NEW: Paris residents are voting in a referendum today on whether an extra 500 of the city's streets should be pedestrianised & greened.
"For the past 25 yrs we've gradually been reclaiming public space for pedestrians & gentle traffic, & with 'garden streets' to create lungs within neighbourhoods.”
Book: Dark Money by Jane Mayer
This is what people mean when they talk about “money in politics,” specifically campaign finance. Billionaires can finance politicians, and here’s how. Watch the money get laundered and the obscure rules around who sits at the table in the room where it happens
Book: How Democracies Die
It’s in the title. Read about the several North and South American countries with in some cases copy/paste constitutions based off the United States constitution. Democracies do slide into dictatorships. Published in 2016 out of fear from the Authors worried about the US
I’m going to post a Casey Approved reading list that feel relevant to my current understanding of modern American politics. All of these books I can recommend, and in large ways agree with.
If you’re looking to improve yourself and improve your community, reading a book is an act of revolution.
Reading: Burning Down the House. To know the future, we must know our history. The modern American Republican Party was born in 1980. Two of the key players were Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan. History in America is brief, and “normal” changes every 50 years or so in a 250 year old country.
It’s not AI destroying democracy, it’s big multinational tech companies thinking laws don’t apply to them. And the law/gov’t sure is struggling to keep up with the pace tech companies set
Worse, they literally explain that the plan is to install a pseudo shadow-president in a high position of traditional political power to Retire All Government Employees. Layoffs and minimization is the playbook to install tech dictators. Sound familiar America?
Unfortunately, as you may have guessed, they would rather replace a democracy with a dictator-esque CEO that controls most of our lives (income, healthcare, time spend, consumption habits…). And I am on team democracy and not team dictator.
You should watch the Majority Report’s IG reel about the Network State.
It explains how big tech million and billionaires see traditional nation state gov’t as “outdated software” and correctly see that big multinational tech corporations are well poised to replace and subvert gov’t rules and norms
Link to watch: youtu.be/lckYPwQj_NM?...
You should watch Ezra Klein’s YouTube video essay about the Republican Congress’s NPC problem.
I think he clearly lays out how President 47 is consolidating power into the Executive Branch of our government and specifically taking power away from Congress.
Of the 3,782 children with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in this dataset, 176 were ever prescribed puberty blockers and 302 ever got hormones.
YET ANOTHER STUDY shows that a tiny number of children are diagnosed with gender dysphoria and an even tinier fraction receive puberty blockers or hormones.
Anyone still pretending there is a "debate" about this is willfully ignoring all of the available data.
gidmk.substack.com/p/gender-dys...
Reflecting on my first January as Governor — and keeping in mind I wouldn't be here without my family.
A few highlights from our Inauguration Day.
The felons first week in office & Project 2025......
Explanation of my profile pic: A classic comic that’s stayed with me since 2015. These are Not Normal times™️ but also people have always liked to imagine we are living through the end times. This is a bump in a long road. Stay strong and be there for each other.