This is a piece I've been thinking about for a long time. One of the most dominant policy ideas in Washington is that policy should, always and everywhere, move parents into paid labor. But what if that's wrong?

In much of SF, you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a sign declaring that Black lives matter and no human being is illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against the new housing that would bring those values closer to reality.

Poorer families — disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant — are pushed into long commutes, overcrowded housing and homelessness. Those inequalities have turned deadly during the pandemic.

And it's not just SF:

"What we see at times is people with a Bernie Sanders sign and a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in their window, but they’re opposing an affordable housing project or an apartment complex down the street," @Scott_Wiener told me.

There is a danger — not just in California, but everywhere — that politics becomes an aesthetic rather than a program.

It’s a danger on the right, where Donald Trump modeled a presidency that cared more about retweets and owning the libs than passing bills.

It’s also a danger on the left, where the symbols of progressivism are often preferred to the sacrifices and risks those ideals demand.

So I've been reporting a story about how you'd fix the impeachment process. It doesn't work for removal, as currently designed. Impeachment was built for a political system without parties. It fails in a system with polarized parties.

The one time it functioned as intended, confusingly, was the time it didn't happen: Richard Nixon wasn't impeached! But the impeachment process, which came at the low ebb of party polarization in American history, convinced his party to force him to resign.

Would Republicans force Nixon to resign today?

Oh, you're cute. Thank you. I needed that.

The problem of impeachment is pretty simple: Presidents are leaders of parties. Parties are tied to the political fortunes of presidents. You're asking a party to basically wreck its immediate political future for the good of the system.

This doesn't just have the effect of making impeachment ineffective as a remedy. It's worse than that. It makes impeachment dangerous to the president's party, and gives them a reason to defend him and either normalize or minimize his crimes. As we are seeing right now.

Spent a quaint half hour in a cafe listening to a guy yell at his dad after his dad said that the women Trump molested wanted it: "Dad, that's like saying the Jews who died in the Holocaust were asking for it!" ENJOY YOUR TERRIBLE FAMILIES THIS WEEK!

"Mom, has a man ever touched you without your consent?"
"Of course."
"Did you report it?"
"No."
"Dad, your WIFE has been through this!"

Dad was unmoved and told the guy to stop arguing with him.

At this point we learned the boy child has allergies.

I forgot to remark upon the presence of the very cute grandson, who was very small and gave not one shit about the yelling. I believe a sister or aunt was present and feeling very stressed. I wanted to hand her a Xanax or seven.

It was really hard to not jump in and say, "Sounds like you guys are going to have a fun meal tomorrow!" so they could unite in hatred against me, the outsider, and stop squabbling. Instead I exchanged glances with a nearby fellow lady patron, who also emotionally ate a cookie.

Anyway, I want to thank the random family for yelling about rape and the Holocaust in an Israeli cafe in the US of A today because it reminded me that while this country isn't the greatest, it is inevitably my stupid favorite and I am never, ever bored.

Oh are we talking about Sheryl Sandberg again? Well, your reminder that disabled feminists, LGBQT feminists, and feminists of color criticised her ‘lean in’ deal from day one. Don’t let anyone retcon that out of existence.

Like, a pretty narrow slice of feminists actually endorse and support corporate feminism, they’re just white, nondisabled, straight, cis, and noisy so their voices have a bigger reach.

So if your impression is that ‘feminism’ gave her a ‘free pass’ maybe you should question your overall impression of feminism rather than continuing to centre a handful of people as ‘thought leaders’ or whatever.

Critics within feminism have been doing this work for a long time and have been getting shat on it for about as long and I'm tired of seeing them erased. But what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.

But I WILL say, from my not-a-feminist perspective, that people who aren’t feminists who are criticising feminism should maybe understand the movement more deeply beyond a handful of high profile celebrity feminists.

So, I want to talk about how sexual harassment and fair pay are linked at Google (and beyond), because I think that's an angle that isn't being highlighted enough in the coverage of these walk-outs. I'm going to frame it largely around my personal experience there. Thread.

When I was sexually harassed by the director of the area I was working in, I was afraid to report it because I was worried that "getting him in trouble" would result in the subtle retaliation of missed leadership opportunities.

I wanted to continue working on the team I was on, because I'd gained a lot of very deep knowledge and expertise in that area, as well as reputation and camaraderie with the other folks working in that area. I didn't want to make the situation more "difficult."

To get promoted at Google, several need to happen: 1. you need opportunities for ownership and leadership above your current level (basically, opportunities to show you're working at the next level you're trying to get promoted to). The work you're "assigned" has a big impact.

2. You need glowing reviews from peers, *at or particularly above the level you're hoping to get promoted to.* Basically, you need people a lot more senior than you to say you're doing awesome work.

I’ve just finished some research about the use of biosolids (human sewage sludge) as farm manure. The results will keep me awake at night.
¾ of biosolids in the UK are spread on farmland. The rules about what it can contain are not fit for purpose. Please read and share this 🧵

Biosolids typically contain a wide range of synthetic chemicals, including antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, personal care products, microplastics and persistant organic pollutants, among them “forever chemicals”. Yet testing is restricted to a small number of contaminants.

Spreading them across the land means spreading them through the foodchain and the ecosystem. There’s plenty of evidence of uptake of many of these chemicals by crops, earthworms and other soil animals, and of large-scale antibiotic resistance developing among soil bacteria.

When soil is blown or washed off the land, these chemicals enter the air and water. Some seep into groundwater. We're likely to eat, drink and breathe them. It’s hard to say what the health thresholds are, or what the combined impact of this cocktail of synthetics might be.

Yet the issue has been wilfully neglected by governments. Regulation is negligible. Farmers in the UK are “responsible for knowing the levels of any potentially toxic elements” before spreading sludge. But how? With an on-farm lab that can test for 80,000 possible contaminants?

Did you realize there is a movement to normalize anti-white hatred? It works with white guilt and psych-op to dehumanize white people. They are working to dehumanize "whiteness". Do not make the mistake of thinking this is an isolated incident because it has been going on for ...

some time. I have collected nearly 100 articles in the last few yrs.
Today there was a whistleblower from Coca Cola, who revealed classes they were to take to learn how to "try to be less white". The classes are provided by Linked In on Linked In.

Many large companies are not only doing diversity training, but "What It Means to be White" seminars. Inside our government seminars are available. Recently we learned the Defense Secretary said he is going to root out extremism,

which we know means white supremacists aka Trump supporters. I do not think he was talking about the Muslim Brotherhood, as he has been fine with them.

A Federal contractor: "A filmmaker and policy researcher has posted online a series of documents showing how the federal government required "white men" who work at Sandia National Laboratories to learn how to "deconstruct their white male culture."(WND 8/13/20