Balls To The Walz! Tabs, Wed., Aug. 7, 2024

Morning news roundup!

Tabs gif by your friend Martini Glambassador!

Tim Walz and his lovely wife had their great kids through IVF. What kind of weird freaks would outlaw that. (Star Tribune)

How Minnesota is addressing climate change! (Governing)

Robert Reich is over the moon about Kamala Harris picking Tim Walz. So say we all! (Reich)

What’s interesting about this isn’t that five state secretaries of state sent a letter to Elno all like “hey Elno maybe your AI chatbot shouldn’t tell people election misinformation?” but rather that the secretaries of state of the red states named in the same disinformation declined to sign the letter. Because they either love it when Elno does disinformation (in this case that Kamala Harris had missed the ballot deadline for these nine states) or they’re too scaredy to even whisper that Musk should maybe fix a thing. (Gift link Washington Post. Yes, I know they ask for your email address. Either give them a secondary address you’ve made for that purpose or don’t.)

Oh man. A high school class! All of a sudden our back end isn’t letting me do blockquotes so: [Dok jumps in and adds the blockquote, semi-heroically]

He had his students build maps of the contemporary world using different layers of data that scholars believed could factor into modern-day genocides. “They started looking at food insecurity, potential drought, just like the UN was doing around famine early warning,” Walz said. 

In 1993, he asked his sophomores where they thought the next genocide might happen, based on the geographic data. They pinpointed Rwanda. The following year, the Rwandan Genocide occurred.

That’s world’s most lovable guy Tim Walz. OBVIOUSLY. (Minnesota Reformer)

That thing with RFK Jr. and the bear cub, I don’t know, probably some other stuff too :/ (New Yorker)

Michigan supreme court not letting the (previous, Republican, since fuckin FLIPPED) Lege get away with its antidemocratic bullshit, where they’d forestall citizen initiatives by passing the laws as written for the ballot, and then come back and strip them after the iniative-less elections had passed. Wouldn’t it be great if the United States Supreme Court cared about democracy too??? (Bolts mag)

US Department of Agriculture finally FINALLY finally FINALLY sent out a cool couple billion in aid it owed Black farmers for past (sometimes present!) discrimination. Of course white farmers sued to block it, because dicks, but I guess it got through somehow anyway. (Louisiana Illuminator via What I’m Reading)

So remember in Kentucky, before Andy Beshear, there was that guy Matt Bevin? Well he adopted some kids and then apparently just left one in Jamaica to become a ward of the state after the school for “troubled boys” Bevin sent him to was shut down for horrific abuse. The boy just never heard from Matt Bevin again. (The Times)

Paris mayor says the far Right should go fuck itself for being shitty humans who just want to freak out about nothing and bullshit, no really she said that. (Politico)

Let’s all get the shingles vaccine and … reduce our dementia risk? YAY! :D (CNN)

Why were so many skeletons in Benjamin Franklin’s basement? I guess I’d better click and find out! (Smithsonian mag)

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