May 16, 1918 The U.S. Congress passed the Sedition Act, legislation designed to protect America’s participation in World War I. Along with the Espionage Act of the previous year, the Sedition Act was orchestrated largely by A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson. The Espionage Act, passed shortly after the U.S. entrance into the war in early April 1917, made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. armed forces’ prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country’s enemies. Aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists, the Sedition Act imposed harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, conscription, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts. The Sedition Act of 1918
May 16, 1943 The Nazis crushed the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto after a month of bloody fighting. 56,000 died in the struggle. Read more
May 16, 1967 Nhat Chi Mai immolated herself in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, to protest the war. “I offer my body as a torch / to dissipate the dark / to waken love among men / to give peace to Vietnam.” The flower known as Nhat Chi Mai. Read more
May 16, 1998 Tens of thousands of Britons supporting Jubilee 2000 formed a human chain around the meeting place of the G7 Summit (an annual meeting of the leaders of the largest industrial countries) in Birmingham, England. Jubilee 2000 urged the major international lending countries to relieve terms of and forgive the massive indebtedness of poor countries around the world. Jubilee 2000 by Noam Chomsky
After being banned from Major League Baseball for life, gambler Pete Rose and others like Shoeless Joe Jackson are now eligible to be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Rose was banned in 1989 and spent the rest of his life crying about it instead of offering repentance. He didn’t even stop gambling. He never helped his case, even when it seemed Baseball wanted to bring him back.
Commissioner Rob Manfred made the ruling and said, “In my view, once an individual has passed away, the purposes of Rule 21 have been served. Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. Moreover, it is hard to conceive of a penalty that has more deterrent effect than one that lasts a lifetime with no reprieve.”
If Rose hadn’t bet on baseball, or if he hadn’t been caught, he would have been voted into the HoF as soon as he was eligible, which is five years after retirement. His 4,256 hits, 3,562 games played, and 15,890 plate appearances are still unbroken records. Across 24 seasons, Rose made 17 All-Star teams, won three batting titles, won the 1973 NL MVP, and won three World Series trophies. Rose earned the nickname “Charlie Hustle” for his aggressive style of play. Rose always seemed to find himself on base, and then the next, and then the next, until he was across home plate. He is a baseball legend. Even his gambling addiction couldn’t take away his legend.
I was excited when I heard this, not because I am a baseball fan and am in Rose’s corner. I’ve always had mixed views about Rose’s ban, and Shoeless Joe Jackson’s, for that matter. I was excited because I thought that here’s a chance I can do a cartoon that’s not about Donald Trump. And then I read how this ban was lifted.
Chilean flamingo. Credit: Victor Ortega Jiménez, UC Berkeley
Flamingos are known for posing serenely on one leg in extreme wetlands, placidly bobbing their heads into the shallow water to feed. But a new study has revealed there’s more going on beneath the surface than meets the eye.
It seems flamingos create controlled underwater chaos to actively trap their prey, according to the research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
They use a repertoire of behaviours, including stomping feet, jerking heads, and chattering beaks, to create swirling “underwater tornadoes” that concentrate and funnel prey into their mouths.
“Flamingos are actually predators, they are actively looking for animals that are moving in the water,” says lead author of the paper Victor Ortega Jiménez, an assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California Berkeley in the US.
“The problem they face is how to concentrate these animals, to pull them together and feed. Flamingos are using vortices to trap animals, like brine shrimp.
“It’s not just the head, but the neck, their legs, their feet and all the behaviours they use to effectively capture these tiny and agile organisms.”
Ortega Jiménez and his collaborators trained Chilean flamingos at the Nashville Zoo to feed from a shallow aquarium.
They used high speed cameras and laser light to view the gas bubbles created in the water to visualise the animals’ feeding behaviour. They then confirmed their observations using fluid dynamics computer simulations and experiments using 3D printed models of flamingo beaks and feet.
They found that flamingos stomp their floppy webbed feet to churn up the sediment beneath them, propelling it forward in whorls.
The birds then draw these vortexes towards the water’s surface by jerking their heads upward at speeds of about 40cm/s, creating mini tornadoes that concentrate particles of food.
These small vortices are strong enough to trap even agile invertebrates, such as brine shrimp and microscopic crustaceans called copepods.
The flamingos’ heads remain upside down within this watery vortex, with their unique beaks angled so that the flat front end stays parallel to the bottom. They then “chatter”, clapping the lower beak open and shut about 12 times every second, to create smaller vortices that direct sediment and food into their mouths.
Experiments with 3D replicas of flamingo beaks revealed that chattering increases the number of brine shrimp captured by the beak seven-fold.
They found that flamingos also use a technique called “skimming”, which involves pushing the head forward while chattering to create sheet-like vortices – called von Kármán vortices.
“We observed when we put a 3D printed model in a flume to mimic what we call skimming, [it produces] symmetrical vortices on the sides of the beak that recirculate the particles in the water, so they actually get into the beak,” Ortega Jiménez says.
“It’s this trick of fluid dynamics.”
The team believes that their findings could be used to design better systems for concentrating and sucking up particles, such as microplastics, from water.
Next, Ortega Jiménez aims to determine the role of the flamingo’s piston-like tongue and how the comb-like edges of the beak filter prey out of the water.
May 15, 1870 Julia Ward Howe Julia Ward Howe, suffragist, abolitionist and author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” proposed Mother’s Day as a peace holiday. She had seen firsthand some of the worst effects of war during the American Civil War—the death and disease which killed and maimed, and the widows and orphans left behind on both sides and realized that the effects of the war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. Mother’s Day did not become a national holiday until declared by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. “… Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe our dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel.”
May 15, 1935 The National Labor Relations Act was passed, recognizing workers’ rights to organize unions and bargain collectively with their employers. Read more
May 15, 1957 Britain tested its first hydrogen bomb over Christmas Island in the South Pacific, after just two years of development. Mushroom cloud over Christmas Island
May 15, 1965 A National teach-in to oppose the Vietnam War was held in Washington, D.C.
May 15, 1966 The American Friends Service Committee, SANE (The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), and Women March for Peace, along with four other organizations, sponsored a 10,000+ person anti-war picket at the White House and a 60,000+ rally at the Washington Monument to oppose the Vietnam War. . . . elsewhere the same day . . . Buddhist altars were placed in streets to impede troops arresting dissidents in South Vietnam.
May 15, 1969 Governor Ronald Reagan sent in the National Guard to reclaim People’s Park from 6,000 protesters in Berkeley, California, who had occupied the space and created the park. Police gunfire killed a bystander, James Rector, blinded another, and injured dozens. People’s Park March, Friday May 30, 1969, at the intersection of Haste Street and Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley
May 15, 1970 In response to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia (an expansion of the Vietnam War) and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, several million U.S. students held campus strikes to oppose the Vietnam War.
May 15, 1970 The Native American Rights Fund filed suit on behalf of the Hopi tribe to prevent strip-mining on sacred Black Mesa in Arizona.
May 15 (since the 1980’s) International Conscientious Objectors Day, established to honor those who leave or refuse to enter their country’s armed forces for reasons of principle. Conscientious Objector Day history
This post is about a case that could be easily overlooked with so much Trump news spewing through the fire hose these days. But Florida’s continued aggression in the culture wars has the potential to affect all of us. So, as here, when a brave plaintiff takes its case to court and wins, it’s news we all need to know about.
On Tuesday, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals decided HM Florida-ORL, LLC v. Sec. of Florida DBPR, a case involving Hamburger Mary’s, a restaurant and bar in Orlando that regularly hosted drag performances, including family-friendly shows. When the Florida legislature passed SB 1438 in 2023, Hamburger Mary’s canceled its family-friendly drag shows and prohibited minors from attending any of its other shows out of fear of losing its business and/or liquor license. As a result, Hamburger Mary’s lost 20% of its bookings.
The new law gave state agencies the power to target LGBTQ+ friendly businesses in two major ways:
It gave the Department of Business and Professional Regulation discretionary authority to fine, revoke liquor licenses, and even shut down establishments.
It made it a crime to admit young people to any performance, exhibit, play, or show that the state deems inappropriate, even if the child’s parents think it is appropriate for their family.
The bill was an effort by conservative politicians, led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to impose their beliefs on the entire state. It was a major salvo in the culture wars. Their too-clever-by-half mechanism was to punish private businesses that included or supported the LGBTQ+ community in order to exclude that community from being a public presence in Florida. The law’s language was so vague that businesses had no realistic way of knowing what it prohibited, meaning they had to take the extreme steps Hamburger Mary’s took to pull back their offerings in order to avoid the risk they’d be put out of business.
So, Hamburger Mary’s filed a lawsuit against Florida, its governor, and Secretary of the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (FDBPR) Melanie Griffin, seeking a preliminary injunction that would keep the state from enforcing its law while the litigation proceeded. The district court granted the preliminary injunction and the Secretary appealed to the Eleventh Circuit.
The issue in the case involves the First Amendment, as you’ve probably figured out by now. Although the technical legal issue was whether the district court had been correct to grant the injunction, the substantive issue is whether Florida’s Senate Bill 1438 (“The Protection of Children Act”), which prohibits children from attending “adult live performances,” is unconstitutional under the First Amendment, because it is both vaguene and overly broad.
The Eleventh Circuit ruled in Hamburger Mary’s favor, keeping the injunction against enforcement of SB 1438 in place, because the panel believed the law was likely unconstitutional—both too vague for people to understand what they could and couldn’t do to remain in compliance with it and overbroad in its supposed efforts to protect children without regard to their parents’ views.
It’s significant that this decision comes out of the conservative Eleventh Circuit, although admittedly, the composition of this panel, which included both an Obama and a Biden appointee, is unusual. Florida could seek en banc review from the full court, in hopes of getting a more favorable hearing. The decision was 2-1. The third judge on the panel, Senior Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat, was appointed by President Gerald Ford. His objection to the majority’s decision primarily involved a belief that the injunction came too early, and the courts should have demurred until they saw how the state enforced the law in practice.
Among the most interesting points made in the opinion:
The Court found the penalties for violations under SB 1438 “grievous.” The penalties for violations include a $5,000 fine for a first offense or a misdemeanor prison sentence of up to a year.
On protecting First Amendment rights, they noted that “The government cannot shroud rules in foggy language and then blame would-be speakers for their fears of what may lurk in the fog.” Laws like this use vagueness as a means to get private individuals and businesses to obey in advance, staying as far back as possible from the line of conduct the law prohibits in order to avoid the consequences of violating it. In this way, the state restricts far more First Amendment-protected conduct than they are legally entitled to. The panel wasn’t having any of it. It noted the importance of securing “breathing room for free expression” in a case like this.
We’ve seen injunction cases before, so we know that Hamburger Mary’s had to demonstrate it was likely to succeed on the merits of its claim in order to get the injunction. The court underscored the point above when it found that they met this burden, discussing the“chilling effect” laws like this have, and the way they discourage people from speaking their minds, even if their speech doesn’t fall squarely within what the law prohibits. They noted that “[T]he Act’s vagueness…means it is likely to stifle a substantial amount of protected speech,” explaing that at oral argument, the state had been unable to explain, for instance, how to decide what kind of performances would be acceptable for kids of different ages, which the law requires venues to do to avoid penalties. They concluded, “If the Secretary’s attorney can’t articulate the difference, it’s hard to imagine how we could expect performance proprietors to know what the Act means.”
At least for now, the First Amendment is still alive and kicking in Florida. The majority in this case held that the state was trying to “empower those who would limit speech” but that “the First Amendment empowers speakers instead.” “Requiring clarity in speech regulations,” the court wrote, “shields us from the whims of government censors.” This case is important for Floridians and for the LGBTQ+ community. Beyond that, in a time when our rights are under attack, it’s important for all of us.
“This is a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity.”–Australian Strategic Policy Institute, urging its government to woo U.S.-based scientists and researchers caught in the Trump II attack on research and development
When it feels like progress isn’t happening, a force field analysis can reveal where the status quo is shifting and point to other strategic leverage points.
If you try to track every piece of news, you may find it impossible to mentally survive the onslaught of these times. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have unleashed a barrage of civil rights rollbacks, weaponized institutions and passed off idiotic/dystopian spectacles as governance. The sheer velocity can numb the senses, tempting us to shut down, turn off the feed and retreat.
But you also cannot be good to the world (or yourself) if you keep your head down and pay attention to nothing. Withdrawal is understandable, even necessary at times — but permanent disengagement only cedes ground to the authoritarian momentum, while reinforcing our image of ourselves as powerless.
With that in mind, an important question emerges: How do we observe what’s happening without being crushed by its weight?
This is where the work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin becomes a powerful tool. Lewin — a Jewish intellectual who fled Nazi Germany — developed force field analysis to understand how power, behavior and transformation occur in real social systems.
He saw that any given situation is held in place by a dynamic equilibrium between forces pushing for change and those resisting it. To shift the status quo, you don’t necessarily need to move everything at once — you can focus strategically on specific forces or actors that influence the whole.
In activist training, I was taught force field analysis as follows: First you make a list of forces and organizations pushing towards the dreary authoritarian oligarchy-controlled vision. Then you make a list of forces pushing towards a reordered society that’s deeply democratic and where wealth is shared.
There’s a tension between these two forces. For example, on the authoritarianism side right now, Trump’s FBI ordered the arrest of a state judge for allegedly trying to prevent ICE from detaining a man in her courtroom or the arrest of New Jersey’s gubernatorial candidate Ras Baraka. On the democracy side, judges, lawyers and plaintiffs have defeated Trump 93 percent of the time in court because his orders are sloppy and patently illegal. What’s more, the Trump administration has quietly followed the judge’s orders most of the time.
While all authoritarians favor loyalty over competency, this regime is particularly extreme in its mistakes. And Trump is still fighting Harvard, and trying to take over now museums too. But again, new frontline resistance is appearing in the arts community and amongst librarians and museum leaders.
There can be an impulse to want to ask, on any given day, “Are we winning? Or are we losing?” Like a basketball game, many of us do a kind of score keeping about how many points we are down. But, just to continue with the sports analogy, our situation is more like soccer — where a lot of the game isn’t about immediate scoring but positioning, repositioning, quick advances and quick retreats. Progress may not always be visible or immediate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
A Colombian elder — who has lived her whole life in the shadow of war — recently told me, “People in the U.S. are obsessed with winning, and it’s very unhealthy in moments like this. You keep wanting to know if it’s going well or not — and these times can’t be analyzed in headlines or moments. Sometimes it just is what it is. It’s losing and winning. The yardstick is measured in hearts, and the timeline is generations of work on people’s attitudes and views.”
Lewin’s brilliance was in recognizing that we don’t have to act on everything all at once just because we see the bigger picture of what’s happening. We can begin by identifying the different forces at play: forces for good, forces against and some forces that are mixed. Crucially, in his analysis, you then assess which of these forces can be strengthened or weakened.
This is where it’s helpful to get practical. Courage anywhere begets courage everywhere. Because Trump has picked a strategy of everywhere all at once — nearly every group has a chance to stand up and support each other to be more bold. We’re already seeing great examples of this, such as the hundreds of nonprofits signing on to support Harvard’s fight, the lawyers retaking their oaths to the Constitution in public, and the government workers resisting unauthorized access by DOGE and continuing their important work.
In practical terms, the best strategy might be not focusing on Musk or Trump directly, but on amplifying local election protections, funding investigative journalism, or supporting tech workers organizing against misuse of platforms. You don’t need to tackle the entire regime to weaken its foundation. You need leverage points — clear, concrete places to act.
Using Lewin’s tool helps prevent burnout. It turns despair into direction. It gives structure to what might otherwise feel like flailing.
So, yes: These are hard days. But it’s not all bad or good — it’s a force field in motion. Even small acts, strategically placed, can shift the balance. We are not powerless — we are participants.
I was watching Trump talk about the “gift” from Qatar, the 747 jet that’s going to be our newest Air Force One. He said, “I could be a stupid person and say we don’t want a free plane, but this helps us out.” That sounds a lot like an excuse from a guy who just took a bribe.
This plane doesn’t help us out, it helps him out. If Qatar were trying to help us out, they would have given the gift without any stipulations, except they didn’t give us the gift. They gave it to Trump, and only to Trump.
Yeah, sure. It technically belongs to the Air Force, but the stipulation is that when Trump leaves office, which is supposed to be in January 2029, the plane is transferred to his presidential library. Three odd things about this is, why does Qatar get to tell us how to use its gift, why can’t the plane remain in service, and why does an illiterate fuckface get a library?
Don’t believe me on the illiterate part? Check this out from 2017. I noticed three things in that video.
One, he can’t read. Two, he’s calling out his new friend in Qatar and accusing them of financing terrorism, which includes groups like Hama, ISIS, al Qaida, and the Taliban (who are also his friends now). Three, the wind is having a very difficult time budging that bleached, dead aardvark on his head. What the hell does he put in that shit, concrete?
Maybe Qatar bribed Trump to stop accusing them of financing terror while encouraging him to learn how to read. There’s no help with the bleached, dead aadvark shit.
So what does Qatar get from this bribe? Maybe we’ll find out from his personal business deals in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Trump is visiting all three nations during this trip. By the way, the Trump Crime Family’s net worth increased by $3 billion since January. I’m sure that happening after Trump becoming president (sic) is just a coincidence.
It was announced last week that a brand new Trump Tower and hotel resort will be built in Qatar. It’s even being developed by one of the government’s companies. The Trump Organization announced an ethics (haha) pledge for Trump 2.0, and that it would permit foreign business deals, but explicitly bar partnerships with foreign governments. HAHAHA. Ethics from the Trump Organization.
On my GoComics page, there’s an idiot still screaming about Joe Biden’s “foreign” business deals.
There’s also going to be a $5.5 billion Trump beachside golf course in Dubai in the UAE, which was canceled years ago but re-approved in 2025. What explicit timing.
Saudi Arabia, the nation that butchered an American-protected journalist, recently announced new deals for Trump properties in several of its cities, which I’m sure had nothing to do with Trump giving them huge arms packages today.
Also, I should have scratched out the hamberders on the list, because the Saudis rolled out a full-size, mobile McDonald’s truck ahead of Trump’s arrival, knowing that a corrupt toddler with power was coming.
Trump is announcing investments in America from these three nations worth billions and perhaps even trillions, but the thing with these promises is that they’re just promises. Sure, they’ll invest, but in what and for how much? You can’t trust Trump’s numbers. It’s like all those factories he promised would be built by companies that exported jobs. They didn’t arrive.
The Trump Organization also announced deals for new golf resorts in Vietnam, which are with the Communist Party.
One last point for the day: If President Joe Biden were corrupt, some foreign country would have bought him a plane.
Speaking of Gocomics: The streak of posting a brand new cartoon every day on GoComics is now at eight years. I passed it on May 6, but I was too busy drawing a cartoon to notice.
AI thieves: So this is new. A couple of YouTube channels are using AI to copy cartoons, or as ToonAmerica says, reported by the Daily Cartoonist, finish “manually sketch[ed] unique, raw cartoon concepts”
First off, when my cartoon is published, it’s “finished.” I get annoyed simply by a reader telling me how the cartoon could be better or how I should have drawn it, but this shit?
I don’t like to give these guys publicity, but I do need to post the links so you know where to go to report them.
I’m very protective of my work. I don’t like it when Facebook pages steal my cartoons to build their audience, don’t even give me a tag or credit, and then argue that they had the right to steal it. But this theft of copying my work, and doing it with AI, really pisses me off.
Someone defending AI posted to Facebook a few days ago, “What’s the problem?” This. This is the problem, asshole. Another user of AI “art” told me today not to take it personally. I hope he doesn’t take it personally after I block him.
So, when people steal my work, I go after them. Fortunately, I’m not alone this time, because he/it/they hit a bunch of cartoonists.
Most of the time, my colleagues support me in these fights and say, “Go get ‘em, Tiger,” but they don’t get off the bench. They were too afraid to go after Ted Rall when he was working for a Russian propaganda outlet, they remained silent about the anonymous cartoonist (Rivers) or outright supported him, and most refuse to call out all the tracers out there (there’s a bunch). But now, they want to form a posse. Welcome to the game, fuckers.
I’ve been trying to fight for this industry, and not just for myself. Other cartoonists don’t want to ruffle feathers or get in trouble with colleagues. Maybe I’m the stupid one for doing so. But now, other cartoonists are ready to fight because someone stuck their fingers in their pies.
I told a couple of colleagues on Facebook, who are victims of this AI theft, that I would help them, and that was before I found out I was a victim too. They should take note of that. So far, the only ones I’ve noticed who have spoken out about this are the ones who’ve been affected.
Comic Strip of the Day: Mike Peterson does a great service for political cartoonists with his daily feature, Comic Strip of the Day, which can be found at the Daily Cartoonist. But there are times when I think he’s full of himself.
Today, he included two cartoons about the pope being an American. The cartoons were the same cartoon, and he wrote, “I’m ignoring cartoons about Leo XIV being a White Sox fan or refusing to put ketchup on hot dogs, and even the mildly sacrilegious jokes about deep-dish communion hosts. While I don’t think they’re insightful or funny, I’m not particularly offended.”
Peterson uses my work quite often, and I appreciate it. A lot of the White Sox and Hot Dog jokes did get old (but I was the first with the hot dog thing). But, Mike, with all due respect, I would never rely on you for what’s insightful or funny.
Creative note: I chose this over Trump pausing tariffs on China. I may go back to that tomorrow.
CHRONOLOGY-Who banned slavery when? 
Scottie's Playtime 