Back in 2011 I wrote about cycling being a superior route to transportation equity. I even cited Victorian England since women’s liberation evidently was tied to the advent of modern cycling (could ride to work and be independent of typically male-dominated transit such as horse or carriage).
Now I see a fascinating new report on cycling in Chicago that says police are issuing more tickets against Black riders to prevent them from having mobility on bikes, despite data showing the majority of accidents are white riders.
In Chicago, cyclists in Black neighborhoods are over-policed and under-protected.
A simple solution for transportation equity: bike lanes.
The Smithsonian tells us America’s “founding fathers” promoted and spread early forms of vaccines very widely.
Jefferson had given 200 members of his extended family and neighbors the vaccine by August of 1800
When they didn’t, they experienced a devastation of regret for not having vaccinated more.
Both Jefferson and Franklin had to argue with the early anti-vaccination movement. For Franklin, some of the discussion veered from the scientific into the personal: One of his sons died of smallpox at age 4, six years before Jenner discovered cowpox’s use. Some thought that little Franky had died after his father inoculated him with smallpox. But those were just ugly rumors. Franklin wrote in his autobiography: “In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation.”
A new article makes the strange claim that propaganda networks have “shifted” targeting from drugs to political activism.
New war: How the propaganda network shifted from targeting ‘addicts’ to activists.
The problem with such “new” analysis, any historian could probably show, is that activists historically have been called things like drug addicts to make them targeted more easily (avoid scrutiny of anti-democratic actions).
There is no shift, just recognition a system of heavy-handed criminalization uses encoding to escape proper scrutiny.
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Today extremist right-wing Americans just overtly say they are going with war with the “left” instead of pretending to care about drugs.
This very typically biting and insightful anecdote about Churchill comes from a military history book describing Allied preparations for D-Day:
Air Superiority in World War II and Korea: An Interview with Gen. James Ferguson, Gen. Robert M. Lee, Gen. William W. Momyer, and Lt. Gen. Elwood R. Quesada. (1983). United States: Office of Air Force History, U.S. Air Force. Page 56
Mosley was to put it more concisely later when he repeated that the British Fascists wanted to turn Parliament ‘from a talk-shop to a work-shop’. When Churchill praised Mussolini’s Italy for its economic realism, it was of course the British Chancellor of the Exchequer envying the Fascist dictator for the room for manoeuvre which the absence of an effective opposition gave him.
The offensive declarations of January 1927 were of a different nature, in that they clearly justified the introduction of Fascism as a bulwark against Bolshevism.
However, a careful reader of history will note that Churchill preferred death to either Fascism or Bolshevism and thus was crudely thinking of himself as above either.
…his Commons speech of 14 April 1937 he suggested that a self-respecting Briton would face death rather than accept ‘to choose between Communism and Nazism’ :
I hope not to be called upon to survive in a world under a government of either of these dispensations.
Self-respecting here is taken to mean a Briton who hasn’t stooped so far as to allow extremism to take hold. Or to put it another way, as I described in a 2014 blog post, fall victim to what Germany experienced:
The stock market crash of 1929 led to extremely heated conflict by radical groups trying to split votes; intellectual communism versus ultra-nationalism. This led to violence, which led to mob rule by fascist militia and 1932 end of the republic.
Britain arguably rested upon a representative government that had increasingly allowed for mass dissent. And while it was far from an ideal system it didn’t end with abrupt violent revolution in the “European” way.
Seems almost natural for Churchill to claim to appreciate the very thing that he also detested so much, through dark sarcasm and sharp wit.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
