on "don't use it at all," but also refuses to explain away evidence. That said, this is a shift from two weeks prior, where he basically said "don't worry," although by March 30 he had already heightened his caution.

Texas is up to a whole 18 percent vaccination as of last Friday. At that rate, we'll have herd immunity at about the time Strangeabbott is running for guv again, bolstered by vote suppression. It's 45th nationally in that. (Among neighbors, New Mexico is No. 1, Oklahoma 22 and Louisiana 34.)

White evangelicals are the top vaccine-hesitants. Christianity Today claims that vaccine hesitancy is NOT coming from the pulpit. Slacktivist says that's not true.

COVID may be leading Texas into becoming more of a biotech hotspot, if emergency vaccine making becomes a cornerstone.

Abandoned oil wells: A growing hazard in NM AND TX

Both New Mexico AND Texas suck at inspecting abandoned oil wells in the Permian. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has done some modest improvements to that into the Land Different, but not a lot. (Lujan Grisham has gotten the state tax code tweaked and other things beyond Gov. Martinez, but on environmental justice, she's still relatively slow See "Richardson, Bill." Better yet: See Gov. Lujan Grisham accept state oil and gas industry award.)

And, we know in the Texas side of the Permian, and presumably in NM, that they're leaking methane. And, possibly, toxins like toluene and benzene. (Beyond these two stories: In both states, and other petroleum-gas heavy states in general, state regulatory agencies' required deposits on wells are a pittance.)

And, many, many more may be abandoned in coming years, as the truth of short-peak, quick-death fracked wells hits home.

Beyond the health hazards of the methane, and even more, the other substances, is the climate change alteration by the methane, much more potent than carbon dioxide over shorter scales of a century or less. On the economic side, this ultimately becomes money out of state taxpayer pockets that can't be used for other things. And, given that state governments won't do any more than a minimalist job, it becomes a blight on communities. It also becomes a recreational blight on federal land, in places where the BLM may not hold feet to the fire much more than state governments.

Meanwhile, NM Environment Department's stripper well loophole for methane further confirms MLG is not a friend of the environment. As New Mexico has cabinet-style government, not the quasi-plural executive of Texas, MLG could fire NMED Secretary James Kenney or do whatever else she deemed necessary to close this loophole.

Time for another quarterly blogroll update

First, what's gone?

Both of these are not for "ideological" reasons but rather, lack of activity ones.

Old friend Shem hasn't blogged in nearly 10 months, so Driven to Abstraction goes to my links list but off my blogroll. (He'd only blogged once in more than six months before that.)

Ken White, aka Popehat, gets his Substack dropped. He only wrote there for two months after abandoning his old website. And, he'd only blogged THERE three-four times in the last year before dropping it.

Added?

Becoming is Superior to Being. A "nice" site, Tumblr-like, but most the Sonoran Desert and other Aridzona pix aren't that good, and the poetry is five times worse than Counterpunch's poet laureate. Plus, he posts 3-4 times a day with stuff that's not that good. Don't be surprised, Kenne, if you're gone again in three more months.

The Daily Poster, the latest news-and-opinion site affiliated with David Sirota or vice versa. That said, while it doesn't have a Substack-based URL ... its front page, including with the "no, let me read it first" clickable link, looks EXACTLY like a Substack blog front page. In that case, Sirota is another of the media 1 percenters enhancing his wallet, with others along for the ride. And, if you click through the "About" page, at the bottom, you find out it IS a Substack site. So, it too may be gone in three months, also since I don't think Sirota is necessarily all he cracks himself up to be, starting with the fact he's never dipped a toe outside the duopoly.

Also added: Capital and Main, which had been Sirota's roost before Daily Poster. It has enough interesting stuff on its own, it's likely to stay.

On watch?

Independent Political Report, even though I've got posting privileges now. William Saturn posting racism and walking, talking and quacking like a racist himself is pushing the limit. (Saturn took a deep dive on the Trump Train on posts and comments there that last month or so before the election, and so, per Bayesian ethics, I'm less and less inclined to be charitable toward him with each new action or statement.) If nothing else, I'll hang until the GP votes on Georgia deaccreditation. (I'm expecting it to happen, but want to wait for the official vote and blog about it there.)

William Saturn posting racism