America’s Most Wanted Librarians
GOP-controlled statehouses have been cranking out reams of preposterous and frightening library legislation. One proposed bill in Louisiana, HB 777, would make it a crime for librarians to use public funds to join the American Librarian Association or attend an ALA conference, punishable with prison time and hard labor for up to two years. I think Deborah Caldwell-Stone of the ALA put it best: “This is not a culture war; it’s a threat to our democracy.”
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The Sorensen Monologues
If media talked about the donor class the way it talks about college students
Insulting college students is part of a long history of right-wing demonization of academia. Many current pundits, appealing to a lefty-hating donor class, continue this long tradition. It seems like hardly a day goes by without a hand-wringing article about those CRAZY COLLEGE KIDS appearing somewhere in the mainstream press. Obviously there’s been tension over the last year due to the Israel-Gaza conflict, including some ugly incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia that should be condemned. But to take a wider lens, it seems to me that college protesters have mostly been on the right side of history — from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War to apartheid in South Africa. The draconian crackdown on student protests by university administrators (and the doxxing and bullying we’ve seen from right-leaning donors over this and other issues) has been an appalling attack on the First Amendment.
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The Dirty Food Dilemma
This Guardian article lists various foods that tend to be high in toxic PFAS, commonly known as “forever chemicals,” which are used to make products stain- and water-resistant. To quote from the report, “Among the main sources of food contamination are tainted water, greaseproof food wrappers, some plastics, pesticides, or farms where PFAS-tainted sewage sludge is spread as fertilizer.” As for microplastics, where to begin? They’re everywhere, from human placentas to the oceans to Mount Everest.
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What can we do about a Supreme Court packed with corrupt extremists?
To be fair, some Dems have made an effort to expand the court. In 2023, a group of senators and representatives including Ed Markey, Elizabeth Warren, Tina Smith, Hank Johnson, Jerrold Nadler, Cori Bush, and Adam Schiff reintroduced legislation to increase the number of justices to 13. Schiff made the case eloquently:
Schiff, a congressman from California, said: “This is not a conservative court, not in a legal sense. A conservative court would have some respect for precedent. This is instead a political and partisan court with a reactionary social agenda and the only question, Mitch McConnell having packed the court, is will we do anything about it or will we subject an entire generation of Americans to the loss of their rights?
“Dirtier air and dirtier water and dirtier elections? Is that the fate we would have for the next generation? My kids are both in their early 20s and I am not satisfied that they should have to live under a reactionary supreme court for their entire adult lives and I don’t want anyone else’s kids to have to suffer that fate.”
If you’re still not convinced about expanding the court, the nonprofit Demos has an excellent explainer, a key takeaway being that concerns about violating norms need to be weighed against the fact that those norms have already been destroyed.
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What Did We Learn From Covid?
These days, a conventional wisdom has settled in that we somehow overreacted to Covid. That our response went too far, and we are now past those silly times. Here’s the lesson to take away: we didn’t do enough. Trump’s response was idiotic and catastrophic (does anyone remember him saying blue state governors “have to treat us well” if they want coronavirus help?). In the last four years, over 1.1 million Americans have died of the illness. Countless lives have been shattered by Long Covid. The immunocompromised and other vulnerable populations are barely an afterthought. We let the virus be politicized by opportunists, and allowed false narratives about governments “controlling” us to dominate our media. The hard choices that were made to prevent even more death and suffering are now, ludicrously, seen as mistakes.
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Electric Vehicles Gone Wrong
For a while there, I was somewhat willing to indulge the idea of gigantic EVs as a way to wean Americans off of fossil fuels. But my patience has worn thin.
I appreciate that the new Dodge Charger EV does not have a ten foot-high grille; however, it comes with an obnoxious feature called “Fratzonic Chambered Exhaust” which creates fake engine-revving sounds through a system of woofers and speakers and acoustic chambers, with a volume up to 126 decibels. According to the CDC, “loud noise above 120 dB can cause immediate harm to your ears.” We’re not talking about the soft, whirring spaceship sounds that some electric vehicles emit as a safety feature. The last thing we need is more noise pollution, especially totally unnecessary sounds from an EV!
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Floored
This is the second time in fifteen years or so that I’ve gotten stuck in an airport overnight. Passengers were sprawled out in every possible spot. Some were snoring loudly, a feat of sleep unimaginable in those circumstances, especially given the twice-hourly announcements to NOT LEAVE YOUR BAGGAGE UNATTENDED.
I’ve been to Seattle and San Francisco in recent months, but somehow the inequality in DC seemed more pronounced than I was expecting, and greater than I’d seen on previous trips.
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“Cryogenic Nursery”
I’ve done so many cartoons over the years about blobs of cells being regarded as full human beings that it has become a challenge to find new ways to satirize this idea. Fortunately, or rather unfortunately, the Alabama Supreme Court provided some new fodder with its recent ruling that IVF embryos are people. In a case involving the accidental destruction of frozen embryos, the court disturbingly referred to the embryos as “extrauterine children” kept in a “cryogenic nursery.” Needless to say, this is wreaking havoc on Alabama’s IVF clinics and upending the plans of many would-be parents.
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Using the First Amendment to End the First Amendment
In recent years, the First Amendment has been shoddily invoked to justify decisions that ultimately diminish its very raison d’être, quite possibly leading us to fascism.
Alarmingly, we’re now seeing state-level absurdities such as Florida removing sociology as a core course in its college curriculum and replacing it with a course teaching the “historically accurate account of America’s founding.” Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita has launched the creepily-named “Eyes on Education” portal for the public to report “indoctrination” in classrooms. The West Virginia House just passed a bill allowing for the prosecution of librarians if an “obscene” item falls into a minor’s hands.
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Forced Labor Funnies
This cartoon is based on the AP story entitled “Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands” that was published recently. (It’s a long piece, so if you’re in a hurry, you can check out their “takeaways” article summarizing the report.) To put it briefly, prisoners are doing a lot more labor in the food supply chain than I think most of us realized. While some inmates choose to work, many are compelled to do so under threat of punishment. The 13th Amendment allows involuntary labor as punishment for a crime, so the practice — which disproportionately affects people of color — can look an awful lot like slavery. The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, where inmates do farm work, is literally located on a former slave plantation. These jobs often pay pennies or nothing at all.
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Signs Your Government is Committing Crimes Against Humanity
Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir responded “Hague Schmague” after the world court allowed South Africa’s charges of genocide to proceed. Netanyahu’s Twitter account posted “Nobody will stop us – not The Hague, not the axis of evil and not anybody else.” Whenever you hear government officials attempting to discredit The Hague, that is a huge warning sign that something has gone very wrong in that country. Yes, Hamas committed heinous crimes requiring a response, but Hamas is not the same as the whole population of Gaza, which is being indiscriminately slaughtered and starved to death. Journalists reporting on the carnage are being targeted as well.
For more background on the third panel about the State Department making human rights exceptions for Israel, see this Guardian article.
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The AI Journalism Awards
Almost overnight, the internet has become flooded with junky AI content (the word “content” really does apply here). I tend to do a lot of research for my cartoons, both image and news searches, and the top results used to be mostly trustworthy publications, or at least sites I was familiar with. Now I get walls of search engine-optimized garbage. A publisher of a tech website complained on social media the other day that AI sites are showing up in news results instead of their publication that employs actual human journalists. Amazon’s website has been notoriously plagued by AI-generated products, including fake books on Kindle. Sports Illustrated, which just got shut down (!), made news a little while ago for using fake AI-created writers with realistic biographies.
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