Advance surrenders in NOLA

It really should be no surprise.

The Baton Rouge Advocate, having started a New Orleans edition several years ago when Advance, owners of the venerable New Orleans Times-Picayune, made noises, then did it, about getting rid of a 7-day print product, or at least a 7-day print product for home delivery, has now bought the TP. (IF you're going to do something like this? Don't piss off subscribers. Instead, even though you're delivering in volume, whack everyday delivery to racks and retailers instead. Advertisers would probably prefer to reach dedicated customers, too.)

The takeover is brutal for NOLA staffers — all of them were sacked and will have to reapply. The Georges family would have come off better at saying "we'll look at staffing needs," and hired all op-ed staff immediately on a contract basis, along with section editors off the copy desk and selected top staffers otherwise, while saying "we'll get back to you" on the rest.

On the third hand, per the official announcement, the Advocate had its own, well-sized for today's newspaper world, staff.

But in terms of the big picture, the only question I have is — what took this so long? Did Advance not face reality? (As soon as the Advocate announced a New Orleans edition, it took off like white on rice in jambalaya.) The officially announcement said that NOLA was not for official sale but that Advance saw the handwriting on the wall.

For the Georges ownership, it makes great sense. They launched a paper in Lafayette a few years back and own an alt-weekly in NOLA. And, contra a NOLA TV station, the TP had ceased to be a gold standard at least since the 2012 circ decision. (Oh, pro tip to the TV interviewer? Turn your cellphone off before starting an interview. And, if the interview itself was done on cellphone video cam? Pro tip to station: stop being so fucking cheap.)

So, why isn't this happening elsewhere? Why doesn't the Akron Beacon Journal roll the dice on a Cleveland issue and see if Advance and the Plain Dealer will surrender? Ditto on whatever the paper is in Vancouver, Washington, (it's the Columbian) versus the Oregonian? Especially since Advance's company-wide transition to being allegedly digital-first has been as slow as hell.

High Country News goes from surrendering to movement rightists to kowtowing to SJW environmentalists

High Country News, which surrendered to the militia/3 percent/posse comitatus type western conservatives more than a year ago when it shut off all commenting on its stories, and has long decided not to seek out editorial contributions from more leftist environmentalists like Jeff St. Clair, has now also decided to kowtow to a SJW-driven group of minority outdoors lovers by letting their leader pen an op-ed screed claiming that people calling out the Instagrammers trampling on poppy blooms and other expressions of environmental concern are all racist.

No, seriously, though:

.@highcountrynews, my eyeballs rolled in my head so hard they got stuck when I read this Melanin Base Camp claim that opponents of Instagrammers sticking their feet into parks pix then geotagging them are worried about this because "white privilege." https://t.co/sdL8OOKW6w

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) May 4, 2019

And, yes, this may well be the most ridiculous piece I've ever seen in HCN in 15-plus years of semi-regular, semi-continuous subscriber readership.

(Note: A modified version of what I had originally created as this blog post was submitted to HCN as a letter to the editor. We'll see if it runs it as is, bounces it back to be shortened or politened, or refuses to run it and never contacts me about that. Given that it hasn't responded to most Tweets when I've been critical of articles before and listed specific reasons, I am not holding my breath.)

An anti-geotagging movement is supposedly racist, in part because it's an exercise in privilege.

The "Leave no Trace" campaign is hysteria. And it's supposedly about "policing black and brown bodies" in the outdoors. And, it's allegedly misguided because traces are already left. (No duh; any good environmentalist knows that.)

And the idea that "Leave no Trace" campaigners are "out there" and while "out there," engaged in "policing black and brown bodies" is ridiculous. And, based on a misinterpretation of what the Leave no Trace Center says on this Instagram. The LNTC account says X, Y, or Z MAY happen with regular feeding of a wild bird. AND, it does NOT mention "this MAY happen ONLY if the person feeding the bird is a minority."

This is one of those areas where the Center doesn’t have an official stance. Rather, we leave it up to personal choice (as with many things Leave No Trace) as to the best decision. Again, our focus is on non-motorized recreation and how to enjoy the outdoors in a responsible way.”

Is the misinterpretation accidental or willful? I can't prove it's willful, but given the tenor of the main HCN article, it sure comes off that way.

This excellent Jezebel piece about poppy tramplers and the person running the Public Lands Hates You account says NOTHING about "casual hikers quoting rap lyrics." In fact, it doesn't mention minorities at all.

And, if you go to the Instagram account, it calls out capitalism, then the hunt for the infamous 15 minutes of fame, not people of any race.

Speaking of, here's my second tweet in a thread about this utter dreck:

.@Melaninbasecamp I'm a community newspaper editor who likely makes less money than many of your members do. In turn, I'm offended by your presuppositions and presumptuousness. https://t.co/sdL8OOKW6w

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) May 4, 2019

The rest of the piece goes on with what seems to be continual evidence free (or even evidence refuted, as above) claims.

Is there still racism in environmentalism? Is there still racism in the Green Party as an environmental party? Yes and yes.

Does this piece and the Instragram hullabaloo document any of that related to the Instagram hullabaloo? No.

As for other things, like claims that some flower tramplers are drunken? Maybe they are/were, maybe not.

In either case, that's the only claim made. NO claim was made that they were "black drunks," or "Hispanic drunks," or anything like that.

Instead, the PLHY guy has been threatened with multiple lawsuits from Instagram influencers, as well-known environmental writer Christopher Ketchum describes, something the Melanin Base Camp folks conveniently omit.

The Ketchum piece is itself worth a thorough read, rather than MBC's attempt to trash it. In fact, I'm seeing this as being a "whose ox was gored" as much as anything.

It's no surprise that HCN, in what I see as a continuing incremental rightward drift, won't instead write more about the Instagrammer problem. And the capitalism behind it.

Meanwhile, MBC founder Danielle Williams next goes straight to Whataboutism in spades:

What they don’t say is striking. None of the articles place responsibility on Congress to increase appropriations for the Department of the Interior which faces a budget cut and a massive administrative overhaul. Nor do they ask Congress to stop weaponizing government shutdowns — which have devastated national parks like Joshua Tree in the past — to play to their political base. There is also little expectation that land management stakeholders respond to overcrowding with increased staffing, education, permit requirements, enforcement or outreach. No, the overwhelming emphasis is on keeping hikers they don’t want in, out.

Ketchum and others, PLENTY of other good environmentalists, have written about all of this, and the suggestions at the end of the HCN piece, plenty of times.

HCN printing such whataboutism is itself disgusting. 

Sorry, HCN, but that's how I feel. You've run a number of good stories about the lack of minorities in the outdoors, which have pointed out legitimate issues, and legitimate attempts to address them.

Then you run a piece that could be by, and certainly is in support of, a bunch of Instascammers (I went there) wrongly using racism accusations as an SJW tool.

And, while I know more and more than Twitter has a low call-to-response ratio, this isn't the first time that HCN has not responded to me when I've called out what I see as "framing" errors. That's another reason I'm definitely ready to let my subscription lapse and am close to asking to have it canceled now and refunded what remains.

Beyond that, the Instascammers — and arguably, HCN, per my previous call-out partially to it — don't take climate change's portion of environmentalism as seriously as it should maybe be taken. The Instascammers under cover of SJW eco-woke-ness (yes I said that) are clearly pro-capitalist. HCN has only occasionally written about the left not liberal early unionizing history of the west, and even that, mildly.

==

Update, May 13: A condensed version of this was submitted to HCN as a letter to the editor. Editor-in-Chief Brian Calvert has responded by saying he'll keep this in mind. Whether it runs as an actual letter or not? Stand by. With this issue being HCN's travel issue, I wasn't expecting it in there, but ... next issue?

And, answer is no.

If you don't run mine, you'd better run somebody's angry letter, and I assume you got them over that piece.

And, answer is that they ran nobody else's.

The answer now, May 27 is that this was an online-only piece, so no print letter to the editor. I've inquired about online letters to the editor; somehow I doubt HCN has even thought about that, and I also doubt that it will change its policy, or tweak its website, to make that happen.

In essence, you're saying that you'll publish whatever you want online without reader feedback. You've already turned off online commenting, and you don't have online letters to the editor.

NOT wunderbar.

==

And, call it an irony alert, or more likely, either unaware irony or something else. In its Heard Around the West from that issue, HCN notes a New York Times story calling out Instagrammers.

Slightly in the same vein as the Melanin folks' piece is this interview with a Berkeley prof who claims previous histories of the Transcontinental Railroad have ignored the sociological personal story of the Chinese who were part of the work. Actually, Empire Express, at least, does talk about that, as I note in my long-ago review. Although not specifically mentioned by me, Bain does talk about the Chinese strike, among other things. And, mentioning Philip Foner by name, when, although he wrote books about labor history in the era of railroad building, he did not write one specifically about the transcontinental railroad, seems a bit specious.

Anyway, on a lesser scale, like Melanin Base Camp, this seems another angle of using social justice warriordom in the service of capitalism.

==

Beyond THAT, said influencers are losing influence, the Wall Street Journal reports. THAT (per my suspicions) was probably behind the Melanin folks' bitching, and again, something HCN never considered.

Good bye to Rob Franke as Cedar Hill mayor You deserve a legal kick in the butt that you're not getting

STB-ex Mayor Rob Franke and then-Councilman Chris Parvin — Cedar Hill's original Piety Brother hypocrites.

Perhaps the soon-to-be-ex Cedar Hill mayor did nothing criminally wrong, but ethically wrong? Shit, that good-old-boy network of real estate issues stunk to high heaven ethically. And, per Franke's personal background, was hypocritical as hell for a conservative evangelical Christian. Franke said he was embarrassed, but maybe it was only for being caught, especially since he blamed city staff for not reminding him — OVER A FULL DECADE — to not file conflict of interest materials. Others caught up in the issue, like Councilman Chris Parvin, may not even have been embarrassed. And, it's too bad Creuzot, didn't find enough to bring charges during the investigation, or rather, it seems, too bad Creuzot went in the tank for whatever reason. (Adding to the problem, perhaps, is that Creuzot's Greg Abbott-appointed GOP predecessor, Faith Johnson, is a Cedar Hill resident.)

Parvin, like Franke, was at least embarrassed enough not to run for re-election, ending his tenure a year ago. Fellow hypocrite Jami McLain — not on the council when I was there — unembarrassedly tried to succeed Franke as mayor, and lost. It makes me wonder what shenanigans went on behind what is now the semi-flop of a mall in Cedar Hill, the former Uptown Village, even if it's not inside the economic development zone that brought up the conflict of interest problems. The same lack of ethics that led to a refusal (NOT a "failure") to disclose conflicts of interest could have led to other unethical behavior in terms of land and economic development. The 2008 start of non-compliance is kind of a red flag. I wish I could ex post facto throw up Parvin's White Rhino coffee.

Parvin, unlike Franke, never really fooled me. Parvin was active then in partisan politics, along with then-fellow councilman Wade Emmert, who went on to eventually become Dallas County GOP chairman.

Franke? I don't bash all conservative Christians as people, even when I disagree strongly with their views. But, if they walk the walk ethically, I will tip my hat. And at the time I was in Cedar Hill, he struck me as a straight shooter.

I had no idea until reported several years later that he had these conflicts of interest ... and conveniently chose to stop reporting them just as the old downtown area of Cedar Hill was looking at new development, a possible planning overlay for that, etc.

And, Franke made this all much worse by claiming it was inadvertent, and that it was inadvertent because city staff didn't remind him.

Really, Rob? You (IMO) lying sack of shit? You'd been filing conflict of interest forms before that, and after that, because some city staffer reportedly didn't remind you, you magically forgot?

And, if I'm understanding correctly, this isn't just a civil issue. Creuzot could have filed Class B misdemeanors, at least if the prohibition on state officials applies to local elected bodies. He would have had to prove intent, but, still ...

That said, if former long-term city manager Alan Sims (city manager in 2008 and 2009, at least, per Franke's comments above) is now joining the city council, how much will really change? (Cedar Hill ISD trustee Valerie Banks would have been better, IMO, even if Sims won't be bad — I think.) Well, Cedar Hill voters are apparently allowing package booze sales, so that much has changed. And, Sims didn't appear to be as much a toady to Franke as Sims' assistant city manager, then successor, Greg Porter.

Other Best Southwest election results show long-term Drunkenville ISD board member Dorothy Wolverton poised to lose her seat.

TX Progressives take a look at the TX Legislature, GOPers for Prez and more

The Texas Progressive Alliance supports an impeachment of President Trump on real grounds, like the Emoluments Clause, while encouraging both national Democrats and Beltway stenos to drop the worst of their Russiagate mindsets. Meanwhile, here’s this week’s roundup.

Off the Kuff celebrated the settlement agreement in the lawsuits over that bogus SOS advisory.

With Bill Weld now officially in, SocraticGadfly offers his first take on the 2020 GOP presidential race.

Brains discusses the 2020 Senate race. 

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs and news sites.

Texas' anti-BDS ban with oath, for state contractors, ruled unconstitutional by federal judge. 

A.H. Belo invester-shareholder says company should take newspaper half private, questions decision to expand digital marketing in areas where it has no expertise.

Will Joaquin Castro's friends and allies be more or less baffled now that he is officially done playing Hamlet and instead chickened out on running for the Dem nomination to face Big John Cornyn? (Winners are both M.J. Hegar and Sema Hernandez, Hegar because she won't have to face an experienced politician and Hernandez because there likely won't be a second Hispanic in the primary. Just saying.)

Texas Observer talks more about the sales tax for property tax swap, while still failing to mention Legiscritter Drew Springer, the stealth actor behind this.

Ed Espinoza calls us to action to stop SB9, the latest anti-voting effort from Dan Patrick and the Republicans.

Abbie-Louise Lord and Jenn Char document their efforts to give up single-use plastic for Lent.

Jef Rouner argues that you cannot be "pro-life" if you are anti-vaccine.

Daniel Williams presents his research on how conflicts inn policy positions between special interests may be analyzed.

Sanford Nowlin reports on the effort to push bail reform in Bexar County

Juanita checks in on our old pal Rick Perry.

The Texas Trib has an update on the status of the Dallas-Houston bullet train. 

Stephen Young reports that AG Kenny Boy Paxton, or his office, DID communicate by email with his state senatecritter wife before she filed a bill to gut state securities law. 

Jim Schutze talks about how the city of Dallas’ plan for a Trinity River mud run, er city park, have hit snafus.

My former state house legiscritter Dan Flynn, for the first time since he proposed it many sessions ago, got his Ten Commandments in schools bill out of committee. In case you don't know, Flynn is a loon about fake Sharia law claims anywhere while being a loon of another sort, against the Constitution, for anything Christian.

"Happy" May Day

Happy May Day in a country that refuses to celebrate it, even though the idea of May Day, not a defanged Labor Day, arose in America, as international organized labor celebrated the Haymarket Resistance with International Labor Day on the old May Day.

Happy May Day in a country that has no real, at least strong, national party of labor and hasn't for decades.

Happy May Day in a country where the more "left" of the two national parties has most national leadership opposing single-payer national health care, either directly or by stealth euphemism.

Happy May Day where that party follows the Overton Window and refuses to admit the reality of economic classes existing in the US, and generally being more firmly ensconced than in old Europe.

Happy May Day where the history of that first paragraph gets eliminated from school history textbooks.

Accepting aging, accepting death

Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer by Barbara Ehrenreich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There's plenty of punch in this slim volume, and it goes beyond what most reviews note. And, for this blog post, I have further expanded my original Goodreads review.

That alone, what is in the reviews, is notable enough. Doctors overexamine most Americans, whether out of profit motives, an overdoing of precautionary principles, the idea of doctor as superman or some combination of all of the above. For two biggies specific to men and women, Ehrenreich references mammograms for women and PSA tests for men. Colon cancer testing, she says, is probably also overdone.

And, then, she dives into issues related to this and beyond. First, our mix of individual genes, the fact that many cancers are hugely multigenic in nature beyond environmental factors and other things, means that outside of things like BRCA, a lot of genetic findings are probabilities, no more, and probabilities not much different from random chance.

So, most such tests aren't worth a whole lot. If they do find anything, "watchful waiting" is much better in most cases than surgical, radiative or chemotherapeutical undertakings. But, a doctor may not tell you that. For one or more of those three reasons above, or others.

Then we get to the real fun.

Your own body may exacerbate many cancers.

Ehrenreich looks at how macrophages can be "bad guys" as well as "good gals." They can "encourage" cancer cells in the area of tumors to continue reproducing rather than killing them. They supply cancer cells with chemical growth factors. They build new blood vessels for them. They help them enter blood vessels they couldn't on their own. This all is best documented with breast cancer, but also shown with lung, bone, gastric and other cancers, she says.

In addition, the spread of arthritis and other inflammation-generated diseases, are also assisted by macrophages.

So, from this, riffing on her previous book "Bright-Sided," Ehrenreich says New Agey ideas of visualizing your body, or "your body," attacking cancer is nonsense. The "your body" goes in scare quotes, because she also documents other ways in which macrophages can be free agents of sorts. She goes back to Russian zoologist Elie Metchenikoff, who first talked about this a century and more ago, but was roundly rejected. Now, his ideas are gaining acceptance. Some other immunological cells have lesser, but not insignificant, degrees of free agency, Ehrenreich says.

We're still not done, though.

Next comes philosophy.

If these cells have that much independence, what does this mean for the idea of a unitary "self"? And, if they're not conscious, but seem to have some independence, what word do we use for that?

Ehrenreich starts by referencing Jessica Riskin and her book "The Restless Clock." Riskin talks about "agency" as a purpose-based set of actions that is below the mental level (if we can even talk about mental levels of a single cell) of consciousness. Ehrenreich notes that we as a species are believed to have evolved highly sensitive agency detectors, but says that dismissing the idea of agency, especially non-conscious agency, from the non-human natural world altogether is a mistake. She says it's a greedy-reductionist view of biology, wanting to cut down to genes, not cells, and base biology on chemistry.

And, we're still not done.

Ehrenreich, paralleling somewhat Irvin Yalom, written up in The Atlantic two years ago about "How to Die," talks about "successful aging" next. That means accepting that aging will happen. Accepting that many blows of aging cannot be fully dodged, not even by rich anti-aging gurus. Accepting and embracing that aging has positive sides. With that, people can stop wasting money on gimmicks and brainwaves on stressing out. They can accept that aging is a normal evolutionary process, too. And, those macrophages that are quasi-free agents, along with other parts of "our" immune system? Just maybe their biggest job is to help kickstart the process of decomposition when each of us dies. (For insightful quotes from Yalom, go here.)

From here, back to philosophy.

Ehrenreich talks about the invention of the "self." In Europe, she says it probably started with the Renaissance and the rise of humanism, then took off in the Enlightenment. Rousseau, of course, majorly boosted the idea.

From there, we've gotten to the modern bombardment with selfhood, "branding" oneself on social media, selfie sticks for smartphone photos and more. (Ehrenreich politely doesn't call a lot of this "dreck," which it is.)

And, thus, it is harder for a modern Westerner, at least in the US, vaguely religious or "spiritual but not religious," to memento mori than it was a medieval Christian who was regularly reminded of that idea at Mass.

Ehrenreich's conclusion? Kill the self, or at least diminish the attachment to it. She mentions psychadelic drugs; on the other hand, many modern Americans who talk about using them seem to look at attaching more to a "self" afterward than before. But, there's potential there, along with long, distracted walks in nature and other things.

Don't rage against the dying of the light; accept that you don't control the sunset or the light switch.

Ehrenreich also refers to the perennial existential insight that while none of us can truly conceive of a world going on its merry way of existence after we're gone, at the same time, none of us can conceive of the world that was merrily going on before we were born, reincarnation claims aside.

But, the problem is ... we as individuals have existed. So, death, or post-death, anxiety hits us in a way that pre-birth trembling doesn't.

One thing that Ehrenreich does not really dive into is the differentiation between fear of death, which is largely existential in nature, and the fear of dying, or of specific types of dying, which is largely empirical in nature. Many of us have had a relative or friend of some sort, if not a loved one, die from some gruesome cancer or something else horrible.

But, with her notes on ixnaying overdone medical testing, Ehrenreich does, however, bring in an existential angle to fears of dying, too. Stop overdoing them.

This is in total contrast to Diane Ackerman, who in the disappointing "The Human Age," seems to want to "rage, rage against the dying of the light."

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A disappointing book

Ackerman is fairly good, though nothing extraordinary, until about three-fifths in, then she kind of loses it. I'm culling the full review to what is relevant related to Ehrenreich's book. ...

First, feeling love for a Ray Kurzweil prediction is always a way to start losing me. (Specifically, Ackerman likes his Singularity and related ideas.) ...

After that, she assumes we will get used to living inside a digital bubble. Salvific technologists generally make such assumptions. And there’s no guarantee they’ll be true. At least not if she means “adapt well” rather than “adapt haltingly and very imperfectly.”

And, I’ll definitely pass on a borg-based Internet. Ackerman wrote before the worst of Facebook (so far) arose, but even half a dozen years ago, one could have had some sort of guess, just from Shrub Bush, then Dear Leader, spying on people via the NSA, that a Borg-based Net is a horrible idea. (It's also why supporters of the paranormal existing, especially those who want it to exist, should rethink how wonderful telepathy and related ideas might or might not be.) ...

Also, while Ackerman can wax poetic in her language, she can also wax inaccurate. Having a screw in a bone to help fix a break is NOT “bionic.” If she didn’t watch “Six Million Dollar Man,” Merriam Webster will straighten her out.

Finally (and not the first time I’ve complained about a blurb/PR authorial photo for a book … it’s vaguely offputting to see one that’s at least 15 years old as of the time the book was written. I just have this vague feeling that she’s almost a polar opposite of Ehrenreich on aging and dying issues. The photo, the yearning for Kurzweilian ideas, and other things all just seem to point to that.

View all my reviews