First, you create a problem that creates a reaction. If you evoke enough fear and hysteria, people will not only accept a solution that violates their rights, they will actually demand it.
Apr 13, 2025
Apr 12, 2025
Clean Up
When you muster the will, you can do big things.
Feb 2015
Nov 2023
Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change.
Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.
Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.
Airparif, an independent group that tracks air quality for France’s capital region, said this week that levels of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) have decreased 55 percent since 2005, while nitrogen dioxide levels have fallen 50 percent. It attributed this to “regulations and public policies,” including steps to limit traffic and ban the most polluting vehicles.
The change shows how ambitious policymaking can directly improve health in large cities. Air pollution is often described by health experts as a silent killer. Both PM 2.5 and nitrogen dioxide have been linked to major health problems, including heart attacks, lung cancer, bronchitis and asthma.
Paris has been led since 2014 by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a Socialist who has pushed for many of the green policies and has described her wish for a “Paris that breathes, a Paris that is more agreeable to live in.”
Her proposals have faced pushback — from right-leaning politicians, a car owners’ association and suburban commuters, who say that targeting cars makes their lives more difficult.
But last month, Parisians voted in a referendum to turn an additional 500 streets over to pedestrians. A year earlier, Paris had moved to sharply increase parking fees for SUVs, forcing drivers to pay three times more than they would for smaller cars. The city has also turned a bank of the Seine from a busy artery into a pedestrian zone and banned most car traffic from the shopping boulevard of Rue de Rivoli.
Carlos Moreno, a professor at Paris’s Sorbonne University and a former adviser to the city, said Paris has developed “an urban policy based on well-being.”
Apr 11, 2025
Today's TweeXt
Trump's cabinet meetings pic.twitter.com/6qZQ6bDU64
— Molly Ploofkins (@Mollyploofkins) April 10, 2025
Show Me
There is no truth Trump can handle, and none that he won't deny.
He's a small, fearful little man.
Apr 10, 2025
A Short List
Today's list of stuff that should be obvious by now,
even to the MAGA rubes:
- Jesus wasn't white.
- We have plenty of nukes already
- Trickle-down has been thoroughly debunked
- Trump is not a Christian
- Trump is not a good businessman
- Trump is not smart
- Show me a 30-foot border wall and I'll show you a guy selling 35-foot ladders
- The struggle isn't about Race, it's about Class
- Climate Change will ruin every business on the planet
- Legal abortion saves lives
- Obama was born in Hawaii
- Vaccines work - and they don't cause autism
- Conquest and colonization are morally wrong
- The UN is useful when we use it properly
- Up is up
- Down is down
- Rain gets things wet
Reasons
Trump is failing.
Again.
As Always.
He's ignoring the plutocrats as they run their playbook (Project 2025), and while everybody sees it, nobody can count on the Press Poodles to point it out except in this offhand, once-in-a-while kinda way. It's all but disappeared from the news cycle the last few weeks.
He just claims ignorance, letting the chaos explode, as he looks for advantage, and opportunities to cash in on everybody else's misfortune.
He broke from the Reaganites in a huge way 10 years ago when he started going against Ronnie's 11th Commandment - "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican."
He has since frequently taken a giant dump on The Gipper's head by picking stupid fights with everybody for reasons nobody could fathom at the time.
But he was, and is, the president, and if that's how the leader of the party does things, then there will be an endless parade of self-loathing jagoffs who will follow right along behind him, emulating everything he does.
So why does Trump do this big tariff thing? Who the fuck knows? But he's violated the one principle held absolutely sacrosanct by every Republican since the beginning of the republic:
Don't fuck with the money
And that's not a bad principle to hold sacred. In fact, it's been a saving grace for Democrats who've been able to fend off most major assaults on FDR's New Deal stuff.
So where does this leave us? In spite of everything that so many cynically manipulative assholes have been doing to separate us from each other, and to keep us isolated in our own little siloes, I think more of us are starting to understand what those assholes have been up to.
By blowing holes in the plutocrats' schemes (purposely, or because he's just that guy who always fucks it all up),Trump is uniting Left and Right in opposition to him. Which in a very perverse way has always been the Trump Hallmark - me against the world. And even if others are doing things that help me, I not only have to take credit for it, but I'll make sure it eventually fails because with my delicate crystalline ego, I won't survive if people think any of the good ideas aren't mine and mine alone.
When you're the narcissist's narcissist, you'll eventually become both totally full of yourself and paranoid to the max. I think that's what drives his brand of madness.
- How long will this go on?
- Who will step up to take him down?
Today's Keith
And the big thing in this episode is actually his inside look at that "vast right wing conspiracy".
It was - and is - a thing.
Apr 9, 2025
Don't Step Out Of Line
And suddenly she's maybe not quite the dirtbag to the left, but boy howdy, she's a total demon spawn to the right.
From Parler Watch on Reddit.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)