Month: February 2023

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

The Flowers of Manchester

On February 6, 1958, Manchester United was returning home after eliminating Red Star Belgrade in the quarterfinals of the European Cup. This was the third year of that European competition, today known as the UEFA Champions League. 

Their plane had stopped in Munich, West Germany, to refuel because the flight distance from Belgrade to Manchester was beyond the range of the aircraft.

On that flight were team members, coaches, support staff, and journalists who had covered the match. The players included the famous Busby Babes, a group of young players who had progressed through the team’s youth academy. They won the English First Division Championship under manager Matt Busby in 1956 and 1957 at an average age of 21 (1956) and 22 (1957). The future seemed bright. 

The weather in Munich was awful. Snow had been falling, and the runway was slushy. The pilots aborted two takeoff attempts because of a boost surge in the left engine. Rather than stay overnight, however, the pilots wanted to try a third takeoff attempt. 

On that third attempt, the plane could not make the speed required to get into the air. It crashed through a fence at the end of the runway. 

Of the 44 people on board the plane, 20 died at the scene. Three more would die at the hospital. 

Manchester United’s memorial to the Munich Air Disaster names all of the people who died as a result of the crash:

“The eight players who perished were Geoff Bent (aged 25), Roger Byrne (28), Eddie Colman (21), Duncan Edwards (21), Mark Jones (24), David Pegg (22), Tommy Taylor(26) and Liam Whelan (22). Edwards, considered by many to be the finest player of his generation, died 15 days after the accident.

The three club officials who were killed were secretary Walter Crickmer, trainer Tom Curry and coach Bert Whalley.

Eight journalists died – Alf Clarke, Donny Davies, George Follows, Tom Jackson, Archie Ledbrooke, Henry Rose, Eric Thompson and former Manchester City goalkeeper Frank Swift.

Aircraft captain Ken Rayment, fellow crew member Tom Cable, travel agent Bela Miklos and supporter Willie Satinoff, a friend of United manager Sir Matt Busby, were also victims of the terrible tragedy.”

Busby had been seriously injured and was given his last rites twice at the hospital before a long recovery. There were serious questions about whether Manchester United could continue as a team after the death of so many of its players. 

But Manchester United did survive. Busby’s assistant, Jimmy Murphy, put together a team to finish that season. Busby returned to manage the following year. 

Busby and Murphy rebuilt the team, starting with a core of the surviving Busby Babes. Manchester United would win the FA Cup in 1963, the league championship in 1965 and 1967, and the European Cup in 1968—ten years after that darkest day in Munich. 

We will never forget The Flowers of Manchester. 

Honouring the heroes we lost ❤️

#FlowersOfManchester 🌹

— Manchester United (@ManUtd) 3:03 PM ∙ Feb 6, 2023

The Journey of a Chinese Spy Balloon

The U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. The balloon had been drifting over the United States for a few days. 

The right-wing outrage machine is trying hard to make the delay in shooting down the balloon into a scandal, supposedly demonstrating President Biden’s weakness in the face of Chinese aggression. 

But, as The Atlantic’s Juliette Kayyem explained, the delay was because the president understands how gravity works. 

“I’m no military expert, but I understand gravity. A surveillance balloon isn’t really a balloon; it likely has metal frames and carries electronic gear, and contains gases and other chemicals. These potentially dangerous materials will not reliably burn up when entering the Earth’s atmosphere, because they are already in the Earth’s atmosphere. Although the balloon lingers somewhere above where passenger jets normally fly, it is in American airspace—which is to say, the American homeland.

Homeland-security threats demand different responses than national-security threats. Blowing up an adversary’s airborne surveillance equipment over Montana, or even scrambling to capture it, involves different logistical and legal calculations than doing so in an active theater of war. Montana residents probably wouldn’t appreciate stuff spilling from the sky. Falling debris could maim or even kill Americans on the ground. Personal and property damage would occur. Kinetic action in a situation like this has a cost borne not by another country or its citizens, but by ours.”

So our military waited until it could shoot it down in relatively shallow water. It should be easy to recover and allow us to learn a bunch about what the balloon did, how it works, and what the Chinese were hoping to learn. And they had a bit of history fun with it, as the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton, Dan Lamothe, and Rosalind S. Helderman write: 

“The balloon was struck by an air-to-air Sidewinder missile at an altitude of 60,000 to 65,000 feet by a jet that had flown from Joint Base Langley-Eustis in southeastern Virginia, top Defense Department officials told reporters in a conference call. The Raptor pilot’s call sign, Frank 01, was a nod to World War I ace Frank Luke Jr., known as “the Arizona Balloon Buster” for destroying German observation balloons and enemy planes. The historical connection was reported by the War Zone.”

So what was this all about? As James Fallows explains, it was a mistake by the Chinese, but we don’t know if the Chinese leadership was aware of this operation. But it isn’t likely that the Chinese were trying to learn about the location of U.S. nuclear weapons sites because that’s already public information. 

“What the Chinese (or anyone else) would not learn much about is the placement of U.S. nuclear-deterrent forces. That information has been on the public record for decades.

I, personally, have flown a little single-engine plane at 3,500 feet above U.S. nuclear-submarine bases—not 60,000 feet up, like this balloon. I have done this many times, above bases both on the East Coast and on the West. 

What I did is perfectly legal. It would have been equally legal for any Chinese citizen who was a passenger or pilot on a helicopter or small plane. The listings are publicly available on any aviation chart.”

Now we will see how the Biden Administration handles the opportunity to use what happened to adjust our relationship with China. 

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Domestic Abusers Can Legally Own Guns in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that the federal law prohibiting people from possessing weapons while under a domestic violence restraining order is unconstitutional. 

Vox’s Ian Millhiser explores the immediate ramifications of the decision: “The immediate impact of this decision is that Zackey Rahimi, who “was subject to an agreed civil protective order entered February 5, 2020, by a Texas state court after Rahimi’s alleged assault of his ex-girlfriend,” may not be convicted of violating the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers. 

More broadly, because the decision was handed down by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which presides over federal lawsuits in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, this federal law can no longer be enforced in those three states.

One of the most alarming things about Rahimi, moreover, is that it is far from clear that this decision is wrong — at least under a new precedent the Supreme Court handed down last year drastically expanding the Second Amendment.

I fear that’s correct. 

Millheiser explains the implications of the new standard requiring gun regulations to be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” He also notes that since it was legal in all 50 states for married partners to beat their spouses until 1871, domestic violence restraining orders likely cannot be consistent with what the Roberts Court has ruled. 

This decision will lead to more deaths. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern lays out the grim statistics: “An abuser’s access to guns makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed. More than half of intimate partner homicides are committed with guns. An American woman is shot and killed by an intimate partner every 14 hours. Domestic abusers are also disproportionately likely to commit mass shootings: Nearly a third of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence, while more than half of mass shootings with four or more victims are committed by domestic abusers. “

The Delusions of Chief Justice John Roberts

I agree with The Nation’s Elie Mystal’s efforts to debunk Chief Justice Roberts’ attempt to compare his court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as heroic in the tradition of the Warren Court’s decision to end school desegregation with Brown v. Board of Education. 

Mystal writes, “More important, it would be foolish to think that Roberts brought up the history of desegregation by coincidence. Conservatives have long made the argument that overruling Roe v. Wade is the kind of bold revocation of precedent that aligns with the court’s decision to overturn the segregationist ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. No matter that Brown restored constitutional rights secured for Black people under the 14th Amendment, while Dobbs revoked a constitutional protection given to women and pregnant people. In the conservative mind, Brown and Dobbs are linked, and in both cases, unelected, unaccountable judges are the heroes for standing tall against the popular will.”

Roberts makes these arguments because he understands the stakes if the people see the Supreme Court as the political actor it has become rather than as the metaphorical umpire calling judicial balls and strikes he described in his nomination statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Mystal explores the potential consequences of what the Roberts Court has done: “The great irony of Roberts’s parable about the heroic dedication of federal judges, then, is that it offers precisely the opposite lesson: It shows how powerless judges are when they are not perceived as legitimate by the other branches of government or by the people themselves. And it’s that very legitimacy that Roberts and his conservative friends have traded away in their extremist rush to unmake the progress of the 20th century. The Roberts court is one that ignores precedent and makes up facts to suit its agenda, and regularly grants special access to lobbyists and religious fundamentalists looking to push their agendas through the court. The Roberts-led judicial system does not live in fear. It lives in the muck.”

California Trying Again to Cap the Price of Insulin

California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) has introduced legislation, SB 90, to limit patients’ monthly copay for insulin to $35. 

As CalMatters Ana B. Ibarra explains, previous efforts along these lines have failed because of strong insurance industry opposition. 

“California legislators have tried passing cost-sharing caps in the past without success. Last session’s bill, carried by former Republican Sen. Patricia Bates of Laguna Niguel, died in an Assembly committee. Despite bipartisan support, the insurance industry pushed back, arguing that capping costs only on the consumer’s end does little to tackle the underlying issue: the list price of insulin. 

“I would never suggest that the only problem is copays; overall cost is also a problem,” Wiener said. “We absolutely need to limit what consumers are paying out of pocket at the same time that we do this other structural work around the cost of insulin.”

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have enacted caps on copays, ranging from $25 to $100 a month, said Dr. Francisco Prieto, a family physician and advocacy chair for the American Diabetes Association, which is sponsoring Wiener’s bill.”

Congress last year passed legislation putting a $35 copay cap, but it only applies to people covered by Medicare. 

Ibarra also provides an update on the status of California’s effort to begin manufacturing insulin. The 2022-23 state budget allocated $100 million for this effort, and the state needs to identify a pharmaceutical manufacturing partner to move forward. 

People with diabetes should not have to pay so much for a drug that keeps them alive, especially since insulin’s creators did not profit from a patent for their work and wanted it to be affordable.

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Media’s Anti-Trans Bias

Public Notice’s Noah Berlatsky talks to The Present Age’s Parker Malloy about the mainstream media’s anti-trans bias. It is a bias that editors and publishers appear determined to make worse. 

Berlatsky introduces their conversation: “As journalist and media critic Parker Molloy pointed out recently on her Substack The Present Age, the New York Times started out the new year by hiring conservative columnist David French, who has called trans people a “tiny, disturbed population” and who has stated that he plans to willfully misgender trans people whenever he writes about them. French, as Molloy notes, joins an opinion staff “absolutely loaded with anti-trans voices” —from Pamela Paul on the right to Michelle Goldberg on the left. In contrast, there are no regular trans columnists writing for the Times.

Molloy has been writing about the mainstream media’s anti-trans bias for years, not because she wants to, but because she feels someone has to.

“I don’t like writing about trans issues,” she told me. “I’m not an activist. I don’t like writing about this topic. If I had the choice, I wouldn’t write about it ever again in my life. But I have to because these things are happening and the mainstream media just isn’t paying attention or covering it in a fair way.”

Malloy highlights many of the arguments she has been making in her writing. Our media outlets are not just reporting on anti-trans efforts by radical conservatives—they are facilitating them. 

This Week in Abortion

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. She is now trying something new: a weekly recap about abortion news. 

Valenti writes, “The other reason for the new feature is that I know there may be times when you’re overwhelmed by the onslaught of daily abortion news. The weekly roundup can be a tool to ensure you’re caught up with the most vital stories, even if you decide to skip a few days of the newsletter.”

And a lot happened last week. 

Quick Pitches

Former Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili’s health continues to worsen while in prison. As an opponent of Putin, he seems to be suffering from an all-too-familiar Soviet-era punishment. “Georgia is a former Soviet republic, and to those who live in the former Soviet empire—the same empire that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, now seeks to re-create—Saakashvili’s accumulated prison illnesses form a familiar pattern. The slow prison death was a Soviet speciality: not a murder, not an assassination, just a well-monitored, carefully controlled, long, drawn-out decline. Most of the people who died in Soviet prison camps were not executed; they were merely starved until their heart stopped beating. In Putin’s Russia, torture and the deprivation of medical aid famously killed Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who uncovered an infamous corruption scandal at the highest levels of the Russian regime. Isolation, withholding of food, and other punishments are right now being inflicted on Alexei Navalny and other political prisoners too.” (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic)

The Los Angeles Dodgers are finally retiring Fernando Valenzuela’s number. Molly Knight explains the importance of this long overdue honor. (Molly Knight, The Long Game)

Major League Baseball this season will feature the most radical scheduling change of its history, as each team will play all of the other 29 teams at least once. And yes, because of the changes, the Cardinals will play the Cubs in London before they host them in St. Louis this year. Totally normal! I suspect a significant realignment is coming soon, and the current leagues will become history as part of the next labor agreement. Yay for MLB East and West, everyone? (Jayson Stark, The Athletic)

ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in January, setting a new record for the fastest-growing user base of any consumer application in history. (Krystal Hu, Reuters)

The stupid. It burns. 

@SpeakerMcCarthy To everyone responding “we’re not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic” — that’s like saying “it’s not a car, it’s a Honda Civic.”

You’re repeating a slogan cooked up by the John Birch Society on the assumption it would sound smart to idiots. And only idiots.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) 7:59 PM ∙ Feb 4, 2023

Whew. We needed some good news. 

War has been averted. For now. https://t.co/xzaRXd3dh1

— John Moe (@johnmoe) 4:49 AM ∙ Feb 6, 2023

I wish leap years didn’t mess this up. 

Important note:

February has 28 days (7 x 4). Each day has 24 hours (8 x 3). Each hour has 60 minutes (6 x 5 x 2).

So February has 8! minutes. 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.

— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) 9:50 PM ∙ Feb 1, 2023

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Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

Belated Holiday Greetings

I hope you had a fantastic Groundhog Day. Yesterday I went down a bit of an internet spiral learning about the day’s origins. Here’s where I started with a post from the History Channel: 

“Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal—the hedgehog—as a means of predicting weather. Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition, although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State.”

I found that more interesting than speculating about an animal’s possible meteorological accuracy. 

Exposing Junk Science in the Courts

ProPublica’s Sophia Kovatch, Pamela Colloff, and Brett Murphy write a great summary of the media outlet’s work exposing the use of junk science in our nation’s courtrooms. 

The rise of the forensic science-focused television show over the past few decades has left far too many people with the impression that some scientifically debunked techniques are as accurate as a screenwriter or prosecutor may claim. 

ProPublica has found several common traits that help define whether a technique is actually junk science: 

• It has limited or no scientific evidence or research supporting it.
• It is presented as absolutely certain or conclusive, with no mention of error rates.
• It relies on subjective criteria or interpretation.
• It oversimplifies a complex science.
• It takes just a few days to become an “expert.”

Kovatch, Colloff, and Murphy write about what we’ve learned about 911 call analysis and bloodstain-pattern analysis as examples of the spread of junk science leading to the wrongful convictions of innocent people. They also note how our courts have had a junk science problem for decades. 

“Forensic science has had a junk science problem for decades. In the 1980s and ’90s, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies used faulty microscopic hair comparison in hundreds of cases, only formally acknowledging the problematic science in 2015. Since at least the 1990s, law enforcement has used a written content analysis tool with no scientific backing to interpret witness and suspect statements.

The 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences, which reviewed the state of forensic science in the United States, found that a lot of forensic evidence “was admitted into criminal trials without any meaningful scientific validation, determination of error rates, or reliability testing to explain the limits of the discipline.” A 2016 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology found that despite efforts to fund forensic science research, there was still a major gap in understanding the scientific validity of many forensic methods.

In 2017, the Trump administration allowed the charter for the National Commission on Forensic Science to expire, further limiting the progress on validating forensic science methods.”

We need to do more to validate these scientific claims. We also should make it easier for convicted persons to access the courts when we learn that scientific testimony used in their case has been found to be unreliable. 

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Fixing the Recall

One of my annoyances with our government is the continuing failure to deal with critical problems after events have exposed a vulnerability. 

For example, the September 11, 2001, attacks revealed a significant continuity of government problem because our Constitution requires elections for the House of Representatives. The likely target for Flight 93 before the passengers intervened was the United States Capitol Building, where Congress was in session. If more than half of the members of the House were killed in an incident, it would be impossible for that chamber to convene for months while states held special elections to fill the seats. Here’s a great report from the Continuity of Government Commission that explains this vulnerability in more detail. 

Congress hasn’t fixed this problem. I’m frustrated. It is also dangerous. 

Anyway, that’s why I am glad when I see efforts to fix this kind of policy problem after they are exposed. The September 2021 effort to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom highlighted several issues with how those elections are conducted. California State Senator Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) has introduced SCA 1 to improve the rules in the state’s laws about recalling statewide officials (like the Governor) and legislators. 

As Newman’s office explained in a press release: “With the support of the California Secretary of State, California Common Cause, and the League of Women Voters of California, State Senator Josh Newman introduced a constitutional amendment today that, when approved by California voters, will ensure that future statewide and legislative recalls in California are democratic, objective and less susceptible to hyper-partisan gamesmanship. 

Under the provisions of SCA 1, in the event that the recall of a state or legislative official qualifies for the ballot, voters would be asked simply to make a judgement on the fitness of the elected official in question. The second question, in which voters choose from among replacement candidates in the event that a majority support a recall, would be eliminated, and the process for replacement would follow the same steps as currently provided in other scenarios in which a state or legislative office is vacated.”

Let’s quickly get this through the legislature and on the November 2024 ballot while we all remember why the current system doesn’t work. I don’t want to see us have these conversations again the next time a recall effort qualifies for the ballot. 

How Police Use Digital Data to Prosecute Abortions

Police are using the digital tracks of texts, messenger conversations, and geolocation data to charge women and the people who help them with offenses under the forced-birth laws active after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.

TechCrunch’s Runa Sandvik reports: “In late April, police in Nebraska received a tip saying 17-year-old Celeste Burgess had given birth to a stillborn baby and buried the body. Officers soon learned that her mother, Jessica Burgess, and a friend had helped her with transportation and burial. The police issued citations for concealing the death of another person and false reporting. But in June, they also charged Jessica with providing an abortion for her teenage daughter. Police had made the discovery after obtaining a warrant that required Meta to hand over their conversations on Facebook Messenger. The messages, which were not encrypted, showed the two had discussed obtaining and using abortion pills.

Warrants for digital data are routine in police investigations, which makes sense, given how much time we spend online. Technology giants have for years responded to valid court orders for specific information sought by law enforcement, though some companies have done more to fight for our privacy than others.”

While companies have to comply with subpoenas, they can do much more not to keep this sensitive data and ensure users are aware of all the risks. Sandvick summarizes many recent examples of tech companies’ failures. 

“Last year, reporters found that Facebook and anti-abortion clinics collect sensitive information on would-be patients. The Markup also reported that Hey Jane, an online abortion pill provider, employed a series of online trackers that follow users across the internet — until the journalists reached out about the practice. More recently, ProPublica found nine pharmacies selling abortion pills also sharing sensitive data with Google and other third-parties. All nine were recommended by Plan C, which provides information about how to get abortion pills by mail. None responded to ProPublica’s request for comment.”

Aggressive prosecutors are going to come after this data. Technology companies have a responsibility not to put these women and people who can become pregnant at additional risk. 

Putin’s Plot Against America

Puck’s Julia Ioffe explains why Western governments believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is preparing to escalate the use of hybrid forms of warfare against the United States and other allies of Ukraine. 

She writes, “People in the Biden administration are worried that this leaves Putin with one remaining option: unleashing a wave of asymmetric chaos across the West. Think political interference, cyberattacks, assassinations. “The Russians wrote the book on this but they haven’t turned it on,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who once ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Europe, countering the Russian threat. “Why is that?”

As Ioffe notes, there are reasons to believe some of those efforts have begun. She describes an incident last month in Sweden where a far-right activist set a Quran on fire in front of the Turkish embassy. This complicated ongoing diplomatic negotiations to get Turkey to drop its objections to Sweden joining NATO. What a coincidence. 

“Turkey, a majority Muslim country and NATO member which had already been on the fence about voting to accept Sweden into the alliance, was outraged. This triggered protests in Ankara, with Turkish protesters setting a Swedish flag on fire outside the Turkish embassy. The Turkish foreign minister said that the Swedish government was complicit in the Quran burning—Paludan had gotten a government permit for his demonstration, after all—and Turkey canceled a visit by the Swedish defense minister, who was on his way to Ankara to plead his country’s case for NATO accession. Within days, anti-Swedish protests broke out around the Muslim world. By week’s end Turkish President Reçep Tayyip Erdogan, who had already extracted significant concessions from the Swedes for his NATO vote, said, “Those who allow such blasphemy in front of our embassy can no longer expect our support for their NATO membership.”

But then an interesting bit of information emerged. Paludan, it turned out, hadn’t paid for his own protest permit. It had been paid for by a journalist, Chang Frick, who had once been a contributor to Russia Today and once bragged, while pulling out a wad of rubles, “Here is my real boss! It’s Putin!” The foreign minister of Finland also publicly hinted that the Quran-burning incident had ties to Russian intelligence.”

Ioffe explores several other recent incidents in the rest of her article. 

Russia has excellent resources to fight—and demonstrated considerable success in fighting—an asymmetric war against the United States and other western countries. Ioffe’s Puck column was originally titled Tomorrow Will Be Worse for a good reason. 

United States Claims Russia Violating Nuclear Arms Treaty

The Wall Street Journal’s Michael R. Gordon reports that the United States believes Russia is violating the last nuclear arms treaty that remains in place between the two countries. 

“Russia has violated the New START treaty cutting long-range nuclear arms by refusing to allow on-site inspections and rebuffing Washington’s requests to meet to discuss its compliance concerns, the U.S. State Department said in a report sent to Congress on Tuesday.

The State Department’s finding that Moscow is in “noncompliance” with the accord marks the first time that the U.S. has accused Russia of violating the treaty, which entered into force in 2011.”

Our planet does not need a renewed race of nuclear arms escalation. As Gordon explains, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had already created concerns about the possibility of negotiating a new treaty to be in place when New START expires in 2026. These tensions are one of the reasons The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January reset its Doomsday Clock to the closest-ever 90 seconds to midnight. I discussed that more in the January 26, 2023, edition of this newsletter. 

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Florida’s Descent Into Fascism

While I subscribed to Craig Calcaterra’s Cup Of Coffee newsletter for the baseball news, I often nod my head at his political analysis. Since it was his Free Thursday, I hope you’ll read what he writes about how Ron DeSantis is turning Florida into a fascist state. 

“I absolutely love the fact that the governor of the third largest state in the country is threatening teachers with felonies if they don’t empty classroom bookshelves, has essentially banned the teaching of Black history, seeks to terrorize and stigmatize students in furtherance of a hateful campaign against trans people, and is destroying an entire college for ideological reasons and The New York Fucking Times thinks that the key takeaway here is what it means for the 2024 horse race. Apparently, if it doesn’t happen in Manhattan it’s just theater. 

My angst at the media aside, what is going on in Florida right now is profoundly reprehensible and downright dangerous.”

It is, indeed. We should pay attention now because we can see the signs of this descent into fascism right now. We won’t be able to claim to be surprised as DeSantis continues down this path and seeks national power. 

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Today she highlights efforts by Republican state legislators to ignore voters who want to keep reproductive rights on the books. 

Valenti writes: “I told you this week about the bill that Wyoming Republicans are trying to pass which would ban abortion without exceptions for rape and incest—essentially, they’re supporting this new legislation because their trigger ban is currently blocked. The hope is that by passing HB152, they’ll have a ban that isn’t so easy for the courts to find unconstitutional. But some Republicans are concerned that in pushing for the new legislation—which would make the old ban moot—they’ll end up with no abortion ban at all. 

But here’s the other super important thing to know about this bill: It’s the legislation that Republicans are using to declare that lawmakers have the same standing as the Courts to interpret the state constitution—which is a way for them to pass their abortion bans whether the courts agree or not. As you know, this has become a broad Republican strategy: Utah Republicans want to change the standards by which an injunction can be ordered as a way to remove the current block on the state’s abortion ban; and in Montana, Republicans have introduced legislation that gives them the power to declare that the state’s constitutional right to privacy doesn’t include abortion, no matter what the state Supreme Court says. And then there are the states like Missouri and Ohio who are trying to make it harder for voters to pass pro-choice ballot measures. They are going to do everything they can to bypass voters and the courts—because they know their bans are unpopular and unconstitutional.”

I also draw your attention to the story about a whistleblower who has exposed how a Kentucky crisis pregnancy center is “using expired disinfectant on trans-vaginal ultrasound probes” and how “lubricant gel staff used for trans-vaginal ultrasounds was actually only meant to be used externally on someone’s abdomen.” Crisis pregnancy centers are basically unregulated in red states that would regulate abortion clinics to the point that they would have to close because their hallways were not wide enough. 

Women’s World Cup Hosts Protest Saudi Sponsorship

The co-hosts of the 2023 Women’s World Cup—Australia and New Zealand—are protesting the decision made by the international soccer governing body, FIFA, to sign a sponsorship deal with Saudi Arabia’s tourism authority given that country’s notorious record subjugating women.  

“Such a confrontation between a World Cup host and FIFA is unprecedented in recent history, and is likely to shine more attention on so-called “sportswashing” investments by Saudi Arabia.

“We write to express our serious disappointment and concern at the news of the apparent appointment of Visit Saudi as a sponsor,” Chris Nikou of Australia and New Zealand’s Joanna Wood wrote Wednesday in the letter to FIFA seen by The Associated Press.”

This awful decision again demonstrates the ability of FIFA’s leadership to make the wrong decision because money is involved. 

The Last Professional Player Drafted by the Montreal Expos Retires

Yeah, Tom Brady was also a pretty good baseball player. The Montreal Expos drafted Brady in the 18th round of the 1995 Major League Baseball Draft. As we know, Brady decided to go to Michigan after getting a football scholarship. 

CBS Sports’ Mike Axisa features a quote in the Hartford Courant from Expos scout John Hughes describing the team’s evaluation of Brady, the baseball prospect: 

“I never had as much fun scouting a player that we eventually didn’t sign,” chuckled Hughes, now an area scout with the Marlins. “We knew we didn’t have a good chance to sign him, because he had the scholarship (to play football for the University of) Michigan.

…

“He was drafted in the 18th round because everyone knew how difficult it would be to sign him,” Hughes said. “He was very talented. I mean on talent alone he would have been projected a late second-round pick.

“And I believe he would have made it, as a catcher, he would have gotten there.”

In his scouting reports, Hughes recalls Brady as already being around 6-3, “good athletic body” and “obviously” he could throw, Hughes said with a laugh. He had power to the pull-side and a good instinct for the game.”

Quick Pitches

People playing the online post-nuclear apocalyptic video game Fallout 76 can come across the Wasteland Theatre Company and its productions of Shakespeare’s plays. “Fallout 76 is an online open world; players travel wherever they wish and can bump into real-life strangers. With “area chat” enabled they can even talk to each other through microphones, calling out to a passer-by on the dusty road. This opens up endless opportunities for user-generated serendipity, and the Wasteland Theatre Company is one such experience: a delightfully unexpected thing for players to stumble upon in the devastation.” And yes: there is a reference to the traveling theater company from Emily St. John Mandel’s wonderful novel Station 11. Because, as St. John Mandel writes, “Survival is insufficient.” (Alysia Judge, The Guardian)

Tax experts who have examined Former President Donald Trump’s tax returns think they show how his finances are worse than many of us imagined. (Roger Sollenberger, The Daily Beast)

Figuring out what time it is on the moon is not easy because of the relativistic effects of gravity on time, but it is increasingly important to have a standard as countries plan more missions there over the coming decade. (Elizabeth Gibney, Nature)

Science explains why chocolate tastes so good, thanks partly to a 3-D printed tongue. (María Luisa Paúl, Washington Post)

Scientists have found more evidence supporting the theory behind one of the planet’s six mass extinctions. “The link between ancient volcanic eruptions and the most severe extinction event the world has ever seen just got even stronger. A new analysis of mercuryisotopes has provided evidence that a quarter of a billion years ago, far-flung places in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere were blanketed with debris from volcanic eruptions in Siberia. The so-called Great Dying, also called the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, ensued, where most of life was wiped out under ash-filled skies.” (Clare Watson, Science Alert)

Let’s have more like this in Major League Baseball, please. 

You ever seen a walk-off this electric?

Venezuela does it differently.

🎥 @ElExtrabase

— The Athletic MLB (@TheAthleticMLB) 5:08 AM ∙ Jan 31, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

GOP Wants to Wish Trump Away

The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins writes about an epidemic of wishful thinking among Republican leaders.

“Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump.

But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him. Maybe he’ll flame out early in the primaries, or just get bored with politics and wander away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He’s old, after all—how many years can he have left?

This magical thinking pervaded my recent conversations with more than a dozen current and former elected GOP officials and party strategists. Faced with the prospect of another election cycle dominated by Trump and uncertain that he can actually be beaten in the primaries, many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will make him go away. And they would strongly prefer not to make it happen themselves.”

I guess we won’t need another volume of Profiles in Courage any time soon. 

Republicans have had repeated opportunities to leave Trump behind. I believe they would be in a better electoral position had they taken any one of the possible offramps, especially the one available to them with the impeachment that followed the January 6 Insurrection. 

Instead, they hope for his death to free them. I hope our democracy can survive their cowardice. 

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Time for Real Reforms

The police murder of Tyre Nichols is the latest atrocity to spark a conversation about reforming the police to prevent these killings. 

We ask the police to take on activities beyond their training and expertise. Armed people focused on the “warrior mentality” shouldn’t be handling mental health crises or routine traffic stops. 

I dont think Americans realize how dystopian it is to get pulled over and effectively detained by a gov’t agent with a gun who runs through your entire criminal history before issuing you a ticket (or worse) for a traffic violation versus just getting a ticket in the mail.

— Darrell Owens (@IDoTheThinking) 4:19 PM ∙ Jan 30, 2023

Thom Hartmann argues that it is time for the federal government to regulate local and state police departments, end policing for profit, and roll back the militarization of the police. 

He writes: “You and I are 30 times more likely to be killed by police than are citizens of Germany or Great Britain. In 2018, for example, police killed over 1000 people in America. In Germany cops killed 11; in Australia 8; in Sweden 6; in the UK it was 3 people; and cops killed only 1 person in New Zealand.

The reasons for this disparity are deeply systemic.

At the top of the list is the fact that the United States is the only developed country in the world lacking national standards for hiring, training, supervising, and disciplining police across the 18,000 departments in the country.

While it takes years to become an officer on the street in most developed countries, the average cop in America spends about as much time training as does a barber. Many small police agencies require little to no training.”

I would love to find an alternative to the current policing model because of its history of racism and control over local governments. Enacting that kind of change isn’t likely in the short term. Hartmann’s proposals are the minimum response we should accept now. 

Students Ask for Mental Health Services; 
To Receive Guns on Campus Instead

West Virginia University students last May talked to members of the state’s legislature about the need for increased mental health services on campus. 

But, as the Mountain State Spotlight’s Ian Karbal reports, there has yet to be any follow-up about those needs. Several student mental health care bills stalled in the legislature despite bipartisan sponsors. But a bill concerning the campus appears likely to pass despite opposition from students and university leaders.

“Yet the campus carry bill is moving. It would allow students to carry concealed weapons on most areas of campus, and require schools to provide secure storage of those weapons in dorms and residential facilities. It passed the Senate last week, but still has to pass the House.

Sen. Rupie Phillips, R-Logan, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in an interview that he does not see the issue as connected to concerns about mental health, and has been trying to get a similar law passed since well before the calls for campus mental health funding increased during the pandemic.”

Phillips has his agenda, and he isn’t interested in any facts. 

“Notably, research has repeatedly shown that access to firearms is one of the leading predictors of suicide, and in West Virginia suicides account for a majority of firearms deaths.

Phillips said that he doesn’t believe data linking gun access to suicide.

“I can write anything down and call it data,” Phillips said.”

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Today she highlights another example of why exceptions to abortion bans may provide a public relations boost but won’t meaningfully help people who can become pregnant. 

“I’ve been writing a lot about how Republican lawmakers across the country are suddenly very interested in adding exceptions to their abortion bans as a way to pretend like they give a shit about women: It’s a win-win for conservatives, who know that abortion exceptions aren’t real but that voters overwhelmingly support rape and incest victims having access to care. This kind of strategic PR play is especially important in places like Tennessee, where the abortion ban is so strict that it doesn’t have an exception for women’s lives. That’s why Republican Sen. Ferrell Haile has introduced legislation that he says would create an exception for rape and incest victims. But if voters catch on to what Haile’s bill actually does, the legislation may blow up in his face.”

Proposition 28 Protects Arts Education

This year’s California budget debate provided an immediate example of why passing Proposition 28 last November to guarantee funding for the arts in our schools was so important. 

Governor Newsom’s initial budget includes a $1 billion cut to a block grant that included arts funding in its title. The funding provided by Proposition 28 should offset that cut should it comes to fruition in the final state budget bill in June. 

EdSource’s Karen D’Souza explains why ongoing funding for arts and music education needs to be a priority: “Once considered a cornerstone of any comprehensive education, the arts have long been scrubbed in California classrooms in favor of math and science. But the pandemic exposed the urgent need to help children cope with trauma and find ways to heal, experts say, amid what many see an escalating youth mental health crisis. 

“The pandemic has taught us a lot about all the things the arts offer in terms of social-emotional well-being and student mental health,” said DeCaigny. “If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that there needs to be some joy in our lives, and we’ve always known that the arts provide that.”

Arts advocates also point to the power of the arts to boost student achievement. Despite the fact that students with access to the arts are five times less likely to drop out of school and four times more likely to receive a bachelor’s degree, nine out of 10 California schools, research shows, fail to meet the state mandate to provide arts education in schools. This is an equity issue, experts say, because it’s generally only affluent students who receive ongoing exposure to the arts. 

Building student engagement may also be crucial to combating learning loss, many suggest, as students struggle to rebound from the academic setbacks triggered by the pandemic.”

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

An Early Preview of the 2024 California Ballot

CalMatters’ Dan Walters takes a peek at the high-impact propositions that already seem likely to make the November 2024 ballot in California. 

I discussed the referendum coming about the law seeking to improve working conditions for fast food workers in the January 28, 2023, edition of this newsletter.

Walters provides updates on five other measures that already seem likely to make that ballot: including a referendum against a law creating a buffer zone for oil and gas drilling, a business-backed effort to overturn the Private Attorney Generals Act, a tax on upper incomes to fund pandemic preparation, an attempt to overturn a state Supreme Court decision lowering the voter-approval threshold required to pass local special purpose taxes, and an increase in the minimum wage. 

Quick Pitches

After three years of implementing a strict zero-COVID policy, the Chinese government made a snap decision to drop the restrictions after protests in November. But local officials were not prepared, partly because “[a]ny preparations for ending zero-Covid would be seen as a vote of no confidence in both the policy and Xi – an act of political suicide.” Now many Chinese are wondering if all of the sacrifices were worth it and how all this will impact Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin, The Guardian)

Efforts to ban TikTok in the United States have to overcome a 1988 United States law known as the Berman Amendments, which “took away the president’s authority to regulate or ban imports of “informational materials” from adversarial nations such as Cuba, and shielded those who produced such works—and their U.S. distributors—from penalties for violating economic sanctions.” (John D. McKinnon, Wall Street Journal)

Representative Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) became the first Member of Congress to deliver a speech partially written by artificial intelligence on the floor of the House. “The speech was written using ChatGPT, and is as dull and anodyne as you might expect for a political speech filtered through an AI system based on probabilistic averages. That’s not to say AI text tools can’t generate unusual and creative outputs, but that usually requires a little bit more imagination in both the prompting and the subject matter.” (James Vincent, The Verge)

Margaret Sullivan is one of my favorite media critics, and she is not happy with how the media has covered the revelations that President Biden’s offices improperly possessed classified documents. “Finally, all this coverage seems to say, a chance to get back to the false equivalence that makes us what we truly are! And make no mistake, any effort to equate Biden’s sloppy mishandling with former president Trump’s removal of hundreds of classified documents to his Florida hangout at Mar-a-Lago is simply wrong.” (Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian)

I’m a couple of weeks late to this, but the On with Kara Swisher podcast featured a great conversation about Prince Harry’s recent book release. Swisher interviewed journalist and King Charles III biographer Catherine Mayer and PR executive Patrick Harverson, who served as a communications advisor to the then Prince of Wales and Dutchess of Cornwall. 

John Adams, who was famous in baseball circles as the fan who played the drum at Cleveland baseball games for nearly 50 years, has passed away. (Paul Hoynes, Cleveland.com)

Some people were skeptical when, in 2020, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny purchased Wrexham, a Welsh team playing in the fifth division of England’s soccer pyramid. It’s a captivating story and the subject of a wonderful FX documentary. Here’s a story about all of the improvements in Wrexham as Reynolds and McElhenny seek to keep their promises and get the world’s third-oldest professional club back in the Football League. (Stuart James, The Athletic)

Jonah Furman recaps the week in U.S. unions at Who Gets the Bird?

The European men’s soccer winter transfer window SLAMMED SHUT yesterday. Men in Blazers recaps all of the transfers, including some intriguing moves for U.S. Men’s National Team players. 

This report is good news. 

🏔️ The Sierra snowpack is still showing impressive numbers due to the storms we have observed so far this winter. Here is a look at the snow water equivalent percent of normal for today’s date, January 31.

Snowpack data courtesy of CDEC/DWR: cdec.water.ca.gov/snowapp/sweq.a…

#CAwx

— NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) 1:00 AM ∙ Feb 1, 2023

We sadly have many reasons to start using this word.

Word of the day is ‘malverse’ (17th century): to act corruptly in a position of trust.

— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) 9:03 AM ∙ Jan 30, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

Homeschooling Nazis

I wish that title were a droll euphemism for some awful policy, but I mean it literally. HuffPo’s Christopher Mathias reports: “The Saxons said they launched the “Dissident Homeschool” channel on Telegram after years of searching for and developing “Nazi-approved material” for their own home-schooled children — material they were eager to share.

The Dissident Homeschool channel — which now has nearly 2,500 subscribers — is replete with this material, including ready-made lesson plans authored by the Saxons on various subjects, like Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee (a “grand role model for young, white men”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“the antithesis of our civilization and our people”). 

There are copywork assignments available for parents to print out, so that their children can learn cursive by writing out quotes from Adolf Hitler. There are recommended reading lists with bits of advice like “do not give them Jewish media content,” and there are tips for ensuring that home-schooling parents are in “full compliance with the law” so that “the state” doesn’t interfere.”

Mathias puts this movement into the larger context of radicalized right-wing politics. We should consider how conservative politicians’ efforts to take over school boards, ban books, create voucher programs, and help to foster these homeschoolers. 

“Meanwhile major right-wing figures are increasingly promoting home schooling as a way to save children from alleged “wokeness” — or liberal ideas about race and gender — in public and private schools. As extreme as the Dissident Homeschool channel is, the propaganda it shares targeting the American education system is just a more explicit and crass articulation of talking points made by Fox News hosts or by major figures in the Republican Party.”

And before I move on from this subject, I want to reiterate that Robert E. Lee was a traitor to our nation. 

There were 8 full bird Colonels from Virginia in the United States Army in 1860.

6 did not commit treason.

1 resigned, took a commission in the Virginia Militia, then resigned that when Virginia provided the militia to the Confederate Army.

The other was Robert E. Lee.

— Dagger John 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@theSloopJohnM) 5:31 PM ∙ Jan 14, 2023

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Erasing LGBTQ People from Michigan Schools

Popular Information’s Judd Legum exposes radical conservatives’ efforts to erase LGBTQ people from Michigan schools by overloading districts with misleading requests to opt their children out of sex education requirements. 

“A newly-formed conservative group is launching a brazen plan to remake Michigan public schools — using aggressive legal action to effectively mandate the erasure of LGBTQ people. 

The effort, organized by the Great Schools Initiative (GSI), seeks to exploit a Michigan statute that allows parents to opt their children out of sex education. Michigan law allows schools to offer courses in sex education. The nature of this instruction is quite traditional, and by law must “stress that abstinence from sex is a responsible and effective method of preventing unplanned or out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease and is a positive lifestyle for unmarried young people.”

Legum explains that the people behind this effort are not hiding their motivations here. The question is whether the school districts and Michigan officials can effectively counter this horrible effort, given how previous conservative legislators wrote the state’s permissive laws in this area.  

Far-Right Group Connected to Evangelicals Grows

The Guardian’s Peter Stone reports: “A far-right project that has helped spread Donald Trump’s false claims about voting fraud in 2020, and misinformation about Covid vaccines, is trying to expand its mission, while facing new criticism from scholars and religious leaders about its incendiary political and Christian nationalist messages.

ReAwaken America, a project of the Oklahoma-based entrepreneur Clay Clark, has hosted numerous revival-style political events across the US after receiving tens of thousands of dollars in initial funds in 2021 from millionaire Patrick Byrne, and become a key vehicle for pushing election denialism and falsehoods about Covid vaccines.

ReAwaken America also boasts close ties to retired Lt Gen Michael Flynn, who in December 2020 met with Trump, Byrne and others at the White House to plot ways to reverse Trump’s election loss. The meeting happened shortly after Trump pardoned Flynn, who was convicted for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador before serving briefly as Trump’s national security adviser.”

The key element of this group is its ties to the Christian evangelical movement. 

“Christian nationalism has deep roots in American history and has gained traction at different points,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. “The ReAwaken America Tour taps into the unholy well of Christian nationalism to sow doubt about the US election system and the safety of Covid vaccines while equating allegiance to Trumpism with allegiance to God.”

She added: “Clay Clark and others who run this tour are using the name of Jesus, holy scripture and worship music to promote a partisan political agenda and personal business interests.”

I once again ask how religious organizations can participate in these activities while keeping their tax-exempt status. The article explains that there has been a backlash within the Christian community, but I fear it isn’t large enough to make a difference as we start the 2024 presidential election cycle. 

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. The story that most caught my attention involves a 29-year-old Georgia woman who gave birth two months ago and wanted to get an IUD. 

But, as Valenti writes: “Conservatives keep telling us they’re not coming for birth control, yet they don’t do much to hide what a total and complete lie that is. Last week, I spoke to a Georgia woman whose health insurance denied her coverage for an IUD because of the “sanctity of life.”

DeSantis and Destroy Florida Schools Until Voters Stop Him

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols argues that Florida voters are responsible for stopping Governor Ron DeSantis’ efforts to destroy the state’s schools and universities. 

Elections have consequences. DeSantis has every right to appoint radical conservatives to boards. He has every right to work with the legislature to restrict the school curriculum to own the libs. 

Nichols writes: “Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.

But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.”

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Cost of Fighting for Better Pay and Benefits

From November 14-December 23, 2022, 36,000 graduate student workers and 12,000 other academic employees at the University of California participated in the largest higher-education strike in history. 

As a result, graduate students earned increases in pay and benefits. That was a start, but much more is required to ensure these students can afford to live in California. The fact that the University of California treated these graduate students so poorly does not reflect well on generations of leaders and legislators who failed to force the issue before the strike. 

Now the other part of the cost comes due. The University of California is clawing back any wages paid during the strike. It is required to take back the money, but the union claims the University is handling it poorly. 

EdSource’s Mikhail Zinshteyn provides the details: “But unions representing the striking workers allege that how the UC is going about this is all wrong. Rafael Jaime, president of the UAW 2865, the union of 19,000 teaching assistants, tutors and instructors, said the UC is violating state labor law by unilaterally docking pay without first allowing workers to review how much the university plans to claw back.

The UC is “well within their right to recover any money that was incorrectly paid out to workers who are on strike,” Jaime said in an interview Friday. “But there needs to be a fair process to make sure that workers aren’t left with additional hardships.”

Lawyers representing the three unions that struck last year filed an unfair labor practice charge against the UC on Thursday with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board. Core to the complaint is that the UC will deduct pay “without getting employee consent or first notifying employees of the actual deduction amounts before money was withheld from their paychecks,” the complaint read. “No other options were given to employees to ‘correct’ the payroll or otherwise review the University’s calculations before amounts would be withheld.”

State and federal law seem to require the university to take back money paid out to the graduate students and other faculty who participated in the strike. But they need to be fair about it. And administrators should be held accountable for the fact a strike was necessary for the graduate students to get these modest improvements. 

Restoring Workers’ Freedoms

The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson explains why the Federal Trade Commission’s decision to start a process to ban companies from using noncompete agreements is so crucial to efforts to protect workers. 

Meyerson writes, “The other freedom workers have lost is even more elemental, and fundamental: the right to leave one job to take another. A large number of American workers are compelled to sign noncompete agreements, with which their employers forbid them from taking a job at a rival firm or leaving their job to start a business of their own in the same field. In recent decades, emboldened by the courts’ attitude—ranging from indifference to hostility to worker rights—employers have expanded this practice from the relatively small number of professional workers privy to proprietary trade secrets to any workers who may at some point want to move from the burger joint they’re working at to the burger joint across the street.

Which is one reason why the Biden-appointed majority on the Federal Trade Commission announced in January that it was beginning a process to abolish noncompete agreements. “Economic liberty, not just political liberty, is at the heart of the American experiment,” FTC Chair Lina Khan wrote in a New York Times op-ed, explaining the proposal. “You’re not really free if you don’t have the right to switch jobs or choose what to do with your labor. But millions of American workers can’t fully exercise that choice because of a provision that bosses put into their contracts: a noncompete clause.”

With the House of Representatives in Republican control, more Congressional action is unlikely in the next two years. So it falls to President Biden and his executive branch agencies appointees to address these power imbalances. 

Welcoming the NWSL to the Bay Area

The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Toonkel and Rachel Bachman shared that the National Women’s Soccer League plans to expand to the Bay Area, Boston, and Utah. 

The price of the Bay Area and Boston franchises is reportedly $50 million—a considerable increase reacting to the growth experienced by the NWSL in recent years. 

Toonkel and Bachman write, “The addition of three teams—more than what NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman had previously signaled she expected in the near-term—will bring the league to 15 teams. The franchise fees reflect growing interest in the decade-old league despite its recent off-field turmoil involving abuse allegations that an investigation found had been ignored for years by league executives.

As recently as 2020, when Los Angeles and San Diego groups made deals to join the league, franchise fees were $2 million-$5 million. The strength of those teams’ launches in 2022 helped propel interest in expansion, and spurred initial interest from dozens of interested parties, according to the league.”

I am quite excited by this news and look forward to rooting for the Bay Area team as the NWSL announces the details. 

Quick Pitches

Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky reports about how we narrowly avoided a calamity in Earth’s orbit: “An old rocket body and military satellite—large pieces of space junk dating back to the Soviet Union—nearly smashed into each other on Friday morning, in an uncomfortable near-miss that would’ve resulted in thousands of pieces of debris had they collided.”

NPR’s Ayana Archie reports: “Consumers are suing Sazerac Company, Inc., the makers of Fireball whiskey, for fraud and misrepresentation, as the mini bottles of the alcoholic beverage don’t actually contain whiskey.” Yeah, I’m not looking to consume a mixture of malt beverage and wine. 

I’ve become such a weather wimp and traitor to my Yooper heritage that I now wear gloves when the temperature is above freezing. 

I do not want to say it is freezing cold outside, but my fingers are blue.

— Grover (@Grover) 2:03 PM ∙ Jan 31, 2022

The simulation is glitching again.

Y’all, we’ve discovered a new kind of number!

— Phil (I have a SubStack link in bio) Plait (@BadAstronomer) 5:09 AM ∙ Jan 31, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription.